Let’s say you have a goal to make more money. Now, since you’re a hardworking productive person you start thinking of ways to get more money. After a bit you start to feel disconnected from the goal and from yourself because you don’t like the greedy person you feel yourself becoming. Perhaps you’ll also find that you haven’t made much money at all or improved your financial situation. Perhaps it’s gotten worse. Pretty common experience, it seems like.

Now, let’s say you decide that instead of trying to get money (the production), you try to improve the thing that gets you money (production capacity)–the value you deliver. Getting money is a consequence of value given/created for another person.

Here’s why you don’t wanna focus on getting money: 1. In the experience of a number of people (Steve Pavlina and myself included), it doesn’t work. 2. Extrinsic motivation reduces intrinsic motivation. Like playing guitar? If I start paying you for it, you’ll start liking it less and will likely play it on your own time less. It’s gotten bound up with the money, and if there’s no money, there’s no incentive to play for yourself.

Focusing on value creation and delivery, on the other hand, feels a helluva lot better. And here’s the thing: it works better by miles, too. My theory is that it works better because as you improve your production capacity, you get a bigger hammer to drive in this small nail. You can keep developing until a small tap crushes the nail right into the wood.

Grades are the same thing: you can try to focus on getting grades, or you can focus on becoming a better student. The second will work a lot better and you’ll have a lot less anxiety. And as you improve your ability to be a student, your grades will improve as a natural consequence. This is related to the idea that you don’t just get a certain goal (ie a certain amount of money or grades), you become the kind of person that gets that goal (ie a productive value-creating person, or a conscientious and effective strategy-using student).

BTW, if you’ve noticed the lack of posting lately, it’s because I’ve had the worst month of my life. Worse than the time I failed all my courses and worse than the time our house burned down…so it was bad. Good news though is that things are better but I’ll be very busy going forward, so posting will be spotty. Sorry.

“Observation #2: I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but college is hard.

A new major is like a new boyfriend. At first, it’s all excitement and possibility. Then you find out his feet stink. For a major, this metaphorical foot odor comes in the form of decreasing novelty and increasing amounts of hard work. It’s like a one-two punch to your motivation: at the same time that subject loses its freshness (because you’ve been studying it for a while) it ramps up the intensity of the work it demands (because upper level courses are harder than intro courses). This shift is unavoidable. Don’t mistake it for a shift in your fundamental feelings toward the subject.

The key thing to remember is that nobody loves a subject during the process of mastering it. Have you ever seen Rocky 4, where Stallone has to retreat to the mountains of Russia to prepare to fight Drago? He drags carts, and rolls boulders up a hill, and, in one of the most subtlety-crafted moments in cinematic history, he does inverted sit-ups in a barn while Pauly hits him in the stomach with a stick.

This sucked for Rocky. But it doesn’t mean that he didn’t respect the art of boxing or the dedication required for mastery. It’s just that the process of mastery itself is not consistently pleasant. This is probably the first time anyone in the history of education has ever said this, but your junior and senior year of college are a little bit like Rocky 4.

That’s partially why doing something you are actually interested in or enjoy is so important: you’re actually driven to master it. You may not consciously set that goal, but your actions such as reading about your subject matter on your own time are the actions of someone mastering a goal.

I added my observations to that post here:

“I wanted to add onto your comment about majors being hard. Though I doubt many of your readers feel this way, there are some people who believe majors should be easy. (Some people life should just be easy…but then it’d be so boring!)

To them I say, The sooner you let go of the expectation that it SHOULD be easy, the sooner you’ll do a lot better and stop procrastinating. If you’re always holding the expectation that there has to be an easy way, then you won’t wanna get started and your work will seem as it is being inflicted on you. If not by your parents, then perhaps by your prof or even by yourself. You will suffer from deep procrastination and the difference between what your belief of how the world is and how the world actually is will crush you.

