The study sited in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” that encouraged 10,000 hours of practice being necessary for craft mastery, included another statistic that went strangely ignored. It noted that exceptional practitioners of their crafts differed from merely good performers in the amount of sleep they averaged each week by five-and-a-half hours.
The achievers got more. Shocking, huh? Americans like to think more always gets you more and that keeping your nose to the grindstone is the only way to achievement (regardless of what it does to your nose), but maybe it’s not.
Here’s another weird statistic: If you come from a town with a population of 50,000 to 90,000, you are over 25 times more likely to be in the NFL or the NBA than if you come from a city of over three million.
Staggering. The theory goes, in part, that the kids from the smaller towns aren’t forced to specialize and can play a lot of different sports and maybe, because it’s more fun for them, they come to appreciate the spirit of their games which better sustains their craft.
This leads me to propose three New Year’s resolutions that will probably strike you as counterintuitive
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