You Perform Better When You Stop Trying So Hard
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Carl Lewis was the fastest man alive and he never ran at full speed. There’s a lesson in that for everything you’re doing right now.
There’s a story about Carl Lewis that changed how I think about effort.
Lewis won nine Olympic gold medals in sprinting. He was one of the fastest humans who ever lived. And if you watched his races, you’d notice something strange. At the 40-meter mark of a 100-meter sprint, he was almost always in last place or close to it.
A sprint coach spent a year studying this, trying to figure out how a guy who was trailing at the halfway point kept winning by the end. What he found was that Lewis wasn’t a slow starter. He was running the same way from start to finish. His breathing didn’t change. His form didn’t change. His face stayed relaxed the entire race.
Everyone else was doing the opposite. At the 50 and 60-meter mark, the other runners would start pushing for the finish. Their fists clenched, their jaws tightened. They were giving it everything they had, and that everything was slowing them down. The tension in their muscles from trying at 100% was working against the very speed they were chasing.
Lewis just stayed at 85%. Same form, same breathing, same relaxed face from the gun to the tape. And he breezed past all of them.
The sprint coach called it the 85% rule: if you tell most competitive athletes to run at 85% of their capacity, they’ll run faster than if you tell them to run at 100%. Because at 100%, the tension takes over. And tension makes you slower.
This isn’t just about running
I heard this story on a podcast a few years ago and it stuck with me because it put words to something I’d been feeling in my own work for a long time.
My best podcast episodes are never the ones I prepare the hardest for. The ones where I over-research, over-plan the questions, go in with a rigid structure in my head. Those feel tight. The conversation doesn’t breathe. I’m so focused on hitting every point that I miss the moments that would have made the episode great.
The best ones are the conversations where I know enough to be dangerous and then let the conversation go where it goes. Where I’m at about 85% of my preparation ceiling and the remaining 15% is room to be present, to follow a thread I didn’t expect, to listen instead of waiting for my turn to ask the next question on my list.
I think most people have a version of this. The presentation you rehearsed so many times that it came out stiff. The sales call where you followed the script so tightly that you missed the thing the client was telling you.
The harder you try, the more tense you get. And the tension crowds out the thing that makes you good.
The tension tax
There’s a book from the 1970s called The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey that gets at the same idea from a different direction. Gallwey coached tennis for years and noticed something he didn’t expect: his players improved most when he coached them less. The more instructions he gave, the worse they played. The more he stepped back and let them play, the better they got.
His explanation was that we operate with two selves. There’s the conscious self, the one that’s trying, analyzing, correcting, overthinking every move. And there’s the subconscious self, the one that knows how to play because it’s absorbed thousands of hours of practice.
When you try at 100%, the conscious self takes over. It grabs the wheel and starts micromanaging every movement. The subconscious self, the one that’s actually skilled, gets pushed to the back seat. You’re performing worse because the part of you that’s trying is getting in the way of the part of you that knows.
I think about this when I see founders who are so deep in every detail of their business that nothing moves without them. They’re trying at 100%. They’re in every meeting, reviewing every decision. And the business runs slower because of it. The tension of maximum involvement is choking the thing they built.
Where 85% changes things
The 85% rule isn’t about being lazy or doing less for the sake of doing less. It’s about recognizing that the last 15% of effort you’re adding is usually tension, not value.
In my own work, the difference is obvious when I look back. Some of the best content I’ve published had a looseness to it that my most polished work doesn’t have. The polished version was technically better. The loose version connected more. And the best conversations I’ve had, on the podcast or anywhere else, are the ones where I know my points but I’m not performing them. I’m present enough to respond to what’s happening instead of what I planned for. That 15% of unused preparation is what leaves room for the thing you couldn’t have scripted.
Alan Watts put it in a way that stuck with me: “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” It sounds like he’s talking about meditation. He’s talking about everything. The water clears when you stop stirring it. The last 15% of effort is just stirring.
Why 85% is harder than it sounds
You’d think this would be easy. Someone tells you to try less hard and get better results. Who wouldn’t take that deal?
But most people can’t do it, and the reason isn’t discipline. It’s that being the person who tries hardest has become part of how you see yourself. You’re the one who outworks everyone. You’re the one who stays latest and prepares most and grinds when other people coast. That story matters to you. In some cases, it’s the main story you tell about yourself.
Dropping to 85% means letting go of that. Even if the results are better at 85%, you’d miss the identity. You’d look around the room and not be the hardest worker anymore, and something about that feels like losing even if you’re winning by every other measure.
I’ve noticed this in myself. There are days where I know I’m over-preparing for something, where I can feel the diminishing returns setting in, and I keep going anyway. Not because the extra work is making the thing better. Because stopping feels like I’m not taking it seriously enough. The effort is for me, not for the outcome. And that’s worth being honest about.
The hard part
The reason this is difficult for ambitious people is that we’ve been trained to believe more effort always equals better results. The entire culture around success is built on maximum output. Grind harder. Give 110%. Nobody ever gets a standing ovation for saying “I gave it 85%.”
But Carl Lewis did. Nine gold medals at 85%. While everyone around him was clenching their way to second place, he stayed relaxed and won.
The question I keep asking myself now is simple: where in my life am I clenching? Where would 85% actually get me further than the 100% that’s leaving me tight and performing below what I’m capable of?
The answer, every time I check, is more places than I’d like to admit. I think yours will be too.
Thank you for reading,
Scott