Today I want to talk about the part of your brain that creates the future, why you shouldn’t be afraid to have a big vision, big goals for your business.
There’s a part of the brain unique to humans that we don’t use enough, but as business owners and entrepreneurs, we own evolution, the chance to use this part of the brain.
Entrepreneurs must nurture this part of the brain like a muscle. Not talking around in circles or a metaphor. I’m literally talking about a part of the brain that allows us to be entrepreneurs.
When you’re an entrepreneur, you have a vision for something that you think could be better or different and the more you use that, the bigger your visions become.
Maybe you’re struggling with paying the bills and that your income level isn’t quite at the height that you want it to be. Maybe you’re just struggling to keep your head above water in general.
If you’re running a business, maybe you feel that nothing seems to be getting better or easier. I certainly know that feeling for a long time. My business never seemed to grow further than I wanted to. It seemed to be at a stalemate. I do understand that problem.
There’s also a problem with finding the time to spend on visualization and strategy. We often talk about visualization. We often talk about strategy, but being able to find the time to actually sit down and do that is very difficult.
Particularly, if you’re struggling with income, if you’re struggling to keep your head above water, it seems like a bit of a waste of time to then think, “Well, I’m going to go and read a book or I’m going to meditate, or I’m going to spend some time on the strategy for my business.”
There’s a huge misconception that some people are just born with great visions with a great strategy with this kind of Herculean view of the world. I often think of Alexander the Great, people have him at this level where he was born into greatness. He was born to do great things. He was born with this vision.
I think a lot of people feel that you either have it or you don’t, and this is wrong. Your vision for a bigger future is not limited to just a handful of human beings that this was passed down to. That’s an excuse given to people.
We’re going to be talking about the part of the brain that creates vision, creates futures, creates a strategy, and the change in the world.
I’m not a neuroscientist. In fact, I’m not a particularly bright person overall.
A lot of the things that I’m going to be talking about in this video, I’ve learned from other people, scientists, research, authors, entrepreneurs, and experts.
I don’t really also understand the intricacies of parts of the brain and apologies if I get some of the pronunciations wrong. If I have this way off, please just let me know but as I understand it, there are essentially three parts of the brain.
The first model, I want to show you, is from a book called Pitch anything by Oren Klaff, a very, very powerful book.
We have the amygdala, which is the crocodile brain. This is the most primitive part of our brain. It’s so primitive that it’s been with us since before we were even humans before there were even trees on the planet.
We then have the mid part of the brain, which deals with doing actions and completing tasks in essentially using our body.
Then we have the neocortex, the part of the brain that only human beings have. This allows us to imagine things that have never happened. It allows us to imagine and create visions in our minds and futures that are impossible to realize.
We can imagine scenarios and things that animals can’t do. Animals are very good at doing stuff. They can even predict danger or through habits understand what’s going to happen, but they can’t create imagery in their mind. They can’t create futures.
Another one that I like is from the book Entrepreneur Revolution by Daniel Priestly.
The reptile brain, that’s the amygdala. Again, it essentially escapes and survives. That part is based on emotion and survival.
The monkey part basically is attracted to drama or recognizes drama/ social interactions, as well as understanding things that are familiar and tasks.
It likes to do things it knows already. This is again, the monkey brain allows us to take on tasks, do things with the body, repeat things over and over and over, find familiarity. The reptile brain is about safety, comfort.
The entrepreneurial part of the brain, the neocortex focuses on vision. It is able to create scenarios in your mind that don’t exist or can’t exist or haven’t existed. It’s able to take things that you can imagine and make them as real as they can in front of you.
This is the part of the brain to do with daydreaming, to do with strategy, to do with vision, to do with what could I change in the world, what could be in the future?
A book called Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu as well as James Robinson, which essentially talk about how the entrepreneurial part of the brain has been used for thousands of years.
What’s really interesting is we look at why has technology come on so far in the last hundred years, it’s accelerated at a pace far faster than ever before.
People have said, “Well, it’s for one thing or another.” The reality is there have been entrepreneurial ideas, similar to the industrial revolution, which is essentially production at mass scale without manual labor using factories and machines.
In the Greek times or Roman times and Turkish times, Babylonian times, the reality is it’s usually stamped out by political fear.
People who are in charge don’t like the idea of the common man using the entrepreneurial part of their brain because they are usually servants to hire.
A king doesn’t want his servants to come up with ways of making their job, their life easier because they believe that to be the best possible servant and to keep power remain, other people can’t also have power.
The reason the industrial revolution was so important and the reason it is sprung predominantly from England and then spread over to American and much of Western.
There was less power from Kings and Lords at the time to withhold the ability for people to use the entrepreneurial part of their brain. When people came up with the idea of factories and mass production, there wasn’t a lot that Kings could do about it.
Whereas, in many times during more ancient times in human history, Kings and Lords and rulers and emperors, could literally just destroy and kill people who had these ideas. It’s not uncommon.
The book has a lot of examples of people who did come up with ideas that would make farming and agriculture, transport, and communication much easier and much faster and not only right.
The idea stamped out because they were worried about losing power because as soon as common people get more technology, they get more power and they will lose power. They lose income.
It goes into a huge amount of examples of this, but the person was often killed as well as punished. This is not new. This is not something we’ve just come up with.
We’ve been experiencing this for thousands of years and it’s only in the last hundred years and that’s not even across the entire globe.
It’s most of the globe we’re allowed and encouraged to use that. Our education system has to keep up with that.
You have the real chance to exercise this ability. You have a real chance to exercise this part of the brain. You can use the entrepreneurial part of your brain and begin to visualize and spend time strategizing.
This isn’t just a thing some people can do it, some people can’t. It’s literally a part of the brain that allows you to be capable of it.
In my previous video, when I talked about daydreaming and how you have the power to daydream, and how it was incredibly important.
This is something you should be doing, imagining the future. Imagining what could be.
What’s really interesting is the more you do it, the more accustomed you’ll be to it and the more you’ll allow yourself to think of these mad futures where no one else is able to create this kind of change in the world and you’ll be more comfortable with thinking about it.
