Episode Highlights

• Developing the ability to perform your best in those career defining moments
• Pushing yourself beyond your limits by embracing new challenges with optimism
• The important differences between Amateurs and Professionals
• Being intentional and setting a clear vision for your goals
• Mastering skills so you can adjust to difficult tasks quickly and produce at an elite level
• What it means to have a Growth Mindset vs. a Fixed Mindset
• How your goals feed into your identity and your character
• Starting meditation and training your focus as a skill
• Learning to rely on more that just your talent

Useful Links

• ‘Ultimate Guide to High Performance’
• Allon Khakshouri

About Guest

Allon Khakshouri is a sports agent who managed three world #1 tennis players, including Novak Djokovic. He is also a best selling author and helps ambitious entrepreneurs introduce high performance habits and strategies to feel more energized, productive and inspired to become leaders of their industries. He is also a Member of the ATP Council.

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Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Allon Khakshouri, and I’m pretty confident that I probably messed up at least one or two syllables of that, but Allon is a sports agent who managed three of the world’s number one tennis players, including Novak Djokovic, and he’s also a high-performance expert who helps entrepreneurs amplify their focus, their productivity, and their energy, so they can become leaders of their industry, and when I say words like focus and productivity and energy, I just get really, really excited and tingly, because those are words that make me very, very excited. So, Allon, I am very, very excited to have you here today to chat with me.

Allon Khakshouri: Thanks, Zack. I’m excited as well.

Zack Arnold: So, just so people understand, where are you from?

Allon Khakshouri: I’m from Israel, but actually I was born in Germany, raised in Switzerland, grew up in Europe, and I moved here about 10 years ago. But most of my family come from Europe.

Zack Arnold: Got it? Okay. Well, we’ll go a little bit deeper into your background, because I really want to understand kind of the origin story of the guy that got to where you are now, and why you’re so into high performance productivity, and all these things that you geek out on, I geek out on. So, I just think that this is going to be an hour of us geeking out on stuff, digging through all of your materials, and I’m going to say you are a very, very prolific person, because you have a lot of blog articles, you have a lot of ultimate guides, and there’s a lot of stuff to go through, and I say that as a person that also produces a lot of content, and you’ve just made me feel, I don’t know, maybe a little bit self-aware, that, oh, I could be doing more. I felt like I was doing a lot, but then I see what this guy is doing, and I’m like, “Oh, okay, well, I could definitely do more. So, the reason I say that is because you have so many varying topics that you talk about, but there’s one general area that I am just fascinated by that. I really want to dive in deep, and we can go off into different tangents and talk about strategies, or whatever we think about, but if there’s one topic that I would love to pick your brain about for the next hour, it’s about identifying the difference between people that are amateurs versus professionals, because that is something I’ve really been interested in for a while, especially considering that this year specifically I set the goal of wanting to become a participant on the TV show American Ninja Warrior, and I don’t know if that’s something you’re familiar with or not.

Allon Khakshouri: I’ve heard of it, and it’s a topic that is very clear for me, not only amateur and professionals, but also within the professionals, you know, like a tennis player ranked 60 in the world versus a tennis player ranked five in the world, like what are the differences there? Those are topics that I’ve really been thinking about,

Zack Arnold: Exactly. And that’s something that really interests me, because I’m building my Focus Yourself program right now, and it talks.. it’s funny because I read so many of the things that you’re writing, and I’m like, oh my god, I could have written this. Like, we talk about such similar things, like, you know, really clarifying your goals and having a clear picture of the destination, identifying your obstacles, like there’s so many things that just ring true, and one thing that I always think about, I don’t know if you’re familiar with James Clear, but he’s one of the world’s foremost experts on habit formation and creating habits and just everything around the idea of behavior, and one thing that he said that really struck me in our recent podcast was that if you look at Olympic athletes, all of them have the exact same goal, they all want gold medals, so what’s the difference, and when you really dig in, it’s all about their daily routines, their habits, and their mindsets, so that’s kind of the. Direction, I want this interview to go today, but before we go right into the weeds, I think it’s really important that people understand your background and why your point of view specifically is going to be so fascinating. So, just give us a little bit of a background of kind of your origin story and how you became an agent to some of the top tennis players in the world.

Allon Khakshouri: Sure, it’s a long story, I’ll try and share the key features, I was born as the third kid of a family that originally comes from Persia, Iran, the Jewish family, and I was born in Germany, and my mother had a difficult birth with me, so I was born with a lot of physical and also mental issues, I had movement issues and motoric movement issues. My, I had delayed speech capabilities, and they.. when we moved to Switzerland, the school system wanted to put me in a school for kids with special needs, and my mother was very resistant to that idea, and she managed to put me into a private international school. So I went to this private international school. I got a lot of support, a lot of personal tutors and physiotherapists, and all sorts of other aids, and I’m really grateful to my parents for all the effort they put into me, but I really wanted to fit into the Swiss society. I really wanted to go to a normal school, a German-speaking school. I had this like drive that I like, I had also this feeling that I needed to go to a good school, a good education, and I started to also watch sports on TV and professional athletes, and I really thought, “Wow, look at these people. I’d love to be like them, like winning big competitions, working hard. And so I managed to convince my mother and other people to give me a trial period at a primary Swiss school for a month. So I went to this trial period. I really worked as hard as I could, and after a month, we had this meeting in the teacher’s room, and it was really a life-changing meeting. And the teacher said, “Look, we like Allon, he works hard, but he’s just not good enough for the school. He will just not make it. And in that moment, my world fell apart, but a day or two later, I was watching a tennis match, and I was really asking myself, what would a world-class athlete do in that kind of situation, like just give up and let other people determine my future, and I said, no way, I’m gonna prove those people wrong, and I’m never ever gonna let someone else determine my future again, so I really made it a mission to get into a Swiss school. I worked really hard, and then I found a school that had a prep class for a gymnasium, and gymnasiums are tough in Switzerland, because only 15% of older kids do a gymnasium, but I worked really hard in this prep class, and then I had to fulfill the entry criterias to get into the gymnasium, which I finally managed, and I was really, really proud I was there in a Swiss gymnasium, and so I managed to complete the Swiss gymnasium. I got accepted to a top university in London, the London School of Economics. I also took the New York bar exam. I did a master’s in diplomacy, so I really had, like, a very thriving academic career. But at the same time, I was this big tennis fan. I shared this passion with my father, and this is a whole another story. It would take me another 15 minutes, but by coincidence I became very friendly with a young and upcoming tennis player. He was being managed by one of the top agencies, but he was very unhappy with them. He actually asked me if I was willing to manage him, and I said I had no clue how to manage tennis players, but I had a friend who was a top agent, and I contacted this friend. I said, look, I have this chance to recruit this guy. Would you be willing to do it together with me? And the guy said, yeah, absolutely. This guy is like, you’re gonna be awesome. We signed this player, it was a Russian guy called Mahat Safim, and within a year he won the US Open, and he became one of the youngest world number one tennis fairs, and so suddenly my big passion tennis became my profession, and I was doing the job of my dreams. I was traveling to all these tournaments, all these fancy cities, I was dealing with the guys that I admired all my life, and yeah, a dream became true.

