Since the beginning of this newsletter way back in early 2020 it has been a personal mission to encourage high performers to stay the course - especially when things get difficult, when emotions are not stable, when progress feels lost, when you don’t know what to do next.

Your trajectory is rarely ruined by a single catastrophic mistake. More often, it is silently altered by the subtle gravitational drag of the people around you.

“You’re never going to feel ready to jump off this board. At some point, we’ve got to stop thinking and just move. You need your hands and your feet right now more than your head and your heart.”

What if true courage is simply the willingness to drop the act?

Frameworks are the invisible architecture that gives shape to the processes leading to our desired outcomes. And here is the fascinating thing about them: They impose their influence regardless of whether you are aware of their existence or not.

Winston Churchill said, “Success is the ability to move from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” 

Few have been as successful as Mike Brown.

The research suggests sustained focus occurs when a task sits just 4% beyond your current comfort zone.

It needs to be hard enough to demand total cognitive presence, but familiar enough that your skills can absorb the strain. 

Your capacity to encourage the discouraged is directly proportionate to how you walked through discouraging times in your own life. 

Walk through it well in order to build capacity for someone who needs you later.

It’s the frustrating plateau where you find yourself asking, “I’m doing the work. Why am I not seeing the results?”