Exceptional actions
When I studied piano, it was no mystery why other pianists excelled more than I did: they practiced more frequently and intensely than me and most others in my program.?
Furthermore, while averaging 4 hours of practice per day without looking at their phones felt extreme for me, it was perceived as the norm for the exceptional players.?
Exceptional actions tend to yield exceptional results.
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport features Adam Grant as a perfect case study for this phenomenon. As someone who finished his Ph. D in less than three years and was tenured at the age of 28, Grant’s track record is nothing short of impressive.?
Equally exceptional, and perhaps not so surprising, are Grant’s methods for achieving these results which Newport describes as: “[batching hard] but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches”?—?an increasingly difficult thing to do for most people in today’s era of hyper-connectivity.
Achieving better-than-average outcomes will generally require the adoption of more-intense-than-average and more-rigorous-than-average methods that, by definition, will not feel normal at first.?
This also means that the degree to which you will feel stretched will also feel greater than usual… but then you adapt and get used to performing at this exceptional level.?
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About me:
I'm a second-generation Taiwanese American trying to find life’s greatest sources of meaning and make the most out of it.