This Is Your World Cup

I read a lot of biographies, mostly of people I find kind of inspiring, and athletes come up a lot, because the way the great ones live is just flatly different from how the average person with a nine-to-five lives.

Here’s the difference. These people have a World Cup. A specific thing, a tournament, an Olympics, a defining stage, that they’ve decided matters enormously. Michael Phelps had the Olympics. I’ve got a friend who’s been grinding for a spot on an Olympic team for over a decade, in and out every single day, over one event. And when you have a World Cup, the small decisions stop being a fight. These people wake up at 4:30 not because they’re superhuman, but because they go to bed early, because they’ve decided the long-term thing is worth more than the stuff they’re giving up for it. The behavior isn’t the hard part. The behavior follows the decision.

But this piece is actually about filtering and prioritization. It’s also not about dedicating your entire life to one specific thing. The point is to bring a higher level of focus and attention to any given task in your life, such that you prioritize fewer things, so fewer things get filtered into your life and more things get filtered out of it. And then, because you’ve now created more attention associated with a specific project or task, you have the capacity to give more of your energy, not necessarily all of it like a professional athlete, but more energy, to these fewer, clear responsibilities that you have.

The premise here is quite simple. You only have so much time on this plane. You’re going to spend it one way or another. You’re either going to doomscroll it out of existence, or you’re going to spend this time on things that are genuinely important. And even when I say genuinely important, it might be administrative busy work, the stuff you have to do that isn’t super exciting, but that’s aligned with the general direction you want to be headed in. Even doing your current work in order to set yourself up so you can find a better job that you enjoy more, or pivot into a different career you’d enjoy more, those become mission-aligned things. Just like a professional athlete does ice baths and PT that aren’t necessarily enjoyable, but they support the overall mission of achieving in the larger tournament. Right now you might be doing more administrative work, things that aren’t exactly as enjoyable as you’d like, but if you don’t have a clear mission they’re associated with, if you don’t have the purpose or the specific task you want to prioritize them into, then what ends up happening is you add too many things into your schedule, trying to change the thing, and then you don’t push forward any specific one of those projects. And then you stay in the loop of nothing getting done to the degree that you want.

So the point of this example is not about putting everything on hold to pursue a target, like the World Cup, like a professional athlete does. It’s to prioritize more effectively, having a clear filter that filters out the things that are low-leverage, or not mission-aligned, or not valuable, such that you can spend more attention directly targeting the things that will actually put you in that next direction. And then, once you do that, establishing a deeper level of focus associated with those things, genuinely applying real focus to it in order to make strides in that direction. So you don’t have to put your whole life on hold like a professional athlete where it’s 24/7, but when it’s the couple hours a week, or the couple hours a day, you need those to be absolutely and entirely driven toward that one thing. So it’s partly about creating space by having the right filter and prioritizing effectively, but then, once you’ve done that, intentionally filling that space with deep focus that pushes that project across the line.

And it might even sound silly, but this is the thing I really resonate with in those biographies I love so much, and it’s not just professional athletes. It’s Joseph Campbell, who wrote A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. It’s people who built massive things, Steve Jobs, regardless of how you feel about him, the way he perceived building Apple. Anyone who built something really remarkable and unique and great clearly had this really driven focus, where it was all-consuming. Once again, you don’t have to be all-consuming, but you do have to deeply and intentionally pursue the dream you’re after, if you want to build that thing.

And I think a lot of people actually get kind of embarrassed by this idea of prioritizing themselves, because it almost feels selfish. People get embarrassed by this idea of actually fully diving in, of fully creating a lifestyle that’s like, this is the thing that I’m going to fucking build, this is what I’m going to do, this is what my life is about. And I may actually fail because of that, but I am willing to actually try. So sometimes it’s not one piece of it. It could be the embarrassment. Another piece of it could be the fear, the fear of failure, or the fear of success, that may show up if you actually integrate this, put in the time and effort, and do the thing.

Because there’s a reality. There are many people who enter the Olympics and don’t win. And so you’d look at them and be like, oh, did they waste their life? No. You’d be like, damn, you were an Olympic athlete. Who cares if you didn’t get on the podium? That was a life worth living. That was a goal worth pursuing. That was time well spent, because you tried, and you put genuine effort in. And so we take that into our own lives. You could be a software engineer, like, dude, I’m not an Olympic athlete or a World Cup athlete. Yeah, but that doesn’t mean there’s a difference in the human flesh and bone and genetics of those people versus you. You get to decide if you put the level of attention and energy into your own specific goals the same way that these athletes do in theirs. And if you do that, do you think you have a higher likelihood of doing something fucking remarkable or not? Because for me, the answer is emphatically yes. And I believe the answer for you is yes as well. But it is reliant on the condition that you allow yourself to feel that embarrassment, to overcome that embarrassment, to handle it with the right tools. Or that fear, of failure, or of success, or of judgment, or whatever it is. You have to encounter and overcome those in order to actually fully go all in. And again, it doesn’t have to be 100 percent of your time, but when you do it, when you prioritize outside of it, these things are a part of the decision-making, and they receive your time and attention and purpose. That’s the point of this.

That’s what this whole first week has been about. You’re not lazy and you’re not broken. The fix was never more willpower. It’s deciding, on purpose, what your World Cup is, filtering everything else down around it, and then giving those few hours real, deep focus.

So here’s my actual ask, and it’s the first one I’ve made all week. If you’ve got a project that could be your World Cup, the technical thing you can’t quite ship, the company, the work you’d be proud to put your name on, and you’re tired of watching yourself start and stall on it, let’s talk. I run a quick, free fit call where we map out what your version of aligned actually looks like, and what’s really been standing between you and it. No pitch, no pressure. If you want it, reply to this or grab a time.

Because it’s the willingness to actually act like an Olympic athlete, even if you aren’t one, in your own goal. And what that is, it’s a declaration of self, that you and your work and your energy and your time is important. That’s a beautiful thing.

This is your World Cup. Go train for it.