Making a Quantum Leap
December 18th, 2004 by Steve Pavlina
Email this article to a friend
Since 1992, I’ve been pursuing personal growth with a passion. I’ve attended seminars, listened to audio programs, and read hundreds of books in this field. I’ve easily spent many thousands of dollars and invested thousands of hours on such pursuits. And one thing I can tell you from all of this effort is that personal growth is very, very hard.
Many books, audio programs, and self-help gurus promote the quick fix mentality. Read this book and all your time management problems will vanish. Attend this seminar and you’ll be the next self-made millionaire. This kind of marketing is unfortunate because most people who buy these products will achieve only modest results with them. Then disappointment and disillusionment set in. Some people feel they must be defective if they can’t meet such unrealistic expectations. Maybe I have a genetic predisposition to being lazy. Others conclude the whole personal development field itself is just a sham. [Insert guru name here] is only in it for the money — none of his/her ideas really work.
I’ll say it again. Personal growth is very, very hard. If you think you can read one book or article on time management and instantly erase procrastination and disorder from your life forever, that’s an extremely unrealistic expectation. While a single book can potentially lead you to a big change, most won’t. When you experience a big change in your life, it’s probably the result of a long chain of events, of which reading a particular book was only a small but perhaps critical part.
Personal growth experiences often occur in the form of a quantum leap — a strong and radical shift from one mindset to another. There may be a number of small steps leading up to that leap, but at some point there is a big change, and it happens in an instant. You go to work and suddenly realize you’re going to quit your job; even before you tell your boss, you know you’re certain and that there’s no going back. You decide to ask your boyfriend or girlfriend to marry you after you’ve been together for years. You decide you’re done smoking, and you quit for life. These decisions can happen in a mere second – a moment of clarity suddenly hits you, and you know what you have to do. A quantum leap occurs, and from that moment on, you’re never the same again. Some of these leaps appear more gradual than others, but virtually all of them can be traced back to a moment of decision. At some point you made a decision to change. And even before you manifest this change in your physical reality, you immediately know you’re not the same anymore.
It’s rare that reading a single book will produce a quantum leap. Quantum leaps require a large amount of consistent input and energy. When you decide to quit your job or break off your relationship or move to a new city, it may be the result of months or years of dissatisfaction. It may also occur after lots of time spent thinking positively about what life will be like after the shift. Both positive and negative factors can help generate a quantum leap.
Most of the time when people pursue personal growth, they simply don’t invest enough time and energy in a consistent direction to achieve a quantum leap. Maybe you’ve read a book on getting organized, and while you were reading it, the positive energy you experienced moved you closer to making a leap. You felt fairly certain at the time that this was going to work. But then you finished the book (or got sidetracked and didn’t finish it), and the impact of the book gradually faded. You never reached the quantum leap that allowed you to break through to a new level of order in your life. Over a period of days or weeks, your old pattern reasserted itself. Sound familiar?
But it wasn’t the book or the ideas themselves that failed you. The problem was that you didn’t invest enough sustained energy in the same direction to achieve the quantum leap. You never reached the point of no return. Reading a single book was only a small, short-term nudge, albeit in the right direction.
In order for a rocket launched from earth to reach outer space, the rocket must exert a sufficient amount of sustained force to overcome the earth’s gravity. If the rocket’s engines cut out prematurely, the rocket will crash back to earth. Just as it can take a massive amount of sustained force to put a rocket into orbit, recognize that there are certain areas of your life where you may need a large force to knock you into a higher state. Small efforts over a long period of time may do absolutely nothing for you. You can read one time management book a year and be no better at your managing your time.
So what does work? How do you achieve a quantum leap? You need to exert some effort in a particular direction where you want to grow, and you need to consistently sustain it until you achieve a quantum leap. If you stop short, you’ll likely fall right back to where you started. So first of all, if you’re going to target a new quantum leap, you need to commit to sustaining that effort until you hit the leap.
