The Last Few %
We all know the feeling. You’ve worked incredibly hard on something, only to have much of it undone during a momentary loss of focus within sight of the finish line.
Fatigue tries to tell you that the last little bit doesn’t matter, but it almost always does. It’s why the last few percent are so often the hardest, and tend to be the biggest differentiator between greatness and mediocrity… or worse.
In the tech world you often hear that you should ship products when they are barely presentable. Something along the lines of… “if you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’ve shipped it too late”. This mantra is true when the stakes are low, so you can begin the important process of feedback and iteration. But when the stakes are high, the last few percent are the most important because they tend to drive the majority of the outcome, and failure can be disastrous.
I try to approach everything with this dichotomy in mind — finding a balance between iteration and play, and focus and control. Maximizing progression, yet minimizing regret.
A few weeks ago I miscalibrated, and paid the price with a broken collarbone during a mountain biking trip in Whistler, BC.
I had trained all year to recover from a (right) shoulder injury last summer, and was feeling as close to 100% as possible. We rode hard all week and steadily ramped up the degree of difficulty each day. Although mountain biking is a sport where you can get hurt at any time, it felt like pure play, and any memories of previous injuries were conveniently absent from my mind. After spending a day honing my skills on some bigger and faster trails in the lift-accessed bike park, I decided to hit the pedals the following day to challenge myself on some more technical and committed lines deep in the woods.
After nailing some early features on an off-grid trail named Green Therapy, including the biggest rock roll I’ve ever attempted (top photo), I was focused and fully present — a rare and exquisite sensation.
We scoped out the next feature and I quickly identified the first of three sections as the most challenging and intimidating. I watched my friends try their luck, and then started my own roll down the convex granite just as a light rain was starting to fall.
After clearing what I thought was the crux, I approached the second section with a bit of pace. When I walked it, I thought it was challenging but straightforward — shorter but steeper than the first, and into a flat but loamy transition.
But with a fresh injection of adrenaline pumping through my veins as I crested the second apex, I suffered from a split-second lapse in focus and presence. My friends’ cheers took me out of the moment, and instead of focusing on my speed, body position, and the placement of my front wheel, I briefly imagined myself safely at the bottom — the equivalent of taking my eye off a fastball to celebrate a home run, except with very different consequences.
I was carrying too much speed, and my center of gravity was too high, causing me to bottom out my fork when I hit the transition. Before I knew anything was wrong, I was crumpled forward over the bars, and my left shoulder buried itself into a decomposing stump, camouflaged in loam.
In the chaos of the crash I heard a loud snap, which I assumed was my handlebars, meaning my day was over. But when I stood up and felt a lump where my collarbone should have been, I knew it wasn’t my handlebars that had failed.
After all the preparation, training and rehab, one momentary lapse in focus ended my season. I’ve seen this play out time and again in the working world too — within myself, in my teams/company, and with my clients. Little details get missed at the end of a big project or launch, most often due to distraction and fatigue, and have disproportionately negative impacts on the results despite of all the hard, quality work that went in before then.
Don’t get me wrong — sometimes things don’t go as planned for reasons well beyond our control. In fact, that’s what happened when I injured myself last summer. It was a fluke crash, and there’s nothing I would have done differently given the information I had at the time.
The important thing is just to be present and recognize when you’re in a high stakes situation, because small differences in attention can have big influences on outcome — for better or worse. That way, you’re least likely to have any regrets when you look back on it later.
Anyway, for the next few weeks I’ll be focused on healing my body, and etching this lesson into my brain, so the next time the stakes are high, I don’t forget the consequences of letting up too soon.
This post was originally shared in Issue #30 of my biweekly newsletter, In The Know. Please check it out and subscribe if you’d like to have these posts delivered directly to your inbox, as well as other thoughts on how to live a healthier and more examined life.
