Especially when you are looking for one.

And it always sounds good to you.

In fact, with the right dose of “facts” and a piece of paper illustrating your position, you can justify just about anything.

All of your excuses make sense.

You can justify:

• that you being a jerk was just because you didn’t have enough sleep last night
• that you were going to return my call but got too busy with other emergencies
• that you were going to follow-up with more information but got sidetracked
• that your talking over me doesn’t mean you don’t take my time and opinions seriously
• that you not following through on your promises doesn’t mean you’re lacking discipline

It’s legitimate.  You can justify each of these.

And as long as you are only selling to yourself, you should have no problem closing the deal.

Your excuses are golden.

But if you need something from me (or your prospects), your excuses might not work.

And that’s not necessarily fair to you.

You might really have a perfectly good explanation.

You might be able to explain to me that it was all my misunderstanding.

The problem is that I lump all these excuses together into the “tired of hearing them” category.

And so does everyone around you.

Your manager.  Your co-workers.  Your clients.

We all smile and politely say things like “no worries” and “that’s OK”.

But really.

You should be worried and it’s not OK.

Your success at creating excuses is robbing you of the success you really want for you.

So.

Stop.

It’s really that simple.

Success (always) comes to those standing closest to the edge of explosion.

You just can’t help it.  

If you are close to where huge opportunity explodes, you get caught up in the inferno of massive mind-blowing success.

It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, what your job title might be, or how much education you have.

Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what you think of as success.

If you are standing next to opportunity when it explodes you’ll be a part of something so special and amazing that you’re likely to never be the same ever again.

And in all the best of ways.

Part timing.  Part patience.  Part preparation.

Getting to the edge of explosion is no easy task.

(Staying there can be even harder.)

And it’s no wonder.

There’s nothing you can do to put yourself at the edge of explosion…

Nothing.

You can’t buy your way there.  You can’t educate your way there.

You can’t bully, banter, or barter your way there.

It requires something more.

It requires you to “be”…

And that’s not a secret formula or set of “get rich quick” steps that you can easily follow.

It requires doing, yes.  But doing as the result of who you are.  Not doing to define who you should be.

You do because you are.

Not to be.

It’s a fundamental quality of highly effective people, companies, and ideas.

They focus on:

• Being amazing – not just doing amazing things…
• Being disciplined – not just doing disciplined things…
• Being giving – not just giving as an activity…
• Being extreme – not just doing extreme things…

And “being” takes all the hard work out of figuring out what to do.  And that is most of the battle around being truly effective.

So, if being at the edge of explosion is where you’ll find yourself most effective, why aren’t more of us working to put ourselves there?

Why aren’t we focusing on being “edgy”?

1. “Doing” looks about the same

For a lot of the time, “doing” and “being” look a lot alike.  In fact, “doing” actually looks a heck of a lot more productive.

The classic example of this is timing when we leave the office to be a few minutes after the boss.  Ever catch yourself doing that?  We don’t need to be at the office.  We aren’t doing anything productive.  But hanging around makes us look like highly productive people.

Sometimes we even fool ourselves into thinking that we really need to be there doing that.

It’s easier to do than be.

It’s easier to appear being productive than rejecting the social pressure to “hang out”.

It takes emotional guts.

And that quality, frankly, is a rarity among pretenders.

What you really start to notice is that the more audacious and amazing you set your goals, the less you need to do, the more you need to be, and the wider the gap really is between each of those.

2. Fear and pain distract us

Time and money aren’t the big things in life.

It’s pain and fear and loss that stop us from finding the edge of explosion.

We fear failure.  We fear rejection.  We fear being exposed.

And that fear distracts us from being an amazing person.

And not just fear, it’s pain.

It’s the pain of:

• Past regrets
• Being transparent
• Attempting to care
• Exhaustion
• Having discipline

It’s hurts us.  We hurt.  And we flinch.

And in that moment, in spite of our logic, our reasons, our explanations, we begin to move away from the edge of explosion.

