No Limits: The Art and Science of High Performance

by Mukesh Bansal

So, if you can identify a keystone habit that is holding you back, what can you do about it? All change starts with self-awareness. First, be clear about the keystone habit that has the maximum downstream impact on your desired goals. Once you are clear about that keystone habit, it will be helpful to write down the impact generated by that habit so you are sure about its powerful domino effect. Plan to rectify the bad habit by going to bed at a certain time, hitting the gym in the morning, eliminating certain foods from your diet, getting rid of that cable connection, meeting with your mentor once a week, etc. Next, list the cues that trigger the activity and recruit support through tools and people. For example, set an alarm for 10 p.m. as a reminder to wind up your day and prepare for bed.

You can literally change yourself by changing one keystone habit.

Performance Hack #17: Summarise Your Day Wrapping up your workday is something you may not pay much attention to, but it can play an important role in improving your productivity. Apart from clearing out your inbox and organising your desk, one of the key tasks that you can include in your routine is to jot down a summary of your day in a diary. This summary can include the key tasks you completed, which will give you a sense of accomplishment, as well as your thoughts and perceptions on how the day went. In addition to this, you can list out the main tasks to be done the next day, thus clearing your mind of all pending and incomplete tasks. With this done, you can get on with an evening of relaxation, knowing that you’ve had a good day and that you’re clear about the next day’s schedule.

SLEEP: THE MOST POWERFUL KEYSTONE HABIT Sleep is a truly powerful keystone habit. We read about the profound impact of sleep on both the body and the mind in earlier chapters. In a way, sleep is like a skill, affected by a series of small cues and routines. While many people struggle to fall asleep and get a good night’s rest, others fall asleep the moment their head hits the pillow, wake up energised and ready to take on the world. What is the difference between those for whom sleep is an uphill battle and those who fall asleep almost effortlessly? The differentiating factor is usually the routine that’s associated with sleep. Is your room conducive to a good night’s sleep? There should be no ambient light, no blinking electronic lights, a comfortable and clean bed, as well as the right temperature and humidity. Ensuring that the bedroom is a sacred space for rest, by keeping it free of gadgets and screens, can be a powerful step in creating a better sleep habit. For people who find meditation helpful in calming and clearing the mind before bed, tying this habit into the night-time ritual can be very useful. Do you go to bed around the same time every night to regulate your body clock so it expects to sleep at a certain time? Do you have a night-time ritual that you do in the same order every day? If you do, sleep becomes super easy, and with the foundation of good sleep, you wake up with the energy and positive attitude to face the challenges of the day. Without it, you ...

Performance Hack #18: Eat Your Frog First Sounds disgusting, right? But this might be the single most important change you can make to your daily schedule to perform at optimum productivity. Mark Twain famously said that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, then the worst thing that could possibly happen to you that day is already behind you. The frog, in this analogy, is your most important task. It might seem frightful and impossible, and something you may have been dreading and putting off for weeks. But if you can make sure this task is the very first thing you attack in your day, you will find that it isn’t as bad as you thought and is quite doable. And once you’ve eaten that frog, you will be filled with a sense of accomplishment that will drive you to complete the rest of your to-do list.

science has proven that there is little difference in innate potential from person to person. What differentiates people from each other are the habits that either keep them where they are, day after day, or the habits that take them to a higher plane of performance every single day. These habits add up over many years and become the difference between someone who seems ordinary and someone whose performance seems almost superhuman.

The compounding power of small habits, over a long period of time, can’t be underestimated. If you improve 1 per cent in a particular skill or behaviour every day, you will be forty times better in that activity within a year. That’s the power of habit formation. Once you become aware of yourself as a bundle of habits, you can endlessly tinker with them to carve the perfect you

Performance Hack #19: Take Ten Even on days when you feel like you just can’t afford to take a break because of how much you have to do, it’s still important to take one. In fact, it’s important to schedule breaks into your workday. One way of doing this is to set a timer for one hour and settle down to work. During this hour, don’t allow any distractions to hijack your attention, and stay focused on the task at hand. When the hour is up, set the timer again for ten minutes and give yourself a break. Ideally when you’re on your break, take a quick walk around your office or step onto the balcony for fresh air. But if you’ve been itching to check your email and social media notifications then do that, so you aren’t distracted by them once your next hour of work begins. You will find that working with ten-minute breaks every hour makes you more productive than if you work for several hours without a single break in-between.

