Audiobook Part 6. High Performance Habits: Increase Productivity

Section 2 Social Habits on page 171 of High Performance Habits is the section 2 opener, and there is a diagram there of two circles joined together, just like at the beginning of the book. The personal habits on the left, the social Habits on the right. This section focuses on the social habits. So highlighted here are the next three of the High Performance habits Increase Productivity, Develop influence, and demonstrate courage. High Performance Habit number four Increase Productivity. Don't think about making art. Just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art. Andy Warhol this chapter has three practices. Increase the outputs that matter. Chart your five moves. Get insanely good at key skills. It's just not happening fast enough. Athena, a school administrator, says this in a defeated tone. We're in her office, discussing her goals and how productive she feels that her career has been. Thick binders are crammed into the shelves behind her. There's a tiny window next to her desk. No pictures adorn the white walls, which seem yellowed with time. I can't help but feel that this office no, make it the entire admin building was built in the 1970s and never painted it again. Athena has worked in this room for 14 years. I'm busier now than I've ever been in my whole career. There's a lot of urgency right now because they're about to close two of my schools. I barely leave this office, even for lunch. She points at two takeout boxes on the windowsill. I have meetings all day with teachers, principals, parents, community leaders. In between, I try to cram an email. I'm up late every night reviewing proposals. I've worked around the clock for what feels like four years. I don't feel like I'm making enough progress. Even though I'm ticking off one thing after another, I decide to ask a question that Type A's dread when discussing their productivity. Are you happy? Athena scowls. I don't want to sound unhappy, Brendan. It's not like I'm saying my life is awful or my career sucks. I'm just not as effective as I want to be. Or. Or everyone needs me to be. That's why we asked you here, to focus on being more effective. I found that when you're talking with really busy people, they usually leave the topic of happiness quickly. Okay, so, Athena, are you effectively happy? She laughs. Happy enough, I guess. It's not like every day is a dream, but I do love what I'm doing. It just. I Think there must be a better way. A better way than what? Than killing myself. Working this hard to get what feels like nowhere. I want to retire after 20 years, but that's six years from now. I don't even know if I can make it another two at this pace. And even if I do, I'm scared I'll retire and look back and think what was it all for? What did I really accomplish? What do you think it's all for? Oh, the schools for sure. I'm clear about that. That's why I started this career. I know if I can make the schools in my community healthy, I can make generations of kids have better lives. Okay. Sounds like a wonderful mission. You say you might wonder what you really accomplished. What do you hope that to be? I hope to have accomplished some more big projects that these schools can benefit from for generations. But I can't imagine how I can get there. I'm already trying so hard just to maintain. I'm putting in the hours, but I haven't advanced as fast as I thought I would. I'm not making the difference I had hoped because my projects move too slow. My work life balance is a mess. It's just that I feel like I'm always pushing and pushing and juggling and juggling. I'm always having to reinvent the wheel with every project. I'm always fighting fires and scrambling to achieve anything that lasts. She trails off and looks at the blank yellowed wall beside her. It's like no matter what I do, I'm not getting these big projects accomplished. And I worry I'm not approaching them right no matter what I do. It's just. I feel an intense energy coming from her. A lump has grown in my throat. I know where this is going. It hurts to see someone with vision caged here in this office. It's just. What? Everything I do, it's just never. She blinks back tears. Enough. One of the worst feelings in the world is to be incredibly busy but feel that you're not making any progress. You're fighting the good fight, but your approach is wrecking your health or compromising your well being. Projects seem to take forever. Progress seems too slow. Happiness is always a distant horizon never reached. Athena felt that most of us have at some point. It was hard watching Athena experience these feelings because from the outside she seemed like a one woman SWAT team. She finished each day with a lot of to do's crossed off her list. What she had yet to learn was that not only was balance possible, but so was increased progress she also had to discover that sometimes all that busy work isn't your life's work. Sometimes being effective isn't enough because achievement can be hollow if it goes out of sync with who you are, what you really want to be doing, what you're actually capable of. She had to learn the difference between just getting things done and reaching high performance productivity. High performers have a very deliberate approach in planning their days, projects and tasks compared to under performers. Like most productive people, high performers score well on statements such as I'm good at setting priorities and working on what's important and I stay focused and avoid distractions and temptations. The stronger the agreement with such statements, the greater the overall high performance score. The difference is is that when they compare themselves to their peers, high performers are more productive and yet also happier, less stressed, and more rewarded over the long term. The happiness finding is especially relevant since many people believe they can't possibly do more without compromising their well being or sense of balance. But that's just not true. High performers have found a way to produce more, but also eat healthier, work out more, and still feel a greater love for taking on new challenges than their peers do. And they don't just get more busy work done in the sense that they slop things together. High performers complete more activities and report being more excellence driven than their peers. My interviews with many high performers and their peers over the past decade confirm their statements. None of this is because high performers are superhuman or over caffeinated. Nor is it because of the feel good ideals we're often sold today to become more productive. Believing that you give more than your peers or that you are making a difference can certainly increase your sense of motivation and satisfaction. But again, those things don't always lead to increased productivity. Just because you're a giver doesn't mean you're good at setting priorities or avoiding distractions. Givers, meaning might feel a lot of heart, but they don't always finish what they start. So how is it that high performers produce more but also maintain well being and balance? It's because they have many of the deliberate habits you'll learn in this chapter. To get the most out of this chapter, it's important that you set aside any preconceived notions about work, life, balance, or whether seeking tangible achievements in your life is a worthy goal. Stay open minded because mastering this habit can have far reaching consequences into every aspect of your life, especially in how you feel about yourself and the world in general. Our research found that if you feel you are more productive, you are statistically more likely to feel happier, more successful, and more confident. You're also more likely to take better care of yourself, get promoted more often, and earn more than people who feel less productive. These are not my opinions. They are important and measurable life outcomes that we found in multiple surveys and studies. In my coaching experience, it's clear that high performers are also the most valued and highly paid people in an organization. Organizations want high performance leaders because they are focused, manage tasks well, and succeed more often in taking projects through to completion. They get overwhelmed less and they work on their goals longer or with a greater sense of joy and camaraderie than others experience. Clearly, there is power in mastering this area of your life. Let's examine the basics, then move on to the advanced habits. Productivity Basics the day is always his who works with serenity and great aims? Ralph Waldo Emerson the fundamentals of becoming more productive are setting goals and and maintaining energy and focus. No goals, no focus, no energy and you're dead in the water. Productivity starts with goals. When you have clear and challenging goals, you tend to be more focused and engaged, which leads to a greater sense of flow and enjoyment in what you're doing. Greater enjoyment gives you that intrinsic motivation that