Train hard, fight easy.
It's an age old adage that you hear from athlete's, chess champions, musicians and military alike. The idea being that if you train harder than the competition/event/gig/war it will be easy to accomplish when the time comes.
It's a great theory, and I'd argue that it's true. It's only through pushing yourself to the point of failure that you really understand what you're capable of. The added bonus is that once you know where your failure point is, you can train to extend it, and therefore improve. Without that test you simply don't know what you're capable of and therefore can't improve.
I remember listening to DJ Craze explain that he trained 8 hours a day for the upcoming Technics DMC World Championship. That's 8 hours a day practicing turntablism, the same as a full time job and probably the same or more than most professional athletes. Now, if you want to be the world champion at something or even just competitive then clearly you need to put more time in than the hobbyist.
This does still apply to the average person on the street however. Most of us are doing something that requires learning, wether that's exercise, music, art, or chess for example. All of these hobbies require a sequence of learning and evaluating. You learn the new skill, test that it works and then move on to the next problem.
If you do it right it enables you to struggle less and potentially enjoy the event itself too, rather than grinding it out because you haven't prepared enough.
Practice more, get better and breeze through the big day, whatever that may be.
Speak to you Friday,
Josh.
p.s. The Obstacle is The Way: The Ancient Art of Turning Adversity into Advantage by Ryan Holiday is a great book. The simple change of attitude towards potential road blocks/problems really helped me working through them, I thoroughly reccomend it.