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Welcome to Week 47 of the High Performance Playbook.

You’re now reading with over 26,000 other high performers! As our community grows, we want to extend our gratitude for reading and for continuing to share The High Performance Playbook with friends, family, and co-workers. Your support means the world.

If you’re new and just tuning in to the HPP, we cover the strategies and frameworks that separate the top 1% from the top .01%. We dive deep into: health & fitness + longevity, personal finance & investing, business growth hacks, and how to optimize all areas of your life.

If any of those topics sound interesting, the High Performance Playbook is for you.

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Ready? Start your engines… Let’s GO:

Mindset & Psychology

How is Your Frame?

Part of being a high performer means controlling the frame, not just reacting to circumstances.

The frame is the set of standards through which you interpret events. It determines what feels threatening, what feels meaningful, and what feels possible. 

Two people can face the exact same situation and walk away with completely different experiences because they frame it differently.

Consider a missed opportunity. One person sees proof that they aren’t good enough. Another sees information about positioning, timing, or preparation. A difficult conversation can feel like conflict to avoid, or it can be viewed as clarification that strengthens a relationship. A slow quarter in business can look like failure, or it can function as feedback about the market.

The event itself is neutral, but the frame drives the response.

Controlling the frame doesn’t mean denying reality or pretending problems don’t exist. It means deliberately choosing the most constructive interpretation available. 

Instead of asking, “Why is this happening to me?” you ask, “What does this make possible?”

Instead of asking, “What did I lose?” you ask, “What did I learn?”

This shift changes behavior immediately. 

A threat frame triggers defensiveness and hesitation. 

A learning frame triggers curiosity and experimentation. 

A scarcity frame leads to hoarding and fear-based decisions. 

An opportunity frame encourages creativity and calculated risk-taking.

Over time, frames compound. If you consistently interpret friction as growth, you take more action and build more capability. If you consistently interpret discomfort as danger, you avoid challenges and your world slowly shrinks.

One practical way to audit your frame is by listening to your own language. Words like “always,” “never,” “ruined,” or “disaster” usually signal emotional distortion. They turn specific problems into global narratives. 

High performers do the opposite. They use precise language that keeps situations contained and solvable.

“This project failed” is very different from “everything is falling apart.”

The frame can’t change what happened, but it can change what you do next.

And what you do next compounds into results. Over months and years, your framing habits quietly shape your resilience, your opportunities, and ultimately the trajectory of your life.

💪 Biggest Story of the Week (Mindset & Psychology)

What If You Didn't Have to Push Yourself Anymore?

Imagine waking up Monday being pulled out of bed — not needing to pushing yourself out of it.

That pull isn't motivation. It isn't willpower. It's what happens when Tony Robbins conditions a different identity into your nervous system.  An identity doesn't wait, doesn't hesitate, doesn't negotiate with itself.

That's what Unleash the Power Within does. It’s not inspiration. It’s Conditioning. The patterns that keep you hesitating, shrinking, and circling the same problems — Tony interrupts them at the root and installs new ones. You don't leave motivated. You leave re-wired differently.

4 days. Virtual. March 12–15. 5 million people across 195 countries have done this. It’s your time. 

Save $100 by getting a ticket before March 6th. After that the price goes up. But the real cost is another year pushing instead of being pulled.

Ready to Rewire? Register Now.

Health & Fitness + Longevity

Build Your Cardio Base

High-intensity training gets attention because it feels productive. Sweat, breathlessness, and exhaustion leave you tired, making you feel like you’ve put in a hard day’s work. You finish the workout knowing you pushed yourself. 

But long-term performance and health are usually built on something quieter: a strong aerobic base.

Low-to-moderate intensity cardio, often referred to as zone two training, develops the underlying systems that make everything else work better. At this intensity, your body becomes more efficient at producing energy. Mitochondrial density increases, capillaries expand within muscle tissue, and your body improves its ability to burn fat for fuel.

In simple terms, your engine becomes more efficient, and you generate energy with less physiological stress.

Without that base, high-intensity work becomes more taxing than adaptive. Hard workouts feel harder than they should. Recovery takes longer, fatigue accumulates across the week, and instead of building capacity, training starts to chip away at it. 

Over time, this pattern can raise the risk of injury, burnout, and stalled progress.

A strong aerobic foundation changes that dynamic. Your cardiovascular system moves oxygen more effectively. Your body clears metabolic byproducts faster. Between strength sessions or intense intervals, you recover more quickly. This allows you to train more consistently without constantly feeling depleted.

There are also broader health benefits. Regular aerobic training supports heart health, lowers resting heart rate, improves blood pressure, and increases metabolic flexibility, which is the body’s ability to switch between fuel sources depending on demand.

The good news is that building this base doesn’t require marathon-level training. Thirty to forty-five minutes of steady, conversational-pace cardio one to two times per week is enough to produce meaningful benefits. If you can hold a conversation without gasping for air, you’re probably in the right range.

Incline walking, cycling, rowing, swimming, or light jogging all work. The goal is consistency.

High performers treat intensity as a tool, not a default. They build capacity first, then layer intensity strategically.

I like to do LISS (low-intensity steady state) cardio for 20 or 30 min after my workouts, three or four days a week. And then on Fridays, I go hard with some high-intensity cardio (there’s also a psychological benefit to doing this before the weekend).

If you constantly feel exhausted from training, the issue may not be effort. It may be missing infrastructure. Your body hasn’t yet developed the systems needed to support repeated stress.

Build the engine first. Then press the accelerator.

🥂 Biggest Story of The Week (Health & Fitness)

Personal Finance Tip of the Week

Fixed Costs and Freedom

Fixed costs in relation to income are a key indicator of resilience.

