In today's fast-paced world, the pursuit of success often leads to burnout and disappointment. However, Eric Potterat's book "Learned Excellence" offers a comprehensive guide to achieving sustained excellence and becoming a peak performer. This insightful work presents a framework of five crucial mental disciplines that can transform your approach to challenges, leading to remarkable achievements and personal fulfillment.
Introduction
"Learned Excellence" is not just another self-help book; it's a roadmap for anyone seeking to excel in their chosen field, whether as an athlete, CEO, parent, or student. Potterat's approach is based on the understanding that excellence isn't simply about working hard – it's about working smart with a deep understanding of oneself and taking a strategic approach to life's demands.
The book introduces five mental disciplines that form the backbone of peak performance:
- Identifying and aligning with core values and goals
- Choosing and cultivating a productive mindset
- Meticulously planning and refining processes
- Developing tolerance for adversity
- Embracing the principles of balance and recovery
Each discipline builds upon the previous, creating a comprehensive framework for achieving and sustaining success. Let's dive into each of these disciplines and explore how they can help you on your journey to excellence.
Discipline One: Values and Goals
The foundation of peak performance lies in understanding your values and goals. This may seem obvious, but many people pursue success without first clarifying what truly matters to them. Potterat emphasizes the importance of self-awareness as the starting point for excellence.
Crafting a Personal Credo
One of the key exercises in this discipline is creating a personal credo – a clear statement that encapsulates your core values. This short, curated maxim acts as a compass, guiding your decisions and actions to ensure they align with what truly matters to you. It's more than just a vision statement; it's a declaration of your identity and how you want to live your life.
To create your personal credo, take some time for introspection and try to fashion a ten-word sentence that sums up the performer you seek to embody. This exercise may take some time and reflection, but it's crucial in setting the foundation for your journey to excellence.
Setting Short- and Long-Term Goals
Once you have a clear understanding of your values, the next step is to set specific goals across various aspects of your life. Potterat suggests establishing objectives for your career, relationships, health, spirituality, hobbies, and legacy over one-, three-, and six-month intervals. This creates a roadmap for your journey, with each goal serving as a stepping stone towards a fuller, more rounded existence.
Identifying Your "Engine"
Another important aspect of this discipline is identifying your "engine" – the passions that drive you forward. This requires deliberate reflection on what fuels your ambition and how these motivators intertwine with your core values. Understanding the "why" behind your drive gives purpose and direction to your pursuits.
By articulating your values through a personal credo, setting specific, time-bound goals, and understanding your passions, you lay the groundwork for sustained excellence. This deep self-knowledge equips you to navigate life's challenges with purpose and resilience, setting the stage for the second discipline: mindset.
Discipline Two: Mindset
The second discipline focuses on the power of mindset in achieving peak performance. Potterat emphasizes a crucial truth: your mindset isn't merely a personality trait; it's a deliberate choice. Understanding this concept is fundamental to achieving excellence across various aspects of your life.
Choosing Your Mindset
The process of selecting your mindset involves identifying and adopting traits conducive to your distinct roles. For example, your professional persona might benefit from being aggressive and risk-taking, while your personal persona – as a parent or spouse – might require you to be more compassionate and conservative. There's no one-size-fits-all approach, but making these distinctions is critical for success in different areas of your life.
Staying in the Circle
Potterat introduces the concept of "staying in the circle" – focusing on the three sole elements within your control: attitude, effort, and behavior. By monitoring and adjusting your attitude, you can foster positive, rational self-dialogue, replacing negative or irrational thoughts that may hinder your progress. This active self-engagement encourages a relentless pursuit of effort, pushing you to consistently prioritize productivity over idleness.
Increasing Your Effort Quotient
The author introduces the idea of an "effort quotient" – how often you choose actions that propel you forward rather than hold you back. By consciously increasing your effort quotient, you can make significant strides towards your goals.
Embodying Your Chosen Mindset
The final piece of this puzzle is embodying your chosen mindset through behavior. This involves establishing routines and daily habits that reflect your desired mindset, ensuring that both your internal dialogue and outward expressions are aligned. Surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals further reinforces this mindset, creating an environment that facilitates growth and achievement.
Embracing Risk and Failure
Stepping outside your comfort zone and embracing risk is essential for practicing and solidifying an adaptable and resilient mindset. Such experiences provide valuable lessons in handling failure, learning from it, and bouncing back stronger.
As you progress towards peak performance, it's vital to remain aware of the mindset that paved the way. This awareness helps combat the natural tendency to become defensive or complacent, ensuring that the drive towards excellence stays undiminished.
Discipline Three: Process
The third mental discipline focuses on meticulously cultivating your process – your curated, consistent approach to performance. Potterat emphasizes that while amateurs focus on results, peak performers concentrate on process.
Maximizing Time Management
This discipline centers on maximizing your most precious resource – time – and advocates for an intentional planning strategy. Potterat suggests starting with your calendar, allocating an activity for every waking hour, two days a week. Each task should be color-coded green, yellow, or red, depending on its importance and flexibility.
While there are many time-management tools available, if this method works for you, gradually increase the number of days you schedule and color-code until you reach six or seven days a week. This practice may seem simple, but it can be surprisingly effective in propelling you towards success.
