We all want to improve. But you may find yourself at a plateau where your progress has slowed down, stopped — or much worse — gone in reverse.

This can often be because we stopped pushing ourselves to improve, we can only muster a minimal effort, or we quit at the first sign of boredom, comfort, fatigue, or pain. Of course, you should listen to your body and stay within safe limits, but you almost always have more effort to give in almost every situation.

David Cain, the writer behind the blog Raptitude, shared a story about how his strength training finally started to improve by going past his usual number of repetitions to the point of muscle failure:

Those last few reps are the money makers — the best return for your effort you’re going to get, but many people don’t even know they’re possible. My usual stopping point felt like just about the end of the road, but it was actually the beginning of a hidden, hyper-rewarding territory where exceptional results happen.

This discovery made me wonder how often life works like that — where giving an extra 10-15% can pay off as much as the entire rest of the effort — and how often you have no idea.

To push our maximum effort even further, David Goggins, modern symbol of extreme discipline and mental toughness, wrote in his best-selling memoir Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds about where we think our limit is:

Sadly, most of us give up when we’ve only given around 40 percent of our maximum effort. Even when we feel like we’ve reached our absolute limit, we still have 60 percent more to give!

Goggins continues:

Once you know that to be true, it’s simply a matter of stretching your pain tolerance, letting go of your identity and all your self-limiting stories, so you can get to 60 percent, then 80 percent and beyond without giving up.

So, whether you’re going for a run, practicing piano, sitting in meditation, or writing an essay, don’t stop when you first think you may be done. Keep pushing past that point — whether it’s 10% or 60% further — and find yourself improving with greater speed and success.

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