Our desire for comfort, for relief, for the moment of pain to be gone robs us of our will to achieve outrageous success.

3. It’s lonely (and we want validation)

It’s lonely at the top.  It’s lonely all by yourself.  It’s lonely when logic, facts, and social pressures position themselves against the dreams you want to create for yourself.

The crowd is long gone.  The applauding is over.  The passion of the moment has passed.

You are left with your will to persist.

That is all.

And the truth is that what you really want is to feel like where you headed is the place where you really want to be.  You crave that validation.

You can deal with the pain and the fear and the loss as long there is a someone cheering you on.

And so when the crowd turns and heads toward comfort, away from the edge of outrageous success, every part of our being demands that we follow.

Sometimes it’s even our closest friends and family who lead us away from the edge.

A mentor.  A minister.  A mission.

And, so, step by step we back away from everything that we could do and become the person that everyone around us thinks that we should be.

We step back from the edge of explosion.

Time to be “Edgy”.

Maybe it’s time to focus on something different.

Maybe the old mantras of strategy and process and critique are less important than you taking responsibility for being the type of person that is ready and willing and expecting to explode when an opportunity appears.

Maybe you need to be at the edge of explosion.

Everything you are will put you at the edge of explosion.

And when that explosion of opportunity happens, you’ll be the best prepared to realize amazing success.

Let’s face it.  We love to be illogically irrational.

In spite of our experience, talents, and ability to perform at high levels, we seem to be unable to escape our penchant for making bad decisions.  And it’s these choices that cost us success.

(I have really begun to see this happening more and more)

We have a generation of great sales people making bad decisions.

Horrible decisions.

These decisions negate our ability to be amazing.  To do amazing things.

No matter how much good you do, you seem to take four steps back every time you do one thing that is super amazing.

Here are two of the most popular bad decisions that we tend to make:

1. Using debt to leverage future high performance

Stop screwing up your personal finances.  It affects your ability to sell.

That old “buy a Cadillac” your first day on the job so you are motivated to work extra hard to pay off the debt, is for the birds.  Worse.  It’s a self limiting choice.

You can’t make the right selling decisions when you have to “eat” right now.  You can’t wait to put in the effort that is required when all you are thinking about is paying off credit card bills that are three months behind.

Debt is death…

It’s not just physical and mental health that you need to maintain.  You need to make sure you are flexible enough to make the right decisions. You need to stop surviving and start planning an outrageous future.  (Love the article my partner wrote about this.)

2. Choosing opportunities based on starting salary

We love to make our decisions based on the “guaranteed earnings”.  It’s not just for athletes anymore.  It’s the hottest rage for sales execs.

We work for bad companies just because they manage to help feed our spending addiction.  Instead of looking at “opportunity”, we tend to look at “money right now”.

And that just means that you lose out on the best deals.

In the spectrum of risk and reward, you always make the most money when you take on the risk of delivering results.  You might also find yourself accomplishing some things you didn’t know were possible previously.  All because  you stop letting the things like your opening paycheck determine what you do.

It’s a bad decision.

Think. Dream. Succeed.

Stop thinking that what you do outside of nine-to-five doesn’t matter.

It does.

No amount of sales training or coaching can undo long-term bad decisions you make while being irrational.

It’s something you are going to have to start fixing right not.

Especially if you really want to accomplish the impossible.

You won’t be successful overnight. (Unless it’s 2,745 overnights later)

Certainly you’re smart enough and talented enough to get it right the first time.  And with the right amount of luck, you might just make it happen.

The odds aren’t in your favor though.

More than not, you’ll try really hard and maybe even “want it” really bad and still end up on the losing end of the equation.

It’s no wonder that being successful is the subject of countless books, articles, and self-help seminars.  It’s hard to do.  And yet, in spite of all the training around writing the perfect business plan or how to generate the most profitable sales, we seem to lack interest in most guaranteed way to realized outrageous success:

Continuous Progress.

