A YouTube video changed my life, and inspired me to write the below. Specifically, the moment starting at 2:08: https://youtu.be/m0qeyFJrHWU?si=J8y9H3h4xFiJouAq&t=128
Now traditionally, we are taught that when you workout, it tears the muscle fibers so you should do maybe 2-3 sets of 6-12 exercises and then you need to rest and recover for 2-3 days so you can get stronger and you can workout again, and that rest is very important. Now if I had to pick one thing I learned from Ido to teach you, the one most important thing, it would be this: I learned that elite athletes, coaches, etc at the highest level, at any competitive sport, they take this rule and they throw it out the window. Volume which can be defined essentially as how much work you’re doing is BY FAR the most important driver of progress for building muscle for building strength for building flexibility for building skill, anything. Anything you want to get good at, a little bit of stimulus is not enough, we need as much volume as possible, often more than your body will recover from at first.
The narrator shares stories of world class athletes who do ABSURD amounts of training volume, despite conventional wisdom advocating for much much less, and demonstrates how important volume is for serious improvement and world-class results.
I’ve come to believe that this lesson applies not just in sports, but in nearly every aspect of life. In sports, in business, in relationships, in life satisfaction.
In fact, it’s hard for me to think of an area where this principle — that doing more leads to more success — does NOT apply.
Basically if you want outsized results, you need to do outsized amounts of work.
It’s the power of volume.
Want to do better at your job? Work more hours.
Want to make greater gains at the gym? Lift more weight, more often.
Want to have a better relationship with your loved ones? Spend more time with them. Pay more attention while you’re with them.
It’s astoundingly simple, yet astoundingly easy to forget.
It’s easy to forget because there are unspoken rules that encourage moderation and setting arbitrary limits.
9-5 workdays encourage you to think that 8 hours of work is enough.
1 hour training sessions (with a coach, or at the gym) encourage you to think that one hour is enough.
Normies scare you off by talking about overtraining, burnout, and diminishing marginal returns.
Yes, those are all risks along the route to success, especially at higher levels. But as John Steinbeck says, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. If you’re NOT getting injured, or if you’re NOT burning out, then you probably don’t know how much more you can do. In fact, it’s highly likely those limits are much greater than you estimate.
There is another study I remember that illustrates this point in a different manner:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Again, the power of volume. Just do more. Quantity itself can lead to quality.
So when you feel like you’ve plateaued in some aspect of your life, but want to keep getting better — whether it’s speaking French, improving your pickleball, or learning to cook — the secret is just to do more.
Volume solves most.
Ten minutes of Duolingo French is good, but an hour is better. Better yet, finish all of Duolingo in a few days, and then spend that same amount of time watching French learning videos on YouTube.
An hour of tennis is good, but two hours is better. Better yet, attend a tennis camp and play every day for 3-4 hours a day. I bet you’ll break whatever plateau you’re on and get good faster.
That’s what kids do, yet we forget this lesson — or create excuses — when we’re adults. Kids become obsessed with things. They spend hours and days and weeks on those things. They go to summer camps dedicated to those things. They talk about those things with their friends and anyone who will listen. For kids, volume is natural. They don’t want to just do more — they want to do as much of that thing as they possibly can. And that’s how kids often get good quick.
Gladwell helped to popularize the 10,000 hour rule, which is a related principle that states, briefly, that approximately 10k hours are necessary to achieve world-class expertise in a topic.
But in the same book, Gladwell mentions that the top performers go far beyond 10k hours. It’s more of a pre-requisite:
Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
What separates the best from the rest? It’s often just how much they work.
Again, the power of volume, and the lesson of just doing more.
When you study top performers in many fields, you realize they’ve already internalized this rule.
Take Danielle Steele, perhaps the best selling romance novelist of all time. My mom always had a stack of Steele’s glossy paperback novels by her bed:
She works all the time. According to a 2019 Glamour profile, Steel starts writing at 8:30 am and will continue all day and into the night. It’s not unusual for her to spend 20 to 22 hours at her desk. She eats one piece of toast for breakfast and nibbles on bittersweet chocolate bars for lunch. A sign in her office reads: “There are no miracles. There is only discipline.”
