The Rule of Thirds

What Track Taught Me About High Achievers and Staying on Track When Things Get Hard

There is a quality shared by almost every person who has ever built something big. It looks like optimism from the outside. It looks like confidence. Sometimes it looks like recklessness. But I think it is something more specific than any of those things.

I call it Entrepreneurial Blindness. I have seen it in my track kids who sign up for a race that will break them before it ever builds them up. I have seen it in football players who believe they can win before they have earned the right to. I have seen it in myself, building a foundation from scratch in a small Colorado mountain town with a goal that still looks ambitious from where I stand today. I saw it years ago when I joined a small group of people that decided to change the Colorado constitution and legalize gaming in an old historic mining town. None of us knew everything it would take to get these things accomplished. If we had, we would have been derailed from the start.

This blindness is the whole point behind finding and working on big projects.

Great achievers have an unusual ability to not see everything that stands between them and a big goal. They look at where they are and where they want to be, and they move toward it without a full accounting of what it is going to cost them. We don’t act this way because we are naive or careless. We do it because that blindness in our overarching vision is the only thing that makes starting possible.

My dad used to say this about people who took on too much: they bit off more than they could chew. He meant it as a warning to be measured. Looking back, I think he was describing every high achiever who ever did something worth doing. Entrepreneurial blindness is biting off more than you can chew on purpose, or more accurately, without fully knowing that you are doing it. A pessimist never bites off more than they can chew. They measure everything first. They see every obstacle, every risk, every reason the plan will not hold. The odd part about this is that they are often right. But I have never seen a pessimist build anything of real importance. It must be an unfulfilling life to be sure.

If you knew everything before you started, you would never start. If you could somehow see the future in full color, if someone walked you through every setback, every relationship that would get strained, every dollar that would disappear, every piece of your reputation you would put on the line, every unforeseen thing that would hit you in year three when you were already tired, you would look at the whole picture and say this is going to be too much. No reasonable person would know what I know about what it would take to build a state champion or build an enterprise and still want to jump in with both feet. If you really knew the future, you would be crazy to take on the task.

As a high achiever you do not see all of it. You see the line from where you are to where you want to be, and you move. I now see it clearly and don’t think of it as a flaw in thinking. That entrepreneurial blindness is the thing that gets you out of the chair and produces the action. It is what gets a kid to sign up for a race they have never run before. It is what made me decide to build a foundation in a small mountain town with the goal of a $1 million endowment. If I saw every obstacle between here and that number, I would just stay home. Instead I see two points and a vague path between them, and I keep moving.

The blindness gets you started. But it does not keep you going.

That is where the Rule of Thirds comes in, and coaching track gave me the clearest classroom to teach these rules to my runners and by extension, my football players.

Track is one of the few sports where the measurement is exact and generational. A time is a time. The 1,600m run I watched someone run in 1983 sits next to the 1,600m run a kid posts today, and the comparison is real. No adjustments. No context. The stopwatch does not care. That creates something rare: an honest, objective record of what the human body can do at a given age over a given distance.

If you have never been part of track, this is hard to fully understand. But if you have run it, you know. Track people recognize each other the same way football people do. You share knowledge that does not translate from the outside. You know that in an 800 or a 1,600, you run your race from the gun. There is no saving anything for the end. People who have never competed in a track race designed to produce your fastest time have no idea what that demands. They look at a kid’s strong kick and think they did something. They clap and cheer down the home stretch. But I know they saved something for the end and that will never get you your fastest time and certainly never get you to a championship.

What makes a track athlete is not a mystery, though it can look like one from the outside. A real track kid knows their splits. They know that if they hit certain marks at certain points in the race, they already know what the final time will be before they cross the line. That is not clairvoyance. That is your race plan. It is math built from disciplined work. On an ordinary day, you hit your splits and you get your expected time. On an extraordinary day, when everything is clicking and the work has compounded the way it sometimes does, you take time off that number. That is your PR. That is the record. That is a trip to state. You were not lucky. You were ready, and when the moment showed up, you rose to the occasion.

That is the part people on the outside confuse with talent. It is preparation meeting opportunity. The age old mantra.

Track puts the stopwatch right in front of you. And for a young athlete who expected more, that number can feel like a verdict and it can be discouraging.

This is where I started working out the Rule of Thirds. I am still learning how to teach it to my players and runners. I am also sharing what I have learned here for anyone currently pursuing a righteous cause or even just thinking about taking a leap.

Here is what I have figured out so far.

Working on anything real, whether it is training for a race, building a football program, or spending years putting together something like the Colorado 8-Man All-State Football Game, all great projects have a predictable rhythm. Most people do not recognize it until they have been through it a few times. Some never recognize it at all.

