You’re Not Failing. You’re in the Zone.

Issue #544 – Monday, September 7, 2026

In This Issue:

🧠 The 85% rule & why struggling is proof you're learning

💡 An easier way for you to take your next step ends tonight

🤯 Five ways to stay in the sweet spot when things gets hard

🎤 Why you're allowed to be bad at the new thing for a while

🤔 How unfinished tasks nag at you harder than finished ones

🏛️ Bill on practice, persistence and the one skill worth mastering

🧠The Big Idea

Estimated Read Time: 4 Minutes

You're Not Failing. You're in the Zone.

What Learning Is Supposed to Feel Like (and Why
Most People Quit Right Before It Works)

By Ryan Standifird

Back in high school, I ran cross country.

On Saturdays, our long run took us up to the Santa Rosa Plateau, a rolling trail overlooking the Murrieta Valley. Ten miles, up and back.

And when I first started… I couldn't do it.

Not all at once, anyway. A few miles in, my legs would go heavy, my lungs would burn, and I'd wonder if I should have signed up for a different sport.

But I couldn’t stop. Stopping killed my momentum. Instead, I'd slow to a walk and take a few deep breaths. Then I'd pick a tree up the trail and tell myself, "Okay… when I get to that tree, I'll start running again."

Tree after tree. Week after week.

Until one Saturday, I ran all ten miles without walking once.

Why Today Is a Good Day to Start Something

I'm thinking about that trail today because it's Labor Day. A day we set aside to rest from work… and, oddly, a day a lot of us feel the itch to start something new.

That’s because according to researchers at the Wharton School, people are far more likely to go after a goal right after a "temporal landmark" - a new week, a new month, a birthday, a holiday. They call it the fresh start effect.

Part of why it works? A landmark lets you file every past attempt under "the person I used to be." Holidays like today make it easy to draw a line between the “old you” and the “new you.”

So if you've been meaning to learn a new skill or finally change something about yourself, your brain is already leaning in.

The question is what happens a few miles in… when it gets hard.

The Sweet Spot of Struggle

In 2019, a team of researchers from the University of Arizona, Brown, UCLA, and Princeton set out to answer a deceptively simple question: 

How hard should something be for you to learn it fastest?

Their answer, published in Nature Communications, was called the Eighty Five Percent Rule.

According to the study, learning happens fastest when you're getting it right about 85% of the time… and wrong about 15% of the time.

The team worked this out mathematically and tested it on learning models, and it lines up with what educators have long called the "zone of proximal development."

So what does this mean for you?

If something feels easy, you're not really learning much. 

If it feels impossible, you're not learning much either. You're just failing. And you’ll probably give up.

Growth lives in that uncomfortable middle - where you're mostly getting it, but not quite.

That's where the walk breaks come in.

I didn’t consciously realize it at the time, but when I slowed down on that trail, I wasn't quitting. I was dialing the difficulty back just enough to stay in the game. And when I hit that tree, I dialed it right back up.

I was staying in the 85% sweet spot without knowing it existed.

What the Sweet Spot Looks Like

It's not always a trail. But you've felt it.

It's picking up a guitar and getting through most of the song… except for that one chord change you flub every time.

It's learning a new language and following most of the conversation, until one sentence sails right past you.

It's taking that online course with material just past the edge of what you already know.

It's trying to stop snapping at your kids after a long day, and catching yourself most of the time. Not every time. Most.

None of those feel like winning. That's exactly the point.

If any of them felt easy, there'd be nothing left to learn. If any of them felt impossible, you'd have quit.

The fumbled chord, the lost sentence, the sharp reply you catch a second too late… that's your 15%. It's not proof you're too old, too busy, or not cut out for this.

It's proof you're in the zone.

What It All Comes Down To

I still think about the time I hit that last stretch of trail where the valley opened up below me and I realized… “Hey, I didn't walk once!”

