A Revolutionary – Action-oriented – Career-acceleration ADVICE COLUMN dedicated to maximizing careers and lives
About the Savanting Studies Series
Each Savanting Study provides actionable instructions for how to resolve common career and work challenges in a way which simultaneously springboards one to self-actualization and the emotional, material, and meaning rewards of career maximization.
These studies are an extension of the comparative analysis of 6 icons in Lauren’s 2019 book, Savanting: Outperforming your Potential. This analysis revealed a new level of human potential and a new route to sustainable self-actualization and peak functionality and performance.
Savanting Studies 1 to 6 include Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Jim Carrey.
Lauren wants to encourage discussion among those pursuing career maximization, self-actualization and pushing the envelope on true human potential through the Savanting modus operandi shared by these 6 superstars and the implementation-focused Savanting Studies Series.
She wants to learn of your reactions to these cutting-edge articles, what was meaningful to you, how your own implementation and transformation is proceeding, how she can help you to succeed, and so on.
This series will teach you the secrets from decades of experience of an evolutionary and biological anthropologist for executive career maximization. Lauren will share her rapid routes to self-actualization, self-transcendence, your bio-driven purpose, peak performance, and your true potential.
“Isn’t it uplifting to realize that, when stripped of interfering cultural constructs, beliefs, norms, and identities, . . . . . . contribution, altruism, and philanthropy guide our natural state?” Lauren Holmes, Lead from Enlightenment, 3-7-22
UPCOMING STUDIES
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LEAD from SAVANT SUPERSKILLS when Aspirations exceed Abilities, Study 13
Excerpt from The Encore: A Transformational Thriller, from Chapter 3, Connor’s Council Speech by Lauren Holmes (2018)
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Connor stood at the head of the table collecting his thoughts on what he wanted to say. Suddenly his thoughts were arrested by the sheer beauty of the high-gloss, deeply burled wood of the long thick tabletop. He had never seen anything like it on Earth. The three-dimensional complexity and convolutions of the pronounced grain patterns pulled him into their depths, grounding him.
It incited within him a resonance upon which he had come to rely to signal that he was taking the right path. In an instant, everything he was about to say was recolored with new meaning and purpose. It was infused with new energy and inspiration. He was transformed from coerced to committed. He began his speech from a new depth.
“The simultaneous occurrence of a number of crises which threatened the survival of Earth and humanity fueled a dramatic change in the power structure which had dominated our planet. Those with the greatest power and/or money came to realize that all the power and money in the world were not going to save them. They had no choice but to relinquish the reins to ‘lesser beings’ more creative and talented than they were who could solve the problems.
“The creativity and inventiveness of the world’s human resources were unleashed to find solutions. Brilliant breakthroughs defeated the crises. Humanity survived. Civilization evolved into a more advanced level of existence.
“I’d been recruited as Commander-in-Chief, Global Human Resources Maximization because I’d had unusual success over a few decades in creating worldchangers. Worldbuilders, may be more precise. The key to my methods was a dedication to the daily use and improvement of one’s strongest most rewarding talents. This was our maximum. Our peak performance.
“I discovered that, once engaged, we had evolved mechanisms to addict us to operating at this maximum as you would expect of any successful species. My formula triggered these addictive survival mechanisms for maximization. Magic happened as a result of living this maximum day after day.
“An overdrive state emerged which exceeded known human potential. It was a state of genius which we routinely observe in savants who do not have the brain capacity to express such genius. It was the state of spontaneous knowledge which those who’ve had near death events universally describe.
“What emerged from my formula was serial breakthroughs, flashes of genius, creative inspirations, and other forms of spontaneous knowledge. Whole systems or ‘books’ of relevant information seem to download into their heads to help them complete the task at hand. One breakthrough could bypass hundreds of steps necessary to achieving a goal.
“The internal mechanisms humans had evolved to pressure peak performance to improve our chances of survival include addictive drives, biochemistry, positive emotions and passions, to name a few.
“These mechanisms are part of the same system we have evolved to maximize the health of our bodies. But our pressure to maximize appears to be larger than an internal maximizing process.
“It became evident that human beings are linked to a larger external maximization process with which they have co-evolved. This external maximizing machinery seeks to maximize all living things synergistically, symbiotically, and synchronously.
“This extension of our internal resources with external resources was the source of the overdrive state I discovered. It was a new level of peak performance and human potential. The formula I invented was the means to invoke this overdrive state.
“Recruiting this external maximization machinery occurs automatically when one is operating at one’s maximum. This is because maximization internally and externally is a single system. We have not evolved to operate as separate entities. When one is complying with the direction of one’s maximizing machinery internally, one will automatically merge with the external maximizing machinery.
“Because this machinery is advancing all living systems, I call it the bioflow. It is the direction of the co-evolution of all living species. When we comply with the bioflow, our capabilities are suddenly extended by the power, information, direction, synergy, and evolution of all living systems. We can achieve beyond our internal potential.
“To complete my overdrive formula, I discovered a fast route to maximization. A built-in mechanism that humanity has evolved. I discovered savantflow. We’ve all experienced ordinary flow states. They are periods of altered consciousness that arise from hyperfocus on an activity.
“They are sessions of complete absorption in an activity such that time, place, and sense of self disappear. They invoke activity fusion, if you will. Normally, our brains fire chaotically. However, in flow, one’s entire brain unifies to a cohesive focus on the activity at hand. Peak performance results.”
“Are you talking about that 1990 book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by a name I can’t pronounce?” asked Nyhus as he looked up from his tablet.
“Csikszentmihalyi (cheek-sent-me-high-ee),” responded Connor. “And yes, this is the generic peak performance flow state to which I’m referring.
“Savantflow is a specialized subset which I identified. It occurs when the flow state experienced arises specifically from applying one’s strongest most rewarding talents and strengths in the most meaningful way for the most appreciative or valuing audience.
“This is the formula for the true maximum performance of anyone’s system. Savantflow is the way for us to automatically flick into maximized state.”
Grand General Haugstad, the head of armed forces, interjected, “Did physicist David Bohm not talk about a ‘holomovement.’ How does this fit with the bioflow you’re describing?”
“For simplicity, you can assume they are one and the same, Grand General Haugstad. You can assume a singular integrated, synergistic, and synchronous flow or pulsation for all successful living systems. Every successful living system is co-evolving dynamically.” Haugstad nodded.
“This organizing bioflow continuously puts each living system into proximity with the information they need to advance and maximize,” continued Connor. “Think of every living system as simply an information system.
“Think of nature as a librarian who organizes these living information systems to the advantage of the majority and priority. When one merges with the larger maximization machinery, the librarian will position you advantageously in the database to source the information you need next for the task you’re focused on in your savantflow. The information you need for your continued or sustained maximization.”
“You said ‘goals which will maximize them,’” interrupted KahlDahr Chief of State Lennart Lorenson. “So then not every goal will be supported by the bioflow?”
“Correct, Minister Lorenson. And an astute observation. One must frame one’s goal in the direction of the internal-external maximizing process if one wants the bioflow to accelerate and enhance its achievement. Each of us can know what future goals will be supported based on what goals were supported in our past.
“One’s maximum is a constant. The way the bioflow pressures your system to maximize is a constant. Therefore, what was supported in your past will be supported in your future. You will know which projects will succeed or fail based on your history. You’ll have predictability.
“If you’re trying to obtain money to perpetuate a state of sub-maximization, or worse, a detrimental state, you’ll have to fight upstream against a bioflow intent on maximizing you,” explained Connor.
“Would the corollary be supported?” asked Rikard Riis. Connor had to smile to himself at Riis’ interest in money. He’d already suspected that Riis was a puppet who could be bought.
“It’s not as straightforward as that, Supreme Commander. Money for something on one’s maximization path would be provided only if it is the fastest and easiest route to your maximization.
“We think we need money for every goal we want. Nature, however, is infinitely more creative. For example, one information coincidence might catapult you past hundreds of steps to your goal without the need for money. Accordingly, you’ll want to be open to being orchestrated by the bioflow to achieving your goal through any channel rather than insisting it come through a specific channel such as money.
“The goal of the internal-external maximizing machinery is to keep you in savantflow, your maximum state. Period. You’ll have to build your money goal in the direction that the bioflow is heading in order to benefit from it.
“I’ve already identified each living being as an information system,” continued Connor. “Now I want you to think of creativity in information terms as well. Creativity, creation, innovation, inventiveness, and creative breakthroughs are the result of combining existing information systems to create a new novel information system.
“Think of the merging of a system of DNA information from each parent to create a new novel information system, a child. This recombining of information systems is how breakthroughs and epiphanies occur.
“This means that one will need easy access to the right information fuel to generate the breakthroughs necessary to solve Annutia’s crises quickly. If you’ll allow the bioflow to orchestrate your direction, you’ll find yourself colliding with the exact information you need at the time you need it to re-combine for creative breakthroughs, flashes of genius, and Eureka events. This happens automatically with savantflow-bioflow integration.
“Over time, the magnitude, speed, quantity, quality, and impact of your breakthroughs will increase. Again, one breakthrough could eliminate hundreds of steps to achieve needed solutions faster. One breakthrough can change the world. One breakthrough can save a world in crisis. This means that even the ordinary can achieve the extraordinary.
“Obviously, the access to information fuel is key to the kind of serial breakthroughs we need to address Annutia’s crises. Let me explain how I discovered how to increase the fuel to increase the breakthroughs.
“Mysteriously, savants usually display genius in one of five general fields — music, art, calendar recall or computation, mathematics, or mechanical/visual-spatial skills. A music savant may be able to perform an entire piece of music flawlessly after hearing it only once. Or, they may be able to play an instrument perfectly with no instruction or practice. Or, they may be able to demonstrate having an extensive repertoire of songs or pieces many of which they may never have heard before.
“Calendar savants can quickly identify the day of the week, the weather, and events for any calendar date past or present. Mathematical savants may be able to do rapid, complex calculations and equations in their heads in seconds. They can suddenly know the right mathematical answer even though most have brains incapable of even simple arithmetic.
“It gradually became obvious to me that most savants share a common skill – access to massive amounts of field-specific information which include procedural instructions. Savant superskills are information-based. Information and savantism are intimately linked. In some cases, the information base is itself the savant superskill as in mnemonist savants. Mnemonists have the ability to provide long lists of data such as names, numbers, entries in books, and so on.”
“Do you mean a savant like Dustin Hoffman played in the movie Rain Man?” asked Axl.
“Precisely, Minister Plenipotentiary.” Connor was delighted to discover another movie lover and another commonality with Axl. “Though fictional, he’s the most famous savant. He’s a composite of a few true savants.
“Through Raymond Babbitt, many of us were introduced to savants and learned what the human mind is capable of doing. You could see how Raymond was dysfunctional for so many things, but for capabilities based on access to a large database of information, he was a genius.”
“Well, he must have been smart in some way to do the mathematical calculations he did,” conjectured Rikard Riis.
“Or did he simply access calculations already in existence in a database of all potential calculations, Supreme Commander?” speculated Connor. His brain was too damaged to do the calculations or to retain the massive amounts of information which he demonstrated.
“I puzzled over why so many savants had precisely the same capabilities despite the variations in the damage to their left brains. Why did they access the same five or so databases of information? And why did those who acquired savantism later in life due to left-brain injury, suddenly know the same information about one of the savant field as other savants when they didn’t know it before their injury?
“And why did so many savants access this information even though neuroscientists were able to prove that, like Raymond Babbitt, their brains should not be able to retain such information even if they could acquire it? This was all too coincidental to be simply an individual capability. Something larger and more universal was going on.
“It suddenly occurred to me that every savant was downloading a single book or system of information from an external library specific to the field of their genius or talent. Suddenly, everything fit. Savants in each of the five fields of genius were downloading precisely the same book. If the book didn’t exist how could they all have access to that same book? The information had to be externally sourced. This is why I now call my overdrive achievement methodology savanting.
“In savantflow, we automatically connect to the information database relevant to the activity which has generated the flow state. Therefore, we have many more breakthroughs when we’re in savantflow. We have access to more information fuel relevant to our task at hand which can be re-combined to generate breakthroughs.”
Azurite Chief of State Einar Nyhus looked up from researching on his tablet. “Savant genius could indeed be externally sourced. There is nothing in the Annutia or Earth databases which demonstrates that scientists have discovered mechanisms internal to savant brains which proves how their genius occurs.
“In fact, the study of savant brains has demonstrated the opposite – that savants should not be able to do the amazing things that they do. Commander Kane’s explanation may indeed be the more plausible one.”
“Thank you, Minister Nyhus. Creativity from non-creatives becomes possible with this new modus operandi,” continued Kane. “As with savants, the quantity and quality of the breakthroughs is not limited by one’s intelligence, experience, or creativity.
“Rather it has to do with the access to information that results from integrating into the bioflow of nature’s larger maximizing process. This automatically occurs in savantflow which is built into everyone. It is everyone’s maximum state. Therefore, we could recruit an army of both creatives and non-creatives alike to help solve the Annutia crises.
“In addition, integration into the bioflow enables one’s creativity to be guided in the direction of humanity’s evolutionary flow. This means that the breakthroughs one will have will be important to the evolving human race. This integration is why a Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos could invent at the front end of the evolution of civilization thus ensuring their products and services would be popular. They lived in savantflow.
“Therefore, connecting to the bioflow is how we’ll ensure that we’ll have the specific breakthroughs necessary to save Annutia. The bioflow is already trying to correct the damaged living systems of the planet. If we tap into that, our efforts will be synergistic with nature’s efforts.
“To enter flow or savantflow, one must be stretched beyond one’s previous capabilities. Consequently, growth is built in. The more time you spend in savantflow, the faster your functionality and strengths will increase. Therefore, over time, your system’s maximum will increase.
“Because flow is an altered state of consciousness, one’s consciousness will also develop over time. Specifically, serial savantflow sessions will cause your consciousness or breadth of perspective to expand.
“What does this mean for you? If you’re sitting in a rowboat on a river, your view of the events in your life might be like seeing boxes float past you. However, if you’re in a hot air balloon above the river, you might see a pattern in those boxes or that they’re connected into a system. From a plane you might be able to see that that system of boxes was connected to four other systems upon which you might capitalize to meet your goals.
“Eventually continuous expansion will lead each individual to experience unity consciousness. This means you can see and capitalize on the interconnectedness of all things for each territory upon which you choose to focus.
The solutions you can contribute to the world from this state will increase exponentially. With unity consciousness and immersion into the bioflow, you’ll have more information upon which to make decisions. You’ll also have more information to combine into new information systems.
“In addition, expanded consciousness will also trigger a cascading increase in your baseline functionality. Especially your meta-competencies. Cognitive skills, for example, will improve. There’ll be 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.
