No Limits: The Art and Science of High Performance

by Mukesh Bansal

‘It takes just six grams of gold to lift the worth of a nation.’

I have decided to donate all the proceeds from this book to OGQ. This will go towards supporting athletes who aspire to make a mark in the 2020 and 2024 Olympics.

Being a sort of an introvert in my everyday life, books have been my constant friends for the last twenty-five years, and I have never felt alone in their company.

performance is a skill just like any other,

and it is transferable, which means that once you have figured out a way to be a high performer in one field, you can acquire high performance in a very different field with much less effort.

If you want to excel at something, nothing less than a long-term commitment to long-term performance will do.

A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions.

an average person has access to more information than the president of the United States did twenty years ago.

The pace of progress is exponential, which means that the extent of technology disruption over the next ten years could be five times more than in the previous decade, and will multiply five-fold again in the decade after.

‘With great power comes great responsibility’.

The body is an extremely efficient machine, with no desire to waste precious energy on something that is not being used, so it atrophies the muscles that are not actively engaged.

we will look at the three main ingredients in the recipe for excellence in any field: deliberate practice, motivation and coaching.

Deliberate practice is the act of repeating a task while paying close attention to every detail, having specific goals, deliberately stepping out of your comfort zone and actively seeking feedback for improvement.

Bokaro.

If there’s one severely underrated skill that is a key determinant of performance in the long term, it is learning.

Imagine a person who sets aside some time every single day, putting in deliberate effort to learn a foreign language. These efforts, compounded over a long period of time, can completely transform the person, opening up opportunities to travel and work in a new country, thanks to the newly acquired language skills.

Creativity can be defined as the ability to connect seemingly unrelated dots, to think of something quite original, or combine existing ideas in new and unexpected ways.

‘The obstacle is the way’.

and was on the verge of losing the match. Kapil Dev scored an incredible 175 runs (not out) and led India to victory.

This was perhaps a reflection of where they grew up, what inspired them, and who their coaches and role models were, but it resulted in an environment where sheer hard work was commonplace, without any need of cajoling by elders.

However, I ended up pursuing a different path in college. I’ve always had a deep curiosity and desire to understand the world around me. In my first year at the IIT, I discovered the majestic library on campus and felt thrilled like a kid in a candy store. I could go to any floor and read a book on any subject without restrictions. Moreover, the library was open from six a.m. to midnight. I got lost in reading everything that I could lay my hands on, and each book would open up a completely new world for me. From history to philosophy, from economics to business, I found learning about the world endlessly fascinating. I even toyed with the idea of reading the whole encyclopaedia, but fortunately, abandoned that project in time. This, of course, meant steadily dropping grades, which became quite embarrassing by my fourth year. Sometimes, I wonder if I squandered the opportunity to go deeper into computer science and missed some of the possibilities that a characteristic IIT education could have enabled.

The experience reinforced a simple principle: you will not get what you don’t work for.

Another stroke of luck was that I got a campus placement offer from Deloitte Consulting for their Chicago office. So despite having no previous plans of going to the US, I was headed there at the age of twenty-one, with less than impressive English-speaking skills. Within six months, I was working as a consultant, advising old school auto and insurance companies on how to improve their processes and use automation. We would get projects in different cities in the US and one of the best perks of the job was that we could either fly back to our home office in Chicago for the weekend, or to any other place as long as the fare was similar. And boy, did we make good use of that policy! Every Friday, I, along with a few colleagues from India, would spread the map of the US on our tables and pick out a city at random. Miami, Seattle, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas—you name it and we visited it.

Devices like landline phones, bank tellers, fax machines, foldable maps and film cameras, which were a big part of daily life in the nineties, are now antiques.

Working for a large consulting firm in Chicago, I felt that I was missing out on a great revolution brewing a few hundred miles away, and so, on a whim, a colleague of mine and I packed our bags, rented a U-Haul truck and drove to the Silicon Valley with the dream of starting a company. It turned out that we had no clue about starting a business whatsoever and so, after bouncing around for six months, I decided to join a start-up. By then, I was convinced that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, no matter how long it took. I made one of the smartest decisions of my life by choosing to work only in start-ups until I was ready to start something of my own.

The life of a particular species of tree that grows in China, known as the Chinese Bamboo, is often narrated as a lesson in patience and perseverance. Unlike most trees, this one doesn’t break through the ground for the first four years of its life. And yet, right through this period, it must be watered, fertilised and cared for. It is only in the fifth year that something incredible happens. Not only does the tree appear above the ground, but it also grows at an amazing rate. Within five weeks, it can reach a height of 90 feet. If the people who plant the Chinese Bamb...

what you learn from failure can’t be learnt any other way.

