Stamina

In his book The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about why little Chinese kids are so much better at maths and science than their Western counterparts. One of his theories is that it is much easier to do “sums” and count in Chinese. But his major theory is that the Chinese kids spend much more time per year at school than our little darlings. They have a much longer day and much shorter holidays. And they have homework as well and none of them seem to have died from overwork. There is also a school in new York City that runs along these lines and is churning out well rounded, well educated scholars who are also getting phenomenal results in the maths and science arena.

My school teacher friends will remain friends because I am not advocating longer school hours; I am using this as an example that if people (children in this case) are trained to work longer hours then they will be just fine. They wont be tired, pooped out, exhausted, fit to drop….

They are like athletes…. You cant expect to run a marathon unless you work at it, put in the time and effort and train for it. You have to build up the stamina. You may feel a bit worn out at first but you will get used to it.

And I also believe this is why we “give up” too soon. You have to develop the stamina for a new task. Lets face it, the first time you sit in front of a PC for the entire day, you’ll feel like hell – sore eyes, arms, back, knees….in fact everything will ache. The weekend gardener will suffer from planting seedlings.

It takes a bit of time to build the skills, the muscles and stamina to do the new job. You need to get working fit, studying fit. You need to get past the discomfort zone.