Jul 22 • General discussion
On Being Superhuman
There’s a series of books I highly recommend reading called The Brilliance Trilogy written by Marcus Sakey.
Similar to X-Men, but more realistic, the story is set around an idea that 1% of the population are “brilliant” due to some unknown change in human DNA. These “gifted” people are extremely adept at pattern recognition, and this plays out in different ways and to different degrees of intensity.
Some are able to do complicated mathematics in their head. Some have eidetic memories (they remember and recall everything). Some are strategic masterminds who can beat chess grandmasters, while others have physical skills that make them able to dodge opponents on the sports field as if they can read minds.
What I love about these books is that these abilities are not superhuman exactly, more like representations of what extremely talented, gifted and genius humans are capable of. Sure, some of the characters in the books are above and beyond anything a human has ever achieved, but unlike most superhero stories, these abilities are just normal human talents amplified to the extreme, like if you were able to dial up any human trait to it’s maximum possible setting.
Why am I talking about this?
Because after studying psychology for the better part of 20 years, and in particular applied psychology - i.e. what actually works in real life rather than just in textbooks - I’ve been hit time and time again with a painful truth: humans perform nowhere near their potential. The Brilliance books are a bittersweet fiction for me, because they are often what I’ve imagined humans would be like if we were not so self-limited.
I emphasize SELF-limited because while nearly everyone I’ve worked with believes it’s the external world holding them back and causing them problems, the truth is the old cliche is true: each person is their own worst enemy. And it’s not even close - nearly no-one experiences more hardship from the outside world than they do from their own mind.
Great sports coaches know this. When Serena Williams loses an important tennis match, if you watch closely you’ll realise she’s the one losing, it’s not the other player winning. What I mean is that she throws the game away. It’s subtle, barely noticeable. But you’ll see extra faulted serves, a little bit less enthusiasm than usual to get to the ball, and a few rookie errors. All the other player needs to do is just hit the ball back over the net, and she’ll ruin the game for herself.
Top chess grandmasters do this as well. It’s a common understanding in chess that the guy who loses is the one who makes the most errors. All the other guy needs to do most of the time is just follow basic sensible chess principles. The crazy thing is I know this is true and yet when I play chess I still regularly rush and underthink and make rookie mistakes. It’s almost like I want to lose.
I say all of this to merely open your mind to an idea: what would a human be like if they didn’t self-sabotage… at all?
I’ve spent my whole career seeing people fail to live up to their potential. I don’t mean general human being potential, but their individual potential that has previously been proven. Most people ruin or at least slow their progress by doing things wrong when they actually know how to do it right. It’s not ignorance, lack of skill, lack of experience, or extraordinary external circumstances that are responsible for most failures. A large percentage of the time, it’s the person not doing as good as they have proven they’re able to do.
How often do people repeat mistakes? How often do we binge-eat while simultaneously knowing it’s a bad idea? How often do we drink and smoke while knowing it’s bad for our health? How often do we follow a pattern to find a partner and start a relationship that has previously ended in disaster for us time and time again?
Even top scientists, athletes and socialites still frequently make amateur mistakes. They cheat on their partners, get in trouble with the law, create scandals with their tweets, and allow themselves to be swindled in bad deals. Even our highest performers are still living nowhere near their hypothetical peak.
So this question bugs me: is it possible to live to our potential? Is it possible to become superhuman?
I made a list recently of all the things I would do in a normal day if I was perfect. This list of activities represents what me living up to my potential would look like; doing only what I know are the right and best things to do, to the best of my ability. It’s not beyond reason: everything on the list is within my capabilities and there’s enough time each day to do it all. Hypothetically it’s possible.
There’s the daily workout. There’s practicing Czech language. There’s spending quality time with my daughter and intimate time with my wife. There’s eating healthy. There’s keep my house and self maintained and orderly. There’s giving work my all but not overdoing it. There’s taking breaks to reduce stress and maintain high performance.
And there’s the NOT do items: binge on sugar, masturbate to porn, scroll on my phone, try to solve other people’s problems, and so on.
This is a reasonable list that - barring some extraordinary external barrier - could easily be achieved in a normal day.
And yet, nearly three weeks into this experiment, I’m yet to have a perfect day! There’s always something. Either I fall off the wagon with one of the NOT do’s, or I seem to inexplicably run out of time for the important tasks, or some “unusual” thing happens that gets in the way.
It’s highly suspicious. Technically speaking, the list is solid. There’s no reason to look at it and think getting just one day right would be impossible. Sure, I have a young daughter, and we have a lot of spontaneous trips and events, and I’m severely sleep deprived. But even with that in mind, the list should still be possible for me to complete in my situation with my abilities.
And that’s just getting ONE day on the books. The idea was to get to a point where I’m always on point with everything on the list, to try to experience being superhuman. The longer the experiment goes, the less certain I am that it's possible to break away from the deep-seated human compulsion to sabotage things. And I’m a fairly intelligent, ambitious and disciplined guy. If I can’t do it, what hope do we have as a species?
Many of my coaching clients are objectively high performers. Most people would admire them and envy their success. But I see behind the scenes. It’s almost amazing that they’re able to achieve anything with the sheer amount of self-sabotage they subject themselves to on a daily basis. I estimate that they spend somewhere in the range of 30% of their time, energy and resources just cleaning up the messes they’ve gotten themselves into.
It’s often a case of allowing the spinning plates to fall. I often find that people can only excel in one area if they allow other areas to crash. The rich guys have terrible relationships. The happily married guys can’t get their weight under control. The athletes struggle with their mental health. On paper, they could have it all, but in reality they barely keep one plate off the ground at a time. And these are the HIGH performers; most other people I’ve observed don’t even have one area of life under any form of respectable control.
Of course, we don’t know what we don’t know. I’m not measuring people against some objective standard, only against what they definitely know how to do. A guy who’s never started a business before isn’t going to crush it in his first year, that’s understandable. What’s crazy is that in 10 years he’ll still be making some of the same mistakes he made in year one, only now he knows they’re mistakes and yet he does it anyway.
The bit I struggle to reconcile is that despite the evidence in front of me, I’m still clinging to the “logical” hypothesis that it’s NOT impossible for someone to access all their skills and knowledge and wisdom consistently. While I’ve never seen this, it seems like it should be able to happen.
Maybe it’s because we sometimes do it in bursts. We’ve all had good days, even good weeks, and sometimes good months. There are times where we get on a roll and just make one good decision after another, using the most of our gifts and talents. Most of us have had a glimpse as to what’s possible, even if it’s still only 80% of full potential. We have the power to be gods.
But it never lasts, does it? Sooner or later we fuck it up somehow, usually in what appears to be a subconscious or impulsive way. Either there’s a long build up of a problem that’s repeatedly ignored, or we just randomly wreck everything with one big stupid move. And then we’re back to cleaning up the mess rather than building progress momentum
Am I attached to the impossible? Am I dreaming of alchemy - thinking lead can be turned into gold because the elemental chart suggests it’s reasonable? Is self-sabotage just part of being human, as unavoidable as illness, injury and death?
Or are we missing something vital, something that would unlock full access to everything we have, and allow us to evolve past homo sapien into something closer to a grandmaster chess playing athlete with masterful communication and financial skills?
Whatever it is, I have yet to find it. But when I do, I’ll be sure to let you know.
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On Being Superhuman
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