Care about how the work is done
High performance can manifest itself in different ways and it’s important to recognize that. But one thing that all high performers I know do is to approach their work with a kind of metacognition: They care deeply not just about doing the work but how it’s done. They obsess about efficiency — from small details (keyboard shortcuts, editor configuration, etc.) to general strategies (how to structure their day, how to minimize distractions, knowing when they’re at peak performance, etc.). They understand the power of iteration and that you can only get better if you constantly examine and revise your own work. Great engineers, for example, have a habit of reviewing their own PRs because it gives them a top-down view of their output and a chance to see whether they could’ve solved the problem differently.
Importantly, high performers take a long-term view in their pursuit of efficiency. They view their work as a craft to be refined over years, not something that has a definitive end state. This long-term orientation means they tend to strike a better balance between exploration and exploitation. Sometimes it makes sense to take the longer route because you get to learn a new technique that will speed you up in the future. The dividends of such calibrated detours often materialize more quickly than people think, but the pressure to use what you already know to ship something now can be immense.
People often brush the kinds of details high performers care about aside as not mattering in the bigger scheme of things. I’d argue these people don’t understand how high performance comes about. It’s the accumulation of a hundred micro optimizations that add up logarithmically. Doing any one thing won’t make a difference on its own, but combined they compound and get you from 70th to 99th percentile. Better keyboard shortcuts and a clean desk for example won’t make you magically produce outstanding work but they reduce context switching and keep you in flow state, which is essential to solving hard problems.
Because people tend to misunderstand how high performance is achieved, its markers are also not tested for during interviews. Looking at things like typing speed and how quickly someone moves between their editor and browser is often ignored in interviews, but in my experience, can give useful signal. Plus the nice thing about these aspects is that you can glean them passively by observation. No need to come up with tricky questions to uncover them.
So, if you care about performing at the highest level, analyze your own output and pay careful attention to how you do things. And just to state the obvious: Don’t mistake the map for the territory. Obsessing about efficiency and self-improvement are markers of high performance but they are not the end goals. Know what you want to achieve first, then work on getting there faster.
Notes:
Obsessing about efficiency is something that high-performing knowledge workers have in common with top athletes. Details matter. Practice and constant tweaking get you there. But it happens to be a lot harder to recognize that this is true for knowledge work compared to sports. I suspect this might be because performance is harder to measure and there is no direct, one-to-one competition involved. But while “winning” may not be as clearly defined for knowledge work, approaching it with a similar rigor as an athlete can still lead to dramatically different outcomes over the course of a career — regardless of whether measured in wealth, happiness, impact or whatever else matters to you.
