Super Performance: 8 Strategies to Reach Full Potential for Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization
George Pesansky
Fast Company Press (September 2025)

“Potential” means “you ain’t done it yet.” Coach Darrell Royal, University of  Texas

George Pesansky xzsuggests and then focuses on eight separate but interconnected strategies by which to reach your — and to help others to reach their — full potential. They are:

1. Avoid the traps created by rigid (usually unrealistic) expectations within stressful environments
My comment: Set goals for substantial improvment, not for perfection.

2. Harness the shift from individual to collective efforts
Comment: Everyone should thinkin terms of first-perrson singular pronouns (i.e., we, our, us).

3. Improve communication, cooperation, and (especially) collboration within your environment
Comment:

4. Create a ‘toolbox” to expedite efforts to identify/answer the right question and identify/solve the right problems
Comment: According to Peter Drucker,

5. Recognize/eliminate barriers and bottlenecks as well as waste to improve efficiency and productivity
Comment:

6. Shift from focusing only on problem-solving to identifying and replicating the root causes of success
Comment: On average, prevention costs about 16% of a repairs.

7. Help everyone to learn how to learn, unlearn, and relearn through continuous practice
Comment: Peak performers spend most of their time on improving what they do and how they do it.

8. Differentiate what cannot be improved now from what can be improved now. Focus on the latter.
Comment: Sometimes (not always) improving the former makes improvement of at least some of the latter possible.

I commend George Pesansky on material that if (a HUGE “if”) his counsel his counsel is applied effectively, it can help almost any organization to accelerate the personal growth and professional development of its workforce…at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise.

If you share my high regard for the value of Super Performance, I urge you to check out Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life coauthored by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. It was published by HarperOne (2017) and is available in a paperbound edition.

* * *

Here are two other suggestions while you are reading Super Performance: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a lined notebook kept near-at-hand,  record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the ‘Your Outline for Action” suggestions and questions that conclude Chapters 1-40 and then the material in the next and final chapter, “Walk the Talk — A Call to Action.”

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.