PNTV: How Successful People Think by John Maxwell

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, How Successful People Think by John Maxwell. How Successful People Think Subtitle Change your thinking, you change your life. John Maxwell is one of the world's leading authorities on leadership. He has sold over 25 million books copies of his books on a range of topics within leadership. This one is on, as you guess from the name of the book, How Successful People Think. And he makes the important point that if you look at successful people and unsuccessful people, and he studied them for four and a half decades, the primary difference is that successful people think differently than unsuccessful people. He has 11 essential different ways of thinking, from big picture thinking to realistic thinking and everything in between that he walks through in the book. It's a tiny 127 pages, quick read, inspiring, basically, stories and big ideas. I've got a bunch of my favorites here. Let's look at five of them now. First, big idea is focused thinking. I think this is the second of his essential big picture is the first one. Second is focused thinking. And he makes the important point that if you want to have focused thinking, you need to have a target. And he likens it to golf. One of the reasons why people enjoy sports so much, and golf in particular, is that it forces you. You have a very clear goal. You know what you want to do. You want to hit the ball here, then there, and then there and get it in that hole. That's the goal. And you're getting feedback very quickly. Those are two key features of being in flow. Very clear target and very clear immediate feedback. Whereas most of the things we do in our lives, unless we structure them deliberately, aren't that clear in their focused goals, right? And we don't get feedback that quickly. He says the difference between we bowling and work is in three seconds in bowling, you know how you did. But anyway, if you want focused thinking in your life, you need to have clear targets. Back to golf. Imagine John on the course and he's golfing and the guy in front of him decides not to put the pin back into the cup after he putts, right? So he's sitting there and he's following this guy and he can't see the flag. He doesn't know precisely where the hole is. And he struggled and he was playing poorly and he started to get frustrated because he didn't have a clear target. It's tough to focus. You don't have a clear target. And in the note I talk about, imagine it being even worse. Imagine if rather than playing on a golf course without a clear flag, at least he knew where the green was roughly. But imagine if he was just out whacking the ball randomly in some big field. How unfun would that be? And then imagine rather than even knocking his own ball from place to place, however he decided to do other people's balls were flying into the course and he was just hitting them back. Be super weird. It wouldn't be the experience that we have that we enjoy when we're playing a sport like golf that we enjoy very much. Clear targets allow us to focus, which allows us to get into flow. If you're not feeling flow, define some clear targets. We talked about this a lot. I just released the Procrastination 101 class goals are unbelievably important if you want to get over procrastination. We'll leave it at that for now. If you want to focus, have a very, very clear target. Second big idea is possibility thinking. He quotes Napoleon Bonaparte, who said, impossible is not a word in my dictionary. Possibility thinking is one of the 11 essential styles of thinking that successful people have. And he says, too often we use the word impossible when it's just difficult. We talked about that with Spartan Up. Remember, difficult but not impossible. The guy that rode a bike from somewhere in Scandinavia, Sweden, I think, down to the Himalayas and out to the Himalayas, hopped off his bike, ascended Mount Everest without oxygen, came back down and rode his bike back. Impossible or just very, very difficult? He says, some of the people you need to be most concerned about in terms of impossibility are the supposed experts or even the real experts who tell you that something's impossible. He says you need to learn how to ignore them and live in possibility thinking. I share a story that I've shared before. In the note, I share this story of me as a young entrepreneur, 24 years old, just dropped out of law school, coached a little league baseball team. And I had this vision 1998, that every single team and league in the world would be using the web for everything. And I could see that we could build a technology platform. At the time, content management systems that wasn't even a phrase didn't exist. Geocities was big. Yahoo was the dominant portal, and there are only a dozen or so, a few dozen leagues that had websites. But I could see it that in five years we could build something that a million teams around the world would use. I was all fired up with that vision right And I talked to a friend's father who is the chairman of a huge publicly traded company. I told him my idea and he basically said, that's impossible. Uber expert who said, good luck with that. You have no business experience, you have no connections, you have no money. It's. And there's not even a need. These people. Who really needs a website. Right? Impossible is what he said. But thankfully, I had a healthy dose of possibility thinking, and I also had a healthy horror of going back and getting a normal job. So I created this business, and not only did we serve a million teams, we did it in less than five years. Whole nother conversation. But possibility thinking is important if we want to be successful. Of course, we need to counterbalance that with realistic thinking. I just did a micro class for our members on the barbell strategy that Nassim Taleb talks about. You need to be super conservative and super aggressive together. We're not saying fly away into possibility and not ground yourself. You need to ground yourself, obviously. But you also need to be willing to dream. So check in on your life and see how's it going. Are you letting go of some dreams because people told you they were impossible? Or maybe you're a big dreamer. That's not the problem. But you don't apply realistic thinking. You don't have the discipline to do what it takes day in and day out to make that possibility in eventuality by your hard work and hustle. Third big idea, anxiety, which is a word I just came up with as I was preparing for this anxiety. Basic idea here is that anxiety goes with creativity. You cannot have creativity without failure, which leads to anxiety. They go together. Alan Watts, I use his phrase goes with one word goes with right? Creativity or anxiety goes with creativity and vice versa. You can't separate the two. He wrote another book, I think it was called Failing Forward, a whole book about embracing failure. You can't go out on the limb to get the good stuff right without realizing that sometimes the limb breaks, sometimes you fall down, sometimes you fall short, sometimes you fail. And that produces a certain level of anxiety. So the trick is not to get rid of the anxiety. You can't do that, A, and B, you don't want to do that. You want to use that energy as wisely as you can. I did another micro class on the difference between hedonic pleasure and eudaimonic flourishing. The Greeks had words for this. And Kelly McGonagall and I chatted about it when we were chatting about her great book, the Upside of Stress. And she Said, if you