Push Hard, Collapse, Push Hard, Collapse

Push hard, collapse, push hard, collapse.

This all-too-common pattern is a distortion of high performance. It’s so close to what makes a truly remarkable career, and yet it suffers from a kind of exaggeration - toil instead of work, exhaustion instead of rest.

A system like this is maddening for many reasons, not the least of which is that its results are nowhere near on par with the effort exerted.

Perhaps we can take a look at how to get out of this vicious circle…

The first thing to recognize is that if you’re already performing at a high level, the most important thing is simply to ensure that you don’t blow yourself up.

Read that again.

There’s no question that you can produce. Your track record makes that abundantly clear: you come up with great ideas, do work that get your clients incredible results, and people recognize you as a leader in your field.

If you can keep yourself in the game long term, there’s no doubt that you’re going to create remarkable success. Right now, however, you’re probably pushing too hard and moving too fast for this to be sustainable (which is all the more difficult given how much you value sustainability in the world “out there”).

Hence the collapse.

The highest performers distinguish themselves by becoming skillful with restraint. They know how to leave some in the tank, ensuring that they never bottom out. As a mentor of mine once put it: failure is expensive. It’s psychologically taxing to hit your limit, and doing so repeatedly becomes incredibly demoralizing.

For the time being, focus is best directed toward hedging against the experience of collapse. You can consider how to make your bests better once you’ve solidified your position and made sure that — at the very least — you aren’t backsliding.

If we were working together, we’d do this by taking a look at your previous experiences of hitting a wall and examining what occurs in the hours, days, weeks, and months leading up to you hitting the wall. We’d determine the early warning signs that indicate something is amiss and based on that, figure out how to set up guardrails for your behavior moving forward.

For example, I know that if I reach the end of a workday really craving alcohol, it’s a clear sign that I’ve overdone it that day. Enough of those days in a row, and I’m toast. Maybe I still have that drink, but beforehand I can reflect on the day and figure out where things went wrong.

* Did I wake up poorly rested?

* Did I skip meals?

* Did I skip my walk?

* Did I book too many meetings back-to-back?

Bringing awareness to the ways you deplete yourself allows you to focus on reducing the likelihood that those things happen again down the road. This is basic behavior modification, and because there’s a wealth of research on it, I won’t go into the details here.

Suffice it to say: if you can make it such that you never end up collapsing in the first place, you’re far less likely to have that “catch up” mentality that leads to continued overwork. Immediately the rolling average starts working in your favor because you are — on average — better, more often.

When you’ve prevented the collapse, you’ve interrupted the vicious circle.

The next step is to create a virtuous circle.

Consider that if your style of work has continuously resulted in exhaustion and collapse, then there’s clearly an error in the way you’re working.

It is entirely possible to organize your work in such a way that you’re both proud of the contribution and progress you’ve made AND have enough left in the tank to enjoy your success, actually relaxing and being present with your family.

In my experience working with and observing high performing entrepreneurs, there are three crucial ingredients to this:

1. Identifying — and operating in accordance with — your natural rhythms and personal preferences.

2. Prioritizing highly leveraged activities, those that have a disproportionately positive upside compared to a relatively small downside.

3. Knowing the difference that makes a difference and how much is enough. What are the minimum criteria sufficient to create the change that you seek to make?

Your stress levels will plummet, and your quality of life will skyrocket when this falls into place.

Not only are you no longer risking blowing yourself up, you’re also playing a game you genuinely enjoy, making only those moves that are most likely to result in you winning.

And that’s what gets you back on a sustainable path.