Your Biology-Driven Purpose

Purpose

Excerpt from Savanting: Outperforming your Potential Chapter 24 by Lauren Holmes

Each person comes into this world with a specific destiny – he has something to fulfill, some message has to be delivered, some work has to be completed.  You are not here accidentally – you are here meaningfully.  There is a purpose behind you.  The whole intends to do something through you.               Osho

So many have an emptiness that causes them to yearn for more SAVANTING: Outperforming your Potential meaning, purpose, and mission in their lives.  They feel purpose is the key to a plethora of desirable psychological, physical, material, and emotional rewards that they crave from their core. 

In fact, this need is so widespread that one could assume that it is genetic.  And it would be understandable why evolution might select for such a yearning to pull us to protect, adapt, and advance the species.

The methods currently popular for discovering one’s purpose are rather haphazard – yielding imperfect, incorrect, temporary, SAVANTING AUDIOBOOKburdensome, or unsustainable directions.  Savanting more precisely satisfies this craving for the desired emotional state of having purpose.  Instead of having to rely on human intelligence to determine one’s purpose, savanting conscripts nature’s intelligence.  Our purpose and even the need for a purpose are biology-driven. 

SAVANTING’S BIOLOGY-DRIVEN PURPOSE

Biology is used in savanting not only to identify your purpose but also to drive it, evolve it, and adapt it throughout your life as you grow and as your context progresses.  The bioflow tells you when you are on purpose and maximized within your savant domain by responding with support. 

Biological mechanisms which have evolved over generations as part of our biological imperative determine what we now label “our purpose.”  It need not be the confusing intellectual exercise that so many seekers endure to find meaning in their lives. 

In addition, most popular methods for defining one’s purpose yield a goal-driven approach – a mission that you must achieve even if you dislike what you have to do to get there.  Savanting instead provides a state-driven approach.  It addresses the real goal – sustainably generating the fulfilling state of being that you are craving.  This is the underlying driver of the careers of our six superachievers.

This state is achieved and sustained by doing the most meaningful, intrinsically rewarding activities at your biological maximum with continuity.  Each of these activities build on each other throughout your lifetime until your legacy becomes significant worldchanging work.  You live your purpose rather than know where it will lead.  You have the “emotion of purpose” every day in savantflow as you scale frontier after frontier within your savant domain. 

Savanting provides the means to sustain a state of peak-purpose, peak-meaning, peak-growth, peak-performance, peak-achievement, and peak-creation in the territory of your greatest talents and passion.  It is the guidance system so many of us seek to keep us on-path throughout our lives. 

Your ideal “purpose” then would be the same as your savant formula.  It would have you operating at your biological maximum so that you can apply your strongest most rewarding talents to the most meaningful, intrinsically rewarding activities for an audience that will value this, your greatest work.  Add to this formula the support of the bioflow to help you outperform your innate potential and you have the only logical foundation upon which to build your life’s work. 

Now that you know about the bioflow, do you really want to risk committing to a life purpose which requires you to fight continuously upstream against its direction?  The advantage of savanting for identifying and implementing your purpose is that your pathway, at any point in your life, will be clear. 

There will be clear signals inside and outside of you when you are moving in the right direction.  The ideal path for your maximization can be determined at any point based on the empirical evidence of bioflow support in your past which will predict future bioflow support and hence your ideal direction.  You are guided. 

Even nonvisionaries can operate as if they have a vision of the future because they are guided by the evolutionary flow of humanity.  Even the execution-challenged may operate with the genius of execution creatives such as the four founders of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple.  Even noncreatives may generate the new and unprecedented. 

You are supported.  You have relevant information at the right time from the bioflow for a re-combining process which will produce new information systems to advance your savant domain.  You will enjoy coincidence after coincidence catapulting you ahead to a goal which may be better than the one you pursued when you started. 

How helpful is it to have a guidance system which is up to date with all the new inventions, innovations, and events in your savant domain despite you not knowing about any of them?  You will have a better chance of achieving your purpose when you go with the flow.  One’s savant formula provides a new more reliable way for determining one’s purpose and living it. 

DETERMINING YOUR BIOLOGY-DRIVEN PURPOSE

To launch your biology-driven purpose, you need only to begin doing activities or pursuing learning that you are passionate about which will put you into a savantflow.  How do you know which activities are likely to invoke savantflows?  There are two ways to predict these.  

First, activities which provoked savantflows in your past will likely generate savantflows in your future.  Savantflows will have the telltale signs of support from the bioflow.  The savantflows will conform to a pattern or theme over time.  Your life purpose and your savant domain will emerge from that order. 

Savantflows are high-growth states.  Your purpose is going to evolve with serial savantflows as you do.  The “emotional feel of being on purpose” will provide you with better direction indicators than trying to apply labels to define and pursue your purpose. 

Eventually, you’ll be able to look back with 20:20 hindsight and see how your biological wiring in partnership with the bioflow has perfectly advanced you along a logical pathway that defines an identifiable purpose.  Then you can project that purpose into the future to accelerate your progression. 

The second way in which you can predictably determine which activities are likely to generate the savantflows defining your purpose is through other themes of activities supported by the bioflow in your past.  You can identify the direction of your purpose from any of several interchangeable themes or patterns of events in your past because they are all leading you to the same place.  Biological maximization.

Your unpaid work theme, your knowledge-pursuit theme, your creativity-pursuit theme, your frontier-pursuit theme, or the theme of activities that triggered relevant spontaneous knowledge, clusters of coincidences, or spontaneous creativity.  Each one of these themes will identify your biology-driven purpose. 

Just begin.  Find safe places, projects, or activities to begin the process.  The block and flow events in your reality will tell you whether you are going in the direction supported by the bioflow for your purpose.  You’ll have all the distinct telltale signs to confirm that you’re moving along your purpose path.  You’ll be attracting people, events, and information into your life routinely which will feed and facilitate the advance of your purpose. 

An intrinsically rewarding purpose

I want to reiterate a concept in the context of this discussion of biology-driven purpose.  The activities that are part of your purpose will be intrinsically rewarding.  This is not about doing activities you are excited about to achieve a particular goal.  “Intrinsically rewarding” or “biologically rewarding” mean that the activity itself is the goal. 

Think of our six superachievers.  Their childhood play became their adult paid play in the savant domain in which they became famous.  Their careers were biologically not intellectually driven.  So many seekers never find their purpose because this singular requirement was never met.  Instead of concentrating their time on intrinsically rewarding activities and letting a purpose-related context unfold, they instead sought a goal and took action – often unpleasant action – to achieve that goal. 

Your lifework may lie in a field which does not yet exist.  Or there may be a channel from which to launch it which never occurred to you.  There may be coincidences which can save you hundreds of steps to accelerate your start.  There may be a few models for how to proceed which, when you combine them together will lead to a worldchanging, paradigm-shifting breakthrough. 

Begin with what you know to try to trigger engaging addictive, emotionally rewarding savantflows.  What feels good; what you are passionate about; what is meaningful; what is fun; and so on.  When you discover your purpose, it will rely on work that is its own reward.  You cannot enter savantflow without this. 

Accordingly, it is also important not to choose work that you think will get you to the intrinsically rewarding work or place that you want to be.  This is contrary to the biological functioning and benefits of savanting.  You’ll have none of the magic working for you.

Wholeness through Awe

AWE AND WHOLENESS

A byproduct of Savanting

Excerpt from Savanting: Outperforming your Potential, Chapter 23 by Lauren Holmes (2019)

Not only do self-actualization and self-transcendence emerge from the savantflows driving savanting, but so too does another oft-pursued goal – “awe.”  This is the emotion which attracts so many to religious and spiritual organizations.  It even draws extraterrestrial believers to the UFO “religion.”

SAVANTING: Outperforming your PotentialAwe is a powerfully addictive emotion.  Awe experiences are innately self-transcendent.  They shift our attention away from ourselves.  They make us feel as if we are part of something greater than ourselves.  They make us more generous toward others.

SAVANTING AUDIOBOOK
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The 2003 paper of Keltner and Haidt,[i] “Approaching Awe – A Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” identifies studies which show that awe is often accompanied by feelings of self-diminishment and increased connectedness with other people.  Experiencing awe often puts people in a self-transcendent state where they focus less on themselves and more on being part of a larger whole.

In this way, awe is both an altered state of consciousness and an emotional state.  As such, it is akin to flow state.[ii]  In fact, awe is a component of the addictive draw of flow.

Shiota et al. (2007) define awe as “an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that overwhelm current mental structures yet facilitate attempts at accommodation.”

Awe is one of the very rare emotions that turn our minds outwards rather than inwards. The experience of awe entices us to transcend the boundaries of our individual self.  We are drawn outside of ourselves to wonder at phenomena in the natural world, the noble actions of others, or the genius of creativity.  Our daily concerns and ingrained expectations of life are revised as a result.

