Welcome to Week 44 of the High Performance Playbook.

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If you’re new and just tuning in to the HPP, we cover 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

The Power of Mental Models

High performers think differently. 

What separates them from everyone else is not raw intelligence or effort, but the frameworks they use to interpret reality. Another way to describe those frameworks is mental models. Hormozi talks about this a lot. So does Tony Robbins.

They are simplified representations of how the world works, designed to help you make sense of complexity, uncertainty, and tradeoffs. Instead of reacting emotionally or improvising under pressure, you rely on proven lenses to guide decisions.

Consider opportunity cost. Every yes is simultaneously a no to something else. High performers constantly ask not just “Is this good?” but “Is this the best use of my time, energy, and attention right now?” 

This single model prevents overcommitment and forces ruthless prioritization. 

Inversion offers another powerful lens. Rather than asking how to succeed, you ask what failure would look like and then avoid those behaviors. It’s often easier and more effective to eliminate obvious failure modes than to chase ideal outcomes.

First principles thinking strips problems down to their fundamentals. Instead of accepting assumptions, you ask what must be true at the most basic level. 

This model is especially valuable when facing novel or rapidly changing situations where conventional wisdom breaks down. When you combine first principles with probabilistic thinking, you stop seeking certainty and start making decisions based on probabilities, ranges, and risk-adjusted outcomes.

The real advantage of mental models, beyond clarity, is speed. Decision fatigue is one of the biggest performance killers. When every choice requires starting from scratch, energy drains quickly. 

Mental models act as cognitive shortcuts, allowing you to recognize patterns and respond decisively. Over time, these compound, resulting in better judgment under pressure.

To build this skill, start small. Identify the challenges that repeat in your life, like career tradeoffs, relationship dynamics, time management, and risk-taking. Then ask a simple question: which mental model helps me see this clearly? 

As you practice, you’ll begin layering models, checking decisions from multiple angles before acting.

Eventually, life stops feeling reactive. You’re no longer wandering down a foggy street, guessing at every turn. You’re playing chess, thinking several moves ahead, aware of constraints, and choosing deliberately. 

That’s how high performers turn how they think into a competitive advantage.

😃 Biggest Story of the Week (Mindset & Psychology)

Health & Fitness + Longevity

Hormetic Stress for Resilience

I’ve said before that rest and recovery are important for high performers. While I still believe this is true, it’s important realize that how well you train your system to handle stress is also crucial.

So let’s talk about hormesis. 

Hormesis describes a biological principle in which small, controlled doses of stress trigger adaptive responses that make the body and mind stronger over time. Rather than avoiding discomfort altogether, high performers use it deliberately.

At the cellular level, hormetic stress activates survival pathways. Short bouts of cold exposure, fasting, or intense exercise challenge the body just enough to stimulate repair and optimization. Research indicates that these stressors improve mitochondrial efficiency, increase antioxidant defenses, and enhance autophagy, the process by which cells remove damaged components and regenerate. 

The result is greater energy, improved metabolic flexibility, and long-term resilience.

Physical hormesis is the most visible application. Cold exposure, such as a two-to-three-minute cold shower, trains the nervous system to regulate stress responses more efficiently. The same is true for heat (hot saunas).

Intermittent fasting encourages the body to switch between fuel sources, improving insulin sensitivity and metabolic health. This is one of the biggest health hacks known to man. 

Don’t believe me? Watch this video (10M views) when you’re done reading.

High-intensity interval training delivers a powerful stimulus in a short window, pushing cardiovascular and muscular systems to adapt without the wear and tear of chronic overtraining. 

The common thread is intensity paired with brevity.

Mental hormesis operates under the same logic. The brain adapts when it is challenged, not when it is constantly protected. 

Learning difficult skills, working through complex problems, or intentionally practicing brief periods of discomfort strengthens focus, emotional regulation, and cognitive endurance. Over time, this reduces your reactivity to pressure and increases your capacity to stay effective in demanding situations.

The key to hormesis is dosage. Hormetic stress must be strong enough to trigger adaptation, but limited enough to allow full recovery. 

Chronic, unrelenting stress produces the opposite effect, degrading performance and health. Strategic stress, applied intermittently, builds capacity.

By integrating hormetic practices into your routine, you train for volatility rather than hoping it never arrives. Your body becomes more durable, your mind more composed, and your recovery faster. 

No one can eliminate stress from their lives, and this is especially true of high performers.

But you can curate it, respect it, and convert it into a long-term advantage.

