Last year I bought a strength training program from a Canadian bodybuilder named Jeff, and it kind of made me better at everything.

The program was designed for people who don’t have much time to train – busy people cramming 35-minute workouts into lunch breaks. Because you only have time for one or two working sets per exercise, you have to make each set really good. The usual effort won’t do for these precious few sets – each one has to be high quality and high intensity.

High intensity, in a strength training context, means you do enough repetitions that you’re flirting with muscle failure — the point where your muscles physically cannot move the weight another inch.

The author insists that people almost always overestimate how close their normal effort gets them to this max-out point. You might feel like you would fail on the next rep, but if you test that assumption by continuing anyway, you find you can actually do two, three, even four more before you really hit the wall.

I started focusing on these extra reps as the whole point of the workout, and immediately started getting better results than I had in all my years of gym-going.

Those last few reps are the money makers — the best return for your effort you’re going to get, but many people don’t even know they’re possible. My usual stopping point felt like just about the end of the road, but it was actually the beginning of a hidden, hyper-rewarding territory where exceptional results happen.

This discovery made me wonder how often life works like that – where giving an extra 10-15% can pay off as much as the entire rest of the effort – and how often you have no idea. Imagine you could stay an extra half-hour at work and your boss would start paying you ten times your usual rate, but you didn’t know that was even a thing until you were almost retired.

Now I do all my sets like that. I’m way stronger and I no longer have to prod myself to get to the gym, because it’s so much more rewarding than it used to be. Adding the extra work makes the whole thing easier, because the extra rewards climb so fast at that point compared to the extra effort.

I’d previously had a similar breakthrough with meditation, because of a simple instruction from a teacher. She said “When you have the urge to get up and end your session, that’s a cue to stay with it a bit longer. When the urge comes back, maybe get up then. Or maybe stay a bit longer again.”

This is another example of hidden territory, just a little further on, with lots to gain from it. I was now staying present with the small discomforts and impulses that normally chased me off the cushion and stopped my progress. By staying at least a little longer, my practice improved for good, and I gained a reliable way to keep improving.  

At the time, I didn’t yet see the general principle: always be curious about what’s just beyond your usual stopping point. Doing more often makes things easier, not harder.

There must be many situations like that, where you’re getting ripped off because you’re stopping in the wrong place. For whatever reason, you learned to get yourself to a certain point, and that point comes to feel like a stop sign: time to pat yourself on the back and go home. You get what you get out of the endeavor, and it seems like that’s it for you.

However, your usual standard is only where you’ve happened to settle for now, and that standard may be working against you. You might be only a few “reps,” or whatever effort-units, from a massive upswing in payoff. But how would you know?

The only way to know whether your usual standards are serving you is to surpass them on a regular basis and see what happens. And each of us has our accustomed standards for everything: how much sleep is enough, how much screen time is okay, how much effort at work to put in, how proactive to be in your friendships, how much or little to eat, how much news to consume, how disciplined to be with household order and cleanliness.

We’ve all settled somewhere on each of these questions and countless others, probably out of inertia rather than principle. It’s unlikely our standards have randomly landed in their respective sweet spots. For each standard you’ve adopted, there might be a significant spike in the payoff not too far beyond it. (Or perhaps you’re doing too much for little gain.)

Whenever I play around with standards, I often discover a better one. If those extra reps have utterly changed my fitness experience, maybe getting to my desk at 7:30 instead of 8:30 will utterly change my at-work experience (it has).

When you push past the usual stopping point and life gets immediately better, you now have a new standard – not just for how much effort is enough, but for the outcomes you expect.

The real paradigm-shifting moment is when you discover that your new standard, both for your effort and your results, is just someone else’s minimum standard. What is “extra” effort to you might be considered totally necessary to others, and what’s an exceptional result to you might be the minimum they’d accept.

That might be why some people do so much better in a given endeavor. It can seem like people getting wildly better results are built differently, or enjoy advantages that are unattainable to you. That might be true, but are you really maxing out your own advantages? It’s easy to attribute someone else’s success to luck, nepotism, or natural talent, when the most likely explanation is that they’re doing something you’re not.  

In other words, another person’s standards might be more conducive to living your values than yours currently are, and maybe you can make them your standards.

All I’ve really done at the gym is discover what the people who are stronger than me discovered years ago. Starting earlier at work, and ditching online distractions, is only revealing what more successful entrepreneurs already know.

The great thing is that standards probably account for more than anything, and they are movable. But you do have to experience a new standard to know if it’s better. Someone urging you to “go the extra mile”, “train hard”, or “be at your desk bright and early — that won’t show you what’s waiting for you across the line. You have to step into the new territory yourself to understand what life there can be like.

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There’s still time for a big win this spring

If you want to explore some new territory, there are a few days left to join the One Big Win group starting later this month.

Following a simple framework, each person selects a major personal win they want to achieve, then makes it happen over eight weeks in small, focused chunks of work called Blocks.

You can do your project along with me and the rest of the cohort, or you can choose your own start date. Registration closes soon.

[Learn how One Big Win works]

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Running photo by Filip Mroz