How Successful People Think

Maxwell unpacks those eleven essential styles of thinking with great stories and quick little Ideas. Let’s take a look at some of my favorites we can apply TODAY!

That’s from Chapter 2 on the Power of Focused Thinking.

The best way to bring focus to your thinking and life? Set a clear target. Create a specific goal.

Think of John golfing that day when he followed the golfer who forgot to put the flag back in after he putted. He couldn’t clearly see his precise target and his score (and enjoyment) suffered.

Well, imagine if he tried to play golf without even having a hole to shoot at. Imagine if he just whacked one shot after another after another. And we’re not talking about sitting on a driving range here practicing shots—imagine him just kinda wandering around an open patch of land hitting the ball from place to place.

How un-fun would that be?

As the Greeks told us, we’re teleological beings. To feel our best and flourish, we need TARGETS to aim at. And, the more specific and immediate, the better.

This is why it’s so important to break our huge goals down into progressively smaller and smaller chunks—ideally winding up at a (flexible) prototype of a masterpiece day and then clear stretch goals for the DAY that line up with the week, the month, the year, etc. ONE Thing domino-style.

Then, within your day, we want a clear “next shot” that forces us to focus. Without that, we’re much more likely to give in to distraction and find ourselves off course just whacking at random balls in our path. (<— Let’s not do that.)

P.S. Maxwell shares another great sports metaphor later in the book when he says: “What’s the difference between bowling and work? When bowling, it takes only three seconds to know how you’ve done! That’s one reason people love sports so much. There’s no waiting and no guessing about the outcome.”

Possibility thinking.

If we want to tap into our deepest potential, we must (!) open up to the possibilities and notice just how often we (and others) quickly dismiss an idea as impossible.

When I read the end of that quote, I think of a younger version of me. I’ve shared this story before but I think it’s worth repeating in this context: After dropping out of law school, I coached a Little League Baseball team and had a vision of creating technology that would serve over a million youth sports teams around the world.

At the time (1998) Yahoo was the dominant “search” portal and there were (literally) only a few dozen baseball leagues that were online. But I could see that they would ALL be online in a matter of years—using the web for everything from schedules and standings and directions to the field plus pictures grandma and grandpa could check out if they missed the game.

The vision was clear: 1 million teams using the technology we’d build within 5 years.

I shared the vision with a friend’s father who happened to be the Chairman of a huge publicly-traded company. An uber-business expert. He, basically, told me I had NO chance of doing what I wanted to do. (Laughing.) I had no biz experience, money, connections, etc. And (gasp!), there wasn’t even a true market need for what I was talking about.

Thankfully I ignored him (actually felt catalyzed by the chat—hah) and, with a wonderful combo of hustle and good fortune, served 1 million teams in LESS than 5 years. (Go eteamz!)

As John Eliot says in Overachievement (see Notes): “You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.” Plus: “as soon as anyone starts telling you to be ‘realistic,’ cross that person off your invitation list.”

Now, of course, we want to bake realistic thinking into the mix as well (check out this Micro Class on The Barbell Strategy), but let’s see if we can delete the word “impossible” from our dictionary or, at the very least, use it much, much less often.

That’s the fun high level to this idea. (Got any “impossible” dreams you might want to revisit?)

The super practical side of the chapter focuses on how to build our possibility muscle.

Here’s one way: See possibility in EVERY.SINGLE.SITUATION.

Rather than immediately see all the things that could go or are wrong with a situation, train yourself to see the best possible interpretation of what’s going on. Be what Tal Ben-Shahar calls a “benefit finder” rather than a “fault finder.”

Easier said than done, but let’s hit the Possibility Gym.

P.S. Maxwell quotes Bob Rotella and George Lucas in this chapter.

Bob Rotella (who wrote Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect) says: “I tell people: If you don’t want to get into positive thinking, that’s OK. Just eliminate all the negative thoughts from your mind, and whatever’s left will be fine.”

George Lucas tells us: “As corny as it sounds, the power of positive thinking goes a long way. So determination and positive thinking combined with knowing your craft . . . that may sound like a naïve point of view, but at the same time, it’s worked for me and it’s for all my friends—so I have come to believe it.”

That’s from the chapter on “Harness Creative Thinking.” Maxwell wrote an entire book on the subject of creativity and failure (that we’ll profile soon) called “Failing Forward.”

Failing is part of the creative process. Period.

And, remember: “Anxiety is the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation.”

