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Elite Performance - Do You Have What It Takes?
Posted by Joseph Riggio on Sunday, January 27, 2008Everyday I get dozens of promotional emails offering me the opportunity to get rich ... get thin ... get strong ... get successful ... without having to do much at all, except of course to buy the program on offer. Yet every time I look at what it really takes to join the ranks of world-class elite level performers I find that the price of entry virtually always includes serious work. The question then becomes, “Do you have what it takes?”
Good Evening All,
I've been a busy little bee ... in part doing projects for clients (I've been back and forth to Europe about twice a month for the last six months), preparing for upcoming programs (we've got a MythoSelf Intensive coming up in Italy this summer, an Intentional Performance Retreat coming up in Denmark this July, and we're planning a MythoSelf Facilitator's/Trainer's Training in NJ later this year ... and that's just what I have on the boards right now ...), I've been writing and reading like a madman as well (to tell the truth the proper sequence is reading and writing).
So it would be fair to say on average I've been at it somewhere between ten and twelve hours a day between five and seven days a week for months on end. But, what I wanted to share has to do with the simple realization that what it takes to perform at elite levels includes the persistence to stay with it through the intensity of prolonged exertion - either physical and/or mental.
In examining what elite performance looks like in various contexts ... academia, athletics, business, politics ... one thing becomes immediately evident: elite performers work harder and longer than mediocre performers. It may be most interesting that these elite performers perceive this particular quality of working harder and longer not as work at all. For elite performers, what would be perceived by ordinary folks as extreme amounts of work ... i.e.: mental and/or physical exertion ... simply becomes what they do.
Despite the tendency and proliferation of offers to minimize the work it takes to succeed, elite performers tend to work harder and longer than most mediocre performers would be able to attain or sustain.
While it may be most obvious to recognize such high-level output in physical activities, like professional or olympic sporting events, the same kind of exertion exists among virtually all world-class, elite performers ... like top academics for instance. These folks tend to read more, write more and interact professionally more than all their colleagues who do not perform at the same world-class, elite levels. When we look at world-class, elite entrepreneurs/executives they simply work harder and longer than virtually all their contemporaries. World-class, elite business professionals do more, e.g.: close more deals, have more meetings, manage more people and they spend more time ... on average over sixty-five hours per week on actual work activities - not just time spent sitting at their desks.
In my experience there are at least two aspects to this phenomena of world-class, elite performance:
The second aspect, Education/Training/Practice/Experience, are mulitple expressions of the same phenomena ... i.e.: conditioning the system to respond when it counts. For arguments sake we could call this aspect, learning. To be more specific we should call it something like "effective learning" ... i.e.: learning to perform when it counts to produce results that count. This may be especially true when everyone around you thinks your down for the count!
However, I believe we have to consider another less obvious and most critical factor ... DRIVE! What I mean by "drive" includes the internal motivation an elite, world-class performer brings to the task.
Elite performers decide that they will succeed ... despite the condition ... despite the evidence to the contrary ... despite what would prevent or stop others from succeeding ... these folks simply have the personal drive to succeed at all cost to themselves.
In the old days my boxing coach would call this drive to succeed, HEART ... in fact it was the single most praiseful thing that he would say to or about anyone ... "You/They have HEART."
It takes great HEART to succeed. This translates into the willingness and the ability to persist and do what it takes to succeed. I haven't ever met, heard about or read about a world-class, elite performer who doesn't have heart. Even the folks who appear to be lost souls ... drunks, drug addicts, social misfits ... you name it ... who are nonetheless world-class elite performers have heart where it counts in regard to their domain of performance.
We can all think of them ... actors, actresses, musicians, athletes ... who have ruined their lives by their extreme inappropriate habits and/or behaviors ... who are nonetheless world-class, elite performers in their domain of expertise. Yes, when you look into their lives you find that they have innate capability—even genetic advantages for their particular skills, they have the best training/coaching available to them, and often they also have full-time handlers that can run interference for them when they misbehave. However, these folks also do what it takes to perform at the levels they do ... hundreds and thousands of hours of practice that no one ever sees ... a lifetime of interest and attention on their area of expertise ... precision focus on details unimaginable to folks less capable ... they have what it takes, and I'd argue it all begins with the drive they have to do it.
So what am I on about? Simply, that most people don't and won't do what it takes to succeed at a world-class, elite level of performance.