“Now imagine this kind of accelerated growth across Annutia’s entire pool of human resources. You’ll have raised the bar on the potential, the quality of life, and the operation of your entire civilization. You’ll have made everyone’s life more meaningful and contributory. You’ll have linked everyone to the bioflow guidance system, so they’re being orchestrated to the advantage of humanity.”
“At this point, a global transformation will occur,” continued Connor. He felt his frequency rising and those in the room coming with him as he continued to reveal compelling logic while bringing them to an emotional home innate in everyone.
“What will have emerged is a singular creative, inventive force directed by nature’s evolutionary flow. The need for government control and direction will dissipate into distributed power and leadership. With every human being maximized in savantflow and moving with the bioflow, you’ll have created unified direction and unified consciousness. You’ll have a civilization based upon a single shared consciousness and purpose.
“Flow is an egoless state in which all that exists is the activity at hand. It is characterized by only positive emotions. Identity and separation cease to exist. Discrimination and conflict can therefore no longer exist. War will disappear. The fractionalization and segmentation of your society will fall away in this nature-run, talent-maximized world.
“Your society will have achieved spontaneous unification. All will become one. A single synergistic and synchronized oneness will emerge for the advance of humanity. Universal peace and love would now be achievable as a byproduct of individual self-actualization and fulfillment.”
Excerpt from Savanting: Outperforming your Potential, Chapter 15 (2019) by Lauren Holmes
Almost all creativity requires purposeful play. Abraham Maslow
While “innovation” improves an existing system, “creativity” merges existing information systems to generate an entirely new unprecedented system. In Chapter 3, I noted that American cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner claimed that we are only creative in one or a few domains in which we have expertise. Therefore, before you label yourself uncreative, it’s important to assume you are only creative in your savant domain.
In addition, researchers such as Harvard’s Teresa Amabile have studies which show that creativity increases during flow states. Because of biological maximization, bioflow compliance, and activity fusion, savantflows will increase creativity even more.
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Therefore, in your savant domain you might be tremendously creative, especially if the bioflow is feeding you the right information at the right time to fuel it. With savanting, even noncreatives may become creative. Simply choose savant-domain activities which will incite savantflows. This is the formula for your greatest creations.
Many assume Steve Jobs is synonymous with creativity and Bill Gates is not. Yet, both men changed the world. Let’s explore these assumptions to see what we can learn about savanting’s creativity and how to exploit it for your own worldchanging creations.
Bill’s creativity questioned
Steve Jobs said of Gates, “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology.” “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”[i]
Yale University computer science professor, David Gelernter, wrote in “Time” magazine in 1998 that he believes Gates is overrated as a pioneer and entrepreneur. “Bill Gates is an American unoriginal.” “It can be wiser to follow than to lead.” Gelernter contends that Microsoft often makes products by re-combining ideas that already exist in the marketplace.
Isn’t this the very definition of creativity in the savanting paradigm? Steve Jobs’ own definition confirms it: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”
Bill Gates’ genius arises from his talent for re-combining entities throughout his life to generate the unprecedented – software programs, businesses, organizations, industries, governments, OED computer manufacturers, philanthropists, charitable organizations, and so on as he aged. His creativity can’t be confined to Jobs’ limited world of device invention.
In the infancy of Microsoft before Bill’s consciousness had expanded, he could address the creation of a program or later, the re-combining of existing programs, to invent a new program which he would then modify and enhance.
However, with years of savantflows triggering the expansion of his consciousness, Gates’ ability to re-combine what exists expanded to larger entities. Jobs savant domain and creativity was more like that of savants – narrow but deep. Comparing the creativity of the two men is like comparing an “Apple” to an orange.
Someone laid down the early structures of the personal computing and software industries – the licensing, structure, standards, and rules of operation behind it. Creativity occurred. Can anyone really suggest Bill Gates was not the key creator? Especially as he does the same for the field of philanthropy and through it to many aspects of the infrastructure underpinning our society.
There can be little doubt about Bill’s talent for generating the foundations for new frontiers, governments, organizations, industries, and markets. Microsoft thrived locked into the marketplace by Bill’s brilliant business constructs, innovations, and partnerships which made its less-than-stellar technology number one.
Because Jobs did not recognize Bill’s creativity beyond technology, he did not cultivate it in himself. This was undoubtedly a contributing factor to his being fired from Apple for a decade and the creation of a culture which took Apple to the brink of bankruptcy. The brilliance of Job’s design required him to relentlessly commit to a narrow focus. This dedicated focus is a key contributor to the brilliance of his designs.
Is Jobs’ creativity different?
The executive summary
Let me overview my response to this question before going into detail with examples. Both entrepreneurs had the same intent – to better the lives of individuals en masse. Both were merged within the bioflow evolving the human race, so they generated products at the forefront of humanity’s evolution. Both were being fed the right information at the right time by the bioflow to catalyze creativity in their respective savant domains.
Their missions overlapped for most of their careers in the field of personal computing, which – as we have already seen with their success outside of that field – did not define either of their savant domains. The creativity of Jobs and Gates are, by definition, the same. Both re-combined existing systems to create an unprecedented system.
However, how they arrived at their end results was different. Jobs used more creative inspiration where the creative re-combination occurred in his head. It was achieved by breakthroughs fueled by information systems from the bioflow. His quote earlier in the chapter reinforces an internal remix.
Gates, on the other hand, used more logic with the re-combining information occurring externally. It was fueled by coincidences, models and facilitating people and events generated by the bioflow. His creativity was more action-based.
Their savant domains are different. Bill’s is broad and big picture. Steve’s was narrow, deep and detailed. Bill’s consciousness or span of purview was significantly wider. This increased his source of fuel for his creations and the information systems he re-combined were bigger.
Gates built the Microsoft product line and business through partnering and inclusion for shared prosperity. Jobs’ strategy was more isolating by design. He structured Apple initially to have an exclusive, proprietary, and independent product line which did not mesh well with others.
However, he seemed to model Gates’ inclusion approach when he returned to Apple to rescue it from bankruptcy after his ten-year absence. Pixar’s work with Disney and others may also have contributed to his transformation as well.
Jobs came to allow others to generate applications for his exclusive product line which helped him to defeat competition such as Blackberry which followed Jobs into exclusion but missed his redirection to inclusion. Blackberry missed the app bandwagon that saved Apple – especially with its iPhone market penetration. Without a plethora of device-compliant applications, functionality and personalization were greatly reduced.
The GUIs incident
Let me reveal some of the historical events upon which I based these opinions. While at Apple, Steve Jobs contracted Bill Gates at Microsoft to write new software to provide the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that were so critical to so many of Jobs’ greatest inventions.
These interfaces would allow a user to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators rather than having to type commands on a keyboard. As you might imagine, requiring users to learn a plethora of keyboard commands would present an intimidating barrier to entry for most.
Bill Gates was enthralled with the idea of graphical user interfaces and wanted to use them for Microsoft instead of Apple. Unfortunately, it would be unethical to steal a client’s idea. Fortunately, Bill coincidentally discovered that Jobs had learned the idea from products both Apple and Microsoft people had seen at Xerox PARC. Xerox had revealed what they had developed in the hopes that known producers such as Apple and Microsoft would buy the technology or help Xerox to commercialize it.
Therefore, GUIs were not Steve Jobs’ proprietary idea. It would therefore be fair game for Bill to develop software with graphical user interfaces for Microsoft instead. This led to the birth of Windows, a system that uses a mouse to drive a graphic interface which displayed text and images on the screen. Windows was quite an improvement over the text-and-keyboard-driven MS-DOS operating system.
Needless to say, when Jobs heard about Windows, he went ballistic. This led to Apple initiating a court case which was later dismissed as being without merit. But fair is fair. This is how creativity works – new creations emerge by re-combining existing information systems.
While Bill may have sourced software from the marketplace, he was quite clever about adapting and enhancing it for greater market receptivity. He did the same with Xerox’s GUIs.
He did not directly copy what Xerox had done. Rather, Gates combined Xerox’s ideas with the trends in his reality and other information systems plus his years of programming finesse to achieve a significantly more advanced outcome with Windows. Bill was just as creative but didn’t see the need to start from scratch as Jobs did.
Might I also note in Gates’ defense that, despite his criticism of Bill for “ripping off the ideas of others,” Jobs was unconsciously doing exactly the same thing with what he had learned from Xerox. This is not a criticism. This is simply the way creativity works for evolution’s adaptivity, for the uber-creative Steve Jobs, and for all of us ordinary folk.
Creative tension
Had Jobs realized this basic underlying dynamic of creativity on an implementation level, he might not have suffered the stresses and strains of the creative tension arising from demanding so much originality from himself and others. I think this creative tension led to issues with his temper, his toxic disparagement of others, and the health problems that plagued him. Even a dedication to mindfulness meditation could not dissipate all the creative tension he experienced.
It was undoubtedly this disposition and temperament which caused Jobs to launch a smear campaign against Gates. As we have seen, Jobs respected Gates enough to hire Microsoft for software development. According to his authorized biography, Jobs kept a note from Bill Gates beside his deathbed.[ii] All was not what it seemed between them. It would appear that many have had a plethora of wrong impressions about Bill Gates for decades.
Different savant domains
What Jobs and others assumed was Bill Gates’ savant domain was, in fact, not. As a reminder, “domain” and “field” or “industry” are not interchangeable in savanting. Existing epithets, fields, and categories may not apply.
Your savant domain is based on the maximization of your biological wiring. The bioflow maximizing machinery decides what your savant domain is at any moment in time based on the theme of which intrinsically or biologically rewarding activities incite your savantflows.
Jeff Bezos knew the truth about Gates when he switched disciplines from physics and Stephen Hawking’s space to computer science and Bill Gates’ worldbuilding. Yes, it is Bezos and Gates who are comparable not Jobs.
Jobs is the artist who strived for perfection in design to produce devices that were universally loved aesthetically and functionally. Steve was an aesthetic idealist to whom it was more important to create the best product than to sell the most. He had passion and vision for what technology could do in people’s lives and the magnetic charisma and incredible showmanship to promote his devices. Steve Jobs is truly a legend in the field of innovative and interactive design.
For Jobs, software was merely the means to run his devices, make them more endearing and better able to enhance the lives of consumers. For Gates and Bezos, it was the means to advance the structural underpinnings of civilization globally. For Zuckerberg, it was the means to unite humanity by creating, reinforcing, and joining the constellation of relationships of each individual. For all four, it was about bettering the quality of life of individuals en masse.
Bill Gates has a proven history of a logic-sourced creativity that even noncreatives might emulate. Gates took existing technology, adapted it to a specific market, and then dominated that market through innovative promotion and shrewd business savvy.
For example, Gates shrewdly chose not to offer to transfer to IBM the copyright on the MS-DOS operating system Microsoft was hired by IBM to write because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM’s system. This was Gates’ form of brilliant creativity. And he was right.
Much as he had anticipated, after the first IBM PCs were released, cloners such as Compaq began producing compatible PCs, and the market was soon flooded with clones. Rather than produce their own operating systems, the cloners decided it was cheaper to purchase MS-DOS off the shelf.
As a result, MS-DOS became the standard operating system for the industry. By 1993, Windows was selling at a rate of 1 million copies per month and was estimated to be running on nearly 85 percent of the world’s computers. Microsoft’s sales soared from $7 million in 1980 to $16 million in 1981.
A single creative business move may have generated the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue. Jobs, David Gelernter, and others had missed the true creativity and worldchanging breakthroughs of Bill Gates.
Microsoft solidified its industry dominance through another creative business move in the mid-1990s. They combined Windows with their other applications to create “suites,” then persuaded leading computer makers to preload their software on every computer they sold. The strategy worked so well that by 1999 Microsoft was posting sales of $19.7 billion, and Gates’ personal wealth had grown to a phenomenal $90 billion.
Gates’ passion for global business changed how business was done both within his industries and other industries as well. He set standards, first with MS-DOS and later with Windows. These standards shaped the modern computer industry and will continue to influence its growth for decades.
And now, he is repeating the process to generate new standards, structure, and strategy for more impactful mega-philanthropy to ensure it will cause permanent transformation in the world. The message here is that the real magic of the science behind savanting occurs in one’s savant domain. For those craving global impact, honor internal and external biology. Exploit biology to live a life of serial creativity and breakthroughs that will evolve humanity.
Vision from nonvisionaries
Bill Gates was criticized in the 1990s for not recognizing the power and potential of the internet. He was accused of not being visionary. Gates admits he did not embrace the Web until 1996, two years after browsers debuted. However, this does not mean this was the wrong decision for him or Microsoft.
It is not necessary to “see” trends if one is using the signals to move moment by moment with the bioflow evolutionary engine that is generating those trends. The bioflow would have been orchestrating the maximum of Gates’ system within the maximization of the Microsoft system within the maximization process for humanity’s system.
There is lots of evidence that Gates’ was attuned to the evolutionary advance of those three systems as well as those within his savant domain. Just by continuing to do intrinsically rewarding work every day, he could experience all the benefits of knowing trends without knowing them.
What appeared in 20/20 hindsight to be smart business strategy may in fact be simply compliance with the bioflow day after day as he had done since childhood because he had never lost the connection into which each of us are born.
Nonvisionaries can thus proceed as if they are insightful visionaries. By moving with the trendsetting bioflow engine one may exploit the trends to maximize within one’s savant domain. This is another way that the ordinary may achieve the extraordinary.
With 20/20 hindsight, the signals did not fail Gates. Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer, benefited from having a few years to see what features of other browsers were most valued. Microsoft could then capitalize on the best of the browsers to leapfrog them to create a product ahead of them all.
In yet another seemingly brilliant business breakthrough, Gates was then able to prevail in the browser market by bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system, Internet Service Provider software, and new PCs from OEMs.
Thus, without the requirement for a user-initiated installation, Microsoft could lock consumers into its browser solution before users even had a chance to acquire and try another browser. Gates had not only caught up to the Netscape browser lead but leapfrogged ahead as he did with the Xerox GUIs.
The Netscape browser ultimately died despite its rapid success after early market entry. This was yet another business decision made by Bill Gates that locked in Microsoft revenues. It was not the browser “technology” which made the money. It was Gates’ savvy and creativity in inventing new business infrastructure in the frontiers of his savant domain.
Not everyone needs to have the creative mind of a Jobs or the venturing prowess of a Bezos to have creative breakthroughs. Noncreatives and nonvisionaries may proceed in partnership with the bioflow as if they have both creativity and vision. You are about to learn some of the ways in which the four iconic founders exploited the dynamic flow of information all around them as byproducts of this incredible biological guidance system.
As Bill Gates proves, despite his not having the technology visionary capabilities of a Steve Jobs, he was still able to sustain his position at the forefront of technology trends. He moved Microsoft at top speed to greater success than Apple by not just assimilating existing technologies but using them as springboards to jump ahead.
More about leapfrogging and springboarding in Chapter 17 to capitalize on environmental scanning to increase your creativity and creations. Technology vision is only a small part of Bill Gates’ savant domain for bettering the lives of people. His vision and creativity in the invention of the business infrastructure portion of his savant domain are unsurpassed.
