Hitting Pause to Improve Performance

Performance is performance, it doesn’t matter if it’s sports, music, business, or some other field. The main principles of getting better at, and eventually doing something pretty well, are universal: work appropriately hard, recover adequately, repeat. This happens on the micro (day-to-day), meso (week-to-week/month-to-month), and macro (season-to-season/year-to-year) levels. Employ these principles for a long time and you’ll get pretty good at whatever you’re trying to do. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.

But as hard-charging Type-A strivers, pushing hard isn’t the problem—the real challenge is in forcing yourself to go easy, rest, and take breaks from time to time. Longtime shakeout reader and supporter Henrik Wist recently shared this short post from Viktor Nyblom about “pushing and pausing” in the context of business and it’s a worthwhile read.

“For two years straight, the tech department pushed harder and harder,” he writes. “No time to catch their breath. No time to celebrate wins. Just constant push. At first, the tempo seemed fine. Features were being shipped and the few partners we had were happy. But as more partners where onboarded, cracks started to appear…Within three months, they lost 25% of their engineering team, which in turn made all projects get seriously delayed. The very thing that made them successful – their ability to ship features quickly – had become their downfall. All because they failed to pause to take a breath.”