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
Join this website to learn of each new publication. Here are some of the future articles being planned :
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 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 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
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.
Excerpt from BioMaxed, Chapters 6-8 (2019) by Lauren Holmes
PART TWO: BORROW EXTERNAL POTENTIAL – External support for your biologically maximized career – Borrow from nature and surrounding systems: predictability, power, resources, information, functionality, creativity, growth, and frontiering™.
Your biologically maximized career – serial breakthrough synthesis; serial top-talent flow; serial frontiering™; trend integration and mass synchronization; synergies and multi-system achieving.
Our examination of the biologically maximized career continues. In Part One, we examined the new career maximums possible from exploiting internal elements of the maximizing process that has evolved the human species. In Part Two, we will discover how the external portion of this process may be exploited to achieve new career maximums. The external maximizing process provides the fuel for the internal processes. That fuel is information. It also provides direction, power, borrowable capabilities and functionality, predictability, synergies, and synchronization with world trends.
We have been examining the careers of seven icons for commonalities: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon). What they share is a biologically maximized career. Discover these new career maximums for yourself. Their level of world-changing legacy may then become yours.
BREAKTHROUGH SYNTHESIS
There is a singular dynamic transaction within nature’s maximizing process which ensures not just the survival of living systems but their synchronized and synergistic advance. This dynamic is the underlying energetic for growth, adaptation, creativity, and even evolution. It is an information creation dynamic I will call breakthrough synthesis since something novel is always created. Breakthrough synthesisre-combines existing information systems to create a new information system.
Brilliant breakthroughs
The newly manufactured information systems emerge from this breakthrough synthesis as “sudden nonlinear creations” or “quantum leaps.” The highly desirable quantum leaps from Part One all rely on breakthrough synthesis: flashes of genius, “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, sudden insight, sudden knowledge, sudden savantism, sudden creativity, creative inspirations, intuitive leaps, epiphanies, and enlightenment.
These desirable breakthroughs all require the right information fuel at the right time. This fuel is provided by the external portion of the maximizing machinery. Even a few such breakthroughs may be sufficient to create a life-changing or even world-changing career. However, a career of serial breakthroughs may lead to cumulative legacies substantially beyond one’s perceived potential. Even those of only ordinary intelligence and with little ability to innovate likely have sufficient smarts to re-combine information pieces placed right in front of them by the maximizing process to generate flashes of genius.
Biological breakthrough synthesis
Breakthrough synthesis is not a new tool invented for career advance. It is a key biological dynamic of maximizing, adaptation, growth, creativity, and evolution. It synthesizes the creative solutions to the everyday challenges to maximizing living systems for survival. It is nature’s preferred form of creativity. Consequently, it is available all around us for us to conscript to achieve bigger goals better. We can extend our creativity with nature’s to achieve beyond our potential.
Breakthrough synthesis is evident in the genetic synthesis which re-combines the information of our parents and the generations before to create each of us? Breakthrough synthesis generates the proteins that are the foundation of all living systems. The synthesis of amino acids into proteins and nucleic acids into genetic material are fundamental to life. The promising future from these two examples is that they too once appeared to scientists as sudden leaps to a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. One day we may know enough about what created our “Eureka!” events that we can make them routine for everyone.
It would be illogical to assume that we, as individual human beings, are exempt from this breakthrough synthesis theme that is advancing all living systems. Reintegrating into the maximizing machinery that evolved us will restore breakthrough synthesis to us as a career tool for exceptional performance. But more than this, we, too, are information systems which may be re-combined to create new information systems. We may therefore play a role as the information fuel, the catalyst, or the creation once we allow ourselves to be orchestrated by the maximizing machinery helping all living systems to survive.
Flow is our internal breakthrough synthesis
This same breakthrough synthesis drives our shifts into our peak-performance, peak-growth flow states. It is not by accident that the activity of the anterior superior temporal gyrus in the right brain increases during flow. This is where remote and unconnected associations are brought together and linked in breakthrough synthesis. In Part One we learned about new career maximums such as this one that are possible through the internal portion of the maximizing machinery. The external portion provides the fuel for this internal breakthrough synthesis: the information.
An increase in career-changing breakthroughs is built into flow state. This is especially true of our top-talent flow states that arise from the application of our strongest, most preferred talents to our most meaningful challenges. A shift into flow is a leap to maximization. Flow states therefore automatically integrate us into the maximizing machinery. The external portion of the machinery then orchestrates us to the right place and time for the information to fuel our internal breakthrough synthesis. Examine your past top-talent flows to view this process in action. You now have a formula for generating breakthroughs at will with which to excel.
Growth internally / Creativity externally
Sudden insights and flow states are not alone in being driven by breakthrough synthesis. • Growth is breakthrough synthesis applied internally. • Creativity is breakthrough synthesis applied externally.
Inward-facing growth is the combining of new information with your existing internal information to create a new you. Your personal information structure is replaced with a more advanced one. In exactly the same way, outward-facing creativity incorporates new information into the information structure of the world system to generate a new world system. Creativity is “world growth,” so to speak, no matter who is creating something new.
Exploit maximization-linked coincidences
Coincidences are yet another of the sudden leaps to new knowledge discussed in the previous section. They too are products of breakthrough synthesis. A single coincidence has been responsible for some of the most spectacular careers. However, a coincidence is also the information fuel for breakthrough synthesis. Three to seven coincidences or information systems are usually sufficient for the re-mix to create a significant new information system: an “Aha!” or “Eureka!” event, for example.
Coincidences are both the fuel and the product of breakthrough synthesis. Fortunately, integrating into the maximizing machinery will exponentially explode your experience of coincidences. How delightful! These coincidences, of course, will fuel a plethora of career-making breakthrough syntheses. Your career maximum will increase commensurately. How one cultivates these catalytic coincidences is an article in itself. However, here is a brief introduction.
