This book is the culmination of the intervening twenty years as I (Brendon Burchard) have sought answers to three fundamental questions:
- Why do some individuals and teams succeed more quickly than others and sustain that success over the long term?
- Of those who pull it off, why are some miserable and others happy on their journey?
- What motivates people to reach for higher levels of success in the first place, and what kinds of habits, training, and support help them improve faster?
My work and research into these questions—what have become known as high performance studies—have led me to interview, coach, or train many of the world’s most successful and happiest people, from CEOs to celebrities, from high-level entrepreneurs to entertainers such as Oprah and Usher, from parents to professionals in dozens of industries, to more than 1.6 million students from 195 countries around the world who have taken my online courses or video series.
The adventure has taken me into tension-filled boardrooms and Super Bowl locker rooms, onto Olympic tracks, up in private helicopters with billionaires, and to dinner tables around the world, where I’ve talked with my students, research participants, and everyday people striving to improve their lives.
This work helped me create the world’s most popular online course on high performance, the most widely read newsletter related to the topic, and the largest data set on high performers’ self-reported personal characteristics. It also led to the founding of the High Performance Institute, where a team of scholars and I conduct research on how high performers think, behave, influence others, and win. We’ve created the world’s only validated high performance assessment as well as the first professional certification program in the field: Certified High Performance Coaching. We have now been blessed to train, coach, and measure more high performers than any other organization in the world, and I personally certify over two hundred elite-level high performance coaches per year.
The insights from all these efforts fill this book. The research not only spans twenty years of my own personal development and self-experimentation, but also includes data from coaching interventions with thousands of clients, detailed before-and-after assessments from thousands of live-workshop attendees, structured interviews with hundreds of people at the top of their fields, insights gleaned from academic literature reviews, and hundreds of thousands of codified comments from my students and from my free online training videos, which have received over 100,000,000 views.
From this vast data set and two decades of experience, I’ve found habits that have been tested and proved in both personal and professional contexts. Here’s what I’ve learned:
With the right habits, anyone can dramatically increase results and become a high performer in almost any field of endeavor.
High performance is not strongly correlated with age, education, income, race, nationality, or gender. This means that many of the excuses we use to explain why we can’t succeed are simply wrong. High performance is not achieved by a specific kind of person, but rather by a specific set of practices, which I call high performance habits. Anyone can learn them, regardless of experience, strengths, personality, or position. People who are struggling to make new progress can use this book to revitalize their lives, get ahead, and fulfill their potential. And those who are already successful can use this to get to the next level.
Not all habits are created equal.
It turns out that there are bad, good, better, and best habits for realizing your full potential in your life and career. It matters which practices in your life come first and how they are arranged to create effective habits. If there’s anything special about the work of my team of researchers, it’s that we’ve cracked the code, figuring out which habits matter most and how you can set up practices that strengthen and sustain these habits. Yes, you can start a gratitude journal and that will make you happier, but is it enough to propel you toward real progress in every area of your life? Yes, you can start a new morning routine, but will that be enough to significantly improve your overall performance and happiness? (The answer is no, by the way). So where to focus? We’ve found that six deliberate habits move the needle most in helping you reach high performance across multiple domains of your life. We’ve also learned that there are habits for tactically getting ahead, and strategic habits for enjoying life. You’ll learn both.
Achievement is not your problem—alignment is.
If you’re reading these words, then the odds are that achievement is not the issue. You already know how to set goals, make checklists, knock off to-dos. You care about excelling in your chosen field. But odds are, you’re experiencing your fair share of stress and overwhelm. You can deliver, sure, but you’ll learn something every achiever must discover: Just because people want to put things on your plate because you’re good doesn’t mean you should let them. What’s achievable is not always what’s important. You have a lot of things you can do. So the central question shifts from “How do I achieve more?” to “How would I like to live?” This book is an escape plan from the soul-killing singular pursuit of external success for no other reason than achievement for achievement’s sake. It’s about realigning your thoughts and behaviors so that you can experience growth, well-being, and fulfillment as you strive.
Certainty is the enemy of growth and high performance.
Too many people want certainty amid the chaos of this world. But certainty is the fool’s dream and, thus, the charlatan’s selling point. Certainty ultimately blinds you, sets false or fixed limits, and creates “automatic” habits that become predictable bad thinking and openings for your competitors to surpass you. The person who is certain is most closed to learning, most vulnerable to dogma, and most likely to be blindsided and overtaken by innovators. You’ll learn that high performers outgrow their youthful need for certainty and replace it with curiosity and genuine self-confidence.
Technology won’t save us.
We’ve been sold this alluring vision of a world where new gadgets will make us smarter, faster, and better. But many of us are beginning to see behind the hype. Tools cannot replace wisdom. You can have all the gadgets in the world and dive deep into the “quantified self” movement, where every step, second of sleep, beat of your heart, and moment of your day is tracked, scored, gamified. But a lot of people are connected and tracking and remain alone and troubled. Too many are checking in to all the apps and stats and still losing touch with their real ambitions and soul. Amid all the excitement about technology improving our lives, it turns out that what does the job better than anything else are simple human habits of high performance.
* Source: High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard