3 Accelerator
Because running fast is more fun than running slow.
—FRANK SHORTER
You are here.
In the sweet spot.
It often creeps up on you unawares. From “I’m stressed out; I can’t do this,” things gradually shift. Like waiting to recover from an illness and slowly improving but not really noticing, until one day, you are better. We notice pain much more readily than we notice improvement.
But now that you are here, something marvelous is happening in your brain: it’s changing. When you understand how it’s changing and why, you can grow even faster.
Our brains are more than mere processors—they’re predictors. They are continuously running predictive models that govern all our conscious and unconscious actions, everything from typing the next keystroke to planning the next twenty years.
Running a predictive model requires a hypothesis: an expectation of what will happen. If I read this book, I will get smarter. Whether your behavior is deliberate or automatic, your brain constantly collects data to test hypotheses. What are my senses telling me? What is my intuition—my “gut”—telling me? Does this data confirm or disconfirm what I currently believe?
This is learning. There’s a physical change in our brain (it’s called neural plasticity) when we learn. Our amazing brain cells, the neurons, develop cell-to-cell connections called synapses. When we learn, new synapses form between cells that hadn’t previously been connected. Think of it as a networking event in your brain. (“Hello, my name is Neuron.” “No kidding! That’s my name, too.”) Every time you take a breath or think a thought, you are calling your neurons and their synapses to action.
The rate at which our synaptic network grows is a function of how often we do things that challenge our brains. New learning outside our ordinary comfort zone takes extra effort, and mental effort translates into faster neuronal growth. As Terry Sejnowski, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, described to me, “We need to acquire some stress.”1 The learning stress we acquire provides new cells and circuitry, which can be put to work for our brains’ predictive modeling.
The results of the predictions produce a physical reaction—specifically the release of dopamine, the chemical messenger that makes us feel delight. When you make a prediction and get it wrong, your unmet expectations lead to a drop in dopamine. You are less able to feel good; you may even feel bad. If you get what you expect, you experience little to no increase in dopamine. Exceeded expectations generate a large increase in dopamine. As you might guess, the brain catalogs these reactions and seeks the dopamine reward of exceeding expectations.
When you strike out on a new S Curve, you may be accustomed to a predictable, ho-hum level of dopamine. Your brain has its expectations. But as you, a creature of habit, become a creature in the wild—an Explorer, a Collector—your lack of experience leaves wide gaps in your predictive model. You will run up against unmet expectations as you attempt new things. Unmet expectations don’t feel good. That’s part of why the launch point of an S Curve can feel like a slog. Slow.
The sweet spot, by contrast, is characterized by increasingly accurate (but not too accurate) predictive models, together with increasingly more and more dopamine rewards. It’s the upside surprise that gives you the frisson of excitement. The sweet surprise fast-tracks the formation of neural connections. Dopamine is teaching you what is and isn’t working. Fast.
The connection between dopamine and neural growth highlights the marvelous plasticity of our brains. Brains can change. We can change them. We can alter our hypotheses. We can add new inputs. We can produce different outcomes. We can choose smart growth.
Welcome to the Sweet Spot
Accelerator is the third phase along your S Curve of Learning. You have now collected the data and resources you need, committed to an S Curve, and tipped into the sweet spot of your growth. There are fewer gaps in your knowledge, and you have a good sense of where the remaining gaps lie. You’re making conscious, deliberate choices about how you want to grow, and those choices become more automatic as stress and growth approach equilibrium. It’s fun! You feel the exhilaration that comes with conquering your challenges, with managing yourself.
Jeremy Andrus is a serial entrepreneur, currently CEO of Traeger Grills. Backyard chefs know Traeger as the grill that burns hardwood pellets instead of charcoal or gas—without having to chop wood. Patented in 1986 by amateur inventor Joe Traeger, the pellet grill gained a niche following.
When I sat down with Andrus in late 2019, he’d had a particularly busy week.2 As he got home one night around 10 p.m. after a business dinner, his wife, Kristin, asked him how his day had been. He said, “Today was crazy and chaotic and hard, but it was awesome. I loved it.” That, to me, is the sweet spot.