Another consequence of the “diminished sense of self” spawned by awe is an enhanced awareness of being part of something infinitely larger and more universal.  Shiota et al. (2007) report that those asked to re-live an awe-inspiring moment revealed pronounced feelings of love, connectedness to the world around them, rapture, contentment, awareness of something greater than the self, a lack of awareness of everyday concerns, and a desire to prolong the emotional state for as long as possible.[iii]

Awe is a compelling part of the beneficial addiction to the savant-inspired protocol once you start advancing your savant domain.  Think of the emotional highs in a productive savantflow, when you are achieving at your maximum and elements of your reality generated by the bioflow are helping you every step of the way.

Imagine getting the exact information you need when you need it to achieve a goal.  Or a model that will show you how to get what you want.  Or clusters of coincidences catapulting you ahead – each one a magical mystical experience.  Imagine the emotional highs of breakthroughs and epiphanies creating unprecedented futures.

This is the stuff of a life of miracles.  Awe will become a frequent feature of living the savanting modus operandi.  Imagine looking back across major creations and inventions in your savant domain, especially if you’ve been a nonperformer before savanting.  Then imagine that you achieved all of that through play not work.  Imagine how the world would be different because you lived and left your footprint.

WHOLENESS FOR THE DAMAGED

One of the most frequently mentioned dimensions of the flow experience is that, while it lasts, one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Happiness[i]

One of the most frequently mentioned dimensions of the flow experience is that, while it lasts, one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life.

Respite and self-transcendence

Awe is a sought-after emotional goal for everyone, but it is heavenly for “the damaged.”  I want to encourage those who think themselves too damaged from abuse, trauma, or psychological or physical limitations to pursue self-actualization, self-transcendence, and worldchanging goals to switch to the savanting modus operandi.

There are no negative emotions experienced during savantflows.  Imagine the hours, days, and years of relief that those tormented by looping negative thoughts or addictions might have.  If you want an escape from the noise in your head holding you back, savanting creates a place where innate drives and biochemical rewards can pull you to do your greatest work.

As the beneficial addiction to advance one’s savant domain takes hold, lives that might otherwise have been wasted through psychological issues and complications will be pulled to achieve great meaning and contribution.

Savanting may be a most unexpectedly profound psychological solution.  It is a step beyond Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy based on “our will to meaning.”  Savanting addresses “our will to meaning” and “our will to creativity, creation, invention, innovation,” and “our need to contribute” as an integrated process.

Repair

But more than relief, serial savantflows may be able to correct the problems of the damaged so they can become whole.  Savantflows provide some extremely positive emotional, spiritual, and even mystical experiences that are rejuvenating.

Damaged individuals may thrive in savantflows where their damage either doesn’t exist or is not invoked.  And, over months and years devoid of re-damaging cycles, the hold of old noise in one’s head will dissipate.  It will be overwritten by new more positive habits and thoughts.

In addition, activities triggering savantflows are often ones which creatively express, reinforce, and nourish one’s essence.  These often lead to experiencing self-sufficient, sustainable self-love – often the missing ingredient that resulted in the damage in the first place.

While there are no studies specifically investigating savantflows, there are flow studies which reinforce these findings.  There was a 2009 study conducted on Japanese students by Kiyoshi Asakawa at the Department of Intercultural Communication at Hosei University Chiyoda-ku in Tokyo, Japan.

The study found that those who experienced flow more often were more likely to have higher levels of self-esteem, Jujitsu-kan (a sense of fulfillment), life satisfaction, better coping strategies, and lower anxiety.[v]

If you’re in therapy to deal with your lack of fulfillment, even ordinary flows may be an alternate way to achieve this goal.  As one’s time in savantflows increases and significant projects start to define one’s savant domain, positive emotions will emerge around self-love, self-esteem, self-respect, self-confidence, and a strengthened identity and purpose.  Sustainable happiness is possible from accelerated and amplified achievement and the increased creativity of savantflows.

Those damaged by deprivation or interference with this critical suite of emotions can be made whole.  This is just one more way in which human biology has been designed to be self-correcting.  Evolution would of course have built a powerful constellation of positive and compelling emotions into Man’s maximum to entice repeated reentry to savantflows?

The damaged may still reveal their flaws in other arenas of their lives.  However, if they can concentrate their lives on activities which generate savantflow and integration with the bioflow, their damage will not be triggered.  They’ll be pulled towards forums for their art that invoke savantflows where negative emotions are replaced with emotional highs.

Addiction

If substance addictions are biology-based, then invoking the different biological pathways inherent in savanting may lessen or eliminate their pull.  If substance abuse is a way to avoid emptiness, then the meaningful work in savantflows will offer an alternate route.  Evolution has ensured that we have many drives and biochemical draws to keep us pursuing a savantflow way of life.  Over time, they may become the substance of choice for addicts.

[i]     Keltner and Haidt (2003), “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion,” in Cognition and Emotion, 2003, 17 (2), 297-314

[ii]     Keltner, D. J., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion.  Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297

[iii]     The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept by Michelle N. Shiota and Dacher Keltner, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA and Amanda Mossman, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group, Cognition and Emotion 2007, 21 (5), 944-963.  Also https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/dacherkeltner/docs/shiota.2007.pdf 4-6-1

[iv]     Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness 1992, Ebury Publishing, November 15, 2013

[v]     Kiyoshi Asakawa, Flow Experience, Culture, and Well-being: How Do Autotelic Japanese College Students Feel, Behave, and Think in Their Daily Lives?, Journal of Happiness Studies, April 2010, Volume 11, Issue 2, pp 205–223 |Department of Intercultural Communication, Hosei University Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan, Research Paper, First Online: 04 January 2009, K. J. Asakawa, Happiness Stud (2010) 11: 205.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-008-9132-3 http://www.springerlink.com/content/xl76g47386275241/

https://link.springer.com/journal/10902/11/2/page/1

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10902-008-9132-3#citeas

 

Coach-Client Co-Evolution

Seeing Multiple WorldsHave you experienced it?

Many coaches, in their moments of inspiration, have given profound advice to their clients which was exactly the advice they needed for their own lives.  I will tell you why I think this happens.  I will also hint at how you may selfishly cultivate this handy synergy to accelerate your own problem-solving and growth while giving great coaching.BIOMAXED

However, I want to hear from other coaches, mentors, leaders or parents:  Have you ever experienced symbiotic growth with your ‘coachees’ through your own insightful coaching?

MY PERSPECTIVE

Here are the why and how hints that I promised.  I am a biological anthropologist specializing in career and talent maximization.  As such, I am biased towards analyzing how internal and external biological factors influence our nature, behavior, and culture.

I routinely re-integrate clients back into the biological machinery that adapts, evolves, and maximizes us for survival.  By extending their capabilities with adaptive biological mechanisms, processes, and systems, clients are able to achieve beyond their potential.  They are able to achieve bigger goals better and faster.  They are able to penetrate new territories or bring unprecedented creations into existence more quickly, safely, and effectively because that is built into nature’s adaptation process.

EXPLOIT NATURE’S SELF-ORGANIZING
FOR SYNERGY AND SURVIVAL

Biological systems self-order for improved survival.  Translation:  Nature is a good librarian and CEO.  It groups all living systems into their most advantageous proximity for information-sharing to solve adaptation challenges.  This ordering includes coaches, clients, and solutions.  After all, we too are just information systems.

Rather than being separate entities, we are all elements of a single dynamic information matrix or database.  This database is really just a single integrated flow of living systems continuously re-ordering and synchronizing for synergy to ensure their mutual survival.

SOURCE THE RIGHT CLIENT AT THE RIGHT TIME?

Any assumed separation between coach and client then is cultural not biological.  The events in either life inform the other when one releases to nature’s adaptive self-ordering process.  When one complies, one is ushered to the right client at the right time to source the information to adapt or advance both coach and client.  Has anyone experienced this?

CLIENT CLUSTERING?

As a natural extension then, going with this adaptive flow actually causes a clustering of clients to provide the information required to adapt or maximize the coach’s system and each other.  Needless to say, this clustering is wonderfully efficient from a business and growth perspective.  A coach will be orchestrated to deal with the many sides of a personal growth issue across a multitude of clients if necessary until his/her own system has the information required next to correct, adapt, or advance.

ACCESS MORE COACHING INSIGHTS

What does this single ordered information matrix mean for your coaching?  There will be patterns of events or information groupings across your life and indeed the lives of all of your clients that are relevant to the maximization of any person in the cluster.  More information means you have better advice, strategies, and insights for your client.  This is very advantageous when there is a multitude of unknowns with which to deal.

These event patterns provide a wealth of new information to make a coach more effective, more insightful, more inspired, more ingenious.  Profound and perhaps life-changing coaching may result.

YOUR EXPERIENCE?

Now it’s your turn.  What is your experience of these phenomena or absence thereof?  Has seeming serendipity ever crept into your coaching?

Leaders Frontier

Frontiering  is  the  new  Leadership

The person who can ‘frontier’
will always lead

Excerpt from BioMaxed, Chapter 39, (2019) by Lauren Holmes

Most people are fearful of venturing into the unknown.  Yet a world of accelerating change is now the norm.  We are increasingly BIOMAXEDbombarded with unknowns.  We look to our leaders to buffer us from their assault.  We expect our leaders to get us through safely, quickly, efficiently, and painlessly.

