[You can follow me on Twitter @creatorvilla.] Today I want to share a short clip I transcribed in which navy seal and motivational speaker David Goggins discusses his relationship to drugs and alcohol. Goggins knows a lot about sobriety as someone who went through hell week training three times and routinely competes in ultramarathons and other excruciating athletic events. For Goggins, sobriety is about staying in control of his mind and living authentically. To be sure, this is not a knock on anyone or any lifestyle, just one man’s perspective that I found thought-provoking.

I want to make sure that every single thing I feel is real. I want no masking. I want nothing to mask my ability to feel fear and to overcome fear, whatever it may be.

David Goggins

Transcript:

Interviewer: And I know one thing that, —we spoke about it before [we were on] camera. To most of the world, you’re super clean. You’ve never done drugs. You’ve never had alcohol. You don’t drink alcohol.

Goggins: I’ve tasted alcohol, but no, I’m not a drinker.

Interviewer: Do you think that has to do with your father who used to drink a lot?

Goggins: It’s probably due to him, but it’s also due to—at a young age, I realized that I had a very weak mind, a very weak mind. And I want nothing to interfere with my own thought process. A lot of people before they go on stage, they get a little bit tipsy, get a little buzz. Maybe smoke a little something, do a little something.

I want to make sure that every single thing I feel is real. I want no masking. I want nothing to mask my ability to feel fear and to overcome fear, whatever it may be.

I’m not saying people who drink or do these different things are trying to hide. Some people just do it. For me, I think it’s almost a masking agent, so then your mind doesn’t have to work as hard. That means I’m losing.

It’s been a while since I’ve transcribed any new material, but I recently came across a clip that was simply too good to pass up. Naval Ravikant’s take on meditation sums up a lot of what I have come to understand through years of experimentation. Meditation, Ravikant asserts, is the art of doing nothing. It does not require a fancy technique to accomplish, as many might lead you to believe. What does it require, according to Ravikant? “Nothing. You just sit.” Meditation, he goes on to explain, is self-therapy. “It’s just that instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you’re listening to yourself.”

Pascal famously said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It follows that Ravikant’s contention–that learning to be alone is a kind of superpower–is no exaggeration. “You leave me alone for a day, it’ll be like the happiest day I’ve had in a while. And that is a superpower that I think everybody can obtain.”

What is the end goal for Ravikant? “The place where I end up the most—that is, really the one that I want to be at—is peace. It’s just peace.”

Check out the fascinating exchange and its transcription below. Do you agree with Ravikant?

Transcript:

Ravikant: Meditation, yeah.

Rogan: Yes, I mean, it’s huge.

Ravikant: It’s been a life saver for me.

Rogan: I do it. And I do it whenever I get, like, spare time. I was at the doctor’s office this morning, and I knew it was going to be 20 minutes, and so I just sat there with my eyes closed for 20 minutes, and I meditated.

Ravikant: You know, when I was growing up, there was this statement. I think it was Pascal, he said, “All of man’s problems arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone.” And it’s very true. I always needed to be stimulated, and when the iPhone came along, boredom was dead. I would never be bored again. Even if I’m standing in line, I’m on my iPhone, and I thought it was great. And when I was a kid, I used to try and overclock my brain. “How many thoughts can I think at once?” The answer is only one. But I would try to think multiple thoughts at once. And I was proud of that, and I was proud that my brain was always running. This engine was always moving.

And it’s a disease. It’s actually the road to misery. And now that I’m older, I realize that you actually want to, again, rest your mind. You want to learn how to settle in to your mind. Now, I look forward to solitary confinement. You leave me alone for a day, it’ll be like the happiest day I’ve had in a while. And that is a superpower that I think everybody can obtain.

Rogan: The superpower of learning to be alone and enjoying it.

Ravikant: Yeah.

Rogan: Well, I think it’s critical. And I do think that these times where we just think about things, just be alone, and think about things, are so rare these days. And I think during those rare times is when you really get to understand what you actually believe or don’t believe.

Ravikant: Yeah, it’s funny. When I first started meditating, it was really hard because everybody—I think a lot of people who listen to this broadcast have heard of meditation. It has a good wrap, so everybody tries it. They struggle, and they kind of give it up. It’s one of those things that everybody says they do, but nobody actually does. It’s like not eating sugar. Everyone talks about how I don’t eat sugar. Then the dessert tray rolls around, and everybody’s going for the cookies. In fact, it’s now even become a signaling thing.

It’s like, “Oh, how much did you meditate?” “I meditated this much.” You know there are people now wearing headbands with [?] that chirp when they are in deep meditation. I don’t know how they make it work. They’ll be like, “I got a lot of chirps today, how many chirps did you get? Oh, your meditation technique is wrong. Mine is right.”

Really, all it is is the art of doing nothing. And it’s important because I think when we grow up, right, all the stuff happening to you in your life. And some of it you’re processing, some of it you’re absorbing. And some of it, you should probably think a little more about and work through, but you don’t. You don’t have time. So it gets buried in you. And it’s all these preferences and judgments and unresolved situations and issues.

It’s like your e-mail inbox. It’s piling up. E-mail after e-mail that’s not answered, going back 10, 20, 40 years. And when you sit down to meditate, those e-mails start coming back to you. “Hey, what about this issue, what about that issue, have you solved this, did you think about that? You have regrets there? You have issues there?” And that gets scary—people don’t want to do that. “It’s not working, I can’t clear my mind. I better get up and not do this.”

But really, what’s happening is it’s self-therapy. It’s just that instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you’re listening to yourself. And you just have to sit there as those e-mails go through one by one. You work through each of them, until you get to the magical inbox 0. And there comes a day when you sit down and you realize, the only things you’re thinking about are things that happened yesterday because you’ve processed everything else. Not necessarily even resolved it, but at least listened to yourself. And that’s where meditation starts. And I think it’s a very powerful thing that everybody should experience. And that’s when you arrive at the art of doing nothing.

Rogan: And I think it’s even a problem that most people are getting their meditation from an app.

Ravikant: I will not use an app.

Rogan: I mean Sam Harris is a very good meditation app, I should say that. But you should be able to just do that, and many people can’t.

Ravikant: It’s literally the art of doing nothing, and so all you need to do for meditation is sit down, close your eyes, comfortable position, whatever happens, happens. If you think, you think. If you don’t think, you don’t think. Don’t put effort into it. Don’t put effort against it. [That’s] all you need..

Rogan: Do you concentrate on your breath, or do you have a specific technique?

Ravikant: Nothing. Nothing. You just sit.

Rogan: I think about my breath. That’s all I do. I try to only concentrate on breathing.

Ravikant: I used to do that. But at some level, every meditation technique is leading you to the same thing, which is just witnessing. And concentration is a technique to still your mind enough so that you can then drop the object of concentration. So you can also just try going straight to the end game. The problem with what I’m talking about, which is not focusing on your breath, is you will have to listen to your mind for a long time. It’s not going to work unless you do at least an hour a day, and preferably at least 60 days before you kind of work through a lot of issues. So it will be hell for a while, but when you come out the other side, it’s great.

Rogan: You get rid of the chatter.

Ravikant: Or when the chatter comes, it’s in the background. It’s dimmer, it’s smaller, You’ve heard it before. You see the patterns. It’s more recent. It’s something you need to resolve anyway. And you will get moments of actual silence.

Rogan: What is your ultimate state when you meditate, like is there a state where you’ve achieved rarely, if ever, where you just—you’re in bliss. Or you’re in harmony. Or you’re in enlightenment.

Ravikant: It’s kind of indescribable because when you’re really meditating, you’re not there. When there’s no thoughts, there’s no experience, there’s nothing. There’s just nothing. So it’s hard to describe, but I would say that—every psychedelic state that people encounter using so-called plant medicines can be arrived at just through pure meditation. And I’ve definitely hit some of those states.

Rogan: You’ve hit some transcendent psychedelic states where you’re hallucinating, the whole deal.

Ravikant: I’ve had trippy visuals. I’ve had the lights and colors. I’ve had the so-called downloads. I’ve had the realizations. I’ve had the bliss. I’ve had the light. I’ve had the colors.

Rogan: But not every time.

Ravikant: No, it’s rare. And, in fact, I’d say that’s also an experience you can start craving, which will then take you out of meditation. Where you’re really—and I’m not enlightened or anything close to it, not even the ballpark—but my own experience. And this is just personal experience, the place where I end up the most—that is, really the one that I want to be at—is peace. It’s just peace.

Rogan: Peace, happy.

Opinions are a dime a dozen, and they change at the drop of a hat. Some people’s opinions matter, but most do not. If you’re like most people, including myself, you meditate too much on what others think. This leads to unhappiness because we can’t control what others think, and even when we can, it takes an enormous outlay of energy. To the extent we are successful at people-pleasing, we lose touch with what intrinsically matters to us.

