We all have that greatness, we all have that genius, we all have that destiny, we all have that giftedness within us, but it’s smothered as we leave the perfection of childhood, and we receive the messaging of our mom and our dad, well-intentioned as they were, but they start to share the fears that they were trained to fear with us. And then we go to school, and our teachers say, “Fit into a box, and think like everyone else, and don’t dream too big.” And we get the messaging from the media, and the rest of society, and the peers around us that says, “Live within a box, and eat from a box, and drive to work in a box, and die in a box.” And we live the best years of life in this box of mediocrity or averageness versus stepping up to the bigger game of playing at world-class. And I want you to think about Florence and Michelangelo. He was told to be small, he was told to have a real job, his father wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer, and he wanted to be… What did he want to be? He wanted to be an artist. He wanted to be a sculptor. And he just was relentless and relentless, and his father used to beat him for his idea and his vision to be a sculptor. But eventually, his father relented, found an apprentice, and look what happened to Michelangelo. I mean, it took him four years of obsessiveness to create that Sistine Chapel. He hurt his back from it, he had to create special scaffolding that the world had never seen, and people laughed at him. His sponsor actually said, “We’re no longer going to pay you,” because things were so delayed, frustration after frustration. But where the victim sees failure and adversity, the game changer sees opportunities and a chance to pursue your craft. You don’t need a privileged background, you actually don’t need a lot of money to be a game changer. You actually don’t need special skills and talent, you just need to have the education, the learning, the exposure. Then surround yourself with the right, what I call talent army, which is coaches, the right peers and friends, who support your rise from where you now are to where you want to be. 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’re walking around checking their smartphone, gossiping, making excuses, overstimulated, absolutely exhausted, too much TV, too much 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 around being world-class at just a few things. Van Gogh didn’t want to be a world-class chef, Ferran Adrià, 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 a 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 possessions could be impact on the world around you, in 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 scary good,” “He’s unbelievable,” “She’s so talented.” It’s not about natural talent, it’s about doing the right things.
