Critical Chance

Tag: Perception Pivots

  • Playing your hand

    “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”

    –Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

    When your time is limited 

    Randy Pausch learned that he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006, and was given 3 to 6 months to live.

    As a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, he wanted to do something authentic before passing, something that encapsulated his life; who he was and what he learned. 

    He got to writing and within the next year, he gave a lecture titled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” The talk was later turned into a book, The Last Lecture, which became a New York Timesbest-seller.

    Both are phenomenal, and worth checking out.

    Playing Your Hand

    There’s no doubt you’ve experienced some sort of setback in your life. How you choose to interpret the situation is up to you.

    Sure, we need to be realistic; your mentality doesn’t change the fact that you were dealt a 7 / 2 off-suit. 

    Yet at the same time, you only get one hand to play, so you might as well play it as best you can. 

    “You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences… and then you die. How you choose to interpret that is up to you. And you do have that choice.”

    -Naval Ravikant 

    Stop focusing on your cards. 

    Get out, get going, and play the best damn hand you can. 

  • The hidden base

    You’re interviewing people for your new sales team, who would you rather hire?

    Group A: Scores high on an aptitude test, but has average levels of optimism

    Group B: High levels of optimism, but scores average on an aptitude test

    Turns out someone ran this study and if you picked B, your team performed better. Not just slightly, but significantly better.

    “The optimistic group outsold their more pessimistic counterparts by 19% in year one and 57% in year two.”

    Eric Barker, BUTWT

    While intelligence and skill are important, we are discovering that there’s this hidden section to the chart being less discussed and it’s at the base.

    75% of long term job success is predicted by three factors:

    • Social Connection – the depth and breadth in your social relationships
    • Optimism – the belief that your behavior matters in the midst of challenge
    • Perception – the way that you perceive stress

    Most people have the equation flipped (they focus on IQ), but this month we’ll be diving deeper into the base.

    Buckle up because May is all about Social Connections; how to build them and why they matter.

  • The ultimate superpower

    Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis opened more than 40,000 concentration camps across Europe. Millions of people were stripped of their rights, forced into labor, and dehumanized; one of those people was a psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl.

    His parents, brother, and wife were killed inside the camps; he nearly lost his entire family. Each morning, he woke up with less faith in humanity.

    One day, he became aware of what he called, “the last of human freedoms.”

    While everything was taken from him, there was one thing they could not take: the freedom of choice. He still had the ability to decide how his circumstances would affect him. This one power gave him the strength to survive the war and go on to publish 39 books and receive 29 honorary doctoral degrees.

    Each time something happens, there is moment between the action happening and your reaction. Inside this space, each person has the ability to choose their way forward.

    It doesn’t matter what the situation is; you always control the space. Sometimes the space feels small, sometimes, it feels non-existent, but it’s always there. If Dr. Frankl was able to recognize the space despite his extreme, despondent circumstances, it can always be found. Recognizing the power to control the reaction is stronger than any comic book characters’ supposed gift.

    It’s not what happens to us, but how we respond that determines our reality.