Reliable Access to the Extraordinary

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. […] Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” — Shakespeare, Macbeth

Our everyday, ordinary way of being in life is what all of us experience day to day to day.

We wake up in the morning, do what we need to get ready for the day and quickly settle into our daily activities. There are tasks to be done, things to be taken care of, and challenges to deal with and — preferably — overcome. At some point we settle for the night, sleep, and the following morning the cycle begins anew.

We propose that, for most of these times, what we call living could be best described as Going through the Motions of life. Think of it like being on autopilot.

Remember the last time you were driving a familiar route — maybe on your way to work or to the grocery store. You start your drive, and at some point you begin to “space out” (and your DMN activates). A while after, you suddenly “wake up”, startled, questioning yourself: “Who was driving just now??”

We’d like you to consider that that is how we mostly go through life — and, by extension or by inclusion, how we go about our work. Our skills, our familiar patterns, and familiar ways of dealing with things run in a semi-automatic fashion.

But, from time to time, we experience bouts of peak performance — what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “Flow”. Consider also that we live a life where our relationship to these States of Consciousness is that they obviously only happen seldomly, or terribly infrequently.

What we are proposing in this document, in Performance Culture, is that these two types of experiences can be distinguished as, what we call, the World of Ordinary and the World of Extraordinary (or Possibility, or Performance).

There exists true, Reliable Access to shift ourselves from our everyday common dwelling in the World of Ordinary directly into the World of Extraordinary.

There are two worlds that human beings operate in: the ordinary and the extraordinary. The goal of defining high performance is to equip you with the tools necessary to leave the world of the ordinary and gain reliable access to the extraordinary.

Please know that it is very common for fundamental new concepts to be first perceived as threats to one’s existing worldview, and only later as something worth engaging with. To maximize what you can get out of this material, we encourage you to be open to the possibility that what we are outlining here might actually work — even for you!

Embrace what’s possible with us, even if it introduces a degree of discomfort. In fact, discomfort is a sign that you are truly stretching. We often refer to comfort as the Strategies we Use to Get By with the Way we Wound up Being — and those strategies keep us in the ordinary space.

It is common to revert to old habits when attempting to create a moment of performance inflection. When you find yourself prioritizing what is “reasonable” over seizing this opportunity, we strongly suggest you break that pattern and adopt the Try it On distinction.