A Navy
SEAL's Secret for Pushing Yourself Way Beyond Your (Supposed) Limits
The toughest of the tough use the '40 percent rule' to push
themselves to accomplish amazing things.
What are we
to make of this incredibly high success rate? As anyone who has ever run
a marathon can
tell you, the correct takeaway isn't that running 26 miles is a breeze.
Everyone hits a wall of pain at some point, yet almost everyone keeps going.
Instead, the
real lesson, according to entrepreneur and endurance athlete Jesse Itzler,
"is that we have so much more in our reserve tank than we think we
do."
This is a
truth Itzler learned in an unusual way -- by inviting a Navy SEAL he met while
running a 100-mile race (Itzler was doing it in relay, the SEAL was doing it
alone) to come and stay
with his family for a month and
teach them the secrets of incredible
mental toughness. He
shared one of his biggest lessons from the experience recently in a short video for Big Think.
The
40 percent rule
It's all well
and good to tell people they are capable of accomplishing way more than they
believe they are, but when the going gets tough, vague reassurances probably
aren't going to count for much. That's why Itzler's unusual houseguest offered
something more specific than empty encouragement. He taught Itzler the Navy
SEALs' "40 percent rule." (Spoiler alert: He also made him do a lot of
pull-ups to illustrate it.)
"He
would say that when your mind is telling you you're done, you're really only 40
percent done," Itzler explains. "And he had a motto: If it doesn't
suck, we don't do it. And that was his way of every day forcing us to get
uncomfortable to figure out what our baseline was and what our comfort level
was and just turning it upside down."
It turns out
that the 40 percent rule is why so many people are able to finish marathons.
When you hit that wall, you're really only 40 percent through your stores of
energy and determination. When your body complains, your will still has a lot
to give. And as the success rate of runners makes clear, that's true of just
about everyone.
That's handy
to know if you suddenly feel like your legs are going to fall off at mile 18 of
a marathon, but it's a truth that can have a huge impact even if long-distance
running really
isn't your thing. Whenever life puts a challenge in your path and you feel
like you're on the edge of giving up, you can lean on the SEALs' 40 percent rule to remind
you that your apparent limits really aren't.
"We all
have that will. It's just a matter of how we apply it not just to the
once-a-year marathon, but to a variety of things in our daily
lives," concludes Itzler.
BY JESSICA
STILLMAN
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