Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Jim Carrey. What do they have in common? Deep analyses by executive career maximizer Lauren Holmes show they all achieved their success using Savanting’s biology-driven protocol.
Savanting exploits the biology behind how savants outperform their potential – how they achieve incredible feats of genius from deficient brains theoretically incapable of them. We saw this juxtaposed brilliance and deficit with the world’s most beloved savant, Raymond Babbitt, brilliantly portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 Best Picture, Rain Man.
Yet savant superskills hint at capabilities of the human brain most have never experienced. Savanting makes savant genius accessible. This unprecedented protocol empowers brilliant breakthroughs from the nonbrilliant; vision from nonvisionaries; and extraordinary execution from the execution-challenged.
But above all, it releases creativity from noncreatives. Savanting renders all current methods for cultivating creativity obsolete. Studies show we’re born 98% creative. Entry into our school systems reduces us to 2% creative by age 7. Savanting reactivates our innate creativity by returning us to the way we were born to operate before cultural interference.
Creativity increases in flow state. Savanting’s power derives from a subset of the flow state identified by psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in his 1991 bestseller, “Flow: The Optimal Experience.” Lauren calls this specialized subset “savantflow.” The “savant brain” and the “savantflow brain” yield similar savant superskills.
Studies show that each of us has one domain in which we exhibit significant creativity. Coincidentally, savants also excel in only one domain. Savanting helps you to discover and develop your domain for creativity, breakthroughs, and flashes of genius.
Steve Jobs is synonymous with creativity. Bill Gates is not. Would it surprise you to learn that Lauren’s comparative analysis confirms that Gates is at least as creative as Jobs? Bill’s unique brand of creativity went undetected by critics who mistakenly assumed the creativity domains of rivals Jobs and Gates were the same.
One’s creativity domain needs to be the foundational strategy for one’s most rewarding career and life. All six superachievers demonstrate this. Jeff Bezos appears eclectic in his pursuits. Lauren shows that he has been creatively forwarding a singular domain since childhood. As a result, even the ever-venturing Jeff Bezos is predictable. Based on his prowess in his creativity domain, you’ll want to invest where Jeff invests.
This savant-inspired protocol is also a faster more reliable means to achieve mankind’s most sought-after goals. Savanting is the most expedient route to self-actualization in existence today. Continuous self-transcendence is built in. Extreme self-knowledge; sustained, self-sufficient self-love and happiness; wholeness; enlightenment; expanded consciousness; and true biology-driven purpose and potential. As the book’s final chapters reveal, these are byproducts of the savanting modus operandi.
Lauren Holmes developed savanting after interviewing over 300 global change executives in a compressed period of time. The shared way of working she observed was then filtered through the lens of her degree in biological anthropology and her subsequent specialization in career and talent maximization.
Needless to say, Lauren has similarly focused her education and career on her own creativity domain to develop this unique maximization methodology. In Savanting: Outperforming your Potential, Lauren shares discovery and invention which she was biologically predisposed to pursue. She too outperforms her assumed potential in her personal creativity domain.
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jim Carrey, Oprah, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates
Excerpt from Savanting: Outperforming your Potential, Chapter 15 (2019) by Lauren Holmes
Almost all creativity requires purposeful play. Abraham Maslow
While “innovation” improves an existing system, “creativity” merges existing information systems to generate an entirely new unprecedented system. In Chapter 3, I noted that American cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner claimed that we are only creative in one or a few domains in which we have expertise. Therefore, before you label yourself uncreative, it’s important to assume you are only creative in your savant domain.
In addition, researchers such as Harvard’s Teresa Amabile have studies which show that creativity increases during flow states. Because of biological maximization, bioflow compliance, and activity fusion, savantflows will increase creativity even more.
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Therefore, in your savant domain you might be tremendously creative, especially if the bioflow is feeding you the right information at the right time to fuel it. With savanting, even noncreatives may become creative. Simply choose savant-domain activities which will incite savantflows. This is the formula for your greatest creations.
Many assume Steve Jobs is synonymous with creativity and Bill Gates is not. Yet, both men changed the world. Let’s explore these assumptions to see what we can learn about savanting’s creativity and how to exploit it for your own worldchanging creations.
Bill’s creativity questioned
Steve Jobs said of Gates, “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology.” “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”[i]
Yale University computer science professor, David Gelernter, wrote in “Time” magazine in 1998 that he believes Gates is overrated as a pioneer and entrepreneur. “Bill Gates is an American unoriginal.” “It can be wiser to follow than to lead.” Gelernter contends that Microsoft often makes products by re-combining ideas that already exist in the marketplace.
Isn’t this the very definition of creativity in the savanting paradigm? Steve Jobs’ own definition confirms it: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”
Bill Gates’ genius arises from his talent for re-combining entities throughout his life to generate the unprecedented – software programs, businesses, organizations, industries, governments, OED computer manufacturers, philanthropists, charitable organizations, and so on as he aged. His creativity can’t be confined to Jobs’ limited world of device invention.
In the infancy of Microsoft before Bill’s consciousness had expanded, he could address the creation of a program or later, the re-combining of existing programs, to invent a new program which he would then modify and enhance.
However, with years of savantflows triggering the expansion of his consciousness, Gates’ ability to re-combine what exists expanded to larger entities. Jobs savant domain and creativity was more like that of savants – narrow but deep. Comparing the creativity of the two men is like comparing an “Apple” to an orange.
Someone laid down the early structures of the personal computing and software industries – the licensing, structure, standards, and rules of operation behind it. Creativity occurred. Can anyone really suggest Bill Gates was not the key creator? Especially as he does the same for the field of philanthropy and through it to many aspects of the infrastructure underpinning our society.
There can be little doubt about Bill’s talent for generating the foundations for new frontiers, governments, organizations, industries, and markets. Microsoft thrived locked into the marketplace by Bill’s brilliant business constructs, innovations, and partnerships which made its less-than-stellar technology number one.
Because Jobs did not recognize Bill’s creativity beyond technology, he did not cultivate it in himself. This was undoubtedly a contributing factor to his being fired from Apple for a decade and the creation of a culture which took Apple to the brink of bankruptcy. The brilliance of Job’s design required him to relentlessly commit to a narrow focus. This dedicated focus is a key contributor to the brilliance of his designs.
Is Jobs’ creativity different?
