If you’re not giving it 110%, maxing the envelope, tilting the paradigm and shifting into 9th gear, you’re in the wrong job and you should quit and do something you’re truly passionate about. After all, there’s always going to be someone else who can take your place if you’re not willing to give it your all.
If you’re like most of us, you’ll have heard some variation of this bullshit, either at work or from some vacuous influencer. And the thing is, that sort of whip-cracking business bro bullshit isn’t just insensitive – it’s actually wrong.
And if you’re thinking “here comes more of that soft-play, milk toast, you’re brilliant just the way you are snowflake nonsense”, a) I think you might want to calm down and have a nice cup of tea as you’ve clearly wondered into the wrong podcast, and b) this isn’t coming from me, this is coming from one of the world’s most accomplished athletes.
Burnout
Burnout is real and it’s measurable. A report in early 2022 showed that one in four workers were experiencing symptoms like fatigue, difficulty concentrating, loss of motivation, headaches, tummy aches, and difficulty concentrating.
As behavioural scientist Thomas Curran discovered through a decade of research, the give-it-all-you-got mentality horrible bosses perpetuate is capitalism at its darkest and least humane.
Now I can talk up a whole game about the cruelty behind capitalism and how companies like Amazon drive people to the brink of physical exhaustion and beyond, but right now the sun’s shining and my therapist says I should probably stop reading Grace Blakeley.
Suffice it to say we have evidence to show that giving your work 100% of your energy leads to burnout. But there’s a sweet spot – a magic number – that allows you to give it some welly, but also leave some headroom. Let me introduce you to Carl Lewis.
Meet Carl Lewis
Known to some as the “master finisher”, Carl Lewis is an American track and field athlete – he’s basically the track and field athlete, with 9 Olympic gold, one silver, and 10 World Championship medals to his name.
He was a sprinter and long jumper who competed on the world stage from 1979 to 1996. He set world records in the 100m, 4x100m, and 4x200m relays, and he still holds the indoor long jump record, and has done for over forty years. Now, I am not an overactive man, but imagine doing something so well that no-one has done it better in forty years.
Thing is, if you watch the start of one of his races, he’s by no means the first out of the block. If often looks like he’s speeding up to make up for lost ground, but in fact everyone else is slowing down and he’s just running at the same, consistent pace. That pace frequently saw him best other sprinters who’d come out the traps like a bullet, and this approach has become known as the 85% rule, or the Carl Lewis approach.
Turns out it’s all in the body. Other athletes scrunch up their fists and their faces and get all tensed up, while the likes of Lewis are visibly more relaxed, so much so that pretty much any description of his running style talks about that relaxed fluidity.
This is Andy Kidd, a sports therapist who specialises in helping sprinters stay relaxed. For him, it comes down to trust. Can you trust yourself to start off at the back of the pack, knowing you’ll be able to sustain that pace and ultimately triumph over those that went off like a rocket.
A couple of days ago I watched a video of two people stacking cups. The object was to collect each cup and place it in a stack on a specific spot. One player started with the cups closest to him, while the other started with the cups furthest away.
Each time they grabbed a cup, they had to run back to the starting point and place the cup on the stack. As you watch them, you think “surely the guy on the left is going to win. He’s clearly ahead”.
He started off by collecting the cups closest to him, so for the first half of the race he makes incredible progress. But as the race continues, he gets more and more fatigued and gradually slows down, as his job is getting harder and harder.
Meanwhile the other guy is only now getting warmed up, as he’s done the hard yards of running all the way from one end of the line to the other, back and forth in gradually decreasing amounts, keeping his energy consistent. He wins.
The reason why this method works has some of its roots in flow, which we covered in episode 5.
Flow is about ease, not going full throttle, balls out, guns blazing. When you’re in flow, what you’re doing feels natural, not strained. Unlike, say, tunnel-vision or hyperfocus, you’re aware of your surroundings – you have what we call headroom.
And that headroom is what counts. It’s what allows you to think, to take in the world around you, to track your surroundings and watch your exits.
The rule doesn’t just apply to your work, but to other aspects of your life. Obviously we can see how it impacts exercise, but you can apply this to your diet, too.
If you’ve ever struggled with making any kind of big life improvement, you’ll know that sticking to it is hard. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago, and one of the things that can be tricky, especially if you’re neurodivergent, is having something of an all-or-nothing mindset… which may be partly why habits you want to stick to are still proving themselves elusive.
So, instead of aiming to eat nothing but healthy food for every meal, why not give yourself a day off? Turns out, if you eat three healthy meals a day to help you achieve a calorie deficit, having a cheat day once a week runs to just over 85%.
How you actually structure this is of course up to you – the point is to build in some slack.