This is why I say personal growth is very hard. Effecting a quantum leap is tough work. It requires a strong force of sustained effort, and you can’t let up until you hit the leap. If you get sidetracked for too long, you have to start over again.
But the bright side is that after you make the leap, you can rest for a bit. You’ve reached a higher state, and you’re going to stay there by default, just as a satellite in orbit will remain in orbit. Sure the orbit may slowly decay, but if that happens it will be over a long period of time, and only a minimal investment of energy is needed to adjust course and sustain your new orbit indefinitely. Quitting smoking may be very difficult. But if you’ve been a nonsmoker for years, it doesn’t take nearly as much effort to remain a nonsmoker; you may need to make some adjustments along the way, but they’ll be minor required to the initial energy required to quit.
Suppose you want to lose weight. You read a book on weight loss and get motivated to lose weight. You join a gym and start working out. After a few weeks, you’ve lost five pounds. But you get busy with work and gradually stop going to the gym. Crash! You gain all the weight back plus a couple more pounds. A few months later you try again. You get inspired and buy some new exercise equipment. Again you use it for several weeks and lose some weight, and again something takes you away from this habit and you gain all the weight back. The next year you join a weight loss organization, adopt their diet plan, and start going to weekly meetings. But after a dozen sessions, you drift again and gain back all the weight you lost. You’ve invested a lot of time, money, and energy into this goal, but it wasn’t enough to hit a quantum leap.
So how would you pursue such a goal as a quantum leaper?
The exact manner of pursuing this goal is up to you of course. But here’s are some ideas that will help you achieve a quantum leap:
- Immerse yourself in your goal. Get clear on your exact goal, and write it down in your own words. Post your goal somewhere you’ll see it every day; I often use the text of my goals as screen savers or write them on my marker board.
- Educate yourself on what it will take to achieve your goal. And I mean really educate yourself to the point where you become an expert. Keep pouring knowledge into your head until you succeed — continuously. Don’t just read one book on the subject. Read 10. Then read 10 more. Then 10 more. Listen to audio programs. Talk to experts. Never let up on your self-education.
- Alter your environment to support the achievement of your goal. This subject was already explored in a previous entry.
- Consciously change the people you spend the most time with such that your goal is supported by those around you. For details read this entry.
One reason people fail to achieve a quantum leap is that they make only a meager effort in these four areas. They don’t get really clear about what they want and keep their goals in their face every day. They invest only a few hours in education instead of several hundred. They maintain an environment that fails to reinforce their new identity. And they continue to cling to people who hold them back. Year after year they remain stuck in unfulfilling careers, unhealthy bodies, stagnant relationships, and incongruent belief systems.
In my own life, I’ve experienced many of these leaps:
- employee -> independent contractor -> retail game developer -> shareware game developer -> game publisher -> speaker/writer (in progress)
- SAD (Standard American Diet) -> vegetarian -> vegan (with some branches going into raw foodism, alkalarian diets, whole foods, and macrobiotics)
- single -> dating -> living together -> engaged -> married -> father of one -> father of two
- Catholicism -> atheism -> agnosticism -> various new agey stuff -> ? -> Buddhism -> ? -> Bajoran wormhole aliens -> ? -> objectivism -> ? -> ? (the ?s are belief systems that can’t really be labeled)
None of these shifts happened by accident; each leap was a consciously chosen step… well… all except “father of two” — whoops!
If I’d never experienced any of these quantum leaps, I’d be an employed Catholic bachelor who eats the standard American diet. And that’s not necessarily any “better” or “worse” than my current situation (OK, the diet part is a lot better). I don’t think in terms of trying to reach some kind of final destination though. What’s important to me is experiencing the path itself: having been single AND married AND a father, having experienced lots of different belief systems, having worked in a business AND having owned one. In some areas there’s a logical progression; for example, I keep shifting careers to those that give me more and more freedom and which increase my ability to contribute. But in other areas, I find the most growth by experiencing a lot of different perspectives in no particular order, such as in my spiritual growth pursuits.
