Always Do

Have you really changed at all?

What’s on the other side of fear? Nothing - Jamie Foxx

I went mad-scientist in this episode and investigated what is really holding people back. Here is what I came up with:

(Desire) x [(Explicit Knowledge) + (Tacit Knowledge)^(Focus + Time)] = Level of Resistance/Progress

Desire of is a multiplier of your knowledge. And tacit knowledge grows exponentially to (time + focus). This is intense, I know, but bear with me.

For example, you can know how to eat healthy, but if your desire is a 2 out of 10, then good luck changing. And you can have all the desire in the world (a 10 out of 10), but without knowledge you aren't going anywhere, mainly tacit knowledge. 

The key to all of this is tacit knowledge - the knowledge you can only get through experience. And that compounds over time, like money in the stock market, based on the time you put in and the focus you give.

You might ask, "Well how do I get over the procrastination caused by lack of tacit knowledge?" The answer would be to do something that you enjoy and that challenges you. Something that solves a problem in the world and helps others. Something that aligns with your values and fills you up. Work on awareness and habits. Once you have awareness that you are procrastinating because you lack tacit knowledge you will be faced with a simple choice: keep procrastinating or not.

The choice is yours. It's always been yours.

“We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur—the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love (in French, the word means “lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career—who often has the advantage over the professional. Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results…Amateurs might lack formal training, but they’re all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open, so that others can learn from their failures and successes. Sometimes, amateurs have more to teach us than experts.” Austin Kleon, Show Your Work

“You’re so lazy” - parents everywhere to their teenagers and people to other people that don't grind

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid doing it.

That means that the more something threatens to change how you see yourself, how you believe yourself to be, the more you will procrastinate ever getting around to doing it.

Here is how you create your reality and how your body and mind are interwoven. It is so fascinating to me how the brain works and is a prediction machine. This is a dive into How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. 

“Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.”

“People like to say that seeing is believing, but affective realism demonstrates that believing is seeing. The world often takes a backseat to your predictions.”

“The bottom line is this: the human brain is anatomically structured so that no decision or action can be free of interoception and affect, no matter what fiction people tell themselves about how rational they are. Your bodily feeling right now will project forward to influence what you will feel and do in the future. It is an elegantly orchestrated, self-fulfilling prophecy, embodied within the architecture of your brain.

“Scientists have known for some time that knowledge from the past, wired into brain connections, creates simulated experiences of the future, such as imagination. Other scientists focus on how this knowledge creates experiences of the present moment. The Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman called your experiences “the remembered present.” Today, thanks to advances in neuroscience, we can see that Edelman was correct. An instance of a concept, as an entire brain state, is an anticipatory guess about how you should act in the present moment and what your sensations mean.”

Have you ever found yourself thinking "What the hell is journaling and how do I do it? And what am I supposed to write about?"

This episode shed some light on why you should journal (with the science to back it up) and three styles of journaling you can try out today.

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” - Marcus Aurelius

It helps to get those thoughts on paper.

How you are stealing everything from your future self because you don't have this skill.

’Tis not difficult to conquer, once understood. No man willingly permits the thief to rob his bins of grain. Nor does any man willingly permit an enemy to drive away his customers and rob him of his profits.” - The Richest Man in Babylon

Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it - Steven Pressfield

Today we discuss whether or not following what scares you most is a good idea when it comes to finding your passion.

Do our fears show us which direction our dreams lie?

Is there a bigger lesson waiting to be discovered by pursuing that which terrifies us?

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what career you would love before you even start?