Serious
Planted 02024-07-28
Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.
Never confess to me that you are just as flawed as I am unless you can tell me what you plan to do about it. Afterward you will still have plenty of flaws left, but that’s not the point; the important thing is to do better, to keep moving ahead, to take one more step forward. Tsuyoku naritai!
As I got older it became clearer to me that not many people are really serious about anything. Some people go their whole lives without ever having met anyone else who I might describe as actually serious, so they find it hard to believe that anybody could really mean what they say, since everything everyone says is bullshit. I remember feeling like that myself at some of my low points in life, when I was at my most depressed.
[…]
I want… to be as serious as I can about the things that matter to me, to be encouraging to everyone else who wants to be serious too, and to be kind to everyone who doesn’t quite manage to be.
I don’t know what being serious looks like for you. I barely know what it looks like for me. But no matter who you are, being serious means holding something sacred. And if you don’t feel like you’re doing that right now, it means taking a small but perceptible step toward doing that tomorrow, and then another step after that.
There is not some distant future where it will be easier to be serious, and no one is ever going to give you permission to start. You don’t have to be 100% serious right now, nor do you have to be 100% serious about everything—these are just excuses not to be serious about anything. But the goal is to be 100% serious about at least one thing, and soon.
have a disinterested obsession with something that matters
“Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce if I run any more,” –and we’re still running-”if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”
negative energy is wasted energy.
You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments. That to me is the sign of a champion.
The best in the world are not the best because they win every point… It’s because they know they’ll lose… again and again… and have learned how to deal with it.
You accept it. Cry it out if you need to… then force a smile.
You move on. Be relentless. Adapt and grow.
Work harder. Work smarter. Remember: work smarter.
Research is, of course, only a part of life, and must be understood in relation to the rest of life. The foundation of effective research is a strong motivation or desire to do research. If research is not incredibly exciting, rewarding and enjoyable, at least some of the time, then why not do something else that is? For the purposes of this essay, I’ll assume that you already have a strong desire to do research
find the things in life that ignite you and deepen your understanding of the world and those within it.
No matter how far my goal is, now matter how small the steps I take are, as long as I don’t stand still, someday I’ll get there.
Anyone can do obstinacy. Indeed, kids and drunks and fools are best at it. Whereas very few people have enough of all five of the qualities that produce the right kind of stubbornness, but when they do the results are magical.