The person with the expertise for penetrating the unknown will always be the leader.  This will be true whether or not that person has all of the wonderful capabilities promoted by today’s leadership pundits.  And it will be increasingly true as the unknowns continue to multiply.

WHAT IS FRONTIERING?

Penetrate the unknown and Create the unknown

Frontiering™ is a term I coined to label finesse in scaling new frontiers.  It encompasses expertise for quickly, safely, and expertly
(a) penetrating new or unknown territory or
(b) creatively bringing the new or unknown into existence.
Frontiering™ is the drive to fearlessly forge futures in the face of the unknown and the unknowable.  Frontiering™ expertise equips us to transcend and triumph over unknowns of every specification.

Frontiering is the new leadership

Frontiering™ will become the new leadership.  In fact, I would like to suggest that there will be no leadership without frontiering?  As change continues to accelerate to become the status quo, frontiering™ will quickly exceed leadership as the most prized skill.  The demand for all of us to take risks, to venturesome, to adapt in the face of novel challenges, and to become opportunistic and innovative will rise.  The ability to thrive in and exploit unknown frontiers will become the most sought-after skillset of this millennium:

 Frontiering acumen will determine competitive advantage. Frontiering will determine the next generation of winners and losers, individually and corporately.

A 2014 redefinition of leadership

Over the decades of the evolution of the concept of leadership, there have been a plethora of definitions for “leader” and “manager.”  These past stages of evolution dilute and color today’s understandings.  Clarity for the target expertise has dissipated.  Frontiering expertise provides an easy differentiator.

Managers manage what exists.  Leaders bring the new into existence.  Managers run existing organizations and territories.  Leaders penetrate new territories. Leaders advance, transform, and create new human systems.  Leaders lead people into new territories or bring new systems into existence.

If you are simply repeating what was done before, leadership is not required. If there is no change in reality, leadership has not occurred. The magnitude of change in reality is the measure of leadership strength. Therefore, the degree of frontiering is the measure of leadership impact.

The new development continuum

As the below figure indicates, the growth in frontiering expertise defines the development continuum from manager to leader. A leadership development continuum emerges based on the degree of frontiering applied. The frontiering-based leadership development continuum will progress from

1       a manager running an existing organization, to

2    a transitional change leader adding linear advancement to the organization, to

3      a transformational change leader adding nonlinear change to an organization, to

4       those leaders who have mastered the unknown, either a creational leader or a frontiering leader or both. Respectively, these individuals either (a) bring the new and unknown into existence or (b) penetrate new or unknown territory.

LEADERSHIP and FRONTIERING DEVELOPMENT CONTINUUM
LEADERSHIP and FRONTIERING DEVELOPMENT CONTINUUM

This leadership-skill development continuum is identical to the process for growing individuals into frontiering experts.  The definition for leader and frontiering expert is therefore the same. There is no need for leadership if you are standing still.

Secondly, the above continuum also demonstrates another dimension to the progression from manager to leader.  Creativity.  Systems maintenance for which no change is made, gives way to increasing systems advancement in which linear then nonlinear changes are made.  And finally, one progresses to systems creation – usually by re-combining existing systems to create new systems.

Thirdly, as managers advance along the leadership development continuum, their ability to impact and advance reality increases.  The ability to change reality is dependent upon the ability to change beliefs.  The greater the change in reality required, the greater the commensurate change in follower beliefs that the leader must instill.

Mark the birth of the new definition

I propose we draw a line in the sand to release all past definitions of leader and manager in favor of this 2014 clarity and necessity.  The person penetrating the unknown with passion, expertise and, yes, especially addiction, will always be the leader.

Reactivate innate frontiering

The exciting news is that, as a successful species, human beings are born with frontiering drives and skills.  In childhood, we are all in a perpetual state of frontiering to learn everything that we must in order to survive and integrate successfully into a complex and ever-advancing world.  Most children experience surprising success in facing, negotiating, mitigating, and surmounting a deluge of unknowns in their first five years of life.

Unfortunately, our cultures and institutions curtail the development of our innate frontiering drives and expertise by pressuring us into more linear and logical modes of operation.  Most children begin to find it unsafe to frontier once they enter the school system around the age of five.  Our cultures make unsafe the trial-and-error required to succeed in new territory, for example.  Failure means you are a failure, not the frontiering expert who will bring new knowledge, experience, and expertise to the next trial and the next and the next.

Secondly, the pressure to use linear procedures that seldom work in novel situations is another example of cultural interference.  The widespread pressure to adhere to linear business plans and project plans are illustrations.  Thirdly, sensationalizing media punish rather than support frontiering™ missions which fail.  Consequently, millions of dollars must be wasted on making experiments and forays into the unknown guaranteed to be successful before they are begun.

If it were not for the fear of public censure, quick, inexpensive experiments which might fail could accelerate progress.  Members of the scientific community are allowed often hundreds of opportunities to fail as they scale new frontiers.  The CEO of a publicly-held company may discover that one failure is often his or her last.

As a successful species, mechanisms have evolved which favor and promote frontiering. These include addictive drives pulling us into new territory and creation – the essence of agile adaptivity.  The more you comply with these drives, the more you want to comply in the future.

Consequently, we need only increase our daily frontiering activity to launch a frontiering way of life. There are biological mechanisms to perpetuate and increase one’s addiction to frontiering.  Voilà!  Both the leadership and innovation shortages are solved in an entirely unprecedented way.

  • Could the human race not decide to revise our cultures to free frontiering in everyone?
  • What could we accomplish if everyone reactivated the innate frontiering expertise we demonstrated in childhood?

Perhaps this cultural conversion will begin with the pressures of corporate competition.  Those companies which choose to make frontiering™ safe for their employees will undoubtedly prevail in the future. Career success will continue to favor those who scale new frontiers.  If we examine the most successful careers, it is apparent that frontiering already exceeds leadership as the most sought-after aptitude, expertise, and skillset.  Yet they are one and the same:

“Leadership for this millennium is defined by frontiering.
Leadership is now, by definition, frontiering.”  Lauren Holmes

The New Corporate Maximums

BIOLOGY – The Competitive Advantage no one Foresaw

Corporate Best Practices RevolutionizedBIOMAXED
System Integrity Honored
New Change Management Best Practices
New Project Management Best Practices
Leadership and Leadership Development
Leadership and Frontiering Development Continuum

Snapshot of a maximized individual in action             One human-develop continuum             Corporate best practices merge into one process            Maximizing and synchronizing              The learning organization           Borrowed creativity and innovativeness           Individual integrity honored: centered on core strengths            Company integrity honored          Competitive breakthrough           Growth honors systems integrity           Customer system integrity honored            Outsourcing, suppliers, and partners           Business web integrity honored          Product development for system unification            Overcoming change resistance           Quantum leaps for faster, bigger change with reduced risk           Change accelerated by clusters of coincidences

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 New Corporate Best Practicessnapshot 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 twelve Sourcing-Your-Savant exercises 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 extended potential. 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.

One Development Continuum for all Human SystemsFigure 2 ©1995 Lauren Holmes

Corporate best practices merge into one process

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.Cultural interference with creativity, frontiering, and adaptivity

Figure 3 ©1995 Lauren Holmes

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 extended potential. 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. New Corporate Best Practices: Capitalize on our natural growth path

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-talent flow 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-Savant exercises 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-talent flow 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.

Leadership and Frontiering Development Continuum

LEADERSHIP and FRONTIERING DEVELOPMENT CONTINUUM
. . . . . . . . . . . . . Figure 4 ©1995 Lauren Holmes

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.

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

 

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

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

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

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

The Pull of Paid PlayApple Steve Jobs Career Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Triggering of Cascading Functionality Upgrades

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

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

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

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

Performance beyond your Potential

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

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

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

An upgraded modus operandi for the Everyman

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

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

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

Career Must-Haves II

THE NEW CAREER MAXIMUMS

–   Part Two – Have you settled for too little?

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

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

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

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

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

BREAKTHROUGH SYNTHESIS

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

Brilliant breakthroughs

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

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

Biological breakthrough synthesis

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

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

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

Flow is our internal breakthrough synthesis

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

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

Growth internally / Creativity externally

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

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

Exploit maximization-linked coincidences

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

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

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

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

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

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

These coincidences are not psychological or RAS events

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

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

THE SCIENCE BEHIND BREAKTHROUGH SYNTHESIS

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

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

MASS SYNCHRONIZATION: Trend creation and exploitation 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROFIT FROM THE PREDICTABILITY
OF THE MAXIMIZING PROCESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

EMBRACE THE NEW CAREER MAXIMUMS

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

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

The biologically maximized career

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

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

Serial top-talent flows or serial internal maximizations

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

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

Serial breakthrough synthesis or serial information creation or serial frontiering™

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

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

Brilliant breakthroughs for the ungifted?

