Breakthrough. David Nurse

after realizing that I will never be able to take a bite before he films the entire spread on his phone. Sharing these daily joys, even the ones that drive me a little batty, is our key to turning our opportunities into wider breakthroughs—and we schedule them into our time. Every night before bed, we tell each other all the joys we had throughout the day and celebrate each other. No matter what amazing things God has blessed us with as individuals, we celebrate each other every day—on schedule. We are a breakthrough team, and we prioritize each other's growth—not when it's convenient to us, not once it's reached a breaking point, but as a natural part of our daily lives.

      As David launches his second book, I see a person who is even more sure of who he is, more sure of the mission he is on, and a leader for not only our family, but for the world. I met a man who said he would do things; I married a man who actually did the things he said; I am a life partner to a man who makes things happen. Everyone is always perplexed with how he does it, but I've got the inside scoop: he uses this Breakthrough Blueprint, over and over, each day of his life. The formula in this book is the one my husband actually employs to make impossible things happen. It's the one I've now adopted to make impossible things happen. I'm so proud of him, I am so grateful for him, and I'm frankly astounded he's giving away the secrets to breakthrough success like this. David might be a mindset magician, but he's always been tapped into a truth that takes most of us longer to appreciate: we break through by helping others break through.

David stole my heart the day I met him. He won my heart the day I married him. He is on a daily pursuit to make me feel like the most special person in the world—a true breakthrough and the blueprint to our amazing marriage! But David is also a servant leader. He is so comfortable in his own skin that, at times, I have to tell him to tone it down in public. He makes random strangers feel like they have been best friends since elementary school; he can drain himself of all emotional energy because he is so concerned about helping everyone he talks to and fully pouring himself into them. I know I have to share him with the world (even when I don't always want to), because everyone deserves the blueprint to the daily joy in their lives, their careers, their relationships, and their futures that David has gifted to me.

      The pages ahead are the biggest breakthrough opportunity you have ever been presented. I hope you use them to their fullest potential.

INTRODUCTION

      You are the best of the best. It doesn't matter if you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the parent of a toddler way overdue for a nap (or both!), you are the smartest, most talented, best‐positioned individual to live exactly the life you were meant to live.

      But being the best is a challenge. You've got less breathing room and fewer areas for incremental improvement. No matter what industry you're in, innovation is critical to your business operations. In rapidly changing environments, it's not enough to be the best. You can't rely on yesterday's performance; you need exponential growth and constant improvements. Your teams rely on you to do it smarter and better each day than the one before. We are all relying on your work, on your genius—on you—to have the next breakthrough that will revolutionize the way the job is done.

      I'm not here to hand you your next breakthrough. You are the world's foremost expert in you—what you have accomplished, what you are capable of, and what you dream of doing. You're going to blow us all away with your breakthrough, and I can't wait!

      No, literally—I can't keep waiting around for you to have a sudden jolt of inspiration, some happy accident that reshapes the world. So I'm going to teach you the system to build, schedule, and achieve your next breakthrough.

I've relied on breakthroughs throughout my career. Before I could even tie my own shoes, I was determined to make a name for myself in basketball. I set my heart on a game where the primary offensive focus was to get the ball to a dominant big man (aka Shaq) in the post and let them go to work. When I graduated college and started my professional basketball career, nearly every top draft pick was a seven‐foot‐tall giant with promising upside.

      I was never going to be tall, fast, or athletic enough to achieve my dream. But I was still positive I could break through. I just needed to change the way the game was played.

      There was one thing I could do on the court—shoot three‐pointers. I watched my uncle, Nick Nurse, become one of the best three‐point shooters in college basketball, and I grew up down the road from Kyle Korver, who would become one of the best three‐point shooters in NBA history. I put in my 10,000 hours (and then some) developing my shot from beyond the arc. I was convinced three‐point shooting was the future of the NBA.

      The NBA disagreed. They treated three‐point shots (really, any type of volume shooting) more like a party trick than a serious skill … until the seventh pick of the 2009 NBA draft came along. Steph Curry's scouting report was infamously weak: “Tweener, small frame, not explosive, bad shot selection.” He was too short, too slow, and not nearly athletic enough—and those weren't the only things we had in common. Steph got out there and played his game, shooting threes. A lot of threes.

      Overnight, the entire paradigm shifted. The big man quickly went the way of the dinosaur. Now, every single NBA player had to shoot threes. The NBA finally needed me as much as I'd always wanted them, because if there was one thing I did better than shooting, it was teaching others to shoot. After years of running shooting camps all over the world, living out of rental cars and airplane terminals, I became one of the top shooting coaches in the country and through an email in my junk box I nearly clicked ‘delete’ on, landed a spot with the Brooklyn Nets.

At first, I thought my breakthrough was lucky. Who am I to deserve this? Working with NBA players, though, I realized that my “luck” was a combination of factors—and that those factors were universal. Through in‐depth trials (and a lot of errors), I pieced together the simple, tried‐and‐true, four‐part formula that any athlete could employ to spark their own breakthrough. It worked flawlessly, turning elite performers into breakthrough impact optimization machines—what I call BIOnic leaders. Just as long as they committed to it.

      But who has time for another commitment? Top athletes have nearly every millisecond of their day scheduled and planned—every bite they put in their mouths, every play they make, practice they do, sleep they get, everything. They couldn't choose between playing at their peak and working through the breakthrough formula. Breakthroughs and performing at the top had to work in unison. While I saw some incredible breakthroughs from players able to commit to the formula, I knew I was missing an important piece—the piece would enable every BIOnic leader to lead a breakthrough day on and off the court.

      As I searched for this important piece to make my formula truly universal, I became obsessed with what exactly makes an elite performer an elite performer. I was on the search for greatness. My business morphed as I did, from professional basketball player to NBA shooting coach to leadership motivation expert. It's an unusual background for corporate boardrooms, but the mindset and the systems I established in the NBA outshine any I learned in my MBA. In all my consulting work, I've yet to find a business challenge, leadership initiative, or mental training that didn't have a direct parallel in basketball. No matter where I've gone or who I've coached, the breakthrough formula worked—but no elite performer had the precious time to spend on the treasure hunt.

Even in my own life, the notion of a bad quarter seemed like a luxury—one lousy week could have (and sometimes did!) ruin my business's reputation, kill any hard‐won momentum, and financially destroy my shareholders (aka me). Staying competitive meant constantly innovating—doing it better and smarter than my competition and than myself the day before. In order to integrate the formula into my own life, I needed a structure. I needed to be able to schedule my breakthroughs, to actually stick them in my calendar.

      To conquer the complicated, we must first bring it back to the simple. I deconstructed my own formula and everything I knew about breakthroughs, and started beta testing new systems. When I started quickly, painlessly, even joyfully delivering breakthroughs on a rapid‐fire schedule, I knew I had the perfect formula anyone could use to become a BIOnic leader.

      The