Toying with your senses
What I'm about to share is a little weird, but it's also kind of amazing
I’m about ready to blow your mind with a very simple idea.
I didn’t come up with this idea on my own. In fact, I should give credit to someone on TikTok, but I honestly don’t remember who they are now.
Regardless, I want you to take 5 seconds to look around the room you’re in, picking out a few key things you see.
Now here’s a weird fact that you will likely never forget. Ready?
Crazy, right?
And it’s not just things you can immediately see or touch, it’s anything that you can visualize in your mind.
You’ve likely never licked a dirty beer bottle, a wet cotton ball, or a deflated mylar balloon, but just now, your brain just told your tongue exactly how all of those would feel, and it wouldn’t be wrong.
But let’s be honest, it’s not really the tongue doing the work.
The reason your tongue knows this is because your senses share gossip. Your eyes see something, your hand can touch it, and your brain takes that info and shares the evidence with the rest of your senses.
We take our brain for granted, not realizing that we have the most powerful supercomputer nestled between our ears, processing thousands of points of data every single second and relaying information back to all the parts of our body at the same speed all at once.
Our mind gets it wrong sometimes
Just like any other computer, it’s been programmed to think a certain way, and our mind’s programming was built over years and years of life experiences.
However, sometimes those life experiences feed our minds some bad code.
The starving artist mindset is one such bit of coding that we got fed repeatedly over our lifetime by parents, teachers, peers, strangers, and the media.
Devaluing artists, designers, illustrators, photographers, etcetera, have been such a huge part of our lives, it’s a pop culture phenomenon. People in movies, television, and other media make jokes about it, and we laugh nervously because we believe it to be true.
To your brain, everything is binary
You’ve likely heard the references about binary code in programming, a series of 1s and 0s where each number is fundamentally an on/off switch.
1 = On
0 = Off
Similarly, the synapses firing in your mind right now are exactly that, a series of on/off commands triggering thoughts, reactions, and responses to whatever input your mind is receiving.
As complex as your mind is, the code that runs it is simple and uncomplicated; on or off, that’s it. Because the brain is so incredibly complex, operating thousands of processes per second, it needs simple code to run smoothly.
Instead of thinking of the commands as on/off though, let’s imagine the commands as start/stop. Anytime your brain gets one of those commands, it translates it as an independent directive, and whatever follows is the process is must do next.
[directive] action = [START] lick beer bottle
Now take a moment to think about anything that you may have told yourself you were going to change about your life but didn’t take action on.
“I need to STOP drinking so much coffee.”
“I must STOP going to bed at 2 am.”
“I gotta STOP procrastinating on that project.”
“I’m going to STOP making dinner so late.”
“I need to STOP charging so little for my work.”
You might think these would be simple commands that our brain could easily process and execute, but the mind reads differently than we think.
It sees STOP, briefly pauses to take in the rest of the thought, and then processes the command.
What you say: I need to stop drinking so much coffee.
Your mind reads: [STOP] Drink coffee.
You: I gotta stop procrastinating.
Your mind: [STOP] Procrastinate.
You: I must stop charging so little for my work.
Your mind: [STOP] Charge little.
Your mind also doesn’t understand -ing and the intention behind it. It just reads the verb as a command.
How do I know this? I read it in books.
Which books, you ask? All of them!
Well maybe not all of them, but I have been reading a lot of books lately about money, success, and shifting mindset and all of those books imply references to this idea.
I also listen to a lot of podcasts and watch a lot of videos featuring successful people, and the concept that we have the power to change our circumstances simply by reprogramming our thoughts is echoed through all of those conversations.
Thoughts become beliefs that trigger actions that produce results
I don’t remember where I heard that first, but it’s a common sentiment shared by many successful people.
When we think about something often enough, we learn to believe it. Believe it long enough, and it triggers an action. Taking action on something will always produce some result.
As powerful as that statement is though, it works both ways, positive and negative.
If you think to yourself repeatedly, “I need to stop charging so little for my work.” And your brain reads it as [STOP] Charge little. Then that becomes your belief, which eventually creates an action of not charging more, bringing the negative result of you not making enough money.
Your tongue knows the power of your mind
If our eyes, hands, feet, and tongue all know to trust our minds, why do we struggle with trusting them to give us what we truly want?
You only needed to touch a hot stove once to know that you shouldn’t do it often. We input that [STOP. Hot!] programming; our mind didn’t come up with that on its own.
If we have the power to input the negative, the opposite must also be true.
“I will start drinking more water.” [START] Drink water.
“I will start going to bed at 10pm.” [START] Go to bed.
“I will start taking action on that project.” [START] Take action.
“I will start making dinner at 5pm.” [START] Make dinner.
“I will start charging double for my work.” [START] Charge double.
As crazy as it may seem, the simple act of changing how we talk about things can bring us the results we desire, but it can’t just be words. Our thoughts must become beliefs, and in order for that to happen, we must repeat them to ourselves often, doing everything in our power to turn our STOP commands into START commands.
Now I’m not the expert here, because I have plenty of my own STOP commands to reprogram, but I’m smart enough to realize that if dozens if not hundreds or thousands of successful people are willing to publicly share that their minds were powerful enough to change their circumstances, who am I to deny that?
Also, there’s very little risk involved in just being more gracious in your thoughts about yourself.
Perhaps Steve Jobs and Apple had it right all along.
[START] Think Different!
See you next time,
Dave
PS - I posted a video this week about how storytelling can help us change the value of our work. That video makes a good companion to this story.
If you made it this far, you're more likely to follow through. Tell us how you're going to reframe your programming, reply to this note.