I like to think of it a bit like this: your major and college SHOULD be hard. I’d rather live in a society where the rewards of higher pay, greater prestige, etc go to the hard working, rather than some arbitrary thing such as who your parents were or your body. I mean, those things have value, but I’d rather live in our society which has about a 0.6 correlation between intelligent (IQ), hardworking (trait conscientiousness) and creative (trait openness to new experiences) and success. I definitely don’t want to live in a society that arbitrarily and randomly hands out success.”

So, my advice? If you believe life should be easy or some aspect of it should be easy and you’re just not getting anywhere in that life area, give up that belief. Some aspects of life can become easy and you can make life much easier, sure, but making something easier isn’t necessarily an easy process. My experience is that most things that are worthwhile aren’t easy, but they’re often worth it! In fact, I try to strive to find things that aren’t easy (but not too difficult) because that’s where the most personal growth is. Of course, you may have just picked something that’s too difficult for you right now, so perhaps you can scale things back so you’re still improving and learning something without getting crushed.

Ironically, despite the initial discomfort of hard work, it’s a lot of fun! You can learn to love working hard, as long as you know that YOU chose it, that you WANT it and it’s for a greater purpose.

That, I believe, is the real reason people ask this question. It’s easy to feel good about yourself if everyone else is also stuck in the same place, or if you can assign some external reason for why you are not doing what you really want to do but don’t have the courage to right now. Those reasons enumerated, I do want to answer the question as asked:

Like I said previously, a massive change like everyone following their dreams will not happen suddenly. If anything, it could be argued that its been happening slowly over the last many decades. Massive social changes like that rarely happen very quickly (they’re called revolutions if they do). “For example, if everyone did what they felt their purpose was and there were no garbage-collectors left, this is some of what might happen: 1. The wages for a garbage collector would skyrocket. 2. People would have to clean up after themselves. 3. There would be a greater demand for solutions that didn’t require humans or as many humans, such as automated cleaning machines, and the people who really enjoy solving society’s problems using technology would love to create that.”

There are every kind of people. Paul taught me about this. This may sound really, really strange to you, but there are people who ENJOY being garbage collectors. The Fred Factor is a book about a postman who brings so much joy and purpose to his work. Most people would think that being a post delivery person would be dreary and boring, but Fred loves his work. The value of these people who really love to do this would go up dramatically because they are so rare, so they could actually make a lot of money doing something that others would consider “dreary”.

Finally, we, as a species/culture, can adapt to massive social changes such as if everyone is starting to follow their dreams. We’ve gone through a number before now. For example, I’m willing to bet that someone said at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, “What if everyone went to work in jobs in factories and left the farms; we’d all starve!”. And we have not starved. This henny penny, “the sky is falling” stuff is usually overrated.

Let’s say there was suddenly a severe shortage in the number of postal workers. Courier businesses would probably skyrocket, people would stop sending as many letters (as they have), the wages of postal workers would skyrocket, faxes and emails would grow much greater in number, many entrepreneurs would step in to attempt to come up with solutions that are cheaper and/or more efficient than the current system. Perhaps instead of getting mail delivered to our doors, each neighbourhood or block would get its own central mail box racks where you go to pick up the mail, like a PO Box, this is pretty common in many places around the world.

In this post I’m going to:

• give some examples of self-fulfilling prophesies
• relate them to the field of personal development and beliefs in general
• discuss how we come up with beliefs about the world and why this is pretty much useless
• try to come up with a better way of choosing beliefs from Steve Pavlina

Quirkology, a fascinating book on various aspects of the human psyche, talks about the role of self-fulfilling prophesies in our daily lives. “For example a person who expects people to be friendly, may smile more and thus receive more smiles, while a person expecting to be lucky, may enter many more competitions and thus increase their chances of winning.” Bam. This is where personal development (PD) work meets psychology. PD has long recognized the roles of beliefs as not just observations, but as self-fulfilling prophesies.

We tend to imagine ourselves a bit like scientists: we know the “truth” about the world and we simply observe that “truth”, not create it. For example, if I believe other people are just out take advantage of me and the only people I can trust are my family, this belief could have come from my personal experience with others. It could also have been inherited from my family.

