Seth Godin and Steroids

If you click on the title or here you can read Seth Godin's post from this morning. The interesting thing for me is to take his idea a step further and say that trying harder is a race to the bottom. Take the baseball pitchers. Throw the ball really fast and you succeed. So everyone starts working really hard at throwing a ball faster. Then they start changing training techniques. Then they start changing their diets. Then they start taking steroids.

Roger Clemens (steroids) was 6'4" and 240 lbs, at 47! He hit the wall of work harder, and then realized there was still another step. Where Seth leaves off is sometimes working harder is actually not the end, but the end is even worse.

There is another pitcher in baseball aptly nicknamed "The Freak" who is 5'11" and 170 lbs. Seventy pounds less then Roger. Five inches shorter than Roger. I promise you, that if Tim Lincecum had tried to beat Roger by working harder, changing nutrition and shooting steroids, he still would not have won. And yet he did, best pitcher two years in a row. Sometimes you need to stop working harder not because there is nowhere else you can go, but because there is no where else you should go.