Fixed Beliefs Keep You Alive
We are full of useful fixed beliefs:
I can’t look at my computer as I write this and believe I am standing at the top of Everest.
I can’t look into the sky and believe I can walk to that spot ten metres above me.
It’s good to be based in reality.
However, we have other fixed beliefs that suck:
I can’t do stand-up comedy
I can’t do Maths.
These aren’t true. We can improve at any skill.
If you can read, speak and understand the concept of the numbers of 1-1000 you can improve at stand-up comedy or maths.
You might not improve incredibly fast. Yet, you will improve.
I would add you will almost certainly improve faster than you expect.
Most difficult things we put off are usually easier and less scary than we expect.
We invent worries.
Examining Fear
There is a brilliant quote about fear.
“Our fears are a mile wide and one inch deep. We look at this vast ocean of a task and it looks so big, it’s overwhelming and unbeatable.
No chance we can get to the other side.
Yet when we finally step into it we find that we don’t sink. It doesn’t eat us up.
We just walk over it.
We find ourselves amused at what it was we were so scared about.
Like, Is this it? Really…
Oh man why did I waste so much time waiting to do this.”
I’m not saying that everything in life is easy.
I’m saying that when you choose to do the hard thing, it nearly always gets done.
So we shouldn’t let our thoughts of difficulty fool us into assuming we can’t do something. Because then we never will do it.
The biggest thing standing in your way is yourself.
The fight you need to fight is in your mind.
Autopilot and Addiction vs Flow
In my last post Dimensions, I spoke about the flat dimensionality of our thoughts.
I gave the example that physically humans can’t escape gravity and live their lives glued to the surface of the planet.
Despite being 3 dimensional creatures our lives are lived in a tiny 2 dimensional film, bound forever to the floor.
It is the same with our thoughts.
We could be thinking all kinds of bonkers ideas, but our minds are stuck.
Our thoughts are pulled into a very singular and flat way of thinking compared to the diversity of possibilities.
I could start reciting the works of Shakespeare in Latvian right now. It’s technically possible.
Instead, I will only consider toilet breaks, eating, procrastinating and writing.
Mostly we need to be on autopilot.
It helps us not crush ourselves under the weight of trying to decide every possibility.
I don’t need to compare a thousand locations to put my water bottle right now, I just need to put it down.
Flow is the state of being engulfed by a task and blind to what else you could be doing.
One of our big issues is our inability to ‘break into flow-states’. So any help is mostly a good thing.
We struggle because our attention is hijacked.
We fear the difficulty we face, that mile-wide ocean.
If we can just start we would make progress. It’s not the difficulty of the thing that causes us to sink. It’s our expectation that it will be difficult.
As we are busy sinking ourselves we search for a lifeline. And that’s where we get hijacked.
It’s our addiction to easier things.
What is an Addiction?
You practice it daily
You abandon other hobbies
You hide parts of it from your partner
(such as cost)You consider selling / sacrificing things to invest in the addiction
(selling a car to buy crypto / not affording healthy meals to buy alcohol)You stop following your own rules
You believe you’ll make it back
(money lost gambling or in crypto / health lost smoking when you finally quit)You don’t think you have a problem
(You think you can stop if you want to)You try to quit and get pulled back in
An addiction is insanely repetitive when you remind yourself of the infinite array of ideas you could be contemplating.
Every task is bookended by your addiction.
It might often be broken up by it.
Whether you suffer from checking crypto prices, checking email or having a cigarette.
It’s a constant return to a home state. If you were to read the transcript of your thoughts it sounds like a crazy obsession.
Wake up - Check Phone
Coffee - Check Phone
Toilet - Check Phone
Commute - Check Phone
Work - oh actually Check Phone before work silly
Finally work - Check Phone because I’m stuck.
So on…
It is so obsessive and uninteresting.
Check phone
How embarrassed would you be if someone read the amount of times you thought about any addiction you have? Porn, drugs, doughnuts, Instagram….
You’re on your phone right now aren’t you
Many alcoholics can’t go somewhere or do something without thinking about if they have alcohol on them or when the next drink is. The longer they go without a drink the louder the noise in their mind distracting them.
Subliminal message to use your phone less
An addiction is a burden on your mind.
Why are you reading this crossed out italic stuff???
Like reading this email along with the constant weird crossed-out thing going on is a bit confusing.
HA there was a reason for me to read this. Wait why I am now reading in first person. WTF
No one needs two sets of thoughts or conversations going on. It sucks.
Sorry bye
Open minded
An addiction is the opposite of diverse or liberated thinking
It eats away your time and attention like a greedy virus. Cycling through the same thought pattern again and again on repeat.
It’s not new. It’s not exciting.
It’s just the same thought again and again and again.
If you do something 100 times in a day, that’s totally weird, right?
The same thought again and again and again and again.
It’s annoying, to say the least.
The same thought again and again and again and...
What’s up with this again and again thing?
The same thought again and again and agaaain…
WHAT - It KEEPs happening.
The same thought again and again and agaaain…
HOT DAWG - someone NEEDs to stop this
The same thought again and again and agaaain…
It’s ME 🫠 - Hiii 👋 - I’m the problem it’s me 😈
The same thought again and again and agaaain…
Someone NEEDs to stop ME 🫨 😱 😫
The same thought again and again and agaaain…
If I had an editor I’d shoot them!
The same thought again and again and agaaain…
Oh, I am the editor…
The average teen checks their phone over 100 times a day
Consider that your brain is a precious resource, your one possession that will make all your decisions for you and determine your success in life.
