Category: . . . . Career Strategy

The Secret Career Strategy of the World’s Most Successful Executives

 

The Pull of Paid Play        The Triggering of Cascading Functionality Upgrades        Performance beyond your Potential         An upgraded modus operandi for the Everyman

Many of us have followed an externally driven career strategy. Once we take our first career job we choose the next to capitalize on the BIOMAXEDfirst. With repetition, we soon inadvertently commit to a career ladder for our increasing rewards. We compromise to conform to the requirements of each ladder rung to ensure our climb.

In contrast, those most successful in achieving the rewards to which so many aspire appear to be internally driven. Examine the lives of super-achievers Bill Gates (Microsoft co-founder), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founders), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google co-founders), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) for this common thread. Rather than compromising to fit into the next job up the ladder, they create or take the job that provides the ideal next growth-and-achievement context.

This first article in the series will introduce you to how a biologically maximized career strategy will
• pull you ahead with addictive drives for growth and achievement
• cause new functionality to emerge, and
• have you operating at peak performance and beyond.

The Pull of Paid PlayApple Steve Jobs Career Strategy

For our seven super-achievers, the addictive play of their childhood continued as the paid play of adulthood. The movie, The Social Network, gives us a glimpse into the addictive play that engaged Zuckerberg’s greatest talents in the creation of Facebook. Bill Gates’ addictive software wizardry was irresistible play that got him into trouble as a child until it got him into Microsoft and money.

While Bezos’ programming expertise might have launched Amazon, it is his captivation with incessant invention – his true paid play – that has sustained Amazon‘s global prominence. His brilliance for creative solutions and his need for their challenge were evident from a pre-school age. Programming, computers and the digital world became tools for his invention. This resulted in Bezos’ change of venue for his drives to invention from physics to computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton as he narrowed to compliance with his biological bias. This foreshadowed a further refinement of venue for his addictive invention drives in leaving the safety of the corporate world for the unprecedented world of pure invention that became Amazon.

To others, this addictive play would be work. But to our super-achievers, this is irresistible play they enjoy so much that they woAmazon Jeff Bezos Career Strategyuld do it for free. It is work that is intrinsically rewarding. For all of them and for all of us, it is the specific “work” that each of us would want to do if we had unlimited resources and freedom. It is the work or play that we are innately predisposed to do. It is thus the grist of our greatest legacy and contribution to the world.

Imagine a career propelled not by discipline or external enforcers but by internal biological drives to use and improve our most addictive and rewarding strengths.

Built into the drives to this addictive play is the pressure to stretch to apply one’s best talents to creations at increasingly more challenging and impactful levels. We have evolved addictive drives that biologically bias us to use and improve our greatest strengths. We are biologically biased to peak performance. It is advantageous to the survival of the species. The more you comply with the addictive drives we have evolved for it, the more you want to comply with them.

The addictive drives entice one along a lifetime continuum of growth-and-creation iterations: growing oneself to grow one’s creative impact on the world. Aligning one’s career strategy with this biological bias yields superior performance and a commensurate increase in internal and external rewards. It is the ultimate formula for the maximized career and the maximized life.

Jeff Bezos was surrounded by gifted physicists at Princeton. While his marks were good, he knew he did not love the work as they did. He was not maximized by operating in his Microsoft Bill Gates Career Strategyfield of addictive paid play as they were. They offered him the model of a maximized career and life founded on their greatest strengths. Jeff shifted his academic major and his career to achieve this model. His seemingly multi-faceted career has been one of continuous narrowing to the addictive “invention” drives at his biological foundation. This is the maximized career strategy promoted in this blog series.

Magic happens when you stretch your best talents to more impactful achievements over long periods of time. You repeatedly experience an altered state of consciousness that psychologist Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. Attention is 100% focused on the activity at hand. Peak performance and growth are built in. Time, space, and even self-awareness cease to exist. Flow is intrinsically rewarding. It too is an addictive drive that will raise your baseline functionality as it did with our super-seven.

The Triggering of Cascading Functionality Upgrades

Repetitive experience of flow arising specifically from the application of your key talents to meaningful work will launch an accelerated growth continuum. New functionality and meta-skills will emerge. Therefore, the addictive play of our seven super-achievers inadvertently had them operating at peak performance while triggering continuous increases to their baseline functionality.

For exampThe Biologically Maximized Career Strategyle, the flow state associated with using and improving your key talents expands one’s perspective. As consciousness expands, the interconnections of all human systems become visible. The potential for a unified humanity becomes apparent. Each of the visions of our seven super-achievers was informed by their view of the world from their bouts of expanded consciousness in flow.

This shared perspective pulled Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google through the interim steps we have seen to date to unify and advance our world. Ponder the breadth of thinking of Page and Brin based on their Google mission statement:
“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” A mission “to set up a search engine” could never have inspired the diversification and impact that Google has achieved.

Expanded consciousness causes a chain reaction. Cognitive capabilities increase. Upgrades occur in conceptual skills, systems thinking, relational thinking, big-picture thinking, pattern recognition, the use of models, theories, and inferences, and abilities for creative and opportunistic problem-solving, adaptivity, and inventiveness. Does this remind you of the capabilities that emerged over time in our super-seven?

Performance beyond your Potential

The addictive drives that promote the application of one’s strengths have evolved as survival drives for the individual and the species. They are part of a network of internal and external forces that have evolved throughout nature to maximize living systems forFacebook Mark Zuckerberg Career Strategy survival. They are an extension of the same forces that keep our internal organs and systems operating at their maximum.

Most of our seven never separated from nature’s network of maximizing forces. Others, such as Jeff Bezos, re-merged when they turned themselves over to their natural growth-and-creation continuum. When we comply with our talent-promoting addictive drives we re-integrate with nature’s drives for maximizing systems. We shift into overdrive.

Circuits inside of us are completed by circuits outside of us to increase our performance for survival. Our capabilities are extended by nature’s capabilities. We can perform beyond our potential. As intelligent as our super-seven are, it is their slips into this internal-external overdrive that resulted in their moments of brilliance. Even those of average intelligence can achieve the genius of savant status in this biologically compliant state.

An upgraded modus operandi for the Everyman

The new method of operation examined in this blog series is a paradigm shift. It is the true secret career strategy of the world’s most successful executives. It explains their success in an unprecedented way that everyone may replicate. It provides one with access to levels of success one may not have thought possible for oneself. It offers a new route for each of us to make our most meaningful contribution to the advance of the world.

But it also hints at a future modus operandi for humanity. These seven men did not just discover a better career strategy. They did not just advance humanity on a better path. They modeled a new level of peak performance accessible to every human being. Explore your biologically maximized career potential in future blogs to push the envelope on your own lifetime achievements and rewards.Steve Jobs

FURTHER READING:
Sourcing your Savant: Hyper-Focus your Career on your Genius
The New Career Maximums – Part One: Are you Settling for too Little?
The New Career Maximums – Part Two: Are you Settling for too Little?

