The 85% Rule

Or, the benefits of performing below your peak capacity

👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.

It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.

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Today, let’s talk about performance. “Do your best and forget about the rest” is good advice. It prevents you from the anxiety of getting good results, but that’s half of the problem. The other half of the problem is the continuous pressure while performing at full-throttle. As counterintuitive as it may sound, you don’t produce your best work when you give your 100%.

As a kid I had figured out that it didn’t make any difference whether I scored 85% or 95% in exams. I would be considered a “good student” as long as it was above 80%.

While my teachers believed I had potential to score 90–95%, I didn’t want to lose any sleep over it since, going beyond 80% had diminishing returns. I didn’t need that kind of pressure in my life. So I studied enough to score 80 in all my exams, and focussed on having a relaxed childhood. Interestingly, even though I didn’t give my best, I ended up getting 90–95% all the time.

This reminds me of a story Hugh Jackman tells in an interview about Carl Lewis, the athlete. Lewis, the 9 time Olympic gold medallist sprinter, who was known as the “master finisher,” was considered to be a slow starter.

In a 100-metre sprint, he was either last or second to last at the 40-metre mark, but breezed past others before reaching the 100-metre mark. Contrary to common sense, he did nothing special towards the end.

His breathing and form remained the same throughout the race. While other runners were trying to push harder at the end—clenching their fists, scrunching their faces—Carl Lewis stayed exactly the same, and won the race.

It came to be understood later that while others were performing at full-throttle, Carl Lewis was running at 85% from start to finish.

If you tell A-type athletes to run at their 85% capacity, they will run faster than if you tell them to run at 100%. Because it’s more about relaxation, form, and optimising the muscles the right way.

As counterintuitive and absurd as it may sound, you don’t do your best when you give your 100%. You do far better when you perform below your peak capacity, thereby giving you some breathing room to relax. It’s popularly known as the 85% Rule.

For example, while building a business, giving 100% would mean working 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is the equivalent of clenching your fist and scrunching your face all the time. This clearly isn’t sustainable. You’ll exhaust and get out of the game soon.

It’s counterintuitive to take your efforts down a notch, but that’s how you find a balance between relaxation and intensity. Relaxation is an essential element in order to do your best work. That’s why you see athletes dancing around with joy before a sprint while poking their tongue out. They are trying to achieve the right level of relaxation.

The goal is to enjoy the game, not to perform at full-throttle so that your head becomes a pressure cooker ready to explode.

For example, my weekly goal isn’t to produce the best essay I’ve ever written. That’s too big an expectation which sucks the joy out of the writing process. My goal is to write an essay that’s readable, and doesn’t waste my readers’ time. Every week I give myself some leeway so that it doesn’t become exhausting. This helps me relax and write better.

Similarly, your goal isn’t putting all the effort into a game until you reach exhaustion. It’s to perform at 85% capacity for a long time so that by the time most people are out of breath, you are still running like Carl Lewis or batting like Rahul Dravid. Performing at 85% not only takes the pressure off, it allows you to play the game for a long time. This gives you an unfair advantage over others.

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Interesting Finds

I.

According to Leo Tolstoy, there are two forces that influence our decisions. The first, free will, is what resides within us. This is what drives us to act as per our wishes.

You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall. Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an irrefutable demonstration of freedom.

The other force is necessity—which is external. Necessity strips us of our choices, and compels us to conform to the demands of external circumstances.

A sinking man who clutches at another and drowns him; or a hungry mother exhausted by feeding her baby, who steals some food; or a man trained to discipline who on duty, at the word of command, kills a defenceless man—seem less guilty, that is less free and more subject to the law of necessity, to one who knows the circumstances in which these people were placed, and more free to one who does not know that the man was himself drowning, that the mother was hungry, that the soldier was in the ranks, and so on.

But none of these forces exist in absolute form.

A person is never absolutely free to decide anything, and never completely bogged down by external circumstances. It’s a spectrum. Every decision of a person’s life exists within that spectrum. 

If we consider a man alone, apart from his relation to everything around him, each action of his seems to us free. But if we see his relation to anything around him, if we see his connection with anything whatever—with a man who speaks to him, a book he reads, the work on which he is engaged, even with the air he breathes or the light that falls on the things about him—we see that each of these circumstances has an influence on him and controls at least some side of his activity. And the more we perceive of these influences the more our conception of his freedom diminishes and the more our conception of the necessity that weighs on him increases.

The concept of an action without any element of freedom, solely due to the law of inevitability, is just as impossible as the conception of our complete freedom of action. Link

II.

Going with the herd is natural. Social proof is based on consensus or accepted wisdom. But accepted wisdom doesn’t give you an unfair advantage.

“Most of Union Square Ventures’ big wins have been in companies where we were the first institutional VC to talk to the company, or where we had way more conviction about the opportunity than other investors at the time of our investment,” writes Fred Wilson.

To have an unfair advantage, you to have to bet on things that are rejected by the consensus—invisible gems.

I like to tell the story of when I met Brian Armstrong, the founder of our portfolio company Coinbase in the summer of 2012. Paul Graham had asked me to do office hours at Y Combinator and so I came to their offices and spent four hours meeting sixteen companies in back to back 15 minute pitches. At the end of the four hours, I walked out of the conference room and Paul was waiting for me. He asked “which ones did you like best?” and I replied “I like Coinbase. I think Brian Armstrong is on to something big.” He was surprised and said, “You are the first VC to say that.” And I said, “Then it’s going to be huge. Please make sure we get the call when they want to raise.”

Invisible gems cannot be easily identified. You might get it wrong once in a while. As long as you are not betting everything, you are good. Thinking in bets before betting would be a good strategy. Link

III.

Don’t pay for something you’ll end up using only 5% of the time.

If you won’t use the spare bedroom 95% of the time, buy a smaller house. If the car would sit in your garage 95% of the time, don’t buy one. If you won’t go to the gym 95% of the time, no matter what deal you get, it’s not worth it.

This is perhaps the best investment advice to avoid a lot of bad spending. Bad spending is the number one reason for low savings.

If it sounds so obvious why do people still buy stuff they don’t use?

Convenience is one reason. Ego is the other. It’s convenient to plan a long drive in the middle of the night if you have car. Having a car also sends a social signal that you’ve made it. It’s also a relief that you are not insane not to buy a car since everybody around you has one.

A false sense of value is also at play. We’re taught that more is better. Also, “just in case” we need somebody visits on a weekend, it would be good to have a spare bedroom. Well, just in case I need to instantly visit my sister who lives in another country, I would like to have a personal jet as well.

Don’t buy what you don’t need with the money you don’t have. Link

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Talk to Me

As a kid, we had 1.5–2 hrs of daily load shedding in the city where I grew up. Electricity was cut-off everyday so as to meet the overall demand of the state.

There was a massive power outage in Mumbai last week—no electricity for ~12 hours. 4G had stopped as well. I spent the morning reading books, but the evening was magical. It reminded me of my childhood days when we used to sit by a candle or kerosene lamp and chat about the day with the elders. I was too young to take part in the conversations, so I did most of the listening.

Last week my partner and I did the same. We sat beside a candle. I recounted few incidents from my school and college days, while she shared some horror stories (which were apparently true).

By the time power came back it was 9pm, and it got me thinking. We all need some load shedding in our lives—at least once a week we should turn off our laptops, our phones, and the lights. Light a candle, sit beside it, and talk about anything and everything with our loved ones.

And don’t forget to send me tips, comments, questions, and your favourite hacks to boost performance: abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com. 🤜🤛

Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