Zack Arnold: So, having said all of that, you’ve kind of led us down the path from dealing with some struggles as a young person, discovering tennis, and then getting into the world of tennis, but now what I’m more interested in is how you got to the point where you were one of the leaders in your industry, managing or being an agent, or both. You can kind of help specify to my audience specifically. Kind of what area of expertise you had, but you were working with literally at one point the number one tennis player on the entire planet. So, how did you go from getting into this world to becoming one of the best at what you do?

Allon Khakshouri: So, a few things. First of all, I’m convinced that the reason I got into the tennis industry was that it was such a big dream, it was something like, as a kid, I would visualize being a professional tennis player, which obviously I never ended up becoming, and I never practiced to become, but it was an obsession. I was a tennis computer, I knew every fact about every player, I went to tournaments at a young age, so I really developed this passion, this expertise, and then I met this young player who became a world number one very quickly in my art session, winning the US Open. I did something smart, partnering up with someone who was a top agent, so rather than trying to manage someone on my own without the expertise, I teamed up with one of the best agents I could learn firsthand how the business works, and then once you have one top player, everything else opens up, you know, the doors open, and everything becomes so much easier. And then, yeah, I was very dedicated to work very hard. I loved my job, it was a dream come true. And so I had a lot of top players, I had three world number one players, and I guess the combination of passion, hard work, and a bit of luck.

Zack Arnold: I’m not a big believer in luck. Anybody that listens to my show knows that I try to think about luck as something that is simply the intersection of hard work and opportunity, because I feel like luck is such a great excuse for people that never achieve something to say, oh, well, that other person that’s more successful, well, they just got lucky, so that’s always kind of the magic word on my show. Whenever somebody says it took some luck, I believe in bad luck. I believe that you can just get hit by a bus someday, but at the same time, I think that anybody that really creates success in their life, and I’m sure this is something you can attest to as well, as we go deeper down this rabbit hole, but anybody that quote unquote looks like they have luck, there’s a whole combination of things going on in their habits, their behaviors, and the mindsets that got them where they are. But before going in that direction, what I am very, very curious about is what you actually did on a daily basis, because saying you’re a manager or an agent can mean a lot of different things, and the reason that I asked this question to kind of help clarify what your duties were as an agent or a manager is because I don’t really have people to listen to this show that are into sports or into athletics at a professional level. The reason that I’m so fascinated by sports is because I’m trying to take all of the practices, all of the mindsets, all of the fitness expertise, the health expertise the high performance expertise and bring that into creative fields, so the people that listen to this show do creative work, they live most, if not all, of their days in front of computers, and I’m trying to blend the worlds of athletic performance and high intense creative work and bring them together, and I know that because you’re somebody that’s in the online business world, you very much understand how to translate a lot of the things in the sports world to the business world, so that’s why I think it’s very helpful to just kind of understand and get a picture of the kinds of things that you would do in your business and for your athletes.

Allon Khakshouri: Absolutely, let me just share a word on luck. I believe in the short run, you know, luck can help make shortcuts in the long run. I don’t believe in luck. In the short run, you know, having had a client who became number one within a year, that accelerated my career, but I’m definitely sure I would have achieved it anyways, because I was working hard, I was passionate, I had a vision. Yeah, so that on luck, and I totally agree with the quote of opportunity meeting hard work. That’s when you get lucky. I love that. Absolutely. Now, as an agent, the primary job is to take care of all the commercial aspects related to a client, meaning getting him commercial deals, like an apparel deal, a racket deal, other sponsors getting him appearance fees when he plays at tournaments or exhibitions, taking care of his PR and marketing, but here, here’s the connection to high performance. In order to make a lot of money with a client, he needs to perform well. That’s really the bread and butter in tennis. So, as an agent, you’re always thinking, how can we get our client to the next level? Who is the next coach who can take him to the next level? Who should be in his team? What are the other factors that can help him really perform at his best? And, for example, with Novak Djokovic, I was the person who found him, his coach, then, who he now rehired, and ever since he rehired him, he won Wimbledon and the US Open. So that was one of the things that I really studied, you know, like who could be the kind of coach that would fit into his mentality, his family’s mentality, and his budget at the time, and all these kind of considerations, so. The end. The agent really wants to be obsessed about the fact. How can I help my client perform at his best? Because once he does, everything else starts working. All the commercial opportunities come in. You know, we all like, we all try and pride ourselves about how capable and how good we are, and what amazing deals we got. But in the end, it is really the performance, and maybe the charisma, and a few other little characteristics that define how much money a client will earn.