has been correlated with greater productivity in both quantity and quality of output. The same goes for teams. Groups that have clear and challenging goals almost always outperform those without explicit goals. Research consistently shows that group goals inspire people to work more quickly and for longer periods, pay more attention to the tasks that matter, become less distracted, and increase their overall effort. Energy is another huge factor in determining productivity. As we discussed in Chapter three, almost everything you do to take good care of yourself matters and in increasing your high performance. Good sleep, nutrition and exercise are huge enhancers of productivity and not just your productivity. The productive output of entire economies can be tied, for example, to their citizens nutrition habits. You'll recall that Capital E energy wasn't just about sleep, nutrition, and exercise, but also about positive emotions. It's an undisputed fact that happier people are more productive. In fact, one meta analysis of over 275,000 people across more than 200 studies found that happy people aren't just more productive, they also receive higher evaluations for quality of work, dependability, and creativity. Another study found that students who were more cheerful in college were more financially successful than their peers over a decade after graduation. Even that old advice of smile and you'll get more done plays true. One study found that just watching a comedy clip to bring some joy into your life before Doing serious work can increase productivity. Finally, if you're going to be productive, you've got to maintain focus. This isn't easy in the modern era. Information Overwhelm, distractions and interruptions cause dire consequences in both our health but and our productivity. Information overload causes demoralization and lower work quality. Dealing with an endless stream of inputs or having to spend a large chunk of our day poring over data or searching for it makes us miserable. That's why we have the term analysis paralysis. We are paralyzed by too much data and too much time spent gathering and analyzing that data. This is just one reason why you should never check your email first thing in the morning. That big flood of emails causes overwhelm and reactivity, not the emotion or mindset you want to frame your day with. Instead, try some of the activities we discussed in the Energy chapter. Distraction is another downer. One study found that distraction lowers productivity by 20%. It's even worse if we're working on challenging mental tasks. Distractions then can slow our thinking by almost half. Several studies have shown that multitasking itself is a distraction. It is incompatible with the peak concentration states that are associated with high performance and quality work. When people multitask, they cannot focus fully on the task at hand because their brain is still processing their last unfinished task. The final big culprit is interruptions. Most people in larger organizations are interrupted several times during any given task, activity or meeting. When they are, they have trouble focusing again and catching back up to what they were doing. They don't bounce back to their original effort, but instead turn to on average, two other tasks or projects before reorienting themselves to the original effort. With my Fortune 50 clients, even the highest achieving I've noticed that one significant interruption in the workday can throw off important and scheduled tasks. But by two to three hours, these facts should get you seriously disciplined about setting challenging goals and keeping your energy and focus on track. But that's hard work, and often those efforts are derailed by our assumptions that it's just not possible. Too many people say they can't set larger goals or maintain energy because their work life balance would be upended. In fact, the conversation around work life balance has become so absurd I I'd like to address it specifically before moving on to our habits. The Work Life Balance Debate One of the most common ways for the modern person to maintain self deception is to keep busy all the time. Daniel Putnam these days, many people have thrown in the towel on the concept of work life balance. But not so fast. People can find balance in their lives, and to believe otherwise is a terribly disempowering and an inaccurate assumption. Having trained literally millions of people on the topic of productivity, I've come to realize that those who don't think work life balance is possible believe this because either a they've never made a fully conscious, consistent effort to define, seek and measure that balance, or b they simply define work life balance using an impossible to achieve standard first, let's address the often voiced idea that work life balance is impossible. Calling any human endeavor impossible typically proves to be a naive conceit, and this is no exception. When someone says to me that work life balance is impossible, I remind them that human beings have crossed oceans, summited the highest mountains, built skyscrapers, landed on the moon, and guided vehicles beyond the solar system. What we are capable of is remarkable, and what we will attempt is constrained only by our beliefs. And so I say to you that if you believe a better work life balance is impossible, you've already lost the fight. I also remind many of my clients who have given up on this issue that they simply never tried as hard to find balance as they've tried in other efforts. They'll spend 10 months planning the achievement of a work project, but not a single day planning more balance in their upcoming week. If you won't focus as attentively on balancing your life as on achieving any other project, then you've settled the matter. In that case, don't point an accusing finger at the entire work life balance conversation. Point the finger at the person looking at you from the mirror who simply refused to try. If we can keep an open mind in this discussion, we might realize that a major problem is the way we approach work life balance in the first place. The great mistake most people make is to think of balance in terms of evenly distributed hours. They think they're supposed to spend equal time on work and life. Their expectation is a quantity expectation versus a quality expectation, and anytime we confuse the two, we get into trouble. Still, despite how many people feel they don't have balance in this regard, most in fact, do. The vast majority of us spend 30% of our lives working, assuming a standard 40 hour workweek, 30% sleeping, and 30% doing other stuff such as hanging out with the family, pursuing hobbies, or health handling life's basic needs. Indeed, most people have a lot more time off and more time with their families than they think. It's just that they're not intentional about that time and hence don't enjoy that time enough. It's ironic that the average American who watches four to five hours of television per day says they have no time and no balance. To be fair, a lot of people do work a lot more than 40 hours per week. And in the always connected culture we live in today, where response is expected at all hours of the day and night, it can feel as though balance is gone. That's why I think there's a better approach to thinking about work life balance. Instead of trying to balance hours, try to balance happiness or progress in your major life arenas. Let me elaborate. When most people feel that they're out of balance, it's because one area of their life became more intense, important and time consuming than the others. They got so obsessed about work that they let their health or their marriage slide, or they got so focused on a family issue that their work suffered. The solution is to keep perspective in life by keeping an eye on the quality or progress of of the major life arenas. A simple weekly review of what we're after in the major areas of our life helps us rebalance or at least plan for more balance. I found that it's useful to organize life into 10 distinct health, family, friends, intimate relationship, whether partner or marriage, mission and work, finances, adventure, hobby, spirituality and emotion. When I'm working with clients, I often make them rate their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10 and also write their goals in each of these 10 arenas every Sunday night. Most of them have never done that before, but doesn't it stand to reason that only from measuring something in the first place can we determine whether it's in balance? If you aren't consistently measuring the major arenas of your life, then you couldn't possibly know what the balance you seek is or is not. This activity is really just a simple check in, I know, but you'd be surprised how powerful it is. I once gave an executive team of 16 people this weekly activity and in just six weeks they reported dramatic increases in their sense of well being and work life balance. Admittedly, this was a small and informal study, but nonetheless we