As candidly as I possibly can share with you, balance and world-class can’t live in the same room together. Now, what do I mean by that? I am someone who really loves balance and I believe you can make your rise to be a game-changer and a legendary performer and a human being who leverages the rest of your days to make history, but you can’t do everything. I mean, it was Confucius who said it beautifully, “The person who chases two rabbits catches neither.” So you can have some form of balance, but you can’t be a jack of all trades. And if you really want to be a virtuoso, you do have to be obsessed with what I call the vital few. We live in a world that is addicted to distraction. So it is so easy to become addicted to distraction now and you see people succumbing to this seduction. They are walking around checking their smartphone, gossiping, making excuses, overstimulated, absolutely exhausted, too much TV, too many video games, too much web surfing, too many notifications, but the virtuoso is so
different.
They live in this tight bubble of total focus. They are monomaniacally obsessed with being
world-class at just a few things. Van Gogh didn’t want to be a world-class chef. Ferran Adria, one of the greatest chefs in the world didn’t want to be an NBA player. Roger Federer didn’t want to be a rockstar or a racer. Edison didn’t want to be whatever it was. What I’m suggesting to you is pick your battles, pick your obsessions. And you might say, “Robin, what’s this word obsession?” Well, an obsession is only a bad thing if it’s an unhealthy obsession. And so pick your obsessions. It might be the vital few. I call it The Big Five. It could be a great parent and a great family man or family woman. Your second part of your big
five could be world-class fitness and strong spiritual life and internal core. And then it could be world-class at your skill of choice, which could be a manager or a baker or an entrepreneur or a business leader or a humanitarian. Your fourth of your obsessions could be an impact on
the world around you, whatever way.
And the fifth one, I don’t know what it is. That’s the great thing about being human and a game-changer. You get to pick your five obsessions, but the key idea is it is a myth that you can be brilliant at everything. And why? Because you just need to tighten up your focus. You need to put in the training.
You need to put in the learning on those few things. And if you do the few things every single day versus trying to do many things, of course, after the 10,000 hours and the 10 years, 3.4 hours a day according to science, 3.4 hours a day on the training of your skill. You need to put in that obsession and focus over time for you to rise to a place where witnesses say, “She’s gifted. She’s so talented. She’s scary good. He’s unbelievable.” But the backstory is, it’s not about natural talent, it’s about doing the right things.