My son Lachlan after wrestling practice: “Dad, next practice is on Monday, can we practice at home so we can be better by then?”

Me: “Yes of course. Let me ask you a question, how good do you want to be?”

Lachlan: “The best.”

Me: “Then you will need to practice every day.”

Lachlan: “What about holidays?”

Me: “Yep, every day if you want to be the best.”

Older brother Drake: “What about if we’re too busy?”

Me: “You will have to get up earlier.”

Drake and Lachlan: …

Lachlan is five and Drake is six. Are they going to practice every day? I don’t know, but the principle stands.

As a general rule the more you do of something the better you get at doing that thing. Common sense that isn’t put into practice often enough.

Here’s a quote from Elon Musk, who has a net worth of $31.1 billion on working…

“Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that…you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.”

Mr. Musk has a few titles…
Founder, CEO, Lead Designer of SpaceX
CEO, Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.
Co-founder of Neuralink
Founder of The Boring Company
Co-founder of Zip2
Founder of X.com (now PayPal)
Co-founder of OpenAI
Chairman of SolarCity

Now, I get that there is this notion of balance. Well, balance can be achieved in many different ways and the people who are the BEST at something do not have balance at the point when they are the best. Being the best is by definition a state of tipping the scales out of balance.

You may say, wait, but I don’t want to be the best. Even if you don’t want to be the best the more time you spend doing something the better you will be and the faster you will get results.

Do you need rest and recovery? Without a doubt. Thus, the trick is to optimize your rest and recovery and focus the rest of your time and energy on the things you want to be really good at. For many people looking at the way they spend their time this would be things like watching Netflix, scrolling social media, and complaining about…well everything.

Not wanting to be the best is okay and the sooner you can own that the better. Once you own the choice of not wanting to be the best and instead simply want to improve you can move on. When you simply want to improve the required commitment level and time necessary will be less allowing time for other things (which is what most people want).

The key is understanding that you cannot get better at something without doing the thing enough to get better at it. If you find yourself wanting to be better at something or complaining about not getting results in some area of life increase the amount of time, energy, and resources you are spending on it.