(The Journey Continues)
Welcome back, sports fans, to the next instalment of “how to un-weaponise high performance.” The point being, as has been made in my past few blogs, that we have been collectively duped by some old-school (and frankly damaging) ideas about what high performance is supposed to be about.
Myth 2: High performance is about winning at all costs. Or, even just winning at all. As soon as we make this journey a competitive one, we actually limit ourselves.
This phenomenon became salient to me in my work in the Paralympic space, back when the movement was just starting. Believe it or not, when the Paralympic movement was first moved under the Olympic umbrella in 2001, the US Olympic Committee housed the Paralympic sport division in their marketing department. Says something about the complete disregard for high performance expected back then, doesn’t it?
At that time, as a sport psychologist, I would occasionally give presentations to Paralympic sports, and there I confronted athletes who were savvy enough to realise that all it took to win Paralympic gold was to beat the very few other elite international Paralympic athletes—maybe just one or two in the world—in their sport. Why should I have to work to be my best, KP, if all I need to do is be better than them?
There was an inexorable logic to that reasoning…if winning was the only criteria for success.
When high performance is just about being better than someone else, or being number one in your market, it shuts the door on the possibilities you haven’t even considered. True high performers who excel here–think NBA’s diminutive Steph Curry Curry who built his game around range, speed, and long-shot skill to counter the prevailing wisdom that only size and proximity to the basket mattered, or think Apple and how it revolutionised the world of tech–ask a different question.
Rather than, “how do I outperform the best?”, their questions might be versions of, “how can I do things differently?” “What am I capable of?” or “what is the next problem no one has thought to solve?”
And then they reinvented themselves or their product and, in the process, changed the very rules of the game for everyone else.
This pivots the question away from what others are doing, and toward what can I/we do better. How much better could we be? This question in and of itself is one to really blow up and dream big about. I take my cue in this space from the book, 10x is Easier than 2x, which extolls the virtues of dreaming and strategising big. As the authors Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy argue, while there may be many ways to do something twice as good, there are very few ways to do anything 10 times better. So in a way, the 10x path is counterintuitively simpler as it is based as much on what you stop doing so you can focus all your efforts on that one thing that would make the biggest difference.
Questions that foster this kind of thinking:
- How is the system I work in limited, and how can I/we exploit that?
- What is the answer or approach to this problem that no one else has thought of?
- How do we best leverage the talents and skills of everyone here – maybe in ways we haven’t done before?
Because once we shift the focus away from beating someone else, something interesting happens. The spotlight moves away from the individual and toward the collective. Which neatly brings me to the next myth, the myth of the hero. Stay tuned!
How do you define high performance? Is it in comparison to someone or something else or is it all about your own potential? Where are the constraints in your system that need a vision readjustment?