Career Must-Haves II

THE NEW CAREER MAXIMUMS

–   Part Two – Have you settled for too little?

Excerpt from BioMaxed, Chapters 6-8 (2019) by Lauren Holmes

PART TWO:   BORROW EXTERNAL POTENTIAL – External support for your biologically maximized career  –  Borrow from nature and surrounding systems:  predictability, power, resources, information, functionality, creativity, growth, and frontiering™.

BIOMAXEDYour biologically maximized career  –  serial breakthrough synthesis; serial top-talent flow;  serial frontiering™;  trend integration and mass synchronization;  synergies and multi-system achieving. 

Our examination of the biologically maximized career continues.  In Part One, we examined the new career maximums possible from exploiting internal elements of the maximizing process that has evolved the human species.  In Part Two, we will discover how the external portion of this process may be exploited to achieve new career maximums.  The external maximizing process provides the fuel for the internal processes.  That fuel is information.  It also provides direction, power, borrowable capabilities and functionality, predictability, synergies, and synchronization with world trends.

We have been examining the careers of seven icons for commonalities:  Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon).  What they share is a biologically maximized career.  Discover these new career maximums for yourself.  Their level of world-changing legacy may then become yours.

BREAKTHROUGH SYNTHESIS

There is a singular dynamic transaction within nature’s maximizing process which ensures not just the survival of living systems but their synchronized and synergistic advance.  This dynamic is the underlying energetic for growth, adaptation, creativity, and even evolution.  It is an information creation dynamic I will call breakthrough synthesis since something novel is always created.  Breakthrough synthesis re-combines existing information systems to create a new information system. 

Brilliant breakthroughs

The newly manufactured information systems emerge from this breakthrough synthesis as “sudden nonlinear creations” or “quantum leaps.”  The highly desirable quantum leaps from Part One all rely on breakthrough synthesis:  flashes of genius, “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, sudden insight, sudden knowledge, sudden savantism, sudden creativity, creative inspirations, intuitive leaps, epiphanies, and enlightenment.

These desirable breakthroughs all require the right information fuel at the right time.  This fuel is provided by the external portion of the maximizing machinery.  Even a few such breakthroughs may be sufficient to create a life-changing or even world-changing career.  However, a career of serial breakthroughs may lead to cumulative legacies substantially beyond one’s perceived potential.  Even those of only ordinary intelligence and with little ability to innovate likely have sufficient smarts to re-combine information pieces placed right in front of them by the maximizing process to generate flashes of genius.

Biological breakthrough synthesis

Breakthrough synthesis is not a new tool invented for career advance.  It is a key biological dynamic of maximizing, adaptation, growth, creativity, and evolution.  It synthesizes the creative solutions to the everyday challenges to maximizing living systems for survival.  It is nature’s preferred form of creativity.  Consequently, it is available all around us for us to conscript to achieve bigger goals better.  We can extend our creativity with nature’s to achieve beyond our potential.

Breakthrough synthesis is evident in the genetic synthesis which re-combines the information of our parents and the generations before to create each of us?  Breakthrough synthesis generates the proteins that are the foundation of all living systems.  The synthesis of amino acids into proteins and nucleic acids into genetic material are fundamental to life.  The promising future from these two examples is that they too once appeared to scientists as sudden leaps to a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.  One day we may know enough about what created our “Eureka!” events that we can make them routine for everyone.

It would be illogical to assume that we, as individual human beings, are exempt from this breakthrough synthesis theme that is advancing all living systems.  Reintegrating into the maximizing machinery that evolved us will restore breakthrough synthesis to us as a career tool for exceptional performance.  But more than this, we, too, are information systems which may be re-combined to create new information systems.  We may therefore play a role as the information fuel, the catalyst, or the creation once we allow ourselves to be orchestrated by the maximizing machinery helping all living systems to survive.

Flow is our internal breakthrough synthesis

This same breakthrough synthesis drives our shifts into our peak-performance, peak-growth flow states.  It is not by accident that the activity of the anterior superior temporal gyrus in the right brain increases during flow.  This is where remote and unconnected associations are brought together and linked in breakthrough synthesis.  In Part One we learned about new career maximums such as this one that are possible through the internal portion of the maximizing machinery.  The external portion provides the fuel for this internal breakthrough synthesis:  the information.

An increase in career-changing breakthroughs is built into flow state.  This is especially true of our top-talent flow states that arise from the application of our strongest, most preferred talents to our most meaningful challenges.  A shift into flow is a leap to maximization.  Flow states therefore automatically integrate us into the maximizing machinery.  The external portion of the machinery then orchestrates us to the right place and time for the information to fuel our internal breakthrough synthesis.  Examine your past top-talent flows to view this process in action.  You now have a formula for generating breakthroughs at will with which to excel.

Growth internally / Creativity externally

Sudden insights and flow states are not alone in being driven by breakthrough synthesis.
 •  Growth is breakthrough synthesis applied internally.
 •  Creativity is breakthrough synthesis applied externally.

Inward-facing growth is the combining of new information with your existing internal information to create a new you.  Your personal information structure is replaced with a more advanced one.  In exactly the same way, outward-facing creativity incorporates new information into the information structure of the world system to generate a new world system.  Creativity is “world growth,” so to speak, no matter who is creating something new.

Exploit maximization-linked coincidences

Coincidences are yet another of the sudden leaps to new knowledge discussed in the previous section.  They too are products of breakthrough synthesis.  A single coincidence has been responsible for some of the most spectacular careers.  However, a coincidence is also the information fuel for breakthrough synthesis.  Three to seven coincidences or information systems are usually sufficient for the re-mix to create a significant new information system:  an “Aha!” or “Eureka!” event, for example.

Coincidences are both the fuel and the product of breakthrough synthesis.  Fortunately, integrating into the maximizing machinery will exponentially explode your experience of coincidences.  How delightful!  These coincidences, of course, will fuel a plethora of career-making breakthrough syntheses.  Your career maximum will increase commensurately.  How one cultivates these catalytic coincidences is an article in itself.  However, here is a brief introduction.

Officially, a coincidence is the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.  However, the coincidences that you will be experiencing with this proposed new career maximizing methodology will be causally linked to the maximizing process for your system.  These are maximization-linked coincidences.  Because they will seem serendipitous, the term ‘coincidence’ still works for our purposes.