I recently wrote an article entitled A Simple Lifestyle Tip To Increase Self-Confidence. In it, I talked about how living true to our values–however we define them–makes us more confident people. In addressing the broader topic of how to stop caring what people think, popular vlogger Charlie Houpert from Charisma on Command makes a similar appeal. Charlie argues that the solution is to focus on our own perceptions expressed in terms of values rather than those of other people. At the end of the day, ask yourself, “Did I live up to my values?” rather than “How did my behavior today influence what other people think?”

Check out the complete video and transcript down below, as well as other content from Charisma on Command, one of YouTube’s finest. In the mean time, here is a famous excerpt from the New Testament that tells you everything you need to know about human opinions.

When Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks and put them on the fire, a viper came out because of the heat and fastened on his hand. When the native people saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another, “No doubt this man is a murderer. Though he has escaped from the sea, Justice has not allowed him to live.” He, however, shook off the creature into the fire and suffered no harm. They were waiting for him to swell up or suddenly fall down dead. But when they had waited a long time and saw no misfortune come to him, they changed their minds and said that he was a god.

Acts 28:3-6 (The Fickleness of Opinion)

Transcript:

Have you ever lied about an odd hobby you have? Or maybe your job status or your height? Or even just avoided putting yourself in a situation in which you knew you were likely to fail? Why did you do that? Short answer — because you were embarrassed. Embarrassment comes from trying to control how other people perceive you. So instead of just showing the world your nerdy hobby, say, that you collect beanie babies, you go, “I don’t want people to think I’m a dweeb,”and pretend that you don’t have one.

The same process plays out with hobbies as it does with mistakes that we’ve made, areas in which we’re weak and areas in which we might get publicly rejected. We hide what we don’t want people to know about us. We conform to what other people would like us to be. But it doesn’t have to be the answer because there is another more empowering mindset. Instead of focusing on other people’s perceptions and feeling embarrassed about what they may think, focus on whether or not you live up to your own values.

For instance, if you do have a killer beanie baby collection,you obviously value something about it —maybe it’s the nostalgia or maybe it’s just a quirk that started when your grandma gave you one twenty years ago. Either way, if you value your own opinions, you won’t try to hide the collection no matter what anyone else thinks of it.

Or maybe you have a crush that you’re thinking of asking out. Focusing on other people’s perceptions of you would stop you dead in your tracks. After all, what if other people found out and laughed at you for getting turned down? But what if you instead focused on your own values like doing the courageous thing or being honest even when it’s uncomfortable? You would ask that person out. Now maybe you’d go on a date, maybe you wouldn’t but either way, you’d have lived up to your own values and no matter what anyone else said or did, you could feel proud of yourself.

The point is that when you focus on living up to your own values,you never have to feel embarrassed again. It doesn’t matter whether you trip up an escalator, get fired from a job, beat up in a fight or blown off by a girl or a boy that you like —none of that stuff is pleasant, but you don’t need the double penalty of being embarrassed by those things. Your attempts to live up to your values are all that matter, so take responsibility, try to correct course and move on. And if you have traits that embarrass you, whether it’s your looks, your height, your age —well, you can’t control those things and you can’t live up to a value that you can’t control. So even though you might not like something about yourself, own it. You will immediately feel relieved when you accept yourself the way you are.

Now this isn’t an excuse to simply give up on improving yourself in the name of self-acceptance. Some things are worth a moment of embarrassment because they remind us that were not living up to our values. So in the case of maybe having fallen out of shape, a moment of embarrassment is worth it to get you back to a healthy lifestyle or a moment of embarrassment in saying your job title can be worth it if it inspires you to hustle to land your dream job. The point is to get clear on your values then live in line with them. Let other people’s perception of you fade into the background noise.

Now this doesn’t mean you ignore other people completely to the point of becoming a self-absorbed jerk. For instance, if one of your values is to be kind and you keep getting feedback that you’re hurting people’s feelings,you probably need to make an adjustment. But just remember there are 7 billion people with 7 billion different opinions —you cannot please them all. So when you take feedback from others, focus on doing the right thing rather than the thing that pleases everyone else.

In short, stop trying to be okay by everyone. Stop trying to control the opinions of strangers. Instead, figure out your values and live by them. Be your unadulterated self all the time regardless of the audience. Make mistakes, fail publicly, get laughed at —you’ve got nothing to lose and as long as you’re trying to do the right thing,you’ve got no reason to ever feel bad about it. Own your screw-ups, your weirdness, you’re unpopular actions, and you’re free. . .

Beliefs influence how people think, act, and feel; they are based on interpretation of lived experience and have everything to do with perspective. Beliefs are typically not “true” or “false;” they are simply more or less resourceful. Many beliefs that were once resourceful continue to exert an effect long after the circumstances that motivated them have evolved. Enter the elephant-and-the-rope illustration.

Some of you are already familiar with this story. When the elephant is a baby, the trainer ties a small rope around its leg and fastens it to a peg to keep it from wandering off. The elephant repeatedly attempts to free itself but fails due its small stature. Once the elephant is grown, it can easily break the rope and gain the freedom of movement that it craves–but it doesn’t even try. By then, the elephant has internalized the belief, deep-seated and uncontested, that the rope is stronger.

It takes courage to try where we’ve failed in the past. But sometimes that is the only way to create new evidence without which the brain is loathe to abandon old beliefs.

Today, I’ve transcribed a short YouTube clip that expands on the elephant-and-the-rope story. (FYI, it’s a text-only video). Reality or fiction, I hope you find it as thought-provoking as I did!

Transcript:

Failure isn’t fatal, but failing to change might be (John Wooden).

One of my friends was passing by the elephants and suddenly stopped. He saw that a huge elephant was held by only a small rope tied to his front leg. It was obvious that the elephant could break away from the rope but he did not. My friend asked the trainer why the elephant just stood there and made no attempt to get away.

The trainer said, “When the elephant was very young and much smaller, I used the same size rope to tie him. As he grew up, he was conditioned to believe he could not break away. He still believes the rope can hold him, so he never tries to break free.”

My friend was amazed. Like the elephant, how many of us go through life hanging on to a belief that we cannot do something simply because we failed at it once before? How many of us are being held back by old, outdated beliefs?

[You can follow me on Twitter @creatorvilla.] Have you ever chased after something that didn’t satisfy you? We’ve all been there before. We set goals, and we achieved them, only to discover that they weren’t what we needed after all. Materialism is one of the most common values responsible for inspiring deficient life goals. If all we have to live for is a bigger house, car, or nicer pair of sneakers, then we are unlikely to ever experience true fulfillment.

Per his Wikipedia, Johann Hari is a Swiss-British journalist. He has written for syndicated publications including The Independent and The Huntington Post. Hari is author of Chasing the Scream: The Opposite of Addiction is Connection and Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions.

Today, I’ve transcribed a clip from The Joe Rogan Experience in which Hari expounds on the emptiness of materialism. He explains that there are two kinds of motivation in life–intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from the enjoyment of an activity itself, while extrinsic motivation is transactional–we perform the activity to get something else out of it. An example of intrinsic motivation is playing piano because you love piano. An example of extrinsic motivation is playing piano to please your parents or impress a girl.

Hari argues that the more extrinsically motivated we are, the more likely we are to experience depression and anxiety. Our culture, he laments, is overrun with extrinsic motivation in the form of people-pleasing, image-conscious behaviors–a manifestation of junk values. Junk values, Hari argues, are exacerbated by social media. According to Hari, the remedy for junk values is knowledge. By educating people on the art of happiness, people will develop intrinsic values more in line with their well-being. More controversially, Hari suggests that top-down ad regulation is another importance piece of the puzzle, and idea that Rogan pushes back against on the grounds that it violates free speech.

Check out the thought-provoking video and transcript, and let me know where you stand down below.

Transcript:

Hari: Nobody had ever scientifically investigated this until an incredible guy I got to know called Professor Tim Kasser, who’s at Knox College in Illinois. And Professor Kasser made some really important breakthroughs in this. There’s two ways–everyone listening to your show has two kinds of motivation in their life–we’re all a mixture of both. Imagine if you play the piano in the morning because you love playing the piano–it gives you joy. That would be what’s called an intrinsic reason to play the piano. You’re not doing it to get anything out of it, that’s the thing you love. Jiu Jitsu is like that for you, writing is like that for me. Everyone will have something in their life that gives them joy as they do it, right.

