Winners quit. More.
2nd August 2009
To be blow-your-brains-out-fantastic at something, you need incredible focus.
You need - say - 10,000 hours working on just one thing to master it. Oh, and you've got to choose the right thing.
If you've read The Dip, you'll know that after a brief period of success learning a new skill, you enter a drop which most people never escape from. It's the part where the harder you try, your reward keeps diminishing. It looks like this:
So you've started learning how to, say, dance salsa. You began with two broken left feet, and after a few weeks you've beaming inside at your newly discovered talent. "Look - I can dance!" you cry, shuffling your arrhythmic limbs like a jellyfish stuck on a cattle prod.
And so it goes. But after a time, you find it harder to get better. You plateau, and all this time you've been discovering other dancers who have real talent, and as you learn you realise just how much further you have to go.
It's around this point most people give up. It's usually pretty far down in the dip, so they've expended loads of energy to give up on a low.
Those who do break it through the dip are usually the star players. They've put in phenomenal amounts of extra effort to break through the dip. I mean insane effort. Often 10 years.
Funny thing is, it's easy to assume the best strategy is always to push through the dip, but that's not true. If you're smart, you should either commit fully, or pull out as soon as possible - before you sink too much into it. You need to try something for long enough to figure out if it's worthwhile, because not everyone is cut out to be a star salsa dancer. Or guitarist. Or triathlete. And even if you are, is that really what you want? If it cost you 10 years?
So winners quit. They try something, and quit early when they're sure it's not going to be an amazing success. And they try something else, and quit again. They're usually quite fearless about trying a lot, and quitting a lot. But when they find their chosen something, they'll power themselves through any dip while those around them give up. For every moment they're struggling, they're looking for something they can do to improve. It's that forceful, proactive feedback and sheer determination that pulls them through.
Success isn't about not quitting. It's about quitting the right things.
