The Potential Principle

Mark Sanborn

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780718093167
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

You may honestly be able to say (and have others say about you) that you are the absolute best in your field--the best athlete, scholar, CEO, parent, mathematician, teacher, mechanic... whatever it is that you fill out the "occupation" box with. But being the best at something only means you are better than everyone else. It doesn't mean you are the best you. Your potential is higher than where you are right now.Leadership expert and international bestselling author of The Fred Factor and You Don't Need a Title to Be a Leader, Mark Sanborn invites you to get better. Not better than others, but better than you! By learning to employ Sanborn's uniquely designed "Potential Matrix" to specific areas of their lives, readers can gain the tools they need to see breakthrough improvements in places they previously thought had reached their maximum potential.Every day, you have the exciting opportunity to be better. To pursue your true potential. To make what you thought was your best, now second-best. And then the next day, start again. You can be better.

PART 1

Why You Should Improve

CHAPTER 1

The Potential Principle

Wealth, notoriety, place and power are no measure of success whatever. The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made of ourselves on the other.

—H. G. WELLS

In 1985 three-time Olympic athlete John Howard was at the Bonneville Salt Flats, trying to set a new land speed record . . . on a bicycle. Howard was not riding your dad’s Schwinn. His was a specially built bicycle. One turn of the pedals moved the bike more than 110 feet. When Howard set the land speed record, his monitored heart rate was 195 beats per minute. His top speed? 152 miles per hour.

If you guessed that this is the top speed for riding a bicycle, you’d be wrong. A decade later, a European beat Howard’s best by reaching a top speed of 161 miles per hour.

You might have little or no interest in bicycles or land speed records. That’s not the point. What’s important is this: We have no idea what is possible physically, mentally, or organizationally. Most of us far underestimate our own potential and the potential of others.

BEYOND EXPERIENCE

Even though I’m no mind reader, I can say with a high degree of confidence that you were at least surprised, if not shocked, that a human could ride a bicycle so fast. Nothing in the average person’s experience with bicycles would suggest that anyone could ride one as fast as 150 miles per hour. We’ve never ridden a bicycle faster than 40, maybe 50 miles per hour. What’s more, most of us have never been in a car that’s gone faster than 110 or 120. Based on our experience—that is, what we know—most of us would guess the top speed for a bicycle is far slower than what’s actually possible.

This means that sometimes our experience—our frame of reference—works against us. In this case our experience didn’t lead to a complete failure—we didn’t say 500 miles per hour. But we set a limit based on what we thought was possible, only to find out that we didn’t have a clue. Of course, most of us aren’t terribly bothered that we underestimated the land speed record of bicycles.

But what about when the subject is you and your potential? The hard truth is that we use the same deductive powers on ourselves that we used to determine the speed of the fastest bike ride. In fact, it’s actually worse. My question about the top speed of a bicycle was meant to put your imagination to the test. But what if I had asked, “How fast could you ride a bicycle?”

Now your experience is working against you even more. Once again, I can’t possibly know how fast you think you can ride a bicycle. But I can tell you one thing: Your answer is probably wrong. You can ride a bike much faster than you think.

Your imagination is limited because of your experience. Maybe that’s why Einstein is purported to have said imagination is more important than knowledge, “for knowledge is limited to all we know and understand.”

Most likely, in making your estimate you’re afraid of being unrealistic: Perhaps you’ve been criticized for aiming too high or trying to accomplish too much in the past. Or maybe you failed to meet a goal you or your boss set, and the memory still stings. Whatever the reason, experience makes us set the bar a little lower—just a little lower, a little more, and a tad more. There. We can hit that speed.

Now forget about the bike.

How good could you be? How much better might you be than you are right now?

BETTER THAN YOUR BEST

This book isn’t about doing the impossible, like defying gravity or flying with no equipment of any kind. I’m not saying you can—or should even try to—ride a bike faster than you’ve ever ridden one before. This book is about making your best better. It is focused on helping you improve in whatever areas you choose and becoming even better than you were before.

This book also isn’t about achieving your dreams, whatever they might be. If you’ve always wanted to start a business, this book won’t tell you how. Many readers may have already achieved their dreams: mastered the skill, run the marathon, started a successful business, or published a book. The message of this book, however, is this: No matter how good you’ve become, you can become better. No matter what you’ve done so far, you still haven’t fulfilled your potential.

