Question for you. Do you have any desire to be truly great at something you love? Well,

if you do, maybe here's a piece of advice. Don't follow the age old tropes about how

to get there. For decades, we've been told that in order to become truly great at anything,

we need to devote ourselves to thousands of hours of deliberate practice or just have

mad talent, even better if you have both. But what if that was a lie, or at least not the full

picture? What if there was a third path that was actually the secret to greatness for many of the

world's top performers across nearly every domain? Well, according to today's guest, Ron

Freeman, there is. Ron is an award-winning social psychologist who specializes in human motivation.

And in his latest book, Decoding Greatness, he breaks down the counterintuitive strategies

of the world's highest performers take to achieve excellence. And he specifically focuses on one

that maybe you've heard of in a different context, but it never really comes into the greatness

conversation, at least in the way that he really deep dives into it. He was inspired to write

and research this book by research on pattern recognition, skill acquisition, and creative genius,

as well as a personal fascination with creators, entrepreneurs, and athletes who accomplish things

that almost no one else can. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields,

and this is Good Life Project.

So you've been spending a lot of time over the last 10 years focusing on this kind of new context,

I guess, this sort of an evolution of your work. And it's around this notion of greatness. And I

want to actually talk about that and deconstruct it in a lot of ways. But at the same time,

I've had some fascinating conversations that have taken me by surprise over the last few years

when the word greatness came up, just as a phrase. It seems to be fairly innocuous, fairly

inspirational and aspirational. But in some context, I've actually seen it be triggering.

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