The 'Not So Sexy' Truth about High Performing Individuals

Don’t follow your passion.

?High performing individuals do what they are good at, not what they are passionate about.

?For years I tormented myself with panic and misery, clinging to a glimmer of hope that I would eventually find something I was passionate enough about to make a living from. Why? Because that’s the plan, isn’t it?

?Every business talk and success story are signed off with a rally cry to ‘follow your passion’.

?And that’s because there are a handful of impressive, well-publicised wins where people made eye watering sums of money from their passion. Some, but not enough.

?The problem for me was, I like doing lots of things, but I was at a loss when it came to ideas for making reasonable sums of money from the things I liked doing. I enjoy reading fiction books, for example, but I don’t want to talk about them, nor do I own the imagination to write one.

?I also like exercising, eating, travelling, and having interesting conversations, but do I like them enough to put in the thousands of hours required to be better than the other 99% that also believe eating is their hobby? Because mastery, or at least the path towards it is what it takes to acquire the economic sustainability we all desire.

Success leaves clues, and the most popular way of being successful is via tedious, tiresome, unrelenting hard work. When your work becomes challenging it is easy to fall out of love with what you are working on. People who are successful just love working, not what they are working on. This allows them to detach emotionally from what they are doing, rather than destroy their passion with the labour required to make that passion a success.

?Scott Galloway is a Professor of Marketing at NYU, entrepreneur, speaker and author. He is also someone who speaks openly about topics that aren’t cool, that people don’t want to think or talk about.

?And he claims, rather successfully, that the worst advice given to young people today is, ‘follow your passion’.

He says, ‘If someone tells you to follow your passion, it means they are already rich. And they made money doing something they were good at in order to be able to make some money from their hobby’.

?Successful people understand that they have more chance of being successful at the things they are good at rather than their hobby.

?Nobody is born wanting to be a tax lawyer, but the best of them fly private and the next best join private clubs and the next best own their own homes, go on great family holidays and have lots of disposable fun coupons. Over 99% of people who wake up wanting to be an actor spend decades following their passion, only to get rejected from every attempt to be an extra whilst working in a local bar. Do you know why George Clooney is so famous? Because he’s George Clooney.

The economic prosperity you receive from being good or even great at something, gives you the self-worth you try to achieve by earning from your passion. If you are great at your job, you get to do interesting things. And as you do interesting things, you will become an interesting person. You will then gather more achievements. And that, in turn, will make you passionate about the things you are good at.

High performing people assume they are not Beyonce. Save your passion for the weekend.

?

Don’t measure performance, measure trust.

?The majority of leaders in business obsess about how they will get the most out of their people. They seek the highest performers in their chosen field, then try to build a team of excellence. That formula works for a while until the smart employees flood their mission with toxicity. The employer then dismisses the smart employee and recruits another. And so, the cycle continues.

?High performing people create an environment for other people to perform.

They know that success is rarely due to the individual themselves but the place in which they work. They ask people what they need in order to do their job better, they don’t ask why they are not performing. They create a culture of feelings, and they allow people to feel like they can be themselves. When people feel like they can express themselves, they have ideas and ideas are the foundation of intelligence.

People want to be made to feel important. Everybody walks around with a sign on their head saying, ‘notice me’. High performing people notice everybody. They take an interest in their lives, and they treat everybody well regardless of their position of power.

?They also network like you have never networked before. To be successful, it is a necessity to have people rooting for you. For people to follow you, it is essential they trust you.

?Do what you say you will do.

?

?Truly successful people don’t fear being an idiot

High performers have bounds of humility. They believe that what they don’t know is more important than what they do. They know that they don’t know enough for their life or business to be what it could be. They love to be told how and why they are wrong. And they know that if you listen to people, they will tell you amazing things about yourself and the world around you. They believe that others see life in a way they never will, and they want to know all about it.

?Success requires you to be the fool that gets better, not the person that ceases learning having assumed they know enough.

?They practice the art of listening, to make the other person feel heard by replacing judgement with curiosity. They create a space that allows people to communicate freely, without pointing out flaws and logic.

