Why High Performance is More an Outcome Than a Goal

It’s easy to treat high performance, regardless of our chosen craft, as the goal and well-being as the reward for reaching it, but that order can often be backwards. When we consistently show up, recover well, and stay absorbed in the work itself, strong performance tends to follow as a byproduct rather than as the prize we think we’re working so diligently to achieve.

A common perception seems to be that first we perform, then we get good at the thing, then we hit the numbers, and finally we earn the result. Once that's handled, we get to “live well” and experience the rest, ease, and sense that things are okay that come along with it. Through this framing, well-being is the payout, and performance is the price we pay to unlock it. This often leads to the optimization spiral, where we can slowly sacrifice pieces of ourselves in the name of peak performance and health, yet it can be a paradoxical pursuit. Our body becomes equipment, and the point of equipment is maximal efficiency at all costs.

The interesting thing is that the people who are the best at what they do rarely describe their path like this. Ask them what their best work is the result of, and they don't point to the grind. They point to feeling settled, aligned, and genuinely absorbed in the work, the way we get when we'd do the thing even if no one were keeping score. The “elite performance” is what happens when they pay attention to the process of feeling their best instead of banking on the outcome of all the work. 

Feeling Good Usually Comes First

Feeling good usually comes first, and success tends to follow from it. Sometimes the causation ends up backwards in our heads. The intuitive story is that we do well and then we feel good about it, with our mood riding on the back of the achievement. Studies over the years reverse the logic here and make the case that the good feeling tends to come first and actually help produce the success we assume causes it.

When we feel good, we've got more to spend. We stay on a hard problem past the point where we'd normally get irritated and quit. We're easier to be around, so people help us more. We try the slightly risky thing instead of the safe one, and that's how we get better.

People who feel good more often go on to do better at work, in their relationships, in their health, and even in how long they live. None of it usually feels like a strategy while it's happening. It just feels like a good day, but a long string of good days is really what our dreams are made of.

How Our Body Responds When Only the Result Matters

The same moment can hit our body in two completely different ways, depending whether we're focused on the outcome or on the task itself. Take a single high-pressure situation, say the closing minutes of a match or the make-or-break version of whatever we do. We can walk into it asking one of two questions, and whether we know it or not, these questions are always looming over us. The first is all self-directed and all about us, “Am I going to win, am I good enough, and what does it mean about me if I blow this?” The second is all about the work itself, “What's the next move, what does this problem actually need, and what am I learning?”

Those two questions set off different systems in the body. Our brain runs a fast threat-detection system built around the amygdala, which fires before we’ve consciously decided anything, and it can't really tell the difference between a physical danger and the social danger of being judged. When the moment feels like a verdict on us, our body braces the way it would for a threat. 

When the same moment feels like something to take on, our body shifts toward a challenge state instead. The gap between the two is large enough that we can actually measure the difference using cardiovascular instruments, and it’s a major factor that can predict who performs and who crumbles. A challenge pattern measured in athletes before their season even began lined up with who played better throughout the whole season.

If we tune into ourselves, we can feel it from the inside long before anyone hooks us up to an instrument to prove it. In the threat version, we grip the racket too tight, we second-guess a decision we've made a thousand times, we read the same line of an email four times without taking it in, or we get clumsy at the exact thing we're best at all because our system has yanked our attention back onto ourselves, and our attention is the one thing the skill actually needs. The challenge version taps into our deeper capabilities while still keeping us relaxed. Maybe what we’re doing is hard, but it's clean, and we're inside the work rather than standing outside watching ourselves do it.

Why Being Absorbed in the Work Leads to High Performance

Getting lost in the work itself tends to produce better results than just watching the scoreboard. When our drive comes from the activity itself, whether that’s from the problem in front of us or the next rep done right, that drive is called intrinsic motivation. This kind of motivation is rooted in doing the thing in front of us because the doing is its own reward. In classrooms as much as on playing fields or in the office, that kind of motivation is one of the stronger predictors of how well people actually do. It holds up even when there's money, a grade, or something more high-stakes riding on the result too.

There's a related concept in how we pursue our goals when it comes to extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation. Even if we know what kind of motivation is fueling us, how do we measure our progress? We can measure against ourselves and how we did last time or measure against the others, but that isn't where the performance difference actually sits. 

The drive to get better and the drive to come out ahead can both push us to move toward something we want. This gets nuanced, but the general advice to avoid comparison to others is accurate but not for the mainstream reasons we are often told. Both approaches (i.e. comparing our progress to ourselves vs. comparing ourselves to others) negatively impact performance if we’re aiming not to fail, not to be exposed, or not to be judged badly. That avoidance of failure is what causes our brain to register the situation as a threat. Wanting to win is fine and often essential. It’s alright to want to be better than others and ourselves for the right reasons, but playing not to lose, or playing to make others lose, is what costs us.

"The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist, Claremont Graduate University

Csikzentimihalyi is one of the preeminent researchers of flow state, what leads to high performance, and at the core, what leads to a good life. A key conclusion is that outcome-oriented thinking has no place in performing at our highest potential. The best moments come from being dialed into the effort itself, and the result tends to come along for the ride. 

A lot of people describe this in hindsight, where they stopped playing for the win, started playing because they loved the game, and somewhere along the way, they become one of the best at what they do.

What Changes When High Performance Stops Being the Goal?

High performance starts to look less like a prize we earn and more like a readout of how well our system is running. That doesn't make effort optional, and it doesn't mean the outcome stops counting though. The hunger to be excellent at something is one of the most human things we have. What the evidence keeps pointing at is that this hunger works better when we aim at the work than direct it at the finish line.

Once we see it this way, a lot of the optimization we pursue looks like it's solving the problem from the wrong end. We try to manufacture the output directly and treat well-being that we’ll experience eventually. The more dependable route seems to run the other direction, suggesting that if we get the conditions right, our ability to perform grows proportionally. The deadline is still real, and the score still counts, but we can stack the odds in our favor by knowing which question we’re asking ourselves. We can stop forcing better performance out of ourselves and instead direct our energy into what it takes to live in a way that produces it.

References

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2. Cerasoli, C. P., Nicklin, J. M., & Ford, M. T. (2014). Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4), 980–1008. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035661

3. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

4. Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 803–855. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.6.803

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