At forty-two, Andrus was the former wunderkind of Skullcandy, maker of cool headphones and audio accessories. He was initially reluctant about Traeger; he had no experience in the grill business. But when he started collecting data, he found something compelling. “As I spoke to Traeger grill owners, there was a level of passion that I’ve never seen in a consumer product before,” he says. “They didn’t say it was the best grill they’d ever owned, it was the best product they had ever owned.”3 But despite the magic in this twenty-seven-year-old brand, the company hadn’t scaled. Andrus’s interest was piqued.
It quickly became clear why Traeger hadn’t accelerated: its whole operation was costly and inefficient. Traeger was still performing tasks in-house that its competitors had outsourced years before. Given the strength of its product and brand, overhauling operations should give the company the lift it needed.
It was an S Curve too tempting to resist; Andrus took the CEO job. He quickly learned that the operational issues paled in comparison to Traeger’s culture, which was deeply hostile toward change. Seven CEOs had come and gone in rapid succession, each defeated by Traeger’s toxic culture. No one was able to turn the company around. Andrus was number eight.
Later on I learned that employees called me Ocho (Spanish for eight) behind my back. They didn’t expect me to last long. Their behavior reflected that. When I asked for data, they would ignore me. I’d ask people to work together on a project, and they’d simply refuse. Once, when I was visiting headquarters, I asked the CFO if he could meet with me. Even though I was his boss, he said he couldn’t find any time in his schedule.
The launch point of his Traeger CEO S Curve was painful. His first step was to buy out the majority shareholder, who was holding the company hostage in 1980s operations. Andrus said, “It was an important moment—one we celebrate as a company holiday every year. We call it Traeger Independence Day.” The second step was to upgrade warehouses and outsource trucking operations. Andrus knew that meant layoffs, and he agonized over the decision. Predictably, he faced considerable resistance from Traeger’s old guard. “Toxic culture” took on new meaning: “I pulled into the parking lot at my office to find it surrounded by fire trucks. One of our big-rig trucks was on fire. We didn’t know who was responsible, but it was obviously arson.”
Andrus was sympathetic toward the employees that would have to be laid off if Traeger meant to modernize and grow. He knew they were hurt. He was offering generous severance payouts. But an employee barbequing a company truck was too much. Traeger needed serious restructuring before somebody got hurt. He moved headquarters from Oregon to Utah. Only a fraction of the employees came along.
The Utah move was Traeger’s tipping point into the sweet spot. Acceleration followed. Soon operations were cooking. Sales exploded. Legacy culture gave way to a spirit of camaraderie on the new campus where employees were flipping burgers at a home office stocked with Traeger grills.
When Andrus joined me on my Disrupt Yourself podcast, you could have called him Siete—as in seven years at the helm of Traeger during which revenue went from $70 million to half a billion and climbing.4 Andrus shared his own recipe for smart growth: “Reset, swing big, and make sure you have a team that’s as good as the size of your vision.”
We Have Liftoff
I enjoy watching footage of the 1969 Saturn V rocket, the pioneering craft that launched the first moonwalkers into space. It is an apt metaphor for the S Curve of Learning. For all the elegance of its engineering, the Saturn V’s liftoff looks a bit clumsy: like trying to get a high-rise building off the ground. The massive first-stage engines generated more than 7.5 million pounds of thrust, yet it took a slow twelve seconds for the 3,100-ton rocket to clear its own launch tower.5
Acceleration didn’t begin in earnest until roughly thirty-eight miles up, when the second-stage engines fired and the first-stage engines dropped away. Then the ungainly phase was over. Stage two was over thirteen times more fuel efficient and reached a speed three times faster than stage one.
When we reach the acceleration stage in the sweet spot of the S Curve of Learning, the gawkiness of exploration and collection is likewise complete. We are increasingly productive, competent, and confident. Our stage-two rockets have fired. Serious acceleration is underway.
Racing along the S: C + A + R
Motivation to continue and confidence in the outcome are hallmarks of people in the Accelerator phase. Jeremy Andrus currently exemplifies this. “We’re swinging big,” he told me. “I love the problems we are solving and I’m confident we can solve them.”
According to self-determination theory, our needs for the following are being fulfilled:6
- Competence
- Autonomy
- Relatedness
We’ll use the acronym CAR as a mnemonic device.
