In what now feels like a former life, I used to run races. Really long races. I could do 80-mile weeks on autopilot, never really getting burned out or all that sore. But to get the results I wanted, I needed 100-mile weeks.
Those extra 20 miles required much more than an extra 20 miles. They pushed my body and mind past what they could handle. During those weeks I needed to stretch more, pay closer attention to what and when I ate, sleep more, do more core exercises, spend more time with the foam roller or whatever other contraption I told myself was helping. All this extra stuff was really hard to do, especially on top of the 100 miles of running. I rarely had a hard time motivating myself to run, but pulling out the yoga mat for some late evening core work would often break my spirit. Something that took five minutes or less felt insurmountable.
Why are these little things are so hard?
I used to think it was about time, but there’s no way I couldn’t find five minutes. A few years back, my friend and A New Angle collaborator, Bryce Ward, clued me into the notion of capacity constraints. What was limiting me wasn’t time - it was some combination of energy and motivation. I put all my resources into running and didn’t have any left for some critical things that would keep me healthy and help rebuild capacity.
In my classes on business and brand strategy, we talk about lots of fancy frameworks - Strategy DNA, Porter’s 5 forces, PESTEL, Blue Ocean, Business Model Canvas, etc. These frameworks are useful, for sure, but they often obscure a simple wisdom at the heart of strategy. In whatever domain you are in, figure out the most difficult thing about it and get really, really good at doing that thing.
It’s often hard to figure out what the most difficult thing is. Over the 20 or so years I’ve been teaching college students, we cycle through various trends in which we think we know the most difficult thing and preach to our students the importance of mastering it. For a long time that was coding. Now ChatGPT will write code for you, you just have to know if it’s any good. Other times it’s been the ability to process and analyze data. For a while, it was the so-called “soft skills.”
The most difficult thing today might be the ability to just say no.
To what? To your phone!
It’s becoming increasingly clear that smartphones and social media are wrecking our brains and bodies. Your ability to protect your mental health, to preserve your attention and your capacity to focus - to resist the dopamine in your pocket - is the new muscle you must train. The good news is you have abundant opportunities to train it. The next time you’re in the line at the grocery store and feel the need to dull the boredom with a quick hit from your phone, leave it in your pocket. Don’t bring it to meetings. If you must, don’t put it on the table - that sends a signal to your colleagues and yourself that whatever that phone has to offer is more important that they are. Try leaving it at home the next time you run or go to the gym. Turn off social media. Set time limits. My kids and I are trying Brick. So far it seems pretty good.
“Just say no” was Nancy Reagan’s plea to youth in the 80s, and the approach it represents has many, many flaws. Personal choice and agency seem powerless in the face of the addiction-industrial complex we faced then and face now. But given our leaders’ failure to act on phones and social media thus far, personal choice is all we have. Fighting a superbly designed dopamine machine is hard. Perhaps this moment’s version of the hardest thing.
Building your capacity to fight it will serve you well.
For the generation of students now in high school and college, developing that muscle might be the superpower most critical for finding success.