saw double digit increases when nothing changed in their work or personal lives and except taking time each week to assess their 10 life arenas. Sometimes just having a look at the larger picture can help us feel more in control, adjust course as needed, and yes, find more balance. That was what Athena, the school administrator at the beginning of this chapter, so desperately needed. That day in her office, I asked her to rate herself in the 10 arenas. To her surprise, she hadn't even thought about many aspects of life outside of work for years. Who's to blame in that situation. Is it her boss's fault? The society we live in? No. If we're honest, our lack of attention to the important areas of our life is no one's fault but our own. What Athena discovered was that she needed a weekly ritual to assess where she was and what balance could even mean to her. The other distinction generally missed about work life balance is that it's not so much about evenly distributed hours as about feelings. It's not about the hours you spend, but about the harmony you feel. Often people simply feel unhappy with or disconnected from their work. If you don't like your work and you have to spend a lot of time doing it, then of course you feel as though your life is out of balance. You would recognize that your busy work isn't your life's work and that dissonance would cause you mental distress. That's why it's important to live in harmony with what you truly desire and to do the activities in the chapter on clarity. You'll always feel out of balance if you're doing work that you don't find engaging and meaningful. Other times, people are engaged and enjoying their work, but they're fried from too much stress and too many hours on the job. There's a fine line between busy and burned out, and when you cross it, no matter how great your life is outside work, you will feel out of balance. Burnout in one area of life easily scorches others. So what can we do? In the chapter on energy, we covered a lot of the basics. Transition better. Release tension. Get more sleep. Exercise more. Eat better. The good news is that if burnout is often just a feeling of fatigue, there's also a simpler fix. If we can just give you a short mental and physical refresh or reset every hour, then you can dramatically improve how you feel and you'll sense a significant improvement in your work life balance. This means that for most people, they didn't need to quit their job because of work life balance problems. They just needed to change what they did on the job so that they felt more energetically balanced. Happily, that's easier than you may think. Take a break. There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither. Alan Cohen your brain also needs more downtime than you probably think to process information, recover, and deal with life so that you can be more productive. That's why for optimal productivity, you should not only take longer breaks, claim your vacation time, but also give yourself intermittent breaks throughout the day. Researchers have long known that taking breaks at work leads to positive emotions and greater productivity. For example, simple acts such as taking a lunch break away from your desk each day can significantly increase your performance at work. Taking a short break to get outside to a nearby park for just a few minutes can give you cognitive benefits so that you return to work restored and with greater focus. If you're unwilling to move away from the desk, simply standing up intermittently at your desk to work can increase productivity by 45% compared to sitting all day. Some researchers have argued that we need these breaks because we have limited cognitive resources and we use up our psychological bandwidth or self control. While this theory has been questioned, perhaps we don't run out of self control and focus at all, but rather just lose motivation. One thing is is certain, working straight through the day with no breaks makes people unhappy and less productive. We've all sat at our desk and noticed our attention flagging. Even when we like our work. We've all felt tired even doing work we love. We've all run out of ideas even when our butt is on the line to solve a problem. In all these instances, that's your mind telling you that you need a break. We've all noticed too that simple things such as a chat at the cooler, a bathroom break, or or letting our mind wander for a few minutes after lunch often refreshes us. It's self evident that our minds need rest to restore neurochemicals and increase our future attention. The science is so conclusive on this that most organizational experts recommend brief breaks away from the desk at least every 90 to 120 minutes to increase employee satisfaction and performance. But my research as well as others has shown that the number should be cut in half if you want to feel more energized, creative and effective at work and still leave work with enough oomph for the life part. The ideal break point is to stop your work and give your mind and body a break every 45 to 60 minutes. This means you shouldn't work longer at any one thing without a mental and physical break for more than an hour before tops. A break of just two to five minutes every hour can help you feel much more mentally alert and energized for your work and life overall. For example, if you're going to work on email or a presentation for two hours, I recommend you get up from your chair at 50 minutes in, then take a fast stroll around the office, grab some water, come back to your chair and do a 60 second transition meditation. As a reminder from the chapter on energy, a transition meditation means you simply close your eyes, focus on deep breathing, repeat to yourself a mantra such as release and then set an intention for the next activity. If you want extra credit, also ask the Desk trigger question from the previous chapter on who needs me on my A game right now the most. Notice what's not included during these breaks? Checking email, texts or social media. Checking in is the exact opposite of our goal here. Checking out so we can recharge. Achievers often brush off this advice because they just want to sit and power through hours of activity at their computer or in meetings. But that's exactly why they are feeling so wiped out in their home life and thus report a terrible work life balance. Remember, hours at home versus at work is not the issue, it's more about their feelings and overall sense of energy. Powering through is just bad advice. Studies of the world's top performers in dozens of fields found that they don't necessarily practice or work longer than others. It's that they are more effective in those practice sessions or simply have more sessions, not longer ones. Putting in longer hours is almost always the wrong answer if if you want to reach balance, happiness or sustained high performance. It's counterintuitive, but it is true. By slowing down or taking a break once in a while, you work faster, leaving more time for other areas of life. For my clients, this 45 to 60 minute break becomes a way of life. It's a strict protocol in the first months working together. I tell them if your butt lands in a chair, Then set a 50 minute break timer on your phone or computer at 50 minutes no matter what you're working on, stand up, move, breathe, set an intention and then return to your work. If you want the 50 minute timer I give them, just visit highperformancehabits.com tools the stand up part of my advice is important. You can't just close your eyes and meditate at your desk. You need to give your body a break from the posture you've been holding while while sitting. So get up and move around a bit and do some basic stretching. If all you did was stand up every hour, close your eyes and bounce in place while taking 10 deep long breaths, you'd feel a total renewal of focus and productivity in your life. No matter where I'm sitting, on a plane, in a cafe, at work, in a meeting, on the couch, I get up every 50 minutes. I do a short two minute physical routine of calisthenics, qigong and yoga paired with deep breathing. This 50 minute rule is something I never break even when I'M in a meeting with other people, I often make them stand and do an energizer with me or I excuse myself and go and find a place to refresh for two to three minutes. Those short few minute breaks buy me hours of added focus and effectiveness each day. If you follow the steps outlined in this chapter, you you can find greater work life balance. So do not fear becoming more productive or seeking higher achievement. Just be sure to gauge your work life balance every week by rating yourself in the 10 areas of your life and having goals in each. Then take a two to three minute break every 45 to 60 minutes of your day. That's the basics. Now let's get to the advanced practices for productivity practice. 