By Agata Bloswick | March 2026
Someone asked how I got into shooting. I said I started at 14 as a rifle shooter — but quit after a year because I’m left-handed and left-eye dominant, and the club didn’t have the right equipment setup for me. I spent a year fighting the gear instead of learning the sport.
They stopped me: “Wait — left-eyed? How do you even know which eye is dominant?”
It’s the eye you instinctively use to look through a peephole. Or a telescope. The one that takes over without you thinking about it.
Silence.
Then — one by one — the winking started.
Hands curled into makeshift telescopes. Someone picked up their water glass. Chuckles around the table as a room full of very senior people tried to figure out something about themselves they’d never thought to check.
I let it go on longer than necessary. It was just too good to stop.
In precision shooting, eye dominance isn’t a party trick — it’s a variable you engineer around.
When you’re left-handed and left-eye dominant, everything needs to be set up for the left side — stance, grip, sighting, equipment. But most clubs, and most default setups are built for the right-handed majority. At 14, I was handed a right-configured rifle and told to make it work. I spent a year doing exactly that — fighting the setup instead of learning the sport.
Nearly thirty years later I came back — this time with the right equipment and a much better understanding of what I was actually working with.
This applies in business just as much as in sport.
Knowing your strengths and building around them will always deliver better and quicker results than grinding away at your weaknesses. If you’re a visual thinker, you’ll struggle in a team that runs on talk. If you’re wired to create, you’ll suffocate somewhere that needs you to execute within fixed boundaries.
You can learn to do things differently. But will you ever be truly good at something that runs against your own grain?
Knowing yourself — your instincts, your skills, the way your mind actually works — isn’t a soft concept. It’s a strategic advantage. It tells you where to invest your energy, and where you’re just burning it.
It also tells you which eye to use to look through the pistol sights.
Which eye is your dominant one?
Come on — I know you already tried the telescope thing while reading this. Don’t pretend you didn’t.