Summary

peak performance is unsustainable. you hit it once a year if you’re lucky. optimal performance is different. it’s 80 to 85% capacity every day, every week, every quarter. way more powerful than a peak you can’t repeat.

1. sleep. seven to eight hours. non-negotiable. nothing else on this list matters if you’re sleep deprived.

2. hydration. half your body weight in ounces of water daily. it’s stupid simple and it changes how clearly you think.

3. blood sugar. balanced meals, moderate carbs, real protein. the crash after a bad lunch is the difference between a good afternoon and a wasted one.

4. fitness that supports life, not consumes it. 20 to 30 minutes, moderate intensity, most days. if your workouts leave you fried for work and family, the workouts are the problem.

5. deep work. up to four hours of single-focus work without context switching. that’s where the actual output is. defend the block on the calendar like rent.

optimal beats peak because optimal is daily. peak is a stunt. show up at 80 to 85% for 250 days and you smoke the person who hit 100% twice. try harder.

Transcript

intro

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe, if you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. How do we achieve optimal performance? How do we have energy all day? How do we maintain motivation? How do we get the most out of work and life? This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon.

And today I want to talk a little bit more about how to achieve optimal performance physically, mentally, in every way possible. This is something I’ve been chasing for a long time. And first we have to define what optimal performance is. So optimal performance is not peak performance. Peak performance is where you are at just your absolute best.

optimal vs peak

Nobody can live in peak performance. If you think about climbing a mountain, climbing Mount Everest, once you reach the peak, you actually are starting to die. There’s not enough oxygen for you to stay at the peak. You can go up there, you can have the achievement, you can have the moment, but you have to come back down.

But how far you come back down is up to you. It doesn’t have to be all the way down. And that’s the difference between poor performance or inconsistent performance, optimal performance, and peak performance. So peak performance, knowing that’s not a reality, it’s not something we can do all the time, how do we maintain optimal performance?

This is more like operating at 80 to 85% of your capacity, but at all times, every single day, not 20% one day, 30% the next day, so on and so forth. So how do we maintain that 80 to 85% optimal performance flow that we want to be in? I’ve been all over the place with this. As an entrepreneur, I’ve worked so hard, just like on such mentally demanding tasks that when it came time to the end of the day for me to be with my family, I’m too brain dead.

the 80 to 85 percent rule

Right? I’m too brain dead to focus on my family or give them the attention that they need. I’ve been in that situation. I’ve also spent too much time doing work in the evenings to where I don’t get enough sleep and then I suck the next day as an entrepreneur. I can’t put in that kind of mental energy and bandwidth.

I’ve had a lot of massive energy swings up and down that make me feel like I have no motivation. I can’t do anything. I just want to go to sleep at some point. And I just really want to get after it at other points. One thing I even used to do unknowingly many, many years ago is I would eat very little throughout the day.

I was doing like intermittent fasting. I wouldn’t eat that much because I’d be busy working, didn’t want to waste time having to eat. And then right around the end of my day, like the end of the work day, I would eat a ton of food. Like I would just eat a bunch and have this carb load at the end of my work day.

sleep, hydration, blood sugar

And what this would do is it would skyrocket my blood sugar and then I’d have this huge energy crash after, again, ruining family time. And there are all these little things and tricks and hacks that I’ve learned just for myself personally. And I want to share them today so you don’t fall into that camp.

Hopefully you can maintain some optimal performance in your life. So here are the things that I’ve learned. First is sleep is important. You’ve heard it everywhere. You already know it. Getting seven to eight hours of sleep vitally important. You need to focus on that. That needs to be a major part of your life is getting enough sleep.

You can read books on it. Why We Sleep is one of my favorite books by Dr. Matthew Walker because I’m not going to get into all the tips and tricks. Different things work for different people. But just shoot for those seven to eight hours of sleep. The second thing, hydrate. I’ve noticed my mental energy is way better when I’m hydrated.

fitness that supports life

So drinking at least half of your body weight in ounces of water per day. And try to get some electrolytes in there occasionally as well, especially as it heats up in the year and you do sweat more like I do here in Texas. You could use any kind of different electrolytes. There are a thousand on the market.

