Human Potential…And How to Let Go To Find It
This week, I wanted to talk about human potential by sharing a short story from my time in the military.
Picture this:
I flopped down, exhausted, onto the forest floor, with a sinking feeling that I was not going to make it in time.
The sun had been up for a couple hours now, and my stomach growled for breakfast.
It was 2011, and I had just begun assessment and selection 3–4 days prior.
At that time, a new task marked each 24-hour period of my life, usually involving very little sleep, a 60- to 70-pound rucksack, and a lot of walking.
At this point, I had been rucking for almost 24 hours straight, and the drop-dead time for this event was creeping up fast.
And despite only having a map and compass, I have been navigating through the forest-covered mountains to each checkpoint so far without issue.
Even during the black of night.
But for some damn reason, I could not find this last point. And I've been searching for almost two hours. So as I laid out my map and my compass for the 20th time, I began to rack my brain—what the bloody hell was I missing?
Up until this point, a trail had marked, or at least been next to, every checkpoint. So naturally, I hadn't even considered that it might be at the top of the small outcropping above me, where there was no trail.
I have been walking around the outcropping for the past two hours.
But as I zoned out, my mind drifted off; I could hear the birds, a cricket, and voices. I heard voices drifting down from the outcropping above. I grabbed my shit and started sprinting, hoping to score at least one more point before the event ended.
It occurred to me that this is how we live our lives.
We often miss the most obvious people, places, and opportunities in life because we only focus on what we think we know.
We live in our identity, made up of our past, unconsciously filtering out possibilities simply because they are outside of our understanding. I made that last point that morning and went on to graduate eight months later, but the lesson learned has always haunted me.
What else am I missing in life, simply because my current mental state is not open to it?
And how do I expand my awareness enough to see these opportunities?
As it turns out, it's much simpler than I initially believed.
All I had to do was relax and get out of my conscious mind long enough to allow my subconscious to take over. This works because the conscious mind can process about 50–100 bits of information per second, while the subconscious mind processes over 11 million bits of information per second.
The Zen monks often refer to this heightened awareness as the zone, flow state, or "no mind."
All of a sudden, we start connecting dots we never saw before; we have access to possibilities and potential we never knew existed.
So, how do we access this unlimited potential, this state of hyper-awareness, and this flow? How can we enter the zone and unleash our potential, our capacity for innovative thinking?
For many highly successful athletes, wealthy business entrepreneurs, and elite military units, they utilize tools such as
Float tanks
Binaural beats
Cold immersion
Breathwork
Heart rate variability
Conscious movement: Tai Chi, Yoga, and Martial Arts
Meditation
Plant-based medicine or microdosing
And/or a practice that requires a lot of attention, either due to difficulty or danger. Essentially, it takes the mind out of the head and into the body.
However, these practices are all available to us; we just have to learn to incorporate them into our daily lives if we want to access these parts of the mind and tap into our full potential as entrepreneurs, athletes, and humans.
Stay Savage.