An IQ & EQ boosting habit every entrepreneur should have
Every small business owner and entrepreneur knows that determination and hard work are the keys to success over the long term. However, persistence in banging your head against the wall won’t get you anywhere (except maybe the ER). Similarly, not understanding what motivates your customers and coworkers but charging ahead anyway is often a recipe for disaster.
Having a high IQ and EQ will help you make smarter business decisions and get the most out of the decisions you do make. But how can you increase these?
Your first thought might be digital brain games, and you’d be partially right. Brain games were all the rage a few years ago, but recently they have come under fire when new studies found that they provided no generalized benefits. In other words, playing these games just makes you better at… playing these games- not more intelligent, better at math, able to read faster, etc.
Increasing your Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
Fortunately, a recent study has found that dual n-back tasks do increase working memory and fluid intelligence. What, you might ask, is a dual n-back task? Here’s a video that explains it well:
(Not the greatest quality, but it is informative)
In short, a dual n-back task is a simple memory-type game where you see a square appear in a grid. Your goal is to try to remember if the square is in the same spot it was n times ago. For example, if your task is dual 1-back, you think “was this square in the same position the last time it appeared?” If the answer was yes, you press a button.
Sounds easy, right? Well, the “dual” part of dual n-back is that each time the square appears, you ALSO hear a letter, and you need to try to remember what you heard n times ago as well. Same rules apply: if it matches, you press a button. So as a final example, if you are playing dual 2-back, each time you hear a letter you think “did I hear this letter not last time, but the time before that?”
The program I use is called Brain Workshop. It’s free, open source, and cross-platform. It’s not as polished as a lot of programs, but it is effective, is feature rich, and tracks your results over time. You can get it here: http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/download.html
If you want to do this on your iPhone, the best free app I have found is called Dual N-Back by Mikko Tyrskeranta. While you do need to use headphones to hear the audio, everything else is great quality.
There’s almost certainly a version for Android, but since I don’t have an Android device, you’re on your own with that.
According to the studies that have been done on this, playing a dual n-back game 20 minutes a day for 4-5 days a week leads to a significant long-term increase in both working memory and fluid intelligence.
So that takes care of raising your IQ, but what about your EQ? This is where meditation steps in.
Increasing your Emotional Quotient (EQ)
A useful way to think about emotional intelligence (the thing that EQ measures) is to separate it into two components: how well you know and deal with your own thoughts, emotions, and motivations, and how well you know and understand the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of others.
Meditation has been shown to reduce emotional reactivity and worry while also giving you tools that help you recognize and handle negative emotions effectively. Increasing your awareness of what your thoughts are “now” is one of the main benefits of meditation, and awareness is the first step to better regulation.
Meditation also helps with the other side of the equation: understanding others. Loving-kindness based meditation has been shown to improve empathy while also “increasing feelings of social connection and positivity toward novel individuals”. So, not only does meditation lead to a better understanding of our fellow humans, it increases how much we like them!
“But how”, you might ask, “are these connected? Why would you pair them together?” Because they go together like protons and neutrons! I have found it extremely effective to do them one after the other- dual n-back first, meditation second. Why? Because dual n-back requires high concentration to play and is like putting your brain through a high-intensity workout. After 20-30 minutes of this, my brain is tuckered out and I can’t focus as well as I could (much like after you run a marathon, you find it difficult to walk back to your car). Meditation acts like super-concentrated sleep on your mind, leaving you relaxed, sharp, and ready to get back to work.
Everyone can benefit from this habit, but it is especially vital for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs need to work harder, smarter, and deal with novel situations better than their established competitors or their businesses will never even get out of the hanger, much less get off the ground. Increasing your IQ will help you with the last two, and meditation revives and refreshes you making possible to work long hours when you need to.
Plus, often the only things you have to convince customers to buy from you, employees to work for you, and companies to partner with you is charm and leadership. Most people aren’t natural-born sales machines or perfect leaders- increasing your EQ will make you better able to wear both hats.
So add this habit to your routine, but whatever you do, don’t forget the importance of determination over the long haul. As President Calvin Coolidge said, “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”