mastery.fm – Page 24 – caffeine for the mind & spirit

Depression & Curiosity

Elizabeth Gilbert, on the Good Life Project podcast:

Jonathan Fields: It’s interesting, you brought up depression and curiosity. It reminded me of a conversation I had a few years back with Chip Conley, and during our conversation, that was the first time I had ever heard somebody offer that there might be a relationship between those two. He said: “Look, people think the opposite of depression is happiness. The opposite of depression is curiosity. Because the moment you have the spark of curiosity…. it’s virtually impossible to stay in a state without possibility.

Elizabeth Gilbert: That’s why we have to be makers, too, because we are made to live in a state of vitality. We live in a universe of motion. All evidence points to the fact that we live in a world where things are changing every minute, every second. What is it, every five years — you have a totally new body, because you’re shedding cells and growing cells. It’s all in motion.

My friend Rob Bell has a great line, where he says, “Despair is a spiritual condition, because despair is the mistaken notion that tomorrow is going to be exactly the same as today.” That’s when you fall into despair, when you’re in a place in your life where you’re like, Ok, this is just all it’s ever going to be. It’s just going to be this. Every single day. The same.

And it’s a lie, because all history points to the fact that tomorrow is actually not going to be at all like today. The whole thing is shifting and moving, the ground under our feet is in motion all the time, and what all of the universe is asking you to do is step back into that current and participate with it. In creation. In becoming. In unfolding. In the movement. In the change.

And as soon as you can start to believe, “Oh, maybe it’s not always going to be exactly like this. And maybe my actions matter, because maybe the choices for how I’m spending my time will affect how tomorrow is going to be different from today.” That’s when you begin to reclaim your life.

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Humans are the ultimate adaptation machine

Tom Bilyeu, on the James Altucher podcast:

When you see somebody with six-pack abs and they say “I used to be a 100 pounds heavier”, you call B.S. until you see the before-and-after photo. But what’s the before-and-after photo of a mind? That becomes really difficult.

But I can tell you stories…

When I started in business (…) I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I didn’t understand business. I am not a born entrepreneur in any shape, way, or form. I definitely meet minimum requirements, though. I am smart enough. Okay, so once you’re smart enough — you can learn anything you want. You just have to put in the time.

Humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. More than any other species, we can adapt to our environment, we can adapt to stressors. You can put yourself in any environment, you can get good at it — if you have the will to do the work.

I have the will to do the work. I know how to want something. I know how to start with “I’m interested” and turn it into an all-consuming blaze of desire. It’s cultivated. And I believe anyone can do it. You have to know how to fan the flames, you have to know how to self-congratulate, you have to know how to self-punish… all of that… but all I do is say: “I’m going to DECIDE I want this thing.”

And:

You have to get to the nature of things. The reason that I’m always telling people that “humans are the ultimate adaptation machine” is — humans lead with belief. You’re never going to take an action to which you don’t believe you will ever get a positive result.

But if you believe, “Oh, nothing special has to be true of me, I just have to accept that I am a human, and humans are adaptation machines.” That’s literally what we’re designed to do. So just because I’m not good at something today doesn’t mean I can’t be good at it tomorrow.

And that was that first belief that allowed me to start down the path of really developing a growth mindset, building out a set of skills that was valuable.

I believed that my efforts would be rewarded just by the fact that I’m a human, and that’s how the human brain works. You do something over and over and over, and you get better at it. You certainly get more efficient. And then if you can train well, then you can really improve.

So, because I simply believed that that is true of the human animal, I don’t have to think anything unique about me, it’s just — that’s the way this works. If I put the energy in, I’m going to get a result.

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Delicious Outcomes

Steve Pavlina:

To this day I still have the habit of obsessively thinking about what I want. It’s like the opposite of depression. If I’m standing in line or driving in my car, my mind will just start roaming through all kinds of positive scenarios, envisioning one delicious outcome after another. If I want to consider what might go wrong, I have to sit down and think about that consciously, and even then it’s hard because my mind will habitually return to obsessing over how great everything will be.

And:

How do you establish the habit of thinking about what you want? First, do your best to catch yourself thinking about what you don’t want, and consciously stop and replace those thoughts with positive alternatives. It doesn’t matter if the alternatives are realistic or not. This is your imagination we’re talking about, so you’re free to dream up whatever crazy scenarios you like. All that matters is that you enjoy thinking about them. You don’t need to write them down or tell anyone about them. Just enjoy basking in their glow.

Secondly, set aside a few minutes each day to consciously think about positive outcomes. Allow yourself to dream. Imagine how your life could become even better. Do this when you’re driving — put a sticky note in your car with the word “Dream” to remind yourself. Do it when you’re standing in line. Do it when you’re lying in bed waiting to fall asleep. Eventually this will become a habit, and you’ll dream about what you want whenever you have a spare moment. Again, it doesn’t matter if you think these outcomes are possible or not. Just enjoy the positive energy you get from thinking about what you want, and also notice that you can apply that energy to improve your current practical results right here, right now.