The concept is not ground-breaking in originality and certainly not trendy enough to be a part of anything in Harvard Business Review.  But it’s exactly the formula you need to realize your dreams. Let me be clear about this:

The only thing standing between you and outrageous success is continuous progress.

Here’s why you need to focus on it:

1. Time clarifies perspective

You’re biased.  Could be all your experiences to date or what you are going through right now.  Believe it or not, the last 24 hours of your life have a lot to do with how you feel about your goals.  Your potential.  Your stamina.  The guts you need to summon to get past the pain to become a success.  It all changes pretty quickly.

A day from now, what you know and how you feel will be completely different.  By making progress every day regardless of how you feel, you learn to look past the pain and fear of the moment and just “take another step”.  Over time you get a better perspective.  You realize that your emotions are less important than you doing something.

2. Iteration builds momentum

Getting things done fuels your sense of purpose.  And that sense of purpose and self worth is what powers your ability to accelerate through the obstacles and toward your goal.

Learning through the journey is the real destination.  By leveraging small (but continuous) progress, you iterate through a series of meaningful steps toward what would otherwise be an unattainable goal.

3. Practice compensates for failure

You’re not going to get it all right at first.  Success isn’t a day in time and neither is failure.  Failure is just another practice round.  And that’s not just me blowing hot air at you.

We don’t think our 5 year old toddler is a failure when he can’t play Mozart’s Symphony #41 in C Major the first time they try.  For some reason we understand that it takes thousands of hours of deliberate practice to play a concert level concerto.  But then we get frustrated when we can’t master our wildest dreams in a single six week spurt.

Practice is the secret.

4. Movement trumps lurching

Stopping and starting causes massive amounts of damage — emotional and physical. Steady progress is the key to success.

Any of us can do an “all-nighter” now or then.  Maybe even do 50-60 straight hours on a single project.  But it comes at a cost.  You won’t ultimately find outrageous success.

Your behavior destroys anything depending on you.  Continuous progress is a kinder (more impactful) way to leverage the support of those around you as you try to move closer to your goal.

5. Passion builds investment

When you put enough into something, you work creatively to make sure you come out on the winning end of things.  When you jump into a quick “emotional fling”, you have so little invested that it’s easy to give up on yourself.

Your commitment to long-term success forces you to build a passionate investment in your success.  That investment is the antidote to the setbacks you can anticipate along the way.

6. Flexibility multiplies opportunity

Success pops up in all the wrong places.  Right?  You work outrageously hard; and just about the time you think you know what you want, success points you in a different direction.  Continuous progress allows you to adapt.

Instead of working non-stop through an obstacle that could redirect you to even bigger success, you are aware.  You are calm.  You are watching for the earliest signs of greatness.  And that flexibility leads you to find outrageous success.

7. Lasting yields differentiation

You’ve probably heard someone say that “showing up is half the battle”.  It’s more than that though.  It’s closer to 99% of the battle.  If you don’t have the guts (the stamina) to keep fighting for your goal, then you’ll ultimately end up losing.  You can’t help it.

Continuous progress is the ultimate way to stand out from everyone else.  You’re still around when everyone else has given up.  When they are gasping for air, you are pumping your legs and pushing for the finish line.

Get Moving.

You don’t have to do it all today.

You have the rest of your life to realize outrageous success.

You just need to get started…

Ever find someone that always looks like he wins — no matter what he does?  You try and try (and try) and this guy seems to roll over and hit home runs.

No matter what he does (whenever he does it), that guy seems to end up in the winner’s circle.

Guess what?  You can do that too…

With a few small changes, you can be that guy.  You just need to start looking at the world a little differently.

Let’s Start at the Beginning.

Here’s a reality of life:

You will always fail before you succeed…

That’s why you cried before you could talk.  You stumbled and fell before you could run.  You went to grade school before high school.  And you fell off your bicycle before you learned to “pop a wheelie”.

Right?  Life was a process back then.  Your whole life was about turning defeat into success.  That’s all you knew how to do.  And you were really good at it.

