High Performance
A recent work trip down to the F1 Grand Prix in Melbourne got me into the sport again for the first time since I was a teenager.
The Netflix series Drive to Survive and an active meme community on Reddit certainly helps as well.
And it’s made me think about high performance and what that means in my context.
I’ll start by talking a bit about what it is I like about F1 as a sport and then consider this idea of high performance and the ways I can be more of a high performance journalist and writer.
Motorsport sets itself apart through the equipment which takes a highly skilled individual to use at all, let alone well.
The first time I really learned to appreciate this was when Richard Hammond tried to drive an F1 car for Top Gear.
His aim was to get two laps out of the car and it was a struggle at first. Hammond had to work himself up among high powered open-wheeled cars and then when he finally got into the F1 car he couldn’t get it moving at first.
This is a guy whose career has involved driving exotic sports cars around racing tracks. Sure, he’s not racing but his aim wasn’t to race this thing against anyone else – just to get the thing around a small track twice.
Compare that to soccer which is quite straightforward: put ball in goal. Unlike driving an F1 car around a track, kicking a soccer ball into an open goal is no great feat.
What makes high level soccer, as with most ball sports, interesting isn’t the equipment but the competition.
Elite performance in F1 is a concept that extends beyond just the athletes (the drivers) and to the vehicles they’re driving which are engineered to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of their components while still ensuring the safety of the driver in the highly likely event of a crash.
It’s all about the one-percenters; small things with compounding effects.
Personally, I’m not looking for an overhaul here – that’s kind of impossible anyway – I just need to get little bits of extra performance where possible.
Humans aren’t machines and any exploration of high performance needs to account for the fact that we have emotional and spiritual needs as much as physical ones.
So what I want to figure out is what high performance looks like for me as a journalist and writer. Where can I find an extra
Let’s start with the easy stuff, the physical needs: sleep, food, and exercise are the main ones here.
Lately I’ve been feeling tired which I know is because I’m up late most nights watching things or playing video games.
I can see this quantified in the health app on my iPhone which I’m pretty sure uses watch and activity data to tell me that over the last week I’ve averaged just 6 hours and 11 minutes asleep.
Now already I think I’ve found a way to improve this.
My current Monday-Friday sleep schedule is, sadly, aspirational. In reality, I tend to set a series of alarms until I get up just before work.
I can see this in the data because it crudely uses my ‘sleep schedule’ as a measure and while it knows that I didn’t go to bed on time the night before, it doesn’t recognise my hour-long snooze-fest as actual sleep. Honestly, it’s not good quality sleep anyway.
So with a few button presses, I should get part of an extra hour’s sleep tomorrow.
That’s one small thing that I’m hoping can help make a difference in how I perform at work and with my personal writing goals.
I won’t write more out with the same reasoning, but I’m thinking I need to think about my brain in the way an athlete thinks about their body.
After all, my work is mental and its quality is thus affected by the quality of my mental state. Being tired, therefore, deteriorates that, as do distractions. Focus and flow is the aim here and it takes a certain dedication to achieve, or just necessity as is the case when you’re steering an immensely powerful and light car around a track at high speed.
Being on a tight deadline is one of the best parts about being a journalist because you don’t have time to faff about and procrastinate writing blog posts – you just have to get the job done.
This is something I lack in my writing and on Wednesdays like this when I have space to work on other projects and not just bash out stories.
Pressure, that’s the word. The pressure of a deadline or a race, or a game forces focus.
Maybe in the absence of pressure it’s about sustaining effort over a period of time, taking time to experiment, be creative, and work on a more conscious focus.
Often I’ve put pressure on myself as a way to mitigate against future stress or disappointment. I must work on a piece of fiction writing now or else I won’t get to where I want to be.
Sometimes though I build in expectations from myself and especially other people which are certainly not articulated and are maybe entirely non-existent. That’s less healthy and perhaps I need to take an attitude that the absence of pressure is actually an opportunity for creativity and experimentation, like this time I’m using now to write and post a blog.
Anyway, I’ve got lots of work to do for myself, but I’m sure I’ll get there. Got to keep at it. Sustained effort over time.