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Why ten years, when by working ten hours a day you’d get to 10,000 hours in a thousand days, which is less than three years? Because it’s not enough to accumulate hours of practice; the practice has to be deliberate, it has to represent an effort to achieve a specific goal, ability, or gesture that as yet eludes you. To put it another way, you need to feel the time passing, it needs to not be easy. This is quite different from the so-called ten hours a day spent by Zola or Flaubert, who seem like workaholics when in fact they spent most of their time dreaming of the right word, “fiddling around” with their sentences like Giacometti fiddling around with his clay; in short, doing what they liked best, which takes a lot of deliberately wasted time and a certain kind of nonchalance. Nothing to do with continuous effort, in any case. Three or four hours a day of deliberate practice, preferably spread out over several sessions, would therefore be a maximum, because the effort of all that attention is exhausting. The rest of the day should be spent resting, or in comparatively less intense activities: reading, reflection, strategy, associated leisure activities, and so on. Three to four hours a day with one day of rest a week, and two weeks of holiday a year, gets you to 1,000 hours a year, or 10,000 hours in ten years. In any case, putting in your 10,000 hours in your given area absolutely does not guarantee that you will reach expert level. You need both the innate “hardware” (the “cables,” the computer), which comes from nature, and the acquired “software,” which comes from training. To achieve greatness there is no magic number of hours that will allow you to substitute work for being gifted. You need both: the gift and hard work. The gift without the work will go uncultivated, the work without the gift will be sterile. In both cases, it’s a waste. It’s a pity not to train if you’re gifted, but training when you have no gift can be harmful. You may incur needless harm to your physique and to your ego, and tenacity or denial can turn into blindness and useless obstinacy. My heart is so forcibly pressed against that wire, each beat echoes, echoes and casts each approaching thought into the netherworld.
PDF / EPUB File Name: The_French_Art_of_Not_Trying_Too_Hard_-_Ollivier_Pourriol.pdf, The_French_Art_of_Not_Trying_Too_Hard_-_Ollivier_Pourriol.epub Through hard work, the pianist prepares for the moment of visitation. As I walk across the stage, I’m alone, and the moment I start playing, I cease to be. A presence is protecting me. Is it the presence of the music? Of the composers whose work I’m playing? It’s as though there are two of me and I can watch myself playing at the same time as continuing to play—sometimes I see a light come down that casts a halo around the piano and I know that that light is them. Identifiers: LCCN 2020022658 (print) | LCCN 2020022659 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135494 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525507161 (ebook) This is not a new idea in France: since Montaigne, philosophers have suggested that a certain je ne sais quoi is the key to a more creative, fulfilling and productive existence. We can see it in their laissez faire parenting, their chic style, their haute cuisine and enviable home cooking - the French barely seem to be trying, yet the results are world famous.
Do without thinking. Do not focus on the goal, on the aim, simply release the arrow, as it knows where to go. Be satisfied with being, and allow the work to come. The more you focus on something, the more you can cause yourself to make mistakes. When you think, you are focusing, you are judging, and therefore are thinking and not acting. When thinking, you are the antithesis of acting, and therefore, when firing an arrow can never hit a target. Express your pride through your posture, Pretend to be proud. Start by miming. "Man is formed through struggle, his true pleasures must be won, must be served. He must give before he receives. That is the law." (alain). Certain goals can only be achieved if we do not aim at them. Whenever I’m able do something without any effort I start to think it is inherently easy, that anyone should be able to do it. This is called the expert’s illusion. The minute you find yourself on the other side of expertise you realize it is an illusion, and that what is easy for one person isn’t necessarily easy for another. You find the illusion of the expert with literature teachers who think everyone must love reading. Or with math teachers who can’t understand why you don’t understand. This is the only thing they find difficult: understanding that what is easy for them is difficult for others.
