You may have heard of the 40% rule before. To the best of my knowledge, this rule was coined by David Goggins in his book “Cant Hurt Me.”
And if you haven’t heard of it, it goes something like this...
Whenever you feel like you’ve reached your limit, you’ve truly only hit about 40% of your full capacity. You’ve got another 60% left in the tank.
I don’t know about you, but that’s a LOT to leave on the table.
I mean…. Imagine someone offering you $1M, and you tell them “thanks but I’ll just take $400k.”
I truly believe that greatness does not happen by chance or because someone was born into greatness. Rather people become great because they push themselves past most people’s natural stopping point. Their level of effort extends beyond the realm of comprehension for the average person, and as a natural result of putting forward considerably more effort, they separate themselves from average and become outstanding.
Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant weren’t simply born as the best basketball players of their respective generations. Of course, they had talent and genetics on their side, but they both also possessed a level of obsession and competitiveness that drove them to far exceed the efforts that their contemporaries gave to the game.
These are examples of people breaking through the 40% limitation and giving their all to their craft, their profession, and their passions.
“So what exactly is this 40% thing?” you may be asking.
If you’ve ever found yourself doing something difficult… anything that requires physical, mental, emotional or spiritual struggle… and you finally reach your stopping point, the point at which you literally cannot go any further, then chances are that’s actually where your 40% level of effort resides.
Despite the pain or discomfort that certainly indicates you’re reached your threshold, this is probably a false signal from your brain which is trying it’s best to convince you that there is nothing left.
You see, whenever we reach a point that is too uncomfortable for us to bare, our brains perceive this as a threat to survival and sends us extraordinarily powerful signals to “stop.” The analogy that Goggins uses is a rental car that has a governor to limit its speed far below its actual mechanical potential. This governor is put in place as a safety mechanism to prevent an accident. And just like the speed-limiting governor in a rental car, our brains limit our activities to a level far below our capabilities. This is the brain’s way of preventing us from hurting ourselves in what it perceives as a life-threatening situation.
The problem is that in modern life, we rarely are faced with truly life-threatening situations. So that self-limiter that serves as an extraordinarily strong internal resistance holding us back from going any further is an antiquated piece of biological hardware. The scenarios where we find ourselves wanting to stop, or give up, are hardly ever life-threatening.
So this is where understanding the 40% rule comes into play. When you reach that threshold of not being able to go any further, you remember that there is another 60% left in you, and your mindset shifts…
The reason why I’m discussing this is because I know for a fact that I, and many others, have given up on something believing that we were just not cut out for that thing. I have given up on entrepreneurship ventures because I believed I was just missing the spark needed to be successful in that particular business. I’ve seen many, MANY, people give up prematurely on their efforts to get back into shape and then come up with some excuse as to why they are a special case to which the rules of biology don’t apply.
The reality is that we simply didn’t give it 100% effort. We likely didn’t give it 70% effort. And we probably didn’t truly give it a 50% effort. We most likely stopped somewhere in that 40% range, and then concluded that “this isn’t for me.”
In sticking with my personal experience, I remember spending years of thinking that I was cursed with the “skinny” gene. I believed I was destined to spend my whole life “looking like the skeleton in my 10th grade biology class” as one high school classmate so eloquently described it. Back in those days, I tried all kinds of tricks to not be so skinny. One summer I committed to being a couch potato. Another summer I committed to eating 4-6 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day.
In these cases, I did not truly commit to attaining the knowledge and doing the work to actually produce changes. I put forth a halfway effort at best.
Yet it was years later after I turned fitness into a lifestyle through and through that I began to see transformational changes and an eventual separation that has helped me to unlock mastery of calisthenics and bodyweight movements; skills that I once previously thought were far outside of my physical abilities.
More recently, after my first and second iterations of this business saw lukewarm results, I was ready to pull the plug thinking that I just didn’t have the chops to be in this line of work.
However, it was only after I remembered the 40% rule that I asked myself whether or not I have honestly given a 100% effort. And the answer to that question was a resounding NO. There was so much that I left on the table, expecting my business to flourish despite giving a half-assed effort. The truth is that I treated my business like a side project rather than the main event. There were marketing channels that I left untapped, there were business processes that I never attempted to streamline, there was a laundry list of actions that I didn’t take because they were beyond my pain threshold (too boring, too uninteresting, etc.).
So, I in all honesty could not say that I gave 100% effort. And what a tragedy it would be to walk away from something that’s such a high priority because I drew the line at 40%.
