5 scientific secrets to high performance

A ritual is a highly precise behavior you do at a specific time so that it becomes automatic over time and no longer requires much conscious intention or energy. [Maximize Your Potential]

You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. "You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits," (Obama) said. "I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make." He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one's ability to make further decisions. It's why shopping is so exhausting. "You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia." [Vanity Fair]

The formula at Club Med is to include pretty much everything in the price—activities, food, even drinks—giving you fewer decisions to make. Now I know the research on decision-making, and how making any conscious decision uses a measurable amount of glucose, but I wasn't prepared for how relaxing it was not having to think anywhere near as much, even about simple things. It turned out to be a remarkably restful holiday.When you work at Google, you get to save your limited mental resources for the most important decisions. As Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said, "Let's face it: Programmers want to program, they don't want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both"....Other companies could do well to do the same, noticing what their employees end up wasting their attention on and doing something about it. It's sure making me rethink my own company's benefits policies....As well as minimizing distractions and respecting attention, Google does other things to help its people be more productive, in particular being more productive at complex problem-solving. [David Rock]

One of the most effective distraction-management techniques is simple: Switch off all communication devices during any thinking work. Your brain prefers to focus on things right in front of you. It takes less effort. If you are trying to focus on a subtle mental thread, allowing yourself to be distracted is like stopping pain to enjoy a mild pleasure: It's too hard to resist! Blocking out external distractions altogether, especially if you get a lot of them, seems to be one of the best strategies for improving mental performance. [Your Brain at Work]

The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and email off. [Manage Your Day-to-Day]

What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. [Herbert Simon]

In field after field, when it comes to centrally important skills — stockbrokers recommending stocks, parole officers predicting recidivism, college admissions officials judging applicants — people with lots of experience were no better at their jobs than those with less experience. [Talent Is Overrated]

In the 1960s, psychologists identified three stages that we pass through in the acquisition of new skills. We start in the "cognitive phase," during which we're intellectualizing the task, discovering new strategies to perform better, and making lots of mistakes. We're consciously focusing on what we're doing. Then we enter the "associative stage," when we're making fewer errors, and gradually getting better. Finally, we arrive at the "autonomous stage," when we turn on autopilot and move the skill to the back of our proverbial mental filing cabinet and stop paying conscious attention.... The Okay Plateau is that point when we reach the autonomous stage and consciously or unconsciously say to ourselves, "I am okay at how good I have gotten at this task," and stop paying attention to our improvement. We all reach Okay Plateaus in almost everything we do. We learn to drive when we're teenagers, and at first we improve rapidly, but eventually we are no longer a threat to old ladies crossing the street, and we stop getting appreciably better. [Moonwalking with Einstein]

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher's help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it's highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn't much fun. [Talent Is Overrated]

But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you're falling short. [New Yorker]

Osteen (Gawande's coach) watched, silent and blank-faced the entire time, taking notes. My cheeks burned; I was mortified. I wished I'd never asked him along. I tried to be rational about the situation — the patient did fine. But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I'd let him see that I may not be who I want to be.This is why it will never be easy to submit to coaching, especially for those who are well along in their career. I'm ostensibly an expert. I'd finished long ago with the days of being tested and observed. I am supposed to be past needing such things. Why should I expose myself to scrutiny and fault-finding? [New Yorker]

Just about every mental test possible was tried. No matter how it was measured, the answer was consistently yes: A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so-called fluid-intelligence tasks. These tasks test the ability to reason quickly and think abstractly, improvising off previously learned material in order to solve a new problem. Essentially, exercise improves a whole host of abilities prized in the classroom and at work. [Brain Rules]