We Were Made To Do The Impossible

If you always do what is easy life will be hard, but if you always do what’s hard life will be easy.

There’s so much truth to that you can’t even imagine. It applies to every area of life. Look at athletes, the harder you train consistently the better you are.

Look at popular music, the artists that stayed on top for any period of time were constantly reinventing themselves, Madonna, Sting. Multi generational artists have good songs and bad songs, then they have iconic songs. Those bad songs were them trying something new that they weren’t familiar with yet. Those bad songs allowed them to achieve the iconic songs.

Michelangelo famously said “if people knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.”

Mozart wrote more than 600 pieces of music, how many do you still hear today? Maybe 20. So the greatest child prodigy of all time didn’t hit the mark on 580 out of 600 musical pieces. That 580 was doing what was hard so that the 20 could be amazing.

What is a master of anything? They are a beginner that kept on beginning. They aren’t afraid to keep pushing the limits of their capabilities.

Do you know who fell more in practice than any other hockey player? Wayne Gretzky. That’s right the greatest player of all time would fall down at least once and usually more during any practice. How could that be?

It’s because he was always trying to push his body to do things that he had never done. When you hit that point at which the movements are new it’s like trying to walk for the first time. I bet you fell quite a few times before you ever got those first few steps right. Well that’s effectively what Wayne Gretzky was doing every practice. He was making new neural connections and strengthening muscles necessary in order to perform at the level he wanted.

I heard this story about who, in my mind, was the greatest athlete of all time: Jerry Rice. Jerry Rice has 208 TDs. Number 2 on the list has 175. That’s 18% behind number 1. Oh not to mention the fact that it’s a running back. Running backs average 30–40% more touchdowns than receivers due to the number of touches they get inside the red zone. Ladanian Tomlinson set the record with 28 TDs for a running back. And Randy Moss caught 23 TDs to set the record for receivers. That’s still a 20% advantage for the running backs.

The number 2 wide receiver all time is Randy Moss with 157 TDs. Wait, what? The #2 of all time is 51 TDs behind Jerry Rice. So the number 2 is 32% behind number 1. You will never see that in any other sport. Even in golf when talking Major tournaments won Tiger woods has 14 and Jack Nicklaus has 18. Only a 28% difference. How does anyone get that much better than everyone else. (Edit Tiger has since won the Masters to claim his 15th major).

Jerry Rice just flat out out worked everyone, every day of his entire career. Bo Eason told this story on stage at a conference. He has always been the first 1 on the practice field until he was traded to the 49ers. He got beat out by Jerry Rice. Rice is out there putting in hard work already. Hours before the rest of the team was asked to report. The team moves into stations to start drills. The wide receivers line up and are running slants. The other wide receivers are running half speed not even planting hard to turn in on their slants, catching the ball and walking back to the line.

Jerry Rice steps up and *bam* he takes off like a rocket. Hard plants his outside foot and doesn’t even lose any speed. Catches the ball and sprints full speed to the other end of the field. Then runs back to get in line again. He does the same thing, for every rep for the entire practice.

Bo Eason had to ask him after, he asked “Hey Jerry, why do you do all that extra running?”

Rice replied, “Because I’m training myself. So when these hands touch a football my body finds the end zone.”

That’s what 32% better than #2 of all time looks like. Constantly pushing to his limits. By the way #3 of all time is Rice’s teammate Terrell Owens. They trained together. They used to run “the hill.” Which is this epicly steep street in San Francisco. Owens who is probably 1 of the fittest athletes to ever wear a jersey said he couldn’t even see Rice after the first 5 min.

It’s easy to see work put in by athletes. Because you see it in their bodies. Then you see it in their numbers. But how do we as businessmen, managers, entrepreneurs or creatives do that. You can’t practice being a leader or practice being in business. So how do we set up our lives if we want to be the best?

To be the best you need 5 things:

1. Mentor
2. 2. Coach
3. 3. Growth Mindset
4. 4. Driven by something
5. 5. Health
6. Each of these is important in the chase for greatest of all time.

Mentor: is someone who has done what you’re trying to do at an elite level.

A mentor can let you know how they did it. Then you can model their process and improve upon it. They have already made the mistakes and know what worked best. So they are able to guide you in your training so that you can achieve what they did faster than themselves. If you achieve their level of success faster than they did then there’s no reason you can’t push further.

Coach: is someone who has trained people in the skill set you are looking for before.

This is fundamentally different than a mentor. A coach is there to set up the boundaries and goals. To motivate you to train harder. Being a coach is harder than being a mentor. Because they haven’t achieved what they are teaching at an elite level. But they have trained people to get to that place.