The executive summary
Let me overview my response to this question before going into detail with examples. Both entrepreneurs had the same intent – to better the lives of individuals en masse. Both were merged within the bioflow evolving the human race, so they generated products at the forefront of humanity’s evolution. Both were being fed the right information at the right time by the bioflow to catalyze creativity in their respective savant domains.
Their missions overlapped for most of their careers in the field of personal computing, which – as we have already seen with their success outside of that field – did not define either of their savant domains. The creativity of Jobs and Gates are, by definition, the same. Both re-combined existing systems to create an unprecedented system.
However, how they arrived at their end results was different. Jobs used more creative inspiration where the creative re-combination occurred in his head. It was achieved by breakthroughs fueled by information systems from the bioflow. His quote earlier in the chapter reinforces an internal remix.
Gates, on the other hand, used more logic with the re-combining information occurring externally. It was fueled by coincidences, models and facilitating people and events generated by the bioflow. His creativity was more action-based.
Their savant domains are different. Bill’s is broad and big picture. Steve’s was narrow, deep and detailed. Bill’s consciousness or span of purview was significantly wider. This increased his source of fuel for his creations and the information systems he re-combined were bigger.
Gates built the Microsoft product line and business through partnering and inclusion for shared prosperity. Jobs’ strategy was more isolating by design. He structured Apple initially to have an exclusive, proprietary, and independent product line which did not mesh well with others.
However, he seemed to model Gates’ inclusion approach when he returned to Apple to rescue it from bankruptcy after his ten-year absence. Pixar’s work with Disney and others may also have contributed to his transformation as well.
Jobs came to allow others to generate applications for his exclusive product line which helped him to defeat competition such as Blackberry which followed Jobs into exclusion but missed his redirection to inclusion. Blackberry missed the app bandwagon that saved Apple – especially with its iPhone market penetration. Without a plethora of device-compliant applications, functionality and personalization were greatly reduced.
The GUIs incident
Let me reveal some of the historical events upon which I based these opinions. While at Apple, Steve Jobs contracted Bill Gates at Microsoft to write new software to provide the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that were so critical to so many of Jobs’ greatest inventions.
These interfaces would allow a user to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators rather than having to type commands on a keyboard. As you might imagine, requiring users to learn a plethora of keyboard commands would present an intimidating barrier to entry for most.
Bill Gates was enthralled with the idea of graphical user interfaces and wanted to use them for Microsoft instead of Apple. Unfortunately, it would be unethical to steal a client’s idea. Fortunately, Bill coincidentally discovered that Jobs had learned the idea from products both Apple and Microsoft people had seen at Xerox PARC. Xerox had revealed what they had developed in the hopes that known producers such as Apple and Microsoft would buy the technology or help Xerox to commercialize it.
Therefore, GUIs were not Steve Jobs’ proprietary idea. It would therefore be fair game for Bill to develop software with graphical user interfaces for Microsoft instead. This led to the birth of Windows, a system that uses a mouse to drive a graphic interface which displayed text and images on the screen. Windows was quite an improvement over the text-and-keyboard-driven MS-DOS operating system.
Needless to say, when Jobs heard about Windows, he went ballistic. This led to Apple initiating a court case which was later dismissed as being without merit. But fair is fair. This is how creativity works – new creations emerge by re-combining existing information systems.
While Bill may have sourced software from the marketplace, he was quite clever about adapting and enhancing it for greater market receptivity. He did the same with Xerox’s GUIs.
He did not directly copy what Xerox had done. Rather, Gates combined Xerox’s ideas with the trends in his reality and other information systems plus his years of programming finesse to achieve a significantly more advanced outcome with Windows. Bill was just as creative but didn’t see the need to start from scratch as Jobs did.
Might I also note in Gates’ defense that, despite his criticism of Bill for “ripping off the ideas of others,” Jobs was unconsciously doing exactly the same thing with what he had learned from Xerox. This is not a criticism. This is simply the way creativity works for evolution’s adaptivity, for the uber-creative Steve Jobs, and for all of us ordinary folk.
Creative tension
Had Jobs realized this basic underlying dynamic of creativity on an implementation level, he might not have suffered the stresses and strains of the creative tension arising from demanding so much originality from himself and others. I think this creative tension led to issues with his temper, his toxic disparagement of others, and the health problems that plagued him. Even a dedication to mindfulness meditation could not dissipate all the creative tension he experienced.
It was undoubtedly this disposition and temperament which caused Jobs to launch a smear campaign against Gates. As we have seen, Jobs respected Gates enough to hire Microsoft for software development. According to his authorized biography, Jobs kept a note from Bill Gates beside his deathbed.[ii] All was not what it seemed between them. It would appear that many have had a plethora of wrong impressions about Bill Gates for decades.
Different savant domains
What Jobs and others assumed was Bill Gates’ savant domain was, in fact, not. As a reminder, “domain” and “field” or “industry” are not interchangeable in savanting. Existing epithets, fields, and categories may not apply.
Your savant domain is based on the maximization of your biological wiring. The bioflow maximizing machinery decides what your savant domain is at any moment in time based on the theme of which intrinsically or biologically rewarding activities incite your savantflows.
Jeff Bezos knew the truth about Gates when he switched disciplines from physics and Stephen Hawking’s space to computer science and Bill Gates’ worldbuilding. Yes, it is Bezos and Gates who are comparable not Jobs.
Jobs is the artist who strived for perfection in design to produce devices that were universally loved aesthetically and functionally. Steve was an aesthetic idealist to whom it was more important to create the best product than to sell the most. He had passion and vision for what technology could do in people’s lives and the magnetic charisma and incredible showmanship to promote his devices. Steve Jobs is truly a legend in the field of innovative and interactive design.
For Jobs, software was merely the means to run his devices, make them more endearing and better able to enhance the lives of consumers. For Gates and Bezos, it was the means to advance the structural underpinnings of civilization globally. For Zuckerberg, it was the means to unite humanity by creating, reinforcing, and joining the constellation of relationships of each individual. For all four, it was about bettering the quality of life of individuals en masse.
Bill Gates has a proven history of a logic-sourced creativity that even noncreatives might emulate. Gates took existing technology, adapted it to a specific market, and then dominated that market through innovative promotion and shrewd business savvy.
For example, Gates shrewdly chose not to offer to transfer to IBM the copyright on the MS-DOS operating system Microsoft was hired by IBM to write because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM’s system. This was Gates’ form of brilliant creativity. And he was right.
