We do not like what is unfamiliar or unknown. To compensate for this, we assert ourselves with opinions and ideas that make us seem strong and certain. Many of these opinions do not come from our own deep reflection, but are instead based on what other people think. Furthermore, once we hold these ideas, to admit they are wrong is to wound our ego and vanity. Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible. This ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties is what Keats called negative capability. All Masters possess this Negative Capability, and it is the source of their creative power. This quality allows them to entertain a broader range of ideas and experiment with them, which in turn makes their work richer and more inventive. Negative Capability will be the single most important factor in your success as a creative thinker. In the sciences, you will tend to entertain ideas that fit your own preconceptions and that you want to believe in. This unconsciously colors your choices of how to verify these ideas, and is known as confirmation bias. With this type of bias, you will find the experiments and data that confirm what you have already come to believe in. The uncertainty of not knowing the answers beforehand is too much for most scientists. In the arts and letters, your thoughts will congeal around political dogma or predigested ways of looking at the world, and what you will often end up expressing is an opinion rather than a truthful observation about reality. To put Negative Capability into practice, you must develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path. You consider and even momentarily entertain viewpoints opposite to your own, seeing how they feel. You observe a person or event for a length of time, deliberately holding yourself back from forming an opinion. You seek out what is unfamiliar—for instance, reading books from unfamiliar writers in unrelated fields or from different schools of thought. You do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth. In order to produce work of any sort we must create limits on what we’ll consider; we must organize our thoughts into relatively cohesive patterns, and eventually, come up with conclusions. In the end, we must make certain judgments. Negative Capability is a tool we use in the process to open the mind up temporarily to more possibilities. Once this way of thinking leads to a creative avenue of thought, we can give our ideas a clearer shape and gently let it go, returning to this attitude whenever we feel stale or blocked. The brain is constantly searching for similarities, differences, and relationships between what it processes. Your task is to feed this natural inclination, to create the optimal conditions for it to make new and original associations between ideas and experiences. And one of the best ways to accomplish this is by letting go of conscious control and allowing chance to enter into the process. Mastery Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Depending on where and how we are raised, we learn different ideas about what we need to be happy. These ideas often show up as either our fantasies or our beliefs about what we should be doing with our life. The most common beliefs are that marriage, love, having children, success, wealth, major achievements, fulfilling potential, making history, fame, power, respect, or travelling the world will make us happy. As soon as we believe that something is the key to our happiness, and we don’t have it, we have no choice but to think, “My circumstances aren’t good enough right now to be happy”, or “I need my circumstances to change for me to be happy”. These thoughts make us feel as if something is missing from our lives, and as though we are somehow lacking or incomplete. We then innocently blame our unhappiness on our seemingly insufficient circumstances instead of recognizing that it’s only our thoughts about our circumstances that have created these feelings. We first need to understand what our identity is. Our identity, or self-image, is our answer to the questions, “Who am I?”, or “How would I describe myself?” Part of our answers to these questions includes the facts of our age, gender, physical measurements, job title, education, living situation, marital status, and so on. However, the facts themselves aren’t what create our identity, emotions, or self-confidence. The basis for our self-image, and our ensuing happiness or unhappiness, is our opinion of ourselves (our thoughts about ourselves). For example, even if two people are the same age and have the same weight, education, and jobs, one person could be proud of himself, while the other person could be ashamed to have these very same characteristics. Basically, our self-image is predominantly made up of our opinions of all the facts, as well as our opinions of completely subjective topics such as our personality and whether we are attractive. Put simply, our identity is made up of thoughts (opinions). Psychological thoughts are the ones that decide whether something is “good” or “bad”, and these are the thoughts that create our suffering. For simplicity, our psychological thoughts are nearly all of our thoughts that have opposites. This is because if a thought has an opposite, then we will almost certainly consider one side to be “good” and its opposite to be “bad”. For example, if we think it is “good” to be rich, funny, skinny, and intelligent, then we would consider it “bad” to be poor, boring, overweight, and unintelligent. Our minds tend to be filled with the same psychological thoughts repeating themselves over and over again. Functional thoughts are mostly answers to the question “How do I do that?” Functional thoughts determine how to build something, how to get somewhere, or how to solve a