Zack Arnold: Well, and that’s a smart approach as well, because, as you know, in the world of productivity, you’re always trying to find leverage, you’re always trying to say, all right, what is the most impactful lever that I can pull, or the biggest domino that I can knock over and start knocking over other ones, and for a lot of agents, I’m sure they’re always focusing on the next deal, the biggest dollar signs, but you are playing a longer game and saying, well, all of those deals and everything that we want to do gets infinitely easier if we just focus on one thing, and that’s making our player better,

Allon Khakshouri: 100% and you know when we talk about what separates the top performers from everyone else, there are a few things, but one of the characteristics is really be able the ability to see the longer game, you know, like the opposite of a top performer is an alcoholic, and an alcoholic is characterized by really thinking of his next drink, usually you know, like once he gets into this addictive cycle, that’s his focus. The next drink, the opposite is someone who can think, what am I going to do tomorrow, in a week, in a month, in a year, three years, five years, or even 10 years. The longer we can stretch our vision and take the kind of action that serves that vision, sometimes at the expense of our instant gratification. The more we’re moving towards being a top performer.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, you could not be preaching more to the choir right now. In the last two weeks, I’ve probably written 15,000 words that echo the exact same sentiment as I’ve been building my program. What I’m doing is I’m helping people first break down their goals. I’m using the Go Far framework, which is a five-step framework. The first one is goals, and the idea is that you can say something like, well, I want to be a famous tennis player. Well, that’s much better than, like you said, just somebody that’s looking for the next thing today or tomorrow, but I want to be a famous tennis player isn’t necessarily a very clear goal. So, like you said, you have to start chunking it down to five years, where would I be? One year, where would I be? What does that mean in six months? Well, what does that mean in a month, and how do I break down that month into weeks? So, I’ve gone through some of your materials, and I’ve seen that you two are also very much in the mindset of breaking everything down and doing exercises and writing it down, so in your mind, if I’m somebody that says, well, I kind of feel like I’m just taking it day to day, and it’s not necessarily, you know, I’m hoping that I don’t have a lot of people that are alcoholics listening to my show, if I am, well, then you know, hopefully they can find some help, but at the same time I think there are a lot of people in my industry and other creative industries that are always looking for, quote unquote, the next job. I just need a paycheck. Oh, you know what, this is an opportunity. I’m just going to accept this job. I’m going to take it, and then another one comes along, and then another one comes along, and then a decade later they’re coming to me, saying, can you coach me, because I’m in a job that I hate. I don’t know how I got here. It’s been a decade, and this is not what I want to be doing for a living. And I feel like it’s because they’re only playing the short game and not playing the long game.

Allon Khakshouri: So, the issue is that one thing that people really avoid doing, and I include myself often into these people is we avoid spending time to think about our life, you know, we avoid like taking a reflective walk on the beach or sitting on an armchair for an hour with no phone and no interruption, and asking ourselves key questions like what is it that I want to achieve? Who is it that I want to be? What are the kind of contributions that I want to make? What kind of relationships do I want to have with key people in our lives? And the reason we like to avoid spending thinking time, there are several reasons, but one main reason is that we live in our comfort zone. Some of these questions might require us to take the kind of bold action that is a bit uncomfortable and it might really make us have to do the kind of actions that will require some sacrifices and the issue with long term goals what makes it so difficult, and the issue with doing, like poor habits, it’s the same issue, is that we don’t see the consequences of our actions very quickly, meaning that say you eat like a hamburger every day for the first week, you might not feel different, you might. Not see any differences, maybe even after two or three weeks, you won’t see the differences. It will only accumulate over time, and the same strikes true if we have like these big dreams and goals in the long run, and we start working towards them. It might take weeks or months or years till these habits compound together, and we really see a difference, and so many people I believe stop just before making their breakthrough, just before seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. They feel fed up, and they revert back to their old routines, or their old habits, and so back to spending time to rethink what it is we want. I think one of the most valuable things we can do is to give ourselves an hour a week, or 20 minutes a day, or 20 minutes every second day to really just embrace silence and ask ourselves powerful questions and trying to discover exactly who it is we want to be and what it is we really want to do,

Zack Arnold: So looking at this idea of trying to set aside time, think about who is it that I actually want to be, and I love the fact that you introduce identity into this, and it wasn’t just about, well, here’s a goal that I want to achieve, I want to make x amount of dollars, I want to have this kind of job, I want to own this kind of car. It was more about this is who I want to become, this is why I want to be to other people. I think that’s really, really important. Identity is a huge component, but I love the fact that you’re talking about behaviors and habits, and this picture of somebody that’s eating a hamburger. Yeah, for a day or two, you’re not going to feel anything. I mean, if I ate a hamburger, I might feel like crap, but for the most part, you’re not going to see any difference. The scale is not going to change, your clothes are going to fit the same, but your behaviors become habits, and eventually your habits become character. But because it takes so long for that to happen, you don’t really notice it. You just want that instant gratification, which is why so many people find it so hard to stick with long-term goals, like you said, so right now we’re kind of talking about the difference between people that don’t really have a very clear vision for where they want to go versus people that are very intentional and take the time to do this, but now let’s go to the next level. If we’re talking about the types of athletes that you’ve worked with, they clearly have goals and they clearly have vision, they’re not just kind of wandering through life and taking the next job, and they very much have dedicated themselves to their craft. So, now, what is the difference between people that are, say, really highly skilled, talented amateur tennis players, or even the lower-ranked professionals, versus the top in the world when it comes to very clearly setting their goals, and then building habits.

