The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Unmistakable Classic: How to Become a BulletProof Performer with Noa Kageyama

In this unmistakable classic we revisit our interview with Julliard faculty member, violinist and performance psychologist, Noa Kageyama. We discuss how to apply principles of peak performance psychology from the world of music to every area of your life.

A Look into the Influences of Suzuki Violin in Noa's Life
Why You Can Only See Dots Connecting in Hindsight
The Reality of What It Takes to Get Good at Something
Why So Many Small Ideas Are the Foundation for Big Things
The Role That Intense Curiosity Plays in Your Success
Why There's an Element of Performance in Everything You Do
The Role That Learning and Practice Plays in Peak Performance
Why You Can't Learn Effectively without Taking Action
Making Small Adjustments and Tweaks to Get Closer to Your Goal
How the Curse of Instant Results Holds You Back
Why You have to Be OK with Being on the Journey
Making a Mindset Shift to Doing Things for Intrinsic Value
An Eye-Opening Look at the Master's Path
Why There Is No Final Destination
Looking at the Times in Your Past When You Were Really Engaged
Why You Must Learn to Simplify Very Difficult Concepts
Identifying and Developing the Key Mental Skills for Peak Performance
Using the Past to Act Courageously in the Moment
How Pushing Your Comfort Zone Will Cause You to Exceed Your Expectations
Cultivating a Framework for Accelerating Your Progress
Leveraging the Influences of Others to Create Your Artistic DNA

Dr. Noa Kageyama is a performance psychologist, Juilliard graduate, and is on the faculty of both Juilliard and the New World Symphony. He teaches musicians how to do their best under pressure. He is a wee bit obsessed with computers, technology, and the internet (and all things Apple). If you liked this article, would you share it with your friends? Just click hereto post it to Twitter.

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Duration:: 1h 7m
Broadcast on:: 09 May 2014
Audio Format:: other

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In this unmistakable classic, we revisit our interview with Juilliard faculty member, violinist and peak performance psychologist Noah Kageyama and we discuss how to apply principles of peak performance psychology from the world of music to every area of your life. Noah, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. So I'm going to ask you my very first question that I ask everybody and that is can you give us a bit of background on yourself, your story and how that has brought you to doing what you're doing over at the Bulletproof Musician? Sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, the interesting thing about the story is it actually starts back when I was about two years old. I started playing the violin when I was two and a half. Apparently it was my idea. I don't remember this, but my parents say it was my idea. And you know, I took to it relatively quickly. When I was in kindergarten, my mom took me out of kindergarten and actually we flew over into Japan, the city called Matsumoto to study with a fellow named Dr. Suzuki who came up with the Suzuki method. That led to lessons all over the place. At one point in middle school, I was driving, you know, as a family, we were taking these 16-hour road trips, round trip to Chicago from Central Ohio to study with these teachers. And in high school, I was flying in New York City on the weekends to do the Juilliard-Bricow program. And so, you know, I followed the path to Conservatory like most other musicians do and it was a serious business and had to give up and make lots of sacrifices. And then things started to diverge a bit when I got to college, but I didn't see that at the time. It's only in hindsight that I see this diversion, but basically I got to college. First order of business, I said, you know, I have to figure out how to get out of orchestra. Couldn't take playing in orchestra. I didn't want to take music history, music theory, ear training. Basically, I didn't want to take any of the music classes. I just wanted to take lessons and practice and be left to my own devices. And that doesn't work when you're in a music program. But I found a loophole. You know, I can be really determined what I want to be. So I found a loophole. I exploited the loophole and it ended up getting out of all that stuff and graduated with a psych degree. And I actually didn't have any interest in psychology. I fell asleep in most of my classes. I got bees and seas and I just did it to get out of orchestra. So then I went to Juilliard, which was always a plan, you know, to be a soloist and travel the world and all that, even though I actually didn't realize I didn't like traveling. So I ended up at Juilliard and I took this class called Performance Enhancement. It was taught by a former Green Beret and an Olympic sports psychologist. And this was, this is a class that really changed everything for me, because I didn't realize there was such a field of sports psychology, didn't realize there was an entire literature devoted to studying what allows some people to perform at the top of their abilities when it actually counts. And why is it that some people crash and burn when it really matters? And this class just taught me a whole set of skills I'd never come across before. And it really made a big difference in my own performing. And I saw this make a huge difference in my fellow classmates performing. And so I wanted to learn more about it. And when I talked to the sports psychologists, he was kind of joking, but he said, "Well, you know, go and get your PhD in psychology and then we'll talk." So I ended up leaving Juilliard when I was finished or leaving New York City when I finished up at Juilliard. And I went to Indiana University and got my PhD in psychology. One thing led to another and now I'm back at Juilliard teaching and doing this thing that in a million years they never ever would have been able to dream up. So a lot of really cool parts of your story and I knew there would be a lot to dig into here. And I wouldn't take a lot of steps back to the very, very early part of this and it might date you to try and get you to remember this. But one of the things that interests me, like right when you went to Japan, I knew you were going to say the word Suzuki because most kids who start violin at such a young age, you hear the word Suzuki violin, a couple of questions that come from this early part of your background for me. When you look at somebody like Suzuki and you study it and you're observing somebody who is truly a master of their craft. And I'm wondering what are the lessons and the influences that you've brought forward throughout the rest of your life from that experience. And the other component of this, and you and I were just talking about this earlier, is this idea of performance. And I feel like regardless of whatever our careers are today, there's an element of performance that goes into what we do. Not performance in terms of quality performance, artistic ability in terms of performance. I'd love for you to talk about how those things influence us in the world today and the impact and what the implications are for people who are listening. Yeah, well, for me, the thing that I learned most back then was, well, back then I learned how much work it takes to actually be good at something. And looking back on it, what I really admire about Dr. Suzuki and anybody who creates