3 things high-performing people do that most are oblivious to

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Back to the article…

It took me years of bumbling through life before I started to get what worked.

I just couldn’t understand how some people seemed so much more effective, while I writhed around like a goose in honey.

It took years of speaking to people who inspired me, working with mentors and hundreds of mistakes, to learn what I value most.

Here’s what I learned about performance:

1. Stop trying to perform.

The more focused you are on your performance, the worse your performance will be.

This is because our performance is closely correlated to the volume of our thinking.

If we entertain many thoughts at once, we reduce performance because performance is best when we’re in flow, i.e. when we aren’t thinking much.

2. Do more.

Doing things is the highest intellectual pursuit.

The true geniuses are not spending as much time as we think thinking.

They are in action, trying things, writing things and designing things.

As they are in motion, they receive the best thoughts, without trying, creating the illusion they are doing a lot of thinking.

3. Become immersed.

Absorption is the secret to high performance.

When we witness Tiger Woods on an insane birdy streak, we watch a man absorbed in what he’s doing.

How do we get to something similar?

First, we learn to direct our attention away from how we look or what we’re doing wrong.

Now we create space to view the task as a kind of art form.

We can enjoy anything in this way, from golf to doing the dishes. It’s up to us.

When we enjoy ourselves, we become immersed, and our performance lifts sky-high.

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