More thoughts on skilled people.

I wrote a piece talking about skilled surgeons and the idea that people “could” call them obsessive.  But I personally believe that it’s not obsessive but skilled people who practice and hone their techniques in a particular (small) area.

Any genius who designs something that changes or impacts the world in some particular way, I don’t think would necessarily be called obsessive but they are extremely focused on the ONE thing they are inventing/creating/changing.

If you think back to the Second World War, there was SO MUCH innovation and creating NEW machinery for almost every area in life.  Would that mean the creators and innovators were obsessed?  Even if you want to put them in that category, they worked and studied and considered and thought about their inventions to ensure the ending of the Second World War.

To become good at anything, you have to be willing to keep on trying and practising and changing and learning and be extremely focused on that one thing until you get it completely right.  And then you have to be able to do it consistently accurately day after day.

But also BEFORE ALL OF THAT, you need to have a spark of talent for the actual thing you are going to be doing and WANT to be doing it, not for a job, but just because you love doing it.  Skill takes YEARS to learn and perfect.  As I say to Johnathan “you can’t come in to school on the very first day and write an entire encyclopaedia.  There are so many things you need to learn and study and perfect before you can create something like that.”

TREASURE

With love, creativity, imagination, hard work, dedication, you can become an expert at whatever you want.