The Mindset That Unlocks Your Full Potential | Dr. Gio Valiante

**Gio Valiante** (0:00)
If you go through life over-indexing and caring too much what people think about you, that's your ceiling.

**Shane Parrish** (0:09)
I wanna start with something you said last time we talked, which is most people are underperforming relative to their ability. Walk me through that.

**Gio Valiante** (0:18)
There's a term that I came across many years ago called the Central Governor Hypothesis, and essentially conveys the fact that most people underperform, and any observer of the human condition, I think going back to forever, agrees that that's probably true. Now, why is that? Well, you have to delve into human biology and genetics and understand. So what's the purpose of the brain?
Generally, to keep you alive long enough to reproduce, right?
At a fundamental biological level. But we're not designed to overperform, we're designed to survive. And so overperformance or achieving one's potential requires sort of a cognitive decision to push oneself there, right? So to illustrate it, I think a common illustration is if you look at marathon runners or any extreme athlete.
Marathon runners, triathletes, these are people who design their lives around pushing human potential. And so it begs the question, well, then if these are people who are even the ultra marathoners, people do five marathons over the course of five weeks or five days, whatever they do, how many of them push themselves to the point of death? How many people push their limits? The answer is typically it's a very small percentage, single digits.
If you have five rounding numbers, five million marathoners, maybe five or 10 die in a year. And most of the times because they get hit by a car or some other condition, but it's not because they push themselves too hard. They cross the finish line and they're still alive. And they go and they carbo load and so forth. Now, why is that? Because the brain has built in mechanisms to shut us down so that we don't do self-harm, right? And so those are the same mechanisms that drive level for human beings, you know, govern our conduct. So underperformance is built into the human condition so that we can stay alive. And that's why, you know, they do these really interesting studies with sort of single cell organisms, where you put them in a petri dish and you make the conditions uncomfortable, right? So you put these various, they use various types of organisms and you make it hot on one side of the plate and they gravitate to comfort. You make it too cold, they grow. So really at a fundamental biological level, we are all programmed to seek comfort and safety. Well, comfort and safety are the exact opposite of overperformance or realizing one's potential. And so therein lies the starting point, sort of table stakes. If you want to be great at something, the old adage is you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable, but that's something you have to train yourself to do. And so the Central Governor Hypothesis suggests that, yeah, there's a governor in the human brain, and that governor is built structurally by a couple of things. Number one, the survival instinct. Number two, the desire for comfort.
Number three, the desire at a fundamental biological level for our DNA to replicate itself. There's this view from geneticists that we as humans, we talk about human agency. Human agency being defined as the degree to which we have conscious control over our lives, right? Agency being acting on your own behalf. The fundamental question is, do human beings have free will, right? William James and the pragmatists asked that question. Again, most observers of the human condition suggest that we have less control over ourselves than we believe we do. So what did William James conclude? He said, my first act of free will is to choose to believe in free will. And if you really think about that, and you go down that rabbit hole, and then you look at the studies, people think that they're thinking where they're generally rearranging their prejudices. And so the few acts of agency we really have, one of them is to decide our path, and then cultivate the habits which then become unconscious to push us out to the tail end of the curve in any domain. But again, we all default to underperformance. So to become really, really good at something, requires an act of agency to choose to become really, really good at something. That's table stakes. That's the opening bit. And then from there, that's where the work begins. So yeah.

**Shane Parrish** (4:46)
So if I choose to become good at something, I'm going to be good at something, like what is one practical thing that people can take away from this, to change in their life, to help them realize their potential?