Our strengths often become weaknesses because we rely on them too heavily, habitually doing what we do best instead of seeking the best things to do. Someone said: If your only tool is a hammer, you approach every problem as if it were a nail.

Put down your old, familiar tools for now, or else find a different way to use them. Doing the right things, even very imperfectly, can bring about a quantum leap. Doing the wrong things, even if you do them to perfection, will never deliver your dreams.
What is important is to think beyond what common sense would allow.

Webster describes common sense as: Ordinary good sense or sound practical judgment. Ordinary, according to the dictionary, means customary, usual, regular, normal; familiar, unexceptional, common; relatively poor or inferior. Webster also describes common sense as sound practical judgment. The meaning of practical is obtained through practice or action. In other words, common sense is judgment based on past experience. When you boil it all down, common sense is just what it sounds like – it is what people today commonly believe. And common sense is full of dumb, limiting ideas. It has always been that way.

Common sense used to say the world is flat, people can not fly, bleed people if you want to heal them. The idea of a man on the moon was once pure science fiction, so was television and the idea of a heart transplant. Common sense lies to you. It focuses on the obstacles, reviews what you have done in the past, studies the normal achievement patterns of people in general, and tells you what you can commonly expect to achieve. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rely too much on common sense, and you can expect to see common results.

Quantum leaps require that you start thinking
about what you want, instead of what common sense
says is the reasonable thing for you to expect.
What would common sense say you can accomplish? What would be a sensible goal?

Uncommon sense says that you can accomplish astounding things. What would be a goal well beyond the boundary of improbable… far beyond the obvious next logical step? What would you go for if you knew your success was guaranteed? What would you do, how would you proceed, in terms of specific action steps?

Most people have the wiring in their brains messed up. They have decided to doubt the wrong things, such as their potential, the availability of breakthrough opportunities, and their chances for making a quantum leap. For now, if you must doubt something, doubt your limits. While it is true that you cannot make yourself believe in your ability to make the quantum leap, you definitely can act like you believe.

You can go ahead and do what you would do if you had complete faith. You always get to choose how you are going to act anyway. You decide how you are going to behave. You do not have to eliminate doubt to disregard it for the time being. Let it lie there, without influence, while you produce a remarkable set of results by acting as if your success is for certain. Instead of letting doubt decide what you will do, decide what you are going to do with your doubt.

Focus on ends rather than means. Develop a razor-sharp picture of where you want to land at the end of your quantum leap. Make your goal specific. Pay careful attention to the details. Focus on this goal constantly in your thoughts and imagination. Carry in your mind a picture of you achieving the objective.

Adults rarely make quantum leaps, but small children make them all of the time. Little ones focus on ends, rather than means. Kids have no hang-up about technique. Being so young and inexperienced, they are often practically devoid of methodology. But they are open-minded, goal-focused, and true believers in experimentation. They lock in mentally on their objective, and seem quite willing to let the goal determine the methodology. In fact, they proceed such that the goal often creates the methodology. The child does something for the first time ever, it works, and inherent potential is discovered. The necessary technique, the means, just sort of evolves in the process.

Grownups get it all backwards. Adults cannot seem to choose a goal without simultaneously evaluating their resources and personal repertoire of skills to see if they have what it takes to reach the objective. The adults command of technique methodology or resources then becomes the screening device used to select the appropriate goal. The choice of goals (the ends) depends too heavily on what the individual perceives as his or her obvious, available methodologies (the means).

Start by working on defining your goal, not by worrying about everything that will be involved in getting from here to there. The technique or methodology of the process you will need to follow will come to you. Just make sure your aim is good, open yourself to the unexpected, and proceed. You do not have to know how you are going to get there, but you must know where you want to go.

Think of problems, mistakes, and failure as growing pains. When you stop running into problems that is when you truly have a real problem. Somewhere in the process of growing up, we got the idea that it is best to avoid problems. Parents encourage kids to keep trouble at a minimum and eliminate mistakes as much as possible. Teachers give out As for getting everything right, and nails a student with a low grade for making errors. Eventually, failure gets a bad reputation.

In the world at large, however, failure can be a friend. There is a certain magic in mistakes. Problems, foul-ups, and breakdowns push you back on track, educate you, leaving you better equipped to navigate accurately toward your goal.

Unless you are willing to stretch yourself beyond the point where you know you can perform basically error-free, you will never find out how good you really are. If you are unwilling to taste failure, there is no way on earth you can taste the sweet fruits of your true potential.

Remember that progress often masquerades as trouble.
Mistakes and failures typically carry clues for breakthrough performance.