The 100x Formula.
The small step to achieve mastery.
Mastery is a great book by the amazing George Leonard. The “amazing” part will be justified when you read the book itself.
The book talks about how your work ethic amounts ultimately to your success. He gives examples from Aikido training, to his fathers fire insurance company, he explains how you excel at the work you love.
Work is tough, and unlike what they show in movie montages, hard work and perseverance is seldom so clean and effortless. The way directors show people working out and making progress seems to be so easy and relaxing to the viewer, that you would never imagine anything different in real life. But that’s simply not true.
The truth is, hard work is messy. It is full of big and small failures. answers tend to go wrong. Essays tend to remain incomplete. Circuits tend to break. Sometimes you have to start over on a project you have spent weeks, or even months working on. It is messy as hell. It is not as mentally pleasing as they show it in the Rocky and other motivational clips on YouTube. There are times when you will give it your all and you receive nothing in return. You will see no progress. You will plateau most of the time. The videos and short films you make will receive no views or a single like. You will start questioning your life’s choices. Yes, it gets that hard. It gets messy. And the fun part is, you will never experience these difficulties in school and college. Because there are people in schools and colleges, to take care of you. To tell you the answers if you don’t get them. To tell you things like , “Hey that’s not in the syllabus, why are you studying it?”
Real life is much more difficult, and unlike school, you don’t have a second shot,every time you lose an opportunity. That is why you need to get some perspective on how the world really works, and get down to working hard.
The 100x formula.
I use this formula everyday, and you can too. It is a sure-fire way to get something done, every single day, if you just begin doing something, and complete the above formula.
The secret is, pick a skill set you have to practice everyday and apply 100x to it. For example, if you want to excel at karate , do a set of 100 pushups. Or a 100 front kicks. Doesn’t matter if you break it down into 4 sets, just make sure you do hundred. If you want to be a good artist, make a hundred small sketches. Stick figures, muscle anatomy, cubes and spheres, doesn’t matter. Whatever you do, 100x it. This will make sure you keep pushing yourself everyday, and have you keep a target that you have to achieve everyday, making sure you get it done. Now I know there aren't some things you can 100x, but that’s what the x stands for. You can change the value of x lower,or higher than what you are currently capable of. If you cant do a single pushup, try to get in 10 in a day, the whole point of the formula is to give you a target. A target to achieve.
If you get better, you can always increase the number. You can go up to 200x, 500x, or why even a 1000x!
All this formula gives you is a metric. Something to follow. Something that you can show accountability for. In the end of the day,you can say,
Yes, I did practice something a hundred times.
The formula is a sure-fire way to push you towards success. In hops and skips,but as long as it is something you like doing, You’ll just breeze through it.
Intimidation
Hard work can be intimidating. When the going gets tough, your mind and body do everything in their powers to protect you from difficulties. Here is where you understand that you have to override this defence mechanism against hard work. When you get something wrong, you start feeling if you are actually worth whatever it is you want to do. The truth is you are.
Your work is not supposed to be easy. If it were easy, there would be prodigies hanging out every square inch of your city. The point is, even prodigies have to work hard to become great. 7–8 hours of practice, every single day, to get where they want to get. Even if it is something you absolutely love doing, don’t let your mind go into autopilot mode and scare the hell out of you when you face hardships. Your mind will focus on all the negative outcomes and difficulties, you would potentially face, just to keep you from doing the work. But that is just a Defense mechanism. The true power lies in your positivity, to go ahead and do it, regardless of how you “feel”.
(I get 1 or 2 views on each of my articles,I still keep writing everyday, for that one reader.)
