Why giving less than 100% is better for your health

Summary

Undo Podcast Summary: "Why Giving Less Than 100% is Better for Your Health"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done
• Host: Mark Steadman
• Episode: Why giving less than 100% is better for your health
• Release Date: May 4, 2025

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1. Introduction: Challenging the 110% Ethos

Mark Steadman opens the episode by confronting the pervasive "give it 110%" mentality often touted in workplaces and by influencers. He criticizes this approach as not only insensitive but fundamentally flawed, setting the stage for a deep dive into more sustainable productivity methods.

Mark Steadman [00:00]: "If you're not giving it 110%, maxing the envelope, tilting the paradigm and shifting into ninth gear, you're in the wrong job and you should quit and do something you're truly passionate about."

2. The 85% Rule: Insights from Elite Athletes

Steadman introduces the concept of the 85% Rule, inspired by legendary athlete Carl Lewis. Unlike the all-or-nothing approach, the 85% Rule emphasizes maintaining high performance without reaching the exhaustion point that leads to burnout.

• Carl Lewis's Approach: Mark details Carl Lewis's consistent pacing strategy, where Lewis avoids the initial sprint-heavy start that often leaves other competitors fatigued. Instead, Lewis maintains a steady, relaxed pace, allowing him to outperform sprinters who expend all their energy early on.

Mark Steadman [07:20]: "The 85% rule is that sweet spot, that Goldilocks zone, where the work is just hard enough that it keeps you engaged but not too hard that it stresses you out."

3. Beyond Athletics: Applying the 85% Rule to Everyday Life

The episode explores how the 85% Rule can be integrated into various aspects of daily life, including work, diet, and personal habits.

• Work and Productivity: Steadman explains that striving for 100% effort in professional settings often leads to burnout. Instead, aiming for 85% allows individuals to remain productive and engaged without exhausting their mental and physical resources.

Mark Steadman [09:57]: "If you're relishing the challenge, chances are you're going at the right clip. If it's boring, you need more stimulation. If it's doing your head in, then it's time to back off."

• Diet and Habits: Adopting the 85% mindset in dietary practices can make sustaining healthy eating habits easier. For instance, allowing a cheat day each week prevents the all-or-nothing mentality that typically leads to failure in maintaining a balanced diet.

Mark Steadman [09:59]: "If you eat three healthy meals a day to help you achieve a calorie deficit, having a cheat day once a week runs to just over 85%."

4. The Science Behind the 85% Rule

Steadman delves into the neurological and psychological foundations of why the 85% Rule is effective.

• Flow State and Headroom: Drawing from previous episodes, he ties the 85% Rule to the concept of "flow," where individuals perform optimally when challenged but not overwhelmed.

Mark Steadman [09:59]: "Flow is about ease, not going full throttle, balls out, guns blazing. You're aware of your surroundings. You have what we call headroom."

• Research Insights: Referencing a 2019 study, Steadman highlights how allowing a margin for error (getting things wrong about 15% of the time) enhances learning and performance, demonstrating that balance fosters better outcomes than relentless perfectionism.

5. Practical Implementation: Balancing Effort and Relaxation

The episode offers actionable strategies for applying the 85% Rule in various scenarios.

• Before High-Effort Tasks: Techniques such as burning off excess energy through physical activity can help maintain the relaxed state necessary for optimal performance.

Mark Steadman [10:06]: "He suggests burning off some of that energy before you need it. Moving your body can help you reduce what you've got in the tank so you don't come off with too much intensity."

• Personal Anecdotes: Steadman shares his experience with podcasting, illustrating how dialing back effort in certain areas can lead to more genuine and sustainable engagement.

Mark Steadman [16:29]: "The idea of the 85% rule is that it's all about that sense of effortlessness. If you can hear the effort in something, it becomes less enjoyable."

6. Real-World Examples: High Performers Embracing the 85% Rule

Steadman cites other notable figures who advocate for giving less than 100%, reinforcing the universality and effectiveness of the approach.

• Hugh Jackman and Usain Bolt: Both personalities exemplify the 85% Rule in their respective fields, demonstrating that top-tier performance does not necessitate total exhaustion.

7. Conclusion: Embracing Sustainable Productivity

Mark Steadman wraps up by reiterating the importance of balancing effort to maintain long-term productivity and well-being. He encourages listeners to evaluate their own efforts and consider where they might benefit from adopting the 85% mindset.

Mark Steadman [16:29]: "The idea of the 85% rule is that it's all about that sense of effortlessness. If you can hear the effort in something, it becomes less enjoyable."

Steadman invites listeners to engage further with the podcast through Patreon, offering bonus content and community interaction to deepen their understanding and application of these productivity principles.