It was over time that you started to think about avoiding defeat at all costs.

But Then you Noticed Something.

The more you avoided defeat, the more success seemed to be even farther away.

You lied to yourself to soften the blow.  You started blaming others to shift the guilt.

You stopped being risky, brave, courageous, or bold.  You stopped taking chances, because chances mean room for defeat.

The more you tried not to fail, the more you found yourself headed that direction.

You Can Change All Off That.

And you can change it right now.

It’s just a different perspective.  A few of them, in fact.  You don’t need a better degree from a better college or a new job with a different boss.

You need to take everything you have ever learned from defeat and turn it into success.

And here are the top 13 ways to do that:

1. Ask for help — You are so close to the action that you are probably an unreliable (and unemotional) resource for yourself.  Ask someone else their opinion.  Advice is free.  Can’t hurt to ask.
2. Admit that it’s a failure — Stop the mental paralysis around convincing yourself that you might not have “really” failed.  You did.  It stinks.  Let the healing begin.
3. Try to fail fast — Do a lot of rapid activity fast.  Plan to fail and bounce down the paths where you end up being successful.  As long as you’re flexible, you’ll find yourself winning.
4. Use a different angle – What you last did, did not work.  Don’t give up your goal.  Try a different process.  Look at the situation from a different angle, and then execute a different plan to get you there.
5. Be brutally honest – You did this.  No one else.  If someone has to “suck”, it’s you.  The good news is that you are the best person available to get yourself out of this mess. Stop selling yourself short.  You’re actually kind of a bad-ass.
6. Double-down your effort – It’s either what you did or how hard you did it.  Most of the time, it’s the latter one.  Do everything you were doing before just put in 5 times as much effort — literally.
7. Learn from your mistakes — There is something wrong here.  Maybe it’s the timing, the goal, reality, or just the scope of your vision.  Why did you fail in the past?  There’s something you can learn from that right now.
8. Throw a fit – Curse, swear, and get emotional about your success.  There is something cathartic about focusing your emotion around success.  It reminds you that you really “want it”.  It takes the sting out of defeat.
9. Shrug it off — Get over it.  Seriously.  And fast.  The longer you obsess over defeat is the longer you waste not being successful.  We all lose.  It happens.  Stop focusing on your fears and be thankful you are smart enough to fail in the first place
10. Go fight a ninja with nunchucks – Blow off some steam.  Do something crazy.  Let your mind clear.  Pursue another passion.  Be extreme.  It all reminds you why you want this success in the first place.
11. Create a task list — Start small.  Write down what success looks like and then work backwards from there.  Turn that list into chores that you put on a calendar and execute.
12. Write it all down – Your thoughts.  Your passions.  Your fears.  Write it all down.  That process allows you to be in control.  It’s no longer in your head.  It’s on paper.
13. Decide to smile — You are alive and you are a winner.  That’s something to smile about.  And if you follow the other 12 items on this list, you are about to be successful as well.  Why wouldn’t you be happy?

Success is Right Around the Corner.

It’s just behind that ugly monster called defeat…

And just a little in front of that dream you call “limitless possibility”.

It could be that next big sales deal or that partnership or promotion you’ve been working for — Are you ready to start being successful?

Because that’s the only way you’ll listen.

That’s the only way to get you out of your own way and on the path to extraordinary…

Here’s  a harsh reality.  Being edgy — living on the edge of outrageous opportunity hurts like hell at times. 

Especially when you first decide to get started and extend yourself.  When you step out and decide to live the impossible.

Success is gut-busting endeavor.  The hurt is what prepares you for success.

In 1930, the 23 year old Freddie Chapman led a British expedition to Greenland.  He experienced such ferocious cold that he lost all his finger and toe nails.  He got lost at sea and spent 20 hours in a kayak.  During one exploration he fell into a deep gash in a glacier and just barely saved himself by holding onto the handles of his dog sled – pulling himself hand over hand back to the top.  At the end of this exploration he was one of only 3 people who made it out alive.