And while we’re on the subject, anyone who tells you they don’t need slack or that it’s just an excuse or you’re not fully committing… is dancing with different demons. Or they’re just flat-out kidding themselves because they’re not comfortable with admitting they’re human.
And remember, we’re talking about high-performing people here. Lewis isn’t the sole outlier; Hugh Jackman has also talked about giving it 85%, and people often see fellow sprinter Usain Bolt as an exemplar. The key is in the relaxed attitude before the race.
Because if your coach tells you to give it 100%, you’re more likely to tense up and do a worse job.
So last year I did a standup course, which culminated in me doing a 5-minute set in front of a warm crowd of friends and family.
There was one act that stood out, not for their incredible material, but for how much fun they were having. They’d brought half their street with them, so when they came up to the mic, they were essentially just riffing in front of mates. And it showed.
Meanwhile there were other comics who’d sweated every beat and were visibly performing at their capacity, and they were fantastic to watch, but you knew that level of intensity was just not sustainable.
An American entrepreneur by the name of Suneel Gupta wrote a fair bit about how we can calibrate the amount of effort we need to give in any situation.
For example, if you’re walking into a presentation or a meeting with your team, you may decide to be effective, it’s not 100% you need; it’s actually 70%.
Think about it this way: if you’re on stage giving a talk, and you elect to give it 100%, that means 100% of your focus is on the slides, your script, whether the clicker’s working, and how much time you’ve got left. That leaves you absolutely no room to assess whether people are engaged with what you’re saying, if they’re a bit confused, or if they’re planning what to grab from the buffet or who they want to swap LinkedIn details with.
Another problem is that “leaving it all on the field” – to continue with the sporting parlance – means you might have scant energy left to shake hands with people eager to connect with you after your presentation, which is probably the reason you were on stage in the first place when you’d rather be at home doing anything else.
The Yerkes-Dodson stress curve
Now, you might have noticed I tend to refer back to previous episodes of this podcast. I’m not doing that to increase more listening time, but to show you how interconnected so many of these concepts are, and that in some ways they’re all just different expressions of the same underlying ideas.
In episode 2 I briefly mentioned the Yerkes-Dodson stress curve, when I probably did just as great a job at pronouncing those names as I did just now.
The stress curve is in the shape of a bell, with optimum right up top, boredom to the left, and stress to the right. The 85% rule is that sweet spot: that Goldilocks zone where the work is just hard enough that it keeps you engaged, but not too hard that it stresses you out.
We can see this rule in nature, too. A study in 2019 drew on work from Law and Gold that showed how perceptual learning of visual motion direction in monkeys was correlated with changes in neuronal responses in the lateral intraparietal area involved in attentional control, rather than the middle temporal area which encodes motion direction.
Essentially what the study found was that we learn the fastest when we’re allowed to get things wrong around 15% of the time, rather than being expected to get it right every time.
What this tells us is that our brains work better when they’re challenged, but not overwhelmed. And this study, by the way, is completely unconnected with the whole Carl Lewis of it all. This is just another way in which the number shows up, and I think we can draw an easy line between productivity and behaviour change.
So how can you tell you’re giving it 85% and not just slacking off? Well, the key is in the amount of challenge. if you’re relishing the challenge, chances are you’re going at the right clip. If it’s boring, you need more stimulation. If it’s doing your head in, then it’s time to back off.
And what if you don’t know how to dial it down, or it doesn’t feel like the thing you do has that kind of dial? Our man Suneel has some good advice here too. He suggests burning off some of that energy before you need it.
If you’ve ever spoken in public or looked for advice around it, you’ll probably have heard about shaking out the nerves or likewise moving your body in some way. That not only helps you channel some of that adrenaline so it doesn’t just course through your veins, but it can also help you reduce what you’ve got in the tank, so you don’t come off with too much intensity.
I discovered the band Blues Traveler around the early 2000s. Their lead singer, John Popper, used to clock in at over 430lb (which, for British listeners is over 30 stone, or nearly 200kg). I remember seeing an interview with him describing how he would repeatedly need oxygen after coming off stage, because he was putting so much into his performances. His amazing vocal gymnastics plus prodigious harmonica playing plus the extra weight put a huge strain on his body night after night. Thankfully he was able to make some changes and we still get to hear him make music. The Blues Brothers sequel movie would have been very different without him, but it would still have been shit.
I get the desire to give it all you’ve got when the work you do involves passion. I still see singers straining until they’re red in the face and their veins pop so far out of their heads they look like a road atlas. And I’m not out here saying they should dial it back if that’s how they get their sound… moments of peak performance are absolutely part of the deal. And some work is about peak performance, but it has to come in controlled bursts.
But sometimes, all I’m sayin’ is that sometimes, you’ve gotta look at yourself and go “Does this spreadsheet really need me to be at 100%, or could I maybe dial it back a notch?”