1% better is a lie

Many moons ago, I played professional soccer both in the U.S and abroad. I spent my late teens and early 20’s in stadiums full of people, doing something I spent most of my life working toward.

I wasn’t a natural. I spent most of my youth riding the bench.

And that made me angry.

And so I spent every single day of my childhood, before school, at lunch, in the hallway between classes, at practice, at home after practice, in my bedroom when my parents made me go to bed, training, on my own, for hours. Thousands of them. I obsessed on growth. My brain knew this was needed to succeed when I was 6 years old. I made winning an inevitability. And I did, but at a cost of nearly 15 years of non stop effort. I did not miss a day, because I couldn’t.

Because the old adage "of “just show up every day and get 1% better” is bullshit.

Do you really have the audacity to think that 1% growth can happen in an hour? In a day? In a week? Absurd. Show up every day, get .00001% better and do it until you die. That is how you give yourself the opportunity to win. That is how you enter into a special space.

I think one of the reasons I am drawn to ultra-endurance mountain sports is because of this exact concept. You can’t be a naturally athletic human, wake up one day and go finish a brutal 100 miler. You don’t luck your way up the summits I’ve stood on or the routes I’ve climbed. You don’t become capable of doing the most extreme of human endeavors over a day, a month or even a year. It takes decades of showing up, every day, and doing what’s needed to be done, to maybe have the opportunity to succeed 10 years down the road.

Can you look ahead like that? Can you look within like that? Probably not, but prove me wrong.

Anything you desire, that’s truly worth having, takes more work than you’ve done right now. Don’t get caught up in the first shiny object you see on the horizon, look past it, look bigger, chase something so big you have no choice but to spend years preparing for it. Complacency will kill you in every aspect of life if you get sucked into it.

There is always more, you have never arrived and you never will.

Onwards, Always.