Skip forward a decade.  Captain Chapman single-handedly thwarted the Japanese invasion into Malaysia.  For four years he led guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines.

In 1945, two years into his stay,  just as he ran completely out of supplies, all of his team members were lost to either gunfire or disease.  For the next 100 weeks, he suffered from malaria, dysentery, and skin-eating leeches.  He was captured by both Japanese forces and rogue Chinese bandits — and escaped from both.  He was unconscious for 17 days as he succumbed to pneumonia, jungle fever, and typhus.  He was wounded by a bomb and shot in the arm.  His boots wore out and he walked barefoot through the jungle.

He had destroyed 7 supply trains, 15 bridges, 40 tanks and armored vehicles, and hundreds of Japanese troops.

His training in Greenland a decade earlier gave him the training and guts to return to Britain with the nations highest award — a hero against all the odds.  He would later tutor Royal Prince Philip.

You can’t do amazing things until you understand how to deal with the pain.

Success hurts first.  It needs to.  That’s how being edgy works.

There is no one secret formula to doing amazing things – to achieving the impossible.  Timing, a lot of effort, and good old-fashion “luck” have a way of making what someone else has already done pretty hard to reproduce.

Which is why I have problems with a lot of the sales books I read.  They don’t tell the true story about what was the real cause of the success that happened.  Most of the time, it’s not a single, simple formula.  Like a giant game of Clue, you have to piece together a lot of different variables to make sense of what happened.  And if you do that right, usually you walk away with a couple of clues about how to do those couple of things right. A case study on what it takes to achieve the impossible.

Making big sales, running up the career ladder, being at the top of your class, winning the Tour de France 10 times — they are all possible.  You just need to know how.

Here are three clues that I have learned over the years:

1. Put in (massive) effort.

Big goals take massive effort.  Even small goals take big effort.  For some reason, we have decided that the 21st century is a place of “working smarter at all costs”.  We try to replace gut-busting, tired-as-heck effort with intellectual reasoning about project targeting and resource allocation.  There is nothing logical about working yourself to the bone to achieve the impossible.  So if you want to talk yourself out of it, it’s pretty easy.  Just don’t expect to achieve the impossible.

2. Always be different (in a big way).

Don’t try to compare yourself to the competition, your industry, or what the wonks say you should be doing.  Be different.  Lead.  Go the opposite direction.  As a matter of principle, you need to literally change course to polarize those around you.  Achieving the impossible starts with you being different.

3. Live with discipline.

You won’t conquer in a day (or two or three or four).  It will be the result of you practicing greatness for thousands of hours over many years of your life.  You can’t be sloppy and do that.  Discipline is demanded of you.  It keeps you headed toward your goal.  When you get tired and your body screams to give up, discipline keeps you doing the handful of things that you need to do to be successful.  Day after day.  Month after month.  Discipline is what separates you from your build-in mediocrity engine.

There are a lot of formulas that don’t work.  The days of selling vacuum cleaners door to door is over.  But these three clues seem to stand the test of time.

How you could you NOT achieve the impossible by putting in massive effort doing something different, and living with discipline?

I don’t think you can.

Try to prove me wrong.

We all want to believe that who we are matters. We desperately want to know that what we do makes a difference.

That’s not odd.  It’s the way that we are made.  Our brains are made to search for meaning —  to find self-worth.

Like footprints through the timeline of destiny, we like to look back and feel assured that us being there made the world a better place.

“What did we do?  How much money did we amass?  How many awards did we win? What lasting value did we contribute to history?”

It’s actually a lot easier than that.  Changing the future for those around you isn’t about mind-blowing  invention, legendary awards, or vested stock options.

It’s the small things that make a different.  It’s a lifetime of details expertly managed.

