PNTV: Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness (#345)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Today we've got another great book, Peak Performance, Peak Performance by Brad Stolberg and Steve Magnus. Subtitle Elevate your game, avoid burnout and thrive with the new science of success. Brad Stolberg is a great writer and Steve Magnus is a great coach. The two of them performed at a very high, elite level earlier in their careers and then burned out. They met, talked about, well, how do you perform at a really high level and not burn out? This book is a product of that dynamic. It's a great book. I kind of think of it as a mix between Anders Ericsson's peak. You want to reach the top of your game and of your life and of Tony Schwartz and Jim Lohr's the Powerful Engagement. How do you get to that peak? By training your energy oscillating, as we'll talk about today. So great book, quick, fun read. And we've got the Philosopher's Note, as always. Six page PDF, 20 minute MP3 with some of my favorite big ideas, five of them here. Let's start with the equation. You want to grow and reach your highest potential and perform at your peak. Then you need to master this equation. Stress plus rest equals growth. Stress plus rest equals growth. You need to stress yourself and then you need to rest and recover. So we've seen this, we've used this quite a bit, right? So this idea of oscillating, you need to be intensely on and stress yourself. We'll talk about just how much in the next idea here. Just manageable, just past your comfort zone, but intensely on. And then very importantly, you need to train your recovery. You need to be as intense in your training of your rest phases as you are in your on phases. So if this is your on, this is your off, this is your stress, this is your rest. You need to train your recovery, create really great waves rather than be kind of sort of flatline, where you're just going through your day and you're never really engaged, you're never really disengaged, etc. Or you could be the kind of person that always tries to be here, or even, even higher, right? And you never come down, you never take a break. That's a great recipe for burnout. So this is the way you grow anything. You want to grow your biceps, you want to grow your cardiovascular system. You stress yourself, you properly recover and you grow, you come back stronger. So that's the essence of the equation for growth, which is the essence of this book. And for me, my biggest takeaway is training recovery, truly training it, which we're going to talk about in the third big idea. So second big idea here is just manageable challenges. So the question is, well, how much should I stress myself? What's the proper amount of stress? I love the phrase just manageable. So you're pushing past your comfort zone. If it's easy, you're within your comfort zone. Growth is not going to occur there. You have to deliberately stress yourself, go a little past what you can do, but not so far that you snap. So we've described it as stretch. Don't snap that rubber band that's not pulled so hard, you snap. It's stretched nice and taut. Dynamic tension, just manageable. Steven Kotler in the Rise of Superman shares a similar idea. He tells us it's 4%, 4% past your current abilities, just manageable. But if you do 4%, 4%, 4%, 4%, 4%, 4%, you stretched, you stressed, you recovered, and you grew. You keep on doing that, and again you aggregate and compound. He says the impossible peak performance is just what's next. It's what's for breakfast. It's another day at the office. But you've got to be willing to go a little too far and then recover. Just manageable challenges. That's our proper level of stress. And then we can bust this out in the flow model too, right? So flow Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We have challenges and skills, right? So flow is where it matches your challenge and your skills line up. Challenge just a little above it. 4%. That's where you enter flow. That's where you enter growth. Now, if the challenge is super high and your skills are super low, what happens? You get anxiety. This is flow, right? But if your skills are super high and the challenge is low, then what happens? Then you get boredom. So you need to find that spot where you're consistently moving just a little past your current skill level, but not too much. So then, third big idea. If we have work, rest, work, rest. And we move through cycles throughout our day, which we do, which we've described in other episodes as ultradian rhythms. There's circadian, which is every 24 hours, circadias every around a day. Then ultradian, which is around every 90 minutes, your body and your consciousness is going through a cycle, right? So they say that your ideal work phase should be intense on should be 50 to 90 minutes long, and then your recovery should be seven to 20 minutes long. You go off for 90 minutes and you recover for 20 minutes, repeat, right? So I've been playing around with this anywhere from 30 minutes to 90 minutes. You go hard and then you turn off. And very important distinction here. We when you go off, I think most of us who watch, if you're watching this, you probably don't have a hard time turning on. That's probably not your area where you can use some improvement. It's certainly not mine. I'm pretty good at being on. My challenge is I can tend to stay up here and I don't actually come down and oscillate down. So my biggest thing is getting completely offline. If you want to really recover after going on, you, you can't use your checking of email or social media or news or whatever as your off cycle because you're still in that dopamine intense, adrenaline dripping stimulation mode. You've got to get away from your technology and go check out Go. For me, it's go hit a trail, go do a napitation. Part nap, part meditation. I just got a sauna. I'm sitting in that air. A new sauna. We're sitting in that. I am sitting in that every afternoon. I'm finding ways to really, really train deep recovery. We want to get really good at that. And paradoxically, the more you recover, the more you have to come back with the next time around. So work rest cycles, super important. Those are some ideas to think about. 