The key question is whether there is a method for an engineer to excel and be distinguished from others. My answer is “YES.”

I believe that exceptional performance, breakthrough innovation, and extraordinary results happen when engineers decide to finally break the standards or the norms in their industry, specialization field, and existing attitude. For example, if you have a furniture company, and one day you decide to no longer assemble furniture for your clients, probably you would end up with a company called IKEA. A similar approach was pursued by Dell Computers too. Thus, there is always a method to achieve excellence by understanding that the majority is always wrong when it comes to high performance because only then someone can have the opportunity to quit fixing things and move to massive innovation instead.

Therefore, if you do what everyone else is doing you are not distinguishing yourself, and you are probably stuck. And this is why when it comes to high performance most engineers are always wrong.

This is what we know today. We know that 3% of engineers can achieve extraordinary results. And I strongly believe that each of you can become part of those 3%, by deciding as of today to break your industry standards as well as your industry norms. The alternative, of course, is that you become part of the 97% who in the end work for those 3%.

The problem with the 97% of engineers is that they think as short as possible, and then they return to automatic pilot 97%. This is because thinking is a high-energy activity, and it takes a lot of energy to think. Therefore, engineers mostly try to think as short as possible and then return to automatic pilot. Thus, if your brain is on automatic pilot, this leads to what scientists call “Mental Myopia,” also known as “Tunnel Vision”. If an engineer has “Tunnel Vision”, that’s a bit of a problem, because he confuses people about their performance.  This is the reason that many engineers go through life acting like mediocre race car drivers who sit in their cars, look in their rear-view mirror, see their competition, and are so far behind that they think they are first. In other words, they tend to think inside the box, and the box is a very good metaphor here. If you take a close look inside the box of an engineer, usually there are 4 boundaries: the technological, the physical, the legal, and the moral. These boundaries of this box are called industry standards, or industry norms. Thus, the question is how someone can kick himself out of the box of his industry and professional field and move to the happy place where cool innovation and great performance happen. On the other hand, a plethora of engineers, most of the time cannot think efficiently because their brains are on automatic pilot and hit a wall. Then tend to do one of two things. They either do more of the same things, or they do less of the same things.