How To Reach The State Of Mind Required To Achieve Anything
The state of mind you’re in has the power to provide a transcendent life experience or a miserable one.
I call the transcendent state of mind, the state of knowing.
What’s insane is the almost absolute control we have as sentient beings to create the realities we want, if we just took ownership of it.
We owe it ourselves and the world around us to hold ourselves responsible to have high standards, that further uplift the state of minds of others around us — who also shape and create the world they see which we all ultimately inherit.
Most of us don’t take advantage of this gift of choice, or worse yet, choose the lower path of passivity, laziness and or self satisfying ego.
The person who chooses to constantly stay entertained and unable to think for themselves. Most of us live here.
The world leader who believes fighting war with war actually works (it never does).
The person who isn’t willing to challenge assumptions of what’s ‘real’ or possible.
I told a friend cops should fight evil with good, and he said that just isn’t realistic.
I’m here to say change that belief and watch the world change.
The millions of knowledge workers who are fine with mediocrity and don’t hold themselves to high standards to perform their best at work.
Everything is tied together. Everything matters and it’s always on the line.
The knowledge worker in sales has the power to transcend his/her own world in the same way Ghandi did.
It’s the meaning you attribute to what you’re doing, and how serious you take yourself and the resulting faith you have.
As Benjamin P. Hardy, Ph.D says,
“The compression of time is not a matter of compounding activities, but the compounding of meaning.”
I live my life this way and am here to tell you that cultivating the sensitivity of your consciousness awareness is the most important task to wake up and transform into a loving learner and top performer.
Here’s Robert Greene from the absolute best book I’ve read on mastering your field of work.
It’s so much more than working better for a promotion or building a few better habits.
You have one life to live and owe it to yourself and the rest of the world to live it your best and become a positive force for the rest of us.
I try to meditate on this daily. That’s me in the illustration below.
For Context: What Is Sensitivity?
Sensitivity is ultra high physiological self awareness.
Though it’s physical because it’s based on how attuned you are to your senses and controlling consciousness, it’s built and cultivated by your mind. Slightly different than high EQ.
Imagine being at your computer and you’re about to make a trade for $1 billion and you’re looking at market data to click the mouse. The state of mind in that ‘environment’ is highly attuned to listen to intuition which is why leading hedge fund managers spend tons of money cultivating this in high stakes decision making.
If you can cultivate high physiological sensitivity, and create your own high stakes mental environments, you can really learn to separate and recognize when your emotional ‘survival brain’ is at work.
People who are good at this actually go the opposite route and perform their best in highly stressful situations vs. the normal response which is the opposite.
They know how to manage themselves best and shut down.
That highly sensitive state:
- Turns empathy into radical empathy.
- Turns prospects into people who want to work with you for no other reason than being associated with you because they’re attracted to your energy. And if they can’t work with you somehow, they will help you.
- It turns talent acquisition into the easiest game to win. There is no war for talent, you’ll attract and be attracted to who you’re supposed to find and everyone will want to work with you.
I’ve witnessed this first hand at my company. I heightened my state, made failure not an option — and showed up each day and attracted the perfect partners who are making me successful.
Was it ‘hard’, yes there are daily challenges that are outside of my control of course.
But I’ve had no problem attracting team members and customers when we needed them.
All the people who in the start up ecosystem who are “so hard to find” become found.
In a high state of knowing, you don’t just command a room, you dominate it by controlling your own frame, to control other people’s frames.
You don’t just train to stay sharp, you voraciously learn because you yearn for every edge and acquire knowledge with that intent.
Being the best in the world is the only way, and becomes an easy game you enjoy playing.
In this state, you realize the world is your oyster and 99% of the people are easy to beat, and you love the game of winning.
So What Actually Is Physiological Introspective Sensitivity?
Comparable to Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence, it’s our physiological inner intelligence that leads to heightened conscious awareness.
It’s being attuned to your senses and using them more effectively as a result.
It leads to reading between the lines.
It’s elevating your perspective so you can wear multiple hats and see things from other people’s perspective.
It’s the foundational trait to mastering yourself and people.
It’s what the world’s best hedge fund manager, Ray Dalio, cultivates as much as he can and attributes to be the biggest determinant to his success.
It’s controlling reactions, emotions and regulating yourself like a fearless leader.
In a nutshell, it’s the state of being that makes you want to sit in a room, alone, contemplating. Because that is the hardest task for most of us.
