Conor Mcgregor motivational, the power of postive thinking?
11-23-2016, 07:51 AM
As I'm guessing you already suspect, there are very few top-of-their-game people who don't have some form of natural talent that gives them an advantage or an edge of some kind in whatever they do. This is mainly because, in results-oriented endeavours, at the levels where guys like Conor McGregor operate, everyone busts their ass hard.
Hard work is not an essential for reaching that level. It's a condition precedent. You simply will not reach those sorts of levels without putting in the time, putting in the hours - and to make matters worse, they have to be meaningful hours.
Contrary to what Malcolm Gladwell tells you, it's not just a case of 10,000 hours and you have instant mastery of a discipline. There are many lawyers, for example, who have been practicing for 20 years but in reality are just first year lawyers who've been doing the same shit all the time. No amount of positive thinking is going to change that physical fact. This is where shit like The Secret falls down: your thoughts alone, unacted-upon, are not sufficient.
Once you do reach these sorts of elite levels, though, mainly because hard work is done by everyone, there are two factors which then set apart the top from the also-rans.
(1) Natural or genetic advantages
(2) Mental training.
And even then, mental training can override natural talent. The proof of this is the fact people with natural or genetic advantages do not always succeed in the endeavours they are talented in. All physical combat is ultimately mental combat. As an example, underdogs are often beaten by their own belief they can't beat the champion. Underdogs who do win are smart enough to realise that they often can't beat the champion if they play by his rules. When they do have that realisation, they change how they confront the challenge. And it works in many cases of underdogs: see Malcolm Gladwell's "How David Beats Goliath" for a more accurate picture of how guerrilla warfare is so devastatingly effective, how unathletic Indian and white girls can beat experienced black girls' basketball teams.
Natural talent gives a person a step up on the mental training needed to win in the sense that it provides positive reinforcement to the beginning or even the journeyman athlete. If you have a natural talent, odds are on you will find at least beginning a discipline easier for you. Finding it easy reinforces your positive feelings while doing that discipline, so you're more likely to do it and therefore get better -- provided you have the growth mindset that ability and intelligence is not fixed across the lifespan. A mindset of constant improvement is the only way a natural talent is truly realised.
This is the real power of positive thinking: it is the foundation of the mental training that makes the difference in otherwise equal contests.
Here's a great secret, one they never teach you in high school or university, one the real world tries to conceal from you unless you're looking for it: nobody is logical, and nobody is objective - including you.
Emotion is the foundation and driver of thought. Logic, at best, is a handy justification for the thoughts that flow from it. When you get right down to it -- and especially for women, as a thousand years of experience tells us -- people are driven first by emotions, second by logic if it supports their emotions. Change a person's emotion, and you change their reasoning on the subject.
Plato himself said, like Thucydides before him, that human behaviour was a chariot driven by three horses: phobos, kerdos, and doxa. That is: fear, self-interest (gain; advantage; greed), and public opinion (pride.)
Three emotions. Three wild, hardly-containable horses that pull the mind along behind them. Plato, Socrates and Aristotle gave us the precepts of reason, but even they had to concede that emotion ultimately came first, before the logic they treasured.
This remains the truth down to our own time. Gerry Spence, one of the most successful lawyers of the 20th century (if not the most successful) puts in plainly in his books: no persuasion can succeed if the person listening is being asked to do something against his own self-interest. This is the practical illustration of the principle: Spence never lost a case from 1986 onwards, whether in civil court, criminal prosecution, or criminal defence. If you cannot avoid galloping kerdos, no amount of reason will stop it, nor the chariot drawn by it.
And consider again Plato's metaphor: the horses drawing a chariot can be controlled if the rider has the appropriate reins. Plato and his forebears believed logic was that tool, that the practice of philosophy -- from the Greek philo-sophia, the love of wisdom -- could allow a man to control where the emotions went. In this they were in error, or perhaps understood all too well that it took a man a lifetime of discipline and logical reason to control his emotions; the vast majority of the human race would never reach such control.
Emotion drives thought first. The pseudo-science of NLP and similar at least recognises this, and takes it one step further to suggest emotions can be induced from biological change to the body. The simplest example of this is to compare how you feel, sitting hunched over reading my words on a computer or mobile, and how you feel with back straightened, shoulders back.
Positive thinking trains the unconscious. Its aim is to change those neurons firing just above the amydgala level of the brain, and thereby influence our biological reactions to events by installing more positive habits. Sow an act; reap a habit. Sow a habit; reap a character. Sow a character; reap a destiny. Positive thinking on its own will not do the trick - but it will alter the way the brain responds to opportunities and advantages, if done resolutely and long enough.
The point being: you have been told lies your entire life that people who are positive thinkers are overly optimistic or don't have the right view of the world. Those who said so were no freer from the influence of their emotions than the positive thinker is. But the positive thinker chooses to be proactive about his thoughts, and chooses to be mindful of what he tells himself. This is what makes all the difference in close contests. And all contests, when it comes to a career of constant growth and advancement, are close: overcoming a challenge means there is a chance of failure.
And failure is a necessary element of success. Compare Donald Trump and the Clintons as business owners. Trump has had roughly four of his companies go bankrupt. The Clintons had one: Whitewater. Which of them is the successful business owner, and which of them had to rely principally on dirty money to afford a seven, eight figure salary?
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm