Mind-Manual

What if Everyone Followed Their Dreams? There’d be no garbage pickers!

This is a question that shows up in various forms, such as, “If everyone awakens, will we all starve?” Usually, this is an excuse to justify the fear that causes us to not pursue what we truly want. Not being courageous enough to pursue our goals is ok, its the denial that that is the real issue is what will hold you back. The first thing is to acknowledge it. Courage is like a muscle and you are simply a bit weaker than your goal requires. However denial will only hurt you in the long run.

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.

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Self-Fulfilling Prophesies & How Your Life Happens

Do you know what a self-fulfilling prophesy is? It’s a prediction that somehow causes itself to come into being, usually by the knowledge of it. Here’s an example from wiki: “The 1973 oil crisis resulted in the so-called “toilet paper panic.” The rumour of an expected shortage in toilet paper—resulting from a decline in the importation of oil—led to people stockpiling supplies of toilet paper. This caused a shortage, which seemed to validate the rumour.”

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.

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