Pursue Your Goals With Intentionality: 3 Recommendations

Do you have big dreams for your future? What are Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness’s recommendations for pursuing your goals?

In Peak Performance, Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness recommend that you intentionally structure your day-to-day life around your goals. They offer three concrete recommendations for intentionally pursuing your goals.

Discover how to pursue your goals with a laser-focused mindset.

Recommendation #1: Embrace Your Chronotype

First, Stulberg and Magness write that to pursue your goals, you should work in line with your chronotype to optimize your time. Your chronotype, they explain, is your body’s natural pattern of high and low energy throughout the day. For example, larks are most alert and energized in the morning, whereas owls are most energized at night. Consequently, the authors argue that for optimal performance, you should complete your most demanding work when your energy is highest—in the morning for larks, and in the evening for owls. But, because creative insights are most common when your energy is lower, as we previously saw, they note that you should instead perform creative tasks during your off-time—in the evening for larks, and morning for owls.

(Shortform note: While Stulberg and Magness focus exclusively on larks and owls to illustrate their point about chronotypes, sleep experts recognize several other chronotypes in addition to these two. For example, dolphins tend to be notoriously light sleepers who struggle to sleep through the night and have inconsistent bedtimes. Moreover, bears strike a middle ground between larks and owls, as their sleep schedule generally aligns with the sun’s rise and fall, making them most productive in the middle of the day.)

Recommendation #2: Find Encouraging Friends

While capitalizing on your chronotype can help you best structure your time, you might nonetheless work inefficiently if you’re surrounded by those who drag you down. In turn, Stulberg and Magness argue that you should surround yourself with friends who encourage and motivate you to strengthen your performance.

To defend this claim, they point to a study that investigated why some Air Force squadrons are significantly more fit after training than others, despite every squadron undergoing the same training. The determining factor, according to the study, was how motivated the least fit cadet was in a squadron; if the least fit cadet was highly motivated to improve, the whole squadron improved, and vice versa. Thus, the researchers concluded that motivation is contagious, as the least fit cadet either improved or diminished the other cadets’ motivation.

(Shortform note: Although Stulberg and Magness recognize the importance of surrounding yourself with encouraging friends, they don’t offer concrete recommendations for finding these friends in the first place. To that end, Dale Carnegie’s strategies in How to Win Friends and Influence People are helpful. Carnegie explains that making friends requires you to be likable, and he offers several recommendations for becoming more likable. For instance, he suggests cultivating a genuine interest in other people, since people like to feel as if you’re interested in them. This might involve going out of your way to learn about and discuss their interests, rather than simply talking about yourself.)

Recommendation #3: Consistently Perform Each Day

Finally, Stulberg and Magness write that to maximize your performance, you have to consistently perform each day rather than making excuses that impair your habits. They clarify that by sticking to your routine and performing every day, you’ll form habits that make it easier to perform in the future.

(Shortform note: In Atomic Habits, James Clear offers an explanation of habit formation that can help you form the habits that lead to peak performance. He writes that habit formation has four stages: First, a cue signals to the brain that there’s a possible reward. This causes a craving to manifest to earn this reward. Then you respond to this craving by taking action, which causes you to receive the reward. For example, long distance runners’ pre-running routine might be a cue that endorphins (the reward) are looming, causing them to crave going on a run and receiving these endorphins.)

Pursue Your Goals With Intentionality: 3 Recommendations