However, they are actually co-maximizations or synergies among fellow maximizers.  Living systems grab information from each other to fuel breakthrough synthesis to generate creative solutions to maximizing or adaptation challenges.  The new information systems created by the re-mix appear as the coincidences in your life.  However, these created coincidences are also the fuel for the next round of breakthrough syntheses or maximizing.  In effect, breakthrough synthesis is the maximizing process.  It both creates coincidences or information systems and uses them.

Accordingly, a cluster of coincidences will always indicate the flow of the maximizing process in your reality.  The closer you are to your maximized state, the more compliant you will be to being orchestrated by the maximizing machinery to the right information at the right time for breakthroughs.  The self-ordering nature of the machinery will then group you with the systems best able to provide you with the information you need next.  This will increase the volume and quality of the information coincidences that you will experience.  Your breakthroughs will increase commensurately.

You may recall from Part One that your maximized state is top-talent flow or a flow state that derives from applying your strongest, most preferred, talents to the field or application that is most meaningful to you.  If the coincidences in your life are sparse or nonexistent, then you likely have moved out of the flow of the maximizing process.  You are not maximized.  You are sitting idly on the riverbank with the other unmaximized living systems.  You will have no information fuel for the quantum leaps to career-making breakthroughs, insights, and flashes of genius.

These coincidences are not psychological or RAS events

These maximization-linked coincidences are not simply psychologically meaningful events as psychologist Carl Jung proposed in his 1920s’ definition of “synchronicities.”  These are not simply psychological transactions whereby you confer shared meaning on unrelated events.  These are true physical events which result from the shared information pieces from your co-maximizing partners.  These “coincidences” are physical symptoms of the underlying dynamic order of a singular process which might be called “maximizing” or “adaptation” or “growth” or “creativity” or “creation” or “emergence” or “self-ordering” or “problem-solving” or “breakthrough synthesis.”

Nor are these coincidences or information quantum leaps or co-maximizations the result of your reticular activating system (RAS) seeing whatever you have been focused on.  Your RAS is your information filter or gatekeeper.  It is the reason why, when you buy the car you have been researching, you will see that model everywhere.  It has evolved to filter thousands of items per second to select the information that you need for survival.  Your RAS may help you to identify the best coincidences for your next breakthrough synthesis.  However, it obviously does not create those coincidences.  It is filtering true physical events.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND BREAKTHROUGH SYNTHESIS

Part One and Part Two contain biological discoveries and theories by the author resulting from extensive executive interviews, examinations, and experimentations which applied scientific method to the lives of individual executives and, especially, multinational executives.  This has resulted in a new biologically maximized modus operandi for human beings which bypasses cultural interference.

This new way of operating prescribes full integration into biological mechanisms and processes inside and outside of us which have evolved to work together synergistically but which have been culturally overruled.  I have created a link to material that hints at some relevant science to explain in laymen’s terms what enables the breakthrough synthesis to work.  Hopefully, this brief description will suffice until separate articles may be written with more details about the relevant scientific discoveries. (See Chapter 5).

MASS SYNCHRONIZATION: Trend creation and exploitation 

Mass maximization generates mass synchronization.  Mass maximization provides the ideal synchronized direction for the majority of living systems to survive.  Here are some of the ways this synchronization is created and may be exploited to increase your career potential:

1     The dance of systems maximizing and re-maximizing to each other and their shared context serves to orchestrate a synchronized advance of living systems.  It orchestrates synergies which further synchronize systems.  Mass synchronization groups potentially synergistic systems together to better share resources, assets and functionality.  Your career potential is extended and supplemented by these other systems.

2     These synergies include information sharing for the breakthrough synthesis that will solve respective maximization challenges.  Complying with the maximizing flow will orchestrate you to the right place at the right time to source the information you need to fuel your career-making breakthroughs.

3     Clusters of coincidences will always identify the direction of the synchronized flow.  You will always know where the flow of the maximizing machinery is in your context or your company’s context by the clustering of coincidences and facilitating events.

4     In a world of systems nested within systems, order nested within order, and emergence nested within emergence, the orchestration of compliant systems into synchronization defines world trends.  Complying with the maximizing process then will keep careers, companies, and, indeed, any human systems, at the leading edge of world trends.

5     An added benefit, of course, is that being compliant or being part of the synchronization will ensure that you will also not be fighting against trends as you try to get ahead.  You will not be impeded from achieving your career maximums.  Careers therefore benefit from being integrated into current trends.  Careers gain by complying with the flow to maximization of the larger system of which we are all a part.

6     If you find yourself constantly hitting blocks to your progress or negative frustrating events, you have either fallen out of the mass synchronization or not found it yet.  When you tap into the ongoing maximizing quantum leap process all around you, you can be catapulted to your work or career goals.  It will become apparent how your career may be dramatically amplified and accelerated.

7     Mass synchronization allows you to extend your capabilities with those of other systems and the maximizing machinery itself.  You will then be able to operate beyond your potential to achieve new career maximums.

Merging into nature’s maximizing process causes synchronization as a byproduct.  Synchronization will keep your career and your company leading edge.  It is also a potential new leadership tool for keeping any human systems – companies, countries, and humanity –  moving in lock-step towards your goals.  It is one of several means for multi-system achieving in this proposed new way of biologically maximizing careers.

PROFIT FROM THE PREDICTABILITY
OF THE MAXIMIZING PROCESS

How much more successful would your career and your life be if you could know whether a project was going to fail or succeed before you even began it?

The maximizing process is knowable, predictable, and “harnessable” – not just generically but personally.  This is because the maximum for your system is a constant.  Therefore, maximizing forces will act on your system in consistent and predictable ways.  Once you discover how they have supported and opposed your system in your past, you can predict how they will react in the future.  You will then know which projects to choose or to avoid to ensure your career success.  The provided exercises will support the review of your past: The exercises in the Sourcing-your-Savant Exercises in Chapter 7 will support the review of your past.

Historical patterns of events since your childhood will identify, with shocking consistency, the types of projects favored by mechanisms that maximize.  It will be no surprise that projects which incite top-talent flow, your maximized state, will be favored most.  Expect to be catapulted forward by coincidences and flow events.  Breakthrough synthesis will increase dramatically.  You will have the means to achieve bigger goals more successfully.

This is the simple, consistent, predictable, dynamic order that created our seven iconic innovators.  They excelled through a biologically maximized career modus operandi.  Just as models and actors know how to position their face in every scene for the best light, our seven achievers learned to unconsciously position themselves for the flow of breakthrough syntheses and coincidences.  They capitalized on this predictability to achieve at their maximum.

The more contrary you are to your biological maximum, the more you can expect to be impeded by blocks and negative experiences.  The extremes of Steve Jobs’ career offer strong examples of when he was and was not biologically compliant.