Here are a few (small) ways to make a (huge) difference:

1. Open the door for a stranger
2. Smile at those around you
3. Be a mentor
4. Say, “Thank You”
5. Assume the best in others
6. Fail gracefully
7. Learn from your mistakes
8. Try something new
9. Practice being vulnerable
10. Stop whining
11. Listen to your critics
12. Decide to be optimistic
13. Fear less
14. Get into financial shape
15. Ask more questions
16. Be kind
17. Donate time to charity
18. Read a new biography
19. Let yourself be inspired
20. Teach what you’ve learned
21. Do something outrageous
22. Lead someone
23. Give an opinion when it’s hard
24. Think for yourself
25. Pay off debt
26. Care about others
27. Put in more effort
28. Chose a side
29. Pay attention to the details
30. Ask for help
31. Pay more for quality
32. Be a friend
33. Tell the truth
34. Lend a hand
35. Do physical labor
36. Put in some exercise
37. Let past mistakes go
38. Brag on someone else
39. Decide not to get angry
40. Be invincible
41. Share more
42. Explore new ideas
43. Be more efficient with your time
44. Love someone
45. Be more effective with your talents
46. Stop playing politics
47. Have a dream
48. Meditate on your goals
49. Plan to be successful
50. Get up an hour earlier
51. Pursue your goals each day
52. Be an expert
53. Write down your thoughts
54. Make a list of tasks to get done
55. Stop explaining “why”
56. Apologize more
57. Live with honor
58. Decide to take action today
59. Stay mentally strong
60. Feed your inspiration
61. Practice getting back up
62. Put yourself in tough places
63. Avoid the crowd
64. Fight mediocrity
65. Cry when you hurt
66. Stop being passive aggressive
67. Laugh at life
68. Have a purpose to each day
69. Find answers to your questions
70. Go to bed tired
71. Don’t stop until you finish
72. Be accountable
73. Ask “what you can do better”
74. Be passionate about others
75. Work on your biggest weakness
76. Give a stranger flowers
77. Pay attention to the conversation
78. Replace “No” with “No Thanks”
79. Hold the elevator door
80. Appreciate differences
81. Let someone else get the attention
82. Compliment a great idea
83. Be less selfish
84. Listen with your eyes
85. Work on being  p-a-t-i-e-n-t
86. Ease someone else’s pain
87. Say what’s on your mind
88. Slow down (for a minute)
89. Demand brutal analysis of your actions
90. Have a big vision for those around you
91. Create what’s missing
92. Imagine the possibilities
93. Defend your friends
94. Stay in mental shape
95. Care enough to cry
96. Remember the good times
97. Write a kind note
98. Over look immaturity
99. Give away your best idea
100. Offer to help for free
101. Care less about “being right”
102. Stop being offended so easily
103. Have a plan
104. Schedule time to invest in others
105. Value your own time
106. Offer encouragement
107. Share a good example
108. Inspire others quietly
109. Shake hands while looking that guy in the eye
110. Offer to buy dinner or dessert
111. Make a call because “you’re thinking about them”
112. Don’t do anything halfway
113. Decide to learn from everyone
114. Welcome diverse perspectives
115. Do good things for the right reason
116. Shake off the straws (before they break your back)
117. Don’t go to bed angry
118. Get help for your head
119. Let life happen around you
120. Deliberately invest in healing
121. Enjoy others’ success
122. Make a big deal of small wins
123. Decide if caring is more important that winning
124. Share your failures unblemished
125. Put in the effort you expect of others
126. Anticipate  the success of others
127. Ask others to “pay it forward”

Bonus 128.  – Be a better “you”…

It’s not all you doing something.

“It’s you being.”

You can only “do” so much.  But you can “be” a difference 1,000 times today.  And just imagine if you did that every day for the next year?  You might effect a million different outcomes for the better.

Now think about that 30 years from now.

“What would happen if we didn’t waste the next 30 million small opportunities to make a difference?”

How much could we do?  How many lives could we change?

Are you ready to get started?

There is no Easy Street.

Sure, growing up in Northern Virginia there was an actual road off Route 1 called Easy St. close to where I used to get my hair cut once a month. (Ironically — it was in the bad part of town.)

