And how to break out of your plateau
Value of your Brain
Your brain is such an intelligent tool that the richest people in the world right now are the ones trying to get machines to work even a little bit like it. Think about that, the thing inside your head deciphering these words and making your cup of coffee, is the hottest commodity on the market. Actually, just a dumbed down version of it will get you billions.
The limitations of AI as we see today are the same ones we carry around with us. And it is why really smart, driven people start to stagnate.
How - and Why - it Works
Your brain is designed to cut out noise so you can focus on the important stuff. If people heard every car horn in Manhattan, there would be very little productivity coming from the East Coast. It's amazing if you pay attention to the way your brain cuts out unnecessary information. When was the last time you smelled your own perfume? You likely went nose blind to it after the first few times you wore it.
The difference between success and getting stuck is knowing what information is important and what is extraneous.
So, one would think, as you've proved to be successful in one area (or even in life in general) that you must know how to pick out the right information. Where others get sucked into the details or maybe they focus on the wrong details entirely, you got it right. You were able to spot the important stuff. We train our brains what to focus on by what we care about. And in the early stages of anything (a project, career or life in general), we are very intentional in choosing what to believe. And these small choices add up to our outcome. Like a massive Choose Your Own Adventure.
How Thinking Sharpens
The trouble is that once a choice is made - it is stored for reference later.
The reason for this is that your brain wants to tackle only new problems. We tend to get bored with same old same old, and maybe the brain craves novelty just like we do. But the more common reason sited is energy conservation. It takes a lot of energy to make a brand new decision. Those early days (of anything) are all consuming - for exactly this reason. You are literally making it up as you go - and it takes your brain's full capacity.
It would be incredibly inefficient to relearn everything you do every time you do it. Imagine examining the coffee pot ever single morning to figure out how it works.
You brain doesn't just store the choice, it also stores two other important pieces of information.
Your emotions and the external senses (smells, sights or sounds) at the time of this choice
How you felt after the choice was made
This is why you remember exactly what you were wearing that night… you know the night…
How Emotions Establish Patterns
The final touch applied before the choice is filed into the archive is a weighting - the brain needs to know how important this choice will be in the future. Things that protect your survival are the most important while remembering someone's name you were casually introduced to is lower on the scale.
Wouldn't it be great if the weighting was some complex (logical) system related to the long-term outcome of this choice? That time you had a salad instead of a cheeseburger eventually resulted in some lost pounds. That would be nice. But no.
The importance of a choice, for your brain, is determined by the magnitude of your emotional reaction to making it. Good or bad. At the time the choice was made.
Eating the salad is better for the success of your health goals, but you felt like you were depriving yourself when you ordered it. So the next time you pick up a menu, your brain is going to remind you of the FEELING of deprivation as you skim over the salad section. And it's going to serve you some good logic to keep skimming.
Now, we all know we make decisions we don't like every day. If you have achieved things in life its because you are capable of working for a future outcome. So how can this be based on emotion?
Emotions are actually more complex. You are working for a goal you want, getting nothing but pain today. But you aren't dreading the pain today. In fact, you believe this pain is going to result in the thing you want. So, emotionally, you may be stressed but there is a level of satisfaction. The brain (and body) don’t mind stress - especially when you are emotionally invested in it. In fact - this is what it's designed to do. Give me a hard project that means something and I'll give you every ounce of energy I have to get it done.
Diminishing Returns of a Flawless System
So… in early days, we make intentional choices because we don't know any better. We have to learn.
Each choice we make - big and small - is associated with what was going on around us and inside us at the point of the choice, how we felt after the choice, and how big of a deal it was to us. If you're introduced to a really attractive stranger you are far more likely to remember their name than someone you couldn't pick out of a lineup. Not because you practiced it over and over in your head (you might have) but because you got an emotional jolt when you heard it and saw them. Your brain decided - based on that jolt - that this was an important piece of information.
Congratulations, now you can be embarrassed forever that you remember that one guy's name from 5 years ago.
It's a beautiful system - but it's one that also degrades over time if you keep it on autopilot.
All of those choices build up and up and up. Yes, there is a nightly decluttering that happens (read up on sleep research, it's fascinating). But that's removing things like which underwear you wore today or where you put your keys before bed. It's not getting rid of the way you drove to work, that weird look your spouse gave you, or how unsatisfying your salad was.
Build this up over a 15 or 20 year career, relationship, life. And you start to have a huge backlog of knowledge to draw from. This is when we start calling people experts or when we see real accumulations of success start to happen. Of course, if you've done it, you know that this isn't an overnight occurrence. Everything you've done accumulated to everything you see now.
That's true for the things around you - and all of this success over time makes you feel very confident in your ability to choose important information to pay attention to. This confidence feels like stability. And your brain really, really likes stability. Once you achieve this - the brain doesn't just store information - it takes regular backups of it just in case. It is archived and cemented into place, never to be re-examined. It makes sense - if you only want to build your life to a specific point and then you want to enjoy your crossword puzzles until your time around the sun is complete. It makes absolute sense. You can't spend your crossword puzzle years questioning if you used the right tone of voice with the door to door salesman. Those types of concerns are for people just starting out in the world. Not for people who've already figured it out.
The Opposite of Stability is Growth
But sometimes we do want to continue growing. And this is exactly why growth can be the most difficult for people who have achieved their initial goals in life. You are perfectly optimized to do the thing you already did.
It isn't that you are wrong in your choices - it's just that the choices are the same ones you made in the past. So, you're going to continue to get the same outcomes. Especially, and most reliably, the same emotional outcomes (more about that in a different post).
In order to break out of the success stagnation trap, you have to be willing to disrupt your brain's stability patterns. You have to become intentional again. And I won't sugarcoat it - it's an uncomfortable and sometimes downright painful process.
Set up a call to talk more about how I step clients through the process.
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