It’s strange where you pick up pearls of wisdom from. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I didn’t expect to have picked up a piece of advice that has greatly helped my in my new job whilst watching a documentary on Usain Bolt. Unfortunately I can’t remember whether it was Bolt himself or his coach who uttered this advice, but it has stuck with me nonetheless.
The discussion was about how you train to run 9.60 seconds or faster for 100m. The point that was being made was that it is not possible to simply sit down and say “Right, if we do a, b and c, it will result in a time of 9.60 seconds.” That’s not the way things work. If it was that simple, we’d all be running that time. Instead, the starting point must be to think “Where and how can I improve my performance?” So, Bolt identified that having a more explosive start would greatly help him to run faster times, and so trains specifically to improve this and all the other aspects of his race. If you do that, you’ll improve your times, and if you have the talent and natural physical gifts of Usain Bolt, then perhaps a 9.60 second time will be a reward for this.
The moral of the story is that a result is an outcome, and the only way to bring about the results that you hope for is instead to focus on the processes that will help you to get there. So whilst I might have lots of ideas about where I’d like to be in my job in a year, the only way I’ll get there is to focus on the processes that will bring these results.
That said, there must have been moments in Bolt’s athletics career where he reached a milestone in terms of times that have brought him a lot of pleasure. The first time he ran under 20 seconds for 200m, or his first sub-10 second 100m, each of his World Records and plenty of other milestones along the way.
And so it has been for me over the past 24 hours. The first milestone was that our Decathlon U.K. Facebook Page (www.facebook.com/DecathlonUK – check it out! Which other Facebook pages would cite Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Have I Got News For You as influences?) reached 5,000 likes. It’s a nice milestone to reach, but not one I can take much credit for considering the vast majority already liked the page when I started my job.
And then, earlier this evening, I reached 10,000 views on this blog. Since I’ve built this up from nothing with virtually no publicity, it’s a big moment and a very proud one at that. So once again I’d like to thank all of you for taking the time to visit my blog and read what I have to say – I wouldn’t have gotten my current job without this blog being a success, so I have a lot to be grateful for.
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