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

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

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

Breakthrough synthesis redefines leading?

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

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

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

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

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

Relevant biological processes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relevant scientific definitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploit maximization-linked coincidences

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

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

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

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

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

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

These coincidences are not psychological or RAS events

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

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

Career Must-Haves I

THE NEW CAREER MAXIMUMS   

–   Part One – Have you settled for too little?

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT IS YOUR CAREER MAXIMUM?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your biological career potential?

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

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

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

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

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

Exploit biological maximizing for a career beyond your innate potential

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flashes of genius and sudden savantism

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

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

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

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

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

Whole-Brain Savantism

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “Eureka!” or “Aha!” effect

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

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

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

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

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

Flow maximizes instantly

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

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

Your maximum flow: top-talent flow

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

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

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

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

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

Sudden savantism through top-talent flow

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

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

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

Growth through top-talent flow

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

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

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

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

New meta-skills from extensive top-talent flow experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUR NATURAL GROWTH PATH

Accelerating Growth

Growth Acceleration

Excerpt from Peak Evolution:
Beyond Peak Performance and Peak Experience , Chapter 15 (2001/2010) by Lauren Holmes

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”                                    Alan Cohen

Growth is the success skill of the new millennium. Our world is changing at an accelerating pace. Those who wish to survive and Peak Evolution: Beyond Peak Performance and Peak Experiencethrive must excel at the art of growth. With growth expertise will come growth safety and proficiency. Because of our natural drives, if growth is safe, we will want to do it all the time.

If we commit to growth as a way of life, as a raison d’être, eventually there will come a point of no return where we will become benevolently addicted to growth. We are so designed for growth that once we become growth experts we will become growth addicts. Growth is exhilarating when you know how to do it.

Nature is the expert in growth and adapting to change. Rather than trying to duplicate nature’s expertise, the smart strategy is to partner with nature. The Optimizers give us the means to do this. When we harness natural forces through the peak evolution science, we can achieve unforeseen rates of growth as a way of life. The growth technology promotes a powerful and profound way of being and becoming in partnership with nature.

It is my hope that by making you consciously aware of the naturality flow and enticing you to reintegrate into it, you will get to the point where no conscious effort is required for growth and peak performance.

The analogy I like to use is one of learning to drive. Initially, there seems to be all too many things to remember and too many stimuli competing for our attention. Over time, however, the whole process of driving becomes natural, automatic and unconscious. That is our goal for your future modus operandi – automatic growth and automatic creation in unconscious compliance with nature’s Optimizer signals and your naturality.

My perception of the evolved human being is based on accelerated cycles of self-creation, creation, self-creation, creation, self-creation, and so on in perpetuity. Alternatively, you can think of this iterative process as self-growth, creation-growth, and so on. We grow ourselves and then our creations grow by reflection. The pursuit of more significant creations is the impetus for growth. The process of striving to create better realities grows us. Growth, then, has a single focus and that focus orders our lives.

Isn’t the real focus of existing in the dimension we do to create at our maximum potential and evolve in the process? We want to achieve our greatest legacy through our greatest capability. More than this outcome, we want to sustain peak creation as the ultimate expression of ourselves.

The experience of growth-creation flow, with its built-in peak performance and peak evolution, is the ultimate state of human existence. The stretch required for the pursuit of meaningful creations invokes flow at the deepest levels and flow is a growth state. New growth is the byproduct of creation and new creation is the byproduct of growth.

Growth is a change in beliefs. Beliefs are information storage units in our system. Growth means the information held in our systems has changed. In a belief-created reality, our realities will change as our beliefs change. If our realities haven’t changed, we could not have changed our beliefs and no growth has occurred. To grow our reality creations, we must grow ourselves. We must hold new information that sends different instructions to reality.

GROWTH IN THE NATURALITY PARADIGM

“Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.”43                              C. S. Lewis

“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.”44                                Henry Miller

Human growth is a process of developing, maturing, increasing, advancing, and strengthening. Physical and psychological growth is well documented. We also have good evidence of how we evolved to our current physical and cultural state. Our understanding of future evolutionary growth of individuals, however, is still emerging. This perspective can instruct on a modus operandi for living that will generate our highest emotional states, our highest levels of performance, our greatest contributions, and our greatest rewards.

In the naturality paradigm, evolutionary growth is the process of continuous re-optimization that is required as a result of interacting with co-evolving systems in our context. Creativity in one system changes the environment of another system requiring it to re-optimize. As such, growth entails the creative resolution of optimization challenges.

Growth is advantageous, adaptive change where an improved level of functioning is sustained. It is the process of continuous adaptation to our changing world. Consequently, there is no arrival at a final end state. Our growth expertise is defined by the degree of adaptiveness of our personal system. The growth technology dramatically increases both the quality and speed of our adaptivity.

Science routinely discovers new hierarchies of order out of chaos. There is an underlying dynamic order that exists throughout the universe and, by token of us being part of nature, within every one of us.

The growth technology, as with all the peak evolution science technologies, capitalizes on this universal optimizing dynamic, the naturality flow. Nature is the expert for re-optimizing or growing us. Consequently, we don’t have to go through a major learning curve to become growth experts. We just need to learn to partner with this optimizing dynamic as identified by the ten Optimizers.

Evolutionary growth in the naturality paradigm is achieved by aligning with the optimizing forces of nature. These forces are relentlessly re-adjusting interacting systems for optimal performance in reaction to changes within any or all of their co-evolving systems. Because we are designed for re-integration into the naturality flow, we can expect to be benevolently addicted to this flow. We come equipped with natural drives to draw us into this flow and emotional highs to keep us there. Our cultures have simply interfered with this process.

In the naturality paradigm, growth and re-optimization to environmental changes are always in the direction of naturality. Growth is towards increasing expressions of our naturality. Think of the expression of the “true you” expanding by concentric circles around your authentic core. This is our natural growth path. It is not linear.

Natural forces are perpetually acting on us to push us to intensify our expression. We do not need to have conscious control of it. We can simply action the messages of the ten Optimizers. Growth then can be defined as the amplification of an individual’s true innate identity. Growth is measured by the creative expressions of that natural identity . . . . our reality creations.

Progression along our natural growth path is really a process of locking new and stronger beliefs into our system. Growth is about changing our belief structure. Beliefs are information storage units in our system. Growth, then, changes the information structure of our system.

Therefore, without belief changes, no growth has occurred. In a paradigm in which beliefs create reality, new beliefs mean reality will change. Therefore, if there is no corresponding change in reality, can we really say that growth has occurred? The degree of improvement of the adaptivity of the new reality over the old reality is the measure of our growth at any point in time.

    The purpose of growth, then, is to enable us to create the next reality we want to bring into existence, the next expression of our natural identity. Growth is an iterative process of self-growth and creation-growth. If we are happy with our current reality, there would be no need for growth.

However, human beings are not designed to maintain the same emotional highs from the same stimuli. Unfortunately, we adapt to them. We need new stimuli to sustain the same positive emotions. We are designed to grow, learn and create new things. Therefore, the requirement for growth is perpetual. In addition, because of the interaction of multiple creative systems, our capability for sustaining a reality over time isn’t possible. Change is a constant.

The growth process then is really to define our next desired creation and become the person who has accomplished that creation. When the creation comes into existence, it will then reinforce our new state of evolution. Self-creation. Creation. Self-creation. Creation.

There is no growth without the expression of that growth out into reality. A change of beliefs creates a change in reality. We grow and create in the same direction, since growth and creation are two sides of the same coin. As you change your beliefs, reality is automatically changed.

GROWTH DIRECTION

Choosing the right growth direction can accelerate growth. The direction for every aspect of the technologies presented in this book is identical. Successful growth projects will move in the same direction as successful pathfinding and reality creation projects. The formulas for experiencing spontaneous knowledge, flow, and growth are not only consistent but identical. To maximize our potential, we must move with nature in the direction of the naturality flow.

The dissection of our ideal re-integration with nature’s optimizing flow into the knowledge technology, the reality creation technology, the growth technology, the pathfinding technology, the reality design technology, and the quantum leap technology is artificial. It is just a means to perfect each of the components that will allow us to transition into the naturality paradigm to operate proficiently in the way we have evolved to function.

Growth is a continuous process of adaptation to our environment. The peak evolution science is a means to transition back to our highest form of creative adaptiveness for peak performance and peak evolution. Let’s examine the direction of growth so we can remain focused and strategic in our efforts.

Move with the Naturality Flow

If we can grow in the direction nature is trying to evolve us, growth will be easier and more efficient. We will be moving with nature rather than fighting it. A multitude of natural processes and mechanisms will facilitate our progress rather than interfering with it. If we know nature’s growth goals for us, we can go directly to them. This is more advantageous than meandering through disconnected growth events without getting their cumulative effect. Where possible, we would want to minimize disconcerting transition states and instead move from one stable state to the next. In other words, we would rather quantum leap than transition gradually. This becomes easier when we know where we are going.