I like Noon and I like Element. I also just like adding some lemon and Himalayan pink salt to my water in the morning sometimes. So stay hydrated, get your seven to eight hours of sleep. And now a couple more tactical ones. The first one is blood sugar. So I mentioned this and this could be super dependent on me.

But I have gone through these huge energy swings based on my diet. Eating too many carbohydrates all at once and again having that crash. A lot of people will have things like that. And I really pay attention to what I eat, how I balance each and every single meal. Trying to get anywhere from 20 to 40 grams of protein in each and every single meal along with my carbohydrates.

deep work and habit stacking

That tends to give a smoother ride so you’re not on that roller coaster ride of blood sugar. I also don’t eat an overwhelming amount of carbohydrates in any one sitting. I wouldn’t say I’m low carb but maybe moderate carb and I try to spread those throughout the day. Again with proteins and fats so I don’t have any kind of wild energy or mood swings based off of what my body’s trying to do by pumping out insulin when I have a bunch of sugar.

Or should I just say carbohydrates. I would say pay attention to your blood sugar. Pay attention to how you feel within the two hour window after you’re eating and notice if you have any energy swings. That one was like a hidden one for me for a long time is I didn’t realize what I was doing and how it was affecting my mood, my concentration, everything.

So I’ve really balanced that out. I also do intermittent fasting. I did it for a long time. I stopped for a while. I’m doing it again. I just prefer it. I prefer not stop eating around 7 p.m. and then I start eating again around 11 a.m. the next day. I feel like it just helps me again with kind of on the mental clarity maintaining some of the optimal performance.

So blood sugar. Next one, fitness. But fitness that supports your life and does not detract from your life. And so if you know me, I am super into fitness. I love training. I love doing all those things. But I’ve definitely toed the line on training too much or too hard with really no purpose other than the fact that I like it.

I like hard training. I like doing hard things. But more recently, I’ve been training for this 50K ultramarathon and the volume got pretty up there. And what I would notice is if I went on a 10, let’s say the 10 to 15 mile range, if I went on one of those long runs on the weekend, I’d be shot. Like I just was exhausted the rest of the day.

I was faking it that whole Saturday after I would do that early morning run. I just didn’t have the energy. And really I was just, the more I did it, I was like, this isn’t getting better. It’s not like I’m getting fitter. It’s just it always sucked. And I tried so many different things, but ultimately I just backed down.

And I’ve done that with other things too, like doing incredibly hard workouts that just take me out. Again, some of these things you can build up to, but ultimately I try and stay away from things like that for the most part these days. Now I still do really hard training sessions. It’s just when the volume is getting absurd.

So I only try to do fitness that supports my daily life. Whatever more than about an hour is always good for me, like getting in some high intensity in an hour is good, or even low intensity, whatever it is for an hour, that supports what I’m trying to do. It does not detract from what I’m trying to do.

And that’s helped me a ton because it just helps me maintain energy. Obviously, exercising is going to give you more energy. It’s going to help your cognitive function. It will help you achieve optimal performance, but you just have to do it in the right doses. Now the last one is deep work. I’ve talked about this on the podcast several times, but setting aside time for deep work.

Whatever you can set aside. So you probably have your goals written down somewhere. The goal for deep work would be up to four hours per day. That’s like the ultimate, just deep work focused on whatever that is, business growth, maybe it’s a specific marketing strategy until that goal is achieved. But not everybody has like a four hour time block.

So it’s going to be whatever that you can do. So if that’s one hour, two hours, three hours, it’s a deep work session where you are completely locked in on the task. There’s no notifications, there’s no phone, there’s no email checking. There’s nothing but doing the work. Just doing the work. Again, set aside whatever time you can.

But the reason the deep work helps is because it helps you stay focused and you actually get into this state of flow. You’re able to realize what it’s like to actually concentrate and work on something specific for a very long time. And this deep work habit has been huge for me in the ability to achieve things, but also in maintaining optimal performance.

