Sustainable High Performance at the office

Sami Inkinen
5 min readSep 3, 2021

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Nobody needs to ask an Olympic gold medal calibre athlete, such as Michael Phelps, Eliud Kipchoge or Annemiek van Vleuten questions like:

  • Did you have to work very, very hard to achieve that level of success?
  • Did you prioritize rest and sleep before your biggest races?
  • Did you have to say no to many things “ordinary” people do (that could have been distractions) to achieve your level of success?
  • Did you stay away from mental distractions (perhaps social media?) right before your most important competitions?

Nobody needs to ask these questions, because the answer would always be “YES!”.

Sustainable High Performance in action (45 days and 3 hrs non-stop in this case)

Yet, in the ultra-competitive world of business when creating something out of nothing, often in an industry dominated by incumbents (i.e. especially startups and growth companies), people often fail to understand (or implement) what it means to deliver high performance as a professional. And delivering high performance by everyone in the team over many years, sometimes decades, is typically necessary to get a company off the ground and build to scale. Building a successful growth company is like getting an Olympic medal in sports.

How do you do that? It is not easy. To achieve that, I’ve talked about and prioritized Sustainable High Performance (SHP) with my team at Virta Health ever since we started.

Only a fraction of knowledge worker performance is about IQ and knowledge

Especially in Silicon Valley, the prevailing view is that as long as you’re smart (high IQ), have sufficient knowledge (right school(s), training grounds and/or self-taught) and perhaps learn the latest hacks and productivity tips, you are going to be a high performer.

I disagree. For example, little sleep and all-nighters are often a badge of honor among professionals. These sleep-deprived minds are then fueled with caffeine (and who knows what else) just to keep eyes open. Is that high performance at “Olympic level”?

And apparently just being a human with a 10,000+ year-old hunter-gatherer brain operating system in the 21st century, while working on a computer is hard. Very hard. Nearly every fifth woman and every tenth man is on anti-depressants in the U.S., 70,000+ Americans die from drug overdoses every year, 50,000 Americans commit suicide every year and half of U.S. adults have a chronic disease. This is not even about professional SHP, but just trying to stay alive or get through a day. Being a human is hard and delivering SHP on top of that must be even harder.

It is against that backdrop that I’ve become even more convinced that the prevailing view of human performance in a knowledge-worker setting is completely lacking. This view assumes that the combination of a high IQ, enough competence, and right incentives (e.g., you make more money if you exceed metric X), will deliver optimal performance and create most value.

This is shortsighted and wrong. Increasingly, my view about SHP mirrors how we look at professional athletes — even in a job where we sit in front of a computer most of the day without a lot of movement.

The enablers of Sustainable High Performance

IQ, competence and incentives are easy. The first one is pretty much a matter of luck (genes), the second easily learned and the third can be copied from any other company with some customized OKR magic thrown into the mix.

Most importantly, one has to focus on the enablers of Sustainable High Performance (SHP) to get the most out of the IQ and competence. And we can look up to professional athletes to figure out what these enablers are. I think of the enablers of SHP in three categories:

  1. Physical
  2. Mental
  3. Purpose

Physical — Imagine someone who is constantly sleep-deprived and following a poor diet attempting to compete in the Olympics. It’s hard to conceive of this, as no professional athlete would prepare this way. Similarly, a business professional following this same routine won’t be able to show up at work making sound decisions and consistently delivering positivity and creativity compared to someone with a strong foundation of physical health. (Just one data point: slight sleep deprivation is like being drunk. Is your boss drunk? Do you show up to your meetings drunk?)

Mental — Fortunately there’s a lot more focus and talk about mental health. Anxiety attacks on a sports field or in a high-pressure business situation are obviously disastrous. But it doesn’t have to be like that, even if it occasionally happens. Athletes have known this for a long-time and have tools and techniques to build mental resilience, focus and relaxation into training and game-time situations. Knowledge workers must do the same. Frantic scrolling of one’s Twitter feed when there’s a two minute break is unlikely to help.

Purpose — Do you ever wonder why people risk their lives and actually pay for the privilege to go and climb Mt. Everest. On the surface, it doesn’t make any sense — yet these people do it with a smile on their face. How is that possible with no OKRs, no promotions, and no cash bonus payments or stock options?? It comes down to purpose, and having a deep sense of purpose is probably the greatest enabler of sustainable high performance.

Putting enablers or SHP into practice — Routines

I’ve encouraged all my Virta team members to think about the enablers of SHP, create their own plans and prioritize time and life accordingly.

I think that is the most important first step: realizing that as a professional you have to focus on the enablers of Sustainable High Performance to help yourself and your team succeed.

After that, almost everything depends on the person, yet I’ve found that creating routines is an effective way to put the enablers into practice. For example, I personally focus on the following:

  1. Physical: Daily sleep routine and enabling sufficient sleep
  2. Physical: Daily exercise routine
  3. Mental: Mental development routines (daily meditation and breaks or vacations hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/annually; reading, nature and prioritizing personal relationships)
  4. Purpose — choose your career and life priorities wisely (mine)

These are all driven by routines, not ad hoc decisions.

Once the enablers of SHP are taken care of, it’s then relatively easy to learn new skills, knowledge, grow as a manager, etc. which of course is necessary to perform in a professional setting.

In summary, Sustainable High Performance (SHP) is not just about high IQ and high competence. Instead, focusing on the enablers of SHP makes it possible to make the most out of your given IQ and competence to perform.

SHP is enabled by three key pillars: physical health, mental resilience and purpose. Routines — daily, weekly, monthly, annually — that include periods of stress (effort) and physical/mental recovery are the best way to put these pillars into practice.

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Sami Inkinen
Sami Inkinen

Written by Sami Inkinen

Founder & CEO @VirtaHealth on a mission to cure irreversible diseases, Co-Founder @Trulia, Data Geek. 8h24min Ironman & Triathlon world champ (ag).

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