1. Increase the outputs that Matter Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all. Peter Drucker if you want to become extraordinary, you need to figure out the productive outputs that matter in your field or industry. Eminent scientists produce more important papers than their less known or less effective counterparts. Mozart and Beethoven became great not only by their genius, but also through their productive output. The same goes for Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, the Beatles. In its highest performing years, Apple launched products that were hit after hit. Babe Ruth took more swings than his contemporaries, just as Michael Jordan took a lot more shots and Tom Brady threw a lot more passes. Seth Godin cranks out blogs, Matthew Malcolm Gladwell cranks out books and articles, Casey Neistat keeps Uploading those YouTube videos, Chanel keeps the fresh designs coming, and Beyonce keeps dropping great albums. High performers have mastered the art of prolific quality output, what we call pqo. They produce more high quality output than their peers over the long term, and that is how they became more effective, better known, more remembered. They aim their attention and consistent efforts toward PQO and minimize any distractions, including opportunities that would steal them away from their craft. This point seems almost universally lost in a world where people spend over 28% of their workweek managing email and another 20% just looking for information. People spend eons of time on worthless activities, say, creating folders and organizing their email, even though these have nothing to do with real productivity. Yes, sorry, your elaborate email folders aren't helping you. A 2011 study of 85,000 actions by 345 email users found that people who create complex folders are less efficient in finding what they need than those who simply use search or threading. I bring up email because achievers almost universally blame it for their poor productivity. But email per se is not the problem. The real Culprit is our very orientation to work itself. Real work isn't replying to everyone's false emergencies, shuffling paper, deleting junk emails, posturing to look good, or attending meetings. Real work is producing quality output that matters. Part of your job is to figure out what relevant PQO means to you. For the blogger, it might mean more frequent and better content. For the cupcake store owner, it might be discerning the two best selling flavors and expanding distribution on just those two flavors. The parent may choose to increase the frequency of free time and great experiences with the kids. The sales rep might go after more meetings with qualified prospects. The graphic designer might pump out more gray images. For the academic, it might be the quality of the curriculum in classes or the number of published papers or books. Figuring out what you are supposed to produce and learning the priorities in the creation, quality and frequency of that output is one of the greatest breakthroughs you can have in your career. Look back to almost any business icon and you see a turning point in their career and wealth which came about when when they discovered their pqo. For Steve Jobs, it was dumping a bunch of products from Apple's list so he could focus on massively scaling fewer products, which would change the world. For Walt Disney, it was ramping up production of movies. In the modern digital era, some of the greatest success stories are those who simply enabled others to share more original and prolific content. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, for example. Wherever PQO is found, it seems that breakthroughs in wealth follow. I left a corporate consulting job in 2006 because I couldn't find fulfillment in the outputs that were being rewarded. When I looked to the partners at my old employer, the PQO was basically how many big clients they signed per year. Though a lot of wonderful things came with that. The ability to do deals change things. I just didn't connect with the idea of dedicating my life to a career built on deals. For a guy at my lowly level, the informal culture supported a PQO of project hopping, getting on as many projects as we could so that we gain perspective, expand our network, and get paid for extra travel. Again, there were other benefits to all this, but I just didn't connect. Very little of the end game at that job resonated with me. One of the great realizations of life is can come from discovering that the outputs you are being compensated for are not exciting or fulfilling. When that realization comes, it's time to honor that truth and make a change. I chose to quit and begin my career as a writer, speaker and online trainer. I saw the outputs of those efforts creating content for inspiring and empowering others as something that would be meaningful to me. The issue was I had no idea how to start or what specifically to do. And like a lot of people new to the expert industry, I thought I had to figure out the writing industry, the speaking industry, the online training industry. I made the mistake of going to dozens of conferences to try to figure out each of the industries without realizing that they all were the same career of being a thought leader and had similar outputs that mattered most. For almost a year, casting about with no clarity on which outputs really mattered, I was a mess. I was trying to write articles for magazines and blogs, begging people to let me speak to their groups and hoping to get paid, spinning my wheels, learning 100 online marketing ideas. Then one day sitting in a cafe, I realized I'd spent all day working but had nothing really to show for it. I thought, not one thing I've done today is going to advance my career or be remembered by me or anyone else. Ten years from now, I still remember that conversation in my head. If you're honest with yourself, you want to create things that matter. You want to know that a good day's work produces something worthwhile, something that will be part of your important contributions to others and the world. Something that shows you care about your craft. Of course, I realized that not every day would be a magical, perfect day where every task I did was earth shaking, monumental. We all have activities that have to get done that don't make us feel like legends. Taking out the trash isn't adding to your body of great works, but it has to get done. What changed the trajectory of my career that day was deciding on a single page what my PQOs would be. If I was going to be a real writer, then my productive output needed to become books. This audiobook you're listening to. It's the sixth I've published since that day. Two more unreleased manuscripts are waiting in my drawer. This says nothing of the thousands of emails, blog articles, sales letters, and social media posts I've written, but my main effort is books. Wayne Dyer, a mentor and dearly missed friend, wrote and published more than 30 books. I'm just a beginner, but I know my PQO, and that gives me what Wayne would have called the power of intention. I decided that if I was going to be a professional speaker, my PQO would be the number of paid speaking gigs at a certain booking fee. I stopped all wasteful conversations, asking people to give me a chance to speak and started building marketing materials and videos like those of other speakers who were getting booked at the levels I wanted to reach. I knew that if I was going to be an online course trainer, a relatively new career back in 2006, then my PQO would be curriculum, training videos and full online courses. As I shared in the chapter on clarity, I stopped trying to learn every new marketing technique that came along and put my full effort into creating and promoting online courses. The rest, as they say, IS history. Nearly 2 million people have enrolled in my online courses or video series, and my free instructional videos about how to live a fully charged life have been viewed over 100 million times. If I hadn't figured out my PQO, I would never have had the blessing of reaching all these students. I would never have had been named one of the most successful online trainers in history by orper.com or to make Success magazine's list of the top personal development influencers for so many years. Please know that I'm not sharing this to impress you, but I am sharing it to convey the the tremendous power of deciding what your PQO is to be and going for it. The results in my career are not because I'm particularly special or talented. They happen because I honed the focus for the PQOs that mattered in my career and gave those outputs my obsessive attention and dedication continuously over the long term. I cannot emphasize the importance of this strategy whenever I have to help a client increase high performance. Quickly discovering what output they should be creating is one of my go to strategies. No matter what topic or type of deliverables they decide to get productive toward, I have them reorient their entire work schedule toward that endeavor as quickly as possible. I want them spending 60% or more of their work week oriented to PQO. In my experience over this past decade, that 