Welcome back to the Daily Mastermind. My name is George Wright III. With your daily dose of inspiration, motivation and education, get your week off to an amazing start. So today's topic is going to be the benefits of high performance habits.
It's the secrets of extraordinary life and creating your best life using some concepts from a mentor of mine, Brendan Bouchard. Now I recently went back to this amazing content. I've done this once before, probably last year on the podcast, because Brendan wrote this book, High Performance Habits, How Extra Ordinary People Become That Way. And the book was pretty instrumental in helping me to create some clarity in my life and structure some extremely helpful daily rituals.
So I want to give you a high-level review of some of the content that he covers, and maybe we'll get into some more details of that during the week on the podcast. But before I do, I love this quote from Aristotle that says, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit. And the reason I love that quote is because I do feel like we lose track of what matters most sometimes in our lives when we're trying to become better versions of ourselves.
I think sometimes we struggle daily to constantly achieve happiness and fulfillment and prosperity through the acts or the activities that we're engaged in. But we lose focus of the fact that excellence is really a result. It's a result of habits that we develop in our life, not simply the result of activity that we're trying to do at that given time. It's long-term habits that we create.
And Brendan provides kind of a really good roadmap for how to achieve extraordinary results and an amazing life of happiness and achievement because he has these six core habits of high achievers that he's created over the years of research and study that he's had. So like many of us, he worked his whole life really hard and he achieved a lot of success and positive results and he had ups and downs, you know, plateaus and failures. But it definitely seemed to be that hard work just doesn't, it's just not enough, right? Maybe you've experienced this as well.
I know I have. You know, have you ever felt like you were working really hard and focused on your strengths and following all these discipline schedules and checklists, but you're still just not getting the results that you want? Or maybe you got results like I have, but you still don't feel fulfilled or satisfied or happy with those accomplishments that you were getting at these times. Well, look, you know you're not alone and this is a great example of why just working hard and grinding really isn't enough to create an extraordinary life.
And this, the concepts and content that Brennan has in his book points out that there are, you know, are a couple of key truths that you've got to recognize before you before you can really make progress. And the first one is that achievement is not the problem. It's not the, it's not the solution. Alignment is.
And what that means is you have to understand that what's achievable is not always what is most important. It goes back to something I've mentioned many times on the podcast. Most people ask themselves the question, what do I want to do? Or what do I want to get?
Like what levels and goals do I want to hit? And the real question you should be asking yourself is what do I want my life to be like? You know, what emotions and experiences and lifestyle do you really want? This is the question you have to start with.
And the second key factor is that certainty is the enemy of growth and high performance. You know, by, by human nature, we're usually chasing success. But at the same time, we're hoping for certainty and predictability and comfort and safety in our lives. It's sort of like running a race with ankle weights on right or being tied down with an anchor, but you're still trying to run.
You can't outperform the marketplace while you're at the same time trying to hold yourself back. It just, it doesn't work. Now, we do this because of fear or low self-esteem or self-confidence and our past failures do that to us. But the truth is you can overcome that.
And it's important to learn that success usually will reside in direct proportion to uncertainty or outside your comfort zone. And the third kind of key thing you've got to understand is that technology is not the answer. You know, our lives today are filled with gadgets and technology and social media and influencers. But we're always convinced that there's an automated, you know, an automated way to create success, a simpler, easier, faster, you know, silver bullet, magic pill.
But the truth is nothing will ever replace, you know, the wisdom and discipline of good, solid habits and executing on key principles that you know are going to create long and lasting success. So these are some things you've got to understand before you get going. But Brendan also points out key characteristics or traits of high performers. And I just want to list those for you.
I'm not going to go into detail on them. But I think when you understand and you think about the characteristics of high performance, it'll help you to be more aware of it. So let me just list those out for you. High performers are more successful but less stressed.
High performers love challenges and are confident that they will figure them out. High performers are healthier than their peers. Health definitely makes a difference. High performers are happy and it's because of their focus.
High performers are admired. This is a key part of leadership, right? You want to be admired, not just followed. High performers get better grades and achieve higher levels of success.
And high performers work passionately regardless of traditional rewards. In other words, they have other things that are driving them. Another characteristic of high performers is that high performers are assertive for the right reasons. And high performers see and serve beyond their strengths.
I want to make a note on this one because this is key. It's sometimes hard to see the greatness in ourselves. But if you realize that the characteristic is that you see and serve beyond your strengths, then what you're doing is you're stepping into your greatness. You're stepping up into what you know you can do.
Even though you may not see that you can do it, you see and serve beyond your strength. I hope that makes sense. And then also key performers master unique output called prolific quality output. Now this basically means they produce results on the right things, not just results to create results.
