So society sells us this bill of goods, that those who are great performers are somehow cut from a different cloth. They are child prodigies. Mozart’s a great example. But if you look at the backstory of Mozart, he, for the first 10 years of composing music, was very average. His early works for 10 years were described as mere curiosities. They showed no signs of great talent. So the key idea on Mozart is it took him 10 years of daily focus. His father was a music coach. His father said you must be doing this all the time and composing music, an
d he pushed him very hard because that’s how the family survived in
terms of an economic income. And Mozart just spent the time.
Anders Ericsson is the preeminent research in the field of exceptional performance, and he’s the one who actually came up with this famous 10,000-hour rule. And so the myth of the gifted prodigy really is a myth that says the Elon Musks, and the Google guys, and the great tennis players, and the world-class violinists, and the great entrepreneurs, and the great humanitarians, the great scientists, they were child prodigies. They had this natural inborn talent.
And the real idea that society sells us is you don’t have that, you’re just ordinary. I’m just ordinary. Resign yourself to average and spend your best years not dreaming too big and not reaching too high.
And the key idea I invite you to really think about is genius and legendary performance is so
much less about your DNA, it’s so much less about what you are born with, and it’s so much more about what you do with your potential. It’s not really the potential you’re born with. What makes the best athletes, for example, is how much of their potential they capitalize on to bring it into their skill. Boom Boom Mancini, he was, I believe it was the heavyweight champion of the world for a while. And I still remember a great documentary on him. And the documentary said, he said, “I wasn’t the most gifted. My brother actually had longer arms and he was more talented naturally, but I outworked him and I had a bigger heart, and I was
more devoted, and I was obsessed with being a great boxer. And that’s what made me great.”
So we put these people that we admire up on a pedestal, those people who look otherworldly
when they’re performing their skill. And we see them or we witness them at the end result of their years of training, learning, practice. We see them in the full blazing glory of their epic skill. And we fall into the trap of thinking, wow, they must have had overnight success. But if you look at the backstory, every great performer, it’s the old idea, right? It took me 20 years to become an overnight success. And so I just want you again, to wrap your brain cells around the idea that patience is more important than natural talent. Patience truly is a virtue when it comes to legendary performance. Don’t play the short game, be in it for the long game, right? What you do every single day is much more important than what you do once every few years. You want to be consistent. You want to do the training. You want to do the learning. You want to run the right routines and rituals. Small daily acts of optimization and focus when done consistently over time are guaranteed to yield you remarkable results.