Raising the bar

Imagine two six-foot people holding an imaginary high jump bar at head height. We'd like you to find three easy ways to get over the bar. 
Now imagine that the bar has been raised from six feet to 100 feet in the air. Your next challenge is to think of five-plus ways to get over the 100-foot bar. 

Could you take a moment or two to do this? Never mind about logic or any of the other potential constraints. Stretch your mind to come up with solutions. Draw two columns on a page, and in the left-hand column, headed six-foot bar, capture your three ideas; in the right-hand column, headed 100-foot bar, capture your five-plus ideas. 

In 99.9 per cent of cases, the answer is no. 

Would the ideas that get you over the 100-foot bar also get you over the six-foot bar? The answer is yes, every single time. Now, here comes the entire purpose of the exercise, wrapped up in one question:

Where are you setting your bar? 

Are you setting your bar at six feet and therefore having six-foot thoughts daily, or are you setting your bar at 100 feet and thinking openly and creatively about how you can achieve your goals? 

Stop, pause and reflect on the question for a moment. Explore it, letting it penetrate deep into your psyche and the very essence of your being. 

If you’ve set your bar at six feet, it’s similar to thinking from a tunnel perspective, seeing only what is right in front of you. At 100 feet, you’re feeling not from a tunnel but a funnel perspective, which opens out to a wide-open space, genuinely seeing all around you. You’re thinking outside the constraints and seeing far greater possibilities. 

And isn’t it interesting that the higher you set the bar, the more creative you become in thinking of ways to get over it? Did your ideas get more creative? Creativity, imagination and removing constraints allow you to free your mind of limitations.

You could argue that you were asked for three ideas for the six-foot bar and five-plus ideas for the 100-foot bar, and therefore, you were asked for more 100-foot solutions. And there’s an essential reason for this.  What difference does it make when you add the word ‘plus’ to the end of the number? It removes limiting beliefs. 

Many people are moving through life, creating ‘false’ limiting beliefs and false ceilings about what they can and can’t achieve. What limiting beliefs have you created for yourself, either consciously or unconsciously? 

If you improve your quality of thinking by 100 per cent PLUS, what difference would it make to your life.? Does it make a difference to the results you achieve? Absolutely. 

Sometimes, when we've shared this exercise, a sceptic might say, ‘Ah, but you’re missing a key point here; the ideas that get you over the 100-foot bar are more expensive, and some are not practical.’ 

The answer is simple: the purpose of the exercise has nothing to do with the complexity or cost of the ideas and strategies put forward. It has everything to do with the level of thinking in the input bowl. Change your thinking, and you change the game! 

The fundamental principle is that the great advantage we have as human beings over other animal species is that we have 100 per cent control over our thoughts. 

Many people are searching for the magic key to unlock the door to the source of power, yet we all have the key already in our hands. And we can use it the moment we learn to control our thinking.

Think of it this way: if you aim for six feet in life, where are you likely to reach? Five feet? Seven feet? Somewhere around six feet, that’s for sure. But if you aim for 100 feet, where are you likely to get to? 20 feet? 52 feet? 78 feet? One thing’s for sure: you’ll be above six feet. 

If there is only one thing you take away from this article, high achievers, whatever their chosen field, think BIG. They have proactively programmed their mentality to daily/weekly/monthly/yearly 100-foot thinking. The great news is that they are no different from you. You have the same potential and the same opportunity. 

You may not be familiar with the term ‘Fosbury Flop’, but if you’ve ever seen someone do the high jump, it’s the backward body arc that athletes lean into as they leap over the bar. It is the standard technique for today’s high jumpers. But it wasn’t always this way. 

The technique was named after Dick Fosbury, an Ameri- can athlete who won the gold medal in the 1968 Summer Olympics using his invented technique. In the years that followed, it became the standard. Before 1968, every jumper was using a technique that turned out to be very inefficient. And yet they all did it, year in and year out, clearing the bar by jumping forward.