Except this is not a scientific observation, such as gravity, in that can’t be affected by the belief I hold. For example, if I do not believe in gravity, it still binds me and my belief does not change it. But if I believe other people are shifty and untrustworthy, I may treat them in a way to suggests to them that they’re untrustworthy, and they’ll act in an untrustworthy way. If I inherited this belief from my family, they may have done the same thing to arrive at this conclusion. And I’ll have plenty of evidence to support this belief using confirmation bias (the human tendancy to seek information that confirms your conclusions or beliefs, not look for “objective” data) or selection bias (ignoring the times when people were trustworthy and instead focusing on when they were untrustworthy). If you feel that you are immune to these biases, I would suggest you reconsider. I have known about these and many other biases for years now and it is a constant battle to fight these for the simple fact that I am a human being and these are pretty much built in. Of course, you could know more than me or better than me, or are simply better than human . These biases do not mean that we’re somehow “imperfect”, there’s good reasons for a number of these biases, usually that as human beings, we’re finite creatures and these biases are a result of that finitary predicament, such as having limited processing power or time. If you’re interested in learning about other biases, I would suggest Quirkology and Influence by Cialdini (one of my favourite books of all time).

We’re learning mechanisms and for the sake of our psychological health we have to attempt to distill some beliefs or theorems about how the world is so we can work within it. However, as I’ve suggested enough, determining how accurately a belief models the world is difficult, because we could have gotten that belief through means that are biased, and if we already have a belief, we can get all the evidence in the world to support it that we want. So, what do you do?

Steve Pavlina suggests that we try out various beliefs. Living with a particular belief gives you a specific experience that looking from the outside in doesn’t, because you’re always looking out from within your current belief. For example, from my recent perspective, when someone says, “making money is easy: you just create and deliver value”, I have to admit I look at them like they’re crazy. However, I’m starting to adopt this belief and trying it out for a while to see how it fits and its becoming more true. Steve Pavlina, then, offers a number of criteria to measure a belief by.

The actual process of belief change usually occurs within the context of a goal you’ve set. For example, if I have a goal to get straight A’s, a belief which says, “I will need to put in 20 hours a week of studying to get that A” is not as effective as, “I can get As while putting in less than an hour a week of studying.” The second belief not only makes achieving this goal easier, but it also encourages me to seek out new ways to fulfill this belief, such as this article from Study Hacks called “The Art of Stealth Studying: How to Earn a 4.0 With Only 1.0 Hours of Work“. I could also find ways to dramatically improve my studying ability. Do you see how this self-fulfilling prophesy is a positive one that can really help me achieve my goals and improve myself? Do you also see that either of the above two beliefs are as “true” as each other, and while I hold one, its “true” and while I hold the other, its also “true”?

I’ve written about the actual specific process of belief change in an article called “Improving Self-Awareness to Achieve Your Goals“.

Finally, this applies at beliefs of all levels of analysis about your life. If you believe life is hard and difficult and everybody is out to get you, it will be so. If you believe life is easy and meant to be enjoyed, it will be so. A common metaphor for beliefs are “lenses” and I think its a powerful one. If you’ve gone to get your eyes checked, the optometrist will put a few different lenses in front of your eyes and ask you which gives you the clearest vision. Think of beliefs as trying out various glasses until you find ones that work well for you.

There is one big difference between theories and the stories we use to explain our lives, though, and that is that while theories tend to be observational and simply try to explain the events as best as possible, stories and a consistent style of story-telling can affect future events, and multiple stories are just as valid or “right” as each other. As an example, psychologists have identified an explanatory style that people use to tell the stories of their lives.  There are three components, and I quote:

• Personal. People experiencing events may see themselves as the cause; that is, they have internalized the cause for the event. Example: “I always forget to make that turn” (internal) as opposed to “That turn can sure sneak up on you” (external).
• Permanent. People may see the situation as unchangeable, e.g., “I always lose my keys” or “I never forget a face”.
• Pervasive. People may see the situation as affecting all aspects of life, e.g., “I can’t do anything right” or “Everything I touch seems to turn to gold”.

