Want to be Great?

Want to know how to become great at something?

When I was fifteen I knew that I wanted to learn machining. Lucky for me, my uncle owned a machine shop. I begged him for a job, but he kept telling me that there were child labor laws, and that I had to be at least sixteen. A few days after my sixteenth birthday I asked him again. Then, I got my driver's license and I drove to his shop and asked him again. And again. Finally he told me that after the new year he would hire me, because it was easier for tax reasons than doing it at the end of the year. I showed up again to ask as soon as I could in January, and started the same day.
I learned a lot very quickly, but I wasn't anything great. In fact, I am pretty sure that my uncle may have wanted to fire me for a bit there in the first year I worked for him. He talked to my dad and my dad talked to me. It didn't help much that I got my first girlfriend that same year in February. There was a guy who started there about a year later who made a big impression on me. He was about 40 some years old and had a bust ass work ethic. He would tell me things like "If you are going to walk somewhere, walk with a purpose!" He would also have impromptu contests to see who could load the machines faster. It is because of him that I learned how to be efficient and cut time out of repetitive tasks by doing stuff like using both hands to screw in bolts. Between the talk from my dad, and this guy, I started to shape up.
Something else clicked in me at some point. I stopped carrying and checking my phone at work. I started leaving it in my car actually. I started to focus on the job when I was at work instead of getting distracted. I would think, hard, instead of just trying to get the answer out of somebody. When I was at work, my mind was in that machine with me, and that was the only place it was. It didn't take long for me to become pretty darn good at what we did in that shop. Soon after that, I became the foreman and then the production manager. That sounds super fancy, but it wasn't quite as prestigious as it sounds. Either way, I was second to the owner.
I quit this job ten years after I started. I wasn't happy anymore. I spent a few months learning who I was, took a job servicing fire extinguishers, and then ended up back in a machine shop because I was good at machining. It didn't take too long to realize that I just didn't have the same passion for it that I once did. I think it is because I didn't get to make what I wanted, just what other people told me to. That is no fun. If you aren't working on your dreams, you are working on someone else's.
I spent a long time trying different things to make money so I could work for myself instead of in a machine shop. None of the things really panned out. Then it dawned on me...I haven't committed. I need to pick that thing that I WANT to do and “put down the phone”, and focus on it. If I give my next goal that single minded focus that I gave my first one thirteen years ago, I can be the exceedingly good at it in no time at all. Granted, it is slightly more complicated once you are married and have a kid, but it can still be done.
If you want to be good at something, then do everything you can to be good at it. Put the phone down, don't check it. If you are working on that thing, then work on that thing and nothing else. You need to let yourself get good at it. There is no such thing as multitasking, people who are the best in a certain field are the best at single tasking. Pick any top performer in any specific thing and ask them. They will tell you that if you want to excel, you need to eat breathe and sleep that thing. You don't have to do that forever either. You can do that for a few years and then do it again for a different thing. The point is, you can't get good at something if you are distracting yourself from it.
What do you want that you won’t focus on long enough to be good at?