The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer; Evolution:Scarcity

Procrastination – is it your brain playing games

Energy, Fear, Human Brain, procrastination, Productivity

Your brain occupies about 2% of body mass but uses upto 25% of the energy. Nothing new here. These facts are more or less known for a very long time. What was new to me when I was reading Steven Kotler’s book The Art of Impossible was the fact that the brain tries to conserve energy, so it tries to do tasks which require less energy and creates a resistance to anything new, novel, unknown etc.

I have been a big procrastinator all my life. And till now I used to feel the biggest reason for me to be like this was that I was scared, I had a fear – of just about anything. I have tried a lot of things to get out of this habit of procrastination and over the years have improved tremendously. One of the best things that I learnt was identifying the task which can have the most impact on my day and then finishing that one task, before moving to anything else.

When you have a team and you also have to coordinate with peers, you may not be able to close all things that you plan in advance.However for that I use my electronic calendar and shift the dates to follow-up with my colleagues and they remain on my calendar till completely closed. So in that sense I have become more action oriented, but there are still a huge amount of areas where I can be many times better, except for my procrastination.

Dan Sullivan has different take on procrastination, and he and Dean Jackson have a podcast called the “joyofprocrastination”. where they talk extensively about how procrastination is actually your friend. I have used some of their concepts also in my journey to improve my productivity.

However after I read the above facts in Steven’s book, it kind of made an “aha” situation for me. My brain resists my doing something new or unknown because it will have to spend more energy. Since the new or novel thing could also hurt me, it will have to do even more work to protect me.The more work it has to do, the more energy it will need to spend. Since the brain is also a pattern recognition system, it tries to keep predicting how things could shape up and therefore predicts the amount of energy it may end up spending. So it suggests avoiding the task altogether as an easy way out to conserve energy.

So now I know, I won’t blame myself for my procrastination habit. I will blame it on my brain for playing games with me. You could also check out and see if this logic holds good for you as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Autotelic – Have you read about it before?

Flow, Focus, Human Brain, Thinking

This is a new word I read about recently. It came about in the book The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler. Today was the third time I read this word. The first two times also I read it in this book itself, but didn’t quite get it.

For those of you who read my blogs regularly, first of all thanks for doing so, you would have noticed that I like to see the nuances between words, the way they are used by different authors.

This word was however unique. Its kind of tongue twisting, but its a little scientific in nature so can be excused.

So coming back to the book where I read this word. This word has been used in context to getting into a “flow” state where the activity is its own reward. As Steven says – “the thing we are doing is so pleasurable and meaningful, that we will go to great lengths to do it……”

I have written earlier how just before I start to write I have a big lock on what I will write today. And then I put my hands to the keyboard on my tablet or computer and then just start typing. Soon I get into the flow and create something. Sometimes there are portions of topics, which may have been written by me earlier also but generally most of the content written everyday is fresh.

The key is that 1) when I start writing – I kind of forget about what’s happening outside, 2) after finishing my post I feel a deep sense of achievement. Now I am not an author – at least not yet. But writing helps me recover from the stresses of the day and feel rejuvenated.

So this word kind of resonated with me. I went and searched out for it on the internet. As per the “meriam-webster” “autotelic,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/autotelic. Accessed 7/31/2021. dictionary it is an adjective – meaning having a purpose in and not apart form itself. with its first known use in 1900. Which means its not a very old word even though it has its oringins in the Greek language.

As per Steven, Autotelic is one of the six core psychological characteristics and if all six show up, we call the experience “flow”. In the flow state time just passes, without you thinking about it. While I don’t always reach flow state as the author talks about while writing, it does help me concentrate to what I am doing at the moment without thinking about the past or future , without getting judgemental about what I am writing, and helps me put thoughts in a matter of minutes.

Let me know in which situations you get into a flow state.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Gratitude – Part 2

Fear, Financial Independence, Gratitude, Happiness, Human Brain, peak Performance

if you do a split of my posts, they can get equally split between Marketing, Financial independence, Human Mind & Performance, Charity / Karma / Gratitude.

