The 7 principles of peak performance

Principle #1 Break your goals down into something you can do every day

It’s the Monday morning after I had finished my first Ironman (yep, open water swim of 2.4 miles, followed by biking 112 miles and then running a marathon (26.2 miles)); I’m in a meeting with a team from a bank talking about launching a new business.?After a colleague shares what I did that weekend and a round “Congrats, that’s amazing” and “How did you find the time to train?” and a fair bit of surprise that someone so, let’s just say “not athletic” could complete it, we get down to business.??It may not have been the best meeting ever, but I find my energy level has never been higher, my thoughts are clear and not bothered by small doubts, and I’m connecting with people more deeply.?The meeting starts off on a high and ends with even more excitement about the business we are going to build.

I reflect that there is something about going after, and achieving, a long-term goal – particularly one that requires mental and physical endurance, that is incredibly satisfying but also clarifying.?You suddenly feel like that path to the next goal is crystal clear and it’s just a matter of when not if.?(You also risk deeply annoying your colleagues and family if you don’t stop talking about it.)

Just 10 months before, I was in a very different place.??I had never been in a competitive running or biking race and could not swim more than 20 yards without gasping for air.

I’m not sharing this to brag.??I’m sharing because the process really did change me.?I also want to start a conversation about other ordinary people achieving extraordinary results and how they did it – particularly the repeatable, everyday habits, hacks, and principles that they used.?

For me, over 20 plus years of consulting, I have been refining an operating system – a clear set of behaviors, consistently applied, which can achieve great results. As I trained, I refined the operating system and I came out with a short list of seven principles (or hacks) that led to that moment of peak performance. I have found that those same principles lead to outstanding success for teams that are striving to break out of their current performance limits or build new businesses or individuals looking to achieve more success.

I believe that almost anyone – with enough time and patience – can achieve extraordinary business and life results and can even complete an Ironman using this approach. Preparing for, and finishing, my first Ironman triathlon on top of a hectic work and family life has – much to my surprise – made me a far better business leader, counselor, and mentor.

If I can do that, almost anyone can.?

Let me provide some context, and then I’ll share the first principle.

I’m no athlete. The idea of swimming in open water for any distance was terrifying. I had no experience with competitive races. (When I entered a five-mile local race in January, I lined up at the finish line – then looked up and saw a crowd of people a quarter mile down the road. Everyone had to wait for me to run over before starting the race). If I have any fast-twitch muscles, I have not found them yet.

In December, 2021, I decided I needed a big, scary goal to get me out of my pandemic low and back into some sort of healthy shape. I was at a low - our family was still relatively isolated by the pandemic, the days were short, and I had never weighed more.?Even thinking about doing an Ironman was scary and exciting. What was even more exciting for me was getting a chance to test whether the behaviors I was building for business success would translate to being able to complete an extreme endurance event.?

On January 1, 2022, I started training. I was not sure I would be able to complete a half Ironman, and certainly had significant doubts I could do a full one.

Just over ten months later, I was able to cover the 140-mile distance in 15 hours, 59 minutes and 49 seconds – beating my goal by 11 seconds and comfortably before the 17-hour cut-off.

I was surprised by the number of ways the event changed my life. Challenging my own perceived limits led me to a place that was so satisfying and exciting that I wondered why I’d waited so long.

I started to ask what other limits I had unconsciously set in other parts of my life, and what limits the people I work with were setting for themselves. Business – and life – is mostly an endurance sport, and like the triathlon, success is at least 80 percent mental, so it’s not surprising I found applying these habits more generally could lead to peak performance in business as well.

This is the first of the seven principles of the operating system.

#1.??Break your goals down into something you can do every day.

You’ll get lots of good advice in business and fitness books about finding your ‘why’. And believe me, you’ll need a good ‘why’ on the days when you don’t want to train, or when you find yourself off course and being stung by a jellyfish in the middle of a swim.?You'll also need a ‘why’ or a purpose when you are struggling to launch a new business or get a team motivated to seek a higher level of performance for customers.??

