What does “do what others are not willing to do” actually mean? It means being willing to do the unglamorous parts of getting good at something: starting before you feel ready, practising the bit you find hard, and carrying on when the novelty has gone. Research on deliberate practice, habits and perseverance supports this idea, but it also shows limits that motivational posters leave out, including the need for rest.
What “do what others won’t” really means
The phrase sounds like a challenge to work longer hours than everyone else. That is not what the evidence supports. When psychologists study people who improve fastest, the difference is rarely sheer hours. It is what people do during those hours and whether they keep doing it week after week.
Most students already know what they should do: review notes, attempt past questions, ask for help. The gap is not knowledge. It is that these jobs feel dull, awkward or uncomfortable, so they get postponed. “Doing what others won’t” mostly means doing those ordinary jobs on a Tuesday evening when nobody is watching and nothing exciting happens.
This article looks at four research areas that explain why that is hard and how to make it easier: deliberate practice, delayed gratification, habit formation and grit. Each has famous claims, and each has critics. You will see both sides, because a motivation tip is only useful if it is true.
The banner above captures the basic tension. Comfort feels good now. Progress usually feels worse while it is happening. That does not mean you should avoid comfort altogether. It means noticing when comfort is quietly replacing the one task that would move you forward.
Deliberate practice: why some hours count for more
The best-known research here comes from psychologist Anders Ericsson. In 1993, he and his colleagues Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer studied violin students at a music academy in Berlin, split into three groups: those rated most likely to become soloists, those good enough for professional orchestras, and those training to be music teachers.
The top group had practised alone for far more hours. By age 18, the best violinists had averaged about 7,410 hours of solo practice. By age 20 they averaged around 10,000 hours, compared with roughly 3,400 hours for the future music teachers.
The key idea was not the number of hours, though. Ericsson’s description of deliberate practice is often summed up in four features:
- A well-defined task for the session, such as “play bars 12 to 16 cleanly at full speed”, rather than “practise piano”.
- Full attention, not half-watching a screen while you work.
- Informative feedback and repetition to correct errors, from a teacher, a mark scheme, an answer key or a recording of yourself.
- Working just beyond your current level, where mistakes are likely, rather than repeating what you already do well.
Ericsson also noted that this kind of concentrated work is tiring. Experts could only sustain a few hours of it per day, which is why rest is part of the picture rather than the opposite of it.
What deliberate practice looks like for revision
You can borrow the same structure for school work. Compare two students who each spend an hour on chemistry.
| Ordinary study | Deliberate practice |
|---|---|
| Re-reads the chapter and highlights it | Closes the book and writes down everything remembered about one topic |
| Practises questions already known to be easy | Picks the three question types marked wrong last time |
| Checks answers at the end, or never | Marks each answer immediately against the mark scheme and notes why it lost marks |
| Studies with a phone nearby | Puts the phone in another room for a 25–45 minute block |
The second column feels harder, and that is the point. If you want more detail on how to set this up, our guide on how to practise and remember what you study walks through it step by step, and the article on how to improve memory for better learning explains why retrieval works better than re-reading.
What the critics say: practice matters, but it is not everything
Deliberate practice has been challenged. In 2014, Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald combined 88 studies in a meta-analysis. They found practice explained about 12% of the differences in performance overall. The figure varied by field: about 26% in games such as chess, 21% in music, 18% in sports, 4% in education and about 1% in professions.
Ericsson and a co-author replied in 2019 that many studies in that analysis measured general practice or training time, not true deliberate practice with a goal, feedback and stretch. So the debate is partly about definitions. Both sides accept that practice helps. They disagree about how much of the gap between people it explains, and other factors such as starting age, teaching quality, health and opportunity also play a part.
The honest summary is useful: how you practise matters, effort is necessary, and it is not a guarantee. That should be reassuring. If a result does not match your effort, it does not automatically mean you did not try hard enough.
Delayed gratification: the marshmallow test, and what happened next
Delayed gratification means choosing a bigger reward later over a smaller one now. For students, it is the choice between an hour of revision and an hour of video games, with the exam result arriving months later.
The most famous experiments were run by psychologist Walter Mischel and colleagues at a Stanford nursery school in the late 1960s and 1970s. A child was offered one treat, often a marshmallow, and told that if they waited alone for the adult to return, they could have two. A follow-up published by Shoda, Mischel and Peake in 1990 reported that children who waited longer tended to do better on later measures such as exam scores. That finding became a headline: self-control at four predicts success at eighteen.
It turned out to be more complicated. Three findings matter most.
1. The original sample was small and unusual
The children were mainly linked to a university community, so they were not a typical cross-section of families. That makes it risky to treat the result as a law about all children.
