Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.

Jim Rohn

Over the past several years, we’ve zeroed in on what moves the needle most in helping people achieve long-term success. And we’ve found: High performers do things differently from the way others do, and their practices can be replicated across projects (and almost any situation) regardless of your personality, past, or preferences. In fact, we’ve found that there are six deliberate habits that made most of the difference in performance outcomes across domains. Even your greatest strengths or natural abilities are moot without these habits to support them.

To uncover which habits mattered most, we used relevant concepts from the academic literature, data from our global lab, and insights from over three thousand high performance coaching sessions. We then marshaled all these inputs to create structured interview questions that we could ask high performers.

We identified high performers through standard social science practices, such as survey identification and objective performance measures (e.g., academic performance, athletic performance, objective business and financial outcomes, etc.). For example, we asked people how strongly they agreed with statements such as the following:

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.

Beyond habits, what else holds most people back? I (Brendon Burchard) have found that many people simply feel undeserving or unready to rise to the next level. They question their value or await some external validation—promotion, certification, award—before they can start playing a bigger game. This is wrong, of course. You deserve extraordinary success just as much as anyone. And you don’t need anyone’s permission to start living life on your own terms. You just need a plan. And I promise you it’s in this book.

Sometimes, people haven’t sought greater success in their lives because they’re surrounded by people who say, “Why can’t you just be happy with what you have?” Those who say this don’t understand high performers. You can be wildly happy with what you have, and still strive to grow and contribute. So don’t ever let anyone discourage you from your ambition for a better life. Don’t minimize yourself or your dreams for any reason. It’s okay that you want more. Don’t fear your new ambitions. Just understand how to reach for them with more focus, elegance, and satisfaction than you did last time. Just follow the path outlined in this book.

The next chapter will reveal six high performance habits, the HP6, and give you more detail about how they were discerned. Knowing the science behind these findings will help you understand the nuance and power of this approach. Then we’ll jump right into each of the six habits. Each habit has its own chapter, which will teach you three new parctices to help you establish the overall habits. Finally, I’ll warn you about the traps that can cause you to plateau or fail, and I’ll leave you with the number one thing needed to maintain your progress.

If anything defines my research and training approach, it’s that certain habits give a competitive advantage, turning an average performer into a high performer. High performers have simply mastered—either on purpose or by accident through necessity—six habits that matter most in reaching and sustaining long-term success.

We call these six habits the HP6. They have to do with clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, and courage. They reflect what high performers actually do continually—from goal to goal, from project to project, from team to team, from person to person. Each of the habits is learnable, improvable, and deployable across all contexts of life. You can start using these habits today, and they will make you better. We’ll cover each habit in the chapters ahead and give you practices to develop them.

Before we get into the HP6, though, let’s talk habits. As traditionally conceived, habits are created when we do something so many times that it becomes almost automatic. Do a simple action that’s easy to remember, do it repeatedly, and get rewarded for it, and you start to develop a habit that will soon become second nature. For example, after doing it a few times, it’s easy to tie your shoes, drive a car, type on a keyboard. You can now do those things without much thought. You’ve done them so many times, they became automatic routines.

What do we know about the people who succeed beyond standard measures consistently over the long term?

High Performers are more successful than their peers, yet they are less stressed.

The myth that we have to grin and bear more burdens and anxiety as we become more successful simply isn’t true (as long as we have the right life habits). You can live an extraordinary life that is far different from the battle that most people endure as they fight for survival or experience achievement only by bluster or burnout. This isn’t to say high performers don’t ever feel stress—they do—but they cope better, stay more resilient, and experience less severe performance dips related to fatigue, distraction, and overwhelm.

High performers love challenges and are more confident that they will achieve their goals despite adversity.

Too many people avoid any sense of hardship in their lives. They fear they can’t handle it or that they’ll be judged or rejected. But high performers are different. It’s not that they lack any self-doubt at all. It’s that they look forward to trying new things and they believe in their abilities to figure things out. They don’t shrink from challenge and that not only helps them progress in life but it inspires those around them.

For our purposes in this book, high performance refers to succeeding beyond standard norms, consistently over the long term.

However success is defined in any given field of endeavor, a high performer—be it a person, team, company, or culture—simply does better for longer periods. But high performance isn’t just about never-ending improvement. Mere improvement does not always result in high performance. Lots of people are improving but not necessarily crushing it—they’re inching forward, but so is everyone else. Lots of people make progress but not real impact. High performers break the norms. They’re consistently exceeding the standard expectations and results.

High performance is also very different from mere expertise development. The quest isn’t just to learn a new skill or language, or become a chess master, a world-class pianist, or a CEO. A high performer in any field isn’t just good at a singular task or skill—she or he has learned adjacent competencies to complement a particular expertise. They are not a one-hit wonder. They have multiple skill sets that allow them to succeed over the long term and—importantly—lead others. They practice meta-habits that enable them to excel in multiple areas of their lives. A Super Bowl-winning quarterback doesn’t just know how to throw a ball. He has had to master mental toughness, nutrition, self-discipline, team leadership, strength and conditioning, contract negotiations, brand building, and so on. Someone who reaches high performance in any career must have competence in many of the areas that touch that career.

This book is the culmination of the intervening twenty years as I (Brendon Burchard) have sought answers to three fundamental questions:

1. Why do some individuals and teams succeed more quickly than others and sustain that success over the long term?
2. Of those who pull it off, why are some miserable and others happy on their journey?
3. 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.