A high-achieving entrepreneur once said to me:

“I don’t want anyone to tell me to slow down. I’m full of excitement for my big dreams. I want to go fast.”

But speed is not the same as progress. Let’s not forget that hamsters, despite how fast they like to run on their wheels, go nowhere.

Busyness is a drug that feels productive and gets us into trouble when we mistake it for progress.

It’s a challenge that's unique to high-achievers. Other people don’t have the same fire burning in them. They feel scared to go faster, or don’t see the point in going fast at all, because they don’t reap the rewards of arriving at their destination.

But high-achievers are courageous enough to go faster, and we expect a juicy reward when we get to the finish line. A reward so large it will make the incredibly large effort worth it.

Together, courage and expectation foster a deep motivation that drives us forward, seeking to go faster, and farther, at the same time.

It’s thrilling.

In a world where people who work hard never fatigue, and the finish line never moves, faster is always better. I think this is why going faster intuitively feels safer for high-achievers. But it’s a trap.

Because, the truth is:

When we work hard, we eventually become fatigued, and

The distance between us and our goals is constantly growing, or shrinking, based on the quality of our decisions and work output along the way.

When we only see effort, we overlook the consequence of distance while distance constantly changes based on our performance. And we all underperform when we’re not fully charged up.

Nowhere is this impact clearer than in the world of distance running, where the same flawed intuition that affects us as executives and entrepreneurs seems obvious, and yet is completely ineffective.

Everything about distance running tells us that in order to beat the other runners, you should just simply run faster. That’s it.

But across millions of runners, races and routes that strategy doesn’t produce winners. Somebody tried. It didn’t work. The data proves it.

Here are the world-record holding times for each running race from 100 meters up to the marathon. Notice how the pace of each world-record time slows as the length of the race increases.

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Figure 1 Source (https://worldathletics.org/records/by-category/world-records)

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These times represent the maximum efforts of millions of humans evolved over thousands of years. Yet despite all the uncertainty and variability these inputs represent, a perfectly reliable pattern emerges.

There’s not a single longer race with a faster winning pace.

Do you think the runner who set the world-record in marathon isn’t able to run faster than their world-record marathon pace? Of course not. The data shows us that their top running speed is probably about twice as fast as their marathon pace.

So why then didn’t they run the marathon twice as fast? Because they’re not able to sustain that faster pace for the additional time it takes to move through a marathon. They can only sustain their fastest pace in short bursts.

I assume that at some point in history when the marathon was first invented, a runner said to another runner, “I don’t want anyone to tell me to slow down. I’m full of excitement for that marathon finish line. I want to go fast.”

So off they went at full sprint for as far as they could sustain their fastest pace. Only to soon find themselves exhausted and collapsed under a tree many miles short of their destination.

And while they napped, it’s likely that a runner using a slower pace jogged right by them. Making more progress toward their destination and winning the race.

This is why we should never confuse pace with progress.

Eventually those two early marathon runners must have discovered that there was an Optimal Pace for running such a long distance that wasn’t as fast as a sprint, but also wasn’t as slow as walking.

Over the years this wisdom was passed down and eventually made it to today’s marathon world-record holders who use the strategy to beat previous world record times. Each trying to train for a pace that’s fast enough to win but not so fast they find themselves collapsed under a tree before the finish line.

So, how then, do winning marathoners get themselves to run at their Optimal Pace, instead of their maximum speed, so they get to the finish line first?

They need three things to make it happen: knowledge, trust and discipline.

They have to know their Optimal Pace

They have to trust their experience that informs them that their fastest pace is not a winning pace for long races, and

They have to have the discipline to run slower than their top speed even when their intuition lies to them and urges them to speed up.

Some runners have the knowledge, trust and discipline it takes to win long races. The ones who don’t will arrive at the finish line after them, or never make it there at all.

As runners, it might be a rainy day, the competitors might be extra strong, or we might be running into a headwind. But none of those factors are within our control.

Our pace, on the other hand, is always within our control, and running as closely as possible to our Optimal Pace will always increase our chances of winning.

As executives and entrepreneurs on the path to our own goals, we encounter external challenges too. Project requirements shift, market demands rise and fall, and we uncover new complexities along the way.

Most of these things are out of our control.

But one part of the journey is highly in our control. One variable we can influence will reliably improve our outcomes. It’s our pace.

Pace is our most powerful tool for increasing our chances of success and shortening the time it will take to see our biggest and wildest dreams come true.

As we work, the amount of time it will take to achieve our goals grows or shrinks based on our pace.

Because working a bit above our Optimal Pace causes us to fall back to a pace that is far slower, and working below our Optimal Pace isn’t fast enough to win.