Officially, a coincidence is the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection. However, the coincidences that you will be experiencing with this proposed new career maximizing methodology will be causally linked to the maximizing process for your system. These are maximization-linked coincidences. Because they will seem serendipitous, the term ‘coincidence’ still works for our purposes.
However, they are actually co-maximizations or synergies among fellow maximizers. Living systems grab information from each other to fuel breakthrough synthesis to generate creative solutions to maximizing or adaptation challenges. The new information systems created by the re-mix appear as the coincidences in your life. However, these created coincidences are also the fuel for the next round of breakthrough syntheses or maximizing. In effect, breakthrough synthesis is the maximizing process. It both creates coincidences or information systems and uses them.
Accordingly, a cluster of coincidences will always indicate the flow of the maximizing process in your reality. The closer you are to your maximized state, the more compliant you will be to being orchestrated by the maximizing machinery to the right information at the right time for breakthroughs. The self-ordering nature of the machinery will then group you with the systems best able to provide you with the information you need next. This will increase the volume and quality of the information coincidences that you will experience. Your breakthroughs will increase commensurately.
You may recall from Part One that your maximized state is top-talent flow or a flow state that derives from applying your strongest, most preferred, talents to the field or application that is most meaningful to you. If the coincidences in your life are sparse or nonexistent, then you likely have moved out of the flow of the maximizing process. You are not maximized. You are sitting idly on the riverbank with the other unmaximized living systems. You will have no information fuel for the quantum leaps to career-making breakthroughs, insights, and flashes of genius.
These coincidences are not psychological or RAS events
These maximization-linked coincidences are not simply psychologically meaningful events as psychologist Carl Jung proposed in his 1920s’ definition of “synchronicities.” These are not simply psychological transactions whereby you confer shared meaning on unrelated events. These are true physical events which result from the shared information pieces from your co-maximizing partners. These “coincidences” are physical symptoms of the underlying dynamic order of a singular process which might be called “maximizing” or “adaptation” or “growth” or “creativity” or “creation” or “emergence” or “self-ordering” or “problem-solving” or “breakthrough synthesis.”
Nor are these coincidences or information quantum leaps or co-maximizations the result of your reticular activating system (RAS) seeing whatever you have been focused on. Your RAS is your information filter or gatekeeper. It is the reason why, when you buy the car you have been researching, you will see that model everywhere. It has evolved to filter thousands of items per second to select the information that you need for survival. Your RAS may help you to identify the best coincidences for your next breakthrough synthesis. However, it obviously does not create those coincidences. It is filtering true physical events.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND BREAKTHROUGH SYNTHESIS
Part One and Part Two contain biological discoveries and theories by the author resulting from extensive executive interviews, examinations, and experimentations which applied scientific method to the lives of individual executives and, especially, multinational executives. This has resulted in a new biologically maximized modus operandi for human beings which bypasses cultural interference.
This new way of operating prescribes full integration into biological mechanisms and processes inside and outside of us which have evolved to work together synergistically but which have been culturally overruled. I have created a link to material that hints at some relevant science to explain in laymen’s terms what enables the breakthrough synthesis to work. Hopefully, this brief description will suffice until separate articles may be written with more details about the relevant scientific discoveries. (See Chapter 5).
MASS SYNCHRONIZATION: Trend creation and exploitation
Mass maximization generates mass synchronization. Mass maximization provides the ideal synchronized direction for the majority of living systems to survive. Here are some of the ways this synchronization is created and may be exploited to increase your career potential:
1 The dance of systems maximizing and re-maximizing to each other and their shared context serves to orchestrate a synchronized advance of living systems. It orchestrates synergies which further synchronize systems. Mass synchronization groups potentially synergistic systems together to better share resources, assets and functionality. Your career potential is extended and supplemented by these other systems.
2 These synergies include information sharing for the breakthrough synthesis that will solve respective maximization challenges. Complying with the maximizing flow will orchestrate you to the right place at the right time to source the information you need to fuel your career-making breakthroughs.
3 Clusters of coincidences will always identify the direction of the synchronized flow. You will always know where the flow of the maximizing machinery is in your context or your company’s context by the clustering of coincidences and facilitating events.
4 In a world of systems nested within systems, order nested within order, and emergence nested within emergence, the orchestration of compliant systems into synchronization defines world trends. Complying with the maximizing process then will keep careers, companies, and, indeed, any human systems, at the leading edge of world trends.
5 An added benefit, of course, is that being compliant or being part of the synchronization will ensure that you will also not be fighting against trends as you try to get ahead. You will not be impeded from achieving your career maximums. Careers therefore benefit from being integrated into current trends. Careers gain by complying with the flow to maximization of the larger system of which we are all a part.
6 If you find yourself constantly hitting blocks to your progress or negative frustrating events, you have either fallen out of the mass synchronization or not found it yet. When you tap into the ongoing maximizing quantum leap process all around you, you can be catapulted to your work or career goals. It will become apparent how your career may be dramatically amplified and accelerated.
7 Mass synchronization allows you to extend your capabilities with those of other systems and the maximizing machinery itself. You will then be able to operate beyond your potential to achieve new career maximums.
Merging into nature’s maximizing process causes synchronization as a byproduct. Synchronization will keep your career and your company leading edge. It is also a potential new leadership tool for keeping any human systems – companies, countries, and humanity – moving in lock-step towards your goals. It is one of several means for multi-system achieving in this proposed new way of biologically maximizing careers.
PROFIT FROM THE PREDICTABILITY OF THE MAXIMIZING PROCESS
How much more successful would your career and your life be if you could know whether a project was going to fail or succeed before you even began it?