50 to 90 minutes on, 7 to 20 minutes off. Fourth, big idea, the iPhone. So they talk about the iPhone in its effect on your performance. We've talked about it in other contexts. So the iPhone X3. Let's look at all the different ways the iPhone affects us. Number one, if you have an iPhone out when you are connecting with someone else, let's say you're going to lunch with a friend or a colleague or whatever. And if there is a phone on the table, research shows that the quality of your interactions is likely to be diminished as a direct result of having that iPhone in sight, or smartphone, whatever, even if it's not yours, even if it's not on, etc. The second thing that we know about the iPhones is Amy Cuddy. She's done research looking at the size of the device you use and your power, your assertiveness. Long story short, the smaller the device, the more your assertiveness and power is eroded. And she posits that it's because you're hunching over and assuming a body posture that's not strong. So if you have an iPhone versus an iPad versus a big monitor. You're going to see differences in your assertiveness and power. The bigger the better. And then the third thing that they talk about in this book is your performance. So you can measure someone's performance on whatever task. And again, there's two different conditions, right? One, no phone. The other phone. So you have a phone visible. Simply having the phone visible, whether it's yours or someone else's, will diminish your performance vis a vis people that perform the same task without a smartphone. Insight. That's a huge insight that it doesn't even have to be your phone to distract you. Technology and smartphones are so incredibly addictive that there's a part of your brain that, when it's in sight, is having to resist it and is thinking about what it could do. We're going to talk about this in an episode coming up soon on Irresistible. It's truly remarkable how addictive this technology is. My solution to that is the iPhone is off. It's in my closet, top shelf in airplane mode. Completely out of sight, out of mind. I haven't turned mine on in over a week. At this stage, it's a sport for me to see how infrequently I can use my phone. In any case, think about it for you, if you want to go deep and you want to perform at a high level again, whether that's connection or task orientation, get rid of your phone, hide it and don't put it in your pocket because that will lead to its own effects, etc. Etc. Etc. Save that for another chat. The fifth big idea here is mindset. If you want to perform at your peak, you need to get your mind right, obviously. But specifically you need to reorient your relationship to stress. We talked about this in Kelly McGonigal's the Upside of Stress. And you need to like. How you perceive your stress dictates how it will affect you. If you are stressed by life and you view it as a threat to your well being, your body will respond as if it's being threatened. Not in optimal ways, but if you take that same stress and you view it as a challenge to step up all of that energy that's elicited when you face a stressful situation, when will be used positively. There's a huge difference between the threat response and the challenge response. We want to get our minds right, see life's challenges as opportunities to get a little bit better. We want to eat stress like an energy bar is how John Elliot puts it in overachievement. He says you got to be like a race car driver if you want to perform at your peak, right, you need a V12 or whatever those guys race with. You need a huge, powerful engine. The stress of trying to manage that is the only thing that's going to allow you to win a race. And he says you got to get used to that. You got to look at it as an opportunity to perform at your best. And you don't want a lawnmower. Yeah, it's a more comfortable ride, but that's not what's going to get you to the finish line and the position you want to be in. So if you want to perform at your best, you've got to reorient your relationship to stress. And you want to remember this equation. Stress plus rest equals growth. Don't be just burning yourself out up here and don't be going kind of sort of on all day. Make big waves, on and off. Remember, you want to have just manageable tasks. 4% more than what you're capable of, currently capable of doing. You go too high on the challenge, you get anxious. You go too low on the challenge, you get bored. You want to play with that. Find that realm where you're stretching, not snapping. Work rest ratios, 50 to 90 minutes on. I do 30 to 50 to 90 minutes on and then 5 to 7 to 20 minutes off. Truly off. This is one of my new favorite things. Training, recovery. We want to get really good at that. Remember, the iPhones don't work. And then again, life. When we're facing these stressful opportunities and deliberately creating them for ourselves, those are challenges. We want to eat those like energy bars and use them as our fuel to our peak performance. I hope you enjoyed if you did. I think you'll love the book and have another awesome day. See you. 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