But in training, and business, I’ve found the ‘why’ isn’t enough. What matters is turning the ‘why’ into big, specific goals. Then it’s important to break those big goals into things you want to achieve in 3 months.

The real magic – and hard work – comes from two things–finding all the improvements that can be made and breaking those improvements into small steps that move you toward your goal.?

Those small steps forward every day result in massive impact in a way I think we typically can’t anticipate. I’m sure you’ve heard that the math of a 1% improvement every day is nearly a 40x improvement over the course of a year.

The insight is this - we tend to overestimate what we can get done in a few days and underestimate what we can get done in a year.

Once the small steps are identified, the trick is to turn those steps into something that you can do every day.?For the Ironman, it meant some training every day – even if it meant getting on a hotel treadmill at 10 at night.??Knowing that I was trying to train almost every day (typically I had one full rest day a week), didn’t really give me the chance to have a “whether” discussion with myself; it was only a matter of when.??And over the course of a year, I only missed a few workouts – which is the key to building endurance.

There are many examples of this in sports and in business.?In sports, when Sir Dave Brailsford, a cyclist, and MBA, became the performance director of British Cycling, he found all the ways that he could make a 1% improvement to the team – improving their truck so they could sleep better, enhancing the bikes to make them more aerodynamic, painting the trucks carrying the bikes white so they could spot dust before it caused mechanical issues in the shifters, and having the team practice better hygiene to avoid getting sick.?These changes became cumulative and in part resulted in the team going from having won only one Olympic medal in 76 years to winning 7 of 10 in the Beijing Olympics and similar results in London.??(Read an interview here).??

As I’ve worked with leaders to build the same level of granularity from their “why” to their goals, to the set of things they want to get done every day, it forces a real discussion about priorities.?I found I had committed to too many things as I realized I could not make progress on initial goals at least every week. Nearly every executive I’ve worked with has found the same.?The answer is to of course tighten priorities and cut the “to-do” list.?This doesn’t necessarily mean giving up on a goal forever; focusing on fewer things often means getting through a shorter list faster, and then a new goal can be added.?This is a core principle of agile development – where future work to be done is moved to a “backlog” and only evaluated when the current work is completed.?

Here’s an example. We were working with a wealth management team that wanted to build a new business. As we discussed the “why”, they realized that they had been very product focused. As they started to view things from the customer’s eyes, they realized that they could serve their customers far better by making changes to their approach so that they were working backward from a customer goal – saving for a child’s college education, for example – rather than focusing on performance in a particular fund or other product.?

This led to a fundamental redesign of their offering. They changed their website and tools (for example, allowing co-browsing) and also how they approached clients in every meeting.?The “why” – working backward from customer needs – became a set of goals in terms of how they ran their business, but also a set of behaviors they could act on every day (like?spending time in every client meeting discussing current financial goals and the progress towards them).???

On a personal level, this depth of planning really pays off - you get into a strong flow where you know the small things you are doing add up to the big things which in turn support your “why.”?I realized that if something is important, you should do it (nearly) every day.

With the people and teams I work with, we do an exercise of listing all the things we want to get done this year – for themselves, for work, and for life – on one sheet of paper that has the “why” at the top, the big goals for the year on the left, the objectives for the next three months in the center, and the things they were going to do every day to meet those objectives on the right.?Looking at this one sheet of paper every day means nearly every day had forward progress to the goal. Sharing these one-page summaries also created collective ownership and a better-shared understanding of everyone’s goals.

A few thoughts:

• Do you break your goals into actions you can take every day or week? ?
• What has helped you do that??
• What obstacles are getting in your way?
• What other approaches do you take to ensure you are making progress toward your goals??

I am looking forward to the discussion and hearing your thoughts.

Looking ahead:

Principle No. 2: Fall in love with technique