High performance through daily action
40+ actions for career success
Welcome to this week’s free article of Level Up: Your source for executive insights, high performance habits, and specific career growth actions.
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Justin Best (Olympic Gold Medalist & investment banker) and Jason Yoong (my Operating Partner) on Friday, October 25 will have a fireside chat about “Habits of Peak Performance” covering how Justin does it all (time & energy management, training, recovery, balancing sport/work/life), how he views competition, impactful career advice, and his favorite Paris 2024 Olympics memories.
If you want insight on world-class performance, this talk is for you.
High performance and career success comes from what we do each day.
Here are some easy ways you can stand out:
Get one more thing fully done (quantity)
Get one thing done better (quality)
Get one thing done sooner (speed)
Get one hard thing done (difficulty / impact / value - this is a big lever)
Build or enhance one relationship (network)
Make a key decision (action)
Hire or develop someone (investment)
Ask the right question (insight)
Partner with someone (depth)
Learn something (learning)
Share something (thought leadership)
Celebrate something or someone (acknowledgement)
For more, use the below checklist of 40+ actions (includes thoughtful contributions by my LinkedIn community).
There is something on this list that will allow you to up your performance naturally, without stress, because it fits your style and interests.
The difference between good and great is 250 (or 365) of these small daily actions per year.
No one "extra" thing will give you instant career success, but finding the thing(s) that you can do slightly better / faster / with more joy, day after day, will accumulate.
You do NOT have to do everything.
You DO have to do something.
Find your thing and shine.
The ultimate key to being "high performance" is not to "work harder" but to find a way that you find easy and natural.
Level Up Slack Community: What’s Happening
Leaders are hiring for multiple mid and senior level engineering roles at Cloudflare and Peloton, Principal Technical Program Managers at Amazon, and various 2025 summer intern roles at Home Depot.
Members are discussing various AI tools to better integrate custom prompts (e.g. Lex.page, Microsoft Copilot), how to keep the recruiter conversation going for a VP of Eng role when the discrepancy is team size (60 vs 100), how job leveling works between startups and public companies, current market needs for more player coaches than managers, red flags in company financial statements, corporate sabotage, fun memes about leadership, and more.
Multiple product leaders are attending the Lenny & Friends Summit and plan to meetup.
And, we have 2 upcoming virtual networking events (each 30min for busy schedules).
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Learn how Olympic Gold Medalist (and investment banker), Justin Best, works and competes at the highest levels
Read and watch takeaways here.
For example, this is the intense schedule Justin uses to manage both:
5:30am wake up
6:20-8:45am training #1 cardio on the water, interval or steady-state
9:30am arrives at work via BART (train)
9:30am-5:30pm at working doing deal support, execution, mandates, and anything that needs to get done
5:30-8pm training #2 weights and indoor rowing machine
8-10pm complete unfinished work (sometimes till 11pm)
The next day…run it again!
Connect With Ethan & Jason
Follow Ethan on LinkedIn.
Get Ethan’s career advice on YouTube.
Connect with Jason (Ethan’s operating partner) on LinkedIn.
Learn more about Ethan’s live online courses and on-demand courses.
Contact us for corporate training, speaking, podcast appearances, and more.
Many subscribers expense this newsletter to their Learning & Development budget, use this email template to send to your manager.
This is a great list. "Career Success comes from daily action"
Great list. I love #12. Celebrate something or someone (acknowledgement)! How do you recommend weaving this into daily action? Choose 1 or 2?