High Performance Secrets from Buckminster Fuller

Summary

Welcome to the High Performance Series, in which I will be deconstructing the best lessons in high performance from some of the world's best entrepreneurs and business people. In this first lesson, I will explain what Buckminster Fuller (an American architect, systems theorist, inventor, and futurist) can teach you about achieving & sustaining high performance. If you want to be your best, you need to learn from the best.

Transcript

Welcome to the first video of the high performance series in which we are going to dissect some of the best examples of high performance found in the history of humankind if you watch and follow this journey with us you're going to find the best frameworks for you to learn internalize and apply in your daily work so that you're able to achieve and sustain high performance in your personal and your professional life welcome back hello everyone Leon Castillo here CEO and founder of Selfmastered which is a company that specializes in peak cognitive performance for entrepreneurs and business leaders you're new to the channel consider subscribing because we release a few videos every week to help people like you achieve and sustain high performance in their life and work in this first lesson of the series i want to discuss the story of one of the most exciting intellectuals of the 20th century buckminster fulda he was an architect systems thinker futurist builder and structural engineer that rose to fame as the inventor of structures like dirt and security spheres and a handful of others the dimension house that really push the limits of what human science applied to structural design could do at that time and obviously such a gifted individual looks like he had everything easy in life that he probably had the correct education the correct connections a lot of capital to achieve what he achieved but what if i told you that he was twice expelled from harvard that he lost control and was expelled of the company he had founded himself at age 32 and that as a result he was determined to suicide when his little girl was only four years old so that his wife and children could inherit the money of the insurance policy when he was 32 years old he was in dire straits but he managed to overturn his life around by engaging in a powerful experiment that leverages some of the key principles of high performance and out of the incredible area of things that i could be discussing about buckminster fuller in fact is one of my personal heroes i believe there's two things that he did that he followed that he practiced that actually encapsulate what high performance is about and one is the commitment to vertical coherence vertical coherence is a concept used in positive psychology that postulates that when you have coherence between your long-term goals and your short-term actions that intrinsic motivation naturally follows you are working in a state of bliss and there's no separation between work and play so that you're able to summon your best performance because you're actually living in that state of bliss that few are able to manufacture but in order to make sure that this is actually happening you need to ask yourself what is it that you're going and why does it matter to you and more importantly what's the next step that you can take so that you live to that long-term goal that you are committed to chase and this is such a powerful concept that it works at every moment it doesn't matter how fuzzy the goal might be or how far away or ambitious that goal might be vertical coherence is a principle that can be leveraged at all points and in the example of bug mr fuller it is very interesting because when he was decided to commit suicide he realized that he could be useful to others that his life was not over that the fact that he had failed and very spectacular that he failed at that time wasn't the end or be all of his life there was still his ability to create and serve others and what he decided was in his own words i sought to use myself as my scientific guinea pig in a lifelong experiment designed to discover what if anything a healthy young male human of habit size experience and capability with an economically dependent wife and child starting without capital or any kind of wealth cash savings credit or university degree could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great private enterprises to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human beings this is a very big goal it's even a purpose-induced long-term goal that will foster his sense of belonging to the human community but what it's incredible at this point is that instead of going back to harvard from which he had been spilled twice or i don't know asking for a loan to build anything or i don't know doing all the anything that he could be doing he decided to start experimenting on the tiniest scale that he could he started talking to people asking what they needed and how he could apply the skills he had to help others and do so in a way that big nation states hadn't thought of or didn't have the ability to do so he committed in his own words to intense experimentation his long-term goal was service based on discovering something nobody else had done before but in order to get there he needed to be vertically coherent and start experimenting in the now so his life became a series of experiments in which he he did a lot of stuff in a lot of different fields he worked on he was an architect a structural engineer he built bridges built houses a new way of understanding the map of the world he became one of the most interesting intellectuals in the 20th century and this happened because he harnessed the power of vertical coherence of knowing exactly what it what is it that you're trying to do and making sure that everything you do every fiber of your being is aligned with that long-term goal and that's principle number one how can we make sure that we are vertically coherent at all times so that we harness the power of intrinsic motivation and the second principle that i believe buckminster fuller epitomizes better than anyone else is systems thinking and design everything he did was part of a system he saw the world as a series of interconnected systems that could be influenced by one another and because he truly believed in his ability to influence external systems he was absolutely sure that in his words a tiny individual with no special merit or capital connections could have a massive impact and a massive impact he had because he was able to see reality as a series of behaviors not as a series of events that could be influenced by the patterns that lied below those behaviors and he sought to influence those behaviors how people lived how people related to each other how people can connect it how people communicated how buildings were built at that time he was trying to refine processes and systems so that he could get the outcomes he wanted with a fraction of the effort that's the power of committed individual that has a sound understanding of systems and therefore leverage because with good system design comes leverage and these two examples of high performance one is vertical coherence the other one is systems thinking and design but mr fuller could turn around his life and go from being broke penniless really considering suicide with an economically dependent wife and child to changing the history of architecture via constant experimentation even without a clear goal even with a fuzzy long-term goal of serving humanity he was able to pull off incredible things because he harnessed the power of vertical coherence so i suggest you take note of this incredible example and really research about buck mr fuller because he is one of a kind and i will finish by quoting him he said that the problems of the world will have no end until individuals become self-educated and this was the inspiration for me to found self-mastered black mesophyll is one of the biggest mentors i ever had and i highly encourage you dive deep into his material and learn the power of systems thinking and harnessing vertical coherence to make your goals inevitable see you next lesson