The Best Minute: Exponential results, practice, and trying hard things

1 IDEA FROM ME

Small consistencies produce exponential results over others over time.

I once listened to an interview where the late Kobe Bryant explained why he got up so early in the off-season to practice. It was because after each practice session, you needed to give your body a few hours to rest before going again. By getting up early, he could have three practice times a day instead of two. Since most guys practiced twice a day, after a few years, he knew that no matter how much they practiced in the future, they would never be able to catch up to him.

While you may not notice much of a difference early on, if you:

Read consistently, eventually you will accumulate more wisdom and knowledge than your peers
Eat well, eventually you won’t have the same health issues as your peers
Practice a little bit most days, eventually your skill gap will be much larger than your peers

It may not feel or see a difference in results for a while, but eventually, small consistencies produce exponential results over others over time.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I. Golf great Gary Player on practice:

“The more I practice the luckier I get.”

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II. Eliezer Yudkowsky on trying hard things:

“If you never fail, you’re only trying things that are too easy and playing far below your level… If you can’t remember any time in the last six months when you failed, you aren’t trying to do difficult enough things.”

1 INTERESTING FACT

The gap between conversation responses typically lasts 200 milliseconds.

While that's an average, it's also nearly universal. In most languages—including sign language—the pause between when we speak and when the person we're talking to takes their turn keeps to a familiar pattern. Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has said this is "the minimum human response time to anything," including when runners react to a starting pistol.

Source: Best Life