Choose a favorite car to use in the acceleration phase of your S Curve. Maybe the Accelerator you imagine is a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, or a Porsche. Or maybe you prefer a vintage muscle car or a 4 × 4 truck. Perhaps it’s a Tesla or some other peppy electric vehicle. Visualize your ideal car.
Now, imagine driving it. Maybe you’re navigating breathtaking curves on the Pacific Coast Highway, California’s iconic coastal highway, enjoying the ocean views. The power at your feet is exhilarating. The salt air breeze off the ocean carries the scent of adventure.
C Is for Competence
You are enjoying this because of the competence you’ve acquired. You’re not a sixteen-year-old, first learning to drive. You know what you’re doing, completely at ease behind the wheel.
When you’re in the sweet spot, you experience equilibrium: You’re competent and things are getting easier, but not so easy that you’re bored and complacent. You know what you know. You have a good grasp of what you don’t know. The sweet spot is full of challenges that hone your predictive models. “Is everything working?” Jeremy Andrus asked, speaking of Traeger. “No. We have a thousand problems. But we have a strategy, and we have an unbelievable platform of people who can help us solve those problems.”
In 2018, Traeger confronted a major problem. Steel prices soared with new tariffs on goods imported from China. Lower-cost competitors edged into Traeger’s territory. Growth was ominously slow. Traeger faced a risky choice: double down on branding and emphasize the quality of its products or hunker down and cut costs to keep up with the interest on its debt. It could swing big or bunt.
Andrus, in full Accelerator mode, chose to swing for the fences. He knew he was competent enough to face the crisis, because he’d already been thrown this S Curve at Skullcandy. Consumer spending slumped at a time when Skullcandy’s competitors were carving into the millennial demographic, armed with similar products and hip branding. “We went from white-hot to, painfully, ‘how do we eke out growth and profitability?’ And I didn’t know how to reset.”
With Traeger, Andrus knew how. At the time, Traeger was inventing a line of reasonably priced grill-smoker hybrids. Best of all, they were Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled. “Set it and forget it” was the catchphrase. Traeger decided to bet on the tech-savvy demographic: cooks who could keep a watchful eye on the grill from an app.7 “We took a really big risk on launching a connected product at a relatively low price point,” Andrus told me, “but [appealing to millennials] was an important risk to take.”
Andrus has the hallmarks of a smart growth leader. He’s been at the wheel of his car a time or two around the track, he knows when to hit the gas and when to put on the brakes; he knows how to course correct. He also knows that to grow Traeger, he needs to grow himself. When asked about his Skullcandy experience, Andrus says he feels nothing but deep, deep gratitude because of what he learned. He says, “I’m in the middle of these incredibly difficult situations and they don’t feel like a burden to me. They feel fun.”
A Is for Autonomy
The A in CAR is autonomy, which Accelerators require. Autonomy equals choice. We govern ourselves. We legislate our lives. We have the power to choose. Determined Accelerators find autonomy even when circumstances seem to offer little in the way of choice.
Let’s revisit the story of Astrid Tuminez from the introduction. Even in the slums of her childhood upbringing in the Philippines, choices were still available to her. Nuns in Iloilo City made school available to her for free, and she chose to take advantage of that. She chose to work hard. “Because I had access to a library at school, I got to read magazines like Time and Newsweek. I made the decision quite early that I would go to the United States, that I would live in New York, and that I would work for the United Nations because I read about it in Time magazine.” And she did.8
Astrid Tuminez couldn’t choose to be born in a family where getting a US visa was a forgone conclusion. She couldn’t shape US immigration policy. Her visa applications were twice denied. “You’re young, you’re poor,” she was told. “You’re an immigration risk. Don’t come.”
But Tuminez could choose to tap into her human resources.9 Her network of friends and mentors opened the doors that circumstances shut. There were people who would vouch for her character and potential. The third time, she got a visa. “Coming to the US was incredibly liberating,” she says. America gave Tuminez more freedom than she had ever known.