particular problem at work. Purely functional thoughts don’t create suffering, only psychological thoughts do. However, most of the time, our functional thoughts are tainted by psychological thoughts. In any moment when we have no psychological thoughts, or we don’t believe our psychological thoughts, what remains is the experience of the present moment. When we don’t have or believe the thoughts that create our unwanted emotions, none of these emotions are experienced, and we get to experience the present moment. The ability to experience the awe of something simple arises in the moments when we have silence or space between our thoughts. It is like seeing something for the first time. This feeling is similar to the sense of wonder and innocent curiosity that young children have. A Guide to The Present Moment Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Deep and regular breathing, also referred to as diaphragmatic breathing, helps to quiet the sympathetic nervous system and allows the parasympathetic nervous system—which governs our sense of hunger and satiety, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function—to become more dominant. Conversely, shallow breathing, breath-holding, and hyperventilating trigger the sympathetic nervous system toward a fight-or-flight state. In this state, our heart rate increases, our sense of satiety is compromised, and our bodies gear up for the physical activity that, historically, accompanied a fight-or-flight response. But when the only physical activity is sitting and responding to e-mail, we’re sort of “all dressed up with nowhere to go.” Our bodies are tuned to be impulsive and compulsive when we’re in fight-or-flight. We also become tuned to over-consume. In this state, we’re less aware of when we’re hungry and when we’re sated. We reach for every available resource, from food to information, as if it’s our last opportunity—pulling out our smartphones again and again to check for e-mail, texts, and messages. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series) Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Visualization is an incredibly powerful technique that will enhance your mental strength, allow you to tap into more of your mind power, and allow you to accomplish more challenging tasks. It is the law of “win in your mind first,” and it is no surprise that great inventors, entrepreneurs, and athletes all use some form of visualization to create their desired outcomes in their minds while they act powerfully in the world. It is time we made this a routine skill. Visualization is the creation or re-creation of an external experience in your mind. Mental projection is visualizing a personal future state or victory. Visualized images create energy around a desired future experience before you experience it “for real.” I call this type of visualization a Future Me visualization because you are envisioning a future “ideal” version of yourself. You create the event in your mind well before it happens. The visualized event is then charged with emotions and vivid colors, sounds, smell, and tastes. You will reinforce those visual images through repeated practice sessions. This process plants a powerful seed in your subconscious mind of the potential energy for the event. Then as you work on the goal, your subconscious mind goes about supporting you with the resources necessary to nurture the event to its fruition. In a sense you could say that visualization rewires the System 1 brain to align with your goals. The second form of visualization is a Mental Rehearsal, whereby you practice a skill or prepare for an event in your mind. A SEAL platoon will “dirt dive” a mission to set the patterns for winning in the mind prior to executing it for real. The SEAL operator will walk through a dive profile on dry land while visualizing every detail. In this manner he performs all the major elements of the dive before ever getting wet. This was an important part of my mission prep when I was at SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1. The mini-sub dives were often six to ten hours in duration replete with complicated navigation patterns. Dirt diving the missions prior to launch proved crucial during the mission when fatigue and Murphy’s Law reared their heads. The mental rehearsal implanted the route in both conscious and subconscious minds and provided a memory aid as well as subtle physiological cues. Additionally, it helped identify potential challenges before the mission hit the reality of the deep face-to-face. Both forms of visualization can be performed from the first person or third person perspective. What I mean by this is that they can be imaged from your subjective frame as if you had a helmet camera on, or imaged from your objective frame as if watching yourself in a movie. Either method is effective; however, most people start with the objective frame and then migrate to the subjective frame as they gain experience. Visualization leads to improved concentration in that the practice of visualization requires you to develop greater powers of concentration due to the effort required to construct and maintain the visual imagery. In the early stages, the training can be frustrating, especially if you have difficulty holding an image in your mind for long. You may be more kinesthetic or auditory in nature; thus developing the capacity to visualize will take patience. You will experience enhanced confidence as the result of the training. When you can clearly visualize an event skill in advance, your mental practice is accepted as real by your body. Though not as visceral as the physical doing of the event, the visual practice is still felt internally and leads to more confidence every time you do it. This translates to more confidence as actual improvements in the skill accrue. Next, closely related to confidence is the greater emotional control you will experience. If you fear performing to some degree, which we all do (especially for scary things such as public speaking), visualizing the performance repeatedly will dampen that fear response when you perform the event live. A final note on visualization: When done well, a visualized event involves the sensations of feelings, emotions, and sounds to support the imagery. The objective is to create as realistic a mental representation as possible, as if you are really experiencing it. That is why it is really important to ensure that your image is positive, powerful, and as near to perfect as possible. