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Once you get to the edge of your field, you may not know exactly where you’re headed, but you know the general direction, and you have spent a good deal of your life building this ladder, so you have a good sense of what it takes to add on one more step. Researchers who study how the creative geniuses in any field—science, art, music, sports, and so on—come up with their innovations have found that it is always a long, slow, iterative process. Sometimes these pathbreakers know what they want to do but don’t know how to do it—like a painter trying to create a particular effect in the eye of the viewer—so they explore various approaches to find one that works. And sometimes they don’t know exactly where they’re going, but they recognize a problem that needs a solution or a situation that needs improving—like mathematicians trying to prove an intractable theorem—and again they try different things, guided by what has worked in the past. There are no big leaps, only developments that look like big leaps to people from the outside because they haven’t seen all of the little steps that comprise them. Even the famous “aha” moments could not exist without a great deal of work to build an edifice that needs just one more piece to make it complete. Furthermore, research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time—exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities in the first place. For example, a study of Nobel Prize winners found that they had generally published scientific papers earlier than most of their peers and that they published significantly more papers throughout their careers than others in their discipline. In other words, they worked harder than everyone else. Creativity will always retain a certain mystery because, by definition, it generates things that have not yet been seen or experienced. But we do know that the sort of focus and effort that give rise to expertise also characterize the work of those pioneers who move beyond where anyone has been before.
Peak
Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool
I’m going to come back a better player. Still not satisfied. That is a Cleaner. That’s the core message of this book. I understand it’s a message that truly motivates some readers, and infuriates others. I read and appreciated every comment and review, positive and negative; you can’t keep improving if you fear others will disapprove of what you’re doing. The only difference between “feedback” and “criticism” is the way you hear it, and I heard it all. And while most of the response was overwhelmingly positive, or at least fair, I was intrigued by this occasional comment: “It doesn’t tell you what to do.” That is 100 percent accurate. Why should anyone want to be told what to do? The whole point of this book is that in order to be successful, to truly have what you want in your life, you must stop waiting be told what to do and how to do it. Your goals, your decisions, your commitment. If you can’t see the end result, how can anyone else see it for you? I can’t give you a ten-step process or a checklist for accomplishing your goals; no one can do that for you, nor should you ask them to. What I am giving you is insight into the mentality and guts of those who have found unparalleled success by trusting their own instincts to get to where they want to be. They do it in the sports world; you can do it in your world. It’s a mind-set for mental toughness. Tell yourself what to do, and stop waiting for others to lay it all out. Can anyone do this? Do you have to be born this way, or can you learn it? Here’s my answer, and what I hope you keep in mind as you read this book: You don’t have to play basketball like Michael Jordan to have his mind-set and mental toughness, and apply it to whatever you do.
To take it up a level, stash a folded towel in your office desk or a SlackBlock underneath it and make it part of your ritual. Maybe you’re just doing this for a second or two every hour or so, but this is all it takes to fire up your balance system. And to polish it all off, have a plant on your desk to break up the weariness of the typical—and deadening—geometry of the workplace.
Balance Is Power
Jim Klopman and Janet Miller
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