Patterns I've seen in every high performer I know (that are rarely spoken about)

High performance feels like BS to most of us.

It seems like an impossible dream. It may even look and feel like privilege, elitism, or undisclosed wealth from daddy’s trust fund.

But I want to share with you a different form of high performance. One that is obtainable. One that is simple. One that anyone (even you) can make work.

I’ve spent 12 years through my academy working with Olympic Athletes, top 1% entrepreneurs, viral writers, big-name Youtubers, and skilled professionals at the top of their field.

I was lucky in my banking career to work with the tycoons of Silicon Valley too. At this stage of my life the patterns of attainable high performance are undeniable.

Study these patterns if you want to get ahead and live the good life.

1. No one understands what the hell they do for a living.

True high performers are weirdos.

Their lives are hard to explain. What they do every day is a mystery. When I became a high performer in my field about 5 years ago, something odd happened.

People started to think I was a drug dealer.

I couldn’t really explain what I do. I preferred to keep quiet in the real world about any success I’d had online. I lived a double life the way Batman does.

This week in Australia is father’s day. I went to my kid’s daycare for a father’s day celebration at 2PM. Out of the 100s of kids at the center, 7 dads showed up wearing their work clothes. I rolled up with bright yellow crocs, Ray Ban sunnies, and a pair of grey shorts. It was winter in Australia. It was raining.

One of the dads told me the teachers think I’m a drug dealer. Or that I might be high on coke sometimes because of how I laugh and joke with the other parents.

They don’t understand how I can pick my kid up some Mondays at 2PM to go play.

When one of the dads asked me what I did for a living, I froze. It’s hard to explain. So I didn’t. I just said “I do consulting” which means nothing. He looked confused.

It feels risky to live a life like this.

One where you can’t explain what you do and people won’t understand. There’s no college degree or cookie-cutter plan to follow. It’s full of randomness. It makes you feel like a psycho.

If people understand you, you’re playing it too safe.

2. They obsess for f*ck's sake.

High performers don’t have lukewarm passion. They don’t have a part-time mindset and they don’t have side hustle businesses that spent 10 years making $0.

High performers are driven by pure obsession. They spend a stupid number of hours doing one thing. They have painstaking attention to detail. To the untrained mind, it looks like perfectionism. To a high performer, it’s the one-percenters that lead to outperformance no one understands.

They have a level of motivation that doesn’t come from shallow goals or trophy prizes, but from deriving a deeper sense of meaning from what they do. The normie might see a business or a type of sport. They see a movement.

Doing the work they do is the privilege. They’re not trying to avoid work or make passive income so they don’t have to work.

They’re trying to work as much as possible because they don’t see it as work. Work doesn’t feel like work. It feels like service. It feels like they’re changing the world in some small way and that’s worth fighting for.

Murder your passion. Replace it with obsession.

3. They go all in and act like a psycho

They absolutely hate the hobbyist mindset.

In life, there are tourists and citizens. The tourists pop in and pop out of doing the work that gets them to their goal when they feel like it or when it looks cool to do so. The citizens live in their work. They live there when it’s snowing, there’s a tornado at the door, or when nobody is watching or giving a f*ck.

A high performer’s level of execution will rip most people’s faces off.

They do a massive number of reps. But what’s unknown is they do a massive number of iterations too. If someone posts on Instagram once a day, they post 300 times a day.

Their mindset is they’ll either win or die trying. There’s no maybe. Only “when I win.”

4. They let people call them insane

The rewards for being average are poverty and modern slavery.

So to be anything but a high performer in your field guarantees sadness. The insane way of life is to eat junk food, overdose on sugar, become overweight, take meds, scroll platforms mindlessly, look at a phone all day, get told what to do, and start living life at 65 when you retire from a boring job and your best years/energy are gone.

When you understand how toxic the traditional path is, and if you decide to escape it like I have, you’re gonna piss a few people off.

The anger is directed at you but deep down comes from the fact you refuse to settle for second best like they do.

Act insane. Piss a few people off. You’re supposed to.

5. They've studied neuroplasticity

I recently had an essay about neuroplasticity go viral.

A few trolls got angry.

They said I was riding a trend. They’re full of sh*t. I’ve been obsessed with neuroplasticity since 2013 when Tony Robbins mentioned it at one of his live seminars I was at.

As soon as Tony described neuroplasticity, it felt like a come-to-jesus moment. I could not get the idea out of my mind. I realized everything in my head was a bullsh*t story I told myself. And I could just write a new story and override the old one.

Prior to this moment, I thought the brain was fixed and I obsessed over genetics and how I couldn’t escape my natural born personality traits.

