Secrets to Higher Performance
There is no secret potion, nor is there a shortcut to achieving sustaining high performance. We here at Perfect Perch have been seeking various ways to maximize our efforts, and we came across an excellent book recently - High Performance Habits by Brenden Burchard (LINK).
You read it right, the secrets are in the habits we build. "Rome wasn't built in a day", so if we want to be the best version of ourselves, it will take time, discipline, and commitment. Brenden Burchard shared 6 habits that are shared by successful people:
- Seek Clarity
- Generate Energy
- Raise Necessity
- Increase Productivity
- Develop Influence
- Demonstrate Courage
There are smarter people who have written great summaries of the book, and you are welcome to purchase your own book to learn the details. We'd like to share what we learned through our own examples, and hopefully this will encourage you to make changes in your own life, so that you can achieve higher performance in everything you do.
- Seek Clarity: We have a clear vision in what we want to do - help people become healthier and happier. With this mission in mind, we constantly remind ourselves to drive toward that goal. Yes, day-to-day things could get frustrating, but we make it our goal to wake up early every morning to revisit our mission.
- Generate Energy: The second point in the book is to generate energy, and we found it by sleeping earlier and waking up before everyone else does. There's something special about waking up early, because the air is fresh and there's no one around just yet. We get to do a lot of thinking, with the first 30 minutes spent on prayers and being self-aware. There's no screens in the first 30 minutes when we start every single day, and the team has been disciplined about that. Of course, 20 minutes of exercise a day does the trick to generate energy for the body also.
- Raise Necessity: We understand there are others who are smarter, with more resources, more experienced in our industry, and that's why we stand on our toes all the time. The moment we are complacent is the moment we fall behind. We don't know all the answers, but the more we talk to our customers, the more we learn about how to help you and understand what you're looking for.
- Increased Productivity: We also started practicing setting aside at least 90 minutes a day to work on the most important tasks. There are the daily routines we need to go through - answering emails, responding to chats, talking to partners, fixing various issues. But the key to be productive for us, is to set aside 90 minutes of uninterrupted time a day to work on one thing that we believe will bring exponential value. It could be working on an email template, investigate a production issue, or going through the user experience (yes, that's your experience) when using our products. 90 minutes of absolutely uninterrupted time!
- Develop Influence: Spending time with our customers and our friends to share our vision, our struggles and how we overcome them help us feel so much better. We constantly share our journey so far with others - the good, the bad, and the ugly. We are not perfect and we made many mistakes along the way, but the more we share, the more we learn about ourselves, and in the meantime, our friends learn from our experiences and hopefully don't make the same mistakes in their own journeys. Isn't it wonderful?
- Demonstrate Courage: We have our personal goals and loved ones we want to fight for, and though we're at different stages of our lives and come with different personalities, we practice courage. It's scary when we don't know what to do or what to say when problems come up, but each time we face our fears, we get more confident for the next challenge. When we had a manufacturing issue that impacted 30% of our products, we had to admit the mistake and offer solutions to customers who believed in us. Yes, we lost money, but we do not lose our integrity.
Are you ready to level up yourself? Do you look forward to having higher performance in whatever you do? There's a price to pay, but the secrets are out, so let's challenge ourselves to be better by having a growth mindset. Let's do it together!