Why am I writing on overperformance – a concept that may or may not be intuitive and that, in any case, remains to be defined? And, if there is such a condition as overperformance, there must be one of underperformance and one of ‘expected’ performance.

What benefit can any of us derive from the exploration of this over, under, and expected performance?

Here I try to answer. I’ll start with the last question: what benefit is there to exploring this concept?

My answer: It is because we might be able to lead more successful and happier lives if this concept can shed light on potential opportunities and potential pitfalls in our habitual ways of behaving, judging, and perceiving.

Let’s start.

Performance is the act of accomplishing an action, task, or function. The success of the performance of our actions in our day-to-day lives depends on our entire endowment of talents and the opportunities we’ve been gifted and acquired over our lifetimes. These talents and opportunities are tempered by the (often unfair) exposure to neglecting, traumatizing, or withholding environments we’ve grown up and lived in.

Based on this complex interplay of contributing factors – genetic, epigenetic, and environmental – we navigate life as best we can. Who, after all, navigates it to less than the best of their abilities – in their estimation?

So, what does it mean to under or overperform? Well, the case may be that once we become more self-aware, once we are exposed to other or better ways of thinking, judging, and acting, we can then elevate our level of performance.

We probably can all name people we grew up with who, based on their entire endowment of talents and opportunities and on the promise they showed as children or adolescents, went on in adult life to do worse than many expected or better than many expected. Often, in high schools across the USA, graduating seniors vote on who is most likely to succeed in one of various, sometimes whimsical, categories. Sometimes these predictions are spot on; often they’re wildly off.

One last point before I present the main body of this post. Success is subjective. A person judged by their high school classmates to be ‘mostly likely to succeed’ who then seems to do poorly in life, may not judge themselves to be a failure. They may have followed life goals that do not confer status based on societal norms. For example, a person may have moved away from city life to farm the land or to forego making a lot of money to instead pursue an artistic passion. So, my point in this post is not to argue for striving to meet other people’s or society’s performance goals, but rather our own. The goal here is to explore how a person can perform well or even ‘overperform’ in their own eyes.

Now, let me present some factors that I believe are under, at least partial, control, and that can lead a person to overperform their own expectations. Please consider these as ‘food for thought.’ Send me some of your own ideas or experiences if you see fit.

Don’t Peak Too Early

After my residency, I did a three-year fellowship at the National Institute on Aging. It was at a lab there, one filled by researchers and clinicians ranging in age from their 20s to 80s, that I realized that some people peak early while others never peak or – to present it more accurately – they may peak at some point late in life in terms of objective output, but they never peak in terms of their drive and effort. There were some computer specialists and coders in their 20s whose skills were already becoming outdated. They remained with a computer language that was already being superseded and didn’t, yet, if ever, make efforts to learn the up-and-coming language.

On the other hand, there was a neurologist in his mid-80s working there as an unpaid researcher who was and remains a very important man in my learning how to grow old well. His name was Edwin Weinstein, MD. He came in regularly to assess the subjects in our unit and write up and submit papers on whatever behavioral and cognitive neurology topic that was his focus at the time. In fact, Dr. Weinstein kept going until 6 weeks before his death at the age of 89. His efforts were cut short by a massive stroke he never recovered from. He continues to serve as an example for me.

In my personal life, this difference between an approach of “checking out early” vs. “keeping the keeping on” is evident among my friend group established in my teenage years. Now, with me and my friend group in our 50s and 60s, the differences among individuals are stark. Some remain vibrant and engaged, others checked out years ago, becoming boring to themselves and to others. It is the latter group that seems to age most quickly.

This perseverance vs. leaning back sometimes in the middle of life often has enormous consequences. Just as in savings, where compounding interest leads to non-linear growth in wealth over time, with most gains achieved in the last years of saving, the same appears to be true in one’s career: the knowledge, skills, and experience that is achieved and ‘saved’ over the years and decades, compound. It is in the latter years that the most gains are achieved. In the case of researchers and thinkers like Dr. Weinstein, sometimes the greatest conceptual breakthroughs come later in one’s life, after decades of one’s efforts at understanding and clarifying.

At some point in one’s career, a professional may say to themselves one day, “I’m tired of working for someone else. I think I’ll set off on my own,” or “Hmmm, I just realized there’s a better way of doing this. Let me look into how I make this happen and maybe monetize it, or instead just give it away for free.” These breakthroughs can come at any time. Often, they can only come from hard-won experience and reflection.

