THE SECRETS TO PEAK PERFORMANCE

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MAXIMUM NEURO-HARMONY AND COGNITIVE CONTROL

3 TYPES OF FOCUS

I wrote out some notes from Prof. Daniel Goleman talk at google on his new book: Focus: the Hidden Driver of Excellence. He stated the 3 types of focus anyone with a sphere of influence requires.

Inner focus: The ability to manage oneself.

Outer focus: The ability to read other people effectively and be able to persuade other people.

Systems awareness: useful for strategic thinking – ability to be aware of what is going on in our world with respect to technology, the economy, and so on. For example, if your boss gave you a query at work, that is a threat. So is global warming. However, intuitively, the latter is usually relegated to “nothing”.

INNER FOCUS

Here I will focus on inner focus: the ability to work at one’s best. This is sometimes called Good work, and it occurs when we have “maximum neuro-harmony”. Good work tend to reflect when we fulfill 3 main requirements.

The best set of skills for the job

Love for the job

Perfect alignment of the job with one’s ethics.

To also get to the state of Good work, psychologists have figured out that cognitive control (also called delay in gratification) is non-negotiable.

TWO STUDIES

The famous marshmellow test. Four year olds were given 1 marshmellow, and they were instructed that if they could wait 10 minutes without eating the marshmellow, they will get an additional one. Some grabbed and some waited. About 14 years later, the kids that delay gratification (waited for 10 minutes) had a 200 point average advantage on the SAT.

In a similar study in New Zealand about a thousand 4-8 year olds were tested for cognitive control. 32 years later they were tracked down. The study revealed that their cognitive control predicted health and financial success better than their IQ or the socio economic status of their family.

Hence, there has been a push to teach cognitive control to kids.

ON GOOD IDEAS AND ERRORS.

 “...IT’S PRETTY OBVIOUS, THE MIDDLE TOP IS THE SWEET SPOT”

Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries...” In the same vein, British economist William Stanley Jevons also stated “In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous ones.”

Error is one of the 7 reoccurring patterns associated with innovation, which Steven Johnson detailed in his book Where Good Ideas Come From. Indeed, it takes an enlightened mind to see error as a smooth path to innovation.

When you win, you will probably throw a party, I’d guess. However, when you lose, it triggers a totally different action – you ponder, you question, you explore, and challenge assumptions. Verily, nothing begs innovation than the aforementioned quadruplets. William James. Quoted: “The error is needed to set off the truth, as much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture”.

According to legend, Thomas Edison carried out 1000 experiments before he invented the light bulb. In other words he failed 999 times! That’s humongous for one experiment. Think about this, an error means a deviation from correctness, so if there is probably one – or very few ways – to make the bulb light up, and say, there are two thousand potent theories to try out. How the hell will he get to the correct 1 without ‘getting drenched’ in errors? Well, math tells us it’s possible – with a probability of 0.0005.

Edison knew he had to tolerate failure because the path to correctness is riddled with errors.

The message should not be misconstrued, errors are to be avoided when possible, but the nature of most problems make error inevitable.

Visualize a graph with an inverted U curve, which plots success on the y axis and error on the x axis. You don’t want to be at the two extremes – bottom left or right. The bottom left spot rarely exist (that’s the pith of this article) and for the bottom right: run from that. That occurs when you don’t plan and make degenerative mistakes as opposed to generative errors. It’s pretty obvious – the middle top is the sweet spot.