Why Doing MORE Is Making You Weaker

High performers don’t struggle with laziness, they struggle with overtraining. In business, content creation, leadership, or performance, it’s almost impossible to spot when you’ve crossed from productive discomfort into cognitive damage. This episode breaks down how elite performers accidentally sabotage their results by pushing too hard, and why doing less (strategically) leads to bigger outcomes. If your default is “try harder,” this will completely reframe your approach.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Some of the top stuff that I find myself helping
people with is people like at the basic level, a
lot of elite performers bite off too big of chunks.
And the reason why is because of all this self
development narratives around. You need to push yourself in order
to grow. There's fundamental theories that encourage this Vygotsky's proximal

(00:20):
zone of development. There's all sorts of stuff that says
you need to push yourself in order to grow. And
we do know that discomfort is useful, but most people
don't actually know the difference between discomfort and damage. It's
very obvious when you're training in the gym. If you
go to the gym and you work out and you overtrain,
you can see the results of your overtraining and it

(00:41):
makes it, you know, less possible for you to gain muscle.
But when an elite performer, you know somebody who is
you know, an executive, a business owner, an influencer, an artist,
a content creator, a professional gamer, it's very difficult to spot.
Over time training is very difficult to spot. When you've

(01:04):
just worked for ten minutes longer than your brain actually
can utilize it, can I actually function and resulted in
needing to, you know, wait three hours of downtime when
you could have waited twenty minutes. I work with people
whose greatest desires to do the most they can. I
don't work with lazy people telling them to try harder.

(01:26):
I work with people who are doing their best on
every possible level, and they only have the basic narratives
and the basic tools guiding them of like, well, let
me just try harder, let me see if I can
do more. And I teach them how to do more intelligently, right,
I teach them how to limit behaviors strategically in ways

(01:50):
that they actually get more results. So I help people
perform better basically by doing less. Right, do less in
order to get more, do less in order to get
better results. Don't get me wrong, I love pushing people.
I push myself all the time. I'm addicted to pushing myself.
The point is that people who are like that also

(02:12):
need another piece of the puzzle, and so I'm big
on strategies that turn you into a high performer versus
yelling at people to get them to perform more, because
I've found that when you are yelling at yourself to
perform more, usually you perform less if you are one

(02:32):
of these people who's truly your greatest desires to do
the most you can, because what that means is you
are already doing the most you can, and then you
yell at yourself. So it's like that that was irrelevant, right,
that was useless. And so I help people think more
intelligently about what will get them results and then chunk

(02:53):
things down and then you spot the small moves that
will help them achieve balance to do the things that
truly create big, massive, exponential impact over time. If you'd
like to build your life and business with me, go
to the link below or go to apply dot Josh
cherry plays dot com