Dick Fosbury was the only athlete to go over the bar backwards in the 1968 Games, and he caused a significant stir when he did. Athletes began to pay attention, and by 1972, 28 out of 40 high jumpers were doing the Fosbury Flop. In 1980, that number rose to 23 out of 28. 

The biggest reason for the change, which caused athletes to jump higher than ever, was one person’s willingness to ask probing questions, try out a new idea, and work hard to perfect it. Someone dared to change the rules. 

Dick Fosbury is the epitome of the 100-foot thinker and the kind of person who can (and did) change the world of high jumping. 

The New Zealand All Blacks rugby team has had similar success, rewriting the rules of what is possible and setting 100-foot standards for themselves – individually and as a team.

Evidence of the All Blacks’ excellence is that they have won 84 per cent of their games since 2004 and 75 per cent since 1901. That’s a remarkable record, unrivalled by any other rugby team. It’s no wonder they are revered as one of the greatest sporting teams ever. 

Their secret is a little different, however. While they believe in great rugby and look for great rugby players to join their team, the entry barrier – the 100-foot bar – is about something else entirely. The All Blacks believe in whanau, a sense of extended family, as their team’s core value. They know you win games by playing great rugby, but they think you can only play great rugby by being a part of a meaningful team. 

Whanau is a deep-rooted core value that demands a way of thinking, acting and being from each player who dons the black jersey, and it is demonstrated through rituals such as ‘sweeping the sheds’. At the end of each match, win or lose, the All Blacks players clean the changing room themselves, ensuring they leave it better than they found it. Sweeping the sheds is a demonstration of whanau. If you don’t have it, you are deemed to lack the humility required to be a team member. 

Their purpose, mantra, and reason for being is ‘inspiring and unifying New Zealanders’.This is played out in their personal standards of excellence – their 100-foot bar – where all players put the shirt first and commit to always leaving it in a better place. 

Some might say it’s a coincidence that they win as many games as they do, but their success is no accident. It’s a conscious, deliberate choice built on a solid foundation and core of unwavering personal excellence standards and 100-foot thinking. 

Steve Jobs of Apple believed in setting 100-foot bars. Under his leadership, Apple successfully disrupted one industry after another, from publishing in the 1980s to music, telephony and mobile computing in the early 2000s.

As Jobs frequently saw it, the challenge was that customers were awash with solutions, products, ideas, and services created by people thinking 6-foot thoughts. Consequently, it was just enough to be helpful but never enough to be inspiring or revolutionary. By applying 100-foot thinking, he catapulted Apple so high that competitors could never match it. From the day Apple entered the music industry, it dominated it. From the day it entered the mobile phone industry, it set the rules based on 100-foot thinking. 

Another example of 100-foot thinking is Sara Blakely, the billionaire entrepreneur who initially planned a career as an attorney but reconsidered after scoring too low on the Law School Admission Test. After a short stint working at Disney, Blakely accepted a job with office supply company Danka, where she sold fax machines door to door. With 5,000 dollars of savings, she started Spanx, an American intimate apparel company. Forbes now lists her as the 93rd most powerful woman in the world.

Richard Branson is another excellent example of a 100-foot thinker. With his Virgin Group of companies, he has moved from one industry to the next, disrupting entire industries, improving products and services, and transforming the customer experience in every bold move. 

There is a list of more great 100-foot thinkers whose names you know because of their exceptional achievements, which shine through their excellence standards. Elon Musk set himself the goal of minimising climate change and has made massive advances in clean energy over the past decade in pursuit of that 100-foot (perhaps even 1,000-foot) goal.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook set himself the goal of creating a community where people could share information with the entire world and so far has a user base of more than two billion in less than a decade and a half.

The list could go on; Henry Ford, Dale Carnegie, Sir James Dyson, Enzo Ferrari, Diane Hendricks, one of the USA’s wealthiest female entrepreneurs and Arianna Huffington come readily to mind.

The most notable names in politics – Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., Margaret Thatcher and Mahatma Gandhi – are all household names because they set their standards of excellence in leadership at 100 feet. They all have their legacies, and their achievements will be studied and recognised for years.