Because like I mentioned towards the beginning, I’ve worked so hard as an entrepreneur that I end up brain dead by the end of the day. So I can’t even talk to my wife or play with my kids in any meaningful way. That’s where the deep work has really helped me. Because if, let’s just say I had two hours today to do deep work, I’m going to lock in on my most important tasks, I’m going to be really focused for those two hours, I’m going to knock those things out.

Then I can come out of that mode and I can do other things that aren’t as mentally demanding. And so that way I know I’m focused, I’m getting things done that I want to, but then I can come out, do a little bit lighter work, check the email, all those kinds of things, things that aren’t as mentally demanding.

And that has really helped me maintain my mental energy throughout the day, which is a major part of really optimal performance. Because what I want, even though I exercise a lot and I’ve been in a fitness world for a long time, I’m not trying to achieve some sort of marathon time or race goal or amount of weight squatted.

Those are things I had done for a long time. But now I’m just trying to maintain optimal performance across a wide spectrum. That’s it. I want high mental energy throughout the day. I want to maintain that mental energy and just overall energy after work with my family, be able to play with my kids, be able to have those meaningful conversations with my wife.

So those are all the things that I do and want to be able to do each and every single day. And I’ve been doing, really paying attention to the things that I mentioned in this podcast. I’m sleeping well, I’m regulating my blood sugar well by the meals that I’m choosing to eat and how they’re structured.

I’m hydrating, I have decent fitness sessions that aren’t detracting, and I’m doing deep work. When I’m doing all of those things, I do feel like I’m just in this 80 to 85% optimal performance flow and perpetuity. And it’s awesome. And when I get out of that, it sucks. I can pretty much maintain doing those things, but it takes building them into a habit.

And habits are very hard to build. So maybe don’t try and do every single one of these things all at once if you don’t have any of these habits. Just focus on one. But focusing on none is not an option. You need to try harder. --- title: “How to Achieve Optimal Performance” episode: 81 published: 2024-02-22 podcast: better. podcast tags: - betterpodcast ---

How to Achieve Optimal Performance

Episode: 81 Published: 2024-02-22 Podcast: better. podcast

#betterpodcast

Jerred discusses the concept of optimal performance, distinguishing it from peak performance, and shares strategies to maintain a consistent 80-85% performance level daily. He emphasizes the importance of balance and sustainability over unsustainable peak efforts. Jerred shares personal anecdotes about his journey to finding this balance, including challenges with energy management and family time, and outlines practical steps to achieve optimal performance in various aspects of life.

Key takeaways: - Optimal performance is about maintaining 80-85% capacity consistently, rather than aiming for unsustainable peak performance. - Prioritizing sleep, aiming for seven to eight hours per night, is crucial for maintaining energy and focus. - Staying hydrated, with a goal of drinking half your body weight in ounces of water daily, can significantly improve mental energy. - Managing blood sugar through balanced meals with moderate carbohydrates and sufficient protein helps avoid energy crashes. - Fitness should support daily life without detracting from it; excessive training can lead to exhaustion rather than improved performance. - Incorporating deep work sessions, ideally up to four hours, enhances focus and productivity, preventing mental burnout.

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe, if you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. How do we achieve optimal performance? How do we have energy all day? How do we maintain motivation? How do we get the most out of work and life? This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon.

And today I want to talk a little bit more about how to achieve optimal performance physically, mentally, in every way possible. This is something I’ve been chasing for a long time. And first we have to define what optimal performance is. So optimal performance is not peak performance. Peak performance is where you are at just your absolute best.

Nobody can live in peak performance. If you think about climbing a mountain, climbing Mount Everest, once you reach the peak, you actually are starting to die. There’s not enough oxygen for you to stay at the peak. You can go up there, you can have the achievement, you can have the moment, but you have to come back down.

But how far you come back down is up to you. It doesn’t have to be all the way down. And that’s the difference between poor performance or inconsistent performance, optimal performance, and peak performance. So peak performance, knowing that’s not a reality, it’s not something we can do all the time, how do we maintain optimal performance?