Selecting Quality Information Sources
A critical element of refining your process is carefully selecting your information sources. The quality of input you receive – whether from family, friends, co-workers, or media – directly influences your output. Therefore, it's crucial to vet your inputs for reliability and validate the evidence they provide.
Potterat recommends periodically reassessing your go-to sources for their loyalty, honesty, willingness to challenge, and understanding of your unique characteristics. By filtering out noise and concentrating on credible feedback, you ensure that your process runs on high-quality fuel.
Evolving Your Process
As your performance improves, your process will need to evolve. However, Potterat advises making adjustments cautiously and deliberately. Base any changes solely on the information sources you have pre-vetted and validated. It's also wise to make modifications incrementally – altering one or two factors at a time rather than starting from scratch. This systematic approach allows for careful assessment and ensures that each adjustment contributes positively to your overall process.
By emphasizing consistency and quality, a strong process provides you with a framework that increases your chances of success. This foundation in process also sets the stage for the fourth mental discipline: adversity tolerance.
Discipline Four: Adversity Tolerance
Mental toughness is pivotal in managing stress responses during demanding situations. Developing this resilience, known as adversity tolerance, involves a set of practices designed to prepare the mind and body for challenges ahead. This discipline ensures that you're not just ready to face hardships but that you can also learn from them and grow stronger.
The Power of Visualization
Visualization plays a central role in preparing for adversity. This technique involves mentally rehearsing upcoming performances using all five senses, making the actual moment of performance feel familiar, reducing anxiety, and improving execution. Visualization can be used as both a pre-performance routine and a post-performance reflection tool.
As a pre-performance routine, visualization primes the mind and body for the task at hand. Post-performance, it offers an invaluable opportunity to reflect, learn, and note adjustments to make in the future.
Developing Contingency Plans
Potterat emphasizes the importance of having a comprehensive contingency plan for potential challenges. By practicing these plans to the point of automaticity, you can ensure swift and correct actions under pressure, bypassing the need for distracting deliberation in the heat of the moment.
The "Black Box" Technique
When faced with unforeseen challenges during a performance, Potterat introduces the "black box" technique. This approach encourages you to move on from mistakes – temporarily setting them aside for post-performance analysis – and return your focus to the only thing you can control: the present moment.
After your performance, you can unpack the "black box" to objectively review events and the subsequent emotions. This practice keeps your performance on track when it counts, helps you better understand what occurred and why, and allows you to develop specific strategies to bypass similar setbacks in the future.
Building adversity tolerance through these practices helps you to withstand challenges and, crucially, to thrive amid them. This resilience fosters continuous growth and learning, preparing you for the fifth and final discipline: mastering balance and recovery.
Discipline Five: Balance and Recovery
The final discipline in Potterat's framework emphasizes that peak performance is not solely about relentless forward momentum. Balance and recovery are essential elements for sustainable excellence.
Embracing Balance Across Life Domains
Potterat advocates for equitable investment across six life domains: career, relationships, health, spirituality, hobbies, and legacy. However, he acknowledges that perfect balance isn't always possible. The key lies in recognizing imbalances and strategizing a return to harmony when feasible. This adaptive approach allows for short bursts of focused intensity when needed, without losing sight of overall well-being.
The Importance of Recovery
Recovery focuses on replenishing physical and mental reserves post-performance. Potterat introduces the "4444" controlled breathing technique as a simple yet effective method for recentering and restoring oneself. This technique involves inhaling for four seconds, holding for four to six seconds, and exhaling for four seconds over four minutes. It's a free and always-available tool to reduce stress and enhance mental clarity.
Incorporating Restorative Activities
Taking recovery further, Potterat emphasizes the importance of incorporating more extensive restorative activities into your schedule. These may include:
- Prioritizing quality sleep
- Engaging in regular exercise
- Practicing gratitude
- Immersing yourself in nature
- Practicing yoga or meditation
- Engaging in activities outside your skill set
These practices not only aid physical recuperation but also promote psychological resilience, enriching your capacity for handling future challenges.
By incorporating balance and recovery into your routine, you recognize that peak performance is a holistic endeavor, requiring attention not just to the task at hand but to the broader spectrum of life's demands. This approach ensures that your achievements aren't just momentary flashes of brilliance but milestones in a sustained journey of excellence.
Final Thoughts
"Learned Excellence" by Eric Potterat offers a comprehensive framework for achieving and sustaining peak performance. The book emphasizes that excellence is not an innate quality but a learned and earned skill. By honing the five mental disciplines – values and goals, mindset, process, adversity tolerance, and balance and recovery – anyone can achieve excellence.
However, Potterat is clear that this journey requires conscious, constant work. Excellence is impressive precisely because it demands such dedication. But what could be more rewarding than dedicating yourself to realizing your true potential, both professionally and personally?
The book leaves us with a powerful thought: it's the things we didn't try or only half-heartedly attempted that we'll most regret at the end of our lives, not that we strove to give our all. By following the five disciplines framework, you can create a life that's as meaningful as it is spectacular.
In essence, "Learned Excellence" is not just about achieving success; it's about transforming your approach to life's challenges, fostering resilience, and cultivating a balanced, fulfilling existence. It's a roadmap for those who aspire not just to momentary triumphs, but to a lifetime of sustained excellence and personal growth.