Fortunately, autonomy doesn’t entirely hinge on the level of freedom granted to us by others. Even for those fortunate enough to live in wealthy democracies, not all circumstances will offer an abundance of choice. Autonomy also depends on our willingness to act rather than to be acted upon and to own the consequences of our actions. Astrid Tuminez was living in a slum in Iloilo City, and still she managed to be an Accelerator.
Sometimes the fuel in our accelerating CAR runs a little low. Liz O’Donnell, for example, encountered a crisis of autonomy when her aging parents began to require extra care.10 O’Donnell is chief content officer at Double Forte, a public relations firm and the author of Working Daughter: A Guide to Caring for Your Aging Parents. In 2020, she told me, “I remember the exact moment that Working Daughter came to me.” It was on a vacation day she had scheduled because her mother needed to visit the doctor. O’Donnell’s “vacation” began at 6 a.m., fielding work emails. She got her two children off to school. Then came the doctor’s appointment with her mom:
The doctor grilled me. He wanted to know why I didn’t know how much my mother was eating and why I wasn’t calling her every day. He asked me, right in front of my mother, “Why haven’t you moved her in with you yet?” He stopped just shy of asking me why I was still working.
The growing demands in O’Donnell’s life were both logistical and emotional. In a phase of life where she might have been accelerating, there wasn’t enough time to grow in her career, not enough time to spend with her young family. Even greater challenges followed. O’Donnell’s mother and father were diagnosed with terminal illnesses, both on the same day.
O’Donnell candidly shared how she felt at first. “I really resented it,” she told me. “I was a working mom. I only had so many hours with my children.” Her choices were now more limited. The cost of being there for her ailing parents was going to be high, but the opportunity was greater: to be present at the end of their lives. That recognition was a turning point. She says, “I thought, The only way through this is through this. So stop fighting it and get it done.”
O’Donnell’s let’s-do-this attitude was a choice. With her choice came confidence. The sweet spot is not mere happenstance; it’s a place you choose to be. Right here. Right now.
O’Donnell learned that she had autonomy, even when it wasn’t obvious. She was in the driver’s seat. What began as a compulsory new S Curve of Learning (“I have to deal with this because no one else can”) developed into an autonomous S Curve (“I choose to be here at the end of my parents’ lives”). Even when unforeseen circumstances limit our autonomy, “we can hold two truths at the same time,” O’Donnell said. “We can hold one truth, which is ‘this is hell, and I don’t want to do it,’ and the other truth which is ‘I know that this is a phenomenal moment, and I love that I’m able to care for my parents.’ ”
Organizations can accelerate through autonomy, too. Nearly three decades ago, engineers at the Indian automotive company Mahindra & Mahindra had come up with an idea for a full-fledged SUV: the Scorpio. They presented a crude clay model of their brainchild to executives at Ford, a partner company they hoped would back them on it. They talked about their development budget. They wanted Ford to guide the process and make Scorpio a reality. Ford was impressed. “Right away,” recalls CEO Anand Mahindra, “the vice chairman of the company offered … a team of seasoned Ford engineers to assist us.… At that point, the chairman interjected and said, ‘No, let’s not send any engineers at all. If we do, this vehicle may come out looking like a Ford car and costing just as much. If these guys can really develop this car they’ve just shown us at the cost they claim they can, then I think we are the ones who should be learning from them.’ ”
Mahindra took the wheel. The Scorpio has sold more than a half-million units since its rollout. Mahindra said, “I owe Ford a debt of gratitude for leaving us to fend for ourselves. Because when I look back upon these events, I know that the choice Ford made [not to partner on the Scorpio] put us solidly on the path of self-reliance. But I admit that I have often wondered how things would have turned out had Ford made a different choice. What if they had not abandoned us to do the Scorpio alone? We would not have built the capabilities we possess today.”11
As Accelerators, we have the skills we need (competence), we have the power to make choices, and we choose to be on this S Curve (autonomy). That leaves R, relatedness, which is the recognition that we are interconnected and that we belong.
R Is for Relatedness
Priyanka Carr and Gregory Walton conducted a study that demonstrates the power of relatedness.12 Subjects met in groups and then were separated and tasked with solving puzzles alone. One group, the “psychologically together” group, was told that they were still working as a team to solve their puzzle, and they would receive “a tip from a team member.” A second group heard nothing about teamwork.
