Suppose you want to be exceptionally great at something. What will you do ?

Majority of people just dream about becoming great without putting in kind of efforts required to achieving them leave alone extra efforts. While what rest of them do is quite exceptional. They put in extra hours to their craft to really outshine majority.

Often, achievements requires great sacrifices. Sacrifice of personal time which most of the people don't consider as an option.

I stumbled upon a fantasic blog post which refreshed every concept I had in my mind of becoming rockstar at something.

When you are having a job, you are given a set of "Key Responsibilities", while it's important to be great at those for optimal work -> output -> promotions, it's equally important to expand the list of KRs for growth. The longer the list will be, more importance you will hold in the eyes of your boss and the company. And that means great growth ( financially and Role-wise ). Won't you like that ?

It has become a cliche to "Work Hard", but it never lost it's importance. Working Hard is a critical act which every successful purpose performs, failing in which will lead to distress in life. You have to kill your ego / moodiness to keep on working on the task allocated to you as often we have to do the works we don't like much.

Being ultra productive is very important. People like Will Smith, who had very humble beginning, they never wasted any single second and they putted all of the time to work on their craft to shine and at times, outshine others.

In an average job, average employee works at 60% efficiency ( 40%-80% ) eventually making it to be about 3 hours a day as the work-time often is full of distractions / time is spent surfing the internet, Switching tasks / getting back to work takes about 27 minutes ( Source ) which makes it to loss of more than 3 hours of what could have led to some productive work, such a massive opportunity cost isn't it ?

In a work-year of 200 days, easily you are wasting 600 hours ( often 30% more ). That's the key differentiator between high achievers and someone who achieves much lesser in their respective career. These hours could easily be accumulated for getting into elite club of skill masters -- 10,000  hours which is required to "mastering" desired skill.

Therefore, save these hours and put them in your craft, be that missing piece in your company who knows it all, who does it all, by learning everything you possibly can by obviously putting in these saved hours. That's how great achievers achieve, by doing exceptionally great work.