Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Jim Carrey. What do they have in common? Deep analyses by executive career maximizer Lauren Holmes show they all achieved their success using Savanting’s biology-driven protocol.
Savanting exploits the biology behind how savants outperform their potential – how they achieve incredible feats of genius from deficient brains theoretically incapable of them. We saw this juxtaposed brilliance and deficit with the world’s most beloved savant, Raymond Babbitt, brilliantly portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 Best Picture, Rain Man.
Yet savant superskills hint at capabilities of the human brain most have never experienced. Savanting makes savant genius accessible. This unprecedented protocol empowers brilliant breakthroughs from the nonbrilliant; vision from nonvisionaries; and extraordinary execution from the execution-challenged.
But above all, it releases creativity from noncreatives. Savanting renders all current methods for cultivating creativity obsolete. Studies show we’re born 98% creative. Entry into our school systems reduces us to 2% creative by age 7. Savanting reactivates our innate creativity by returning us to the way we were born to operate before cultural interference.
Creativity increases in flow state. Savanting’s power derives from a subset of the flow state identified by psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in his 1991 bestseller, “Flow: The Optimal Experience.” Lauren calls this specialized subset “savantflow.” The “savant brain” and the “savantflow brain” yield similar savant superskills.
Studies show that each of us has one domain in which we exhibit significant creativity. Coincidentally, savants also excel in only one domain. Savanting helps you to discover and develop your domain for creativity, breakthroughs, and flashes of genius.
Steve Jobs is synonymous with creativity. Bill Gates is not. Would it surprise you to learn that Lauren’s comparative analysis confirms that Gates is at least as creative as Jobs? Bill’s unique brand of creativity went undetected by critics who mistakenly assumed the creativity domains of rivals Jobs and Gates were the same.
One’s creativity domain needs to be the foundational strategy for one’s most rewarding career and life. All six superachievers demonstrate this. Jeff Bezos appears eclectic in his pursuits. Lauren shows that he has been creatively forwarding a singular domain since childhood. As a result, even the ever-venturing Jeff Bezos is predictable. Based on his prowess in his creativity domain, you’ll want to invest where Jeff invests.
This savant-inspired protocol is also a faster more reliable means to achieve mankind’s most sought-after goals. Savanting is the most expedient route to self-actualization in existence today. Continuous self-transcendence is built in. Extreme self-knowledge; sustained, self-sufficient self-love and happiness; wholeness; enlightenment; expanded consciousness; and true biology-driven purpose and potential. As the book’s final chapters reveal, these are byproducts of the savanting modus operandi.
Lauren Holmes developed savanting after interviewing over 300 global change executives in a compressed period of time. The shared way of working she observed was then filtered through the lens of her degree in biological anthropology and her subsequent specialization in career and talent maximization.
Needless to say, Lauren has similarly focused her education and career on her own creativity domain to develop this unique maximization methodology. In Savanting: Outperforming your Potential, Lauren shares discovery and invention which she was biologically predisposed to pursue. She too outperforms her assumed potential in her personal creativity domain.
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jim Carrey, Oprah, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates
Excerpt from Savanting: Outperforming your Potential, Chapter 4 (2019) by Lauren Holmes
SAVANT DOMAINS FROM CHILDHOOD
The six superachievers I have selected to demonstrate savanting have pursued what I consider biologically maximized careers – ones which honor their biological predispositions in compliance with the bioflow. One’s biological wiring, one’s strongest most rewarding talents, and one’s savant domain are more obvious during the simplicity of childhood. Therefore, it would be enlightening to examine what preceded their illustrious careers.
In my view, these six successful models never left the internal-external maximizing machinery into which we are all born. They remained integrated into the bioflow for most of their careers. Accordingly, their capabilities were always extended by the external bio-infrastructure and informational databases.
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They live(d) maximized lives of continuous savantflows within their savant domain. Not only were they operating from peak performance, but they were in a high-growth state which continually pushed the envelope on their baseline functionality and the advance of their savant domain. As a result of being guided by the bioflow – the evolutionary flow of all living systems – they each pioneered new frontiers for humanity.