something that didn't exist and turns it into a huge movement, I think oftentimes these things start really small. They're not these grand, huge plans that you envision five years and 10 years out. No, it starts really small with these people who, something gets under their skin, like something just not right about the world that they live in. And they, over time, either follow this curiosity or kind of pick at it or what have you. But they start trying to change the world that they live in in some small, meaningful way that matters to them and they can't not do it because it just, they see the way that the world should be. And it's like, you know, I can't leave well enough alone. So, you know, one thing leads to another and it turns into this huge world-changing movement that Dr. Suzuki started, but, you know, it starts as a small thing. If you read a story, I mean, it wasn't anything huge. She didn't have these grand plans and just kind of one thing leads to another. And I think that ties into the whole, I don't really want to use the word passion because that's a word that kind of hurts me, but, you know, frustrations or curiosities. I think, like I said, it takes a lot of work to be great at something and to do really great work, it just takes a lot of work. So unless it's something that really gets under your skin like that or becomes something that you're intensely curious about, I just don't think we have what it takes to put that kind of time, energy, investments into whatever it is that we're pursuing. And so I don't know if that directly answers your question or not. Yeah, it does. You know, there's a couple of things that come to mind for me and I love that you brought up the idea that it starts as something small. And I've said this over and over again, I said, you know, we are very resistant to our small ideas because we don't think they matter, but often they're the spark for a lot of the bigger things. And I think, you know, it's interesting because you brought up this idea of, you know, being irked enough to want to follow that thread down a fairly long trail. But at the same time, I think it's this constant balancing act of going in indulging your curiosity, something that I think we lose as we get older, we don't tend to be as, you know, like exploratory about things. But you know, also, I think it's the willingness to explore a bunch of different things that allows you to stumble up on that small idea that might lead to something bigger. I mean, I started something like six or seven failed blogs before anything really kind of started to move. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, if we don't have that willingness, like you said, to fail and to try new things and to learn from it, we're going to give up too soon. We're going to quit too early. So the other question that I want to dig deeper is the second one, which I realized as a somewhat esoteric question, about bringing this element of performance into what we do in our careers, in our lives, in our online brands, I'm curious, you know, how can we take lessons from the world of performance arts and bring them into what we do as content creators, entrepreneurs, and everything else. Like, you know, kind of like Eric Wall talked about blending sort of this idea of this theatrical multimedia experience with what we do as business owners. Well, someone once said that performance is performance is performance. And to me, it also kind of harkens back to Dan Pink's recent book on, you know, everything, everyone, no matter what is it, they do. Some form of fashion involved in sales. I think most, if not all of us, at some point in our day or in our week or in our career, we're involved in performance. We're trying to convince somebody of something, even when we speak up in a meeting, to some degree, that's a performance. We could totally say something idiotic, fall on our face, and fail to make an impression on the president or the VP or the board or what have you. I mean, I think we're constantly in a position where, even if it's, you know, a weekend warrior, golf league kind of thing, the ability to perform up to your potential, up to your abilities when you need to, when it actually counts, is I think something that we just don't get any training in. We're just assumed that we'll learn it at some point, or actually I think the way things usually tend to be is people assume that you either have that kind of thing within you or you don't. And the sad thing, you see in music and even in other areas, is that when someone gets it in their head that, "Oh, I'm just not that kind of person or I don't have it in me," they tend to give up and they don't learn the skills that others have really learned over the course of time, a lot of performers in the world of sports, as well as music have to learn these things, and they can totally get there. It's just that, again, when you give up this soon or you're getting your head that you're not that kind of person, you never get there. Yeah, well, I mean, I shared this example before, like, I suffer from complete athletic ineptitude and I never thought in a million years of all the sports I would pick up surfing would be the one and now I've surfed for five years, and I'm not Kelly Slater, but I can surf. And it kind of blows my mind that a complete lack of coordination, and I've just through sheer practice, I've gotten to that point, you know, the learning part is something I would love to dissect in a bit more detail, and maybe this might make sense later on when we get into the core of what it is you do, which is peak performance psychology, but I mean, how do we make our learning more effective when we are learning, like even somebody listening to this podcast, in one way, this is a form of learning for them, and nowadays, the sheer volume of information online makes it. On the one hand, it's like, you know, you've been handed back your box of crayons. On the other, it's like, okay, there are so many colors that what I'm about to make as a mess. Right, right. So what I'm curious about is how we get the most out of our learning efforts. Well, you know, I'm reminded of a quote, and I came for the life of me, I remember who said this and I'm going to butcher the quote here in a moment, but something to the fact of, you know, the point of education is not knowledge, the point of education is action, and I think learning in a real practical, applied sort of way is difficult unless we actually take action. I mean, you can think about writing a blog or creating a blog or a podcast all you want, but unless you actually start doing it, you're not really going to learn in the most effective possible way. Once we start taking action, of course, the difficulty that we run into with learning is, at least in terms of skill development, is we often don't think about what it is that we were going for in the first place. We don't have a goal in mind or specific enough goal. We just want to, you know, hit the golf ball more effectively or we want to win a tennis match. We don't think about what specifically do I want to do when I'm practicing this topspin serve to get the ball to arc like I wanted to over the net and into this part of the service box. If we don't have a specific enough goal to target when we go for it and we try to analyze the feedback that we get from the world about whether we succeeded or not, it's kind of tough to evaluate if we succeeded or not. Because if your goal is just to get the ball in, that's okay, I