Great achievement needs a capacity for consistent recovery during setbacks. Setbacks are inevitable, but for someone who is motivated and curious, and has their eye on the prize, and dealing with them is as important as (arguably more important than) high performance during good conditions.

In any part of life, high performance is about recovery. In sports, recovery allows you to continue pushing without injury. In relationships, recovery deepens connections instead of severing them. In professional life, recovery turns weaknesses into strengths.

If you want to go high, you need to go far. If you want to go far, you need to know what to do when conditions are bad. If you want to learn to succeed, learn to recover well. Good recovery is not about beating yourself up or examining your failures under a magnifying glass. It's about giving yourself the time and grace to see what went wrong, understand why it went wrong, and evaluate honestly what your part in it was. This is hard and uncomfortable, but it's the only way to be real and the only way to move forward.