Tag: Sports

The 3 Overlapping Drivers Of Long-Term Success

Avoid pushing a boulder up the hill, becoming a drunk painter or a depressed actor.

I met a famous VC at a recent event. Multiple exits as a founder, multiple unicorns as a VC, and a thriving media business. On a sweltering SF afternoon (this week saw a massive heat wave across the Bay Area), his face had an extremely tired look and he could barely keep his eyes open. Yet, he took the time to patiently answer my questions.

I wake up the next day and see the same person doing a live stream discussing everything SaaS at 8 AM PT with all the passion and energy of a 20-year-old. Having seen his exhausted version just 12 hours back, I could never have imagined him bouncing back early the next day and bringing his best self to the game.

I was discussing this observation with my better half and in the flow of the conversation, outlined that this person was demonstrating what I saw as three key elements that when coming together, create a high likelihood of long-term success in any area of life:

Three Overlapping Drivers of Long-term Success
©An Operator’s Blog – by Soumitra Sharma

1/ Desire – Massive internal motivation to win, to be the best at something, to become the best version of yourself. In his all-time classic ‘Think and Grow Rich‘, Napoleon Hill calls Desire the “Starting Point of All Achievement”.

2/ Energy – Backing up Desire with raw physical and mental horsepower to do the work, put in the daily reps in your field, outwork competition, and practice enough (the 10,000-hour rule) to become world-class in your area.

3/ Natural Strengths – When Desire and Energy are channeled in an area that aligns with your Natural Strengths, the ROI on the effort becomes massive. This amplification creates a snowball effect, leading to rapid daily progress which over the long term, shows up in high rates of compounding. PS: I have covered a specific facet of this snowball effect in my posts ‘The Success Flywheel‘ and ‘The Success Flywheel – Part 2 (Superhuman, Perplexity)‘.

There is a reason why I have depicted these 3 elements as a Venn diagram. They have to necessarily overlap to enable long-term success. Even if one of the elements is missing, the snowball effect might never kick in. Here’s why:

Case 1: Desire + Energy BUT no Natural Strengths

In today’s age of near-zero information asymmetry and high leverage, which leads to intense competition in any given field, the key to standing out amidst all the noise is to focus on your unique and differentiated strengths. In the context of both startups and individual careers, I call this the right-to-win.

In Case 1, while this person has the Desire to succeed and the Energy to do the work, the ROI on the effort is low given it’s not being directed in a field where the person has differentiated strengths. It, therefore, reduces the odds of them being able to grow fast and grab market share against competition in their chosen field.

Think of Case 1 as the ‘Pushing A Boulder Up The Hill’ phenomenon – requiring enormous efforts daily but without commensurate rewards in terms of progress and rate of compounding. Essentially, it’s a case of having the right intentions and ability to do the work, but with poor strategy and direction.

PS: I see this at play a lot when strong founders choose a market where they have a weak fit and therefore, an unclear right-to-win.

Case 1 persona: Pushing A Boulder Up The Hill

Case 2: Energy + Natural Strengths BUT no Desire

This case reminds me of many sportspersons who couldn’t live up to their potential over the years – the likes of Vinod Kambli and Prithvi Shaw in Cricket, Maria Sharapova, Mark Philippoussis and Richard Krajicek in Tennis, Daniel Ricciardo and Fernando Alonso (to some extent) in Formula 1.

All these sportspersons had natural strengths in the sport and had high energy due to which they got initial success, but then, the internal motivation just wasn’t strong enough to sustain it.

Desire is crucial because it leads to discipline, which is critical for continuous improvement and growth. As I had written in my post ‘Willpower is a reservoir, and that’s why focus is important!‘ many years back, humans have a finite amount of willpower. Having discipline ensures that this willpower is carefully and optimally allocated in the right direction on a daily basis.

A Case 2 persona that comes to mind is ‘The Drunk Painter’ – talented and charismatic, but long-term lazy. When this person creates, it’s magic, but unfortunately, that’s too few and far between to make this person an all-time great.

Case 2 persona: The Drunk Painter (Image Source)

Case 3: Desire and Natural Strengths BUT no Energy

This case underlines the importance of fitness (physical and mental) to back up Desire and Natural Strengths. Without fitness, one can’t show up every day with their best game.

This, of course, becomes very obvious in sports. The hugely talented English cricketer Marcus Trescothick had to prematurely end his career due to mental health issues. Despite being the fastest bowler in the world of his time, Australian cricketer Shaun Tait could never reach his potential due to fitness issues. Australian tennis ace and Wimbledon winner Lleyton Hewitt had to end his career early due to a string of recurring injuries.

Similar examples also exist in other fields where fitness might not be traditionally considered a central pillar of success. Just after delivering an Oscar-winning performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight, which should have resulted in a Jack Nicholson-like long career, Heath Ledger died from drug abuse perhaps from prior mental health issues. Despite being one of the legendary stars in Friends for a decade, Matthew Perry dealt with perpetual alcoholism and depression, leading to an underwhelming career and ultimately, a sad end.

A Case 3 persona that comes to mind is ‘The Depressed Actor’ – this person loves to act, and is pretty damn good at it, but doesn’t have the physical and/or mental fitness to regularly bring their best game to auditions, and to keep improving and doing their best work over decades.

Case 3 persona: The Depressed Actor (Image Source)

TLDR: to summarize, if you are looking to set yourself up to chase long-term success in any aspect of life, focus on parallel-processing three things:

  • Inculcate a deep Desire to succeed.
  • Develop Energy to provide fuel to the Desire.
  • Lean into your Natural Strengths using this combination of Desire and Energy.

