The roadmap to high achievement and elite performance
The 3 most influential books out of 16 listed.
Eight months ago I started going down the rabbit hole of high-achievement content.
I wanted to study individuals who’ve successfully tapped into that reserve of human potential. Folks who found leverage in their lives, creatively solved problems, and made ungodly amounts of money in the process.
Over the past 8 months I’ve read 16 books. I’ll list the most relevant ones here, if you’re curious:
Productivity books that had the most impact:
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Joe Dispenza
The One Thing, Gary Keller
The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy
The E-Myth Revisited, Michael E. Gerber
The Creative Act, Rick Rubin
How to Own Your Own Mind, Napoleon Hill
Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
Books that had less impact, but are still good:
Diary of CEO, Steven Bartlett
Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki
Key Person of Influence, Daniel Priestley
How to Talk to Anyone, Leil Lowndes
Atomic Habits, James Clear
In addition to the book habit, I consumed at least 6 hours worth of entrepreneurial podcasts each week. I’ll list some of my favorite shows, here:
Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
Steven Bartlett Podcast
Colin and Samir Podcast
Jay Shetty Podcast
I want to distill some of what I’ve drawn from these sources, as well as some philosophies that have brewed up organically.
1. Childhood sets the stage for everything else
Your worldview was crafted (or at least impacted) by the environment that raised you. Can you identify any beliefs you inherited from your caretakers?
Ex:
A chronic need for organization or control
Fear of confrontation
Aversion to apologies or vulnerability.
It’s a shame that the occurrences from when we have the least amount of control, affect us for the rest of our lives. It’s when we’re most vulnerable, that the seeds of our worldview are planted.
It’s during the ignorance of prepubescence that our dispositions, fears and personalities are sewn.
But that’s the game. Once we’re sophisticated enough to backtrack and pinpoint the origins of our limiting beliefs, we must. It is through this unraveling that the world (and your perception of what’s possible) expands. Consider that your identity is not fixed. It’s a raw clump of clay waiting to be sculpted by you.
2. Start with your thoughts
Control your mind and you control your world.
Life is only what you perceive it to be, and your reality is a direct result of your repetitive thoughts.
Harness the flow of your mind, and you’ll be able to drive the direction of your life.
Become keenly aware of any current thoughts or beliefs that put you in a state of low-energy, anxiety, or inactivity. Recognize those thoughts and pluck them out one by one. Replace these with thoughts that make you feel energized and optimistic about your capabilities, your future, and life as a whole.
Conquering your thoughts is conquering reality.
The only thing in this world that we can really exercise control over is ourselves. Change your perception of the world and you have effectively changed the world.
3. Master “The One Thing”
This wouldn’t be a thorough investigation of high-achievement if we didn’t address the multitasking myth.
When there’s a lot we want to accomplish, many of us have the urge to bounce between multiple tasks. We feel the need to do too many things at once, so we double and triple up thinking we’re multiplying our productivity.
Every time we make the premature mental switch from one task to another, there is a price paid in the form of time and efficiency. We’re not speeding things up. We’re effectively slowing down the process and lowering the quality of our outputs.
By not learning to control this urge, we will chronically stifle our chances of accessing where the real nectar lives–the flow state of deep work.
Multitasking doesn’t save time. It wastes time.
The very concept of multitasking needs to be reframed for those of us who seek to maximize our potential. “Multitasking” does not really allow us to execute multiple tasks. It simply divides our attention.
Take on two things and your attention gets divided.
Take on a third and something gets dropped.
When I was at the peak of my frantic productivity era, all I did was multitask. When every day came to a close, I felt that I should have a high number of tasks completed. I was constantly looking for a high number of outputs and thought that putting 9 things on my to-do list for that day (and chipping away at them simultaneously) would get me closer to that goal. Almost everyday, I ended without a single task meeting its full potential.
This mindset and approach kept me from going deep into high-value projects where quality is the most important thing.
There is usually something valuable to be extracted from extended time spent focused on a single task.
Conquer the “monkey mind” and do it.
4. Hardship is an opportunity
Hardship gives you a unique opportunity to see yourself from another angle.
You will be unstoppable if you can adopt this perspective. Instead of taking it as an indication of failure or personal inadequacy, see it as a gym that you occasionally visit so you can assess how strong you’re becoming.
Observe your ability to remain fluid, flexible, and healthy-minded in the face of adversity. Are you handling this hardship better than you handled the last?
That’s progress.
Become so expanded that negativity is but a movement to you. A curl of wind or a crash of wave. Expand so widely that you develop some level of appreciation for all that there is to be observed–positive or negative.
Expand and expand until the things that you once thought were big are but a blip.
5. Success is a practice
Mastering control over oneself is really mastering the art of negotiation. The art of dance, flow, forgiveness and parenthood. It’s more elusive than it looks on the outside. It’s all about you taking the reigns over your life and the emotional fluctuations that come with the often bumpy pursuit of freedom.
You’ve gotta’ just dive into it.
You’ve gotta’ have a lot of internal conversations, dissolve a lot of old ways, and build a lot of new thought-habits before you can reap the fruits of the compound effect. It’s applying yourself everyday, adding a new sheet of paper to the stack until it’s a mountain tall.
Life is maintenance.
If you do it right, you never truly arrive.
You just get more comfortable and confident on the journey.
6. You are the bottleneck
There is no tactical hack that’s going to save you from your circumstances. The only thing there is to do is surrender into the full, immersive, episodic, and fluctuating adventure of rebuilding who you are.
You get things by becoming the type of person who gets those things.
This means dedicating real energy to dissolving bad habits.
This means dedicating real energy to engineering new habits that will help us meet our goals.
This means looking at yourself holistically and becoming very clear on where you are and how that relates to where you want to go.
Anything can be accomplished when supported by empathy for oneself, systems of honest self-assessment, and a vow of persistence.
– Dezzy
There’s more to explore.
I make content to help people identify the mental blockages that prevent them from doing great work.
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