Over time I developed a pretty simple philosophy that I just call "The Thousands."
It's pretty straightforward; most of the things that you want to excel at, you can excel at just by doing that thing a couple thousand times.
It sounds daunting but then you realize that if you do the thing thirty times per day, then at the end of about a month you're just shy of your first thousand.
There are things this doesn't apply to, of course. If I want to reach peak fitness, for example, that would involve doing some basic things (push-ups, squats, etc...) tens of thousands of times, and not stopping for years. So, okay--there are limits.
But when you're working on getting a PhD it turns out you only really need to read about 100 papers and internalize them properly in order to be a world-expert in a narrow sliver of a topic. Bump that to 1000 and you're a world expert in a much broader sliver of the same -- instead of knowing a lot about procrastination and its relationship to anxiety, for example (100 papers) suddenly you know most of what you need to in order to be current with the psychology of procrastination (1000 papers).
These things take time but the truth is they're not frightening. And in spite of that most people don't do them.
I took that logic and applied it to writing, too. The reason I joined Medium in 2019 is that I knew that if I wanted to be a writer I had to do hundreds of articles. So I did that here. It was a great choice.
Anyhow all that is to say that I agree with you here. The truth is that there are a lot of things that you can do that would change your life -- achieving meaningful personal goals, breaking into a new job field, or learning a new area for your writing. And all you really need to do to achieve a comfortable lead is to do a pretty straightforward activity (like reading an article) anywhere from 100 to 1000 times. Bump it to 5000 and you're above 99.9% of the population. 10000? For a lot of things, you're probably the best.
I know it's more complex than that. But also it's not much more complex than that. Do the simple thing on repeat and a lot of the time the other complexities will arrange themselves naturally around your initiative.
Peace and thanks to you, Tony. You always write a good article.
J