Much as he had anticipated, after the first IBM PCs were released, cloners such as Compaq began producing compatible PCs, and the market was soon flooded with clones. Rather than produce their own operating systems, the cloners decided it was cheaper to purchase MS-DOS off the shelf.
As a result, MS-DOS became the standard operating system for the industry. By 1993, Windows was selling at a rate of 1 million copies per month and was estimated to be running on nearly 85 percent of the world’s computers. Microsoft’s sales soared from $7 million in 1980 to $16 million in 1981.
A single creative business move may have generated the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue. Jobs, David Gelernter, and others had missed the true creativity and worldchanging breakthroughs of Bill Gates.
Microsoft solidified its industry dominance through another creative business move in the mid-1990s. They combined Windows with their other applications to create “suites,” then persuaded leading computer makers to preload their software on every computer they sold. The strategy worked so well that by 1999 Microsoft was posting sales of $19.7 billion, and Gates’ personal wealth had grown to a phenomenal $90 billion.
Gates’ passion for global business changed how business was done both within his industries and other industries as well. He set standards, first with MS-DOS and later with Windows. These standards shaped the modern computer industry and will continue to influence its growth for decades.
And now, he is repeating the process to generate new standards, structure, and strategy for more impactful mega-philanthropy to ensure it will cause permanent transformation in the world. The message here is that the real magic of the science behind savanting occurs in one’s savant domain. For those craving global impact, honor internal and external biology. Exploit biology to live a life of serial creativity and breakthroughs that will evolve humanity.
Vision from nonvisionaries
Bill Gates was criticized in the 1990s for not recognizing the power and potential of the internet. He was accused of not being visionary. Gates admits he did not embrace the Web until 1996, two years after browsers debuted. However, this does not mean this was the wrong decision for him or Microsoft.
It is not necessary to “see” trends if one is using the signals to move moment by moment with the bioflow evolutionary engine that is generating those trends. The bioflow would have been orchestrating the maximum of Gates’ system within the maximization of the Microsoft system within the maximization process for humanity’s system.
There is lots of evidence that Gates’ was attuned to the evolutionary advance of those three systems as well as those within his savant domain. Just by continuing to do intrinsically rewarding work every day, he could experience all the benefits of knowing trends without knowing them.
What appeared in 20/20 hindsight to be smart business strategy may in fact be simply compliance with the bioflow day after day as he had done since childhood because he had never lost the connection into which each of us are born.
Nonvisionaries can thus proceed as if they are insightful visionaries. By moving with the trendsetting bioflow engine one may exploit the trends to maximize within one’s savant domain. This is another way that the ordinary may achieve the extraordinary.
With 20/20 hindsight, the signals did not fail Gates. Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer, benefited from having a few years to see what features of other browsers were most valued. Microsoft could then capitalize on the best of the browsers to leapfrog them to create a product ahead of them all.
In yet another seemingly brilliant business breakthrough, Gates was then able to prevail in the browser market by bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system, Internet Service Provider software, and new PCs from OEMs.
Thus, without the requirement for a user-initiated installation, Microsoft could lock consumers into its browser solution before users even had a chance to acquire and try another browser. Gates had not only caught up to the Netscape browser lead but leapfrogged ahead as he did with the Xerox GUIs.
The Netscape browser ultimately died despite its rapid success after early market entry. This was yet another business decision made by Bill Gates that locked in Microsoft revenues. It was not the browser “technology” which made the money. It was Gates’ savvy and creativity in inventing new business infrastructure in the frontiers of his savant domain.
Not everyone needs to have the creative mind of a Jobs or the venturing prowess of a Bezos to have creative breakthroughs. Noncreatives and nonvisionaries may proceed in partnership with the bioflow as if they have both creativity and vision. You are about to learn some of the ways in which the four iconic founders exploited the dynamic flow of information all around them as byproducts of this incredible biological guidance system.
As Bill Gates proves, despite his not having the technology visionary capabilities of a Steve Jobs, he was still able to sustain his position at the forefront of technology trends. He moved Microsoft at top speed to greater success than Apple by not just assimilating existing technologies but using them as springboards to jump ahead.
More about leapfrogging and springboarding in Chapter 17 to capitalize on environmental scanning to increase your creativity and creations. Technology vision is only a small part of Bill Gates’ savant domain for bettering the lives of people. His vision and creativity in the invention of the business infrastructure portion of his savant domain are unsurpassed.
Bill’s partnership with nature’s bio-underpinnings was working perfectly. Again, with 20/20 hindsight, Gates’ decision to focus on Windows in the mid-nineties over the internet was the right one for him and for Microsoft, even if the nay-sayers were correct and he seemingly did not have the vision to realize its value.
He analyzed the signposts inside and outside of himself correctly and took the right action as if he was a visionary. Significant revenues from the internet did not really emerge until around 2004 as Gates, the supposed nonvisionary, had predicted 10 years earlier. Therefore, little was lost by delaying attention to a browser and much was in fact gained by focusing on Windows.
So far, we have explored how savanting facilitates “brilliant breakthroughs from the nonbrilliant,” “creativity from noncreatives” and “vision from nonvisionaries.” Now we want to investigate how savanting enables “exceptional execution from the execution-challenged.”
[i]Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, October 24, 2011, Simon & Schuster
[ii]Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, October 24, 2011, Simon & Schuster
Biological maximization is the next generation of breakthrough competitive advantage for the future corporation. Individual and multi-individual human systems are maximized by nature’s adaptation mechanisms in exactly the same way. Therefore, the techniques for biologically maximizing yourself that you have learned in previous essays may be applied to maximize all human systems – an individual, a family, a company, a marketplace, a country, and the human race as a whole, for example.
I nearly wrote the obvious article which extrapolates from individual to corporate maximization. But then it occurred to me that it might be more intriguing for both reader and writer if I assumed that both the employees and the corporation are already maximized. This would give us a view of the goal state of maximized corporate operation. It would reveal the potential company of the future.
We will therefore assume that both individual and company have both already partnered with nature’s machinery for adapting and maximizing all living systems for survival. We will assume that they are thus already operating not only at their internal potential but their extended potential. This means that we will be assuming that they both have extended their innate capabilities and potential to include those of the maximizing machinery externally and all of the systems it orchestrates. What will the future company look like when populated by employees operating beyond their potential?
Snapshot of a maximized individual in action
First, let’s quickly review how the biologically maximized individual will be operating. A snapshot of that state can serve as a model for our discussion of the biologically maximized corporation. Peak performance for a human system is the application of one’s strongest talents to the context that will most benefit from them. One’s greatest strengths then will thus be applied to one’s most meaningful and rewarding work for an audience that will value that work the most.