There is no easy way to do amazing things. If it’s easy to do then it can’t really be amazing. Those two things are as different as night and day.

“Easy” is the reward of mediocrity.

Having it easy is the reward you get for high-performance mediocrity. “Grade A” average showmanship.

It’s should scare you when you think you are doing something amazing and find it easy.  Outrageous success is the result of gut-busting, mind-blowing, patience-pushing effort…

You can’t get it any other way.

Think about running. (By now you know that I love running).

You can run a few miles here or there — casual “stay in shape” stuff. Or you can decide to run a 5K. With the 5K, you suddenly have peer pressure. People running beside you, ahead of you. People trying to beat you.

Once you master the 5K, there’s the 10K — twice as far, twice as hard. And then there’s the half-marathon. Tons more time on your feet, but still not as bad as a marathon.

The marathon is like overtime at the office.  Even if you’re good, it’s 3-4 hours of torture. You need to refuel along the way — stop for a bathroom break perhaps. It’s a whole strategy thing.

Still more challenging is an Ironman race, where you have 50 miles between you and the finish line.  It’s brutal.  And when you master one of those, you can try a Super Ironman — 100+ miles of pavement pounding. It’s a 24 hour dedication to peak physical performance.

If someone were to pay you $5 million dollars to run a Super Ironman right now, most of you would give it serious thought. You would spend a few minutes considering whether the deal was legit and whether you thought you had the “guts” to make it to the prize — that $5 million check.

In your mind, it’s a lot of of effort, but it appears possible. Somehow, someway you could pull it off. A lot of people might not be able to do it, but you could — especially for $5 million.

After all, almost 40,000 will people run the Boston Marathon this coming year.  This is just a little longer.

Let’s take it up a notch.

How about a running event like this one: The 14th Annual Self-Transcendence 3,100-Mile Race.

A race that only 11 people will run this year.

3,1000 miles in 52 days or less.

More specifically — 5,649 laps of a .5488-mile loop around the Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School in Jamaica, Queens in New York City.

52 days of the worst torture the human body could experience.  An experience only 25 people have ever finished in the history of the race.

This race is the perfect illustration for the effort and dedication that it takes to do amazing things. It’s not a lot. It’s a quantity so big you can’t even imagine it right now.

Could you run 2.5 marathons every day for the next 52 days?

It’s a lesson in why we break. We lose our passion. We just decide that we don’t have the will, the heart, the soul to make it to the finish line.

The same heart that could take you 100 miles, is the same heart that could lead you to the finish line 3000+ miles away. You haven’t changed (besides dropping a few calories along the way). The only thing that is different is the effort that you are willing to put towards your success.

And that realization is inspiring.

Because it means that you can accomplish anything as long as you are willing to put in the effort.  As long as you believe success is that important.

So, here’s the real question: what do you think is important?

Are you willing to put in the effort?

Being successful all comes down to doing one thing really well.

And that one thing is: PRACTICE.

And not just the type of practice where you turn on the egg timer and sit down at the piano to grind through your drills until you hear the ding (which brings me back to the 10th grade).

Growing up as the second child of five, I was raised by parents who understood the art of practice and relentlessly demanded it.  Each of us five children were required to practice the piano at least one hour per day (starting from the age of five) and that increased to two hours when we were older and our lessons became more taxing.  As well, we were required to read at least one hour per day — every day.  Summer or not.  And to make sure we weren’t fooling around, we had to report on the topic that we read in the book.  And fiction wasn’t an option.  We read biographies or “practical” works.  At twelve or thirteen I can remember reading through my Dad’s law books.

But back to music.  My mom was smart.  She did not allow any one person to monopolize the piano for longer than 30 minutes.  You signed up for a time slot and the schedule was firm.  During the summer, we got ourselves out of bed at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning to get practice time out of the way so that we could go run our lawn mowing business.