The maximizing process is knowable, predictable, and “harnessable” – not just generically but personally. This is because the maximum for your system is a constant. Therefore, maximizing forces will act on your system in consistent and predictable ways. Once you discover how they have supported and opposed your system in your past, you can predict how they will react in the future. You will then know which projects to choose or to avoid to ensure your career success. The provided exercises will support the review of your past: The exercises in the Sourcing-your-SavantExercises in Chapter 7 will support the review of your past.
Historical patterns of events since your childhood will identify, with shocking consistency, the types of projects favored by mechanisms that maximize. It will be no surprise that projects which incite top-talent flow, your maximized state, will be favored most. Expect to be catapulted forward by coincidences and flow events. Breakthrough synthesis will increase dramatically. You will have the means to achieve bigger goals more successfully.
This is the simple, consistent, predictable, dynamic order that created our seven iconic innovators. They excelled through a biologically maximized career modus operandi. Just as models and actors know how to position their face in every scene for the best light, our seven achievers learned to unconsciously position themselves for the flow of breakthrough syntheses and coincidences. They capitalized on this predictability to achieve at their maximum.
The more contrary you are to your biological maximum, the more you can expect to be impeded by blocks and negative experiences. The extremes of Steve Jobs’ career offer strong examples of when he was and was not biologically compliant.
Our health, and even our patience, is unforgiving when maximization has been experienced and then lost. Thwarted creativity in the field of one’s greatest strengths and meaning may turn out to be the key cause of illness in aspiring executives. It is a mistake for the individual and the world to push a career in opposition to the maximizing flow.
EMBRACE THE NEW CAREER MAXIMUMS
Emulate the iconic founders of Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft
Many aspire to the success of our seven super-achievers: Bill Gates (Microsoft), the two Steves: Jobs and Wozniak (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon). They have achieved the goals that many pursue in their careers. Many mistakenly assume that they accumulated their wealth and acclaim through their pursuit of these rewards directly. Many therefore try to emulate what their pathways seem to have been in order to acquire comparable extrinsic rewards.
The biologically maximized career
However, the formula these seven successful innovators truly share is a biologically maximized career path. It was their pursuit of intrinsic rewards that led to the external manifestation of their internal wealth and success. By operating at their biological maximum, internal and external maximizing mechanisms and processes linked up to enable them to frequently perform beyond their potential. Functionality, growth, and creativity automatically emerged that are not available when we operate as separate entities.
There is an addictive pull to doing meaningful, challenging work to which we are biologically predisposed. Only by harnessing a machinery dedicated to our biological maximum may we know our true career potential. Once you understand the biologically driven career strategy of our seven super-achievers, you realize not only that it is totally replicable in your own life but how to do it.
Serial top-talent flows or serial internal maximizations
Flow state is our maximized state. In flow we operate at peak performance and peak growth. We have functionality and capabilities above our norm. However, the flow states experienced serially by our super seven had them operating 100% in their savant state.
In top-talent flow they applied their strongest most satisfying talents to the work they were biologically predisposed to do and, in fact, biologically addicted to doing. Internal biological incentives enticed them to operate in serial states of top-talent flow and the serial breakthrough synthesis that is its byproduct. New functionality perpetually emerged in them with every top-talent flow experience. They scaled frontier after frontier in their most meaningful field with world-changing consequences – Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook.
Serial breakthrough synthesis or serial information creation or serial frontiering™
Years of serial breakthroughs in the territory of their strongest, most rewarding, and most addicting talents yielded their incredible career achievements. This addiction of our seven icons to serial states of top-talent flow was compounded by a second biological addiction. This addiction was to the frontiering™ or serial breakthrough synthesis that occurred at the frontiers they were scaling. The cumulative effects of these two benevolent biochemical addictions pulled them to advance our world. They were sufficiently compelling that the disciplined linear hard work traditionally promoted for career advancement was never required.
The career success of each of our seven iconic founders is defined by their moments of breakthrough synthesis when they re-mixed the known to create the new. They all had access to seemingly serendipitous information that they synthesized into the breakthroughs that peppered their careers. Breakthrough synthesis is evolution’s way. Take a page from nature’s silver linings playbook. Serial breakthrough synthesis is the modus operandi for a biologically maximized career.
Brilliant breakthroughs for the ungifted?
Is it possible for ordinary people, non-creatives, or the change-adverse to routinely experience effortless epiphanies, brilliant breakthroughs, and fruitful frontiering forays to springboard their careers ahead? The answer is “Yes!” for those who know how to harness nature’s maximizing process to source then re-combine existing information systems to create new ones.
You will come to know the indicators of the flow of the maximizing process. Clusters of coincidences are one example. Over time, it will become progressively easier to follow the indicators to be in the right place at the right time for the next piece of information that you need. Even normal intelligence will be able to see how to re-mix to create something new when magical information pieces emerge right in front of you. It will become routine.
Could it be that the seven iconic super-achievers who founded Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook did not need to be as creative, innovative or as brilliant as we might have thought to attain their life-changing and world-changing careers?
Could it be that they only needed to be able to source and re-combine existing information systems to create new information systems?
Could it be that our seven were, in fact, expert breakthrough synthesizers?
Could serial breakthrough synthesis as a way of life have been their shared formula for career success?
Could it be yours?
Could you become as world-changing as these icons?
Breakthrough synthesis redefines leading?
Managers manage existing human systems. Leaders penetrate new territory or bring new information systems into existence. The person with the expertise and passion for penetrating unknown territory will always be the leader. The person creating the next iteration of the world will always be the leader. Therefore, breakthrough synthesis will define the leader of the future.