People who generally tend to blame themselves for negative events, believe that such events will continue indefinitely, and let such events affect many aspects of their lives display what is called a pessimistic explanatory style. Conversely, people who generally tend to blame others for negative events, believe that such events will end soon, and do not let such events affect too many aspects of their lives display what is called an optimistic explanatory style.

You’ll notice that personal development offer a consistent explanatory structure to use, that you are the master of your life (personal internal), that you can and do change things (impermanent), and depending on what you read, may promote having a singular personality, or learning to recognize your intrinsic worth as a person is not tied to your actual effects. The second two are also examples of beliefs including both limiting or positive ones.

There is a problem with theories and thus stories, though. The facts can support an infinite number of theories. Broadly speaking, then, there are two ways that people can tell their stories–optimistically or pessimistically. To help drive this point home, here are my stories:

Ever since I’ve been a kid, I’ve felt like I didn’t really belong. I was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents. My father was a guest worker and the Saudis generally didn’t like us very much, so I grew up as a perpetually expat Pakistani. I draw a large part of my identity from being a Pakistani but I’ve probably never spent more than a year total there. When I was 11, I was taken away from all my friends and the life I knew and brought to Canada, a foreign and cold land. I grew up in a mostly white neighbourhood and the darkest person in my class was a half-black, half-white kid that I befriended, probably because he was about the most familiar thing there. Being the new kid and being different were marks against me and I was bullied and made fun of by the other kids for the first 5 years of coming here. I’ve lived most of my life as an outcast, not quite fitting in anywhere.

This story makes me feel depressed just thinking about it. However, it is just about as true as the next one:

My parents lived in Saudi Arabia and I was born in an excellent hospital that was part of my father’s benefits. It was better than any hospital I would have been born in in Pakistan, and there’d already been a stillbirth before me so I’m appreciative of the better medical facilities. I also got much better schooling than I would have, and the standard of living in Saudi Arabia was higher than in Pakistan. My parents desiring the best for us decided to bring us to Canada, where the standard of living is much higher, the education is world reknowned, the opportunities are vast and we had a shot at actually becoming citizens of this country. Through trials and tribulations, which are a normal part of life, I’ve grown up to become the person I am today. I may still feel a bit like an outcast (I have come to enjoy it), but I’ve built a strong network of friends who make me feel like I am part of something. I’ve also learned to build an identity as a Canadian-Pakistani and, in some ways, I finally belong. Currently, I’m going to one of the top 50 universities in the world, on my own terms. I am also engaged in improving myself and my life, and I am building a successful future for myself.

Which story do you like better? They’re both true and cover most of the same facts. Life is so complex that you necessarily have to highlight some facts versus others. I like the second story better because it is one of hope and it is empowering. With this story, I can feel that my life is going well, and since there’s no real “objective” data on that, I’d rather feel that things are going well rather than badly and that I am improving things.

How do you tell your story if someone asks about you? What do you say when someone asks you what you do? Do you tell the victim story, the martyr story, or the story of hope and empowerment?

“I want to have enough”

“I want to be comfortable”

“I want enough so I don’t have to worry about money”

The obvious problem with all three of these goals is that they’re not well defined. Good goals are well-defined and can only have a binary interpretation. That is, either you’ve reached your goal or you have not. A good goal formed like this might be, “I’m making $50,000 dollars a year and my expenses are less than $35,000 dollars, I save $10,000 dollars a year and spend the other $5,000 on whatever I like by 2010″. You can read more about forming clear goals in Steve Pavlina‘s wonderful article, “The Power of Clarity“. All of the above three fail this criteria by using feelings to gauge whether you’ve reached your goals. That would be fine if feelings were at all objective, but they’re not, so you find some curious patterns people go through for each of the above goals.

“I want to have enough” is a goal I had in mind for a while as an overarching goal in life, but the problem with that is that as my income has gone up (I’m making at least twice what I was making last year), I have found my expenses to increase in step, so “enough” which was generally having enough to cover my expenses is pointless. Every year, there’s lifestyle inflation as my income goes up, so what’s “enough” increases every year. I have some ideas of why this happens, including that I believe I have a belief that prevents me from having much more than necessary for my survival, so as my income goes up, my belief unconsciously pushes my expenses up.