guess is a goal, but it's much more effectively say, you know, I want the ball to go over here in this area. And then we can evaluate, okay, it didn't go over in this area, it went into this area instead. And then we can trace it back to, okay, well, what did I do that successfully got the ball into this area that I didn't want it to go to? What can I tweak? What can I adjust specifically with my technique or with my strategy to then get the ball to go into this other area that I originally targeted? So even whether it's creating a blog or creating a presentation, to clear an idea we can generate in advance of exactly what we want things to look like, the more effectively we can then figure out how close we came to what we wanted, and then what strategies or what tactics we can use to adjust and to tweak things so that we get closer to what we originally wanted. Well, I mean, to me, it's this whole idea of one small adjustment makes a world of difference. You know, I can easily tie this back to surfing because I remember when I first started, you know, every time I'd go for a wave, like, sometimes I would make it and other times I would fall, and then it suddenly occurred to me, I said, oh, wow, like if you bend your knees, you're much less likely to fall. A tiny little thing, especially the steeper the wave, you know, because you want to be lower to the ground so that you don't fall, then you actually make it every time. And of course, you know, one, you have to be willing to fall because even five years later I still fall plenty, plenty of times when I don't make it. And I think the other thing, as I'm listening to you think about this, just to talk about this, I think that the other thing that causes people to give up is their expectation for their ability to do something is just completely out of whack, right? It would be like me coming and hanging out with you at Juilliard for an hour and saying, you know, now I want to go play a concert with you. And wondering why I'm not good. Right. There's a, there's a terrific book called Mastery. There's actually two terrific books called Mastery. Actually. Yes. One's by Robert Green. The other's by a fellow named George Leonard. And George Leonard's book on Mastery has to do with this notion that, and it was written quite a long time ago, but even still it talked about how we want instant results. And I think that's only continuing to be the case, you know, as we can get things to be, we can stream things online, we can get music immediately, we have, we don't have to wait as long as we need to. I mean, I go to Wendy's and I'm impressed at how darn quickly they're able to get me my, you know, my grilled chicken burger thing. But true mastery doesn't happen like that, as, as you know, as you know, and as most people realize on some level, but you know, we have things like exercise in a bottle. We have pills. We have all these things that are supposed to deliver instant results yet. True mastery, whatever our craft is, unfortunately, it's just going to take time. And if people can appreciate that and get to the point where what matters to them more is being on the path rather than whether they eventually get to a certain milestone on the path or not, that, for me, and for a lot of musicians that I've worked with, really starts changing your perspective. I mean, it even goes to Carol Dweck's work in the book Mindset, where it becomes more about growth and nonstop learning and constant evolving of your skills as opposed to whether you're any good or not or whether you get the acclaim or whether you make X number of dollars or whether you, you know, get this award or not. Okay. I'm so glad you brought this up because this is like probably one of my hot buttons lately. You know, definitely resonate with the work of Carol Dweck, but I think, you know, you brought up something about this idea of being okay with being on the journey or, you know, and people who truly are good at what they do get to the point where they, that is where they operate from. You're not doing everything you do from a place of intrinsic value. That's a radical Mindset's mindset shift for some people, right? Because in a lot of ways, for our whole lives, we've been talked across off checkboxes and try to get a list of accolades of some sort, right? And you come from a field in which I can only imagine that there's probably a fundamental turning point in which people have to shed their ego and, you know, having been a musician I can tell you. Here's one of the reasons you asked me why I didn't pursue the tubal playing thing. I realized the whole reason that I liked it was because it fed my ego. I liked being good at something. I didn't like playing the tuba. I liked the fact that I was principal tuba in all state band. And I was for two years and I was like, wow, for the first time in my life, I'm not just good. I'm really good. And then I realized, you know what, the thing that I enjoy most about this is the actual attention that I get from it, not the actual tuba playing. Right. Well, it's funny because that's the realization I had as well. I mean, I was probably more talented at the violin than anything else in my life. So there's this irony where the thing that I am most gifted and talented at is not actually the thing that I love and want to do for the right reasons. I realized that I was doing it and I continued at it. One, because I loved the opportunity to be in this area where I could continue to grow and continue to tweak and continue to make something better. So I did enjoy that part of it, but fundamentally, I was doing it because I liked being able to be better at somebody, at something. And that wasn't a good enough reason for me to work my butt off in the way that I needed to actually fulfill my potential. And I realized that when I got to Juilliard, you know, I don't love this enough for the right reasons to work my tail off to get to the level that I can. And I knew that I was going to be constantly frustrated at the underachieving I was doing because I just didn't care about it enough in the right way to pull out all the stops. Right. Well, I think what we're talking about is sort of the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. And what I'm curious about, and this is, you know, feel free to answer this in any way you can because I don't expect you to have some concrete answer for this, is making that mindset shift from where we are extrinsically motivated, especially in the online world, where everybody is always up to something more epic than we are, to doing what we do for intrinsic value, I mean, do you, have you, like, you've coached musicians, I'm guessing and worked with them, I mean, as artists, because every one of us, like you said, is an artist on some level. How do we make that transition? You know, I can only speak to my own experience with this, and, you know, I didn't read this mastery book until I was in grad school here at Juilliard. And when I did, I was so inspired by George Leonard's description of what the master's path looks like, that I was like, I want that, like, I want to be on that, whatever that would be, like, I want that to be where it is that I am, and I want that to be what it is that I pursue. And I don't know what domain it's going to be in, but that's what it is that I want. And so, for me, when I saw what that looks like, and it was an inspiring place to be, it shifted away from wanting to be better than other people, and wanting to win this award or get