Boost!

Boost! is a guide for becoming more productive at work by using the preparation and performance techniques that world-class athletes use to win gold medals.

It’s winter in 1971 and the author is in the Israeli military. He’s struggling with completing a 3,000-meter run in under 12 minutes as part of basic training. During every practice Bar-Eli is the slowest, ending up at the back of his team. But his motivation quickly changes after a threat of punishment from one of his superiors.

Michael focuses on his new goal of keeping up with those at the front of the pack. When it comes time for the actual race, he accomplishes the requirement to finish in under 12 minutes.

Because he had set a specific goal, the author was able to do something that he was previously unable to accomplish. One of the biggest reasons this works so well is because trying to “do your best” doesn’t give you anything concrete to measure your progress against.

When you define your goal well, you give yourself a standard to work toward. This makes it possible for you to track each step of your growth to make sure that you’ll achieve your goal when you need to.

This works especially well for long-term goals. The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, they say, and the same is true for your ambitions. Being specific with short-term goals that will lead up to achieving your long-term ones is a sure way to make sure that you accomplish what you set out to do.

The word innovation probably makes you think of business rather than sports. But it does have it’s place in competitive events. The history of it in athletics can teach us a lot about how to use it in other areas too. Just three years prior to the author’s experience with specific goals, another athlete was making history in the Olympics. Richard Douglas Fosbury was a high jumper whose unorthodox method would make him famous and win him a gold medal. Prior to the back-arching Fosbury Flop as it’s now known, high jumpers would leap frontward in the sport. Although everyone was skeptical about his new approach, they all ended up surprised when it worked so well and became so widely used. What we can learn from this experience is to look for counterintuitive solutions to problems. To easily utilize this tool, use the four-step pattern: Realize your problem Find an unexpected solution Make the idea better by repeatedly practicing it Share your innovation with the world Fosbury’s problem that led to his uncanny solution was that he struggled with the common frontward straddle roll that high…