It’s the first week of a January 2017.
I’d like to raise a glass of my homebrew to the new year.
When I crack open the bottle and pour it gently, perfectly into a glass half the size of the bottle, it’ll be brilliantly clear. So clear you can see the other side of the room through the beer. For the vast majority of beer styles, this brilliant clarity is the goal. In homebrew competitions this brilliant clarity is often what moves a beer into the second round of judging. Despite appearance accounting for three of 50 points. Now, if I grab a second glass and poured the remainder of the bottle in it, the second glass is likely going to be cloudy, hazy, and in at least one case – murky. In competitions, it’s this glass the second round judges are evaluating. It’s in this second round evaluation where the judging is more critical, the faults weighed heavier. This is where winners are declared. This is where everything matters more including appearance. Yet, this is where I regularly present the worst half of a beer.
This phenomenon of performing worse when it matters more isn’t unique to my homebrewing or even homebrewing. It’s also the consistent story – as you read in Rebuilding Blocks – of my kubb team’s experience at the US National Kubb Championship. We’d handily win the group play and position ourselves well in for the more competitive bracket play. Unfortunately, it’s here in these more competitive matches where our performance falls apart because we’re fatigued from playing too hard, too intensely in the early rounds. In the heat of the Eau Claire summer sun this past July, I had the epiphany, “kubb is an endurance sport.”
Like I said, this isn’t unique to homebrewing. Or kubb for that matter.
The gym air is filled with freshly declared resolutions. There’s a renewed optimism, a renewed enthusiasm, to achieve a new level of success. At the office, new strategic initiatives – and their respective clusters of projects – are kicking off (I know cause we’ve been working on them since Sept). It’s tempting to go into these new efforts with the throttle fully open. It’s tempting to overload this quarter, this month, this week with every success and performance metric for the year. Often however, it’s these early stages where we have the least information about the actual, specific, detailed challenges to our success, where we have the least structural support for our progress, and we simultaneously have the greatest chance of fatigue and burn out. This temptation, here in this first breath of the new year is in many ways self-sabotage. Perhaps counter-intuitively the best thing we can do is temper our enthusiasm for the new, under-committing, and celebrating the small, early, steady wins.
There’s going to be a second quarter. There’s going to be a second half of the year. Let’s position ourselves to be able to perform then with the same level of enthusiasm we have now. This means, rather than launching 34 brand new projects this week, launching three of the most well-understood, most foundational initiatives across January. Then, with laser focus, making clear, steady, progress on them throughout the quarter. Then kicking off the next three. Repeat.
The only way for me to sustainably put the clear beer on the bottom half of the bottle is to improve my process for pulling more yeast out of suspension prior to bottling. The only way to sustainably make deeper into the U.S. National Kubb Championship bracket is to play well with more ease. This improves the early rounds and the subsequent rounds. The way to sustainably kick this year off is to focus on fewer and more foundational efforts.