For some of us, doing something we’ve never tried or always wanted to do is an achievement in its own right. We do the thing, and then we move on. But do you ever move on from being a parent? Do you ever move on from having a career? Do you ever move on from living a meaningful life? These are pursuits without end. They don’t have a finish line. You can’t brush the dust off your hands and say, “Well, that was fun. What’s next?”

Improvement in the important areas of your life can and should be an ongoing journey.

Consider this example: John isn’t just any doctor. He’s the chief cardiac surgeon at one of the best hospitals anywhere. This means that John is one of the best cardiac surgeons in the world. Patients and colleagues come to John when they have the toughest problem, the hardest case, the most formidable challenge. Although self-effacing and humble with others, John knows he’s the best. To be a surgeon requires a certain confidence—a firm belief in your own talents. John has this. He wants the toughest cases, because he knows he is the best.

At this stage in his career John has two choices. One, he can believe that he has reached the highest pinnacle of professional success. With nothing left to prove to himself or others, John can rest assured that he will always be considered one of the best surgeons in the world. He can, as the saying goes, rest on his laurels.

Or two, John can challenge himself to become better than his best. He could strive to improve his already excellent skills and continue to be challenged and stimulated. But here is a question: When you’re the best, who can help you get better? It’s a daunting challenge. Why? Because John is the standard against which other surgeons compare themselves. He has no one ahead of him to emulate. To get better—to get closer to his true potential—he will have to raise the bar he’s already set.

Consider this quote from one of the most popular movies of the last fifty years: “Gentlemen, you are the top 1 percent of all naval aviators—the elite. The best of the best. We’ll make you better.”¹ (Did you recognize the movie? It was Top Gun.)

I assume that if you’re reading this, you are already good, perhaps even among the best, at what you do. So what’s my job? To show you how to keep improving, to get closer to fulfilling your potential. Or, most accurately, to make your best better.

BETTER AT WHAT?

If you are a naval aviator, professional athlete, world-renowned surgeon, or movie star, I’m delighted you’re reading this book. But most of us don’t work in such rarefied fields. We’re executives, vice presidents, CEOs, CFOs, directors, managers, salespersons; we’re fathers, mothers, employees, friends, associates, peers; we’re athletes, coaches, teammates, and mentors. This book is for all of us. In this book I make little distinction between, say, being the best president and being the best mother. What goes into making both better is the same.

And that raises the most basic question: Better at what? Better at what matters to you. Better at being someone whom others respect, emulate, and trust. Better at being someone who continues to improve and achieve. A person who motivates, challenges, and inspires others through his or her example. You may not have considered it, but these qualities and others define leadership; and they make up the little metrics that allow us to start gauging how and where we’re actually getting better, actually reaching more of our potential.

You certainly can measure being better than your best in dollars: increased sales, revenue, and income. Those are legitimate metrics of success, and ones that you need to use to keep your job. I hope to show, however, that monetary improvement is usually the result of improving what you are already the best at.

As we’ll see, the skills that people must improve to be better than their best are often different from the ones that got them to their current positions. While most people think about improving their jobs or performance skills, the more important thing to focus on is improving your mental, contemplative, and reflective skills. These are the metrics that can’t be measured by employer evaluations, but they measure the skills that allow us to move beyond what we have ever thought was possible.

I can’t teach John, our chief cardiac surgeon, about medicine or surgery. But I can teach the process that he or anyone else can use to improve. I can challenge his thinking and understanding and provide new insights he can then apply to his highly specialized area. And that’s what we’ll be doing in this book. Just as I have nothing to say to John about medicine, I’m unlikely to have anything to say to you about your profession. But in getting better than our best, whatever the thing is—the job, the hobby, the pursuit—is almost beside the point. The point is us. You. Me. If the goal is for us to be the ones to get better, then what needs to improve is inside of us.

UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL

In the cognitive sciences there is a phenomenon known as the Pygmalion effect. Also known as the Rosenthal effect for one of the psychologists who discovered it, the phenomenon is simple enough: It reveals that higher expectations lead to better performance. The phenomenon is more than a theory; it has been demonstrated in the lab.

So why don’t we expect more from ourselves? This can be especially difficult if we’re already good (even the best) at something, since then we can hav...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Part 1: Why You Should Improve
• Part 2: The Path to Improvement
• Part 3: The Means of Improvement
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1: Sixteen Combinations of Matrix and Breakthrough Improvement
• Appendix 2: The Eight Questions for Making Your Best Better
• Notes
• About the Author