Now imagine you play the piano not because you love it but because your parents are massively pressuring you. It’s their dream for you. Or at a dive bar that you can’t stand to pay the rent. Or to impress a woman. That would be what’s called an extrinsic motivation to play the piano. You’re not doing it because that thing gives you joy, you’re doing it to get something further down the line. Now obviously we’re all a mixture of both, but Professor Kasser showed a couple of really interesting things.

Firstly, the more you are driven by extrinsic values, the more your intrinsic values are starved, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by quite a significant amount. He also showed as a culture, as a society, we have become much more driven by these junk values. We’ve become much more driven–think about how Instagram makes you feel. We’ve become much more driven by this hollow external sense. . .

A little while ago it was Elton John’s last night at Caesar’s Palace, an amazing thing to be at, and about half the room is filming it–not even looking at Elton John, just watching it through their phone. That’s a small example, but you can see what they’re doing. In order to display their life, to invite envy from other people, they are not living their life. No one wants to watch your sh*tty video of Elton John. There’s thousands of videos of Elton John that are much better than yours. Why are you doing that? You are never going to watch it either. You are doing it to say to other people, “Envy me.” It doesn’t make you feel good in that room, it actually makes you feel worse. You’re not enjoying the experience, and it makes them feel like sh*t because you’re trying to invite envy in your friends.

That’s a small example of a much wider thing, of a kind of junk values that have taken over. The reason that relates to what you’re asking about Brazil is that Professor Kasser has shown that there’s two sets of solutions to these junk values that have taken over our minds. One is–it’s like f*cking air pollution–get the messaging out of your head. More 18-month-old children know what the McDonalds M means than know their own surname, their own last name. Professor Kasser put it to me–from the moment we’re born, we’re immersed in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life. None of you listening to this will lie on their death beds and think about all the sh*t they bought and all the likes they got on Instagram. They’ll think about moments of meaning and connection. That’s like a banal, obvious thing, but we’re constantly pushed to not think in those terms, to think about show it off, buy, spend. These junk values have taken over our minds, so part of the solution is just f*cking get rid of most of this advertising, get rid of most of this very tightly regulated. . .

Rogan: But in doing so, you limit commerce, you’re limiting people’s ability to sell things. You’re changing the current market that a lot of people don’t have any problem with.

Hari: I know this is a heresy in the United States, but limiting commercial speech is fine by me.

Rogan: I think it’s fascinating, I think it’s a fascinating discussion, but in a sense it’s limiting free speech as well. And we have a real problem with that. The problem with it is as soon as you start to put any regulations at all. You say, “You shouldn’t be allowed to advertise,” even if it’s advertising honestly about a great product, people will have real issues with that.

Hari: We already have advertising regulation. You can’t put an ad saying “I’ve found the cure for cancer.”

Rogan: That’s what I’m saying, honestly.

Hari: I would argue this is a tightening. For example, in London there was a controversy a little while back. There was a billboard of an impossibly hot woman and an impossibly hot man, and the billboard said something like, “Are you beach-body ready?” The clear implication being if you don’t look like these people who you’ll never f*cking look like, you’re not ready to go to the beach. And the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said you can’t do this.

Rogan: But that’s so silly. I mean it’s not an unobtainable ideal, you’re looking at two examples of it. They’re real human beings. Look, I’m not saying that you have to be that way, but if you do want to look that man and have that body, it is a possible goal.

Hari: It’s not possible for the vast majority of people.

Rogan: If they don’t have the time or the effort, it’s not. But very many people have radically changed their body. I’m not saying that you have to do it, I’m not saying you should do it. But it is a possible thing to do. And if you’re trying to sell fitness, wouldn’t you sell an example of someone who’s really good at it. Like if you’re trying to sell a business course, wouldn’t you show a guy with a giant house and a Ferrari. This is a guy who’s done really well at business. Look at his penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan. You wouldn’t say, “Well, that’s an impossible goal. I’m going to show you a person in a middle-class suburb because this is as good as you’re going to get.”

Hari: I think that’s a fair point. I think there are two things going on, isn’t there. There’s the freedom of people to market what they want to do, and there’s. . .

Rogan: It’s a nanny-state issue that people have a problem with. By saying these are impossible-to-achieve body goals. . .

Hari: We already have regulation of these things. And people don’t call that a nanny-state thing.

Rogan: We have regulation, but I don’t think this is a good example.

Hari: What’s a better example–Professor Kasser said there’s two sets of solutions to these junk values problems. There’s “Get the contaminants out of the atmosphere sort of thing,” which he says is actually a weaker one than the second set of solutions. So how do we stop people being pumped full of bullsh*t values. .

Rogan: Educate them on what is happening to them and make it less appealing.

Hari: And this is the second part. And you’ve got to what I think was the most important part of the research that Professor Kasser did. He was working with a guy called Nathan Dungan–who I interviewed. Nathan is a financial advisor in Minneapolis, and his job was to work with adults who were having trouble budgeting, and explain budgeting to them and help them do it. And he gets a job from a school. It was a kind-of middle class school–wasn’t super rich, wasn’t poor, it was middle class, where they’re having a problem. The kids at the school we’re becoming obsessed with getting like the latest Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone or whatever it was. And if the parents couldn’t afford it, the kids were really freaking out.

So they said to Nathan, would you just come in and explain budgeting to these kids. So Nathan goes in and he tries to explain budgeting, and he quickly realized these kids don’t give a sh*t about budgeting, there’s something else going on here. They are so obsessed with getting these things. So with Professor Kasser, he designs this program that led to a really interesting breakthrough, and it’s something people can try at home. You don’t have to do it in this context. And you can do it just as adults, but they did it with parents and they’re teenagers.

They come in, once every couple of weeks, for I think 4 months. The first meeting they had, they just said, “Write a list of everything you have got to have.” They didn’t define that. And people, of course, say like a home, a car, whatever. But quite quickly people would say Nike sneakers. The parents would name expensive things. “Tell me how you would feel if you got these Nike sneakers.” And very rarely, I don’t think any of them were like basketball players where it was like “I need to jump,” or whatever, if that’s the right phrase. Almost immediately they would say, “I’d be accepted by the group. People would envy me.” These insights are just beneath the surface. Who put that idea in your head? Where did you get that idea? Of course, everybody thinks they’re smarter than the ad, but giving people the ability just to see how hollow those junk values are–that was the first part.

The second part was much more interesting and took longer. Then they would have in future sessions–they’d say, “Given that has not actually made you feel better, what are moments in your life when you have felt satisfied, happy, in a flow state? What are things that are meaningful to you?” A whole range of things. Playing sports, playing music. Reading–whatever it was. They said, “How can we build more of that in to your life and less of these junk values? How could you do more of this every week and just meeting–we don’t have these conversations in our culture very often–just meeting once every couple of weeks and checking in with each other.

Actually I managed to play guitar for an hour every day. I managed on Saturday to take my kid to the beach, and we went.

Rogan: That’s going to stifle materialism?

Hari: What it led to, monitored by Professor Kasser, it led to significant shifts in people’s values. They had a significant decrease in junk values, and a significant increase in more meaningful intrinsic values. And we know that that correlates with lower depression and anxiety over time. The weird thing is I sometimes feel like with both of my books–Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections–I sometimes feel like I’m giving people permission to know the thing they already know.

No school system is perfect, and if you’re like me, you have many ideas on how it can be better. The stakes are high, after all. Many kids spend more time in school than they do in their own homes. Outside the family, school is the most formative institution in society. It goes without saying that young people’s development and well-being are largely determined by their experience at school.

Modern school systems are frequently criticized for killing creativity. Students are encouraged to regurgitate information and are often penalized with bad grades for experimenting with new ideas. A stringent grading system and infrequent recesses/breaks can also lead to a stressed-out learning environment. And artistic development is of marginal importance since it does not fuel economic growth in the same way as other subjects. I’m not suggesting alternative models are without their shortfalls, but people, especially those with authority, should give serious thought to an institution as crucial as the school system.

Ken Robinson is author of Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. I’ve reposted a Ted Talk in which he entertainingly addresses the topic. As you will see, his purpose isn’t to present specific policy prescriptions but rather to provoke people to think based on their own experiences and perception. His presentation has struck a chord with millions of people and is one of the most popular Ted Talks ever delivered.

Transcript:

Good morning. How are you?

(Audience) Good.

It’s been great, hasn’t it? I’ve been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I’m leaving.

(Laughter)

There have been three themes running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we’ve had and in all of the people here; just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it’s put us in a place where we have no idea what’s going to happen in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.

I have an interest in education. Actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education. Don’t you? I find this very interesting. If you’re at a dinner party, and you say you work in education — actually, you’re not often at dinner parties, frankly.

(Laughter)

If you work in education, you’re not asked. And you’re never asked back, curiously. That’s strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, “What do you do?” and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They’re like, “Oh my God. Why me?”