🦺 Biggest Story of The Week (Health & Fitness)

Personal Finance Tip of the Week

Building a Skills-Based Portfolio

We often measure wealth by balances and portfolios. But there’s another form of wealth that’s often overlooked: portable skill. 

Skills compound in much the same way financial assets do, except they cannot be taken by market crashes, policy changes, or platform risk. A high-leverage skill increases your earning power, expands your options, and reduces dependence on any single employer or income stream.

What characteristics set apart high-ROI skills from low-ROI ones?

The highest-ROI skills share three traits. 

First, they are transferable across industries. Coding, writing, sales, negotiation, systems design, and marketing are valuable in nearly every sector because they sit close to value creation. 

Second, they scale. A single capability can be applied repeatedly with marginal effort once mastered. 

Third, they compound socially. As your reputation for a skill grows, opportunities come to you with less friction.

Acquisition of a skill alone, however, does not create compounding returns. Passive learning produces familiarity, not income. Compounding begins when learning is paired with application. This means using the skill to solve real problems, deliver outcomes, and generate cash flow or leverage. 

A marketer who studies funnels but never runs campaigns remains untested. A negotiator who reads frameworks but never enters difficult conversations leaves value on the table. Practice must be deliberate, measurable, and tied to results.

High performers treat skills like a portfolio. They allocate time and energy based on expected return. 

Some skills generate immediate income, such as sales or consulting. Others expand future opportunities, such as technical literacy or leadership. The mistake is spreading effort thin across low-impact abilities. Focus instead on one or two skills that sit closest to revenue or decision-making power, then deepen them aggressively.

As with most things, reinvestment is what accelerates compounding. Use the income or leverage created by a skill to buy better tools, coaching, and environments that sharpen it further.

This creates a flywheel: skill generates value, value funds improvement, and improvement increases skill.

In uncertain markets, financial assets fluctuate, while skills appreciate. A strong skillset adapts to new industries, new technologies, and new constraints. 

Over decades, the individual who continuously compounds high-leverage skills builds a form of wealth that is antifragile. 

Cash can be spent once. Skills pay dividends for life.

💵 Biggest Story of the Week (Personal Finance)

Business Playbook

Reducing Cognitive Overload in Leadership

Scaling a business is often framed as a problem of systems and processes. Often, the deeper constraint is cognitive capacity. 

Every organization runs on human attention. When decision-making is fragmented, unclear, or constantly escalated, growth creates drag instead of momentum. 

High-performing companies scale by intentionally reducing cognitive overhead across the organization so that talent is applied where it matters most.

Cognitive overhead comes from ambiguity, not workload. Contexts where unclear ownership, inconsistent standards, and ad hoc decision-making are common force people to stop, interpret, and second-guess. Each pause consumes mental energy. 

Over time, this erodes speed, confidence, and execution quality. The solution is not micromanagement. It’s a structure that enables autonomy.

The first step is clarifying decision rights and responsibility. Every recurring decision should have a clear owner, defined constraints, and an escalation threshold. 

When people know what they own, what “good” looks like, and when to ask for input, decisions move faster and with less friction. This alone eliminates a significant portion of internal back-and-forth.

Next, standardize where variation adds no value. Repeatable SOPs, checklists, and templates remove the need to reinvent the wheel. This preserves creativity for high-leverage problems. 

The goal is not to automate thinking, but to reserve thinking for decisions that actually warrant it.

Prioritization frameworks can further reduce load. When teams share a common lens for evaluating trade-offs (like customer impact, revenue leverage, or risk exposure), decisions align without constant coordination. 

Instead of debating from first principles each time, teams apply agreed-upon criteria and move.

Leaders play a critical role here. Every decision a leader unnecessarily retains becomes a bottleneck. No need to be shy about delegation. It’s the intentional transfer of authority paired with context. 

The more clearly leaders define outcomes, guardrails, and metrics, the more decisions can be safely pushed down the organization.

If you’re wondering where to start, a good place to begin is mapping your most frequent decisions over 30 days. Identify which ones are high-impact and which are habitual. 

For habitual decisions, design rules, defaults, or checklists that eliminate a necessary choice entirely. For high-impact decisions, clarify ownership and criteria.

Reducing cognitive friction compounds. Teams move faster, errors decline, and leaders regain strategic bandwidth. 

Most importantly, scale stops feeling chaotic because the organization is no longer asking human brains to solve the same problems over and over again.

🏢 Biggest Story of the Week (Business)

DOPAMINE HIT

Thanks for reading!

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🗓️ STAY TUNED:

Next week, we’ll discuss how your own self-perception can be leveraged to create identity-based behavior change, and the difference this can make in every area of your life.

… 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.}