This is actually an excersize I learned from Brian Tracy and I’d like you to do it. I hope I’m remembering this correctly. He asked some seminar participants to ask themselves how much money they would like to have and most of them quoted something two to three times more than what they’re making now. Then he asked them how much they were making when they first started working and they often quoted amounts two to three times less than what they’re currently making. I drew a couple of lessons from that. The first is that a lot of us are stuck in this rat race and don’t keep things in perspective. More about that in the next section:

“I want to be comfortable” is another thing people often cite when asked how much they want. The problem with this is again that what you consider “comfortable” increases every year. Last year you may not have had a dishwasher, but this year you bought one and now you feel you are living in greater comfort, even though that’s an additional cost. Of course, internally, you’ve probably habituated to the washing machine so you’re no longer thinking it’s a “comfort” item, it’s just a necessity.

“I want enough so I don’t have to worry about money” is a goal I personally thought was a worthy one until I realized what that meant. Basically, I was willing to be disciplined about spending and making money and doing a broad budget for the hope of some point at which I did not have to be disciplined at all and I could spend money however I wanted. I didn’t notice the problem with that for a long time, but it was that I will always have to be disciplined with money, and I may have to deny myself things because I don’t have the money at any income level. The thing is, while today I may have to deny myself a 5 dollar item, when I’m making much more than that, I may have to deny myself a plasma screen TV or a new car. I will still need to be disciplined, probably in broad strokes, while still giving me enough to enjoy life and indulge every once in a while. That is, say I put aside 10% of my income as play money, which I can do anything with, as my income grows, this amount will grow, but I will always have to stay within it. You can read more about it under the number 3 tip in “8 ways to prepare to be a millionaire” at Getting Finances Done.

If you’re reading this blog, odds are that you are rich. Read that again. Read that over and over again if you’d like to. I often forget this, and I need to remember it as often as anyone else. Compared to someone somewhere, I am rich. I have many of the amenities that money can buy, including a house, a computer, a cellphone, good food, clean water, I’m getting an education, I have clothes, warmth, friends, various technical goodies, access to great healthcare. Odds are good that you have access to all of these as well. That’s enough to survive and then some. Think about it, does that not make you rich?

All of the above leads to a curious conclusion, I believe feeling rich is an internal state, as is being comfortable or having “enough”. There are some people that spend their whole lives acquiring and making more and more because they feel poor on the inside and their pattern says that having more will make them less poor and thus they will have more of the “good life”. The pattern essentially says, “if poor or not rich, make more to become rich or well-to-do”. Because feeling rich is an internal state instead of an objective situation, I can feel rich and grateful right now. In general, people want money because of how it makes them feel. For different people, its different things, it could be security, it could be self-validation as a member of society, it could be the ticket to the “good life”, freedom, the end of self-discipline, etc. It means all of these things and none of these things. Money is money, but your relationship with it causes you to feel certain things.

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer for you, yet. I can’t tell you what’s a good money goal, or a good motivation for making much more than necessary for your survival, only what I feel are bad goals. In short, I can’t tell you why you should be rich. All of the arguments I’ve heard so far have not been compelling, but that might be because I have some beliefs that make them so. I’d love to hear your perspective on these things, so please drop me a line in the comments and help me figure this out. Thanks in advance! Any thoughts are appreciated, honest.

Some beliefs obviously limit you from achieving your goals, and are appropriately called limiting beliefs. Usually they are pretty obvious when presented in examples such as, “Money is dirty and unspiritual”, which would obviously interfere with a goal of making money. Other beliefs, however, are less obvious.

