How people get high rewards? Step 1: They don’t care
Back when I was a kid, I was told the greatest award on the planet is the Nobel Prize. I had assumed that people must be working extremely hard to get this award. I was partially right, they work hard — right, to get the award — wrong. I recently watched Nobel Minds 2017, a round table discussion of the 2017 Nobel laureates, where they discussed how none of the people actually didn’t work hard because they wanted to win the prize but they did so because they loved the process and were driven by the cause of helping science progress.
This process of earning a high reward can be broken down into steps. Here’s how people get high rewards:
- They don’t care about the prize. They work because they love what they do and are driven by the cause.
- They play a high-risk-high-reward game. They pick up tough problems to solve where they experiment and fail many times but when they succeed, the reward makes their effort worthwhile. To reduce the risk/ increase their chance of success, they play the game long-term.
- They fail 99% of the time. People who pick up tough problems to solve, fail most of the time before finding any considerable amount of success. Throughout this journey of failures, they build emotional resistance and perseverance.
- ‘Love for doing’ motivates them to keep trying. It is a game of wayfinding where you keep travelling, keep finding dead ends and keep re-routing till you find the destination. However, what keeps these people going is the fact that they love travelling and they understand that failures are part of progress.
- One day they succeed. When they play a game long term, they get better at it and they eventually break through. They get high-reward as a by-product for playing the game long enough.
Effort gives progress. Progress gives joy. Failure gives direction. Success validates direction. Success compounds to impact. Impact makes it worthwhile.
The reward is what they set for themselves and not what society recognises them with. Nobel prize is just recognition, the real reward is the joy of working and knowing the impact of their success for the generations to come.
🙏 Thank you for reading.
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