Hard Way VS. Easy Way
The difference between doing things the hard way and doing things the easy way o
Easy way: doing things that match the way your brain and body body are designed to work
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Hard way: doing things the way we’d like to think we should be able to do things, as up-
standing independent self-reliant people; we should be able to do things on our own with just willpower
External and Internal Factors
External Factors are just as important or more important than internal factors o
Example: If you’re starting a business, you can’t have a business without customers; doesn’t matter matter how good your product is
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Regarding personal habit change:
Intentions are not enough; you can be self-righteous and try to succeed in spite of the odds of a bad environment, but fra nkly, if you take that route, you’re being an idiot and making things hard for no reason
Noble intentions are useless if temptations and obstacles aren’t removed first
Importance of Committing You don’t need to know how before you commit; you need to comm it to find out how o
You have to be willing to pay the price
Decisions
Decision: cutting off all other possibilities o
“I’m going to give this a try,” or, “this just seems like the right thing to do,” are no t really
decisions o
Decisions are not something that happen as a result of your reasoning process
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Making decisions based on reason or circumstance circumstance is laying the foundation of your failure to follow through
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It’s not a decision unless you can make it independent of your current circumstances
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Example: if you decide this week is a really good week to start something, what happens next week when it’s not a good week?
Circumstances change all the time; you have to be able to not change wi th them
Indecision is suffering o
not only is indecision suffering, but time itself is a suffering and divided mind
Asking VS. Telling You can’t always tell yourself what to do, but you can always ask what you can do o
Asking questions vs. telling yourself things:
Asking leads to you becoming interested, curious, motivated, etc
Engaging Mental Resources
How to engage the resources in your mind o
Commit to a course of action and rule out other possibilities
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Know the price you need to pay and be wi lling to pay it
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Ask yourself what you need to do
The Evolution Conspiracy, or Why Change Is Hard! We can’t stay focused or take consistent action BECAUSE we are slaves to our habits and our
environments o
Brains are designed to pay more attention to what happens outside of us than to what happens inside of us; this is so our brains don’t lock up in a loop and s tart obsessing about things and not paying any attention to what’s going on around us, because not
paying attention to what ’s going on outside you is a good way to get eaten
our genes want us to pay attention to w hat other people in our tribe or pack are doing because our genes don’t want us to be caught up in some personal obsession when the rest of the tribe just found a kill that they could scavenge on, and we might get lef t out and not get any because we weren’t paying enough attention to what other people were doing
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We’re designed to learn to do things th e same way, over and over again
so if something works, our genetic heritage wants to make sure that we’ll
continue to do things that actually work —because you survived;
that’s why we have habits: they are designed to be the overriding function in
our lives, our brains are not wired for us to really have a lot of say in this o
Willpower is limited resource, kind of like muscle is; setting up 9 big goals or changes without a system is asking to burn out quickly
Want to set things up so you don’t have to make decisions— decisions take
willpower points
Brain only gives certain number of points each day, and this is a safety mechanism to keep us from overriding our evolutionary imperatives that drive us to survive and reproduce; this is so we don’t get too obsessed with hobbies
and forget to hunt or eat; brains are designed to keep us focused on outside, and give us limited control to respond to our circumstances differently than what the circumstances dictate We can’t stop procrastination and self -sabotage BECAUSE we are slaves to our learned safety
signals o
Emotional imprint time period & safety signals/responses
Period before the age of 5 or so when we’re particularly prone to taking
emotional pictures that represent a fight, flight, or fright response to a particular circumstance
Excellent survival mechanisms
Humans have more sophisticated brains than animals, and humans take these safety signals/responses and generalize them to a wide variety of things
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Safety signals kick in and override the will
Concept of Deserve
Learned safety signal designed to keep you from being killed by competitors in your pack Among social animals, there is a pecking order, and violating that picking order is seriously asking to get yourself killed Animals therefore do not violate this pecking order o
Done by using these emotional responses that stop animal from showing any aggressive behavior towards resources of the group
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Safety signals have no useful purpose for humans in modern day and age Also have other ways to resolve difficulties Intellect allows us to figure things out on our own instead of acting based on safety response
We can’t decide what will make us happy BECAUSE we are slaves to our biased prediction
mechanism o
Biased prediction mechanism: we can’t decide what will make us happy because we don’t know; evolution didn’t give us a mechanism to figure o ut what will make us happy because evolution doesn’t care; evolution makes us happy when we do the things that
make evolution happy like stay alive and reproduce; a fulfilling life is not the function of our existence from an evolutionary standpoint o
Our brains aren’t good at predicting what will be fulfilling for us
ie winning the lottery research
Always best to make a gut decision, and this stops the agony of indecision
Internal states and attitudes are more important regarding happiness than are external factors
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When people asked what would make them happy, they tend to li st points in time
I want to lose twenty pounds vs. I want to weight a certain weight for the r es t of my life
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I want to quit smoking vs. I want to be a non-smoker for the rest of my life
I want to start a business vs. I want to own and run a successful business
Brain’s predictive machinery designed for point -in-time goals because we’re not
designed for any type of long-term planning o
Humans need to balance between day to day goals and living a fulfilling life
Living a fulfilling life is completely different from achieving goals Achieving goals is a nice and enjoyable part of having a fulfilling life; it does not give you a fulfilling life when you’re done with a goal, all you have is a finished goal
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we shouldn’t focus on goals to the exclusion of understanding what that goal is going to
do for your life
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doing so could lead to disrupting other areas of your life
in short, we don’t own our lives— our genes do by default
What can we do with all this? o
understanding all of these limitations will help us overcome them
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if we want to reclaim our lives, the only way to redeem ourselves is to pay the price of freedom
Price of freedom is eternal vigilance By default, we’re slaves to our habits and environments
you have the choice to set up good habits once you understand what a good habit actually is and how to set it up you have the choice of setting up your environment, of changing your environment, of making sure people who support your goals are in your environment, and people who don’t are not
you have the choice of exposing yourself to experiences and situations and thoughts and ideas and people who have a different perspective on life; this will help you change your perspective and start thinking about things in a different way o
Would you rather be special or would you rather get results?