The way I discover some of my limiting beliefs is like this: I ask myself, “Why have I not achieved this result yet?” The answer is usually in terms of doing, being or having. Sometimes the answer is reasonable. For example, “Why am I not healthier?” has the obvious answer that I do not excersize. On the other hand, there have been studies where one group of people were told that their normal, everyday movements were enough excersize and they subsequently showed muscle growth. So, it’s tricky to figure out what is simply a limiting belief and what is a physical state in reality. As a personal anecdotal example: since I was a kid I’ve believed I have really good reflexes (cause I thought it was cool, all my favourite characters had great reflexes) so I do. I’ve often caught things that were dropping that I only saw out of the corner of my eye and impressed people that way, too. I don’t recall doing a reflex test recently, though, I should try it out. Anyhoo, my belief seems to have translated into an actual quick reflex time even though I do not have any training like that.

On the other hand, if you believe in IM, then its all limiting beliefs and you can just change your beliefs, even those that seem reasonable and do whatever you want. However, there are some beliefs may be limiting you from achieving some goals, but they are not really beliefs, but values. That is, your conscience says that they’re not good things.

Some examples:

Question: “Why do I not have an A+ in all my courses?”

Answer: Because I do not spend enough time or energy studying. I believe that there is a certain amount of time or studying I need to do to achieve this goal. On the other hand, I could find a way around this belief by becoming a more efficient student.

I can think of this pattern working unconsciously earlier in my life, too. For example, I had a lot of trouble with what I call the SML, or Standard Model of Life, which is basically, you go to school to go get a job, then you get a job so you can have kids, get married and retire, you retire so you can die. That’s not to say I’m ok with this way of living, now, because there just seems to be so little meaning there, but I have lost a sort of irrational resistance to it, and can now consciously choose with my rational mind (or what I have of it) either to follow this path or not to. It is a suggested path, not a constriction to one way and it is just one path out of many.

As I wrote recently, the idea of a life purpose also seemed restrictive to me. This is miles away from writing now, isn’t it?

I also feel this way about PhotoReading. One of the keys to PRing is to choose a specific purpose that you want to fulfill and is why you are reading this book. Similar to how I feel about life purposes, I felt one purpose for reading too constricting and would rather prefer to read the whole thing.

To-do lists or NextAction lists are a tricky thing. David Allen once said that everything on your list is either pulling you or pushing you; there is no neutral territory. A lot of times, I’ll put something on the list that I think is a good idea at one time, and then it’ll feel like its set in stone. I’ll do everything that I want to do (or want to do more than I don’t want to do the other items) but then I’ll simply have just the things I don’t want to do left, and thus to-do lists become oppressive rather than just a guide to structure your day.

Over-structured lives in general seem restrictive. I like having lots of flexibility in time, so I don’t really like a full schedule. I guess that gives me the illusion of freedom.

Another, potentially very important shift from this new belief has to do with why I never pursued any sort of technical studies in school. I did not want to be “just another” coder or “just another” engineer. Engineering is a bit of a tradition in my family, and among my ethnic background, so I supposed I wanted to feel unique, even though I am very well suited for these sort of technical things and really enjoy it, too.

About figuring out why I may dislike restriction of structures so much. I have two ideas, and th first is that I simply value freedom highly. However, having a preference does not translate into resistance. Usually resistance is caused by something under the surface that you are not aware of, because once you become aware of it, you can accept the choice and whichever option you choose, even if it is negative. I prefer organic solutions rather than forced ones for some reason, too, and I mean an irrational sort of resistance.

Another possible reason may be that I feel on some level that if I follow a structure too much I will become that structure. I have felt this sort of identity crisis a few months ago when I started wondering if I was just a “conduit” for PD or Steve Pavlina, rather than my own person. This particular fear may come from the feeling that I will be dismissed by people as “just another PD geek” or so forth. I have a particular dislike for this sort of dismissal, as I mentioned above to do with doing something with technology. I suppose I would feel this sort of dismissal as a rejection of my personness as uninteresting, unidimensional and probably useless. This is a useful and important thing to work, I think, because I am still having trouble getting myself to optimize this site and do things which will bring in more income. That might be because I genuinely don’t feel like I am delivering enough value to feel good about monetizing it, or it may be there is another limiting belief in there somewhere. I’d like to know what it is soon, though.

