I once had a very good manager who absolutely destroyed me when he told me: “Your willingness to work extra hours to make sure the job gets done is not a virtue.”
He explained that because I came into each day with no boundaries about how long I’d work, I worked inefficiently. I didn’t challenge myself to work smarter because I was willing to work harder. I didn’t search for improved practices because I was willing to crack another energy drink. The end result was that I worked harder, but I didn’t actually get more work done.
The sculptor is a fascinating artist. You start with a chunk of marble and your glorious statue of the most beautiful human form is already done, it’s just covered in other bits of marble that you don’t need. The exact molecules of marble that are in Michaelangelo’s David were already there, in that exact configuration, before Michaelangelo even started. Michaelangelo just cleaned it. A sculptor is like a paleontologist who can’t use any tools to find the fossils except their own mind’s eye.
That’s the kind of artist you need to be with your time. Don’t be a painter, always adding more to make the painting more robust, more detailed. Be the sculptor – clear away everything except the most perfect minutes, and use only those. It will take some time to learn what those minutes are, just as it took Michaelangelo time to learn which marble to clear away.
But he never added marble. That was his virtue.
The Opportunity Machine 