The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

by Jeff Haden

You don’t need to be a world-class athlete to (cliché alert) run a marathon, but if that is a goal you set, and you achieve that goal, you will then have accomplished something that 99.999 percent of the population never will. Because the average person can successfully train to run a marathon in less than a year . . . when you think of it that way, achieving the rank of “superior” is an excellent alternative to applying Gladwellian levels of effort. Besides that, you don’t want to try to become world-class in a variety of pursuits. It’s incredibly difficult to perform at an extremely high level in very different—and sometimes conflicting—pursuits.