PNTV: Overachievement by John Eliot (#26)

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Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to profile an awesome book called Overachievement. You cannot see the COVID on this hardcover book because I took it off, but it's awesome. Kind of a guy in a suit ripping off his suit with a Superman on the COVID which you can see in the note. As always, we've got a great book. We've got the Philosopher's Note with a dozen or so of my favorite big ideas in this six page PDF. This book's super fun. It's one of my favorite books. It's all about overachievement, written by a guy named John Elliot who is in the lineage of T.S. eliot and a bunch of Harvard presidents and just a good guy, super funny, super audacious and just kind of puts it out there that if we want to achieve extraordinary results, we've got to do extraordinary things. We've got to think differently. And he says the great performers are by definition abnormal. If you're normal, you're not going to achieve extraordinary things. So this book is pretty intense. I love it. And he profiles a lot of people who are rock stars and just going out there and demonstrates and shows who they are and what they're doing to achieve some of these extraordinary things. So we're going to cover a few of my favorite big ideas on it. The first one is the greatest achievers. Those who overachieve have learned how to trust themselves. All the great teachers talk about this, but he describes it in a really beautiful way. So we've got two different mindsets. We've got a training mindset, we've got a trusting mindset. The training mindset is, is when we're practicing something. So if we're practicing a business pitch or a sales pitch or a golf swing or singing or whatever it is we do, there's a practice phase where we're training and we're paying attention to what we're doing and how we're necessarily self conscious. Then there's a performance mode. That's when we need to be in our trusting mindset, where when we're sitting there doing a business deal, that's not the time to be thinking about, okay, wait, so when they say this, then I say that if you do that, as John Elliott says, you're just going to come across as a goof. Whatever you brought to that meeting is what you brought to that meeting. In golf. They say don't practice Your swing on the course. Whatever you brought that day is the best you brought. What you need to do is get clear on where you want to hit the ball and swing and trust your swing. Same thing in life. No matter what we're doing, whether it's making love or closing a business deal, we want to get into a place where we're trusting ourselves. So that's the idea of the trusting mindset. He has some great ways to describe it, just to kind of bring the visual home. He says, and I talk about this in a note. What does a squirrel think about? Have you ever watched a squirrel scurry up a tree or jump from tree to tree or go across a telephone wire? He asks the question, what's that squirrel thinking about while it's doing that? The answer is, it's not thinking. Squirrels don't have a cerebral cortex to process any level of thought. They're completely in the moment, completely trusting themselves and simply being present in the process of moving across that telephone wire. And we can get into that same kind of state. And he says, we want to get into that same kind of state. But couple other examples to bring the point home. If I asked you right now to toss your keys to me somehow through the computer, but you just toss them to me right? And hit me right here, just toss your keys to me, you'd gracefully and easily just toss your keys, and they'd hit me right here almost every time. But if we figured out, and everybody would. But if we figured out that it'd be really cool to see who can toss keys the best, right? And then we got in the middle of a basketball stadium or a huge auditorium, we put a million dollars on the line to see who can toss keys the best. All of a sudden, that natural toss, the trusting mindset that you had in one scenario, would disappear, and we'd be all up in our heads worrying about the mechanics of tossing. Suddenly we'd start practicing tossing, right? That's the training mindset. If we want to have natural performance and really overachieve, we've got to put away all of our thoughts about results, all the stress, and that comes with the training mindset. And trust ourselves and just toss the keys. He's got some other great examples I cover in the note. But it's big stuff, and it's tied into the Bhagavad Gita and a lot of the other great literature out there. And we talk about it, too. Procrastination in a great book called the Now Habit. Check out the note on that I don't think we're profiling it here in the 50 day challenge, but check it out. It's awesome stuff. And when we start thinking about results, we clench up. We just need to get into the moment and do what needs to be done. And that's. We're going to overachieve so we can talk about that for a weekend. For now, we're going to move on. Here's a great story. He says we need to just kind of reorient our relationship to stress. Right? We're going to reorient our relationship to stress. So most people don't like stress. They want to get rid of it at all costs. He says, no, no, no. If you want to achieve extraordinarily, what you need to do is learn how to manage the stress. There's a huge difference there, right? Meditation is an awesome thing in order to give us kind of the grounding and the sense of self so we can go out and intensely give ourselves and oscillate kind of off and on and off and on. But meditation is a means to an end. It's not the state we want to live from if we want to overachieve. He says it's kind of like having a V12 engine. You're a race car driver. You have a V12 engine now. You wouldn't replace that V12 engine with a V4 simply because it rides more smoothly. Right. You'd learn how to manage the V12 well, same thing in life. If we want to over perform and win races, we've got to learn how to manage our intensity. We've got to learn how to manage our stress, and we do so by reorienting our relationship to stress. He says we want to eat stress like an energy bar, and that everything that happens to us when we're stressed is good. The issue is our cognitive interpretation of the stress is what gets us in trouble. We interpret nerves cognitively in such a way that we become anxious. There's a big difference between the physical response and the cognitive interpretation that we talk about in the note. He talks about a lot in the book Great Stuff. He mentions some of the greatest performers are those who have been the most nervous before their performances. Bill Russell. Great story. Heel. Bill Russell is one of the greatest athletes ever who won an NCAA championship, an Olympic medal, and a professional championship in the same year. The only athlete to ever do that. And before every game, he threw up one little problem, but then he stopped throwing up for a while and his performance completely diminished until he got those nerves back Again. And he felt that intensity. Threw up before the game, had a great game. Now we don't need to throw up before we do something, but we need to reorient our relationship to that stress, see it as a good thing and allow ourselves to flow with it. It's kind of like getting those butterflies into alignment. We don't want to get rid of them, we just want to fly with them. Big difference. Again, he talks about some great stuff with ultimate knowing confidence, just knowing that nothing is impossible. That's kind of the ultimate place of overachievement. He's got an entire chapter on dreaming big and being unrealistic. And he says anyone who tells you to be realistic, you should cross them off your invitation list in terms of people you talk to about your ideas. If we want to overachieve, we've got to be willing to dream big and, and to sometimes come across a little silly. And he says all the great social reformers, politicians, industrialists, artists, sports individuals, all of them who really put themselves out there, people thought they were nuts, they thought they were crazy until they did what they said they would do. Then all of a sudden they were geniuses. So if you want to be over achieving, we got to be willing to embrace people thinking we're a little wacky. My hunch is you've experienced that once or twice. It's pretty good stuff. So again, I mentioned the Bhagavad Gita here. We got to let it happen, be totally independent of the results and just give our best to this moment. Really big idea. So we'll go back to the incredible dreams. We are not going to achieve anything extraordinary unless we have the willingness to dream big. And it doesn't mean how many cars can you get and how many big houses can you get? If that's what fires you up, fine. But what we really want to think about is what if we can do anything, if we can give anything to the world and create anything we want or achieve whatever we wanted to achieve or be whoever we wanted to be, what would that look like and truly dream about that. I like to call it an angel's advocate. We have the devil's advocate that says what can't work, then the angels advocate and is what can work. If everything went perfectly, you and the angel are waving a magic wand. What would your life look like and really dream and really stretch and imagine what's possible? That's the starting point for extraordinary achievement. And of course we've got to back it up with a trusting mindset and consistently audaciously, confidently put ourselves out there day after day after day after day, and we're bound to be successful. So there you go. Quick look at overachievement. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.

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