Learning in this state
Learning becomes deliberate, heightened, appreciated, happy and fulfilling.
It’s the difference between acquiring knowledge when it matters or just acquiring it on the internet for the sake of knowing stuff or fomo.
Case in point my co-founder comes from a private equity background and seems to know everything from a knowledge standpoint.
I don’t think the guy knows how to make a wrong decision.
The reason is in private equity you’re gaining market knowledge in a state that knows it may or may not make a massive financial bet on an investment.
Think you’d forget anything if you’re putting $100 million or $ 1 billion on the line?
You would never. So he’s trained himself well and now reads the news in that state and shows up to work in that state as well.
The trick is to make that you’re new reality today.
What’s great is that state becomes your addiction. At least it is mine.
Not video games or time off or running the marathon (but you’ll probably make the time to run the marathon anyway), but learning for love, at one with the world, which cultivates a deep connection to your job and craft.
Excellence become your purpose for it’s own sake. With work being such a force in our lives, and forming our identities, it will become the natural place you attribute your efforts to.
I won’t ever say someone should attribute their effort and energy to something, but assuming you’re playing the capitalist game in modern America, and you want to win at it in today’s environment, you need to become your work full time, all the time.
The good news is, it becomes fun and you learn to love it.
This is the secret of the big winners in the market. Unfortunately, the market is the force function and today’s ruthlessly competitive market requires this.
Especially if you want to be #1.
However in this state, happiness chemicals fire through the roof and you feel fulfilled, happy and confident. I know I do.
This is what creates a high performing team.
This is what the best leaders who create high performing cultures talk about when they created the culture map that Zappos used to be the best run company and Phil Jackson used to lead athletes to 11 world championships:
As you can see, the top 2% of high performing organizations, operate in a state of innocent wonderment believing ‘life is great’.
Again, ‘life is great’ is a state, not something you particularly do. It’s something you believe, which is powerful.
That is the ultra high performing organization, and right under that, which makes up the bulk of high performing organizations who can make it that high, is ‘we’re great’, which is a state of tribal pride and stable partnerships.
What Is “Knowing”
Once you achieve high physiological introspective sensitivity, and live in this state, you’ve arrived in a state of ‘knowing’, which is empowered, confident, fearless and without pride.
You’re untouchable.
You know how to let go of things. Let go of pride which is a killer of performance.
Yes, this is very hard.
Paradoxically, it allows you to ‘un-know’ everything you knew or thought you knew. I borrowed this from Krishnamurti’s ‘Freedom From the Known’ which is an absolute must read.
You know there’s nothing you can’t do and most importantly, the people around you know it as well.
You and everyone around you knows there’s nothing you can’t handle and nothing you won’t get done.
You and everyone around you believes there’s nothing you won’t be the best in.
You skyrocket through the ranks. People at your firm will fight tooth and nail to keep you there because you’re an in disposable asset.
Often, they won’t even know why, but they want you around.
You won’t worry about being fired or leaving firms because you’re so confident and have so much faith that you can make it doing anything, anywhere and the people around you will believe it and will be so attracted to you even more.
This is Jay Z’s Empire State of Mind where he says he can make it anywhere, anytime with nothing or everything.
You Guessed It, Achieving a State of Knowing Is Hard, Very Hard, Few Make It, But Those Who Do Have the Power to Transcend Our World
Mother Theresa achieved a state of knowing, as did Ghandi.
However you don’t have to commit your life to world peace or fight for a billion person nation to achieve a state of knowing, they’re both human like you are, who were either forced or chose to put themselves in the highest and hardest possible situations to become who their best selves — committed, fearless and powerful.
All you have to do is choose how big you want to become and put yourself in the situation and commit to embracing the ‘pain’.
The rest happens by itself if you cultivate grit and resilience throughout.
I didn’t read business books to become a winning entrepreneur.
I forced myself to win at entrepreneurship by doing it, and through that, deeply learned and understood market dynamics and the winning ingredients and the nature it takes to win at solving a big problem against incumbents and other competitors.
Jay Z said: “I’m hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That’s what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that’s from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.”
Raise the bar.
The question becomes, how much pain are you willing to undertake? The trick is being able to embrace it for positive growth.
You know people with the same traits, the boss who makes you feel safe, or the COO with untouchable temperament who can handle any problem.
