Capacity is the ability to use every skill and resource at your disposal.

—Dr. Phil Nuernberger, author Strong and Fearless

We believe this book can be the catalyst for our two most insatiable desires: success and happiness.

Every leader and organization recognizes the power of professional development and skills training. Without evolving people, processes, and products, organizations will not survive changing demands and fierce competition. Without growth, market share begins to erode until there’s no bottom line left to protect. And yet, despite heavy investment in ongoing development, most organizations fail to see the kind of cultural transformation they desperately want. The road to transformation is littered with the carcasses of once-great giants who spent millions upon millions on professional development. Employee engagement is at an all-time low. Productivity is decreasing rapidly with endless e-mails, meetings, and electronic distractions diminishing focus, stifling creativity, and slaughtering innovation.

Look around your office—is this the best it can be? What can your organization do to thrive and prosper? What if it were possible to improve the organization one person, one team, and one leader at a time—not by simply teaching more or turning up the volume, but by plugging into a deeper source?

Our capacity for change is limitless. Our ancestors have shown us what’s possible if we all unite under the universal theme of human progress—creating a better future built on an expanded capacity for change. We are a resilient species that plows the fields of failure in order to plant the seeds of change. We will show you how to capture the hearts and minds of your people and provide a clear, compelling, and actionable path toward transformation and prolonged prosperity. It’s time to look inward and unleash your full potential.

What Is Capacity?

We have all used the word capacity in our daily lives to describe maximal storage or effort. What’s the towing capacity of my pickup truck? What’s my lung capacity? Let’s look at the formal definition of capacity:

ca·pac·i·ty

1. The maximum amount that something can contain
2. The ability or power to do, experience, or understand something

Here is how we want you to think about capacity:

• Capacity is the ability to do more, the ability to have more, and the ability to give more.
• As you increase your capacity, you increase your ability to do more with seemingly less.
• Everyone has unused potential energy waiting to be converted to purposeful action.

There is no question that some people are simply born with more talent or skills than others. One of the hallmarks of a fully realized life is optimizing your innate abilities and applying them with maximum efficiency. We have all witnessed the often-tragic trajectories of child protégés. They were destined for stardom and had every conceivable advantage to pave a surefire road to glory. Then out of nowhere, a lesser talent makes a bigger impact than the protégé ever dreamed! This book isn’t about the merits of talent over training or taking shortcuts to success. Capacity is about asking the tough questions that lead to better choices and expanding your body’s ability to contain more input without sacrificing the quality of your body’s output (Figure 1.1).

What follows is a list of a few names you might recognize. There is no question that all of these people have talent—in many cases a ton of talent—but we think you would all agree there are graveyards full of talented people with unrealized aspirations and dreams.

• Sara Blakely, founder and owner of SPANX
  “It all started with a pair of pantyhose, some scissors, and a bright idea.” Sara cut the feet out of her pantyhose to make her butt look better in white pants. To start this dream, she saved $5,000 by selling fax machines. From there she spent all of the money submitting a patent she wrote herself while practically begging hundreds of manufacturers to produce the first prototype. Don’t underestimate a woman with fanatic focus on changing other women’s lives! Sara had to push her capacity to create success.
• Arianna Huffington, cofounder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post
  Recently, Arianna wrote a book titled The Sleep Revolution about her journey to renewing her relationship with sleep. She had a paradigm shift after she fainted from exhaustion and hit her head on her desk, breaking her chin bone and requiring five stitches on her eye. At this point in her career, people thought of Arianna as a super-talented, highly successful media mogul, but she wasn’t at her best. She discovered that sleep allowed her to be more productive, more inspired, and more joyful in life. She expanded her capacity through sleep.
• LeBron James, five-time NBA MVP
  “The King” was born with generational talent for the game of basketball. He skyrocketed from the streets of Akron, Ohio, to the front cover of Sports Illustrated by his seventeenth birthday. Unlike many stars before him, LeBron knew he couldn’t rely on talent alone to be considered one of the best players to ever lace it up. He adheres to a strict routine of clean eating, mindfulness training, yoga, rest, and recovery to ensure he has more than enough gas in the tank for a grueling NBA season.
• Chesley Sullenberger, American Airlines captain
  During an emergency, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed Flight 1549 on the Hudson River—saving all 155 people aboard! Captain Sully flew fighters in the military before he started flying commercial airliners. He also flew gliders during his downtime, which have zero propulsion. There was no mandate from the airline to cross-train with different types of aircraft. His passion for pure flight created the capacity to gently land a 70-ton behemoth with complete engine failure (Figure 1.2). He may have been the only person capable of that landing. As he has said:

  

• The way I describe this whole experience—is that everything I had done in my career had in some way been a preparation for that moment. There were probably some things that were more important than others or that applied more directly. But I felt like everything I’d done in some way contributed to the outcome—of course along with [the actions of] my first officer and the flight attendant crew, the cooperative behavior of the passengers during the evacuation, and the prompt and efficient response of the first responders in New York.¹
• Tom Brady, five-time Super Bowl–winning quarterback
  He was drafted in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft. Brady was the 199th overall selection in the draft that year, and as crazy as it sounds, was the sixth quarterback to be selected that year—the sixth! How could seasoned scouts, coaches, and general managers of these highly sophisticated professional football franchises all miss such a talented athlete? Did Tom Brady not have the talent these football experts were looking for? Tom Brady had talent—maybe he did not possess the unrefined talent that other quarterbacks selected ahead of him had in abundance—but there is no mistaking that Brady had talent! What separates Brady from many other talented athletes is his desire to get better through a systematic process to build his capacity. His off-the-field conditioning and nutritional regimen is unrivaled. His aptitude and mastery of the system devised by his coach, arguably the greatest football coach of all time, enables him to thrive under unrelenting pressure and punishment from elite NFL defenses. Brady built his capacity for greater performance.

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Think of all the talented people who fell short in life. Many just relied on their talent and skill, without growing their capacity to do more with it. Now think of the seemingly talentless person who changed the world by consistently growing their capacity and refusing to settle for less.

What Tom Brady, LeBron James, Captain Sully, Arianna Huffington, and Sara Blakely possess—what separates talented athletes, people, and organizations—is the desire for continuous improvement. These folks build a rock-solid foundation and carefully construct a process of incremental improvements on top of it.

Resilience is a common attribute used to describe countless people who have shaped our world for the better. Here is something to think about—the definition of resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from adversity or strife. Toughness is the great equalizer. Some people are born with natural abilities, talents, and skills, but capacity must be earned and managed.