A coach has to know the skill so well that they can immediately recognize when you aren’t progressing and adapt the training to ensure the optimal growth in the shortest timeframe. The biggest benefit of a coach is they shorten the feedback loop. That means they reduce the amount of time between action and feedback on how well you performed it. The more points of feedback the more you can course correct to make sure you’re headed in the right direction.

Growth Mindset: the mindset optimal for growth.

There are 5 keys to the growth mindset that are necessary to become your best:

1. See tough times as challenges and get inspired
2. 2. Know that you can always get better at anything
3. 3. See failure as fundamental to success
4. 4. Limited negative self talk/positivity
5. 5. Anything is possibleo2

If you have these 5 beliefs then you have a growth mindset and are capable of anything.

Driven by something: in order to push through the tough times you have to be driven.

I’ve always seen this manifest in 2 ways. You are either driven by something inside yourself or by something outside yourself. When athletes win championships they always respond in these 2 ways. It’s either “I want to thank god” or like Muhammad Ali “I always knew I was the greatest.”

I actually believe it is stronger to be pulled by something outside of yourself. Because then you have no choice in the matter. You have to put in the work for whatever is pulling you. If you have to find that inside of yourself that is much harder. To honestly look at yourself and say I’m not good enough yet, I need to work harder because I believe in me.

Health: I hope I don’t need to define health for you.

But just to be thorough I will say that this isn’t just strength, diet, flexibility, or recovery. It’s all of it. Our bodies aren’t silos where the mind can still function with the body in poor health.

Now that we have an understanding of what it takes, now I want to go over how to get there.

There are 3 phases of any growth period.

1. Early: experimental phase
2. 2. Struggle: push through plateau phase
3. 3. Mastery: habitualize flow phase

The early phase — this is when you are first starting out at anything new.

We’ve all been here. Its new, it’s exciting. You see improvements very quickly. Psychologically what is going on during this phase? What you’re trying to do is still new, and your brain craves novelty. Your brains reward centers light up with excitement. This is fun.

Every time you make a new improvement your brain rewards you again. “You know I’m actually pretty good at this and it’s fun. Plus yesterday I could’ve never done what I just did today.” Your brain is releasing dopamine and adrenaline. 2 feel good neurotransmitters that elevate mood, increase memory formation and makes it easier to form habits. You are getting better by leaps and bounds. Every time you repeat this activity it seems like you’re getting better at it.

This is the easiest stage of growth. Because it’s so easy and rewarding it’s tempting to just stay in this stage. This is responsible for people that keep switching jobs, the honeymoon phase of relationships, and for the psychological condition I like to refer to as shiny object syndrome (Not the actual diagnosis term, so don’t walk into your doctors office and claim you think you have shiny object syndrome. Or they may laugh at you).

Think about this seriously we all know these situations. We all have or know someone that gets bored of a job quickly so they start sabotaging themselves. Or those people that are head over heels for a new love of their life every six months. Then my personal battle with shiny object syndrome is no walk in the park. Every time I come across or come up with a new idea, it’s like that’s all I want to think about. Forget all this other boring stuff I was doing, that was so 2018.

Important mindset for the early phase:

1. Self awareness — realize you’re in this phase
2. 2. Praise yourself for the work you put in not for getting better
3. 3. Find your why — your reason to connect and pursue this activity
4. 4. Set immediate and stretch goals
5. 5. Set up your systems — in order to habitualize the activity and the practice of it

It’s very important to not get caught up in the new flashy excitement of this stage.

The struggle phase — this is the period at which returns diminish and the activity is no longer novel.

When you come to the point at which the activity is no longer novel, the reward centers of your brain shut down. You have become so good that you cannot see gains very often anymore. So your talent feels stagnant and your mind is wandering because there’s no longer dopamine and Adrenalin in your system every time you practice this activity. It’s only human to lose motivation at this point.

At this point is where most people stop. They think they’ve reached the vertex of their talent. Or that the return on investment isn’t worth them still practicing the activity. This is when you have to fall back on the stability of the systems that you have set up in the early phase.

James Clear calls this the plateau of latent potential. The point where you level off and don’t get any better while you continue to put in work. Then all of a sudden something clicks and you have a break through. But then after you’re on another plateau.

It’s kind of like you have a room at 25 degrees and you’re trying to melt ice that’s on a table. You work really hard and increase the room temperature to 26–27 degrees. You look at the ice and it hasn’t changed yet. 28–29 look at the ice again, nothing. You really kick it into high gear 30–31, still nothing. All that work for nothing, but at 32 degrees all the magic starts to happen. The ice starts melting and eventually it’s just a puddle of water. You didn’t waste all that energy between 25–31 degrees. That energy was necessary to break through and then you see all the rewards all at once.

The struggle phase is plateau after plateau. Work, work, work… nothing. Then a breakthrough. Work, work, work, work… you’re tired, you’re grumpy. Then another break through.