want to see who has the most meaning in their lives, ask them how much stress they have. There's an amazing correlation between the amount of stress someone has and the amount of meaning they have. No stress, no meaning. High stress, high meaning. But if all you want to do is feel good all the time and have one big happy face. Yellow sticker, right? Then you think that anxiety is bad. You think that feeling stressed is not good. But that's essential if you want to flourish. If you want to become all that you're capable of being, you need to be willing to embrace the anxiety, right? Big thing to wrap your brain around. It's not a function of you being somehow flawed that you feel stressed. It's a condition of the game. Go out and play it as well as you can. Fourth, big idea, it's about telescopes. And this is in the chapter on challenging common thinking. Popular thinking, right? So if you want to do uncommon things, you need to think uncommon thoughts. You can't just go with the herd every step of the way. And he shares an awesome story about a geneticist. Geneticist. Geneticist. I think that's about how you say it in somewhere in Europe. Who. When they were a kid in high school, they were in a line of kids 40 deep, and he was the last one in line. And the physics teacher had them look through a telescope so they can observe a planet and some moons. So he's 40th in line, and these kids are going through. The first kid walks up and he says, I can't see anything. I think it's because I'm nearsighted. And the teacher says, oh, okay, well, adjust the dials like this and like that, right? So he adjusts it and he says, okay, now I can see it. Second kid comes up, he adjusts it. He goes to the next kid. Next kid, next kid, next kid, next kid, next kid, next kid, right? You get to the 39th kid who goes up and he says, I can't see anything. Then the teacher gets super frustrated. He's like, what are you talking about? You can't see anything? It just the lens, like everyone else was doing, right? And the kid tries to adjust it this morning, he says, I can't see anything. It's just dark. The teacher is even more frustrated, and he comes up and he peers through the lens in the telescope, and he makes a strange expression on his face, right? And he looks and he realizes the whole time, the lid, the cap was on the telescope. He hadn't even taken the cap off yet. 38 other kids pretended that they saw something because the one before them said they saw it, and they didn't want to be the one to say something was wrong. So they just said, oh, yeah, it looks great. Moon looks really cool around that planet. Until the last kid was willing to say, I can't see it. Everyone else conformed. Common thinking reminded me of a story that Sir Ken Robinson shared in the Element about conformity. There's a lot of research on this where you can bring people into a lab. Say there are 10 people in a room, right? 10 people in a room. Nine of them are plants. They were put there by the experimenter. The one person in the room is a subject, and they want to see if these other nine people can influence that one person in how they respond to a challenge. And then they project two lines on a screen, right? And the lines are basically like that and like that, right? Something like that. Where they say, hey, which of the lines match, right? So you got A, you got B, you got C. And the answer is obvious. Obviously, A and C match, right? But the nine plants give the wrong answer. They say something like a and B match. Then it comes around to. To the 10th person, our subject, and more often than not, they conform. And they say, yeah, it's A and B. They match. And the researcher said, this is scary. Really smart, intelligent, good people will call black white. What's going on there? The urge to conform is extraordinarily powerful. And if we want to think successfully, we need to be willing to challenge common thinking. Ralph Waldo Emerson says we need to trust ourselves. Everything comes back to that. But society will whip you with its displeasure for nonconformity, right? It takes something heroic, godlike in him or her, Emerson says, to trust ourselves as our own taskmaster, right? Everyone wants to conform. They don't want to be the one that's calling everybody else out. They the 38 kids right in line who's like, yeah, that looks good, and the cap's on the telescope. So think in your life about how you're conforming. Another little blurb here that I love. Mark Twain says, anytime that I find myself on the side of majority of the majority, I have to pause and reflect. It's not a good thing in today's modern society. You don't want to be thinking like most people are thinking whole nother conversation. Number five idea here is repeat. He's got an awesome definition of systems. He talks about strategic thinking. And, you know, the idea of a big, big challenge, you got to break it down into Smaller components, Domino's style, etc. But he has a line in there that I just love. He says basically, systems simply good strategies repeated. Systems are nothing more than good strategies repeated. And at the end of the day, all the things that we talk about in these videos come down to a very simple idea. You need to identify what works for you when your life is working. What are you doing? And then you need to do those things more often. It's a good strategy repeated that creates a system that you can run your life on you. It's not complicated. In this case, we want to take common sense and make it common practice. What do you do when you're on do that more often and systematize that. Make it more a regular occurrence rather than a oh yeah, I had a good day. Didn't notice the fact that it was because I went to bed early and I worked out for a week straight and I ate really well and I was motivated and I was hanging out with inspiring people. Identify those variables that lead to awesomeness and repeat them. Just get a little bit better as you repeat them more and more consistently. And you compound that over time and you're optimized and you're actualized and you're enjoying the process of evolving and becoming that which you're capable of being. So remember that systems are just good strategies repeated. It's not complicated. Remember the telescopes. And notice how often you want to conform rather than express yourself and your truth powerfully. Anxiety, anxiety and creativity go together. Failure is an inherent part of the process of actualizing and creating possibility. Thinking. How often are we told something's impossible or we tell other people something's impossible? Challenge that and of course, ground that in reality as well. But be willing to stretch and remember, if you want to focus, you need to have a clear target if you want to do deep work. I talk about this in the Procrastination 101 class as well. If you want to do deep work with which is focused work, you need to identify what's wildly important to you. I can't say, hey, you know, just say no to the distractions. Focus by saying no to the distractions. That's kind of not very powerful. But if you figure out what drives you and what's inspiring you, what's wildly important to you, you say yes to that. It's a lot easier to say no to all the distractions. So there you go, quick look at how successful people think. I hope you enjoyed what was the big idea that jumped out and landed and how are you going to make that a bigger part of your life? Starting now. Look forward to sharing more. Have another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. 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