Selfmastered

Frank Slootman is a Dutch executive that has managed to IPO three companies in just a mere 15 years. In this video, I'm going to share his performance execution framework that you can immediately apply to your own life to be at least 10x more productive. Enjoy.

Too many people focus on being smart, while not many focus on how to avoid being stupid in the first place. In this video, I discuss the 7 most common pitfalls everybody falls into when deciding so that you never fall for them again.

At the end of August 2021, I spent 11 days walking an average of 33 km (20 miles) under the scorching sun. I climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and slept in the open trying to reach Santiago de Compostela, where the shrine of apostle St. James is located.

The lessons I learned helped me re-evaluate my own framework for peak performance.

A few years ago I co-invested in a super-smart founder that soon started to have performance problems that compromised his business. In this video, I discuss how I helped him transform from being a C player to an A player with a simple tool.

In this video, I discuss the mental model from which all high performance stems. Without understanding it and making the right choice at every crossroads, operating at peak performance is impossible.

The key skill nobody likes to talk about is the missing piece that most entrepreneurs lack. Those who master it, inevitably reap the rewards of their execution. What is it? Patience. There is ALWAYS a lag between performance and results that must be endured if we want to be successful.

I made my debut in the VC world in 2015. So far I've had the chance to review hundreds of business plans, talk to dozens of entrepreneurs and invest in 40 startups (as a VC or a BA). Even if I could have had easy access to smart money, I decided to avoid it. Here's why:

A common misconception about peak performance is that high IQ professionals are invariably high performers. This couldn't be further from the truth, as they can easily suffer from a pernicious habit of mind that prevents them from maximizing their cognitive performance. Let's review it.

The fastest way to wreck your life is to have insanely high expectations.  Unchecked, these expectations can serve as invisible shackles that prevent you from growing personally and professionally. The way to go is to achieve a healthy balance between your expectations and your aspirations.

The same psychological principle that prevents an entrepreneur from getting laid also prevents him from making sales: a lack of confidence in his abilities. Lacking sales (and sex) is a belief problem, not an execution (most people know how to sell - and get laid - when they honestly, intimately, believe in what they are selling. Learn how to fix the problem at the core with us.

If you want actionable information that helps you improve, never ask for feedback. Research proves that people received more effective input from third parties when they asked for advice rather than feedback. Research even found that feedback often has no (or even a negative) impact on our performance. In this video, I discuss why you should collect feedback from your tools (like a personal Dashboard), but ask for advice from other people instead.

Success (= results) is an inevitability when high performance is sustained for long enough. Oftentimes, though, entrepreneurs take the slow path to success by repeatedly making three easily avoidable mistakes.

It is very much possible to double your business while working less. Due to the universal fact that only things tend towards disorder, it is inevitable that after just a few short months in business you are wasting time and energy on things that don't matter. By eliminating those wastes of time and doubling down on the unique leverage points of your business, you can double your business in less than 3 months. We've done that time and time again at Selfmastered, after all.

In this video, I discuss five reasons why TO-DO Lists don't work anymore, and I provide an alternative solution. I argue that if we genuinely want to be effective when keeping track of our daily obligations, we need to substitute TO-DO Lists with a more sophisticated tool that can provide clarity on the road ahead and nudge us into peak performance every day.

In this video, I share four proven strategies to de-load, de-stress and recover from burnout while still working full-time. Since modern knowledge workers are subject to huge amounts of stress (that can quickly develop into burnout when mismanaged), learning how to de-stress every day is paramount to achieve and sustain peak performance in the long run.

One of the key differences between low and top performers is the quality of their decision-making. In this video, I discuss 5 steps to good decision-making that have served me well in life & business throughout the years. You can't miss out on this advanced thinking protocol, especially if you are in the business of making irreversible decisions often.

The best mindset to cultivate isn't a "growth mindset", in Carol Dweck's terminology, but an "Antifragile" mindset. This mindset will allow you to use all circumstances to your advantage and rapidly evolve into a laser-focused top-performing entrepreneur that thrives under the same pressure that makes others crumble. In this video, I discuss why improving the mechanics of our mind should follow the same rules that we apply to all systems of our lives: going from Fragility to Robustness to Antifragility.

Mainstream advice suggests that radical transformation is inevitable in the long run if we become  1% better every day. In this video, I explain why this idea, albeit interesting, doesn't apply to knowledge workers. I'll also leverage Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on flow to discuss the optimal target you should aim for every day if you want to truly transform the way you live and work.

Five years of researching the art & science of how to become a high performer have led us to create the "Selfmastered Evolution Program", which has helped hundreds around the world reliably transform their performance in the workplace. Since high performers can be up to 800% more productive (according to McKinsey), becoming a top performer is an absolute prerequisite to winning in the digital age.

One of the best-kept secrets within the productivity industry is that time management doesn't work. Especially in our hectic, distraction-fueled digital age. The best strategy to maximize your impact while working less is to manage your schedule based on your own biorhythms and the true nature of your work. Time management, in the grand scheme of things, is a useless skill to cultivate.

One of the most frequently asked questions in the productivity space is "Does the Pomodoro Technique actually work?". The answer is no. In fact, it is counterproductive if you want to harness the full potential of your mind. In this video we uncover why most of the mainstream productivity advice is misguided or wrong, and what is the best way of *actually* getting real results on attention spent.

Since human emotions follow mechanics, we can architect our cognition and environment to keep raw irrational emotions under control. This is one of the core competencies of top performers, especially in the higher echelons of business. Unless you master your emotions, you'll never learn to achieve & sustain peak performance - for real and forever.
This video is all about how to manage your emotions, how to architect your cognition and environment, how to keep low emotional variance, why emotional management is more important than IQ, what is "emotional nirvana", how to be content in the present and confident in the future.

The ability to think like a top performer isn't something you are born with, but rather something you develop over time. You can, without the shadow of a doubt, upgrade your performance and thus accelerate your career if you upgrade the "mental environment" in which your thoughts happen.

High-impact work is what differentiates low and top performers. In this video, I provide a simple framework you can use to audit any task you are normally involved with to make sure it fits the definition of "high-impact work", and thus start gaining momentum at an accelerated pace. This is crucial to learn because high-impact work is one of the core competencies of top performers.

Learning how to leverage your beliefs (and resolve cognitive dissonances in your favor) is a crucial habit of mind that all successful entrepreneurs have. In fact, there's little you can achieve in life or business if you don't understand and apply your ability to transform the Territory you operate in based on the Map you harbor in your mind.

Stop trying to become more productive because it will never work in the long term. Until you acknowledge that, as a human being, you are a complex system that is dependent on a diversity of factors to be consistently productive, you won't transform your productivity for good. No Notion dashboard, new mental model or productivity hack can deny that only a systematic approach towards personal performance optimization can guarantee sustained optimal results in the long term (and skyrocket your productivity, as a by-product).