And:

It doesn’t matter how much time and energy you’ve invested in this habit already, how many times you’ve tried to change and failed, or how adept you are at making excuses. You can still begin to pay attention to your thoughts and rechannel them in a more positive direction. You’re always free to dream. It may take weeks, months, or even years to reach the point of feeling consistently good about your life, but the time is going to pass anyway, so you may as well get started today.

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ACHIEVE

Steve Pavlina:

You become an achiever by achieving your goals. If you achieve your goals, you’re an achiever. If you don’t achieve your goals, you’re not an achiever.

And:

To be an achiever, you must give your goals sufficient attention to reach, attain, or accomplish them. This means you must withdraw much of your attention from activities that are not directly leading to the accomplishment of your goals.

In a given week, where is your attention going? If you aren’t habitually obsessing over your goals, then what are you obsessing over instead?

(…)

What exactly are you reaching, attaining, or accomplishing in a typical week? Are you making progress on your goals by giving them many hours of attention, or are you putting your attention elsewhere?

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Create Your Vision

Steve Pavlina:

By default, you are visualizing the status quo. Without a grander vision to occupy your thoughts, you will naturally succumb to the habit of thinking about what you’re already getting, and you’ll often feel some emotions when you do so. This is exactly how you hold the intention to manifest more of the same. So by default, you are automatically holding intentions to keep getting what you’re getting.

This is why it’s rather silly to complain about your problems. Sometimes people come to our discussion forums and write really long posts to explain what they’re experiencing in life and why they don’t like it. What they don’t realize is that what they’re doing is the exact process necessary to ensure that they’ll experience more of the same. They’re imagining their past and present as they write about it, and they’re feeling strong feelings as they do so. They are using the power of vision to create a future that resembles their past and present.

If you want to create something different than what you’re already getting, do NOT do what I described in the previous paragraph. It’s stupid. This is the exact opposite of an intelligent solution. Only do this if you want to be stupid. And if you catch someone doing this, please refer them to this article, so they can hopefully understand why it cannot possibly work… and so that they’ll get some motivation to start creating a new vision, even if they have to guess at first.

Instead of reviewing and rehashing what you don’t want, create the vision of what you do want. If you feel a need to post something online, post about your dreams and desires. Write a really long, emotional post about what you most want to experience next in life. This way you won’t make the terrible mistake of reinforcing what you’re already getting.

And:

If you don’t like what you’re already getting, the best thing you can do is to ignore it. Turn your back on it. Stop dwelling on it. Only pay the minimal amount of attention to it that is truly essential. Turn the bulk of your attention (and emotion) to the new vision you’ve created. Spend more time living in the new reality you’re creating as opposed to the old one you wish to leave behind. This will quickly draw that new reality into your life in physical form. Don’t worry about trying to be perfect at this. Just do the best you can. The more you can turn your attention away from the past and towards your new vision, the better. The more you practice this, the easier it gets.

And:

Keep tweaking your vision as you feel the need to do so. Keep renewing it once or twice per day. Feel the feelings of being there. Eventually you’ll create a vision that feels so good that you’ll find it immensely pleasurable to just sit back and imagine it as real. You may reach the point where you’d rather live in your new imagined reality than in your current physical reality. That’s what creates the shifts that make your vision a reality.

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Take some time today to think of all your favorite memories from this year. Start from January, or work your way backwards. Remember and savor every good memory and good experience that you’ve had this year. Give thanks for it. Feel appreciation for all the good times you’ve had, the people you’ve met, the places you’ve been.

Abraham-Hicks:

If you could just find the things that you adore, the things that feel the best to you, and just for a little while, give those things your undivided attention… everything that has been murky, everything that has been slow, everything that has clogged up will begin breaking free.

And:

Every time you praise something, every time you appreciate something, every time you feel good about something, you are telling the Universe, “More of this, please. More of this, please.”

Also…

Here’s a technique from Tim Ferriss that you can use to welcome 2019:

I’m often asked about how I approach New Year’s resolutions. The truth is that I no longer approach them at all, even though I did for decades. Why the change? I have found “past year reviews” more informed, valuable, and actionable than half-blindly looking forward with broad resolutions.

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Premortem

Ryan Holiday:

A CEO calls her staff into the conference room on the eve of the launch of a major new initiative. They file in and take their seats around the table. She calls the meeting to attention and begins, “I have bad news. The project has failed spectacularly. What went wrong?”

The team is perplexed: What?! But we haven’t even launched yet…!

(…)

The technique that the CEO above was using was designed by psychologist Gary Klein. It’s called a premortem. In a premortem, a project manager must envision what could go wrong—what will go wrong—in advance, before starting. Why? Far too many ambitious undertakings fail for preventable reasons. Far too many people don’t have a backup plan because they refuse to consider that something might not go exactly as they wish.

Tom Bilyeu:

“Paul, we’re here to answer exactly one question: Why am I going to fail?”

