There’s a smell you recognise before you even open your eyes in the morning: wet grass, firm ground, that mix of green and mud that stays on you for hours. The pitch is heavy. The blisters on your feet hurt and won’t go away, the sun has been beating down for an hour and your heart is racing. Your breath comes in and out in gasps, sweat runs into your eyes and for a moment you can’t see anything else. You hear only your breath, your own, rising and falling like a tide that gives you no respite. Your legs hurt, but strangely, they no longer feel like yours. Eighteen teammates run alongside you, a whistle sets the pace at intervals, and somewhere, at the far end, there’s a cone marking the finish. The goal. The end.
It’s the last ten metres.
You did so much to get through ninety. You gave almost everything. And then a reasonable little voice, the kind that sounds wise, whispers to you: what are ten metres, really? And yet they weigh on you. They seem endless, longer than the ninety behind you, as if someone had lengthened the pitch just for you. You did well, truly. You did ninety per cent of the work. But inside, in that part of your head where excuses can’t reach, you already know: not crossing the line first, now, would be a defeat. And so you find a strength you didn’t think you had, put your head down, swallow a groan and keep your legs moving. You can no longer see the cone: you don’t need to, because the goal has moved. It’s no longer getting there. It’s going beyond the limit. You cross the finish line with a power that isn’t yours, and a second later you’re shattered, exhausted, emptied. But you’re happy. With the kind of happiness that only comes when you’ve passed the line you set in front of yourself.
I want to talk about those ten metres. Because I firmly believe that’s where growth happens.
Not in the ninety. In the ten.
Everyone can do ninety per cent
Plenty of people get to ninety per cent of the work.
If not quite everyone, I’d say at least most. Ninety per cent of people, let’s put it that way!
After all, covering ninety per cent of the pitch is the norm. Diligence. That “I’ve done my bit” that so many people repeat to themselves, convinced it is true.
An honest result, of course. But a common one. And the difference between those who grow and those who stay the same isn’t decided there, but in those metres where your body asks, begs you, to stop and your head offers you a complete catalogue of reasonable justifications.
That is the terrain of the exceptional.
The point is this: the best excuses don’t come at metre five. They come at metre ninety-one, and they sound more or less like this:
“But I did well.”
“I gave it my all.”
“I did a lot, but I didn’t have time.”
Phrases I hear repeated constantly, at work and beyond. They are true enough to seem sufficient; and that is their trap, because they are not lies. You are not lying. Or at least, not entirely.
Really, you did well. You put in the effort. It’s just that the work isn’t finished. The last cone is right there, and you are using those excuses only to avoid running the last few metres. Why are you doing it?
The psychology of fatigue
The South African physiologist Tim Noakes proposed an idea that overturned the way we think about fatigue: the brain, he argues, works as a central governor. It doesn’t stop you when your muscles are truly exhausted, but much earlier, when it judges that carrying on could become risky.
The problem, though, is that fatigue is largely a forecast. A cautious alarm that goes off with a wide safety margin, keeping a reserve of energy locked in a safe, not to be touched. So when, in the last ten metres, you find “a strength you didn’t think you had”, you aren’t performing a miracle. You’re simply opening that safe. The strength was already there. The limit you felt wasn’t real.
Granted, your legs hurt. At a certain point, though, it’s as if you can no longer feel them. The psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi studied this sensation for a lifetime, calling it flow, the flow state. In flow, pain recedes, time warps, noise disappears and all that remains is your breath going in and out. In that moment you are wholly in the present: so much so that fatigue, at some point, stops talking to you.
Professional athletes are constantly chasing flow, but the same experience is possible outside sport too. It happens when, ten metres from the finish, you no longer think about how far is left, but about how good it feels to be in motion.
A feeling that those who stop, or who never start at all (to stay in their comfort zone), will never know.
The ten metres of work
In sport it’s easy to develop this mindset. Or rather: no, it’s no easier. But visualising the finish line (be it a cone, a goalmouth, the end zone in American football or whatever else) is decidedly simpler.
In the working world, the ten metres look like details. The e-mail reread one more time. The presentation that might already be good enough but could be memorable. The awkward phone call put off until tomorrow. Many small final stretches, yet they mark the point where most people slow down, because the bulk is done and no one will notice the difference. And yet the difference lies entirely there, and true quality always hides in that last ten per cent the client didn’t ask for and the schedule didn’t allow for.
With the younger generations, the conversation becomes more delicate. Those starting out today have tools we could only dream of and a clarity about their own limits that we often lacked. But there is a risk, and it is that of having learnt to protect effort more than outcome. “I gave it everything” has become a phrase that closes the conversation, when it should open it. Because the real question isn’t whether you gave it everything. It’s whether you gave it everything in the last ten metres or only in the ninety that came before.
So is the society that pushes us in the right?
And now we come to the question that occurs to me when I read certain articles denouncing our society and its “obsession” with never stopping and with performance. Are we really sure they are right?
My answer is: they are half right, and it is the wrong half that makes the most noise.
A limit, in fact, is something you can choose or something you can endure.
You run the last ten metres of your race because you chose that race: you put that finish line there, and crossing it adds something to who you are. In short, it is your limit.
Often, however, this society leads us to make efforts we haven’t chosen. Efforts imposed on us from outside (perhaps by a boss, an algorithm, a social expectation) that move the finish line a metre further every time we’re nearly there.
This kind of attitude and culture does not help us grow. It consumes. And calling it “pushing past your limits” is a deception, because instead of driving us beyond a boundary we have chosen, it has us chasing a boundary that someone else keeps moving so that we never arrive.
Criticising this attitude is right.
Confusing the last ten metres with toxicity, however, is not.
That is why you don’t have to run the last ten metres of every race put in front of you. It would only leave you more exhausted and without direction. Reject the limit when it isn’t yours. Respect the limit when it protects you. Choose your races carefully, and then run them to the end.
At some point, you’ll see, the final cone will no longer matter. All that will matter is the feeling that comes a second after the line: when you are shattered and happy at once, and you know, without having to prove it to anyone, that you have crossed to the other side.
No one will give you that feeling. You can only take it.
Always, in the last ten metres.
New connections (FAQ)
Why does the last ten per cent of the work feel harder than all the rest?
Because it comes when the initial enthusiasm has run out, most of the result is already visible and stopping seems a reasonable choice. It is precisely at this stage that the brain tends to overestimate the effort still required and underestimate the value of the finishing touches. The last ten metres rarely call for new skills: they call for presence, discipline and the ability not to treat as finished what is only nearly done.
How do you tell perseverance from obstinacy?
Perseverance serves a chosen goal and keeps a sense of direction. Obstinacy, by contrast, carries on with an effort simply because it has already begun, even when the finish line has lost its meaning or the price to pay has become disproportionate. Pushing past a limit can help us grow when that limit belongs to the race we have decided to run. Insisting on every course, regardless of its value, only risks draining our energy.
How can we tell whether a limit is our own or imposed by others?
A limit is ours when it stems from a goal we recognise ourselves in, and pushing past it brings us closer to the person or professional we want to become. It is imposed when the finish line keeps being moved by external expectations, without our being able to define its meaning or its measure. One question can help: will going all the way make me feel closer to my own direction, or merely more adequate to someone else’s demands?