To Climb a Higher Mountain, First Come Down From the One You Are On

I owe my Top of the Table years to a director who told me not to work so hard.

Some years ago I had just hit my second consecutive MDRT. I had real momentum and I was charging at the next one with everything I had.

That was when Edmund asked me a question that stopped me.

Are you sure you want to work this hard forever? I will not stop you. But one day, when you settle down and have a family, do you still want to be grinding like this? Think about working smarter, not just harder.

In an industry where a great deal of leadership amounts to pushing for production, that was not the question I expected. He was not trying to extract more from me this quarter. He was asking whether what I was building could survive contact with the rest of my life.

Then he challenged me to aim higher anyway. Not another MDRT. A double round.

And he was explicit that getting there would not come from doing more of what I was already doing. It meant rebuilding the approach from the ground up.

The line I have never forgotten

He said two things in that conversation that I still repeat to my own mentees.

The first: the biggest obstacle to your growth is your past success.

The second: to climb a higher mountain, you first have to come down from the one you are on.

That frightened me at the time, and I think it should frighten anyone hearing it while something is working. Let go of the thing that is currently producing results? On the promise of something better that has not happened yet?

But he was right, and the logic is uncomfortable precisely because it is correct. What got you to where you are is a set of habits tuned to a particular altitude. Those same habits are what keep you there. They are not neutral. They actively hold the ceiling in place, because every hour they consume is an hour unavailable for whatever the next level requires.

You cannot add the new approach on top of the old one. There are not enough hours, and you will simply be more tired at the same height.

What I changed

The shifts were not dramatic, and none of them felt clever at the time.

I stopped chasing volume and went for depth. Fewer conversations, taken further. That is a frightening trade when your pipeline is a numbers game, because the activity metric you have been reassured by goes down first.

I spent more time on each client’s story than on their numbers. The numbers are the easy part and they arrive on their own once you understand the person. I had been doing it in the other order for years.

I stopped trying to be everywhere. I built a practice on trust, education and long relationships rather than presence. Presence is exhausting and it does not compound. Relationships do.

It was slower at the start, and it was considerably less flashy. There is a stretch in the middle where you have given up the old engine and the new one has not caught yet. That period is where most people turn back, and I understand why.

Over time it became more fulfilling, because I was no longer only hitting production milestones. I was building something with the sort of stability I would want for my own family.

Why this matters more than it sounds

There is a specific failure mode in this business that I watch happen repeatedly to capable people.

Someone works extraordinarily hard, gets good results, and concludes reasonably that the effort is what produced them. So when growth stalls, the answer is more effort. More activity, longer days, more of the same thing done harder.

Sometimes that works. Often it produces a plateau that no amount of additional hours will move, because the constraint was never effort. It was method. And method is invisible to you when it is working, which is exactly why you need someone outside your own head to point at it.

That is most of what mentoring actually is. Not motivation, and not technique. Someone who can see the mountain you are standing on and tell you, at the point you least want to hear it, that you have reached the top of it.

The part I am still working out

It has been over ten years since that conversation and I am still drawing on it.

I still work hard. Anyone who tells you this business does not require that is selling something. But it comes from a different place now. Not from chasing, and not from the fear of the number slipping.

The question Edmund asked me is one worth asking yourself honestly, particularly if things are currently going well:

Is the way you are working right now something you would still want to be doing in ten years, with whatever your life looks like by then?

If the answer is no, that is worth knowing while you still have the room to change it. The moment to come down from the mountain is while you are still climbing well, not after you have been stuck at the summit for three years wondering why more effort has stopped producing more results.