Hyperbrain Owner's Manual - 2. Accept and reject your limitations 13
This article follows a previous article. It’s part of a series of yet undefined length. If you haven’t read the first instalment yet, it might be worth going back and reading it.
This is addressed mainly to people who recognise themselves in the description of the hyperbrain, although it may be of interest to others. When you count up all the different ways in which your hyperbrain differs from the average, you might be tempted to think you’re not normal. Well, it’s true, you’re not. You’re different from the norm, but that can be a good thing. After all, you can’t be normal and expect abnormal results. The focus of these articles is to make you more aware of how you can deal with those differences, counteract your limitations, and build on your strengths, to achieve what you’re capable of.
So what are you capable of? Well, you can do anything you want (that’s the good news). But in order to do those things, you need to learn to work with your hyperbrain, otherwise you will constantly fail in public and humiliating ways at the worst moments (usually, on the cusp of victory, at least in my experience). And that will hurt you more than the average person, because you are far more sensitive to negative feedback than you’d care to admit. Let’s look at the first practical step to take to improve your chances of success.
The first step to success with a hyperbrain is to both accept your limitations and reject them.
Accept your limitations
You are not built for consistency. Putting yourself in situations which require you to provide a constant output, and which hurt you the moment you fail to do so, is a recipe for disaster for you. Yet you might be tempted to set up just such a system in order to generate motivation. To succeed, however, you need to engineer your environment to focus on what you’ve achieved rather than what you’ve planned to achieve.
Your focus can shift radically in an instant. This means you cannot rely on continued focus in a period of time, so, to succeed, you need to structure your (focused) work in a way that allows you to abandon it at short notice without downside.
You crave validation from yourself. If you can’t feel that you’re doing something really worthwhile, your productivity will shoot down to a hundredth of what it might otherwise be. You need to ensure your work is always presented in a way that makes you feel it’s worthwhile.
You crave validation from from other people, too. Most people like a pat on the back, but without that pat, you can’t go on. Putting yourself in situations where no one really cares about what you’re doing will demoralise you fairly quickly, unless you can come up with elaborate rationalisations for why they don’t care yet (e.g. secret projects). So, paradoxically, to succeed, you actually need to be on the front lines, where it’s most visible and most dangerous to fail, because that’s where you’ll feel most energetic and driven.
When you’re on a high, you feel you can take on the world. And you could - if only you could maintain that high. But you can’t. So, on a high, you actually do take on the world, and then the world chews you up and spits you by the side of the road. To succeed, you need to moderate that eagerness to ensure you don’t set yourself up for failure.
You get involved in too many things. All successful people do that to an extent, but you’re really pushing the boundaries. At any given time, you’re reading 5 books, pursuing 10 pet projects, and working on 15 things - and you constantly shift between them. To succeed, you need to structure your environment to allow you to shift between those things without negative side-effects.
You are extremely sensitive to negative criticism. Most people dislike being told they’re wrong, but the wrong bit of criticism from the wrong person can shut down something that you genuinely cared about permanently. To succeed, you need to develop a healthy scepticism for people’s negative criticisms (if only because success is always, inevitably, accompanied by harsh negative criticism from people who are mean, jealous, in a bad mood, or just simply disagree in overly harsh terms).
You have a strong tendency to martyrdom and self-victimisation. How better can you gain other people’s positive feedback than by sacrificing yourself? If only I had the support I needed, I could do so well! To succeed, continue reading.
#1: Reject your limitations
One of the hyperbrain’s tendencies is self-victimisation. Well, that’s not unique to the hyperbrain. Many people feel misunderstood, although the craving for external validation makes it particularly acute in this type of mind, because the only way to fulfil that craving is to succeed, and you cannot succeed while you feel the odds are stacked against you. This self-victimisation is crippling, though. It’s oh so easy to slip into thinking that you are doomed to fail at everything you try, because you’re just that way, and there’s always some bit of the “support system” that’s missing (tip: it’s a catch-22 - you will only be able to build a full support system when you’ve already succeeded).
If you take only one thing from these articles, take this:
Your limitations are not an excuse for failure.
You should never throw up your hands and accept that you will fail because of your limitations. Analyse past failures in terms of your limitations to see how you can make up for them, but never accept defeat as a given. This advice goes for anyone, really, but it is especially important for hyperbrains because of these self-victimisation tendencies.
Your environment is not an excuse for failure.
You may try to dodge the above advice by saying something along the lines of: “Well, I can deal with my limitations, but my environment just doesn’t work with my personality.” Bullshit. You can succeed in any environment. The match (or mismatch) between your limitations and your environment is just a puzzle to be solved. In later articles, I’m going to drill down into specific techniques for how to counteract those limitations without taking away from your strengths, and you’ll see that almost no environment is incompatible with the hyperbrain, so long as you know how to handle yourself. You are the sole factor in whether you succeed or fail.
You don’t need to sacrifice yourself in order for others to succeed.
People don’t need you as much as you feel they do. How many times have you been in a situation where you thought the project couldn’t run without you, and you got moved somewhere else anyway, and the project still went on? Because of your ability to pick up many different skills, you’re involved in everything, so it’s easy to end up feeling you’re indispensable. Then, you feel that you can’t possibly go and do what you want because everyone is depending on you. It’s easy to turn this into another excuse for not achieving your potential. Don’t let it be so. People don’t need you as much as you think they do, and they will not appreciate your sacrifice at all - so don’t do it.