Our health, and even our patience, is unforgiving when maximization has been experienced and then lost.  Thwarted creativity in the field of one’s greatest strengths and meaning may turn out to be the key cause of illness in aspiring executives.  It is a mistake for the individual and the world to push a career in opposition to the maximizing flow.

EMBRACE THE NEW CAREER MAXIMUMS

Emulate the iconic founders of
Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft

Many aspire to the success of our seven super-achievers:  Bill Gates (Microsoft), the two Steves: Jobs and Wozniak (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon).  They have achieved the goals that many pursue in their careers.  Many mistakenly assume that they accumulated their wealth and acclaim through their pursuit of these rewards directly.  Many therefore try to emulate what their pathways seem to have been in order to acquire comparable extrinsic rewards. 

The biologically maximized career

However, the formula these seven successful innovators truly share is a biologically maximized career path.  It was their pursuit of intrinsic rewards that led to the external manifestation of their internal wealth and success.  By operating at their biological maximum, internal and external maximizing mechanisms and processes linked up to enable them to frequently perform beyond their potential.  Functionality, growth, and creativity automatically emerged that are not available when we operate as separate entities.

There is an addictive pull to doing meaningful, challenging work to which we are biologically predisposed.  Only by harnessing a machinery dedicated to our biological maximum may we know our true career potential.  Once you understand the biologically driven career strategy of our seven super-achievers, you realize not only that it is totally replicable in your own life but how to do it.

Serial top-talent flows or serial internal maximizations

Flow state is our maximized state.  In flow we operate at peak performance and peak growth.  We have functionality and capabilities above our norm.  However, the flow states experienced serially by our super seven had them operating 100% in their savant state.

In top-talent flow they applied their strongest most satisfying talents to the work they were biologically predisposed to do and, in fact, biologically addicted to doing.  Internal biological incentives enticed them to operate in serial states of top-talent flow and the serial breakthrough synthesis that is its byproduct.  New functionality perpetually emerged in them with every top-talent flow experience.  They scaled frontier after frontier in their most meaningful field with world-changing consequences – Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.

Serial breakthrough synthesis or serial information creation or serial frontiering™

Years of serial breakthroughs in the territory of their strongest, most rewarding, and most addicting talents yielded their incredible career achievements.  This addiction of our seven icons to serial states of top-talent flow was compounded by a second biological addiction.  This addiction was to the frontiering™ or serial breakthrough synthesis that occurred at the frontiers they were scaling.  The cumulative effects of these two benevolent biochemical addictions pulled them to advance our world.  They were sufficiently compelling that the disciplined linear hard work traditionally promoted for career advancement was never required.

The career success of each of our seven iconic founders is defined by their moments of breakthrough synthesis when they re-mixed the known to create the new.  They all had access to seemingly serendipitous information that they synthesized into the breakthroughs that peppered their careers.  Breakthrough synthesis is evolution’s way.  Take a page from nature’s silver linings playbook.  Serial breakthrough synthesis is the modus operandi for a biologically maximized career.

Brilliant breakthroughs for the ungifted?

Is it possible for ordinary people, non-creatives, or the change-adverse to routinely experience effortless epiphanies, brilliant breakthroughs, and fruitful frontiering forays to springboard their careers ahead?  The answer is “Yes!” for those who know how to harness nature’s maximizing process to source then re-combine existing information systems to create new ones.

You will come to know the indicators of the flow of the maximizing process.  Clusters of coincidences are one example.  Over time, it will become progressively easier to follow the indicators to be in the right place at the right time for the next piece of information that you need.  Even normal intelligence will be able to see how to re-mix to create something new when magical information pieces emerge right in front of you.  It will become routine.

  • Could it be that the seven iconic super-achievers who founded Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook did not need to be as creative, innovative or as brilliant as we might have thought to attain their life-changing and world-changing careers?
  • Could it be that they only needed to be able to source and re-combine existing information systems to create new information systems?
  • Could it be that our seven were, in fact, expert breakthrough synthesizers?
  • Could serial breakthrough synthesis as a way of life have been their shared formula for career success?
  • Could it be yours?
  • Could you become as world-changing as these icons?

Breakthrough synthesis redefines leading?

Managers manage existing human systems.  Leaders penetrate new territory or bring new information systems into existence.  The person with the expertise and passion for penetrating unknown territory will always be the leader.  The person creating the next iteration of the world will always be the leader.  Therefore, breakthrough synthesis will define the leader of the future.

Consequently, our seven iconic executives were leaders even if they never conformed to any of the competencies promoted by the leadership development industry.  Those competencies are just window-dressing.  Breakthrough synthesis is this essence of leadership.  It determines whether you will or will not be the leader.

But there is more.  Revisit the definition of breakthrough synthesis for a moment.  Is not each person an information system which may be re-combined to create a new information system?  Are not all collections of human resources information systems?  Could leadership itself then not be better defined in terms of breakthrough synthesis using human information systems?  This is obviously a whole other chapter of career maximums best saved for a future article.

Part One and Part Two contain biological discoveries and theories by the author resulting from extensive executive interviews, examinations, and experimentations which applied scientific method to the lives of individual executives and, especially, multinational executives.  This has resulted in a new biologically maximized modus operandi for human beings that bypasses cultural interference.

This new way of operating prescribes full integration into biological mechanisms and processes inside and outside of us which have evolved to work together synergistically but which have been culturally overruled.  I have created a link to material that hints at some relevant science to explain in laymen’s terms what enables the breakthrough synthesis to work.  Hopefully, this brief description will suffice until  separate articles may be written with more details about the relevant scientific discoveries.  At minimum, it will provide the terminology that those who are interested may research to learn more.

Relevant biological processes

In brief, the following touch on how the maximizing machinery provides the information fuel for the breakthrough synthesis to generate quantum leaps in new information that may define new career highs for you:

1     Power for the maximizing machinery:  There is an unending dance of systems re-maximizing to a contextual system changed by other systems which in turn were forced to re-maximize when their context was changed by other systems re-maximizing and so on endlessly.

2     Information source:  The information fuel for new information systems comes from the raiding of information pieces from synergistic systems to enable a system to re-maximize to its changing contextual system.  These information pieces are re-combined again using the breakthrough synthesis on which everything in this article relies.

 3     Grouping of information sources:  Spontaneous self-organizing or sudden ordering of the larger contextual system groups us with the best synergy partners from which to source information fuel to re-maximize.  This sudden leap to order systems for synergies will improve their mutual chances of survival.  Complexity theory is relevant to the re-ordering of this complex contextual system.

4     Information access:  The information to be re-combined for the breakthroughs appears as coincidences or co-maximizations in one’s immediate context or reality.  It is the grouping of synergistic systems noted in point 3 that causes clusters of relevant coincidences of information to emerge in one’s life.  The more one is maximized (in top-talent flow, for example) and being orchestrated by the maximizing machinery, the greater the number and value of the coincidences experienced.