The new savant-inspired mode of operation will be examined in the lives of the four iconic founders of Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. Excerpts from the lives of these and other superachievers will model how the internal-external partnership may be exploited to generate the worldchanging achievements they each attained.
“Control” of nature versus “compliance”
I have also selected the lives of two additional icons from very different savant domains as models. I specifically chose Oprah and Jim Carrey because they have self-identified as celebrity proponents of the law-of-attraction movement. I think you’ll find that explaining their success is much easier through savanting than the law of attraction (LOA). Their success will certainly be more replicable with savanting.
I also chose Oprah and Carrey because there are publicized events in their lives which are instructional with respect to pursuing the savanting way of life. This is my purpose for having six models. In addition, I think you’ll come to see that all their favorite success stories used to promote LOA result from honoring their biological wiring as savanting promotes.
In one critical way, the law of attraction is the exact opposite of savanting which is itself instructional. Savanting outlines a means to comply with internal and external biological processes in order to achieve goals associated with self-actualization and biology-driven purpose.
The law of attraction has the expectation of controlling natural forces. It is about redirecting natural forces to materialize what one wants through “like” attracting “like.” I assume this means that theoretically everyone in the world can simultaneously change the direction of powerful integrated and co-dependent universal forces to attract money. A bit of a challenge to reasoned thinking.
Savanting is about biological maximization. Both Carrey and Oprah were true to their biological predisposition in advancing their savant domains. Their success was achieved through sustained self-actualization. Have a look at their lives in the coming chapters and decide for yourself whether they controlled or complied with natural forces.
For now, let’s examine snapshots of the childhoods of all six superachievers for the beginnings of the savant domains in which they achieved such sensational success. I think the parallels of their biologically maximized careers will inspire your career.
THE CHILDHOODS OF OUR SUPERACHIEVERS
JIM CARREY – comedian, entertainer, actor, impressionist, screenwriter, film producer, uplifter
Jim Carrey was an entertainer from birth. He was addicted to uplifting people’s spirits. As a young boy, Jim slept with his tap shoes on in case his parents needed cheering up during the night. Unfortunately, his father had become unemployed and their financial situation had become dire. Carrey applied to be on the Carol Burnett Show at age ten and gave his first standup comedy performance at a comedy club at age sixteen. The savant domain in which he ultimately became successful began in his childhood.
OPRAH – media mogul, talk show host, actress, producer, philanthropist, uplifter
When Oprah was just three and a half, she was passionate about preaching to help people. She loved to recite the uplifting sermons of renowned preachers in the churches around her home. She knew even then that she aspired to inspire, encourage, and uplift.
Her talent as an orator and storyteller and her gift for drawing out people’s stories to benefit others were all in evidence by the age of five. She took drama in high school. During her senior year, WVOL, an African-American radio station in Nashville, Tennessee hired Oprah to read the news. Her broadcasting career was launched.
She then won a public speaking contest which gave her a scholarship to Tennessee State University. She majored in speech communications and performing arts. As with our other four founders, Oprah too left university in her teens to do the work she was passionate about. She accepted a job as a co-anchor at a CBS television station.
In 1978, while she was in her early twenties, Oprah was offered her first talk show to co-host, a morning show called “People are Talking.” After her first show, Oprah knew that this is what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. The savant domain of her ultimate success began in her childhood.
STEVE JOBS – co-founder of Apple, information technology entrepreneur, consumer engineer and artist, inventor, microcomputer industry pioneer, Pixar computer-animation pioneer
Steve Jobs was committed to consumer engineering for electronics from his early teens. That is the only audience that has ever connected to his heart. Jobs’ mechanical prowess and passion began at an early age. By age ten, Steve’s attraction to electronics had become obvious to his parents. As a result, he spent long hours with his father dismantling and rebuilding electronic devices in the family garage.
When he was twelve years old, he called William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, to ask him for some parts to complete a school project. Impressed, Hewlett offered Jobs an internship at his company. Jobs thus launched into his savant domain before he was even a teenager.
