Sept. 25: Doing the hard thing

There is the story of the young piano student who goes to the concert hall to see a world famous maestro perform. For an hour, this master musician tickles the ivory, navigating his way through a virtuoso selection of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach. When the concert is over, he has the following brief exchange with the young student:

Student: Maestro, I would give my very life to play the way you do.

Maestro: I already have.

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I am a magician but by no means am I a master magician. I won't use that adjective to modify my (sometimes) occupation. To do so would be an insult to the true masters. I am friends with dozens of magicians on Facebook, some of whom I would consider to be masters of their craft. One of them is one of the best card mechanics in the world. Seriously, this dude can do anything with a deck of cards. I have seen him take a shuffled deck, spread it out on the table, spin a poker chip and make it land on the Ace of Spades. He can bottom deal and centre deal flawlessly, can deal himself a royal flush and give everyone else at the table a full house.

How did he get that good? By practising. He would stay up into the wee hours of the night, bending the deck of cards to do his will, repeating the same moves over and over again until his fingers were numb. He practised while most of us went to the movies or played video games or allowed distractions to rule us. And now he is reaping the rewards of all that sacrifice.

Practice, man. That's the hard thing. 

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There's this rule called the 10,000 hour rule. It says that if you want to get really good at something, you have to put at least 10,000 hours into it. If skill is built bit by bit, then 10,000 hours translates to a lot of bits. I doubt I've spent 10,000 hours practising magic (that's more than one year, by the way) but I'm sure I have put that much time into journalism and writing, so I could you could say I'm a master journalist.

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But it's hard, man. Most of us are inclined to sloth, we'll find the easiest way to do something and then we'll do that. We eat the French fries instead of the broccoli. We play that video game instead of finish our chapter. Sacrifice is hard work.

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David Mamet once said that there's no such thing as talent, you just have to work hard enough. I think I agree with 85 per cent of that. I believe in something called innate ability; I believe that some of us are just genetically predisposed to certain activities.

Wayne Gretzky is largely considered to be the greatest hockey player of all time, but I won't suggest that the reason he's so good is because he worked harder than anyone else. The National Hockey League was, and is, filled with players who work just as hard as he did, problem is that they didn't have his genius.

No matter. No one goes to the Statue of Liberty to look at the foundation, they go there to look at what was built on the foundation. I hope the analogy fits. Want to be good at something? Then do the hard thing and work at it.