High Performance Review

High Performance: Lessons From From The Best On Becoming Your Best

By Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes

How do Olympic medal-winning athletes turbo-charge their motivation?
How do multi-millionaire founders develop the habits of champions?
And how do Premier League football coaches lead their teams to victory?

High Performance reveals the methods the world’s most remarkable athletes, coaches and entrepreneurs use to excel.

From taking responsibility for your situation to finding your ‘trademark behaviours’, thinking flexibly to crafting a high performance culture, Jake Humphrey and Professor Damian Hughes identify the eight crucial steps to becoming the best ‘you’ possible.

Along the way, they draw on cutting-edge research to explain why these methods work – and how we can all use them. Anyone can learn the secrets of high performance.

Summary from Goodreads.

Wow. I know some people say that you come to things when it is the right time in your life, but boy do I wish that I had found either this book or the podcast earlier.

High Performance is a cumulation of knowledge that Humphrey and Hughes have accumulated from the time that they have spent doing their podcast: High Performance. It is intended to help you understand exactly what all of the individuals that they have has on the podcast all mean, even if they have different ways to explain it. Now, you may be wondering ‘why would I buy this book when I could just listen to the podcast?’. I would honestly say that listening to the podcast and having this book is actually the best combination. As of the time I am writing this review (March 20th 2023), they have released 182 episodes of the podcast that are around an hour long each, with around the same amount of mini talks that are between 7 – 15 minutes. While the book does not have every guest as an example, I found it to be a more digestible way to understand some core concepts that anyone who achieves at the top of their chosen field. The podcast is a great thing to have on in the background when cooking or on your commute to work to listen to individual experiences and how they personally think what high performance is.

The book is broken down into 8 chapters that fall into one of three categories. High Performance Mindset; High Performance Behaviour; and High Performance Teams. Each of these sections really get down to the basics of what makes some people perform at high levels than others. High performance is never just about one aspect, whether it be natural talent, luck, timing or hard work. High performance is and attitude and a lifestyle that those at the top live their entire life with, which also explains why they always seem to be achieving in multiple things at once.

One thing that I loved about this book is that thought they regularly give references to their podcast, but more importantly other quotations and case studies outside of their own podcast. They number each of theses quotations and cases studies and provide a reference list at the back of the book, with a web address or book that it came from. This makes it easy to go into deep further research to increase you understanding, especially if what they were quoting was a case study.

I could not recommend this book enough to anyone! I will regularly reread this to keep myself on the right track to being my best and in know that the lessons / tips in here will help me along the way.

5/5

Check it out on Goodreads here.

Purchase it on Amazon here.