The three Ss are incredibly important for great creativity and exponential productivity. The three Ss are silence, solitude, and stillness. Silence, solitude and stillness, write that down please. I think you can own your domain or you can be with lots of people all the time, but we can’t do both. Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, said it so much more elegantly than I ever could when he said, “Most of many miseries derive by his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself.” We have become a culture of people who escape our finest selves, I want you to think about that. Do you need to be around people? Even when you come home, do you need to turn on the radio or the TV or have things in the background because you haven’t worked through your micro and macro trauma? So you’re afraid of silence, because in silence, solitude, and stillness, we are confronted with who we truly are. If you’re in pain that you’ve been masking because you haven’t worked through it by journaling, prayer, meditation, then it starts to come up when you’re alone. And what we do is we develop these escape mechanisms like always being around people or always checking our phones, designed to keep us from being with who we truly are. So get good at being alone, because when you’re alone, that’s a great time to go in… that’s when your brain goes into flow state. I got up this morning, did my 5 o’clock workout, had a large cup of coffee for my cognitive enhancement, and then I did some gratitude journaling along with who I want to be and just revisiting the man I want to become, the leader I want to become, what I wish to do. And then I started writing, and I’m writing alone. And so I set myself up to go into flow state, I had a very productive writing session because I structured my environment in a way designed to activate flow. I’m not special, I just do the things required to allow that flow mechanism to activate itself, and you can do the same thing too. And knowing you as I do, you probably are already doing it, but I want to push you to make things even better because you do not want to rest on your laurels and you don’t want to coast and you want to make every day better than yesterday. It’s a great game to play, psychological game or philosophical game. Make each day better than yesterday, every year better than last year, every decade better than the previous one.