So how does one even know that they’re giving 100%? How can anyone tell what the true upper limit looks like? I’ll admit, it is not a cut and dry thing. However, at the least, we know that the limit of human potential exists beyond what has already been accomplished by others. Or in other words, other high achieving people have at least shown us what is within the limit of possibilities.
And when I speak of possibilities, I’m not speaking in terms of outcomes. I’m speaking in terms of EFFORT. Outcomes are to an extent beyond our control. But we certainly can control how much effort we put into something. You likely will not achieve the same outcomes as Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, but you absolutely can put in the same level of effort as they did, if becoming great at basketball is your priority in life.
So finding people who are on a similar journey as you are, as well as people who have accomplished what you have already accomplished, and surrounding yourself with these kinds of people, in my opinion, is one of the most effective ways of raising your threshold beyond 40%.
Sticking with the fitness example, if you struggle to lose body fat and put on more muscle, then first you need to put yourself in an environment in which eating, exercise, and a disciplined lifestyle are normalized. When everyone around you is exceeding what was your previous limit, you will quickly begin to raise your limit from 40% to 50%, and then to 60%. You may be humbled to learn that what you thought was your best effort is someone else’s minimal effort.
I want to be clear, that everyone is on their own journey, and so, one must be careful when drawing comparisons. However the purpose of doing so is to come to terms with reality regarding where the true limit of human potential resides, and I believe this is the quickest way to do so.
But don’t just surround yourself with these people. PAY ATTENTION to what they actually do, and mimic those actions. Because at the end of the day, it is action that produces results. Once you become aware of the aspects of your journey in which you are giving subpar effort, you’ll eventually need to take action in line with those who have achieved the goals that you seek for yourself. You can’t just watch from the sidelines and hope the energy rubs off on you passively. You need to actively engage and conduct yourself in a similar way as those who’ve already walked the walk.
I also want to make it a point not to confuse passion with effort. I think many people expect to see success in their journey simply because they strongly desire a particular outcome. But being passionate does not entitle you to being successful. Success, is built on top of a foundation of focused and intentional effort, and greatness is built on top of a foundation of focused and intentional effort far beyond the 40% limit that most will stop at.
However, I would be remiss to not give the same disclaimer I give for so many topics that I speak on.
With the 40% rule.. and when it comes to giving 100% effort, I believe it is important to be intentional about where you direct this level of energy towards. We are humans, and I don’t think it is healthy to operate at maximum effort for all areas of life. I believe these things should be limited to those areas that are of the highest priority to you at any given time. 1 or 2 concurrently at the most.
For some, the priority might be raising children. And if the priority is raising children, then are you truly giving 100% effort? This is a very subjective topic, as there is no universal standard for what doing your best to raise a child looks like, but if you drink alcohol in front of your children, if you don’t set a standard for eating healthy foods and being physically fit, and if you delegate raising a child off to digital devices then is this reflective of a 100% effort on your part? Are you stopping short of excellence because the mental limiter kicks in and convinces you to stop at 40%?
For others the priority might be finally locking in and getting their weight, health, and fitness under control. And if this is your priority, then are you truly giving it 100% effort? Or are you giving up because a tad bit of discomfort from food cravings are setting off your mental governor and making you believe that you’re not cut out for it?
If financial independence is a priority for you, then are you truly making the lifestyle adjustments necessary to achieve this vision, or are you stopping short of exhausting all options? In my experience working with clients who’re trying to escape the corporate rat-race, people consistently stop far short of their full capacity when it comes to the effort they put into such a potentially life-changing thing. They leave a lot of low-hanging fruit on the tree and then resign themselves to 30 years of soul crushing work because they believe they’ve “tried” to find a way out, but its just not part of their reality.
So wherever your greatest priorities in life lie, this is where I suggest you to take an honest inventory of the effort you give to seeing those priorities manifest. Make an assumption that you have fallen into the 40% trap, and then begin searching and probing for pathways to access that untapped capacity that you’ve been letting sit dormant all this time.
Give it 100%, as any conclusions that you draw about yourself before you truly give something your all, are premature and based on both incomplete information and effort.
And with that, if you feel like you could use a bit of inspiration to unlock your untapped potential for breaking way from the 9-5, for getting into much better shape mentally and physically, and just truly living the life that you want for yourself, then feel free to schedule a consultation with me. If you have the drive and the willingness to live your life on your own terms, and become your best self, then I will happily work with you to put you on a more aligned trajectory.