Strategic quitting: Paul Rulkens at TEDxMaastricht

ladies and gentlemen when I was a young boy I was totally in love with playing chess so I was skinny clumsy and Peele and my parents brought me to the doctor and the doctor said to me Paul needs to play more outside in the open so my father dragged me to a children's playground and on the children's playground you have a toy it's called a Monkey Bar and this is a horizontal set of bars and children cross moving from bars two bars so my father he lifted me up and I was hanging there stiff as a board and after a couple of seconds my father said to me Paul you have to let go in order to reach out now Ida deja was very obedient boy so I let go and half an hour later I was back at the doctor's office and the doctor said to me next time we have to let go strategically and this is what we call strategic quitting now ladies and gentlemen today I'm going to talk about strategic quitting and the reason is that we have heard dozens of magnificent ideas how to create a great future for nine billion people but the thing is that ideas are worthless without us taking massive action and what I'm going to show you is that it is through the strange secret of sati ji quitting that you can move yourself from being inspired to becoming absolutely unstoppable now the strange story of strategic quitting starts with understanding what happens with your energy and enthusiasm level between having an idea in your head and realizing this idea in the real world because the first moment an idea grabs you whoa you are enthusiastic and your energy and enthusiasm level is high and then you start to take action and progress is slow and people start to make fun of you and at a certain point in time you reach a plateau and I got a little bit of success feeling and now you're invited to speak at Ted ding ding but only in the end when your success becomes inevitable whoa whoa it goes through the roof and this curve which starts over here and ends all the way over there it's what we call the valley of death and the reason that we call this the valley of death is that somewhere along your journey you will get stuck you will get stuck and the scientific term for getting stuck in the valley of death is called procrastination now procrastination means knowing that you need to do something not doing it and feeling miserable about it that's progressive and if you want to become an unstoppable goal achiever you have to overcome procrastination and not once but every single day so how do they do that and to answer that question we need to take a closer look at the human minds our brains and there's a very simple model which describes our brain which can use here and this model tells us that actually our brain the human brain consists of multiple brains and one brain it's called a lizard brain and this is part of your brain which is totally focused on the status quo it hates risk and it hates uncertainty now on the opposite side of the brain spectrum you have another brain it's called a neocortex also known as the thinking brain and this part of the brain can best be compared to the crazy uncle who always shows up at family parties yeah because this is the part of your brain which wants to do cool stuff this is the part of your brain which wants to do bungee jumping and skydiving and growing hamburgers in your living room now here's the thing in order to do all this cool stuff by definition you have to take risk and this causes tension tension with the lizard brain and this tension is what the brain scientists call the war in heaven the war between your ears now the outcome of this war is very predictable and the reason is that your lizard brain is the oldest brain that you have it was there first and because it is the oldest brain it has been granted veto power over your body in other words if it believes you're going to do something stupid it will literally pull the plug and we see that sometimes in moments of great stress we see people faint it gets even worse if you are in mortal danger you run the risk of losing control of your bladder now for those of you who didn't know this this is the very reason that lion tamers bull fighters and Ted speakers always wear dark trousers now coming back to our subject you have to overcome your lizard brain and I'll solve all called achievers have to do that now the good news is that brain scientists have found two surefire ways of doing exactly that drugs and alcohol yeah now using drugs and alcohol to achieve your goals would be wrong so on Savile Gold achievers have found a third way of overcoming the laser brain and they know a little secret and that secret is that your lizard brain is your natural quitter it loves to quit so this is what unstoppable Gold achievers do while they are crossing the valley of death they give it strategically stuff to quit they feed the crocodile to keep it happy that's what they do and this is a cunning plan because it means for subtle goal achievers so tgd quitting is knowing that you need to do something not doing it and feeling magnificent about it now how do they do that and there is a great practical application which you can use immediately to move massively towards your goals and this application is called delegation now delegation probably doesn't mean what you think it means because for many people delegation means giving my work to someone else but that's not delegation that's management something very different what delegation actually means is giving something which is work for me to someone else for whom it is play and it's based on the ideas that are millions of people who simply love to do what you detest doing and for those of you who are skeptical about this concept keep in mind that today on this very stage we have seen people eating small bugs and swallowing big swords and this is the real secret of unstoppable gold achievers they are mastered alligators take for example iodine iodine sham was relatively weak in mathematics so while he was dreaming up the theory of relativity he had a crack team of mathematicians knocking themselves out to make all the numbers work and they loved it Albert Einstein didn't clutter his mind to become some kind of expert in mathematics no no no no no Albert Einstein chose immortality by focusing on physics instead and this is the great secret of unstoppable gold achievers because what they do is their day relentlessly and brutally focus on their strengths there are very few strengths and at the same time they strategically quit everything which is associated with their many weaknesses and the reason is that they know that if you would spend your entire life trying to compensate your weaknesses the only thing you will end up with is a large set of very strong weaknesses and this is why we have to say unstoppable 'ti means you have to let go in order to reach out ladies and gentlemen the great Austrian philosopher Arnold Schwarzenegger my failure Arnold Schwarzenegger once said no one has ever built muscles by watching me working out and this is true for us today because because that is about ideas worth spreading but ideas are worthless without us taking massive action and what we have seen is that it is through strategic quitting that you can move yourself from being inspired today to becoming absolutely unstoppable tomorrow however before you jump out of your seats and boldly start to quit stuff keep in mind the following sadita quitting is a very dangerous idea when thoughtlessly applied and reason is that is a very fine line between sativa quitting on the one hand and on the other hand giving in to your lizard brain and giving up on your magnificent dreams and on supple gold as users they know that because every time they decide to enter the valley of death they have to steel themselves because they know that failure is seldom fatal but they also know that success is never final in the valley of death in the end it is only your courage to continue which really comes you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 77,887

Rating: 4.9488764 out of 5

Keywords: ted, tedx talks, ted talk, ted x, TEDx, tedx, ted talks, tedx talk

Id: QLuqXctU_IQ

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Sun May 11 2014