To be great at something, you must love the process and not the outcome. Everyone enjoys winning, what matters is whether you obsess over the preparation.
You must be obsessed with your craft. It is perhaps the most important trait to approach greatness. Great people are obsessed, period. To that end, it is hard to be better than those people if you aren’t obsessed with your craft.
Obsession is an intrinsic motivation, typically in the pursuit of seeking autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose from the process. Don’t pursue something because you want to be great. Pursue something because it fascinates you, because the journey itself engages and compels you.
People extrinsically motivated are never genuinely obsessed. I caution myself and others in playing the societal games of prestige and power. Before getting swept up in the competitions that define so much of life, ask yourself if you even want the prize. Does prestige or money really matter that much to you?
The sad reality is that most people are unserious amateurs. Amateurs have goals. You must have an obsession. All professionals, all Olympians, all world-class players have an obsession with improving, day in and day out.
You may think you cannot be great because you are not talented. But hard work beats talent in virtually all cases. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things by choosing to be what most people are unwilling to be: consistent, hardworking, patient, and determined.
If you discover that you love something for what it is, the second step is to improve your focus. To be consistent in your progress towards mastery. In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. But to win long term, you are only as good as your consistency.
The difficulty in obsession and consistency is that you must say no to everything.
The power law applies here. In 99% of cases, what you choose to do is inconsequential to your life’s direction. Only a select few decisions will change your direction. Your goal, then, is to say yes to only the 1% of decisions that will meaningfully change your life. That decision may not change your destination overnight, but it can change your direction overnight.
So say no more. Say no in 99% of cases. Even if it is hard – because saying yes is easy, but carries a burden. It may be hard to say no to going out with your friends to party, but if you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want will inevitably become the sacrifice. In some ways, the most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word no.
A lot of people say they want to be great, but they’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness. They have other concerns, they don’t say no, and they spread themselves out.
Greatness isn’t easy to achieve. Greatness isn’t for most people. Greatness results from an extreme personality and will come with a cost of many other things, namely your happiness. Greatness is not being successful. It requires a lot of time and a lot of sacrifices. It requires a lot of tough choices.
It requires you to say no.
It requires you to be focused.
Be focused.
Focus.
Everyone says they have no time (including me!), but what we really mean when we say that is that we have no focus. There is no such thing as “I don’t have enough time.” You always have time. Everyone has the same amount of time everyday. You just don’t have the right priorities. Fix that first.
This may be contradictory to people who tell you to say yes to everything. Explore! Try new things! That is what most people say. I agree, as that’s what I did to begin finding my obsessions and passions. Expend energy so that you can eventually find the few things you do exceptionally well. But the experimentation phase has to end eventually.
So how do you know what those 1% decisions are?
I’m not really sure myself, but here’s my anecdotal advice. First, you must think for the long term. Make decisions not for the short-term outcome, but for the long-term outcome, because the best returns in life come from compound interest.
Second, just say no! If you study successful people, you will come to realize that successful people say no to almost everything. A good rule is that if you’re uncertain, the answer is no. Not sure about playing that video game over learning electronic design? The answer is no. Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.
And the biggest decision you make daily is what to focus on.
If you haven’t already, focus on improving upon your personal inputs. Read more. Write more. Exercise more. Sleep more. Eat healthier. This will improve your overall output more than anything else you can do. Figure out your primary focuses and turn those into habits. Make them non-negotiable priorities. Make time for them. Days with zero output kill urgency. Those who do will go further than the person who negotiates with themselves every day.
If you are able to make consistent scheduled time for your obsessions, then time becomes your friend. Time will become your friend, or if not, the enemy of the inconsistent. Success in the long term can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for a long time. Trade consistently boring days for exceptional decades.
Obsessed people feel a sense of constant urgency. They want to move faster, do better, and win. They push themselves without needing others to do so. Think about the truly obsessed people you know. Instead of worrying if they are moving fast enough, you likely worry if they are going too hard at something. Urgency is good. It means you want to win.
It means you’re not comfortable. That’s good, because comfort is the killer of dreams. If you’re not feeling fear, then you’re not doing anything important. So when you feel fearless, stop and re-evaluate what you’re doing wrong with your life. Fear occurs in proportion to the importance of the task: the more something scares you, the more necessary it is for your growth.
I want to tie this back to education and college because that is something I’m struggling with now.
If you conflate the idea of college with learning and education, then I will say you are wrong. College does not index on true learning, but on artificial metrics that are often game-able. College is a system that encourages comfort and kills your urgency by making you wait for an authority figure to tell you what to do next.
College is the biggest killer of dreams.
In my worldview, there are only two places in the world where you are told what to do, what you think, how to dress, etc… school and prison. The modern education system was set up to serve the industrial economy, where we needed people to become robots to do repetitive activities without complaining.
Do you want to be part of that system?
Would you rather have a Penn diploma without a Penn education, or a Penn education without a Penn diploma?
If you even pause to answer, you must think signaling is pretty important.
Winners focus on winning (being better, moving faster, learning more). Losers focus on the signals of winners (winning medals, awards, prestigious companies and schools). Obsess over fundamentals, not wins. Let others chase revenue and titles, but you should focus on working on yourself.
Great people always focus on learning (and thus winning), regardless of whether they are in college or not. Interestingly, all great people read and learn a lot. They spend years reading and gathering dots of information and connecting those dots until a problem begins to emerge. A big problem, one that compels you to solve it or die trying. Compare that to the average adult individual, where driving is the last time most adults learn a new skill.
Never stop learning.
Finally, some closing thoughts.
The concept of greatness is interesting, because greatness usually entails differentiated outsized results. And oftentimes, the path towards differentiation deviates from the masses and comes from betting against conventional wisdom. After all, consensus is regression to the mean. If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results everyone else gets. Thus, the path toward greatness often looks like madness to the masses. Greatness requires misunderstood choices.
The right path must be walked, even if alone.
To be great is to be a risk-taker. You must be willing to take risks, to bet against conventional wisdom, to expose yourself to the possibility of massive failure, but yet you believe in what you are doing so much that you do it anyway.
Becoming great is greatness itself.
Those who aren’t are replaceable. That is the fate of most people. The game of life is to become irreplaceable. No one can replace the great Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, or Napoleon.
Because greatness can’t be bought by the rich, rushed by the impatient, or inherited by the privileged. Greatness is only earned through hard work and working hard.
Be great.