Hewlett-Packard became a model for how he would run Apple at such a young age. Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak met in high school when Jobs was just thirteen. Woz was the first person Jobs had met who knew more about electronics than he did. Their days quickly became about the type of work that eventually created Apple and made Jobs a leader in his savant domain.
Steve’s entrepreneurial skills showed up early in his life with several commercializations with Woz while a teenager. His love for minimalist design used for all Apple products also started in his teens and is rooted in the modernist architecture of his childhood home and his study of the principles of simplicity in Japanese Zen Buddhism. He took art classes in his teens to develop his interest.
BILL GATES – co-founder of Microsoft, information technology entrepreneur, mega-philanthropy pioneer, software pioneer, microcomputer industry pioneer, worldbuilder
By the time Bill Gates was thirteen, his key talents had intersected into a savant domain focused on improving the quality of life of individuals en masse. Bill’s brilliance in the tools of his mission – programming and business – were winning him acclaim and money throughout his teens.
In fact, he knew as a pre-teen that he would be an entrepreneur running his own company. However, his entrepreneurialism embraced the true meaning of the word with respect to pioneering new frontiers not simply business ownership.
Gates had a passion and aptitude for penetrating the unknown and building the structure to underpin it. The words of Ralph Waldo Emerson come to mind. “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
These three talents – business, programming and entrepreneurialism – were only tools of Bill’s worldbuilding domain. So many have missed the essence of the man and what drives him because they assumed (a) that the accouterments of success he accumulated from his achievements were his goal or (b) that the fields or industries in which he played identified his savant domain. Had Microsoft never existed, Bill Gates’ career would have looked exactly the same in some other frontier.
He was ready to launch his first company by age fifteen but was overruled by his parents wanting him to attend university. By the time he was twenty his passions had found vent in Microsoft which launched two new fields – microcomputers and software – in the service of personal computing.
Microsoft let him begin his widespread service to enhancing the lives of consumers en masse until it was easier to do this more directly through philanthropy, or more precisely, mega-philanthropy. This had been a key focus of his family from his birth.
JEFF BEZOS – founder of Amazon.com, business leader, entrepreneur, e-commerce pioneer, aerospace pioneer, worldbuilder
Jeff Bezos is considered to be the inventor and developer of e-commerce through Amazon.com. Amazon has transformed the way we read, shop and watch TV, and through its cloud services division runs an astonishingly large portion of the internet.
Bezos is a self-proclaimed “change junkie” continuously scaling new frontiers of learning, experimentation, and creation. At age eighteen, Jeff’s valedictorian speech at his high school revealed his vision of the retail and residential expansion of humanity into space. This colonization vision undoubtedly drove the planetary expansion of Amazon.
In addition, Jeff has now founded a consumer spaceflight company, Blue Origin, to develop the necessary technology for establishing an enduring human presence in space. Commercial suborbital human spaceflight experimentation began in 2018. The planet-wide expansion of Amazon into new unknown territories was preparation for the new frontiers he hopes to scale for the colonization of space.
The savant domain that spawned both Amazon and Blue Origin first appeared as Jeff’s obsession with science fiction books emphasizing worldbuilding. Even as a child his mind was captivated by their ambitious, mogul-driven projects with a self-contained set of planets, space colonies, and social relations (human, post-human, or other-than-human) run by radically different principles from the ones we know.
Following an announcement ceremony for Blue Origin at Cape Canaveral, Bezos talked with the media about his childhood obsession with the space program and science fiction books, and how that passion has motivated his business pursuits and shaped his ultimate goal to eventually put “millions of people” into space.
While an undergraduate at Princeton, Bezos served as the President of Princeton’s Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. His goal has always been to continuously make history. One can trace Bezos’ savant domain from childhood to the present and even project it into the future. Even if Amazon disappeared from the world tomorrow, we can know where his life will go. He will be true to his biological wiring.