(Laughter)

“My one night out all week.”

(Laughter)

But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall, because it’s one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion and money and other things. So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet, we’re meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

And the third part of this is that we’ve all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have — their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn’t she? Just seeing what she could do. And she’s exceptional, but I think she’s not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

That was it, by the way. Thank you very much.

(Laughter)

So, 15 minutes left.

(Laughter)

“Well, I was born … ”

(Laughter)

I heard a great story recently — I love telling it — of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, “What are you drawing?” And the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.”

(Laughter)

When my son was four in England — actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.

(Laughter)

If we’re being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story?

(Laughter)

No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.

(Laughter)

“Nativity II.” But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: “James Robinson IS Joseph!” (Laughter) He didn’t have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. This really happened. We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and said, “You OK with that?” They said, “Yeah, why? Was that wrong?” They just switched. The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads. They put these boxes down, and the first boy said, “I bring you gold.” And the second boy said, “I bring you myrrh.” And the third boy said, “Frank sent this.”

(Laughter)

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original — if you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?

I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition this was.

(Laughter)

Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare’s father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don’t think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he?

(Laughter)

How annoying would that be? “Must try harder.” Being sent to bed by his dad, to Shakespeare, “Go to bed, now!” To William Shakespeare. “And put the pencil down!” “And stop speaking like that.” “It’s confusing everybody.”

(Laughter)

Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition. Actually, my son didn’t want to come. I’ve got two kids; he’s 21 now, my daughter’s 16. He didn’t want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He’d known her for a month.

(Laughter)

Mind you, they’d had their fourth anniversary, because it’s a long time when you’re 16. He was really upset on the plane. He said, “I’ll never find another girl like Sarah.” And we were rather pleased about that, frankly — because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.

(Laughter)

But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn’t matter where you go. You’d think it would be otherwise, but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities. At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting?

(Laughter)

Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.

If you were to visit education as an alien and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there.

(Laughter)

And I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life. Another form of life. But they’re rather curious. And I say this out of affection for them: there’s something curious about professors. In my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.

(Laughter)

Don’t they? It’s a way of getting their head to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics and pop into the discotheque on the final night.

(Laughter)

And there, you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat. Waiting until it ends, so they can go home and write a paper about it.

(Laughter)

Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.

Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? “Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.” Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.

And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities design the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.

In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people. And it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about: technology and its transformational effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.

Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn’t have a job, it’s because you didn’t want one. And I didn’t want one, frankly.

(Laughter)

But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

We know three things about intelligence. One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

By the way, there’s a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain, called the corpus callosum. It’s thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, this is probably why women are better at multitasking. Because you are, aren’t you? There’s a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often … thankfully.

(Laughter)

No, she’s good at some things. But if she’s cooking, she’s dealing with people on the phone, she’s talking to the kids, she’s painting the ceiling —

(Laughter)

she’s doing open-heart surgery over here. If I’m cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone’s on the hook, if she comes in, I get annoyed. I say, “Terry, please, I’m trying to fry an egg in here.”

(Laughter)

“Give me a break.”

(Laughter)

Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, “If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, did it happen?” Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great T-shirt recently, which said, “If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”

(Laughter)

And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s distinct. I’m doing a new book at the moment called “Epiphany,” which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there. It’s really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne. Have you heard of her? Some have. She’s a choreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera.” She’s wonderful. I used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see.

(Laughter)

Gillian and I had lunch one day. I said, “How did you get to be a dancer?” It was interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the ’30s, wrote to her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD. Wouldn’t you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn’t been invented at this point. It wasn’t an available condition.

(Laughter)

People weren’t aware they could have that.

(Laughter)

Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes, while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school, because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on. Little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “I’ve listened to all these things your mother’s told me. I need to speak to her privately. Wait here. We’ll be back. We won’t be very long,” and they went and left her.

But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick. She’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”

I said, “What happened?” She said, “She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room, and it was full of people like me — people who couldn’t sit still, people who had to move to think.” Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. She became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she’s given pleasure to millions, and she’s a multimillionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

(Applause)

What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.

There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years, all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish.” And he’s right.

What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

As people, we often do things without thinking. Especially harmful things, like smoking, overeating, or lashing out in anger. We get in this numb state of mind where we aren’t rationally processing what’s going on. And that leads us to make bad decisions. Many people have discovered that when we stop and focus on the present moment, we are less likely to make decisions that go against our well-being. This is called being mindful. Mindfulness is how we live life with intention and purpose rather than being dragged from moment to moment like subconsciously programmed robots.

Judson Brewer is author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love — Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits. Brewer gave a Ted Talk in which he argues that the easiest way to break a bad habit is to practice mindfulness. Our brain likes to wander to distract from unpleasant feelings (the numbing effect I talked about in the previous paragraph.) People seek distractions in the form of food, drugs, or relationships. Mindfulness, however, is about cultivating interest and curiosity in the present moment such that our brain no longer seek a distraction. And when it does seek a distraction, mindfulness enables us to evaluate its effects.

Brewer and researchers have found that mindfulness can help people quit smoking and break other bad habits. Check out the inspiring video and complete transcript down below. I leave you with a provocative quote from Thich Nhat Hanh.

When you drink whiskey, learn to drink it with mindfulness. “Drinking whiskey, I know that it is whiskey I am drinking.” This is the approach that I would recommend. I am not telling you to absolutely stop drinking. I propose that you drink your whiskey mindfully, and I am sure that if you drink this way for a few weeks, you will stop drinking alcohol. Drinking your whiskey mindfully, you will recognize what is taking place in you—in your body, in your liver, in your relationships, in the world, and so on. When your mindfulness becomes strong, you will just stop.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Transcript:

When I was first learning to meditate, the instruction was to simply pay attention to my breath, and when my mind wandered, to bring it back. Sounded simple enough. Yet I’d sit on these silent retreats, sweating through T-shirts in the middle of winter. I’d take naps every chance I got because it was really hard work.

Actually, it was exhausting. The instruction was simple enough but I was missing something really important. So why is it so hard to pay attention? Well, studies show that even when we’re really trying to pay attention to something — like maybe this talk — at some point, about half of us will drift off into a daydream, or have this urge to check our Twitter feed.

So what’s going on here? It turns out that we’re fighting one of the most evolutionarily-conserved learning processes currently known in science, one that’s conserved back to the most basic nervous systems known to man. This reward-based learning process is called positive and negative reinforcement, and basically goes like this. We see some food that looks good, our brain says, “Calories! … Survival!” We eat the food, we taste it — it tastes good. And especially with sugar, our bodies send a signal to our brain that says, “Remember what you’re eating and where you found it.”

We lay down this context-dependent memory and learn to repeat the process next time. See food, eat food, feel good, repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. Simple, right? Well, after a while, our creative brains say, “You know what? You can use this for more than just remembering where food is. You know, next time you feel bad, why don’t you try eating something good so you’ll feel better?” We thank our brains for the great idea, try this and quickly learn that if we eat chocolate or ice cream when we’re mad or sad, we feel better. Same process, just a different trigger.

Instead of this hunger signal coming from our stomach, this emotional signal — feeling sad — triggers that urge to eat. Maybe in our teenage years, we were a nerd at school, and we see those rebel kids outside smoking and we think, “Hey, I want to be cool.” So we start smoking. The Marlboro Man wasn’t a dork, and that was no accident. See cool, smoke to be cool, feel good. Repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. And each time we do this, we learn to repeat the process and it becomes a habit.

So later, feeling stressed out triggers that urge to smoke a cigarette or to eat something sweet. Now, with these same brain processes, we’ve gone from learning to survive to literally killing ourselves with these habits. Obesity and smoking are among the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in the world. So back to my breath. What if instead of fighting our brains, or trying to force ourselves to pay attention, we instead tapped into this natural, reward-based learning process … but added a twist? What if instead we just got really curious about what was happening in our momentary experience?

I’ll give you an example. In my lab, we studied whether mindfulness training could help people quit smoking. Now, just like trying to force myself to pay attention to my breath, they could try to force themselves to quit smoking. And the majority of them had tried this before and failed –on average, six times. Now, with mindfulness training, we dropped the bit about forcing and instead focused on being curious. In fact, we even told them to smoke. What? Yeah, we said, “Go ahead and smoke, just be really curious about what it’s like when you do.” And what did they notice?

Well here’s an example from one of our smokers. She said, “Mindful smoking: smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals, YUCK!” Now, she knew, cognitively that smoking was bad for her, that’s why she joined our program. What she discovered just by being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like shit. Now, she moved from knowledge to wisdom. She moved from knowing in her head that smoking was bad for her to knowing it in her bones, and the spell of smoking was broken. She started to become disenchanted with her behavior.

