Ever got into an argument with a friend about who was right? You kept fighting about some tiny meaningless detail that doesn’t even matter. Regardless of who was right, this scene is an example of the inability to accept the thoughts of others. Even when what the other person said is crazy, something like “Gravity is not real” (this example was obnoxious on purpose). The majority if not all of you would say that gravity is real, so you would probably end up dismissing the thought of the other person because you have conviction you are right but have we tried to understand what the other person was thinking or where they were coming from? Most likely not.

Throughout our everyday lives, we all have a lens through to understand the world. Call it a model, a world view, or any other label that fits your thinking. To no fault of your own, you grow up learning the model of your parents or siblings as you are still too young to start articulating your thoughts about the world. As a child the only things that matter to you are what Tom and Jerry are up to today, the sneak attack to start spraying your family with nerf guns, and how unlucky you are to not get access to the cookie jar on Christmas mornings (likely because of the nerf guns).

“I failed biology is a lot different than I failed my parents. The first one’s a fact, the second one’s a story. I’m an alcoholic is a lot different than no one will trust me again. The first one’s a fact, the second one’s a story. The stories tend to take the facts and twist them into an extremely negative and unrealistic situation. Listen to yourself and see what stories that are holding you back.” — Neil Pasricha

What this happiness expert describes is something called the spotlight effect, where when we hesitate our brains perceive it as a threat no matter what it is. You could be about to ask a question in a meeting and you hesitate because of what others will think of you. As it is your brain’s job to protect you, our brain magnifies risk to you pulls you away from something (because it perceived it as a risk), even though it is not something that is threatening to you in any way.

Now this story that you tell yourself is an integral part of your worldview because of course, you are at the center of your universe. Understanding your story is a great first step to understanding yourself. Whether you think you are not thin enough, not smart enough, or not good enough. None of that is true. To first explore the reason why all of these ideas are false is that there is no right answer.

If you think you are not thin enough, think to yourself “Why do I think this?” You would probably come out with the idea of social norms are what put you up to that thought. In reality, you don’t care about your weight as much as you care about your perception in front of others. In this mode you thinking, you end up judging yourself (with your thoughts) so much more harshly than people would.

Reality check: PEOPLE DON’T CARE

Everyone is so worried about their insecurities that they don’t have the time to be caring about the insecurities of others. Take some time to think, why it is so important to be extremely thin (almost model-like)? What does it provide you? Does it even matter? This narrative that you create for yourself often what you will end up manifesting that narrative. If you believe you are a dumb, uneducated clown then everything you do will align with that narrative unless you have a major identity shift. If you think that you going to be the successful CEO of a new startup that will happen. Just to be clear this is not the law of attraction, where if you think of something then it will happen. The missing step in that thought is acting in favor of the person you want to be. You won’t be a professional soccer player if you keep thinking “I will be a professional soccer player.”What has to go along with it are actions that would help manifest that thought of the ideal situation for you. In this example, you would need to find the best soccer players, practice specific skills trying to emulate them, improving your diet, etc.

There are times where what we want to do with our lives (or passion) is not certain, we have no idea what we are doing and where we are going. That’s okay too, your worldview is a strong participant in creating that. Knowing our world view creates much less difficulty in discovering your passion, the things you do in support of your world view start slowly leading you to what makes sense for you. Often when you don’t mention your worldview explicitly (out loud), you have a weak grasp how what makes sense for you to do. You could be studying emerging technologies, going through hours of game theory, and writing a little bit every day. Maybe none of that stuff makes sense to you as your world view doesn’t take the things I just mentioned as important.

When in the process of creating your world view. It is not about trying to start from scratch. On your own without any experience, you likely don’t have good models from your head, you start by understanding the scope of the ideas of some of the most articulate people over the history of humanity. You could go explore Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Marcius Arreilaus, Socrates. These people reached a point in their thinking where they were able to articulate some of their thoughts that you can not. The point is not to be a sheep and just follow all of their ideas. You should be taking bits and pieces of what makes sense to you and how you want to live your life.

You don’t have to agree with Freud that all your drives are sexual and you don’t have to agree with Marx on whether we should abandon democracy, The idea is to fill your mind with a lot of thoughts, from which you pick and chose the ones you agree with to form your world view. From then forward you understand what living a good life means to you. We often don’t listen to ourselves on what we want. We desire the things that seem to be glamorous, but we don’t know that we don’t want them.

