On Ambition
"Be not as you are, but as you should be"
To My Precious Students,
In your 20s you’ll feel like you’re losing the race. It is important to understand that there is no race.
Attend to your ambitions.
The Professor’s that I’ve had seemed to have none. I believe it is an implicit rule of professionalism, that one must never share their hunger with those they teach.
But I find myself unable to be a mouthpiece that simply reproduces information.
My teaching style does not submit to gravity.
I want everything.
And I want you to want everything too.
On the Work
We need to put in the raw hours. 10,000 hours like Gladwell suggests in his book Outliers, or whatever the current metric for mastery is.
The work is necessary but it is not sufficient.
It is like sleep. To sleep well, you need a bed, a pillow, and the night. But how many nights have you had those things and still found rest elusive? The hours you put into your craft are just the bed.
The place where you make sleep happen. By no means the quality of the sleep itself.
The work itself is the path.
“Half gods are worshipped with wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.” - Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes were Watching God
On Obsession
Passion is a temporary. It passes.
Obsession is inescapable.
It is unique in that it gets us past points where anyone who was simply passionate in the same endeavor would have quit.
We know the obsession is there when the mind constantly deviates from the world around us.
I am voracious.
I find myself toying with the training plan, my study schedule, tinkering with my network just to gain a single situational advantage.
It is the love of the game.
Attention is a commodity. And so alternatively, all that occupies the mind without advancing our vision decelerates momentum. And delayed are the revelations by which we are transformed.
On Community
America loves celebrating the lone genius. But even Newton, who invented calculus before 26 because algebra was too small for his thoughts, had tutors. His peers who had been flirting with those theorems for years.
The versatility of many minds focused on one problem accelerates anything that I am able to achieve alone.
And I am only one mind, at least for the time being. We need a circle of those who are equally obsessed. We need the exchange of news, techniques, and gear. We need the shared momentum that an individual cannot generate in a vacuum.
Isolation is required for greatness, but greatness cannot happen only in isolation.
On Coaching
Sometimes I’m going to a new place for the first time. And I know roughly how to get there. But I’m unsure about the best path. I also don’t want to make any wrong turns. Or get off at the wrong train stop. And so I use google maps, which is essentially a coach for directions.
Coaching is essential, because you get the individualized attention of an expert who can recognize and draw out our unique strengths. Allowing you to leverage latent skills and talents that would’ve otherwise been left on the table.
The Ticket
This isn’t article isn’t a model on how be the best in the world.
In fact, you probably knew most of this stuff already. It’s just about what it takes to get past the barrier to entry to begin to try and be the best.
Because after mastering everything here, all we are given is entry.
After hours of obsession, community, coaching, the systems, you have earned exactly one thing: a lottery ticket.
The world owes us nothing for our effort.
But without these efforts, we don’t even get to set foot on the world stage.
The Impossible
Thor was the strongest of the gods. But he found the giant cup difficult to lift and impossible to drain. And the giant who imposed this challenge told Thor that most of the soldiers in the giant’s army could drain the cup in a single gulp.
Thor struggled, and was unable to empty the cup in three gulps. He barely seemed to make a dent.
Failure.
But then a secret about the cup was revealed. It was magically connected to the bottom of the ocean. And that if Thor had managed to finish the cup, he would have drank the sea dry.
Thor managed to drink so much, that he created the first tides.
There many nights as I drift off to sleep, I can almost hear the sounds of the ocean lulling me as it used to in my tiny apartment on the coast just outside of San Francisco.
My students. My hope. My hope is that you find ambition whispering to you as she does with me in the gentle roll of the tides.
“Drink the Sea”
- Professor Jonathan