If you want to reach peak performance, you have to find the limit. Finding the limit means stepping over the limit. Going too far, going too fast. It means taking a good idea to the extreme to learn just how far it’ll bend before it snaps.
In racing, the driver who can most consistently drive just beyond the limit — running the optimal seven degrees of slip — is most likely to win. The same applies in business.
When you continously seek out the limit, you’ll realize that it’s often much higher than you expected. Yes, you can make that screen even simpler than the bare-boned version you’re looking at. Yes, you can trust your employees much more than you imagined. Yes, you can launch without a billing system.
Once you train yourself to seek out the limit in all endeavors, you’ll get better and faster at correcting the inevitable oversteps, and hit that peak performance.
But if you never dare venture close to the limit, you’ll find that it’s shrinking all the time. There will be even more people you could possibly offend, even more bells that need whistling, ever more realities of the real world you cannot change.
Records are set by the people who said fuck your limits and found their own.
David wrote this on Dec 13 2011 There are 31 comments.
Sheldon Hearn 13 Dec 11
You can really feel this principle at work in weight training. As soon as you decide you’ve reached the maximum weight you can handle, you have.
phpguy 13 Dec 11
If you never push your limits, you don’t know what they are. Nothing new here except a name. Catchy as it is.
Tapan Karecha 13 Dec 11
This principle is [almost] universally applicable. I liked this statement in particular:
Fred Schechter 13 Dec 11
Just make sure there’s enough rubber on the tires for the last lap. (too bad ProstGP never finished their mechanical traction control!)
Jean Moniatte 13 Dec 11
Good post, would be even better without the usual slang DHH needs to use. It feels like you are trying to hard to sound “native” (which I am fucking not either).
KCrosby 13 Dec 11
It’s like William Blake said in his Proverbs of Hell – You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19361
ploogman 13 Dec 11
great post – very inspiring – and more meaningful coming from someone who has actually driven on a race track of course the f bomb is expected eventually and in this case works especially well to punctuate the post finally, wondered if you still like the MacBook Air as much as you did when you were first using it or if you switched to something else
Kathy Sierra 13 Dec 11
I just got this same lesson recently on my Icelandic horse. My trainer (also Icelandic) called it “finding the buck.” The notion is that breakthroughs for horse and human athletes will occur only when you have pushed through the edge. I spent years doing what most riders do - AVOID the buck - but by finding it, we have accomplished more than I was able to do in the previous year, and both my horse and I were like, “Who’s badass? WE are badass!”
Chris 13 Dec 11
Never a truer word spoken. Limits are only there for us to push, break and then respect.
DHH 13 Dec 11
Kathy, so true. It’s so easy to let yourself be held back by what you think is possible. I found that learning to race cars, especially at the local club level. So many drivers would see a fast time from someone they thought were really good, so that became the ceiling of “what’s possible” and they instinctively avoided trying to push beyond that.
Then you have a someone from the outside come in and drastically improve that time. They shattered the perceived limits and then all of the sudden everyone else starts going faster after that. The limit was all in the mind and because they weren’t testing it, they didn’t realize that it was artificial.
I remember reading something similar in maybe the Talent Code about how Iron Man and Super Iron Man contests popped up after someone completely shattered the belief of what the limit was for the human body.
DHH 13 Dec 11
ploogman, still absolutely love the air. My favorite computer and a great example of pushing and finding the limit. The first version shed the CD drive, was dramatically slimmer than anything else, and had only 1 USB port. Most of that stuff stuck, except they stepped back from going over the limit on the USB port count, and now it has too. But the ditched CD drive never can back (and I never missed it).
Alex Veldtman 13 Dec 11
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” ~ Henry Ford
Ryan Clark 13 Dec 11
Great article, but also I have to say I’m impressed with how quickly this has propagated across the web and Google’s results. I was curious about the “optimal seven degrees of slip” (I assume it’s something to do with ideal cornering conditions, but would like to know more), so I Googled it and the first few pages of results are all your article in different iterations. Not bad for a few hours after posting!
condor 13 Dec 11
The flipside to that advice is being responsible for when things break.