In the last few decades, our understanding of habits has undergone a profound change. Through the rigorous efforts of many behavioural psychologists, we now understand how habits form and how they change. And this knowledge is perhaps more powerful than we might think. We no longer need to be chained to random habits because they don’t define who we are. No matter how old the habit, you are only a few months away from completely changing a habit for the better. Imagine stepping out of your body and observing yourself from a distance. It is a powerful thought exercise. If you visualise yourself as a piece of complex machinery that is run on well-defined principles and methods, you’ll realise that the more you understand these principles, the more you can steer the machine in the desired direction. Habits are one aspect of these fundamental mechanisms, and the more you can get in tune with the habits that run your life, the more in control you will feel about what happens to you and how you choose to spend your time. You can visualise what habits constitute today’s version of yourself and what kinds of habits will create the future version that you are working towards. And then you can start the transformation, one habit at a time, by carefully engineering the cue-action-reward loop until the habit becomes automated, and enhances your performance on the path to your desired goals.

GROWTH VS FIXED MINDSETS: IT REALLY IS ALL IN THE MIND

Dr Dweck divides people into two groups based on the two kinds of mindsets that she has identified.50 The first group of people, with a ‘fixed mindset’, believe that their capabilities are fixed at birth and can’t be changed even with effort. Those with this kind of mindset are obsessed with proving their intelligence or achievements repeatedly to reaffirm what they see as their static abilities, and are afraid to risk any kind of failure as they believe that it would be a direct reflection of their capabilities, affecting their self-worth. With this attitude, they completely stunt their ability to grow, as growth requires experimentation, failure, course correction and adjustments. These folks always play it safe and attempt something new only when they know that their results will be predictable. Children with a fixed mindset will choose a puzzle only if they are confident of solving it but won’t take up a more challenging one with a high chance of failure, as they see it as a reflection of their permanent abilities. This mindset keeps them in a protected shell throughout life, where personal development and growth stalls, and these people are unlikely to achieve world-class performance.

This is in contrast to the other type of mindset that Dweck calls the ‘growth mindset’. People with this worldview see their current capabilities as transitory and believe that they will continue to evolve over a period of time. For these people, failure or success is not a lasting event but a new data point, from which they learn what they can do and where they need to improve. They see themselves as a work in progress and don’t shy away from trying out new things, which they see as opportunities to learn and grow. Each failure shows something new to work on. People with a growth mindset put themsel...

The impact of mindset is also captured in a folktale about an elephant who is tied up in a spot with just a tiny rope around one of his legs. A passer-by notices this and is amazed by the fact that the elephant hasn’t pulled hard and broken free, as he is obviously stronger than the small rope. Intrigued, he asks the caretaker how he manages to keep the elephant in check with just a small rope. The caretaker replies that it is all about mental conditioning. He explains that the elephant has been kept that way ever since he was a baby. When he was small, the rope was strong enough to hold him. If he tried to pull hard, the rope would pull him back with greater force. After some time, the elephant got conditioned into believing that the rope was stronger than him and just stopped trying altogether. He soon grew into a strong and powerful adult elephant. But by then, he had given up all hope of ever breaking free from the rope and never even tried. This little story has a strong message about a psychological pitfall that many people fall into and is emblematic of the fixed mindset that holds numerous people back from discovering their full potential. Your mindset can be the single-most powerful tool in your journey to reach your full potential. A mindset, as the folktale illustrates, can hold you back from achieving what you are truly capable of. But it can also be the ingredient that transforms your journey from average to great, simply by allowing you to pursue your ambitio...

