Lighting and Maintaining the Fire
We’ve all heard the adage: man who go to sleep with itchy butt wake up with smelly hand practice makes perfect. With massive amounts of “deliberate practice” - say around 10,000 hours give or take - you too can achieve the status of excellence. For those who have read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, this might sound familiar. He argues that there is no such thing as “genius;” rather, excellence/expertise is derived from intense and constant practicing. Much like a champion weightlifter may enlarge his biceps with steroids by methodically performing bicep curls, the human brain becomes more adept at performing functions that are routinely practiced. The brilliance of prodigious talents like Bill Gates or Mozart at such early ages was therefore not so much the result of some uncanny freak ability to grasp skills at lightening speeds, but the fact that they obsessively learned and practiced their crafts early and often.
Yet, for as obvious as it is that practice makes perfect, perfection more often than not seems fleeting. If you want to get all existential about it, yes, perfection in many regards is arguably impossible to achieve. The more salient point, however, is that willpower and discipline are virtues people struggle to consistently maintain. Even if the aim is not to be perfect, try losing weight or learning a new language or becoming a ninja and it’s not hard to feel the force of monotony compelling you into complacency. A couple days or weeks of taking it easy, and the focus begins to drift from practicing, learning or exercising to figuring out shortcuts or finding get rich/learned/fit/attractive schemes or quitting the endeavor all together. Unless you are driven by fear (like I was this summer when studying for the bar exam) or benefit from inspiring relationships or experiences that have dug deep reservoirs of motivation within your psyche, it is downright difficult to spark and maintain the fire necessary to work hard enough to attain success/perfection. Call it the human condition or just laziness, but whatever chemical interactions that occur in our brains that weaken and break our resolve, the effect is often frustrating and at times maddening.
I always find it interesting to learn what motivates someone to work hard in the pursuit of a goal or to generally do well for themselves. Sometimes it’s pure passion that motivates. Some carry a chip on their shoulders and want to prove naysayers wrong, while others simply have no choice but to work hard. Often, a variety of reasons not limited to the ones mentioned keep people motivated. But whatever the impetus, I’ve found the common nexus to be a confidence and willingness to embrace challenges. It’s a psychological impulse that entails more than just the mere acceptance of a challenge, but a profound ability to actually relish in undertaking a difficult endeavor in the face of failure. When exercised, the effort is anything but casual and takes on a methodical zeal for not only the end goal, but maintaining the sanctity of the process necessary to achieving the goal. Ultimately, it’s this type of raw energy that results in the kind of pure competition necessary to anoint greatness.
We are not born with the innate ability to work hard, sacrifice, be disciplined, and delay self-gratification. Otherwise, we would be robots or some sort of Chuck Norris creature. The process of figuring out why these values are so important and how to maximize them is part of what has made growing up at times harrowing and at other times exhilarating. And so with every new challenge that presents itself, the basic process of figuring out how to become motivated and maintain our focus will remain persistent. Mastering this process will be vital to our success as citizens, professionals, and family members. The question is, will you begrudgingly accept or embrace the challenge?
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