Your company, organisation or team are a boat. All of the people involved in these entities are the crew. Your collective goal is to make the boat go as fast as you can. Everything you do should be based on the simple question…. “will it make the boat go faster?” Olympians split goals into four layers: the crazy layer , the concrete laye r, the control layer and the everyday layer . Ben Hunt-Davies is a former British rower turned author and performance expert. He won an Olympic gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, as part of the first British rowing team to do so since 1912. But, while doing it, make it at least somewhat entertaining. For example, training five hours a day is boring, but training with music isn’t. Dieting is not as much fun as eating chocolates, but signing up for pole dancing is fun and will help you get fitter as well.

Finally, the everyday layer outlines the steps you need to take on a daily basis that are vital to achieving your crazy layer goal. For example, on Mondays you could complete 20 bench presses in five minutes. On Tuesdays, you could make sure to row with teammates for at least one hour, and so on throughout the week.

Beliefs

The crazy layer is where you can be bold, even excessive. These are the goals that light up your imagination, that don’t belong on a mundane to-do list. The author’s crazy layer goal, for example, was to win the gold medal in rowing at the Olympics! The crazy layer of your goal is, obviously, the outrageous one. And you can’t go much crazier than setting a goal to win an Olympic gold medal. Role models—Who else has achieved what you want to? Are they that different than you? When I was doing bobsleigh, I was terrified of my first run down; what if we crashed? But I looked at everyone else—athletes from other countries—and decided, if they could do it, so could I.

The crazy one is for the objective you can only daydream about. The concrete one is for specifying this objective into measurable quantities. The control layer is for deciding what you can, and what you can’t influence. Finally, the everyday one is for your day-to-day training program. Accept the facts, but challenge the negative interpretation—Before any major race, I was terrible in training a couple of days beforehand. I wanted to be good—to have a great session to build my confidence—but I tended to be much slower. The fact is that my times were down; the negative interpretation is that it meant I was out of shape. But flipping it around, perhaps it meant I was saving myself for the race itself.

Who is the author of Will It Make the Boat Go Faster??

Having a target makes you start thinking about how you can achieve it, it’s the starting point in planning what you must do, to get what you want. The alternative is essentially hope, and I don't see many gold medal winners relying on hope. Hope is not a strategy! This is an old adage and you probably already know it. But, it’s important to repeat it. Because, teams are built around common objectives, and because no team of brilliant individuals will ever win unless they decide to think and work as one.

To begin, we must shift our perspective from solely fixating on the end results to embracing the process itself. By being curious and open to exploring what methods work best for us, we gain valuable insights that improve our approach. Sharpening our attention on specific elements of our journey enhances our performance and increases the likelihood of positive outcomes. If all the attention is focussed on the work, and not enough attention to the way you’re doing the work, you never get to fix the deeper issues. A large government agency did an internal reorganisation which meant departments got cut up differently. Staff were understandably concerned, so we ran Make Your Boat Go Faster with them. The best example I’ve ever heard of the use of implementation intentions was the British rowing team of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.Will It Make the Boat Go Faster” is called a book written by winners – for winners. This is true, but only if you are a bit more specific. Not that the book isn’t great, but we guess it’s more about Olympians than for regular people. In a very shared way – your people will be shaping the conversation, so you get more buy in and engagement Mindset matters: The authors emphasize the importance of having a growth mindset and being open to learning and improvement. They also talk about the importance of having a clear vision and goal and staying focused on it.