Performance Hack #21: Find Your Firsts First days are important for all of us, be it the first day at school or at a new job, the first day of the year or month. These days are more significant than others in our minds thanks to the power of new beginnings, which is why we all make birthday or New Year’s resolutions. Author Daniel Pink says that we can assign similar importance to other seemingly ordinary days to motivate ourselves, and get more done. He identifies 86 such days: Mondays (52), the first day of every month (12), and the first day of every season (4). The rest of the days include big festivals or holidays, birthdays and anniversaries, and big work deadlines. Building fresh starts into your yearly calendar can help you plan your goals better, by giving you motivation just when you need it and boosting your productivity significantly.

Performance Hack #22: Bad News before Good News On a daily basis, it’s likely that you have to deal with giving and receiving feedback and news—both positive and negative. When we give feedback, we tend to give someone the good news first to soften the blow of the bad news. But most studies confirm that we prefer to receive bad news first. Receiving good news at the end leaves us feeling more positive, enabling us to even see the negative news as an opportunity for improvement. Ending a conversation on a low point, on the other hand, can actually ruin a day, leave us feeling dejected and unable to keep going. If you’ve been at the receiving end of poorly planned feedback, you might have experienced this and seen how getting bad news can ruin a productive day.

Stephen Francis, who founded MVP, believed that the environment at the club should be designed keeping hard work in mind, not comfort or luxury. He felt that if the ambience was too easy and comfortable, players would grow complacent, feeling like they deserved the best because of their talent. A mindset of comfort or satisfaction would set in, instead of a mindset of growth, which is required to pursue and strive for excellence. Francis kept the training facility simple and humble, because he wanted the players to focus on what was most important—putting in the effort.

‘Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.’

Performance Hack #23: Take One Deep Breath On the busiest days when stress levels are high and there’s barely a moment of calm, let alone time for a forty-minute meditation session, all you really need to do is take one deep breath. Whether you’re stuck in a traffic jam, inundated by emails or rushing from one meeting to another, if you can pause to take one single, mindful breath, you can truly calm your mind. A single deep breath can clear the mind, quieten the chaos and bring you into the present moment. And with this hack, you can approach the rest of your workday feeling refreshed.

When we encounter some form of stress, there are two general ways in which we can respond. The first and perhaps the more common way is to think of it as a harmful, negative experience. People with this sort of stress mindset tend to avoid potentially difficult situations, withdraw from them, turn to other excuses, and feel overwhelmed, similar to the fixed mindset that Dweck talks about. Those who view stress as something that could enhance their performance look at it as a challenge that they can overcome, address its root cause and try to make the best of the situation. The latter group tends to be more productive, optimistic, tolerant and healthier. We need controlled stress for us to learn and grow. Every challenging situation has the potential for an increase in stress and depending on your attitude towards it, it can be the source of learning and growth, or it can lead to anxiety and depression. The next time you find yourself in a stressful situation, notice your response and approach the situation with a growth mindset.

`It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to ...

Performance Hack #24: Clear Your Mess to De-stress You might have heard people say that a messy space indicates a messy mind. Well, there is some truth in that. How much time do you waste searching for a document on a messy desk, or for files and emails on a computer that you never clean-up or organise? In addition to this, being surrounded by clutter can be overwhelming and exhausting as it can overload your senses and reduce valuable productive time. So, clearing your workspace can really clear your mind, allowing you to get more and better work done.

As you might know by now, awareness is the first step to bring about any change in our lives. Without being aware of what governs our mindsets and attitudes, how can we transform them? The other tool to change lies in the knowledge that we can actually change.

Introspection and self-dialogue can be powerful tools to bring about mindset awareness and change. Asking yourself certain questions can help you focus your mind on the things that really matter and analyse the situation with a constructive outlook. Here are some questions that can help you on your journey in changing your mindset: What can I learn, or how can I grow from this situation and from the people around me? What is the outcome that I am seeking? What is my plan to achieve that outcome, and how will I follow it? In case the plan doesn’t work, what is my back up plan? If I made a mistake, what can I learn from it? How can I seek constructive feedback? Did I make an effort to achieve my goals? What do I need to do to keep growing, learning and improving?

