The Myths of High Performance

Overachievement: The New Model For Exceptional Performance
by John Eliot, Ph.D.

Relax. Set goals. Focus on the outcome. Lose yourself to the Zone. All reasonable, sensible advice when you are facing a big presentation at work, a crucial point in the game, or any kind of career-launching performance. And all utterly, hopelessly, wrong.

According to John Eliot, Ph.D., "Such self-improvement balderdash will do nothing but relegate you to a career in mediocrity." As Dr. Eliot has discovered through his cutting-edge research and real-world coaching, techniques such as goal-setting, relaxation, visualization, stress management, and flow just don't work for most people. Relaxing when the pressure is on is the wrong way to go. Instead, to really ratchet up your performance, you'll need to change the way you think about pressure and learn how to welcome it, enjoy it, and make it work to your advantage.

Mixing scientific insights with entertaining and inspiring stories, Overachievement will help you achieve spectacular success in any situation that demands you rise above and beyond what you ever thought possible.

Whose life do you admire the most? Whose phenomenal success do you wish you could call your own? Have you ever wondered what they know that you don't about the path to success? Bill Gates started "fooling around" with computer software when he was a kid just because he loved it; that youthful passion has made him the richest man in the world. Michael Dell dropped out of college, convinced that his one-boy computer company would someday beat IBM, and fifteen years later Dell Computer was the number-one seller of PCs in the world. Against all odds, Carly Fiorina became the first woman to run a Fortune 20 company and then merged it with Compaq, a deal that many said could never work. The super-sized Hewlett-Packard is doing well, and Fiorina is now trying to surpass Dell. When J. Craig Venter, a surfer/Vietnam Vet-turned-scientist, announced in 1998 that he was starting a company to complete the mapping of the human genome in the next three years - and thus faster and more economically than a government-funded consortium of scientists - the biogenetic establishment attacked him as a "publicity machine" that could never deliver. A top biogeneticist warned Congress that the Venter strategy "will encounter catastrophic problems." In February 2001, well ahead of schedule, Venter announced that his Celera Genomics Group had delivered on his promise, opening a treasure trove of knowledge about human physiology and disease. Tiger Woods turned pro at twenty-one and proceeded to win the Masters in his first year by twelve strokes - and then went on to win two more Masters titles and a total of forty championships by the time he was twenty-nine.

What would your career be like if you could handle pressure like Tiger or get rich off one of your passions like Gates? Imagine what you could pull off with Dell's kind of confidence or Fiorina's steely commitment. How great would it be to pursue your wildest dreams like J. Craig Venter and show up all the naysayers in the process, not to mention earning hundreds of millions of dollars that would allow you to pursue your work unimpeded by the conventional wisdom of your field? Or maybe there's someone in your company or line of work who never ceases to impress you - your boss, a colleague, even the competition. Or maybe it's an old friend or family member who, no matter what job or challenge he or she takes on, always seems to come out on top without even breaking a sweat.

This book can help you be one of them, and boost you into the ranks of great overachievers.

Simply put, all of the above may perform like Superman, but they are not genetic freaks; they represent what we all could be. As smart as Bill Gates and Michael Dell might be about the personal computer business, they'd be the first to concede they have people working for them who know a lot more about computers than they do. Carly Fiorina may run one of the world's most prestigious technology companies, but by her own account she is "not a technologist," never mind a talented one; Fiorina majored in philosophy and medieval studies in college. When Venter founded Celera, scientists from the nation's best universities - with $3 billion in federal backing - had already logged years of research to decipher only three percent of the sixty thousand or so genes of human DNA. And yes, Tiger Woods is a divinely gifted golfer, but in every state in the nation there is some big strong guy who can hit a golf ball farther and a teenage girl who is a better putter. Natural talent and intelligence can certainly make life a lot easier. But neither is the measure of most major careers. Nor is luck. Whoever it is that you admire most is, in fact, a lot more like you than you might expect.

Except for one thing: They think differently. When the whistle blows, when the chips are down, when the deal is on the table, when they step into the limelight, they are in a special mindset. What turns ordinary people into overachievers is the way they use their minds when they are called upon to perform. And in case you think that only athletes, musicians, actors, and other entertainers "perform," you should know that any time you engage in your work, you are performing; any time you are not alone or talking to yourself, regardless of your profession, you are performing in public. To be as successful as you can be as a performer, you will need a performer's head. That is what this book is for - not to show you how to act but to teach you how to think.

