1-Sentence-Summary: Elite Minds delves into the idea of success and teaches you how to train your mind to tap into its highest potential, adopt a winning mentality, embrace the gifts you’ve been given and improve mental toughness.
Read in: 4 minutes
Favorite quote from the author:
Our mind is the single most powerful tool in achieving performance of any kind. It’s an undebatable fact that the brain controls the body. Our mind is therefore responsible for everything the body does, whether it’s good or bad, much like software controls a computer, but is made of its hardware.
Training the mind to become an asset and participate in achieving success, rather than standing in the way of it, is essential in every field of activity. For this reason, Elite Minds by Stan Beecham talks about strengthening the brain to become the competitive edge that you need to get ahead in life, instead of letting it become an obstruction in your path.
Here are my three favorite lessons from the book:
- The chances of you suffering from a mistaken identity are quite high.
- Bad days and hardship on the way to success are a part of the process that you must accept.
- Kill fear and embrace your highest potential by taking that jump towards your dreams.
While this book is packed with many more useful lessons, we’ll stick to exploring these three in detail one by one and offer you the starting frame for your path to success.
Lesson 1: Achieving your potential might be delayed by your mistaken identity.
What if you haven’t even met your best self? Chances are, no one has! Leading this hypothesis further, it may look like no one really knows you, including yourself. However, that’s not a bad thing necessarily.
Not living your life to its highest potential is a waste of talent and it’ll likely make you feel miserable. That’s how you know that you don’t know your true self just yet. We are much more than we think we are. As humans, we have a purpose to fulfill, a mission to commit to, and talents to exploit.
However, we’re all brought to this world to fulfill this quest, not knowing how to, or even without knowing what the final destination is. One thing is for sure: until we reach that stage, we don’t really know ourselves. We rarely understand the power of a conscious mind.
Your mind is you, and that’s the only superpower you need to overcome obstacles and hardship, and therefore achieve your potential. Understanding that is the first step. And then strengthening your mind to look at the world objectively is the quest you must fulfill.
The fulfillment of all your goals is a direct result of your mind’s action over your body. When that stage is reached, you’ll finally find your true self. Anything below your best self is a mistaken identity, and you have to live with this idea in order to achieve success.
Lesson 2: Challenging times are part of the road to success.
The trend of perfectionism and high-performance anxiety is taking over the world, and it’s driving people insane, unfortunately. Perfectionism makes people think that nothing they’ll ever do is good enough for as long as they encounter failure and bad days. Wrong!
Those days are a natural part of the process. No successful individual got to the top without encountering hardship on the way. Even once you achieve your goal, you’ll still have bad days. It’s not part of your persona, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong. But it’s simply a universal rule of life.
So how many bad days are we talking about? Well, everyone’s life is different and we all must face our own demons. But studies on the best athletes in the world indicate that even they have between three and six bad days a month. The best thing to do about it is nothing! Accept failure as a lesson and hardship as a natural part of life. Free yourself from the curse of perfectionism!
Lesson 3: Greatness arrives in your life when you learn how to kill fear.
Fear is the biggest opponent in achieving our dreams. In life, other people often tell us to be rational, realistic, and careful. This type of advice prevents us from doing something courageous and great. No one made something memorable out of fear. And this concept goes back to ancient philosophy.
Aristotle believed that those who conquer their fear win in life. In fact, he said that courage is the virtue to live by. And that only by being brave in your endeavors and chasing your end goal you can reach the state of eudaimonia. A state of pure happiness, achievement, and self-fulfillment.
Therefore, another step to mental toughness is conquering fear and chasing your dreams despite the uncomfortable position it puts you in. Help yourself do so by looking for extrinsic motivation, getting excited about the journey ahead, and going for whatever scares you despite your instinct telling you otherwise.
Elite Minds Review
Elite Minds talks about the importance of training your mind to help you and stop self-sabotage by using mental toughness to achieve goals. Conquering fear, going for whatever it is that you want, achieving your higher purpose, and embracing failure, are all major aspects the book discusses.
Reading this remarkable piece will teach you valuable ideas from ancient philosophy to modern studies about the importance of training your mind and embracing the winning mindset in your journey to success.
Who would I recommend the Elite Minds summary to?
The 30-year-old person who feels stuck in the mundane and wants to live a more meaningful life, the 40-year-old who has achieved the average life they were striving for and wants to aim for their higher purpose, or the 33-year-old who is intrigued by the power of the brain in relation to sustained performance.
Last Updated on October 6, 2022
