Excellence Comes from Diligence
Updated 2026-08-10
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
A line from Han Yu's essay on learning holding that excellence in a craft comes from diligence and is ruined by play. Its core proposition is that accumulated practice, measured in repetitions and iterations, is what separates people in most fields, because the ceiling imposed by innate talent is rarely reached before effort has decided the outcome. The qualifier is that the diligence must involve refinement, since low-quality repetition accumulates hours without accumulating skill.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Daily minimum: reduce the goal to the smallest practice action you can repeat every day. - Continuity protection: keep the frequency high, since gaps of idleness undo accumulated gains. - Refinement check: make each repetition slightly better rather than repeating it mechanically.
Anchor fast decisions
Skill improves as a function of the number of refined repetitions, not the number of hours, so a high frequency of small improvements compounds while a burst followed by idleness loses ground. In most fields the volume of practice required to reach the ceiling of natural ability is large enough that effort decides the ranking first.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
account_treeGenealogyexpand_more
menu_bookReferencesexpand_more
Source support: Explicit
- zdic.nethttps://zdic.net/hans/%E4%B8%9A%E7%B2%BE%E4%BA%8E%E5%8B%A4verified
PRIVATE NOTES · Only visible to you
SAVED Q&A
ENTRY Q&A · Private saving available
Ask with a clear boundary
thinkingmodels answers from published entry context only.
Your question is sent to thinkingmodels. The answer uses public entry context only.
RELATED MODELS