In the last 24 hours at least 2 people I know pushed themselves much further than they ever thought was possible. As I am one of those two, only now do I think I understand what Gary Vaynerchuk really meant in this video he made a couple months ago when he emphatically said: “Most people are massively underestimating effort.”
Here’s a question for those of us with day jobs who’ve read Gary’s bestseller Crush It. What did you actually think when you came to the part (on page 13) where he said as soon as you’ve put the kids to bed (or whatever) then go work on your online business every night between 9 PM and 3 AM? Did your eyes glaze over at that suggestion? I know mine did sort of. The idea of deliberately shortening my sleep by several hours sounded downright stupid. Working what, in reality, amounts to two jobs a day sounded completely over the top.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday at 5 AM I set the alarm so I could sit at my computer all day glued to a Ustream single camera feed as well as an online athlete time tracker to follow the progress made by my daughter nearly 1000 miles away competing in her very first ironman triathlon. The full ironman — all 140.6 miles (226 km) of it! The stunning news is that she completed exactly what she went over to New Zealand to do, which was FINISH inside the 17-hour midnight cutoff. This feat was accomplished in precisely a time of 16:12:00, as it transpired.
I hope Jules doesn’t mind me telling you this, but she officially STARTED focused training only 10 weeks ago, in the last week of 2009. And a mere handful of months before that she was an overweight non-athlete in every sense. Mentally it was even worse for her back then.
Can you guess what brought about the transformation?
Sure hard work is obviously a huge ingredient for such success. Without it no dream will ever be achieved. But it’s not enough. Bring also an unrelenting passion to anything and strangely enough, difficult things don’t feel like such hard work when you do them.
My daughter starting blogging a few weeks ago, and on her site you can read a couple posts written during the lead up to her first ironman. I’m sure she’ll have even more wisdom to add after she returns home to Brisbane, Australia in a few weeks.
The saying that “success breeds success” is usually applied to a person building on their own past wins to achieve better and better things in life or in business. Here I’m going to twist it around a little by saying my daughter’s huge achievement yesterday has spawned a completely new approach to every aspect of living for her Dad. For example, physically until now I’ve been out of shape and getting worse. The first part of this YouTube video contains poor quality footage shot just before dark yesterday in between my daughter’s time splits during the marathon run stage of her event! As if motivated by some unseen force, I spontaneously went to my old rusty bike which hadn’t been ridden for 2 years, hauled it out of the shed, pumped up the tires and took off like a demon. There’s a new-look me coming!
Do you want to see Julia’s delightful leap over the finish line? It’s in the last third of my video compilation, and also, annotated over the top of her race tracker “scorecard,” I highlighted her times for each of the 3 ironman disciplines.
Oh, and here’s one indication for how passionate I’ve just become for life and my online business. I’ve not slept since that early morning alarm yesterday – nearly 30 hours straight. During the night since race finish, I’ve manually syndicated over 100 items for members of the Tribal Syndication Association (TSA), a Facebook group I belong to.
Gary Vee’s right — most times we do underestimate what difference real effort can make, and instead we just roll our eyes. But now for me the choice is quite stark: Choose effort or choose mediocrity. What about you?
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