The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance

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.

“She basically told me that when something bad happens, don’t waste time crying over it. Get over it quickly and get to work on the things that you can control.”

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

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.

“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.”

You don’t need saliva when you’re fighting for survival, which is why your mouth goes dry when you’re anxious or stressed.

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.

“Nature doesn’t care about the source of your stress,” Andrew says. “It doesn’t care about your hard-to-handle boss, the traffic you’re sitting in, the sickness you’re dealing with, or the ramp you’re about to jump off of at twenty thousand feet. All it cares about is: Are you moving forward, are you pausing, or are you retreating? And when you phy

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.