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Insights from “The Mundanity of Excellence” — learning from Olympic Swimmers

Recently on Twitter, I came across one of the best academic papers I have ever read — “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers”. Published in 1989 and authored by Daniel F. Chambliss from Hamilton College, the paper is profound because its findings are so easy to understand, practically applicable and above all, give empirical answers to that important question we all keep asking — what’s the secret of excellence?

The paper studies the sport of competitive swimming (particularly in the Olympics) to better understand the nature of excellence. Why swimming? ‘Cos 1) success in swimming is clear and well-defined (medals, plaques etc.) and 2) the sport has clearly stratified ‘levels’ (Country Club, Junior Nationals, Senior Nationals, Olympics etc.) that allow the study of excellence via movement across levels. Between Jan’83 and Aug’84, the author studied a cross-section of non-Olympic and Olympic swimmers, with a specific objective of seeing how the eventual winners drove excellence, and consequently their Olympics success, prior to the actual competition itself.

Here are the key sections, and their respective insights, from the paper:

  1. What DOESN’T create excellence?

Excellence meaning “consistent superiority of performance” over competitors. The Author found that the following, often-cited drivers of excellence, actually aren’t true:

1.1 “Excellence is NOT the product of socially-deviant personalities”— excellent swimmers weren’t oddballs, loners or possessing some other kinds of non-conventional personality traits.

1.2 “Excellence does NOT result from quantitative changes in behavior “— eg. putting more hours of the same swimming practice. Simply doing more won’t result in moving up a level in the sport.

1.3 “Excellence does NOT result from some special inner quality of the athlete” — usually referred to as “talent”, “gift” or “natural ability”.

2. What DOES create excellence?

The Author found that the single biggest driver of excellence in competitive swimming was achieving “qualitative differentiation”, and NOT purely quantitive increases in “doing more of the same” (eg. increasing daily practice time from 2 hrs to 4 hrs, or swimming 7 miles everyday instead of 4).

Now, am sure you are thinking — what exactly is qualitative differentiation? I love this line from the paper that neatly defines it:

“A qualitative change involves modifying what is actually being done, not simply doing more of it”.

This includes things like changing your arm-pull technique in a breaststroke, competing in regional meets instead of local ones, eating complex carbs and veggies instead of fats and sugars etc. (PS: for cricket fans, I think the Indian captain Virat Kohli has pretty much done qualitative changes on multiple fronts to take his game to the next level. Same is the case with Novak Djokovic in tennis; see this awesome article on his regimen, published a few years back).

3. How do Olympic swimmers manifest qualitative differentiation?

This para from the paper captures the difference between Olympic swimmers and country-club swimmers really well:

“…they don’t just swim more hours, or move their arms faster, or attend more workouts…….Instead, they do things differently. Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their group of friends are different; their parents treat the sport differently; the swimmers prepare differently for their races, and they enter different kinds of meets and events”.

Three specific elements where qualitative differentiation gets manifested in competitive swimming:

3.1 Technique — “not only are the strokes different, they are so different that the ‘C’ swimmer may be amazed to see how the ‘AAAA’ swimmer looks while swimming”.

3.2 Discipline — “…(Olympics swimmer) is never sloppy in practice, so is never sloppy in meets”.

3.3 Attitude — “what others see as boring — swimming back-and-forth over a black line for 2 hours, say — they find peaceful, even meditative”.

4. Stratification in the sport is discrete, not continuous

Few key ideas from the paper on this concept:

4.1 “A rather small quantitative difference produces a huge qualitative difference”

4.2 “…certain teams are easily seen to be stuck at the same level”

4.3 Athletes don’t “work their way up” through levels; instead they move to higher levels via “qualitative jumps” created via a change in settings

5. Calling out our collective blindspot on “hard-work”

The paper argues that just achieving quantitative change does bring success, but only within the level of sport the swimmer is currently at. There is a behavioral bias at play here around extrapolating value of hard-work using only your own limited, visible and localized experience (“If I worked this hard to get to my level, how hard must Olympic swimmers work?”).

6. Not everyone is running the same “excellence” race anyway

The paper argues that not all competitive swimmers are running the same proverbial race of winning the Olympic gold. Some are just looking to exercise, or have fun with friends, or escape their parents. The Author calls it “horizontal differentiation — of separate worlds in competitive swimming, rather than a hierarchy”, and asks for top performers to be seen as “different”, rather than “better”.

7. Why talent doesn’t lead to success

I am preferring to just give you this takeaway here as I believe that’s more important to know, than the ‘why’ of it. However, the paper does present some fascinating arguments on it.

8. THE MOST IMPORTANT TAKEAWAY — Excellence is mundane

This para really captures the essence of this paper:

“Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or super-human in any one of these actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence”.

Related point: motivation is mundane too, and focusing on “small wins” — more than the long-term goal of an Olympics gold medal, champion swimmers divided this into small daily tasks, and focused on motivating themselves towards these daily goals and achieving these “small wins”, which eventually combine together to create the long-term win.

MY LEARNING FROM A BUSINESS/ PROFESSIONAL/ PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE:

A. Focus on ‘qualitative change’ — don’t do dumb hard work, relook at the way you are doing things, change your “settings”, do things differently.

B. Check what ‘excellence race’ you are running — very often, there is no alignment between 1) what we want out of our careers and life, 2) what race we choose to run (should flow from point 1) and 3) what prep we put in to win the race (should flow from point 2). Proactively create this alignment. PS: to manage the human tendency of benchmarking against peers, first check what excellence race is each person running and whether they are even comparable.

C. Do the small things correctly and consistently — true competitive advantage comes from creating a mesh of habits that are just impossible to replicate as a group by other individuals/ organizations. Focus on the “boring, small, daily wins” and you will win long term.

Would love to hear your take on this paper.

Source: “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers”

Note: direct excerpts from the paper are presented in inverted quotes.