It didn't happen because I pushed harder than everyone else. It happened because I found a way to keep going even when I wanted to quit.

So on this Labor Day, if there's something you've been meaning to learn - or a version of yourself you've been meaning to become - remember this:

You don't have to run the whole ten miles today.

You just have to keep going - even if that means slowing down.

And pick your next tree.

🤣Meditation Meme of the Week

Lorem Ipsum

🤯Hack-Worthy

5 Ways to Stay in the Sweet Spot

1. Slow down. Don't stop. When a new skill or habit gets hard, the instinct is to walk away entirely. Instead, shrink it. Practice for five minutes instead of thirty. Do the easy version. Read one page. A walk keeps your momentum. A full stop means starting from zero tomorrow.

2. Pick your next tree. Ten miles is too big to hold in your head. One tree isn't. Stanford research on "proximal goals" found that near-term targets build persistence and confidence far better than distant ones. Whatever your ten miles is, find the tree: the next lesson, the next page, the next conversation.

3. Expect the 15%. That feeling of struggle or “not quite getting it” is what learning is supposed to feel like! If you're getting it wrong sometimes, you're in the zone. If you never get it wrong… you might need a harder trail.

4. Use the landmark. The fresh start effect works because a Monday, a birthday, or a holiday lets you file your past failures under "old me." But don't wait for January. Pick the next landmark on your calendar (even today is an option), name what you're starting, and treat everything before it as a previous chapter.

5. Keep your awareness high. Every tip above depends on one thing: noticing. Noticing that you're about to quit instead of slow down. Noticing that you've lost sight of the next tree. Noticing whether the frustration you feel is the 15%… or a sign you've pushed past the zone into panic.

That's where meditation comes in. A regular practice, especially with Holosync, strengthens the part of you that watches what's happening while it's happening. And the earlier you catch the "I'm failing, quit now" alarm, the more choices you have left. You can walk instead of stop. You can dial it back instead of blow it up.

Awareness doesn't make the sweet spot easier to sit in. It makes it easier to find your way back when you slip out.

🎤 MaryEllen's Mic Drop

You're Allowed to Be Bad at It

Somewhere along the way, most of us decided that being new at something should feel graceful.

It doesn't. It feels clumsy. A little embarrassing. Like your brain is letting you down.

But your brain isn't letting you down. It's doing something hard and unfamiliar, and the awkwardness you feel is what growth feels like from the inside.

So today, give yourself a little room. You're allowed to be bad at the new thing for a while. It isn’t failing. 

It’s growth.

-ME

🏛️ Founder's Archive

"Like anything else worth mastering, it takes practice and persistence to become aware of how you create your reality."

-Bill Harris
Centerpointe Founder (1950 - 2018)

Bill spent thirty years telling people that awareness was the whole game. What he said less often, but just as firmly, was that awareness is a skill. And skills are learned the way everything else is: badly at first, then a little less badly, then one day without noticing you've gotten good.

🤔 Unexpected Curiosities

Why Your Brain Won't Let Go of an Unfinished Task

In the 1920s, a psychology student named Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a busy Vienna café when she noticed something odd about the waiters.

They could remember every detail of an order that hadn't been paid for yet. But the moment the bill was settled, the whole thing seemed to vanish from their minds.

Back in the lab, she tested it. People were given a series of small tasks and interrupted partway through some of them. Afterward, the interrupted tasks were recalled far more often than the finished ones. Roughly twice as often.

It's now called the Zeigarnik effect: an open loop stays lit up in your memory in a way a closed one doesn't.

It's the reason why a cliffhanger works, or why the song stuck in your head is the one that was cut off before it finished.

It's also something you can use on purpose. Some writers stop each day mid-sentence, right when they know what comes next, so the unfinished thought pulls them back to the desk tomorrow. 

Try the same with anything you're learning. Instead of ending at a clean stopping point, stop one step short. Your brain will do the rest of the nagging for you.