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 are designed to work o Hard way: doing things the way wed like to think we should be able to do things, as upstanding 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 youre starting a business, you cant have a business without customers; doesnt matter how good your product is o 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 frankly, if you take that route, youre being an idiot and making things hard for no reason Noble intentions are useless if temptations and obstacles arent removed first

Importance of Committing You dont need to know how before you commit; you need to commit to find out how o You have to be willing to pay the price

Decisions Decision: cutting off all other possibilities o Im going to give this a try, or, this just seems like the right thing to do, are not really decisions o Decisions are not something that happen as a result of your reasoning process o Making decisions based on reason or circumstance is laying the foundation of your failure to follow through o Its not a decision unless you can make it independent of your current circumstances o Example: if you decide this week is a really good week to start something, what happens next week when its not a good week? Circumstances change all the time; you have to be able to not change with them Indecision is suffering o not only is indecision suffering, but time itself is a suffering and divided mind

Asking VS. Telling You cant 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 o Know the price you need to pay and be willing to pay it o Ask yourself what you need to do

The Evolution Conspiracy, or Why Change Is Hard! We cant 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 dont lock up in a loop and start obsessing about things and not paying any attention to whats going on around us, because not paying attention to whats going on outside you is a good way to get eaten our genes want us to pay attention to what other people in our tribe or pack are doing because our genes dont 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 left out and not get any because we werent paying enough attention to what other people were doing o Were designed to learn to do things the same way, over and over again so if something works, our genetic heritage wants to make sure that well continue to do things that actually workbecause you survived; thats 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 dont have to make decisionsdecisions 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 dont 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 cant 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 were 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 Safety signals kick in and override the will o 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 o 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 cant decide what will make us happy BECAUSE we are slaves to our biased prediction mechanism o Biased prediction mechanism: we cant decide what will make us happy because we dont know; evolution didnt give us a mechanism to figure out what will make us happy because evolution doesnt 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 arent 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 o When people asked what would make them happy, they tend to list points in time

o o

I want to lose twenty pounds vs. I want to weight a certain weight for the res t of my life 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 Brains predictive machinery designed for point-in-time goals because were not designed for any type of long-term planning 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 youre done with a goal, all you have is a finished goal we shouldnt focus on goals to the exclusion of understanding what that goal is going to do for your life doing so could lead to disrupting other areas of your life in short, we dont own our livesour genes do by default

What can we do with all this? o understanding all of these limitations will help us overcome them o 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, were 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 dont 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 dont 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 dont do things because we assume were 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 This assumption is on a gut level, feeling level o The thought that we might succeed, really succeed, sometimes never even enters our consciousness WAYMISHWhy 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 wont 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 dont get killed You are not a pack animal; you dont need to deserve anything; you can have what you wantits that simple moral objections, etc are rationalizations built fundamentally on a submission instinct thats designed to preserve you from getting your head clawed off by another animal you dont need this guilt is another such safety signal; its a response to create submission behavior to show to the other animals that youre not worthy, and so youre not interfering with their rule of the pack o Vague and conflicting goals If you arent specific enough about what exactly you want and when you want it, youre not going to get it o 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 havent yet established a habit or set down and decided how youre going to accomplish task, its too ambitious at this point Its okay to put energy into ambitious goals, but theres 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 arent special enough to break the rules

2 ways to accelerate your life Removal of obstacles o Corresponds to removing your learned safety signals o This is essentially increases confidence o Only thing you can do quickly Path is already there; its just blocked; the removal of the obstacle allows you to immediately move forward Development of skill o Whatever you practice, you grow your brains ability to do; rewiring of the brain takes place; takes time and repetition Requires growth of new connections/pathways o This essentially increases your ability to handle more things in your life; increases your competence

Implementing what you know o 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 whats really holding you back and break free Do the thing first, even if youre sure youll 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 o 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 keep going in the same direction; ensure that youre always progressing, or at least never regressing

Write your goals down o A verbal agreement isnt worth the paper its printed on Nothing happens without a deadline Have a success environment o necessary for making lifestyle changes o need examples to emulate and aspire to o need to be challenged and encouraged o need a fellowship of your peers o need a shared and clear code of conduct amongst people you interact with o need rituals and systems for success