Now, the prefrontal cortex, that youngest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective, it understands on an intellectual level that we shouldn’t smoke. And it tries its hardest to help us change our behavior, to help us stop smoking, to help us stop eating that second, that third, that fourth cookie. We call this cognitive control. We’re using cognition to control our behavior. Unfortunately, this is also the first part of our brain that goes offline when we get stressed out, which isn’t that helpful. Now, we can all relate to this in our own experience. We’re much more likely to do things like yell at our spouse or kids when we’re stressed out or tired, even though we know it’s not going to be helpful. We just can’t help ourselves. When the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we fall back into our old habits, which is why this disenchantment is so important.

Seeing what we get from our habits helps us understand them at a deeper level –to know it in our bones so we don’t have to force ourselves to hold back or restrain ourselves from behavior. We’re just less interested in doing it in the first place. And this is what mindfulness is all about: Seeing really clearly what we get when we get caught up in our behaviors, becoming disenchanted on a visceral level and from this disenchanted stance, naturally letting go. This isn’t to say that, poof, magically we quit smoking. But over time, as we learn to see more and more clearly the results of our actions, we let go of old habits and form new ones.

The paradox here is that mindfulness is just about being really interested in getting close and personal with what’s actually happening in our bodies and minds from moment to moment. This willingness to turn toward our experience rather than trying to make unpleasant cravings go away as quickly as possible. And this willingness to turn toward our experience is supported by curiosity, which is naturally rewarding. What does curiosity feel like? It feels good.

And what happens when we get curious? We start to notice that cravings are simply made up of body sensations –oh, there’s tightness, there’s tension, there’s restlessness — and that these body sensations come and go. These are bite-size pieces of experiences that we can manage from moment to moment rather than getting clobbered by this huge, scary craving that we choke on. In other words, when we get curious, we step out of our old, fear-based, reactive habit patterns, and we step into being. We become this inner scientist where we’re eagerly awaiting that next data point.

Now, this might sound too simplistic to affect behavior. But in one study, we found that mindfulness training was twice as good as gold standard therapy at helping people quit smoking. So it actually works. And when we studied the brains of experienced meditators, we found that parts of a neural network of self-referential processing called the default mode network were at play. Now, one current hypothesis is that a region of this network, called the posterior cingulate cortex, is activated not necessarily by craving itself but when we get caught up in it, when we get sucked in, and it takes us for a ride. In contrast, when we let go — step out of the process just by being curiously aware of what’s happening — this same brain region quiets down.

Now we’re testing app and online-based mindfulness training programs that target these core mechanisms and, ironically, use the same technology that’s driving us to distraction to help us step out of our unhealthy habit patterns of smoking, of stress eating and other addictive behaviors. Now, remember that bit about context-dependent memory? We can deliver these tools to peoples’ fingertips in the contexts that matter most. So we can help them tap into their inherent capacity to be curiously aware right when that urge to smoke or stress eat or whatever arises.

So if you don’t smoke or stress eat, maybe the next time you feel this urge to check your email when you’re bored, or you’re trying to distract yourself from work, or maybe to compulsively respond to that text message when you’re driving, see if you can tap into this natural capacity. Just be curiously aware of what’s happening in your body and mind in that moment. It will just be another chance to perpetuate one of our endless and exhaustive habit loops … or step out of it. Instead of see text message, compulsively text back, feel a little bit better — notice the urge, get curious, feel the joy of letting go and repeat.

Thank you.

Today’s athletes are far better than yesterday’s athletes–you hear it all the time. It’s a common argument used in generational legacy debates (Maradona versus Messi, Lebron versus Jordan, Woods versus Nicklaus). In fact, many people today believe that we’ve made progress in every area as a society, and athletic performance is the rule not the exception. After all, aren’t athletic records broken every year? The picture, however, is slightly more nuanced than a first glance would let on.

Journalist and Colombia-graduate David Epstein has spent the great part of his professional life studying athletic performance. He is author of The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance and Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Epstein gave a Ted Talk in which he addressed the very question posed in the previous paragraph. Epstein concludes that humans couldn’t possibly have genetically evolved in such a short period of time. Epstein attributes advances in athletic performance today to changing technology, changing genes, and changing mindsets.

Changing technologies as in synthetic track surfaces and more aerodynamic bicycles. Changing genes as in better selecting for sports based on body types (e.g. taller builds in basketball and bigger builds for football). And changing mindsets as in more people attempting great athletic feats like matching Roger Bannister’s famous 4-minute mile. I would personally add a fourth explanation: changing performance-enhancing drugs. Reality is that athletes today are not genetically superior, but modern technology and scientific methods may be partially responsible for advances in athletic performance.

I have reposted the fascinating talk with permission from Ted.

Transcript:

The Olympic motto is “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” Faster, Higher, Stronger. And athletes have fulfilled that motto rapidly. The winner of the 2012 Olympic marathon ran two hours and eight minutes. Had he been racing against the winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon, he would have won by nearly an hour and a half. Now we all have this feeling that we’re somehow just getting better as a human race, inexorably progressing, but it’s not like we’ve evolved into a new species in a century. So what’s going on here? I want to take a look at what’s really behind this march of athletic progress.

In 1936, Jesse Owens held the world record in the 100 meters. Had Jesse Owens been racing last year in the world championships of the 100 meters, when Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt finished, Owens would have still had 14 feet to go. That’s a lot in sprinter land. To give you a sense of how much it is, I want to share with you a demonstration conceived by sports scientist Ross Tucker. Now picture the stadium last year at the world championships of the 100 meters: thousands of fans waiting with baited breath to see Usain Bolt, the fastest man in history; flashbulbs popping as the nine fastest men in the world coil themselves into their blocks. And I want you to pretend that Jesse Owens is in that race. Now close your eyes for a second and picture the race. Bang! The gun goes off. An American sprinter jumps out to the front. Usain Bolt starts to catch him. Usain Bolt passes him, and as the runners come to the finish, you’ll hear a beep as each man crosses the line. (Beeps) That’s the entire finish of the race. You can open your eyes now. That first beep was Usain Bolt. That last beep was Jesse Owens. Listen to it again. (Beeps immediately after) When you think of it like that, it’s not that big a difference, is it? And then consider that Usain Bolt started by propelling himself out of blocks down a specially fabricated carpet designed to allow him to travel as fast as humanly possible. Jesse Owens, on the other hand, ran on cinders, the ash from burnt wood, and that soft surface stole far more energy from his legs as he ran. Rather than blocks, Jesse Owens had a gardening trowel that he had to use to dig holes in the cinders to start from. Biomechanical analysis of the speed of Owens’ joints shows that had been running on the same surface as Bolt, he wouldn’t have been 14 feet behind, he would have been within one stride. Rather than the last beep, Owens would have been the second beep. Listen to it again. (Beeps) That’s the difference track surface technology has made, and it’s done it throughout the running world.

Consider a longer event. In 1954, Sir Roger Bannister became the first man to run under four minutes in the mile. Nowadays, college kids do that every year. On rare occasions, a high school kid does it. As of the end of last year, 1,314 men had run under four minutes in the mile, but like Jesse Owens, Sir Roger Bannister ran on soft cinders that stole far more energy from his legs than the synthetic tracks of today. So I consulted biomechanics experts to find out how much slower it is to run on cinders than synthetic tracks, and their consensus that it’s one and a half percent slower. So if you apply a one and a half percent slowdown conversion to every man who ran his sub-four mile on a synthetic track, this is what happens. Only 530 are left. If you look at it from that perspective, fewer than ten new men per [year] have joined the sub-four mile club since Sir Roger Bannister. Now, 530 is a lot more than one, and that’s partly because there are many more people training today and they’re training more intelligently. Even college kids are professional in their training compared to Sir Roger Bannister, who trained for 45 minutes at a time while he ditched gynecology lectures in med school. And that guy who won the 1904 Olympic marathon in three in a half hours, that guy was drinking rat poison and brandy while he ran along the course. That was his idea of a performance-enhancing drug. (Laughter)

Clearly, athletes have gotten more savvy about performance-enhancing drugs as well, and that’s made a difference in some sports at some times, but technology has made a difference in all sports, from faster skis to lighter shoes. Take a look at the record for the 100-meter freestyle swim. The record is always trending downward, but it’s punctuated by these steep cliffs. This first cliff, in 1956, is the introduction of the flip turn. Rather than stopping and turning around, athletes could somersault under the water and get going right away in the opposite direction. This second cliff, the introduction of gutters on the side of the pool that allows water to splash off, rather than becoming turbulence that impedes the swimmers as they race. This final cliff, the introduction of full-body and low-friction swimsuits.

