Behavior is 1% direction, 99% recursion

"Practice makes a man perfect" -- The famous 10,000 hour rule states that to achieve success in any specific field, one needs to go through, basically a large number of repetitions before it becomes a habit rather than a task. It`s no new information, we see similar adage in sports where they always advise you to "just feel and react" without thinking. What they're saying is actually an outcome of the same philosophy. It needs to be a habit (built into your muscle memory) rather than you having to consciously think about it. But to get there, sports persons go through tremendous number of repetitions---going back to the 10,000 hour rule---that programs their subconscious.

Interestingly, we can see that just because the information is redundant doesn't mean that it is unnecessary. Why else would people go to self help books, watch motivational videos, and so on, which basically expound the same rational crap that everyone inherently knows already? It's about ingraining a philosophy into your subconscious. To an extent, it seems plausible that if you repeat a "factual" statement to yourself a hundred times, you may start believing it. Especially if it is on a more subjective manner. Like, if you have a low confidence level, you are advised to speak repeatedly to yourself, 'I'm good, I can do this', or something to the effect.

In my opinion this method continues to a meta level as well. Not just for academics, habits, sports, philosophy or attitude, the method can be applied towards motivation, organization, optimization and justification of the same activities.

Recently ran across this interesting nugget:

(and then I ran across a few hundred more...inspired me to go download and watch 'The Pursuit of Happiness') It's not difficult to argue that there's a lot of crap in most of these stories. From propaganda (subtle or flamboyant) to fictional anecdotes disguised as facts to unnecessary generalizations. But like most other source of information, we can just as easily filter through the noise and get to the signal. One signal that really struck me---and has stuck to me since---is the following line:

You don't really want it. You just kinda want it.

Really, that's just it. In my opinion, the most succinct way to get motivated is the driest way. 'Get over it'; because that line up there. Anything significant or worth being proud of in life requires hard work and effort beyond the point of tiredness/boredom/hopelessness etc. because it's that point where you need to remember the corollary to this message:

...If you want (this) as bad as you want to breathe when you're drowning, only then will you find a way to get it done.

We can convince ourselves, through repeated attempts, to want to achieve greatness as bad as we want to breathe. Then the struggle to achieve it will---and should---become nothing more than a habit. It's what I will strive to from now on.

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There are some other asides to look at this philosophy at. My favorite one comes from one of the best series of lectures I've found on the internet, the graduate course of Principles of Digital Communication-I by Dr. Robert Gallagher. Here he brings up the point that struggling through theory and toy problems are not what engineers do. However, that's exactly how great engineers are made. One needs to spend enough time getting their theory right and then understanding how the different parts behave using toy problems so that looking at a system from an architectural point of view becomes second nature. Greatness is achieved when a person knows how to break the problem down into its essentials and then how to add the 'nasties'.

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As another aside, I wanted to talk a little bit about the fact that some people don't need to go through as many failures as others to learn the same number of things. In my opinion as a member of the latter group (more failures), I think that's just how the world is. Maybe the reasons that we aren't as good at induction as the former group; but at the same time, the repeated attempts show us more facets of the same problem than the ones who have better induction. In my opinion of course. I chalk my reasons to the relatively statistically indeterminate nature of the world. There's always some things one can't foresee.