There’s Jiro Ono, the legendary sushi chef with the namesake restaurant and Netflix documentary, who spent more than 7 decades dedicating his life to make sushi. Here’s what he had to say:
All I want to do is make better sushi. I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is. – Jiro
I fell in love with my work, and gave my life to it. Even though I’m 85 years old I don’t feel like retiring. That’s how I feel. – Jiro
There’s the Oracle of Omaha himself, legendary investor and mega bajillionaire Warren Buffett:
You can make magic by going farther than most other people think is reasonable. When Warren was asked, “How’d you do it?” He said, “I read a couple thousand financial statements a year.”
And who can forget Elon Musk, the living embodiment of the power of volume. Routinely working 100 hour weeks, running too many mega successful companies to name, sleeping 6 hours or less — often under his desk, all while being a high profile advisor to President Trump responsible for cutting trillions from the federal budget:
“If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks, and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, you’ll achieve in four months what they do in a year.”
So keep it simple. Just do more. And you can often do much more than you think.
Final thoughts —
1. I want to thank my friend and writer Cedric Chin, whose series of essays on judo and deliberate practice are where I first discovered the above YouTube video, and began to internalize the power of volume
2. There are secondary benefits to the power of volume. To paraphrase Chuck Close, new ideas and inspiration will arise during the process of doing. But you have to be “doing” to receive those benefits
3. The more you do, the easier it becomes to do more — through efficiency, experience, and the building of good habits — thus you begin to effectively compound your volume. The same way that a pro basketball player knows exactly how to prepare for their next game, or a successful author knows how to begin a new novel
4. I wrote this essay for myself, because I believe the best way to understanding something is to write about it, and because this lesson is probably the second most impactful one I’ve learned as an adult — the first being the insane power of habits (a term coined by author Charles Duhigg, whose book I fully recommend)
Below are more anecdotes from top performers in sports, fitness, art, and business:
THE POWER OF VOLUME IN SPORTS:
When asked if he had any regrets about lifting so heavy, after his 13 surgeries, Ronnie Coleman said “YES”, “I regret not lifting more weight for more reps”
I don’t love max weights. I love hard training — Karlos Nasar
Reps, reps, reps. You might think you only do reps in the gym, but repetitions are the key to life. Whether you want to improve at speaking in public or reading books or just eating better, you will need to do reps. Whatever you work at, it becomes easier and less uncomfortable with every rep you do. – Arnold
You practice until you can’t get it wrong, not until you can get it right – Nick Saban
Today Jack plays such sensational golf with such apparent ease that many people who watch him probably gain the impression that his skills are heaven-sent rather than self-developed. That isn’t true. No one ever worked harder at golf than Nicklaus during his teens and early twenties. At the age of ten, in his first year of golf, Jack must have averaged three hundred practice shots and at least eighteen holes of play daily. In later years, he would often hit double that number of practice shots and play thirty-six — even fifty-four — holes of golf a day during the summer. I have seen him practice for hours in rain, violent winds, snow, intense heat — nothing would keep him away from golf. Even a slight case of polio failed to prevent him from turning up for a golf match.
THE POWER OF VOLUME IN ART:
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case. — Chuck Close
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. – John Cage
Picasso lived for a total of 33,403 days. With 26,075 published works that means Picasso averaged 1 new piece of artwork every day of his life from age 20 until his death at 91. He created something new, every day, for 71 years
Kong: [Laughs] It’s true. Back when I was learning the piano, I felt like many of my classmates, such as Xu Zhong, Wang Jian, and Qian Zhou, had more inherent talent. I relied on relentless practice, often putting in 15 to 16 hours a day. Even after becoming a professional pianist, I needed constant practice to keep my confidence up
https://x.com/GRIMES_V1/status/1839818832002855410
How to make a good song:
1) write an entire album
2) delete everything except the best song
3) repeat
4) until you have an album again
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I should make sure that I’m sufficiently exhausted from working that no one can keep me up at night. That’s really the only thing I can control. – Jensen Huang
Trust your instinct. Don’t think, just do. – Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick
“In the academic field of talent development, there is a mountain of research supporting the conclusion that the volume of accumulated deliberate practice is the single biggest factor responsible for individual differences in performance among elite performers across a wide variety of talent domains”