Throughout sports, technology has changed the face of performance. In 1972, Eddy Merckx set the record for the longest distance cycled in one hour at 30 miles, 3,774 feet. Now that record improved and improved as bicycles improved and became more aerodynamic all the way until 1996, when it was set at 35 miles, 1,531 feet, nearly five miles farther than Eddy Merckx cycled in 1972. But then in 2000, the International Cycling Union decreed that anyone who wanted to hold that record had to do so with essentially the same equipment that Eddy Merckx used in 1972. Where does the record stand today? 30 miles, 4,657 feet, a grand total of 883 feet farther than Eddy Merckx cycled more than four decades ago. Essentially the entire improvement in this record was due to technology.

Still, technology isn’t the only thing pushing athletes forward. While indeed we haven’t evolved into a new species in a century, the gene pool within competitive sports most certainly has changed. In the early half of the 20th century, physical education instructors and coaches had the idea that the average body type was the best for all athletic endeavors: medium height, medium weight, no matter the sport. And this showed in athletes’ bodies. In the 1920s, the average elite high-jumper and average elite shot-putter were the same exact size. But as that idea started to fade away, as sports scientists and coaches realized that rather than the average body type, you want highly specialized bodies that fit into certain athletic niches, a form of artificial selection took place, a self-sorting for bodies that fit certain sports, and athletes’ bodies became more different from one another. Today, rather than the same size as the average elite high jumper, the average elite shot-putter is two and a half inches taller and 130 pounds heavier. And this happened throughout the sports world.

In fact, if you plot on a height versus mass graph one data point for each of two dozen sports in the first half of the 20th century, it looks like this. There’s some dispersal, but it’s kind of grouped around that average body type. Then that idea started to go away, and at the same time, digital technology — first radio, then television and the Internet — gave millions, or in some cases billions, of people a ticket to consume elite sports performance. The financial incentives and fame and glory afforded elite athletes skyrocketed, and it tipped toward the tiny upper echelon of performance. It accelerated the artificial selection for specialized bodies. And if you plot a data point for these same two dozen sports today, it looks like this. The athletes’ bodies have gotten much more different from one another. And because this chart looks like the charts that show the expanding universe, with the galaxies flying away from one another, the scientists who discovered it call it “The Big Bang of Body Types.”

In sports where height is prized, like basketball, the tall athletes got taller. In 1983, the National Basketball Association signed a groundbreaking agreement making players partners in the league, entitled to shares of ticket revenues and television contracts. Suddenly, anybody who could be an NBA player wanted to be, and teams started scouring the globe for the bodies that could help them win championships. Almost overnight, the proportion of men in the NBA who are at least seven feet tall doubled to 10 percent. Today, one in 10 men in the NBA is at least seven feet tall, but a seven-foot-tall man is incredibly rare in the general population — so rare that if you know an American man between the ages of 20 and 40 who is at least seven feet tall, there’s a 17 percent chance he’s in the NBA right now. (Laughter) That is, find six honest seven footers, one is in the NBA right now. And that’s not the only way that NBA players’ bodies are unique. This is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” the ideal proportions, with arm span equal to height. My arm span is exactly equal to my height. Yours is probably very nearly so. But not the average NBA player. The average NBA player is a shade under 6’7″, with arms that are seven feet long. Not only are NBA players ridiculously tall, they are ludicrously long. Had Leonardo wanted to draw the Vitruvian NBA Player, he would have needed a rectangle and an ellipse, not a circle and a square.

So in sports where large size is prized, the large athletes have gotten larger. Conversely, in sports where diminutive stature is an advantage, the small athletes got smaller. The average elite female gymnast shrunk from 5’3″ to 4’9″ on average over the last 30 years, all the better for their power-to-weight ratio and for spinning in the air. And while the large got larger and the small got smaller, the weird got weirder. The average length of the forearm of a water polo player in relation to their total arm got longer, all the better for a forceful throwing whip. And as the large got larger, small got smaller, and the weird weirder. In swimming, the ideal body type is a long torso and short legs. It’s like the long hull of a canoe for speed over the water. And the opposite is advantageous in running. You want long legs and a short torso. And this shows in athletes’ bodies today. Here you see Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer in history, standing next to Hicham El Guerrouj, the world record holder in the mile. These men are seven inches different in height, but because of the body types advantaged in their sports, they wear the same length pants. Seven inches difference in height, these men have the same length legs.

Now in some cases, the search for bodies that could push athletic performance forward ended up introducing into the competitive world populations of people that weren’t previously competing at all, like Kenyan distance runners. We think of Kenyans as being great marathoners. Kenyans think of the Kalenjin tribe as being great marathoners. The Kalenjin make up just 12 percent of the Kenyan population but the vast majority of elite runners. And they happen, on average, to have a certain unique physiology: legs that are very long and very thin at their extremity, and this is because they have their ancestry at very low latitude in a very hot and dry climate, and an evolutionary adaptation to that is limbs that are very long and very thin at the extremity for cooling purposes. It’s the same reason that a radiator has long coils, to increase surface area compared to volume to let heat out, and because the leg is like a pendulum, the longer and thinner it is at the extremity, the more energy-efficient it is to swing. To put Kalenjin running success in perspective, consider that 17 American men in history have run faster than two hours and 10 minutes in the marathon. That’s a four-minute-and-58-second-per-mile pace. Thirty-two Kalenjin men did that last October. (Laughter) That’s from a source population the size of metropolitan Atlanta.

Still, even changing technology and the changing gene pool in sports don’t account for all of the changes in performance. Athletes have a different mindset than they once did. Have you ever seen in a movie when someone gets an electrical shock and they’re thrown across a room? There’s no explosion there. What’s happening when that happens is that the electrical impulse is causing all their muscle fibers to twitch at once, and they’re throwing themselves across the room. They’re essentially jumping. That’s the power that’s contained in the human body. But normally we can’t access nearly all of it. Our brain acts as a limiter, preventing us from accessing all of our physical resources, because we might hurt ourselves, tearing tendons or ligaments. But the more we learn about how that limiter functions, the more we learn how we can push it back just a bit, in some cases by convincing the brain that the body won’t be in mortal danger by pushing harder. Endurance and ultra-endurance sports serve as a great example. Ultra-endurance was once thought to be harmful to human health, but now we realize that we have all these traits that are perfect for ultra-endurance: no body fur and a glut of sweat glands that keep us cool while running; narrow waists and long legs compared to our frames; large surface area of joints for shock absorption. We have an arch in our foot that acts like a spring, short toes that are better for pushing off than for grasping tree limbs, and when we run, we can turn our torso and our shoulders like this while keeping our heads straight. Our primate cousins can’t do that. They have to run like this. And we have big old butt muscles that keep us upright while running. Have you ever looked at an ape’s butt? They have no buns because they don’t run upright. And as athletes have realized that we’re perfectly suited for ultra-endurance, they’ve taken on feats that would have been unthinkable before, athletes like Spanish endurance racer Kílian Jornet. Here’s Kílian running up the Matterhorn. (Laughter) With a sweatshirt there tied around his waist. It’s so steep he can’t even run here. He’s pulling up on a rope. This is a vertical ascent of more than 8,000 feet, and Kílian went up and down in under three hours. Amazing. And talented though he is, Kílian is not a physiological freak. Now that he has done this, other athletes will follow, just as other athletes followed after Sir Roger Bannister ran under four minutes in the mile.

Changing technology, changing genes, and a changing mindset. Innovation in sports, whether that’s new track surfaces or new swimming techniques, the democratization of sport, the spread to new bodies and to new populations around the world, and imagination in sport, an understanding of what the human body is truly capable of, have conspired to make athletes stronger, faster, bolder, and better than ever.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

One of the most common pieces of advice ever given is “Just be yourself.” And it’s often just what we need to hear. We as people too frequently modify our personality to please others. We say, do, and act a certain way to win their approval rather than from a place of authenticity. If this describes you, “Just be yourself” can be great advice. However, there’s another sense in which we all rightly want to stop being ourselves. What if we struggle with anger? What if we’re depressed, anxious, or peak stress all the time? What if we’re simply not living the life we know we’re capable of? That’s when not being ourselves is in our best interest.

Joe Dispenza has dedicated his career to improving life outcomes using the power of the human mind. He studied neuroscience in college and is a practicing chiropractor. Dr. Dispenza is author of the best-selling Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One. I was initially introduced to Dr. Dispensa through an online lecture that he gave on his book. I was struck by how deeply what he was saying resonated with what I know to be true from my own research and experience.

I’ve created a transcript of Dr. Dispenza’s fascinating lecture on Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. His main thesis is that to truly change is to think outside your environment.