this kind of attention, I just saw that as, you know, that's what I want my life to look like. And so I would recommend, if you haven't read this book, I would recommend reading it. I'd encourage listeners to read it. And for a lot of people, that might be all it takes to realize, because what he does is he compares the master with a few other types, which we can all recognize parts of that in ourselves. You know, one of them is the obsessive, one of them is the hacker, one of them is the dabbler, but all these different types, the thing they have in common is they're not truly devoted to learning and lifelong learning and never-ending learning and continuing to be satisfied with just getting better. And so for me, I think whatever it is that we do, if we could focus more on, you know, I just want to get better today at this thing that I care about, that helps us shift away from comparing ourselves with others or wondering when we're going to get to some point, because the other thing about the master's path is you never get there, you never get to absolute mastery. I mean, you talk to martial artists who practice for years and it's not like you get to some place like, oh, you know what, I don't have to learn anything anymore. This is it. I've gotten to that destination. I mean, there is no final destination. We die, you know, before we get there. Yeah, I absolutely love that. It's funny. I can recognize parts of what you said in a lot of myself in different areas, and I think this idea of constantly getting better, and I mentioned in a recent interview, I said, you know, I listened to every one of our interviews once during the editing and twice once it's been published, and the only reason I do it is so I can go back and I can figure out what to do better. And it's always the next one is the iteration, is an iteration of the previous one, and you're, I think that you never reach a point of satisfaction or this. I think that there's this myth of the, what I've called the "I've Made It" moment. Somebody asked me, you know, a guy in another podcast asking me, he's like, "Shrini, have you ever had an "I've Made It" moment?" And he caught me off guard for a moment, and I thought, you know, truth is, I said, "John, I don't think there's such thing. I think it's a fallacy that people who think they haven't made it believe exists, and when they get to that moment that if they thought was going to be there, I've made it moment, they realize that it's all bullshit." Absolutely. Yeah. And the founder of Subway was talking about a similar thing, you know, when he realized they had more subways than there were McDonald's, he said it wasn't this fist-pumping, jumping up and down, shouting, you know, into the sky kind of moments, like, "Oh, all righty," and then you move on. You do the next thing, because I think once you get to a certain point, I mean, that's when you realize, "Oh, you know, there's more," and it's exciting, it's like, "Oh, you know, wow, sometimes it's exciting, but sometimes it's also, it's like, "Man, I can't believe I couldn't see this before," and you want, you want to do it. You want to do more. You want to evolve. I think once you get on that path, it's hard to get off anymore, because it's almost addictive, perhaps, in a good sort of way. I think what it is is that we're constantly evolving, right? Like, I would imagine that you don't pick up a violin and say, "You know what, I'm as good as I'm ever going to get," like, you know that you could get better. Absolutely. So, yeah. Well, let's, so one more question about sort of the earlier part of your background that brings us up to the Bulletproof Musician, and then we'll start getting into kind of how I found you and all of the stuff I really want to dig into. What's interesting to me is that you took all these, you know, you brought in your background as a performance artist, then you, you know, blended it with psychology, then you identified somewhere, you saw sort of a loophole, and some of you combined all these really bizarre backgrounds together to create a career that you couldn't have predicted. Much like myself. I mean, we were talking about this earlier. There's no way you could have predicted that I was going to end up here. And what I'm curious about is how we can look at our past and look at kind of where the opportunities are for us to really, for lack of a less eloquent question, create a job that we absolutely love or a life and an experience that we absolutely love. Well, you know, I'm going to reference Steve Jobs, famed Stanford commencement address, because, you know, the thing that resonated with me about that is, you know, I look back, like he says, you connect the dots, and he's right, like, even with the technology piece of it, with the blog, you know, kind of a geek about computers, and I started the blog because it's kind of an excuse to mess around with computers, so my wife wouldn't, you know, wonder what I was doing on the computer all the time. And, you know, I've had to hire people to do some work, but for the most part, I do it on myself, and I'm in the middle of revamping it, and, you know, I'm constantly breaking my computer because I'm trying to get it to do more than it really can handle, and, you know, going back to college when I did the psych thing, like, I should have seen that something was coming along those lines, but there's no possible way at the time all it was was a way to get out of orchestra, but even that should have meant something to me. So, you know, even in psychology, there's something to be gained sometimes by looking backwards, but oftentimes it's more instructive or helpful to just look from the present forward. I mean, to the degree that, you know, looking at the past is helpful, one of the exercises that can be useful is to look at times in your past where you've really been engaged with something, whether it was some kind of problem you wanted to solve or something you just couldn't let go of, and write out that story, and collect stories like that, and look at them together, and sometimes I can help you tie the pieces together in a way that makes sense. But even for me right now, I mean, I'm continuing to evolve and things are changing, and I'm poking my nose into different things, and to be honest, I have no idea where I'm going to be in five years from now. Spark something uncommon this holiday, just the right gift from uncommon goods. The busy holiday season is here, and uncommon goods makes it less stressful with incredible hand pick gifts for everyone on your list, all in one spot, gifts that spark joy, wonder delight, and that it's exactly what I wanted feeling. 