60% figure seems to be the sweet spot where real results start happening for a person's career. For most people, the other 40% ends up in such buckets as strategy, team management and the everyday tasks of work or running a business. I spend 60% of my work week on writing, creating curriculum for online training, and filming videos. The other 40% goes to strategy and team management, industry relationships and customer engagement, which includes social media and communicating with students. The 40% is really just the things that support or facilitate the 60% the prolific quality output. Not everyone has my career, of course, and the golden proportion of 60:40 is not feasible for everyone. But the goal isn't to do what I do, it's to find your best allocation of time and stick to it the best you can. I'm tenaciously consistent about my 6040 and whenever it drops below that, I know I'm not producing my best. If these time allocations sound extreme, please note that this is very different from the advice of those who tell you to go all in and give one of your passions 100% of your time. Such guidance is patently absurd anyway. We can't give 100% of our time to anything, certainly not if we're working with other people, caring for our families, or trying to make a big impact. There's always going to be a percentage of time we must give to working with or leading other people, managing and administering the details of our jobs, and yes, email. My point is you can't shirk those things, but you can and must strategize and maximize your time working on outputs that that make your career important and influential. Why don't more people focus on producing prolific quality output, especially given that they still have the 40% allocation for dealing with the inevitable obligations of work? The most common excuses is delusion's a better word are Procrastination and perfectionism despite how familiar we are with blaming procrastination and it's not a real thing. Procrastination isn't a part of the human psyche. It's not even a personality trait. It's also not a result of poor time management skills that can easily be pointed at. Instead, researchers have found that procrastination is really a motivational problem. It's an issue that arises because you're not working on things that intrinsically matter to you. In rare cases, it can be about anxiety or fear, fear of failure. But far more often it stems from working on things that don't excite you, engage you, or matter to you. That's why finding a PQO you can get behind is so important. If you love what you're creating or contributing in the world, you'll experience less procrastination. Whenever I tell people to create more output, inevitably I run into the perfectionists. They say things like, well Brendan, I can't just put more stuff out there. I'm a perfectionist. I have to know that it's absolutely right and we'll be loved. Perfectionism, though, is just a delay logic fancied up to look respectable. The reason people don't finish more things isn't perfectionism. It's that they rarely even begin or they get tangled up in doubt or distraction. If someone were a true perfectionist, they they would at least have completed and released their work. Since the very act of perfecting something comes only after it is completed, released, and then improved on. We could all find reasons why it's hard to be more productive. But rather than spending any more mental power there, let's just get to work. Let's remember what's most important. Let's focus. Let's produce real things that we're proud of. Let's be prolific and change the world. Performance Prompts Number one the outputs that matter most to my career two. Some things I could stop doing so I can Focus more on PQO3 the percentage of my weekly time I will allocate to PQO is and the ways I'll make that happen. These performance prompts are on page 194 of High Performance the Book, and you can also download them again at@highperformancehabits.com Tools Practice 2 Chart your 5 moves I believe half the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things. William Locke Humans are masterful jugglers. We can manage several projects at the same time, achieve many tasks concurrently, carry on multiple levels of conversation, implicit and explicit, with several people at the dinner table. This strength serves all of us up to a point. Then it destroys us. Most people reach their first levels of success through their ability to multitask with excellence. The entrepreneur starting the cupcake shop plays every role necessary to succeed and chases every opportunity available to her. She's the person who orders inventory, the baker who makes the cupcakes, the cashier who takes the orders. The the marketer who mails the coupons, the networker who wins friends in the neighborhood. She hustles in dozens of roles and takes on hundreds of tasks. At some point, she earns a profit. Over time, she succeeds. She might even hit high performance. But with success comes new opportunities. Soon she's advising other startups. She's dabbling in other opportunities. She hasn't reached her primary goal of a world class cupcake shop, but she's comfortable. She'll tell you that her cupcake business is still a priority. But dig into her calendar and you can see that priority no longer equates to work. Look closer and you'll see that most of her efforts are unaligned. She's busy, but she's not progressing with purpose. What should she do now to get back on track? She should simplify, strip things down to the essential parts and favor deep work. Most importantly she should get a plan. A lot of highly driven people think they don't need well defined plans. They have talent. So they just want to get in the game, hustle, wing it, and see what happens. That might work when they're just starting out and everyone on the field around them is also uninformed. At that point, perhaps their innate God given talent can help them get ahead. But the advantage dies quickly. As soon as the other teams and players have actual experience and plans. They know the X's and O's, their routes and play calls, and you don't, you're toast. This is terribly difficult for high performers to hear. I can't tell you how many high performers lose their perch at the top because of the inevitable distraction that comes from unfocused efforts. I'm not talking about the lazy kind of distraction. High performers are making things happen all right. But when they start making a lot of things happen with no unifying trajectory, they begin losing their power. Then they lose their passion. Then they're achieving a lot of little things, but no big meaningful things. The issue is that some people simply got away with not planning for a long time. That's because you don't need much of a plan to figure out simple tasks. Simple tasks usually require obvious steps, few interaction points, and your own independent actions. But for complex tasks and goals, planning is vital because there are usually a variety of strategies that can help achieve a goal, and some are more effective or desirable than others. The bigger the goal, the more to manage and the more interaction points with other people. To become a high performer requires thinking more before acting. This doesn't necessarily mean you must have the entire path and every task figured out in advance. Often, long term projects require you to set a plan as best you can, then figure things out on the fly. Still, research continues to show that when goals or projects are complex, planning always improves performance. Having a plan and working through it step by step is more important than you think. A plan focuses scattered thinking, and finishing each vital task on your list fires off dopamine in the brain, making you feel both rewarded and more motivated to continue. A plan not only increases your likelihood of completing an activity, but also increases your joy during the project and your available cognitive resources for the next goal. And so, after all that we've discussed about finding the area where you want to create prolific quality output, it is now time to plan. Think of the most ambitious dream you'd like to take on. Identify what you really want. Then ask yourself if there were only five major moves to make that goal happen, what would they be? Think of each major move as a big bucket of activities, a project these big five projects that move you toward achieving your dream can then be broken down into deliverables, deadlines, and activities. Once you're clear on these things, put them into your calendar, scheduling the bulk of your time into protected blocks during which you do nothing but make progress toward the activity that the specific block is dedicated to. So if I show up at your house and say, show me your calendar, I should readily see the major projects you are working toward. If I can't discern from your weekly and monthly calendar what major moves you are working toward, then you're not optimizing your time and you're at risk of getting sucked into a life of