Peak Performance #32 | Performance Roundup
Peak Mental Performance, Aligning Knowledge and Intuition, and Creating Entrepreneurs
It’s been busy in my world lately—so much so that I’ve had a scarcity of time to write.
Rather than allow a month to lapse between essays (I’ll be traveling for the next two weeks), I’m sharing some resources that have been inspiring me in the world of performance:
Justin Su’a on Peak Mental Performance
Justin Su’a is the Head of Mental Performance at the Tampa Bay Rays. His job is to take those who are already great and help them become elite.
He was recently interviewed by Shane Parrish on Farnam Street. The episode is packed full of gems and counterintuitive wisdom. In a world overburdened with content, this rises above the noise.
I put together a summary of my favorite points on twitter:
My biggest takeaways for how to be an elite mental performer:
Debate yourself
Focus on actions over feelings
Distinguish between losing and being beaten
Post-mortem after your losses AND your wins
Watch yourself
Get your foundation right
Listen to the full episode here.
Aligning Knowledge for Excellence
Read: The (Mis)Alignment of Knowledge
Joe Norman is one of my favorite thinkers on complexity. He ventures into epistemology in this short essay, making a profound point:
We can do what we don't understand. We can even do what we misunderstand. But we MUST understand what we do to achieve excellence. Head and gut must become aligned.
You can be unconsciously competent. You can even be mistaken about what drives success while achieving good outcomes. But if you want to become excellent, you must understand what drives success and what holds you back.
You can then remove things that you are successful despite doing and double down on the things that drive success. Only then can you play in the realm of mastery.
Making Successful Entrepreneurs
Pear VC’s Mar Hershenson gave a talk at the All-in podcasts’s All-in Summit about how to create entrepreneurs. Her talk is profound in its simplicity, and the discussion afterwards provides as much wisdom.
The takeaways are dead simple. To become an (better) entrepreneur:
1. Join a peer group of ambitious entrepreneurs and share updates with each other regularly
Stanford university reliably outputs great entrepreneurs. How?
Because so many who attend want to start a company.
When you gather a group of ambitious would-be-founders, it creates a positive feedback loop that encourages entrepreneurship and provides support that enables success.
Mar runs a class where she forces everyone to present weekly. She’s found that this habit pushes the teams to try harder and strive for excellence. Groups like this also enable an order of magnitude more learning—you’re exposed to the results of 10x the number of experiments that you can run alone.
2. Build the muscle for failure
There’s a sentiment in tech that ex-google employees make for bad founders. Why? Working at Google is too easy! There’s too little exposure to failure.
Entrepreneurship involves struggle after struggle and failure after failure. If you’ve never failed before, this essential aspect of entrepreneurship is going to be exceptionally challenging.
Mar addresses this by giving her class challenges they will almost definitely fail at. She assigns an outrageous challenge as homework (10xing sales in a week) or forces them to do something in one of their weaknesses (making an engineer focus on user growth).
By developing this muscle, entrepreneurs are better able to take risks and be resilient in the face of failure.
3. Read a lot
The top 10% of Mar’s founders, including Drew Houston of Dropbox, read voraciously.
Causation or correlation? Unclear. But the jury is out: the insatiable curiosity that drives reading or the expansive and deep knowledge that comes from it create a superior entrepreneur.
4. Get a coach (or peer group)
Having an external source to provide feedback is a force multiplier. Be it a coach or a group of peers specifically focused on candid feedback, these external eyes see things about yourself, your business, and your leadership that you simply can’t see alone.
A coach can also facilitate all of the above points: building an ambitious peer group, developing resilience in the face of failure, and expanding your knowledge.
5. Get good at sales
This came up in the discussion and was something everyone on stage agreed on. To be an entrepreneur, you have to know how to sell.
You don’t have to be great at the beginning, but developing it as a skill is essential to your success.
Five simple things that will take you a long way. If you’re an entrepreneur or pre-entrepreneurship, consider how this combination of factors could determine your success.