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For a 30-day risk-free trial, go to hydro.com and use code RO450 to save $450 on a Hydro Pro rower. That's H-Y-D-R-O-W dot-com code RO450. All that and a whole lot more. It's called "Not Your Answers." It's available anywhere you get your books right now. I'm so glad you said that because I can relate to that whole five years. If you had asked me five years ago, would I be doing this? I would have been like, "No, in fact, I've told you this. When I was in business school, I told people I would never do anything related to the internet. That was my goal." Life is ironic that way. Let's shift gears a little bit. Let's start talking about the Bulletproof musician and kind of where that whole idea came from. What were the seeds for the idea of the Bulletproof musician? To be honest, partly it was my mentor's fault. He continued to tell me, "You got to write a book. You need to write a book. You got to write a book. You got to do these things." I was like, "A book seems overwhelming to me. I read books all the time and they're masterfully done. I can't even wrap my head around writing a book. I'm tired enough as it is with young kids and whatnot. I can't even take that first step. Like I said, computers were cool to me. I wanted an excuse to have some tax write-offs." I was like, "You know this blogging thing seems to be intriguing. Let me do that because I could write a book perhaps in tiny 500 word or 1,000 word chunks." It was kind of an excuse for me to, again, play with computers. Part B was to start along the path of perhaps writing a book. The third part was to continue to educate myself. One of the difficult things is you read studies, you read the literature, and it's really fascinating, really interesting. But researchers are not required to, at the end of their papers, write about next actions or next steps, or how do you implement this into your life? The real challenge for psychologists is to figure, "How do I apply this? How do I help my clients apply this?" The blog was an opportunity for me to force myself to think in those terms. Let me ask you this. This is something that out of personal curiosity because for the most part, academic writing is pretty dry and uninteresting. Yet, you have to make that transition because you're not writing a PhD thesis or you're not writing stuff that's published in scientific journals or psychology here, but you're writing for a blog audience which is totally different. You have to basically make the transition to dumb it down for somebody like me who is still interested in the subject matter, but if you wrote it kind of like an academic paper, wouldn't read it, and I'm curious, how has that balance been and how have you made that transition? Well, to be honest, writing for an academic audience is kind of easy, I think. It's lots of big words and really long sentences. It's kind of fun. I would say that it's actually easier to write in an academic style than to take this nuanced, complex literature and to craft it into a more engaging, and not to dumb it down, but to craft it into a more engaging and understandable, applicable style. There's these great stories about, oh, I forget the name. The name eludes me via the famous G of Jack Welch about how there is this statistician or an account or something in a meeting trying to explain this really difficult concept to Mr. Welch. He said, "Explain this to me like I'm a kinder gardener or a first grader." And this guy said, "I spent my whole career trying to understand this. I can't do that. This guy wasn't working for the company for very long because he wasn't able to understand it well enough to articulate it in a more easily understood way." So to be honest, it's been a journey. If you look at the stuff that I wrote earlier, it was longer, it was more dry, it was long-winded, but over time I think I've, again, it's a skill. I've been doing this for a few years now and it gets easier over time. You find your own voice, like people say, and you find a structure that works for you. So it's not formulaic, but it's a craft, and you get better at it over time. And then talk to me about some of the growth in the early part of it, because it's weird. You're not like a lot of the people in this audience who have a job. You're a professor at a university, a damn good one. And so for you, this is almost like a hobby on the side, so it's an interesting thing to think about, but you've had quite a bit of success with it. I know, because I found you, otherwise you wouldn't be here talking to me. And so what I'm curious about is one, where the name came from, and two, sort of what the growth looked like in the early days, and then we'll start getting into peak performance psychology, which is really what I want to drill that down into. Well, you know, the name came about because I wanted to catch a name. To be honest, there were a few names previous to that of prior blogs, just like you, that failed and went nowhere. I think one was called Performance Anxiety Solutions dot com, which doesn't get much drier. The other one, I don't even remember what the name was. You might have attracted the wrong audience for that one. Right, right. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You're right. Yeah, that's funny. But what I was doing was just reading lots of things, looking for catchy words, trying to kind of mash them together. And I think it was one of my mentor's books. He talked about bulletproof focus or something like that, and I was like, oh, bulletproof. That's cool. You don't usually think about bulletproof in the context of musicianship or performing, but that's exactly what I wanted. I want someone who's, you know, not immune to what's flying around you, but has what it takes to kind of fly through it and get to where you're trying to go anyway. As far as growth goes, again, I wasn't trying to make money from this or do anything. It was really kind of a self-educational tool at the beginning. And so I didn't even really post all that regularly. I think I'd post sometimes once a month, sometimes a couple of times a week, and I didn't even try to get subscribers. I think once I started to get subscribers, it took forever to even get to 100, because I wasn't telling anybody about it. I didn't tell my friends. I didn't tell teachers. I didn't tell anyone I knew about the blog. I just continued to keep it a secret. At one point, there was someone in Iowa who kept, you know, from Google Analytics, I was able to figure out there was the same person from this one IP address in Iowa that kept checking out the blog. And that was really exciting to me that someone outside of my family was actually looking at it. You know, I wrote that practice article that you're talking about probably two years before it got any noticeable likes on Facebook. But one day, out of nowhere, just traffic went crazy. At one point, I had hundreds of people on the blog all at the same time, and I didn't even have hundreds of people a month on the blog. And now I think it's got 50 something, 1,000 likes on it. But again, if I was trying to do this for the money, I would have quit a long time ago. But because I was doing it for me and trying to develop a brand, develop an identity, educate myself, it gave me the right reasons to continue to push forward and to do this. And to be honest, right now, I ran the numbers not too long ago. And essentially, let me see if I can remember the right numbers, about 1/5 of my total time working is spent on the blog. But between 1/2 to 2/3 of my income is either directly or indirectly through the blog. It's definitely been a financial piece of the puzzle for me. I think that actually makes a perfect transition to talk about how that income is driven, which is your background. And I guess this might be a kind of a cheesy way to phrase it. But how do we become bill-approved performers in what we do? This Halloween, Google All Out with Instacart. Whether you're hunting for the perfect costume, eyeing that giant bag of candy, or casting spells with eerie décor, we've got it all in one place. Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. 