A Strategy For Dialing In Your Career

One of my favorite "Maximize Your Career" stories comes from Lance Armstrong. It is detailed in his book, “It’s Not About The Bike” and also highlighted in Brian Souza’s excellent book, “Become Who You We’re Born To Be”.

As you may know, Armstrong is a six time winner of what may be the world’s most grueling sports event, the Tour de France. What you may not know is how hard Armstrong had to work to find his niche, his area of greatness.  Lance grew up in football-crazy Plano, Texas. It didn’t take him long to figure out he was just plain lousy at anything that involved eye-hand coordination or side to side movement. In fact, he discovered, if the sport involved any sort of ball, he didn’t do so well. Most of us have experiences like this. It allows us to rule some things out quickly.

But Armstrong became very focused on finding something he could be great at. At age 12, he gave swimming a shot, and after almost drowning a few times his coach put him in a class with the 7 year olds. He was a bit humiliated, but he didn’t give up. He actually developed fairly quickly and by the end of his first year, he took 4th in the state at the 1500 meter free-style.

In order to get in two swim practices a day he rode his bike to school. That gave him six miles a day in the water and twenty miles round trip on the bike. At age thirteen, he spotted a flyer for a swim-bike-run junior triathlon. At the time it seemed like a lark… he’d never heard of a triathlon before, but amazingly he entered and won.

Although he was a top junior in swimming, Armstrong reflected, he’d never been the absolute best at it. But in Triathlons, he was best in the whole state. He hadn’t quite discovered the arena where he would become insanely great, but he was in the vicinity. By age sixteen, he had become a professional triathlete, and by the time he was a high school senior he had a growing career with sponsors knocking on his door.  Eventually he began to focus on cycling. After countless hours of hard work and sacrifice he became the world’s best.
Lance Armstrong’s story reveals several transferable concepts:

1. Try stuff and quickly eliminate some things that don’t show promise.
2. Get in the vicinity. Find some things you can be good at and work at them.
3. Keep trying things with an eye out for that one thing you can be insanely great at.
4. Once you find it, work harder than any one else to develop it.