Lesson Four: The Hidden Language of Top Performers

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This lesson was written by Scott Young.

One of the challenges with building rare and valuable skills is figuring out just what those skills are. Sometimes top performers themselves aren’t even able to fully articulate what matters for success.

As Chris L., a former student of Top Performer explains, “I started by talking to people a few ranks above me in my job, and asked them what I should focus on. They all came back with the same answers, ‘You you’ve got to set goals with your manager and have regular check-ins, blah blah blah…’”

This is a common experience when doing research on your career. Experts often give generic, vague-sounding advice, even though you know that can’t possibly be the distinction that made them successful. In Top Performer, we explain how to get past these answers and dig into what really matters.

Chris continues, “The idea [from the course] that you can ask an expert a question, and they don’t know that they know the answer. They don’t say the answer, but you can still get the answer. It blows your mind if you think about it for a second, but that was my experience.”

Digging Deeper to Uncover the Hidden Language

As Chris dug deeper, he picked up on a phrase that kept coming up, again and again, with the people he spoke with. What he noticed was that the people who kept getting promotions were acutely focused onto how much value, in terms of dollars, they had provided for the company.

One of Chris’s colleagues even shared an anecdote about overhearing a promotion discussion. “There were two people up for promotion and what it came down to was one person had created $19 million in value and the other $20 million.” The latter person got the promotion.

Now, in retrospect, the idea that creating more value in a for-profit company isn’t surprising. But Chris worked in this company for years and hadn’t noticed that this was the hidden language top performers were using to distinguish themselves from the rank-and-file.

In his own words, “I hadn’t been defining my job performance in terms of that. I’m not in a sales field or anything. It sounds sort of obvious when you say it, but nobody had ever come to me and said, ‘Hey Chris, this is what matters.’

“I was frustrated because, I think I’m doing a good job and I say to myself, ‘What’s the hold up?’ And I see other people who I don’t think are doing a good job, and they’re getting ahead. I talk to other people and they say the same thing, ‘I work hard, but nothing happens.’ Well, it turns out I was working hard on the wrong things.”

What’s the Hidden Language in Your Field?

One of thing we were surprised to learn in running Top Performer, was just how varied these hidden languages of success were. That means, it isn’t fair to say you can just copy Chris’s insight and apply it to your own position. The language in one field will be different from another. Even in different companies, with different cultures, different qualities may be emphasized more than others.

In other words, you need to do your own research. That’s a process we can guide you through in Top Performer.

In the meantime, think about discussions with your own colleagues. Do you notice certain words and phrases tend to be used more by the best people? The language people use to describe their work can often give a good insight into what really matters in a way that simply asking for advice can’t.