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Visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. Discover Hydro, the best kept secret in fitness. Hydro is the state-of-the-art at-home rower that engages 86% of your muscles, delivering the ultimate full-body workout in just 20 minutes. From advanced to beginner, Hydro has over 500 classes, shot worldwide and taught by Olympians and world-class athletes. For a 30-day risk-free trial, go to hydro.com and use code ROW450 to save $450 on a hydro-pro-roar. That's H-Y-D-R-O-W dot com code ROW450. Hey there it's Greenie and Hambo and we are back and better than ever. Got your answers is for sale. And if you are interested in winning every sports debate you have for the rest of your life, this is the book for you. We take the 100 biggest sports debates and answer them, settle them once and for all. Meanwhile, Hambo, what's your favorite part of the book? 100? Sneaky head coach review. All that and a whole lot more, it's called not your answers, it's available anywhere you get your books right now. Hey I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous to your contracts, they said what the f*ck are you talking about? You insane Hollywood f*ck. So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 a month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of details. Well everyone's looking for this magic pill or this quick fix kind of thing and it's not going to take years or decades to become a bulletproof performer, whatever it is that your craft or domain is. But it's also not this, you know, paint by number, simplistic approach. One of the coolest things that my mentors really contributed to the field is a series of assessments, performance assessments that take whatever it is that you do, whether you're an attorney or a surgeon or a sales professional or a musician, an athlete and it helps you identify the key mental skills that are your strengths but also your weaknesses in terms of performing at the top of your abilities when it really matters. And I can share the link to you later, perhaps if your readership would be interested. But when I took this in grad school, I mean it didn't reveal anything that I didn't know per se, but it put it in such a way I was like, oh, that's why I'm so inconsistent or that's why I don't always perform like I know I can. It's things like energy regulation, your ability to manage your nerves under pressure, preparing the right way like the practice article you were referencing, our ability to build confidence instead of sabotaging ourselves, courage, concentration, focus, resilience, mental toughness, determination, things like that. These are specific skills that athletes and top performers are strong in and the rest of us, you know, it's a little bit hit or miss because we've never really identified these things as things to work on. So when we get to a performance situation, which for most of us happens relatively rarely, suddenly we're like crap, I wish I knew exactly what to do, I wish I were prepared for this differently, but it's too late at that point. So how do you take these mental skills like courage for example, I think probably the most relevant one for our audience is going to be something like stage fright or I mean even writing, you're putting yourself out there so publicly so there's a component of stage fright that kind of works into it, and I always say if you've hit a fear of pushing publish, you've probably just created some of your best work ever. But what I'm really curious about is in our day-to-day lives are there practices like tactical things that we can do to cultivate these mental skills and to rapidly increase them or to get better at them. Absolutely. I mean some of them are rather tactical and skill-based and go beyond what we can cover here, but some of them are just a matter of choosing differently and taking certain actions. So for instance with courage, and this is something that I encourage everyone to do because it's an interesting experience, first step is to sit down and to draft out a top ten list of the most courageous moments you've had in your life. And some of these things could go way back to third grade when you asked little Sarah to the dance or to the mall or something. And at the time, you're a third grade kid, it's in the grand scheme of things kind of a meaningless thing, but at the time you're freaking out and you're shaking and your hands are quivering and feel sick to your stomach, and it was a big deal that you actually went through with it. So what happens is we often forget how courageous we've been in the past and how much it took for us to take these courageous leaps of faith or actions. And so if you write down a top ten, you know, whether it's something like let's say the situation that you were in, what you were afraid of, what you did, and how it worked out, even if it didn't work out well, the fact that you still took that courageous action speaks volumes about what it is that you're capable of. And so you look at that top ten list, oftentimes people realize, wow, I've done some crazy stuff or I've done some really impressive courageous stuff in my past. I can certainly handle this now. I remember how freaked out I was about X, Y and Z. I can do this next thing now. So we remind ourselves how courageous we're capable of being. And then the next step is to take this 21-day courage challenge, which is to say you do one thing every day that scares you a tiny bit more than what you did the day before, whether it's negotiating, you know, credit card late fee or, you know, making eye contact with someone really attractive on the subway or, you know, trying something new at work that you've never done before that may not work out so well. You know, just step-by-step, increase the level of courage that you put out into the world on a day-to-day basis. And you write this stuff down, otherwise you're going to forget. So same thing, you write down the situation, what you were afraid of, what you did and how it worked out. And over the course of 21 days, I almost guarantee that it's going to change how you feel about yourself and your level of willingness to go out and push yourself even further than you might be right now. And when you reflect on it, you see, wow, you know, you see the trajectory, you see what you're capable of and you realize that one that, you know, the world's not going to end no matter what happens to you on one of these courageous leaps and you feel a difference. I mean, because all the good stuff out there, all the great relationships, the great jobs, the great opportunities, most of them are outside our current level of comfort zone. Yeah, you know, I think anything, it remarkable lies outside of your comfort zone, like the greatest opportunities of our lives do. And as I'm hearing you say that, one of the things that came to my mind was this idea, the gap between who we currently are and what we think we're capable of is ridiculous at times. Because we think it's so far, like, I think we really underestimate our own capabilities far too often. Absolutely. You know, there's an interesting study that came out not too long ago. It talks about how we fully acknowledge how much we've grown and changed in the last five or ten years, you know, from the time that we were teenagers or the time we were in college to now, we totally see how much we've grown and changed and improved in a variety of ways and become capable of more in so many ways. Yet, somehow, when we look to the future, we really underestimate how much more we're going to continue to grow and change and evolve, and even exponentially grow. And so what we end up doing is we look at