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Welcome to Week 24 of the High Performance Playbook. In less than 6 months we’ve brought together almost 6,000 high performance community members, so BIG thank you for reading and continuing to share this with friends!

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

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Ready? Start your engines… Let’s GO:

Mindset & Psychology

Strategic Under‑Commitment

I used to try to out‑discipline my calendar. New tools. New habits. More grind. Eventually, we all reach a point where we’ve overcommitted ourselves to things that don’t actually move the needle in our lives and businesses.

I was guilty of this myself.

For me, the underlying issue became how many promises I was making on a daily and weekly basis.

Every soft yes keeps a tab open in your head and on your to-do list. That’s attention drag. It taxes judgment, slows decisions, and lowers quality of the work you do.

When I ran my first “promise purge,” I removed or delegated a chunk of open loops in one afternoon, and ended up being more productive and effective seemingly overnight.

If you’ve ever cleaned your email and gotten to the mythical “inbox zero.” Same feeling.

Something I need you to hear (and was hard for me to learn):

You don’t need more discipline, you just need fewer competing promises.

Knowing that, here are a few things I’d suggest giving a try heading into the weekend:

• Dump your open loops: List every project, “circling back,” favor, and soft yes. Be ruthless. I’ve even found success organizing my email in 3 folders: Top Priority, Coming Up, and Archive. Every email instantly gets dropped in one of those three and then I manage my workflow from there.

• Remove or delegate 30% now: If it won’t meaningfully move you closer to your goals, it’s off your plate or on someone else’s with a due date. This is a great opportunity to empower employees or team members as well. Giving them tasks and saying “I trust you with this one” builds confidence, gives them a feeling of ownership, and strengthens culture.

• Renegotiate 20%: Send clean timelines with owners and outcomes. Clarity prevents rework. My partners and I who are working on multiple projects simultaneously recently set up Asana with our project workflows. We prioritized things that need to be done now, things coming up, and what’s already been done. As we get more in depth with it, we’ll start assigning due dates to tasks and keeping each other accountable to those timelines. So far it’s working great, I’d recommend it if you don’t have a good project management tool.

• Set a daily limit: Start off by committing to no more than 3 main promises per day. Protect your best hours for needle‑movers. A quote I like that relates to this: “We often overestimate how much we can get done in a day, and underestimate how much we can get done in 6 months.”

Be strategic about “under-committing” yourself to certain things and be intentional with what you say “yes” and “no” to.

🧠 News of the Week (Mindset & Psychology)

Learn from this investor’s $100m mistake

In 2010, a Grammy-winning artist passed on investing $200K in an emerging real estate disruptor. That stake could be worth $100+ million today.

One year later, another real estate disruptor, Zillow, went public. This time, everyday investors had regrets, missing pre-IPO gains.

Now, a new real estate innovator, Pacaso – founded by a former Zillow exec – is disrupting a $1.3T market. And unlike the others, you can invest in Pacaso as a private company.

Pacaso’s co-ownership model has generated $1B+ in luxury home sales and service fees, earned $110M+ in gross profits to date, and received backing from the same VCs behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

Invest for $2.90/Share

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Health & Fitness + Longevity

Is ‘Fasting’ Worth The Hype?

Fasting gets pitched as a miracle or dismissed as starvation. It’s neither. Used well, it’s a simple lever for energy, body composition, and discipline… without turning your life into a diet.

What fasting is:

• Time‑Restricted Eating (TRE): Eat all meals inside a daily window (e.g., 10am–6pm). Overnight fast = 16 hours, no calories.

• Intermittent Fasting: Patterns like 16:8 daily, 18:6 on busy days, or 5:2 (two lower‑calorie days/week).

• Extended Fasts: 24–48+ hours. Advanced. Not required for most benefits.

• What’s allowed while fasting: Typically, it’s water, electrolytes, black coffee/unsweetened tea. No calories.

Why it works (for many):

Tightening the eating window reduces grazing and decision fatigue, which usually lowers total intake without calorie counting.

The longer gaps can improve insulin sensitivity and flatten those post‑meal energy crashes that are common after lunch.

Hunger adapts quickly, ghrelin spikes come in waves (the hormone produced in the stomach that regulates appetite & energy balance), and shrink after a few days so you’ll feel more in control. Many notice cleaner mental focus from a mild catecholamine rise and, if carbs are lower, a touch of ketones.

Some common myths I see:

Fasting is not a form of starvation. It’s planned with adequate nutrition.

You won’t “melt muscle” if you keep protein high during your eating windows and continue to lift weights.

Risks related to fasting often happen during multi‑day fasts and chronic under‑eating, not a 14–16‑hour window.

Breakfast isn’t mandatory for performance, quality and total intake matter more.

You don’t need 72‑hour fasts, most practical benefits show up with TRE. And no, short‑term fasting doesn’t “wreck metabolism."

My thoughts on fasting:

Like many other things in health and fitness, it’s a tool.

