Achieving Your Personal Best
It almost goes without saying that a strong team is made up of strong individual members. To help you be at your best, and to make a stronger contribution to your team, there are some individual best practices that you can implement.
Do: Genuinely commit to peak performance
The biggest thing you can do to help yourself succeed in the Pentathlon is one that might sound boring, trite, and banal — you've no doubt heard it before. But genuinely committing to excellence is something we see the top performers often explicitly do.
"I made a decision I was going to win, that was the #1 thing — I made a commitment. I was f'ing determined not to miss a single day — other people were clearly not missing their days. Most of this stuff is just showing up and doing it — so I did it." — Michael Smith, perfect scoring in UWP3
Commitment can't be overstated — Diarmuid Kidney runs a small tech agency in his civilian life, but is also a reserve NCO in the Irish Army. For half of Pentathlon 3, he was doing military training exercises. He explained,
"I knew what it would take to get it done. It was tough — really rough — since I was away for half the time doing full-time with the Army. I had to make a commitment to get up early, and do the most important work an hour before everyone would wake up, and get another hour done when we had a bit of downtime. It was tough, but I managed to do it."
This theme recurs repeatedly among people who do excellent on the Pentathlon — they committed at the beginning to maxing out and doing excellent. It sounds simple, basic, maybe even trite — but it's a consistent theme among the people who get the most out of the Pentathlon.
Do: Prepare for the worst with counterplanning
(We've included a Counterplanning Template in the Appendix to help with this)
There's a somewhat silly and dangerous idea in the world right now that you should only think positive thoughts, and never think about anything that could go wrong.
Obviously, this is not how any successful organization runs — we have firefighting departments in every major city, engineers think constantly about safety conditions and possible points of failure, successful businesses are constantly assessing the changing risks to their business — but for some reason, there's a silly idea being kicked around that you shouldn't ever "think negatively."
At Ultraworking, both our research and our experience shows that successful people think in advance about what can go wrong, and do "counterplanning" against that.
We have a number of prompts in our surveys and planning tech to help you counterplan, especially about fitness — things like thinking through, in advance, what to do if you're very sore from your last workout the next time you go to the gym.
But successful people often go over and above that. For instance, if you have young children (a number of competitors on the Pentathlon have young families), what will you do the next day if one of your kids wakes you up in the middle of the night? Making a plan of what to do can be the difference between success and failure — in the parent's case, perhaps something as simple as scheduling a nap if this happens, or having some simpler work related to your core most important work that can be done when you're tired.
Everyone's situation is different, but not totally unpredictable — think through, in advance, what could go wrong and what you will do if those things go wrong. Counterplanning means that unexpected disturbances are converted to something known and manageable, and it's worth thinking through what could happen during the Pentathlon, as well as doing this periodically throughout everyday life.
Do: Making gains permanent by journaling
We've noticed that people who journal about their experience, and who take notes from the trainings, do better.
This doesn't need to be a big "production" — even a few sentences about how you're feeling and reflecting on the upcoming important things of the day each morning, and perhaps a quick debrief in the evening, can go a long ways.
If you want a very simple journaling prompt, you could try what Ultraworking co-founder Sebastian Marshall fills out at the end of every day —
- What went right today?
- What would I do differently?
- What environmental factors affected me?
- What am I currently improving?
The added benefit of keeping a journal is it lets you analyze what type of habits, moods, and work leads you to more success or less success over time — if you have a very successful week, for instance, you can re-read your journals and notes for lessons to implement permanently. It's not essential, but it's pretty well-proven to work and lead to learning a lot more about yourself — and thus to thrive more.
Finally, we'll again emphasize that we'd love for you to make more permanent gains as a result of participating in the Pentathlon.
To do that, it's helpful to analyze what worked for you, and why, and to make those into some easy notes that you can refresh yourself on from time to time.
We look to prompt this with our surveys and questions we ask, but you can above and beyond it — marking down lessons learned, why particular techniques are effective, putting those into an easily reviewable format, and sharing those with others on your team, with us, and with real-life friends and colleagues can go a long way towards having better workflows, productivity, and thriving across your life.