All participants were, in fact, working alone regardless of what they were told. But people in the psychologically together category worked 48 percent longer, solved more problems correctly, and had better recall for what they had seen. They also said that they felt less tired and depleted by the task and reported finding the puzzle more interesting.13
Accelerators work together, and as important, they feel as if they are part of a team.
Zaza Pachulia, a retired two-time NBA champion, told me that during his career, it was rare to find an NBA rookie who put his team first.14 Rookies want to prove themselves as individuals, a mindset that can result in selfish play. Over time, most players come to realize that they won’t be at their best unless the team is at its best. The team is more likely to win.
Pachulia learned this during his 2013–2015 seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks. His coach was Jason Kidd, new to the job after a legendary career as an NBA point guard. Some pundits derided Kidd as “the worst coach in the NBA” after a gaffe-ridden first year as head coach for the Brooklyn Nets.15 But Kidd pushed through his early setbacks to become a Coach of the Year candidate in 2015 when he turned Pachulia’s Bucks into a contending team.
Kidd taught Pachulia that you have to be able to read what’s about to happen as a play unfolds. “You can’t read the court if you don’t know the tendencies of your teammates,” Pachulia told me, “their strengths, their weaknesses.” Pachulia says that, for example, he “cannot jump,” so it was pointless to throw him a high pass. A low pass followed by a hard drive to the paint offered better odds of scoring. Pachulia’s teammates needed to understand his strengths and weaknesses to help him play most effectively.
When Pachulia and others talk about team “chemistry,” they are, in essence, talking about team relatedness. Relatedness requires both a shared identity and a personal familiarity with other team members. Time on the road (half of a team’s games are played on the road) gives players the opportunity to get to know each other off court. “That carries over onto the court,” Pachulia says.
Team identity is basic to our biology, key to the survival of our highly communal human species. When we share an identity, we feel related. Relatedness accelerates our growth. In their landmark 1995 study, psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary write, “Human beings are fundamentally and pervasively motivated by a need to belong, that is, by a strong desire to form and maintain enduring interpersonal attachments.”16
But interpersonal attachments and teamwork can be tough when our individual identities, interests, and incentives are battling with the shared identity, interests, and incentives of the group.
Conflict resolution expert, Donna Hicks, joined my Disrupt Yourself podcast in 2018. She is a scholar with experience in bringing adversaries to the table in some of the thorniest conflicts in the Middle East.17 Hicks explained that when we believe another person is standing in the way of our needs or our interests, deep down we believe they’re standing in the way of our basic human dignity—our inherent value and worth.
You can protect the dignity of others, thus disarming their conflict response, by fostering relatedness. That starts with shared experiences (like playing on the same team) and nonconflicting goals (like winning an NBA championship).18 When drawing upon shared experience, we feel safely connected to someone. We use the same part of the brain for thinking about their experience as we do for thinking about our own.19 It releases oxytocin, the empathy hormone. We conclude someone is a friend; we affix the friend label. Without shared goals, our brain functions differently. We attach a foe label. A foe’s thoughts are not our thoughts: less empathy, less oxytocin, less relatedness. Whether we’re in a boardroom or a locker room, we require relatedness to accelerate and maintain the momentum of the sweet spot.20
One more thought as we complete our lap around the confidence track: the S Curve of Learning model itself increases confidence. It maps to where you are in your growth journey (competency), sets you as the driver of your growth (autonomy), and it gives you a shared language for growth (relatedness).
C + A + R = Competence + Autonomy + Relatedness = Confidence.
Cooking with Confidence
Ellen Bennett, a Mexican American entrepreneur, started out as a restaurant line cook. In 2012, Bennett was working her way up the food chain at a two-Michelin-starred restaurant. Nobody knew that the twenty-four-year-old sauteing the onions was also dreaming big. Bennett had acquired a California business license, bent on starting her own culinary clothing company. “I felt so legit and official,” she laughingly told me. Her business plan? Nonexistent. “I didn’t even know when, or where, or how I was going to do it,” she said.
