#213: Stay in Your Comfort Zone
Dear friends
Bibliophiles should diarise 4 August and oenophiles 22 August.
I first encountered Anna de Koningh, in Phakamisa Ndzamela’s masterfully researched The Native Merchants, which I wrote about here. She started life enslaved and ended it as one of the Cape’s wealthiest landowners. On 4 August, Lauren Holmes launches Woman of Freedom which tells the tale for children.
If you feel left out when you buy Holmes’ book, you might add recently released Clay Formes, which focuses on thirty prominent South African ceramicists. You could also explore what I’m reading or dive into The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
Then, on 22 August master winemaker Duncan Savage, releases his latest vintage. Purchases are always limited and sell out in a heartbeat. Speaking of spectacular and scarce, I was happy to get my hands on a case of Donovan Rall’s Syrah.
/ strategy
I regularly write about the power of positive feedback, optimism, being proactive, curiosity, and using your and your company’s strengths (it led me to make this comment about South Africa’s power generator, Eskom). I do so because in all I study – great artists, leaders, athletes and companies – they’re the most consistent sources of success.
This passage, from Nine Lies About Work, captures the science beautifully, “In the brains of the students who received negative feedback the sympathetic nervous system lit up. This is the ‘fight or flight’ system, the system that mutes the other parts of the brain and thus allows us to focus only on the information most necessary to survive. When this part of the nervous system is triggered, your heart rate goes up, endorphins flood your body, your cortisol levels rise, and you tense for action. This is your brain on negative feedback: it responds as if to a threat, and it narrows its activity. The strong negative emotions produced by criticism ‘inhibits access to existing neural circuits and invokes cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment,’ psychology and business professor Richard Boyatzis said in summarizing the researchers’ findings.
“Negative feedback doesn’t enable learning. It systematically inhibits it and is, neurologically speaking, how to create impairment.
“In the students who received attention focused on their dreams and how they might go about achieving them, however, the sympathetic nervous system was not activated. Instead it was the parasympathetic nervous system that lit up… To quote the researchers again: ‘[T]he Parasympathetic Nervous System… stimulates…, a sense of well-being, better immune system functioning, and cognitive, emotional, and perceptual openness.’
“In other words, positive, future-focused attention gives your brain access to more regions of itself and thus sets you up for greater learning. We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but this finding gives the lie to that particular chestnut—take us out of our comfort zones and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zone, because that’s our strengths zone, where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, and it’s where we are most creative and insightful.” (Buckingham and Goodall, “Nine Lies About Work”, p.120-121)
There’s no need to say anything else…
// self
Working from our comfort zone, is central to David Brooks’ essay, “You Might Be a Late Bloomer”.
Contemporary culture is dominated by stories of those who seemingly made billions before they could tie their shoelaces.
The facts are somewhat different. Brooks tells us Nobel Prize winners made their crucial discoveries at 44, the average age of a U.S. patent applicant is 47, and ‘45-year-old is twice as likely to produce a scientific breakthrough as a 25-year-old’ and ‘the likelihood that an entrepreneur’s start-up will succeed increases significantly between ages 25 and 35, with the odds of success continuing to rise well into the 50s’.
He introduces us to University of Chicago economist David Galenson’s Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. Galenson outlines a taxonomy of success.
First, there are those young geniuses, who completely reinvent what went before.
There’s a second category of people, who build career success but leave it behind to climb a new mountain, where they really shine.
And then, there is the category Galenson labels ‘the masters’, the people who spend their lives learning and improving.
Brooks is arguably less generous but describes it well, ‘They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life. They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans’.
We don’t think about it now, but Pixar is one of those stories. Co-founder, Ed Catmull was 50 when Toy Story was released in 1995, twenty years after Catmull and others had started working on creating digitally animated films.
Brooks continues, ‘Successful late bloomers… are aggressive about wanting to acquire knowledge and learn—but they are also modest, possessing an accurate sense of how much they don’t know’.
This combination means that as they approach their later years, they do so with deep, and often quite eclectic knowledge. And then, they start to narrow in, but in fascinating and unexpected ways using the combination and knowledge of all that has come before to craft a unique and masterful path. The exploring lessens and concentrated effort takes over.
You may be on the edge of your mastery and not even know it. Pay attention.
/// soul
To close, we’ll use a well-known exercise from Stephen Covey’s Begin with The End in Mind (The second habit of the famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People). It will give your brain greater access to itself by exercising ‘positive, future-focused attention’.
Imagine your funeral. There are four speakers. One from your family, a second from your closest friends, a third from work and the fourth from your community.
What would you want them to say about you? What contributions and achievements would you want to be remembered? How do want them to say you treated others? What words would they use to describe you? What difference did you make in their lives? What had you overcome and how had you become better with time?
As you do this, be ambitious and generous. Think of the very best of you. Write down your thoughts. There’s your plan. Now, be honest, are your existing habits likely to result in those tributes? If not, change them.
Incidentally, Seven Habits sold twenty million copies. Covey was 57 when it was published.
Best wishes
Karl
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