Allon Khakshouri: The main difference that I’ve discovered between even a guy ranked 56 in the world and a tennis player was ranked two or three in the world. Or let me start with what they have similar, in my opinion, their technical skills are similar, their athletic skills are similar, meaning that as a tennis player the differences are minor, if any, but what separates the very best from everyone else is that they have made their career a lifestyle, meaning that while both the number 60 and the number five in the world might practice a few hours a day and very hard, the top players, they understand that everything they do is connected to their success. What they eat, when they sleep, who they hang out with, how they schedule their time, how they schedule their tournaments, all of it is connected to becoming a world number one tennis player. All is connected to building the kind of high-performance lifestyle that generates sustainable and lasting success, and you know the reason that is so important is to be a top tennis player, or to be a top creative professional. We need to embrace the uncomfortable. I think it was Carl Newport who said, like, for I think more like entrepreneurs, but it probably applies for any field. He said that in order to become successful in the future, in order to make a lot of money, you need to master two skills. You need to be able to learn difficult things very fast, and you need to be able to produce at an elite level, meaning that, like, your favorite singer or your favorite film director or producer, they’re probably people who produce high-value content on a regular basis, they’re not one-time wonders, and in order to do that, or in order to play at the top level antennas on a consistent basis, you need to live a high performance lifestyle. You need to take care that you feel recovered as much as that you practice hard and that you improve your skills, and you need to also have this growth mindset of continuously. Improving your skills, which is not easy, and that’s something very few people do. And I personally really believe that happiness – a big element of happiness is growth. And how many people do you really know that have a very active growth plan? Like, how am I going to get better in a week, in a month, in a year from now, so that is another thing that separates the very best from everyone else, but it’s again part of this lifestyle, understanding that everything connects to these big ambitious goals. Everything, everything that you do shapes who you are, and you know that’s why there’s, I think a quote that, like someone said, that everything you do counts, you know, if you have like one really poor habit, like say you love procrastinating for two, three hours watching TV, if you really want to become the best at what you do, eventually that will pay its price, that will cost its price, like, because in the end, top performance is a lifestyle.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I love that you’re talking about lifestyle so deeply, because I believe exactly the same thing we talked about this earlier, when we talked about you’re creating this vision and setting your goals. It’s not just about the goals, it’s not just about measuring the bottom line, or creating like this smart goal that’s measurable and timely and all these other things, identity is such a huge part of changing your behaviors and ultimately achieving something, and you’re right, it is a lifestyle, and for example, when I started going after this goal this year to participate on American Ninja Warrior, people just thought, oh, that’s that’s kind of cool, that should be fun, it’s like, no, you don’t understand. I’m setting a very, very difficult goal that pushes me drastically out of my comfort zone, because in order to achieve something like this, I have to adopt the identity of what it means to be a quote unquote ninja warrior, and what does that lifestyle mean? So I’m always asking myself the question, with everything, whether it’s sleep or whether it’s what I’m eating or how many hours I’m training per week or how I’m treating my children, I’m always thinking it sounds kind of goofy, but is this what a ninja warrior would do? And that has completely changed so many of my behaviors and my choices and my habits, and I still have a few bad ones that I’m trying to work out that have taken me a few more months than I thought, but at the end of the day, I’m not asking myself the question, well, what exercise am I supposed to do today, or what am I supposed to be eating. I’m just always thinking, well, what would a ninja warrior do, right? So, I think that this identity thing is so important, and what I want you to go even deeper into, because I love these two concepts, are the ideas of the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset, and also this concept of embracing discomfort, because those two really, really go together, and I keep stressing. I mean, this is basically like in the cornerstone of my website and my program, is that you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable, because if you can’t, you can’t grow. So, talk to me a little bit more about growth mindset versus fixed mindset, and this idea of embracing comfort.

Allon Khakshouri: Sure, and before I do, just a word on top performers and everyone else. I had a client who was ranked 60 in the world, and, like, I think he went out late at night, or I don’t know, he did something, and I just asked him, like, tell me, do you think Nadal or Djokovic or Fedora would do that? And he answered to me, Why do I care, and not them? So he didn’t embrace their identity. So I love how you try and ask yourself, would a little warrior do that? And exactly, it’s like trying to create the identity of the person you want to be on. One thing that I also found very important is that we often underestimate what we’re able to do in the long run, and we overestimate what we’re able to do in the short run, and again, the theme of patience is so critical, you know, to have big ambitious goals, but at the same time to chunk them up in more manageable short-term goals, so that we build our confidence and enjoy short-term successes that, like, really move us towards the big goal. Now, to the topic of growth mindset, it’s one of my favorite topics, and it was done by Carol Drake, who wrote a book called Mindset that I recommend all your readers, and basically, a growth mindset means that we think that it is effort and hard work that helps us achieve the goals that we have, whereas a fixed mindset believes that it is talent and natural traits that help us become successful. Carol Dweck did an amazing study with I think it was 10 year old or 12 year old kids, and I want to share this study because it really changed how I think about praise and how I think about like effort and fixed trades. I’ll try and remember it. Basically, she gave all the kids a very easy task. Asked to do first, and then some kids were praised with a fixed mindset. They were told, ‘Wow, you’re so gifted, look how you managed to do this. And the other half of the group were praised with a gross mindset. They were told, ‘Wow, you worked really, really hard. Look, when you work hard, look what you’re able to do. In the second part, the kids were all given the choice to either do a very difficult puzzle or another easy puzzle. What do you think the fixed mindset kids chose?

Zack Arnold: Well, I’m sure that they would choose the easier one, because they’re thinking, well, based on my internal character traits, I’m not sure this is something that I can do

Allon Khakshouri: Exactly. And the growth mindset guys chose the harder ones, then in a third test she gave all of them a very hard puzzle that they were definitely not going to be able to solve. The guys from the growth mindset tried harder, they enjoyed the process, and the guys from the fixed mindset they gave up much quicker, and then finally, and this is the most fascinating part. She gave them all a very easy riddle again, similar to the first riddle, and the growth mindset kids did much better, and the fixed mindset kids actually did less well than the first test that they did, and the reason this is so important is we see even just the way we praise ourselves or kids has such a massive impact on our performance and the reason why fixed mindset is so problematic is that when we have fixed mindset we always feel that we need to justify our talent and if we mess something up, then it means we’re not that talented. So often we either choke on purpose to show people, look, I’m not even trying, or we avoid the real challenges, and so to embrace the uncomfortable, it is crucial to have a growth mindset to have the kind of mindset that the process, the journey is as important as the outcome, the goal, and the reason that is so important is because that’s how we learn skills, that’s how we build our character, and once we understand that life is about building character more than it is about achieving specific outcomes, that is when we’re able to embrace the struggle, that’s when we’re able to embrace the uncomfortable, and there is an irony to the whole story, because once we detach from specific outcomes, we achieve so much more now. It is a bit confusing, and so I’ll try and bring another analogy. I think it was Matthew Scene who wrote the book Bounce, who calls it double thing. On the one hand, you want to have big goals, you really want to achieve, for example, becoming a ninja warrior, you want to work towards it, but at the same time, when you have these pressure moments, like you’re in a competition, or in a big negotiation, or even in a date, you want to let go of any outcome, you want to be satisfied with giving your best and enjoying the process, because by doing that, you’re able to really perform at your best without interrupting yourself with negative thoughts, like don’t mess up, don’t screw this up, and when you have those thoughts, that’s when you choke, that’s when you stutter, when you have a presentation, or when you mess up in a date, or when, as a tennis player, you make a double fold in big points because you suddenly interrupt the skills that you’ve developed, and that almost happened effortlessly and subconsciously. You interrupt them with conscious thoughts, like, okay, what should I do not to mess up? Does that make sense?