The importance of mindset can’t be emphasised enough when it comes to optimising one’s performance and impact, especially over a long period of time. Mindset is what enables us to look at things constructively, venture out of our comfort zone, take failure in our stride and doggedly pursue what we earnestly desire—through thick and thin. Similarly, fixed mindsets hold people back, sometimes for life. Opportunities just keep slipping by as they rest on their laurels and don’t risk much, lest their reputation as a talented person or a winner gets tainted, and hence learning comes to a halt until they are left behind and completely out of the game. By now, you must be convinced about the importance of the growth mindset and will have some sense of what kind of mindset you bring to your game.

A small lapse every day adds up to a significant loss of momentum over time, while a little discipline over a few weeks can add up to a new habit that you feel quite possessive about. Let’s look at the science of willpower to understand how this works.

Performance Hack #25: No Decisions after Lunch If you find yourself unable to concentrate on a task in the late afternoon, you’re not alone. This afternoon slump could be a fallout of our circadian rhythm that determines the ebb and flow of our energy levels throughout the day. It might also be the result of an extraordinarily heavy lunch or lack of proper sleep at night. Willpower is a finite resource, and after a busy morning of meetings and calls, it could be that your willpower is just drained out and you need a boost of glucose to return to a state of alertness. Studies have also shown that the reward-and-risk centres of our brain function less optimally in the afternoon, making it a bad time to take important decisions or actions.

In an earlier chapter, we looked at the profound impact of mindfulness in developing self-awareness and improving willpower. A self-aware person will recognise their state of mind.

Mindfulness improves awareness, which in turn enables us to exercise our willpower more judiciously.

Now that we’ve understood the basics of willpower, how do we strengthen this ‘muscle’? We have already discovered the wonder drug that is exercise. Unsurprisingly then, exercise also plays a key role in increasing willpower reserves. Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng, scientists at Macquarie University in Sydney, recruited participants who were given a free two-month membership at a gym to follow a regular routine of physical exercise.63 Being regular in itself required a certain amount of willpower, and those who stuck with the programme reported a whole lot of changes, including an improved ability to pay attention and ignore distractions, less smoking and drinking, eating healthier, being more punctual and spending less money on impulse purchases. The effects of exercise on willpower are almost immediate. Even fifteen minutes on a treadmill can be beneficial. We have previously talked about exercise being the magical pill. Now, we can add its profound impact on willpower as another magical advantage, in addition to other health benefits.

Performance Hack #26: The Five-Second Rule No, this rule isn’t about how soon you can eat something that’s just fallen on the floor but about how to beat procrastination for real. Author and reporter Mel Robbins64 came up with this rule that states that the moment you have the instinct to work on a task, you must immediately begin it within five seconds. Because if you don’t, the other powerful instinct that is procrastination will kick in, and it’s likely that the task will get delayed. One of the big reasons why we procrastinate is because we perceive a task as huge, too difficult or one that requires too much effort. The five-second rule allows your brain to eliminate these fears or worries and makes you just jump into the task. By using this rule regularly, you will learn to procrastinate less and become more productive.

Sleep is another all-powerful drug to which we rarely ascribe the importance it deserves. And guess what? Sleep plays a role in exercising willpower as well. Chronic sleep deprivation leads to a decrease in reserves of willpower. The less we sleep, the harder it becomes to exercise self-control. There are multiple studies65 that confirm that after a sleep-deprived night, people are highly likely to miss their workout, eat more junk food, avoid making tough decisions or make decisions without due consideration, as their willpower reserves are depleted. After a good night’s rest, the willpower reserves are fully recharged, and you have enough self-control and awareness to go about your day mindfully, with a sense of purpose and deliberation. Without adequate sleep, you start the day on an empty tank and things get harder as the day progresses. On such days, you can limit the damage with a short fifteen-minute nap during the day if you can afford it.

