The path to greatness is clear, right? You set goals, you achieve those goals, eventually your goal is greatness and you achieve it.

And I’d argue that this works great when you set your sights 50 pounds above your current deadlift. The path is fairly clear, the objective is right in front of you, and the things you can measure along the way directly contribute to the end objective.

But how do you set your objectives if you’re trying to become the strongest person in the world?

Now the path isn’t as clear anymore. Should you first improve your pulling or pressing strength? Should you work on your grip? Should you build your work capacity? What do you do first? What do you do fiftieth? How do you address the inevitable setbacks? Do you plan ahead for them? Do you even know what your inherent advantage is going to be, the thing that sets you apart from those who aren’t the best? Everyone has one and if you don’t develop that (and quick) you’re much less likely to be the best…

You can see how it falls apart pretty quickly.

Now what if you are trying to to reach an objective for which the metrics are not clear at all? If you wanted to be the strongest person in the world you could pretty easily set out a list of metrics that, if all were achieved, would put you at or near the top of the pack.

But what if your objective is to make American schools the best in the world? What does best even look like? We already know that test scores on standardized testing have almost no bearing on quality of education. If you could pick any outcome in the world, what would you even measure? Eventual earnings throughout a lifetime? Well we know that anything over $75k doesn’t materially impact day to day happiness, so why measure a financial metric that maybe doesn’t reflect quality of life? We could try to measure happiness, but besides the difficulty in measuring something so nebulous, is that what we’re trying to achieve, just happy bubbly people?

Another way to think about this would be to look at the difference between the way that children learn about the fundamentals of moving their bodies through space, communicating with others, and keeping themselves alive by fulfilling basic needs. They do it through play, observation, and experimentation. Babies aren’t told that their next objective to crawl, they just start doing it and figure out that it’s a useful way to get where they want to go to break the next thing. Eventually they figure out that walking is even more effective and allows them to wreak even more destruction. And then adults come in all helpful-like and start setting objectives and I’d argue screw the whole thing up.

No one set out with the objective to create rock music, or to go to the moon before we even realized what the solar system was, or to create artificial intelligence before there was a computer, or to create antibiotics before we knew what germ was.

Objectives and metrics can be useful, for sure, especially if they’re just out ahead of you and the path is clear.

But I’d encourage you to consider that maybe objectives aren’t the end-all be-all when the path leads way over the horizon. You may not even know where you’re going until you start exploring that way and playing in the sandbox more.

Something to think about.

Last week I was in San Diego, and I had lunch with my friend Melissa Hartwig who is the capo di familia of the Whole 30. For those unaware the Whole30 is essentially a 30-day elimination diet designed to drastically reset your eating by limiting you to plants and things that eat plants. It’s quite difficult to do, and it’s also quite effective. It’s certainly not for everybody but for those who it’s for it’s Very Good.

ANYWAY, the Whole30 strictly forbids things such as Girl Scout cookies and this is important to our story.

I was walking down the Embarcadero in SD to retrieve my car and I passed a little girl dragging a wagon full of GS cookies. As I got a few feet away from her I realized it would be a perfect opportunity to buy a gift to troll Melissa with a joke that she has heard I am sure no less than three trillion times asking if something is W30-compliant. But really they were just for her kid, or sister, or whomever.

So I doubled back to buy some cookies and I was blown away because I met myself, if I was reincarnated as a 9 year old Mexican girl.

“Hi, I’m Paloma, I’m 9 years old and I am sick and tired of this other girl in my troop winning the cookie selling contest so this year I am going to sell the most boxes.”

Say no more. I’ll take all the boxes. We chatted about how when I was a young Boy Scout I took home the top awards for selling the most popcorn in my troop by hustling in the same way, going door to door to every house for miles in every direction from my house. But that wasn’t even the best part.

Her mom was keeping an eye on her and she really wanted me to know that she had basically nothing to do with this, it was all Paloma who decided she wanted to win the contest.

But as a result ALL the girls in her troop had been spurred into action by Paloma’s drive to be number one. Their sales numbers across the board were through the roof compared to previous years just because one girl decided she wants to really start competing.

I think there’s a lesson there for all of us.

What driven pursuit of yours might drive those around you?

And if there isn’t one, why not?

Last week I stopped by to visit at a friend at Invictus (Crossfit) in San Diego and it just happened to be the first Friday night of the CF Open so naturally I got to watch a bunch of freakshow athletes suffer through something you couldn’t pay me any price to do.

And it got me thinking about something with regards to resilience and injury.

One of the movements in this open WOD was the one-arm dumbbell snatch, naturally for high reps. Now you might look at this (combined with burpees and box jumps) and you might think man that is a great way to jack up a back.

Yet I have been paying attention to open workouts for many years now, and through observing trends on Facebook I can see which ones are jacking people up and which ones (sometimes surprisingly) aren’t.

And this one isn’t.

Why? And how does it relate to the deadlift?

Well first of all you have to recognize that the dumbbell snatch is basically a one-arm deadlift done with a light weight and brisk movement. It’s nothing like a barbell snatch, and with the light weight done for high reps it’s simply a hip-dominant movement with minimal knee bend done explosively. In other words a deadlift.

And it doesn’t jack up peoples backs because it’s asymmetrical.

Perfectly symmetrical movements force a body that is not symmetrical (in the vast majority of people) into a position of symmetry that is not natural to begin with, and then there’s no room to move or to move away from tension or stress because of the symmetry. Check out this screen cap:

All that rotation and asymmetry allows the body to involve more tissue and more variability in the movement. Sure there’s some rotation in the spine, but it’s ok for the spine to move like that. What little risk there is in rotation is more than offset by the fact that there is so much more tissue involved to bear the stress of the movement.

So what’s the takeaway?

Don’t be afraid to stagger your position or otherwise introduce asymmetry. One of the places I always start when I’m nursing someone back to health after a back injury is with asymmetrical deadlifts because they are almost universally well tolerated. Not so for conventional symmetry. This is why I’m such a fan of asymmetrical deadlift options like the Jefferson.

Even if you don’t have any issues, I’ll wager that it’ll feel better with a bit of asymmetry. Ideally, you can always test and find the best option with biofeedback.