Have you ever sat in a room full of top-level executives and felt inferior or insecure about your intelligence or education? Or, have you ever thought to yourself “Am I smart enough to succeed in this competitive world?”
It’s easy to compare ourselves to others and feel that they are smarter or better educated than we are - and use that as an excuse for our own challenges and setbacks. But, if we delve deeper, we can see that their level of education and intelligence is not the reason for their successes – it’s the application of it! Some of the most amazing leaders I have come across only have normal levels of intelligence, but they master at focussing the intelligence and applying it. By doing so, they achieve success in what they do and inspire others to follow their path!
If that’s the recipe for success, what can we do to change ourselves and our brain function?
We make hundreds of decisions everyday - some important and some mundane! What do I wear today? What time should I leave for work? What should I eat today etc… and the capacity for our brains to make well informed out decisions throughout the day is finite.
Have you ever wondered why Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or even Albert Einstein wore the same outfit everyday? And have you wondered why most athletes eat the same meals everyday when they train for major events?
According to Steve Jobs, he understood that the brain has a limited capacity of brainpower to make well thought out decisions throughout the day. A minute of brainpower he used to decide which T-shirt to wear meant that he had a minute less brainpower to think about his company. Likewise, for athletes if the meals are the same, it’s one less thing to think about, it’s consistent and they can utilise all of their brain power for training strategies. This is just one of the examples of how great leaders think!
In fact, it doesn’t stop there, the people who we deem to be super intelligent tend to not clutter up their brains with useless facts or trivial matters. There is always search engines and smart phones for that!
At some level we all pride ourselves on how much we know about everything, how much trivia we know and our ability to small talk. It’s a great skill for us as social beings and makes us interesting people, but it consumes a lot of our brain power. What we need more of is “focus” on what we want to achieve, the positive “can do” attitude, creative thinking and the willingness to use all our brain power to achieve positive results.
And there is good news! And this good news will hold us accountable! Because we can control how we choose to use our brains. We can control the kind of thinking that guides our brain function, tap into all of our natural intelligence and apply it to get optimum results for our lives. We can set the mundaneness of our lives on “auto-pilot” and just focus on things that matter and think about things that actually lead us to our destination.
Imagine what would happen if we wore the same clothes and ate the same meals everyday? Imagine if we scheduled all our bills to be paid on auto-debit and ran the same 5k route everyday! Imagine if we had a fixed routine and gave all our brainpower to only things that mattered. What would happen if we hung around in social circles where our brains only needed to store, think and apply intelligence to what mattered most and our priorities!
How much more brain power would we have? How much smarter would we feel? Food for thought!
Smartness Tip: When you feel intellectually inferior, as we all do sometimes, change your focus to how you choose to apply and use your natural intelligence. Read and study. Take positive action. Do not over analyse and paralyse your progress. And ultimately, do not compare yourself to others and Live Life on Your terms | Unleash Your Potential | And Live Your Dream.
Comentarios