Creating and explicitly describing what your worldview provides you with clarity with what things you should be intentional about. The intentional life is what ultimately helps you create fulfillment, while the non-intentional life is a life filled with only short-term activities that don’t build too much in the future. Avoiding acting in favor of your id (it’s a Freud thing) where we act within our desires and respond to our immediate urges without any consideration of the consequences after when living such a life.

Usually, the people who tend to live unfulfilling lives are the ones that don’t give themselves the reason for what they do. They work a job they hate, complain about it to other people, and they wonder where it all went wrong. This all stems from the lack of awareness of their world view, lack of intention, and a generally poor mindset about a lot of things.

In your process of self-exploration, sitting alone with your thoughts and keep challenging them. What you are challenging your habits, which are a huge contributor to your identity. The more you do a specific action, the more reinforcement you create, the more you identify with doing these actions. If you constantly avoid doing the difficult things in your life, you reinforce the concept that you are not up for your challenges. These actions are extremely difficult to disrupt as we are naturally inclined to act in favor of our identity.

What Can You do?

In the process of building your new identity, one where you are okay with being wrong and focusing on growing things in terms of thinking and knowledge you need to start creating habits. These habits are the foundations of your life that allow you to live to your full potential (assuming you have beneficial habits rather than non-beneficial habits). You might be thinking that when you have a life with habits, it is boring because you keep reliving the same day over and over, in reality, this isn’t the case.

Every day we wake up with a certain amount of mental resources, this can depend on how much we slept, our emotional state, etc. The important part of habits is that it takes unimportant tasks makes them unconscious and thereby taking minimal if any mental resources to perform the task. The act of thinking whether you workout today. Whether you should have coffee or tea. Whether you should work you should work on the project or the assignment.

All of these activities hinder you throughout the rest of the day, you are using valuable mental resources trying to decide what is the correct decision to make. When you have already decided that you workout Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you will drink tea on workout days, and have the project as a priority one. You allow yourself to focus on the things that are difficult and require lots of thinking, like trying to understand a physics research paper when half the words aren’t English.

In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. He describes the process of habits as follows

Step 1: Cue

Step 2: Craving

Step 3: Response

Step 4: Reward

The cue triggers a craving, which motivates a response, which provides a reward, which satisfies the craving and ultimately becomes associated with a cue.

For a more concrete explanation, imagine you working on your desk, your work environment is clean, you vibing to the silence of your room and you are in flow, you are super focused and you are extremely productive. All of the sudden you the sound of notification. You start getting curious so you open your phone, you read the message, and you get back to work. That doesn’t sound so bad right? You only stopped working for 10 seconds, big deal. Wait…it is a big deal. In reality, this is what happened.

Step 1: Your phone buzzing was a cue

Step 2: The cue created a craving to see the contents of the notification

Ste 3: Your curiosity for the craving made you respond by grabbing your phone

Step 4: You are satisfied (rewarded) that you had a response to satisfy a craving.

End Result: grabbing your phone is associated with your phone buzzing

Over time this habit keeps getting reinforced again and again. It became such a common behavior that you don’t’ even realize it anymore. As you accumulate one bad habit after another the short-term feedback won’t tell you much, but with the time you will recognize that where you are is nowhere near the person you want to be and you wonder where it all went wrong.

Usually when we want to solve this short-term problem when we still have the power to stop the bad habit in its tracks we result in goals. That doesn’t sound so bad, we create goals, and then we do it right? The model in itself is a little bit faulty, I want you to think of new year’s day when you wake up in the afternoon after staying up till 3 am. You say to yourself, “I want to lose X pounds, I want to stop eating sugary foods and get back to playing guitar. The first couple of days, you do it just fine you act out what your goals say.” Fast forward a few weeks, you return to binging Netflix, not going to the gym, and letting yourself go because you don’t feel like it and you repeat the whole process year after year till you give up and you think that you can no longer change.

I would say you went about the whole process wrong. Here is what most people don’t realize about goals: they are an outcome. We often fail to understand that outcome is not what we need, we need a process or plan to execute. Think of Dwayne Johnson, do you think he randomly woke up one day and looked like this?

