Let’s start with an astonishing story that one of my best friends, Brian Lee, told himself when he was a young army officer that changed his outlook on life.
This is a simple story that begins with my joining the educational establishment. There was a sergeant who spoke sarcastically. “Welcome to the boot camp. What we’re going to do now is take a little tour around. I’m asking you to put on your uniforms and military boots. Oh, incidentally, I want you to carry your small backpacks as well. Also, put the things I will count in your bag…”
The sergeant counted a lot of supplies, and all that stuff was pretty heavy. “I want you to do these things in ten minutes and meet me here for ten minutes. We’re going to do a little jog on the tank track.”
The tank track here was arranged so that the tanks could train on rough terrain. There were many mounds eight to ten meters high. We had to run with our heavy bags on this road. We ran the course, came back exhausted, and the sergeant said, “The point of this few miles of rig running was to test if you had average form. I’m sure you’re happy that you’ve been able to achieve this,” he said.
And everyone cried out, their chests heaving, “We’re so happy.” “Well then, we’re going to run one more lap to show you how fit you really are”. No one could say anything; because in such cases you cannot say anything; even if you are about to pass out or die. And we continued. It had been 45 minutes when we ran the course and came back, distraught and exhausted. Everyone was leaning against each other in order to be able to stand. “Here you are!” said the sergeant. “You really have no idea what you can do. I’m sure you’re all very surprised. You have proven that you can do at least twice as much when you think about doing it before you start running! You are all here and in good shape. Do we agree?”
“Yeah, right, we’re all here and we ran two laps before we even thought about running a lap,” we muttered.
“Well, let’s go half a lap before we go and have our tea,” he said. Everyone thought he was joking, but he wasn’t kidding. He took us to another road and we took another half lap. When we got back, we were completely exhausted.” Look guys, the third lap we took has a really simple message. Whatever you think about what you can do, you can do so much more. For some of you, doing this may mean doing more than half, for some doing 10% more, and for others doing ten times more. You’ve done two and a half times more than you thought. This means an increase of 250%. For many of you, a 300% increase is entirely possible. You proved that this is possible, even though we were very ready. This is something we can do for yourself. Now let’s go and have our teas”.
It was that simple. Later I understood the real message better. The idea was simple: Humans are capable of doing much more than they believed they could do when someone came along and forced us to ascend to higher levels.
Tony Buzan – “The Power of Physical Intelligence”
