Become an Elite Mental Athlete

By David Silverstein

Become an Elite Mental Athlete

Commit to Building Your Brain and Improving Your Mental Game

Contents

Chapter 1: Elite Performance 5

To excel in competition, business professionals must develop their mental muscles.

Chapter 2: The Brain: Did You Know? 11

Learn how the brain’s systems interconnect to form a coordinated high-performance mental machine.

Chapter 3: Nutrition: Feeding Your Mental Machine 17

What to feed your brain to keep it functioning optimally.

Chapter 4: Exercise: Healthy Body, Healthy Brain 25

How aerobic exercise and strength training benefit the brain.

Chapter 5: Sleep: The Undervalued Resource 31

Why sleep is vital for elite mental performance—and how to ensure you’re getting enough. 

Chapter 6: Stress: The Creativity Killer 41

Operating at the highest levels of performance means managing stress.

Chapter 7: Mental Stamina 47

Ways to build your stamina and cure mental fatigue. 

Chapter 8: Pattern Recognition and Expertise 51

The key to expertise is making a task automatic.

Chapter 9: Decision-Making and Cognitive Traps 57

Learn to spot and avoid common traps that lead to “wrong decisions.”

Chapter 10: Brain Training Apps 61

An overview of software programs that improve memory or intelligence.

Chapter 11: Becoming an Elite Mental Athlete 65

What could you start doing today to prepare yourself to become an elite mental athlete?

INTRODUCTION

This book is one I have looked forward to writing for several years. It represents the convergence of a number of observations, experiences, and lots of research. The concept is derived from my thinking about what it means for us to live in a “knowledge” economy or the “information” age. 

Living in Boulder, Colo.—a prime Olympic training ground and home to many world-class athletes—I’ve become familiar with the kind of training elite athletes subject themselves to. So for some reason…I don’t really recall why…I asked myself one day, “Why is it that the best athletes in the world are always working at becoming even better athletes, yet the best thinkers in the world don’t work on becoming better thinkers?”

Now, to begin addressing that question, it’s important that I provide some context for what working to get better really means. Let’s take a world-class basketball player like LeBron James, who many argue is the best in the world and some even think the best that’s ever played the game. What does LeBron James do to get better at basketball? Presumably, some combination of many things including working on his vertical leap, his strength, his flexibility, his reflexes, his inside shooting, his outside shooting, his ball handling, his nutrition, his sleep, and his stress control. What LeBron James doesn’t do is simply head out and play some pickup basketball.