What Does Peeling Bananas Have To Do With Peak Performance?

To attain peak performance, you’ll need to change how you do those things that up to now have been working okay.

It’s quite natural to settle for what we know works, even if it doesn’t work every time.

Let me tell you a story…

I learned how to peel a banana when I was a very young boy and I’ve spent my entire life believing I was pretty good at it!

Sure, there’s been the odd time when a banana has been awkward to peel and I had to bite into it, getting that awful, bitter taste from it’s tough skin.

Or those real stubborn times when I’ve squeezed too hard and ended up with a gooey, mushy mess on my hands.

Most of the time I’ve done okay though, and frankly I’ve never given it too much thought.

That is, until I came across this short video on YouTube — click the image to watch

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality Nikos Kazantzakis

There’s Always A Better Way


All these years and I never knew there was a simpler, easier and more effective way to peel a banana!

I could have noticed monkeys opening bananas this way many times before, as I watched countless nature programmes over the years.

Or watching chimpanzees at feeding time over the years, during countless visits to the zoo.

Maybe even on the few occasions I’ve seen them in the wild!

Yet, in all this time I missed this better way of doing one of the simple things I do almost every day.

It set me thinking…

How might this play out in other walks of life?

What opportunities might we miss, believing that what we are doing is okay?

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.- Jim Collins

Related: Are You Actually Doing Something To Get The Job Done?

Call to Action

Imagine all of the things people are doing in organisations everyday, that are viewed as okay.

The ways of doing stuff that have been handed down from person to person that, although mostly work, sometimes go wrong.

Your own way of working that remains unquestioned through the years because it’s done the job.

Now, imagine that there is a better way, one that will lift you and your organisation above being simply good enough and help you reach peak performance.

One that will mean taking you and your team away from the false belief that you know how to do stuff well, simply because ‘that’s how it’s always been done‘.

There are always new and better ways to take you beyond the mediocre of ‘okay‘.

Perhaps you just haven’t noticed them…yet.