Your Best Week Might Be Ruining Your Next Three

Your best week might not be something you should try to repeat.

I know that sounds strange, especially if you're ambitious.

When you have an extraordinary week, the natural response is to think,

What if I could do that every week?

What would my business look like six months from now?

And those are reasonable questions.

But there's another one worth asking.

What did that week cost you?

Think about somebody who has an exceptional week in sales.

They work longer hours, create opportunities, follow up with everybody, and produce results well beyond what they're accustomed to.

It's exciting, because they've demonstrated what they're capable of.

But then the following week comes around, and they're exhausted.

Their activity drops.

They're not making the same calls, having the same conversations, or creating the same opportunities.

And maybe the next week isn't much better.

Now, if you look only at that first week, you might conclude that the answer is to push harder all the time.

But what if the effort required to produce that week is part of the reason the next two were so unproductive?

That's a different problem.

I think ambitious people have a tendency to judge their potential by their maximum output.

We take the most intense period we've experienced, when we were working harder than usual and somehow managing to get an enormous amount done, and decide that's the standard we should be able to maintain.

Then, when we can't reproduce it, we start questioning our discipline.

Maybe we're getting lazy.

Maybe we're not hungry enough.

Maybe we need to push ourselves harder.

But there's a difference between what you can occasionally produce and what you can consistently sustain.

And if you're trying to build a business, that distinction matters.

Because one extraordinary week doesn't tell you much about what your business will look like over the next six months if the following three weeks are spent trying to recover from it.

You have to measure the entire period.

That may mean discovering that a slightly lower level of activity, maintained consistently, produces more than constantly alternating between intense effort and exhaustion.

And I don't think that's settling for less.

It's taking the long-term result seriously enough to stop being impressed exclusively by short-term intensity.

I want to be careful with this, because there are times when you should push.

Sometimes an opportunity requires an extraordinary effort.

Sometimes circumstances demand more than usual, and being capable of responding to that matters.

But an exceptional week should be something you can choose when the situation calls for it, not the only standard by which you judge your ordinary performance.

Otherwise, you can end up in a cycle where you're always trying to get back to a level of intensity that you couldn't maintain in the first place.

And you start treating the exhaustion that follows as a failure of character instead of information about how you're working.

The more useful question is what you can repeat long enough for the results to compound.

Not the most you can force yourself to accomplish when everything is on the line.

What can you build when it isn't?

Because the goal isn't to prove, over and over again, that you can push yourself to the limit.

It's to create something that continues working when you aren't at yours.