My entire journey was essentially defined by continual failure, interspersed with the occasional success, which would give me just enough impetus to grind it out and wait for the next break.

I also understood that building anything worthwhile takes a long period of time. The wisest business advice I have ever heard is from Jeff Bezos who says, ‘It is always day 1’, even after two decades of building Amazon. He truly understands the power of playing the long game, just like test cricket.

I worked with and how the entire team worked together, were far more powerful drivers of performance than whatever ‘talent’ any single individual may have possessed.

Some people grow so much and so quickly that you can hardly recognise them after a few years. On the other hand, many just become stagnant, never truly understanding what happened.

I have treated entrepreneurship like a laboratory, in which one can keep running controlled experiments and make adjustments based on results.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade, and yet the menace of the years finds, and shall find me, unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. – ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley

5. Crossing the Threshold A time comes when the hero must make the choice and take the decisive step to cross the threshold from which there is no return. In your journey, this might be leaving your home, declaring your intentions to the world or quitting your job. Alexander is said to have burnt the bridges that his army used to cross a river so that there was no option of running back out of fear. Many first time entrepreneurs face this when they need to take a call about whether to quit their jobs or not. It is only when your resignation is accepted that your adventure into the world of entrepreneurship truly begins.

When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.’

NASA rejects applications from those with pure histories of success, seeking instead those who have undergone professional failures of various kinds and bounced back from them.

Let’s look at the version made popular by Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers.9 He states that it takes about ten thousand hours to achieve greatness and become a world-class performer. If you practise for three hours every day, it will take you around ten years to hit ten thousand hours. Now ten thousand hours is only an average, so depending on the field, the number of hours required to become exceptional may vary from 5,000 to 20,000 hours. Nothing comes easy. As someone once said, ‘It takes ten years to become an overnight success.’

Research has shown that even medical professionals don’t necessarily show improvement with more years of experience. So, it isn’t just about spending a certain number of hours or years, repeating a skill mindlessly. What’s also needed is deliberate practice. What is deliberate practice? You can think of regular practice as coasting along within your comfort zone; while deliberate practice involves breaking down what you are trying to learn into smaller elements and specifically focusing on each step, pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, and doing it again and again. For example, let’s visualise a sprinter working on their starting steps. Imagine that the sprinter takes their crouching stance on the starting block and takes off for a few steps until they are fully upright. Then they go back and do this again and again, while a coach observing them gives continuous feedback about what they’re doing right and what needs to be improved. Or imagine a badminton player practising hundreds of serves, but each time they only focus on their athletic stance during the serve, without caring about anything else. These athletes are engaged in deliberate practice—an extremely powerful tool to consciously refine something until it becomes second nature. This method can be translated to almost any task or skill in which one aspires to excel.

The story of the early years of The Beatles is lesser known. Before they scored their first national hit, they spent several years practising and playing in local clubs, with a lot of improvisation and real-time feedback, which was not always very flattering. But they were getting the stage time, and they kept up their practice, fine-tuning their performances until they became an international sensation.

Performance Hack #2: Bid Farewell to the Comfort Zone Every time we do something that we have not done before, we feel uncomfortable and are forced to think and pay a lot of attention to the task. Think about the time when you were learning to ride a bicycle. There is no way to learn that absent-mindedly! Finding new activities challenges you, makes you sharper and keeps your mind alert and young. As one gets older, one tends to withdraw more and more into one’s comfort zone. If you intend to stay young in both mind and body, embrace the new and fight your way through the struggles and challenges of the chosen path.

‘Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.’ – Dwayne Johnson

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, (Penguin, 2008).

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How (Bantam, 2009).

‘Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.’

Performance Hack #3: Ice-Cold Showers Taking a freezing cold shower or sitting in a tub of icy water sounds like a painful form of self-inflicted torture, but it has been found to be a powerful performance hack. As you shock your body with cold water, your mind sharpens its focus. These ice baths can also heal muscle soreness after an intense workout, making you feel more energetic, and even help you sleep better. Research has shown that this practice also improves immunity and can increase metabolism. Taking a super cold shower first thing in the morning can shake you out of your groggy morning stupor and put you straight into high-performance mode for the day.

Many people don’t even get their first full health check-up done until after the age of fifty.

People have become extremely comfortable with self-medication or just ignoring symptoms like feeling low on energy, suffering from sleep disorders, persistent headaches, various aches, itches, rashes and a whole host of other conditions that require medical attention.

slow twitch and fast twitch.

It is primarily governed by what is known as the ‘use it or lose it’ principle. If you don’t want to lose it, you better use it. If you use a particular part of the body more, the body makes that part better.

‘Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.’ – Frank