Investing in a pension

I had an interesting chat with a pensions guy. He pointed out that the historic performance of even relatively conservative pension funds exceeds the APR on my mortgage. So, given that my paid mortgage interest is tax-deductible on my US taxes, and that I have the tax efficiency of being a higher-rate taxpayer who can pay pre-tax salary into their pension, indeed it probably makes sense to direct any spare money (e.g., annual bonus) into pension instead of mortgage. I have other debt too that I shall prioritize but it is nice to have that bigger picture.

Frankly, I think that I should take some risk in pursuit of faster growth. My pension savings are inadequate at the moment. My suspicion is that gentle, conservative pension investing would leave me still without much of a pension. I would like to think that I have another good couple of decades' of full-time work in me; perhaps that duration, plus not soon rebalancing toward blue-chip bonds and suchlike, might mean that I actually receive a reasonable pension in the end, we'll see.