In our last +1, we did some swooping and gliding and hunting with a red-tailed hawk and our bird-watching guide: Carlos Castaneda. Today I want to chat about that hawk again. I mentioned the fact that he’s not worried about whether or not he’ll find his prey. He’s just hunting. Calmly, 100% focused on the PROCESS. Letting the outcomes take care of themselves. He’s not up there flying around thinking to himself, “OMG. My family’s going to starve if I don’t pull it together and find a mouse soon. I’ve been flying around up here for TWO HOURS (!) already and I haven’t seen a single mouse. Where’d they go? OMG. OMG. OMG.” Enter: Castaneda and his wisdom: “Once a man worries, he clings to anything out of desperation; and once he clings he is bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whomever or whatever he is clinging to. A warrior-hunter, on the other hand, knows he will lure game into his traps over and over again, so he doesn’t worry.” Now… To be fair (and to state the obvious), our red-tailed hawk friend doesn’t have the prefrontal cortex to engage in any anxiety-provoking overthinking. (Or, well, any “thinking” for that matter.) Which reminds me of some parallel wisdom we explored back in the day. Remember our +1 on Squirrels, Einstein and You? As you may recall, that one was inspired by a pre-Trail drive. As I stopped at a stop sign right next to Byron Katie’s little chapel in Ojai, I spotted a squirrel racing across a telephone wire and thought to myself, “I wonder what that guy’s thinking?!” Then I reminded myself that he WASN’T THINKING. Then I thought of some wisdom from Jon Eliot’s Overachievement. He tells us: “Great performers focus on what they are doing, and nothing else... They are able to engage in a task so completely that there is no room left for self-criticism, judgment, or doubt; to stay loose and supremely, even irrationally, self-confident... They let it happen, let it go. They couldn’t care less about the results.” That’s Today’s +1. That red-tailed hawk? He’s the flying embodiment of great performers. Let’s be like him a little more. TODAY.