Sometimes we work on our checklists and we feel productive, but it's about being productive with the right things. So it's quality things. And finally, high performers are adaptive servant leaders, adaptive servant leaders. Now what this means is high performers don't just develop skills in people.
They develop people. They don't just develop skills in themselves. They develop people and they serve people. And that's a key thing.
So these are all characteristics. Now once you begin to understand, learn and sort of prioritize these traits that I just kind of outline, it's much easier to understand why habits are going to be so important to become extraordinary, because people are not born leaders. It's very important that you understand that high performers are not just born high performers. They become high performers and extraordinary leaders through the habits and discipline that they create.
And these are the same habits and discipline that you can do. So let's take a second and explain a key difference between habits that you know, Brendan talks about and then the habits that you may think or we talk about every day, because habits are not all created equal, right? Most habits are things that you do over and over and over and then they become automatic. You want to create habits of good health and things like that.
There are habits that you create and you do over and over and over and through that neuroplasticity, they become ingrained and automatic. But the habits that, and this is important, I want you to listen to me for a minute, there are habits that are needed to become a high achiever that never become automatic. These are habits that will require conscious effort forever. And so you can think of these as more like a checklist, right?
And the reason for this is that when you're growing and you're constantly improving and getting to that next level, you have to constantly adapt. And so you have to change with your environment and the new challenges that you face. That's why these habits are not automatic. They're quote unquote deliberate.
And there are habits that you have as more of a checklist so that as Gary Vee would say, you can learn to crush the day, right? Crush the day. So we're not going to go in depth into the habits, but I'm going to give the six core habits for you. And then I want you to, I want to encourage you to study and learn these habits because these are going to be the key to unlock your greatness.
So the first three are what we're called personal habits. These are things you can do yourself, just yourself, right? The first one is to seek clarity. I really believe most of us simply just aren't clear on what we want and where we're going.
And that is the very first and most important habit. Your personal habits seek clarity. The second one is to generate energy. Now notice I didn't just say find energy, you know, get more energy.
It says generate energy. I think high performers find ways to generate energy because they understand what they do, how they do, they can get refocused. And we'll talk about that a little bit later this week by creating intention when you do things. And the third personal habit is to raise your necessity.
My partner, Robert Stuber, go, he says, when you can make things, change things from a want to a must, or as Tony Robbins says, from a could to a should, you know, or a must, then that's when you raise necessity, you have to learn to raise necessity on key important areas in your life. Those are the first three habits. The second three habits are social habits. These are social habits.
The fourth one is to increase productivity, increase productivity. The fifth one is to develop influence. So as you can see, both of these habits, as well as the last one, they involve other people in teams and service and, you know, people around you and your environment. So if number four was increased productivity, number five was develop influence.
And the sixth one, and this is the one that I really believe is the key that unlocks the next level of your performance. And that's to demonstrate courage. Because courage is that area when you reach it, that really helps you get outside your comfort zone. It's the area that really takes you to your next level.
So in review, the six habits are seek clarity, generate energy, raise necessity, increase productivity, develop influence, and demonstrate courage. Now there are a couple of final thoughts I want to leave you with. I know we're a little bit longer than normal today, but there's just a couple of quick thoughts I want to leave you with. First is that true and lasting success is never going to come from doing what is natural, certain, convenient, or automatic.
You know, it's as Brennan talks about in the book, it's most often going to come from things that challenge and push you outside your comfort zone. So let's just make a decision today that you accept that fact and you understand that true lasting success is not going to come from doing stuff that's easy. Okay. Second, most people struggle with limiting beliefs that are going to keep them from creating their extraordinary life, regardless of how much hard work or efforts you put into these habits.
So you have to spend a little bit of time and identify what your limiting beliefs are. And you've got to get figured out from your past, whatever it is, what your limiting beliefs are that are going to keep you from achieving your high level of results from the core high performance habits. Okay. So that's a second, that's a real important thing.
And then third, and finally, the most important thing to remember through all of your personal development work or your financial education or your high performance habits is to always find and maintain a focus. Brennan likes to talk about to succeed, always remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, right? The main thing is got to be the main thing, or you maybe have heard the acronym for focus F O C U S is follow one course until successful. Focus is something that I believe most people, including myself, have a horrible time with because of distractions in the world.
You've got to learn to maintain focus or you simply just won't get results because you won't be consistent enough. So those are just a couple of final thoughts I want to leave you with. I hope these principles, these characteristics, these habits are all things that maybe help you that get you focused on performing at a higher level. They've certainly helped me in just like in sports, I think it's always important to come back to the fundamentals when you need a boost or you feel like you might be hitting a plateau or you're stuck.
And I hope that they're ones that will help you. I hope you have an amazing week this week. I look forward to seeing you throughout the week and talking to you more on the daily mastermind podcast. Once again, my name is George Wright, the third and this has been the Daily Mastermind.
Have a great day.