I’ve always been a performance nerd.

I was never naturally great at the things I cared about. I was a Try-hard that had to do everything under the sun to improve and get an edge.

So when I got the chance to talk with Dr. Anders Ericsson, the renowned “expert on expertise,” I jumped at the opportunity.

Ericsson is the pioneer of Deliberate Practice. For over 30 years, he has studied the practice habits and routines of top performers across dozens of domains. If anyone knows how to maximize potential and achieve mastery, it’s him.

After two days of turning his theories inside out and examining them from every angle, I asked him. “Anders, if you had to boil it down to a single point, what’s the secret to mastery?”

He folded his arms and pursed his lips, mentally compressing decades of research down to a singular morsel of wisdom.

He told me:

“Those who do the most work over the longest period of time, do the best.”

It turns out, if you can just stick to something long enough, you’ll eventually get pretty good at it. The operative words being, “if you can.”

The problem is, “sticking to it,” is easier said than done. Most of us simply don’t.

The reasons are numerous but often related. We get scared. We lose focus. We burn out. We get hurt. We suffer.

Eventually…we quit.

For these reasons and more, far too many of us never reach our potential. And that’s a shame, because at TrainHeroic we believe reaching our potential is the most valuable thing each of us can do for ourselves and society.

In fact, our friend and newly minted #1 author Logan Gelbrich presents an argument in Going Right that failing to stay on one’s path is one of the sadder things happening in the world.

We tend to agree and are working to fix this.

// We partner with coaches to keep athletes on their journey of training, designing solutions to help them find joy along the way.

In the spirit of that purpose, this past month our team rallied to energize and bring our Mobile Athlete Profiles to life.

Our initial implementation in 2018 was basic. Some might even say “spartan.” While it was built upon a firm philosophical foundation, the presentation left much to be desired. Our first pass didn’t quite honor athletes’ efforts the way we felt it should.

We believe effort is beautiful and we thought the design of the athlete Profile should reflect that belief. So when our UX maven Kelli Fox set out to take that interface up a notch, she carefully considered the intention and effect of each visual element.

The newly designed Profile pops. It moves. Loading states pulse like a high intensity heartbeat. Rising bar charts document athletes’ individual efforts. Area graphs add up each smaller effort to show their contribution to the bigger picture.

There is enough detail for an accurate portrait of performance and enough perspective to drive home the theme.

Every Rep Counts.

As PowerAthlete CEO John Welbourn says, “Training is like moving a pile of dirt. Some days you use a shovel, some days you use a spoon but as long as you move some dirt, you’re headed in the right direction.”

Whether you had big days or smalls days in the past, what really matters is that you showed up consistently and remained committed to the process.

Combined, the elements in the updated Profile our team crafted tell the story of that process. They visually narrate the obstacles overcome, reps performed, and hours put in.

We hope the refreshed Profiles better honor the art of your efforts and inspire you to take action today.

Because as the great Coach Bill Shakespeare once said, “What’s past is prologue.” Whatever happened in the past, regardless of its seeming level of significance, set the table for this moment.

In that way, the past is everything and it’s nothing. It’s both responsible for providing the opportunity in front of you and it’s irrelevant to what happens next.

In each moment, you have a choice.

You can choose to Be Your Best or choose to be something less.

You write your destiny every single moment of every single day. To that end, the rep that matters the most is the one you do next.

Don’t waste energy worrying whether each session is perfect or how it stacks up to the last one. On the journey to being your best, Every Rep Counts.

So get your reps in today and continue crafting the masterpiece of your journey.