If you want to get results, you need to make things easy for yourself by making your environment reflect the goals that you have Ask: How can I make this easier? How can I break this down into the smallest pieces that can be habits that I don’t have to think about when
I do them? o
Figure this out ahead of time and make it an unbreakable rule; your brain can handle this since it requires simply doing the same thing every single day, which is what it was designed to do
How Most Habits and Resolutions Get Broken, and What You Can Do About It
The presumption of failure o
We don’t do things because we assume we’re going to fail , and we make decisions
based on this assumption; this cuts us off from certain choices; “what if I fail” is a tremendous block that we put against ourselves
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This assumption is on a gut level, feeling level
The thought that we might succeed, really succeed, sometimes never even enters our consciousness
WAYMISH—Why Are You Making It So Hard o
One reason is because we believe we have to make it so hard; otherwise, we believe that we won’t deserve it
Deserving things is for animals; deserve is an emotion that is to regulate the behavior of a pack to respect the pecking order so they don’t get killed
You are not a pack animal; you don’t need to deserve anything; you can have
what you want—it’s that simple
moral objections, etc are rationalizations built fundamentally on a submission instinct that’s designed to preserve you from getting your head clawed off by
another animal you don’t need this
guilt is another such safety signal; it’s a response to create submission behavior to show to the other animals that you’re “not worthy”, and so you’re not interfering with their rule of the pack o
Vague and conflicting goals
If you aren’t specific enough about what exactly you want and when you want it, you’re not going to get it
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Over ambitious goals
Just as bad as no goal
Lots of these overly ambitious goals are attempts to deserve the results
Instead of making a goal to _____ every day, goal should be to establish a habit of ______ing every day
If you haven’t yet established a habit or set down and decided how you’re going to accomplish task, it’s too ambitious at this point It’s okay to put energy into ambitious goals, but there’s a difference
between doing that and forgetting that you need to live every day of your life in between o
Ignoring the price, or not paying it in advance is one of the biggest reasons why habits and resolutions get broken
The decisions need to be made beforehand by knowing and paying the price in advance; need to know in advance how to handle circumstances of problems that will arise
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules
2 ways to accelerate your life
Removal of obstacles o
Corresponds to removing your learned safety signals
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This is essentially increases confidence
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Only thing you can do quickly
Path is already there; it’s just blocked; the removal of the obstacle allows you to
immediately move forward Development of skill o
Whatever you practice, you grow your brain’s ability to do; rewiring of the brain tak es
place; takes time and repetition
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Requires growth of new connections/pathways
This essentially increases your ability to handle more things in your life; increases your competence
Implementing what you know o
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Involves writing things down
moves from being an idea in your head to a thing that is in your outside reality
as said before, brain cares more about outside reality
use the limitations of the brain against themselves
How to discover what’s really holding you back and break free
Do the thing first, even if you’re sure you’ll fail o
Need to access/encounter the specific blocks in order to override/remove them
Separate your feelings from your thoughts o
Locate feelings in your body
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Learned safety signals have physical responses
Can be resolved by taking conscious control of the muscle tension
Use the feeling removal technique Ruthlessly eliminate all negative emotions and their sources from your life permanently o
Covered elsewhere (procrastination cure recordings)
How to stay focused, and accomplish any goal in far less time, with far less stress than you ever imagined possible
Use the ratchet principle o
Make your life better in small incremental improvements, as long as they kee p going in the same direction; ensure that you’re always progr essing, or at least never regressing
Write your goals down o
A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on
Nothing happens without a deadline Have a success environment o
necessary for making lifestyle changes
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need examples to emulate and aspire to
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need to be challenged and encouraged
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need a fellowship of your peers
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need a shared and clear code of conduct amongst people you interact with
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need rituals and systems for success
