You’re Capable of More: What’s Really Stopping You?

I'll start at the very top with the extraordinary because it's instructive, even though it isn't where we're going to stay.

Think for a moment about the truly exceptional, you know, Usain Bolt, the fastest human being who's ever lived so far ahead of the finest sprinters on earth that he could ease up and glance around before the line.

Think of Roger Federer, who for the better part of 20 years made a brutally difficult game look like something close to art or turn to business.

Elon Musk building rockets, electric cars at a scale most sensible people said was flatly impossible.

Jensen Wang, who spent three decades quietly building NVIDIA from almost nothing into one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Now, whatever you make of any of these people, and they divide opinion, they share something, and it's worth naming it plainly.

An almost unreasonable belief in themselves, a drive that doesn't seem to have an off switch, and a willingness to commit utterly for years and years, long before there was any proof it would pay off.

They're fascinating to watch and they are deeply instructive because they show you, in the extreme, what human potential looks like when it's fully backed by belief and by relentless work.

And notice that word, work, because the story we're usually told about these people is a story about talent, about gift, as though they'd been born a different species from the rest of us.

That's the least interesting and least useful part of the truth.

Both trained brutally for years for races that lasted under 10 seconds.

Federer hit millions of practice balls that nobody ever saw.

The genius we admire is almost always sitting on top of a mountain of unglamorous, invisible work, which is oddly encouraging when you think about it because talent you either have or you don't, but work is available to absolutely everyone.

even at the very top potential turns out to be built mostly not bestowed and the part that transfers to you and me isn't the talent isn't the attitude the refusal to be talked out of it the willingness to be bad at something for a long time on the way to being good the quiet daily commitment when nobody's watching and there's no applause yet Those aren't gifts handed out at birth, they're choices and they're available to a barman or a bookkeeper exactly as much as they are to champions.

Strip away the fame and the money and the once in a generation talent and what's left in these people is the way of approaching their own potential that any of us could pick up tomorrow morning.

But here's where nearly everyone goes wrong with examples like these.

They look at Bolt, at Federer, at Musk, and they think, well, that's them, isn't it? Freaks in nature, geniuses, billionaires.

Nothing whatsoever to do with me.

And they quietly close the book.

If that's the reaction, then these people are worse than useless to us.

Because all they do is make our own lives look small by comparison and send us back to the sofa feeling flat.

So let me be clear about it.

Why I raised them at all? I'm not holding these people up as targets.

You're not going to out-sprint Usain Bolt.

Neither am I.