Passion

My friend told me that great erhu player does not become an alpha by accident; unrelenting persistence in the focus on a task every day is always the case. I can't agree more. Think of Rice Condoleezza, the United States Secretary of State. Long before Rice became Stanford University's youngest - and first female - provost, she began studying at Alabama's Birmingham Conservatory at the age of 10, rising at 4:30 a.m. to spend two hours at the ice skating rink before school and piano lessons. How can she do it?

To be precise, how can she keep up? To be passionate about an activity seems to be inborn but not quite etched into our DNA. Most of us simply grow out of this keen sense of repeating a job without getting bored. I have lost count of the number of times I saw a baby stumbles, in his relentless efforts, simply to learn eagerly the amazing skill of walking. Or, take a look at how preservative a toddler learns to talk. It is only several years later, around the start of junior school, that an awful lot of us seem to lose our innate drive to go on resolutely in pursuit of any basic daily job.

You might argue with me whether losing this yearning for any mundane task can be the reason to distinguish champions from the under-achievers. I am not making this up. I still remember a study published in the British Medical Journal more than five years ago, when the researchers set out to test whether medical students who were unable to comply with simple administrative tasks - for example, supplying a photograph at registration for the paediatric module - were more likely to struggle and subsequently to fail the examinations. Believe it or not, almost half the medical students who did not complete this basic task of providing a recent photograph (despite written and verbal reminders) failed the year-end examinations!

I learned the lesson and decided to take a look at my dialysis patients who are required to complete a training course before the start of home-based peritoneal dialysis. During the training which lasts around a week, the patients are instructed to come back to the dialysis unit every morning before 9 a.m. For those patients who arrived late for training in over 20% of occasions — after controlling for a host of other variables — they were then shown to have over 50% increased odds of developing infection problems with the subsequent dialysis procedures.

If all these proved anything, it's that we are to think small. In any case, dreaming big dreams is worth the bother, but it seems that fostering a habit of doing every small simple task everyday - and doing it well - can pay off in many stunning ways.