Here’s an exercise. Instead of asking yourself what are all the things that you could be doing, that you aren’t. Instead, ask yourself what are all the things that you’re doing that you shouldn’t be doing.
Is your behavior conducive to your goals? Are you getting everything out of life that you want? If not, It might not be what you’re not doing but what you’re already doing that’s holding you back. How much of the wrong that you’re doing is canceling out and diminishing the right that you’re doing?
What’s holding you back and anchoring you down?
Some degree of autonomy is needed here, you can’t just blame the water for all of your swimming problems. It isn’t that it’s not true, but that it’s exclusive to what you’re doing wrong and it’s simply not helpful. You can fault the water for its hypothermic properties and extraordinary resistance. And blame the Poseidon patriarchy for its harsh dictatorial governance of the domain. But that doesn’t mean you don’t play a role in your success or failure as a swimmer. So then you might ask, how much of a role do you have in that success or failure?
You have to know what the frictions are in your environment so you can develop work-arounds and compensatory measures.
Propellant vs. Drag
People focus more on propulsion than they do drag. They don’t focus enough attention on the resistance, the things that oppose progress. This coupled with the additive effect: our tendency to add to a problem to solve it instead of subtracting things can lead to quite a mess. The additive effect shows up when people try to do more of what’s working for them instead of subtracting what’s unnecessary or acting as a hindrance.
A plane’s jet, a bullet's gun power, a swimmer's arm, a cyclist's legs are not independent of gravity, aerodynamics, hydrodynamics i.e. the environment. And we haven’t even spoken of skill, that there are better ways to do things than other ways. This is what technique is. Spiral on a bullet, pull type of a swim, gear selection ratio of a bicyclist.
The faster an object moves the more resistance it creates. This means that the importance of the aerodynamics and imperfections of the object become more and more relevant the faster it goes. This is a major limiting factor in people's life progressions.
As they gain steam and momentum, it’s often their bad habits that hold them back, which is why they find escape velocity so hard to achieve.
Your good habits not only need to be commensurate with the goals you're trying to achieve but also to compensate for the bad habits you’re dragging along and that are slowing you down. And the faster you go the more those bad habits anchor in. Eventually making your efforts futile and exhausting you. What makes this so insidious is that often we don’t recognize that we’re getting in our own way.
Gottman Ratio
This idea of friction makes me think of The Magic Ratio. For every bad encounter you have you need 5 good encounters. If you don't, the relationship is likely to fall apart. We can take this same idea and apply it to much of what we do in life. For every bad habit in your life, you need five good habits to keep you afloat. And this is just the bare minimum, not optimal. And at some point you hit diminishing returns and you can’t compensate for the bad anymore. But people don’t. The solution is where you want to look the least because you’ve searched everywhere else. The low hanging fruit has been had. The easy work has been done.
This is the Peterson principle (rising to a level of respective incompetence) and where a lot of people stop. They’ve made it as far as they can in their default state. No technique development, no CO2 tolerance training, no ancillary training to compensate for muscular imbalances. They condemn what they’re after as though they no longer want it and settle in where they’re at. And I can’t help but wonder how much of the glass ceiling that so many talk about is a consequence of this.
It gives a different insight into the phrase: the more things change the more they stay the same. It’s your bad traits that are anchoring you. And although you’re adding all these new good traits, it’s the bad behaviors keeping you tied down. So here you are, drastically changing, but you can’t seem to elevate yourself. Why? Maybe it’s because of those anchors in your life. The baggage of the past, that you haven’t come to terms with.
Pep talk
The initial propulsion gives you initial velocity, think a motivational video on Youtube or an inspirational speech you’ve read, but it quickly subsides. But the reason that a bullet flies so long and so true is because it doesn’t fool itself about the world it’s in. It factors in aerodynamics, the curvature of the earth, Its long barrel and muzzle twist gives it the guidance it needs to make its journey and to hit its mark. It’s designed to resist the frictions operating against it. It doesn’t just rely on its fuel, knowing that that will only get it so far. It has to come to terms with the frictions of the world.
As a person who’s trying to improve their swimming, I can attest to this. I know that kicking and pulling harder and harder will only lead to exhaustion. I need to be hydrodynamic, work with my environment, favor buoyancy, get out of my head and my hesitancies, and place myself outside my comfort range.