If we want to accelerate our growth, all we need do is identify the naturality flow by the ten Optimizers indicating its direction and move with that flow rather than fighting it. In fact, it might be more strategic to become proactive in accelerating ourselves in the direction supported by nature.

Coincidences, flow events, quantum leaps, and spontaneous knowledge events will abound. We will experience the peak performance and peak experience of flow. Emotional highs will optimize and energize us. Because we exist in pure naturality in flow, adaptive realities will automatically be created by reflection. Whatever is needed next will appear by a series of coincidences reflective of the precision of our instructions to a belief-created reality.

Short term, systems want to operate at their peak efficiency to meet their needs. Long term, systems want to survive. You will notice, through the Optimizers, nature taking both aspects into consideration before supporting any changes to our system.

With 20/20 hindsight, it will become apparent that nature has much more information than we do from which to choose directions of growth. That information leads to additional options and creativity unavailable to us.

Until our consciousnesses are expanded enough to see how everything interconnects, we can rely on the ten Optimizers to flag our ideal growth direction based on nature’s greater intelligence and knowledge.

Growth is about constantly adapting to a changing context. With pressure from nature, our system will be trying to re-optimize every time something changes. Interacting systems which are also constantly using creativity to resolve optimization challenges must constantly re-adapt to each other. All of the systems then are progressing. They are growing and changing.

Therefore, for our system to remain at its peak, we will always have to keep pace with systems relevant to our survival. Our system must co-evolve. Again, the ten Optimizers will reflect nature’s greater knowledge of what’s happening in all of our surrounding systems. They will point us in the ideal direction for growth.

With each creative resolution of an optimization challenge in any interacting system, the whole context advances. Re-optimization then has both a short-term aspect and a long-term aspect. Short term, your system might just adjust to come back into balance and optimal performance given a single change within your context. However, that short-term change is ideally made in such a way that the long-term fitness of your system is increased or maintained.

We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing  inconsistent with our past selves.45          Havelock Ellis

Let’s think like nature for a moment. “Fitness” indicates a system’s ability to keep as many options open as possible to adapt to future environmental changes. Fitness then is the means to ensure the long-term viability of a system. Therefore, fitness is the way we will keep our system safe and thriving. Whenever nature is resolving an optimization challenge to our system through growth, fitness will be a consideration.

When operating in a shared context, an improvement in the “fitness” of one system will lead to it having an advantage over competing systems. Therefore, continuing development is a must just to maintain a system’s “fitness” relative to the rest of the systems it’s co-evolving and competing with. This concept is called The Red Queen Principle and it was proposed by the evolutionary biologist L. van Valen (1973).

The Red Queen Principle is based on the observation to Alice by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” that “in this place it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.3    Ideally then, we will want to keep pace with the rest of the human race.

Therefore, re-optimization is a never-ending process both short term and with respect to the long-term increase of the fitness of our systems which enable us to co-evolve with the supporting and competing systems within our context. Not only does our system have to adapt and adjust to each system we bump into, our system also has to progress with the rest of the systems in order to ensure our needs are met. If growth is re-optimization, then growth is with us forever and we will want to become expert at it.

Only Two Directions of Growth

Let’s translate the direction of the naturality flow into practical, actionable terms. There are only two major directions we need to be concerned about with respect to growing in the direction of nature’s flow. The first is the removal of interferences to naturality (Growth Direction I).

The second is the continuous augmentation of the expression of the authentic nature of our system (Growth Direction II). Everything needed to comply with these two directions is presented in this book.

Specifically, this includes the ten Optimizers and the peak evolution science: the knowledge technology, the reality creation technology, the growth technology, and their subsets, the pathfinding technology, the reality design technology, and, finally, the quantum leap technology you will learn about in the next chapter. The ten Optimizers help us identify the naturality flow for both the expansion of our naturality and the clearing of interferences.

Growth along our path of optimization around our authentic identity is a given. If nothing else, we have only to get out of nature’s way and it will happen. That means we have to stop fighting nature – trying to go in a different direction than what the messages are indicating. In fact, by honoring nature’s messages, we can accelerate this inevitable natural growth process.

GROWTH DIRECTION I: Clearing Interferences to Naturality

Our self-created reality is a phenomenal tool for helping us to clear the maladaptive beliefs interfering with our expanding naturality. In the Reclaim Your Reality chapter of the reality creation technology’s De-Create Undesirable Realities section, we learned that nature is very systematic about clearing one disruptive belief after the next. This clearing is prioritized based on the threat each belief is to either being able to operate with naturality and/or to the achievement of our current emotional goals.

A cluster of events reflective of the dysfunctional belief will emerge in our reality with increasing strength and number until it is cleared. Take an inventory of past events to see this incredible orderliness in action in your own life. This needs to be seen to be believed. This is obviously a growth direction we want to not only comply with but to proactively assist. Toxic emotions are cleared in the same systematic way in partnership with reality.

We also learned how to clear struggle events which result from conflicting beliefs creating conflicting realities. In addition, we learned how to clear fear beliefs since fear beliefs can create realities in the same way that any other beliefs can. Reality design technology can also be used to create information coincidences for reality to act as your mentor; or to provide courses on the various territories of growth that you need to pursue; or toxic beliefs that need to be cleared.

In Chapters 9 and 10, we learned how to clear whole complexes of beliefs interfering with our naturality with respect to powerlessness and judgment, respectively. Both these belief complexes are unfortunately culturally induced and therefore inhibit many of us from being the people we were designed to be. The effects of removing these two belief complexes are so dramatic that the process for each should be considered a quantum leap.

We have another opportunity to clear a plethora of conflicting beliefs every time we set a new goal. I’ve mentioned the new-goal syndrome before, especially with respect to problems when setting new reality creation goals. However, it has advantages in the growth technology for accelerating growth. We can proactively use this phenomenon to address Growth Direction I challenges for growth.

With each new goal, all relevant beliefs are activated and begin neutrally sending instructions to reality. Some may yield positive events while others are negative. Pairs of beliefs may be in conflict creating struggle events. Consequently, right after setting a new goal, we may experience a number of struggle events. Struggle events flag conflicting beliefs we need to change in order to achieve the new goal. The faster we change them, the faster we will achieve our goal and the faster we will grow. The bigger the goal, the greater the number of belief changes because more parts of our belief blueprint are activated. Proactively setting substantial goals, then, is a means to clean up our belief blueprint that much more quickly.

At first, the negative post-goal-setting events might seem to suggest we should not be pursuing that particular goal. Blocks have no negative emotions associated with them, other than perhaps a little frustration. Therefore, if your post-goal-setting events have a definite negative emotional charge, you are likely experiencing struggle events caused by conflicting beliefs.

As well, if you have passion for your new goal, then you know it’s right for you. This is a clue as well that the problem events might simply require the removal of interfering beliefs activated by your new goal rather than abandonment of your goal. Once you know what nature is trying to accomplish, you can help it, accelerate it, and become proactive. Some of the common conflicting beliefs usually include valued/not valued, respected/not respected, powerful/powerless, abundance/scarcity, safe/not safe, free/not free, capable/not capable, and worthy/not worthy.

To grow, all you have to do is your normal procedures for clearing interferences to naturality presented in Chapters 8, 9 and 10. You will want to incorporate the cleanup of conflicting beliefs into every new reality design you make. As you become a growth expert, you will automatically be actioning any struggle events that come up in order to eliminate the conflicting beliefs that caused them. But as a “growth novice,” this may not be business as usual for you yet.

By consistently setting significant goals, you will be able to identify maladaptive beliefs interfering with your naturality at a much faster rate. This means you can clear them faster thus freeing yourself to move along your natural growth path more quickly.

Whenever you set a new goal, all of the beliefs relevant to that goal are activated to create the necessary reality. We often can’t identify problem beliefs through introspection. However, when they are dumped out as events in reality they become much easier to identify. Reality then becomes one of the many self-correcting feedback systems designed to keep us in optimal form.

When you make the necessary belief changes, events reflective of the old belief get smaller and less frequent until they fade away. At that point you have verification that growth has occurred. Reality has changed. Therefore, the information in your belief blueprint must have changed. Because reality is 100% self-created, you can use it to strengthen your naturality as well as clearing interferences. Using the new-goal cleanup process is an example of how you can proactively accelerate a process that nature is doing anyway. If we respond to the messages early enough, there is no need for growth to be painful.

You may have had a terrible childhood leaving you with all sorts of emotional scars. Because growth is re-optimization, it is not about going back and making right all of the damage we received from childhood traumas or unfortunate events in our lives. There is no need to relive those experiences in order to clear your system. In fact, doing that will re-vitalize all sorts of old dysfunctional channels, responses, and toxic beliefs and emotions. These, in turn, will create unpleasant events in your reality by reflection. To use these channels again is to strengthen them and create events which will re-traumatize our system.

How much better it would be to have those channels atrophy from disuse. This is what nature does. Just because there is a defect in your system does not mean it has to be corrected. The way to enable these pathways to become dormant is to not keep irritating them or engaging them.

