Crunch Time

Is talent really that important?

We marvel at those who seem to navigate life with exceptional giftedness. Mozart was composing music at age five, first performing at age eight, and producing hundreds of musical masterpieces before he died at age thirty five.

Tiger Woods defied categorization, winning major tournaments at a breakneck pace at a young age. Stephen King cranks out bestsellers year after year after year. They must have a divinely appointed moxie and mojo that the rest of us just don't have.  Or do they?

I just finished reading a book by Geoff Colvin entitled, Talent is overrated. He set out to  explore why some people become elite performers and others do not. What he discovered is very surprising: Their exceptional performance has nothing to do with innate talent. In other words, the elite performer you admire has no more talent than you do. So what's the difference?

According to the research Geoff investigated, elite performance boils down to two things:

Deliberate Practice: Elite performers practiced more than others. The hours put into a craft or endeavor was deliberately pursued, in spite of the boring, unpleasant, sometime agonizing aspects. They persisted and never stopped. It seemed the Beatles were a phenomenon- musical geniuses that suddenly came into the scene and changed rock and roll overnight. What we tend to forget is they were playing small cramped venues for five grueling years before their first hit. Lennon and McCartney would put relentless hours honing their songwriting skills, toiling away in obscurity before realizing their first hit single. Beatlemania didn't just happen solely because of their talent. It happened because they deliberately practiced, and practiced, and practiced and practiced.

Garrison Keillor the writer and host of the radio show "A Prairie Home Companion" admitted he isn't a better writer than anyone else. He's just willing to slog it out writing more than most.

Unwavering belief that they could do it. Elite performers have a tenacious confidence in their ability. They know deep down that they could reach the highest heights, to become the best at what they do. They never let setbacks or doubt stand in the way of their ability to make it happen. They were brutally honest with themselves about their weaknesses and took deliberate steps to overcome them. They imagined a successful future with them as a key player in it. It made the agonizing moments of deliberate practice, the lack of accolades or immediate success take on a greater purpose.

Walt Disney continued to see the immense potential of animation to move emotions and impact the world when everyone else saw them as simple, short diversions. He persisted because he saw clearly the power in telling deep, character driven stories as a feature length film. He could see it and knew he was the one to make it happen. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was the result. It changed animation forever.

Great performance in any field isn't reserved for an elite few. Great performance is available to all, but it never comes easy. Deliberate, sometimes painful practice must be maintained and a raw self assessment of your ability must continually happen. Practice, Setbacks and Adjustments are ways to realize peak performance in whatever you do.

The hardest thing you'll do today

Every day you're confronted with a choice. In the stress and strain of everyday life, you have to choose between two different mindsets. I believe doing this is the hardest thing you'll do each day.

The choice is between allowing a vulnerable mindset or a resilient mindset to direct your day. That choice determines how your day is structured and your effectiveness in engaging its stress.

A vulnerable mindset tells you you're ill equipped to handle challenges and so you respond with a weakened resolve. A vulnerable mindset creates inadequate thoughts that are easy to adopt. They're the "I can't..." or "I should..." statements. They don't require anything from you but to give in. In fact, they can become excuses for not doing anything.

A resilient mindset, on the other hand, is hard to implement. It takes an act of the will. It requires a constant vigilance against vulnerable, ineffectual thoughts. You won't always want to deal with difficult situations, but you WILL because that is what resilience requires. It takes discipline and daily practice. You can choose resilience in the following ways:

• Begin each day with the conscious resolve to confront vulnerability. The first thought when you get up each morning should be one of strength to tackle the day. Tell yourself you can and you will engage the challenges with a gritty resolve. This daily conditioning will create a habit of thought that will carry over to the rest of the day.
• Interrogate your thoughts and determine their effectiveness. Ask yourself if the thoughts are diminishing your ability to resist stress. Remember vulnerable thoughts are the white flags of surrender. Don't give in or take the easy way out.
• Counteract a vulnerable mindset with the truth. Are you really that incapable of going where you need to go or doing what you need to do? Of course not. People who survived the holocaust did so because they knew their captors could never take away the efficacy of their inner experience.
• Interface with others that care for you. A resilient mindset is not embarrassed or too proud to ask for help. Give people the privilege of ministering to you in tough times. Spending time in relationships helps sharpen your resolve. It also normalizes any challenges you experience- you're not alone.