It seems like an inconvenience to take up so much of its processing power and time with an addiction.
To rudely interrupt any thinking process it has with this extra task on endless repeat.
That’s annoying.
No one likes that….
How do addictions impact Ability?
Back to physical dimensionality and our exploration potential.
We can’t truly explore the 3 dimensions and walk in the air. We are already limited
Having a disability that puts us in a wheelchair or on crutches suddenly radically narrows the potential of exploration we have on the surface of the earth.
It’s a hindrance you must consider and plan around. It holds you back in everything you do when you try to go somewhere. (Trust me)
Now think about the exploration potential of your thoughts.
An addiction is like a disability for your mind.
It gets in the way of everything.
Imagine you are trying to get something done and someone keeps slowing you down.
Interrupting you, ripping you out of your progress, and holding you back.
That’s an addiction.
“If you're trying to do something that is, by definition, a breakthrough or a breakout, something slightly beyond your reach to achieve.
You need 110% of your ability, your energy, everything”
Matt Higgins
(A clever man off Shark Tank I had on my podcast this week - Listen here)
Easy is Evil
We develop addictions as easy answers to a problem.
🍺 😊
This social situation is hard - Have a beer
I don’t know how to talk to my partner - Have a beer
It’s 9 am and I have a headache - Have a beer
📧 🤓
I don’t know what to do next - Oo check email
Writing is hard right now - Ahh just check email for a bit
This meeting is boring - Get some email done
Devices amplify this…
You can develop a distraction ritual where you bounce from email onto news, to social media and then stock prices.
Why is DogWifHat up 2,500% this week?
If I’d put 1 ETH ($3,500) into that when it was $0.022 and it’s now $3.65 I’d have $580,700. Ooof… (or should I say Wooof)
By the time you finally open up the work you need to do you’ve accidentally (INTENTIONALLY) wasted an hour.
Your head’s a bit scrambled.
It’s a good time to have a break and a cup of tea.
After that, you sit back down ready to start working with a clear mind. You’re not too sure where to start.
The mile-wide lake of fear has appeared.
It is now an hour since you checked your emails actually, so you decide to quickly check your email again just in case and…
oh s#!t
The biggest thing standing in your way is yourself.
Responsibility
Remember that whole weird issue with the “again and again and again” thing?
How could you forget?
Not only did I have to accept that I was the one doing it (sorry).
I also had to accept that I was the editor of my writing (double sorry).
With addiction, we need to recognise ourselves doing the bad thing and recognise ourselves choosing to use our time to do the bad thing.
And then we have to stop.
Yes, it’s hard.
Maybe like crossing a giant lake, we don’t know how to cross.
Fear and Desire
A funny thing about addictions is that everyone you know has had them.
At some point, they decided they had had enough.
It stopped being worth it.
They realised the difficulty it caused them was worse than the short-term relief it gave them.
They concluded it was a bad decision to spend time doing it and they stopped doing it.
They cease listing all the reasons it’s hard and just do it.
It’s in your mind
It’s incredibly hard to get someone to do something they don’t want to do.
Conversely, it’s just as hard to stop them from doing things they want to do.
Do you want it?
If you try to give something up but still want to do it, you don’t succeed.
You start listing all your different fears and difficulties, scrambling for something easier.
You sink into the lake of fear and difficulty.
Instead, accrue enough evidence to convince yourself it’s an awful idea. Not intellectually aware it’s stupid. In your bones.
Get physically repulsed by it.
The lake of difficulty transforms into a highway.
If anything interested you please share it with a friend 🙏
If you’re into positive psychology you might like my podcast - Listen here
Any funky questions you have about the mind or addictions, let me know.
— NOTE —
Internalised Ableism
Ableism is discrimination against people with physical or mental disabilities. It characterises people as defined by their disabilities as inferior to non-disabled people.
It’s largely seen as bad, because it is.
Internalised ableism is mostly destructive fixed mindset thinking that you are bad. That is damaging.
It would be wrong to read this and believe you are permanently inferior due to your addiction.
We all have enough reasons to hate on ourselves.
It would be good to read this and realise the inferiority you have compared to your potential if you liberated yourself from your vices.
Even better - realise your power to change the situation and address those addictions.
This was written mostly as a discovery of my own self-inflicted limitations.
Considering an addiction as a self-inflicted disability for my mind is an angle I have never heard of as a concept, yet it intuitively made sense.
In a 3-hour flight without internet, I can complete multiple days’ worth of coding or writing compared to normal. The daily gale-force wind in my face slowing me down the rest of the time, is optional.
The battle to ignore the internet when not on a plane, is in my mind.
— — —
I also fully acknowledge this piece is also full of holes. It’s meant to give a view to spark debate.
For example - One great thing about smoking is having a break every hour or two to go outside and chill out. That can be restorative and help lead to breakthroughs.
Many non-smokers would benefit from an excuse to stand outside and do nothing now and then…
Ever wonder why people talk about their nicotine addiction but almost no one got addicted to nicotine patches?
It’s the ritual act of smoking paired with the nicotine rush and potential social break that grabs people.
There’s a lot to dig into with addiction probably worth a series of pondering.
— — —
Ultimately addiction mostly screws your mind over from its capabilities.
For me, this is a huge benefit to help persuade me against any addiction.
Modern life is full of new solutions to make things “easier for you” by adding new things in, you need to do the opposite.
Most progress comes from less not more.
What can we take away rather than what else can we add in?
If nothing else, ask yourself what one thing you can limit or remove that would give you more freedom to complete something you are struggling with.