building Strength pt.6
Setting The Standards
Michael Phelps didn’t become a 23-time Olympic gold medalist and then raise his standards to match. His standards were championship-level before he ever touched a medal.
“Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions.” (76)
Starting when he was a teenager, he would work out in the pool twice every single day, lift once every day and follow a strict diet. He consistently worked like a champion for years before he went to the Olympics. He would swim 80,000 meters some weeks in training. That’s the entire length of Manhattan four times.
I’m not saying we should all go hop in a pool or dedicate every waking moment to a single pursuit, but I think Michael Phelps’s success is a testament to the power of setting your standards high.
Two Pieces of Coal
Epictetus, an ancient Stoic philosopher, has a great passage about how we turn into the people around us. If you put two pieces of coal beside each other, one lit and the other dead, one of two things will happen. Either they both get lit or they both get extinguished.
The standards of the people around you rub off.
Keep this in mind when you’re picking who you spend time with. Ask yourself, if someone said you’re just like Bob, the guy you hang out with a lot, would you consider it a compliment? If not, why do you spend time with him? The more time you spend together, the more similar you become.
“It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not typically how it works.” (75)
We increase the amount of effort we need to keep our standards high by spending time with people with lower standards. The natural inclination becomes to drop our standards to theirs. We make our own lives harder by not purposefully choosing our environment.
Think about working as a teacher or as an investment banker. You’re the same person but you work infinitely more at one job because the standard is higher. The bar for what is considered a “good job” is at a completely different place. Now consider you work as a teacher but you have huge ambitions. Do you think it will be easier or harder to work 100 hours a week at a high school or at an investment bank? Standards are powerful motivators.
Setting Your Own Standards High
Lucky for us, there is a flipside. We can set our own standards. Consider all the cheesy inspirational stories of people making it out of their small hometown where they weren’t supported and they became the mayor of planet earth. It’s not the norm, but it happens often enough that we’ve all heard one or two stories.
The two common themes in these situations are:
Passion for the work they do
A master role model
If you can’t surround yourself with people of high standards, the next best thing is to have intense passion for your work or to have a mentor. And today, having a mentor is easy. Find someone on the internet who shares publicly once in a while and treat them as your friend.
Ask yourself if they would be proud of you. Ask yourself if they were watching you, what would they think? I use that a lot. I have a “personal board of advisors” of authors, professors, athletes and other professionals I look up to who I use to set the standard high. It works for me.
TLDR:
You become like the people around you. Choose them wisely
The standard makes the champion, not the other way around
Use masters in the field as mentors to increase your standard
Brains Gains
Who do you spent too much time with? Who’s rubbing off on you?
Go have a good day. A day of doing good. And being good.
Your Friend,
Noah “BigNerd” Sochaczevski