Yes it’s a lot of hard work to achieve a quantum leap in any of these areas, but I think the alternative of stagnation is worse. You can pursue the quick fix methodology and fall flat on your face over and over. Or you can accept that the change you want is going to be hard and that it may take years to achieve, but it will be worth it. And best of all, once you’ve gone through a few quantum leaps, you may learn to enjoy the process of building up to the next one. It’s deeply satisfying to look back on your previous state of being and see how much you’ve grown.
December 18th, 2004 at 8:18 am
Seeing “Bajoran wormhole aliens” mentioned as a label-able religion…
Reinout
December 18th, 2004 at 3:31 pm
Great articles Steve, I am very thankful for them. I am just curious, are you eating macrobiotic? And what’s your last religion leap?
December 18th, 2004 at 4:01 pm
Can you describe the issues you had with Objectivism that caused you to reject it? I’ve only recently discovered this school of thought myself and find that many of it’s tenents are things that I’ve independently discovered for myself. However, I only have a cursory understanding of Objectivism, so I don’t know for sure that I’d agree with all of its beliefs.
December 19th, 2004 at 4:51 pm
I don’t currently follow the macrobiotic diet, although I do often eat a lot of macrobiotic foods. I got introduced to macrobiotics through Real Food Daily, a great vegan/macrobiotic restaurant in Santa Monica, California. In fact, I’ll be eating there later this week when I return to L.A. for Xmas. The actor Dirk Benedict wrote a book basically explaining how this diet saved his life: Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy. I followed it perfectly for a while a few years ago, but I couldn’t detect any measurable improvements over my base vegan diet.
I don’t really have a religion that could be named. Do I believe in a higher power? Yes, because I’ve seen evidence of some kind of force at work that appears to be beyond the physical world as I understand it. Is it a conscious God though or is it something more like “the force” from Star Wars (i.e. an invisible ether of consciousness that humans can tap into, but don’t quite know how very well yet)? That I don’t know. Dr. Wayne Dyer often refers to this higher power as “the source,” which seems a lot like “the force.”
I really liked objectivism (i.e. Ayn Rand’s philosophy) when I first encountered it. Atlas Shrugged is one of my all-time favorite fiction books, and The Fountainhead wasn’t bad either. But I dropped this belief system quickly when I realized that if everyone was an objectivist, this planet would be utterly doomed. Objectivism is essentially a death sentence for humanity if you think about it. Ayn Rand makes some good points, but they were heavily influenced by her encounters with communism, and in her time the philosophy of objectivism would have seemed a lot more logical than it does today. I think objectivism is too much of a reactive philosophy (against communism) instead of a proactive one. Environmentally the planet is in much worse shape today than it was during Rand’s time; if she were alive today, I think even she would have a hard time maintaining her original philosophy.
December 20th, 2004 at 6:31 am
Interesting post Steve. You might want to further explore the processes of energy and attention. As an expectant parent you probably experienced what I call “baby radar.” When you’re expecting, suddenly babies are everywhere. Baby stuff is all around you and it always has been, but you never really noticed it before — I guess because we’re built to filter out irrelevant inputs. I find this phenomenon holds no matter the subject. Try it with something like buying a car. Having decided you like the looks of the New Beetle, suddenly you see them all the time…. I think this may be what MC Escher was getting at in some of his art, for example where he shows a city scene, but a bubble of detail protrudes into our view.
Unfortunately, an idea or fixation doesn’t have to be “good” or valid in order to become the main item on our radar. When someone says “she’s a witch!” people suddenly become alert to anything that looks or sounds like “witchcraft.” We saw the same thing in the mid-80’s with satanic-kidnapping-rituals, recovered memories of childhood abuse, etc.
The challenge for those interested in personal growth is, I think, to pick the things to focus on, and sustain that focus for long enough to achieve escape velocity.
