Something hit me this morning though, while I was listening to my latest audio book, preparing to clean-up the remnants cooked in what my wife Laura likes to call, “John’s Kitchen.”  Her way of politely describing my inability to keep the kind of order she does when making the meals for our household.

The founders at Google, Sergey and Larry were notorious for operating under the assumption that things would be ‘watered down along the way…”  Under this assumption, starting with something that’s a lot more ambitious will get you something that is reasonable.  But if you don’t put the ‘goal post’ way out there, people are already taking fewer risks, and are less ambitious about how big the idea should be.  This was another reason that early on Google valued intelligence over experience. A fact that in my opinion caused some real problems for them as a burgeoning company, but that in the long run is what allowed them to create the mecca that they ultimately did.

Since at least part of that last paragraph is almost verbatim from the book, I better reference it again here: “I’m feeling Lucky – The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59.“  Another book I highly recommend.

Back in the late 80s when I was only worried about sports, girls, and whether or not my knee would allow me to ever play soccer again, the teacher in that video I linked to above, Tom Martin, the one who helped me with the ‘mental side of the game’ helped me in this same way.

In addition to teaching me the fundamentals of kicking a field goal soccer style, he did one more very important thing.  We attempted long field goals.  All kickers do that, and almost every Saturday or Sunday you’ll hear some announcer talking about how long a kicker was successful from in pregame. What we did is move the ball to what seemed like near impossible angles to the goal posts, which ultimately left almost no room for error left or right.  Angles so tight that unless I kicked the ball perfectly straight, it would not pass through the uprights.  To help give you a perspective, it was the equivalence of taking the ball to the sidelines as close as the goal line as possible, and attempting the kick from there.

That experience was profound, and Tom and I turned it into a game that I practiced for as long as my leg would hold out.  It taught me how to block everything else out except lining up those shots EXACTLY the same way EVERY TIME I kicked the football.  It taught me that even the smallest deviation in ANY part of the process would mean failure.

How this relates to your fitness career…

Last night I noticed a picture in an article in The Atlantic Monthly.  The story was about how to find and keep a job in today’s job market.  The picture depicted hundreds and maybe even thousands of people lined-up on curved sidewalks meandering through some office park.  It was some kind of job fair.

To me, they’re still kicking from the middle of the field with all of the other working stiffs.  Because unless any of them had decided to wear a pink leisure suit, what was the real difference from one person to the next?  Where were the linchpins?  From the picture I couldn’t tell.