They ask enough questions to understand because they know the majority of people nod and pretend they know what others are talking about. They are not afraid to look stupid because they know they will only look stupid when in reality, they will be learning more than everybody else.

Assume you are wrong.

?

High performing individuals believe it could be them

?‘If you hang around the barber shop longer enough, sooner or later you’re going to get a haircut’.

The highest performers don’t believe in who they are, they believe in who they could be. They believe that one day they will catch a break. They don’t hold back, they don’t wake up discouraged, they fall forward. They are prepared to follow unfamiliar routes and make unpopular decisions that leave others questioning their ability. It’s a necessity. High performers are defined as such because they don’t follow the crowd.

?Producer and Singer-Songwriter, Pharrell Williams once visited a New York University. He was attending a music production class to critique the songs of students.

?After listening to one track in particular, he said, ‘Wow, I have zero, zero, zero notes for that. And I’ll tell you why…’

Pharrell went on to tell the student that he couldn’t provide feedback because she was doing her own thing. Her music was singular. He told her that it was like listening to Wu Tang Clan for the first time, nobody could judge it. You either liked the music or you didn’t, but you couldn’t compare it. And that is such a special quality, and all of us possess that ability. However, you must be willing to seek. You must be willing to be really frank in your music, and frank in your choices. He said, sometimes people make certain kinds of songs, so that it feels like something we have heard or felt before. The same is true for decisions, I thought.

Her song was unique. Because of that, it was her own, her story, her journey. And who can tell you that your story is right, or wrong?

?High performers believe it could be them. They treat themselves as though they are valuable. They aim high.

?They assume the best and act courageously in the pursuit of it.

?

Successful people believe that things could be improved by their work. However, paradoxically, they are cripplingly insecure.

?High performing individuals believe they will never be enough, and they will be measured against the things they achieve. They move quickly and have a mentality that it is better to do things now than it is to do them later.

?Their insecurity of who they are against the vision of who they could be drives them to act with the urgency required to achieve things that many others do not. People who run towards the things they want get there quickly, but nowhere near as fast as someone who is running away from something they fear.

When we compare ourselves against highly successful people, we do so using their accolades as the benchmark. However, interestingly, nobody really wants to be the other person. Nor, in many circumstances, do high performers want to be themselves. Anyone who has seen the Michael Jordan documentary felt sorry for him, despite his success and wealth. Elon Musk has openly said that he thought he was insane. He believes others wouldn’t want to be him, and that living his life is a never-ending explosion.

For someone to get really good at one thing, you have to sacrifice everything else. The thing that separates champions from players is their ability to outwork the competition. And champions will outwork you every single day of the week because to them it doesn’t feel like work, it feels like they are keeping themselves safe from a mind they could be murdered by.

?

Lastly, they understand the only truth of life as we know it. The future is where you go to die.

?Hope and hopelessness are the two factors that define how we react to situations, and how we feel about them. It has nothing to do with events that have happened or what may come. But we don’t account for this and end up devoting our entire existence to a fictional projection we think is worth living for. Or more commonly, not.

You’re not alone. People of all ages forgo years of potential joy in pursuit of the future, giving up on today in anticipation of what the mysterious, formless tomorrow may hold. Every choice we make is dictated by our vision for the future. Hope or hopelessness determining the route.

The elderly worry how long they have left, and whether their accomplishments in life – or what they believe to have been accomplishments – are enough to make death any more bearable. The young are only concerned with themselves – and what they’re going to do with that self in the future. And the middle aged spend the entire mid-section of their lives worrying that they are at the mid-section of their lives – and if they’re doing the thing that nobody knows how to do, admirably.

High performing people fall in love with day-to-day activity, the process. They understand the mundane isn’t as boring as we all believe it to be. They rush when it makes business sense, but they also know that the majority of success, and the majority of problems are solved with patience.

That said, the principal reason it is so vitally important to master patience is because the opposite of patience is the desire to be somewhere else. That somewhere else is always the future, not focused on what you can control now. Somewhere else is an imaginary projection, regrettably, the only thing bringing comfort to your day.

Live what life you have left, patiently, without complaining. What’s the rush? The place you’re so desperate to be – the future – is the place so desperate to take you away.

…The future is where you go to die.

?