🚣‍♂️ Will it Make the Boat Go Faster?

In the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, the British 8-man Rowing Team (M8+) finished 7th. Not a great finish, but not unexpected as the team hadn’t won a gold medal since 1912.

After yet another disappointing result in the World Rowing Championships in 1998, they decided they weren’t going to sit and wait for their luck to change. The team decided to take ownership of their future, and adopted a single filtering question that would forever change their trajectory:

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They asked this question of themselves and each other before pretty much everything they did:

• Will 70 minutes on the rowing machine today help the boat go faster? (Yes)
• Will going to the pub tonight help the boat go faster? (No)

The result was instant alignment towards a common goal.

And in the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, it paid off with the team’s first gold medal in almost 100 years.

So what can we learn from this?

If you want a better life, ask better questions!

Good questions force you to naturally consider what’s most important. When you ask a question like “will it make the boat go faster?” there isn’t room for complicated explanations or excuses.

Either what you are about to do will make the boat go faster, or it won’t. And once you have your answer, it creates clarity and motivation to take action.

Which highlights just how powerful asking the right questions can be.

Asking the right question can change your life forever.

If you want some better questions of your own, I highly recommend the book Personal Socrates by Marc Champagne. It’s broken down into around 40 short character profiles, and is chock-full of powerful reflective questions to help bring clarity, intentionality, and possibility to every aspect of your life. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Who am I optimizing to become? (James Clear)
• What does it mean to be unapologetically me? (Robin Williams)
• What discomfort am I running from? (Chris Messina)
• What if it were possible? (Naveen Jain)
• Who’s showing up at my party? (Jeff Warren)

Don’t listen to the “gurus” who claim to have it all figured out. You don’t need someone else’s answers.

When you learn to ask the right questions, the answers become clear.

— Mike Schmitz

P.S. I got a chance to interview Marc Champagne about asking questions for the Focused podcast a while back. Click here to give it a listen.