This work must scale new frontiers either for the individual or for advancing reality. It must change the physical world in some way. There is the requirement for creative and learning elements. This is because the entrance fee to attain our maximum state requires us to be stretched beyond our previous performance levels. It requires that we apply our strongest talents at increasingly more elevated levels. Obviously, as a successful species, we have evolved addictive or motivating drives to pull us to maximum performance and adaptive advance to improve our prospects for survival.
Until this series of articles, our peak performance or maximum state had been called flow. I have identified a subset flow state which is even more precisely our maximum. I have called it top-talent flow state since it emerges as a result of applying one’s strongest talents to advance ideal contexts as identified in the above definition of our maximum.
A requirement for entering this enticing top-talent flow state is that the activity that invokes this altered state of consciousness must stretch you beyond your previous capabilities. Therefore, growth in skill and impact are built into this state. Every time you enter flow, then, your system will be advancing. In top-talent flow, you will therefore achieve peak growth and peak performance. We have evolved drives what will always pull us to this maximum. They have evolved to ensure our survival.
Growth to maximum performance then can never be linear. Your core is a constant. Your strengths, your talents, and your essence are a constant. Biological predisposition determines this core. Therefore, mechanisms trying to maximize you will always pressure you to expand around your core strengths. Think of ever-widening concentric circles. Nature will always pressure you to operate in flow states which emerge from applying your greatest strengths.
This is why the twelveSourcing-Your-Savantexercises are so critical. They tell you your formula for operating sustainably in your maximum state. They tell you when the machinery has and has not supported you in the past so that you might determine the formula for when it will and will not support you in the future. Maximized individuals move with the maximizing flow and never against it. Therefore, they live by this formula going forward. They choose all projects or goals to capitalize on the machinery and to avoid problems. Imagine knowing which projects will or will not work before you begin them.
This will mean that the machinery will support them with a plethora of capabilities, facilitations, and leaps that will catapult them to their goals. Externally these leaps include clusters of coincidences relevant to their goals. Internally, these leaps include breakthroughs, flashes of genius, breakthroughs, “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, flashes of genius, epiphanies, sudden knowledge, sudden insight, intuitive leaps, enlightenment, sudden creativity, sudden creation, creative inspirations, and leaps to emotional highs.
These leaps are the essence of the maximizing process. They are generated by the re-combining of existing information systems to create new information systems. This is the basic creativity used to solve maximizing challenges. It is the essence of adaptation. Obviously, maximized individuals will automatically merge with a machinery that has evolved to maximize us. They can thus achieve bigger goals better and faster with this extendedpotential. They can achieve beyond their potential.
In addition, your performance will increase in another way. You will be merging with the production line that generates adaptive leaps or solutions. Even non-creatives and those of normal intelligence may come up with career-changing if not world-changing breakthroughs through tapping into this powerful process. Imagine what you could accomplish with a lifetime of leaps. No wonder every one of us wants to know our maximizing formula.
CORPORATE BEST PRACTICES REVOLUTIONIZED
One human-develop continuum
The maximizing machinery maximizes all human systems identically. It neutrally applies the same pressures to every human system. This means that there is only one human-development continuum for individual and multi-individual systems. There is a single human-development continuum for every individual system, every company system, every country system, and so on. Because the maximizing machinery is logically integrated, the new standards deriving from a partnership with that machinery will also be integrated and interlinked.
This translates into a single develop continuum or single process for organizational development, leadership development, talent development, change management, and career management, for example. Because leadership development and individual development use the same systems maximization process, leadership development will become a by-product of pursuing one’s natural growth path. The natural drives of the individual will propel personal advancement. Yet they will also inadvertently pull individuals to meet organizational needs for leading and leadership development as a byproduct.
In fact, you will learn that this singular development continuum pressured by the maximizing flow will merge today’s fragmented corporate best practices into a single integrated process. Partnering with the maximizing process will simultaneously revolutionize standards for management science, leading, entrepreneuring, frontiering™, innovation, leader creation, leadership development, organizational development, performance improvement, productivity improvement, project management, high-speed growth, change management, talent attraction, talent retention, talent development, career management, recruiting, outplacement, and more. Pursue improvement in one aspect of running a corporate system and the other aspects will upgrade as well.
Maximizing and synchronizing
With every individual linked to the same maximizing machinery, corporate best practices are merged and simplified. Levels of uniformity and unified advance never before achievable within organizations are possible. Leadership responsibilities can be embedded throughout the employee population without the requirement for hierarchy. Unprecedented opportunities emerge for not only distributed leadership and decision-making, but also for universal core competency upgrades. Mass maximization and mass synchronization are integral to the maximizing mechanisms that have developed over generations. They can be duplicated within corporations by simply tapping into these ongoing processes being orchestrated by the maximizing machinery, the master.
The learning organization
Learning-to-learn programs may be replaced by the agility and adaptivity inherent in the partnership with the maximizing engine. This new formula for creating the learning organization does not stop here. As a successful species, we already have the drives for learning and adaptivity. The study in figure 3 shows that these drives have been deactivated by cultural interferences. The learning organization can be achieved by simply reactivating the drives and functionality we can see in operation in our children before they are pressured to conform to our cultures around the age of five.
Partnering with maximizing mechanisms which have evolved the species will release learning agility from the inside of each employee more quickly and successfully than traditional organizational programs can instruct and pressure learning-to-learn expertise from the outside. The very definition of a learning organization is individuals en masse with their drives for learning released. In addition, partnering with maximizing process makes its themes, modus operandi, and functionality available to us. So, while our own learning, adaptivity, and frontiering drives are being reactivated, we can borrow nature’s adaptivity, agility, advance, and problem-solving to operate as if we are already learning experts.
Borrowed creativity and innovativeness
The same is true of organizational creativity and innovativeness. Adaptation is nothing if not a machinery for creativity and creative problem-solving. As above, figure 3 shows that most of us are born creative and adaptive. Our cultures interfere. They provide structured, linear processes which preclude creativity. They make experimentation and the failures inherent in the process risky to our acceptance and advancement. Because change is feared, those who offer new creative solutions are often criticized and ostracized. Societal mechanisms for resisting change are translated into personal attacks on those promoting change. Funding for innovation is limited to a few fields.
