Excellence gets displayed in public and built in private. The private part is slow, repetitive, sometimes humiliating, and spread over years, so there's no single moment you could point to. So when someone says "she's just talented," they're usually describing the visible tip of something they never saw.
The most dangerous form of laziness is performative productivity. Notes, tabs, highlights, summaries, plans. A whole pile of activity arranged to avoid direct contact with the work.
The hack is honestly just "do the work". Which I know doesn't sound like a hack, but so many people just waste their time whining and sandbagging and bullshitting in various ways, that just locking in and doing the work is actually a gigantic edge.
its mind-blowing how many young people justify inaction by saying that things are not worth pursuing because the outcome is uncertain
nothing in life is certain. nothing that changed millions of lives started out certain. only betting on certainty is how you end up mediocre
You don't need to know exactly where you'll end up. You just need to keep becoming more capable. Capability creates options, options create opportunities, and opportunities create futures that were invisible when you started.