Bill’s partnership with nature’s bio-underpinnings was working perfectly. Again, with 20/20 hindsight, Gates’ decision to focus on Windows in the mid-nineties over the internet was the right one for him and for Microsoft, even if the nay-sayers were correct and he seemingly did not have the vision to realize its value.
He analyzed the signposts inside and outside of himself correctly and took the right action as if he was a visionary. Significant revenues from the internet did not really emerge until around 2004 as Gates, the supposed nonvisionary, had predicted 10 years earlier. Therefore, little was lost by delaying attention to a browser and much was in fact gained by focusing on Windows.
So far, we have explored how savanting facilitates “brilliant breakthroughs from the nonbrilliant,” “creativity from noncreatives” and “vision from nonvisionaries.” Now we want to investigate how savanting enables “exceptional execution from the execution-challenged.”
[i]Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, October 24, 2011, Simon & Schuster
[ii]Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, October 24, 2011, Simon & Schuster
Excerpt from Savanting: Outperforming your Potential, Chapter 5 by Lauren Holmes (2019)
“Developmental psychologist Joseph Chilton Pearce is the grandfather of the conscious parenting movement. In his book “Evolution’s End” (1992), Pearce recounts a story from his own life that demonstrates what he calls a “savant episode.” It serves as another example of external information inflow, but this time from a nonsavant with normal intelligence.
In his early thirties, Pearce was obsessed with the nature of the God-human relationship – a key thrust of his savant domain. One morning his five-year-old son came into his room and launched into a 20-minute speech on the nature of God and man. “He spoke in perfect, publishable sentences,” Pearce writes, “without pause or haste, and in a flat monotone. He used complex theological terminology and told me, it seemed, everything there was to know.
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“As I listened, astonished, the hair rose on my neck; I felt goose bumps, and, finally, tears streamed down my face. I was in the midst of the uncanny, the inexplicable. My son’s ride to kindergarten arrived, horn blowing, and he got up and left.
“I was unnerved and arrived late to my class. What I had heard was awesome, but too vast and far beyond any concept I had had to that point. The gap was so great I could remember almost no details and little of the broad panorama he had presented. My son had no recollection of the event.”[1]
Pearce speculated on how his son’s enlightening communication might have occurred. His son was a bright, normal child. At age five, his son had presented a field of knowledge which he could not have acquired – just as with savants.
“Terms such as telepathy are misleading,” Pearce warns. “He wasn’t picking up his materials from me. I hadn’t acquired anything like what he described and would, in fact, be in my mid-fifties and involved in meditation before I did.”
Pearce came to believe that his son had come into the influence of Pearce’s field of concern and the larger ancient field of theological and psychological inquiry. “My son’s theological discourse was not random but squarely in keeping with my own passionate pursuits,” Pearce claims.[2]
Since the information was beyond Pearce’s knowledge and comprehension at the time, psi or ESP could not have been a possible explanation. Therefore, Pearce concluded that his son must have undergone a “savant episode.”
Bioflow-driven savant episodes
Savanting offers another explanation. It is not his son who was driving the savant episode but Pearce himself. Pearce was operating in his savant domain exploring the nature of the God-human relationship. He was likely in savantflow operating at his maximum at the time. He was therefore connected to the bioflow which brings spontaneous information related to the activity generating the savantflow.
The savant episode was an example of support by the bioflow. This support includes providing information for your progress or growth through a multitude of sources. Such information might present through clusters of information coincidences, models of solutions, and facilitating people and events, for example.
Through his son, Pearce had access to information relevant to the goals of his savantflow within his savant domain in a slightly different way than savants. However, the same principles apply.
As an aside I should point out that Pearce unfortunately didn’t realize that the information his son conveyed was state-bound to Pearce’s very deep savantflow. He therefore did not immediately document the information so he could review it in his normal consciousness in order to retain it.
As you become the creative worldchanger you were meant to be, you’ll want to make it a habit to capture all your spontaneous knowledge during or immediately after your savantflows.
The first time I recognized that I was experiencing the type of savant episode Pearce has described was in 1992 when I had been operating in my savant domain for a little over a year. I had already recognized that my savantflows were getting deeper and more profound over that time. In this particular savantflow, I was stumped as to how biology was working in a certain situation.
A co-worker with negligible knowledge of biology opened my office door, stuck his head in, gave me the answer and then promptly closed the door again. He used the same monotone that Pearce noted for his son. To this day Jack has no idea why he did it, where he got the information, what he said, or even what the information meant when I repeated it back to him at a later date.
There is an additional part to savanting’s explanation of Pearce’s savant episode. In this chapter you are beginning to see evidence that we are all born into the bioflow and must be taught to separate from it by our cultural institutions and our parents. Therefore, preschool children tend to still be connected to the bioflow. As a result, they do indeed come out with information they have not absorbed through their five senses.
Pearce’s five-year-old son was still connected to and compliant with the bioflow. He thus became an instrument of the bioflow for providing the information that Pearce needed for the work of his savantflow. Preschool children thus become an excellent conduit for externally sourced savant genius for advancing one’s work in one’s savant domain.
I suspect that Jack became an instrument of the bioflow like Pearce’s son because he too was working in his savant domain and thus complying with the orchestration of the bioflow. Therefore, we can assume that the instruments for savant episodes are people connected to the bioflow. However, there is one more unexpected explanation for Pearce’s savant episode.
Savant Episodes vs information coincidences
First, I want to take a moment to differentiate savant episodes from information coincidences. Information coincidences will abound as soon as you begin savanting. When you are complying with the directional information of the bioflow you will be colliding with the right information at the right time for meeting savant-domain goals.
This means you will experience a multitude of seemingly serendipitous information events such as opening a book at the right page; flipping on the right TV channel at the right time; meeting a person with the exact answer you need; or clicking on an internet news item with the exact model for the solution to your goal.
Savanting is an entirely different paradigm of operation. Information coincidences are so prevalent in a serial-savantflow life that you’ll find yourself building into your project planning timeframes your accelerated progress as a result of expecting them. Their absence from other sectors of your life makes pursuing a life in your savant domain all the more enticing.
However, the savant episode that Pearce describes or my experience with Jack is a whole other level of mystical magic. This is a real person who gives you the answer you need without knowing they are doing it or having ever sourced that information in their past.
Information is nonlocal
What is the explanation for savant episodes and our increased access to information through savanting? Let me quote myself from a section entitled “All Information is Distributed” in “Peak Evolution: Beyond Peak Performance and Peak Experience” (2001, 2010):
“As we learned in investigating the knowledge technology, quantum physics proposes that all information is distributed or nonlocal. There is no local information or localized memory.
“It is a law of information theory that information transcends time and space, placing it beyond the confining limits of matter and energy. I thus hypothesized a holographic interconnection of all information. A universal information hologram into which we, as information systems, are integrated.”[3]
Albert Einstein reinforced this concept, “Time and space are modes by which we think, not conditions in which we live.” This is an important distinction.
Michael Talbot was the author of a book which was catalytic in launching my development of savanting. In “The Holographic Universe,” Talbot concurred with Einstein, “Challenging evidence is being offered from a number of different directions that information, not mass or energy, is the ultimate fabric of the cosmos.”[4]
Many have heard from physicists that information is nonlocal but have not incorporated the possibilities of this fact into their belief system to augment their access to relevant information. In fact, many assume they only have access to local information absorbed through their five senses. This belief therefore limits the reality that they can experience. Savanting provides the means to get practical about the application of nonlocalized information.
Alternative explanation of savant episodes
Therefore, I want to offer an uncommon explanation for Pearce’s savant episode which requires neither the spiritual nor religious disciplines normally associated with this subject matter.
There is a growing body of evidence developed by psychologists and consciousness researchers about the altered states of consciousness which are associated with even normal flow states. These are enhanced, accelerated, and amplified in savantflows. Over time savantflows become deeper, more productive, more creative, more profound, more mystical, and more expansive.
Consciousness continues to expand until suddenly you will experience cosmic-consciousness events in which you are one with everything. As you progress, you’ll eventually find that, in your deepest savantflows, you can enter cosmic consciousness at will when it is beneficial to the activity which has incited your savantflow. These states are much easier to achieve through savantflow than any form of meditation.
If one shifts into unity consciousness or cosmic consciousness in one’s savantflow only a single consciousness will exist. Therefore, Joseph Chilton Pearce and his son would have been a single consciousness having a single epiphany during a savant episode that was Pearce’s not his son’s.
Consequently, we may assume that the powers and potential of humanity may be greater than I have alluded to this point. They are greater than what is indicated by the existence of savants. The normal state of consciousness of future humans may be far different than what is prevalent today. Instead of visiting cosmic consciousness from today’s normal consciousness, we may instead be visiting normal consciousness from living life predominantly from expanded consciousness.
Needless to say, we are going to want to educate, enculturate, and nurture our children very differently in the future to retain the bioflow connection demonstrated by our six superachievers. Anyone wanting their children to achieve their true internal-external potential will want to identify and cultivate their child’s savant formula.
There are more examples of external information access by other categories of nonsavants in the next chapter. They will reinforce the hypothesis that the fuel behind savant genius is externally sourced and therefore accessible to all of us regardless of our intelligence, talents, or aptitudes.”
In our inner being, we are one with all. Swami Dhyan Giten
Everything exists as information in a field of infinite possibilities, and it is our Consciousness that renders the information and causes it to appear as the material world. Joseph P. Kauffman
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. Yasutani Roshi, Zen master
[1] Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution’s End, 1992 In: San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco; p. 8-9
[2] Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution’s End, 1992 p. 9-10
Excerpt from The Encore: A Transformational Thriller from Chapter 11, Heroes in the Making by Lauren Holmes (2018)
Connor addressed the class. “Good morning, everyone!” Audience members responded in kind. “Over the last few days, you’ve all been working hard to assimilate a new modus operandi for breakthroughs and creativity that we want you to use to solve the planet’s crises.
“School is ending. Our time to begin implementation is at hand. We need to finalize a savant formula for each of you and identify the projects to which you will apply it. Think carefully about your selections as we step through a final review this morning. Let’s begin.
“What is a savant formula?”
Sibylla Lund called out, “It’s your maximum operation around the application of your strongest most rewarding talents. Your own maximization allows you to merge with the bioflow’s maximization process. This enables your capabilities to be extended by those of the bioflow – its evolutionary direction, forces, information, and the capabilities of the living systems it orchestrates. This gives you the means to operate beyond your internal potential.”
Sibylla was an unemployed electrical engineer from the shutdown of power plants due to the xenoforming and the switch to fossil fuels. She was referred to his Breakthru Mission by Axl Dahl’s wife, Freya. She’s a Varunian Freya met through her charity work.
“What else does bioflow integration give you, Sibylla?”
“It’s also the means to access spontaneous knowledge as coincidences externally or as breakthroughs and epiphanies internally,” continued Sibylla. “The more information fuel you have, the more easily, quickly, and frequently you can re-combine existing information systems to create a novel system or breakthrough that will get you to your goal more quickly.
“One breakthrough could bypass hundreds of steps requisite to achieving a goal. Our goal is to have serial breakthroughs driving our projects. Speed plus invention breakthroughs are of the essence. They are the key thrust of this Breakthru Mission since the normal modi operandi have failed to yield the necessary solutions to our crises. We’re a world weak in creativity.”
“Sibylla, I like how you’ve synthesized multiple lectures in a very net way,” Connor responded, obviously impressed. “Well done.
“Why did I name your bioflow integration prescription your ‘savant formula’ and the new modus operandi ‘savanting?’”
“It’s the best explanation for how savants with no working left brains and thus no ability to access, retain, and process large quantities of data, nevertheless demonstrate that ability,” explained Sibylla. “Their access must be external from information databases underlying the bioflow and all of its living information systems including the human species.” Connor nodded.
“What is the generic formula for immersing oneself into the bioflow, Dania? Dania Lind suddenly became a deer in headlights. He hadn’t meant to catch her off-guard. She had a Ph.D. in astrobiology after all and Sibylla had already given the high-level answer.
Oh. Connor suddenly realized that she was sitting next to Mikael Matsen again, the microbiologist. There was a romance forming between them, so she’d undoubtedly not heard his question.
“Anyone?” asked Connor as he tried to quickly take the spotlight off Dania. “What is the generic formula for immersing oneself into the bioflow?”
Gregor Stinar stood up. He was a lucky find assessed Connor. He’d just graduated top of his class with a master’s degree in bioscience engineering and was an expert in environmental technology, rare for his and Annalise’s tribe, the Azurites. Gregor had planned to take a year off to travel before settling into a career job. I suspect we wouldn’t have acquired him otherwise Connor speculated.
Connor had had to ask Axl to get Azurite Chief of State Einar Nyhus to wine and dine Gregor to impress upon him that his planet needed him. Connor had heard something about a promise of first-class global travel that apparently sealed the deal.
“In its simplest form,” began Gregor, “the bioflow is a machinery or set of mechanisms for maximizing living systems for survival. It promotes synergy among living systems. It orchestrates all living systems synchronously into the ideal evolutionary direction for all. Therefore, to integrate into it, one must be moving in the same direction or complying with its goals. One must be operating at one’s maximum. Or at least doing activities which will eventually maximize you,” Gregor added as an afterthought.
“Maximizing inside means you’ll relink with the maximizing machinery outside since they are a single system. When you’re complying with the direction and intent of the bioflow, you’re letting nature maneuver you into your most advantageous position vis-à-vis other living systems, information, and resources.”
“Extremely comprehensive answer, Greg. You’re seeing the big picture – how all of the pieces fit together. You’re understanding nature’s goals and how to exploit them to accelerate your own goals. Thank you for an excellent overview.
“Greg tells us we need to be compliant with our internal maximizing mechanisms to merge with the external maximizing machinery. What then is our maximum?
Dania decided to respond. Connor was pleased that her head was back in the game. She was extremely talented and well-educated. Connor expected great things from her. He wanted to ensure she didn’t waste her talents and opportunity for greatness on the distractions of a romance.
“Savantflow. And, before you ask,” laughed Dania, “that’s the flow state that arises when we’re applying our strongest most rewarding talents to the most meaningful and gratifying tasks for an audience that values that work. The biochemistry and electromagnetics of our most desirable emotions, the constellation of our drives for achievement and creation, our maximization instincts and genes have all evolved to pull us to this maximum to ensure the survival of the individual and the species. Savantflow is our automatic mechanism for flicking us into our maximum.”
“A very complete answer, Dania. Thank you. So how does one get into savantflow within the bioflow, Dania?”
“This is because your maximum is a constant and how the bioflow maximizes your system and indeed all living systems is also a constant. Suddenly you can seem to operate as if you have psychic abilities because you know which projects the bioflow will and will not support. Which projects will and will not succeed. Yet it’s simply a matter of knowing nature’s historical logic, goals, and directions.”