I'd guess that for some folks the idea that what it takes to succeed includes extraordinary effort ... working harder and longer than most people can ... signals an unpleasant scenario given what they'd like to believe. Yet what becomes incredibly obvious to anyone willing to look beyond the "I can make you rich ... thin ... successful ..." promises you'll find so many modern day gurus offering, are that the most successful world-class, elite performers are capable of extraordinary amounts of work and the kind output, learning, results and successes that come with it.
I'd like to share in closing that the simple solution to all this hard work, the solution that almost all world-class, elite performers find for themselves, begins with focusing your efforts on something meaningful and significant enough to you to capture you completely. I love Joseph Campbell's language for this kind of focus ... FASCINATION.
Simple ... find your FASCINATION and find yourself in the company of world-class, elite performers.
Joseph Riggio, Performance Development Specialist
Princeton, NJ
PS - Stay tuned for the details of the 2008 upcoming programs with Joseph ... or drop a note to Nancy if you just can't wait!
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BEING in the World …
Posted by Joseph Riggio on Wednesday, January 16, 2008Shifting your orientation from *GOAL SETTING* to holding a particular way of orienting out towards the world ... what I call simply *BEING IN THE WORLD* ... opens the possibility that what you desire, your most deeply held expectations this upcoming year may in fact fall into place as a function of becoming ready and responding as the real-time information flows towards you from the world.
Howdy ... and Welcome ...
It seems appropriate to offer a welcome to the *NEW* front page of BlogNostra as well as to the New Year. Especially after my last posting about ending the year in appreciation and gratitude ... with a sense of anticipation about what the coming year will bring ... I wanted to set the tone for *NEW* beginnings.
I know that for some people who travel in my circles it may be common to do some goal setting around this time of year. And, of course if you happen to be a self-help, self-improvement, self-development groupie you may even have gotten some emails suggesting that the most important thing you can do at the start of the will be to set your goals and write them down. Many of those suggesting that you write your goals down base their opinions on bad research and old learning. Specifically, the idea that writing down your goals has a direct and immediate impact on achieving them because they believe that those who write down their goals have a better track record of achieving them than those who do not. Personally, I don't know of any definitive research that has established that as a fact, nor do I know of any serious social scientist claiming this to be true.
So what do I recommend instead? Well I really don't care if you write your goals down or not, but I do care where you are beginning from before you begin setting anything like a goal. I find that many people begin thinking about goals as a way to fill in what they perceive to be missing from their life. Another way of saying this would be, they begin from what they want to be present for them in their life that they don't yet have. To a large extent all the evidence I have suggests that where you begin from determines where you will end ... a kind of recursive loop that creates itself.
This has nothing to do with "manifesting" or "attraction" in the ways those ideas have become so popular lately. The idea I'm suggesting builds on the premise that only by beginning from a positively organized state will even come up with the kind of goals that are present in and from that state. In other words there are two potential orientations:
e.g.: what you don't have, what you haven't achieved, what you don't want ...
e.g.: what you have, what you've achieved, what you want ...
What you begin to consider from the INHIBITORY STATE will be how to avoid failing or how to avoid what you don't want ... even if that means something like not wanting to be poor, or alone. Regardless of what comes up in the INHIBITORY STATE it will carry the seeds of limitation within it. So, even if you succeed in avoiding the limitation, you will still be focused on limitation and avoidance.
What you consider from the EXCITATORY STATE will be how to attain success or how to attain having what you want ... including sustaining the experience of operating successfully already. In essence the EXCITATORY STATE operates in a self-referential, self-organizing way to create ... and re-create ... itself ... i.e.: systemic recursion.
An EXCITATORY STATE establishes systemic recursion where the system become self-organizing and self-referencing, forcing your attention outwards towards the world ... what might be called a "READY STATE." In turn operating from an outward directed orientation allows you to act in and on the world in relation to manifesting the external realities you desire - both on your own and with others.
I'm proposing that instead of organizing in regard to goals, you organize in regard to establishing and sustaining a constant state of readiness ... a position that you can act from instantaneously in regard to real-time information in the environment. This position ... the READY STATE ... organizes you precisely in relation to manifesting the specific realities you desire.
From a READY STATE it can be argued that there will be no need to establish or organize in relation to goals - although you could. The orientation of the READY STATE itself becomes enough to set a direction forward. Operating from the READY STATE positions you to succeed while maintaining a particularly powerful position ... without defaulting to or even necessarily referencing goals that had been organized without the benefit of real-time information in a world that operates at light speed. When you choose first for how you are in the world ... your BEING-NESS ... then all the other pieces fall into place in direct relation to that way of being.
Joseph Riggio
Ebeltoft, Denmark
