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+1: #1110 What Great Performance Looks Like

+1: #1110 What Great Performance Looks Like

FromHeroic with Brian Johnson | Activate Your Best. Every Day.


+1: #1110 What Great Performance Looks Like

FromHeroic with Brian Johnson | Activate Your Best. Every Day.

ratings:
Length:
3 minutes
Released:
Apr 19, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

In our last +1, we did some swooping and gliding and hunting with a red-tailed hawk and our bird-watching guide: Carlos Castaneda.   Today I want to chat about that hawk again.   I mentioned the fact that he’s not worried about whether or not he’ll find his prey.   He’s just hunting.   Calmly, 100% focused on the PROCESS.   Letting the outcomes take care of themselves.   He’s not up there flying around thinking to himself, “OMG. My family’s going to starve if I don’t pull it together and find a mouse soon. I’ve been flying around up here for TWO HOURS (!) already and I haven’t seen a single mouse. Where’d they go? OMG. OMG. OMG.”    Enter: Castaneda and his wisdom: “Once a man worries, he clings to anything out of desperation; and once he clings he is bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whomever or whatever he is clinging to. A warrior-hunter, on the other hand, knows he will lure game into his traps over and over again, so he doesn’t worry.”   Now…   To be fair (and to state the obvious), our red-tailed hawk friend doesn’t have the prefrontal cortex to engage in any anxiety-provoking overthinking. (Or, well, any “thinking” for that matter.)   Which reminds me of some parallel wisdom we explored back in the day.    Remember our +1 on Squirrels, Einstein and You?   As you may recall, that one was inspired by a pre-Trail drive. As I stopped at a stop sign right next to Byron Katie’s little chapel in Ojai, I spotted a squirrel racing across a telephone wire and thought to myself, “I wonder what that guy’s thinking?!”    Then I reminded myself that he WASN’T THINKING.   Then I thought of some wisdom from Jon Eliot’s Overachievement.   He tells us: “Great performers focus on what they are doing, and nothing else... They are able to engage in a task so completely that there is no room left for self-criticism, judgment, or doubt; to stay loose and supremely, even irrationally, self-confident... They let it happen, let it go. They couldn’t care less about the results.”   That’s Today’s +1.   That red-tailed hawk?   He’s the flying embodiment of great performers.   Let’s be like him a little more.   TODAY.
Released:
Apr 19, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (100)

OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson features the best Big Ideas from the best optimal living books. More wisdom in less time to help you live your greatest life. (Learn more at optimize.me.)