This Is Why You Should Work Below Your Limits
Weekly Newsletter 01
Originally published in Medium’s “Start it up” on April 15, 2021.
To this day, I’ve never been as excited for a challenge as I was for my first Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world championships in 2016 (some context for my jiu-jitsu readers, it the was no-gi worlds at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, CA).
Before I began training for the tournament, I made a pact with myself to give it my all, no matter what.
It didn’t matter if training was at 5 am or if I was tired or I had a test that day (I was an undergrad at the time), I was always on the mat or in the gym preparing, fueled by corny motivational videos and excessive amounts of caffeine. To crank up the intensity to 11, I also went on a crash diet and lost 15 pounds in 4 weeks to make weight for the event.
I mean, it was the world championships. I had to give it my all, right?
Wrong.
The effects of the training camp were disastrous on my body. Going into the tournament, I developed some of the most intense depression I had ever experienced along with physical burnout that left me bedridden for days. Worst of all, I began to fear my own capacity for work.
I ended up taking 3rd place in the tournament, but the prioritization of short-term success over my long-term health taught me a valuable, but painful lesson:
What doesn’t kill you sometimes makes you weaker.
Let’s Talk About Grit
When it comes to grit (also known as resilience or drive), it seems that many people have the same problem but experience it at different ends of the spectrum. Some of us can’t stop pushing ourselves and do so until we break physically and mentally. Others can’t even muster up the will to get started.
We either overfill our cup or don’t fill it at all. Why? I’d argue that a lot of the problem is due to misinformation.
Most advice on pushing yourself (like this lovely article from “HowToBeast.com”, which is the top article for the Google search “how hard should you push yourself”) is bro-science-based garbage telling you to just “go harder” no matter the consequences.
This advice fails for many obvious reasons, but primarily it’s problematic because once someone instills a true growth mindset, the sky is really the limit on how hard they can work at a given activity. This then creates a whole new set of problems, like sustainability, mental health issues, and burnout.
Is Grittiness Necessary?
The uncomfortable fact is that hard work is irrelevant if it doesn’t lead to good results.
As someone who grew up in the macho world of wrestling and mixed martial arts, this was a tough pill to swallow. Working hard just for working hard’s sake is a fast track to physical and mental destruction, not glory. Toughness does not guarantee success.
That said, it’s still important to look at the extreme examples of work ethic because these extreme examples will expose the fatal flaws and possible strengths of pushing yourself to the limit. Do the ends justify the means?
The problem with studying people who push themselves to extreme limits (like the Navy SEALS, who endure “hell-weeks” that have literally killed people) is that, well, they’re too extreme. Navy SEALs are inspiring, but they’re difficult to relate to.
Honestly, I don’t care that “most people quit at 40%” of their breaking point, I want to know what percent I should shoot for to be the best I can be. This is where grit fails.
Optimal Output Is Complex
My favorite Ted Talk on work ethic is by former Olympic rower Adam Kreek, titled “I Seek Failure”.
During the 2008 Olympic training camp, Kreek looked to a training partner of his, Jake Wetzel, for advice on improving athletic performance. Wetzel was considered to be the best rower on the team. One day, the two rowers went out to lunch, where Wetzel shared the secret to his success. What he said is a bit surprising.
Wetzel said that he consistently trained below his max effort in preparation for the Olympics. That’s right, he did not give his all during every training session… for the freaking Olympics. By all traditional Western metrics, Wetzel was a serial slacker.
But of course, that isn’t the whole story.
One workout per week, Wetzel also pushed himself to his absolute limit where his mind would break and his body would fail. He sought failure because failure showed him his limit. Once he knew his limit, he hovered slightly below max effort for the rest of his training time. Wetzel believed that most of our growth happens just below our limits, not at or beyond them.
This training philosophy won Kreek and Wetzel a gold medal for Team Canada at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. This idea of not constantly pushing your limits should really be taken more seriously, especially because it’s much more common than you might think.
Whether it’s Adam Kreek or any other high-performing athlete in the endurance sports world, most of them train far below their max effort. Ultra-runners who compete in races like the MOAB 240 (you guessed it, a 240-mile running race) rarely ever run more than 90 miles in a week of training. Yet at race time, they run 240 miles in 3 days.
In sports performance, it’s basically a requirement to schedule “rest days” or periodize training so that burnout and extreme (potentially life-threatening) exhaustion are avoided. For some reason, people rarely follow this concept in art, business, or other non-athletic skills. Why?
10,000 Hour Rule Is a Lie
It’s generally considered that 10,000 hours is the amount of time required for mastery in a skill. 10,000 hours of writing, training martial arts or playing the guitar.
That’s a lot of time and energy. In our results-driven culture, people typically want to get to their 10,000 hours as fast as possible because they believe they will receive money or notoriety for their mastery.
As a result, they work themselves to death in pursuit of mastery.
The problem is, not all work is equal. There are many different kinds of practice, and furthermore, psychologists believe that practice only makes up for about 25% of improvements in a given skill. Among high performers, it’s an even smaller margin. The longer you do something, the harder and harder it becomes to make improvements.
This study suggests that among high-level athletes, deliberate practice only makes up only about 1% of the variance in performance. If everyone is working equally as hard, there’s something else that separates the winners from the losers.
I’m not trying to say that there’s no value in practice or hard work, but I am saying it’s important to look at the big picture. If only 25% of my results come from practice, where are the other 75% coming from? That is the question for psychologists of the future.
Your Best Is Not Your Limit
Unfortunately, none of what I’ve said so far is a reason to quit working hard altogether. Hard work is still one of the most important factors in determining success. The point is that our conversation about limits needs to change.
Instead of breaking through our limits, it seems better to slowly expand them.
It’s really difficult to find research on what amount of output will lead to the best results because most of our limits are subjective. 100% of my effort might only look like 85% of yours. If we’re all trying to push ourselves to our limits, each of us will give a different amount of objective effort.
What isn’t different among individuals, however, is the fact that constant limit-pushing will lead to burnout, anxiety, and a slew of other health problems. That’s why the self-awareness of knowing your limits is so valuable.
If we push our limits every once in a while, we learn where they are without breaking our minds and bodies. It’s not about “never stopping”, it’s about never quitting.
That’s a crucial distinction. If you constantly push your limits, you’ll likely decrease your chances of success due to burnout, fatigue, and injury. Even if you’re becoming “grittier”, you’ll be too broken to reap the benefits of your hard work.
Closing Thoughts
It might be a tough pill to swallow, but the hardest workers don’t always win. Any complex game can’t be won with hard work alone. The most important relationship you have is with yourself, but I’d argue that the second most important relationship you have is with your limits.
If you fear your limits, you’ll avoid them at all costs. Limits are painful and potentially dangerous, so you should approach them carefully. Working hard is important, but success is so much more complicated than how much work you put in.
The only reason to really push your limits is the message engrained in our “billionaire mindset” that we must never stop working. The irony is that if we slowed down, we might actually get the results we’ve been working so hard for all this time.
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What I’m Reading
I’ve been on a huge history bender lately, and I’m about 5 chapters deep into Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow. If you’re a fan of the hit musical, Hamilton, but want a more cerebral and complex iteration of Hamilton’s life, I can’t recommend this book enough.
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Wishing you the best,
—Chris