Reaching Your Own Potential
Edition #088
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The Newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Why Students Should Chase Failure
Ryan Leak, Author of Chasing Failure: How Falling Short Sets You Up for Success, shares some interesting insights in Forbes as to why ‘embracing failure’ is essential and the potential implications of doing so.
Here are some of the ideas and thoughts which you may find interesting to contemplate and think about:
Most young people, like adults, perceive failure as unacceptable, and they must start to believe that failure is not the end of the road but instead just a bend in the road.
Previous generations could fail in private, but this generation has to face failure in public. With social media placing an expectation of perfection on young people, the pressure to succeed—or appear successful—is astronomically different.
Every young person should chase failure—because the more responsibilities they get, the fewer risks they’re willing to take. When you’re young, you have the bandwidth to do what you want and can afford to make mistakes and still bounce back.
When you’re young, you can dream uninterrupted because failure has not yet become something you fear.
Embrace the fact that failing is inevitable, and don’t be afraid to look dumb. Make looking dumb cool.
Read the entire article[behind the paywall] here.
Lazarus Lake on Endurance, Uncertainty and Reaching One’s Potential. In Conversation With Tyler Cowen.
Here’s a conversation with Tyler Cowen and Lazarus Lake, a renowned ultramarathon runner and designer. Lazarus’s most famous creation (along with his friend Raw Dog) is the Barkley Marathons, an absurdly difficult 100-mile race through the Tennessee wilderness that only 17 people have ever finished in its nearly 30-year existence.
Here are some highlights from this conversation:
Using every part of your brain continuously is essential, or else it withers. All the electronics and the conveniences of modern life when they are taken away, and people need to rely on themselves to sense what is happening around them to make decisions. That’s exactly what is tested in Lazarus Lake’s ultra-marathon design.
If you want to teach resilience to young kids, any sport helps them develop those characteristics.
What do endurance events like this teach you? You have to do two things - focus on the finishing and learn to live the moment, as you cannot think too much ahead.
When your endurance is tested, you need to have more than a pep talk with yourself; what takes you to the finish line is being totally absorbed in what you are doing. Also, when you do such endurance events for days, you don’t hear podcasts, read, etc. You must be fully mentally occupied to achieve the end goal.
Uncertainty is built into everything in this ultra-marathon, just like how events don’t announce and hit your life. Nobody knows when the race is going to start! You have to practice to be mentally alert. They know there will be a blow of a conch, and people spend sleepless nights waiting in fear they may miss hearing the blow of the conch.
Finally, people can learn and adapt to become better. The mind can drive the body beyond what seems to be physically possible. Who knows where the real limit lies?
Listen to the entire conversation on:
Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts
How To Speak So That People Want To Listen by Julian Treasure
In this TED Talk, Julian Treasure, a sound consultant and top-rated international speaker on sound and the critical communication skills of listening and speaking, outlines what you should avoid doing for people to listen to you.
Seven habits you have to move away from and recommends a toolbox to practice for people to listen to you:
Gossiping - Speaking ill of somebody who is not present.
Judging - Don’t start to judge people when you are in conversation. It’s hard to listen or make people listen when they know they are being judged.
Negativity - It’s hard to listen if you become negative.
Complaining - Stop complaining about every little thing that you come across. When you do that, it’s hard for you to listen to. Complaining is viral misery.
Excuses - How can you listen to people who do not take responsibility but always come up with excuses?
Lying - When you exaggerate things, listening becomes difficult.
Dogmatism - When facts and opinions are confused, listening becomes very hard.
Julian suggests some practical tools that can be deployed to gain people’s attention and make them listen to you - Register, Timbre, Prosody, Pace, Pitch and Volume.
Finally, warm up your voice before you speak.
Just click on the above link and watch the talk.
Reaching Your Own Potential
How do we understand and assess the limits of our own potential?
Often, we are deeply constrained to understand our potential as our mind acts as the first bottleneck. Then comes the subtle messages we receive from the body on the ability or inability to handle the situations we want to get into or are already in. If we develop a strong mind and resolve, the body extends the limits of what it has been used to and gets typically subjected to daily. It’s about how you train your mind and help it perceive the situation or opportunity that makes a difference in discovering your true potential.
Resilience, Endurance and Uncertainty are intertwined to help reach the limits of your potential; tuning these three to work in tandem is one of the secret sauces. Training on one without the other may take you near the finish line but not beyond the finish line.
Barriers to achieving your true potential
Lifestyle and technology conveniences seem to ‘Corrode’ the true capacity that you are born with. When you use them regularly, you become addicted to these technologies rather than helping you enhance your potential. You tend to use less and less of some of the brain capabilities you were born with, and lack of use leads to decay. A few other implications seem to be ‘losing awareness of your surroundings’ as you delegate memory-driven thinking capabilities, losing situational awareness of where you are, inability to handle ambiguity, unplanned events and volatility leading to exaggeration of dire consequences and implosion of signs of potential failure in your mind. Also, the world around you prepares you for a planned and structured approach to life, which is rarely the case.
The Daily Delta Test to Achieving The True Limits of Your Potential
The delta test is a way to keep testing your limits of resilience, endurance and uncertainty all the time, every day.
Add a little delta to anything you do every day, making you uncomfortable and unsure of completing the work you usually do with ease and something you know very well.
For example, compressing a deadline which you know is impossible, taking up something you have no clue about but you need to figure things out step-by-step, testing your limits of attention & effort in an existing important initiative by disrupting what is going well for years to do it better than before etc. are examples of delta test.
You can apply the delta test to the technology and lifestyle conveniences you use by removing them from your life for a few hours or some time but try to do your work with the same efficiency and productivity if you had them. An example could be - having a physical task list and diary of meetings, personal follow-up as against email follow-ups or reminders, or going to new places without the help of maps, etc. These must put you in situations where your limits of resilience, endurance limits and uncertainty are challenged. That improves the neuro-plasticity of your brain and prepares your mind for seemingly impossible challenges and overcoming them.
Your mind sets limits to your potential, and intense practice helps you overcome it.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Celebrating and ‘Embracing Failure’ can be a stepping stone to success. It helps you uncover things that you may have never imagined.
You only know the limits of your potential once you put it to test. You can be surprised by the results it can give you when you push the limits of your mind and body.
Making people listen is an art, and there is a toolbox which you can use to get better at it.