During the first year of my engineering course, I stumbled upon Ayn Rand’s writings through Atlas shrugged and The Fountainhead. There is a particular scene early in The Fountainhead where the uncompromising architect Howard Roark is expelled from his university for refusing to design buildings in the styles his professors demand. He is not defiant for his own sake rather he believes that he simply wouldn’t do anything he doesn’t believe in even if the refusal costs him conventional success. Rand used characters to build a story around integrity and individualism and people over the years have had polarising views on her writings. Shifting a bit from ideology, Roark’s stubbornness illustrates something prominent i.e., excellence is not the accumulation of everything a talented person can do, it is the ruthless subtraction of almost everything in service of that one thing that matters.

It is a rather harder problem to sit with than it actually sounds because it is opposite to what most of us actually try to do. We often assume getting better means adding more hours, resources, options etc. but excellence often comes from narrowing down on the purpose.

In 1993, a study of violinists was conducted by Anders Ericsson to separate elite performers from others and he found that students who had logged the most in practice sessions outperformed others. This study was later popularised by Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell in 2008 as the “10,000 hour” rule in his best-selling book Outliers: The Story of Success. Ericsson later propounded that the study was misinterpreted as the shape or intensity of practice mattered more than the hours. A deliberate, structured practice aimed at improvement with immediate feedback matters more. With his research extending to other fields like chess, medicine, it was found that narrow goals and tight feedback led to excellence and boundaries are non-negotiable. Roark’s refusal to compromise his independent vision defined his boundary. Without it, the work actually dissolves into surrounding pressures. 

But the story isn’t quite that simple, as later research shows psychologist Brooke Macnamara analyzed more than 80 studies and discovered that deliberate practice only explains about 25% of the variance in high-level performance. That leaves a massive 75% driven by other forces. Beyond natural talent, Macnamara points to elusive traits like grit, risk-taking, and bouncing back from failure. And let’s face it head on, those traits are a lot easier to tap into when you aren’t spending every single day fighting with yourself over where your attention should be.

Angela Lee Duckworth, an American academic, psychologist, and popular science author from the University of Pennsylvania points out in her research that ‘grit’ is a key to success. Academic excellence can be predicted from raw cognitive ability but sheer grit and physical stamina decides if one could survive even the most brutal training or not.

Now, the character that Howard Roark plays in The Fountainhead illustrates this principle well, his narrow focus made his work distinct and ground-breaking.Distraction or unnecessary drama was not just annoyance but a threat to his excellence. 

A rock is going to be rock, just wishing that it turns into a bread and becomes edible is preposterous. So every time our mind shifts focus, it pays a heavy price to return to deep focus. Hence, a life open to everything rarely goes deep into anything.

This is definitely not the endorsement of hustle culture or the absolutism presented in Ayn Rand’s novels but one needs to understand that the dividing line between merely competent and truly exceptional people usually comes to what they decide to subtract from their life. Boundaries are not punishments but absolute requirements for creation. 

At last, quoting some of my favourite lines from The Fountainhead:

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons – a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.”

“It’s easy to run to others. It’s so hard to stand on one’s own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It’s easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence–such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.”

“A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason about it; it is not deep if one can see it’s bottom”

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. The man who thinks must think and act on his own. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be subordinated to the needs, opinions, or wishes of others. It is not an object of sacrifice.

The creator stands on his own judgment; the parasite follows the opinions of others.

The creator thinks; the parasite copies.

The creator produces; the parasite loots.

The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature; the parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.

The creator requires independence. He neither serves nor rules. He deals with men by free exchange and voluntary choice.