Keep guard over your thoughts today. The harder a thought is to listen to and act on, the more resilient it is likely to be. It's easy for me to give in to depression. It's much harder to get up and complete the simple task of just taking out the trash. Doing so though, gets me out of my funk and on with day. It takes tough, concerted effort, but anything worthwhile does. The difficulty in choosing a resilient mindset is why so many people spend their days vulnerable to anxiety instead.

Don't go it alone

It’s in the American DNA to romanticize the “rugged individualism” of the frontier cowboy, or the self-made millionaire.  Yet, when history is accounted for and research is taken into account, the ability to achieve and be successful is really a social and connected affair.

A resilient mindset depends on being connected with other people. For instance, people with low social support are prone to more mental illness. In fact, just merely imagining loneliness can negatively affect our behavior.  Even while sleeping and dreaming people’s minds are preoccupied with social relations. 

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.

With today’s extensive and inner-connected “human web”, the chain of acquaintances between us and any other person on the planet is now three.  Resilient people leverage those intimate social networks to increase opportunities for everyone.

Like an influenza outbreak, a recent study by James Fowler et. al. found that happiness spread in social networks, affecting people through those three degrees of separation.

For instance, a happy friend of a friend of a friend increases the chances of personal happiness by about 6%.  The same research also discovered that a $5000 income only bumped the odds of happiness by merely 2%.

Happiness spreads best at close distances. A happy next-door neighbor ups the odds of personal happiness by 34% and a friend within half a mile by a whopping 42%! 

Though people may have hundreds (if not thousands) of social connections via the internet, resilient people always keep a few close and intimate relationships within very close physical proximity and add value to those connections through contributing their own positive contributions to the mix.

A simple rule of thumb regarding human connection is this:

The more relationally significant a piece of information is the less technology you ought to use to communicate.

Call me old fashioned, but I still think a young man proposing to the love of his life ought to get down on one knee, look her deeply in the eyes and say those immortal words, “Will you marry me?”

That proposal just shouldn’t be texted or twittered.

Three knee jerk reactions to stress

Stress in Crunch Time is the uneasy, often unhealthy agitation and energy that accompanies any change. We are prone to be reactive than proactive to its presence.  We then respond with three knee jerk reactions:

Retrench

We retrench as a strategy to win a war.  In reality it leads to our slaughter.  We learned from World War I that trench warfare is one of the most ineffectual and bloody ways to fight a battle.  It has become a byword for stalemate in conflict, with a slow wearing down of opposing forces.

We can’t win when we retrench.  Crunch time lobs an unrelenting barrage of changes at us that will not let up or ever be exhausted.  We end up being the losers, worn down, deflated, and defeated. 

Retreat

We retreat whenever we feel we are losing a battle.  Retreat is a reaction that constantly keeps us on the defensive.  When we retreat we cede ground to stress and project our timidity in the face of it.

As General George S. Patton Jr. used to say, “Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.”
 
Resign

In the movie Braveheart, there is scene on the battlefield when William Wallace, realizing the over powering stress of the situation, resigns himself to defeat.

It is an agonizing scene to see whatever fight he had left escape his soul, expressed through a deadening tone in his eyes, the deflation of hope on his face as he capitulated into the hands of the enemy.

There are better ways to respond. One of the most potent is to Renew. More on that in the next post.

Become who you really are

There was an unemployed man looking for work. He found an opening at a zoo that was looking for someone to dress in a gorilla costume and sit in a cage. The real gorilla, the star attraction, had passed away and they didn't want to let the visitors know.

He figured he could that. He applied, got the job, and began to sit in the cage in the gorilla costume. He got bored so he began to jump around and act "gorilla like". He found out that the more animated he became with the gorilla moves, the more elated the audience became. He was intoxicated with the accolades, so he thought he would really work the crowd.

He began swinging on a vine, and on his third pass he slipped and flew right into the lion's cage. He realized he was in grave danger so he began to tell the audience that he really wasn't a gorilla, he was only dressing up in a costume and they needed to get help.

Before he could get the message completely out, the lion pounced on the man, pinned him to the ground and said, "Would you shut up! Do you want to get us both found out?!"

Most people spend the first half of their lives being what others expect them to be. They then spend the second half of their lives being what they were made for in the first place. But why wait til then to to become an authentic person? Becoming who you really are requires some bold moves.

First you must get out of your costume. Undress yourself from market definitions of who you are supposed to be. Become unbranded from product lines and become your own brand. Do the hard work of discerning what expectations from others are accurate and which are unreasonable. I think your gut knows the difference. This will make you a new person.

