Raising the Floor: How to Keep Moving When You’re Not at Your Best

Why doing something—even on the hard days—matters more than chasing perfect days.

Everyone longs for the times when you enter the zone, perform well, and find a rhythm. Sometimes, you sink into a groove that lasts multiple days, even weeks or months. It’s the heralded hot-streak. These good stretches occupy a lot of mind space—and for good reason. They are exciting, fun, and we produce some of our best work. So of course we want to engineer them and make them happen.

But alas… most of the time we don’t feel our best. And what happens on our bad days, when we find ourselves in a rut or slump or even in a downright hole, might even be more important than what happens on our good days.

It’s easy to show up when you are at your best and everything is clicking.
It’s harder to show up when the current is going against you.

Most everyone can do the former. But it’s the latter that has a huge impact on lasting progress, fulfillment, and success.

An idea called raising the floor can help.

Make Your Bad Days Better

The best performers have high ceilings, no doubt, but they are even better at putting together a decent day when they don’t really want to, at raising the floor. A significant part of what separates the greats from everyone else is how they respond to micro-adversities.

The poor night’s sleep before the playoff match. The misstep in a big presentation. Hitting the wrong note on stage. Getting caught up in doomscrolling when you should have been focused on writing. The double-fault on game point. The messy incision during the last surgical case of the day (yes, this happens, and more often than you think). The days you find yourself apathetic, low-energy, and all-around off for no discernable reason at all.

These situations are unavoidable, even for the best. What comes next is key. Instead of spiraling you can say:

It’s just not there right now, but how can I make this off day a bit better?

You can either freak out, catastrophize, and obsess over the sub-par effort. Or, you can accept that it happened, learn from it if possible, and also realize that sometimes there is no silver lining and you just have to move on. It’s the difference between having a bad moment, a bad day, and having a bad day turn into a bad week. And this difference is crucial.

Long-term performance is not about what happens on any single day. It is about the compounding effect of each and every day. It is about increasing your average over time. Nothing brings down an average like a zero. So you want to avoid them at all costs. If you can turn a zero into a one, two, or three, that’s progress. When you do succumb to a zero, or maybe even two or three of them in a row, you want to avoid it turning into a month of zeros. That, too, is progress.

I try to write at least 1,000 words on specified days when I’m working on a book project. Sometimes it’s just not there. Rather than phone it in and take a zero, I acknowledge I’m having a bad day, release from the original target, and attempt to get out two or three hundred words instead. And on the days when I do take a zero: when I’m at my best, I evaluate what if anything may have gone wrong, learn from it if possible, and then move on. When I’m at my worst, I ruminate, doubt, question, lose sleep, and as a result, struggle to bounce back.

When you are having a bad day, or even a stretch of them, ask yourself: How can I raise the floor?

Raising the floor means shifting your expectations to account for what you’ve got to give in the moment, and then doing your best to give it. It means remembering that what you do on your bad days is important, and even the smallest efforts are deposits in the bank.

Doing hard things, showing up—even when you don’t feel like it—is integral to building excellence and meaning in life. When you play the long game, it’s less about the very best days and more about becoming a better average over time. It requires a steadfast commitment to showing up and giving what you’ve got to give—on good days and on bad days, too.