Harvard-trained brain experts Dr. Jeff Brown and Dr. Mark Fenske—authors of The Winner’s Brain—explore the surprising science behind motivation, focus and extraordinary achievement, interviewing powerful and influential people to see what it took for them to achieve their goals, and breaking down the science behind training your brain for success.
How do you define a "winner?"
Jeff Brown: When it comes to the brain, winning equals success. And success can be obtained across many different aspects of life—from being able to evaluate what is important, to recognizing valuable opportunities, to finding the motivation to achieve your goals. Each of us is geared with different preferences, desires, hopes, and drives. When it comes to deciding how we want to win—how to be successful—we're in the driver's seat.
Can success be attained through diligent training of the mind?
JB: Indeed, for those who are serious about optimizing their brains for success, they'll quickly catch on to the importance of honing their brain to use it to its fullest. The best part? Your brain is immediately ready and waiting to be fine-tuned.
Do you find yourselves working continually to better your own brains?
Mark Fenske: In our home lives, we work toward choosing and maximizing experiences for ourselves and our families that help to build connections, skills, and memories that are useful for the future. Resilience is key, too. Fundamentally, accepting that success can be challenging, dealing with failures, and repositioning ourselves for the next attempt at success is what winners do.
You interviewed a range of VIPs for this book. From whom did you learn the most?
MF: We interviewed Whoopi Goldberg on resilience and perseverance, BB King on humility and generosity of spirit, and Stephen Harris (aka Kid Chaos) on adaptability and pursuing your interests.
JB: Also, the FBI guys on use of memory and training to help anticipate and be ready for new situations, and Phyllis Diller on opportunity radar.
You discuss balancing your emotions to handle any situation. Are you saying it's possible to control the way you feel?
JB: Emotions provide important information that is absolutely critical for success. Being able to make the most of this precious resource, though, also depends on recognizing when certain emotions are guiding us in the wrong direction. In such cases, you can indeed effectively control the emotions you feel.
It's amazing to see how simply changing your thoughts can change the emotions you can experience. This ability is crucial to master when it comes to experiencing emotions like purpose, determination, optimism, etc. The skill of squelching negative emotions such as pessimism, cynicism, and worthlessness is also key in having a successful mindset.
Do the multitasking lifestyles that many of us lead today contribute to a lack of the specific focus needed to succeed?
MF: Each of our brains has a fundamental limitation in the amount of information we can consciously deal with at a given time. So it isn't necessarily the number of projects that we might have on the go that can be problematic, but how many of them we are trying to do all at once.
Being able to focus on a single task for a stretch of time increases our ability to engage with the material at hand, notice details you might otherwise overlook, be creative in finding solutions to potential problems, and reduce the likelihood of making careless errors. So when something really counts, don't hesitate to turn off your email and other distractions so that you can focus appropriately.
Which brain-training tip do you think is most important?
MF: Regardless of who you are, it is clear that good sleeping habits and regular exercise are two of the easiest tips that can improve brain functioning.
For those who feel overwhelmed by the challenges that stand between goal-setting and achievement, what starting point would you recommend?
JB: You need to (and can) get better at identifying which goals are important for you to set. A great starting point is to explore a full range of how your goal can be achieved. Don't implement anything, don't commit to anything, don't make promises you can't keep—just think about the variety of ways your goal can be achieved.
For example, let's use a simple example of going to the grocery store. Getting to the store is your goal. The ways you can reach that goal are numerous. You can go the way you've always gone, you could take a different route altogether, you could walk, bike, jog, or call a cab. You're probably getting the point—sometimes we're limited not by our goal, but by how we approach it. We believe people who are true winners—truly successful—are willing to become creative problem solvers.
Jeff Brown, PsyD, ABPP, is a clinical psychologist on the faculty at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Mark J. Fenske, PhD, is a former research fellow at Harvard and is an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
Learn more about their book at The Winner's Brain site.
Member Comments