This is more like operating at 80 to 85% of your capacity, but at all times, every single day, not 20% one day, 30% the next day, so on and so forth. So how do we maintain that 80 to 85% optimal performance flow that we want to be in? I’ve been all over the place with this. As an entrepreneur, I’ve worked so hard, just like on such mentally demanding tasks that when it came time to the end of the day for me to be with my family, I’m too brain dead.

Right? I’m too brain dead to focus on my family or give them the attention that they need. I’ve been in that situation. I’ve also spent too much time doing work in the evenings to where I don’t get enough sleep and then I suck the next day as an entrepreneur. I can’t put in that kind of mental energy and bandwidth.

I’ve had a lot of massive energy swings up and down that make me feel like I have no motivation. I can’t do anything. I just want to go to sleep at some point. And I just really want to get after it at other points. One thing I even used to do unknowingly many, many years ago is I would eat very little throughout the day.

I was doing like intermittent fasting. I wouldn’t eat that much because I’d be busy working, didn’t want to waste time having to eat. And then right around the end of my day, like the end of the work day, I would eat a ton of food. Like I would just eat a bunch and have this carb load at the end of my work day.

And what this would do is it would skyrocket my blood sugar and then I’d have this huge energy crash after, again, ruining family time. And there are all these little things and tricks and hacks that I’ve learned just for myself personally. And I want to share them today so you don’t fall into that camp.

Hopefully you can maintain some optimal performance in your life. So here are the things that I’ve learned. First is sleep is important. You’ve heard it everywhere. You already know it. Getting seven to eight hours of sleep vitally important. You need to focus on that. That needs to be a major part of your life is getting enough sleep.

You can read books on it. Why We Sleep is one of my favorite books by Dr. Matthew Walker because I’m not going to get into all the tips and tricks. Different things work for different people. But just shoot for those seven to eight hours of sleep. The second thing, hydrate. I’ve noticed my mental energy is way better when I’m hydrated.

So drinking at least half of your body weight in ounces of water per day. And try to get some electrolytes in there occasionally as well, especially as it heats up in the year and you do sweat more like I do here in Texas. You could use any kind of different electrolytes. There are a thousand on the market.

I like Noon and I like Element. I also just like adding some lemon and Himalayan pink salt to my water in the morning sometimes. So stay hydrated, get your seven to eight hours of sleep. And now a couple more tactical ones. The first one is blood sugar. So I mentioned this and this could be super dependent on me.

But I have gone through these huge energy swings based on my diet. Eating too many carbohydrates all at once and again having that crash. A lot of people will have things like that. And I really pay attention to what I eat, how I balance each and every single meal. Trying to get anywhere from 20 to 40 grams of protein in each and every single meal along with my carbohydrates.

That tends to give a smoother ride so you’re not on that roller coaster ride of blood sugar. I also don’t eat an overwhelming amount of carbohydrates in any one sitting. I wouldn’t say I’m low carb but maybe moderate carb and I try to spread those throughout the day. Again with proteins and fats so I don’t have any kind of wild energy or mood swings based off of what my body’s trying to do by pumping out insulin when I have a bunch of sugar.

Or should I just say carbohydrates. I would say pay attention to your blood sugar. Pay attention to how you feel within the two hour window after you’re eating and notice if you have any energy swings. That one was like a hidden one for me for a long time is I didn’t realize what I was doing and how it was affecting my mood, my concentration, everything.

So I’ve really balanced that out. I also do intermittent fasting. I did it for a long time. I stopped for a while. I’m doing it again. I just prefer it. I prefer not stop eating around 7 p.m. and then I start eating again around 11 a.m. the next day. I feel like it just helps me again with kind of on the mental clarity maintaining some of the optimal performance.

So blood sugar. Next one, fitness. But fitness that supports your life and does not detract from your life. And so if you know me, I am super into fitness. I love training. I love doing all those things. But I’ve definitely toed the line on training too much or too hard with really no purpose other than the fact that I like it.

