Something is Better Than Nothing

Today, while I was pushing my way through some 200 repeats in the pool, I asked the question we all ask when things get a bit hard.

Why?

My immediate answer was that I was trying to swim 3500 yards in the practice. And that eventually I would build up to 4000 in the workout. And that I was trying to get my weekly total to 11,000 yards.

The discussion got interrupted by another, common intrusive thought. No sooner had I posited my 11,000 yard goal when I thought:

“That’s nothing, elite swimmers train 50-100,000 yards a week”.

Which brings me to the topic of today’s blog. It’s wonderful to know what is ideal. What you would do if you could isolate one variable in your life? Decisions never actually fall so neatly where you can simply elect to do the optimal thing.

It’s a simple perfectionistic thought. That anything better than the “best” is not good enough. I’ve grown tired of it holding me back from doing basic things. So here’s how I think about it.

It’s math

I’m fond of saying that “people are not math problems”. When we are talking about quantifiable goals however, I think math is most definitely allowed. Now, permit me to wow you with my excellent skills that I developed 20+ years ago at Wellesley High School (thanks Mr. Tiberio).

0 is zero. It’s infinitely nothing. There is no number you can multiply 0 by that will not result in the answer also being 0.

Let’s extrapolate this into a goal around your swimming volume. Not swimming because you can’t train like an elite athlete would results in you training 0 yards.

11,000 yards is first of all, just on a raw level a lot more swimming than 0. If we try to divide 11,000 by zero, the answer is undefined because zero is nothing. There are no way to quantify how many zeros fit into a number that actually has value.

Something is more than nothing. It’s math.

You may find this a silly example, except I can’t tell you how many athletes I have coached and coaches I have known that unwittingly apply this sort of “all or nothing” approach to whatever they do.

The athletes who express that they are disillusioned with the sport because they don’t win. The coaches who won’t ever deign to swim again because they can’t match who they were.

eating a cookie doesn’t make you a cookie monster

Lately I’ve been trying to eat better. I did a podcast with Trever Gray, who’s provided some coaching for me to apply. Nutrition was another area where I realized I had unwittingly applied the “all or nothing” psychology.

If I was feeling defensive, I would tell you I “ate a pretty good diet”. That is a statement that has almost no meaning. I wanted to identify as someone who ate a good diet. This meant that when I was fueling myself the way I thought I should, I would fit it alongside my identity.

When I reached for a cookie (or two or three), I would be upset. I was violating “who I was”. Now I was a cookie eater. A rotten, foul cookie eating liar.

Many of us use guilt to motivate our decision making process. It is a powerful motivator in the local sense. Guilt can stop you if you apply it hard enough. But it weakens your will globally, because overtime it undermines your self identity. Apply enough guilt and you will lose confidence over time and begin to identify as whatever you have been telling yourself that your guilty moments define.

So do I have an “elite” diet? Probably not. I know that I can get better, and crucially now I’m focused on the positive goal that I want to get better. I am, currently, no longer shackled to the polarity of whether I am perfect or imperfect that is destined to actually make me worse over time.

Something, some level of improvement, is infinitely more than just staying at baseline. When you improve you raise the ceiling AND the floor.

There’s nothing wrong, by the way, with just not wanting to improve at something. You still have to ask yourself if you truly just have no interest, or if you are holding yourself back to protect from the disappointment of not being instantaneously great.