Eric Maisel is one of the world’s leading creativity coaches. He says nearly the exact same thing in The Creativity Book (see Notes) where he tells us: “It turns out that creativity and anxiety travel the same road together. Just as the Buddhist pays special attention to suffering and the Christian pays special attention to sin, the everyday creative person pays special attention to anxiety. She understands that she must write her songs against a backdrop of anxiety, and that because of anxiety she may be tempted by tranquilizing drugs. She understands that her inability to write her novel and her anxiety about writing a bad novel are somehow intertwined, and that if she could just calmly say yes to the book it would spill right out. I am calm as I write this, but also anxious, anxious about getting this section right so that I do not fall behind on my schedule and raise a specter of missed deadlines and upset editors, calm because I’ve written many books and have the sense that this section is going well. Is life nothing but suffering? No. Are we perpetual sinners? No. Is there nothing but anxiety? No. But there is plenty of anxiety to go around; it is real, and it matters.”

Although we often want to try to “get rid of” our stress and anxiety, that’s a) not possible and b) not wise. Much better to embrace it.

Kelly McGonigal wrote a whole book about The Upside of Stress (see Notes) and touched on this in our interview as well. She says that the research is fascinating. In short: If you want to see who has the most meaning in their lives, find out how much stress they have.

No stress = no meaning. Higher stress = higher meaning.

It’s not *all* about feeling good all the time.

The Greeks captured this wisdom in two words to describe two different types of happiness: hedonic and eudaemonic. (Check out the Micro Class where I talk about this as well.)

Hedonic is pleasure-based. It’s what “feels” good. I like to think of the big yellow happy face sticker version of happiness when I think of this. “Look at me! I’m happy!!! All.The.Time!!”

Then there’s eudaemonia. Rather than a static sense of emotional “happiness,” eudaemonic joy describes a sense of FLOURISHING. If we want to flourish—to optimize and actualize our potential, we MUST embrace the less-than-shiny-happy-feelings that come along the way.

Why? Because it’s IMPOSSIBLE to stretch yourself and grow without often feeling stress and anxiety.

Martin Seligman captured this in his newest book Flourish (see Notes). Whereas his earlier book Authentic Happiness (see those Notes as well) was more about the affective state of happiness, Flourish is more about the bigger picture of eudaemonic joy and a sense of overall well-being.

One more facet to this discussion: The same day I interviewed Kelly McGonigal, I interviewed Tony Schwartz (author of The Power of Full Engagement).

He echoed Kelly’s wisdom and said that it’s a lot easier to “feel good” than it is to “feel good about myself.” We can open a bottle of wine and “feel good.” It’s a much more challenging process to truly and deeply feel good about ourselves.

That’s the difference between hedonic and eudaemonic fulfillment.

One requires a healthy embrace of stress and anxiety. Let’s continue to work on that.

Hah. Love that. It’s from a chapter on the need to question popular thinking.

Reminds me of a classic research study on conformity Sir Ken Robinson shares in The Element (see Notes). Basic idea: 10 people are in a room. 9 of them are “plants”—put there by the experimenter to see how the 1 person being studied responds to their influence.

All 10 are shown simple lines on a slide projector and asked which ones match. The answer is TOTALLY obvious. The 9 plants give the wrong answer. And, most of the time, most of the subjects will conform and give the wrong answer as well.

“The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong,” Asch wrote, “that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.”

The pull to conform is incredibly strong.

As Emerson says, it demands extraordinary courage to trust ourselves. And, our destinies depend on the ability to cultivate and live with that extraordinary courage.

Spotlight on you: Are there ways in which you’re conforming that you might want to challenge?

P.S. Let’s be direct: Why in the world would you want to consistently and automatically act and think like the majority of people?

As Mark Twain quipped: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

That’s, obviously, from the chapter on the power of strategic thinking. Two things I want to quickly highlight here.

First, on a macro level, strategic thinking is, in its simplest form, taking big challenges and breaking them down into smaller and more manageable sizes. Line them up dominoes style.

On a more micro level, I LOVE (!) this idea that systems “are nothing more than good strategies repeated.” (<— That’s GENIUS.) I’ll do a class on Systems 101 at some point and THAT idea will be the cornerstone of it. —> Systems are nothing more than good strategies repeated.

For our purposes now, let’s apply that to mastering our fundamentals en route to creating masterpiece days. When you are REALLY on, what do you do on a daily basis? How do you eat, how much do you sleep, how often do exercise, with whom are you spending time, how do you focus your energy? Those are your effective strategies for optimal living.

To SYSTEMATIZE them (VERY good idea!), we just need to repeat them. Hah! Sounds so ridiculously obvious (because it is) but *that’s* what it’s all about.