This could be accomplished by avoiding toxic territories. It can also be achieved by building a parallel replacement structure as we did when we exchanged the powerless and power reflexes. And, rather than evolving this replacement structure linearly, it can more quickly come into existence by reincarnation and a quantum leap, again as we did in the powerlessness intervention. Therefore, rather than developing a reality design which evolves you out of the previous toxic state, you need only re-conceive of yourself with new, more advantageous pathways.

Growth is re-optimization, not perfection. Your system can be dysfunctional in many ways that are not called for by your current context. As long as your current circumstance does not invoke those dysfunctional pathways, you can operate with peak performance.

If new goals require the activation of some of your dysfunctional beliefs, these beliefs will create problem events in your reality. Once the problem beliefs can be seen in the events in your reality, you know this is new-goal syndrome and can routinely clear them. Whenever you have negative emotions, this is the signal to select your preferred emotional goal or a reality that symbolizes your preferred emotional state and re-start the cycle of self-creation, creation, and so on.

It is only necessary to clear what is interfering with your naturality right this moment as flagged by the Optimizers. If there are no negative events occurring, then assume your imperfect self is optimized. The ten signals will tell us when there are changes to be made for the current needs of our system. Nature’s focus is strictly in the present at resolving whatever the current optimization challenges are. Nature does not go back to correct historical flaws or previous evolutionary states of the system.

Our system, however, does store the record of past creativity used to solve problems. For example, your body can store antibodies which were developed to re-optimize from a smallpox immunization shot or worse, after the trauma of the disease. We can look at the blood serums of individuals and trace from what peoples and geographical locations their ancestors have derived. We can identify our physical evolutionary history through looking at the primitive states a human embryo passes through.

Nature didn’t go back and correct this embryo for a more efficient version attuned to how we are in our current evolved state. It patches what is not working. Again, good or bad, the history of past creativity and evolution is captured in our system. What is not relevant to our present circumstance is not activated.

To help nature, we want to avoid territories that keep active or reactivate toxic channels. Move in the direction of nature’s ten signals in order to attain peak performance and peak experience. Those signals will lead you to quantum leap to a life of pure creativity where you are experiencing your highest emotional states doing your art in flow. In no time at all, you won’t even be able to access the old toxic emotions.

GROWTH DIRECTION  II: Increasing Your Naturality

Growth or re-optimization is trying to happen to us all of the time. Just as our various internal systems clear toxins out of our bodies every day, we have just reviewed elements of the naturality flow attempting to do this by purging interfering beliefs and emotions from our systems (Growth Direction I). Simultaneously, the naturality flow is also trying to amplify, enlarge, and expand the expression of our authentic core, our true identity. Following here, then, are the elements identifying and supporting Growth Direction II. Compliance with these directions should greatly accelerate your growth process and your understanding of how nature is acting on your system to optimize and evolve you.

Follow your Natural Growth Path

For Growth Direction II growth, we will want to continuously expand our naturality or the strength of our naturality by concentric circles. This is the natural growth path. It is not linear. It is not the progression from one form to another. Rather, it is an enlargement or intensification around our central core. Naturality is the emotion of naturalness that results when we are in alignment with the state of optimization of our system – when all of the information inside and outside of us is in balance. This is our best functioning at any moment in time.

You have to feel the emotion of naturalness inside of you. You have to feel those drives trying to take you to naturality from inside of yourself – drives to self-knowledge, self-improvement, self-esteem, self-expression, self-creation, self-valuing; drives to creativity, creations, achievement, contribution, service, and to meaning; drives to being valued for who you are and what you contribute or achieve; drives to being free to be you, to belonging – with your uniqueness intact.

Naturality is not a static state but changes with our adjustment to our context. The only constant is the feel when you get it right. This natural feel is our continuous goal state. It is similar to moving from the noise and disorder of the outer swirl of a tornado to the order, calmness and power of the eye of the tornado. We want to remain in the eye by doing one natural act after the next, after the next. This will drive our expansion by concentric circles.

At each expansion of our naturality, we will be capable of a new level of power over our realities with respect to creation. If those creations are expressions of our naturality, they will reinforce our naturality and strengthen our authentic core even more. The process of expressing our naturality strengthens that naturality. As a result, our next creations will be an even more significant expression of our naturality. It will again reinforce us to even greater intensities of our naturality.

The basic dynamic for living soon becomes self-growth, creation-growth, self-growth, creation-growth, and so on. Therefore, the more you express your naturality, the faster you grow. If you are trying to be someone else in various territories of your life, you are interfering with this natural growth process. In every territory, you need to take action based on the same feeling of naturality.

As we come into alignment around our natural growth path, every seeming impediment in our reality becomes a call for growth along this path. As we clear the problem beliefs, or change directions with the block events, our lives will gradually move to an ordered simplicity. Everything will be about our progress to our next level of growth, no matter which area of our life we are dealing with.

Align your Life to your Naturality

You can be proceeding on your natural growth path before you have aligned your life with your authentic expression. However, as you do meaningful projects which are consistent with your naturality, you are transformed.

Once you’ve experienced operating at your peak in the growth-creation flow which emerges when you do your art, you become less tolerant of your less evolved functioning in other parts of your life. They seem to be digressive “noise” that has nothing to do with your true work and state of being.

Projects not aligned with your optimization path and thus not supported by flow, will seem to be too much work given your enhanced capabilities in flow. Also, your productivity is less than in flow where flows and coincidences support you and there is an absence of blocks and struggle events. Eventually, you will find yourself shifting every part of your life into alignment with your naturality and the naturality flow.

In alignment, quantum leaps can become daily occurrences. Growth accelerates dramatically. Functionality increases. Peak performance and peak experience come into play. There will be exponential changes. Amazing new powers. Because you are in alignment, you are sending very precise instructions to reality with the full force of who you are. No parts are in conflict. Every facet of your being is conscripted to a single focus. Consequently, the accuracy, speed, and adaptiveness of your reality creation increases. In fact, realities supportive of your natural growth path appear with no conscious effort on your part. These supportive realities and creations further strengthen your naturality. The process spirals up to higher levels.

Alignment makes all Message Events Meaningful for directing Growth

The more you are in alignment with your naturality signature, the more accurate and valuable the messages in reality will be for your progress, your creations and your growth. These include all of the messages from the Optimizers: blocks and flows, coincidences, events that generated passions and emotional highs, flow states, toxic events, and struggle events.

Eventually you will align to the point where everything that happens to you is a significant message for your progress, for accelerating the growth-creation cycle even more. The number of extraneous events diminishes. This messaging phenomenon includes those clearing messages of the Reclaim Your Reality chapter. These systematically signal what interfering belief needs to be cleared next in Growth Direction I for growth acceleration. As a result of more meaningful message events, you can read the growth path easier which increases your speed of growth.

In alignment, the blocks and flows indicate the direction of growth and creation since these are expressions of the same naturality flow. If you are hitting block events, they are significant. Cease and desist. This is not the time to martyr yourself pursuing a particular channel to your goal that is generating block events in your life. No matter how sure you are that this is the only route, stop. You are wrong! You need to poll other possible routes. Or delay moving forward at this time.

And, if flow events are making it easy for you to go in a particular direction, go with them, even if you don’t see how they are related to achieving your current goals. One thing I’ve found is that “growth novices” leave a lot of flow events on the table which might accelerate their progress. Again, experiment.

Do seemingly irrelevant flow events lead to beneficial results when you follow them? Test out whether nature is trying to facilitate your progress after all. New beliefs about reality, nature, the optimizing process and direction need to be gained experientially. May I suggest you honor all blocks and flows until you’ve acquired your own experiential truth?

All of the Optimizers leave a historical record of communications from nature which we can use to identify our ideal growth directions to intensified naturality. For example, you will have flow events in your life when you are moving in the direction of your optimization and nature’s optimizing dynamic, and blocks when you are trying to go against it. Take an inventory of events in your past: blocks and flows, coincidences, events that generated passions and emotional highs, flow states, toxic events, and struggle events.

If you want to grow more quickly, you can simply analyze what the projections of those themes might look like in the future and proactively quantum leap to the indicated next level of expansion. If you are craving a faster growth rate, it is not necessary to wait for the signal events to appear in the present. Nature is very consistent so you can trust the historical record.

Take a look at the pattern of blocks in your past. It is telling you where not to go or grow in the future. There is no point in trying to grow in the direction of your blocks. Nature has already spoken. It is a mistaken cultural norm that has us constantly struggling against the blocks in our life.

Persistence is desirable in committing to have your goal. However, it is not advantageous if you are insisting on a particular channel and fighting all blocks to make that channel work. Innovate or change directions when blocks are encountered. However, persist to achieve your original emotional goal. If you are blocked in the pursuit of the symbol of that goal, find another symbol of the same emotional goal which is supported by flows.

If there is no pattern of block and flow events or other Optimizer message events in your life, it likely means that you have been externally referenced. External rather than internal events have been running your life. Use someone else’s life to prove to yourself that the messaging patterns exist. This will at least build your beliefs that this is, in fact, how reality operates.