5     Information re-mix – information creation – information quantum leaps:  The process of emergence is behind the breakthrough synthesis.  It is what causes information pieces to be re-combined nonlinearly to generate leaps to new wholes which are greater than the sum of their parts.  It is the means to adapt to the continuous contextual changes of the dance. 

A collection of systems is orchestrated by biological spontaneous order or self-organizing principles to pool their resources so that they may each maximize their respective systems for survival.  This information re-mix to create new information which will enable systems to adapt is the essence of the work of the maximizing machinery and its component systems of systems.

6     Goal attainment and problem-solving:  By using the same self-ordering and emergence mechanisms, it is possible to change the information structure of one’s personal system so that peripheral elements of your maximizing formula change.  This maximizing formula change will then group you with different synergy partners who will share information more relevant to your new goal. 

The clusters of coincidences now in your reality will be relevant to your new maximizing formula based on your information structure revised for your new goal.  These quantum leaps to sudden knowledge will help you to achieve goals or solve problems by applying the breakthrough synthesis.

Relevant scientific definitions

Self-organization is one of the ideas, models and techniques bundled together as the sciences of complexity.  It refers to systems that appear to organize themselves without external direction, manipulation, or control.  Self-organization can be defined as the spontaneous creation of a globally coherent pattern out of local interactions.  Self-organizing mechanisms common to biological systems create order from disordered systems using the process of emergence.  Self-organized order is a spontaneous pattern from within.  It is a product of the generic properties of living matter itself.

Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multitude of simple interactions.  In evolutionary theory, emergence is defined as the rise of a system that cannot be predicted or explained from antecedent conditions.  A grouping develops properties that none of its members has.  The brain is an example of an emergent biological structure.  Neither individual neurons nor whole sections of the brain have the properties of a completely integrated brain.

Emergence is the process behind our quantum leaps to sudden insight, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, creative inspirations, flashes of genius, “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, intuitive leaps, epiphanies, enlightenment, frontiering, growth, and jumps to whole-brain operation and flow states.  Emergence is also the same process behind the synergy of co-maximizing systems.  Synergy is the interaction of multiple elements in a system to produce a combined effect greater and often different than the sum of their separate effects.  As such it is a nonlinear process.

Each of us is a living system.  Living systems and forces of nature are nonlinear.  Their outcomes cannot be quantified by additive equations.  Therefore, cause and effect will not necessarily be functionally related.  In linear systems, output is proportional to input.  In nonlinear systems, this is not the case.  A small input may produce an enormous change in output.

The butterfly effect, popularized by the 2004science-fiction thriller, is a well-known hypothetical example of chaos theory which illustrates how small initial differences may lead to large unforeseen consequences over time.  In linear systems change may be predicted by what has happened in the past.  In nonlinear systems, change is discontinuous.  Progress occurs with sudden unpredictable jumps.  Sudden transitions may result from dramatic reorganizations (McClure, 1998*).  Our “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events and other results of breakthrough synthesis involve emergence, nonlinear transactions, chaos theory, complexity theory, and sudden self-ordering systems.

A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that, as a whole, exhibit properties or behaviors not obvious from the properties of the component parts.  This repeats the definition of emergence and the example of the brain.  This is also the breakthrough synthesis’ information creation process or creativity that drives the continuous re-maximization dance.  It is this same process that we will be using to drive your career to its maximum.

Please note that I use the term ‘quantum leap’ conceptually to help you to internalize the required change process.  A quantum leap actually uses the process of emergence.  However, the term ‘emergence’ suggests a linear process for what is actually nonlinear.  Emergence therefore does not help me to ready your system for a leap to change.  So, I will call these sought-after career and work breakthrough states ‘quantum leaps.’

Do you notice how all of these terms reiterate or add dimensions to the basic breakthrough synthesis that generates the creativity to solve maximization challenges?  Imagine harnessing the essential creative force of adaptation and evolution of all living systems to advance your career.  Could it be that our seven breakthrough synthesizers who founded Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook merely tapped into the creativity of the universe and the way human beings have evolved to operate?  Is that the true common thread that they share?
*McClure, B. A. (1998). Putting a New Spin on Groups: The Science of Chaos. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Exploit maximization-linked coincidences

Coincidences are yet another of the sudden leaps to new knowledge being promoted.  They too are products of breakthrough synthesis.  A single coincidence has been responsible for some of the most spectacular careers.  However, a coincidence is also the information fuel for breakthrough synthesis.  Three to seven coincidences or information systems are usually enough for the re-mix to create a significant new information system:  an “Aha!” or “Eureka!” event, for example.

Coincidences are both the fuel and the product of breakthrough synthesis.  Fortunately, integrating into the maximizing machinery will exponentially explode your experience of coincidences.  How delightful!  These coincidences, of course, will fuel a plethora of career-making breakthrough syntheses.  Your career maximum will increase commensurately.  How to cultivate these catalytic coincidences is an article in itself.  However, here is a brief introduction.

Officially, a coincidence is the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.  However, the coincidences that you will be experiencing with this proposed new career maximizing methodology will be causally linked to the maximizing process for your system.  These are maximization-linked coincidences.  Because they will seem serendipitous, the term ‘coincidence’ still works for our purposes.

However, they are actually co-maximizations or synergies among fellow maximizers.  Living systems grab information from each other to fuel breakthrough synthesis to generate creative solutions to maximizing or adaptation challenges.  The new information systems created by the re-mix appear as the coincidences in your life.  However, these created coincidences are also the fuel for the next round of breakthrough syntheses or maximizing.  In effect, breakthrough synthesis is the maximizing process.  It both creates coincidences or information systems and uses them.

Accordingly, a cluster of coincidences will always indicate the flow of the maximizing process in your reality.  The closer you are to your maximized state, the more compliant you will be to being orchestrated by the maximizing machinery to the right information at the right time for breakthroughs.  The self-ordering nature of the machinery will then group you with the systems best able to provide you with the information you need next.  This will increase the volume and quality of the information coincidences that you will experience.  Your breakthroughs will increase commensurately.

You may recall from Part One that your maximized state is top-talent flow or a flow state that derives from applying your strongest, most preferred, talents to the field or application that is most meaningful to you.  If the coincidences in your life are sparse or nonexistent, then you likely have moved out of the flow of the maximizing process.  You are not maximized.  You are sitting idly on the riverbank with the other unmaximized living systems.  You will have no information fuel for the quantum leaps to career-making breakthroughs, insights, and flashes of genius. 