reaction and distraction. That or you're just going to have to take years getting a result that others could do in months. High performers plan almost everything more than underperformers do, from workouts to learning, from meetings to vacation time. It's easy to get confused at this point, though, and become lost in tasks and over planning. Lots of people will overcomplicate this, so let's pause here and remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing Know the big five moves that will take you to your goal. Break those moves down into tasks and deadlines, then put them in a calendar. If that's all you did and you made sure these moves aligned with your pqo, you'd be ahead of the game. Here's a rather public example that I'm amazed worked so well. Earlier, I shared with you my dream of becoming a writer. As you may recall, I was all over the place writing things here and there but getting no real progress until I identified my PQO as writing books. Once I knew I wanted to be prolific at writing books, I stopped other activities. Then I started exploring what the five major moves were to getting a book out. Specifically, I wanted to become a New York Times best selling author. I wasn't after the accolade itself, but what it represented. Lots of people improving their lives. But there was a problem. I'd already written a book and it didn't hit the best seller list. I was demoralized and made the mistake of thinking the system was broken and didn't reward new authors. I wanted to blame a lot of people, but I had to face a tough truth. I hadn't planned well enough the first time. The entire process of writing and promoting a book was as haphazard as could be for a newbie. This Time I decided I wouldn't allow such unsystematic activities to seal the fate of my new book. I didn't just start writing tidbits throughout the day as I had for my previous book. I didn't follow my impulses to go to writers conferences or read a lot of books about writing. I didn't try to do 100 things in a hundred directions. I knew that would lead to exhaustion, frustration and failure again. Instead, I interviewed several number one best selling authors and deconstructed their major activities. I simply asked what five major moves made the most difference in moving your writing forward and landing your book on the big bestseller lists? You can do the same thing. Find the successful people you want to emulate in some way and discover their five moves. What I learned wasn't what I expected. Best selling authors didn't talk about the romantic idealism of being a writer. They talked about the hard work and discipline of cranking out pages even when they didn't feel like it. No one credited attending writers conferences as a determining factor in their success. They didn't talk about focus groups or audience demographics. They didn't talk about conducting years of research before writing their books as a determining factor in their sales. Though some had done that, few mentioned major media coverage or traditional book tours. No one mentioned book clubs. No one mentioned famous people writing a foreword to their book as a determining factor. At the time, all this came as a shock. In my dreamy mind, I thought all those things were important. In fact, I thought that was how you went about it all. While I was interviewing the authors, I had a big long list of things I was supposed to do. Here are a few. Go to writers workshops and get feedback on my writing to find my voice. Interview a bunch of people in my audience demographic to see what they want from my writing. Brainstorm media hooks and angles so I can incorporate them into the book for later use and getting major media coverage. Get famous people to endorse the book. I suppose you could make the argument that these are perfectly fine tasks. Perhaps some would even be helpful. The issue is none of the best selling authors cited these moves as determinant of their successes. None of these things put an author on a bestseller list or guided more people to pick their book up off the shelf. I discovered that to get the result of number one bestseller, all that really mattered were these five basic moves. Number one, finish writing a good book. Until that's done, nothing else matters. Number two, if you want a major publishing deal, get an agent or just self publish. Number three. Start blogging and posting to social media and use these to get an email list of subscribers. Email is everything. Create a book promotion webpage and offer some awesome bonuses to get people to buy the book. Bonuses are crucial. Number five get five to 10 people who have big email lists to promote your book. You'll owe them a reciprocal email, meaning you agree to promote for them later too, and a portion of any sales they might make for you on other products you may be offering during your book promotion. That's it. I know it's less inspiring than find your truth and write each day with magnificent passion and love for the audience whose hearts and souls you will impact forever kind of thing, but these were the five major moves that most of the authors told me about. These were the ones that mattered most. I was stunned and scared. I had no idea how to do any of these things. And yet I had confidence. Because now I had a plan. And as you'll read later, real confidence just means you believe in your ability to figure things out. I had a dream. I now had the secret five moves. You'd better believe I was going to figure out how to make them happen. So all my effort went into those five moves. I stopped almost all other activity. I set up a calendar for accomplishing each activity. The first one finished book consumed almost 90% of my schedule for some time. After I got that done, most of my week was blocked so I could do deep work on the other activities. I sequentially completed these five moves. Everything else was classified as either a distraction or something to delegate. I know this sounds simplistic, but stay with me. Consider the first move. Finish writing a good book. Think of the hundreds of ways to mess that up. I could keep researching, learning about writing, waiting to find my voice one day, interviewing people, procrastinating, trying to write stupid little articles. But all the best selling authors had so clearly communicated this move to me. Finish the book. Until that happens, kid. They all told me. Nothing else happens. And that's the magic of knowing your five moves. By knowing the first major activity, then the second, then the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. You have a map, a plan, a clear path forward. You don't get distracted. So I stopped everything else and I wrote. Then I swiftly followed the next four moves. I chose to publish with a company that basically helped me self publish it. They didn't have to accept me. Rather I gave them the manuscript and they formatted it for a book. I designed the COVID in PowerPoint. I had already started building an email list and had about 10 friends with email lists who agreed to promote some of my videos. Lining them all up took two weeks of begging and prodding. I spent three days shooting videos and four days uploading them to a blog and creating an email sequence. In 60 days total, I took the Millionaire messenger from idea to number one New York Times bestseller, number one USA Today bestseller, number one Barnes & Noble bestseller, and number one Wall Street Journal bestseller. That includes 30 days of writing the book than 30 days getting it ready for printing, creating the social media webpages, bonuses and videos, and getting people to agree to email links to the videos to everyone on their lists. 5 moves 60 days number one bestseller some will argue I was lucky I could do this because I already had some promotional partners and the ability to create web pages and videos. That's completely true, but. But that unfair advantage was only the result of previous years hard work. It's not as if I came out of the womb and right there in the delivery room were promotional partners and a video setup. You know, in fact, never in my life did I have promotional partners until I knew they were crucial to my five Moves this brings up an important point. It doesn't matter whether you know how to achieve your five moves at first. The important thing is that for every major goal you have, you figure out the five moves. If you don't know the moves, you lose. The point of my story isn't speed. It's not what I did or did not do in 60 days. It's that I knew the moves that mattered and I executed them. If I had taken two years, so be it. The result would still have been what I was after, and focusing on the five moves was the only way to get to the result. I followed this simple plan and achieved dozens of major goals in my life. 5 Move planning has helped me build a business I love. Meet US Presidents efficiently, create blockbuster online courses, book huge speaking gigs, and help raise millions of dollars for nonprofits and causes that we deeply care about. It's a