Keep Your Feet Where They Are
"Confine yourself to the present."
— Marcus Aurelius
Not to the last win. Not to the next one. Not to how good last week felt, or how bad last month was. Here. This moment. This standard. This rep.
That sounds straightforward until you are actually in a high period and someone is telling you how well you are doing, and your body is producing the kind of momentum that makes it easy to believe you have already arrived. Confining yourself to the present is simple when nothing is pulling you away from it. The real test is holding that discipline when something is.
Inside every SNOW hoodie, stitched into the sleeve where most people will never see it, is a quote:
"God will steer the boat, but you must row."
The rowing is not conditional on the weather. You row through the storm because there is no other option. But you also row through the calm, at the same pace, with the same intent, because that is the only version of rowing that actually gets you somewhere. The calm is not permission to ease off. It is a different kind of test.
This 7s season has been one of the better periods I have had in rugby. Around six tournaments on the bounce, including a Thursday tournament followed immediately by a Saturday tournament 48 hours later. Different countries, different opposition, barely any time between them. Good performances across the run, real moments. And I will be honest: I am susceptible to letting a run like that become a reason to loosen the standard. Not visibly, not in a way that shows up in a headline, but in the small things. A defensive set goes well, I do my job properly. Then two phases later, when I am tired and the momentum is already good, I catch myself running at 70 or 80 percent instead of finishing the same way I started.
Nobody else would notice. I do. That is the problem with letting a high do the work for you. It does not announce itself as a problem. It just quietly lowers the floor.
In a semi-final on this run, I scored a try. The instinct was immediate: next job. Not celebrate, not reflect, not let the moment expand into something it had not yet earned. Get back, get set, stay in the game. That is the present tense Marcus Aurelius is talking about. Not the try. The next play.
It was only after the semi, sitting with the result and knowing the final was coming, that a different thought arrived. And it was not complicated: if I do not repeat this when it matters most, it means nothing.
Not as punishment. Not as a way of dismissing what had just happened. As a standard. One moment proves you can do it once. The only thing that proves it belongs to you is doing it again, under the same or greater pressure, when the stakes are higher and the opposition knows what is coming.
I scored in the final.
I am not writing this to talk about tries. I am writing it because that sequence is the clearest example I have of what composure during a high actually looks like in practice. Not the absence of emotion, but the management of it. The decision, made in the seconds between the semi-final and the final, to not let the high become the story before the work was finished.
There is a phrase I have returned to more times than I can count, on pitches and at desks and in periods where things are going well and I can feel myself starting to float:
Keep your feet where they are.
It is my version of Marcus Aurelius. It is my version of the sleeve quote. Stay grounded in what is in front of you. The last result is not currency you can spend in the next game. The good week does not carry over automatically. Progress is not what happens when things go right. Progress is what happens when you hold the standard regardless of which direction things are moving.
Everyone talks about resilience in the low. Getting up when you are down, pushing through when it is hard, staying disciplined when the conditions are against you. That is necessary, and it is real, and it matters. But it also has the advantage of urgency. When things are difficult, the pressure itself sharpens you.
The high has no such mechanism. Nobody is forcing your standards up when your form is good and the results are coming and people are telling you that you are doing well. That environment produces a different and quieter kind of drift. Humility in a high is not a soft idea. It is the harder skill, and it is the one that almost nobody develops intentionally, because they are too busy enjoying the run to notice it happening.
SNOW exists in that space. Not as a brand for people who are struggling and need motivation to get moving. As a brand for people who understand that the work does not change shape depending on the result. The discipline that built the first product is the same discipline required to build the next one. The standard that got me through the bad periods is the same standard I am trying to hold now that things are going better.
The boat does not steer itself in the calm. You still have to row.
Keep your feet where they are.