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"You’re in charge of your mind. You can help it grow by using it in the right way."
~Carol Dweck
Unfortunately, we live in a world that cherishes “natural” talent and believes we’re either BORN a genius or we’ve got no hope.
But, that’s just not true. If you look at the history of legends born on this planet, there are more than enough examples to bust this myth.
In fact, most of the geniuses we know today didn’t have any an indication in their childhood of rising to future greatness. They were not granted some magical brain; rather, they might have been simply considered average or normal at the time.
While we looked at a child prodigy like Joshua Waitzkin in the previous chapter, there are way more examples in history where geniuses were not born but were made by sheer persistence and a positive outlook towards life.
Michael Jordan is famous for embracing failure time and time again until he reached success. He has a famous quote:
"I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
In fact, the success stories of all these people show what Michael Gelb, the author of Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, rightly said, “Genius are made not born.”
There has been a lot of debate in the past as to whether we can change our mindsets. Is change possible or are we slaves to the specific type we possess?
Unfortunately, a few decades ago, the common understanding was that human intelligence is limited; people believed that the human mind has a fixed capacity from birth, and it can’t be changed any further.
But thanks to research conducted in the field of neuroscience and human psychology, we now have the concept of neuroplasticity. The good news is that science has concluded that there is no such thing such as a fixed or only-once wired mind. Rather, it has the potential to keep changing during one’s lifetime, thanks to an awareness of the concept of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of your brain to reorganize itself, both physically and functionally, throughout your life due to changes in one’s environment, behavior, thinking and emotions. With the recent capability to visually “see” into the brain with the help of the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagining), science has confirmed its incredible morphing ability beyond any doubt.
Norman Doidge explains the concept of our brain’s elasticity in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science below: “The brain is not an inanimate vessel that we fill; rather it is more like a living creature with an appetite, one that can grow and change itself with proper nourishment and exercise.”
The good news is that your brain makes physical changes based on the repetitive things you do and the experiences you have. The bad news is that your brain makes physical changes based on the repetitive things you do and the experiences you have. Therefore, this morphing capability of your brain, known as neuroplasticity, works both for and against you.
The resourceful characteristic of neuroplasticity, which can make your brain amazingly resilient, also makes it very vulnerable to both outside and internal (usually unconscious) influences.
Norman Doidge calls this the plastic paradox. Think about it. Your brain actually wires itself and forms neuronal connections based on what you do over and over in your life. Lying on your couch for hours in front of the TV with a king-sized burger and fries, having a sugar fix, sipping soda, fixing a cocktail to unwind after work, or smoking cigarettes. Whether you want to call them bad habits or addictions, these activities literally become wired into your brain.
Lara Boyd, a brain researcher at University of British Columbia stated[8] that in order to support new learning, our brains can change based on the concept of neuroplasticity at three specific levels:
How Brain’s Neuroplasticity Can Grow Your Brain (A real-life story)
The miraculous life story of a little girl named Cameron Mott[9], from North Carolina, proves the vast potential of neuroplasticity on our brain’s abilities. Just after her third birthday, Cameron started having violent seizures. They became worse, and eventually she lost her ability to speak. Doctors diagnosed her with something called Rasmussen’s encephalitis, a rare inflammatory neurological disease, and the only real treatment was hemispherectomy—cutting out half of her brain.
The impact of this surgery was to be very catastrophic for this girl because one half of your brain controls and is responsible for movement and sensation in the other half of your body, i.e., the left hemisphere controls the right side of your entire body’s function, and vice versa. This surgery would immediately leave Cameron hemiplegic, meaning suffering from paralysis on one side of the body.
But to everyone’s utmost surprise, just four weeks post-operation, she walked out of the hospital. And after few months of difficult rehabilitation, she returned to good health and was again going to school, participating in school activities, and living a life of miraculous normality. She was free from seizures after the surgery, and despite having half of her brain removed, she was able to live a normal life.
How could 50% of the brain work almost like 100% for Cameron?
It happened because the remaining part of Cameron’s brain sensed the massive loss of neural tissue and it physically rewired and reorganized itself to take over everything that the other half had previously handled. This proves the vast ability of the brain to change itself—to rewire.
Science has shown that neuroplastic changes happen throughout our entire lives, regardless of age or any other factor. Radical improvements in cognitive function—how we learn, think, perceive, and remember—are possible even in the elderly. Your brain makes physical changes based on the repetitive things you do and the experiences you have.
This validates that the below quote by Jim Rohn has some scientific backing. He stated: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
The science-based research and real-life stories in the book prove that you are not stuck with your mind in whatever way it gets formed over a period of time. You have the capability to change your mindset—the way you look and perceive different things in your life—at any stage and age.
5 Pillars to Design a Robust Mindset
All the further chapters in this book are all about the solution part of the equation. You are going to learn how to effectively implement the concept of neuroplasticity by changing your behavior, actions and environment in order to design a new set of neural pathways that can surely lead to a life of happiness, fulfillment and success.
If you have been reading personal development books for some time, these concepts may not be new to you. You might already know them, but the key problem is that most people don’t implement the knowledge and keep looking for new information, because this gives hope that you might get a shortcut to make a quick shift.
Moreover, one of the key reasons for not implementing new knowledge by most people is that most of the time, the information is bit scattered, and it lacks a structure. You and I know that this is already an information overload age: we don’t need more and new information. Your mind wants some structure or a roadmap to arrive at a destination without too much information; precisely, you need a recipe to design your mindset.
Therefore, the next sections of this book are designed to offer a structured path to help you achieve the objective of redesigning your mind.
Everything starts inside us before it takes shape in outside words. Therefore, we will start with working on our self-image and self-talk. Then we will work on redesigning our environment in terms of dealing with people. To bring consistency and automaticity, so that we don’t keep drifting to past behaviors, you’ll learn some effective routines that fit into your daily schedule. A good life is nothing but a combination of days intentionally lived well.
Following this, we will work on feeding our brain, just like upgrading the software at frequent intervals, so it adapts itself to deal with the latest viruses or bugs. As they rightly say, if you are not moving ahead, you’re going backwards.
And last but not the least, as we all know, despite our best intentions and sincerely following the right practices, life at times will throw you challenges and adversities that can either distract or disrupt you. So you will learn how to train your mind to become ready to handle any such adversity and thus become a resilient mindset.
To do this, there are five pillars to design a robust mindset that we will learn in the rest of this book:
Now with this precise structure to upgrade your mind, let’s jump straight into the action.
Chapter 3 Key Takeaways
Modern history is filled with examples of legends, who despite their unfavorable childhoods or even less than average beginnings, turn out to disrupt the world with their genius.
Therefore, the concept of “born genius or else no hope” is a myth. Instead, in the words of Michael Gelb, “Geniuses are made not born.”
Research and the invention of brain imaging technologies like the fMRI have proven the incredible morphing abilities of the brain. The concept of neuroplasticity proves the ability of your brain to reorganize itself, both physically and functionally, throughout your life due to changes in your environment, behavior, thinking and emotions.
As per Lara Boyd, you can change your brain at the chemical, structural and functional level. The real-life incident in the chapter shows how 50% of your brain can handle 100% of your brain activities, thanks to the reorganizing abilities our brain.
Your brain makes physical changes based on the repetitive things you do and the experiences you have. Therefore, you need to do specific activities or design new behavior to change your mindset.
The following are the 5 pillars to build a robust mindset to upgrade your mindset:
