It is so much harder to risk anything and everything when you must succeed in your effort.
Whether may be your boss, your family or yourself, of you can’t fail then you will never be able to make quantum leaps in performance.
First you must get rid of those shackles.
Once you see failure as an option, then you can aim for moonshots.
How effective could that be? First, let’s understand what are emotions and how they emerge?
They are are biological states associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure.
And they exist and emerge, originally, to motivate adaptive behaviors that in the past would have contributed to the passing on of genes through survival, reproduction, and kin selection.
That is, they are responses to external and internal events.
That all sounds perfect, since they constitute a feedback system that help us navigate our daily lives in order to fulfill those 3 objectives life and nature try to achieve.
The problem arises when we start thinking on how different es our life now than it was a few thousand years ago: survival is not dependent on avoiding predators anymore and reproduction is not based on physical traits.
They are magnifiers of the negative. In the past, being over reactive of negative input was rewarded with survival.
They are oftentimes wrong, since a huge percentage of people don’t understand deeply what kind of feeling they are feeling. It is very rare to see in a pure form, they come in a combination of several basic emotions.
Sometimes they will keep hidden. We may culture certain emotions without us even being aware of them. We may be angry to our boss for years, hiding our true feelings, deluding ourselves into saying everything is fine.
So it takes a second order effort to turn emotions into usable information.
One have to be aware of the arising emotions, so a mindfulness practice is required.
Then, we must restrain ourselves of reacting, so self discipline and control must be developed.
After, we must analyze them objectively, without judgment, and then we may decide if they are useful or not.
It takes a lot of effort to integrate this practices into our everyday life, but the alternative, being driven by emotions, is ineffective, high in cost for trying to mend mistakes, and usually will deviate us from our goals.
A startup with funding is a rocket. 3 out 10 will survive and even then, It could blow up.
On the other hand, if you get your own customer base, at your own pace, you might be riding a bike.
And it can go fast yeah, but never go out of orbit fast. The advantage here is that you won’t blow up.
So what vehicle are you building?
More important: are you fit to drive a rocket? Or a bike?
What a time to be alive!
A few years ago, you could only dream to spend time with that inspiring person. The person that you wanted to learn everything from.
Now you can take a deep peak into any of your hero’s minds and hearts.
For me, it’s to hear a conversation between Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jaime Wheal. Not an interview, but a conversation. As if you were in a casual gathering in their home.
And in that conversation they can delve deep into what they think, want and love. You can see their way of de-structuring a problem and how they would and will solve it.
Podcasts, clubhouse, channels. They all give deep teachings and you can actually get to know intimately some people that otherwise would be completely out of your reach.
Choose your mentor. Learn from them. Grow to their level and then thank them in person.
Can be yourself.
Taken from a clubhouse featuring Naval Ravikant. Paraphrasing, this is his exercise:
Imagine yourself from 5 years ago.
Go into detail on how you, felt, what you did, who you were with, your emotional state, your goals, your dreams, your friendships, your partner, etc…
Then try to give (in writing), the best advise to that past self.
Repeat the exercise to the 10 years ago yourself, and then 15 and 20. Go as far back as it makes sense to you.
Analyze the different sets of advise and find patterns, differences and similarities.
Try to apply that set of advise to yourself, today.
Execute.
It is boring.
And for your own personal reality it is useless.
Someone has decoded human life and decanted it in 7 steps, or 10 rules and then tell you to follow them. I mean, come on, it is naive.
We all have to take the long road: learn the dynamics of the problem and the system framing it, and then study your particular case in order to identify how the dynamic is being manifested in that particular case.
Once you have clarity on how things actually work, decide upon the force needed to modify it.
Shortcuts lead nowhere. And even if it looks like you can save a lot of resources following them we should never follow them blindly.
Recipes for life are never useful to follow them by the book.
I am sure you are familiar with a research performed on a group of hotel workers. The researchers told them that the physical work (cleaning the rooms, doing the beds, etc.) performed great as a physical workout. And proceeded to tell them all the benefits of working out.
You can check it here.
The results: They loss weight, and improved in several other physiological metrics. They transformed their reality. The change in narrative did it. At least in this particular subject.
So that’s it? Do we come to someone, tell them something, that might or not be true, and they will change their reality and themselves? Have you seen it happen?
How about all those media outlets, social networks, magazines, etc.? How do they shape people’s reality to a extent that behaviors arise from it?
There is huge potential in using this kind of mindset shaping effect.
The magic wand could be here for us to use on ourselves.
Deal with it.
Just like you are not as fast as Usain Bolt. Or as effective as Brady.
There are certain limitations in everyone’s life. The kind of limitations that are not removable.
You’ll see, “impossible is nothing” it’s super inspiring, but no matter how much I try to fly by myself, I will never do it. And I’m not talking about doing it by a technology or modifying my biology.
Learning and this limitations, and accepting them, will prove to be a hard quest but a very profitable one.
To show up when everything seems to be against you.
But for that very reason, it is determinant to keep holding on.
Imagine you decide to loosen the discipline. Then by failing to be consistent, now you have one more reason to think you are an utterly failure.
A vicious cycle of self fulfilling evidence of a loser in a mean world is created. Very hard to escape the pull of such a situation.
It should be avoided at all costs.
Now imagine you did show up and maybe the performance wasn’t that great, but hey, you didn’t broke the streak!!!
And then you can cling to that evidence, even if it’sminimal, that not every thing is lost.
The world might represent the same adverse context, but you are not helpless, you are in control of something: yourself.
And that little victory could be just the lifesaver that changes everything.
Old time CEOs, maybe 50 years ago, used to talk kind of different as new superstar CEOs do.
They used to mention: be the first and best in the niche, be clever, outperform your competitors, welcome to the jungle, etc. It was a (vulgar) display of power and pretty self centered.
The new superstar CEO’s vocabulary has changed quite a bit. They use recurrently terms like: purpose, kindness, candor, openness, love, passion, collaboration and global responsibility.
How amazing is that?
Today, the richest man on earth knows about rocket engineering and he can understand the Laplace Transform.
Even more amazing, right? Knowledge and science grasping power over malice.
Also, many of them also are actively donating huge amounts of their fortunes into charity, and more important, into trying to fix some of humanity’s biggest problems.
In times like these, it always gives me hope. For me, faith in humanity is restored.
And now, it makes me think: what kind of human being will be the next generation of mega entrepreneurs?