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level Generally speaking there are three mini-brains that have evolved over time, each building on top of the other to form the brain we have today. These mini-brains developed along our human chronological timeline and have different roles. My zoo metaphor comes from the fact that scientists favor labels representing what they believe to be our animalistic past. I took the liberty to continue the trend so as to not feel left out. The Reptilian Brain is formed from the brain stem and cerebellum and is our oldest brain. It is almost identical to a reptile’s brain, hence its name. The reptilian brain regulates basic life functions like breathing, heart rate, and respiration (from the brain stem) and balance, posture, and movement coordination (from the cerebellum). It is also responsible for hardwiring behaviors from memories—so this is where deeply rooted training information is stored and retrieved. It may also be safe to assume that this brain is a component of the subconscious mind. The Mammalian Brain evolved some 300 million years ago, so you probably don’t remember it happening. It is called the mammalian brain because it is similar to the most evolved part of all mammals’ brains. The prominent behaviors it regulates are the fight, flight, or freeze response and our need to feed and reproduce. It is also responsible for emotional behavior and regulating chemical and hormonal activity. When you get depressed, you can blame the mammalian brain. But you can then thank it for regulating your body temperature, blood sugar levels, digestion, hormonal balance, and other important things. The mammalian brain houses the pituitary gland, which is the master hormone gland, and the pineal gland, which regulates sleep. It also includes the hippocampus, which is your memory sorting and storing tool, and the amygdala, which sifts and filters incoming information for threats and opportunities. This sub-brain is largely responsible for the negativity bias so prominent in the human condition. The fear wolf spends most of his time lurking here and sending fear signals to the third sub-brain. The Monkey Brain is the most recent addition to the zoo and is the seat of awareness, cognition, problem solving, and creativity. It is called the neocortex and is the “command center,” where we reason, plan, intellectualize, analyze, verbalize, and learn. It allows us to interpret events and react to them accordingly. This new brain of ours is so complex that it would do it an injustice to try to summarize it here. When someone says you are operating out of “right brain” or “left brain” thinking, they are referring to the hemispheres of the neocortex. This part of our brain differentiates us from other mammals and is one of the reasons we have such enormous potential. The frontal lobe of the neocortex is your “executive office,” where intent, focus, and willpower conspire to bring you greatness or misery. In your teens this area is not fully developed, which explains why you may have made poor decisions fueled by your emotional mammalian brain. Many scientists like to reduce the mind and consciousness to correlates of chemical releases and electrical firings in the brain. Don’t believe them for a minute. Those are simply by-products of the mind performing the processes of thinking, sensing, perceiving, dreaming, and feeling. Your experience of a conscious mind certainly has chemical and electrical correlates, but it is a mistake to conflate consciousness with mere brain electrochemical signaling. Studies of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences support this idea. The yogis and other Eastern spiritual traditions believe that the mind exists outside of the brain and even includes the heart, belly, and spinal column, as well as a connection to a universal intelligence of some form. I believe that consciousness transcends yet includes the matter and functions of the brain itself, though it requires the brain to function in our human form. To connect with this mind, what I have called the witness, you must train your neocortex to acknowledge and comply with it. Only then can your witness become the zoo keeper and direct the activities of the animalistic brain. The problem is that we have largely denied the witness in our culture, instead identifying almost exclusively with thoughts in our brain as being the main thing. The neocortex doesn’t want to give up the power we have anointed it with. Time and space loosen their hold and slow down or warp. In this manner the frontal lobe becomes your “flow activator” to allow the merge, dissolving past and future into the moment. Training so that you can activate the flow state at will does take time. The witness process and sacred silence practices are the best way that I know of to activate this training. As soon as you begin, you will note that the animals running amok in your mind take notice and line up to support you instead of fight. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level Put simply, our identity is made up of thoughts (opinions).