These coincidences are not psychological or RAS events

These maximization-linked coincidences are not simply psychologically meaningful events as Jung proposed in his definition of ‘synchronicities.’  These are not simply psychological transactions whereby you confer meaning on unrelated events.  These are true physical events which result from the shared information pieces from your co-maximizing partners.  These ‘coincidences’ are physical symptoms of the underlying dynamic order of a singular process which might be called ‘maximizing’ or ‘adaptation’ or ‘growth’ or ‘creativity’ or ‘creation’ or ‘emergence’ or ‘self-ordering’ or ‘problem-solving’ or ‘breakthrough synthesis.’

Nor are these coincidences or information quantum leaps or co-maximizations the result of your reticular activating system (RAS) seeing whatever you have been focused on.  Your RAS is your information filter or gatekeeper.  It is the reason why, when you buy the car you have been researching, you will see that model everywhere.  It has evolved to filter thousands of items per second to select the information that you need for survival.  Your RAS may help you to identify the best coincidences for your next breakthrough synthesis.  However, it obviously does not create those coincidences.  It is filtering true physical events.

Career Must-Haves I

THE NEW CAREER MAXIMUMS   

–   Part One – Have you settled for too little?

Excerpt from BioMaxed, Chapters 4-5 (2019) by Lauren Holmes

PART ONE:   RELEASE INTERNAL POTENTIAL – Internal aspects of your biologically maximized career  –  new meta-skills;  sudden knowledge, genius, breakthroughs, and creativity;  whole-brain savantism;  top-talent flow and growth;  and aligning career and growth paths for paid growth and paid play.

PART TWO:   BORROW EXTERNAL POTENTIAL – External BIOMAXEDsupport for your biologically maximized career  –  Borrow from nature and surrounding systems:  predictability, power, resources, information, functionality, creativity, growth, and frontiering™.

Your biologically maximized career  –  serial breakthrough synthesis; serial top-talent flow;  serial frontiering™;  trend integration and mass synchronization;  synergies and multi-system achieving. 

Executives are charged with maximizing corporate resources for corporate gain.  Many mechanisms, processes, procedures and systems have been put in place to discover and achieve maximum returns on corporate resources.  However, one’s personal asset maximization is seldom the focus of career or life strategies. 

Few identify their maximum possible career and then pursue it.  Few pursue their maximum lifetime contribution to the advance of the world nor the commensurate tangible and intangible rewards.  However, this is a common regret on the career front for the majority from their retirement rocking chair.

WHAT IS YOUR CAREER MAXIMUM?

Before I introduce some new potential career maximums, take a moment to determine what you currently consider your highest possible life’s work.  The questions below may spur your thinking:

  1. If you had total freedom and unlimited resources, what creations or footprints would you want to leave over your lifetime?
  2. What work would you dedicate yourself to do to contribute to or advance our world?
  3. Generically, what might your maximum career look like based solely on the continuous application and improvement of your strongest, most rewarding talents?
  4. To what meaningful work would you dedicate your life in the absence of all impediments and distractions?
  5. If we removed all of the demands of family, finances, and the challenges life throws at you, what would be your ultimate career?
  6. If we stripped away all competing “careers” such as parenting, supporting one’s family, a hobby, or a cause, what would be your maximum creative expression?  What are the creations for which you would like to receive your income?
  7. What are your maximum possible lifetime achievements?
  8. What could be your maximum possible career legacy?

In an unrestricted vision of lifetime career maximization, each of us would want to do meaningful work we are passionate about.  We would want to grow in our ability to do that work.  We would want to continuously increase its value and impact.  We would want to apply our greatest talents – the talents we most enjoy – at their maximum to the work which would be most valued by the world and by ourselves.  This is the work which will bring the most tangible and intangible rewards.

In the previous chapter, we learned about a biologically addictive ‘paid play’ that pulled seven executives to success:  Bill Gates (Microsoft co-founder), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founders), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google co-founders), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder).

Because this ‘paid play’ is driven by addictive drives, the more you do this kind of work, the more you want to do it.  And the more you do it, the better you get at it.  Eventually you will achieve breakthroughs that advance your paid-play domain.  The drives which biologically predispose us to our field of ‘paid play’ pulled our seven iconic founders to superior performance and accelerated growth.  The result was performance, throughput, and breakthroughs that far exceeded what they could have achieved through the controlling push of discipline.  These superstars were internally or biologically driven.

Let’s have a look at some other biological maximums that you may not have thought to include in your previous determination of your career maximum.  Let’s look at some of the new career maximums that will dramatically upgrade today’s state-of-the-art career strategy.

What is your biological career potential?

Strip away for the moment all of your competing life goals and struggles.  What do you have the potential to accomplish if you applied full power to a singular focus?  What is your true career potential?  What does nature consider your maximum?

A career based on our biological maximum would be dedicated to work to which we are “biologically predisposed to excel” and “biologically predisposed to crave.”  Such maximum work would require us to apply our strongest, most rewarding talents to their maximum.  Our expertise with those talents would continuously upgrade at our maximum possible growth rate.

Our peak performance would be committed to our most valued work.  This is the work for which we will receive the greatest intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.  A biologically maximized career would be defined by the pull of our most addictive “paid play” and “paid growth.”  It would be propelled by drives not discipline.

However, more than this, a career based on our biological maximums would comply with and capitalize on the maximizing mechanisms and processes that have evolved human beings.  It would have us reintegrate with the flow of systems synergistically maximizing each other.  It would not have us dissipating energy to oppose that flow.  It would exploit maximizing forces and co-evolving systems so that their capabilities could be added to ours to enable us to achieve beyond our internal potential.

This is precisely what we observe in the careers of the seven accomplished founders of Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook.

Exploit biological maximizing for a career beyond your innate potential

The human biological imperative seeks the maximization of the individual and the species for survival.  Nature routinely, perpetually, and impartially maximizes human systems for survival.  Over generations, a “machinery” has evolved inside and outside of us to promote this maximization.

Inside, we may observe it maximizing systems within our body for health and performance.  Think especially of the adaptivity of our immune and nervous systems to external elements, for example.  Outside, we see this machinery maximizing stock markets, and economic and sociological systems.

It is only logical to assume that the same forces maximizing systems within a biological ecosystem would also act on each of us.  We are a part of the larger maximizing machinery that evolved us.  If we knew how to capitalize on this machinery, we could raise the bar on our career potential.  We could extend our capabilities with these maximizing mechanisms, systems, processes, and intelligence to operate beyond what we might perceive is our inborn potential.

Only by reintegrating with this maximizing process will we know our true potential and hence our career potential.  