And if you start with that, instead of “Tell me how to succeed” — which is what most people do — you can start to eliminate some of the obvious paths, or at least understand why they’re dangerous paths, why most people fail as they go down those.

Looking at that, what I’m trying to do is rapidly iterate through all the possibilities. There’s a 1000 doors before you. 999 of them aren’t going to work. So the question is: how do you find the one that’s going to work?

And the answer is, you go through one — “Did this work?” No. Back up. Next one. Back up. Next one. Over and over and over. The goal is to fail rapidly. The question is, what are you learning when you’re failing?

Scott H. Young:

If you can endure the worst case, the best cases take care of themselves.

All of my plans are pessimistic. I focus on what might go wrong, not speculating about what might go right.

This may seem like a mindset doomed to fail, but I’ve found quite the opposite. When you manage and control the worst case, fear and anxiety are less likely to overwhelm your thinking. Since you know you can endure the worst outcome, then anything becomes tolerable.

Part of this is asking whether I could sustain a failed outcome. What if a new project completely goes bust? What if I make no progress? Could I keep going, or would failure to reach a certain outcome be a disaster with my plan as it is now?

But an even bigger part of this is expecting a certain amount of behavioral failure. What if I get sick? What if this takes me longer than I had anticipated? What if this turns out to be harder than expected?

When you take this mindset, you start to feel a lot luckier. Why? Because when you’ve planned and prepared for the majority of negative possibilities, then the “random” events you tend to encounter are biased towards the positive. You get a lucky break, or something succeeds more than you had expected.

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Bending the Rules of Reality

Tim Ferriss:

Reality is largely negotiable.

If you stress-test the boundaries and experiment with the “impossibles,” you’ll quickly discover that most limitations are a fragile collection of socially reinforced rules you can choose to break at any time.

What follows are 17 questions that have dramatically changed my life. Each one is time-stamped, as they entered the picture at precise moments.

Here are some of Tim’s questions:

What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?
What would I do / have / be if I had $10 million?
What if I could only subtract to solve problems?
What would this look like if it were easy?
If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do?

And:

For the last 5 years, I’ve asked myself, in effect, “What can I put in place so that I can go completely off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks?” To entrepreneurs who are feeling burned out, this is also the question I pose most often. Two weeks isn’t enough, as you can let fires erupt and then attempt to repair things when you return. Four to eight weeks (or more) doesn’t allow you to be a firefighter.

On lifestyle design:

The rules of reality can be bent. It just requires thinking in different terms.

(…)

Consider the question: What would you do, day-to-day, if you had $100 million in the bank? If still blocked, fill in the five “doing” spots with the following:

1 place to visit

1 thing to do before you die (a memory of a lifetime)

1 thing to do daily

1 thing to do weekly

1 thing you’ve always wanted to learn

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Delicious Desire

Steve Pavlina:

When you want something, really want it. Let that delicious feeling of desire permeate your entire being… until you’re almost ready to explode from the energy it creates. Desire feels good. This is how you get yourself aligned with what you want. This is what activates the Law of Attraction to help manifest what you want. This is also what activates your creativity and summons inspired action to help you get there even faster.

And:

The receiving/manifesting part isn’t up to us so much — our part is simply to admit what we really want, to hold that desire, and to move into alignment with it. You will begin to feel good as soon as you start moving in the right direction, which starts with clarifying exactly what you want and then allowing yourself to want it.

If you’ve been feeling bad lately, recognize that it’s because you want something you don’t currently have. Want to feel even worse? Try pretending you don’t really want it, assume you’ll never get it, or imagine you don’t deserve it. Want to turn it around and feel fantastic? Step fully and completely into that desire, and bask in the energy it summons.

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Vision

Steve Pavlina:

If you don’t create a vision for each part of your life, someone else will do it for you. The intentions of others will fill in the blanks. You see… you’re always working to fulfill some vision. Either you’re creating and fulfilling your own vision, or you’re working on someone else’s vision for you. There is no neutral.

And:

Keep tweaking your vision as you feel the need to do so. Keep renewing it once or twice per day. Feel the feelings of being there. Eventually you’ll create a vision that feels so good that you’ll find it immensely pleasurable to just sit back and imagine it as real. You may reach the point where you’d rather live in your new imagined reality than in your current physical reality. That’s what creates the shifts that make your vision a reality.

And:

The best thing you can do with your energy is to focus it where you’d like to see further expansion. Personally I’m not that interested in increasing the amount of suffering in the world, so I largely ignore it. I’m much more interested in expanding other aspects of life such as creativity, abundance, playfulness, a sense of purpose, fascinating technology, openness, honesty, courage, expressions of affection (hugs, cuddling), lucid dreaming, traveling, and of course hot sex with Canadians.

If you choose to participate in the expansion of suffering, you’re free to do so, and no one will stop you. Lots of people seem to find it interesting enough to dedicate a significant part of their lives to it. Just as there are people who can’t fathom how I could ignore suffering, I find it ludicrous that so many are able to ignore Canada.

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