How successful have corporate programs been in making non-creative people creative? Would the success rate not be better if we simply partnered with adaptation’s creativity to enable everyone to be creative? And how smart is it that this very process of partnering would reactivate not only the creativity in each of us but the drives that make creative acts addictive? Would our companies not become more competitively creative if we restructured them to free our innate creative drives? And would that creative competitiveness not be increased dramatically by extending it with the creativity of nature’s maximizing process? Of course it would. Our internal creativity has actually evolved to work in tandem with the creativity outside of us in the maximizing machinery. The synergy enables exponential increases in creativity.
This creativeness inside and outside of us is actually the same maximizing continuum. It was our cultures that decided that our potential and our functionality would be limited to what is inside of us. Our cultures keep us separate from the massive maximizing machinery with which we have evolved to operate at our full extendedpotential. It is our cultures which have hidden our extended potential from us.
It is our cultures that make it unsafe to use the frontiering™ drives which both companies and humanity need to thrive in today’s tumultuous world. Imagine the corporate improvements in productivity and innovativeness with the restoration of the full extended potential of each employee. Competitors will be quickly eclipsed. The very capabilities most organizations seek to cultivate through a multitude of corporate programs are accessible through a single shift of every employee to their natural partnered state before culture interfered.
The systems maximizing machinery may be harnessed to maximize your work, to manage your career, and to empower your children to operate at their full potential to achieve their goals. Business leaders may use it to run their companies. National leaders have a new engine for maximizing their countries. World leaders may copy and comply with this multi-system maximizing machinery for running the world differently. We have a new means to adaptively evolve the human race to advantage.
Let’s briefly overview a number of additional territories of company operation revolutionized by partnering individual and multi-individual human systems with the maximizing machinery.
SYSTEM INTEGRITY HONORED
Individual integrity honored: centered on core strengths
Adaptation maximizes and advances systems synergistically and synchronously for survival. To do this, it honors the integrity of each individual or multi-individual human system. It pressures the integration of each human system around its core strengths and the drives that promote the use of those strengths. It pressures operating from the peak-performance and peak-growth flow state that emerges when one is applying these core strengths to advance or be advanced by the contextual system of which it is a component.
This is because the maximization of the contextual system is tied to the maximization and advance of the component system. There must always be synergistic exchanges between them. Our maximum state will always include an exchange. In this flow state, only the parts of the brain required for the task at hand are activated. One’s body and being move into congruence at the highest performance levels.
This is our most powerful state. This is the strongest configuration of a human system for its survival and adaptivity. This is the state of true integrity of the system. It may not always be possible to operate from this state maximized and centralized state. However, it is understandable why maximizing forces and mechanisms will always pressure us to achieve and sustain this state.
For those who want to extend their capabilities with those of the maximizing machinery, it is important to understand its goals. The closer you are to this centered, self-actualized state, the more you can take advantage of your internal-external system. It is in this state that circuits complete between internal and external maximizing mechanisms and processes. Integrated and centered in this state of integrity, you may most effectively partner with the maximizing machinery for your most powerful and productive state.
Company integrity honored
The above model of honoring the integrity of hierarchic human systems is the same ideal model for peak performance and peak competitiveness of the hierarchic interconnections of human systems around a company: employees, teams, departments, company, the company’s business web of suppliers, partners, customers, and support entities.
Competitive breakthrough
Copying evolution’s smart model for synchronizing systems into a synergistic multi-system maximization process certainly would add competitive advantage to a company. But here is a new conceptual platform for the real competitive breakthrough: the powerful maximizing machinery is already driving the company and its associated human systems in this maximizing and synchronizing manner. Ignore it at your peril.
If a company wants to achieve its goals bigger, better, and faster to outperform and outmaneuver the competition, the maximizing flow is a huge factor. It is both an opportunity and a curse. The direction and biases of the maximizing flow need to be factored in when choosing any goals. If not, there would be a 50:50 chance that your company will end up fighting upstream as it pursues its goals. The company would have to fight against a large powerful machine. The competitive gap would widen even more if the competitors of this upstream company were flooding downstream with the maximizing flow at high speed while being catapulted ahead by a plethora of leaps such as coincidences, breakthroughs, and facilitating events.
If you want to take advantage of a partnership with all of the powerful mechanisms, forces and capabilities that have evolved to advance human systems, then you will need to honor the integrity of any human system that you are trying to maximize or to conscript to help you to achieve your goals. Now let’s see some examples of how corporate best practices will change when we comply with nature’s pressures to honor the integrity, growth, and maximization paths of each human system related to the corporation internally and externally.
Growth honors systems integrity
We learned from the snapshot of the maximized individual above that the growth for human systems pressured by the maximizing machinery is not linear. Rather, it honors the integrity of the core strengths of the system. The core configuration remains the same but expands and advances. The key talents and their associated addictive drives advance and become capable of more impact on the context or reality or world.
Therefore, growth, when integrated into the maximizing flow, is an expansion, magnification, and intensification of the ‘nucleus’ of the human system. Growth is an expansion by concentric spheres. The configuration of the core of the human system should remain intact. This is what the maximizing machinery is pressuring.
This means that whether you want (a) your company’s impact to increase or (b) to use your products to help your customer’s system to advance, or (c) to develop your employees, or (d) to increase the contribution of suppliers, the integrity of the core of each human system will need to be honored. If you want to harness the functionality, power, synchronization, synergies, direction, quantum leaps and coincidences of the maximizing machinery, you will need to know where to look for it. You will need to know where the flow is going so that you or your company or your customer or your supplier may move with it.
You will want to select goals to capitalize on an expansion process that already has powerful mechanisms and processes promoting it. You will want to get out of the way as they attempt to expand the capabilities of your human assets or increase the impact of your company. There are drives within us and mechanisms outside us that can motivate your people to some goals but not to others. With knowledge of the signposts and a little experience, you will be able to quickly identify when the internal and external maximizing machinery is supporting or opposing the directions of your company.
At minimum, you will want to avoid choosing goals that will have you pitted against the maximizing flow. You will not want to promote people up a linear hierarchy which eliminates the use and improvement of their key talents. Not only will the company no longer have addictive drives motivating the individual’s work, it will not have all of the maximizing machinery and the systems it orchestrates supporting the individual. You will not have engaged the extended functionality and potential of his/her internal-external system in the service of corporate goals. You will not have maximized your people.
Now let’s examine some examples of how corporate best practices will change when we comply with nature’s pressures to honor the integrity of each human system related to the corporation internally and externally.
