One Olympic Gold Medal Winning Habit You Should Learn to Achieve Your Most Difficult Goals

Reading Time ~ 8-9 minutes

I can say with 100% guarantee that you are struggling right now to achieve at least one BIG goal in your life. And I can even go on to say that this Goal may be evading you for years. Of course, you may be smashing some big goals already. However, there will still be this one thing that is out of your grasp yet.

For instance, a person may have an extremely successful career, but it would have thrown his Fitness Goals astray, and his Relationships Goals out the window. Or another person may be a fitness freak, but he would be struggling with Anger Management for years (he may prefer to camouflage it by saying “I cannot tolerate indiscipline”). But that does not help.

In our path towards success in one area of our lives, it is natural that some other (important) aspects of our life go out of balance. This is fine in the short run, so long as we can course correct in time. However, the longer this goes, the harder it becomes to course correct.

Consider the person from the above example who’s trying to move away from a sedentary lifestyle. He may resolve to “get fit” and join a local gym in January (as a New Year’s Resolution). However, once the initial motivation fades, he will struggle to show up at the gym consistently. After some weeks of regrets, the gym will soon be forgotten, and his life will go on as usual.

He will naively believe that things will be different next time round, only to repeat the same story the next year, and the year after that. In fact, it will then become even harder for him to stick with the gym plan (Since there will already be a pattern to quit!).

It is unfortunate that many people live their entire lives with such an imbalance.

It saddens me when people lose courage after a few tries, give up and call it their ‘fate’. They will blame their failure to their circumstances, or state that it is simply how or who they are (a.k.a. ‘their personality’). But nothing can be further from the truth. Our personality is malleable. We are a sum total of all the actions we take.

The actions we take today, will decide what we become tomorrow.

The fitness freak person mentioned above will snap at others and chose to get angry over what may be trivial issues. If he realizes that he has the power to change, good for him! But it will be hard. Thus, after trying for some time, he’ll simply say, “This is who I am; take it or leave it.” Unfortunately, he may not realize that he has the power to control his anger. Not the other way around. Ultimately, it will be his loss.

However, some will be wise and will understand that change is a choice, and it will depend on the decisions and actions that they themselves take. Ultimately, we can only change ourselves. No one else can, and no one else will.

The people who exercise that choice will rise above the rest; and take a different path. But they will be a minority. We talked about moving from majority to minority earlier. If you missed that post, you can check it out here.

If you want to be a part of this minority and would like to build a better Future Self by working on those Hard Goals of yours, then this Olympic Gold Medal Winning Strategy is for you.

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No one can deny that winning an Olympic Gold medal is extremely difficult and for most athletes, it is a Once in a Lifetime Goal/ Opportunity. To Win an Olympic Gold, your contest is with the best of the best from each country, and the competition only intensifies as one moves to the finals.

Ultimately, what separates the best from the rest is their mindset not just during the competition, but also during the weeks, months and sometimes years leading up to the Olympics.

That leads us to the story I’d like to share today.

In the year 1998, Ben Hunt-Davis and his team had a disappointing finish (7^th place) in the Rowing World Championships. The Olympics at Sydney were just two years away in the year 2000, and they were hungry for a better finish. They realized that if they did what they were doing all this time, the result would be no different than what they achieved recently.

That is when they came up with this unique method which worked like a charm. Ben Hunt-Davis and his team decided to approach things differently. For every decision and action they had to take for the next two years, they came up with just one simple question they had to ask themselves:

‘Will it make the boat go faster?’

That’s it.

Every decision was thus channeled through this one prism. If they felt like sleeping in, instead of going for an early morning practice session, the guiding question was: “Will ‘sleeping in’ make the boat go faster?” Once they had the answer – “NO, it will NOT” – it gave them the burst of motivation to get out of their warm beds and out in the chill of early morning for practice.

Eventually, questions such as these were also tested through this one lens:

Eating a cake? Drinking beer? Hanging with friends for a late-night party? Misunderstanding with team-mates? Two hours non-stop rowing practice? Intense Upper body workout? Mandatory stretching? Meditation?

Suddenly, taking decisions became easier. When all the decisions the team had to take were framed in the perspective of “Will it make the Boat Go Faster?” it eliminated complacency, improved motivation, and helped the team to avoid a path of least resistance.