Tony put a pipe bomb in my mind and lit the fuse until my brain blew up and splattered all over the wall and I had to grow a new one.

Once you understand how the human brain works you can rewire it. Then you can program your brain to work for you instead of against you. 99% of success is psychological.

Master your psychology, master your life.

6. They also program their subconscious

Most people are unaware of this part of their brain. When you can take the subconscious and make it conscious, you can do anything.

Not easy to do but 100% possible.

7. They're delusionally optimistic

Dr Nicholas Fabiano says according to research, “Healthy minds are often delusionally optimistic.”

High performers have known the power of delusional optimism for years. They just think things will work in their favor and they can't explain why.

It's not law of attraction BS. It's just self-belief that comes from backing yourself.

Thinking you can do it helps you take action, and the action produces results that become evidence. When you have real evidence your belief you’ll hit your goals becomes undeniable. Critics don’t debate you anymore either.

Execute as if everything will work out.

8. They’ve mastered game theory

Because incentives drive the world. Every goal is a video game in disguise. Understand how to create value for others, and it'll create value for you. Align your incentives with the people at the top of your game.

This is the big idea of game theory that high performers understand:

> Game theory explains why working harder inside a broken system is the worst response to that system. > > Because a system is never truly broken. > > It's just producing exactly the outcomes its own incentive structures were designed to produce, whether intentional or not. Working harder inside this system increases your output in the payoff matrix, but it simply won't change the actual structure of the system's matrix. > > Thus, the correct response is not more effort.Instead, you must aim to identify whose interests the current structure serves and position yourself in favor of those interests rather than against them. Change the game, or play the game that is actually being played. > > Either way, you must stop optimizing for the game you wish it to be and start acting realistically – @incentivising

Most people get pissed off by wishing the game would be different, rather than playing the game as it is and exploiting the obvious weaknesses.

9. They admire people who refuse to fit in.

Because the outliers and misfits change the world while everyone else watches. Weirdos love other weirdos because they learn from each other. It's so rare so these relationships form quickly.

Naval Ravikant says “There’s no demand for ‘average’” and he’s right. Average is everywhere. It’s not unique. It’s boring and that’s why it gets ignored. There’s a good chance if you’re not already weird, you’re probably boring as hell. It’s time to change if that’s the case.

Get around weirdos. DM them. Make friends. Build something together.

10. They understand that a lack of extreme urgency is the most common way to waste decades of their life.

Moving slow in a world of AI will light your butt on fire.

Speed is critical. I’m surrounded by people building businesses who can come up with an idea this morning and land their first client by tomorrow. That’s how fast people now move.

High performers have known this for years. They know its either going to happen today or it’s a bullsh*t p0rn fantasy. So they set deadlines. They think in ‘today.’ They push others to move faster.

Speed saves you precious time. And gives you more time with family.

11. They see life as "80 summers"

This is where I get emotional.

I realized recently that I only have about 5-10 summers left with my parents. I love them with all my heart. They raised me the best they could and gave me good values to operate from. It destroys me to know they won’t always be here.

They won’t be around to see my daughters grow up, possibly get married, go to Mars (joking not joking), and give their first Ted Talk.

80 summers is a visual way to describe how short life is.

When time feels shorter than it is you waste less time in bad situations. And you appreciate what you have.

The problem is you think you have time but you don't.

12. They understand they'll never be a millionaire with a salary.

Most of us start with a salary. That’s fine.

The tragedy is to stay stuck on a salary for your entire life. It’s step one. It’s how you learn. But a salary is a way for someone else to monetize and profit from your potential.

Trading time for money isn't how you get rich. And even if you become CEO, you'll be stuck in meetings all day and have no free time. So now you're bankrupt. And your family will never see you, so you’ll likely end up divorced or with kids who don’t know you.

Millionaires own assets and businesses. You can too.

13. They avoid what everyone thinks of them and just do whatever the f*ck they want.

You can't control other people's minds.

No matter how noble or kind you are ~5% of people will hate you for no good reason. A few crazies may even send you death threats.

Trying to impress everyone is people-pleasing in disguise. High performers impress themselves first.

If you’re not at least pissing a few people off, it’s a red flag. The only reason it might look like everyone likes you is because what you’re doing in life is so forgettable that the majority of people are just ignoring you, instead of actually liking you.

Zero judgment if that’s the case. I spent a decade being ignored and walked all over like a door mat. Then I got some courage, learned public speaking, became assertive, and started demanding what I wanted.

14. They realize 99% of society is stupid and they can just do things and no one will stop them because they’re too lazy or distracted to even try.

There is no competition.

Most people are looking at their phone. The average person doesn't know how to be bored. Go to the gym. It's full of people looking at phones. You can win. It's easier than you think.