2. A larger replication found a much weaker link
In 2018, Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan and Haonan Quan studied about 900 children from more varied backgrounds. They found that waiting longer at age 4 did still predict achievement at 15, but the link was about half the size of the original. After they accounted for family background, early thinking skills and the home environment, it shrank by about two-thirds. In the group whose mothers had not completed college, most of the effect came from whether a child could wait at least 20 seconds.
3. Children make sensible decisions about whether waiting is worth it
In 2013, Celeste Kidd and colleagues tested 28 children with an adult who either kept promises or did not. Children who had met the reliable adult waited about four times as long as the others. In other words, waiting is not only willpower. It also depends on whether you trust that the reward will really arrive.
How long does it take to build a habit?
You may have heard that habits take 21 days. There is no good evidence for that number. The best-known real-world study is from Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London, published in 2010.
They followed 96 volunteers who each picked one small daily behaviour, such as eating a piece of fruit with lunch or going for a run before dinner, and did it in the same situation for 12 weeks. Every day they rated how automatic it felt. The time to reach a plateau of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days, with a median of 66 days.
Three practical points came out of that study:
- It varies enormously. Simpler habits, such as drinking a glass of water, settled in faster than more demanding ones, such as exercise.
- Missing one day did not wreck it. A single missed opportunity made little difference to the overall pattern, so one bad day is not a reason to abandon the plan.
- The same cue helps. Taking a behaviour to a fixed time and place, such as “after dinner, at the kitchen table”, is part of how it becomes automatic.
Note that the study had volunteers who chose their own habits and reported their own automaticity, and the longest times were estimated by modelling beyond the 12 weeks. It is a good guide, not a stopwatch.
The card above gives five short reminders. Two of them, start before you feel ready and stay consistent when motivation fades, are exactly what the habit research supports. Motivation rises and falls. A habit lets you act without having to win an argument with yourself each evening.
Turning the research into a plan
Here is a simple way to use all of this. Choose one small behaviour, attach it to a cue, and keep it small enough that you can do it on a bad day.
- Pick one target. For example, “do one past-paper question set after dinner”. If goals feel too big, read our advice on having realistic goals.
- Fix the cue. Same time, same place, every school day.
- Make it start-able. Lay out the book and pen beforehand. The first two minutes are the hardest part, and this is where stopping procrastination advice helps.
- Track it. A tick on a calendar is enough. Aim for consistency over perfection.
- Review at 66 days, not at day 5. Judge the habit when it has had time to settle.
If you are low on energy for even that, the guide on what to do when you have no motivation to work offers gentler ways in.
The banner above makes a similar point in two panels: choose discipline over comfort, and learn what others avoid. Notice that both are about choices you make repeatedly, not one heroic effort.
Grit: perseverance with a purpose, and its limits
Grit is the idea that sticking with long-term goals matters as much as raw talent. Psychologist Angela Duckworth and colleagues defined it in 2007 as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. In their studies, people who scored higher on a grit questionnaire tended to do better on certain real-world tests of persistence, including how far finalists progressed in the US National Spelling Bee and who completed an intense summer training programme at West Point military academy.
That research is real, and it fits the central message of this article. But it has been tested hard since.
What the critics found
In 2017, Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan and Peter Harms combined 88 samples covering 66,807 people. They found three things that matter for students:
- Grit overlapped almost completely with conscientiousness, an older personality trait describing how organised and dependable someone is. The correlation was about 0.84 after correcting for measurement error, where 1.0 would be identical.
- Most of the link to school performance came from the perseverance half of grit (keep working through setbacks), not the “consistent interests” half.
- Programmes designed to raise grit probably have only weak effects.
Duckworth has also argued publicly that character questionnaires such as grit scales should not be used to judge or reward schools and teachers. So the sensible conclusion is modest: perseverance is a useful habit, but a score on a questionnaire does not define you, and nobody has found a reliable way to “inject” grit.
Think of a sprinter in the blocks. The race lasts seconds, but the athlete’s season was built from hundreds of ordinary training sessions, most of them unnoticed. The visible moment is the small tip of a large, quiet pile of work. That is the part of the “do what others won’t” idea that holds up well.
Keep going when it gets hard, without being reckless
Persistence does not mean ignoring evidence that your approach is not working. The banner below includes one line that is genuinely good advice: adjust your strategy instead of abandoning your goal.
Here is a practical way to tell the difference between a rough patch and a wrong method.
| Sign | What to try |
|---|---|
| Slow progress but steady improvement in practice tests | Stay with the plan. This is normal. |
| Hours spent but marks not moving after several weeks | Change the method: more retrieval, more feedback, ask a teacher |
| Constant exhaustion, poor sleep, low mood | Reduce the load and talk to someone you trust |
| A goal that no longer fits what you want | It is reasonable to change it. That is not failure. |
Setbacks are also part of learning. The article on lessons from failure to success shows how to treat a bad result as information rather than a verdict, and our piece on growth mindset in teamwork for GCSE students explains how asking for help fits in.