What she did know was (a) how to sew aprons; and (b) that the aprons they were wearing in the kitchen were terrible. “I realized that our gear stunk. It was bad. It didn’t fit well, it didn’t look good on men, women, you name it. It just was terrible.” Her boss knew it too. A vendor was supplying new aprons, he said. Did she want one? Bennett said,
In that split second, I blurted out “Chef, I have an apron company. I will make the aprons.” He said, “What are you talking about? You’re a line cook in my kitchen.” “No, you don’t understand. I’ve been doing business. This is going to be amazing. We’re going to make you the best aprons ever.”
Just like that, Bennett went from line cook to supplier with a forty-apron contract. “I convinced him right there on the spot to give me this order.” Could she single-handedly crank out the first batch in her after hours? She could. “You better believe I delivered the aprons.”
The aprons were terrible.
Bennett continued, “He [my boss] said, ‘Bennett, these aprons suck. The straps are falling off.’ I almost died right then and there. I could have just thrown in the towel and said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ll give you your money back. But instead, I decided to take control of what had happened and make it right. And so I did.”
Back to the sewing machine. She delivered better aprons, and a company was born. In less than ten years, her scrappy startup—Hedley & Bennett—has accelerated to sell millions of dollars of products. This is the sweet spot for a CEO who hasn’t even turned forty. She’s got confidence to produce a quality product, uses her autonomy to own the failures as well as the success, and helps her employees—and her business—grow with positive relatedness. Getting here has involved some disasters: the raw panic of realizing a big shipment wouldn’t make its deadline, the misery of telling a major client their order is going unfilled. Bennett said, “And yet I look back and I think about my chef with the straps, I took responsibility at that moment. And it helped me just learn that that was part of the journey.”
Predicting How You’re Going to Succeed
Outcomes were unpredictable when Ellen Bennett was first growing her business, before she hit her sweet spot. Remembering a big order she got from a high-value client, she said, “It was monumental volumes of stress by the minute, seeing there was an iceberg in front of us, and I couldn’t steer the ship in the right direction.” Now in the sweet spot, her predictive model is more accurate. She feels more certain.
Certainty makes you feel you’re in control. You have more autonomy. You’re in a fast CAR, you’re the driver, and you’ve got the pedal down. But even when your predictions aren’t perfect, your S Curve of Learning road map gives your brain a hack for hanging onto that “I’m crushing it!” feeling. You know where you are on your S Curve, and you know where you’re going.
One of the things I learned from my career in finance was that if you start and finish strong—if you get your buy and sell decisions right—everything in between (the sweet spot, for example) takes care of itself.
Since 1857, the average return for the stock market in the United States has been 5 percent. If you had invested $100 then, it would now be worth $300,000.
But let’s say you didn’t just invest the $100 and forget about the money. Instead, every four-and-a-half years, you sold your stocks before you went on a monthlong vacation and bought them back at the end of your vacation.
If, during your vacation, the market performed poorly, then your average return would be 9 percent. This doesn’t sound like much except that we are talking about compounding returns, so your $100 is now worth $130 million.21 However, if the market performed well while you were on vacation, the average return would be 1 percent, and the $100 would be worth only $800.
Myron Scholes, the Nobel Prize–winning financial economist who conducted this research, says, “All of the returns are explained by the tails [the beginning and the ending]. The middle is a lot of noise.”22
Of course, even the savviest investor can never time their buying and selling perfectly. But let’s apply the idea (loosely) to our growth.
Every S Curve has a beginning, a middle, and an end: launch point, sweet spot, and mastery. Getting smart about our growth means learning to manage through the entire growth cycle. If we frame our curves correctly, get our beginnings (the launch point decisions) and endings (the moves we make when we are in the mastery phase) right, the sweet spot can then have an automaticity. It is not that there is no work to do in the middle; far from it. There are strategies we can employ that help to wring maximum value from the sweet spot—the subject of the next chapter. Broadly, however, many of the middle details will take care of themselves, leaving us free to enjoy the ride. Recall the Saturn rocket; once the stage two rockets fire, the Saturn accelerates. Once it breaks free of the constraint of earth’s gravity, its momentum is maintained by the gravitational pull of the moon. Obviously, there are still complexities, but the heavy lift is over, until it’s time to land the lunar module on the moon.