MARK ZUCKERBERG – co-founder of Facebook, internet entrepreneur, social networking pioneer, philanthropist, worldbonder
According to his tutor in grade school, Mark Zuckerberg was a programming prodigy. Many assume this is his savant domain. However, Mark was smart at everything and programming was just one more field. Would it surprise you to learn that at age twelve, Zuckerberg began connecting his own family – his first social grouping?
“Zucknet” interconnected the computers of his family and their businesses so they could more easily communicate, support, and bond with each other. His passion for relationship-building began in his childhood and has never stopped.
Should Facebook disappear tomorrow, Mark would continue to promote the quality of life and success of individuals en masse through bonding people. Technology was only a convenient tool of his savant domain but not that domain.
It is his passion for relationship-building that prompted a computer science geek at Harvard to also take psychology. Mark’s raison d’être is to elevate the quality of life of people around the world by improving their connections and relationships. He is driven to unify, better, and bond humanity.
Shaping evolution
Each of these six superachievers had a biological predisposition to the personal savant domain for which they later became celebrated. That field of genius was often evident before they were five years old but certainly by the time they entered their teens.
Imagine decades of peak-performance and peak-growth savantflows within their savant domains starting this young. Imagine the success of your career if you never left your savant domain from birth to death. It is easy to see why competitors could never keep pace with these icons.
Notice that, for the four technology founders, the fields in which they became renowned really didn’t exist to any extent until they created or developed them. Notice as well that each of their savant domains was beneficial to humanity. This is what you would expect if people are partnered with the evolutionary forces of the bioflow continuously mutating, adapting and advancing the human species for survival.
Nature will provide support based not only on the maximizing of your system but also the maximizing of humanity’s system. The bioflow will guide you to maximizing both simultaneously – to the perfect intersection of two hierarchical systems maximizing. This is the formula for your greatest support from the bioflow to achieve your goals.
This is what you will learn from the six iconic savant-domain career models examined in this book. They each excelled in a savant domain that was facilitating the ideal direction of human evolution. This is the ideal strategy for yourself or any company you might run.
Excerpt from Savanting: Outperforming your Potential Chapter 24 by Lauren Holmes
Each person comes into this world with a specific destiny – he has something to fulfill, some message has to be delivered, some work has to be completed. You are not here accidentally – you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you. The whole intends to do something through you. Osho
So many have an emptiness that causes them to yearn for more meaning, purpose, and mission in their lives. They feel purpose is the key to a plethora of desirable psychological, physical, material, and emotional rewards that they crave from their core.
In fact, this need is so widespread that one could assume that it is genetic. And it would be understandable why evolution might select for such a yearning to pull us to protect, adapt, and advance the species.
The methods currently popular for discovering one’s purpose are rather haphazard – yielding imperfect, incorrect, temporary, burdensome, or unsustainable directions. Savanting more precisely satisfies this craving for the desired emotional state of having purpose. Instead of having to rely on human intelligence to determine one’s purpose, savanting conscripts nature’s intelligence. Our purpose and even the need for a purpose are biology-driven.
SAVANTING’S BIOLOGY-DRIVEN PURPOSE
Biology is used in savanting not only to identify your purpose but also to drive it, evolve it, and adapt it throughout your life as you grow and as your context progresses. The bioflow tells you when you are on purpose and maximized within your savant domain by responding with support.
Biological mechanisms which have evolved over generations as part of our biological imperative determine what we now label “our purpose.” It need not be the confusing intellectual exercise that so many seekers endure to find meaning in their lives.
In addition, most popular methods for defining one’s purpose yield a goal-driven approach – a mission that you must achieve even if you dislike what you have to do to get there. Savanting instead provides a state-driven approach. It addresses the real goal – sustainably generating the fulfilling state of being that you are craving. This is the underlying driver of the careers of our six superachievers.
This state is achieved and sustained by doing the most meaningful, intrinsically rewarding activities at your biological maximum with continuity. Each of these activities build on each other throughout your lifetime until your legacy becomes significant worldchanging work. You live your purpose rather than know where it will lead. You have the “emotion of purpose” every day in savantflow as you scale frontier after frontier within your savant domain.