  1. What could you accomplish if you spent decades operating beyond your potential in your strongest domain? 
  2. What would be your career maximum if you spent a lifetime conscripting other systems to achieve bigger goals than you are capable of attaining on your own?
  3. Where would your career take you if you rejoined the massive orchestration of all biological systems?
  4. If you learned how to exploit this maximizing machinery for your own system and your career, could you not also apply it to maximize any human system to achieve beyond its potential?
  5. Could you not extrapolate the same process to your subordinates, your company, your family, your child, a market, a country, or the system of humanity as a whole?
  6. How much more profoundly capable would you be as an executive leading multi-system companies in multi-system markets?  This too will increase your career maximum.
  7. What business can succeed against a competitor harnessing the maximizing mechanisms of evolution?
  8. What leader would choose to operate contrary to the direction of the evolutionary flow?

Let’s look first at some aspects of maximizing internally in Part One.  In Part Two, we will look at some of the new career maximums possible by exploiting the external portion of the maximizing machinery.

Flashes of genius and sudden savantism

Our seven super-achievers experienced frequent flashes of genius beyond their potential as they complied with their biologically maximized careers.  With some tweaks of biology, it is possible for even those of normal intelligence or less to experience those same spikes of genius.

Let’s compare these moments of brilliance to savant syndrome for a moment.  Savants exhibit extreme talent in the wake of profound disabilities.  A person with below normal intelligence is able to display an exceptional if not prodigious talent or ability in a specific area.  Savants operate at levels that would be unusual even for normal people.

Many were introduced to this exceptional intellectual capacity by the savant star, Raymond, in the popular movie, Rain Man (1988).  The inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s role came from Kim Peek or “Kimputer” who was born without the thick band of axons connecting the left and right hemispheres. Kim is capable of incredible feats of memory and calculation.  He can recall over 7,600 books and has a nearly complete and up-to-date knowledge of world history, area codes, zip codes, roads and highways and much more.

Savantism appears to emerge when birth, injury, or dementia removes left-brain control of the right brain.  There is evidence that the brain “re-wires” itself to not only avoid damaged areas but to compensate for them.  The exceptional abilities observed in those who acquire savantism later in life do not emerge because of a sudden creation of skills.  Rather, experts believe that what occurs is a release of skills and talents already present.

Since savant syndrome can be acquired, scientists believe that all of us, theoretically, have the potential to become savants.  It appears that each of us may have a super-talent territory or savant domain in which flashes of genius beyond our normal intelligence can be achieved.  Savantism suggests a greater potential of the human brain and how talent and genius may manifest.  Since flashes of genius would upgrade anyone’s career maximum, let’s examine some alternative means to release our own savantism with some adjustments to our modus operandi.

Whole-Brain Savantism

Most of the known savants have been left-brain weak.  This suggests that the level of left-brain intelligence will not determine who will experience the flashes of genius we observe in the lives of our seven super-achievers.

The left hemisphere of the brain provides logic, reasoning, analysis and objectivity.  It is verbal and rational.  Our right hemisphere is the hub for creativity, novelty, intuition, subjectivity, pattern recognition, and holistic and divergent thinking.  It is your nonverbal and intuitive brain.  It thinks in patterns.  It comprehends pictures and “whole things.”  It controls visual, spatial and relational thinking.  It does not comprehend reductions, numbers, letters, or words.

Our goal is not the elimination of the left brain as in savants. However, the current scientific evidence suggests we will still need the left brain to release control of the right brain. This can be more advantageously accomplished by an increase in the right brain so that a partnership of both hemispheres can give us whole-brain operation.  Our goal is a synergy in which the whole brain is greater than the sum of its two parts.

One might try allowing the left and right brain to operate simultaneously in parallel or synchronously to achieve this equal partnership.  However, the right brain may be better freed for aspiring novice whole-brainers if one consciously uses alternating applications of right brain then left brain to any project.  This will free the creative right brain for insights and genius without sacrificing left-brain logic and functionality.

Writers, for example, could do one or more freehand, unedited, and unrestricted right-brain passes for creativity, insights, and genius to develop concepts or story.  A left-brain pass would address the logic, editing, grammar and spelling.  Executives could do the same for developing strategic or tactical plans.  However, whole-brain operation is easier to achieve than one might think.  Other options are built into us as part of the maximizing machinery.

Whole-brain operation is a biological maximum.  It is therefore better for the survival of the individual and the species.  Consequently, we have evolved a biological bias to it.  Many mechanisms, processes, and urges have evolved to promote whole-brain operation.  Flow state is one important example internally that will be discussed below.  External mechanisms that promote whole-brain flashes of genius will be revealed in Part Two.  We can learn to bypass or overcome the cultural and corporate interferences that pressure left-brain control.

The “Eureka!” or “Aha!” effect

When normal intelligence is applied to action, implement, or operationalize your periodic “smart events” or breakthroughs, the sum total of your career performance will increase.  Sometimes it only takes one breakthrough to make a career and change the world.  Our seven iconic founders experienced serial breakthroughs as a way of life.  You can too.  Let’s examine internally and externally (Part Two) what will make that new career maximum possible.

The “Eureka!” or “Aha!” effect refers to the common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept.  If you source only partial solutions to a problem, then you are likely in the midst of a left-brain reasoning process rather than a right-brain “Aha!” event.  This is about sudden knowledge, sudden knowing, and sudden access to new information.

“Insight” is the official psychological term in problem solving for instances in which a previously unsolvable puzzle becomes suddenly clear and obvious.  Neuroscience and brain scans have located the part of the right brain in which true insights occur.  The anterior superior temporal gyrus of the right hemisphere is where remote and unconnected associations are brought together and linked.  As you will learn, the gyrus along with the rest of the right brain is activated by flow states.

It is interesting that anecdotal evidence records rapid experience of “Eureka!” events or seeming all-knowingness during near-death experiences (NDE) when cultural interferences have been minimized.  The brain seemingly clicks into its maximized state of coherence and synergy especially with respect to the super-talent or savant domain associated with the strongest talents of each individual.  NDErs experience savantism.  For some, the savantism and bias for this domain survives the near-death experience.

There is an addictiveness to the highs of “Aha!” experiences that pulls you to pursue them again and again.  As they increase in number, the baseline of your intelligence and functionality increases.  Also, your knowledge of your savant domain goes up with each breakthrough.  Your career maximum augments accordingly.  In no time at all you are penetrating new frontiers in your field just as the seven super-achievers did with Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple.  Have you been settling?

Flow maximizes instantly

As mentioned, one of the internal mechanisms in the maximizing machinery is flow state.  Psychologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, describes flow as our optimal and our most enjoyable experience in his book of the same name (1991).  Flow is our maximized state.  All the body’s resources are trained on the current intrinsically rewarding work.  The biological imperative, then, will seek to have us operate in flow 100% of the time.  Because flow is an addictive, peak-performing and peak-growth state, it is one of the key drivers of human evolution.

