Just a thought…
Every year, modern nations around the world train their NEW military service personnel to fly multi-million dollar helicopters and jet aircraft.
None of the trainees were required to show up to their initial flight training with hundreds of hours of preparatory flying. They simply showed up with a passionate commitment to learn principles and intentionally train towards mastery in skills and procedures.
And the military services do their part by developing their training curricula and instructors to make the training accessible and achievable for a wide variety of learning styles.
Now, not every single applicant passes and that’s just a fact of life. However, the great majority are undaunted, stick with the training pipeline, overcome setbacks and go on to become very successful. The failure rate isn't zero but the terminal rejection rate is extremely low.
Side note - contrary to what Hollywood portrays, the amount of military training that involves lots of dramatic yelling, insults, etc is pretty limited. Most of the time, high performance organizations attract people who already set high standards for themselves. In fact, at least IME, the higher performance the organization, the more relaxed the learning environment. Members new or old approach requirements with an eye for objectives, principles, standards, procedures and quickly adopting “best practices” (techniques). Ergo, browbeating just isn't required and gets in the way of supercharging (a positive thing) the training experience and operational effectiveness.
Let’s not overthink and complicate this diving stuff. If the Navy can train an Ensign to take off and land on a carrier and the Army can train a Lieutenant to hover a Chinook and drop its tail ramp on a mountainside, two extremely complex tasks, then certainly the rest of us can figure out high performance diving.
The article above that
@kierentec provided is excellent.