Consequently, our seven iconic executives were leaders even if they never conformed to any of the competencies promoted by the leadership development industry. Those competencies are just window-dressing. Breakthrough synthesis is this essence of leadership. It determines whether you will or will not be the leader.
But there is more. Revisit the definition of breakthrough synthesis for a moment. Is not each person an information system which may be re-combined to create a new information system? Are not all collections of human resources information systems? Could leadership itself then not be better defined in terms of breakthrough synthesis using human information systems? This is obviously a whole other chapter of career maximums best saved for a future article.
Part One and Part Two contain biological discoveries and theories by the author resulting from extensive executive interviews, examinations, and experimentations which applied scientific method to the lives of individual executives and, especially, multinational executives. This has resulted in a new biologically maximized modus operandi for human beings that bypasses cultural interference.
This new way of operating prescribes full integration into biological mechanisms and processes inside and outside of us which have evolved to work together synergistically but which have been culturally overruled. I have created a link to material that hints at some relevant science to explain in laymen’s terms what enables the breakthrough synthesis to work. Hopefully, this brief description will suffice until separate articles may be written with more details about the relevant scientific discoveries. At minimum, it will provide the terminology that those who are interested may research to learn more.
Relevant biological processes
In brief, the following touch on how the maximizing machinery provides the information fuel for the breakthrough synthesis to generate quantum leaps in new information that may define new career highs for you:
1 Power for the maximizing machinery: There is an unending dance of systems re-maximizing to a contextual system changed by other systems which in turn were forced to re-maximize when their context was changed by other systems re-maximizing and so on endlessly.
2 Information source: The information fuel for new information systems comes from the raiding of information pieces from synergistic systems to enable a system to re-maximize to its changing contextual system. These information pieces are re-combined again using the breakthrough synthesis on which everything in this article relies.
3 Grouping of information sources: Spontaneous self-organizing or sudden ordering of the larger contextual system groups us with the best synergy partners from which to source information fuel to re-maximize. This sudden leap to order systems for synergies will improve their mutual chances of survival. Complexity theory is relevant to the re-ordering of this complex contextual system.
4 Information access: The information to be re-combined for the breakthroughs appears as coincidences or co-maximizations in one’s immediate context or reality. It is the grouping of synergistic systems noted in point 3 that causes clusters of relevant coincidences of information to emerge in one’s life. The more one is maximized (in top-talent flow, for example) and being orchestrated by the maximizing machinery, the greater the number and value of the coincidences experienced.
5 Information re-mix – information creation – information quantum leaps: The process of emergence is behind the breakthrough synthesis. It is what causes information pieces to be re-combined nonlinearly to generate leaps to new wholes which are greater than the sum of their parts. It is the means to adapt to the continuous contextual changes of thedance.
A collection of systems is orchestrated by biological spontaneous order or self-organizing principles to pool their resources so that they may each maximize their respective systems for survival. This information re-mix to create new information which will enable systems to adapt is the essence of the work of the maximizing machinery and its component systems of systems.
6 Goal attainment and problem-solving: By using the same self-ordering and emergence mechanisms, it is possible to change the information structure of one’s personal system so that peripheral elements of your maximizing formula change. This maximizing formula change will then group you with different synergy partners who will share information more relevant to your new goal.
The clusters of coincidences now in your reality will be relevant to your new maximizing formula based on your information structure revised for your new goal. These quantum leaps to sudden knowledge will help you to achieve goals or solve problems by applying the breakthrough synthesis.
Relevant scientific definitions
Self-organization is one of the ideas, models and techniques bundled together as the sciences of complexity. It refers to systems that appear to organize themselves without external direction, manipulation, or control. Self-organization can be defined as the spontaneous creation of a globally coherent pattern out of local interactions. Self-organizing mechanisms common to biological systems create order from disordered systems using the process of emergence. Self-organized order is a spontaneous pattern from within. It is a product of the generic properties of living matter itself.
Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multitude of simple interactions. In evolutionary theory, emergence is defined as the rise of a system that cannot be predicted or explained from antecedent conditions. A grouping develops properties that none of its members has. The brain is an example of an emergent biological structure. Neither individual neurons nor whole sections of the brain have the properties of a completely integrated brain.
Emergence is the process behind our quantum leaps to sudden insight, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, creative inspirations, flashes of genius, “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, intuitive leaps, epiphanies, enlightenment, frontiering, growth, and jumps to whole-brain operation and flow states. Emergence is also the same process behind the synergy of co-maximizing systems. Synergy is the interaction of multiple elements in a system to produce a combined effect greater and often different than the sum of their separate effects. As such it is a nonlinear process.
Each of us is a living system. Living systems and forces of nature are nonlinear. Their outcomes cannot be quantified by additive equations. Therefore, cause and effect will not necessarily be functionally related. In linear systems, output is proportional to input. In nonlinear systems, this is not the case. A small input may produce an enormous change in output.
The butterfly effect, popularized by the 2004science-fiction thriller, is a well-known hypothetical example of chaos theory which illustrates how small initial differences may lead to large unforeseen consequences over time. In linear systems change may be predicted by what has happened in the past. In nonlinear systems, change is discontinuous. Progress occurs with sudden unpredictable jumps. Sudden transitions may result from dramatic reorganizations (McClure, 1998*). Our “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events and other results of breakthrough synthesis involve emergence, nonlinear transactions, chaos theory, complexity theory, and sudden self-ordering systems.
A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that, as a whole, exhibit properties or behaviors not obvious from the properties of the component parts. This repeats the definition of emergence and the example of the brain. This is also the breakthrough synthesis’ information creation process or creativity that drives the continuous re-maximization dance.It is this same process that we will be using to drive your career to its maximum.
