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- The weight of perceptions đź‘€
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it.
Among the qualities that made Steve Jobs an outstanding individual and business man, one stood out the most.
People called it “reality distortion field”.
What does it mean?
Well, in Steve’s perception of the world, he thought that with the right amount of vision and work ethic, everything can be malleable.
This made Steve notoriously dismissive of words such as:
it can’t be done
we need more time
this is too difficult
and many others
He knew that to aim low meant to accept mediocre accomplishment. But a high aim could, if things went right, create something extraordinary.
In simpler words, he lived by the “everything can be done” philosophy.
Unlike Jobs, for most of us it’s unnatural to have this type of response.
In fact, we have a defeatist approach that sometimes feels natural.
It’s like we’re circuited to be pessimistic and limit ourselves to whatever our minimum effort can achieve.
Though I like to think differently.
I believe most of our limiting beliefs are not part of our internal wiring but rather a learned behavior due to continuous conservative and realistic “advice” people often give us throughout our lives.
However, I can’t blame others.
We all want success without risk, even if we “know” that success requires risk.
It’s so paradoxical that success requires risk and the more success we have, the more we’d like to stay away from risk.
I think the correlation or even the causality between difficult times and success is the most oxymoronic and paradoxical concept ever.
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
I think it eventually comes to a perspective problem. Avoiding risk is based on a wrong perception of what risk means, and that’s the part we need to change.
But, going back to our “limiting beliefs”, Steve Jobs is the perfect example of someone who’s entirely on the opposite side of the spectrum.
He didn’t solely belief in himself, but in others as well.
They say Jobs refused to tolerate people who didn’t believe in their own capabilities to succeed.
The genius of his products perfectly embody that trait.
There’s a story about how, a week before the first Macintosh was supposed to ship, the engineers told jobs they couldn’t make the deadline.
One a hastily organized conference call, Jobs told the engineers that if they could make it in two weeks, they were perfectly capable of doing it in one.
His insistence and persistencce ultimately made the engineers capable of delivering to the one-week deadline.
Jobs perfectly understood that even though our doubts or self-doubts feel real, in reality they have little bearing on the outcome itself.
What ultimately defines our outcome is our perception of the problem, not the problem itself.
When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?
So that begs the question…
Why do we pay so much attention to the problem when we perfectly know it will never help us reachign the desired outcome?