“Yes, thank you, Dania,” exclaimed Connor enthusiastically. He nodded at her with a proud grin to tell her that she had redeemed herself. “How does one discover one’s savant formula?”
Olivia Ohlson stood up. She and Kellin’s son Rolland were the youngest of the creatives at age 20. “To identify one’s savant formula, we simply need to look at our past pattern of events and activities that launched our savantflows.
“Whatever the theme of the activities causing our savantflows was in the past – our savantflows theme – will predict how you can move into savantflow in the future. Your savantflows theme will be your savant formula for moving into future savantflows.
“Or, uh, I guess you could call it your savantflow-bioflow theme. It’s this theme which will tell each of us precisely which projects to choose for success with Annutia’s Breakthru Mission.
“Right you are, Olivia,” confirmed Connor to validate both to Liv and the group that he respected how talented she was. She was another KahlDahr like Kellin and Rolland who was brilliant and inventive despite having been deprived of a formal education.
“Savantflow-bioflow theme captures our goal perfectly, doesn’t it? Thank you, Olivia.” Connor was pleased that he’d been right about Liv. Despite being so young she was excelling at savanting.
He had recruited her from the Programming Department after recruiting Kellin. Like Kellin, Liv had been overlooked as all KahlDahr are. Their protruding brows make them appear both menacing and primitive. Also, she was female, beautiful, poor, confident, creative, and self-educated, all of which increased the discrimination she had endured over her short life.
The ruling castes had missed that, with Liv’s unity consciousness, she could see how massive computer systems fit together. She had an executive perspective. Yet she could also work brilliantly on all the tiny details composing that larger picture.
He and Annalise had been waiting for the elevator for the Council Chamber when he watched her flowchart all of the systems for a bullying, condescending executive. He was obviously very much her senior, yet he was having great difficulty grasping the breadth of her thinking.
“What if you can’t identify the pattern in your past savantflow events. How else might you determine your savant formula?”
“Your spontaneous-knowledge theme,” called someone from the audience but Connor couldn’t see whom it was. “Determine the theme of the activities you were doing when you experienced breakthroughs, epiphanies, coincidences and other spontaneous knowledge events.
“Exactly,” said Connor. Other ways of determining your savant formula?
Kellin stood up, “Your unpaid-work theme. This entails an examination of the events in your past when you’ve done work that you crave so much that you’d do it for free. You love it that much. Whereas, others would charge for it because they consider it work. You should be able to trace this theme in patterns of events in your past.
“You’ll have emotional highs when you’re doing this kind of work so the positive-emotions theme will also apply. When you do it, there’ll also be the expected occurrences of spontaneous knowledge, flashes of genius, breakthroughs, and clusters of coincidences.
“This is exactly right, Kellin. You’ve lived your savant formula, haven’t you – since you made the car that died on your front lawn operational in your pre-teen years.” Kellin nodded.
“What’s the difference between breakthroughs, coincidences, spontaneous knowledge and epiphanies,” Connor continued.
Kellin, still standing, responded. “Nothing. They’re all re-combinations of information systems inside of you or outside of you to invent a new information system. They’re all part of the larger scheme of the creative evolutionary advance of the bioflow. Nature can’t always solve evolutionary challenges in a gradual incremental way. It must use quantum leaps to create a human eye for example. We want to harness the bioflow’s creativity production line to solve the crises of our world.”
“Excellent, Kellin,” Connor beamed. I never specifically stated that they were all part of the same continuum that connects our inner systems and brain to the bioflow or that they are simply an extension of nature’s own universal creative, adaptive, evolutionary process, but you figured it out.
“You’re obviously going to excel at exploiting the bioflow for your projects, Kellin. Just as you see how the systems of this huge Government Complex run, you have the expanded consciousness to grasp how the systems of the universe interconnect and operate.”
Connor wanted to ensure that KahlDahr Kellin, Rolland, Olivia and others were not intimidated by those with multiple degrees or from more elevated castes. He wanted them free to create and achieve at the maximum of their significant talents.
Connor was a big Kellin fan. The KahlDahr was so incredibly talented. He was also good people. The two had a special bond. They both shared a wisdom that comes from living from unity consciousness and seeing how everything is connected, even the two of them. He had a warm spot in his heart for Olivia and Kellin’s son, Rolland, for the same reason.
Rolland was still working on his biology degree, yet his expansive brilliance was more insightful than mature professionals in that field. He could see biological systems as ingeniously as his father could see mechanical systems or Liv could see programming systems. All three had effortlessly absorbed the systems thinking underlying savanting.
“You’ve created a quantum leap for everyone, Kellin. In savantflow, your concentration is simply on the creative act you are doing. You become pure creation. This is our natural state. This is nature’s natural state. This is my process of savanting in a nutshell.
“Let’s say you’ve never been free during your life to discover your unpaid work theme. What other patterns of events in your past could you track to determine your savant formula?” No one responded. “How else could you get into savantflow within the bioflow?” No one responded. “What other themes could you follow?” No one responded.
He had told them that all of the themes point to the same savant formula, so perhaps they thought learning only one or two would be enough. However, being fluent in them all means that you’ll be able to action incoming events in your life more quickly. You’ll make directional decisions faster.
“We’ve identified the savantflows theme or savantflow-bioflow theme, the spontaneous-knowledge theme, the unpaid-work theme, and the positive-emotions theme. What else?”
Finally, Henerik Halderson posited an answer. “You can look at the events of new knowledge that you naturally pursued since childhood.”
When they recruited him, Henerik was a biochemistry degree dropout seeking to find himself and his purpose. Henerik had blossomed with the Breakthru Mission and School. He had found his purpose.
“Yes, good,” reinforced Connor. “You want to assess the common thread of any new learning that you voluntarily sought. Your learning-pursuit theme or knowledge-pursuit theme.
Henerik nodded before continuing, “What growth have you sought historically? Your growth theme or growth-pursuit theme. What is the theme that runs through the times in your past when you were creative or inventive? And what is the common territory of new creations that you’ve historically sought? Your creativity theme or creation theme? Also, in what fields did you choose to be creative? What is your creativity-pursuit theme?
“And what is the commonality of the new territories of knowledge or new frontiers that you’ve historically penetrated? Your frontier-pursuit theme. These are all likely to also generate emotional highs so, as Kellin indicated, you could also track what work or activities generated passion, excitement, and enthusiasm. Your positive-emotions theme.”
“Good work, Henerik! You’ve added a number of categories of past events to our list for assessment. There are a couple more that offer alternative means to identify your savant formula. Anyone? Yes, Marta.”
Marta Kaase was a Varunian electrical engineer also laid off from the power plants like fellow-Varunian Sibylla. Connor had learned that in the Annutia caste system, Varunians were one step above the KahlDahr and one rung below the Azurites.
“Your successful-projects theme,” suggested Marta. “I think we could pick our future projects based on our past successful projects – ones with the tell-tale arrows that everyone has been identifying.”
“You’re exactly right, Marta. When you’re choosing your projects for the Breakthru Mission, you’ll want to ensure you capitalize on the formula that has created successful projects in your past. Now that you know about the bioflow, you don’t want to see those projects as isolated events. There is a pattern. If you can dig for it, there is no need to ever pursue a project that will not succeed again. Never again will you swim upstream against the bioflow to try to make a project work.
“We know if it’s a right project for us that we will see clusters of coincidences, breakthroughs and other spontaneous knowledge events, facilitating events and gates, emotional highs, and serial savantflows. Marta, what will we see if we choose projects not on the yellow-brick road, so to speak?”
“Blocks,” said Marta. “Setbacks. Negative emotions. The absence of any arrows or signposts. Hard work step-by-step instead of coincidences and facilitating events catapulting you forward hundreds of steps at a time.
“You’ll have to use discipline to push yourself to keep going instead of being pulled forward by compelling drives. The formula of past failed projects will continue in the future. There is now a predictability that never existed for me before. There appears to be an incredible order to reality where we assumed chaos.”
“Precisely,” said Connor. “Well done, Marta. I’ve asked you all to start developing hypotheses as to what projects you want to pursue to solve the planet’s crises. When you test them out, if they’re wrong for you or the planet or the evolutionary bioflow of the planet, Marta has described precisely what you’ll experience. You’ll then need to quickly replace those projects.
“We can do your first test right now. When you think of doing the project you have selected, are you excited or does your energy nosedive? That is your first indication. Are you going to have to push yourself to do the wrong project rather than being joyfully excited by the right project? Excellent work, Marta.”
“Who has remembered the last two themes or patterns of past events that you can evaluate?” probed Connor further.
Sven Steensen called out, “Your historical meaning theme or meaning-pursuit theme. What projects, work, or contributions have historically given your life meaning. What contributions do you crave to make?”
Sven was a mechanical engineer. Like Sibylla Lund and Marta Kaase, he was also laid off from a hydropower company as they had to return to burning fossil fuels.
“Thank you, Sven. Obviously, we need everyone doing work that is meaningful to them. This is part of the positive-emotions theme when you’re on the right path to maximization and immersion into the bioflow.
What is the last theme to identify one’s savant formula? Jordaan, what is the one we’re missing? The most elusive one until you develop this skill?”
“Resonance. Your pattern or theme of resonance events,” exclaimed Jordaan Jostad after a moment of pensive reflection. An astrophysicist, Jordaan is adept at applying the laws of physics and chemistry to explain the birth, life and death of stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae and other objects in the universe.
This was the perfect direction for someone who’d been addicted to the pursuit of astronomy and cosmology since his childhood years with his Dad, a world-renowned astronomer. Much to his surprise, his Dad was all in favor of Jordaan participating in the Breakthru Mission. Connor learned why at a social event at Axl’s home.
Apparently, Dad attributes his own success to an incredible memory and the logic to apply that knowledge. While they were both passionate about the same fields, these were not Jordaan’s strengths. He showed signs of being much more inventive, imaginative, and creative. Jordaan had a gift for inventing new scientific equipment and designing unprecedented computer software to analyze data and such. Dad’s strengths were left-brain; his son’s were right-brain.
Dad had realized when Connor selected his son that he’d recruited the right strengths for the Annutia Breakthru Mission. He felt Commander Kane could teach Jordaan things that he could not. That Kane could cultivate in his son strengths that he himself did not possess.
Because Jostad Sr, believed so much in Connor, he had secured additional funding for the program to ensure its success. Connor was pleased to have a creative as talented as Jordaan in the group.
“You are exactly right,” confirmed Connor. “Tell us about resonance and how to use it, Jordaan.”
“This is our frequency-sensing ability. You are one tuning fork. When you concentrate on a direction option which is the right one to take towards maximization within the maximization direction of the bioflow, it’s like a second tuning fork starts to tone in resonance with you, the first tuning fork. This is how you can proceed quickly and safely into unknown territory.
“You look at your list of possible directions and choose the one where you feel the surge of a second tuning fork beginning to cause vibration within you in resonance.”
“Is resonance the same as gut feel or intuition, Jordaan?
“No, sir. It has no additional information other than two things having the same frequency.”
“Precisely. Well done. Thank you, Jordaan.” Connor went to turn away and then turned back to ask as an afterthought, “Have you ever used your resonance, Jordaan?”
“No, sir.”
“Raise your hands. Who has used resonance or thinks they have? About 20%. I suspect that within a couple of months, most of you will raise your hands. Resonance or frequency-sensing is faster in determining direction. It means you won’t have to test various direction hypotheses to look for other indicator events in your reality before you can determine your best direction in which to proceed.
“Now, what if you don’t have the patterns of events of any of these themes in your past. A no-themes situation. What does that mean? What should you do? Yes, Mikael?”
“This means you’ve lived your life directed by external elements – you’ve been externally referenced – rather than complying with your natural addictive drives internally – or been internally referenced. Consequently, you haven’t maximized. Therefore, you haven’t merged with the bioflow. As a result, you’ll have less consistent patterns or fewer of them to help you to determine direction to achieve your goals. You won’t be able to recruit the power of the bioflow.”
Connor was pleased that Mikael had taken his attention off Dania long enough to participate. Mikael was brilliantly creative, perhaps the best after Kellin. Connor knew when he recruited him that he was going to excel at using savanting to solve the crises. Since then he’d proven even better than expected.
Mikael was another brilliant Varunian bench-pressing out of his caste. That he should have had difficulty finding work was such a waste of extraordinary talent. Connor was grateful for his availability to contribute to the Breakthru Mission.
“So, what do you need to do, Mikael?”
“Start savanting with serial savantflows so that the indicators will emerge. Then you can use them to predict your future and your ideal direction.”
“Exactly, Mikael. However, I’ll give you all a hint. None of you are in this ‘no-themes’ category. You were recruited based on your themes of past events in your life and their match to the planetary crises.
“Good work, everyone!” Connor praised. I’m going to give you the rest of today to analyze your past patterns of events to help you to pick out at least one project that has the greatest chance of success. Know your savant formula. Then use that formula to select the projects that you would be most excited to pursue to save Annutia.”
What do the founders of Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook teach us?
Excerpt from BioMaxed, Chapter 38 (2019) by Lauren Holmes
Many aspire to the success of iconic founders, 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.
Chasing the success formula
Many mistakenly assume that they accumulated their wealth, acclaim, and world-changing breakthroughs by pursuing these rewards directly. Many therefore try to emulate what their career paths “seem” to have been in order to acquire comparable extrinsic rewards. They try to follow the discipline and linear formulas prescribed by so many of today’s success gurus. They are at a loss when their incredible hard work does not pay off as it did for our seven super-achievers.
The intrinsically-driven career
That is because the elusive success formula these seven share is not what would-be imitators thought. Rather, it was the serial pursuit of intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards along a path defined by biological predisposition and preference. An exercise in my ‘Sourcing Your Savant’ article will help you to identify your personal formula.
A nonlinear career path
In the interim, let’s translate the formula into generic terms that anyone might emulate. Our seven icons applied their strongest most rewarding, most addictive talents to their most meaningful, impactful application for audiences which would value their output the most. They repetitively broke through frontier after frontier of capability, accomplishment, and impact with those talents and this formula.
Their strongest talents are a constant. Therefore, their advance will be a nonlinear expansion in capability and impact around that core. Think widening concentric circles. In other words, they continuously improved on the thing they do best rather than advancing up a linear ladder to more responsibility, for example. Rather than ladder-climbing, our seven founders were simply thrust to the top by the expansion of their greatest strengths into widening circles of impact. Their success was nonlinear.
The biology factor
Yet what I am promoting is not about clichés such as “follow your heart” or “do what you love” or “play to your strengths.” When you get your personal formula correct as our super seven did, there are biological consequences. Biological benefits explode exponentially.
We have been identifying a goal state of operating at one’s biological maximum around the use, improvement, and strengthening of one’s strongest talents. A plethora of biological mechanisms have evolved to pressure us to operate at this biological maximum to ensure the survival of our species. So, when these biological mechanisms kick in, magic happens. An overdrive engages.