And it wasn’t just an hour for the piano.  It was an hour for each instrument that we played.  Each of us played several.  I played the euphonium (think smaller, more eloquent tuba) and trombone as well.  Why the euphonium?  Because you had never heard about it before.    So in the basement I sat and practiced.  Hours at a time.  Until my lips would go numb and I would have to stop for a few minutes.  And the practice paid off.  I became an accomplished national prep school competitor.

But it wasn’t enough.  I can remember the feeling of wanting more.  Of this passion for outrageous success boiling under the surface.  See right around the time that I was winning these awards for brass, my older brother was equally destroying the piano music scene.  It was almost unfair how good he was.  As a teenager, he was writing his own music.  And right about this time, I was done with the piano.  I just decided to move on. And so my parents decided that I could stop taking lessons — stop practicing altogether.  That was the end of 10th grade.

I got an hour back of my life every day.  No more practicing.  No demands on my time.

But a strange thing happened that 11th grade year.  I found myself returning to the piano from time to time.  Really hearing the keys as they touched the piano cords.  Feeling the pressure of the pads as my fingers trickled over the notes.  And then it hit me.  I wanted back in.  I wanted to create art — not just play because I had to.

And so I brought it up in casual conversation to my mother.  When we had a few minutes I mentioned to her that I was thinking about starting up my piano lessons again and competing in the state classical music competition the following year.

To which my mother infamously replied, “Oh.  That’s OK.  You’re good at brass.  Let your brother be good at that…” <silence>

“You’re not good enough” — she never said it, but that’s what I heard.  And at that moment, I knew that I wanted to prove her wrong more than anything else in the world.  And that’s where I learned my most powerful lesson about the art of deliberate practice.  About practicing my way to outrageous success.

It started with choosing the right song.  I had to be smart about this.  I wasn’t the most technical artist.  I needed something that was emotionally moving.  So I enlisted the help of my school music teacher, Mr. Hodges.  After pitching the idea to him he came back with a quick answer, “How about Rachmaninoff’ Opus 3, Number 2.” It was his most famous work.

And so I listened to it.  “OK.  Not that hard,” I thought.

And then he told me the back story.  According to history, Rachmaninoff dedicated this piece to a girlfriend who died before they could find lasting love.   Perhaps the story was a complete legend, but it was enough for me.  I was hooked.  I wanted to win the state classical music competition with this song.

And so I began the first of hundreds of hours of deliberate practice.  My goal was to play this piece perfectly.  I wanted to win.

So, I came home from school and practiced for hours.  On the weekends.  In the evenings.  I started to learn the notes.

Ten fingers in C# Minor.  And I was using each one of them.

Once I learned the notes, I learned to feel the notes.  The way you leave your fingers on the edge of the keys for a half second as the music reverberates off the sound board.  The silky smooth transition between the racing scales in the second movement.  The way to pause ever so slightly before the fastest parts to pull the listener into the experience with me.

And hundreds of hours of deliberate practice later, I heard my name being called to take the stage for the regional classical music competition.  Before I sat down I noted the song I would be playing and a 5-second mention of the history of the piece.  And then I sat down.

And I did what I had put hundreds of hours practicing to do.  I felt the music.  The tone.  The shape.  The sounds.  And it moved me.

It moved the judges too.  Once I finished and stood up, I noticed that three of the judges had tears in their eyes.  I found out an hour or two later that I had won.

At the moment, the full impact of success did not hit me.  It was some time later that I was able to really understand what I had actually done.  It took me even longer to make the connection between what was an outrageous success for me and the practicing that made it a reality.

Yes.  It was passion and heart and will.  But most importantly it was practice.

As I look back, I can see some of the lessons that I learned.  And it’s a reminder of the price of outrageous success.

Practice:

1. It was really hard.
2. It required my time.
3. It required that I care.
4. It made me focus on my weaknesses.

And there are a million other lessons that I am still learning.  But here is the question that I ask myself every day:

“What am I practicing to be…  And will it be enough to earn me outrageous success?”

By the way, here’s the song that I played:

What are you practicing right now?