Unless you accept this key point, that the key to success lies within you, that there is no valid excuse for not realising your potential, then the rest of my advice will be worthless. I’ve started with this high-level “tip”, even though it really applies to everyone (not just hyperbrains) because it is so very important.
In part 3, coming later this week, I’ll present my most important approach for how to deal with distractibility and arrange your work to survive the hyperbrain’s attention deficit without losing out on its ability for extraordinary focus (no, it doesn’t involve some fancy variation on GTD).
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This is the third article in my series on the hyperbrain. If you haven't read them yet, you might want to look at parts 1 and 2 first. Subjectively, I think the greatest challenge about having a hyperbrain is distractibility. If not handled effect...
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This is the third article in my series on the hyperbrain. If you haven't read them yet, you might want to look at parts 1 and 2 first. Subjectively, I think the greatest challenge about having a hyperbrain is distractibility. If not handled effect...
are you referring to any otherwise commonly known condition such as ADHD / Hypomania / something else ? (I did notice you made one mention of attention deficit)
The previous article has a good description of what I’m referring to. I don’t think ADHD or other medical/psychiatric symptoms are a good description of this, for several reasons:
First of all I don’t believe it’s a medical condition, in the sense that I don’t think it needs medication or medical attention, just coaching and advice (it doesn’t even really need that, but it can benefit from it).
Secondly, most of those conditions are usually diagnosed (or supposed to be diagnosed) when they present a serious problem or disturbance that prevents the sufferer from having anything like a normal life. For instance, if you wash your hands 10 times each time you go to the sink, and have 10 locks on your door, then you probably have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. If you feel compelled to fix typos when you’re reading a text someone sent you, you probably don’t have OCD.
Thirdly, the situation I’m describing seems to touch on pretty much each of those medical conditions (as opposed to a single one), though never in a way that is severe enough to require treatment. Everyone does, in fact, but what I’m describing is a bit more acute. In that sense, I believe it’s not a diseased brain but simply a more “hyper” brain, that’s a bit more extreme in its variety than others, if you see what I mean. Hence the (arbitrary) moniker of “hyperbrain”.
However, I am not a doctor. If you think you have a mental disorder, do go and see a doctor.
Thanks. I actually got a little curious since you did mention attention deficit (and the threads you referred to on hacker news did refer to it as well). And I was looking at other data sources for what you were describing … not having got a moniker I could use to search up more, I thought the best thing would be to just straight away ask.
Of course since I do share practically every symptom you talked about, the things that came to mind were ADHD / hypomania (I must confess OCD didnt come to mind but OCPD did). I was attempting to do a pattern match exercise here.
Thanks again. Nice article. Will certainly keep up with the future posts.
Good series so far and quite applicable to my own life. Thanks and keep em coming!
While reading your two articles on ‘the hyperbrain’, I constantly had the lyrics for a Henry Rollins’ song playing in the back of my head:
“I’ll tell you things that you already know, so you can say ‘I really identify with you, so much!’”
Like many of the comments on HackerNews, I was really sceptical when reading it. First instinct was that this is some kind of ego-baiting. After going through it, though, I must say that somehow a lot of it resonated with me. And I do feel (possibly imagination or wishful thinking) that I recognize the symptoms in myself.
Thanks for posting this. I look forward to reading the next installments!
Daniel, I’ve just read the two posts (the first and this one), and I feel like my consciousness is talking to me, unbelievable. Both posts are very good, and I mean this in a totally subjective way, because I feel they are like a gift (I’m not alone!!). Thanks a lot, really. The advice was very welcome, it is important to read what you ‘kinda’ know already, but well written and clear, and from somebody that really knows you… ;)
Looking forward to the next, let’s see if I can shake off the “programmer’s block” once and for all (hey, not trying to put any pressure at all)…
please post the 3rd part now, I am so interested in it.
Thanks for the interest, everyone :-)
Kevin - patience! Third part will be coming up by the end of the week.
Illuminating series of articles so far. I definitely fit the profile, and am looking forward to learning more about how to improve productivity.
Someone mentioned INTP on the Myers-Briggs test. I’m INTP as well. Those interested in psychological typing systems may want to check out the Enneagram, particularly Type 5.
Please continue these articles.
Well, my boyfriend found those articles. And he said that match exactly with “what i am”. I agree, but actually i suffer of bipolar disorder… and i don’t really see the difference between an hyperbrain and a bipolar… except maybe the hyperbrain doesn’t want to kill himself when he is on a down time.
The great parts on your articles is when you explain how to deal with the bad sides of being a hyperbrain.
Hope to read you soon !
I do wonder if this hyperbrain theory is really just a way to trick lazy talented people with big egos into actually doing work, by making out that their sense of self-individualism and importance is actually warrented.
Well, that’s how I feel when I read that, because I’d like to believe I am one of these ‘hyperbrain’ people, but I’m more inclined to believe that I am just lazy but talented. I have had bursts of great ideas and experiments…but nothing groundbreaking; yet, always different to the norm.
facebook support group for hyperbrains? But the catch-22 is hyperbrains tend to or want to be wolves and hence are totally against facebook groups. Am I alone in wanting to be left alone, should we form a support group of some sort ?