the future and we tend to judge what we're capable of in the future based on who we are today, even though we're going to be different tomorrow, we're going to be different next week, we're going to be different next month, next year, five years, ten years. We're going to be vastly different people when it comes time for us to do this crazy thing that we'd love to be able to do in five or ten years, but we can't connect the two somehow. So we stop ourselves and we say, "Well, I can't do that. I'm not capable of that." Well, yeah, you're not capable of that now. In five or ten years, you absolutely will. So let me ask you this. And my guess is I'm probably going to make your head spin by asking you, is there a way to actually overcome that? Is there something we can do today to deal with that? Like, why are we that way? At some level, we're all afraid of looking like an idiot and looking like a fool. For me, this saying bet on yourself somehow just struck me the other day. It's like, "You know what? That's absolutely true. It never really resonated with me, but I think the key is to bet on ourselves or to bet on future us anyway. And what I mean by that is to put yourself in a position where it would suck just a tiny bit to fail. So what I mean by that is if you're not quite sure you're capable of leading this project or running the mile this fast or succeeding in this job or the situation, but it's not crazy talk. It's not going to make you panic, but it's slightly outside of this area where you're not quite sure if you're capable of it or not. My advice or the thing that I've been doing is to say, "Well, you know, why don't you bet on future you? Bet on the fact that you will figure it out. If this is something that means something to you, you're curious about it, you're somehow engaged. Something inside of each other tells you this would be pretty cool. Bet on future you, put yourself in a position where you're going to have to rise to the occasion. And you know, you may not always rise to the occasion, but I think invariably more often than not, you will tend to do what you need to do, to grow or to develop or to learn what you need to learn, to develop a skills you need to rise to that occasion when the time comes." Yeah, it's funny. I'm reading Sean Acor's latest book, and he says, you know, the closer we get to a goal, the more our perception of the changes and the more we start to believe it's possible. And so it kind of brings this full circle in a lot of ways to just constantly taking those small steps on a daily basis, because if you're at a 50% point, you're going to start to believe that you're much more likely to it. And what's interesting is that even your pace at which you move towards it accelerates when you start to see more possibility. I was working with these pre-professionals through Carnegie Hall, and there were these two students who, you know, the assignment was to go out to the city to come back with a phone number from someone they found attractive and a couple business cards. And I told them they can go out and pay us and go out and do this. And these two were completely resistant to the idea. They wanted to find a way to get out of the assignment. But what ended up happening is they ended up at this convention center not too far away. And we're talking to security guards and trying to get inside. And at some point they're like, you know what, we are not leaving here until we crash this fashion show. And they ended up wildly exceeding their imagination, their wildest dreams. They ended up, someone actually created and registered them as this fictitious fashion company. And they got these goody bags and they got free food. They got passes to go back the next day. And any time this company ever hosts another fashion show, they have the ability to go back and get more free stuff and chocolate and all this, all this stuff. And, you know, so these were relatively shy, you know, not typically courageous type of students, but they totally surprised themselves. And what happened is there came a certain tipping point or point beyond which they had already invested so much energy, time, courage, et cetera into making this happen that they became increasingly determined to not believe without making it happen. So there's this thing called loss of version that I think kicks in. Once we get past a certain amount of investment of time and energy, et cetera, where we be coming and increasingly reluctant to pull out and to quit something. And so, you know, if people take nothing else from what we talk about, I think we wait too long, I think, to take action. I think we wait until we're motivated to take action. But oftentimes, motivation comes after action. So action precedes motivation. And once we can take action and keep taking action, things tend to snowball on a positive direction for us. So let me ask you this. And then we'll start closing things up here. One of the things I was really curious about, and I wanted to have you to come and talk about based on your background, is taking this framework of peak performance and applying it to an art form like writing or, you know, being entrepreneurs. I mean, what kind of things can we be doing? Let's use writing so we have something concrete to work with. As a writer, how can I look at my practice, my daily practice of writing and make my practice more effective? Because I remember specifically in the creativity post article, you talked about certain elements of how we practice. And I'd love for you to kind of hit that in terms of the context of writing, because I think that's going to be much more relevant to people here. I think for writing, just like with any art form, it comes back to, because this is the interesting thing even about musicians, a lot of times when I listen to musicians practice, they just kind of do it and expect that over time they'll get better by sheer force of repetition. And what can really accelerate their progress is to have clear concepts or clear goals for what they're shooting for. And then to stop, to analyze the discrepancy between what they're shooting for and what they got, and then to tweak and adjust until they can get closer to what they're shooting for. So I think even as a writer, you know, I'm not the kind of writer that, you know, publishes, you know, literature or fiction and that kind of thing. But even for me, I try to have a stronger concept of what good looks like for me or what I would love my writing to look like. And I continue to shoot for it, I continue to aim for it. And when I fall short, I try to analyze, okay, why doesn't this match up to what it is that I love it to look like? How is it that I can change things? What do I need to learn? What do I need to work on so that I can more consistently, more effortlessly, more effectively get closer to this target that I have out there for me? And this, too, goes back to something that what I call an internal locus of evaluation. So it's so easy to look out into the world, to all the amazing blogs and the writers that are out there, and to continue to compare ourselves with them and usually compare ourselves unfavourably to them and to think, oh, how do they do that? I can never get there. But if instead we use that as a way to kind of cherry pick the things and the qualities that we most admire or envy about these different writers about these different bloggers and use that to form our own mashup of the kind of writer, the kind of blogger we would love to be in a year and