Savanting provides the means to sustain a state of peak-purpose, peak-meaning, peak-growth, peak-performance, peak-achievement, and peak-creation in the territory of your greatest talents and passion. It is the guidance system so many of us seek to keep us on-path throughout our lives.
Your ideal “purpose” then would be the same as your savant formula. It would have you operating at your biological maximum so that you can apply your strongest most rewarding talents to the most meaningful, intrinsically rewarding activities for an audience that will value this, your greatest work. Add to this formula the support of the bioflow to help you outperform your innate potential and you have the only logical foundation upon which to build your life’s work.
Now that you know about the bioflow, do you really want to risk committing to a life purpose which requires you to fight continuously upstream against its direction? The advantage of savanting for identifying and implementing your purpose is that your pathway, at any point in your life, will be clear.
There will be clear signals inside and outside of you when you are moving in the right direction. The ideal path for your maximization can be determined at any point based on the empirical evidence of bioflow support in your past which will predict future bioflow support and hence your ideal direction. You are guided.
Even nonvisionaries can operate as if they have a vision of the future because they are guided by the evolutionary flow of humanity. Even the execution-challenged may operate with the genius of execution creatives such as the four founders of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. Even noncreatives may generate the new and unprecedented.
You are supported. You have relevant information at the right time from the bioflow for a re-combining process which will produce new information systems to advance your savant domain. You will enjoy coincidence after coincidence catapulting you ahead to a goal which may be better than the one you pursued when you started.
How helpful is it to have a guidance system which is up to date with all the new inventions, innovations, and events in your savant domain despite you not knowing about any of them? You will have a better chance of achieving your purpose when you go with the flow. One’s savant formula provides a new more reliable way for determining one’s purpose and living it.
DETERMINING YOUR BIOLOGY-DRIVEN PURPOSE
To launch your biology-driven purpose, you need only to begin doing activities or pursuing learning that you are passionate about which will put you into a savantflow. How do you know which activities are likely to invoke savantflows? There are two ways to predict these.
First, activities which provoked savantflows in your past will likely generate savantflows in your future. Savantflows will have the telltale signs of support from the bioflow. The savantflows will conform to a pattern or theme over time. Your life purpose and your savant domain will emerge from that order.
Savantflows are high-growth states. Your purpose is going to evolve with serial savantflows as you do. The “emotional feel of being on purpose” will provide you with better direction indicators than trying to apply labels to define and pursue your purpose.
Eventually, you’ll be able to look back with 20:20 hindsight and see how your biological wiring in partnership with the bioflow has perfectly advanced you along a logical pathway that defines an identifiable purpose. Then you can project that purpose into the future to accelerate your progression.
The second way in which you can predictably determine which activities are likely to generate the savantflows defining your purpose is through other themes of activities supported by the bioflow in your past. You can identify the direction of your purpose from any of several interchangeable themes or patterns of events in your past because they are all leading you to the same place. Biological maximization.
Your unpaid work theme, your knowledge-pursuit theme, your creativity-pursuit theme, your frontier-pursuit theme, or the theme of activities that triggered relevant spontaneous knowledge, clusters of coincidences, or spontaneous creativity. Each one of these themes will identify your biology-driven purpose.
Just begin. Find safe places, projects, or activities to begin the process. The block and flow events in your reality will tell you whether you are going in the direction supported by the bioflow for your purpose. You’ll have all the distinct telltale signs to confirm that you’re moving along your purpose path. You’ll be attracting people, events, and information into your life routinely which will feed and facilitate the advance of your purpose.
An intrinsically rewarding purpose
I want to reiterate a concept in the context of this discussion of biology-driven purpose. The activities that are part of your purpose will be intrinsically rewarding. This is not about doing activities you are excited about to achieve a particular goal. “Intrinsically rewarding” or “biologically rewarding” mean that the activity itself is the goal.
