Great writers, founders, artists, and athletes condition themselves to be tremendously comfortable with boredom. Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” When you consider the fact that writing a novel can take upwards of 600 hours, you look at Hemingway’s quote through an entirely different lens. Perhaps he wasn’t bleeding from emotion but boredom. Steve Jobs was heavily inspired by Zen Buddhism, where sitting still for extended periods of time is gospel. Jobs would sit cross-legged in front of a wall for long periods of time, staring at a single point. A former engineer at @Apple once said, “Steve could sit there doing nothing longer than anyone in the room. He waited until the truth rose to the surface.” Like Hemingway, Jobs was very good at being bored. While Georgia O’Keeffe practiced boredom not through sitting but by repeating. She would choose a single subject—an iris, a skull, or a mountain—and paint it repeatedly. Sometimes dozens of times. This boredom through repetition isn’t just prominent in the arts but in athletics too. Tiger Woods' childhood coach said he possessed a superhuman capacity for repetition. This extraordinary ability followed him into adulthood. When preparing for a major match, Woods would take 1,000 swings per day until his clubs felt like an extension of his arms. Greatness is hard to come by nowadays. Not because humanity is lacking in talent, but because we are drowning in distraction. This is where discipline and obsession come in. We must be ruthless concerning our attention. We must treat them like medieval monarchs treated those who tested their reign. Those who produce great work in the coming decades will likely appear out of touch with the times. They won't be on social media. That, or they will spend very little time appeasing the algorithm. They will limit their phone usage. They will be abundantly skeptical of the instant gratification that AI promises. In a way, they will live their lives like monks that Steve Jobs so deeply admired.

Kobe Bryant on obsession: “Those days when you stay up late and you work hard, those days when you wake up early and you work hard, those days when you don't feel like doing anything, but you do it anyway, that is actually the dream. It's about the journey, not the destination.”

As Haruki Murakami’s writing career took off, he sold the jazz cafe to become a full-time novelist. His friends and family never understood why he didn’t hire someone else to run the cafe while he wrote his novels. Despite all the conflicting opinions from friends and family, he did what he wanted to do. Everyone thought that Haruki Murakami was crazy and had made a foolish decision. “I couldn’t follow their advice,” he said. “I’m the kind of person who has to commit to whatever I do. I had to give it everything I had. If I failed, I could accept that. But I knew that if I did things half-heatedly and they didn’t work out, I’d always have regrets.” It requires an uncommon conviction to disregard what the majority of your peers consider significant. But Murakami practiced intentional disconnection. He wanted to think in peace, undisturbed by the popular obsession. He ignored easy-to-get opportunities and left money on the table to the point that it seemed foolish. Today, Murakami is hailed as one of the greatest living writers of this century. The pursuit of greatness necessitates isolation from unnecessary triggers. Sheharyar signing out...

Fast pace and quick execution are the holy grail of modern society. Taking time to think and decide, and being inherently slow, is seen as indecisiveness. But history tells a different story. Charlie Munger once said, “Neither Warren nor I are smart enough to make decisions with no time to think. We make actual decisions very rapidly, but that’s because we have spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly reading.” Before technology and the internet, it was the way of the human mind to take up all the time at hand and then reach a certain conclusion and not rush the process. The stillness of the moment was one of the ends. Although man is equipped after the advent of technology, a plethora of new problems have also emerged. “Technology has solved,” writes Mark Manson, “old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems. The internet has not just open-sourced information, it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.” The internet, fast fashion, short-form content, mass production, and over-abundance fueled impatience. Everyone wants more of the good thing right now, right away. Stillness and patience have been long lost to memory. To bring back stillness in my life after a long phase of loneliness and running after worldly gains, I'm learning to slow down and trying to experience what exists right now right here in front of me. I try to go out on long walks as much as I can. On these walks, I look around, observe, and absorb nature in its purest form as much as possible. “If there is time to reflect,” writes Daniel Kahneman, “slowing down is likely to be a good idea.” Sheharyar signing out...

In The Alchemist, there is a very beautiful and powerful dialogue between two characters. Paulo Coelho writes: “My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”

“A young player should not be worried about his legacy. Wake up, identify your weaknesses, & work on them. Go to sleep, wake up, & do that all over again. 20 years from now, you'll look back and see your legacy for yourself. That's life.” — Kobe Bryant

Everybody else moved from place to place, from trend to trend, but Ralph Lauren wasn't trendy. He stayed with a single thing. His single-mindedness set him apart from the crowd.

Writing a novel is a big mountain to climb, but writing a page or two every day is a small stepping stone that almost anybody can conquer. While reflecting on his prolificness, Haruki Murakami once pointed out, “I’m more of a workhorse than a racehorse.” He likes to grind round the clock as opposed to waiting for spurts of inspiration.

When Haruki Murakami finished writing his first-ever story, he submitted it to a contest run by the Gunzo Literature Prize Committee. Months later, he was notified that he had won the contest—having forgotten that he even sent it in—and that his story would be published as a novel. He was more interested in the fact that the story had finished than in the possibility of it ever seeing the light of day as a book. “The work has to be the win,” @RyanHoliday usually says. “You control the effort, not the results. So ultimately, you have to love doing the work. Everything else is extra.”

While King Louis XVI was on the gallows to be executed after the French Revolution in 1793, he remained calm and never lost his nerve. Teddy Roosevelt once pointed out, “What such a man needs is not courage, but nerve control, cool-headedness. This one can get by practice.”