I have mentioned multiple times that when I am feeling low, I decide to go and do charity. It gives me a high of a different kind. This is something which I seriously started doing when I heard Joe Polish on his podcast ilovemarketing.com. He had other ideas also about things which you can do when you are feeling low and don’t even have the money to do charity.

While continuing reading the book The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler, I realised that the human performance is very strongly linked to the human mind – nothing new here, but what was surprise was the scientific reason behind why gratitude or doing good for others helps improve performance.

As per the research which Steven talks about – gratitude trains the brain on looking at the positive things, for which you are thankful. The brain is otherwise seasoned to look for things which can ham us, so that it can protect us. When you are in the state of gratitude , the negative things which can harm us, get filtered out by the brain automatically. When the negative things are filtered out, there is reduced fear. Once that happens you automatically get into a good mood and you feel happy.

When we are in a good mood, we feel safe and secure. When we feel safe and secure, our mind is willing to wander and think. Due to this your creativity also gets enhanced. To get into the more technical details of how the neurobiology and neurochemistry work I would highly recommend reading his book.

Coming back to where I started this post, while I was splitting the Human Mind & Performance , from Charity / Gratitude / Karma, it seems from the research that Steven has done that actually these help improve the performance of the human mind.

So actually my blog posts then, have a skew towards the human mind and performance compared to other areas of marketing and finance. This is interesting.

While I have always had an inclination to continuously find ways to improve myself, I had never actually taken the rigorous analysis that Steven has done on improving myself.

Tell me what do you enjoy more – my posts on marketing, financial independence or human performance.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Books

books, Great People, mindset, Reference Guides, Youngsters

Books are a man’s best friend….so the saying goes.

For me books have always been a huge treasure where I have spent a huge fortune. Till I bought my tablet, physical books were what I bought and there are more than a 1000 books in my house and I have also given away another 200 odd books.

Since I bought my tablet I have moved towards buying books on kindle for 3 reasons, the space for keeping physical books has fallen in my house, I prefer to not use paper because it reduces our forest cover and last but not the least, it appears on my Kindle immediately. When I ordered physical books, I had to wait for about a week or more before I got the books delivered to my home.

Some books leave a very strong impression on me and I write about those in my blogs as I read the books.

Last few days I have been reading Steven Kotler’s The Art of Impossible. This is an amazing book. Its very dense with.a lot of knowledge packed in it with lots of data to back it up. If you like to read non-fiction books, especially in the area of human performance then, Steven Kotler is among the few authors I would highly recommend. This is another book which is going into my categories of reference guides.

Now coming to the main point of this post.

Steven actually gives out a Return on Invested Time of reading various formats of written material. I am giving his logic below because I have not come across any author giving such a clear and concise argument for reading a book.

As per him for reading

  1. a blog post which generally takes 3 min – the author would have spent about 3 days to build the content.
  2. an article in a magazine, that would take about 20 minutes to read, the author would have spent about 15 days of research
  3. a book which takes about 5 hours to read would have knowledge of maybe 15 ears of research.

While most blogs are free to read, include this one, you have to spend a little amount of money to buy a magazine, but you have to spend a decent amount to buy a book. The argument which Steven is placing is that for the 5 hours that you invest and the cost of buying, you are getting a bargain for the 15 years that the author invested in getting the knowledge in place.

I have never bothered about the cost of buying books as an issue because since my childhood, my parents inculcated the habit of not compromising on buying knowledge.

But this argument changed my way of looking at reading a book. With the 15 years of knowledge that the author puts in, you are accelerating your learning process so dramatically. That’s why most of the great people have reading lists and recommendations. However the learning would only if you have a growth mindset. Chances are that if you have a fixed mindset, you will not even pick up a book to read.

For the younger generation this could be an eye-opener. The only other way I can think of shortening your learning curve would be attending a live training where you can interact with the coach and other participants.

Let me know in the comments below if you also think alike.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!