A quote you have probably seen, and who actually wrote it
Motivation posters love one line: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” It is usually credited to Aristotle. It is not his wording. The historian Will Durant wrote it in his 1926 book The Story of Philosophy while summarising Aristotle’s ideas about how people become good at things by repeated action. The idea is Aristotelian, but the sentence is Durant’s.
Test yourself: reveal the answers
Name two features of deliberate practice. (2 marks)
Any two from: a specific goal for the session, full concentration, immediate feedback, working just beyond your current ability.
Why was the 2018 marshmallow replication important? (2 marks)
It used a larger and more varied sample, and found that the link between waiting at age 4 and later achievement was about half the original size. It shrank much further once family background, early ability and home environment were taken into account.
What did Lally and colleagues find about the time needed to form a habit? (2 marks)
It varied widely, from 18 to 254 days, with a median of 66 days. Missing a single day made little difference.
Give one criticism of grit research. (1 mark)
Grit overlaps strongly with conscientiousness (a corrected correlation of about 0.84 in a 2017 meta-analysis), so it may not be a separate trait; and programmes to increase it seem to have weak effects.
The part hustle culture leaves out: rest
If “do what others won’t” becomes “sleep less and work more”, it stops being good advice. Deliberate practice is demanding, and the researchers who described it said people can only do a few hours of it a day. Pushing far beyond that is hard to sustain.
Sleep is the clearest example. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that teenagers aged 13 to 18 sleep 8 to 10 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis. Giving that up to revise late rarely pays off, because tired students find it harder to concentrate and to remember what they studied. Our article on balancing sleep and work for better GCSE results goes into more detail.
Time with friends, movement and fresh air are not rewards you earn after enough work. They are part of what keeps the work going. If you are wondering how much social time is sensible, see our guide to a balanced social life.
The banner above lists some good habits, such as finishing what you start and asking questions that others are afraid to ask. Notice what is missing: it does not tell you to never relax. Discipline and rest work together.
Your first week: a simple checklist
Tick these off as you go. Your ticks are saved in your browser, so you can come back to them.
- Choose one subject and one small daily task (10–20 minutes) to attach to a fixed time and place
- Write a specific goal for each session, such as “six past-paper questions on cells”
- Put your phone in another room for the first block
- Mark your work against the mark scheme the same day
- Note one mistake and one thing to try differently
- Do one thing you would normally avoid, such as asking a teacher a question
- Get at least 8 hours of sleep on three school nights
- Plan one proper break with friends or outdoors
If you still feel stuck, the article on what to do when you have no motivation to study is a good next step.
Frequently asked questions about doing what others won’t
What does “do what others are not willing to do” mean?
It means being willing to do the useful but uncomfortable parts of learning or work, such as practising weak areas, asking questions and continuing when it feels dull. It does not mean working to exhaustion. Evidence suggests consistency, good methods and rest matter more than simply doing more.
How can students stay motivated to study?
Motivation rises and falls, so rely on routines. Pick a small daily task, link it to a fixed time and place, remove distractions and set a specific goal. Track your progress and take proper breaks. Many students find it easier to start for two minutes than to wait until they feel ready.
How long does it take to form a habit?
A 2010 study of 96 volunteers (82 of whom gave enough data to analyse) found it took between 18 and 254 days for a daily behaviour to become automatic, with a median of 66 days. The 21-day figure is a myth. Simple behaviours tend to settle faster than demanding ones.
What is deliberate practice?
Deliberate practice is focused practice with a specific goal, full attention, feedback and difficulty slightly beyond your current level. Psychologist Anders Ericsson developed the idea from studies of musicians and other experts. Simply repeating tasks you already find easy does not count.
Is the 10,000-hour rule true?
No, not as a rule. The figure was an average for the best violin students in Ericsson’s 1993 study by about age 20, not a threshold for expertise. Ericsson said the popular version oversimplified his work. Quality of practice, teaching and individual differences also matter.
Does the marshmallow test predict success?
Only weakly. A 2018 replication with about 900 children found a link about half the size of the original, and it shrank by about two-thirds after accounting for family background, early ability and home environment. Children also wait less when they have reason not to trust the adult.
Is grit more important than talent?
Not necessarily. Duckworth’s 2007 research found grit predicted some outcomes, but a 2017 meta-analysis found it overlaps strongly with conscientiousness and that interventions to raise it probably have weak effects. Perseverance helps, but talent, teaching, opportunity and health also matter.
Should I give up sleep to work harder?
No. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends 8 to 10 hours of sleep per 24 hours for 13 to 18 year olds. Tired students struggle to concentrate and remember what they study, so cutting sleep usually works against your goal.
What if I work hard and still do not get the result I want?
Check your method first: are you getting feedback and practising the weakest areas? If you are, speak to a teacher about extra support. Effort does not guarantee a result, and a setback is information rather than a verdict on you. It can also be sensible to adjust the goal.