I think of it as three buckets. Each bucket represents roughly a third of your time and energy on any big project. The good news is that two of the three buckets are positive, and this is where you will live most of the time.

The first bucket, about a third of your total time, is where you are slaying it. The vision is clear. The work is clicking. The splits are there. The momentum is real and visible. The sponsors are coming in, the coaches are engaged, and what started as an idea is starting to look like something real. This is the part that drew you in. It is the fuel. It is the reason you started.

The second bucket, another third of your time, is where you are cruising. Not slaying it, but moving. Progress is steady and quiet. You are doing the things that need to be done, the early mornings, the follow-ups, the decisions that nobody sees. The weight room when you do not want to be there. The film sessions. The emails. Nothing dramatic is happening in either direction, but this is the foundation of the work. This is where constancy shows what it can do. The actions in this bucket accumulate and drive momentum over time. This bucket is easy to undervalue. You do not score the touchdown here. But it is where most of the actual building happens, and your goal will stall without it.

To sustain a big goal over years, you have to be genuinely good at performing the work inside each of these two buckets. You have to be good enough at your craft to generate wins with some regularity, and good enough at your daily system to keep making progress when nothing exciting is happening. These two buckets are not passive and they cannot be casually worked on. They are the product of real skill, real habit, and real commitment. You do not fall into them. You build them over time.

Then there is the third bucket.

You will spend about a third of your time feeling like the project is falling off the rails. It is a significant amount of your time, and if you do not understand what role this bucket plays during your fight you might mistake it for a signal to quit. At times you can feel like nothing is working. Something unforeseen hits. Funding falls through. A key person walks away. A plan you were counting on does not hold. In track, it is the week where the splits are not there and the legs are heavy and nothing you do seems to matter. In my foundation work, it is the call that does not come back, the grant that does not land after considerable work. It is the times when everything feels harder than it should. If you think that spending a third of your time in this bucket is overstated, you may not be working on a big enough project or have a high enough goal. As the old saying goes, this bucket is just part of the bargain if you want to do great things. It is not something that can be avoided.

You cannot see all of it coming. Some of it is unforeseeable. Some of it is just the cost of being invested in something real. Remember, you started with entrepreneurial blindness. You bit off more than you could chew, and you did it without fully knowing it. That blindness was necessary. But it also means the hard third arrives without a full warning. If you misunderstand how this bucket works in your grand scheme, you can lose what you have built because you still see every setback and disappointment as a signal to stop.

This third bucket is supposed to happen. It is just one part of the process. Nothing ever goes without a hitch. It is the hard work. It is how you know that what you are doing is just beyond your current abilities, which is exactly where you want to be.

It is in those moments of real struggle that most people find a reason to get discouraged. As the old football saying goes, fatigue makes cowards of us all. The setback feels like a mistake, and sometimes it is. Either way, it is not a reason to stop. It is just the third bucket, the part of the process you will need to work through on your way to your goal. When you are in the right mindset, no one can stop your train. You say things like good, bring it on. You are firing on all three cylinders.

But here is where the balance matters and how to make sure you are on the right track as you move forward. Sort of like knowing your splits along the way.

If the third bucket starts to grow, if you are spending more than a third of your time getting knocked around, that is information worth paying attention to. Not a reason to quit. A reason to adjust. Something in the approach needs to change. Maybe the system needs work. Maybe the goal needs to be broken into smaller pieces that generate more wins more often. The pessimist would have predicted this and never started. Your job is to see it, adjust, and keep going.

The same is true in the other direction. If everything is easy, if you are winning all the time with no real resistance, the goal is probably not big enough. You can become very good at something small and win at it almost every day. But that is not the kind of work that earns a fast time, a state title, or a foundation built to last.

The skill, and I am still developing it and still learning to teach it, is the balance inside the thirds. Not work-life balance. This is something different. This is the balance between generating enough wins to stay fueled, building enough daily discipline to keep moving forward with momentum, and handling the hard days or even prolonged stretches without letting them become more than their share.

The entrepreneurial blindness got you started. You bit off more than you could chew, and that was exactly right. The Rule of Thirds keeps you honest about where you are. If you are slaying it a third of the time, making real progress a third of the time, and getting tested a third of the time, you are on the right track. That is not a guarantee you will finish or that you will be successful, but it is a signal that you are working on something worth finishing. Something you can be proud of when it is all done.

The blindness gets you started. The attention to each bucket gives you clarity. Your natural talent, your consistency, and your mindset to overcome adversity do the rest.

That is how big things get done. Fast times and PRs in a sport that does not lie. Touchdowns and wins in a sport that rewards preparation under pressure. A foundation built from nothing, moving toward an endowment that looks impossible to those cold and timid souls watching from the outside.