The mind is the most powerful element in our body’s arsenal and we can use it to shape and guide our journey towards high performance. With the right mindset and adequate reserves of willpower, there is no limit to what any of us can do. The old saying, ‘If there is a will, there’s a way’ gets it right. Our mind is the most important part of the machinery used to devise plans and put in the effort to accomplish our goals. By carefully nurturing the right mindset, we will be able to put our best foot forward, treat each setback as a learning opportunity and continue to grow every single day. Most highly successful people say that it took them ten to fifteen years to become an ‘overnight success’. The right mindset will ensure that you grow every day and inch closer to being that overnight success as you master your field and begin to operate at your peak performance. Mastering anything requires learning the finer a...

Performance Hack #27: Read New Genres There’s no doubt that reading is good for the mind as it improves verbal and visualisation skills, expands vocabulary and memory, and improves connections within the brain. But as we know, our bodies and minds love challenges (don’t forget the ‘use it or lose it’ principle), so reading the same kinds of books, magazines or newspapers can lead to boredom and laziness. By experimenting with new genres, you can keep the brain engaged and active. In addition, it can open your mind to new worldviews, challenge presumptions, as well as improve your creative and imagination skills.

The Conscious Competence Ladder or Matrix is a model that was developed by Noel Burch in the 1970s. It explains the four levels we go through in learning a new skill. They are: Unconscious Incompetence or Unconsciously Unskilled: At this stage, we don’t know that we lack a certain skill, nor do we have awareness about the need to learn it. For example, if you work as a graphic designer for an ad agency, you might never have considered adding coding to your skill set. Conscious Incompetence or Consciously Unskilled: One day, your boss at the agency approaches you to ask if you can help build a client’s website. At this moment, you grow aware of your lack of coding skills. This is the turning point for you in your journey of learning. Conscious Competence or Consciously Skilled: In your journey to conscious competence, you seek resources, courses or teachers to guide you through an introduction to coding. You learn the fundamentals and are gradually able to apply them to actual website-building projects. However, the newness of the skills requires you to work with great concentration at every step of the way. Unconscious Competence or Unconsciously Skilled: At some point, after a few weeks or months of putting your new skills to work, the coding process begins to feel effortless. You spend less time thinking about each step, until eventually, the skill seems to be a part of you.

McDaniel, Roediger and Brown, authors of Make it Stick, a highly influential book on the science of learning, offer an interesting three-stage theory of learning: ‘Encoding’, the first stage, is the conversion of perceptions into meaningful patterns in the brain. This is the equivalent of drawing rough sketches in the brain, giving you an initial hazy silhouette of what you are trying to learn. For example, the first time you learn about Newton’s Laws of Motion at school or from a book, your brain converts the words and facts that you’re listening to or reading into a basic mental framework of understanding. At this stage, the learning is still in your short-term memory and unless you follow up with the next two stages, it won’t last. The second stage, ‘Consolidation’, can be likened to the process of tidying up the notes you scribbled during class—typing them up neatly in a document, adding examples and charts for clarity. At this stage, the brain strengthens the rough mental representations by building connections with prior knowledge or rearranging the patterns to make sense of them. This process requires active concentration and effort, much like the process of deliberate practice. The patterns get deeply assimilated in the brain while we sleep, and hence, there is a high correlation between learning efficiency and quality of sleep. The third and final stage is ‘Retrieval’, in which we access the learnt information using cues that help us recall it. This means not just...

Therefore, effortful retrieval is considered the hallmark of long-lasting learning.

Expert performers, as we now know, put in thousands of hours of deliberate practice and effortful retrieval, so that they are able to immediately select the correct response for different situations, making them the best in their field. If you are struggling to solve a problem or master a skill, but you stay with the challenge and keep at it—trying different approaches, making mistakes—you will improve your learning whether you solve the problem or not. This is where concepts such as willpower, habit, deliberate practice and learning all come together to make you a powerhouse of skills.

There also seems to be value in having space in-between the revisions or practice. This could mean alternating subjects or alternating different elements within the same subject. Neither of these might feel very productive at first, but they pave the way for more consolidated learning as well as the ability to adapt knowledge to a variety of requirements. One could take breaks between study sessions to allow time for embedding.