The Both/And
Humans aren’t great at the middle ground.
We don’t do “something is better than nothing” well. We don’t do well with “imperfect consistency” over inconsistent “maximum perfect effort” — that unglamorous practice of showing up at 70%, again and again.
And the swing is almost always what kills us - our fitness aspirations, businesses ambition, diet that we couldn’t sustain.
I’ve been reading about polarity management. One of the examples that stood out to me: organizational performance — the tension between rewarding teamwork and rewarding individual effort.
You need both.
Reward only the team and your highest performers go quiet and quit. Individual creativity gets jammed. Some people coast. Reward only the individual and collaboration dies — everyone optimizing for themselves, the whole organism stops working.
The perfect solution?
You don’t pick a side. You hold both. Dial one up, dial the other down but you never abandon either pole that need each other to keep the whole thing going.
The both/and.
It shows up everywhere once you see it.
Some time ago I was a “January gym member” in my own business.
Hit sales hard at the start of the year, burned bright, stalled out, results vanished. Rinse and repeat. I thought I had a knowledge problem. I didn’t. I had a self-management problem — I kept treating effort like an ON/OFF light switch, bright or darkness, instead of a dial, slowly adjusting as the days went.
Now, on the days it feels unmanageable, instead of quitting, I ask myself,
What can I do today that’s not maximum effort but still moves me forward?
Not the perfect, maximized, heroic, over-caffeinated version. Not the version worth posting about. Just the version I can actually do today, and tomorrow, and the week after that.
The research on behavior change showed long time ago, starting at a pace you can maintain beats swinging from couch to CrossFit every time. But we keep swinging. Because the swing feels like commitment. It looks like “real effort”.
It just doesn’t last.
The pattern that doesn’t work: go hard, crash, kill the momentum, and usually the desire to ever try again.
The pattern that works: start with the intention to still be going for as long as it takes.
Adjust the dial. Don’t use the switch.
Where are you treating effort like an ON/OFF switch right now, and what would it look like to use the dial instead?