A common theme I’ve noticed among successful people is extremely impressive levels of consistency and obsession with the thing that they’re working on. By working consistently on a small set of skills, they become the best in the world on it and it’s not easy for others to catch up.

Y'all can't match my hustle
You can't catch my hustle
…
Lock yourself in a room
Doing five beats a day for three summers
- Kanye West, Spaceship (2004)

"Your job is to be the best basketball player you can be. To do that, you have to practice, you have to train. You want to train as much as you can, as often as you can. So if you get up at 10am, train at 12, train for 2 hours, 12pm - 2pm. You have to let your body recover. Eat. Recover. Get back out. Start training again at 6pm. Train from 6pm - 8pm. And now you eat dinner, go to bed. Those are two sessions. Now imagine you wake up at 3am, and Train at 4am - 6am. Go home. Eat breakfast. Relax. Now you're back at it again, 9am - 11am. Relax. Now you're back at it again, 2pm - 4pm. And now you're back at it again 7pm - 9pm. Look how much more training I have done by simply starting at 4am. So now you do that, and as the years go on, the separation you have with your competitors and peers just grows and grows larger, and larger, and larger, and larger. By year 5 or 6, it doesn't matter what kind of work they are doing in the summer, they are never going to catch up, because they are 5 years behind."
- Kobe Bryant

“I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.”
- Steve Martin

"The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom."
- James Clear, Atomic Habits

“Writing songs and playing live is like turning on a tap in an old house; first you’ll get the mud and dirty water, but the more you get it out, the quicker the good water starts flowing.”
- Ed Sheeran

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Five beats a day for three summers