This is How Extra-ordinary People Become That Way
“You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
~ Steve Jobs.
Let’s admit.
Some people are born extra-ordinary.
Take example of this kid, Tanmay Bakshi, just thirteen years old, a ninth standard student and with a annual salary package of USD 1.25 million at Google. You said, ‘whaaaaaaaaaaat?’
Yes, he was hired by Google as the youngest programmer on IBM’s artificial intelligence platform. His short interview clip below shows his awesomeness. Watch this quite informative and hilarious video:
Okay, let’s take one more…
One more example of another child prodigy -Joshua Waitzkin, an American chess player, who at a very young age of six, started playing chess. At age 11, he and one fellow prodigy were the only two children to come to a draw against World Champion Garry Kasparov in an exhibition game where Kasparov played simultaneously against 59 youngsters.
Two years later, he earned the title of National Master, and at age 16 became an International Master. He was an eight-time National Chess Champion in his youth, and was the subject of the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.
That’s simply amazing. Isn’t it?
Let’s also admit that when we see such high-achievers at such earlier age, sometimes, we start doubting and second-guessing our abilities. The progress that takes often thirty to forty years of deliberate practice by any normal human being (with no assurance, even after that) to achieve, these kids have achieved in their teenage, this makes normal people like us feel jittery sometimes.
But, hang on!
Life shouldn’t stop here for normal people like us.
Being extra-ordinary is not something that is possible only if you are a child prodigy. Everyone can earn that extra-ordinary levels in life, if one is determined and truly intentional.
Now Let’s Look at some people who have become extra-ordinary by adopting a growth mindset and an approach of persistence in their pursuits.
People like J.K.Rowling, Abraham Lincoln, Jack Ma, KFC founder Colonel Sanders, and many more, who we admire today continued to fail in their lives a number of times. The best part with them was their growth mindset and their persistence despite failure after failure.
Jack Maa, the founder of Alibaba.com is now worth 39 billion USD, but in his background he was a teacher at a university in China. In his own words in an interview at World Economic Forum at Davos, he stated,
“I failed a key primary school test two times, I failed the middle school test three times, I failed the college entrance exam two times and when I graduated, I was rejected for most jobs I applied for out of college. I applied for Harvard ten times, got rejected ten times and I told myself that ‘someday I should go teach there.’”
See what J.K. Rowling, who is now more than worth 650 Million USD and popular for her famous Harry Potter Series. She continued to fail massively before she became extraordinary. In her words,
“I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”
Michael Jordan is considered one of the best basketball players in the world. He already has many accolades in his name, like six times NBA champion, five times NBA Most Valuable Player, fourteen times NBA All-Star and many more. But he was removed from his high school basketball team because he was shorter than the minimum height for playing basketball. On that day, he went home and locked himself in his room and literally cried for hours. But he had a growth orient mindset and willing to learn and persist longer. His famous quote below explains a lot about his mindset and character.
“I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game-winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
~ Michael Jordan
These people didn’t have a fixed mindset. What made them extraordinary was their growth mindset. In fixed mindset, people think about their skills as a fixed trait, which cannot change. They think that their minds are fixed and if they fail, they think that they are not made for it and quit.
Whereas in growth mindset, people believe that our minds are malleable and can learn anything new. They treat failure as a feedback that method they chose was inefficient. They take failure as an opportunity to learn and grow.
“Sometimes a change of perspective is all it takes to see the light.”
~ Dan Brown
Josh Waitzken, we talked about earlier, also had a high growth oriented mindset besides being a child prodigy,. In his book, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, he explains the reasoning for choosing an altogether different sport from his mastered game of chess. He, in fact changed his successful career and now chose to learn and play martial arts. He states that he wanted to test his potential as a human being and validate his belief that that human mind can learn and master anything it wants. He never believed that the capabilities or competency of human beings is cast in stone from birth.
Giving his example of chess, he states that winning every next game, of a level superior to the last, itself proves that the mind has immense potential to learn and grow to any extent. The power of mindset can lead the man to think beyond imagination. With this strong belief, he chose to take on a challenge fresh and new — going from a mental game to a sport requiring great physical strength and alertness.
He proved his mastery in martial arts very soon, too. Josh Waitzkin is a martial arts champion, and holds a combined twenty-one National Championship titles in addition to several World Championship titles. You see the two entirely dissimilar sports and how he was able to achieve mastery in both. This is all through the power of the growth mindset.
And Napoleon Hill has already stated this decades back:
“Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
Thankfully, neuroscience has already done enough research and established the concept of neuroplasticity that means that we can literally change our mindset by exposing to different environments, thought patterns and behaviour. I covered this topic of neeuroplasticity, how to shift from fixed mindset to growth mindset extensively in my bestseller book The Mindset Makeover.
In the nutshell, if one is not born as an extra-ordinary, it doesn’t mean that there are no possibilities to become so. Everyone has a potential to become extra-ordinary. We don’t know our possibilities of what we can become. In fact, our biggest concern should be about that highest potential, that each human being carries with him since birth should not go waste. A seed never knows that it can turn into a big banyan tree. If you could ever talk to a younger seed and tell it that it has the potential to become a banyan tree, maybe it will laugh at you. Imagine a small seed laughing at you and saying, “Come on, you are joking. How can I be such a big tree?” But when this seed is laughing at you, you might be pitying it or sympathizing that this seed is so unaware of its potential.
If we get out of own way, and develop a growth oriented mindset about what can possible for us, each of us carry the potential to become extra-ordinary.
As was rightly said once by Franklin D. Roosevelt:
“The barrier between success is not something which exists in the real world: it is composed purely and simply of doubts about ability.”
Hope you liked this article.
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If you liked above , you’d also want to check my other articles below:
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