I like hard training. I like doing hard things. But more recently, I’ve been training for this 50K ultramarathon and the volume got pretty up there. And what I would notice is if I went on a 10, let’s say the 10 to 15 mile range, if I went on one of those long runs on the weekend, I’d be shot. Like I just was exhausted the rest of the day.

I was faking it that whole Saturday after I would do that early morning run. I just didn’t have the energy. And really I was just, the more I did it, I was like, this isn’t getting better. It’s not like I’m getting fitter. It’s just it always sucked. And I tried so many different things, but ultimately I just backed down.

And I’ve done that with other things too, like doing incredibly hard workouts that just take me out. Again, some of these things you can build up to, but ultimately I try and stay away from things like that for the most part these days. Now I still do really hard training sessions. It’s just when the volume is getting absurd.

So I only try to do fitness that supports my daily life. Whatever more than about an hour is always good for me, like getting in some high intensity in an hour is good, or even low intensity, whatever it is for an hour, that supports what I’m trying to do. It does not detract from what I’m trying to do.

And that’s helped me a ton because it just helps me maintain energy. Obviously, exercising is going to give you more energy. It’s going to help your cognitive function. It will help you achieve optimal performance, but you just have to do it in the right doses. Now the last one is deep work. I’ve talked about this on the podcast several times, but setting aside time for deep work.

Whatever you can set aside. So you probably have your goals written down somewhere. The goal for deep work would be up to four hours per day. That’s like the ultimate, just deep work focused on whatever that is, business growth, maybe it’s a specific marketing strategy until that goal is achieved. But not everybody has like a four hour time block.

So it’s going to be whatever that you can do. So if that’s one hour, two hours, three hours, it’s a deep work session where you are completely locked in on the task. There’s no notifications, there’s no phone, there’s no email checking. There’s nothing but doing the work. Just doing the work. Again, set aside whatever time you can.

But the reason the deep work helps is because it helps you stay focused and you actually get into this state of flow. You’re able to realize what it’s like to actually concentrate and work on something specific for a very long time. And this deep work habit has been huge for me in the ability to achieve things, but also in maintaining optimal performance.

Because like I mentioned towards the beginning, I’ve worked so hard as an entrepreneur that I end up brain dead by the end of the day. So I can’t even talk to my wife or play with my kids in any meaningful way. That’s where the deep work has really helped me. Because if, let’s just say I had two hours today to do deep work, I’m going to lock in on my most important tasks, I’m going to be really focused for those two hours, I’m going to knock those things out.

Then I can come out of that mode and I can do other things that aren’t as mentally demanding. And so that way I know I’m focused, I’m getting things done that I want to, but then I can come out, do a little bit lighter work, check the email, all those kinds of things, things that aren’t as mentally demanding.

And that has really helped me maintain my mental energy throughout the day, which is a major part of really optimal performance. Because what I want, even though I exercise a lot and I’ve been in a fitness world for a long time, I’m not trying to achieve some sort of marathon time or race goal or amount of weight squatted.

Those are things I had done for a long time. But now I’m just trying to maintain optimal performance across a wide spectrum. That’s it. I want high mental energy throughout the day. I want to maintain that mental energy and just overall energy after work with my family, be able to play with my kids, be able to have those meaningful conversations with my wife.

So those are all the things that I do and want to be able to do each and every single day. And I’ve been doing, really paying attention to the things that I mentioned in this podcast. I’m sleeping well, I’m regulating my blood sugar well by the meals that I’m choosing to eat and how they’re structured.

I’m hydrating, I have decent fitness sessions that aren’t detracting, and I’m doing deep work. When I’m doing all of those things, I do feel like I’m just in this 80 to 85% optimal performance flow and perpetuity. And it’s awesome. And when I get out of that, it sucks. I can pretty much maintain doing those things, but it takes building them into a habit.

And habits are very hard to build. So maybe don’t try and do every single one of these things all at once if you don’t have any of these habits. Just focus on one. But focusing on none is not an option. You need to try harder.