“Growth comes at the point of resistance.”- Josh Waitzkin
I always prided myself on my mindset - I built it in my teenage years on my path to a Taekwondo black belt and competing at a national level.
The belt system meant that at every level you had to raise your game, physically and mentally, with more complex techniques to master and tougher opponents to face.
Boxing took it to another level - an intensity that I’ve never experienced before or since.
However, mindset alone is never enough. I found that out the hard way when I attempted my first marathon at the age of 50 without preparing for it properly. My belief in my mental toughness was an act of self-sabotage.
That conviction that I could just push through it saw me reduced to a walk, run, walk from mile 20 onwards. I got over the line, but in just over 5 hours, versus the 4 hours I had naively (arrogantly?) been gunning for.
It was humbling. A tough lesson to re-learn.
I’d forgotten a basic principle that applies to mental performance just as much as physical endeavours. That of progressive overload.
Adaptation only happens under load. So the cognitive athlete should deliberately take on things that are hard and unfamiliar, because that is what builds new capability.
But the pathway has to be intentional and gradual. Too much, too soon is counter-productive.
What isn’t an option is staying still. The stasis of the comfort zone creates the illusion of security. In reality it leads to irrelevance.
You have to keep on moving.
THE PROOF
Even those we regard as geniuses have to put the work in if they wish to progress.
In 1905, Albert Einstein was a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, and published his initial theory of relativity.
In 1912 he was working on extending the theory to gravity. Back in Zurich that summer, he went looking for an old student friend Marcel Grossmann, by then a professor of mathematics. He needed to tap into new ways of thinking.
In October he wrote to the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld. He explained that he had never laboured so hard over anything, and he had gained a deep respect for mathematics, whose subtler parts he had once regarded as “pure luxury”.
Next to this problem, he said, his original theory of relativity had been child’s play.
It took three more years. The outline he wrote with Grossmann in 1913 already came very close to the finished theory, and in November 1915 he presented the general theory of relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
The man held up as the definition of genius was on the record acknowledging that the second level was far harder than the first, and that to make it he had to embrace discomfort, learn something unfamiliar and seek guidance from others.
Progressive overload in action.
THE SCIENCE
The brain is not static; it changes in response to what it is asked to do.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s lifelong physical and structural capacity to change, reorganise, and rewire its neural connections in response to learning and new experiences.
After weeks of demanding new learning, brain imaging studies find measurable changes in structure and function. Those changes build with sustained repetition.
The benefits show up in measurable ways. In a randomised trial, older adults who spent three months learning demanding new skills (about 15 hours a week) improved their memory for events and experiences.
The comparison groups, who socialised or did simple mental tasks, did not show the same gain.
And in a pooled analysis of seven long-term studies, people in more mentally complex work stayed free of dementia for longer.
Demanding, unfamiliar learning, sustained over time, is linked to a sharper and more resilient brain, and staying with the familiar is not.
THE APPLICATION
Progressive overload only works if you apply it with intention and purpose. Five rules to live by:
Be an explorer, not an expert
Experts can get wedded to what they know. Explorers go looking for what they don’t.
In the trial mentioned above, the people who stayed with socialising or simple mental tasks did not show the same gain as those learning something demanding and new.
Every great person that I can think of regards themselves as an explorer, keen to test the limits of their potential.
Do lots of experiments
One of the biggest limiters of potential is the tendency to view growth through the binary lens of success or failure. Instead, think like a scientist and embrace the freedom of experimentation.
No scientist goes into an experiment expecting everything to be right the first time. The experiment is designed to produce valuable data, whatever the result.
An experiment gives you a clear structure to work from - have a working hypothesis, commit to doing it for a duration long enough to throw up meaningful data. Assess it, calibrate and go again.
That steady stream of new information charts a pathway of progress and allows you to make informed decisions along the way.
Embrace discomfort
When something feels hard mentally, there’s a tendency to treat it as a distress signal - a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it.
Add in related issues like status and identity, and it’s easy to kick the can down the road - telling yourself the story that you’ll get around to doing it next week…
The one thing I need you to understand is that the ‘alarm bell’ is actually a growth signal. It’s usually the sign you’re working at the edge of your capabilities, which is exactly where new pathways get built.
Get the reps in
New behaviours and skills get easier over time. Why? Repetition means the brain is turning those new pathways into ‘highways’ - smoother and faster, to the point where they don’t require conscious thought.
Think about the previous achievements that meant most to you and you’ll see a pattern emerging. What seemed impossible, what seemed deeply uncomfortable, over time, with intention, repetition and purpose became second nature.
That’s neuroplasticity at work.
Recover like an athlete
Your cognitive stores are no different to your physical ones. Focused, effortful thinking depletes with use, which is why it’s harder to think with clarity at the end of a long day.
No athlete expects to train flat out every day and keep improving. The same applies to you.
Rest is not the opposite of performance. It’s an enabler of it.
Overload is the stimulus. Recovery is what lets you absorb it.
AI - a use case
I see this struggle playing out right now - the era of AI is bringing seismic change to the workplace.
Resist the temptation to dismiss the forces at work. Resist the temptation to delegate your involvement. Resist the temptation to leave it till the week that never comes.
Start small. Experiment. Increase the (cognitive) load. Go again.
J.
LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER
The best content I researched this week:
- How to accelerate learning and increase cognitive capacity is a natural companion to this week’s theme. Huberman is in conversation with neuroscientist Dr Tommy Wood. There’s a lot they unpack over 2.5 hours - I particularly liked the distinction between flow and clutch state.
- Use it or lose it is the powerful 1-slide message from Dr Ryan Cedermark. I’ve written a lot about how you build new pathways - he points out that they’ll decline if you don’t.
- Finally, 43 Stoic rules that will change how you live, from the wonderful wisdom of Ryan Holiday. ‘Always be ready to adapt’ is one of my personal mantras.