Inundated with astonishment, with sudden and extreme fear, yes, with great joy and pride, I hold myself in balance on the high wire. With ease. Just one more moment before you step out. Be careful how you start. Even beyond the question of life or death, the style of your first step determines the style of the whole crossing. Remember Malcolm Gladwell? He’s a writer at the New Yorker, and I love reading his books. In Outliers, which here is used to mean “exceptional successes,” Gladwell gives a precise answer to that question “how many?” Ten thousand hours, according to him, is the “magic number of greatness.” You want to become exceptional in any given domain? It’s “easy”: you just have to devote 10,000 hours to it, or ten years, to become an expert or perform at a high level. Strangely enough, this is exactly the conclusion Stendhal arrived at: “Write every day for an hour or two. Genius or not.” Ten years of writing for one or two hours a day, somewhere between 3,652 and 7,304 (counting leap years) gets you close to 10,000 hours. You’d only need to write between two and three hours a day to get there. Stendhal seems to be saying, like Gladwell, that what we mistake for genius is simply the result of hard work; ten years’ hard work, to be precise.

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: But let’s ask ourselves simply and honestly: if you really think about it, who actually believes, without doubting the virtue of trying, that with 10,000 hours they could, if not become world champion, then at least reach the top level in their discipline of choice? For anyone who’s hesitating about the answer, here’s another question, which we should all be able to agree on: Who thinks that 10,000 hours of training would give them the courage to walk on a wire 400 meters off the ground? Or, more modestly, just to start small, between the towers of Notre-Dame? Despite the flaws of the 10,000 hours rule well documented, we are still bombarded with variations of the same. Through the example of a failed experiment and other references, the author drives home the point that working hard is not enough The most profound aspect of the book is how it starts, with the famous quote and ultimate take away of the work: "The whole doctrine of action can be expressed in two chapters, each of which contains a single word. Chapter one, continue. Chapter two, start. The other which people find surprising, espresso almost the whole idea" (Alain).Compelling . . . Pourriol set out to write a readable ‘airport book,’ and he has succeeded. . . . In a year of struggle and travel bans, owing to COVID-19, which makes it impossible for Americans to visit France, this title comes at a perfect time.”― Library Journal

Here is an except that is reiterated by many of those who more through the world with understanding: My favourite part of the book, Stop Thinking, walks through hypnosis, yoga, non-thinking, archery and modern rationalism to distinguish between thought and action - “Take a path you don’t know, to reach an unknown place, to do something you’re incapable of doing” I rejected the suffering that comes from pursuing a path to which one is not suited. Effort against the grain is exhausting. It’s a sign of courage and of abnegation, but above all it’s a sign of self-deprivation. A negative virtue is not without value, but in the end someone who doesn’t like what they do will never go as far as someone who enjoys it. The former will do everything on sufferance; the latter will do it with joy, including suffering if necessary. A characteristic of a good sledge dog is that he enjoys pulling a weight for hundreds of kilometers. You don’t have to push him to do it. Eric Morris, a specialist in these matters, explains that to train sledge dogs to go very long distances, as in the Iditarod, known among enthusiasts as the “last great race on Earth” (over 1,500 kilometers through the cold, long nights of Alaska), there’s no point in using food as a reward. Negative reinforcement, a training technique that consists not in giving a reward but in taking away a punishment, doesn’t work either. “To go that distance, it’s like a bird dog sniffing down a pheasant . . . it has to be the one thing in their life that brings them the greatest amount of pleasure. They have to have the innate desire to pull [the sledge] . . . and you will find varying degrees of that in different dogs.”

What can we learn from Stendhal’s example? Not everyone wants to become a writer. But “never make fun of the art of writing,” Alain says, Yesterday, when I saw the exhibition, I thought it looked great. For a moment, anyway. Too good, actually. That does worry me a bit.” 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.