If you want to be triumphant in any endeavor in life, you need a solid trinity. Here are the three pillars of success.
3 Pillars of Success:
(1) Strength
Strength is your capacity for the amount you can handle at any one time.
In the gym, strength refers to muscle capacity, and is measured by how much weight you can move: push, pull, squat, lift, or carry.
Outside the gym, strength refers to your capacity for how many projects or clients you can take on.
Both in and out of the gym, strength isn’t just physical.
Strength can also refer to mindset, focus, commitment, discipline, and resilience.
You build strength by overloading the muscle and then letting it recover. It’s in the recovery phase that your muscles get stronger.
(2) Skills
Skills is different from strength. Skills is about how you move, how you hold, how you lift, how you do the doing.
Skills is about technique.
In the gym, skills refers to movements. A muscle-up or pull-up is a skill. Squatting and deadlifting are skills.
Some Skills Require Strength
Some skills require a certain amount of strength before you can learn them. For example, you can’t learn a bar muscle-up until you can do a certain number of pull-ups.
Skills Are a Pre-requisite to Sustainable Strength
At the same time, you’ll need a base level of skill to build strength — especially if you want to sustain that strength. If you don’t have good squat technique, you’ll reach a limit in how much weight you can squat.
Sometimes strength can compensate for a lack of skill or technique. For example, you might be able to deadlift with you back, or muscle your way over the bar.
In your work, you might be able to pull all-nighters to get things done. You might resort to using brute power or underhanded tactics to compensate for a lack of sales skills.
But this approach isn’t sustainable. Whether it’s in the gym or elsewhere, relying too long on compensations will result in burnout or injury. You’ll be exhausted.
The way to build skills and techniques is through repeated and consistent practice with feedback. The feedback is crucial; without it, you might mistake compensation patterns for skills.
(3) Support
Support is the foundation for skills and strength. Support can come from other people, systems, structures, and strategies.
The most obvious forms of support come from people.
People can
- help you build strength;
- teach you skills;
- can cheer you on;
- hold space for you while you struggle;
- offer compassion and empathy;
- bring humor and levity;
- take on some of the load.
We don’t have to carry it all alone.
Systems, structures, habits, routines, and rituals are also forms of support.
A system can be a structure of your daily routines and rituals, an automation system for your emails, or an approach to how you tackle your work.
Strategies are also a form of support. The right strategy is a guardrail that guides you through a sequence of actions.
Support is what gives us the foundation to develop skills and build strength.
The way you get support is by asking for help, and by creating better systems and structures to support you.
When something isn’t working, ask yourself which piece is missing. If you’re not sure, start with support. the right support person can help you see where the holes are.
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