Today I’d like to share with you what I consider to be one of the most important traps that exists, the biggest self-deception of goal setting that nobody talks about.

Idea : The half-way mark is not the half-way mark.

I will be using physical goals to illustrate this principle, because these are the easiest to grasp, but this totally applies to goal setting in general.

You have a goal :

• 2000 meters
• A marathon
• 10k
• 100 meters
• 100 push ups
• Any other goal of your choice

So, you’ve prepared, trained and are ready. You start.

What happens when you get to the half-way mark ? Have you ever thought about it ?

Do you think, I’ve only got half of the way to go ? or This is unbearable how did I ever get myself into this ? or This is easy, the rest of this race is a piece of cake, or What am I going to eat after the race ? or I can’t possibly finish, I’m going to explode before the end.

I can tell you, I’ve thought all of this before during races. And I still do occasionally. The best thing I have found to remedy this is to focus immediately on your goal and to let go of those distracting thoughts.

But today I’d like to examine one of those thoughts in particular, the first one :
When you pass the half way mark, you’ve only got half of the way to go, right ?

Well I have found that to be one of the biggest self-deceptions you could pull off.

If you have 2000 meters, or even 100 push ups to do, it is natural to assume 1000 meters or 50 push ups is the half-way mark, and thus that you only have to repeat what you have done another time to finish. From a numerical stand point it’s true.

But it’s not true from a more practical point of view, here’s why.

Recently I started doing 100 push ups in the morning again. And I can tell you that for now it is difficult. But I must finish the 100 push ups. And I get to observe myself and my thinking as it varies throughout the challenge of reaching my goal. I had the same experiences when rowing or running.

And, what I found was that 50 push ups are easy, but once I pass 50 it gets hard all of a sudden.

And I also noticed I kept telling myself you’re half way there it’s almost over. But this never helped. And I kept thinking it.

Believing that you’ve done half the race at the half-way mark is terrible thinking psychologically speaking.

You deceive yourself into thinking the effort you put in to do 50 push ups is is going to be the same amount of effort doubled to do 100. That simply isn’t true.

I can assure you, the effort needed to go from 0 to 50 is not equal to the effort need to get from 50 to 100.

For me, 50 to 80 is the most difficult mentally, then 80 to 100 is the most difficult physically.

And both of those difficulties I didn’t have before 50.

When you get to the half-way mark, you believe the effort that got you there is the effort that will get you to the finish line. You see that it wasn’t that bad, so you relax, you become complacent, and ultimately you lose, because you realize that wasn’t true.

When you pass the half-way mark you need to shift gears and step up your game—both mentally and physically.

I believe the 80/20 Pareto principle applies to goal setting and races of any kind.

When in a race I would rejoice when passing the half-way mark, and tell myself that I had only half left. But when you think about it, since you have only experienced half of the race, if you tell yourself there is only half left, you tell you mind that you only really have a fourth left. Even when you mean half, you subtly tell you brain it’s only a fourth. Everything we do we compare to what we have experienced.

And then, when you pass the three quarter mark you feel your getting to the limits of you capabilities, that it’s getting too much, and if you aren’t ready for it, you crack.

The next best thing to think would be to tell yourself, let’s do it again, or one more time, instead of only half left, but even that would be wrong.

What seems the best option to me is to think that the real half-way mark is the 80% mark.

I have come to dread the 50% mark, but I look forward to the 80% because i know that from then on it’s much easier, you think of what you’ve accomplished (80%) and compare it to what’s left (20%) and you feel good because you know you can do that.

Sport is a mental game. 20% physical, 80% mental. You had better train your mental game and be careful how and what you think about. Life is a mental game too. The same thoughts apply there too.

And depending on the intensity of the race or task, you may find that the half-way point is more like 90 or 95%

The 50% mark is when doubt creeps in. And that can destroy you. It’s the first kind of resistance you will encounter. Then, once you get to the 80% mark you start feeling the toughest resistance of all. Your body starts complaining, you start getting bored, you procrastinate, you want to go do something else. But here you can compare what you’ve accomplished to what is left and 80 trumps 20 every time.

So remember the half-way mark is not the 50% mark, it’s the 80% mark.

A race isn’t won because you completed the distance first. A race is one because your mind won. Your mind won over your body. Your mind pushed it’s limits, it’s perception is enlarged. You learned something new. That is when you win.