Capacity

When I took a metal bar to the head, and suffered a massive concussion and traumatic brain injury, my capacity was suddenly limited.  Where I used to have tremendous capacity for mistreating myself, staying up late, eating whatever I wanted, not getting enough rest and being able to work through it, I no longer could.

I was overwhelmed, anxious, and just barely able to make it through the day.  This caused me to rethink, and take a look at how I was spending my time.  Not because I wanted to, but because I needed to in order to be able to function in my day.  I’m hoping it doesn’t take traumatic brain damage for you to learn from my mistakes.

Right after my concussion, the absolute most I was able to do was work for 15 minutes, then sleep for 45.  Work for 15, sleep for 45.  All day, from 9 to 5.  Then, I’d eat dinner, and go to bed.  It was all I could do to get through the day.  Suddenly my day-to-day responsibilities exceeded my capacity.

This made me realize several things: the first being that you only have so much decision making ability each day.  I came to think about it as 100 decisions per day.  Total.  For all things.  What pair of socks were you going to wear?  That was a decision.  Should I answer email, or work on a project.  That was a decision.  Should I turn the lamp on as well as the overhead light?  A decision.

And it wasn’t just the little things, it was the big things too.  How should I respond to that client?  Should I hire that new person?  What is the best thing I can do right now to help the business grow?  And I only had 100 a day.  Total.  For the big and the small.  Think about how fast those go.  So I had to do two things:  Eliminate the need for decision making in as many situations as possible, and build my capacity for more decisions.

So how did I do those things? By making many decisions once, and just doing them.  What time to I get up?  Between 5 and 6.  What do I do first thing?  The 10-10-10, then exercise, then eat, then start work.  What do I have for breakfast?  A yogurt parfait.  Lunch?  Leftovers from yesterday’s dinner.  If there are no leftovers, a salad.  What did I wear?  Whatever was next in the drawer.  What if that shirt doesn’t go with most of your wardrobe?  Get rid of it.  Now everything goes with everything.  This way, I could save up my store of decisions to use them when it mattered.

So now that I was optimizing what I had, I needed to build up my capacity for more.  I did that through steady repetition, and treating myself right.  I got enough sleep.  I was grateful every day for what I did have.  I went to doctors and got treatment for my neck injury that was a by-product of the blow to my head.  I meditated to build up my mental strength even though the first time I did it the strain was so much I couldn’t get out of bed for the rest of the day.  I ate right.  I read, instead of looking at screens.  And slowly, really slowly, my capacity started to grow.  Like any muscle, I had to train my brain to get it’s endurance back.  It’s capacity back.  And I still work on it every day.

One of the interesting things I reflected on, that I’m sure you don’t think about much if at all, is what is your capacity for boredom?  I ask this because believe it or not, this is one of the keys to success.  It is also why I think some people who may not be as bright as others, are still tremendously successful.  They have a higher boredom capacity.

Really smart people are always trying to fix things, reinvent things, and make things improved.  Or they try to do 10 things at once.  If they simply did what needs to be done, they would be much farther ahead.

Think about a basketball star.  They had some natural gifts, such as being athletic and tall, but they still needed to spend thousands of hours, lots of them alone, doing the same thing over and over again.  Bouncing a ball, and throwing it through a hoop.  Again.  And again.  And again.  How boring do you think that is?  Terribly so.  But one of the things that made them successful was the capacity to be bored, and keep being bored.  That is some of their secret sauce.

What’s yours?