Zack Arnold: Not only does it make sense, but there are like four different threads that I would love to pull out of what you just said, because there’s so much goodness in there that I want to break down. There are actually two things that I want to bring up. One of them is I kind of want to put a final little exclamation point on growth mindset versus fixed mindset, because there’s one additional point that I think is super important. And then I want to go into this idea of process versus outcome, because I mean, I could talk for hours about kind of discovering that whole idea, but first, when it comes to fixed versus a growth mindset, there’s an additional kind of point of reference that I think is going to help a lot of people understand the difference that may not already, and that’s the idea of control, so it’s eerie that we’re talking about this, because literally four hours ago I was writing all about internal locus of control versus external locus of control, and how it relates to the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, and if you’re looking at somebody with a fixed mindset, they’re often blaming the world for their problems because they don’t feel like they have control over them, so if. Example, if they’re late for work, all it was the traffic, or if the boss yells at them, oh, he’s just a, you know, what you know, or you know, for if somebody sends them, you know, an email like, oh, that was so rude of them, where somebody that has a growth mindset is thinking about an internal locus of control, so they’re thinking, I was late today, not because of the traffic, but because I didn’t plan properly, or they can look at their boss, that’s yelling at them and saying, oh, you know what, I know that he’s having problems in his life right now, so I accept the fact that he’s angry, but you know, not all of it has to do with my behavior, but some of it might have actually been warranted because of xyz, so I think that this concept of control, at least for me, when I was first learning about fixed versus growth, I was like, oh, that makes sense, because so many people want to defer responsibility for where they are in life to other people or other circumstances, but when you do that, you no longer have control over your own success either.

Allon Khakshouri: Absolutely, and you know this feeling of having control of your life is so critical for building self-esteem and confidence, and at the same time, when we look for excuses, it becomes a character trait, and I worked with, for example, I worked with a tennis player who she had a losing streak, and every match that she lost, there was a justification that was beyond her power, and she didn’t even notice that, like, she was looking for excuses or justifying her losses, and I’m convinced she really believed all the excuses to an extent that it was impossible to convince her that those were excuses, so one of the key things I think is for us to really become aware when we use excuses and our victim mentality and really work towards coming the kind of person who takes responsibility, I think in the end and responsibility doesn’t mean we need to do everything by ourselves, we can hire a coach, have a mentor, create the right kind of environment, but knowing that ultimately it’s our life and we are responsible for the outcomes, and we need to change the things we can and accept the things we can change, but we need to really eliminate blaming other people, and once we do that, life becomes so much easier.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, especially in sports, just because sports is televised, you can always see the difference between the professionals, so to speak, but the really true high performers, because when something goes wrong, they’re pitching a fit, and they’re pointing fingers, and they’re yelling at the ref or yelling at their teammates, but then with the guys that are really at the highest level, you can just see that they’re in this flow, they’re in this zone in their mind where they’re just going through whatever the move might be or the motion might be, and you can see that they’re thinking to themselves, regardless of whatever it was that just transpired, How can I be better in the next point or the next play or the next court.

Allon Khakshouri: Great point, and there’s an interesting twist to it. We also need to accept that we’re human, so we all have our moments of weakness, and we have the top player who freaks out at the referee. And one more thing that separates the best from everyone else is how quickly we recover from our letdowns, you know, if we get really upset or annoyed, how quickly do we recover? Or we have a terrible business deal or a bad day at work, how quickly do we recover? Some people need 10 minutes, some need an hour, some people a week, and some people they have grievances that go back 10 years ago, and they’re still angry about them, and at the same time, we need to build momentum when things go well, and the top performers, they gain a lot of confidence when things go well, they build momentum, they feel invincible, and other people, they feel like an imposter, you know, they think it was luck, they think it was coincidence, so even their successes don’t really last long into their identity, and those are true traits that really separate the top performers from everyone else.

Zack Arnold: In the other area that I want to go back to, because I said that I wanted to kind of pull out two different threads, and I want to make sure that I don’t lose this one before we keep moving forwards, but I really want to go deeper into this idea of process versus outcome. This is something that I’ve read about a lot, and I’ve practiced some in my life, but I’m going to be honest that until maybe a year or two ago I didn’t internally feel it in the core of my being. But what has happened to me this year, and I’m sure you can talk about how this has happened with other athletes as well is that I started out at the beginning of the year, and I thought to myself, you know what, this is a sport that I’ve been kind of casually watching from the couch for two or three years, I really enjoy it, and I always kind of think to myself, huh, I wonder if I could do that, and if I’m watching tennis or I’m watching NFL football or. Watching basketball or baseball at my age and my fitness level, I can’t watch any of those sports and realistically think to myself, huh, I bet I could do that. However, with Ninja Warrior, anybody can sign up and participate, and if your story is good enough and your audition tape is good enough, they will let you on the show. I mean, they’ve had 75 year old men on the show that have completed 123, obstacles, so every time I watched it, I thought, well, I don’t really have an excuse, because technically I know that if I applied myself, I could get on the show. So at first it started as a goal, it started as an outcome, I would love to be on the show, but then I thought to myself, now hold on a second, if I were to put in all of the effort necessary, and I spend over a year training for this, and I try to get on the show, and I don’t, I am a complete and total failure, no matter what I have put in, whatever the process has been, whatever actions I’ve taken, whatever progress I’ve made over a year, I’m a complete and total failure if I don’t get on the show, so I thought to myself, How can I make this about the process and not about the outcome? So I said, I don’t want my goal to be on the show, I want my goal to be that in a year I am in good enough shape to be on the show, and what that later broke down to was, all right, What are the habits that I need to do every single day to meet monthly benchmarks to then get to that point where by the end of the year I can be good enough shape that I can be considered to be on the show, but then what I discovered, and this is really what I want you to go deeper on, because I’m not even sure I can explain it yet. I’ve only been training for ROC, so it’s the end of September when we’re recording this. I don’t know when it’s going to air, so that means it’s been about nine months that I’ve really been in this mindset of I’m training to be a ninja warrior, right, but what’s happened is I’ve learned to love the process so much, and embracing the process has changed the quality of my health, has completely changed my body composition, has changed my energy level, has changed my relationship with my family, and has opened up so many doors and opportunities. Just because I talk about the goal, I don’t even care if I get on the show anymore, because the process has been so awesome. So, is that kind of what you were talking about?