Your fixed cost base is the amount you must earn each month to maintain your current lifestyle. Housing, car payments, insurance, subscriptions, childcare, and minimum debt payments. These are the expenses that continue whether the month is good, average, or difficult.

The higher the baseline, the less room you have to maneuver when circumstances change.

Most people think about spending primarily in terms of total dollars. A more useful lens is how much of that spending is mandatory. Variable spending, like dining out, travel, and entertainment, can be adjusted quickly. 

Fixed costs are different. They’re commitments that are difficult or slow to change.

High performers treat fixed costs as a risk management lever. Controlling them is about building structural flexibility into your financial life.

A slightly smaller home. A car that’s owned outright instead of financed. Fewer recurring subscriptions and long-term contracts. These choices may appear modest in isolation, but collectively they lower the breakeven point of your life.

And that lower baseline changes your risk profile.

When fixed costs are reasonable relative to income, volatility becomes easier to absorb. A slow business quarter, a job transition, or a market downturn becomes manageable rather than destabilizing. Instead of reacting out of urgency, you retain time to make thoughtful decisions.

Lower fixed obligations also create strategic freedom. You can pursue opportunities that have long-term upside but short-term uncertainty. You can invest more aggressively during market downturns because you’re not forced to liquidate assets to meet expenses. You can walk away from unhealthy work environments or bad business deals without panic.

The challenge is that fixed costs often rise quietly over time. Lifestyle upgrades feel incremental: a slightly larger mortgage, a newer vehicle, an additional service subscription. Each change seems manageable, but together they steadily raise the financial floor you must support every month.

Financial stress is often less about total spending and more about how much of that spending is non-negotiable.

The objective isn’t austerity, but optionality. When your required monthly number sits comfortably below your earning capacity, you gain margin for uncertainty.

Freedom isn’t simply a number on a balance sheet. It’s the distance between what you earn and what you’re obligated to spend.

🛢️ Biggest Story of the Week (Personal Finance)

Business Playbook

Kill Your Zombies

Every organization accumulates them. 

Initiatives that once made sense but quietly stopped producing results. They remain on the roadmap, appear in dashboards, and consume occasional attention, but no one seriously expects them to move the business forward.

These are zombie projects.

They survive not because they are valuable, but because they are inconvenient to kill. Someone proposed them, a team invested time, and a leader approved the budget. 

Ending them can feel like admitting a mistake.

So they linger.

You know what I’m talking about! Zombie projects create hidden drag inside organizations. They absorb talent, capital, and attention that could be redirected toward higher-leverage work. 

Even when the effort involved is small, the cognitive overhead remains. Teams must track them, discuss them, and maintain the illusion of progress.

High-performing organizations treat project termination as a normal operational discipline.

The first step is defining success criteria before work begins. What outcome would justify continuing this project? What signal would tell us it’s not working? 

Without predefined checkpoints, initiatives drift indefinitely because no one agrees on what failure looks like.

The second step is scheduling regular portfolio reviews. Instead of asking only what to start next, leadership asks a more valuable question: what should stop? If a project is not generating measurable traction, strategic advantage, or meaningful learning, it becomes a candidate for termination.

Third, normalize sunk costs. Time and money already spent are irrelevant to the future value of a project. The only question that matters is whether additional resources will produce meaningful returns.

The organizations that scale best are not the ones that start the most initiatives. They are the ones that maintain ruthless focus on what actually works.

Killing the wrong project early is far cheaper than carrying it quietly for two years.

Momentum comes from concentration. Every project you remove frees energy for the few that truly matter.

👨‍🏫 Biggest Story of the Week (Business)

Bonus: Health Optimization

Why I Started Experimenting With Peptides

Over the last year and a half, I’ve been experimenting with something that’s becoming one of the most interesting areas in modern health optimization: peptides.

If you’ve been around the health and performance space long enough, you’ve probably heard the term floating around. But most people don’t really know what they are or why there’s so much excitement around them.

At a basic level, peptides are short chains of amino acids that act as signaling molecules in the body. They essentially tell your body to do something: release growth hormone, repair tissue, regulate appetite, reduce inflammation, or improve metabolic efficiency.

The reason this category is getting so much attention right now is that we’re beginning to understand how powerful targeted signaling can be.

Instead of blunt-force interventions, you can influence specific biological pathways.

GLP-1 medications are the most visible example. These compounds help regulate appetite, blood sugar, and metabolic function, which is why they’ve become so widely used for weight loss and metabolic health.

But GLP-1s are really just the tip of the iceberg.

There are peptides that support recovery and tissue repair. Others that influence energy production or cognitive clarity. Some help support hormone balance or body composition.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been testing a few protocols myself, carefully and under medical supervision.

The results have been pretty eye-opening.

Better body composition with less effort (I’m 42 y/o and sitting around 9% body fat). Improved recovery after training. More stable energy throughout the day. And noticeably lower inflammation.

What’s important to understand is that this isn’t about shortcuts or miracle drugs.

When used properly, these therapies work best alongside the fundamentals: good nutrition, resistance training, sleep, and stress management.

Think of them less like magic and more like leverage.

We’re still early in this category, and there’s a lot of noise and misinformation out there. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been spending so much time researching it and working with physicians who specialize in this area.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share more about what I’m learning, what I’m personally experimenting with, and how this space is evolving.

I’m also curious about your experience.

Quick Question For You:

DOPAMINE HIT

Thanks for reading!

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🗓️ STAY TUNED:

Next week, we’ll consider how you can build financial shock absorbers into your financial plan to weather choppy waters, plus some more on peptides.

… Stay tuned. You won’t want to miss it!

Here’s to your success,

Austin L. Wright

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_{Disclaimer: The ideas shared in this newsletter are those of the author, and this is in no way intended to be medical, legal, or financial advice. Always do your own research and consult with licensed professionals.}