Addictive drives and emotions activate to pull you to use your strongest talents. They make what would be work for anyone else into irresistible, compelling, addictive play for you. Discipline and force become unnecessary to achieve long hours of productivity and peak performance. This was the day-to-day life of our seven super-achievers. No wonder they accomplished so much.
Further, one will be merging with nature’s creative process. Even non-creatives may suddenly wax creative. The kinds of breakthroughs and flashes of genius experienced by our super-seven increased significantly. One breakthrough may be life-changing, career-making, and even world-changing.
Imagine the lifetime of leaps these seven founders experienced. Even coincidences increase to catapult you ahead because they are part of the same information-leap process. Routine career strategies could never compete with this kind of capability.
In addition, you will spend most of your day in a peak-performance, peak-growth state called flow. Flow is our maximum state. Therefore, mechanisms have evolved to addict us to it. Every time you enter flow when it is focused on the use or improvement of your top talents, your functionality, skill, and knowledge of your craft will increase. The baseline operation of our iconic founders thus increased over their lifetimes.
There is more in this overdrive state. Flow is actually an altered state of consciousness. It will cause your consciousness to expand. You may better see the interconnectedness of things as a result. Your work will improve with this perspective.
But more importantly, your cognitive capabilities will increase: conceptual, abstract, system, and big-picture thinking, for example. Right-brain activity will also increase significantly. Synergy with the left brain that most cultures develop better will be maximized. The result will be whole-brain operation at levels which exceed the sum of the parts. This further increases what you can achieve. Prepare to transcend!
The biologically maximized career
Imagine what would happen after decades of upgrading, performing, and achieving at your biological maximum as our seven founders did. What will your biologically maximized career achieve? What will ‘your’ Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google or Facebook equivalent look like?
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.
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?
Biological maximization is the next generation of breakthrough competitive advantage for the future corporation. Individual and multi-individual human systems are maximized by nature’s adaptation mechanisms in exactly the same way. Therefore, the techniques for biologically maximizing yourself that you have learned in previous essays may be applied to maximize all human systems – an individual, a family, a company, a marketplace, a country, and the human race as a whole, for example.
I nearly wrote the obvious article which extrapolates from individual to corporate maximization. But then it occurred to me that it might be more intriguing for both reader and writer if I assumed that both the employees and the corporation are already maximized. This would give us a view of the goal state of maximized corporate operation. It would reveal the potential company of the future.
We will therefore assume that both individual and company have both already partnered with nature’s machinery for adapting and maximizing all living systems for survival. We will assume that they are thus already operating not only at their internal potential but their extended potential. This means that we will be assuming that they both have extended their innate capabilities and potential to include those of the maximizing machinery externally and all of the systems it orchestrates. What will the future company look like when populated by employees operating beyond their potential?
Snapshot of a maximized individual in action
First, let’s quickly review how the biologically maximized individual will be operating. A snapshot of that state can serve as a model for our discussion of the biologically maximized corporation. Peak performance for a human system is the application of one’s strongest talents to the context that will most benefit from them. One’s greatest strengths then will thus be applied to one’s most meaningful and rewarding work for an audience that will value that work the most.
This work must scale new frontiers either for the individual or for advancing reality. It must change the physical world in some way. There is the requirement for creative and learning elements. This is because the entrance fee to attain our maximum state requires us to be stretched beyond our previous performance levels. It requires that we apply our strongest talents at increasingly more elevated levels. Obviously, as a successful species, we have evolved addictive or motivating drives to pull us to maximum performance and adaptive advance to improve our prospects for survival.
Until this series of articles, our peak performance or maximum state had been called flow. I have identified a subset flow state which is even more precisely our maximum. I have called it top-talent flow state since it emerges as a result of applying one’s strongest talents to advance ideal contexts as identified in the above definition of our maximum.
A requirement for entering this enticing top-talent flow state is that the activity that invokes this altered state of consciousness must stretch you beyond your previous capabilities. Therefore, growth in skill and impact are built into this state. Every time you enter flow, then, your system will be advancing. In top-talent flow, you will therefore achieve peak growth and peak performance. We have evolved drives what will always pull us to this maximum. They have evolved to ensure our survival.
Growth to maximum performance then can never be linear. Your core is a constant. Your strengths, your talents, and your essence are a constant. Biological predisposition determines this core. Therefore, mechanisms trying to maximize you will always pressure you to expand around your core strengths. Think of ever-widening concentric circles. Nature will always pressure you to operate in flow states which emerge from applying your greatest strengths.
This is why the twelveSourcing-Your-Savantexercises are so critical. They tell you your formula for operating sustainably in your maximum state. They tell you when the machinery has and has not supported you in the past so that you might determine the formula for when it will and will not support you in the future. Maximized individuals move with the maximizing flow and never against it. Therefore, they live by this formula going forward. They choose all projects or goals to capitalize on the machinery and to avoid problems. Imagine knowing which projects will or will not work before you begin them.
This will mean that the machinery will support them with a plethora of capabilities, facilitations, and leaps that will catapult them to their goals. Externally these leaps include clusters of coincidences relevant to their goals. Internally, these leaps include breakthroughs, flashes of genius, breakthroughs, “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, flashes of genius, epiphanies, sudden knowledge, sudden insight, intuitive leaps, enlightenment, sudden creativity, sudden creation, creative inspirations, and leaps to emotional highs.
These leaps are the essence of the maximizing process. They are generated by the re-combining of existing information systems to create new information systems. This is the basic creativity used to solve maximizing challenges. It is the essence of adaptation. Obviously, maximized individuals will automatically merge with a machinery that has evolved to maximize us. They can thus achieve bigger goals better and faster with this extendedpotential. They can achieve beyond their potential.
In addition, your performance will increase in another way. You will be merging with the production line that generates adaptive leaps or solutions. Even non-creatives and those of normal intelligence may come up with career-changing if not world-changing breakthroughs through tapping into this powerful process. Imagine what you could accomplish with a lifetime of leaps. No wonder every one of us wants to know our maximizing formula.
CORPORATE BEST PRACTICES REVOLUTIONIZED
One human-develop continuum
The maximizing machinery maximizes all human systems identically. It neutrally applies the same pressures to every human system. This means that there is only one human-development continuum for individual and multi-individual systems. There is a single human-development continuum for every individual system, every company system, every country system, and so on. Because the maximizing machinery is logically integrated, the new standards deriving from a partnership with that machinery will also be integrated and interlinked.
This translates into a single develop continuum or single process for organizational development, leadership development, talent development, change management, and career management, for example. Because leadership development and individual development use the same systems maximization process, leadership development will become a by-product of pursuing one’s natural growth path. The natural drives of the individual will propel personal advancement. Yet they will also inadvertently pull individuals to meet organizational needs for leading and leadership development as a byproduct.
In fact, you will learn that this singular development continuum pressured by the maximizing flow will merge today’s fragmented corporate best practices into a single integrated process. Partnering with the maximizing process will simultaneously revolutionize standards for management science, leading, entrepreneuring, frontiering™, innovation, leader creation, leadership development, organizational development, performance improvement, productivity improvement, project management, high-speed growth, change management, talent attraction, talent retention, talent development, career management, recruiting, outplacement, and more. Pursue improvement in one aspect of running a corporate system and the other aspects will upgrade as well.
Maximizing and synchronizing
With every individual linked to the same maximizing machinery, corporate best practices are merged and simplified. Levels of uniformity and unified advance never before achievable within organizations are possible. Leadership responsibilities can be embedded throughout the employee population without the requirement for hierarchy. Unprecedented opportunities emerge for not only distributed leadership and decision-making, but also for universal core competency upgrades. Mass maximization and mass synchronization are integral to the maximizing mechanisms that have developed over generations. They can be duplicated within corporations by simply tapping into these ongoing processes being orchestrated by the maximizing machinery, the master.
The learning organization
Learning-to-learn programs may be replaced by the agility and adaptivity inherent in the partnership with the maximizing engine. This new formula for creating the learning organization does not stop here. As a successful species, we already have the drives for learning and adaptivity. The study in figure 3 shows that these drives have been deactivated by cultural interferences. The learning organization can be achieved by simply reactivating the drives and functionality we can see in operation in our children before they are pressured to conform to our cultures around the age of five.
Partnering with maximizing mechanisms which have evolved the species will release learning agility from the inside of each employee more quickly and successfully than traditional organizational programs can instruct and pressure learning-to-learn expertise from the outside. The very definition of a learning organization is individuals en masse with their drives for learning released. In addition, partnering with maximizing process makes its themes, modus operandi, and functionality available to us. So, while our own learning, adaptivity, and frontiering drives are being reactivated, we can borrow nature’s adaptivity, agility, advance, and problem-solving to operate as if we are already learning experts.
Borrowed creativity and innovativeness
The same is true of organizational creativity and innovativeness. Adaptation is nothing if not a machinery for creativity and creative problem-solving. As above, figure 3 shows that most of us are born creative and adaptive. Our cultures interfere. They provide structured, linear processes which preclude creativity. They make experimentation and the failures inherent in the process risky to our acceptance and advancement. Because change is feared, those who offer new creative solutions are often criticized and ostracized. Societal mechanisms for resisting change are translated into personal attacks on those promoting change. Funding for innovation is limited to a few fields.
How successful have corporate programs been in making non-creative people creative? Would the success rate not be better if we simply partnered with adaptation’s creativity to enable everyone to be creative? And how smart is it that this very process of partnering would reactivate not only the creativity in each of us but the drives that make creative acts addictive? Would our companies not become more competitively creative if we restructured them to free our innate creative drives? And would that creative competitiveness not be increased dramatically by extending it with the creativity of nature’s maximizing process? Of course it would. Our internal creativity has actually evolved to work in tandem with the creativity outside of us in the maximizing machinery. The synergy enables exponential increases in creativity.
This creativeness inside and outside of us is actually the same maximizing continuum. It was our cultures that decided that our potential and our functionality would be limited to what is inside of us. Our cultures keep us separate from the massive maximizing machinery with which we have evolved to operate at our full extendedpotential. It is our cultures which have hidden our extended potential from us.
It is our cultures that make it unsafe to use the frontiering™ drives which both companies and humanity need to thrive in today’s tumultuous world. Imagine the corporate improvements in productivity and innovativeness with the restoration of the full extended potential of each employee. Competitors will be quickly eclipsed. The very capabilities most organizations seek to cultivate through a multitude of corporate programs are accessible through a single shift of every employee to their natural partnered state before culture interfered.
The systems maximizing machinery may be harnessed to maximize your work, to manage your career, and to empower your children to operate at their full potential to achieve their goals. Business leaders may use it to run their companies. National leaders have a new engine for maximizing their countries. World leaders may copy and comply with this multi-system maximizing machinery for running the world differently. We have a new means to adaptively evolve the human race to advantage.
Let’s briefly overview a number of additional territories of company operation revolutionized by partnering individual and multi-individual human systems with the maximizing machinery.
SYSTEM INTEGRITY HONORED
Individual integrity honored: centered on core strengths
Adaptation maximizes and advances systems synergistically and synchronously for survival. To do this, it honors the integrity of each individual or multi-individual human system. It pressures the integration of each human system around its core strengths and the drives that promote the use of those strengths. It pressures operating from the peak-performance and peak-growth flow state that emerges when one is applying these core strengths to advance or be advanced by the contextual system of which it is a component.
This is because the maximization of the contextual system is tied to the maximization and advance of the component system. There must always be synergistic exchanges between them. Our maximum state will always include an exchange. In this flow state, only the parts of the brain required for the task at hand are activated. One’s body and being move into congruence at the highest performance levels.
This is our most powerful state. This is the strongest configuration of a human system for its survival and adaptivity. This is the state of true integrity of the system. It may not always be possible to operate from this state maximized and centralized state. However, it is understandable why maximizing forces and mechanisms will always pressure us to achieve and sustain this state.
For those who want to extend their capabilities with those of the maximizing machinery, it is important to understand its goals. The closer you are to this centered, self-actualized state, the more you can take advantage of your internal-external system. It is in this state that circuits complete between internal and external maximizing mechanisms and processes. Integrated and centered in this state of integrity, you may most effectively partner with the maximizing machinery for your most powerful and productive state.
Company integrity honored
The above model of honoring the integrity of hierarchic human systems is the same ideal model for peak performance and peak competitiveness of the hierarchic interconnections of human systems around a company: employees, teams, departments, company, the company’s business web of suppliers, partners, customers, and support entities.
Competitive breakthrough
Copying evolution’s smart model for synchronizing systems into a synergistic multi-system maximization process certainly would add competitive advantage to a company. But here is a new conceptual platform for the real competitive breakthrough: the powerful maximizing machinery is already driving the company and its associated human systems in this maximizing and synchronizing manner. Ignore it at your peril.
If a company wants to achieve its goals bigger, better, and faster to outperform and outmaneuver the competition, the maximizing flow is a huge factor. It is both an opportunity and a curse. The direction and biases of the maximizing flow need to be factored in when choosing any goals. If not, there would be a 50:50 chance that your company will end up fighting upstream as it pursues its goals. The company would have to fight against a large powerful machine. The competitive gap would widen even more if the competitors of this upstream company were flooding downstream with the maximizing flow at high speed while being catapulted ahead by a plethora of leaps such as coincidences, breakthroughs, and facilitating events.
If you want to take advantage of a partnership with all of the powerful mechanisms, forces and capabilities that have evolved to advance human systems, then you will need to honor the integrity of any human system that you are trying to maximize or to conscript to help you to achieve your goals. Now let’s see some examples of how corporate best practices will change when we comply with nature’s pressures to honor the integrity, growth, and maximization paths of each human system related to the corporation internally and externally.
Growth honors systems integrity
We learned from the snapshot of the maximized individual above that the growth for human systems pressured by the maximizing machinery is not linear. Rather, it honors the integrity of the core strengths of the system. The core configuration remains the same but expands and advances. The key talents and their associated addictive drives advance and become capable of more impact on the context or reality or world.
Therefore, growth, when integrated into the maximizing flow, is an expansion, magnification, and intensification of the ‘nucleus’ of the human system. Growth is an expansion by concentric spheres. The configuration of the core of the human system should remain intact. This is what the maximizing machinery is pressuring.
This means that whether you want (a) your company’s impact to increase or (b) to use your products to help your customer’s system to advance, or (c) to develop your employees, or (d) to increase the contribution of suppliers, the integrity of the core of each human system will need to be honored. If you want to harness the functionality, power, synchronization, synergies, direction, quantum leaps and coincidences of the maximizing machinery, you will need to know where to look for it. You will need to know where the flow is going so that you or your company or your customer or your supplier may move with it.