To investigate, choose the reality of a leader or someone who operates authentically or naturally or has strength of character. In the meantime, begin to follow your resonance and the other Optimizers. Within a very short time, you will have generated a pattern of accurate message events in your reality. They will shepherd you to your natural growth path and naturality and help to clear interferences to that naturality.

Resonance always leads to our natural growth path and hence naturality, optimization, flow and the naturality flow. This is also the perfect way to see all of the growth trends and optimizing systems presented in this book in action. Unfortunately, we have habits, beliefs, rules and cultural norms which interfere with following our resonance. The peak evolution science is designed to get you back to what is natural. Natural drives will lock you into nature’s flow so the science will no longer be needed once you are in alignment.

Resonance was one of my greatest clues that the naturality paradigm was correct. If you do nothing but follow your resonance, you will end up in the same place as if you did everything that the peak evolution science prescribes. In other words, you will end up in the naturality paradigm fully integrated with the creative optimizing flow of nature.

If you honor your resonance, you are automatically going to be slipping into flow state more frequently. Flow has growth built in. The entrance fee for entering flow is that you must be stretched beyond your current capabilities. Therefore, you can’t help but grow.

Flow or activity fusion is a backdoor to growth. Flow is pure naturality. Flow increases flow. And flow increases naturality. Flow is a re-optimizing state bringing you back to your naturality. Flow automatically advances us on our evolutionary path. The trick is to hang onto your gains between flow states. Doing your art in growth-creation flow is the best activity for growth gains.

If all Optimizers lead to flow, and flow is a growth addicting state, then we are designed to be perpetually in growth. Those who have mastered the human living experience are those who are growth experts. Because of the nature of our natural drives and Optimizers, to be a growth expert will automatically make us growth addicts.

Being growth addicts will motivate us to perfect the art of accelerated growth. Once you enter the naturality paradigm and growth becomes a way of life, growth is exponential by quantum leaps rather than linear. More about this in the growth horizon section later in this chapter.

The greatest flow states occur around meaningful learning and creations associated with our art. This tells us another direction in which to move for growth. We must liberate ourselves to a life of doing our art. For most people, the resulting addiction to the territory where they have natural talents and skills will lead to a life aligned with that territory. And with the accelerated growth path that results, you’ll soon find yourself operating and creating in that field beyond anything you could imagine.

The projects you become involved with will increase in magnitude and meaning until there is nothing else you want to work on. You have found your territory of greatest contribution and greatest reward, your most enticing growth path, and the route to peak evolution.

Once you truly experience your life theme which draws from you the most meaningful creativity, you will find that you never actually work again. Instead you will use the “effortless effort” of flow to accomplish monumental amounts of throughput. To the outside world, this can appear to be extreme dedication. To you, however, doing anything else is not an option. Your system has reached its dynamic home. Home for us is a flow state of naturality fully integrated into naturality flow. Your life moves into simplicity around the meaningful life theme(s) of your art.

Human beings have a built-in emotional adaptation to stimuli. This demands that we must perpetually pursue new stimuli to sustain positive emotional states. There is no arrival. Our emotional goals therefore, actually flag our direction of growth. Emotional drives are one of the ten Optimizers that identify the naturality flow.

Passion, in particular is an indicator of naturality. Passion tells you something is “you.” Growth will be supported in the pursuit of your passions. We use our creations, including reality creations, to assist us to achieve our emotional goals. The same self-growth/creation-growth process is invoked. Thus our emotional drives satisfy Growth Direction II needs for increasing our naturality.

Just as passion is an indicator of your naturality, so, too, is meaning. Pursuing a great cause means there is a significant reality you want to create. Therefore, the self-growth/creation-growth formula for growth is energized by pursuing what is meaningful to you. Advances along your natural growth path will automatically be triggered.

Your creations, including your reality creations, are the only measure of your growth. Desired creations are the motivation for growing. Creatively expressing your naturality through your authentic art is a profound way to expand and reinforce your naturality. Pursuing this creativity is an imperative direction for growth.

Become Internally Referenced

Many of us have been brought up to look for our identity or how we are going to feel from external events. How much money we have. Our job title. What parents think we should be. Or our employers and friends. However, when we commit to naturality, we are moving to an internally referenced state. There is a very definite trend from childhood to maturity to move from being externally referenced to internally referenced. This means, there is a natural evolutionary path from an identity, beliefs, and self-esteem based on the views of others to operating in accordance with our own internal voice. This then is another part of Growth Direction II.

Become More Fluid

As your growth experience and growth expertise increases, you will become much more fluid with growth as it becomes a way of life. You will be able to routinely change beliefs as they no longer serve you. This means you will be more fluid in changing your beliefs in order to change yourself and your reality. So many of us have been brought up to seek and expect stability when this is not the way of a world. It is filled with continuously re-optimizing and co-evolving interactive systems.

As a result, we are in constant distress when our expectations are never met. We live for the expected stable state not realizing that the stability we want is dynamic. There is safety in mastering dynamic stability and being fluidly able to respond to it. The shift from rigidity to fluidity is a growth direction we want to proactively pursue.

Move from Linear to Nonlinear

Most of us have been conditioned to operate with clear logical linear plans even though we consistently find that “stuff happens!” Consequently, we don’t always get to actually work our plan. Once you have the pathfinding, creation and growth technologies down pat, however, a truly more logical approach to achieving our goals is to operate nonlinearly in partnership with nature. Nature prefers to operate by nonlinear quantum leaps to resolve optimization challenges.

Therefore, if we operate strictly in the present simply actioning nature’s ten Optimizers, we will be capitalizing on nature’s nonlinear expertise. The growth horizon technique is discussed shortly to expand on this concept. With coincidences, flow events, quantum leaps and spontaneous knowledge, your effectiveness in going into the unknown will exceed even experts with the best plans. We want to capitalize on nature’s ability to get there faster. Nature seems to have infinite creativity for achieving a goal with its increased access to information. This is a partner worth having.

Follow the Optimizing Trends for the Human Race

In Chapter 12, Designing Future Worlds, we learned of the directions in which the entire human system is evolving. Just as reality creation benefits from “going with this evolutionary flow,” so too do the pathfinding technology and the growth technology. Here again are some current evolutionary trends for humanity you might want to take into consideration for choosing directions in which to accelerate your growth:

  1. The flow of the human system is towards oneness, wholeness, unification, interconnectedness, integration and cohesiveness. The terms “clustering,” “convergence,” “alliance,” “networks,” “networking,” “internet,” “internetworking,” and “community” are increasingly used in business.
  2. There is a continuous flow to optimization through creativity, the creative expression of naturality, and quantum leaps.
  3. Individuality is increasing.
  4. Creativity is increasing.
  5. The race is evolving towards expanded consciousness, nondual or unity consciousness, and higher frequency consciousness. We are progressing from egocentric to worldcentric and beyond.

 

GROWTH ACCELERATION

Knowing the direction of growth is a wonderful asset for accelerating growth. There are some other growth expert tools that can accelerate your progress.

Flow

Flow is not only the direction of growth, it is a primary accelerator of growth. Flow is always taking us to naturality. Growth is built in because of the requirement for us to be stretched to enter flow. You’re in an egoless state that is pure naturality. Therefore, one of the best techniques for accelerating growth is to significantly increase your time in flow. As we learned in the last chapter, all Optimizers lead to naturality and hence flow. However, following our resonance is especially effective in increasing flow time.

Quantum Leaps and Coincidences

Quantum leaps, which include coincidences and spontaneous knowledge, are an incredible way to accelerate growth. Nature prefers to achieve evolution, re-optimization and growth by quantum leaps. It’s much more efficient to move from one stable state to the next without having to survive all sorts of gradations in the middle. Transitions are highly stressful, less efficient, and require much more work.

Many optimization solutions are not even possible by gradual evolution. It is difficult to imagine how to evolve a human eye, for example. It may be that the problem triggering your re-optimization cannot be resolved in a gradual way. It takes a redesign to an end state which may not necessarily even be linked to the start state. However, suffice it to say that what may look like an impossible task to grow from Point A to Point B can suddenly be achieved effortlessly by coincidences and quantum leaps.

Because the quantum leap technology offers a new artform and a new way of living, this mode of growth acceleration has its own chapter. Nature is much better at quantum leaps than we will ever be. Therefore, the solution, as with growth, is simply to learn how to partner with nature rather than to try to duplicate what nature does.

Your Natural Growth Horizon – Living Precisely in the Present

Growth speed increases tremendously when individuals come into alignment with who they are meant to be and when they begin to narrow their horizon of vision precisely into the present as a way of life. The goal is not just operating in the present but within the smallest possible horizon in the present.

The vision of our growth horizon can be thought of as a teeny, tiny window of time in the present. The horizon need only be as wide as is necessary to read the current signals from the ten Optimizers. All future thinking is relinquished as you shift into pure activity fusion in flow around the activity of actioning Optimizer messages.