Transcript:

Good evening. I want you to turn to the person next to you I want you to look them in the eye and introduce yourself as a genius–let’s begin. Now geniuses, so happy to be with you this evening. I have a few questions for you before we begin. How many people in this audience actually believe in the idea that the way you think has some effect on your life? You believe that, yes? So how many people here actually woke up this morning and consciously created a future? You know the biggest reason why people don’t do it is because you don’t really believe it’s true. You see if you knew on a gut level that it was absolutely true would you ever miss a day–come on– and would you ever let any thoughts slip by your awareness that you didn’t want to experience?

So your brain according to neuroscience is organized to reflect everything you know in your life. Your brain is a record of your environment–an artifact of your past. So if you believe this, then does your environment control your thinking? Or does your thinking control your environment?

If you wake up in the morning and you get out of bed on the same exact side as you did the day before, you shut the alarm clock off with the same finger, you slip into your favorite slippers, you shuffle into the bathroom and you use the toilet like you always do, then you walk over to the mirror and you look at yourself to remember who you are, then you get into the shower and you wash yourself in the same routine way, then you groom yourself to look like everybody expects you to look, then you go downstairs and you drink coffee out of your favorite mug, then you drive to work the same way as you did the day before. You see the same people that push the same emotional buttons. You do the exact thing that you know how to do, and you memorize and can do so well that you’re an expert at. Then you hurry up and rush home so you can hurry up and check your emails. So you can hurry up and go to bed. So you can hurry up and do it all over again.

Here’s my question: Did your brain change at all that day? We can say that you were thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions that create the same experiences that produce the same emotions, but secretly expecting something to change in your life. Would you agree? So then, as the environment turns on different circuits in your brain, you begin to think equal to your environment. As you see the same people and go to the same places and do the same things at the same time, it’s the external environment that’s turning on different circuits in your brain, causing you to think equal to everything that you know. And as long as you think equal to everything that’s familiar or known to you, what do you keep creating more of? Same life. Now the quantum law is still applying to you. You’re just thinking equal to everything that you know, and you keep creating more of the same.

To change–to truly change is to think greater than your environment. And every great person in history knew this. Whether it was William Wallace or Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, or Queen Elizabeth I, or Joan of Arc–they all had a vision. They all had an idea. Couldn’t see it, couldn’t smell it, couldn’t feel it. But it was alive in their mind. It was so alive in their mind that they began to live as if that reality was actually happening now.

So can you believe in a future that you can’t see or experience with your senses yet? But you’ve thought about [it] enough times in your mind that your brain is literally changed to look like the event has already happened. Neuroscience says it’s actually possible. Now your personality creates your personal reality–that’s it. It’s that simple. And your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel. So the present personality who’s sitting here today–you–has created the present personality reality called your life. Would you agree? Would you also agree, then, that if you wanted a new personal reality, that on a fundamental level you would have to change the thoughts that you’re thinking, the behaviors and habits that you’re demonstrating, and the emotions that you’ve memorized that have become part of your identity?

Most people try to create a new personal reality as the same personality, and it never works. We have to become somebody else. So then, as you keep thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions, and living by the same experiences that produce the same emotions–there’s a principle in neuroscience that says nerve cells that fire together wire together. And if you keep repeating the same states of mind and body over and over again, your brain begins to fire in the same sequences, in the same patterns, in the same combinations. And whenever you make your brain work in a certain way that’s called mind. Mind is the brain in action. So as you re-mind yourself every day who you think you are, you’re causing your brain to fire in the exact same ways. And as they fire and wire in the same patterns, over time the brain moves into a very finite signature, and that’s call your personality.

Now that box in your brain isn’t literally a box, but it’s the most commonly wired, neurologically-fired programs that run redundantly because we keep doing the same things over and over again. To change your mind, then, is to make the brain work in new sequences, in new patterns, in new combinations–to begin to make the brain work differently. And the one ingredient that allows us to do that is knowledge, or information because every time you learn something new you make a new connection in your brain. That’s what learning is. Learning is forging new connections. Remembering is maintaining or sustaining those connections.

So now, every time you have a thought, you make a chemical. And if you have a great thought, or an unlimited thought, or a joyful thought, you turn on a set of circuits in your brain that fires in a very specific sequence, pattern, combination, that produces a level of mind that turns on another part of the brain that makes a chemical for you to begin to feel exactly the way you were just thinking–great or unlimited or joyful.

Now if you have a negative thought or an unhappy thought or a self-depreciating thought, you turn on a different set of circuits, and a different combination, and a different sequence and a different pattern that produces a different level of mind. And the brain then begins to make a different batch of chemicals that signals the body for you to begin to feel exactly the way you were just thinking–negative or unhappy or unworthy.

So the moment you begin to feel the way you think because the brain is in constant communication with your body, you begin to think the way you feel. Which makes more chemicals for you to feel the way you think, and then you think the way you feel, and then you feel the way you think, and then you feel the way you think. And some people do this for 20 or 30 or 40 years.

Now the redundancy of that cycle over time creates what I call a state of being. And a state of being is when your mind and body are working together, or your thoughts and feelings are aligned to a concept. So thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. And as people get caught in this cycle of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking, over time they can condition their body to memorize that emotion as well as the conscious mind.

And whenever the body knows as well as the mind, that’s called a habit. A habit is when your body is the mind. Now 95% of who you are by the time you’re 35 years old is a set of memorized behaviors, a set of emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes that run just like a computer program. So 5% of your conscious mind begins to work against 95% of what you’ve memorized. So the person wants to think positively, but they’re feeling negatively. They want to create their dream board, and put up their future life, but they feel unworthy. That’s mind and body in opposition. We have to recondition the body to a new mind.

So how many people here know someone who’s memorized suffering? It doesn’t have to be you, it can be anybody. And you say that person, “Hey, did you read the book I gave you?” What do they say? “No [sad voice]” “Did you see the DVD I gave you?” “Oh, no. [sad voice]” “Hey, listen, we’re going to go out to dinner, we’re going to go see some stand-up comedy, we’re going to go for a walk along the water, do you want to come?” “No. [sad voice]” What do they say? I’m insisting on this chemical order that no person, no thing, no experience can move us from it. And we have these three brains to allow us to move into a new state of being. And the quantum-field, universal mind–whatever you want to call it–responds to who you’re being. Not what you’re thinking, not what you’re feeling, but the combination of what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling called a state of being.

Most people wait for crisis or trauma or disease or loss to really want to change. They wait until the point where the ego is brought to such a low level that they cannot go on business-as-usual any longer. That’s when we begin to look at how we’re thinking or what we believe or how we act or our attitude or what emotions we’re living by. And my message is why wait? We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, which tends to be the human model. Or we can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration.

Now you want to learn the hardest part about all of this–are you ready? The hardest part of all of this–the hardest part of all of this–is making the time to do it. That’s it. That’s it–making time for your precious self.

I’ve been a big sports fan for as long as I can remember. Sports, for me, are a source of relaxation and entertainment. They promote mindfulness in ways that few other activities can. But what I like most about sports is the real world analogy. Many of the skills and character traits that go into making successful athletes and successful teams translate into other areas of life. And so sports are a metaphor for life. They’re as entertaining as they are instructive.

Kenn Dickinson is the President of Fast Break Executive Coaching. He knows a lot about sports from his days as a professional athlete. Dickinson gave a powerful TedTalk at a local TEDxSnoIsleLibraries event in which he talked about the secrets of elite athletes. As he likes to joke, “he had a front row seat. . . at the end of the bench, watching, and observing, and learning from these world-class amazing kind of athletes.” Dickinson concluded that two primary habits were responsible for their success: visualization and deliberate practice (or what he termed specific work). The inspiring takeaway is that anyone can apply these tools to build better families, careers, businesses, relationships, and lives.

Transcript:

I want to introduce you to a friend of mine: Mr. Wilson. No, not Russell Wilson from the Seahawks. He plays with this oblong ball, and it doesn’t bounce very well. But Mr. Wilson and I have been friends for a long time. We go way back, and he’s been by my — I mean, I first met him when I was — at Christmas time. I was about four years old, and there was this big box in front of the Christmas tree, and I just dove in and opened it up, and there was this big orange ball. And he’s been by my side ever since. When I walked down the street or went to school, I always had Mr. Wilson with me. And then I went on to college and obviously played college basketball. Then I went on to play professional basketball, and he’s been actually a part of my life in my business career. So we’ve been on this journey for a long time, and it’s been an interesting journey.

And one of the things that we’ve been able to do is meet some amazing people. Those amazing people are elite athletes; not just your regular athletes but your elite athletes. Now, a lot of you are going to say, “I can’t relate to these people. “They’re superhuman, these men and women.” I’ll give you a little secret: they’re just like you and me. I actually had a front row seat. OK, I was at the end of the bench, watching, and observing, and learning from these world-class amazing kind of athletes.