Think of our six superachievers. Their childhood play became their adult paid play in the savant domain in which they became famous. Their careers were biologically not intellectually driven. So many seekers never find their purpose because this singular requirement was never met. Instead of concentrating their time on intrinsically rewarding activities and letting a purpose-related context unfold, they instead sought a goal and took action – often unpleasant action – to achieve that goal.
Your lifework may lie in a field which does not yet exist. Or there may be a channel from which to launch it which never occurred to you. There may be coincidences which can save you hundreds of steps to accelerate your start. There may be a few models for how to proceed which, when you combine them together will lead to a worldchanging, paradigm-shifting breakthrough.
Begin with what you know to try to trigger engaging addictive, emotionally rewarding savantflows. What feels good; what you are passionate about; what is meaningful; what is fun; and so on. When you discover your purpose, it will rely on work that is its own reward. You cannot enter savantflow without this.
Accordingly, it is also important not to choose work that you think will get you to the intrinsically rewarding work or place that you want to be. This is contrary to the biological functioning and benefits of savanting. You’ll have none of the magic working for you.
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 Savanting: Outperforming your Potential, Chapter 23 by Lauren Holmes (2019)
Not only do self-actualization and self-transcendence emerge from the savantflows driving savanting, but so too does another oft-pursued goal – “awe.” This is the emotion which attracts so many to religious and spiritual organizations. It even draws extraterrestrial believers to the UFO “religion.”
Awe is a powerfully addictive emotion. Awe experiences are innately self-transcendent. They shift our attention away from ourselves. They make us feel as if we are part of something greater than ourselves. They make us more generous toward others.
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The 2003 paper of Keltner and Haidt,[i] “Approaching Awe – A Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” identifies studies which show that awe is often accompanied by feelings of self-diminishment and increased connectedness with other people. Experiencing awe often puts people in a self-transcendent state where they focus less on themselves and more on being part of a larger whole.
In this way, awe is both an altered state of consciousness and an emotional state. As such, it is akin to flow state.[ii] In fact, awe is a component of the addictive draw of flow.
Shiota et al. (2007) define awe as “an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that overwhelm current mental structures yet facilitate attempts at accommodation.”
Awe is one of the very rare emotions that turn our minds outwards rather than inwards. The experience of awe entices us to transcend the boundaries of our individual self. We are drawn outside of ourselves to wonder at phenomena in the natural world, the noble actions of others, or the genius of creativity. Our daily concerns and ingrained expectations of life are revised as a result.
Another consequence of the “diminished sense of self” spawned by awe is an enhanced awareness of being part of something infinitely larger and more universal. Shiota et al. (2007) report that those asked to re-live an awe-inspiring moment revealed pronounced feelings of love, connectedness to the world around them, rapture, contentment, awareness of something greater than the self, a lack of awareness of everyday concerns, and a desire to prolong the emotional state for as long as possible.[iii]
Awe is a compelling part of the beneficial addiction to the savant-inspired protocol once you start advancing your savant domain. Think of the emotional highs in a productive savantflow, when you are achieving at your maximum and elements of your reality generated by the bioflow are helping you every step of the way.
Imagine getting the exact information you need when you need it to achieve a goal. Or a model that will show you how to get what you want. Or clusters of coincidences catapulting you ahead – each one a magical mystical experience. Imagine the emotional highs of breakthroughs and epiphanies creating unprecedented futures.
This is the stuff of a life of miracles. Awe will become a frequent feature of living the savanting modus operandi. Imagine looking back across major creations and inventions in your savant domain, especially if you’ve been a nonperformer before savanting. Then imagine that you achieved all of that through play not work. Imagine how the world would be different because you lived and left your footprint.
WHOLENESS FOR THE DAMAGED
One of the most frequently mentioned dimensions of the flow experience is that, while it lasts, one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness[i]
One of the most frequently mentioned dimensions of the flow experience is that, while it lasts, one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life.
Respite and self-transcendence
Awe is a sought-after emotional goal for everyone, but it is heavenly for “the damaged.” I want to encourage those who think themselves too damaged from abuse, trauma, or psychological or physical limitations to pursue self-actualization, self-transcendence, and worldchanging goals to switch to the savanting modus operandi.