Allon Khakshouri: Absolutely. You know, on the one hand, results often are important, and we get very fixated, and we all want to experience results, but at the end of our life, we’re going to be remembered not for how much money we did and on what TV shows we were, but we’re going to be remembered for the character that people remember us for, and this character can be things like loving, kind person with integrity, it can be ambitious, hard working that can be all sorts of different things that that stick much more than the actual outcomes that we achieved, and I think what you are talking about is that in the process of preparing for that show you develop character traits that have become very valuable and that make you feel good, that make you become healthier, that make people appreciate you on a different level, and that literally changed you. This process changed who you are. If I understand you right, and so with tennis players, you know, you don’t know if a young 10 year old kid is ever going to be a world number one in the world, but if this kid makes it a goal to really build the character of the top athlete in terms of moral character traits like being a fair athlete, a fair sportsman, a loving kind person, but also traits like discipline, hard working, competitive, a true fighter, a true warrior, then that will be valuable regardless if that boy or girl ever becomes the top player, and that’s what I mean with process,

Zack Arnold: And I also think another thing that’s so important to point out, and you’ve kind of mentioned this a little bit as well, but and you can talk about this in the world of tennis, but it really seems like the more that I have studied high performance, and I’ve studied the top performers in any area of expertise in the world, you have people that are just ridiculously gifted, and they just have had it from birth, and that’s a trait that they have, but so, so few people that get to top levels are there because of their God-given talent. It’s because of all these other character-building traits that they’ve actually gotten where they are. And at least in my industry, not in anything athletic, but in the world of film editing and working in Hollywood and working with celebrities and producers and directors, what I find is that the people that are really gifted and talented, for the most part, take it for granted, and they don’t realize that their character doesn’t align with where they want to go, and they’re basically just wasted talent, because all they focused on is the fact that, hey, I’m smart, I’m talented, I’m creative, you should hire me, but nobody really wants to work with them because they haven’t focused. Sudden character,

Allon Khakshouri: So my experience is slightly different, and that is that most people who seem very talented, they may have actually done more work when they’re very, when they were very young, or they were pushed by parents, or they did something that made sure that they learned that skill. It didn’t just come naturally. I mean, some people are more gifted than others, but I don’t know anyone who became very successful without hard work. But what I do know is that people with a fixed mindset, they try and hide the hard work they did, because they want to be known as a really talented person, and they want to also seem like they’re not putting hard work into it, because they’re scared that if they put hard work into it and they don’t, they don’t manage their goals, then people might think actually they’re not as talented as people perceive them to be. So, and there’s a lot of literature. I think, have you heard of Anders Ericsson? I have. Yes. So he came up with this 10,000 hour rule, but it’s not really 10,000 hours, it’s 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, or maybe it’s 5000 hours of deliberate practice, or whatever it requires for different tasks, and deliberate practice is really like engaging with difficult, challenging things, and having either a coach or someone who like pushes you to your limit, gives you feedback, and what he found out was that people like Mozart or Federer, or some of the guys we thought was really talented, that they got a lot of support when they were very young, they did a lot of deliberate practice at a very young age, so I don’t know if that’s very different in the movie industry or other industries, but I think often talent, it’s helpful, but it’s overrated, because without hard work you’ll still not enjoy sustainable success. And then, of course, what you say about character is absolutely right, true character comes from hard work and very deliberate work, and with a consciousness of who it is we want to be, not only what it is we want to achieve.

Zack Arnold: Well, and one thing that I want to pull out of that, that I think is definitely very different in my world than yours, is I am surrounded every day by overrated talent. Anybody that works in Hollywood be like, yep, nope, totally get that. So I think that in your world, in the world of sports and sports agency and business management, you probably are around people that could not even make it to your level or walk in the door if they didn’t work hard enough to cultivate the talent that they had to get there. In my world, you can be a flash in the pan, so to speak, and you can be a one hit wonder, where you made some movie in your backyard with an iPhone, and somebody, quote unquote, discovers you and says, “Wow, what an amazing talent, but then all of a sudden, when they’re confronted with the actual process and all the hard work necessary to maintain that talent consistently, that’s when it all falls apart, because again, like we’ve been saying, they don’t have the habits, they don’t have all the high performance mentality, so the only thing that they have to hang on to is their talent, but in your world, you can’t just wake up, quote unquote, being a talented tennis player and imagine that you’re going to become a professional without hundreds or 1000s of hours of practice, and I love this idea that you brought up, deliberate practice, because I think that when people hear about this 10,000 hours rule, they think that it’s just about accruing the numbers, but the analogy that I like to give people, that kind of, and this was the analogy that I had heard that kind of made this click in my mind, where I’m like, well, let’s deliberate practice, and somebody said to me, you know, how good are you at driving? I’m like, I’m pretty proficient. It’s like, well, I’ve been driving now for 22 years, but am I that much better driver now than I was when I was 25 It’s not like all of a sudden, because I have 22 years of driving experience, I can be a NASCAR just because I’m in the car three hours a day, that’s not deliberate practice, so go a little bit deeper with me about the high performance mentality when it comes to putting in the hours versus actual deliberate practice.

