3 Mindsets that Changed my Life
Make dreams a reality and deal with sh*t
I’d say 80% of people are blind.
It’s the people who never have a plan. They encounter every decision as if it’s a new one. Involuntary movements and those 12 years they spent learning about something are the only passive decisions they can make.
It makes no sense. You live life for ~80 years and never train your mind to deal with daily situations.
That’s exactly what mindsets are, training your brain to deal with situations. Examples of situations: submitting a school paper, meeting someone new, getting fired due to COVID.
On the other hand, people may believe they know how to deal with a situation, but it’s limited by the status quo. Does the way you act align with what you want, or are you just following others?
*Mindset does not = growth or fixed mindset (if that’s what you’re thinking, you’re wrong)
Why Build Mindsets
They are compounding. By training the best way to deal with a situation, you’re improving the next 80-x years of your life.
Even if you encounter that decision once a day, a week, a month, it adds up.
Many of us have heard the science: the more decisions you have to make in a day, the lower level of focus you have as the day goes on.
Removing the thought process saves brain power and focus. That’s extremely important in a world where focus > intelligence.
+Your just more likely to make good decisions.
Mindsets determine:
- Your actions — the quality, how you treat yourself and others, what is practised and ignored
- How you think — how big can you think, how different you think
- How you react — going into slumps, emotions
- How you feel about yourself — how you’re presented, fulfilment
The key: Mindsets are flexible. They can be used for multiple situations and tasks. For example, high standards. When you design a presentation, give a talk or write an article, having high standards will drastically improve the quality.
By planting one seed, your growing plenty of juicy fruits.
Living a Happy Life
Aristotle says that everything we do is to achieve happiness, a central purpose of life. Happiness is a state of being, therefore you can never achieve happiness. There are two forms of happiness:
- Instant Gratification: Those dopamine hits you get on social media, watching YouTube videos about cats and dogs. Most people live their lives experiencing this, inauthentic, form of happiness.
- Long-Term Happiness: You work on things that you love, maybe it’s your dream or something that gets you excited every morning. You enjoy the journey, more than the milestone. This is the ideal form.
Life is too short to work for someone else’s dream.
Still, so many people never pursue what they love. Why?
- It’s too much work, too unstable, too difficult
- Can’t deal with reality. They get discouraged when they don’t see results and when they fail, they think, “You know, this just isn’t for me.”
The problem is, ever since you were young, society has trained you to think this way. It’s confined you to rules and possibilities.
Getting 70% on a test means your not good at that subject. There is always an answer in the back of the textbook. You’re constantly spoon-fed. You need to get a good-paying job.
Luckily, we can train new mindsets to pursue our dreams, fixing the ones ingrained in us by society. Despite how hard they may be, or how much trash is thrown your way.
#1: Activator
Let’s imagine you wanted to learn to code and give a talk about it:
Many overthink decisions. Where should I start to learn? What will people think of me? Should I even learn to code?
Or make excuses: “I don’t have enough time.”, “I’ll wait for this course to come out”, “Winter break is coming up soon, I can start learning then.”
Both hide the fact: you just do not want to put in the work and rather gain instant gratification.
Activators make stuff happen. The difference between people who follow their dreams and those who don’t, are those who actually work on their dreams.
You would have never lived if you waited for someone else to make something happen. You’re letting others control what happens in your life.
Task
The only way to develop a mindset is to constantly train it. To become an activator, you need to set out to do something, and just do it.
- Read a book
- Start a weekly family discussion
- Make a Comedy Routine
- Make a family dream vacation for post-COVID
- Host a webinar
- JUST ACTIVATE SOMETHING
Choose something right now and just start. If you want to read a book, just start by reading a word. Find one joke for that comedy routine. Once you start it’s a lot easier to finish.
For your dreams, break down what you need to learn, and just start. You’re just one google search away.
Results (How to tell if you’ve developed the mindset):
- You have a bias toward action — If you want to do something, you do it.