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Key Takeaways:

• Avoid the 100% Hustle: Striving for less than total effort can prevent burnout and sustain long-term productivity.
• Embrace the 85% Rule: Finding a balance where you're challenged but not overwhelmed leads to optimal performance.
• Apply Across Life: Whether in work, diet, or personal habits, maintaining this balance fosters better outcomes and well-being.
• Scientific Backing: Studies support that a margin for error enhances learning and adaptability.
• Practical Strategies: Activities that reduce unnecessary tension and allow for relaxation support the 85% approach.

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Notable Quotes:

• Mark Steadman [00:00]: "If you're not giving it 110%, maxing the envelope... you're in the wrong job and you should quit and do something you're truly passionate about."
• Mark Steadman [09:57]: "If you're relishing the challenge, chances are you're going at the right clip."
• Mark Steadman [16:29]: "The idea of the 85% rule is that it's all about that sense of effortlessness."

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By exploring the balance between effort and sustainability, this episode of Undo offers valuable insights into how historical outliers achieved greatness without succumbing to the pressures of overexertion. Listeners are encouraged to rethink their approach to productivity, emphasizing quality and well-being over sheer quantity of effort.

Transcript

[Mark Stedman]

If you're not giving it 110%, maxing the envelope, tilting the paradigm and shifting into ninth gear, you're in the wrong job and you should quit and do something you're truly passionate about. After all, there's always going to be someone else who can take your place if you're not willing to give it your all. If you're like most of us, you'll have heard some variation of this bullshit either at work or from some vacuous influencer. And the thing is, that sort of whip cracking business bro bullshit isn't just insensitive, it's actually wrong. And if you're thinking, here comes more of that soft plain milk toast, you're brilliant just the way you are, snowflake nonsense. A I think you might need to calm down and have a nice cup of tea as you've clearly wandered into the wrong podcast and B this isn't coming from me. This is coming from one of the world's most accomplished athletes. I'm Mark Stedman and this is Undo Speed Dating Productivity Methods, listening to them, showing them a really good time, and then definitely texting them the next morning.

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[Paige Desorbo and Hannah Berner]

Hey guys. Welcome to Giggly Squad, a place where we make fun of everything, but most importantly ourselves. I'm Paige Desorbo. I'm Hannah Berner. Welcome to the squad. Giggly Squad started on Summerhouse when we were giggling during an inappropriate time. But of course we can't be managed, so we decided to start this podc continue giggling. We will make fun of pop culture news. We're watching Fashion Trends Pep Talks where we give advice, mental health moments and games and guests. Listen to Giggly Squad on Acast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Mark Stedman]