Always Persevere Through to Creative Solutions

This point is an elaboration on the previous one. The build up of knowledge, skill, and experience, all working together, can lead to intuitive creativity, be it in the sciences, humanities, literature, and/or other forms of art. It is this dwelling in the heart of the matter for years or decades, seeing these issues play out in the lives of people you treat or interact with, attempting solutions, some of which end in failure and some in success, that gives rise to insights, new ‘out of the box’ attempts, and creative solutions. Some heretofore unconsidered solutions came about out of desperation: surgeons operating in a theater of war, finding ways of treating wounds that, until this moment, meant certain death. Or a country facing annihilation by another, needing to improvise new methods of war under conditions of lack. Or a person whose own life or that of a loved one is in danger. Suddenly, unimagined approaches and heretofore unacceptable levels of risk become imaginable and acceptable. New solutions appear and can be pursued.

At other times, solutions are born out of boredom, in the context of a lack of caring about the outcome, wanting to take a roll of the dice. It’s an attitude of “Oh, WTF, I can’t take this status quo, this inertia, this endless dreary drudgery, any longer.” One is freed to try new things through this devil-may-care attitude. Both desperation and boredom have the virtue of freeing a person from habitual perfectionism or fear of failure. Under these conditions, one’s ego ceases to be one’s main concern. Taking a risk and acting creatively and decisively is driven by the need to change an unacceptable and unsustainable status quo.

Stay Healthy and Treat Your Mental and Other Health Conditions

Some people don’t translate their gifted talents and intellectual capacity into much value. They don’t peak early; they never launch in the first place. Why is that?

Out of the many reasons is: personality factors, such as high neuroticism, which can be renamed as high negative affectivity. A person with high neuroticism is often chronically anxious, which is associated with 1) worry ruminations that do not leave much time for other kinds of thinking, 2) physical exhaustion from the chronic stress response and impaired sleep, and 3) behavioral inhibition and risk aversion. Other personality features that may interfere with successful execution on one’s life plans include low conscientiousness and, perhaps to some degree, low openness.

There are ways of changing one’s outcomes that are driven by these personality factors. First, personality features make some ways of behaving more or less likely, in this way serving as soft constraints, but they don’t force certain ways of acting while foreclosing others. A person with high neuroticism can decrease their anxiety and worry rumination. They can learn to plan better and establish safeguards to decrease the level of ambient risk. They can take incremental steps to desensitize themselves to change and risk.

This last point is a good transition to a discussion of mental health disorders. Many of the people I feel have underperformed had forms of anxiety, depression, and/or ADHD. The good news is that these disorders are highly treatable with medications, neuromodulation, and/or psychotherapy. Self-help measures can make a large impact also.

Surround Yourself with the Right People

We are a hyper-social species. We became the dominant species on this planet by coordinating and working together in groups. We evolved in environments where being cast out of the group meant near-certain death, often in a matter of hours or days.

As such, we are highly attuned to and resonate with the people around us. If you surround yourself with people who are checked out or never checked in, then you will increasingly resonate with that group. They will change you more than you will change them, although both occur to an unequal degree. The same happens if you surround yourself with people who continue to strive, each in their own way, but are deeply engaged. It is this engagement with ideas and people that leads to that sparkle in the eye and to a depth of happiness, signs of a life being lived well.

These are the people to align with and cherish, to inspire them as they inspire you.

Be on a Mission

It is hard to remain engaged, work hard, struggle, face setbacks and humiliations, at a time in life when you can get by without any of them.

It is easier to remain engaged and focused and retain a sense of meaning and purpose when you are actually serving an end beyond your own comfort, a higher good.

Given the world’s endless strife and bottomless needs, there is no shortage of things to do that will be of more lasting benefit. You can choose a project, whether it’s hands-on or of a more conceptual type, that can serve as your legacy, as something you know and hope will outlast you. You can be on a mission during your work life and beyond, way past retirement age. That’s what I saw in Edwin Weinstein, and his example lives on in me nearly 30 years after his death.

Until next time,

Dr. Jack

LanguageBrief

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” – Vince Lombardi

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” – Maya Angelou

“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” – Jim Collins

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw