In 2020, 20 years after the events which had occurred in the Sydney Olympics and taken place, Ben Hunt-Davis and Harriet Beveridge published ‘will it make the boat go faster?’ in its second edition.
That book, first published in 2011, is one of the best books to describe the title of this blog and the way that it can be applied to your life or yourself or your business or really your anything else.
Firstly though, full disclosure and complete honesty, I’ve had to struggle to work as hard as I can at this, never getting anywhere near mastering the principle but continually trying my best to refocus on the idea of what is the ‘mission’.
In some aspects of my life, it’s been a successful approach and in others it’s been disastrously wrong and to assume that you can apply it to every aspect of your life all the time and everywhere is like trying to catch water in a net.
But the premiss is clear and the lesson is right out there in front of our very faces.
Four years before the Olympic final in Sydney, Hunt-Davis and the rest of the crew of the GB eight decided that the only question they would have to answer for the following four years was “will it make the boat go faster?”.
Easy to say, easy to write down, easy to put up on your wall.
Not quite so easy to put into practise in every aspect of your life.
The closer they would get to avoiding the distractions and always answering that question in the positive would mean that they would be more likely to achieve their goal come the summer of 2020.
Of course, the book would have been unlikely to have come about had they not achieved it, but they did in the most dramatic of circumstances, almost missing out in the heats to requalify for a separate channel into the Olympic final and then to win by the tiniest of margins.
But isn’t that always the way?
In 2015 I sat down with our senior leadership team of that time at The Campbell Clinic and asked if we were ‘all in’.
We decided that what we needed was a bigger place, with more space and more in keeping with the dreams and aspirations that we had.
With some thought and discussion, we put together a plan to secure 5,000 square feet of space (we were currently in somewhere in the region of 1,300) and 25 car parking spaces in order to double our capacity to allow us to fulfil our aspirations.
Much of what happened over the following 5 years was focused on that goal (at the expense of quite a lot of other things).
Around that time, I had just completed my first Iron-distance triathlon in 2015 and was deciding whether or not to put dentistry and my career as a dentist completely on the back burner and to have 5 years (at least) to have a go at being a triathlete in the later part of my life.
To be completely honest it was a much more attractive proposition than the one which I ended up following.
Part of that goal was to race at Barcelona in 2016 (they close a motorway for the bike in Barcelona and it would have suited me down to the ground).
I would have been able to see then whether it was likely that I could get fast enough to ultimately qualify for the world championships as an amateur in Hawaii in the year I turned 50 (2022 – this October).
So, in the early stages of both of those projects I decided to run them side by side, wondering which one would give way first but that is never how these things will work.
By the time it got to the summer of 2016 so many things had changed but most notably in relation to this project was that I wasn’t able to run anymore which was a significant disadvantage in achieving that goal!
I think it was possible that that’s what catapulted me into my own version of ‘will it make the boat go faster?’.
In the end I and we were wrong, we didn’t need 5,000 square feet and 25 car parking spaces, we needed 13,000 square feet and 100 car parking spaces and so at the moment we’re settling for 7,000 square feet and 78 car parking spaces.
Hunt-Davis and his team hit the goal in 2000 and finished their quest.
They had mission clarity which was absolutely focused on an Olympic gold medal and they ticked off enough of the mission critical elements of that to pull it off even under difficult circumstances.
I had the opportunity to set the mission in 2015/2016 which ultimately came to pass in January 2020.
The inevitable doldrum and downturn that would happen after winning a gold medal or achieving your professional life dream of opening your own designed clinic was swallowed up in a world of covid and recession and depression and all sorts of difficulty.
As I (hopefully) emerge from the turmoil’s of the last 2 years we now have the opportunity again to embrace the mission that we set with clarity and to focus on the parts that are critical.
Watch this space.
Blog Post Number - 3051