It’s really important that when you study the best of the best, whether it’s a Beyonce or a chess champion, whether it’s a world-class tennis player or a Formula One racer, the best of the best it’s all about the little tiny wins when done consistently over time lead to staggering results. And it’s easy to forget that. We see them, we put them up on a pedestal and we forget that the backstory behind all exceptional performers is simply this, 2.44 hours of daily practice over 10,000 hours which amounts to roughly 10 years. And that is the minimum required for the first signs of world-class performance and
genius to present itself. And what we do is we see these people in the magazines or on television, these icons that we adore, and we see the end result of all their practice and all their training and all their investments and learning. And we look at them and we say, “Wow, they’re divinely blessed and cut from a different cloth.” And we forget that who they were were pretty much ordinary people with the minimum viable threshold of
talent, but polished through training, coaching, developing, learning, growing, progressing by micro-wins every single day over time for the 10,000 hours. The metaphor that I want to offer to you is the Formula One metaphor. So if you’ve got a Formula One racer and he is quicker on every lap just by a few milliseconds because the focus is a little bit better, the car is tuned a little bit better, he is relentlessly
optimizing and iterating, well, that millisecond, microsecond of improvement over the competition when done over the entire race lap over lap over lap, allows him to be so far ahead of the competition that they can’t even touch him. And that is my wish for you that through these tiny wins, through this consistency because one of the essential points of mastery is consistency. You want to do these things every day, not once a month. But if you do the micro wins and you run the routines with consistency every single day, it seems like so subtle that nothing’s happening. But over the course of a career and over the length of a lifetime, you get to a place where you actually make history. So the micro-win phenomenon and related to that, the Formula One metaphor, just consider those when you are building your business, when you’re on the process of mastery towards your skill, when you’re building great relationships and a beautiful family life, when you’re building your net worth, when you are building your reputation, when you’re building your brand. Whatever it is, it’s all about the small
daily acts of excellence, iteration, optimization and progress. When done consistently over 10 years, over a career, over a lifetime, it gets you to a place where you become unbeatable, undefeatable, untouchable.
That brings me to transient hypofrontality. There’s a pretty cool guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihayi, and he wrote a book called Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience. And he found that when the best of the best, whether it was in music or science or business or the arts or humanities, they all reached a certain mindset which he called a state of flow. And when they dropped into that state of flow, that’s when they did almost superhuman things. They created superhuman works of art. They arrived at superhuman solutions to problems that ordinary mortals hadn’t been struggling with. The exciting thing I want to bring to you today, hopefully more clear than ever before, is simply this, the flow state is not reserved for the chosen few. The flow state is something that every single one of us can arrive at if we create the right conditions. And one of the best conditions is a state of aloneness and solitude because
here’s what happens. In the age of dramatic distraction, where most people are watching dancing cat videos on YouTube, or checking their Facebook notifications, or picking up their mobile or looking at SMS, or death by meeting.
We live in this world where the vast majority of people no longer are alone. They no longer value solitude. And so if you can be one of those rare-air performers that schedules at least two hours a day in solitude, maybe it’s a dream room in your home. Maybe it’s a quiet area at your office place, maybe it’s going for a walk in the woods. But if you can do that, here’s what starts to happen. Your brainwaves slow down. They go from beta to alpha, part of the brain responsible for thinking and self-criticism, your
inner critic. And that part of the brain is called the prefrontal cortex, the PFC.
The prefrontal cortex actually temporarily is shut off and that’s called transient hypofrontality, where the prefrontal cortex that [inaudible] worrying and ruminating, some people call it the monkey mind, the part of the brain that is doubting yourself, questioning, sometimes I call it the voice of fear, it actually temporarily gets silent. And that’s a beautiful thing because what happens is there’s this pharmacy of mastery that kicks into gear. And your brain starts to release these neurochemicals like dopamine which is the neurochemical of inspiration, and anandamide which is the neurotransmitter of bliss, and serotonin which is the neurochemical of peace and pleasure. And what you do is you fire up your brain to get into this state that is called flow, where you’re fully in the present moment and hours actually pass by in minutes.
And you see the great athletes, they get into this. They go, “I can’t believe what I did.” They got into the state of flow where they tapped into the genius and the reservoir of brilliance that is inside each and every one of us. Most of us don’t create the conditions such as solitude and let’s call it scheduled solitude so it happens daily, where transient hypofrontality kicks in and you actually get to do these amazing things.