Then become free from your cage. If ignorance is bliss, then we have alot of contented people in the world. Don't believe everything you read or hear. Take the time to think and determine where you are being locked in by biases (yours and others), past disappointments and other restrictive components of life. Change and healing begins with you. Often our cages are locked from the inside.

Finally, venture out into the wild. The philosopher David Henry Thoreau said that the "mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Often what is called resignation is in reality desperation. Out into the wild is really a part of the life you live now. To be out of your costumes and free from your cages opens a whole new adventure for the life you are already living. Doing this will give you a whole new purpose.

Welcome to the in-between world

It’s important to recognize where we are.  This is brand new stretch of water.  It’s Crunch Time, a disorienting moment of change rife with such extraordinary potentiality that people are faced with the transformative decision on how to get through it. Professor Walter Brueggemann writes that there are three major stages of orientation that reflect even the seasons of our own lives.

The first stage is being “securely oriented”. It is here that we feel settled and secure. Our lives make sense and the decisions we make are anchored in good judgement. This could be a time when your job seems secure and your family life is well ordered. Financially we are doing okay. Yet we know that this security never hangs around for long. Which leads us to the second stage.

The second stage is being “painfully disoriented”. These are times when we feel blind sided, hurt, and reeling from stress and the perceived enormity of change. Here you may have lost a job, a child, a divorce or some other chaotic and unexpected event. Yet if we persist in this movement, hang on with resilience, the third stage inevitable reveals itself.

This third stage is “surprising reorientated”. This stage is marked by surprise, the way things all seemed to work out for good and gives us something new out of something old. When we are in this stage, life seems renewed and our circumstances are compellingly welcomed. Over time this new place becomes settled and secure and we begin the process of moving through the stages all over again.

Right now we are in a stage of painful disorientation. We suddenly find ourselves in a tough new work and life environment.  We have drifted out of the current of a known world and into the vortex of a completely strange, new world. It's in-between what was and what will be. It will be surprising to see where this all leads us.

Uncharted waters

I can remember the birth of my first child. So many thoughts and feelings accompany that moment- will I be a good father?, what kind of world will he inherit?, am I going to be able to fund his hopes and dreams? can I change a diaper? will I gag on the stench?

That moment was freighted with many unknowns. My wife and I were about to set sail on the uncharted waters of parenthood. Could we do it? How were we going to navigate it? There was no shortage of advice and self-help books promising a compass to point us in the right direction. Yet parenting is messy business, it doesn't always follow accepted norms and patterns. Your final destination is hard to arrive at, let alone know where it is. We had to learn to navigate as we went along, conducting soundings along the way to chart our progress. 

In navigating the unknown waters of change today, there are helpful resources for the journey, but their applications in real life can be tenuous. So, you take soundings and periodically assess how you are doing. In essence, you make it up as you go- throwing out resources that don't work and improvising new ones that do. This requires resilience, the ability to adjust your course accordingly, and continue navigating successfully on the disorientation of uncharted waters. Those who are unable to adjust end up shipwrecked on an island of confusion and despair.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The mauraders of change

A ship ladened with gold, silver, and precious jewels was on its way back to port when it was suddenly confronted by a pirate ship, skull and crossbones flag waving in the wind. The first mate asked the captain what they should do. The captain simply replied, "Bring me my red shirt". They repelled the pirates with out sustaining any casualties.

A few days later the ship was confronted not by one but by three pirate ships. The first mate asked the captain what they should do. His reply again was, "Bring me my red shirt". The captain fought valiantly and was an inspiration to the rest of the crew. They again held off the pirates with very few casualites.

That night as they were celebrating, the first mate asked the captain what the secret of the red shirt was. "It's quite simple," replied the captain. "I wear the red shirt because then the men won't see the blood from my wounds and will be inspired to continue to fight."

Another couple days went by when yet again they were confronted by pirate ships. The strength of the mauraders this time was an armada of ten ships. The first mate, in a panic, asked the captain what they should do. The captain answered, "First mate, bring me my brown pants."

There are many reasons today to wear our brown pants. The mauraders of change that bear down upon us can cause great fear and a trepidation:

The Financial Marauder: We are currently living in the worst economic times since the Great Depression of the 1930's. No one has been immune to its residual effects. People either are, or know someone who is, laid off or underemployed and struggling to make ends meet.

So we wear our brown pants.

The Technological Marauder: We live in a day and age of rapid technological advancement. It's exciting, but is still wrought with fear. Are we able to keep up with the accelerated innovations? As more and more functions are being taken over by technological automation, where does that leave the workforce? With the blending of fact and fiction, real and digital (atoms and bits) what does it mean to be human?