- You care less about what others think — don’t act according to how society functions, don’t feel afraid to stand out because you would be living your whole life as someone else.
- You feel happy — getting things done = 👍
- You have control over your life — don’t wait for something to happen to do what you want.
The world is limited by the activators. The Elon Musk’s who want to make travel electric. The Martin Luther King’s who fight for equal rights. What are you going to activate?
#2 Figure It Out
So you want to activate something…how do you do it?
Figuring stuff out means whatever you encounter, you believe you can figure it out and make it happen.
From school, we are told exactly what we have to do for assignments. What we have to remember. Everyone tells us what we should do. We never get to learn how to figure stuff out by ourselves.
That’s why most people only do the average, they don’t know how to do much else. And when chasing something big, they give up when the answer doesn’t appear right in front of them.
If you can figure stuff out, you can do anything.
Task
The best way to figure stuff out is to figure it out yourself.
If you need guidance, work on things outside of your comfort zone. Think of things that push you, and tackle them yourself.
- Set up a meeting with me
- Learn a new skill: to code, a language
- Read a research paper in a completely new field and understand it
Remember: you have to activate these things right away. Don’t tell yourself, “This is so insightful, let me read some more articles.” That’s BS, you need results.
Reflect on how you were able to figure it out. Here’s how I normally figure things out:
- Mental Models — Decision-making frameworks which break down a task/problem into simple steps. Check out: First-principles, Second-order thinking and the Inversion Principle.
2. Ask good questions — the internet has a ton of resources, you just need to ask a good question to find the best resources and fill knowledge gaps.
3. Learn from the best — how have other people figured things out?
Results
- You have learned how to learn — this skill is essential to figuring anything out. Most of figuring stuff out is just gaining data, and learning stuff is a great approach.
- You don’t easily accept defeat — You don’t just give up when the answer doesn’t appear.
- You have pushed your capabilities — don’t be confined to what school teaches you or your everyday job, you want to do something…now make it happen.
There’s a reason the world has so many problems…those problems have no answers. Steve Jobs designed the iPhone with barely any resources. Same with Elon and reusable rockets. If we are not training people to figure stuff out, nothing new will be made, no problems will be solved.
#3 Stoicism
When you try to do things, they aren’t always going to go your way.
You will fail, there will be setbacks, people will try to pull you down.
Stoicism is a philosophy that states: you can’t control what happens to you, you can only control how you react to those events.
I feel stoicism and gratefulness is the best way to become happy 🙂. Accept what happens to you, take away the benefits rather than focus on the negatives. Remember why you started on this journey. Look back at how far you have come.
Place yourself in the perspective of those 130 million girls who have never attended school. Don’t compare yourself to the few who have more than you, but the billions who have less. Especially on social media.
For example, when you fail think: “That’s one less way I could mess up.”, “Why did I fail, what can be improved?”, “If I never failed, I would have never known.”
Tasks
If you can experience the worst-case scenario, you will be able to deal with it better.
- Sleep on the floor for a week
- Take Cold Showers
- Fast for a day
- Reflect when you fail
- Function without a thumb for 3 days…
Results:
- You look at failures as growth opportunities
- You can control your emotions
- You can gain gratefulness by understanding the worst-case scenario
- You understand that life is short and there is no time to complain, Amor Fati
Too many people can’t endure the hardships of the journey to learn something or pursue their dream. Your mind can make a hell out of heaven or a heaven out of hell. If everyone gave up easily, nothing extroardinary would get done.
How to Achieve Your Dreams and Live A Happy Life:
- Become an activator — make what you want, happen…right now, no BS.
- Figure it Out — How you get from the starting line to the finish line
- Become Stoic — How to make sure you can make it to the finish line
Before You Go
- Connect with me on LinkedIn
- Check out my Personal Website
- Check out my YouTube
- You can reach out to me at adamomarali37@gmail.com for any questions or if you want to chat!