Most weekdays, I run a flexible 14–16‑hour fast. On heavy training or high‑output days, I eat earlier and widen the window.

If I’m feeling sluggish or need a good reset, I’ll occasionally do a 24‑hour fast for the mental reset, not as a fat‑loss hack. This works really well from Sunday evening to Monday evening. Eat your last meal on Sunday around 6 or 7 pm and then don’t eat again until Monday night. Watch how much clarity, creativity, and productivity you have all day on Monday.

Protein and whole foods still remain a major part of what I eat, I keep my training consistent, and a simple rule I follow:

If fasting starts stealing from sleep, strength, or clear thinking, I adjust the window.

I want to close this out by, of course, saying this is not by any means medical advice or telling you to fast. Always consult professionals before attempting any new fitness or nutrition program. But I can tell you from personal experience, introducing fasting can be a game changer for your health and mind.

This is one of the best talks on fasting I’ve ever found. Give it a watch.

➡️ Biggest Story of The Week (Health & Fitness)

Personal Finance Tip of the Week

Tax‑Loss Harvesting:

You can’t control the market, but you can (somewhat) control how gains and losses show up on your tax return.

Tax‑loss harvesting is a strategic move inside taxable brokerage accounts: you sell a position that’s below your cost basis, realize the loss for tax purposes, and immediately buy a similar (but not “substantially identical”) holding so you stay invested.

Those realized losses first offset capital gains (short‑term first), then up to $3,000 of ordinary income each year, and anything you can’t use carries forward indefinitely.

The rule that often trips people up is the wash sale. If you buy the same or “substantially identical” security within 30 days before or after your sale, the loss gets disallowed and added to your new cost basis.

Harvesting lowers your cost basis, which can potentially mean a larger taxable gain later.

The edge comes from smoothing taxes today so more of your money compounds along the way.

Keep it high‑level and sane: don’t harvest every tiny dip, don’t let it distort your target allocation, and skip it if trading costs and complexity outweigh the benefit.

My stance: I like to look at TLH as portfolio housekeeping. I’d rather keep exposure steady, harvest losses when they’re meaningful, and let the compounding work on a higher after‑tax base.

Not tax or investment advice. Talk to a qualified professional about your situation and local rules.

💸 Biggest Story of the Week (Personal Finance)

Business Playbook

Could a 3-Day Work Week Work for You?

Over the years, I’ve been fascinated by founders and operators who’ve figured out how to compress their work week down to just 3 days without losing momentum.

I don’t work 3 days a week (ask my business partners 😂).

But I’ve studied the systems behind this approach and I’ve seen it work for people I know.

When done right, you can really move the needle towards your goals, and at the same time, protect your time like a Fortune 500 CEO.

Here’s what that could look like:

1. Identify Your Real Job (aka the 20%)

Most of your momentum comes from a handful of actions. The rest? Noise.

Ask yourself:

If I could only work 3 days this week… what are the highest-leverage things I’d do?

For most founders, it’s things like:

• Sales conversations

• Strategic decision-making

• Content or offer creation

Build around those. Cut the rest.

2. Build Ruthless Focus Boundaries

If you’re only working 3 days… those days better be focused.

• No meetings before 11AM

• No Slack during deep work blocks

• One or two key priorities per day

Distractions ruin momentum.

You can’t lead a focused business with a fragmented brain.

3. Time-Block Like a CEO

Here’s one model I’ve seen work well:

• Day 1: Revenue (sales, follow-up, offer refinement)

• Day 2: Ops (team syncs, blockers, reviews)

• Day 3: Growth (content, vision, big thinking)

Then the rest of the week?

Family, training, creative space, planning, thinking time.

4. Automate, Delegate, Delete

If something shows up on your plate more than twice, systemize it.

Try this:

• List 5 things you dread doing

• Systemize 3

• Delegate 2

• Never touch them again

This is how you earn back time.

5. Cut Meetings in Half

Most meetings should be:

• A Loom

• A Slack thread or voicenote

• A clear SOP

Not a calendar event.

6. Less Busy. More Aligned.

When you stop chasing tasks and start designing your week…

You realize the best ideas don’t happen in work.

They happen when there’s space.

I’m not saying this model works for everyone.

But if you’re feeling spread thin, buried in noise, or stuck in reactive mode…

It’s worth exploring how much you could get done in 3 or focused days, and what that might open up in your life and business.

Try the experiment.

Let me know how it goes.

📃 Biggest Story of the Week (Business)

DOPAMINE HIT

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, please share it with some friends! And thank you for reading!

🗓️ STAY TUNED:

In next week’s newsletter, I’ll be diving into why your net worth is a lagging indicator and what I track instead to stay financially sharp year-round.

If net worth is the scoreboard, these are the plays that win the game. I’ll get into KPIs and how they give me real-time feedback on my financial momentum.

You won’t want to miss this one. Have a great weekend!

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.}