The Pattern I Find In High Achievers
I have been fortunate enough to been in places that attract high-achievers: the university I went to is the most sought after engineering school in the country and, following that, the place I work at is one of the most sought after “Big Tech” companies that software engineers flock toward.
I find it interesting to interrogate people I look up to and figure out what makes them “tick”. What I found is that the highest-achievers I've come across all find some intrinsic joy in what they do, and this naturally motivates them into refining their skills even further.
Let me repeat that: It is not about sacrifice, not about believing in yourself, not about talent, not about pulling yourself to work harder.
For them, it's about doing what one finds interesting to do.
Let me illustrate that. I've met someone who excels in competitive programming. What I found is that their process is actually really simple: they go through every programming problem they can find. If they already know the solution, they skip and go to the next one. If they don't, they try to really solve it. As a result of that, they've dedicated huge -- and I mean huge -- chunks of time, tackling hard problem after hard problem.
They become energized at finding a hard problem for which they don't know the solution yet, and keep attacking it until they can understand it and solve it.
(Note that they also don't become stuck at that problem if they are unable to solve it. After some serious effort, they move on to the next one, while keeping the problem that has stumped them in the back of their minds for later -- maybe they will find some later problem that leads them to a different framing or approach.)
It only makes sense, right? If one dedicates however many hours they have free per day -- that we “regular people” usually spend looking at news, social media, Netflix or YouTube -- into seeking what they haven't mastered yet and then mastering exactly that, it's only natural over the period of weeks, months and years, they will have a substantially impressive skillset to display.
Let me reinforce the fact this pursuit -- and I found this to be true in all of the people I met -- is not supposed to be a chore or a grind. We are instead supposed to enjoy it! And I find they enjoy it through letting this activity cultivate their natural curiosity, drive of overcoming the next hard obstacle, and reward of having surpassed what was challenging.
I believe that high-achievemnt is about directing -- just like rivers can only be redirected, not created or extinguished -- our innate human tendencies, curiosity and joy, toward: (i) the activities that we naturally find the most useful for our long-term goals; and (ii) rewarding to us personally in the moment of pursuing them.
The end result is that we will spend a huge amount of time highly engaged in whatever we are doing, either performing at our best or inching what “our best” is a bit further at a time. And we can have joy while doing it -- not at some distant goal post we keep planting further away.