You will want to select goals to capitalize on an expansion process that already has powerful mechanisms and processes promoting it. You will want to get out of the way as they attempt to expand the capabilities of your human assets or increase the impact of your company. There are drives within us and mechanisms outside us that can motivate your people to some goals but not to others. With knowledge of the signposts and a little experience, you will be able to quickly identify when the internal and external maximizing machinery is supporting or opposing the directions of your company.
At minimum, you will want to avoid choosing goals that will have you pitted against the maximizing flow. You will not want to promote people up a linear hierarchy which eliminates the use and improvement of their key talents. Not only will the company no longer have addictive drives motivating the individual’s work, it will not have all of the maximizing machinery and the systems it orchestrates supporting the individual. You will not have engaged the extended functionality and potential of his/her internal-external system in the service of corporate goals. You will not have maximized your people.
Now let’s examine some examples of how corporate best practices will change when we comply with nature’s pressures to honor the integrity of each human system related to the corporation internally and externally.
Customer system integrity honored
Where the maximizing machinery is pressuring a company system to go defines the integrity of the system to be honored. There are multiple systems whose integrity needs to be honored with respect to customers. The more your company, as the supplier company, is providing products or services in compliance with how the maximizing mechanisms are pressuring it, the more successful it will be.
Ideal customers need to offer an opportunity for the supplier company to use their key talents in top-talent flow in order to serve that customer. It would go against all of the principles of maximizing human systems to take your company out of top-talentflow in order to supply a particular customer. Take a look at the customers that are causing problems, blocks, and negative events. These may indicate opposition by the maximizing machinery. It would not be wise for a supplier company to build its business around these customers.
It is more than likely better to let a customer go than to come off of the addictive core drives of the corporation trying to take it to its maximum in peak-performing and peak-growth flow state. A customer company which requires a supplier company to come off its peak-performance centering will inevitably cost both companies money. A supplier company which is not providing products or services from their zone of peak performance will ultimately both experience and cause problems.
The customer company also has a nucleus of key talents and drives evolved to promote their creative expression. The better your products support the core creative engine of the customer company and its expansion around that core, the more successful your company will be as a supplier. The more your products support the directions that the maximizing machinery is pressuring the customer system, the more successful your products will be.
You know what the maximizing machinery is trying to achieve for your company, for the customer company, and for the interface system which develops between the two. Avoid swimming upstream. In addition, if you are setting up a new global company or developing a new product to offer globally, ensure that you also honor the integrity of the global human system and where the maximizing machinery is pressuring it to go.
The goal state of being then would be to support customer companies to move with maximizing pressures while your company is also complying with the same maximizing pressures in selecting those products and customers. In other words, both customer and supplier are orchestrated by the same multi-system maximization machinery. They are unified and synchronized externally in the same way that they are unified internally. They are sharing in the coincidences and opportunistic synergies that are characteristic of the multi-system maximizing inherent in a massive biological system of systems committed to the survival of all living systems.
Outsourcing, suppliers, and partners
The same logic which has a company releasing the wrong customers in favor of the right ones, will also dictate an outsourcing strategy which will release suppliers based on the same criteria. A company partnered with the maximizing machinery will spin off those business units that are not part of the company’s core competencies and addictive drives. These units will stand out because they will not be acted upon by the maximizing flow in the same way.
While the bulk of the company is enjoying facilitating events and clusters of coincidences, those parts of the company that need to be outsourced are receiving visible opposition from the maximizing flow. Its reaction to a company’s components identifies what nature considers part of the system being acted upon. No force-fitting actions by the company to integrate something unintegrateable are going to make nature change its mind. Its reaction is neutral and final. Proceed against the maximizing flow at your peril.
Having thus purified your own company to reflect its core integrity, you will only want suppliers who have done the same. You will not want to choose suppliers to support you with products or services which it really should have outsourced because they are not part of the core competencies of the company. You will want to choose suppliers whose core competency is to provide the product or service which will support your core creative engine.
The same criteria will ideally apply to any partnerships and alliances entered into by your company. Over time, you will gain expertise for quickly identifying the core creative engine of any individual or multi-individual human system. You will be able to quickly have it operating as an extension of the maximizing engine that evolved it. You will be able to quickly re-link the internal-external human system to reclaim its extended potential. You will be able to extrapolate this from learning to maximize and centralize your own system.
Business web integrity honored
The business web of suppliers, customers, and partners that surrounds your company is itself a human system being acted upon by the maximizing machinery. Maximizing your company’s business web, then, is as simple as copying and complying with the multi-system maximizing machinery. Do what the maximizing process does and harness its power for you to do it.
Orchestrate systems to co-evolve, co-adapt, synergize, and synchronize the way maximizing mechanisms do. Matrix the capabilities of many systems to enhance company performance. Watch for tell-tale patterns of signposts that your business-web companies are being orchestrated by the maximization process. Then apply multi-system achieving techniques to enable your company to achieve beyond its potential through couplings with co-maximizing companies.
Product development for system unification
System integrity results from the pressure of maximizing mechanisms to unify a human system around its nucleus of greatest strengths and their associated drives. It will be lucrative to choose products which help the maximizing machinery to accomplish this.
For example, the immediate popularity of the Blackberry relates not only to its facilitation of company system integration and unification but also its promotion of the same for the entire system of humanity. The success of technologies which cross cultural boundaries to unify humanity into a single global system will steadily increase over time. This is what the maximizing machinery will always be trying to accomplish. Go with the flow in choosing product and corporate directions.
NEW CHANGE MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES
We have been dissecting what is going on during the maximizing flow in order to better comply with it and capitalize on it. Let’s now look at some examples of how the new corporate core competencies for change management will transform as a result of re-integrating into the maximizing machinery. This machinery serves as the model and the power behind new breakthrough change management methodologies. Many of the change initiatives required today will instead be eliminated by natural levers built into a re-linked internal-external system.
So many of the activities that we consider change management will be included within the daily operations of any company merged into the maximizing process. Maximization is perpetual change. It is nature’s adaptation engine. Therefore, natural levers built into our internal-external system will promote ongoing system advance without requiring human intervention.
Overcoming change resistance
Almost all of the resistance to change is fear of the unknown. The methodologies being presented in this essay series are designed to build not only expertise for frontiering™ but a craving for it as a way of life. Frontiering™ is the method for penetrating unknown territory or bringing the unknown into existence. It is about scaling new frontiers of knowledge and creation. By partnering with the greatest machinery for frontiering™ – adaptation or maximization – to remove the fear of frontiering™, our addictive drives for frontiering™ can be released. We become the frontiering beings our successful species has evolved to be.
The effect on organizations of each person having an addiction to frontiering™ and change will be massive. The push for change from employees will replace the pull from management. Fear of the unknown will be supplanted by a craving for living in the frontiering zone. This is the territory where the unknown is replaced by the known, new frontiers are scaled, the unprecedented is the norm, and routine is anathema. This dramatic reversal will revolutionize change management best practices.
By complying with internal and external maximizing pressures, the development of frontiering capabilities will start in one territory of your life and then spread to others. That first territory is around using and improving one’s key talents. This is where your internal drives and the pressures of the maximizing machinery are the strongest. We use the pull of the addictive top-talent drives and top-talent flow states to mitigate the fear of the unknown associated with frontiering™. There are no negative emotions in top-talent flow.
We capitalize on our innate drives to pursue certain passions, frontiers, creations, knowledge, and growth, to build our frontiering addictive drives – or, more accurately, to release drives we are born with as indicated by figure 3. Each frontiering experience will strengthen your addictive frontiering drives. The more you comply with addictive drives, the stronger they get. The more you override addictive drives, the more they atrophy.
Eventually you will have frontiering expertise and frontiering drives which are transferrable to every aspect of your life. The frontiering capabilities that have been culturally deactivated will be reactivated. Resistance to change will decline while the addiction to change increases. This should significantly transform the corporate change management process. Agility and adaptivity will become the norm.
As we partner with the maximizing machinery, we are exposing ourselves to its perpetual change, perpetual adaptivity, perpetual creativity, and perpetual frontiering. Adaptation and maximization are pure frontiering. There is no need for a separate change management competency if both we and our organizations are merged with nature’s change management process. We simply choose individual or organizational change goals consistent with the directions that maximization is pressuring and merge with its machinery.
Partnering with the maximizing flow is accomplished, to a great extent, by watching for the patterns of signposts and indicators of its direction. Since the flow is always in a perpetual state of flux, change will become a way of life. However, it will feel as if it is business as usual moment by moment. It will feel safe because one is just following the same signposts. Partnering will provide a dynamic stability no matter how fast the change is occurring.
The fear of the unknown and the resistance to change would return only if a company insisted on a change management program which is in conflict with the maximizing flow. If the company and employees are in sync with the maximizing flow, then there is a powerful engine in place to be harnessed to fuel change projects. The unification and synchronization needed for change management are built into this partnering. Change would be routine. It would become a way of life. This is a significant departure from current best practices.
Quantum leaps for faster, bigger change with reduced risk
Part of the power for organization change management will come from copying, complying with, and capitalizing on the quantum-leap bias of the maximizing flow. A high percentage of organizational change projects derail when they attempt to achieve change through a long linear transition. Invariably organizational systems become unstable. Evolution has solved this. It promotes a nonlinear process of quantum leaps which move systems from one stable state to a new stable state without the risky transitional states.
Because quantum leaps use an emergent process, what happens between the current state and the new state is not known. Quantum leaps are nonlinear because the post-leap state cannot always be predicted from the pre-leap state. The post-leap outcome is not usually a linear extension from the start state. The emergent process mixes, matches, and combines pre-existing pre-leap systems to create new unprecedented post-leap systems. In many cases, the unexpected events and products emerge almost by magic or miracle by this creative process.
A metaphor for the quantum leap process would be to install new stable software on a computer to replace existing stable software. It is transparent to us how the new software makes all of the necessary connections to other software within the computer. If we did not know better we would think it is magic.
The same re-connections and integrations are happening behind the scenes of coincidences and other leaps such as flashes of genius, breakthroughs, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, and other such epiphanies. The process is a duplication of the underlying creative process of evolution, maximization, and frontiering: the blending of existing information systems to make new information systems. That is why I call this breakthrough synthesis.
A metaphor corporately would be the cutover to a new computer application over a weekend. On Friday you have one application and on Monday you have only the replacement application. To many, there is no more fearful prospect than that Monday experience and the weeks of dread prior to its arrival. This resistance to change is one of the greatest challenges faced by today’s change managers. If all employees become quantum leap experts by partnering with nature’s quantum leap process, the challenges of change management would diminish dramatically. Everyone would jump from one stable state to the next without the scary interim steps.
Change accelerated by clusters of coincidences
Best practices for change management will not only be transformed by the self-initiated quantum leaps of the previous section but also by the maximization-initiated quantum leaps that are inherent in any partnership with the maximizing machinery. They include clusters of coincidences and leaps to flow states, sudden knowledge, and spontaneous creativity. They serve to catapult the company ahead nonlinearly to its goals, to better versions of its goals, to goals that cannot be achieved linearly, or to alternative goals which will better serve the company system.
NEW PROJECT MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES
Project management has developed over the years as a major new form of management in organizations facing rapidly changing business environments. The Project Management Institute (2000) defines it as “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities in order to meet project requirements.” Project management is intended to provide focus for using resources to achieve a specific objective. The fundamental objective is to “get the job done” to client satisfaction within time, cost, and performance constraints.
Today’s project management best practices will appear primitive by comparison to what is possible by merging with the maximizing machinery. Project plans promote a linear process with pre-set steps rather than the opportunism, creativity, adaptivity, and nonlinear quantum leaps of the maximizing flow. Project plans and processes are limited to human knowledge, intelligence, power and capabilities rather than those of maximization. They are man-run rather than nature-run. They are limited to the capabilities of the human mind.
Projects run with the today’s methodology do not garner functionality, resources, or advantage from either the maximizing machinery or from the co-maximizing systems it orchestrates. They do not benefit from opportunistic synergies. Nor are they pulled with the trends of synchronization with the majority of other human systems.
Without this multi-system maximizing process, projects will not be catapulted ahead by the leaps and facilitating events that are its byproducts. There will be no clusters of coincidences, sudden knowledge, sudden creative inspiration, Aha! experiences or models of solutions. In fact, the inability to penetrate unknown territory or to deal with known and unknown unknowns is a weakness of today’s project management methodologies that is solved with finesse by the maximizing machinery. Today’s projects would also not harness mechanisms that would maximize the project system for peak performance as it does for any human system.
Many unpredictable events happen during a project including opportunities to upgrade the performance of the project. Working to a project plan interferes with working opportunistically and nonlinearly. Rather than following a linear project plan, evolution uses creativity and adaptivity to capitalize on the best options and resources at each decision juncture. The new project management standards will enable each step to be based on the results of the previous step to yield significantly superior results.
Another benefit of partnering with evolution’s machinery is that it enables projects to achieve the intent of their goals in bigger and better ways than might have been anticipated. The most fundamental dynamic of maximization is breakthrough synthesis: the re-combining of existing information systems to create new information systems to solve maximization, adaptivity, or synchronization challenges. This is the essence of adaptation’s creative process. It becomes available to your project with the partnering.
Another beneficial upgrade to best practices then is that partnered project results may dramatically exceed what was originally sought. Consequently, how project goals are defined will need to change to enable the emergence process and adaptation’s creativity to step in to create the best possible outcome to meet the intent of the projects and the true needs of a maximized corporate system.
Current project selection does not factor in the maximizing flow. They not only do not benefit from it but incorrect selection could pit the project against that flow. This will build failure into the project. With the quantum leap process, projects can proceed from one stable state to the next just as evolving living systems do in nature. The need to keep transitional organizational systems stable through a linear process is avoided. Nature was smart enough to figure out that there is danger in the linear approach. Perhaps we could embrace the same learning.
Nature has developed a nonlinear process for achieving breakthroughs for a reason. Evolving the human eye through linear transitional states, for example, is not possible. Similarly, some projects should not be undertaken because there is no way to achieve their goals through the linear process built into today’s project methodologies. The proposed new project best practices corrects for this.
The new standards for selecting projects will be based on what has historically been successful in all project-related human systems. The Sourcing-Your-Savantexercises will identify where the maximizing machinery will or will not support the progress of the project and its implementers. Better project selection will ensure better project results. Honoring project system integrity and that of the participating human systems will accelerate progress.
Project teams currently need to be controlled, disciplined, and motivated to project plans. New best practices will capitalize on the addictive drives innate to the individual to pull them to perform. They will capitalize on what the maximizing flow identifies as the strongest talents of the individual. Top-talentflow states will be promoted. This will promote peak performance and peak addictive pull for project participants. Project teams using the new methodology will outperform what they could do using the old methodology. Less management and less discipline will be required. More passion and more emotional highs will exchange push for pull.
With everyone synched to the maximizing machinery, distributed leadership, creativity, and frontiering become possible. Hierarchy in the teams becomes redundant. The superior functionality of maximizing mechanisms will be available to everyone. The merger will add new meta-skills, dynamics, reflexes, and modes of operating. The inherent ability nature’s adaptation machinery to improve functionality will ensure more capabilities for project success.
