Mental Shifts for Peak Performance Edition 007
I HAVE BEEN LET IN ON A DIRTY LITTLE SECRET:WINNING CHANGES NOTHING. |
In his autobiography Open, Andre Agassi revealed that reflection after winning his first major title, Wimbledon. For many of us that feeling is familiar. You hit the milestone, and it doesn't quite land the way you thought it would. So you reset, you aim higher, and you go again. It looks a lot like ambition. But most people never stop long enough to ask what's actually driving the cycle. I was forced to. My mom died young and by every external measure, she had done everything right. She was in the top 10% of her Stanford Law School class. Argued and won in front of the Supreme Court. And she was the kind of mom that never missed a game. She built a life most people would point to and say, that's what making it looks like. But she carried a version of what Agassi described. The accomplishments were real. The fulfillment wasn't. And then she was gone. It forced a question I hadn't been asking: if you can hit every milestone and still feel like something's missing, what are those milestones actually tracking? That didn't make me less driven. It made me more aware of the system I was using to evaluate my life. And once I saw it, it was hard to ignore. Most high performers aren't failing. They're winning. And it's still not enough. Not because they're doing it wrong, but because their scorecard was only ever designed to keep them performing. It can measure output, progress, and results. It was never built to measure whether any of it is building toward something they actually want, or whether the process of getting there is worth it on its own. |
THE REWIRED TAKE:MOST SCORECARDS WORK AGAINST YOU. |
Dopamine doesn't fire when you get the thing. It fires in anticipation of getting it. Once the reward arrives, dopamine drops to baseline. If it feels less satisfying than you predicted, it dips below baseline. The win can literally register as a small loss. That's Agassi on the court, trophy in hand, feeling nothing. His brain had already consumed the reward before he got there. Behavioral psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky also showed that losses are felt roughly twice as intensely as gains. And even when a win does land, your brain adapts within weeks and starts scanning for the next gap. That's not a character or motivation flaw. It's the adaptation cycle. So a scorecard built entirely around external behaviors and outcomes is perfectly designed to keep you chasing, adapting, and never arriving. The system was never built to produce fulfillment. It was built to sustain output. The fix isn't to want less. It's to make sure your scorecard is doing two things the typical one never will: telling you whether you're still headed where you actually want to go, and making sure the work is feeding you while you get there That realization is what changed my scorecard. |
HERE ARE FOUR THINGS I PUT ON MY SCORECARD THAT MOST PEOPLE DO NOT: |
Not the goal. The thing underneath it that makes the work worth it regardless of the outcome. Agassi didn't need to stop wanting Grand Slams. He needed something beneath that goal that would make the years of training meaningful on their own terms. Research in self-determination theory shows why: intrinsic motivation doesn't trigger the same adaptation cycle. Your brain doesn't consume it on arrival because it was never tied to a prediction. It renews. One of my clients has a goal of 10x EBITDA growth in ten years. Underneath that was something more enduring: he wanted to bring people together to build something they didn't think they could. That motivation is present on a Tuesday afternoon, not just at the finish line. It doesn't expire when the number hits. The people who sustain high performance over decades always have this. The motivation lives below the achievement and feeds them along the way.
A decoy is an achievement that looks like success but doesn't feel like it when you arrive. Not because the goal is too small, but because they are often not aligned with what actually matters to you. Decoys are hard to spot because they are generally pretty logical and your brain is bad at predicting what will actually fulfill you. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert calls this the affective forecasting error. A decoy is what happens when that error runs unchecked for years. Another one of my clients spent two years pushing for more responsibility inside her organization. She called it ambition. But she'd really been chasing power as a pathway to autonomy. The moment she named what she actually wanted, her five-year plan changed completely. Singular focus on building something she could own, not fighting for a seat at someone else's table. On her scorecard, the decoy was "C-level title." The real goal was ownership. Once she could see them side by side, everything else was obvious.
Not the obvious negatives. The words that describe who you become when you're off course. The ones that get rewarded, which is what makes them dangerous. On both mine and my clients' scorecards are three anti-values and they include words you'd never expect. Sacrifice. Indispensable. Warm. They feel productive in the moment. Over time they pull you off course without you noticing. You say yes to things that look right but feel wrong, you avoid tough conversations to be likable, the gap between what you say matters and where your energy actually goes gets wider. Because everything still looks productive from the outside, nobody flags it. Including you. I still catch myself defaulting to mine.
Your brain is designed to automate as much as possible, most of which is useful. But it also automates things like your pursuit of the next goal without asking if you even want it, and your response to discomfort. When something feels off, your brain defaults to the same loop: chase the next win, dodge the hard conversation, grip tighter. It doesn't stop to ask whether the loop is helping. It just runs. A razor is what interrupts it. A razor is a short phrase that short-circuits the autopilot and shows you where you've drifted. Mine is: space not speed. If things feel tight or rushed, it's usually not a performance problem. It's that I've collapsed into urgency instead of thinking clearly. A razor won't tell you what to do. But it will tell you when your wiring is running you instead of the other way around. And that single awareness changes the entire experience of the work, not just the outcome. |
These four things won't show up on any performance review. No board is asking about your enduring motivation, decoy, anti-values or razor. But they're the difference between a scorecard that drives you to your first Grand Slam and one that fuels a career of many titles while loving it along the way. I think about my mom a lot when I sit with this. She didn't need different goals. She needed something on her scorecard that was keeping her calibrated along the way. She checked every box, without cutting corners, without sacrificing the people around her. But I wonder sometimes if she ever stopped to ask whether the scorecard itself was giving her what she needed while she was running it. I don't know the answer. I never got to ask her. What I do know is that the question changed how I measure everything. Meet the moment, Ashley |
SHIFT YOUR MIND: |
DEFAULT Your scorecard tracks your goals, behaviors and results. You pursue achievement largely on automation.
SHIFT Add different lenses to your scorecard to interrupt, calibrate and keep you aligned and fueled along the way.
HOW Try naming your enduring motivation, decoy, anti-values and razor. |
Comments