Michael Burry worked sixteen-hour shifts as a Stanford medical resident and studied stocks after midnight, posting his work on the Silicon Investor message boards 3,277 times over five years. Much of that work was done while working also working at the hospital.

The usual lesson drawn from stories like this is that you must love the work to be great at it. Psychiatrist Phil Stutz points at something harder underneath: "There is no exoneration from pain, uncertainty, or the need for constant work." The need for constant work is a constant of everyone's life, and no amount of money, fame, or success exempts anyone from it.

Under that view, the greats are not people who chose work they love. They are people whose natural compulsions happen to match the work that never stops arriving for any of us. Burry, for example, read subprime prospectuses that nobody but the drafting lawyers read, not out of discipline, but because he could not help himself.

Today's piece is about why compulsion rather than love may be what separates the top 1% of 1%, and what it means if the compulsion is not there.