How The Best Keep Going When It Gets Hard

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The top 1% of talent in any field have one thing in common. They have mastered peak performance.

I have always been fascinated by peak performance and nerd out on all things performance in my ‘spare time’.

While it may seem like the biggest performance gap is between the top and the middle, the truth is quite surprising.

What I am discovering is that once you reach the top tier of anything in life, the jump required to move even one position higher becomes massive.

The final ranks demand something radically different. This is not talent or effort, but rather a level of mental performance 99% of people never develop.

The gap between someone who performs relatively well and someone who reaches the very top, as in the top executives who shape organizations, creators that change culture, founders who build world-class companies is substantial. And, the biggest driver of that gap is not skill.

It is the mental game. They have unbreakable mental stamina to do hard things for a prolonged period of time.

I was listening to a podcast about Roger Federer’s career and his career illustrates this perfectly.

Across his entire professional career, he only won 54% of the points he played. Just 54%. Yet he won 20 Grand Slams and became one of the greatest players in history.

He said it himself in his 2024 Dartmouth commencement address: "Even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half the points they play. When you lose every second point on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot."

That ability to reset constantly is what allows elite performers to keep going long enough to separate themselves from everyone else.

Building Executiv has made this very real for me, and it has without a doubt, been the biggest mental endurance test of my life.

Over the past 20 months, three things have helped me push past my own mental limits.

1. Awareness and acceptance of current my mental limits

You can’t change something you aren’t aware of. The first step is to accept that you are not quite there, mentally. Then pick someone who you think embodies the level of grit and mental toughness you aspire to have. You now have a north star. This is very important. There are a few people I have anchored as the benchmark of mental toughness that I go back to when I’m wallowing in self-pity.

I highly recommend reading biographies of some of the world’s greats to get a sense of the toughness that you have to muster up and learn about how they climbed those mountains.

One of my favourite books of all time for founders is Shoe Dog by Nike’s founder, Phil Knight. It does the most beautiful job of giving you a window into his mind as he built Nike from nothing to hundreds of thousands to millions, to the company we know today and mental battle he fought constantly in the early years of building the iconic brand.

For me, I have come to learn that the gap between the founder I want to ultimately be and the founder I am right now is still much bigger than I would like.

The focus required to start, build, and then scale a startup is intense.

The hours do not end. The mental load of running a business is constant. There is never a real day off. It is no surprise so many businesses do not make it past year one. I truly believe a lot of it comes down to the founder throwing in the towel.

2. Getting leverage on myself

You must get ridiculously clear on your why. This sounds so cliché but it is at the core of being able to get past the really bad days. I wrote down a list my five whys when I quit my job back in 2024 and took the biggest risk of my career to start Executiv. Then, six months ago I added to it when I decided to still keep going despite running out of planned runway. Story for another day.

I invested a lot, both financially, emotionally, and mentally into building Executiv. My whole family has. My wonderful and super high-effort husband, my mother, my mother in-law, my father in-law, and even my kids. Executiv is a labour of love of many people in my life who allow me to do what I do.

I have bootstrapped this company for 20 months foregoing the bi-weekly dose of dopamine from my sweet corporate gig that I still miss very much.

My point is, you need to get leverage on yourself and make it tough to give yourself an out if you want to get past your mental limits.

When the stakes are real and there is no out, you show up differently. Trust me. I saw the difference when I truly burned the boats and chose to go all in.

I left no room in my mind for this not to work. That’s why it worked.

I know for some people all in looks different and that’s okay. We each have unique circumstances and you should do what is right for you.

For me, I am all or nothing and need single-minded maniacal focus. All in means 100% of my focus seven days a week 24 hours a day is on building Executiv. Outside of the time I spend being mommy of course. 😉 

I’m in a self-inflicted, prolonged no-season for anything else.

I could be working on so many other projects that could financially make my life 1000x easier. But, that would mean my focus is diluted.

You have to get so much leverage on yourself that even if you’re being chased by a lion while running towards your goal, you would rather fight the lion and risk dying than run off in a different direction.

3. Developing an athlete's mindset

As I mentioned earlier, I have become a little obsessed with peak performance and studying elite athletes in the pursuit of building Executiv into a world-class company. What strikes me most when studying them is how deliberately they approach performance.

Elite athletes don’t rely on motivation. They rely on systems, routines, and mental discipline that allow them to show up consistently regardless of how they feel on a given day.

As Leila Hormozi says, “Fuck your mood, follow the plan.”

High performers in sports understand something most other professionals forget: performance is cyclical. You train, recover, repeat.

They understand that pushing hard all the time eventually breaks the system. Instead, they operate in seasons. Periods of intense effort followed by recovery and reflection. Then they go again.

This mindset changes how you interpret difficulty. A bad day, a failed launch or two, a rejected pitch, or a deal you have been working for four months falls apart (true story) are not signs you are off track. They are simply a part of the plan.

Athletes expect friction. They assume setbacks will happen. What separates them from us mortals is their ability to absorb those moments without letting them define the outcome.

Bill Bowerman, the legendary track coach and Nike co-founder, once said: "The real purpose of running is not to win a race. It is to test the limits of the human heart."

Building a remarkable career is no different.

You push yourself. You get taken for a wild ride. You get rejected. You recover. You get stronger. Then you push again. Over time, that process compounds.

Ultimately, you reach a new level and become the person capable of things the earlier version of you simply could not fathom.

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“Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.”

Angela Duckworth