15. They see commuting to an office every day to be micromanaged in an adult daycare as hell.

They might start there but they know it's not a life or career.

Their goal is to be self-sufficient. To perhaps learn from a job but then to escape. True freedom is working for yourself and being able to move from country to country without anyone caring where you work from.

High performers are too good to be told what to do until 65 then retire.

16. They see what they're truly capable of by starting a business.

Building a business has nothing to do with business.

High performers do it on the side or full time because it’s the most extreme form of self-improvement known to humankind. It’ll literally rip your face off and force you to grow in ways you never could have dreamed of.

Not even a psychedelic retreat in the Amazon jungle can give you the kind of breakthroughs entrepreneurship can.

Entrepreneurship forces you to think like an owner too, which is a huge shift in mindset (that'll eventually make you wealthy).

17. They set the bar so high average people think they're a psychopath.

To normies they look too extreme. Or like they embraced hustle culture. Good. Their standards are stupidly high which is how they do more with less... And never allow themselves to settle for second best.

Raise your standards.

18. They just work in a flow state for at least 4 hours a day.

No distractions. No phone. No notifications. No back-to-back meetings. This means they get an insane amount of work done and can focus on a single task.

Rather than focusing on admin or bullsh*t corporate work, they focus on work that forces them to use their creativity and imagination. This has become more important as AI has replaced more and more dumb-dumb work.

Always work in a flow state.

19. They know the fastest way to get ahead in life is to proactively choose to do hard things.

Playing life on hard mode is the secret. Playing a game on easy mode gets boring, fast.

Yet that's how most people live.

Do hard things:

• Wake up early

• Build muscle

• Try to make lots of money

• Dare to perhaps have kids

• Run a business

• Run marathons

• Face your fears

• Do a lot of reps

• Move to a new country

• Learn a new language

• Adopt an animal

• Get on sales calls

20. They know that personal growth comes from hitting rock bottom, losing everything, bankruptcy, divorce, or the death of a loved one.

Tragedy doesn't ruin them. It inspires them.

It wakes them the hell up. They let the lows create the next highs. Instead of stopping, they keep going. Instead of fearing failure, they embrace it. They see it as part of the process.

I learned this the hard way many times – a near-miss with cancer, family bankruptcy, startup failures, friends drowning, toxic relationships.

Only when dark times strike are you forced to change.

Until then the idea of change is a nice-to-have and we just delay it by placing all the hard decisions on a future version of ourselves that likely doesn’t exist.

Failure is wisdom. It’s real learning. And it makes your life story 10x more interesting.

21. They act stupidly extreme

So they don't end up thinking small.

They make the vision bigger than needed. They dare to take a few risks. They purposely go beyond what average people think is possible.

Innovation isn't an accident. It's intentional.

22. They know success in life is their energy, not their IQ.

So they optimize for high energy. They work out. They hang around high energy people. They eat the right food. And they go to bed early.

Writer Sahil Bloom says:

> Your entire life will change when you realize energy is the most attractive human trait. Not looks, wealth, or status. Energy. Start walking into rooms with genuine enthusiasm, curiosity, and interest. Watch what happens. You become a magnet for the highest quality people. Energy is contagious. Spread the kind you’d want to catch.

People buy energy... they just can’t explain it. High energy creates extreme aura.

23. They are ruthless at follow up

No ask happens once.

They ask a 100 times. If they get ghosted, they just get other people to ask for them. If they still can't gain access, they show up randomly in person.

When I worked in consulting I had a banking client that wouldn’t take my calls. They discriminated against my employer because we were an Indian-based company. I decided not to get mad.

Instead, because we were an approved contractor, I got an access card to the building where all the decision-makers worked. I rolled up one morning at 7AM and sat in the middle of their open-plan office. I was a total stranger.

I made it a habit to be in all their meetings, eat lunch with them, and told them there was zero chance I'd be ignored. At the start, they thought I was weird. They didn’t like me. Within a few weeks I earned their respect.

They could tell I wasn’t f*cking around and would go to extremes to follow up and make stuff happen. They later signed a massive contract with me. My employer was blown away. No one was able to get past the cultural barrier. Except me. And I’m average IQ.

There is no such thing as no. Only a forced chance encounter.

Assume your first no isn't rejection.

24. They have a habit of getting rejected at least once a day.

The rejection muscle is trained because it’s what allows them to outperform later on.

Rejection is just redirection.

25. They can dance between chaos and order

One tragic event doesn’t throw them off.

They expect chaos and plan for it. They can act through challenging times. Their high performance life is a series of non-negotiable habits.

Without chaos there isn’t opportunity. The world runs on entropy and it must be embraced to be harnessed.

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— Tim