five years and ten years, that creation of future us, that internal set of criteria or means for evaluating our own progress towards our own goals, that is what can help us not only craft our own artistic DNA, our own fingerprint, but keep us from continually comparing ourselves, and I think it was in one of your other talks to talk about looking sideways, that can keep us from looking sideways in a non-helpful way. It's very helpful to look sideways sometimes just to see what's out there, but then we need to buckle down, focus on are we getting closer to who we want to be to the kind of aspirations that we have for ourselves and what future us looks like? Or are we stagnating? Are we not taking enough steps closer to who we want to be? So it sounds to me like the only person worth comparing yourself to is the future version of yourself. Right. Yeah, which we can absolutely borrow different elements from different people to help inform, and that's something that will continually shift and change as well. I mean, the version of future you, that you envision, you would love to be in a year or five years from now. When you get to a year from now, it's probably going to be different from what it is that you envision today. Absolutely. So one final question for you, and this is how I've been closing all of my interviews, and I think it'll be interesting to hear your perspective on it, considering that you're a peak performance psychologist. I'm very curious when you've looked at your students who come in and really kind of just rise to start them, like really play at the top of their game, because you know, we live in this world where resources and things are available at our disposal like never before, and but you get this dichotomy of people who go out and get everything they want, and live this just thriving life on every level, and then you have people who don't quite get there, and you know, given your background and what you've seen with the people that you've worked with, what do you think it is that distinguishes those two groups? Well, at the end of the day, you know, it's probably a few things. One, yes, talent plays a role, but most of us are talented enough in certain areas that it's enough to guess where we want to go, but only as long as we're willing to put in the work. And so the people that really seem to succeed are the ones that, A, absolutely work their tails off. They look at every possible thing they can do to improve and to get better and to evolve, and to aim big and all those things. And they have the courage to put themselves out in that way, and they have the confidence and the belief in themselves to continue to improve and continue to go down that path and evolve and switch tactics at NIMI, but not stop. For me, a lot of this comes back to something that you and I talked about about ourselves earlier, which is whether it's parents or school or teachers or society, we've been conditioned sometimes to put too much energy into the things that we think we should be doing. Like, you should go to business school or you should get this sort of a job. Whereas in reality, we may not really want those things as much as we need to, to do all the things that we need to do to get to peak performance or to thrive in our lives the way that we would like to. Something as simple as writing down a hundred things that you'd love to accomplish or achieve or experience in your life, and then starting to, by process of elimination, get rid of all the things that are on there that aren't truly things you want, but have snuck onto there because of things that you think you should want or that you should be doing and eventually cut that list down to maybe a list of three to five things that at that point aren't going to be shoulds anymore, but are truly going to be wants. If we can find out what those things are, we're much more likely to cross all our T's and to dot all our I's to, to really practice on a day to day basis the things both physically and with our craft and even mentally that we need to, to become those people that seem to get what they want and invariably talk to these people, you know, they love what they do because it's something that means something to them on a really deep level. They're not doing it because they think they should do it. They gave up all the things that they should be doing in favor of this thing that they can't help not doing because it means so much to them for whatever reason. Okay, I think that was a beautiful way to end our conversation. Perfect, I'm not even going to touch it. No, first off, you have been, you have exceeded all my expectations. I knew you would be an awesome guest. Like I said, I was immediately intrigued by your background because I thought, okay, this would be really cool, just a combination that we would never have. You know, a Juilliard violinist and a peak performance psychologist blended into one who happens to have a blog. I thought, yeah, this is going to be awesome. There's a lot of valuable stuff that we can learn from this. So I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share some of your insights with our listeners here at Blockass at them. I have a feeling they're really going to enjoy this. Absolutely. Well, thanks again for having me. Truly, I'm honored to be a part of a community that you're building and the folks on the show that you're inviting in. So it was a pleasure talking with you to be honest or quite an interesting fellow yourself. Hopefully we can continue some sort of a dialogue over time. Absolutely. And for those of you guys listening, we will wrap the show with that. You've been listening to the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. Visit our website at Unmistake Expand the way you work and think with Claude by Anthropic. Whether brainstorming solo or working with the team, Claude is AI built for you. It's perfect for analyzing images and graphs, generating code, processing multiple languages and solving complex problems. Plus, Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy and reliable, so you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit Claude.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. Discover Hydro, the best kept secret in fitness. 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A Look into the Influences of Suzuki Violin in Noa's Life
Why You Can Only See Dots Connecting in Hindsight
The Reality of What It Takes to Get Good at Something
Why So Many Small Ideas Are the Foundation for Big Things
The Role That Intense Curiosity Plays in Your Success
Why There's an Element of Performance in Everything You Do
The Role That Learning and Practice Plays in Peak Performance
Why You Can't Learn Effectively without Taking Action
Making Small Adjustments and Tweaks to Get Closer to Your Goal
How the Curse of Instant Results Holds You Back
Why You have to Be OK with Being on the Journey
Making a Mindset Shift to Doing Things for Intrinsic Value
An Eye-Opening Look at the Master's Path
Why There Is No Final Destination
Looking at the Times in Your Past When You Were Really Engaged
Why You Must Learn to Simplify Very Difficult Concepts
Identifying and Developing the Key Mental Skills for Peak Performance
Using the Past to Act Courageously in the Moment
How Pushing Your Comfort Zone Will Cause You to Exceed Your Expectations
Cultivating a Framework for Accelerating Your Progress
Leveraging the Influences of Others to Create Your Artistic DNA

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