Psychological thoughts are the ones that decide whether something is “good” or “bad”, and these are the thoughts that create our suffering. For simplicity, our psychological thoughts are nearly all of our thoughts that have opposites. This is because if a thought has an opposite, then we will almost certainly consider one side to be “good” and its opposite to be “bad”. For example, if we think it is “good” to be rich, funny, skinny, and intelligent, then we would consider it “bad” to be poor, boring, overweight, and unintelligent. Our minds tend to be filled with the same psychological thoughts repeating themselves over and over again. Functional thoughts are mostly answers to the question “How do I do that?” Functional thoughts determine how to build something, how to get somewhere, or how to solve a particular problem at work. Purely functional thoughts don’t create suffering, only psychological thoughts do. However, most of the time, our functional thoughts are tainted by psychological thoughts. In any moment when we have no psychological thoughts, or we don’t believe our psychological thoughts, what remains is the experience of the present moment. When we don’t have or believe the thoughts that create our unwanted emotions, none of these emotions are experienced, and we get to experience the present moment.R The ability to experience the awe of something simple arises in the moments when we have silence or space between our thoughts. It is like seeing something for the first time. This feeling is similar to the sense of wonder and innocent curiosity that young children have. A Guide to The Present Moment Listening intensely is a far more valuable skill than speaking immensely. People think big ideas suddenly appear on their own, but they’re actually the product of many small, intersecting moments and realizations that move us toward a breakthrough.
Sometimes you know something in your head, and other times you know it in your heart. The mind delivers logic and reason, but the heart is where faith resides. In moments of uncertainty, when you must choose between two paths, allowing yourself to be overcome by either the fear of failure or the dimly lit light of possibility, immerse yourself in the life you would be most proud to live. In any confrontation, most people focus on the perpetrator and the victim. There is an inherent expectation that had one of these two acted differently, the outcomes of a conflict may have been averted. But the greatest opportunity actually exists within the role of the bystander, the person who neither benefits nor gains from the event itself. When a bystander steps up on behalf of a potential victim, just as that tuk-tuk driver did for me that day on the streets of Kathmandu, he or she becomes the very definition of a hero. We are more often bystanders to conflict than we are victims or perpetrators, and with that comes the recognition that we have a moral obligation to defend others, even when the crosshairs of injustice aren’t pointed at us personally. Please support Pencils of Promise. The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change It doesn’t matter whether this is the worst time to be alive or the best, whether you’re in a good job market or a bad one, or that the obstacle you face is intimidating or burdensome. What matters is that right now is right now. The implications of our obstacle are theoretical—they exist in the past and the future. We live in the moment. And the more we embrace that, the easier the obstacle will be to face and move. You can take the trouble you’re dealing with and use it as an opportunity to focus on the present moment. To ignore the totality of your situation and learn to be content with what happens, as it happens. To have no “way” that the future needs to be to confirm your predictions, because you didn’t make any. To let each new moment be a refresh wiping clear what came before and what others were hoping would come next. You’ll find the method that works best for you, but there are many things that can pull you into the present moment: Strenuous exercise. Unplugging. A walk in the park. Meditation. Getting a dog—they’re a constant reminder of how pleasant the present is.
