If I could point out one single factor that will dictate how successful someone will be at whatever endeavor they choose it would not be:

– Talent
– Personal connections
– Mentorship or coaching
– Intensity of focus or dedication

While all of those things are certainly helpful, none of them actually matter if you don’t do the one thing that matters most: consistently show up and invest the time.

You’ve heard all the adages about what percent of success is just showing up already. So the real question is, how do I make it easier to show up more often?

The solution is to remove as many barriers to success as possible.

Want to work out more often? Find the closest gym with the least friction possible to join. Note that for most people that doesn’t mean a home gym. The ambition required to go work out in your own home is many times more than a place you can stop at on your way home from work.

Want to save more money (or do things that require you save money)? Automate the savings so that you don’t have to think about it, and it just happens. I wrote more about this here.

Want to make better food choices? Limit your choices by limiting what you have available at home. A pint of ice cream is always going to be an easier meal than grilling a steak and sauteeing some vegetables. But if you don’t have the ice cream and you already cooked the steak and veggies so all you have to do is warm it up, you’re probably going to make a better chioce.

Want to read more books? Set an alarm for 45 minutes before you typically go to bed. That gives you 15 minutes to wrap up whatever you’re doing, and 30 extra minutes to read every night.

Want to learn a foreign language? Make it impossible not to learn. Move to the country for a month. Can’t do that? I doubt it. Questions your assumptions. My friend Jason spent 2 full years living in Airbnbs all over the world and actually saved money relative to when he lived in Portland.

Whatever you want to do, examine the barriers that add friction or make it harder for you to show up and invest the time. Remove those barriers by making changes or automating them away. Sometimes the barriers are very clear and you can remove them. Sometimes there aren’t any real barriers and you’ll realize the only thing stopping you from writing the book you’ve always wanted to write is taking out your proverbial pen and paper and writing it. If you can’t figure out how to remove your barriers, email me your situation, I’m pretty great at it.

To your success,

Hello friends and countrymen-who-are-taking-a-brief-respite-from-grilling-brats-and-shooting-off-bottle-rockets. I’m not going to take a lot of your time today because you’re probably going to pay about as much attention as high school kid in health class on the last day of school, but there was a bit of interesting news last week I’d like to talk about.

Last week a paper came out that studied the stride of the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt. The data gathered is as extraordinary as it is obvious if you’ve been paying attention to my musings for any length of time.

What they found in their analysis is that the fastest sprinter in history has an asymmetrical gait!

This goes against everything that was assumed by sprint researchers about the characteristics that led to the best sprinters. In fact there was even a study a few years ago that concluded that knee length and position symmetry was a big factor in sprint speed.

Wrong-o dan-o.

Turns out there is actually a significant difference in how much force Bolt is able to transfer into the ground from left to right legs.

Now of course we can’t conclude that this is why Bolt is the fastest man on earth, because to do so we’d have to “teach” the other world class sprinters to run with this asymmetrical gait and see if they can become faster.

But what we can learn is that not only is asymmetry something acceptable that we should tolerate, but it is in fact perfectly fine and isn’t going to stop you from being the fastest man on earth.

What’s that? You say you remember reading an article about Bolt dealing with back pain?

Indeed, Bolt has experienced back pain over his career due at least in part to scoliosis. But to this point I will note a few things. How many thirty-year-olds do you know that don’t experience some back pain? How many athletes do you know that don’t experience some back pain? Did you know that no matter how hard they look researchers are unable to link asymmetry to back pain, or frankly any pain for that matter?

What I would argue, and now we’re just getting into speculation but this is my email so I’ll indulge, is that Bolt is so damn fast not in spite of but because of these unique characteristics. I think the scoliosis allows him to naturally generate force axially, rotating horizontally, which enables him to generate more force using more tissue of the body that he can then drive iinto the ground. All else being equal if you have a “machine” that can only generate force in linear planes back and forth (think the hips moving into flexion and extension) and you have another “machine” that not only can move in that plane but also can rotate in the middle and snap into position to whip more force into that extension or flexion – the latter is going to be more powerful.

A 4th of July boating analogy is in order. If you’ve ever been tubing or water skiing you know that your speed is limited to the speed of the boat when you’re being towed straight behind it. But if the wild yahoo of a driver takes a hard turn, you get whipped out to the side and you can double or triple your speed – even overtaking the boat before losing momentum.

Ultimately, the key to maximizing the natural asymmetry you’ve been born with or have developed over time is to accept it, work with it, and use it to your advantage whenever possible. Of course biofeedback is the best way I’ve found to do that, which is precisely why I teach it in my books and coaching.

Yesterday I was recording an episode of SOFLETE’s Die Living Podcast. The guys at SOFLETE have been friends of mine for many years and it’s been a ton of fun watching them expand and do more and more awesome stuff, and it was a pleasure to be on the podcast.

At one point we got to talking about coaching and the contrast of a coach who gives six or eight things to work on at once versus those who work on one specific thing until it’s fixed before moving on to the next issue. You can probably guess who gets better results.

The same principle applies outside of coaching however, directly to self-driven improvement.

It makes me think of the Roomba, you know the little plastic manhole cover that bumbles around a room vacuuming it completely automatically?

Basically the way that a Roomba cleans is by going as far as it can in one direction before it bumps into a wall, then turns away and heads off in another direction until it can’t go anymore. Given a bit a time, it covers the whole room with this sort of random walk.

And this happens to be a great strategy for improvement in one, or many domains. Focus on one thing and go as far as you can with it before encountering immovable resistance. You’ll get much better at the thing you focus on, and because of the magic of human learning and adaptation you’ll also get a little bit better at peripheral things as well. Your whole sphere of capability expands a little tiny bit, and a lot in one direction. Then change direction and focus on something else for a little while until the same thing happens again.

With physical training this looks like block periodization where you might have a hypertrophy block that you take as far as you possibly can, before switching to a strength block for another period of time, before switching to a power block until you take that as far as it’ll go.

In general it might look like working on your physical training for a while, then focusing most of your time and attention on learning a musical instrument while putting training on maintenance mode, and then when you run out of steam there learning how to weld.

Focusing your efforts on one at a time will yield you much more than trying to juggle all three or more at once.