“Half the game is mental; the other half is being mental.” — Jim McKenny
To do anything exceptional requires exceptional willpower, a borderline obsession and craziness with the infinite game of improving in your passion.
Whether it was Eddie Van Halen noodling on a guitar for hours and hours and inventing new technologies to bring the music he heard in his soul into the world or that teenage girl coding for hours and hours building her startup around her school schedule, there is a technical component but an equally strong passion component that exceeds normal limitations.
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness” Aristotle observed millennia ago. Leonardo da Vinci’s passion for observation of the natural world and Nikolai Tesla’s brilliance are examples of this.
Being crazy about something important was how Darwin and Marie Curie changed our understanding of the world. It is how Buchowski and Monet changed how we see the world. Never be afraid of being told “you’re crazy”, because it is the crazy ones that change the world.