There are no negative emotions experienced during savantflows. Imagine the hours, days, and years of relief that those tormented by looping negative thoughts or addictions might have. If you want an escape from the noise in your head holding you back, savanting creates a place where innate drives and biochemical rewards can pull you to do your greatest work.
As the beneficial addiction to advance one’s savant domain takes hold, lives that might otherwise have been wasted through psychological issues and complications will be pulled to achieve great meaning and contribution.
Savanting may be a most unexpectedly profound psychological solution. It is a step beyond Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy based on “our will to meaning.” Savanting addresses “our will to meaning” and “our will to creativity, creation, invention, innovation,” and “our need to contribute” as an integrated process.
Repair
But more than relief, serial savantflows may be able to correct the problems of the damaged so they can become whole. Savantflows provide some extremely positive emotional, spiritual, and even mystical experiences that are rejuvenating.
Damaged individuals may thrive in savantflows where their damage either doesn’t exist or is not invoked. And, over months and years devoid of re-damaging cycles, the hold of old noise in one’s head will dissipate. It will be overwritten by new more positive habits and thoughts.
In addition, activities triggering savantflows are often ones which creatively express, reinforce, and nourish one’s essence. These often lead to experiencing self-sufficient, sustainable self-love – often the missing ingredient that resulted in the damage in the first place.
While there are no studies specifically investigating savantflows, there are flow studies which reinforce these findings. There was a 2009 study conducted on Japanese students by Kiyoshi Asakawa at the Department of Intercultural Communication at Hosei University Chiyoda-ku in Tokyo, Japan.
The study found that those who experienced flow more often were more likely to have higher levels of self-esteem, Jujitsu-kan (a sense of fulfillment), life satisfaction, better coping strategies, and lower anxiety.[v]
If you’re in therapy to deal with your lack of fulfillment, even ordinary flows may be an alternate way to achieve this goal. As one’s time in savantflows increases and significant projects start to define one’s savant domain, positive emotions will emerge around self-love, self-esteem, self-respect, self-confidence, and a strengthened identity and purpose. Sustainable happiness is possible from accelerated and amplified achievement and the increased creativity of savantflows.
Those damaged by deprivation or interference with this critical suite of emotions can be made whole. This is just one more way in which human biology has been designed to be self-correcting. Evolution would of course have built a powerful constellation of positive and compelling emotions into Man’s maximum to entice repeated reentry to savantflows?
The damaged may still reveal their flaws in other arenas of their lives. However, if they can concentrate their lives on activities which generate savantflow and integration with the bioflow, their damage will not be triggered. They’ll be pulled towards forums for their art that invoke savantflows where negative emotions are replaced with emotional highs.
Addiction
If substance addictions are biology-based, then invoking the different biological pathways inherent in savanting may lessen or eliminate their pull. If substance abuse is a way to avoid emptiness, then the meaningful work in savantflows will offer an alternate route. Evolution has ensured that we have many drives and biochemical draws to keep us pursuing a savantflow way of life. Over time, they may become the substance of choice for addicts.
[i] Keltner and Haidt (2003), “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion,” in Cognition and Emotion, 2003, 17 (2), 297-314
[ii] Keltner, D. J., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
[iii] The nature of awe: Elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept by Michelle N. Shiota and Dacher Keltner, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA and Amanda Mossman, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group, Cognition and Emotion 2007, 21 (5), 944-963. Also https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/dacherkeltner/docs/shiota.2007.pdf 4-6-1
[iv] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness 1992, Ebury Publishing, November 15, 2013
[v] Kiyoshi Asakawa, Flow Experience, Culture, and Well-being: How Do Autotelic Japanese College Students Feel, Behave, and Think in Their Daily Lives?, Journal of Happiness Studies, April 2010, Volume 11, Issue 2, pp 205–223 |Department of Intercultural Communication, Hosei University Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan, Research Paper, First Online: 04 January 2009, K. J. Asakawa, Happiness Stud (2010) 11: 205.