Customer system integrity honored
Where the maximizing machinery is pressuring a company system to go defines the integrity of the system to be honored. There are multiple systems whose integrity needs to be honored with respect to customers. The more your company, as the supplier company, is providing products or services in compliance with how the maximizing mechanisms are pressuring it, the more successful it will be.
Ideal customers need to offer an opportunity for the supplier company to use their key talents in top-talent flow in order to serve that customer. It would go against all of the principles of maximizing human systems to take your company out of top-talentflow in order to supply a particular customer. Take a look at the customers that are causing problems, blocks, and negative events. These may indicate opposition by the maximizing machinery. It would not be wise for a supplier company to build its business around these customers.
It is more than likely better to let a customer go than to come off of the addictive core drives of the corporation trying to take it to its maximum in peak-performing and peak-growth flow state. A customer company which requires a supplier company to come off its peak-performance centering will inevitably cost both companies money. A supplier company which is not providing products or services from their zone of peak performance will ultimately both experience and cause problems.
The customer company also has a nucleus of key talents and drives evolved to promote their creative expression. The better your products support the core creative engine of the customer company and its expansion around that core, the more successful your company will be as a supplier. The more your products support the directions that the maximizing machinery is pressuring the customer system, the more successful your products will be.
You know what the maximizing machinery is trying to achieve for your company, for the customer company, and for the interface system which develops between the two. Avoid swimming upstream. In addition, if you are setting up a new global company or developing a new product to offer globally, ensure that you also honor the integrity of the global human system and where the maximizing machinery is pressuring it to go.
The goal state of being then would be to support customer companies to move with maximizing pressures while your company is also complying with the same maximizing pressures in selecting those products and customers. In other words, both customer and supplier are orchestrated by the same multi-system maximization machinery. They are unified and synchronized externally in the same way that they are unified internally. They are sharing in the coincidences and opportunistic synergies that are characteristic of the multi-system maximizing inherent in a massive biological system of systems committed to the survival of all living systems.
Outsourcing, suppliers, and partners
The same logic which has a company releasing the wrong customers in favor of the right ones, will also dictate an outsourcing strategy which will release suppliers based on the same criteria. A company partnered with the maximizing machinery will spin off those business units that are not part of the company’s core competencies and addictive drives. These units will stand out because they will not be acted upon by the maximizing flow in the same way.
While the bulk of the company is enjoying facilitating events and clusters of coincidences, those parts of the company that need to be outsourced are receiving visible opposition from the maximizing flow. Its reaction to a company’s components identifies what nature considers part of the system being acted upon. No force-fitting actions by the company to integrate something unintegrateable are going to make nature change its mind. Its reaction is neutral and final. Proceed against the maximizing flow at your peril.
Having thus purified your own company to reflect its core integrity, you will only want suppliers who have done the same. You will not want to choose suppliers to support you with products or services which it really should have outsourced because they are not part of the core competencies of the company. You will want to choose suppliers whose core competency is to provide the product or service which will support your core creative engine.
The same criteria will ideally apply to any partnerships and alliances entered into by your company. Over time, you will gain expertise for quickly identifying the core creative engine of any individual or multi-individual human system. You will be able to quickly have it operating as an extension of the maximizing engine that evolved it. You will be able to quickly re-link the internal-external human system to reclaim its extended potential. You will be able to extrapolate this from learning to maximize and centralize your own system.
Business web integrity honored
The business web of suppliers, customers, and partners that surrounds your company is itself a human system being acted upon by the maximizing machinery. Maximizing your company’s business web, then, is as simple as copying and complying with the multi-system maximizing machinery. Do what the maximizing process does and harness its power for you to do it.
Orchestrate systems to co-evolve, co-adapt, synergize, and synchronize the way maximizing mechanisms do. Matrix the capabilities of many systems to enhance company performance. Watch for tell-tale patterns of signposts that your business-web companies are being orchestrated by the maximization process. Then apply multi-system achieving techniques to enable your company to achieve beyond its potential through couplings with co-maximizing companies.
Product development for system unification
System integrity results from the pressure of maximizing mechanisms to unify a human system around its nucleus of greatest strengths and their associated drives. It will be lucrative to choose products which help the maximizing machinery to accomplish this.
For example, the immediate popularity of the Blackberry relates not only to its facilitation of company system integration and unification but also its promotion of the same for the entire system of humanity. The success of technologies which cross cultural boundaries to unify humanity into a single global system will steadily increase over time. This is what the maximizing machinery will always be trying to accomplish. Go with the flow in choosing product and corporate directions.
NEW CHANGE MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES
We have been dissecting what is going on during the maximizing flow in order to better comply with it and capitalize on it. Let’s now look at some examples of how the new corporate core competencies for change management will transform as a result of re-integrating into the maximizing machinery. This machinery serves as the model and the power behind new breakthrough change management methodologies. Many of the change initiatives required today will instead be eliminated by natural levers built into a re-linked internal-external system.
So many of the activities that we consider change management will be included within the daily operations of any company merged into the maximizing process. Maximization is perpetual change. It is nature’s adaptation engine. Therefore, natural levers built into our internal-external system will promote ongoing system advance without requiring human intervention.
Overcoming change resistance
Almost all of the resistance to change is fear of the unknown. The methodologies being presented in this essay series are designed to build not only expertise for frontiering™ but a craving for it as a way of life. Frontiering™ is the method for penetrating unknown territory or bringing the unknown into existence. It is about scaling new frontiers of knowledge and creation. By partnering with the greatest machinery for frontiering™ – adaptation or maximization – to remove the fear of frontiering™, our addictive drives for frontiering™ can be released. We become the frontiering beings our successful species has evolved to be.
The effect on organizations of each person having an addiction to frontiering™ and change will be massive. The push for change from employees will replace the pull from management. Fear of the unknown will be supplanted by a craving for living in the frontiering zone. This is the territory where the unknown is replaced by the known, new frontiers are scaled, the unprecedented is the norm, and routine is anathema. This dramatic reversal will revolutionize change management best practices.
By complying with internal and external maximizing pressures, the development of frontiering capabilities will start in one territory of your life and then spread to others. That first territory is around using and improving one’s key talents. This is where your internal drives and the pressures of the maximizing machinery are the strongest. We use the pull of the addictive top-talent drives and top-talent flow states to mitigate the fear of the unknown associated with frontiering™. There are no negative emotions in top-talent flow.