Important mindset for the struggle phase:

1. Fall back onto your systems that’s what they are there for.
2. 2. Lean on your coach or mentor as they’ve been through this before.
3. 3. Reward yourself for every bit of work you put in.
4. 4. Focus on the process not the progression.
5. 5. Set very minuscule micro goals or process goals. I’m going to hit 1 good shot today or I’m going to practice 5 days this week for 3 hours a day no matter what.
6. 6. You will have bad days. Don’t let yourself quit until you have a great day doing the activity.

It’s important to not give up before you hit your breakthrough.

The Mastery Phase — is the phase where you have habitualized the activity to the point at which you don’t have to think about the activity.

You have embodied this skill so deeply that you can perform it without thinking about every little piece of the process. When you don’t need to think your prefrontal cortex powers down to save energy. What this does for you is it puts you in a state called flow. In this state we effectively get out of our own way and perform the activity with a grace that we could not have achieved before flow.

There’s a couple reasons for this. First, the neurochemistry of flow is the most intoxicating feeling we can experience as humans. It is endorphins to mask pain, serotonin to feel good, Adrenalin to drive and narrow your focus, and oxytocin to feel connected and alive. Flow hits you with all 4 of those neurotransmitters making it a highly pleasurable, highly productive, and highly addicting.

The second reason is because when the prefrontal cortex shuts down we experience a feeling of time dialation and connection to everything in that moment. Time dialation is the feeling of time slowing down or expanding at unbelievable rates. How many times have you been having fun with someone you love and it seems like 20 min has passed but really it’s been 4 hours. This happens because our perception of time is calculated by comparison in several places in our minds. Some of them being in the pre frontal cortex. Same goes for the feeling of connection. We literally can’t determine where we end and the activity begins. So you feel connected to everything.

When the prefrontal cortex shuts down we also lose any and all negative self talk. That inner critic, that voice in your head that’s always telling you that you can’t do it. That shuts off because we don’t need it because the activity is sobdeeply embodied that our minds would rather save the energy and just turn it off. What this does is it frees up cognitive bandwidth to give to the activity instead of the process or worrying about the outcome. That extra bandwidth makes people look like geniuses at whatever they’re doing. They can push themselves far beyond their limits comfortably because they have the focus and mind power to do that. And do that safely.

There’s a story of Laird Hamilton who’s a big wave surfer and the first surfer to be filmed riding a wave over 60ft high. This wave was so big that he was coming down the face of the wave too fast and the wave was going to crush him. He without any practice drug his back hand in the water to slow himself up essentially saving his life. And he rode out that wave like nothing ever happened.

Where did he get the insight to do that? He was caught entirely off guard. They were surfing 20–30 foot waves that day. But there’s a phenomena called a rogue wave that basically happens when 2 waves stack on top of each other. Laird couldn’t have known this. All of his friends on the beach saw it happening and were yelling for him not to drop in. They even radioed the jet ski that towed him into the wave. But it was too late.

Laird was not caught by surprise though and he flawlessly executed a perfect ride of a wave the size of which no one had ever rode before. He had no preparation, he had no time to decide what to do. He just did what was technically perfect for that situation naturally. And this is all caught on camera for the entire world to see.

What’s really amazing about the story is that wasn’t even the largest wave Laird caught that day. Apparently there was another 1 so large that the water was being sucked up the front wall of the wave so fast that he couldn’t have enough speed to keep himself from being sucked up and thrown over possibly to his death. But Laird bunny hopped his surf board off the front wall far enough out that he could safely surf out the rest of the wave.

That is what we are capable of when in flow. When we have the extra cognitive bandwidth to devote to the current activity. That’s when things become so instinctive that it feels like we are connected to a supreme intelligence guiding us with what to do.

Important mindset for the mastery phase:

1. Prioritize health, flow is physically, emotionally and mentally exhausting. You need proper time to recover.
2. 2. To find flow challenge yourself to force yourself to focus on the activity.
3. 3. Set unrealistic goals and chase them.
4. 4. Be grateful for how much work you had to put in to get there.
5. 5. Teach/mentor others to achieve the same things you’ve achieved.

This phase it’s important to push the envelope to achieve something that’s never been done before. Then to pass on that knowledge and see what others do when they find their flow.

So now you know the 5 things necessary to achieve the impossible. You also have a full understanding of the 3 phases of growth and the important beliefs needed in each phase. You have all the tools needed, now you just have to go put in the work.

I’m curious, what is it that you want to be the best in the world at? And why? Leave your answer in the comments and share this with everyone you know. Don’t let anyone get stuck in the struggle phase never breaking through to do anything great. We are humans and we were made to do the impossible.