SUMMARY 

• You have no chance of performing at a high level if you keep doing what you’re doing. You have to change your approach. And that is a subject of today. What do high performers do differently?
• So three things that high performers do differently. They are intentional, they’re productive and they’re anti-fragile.
• Being more intentional is essentially respecting that behavior follows identity, and that we can choose our identities, and that we first start our journey of high performance of reaching our fullest potential by choosing who it is that we want to be.
• Second thing that high performers do is that they are productive. They have an evening routine to shut down their day. They have a powerful morning routine. When they start out their next day, they don’t start it just doing any old thing. They start it working on what was deemed to be most important the day before. 
• Another big productivity driver for high performers is they’re very good at single tasking. Instead of jumping around to a myriad of different things, they focus, 30 minutes, 60 minutes at a time. And that leads to an incredibly high output, much, much higher than jumping around from one thing to the next, throughout the day. 
• Last but not least high performers are anti-fragile. They respect that stress builds strength. They step into discomfort rather than shying away from it. And they have an incredible ability to, when they’re knocked down, stand quickly back up.

TRANSCRIPT

You have no chance of performing at a high level if you keep doing what you’re doing. You have to change your approach. And that is a subject of today. What do high performers do differently? So make sure you stick around for the whole message, because there’s a lot in here that’s going to help you up your game.

Hi, my name is Eric Partaker, and I’m on a mission to help entrepreneurs reach their full potential, and do it in a way that doesn’t require sacrifice of their health or relationships, that still allows them to feel balanced while also maintaining the ability to handle the unexpected, all those unexpected bumps and punches that come our way. Now, high performance has been a passion of mine for two decades. I mean, it was certainly part of the culture at McKinsey and Company, where I started off my career as a consultant. It certainly was the environment that we had at Skype when we grew from 30 people to 500 people. And we were acquired by eBay for $4 billion. And it was certainly the environment that I experienced in the chain of restaurants that I built in the UK, which culminated in me receiving a UK CEO of the Year award in 2019.

So this is an area that I’m super passionate about, and an area that I’ve had to invest a ton of time in. And also an area that I practice regularly day in and day out as a performance coach for entrepreneurs, helping them scale, not just their businesses, but also their leadership, their lives. So what is it that high performers do differently? Three things. And by the way, these are three things that I discuss in my book, The Three Alarms. So if you want to go into any of this content, more deeply head over to Amazon, the book has been ranked as an Amazon bestseller. And you can go into all of these concepts in a lot more depth

So three things that high performers do differently. They are intentional, they’re productive and they’re anti-fragile. And let me go into each of those and teach you also how you can build in each of these areas. And being more intentional is essentially respecting that behavior follows identity, and that we can choose our identities, and that we first start our journey of high performance of reaching our fullest potential by choosing who it is that we want to be. Now, let me kind of put this in perspective, the power of this, and how you’ve actually already have done this most likely at some point in your life. 

If I were to take my seven-year-old and put a Spider-man costume on him, what’s going to happen next? Well, I’ll tell you. He will start shooting webs from his wrists, jumping around the sofa, making funny noises. I never once, after I put the costume on him had to say, “Okay, and now for you to start behaving like Spider-man, I need you to do this and that and this. And then after you shoot a few webs out of your wrists, I want you to roll on the ground and make these noises.” I don’t have to do any of that. Why? Because, behavior follows the identity.

The moment I put the super hero costume on, Spider-Man or Superman, whatever it is, then my son will just start acting like that. It requires no training or instruction. And this is the beauty of the power of identity driven change. This is the beauty of intentionality, because we all do this as kids, right? That superhero costume goes on and we know how to act. Nobody needs to train us or teach us. And it immediately influences our behavior. High performers recognize this. They decide who is it that they want to be. This is something that they do very differently from the rest of the population. 

And they’re essentially, once again, tapping back into that instinct that we all have as kids, behavior follows identity. So choose who it is that you would like to be. And the power of being intentional here is that once you choose an identity that you want to switch into, then you act as if you are that, as if you’re putting on the costume. This is what high performers do all the time. They have intentionality about who is it that they want to be. They might give it a name. They might think of themselves as becoming a certain persona. Or they might simply just define the characteristics, the words that equate to them performing at their best, that bring more intentionality, more purpose into their day.

And the other thing that high performers do with regard to intentionality is that they don’t let their feelings get in the way. And I don’t want that to sound in any way like robotic or abrasive. What I simply mean is that high performers know that it’s having intention about what you want to do, and having that intention drive action, which will generate the feelings you’re after, rather than needing to feel like doing something in order to take action. The equation’s reversed, they know that action generates feeling. And that action is driven by their intentionality. They’re very purposeful, motivated to operate at whatever level, with whatever qualities that they set out for themselves.

Second thing that high performers do is that they are productive. And they do this in a variety of ways. So one is they design powerful routines into their day. They have an evening routine to shut down their day. They, for example, shut down their day by reviewing what happened that day, looking at the calendar ahead, and choosing perhaps the top one, two or three things that they’re going to be doing the next day. And knowing when the day ends exactly what those things are and when they’re going to be doing them. 

They have a powerful morning routine. When they start out their next day, they don’t start it just doing any old thing. They start it working on what was deemed to be most important the day before. And they make sure they spend some quality time working creatively before they start reacting to everyone else’s agenda. High performers also term productivity to have magnetic force, something that pulls them into action, rather than something that’s whipping themselves into action. They do that by making sure they have something to be productive towards.

So by choosing a massive goal, when I was helping build Skype, our massive goal was the whole world could talk for free. And that pushed us into a high performance mode, because it was such a huge goal. We had no choice, but to give it our all, given the lofty vision that we were supporting, that we were campaigning for. High performers, when it comes to productivity, are super careful to be working on the right things. They apply the 80/20 principle. What’s the 20% of the things that I could be doing that will generate 80% of the results that I’m after?

Another big productivity driver for high performers is something that they do differently is that they’re very good at single tasking. Instead of jumping around to a myriad of different things, they focus, 30 minutes, 60 minutes at a time. And that leads to an incredibly high output, much, much higher than jumping around from one thing to the next, throughout the day. 

Last but not least high performers are anti-fragile. They respect that stress builds strength. They step into discomfort rather than shying away from it. And they have an incredible ability to, when they’re knocked down, stand quickly back up. And another part of being anti-fragile is to anticipate obstacles because there’s always going to be obstacles on our path. And high performers do that on a regular basis. What might go wrong? Anticipating that in advance, so they can design solutions for that, so that they’re not surprised when it happens, and they’re ready to act. 

So in summary, what did high performers do differently? How can you up your game? Be intentional, be productive, be anti-fragile. Employ some of the concepts, some of the points that I’ve mentioned in each of those three categories. And if you’d like to go more deeply into this, you’ll find loads more here, a lot more information to help you both practice and embed these concepts in my book, The Three Alarms. So I hope you’ve enjoyed that. And if you head over to my website at EricPartaker.com, you’ll also be able to subscribe to my weekly insights newsletter.