High performers are told a lot of things about what it takes to succeed.

Work harder. Push through. Take time off when you burn out. Trust your gut. See a coach. Follow the latest wellness advice. Work 996. Then recover. Repeat.

Much of this advice sounds reasonable. Some of it can even work, for a while.

But high performance is different from simply working hard. It’s a measurable capability, and like any other capability, it can be understood, trained, and improved.

Over years of studying high achievers, we’ve found that many of the most widely accepted ideas about performance are either incomplete or simply wrong.

Some confuse effort with output. Others treat recovery as the opposite of productivity. And some encourage high achievers to follow prescriptions that were never designed for people operating under extraordinary levels of pressure, complexity, and urgency.

Here are ten of the biggest myths we’ve encountered, and what the data tells us instead.

Myth #1. You have to take a break from work in order to stop falling farther into burnout.

The ten-day silent retreat. The five-day starvation walkabout in the desert.

We’re not saying they’re not fun or transformational, but we are saying they take your head out of the game for days at a time. Use them when your bad habits have driven you off the path of performance and you have the time for a massive reset.

The problem is, slipping on your self-care routine causes you to deliver mediocre work which makes everything harder. Projects lag, team tensions rise, big opportunities are missed, and extra hours are needed to fix mistakes that would otherwise have been avoided.

Which makes it impossible to walk away in the midst of a personal and professional crisis.

Instead, we developed the Dory Protocol with real life in mind so you’re able to start seeing improvements in only one minute a day.

Check in with Dory at least five times a week and you’ll quickly accomplish everything you would have accomplished by taking dedicated time off, but without returning to yet another crisis caused by your absence.

Myth #2. You have to join an hourlong live video call to grow your mental strength.

Ten years ago the only way to understand and optimize yourself was to meet with a therapist or coach for an hour, usually in person. These days the advice industry has turned to virtual calls which has opened up even more opportunities for working together around the world.

Yet the fundamental structure hasn’t changed. Live human interaction and an hour of your time every time you want to move yourself forward. That’s a big ask in today’s fast paced world.

Instead of forcing you to wedge new self-care time into your already packed schedule, we designed the Dory Protocol to fit into the cracks that already exist. With Dory, our members run incredibly-high performing self-care and personal optimization programs in just minutes a week.

Usually found while brushing their teeth, eating a meal, in transit, sitting on the toilet, or having a cup of coffee. Moments that already exist that were previously underutilized or ignored.

Turning downtime into growth doesn’t mean trading play for productivity either. Most of the things you need to optimize your mind feel a lot more like play than work anyway. You’re just not doing the correct amount of the right things right now.

Don’t waste your time by accepting the ancient one-hour-exchanged-for-tiny-improvement model. Break your self-care down into one-minute chunks and watch your personal growth add up faster with ease.

Dory Protocol is self-care with precision so you never waste your time.

Myth #3. You can’t easily measure your mental performance at work.

Gone are the days of operating by gut feelings. Because running an imprecise self-care plan is like guessing how much revenue you generated last month, instead of knowing how much revenue you generated last month. You cannot make a strong plan without precise data.

Optimal Pace is to personal performance what Net Promoter Score became to customer relationships in the 2010s. One simple number that’s easy to measure, that represents a complex system, and is incredibly useful every day.

Dory Protocol is based on our research that discovered that all high performers have an Optimal Pace that changes constantly. And that for each person there’s a specific set of actions that grow or deplete their Optimal Pace every day.

It takes one minute to measure your Optimal Pace, and tracking how it changes over time reveals your own personal playbook for staying mentally resilient so you can consistently produce high quality work through any level of pressure.

Myth #4. The social wellness influencers know how I can become a high performer.

Social wellness influencers have lots of ideas, and some of them will work for you. Our research shows that about 30% of what any one person recommends will work well for someone else.

So if you try ten self-care techniques that you learned from social wellness influencers, only three of them will make a difference for you. That means you’ve wasted 70% of your time trying the others.

And when you’re not sure which ones worked, you’ll continue wasting 70% of your self-care time when you run that adopted self-care routine in your life every day. In today’s fast-paced high pressure world that’s more inefficiency than most people can afford to absorb.

It’s this level of lost time and lost impact that lead so many high achievers straight into burnout despite having the best intentions.

The Dory Protocol currently tracks over 2,000 self-care techniques but we recommend our members be open to accepting inspiration from anywhere. Just make sure to add any new ideas you’re testing to the app so you can be sure if they’re accomplishing what you want from them.

Every technique Dory recommends starts with our population-level efficacy data that proves it works with other high achievers just like you, not everyone else.

A clinical trial review of Dory Protocol recommendations showed that they were 670% more effective at producing the desired impact than generic techniques recommended by social wellness influencers.‍

Myth #5. Therapists and coaches turn people into high performers.

Some therapists and coaches are high performers. Many are not. Most therapists spend the majority of their time studying now to turn under-performers with clinical mental health challenges into average performers. For those people, that impact is life changing.

But high-performance psychology is a very small subset of the science of mental health and most therapists have little to no experience with supporting high achievers through times of high pressure and they often have no personal experiences to draw on from high-pressure high performing roles themselves.

High achievers experience pressure from importance, complexity, and urgency yet most therapists and coaches live their lives on predictable schedules, helping others, at their convenience.

Successful builders know that high performance comes from measurement, testing and iteration and we’ve seen that model work in our businesses for years.

We designed the Dory Protocol to implement the same framework for our minds so we always know where we stand, exactly what’s working, and the next step to take to move ourselves forward toward sustainable performance.

Our data-driven approach to personal optimization feels more like business operations than therapy and will always be more precise than even the most insightful observations of a skilled coach.

