You don’t get lucky, you make lucky. The world sells us a series of lies about what it takes to lead a life that wows all witnesses. Society trains us to believe from a pretty young age, that those among us who express great skill achieve awesome results and rise to iconic, are cut from a different cloth, that they have uncommon genetics, have divinely blessed talents and otherworldly gifts that make them exceptional from the rest of us. The average person is then left with the psychology that world-class performance is something that is just not intended for them. Becoming an, A player is not within their grasp. Being considered a titan of what they do and how they live has no role in their fate. And so most of us don’t even start the proc
ess of becoming one, because what would be the point?
Key insight, I invite you to really wrap your thinking around. Positive psychologists confirm that your perception about your potential determines how much of your potential you will actually bring to life. That’s a tremendously important point, so I’ll say it again. Or suggest it again is probably a better way of saying it. Your perception about your potential determines how much of your potential you’ll actually allow to see the light of day. If you d
on’t think you’re worth very much, you won’t do very much.
If your self-identity says, you’re just the kind of person who needs to spend the best hours of your life watching television in a subdivision, your performance will match that, because your daily behavior always reflects your deepest beliefs.
Leading scientists like Steven Spencer, and you’re going to love this. They write about a
the phenomenon is known as stereotype threat, which describes the fact that when people think they’re part of a social group that doesn’t succeed in a certain area, they perform in a way that exactly matches that internal expectation. What does this mean for you and me? It means that if you come from a neighborhood of low achievers, and if you’re not careful to manage your thinking and your self-identity well, you’ll unconsciously, so it’s unconscious, you don’t even know you’re doing it, but unconsciously you’ll buy into this stereotype and perform as a low achiever. This means that if you fall into the trap of making excuses like my parents didn’t have money, so I can’t have money, or people just like me can’t achieve amazing results, that kind of thinking program will create a self-fulfilling prophecy and you’ll get a life born of those fears.
There’s even more extremely powerful information emerging from science. And it’s called
epigenetics. What is epigenetics? Well, it’s information in a cell that determines which traits within a genome will get expressed. Now it’s all pretty complex, but the bottom line for you and me right now is this, science is discovering that environmental factors, including how you think, behave, what you do every day, how you respond to stress, your daily diet, your environment, even things like do you watch the news, actually influence what part of your genetic potential you will express over the course of your lifetime.
It even suggests according to epigenetics, if the people around you are depressed, you will
become depressed. If the people around you don’t think they’re going to play at world-class,
you will become someone who thinks you can’t play at world-class. If your environment is dull and uninspired, don’t be surprised if the genetic languaging in your DNA, which is in every one of you, does not express the genius that you were born into. Another bottom line, is what it means for you. It actually means you have the choice, the choice, the choice as to how much of your genetic potential you actually get to express between now and the rest of your life. And that is an incredibly exciting finding because it means you actually have the power to choose whether you fully express your genetic potential or not. It means that your decisions actually affect your epigenetics, and gene expression. So it also means if you’re making bad dietary choices, or friend choices, or circle of influence choices, or fitness choices, or intellectual choices, or emotional decisions, you’re actually going to pass that way of being not only across the rest of your life, but down to your future generations who will follow you, according to science. On the other hand, when you make new choice as to how you think, how you perform, how you achieve, what you learn, how you live, you literally change the abilities and the lives not only of your life but your future generations. And as I’ve been suggesting, if you buy into the myth that those who are called geniuses and elite performers are naturally endowed with talents you don’t have, then you won’t do work required, invest in the learning programs needed, surround yourself with the right people to become a genius in your chosen field. If you think and behave like this, you’ll betray your genetic and human potential to do amazing things with your life, and live a life that
does inspire the world around you.