By partnering at least one frontiering expert with the field experts in each project team, projects will have the expertise for penetrating unknown territory or capitalizing on opportunities that emerge during project implementation. It will become part of project management best practices to include one or more frontiering™ experts within each project team. Frontiering™ experts will become a critical team resource for all breakthrough projects or new ventures to supplement experts from the project’s field of endeavor. It is easy to envisage a Frontiering™ Office existing as a subset of the Project Management Office (PMO).
LEADERSHIP AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Leadership and leadership development will transform significantly and in unexpected ways with the shift to partnering with the maximizing flow. All of the functions performed by a leader are integrated into the multi-system maximization process. Natural leaders copy, comply with, and capitalize on this process. They operate as an extension of it.
The maximizing flow includes ongoing opportunistic synergizing and mass synchronization of co-maximizing systems. This suggests that if individuals pursue a partnership with the maximizing flow, they may end up with the functionality of leaders as a byproduct, even if that is not their intention.
Frontiering™ is the fundamental dynamic of the maximizing machinery. Frontiering™ is also the fundamental dynamic of leadership in the new partnered way of operating. The person with the expertise for penetrating new unknown territory will always be the leader. In fact, as the ability to frontier becomes more wide-spread, frontiering™ will become the defining requirement for leadership. Again, it would seem that leader drives, reflexes, meta-competencies and capabilities may emerge inadvertently from the proposed partnering process.
Could it be that the global leadership shortage will diminish by partnering with the maximizing flow? As one pursues personal gain in a biologically maximized career, will leadership be created and developed as a byproduct? There is only one human development continuum for all human systems when they reintegrate into the maximizing machinery that evolved them. Therefore the answer is ‘yes’. Multi-system maximizing, multi-system achieving, mass synchronization and synergies, and frontiering – all driven by their associated addictive drives – can indeed both create a leader and make a leader effective.
With all employees synched with the maximizing flow, organization-wide distributed leadership and frontiering™ will replace hierarchical leadership. Leadership will become the capability and responsibility of every individual within the organization. Once they know how to maximize their own system by partnering with the maximizing machinery, they will know how to maximize any human system, whether it is the company, a subordinate, a customer, a supplier, a market, an industry, or a project.
The definition and development of leaders will change with re-integration into a maximizing flow which is adapting, advancing, and frontiering™ continuously. Frontiering™ skill will replace the need for leadership. Managers manage what exists. Leaders bring the new into existence. The resulting leadership development continuum will progress from a manager running an existing organization, to a transitional change leader adding linear advancement to the organization, to a transformational change leader adding nonlinear change to an organization, to those leaders or individuals who have mastered the unknown – a creational leader and a frontiering leader. These individuals (a) bring the new and unknown into existence or (b) penetrate new or unknown territory respectively (See figure 4).
This is the same skill development continuum that emerges as individuals become frontiering™ experts. The person who knows how to penetrate the unknown will always be the leader. As indicated by figure 4, there is another dimension to this progression. Systems maintenance, for which no change is made, gives way to increasing systems advancement in which linear and nonlinear changes are made. This then progresses to systems creation which includes the underlying creating dynamic of maximization and indeed the universe, breakthrough synthesis: the creating of new systems by re-combining existing systems or parts thereof.
Everyone who partners with the maximizing machinery will, in effect, become a multi-system achiever in the same way that every leader is. They will achieve bigger goals faster through capitalizing on other systems in the same that every leader does and the maximizing machinery does.
The biological machinery maximizes human systems. Corporate leaders must maximize human systems. When the two join forces, every best practice for corporate success is revolutionized. Few companies have foreseen the magnitude of this pending transformation to management science. The corporate landscape will be littered with those who fail to make the leap before their competition.
Our cultures have taught us to operate as separate biological entities. This would unfortunately limit our potential to what is within us. Yet, we have been born into a massive biological machinery.
Systems of mechanisms, processes, and forces have evolved to adapt and maximize all living systems for survival. Could our potential be extended by that machinery and all the systems it orchestrates? Indeed it can. Change the way we operate and the bar for human potential will be raised.
Let’s start by resetting you to your maximum and extended potential. Use the strategies, targets, tactics, and scenario suggestions here to reinstate your partnership with the adapting, maximizing machinery that evolved us all.
Once re-connected, our true power, potency, and promise are released. Circuits complete. Processes partner. Mechanisms mesh. Systems synergize and synchronize. Synchronicities surge. Coincidences cluster. Sudden knowledge, sudden creativity and flashes of genius flood in. Growth processes launch. Our internal-external human system resurrects.
Once re-connected, natural mechanisms inside and outside of you will pull you to peak performance and beyond. Let’s begin by identifying methods and scenarios which will trigger adaptive processes to restore you to your true maximum. Let’s empower you with the ability to achieve beyond your potential. Let’s discover the magnitude of the lifetime legacy with which you might advance our world.
Strategy
The strategy for this exercise to reset you to your maximum will be simple: Find a context such as the scenarios suggested below to abruptly quantum leap to operating at your maximum with the least risk to your existing way of life. Shift from your limited internal potential as a separate biological entity to your true potential when extended by the maximizing machinery and all of the living systems it orchestrates.
You do not need to be operating at your maximum to couple with the maximizing machinery. You only need to be moving in its same direction towards your maximization. When your speed and direction are right, it will feel as if two gears have re-engaged.
The surge in power and potential will be palpable. Once connected, natural mechanisms and processes will take over. Nature knows what to do. Internal and external mechanisms will re-link. The natural integrity of your system will be restored. You will be able to outperform your internal potential.
Targets
Natural maximizing mechanisms will re-engage We have evolved addictive drives that biologically bias us to use and improve our greatest strengths. It is advantageous to the survival of the species that we be biologically biased to peak performance.
The more you comply with the addictive drives we have evolved for it, the more you will want to comply with them. Therefore we need only put you into a scenario in which you begin operating at your maximum and natural mechanisms will work to sustain you at that maximum. The indicators of operating at your maximum will increase
Merging with the maximizing machinery will increase your experience of the following:
Serial top-talent flow states
Facilitating events
Emotional highs
Events in which you operate at full power
Your impact on the world
Your advance of it through creativity and creation
Savant-like Information leaps inside or outside of you:
serial coincidences and other facilitators that speed/enhance your progress
serial breakthroughs:
“Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, flashes of genius, epiphanies
The clarity of the pathway of your maximum path of lifetime impact
Progressions similar to live models of the target maximums will be evident Real life examples help to identify what we are expecting to happen once you reset to your maximum in your selected scenario. Previous articles have examined the careers of seven icons – Bill Gates, the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos, the founders of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, respectively.
They are examples of biologically maximized careers based on addictive drives to using and improving the greatest talents of each. Their careers are peppered with world-changing breakthroughs reflective of savant states that emerge from synchronizing with the maximizing machinery.
We learned how the compliance of these seven icons to biological maximizing processes caused them to lead addictive careers of serial breakthroughs, serial frontiering™ or scaling of new frontiers, serial growth, serial creations, serial emotional highs, and serial flow states.
Even a few such breakthroughs have made careers life-changing and world-changing. What could your career become with serial breakthroughs and sudden-knowledge leaps such as flashes of genius, “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, sudden insights, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, creative inspirations, intuitive leaps, epiphanies, and enlightenment. Even those of ordinary intelligence may cultivate such savantism?
Tactics
Increase Top-Talent Flow We have determined the strategy and the targets of our reset exercise. It is now time to talk implementation. Your absolute maximum is a peak performance flow state that emerges while you are applying your strongest most gratifying talents to your most meaningful goals benefiting the audience most valuing of your efforts.
If, in the scenario you choose for your reset, you did nothing but spend your day in this top-talent flow state, you would merge with the maximizing machinery effortlessly. Magically, new functionality and capabilities would emerge. Serial achievements beyond your potential would become the norm.
Increasing the time you spend in top-talent flow daily is both a target and a tactic. It is, in fact, the one tactic that will eliminate the need for all of the rest of the below prescribed actions for resetting to your maximum. It is a way to turn the task over to natural maximizing processes and mechanisms.
This is because flow is yet another addictive drive: the more you experience it, the more you want to experience it. This is why it has been a key driver or, perhaps more accurately, attractor of human evolution.
Let me provide some links below to what I have already said in previous articles about this maximum and maximizing flow state so that your target will become clearer: “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.”
Top-talent flow will be the ultimate goal for any of the scenarios below that you might choose to facilitate your reset to your maximum. However, should this maximum state elude you, there are alternative approaches which will enable you to re-engage with the maximizing machinery that evolved us.
Again, you do not need to be operating at your maximum for your system to merge with the maximizing machinery. You only need to be moving in the same direction towards maximization.
Honor your savant formula based on your historical experience. Harness future predictability from past patterns You may easily know your target maximum state for this exercise from an inventory of your experiences of your maximum in your past. Your Sourcing-Your-Savant exercise findings provide you with the formula for when the maximizing machinery has and has not supported your progress in your past and hence when it will and will not support you in the future.
This formula defines when coincidences, breakthroughs, flashes of genius, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, and other such flow events will catapult you to peak performance in your selected scenario. Therefore, your savant formula will tell you precisely the design requirements for a scenario for reconnecting you to the maximizing machinery.
Best savant exercises for scenario selection There are certain themes or patterns of past events that are likely to be the most advantageous for selecting and operating in your ideal scenario for resetting to your maximum. For most people, these include: yourunpaid-work theme and your knowledge-pursuit, creation-pursuit, and frontier-pursuit themes.
And, of course, yourtop-talent flow theme will be invaluable since that is the target state we want to increase in any scenario you choose. There is no point in trying to work against what you find in your historical data. Choose your scenario accordingly. Advance in the direction of increased indicators of operating at your maximum The very capabilities that you expect to have at your maximum are not just the targets. They are also the tell-tale signs to follow moment-by-moment to arrive at this maximum. They tell you that you are moving in the right direction. Follow the indicators of your maximum state and you will automatically be re-integrated into the maximizing machinery and taken to your maximum in one seamless process.
The criteria used to identify past events of operating at your maximum for the Sourcing-Your-Savant analyses, are the same signals that you will be following to guide you within the scenario you. When these signposts are not in evidence, you will need to take safe actions in any direction until you find them again. You might have zigged when the maximizing machinery zagged. Your new modus operandi .Follow your savant formula and indicators of your maximum You may recall that this is the thrust of the section entitled why you want toLearn All Twelve Categories: “There is an important reason why you will eventually want to investigate all twelve categories. This is because this will not be a one-time exercise. It will become your new routine modus operandi. You will analyze immediate events as they happen to choose the direction that will keep you hugging the flow of the maximizing process.
Repeating the exercise for more current events will be the way you will read, merge into, and capitalize on the maximizing machinery going forward.These twelve analyses will provide the information that you need for your daily decision-making, goal-setting, and goal achievement.”
If we are resetting you to your maximum then operating in this way will become your new way of life. You will always want to be directed by the signals of the maximizing machinery. There would be little point to resetting to your maximum if it was not your intent to sustain that maximum. Now you know how to do that. You are ready to make the paradigm shift.
. Participate in proactive breakthrough synthesis
Let me offer a little more insight into your new modus operandi. You will be partnering with a nonlinear opportunistic maximizing machinery that is synchronizing and synergizing all living systems for survival and adaptation. The creativity it uses to resolve maximizing challenges is something I have coined ‘breakthrough synthesis’ in previous articles.
Breakthrough synthesis is the perpetual process of re-combining existing information systems to create a new information system.Serial breakthrough synthesis is the recognizable serial quantum leap process which underlies all biological evolution. It is what generates the leaps I often speak of such as coincidences externally and leaps internally such as breakthroughs, flashes of genius, sudden savantism, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, and sudden flow states.
This is the process you are merging with when you reclaim your membership in a massive biological machinery. One goal is to tap into the breakthroughs to accelerate your progress to your goals. However, there is also an opportunity for you to drive this breakthrough synthesis to achieve larger more innovative goals faster. Future articles will help you to develop this expertise.
For the purpose of this paradigm shift or quantum leap to your maximum, it is worth imagining that it will take you three to seven coincidences in order to have the information pieces to recombine into a new information system that enables you to achieve your goal. You will want to be vigilant in letting yourself be guided by the machinery to colliding with the necessary information pieces. Try not to force yourself to proceed linearly through a known project plan. Let yourself become nonlinear and opportunistic wherever it is safely possible to experiment.
As you spend time in your new scenario, growth processes are launched that will continue to raise your baseline performance and functionality for the rest of your life. In effect, even the information system that is ‘you’ will become an ingredient in breakthrough synthesis.
Even you will be recombined with other information systems to create a new ‘you’ around the innate immutable essence that is you. It is important to understand that there is no finite arrival at your maximum.
Once your partnership with the maximizing machinery extends your potential externally your potential becomes as infinite as nature. Given this new breakthrough modus operandi, true human potential is as yet unquantified.
Additional miscellaneous tactics for the reset-to-your-maximum exercise
Some additional rules of engagement will ensure the success of your foray into a scenario for your reset to your maximum:
Your work in your chosen scenario must impact or advance reality or the outside world in some way.
Any action you take should elicit indicators that you are moving towards maximization: top-talent flow b. emotional highs c. coincidences, leaps, and facilitating events
Comply with the historical evidence: Pursue those directions and elements that the machinery supports. Exclude the things it has not historically supported.
As a novice, avoid emotionally-charged goals until your expertise and proficiency improve. For many this will mean you should not set goals for money, valuing, acceptance and inclusion to compensate for abandonment and exclusion, and abundance to compensate for scarcity.
Protect your system integrity at all costs. Where possible, take safe experimental actions only. There is no need to take risks to re-integrate into the maximizing machinery. Risks should be considered ‘blocks’ to routes you were considering. Keep the same end-goal but find another route or a better time when the machinery is more receptive.
Watch for facilitating events or gates to open up to show you the best direction in which to proceed. You should thrill to the prospect of your next action or do not take it. There should be coincidences, leaps and flow events to facilitate your progress in the adaptive direction for you. Alternatively, if there are blocks, even internal ones such as negative emotions, stop. Find a better route to your goal which appears to be supported by the machinery. Nothing should need force.
However, never leave a flow event or coincidence unexplored. These are created by opportunities for synergy with other living systems. Take safe actions to find those opportunities. They indicate the adaptive direction for your system.
Keep non-play elements to a minimum. Honor your goal if you must choose between your goal and the goal of your scenario – a charity, for example. It is important not to be pulled off-track. You may already have that situation at work so your scenario needs to be a safe free environment where you can meet your maximizing goals.
It is okay to take action with the signposts of the maximizing flow without knowing precisely what your goal is. An emotional blueprint or how your arrival at a goal will feel is sufficient.