simple process that my clients have used over and over again to achieve equally impressive results. Decide what you want. Determine the five major moves that will help you leap toward that goal. Do deep work on each of the major five moves at least 60% of your work week going to these efforts until they are complete. Designate all else as distraction, tasks to delegate or things to do in blocks of time you've allocated in the remaining 40% of your time. I know this seems almost too simplistic, but I can't tell you how many hopeful strivers I meet who can't quickly answer what are the five major projects you are working on in sequential order to achieve what you want? Unfocused people respond with off the cuff thoughts, long lists of unnecessary things, a top of mind purge of ideas. High performers? No. They can tell you what they are working on and why that order in exacting detail. They can open their calendar and show you the blocks of time they've allocated to their major goals and projects. So test yourself. If I showed up at your house, could you open your calendar and show me the blocks of time on your calendar that you saved and structured specifically to complete a major activity leading to a specific big goal? If not, you know your next move. I know that at this point many people will say but I know someone extremely successful who doesn't do plans. They just bumble from one thing to another and everything they touch turns to gold. They don't have any long term projects or planning. No doubt these outliers exist, but the question isn't whether or not they exist, it's how much they're leaving on the table. Just a little more planning could significantly improve their contributions. For the rest of us, it's good to remember that without discipline, our dreams will forever remain delusions. Don't spend years on what could be done in months when with better planning and more focused execution, know your five moves, work them hard, and always be thinking about the next steps that will help you produce something that's significant, something that you're proud of, something that makes you extraordinary Performance prompts. These are listed on page 204 of High Performance Habits, the book. You can find them all in one sheet@highperformancehabits.com tools number one. The biggest goal or dream I have that I need to plan out right now is number two, the five moves that would help me progress swiftly toward accomplishing that dream. 3. The timeline for each of my five moves will. 4. Five people who have achieved that dream, who I could study, seek out, interview or model are number five the less important activities or bad habits I'm going to cut out of my schedule so that I can focus more time on the five moves in the next three months. Practice three. Get insanely good at key skills I believe the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master in that line. Andrew Carnegie to become more productive, become more competent, you have to master the primary skills needed to win in your primary fields of interest. Mastery of key skills has long been associated with better productivity and performance at both macro and individual levels. Increased skill is often the goal of educational and economic policy because it tends to promote increased economic growth. Skill is also considered the silver bullet for individual workers since those with deeper skills typically earn higher incomes and experience greater work satisfaction. That's not always the case, though. Skilled workers are sometimes undermined by bad strategy, leadership, job design, or human resource practices. We all know someone who had a lot of skills but wasn't given a chance at work. One thing is certain, not having the requisite skills to reach success in your field is a serious deficit. Without greater skill acquisition, there's no progress in your career. So it's essential that you identify the major skills you need to develop so you can win today and in the future. When we say skill, we often mean a broad range of knowledge and capabilities that allow you to perform adequately in any given area. General skills might include communication, problem solving, systems thinking, project management, teamwork, and conflict management. There are also specific skills for any given task or company, such as coding, video production, finance, and computational skills. And of course, there are personal skills such as self control, resilience, and other forms of emotional intelligence. My goal here is for you to determine how the five major skills you need to develop over the next three years to grow into the person you hope to become. One principle lies at the heart of this effort. Everything is trainable, no matter what skill you want to learn. With enough training and practice and intention, you can become more proficient at it. If you don't believe this, your journey to high performance stops here. Perhaps the three best findings of contemporary research tell us that you can get better at practically anything if you keep a growth mindset. The belief that you can improve with effort, focus on your goals with passion and perseverance, and practice with excellence. When people say I can't, it's usually code for I'm unwilling to do the long term training and conditioning necessary to achieve that. Remember, everything is trainable. Those three words changed my life forever. I know I've shared plenty of examples from my own career. At the risk of making this book overly personal, however, this example is perhaps the number one question I'm always asked about. So let's talk about public speaking because so many people fear it. Twenty years ago, I returned to college after my car accident. I talked with my close friends about the wreck. I shared how I wanted to be a more intentional man so that the next time I faced my life's last questions Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? I would be happy with the answers. Not everyone cared to hear about my lessons and experience, but some of my friends encouraged me to tell my story to their friends. It's inspiring, they said. Though my friends might have called me extroverted at the time in my life, in reality, I was a very private person. I could joke and kid around with the guys, but I was fairly comfortable talking to new acquaintances because I wanted to know people and connect and have a good time. But sharing personal matters was another thing. I rarely shared my real thoughts, needs, or dreams with others. About the same time I began studying psychology, philosophy, and self help, I was looking for answers. I wanted to know how to live a better life. As I read more of these topics, I discovered that many of the author's journeys were much like mine. Something had happened to them that inspired them to improve their life, explore how to become a better person, and want to help others on that journey. Reading their stories, I felt more compared to share my own. I also noticed that many of these authors listed lecturer or professional speaker or workshop facilitator in their bios. These authors tended to be speakers, so I sought out their audiobooks or speeches online. I began to realize that they the better they could speak, the better they could impart their message and inspire others to change. And so I decided that mastering the skill of public speaking was a must in my life. Sometimes the desire to serve and to develop the relevant skills to do so outweighs our fears. I got committed and began a process of learning that I call progressive mastery, which quickly changed my life. Whenever you want to master a skill, you have two choices. You can hope to develop that skill with some practice and repetition, or you can ensure that you become world class in that skill through progressive mastery. The concept of progressive mastery is very different from how most people approach skill development. Most people get interested in an idea, try it a few times, and gauge whether they are good at it. If they are not good, they chalk it up to a lack of natural ability or talent. At this point, most quit. And those who carry on think they have to use brute repetition to get better, hoping that simply by doing a thing enough times they will become proficient and progress. For example, let's imagine you want to get good at swimming. If you're like most people, you'll get some guidance from someone who already knows how to swim. They then you'll start swimming. You'll swim more and more, hoping to increase your stamina and speed. You'll just keep getting in the pool over and over and trying to improve you Imagine that time in the pool is the secret to becoming A better swimmer. This, it turns out, is one of the least effective ways to master a skill. Repetition rarely leads to high performance, and that's why it's important to understand progressive mastery. These are the steps to progressive mastery. Number one, Determine a skill that you want to master. Number two, set specific stretch goals on your path to developing that skill. Number