What Cal Newport calls deliberate practice is nicely defined by Seinfeld. This level of work ethic is required to be excellent.

Interviewer (Graham Bensinger): I think it’s 1993, Adam Sandler’s opening for you in Boston. You start a bit and somebody yells from the crowd, and how does it affect you?

Jerry Seinfeld: I had this amazing bit about weddings. It was like, uh, it was fantastic. It was so long it covered everything. It was a great bit, and I worked on and worked on, and I love developing and polishing every little detail of a bit, so it takes me forever—sometimes years, years. Um, I was talking to Chris Rock yesterday, and he was telling me about his last special; he said I had three jokes in there that I’ve worked on for over 10 years.

Interviewer: What about on the writing front though?

Jerry Seinfeld: Well, he [George Burns] had this routine where he would write two hours every day with writers and they would work on material for his act or whatever he had coming up. And I thought, “Oh, so you have a regular routine of creating material.” This piece of information, this discipline or this understanding. I was doing it, I would say maybe eight months, maybe a year, when I realized, “Oh, this is all about writing. This whole racket is writing.” And if you don’t become a real writer creating new material every single day, you’re going to get wasted like that.

I saw it happen to a guy who was on the Tonight Show and he was a smash hit his first show. Then he came back to do a second one. It’s six minutes an appearance in those days. To do six great minutes on the Tonight Show walking out as a complete unknown and to kill them in six minutes, you need about 40 minutes of material that you’re doing in a nightclub. That will distill down to six. So then they want him to come back in three months, do another six. So he takes another six. So his first six is the best six, right? Of course. And then the next six wasn’t as good. And then he came back a third time, struggled, and he was gone. And that’s when I went, “Oh, I see what’s going on here now. I see what this is. This is something that it’s right or…”