Why I Stopped Studying Performance and Started Building It

For most of my early career, my job was to understand performance.

I was a scientist and university professor. My research focused on metabolism, adaptation, and how the human body responds to stress, training, and recovery. I taught sports nutrition and exercise physiology and trained students who went on to careers in medicine, dentistry, and research.

I loved academia.

But over time I realized something important.

Research explains performance.

It does not change performance.

The people who actually needed the information were rarely the ones reading the journals.

Athletes.
Entrepreneurs.
High-pressure professionals.
Parents managing overwhelming schedules.

The individuals carrying the most cognitive load were often the least supported.

That realization eventually led me to leave a tenured academic career and begin building companies designed to translate science into real-world tools.

The Gap I Kept Seeing

Across sports and business I kept observing the same pattern.

We train the body relentlessly.

We barely train or protect the brain.

Yet the brain is the organ that determines:

  • decision making

  • emotional regulation

  • stress tolerance

  • reaction time

  • recovery from pressure

  • long-term health

Performance is not just physical output.
Performance is cognitive capacity under pressure.

I began to understand that the most important performance system in the human body was also the most neglected.

From Research to Real-World Impact

My first entrepreneurial venture was in sports nutrition. At the time, supplements used by competitive athletes were largely unregulated and often unsafe for drug-tested sport. Our company became one of the first to focus on safe supplementation for athletes competing at elite levels.

That experience taught me something academia never could.

When science leaves the lab, it can scale.

After exiting that business, I continued building companies focused on solving real-world problems rather than publishing theoretical solutions.

Today my work sits at the intersection of:

  • brain health

  • performance psychology

  • recovery

  • entrepreneurship

I now spend much of my time mentoring founders and athletes and working with high performers who operate under constant pressure.

Why I Founded Headstrong

The most recent expression of this work is Headstrong, a performance and brain health company I co-founded while mentoring professional hockey player Evan Nause.

Working closely with athletes revealed a problem that few people openly discussed.

Elite performers are exceptionally trained physically, but often underprepared neurologically and psychologically for the sustained pressure they face.

Concussions, chronic stress, sleep disruption, and cognitive fatigue were not rare occurrences. They were normal.

And the support systems available were reactive rather than protective.

Headstrong was created around a simple premise:

Protect the brain first.
Performance follows.

Performance Is Really About Capacity

One of the biggest misconceptions about performance is that it is about motivation.

It isn’t.

It is about capacity.

When cognitive capacity drops, everything else follows:

  • patience decreases

  • emotional control weakens

  • decision quality declines

  • recovery slows

  • burnout increases

High performers often interpret this as lack of discipline. In reality, it is frequently neurological overload.

We ask people to operate at extraordinary levels while giving almost no attention to protecting the system doing the operating.

That is the problem I am now focused on solving.

Why I Write This Blog

This website is not meant to be a traditional personal site. It is a place to document ideas about performance, brain health, entrepreneurship, and resilience.

I will write about:

  • mental health in high performers

  • leadership under pressure

  • cognitive performance

  • athlete development

  • founder psychology

  • recovery and burnout

The goal is simple.

Take what science knows and make it usable.

Because the people who need it most are not researchers.

They are the ones carrying responsibility.

And they rarely get taught how to protect the brain that carries it.

— Darren Burke
Halifax, Nova Scotia

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