4 requirements for high performance

What do you want to be when you grow up? 

Think back to when you were young (or maybe you are young and currently reading way above your grade level)—what was your dream? Maybe you had a love of horses, so you envisioned that Breyer collection one day turning into a stable where you were the vet who kept them healthy. Or maybe your dad occasionally let you hold his guitar while you listened to music, and your dream became to one day play for real on a stage? 

When John Amaechi was young, he wanted to become an NBA player. 

“Everybody told me it was ridiculous. Everybody told me it had never been done. Everybody told me that a fat kid from Stockport who liked eating pie and reading books was hardly a candidate for the world’s best basketball league. But to me, it was compelling.”

However, the lofty aspiration of becoming a professional basketball player wasn’t enough on its own—by the age of 7, he also knew he wanted to become a psychologist. So, after competing at the highest level of basketball and playing with the Cavaliers, Jazz, and Magic, he did just that. 

Amaechi is now an organizational psychologist, a bestselling author, a professor at the University of Exeter Business School, and the founder of APS Intelligence Ltd. This former NBA player isn’t just his own success story; he’s made it his goal to help others unlock their potential. 

Whether your ambition is career-oriented or something you’ve dreamed of since childhood, he has more than a few ideas about what it takes to realize your goals at the highest level and achieve remarkable things. 

Specifically, Amaechi notes that there are four requirements for high performance: knowledge, skills, opportunities, and motivation. 

Knowledge

This seems self-explanatory—of course, you need to know about something to achieve it—but even this simple-seeming element can cause you to stumble. 

“Please note this is not awareness. People love talking about awareness, but it’s the sickly stepchild of knowledge. It delivers none of the impact,” says Amaechi.

Knowledge comes from work—it is a consequence of exploration and purposeful investigation that yields a tool you can use to achieve your goal. Sure, the vet may show up at the stable and seemingly do some basic tests before administering a treatment the owner may have stumbled on during a Google search. But the veterinarian’s tests are built upon years of earned knowledge that allows them to perform a differential diagnosis. They aren’t guessing with Google. 

Nabeel S. Qureshi, a scholar whose research is focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence, the economy, and technology governance, wrote an essay that discussed this difference of awareness versus real knowledge. He begins it with a story about a friend who wasn’t satisfied with a simple piece of information that someone had figured out prior to himself—he wasn’t even satisfied when he’d proven it once himself.

“The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved.”

He had a drive to understand the building blocks of a piece of knowledge and what made it true. Most people may find this tedious, and that’s because it is. But this tedium results in more than “a right answer,” it results in a comprehensive understanding. 

Skills

This again may sound obvious, but to perform at a high level you will need to master the necessary capabilities of the task at hand. Much like knowledge versus awareness, there is a depth to learning skills that goes far beyond a simple ability and familiarity. 

Amaechi points out, “Some of them will be new to you. Some of them will be things you have, but haven’t considered. The real self-assurance about those and a willingness to increase, adapt them, and take critical feedback about them is going to be essential if you want to be a high performer.”

An important thing to remember is that you don’t necessarily see all the effort that goes into mastering a skill. At a concert, you are seeing the sum of years of working with other musicians, as well as feedback and collaboration. You are seeing the culmination of hours of scale work and repetition with a guitar in a small room. In Amaechi’s case, he remembers entire practice sessions of catching a ball, pivoting, pivoting, and passing. This is all in the effort of identifying an important skill and grinding it into your being. Only then can you apply it later. 

Opportunities

Unlike knowledge or skills, which can be heavily internal (although both tend to flourish when juxtaposed against others and their abilities), looking for, finding, and making the most of opportunities requires looking outward and interacting with the systems and people around you. 

“Opportunity is an interesting one. It’s this idea that you have to be able to both recognize opportunities, but also recognize you sit in a system where just what you want to do and your opinions will not always be enough,” says Amaechi.

You need to be able to recognize opportunities and learn how to build a team around you. Success requires an ability to influence and motivate others to support your goals. Whether learning from a veterinary mentor or spending time working with fellow musicians, one of the best ways to improve at anything is to bring others into your sphere. 

It can certainly be tempting to want to go it alone. How many times have you thought, whether through hubris or a fear of inconveniencing those around you, “This is my goal, I need to accomplish this on my own”? Not only will this hinder your progress toward your goal, but it also cuts you off from potential opportunities provided by a larger world and community.

Motivation

Amaechi makes a point that it is important to know that motivation does not equate to nonstop enthusiasm. It comes on in waves and it will wane over time. You dusted off that guitar, put new strings on it, and you’ve started to learn to play, but your fingers begin to hurt, you get a bit busy with life, and before you know it, the guitar is in the corner gathering dust again. 

“There’s a deep self-awareness part to motivation that’s important. It’s understanding the things about you that are going to get in the way. The biggest key for me early on was discovering that I am intensely, and in a most dedicated way, lazy,” says Amaechi. “Knowing that was incredibly important … I organized my life in a way that I didn’t have to be disciplined, instead I could just be obedient, and those two things are not the same.”

By honestly reflecting on and acknowledging your personal pitfalls, you can stay on track with your goals. Motivation can come in many forms, and it is vital to keep these things at the front of your mind. Where is your motivation from? Is it external, like from your family or the team you’ve built around you? Or is it internal and strictly for yourself? Why is this task important to you to achieve? 

One simple tool to use is a carrot-and-stick model that George Mack called “Skinner’s Law.” This view is based on the idea that there are two ways to self-motivate: intrinsically (an inherent pleasing drive or desire) and extrinsically (for benefit, reward, or punishment avoidance). Skinner’s Law is a commitment device whereby you establish rewards (pleasure) or punishments for doing (or not doing) a certain task.

Last, stay resilient, because you will get dunked on

Perhaps you’re a bit older and you have no dreams of becoming the next big rock act or a horse whisperer. The thing you want to achieve may be a little less pie in the sky—perhaps a second career is drawing you to it, or there is a certification that can further your current career bookmarked on your computer. Maybe that Duolingo app is just sitting unused on your desktop, taunting you about the language you swore you’d learn one day.

Even if you utilize the four steps outlined above perfectly, you will experience setbacks and failure regardless of the goal. Don’t let this dissuade you, though; this is a sign you’re heading in the right direction. Failure is just another piece of knowledge to be filed away. 

“When I played in the NBA, I’d come back to England for basketball camps, and the first question that kids would be interested in asking me is, ‘Have you ever been dunked on?’ Of course, I’ve been dunked on. My first game was against Michael Jordan. Yeah. I’ve been dunked on. If you haven’t been dunked on in whatever context you’re in, you set your sights too low because that is an inevitable part of challenging yourself to meet and then stretch your potential.”