performanceadjacent

Performance adjacent is a term used to describe a set of practices and philosophies that focus on the peripheral aspects of performance, rather than the performance itself. This concept often involves exploring ways to enhance, improve, or augment an individual's performance capacity, often through innovative technologies, design approaches, or intentional habits.

In various domains, such as sports, music, or intellectual pursuits, performance adjacent techniques often aim to fine-tune and optimize the underlying conditions that facilitate superior performance. Examples of performance adjacent approaches include worn-out shoes, emotional composition, cognitive training, software tool design, arrangement, layout, color schemes, ergonomics, keying systems, transmission line flaws, and breathing training. These and other strategies may influence an individual's performance through unrecognized influences on human physiology, emotions, and attention.

Critics argue that the focus on performance adjacent indulges extravagant and inefficient solutions to more basic, standard, and often overlooked challenges that competitors or training programs may observe. An opposing perspective is that performance adjacent helps non-experts initiate improvement, since being adjacent is intuitively helpful, without proclaiming unnatural or mystical results.

This ambiguous concept is itself an open-discussion topic. Discourses on performance adjacent progressively devolve into interpretation and digression, particularly with discussions focused on literature, politically background science, personal histories of excluded overseas practitioners, pronouncements-as-subject-matter expansion, possible mismatch of philosophy operationalities or if physical disclosures provide underlying truths.