What does it take to be great? Or at least as great as YOU can possibly be?
Well, I certainly don’t have all the answers, but the more I read about elite performers and work toward elite performance myself, there is one common factor I’ve come across consistently; struggle. That’s right elite performers aren’t just born great, they have to work like crazy and tweak their approach along the way to reach elite levels.
In his book, Principles: Life and Work Ray Dalio talks about learning to struggle well and how that has helped him become as successful as he is. If you don’t know who Ray Dalio is, he is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, which is one of the world’s largest hedge funds. He is worth $17 billion according to Forbes. But he is elite for more than just his wealth. He is a pioneer in the field of management-using radical honesty and an idea meritocracy to make decisions at Bridgewater, and benefitting greatly from it. He hasn’t always been uber successful though. He was nearly broke and had to lay off all of his employees early in his fund’s existence, but he learned from his struggle and came back better than before. He says that without struggling as often as he did early in his career he would have never been forced to grow, and Bridgewater would never have become what it is today.
As you can tell from Dalio’s life, struggling helped him grow. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness talk about this in more depth in their book Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success. They suggest stretching for goals that are currently just beyond your ability. The goal must be hard enough that it causes stress, but not so hard that is impossible. You need to be able to struggle for it so that you can set a new floor for yourself. For example, if you are a distance runner and run 3 miles at an 8 minute pace, try to lower it to 7:55. It will be difficult but you’ll be probably be able to get there with a little more effort than usual. Obviously, there will need to be other training interventions as well to get to an elite level, but you can see my point.
So if you have high expectations for yourself learn to enjoy the struggle because it’s forcing you to stretch and grow.