The team finally had its North Star. A constant means to course correct so they were always focused on their End Goal.

Framing each decision in this context helped the Rowing Team to ultimately clinch that coveted Gold medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

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Adopting this routine to the areas of your life where you are struggling to improve will help you to course correct every time you lose your focus.

So, our friend from the previous example will be able to continue with the gym routine even after the initial motivation fades away. Every time he has a decision to make, he can ask himself “Will this help to make me fit?” or “Will this help me to reduce weight?” Likewise, the friend who wants to better manage his anger can ask: “Will this make me peaceful?”

We can also ask a similar question to ourselves. Just ask: “Will this (intended action) help me to achieve (intended goal)?”

Such questioning before taking any decision will help you to access the higher brain power, and arrest your instinctive ‘fight’, ‘flight’ or ‘freeze’ response. Also, it will give you a few seconds to pause and reflect on the action you intend to take. Most of the time, acting on our impulse makes us regret our decisions later.

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Ben Hunt-Davis eventually went on to co-write the book ‘Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?’ with Executive Coach – Harriet Beveridge – where they distilled this philosophy further, and also talked about how to use similar strategies to improve performance in business, or in our own life. In fact, he also started a website with that same name – https://willitmaketheboatgofaster.com/

I have listed below a few other strategies that the authors discussed in the book.

• Different Layers of Goals. Olympians split each Goal into four layers. The Crazy Layer, The Concrete Layer, The Control Layer, and The Everyday Layer.

(a) The Crazy Layer – this is where they form their biggest Goal – such as Winning an Olympic Gold;

(b) The Concrete Layer – This layer helps to bring the crazy layer into context – e.g. for the author and his rowing team, the aim was to row 2000 meters in 5 mins and 18 seconds which was the world record pace. If they beat this, the Olympic Gold was theirs.

(c) The Control Layer – For each goal, there are things that we can control, and things that we cannot. The author and his team had no control over the weather, or how fast their competitors could row. But they certainly had control over their own practice; and

(d) The Everyday Layer – This is the layer which defined what process the athletes followed every single day. The level of practice, the kind of nutrition, etc.    

This layered approach is the best way to take practical steps toward your highest goals.

• Work on the Process. Most success results from following a better process, rather than focusing on the end result. If the process works, then it must bring home a positive result. Successful sportspersons and successful businessmen know that diligently and consistently following a process will eventually lead to success. There is no other way! In fact, by the end of those two years of practice, the author and his team were so focused on the process, that they barely registered that they won the Olympic Gold.

• Setbacks are temporary. Sometimes, no matter what you try at the beginning, you will fail. However, these initial setbacks should be embraced, since these will help you to analyze the flaws in your process so that those can be fixed. We can never see our own blind spots. The author and his team identified their own problems, and also discussed within the group how to identify the areas that they might have missed individually. Each setback is temporary, and we should review it, learn from it, course correct, and then let it go. If you allow temporary setbacks to ruin your focus, you end up not only losing the battle, but also losing the war. Think about a bowler in a Twenty20 Cricket match who’s just been hit for two consecutive sixes. He must not allow the prior setback to ruin his focus from the next delivery.

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Concluding Thoughts

Ultimately, you will realize that the strategy from this story will benefit you in every goal of yours. Even on the Goals where you may already be winning.

However, the reason I single out this strategy for your secondary but important goals is because (a) you are losing focus from these Goals all the time, (b) There is no point coming at the 7^th place (i.e. living a mediocre life) when you have the potential to accomplish much more, and (c) winning on these Goals will give you a personal satisfaction similar to winning an Olympic Gold.

A lot of my readers have given feedback that every Saturday when they read a story that I share, it gives them some motivation to act. Most of this motivation is to act on things they wish to achieve in their sphere of “Personal Goals” on which they are not focusing for the moment, but where they’d prefer to have a positive change. But then important things in their life take priority, and they remember about their Goals only when they see my next post the following Saturday.

Now you know an Olympic Gold winning strategy. I urge you to utilize this strategy to tackle the single most difficult goal that you have presently in your life. There will be challenges, and it will not be easy. But with consistency, I am sure that this strategy will help you to tide over the struggle; and make your proverbial boat go faster. All the very best.

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^{Cover Photo by Aditya Joshi on Unsplash}