As this happens, three things are constantly changing:

Our pace,

Our expected finish line time, and

Our chances of even making it to the finish line

To win a race, we need to have the lowest possible finish line time and the highest chance of success. The chart below illustrates how these two situations best align at a specific Optimal Pace.

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Starting from a crawl, our expected finish line time is high because it will take us a long time to get there. But we can sustain this pace forever, so our odds of arriving at the finish line are also high too.

At a slightly faster pace, our expected finish line time falls because we’re moving faster. We can sustain this pace long enough to arrive at the finish line, so our odds of arriving remain relatively high too.

But there’s a faster pace that will deliver the shortest finish line time, that still has strong odds of arrival. We call this our Optimal Pace.

Running faster than our Optimal Pace isn’t sustainable because we can’t hold this pace for the entire length of the course. Our bodies aren’t able to recover quickly enough to allow for this pace to continue.

Why does over-pacing reduce our odds of finishing, and increase our expected finish line time?

This is what actually happens when you try to run faster than your Optimal Pace. You run fast for a while, and then you pull back and run slower than your Optimal Pace for a longer period of time.

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You cycle back and forth between higher and lower pace.

You might think that this would create a pattern of highs and lows where the average pace matches our Optimal Pace and produces an identical result as running at our Optimal Pace the whole time. But that’s not true.

The problem with this strategy is that the gains and losses are not symmetric.

A famous marathoner once said that for every minute he ran above his optimal pace in the first half of a race, he discovered that he lost five minutes off his time in the second half of the race.

For every single unit of gain, five units are lost. This defines the problem with over-pacing. It's a losing ratio. And that’s why working at our Optimal Pace is the singular and only winning strategy.

A marathon is 422 times longer than a 100m sprint, and its winning pace is half a runner’s top speed.

But five years of work is 1,825 times longer than one day of work. So if you’re currently shooting for a dream that will take years to achieve, your Optimal Pace is likely only a fraction of your top speed.

If working 18 hours in a single day is your maximum speed, your Optimal Pace over five years of work is maybe only six hours per day along the way.

The good news is, you can measure your actual Optimal Pace, you can track it, and much like a runner trains to increase their optimal running pace, you can grow your Optimal Pace at work too.

I’ll explain exactly how to do that, next.

Here’s how I suggest business leaders think about working at their Optimal Pace on the course to achieving their goals.

Working more, up until your Optimal Pace, increases your chances of success and shortens the time between you and your goals.

Working at your Optimal Pace gives you the highest combination of odds of success, and the shortest path to your goals.

Working more than your Optimal Pace decreases your chances of achieving your goals and increases the time between you and your goals.

All high-achievers have a strong drive to arrive at the finish line, because the reality is, the finish line is just one of many finish lines along our long journey to seeing our dreams come true and having the impact we want to have on the world.

Much like the marathon runner, we're dying to get there. We want to see the things we’re creating actually happen and have the impact we know they can have.

And to do that, we must moderate the only thing we actually control in this wildly dynamic journey. Our pace. Everything else is up to the whims of the universe, or controlled by other people who are difficult to change.

I’ve been studying high-achievers for ten years and have personally designed and conducted seven scientific studies measuring optimized mindstates, mental resilience and economic outcomes.

Across 10,000 participants and 50 million datapoints, one pattern has emerged. When your goals are big and the pressure is on, working at your Optimal Pace is the most effective strategy for success.

Working at your Optimal Pace maximizes your odds of success and shortens the distance between you and your goals.

It’s been said that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. You can see it visually. The cycle back and forth between faster and slower pace is bumpy, and doesn’t produce winning results.

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But moving constantly at a slower pace is also smooth, yet it’s not a winning strategy either. The winning strategy is somewhere in between, consistently at your Optimal Pace.

When you know your Optimal Pace, trust that you're on the winning path, and have the discipline to work as closely as possible to your Optimal Pace every day, you have the greatest chance of achieving your goals as fast as possible.

World-record holding runners work for years with elite coaches with biometric sensors in physiology labs to determine their optimal running pace. Then, they train for years to increase it so they can win races and make their dreams come true.

Executives and entrepreneurs join the Dory community, use our tools to run their lives on the Optimal Pace Protocol, and go knock down their goals with confidence and precision.

The Optimal Pace Protocol allows you to measure, track and train your Optimal Pace so you’re always increasing the odds of achieving your goals, and reducing the distance between you and your next finish line.

All that’s left to do is work at your Optimal Pace for as long as it takes to make your wildest dreams come true.

And that part’s up to you.

If you’re a high-achiever, we want you to win, and we know you can do it.

Start your Dory membership, use our tools to measure and grow your Optimal Pace, and you'll make it happen as quickly as possible.