The 90 Day Year Story

Hi. I’m Todd Herman, founder and creator of the 90 Day Year. The 90 Day Year got its start accidentally…and then by following instinct, intrigue and iterating on what works, it came to be what it is today.

In 1997, I started working with athletes to help develop their mental game & peak performance skills. I was recently out of College and volunteering as a coach on a high school football team. But while I was on the field, I spent more time developing the players’ inner game than making them do sprints and drills.

You see, I had just finished playing college football and happened to be pretty good at getting into ‘the zone’ as an athlete.

Let me re-phrase that…

I didn’t just ‘happen to be good.’ I had read piles of books on human performance as a teenager because I wanted to be the first Canadian to win the Heisman trophy.

I never did come close, but during that time, I stumbled upon the biological process of getting into the zone consistently. It helped me become a nationally-ranked badminton player (I know, random…) and play College football.

But back to the high-school kids…

Because my inner game strategies were getting results, their parents started asking me to coach them privately. (Accidental business started.)

So ‘The Peak Athlete’ was born, and started to take off. And through the process of coaching & training athletes, the ‘90 Day Year’ was created. Specifically, it was created during a conversation with an athlete who played baseball. Here’s the thing: baseball is a very long season. And when I was tracking the numbers with this athlete to figure out where he was, I could see he had this performance dip in the middle of each season.

Much of my experience was in football, which isn’t a long season. You don’t tend to see this kind of dip in football. So, I suggested we break his season into two separate ‘seasons’ and set a specific goal for each of them.

And his performance spiked.

Well, whenever I see a change or shift happen, I want to figure out why. (You may be the same.)

“Hey, what’s the science behind that?”

“Why does it work that way?”

“Is this repeatable or a fluke?”

That led me to research from multiple Universities, including Stanford, on how any project or goal beyond 90 days creates high levels of avoidant behavior or procrastination.

This was the late 90’s, and what the early 90 Day O.P.P. framework was based on. This framework helped my athletes develop their skills faster, created more focus, and ultimately helped them achieve their goals more precisely.

My success with higher-level athletes in the pro sports world became more widely known, especially after working with clients like Kobe Bryant. Leaders, CEOs, and companies started asking if I could help them as well. My response was simple.

“Peak performance principles are universal.”

Peak performance is peak performance regardless of whether it’s executed by an athlete on a basketball court, an executive in a boardroom, or an entrepreneur at their kitchen table. So I said yes, I could help.

Sidebar:

Frankly, I don’t think I would’ve said ‘Yes!’ if I didn’t have three pivotal mentors to lean on.

One of the most prolific motivational speakers, Jim Rohn, was my early mentor, and he encouraged me to take my system into the business world.

Harvey Dorfman, ‘The Yoda of Baseball’ and the greatest mental game coach to ever live, helped me develop my skills as a coach.

And Russ Ackoff, a pioneer in systems thinking, helped me build a systems mindset.

So, combining sports performance principles with behavioral psychology and systems thinking…the 90 Day Year system was born.

It’s 20+ years now, and The 90 Day Year has been used, implemented, or shared inside of:

• The Government of Canada (first client non-sport client)
• Goldman Sachs
• Ralph Lauren
• And 100s of other corporations.

In 2014, we started focusing on entrepreneurs and smaller businesses. Their world was a lot more closely aligned with the world of athletes. And we became more passionate about helping businesses that weren’t mega conglomerates.

Which is when we made the system available online with over 11,000 entrepreneurs using the 90 Day Year to:

• Get out of start-up hustle mode,
• Smash new sales goals,
• Get off the diet of more, more, more projects,
• Remove the shiny object glasses, and get 20/20 clarity on the right thing to work on for them,
• Play the game of business their way and not worry about what others are doing,
• Compete in and win in tough markets,
• Get their team aligned so they don’t waste time, energy, or money on unproductive work,
• Build discipline, consistency, and perpetual growth like a world-class athlete.

So if any of those sound appealing, consider this a friendly invite to start playing the game of business a new way.