Every Day Is an S Curve
In my previous book, Build an A-Team, I talked about optimizing individuals on their S Curves to build a high-performing, innovative team. I posited that the standard bell curve distribution percentages of about 15 percent of team members on the launch point, 70 percent in the sweet spot, and 15 percent in mastery are a solid baseline.23
What if we applied similar math to every day of our lives? As if each new morning were the launch point of an S Curve, and we spent most of our day confidently in the sweet spot, feeling competent, autonomous, related—and exhilarated? Remember what Jeremy Andrus said of his acceleration at Traeger: “I love every single day of this. Today was crazy and chaotic and hard, but it was awesome. I loved it.”
It’s worth aiming for 15 percent (approximately) of each day spent at the high end, automatically performing tasks that we’ve fully mastered. Another 15 percent spent on the launch point, grappling with problems that are a bit more taxing, even a little beyond our reach. Fifteen percent seems like a magical amount; remember we’re also looking for about 15 percent novelty on a new S Curve, and 85 percent familiarity (Explorer, chapter 1).
Our goal could be to spend most of each day in the sweet spot. When you’re in the sweet spot—whether on a yearslong quest for growth, or just trying to maximize the potential of a single day—you can spend more of your time being, not just doing. Seizing and savoring the moment. It’s been almost three decades since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published his groundbreaking work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.24 The concept of flow has been applied to myriad situations and states of mind since. Spending part of each day in a sweet spot is what I think of as equivalent to flow. Csikszentmihalyi writes:
There are people who, regardless of their material conditions, have been able to improve the quality of their lives, who are satisfied, and who have a way of making those around them also a bit more happy. Such individuals lead vigorous lives, are open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live. They enjoy whatever they do, even if tedious or difficult; they are hardly ever bored, and they can take in stride anything that comes their way. Perhaps their greatest strength is that they are in control of their lives.25
Control is elusive, but highly sought. Perhaps control eludes us because we are almost always looking ahead, trying to ensure control of future outcomes rather than making the most of the moment. Try instead to make each day an optimal experience. Spend more of your life in the sweet spot by spending more of each day in the sweet spot. Tomorrow is always headed our way; it will become today soon enough.
This phase typically feels 
Accelerator Takeaways
The third stage of your S-Curve of Learning is called Accelerator, when you reach the sweet spot phase and the pace of your growth accelerates. You are here because of the hard work you did in the launch phase, including the initial learning, data collection, and decision making. The first stage of the S Curve’s sweet spot is marked by an increasing ability to produce more results with less effort, increased accuracy of your brain’s predictive model, and a feeling of exhilaration. You have liftoff and have moved from slow to fast. Your pace up the S Curve has quickened and you are still picking up speed.
This stage in your smart growth consists of motivation to grow and the confidence that you can. According to self-determination theory, your needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness are being met. Use the mnemonic device (CAR) as you accelerate.
The CAR Model
- Competence. Now that you’ve crossed over into the sweet spot, you are increasingly capable of producing results. You start to experience an equilibrium: progress toward your goal is getting easier, but not so easy as to create boredom and complacency. The data collection and decision making you completed on the launch point has strengthened your mind’s predictive capacity. You can now take on new challenges with a better understanding of what the results are likely to be.
- Autonomy. Autonomy speeds up your acceleration. Note that this is not the “I’m alone and doing this by myself” type of autonomy, but rather the kind that harnesses your internal power to take responsibility, make decisions, and solve problems. Your sense of autonomy is strengthened when you know you’ve made a difference and is weakened if others are doing the work or making the key decisions for you. Successful Accelerators find ways to move forward even when circumstances offer limited options.
- Relatedness. Vibrant connection to something larger than yourself is the third component of your CAR. This relatedness involves two dimensions: the sense that you are connected (for example, contributing to a compelling vision, part of a larger effort) and the experience of belonging to a team or group. Relatedness is a basic human need and essential for maintaining momentum along the curve. We’ll talk about this in depth in chapter 7, Ecosystem.
In the Accelerator stage, difficult situations can actually be fun, as you have sufficient knowledge and resources to make things happen. It may feel like things are going smoothly, and this is normal. When work feels more hard than fun, be persistent to sustain momentum. You can make a conscious choice to stay and grow in the sweet spot—enjoy the flow.