Please note that I use the term ‘quantum leap’ conceptually to help you to internalize the required change process. A quantum leap actually uses the process of emergence. However, the term ‘emergence’ suggests a linear process for what is actually nonlinear. Emergence therefore does not help me to ready your system for a leap to change. So, I will call these sought-after career and work breakthrough states ‘quantum leaps.’
Do you notice how all of these terms reiterate or add dimensions to the basic breakthrough synthesis that generates the creativity to solve maximization challenges? Imagine harnessing the essential creative force of adaptation and evolution of all living systems to advance your career. Could it be that our seven breakthrough synthesizers who founded Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook merely tapped into the creativity of the universe and the way human beings have evolved to operate? Is that the true common thread that they share? *McClure, B. A. (1998). Putting a New Spin on Groups: The Science of Chaos. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Exploit maximization-linked coincidences
Coincidences are yet another of the sudden leaps to new knowledge being promoted. They too are products of breakthrough synthesis. A single coincidence has been responsible for some of the most spectacular careers. However, a coincidence is also the information fuel for breakthrough synthesis. Three to seven coincidences or information systems are usually enough for the re-mix to create a significant new information system: an “Aha!” or “Eureka!” event, for example.
Coincidences are both the fuel and the product of breakthrough synthesis. Fortunately, integrating into the maximizing machinery will exponentially explode your experience of coincidences. How delightful! These coincidences, of course, will fuel a plethora of career-making breakthrough syntheses. Your career maximum will increase commensurately. How to cultivate these catalytic coincidences is an article in itself. However, here is a brief introduction.
Officially, acoincidence is the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection. However, the coincidences that you will be experiencing with this proposed new career maximizing methodology willbe causally linkedto the maximizing processfor your system. These are maximization-linked coincidences. Because they will seem serendipitous, the term ‘coincidence’ still works for our purposes.
However, they are actually co-maximizations or synergies among fellow maximizers. Living systems grab information from each other to fuel breakthrough synthesis to generate creative solutions to maximizing or adaptation challenges. The new information systems created by the re-mix appear as the coincidences in your life. However, these created coincidences are also the fuel for the next round of breakthrough syntheses or maximizing. In effect, breakthrough synthesis is the maximizing process. It both creates coincidences or information systems and uses them.
Accordingly, a cluster of coincidences will always indicate the flow of the maximizing process in your reality. The closer you are to your maximized state, the more compliant you will be to being orchestrated by the maximizing machinery to the right information at the right time for breakthroughs. The self-ordering nature of the machinery will then group you with the systems best able to provide you with the information you need next. This will increase the volume and quality of the information coincidences that you will experience. Your breakthroughs will increase commensurately.
You may recall from Part One that your maximized state is top-talent flow or a flow state that derives from applying your strongest, most preferred, talents to the field or application that is most meaningful to you. If the coincidences in your life are sparse or nonexistent, then you likely have moved out of the flow of the maximizing process. You are not maximized. You are sitting idly on the riverbank with the other unmaximized living systems. You will have no information fuel for the quantum leaps to career-making breakthroughs, insights, and flashes of genius.
These coincidences are not psychological or RAS events
These maximization-linked coincidences are not simply psychologically meaningful events as Jung proposed in his definition of ‘synchronicities.’ These are not simply psychological transactions whereby you confer meaning on unrelated events. These are true physical events which result from the shared information pieces from your co-maximizing partners.These ‘coincidences’ are physical symptoms of the underlying dynamic order of a singular process which might be called ‘maximizing’ or ‘adaptation’ or ‘growth’ or ‘creativity’ or ‘creation’ or ‘emergence’ or ‘self-ordering’ or ‘problem-solving’ or ‘breakthroughsynthesis.’
Nor are these coincidences or information quantum leaps or co-maximizations the result of your reticular activating system (RAS) seeing whatever you have been focused on. Your RAS is your information filter or gatekeeper. It is the reason why, when you buy the car you have been researching, you will see that model everywhere. It has evolved to filter thousands of items per second to select the information that you need for survival. Your RAS may help you to identify the best coincidences for your next breakthrough synthesis. However, it obviously does not create those coincidences. It is filtering true physical events.
Excerpt from BioMaxed, Chapters 4-5 (2019) by Lauren Holmes
PART ONE: RELEASE INTERNAL POTENTIAL –Internal aspects of your biologically maximized career – new meta-skills; sudden knowledge, genius, breakthroughs, and creativity; whole-brain savantism; top-talent flow and growth; and aligning career and growth paths for paid growth and paid play.
PART TWO: BORROW EXTERNAL POTENTIAL – External support for your biologically maximized career – Borrow from nature and surrounding systems: predictability, power, resources, information, functionality, creativity, growth, and frontiering™.
Your biologically maximized career – serial breakthrough synthesis; serial top-talent flow; serial frontiering™; trend integration and mass synchronization; synergies and multi-system achieving.
Executives are charged with maximizing corporate resources for corporate gain. Many mechanisms, processes, procedures and systems have been put in place to discover and achieve maximum returns on corporate resources. However, one’s personal asset maximization is seldom the focus of career or life strategies.
Few identify their maximum possible career and then pursue it. Few pursue their maximum lifetime contribution to the advance of the world nor the commensurate tangible and intangible rewards. However, this is a common regret on the career front for the majority from their retirement rocking chair.
WHAT IS YOUR CAREER MAXIMUM?
Before I introduce some new potential career maximums, take a moment to determine what you currently consider your highest possible life’s work. The questions below may spur your thinking:
If you had total freedom and unlimited resources, what creations or footprints would you want to leave over your lifetime?
What work would you dedicate yourself to do to contribute to or advance our world?