But what I want to give you today is a window into that world that a lot of us don’t have an opportunity to. And a lot of us think that these amazing athletes are there because of their talent, but Mr. Wilson and I realized it’s really not. It’s about a competitive mindset. They actually see, and think, and behave so much different than we do. And that’s what I want to share with you: some two key points that we saw that maybe you could use in your daily life or in your business.

The two points are visualization and deliberate practice. Let’s start with visualization. A lot of us think that visualization is about seeing a goal ahead of us. But actually these people travel in time. They actually take their emotions, their senses – seeing, hearing, touching – and they go into the future. What they’re doing is defining their own reality, their own future, and they’re living there. And then they come back, and then they have already created an imprint, a blueprint of what success is going to be for them.

Let me give you an example. I used to be a really good shooter, and I used to shoot a lot of free throws. Before I shot a free throw, I would actually– and you can take the time if you want to follow with me –is close your eyes, and I would think about how I was holding the ball, I would think about the arc of the ball, I would think of a really good backspin, and it goes right through the net. And what was really cool to me if I could make the net flip up onto the rim. Then all I would do was open my eyes, take a couple dribbles, and I would just let it go. Nine out of ten times, I would make it, 90% of the time.
What I didn’t realize at that time was with neuroscience today when you actually visualize what I was doing, you’re actually using the same part of the brain as if you were doing it. And it’s so powerful today. Even Jordan Spieth, the number-one golfer in the world, you’ve probably heard now with technology their communication with him. Michael Geller would say to Jordan Spieth, “Paint a picture.” Well, what he’s saying is, “Look at the flight of the ball. Watch it hit the green; watch it roll onto the green. How is it going to react?” Jordan would say, “Got it,” and he says, “Make it happen,” and so he does.

One of the most powerful one of these visualizations happened with a gentleman named Colonel Nesmeth. He was an average golfer, shot around 95. But something happened in his life, tragically. He became a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. He was a prisoner for seven and a half years in a solitary confinement of a cell no more than 5 feet by 5 feet by 5 feet. What would you do if you were in that situation? Well, he didn’t want to give up hope. He wanted to overcome this, so what he did is he actually played golf. He didn’t think about golf; he was actually playing golf. He visualized it. So what he would do for four hours is play his golf course back home. He would put a tee in the ground. He would hit it, watch it go down the fairway, put the club back into the bag, and start walking down the fairway. He would hear the birds. He would hear the clippers of the mowers. He would feel the wind on his back, and he would keep on walking along. He would come up to his ball, and he would repeat it again, and he would feel the club in his hands.

At the end of seven and half years, he was finally released. But he did this every day. Now remember I said that he had a shot around a 95. That was his handicap, or his strokes. What do you think he did when he came back
after not touching a club for seven and a half years? You would think he would at least shoot a 95, but probably higher. The amazing thing is, he shot a 75, 20 strokes less than what he did, by just doing visualization. This is a more powerful tool that we can use in our daily lives. If you’re a sales rep, visualize your sales presentation. If you’re going to a job interview, visualize what’s going to happen in the job interview. How many of you want to lose weight? A lot of us want to lose weight. Visualize what you’re going to look like when you lose your weight. Put on the dress, see yourself in the mirror. Eat the food that you need to do, because when you come back, you’ve already created an imprint of what success is going to look like for you. Jack Nicklaus had a saying, “I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp in-focus picture in my head.”

The second thing I want to talk about is we all want to be successful. But nothing cripples success or performance than damaged confidence. So we see these athletes as being super confident because of their talent, right? But it’s not. There was a study in the UK that was extensive, and determined innate gifts do not determine success. So then what’s going on? It’s hard work. No, it’s not just hard work, it’s specific hard work. And that was discovered by Anders Ericsson from Florida State University. And he did a groundbreaking study determining about deliberate practice. What is deliberate practice by Anders Ericsson? “It is the activities that are explicitly intended to improve performance that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence.”

There’s four tenets that I want to share with you today. One of the tenets is: you have to make it personal, and you have to base it upon principles of fundamentals. A lot of us would practice shooting free throws by getting on the free throw line and doing it many, many times. What deliberate practice is is using something in your fundamentals to build upon. So I would actually go to the front of the rim and actually shoot straight up, because I knew arc was an important fundamental in shooting. Then it would come straight down through the hole, or the hoop. Did you know that two basketballs can fit through a hoop at the same time? That’s how big it is. So one of the tenets is basically working on something of your fundamentals and strengths.

Then the next is obviously repetition: repetition, repetition, repetition. So I would do this for 50 times, and then I would do it 100 times.
But then I would add the third tenet, which is stretch your abilities. Get out of your comfort zone. So then what I would do is then I would have to do it without the ball touching the rim. Think about how hard that could be. That is what makes deliberate practice so difficult, because it’s tedious and painful. But if you do it, you’ll be successful in what you want to accomplish.

The fourth tenet is something that we naturally should know but we don’t; that is you need feedback. How are you going to improve without beginning the feedback? A lot of us do things on our own, but guess what? Don’t these people have coaches? Don’t they have people, advisers, and people looking at them to give them the feedback that they need? So, now after you’ve seen deliberate practice, it kind of makes sense why they are so confident in what they do. Now, it’s not what they do or who they are, but it’s how they do it.

So the refresh is use visualization. That is the ability to create a new reality for yourself, determine it, live there constantly, and come back. And then your choices and your decisions are all based upon what you have just determined.

The other is deliberate practice. And deliberate practice, you have to work on fundamentals, and you have to work on the right fundamentals.
The next step after that is basically, “Am I building upon those fundamentals?” And a lot of us know what we’re supposed to do, but we don’t do it.

And the third part is: this is a journey for these people. It’s a constant progression in life. And they’re always asking one simple question, “Am I doing everything I possibly can?” Because they never stop; it’s a journey for them. So they’re always breaking down new barriers. They’re always creating new challenges for themselves. They’re always about winning. And a lot of people say, “Winning? Oh, my gosh.” No, it’s not about vanquishing an opponent. It’s about their way of ability to measure or benchmark where they are in this process, and it’s a process to them, so failure is not a killer to them. John Wooden once said, “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change can be.” So this is a journey that they’ve been on and are continually going.

Now, there’s a lady that inspired me, and it was a tremendous story. And I want to know: how many people have heard of Penny Chenery? Not very many people have. But Penny Chenery — you might know by her sidekick, Secretariat. Secretariat and Penny Chenery were on a journey. If you remember the story, Secretariat was not ever supposed to be a Triple Crown winner. It was a afterthought of a coin flip. But Penny Chenery had a vision, had visualized where her and the horse could be as a Triple Crown winner.
So they were on this journey for the years, and so they won the Kentucky Derby, they won the Preakness, but now came to the Belmont: the graveyard for horses. Here’s a horse that was overweight, was lazy, but they used deliberate practice on that last race and worked that horse in a specific way. They said it was crazy because he had no recovery time, but they challenged the horse. And if you remember, Penny Chenery walked up to Secretariat and said, “I’ve run my race, now it’s your turn to run your race.”

And boy, did Secretariat run his race. He left — most of the time when he leaves the starting gate, he’s always in the behind. But for some reason, in this race he went out in the front. And Turcotte, the jockey, didn’t do anything. He said, “I was here for a ride.” And by the quarter mile, no horse had run this fast ever, and by halfway through the race, it was only him and another horse called Sham. And everybody in the stands says, “No horse can do this. This is impossible. He’s going to kill himself.” But guess what? He kept on going. And he left Sham behind. And he said it was like a locomotive going down the back stretch and around the home curve. He won by 31 lengths. That’s unheard of in horse racing. That’s two seconds. Nobody’s even come close, not even American Pharoah this year, a Triple Crown winner. So it was an amazing feat for this journey for this lady and this horse. Did you know that in the 20th century, Secretariat was rated the 35th best athlete of all time? A horse!

Even on top of that, the Belmont was rated the second best sporting event of all time in the 20th century. The only event above that was Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points in an NBA basketball game. So this was a tremendous journey that Penny Chenery and Secretariat were on. I want to leave you with a quote that Penny Chenery had to say, “We will win if we can, and live with it if we can’t, but you never know how far you can go unless you run. You have to run your race. I don’t care how many times they say it can’t be done. I will not live the rest of my life in regret, and no matter what happens, we are going to live rejoicing every day.”

Mr. Wilson and I have been on this journey, and we want you to run your own race. And a lot of you will say, “I don’t want to be an elite athlete.” You don’t have to be. But why don’t you see how far you can go using visualization and deliberate practice? Thank you.