There's Nothing to Stop You

[Kara Swisher, TEDex Bay Area 20:26]

I've written about a lot of different topics over the years. Much of the work I have done inside organizations has been to witness and record the extraordinary people and ideas that often go unrecognized.

No, it's not about the kind of award-winning awards, or the posterity kind of recognition. It's really more about helping them connect with their own inner flame and talent. If I had to choose one thing that makes the English language so powerful, I'd say it's its ability to march words into action.

I can think deeply in several languages, when I need to use words to say it like it is, English is the best tool -- among the ones I have, of course.

I was reading this morning about culture jamming, the new advertising on the internal side of town. The thing is connections happen on the inside first:

• inside out brain -- synapses between cells to transmit information, the frequency, intensity, and duration of stimuli to teach our OS about the world and where we interface with it
• inside ourselves -- as an example, think about the two-year old you (or maybe your child) who tests the boundaries of everything (including your patience as parent), who turns three and now everything starts being driven from the self
• inside the clan -- the family is our first clan, then neighbors, the class at school, the workplace, the professional association (in some cases), the cricket club, the industry, etc.

With the passage of time, some people continue to be aware of and work to develop a very keen appreciation of how these different insides work in relationships to each other. Usually, we get so busy dealing with the outsides, that we forget.

Remembering is the new discovery

I watched this movie, I cannot even remember the title now, where the lead character finds a drug that can help him discover and organize what he knows in a way that gives him super powers to get amazing things done.

It's a version of the silver bullet, or magic pill, I suppose. A way to think about extreme focus. You probably experienced it, when you had something at the edge of your consciousness, something brilliant. When you're fast enough to capture it, to write it down, or just do it and getting into the habit of doing it, you trade all this information directly in flow.

You're so fully immersed that you may not even know exactly how you got to doing or writing the thing you did when you're done. There were no barriers to downloading the idea from your brain to reality, from visualization to done. Focus kept you on task.

Speed reading

The reason why comprehension accelerates when you read faster is that you're able to take in more information more quickly and see with your mind. You write concepts stimuli directly into your brain cortex.

More is the result of faster processing. Faster processing comes from fewer distractions, like reading out loud to yourself. One function of is shut down, and you're now turned on only visually.

Speech, even of the mental kind, is an output function. Vision is about input. Mix the two, and you're making the brain work much harder.

Why are we (increasingly) visual creatures? Because of lots and lots of stimuli coming at us visually. Reading, watching images, surfing the Web. We're now just starting to reinsert audio into the online experience. Will sound be bigger than video?

More and focus

One of the aspects that fascinated me about people who either lost or never developed completely a function, is that they ended up with an overdeveloped rest of them.

My weekly meditation on connections came to me from Kara Swisher in her TEDexBayArea Talk. Her pieces on AllThings Digital are among the few that demonstrate tech writing can move your reading as fast as the pace of technology itself.

They teach something at many levels -- linguistically, news-wise, as well as how she connects information.

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Recognizing what makes us tick can make a big difference between our ability to do things and doing things with purpose. Purpose is an inner drive that writes to "more".

Enjoy the talk. I did. And gained an even greater appreciation and respect for Swisher's work. Plus she has an Italian grandmother who used to say: "the graveyards are full of indispensable people." Which is part of the lesson.

Recognize your internal drive, connect with it. Honor who you are. There's nothing to stop you.

 

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Comments

[Nicole/MadlabPost]

It looks like I need to be more aware of my internal drive, since purpose should be the only reason why we do some things over others. Meditation is something that I still find to be rather challenging but hope to master at least some version of it, in time.

By the way, the movie that you described sounds a lot like "Limitless" starring Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro.

[Valeria Maltoni]

lots of points for getting the movie title - thank you. You know when you almost recall something, yet you don't? Sounds like I may need one of those pills.

I found my meditation is running. I literally zone out during my daily 6-miler. In fact, in winter, when it's dark early on, once or twice, I could not immediately figure out where I was.