The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance

Optimal performance is about doing the very best that you can in the moment—whatever that moment might be.

Talent, as we now know, is not just skill. It’s a dynamic synchronization of attributes and skills. Talent is developed through both training and education.

THE MILITARY HAS A saying: “Train for certainty, educate for uncertainty.”

“A system is never the sum of its parts,” Russell Ackoff, an organizational theorist and a pioneer in the field of systems thinking and management science, famously said. “It’s the product of their interaction.”

Second, attributes inform, rather than direct, behavior. While a skill might tell us what to do in a situation, attributes determine how we approach and handle that situation.

Attributes are simply the innate traits that determine how an individual will absorb, process, and respond to the world around them.

Remember my quirk of yawning when I’m anxious? Yawning expands the diaphragm and stretches the trigeminal nerve, which triggers the vagus nerve—the one directly linked to parasympathetic stimulation.

The first is that courage cannot exist in the absence of fear. If something doesn’t trigger fear, you won’t have access to the courage circuit. A professional skydiver with thousands of jumps under his belt, for example, probably doesn’t need courage when he leaps off the ramp.

One of my former commanding officers used to coach us all on the two-minute rule, which was something his grandfather had taught him. The rule was that whenever something positive happened, any kind of victory or success, you had two minutes to celebrate and enjoy the spoils. After those 120 seconds, you were to put that success aside and move on.