The Optimal Performance Formula

The Optimal Performance Formula: What makes it different
and why you should care

Success is not about what you have accomplished, it's what you should have accomplished with the talent that you possess.

Kevin Eastman

(Assistant coach to Doc Rivers for the Boston Celtics)

I love people who have wild, ambitious dreams. I love seeing how people overcome the odds and the naysayers and push the limits of what others thought was possible for them. and sometimes even what the world thought was possible for anyone. Period.

Moreover, I love being one of those people. Working hard to achieve something that is difficult and complex lights me up. If that goal is considered "nearly impossible" by others, then I enjoy it twice as much, even when that path requires many long, intense hours of working on the "boring" basics, alone, during hours when most sane people are comfortably snuggled in bed.

I've been like this since I can remember. Even as a child. So, looking back, it makes sense that my whole life I've been fascinated by what drives performance. I didn't call it that as a kid, but I always wanted to understand how to throw a football like the best quarterbacks (I played up to 2nd division) or how to develop a tennis serve that would be a real game changer. All this was multiplied by a million when I discovered the martial arts.

I quickly realized my love of martial arts was destined to become a lifelong journey. My mind was fascinated with the challenge of learning and mastering how to generate the speed and power achieved by legendary practitioners in their techniques. Despite earning black belts in multiple different disciplines, a bunch of tournament trophies, and having had the privilege to study in Japan, I realize more than ever, after 35 years, how much I still have to learn. I still find peace and immense joy in that realization and in chasing that skill by training 5 to 6 times per week.

Even as a teenager, I enjoyed the mere process of chasing mastery, even when I knew it was, at best, years away. Whenever I became fascinated with a subject, such as martial arts, I became obsessed with learning as much as I could. I'd talk to, train with, read or study insights from anyone who could teach me something new. Although I put in long hours, it never felt like work.

Many years later, I found the best definition of how I felt when training in the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known as the Father of Flow. He called it an "autotelectic experience" and defined it as a task where the reward is purely the joy of doing the activity. In other words, when I was training martial arts, time stopped, and I just loved the feeling of kicking, spinning, and discovering the untapped potential of combining my body, mind, and soul on deeper and deeper levels.

Moreover, I've always loved teaching, and it's something that's come naturally to me, perhaps because I'm wired to break down the fundamentals of something so I can understand it, and that allows me to help others filter through the sea of experts and theories out there to understand the key levers that generate the biggest impact in terms of performance improvement.

Teaching also benefits me personally because the more you need to understand and break down the basics of any craft, the further along it propels you towards mastery. I've always told clients that I am "my own laboratory." Before teaching anyone skills and techniques that help drive performance, I test them on myself and experiment a lot, with the corresponding errors and failures, until I find the essential variables and parameters that drive real improvement.

So it seemed natural when I finally discovered that the area where my mission lay would be the intersection of those passions and skills: striving for mastery, modeling what drives performance, and teaching others.

The Optimal Performance Formula detailed in this book is the summary of the fundamental variables, tools, and techniques for driving performance in any field that I've accumulated and refined over the last three decades. It's the marriage of my academic training and research on the science of performance, together with the learnings that the ancient wisdom of the martial arts offers any student willing to embark on a lifelong journey to chase perfection in the hope of reaching one's maximum potential. These concepts have been refined and optimized in my own internal lab and battle tested in the trenches with top professional athletes and senior business leaders from leading multinationals whom I've mentored over my career.

What makes it unique?

One of the most essential constraints I set for myself in developing The Optimal Performance Formula was to make it practical and easy to understand. Although there's a lot of science behind it, most of my clients neither care nor have the time to spend years studying the research. They want to know "Why should I care? How does this help me achieve my goal of becoming a world class [insert aspiration here]?"

This is one of the key differences I believe The Optimal Performance Formula provides. It takes the complex why and breaks it down so it's easy to understand, then it links it to the what and the how you need to do things to benefit from each underlying principle.

I've included in the Appendix a list of some of the best research and books I'd recommend, in case you enjoy that kind of thing and want to get into the details. However, you don't have to read any of that to understand how the variables in The Optimal Performance Formula work and how to apply them to your particular mastery journey.

Let me give you a quick example I use often with my ATP players that illustrates how The Optimal Performance Formula is such a powerful toolbox to help ambitious top performers effectively integrate scientifically validated techniques to enhance their skill acquisition no matter their craft.

Here's a short teaser of how you'll be presented complex neuroscience and performance concepts in a digestible way that's relevant to your personal goals.

There's a weird phenomenon which occurs when highly skilled players try to overthink. The classic example in tennis is a soft ball at half court that the player shanks outside the court. How can that be? I'll often explain to players, without getting into the detailed neuroscience of learning and skill development, why this happens and how to avoid it. To do that, it helps if I give them a very high level view of how different parts of the brain work and are involved in executing a skill, because then we have a base upon which to start training ways to manage those different interactions.

When you learn a new skill, let's say a simple forehand in tennis, you need to think about each piece of the move: choose the right grip for the stroke, hit the ball in front, follow through over the shoulder, etc. At this point, you're executing with the prefrontal cortex, or the cognitive part of the brain. In other words, you're consciously controlling, or striving to control, each part of the technique. This is part of why it's so clumsy at the beginning.

As you drill thousands and thousands of forehands, and assuming you've gotten proper coaching along the way, you will start to burn the correct movement into your nervous system by generating more and more myelin, an insulator that makes these neural pathways easier and faster to access (we'll learn more about myelin later in the book). Note something important here. If you don't have good coaching, you will still consolidate technique, but it will be bad technique you hardwire into your system. For this example, let's assume you do develop excellent form. Your "skillful" forehand gets stored in the cerebellum located at the back of the brain beneath the occipital lobes. The cerebellum connects the brain to the spinal cord and is responsible for motor skills and controls unconscious activities of various organs like heart, lungs, digestive tract, etc.

Now here's the so what? Once you have a finely tuned process, your cerebellum takes care of that being executed in the way you've programmed. If you try to take control with your prefrontal cortex, i.e. your cognitive or conscious mind, you'll find your technique gets poorer, because in effect you're trying to control it with the same part of the brain that you used when learning the technique as a beginner, and it's not as efficient at executing complex movements with precision. Take walking as an example. If you think too much about how each muscle flexes and extends, you start walking clumsily because you're trying to override the skill you've fine tuned and stored in the cerebellum.

This explains how a player can make tens of shots in a row at fast speed from the baseline, but suddenly misses a short, easy shot. The...