Operating at 40%

"Be like the headland against which the waves crash and break. It stands firm, while the seething waters are stilled around it."— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

Marcus wrote that in a tent, on campaign, in the middle of a plague. He was an emperor, but he wasn't writing for an audience. He was writing to himself. A reminder. Don't move. Let the wave do what waves do. I remain tall.

Eighteen hundred years later the line still works, because the situation hasn't changed. The waves just look different now. They look like a job you don't want that pays the bills you can't avoid. They look like an injury that arrives at the worst possible moment. They look like slow growth, an empty inbox, a launch that doesn't land, a season that doesn't go your way. The ocean is the same ocean. The rock is the same rock.

The only question worth asking is whether you can be it.

What 40% Looks Like

I want to tell you about a tournament I played recently. It is not a heroic story. That's why it's useful.

First game of the day, I took a knock. The kind that doesn't end your tournament but does end the version of you that turned up to win it. By the second match I was operating at about 40%. I could move, but I couldn't move the way I'd trained to move. I could contribute, but I couldn't be the player I'd come to be.

That gap, between the athlete I wanted to be that day and the one I actually was, was the entire problem.

There is a private kind of frustration that lives inside that gap. You spent months getting ready for this. You got up early. You said no to things. You earned the right to be at full power on this exact day, and your body has filed a different opinion. You don't get to argue with it. You only get to choose your posture.

I chose to stay useful. I helped where I could. I called the things I could call. I made the simpler plays that didn't need the body I no longer had. I kept my head clear, which sounds small but is the actual work in that situation. We made the final.

I'm not telling you this because we made the final. I'm telling you this because the version of me who could have lost his head and dragged the team down with him was a real possibility, and the version who didn't wasn't automatic. It was a choice made one play at a time.

The rock didn't move. That's the whole story.

The Upgrade

Here's where I want to push the Marcus line a little.

The pure Stoic rock can read as passive. Just absorb the wave. Just endure. That is not what the athlete or the builder is actually doing. You are absorbing the wave and you are studying it. You're noticing what hit you. You're noticing why. You're working out how to be less surprised next time.

The rock stands firm. The person on the rock takes notes.

That's the version that works for the life you're actually trying to build. Not stone-faced endurance for its own sake. Endurance with intelligence. You don't move when you get hit. But you don't waste the hit either. The lesson is in there. Get it out while it still stings.

Who This Is For

The person I'm writing this for is the semi-professional athlete trying to become a professional. The one who is already deep in it but not yet visible in it. You are training in the gaps in your week. You are working a job that doesn't ask anything of the mission but pays for it. You are quietly curating an identity around something most of the people in your life don't fully understand yet.

You fail in private. You pick yourself up in private. The wave doesn't care that you're tired. The rock doesn't either.

I'm writing this from inside the same ocean. SNOW is being built the same way the tournament was played. Days where I'm at full power. Days where I'm at 40%. Days where the wave looks bigger than the rock. The posture has to be the same in all three. Stand firm. Take notes. Don't move.

That's the work.

What You Do Tomorrow

You don't need a new philosophy. You need to be able to find this one in your body the next time the wave hits.

That's training. Same as everything else. You practise the posture in small waves so you have it ready for the big one. The hard email you don't want to send. The training session you don't want to do. The conversation you've been avoiding. Each one is a small rep of the same skill. Get hit. Don't move. Take the note. Go again.

Marcus wasn't writing to philosophers. He was writing to an exhausted man trying to do a hard job. He wrote the line so he could find it again when he needed it. That is the only use of a line like this. Not to admire it. To find it.

Find yours.

The waves keep coming.

The rock keeps standing.

You took the hit. You stayed on the rock. Tomorrow you train again.