One thing is certain. It’s not simply a matter of saying: Oh, I’ll live in the present. You have to work at it. Catch your mind when it wanders—don’t let it get away from you. Discard distracting thoughts. Leave things well enough alone—no matter how much you feel like doing otherwise. But it’s easier when the choice to limit your scope feels like editing rather than acting. Remember that this moment is not your life, it’s just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you, right now. Ignore what it “represents” or it “means” or “why it happened to you.” There is plenty else going on right here to care about any of that. It’s our preconceptions that are the problem. They tell us that things should or need to be a certain way, so when they’re not, we naturally assume that we are at a disadvantage or that we’d be wasting our time to pursue an alternate course. When really, it’s all fair game, and every situation is an opportunity for us to act. It’s a beautiful idea. Psychologists call it adversarial growth and post-traumatic growth. “That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is not a cliché but fact. The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth. The obstacle is an advantage, not adversity. The enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph The first key to the Spartan lifestyle is keeping to the big picture. It’s not healthy to get too focused on any one aspect of your life. If you do, it will almost inevitably be to the detriment of others. Healthy foods, healthy attitude, healthy relationships, healthy mind, and healthy body together define a complete Spartan lifestyle—the Spartan code in action. We want to be popular, good at sports, make good grades, receive parental approval. But we don’t necessarily know how to achieve that. The answer to all of these desires generally comes down to work harder. Practice more hours, study more hours, put more effort into changing your habits. It’s not normal in our society to go out for a run on a Sunday morning and push yourself to the point where the pain is etched into your face. Similarly, it’s not normal for a business executive to wake up every morning and knock out one hundred burpees. It’s not normal, that is, unless you are getting in shape for a special event, or unless you are training for some specific goal. Pain serves a purpose, though. It keeps us from touching hot stoves, from stabbing ourselves with forks when we eat, from biting our tongues off, and from otherwise injuring ourselves. If we didn’t know pain, we would never be satisfied with simple pleasures such as eating, resting, and living.
Learn to Dose Your Pain Here’s a quick checklist for internalizing the process of the “dosing of pain,” the proper management of time, and the fast decision-making of the Rule of Upside Downside. Realize that time is the most precious asset we have. Once you truly understand this, you learn how to make sure you don’t waste any. All of your time is used in a way that maximizes the achievement of your goals. Understand that time passes whether we like it or not. Every second another second is gone. When you truly understand that, it helps you in those moments when you’re uncomfortable. You know you can handle it if it’s for a greater good. Why does quick decision making matter here? You don’t want to waste more time than required in making decisions. This will sound harsh but none of us know if we will be here one minute from now. If you understand that, you won’t want to waste time being unproductive. If you can make accurate decisions quickly, you have time to enjoy the fruits of those decisions. I always try to look at the upside versus the downside of each decision. You should value: Health first Family second Business third Fun fourth I’ll trudge through endurance events for days on end, but I’ll make trivial and life-changing decisions alike on a dime. While this may seem contradictory, it reflects another aspect of the Spartan-ness. We are decisive, but we’re more than that. We are decisive fast. To “Spartan up!” you must decide things quickly. Wait too long, and you’ll lose. If you are losing, lose fast, get it over with, move over, and start winning. It’s a lesson I learned on Wall Street many times: sometimes you need to cut your losses quickly so you’re not totally fucked later on. The Rule of Upside Downside holds that before deciding on a course of action, you should think quickly about the positive effects and negative effects of it, weigh them, and decide. I’ve always been really good at making quick decisions. What’s my downside? This is the question I ask myself dozens of times per day. I do the work because this upside-downside analysis is constantly going through my head. And pretty much every time, the result of the analysis is: Work harder. Be better. Do more. Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life |
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Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |