No Limits: The Art and Science of High Performance

by Mukesh Bansal

‘eudaimonia’.

Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World’ (Grand Central Publishing, 2016).

‘Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.’ – Scott Adams

‘To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.’ – Osho

‘Creativity is always a leap of faith. You’re faced with a blank page, blank easel, or an empty stage.’ – Julia Cameron

Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink

‘You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.’ – Maya Angelou

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and

Performance Hack #40: Travel to New Lands To increase your performance and productivity, your body and mind need to take occasional breaks, and the best way of doing this is travelling. Travelling to new cities and experiencing new cultures opens up your mind, takes you out of your comfort zone and exposes you to myriad new ideas. This is the perfect recipe for creativity and innovation, and can lead you to discover new elements of your field and achieve new heights in your performance.

Performance Hack #41: Tapping into the Subconscious Mind This is a very common hack of high-performing scientists and problem solvers. The idea is to tap into your subconscious mind for creative insights. If you are dealing with a problem and not able to get a breakthrough, try thinking about the problem from various angles just before you sleep and ask your mind to find a solution. You will be surprised how often you’ll wake up with a fresh perspective or a solution that you didn’t think about before.

‘Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.’ – Dee Hock

If every day in your life looks exactly like the previous one, you are not sourcing enough raw material for your brain to generate creative insights.

Performance Hack #42: Write Your Morning Pages Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way, recommends three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing every morning. Known as ‘Morning Pages’, Cameron recommended this practice for creative people, but it is incredibly useful for everyone trying to become the best and most productive version of themselves. This writing is for your eyes only and is not something that you should overthink. It doesn’t have to be perfect or good. But the act of writing and allowing the words to come through without judgement of any kind helps to unblock the mind, release thoughts, ask questions, bring comfort, spark curiosity and discover hidden goals. Making it a habit can be truly life-changing and can prime your mind to become more concentrated. So, write every day, whether you feel like it or not, whether you think you have something to say or not. Morning Pages might turn out to be the thing that changes your productivity forever.

A deep intellectual curiosity defines creative thinkers.

‘Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.’ – Will Durant

‘If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.’ – Ken Robinson

‘Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.’ – Viktor Frankl

‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche

In 1995, just as South Africa was recovering from its Apartheid era, it hosted the Rugby World Cup. Having been excluded from the first two Rugby World Cups, the South African team went on to win the World Cup that year because President Nelson Mandela made the team believe that their victory would play a huge role in uniting a country long divided due to racial discrimination and a deep-seated mistrust of one another. This historic victory has been beautifully retold in the film Invictus. When you play for such a grand purpose, small setbacks don’t matter and you are able to summon an entirely different level of commitment and dedication.

‘Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.’ – W. Clement Stone

‘I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.’ – Steven Pinker

‘What would you like people to write in your obituary?’

‘Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.’ – Washington Irving

‘If you organise your life around your passion, you can turn your passion into your story and then turn your story into something bigger—something that matters.’ – Blake Mycoskie

Having a sense of control in our lives and having a clear sense of purpose and making a contribution is deeply embedded in our psyche.

Performance Hack #43: Practise Gratitude In many traditions, giving thanks for one’s blessings is part of the morning ritual. In gratitude meditation, you take a few moments to feel thankful for everything in your life. You don’t necessarily have to sit in any meditation pose for this, but can reflect on your many blessings as you commute to work, make your morning coffee or even before you get out of bed in the morning. In her book The Magic, Rhonda Byrne offers a detailed guide for a daily gratitude practice that many readers have found transformative.130 A key premise of gratitude meditation is that you give thanks for not only all the good and significant things, but also every little thing including challenging situations and difficult bosses. These few moments of thanksgiving can transform your day, making you happier, more positive, and more open to people and tasks.

Simon Sinek, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Penguin, 2009).

The performance journey is truly a marathon and there is no need to sprint and burn out.

The core belief behind this book is that every human being has incredible potential that can be nurtured with the right training, and that one can develop one’s capabilities without too many hurdles. No matter how good you are, you can get better still. This is what keeps driving world-class performers to practise harder than anyone else. Olympics record-breaking athlete Sergey Bubka has broken the world record in pole vaulting thirty-five times. During a two-year period in his career, he broke his own record fourteen times. Clearly, just setting the record and being the best in the world was not enough for him. He believed he could do better and kept pushing his limits and in the process, completely changed his sport. This seeming lack of limit in our capabilities arises from the amazing plasticity that exists in our genes and physiology. The survival of the fittest has endowed our bodies and minds with this great flexibility. With the right kind of training, we can enhance almost every one of our faculties and optimise our performance. It is almost like having a dashboard for traits that you can dial-up on demand, although it does need a bit of practice and deliberately pushing the limits to trigger growth. This adaptability is counterbalanced by another energy-saving trait that the body deploys which we referred to as ‘use it or lose it’. If there is a physical or mental faculty that is not being used regularly, it slowly begins to atrophy. To stay physically and mental...