And so, we wear our brown pants.

The Environmental Maurader: The degredation of our natural habitat is quickening. The warming of the planet is causing frequent and powerful weather events. Earthquakes remind us that we are beholden to the natural moans and groans of our planet.

And so, we wear our brown pants.

The Educational Maurader: Our public school system is the focus of much critique. No matter how much money we throw at our concerns, education in the United States is lagging in many ways the rest of the world. The answer to the question, 'What does it mean to be well educated today?" does not seem to align with the answer of our current educational systems.

And so, we wear our brown pants.

These are just a few of the mauraders  that are sailing the waters of incredible change. We could come up with many more. The challenges and opportunities are all there before us, confronting our abilities to engage in significant ways. Fear is there, yes, but so too is the adrenaline of where we can go with these changes. The onus is on us to engage them with confidence and in ways that will better the world - or at least our little corner of it.

Made for the struggle

We were made for the struggle. The human race has shown an amazing ability to be resilient in tough times- we all wouldn’t be here otherwise. Exposure to struggle, setbacks, and adversity can steel us to function better than expected with future challenges. It is similar to an inoculation that gives us the strength to resist future exposure to a disease.

Often the deepest joy comes from going through crisis and growing into a stronger, more vibrant person. Meaninglessness in life comes not from having too much pain, but from having too much pleasure. As much as we might not want it, inevitable adversity leads to a depth of meaning that can be garnered no other way.

Becoming a stronger person because of adversity and setbacks is one of the deeper satisfactions in life. However, in order to thrive in the midst of them, we must make a choice. As was previously mentioned, you can either choose to let the situation shackle you with weakness and insecurity or you can choose to lean forward into the headwinds of the storm and find the strength to walk on through.

Choice is the choice to give up choices. When confronted with a difficult situation you must make the choice to give up the choice to give in. It must not even be an option in your mind. You must have a whole hearted resolve to face the difficulty full on and accept the pain that comes along with it. It’s tough though. And there’s the kicker. The weaker response of giving in to adversity is the easier way. That’s why so many people wallow through life. Giving up rather than getting up is a cowardly response that doesn’t take much effort. It’s also surrendering to self-pity and inactivity- the enemies of resolve.

Getting up from tough times takes courage and strength. Its a battle, and a tough one at that. It’s the wounds of that battle that leads to wisdom. I call it “scar tissue”. People who have scar tissue healed by resilience are the wisest, most vibrant of people I know. They become the sages that people seek out for insight on their own quest to thrive.  So, be strong rather than weak, spunky rather than dull, and feisty rather than flaccid.

The definition of resilience

There are many popular attempts to summarize the challenges of everyday existence. Some of the more humorous ones are found on bumper stickers- insights boiled down to pithy statements. One I saw lately that made me laugh was, “there is no gravity, the earth sucks”. Quite an insight on life!
There are other avenues of course to describe life, from scholarly tomes to the movies (remember Forrest Gump and his “life is like a box of chocolates”?). My favorite description comes from a Jewish rabbi:

“Life is tough.   It takes up a lot of your time, all your weekends, and what do you get in the end of it?...I thing that the life cycle is all backward.  You should die first, get it out of the way.  Then you live twenty years in an old-age home.  You get kicked out when you’re too young.  You get a gold watch, you go to work.  You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy retirement.   You go to college; you party until you’re ready for high school; you go to grade school; you become a little kid; you play.   You have no responsibilities. You become a little baby; you go back into the womb; you spend your last months floating; and you finish up as a gleam in somebody’s eye.”

I love that! Today though, it seems as if the gleam is gone. So much going on so quickly it creates stresses and strains on a continual basis. That isn’t to say that there aren’t wonderful aspects of our times. There are many. It’s just that past comforts and ways of solving our problems are fast receding. What is needed today is a new orientation; a new way of being, thinking and doing that are effective in engaging contemporary challenges. We need a mental fortitude and emotional resolve that are up to the task. We also need behaviors that are appropriate to the moment. So how do we develop body, mind, and soul capable of taking advantage of the next round of changes? Through resilience.

Diane Coutu summarized the depth of resilience in an excellent Harvard Business Review article and described its dynamic this way:

“Resilience is a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world, that is deeply etched into a person’s mind and soul. Resilient people and companies face reality with staunchness, make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair, and improve solutions from thin air. Others do not.”

Who you are as a person is revealed most tellingly by who you are during times of conflict and crisis.  It's you're ability to bounce back and thrive from life changing times.