At the beginning of Steve’s coaching journey, a star high school athlete came down with mono heading into his senior track season. The dreams of a state championship looked crushed. When the doctor finally cleared him to train and compete, there was a serious problem. He was out of shape, his system had been wrecked, and he couldn’t recover or bounce back from workouts.
But the star athlete didn’t want to give up hope, so he and Steve made a deal: we’d take what his body would give him—and no more. Anything long or intense caused too much fatigue. We couldn’t do the usual “go run 70 miles per week, lots of long repeats, and tempos” to get ready for his 2-mile race. We started with whatever wouldn’t cause a relapse and built from there. At first, all he could handle were relatively slow 100-meter repeats. So that’s all we did.
The short version is it forced Steve to get creative, to borrow from a 1950s training style developed by Hungarian Mihaly Igloi, which consisted of almost entirely short intervals, which were not very fast either. Igloi built his approach to develop endurance in a constrained, war-torn environment. It was the opposite of modern philosophy. And it worked. For Igloi. And for Steve. The athlete he coached went on to win a state championship in the 2-mile.
In 2019, after battling exertional compartment syndrome for nearly a decade, Brad finally decided to hang up his own running shoes and shift his physical practice to strength training. It was going fine, but not great. He didn’t really know where to focus, and the new YMCA across the street had every machine and rig you could imagine. Then, in 2020, COVID happened. The gym, and just about everything else in America, shut down. He had two 65 lb kettlebells, two 44 lb kettlebells, two 25 lb kettlebells, and a set of three resistance bands. From the winter of 2020 to the summer of 2021, that’s all he used to train. He got stronger than he’d ever been before, and it jump-started him on a path to more serious and committed strength training. He had so few options it became simple; all he could do was train with what he had, and it was remarkably effective.
Herein lies the power of constraints, the topic of an outstanding new book, Inside the Box, by friend of The Growth Equation Dave Epstein. Epstein shows us that, contrary to popular belief, creativity and breakthroughs rarely emerge from total freedom; but rather from constraints. They force us to innovate.
We wanted to highlight just a few of our favorite ideas from Dave’s new book and our conversation with him about it for excellence, actually.
1. What made you good could be what’s keeping you from becoming great.
We often play to our strengths. We find the workout types or coaching style that brought us initial success, and we keep going back to it. After all, if it helped us get good, why would we abandon it? The problem is, the bottleneck or kink in the pipe shifts as you learn, develop, and grow. The things that work, work—until they get in the way. The bottlenecks shift, and you need to shift with them.
That’s exactly what happened to world-class swimmer Sheila Taormina. She was a good but not great swimmer with a big aerobic engine and trained to maximize it. As she was finishing her college career, she failed to make the Olympic team. She was about to call it quits until she took a management class on constraints and addressing bottlenecks. She decided to give training one more go, this time focusing on her weak point: speed and power.
Long story short, she not only made the Olympics as a swimmer but also went on to do so in the triathlon and modern pentathlon too, all by applying the same mental model: find the current bottleneck and address it. As Dave said in our conversation, “What made Sheila really good was a strong aerobic foundation. But to get great, she had to say, okay, this is here, but I’m gonna work on the opposite end of the spectrum…Every system is limited by its least efficient step.”
2. Stop optimizing. Start satisficing.
It’s no secret that we live in an era of optimization. Just look at the number of complicated protocols people say you need simply to get started with your day. Some of this sounds good in theory. Of course, you want to be optimized; who doesn’t! But Inside the Box shows us that “satisficing” can be the ticket to long-term success.
Satisficing is about setting a good enough standard. It’s understanding that if you try to optimize everything, all you’re doing is filling your day with stuff preparing to do the work, and cannibalizing the time and energy you need for the actual important stuff.
As we like to say: don’t major in the minors; keep the main things the main things.
Only do what you can maintain consistently, and don’t keep adding. As Dave put it, “This makes you less likely to fall prey to Fredkin’s paradox, where you spend the most time on the least important decisions because you’re having trouble telling the difference between the options.”
3. You will self-interrupt on schedule…even without your phone.
We all know that having our phone nearby disrupts our concentration and workflow. We think about all the notifications we could be receiving and inevitably reach for it way too often. But in the book, Dave highlights a study showing that even when we remove the phone, we self-interrupt at the same cadence. It’s as if we become accustomed to a pattern of interruption and we stick to it.
This is both mind-blowing and concerning. The good news, though, is that we can create a new pattern. Over time, if we keep the distractions away, we self-interrupt less. It’s just another piece of evidence to protect your deep work and focused time at all costs!
There are so many other great insights that helped shift how we think about work, coaching, and life. It’s a great book from a great writer. Get your copy today.
-Steve and Brad
