1: The rowing team from Great Britain had not won an Olympic gold medal since 1912.
“By all measures, they didn’t have a good rowing program,” Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy write in their book The Gap and The Gain: The High Achiever’s Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success.
Then everything changed.
During the training for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, the members of the British rowing team began asking themselves a simple question: Will it make the boat go faster?
“They developed a one-question filtering response to every single decision they made,” Dan and Ben write. “This one question allowed them to measure every situation, decision, and obstacle—and to not get derailed where most people do.”
Example: Someone gets invited to a late-night party the night before training.
Will it make the boat go faster?
Tempted to eat a donut?
Will it make the boat go faster?
If the answer is no, then the decision is no.
So, what happened?
“They went from being an average rowing team,” the authors note, “to winning Olympic gold.”
2: The question: “Will it make the boat go faster?” is an example of what Dan and Ben call a success criterion.
The authors recommend developing our own success criteria that we can utilize whenever we are presented with an opportunity. Rather than decide in the heat of the moment, we simply look to our success criteria to provide the answer.
A great example comes from author and entrepreneur Derek Sivers, who says, “If you’re not saying ‘HELL YEAH!’ about something, say ‘no.'”
Derek’s success criteria allows him to make smart decisions. “When deciding whether to do something,” he says, “if I feel anything less than ‘Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!’—then say ‘no.'”
Yet another example of success criteria comes from Lee Brower, a successful entrepreneur and gratitude expert whose teachings have been viewed by more than 100 million people.
Lee has created a list of six questions to evaluate potential opportunities:
- Is this opportunity, person, expense, adventure, experience, relationship, commitment, etc., aligned with my values?
Note: if the answer to this question is no, then Lee’s decision is no. No need to even ask the remaining five questions.
- Will this opportunity, etc., take advantage of my unique ability and make me even stronger? Will it lengthen my stride?
- How will this opportunity, etc., benefit mankind? Is there a bigger cause or purpose that will benefit society?
- Does this make sense financially?
- Is this transactional or transformational? In other words, is this a stand-alone opportunity or a gateway opportunity?
- If I say “Yes” to this opportunity, what then must I say “No” to?
3: Our effectiveness increases exponentially when we get good at saying “No” to ideas and opportunities that do not align with our success criteria. Because we don’t get derailed, we create momentum.
Our “list of success criteria is our rocket fuel,” Dan and Ben write. “The more we live it and and stay within it, the faster we’ll get to where we want to go.”
Success criteria provide a path for us to become more aware and more intentional about how we live our lives.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What’s a simple filter or success criteria I can create to evaluate decisions and opportunities (e.g., “Will it make the boat go faster?)?
Action: What is one way I can apply this filter in the next 3 hours?