Transforming Yourself Into The Elite

Foreign Academy. Today, let's talk about how geniuses become genius. Because this relates to you. Do you know you can drive yourself up to elite status? The geniuses themselves tell us how they do it. And here's the myth. The myth is that geniuses are born. They're in swaddling clothes, in a manger like Jesus. They have divine birth. These people do not exist. They are not born geniuses. Things you'll find what this comes from is because the occasional kid genius, you know, we. We have the kid geniuses like Mozart. Most kid geniuses, you know what they do, they burn out. Another Myth is their IQ. Many geniuses have IQ less than 100. Let's just say that is below average. So how can they become a genius in anything if their IQ is less than 100? Genius is consistently perform at an elite level under pressure. Somehow they're consistent, and that tells you how strong their mastery is. Because even pressure doesn't cause them to fold. And what it is, performance, if it's coming up with some kind of idea, if it's performing a physical skill, like the golf, the basketball, they can perform consistently, elite level under pressure. See, because genius is as genius does. And the people that we look at as wow must be a genius. They have to do something. If you ask them how they got that way, that's the big question. Johann Sebastian Bach, he was the minister and the choirmaster and the organ guy at Leipzig in Germany. Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time, did not think of himself as one. What did he say? I was made to work. If you are equally industrious. See, he stayed inside that church and he worked on the music he wrote, he played. He was immersed in it. And he said, if you do what I did, you will be equally successful. And what Bach was saying, if you had worked, put in as much time, energy and effort, written as many as I've written, played as much practice, as much trained courses as much put on as many concerts as me, chances are you're gonna be fairly successful. You might be equal. And you know what? You might be better. Another one was Michelangelo did the Pieta and The basilica in St. Peter's in Rome did the statue David in Florence. I mean, this is like the master artists did the Sistine Chapel. Do you know what he said about himself? If people only knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all. He sweated blood. So how did he get it? He drove himself to do it. Now, Tiger woods, he started now in 2013, he won four of the first seven tournaments. It's just staggering. So people are saying, you know, wow, what's up there, Tiger? And he said, here's what Tiger says. This is just what I do. I don't know, I'm blessed. They love what they do so much that they're just driven to get good at it. They enjoy being good at it. They enjoy the improving. And what Tiger said was, he said finally he got healthy. Finally got healthy enough to practice. That I've been telling you this all the time. But he said, I've always been pretty good. Understatement. And when I could practice, you know, I have a good record. But he said, now I've been able to practice again for the last couple of years. And now you're seeing the results. See, if he was just naturally, wonderfully, easily the best guy in the world, why would he ever had a slump? He didn't. So these geniuses tell us the way you do it is you drive yourself. And so you've heard the phrase perfect practice makes perfect. But here's what they found they call the deliberate practice. And all it is, is you're driving yourself to improve. You take what it is that's holding you back and you work on it. And see, this is why when you see athletes practicing, they don't have smile. This is work. Now, make no mistake, they love it. They know because they spend so much time on it exactly what they're good and what they're not good at. And they know exactly what they've got to do to improve. See, they know exactly what it feels like, what it looks like when you do it right. But since we're imperfect people in imperfect world, lots of things to work to improve on, lots of different aspects. You don't reach elite status because someone bullwhips you. You reach elite status because you love it. And you're driven, because you love it, you drive yourself to improve. This goes back to what I used to say. If you're looking to recruit somebody, if you're trying to had an NBA team and you were evaluating players, you're going to draft them, the most important thing is not what their skill set is coming out of college. Their important thing is how bad do they want it? What's their desire? You know, what's their want to. And that's the question about you. If you want to be elite, want to be great, you've got to park yourself in a place that you love. If you thinking about it in the morning, you're thinking about it. The day when you see a magazine or a newspaper or hear a conversation and that subject comes out and all of a sudden your ears pick up. If you go to the mall, the store, and get on the Internet, if it's guitars or if it's pianos or if it's, you know, you just love the Spanish language, or you love Mexico, or you love gymnastics or whatever that is, maybe that's something that you ought to get involved in because that's where your heart already is. You got to connect your heart with what you could do. Now in business, we have to find something that, well, you know, it has to be something you can do that you can make money at and what you can be good at. And you know you can be good at. Geniuses are made, not born. It's like sharpening a knife. If you want to be elite, you want to get that status, you got to go through the sharpening process. And maybe not every knife can get a razor sharp edge, but most of them can if you spend the time grinding away on it. And maybe they don't have the consistency to be able to keep that edge. And how sharp you get depends on how much grinding you're willing to endure. And the way we got our business going in North Carolina, when I was trying to build an organization, was everybody on the team had to be accountable for exactly those same things. Their income grow, their security grow, the business that they were working to build. And so it's very simple. We didn't reinvent the thing every month. We didn't come up with new theories. We'd come up with something to try and freshen it up and, and put a new spin on it. But we were doing the same thing. Driving to improve, to do bigger and bigger numbers so we could get where we wanted to go as fast as possible, which for us was financial independence. And maybe you don't look like much, but that's you now. That's not what you can become. So if you've got a dream and it's something that's realistic and can pay off for you and you can build a life with, go for it.