We capitalize on our innate drives to pursue certain passions, frontiers, creations, knowledge, and growth, to build our frontiering addictive drives – or, more accurately, to release drives we are born with as indicated by figure 3. Each frontiering experience will strengthen your addictive frontiering drives. The more you comply with addictive drives, the stronger they get. The more you override addictive drives, the more they atrophy.
Eventually you will have frontiering expertise and frontiering drives which are transferrable to every aspect of your life. The frontiering capabilities that have been culturally deactivated will be reactivated. Resistance to change will decline while the addiction to change increases. This should significantly transform the corporate change management process. Agility and adaptivity will become the norm.
As we partner with the maximizing machinery, we are exposing ourselves to its perpetual change, perpetual adaptivity, perpetual creativity, and perpetual frontiering. Adaptation and maximization are pure frontiering. There is no need for a separate change management competency if both we and our organizations are merged with nature’s change management process. We simply choose individual or organizational change goals consistent with the directions that maximization is pressuring and merge with its machinery.
Partnering with the maximizing flow is accomplished, to a great extent, by watching for the patterns of signposts and indicators of its direction. Since the flow is always in a perpetual state of flux, change will become a way of life. However, it will feel as if it is business as usual moment by moment. It will feel safe because one is just following the same signposts. Partnering will provide a dynamic stability no matter how fast the change is occurring.
The fear of the unknown and the resistance to change would return only if a company insisted on a change management program which is in conflict with the maximizing flow. If the company and employees are in sync with the maximizing flow, then there is a powerful engine in place to be harnessed to fuel change projects. The unification and synchronization needed for change management are built into this partnering. Change would be routine. It would become a way of life. This is a significant departure from current best practices.
Quantum leaps for faster, bigger change with reduced risk
Part of the power for organization change management will come from copying, complying with, and capitalizing on the quantum-leap bias of the maximizing flow. A high percentage of organizational change projects derail when they attempt to achieve change through a long linear transition. Invariably organizational systems become unstable. Evolution has solved this. It promotes a nonlinear process of quantum leaps which move systems from one stable state to a new stable state without the risky transitional states.
Because quantum leaps use an emergent process, what happens between the current state and the new state is not known. Quantum leaps are nonlinear because the post-leap state cannot always be predicted from the pre-leap state. The post-leap outcome is not usually a linear extension from the start state. The emergent process mixes, matches, and combines pre-existing pre-leap systems to create new unprecedented post-leap systems. In many cases, the unexpected events and products emerge almost by magic or miracle by this creative process.
A metaphor for the quantum leap process would be to install new stable software on a computer to replace existing stable software. It is transparent to us how the new software makes all of the necessary connections to other software within the computer. If we did not know better we would think it is magic.
The same re-connections and integrations are happening behind the scenes of coincidences and other leaps such as flashes of genius, breakthroughs, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, and other such epiphanies. The process is a duplication of the underlying creative process of evolution, maximization, and frontiering: the blending of existing information systems to make new information systems. That is why I call this breakthrough synthesis.
A metaphor corporately would be the cutover to a new computer application over a weekend. On Friday you have one application and on Monday you have only the replacement application. To many, there is no more fearful prospect than that Monday experience and the weeks of dread prior to its arrival. This resistance to change is one of the greatest challenges faced by today’s change managers. If all employees become quantum leap experts by partnering with nature’s quantum leap process, the challenges of change management would diminish dramatically. Everyone would jump from one stable state to the next without the scary interim steps.
Change accelerated by clusters of coincidences
Best practices for change management will not only be transformed by the self-initiated quantum leaps of the previous section but also by the maximization-initiated quantum leaps that are inherent in any partnership with the maximizing machinery. They include clusters of coincidences and leaps to flow states, sudden knowledge, and spontaneous creativity. They serve to catapult the company ahead nonlinearly to its goals, to better versions of its goals, to goals that cannot be achieved linearly, or to alternative goals which will better serve the company system.
NEW PROJECT MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES
Project management has developed over the years as a major new form of management in organizations facing rapidly changing business environments. The Project Management Institute (2000) defines it as “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities in order to meet project requirements.” Project management is intended to provide focus for using resources to achieve a specific objective. The fundamental objective is to “get the job done” to client satisfaction within time, cost, and performance constraints.
Today’s project management best practices will appear primitive by comparison to what is possible by merging with the maximizing machinery. Project plans promote a linear process with pre-set steps rather than the opportunism, creativity, adaptivity, and nonlinear quantum leaps of the maximizing flow. Project plans and processes are limited to human knowledge, intelligence, power and capabilities rather than those of maximization. They are man-run rather than nature-run. They are limited to the capabilities of the human mind.
Projects run with the today’s methodology do not garner functionality, resources, or advantage from either the maximizing machinery or from the co-maximizing systems it orchestrates. They do not benefit from opportunistic synergies. Nor are they pulled with the trends of synchronization with the majority of other human systems.
Without this multi-system maximizing process, projects will not be catapulted ahead by the leaps and facilitating events that are its byproducts. There will be no clusters of coincidences, sudden knowledge, sudden creative inspiration, Aha! experiences or models of solutions. In fact, the inability to penetrate unknown territory or to deal with known and unknown unknowns is a weakness of today’s project management methodologies that is solved with finesse by the maximizing machinery. Today’s projects would also not harness mechanisms that would maximize the project system for peak performance as it does for any human system.
Many unpredictable events happen during a project including opportunities to upgrade the performance of the project. Working to a project plan interferes with working opportunistically and nonlinearly. Rather than following a linear project plan, evolution uses creativity and adaptivity to capitalize on the best options and resources at each decision juncture. The new project management standards will enable each step to be based on the results of the previous step to yield significantly superior results.
Another benefit of partnering with evolution’s machinery is that it enables projects to achieve the intent of their goals in bigger and better ways than might have been anticipated. The most fundamental dynamic of maximization is breakthrough synthesis: the re-combining of existing information systems to create new information systems to solve maximization, adaptivity, or synchronization challenges. This is the essence of adaptation’s creative process. It becomes available to your project with the partnering.
Another beneficial upgrade to best practices then is that partnered project results may dramatically exceed what was originally sought. Consequently, how project goals are defined will need to change to enable the emergence process and adaptation’s creativity to step in to create the best possible outcome to meet the intent of the projects and the true needs of a maximized corporate system.
