Conor McGregor’s knee snap last night at UFC 329 cements some of the gnarliest lessons in life:
- You can’t take 5 years off from a pursuit that people dedicate themselves to daily and come back to have the capacity you did before.
- 100% obsession isn’t just worth 2x what 50% obsession would be; it’s closer to 10x. Because all the gains accrue to the very best in any discipline, and the biggest game-changing insights come from having every waking moment focussed on obsessing over your craft.
- Relying on raw talent to carry you through will not work in a discipline that is so much about conditioning. Perhaps purely skilful art forms like concert piano or watercolour might have less fall-off, but in a game where any competitive edge is sought after, momentum is a helluva performance-enhancer.
- Age comes for us all. Conor is the same age as me. Workouts, parties, injuries and late nights take way longer to recover from now. Even Cristiano Ronaldo isn’t the player he used to be despite living like a monk for decades. McGregor's nose coffee lifestyle was always going to create a big uphill climb.
On this topic, I’ve been fascinated by the difference between having fallen off, and having never made it...
Trajectory is way more important than position.
If you’re #2 in the world but last year you were #1, that is way worse than sitting at #150 but being on a huge upward slope from #300 12 months ago.
There’s a few reasons for this…
Recency bias; if your value is increasing right now, that means you have to be popular at the moment.
By looking at recent trajectory, you are selecting for only the people who are trendy right now, which is all we can remember.
We can romanticise where someone will be in future if they’re currently hot stuff.
How high might they climb?
Who knows, maybe to the top, maybe beyond the top.
Humans struggle to realise that everything is temporary, including growth and decline.
Instead it’s easier to label people as heroes and losers based on what we know of them right now so we don’t have to predict a messy future.
“There’s an old saying there’s three types of people on a ladder, one at the bottom, one at the middle, one at the top.
Which is the best one to be?
The one that’s still climbing.” — Ryan Long
This doesn’t just work for status but for possessions, achievements, wealth, sex, everything.
And it’s not just how we see other people, it’s also how we see ourselves.
We know when we’ve moving up or down, when life is getting better or worse.
The philosopher A. Tate once said “Having things isn’t fun, getting things is fun.”
Another way to look at it is this…
Any accomplishment is just a new, higher bar for you to get over in future.
I see this in my own work.
Let’s say we do a new episode that hits a million plays in a day.
Amazing! That’s very exciting and a new record.
Wow... also that means that every video in future is now going to feel unimpressive until we hit 1.1m or higher.
In this way, rapid increases in success are more a curse than a blessing.
Even though we might want our goals and accomplishments to arrive immediately, maybe a smarter strategy is to stretch out the achievements of our dreams.
We shouldn’t wish for overnight success as we would then need to be able beat it pretty soon, lest we feel like we’re declining.
Instead, slow, consistent progress is a more reliable way to maintain satisfaction.
Purposefully aiming for Slow Success Strategy may actually ensure you always feel like you’re going in the right direction.