From this narrow focus, we can grow at accelerating rates yet it feels like we are growing at the same leisurely pace. With increased fluidity, growth expertise, and the construction of an infrastructure of supporting beliefs and identities, growth will become easier. Therefore, over time, your effective rate of growth actually increases exponentially yet feels consistent.

It’s as if, without the past and the future, there are no signposts to show movement, and therefore, the speeds of growth do not register. Again, the metaphor of living in the calm center of the dynamism of a tornado seems appropriate. Comfort also comes from the fact that, without past and future thinking, fears do not enter into the picture. Unless you are in imminent physical danger, there is usually very little to fear in the present. The overwhelm that often accompanies growth also does not exist with our focus confined to actioning messages in the immediate present.

This growth horizon modus operandi is the way to feel safe and at home in the dynamics of the naturality flow. Just imagine what this comfortable, naturality-directed, growth is going to accomplish over time if it is accelerating exponentially! Further, if our focus is strictly on the Optimizer signals, we will automatically end up in flow. All Optimizers lead to flow, which, in and of itself, is a glorious growth state.

Also, the growth horizon technique, itself, leads to pure activity fusion around the activity of actioning the Optimizers as a way of life. With growth built into flow, this Optimizer activity fusion defines the underlying dynamic of both peak performance and peak experience. Peak evolution continuously raises our peak performance potential.

The Optimizer activity fusion or the Optimizer flow state is the height of our growth capability (the growth technology), our creation power (the reality creation technology), and our access to spontaneous knowledge (the knowledge technology).

This is the place where consciousness evolves beyond the prevalent state for the rest of humanity. This is the point in which we move to our highest frequencies where we can hold more information and light. One could speculate that there could come a point where our frequency can ultimately cause us to cease to be visible.

Just like other information defined by quantum physics, we, as systems of information, could, theoretically, become nonlocal and distributed throughout the universe. We could access conscious awareness beyond our bodies. This could explain the phenomenon we call death.

There is no need for having a big plan about your growth or where you’re trying to evolve to since we will always be evolving to intensified expressions of our art and our naturality. And nature knows how to do this best. It is more strategic to partner with nature through the Optimizers than to try to duplicate nature’s expertise.

For this, we need simply tap into the optimizing dynamic acting on all systems. All the things we think we are pursuing are just our attempts to achieve this end anyway. Nature’s communications tell you precisely what you need to do, message after message.

I developed this concept of the growth horizon initially on the basis of my work with Carl, a fifty-something marketing executive in a Fortune 500 company that was continuously downsizing. Carl lived in perpetual fear of being de-hired. He hadn’t grown or changed in a long time and the whole prospect was quite formidable. His last performance review had labeled him “Not promotable.”

To circumvent his continuous fear, we worked on taking Carl totally into the present by only having him action the messages from the ten Optimizers as they happened. He just had to focus on acting on each drive, each message event from his resonance, the blocks and flows as they happened, and so on. That’s all he had to worry about. He didn’t even have to think about the future. Gradually, all of Carl’s fears began to fall away. He felt safe for the first time.

At first, we didn’t realize Carl was growing to alignment with his naturality at such an accelerating pace because he wasn’t experiencing any growing pains. Carl was just happy. As his naturality alignment began to automatically create adaptive realities for him, the CEO was fired and Carl was made acting CEO while an executive search firm recruited a replacement. Carl did such an incredible job during the six-month search that he was presented to the Board of Directors with the final shortlist of candidates. Carl was unanimously selected.

As Carl’s alignment increased, he eventually reached the point of no return, where growth became an addiction. He was staying in the dynamic safety of his growth horizon window, but his effective growth rate was increasing exponentially. When Carl and I started, he was afraid of going into any new territory and couldn’t wait until he arrived at some craved stable state again.

Once he became a growth expert and a growth addict and reached this point of no return, things reversed. He disliked the static states. They would trigger an emotional nosedive for him. Depression, fear, low self-esteem, frustration and anxiety all arose when he wasn’t stretching himself into flow state to conquer a new territory.

Flow contains no negative emotional static and it would appear that it is biochemically addicting. Therefore, the new Carl felt most alive and happiest trekking into the unknown where flow was invoked. Stable states which could not incite flow were no longer appealing. In fact, he dreaded them. Carl was now co-evolving with an advancing world rather than falling behind that progress. He had become an adaptive human being. To Carl, his stability was now dynamic. There was no context in which he could not feel safe. This trait alone drew the loyalty and respect of his followers.

The Reality Creation Technology

With the link between self-creation and creation, the reality creation technology can be used to accelerate growth. It is possible to simply create a reality of ideal growth. You can control the speed and direction of growth and the degree of support you want from reality using the reality design technology. The best reality design is always in the direction of the naturality flow, as is the case for nature-supported growth.

As you gradually become addicted to your natural growth path, you will want to receive your growth “fixes” on a regular basis. Therefore, you will want to begin to build an infrastructure of instructions creating a reality of accelerated growth. I recommend having standing growth blueprints for how you want your growth to be; what speed you want; whether you want a quantum leap per week or per day; and so on.

Reincarnation is a self-initiated form of quantum leap. However, it’s an ideal technique for quickly internalizing a whole new set of beliefs in order to quickly change reality. Therefore, it would be advantageous to reincarnate yourself as a growth expert in order to quickly move to the level of expertise promoted through the growth technology. Reality can be set up to support you. Why go through a painful transition if you can quantum leap from one stable state to the next. Rather than transitioning slowly into a growth expert, why not go direct? I’ve already described the end state in the growth horizon section. Why wait!

    The reality design technology discussed in the Designing Future Worlds chapter includes a technique of “visualizing to the point of experiencing the emotions” the reality you want to create. You cannot experience the emotions of the new reality unless you have the relevant beliefs since you can’t have one thought, one emotion, one symbol or one event in your reality without the underlying beliefs.

We need to feel the emotions in order to shift the beliefs in order to create the new reality. And this new reality can include re-creating us as well. Therefore, this same reality design technique can be used to accelerate our growth process. It helps us to lock in the belief changes that are necessary for growth to have occurred and to be sustained.

Growth by assimilation is another tool like reincarnation that is a self-initiated means for dramatic growth. It is a subset of reincarnation. It is another means to experience the emotions in the “visualize to the point of emotion” intervention because sometimes we can’t visualize how it will feel to have a desired reality. It’s too far beyond our world of experience. We need some help.

Can you find someone who has already achieved your next growth goal and absorb his/her emotional structure, thoughts, experience, knowledge and passion for that goal? Assimilation goes beyond having “empathy” or even “modeling” to actually assimilating or internalizing the emotional/belief complex of someone else to speed the creation of a new reality for yourself. It is an emotion-based exercise rather than an intellectual one. Clairsentience is a means to assimilate more effectively.

In the Power of Identity chapter, we learned about how to use your creations to strengthen your identity through identity-affirming creations. This is the foundation of the self-creation/creation growth dynamic. Because reality is 100% self-created, we can use it to strengthen our naturality.

Proactively pursue creations you are passionate about because passion is an indicator of naturality. That means they will be supported by nature. As those authentic creations come into being, they will reinforce your naturality so that even greater creations are possible in the future: self-creation, creation, self-creation . . . . Just doing what you are passionate about can therefore catapult you along your natural growth path.

The Knowledge Technology

You can also use the knowledge technology or, specifically, the pathfinding technology to accelerate your growth. Pathfind what you need next to either remove interferences or to strengthen your naturality. Reality can become a gigantic computer giving you the growth answers you need next. Knowledge derives from information. We are evolving in our individual lifetimes and “evolutionarily” as a race to holding higher frequencies. We can hold/access more information as a result. Growth is the process of adding to and changing the information of our system.

Find the Route of Least Resistance

Because, as a civilization, we have not had expertise in growth, many people have come to associate growth with struggle. How many times have you known how you must change in order for your life to work again, but fought to resist that inevitable change. This just prolongs the unpleasant transition state. How much smarter does it seem, in 20/20 hindsight, to have simply proactively embraced the obvious.

Now that you know about the naturality flow, you can partner with nature’s expertise, processes and mechanisms to minimize disruptive transition states. You can know the direction of growth from the Optimizers. If you are moving with this natural optimization dynamic, it should be without resistance. Blocks tell us we are going in the wrong direction. Blocks which invoke a negative emotional charge are actually struggle events which require us to resolve conflicting beliefs. There is no need to fight nature anymore.

Nature always chooses the route of least resistance for its progress. The route of least resistance tells us we are on the right path. Struggle means we are resisting growth, re-optimization, and evolution. We are resisting making the changes indicated by nature. We are fighting nature. We are not reading and complying with the messages.

Yes, admittedly, there will be some anxiety until you accept and have experienced growth and continuous re-optimization as a way of life for you. The sooner you get started, however, the sooner growth will be comfortable for you. You and nature want the same thing for your system. It’s time to join forces. This is the route of least resistance.

“Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow’s joy is possible if today’s makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line to the withdrawal of the preceding one.”     
Andre Gide, Journals, 1928, TR Justin Obrien