One of my biggest learnings over the past few years has been that most people don’t care. More specifically, most people don’t care deeply about most things they do. This might seem like a negative way of looking at things, but to me it’s empowering: simply caring gives you a huge advantage.
For example, assume you don’t care about running and you enter a race against someone who does. More likely than not, that caring has translated into practice and results, and you better hope you have a lot of natural talent if you want to win that race.
I think a big reason most people don’t care is they aren’t doing the right things. It can take a lot of time and effort to find fields you’re passionate about, but I would bet at least a few exist for every person.
When you care deeply about something, you don’t just give 110% while doing it. Something you truly care about will take up the empty space in your brain: it’s the last thing you think about before you fall asleep and the first thing you think about when you wake up.
Caring is the difference between doing something because you have to and doing something because you want to. If you spent a year forced to take chess classes, I bet you’d learn a lot about chess. But if chess was your passion, I bet you’d progress a lot further in that year and be better than almost everyone you’ve ever met.
This applies to jobs, hobbies, even relationships with other people. You should choose the right things to care about and then care, a lot. If you don’t have passion for what you do, you might as well be living somebody else’s life. How many times has greatness been achieved by somebody who didn’t care?