Even though it has only been a few days since I had that epiphany about joy possibly being my life purpose, I have been in this deep state of calm. It’s been a stressful few days, so while I did have other emotions such as anger, it was easier to put them aside and just focus on what needed to get done. As if the surface of a deep ocean is tumultuous but the depths are calm. So, I definitely feel there is some value to this line of inquiry. I hope you are enjoying reading so much about me, too. :-p

Recently, I was reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, and it was just a rambling bunch of paragraphs. There was no single focus for a chapter and Freud would talk about a number of unrelated things. There seemed like an overall lack of preparation there (something I’ve recently come to recognize the importance of). I came to understand that the three-part structure of essays helps give it clarity and balance. In a similar vein, the three-act structure creates a certain response in human beings which is quite enjoyable. That doesn’t mean its good or bad, it just is.

This is the image I have of these sort of structures: Imagine a human-shaped mold. It can only be filled with a certain amount of material and thus restricts growth. This is how I used to imagine these sort of structures. As molds to pour your work into, and that just felt inorganic and forced. Now, I’ve come to imagine them more as a skeleton that you can drape your work on. In this way, you can gain the benefits of these skeletons (such as clarity and structure) and still create great work.

The final way to learned to be ok with structures is to realize that while they may seem forced now and then but that’s only because I am not very good at them. At the beginning of learning any skill, it may seem forced and awkward, but as you become more skilled, it becomes easier. I wrote about this previously: 4 Stages of How You Learn!

All of that said, that does not mean I cannot play with the structure of these things. In fact, playing with structurs is a great source of joy for me. But I have gotten over my subconscious resistance to these sort of structures. I have a feeling that this has bigger implications than just for writing. I can feel that this has to do with my life purpose (finding which felt restrictive and mold-like to me) but now I realize purpose is simply a back-bone thread that is already in my life. I can feel that this may have to be why I do not want to do anything unoriginal. Similarly, to-do lists are not supposed to be restrictive like that and you have to do everything on them because it’s written down, but they serve as guides and skeletons for your time. There is more introspection to be done here.

I hope that if anyone out there is suffering from a similar subconscious resistance to structures, they can make the mental flip from mold to skeleton and lose that resistance. Without subconscious resistance, you can make conscious decisions better.

Because we can never see the world objectively, but through many different lenses (or mental models), beliefs play a key role as lenses. For example, ever notice how when you’re hungry, all sources and forms of food become highlighted? It all depends on how you (or your hypothalamus) set your filters.

Many beliefs, however, can simply become self-fulfilling prophesies. Say you hold a belief that people are untrustworthy. Your mind will filter out all cases of supposed trustworthy behaviour (it will probably be rationalized away as only being the appearance of trustworthiness), and focus on the evidence of untrustworthiness. Not only that, you will also act in ways which suggest to other people that you don’t trust them, and they’re less likely to trust you. When all is said and done, you’ll continue to be reinforced by the belief that people are untrustworthy.

So, if there’s no way to rationalize your way out of these kinds of beliefs, what’s an intelligent person to do? Pavlina suggests (and I agree) to try out different beliefs, because your belief will usually appear to be right one when you’re within it. After you’ve tried out a number of them, whichever one seems to be the best on whatever scale you choose (such as accuracy, makes you happier, make you more money, etc) you adopt as your belief.

Its a very interesting process of exploration. For example, I recently discovered that I believe effort is value. That the value of something I do comes from the effort I put into it. This helps to explain a few curious behaviours I used to engage in:

• Ignore the opportunity to make easy money.
• Feel bad about making money when it didn’t require effort or personal sacrifice from me (ie by fixing computers which I enjoy and I’m good at, and its just easy for me).
• If I worked really hard on an assignment and got a C, I would say, “but I worked really hard.” Rather than simply accept that effort and the final value of the essay do not have to correlate. And after a while, thinking that my effort wasn’t good enough, I’d stop trying and fall into a pattern of procrastination and not trying very hard.

Objective truth is a hard thing to find these days.

More Reading:

Installing Empowering Beliefs

8 Guidelines for Choosing Effective Beliefs