I (Brendon Burchard) am blessed to have one of the largest personal and professional development “labs”—which is how we think of my global audience and platforms—in the world. As of this writing, that audience includes over ten million followers across our Facebook pages; two million-plus newsletter subscribers; one and a half million students who have completed my video series or online courses; thousands of attendees at our multiday live high performance seminars; millions of book and blog readers on the topics of motivation, psychology, and life change; and over half a million YouTube subscribers. This audience has now helped my personal development videos exceed 100,000,000 views online—and all without a single cat video.
What’s unique about the audience is that they come to us solely for personal development advice and training, which gives us an illuminating view into what people are struggling with, what they say they want in life, and what helps them change. At the High Performance Institute, we use this large public following to take surveys, conduct interviews, mine data from student behavior and comments, and study before-and-after results from online training courses and one-to-one performance-based coaching sessions. Every time we want to understand something about human behavior and high performance, we go to our lab for insights.
Most of what we’ve learned from these large audiences and data sets sounds like common sense. In becoming successful, hard work, passion, practice, resilience, and people skills are often more important than IQ, raw talent, or where you’re from. Nothing here should be surprising, since this knowledge dovetails with contemporary research on success and world-class performance. Read any of the latest social science (and I’ve provided plenty of endnotes in case you want to read the studies for yourself), and you’ll see that success in general, in almost any endeavor, is made possible by malleable factors—things you can change and improve with effort. For examples:
- the mindset you choose to adopt
- the focus you give to your passions, and the persistence you pursue them with
- the amount of practice you dedicate yourself to
- the way you understand and treat others
- the discipline and constancy with which you strive for your goals
- the way you bounce back from losses
- the amount of physical exercise you do to keep your brain and body fit and your overall well-being cared for
What has emerged in our work and in the scientific and academic literature is that success is achieved not by a specific type of person but rather by people from all walks of life who enact a specific set of practices. The question that inspired this book was “What, exactly, are the most effective practices?”
* Source: High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard