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| − | Imagine you’re practicing pole-vaulting, getting ready for a big competition. You need to improve your vault by a couple inches if you’re going to have a chance of winning. How would you decide how high to set the bar to get the best practice? If you set it too high, it’ll seem unrealistic for you to clear, or you’ll get discouraged because it’s too hard. But if you set it too low, you won’t make any progress in your vaults.
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| − | As you might have guessed, there’s a golden mean: you can set the bar just above your personal best. That way the challenge calls forth your best efforts, and your body will give you a boost of adrenaline to help you achieve your goal. Once you have a new personal best, you practice it until it becomes the norm; and then you raise the bar again.
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| − | What would you think, by contrast, of a pole-vaulter who not only never raised the bar, but never even practiced with a bar, instead just vaulting each time onto the mats? It’s inconceivable! Without a bar to clear, there’s no way to strive, improve, or be shaped by practice.
The bar is what makes pole-vaulting an Olympic sport.
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| − | The same ideas apply to your way of working. When you set out to work, do you set a bar for yourself, so that you have something to strive for? If not, you’re in for a great discovery. When you learn to set small, challenging goals for yourself in your work, you’ll turn any task into a sport — an opportunity for self-mastery.
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| − | Imagine you’re a sales clerk working in a clothing store. Your boss was recently reading some Yelp! reviews and noticed that the store’s ratings kept getting dinged because the sales clerks (including you!) are sullen. Your boss tells you that you need to work on being more cheerful when greeting customers. How would you respond to this advice?
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| − | If you’re like most people, your first response might be, “But this is just the way I am!” In psychology, this is called having a fixed mindset, because you consider your personality to be fixed in a certain way. When you have a fixed mindset, trying to change can seem strange, futile, and inauthentic.
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| − | The opposite response is to have a growth mindset, that is, to recognize that you can change. With this way of thinking, you would welcome your boss’s suggestion to work on cheerfulness and start thinking of how to set goals for your growth. You would see cheerfulness as something to practice by raising the bar of your current performance. This might mean engaging customers sooner when they enter the store, smiling at and making eye contact with them before saying anything, or waiting until you fully understand their questions before starting to answer. If you were to start working toward just one of these goals, the behavior would become a habit with practice, and you would grow in cheerfulness.
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| − | The same process applies to any kind of work. Remember that the brain is the organ that is most responsive to our behavior. When we challenge ourselves — in sports, work, or any part of our life — the brain strengthens and prunes synapses to make that action easier the next time. If you learn to set the right challenges, you’ll find that those challenges become easier and more enjoyable.
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| − | When you start setting challenges in your work, you’ll quickly discover that there are a couple of ways to do this. The one that usually comes to mind first is to challenge yourself to get more done in less time. If you normally write one page an hour, you might challenge yourself to write two; if you read 200 words a minute, you might challenge yourself to read 300.
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| − | Challenging yourself to work faster, however, can backfire. It is difficult to challenge yourself well by aiming to do more, because work is unpredictable. How much you actually get done often depends on factors outside of your control: you might be interrupted with something more important, or an aspect of the work might be more difficult than you had anticipated.
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| − | The best strategy for growing in your capacity to work is to challenge yourself to improve the quality of your work. This allows you to keep the focus of your challenge on the way you are working, rather than on the outcome or result of your work.
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| − | Since the way you work is entirely within your control, it’s easier to shape by setting challenges. Aiming to work according to ideals — for example, with greater order, intensity, or constancy — depends only on how you approach a task, so it’s always attainable. Over time, these ways of acting will become habitual for you; in the end, you’ll actually get more done, because you’ll be working so well. When you aim to increase the quality of your work, you’ll end up increasing the output as a consequence.
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| − | You can grow in any way you choose; all you need to do is set a challenge when you set out to work. Every hour of work can then become a time of stretching and growing. Even if the challenge you set is a small one, the habit of challenging yourself in an hour of work can be multiplied hour by hour, day by day. Just learning to pause and set a challenge before starting to work can set you on a trajectory of unlimited growth.
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