Allon Khakshouri: This is a great point, because progress really comes from combining stress with recovery. If you hit the gym, that’s how you build muscles, you stress certain muscle groups, and then you give yourself recovery time, and people always think that success is related to how many hours of work you put, but recovery is equally important, and the reason recovery is so important is to really get good at something, you need to do the kind of work that is difficult, and I think, especially with entrepreneurs, maybe even creative professionals, we like to do what I call busy work, you know, like we like to spend as much time as we can answering emails, doing the kind of things that don’t really push ourselves, like I don’t know, creating a. Up movies or video spots or content, or whatever it is, and at the same time we can also say that with learning, you know, you can go to a language school and like do your homework, or you can really make it a task, like deliberately to improve, to really push your limits, to really get continuous feedback, and what I’m trying to say is that doing the proper work, the deep kind of work takes a lot of effort, and that requires a lot of recovery time, and if you take someone like Roger Federer, who’s still a world-class player at the age of 37 one of his secrets is to play less tournaments than anyone else, probably to practice less hours than most of his competitors, and just to schedule his day much smarter. When he steps on the court, he gives 120% whether in practice or in a match, but as a result he needs to practice less, he needs to play less, and he really focuses on recovery time, and like I think it was a year and a half ago that he took a six month sabbatical, and he came back and had like one of his best years ever at the age of 35 so spending a lot of hours working hard, it’s important, but not the most critical thing. Doing smart work and combining it with recovery is the key, not only to be more successful, but to also be more happy, to be more fulfilled. Ironically, to have more time for your friends and family, and to have what I like to call an awesome life.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more. And I think that the idea of deliberate practice in really thinking about it’s just not the hours that you’re putting in, it’s about the quality of the hours, is.. I mean, that’s the perfect way to put it, because, like, for me, for example, when I started training at the beginning of the year, and I’ve done plenty of athletic training in the past, but not nearly at this level. So, at first, it was just about how many hours can I fit in during the week based on my work schedule and based on having family, and I did that for months and months and months, just to kind of get myself back into shape, so to speak. But then all of a sudden I started to really wear down, and I wasn’t recovering, and I just couldn’t push through the workouts, and I was like, “Man, what’s going on? Like, I just kind of feel physically burned out, and then what I started to really do, and this goes back to what you were saying about feedback, I really started to measure and track my readiness. So I bought what’s called the Aura Ring, and I actually have an entire podcast interview coming out about this piece of technology that measures my heart rate variability, it measures my body temperature while I’m sleeping measures my overall recovery and the strength of my nervous system, and I just said, you know what, I’m going to listen to this thing and do whatever it tells me to do, and it kept telling me that I was tired and I needed to recover more. I’m like, all right, well, if the little ring on my finger and my phone app tells me to rest, that I’m not going to the gym today, and what I found is that as I was training less, I was becoming infinitely stronger when I did show up, and that’s because I had feedback and I had benchmarks, and I think that’s such a huge component when you’re talking about deliberate practice, where you’re not just saying, well, I have to go to the gym for an hour, you’re saying I need to go to the gym for an hour, but last week I burned 550 calories, therefore Therefore, I need to try and burn 600 calories, which means that I have to push just a little bit harder. Or last week I was able to do this many reps with a kettlebell. This week I have to do at least one more, and I feel like just that little mindset shift is a huge difference in the long run when we’re talking again about character and identity and behavior, that’s what really adds up over time,

Allon Khakshouri: 100% And one thing that I think really transformed the life of anyone I work with is this concept of power blocks, and you can do maybe three or four power blocks at most a day, because they really require a lot of focus and energy, but power blocks are, and they can, you can do them in any way you want, but for me there are 55 minute blocks of time where I do nothing but one high value activity free of any distraction, and once I complete it, I take at least a five minute break where I get up, move my body, maybe do some breathing exercises, and just rejuvenate my energy, and then the second thing is that, yes, you need to track your progress, and I have, like, a system where I track it on a periodic, monthly, weekly basis, but they’re very simple things that one can do as well, and my wife just invented a tracking system where she gives herself 10 points every single day on 10 criterias, like one or two points might be related to business. Did I create valuable content today? Did I do a high value activity? Then three points might be related to family, like was I loving with my husband, was I loving with my kids. Kids for each kid one point, and then, like, did I do sports today? That might be another point, and you can do whatever you choose up until 10 points, and then you rate yourself every single day, and you give yourself the scoring, and like that. You can really see just on a day-to-day basis, are you living the kind of life that you really want?

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I love that concept, the idea of measuring based on all the different areas of your life that are important, and I love the fact that you talked about power blocks as well. That’s something that I call time blocks, which is essentially the same thing, but it’s just this concept of during this period of time the world disappears, phone is in airplane mode, email is turned off, there’s no social media, there’s no random browser tabs with the latest news feeds or whatever it is, and the reason that I do that, and the reason that I teach it to all of my students and my coaching clients, is that it takes up to 20 minutes for your brain to get into that state of creative flow, but once it gets there, you just dive way down into that creative rabbit hole until you hear a ding or you hear a chime, or you just want to check your email super, super quick for one minute, it resets the clock, and it takes another 15 to 20 minutes to get back into that state. So, what I always, just like you’re saying, I will basically do for me, it’s roughly about an hour as well, and the most that I can do, and it’s taken years to get to this point, because I basically treat focus like a skill, no different than a sport, where you just slowly, gradually work up the strength. I can get to the point where I can do five or six hours worth of dedicated creative time, but that’s it. But if you look at the amount that I’m able to accomplish in just six hours, it’s far more than I used to be able to accomplish in a 12 hour day when I wasn’t following that habit, because I was just kind of all right, I’ll do 10 minutes of work, and oh, there’s an email, and I should probably respond to that. All right, let me do a few more minutes of work. Oh, look, Facebook. All right, well, I should probably get back and edit a scene for five minutes, and it’s just this endless hamster wheel of busyness that you get sucked into that just never ends. So, I love the fact that you brought up these power blocks, or these time blocks.

Allon Khakshouri: One point here is that, like, you made an analogy to the gym, and yes, focus is literally training the brain, and, like, it’s good to look at the brain like a muscle that can grow, and there’s like proof that we can literally change the physical architecture of the brain by being focused, and I could mention some examples and studies, but I write about them a lot as well. But this is one thing that we’ve discovered in the last 10 years. No matter what your age is, through focus and attention, you can change the structure of your brain, which I think is the best news ever for anyone else.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I could not agree more, because again, talking about the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset. If you’re thinking to yourself, I’m just somebody that’s distracted all the time, and I can never pay attention, I’m just so add, right? You hear people that say that all the time, now it’s like, well, yes, there are certain people that are diagnosed with a medical condition, and the way that their brain is wired makes it very difficult for them to focus. I happen to be one of those people that was diagnosed with adult onset ADD, but what I found is first knowing that helped me make so much sense of my life and my behaviors and why I felt the way that I did, but then when I realized that there’s this thing called neuroplasticity, and I had a growth mindset, and I could change the way that my brain was wired, I just said I’m going to learn everything I possibly can to cultivate the skill, no different than if somebody had said, well, you just have this medical condition where your muscles are weaker than most people, but if you put in extra work in the gym, and you really focus on your nutrition, and you really focus on your recovery, you can actually get stronger than other people. It’s just going to take a little bit more dedication to get there. That’s essentially what I’ve dedicated the last decade plus in my life, is learning how can I basically turn focus from a disability into a superpower, and that’s really why I wanted to create the program that I have, and why I wanted to have an expert on, like you are, because you understand all these concepts as well.

