From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Anyone worth following in peak performance will tell you that 90% of human performance is mental. The understanding of that mental aspect of the game is brand-new – perhaps 10-20 years old. The work being done around the neuroscience of performance is creating an unprecedented rate of change; it's honestly off the charts.
Firms like McKinsey are self-reporting that their people are 5x more productive in-flow than out of flow… 500% more productive. That means you can work Monday in-flow and take the rest of the week off – and you'd still get as much done as your peers. Work two days a week? You're now 1000% more productive than the competition.
The test for any belief isn't whether it makes you feel good. It's whether it makes you better at engaging with reality. That's not self-help. That's applied science.
Strategy is, in large part, institutionalised belief. The question is whether your organisation has any mechanism for examining those beliefs — or whether they're just the water everyone swims in, invisible and unquestioned.
People often say to me, 'You must be so pleased with the effects your work has had.' But the daily feeling is frustration. There's much more to do. For kidney transplantation, I could tell you about victory after victory in a war we're losing -- because the shortage of transplants is growing rather than shrinking, as diabetes and hypertension become an epidemic. There's so much to do, so little time, and it's so hard to be persuasive.
If the sixty hours of capacity was always there in those rats — what are we writing off as fixed limits in human beings that are actually just locked potential waiting for the right belief?
The phrase 'seeing is believing' has it exactly backwards. The research shows that believing is seeing.
We don't fail because we make mistakes; mistakes can be fixed. We fail because we quit. And we quit because belief collapsed, not because the strategy was wrong.
High performance is- truly- a checklist. It's waking up, understanding how many things you can do that day to the best of your ability, getting those things done, allowing yourself time to exercise, eat, rest, engage in active recovery, get some social support, have some mindfulness and gratitude time.