There’s a subtle difference between pushing yourself to get better, and pushing other people to see how much you can get away with.
Some people don’t see the difference (ex: the modern banking system).
Danny 13 Dec 11
Billing system be damned, get their credit card info on paper.
X 13 Dec 11
Excellent, and same in playing music. In school they taught us “if you are not making mistakes, then you are not improvising”. In reality it is only pushing the edge thar reveals new areas of expression. As above, so below – I am finding these this true in software design and all areas of life.
Cleetus 13 Dec 11
Nice thoughts on finding (and moving) the breaking point by the Canadian men’s olympic rowing coach Mike Spracklen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNA-JaCkvQg
Matt T. 13 Dec 11
A bunch of nonsense, eaten up because it was posted by DHH , which includes profanity for no reason except to be edgy.
Bravo!
Roland 13 Dec 11
I made an easy to understand visualization of your blog post:
http://i.imgur.com/wWJEj.png
ChrisS 13 Dec 11
David, right on the money. I’ve been waiting for one of your inspirational posts for a while now. Pushing limits is scary and I find my conservative nature takes over too often to implement what I really want and what I expect from those working with me and for me. Thanks for this post.
GeeIWonder 13 Dec 11
Mr Simon, what do you think?
‘We work our jobs. Collect our pay. Believe we’re driving down a highway when in fact we’re slip sliding away.’
Brad 13 Dec 11
“But if you never dare venture close to the limit, you’ll find that it’s shrinking all the time.” That’s super insightful. Great post, David.
Peter Cooper 13 Dec 11
Records are set by the people who said fuck your limits and found their own.
The last sentence says a lot (of good things) about the 37signals approach. I believe that DHH has given the argument about not working for long hours or sacrificing work/life balance before. Yet this post beautifully illustrates that the Signals share techniques that work for them right now and we must digest and interpret it so we can make our own judgments rather than accept everything as an edict.
EH 13 Dec 11
The Hedonism of Risk
Mat 14 Dec 11
I think it’s easy to stand up and shout “Fuck Limits”. It is a lot different to provide an environment where going too far, reaching a little too much, and failing isn’t catastrophic for the person doing the work.
Often, people don’t stretch to their limits because the risk is vastly greater than any reward. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that people act rationally to incentives. If you give them an incentive to go all out, and they trust you, they will kick ass. Without it, you have a catchy quote on a blog. The kudos go to the people that actively provide the workplaces that don’t punish those that try, rare as they might be.
Rudy Chou 14 Dec 11
Last sentence is great. Figure out how to use it, tell yourself, remind yourself daily that you need to strive and keep on pushing.
To never give up.
Sure, workplace succumb to politics and complacency by management who are risk averse.
Sometimes, you just have to keep pounding and knocking til you reach a limit. And a single outcome will occur.
You make changes or your denied changes. Either case, you have an answer.
alexpoell 14 Dec 11
@condor: Thanks for your remark!
“The flipside to that advice is being responsible for when things break. There’s a subtle difference between pushing yourself to get better, and pushing other people to see how much you can get away with.”
Being truly motivated to push ‘our’ limits is definitely a desirable state of mind. And I agree, we won’t get there without stepping over… But let’s be reasonable enough to keep the other people’s limits in sight.
— Maybe one more thought. A great leader and fried of mine once told me:
“Never push your staff/your colleagues harder than yourself.”
Dmitry Nikolaev 16 Dec 11
Often what not to do is far more important than what to do.
In catalogue 16 Dec 11
This is very useful for me.Can you share with us something more like this ??? Thanks. Thiết kế tờ rơi
business cycle 17 Dec 11
Very nice post. I was thinking about finding limits as well. The only problem with pushing oneself is long-term consequences. You may very well be ahead and achieve something but then you can lose other important things in the long run, such as health, close ones. So finding limits may be costly.
Sherwood 19 Dec 11
Literal illustration of using slip to your advantage: a movie stunt driver does it by the book, then gets trounced by a race driver who deliberately oversteps the limit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGhTL1e8mEw
Gotta love Astons.
This discussion is closed.