It is better to produce one masterwork than 1 million mediocrities. I watch most people in business right now and they’re subscribing to the hustle and grind culture and they use busyness as a badge of honor. If they’re not working, they feel guilty and they suffer from FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out. They’re following the herd. They’re getting up early, they’re working all day, they’re working into the nighttime, and they think they are going to be more productive. Well, that kind of way of working comes from an old era. That way of working comes from the factory age. You work longer at the factory line, you produce more products, that’s more productive for the owner of the factory. We now live in the cognitive economy. We are actually paid to produce magic. We are paid to innovate. We are paid to think. So why would we operate from an old way of working that worked 150, 200 years ago? The new way of working is oscillation. The new way to work is to work in cycles or seasons. I call the twin cycles of elite performance. You’ve got the high excellence cycle, you work for five hours intensely bringing the fullness of your gifts to your work and then pull back and recover. Related to that is, it’s better to push one masterwork out into the world that allows you to influence the entire marketplace than do what most people do. You work all day constantly. You’re constantly putting out different pieces of work and because you’re putting out so much work, it’s not very good. It took Shah Jahan 21 years to build the Taj Mahal. It took Michelangelo 4 years to do the Sistine chapel ceiling. Great work takes time. If you look at all the great novels, you look at all the great movies,if you look at all the great architectural monuments, I mean, like I say, I’m here in Rome, I love Pizza Navona, I look at Bernini’s structure in the four rivers at the center of Piazza Navona. I mean, that Wasnt one in a day. It wasn’t done in a week. It wasn’t done in a short period of time because genius requires intensity and detail and craft and then recovery and then ingenuity and optimization. It is better to release one War and Peace. It is better to release one Citizen Kane. It is better to do one Eiffel Tower that stands the test of time than put out a million mediocrity. So be a minimalist, be a multiple masterwork creator, and don’t push mediocrity out in the marketplace by working 24/7.
