Lesson 4: Becoming a top performer is a choice

Over the last week, Cal and I have been sharing lessons we’ve learned from teaching our course, Top Performer, to over two thousand students the past four years. Today, I’d like to share a different kind of lesson for the last in our series before we reopen the course on Monday.

In case you missed them, here were the previous lessons in the series:
Lesson 1: Meta-knowledge in your career
Lesson 2: Four Principles to decode your career
Lesson 3: How Do You “Deliberately Practice” Your Job?

Life includes a lot of luck and circumstances. Your career is no exception. You may be lucky to bump into the perfect connection who offers you a job at the right moment. You might happen to get a great mentor who guides your career early on. You may just have been born with the right looks and brains that gives you an edge in life.

However, one of the biggest things we’ve learned is that, despite the fact that you never have 100% control over your career, is that being a top performer is a mindset. Over time, those who get really good at their careers view it and work on it differently than the mediocre players.

In the Long Term, Mindset Matters More

The role of mindset, of choosing to become a top performer, is easiest to see once you get a deeper knowledge of how your career works. When you don’t understand how it works, success feels random, unreplicable. When you do, it may not always be easy, but success feels more and more like the consequence of a process than can be followed.

I see this clearly in my own profession of being a blogger. Building an audience online is seen as being about going viral, perfectly timing your message with the wave of some fads, or just knowing the people who can promote you.

However, after over a decade in this business, I see things quite differently. I’ve had friends who started out small and stayed small, and those that ended up building companies with dozens of people. Although moment-to-moment success of particular articles, products or strategies had a lot of randomness, those things tended to smooth out over time.

Instead, the difference was mindset. Some people opted to work hard, experiment and build important skills. Others chose to let their initial conditions or environment dictate their fate.

What is the Top Performer Mindset?

Having seen thousands of students go through our course, Cal and I have gotten a glimpse into the difference in how top performers think. I believe these are mental habits that can be acquired, although a few of them may come more naturally to some than others.

1. Hard work. Working hard isn’t the only thing that matters, but it’s a necessary component. If you don’t want to work hard at your career, you can’t expect to earn the rewards of someone who does.
2. Ambition. Top performers recognize that if you’re going to invest 30-40 years of your life, devoting possibly half of your waking hours to something, you should do it well.
3. Craftsmanship. You end up enjoying things you do well. Building career capital allows you to not just have higher positions and more pay, but to negotiate yourself into doing the kind of work that really matters. It’s this kind of work that leads to fulfillment.
4. Humility. Many people confuse humility with a lack of confidence, but it is actually distinct. Humility means accepting that you might not know everything about how your career works. It means accepting that there’s room for you to get better at your craft. The best people I know are constantly aware of how much better they can still become.
5. Flexibility. Top performers don’t adopt a rigid position that assumes they’ll keep doing things exactly the same way forever. They learn from the best and constantly experiment with their strategy.

These are just a few of the components of the mindset that separates those who, despite luck and circumstances, master their careers. Chances are you see yourself embodying some of these traits well. Maybe there are others you could still improve upon? (I know there’s some I certainly can!)

How to Choose to Become a Top Performer

Given this description of top performers, how do you shift your career mindset closer to that goal? I think this is achieved in two ways:

1. Behave as top performers do. Even if it feels unnatural, taking the actions top performers take will shift your mindset closer to that goal. You become more ambitious by setting big goals, even when they scare you. You become more humble by researching better people, even when you think you’ve already got it figured out.
2. Surround yourself with other top performers. Attitudes are infectious. If you can involve yourself with people who also strive to build fulfilling careers, you’ll be more likely to do it to.

There are many ways you could attempt to do this, and Cal and I won’t be so bold as to suggest taking our course is the only option. However, we have worked hard to make it a good option, especially for those who want to use every resource available to shift themselves closer to the mark.

First, Top Performer teaches you to behave like top performers. To deeply analyze your career, developing an understanding of what needs to be improved. To work on bold, effective projects that will increase your skill level and expose you to new opportunities. To work hard on things that matter and constantly monitor your career progress.

Second, Top Performer gives you a chance to interact with other top performers. Even if you feel like your immediate environment isn’t reinforcing the mindset you want, joining the course allows you to participate in a community of other people eager to do the hard work of building careers they love.