To experience this wonderfully rewarding state of flow, one must be stretched beyond one’s previous capabilities.  Therefore, a maximum- or flow-seeking career will go beyond peak performance to peak growth.  We are not only biologically biased to peak performance but to increasing the baseline functionality of that peak performance.  How smart of the human species to have evolved an addictive maximum state that draws us to perpetually transcend ourselves.  Accordingly, the maximum of a flow-focused career would continuously rise as well.

Your maximum flow: top-talent flow

All flow states are not equal in achieving savantism or your biological and career maximums.  Maximization promotes peak performance from peak strengths for peak expression, peak impact, and peak rewards.  Your true maximum flow state will therefore emerge from using and improving your strongest, most addicting, and most rewarding talents in the domain most facilitating for and valuing of their use.  I call these extended periods of operating at your talent-based maximum “top-talent flows.”

If you were going to release your inner savant or super-talents, this is the territory in which it/they would emerge.  Just as in savantism, the skills of extraordinary performance are already biologically present rather than having to be cultivated.  Most who acquired savantism later in life never demonstrated their savant domain or super-talent territory prior to the injury or dementia which damaged the left brain thus releasing their right brain to savantism.

Since top-talent flow is our true maximum, we are biologically biased to pursue this intrinsically gratifying state.  This is the flow state most supported by mechanisms, processes, and drives enmeshed within the internal-external maximizing machinery.  It is dramatically more powerful and transformative than any other form of flow.  Accelerated growth, breakthrough creations, new meta-skills, and flashes of genius and savantism are significantly more prevalent.

Exponential magic happens in your top-talent flows.  Now imagine how powerful and transformed our seven founders would be after spending years in these transformative flow states which emerge while they are applying their greatest strengths.  This is what I believe caused the significant accomplishments of our seven achievers.  In many cases, these flow states enabled achievements beyond their innate intelligence.

A majority of the seven had computer, internet, and software work in their childhood or early careers.  Computer programming is particularly compelling for inciting top-talent flow states.  Colloquially, they are called “hack mode,” a Zen-like state of total focus.  They are so captivating that many programmers blissfully program all night and forget to eat.  They are so addictive that they not only became the “paid play” of many of our seven founders but fostered an industry of computer and video games.  This is how I believe these seven were pulled to their achievements rather than pressured by a superior discipline or outside force to achieve them.  This suggests an alternative career strategy for those highly disciplined executives who have achieved neither the intrinsic nor extrinsic rewards that they seek.

Sudden savantism through top-talent flow

A person in flow state has alpha brainwaves not unlike those of a Zen monk in meditation.  When in this alpha-intensive state, we can retain cognitive consciousness for far longer than the few seconds of duration characteristic of normal, beta-wave consciousness.  This extended consciousness equips us to solve complex problems, follow extended chains of reasoning, and take on tasks that we simply cannot fit into the transient episodes of normal beta-wave arousal.

Flow states also seem to be more conducive than normal consciousness to activation of the right anterior superior temporal gyrus, the region of the brain associated with intuitive leaps and sudden insight.  It appears that the chatter of beta-wave activity in normal consciousness somehow competes with our “Aha!” circuitry.  In addition, the requirement for stretching beyond one’s previous capabilities to enter into flow, upgrades capabilities and performance towards savant stature.

However, the real power of top-talent flow is that it releases our whole-brain genius to full power.  The right brain is freed from left-brain domination in this maximal flow state.  Thus, the triggers of acquired savant syndrome are duplicated.  Whole-brain flow incites the perfect left-brain and right-brain synergy.

Growth through top-talent flow

Flow is a peak-performance and peak-growth state.  Growth is built into flow and particularly top-talent flow because  a) flow is so fulfilling that it becomes addictive,  b) achieving this intrinsically rewarding flow state requires us to be stretched beyond our previous capabilities, and  c) flow is a transforming state.  Learning adds new information to one’s existing system.  However, top-talent flow actually reformulates or re-wires one’s system with new functionality and new potential.

This is what I believe our seven super-achievers experienced.  As a result, they spent their careers operating at peak growth.  Year after year they raised their baseline functionality and the level of impact of their creations and achievements faster than most of us would.  This is what happened with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.  Not all of the founders are as brilliant as what they created.  However, by adhering to the domain to which they are biologically predisposed, achievement beyond expectation was possible.

Year after year, their meta-skills and “Aha!” events increased in top-talent flow, so they not only operated beyond their potential, they raised that potential.  Consciousness expanded.  Conceptual skills increased.  So even if Gates, Jobs, Wozniak, Bezos, Brin, Page, and Zuckerberg did not start with genius, it would likely emerge over time.  The skills and meta-skills that developed in the savant domain would spill over into other facets of their life to raise overall performance and intelligence.

For example, one’s ability to break through frontier after frontier in one’s savant domain would provide expertise for penetrating new or unknown territory in other disciplines in which one’s performance was innately inferior.  What would your career maximum be if you never diluted your savant strengths and never left your savant domain?  This is what our seven iconic founders share and demonstrate for us.

New meta-skills from extensive top-talent flow experience

Elevations in consciousness will increase our functionality and meta-skills.  Cognitive skills, for example, will advance.  Operational intelligence will be improved by upgrades in abstract thinking, conceptual thinking, big-picture thinking, systems thinking, strategic thinking, mental agility, adaptivity, pattern recognition, trend perception, environmental scanning, problem re-framing, and ambiguity resolution.  Notice the addition of many right-brain capabilities in particular.

Few educational programs have been effective in developing any of these meta-skills.  However, they upgrade collectively as a paradigm shift when we reintegrate into the maximizing machinery and experience serial top-talent flows.  These kinds of meta-skills are pivotal to executive performance.  Executive career maximums therefore will upgrade significantly with this proposed maximum modus operandi.

Paid growth, paid play  –  
Make your natural growth path your career path

The biologically maximum career would consist of a series of top-talent flow experiences in which you would continuously  a) surpass your previous performance and  b) re-wire your system to raise not only your baseline functionality but also your potential.

Our growth path, then, will be a nonlinear amplification or expansion or intensification of our strongest talents to increase their power to impact reality and the precision with which they create.  It will be a growth path in which we are constantly breaking through new frontiers of knowledge, skill, and reality impact in our savant domain.  This accelerated growth path would thus define our maximum career path, biologically speaking.

We have a biological predisposition towards enjoying the application of certain talents more than others.  Therefore, your maximum is innate.  Hence, your growth path will be innate given that nature only seeks to maximize systems for survival.  Therefore, your ideal career strategy is one of being paid to grow your most fun talents and to apply them to larger and more meaningful projects (see figure 1).

Read Part Two to learn more about external maximizing mechanisms and their synergy with internal one’s such as those discussed here in Part One.

OUR NATURAL GROWTH PATH