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Peak Performance as an Infinite Game
Brooke LeBlanc
August 14, 2023
Welcome back to Social Experiment, a newsletter about sobriety from a cultural lens brought to you by Edge Health.
This past weekend the farthest I had ever ran was 13.1 miles, so I typed into our accountability group chat for our August Course that I was aiming to run somewhere between 14-16 miles.
After 4 hours and countless laps around the park, I looked down at my watch. 22 miles.
“We don’t rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our standards.”
My first marathon is 6 weeks out, which means it’s time to get more disciplined with my running practice and prove myself right, that I can accomplish my goal of completing the Abbott Six Star.
Tonight we’re bringing in Kayla Lyons as our first guest speaker during our group coaching call for our MVP program. I spent the weekend reading an advanced copy of her book Soberish.
“AA and Rehab centers drew a rigid line between those who could moderate their drinking and compulsive drinkers who could not, creating a cognitive distortion of black-and-white thinking. The resultant binary way of thinking created the belief that you have to be alcohol dependent to have a real problem.”
Reflecting on who has joined our MVP, we have a group of highly ambitious entrepreneurs and athletes. There is a new wave of adoption in sobriety centered around high performance and self improvement. Peak performance and sobriety are inextricably linked.
This reminds me of The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler.
Getting and staying sober might feel insurmountable at first. The truth is that once you’ve committed to a sober challenge or sobriety, you reinforce your commitment every time you’re presented with an option to drink.
In this way, there is no mastery. If sobriety is a key component of peak performance, then peak performance is an infinite game.
Infinite games have no clear winners or losers. No established time frame for play, and no fixed rules. The field of play is mutable, the number of participants keeps changing, and the only goal is to keep on playing. The field of play is as big or as small as you choose to live your life.
“No matter how mindbendingly a trick looked on the front end, there was always an understandable logic on the back end. The impossible always had a formula. Very little is impossible with ten years’ practice. I assumed that there was a formula. I also assumed that it was learnable.”
Source: The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler
Harvard psychologist William James argues that “the human individual lives usually far within his limits.”
The reason we’re not living up to our potential is that we’re not in the habit of living up to our potential. We’re playing the wrong game.
We’re all capable of so much more than we know. This extraordinary capability is an emergent property, one that only arises when we push ourselves toward the edge of our abilities.
The only limits that exist are the ones that we place on ourselves.
We have social, cultural, professional or familial pressures to drink however ultimately sobriety is a decision that is within our control.*
*Now would be a good time to emphasize the difference between Lifestyle vs. Recovery. I’m referring to choosing sobriety as a lifestyle. This is not a broad statement that should be applied to those with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) or are currently recovering from AUD.
Source: Edge Health
Thank you for reading and sharing this newsletter. Reply and let me know what resonated.
See you next week!
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