I am high performing.
When people hear that about someone at work, they picture a particular kind of person: someone working insane hours, delivering something extraordinary. And here is the uncomfortable part — that is not actually difficult. It is not difficult if you stop caring about every other element of your life. If you never drink a beer with your friends, never exercise, never spend time with your kids.
Extraordinary output in one domain is almost always paid for somewhere else. The bill just doesn't arrive on the same invoice.
The hidden subsidy
Nobody is extraordinary at work in a vacuum. Behind most heroic performers there is a subsidy, and it is usually one of three:
- Someone else absorbs the rest of life. A partner handling pickups, dinners, appointments, the household admin. Real work, done by someone whose name is not on the promotion.
- A life stage that hasn't started charging yet. Twenty-six, no dependents, no aging parents, a body that still tolerates four hours of sleep. Genuinely easier. Not a permanent condition.
- Borrowing from the future. Health, relationships, and curiosity all extend generous credit and then call the loan in at once, usually with no notice.
None of these are moral failings. But when we call the resulting output "high performance" without naming the subsidy, we set a standard that most people can only meet by quietly wrecking something.
The arithmetic nobody argues with
Extraordinary requires concentration. You get exceptional at something by pointing a disproportionate share of your finite time and attention at it. That is what makes it exceptional — most people can't or won't concentrate that hard on one thing.
Which means it is arithmetically impossible to be extraordinary everywhere at once. You cannot concentrate a disproportionate share of your resources on five things simultaneously. Anyone claiming otherwise is either being subsidised, is early enough in a life stage that the costs haven't landed, or is not being honest about at least one of the five.
What high performance looks like for normal people
So here is the definition I actually use: doing well on all the parameters, not only at work.
Concretely, that means:
- Consistent, not spiky. Delivering solidly for eight years beats burning brilliantly for eighteen months and then leaving the industry.
- Physically capable of doing it again tomorrow. Sleep, exercise and eating healthy are not competing with your output. They are the input.
- Still interesting to be around. The friends, the beer, the hobbies — these are where new ideas come from. A person with no life outside work eventually has nothing to bring to work.
- Not the single point of failure. If your performance depends on you personally being available at 23:00, that is not performance. That is a systemic risk wearing a cape.
- Present where you said you would be. Reliability at home is the same skill as reliability at work, and it is the harder one.
Good on all parameters. Extraordinary on none of them, most weeks. Sustainable for decades.
Why organisations should want this version
The heroic definition is expensive in ways that don't show up in a performance review.
Heroics hide systemic problems — if one person keeps saving the release, the release process never gets fixed. They create key-person risk, because knowledge concentrated in the person who never delegates leaves the building when they do. And they set a norm that filters your hiring pool down to people without caring responsibilities, which is a narrower and less experienced pool than you think.
The steady, boundaried performer who has been shipping reliably for eight years has almost certainly delivered more total value than the one who flamed out — and has been considerably cheaper to manage.
The honest caveat
There are seasons. A launch, an incident, a company-defining month where everything else gets deprioritised and you go all in. That is fine, and sometimes it is the right call.
Three conditions make the difference between a season and a lifestyle: it is chosen, it is time-boxed, and it is paid back afterwards. When the season never ends, that is not high performance. That is an organisation running a deficit on its people and calling it culture.
So
I am high performing. Not because I do anything extraordinary at work, but because I do a lot of things well — at work and everywhere else — and I have been able to keep doing it for years without anything important collapsing.
That is a much harder thing to pull off than working insane hours. It just looks less impressive from the outside.