Generically, what might your maximum career look like based solely on the continuous application and improvement of your strongest, most rewarding talents?
To what meaningful work would you dedicate your life in the absence of all impediments and distractions?
If we removed all of the demands of family, finances, and the challenges life throws at you, what would be your ultimate career?
If we stripped away all competing “careers” such as parenting, supporting one’s family, a hobby, or a cause, what would be your maximum creative expression? What are the creations for which you would like to receive your income?
What are your maximum possible lifetime achievements?
What could be your maximum possible career legacy?
In an unrestricted vision of lifetime career maximization, each of us would want to do meaningful work we are passionate about. We would want to grow in our ability to do that work. We would want to continuously increase its value and impact. We would want to apply our greatest talents – the talents we most enjoy – at their maximum to the work which would be most valued by the world and by ourselves. This is the work which will bring the most tangible and intangible rewards.
In the previous chapter, we learned about a biologically addictive ‘paid play’ that pulled seven executives to success: Bill Gates (Microsoft co-founder), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founders), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google co-founders), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder).
Because this ‘paid play’ is driven by addictive drives, the more you do this kind of work, the more you want to do it. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. Eventually you will achieve breakthroughs that advance your paid-play domain. The drives which biologically predispose us to our field of ‘paid play’ pulled our seven iconic founders to superior performance and accelerated growth. The result was performance, throughput, and breakthroughs that far exceeded what they could have achieved through the controlling push of discipline. These superstars were internally or biologically driven.
Let’s have a look at some other biological maximums that you may not have thought to include in your previous determination of your career maximum. Let’s look at some of the new career maximums that will dramatically upgrade today’s state-of-the-art career strategy.
What is your biological career potential?
Strip away for the moment all of your competing life goals and struggles. What do you have the potential to accomplish if you applied full power to a singular focus? What is your true career potential? What does nature consider your maximum?
A career based on our biological maximum would be dedicated to work to which we are “biologically predisposed to excel” and “biologically predisposed to crave.” Such maximum work would require us to apply our strongest, most rewarding talents to their maximum. Our expertise with those talents would continuously upgrade at our maximum possible growth rate.
Our peak performance would be committed to our most valued work. This is the work for which we will receive the greatest intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. A biologically maximized career would be defined by the pull of our most addictive “paid play” and “paid growth.” It would be propelled by drives not discipline.
However, more than this, a career based on our biological maximums would comply with and capitalize on the maximizing mechanisms and processes that have evolved human beings. It would have us reintegrate with the flow of systems synergistically maximizing each other. It would not have us dissipating energy to oppose that flow. It would exploit maximizing forces and co-evolving systems so that their capabilities could be added to ours to enable us to achieve beyond our internal potential.
This is precisely what we observe in the careers of the seven accomplished founders of Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook.
Exploit biological maximizing for a career beyond your innate potential
The human biological imperative seeks the maximization of the individual and the species for survival. Nature routinely, perpetually, and impartially maximizes human systems for survival. Over generations, a “machinery” has evolved inside and outside of us to promote this maximization.
Inside, we may observe it maximizing systems within our body for health and performance. Think especially of the adaptivity of our immune and nervous systems to external elements, for example. Outside, we see this machinery maximizing stock markets, and economic and sociological systems.
It is only logical to assume that the same forces maximizing systems within a biological ecosystem would also act on each of us. We are a part of the larger maximizing machinery that evolved us. If we knew how to capitalize on this machinery, we could raise the bar on our career potential. We could extend our capabilities with these maximizing mechanisms, systems, processes, and intelligence to operate beyond what we might perceive is our inborn potential.
Only by reintegrating with this maximizing process will we know our true potential and hence our career potential.
What could you accomplish if you spent decades operating beyond your potential in your strongest domain?
What would be your career maximum if you spent a lifetime conscripting other systems to achieve bigger goals than you are capable of attaining on your own?
Where would your career take you if you rejoined the massive orchestration of all biological systems?
If you learned how to exploit this maximizing machinery for your own system and your career, could you not also apply it to maximize any human system to achieve beyond its potential?
Could you not extrapolate the same process to your subordinates, your company, your family, your child, a market, a country, or the system of humanity as a whole?
How much more profoundly capable would you be as an executive leading multi-system companies in multi-system markets? This too will increase your career maximum.
What business can succeed against a competitor harnessing the maximizing mechanisms of evolution?
What leader would choose to operate contrary to the direction of the evolutionary flow?
Let’s look first at some aspects of maximizing internally in Part One. In Part Two, we will look at some of the new career maximums possible by exploiting the external portion of the maximizing machinery.
Flashes of genius and sudden savantism
Our seven super-achievers experienced frequent flashes of genius beyond their potential as they complied with their biologically maximized careers. With some tweaks of biology, it is possible for even those of normal intelligence or less to experience those same spikes of genius.
Let’s compare these moments of brilliance to savant syndrome for a moment. Savants exhibit extreme talent in the wake of profound disabilities. A person with below normal intelligence is able to display an exceptional if not prodigious talent or ability in a specific area. Savants operate at levels that would be unusual even for normal people.
Many were introduced to this exceptional intellectual capacity by the savant star, Raymond, in the popular movie, Rain Man (1988). The inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s role came from Kim Peek or “Kimputer” who was born without the thick band of axons connecting the left and right hemispheres. Kim is capable of incredible feats of memory and calculation. He can recall over 7,600 books and has a nearly complete and up-to-date knowledge of world history, area codes, zip codes, roads and highways and much more.
Savantism appears to emerge when birth, injury, or dementia removes left-brain control of the right brain. There is evidence that the brain “re-wires” itself to not only avoid damaged areas but to compensate for them. The exceptional abilities observed in those who acquire savantism later in life do not emerge because of a sudden creation of skills. Rather, experts believe that what occurs is a releaseof skills and talentsalready present.