Of course not. The reason why that is so difficult to get through our heads because all we see is the snapshot of the outcome. Dwayne Johnson did his first workout when he was 12 years old, he is currently 48. This means that he, more or less, worked out for 36 years. Are you willing to put in that much time to look like that? Are you willing to pay that price? In reality, only a few people, would put that much effort to get that snapshot of glory. This is not just with exercise. This principle happens in other situations too. Athletes put time into training, entrepreneurs work for 5+ years before they start seeing results, Warren Buffet doesn’t invest so he can give investors a quarterly gain, he acts in the interest of providing gain over 50+ years. Which is an important factor why is currently the 7th wealthiest man on the planet.

So get it out of your head that you will find success in the short-term change you need to fundamentally change who you are, in this process you first need to understand that there are 3 different types of change. There is a change of outcome, process, and identity.

The change in outcomes is trying to change for the result. This is usually what we form our goals around. The problem here is we never actually plan when and how we are going to do it. This is the reason new year’s resolutions don’t usually work. If you set out what you want to do with an actual method of getting or making that habit more likely.

“A dream written down with a date becomes a goal a goal broken down into steps becomes a plan a plan backed by action makes your dreams a reality”

— Greg Reid

When you don’t make a plan every thought you had about the things you wanted to desperately do, but somehow never had the time for. In reality you always have the ability to do it you are just unaware of how to start. When you spend time thinking about how you can achieve whatever it is you set out to achieve you need a plan of action of how you are going to learn and gain mastery in whatever you want to do.

In 2001, researchers in Great Britain began working with everyday people to help them build better exercise habits over two weeks. The subjects were divided into three groups. The first group was the control group. They were simply asked to track how often they exercised.

The second group was the “motivation” group. They were asked not only to track their workouts but also to read some material on the benefits of exercise. The researchers also explained to the group how exercise could reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and improve heart health.

Finally, there was the third group. These subjects received the same presentation as the second group, which ensured that they had equal levels of motivation. However, they were also asked to formulate a plan for when and where they would exercise over the following week. Specifically, each member of the third group completed the following sentence: “During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME] in [PLACE].”After receiving these instructions, all three groups left.

The Surprising Results: Motivation vs. Intention

In the first and second groups, 35 to 38 percent of people exercised at least once per week. (Interestingly, the motivational presentation given to the second group seemed to have no meaningful impact on behavior.) But 91 percent of the third group exercised at least once per week — more than double the normal rate.

Simply by writing down a plan that said exactly when and where they intended to exercise, the participants in Group 3 were much more likely to follow through. Crazy, right? All you have to do is write down when and where you plan to something and you are going to follow through with it. This is exactly what I mean by the process, the way to achieve your outcome.

The process of the third group is something called implementation intentions. Following the formula of “I will {behaviour} at {time} in {location}. Some examples include: I will meditate at 7 am in my room. I will study for math at 6 pm in the living room. I will work out at 8 pm in the gym.

As you take your outcome of change (your goals) turn them into a process (plan), now you start going into identity. Identity emerges from habit, everything you do is conditioned through experience. For example, when you make your bed in the morning you embody someone who is organized. When you write each day you embody someone who is a creative person. When you train each day you embody someone who is an athletic person. The more you repeat a behavior, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behavior. When you reinforce good habits it becomes part of who you are and you always work in favor of your identity more than anything else.

In the process of habit formation many of us believe that some people are just more motivated or have more willpower than us. As Mel Robbins, author of The 5 Second Rule says “Motivation is garbage because we all bought into the lie that we need to feel like it to do something.” Sure, it would be preferable to have to have excitement rather than dread before you do something. The problem with needing to feel like makes it really difficult to gain mastery in any subject matter due to the focus being on nuances rather than complete sets of information or skills. There are many times where you need to do boring or mundane tasks to keep going that are not very exciting to do. If you want to achieve your potential you need to be okay with doing things that you don’t feel like doing for the greater good of yourself and your end goals. So now you might be asking “What should I do with my worldview?”As you start forming the thoughts based on the articulate people and taking the parts you like while getting rid of the parts you don’t want. You will have a model of what makes sense in the world, with this knowledge you create your ideal person of who you want to be. From that, you can start to reverse engineer how you could become that person. You create your goals, which you turn into a process, and through action start associating with your identity. Assuming that you followed the actions and habits of the person you want to be, you slowly will emerge out of it with a passion that you feel is worth spending your time on.