three, attach high levels of emotion and meaning to your journey and your results. Number four, identify the factors critical to success and develop your strengths in those areas and fix your weaknesses with equal fervor. Number five, develop visualizations that clearly imagine what success and failure look like. Number six, schedule challenging practices developed by experts or through careful thought. Number seven, measure your progress and get outside feedback. Number eight, Socialize your learning and efforts by practicing or competing with others. Number nine, Continue setting higher level goals so that you keep improving. Number 10, teach others what you're learning. These 10 principles of progressive mastery are a more nuanced version of what is often called deliberate practice, a term coined by Anders Ericsson. Like deliberate practice, progressive mastery involves getting a coach, challenging yourself beyond your comfort zones, developing mental representations of what success should be, tracking your progress, and fixing your weaknesses. The difference is that progressive mastery places a high emphasis on emotion, socialization and teaching. In other words, you are more strategic and disciplined in how you attach emotion to your journey, enhance your capabilities by training or competing with others, and leverage the extraordinary power of teaching to discover greater insights into your own craft. I find it a more humanistic, social and enjoyable approach to mastering a skill. Let's see how these principles make you a better swimmer much more quickly than mere repetition ever could. Instead of just jumping into the pool once in a while and trying to get better, what if you tried this? Number one. You determined that you specifically wanted to develop your skill as a freestyle swimmer. You decided you weren't going to mess with the backstroke, breaststroke or butterfly. Number two. You set goals for how fast and efficiently you entered the water, swam a lap, executed a turn, finished your last 10 meters. Number three. Before every practice, you reminded yourself why it was so important for you to get better at this. And you talked about your goals with someone who cared about your performance. Maybe your why is to get fitter, win a swim meet or or lap your best friend a few times. Number four. You determined that a critical factor to success was your ability to work your hips efficiently in the water and that your major weakness was a lack of finishing stamina. Number five. Every night you visualized the perfect race, imagining in detail how you would move through the water, kick off the turn, power through fatigue. Go for it in the last few strokes. Number six. You worked with an expert swim coach who could give you regular feedback and who helped you design harder and harder practices to reach higher and higher goals. Number seven. You measured your progress in a journal every time you swam and reviewed the journal looking for insights on your performance. Number eight. You consistently swam with people you really enjoyed swimming with and you entered competitions so that you could face better swimmers than you. Number nine. After every swim session, you set higher goals for the next session. Number 10. Once per week, you formally mentored another swimmer on your team or taught a swim class at the local community center. Can you see how this approach would lead to much better results than just hopping into a pool and trying to get better? Even if you spent exactly the same number of hours in the pool, these principles would would help you outperform mindless repetition. This is the same approach I devised for myself when I decided I wanted to become a master level public speaker. I thought, well, I can just start trying to give more speeches and hope I get better, or I can approach the process with real emotion and excellence. Choosing to focus on progressive mastery is one of the greatest decisions of my life. I Simply followed the 10 steps I told you about. The most effective principles for me were 2, 3, and 10. I set a goal to use fewer and fewer notes every time I gave a speech. For example, when I gave my first speech in college, I had the entire thing written out and I basically read it. The next time I gave a speech, I pared the notes down to one page, then half a page of bullets, then just five bullets of sentences, then just five words on a note card. By the time I finished college, I was giving full presentations without any notes. That was setting specific stretch goals on your path to developing the skill. This doesn't mean I was a marvel. The first time I was ever paid to speak at a sorority on the topic of relationships, I threw up just before. But I suppose that's because I cared enough to worry about how well I would do. That means I allowed myself to attach high levels of emotion and meaning to my journey and results. When I messed up, I allowed myself to get energized and mad at myself without becoming discouraged. I kept reminding myself how important it was to improve so that I could inspire people with my words. I watched such great orators as Martin Luther King Jr. John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill and read hundreds of transcripts from what many consider the the greatest speeches in history. Principle 10 teach others what you are Learning was also a huge factor in my development. In graduate school, I was fortunate to teach a public speaking course for two semesters. Looking back now, I had no idea what I was doing as a teacher, but every day I faced the task with an earnest devotion to helping my students become better communicators. I shared with them what I learned, but the reality is they taught me more than I ever taught them. In teaching others, I felt their pain and rejoiced in their breakthroughs. By watching them, I learned what I call vicarious distinctions, which helped me improve my own skills. With the full ten step progressive mastery habit in place, everything changed for me in just a few years. I went from a kid terrified of public speaking to to a confident orator addressing audiences without notes. I teach four and five day seminars with thousands of attendees where I'm often the only trainer on stage for eight to ten hours per day. I've been blessed to share the stage with many of my heroes and with leaders and luminaries from dozens of fields in arenas full of tens of thousands of people. Though I was once painfully awkward in front of a camera, I've faced that dark lens without hesitation over and over again. Since filming more than a dozen online courses and untold numbers of videos, I'm still a long way from where I want to be. I have much to learn and I love this process of challenging myself to new levels, even though it means taking a hard look at all the places I fall short. But because of progressive mastery, I am no longer scared or an amateur. Had I just tried to be a better speaker without a disciplined approach, I would never have excelled and been blessed to reach so many people. I've used progressive mastery techniques to help Olympians improve their times, NBA stars to hit more jump shots, CEOs set better strategy, and parents organize their schedules more efficiently. There's nothing in your life you can't improve through practicing progressive mastery. You certainly don't have to take on every new skill with such a strategic and disciplined approach. Sometimes it's difficult to find a coach or mentor who can give you the feedback you need. Perhaps you don't have a lot of opportunities to teach others what you're learning. It's hard sometimes to keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zones and working so hard to improve. But what if. What if you brought a more thoughtful structure to your next efforts in developing skill? What if you could become world class in in your primary field of interest? What if you could create more prolific quality output because you honed your skills? What if you powered through your five moves faster because you were competent and capable. What if today, right here, you decided to seek that next level of momentum and mastery in your life? Performance prompts on page 213 of High Performance Habits. Number one three skills I could develop that would help me feel more confident and capable. 2. The simple steps I could take to improve those skills include. Number three the coaches or mentors I could seek out concerning those skills. Only one ride Only Put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. Pablo Picasso Life is short. We're only allotted so much time to make our mark. I say that's all the more reason to get focused. Stop producing outputs that don't make your soul sing. Avoid trying to be effective or efficient doing things that you're not proud of and make no impact. Determine what outputs really matter to you at this stage in your life. Chart your five moves to accomplish your big dreams and go make it happen with while getting insanely good at what you do. From there, the world is yours.