Acast.com burnout is real and it's measurable a report in early 2022 showed that one in workers were experiencing symptoms like fatigue, difficulty concentrating, loss of motivation, headaches, tummy aches, and difficulty concentrating. As behavioral scientist Thomas Curran discovered through a decade of research, the give it all you got mentality horrible bosses perpetrate is capitalism at its darkest and least humane. Now I can talk up a whole game about the cruelty behind capitalism and how companies like Amazon drive people to the brink of physical exhaustion and beyond. But right now, the sun's shining and my therapist says I should probably stop reading Grace Blakely. Suffice it to say, we have evidence to show that giving your work 100% of your energy leads to burnout. But there's a sweet spot, a magic number that allows you to give it some welly but leave some headroom. Let me introduce you to Carl Lewis and they get away for the third time of asking. Alan Wells had a good start, but Carl Lewis is going well and Emmett King's ahead of him. Emmett King is streaking ahead. Carl Lewis, he's got a lot of and Lewis comes. Carl Lewis, known to some as the master finisher, is an American track and field athlete. He's basically the track and field athlete with nine Olympic gold, one silver and 10 World Championship medals to his name. He was a sprinter and long jumper who competed on the world stage from 1979 to 1996. He set world records in the 100 meters, the 4x100 meters and 4x200 meter relays, and he still holds the indoor long jump record, has done so for 40 years. Now, I'm not an overactive man, but imagine doing something so well that no one has done it better in 40 years. Thing is, if you watch the start of one of his races, he's by no means the first out of the block. It often looks like he's speeding up to make up for lost ground, but in fact, everyone else is slowing down and he's just running at the same consistent pace. That pace frequently saw him best. Other sprinters who'd come out the traps like a bullet and this approach has become known as the 85% rule or the Carl Lewis Approach Turns out it's all in the body. Other athletes scrunch up their fists and their faces and get all tensed up, while the likes of Lewis are visibly more relaxed. So much so that pretty much any description of his running style talks about that relaxed fluidity. We can all agree, I think, that putting in 100% effort in sprinting just slows you down. You're just too tight. That's Andy Kidd, a sports therapist who specializes in helping sprinters stay relaxed. For him, it comes down to trust. Can you trust yourself to start off at the back of the pack, knowing you'll be able to sustain that pace and ultimately triumph over those that went off like a rocket? A couple of days ago, I watched a video of two people stacking cups. The object was to collect each cup and place it on a stack on a specific spot. One player started with the cups closest to him, while the other started with the cups furthest away. Each time they grabbed a cup, they had to run back to the starting point and place the cup on the stack. As you watch them, you think, surely the guy on the left is going to win. He's clearly ahead. He started off by collecting the cups closest to him, so for the first half of the race, he makes incredible progress. But as the race continues, he gets more and more fatigued and gradually slows down as his job is getting harder and harder. Meanwhile, the other guy is only now getting warmed up as he's done the hard yards of running all the way from one end of the line to the other, back and forth in gradually decreasing amounts, keeping his energy consistent. He wins. The reason why this method works has some of its roots in flow, which we covered in episode five. Flow is about ease, not going full throttle, balls out, guns blazing. When you're in flow, what you're doing feels natural, not strained, unlike, say, tunnel vision or hyper focus. You're aware of your surroundings. You have what we call headroom. And that headroom is what counts. It's what allows you to think, to take in the world around you, to track your surroundings and watch your exits. The rule doesn't just apply to your work, but to other aspects of your life. Obviously, we can see how it impacts exercise, but you can apply this to your diet, too. If you've ever struggled with making any kind of big life improvement, you'll know that sticking to it is hard. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago. And one of the things that can be tricky, especially if you're neurodivergent, is having something of an all or nothing mindset. Which may be partly why habits you want to stick to are still proving themselves elusive. So instead of aiming to eat nothing but healthy food for every meal, why not give yourself a day off? Turns out if you eat three healthy meals a day to help you achieve a calorie deficit, having a cheat day once a week runs to just over 85%. Saturday is treat day. For 24 hours, you can literally eat anything. Pizza, birthday pie, pints of cream. How you actually structure this is of course, up to you. The point is to build in some slack. And while we're on the subject, anyone who tells you they don't need slack or that it's just an excuse or you're not fully committed is dancing with different demons. Or they're just flat out kidding themselves because they're not comfortable with admitting they're human. Now, remember, we're talking about high performing people here. Lewis isn't the sole outlier. Hugh Jackman has also talked about giving it 85%, and people often see fellow sprinter Usain Bolt as an exemplar. The key is in the relaxed attitude before the race, because if your coach tells you to give it 100%, you're more likely to tense up and do a worse job. So last year I did a stand up course which culminated in me doing a five minute set in front of a warm crowd of friends and family. There was one act that stood out, not for their incredible material, but for how much fun they were having. They'd brought half their street with them, so when they came up to the mic, they were essentially just riffing in front of mates and it showed. Meanwhile, there were other comics who'd sweated every beat and were visibly performing at their capacity. And they were fantastic to watch, but you knew that level of intensity was just not sustainable. An American entrepreneur by the name of Sunil Gupta wrote a fair bit about how we can calibrate the amount of effort we need to give in any situation.

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For example, if you're walking into a.

[Mark Stedman]

Presentation or a meeting with your team.

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You may decide to be effective. It's not 100% you need, it's actually 70%.

[Mark Stedman]

