How to Leverage Maximum Potential out of Limitations

Trends and the New Frontier

I have always been fascinated by trends. In my view, it is impossible to innovate without paying close attention to trends. In 1990, when I first began training professional actors, performers and voice artists in Hollywood, there was an incredibly high demand for superior training from performing artists.

The trend was the culture and the culture was the trend.

Everyone knew how invaluable it was to have a good coach in your corner and how important it was to spend at least four or five years getting in touch with your real talent and compete for jobs.

Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman and so many others, including myself, spent years and years with Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen, Stella Adler and the handful of amazing teachers, still alive in the 80s in New York.

After three decades of coaching professional acting, public speaking and business communication, I have arrived at yet another crucial quantum for the new decade.

I am thrilled to share it with you explicitly in this essay. By 2010 the fast-food culture was such that your average student barely spent a couple of months with a coach…and it was so for all coaches in LA or New York. “Acting training was basically for losers”. Of course, it wasn’t true, but people follow trends more than anything else.

In 2003, when I created Speakers and Artists International, Inc., the demand for quality and innovative public speaking training was unbelievable. Naturally, as technology and globalization expanded, everyone wanted to “look good and sound good”. It was an amazing ride and business exploded!

By 2016, the “thrill was gone, baby!” Things had become so much less formal with YouTube and the likes. The trend caught on and now, in 2020, it isn’t so dramatic if you don’t sound polished (so the cultural trend says). The times and illiteracy in matters of communication cover up the lack of skills, proper diction, great body language and talent.

Fickle times

Since the crash of 2008, it seems everyone is on the run, and culturally, we “trend” not to focus on things that just a few years prior, were deemed essential. Fickle, fickle, fickle we are collectively.

“Keep your friends close but the trends closer.” That’s what innovation is all about in my world—you must pay attention to trends and what is really going on, from a higher perspective and a wider scale.

If only the Nokia people had paid attention to what the masses were going to trend towards, perhaps they would not have died so suddenly, after years of owning close to 95% of the world’s cellular phone market. In 2007, when Apple introduced the iPhone, it was all over. And the sad CEO was crying “What did we do wrong?” What a wake-up call!

What is an absolute?

Along with being a student of trends, I am also an even greater student of absolutes. Not everything in life is an absolute, like gravity or Earth’s rotation and revolution around the sun.

You may argue that they are relative absolutes but for now, it’s fairly wise to accept the notion, wouldn’t you agree? Absolutes are so powerful and reliable i.e. that you are alive right now is an absolute; but that you will be tomorrow is not.

For instance, to assume that you know what is going to happen to you or in the world tomorrow is not an absolute. It is a foolish speculation at best, and the same goes with the stock market. There are still too many of us who confuse speculation or hope with reality.

In matters of personal growth and development, certain fundamentals rule as well. Concerning public speaking and matters of thriving in the world, there are essential absolutes at play. I got into the habit of calling them dynamics; some are visible and some are not.

For example, you cannot communicate well if you listen to your mind instead of your intention to get your message or feelings across. It is true in any circumstance.

It represents an absolute and any attempt to stray from this absolute spells disaster on the spot. As examples, acting, painting and singing are ruled by the same absolute principle. Hence, the famous “get out of your head” slogan.

Don’t mess with absolutes

Absolutes are not to be messed with, or you will pay an enormous price. They survive trends as well. What I love about absolutes is that they are not moral in any way. Here’s another example: all living things must mutate to survive; it certainly includes companies as well as individuals.

Any relationship or partnership that does not adapt to change and does not constantly innovate simply falls off the cliff of progress into the hungry abyss of none-existence. We had to move out of the caves as an example.

Again, there is nothing moral about absolutes. This is how Nokia died a very sudden and sad death before Apple took over. Incidentally, Steve Jobs was a total “freak” about innovation, design and adaptation. He wanted to be told he was wrong every single day! We remember Apple’s successes but not the many failures. It seems like Steve was born and lived inside an “absolute spaceship”.

Progress is always born out of limitations

Mutation is always born out of limitations as well. It is an absolute. We are often too busy bitching about limitations instead of embracing them as the true treasures of our next quantum growth. The fish could not have existed on land without a mutation and that problem was solved through countless limitations and confrontation with the elements, which are indeed incubators for massive quantum change.

For instance, Neanderthals had the bow but never invented the arrow. Cro-Magnon was another mutation and these strategic creatures did invent the arrow, while Neanderthals disappeared really fast. Cro-Magnon was the first modern man so to speak, it’s quite something to contemplate. The development of the neocortex was indeed a mutation born out of limitations.

Limitations are the prerequisites for transformation on the mundane plane, and it also represents an absolute. Unfortunately, we are not properly educated, so we toss this kind of knowledge as “occult knowledge” only a Shaman or a witch can transmit in Peru on one of your Ayahuasca trips. Or, we usually see limitations as insurmountable problems or a reason to feel disappointment or frustration. Think of the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, the two American aviation pioneers inventing and flying the world's first motor-operated airplane out of unthinkable limitations.

Beyond limitations

Houdini is a great example for understanding limitations and their essential place in growth and development. Let’s imagine for a moment that you are a prisoner of your limited thoughts, a sort of stellar Houdini, trapped in a mental trip or mental delusion that your life is not great or that your problems will not go away. Houdini is tied in a tank filled with water, and you are in an intellectual delusion—not an absolute. Hence, this new Houdini premise goes like this: to forget that you can conquer and surmount all obstacles is to remember your prison, which are the negative thought patterns you seem to be trapped inside of.

Like Houdini, imagine that you purposely put yourself in that mental prison to demonstrate, like him, that you can get out of it. Houdini could get himself out of the tank because he (his deep conviction to himself) was not “in the tank”—he was seeing himself out of the water and ropes from another vantage point, if you follow the logic. Therefore, as a mental prisoner, the moment you remember what you are, you are no longer trapped in your mind. In other words, you remember that being trapped is not an absolute and that the limitations actually demand a quantum mutation, so to speak.

What is a quantum?

A quantum is literally a creative explosion out of enough limitations to drive you absolutely crazy...but not completely, it is a metaphorical yet highly creative pressure cooker, strong enough for something new to jump out unexpectedly. Like Houdini, it does require some “magic” but I hope you see that it is worth considering.

We all create our own prisons…but then we forget we did that. Life can be a game or a very serious plague; the choice is more often than not, ours.

Self-knowledge is becoming an absolute

More than anything else, my partner Amy and I have come to realize that it is self-knowledge that will sit on the throne of successful enterprise in the future. We decided to make it a full-on coaching and training venture as we have been experimenting with it for quite some time. You can see a preview on our new site.

Individual self-knowledge will rule in the future, but it will be quantum knowledge, not ancient knowledge, as we are not the same people we were in the 20th Century, let alone in the 17th and prior. 20 years today is at least 100 years of evolution, relative to times before the year 2000.

Thank you for reading. I will explore self-knowledge, intuitive awareness and emotional intelligence in my next article and look forward to sharing it with you.

Philippe Stonebeck