INFORMATION — CONDITION 3 OF 5
You are not short of information. Books, audiobooks, podcasts, articles, interviews — more good thinking is within reach than anyone could use, and the field of performance is decades deep in it. That much choice brings a problem of its own: it can become confusing and overwhelming, and you can lose your direction in it. Information is one of the five conditions performance is built within, and a plateau can come from any of them. The difficulty in this condition is no longer finding information: it is working out which of it fits you, and whether what you are using is producing change.
The right information is the input that fits you and your stage — not all the advice out there, just the part you can actually use. The skill is choosing what to take in and setting the rest down.
This article covers what the right information gives you, how to know whether what you are using is working, and what to do when a source stops fitting.
Effort needs the right inputs
The third condition is the knowledge and methodology that makes your effort effective. Without the right information, you stagnate at best. With the wrong information, you go in the wrong direction — which is worse than standing still, because you are spending time and effort to get further from where you actually want to be. You do the same thing the same way, expect different results, and get the same result you always did.
The pattern shows up in many places: the office worker taking the same approach to the same problems, year after year; the performer whose own habits are holding them back, who has not yet recognised which behaviours are doing it. Neither of them is lazy. They are working with the wrong information, without useful feedback, and not noticing what their results are telling them.
How do you choose what is right for you?
What is right for you depends on who you are and where you are. The information someone else swears by may not be right for you at all: the same book changes one reader’s career and does nothing for another, and the difference is rarely the book. It is how you digest it, and how it relates to you.
The manifesto puts it as a jigsaw. Imagine yourself as the whole — a jigsaw, with edges, with a shape, with parts already filled in and parts still missing. Every method, theory, idea or practice you encounter is a piece. What matters is placing the pieces that fit your jigsaw, in the order they fit it, and leaving out the ones that don’t. The information you use, and how you use it, has to be individual to you, because you are different from everyone else. It is you building you.
Be aspirational about the quality of what you learn from, and realistic about your stage. A source built for someone years ahead of you can be the right source at the wrong time: you may not be ready for what it asks yet, and readiness may be the development you require first.
The people who bring it to life
Information does not only arrive in print. This is what coaching is for. It is what books, courses, mentors, structured feedback and good methodology are for. None of them substitutes for the other four conditions. All of them make effort more effective when they are there.
The people matter as much as the material, because people bring information to life. A mentor who knows you adjusts the information to where you are and to how you are on the day, works with you to speed the process up, and helps you get the most out of what you are learning. A book cannot do any of that. The people around you also carry the standards you are held to, the benchmarks. And feedback from people you trust, the ones who tell you what they see rather than what is comfortable to hear, gives you an outside view your own reflection may miss. That perspective is different from yours, and valuable for exactly that reason.
The sources have to be trusted ones. And if nobody around you can give you the feedback you need, go where they are: the rooms and communities where the people doing your kind of work talk to each other. That is where information starts being about you specifically.
How do you know it is working?
How do you know whether the information you are using is right for you? You judge it by what happens when you apply it. A source can be well written, widely recommended and right for many other people, and still do nothing for you in practice.
Feedback comes from three places: the outcomes of what you have done, the people whose judgement you trust, and your own reflection. Information that is working produces evidence you can point to over time: a behaviour that changed, a result that moved, a problem that stopped recurring. The change is rarely immediate: it takes time, and it can be subtle. When you apply something and nothing changes, that is not automatically the source’s failure; sometimes the application is where it broke down, and that distinction is worth examining before you discard anything. Either way, what you are seeing tells you where to look next.