Think about it this way, if you're on stage giving a talk and you elect to give it 100%, that means 100% of your focus is on the slides, your script, whether the click is working and how much time you've got left. That leaves you absolutely no room to assess whether people are engaged with what you're saying. If they're a bit confused, or if they're planning what to grab from the buffet or who they want to swap LinkedIn details with. Another problem is that leaving it all on the field to continue with the sporting parlance means you might have scant energy left to shake hands with people eager to connect with you after your presentation, which is probably the reason you were on stage in the first place, when you'd rather be at home doing anything else. Now you might have noticed I tend to refer back to previous episodes of this podcast. I'm not doing that to increase more listening time, but to show you how interconnected so many of these concepts are, and that in some ways they're all just different expressions of the same underlying ideas. In episode two, I briefly mentioned the Yerkes Dodson stress curve when I probably did just as great a job at pronouncing those names as I did just now. The stress curve is in the shape of a bell, with optimum right up the top, boredom to the left, and stress to the right. The 85% rule is that sweet spot, that Goldilocks zone, where the work is just hard enough that it keeps you engaged but not too hard that it stresses you out. We can see this all in nature, too. A study in 2019 drew on work from Law and Gold that showed how perceptual learning of visual motion direction in monkeys was correlated with changes in neural responses in the lateral intraparietal area involved in attentional control, rather than the middle temporal area, which encodes motion direction. Yeah, essentially what the study found was that we learn the fastest when we're allowed to get things wrong around 15% of the time rather than being expected to get it right every time. What this tells us is that our brains work better when they're challenged but not overwhelmed. And this study, by the way, is completely unconnected with the whole Car Lewis of it all. This is just another way in which the number shows up, and I think we can draw an easy line between productivity and behavior change. Okay, so how do you tell you're giving it 85% and not just slacking off? Well, the key is in the amount of challenge. If you're relishing the challenge, chances are you're going at the right clip. If it's boring, you need more stimulation. If it's doing your head in, then it's time to back off. And what if you don't know how to dial it down or it doesn't feel like the thing you do has that kind of dial? Our man Sunil has some good advice here too. He suggests burning off some of that energy before you need it. If you've ever spoken in public or looked for advice around it, you'll probably have heard about shaking out the nerves or likewise moving your body in some way that not only helps you channel some of that adrenaline so it doesn't just course through your veins, but it can also help you reduce what you've got in the tank so you don't come off with too much intensity. I discovered the band Blues Traveller around the early 2000s. Their lead singer, John Popper, used to clock in at over 430 pounds, which for British listeners is over 30 stone, or nearly 200 kilograms. I remember seeing an interview with him describing how he would repeatedly need oxygen after coming off stage because he was putting so much into his performances. His amazing vocal gymnastics plus prodigious harmonica playing plus the extra weight put a huge strain on his body night after night. Thankfully, he was able to make some changes and we still get to hear him make music. The Blues Brothers sequel movie would have been a very different film without him, but it still would have been shit. I get the desire to give it all you've got when the work you do involves passion. By the way, I still see singers straining until they're red in the face and their veins pop so far out of their heads they look like a road atlas. And I'm not out here saying they should dial it back if that's how they get their sound. Moments of peak performance are absolutely part of the deal, and some work is about peak performance, but it has to come in controlled bursts. But sometimes All I'm saying is that sometimes you've got to look at yourself and go, does this spreadsheet really need me to be at 100% right now? Or could I maybe dial it back a notch? Undo is written and produced by me, Mark Stedman. There's a whole rabbit hole of links you can go down if you head to Undo fm. Carl, that's C A R L. If you would like ad free episodes or to hang out with other listeners and suggest ideas for future episodes, you can join our Patreon over over at patreon.com undopodcast stick around after this brief break and I'll tell you about the new podcast I started last week and how I tried to take it to 100% and then dialed it back.

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[Mark Stedman]

Hi. So you join me in the shed. This is only going to be a short one because it's a fairly short episode so I'm not going to keep you too long. So I mentioned podcast. Basically it's just an audio version of a newsletter that I've started for my day job which is helping small organizations like communities, charities, cultural venues, places like that do more colorful comms stuff. And so it's a very short newsletter and I thought, you know, let's get a few bites at the cherry. It's covers cover more surface area. I'll record it in video and and then I can take the audio, put that out as a podcast and the video can go on YouTube and lovely. And I did that and I recorded the first one and I just thought I do not like this. This is not good. I am not someone who is. Well, I am someone who is far more comfortable behind a mic talking to you now than I am trying to do it on video. It's just not a skill I have. I'm not like overly shy or anything, but I am somewhat self conscious and self critical when it comes to the camera. You know, I'm all too aware of my appearance and so that because I'm not natural like I am talking to you now, just looking out in the distance, sometimes closing my eyes, it's a lot more easy for me to do this. And so what I ended up doing is yeah, I could have gone 100%. So the, the 100 version of this is you put out the YouTube version and then Maybe even you can take little shorts from it and like you get loads of bites at the cherry. That's a hundred percent. That's, that's great. But it wouldn't have been so good. It would have been more of a challenge. I would have had to have made sure that my hair was completely in place and my background was right and I was wearing the right kind of shirt and it fit okay and there wasn't any fluff or a cat dander on the microphone, all that stuff. Whereas if I just dialed it back a little bit, I went to 85% and just made the audio nice and crisp and warm and inviting. Like, I hope that our discussions are as they are now. Then it would just be a lot easier and you would feel less of a, or more of a lack of effort. If you like, you would feel that it was less effortful. And I think that's a big thing, a big thing that we can learn from. The idea of the 85% rule is that it's all about that sense of effortlessness. If you can hear the effort in something, it becomes less enjoyable. That's kind of why I put the stand up thing in there. Because when you see the effort, when you see someone's really trying, it makes you a little less comfortable. So that's why I thought I'd bring that up. Right. There you go. I said I'm gonna keep you long and that's it. Last quick mention. Patreon.com/ undo podcast if you would like to get ad free episodes of the show. If you'd like to suggest topics, if you want to get bonus content, we have, when I do interviews, we put the full interview up there. There's loads of stuff that you can get access to as well as having a chat, getting some behind the scenes stuff and helping to support the show and keep the lights on, as they say. Then patreon.com undo podcast is the place to go and you can get started for just $3 a month, which is nothing. Thank you so much for your time. I will look forward. I already look forward to speaking to you again next week.

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