Weekly ideas about living a good, meaningful and high performing life in a chaotic world from Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Best selling authors of PEAK PERFORMANCE, DO HARD THINGS, and THE PRACTICE OF GROUNDEDNESS.
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The Valley Before the Breakthrough
Published 26 days ago • 5 min read
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Reflect: The Biggest Life Hack
Perhaps the biggest life hack is to ignore all the shortcuts and hacks and simply show up, get started, nail the fundamentals, stay patient, and give yourself a chance.
Eight weeks ago, one of us (Brad) was struggling mightily in the weight room.
After a powerlifting meet in the Spring, he had taken three months away from heavy deadlifting. The break wasn’t because he was hurt but because he wants to play the long game, and occasional time off from the big lifts is smart.
When he first got back into it, he felt awful.
Three hundred and sixty-five pounds, a weight that normally moves lightning fast and feels light, felt heavy as can be.
On the third week back, he turned to his coach and said, “This feels like walking on an open blister. I can’t believe how terrible and uncomfortable it is. Maybe I’m just done deadlifting.”
His coach chuckled and told him it’s par for the course.
“But it was only a three-month break. I was training hard, just not deadlifting,” remarked Brad.
“Practice what you preach. Stay patient. Trust the process. Give me a few more weeks,” said his coach.
Ten weeks later, Brad hit 500 pounds for two reps with more in the tank—a lifetime PR. He went from questioning what he was doing to feeling strong, full of energy, and performing at his best. All of this in just 70 days.
It’s a prime example of something we write about frequently: progress is nonlinear. It’s also why the advice to get “just one percent better every day” works great, until it gets in the way.
When you are new to something, the harder you work, the better you get. But once you get pretty good, progress slows and becomes harder to come by. If you are addicted to visible improvement, you may find yourself tempted to give up. You can think of it as the end of the honeymoon period.
But so much of the good, interesting, and most fulfilling stuff comes after the honeymoon period. You’ve got to stay patient and find value and satisfaction in the work itself even, and perhaps especially, when you aren’t making observable progress—even when it feels like you are walking on an open blister.
It’s not just strength training.
It’s writing. It’s music. It’s leadership. It’s running. It’s just about any worthwhile pursuit. One of the biggest traps is the plateau or valley. But much like Brad recently experienced, oftentimes, the plateau or valley precedes a breakthrough. It’s just how it goes once you get pretty good at something.
Add in time off, injury, illness, family obligations, travel, and all the other stuff of life, and for all that we know about human performance, it becomes harder to predict and more of a mystery.
Process over outcomes. Patience. Persistence. Consistency.
We research, coach, and write on these topics. We’ve also been fortunate to work with many of the world’s best performers on them. And yet, when it’s us needing to be patient, when it’s us experiencing a plateau or valley, it’s still really dang hard.
Brad probably wasn’t ever going to quit deadlifting. But having a coach to support and remind him that this is just how it goes certainly didn’t hurt. When we're on a long plateau, the devil on our shoulder convinces us that maybe we should consider throwing in the towel. We need a counterbalance. It's one of the reasons we write this newsletter. It may not be filled with the latest fad or protocol that promises a quick fix, but it does contain nudges and reminders to help keep you (and ourselves) on the path.
Because at the end of the day, the goal is the path and the path is the goal, and so much of success is simply a matter of staying on it.
Excellence, performance, and greatness can be quite simple, but simple does not mean easy. It’s vital to surround yourself with people, writing, and other material that consistently reminds you to fall in love with the process—to stay patient, to stay focused, to stay consistent, to stay hungry. Do that, and eventually the process loves you back.
– Brad and Steve
Listen: From Success to Mastery—The Art of Sustained Excellence
On today’s episode of “excellence, actually” (Apple/Spotify): Okay, so you’ve achieved some success early in your career—now, how do you sustain it?
One useful way is to approach it like love or marriage.
Early on, it’s all excitement, fireworks, hormones, and euphoria. The honeymoon period is the equivalent of getting your dream job early in your career or hitting an unexpected athletic peak.
It’s not always going to be that fun. If you keep trying to recreate the spark of early love, it’ll lead to disappointment. So you shift to new goals: staying endlessly curious about each other, having children, buying a house, and growing old. The relationship deepens in new ways.
It’s a shift from falling in love to being in love. It might be harder and messier, but the rewards can be even greater and more meaningful.
Today’s episode is all about the ways of making that shift. We discuss structuring practice (and play) to facilitate encouragement and engagement, navigating both short-term and long-term feedback loops, staying true to intrinsic motivation rather than external rewards, and much more.
Discover: More Good Stuff
The philosopher Iris Murdoch makes the argument that morality is ultimately about attentive love. One of the best ways to practice attentive love? Engaging with a craft or skill. In other words: the pursuit of excellence.
If you're looking to expand your ability to improve your psychological and/or physical fitness, you might benefit from learning about the Yerkes-Dodson Law and getting into what psychologist Susan David calls the "whelmed" zone.
A brief reflection on our never-ending quest for happiness: "The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world... It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end, we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality."
Thank you for reading this week's edition of The Growth Equation newsletter. We hope you found it valuable.
To go deeper, check out our books!
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Weekly ideas about living a good, meaningful and high performing life in a chaotic world from Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. Best selling authors of PEAK PERFORMANCE, DO HARD THINGS, and THE PRACTICE OF GROUNDEDNESS.
Reflect: Stop Searching for Perfection There is no single best diet. There is no single best workout plan. There is no single best routine for productivity. Anyone who says otherwise is usually trying to sell you something.Don't take them seriously. Ninety percent of plans and programs for most things are marketing snake oil. Ten percent can be effective. Find something amongst the latter ten percent that works for you and stay consistent. That's the name of the game for nearly everything....
Reflect: Doubt is Normal. Accept It. If your mind is filled with thoughts of wanting to quit, it doesn’t mean you are weak. It means you are normal. Even the best in the world feel a strong urge to quit sometimes. What matters is taking those doubts and urges along for the ride: instead of freaking out and reacting to them, you accept them and get on with the show. We all have insecurities. They never fully go away. You just don't want to let them limit your potential. Think: This is normal....
Reflect: What We Get Wrong About Balance The best type of "balance" is dynamic, not static. It's the type of balance you find riding a bike. If you're stationary, you won't go anywhere and you'll tip over. But if you're pedaling persistently, you can make micro-adjustments when you notice you've gone too far in one direction, find equilibrium, and move toward your destination, all the while enjoying the ride. From time to time, you may feel a bit out of whack. This happens to all high...