2024-05-16 20:36:46
“Learn Like An Athlete” is the name of a blog post by my friend - david perell
Even though it wasn’t the purpose of the post, it gave me an idea.
“Think Like An Athlete” came into my mind.
Not many people treat their chosen pursuit like an athlete.
When you think about how a sportsperson behaves, everything in their life is geared toward maximising their performance on game day.
Everything.
From their nutrition to their sleeping pattern, the game tape they watch, the drills they run, the conditioning work, their self-talk, the people they hang around with, their recovery, their pre-game ritual, even the content they consume.
Everything contributes to their performance.
And yet when you ask people what they want to do in life, unless it’s a sport pretty much no one takes their preparation this seriously.
“I want to be a world-class podcaster.”
Ok so tell me what you did on the morning of your episode recording.
“Oh well I got up late cos I didn’t get in from the cinema until 1am and scrolled through Instagram for an hour when I woke up-“
Hang on a second.
I thought you wanted to be the best at this?
Why is it that you don’t treat your chosen pursuit with the same level of finesse and sacredness that athletes treat theirs?
This thing is THE thing you said you wanted to do.
Your highest calling.
Your maximal point of contribution to the world.
But you’re leaving so much on the table.
Why is that?
I think the reason is because the parameters for success and failure in pretty much everything except for sport are so messy and hard to define that we always believe we can just “get by” and no one will notice, not even ourselves.
In sport you have very tight metrics of success and failure.
You know how fast you ran/heavy you lifted/accurately you threw in the last match, so you have a benchmark for this one.
You also know where you were at in training and can predict what should have happened on game day.
These tight, objective metrics of success and failure aren’t there in pretty much anything else.
Who’s to say that this podcast/YouTube video/music performance/day with your children was better or worse than the last one?
What even constitutes a good performance here?
The subjectivity and inherent opaqueness of most pursuits provides sufficient degrees of freedom for you to believe you can just “get by” with poor preparation.
And it’s difficult to draw a direct line from you being a worse podcaster/YouTuber/musician/father to the sleep/nutrition/mindset/training you did.
So we don’t concern ourselves with it.
Where could you be in life if you treated your chosen pursuit in life with the same level of dedication that athletes treat theirs?
You’re only getting one shot at this.
Maybe taking it more seriously would be a good idea.
- Chris Williamson
@TheBestTwitterThreads
5.2K viewsedited 17:36
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