In the realm of love, what could be less seductive than someone who's trying to seduce you? Seduction is the art of succeeding without trying, and that's a lesson the French have mastered.Attention is a wave on which we must learn to surf.” The most powerful and thriving industry today is the one that has our attention at the heart of it. If I want to achieve my goals then I need to ride the wave not get drowned in it As we’ve seen, once you’ve started, you just need to keep going. The stones you’ve laid in a wall give you the shape of the stones you’re going to have to put in next. The more the wall grows, the less room there is for hesitation or chance, the more you are bound by necessity. But how can you dare to start? Laying the first stone may be no big deal, but taking the first step . . . Freedom is dizzying, and the infinity of possible outcomes is a promise of failure, a sky without stars, a metaphysical void studded only with questions: why do this and not that? Why go this way, not that? At least a tightrope walker knows which way he must go. Straight ahead. Sixty meters of cable. The route is laid out. He hesitates not over the direction, but over how to take the first step. No more choices after that. This is not the case in all activities, obviously. The tightrope walker is an extreme case, a metaphor for all the rest. The way you start, in whatever field of activity, contains the seed of future success or failure. It’s not enough just to set out—you have to set out confidently. Whether in horse riding, running, work, or love, the first step dictates whatever comes next. If you set out confidently your chances of achieving your goal are infinitely greater. A bit like in archery: an arrow that is fired cleanly has already hit the bull’s-eye; its flight is already accomplished at the instant it leaves the bow. This is not a matter of predestination: until the moment it’s released, the arrow is going nowhere. Nothing is laid out in advance, but the endpoint of an arrow’s flight is inscribed in its beginning, and for the archer there is a way of beginning the movement that guarantees it will end well. To start out well is to end well, in the same movement. You mustn’t try. You must succeed the first time. And therefore, until you feel the presence of the endpoint, until you feel you’ve reached it, you can’t actually begin. You could, you should, but still you hesitate. Taking the first step: anxiety of all lovers, nightmare of all tightrope walkers. “I wouldn’t be able to walk on that wire if I wasn’t sure before taking the first step that I could do the last . . . It’s very close to religious faith.” Who’s saying this? Philippe Petit. Who’s Philippe Petit? The best way of introducing him would be to make you feel what he does. So let me suggest a little thought experiment. At the end of this paragraph I want you to close your eyes, count to ten, and open them again. Here we go. A laissez-faire guide to self-help. This is a book for those who aspire to the déshabillé, Serge-Gainsbourg-and-Jane-Birkin-morning-after look and the studied negligence of the Parisian Bobo (bourgeois-bohemian).”― The Times(London) This book came about as the result of a conversation with my publisher and friend, Elsa Lafon. It’s important to specify “friend” because we weren’t working at the time, we were just having dinner. It wasn’t a professional discussion; I wasn’t there to outline a project or negotiate a contract. It was just a conversation for conversation’s sake, over a simple family meal and a good bottle of wine. In fact, I can’t even remember what we were talking about—maybe about the children, who were still running around and should have been in bed. What effort we expended—to no avail—trying to get them to do what we wanted! Maybe it would have been best just to ignore them and wait for them to tire themselves out. Sooner or later they’d go to sleep. After all, that night was slightly special: there was no school the next day. What greater pleasure, for a child, than to end up falling asleep on the sofa, lulled by the adults’ conversation? Late to bed, happy to bed—it makes for sweet memories. “How right you are,” Elsa said. “Why struggle? Let’s have another glass of wine.”
The main error is to wait around doing nothing, holding your pen, or with your life on hold. Patience is a virtue, but there is a negative form of expectation—namely, expecting too much of yourself. Nothing grows through that kind of waiting. If you don’t know how you can get out of this kind of stagnation, do what Stendhal did: borrow your first sentence or your first action from someone else, and continue it. Continuing allows you to ride on other people’s momentum instead of having to use your own. In cycling they talk about “drafting,” or, more commonly, “slipstreaming.” In life, as in writing, you first need to get into the wake of someone or something else. We start off learning a language by imitating others, learning by rote. Bit by bit, without realizing it, we end up creating our own slipstream and speaking the language. We write, we pedal, we gallop. We’re off! We never actually had to start and now that all we have to do is keep on going, it’s a whole lot easier. A sculptor needs clay or stone to model or sculpt; he can’t do it out of thin air, from nothing, ex nihilo. Perhaps when Giacometti gives himself over to what he calls an obsession, content just to fiddle around with clay without actually achieving anything, he hasn’t really begun yet, but that doesn’t stop him from carrying on. He may always feel he’s failed to do what he was trying to, but his work gives him great pleasure. Here, in an interview given at one of his exhibitions to the insightful documentary maker Jean-Marie Drot, he has the final word: Originally published in French as Facile: L’art français de réussir sans forcer by Éditions Michel Lafon, Neuilly-sur-Seine. Take cooking, for example. Think of the times you’ve been chatting away to a friend, enjoying yourself, and forgot to turn down the gas on the stove. Oh well, those onions will be nicely caramelized now. It even holds true for washing up: when you burn a pan the best thing is to let it soak, rather than to scrub at it like a maniac. I’m not saying you should never scrub, but that you need to know when there’s no point in scrubbing. Letting time do its work doesn’t mean you’ll never do any yourself. It just means working more efficiently. Where do we start? That’s always been the big question. More often than not, we keep planning and eventually stagnate. “If you don’t know how to get out of this kind of stagnation, do what Stendhal did: borrow your first sentence or your first action from someone else, and continue it.” Like drafting or slipstreaming in cycling or learning a language by imitating others, don't start, continueUnderstanding can't be focused. Distraction can make the work easier, it builds momentum. Distraction helps you to not think about what you are doing, so you are content with doing it. There are two ways to clean a burnt pan: taking considerable time and effort to scrub it, or to simply let it soak and return to it later. The first is based on effort, and the second on ease. Postponing action and letting things look after themselves is a win-win. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Hyper specialization can cause a sort of blindness to the broader picture of what is, based on the view we have of the world and how we operate within it. Don't think about solutions, think about the problem as if the problem were a person, let it speak for itself. Do not confuse preparation with practice. Excessive practice makes you stale. i can conclude this book for you: “the key to action is getting down to it” that’s also one of the phrases the author uses in their conclusion and that’s literally all it says throughout using different words like okay i wouldn’t t know exactly cause i started skimming during chapter 2/3 but that’s what i believe through my expertise in skimming We’ve always been told to think before we speak. But thinking too much and trying to get the right words to describe our thoughts often leaves us paralysed. When I read Alain’s example – “I discover what I want to say when I open my mouth”, I was overjoyed. That is me written all over it