You have to unshackle yourself from the restraints that are holding you back. Powering through things is a temporary solution and the cost is paid by your future. The exertion is detrimental to long term progress, making the cyclicality of your setbacks and progress much more volatile and harder to bear. Often in life, problems delayed are problems magnified. And if you don’t want to deal with a kitten, what makes you think that you’ll try to deal with a lion?
This will lead to frustration and rage quitting if not dealt with properly. If something works it doesn’t mean to do more of it. We’re additive bias, always wanting to do more and doubling down on strategies that seemed effective. But just imagine if you cut the dead weight from you, how much easier would it be to excel? We force and force only to constrict the noose around our future selves. Burnt out and despondent, feeling futile in our efforts, never to see what was holding us back. Thinking that we just didn’t try hard enough or didn’t have enough will power. Never citing bad habits and poorly structured routines.
The good doesn’t excuse the bad, but the bad does nullify and cancel out the good, quick to make any effort futile. Good speaks for itself, but the bad is quick to silence it.
You are the design architect of your life. The amount of force needed to overcome drag is enormous. In racing they do everything possible to cut down on drag. $1,000’s of dollars on a single part to reduce the smallest amount of drag and to have the slightest edge over competition.
Negativity Bias and Gottman
This fuel/friction dynamic reveals itself in many places in life.
The negativity bias. Negative experiences carry a greater weight and influence both psychologically and emotionally than do positive experiences. The low is lower than the high is high. This is why focusing on friction is so valuable. The return on investment is incredible. One good thing is worth one good thing, but removing one bad thing is proportionally and quantitatively worth 5 good things. This is demonstrated in the Gottman ratio. For every 1 bad encounter you need 5 good encounters. Which is to say that a single bad encounter can wipe out and erase the impact of 5 good encounters.
Reducing the shadowing effects of the bad allows your good to shine much brighter. The bad makes the good irrelevant. People get fixated on “look at all my good qualities” but what they seem to never do is a weighted analysis in reference to their bad qualities. It’s like looking at a balance sheet and all of the assets without paying any attention to the liabilities and debt.
Inverting the problem helps. Don’t ask what can I do, instead ask what can I stop doing? Regardless of how you feel about Doctor Phil, I once heard him say: “ it takes a thousand I hate you’s to make up for one I love you.” Think about that before you escalate an argument into a blowout fight. How many good things did you just unravel and make irrelevant? One negative can undo a lot of progress and positively good things.
The Dating/Job market
People unwittingly disqualify themselves from a lot of dates. How? It isn’t their lack of good traits, it's the prevalence of their bad traits in proportion to their good traits. And what those good and bad traits are and how much they compensate for one another.
It isn’t just the presence of good traits but the absence of bad traits. Think of:
Simping
Qualifying
Needy
Clingy
Obsessive
And what do these traits demonstrate?
It subliminally demonstrates to the prospective partner desperation and desperation is a consequence of lack of options, scarcity mindset and not having an abundance for choice. And why would a person have those traits? Because they haven’t put in the work to level themselves up as a person, because if they had, they would be spoiled for choice and consequently not acting like that.
But it’s not really even that. It’s that you need to demonstrate a set of behaviors accompanied by an absence of behaviors in order to pre qualify. It doesn’t give you a bonus, it gives you a chance. And when you start trying to achieve higher value things it becomes more important that you bring your A game.
It’s quite simple. The more you bring to the table the more crap people are willing to put up with. So what happens when you don’t bring much to the table but you have a lot of crap to put up with? The answer is: they skip over you and go find someone else.
What happens at your office job when you know the work inside and out but you're irritable, not personable and hard to work with? The answer is: they skip over you and go find someone else.
Both of these simple examples aren’t extensive models meant to represent the sphere of interpersonal dynamics but to demonstrate an idea. The idea being that you can have all the qualities in the world that people want but if you have a fraction of the ineptness, inadequacies and insufficiencies that push people away instead of drawing them in, it’ll sabotage much of that hard work you’ve done.
It’s incredible to me how tuned in and dialed in you have to be to achieve excellence. And how doing everything right isn’t enough. But how not doing things wrong is just as crucial. Not doing things wrong isn’t enough to succeed but enough to stop you from succeeding. And that can be a hard pill to swallow.
So yes, find the things that drive you and work hard at your goals but keep an eye out for all those little things that can set you back. Because they’re out there, they’re hard to spot and removing them will very likely make the difference in where you’re at versus where you want to be.