Since savant syndrome can be acquired, scientists believe that all of us, theoretically, have the potential to become savants. It appears that each of us may have a super-talent territory or savant domain in which flashes of genius beyond our normal intelligence can be achieved. Savantism suggests a greater potential of the human brain and how talent and genius may manifest. Since flashes of genius would upgrade anyone’s career maximum, let’s examine some alternative means to release our own savantism with some adjustments to our modus operandi.
Whole-Brain Savantism
Most of the known savants have been left-brain weak. This suggests that the level of left-brain intelligence will not determine who will experience the flashes of genius we observe in the lives of our seven super-achievers.
The left hemisphere of the brain provides logic, reasoning, analysis and objectivity. It is verbal and rational. Our right hemisphere is the hub for creativity, novelty, intuition, subjectivity, pattern recognition, and holistic and divergent thinking. It is your nonverbal and intuitive brain. It thinks in patterns. It comprehends pictures and “whole things.” It controls visual, spatial and relational thinking. It does not comprehend reductions, numbers, letters, or words.
Our goal is not the elimination of the left brain as in savants. However, the current scientific evidence suggests we will still need the left brain to release control of the right brain. This can be more advantageously accomplished by an increase in the right brain so that a partnership of both hemispheres can give us whole-brain operation. Our goal is a synergy in which the whole brain is greater than the sum of its two parts.
One might try allowing the left and right brain to operate simultaneously in parallel or synchronously to achieve this equal partnership. However, the right brain may be better freed for aspiring novice whole-brainers if one consciously uses alternating applications of right brain then left brain to any project. This will free the creative right brain for insights and genius without sacrificing left-brain logic and functionality.
Writers, for example, could do one or more freehand, unedited, and unrestricted right-brain passes for creativity, insights, and genius to develop concepts or story. A left-brain pass would address the logic, editing, grammar and spelling. Executives could do the same for developing strategic or tactical plans. However, whole-brain operation is easier to achieve than one might think. Other options are built into us as part of the maximizing machinery.
Whole-brain operation is a biological maximum. It is therefore better for the survival of the individual and the species. Consequently, we have evolved a biological bias to it. Many mechanisms, processes, and urges have evolved to promote whole-brain operation. Flow state is one important example internally that will be discussed below. External mechanisms that promote whole-brain flashes of genius will be revealed in Part Two. We can learn to bypass or overcome the cultural and corporate interferences that pressure left-brain control.
The “Eureka!” or “Aha!” effect
When normal intelligence is applied to action, implement, or operationalize your periodic “smart events” or breakthroughs, the sum total of your career performance will increase. Sometimes it only takes one breakthrough to make a career and change the world. Our seven iconic founders experienced serial breakthroughs as a way of life. You can too. Let’s examine internally and externally (Part Two) what will make that new career maximum possible.
The “Eureka!” or “Aha!” effect refers to the common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept. If you source only partial solutions to a problem, then you are likely in the midst of a left-brain reasoning process rather than a right-brain “Aha!” event. This is about sudden knowledge, sudden knowing, and sudden access to new information.
“Insight” is the official psychological term in problem solving for instances in which a previously unsolvable puzzle becomes suddenly clear and obvious. Neuroscience and brain scans have located the part of the right brain in which true insights occur. The anterior superior temporal gyrus of the right hemisphere is where remote and unconnected associations are brought together and linked. As you will learn, the gyrus along with the rest of the right brain is activated by flow states.
It is interesting that anecdotal evidence records rapid experience of “Eureka!” events or seeming all-knowingness during near-death experiences (NDE) when cultural interferences have been minimized. The brain seemingly clicks into its maximized state of coherence and synergy especially with respect to the super-talent or savant domain associated with the strongest talents of each individual. NDErs experience savantism. For some, the savantism and bias for this domain survives the near-death experience.
There is an addictiveness to the highs of “Aha!” experiences that pulls you to pursue them again and again. As they increase in number, the baseline of your intelligence and functionality increases. Also, your knowledge of your savant domain goes up with each breakthrough. Your career maximum augments accordingly. In no time at all you are penetrating new frontiers in your field just as the seven super-achievers did with Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. Have you been settling?
Flow maximizes instantly
As mentioned, one of the internal mechanisms in the maximizing machinery is flow state. Psychologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, describes flow as our optimal and our most enjoyable experience in his book of the same name (1991). Flow is our maximized state. All the body’s resources are trained on the current intrinsically rewarding work. The biological imperative, then, will seek to have us operate in flow 100% of the time. Because flow is an addictive, peak-performing and peak-growth state, it is one of the key drivers of human evolution.
To experience this wonderfully rewarding state of flow, one must be stretched beyond one’s previous capabilities. Therefore, a maximum- or flow-seeking career will go beyond peak performance to peak growth. We are not only biologically biased to peak performance but to increasing the baseline functionality of that peak performance. How smart of the human species to have evolved an addictive maximum state that draws us to perpetually transcend ourselves. Accordingly, the maximum of a flow-focused career would continuously rise as well.
Your maximum flow: top-talent flow
All flow states are not equal in achieving savantism or your biological and career maximums. Maximization promotes peak performance from peak strengths for peak expression, peak impact, and peak rewards. Your true maximum flow state will therefore emerge from using and improving your strongest, most addicting, and most rewarding talents in the domain most facilitating for and valuing of their use. I call these extended periods of operating at your talent-based maximum “top-talent flows.”
