How Much Does Performance Matter
Posted July 07, 2023.
Est. Reading Time: 6 minutes.
“Nobody’s going to win all the time. On the highway of life, you can’t always be in the fast lane.” – Haruki Murakami.
I enjoy performing this activity but haven’t become good enough at it. This mindset can be productive yet also detrimental for myself. At times, it leads me towards a healthy exploration about what enjoyment, performance, good enough, and invested resources mean to me. Other times, it leads me to overthinking, paralysis by analysis, or a never-going-for-it mentality.
Peak performance is important, but it cannot be the single metric dictating whether you should continue an activity. This is because you momentarily access peak performance rather than permanently acquire it. The higher the intensity, the more likely you will have to step away to step back in.
In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, writer and runner Haruki Murakami shared how he strived to improve his performance while understanding it wasn’t his only metric for doing the things he loved. He’s ran over 33 marathons, including triathlons and an ultramarathon. As a writer, Murakami has produced bestsellers and award-winning literature. In his memoir he reveals what other things athletes and performers can focus on as they move towards peak performance and move past it.
Persist and You Can Discover Talent.
There is a saying, “talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not.” This applies to performance as well: everyone begins with a different level of set skills and with a mix of different talents. Everyone has talents. Some performers and athletes just need the right opportunity to understand what they have. That is why athletic and professional careers can be unpredictable and amazing – there is no exact time and place where talents are meant to be discovered. In other words, a talent shines brightest under the right circumstances, but it still shines under many more circumstances.
There is a common pattern to many forms of performances and sports: in the beginning, the most talented performers will develop skills more easily, and the most skillful performers will be seen as most talented. But peak performance is gracious. When comparing writers with limited initial talent with those blessed with early talent, Murakami shared,
On the other hand, writers who aren’t blessed with much talent – those who barely make the grade – need to build up their strength at their own expense… And while they’re getting by on these, they may actually discover, hidden talent within them…It’s a lucky thing, but what made this good fortune possible was all the training they did that gave them the strength to keep on digging. I imagine that late-blooming writers have all gone through a similar process.
Your talents set you apart from everyone else. Perhaps it is your winning mindset, your chip on your shoulder, your ability to block out distractions, your immaculate consistency. Persist and you will discover what your talents are.
Evaluate Your Starting Point in the Long Run.
Murakami recalled, “Life is basically unfair. But even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness.” Being reminded of his imperfections as a teenager, he shared, “The sad spreadsheet of my life that reveals how much my debts far outweigh my assets.” But Murakami understood that unfairness at the starting point didn’t mean unfairness in the long run. To him, it made more sense to evaluate his starting point taking a long-range view,
But when I think about it, having the kind of body that easily puts on weight was perhaps a blessing in disguise. In other words, if I don’t want to gain weight, I have to work out hard every day, watch what I eat, and cut down on indulgences…But people who naturally keep the weight off no matter what don’t need to exercise or watch their diet in order to stay trim. There can’t be many of them who would go out of their way to take these troublesome measures when they don’t need to. Which is why, in many cases, their physical strength deteriorates as they age…If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their only source, they’re in trouble.
Your starting point is not a barrier to what you want to achieve. The starting point looks like a barrier when you choose to stay there: when you waste the resources of today waiting for a tomorrow that will never come. If your starting point makes you hesitant, try to reframe your current capacity as an opportunity to generate more force; rather than focusing on the friction going against you, think about what you are strengthening to overcome that resistance.
Know What Is Part of Your Peak Performance.
Spectators of elite performance tend to confuse peak performance as an instant “on-and-off” switch. But top-level performers have game days, seasons, trainings camps, rehabilitation and injury teams…a multitude of variables that must be in place for this switch to seem real. This is one example of how spectators and performers deviate in their understanding about what peak performance is and what it’s not.
Different parts of you make up the best version of yourself. It’s not just about going all out in one dimension– blind rage, disconnecting self-from body, or rigid focus. It can’t be achieved by always doing more until exhaustion. To be at your best requires knowing what gets you there.
For Murakami, he starts by paying attention to his body – his lungs, arms, legs, calves, feet…. “Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.” “In order to make any progress, I have to listen very carefully to feedback from my body,” he said. Yet he also works on entering a mental state of “Consciousness trying to deny consciousness”:
I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void…What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.
Throughout his training, Murakami introduced different parts having different roles on game day. Yet, as important each of these parts were, their intention was never to neglect each other. In other words, Murakami never confused his parts or phases of training for his peak on game day.
Familiarity with your performance helps uncover the different parts needed to peak: when you push one part to the extreme or neglect another part; when you overly focus on an emotional state or feeling; when you dwell on some interpersonal problem at home or at work; when you aim to exhaust your body and mind; and when you disconnect from your pain and fatigue. When one part of you takes center stage, it neglects access to your best version. Resources are going somewhere else. The “saying less is better” should really be the “right amount is better.”
Murakami continues to write and run. And he experiences the declines in performance as he ages. That is why it’s more important to have other standards set for himself. He shares, “I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.”
