Myth: Thinking Actually Helps

High-performers in the world of “deal making” share the universal quality of self-assessment. It’s an internal process of strategically measuring the inputs and outputs of a process or idea (or just “what went down…”) and deciding if it could be done better.  And that’s all good.  It’s more than good — it’s necessary.

But it’s probably not good enough to make you an ALL-STAR (the stuff of legends)

You work better when you work with gut instinct.  At this stage in your deal process, you generally know what NOT to do (which is 2/3 of the learning process) and WHERE you need to head.  But to be the best, you have to be extraordinary — and that requires a different, new, or abstractly innovative idea.  Everything that your boss won’t probably agree with…. because it’s not safe.

But there’s actually science to prove that you do make better decisions from gut instinct rather than thinking too much.

“Whether evaluating abstract objects (Chinese ideograms) or actual consumer items (paintings, apartments, and jellybeans), people who deliberated on their preferences were less consistent than those who made non-deliberative judgments,” write authors Loran F. Nordgren (Northwestern University) and Ap Dijksterhuis (Radboud University, The Netherlands).”

And check this out.  The science gets even more compelling.  After 5 different independent studies, the authors found that “the more complex the decision, the less useful deliberation became.”

That means that less “thought-manship” and more gut instinct is the key to outrageous deal success.

P.S.  Ever wonder why outrageous success is so hard to predict (i.e. there’s no formula)?  It’s because you’re thinking too hard about it.  As you move with gut instinct you see enough of the distance to move around obstacles to get to the finish line.  And, like running at the North Pole, you don’t really need to look over your shoulder because your competition is slim…. (and that’s where I like to play)

When We Don’t Run At the Same Speed

Under the right incentive almost any one of us can run the same distance in the same amount of time.

It might only be 20 feet… or 2… but until we scale the challenge with hills and distance and time requirements, we are all pretty much the same.

There’s a certain quiet inspiration to that observation.  That what separates us from each other is our will to win.

Success is not about the 20 feet where we are all the same.  It’s how we perform on the hills and over a long distance that determine our destiny.

And it’s on those hills where we have the greatest opportunity to separate ourselves from the pretenders.

You’re fighting for air.  For the finish-line.  You just want this part of the race to be over.  And yet you find yourself half-way up a hill with the goal somewhere over the top of the ridge with nothing left but the guts to put one foot in front of the other.

And so that’s what you do.

You run…

Because you believe in your heart (and hope in your soul) that the goal is up ahead.

And even if it’s not, you’ve left the pack behind…

Stopped listening…

If the average conversation lasts 2.3 minutes and the average sales pitch is 23 minutes…. something tells me our prospects stopped listening more than 20 minutes ago.

Might be time to change something?

Fuel for the Last Lap

Up the East Coast...

This week I have a pretty crazy schedule that includes about 2000 miles in my car traveling up and back down the East Coast.  Cramped up in tthe tight spaces of my car driving the first 475 miles from Greenville, SC to Woodbridge, VA, I started to think about the task at hand — my goals for this week.  I had a thought about effort that I wanted to share:

Harnessing adrenaline is a means to accomplish extraordinary short term results.

As a runner in high school (the mile) I learned for the first time about wasting adrenaline at the wrong time.  I was a 9th grader when I ran the mile for the first time, and it was the last time I lost a race.  Before I got to the starting block, my adrenaline was already raging — short twitchiness in my legs and a heartbeat that was way too fast.  For three of the four laps, I led the pack, but on the last lap when I should have been able to muster that last bit of kick, there was nothing left.  I had used up my power in the starting blocks.  I remember the experience vividly — the crushing feeling of wanting to use inner strength and finding that it was all used up.  As a 9th grader, I didn’t know so much about all the neuro-triggers that control adrenaline, but I knew that I would have to change the way I “felt” in order to not tap into the deep power that I would need to muster in the home stretch of my next race.

I started practicing running in all kind of weird scenarios to try to figure out what worked — like running with my mouth shut to control my breathing through my nose.  I learned to control my heartbeat and breathing and use it to fuel my  “last laps”.  It was not until almost 10 years later (in training for ultimate fighting) that I learned about how to control adrenaline — and I still barely know what works.

Back to running, I did not lose a race again, and I believe that I might still hold my school’s record for the mile — not sure…

The real point is that as I was driving and thinking about the business tasks at hand and my ability to accomplish these goals, my adrenaline started to race.  I was visualizing the obstacles in my way and systematically eliminating them.  I was living in the future of success and acting as if I had already accomplished those outcomes.

Nothing else can fuel that “last lap” of business like adrenaline.  Just make sure you are burning fuel for the right purpose.