This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 2791. If you're busy, you're doing something wrong. The surprisingly relaxed lives of elite achievers by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com, and I'm just a molic the guy who's been reading to you every day, including holidays for a very long time now. We're gonna keep that up, so let's get right to it, and continue optimizing your life.
If you're busy, you're doing something wrong. The surprisingly relaxed lives of elite achievers by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com. The Berlin Study. In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the University Todd Duracunst, sorry for pronunciation, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin.
They came to study the violinists. As described in their subsequent publication and psychological review, the researchers asked the academy's music professors to help them identify a set of stand-out violin players. The students of the professors believed would go into careers as professional performers. We'll call this group the elite players.
For a point of comparison, they also selected a group of students from the school's education department. These were students who were on track to become music teachers. They were serious about violin, but as the professors explained, their ability was not in the same league as the first group. We'll call this group the average players.
The three researchers subjected their subjects to a series of in-depth interviews. They then gave them diaries, which divided each 24-hour period into 50-minute chunks, and sent them home to keep a careful log of how they spent their time. Flushed with data, the researchers went to work trying to answer a fundamental question. Why are the elite players better than the average players?
The obvious guess is that the elite players are more dedicated to their craft. That is, they're willing to put in the long, tiger-mom-style hours required to get good while the average players are off goofing around and enjoying life. The data, as it turns out, had a different story to tell. Decoding the patterns of the elite.
We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate more hours to music. The time diaries revealed that both groups spent on average the same number of hours on music per week around 50. The difference was in how they spent this time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice.
The uncomfortable, methodical work of stretching your ability. This might not be surprising as the importance of deliberate practice had been replicated and reported many times, but the researchers weren't done. They also studied how the students scheduled their work. The average players they discovered spread their work throughout the day, a graph included in the paper which shows the average time spent working versus the waking hours of the day is essentially flat.
The elite players, by contrast, consolidated their work into two well-defined periods. When you plot the average time spent working versus the hours of the day for these players, there are two prominent peaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. In fact, the more elite the player, the more pronounced the peaks. For the best of the best, the subset of the leads to the professors thought would go on to play in one of Germany's two best professional orchestras, there was essentially no deviation from a rigid two sessions a day schedule.
This isolation of work from leisure had pronounced effects in other areas of the player's lives. Consider, for example, sleep. The elite players slept an hour more per night than the average players. Also, consider relaxation.
The researchers asked the players to estimate how much time they dedicated each week to leisure activities and important indicator of their subjective feeling of relaxation. By this metric, the elite players were significantly more relaxed than the average players. In the best of the best, we're the most relaxed of all. Hard work is different than hard to do work.
To summarize these results, the average players are working just as many hours as the elite players, around 50 hours a week, spent on music, but they're not dedicating these hours to the right type of work, spending almost three times less hours than the elite's on crucial deliberate practice. And furthermore, they spread this work half as or least throughout the day. So even though they're not doing more work than the elite players, they end up sleeping less and feeling more stressed, not to mention that they remain worse, the violin. I've seen the same phenomenon time and again in my study of high achievers.
It came up so often in my study of top students, for example, that I've coined a name for it, the paradox of the relaxed road scholar. This study sheds some light on this paradox. It provides empirical evidence that there's a difference between hard work and hard to do work. Hard work is deliberate practice.
It's not fun while you're doing it, but you don't have to do too much of it in any one day. The elite players spent on average three and a half hours per day engaged in deliberate practice broken into two sessions. It also provides you measurable progress and a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it's not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.
Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment. This analysis leads to an important conclusion.
Whether you're a student or well-long in your career, if your goal is to build a remarkable life, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you're chronically stressed and up late working, you're doing something wrong. You're the average players from the universe of Todd Dr. Koonst, not the elite.
You've built a life around hard to do work, not hard work. The solution suggested by this research, as well as my own, is as simple as it is startling. Do less, but do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you're done, be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.
You just listened to the post titled, If You're Busy, You're Doing Something Wrong, The Surprising Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers, by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com. No, oh, did you want? No. The Devil Wears Product II.
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It can feel sort of good, or we might feel like we've accomplished something on days where we run around working late if we actually think we finished something. But to Cal's point, and based on this study, maybe that's not necessarily a great sign, possibly a bad sign. Not always, but it is possible. So I used to play the drums.
I do want to start again here and there, but anyway, it reminds me of how I'd practice alone compared to having a teacher. When I had a teacher, I'd always be forced in a way to level up, learn something new that my body wasn't coordinate enough to do to begin with. And that was not a lot of fun. It's incredibly frustrating when something sounds so easy, but then the right hand and the right foot refused to cooperate.
But that was when I made the most progress. When I didn't have a teacher, I'd usually end up playing the same old beats and rehearsing the same stuff I already knew. That's nice, and it does make me a bit better, but nowhere near the kind of progress I was making when I was being forced to learn new skills and techniques. I really do think this applies to a bunch of areas in life.
So it's something to think about today and this weekend. And with that, thank you for being here and listening to the almost weekend episodes. Have a great start to your weekend and I'll be back tomorrow where you're optimal life. I'll wait.