raising the floor

view from the valley

If you’ve read Bumpers, you already know most of this game.

But it looks different now, and it it should hit different. I guess we will see…

It starts with the most prevalent folly…

When people set out to improve, they try to beat their best. A better year, a bigger month, a new high.

All of ambition points at the ceiling.

The problem is simple, but difficult to see.

Your best is your best. That is what the word means. The entire record of your life says that exceeding it is among the least likely things you’ll do next. If beating it were probable, it wouldn’t have been your best. So when you pour your effort into raising the ceiling, you are staking your resources on the lowest-probability improvement available to you.

I’m not saying you cannot do better than your best.

Of course you can.

I am suggesting that it’s likely the absolute worst worse of your time to focus on it.

Look down instead of up.

Your worst is also in the record. And here is the part almost no one sits with: you beat your worst constantly. Most days you are already well above it. Doing better than your worst day is not a stretch… it is the ordinary condition of your life. Which means improvement at the floor is not a long shot. It is the most probable thing you could possibly work on.

So if you are the kind of person who wants the best odds of a better outcome (not the most heroic story, the highest probability) the comparison isn’t close.

Raise the floor.
Work on the thing you are already, most days, entirely capable of.

It’s also the cheaper project, and for the same reason.

Raising the ceiling asks you to become someone you have never been, on your best day, repeatedly. That is enormously expensive, and the bill usually arrives as a run of bad days that drags the average back down. On either side of a peak is a valley, if you aren’t careful you might find that you bought a higher peak with a lower floor and broke even.

Same place, but significantly more exhausted.

Raising the floor costs almost nothing, it’s not additive. It’s subtractive. You are not learning to do something extraordinary; you are removing the handful of days where you did something far below your own ordinary. Most of the work is taking the bad throws out of play, not learning to throw strikes. You already throw fine most of the time. You just have to stop sending it down the gutter.

(Hence: Bumpers)

When your floor and your ceiling sit at nearly the same height, there is a word for it.

Consistency.

We treat consistency as the dull cousin of greatness. It is not. It is the rarer thing and the more valuable thing, and the clearest place to see why is anywhere people get chosen.

Picture two ballplayers. The first has a ceiling no one can touch and a floor in the basement. Magnificent on his best day, absent on his worst, with no way to know in advance which one is coming. The second is never the finest player in the league, but his worst season looks a great deal like his best one. You build the team around the second man. Every time. Not because he is better on his best day… he isn’t…

…but because he can be trusted, and you cannot build anything on a person you cannot predict.

A small gap between floor and ceiling is the whole definition of reliable. The wide-gap player is thrilling and impossible to plan around. Consistency is not what’s left over when you give up on greatness. Across a long enough stretch, consistency is the greatness because the floor is where the compounding lives, and the peak-chaser keeps handing his gains back to the troughs.

I don’t think I’ve put this in writing before (but honestly, I’ve written so much… who knows anymore?)

A peak rises slowly. Your best has taken your whole life to build, and it will move a quarter-inch a year if you’re lucky. But a floor can rise fast. Bad days are not made of some rare gift you’re missing. They are made of simple things, missed

…and simple things, missed, can be fixed nearly as quickly as you can see them.

The key is in those last four words.

As quickly as you can see them.

The floor only rises if you are willing to look at it, and looking at your floor stings in a specific way: it means studying your dumbest days, the ones where you knew better and did the foolish thing anyway, the embarrassingly simple stuff you cannot believe you still get wrong.

Almost nobody looks, because looking hurts.

I have found it helps to look at it humor. To tell the story of the stupid thing as a story, out loud, and laugh at it. Not to excuse it, but to make it survivable to examine. You can hold your gaze on a bad day far longer, and far more honestly, when you’re allowed to find it funny. And the longer you can stand to look, the faster the floor comes up.

Which is why there are two of these.

From the Mountain (this publication) is the peak. The considered work: the thinking I’ve turned over until it can stand up straight, the things I expect to still believe in a decade. It is my best, made plain, and it moves slowly, the way a peak moves.

From the Valley is the floor. It is the other side of this madness. The stories from the bottom, the days I missed the simple thing, told as what they are: small, human, usually a little funny. It is me examining my own floor in public, with enough humor to keep looking. It is not my best work and it is not trying to be. It is the faster-moving one, because the floor is the part that can actually move fast.

If you’ve read Bumpers, none of the floor-raising itself is new to you. What’s new is that I decided to do the examining where you can watch, rather than in private, partly because doing it out loud raises my own floor faster, and partly because it seems to be easier for people to look at their own floor once they’ve watched someone laugh at his.

The mountain is what a person is capable of. The valley is the gap, examined out loud. The whole project is the slow, unheroic work of closing the distance between the two

… and, on the good days, finding it funny.

From the Valley is a separate series — short, and its own thing entirely. It’s a different medium (maybe the first newsletter type thing actually run entirely on Amazon?). I write them often, they will be published based on reviews. So perhaps more get published, perhaps they don’t.

It doesn’t need the mountain, and the mountain doesn’t need it. If the floor is the part of this that interests you, that’s where it lives.

Nic