Myth #6. Working harder always means moving faster toward your goals.

So many high achievers confuse quality with quantity when it comes to work. In the Dory Protocol we measure performance as the product of quality times quantity.

The more you work, the more high quality work you can do. The higher the quality of your work, the more you’re able to get done. Neither component stands alone.

Someone working 100 low quality hours a week can easily be beaten by someone putting in 40 hours of high quality work over the same time. But neither of them will ever beat the high performer doing 100 high quality hours of work every week.

High performers move faster toward their goals than lower performers. And high performers who consistently work at high performance over time beat everyone.

This is because low performers create more work for themselves through the mistakes they make and the opportunities they miss. High performers simply don’t have to do as much as move themselves forward. They work smarter instead of harder. Yet it still takes years of hard work for them to achieve their goals.

If you want to move faster toward your goals, you need to understand the quality and quantity of your work output and make sure you’re laying that effort and productivity down consistently over time.

Dory Protocol measures and tracks both components of performance so you always know where you stand and you can follow the growth of each one as you support the strength of your mindstate using the app.

Myth #7. Anyone can work the prescribed 996 hustle culture schedule if they’re tough enough.

Anyone can try. But only people with an Optimal Pace of 11 or higher can productively sustain the esteemed 996 hustle culture workload without falling into burnout and losing their productivity.

We don’t say that runners who cannot run a marathon are weak. We say they’re improperly trained. Because it’s true. It’s not that they’re not tough enough. It’s that they’re not prepared enough.

The same thing holds true for mental performance. Someone who cannot sustainably work the 996 hustle culture definition of hard work isn’t weak, they just haven’t yet trained their mind to gain this capability.

The reality is, most people touting their 996 effort are cycling up and down between periods of burnout and only posting stories when their recovery is on the rise. They don’t have an Optimal Pace of 11 or higher.

Ever wonder why you’re not hearing from them every day? It’s because for every week they’re productive they’re experiencing another week of burnout and ineffectiveness where they stop and go silent.

Anyone can sustainably work 72 hours a week if they train for it, and with the Dory Protocol anyone can run a precision training program to grow their capacity while working every day along the way.

If you’re looking to keep the pace with the hustle culture crowd, and never flame out while doing it, measure and grow your Optimal Pace in the Dory Protocol app and target an Optimal Pace of 11 or higher to make it happen.

But there’s no need to stop there. Many Dory members have Optimal Pace numbers of 12 or higher and are able to sustainably and effortlessly work circles around the hustle culture crowd’s limited definition of productivity.

Myth #8. A 996 schedule is the maximum work output a high achiever can deliver.

The Dory Protocol Optimal Pace prediction model produces a score on a scale from 0 to 18 indicating the number of hours a high achiever can sustainably work today without detracting from their performance tomorrow.

Hustle culture’s hard work prescription defines strong effort as working from nine am to nine pm six days a week for a total of 72 hours in the saddle each week.

Many Dory members have Optimal Pace numbers of 12 or higher although paces this high represent only 8% of all high achievers we’ve studied so far across 10,000 participants over six years.

An Optimal Pace of 18 means the model predicts a high achiever can produce 126 hours of high quality work output this week without negatively impacting their productivity next week.

Dory members who work consistently at these higher levels of Optimal Pace are able to work circles around hustle culture proponents stuck working 72 hours a week. And you’ll never know what you’re capable of right now, if you don’t measure your Optimal Pace.

Myth #9. Personal and team performance always fall when pressure goes up.

Across the general population this is absolutely true. Our studies show that on average for every point that pressure increases, team performance falls by two points.

Yet 2% of the high achievers we’ve studied have pressure and performance relationships that don’t match that standard. They actually perform better under pressure.

We all like to think we’re one of those people, and although everyone can train this capability, the reality is that 98% of us do not perform like this right now.

We designed the Dory Protocol to move more high achievers from the 98% into the 2% where pressure goes from being your kryptonite to being your superpower. Because we cannot control how much pressure is coming tomorrow, but we can control how much pressure we can handle.

Myth #10. Cycling back and forth between 100 hour weeks and weeks of complete exhaustion is still the fastest way to move forward.

It feels logical to believe that working in bursts of productivity and then recovery is the fastest way to move toward your goals.

But our research shows that’s incorrect for two reasons.

First, it’s unrealistic to believe that you can plan your bursts of productivity to perfectly overlap the moments when your work is most urgent and important. In reality, you’re solving just as many critical problems and evaluating just as many big opportunities in the weeks when you’re crushed as the weeks when you’re strong and refreshed.

Problems and opportunities don’t wait for your schedule. You know that.

This means you’re bringing a half-powered version of yourself to your biggest problems and opportunities over time. It doesn’t take much for a competitor to beat you at your own game when you’re always playing with one arm tied behind your back.
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Second, analyzing the productivity and recovery patterns of high achievers who burst their productivity reveals that there’s a hangover effect after each period of exhaustion because mistakes made and opportunities missed during those times don’t stop having a negative impact when they’re feeling charged up again.

Opportunities missed during these periods often don’t come with second chances that can be called back later, and problems poorly solved always come with rework when you’re able to be effective again, taking time away from your most important priorities.

We’ve observed that extra progress gained during periods of bursted productivity are on average matched with five times the losses from periods of exhaustion.

Making the concept of cycling between low and high productivity an incredibly ineffective strategy, in addition to just feeling like an awful way to go through life, completely exhausted half the time.

Stop guessing about your performance. Start the Dory Protocol and begin measuring, training, and growing your Optimal Pace so you can perform at your best for the long haul.