Current project selection does not factor in the maximizing flow. They not only do not benefit from it but incorrect selection could pit the project against that flow. This will build failure into the project. With the quantum leap process, projects can proceed from one stable state to the next just as evolving living systems do in nature. The need to keep transitional organizational systems stable through a linear process is avoided. Nature was smart enough to figure out that there is danger in the linear approach. Perhaps we could embrace the same learning.
Nature has developed a nonlinear process for achieving breakthroughs for a reason. Evolving the human eye through linear transitional states, for example, is not possible. Similarly, some projects should not be undertaken because there is no way to achieve their goals through the linear process built into today’s project methodologies. The proposed new project best practices corrects for this.
The new standards for selecting projects will be based on what has historically been successful in all project-related human systems. The Sourcing-Your-Savantexercises will identify where the maximizing machinery will or will not support the progress of the project and its implementers. Better project selection will ensure better project results. Honoring project system integrity and that of the participating human systems will accelerate progress.
Project teams currently need to be controlled, disciplined, and motivated to project plans. New best practices will capitalize on the addictive drives innate to the individual to pull them to perform. They will capitalize on what the maximizing flow identifies as the strongest talents of the individual. Top-talentflow states will be promoted. This will promote peak performance and peak addictive pull for project participants. Project teams using the new methodology will outperform what they could do using the old methodology. Less management and less discipline will be required. More passion and more emotional highs will exchange push for pull.
With everyone synched to the maximizing machinery, distributed leadership, creativity, and frontiering become possible. Hierarchy in the teams becomes redundant. The superior functionality of maximizing mechanisms will be available to everyone. The merger will add new meta-skills, dynamics, reflexes, and modes of operating. The inherent ability nature’s adaptation machinery to improve functionality will ensure more capabilities for project success.
By partnering at least one frontiering expert with the field experts in each project team, projects will have the expertise for penetrating unknown territory or capitalizing on opportunities that emerge during project implementation. It will become part of project management best practices to include one or more frontiering™ experts within each project team. Frontiering™ experts will become a critical team resource for all breakthrough projects or new ventures to supplement experts from the project’s field of endeavor. It is easy to envisage a Frontiering™ Office existing as a subset of the Project Management Office (PMO).
LEADERSHIP AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Leadership and leadership development will transform significantly and in unexpected ways with the shift to partnering with the maximizing flow. All of the functions performed by a leader are integrated into the multi-system maximization process. Natural leaders copy, comply with, and capitalize on this process. They operate as an extension of it.
The maximizing flow includes ongoing opportunistic synergizing and mass synchronization of co-maximizing systems. This suggests that if individuals pursue a partnership with the maximizing flow, they may end up with the functionality of leaders as a byproduct, even if that is not their intention.
Frontiering™ is the fundamental dynamic of the maximizing machinery. Frontiering™ is also the fundamental dynamic of leadership in the new partnered way of operating. The person with the expertise for penetrating new unknown territory will always be the leader. In fact, as the ability to frontier becomes more wide-spread, frontiering™ will become the defining requirement for leadership. Again, it would seem that leader drives, reflexes, meta-competencies and capabilities may emerge inadvertently from the proposed partnering process.
Could it be that the global leadership shortage will diminish by partnering with the maximizing flow? As one pursues personal gain in a biologically maximized career, will leadership be created and developed as a byproduct? There is only one human development continuum for all human systems when they reintegrate into the maximizing machinery that evolved them. Therefore the answer is ‘yes’. Multi-system maximizing, multi-system achieving, mass synchronization and synergies, and frontiering – all driven by their associated addictive drives – can indeed both create a leader and make a leader effective.
With all employees synched with the maximizing flow, organization-wide distributed leadership and frontiering™ will replace hierarchical leadership. Leadership will become the capability and responsibility of every individual within the organization. Once they know how to maximize their own system by partnering with the maximizing machinery, they will know how to maximize any human system, whether it is the company, a subordinate, a customer, a supplier, a market, an industry, or a project.
The definition and development of leaders will change with re-integration into a maximizing flow which is adapting, advancing, and frontiering™ continuously. Frontiering™ skill will replace the need for leadership. Managers manage what exists. Leaders bring the new into existence. The resulting leadership development continuum will progress from a manager running an existing organization, to a transitional change leader adding linear advancement to the organization, to a transformational change leader adding nonlinear change to an organization, to those leaders or individuals who have mastered the unknown – a creational leader and a frontiering leader. These individuals (a) bring the new and unknown into existence or (b) penetrate new or unknown territory respectively (See figure 4).
This is the same skill development continuum that emerges as individuals become frontiering™ experts. The person who knows how to penetrate the unknown will always be the leader. As indicated by figure 4, there is another dimension to this progression. Systems maintenance, for which no change is made, gives way to increasing systems advancement in which linear and nonlinear changes are made. This then progresses to systems creation which includes the underlying creating dynamic of maximization and indeed the universe, breakthrough synthesis: the creating of new systems by re-combining existing systems or parts thereof.
Everyone who partners with the maximizing machinery will, in effect, become a multi-system achiever in the same way that every leader is. They will achieve bigger goals faster through capitalizing on other systems in the same that every leader does and the maximizing machinery does.
The biological machinery maximizes human systems. Corporate leaders must maximize human systems. When the two join forces, every best practice for corporate success is revolutionized. Few companies have foreseen the magnitude of this pending transformation to management science. The corporate landscape will be littered with those who fail to make the leap before their competition.
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 first. 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 Play
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 would 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 field 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 example, 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 for 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 intooverdrive.
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.
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™.
Your 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 synthesisre-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-SavantExercises 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 thedance.
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, acoincidence 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 willbe causally linkedto the maximizing processfor 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 ‘breakthroughsynthesis.’
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.
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 support 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:
If you had total freedom and unlimited resources, what creations or footprints would you want to leave over your lifetime?
What work would you dedicate yourself to do to contribute to or advance our world?
Generically, what might your maximum career look like based solely on the continuous application and improvement of your strongest, most rewarding talents?
To what meaningful work would you dedicate your life in the absence of all impediments and distractions?
If we removed all of the demands of family, finances, and the challenges life throws at you, what would be your ultimate career?
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?
What are your maximum possible lifetime achievements?
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.
What could you accomplish if you spent decades operating beyond your potential in your strongest domain?
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?
Where would your career take you if you rejoined the massive orchestration of all biological systems?
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?
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?
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.
What business can succeed against a competitor harnessing the maximizing mechanisms of evolution?
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 releaseof skills and talentsalready 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.