If you were going to release your inner savant or super-talents, this is the territory in which it/they would emerge. Just as in savantism, the skills of extraordinary performance are already biologically present rather than having to be cultivated. Most who acquired savantism later in life never demonstrated their savant domain or super-talent territory prior to the injury or dementia which damaged the left brain thus releasing their right brain to savantism.
Since top-talent flow is our true maximum, we are biologically biased to pursue this intrinsically gratifying state. This is the flow state most supported by mechanisms, processes, and drives enmeshed within the internal-external maximizing machinery. It is dramatically more powerful and transformative than any other form of flow. Accelerated growth, breakthrough creations, new meta-skills, and flashes of genius and savantism are significantly more prevalent.
Exponential magic happens in your top-talent flows. Now imagine how powerful and transformed our seven founders would be after spending years in these transformative flow states which emerge while they are applying their greatest strengths. This is what I believe caused the significant accomplishments of our seven achievers. In many cases, these flow states enabled achievements beyond their innate intelligence.
A majority of the seven had computer, internet, and software work in their childhood or early careers. Computer programming is particularly compelling for inciting top-talent flow states. Colloquially, they are called “hack mode,” a Zen-like state of total focus. They are so captivating that many programmers blissfully program all night and forget to eat. They are so addictive that they not only became the “paid play” of many of our seven founders but fostered an industry of computer and video games. This is how I believe these seven were pulled to their achievements rather than pressured by a superior discipline or outside force to achieve them. This suggests an alternative career strategy for those highly disciplined executives who have achieved neither the intrinsic nor extrinsic rewards that they seek.
Sudden savantism through top-talent flow
A person in flow state has alpha brainwaves not unlike those of a Zen monk in meditation. When in this alpha-intensive state, we can retain cognitive consciousness for far longer than the few seconds of duration characteristic of normal, beta-wave consciousness. This extended consciousness equips us to solve complex problems, follow extended chains of reasoning, and take on tasks that we simply cannot fit into the transient episodes of normal beta-wave arousal.
Flow states also seem to be more conducive than normal consciousness to activation of the right anterior superior temporal gyrus, the region of the brain associated with intuitive leaps and sudden insight. It appears that the chatter of beta-wave activity in normal consciousness somehow competes with our “Aha!” circuitry. In addition, the requirement for stretching beyond one’s previous capabilities to enter into flow, upgrades capabilities and performance towards savant stature.
However, the real power of top-talent flow is that it releases our whole-brain genius to full power. The right brain is freed from left-brain domination in this maximal flow state. Thus, the triggers of acquired savant syndrome are duplicated. Whole-brain flow incites the perfect left-brain and right-brain synergy.
Growth through top-talent flow
Flow is a peak-performance and peak-growth state. Growth is built into flow and particularly top-talent flow because a) flow is so fulfilling that it becomes addictive, b) achieving this intrinsically rewarding flow state requires us to be stretched beyond our previous capabilities, and c) flow is a transforming state. Learning adds new information to one’s existing system. However, top-talent flow actually reformulates or re-wires one’s system with new functionality and new potential.
This is what I believe our seven super-achievers experienced. As a result, they spent their careers operating at peak growth. Year after year they raised their baseline functionality and the level of impact of their creations and achievements faster than most of us would. This is what happened with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple. Not all of the founders are as brilliant as what they created. However, by adhering to the domain to which they are biologically predisposed, achievement beyond expectation was possible.
Year after year, their meta-skills and “Aha!” events increased in top-talent flow, so they not only operated beyond their potential, they raised that potential. Consciousness expanded. Conceptual skills increased. So even if Gates, Jobs, Wozniak, Bezos, Brin, Page, and Zuckerberg did not start with genius, it would likely emerge over time. The skills and meta-skills that developed in the savant domain would spill over into other facets of their life to raise overall performance and intelligence.
For example, one’s ability to break through frontier after frontier in one’s savant domain would provide expertise for penetrating new or unknown territory in other disciplines in which one’s performance was innately inferior. What would your career maximum be if you never diluted your savant strengths and never left your savant domain? This is what our seven iconic founders share and demonstrate for us.
New meta-skills from extensive top-talent flow experience
Elevations in consciousness will increase our functionality and meta-skills. Cognitive skills, for example, will advance. Operational intelligence will be improved by upgrades in abstract thinking, conceptual thinking, big-picture thinking, systems thinking, strategic thinking, mental agility, adaptivity, pattern recognition, trend perception, environmental scanning, problem re-framing, and ambiguity resolution. Notice the addition of many right-brain capabilities in particular.
Few educational programs have been effective in developing any of these meta-skills. However, they upgrade collectively as a paradigm shift when we reintegrate into the maximizing machinery and experience serial top-talent flows. These kinds of meta-skills are pivotal to executive performance. Executive career maximums therefore will upgrade significantly with this proposed maximum modus operandi.
Paid growth, paid play – Make your natural growth path your career path
The biologically maximum career would consist of a series of top-talent flow experiences in which you would continuously a) surpass your previous performance and b) re-wire your system to raise not only your baseline functionality but also your potential.
Our growth path, then, will be a nonlinear amplification or expansion or intensification of our strongest talents to increase their power to impact reality and the precision with which they create. It will be a growth path in which we are constantly breaking through new frontiers of knowledge, skill, and reality impact in our savant domain. This accelerated growth path would thus define our maximum career path, biologically speaking.
We have a biological predisposition towards enjoying the application of certain talents more than others. Therefore, your maximum is innate. Hence, your growth path will be innate given that nature only seeks to maximize systems for survival. Therefore, your ideal career strategy is one of being paid to grow your most fun talents and to apply them to larger and more meaningful projects (see figure 1).
Read Part Two to learn more about external maximizing mechanisms and their synergy with internal one’s such as those discussed here in Part One.