This book is to help you regear your mind so that you can perform at your absolute best, take your game to the next level, and become better at what you do. But I will not be giving my intuitions or hunches about high performance; this book is not a write-up of what works for me or my list of favorite psychological tips. Everything that follows is based on scientific research that can help you improve your game no matter what you do, just as it has helped the hundreds of students and clients I've worked with over the past decade.

Overachievement is within the reach of every man, woman, and child. But not overnight. I can't wave my magic wand and instantly turn you into Tiger Woods or Bill Gates. You might be able to get a pill to decrease your weight, another to improve your sexual performance, and a third to wash away depression. But I cannot hand you a pill that will suddenly endow you with the mind of an overachiever. It doesn't work that way. There are no true "giant steps" or "seven steps" to success; I do not have a surefire, sixty-second recipe for achievement. Frankly, I believe that such prepackaged goal setting can be an obstacle to high performance, along with a lot of the other conventional formulae and techniques found in popular books, audiotapes, and videos about what psychologists call "peak performance." I want to show you why you should avoid that stuff; I want to show you how overachievement really happens and arm you to get there yourself - free of the psychological hocus pocus - to become, at last, the consistent overachiever you always knew you could be.

One of the most ragged clichés in sports is the importance of "the mental game"; that players who are psychologically prepared will have an edge on competitors who might be more physically gifted. Like most clichés, it's absolutely true. So, over the past twenty years, clinical psychologists have jumped into the sports arena, offering to help people work on their mental games by teaching techniques of "stress management," "goal setting," "visualization," and "self-talk." Olympic and professional athletes who have actually experienced performing at their peak, or who realized they were stuck on the second string, were quick to consult with these clinicians about how they might enhance their games. Professional sports teams added psychologists to their payrolls. And since sports is such an irresistible metaphor among business executives, many of them former high school or college athletes, Fortune 500 companies began hiring psychologists to teach their top executives the mental fitness tricks of great athletes. Articles were written and a shelf-load of books was published by self-proclaimed "world authorities" promising to teach everyone the same techniques that the pros were using to get the "psychological edge" or to have "mental toughness." Millions of Americans have bought these books, and keep buying them. You may be among them.

So why isn't everyone walking around in the Zone?

Armed with their quick-fix potions, psychologists and "performance coaches" have been propagating what I call The Myths of High Performance:

1. Use Your Head
2. Relax
3. Know Your Limits
4. Set Goals
5. Work Hard
6. Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
7. Don't Be Overconfident
8. Be a Team Player
9. Learn from Your Mistakes
10. Minimize Your Risks

To each of these reasonable, sensible, rational pieces of advice, I say, "Absolute horse hockey." Such self-improvement balderdash will do nothing but relegate you to a career in mediocrity. Overachievers don't think reasonably, sensibly, or rationally. If your wish in life is to fit in with the crowd, then this is not the book for you.

Overachievement is aimed at people who want to maximize their potential. And to do that, I insist that you throw caution to the wind, ignore the pleas of parents, coaches, spouses, and bosses to be "realistic." Realistic people do not accomplish extraordinary things because the odds against success stymie them. The best performers ignore the odds. I will show that instead of limiting themselves to what's probable, the best will pursue the heart-pounding, exciting, really big, difference-making dreams - so long as catching them might be possible.

If you're really serious about being an overachiever, bag the bromides and listen up . . . Using your head is stupid. In high-stakes performance, the real genius is someone like Yogi Berra. On his way to ten World Series rings and a place in the baseball Hall of Fame, Yogi was thinking about nothing.

The best embrace stress - and get juiced. Classic breathing and relaxation techniques tend to undermine most performances, eliminating the possibility of setting records. Stress is the high-level performer's PowerBar.

Copyright © 2005 John Eliot, Ph.D.. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Dr. teaches business and psychology at Rice University and is adjunct professor at SMU Cox School of Business Leadership Center. He is the former director of Rice's program in sports management and performance enhancement. In 2000, he co-founded The Milestone Group, which provides performance consultation and training to business executives, professional athletes, and corporations nationwide. Clients have included Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Adidas, NASA, the United States Olympic Committee, The Mayo Clinic, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and hundreds of elite individual performers.