How to Design a High-Performance Life (style)
What exactly is a high-performance lifestyle?
It comes from creating a life that enables sustained levels of high performance. It comes down to instilling habits, practices, mental and physical actions that promote sustained excellence. It means doing things well often. It means forgoing other things in order to focus fully on the things you want to excel at. When you decide to live a high-performance life, you are essentially committing to becoming better than most people. It is a decision to move past ordinary into the extraordinary. From common to uncommon.
“From common to uncommon.” - HPX Lifestyle
But most of all, it is a very deliberate process. Initially, it’s going to require effort and full engagement. It’s going to require some willpower to replace those old habits with high-performance habits.
A person living a high-performance life is always in pursuit of something better. A world-class performer is trying to make it as a professional. A professional wants to become an all-star. All-stars aim to be champions. Champions have their sights set on the Hall of Fame. Hall of Famers are thinking about their legacies.
There is always something or someway to get better. Life fulfillment comes from exceeding life’s expectations. It is what Kobe Bryant famously called “The Mamba Mentality:”
“Mamba mentality is all about focusing on the process and trusting in the hard work when it matters most. It’s the ultimate mantra for the competitive spirit. It started just as a hashtag that came to me one day, and it’s grown into something athletes — and even non-athletes — embrace as a mindset.” - Kobe Bryant
An easy litmus test for whether or not you are living a high-performance lifestyle is to ask what were the first things you thought about when you woke up this morning?
Were you feeling tired, not wanting to get out of bed, unmotivated, and generally unexcited to be granted another day of life?
Or did you wake up with a fire in your belly, excited to chase your goals and win the day?
My guess is that you woke up less than excited, with no real goals to chase or things to conquer. Unfortunately, our lives have become so soft and comfortable that we have lost the edge that made us the apex predator of the natural world.
The hunger to fight and win.
Making the commitment to a high-performance lifestyle restores our natural inclinations. We are once again, a modern day hunter, except we are slaying mediocrity and conquering ourselves.
Six steps to high-performance x lifestyle:
1. Have a goal, desire, or life’s task.
EX: Make it to the pros; build my business and become a millionaire; become the best salesman in the my company; get into the best shape of my life; graduate top in my class; become the best at X. The reason this is important is because you can’t live in a state of high-performance without an outlet to perform. The goal of comfort or luxury also doesn’t work, since those goals promote less action and hedonistic pursuits can be rented and borrowed, thus making it appear and feel as if you made it but you really haven’t. You may have, instead, locked yourself into a less fulfilling life to pay off those debts. Left unchecked, this pattern can continue for a lifetime. Instead, you can start small with simple goals built around where you are currently at in life (such as becoming the best performer in your current job). As you build confidence and skill, you can entertain the idea of pursuing what really matters to you, what author Robert Greene calls your life’s task.
2. Pursue that goal relentlessly.
Make it an obsession and you actually stand a chance of following through. Start every day with action that moves the needle. Never become idle, the longer things go undone, the longer they’ll stay undone and you’ll slowly become a spectator, watching the life of your dreams unravel before your eyes. Action is the cure and it is the antidote.
“Action is the cure and it is the antidote.” - Chief
3. Become an industry expert.
When you become so knowledgeable at your craft you become indispensable and transform into what Seth Godin calls a Linchpin. The thing about being a linchpin is that a common person can become one, it just takes uncommon effort, discipline, and mindset. It will require you to read more, study more, and put yourself out there more. You will have to fail more than anyone else, but those lessons are invaluable. A high-performance lifestyle is not only the way of the expert, it is the way to become the expert.
4. Install systems (habits), track your progress, and adjust as needed.
Habits are often talked about but vaguely understood. Without realizing it, habits run our lives. The subconscious part of our brain directs most of our actions and we are in some ways, mostly along for the ride. However, we can direct our efforts at establishing high-performance habits while working to replace old, less desirable ones. Here is quick example: you always eat dessert after dinner. Eating dessert is the habit, eating dinner is the trigger and the reward comes from the dopamine hit from a sugary treat. In order to change that habit, you could eat dinner like normal, not drink anything with dinner and instead of dessert, drink a diet soda. Your reward will be the sweet taste from the diet soda and a satisfying drink to quench your thirst. After a week of doing this, you can take note of how many desserts you ate and make adjustments as needed. You could also monitor your total amount of carbs and sugar consumed each day and look for a downward trend.
5. Address your self-limiting beliefs.
These beliefs are made up of those little voices in your head telling you that you are not educated enough, strong enough, smart enough, competent, experienced, big, small, tall, funny, confident, sexy, or good enough. They come up when you are forced outside of your frame of reference, when your identity comes into question. It sounds like this:
I feel like I can’t make any progress.
It feels like I’m going backwards.
I’m not prepared to do this.
I grew up in X, so I can’t do X.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” - George Bernard Shaw
Addressing these beliefs usually come during tough times and usually when it’s too late. However, designing some “hard things” into your life gives you the opportunity to out train these beliefs, so that when it really matters, your mind is forged and you stand ready for anything.
6. Find a mentor or hire a coach.
You must not be fooled, and you are the easiest person to fool said the comedian. We are experts at talking ourselves out of things. We think time is infinite, so we always push it back, wait till tomorrow, wait till Monday, or we just simply wait till death. We don’t mean to do these things. Obese people aren’t purposely choosing to live like that and they aren’t happily choosing to die early. Everyone is simply fooling themselves, over and over again. A mentor or coach (this person CANNOT be a friend, friends only care about making you feel better in the moment), will keep you from fooling yourself.
You’ll say, “I’ve been meticulously tracking my calories and exercising, but I still can’t seem to lose weight, it must be genetics or maybe a thyroid problem?”
They’ll say, “It looks like you haven’t been counting all those snacks or even that Starbucks coffee I saw you with the other day. Maybe meticulously isn’t the word I would choose here.”
For high-performance, the value of a coach increases exponentially. Every high performer has a coach, including the billionaires, the professional athletes, the president and that multi-national executive. It MATTERS that much, or else you fall prey to the one person you can never trust: yourself.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself- and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynman
Originally appeared on hpxlifestyle.com