Master these principles to achieve the highest state humanly possible and transcend yourself and your world personally and professionally.
1. Master Meditation
Get hooked on it.
This takes real discipline, but if you can get hooked on meditation, watch your world transcend.
Neuroscientist Sam Harris has done epic work on the topic of self transcendence via meditation. He says:
“Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind:
Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.
The conventional sense of self is an illusion [and] spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons.
Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation.”
I borrowed that from this great write up of his book, by Maria Popova’s Brainpickings.
Meditation makes you feel your body working, and forces you to observe your thoughts.
This is powerful because thoughts are what we emotionally react and respond to most and the resulting storytelling is what creates stress and unhappiness.
You see reality for what it is and it gives you space for creative insight, which is real value creation.
The biggest and best doers are hooked on meditation and even the top hedge fund manager in the world attributes it to his competitive advantage for his success.
Watch the next step to close the deal come to mind in meditation.
Watch the game changing blog idea that makes waves and makes people want to work with you.
Most can’t and don’t make it past this stage alone.
I’d live in meditation if I could — not joking.
But there’s work to do and a world to transcend.
2. Believe You Know All, And Acquire Knowledge To Actually Know Everything
This isn’t to make you walk around thinking you ‘know everything’. Again, it’s about state.
In this context, ‘knowing everything’ is about being so present, you believe in yourself and having the confidence and fortitude to follow your intuition, and believe in your decisions.
Good decisions are made because you actually believe you make right decisions in the first place.
More about process, less on outcome.
However, you’ll voraciously seek out knowledge to ultimately end up trying to tangibly ‘know everything’ so you can make the most informed, intuitive decisions.
This morning I read a chapter on human learning, artificial intelligence, world history and sales enablement.
I read some Rumi and James Baldwin. I read with no specific purpose but to broaden my knowledge base and feed my intuition to come up with answers to some of the biggest questions I can come up with.
Yes, my friend asked me to go to brunch today and I wanted to go, and yes there’s the pride parade happening in San Francisco and all my friends are there.
Yes it’s something I’d love to have supported and participated in, but I chose the ultimate highest decision point which in my mind is putting out something (this article) with the intention of transcending the world.
So yes, I stayed in last night and this morning.
3. Understand How Belief Works and How Powerful It Is
Belief is the mind programming itself to create an outcome. So if I believe this, then I’ll do/respond/react/look for that.
Belief has the power to differentiate you simply by knowing how it works. Most people don’t or refuse to believe in it’s power.
In a nutshell, placebos are probably the most powerful force the world doesn’t quite know about yet or at least hasn’t appreciated enough.
We need to bring it to the forefront.
What you believe literally shapes your reality. This isn’t philosophy, it’s science.
4. Understand You Literally Create and Shape Reality
I know I’m building a $3 billion company. I have enough knowledge and understand market values to know that $3 billion is not only possible globally, it’s very much within grasp and I’m watching it unfold on autopilot.
Now, the important part is actually believing it to be true, in the bottom of your heart, at the cellular level.
“The way our brain is wired, we only see what we believe is possible. We match patterns that already exist within ourselves through conditioning.” — Dr. Candace Pert
The difference between being delusional and having real conviction and belief.
This naturally takes tangible skills, experience and evidence based feedback.
Feedback from the market in this context of work, which is the hardest force function I’ve ever encountered building a company from scratch.
So in my case, a team, check. Funding, check.
Expertise in every area we need, check.
Connections and value creation to build more connections globally, check.
A plan for strategically executing. Check.
Unfair competitive advantages, check.
I understand that it takes a certain level of cooperation with other people, so I cultivate the right connections as I have the last ten years.
I understand what it takes to penetrate a market and how to execute that penetration effectively.
I know why I commit myself wholeheartedly to my mission to change people with the absolute mobile learning and training at work so people can look forward to training and uplift their states thereby making the world better for me and future generations.
So it’s pretty simple, I believe it and I take action from that place.
The battle’s won before the war and deep down believing that is critical in creating the reality you want.
Conclusion
This ‘skill’ is really about becoming the person you need to be to do what you want to do.
The beauty and curse of being human is it’s all in your control and you have one life to live.
Someone told me the definition of hell is when you’re laying on your deathbed thinking about the life you could have lived and the life you actually did.
Choose to hold yourself to the highest standards now.
You owe it to us.