Allon Khakshouri: Thank you, that’s a great effort on your behalf, and it really is true. You know, now you even have people recovering from mild strokes that they get trained to focus their attention on moving their body parts that they can’t move anymore due to their stroke, and people are like the medical world is discovering tremendous stories of recovery because the brain is able to relearn abilities that have been destroyed through the stroke, so I think in the near future we’re going to hear so much more about neuroplasticity, and it’s so exciting, and it gives hope to any one of us that we can change the state we’re in.

Zack Arnold: Well, I want to be very respectful of your time, and we’ve talked about a ton of big picture concepts, and talking about character, and creating a vision and process. Versus outcome, and all these other things, and then here at the very end, we’ve dug into a couple of very small actionable things that people can do. I want to know, is there anything else? Is there one more quick tip that you could give, because you have ultimate guide after ultimate guide with tons of tips, and I’ll make sure to send people to be able to download your stuff, but if you can just think of one more off the top of your head, it kind of goes along with the first two that you gave. What would it be?

Allon Khakshouri: It’s very simple, you know. Tim Ferriss wrote a book, Titans of Giants, I think it’s called

Zack Arnold: Tools of Titans,

Allon Khakshouri: Tools of Titans, exactly. And what struck me about that book, because he interviewed so many fascinating people, but at the beginning of the book he speaks about a few habits that a majority of people do, and one specific habit that I think over 88% of all the people he interviewed do, and it’s so obvious we all know about it, but so many people are resistant to doing it. Any idea what I’m talking about?

Zack Arnold: I’m gonna guess it’s meditation,

Allon Khakshouri: Exactly. So, like, if someone wants instant results, then daily meditation is the one thing that really transformed my life, because I discovered that I’m not my thoughts, that I can actually change my thoughts, and it helped me create inner calmness, no matter what was going on in my life, or is going on in my life, and there are so many cool apps, like for example Headspace, that help us get into the flow of meditation, and to make that a daily practice, I think is the one thing that I would recommend to anyone.

Zack Arnold: Yep, I am on the exact same page. I think that if our roles were reversed, and you were doing the podcast, and I was the guest, and you say, can you just think of one little habit that anybody can do that’s going to help them focus? It’s exactly what I would have said, is meditation, and it’s even the same app that I would have recommended, and it has nothing to do with me setting you up for the question, or you and I talking about it beforehand. We just are obviously wired the same way, because I would have said meditation, and I would have also said head space, because that’s the app that I use, and it’s something that I find that, do I stick to it 365 days a year? No, I am very human, and I definitely get derailed and off track. But what I’ve discovered is that every single time that I get off track and I don’t stick with it as a regular habit, I find myself thinking, why am I having such a hard time getting into this time block, or why is it harder to write 1000 words in a morning, like I usually can do. Why am I shorter with my family? Oh, all right. I haven’t been doing the meditation, like it. The correlation is so clear, and if I were to chart it on a graph, like I could scientifically prove that the quality of my life changes when I do or when I don’t meditate

Allon Khakshouri: Exactly, absolutely, I agree with 100% and you know, permission to be human is another big thing. We many people meditate, and then we fall off, we get busy, and as long as we realize that, and then we can recommit, it’s great. And there’s a great quote about how much time should you spend meditating, and I forgot who said it, but the person said normally you should meditate like 1020 minutes a day, except when you’re very busy. When you’re very busy, meditate for an hour a day.

Zack Arnold: One of my favorite quotes of all time. I mean, it’s eerie, how you and I could be on opposite ends of the planet, and it’s just like we’re reading from the same playbook. It’s crazy,

Allon Khakshouri: Cool, super cool.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I know. I love that quote. That’s definitely one of my favorites, and I think it was popularized by Tim Ferriss. Obviously, you and I are both Tim Ferriss fans, but I think the first time I heard the quote was from him. I don’t know where it’s actually attributed to, and if he said it, or if somebody else said it, like some stoic that he’s, you know, a fan of, whatever it is. But it’s definitely quotes that has stuck with me for years. So, I’m glad you brought it up. So, on that note, we could literally do this for hours, but I definitely want to be respectful of your time. So, if somebody’s listening to this and they’re saying, “Man, this guy knows a lot about high performance and developing mental toughness and really becoming the best of the best, how can they find you, and how can they find some of your best materials? Cool.

Allon Khakshouri: So, I’ll give you a link where I prepared an ultimate guide to high performance for your readers, and that would be a great way to get to know my material a bit better, and I’ll also give you a link to my website, because it’s www.alancakshwary.com which is not easy to spell, and then finally I have a Facebook group called the High Performance Project. So, anyone really interested in high performance and really embracing the high performance lifestyle, I would invite you to join the group, where we try and share high performance wisdom on a daily basis, hold each other accountable, challenge each other, and really help the entire group to live a high-performance lifestyle.

Zack Arnold: Awesome, I love all those ideas. And yes, you are correct, your name is a little bit hard to spell, it’s not very phonetic. So, what I’m actually going to do, I love the fact that you’ve created like a specific page and ultimate guide just for my audio. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that, and what I’m going to do is I’m just going to create a much easier link, so anybody listening, especially if they’re driving or exercising or at the gym or whatever, I want them to be able to remember it easily, so it’s just going to be Optimize yourself.me/allon which is a l l o n, so it’s very simple, Optimize yourself.me/a l l o n and it’ll send my listeners directly to the page they want them to find, and then I’ll have the Facebook page, and I’ll have your homepage, and everything else in the show notes for this episode as well, so that way they can find everything. On that note, I cannot thank you enough for all the information that you shared with me tonight, with my audience tonight. I don’t know about them, but I learned a whole bunch of stuff, and I basically live and breathe all this stuff every single day. So, you’ve upped my game, so I’m hoping that you’ve upped the game of my audience as well. So, I really, really appreciate you being on the show today.

Allon Khakshouri: Thanks, and thanks for having this amazing show. I love it. I’ll now continue listening to it.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Elyse Rintelman. The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).