A Neurohacker Shares The 4 Mental Abilities Of Super Successful People

For the last 10 years, I've been studying the secrets of mental success—first as a brain researcher at MIT, then as a technologist in Silicon Valley.

Along the way, I've seen that there is a small set of cognitive skills that play an outsized role in our work, relationships, and quality of life.

Your executive function oversees a few important processes in your brain: First, there's your mental flexibility, or your ability to play with different or abstract ideas. Then there's your working memory, which is your ability to use existing information to solve a problem. Inhibition is your ability to engage certain types of impulse control. And finally, another potential aspect of executive function1 is self-control—which actually has been shown to predict health and income beyond IQ and socioeconomic status.

It was Viktor Frankl, Ph.D., a Holocaust survivor who studied how to mine personal meaning out of suffering and trauma, who said, "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

We can interpret the "space" from Frankl's quotation as a place to exert emotional self-regulation. In that space between stimulus and response, we have a choice to make. What we do in that space determines our future. Learning how to manage your emotions and thoughts in that critical space is where "our growth and our freedom" lie.

From research, we know that high emotional self-regulation is tied to success in work, school, and relationships. And unlike other mental abilities, emotional self-regulation does not seem to decline with age. In fact, older adults actually outperformed younger adults and children at emotional self-regulation, implying that it's a skill that takes practice5.

Learning is the ability to encounter something new and make it a part of yourself—either as a memory, fact, or skill. Memory is the ability to pull up something you learned or knew in the past. Being able to learn quickly and remember is increasingly important as jobs around the world continue to change at a lightning speed.

Where learning and memory help us play defense, creativity helps us play offense. In an IBM study of over 1,500 CEOs, creativity was rated as the most important leadership skill—even above hard work.

Creativity is also tied up in what we value most as humans. To wildly oversimplify, let's call creativity the ability to produce things that are both novel and useful. When we think of great thinkers through time, we often think of their creativity: What do the theory of evolution, general and special relativity, and Cubism have in common? Each of their developers was staggeringly prolific. Charles Darwin published around 120 scholarly papers. Albert Einstein published around 250 papers. Pablo Picasso is credited with more than 20,000 paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Were they just masochistically hardworking? More likely, creativity was fueling their work.

After all, entering a flow state, also known as being "in the zone," is an inherently pleasurable experience. It's a focused joy, a feeling of being immersed, fully absorbed, and having an energized focus. It's common when in the throes of creativity. Many artists, scientists, and performers report that they lose track of time and all sense of themselves when they are deep in their craft.