Reset Scenarios
SCENARIOS FOR THE EMPLOYED to Reset to their Maximum by achieving sustained or serial top-talent flow
These scenarios suggest contexts conducive to releasing you to reintegrate with nature’s adaptation machinery. Once you begin moving in the direction of your maximum, there will come a point of critical mass. Nature will take over and begin pulling you to your maximum and into adaptive directions.
Nature’s maximizing machinery will begin grouping your system to advantage for synergies and synchronizing. For those who are employed, it is still possible to free yourself to reset to your maximum. Where possible, however, you should keep risks to your current employment status to a minimum until your expertise develops.
Scenario 1: Redesign your existing job
If employed, your ideal method to reset to your maximum is to re-design your existing job to comply with your natural growth path and the direction the maximizing machinery has historically pressured your system to progress. If this cannot be done directly, perhaps the following strategies might be used:
Add special projects to your job, especially skunkworks or new ventures. Top-talent flow can only be experienced if you are advancing through new challenges and creations.
Join projects elsewhere within your employer
Partner with companies that do business with your employer or create projects around the interface
Create charitable ventures for your employer’s corporate giving program which require your strongest talents
Seek secondments to governments or companies/organizations surrounding your employer which will benefit both sides and yourself.
Scenario 2: Take a different job within your current employer that already exists
Scenario 3: Create a new job within your employer
Scenario 4: Create a new project or new venture within your current employer
Ideally these will become part of your existing job as part of the job redesign sought in Scenario 1. However, if necessary, work outside of your job on perhaps initially unsanctioned projects until they have advanced enough to be supported by your employer and become part of your job or create a new job ideal for you.
Scenario 5: Take an active Board of Director position with an outside company
This will let you do the work you were designed to do without leaving your employer.
Scenario 6: Work for a charity or not-for-profit after work
Ideally this could be a role sponsored by your current employer as part of their corporate giving program identified in the redesign of your job in Scenario 1. However, it may be necessary to create a new context conducive to resetting to your maximum which is unrelated to your current job or employer.
Caution: For the goals of this exercise, it is important to not be dragged into work which is not related to resetting your system to its maximum. Unfortunately, one must recognize that the needs of the have-nots in this world are infinite. You are taking on this additional work to reset to your maximum in a meaningful way. It is best to restrict the gift you are prepared to give to the giving of your strongest talents applied to your most rewarding and valued work at your maximum. This benefits both sides of the equation while energizing rather than depleting you. The resulting partnership with the maximizing machinery will reposition you to a more adaptive context long-term.
Scenario 7: Cultivate a hobby outside of work in which you can maximize
There is the possibility that breakthrough synthesis may find a way for your hobby or home studies to eventually become your source of revenue and ultimately your career. Remember to choose your hobbies to comply with your unpaid work drives, and creation-pursuit, growth-pursuit, frontiering-pursuit, and top-talent flow drives. So many fabulous careers have been launched in a home garage.
Scenario 8: Research projects undertaken for your employer
These projects should comply with your knowledge-pursuit, creation-pursuit, and frontiering-pursuit drives. Achieving breakthroughs that will advance your employer or your industry will advance your career, upgrade your worth to your employer, and become the driver of your biologically maximized career. So many phenomenal careers have begun with a single breakthrough.
Scenario 9: Give Speeches. Write books. Blog. Teach. Pursue a field of study.
The preparation and delivery of material you are passionate about developing within the territory of your strongest talents will pull you into serial top-talent flow states. This will give you access to the magic associated with coupling with the maximizing machinery and its serial breakthrough synthesis. Even a few breakthroughs may be career-changing, life-changing, and even world-changing.
SCENARIOS FOR THE UNEMPLOYED
(and possibly the EMPLOYED) to Reset to their Maximum by achieving sustained or serial top-talent flow
This collection of scenarios for resetting to your maximum capitalizes on the increased flexibility of the unemployed. The scenarios are grouped into two categories: Scenarios 1-4: This set of contexts for biologically normalizing include assembling a company, buying a company, starting a company, or borrowing a company or job Scenarios 5-7: This second category of scenarios is fashioned directly from the seven iconic founders of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon we have been examining in earlier articles. It is about releasing to your natural drives for growth, creation, frontiering™, and learning until you are able to commercialize them into paid play, often with the creation of a new field or frontier. This is the means to achieve your maximum lifetime legacy and really explore the outer limits of your capabilities.
Scenario 1: Assemble a mature virtual company from existing components: companies, firms, professionals, technology, information systems, contractors, consultants, workforces, skills, and such.
This is one of my favourite techniques for quickly resetting my outplacement clients to their maximum to accelerate their job search process. A virtual organization is assembled to provide the perfect context to replicate one’s past maximum events. It should therefore comply with your findings from yourSourcing-Your-Savantexercise: your unpaid work, creation-pursuit, frontier-pursuit, and core-expansion themes and especially your historical formula for top-talent flow. Anything that does not help you to persist in serial top-talent flow states is outsourced. Anything that is more work than play is outsourced. . Virtual company design This scenario is not about starting and growing an entrepreneurial company from scratch. This is about melding fully operational units together as a mature company. Nor should this model be used to recreate a lost job. The job was lost due to system corrections which may have well have been instigated by the adaptivity needs of your own system. There is little future in trying to go against the flow of the maximizing process.
The maximizing machinery found your de-hiring adaptive for some human system whether that system was yours, the company’s, the market’s, the industry’s, or some other system. There had to be many thwarting signals consistent with no support by the maximizing machinery that you had to overlook to end up experiencing the surprise loss of your job.
Now that you know what to look for, you will not be blindsided again. In the future, you will proactively reposition with the signposts of the maximizing machinery to be led out of the old context and into a new more adaptive one.
Coincidences, breakthroughs, flow events, and quantum leaps will catapult you nonlinearly and opportunistically to endgame jobs or the success of this newly created customized virtual organization. When you have the right design for your system, the virtual company will almost form itself. There will be magic.
There should be lots of leaps propelling your forward. So even if you have only an emotional blueprint of the final company design or how it will feel, you can move at top speed to implement it. Partnering with the maximizing machinery will ensure that your natural growth path will become the company’s growth path.
The virtual company is intrinsically rewarding in and of itself. However it will also be one of the fastest ways to penetrate the hidden job market to close your ideal job. This will require a separate article to explain. Suffice it to say that your marketing efforts for selling your virtual company’s services will coincide with selling yourself into your ideal job.
Scenario 2: Buy a company with private equity
You may not need to create a virtual organization to reset to your maximum. You may be lucky enough to find a company that will give you your ideal job for operating at your biological maximum and you can simply buy the company. Look for flows to facilitate finding the right company and blocks to the wrong one.
Scenario 3: Start an entrepreneurial company along your natural growth path
The design of the company should offer the perfect expression of the maximum you. The growth path of the company should align with your knowledge-pursuit, creation-pursuit, frontiering-pursuit and core-expansion or growth drives. The goal is to be paid to achieve your maximum lifetime growth and achievement.
Scenario 4: Borrow a company and/or a job
An interim employment contract is a great way to normalize to your maximum. Employment could be at a company, a not-for profit, an association, a charity, or similar. If there are no interim executive jobs available, it may be advantageous to offer your services for free to speed your reset to your maximum. Coincidences and breakthroughs may then quickly catapult you to a more permanent arrangement.
This is a completely unstructured approach to freeing your day to the above drives in order to advance the world in some way. This is intrinsically rewarding in and of itself. However, over time you will begin to scale new frontiers in your top-talent territory.
A plethora of breakthroughs, coincidences, and leaps will pull you in unknown directions which in 20/20 hindsight will appear immensely logical and adaptive. You will find that your version of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or Apple will emerge.
This is a frontiering adventure into new territory or bringing the new into existence. It is pure serial breakthrough synthesis. Rather than having a defined structure for a project or entrepreneurial company, this is about being pulled by the drives and passions associated with applying one’s strongest talents until the field, the job, the invention, the discovery, or the company emerges.
Scenario 6: Analyzing and developing your ‘science’
This is not about true science. This is about the development of a set of rules or procedures or discoveries that will allow those without your innate talent to operate as you do or to accomplish goals you were able to accomplish. You are seeing my science in these articles. They capture what I do instinctively so that others without my aptitude may apply it to achieve beyond their potential. As you analyze how you use your strongest talents you will be increasing your abilities and breaking through new frontiers. For some, this scenario will allow them to achieve top-talent flow states and reset to their maximum. It will work for the employed or unemployed.
Scenario 7: Pursue your lifetime legacy
There are those who know what they want their greatest lifetime legacy to be based on the maximum application of their strongest talents applied to the most worthy cause for the most receptive and valuing audience. By committing to its achievement using the breakthrough synthesis of the maximizing machinery, you will quickly find that you have reset to your maximum.
Many of us have followed an externally driven career strategy. Once we take our first career job we choose the next to capitalize on the first. With repetition, we soon inadvertently commit to a career ladder for our increasing rewards. We compromise to conform to the requirements of each ladder rung to ensure our climb.
In contrast, those most successful in achieving the rewards to which so many aspire appear to be internally driven. Examine the lives of super-achievers Bill Gates (Microsoft co-founder), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founders), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google co-founders), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) for this common thread. Rather than compromising to fit into the next job up the ladder, they create or take the job that provides the ideal next growth-and-achievement context.
This first article in the series will introduce you to how a biologically maximized career strategy will
• pull you ahead with addictive drives for growth and achievement
• cause new functionality to emerge, and
• have you operating at peak performance and beyond.
The Pull of Paid Play
For our seven super-achievers, the addictive play of their childhood continued as the paid play of adulthood. The movie, The Social Network, gives us a glimpse into the addictive play that engaged Zuckerberg’s greatest talents in the creation of Facebook. Bill Gates’ addictive software wizardry was irresistible play that got him into trouble as a child until it got him into Microsoft and money.
While Bezos’ programming expertise might have launched Amazon, it is his captivation with incessant invention – his true paid play – that has sustained Amazon‘s global prominence. His brilliance for creative solutions and his need for their challenge were evident from a pre-school age. Programming, computers and the digital world became tools for his invention. This resulted in Bezos’ change of venue for his drives to invention from physics to computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton as he narrowed to compliance with his biological bias. This foreshadowed a further refinement of venue for his addictive invention drives in leaving the safety of the corporate world for the unprecedented world of pure invention that became Amazon.
To others, this addictive play would be work. But to our super-achievers, this is irresistible play they enjoy so much that they would do it for free. It is work that is intrinsically rewarding. For all of them and for all of us, it is the specific “work” that each of us would want to do if we had unlimited resources and freedom. It is the work or play that we are innately predisposed to do. It is thus the grist of our greatest legacy and contribution to the world.
Imagine a career propelled not by discipline or external enforcers but by internal biological drives to use and improve our most addictive and rewarding strengths.
Built into the drives to this addictive play is the pressure to stretch to apply one’s best talents to creations at increasingly more challenging and impactful levels. We have evolved addictive drives that biologically bias us to use and improve our greatest strengths. We are biologically biased to peak performance. It is advantageous to the survival of the species. The more you comply with the addictive drives we have evolved for it, the more you want to comply with them.
The addictive drives entice one along a lifetime continuum of growth-and-creation iterations: growing oneself to grow one’s creative impact on the world. Aligning one’s career strategy with this biological bias yields superior performance and a commensurate increase in internal and external rewards. It is the ultimate formula for the maximized career and the maximized life.
Jeff Bezos was surrounded by gifted physicists at Princeton. While his marks were good, he knew he did not love the work as they did. He was not maximized by operating in his field of addictive paid play as they were. They offered him the model of a maximized career and life founded on their greatest strengths. Jeff shifted his academic major and his career to achieve this model. His seemingly multi-faceted career has been one of continuous narrowing to the addictive “invention” drives at his biological foundation. This is the maximized career strategy promoted in this blog series.
Magic happens when you stretch your best talents to more impactful achievements over long periods of time. You repeatedly experience an altered state of consciousness that psychologist Csikszentmihalyi calls flow. Attention is 100% focused on the activity at hand. Peak performance and growth are built in. Time, space, and even self-awareness cease to exist. Flow is intrinsically rewarding. It too is an addictive drive that will raise your baseline functionality as it did with our super-seven.
The Triggering of Cascading Functionality Upgrades
Repetitive experience of flow arising specifically from the application of your key talents to meaningful work will launch an accelerated growth continuum. New functionality and meta-skills will emerge. Therefore, the addictive play of our seven super-achievers inadvertently had them operating at peak performance while triggering continuous increases to their baseline functionality.
For example, the flow state associated with using and improving your key talents expands one’s perspective. As consciousness expands, the interconnections of all human systems become visible. The potential for a unified humanity becomes apparent. Each of the visions of our seven super-achievers was informed by their view of the world from their bouts of expanded consciousness in flow.
This shared perspective pulled Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google through the interim steps we have seen to date to unify and advance our world. Ponder the breadth of thinking of Page and Brin based on their Google mission statement: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” A mission “to set up a search engine” could never have inspired the diversification and impact that Google has achieved.
Expanded consciousness causes a chain reaction. Cognitive capabilities increase. Upgrades occur in conceptual skills, systems thinking, relational thinking, big-picture thinking, pattern recognition, the use of models, theories, and inferences, and abilities for creative and opportunistic problem-solving, adaptivity, and inventiveness. Does this remind you of the capabilities that emerged over time in our super-seven?
Performance beyond your Potential
The addictive drives that promote the application of one’s strengths have evolved as survival drives for the individual and the species. They are part of a network of internal and external forces that have evolved throughout nature to maximize living systems for survival. They are an extension of the same forces that keep our internal organs and systems operating at their maximum.
Most of our seven never separated from nature’s network of maximizing forces. Others, such as Jeff Bezos, re-merged when they turned themselves over to their natural growth-and-creation continuum. When we comply with our talent-promoting addictive drives we re-integrate with nature’s drives for maximizing systems. We shift intooverdrive.
Circuits inside of us are completed by circuits outside of us to increase our performance for survival. Our capabilities are extended by nature’s capabilities. We can perform beyond our potential. As intelligent as our super-seven are, it is their slips into this internal-external overdrive that resulted in their moments of brilliance. Even those of average intelligence can achieve the genius of savant status in this biologically compliant state.
An upgraded modus operandi for the Everyman
The new method of operation examined in this blog series is a paradigm shift. It is the true secret career strategy of the world’s most successful executives. It explains their success in an unprecedented way that everyone may replicate. It provides one with access to levels of success one may not have thought possible for oneself. It offers a new route for each of us to make our most meaningful contribution to the advance of the world.
But it also hints at a future modus operandi for humanity. These seven men did not just discover a better career strategy. They did not just advance humanity on a better path. They modeled a new level of peak performance accessible to every human being. Explore your biologically maximized career potential in future blogs to push the envelope on your own lifetime achievements and rewards.