I also find interesting your recent thinking about choosing the people with whom we associate. As a parent, I’m absolutely convinced that you act like those that you hang out with. (And I vaguely recall certain conversations with my own parents . . .) I agree with you that as adults we almost never conciously choose our associations, but that we would benefit from doing so. I found at one point in my life that, while I was very focused on personal growth, my friends and associates were pretty scornful of anything that smelled like “self improvement.” Heaven forbid that they should catch me reading “7 Habits” etc.
Is that one of the things you are currently experiencing with your shift in business and personal focus?
December 20th, 2004 at 8:33 am
The idea of “baby radar” is also called the RAC (reticular activating system). I experience this phenomenon all the time. What we focus on expands, which is one reason I recently pushed clarity/focus to be my top value.
December 25th, 2004 at 2:27 am
Please excluse my poor English. I’m not a native speaker, and I’m very tired right now so I may make mistakes.
Thank you for a truly excellent article. I shall certainly use information from it for my new year’s resolution. In fact, I think it’s one of the best articles you written.
I have myself experienced several quantum leaps. The secret to experiencing them is to work very hard in one direction.
However the weigth loss ideas in the article are not very appropriate.
For people who are not very overweight (for example one has 5 KGs he wants to shed) they are true. Just make the effort, shed the 5 KG, and then maintain your weight.
However, for someone who is very overweight, it’s very hard to lose the required amount of weight. For example I have to lose over 50-60 KG (I think that in pounds that’s about 100 pounds).
The first 5 KG are easy. The next 5 KG is harder, and maintainance is also harder. Losing 15 KG is extremely hard, and losing 25 KG requires super-hero like will to achieve and maintain.
The problem with weight loss is that in very overweight people, maintainance after a large weight loss is extremely difficult.
The more you slim, the more maintainance effort is necessary to maintain the new weight afterwards.
If the only task I have to do is getting thin, then I would succeed. But I also have to work, etc.. and this takes away a part of my will, so less remains for maintainance, and I leap back.
Also the more diet attempts a fat person has made, the harder it is to diet and the harder it is to maintain the new low weight after a diet.
I’m telling you this in order for you to see that the weight loss example is not really a good example.
Why is this text area so small? Please enlarge it. It’s very hard to edit text in a text area that only holds 4 lines!
December 25th, 2004 at 9:02 am
The reason weight loss seems so hard and maintenance so difficult is that overweight people don’t make health and weight maintenance a top priority. That may be a strong statement, but in my experience I’ve never met a chronically overweight person who made weight loss their #1 priority. Something else is always more important — often it’s work. You just implied above that work is more important to you than losing weight, for example. So it wouldn’t surprise me if your work results exceed your health results for the time being.
Overweight people often claim to have no time for weight loss, yet if you look at their actual behavior, they have plenty of time — they just put so many other things first. They somehow manage to keep up with their favorite TV shows. They go to work. They spend time with family and friends. If I was 50-60 kg overweight, goodness — I wouldn’t watch TV at all. I wouldn’t read any books except for those on the subjects of diet and exercise. I would put my career and family and social life on the back burner and exercise at least 2-3 hours per day to get the weight off. I would negotiate agreements with anyone that would be affected by this. Being 50+ KG overweight is just too serious; that would mean my very life is being threatened. That’s not something that can be put on the back burner even to income. If someone is holding a gun to your head and threatening to kill you, you don’t say, “Hang on, I have to finish this project first,” or “Sorry, I’m on the way to a family celebration.”
But of course, obese people don’t take health this seriously. Their standards are so low that being obese is acceptable, perhaps just mildly annoying. That’s why they’re obese. I’ve seen some obese people who’ve lost a lot of weight; in every case I can recall, at some point they made health their absolute priority, and they acted on it. It became more important than work, school, family, friends, etc. Many people think this kind of behavior is selfish … yet another limiting belief that keeps people overweight. It’s not selfish to preserve your body such that you have much more energy to give to other people.
March 11th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
Quantum weight loss
I don’t remember how I first came across Steve Pavlina’s articles on his Dexterity Software site. But they certainly struck a sympathetic chord with me. I’ve carried a few on my Palm and re-read them regularly. So I was excited