The part you don't want to do

Mae Jamison got to do some cool things as an astronaut. Prior to that, she earned two bachelor’s degrees (including one in engineering), became a doctor, served in the Peace Corps, and learned to speak four languages fluently. Oh, and she had the courage to apply to NASA immediately after the Challenger explosion. (NASA photo)

The way most people learn classical piano, they are building in mistakes that will make them sound like amateurs forever.

They start at the beginning of a piece, which is only logical, and keep playing until they reach the end. There are stumbles along the way, but that’s only natural. It will get better with time, right?

Not necessarily. A piece can get more familiar, but it isn’t guaranteed to get better. If your fingers play the same wrong thing a hundred times, that’s what they will “think” is correct. Fixing this problem requires an intervention. It requires isolating the difficult sequence, studying it carefully, and playing it slowly and correctly until the new way is natural. Then, you have to integrate that part with the rest of the piece so that you don’t trigger the old wrong way when you encounter it.

Most of us do not like doing this work. We tend to want to perform instead of practice. We like to focus on what we’re good at instead of where we’re struggling. We can get by this way for a while, but if we want to achieve excellence at a skill, we’ve got to address the weak areas, too.

In general, we ought to build our professional lives around our strengths. That’s because addressing weaknesses is extremely time-consuming. It’s more efficient to hire other people to do the things we’re not good at. That’s the 80/20 rule in action: 80% of your output comes from 20% of your inputs. Might as well work that 20% and reap the 80% reward.

However, the flip side of the 80/20 rule is that, often, the other 20% of your output comes from an additional 80% of effort, and that’s what makes the difference in top performers.

You can’t just crab-walk around the tennis court in order to favor your forehand. You’ve got to put the time in to develop your backhand, too, and be a well-rounded player.

A half hour of looking over your notes before the test will get you a C. If you want to get an A, you’ve got another couple of hours that you must invest.

Nobody wants to hear the 80% of a piano piece you learned in an hour. You must spend another four hours polishing the remaining 20% of the piece—and it can’t be delegated.

It’s fine to dabble. But if you really want to get good at something, dabbling isn’t going to do it. And the process of getting better won’t be easy and fun. It will be the part you don’t want to do—the part that no one wants to do. And that’s why only the most accomplished people in your field do it.

You are allowed to consider carefully whether it is worth it to put your energy into a particular skill or knowledge area in order to get great at it. That said, it’s kind of fun to recognize that, as Seth Godin pointed out in The Dip, everyone who is attempting a particular endeavor will run into the same obstacles and discomfort once the honeymoon phase is over and the initial period of rapid growth slows to a plateau. So if you want to be impressively good at something, you can actually make a game out of seeking out the ugly parts you don’t want to do, challenging yourself to master them.

In this way, the very hardest math problems, the trickiest musical pieces, the most elusive social media algorithms, and the most complex choreography can be your entrée into the elite level. Pursuing the toughest projects is definitely not a shortcut, but it’s a way to reframe the work you’re doing to help you see your choices differently and stay motivated. You’re less likely to be miserable when you remember that you deliberately requested the hottest spice level at the metaphorical restaurant. You can smile grimly and embrace the self-inflicted pain.

Some days, you won’t feel like doing the hard work and you’ll want to coast along doing what’s fun. That’s a reasonable choice. When you’re ready to level up, the hard stuff will be waiting for you. When you’re aware that pursuing the parts you don’t want to do will make you better and stronger, you might almost enjoy it. But even if you don’t, your effort will pay off.