No.1 Performance Psychologist: The Secret to High Performance and Excellence

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Underperformance is the default: a 'central governor' in the brain puts survival and comfort ahead of potential.

  Valiante cites the central governor hypothesis. Even marathoners, who build their lives around pushing limits, almost never push themselves to death; of roughly 5 million, only five to ten die in a year, mostly from things like being hit by a car. Single-celled organisms in a petri dish move away from heat and cold toward comfort. Reaching your potential therefore takes a deliberate act of agency, which he calls 'the opening bid'.

• 02

  Change comes from what you do, not what you think, say or feel.

  He leans on Bandura ('behavior is a cause of behavior') and John Dewey ('We don't think our way into a pattern of living. We live our way into a pattern of thought.'). Most New Year's resolutions are dead by February or March. His one practical step is to find the single comfortable habit holding you back, whether your phone, your food or an excuse, change it, and hold yourself accountable to it repeatedly.

• 03

  There's an 'everydayness' to excellence: you work through the bad days to reach the good ones.

  His answer to 'How do I write a book?' is to sit down every day, and when nothing comes, stay in the chair and write badly. Writers in his workshops at Rollins College and Emory learned the same thing. Great performers learn to love the mundane details of the work rather than waiting for inspiration.

• 04

  Mastery motivation lasts; ego motivation burns out.

  People with mastery motivation do the craft for its own sake. People with ego motivation use it as a vehicle for money or importance, like a doctor who doesn't care about medicine or a lawyer who just wants to be rich, and they burn out. The common arc is that you start out loving the thing, the rewards become more powerful than the thing, you lose yourself, and the best performers find their way back, as Kelly Slater and Brooks Koepka described 'falling in love again'.

• 05

  Presence is a trainable habit, and a divided mind is the enemy of good thinking.

  Flow can happen while gardening, cooking or talking. Its signs are that time disappears, hard things feel easy, and you forget you're being watched. Dewey wrote that 'a divided interest' is the greatest enemy of effective thinking. The best performers are present for everything, and since distraction and attachment are what pull you out, small consistent practice goes a long way.

• 06

  If you want to be someone else, change your environment, not just your mind.

  He corrects a Sister Hazel lyric using 'situated cognition': the brain responds to its surroundings mostly unconsciously, the way we sweat or get goosebumps without choosing to. Citing Atomic Habits, he says we fall to the level of our systems. A portfolio manager under a risk officer who automatically says no will hit that ceiling no matter how talented they are.

• 07

  The gap within one person, between their best and their worst, is usually bigger than the gap between two candidates.

  Firms spend heavily comparing candidate A with candidate B but never ask what someone looks like at their best or worst after hiring. He says research shows the variation within an individual usually exceeds the variation between individuals, so there's more 'psychological alpha' in removing a person's 'mechanisms of suppression'. The biggest of those is how they've been conditioned to handle mistakes.

• 08

  Confidence and motivation predict performance better than IQ.

  IQ began with Alfred Binet's narrow goal of identifying French schoolchildren who needed help, and it survives partly because testing is a multibillion-dollar industry. He prefers Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, including interpersonal (reading others), intrapersonal (knowing yourself) and bodily-kinesthetic (Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Martha Graham).

• 09

  Confidence, or self-efficacy, comes from four sources, and each is biased toward the negative.

  The four are mastery experiences, verbal and social persuasion, vicarious comparison, and physiological states. Failure hurts more than success feels good, and criticism stings more than praise lifts, so over a lifetime people anchor to their failures and underrate themselves. Self-esteem has no empirical link to excellence. Being slightly overconfident relative to your skill is useful, while being a lot overconfident leads to sloppiness and self-delusion.

• 10

  Forethought is a human superpower, but anxious people use it to live in worst-case futures.

  Only humans plan ahead, like saving now to be comfortable in ten years. But that same ability produces endless 'what if' questions, which almost always go to the worst case and are then reacted to as though they were real. He also notes that because natural selection is slower than social change, we're trying to do modern work with a brain built for the tribe, where exclusion meant death, which is why fear of rejection runs so deep.