Why don’t you aim to be your best self every day?

Imagine this: you are athlete A new team of runners. On your first day, your coach will ask you, “What is your 5K PR?” You tell them. The coach says, “Okay, do that.” The next day they say the same thing: “Do 5K PR again or do it a little faster.” You are confused. Of course, you don’t achieve that. You’re not peaking or tapering. This is not a race day where race days are required.

Professional athletes don’t aim to achieve personal records every day. It’s neither realistic nor strategic.

But sometimes we try it in our work and personal life. We aim for daily performances to emulate the best performances ever. Just like our athletes, we fail. And we feel like a failure.

But that’s not just because it’s impossible for us to not try. That’s also because it’s an useless purpose. Let me explain.

Normal distribution of performance

If you try to improve performance consistency, you will get a monotonous middle, which is the fat center of the performance bell curve. We’re missing out on the really amazing and really awful tail of the curve.

When scientists are in their most productive periods, they usually produce both their best and worst jobs.

That’s all about creative thinking Encourage the idea of ​​”dopey” that great ideas are allowed to emerge.

Stanford Professor Jeremy Atley explains it like this: If you try to block the left side of the distribution (i.e., there is no “bad” idea”), you unconsciously also eliminate the right side (where the genius lies!).

Not every painting will become your Mona Lisa. Not all newsletters will be the best ever. Not all business transactions are your most profitable.

Trying to replicate the best performance limits the experiment

Human behavior involves exploiting trade-offs. Always choose to use proven strategies (exploits) and test new approaches (exploits). When we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to achieve super-consistent high performance, the default exploits the strategy. We default to what we know. For example, you are a YouTuber and crank out another variation of a video that follows the same format that already worked with successful videos. Or you are a real estate developer who rehabilitates your property and procure your next transaction the same way you source your last one.

When we put performance pressure on ourselves to equal or exceed the best performance each day, we do not want to explore and experiment to test uncertain behaviors and choices in the outcome. Excel needs to try experiments with uncertain results.

For example, if you learn something new through experiments, you can improve every day without achieving the best performance each day. However, hustle culture does not present achievement in this way. We are used to seeing it presented linearly as something that can be followed as if it were a tutorial. However, you cannot achieve your best success by directly copying someone else, including your past self.

Tolerating changes in our performance requires psychological skills

One reason people are drawn to consistency is because contradictions are psychologically challenging. Inconsistent performance involves many cognitively emotional ups and downs. To reach the highest performance level, you need to develop psychological skills that will help you withstand daily variability in your results. We need to Learn to meet ourselves where we are.

Especially necessary Skills for dealing with anti-mission and doubt It happens on days when our results are subpar. Also, it is necessary skill To combat certain human tendencies, such as actions that make you more controllable when you feel uncertain. This control response can lead to Oversinker Paradoxoverflowing limits success more than failure.

If we limit ourselves to what we can consistently do, we limit ourselves

Let’s go back to the athlete example. Because you can learn more about why you should try perfect everyday consistency. Professional runners usually do hard workouts twice a week. Outside of this, it usually does one long, stable run in addition to a simple run. Marathons may just race marathons twice a year due to the demands of recovery and the need to reach their strategic peaks and reach their best performance.

Imagine if a runner attempts to work out. They don’t do this. They accept that their best performance comes from training in some way (presenting and doing something), almost every day, but their most intense sessions only occur a few times a week. Otherwise, you could risk the consistency of being able to show up and run, for example, six days a week.

Non-athletes looking to gain overall performance in their lives or careers can learn from this approach.

Don’t get wrong trying to consistently perform best

When we are motivated by Excel, we often mistakenly believe that consistency at our highest level is our goal. But as we have seen, excellence emerges from embracing the bell curve nature of human performance, from athletes to scientists to creative experts. Just as athletes don’t try to promote themselves every day, you shouldn’t either.

Here’s a simple way to experience how you can actually get the overall results by enabling “bad” performance:

Try it yourself: chatgpt etc. ai Chatbots replicate human thoughts in a variety of ways, including how to generate and filter ideas. Ask your favorite AI chatbot for 15 ideas on your favorite topic. Next, reroll. I ask again, but explicitly ask for a variety of ideas and try to include some drugs. Check if you are making the same observations as me: when you encouraged it to include some dope ideas, were there any ideas that made you better overall?