What the research adds
To develop you need high-quality information and feedback; you then need to apply it with purpose and attention to detail. The deliberate-practice research, with Ericsson’s work at its foundation, describes what that looks like: learning aimed at a specific goal, focused on what is currently just outside your reach, with feedback built in rather than bolted on. Ericsson’s own caveat applies: not every field allows full deliberate practice, but you can get close to it. Practice without feedback does little, because mistakes go uncorrected and good performances go unsupported. And the feedback asks something of you in return: ownership. When you drop a standard or make a mistake, go back and repair it rather than carrying on, then go again. That is the loop. Translated to this condition: information you cannot get feedback on is information you cannot assess, and information you cannot assess has to be taken on faith.
Six questions to ask of any source
Ask these of any source you use — a book, a method, a course, a mentor’s standing advice.
The questions will not always tell you to change anything. What they do is make the decision deliberate instead of automatic. And if you have stopped questioning a source, that is itself information about whether it still fits.
Progress comes from the right information for you, at your stage, with feedback you can act on.
How do you know when a source has stopped fitting?
The book that opened a door for you, the method that broke a plateau, the mentor whose voice is still in your head when you decide — each of them earned its place, and what they built in you does not disappear as you develop past them. They are part of your foundation. Moving on from a source does not mean you have to discard it. It means you can build upon it and progress.
When a source stops producing change, there are three responses: keep building on it where it still serves you, refine or tweak it to improve it, or add what it is missing from somewhere else. Progression is not linear; it goes in steps, so a stretch where a source produces nothing new does not always mean it has finished its work. And outgrowing a source is evidence that it worked: you built upon it, and it carried you to the point of needing the next piece.
What this looks like in practice
Take a capable professional who takes learning seriously. They read the recognised books in their field, listen to the podcasts, save the articles, and finish each one intending to use it. Their results have stopped moving. Run the six questions across what they are using and two answers stand out: nothing they consume gives them feedback they can act on, and they rarely implement what they learned from the previous book before starting the next. Part of it is that reading is the enjoyable half: they finish a book, move on to the next, and hope it all falls into place on its own. Of course, it does not happen like that. The problem was never how much they read. So they change three things: they choose the one method that fits their stage and use it until it is part of how they operate; they set one measure that will tell them whether it is producing change; and they ask one person whose judgement they trust to tell them what they see. The reading continues, with more of it applied and tested before the next source is opened. The change that follows is not dramatic and does not arrive overnight. It builds gradually: hard to notice from one day to the next, but clear when you look back over a longer stretch.
Keep it refreshed
Like the other four conditions, this one is never finished: you keep building upon it. Some information goes out of date; some stays sound while your circumstances change around it: your goals, the standards around what you do, your personal and family situation. Either way you have to be adaptable, because the sources that fit you at one stage will need adding to at the next. When you notice you are struggling, that is the signal to look for the next piece: you find it, you add it, you build it into how you operate, you work at it until it runs without thinking, and you keep refining yourself that way.
Do the same with what succeeds. When a piece of information works — you have implemented it and it is producing change — make notes on it and understand how it is working. The notes from the good times are what you fall back on in the difficult ones, when you cannot rely on remembering what got you there.
How far you take it depends on how complete you want to be, or whether you want to become an expert in one area. The people who master their trades keep building either way: they do not stagnate, and they keep looking for the next piece. Stay open enough to learn from new information, and anchored enough that you do not lose track of who you are or get confused by what you take in.
Next in the sequence: Application — making what you have learned part of your lifestyle and your daily habits. For the full structure, How High Performance Is Built lays out the five conditions and the path that connects who you are to where you are going.
Find out whether Information is your underdeveloped condition. The two-minute diagnostic scores you across all five conditions and points you to the right next read and tool.
Then continue in sequence: Apply Yourself to Evolve →
Start with the free 7-Action PDF. Seven actions drawn from performance psychology research, each one explained, each with a practical exercise. You also get the monthly letter, which applies one idea at a time.
Research referred to above: Ericsson & Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016), and the deliberate-practice research behind it. The full system, with all sources, is in the manifesto. To audit the information you use — the six questions, with space to work through what to keep, what to refine and what to add — the Performance Workbook is built for exactly that.