steven kotler

Ferocity – 2

Habits, problem solving, Questions

In the last post on this topic I had pointed out how Steven Kotler talks about Ferocity , in his book The Art of the Impossible, to be able to achieve impossible dreams. The basic premise is that if you make a habit of going after big problems and solving them , then you can achieve Impossible dreams.

Having worked on this aspect I think it is also important to ensure that we learn to anticipate the small problems that can come our way while attempting to handle the bigger ones.

Otherwise the small problems act as a diversion of your energy and resources. You end up trying to manage the small things and the bigger prize gets away. There’s a phrase in English about missing the forest for the trees which would be apt for this.

So while you go with a ferocity to making a habit to solve bigger and bigger problems, you also need to make a habit of diagnosing the roadblocks.

Just yesterday while we were at a customer location to handle some complex issue, just the fact that we did not have an adequate answer to a minor question derailed our discussion. I had warned my colleague, who was accompanying me , and whose line of work we were talking about, this question was coming up for sure, but he didn’t take it seriously and our sign-off discussion got derailed.

Especially when you are targeting a problem which has a human element , then knowing about the nuances of the people involved and how they could derail a process has to be planned out well in advance.

Till next time then….

Carpe Diem!!!

Thinking and Action – frameworks

Affirmative action, books, Flow, Frameworks, Habits, Human Brain, possibility thinking, problem solving

Till now I have been generally written about how the brain gets positive feelings when you do a gratitude exercise or when you do charity etc. This feeling helps your brain see more possibilities. This was actually topic of my last post. While all of this is true, I still was not able to figure out what will ensure that I keep taking action on a continuous basis because at the end of the day, just thinking won’t get you there, you need to take action.

This is not to degrade the thinking process. As a matter of fact if you spend time into thinking then the chances are that you will find a solution which may be extremely elegant and solve the problem. But you need to have the grit or persistence to work on the solution, figure out if it actually works, if it doesn’t, go back to the drawing board and find another solution.

How does someone ensure that they are always taking action. What will create that behaviour which will make me ensure that I am moving in the direction, to achieve my goals of the impossible while I am coming out with more creative solutions to handle my constraints.

While I am not sure if I have all the pieces of the puzzle in place for me, I do think that there’s a combination of things which I have observed when I have read the following 4 books – Tiny Habits by B.J.Fogg, The Art of the Impossible by Steven Kotler, A Beautiful Constraint by Adam Morgan & Mark Barden and Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol.

So two of the books – in no particular order – are about solving problems and handling constraints, one is about creating behaviours and the last is about taking your brain into a high performance agenda. over the next few weeks I will try to see if I can take out the best pieces of advice and put it into a framework for myself and see the results.

So there are some low levels activities which I completely stop doing – like writing emails. Then I create behaviours for small things which can make a huge impact for me, find processes and frameworks to resolve constraints – thinking tools and then get into flow to figure out creative solutions. If I can have prompts to help me do all this then I would have really figured out a way to not get stuck from time to time in time.

Once there’s a behaviour based on a habit, then my brain will also not get over worked. With the energy that I conserve, I may actually figure out even better solutions.

Is this too much of a fancy. I don’t know. Let me put it in action and see. I will keep you posted.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Ferocity

Energy, Habits, Human Brain, Marketing, problem solving, Sales

This is another of the new words which have got added to my Lexicon after reading Steven Kotler’s book The Art of the Impossible.

The word ferocious is a well understood adjective generally used with wild animals and people who are very savage or intensely angry kinds.

However Steven over here is using the word as a noun and is calling it a habit. Now that is what I found unique.

Ferocious, fierce are all words which are generally used in the negative or wild sense. I have not found them being used in positive sense and that’s why I thought of sharing this with you.

Here Steven has made it an essential habit if you need to have enough motivation to achieve the impossible. If you know the big dreams you want to pursue ( he calls them MTPs and HHGs) then you need to be at them day -in and day – out for a long period of time. The impossible is not something which can be achieved in the short term.

But if you attack your dreams by ensuring you are continuously solving the big problems that come your way, sooner rather than late you keep getting better at it. Then it becomes a habit. Once something becomes a habit it takes less energy. Something similar to what I was talking about in my post a couple of days back. Once the habit gets ingrained into your system the brain goes into automatic mode. It does not need to spend energy. As I have mentioned in my earlier posts, the brain uses almost 25% of the requirement of energy that the body has. By making something a habit you conserve energy.

The advantage of this is 2 fold when you attack the challenges with ferocity and make its a habit – the first is the saving of energy which means you have more energy to handle other tasks and the second is that you save time. If you can solve more problems in the same time than I can, you will be way ahead of me. This attribute of being able to save time in the long helps you target impossible dreams.

The bigger the problems you solve, and more problems you solve, the more valuable you become. The more valuable you become the more people get aligned with you.

This is true in all facets of life. Even in sales / marketing, the more prospects you interact with, the more challenges you handle, the better your responses become, faster. You therefore are able to handle even larger number of prospects. If your sales team has the habit of ferocity to target a large number of prospects in a limited amount of time, success will be with them. We generally use the term fire in the belly of the sales person. Now this is a new term I have learnt to push my teams

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Habits & Procrastination – Part 2

Brain size, Habits, Human Brain, peak Performance, procrastination, Productivity

Yesterday I wrote about one intersection which I think that exists between the book Tiny Habits by B. J. Fogg and The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler. Like I have said multiple times earlier, I find the work of both the authors, amazing to say the least. I have read more books by Steven Kotler (SK) , than by B. J. Fogg (BJF).

Now one of the things BJF talks about to make something a habit is that after doing the habit you reward yourself by pushing a fist in the air or anything else which gives you a feeling of accomplishment. that happiness feeling caused by the feeling of achievement causes the feeling to become permanent over a period of time.

I think SK looks at the neurological aspects and says something similar. When we feel good various chemicals like dopamine (he’s listed another 5-6 of them like oxytocin, serotonin etc. ) get released. These chemicals make you feel good and while you are feeling good you tend to achieve more. So when you do a tiny habit like BJF says and then do a happiness gesture, the mind catches it and it makes you feel good and the brain remembers the feeling.

What BJF is doing is however having a prompt to do an action – a very small action at that – the tiny habit forming action – and making the process more mechanical and therefore repeatable so there’s no chance for the brain to scuttle your plans and make you procrastinate.

I would love to take the best of both the books and see how I can profit from it. I consistently want to figure more and better ways to improve my performance levels, so let me see how combining the 2 methods from these two authors can help me tame my brain to perform even better feats.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!