It’s bullshit to believe that “I need to breathe to live and that’s all there is to the story.” This type of thinking would lead to a false conclusion of, “I’ll die if I don’t breathe for even a moment.”
It’s not bullshit to believe “I need to breathe to live in the long term, but there are times I don’t need to breathe.” This type of thinking doesn’t make “I need to breathe to live” true or false. It doesn’t make breathing inherently good or bad. It recognizes there are many ways of looking at that statement.
All that changes is an understanding that there’s more to the story. There’s a bigger picture. Since you’ll never have the full truth, everything you will ever think and come across is a partial truth. As long as you’re aware that anything you believe is just part of the story, you’re not bullshitting yourself. As soon as you think “this is all there is to it,” you’re bullshitting.
You may already know this on some level, but it’s often easy for some to get caught up in thinking things like weakness, pain, pressure, selfishness, restrictions, resistance, confusion, separation, helplessness, dependency, complexity, risk, obstacles, mistakes, lack of time or money, sickness, junk food, opposing political viewpoint, disapproval, chaos, death, fear, and more are somehow “bad.” If you’ve bought into any of these things as being barriers to your greatness and a better world, the good news is you’ll have plenty of bullshit to start working through as you go through this book.
It’s not just that what you consider bad could be good. In the next section, we’ll explore how one of the things you value the most can be the very thing that destroys you. Without understanding what’s in the next section, the knowledge you gain in this book or anywhere else could actually make your life far worse instead of significantly better. Keep reading to discover the three deadly words that often sabotage people from reaching their greatness.
What You Know Is BS
“I know that.”
These three words can be very dangerous or helpful depending on the choice you make after you think them. Another variation would be, “That’s common sense.”
Think of a regret you’ve had recently – and please don’t pull the “I don’t have any regrets” BS. If it’s more suitable to you, think of a momentary lapse in judgment you’ve had.
With this poor choice…
Did you know better?
Did a part of you know not to do something, and yet you still did it? Or did a part of you know to do something, but still you didn’t do it?
Think of a breakthrough you’ve had recently.
Got it?
Was the gist of what you needed to do something totally brand new, or an old idea you finally acted upon?
As a fitness coach, rarely am I going to tell someone how to get fit with a brand new concept they don’t already know. It will typically boil down to exercise, eat generally nutritious food and avoid a ton of crap food, keep stress in check, and get enough sleep. Not exactly mind-blowing stuff. And while the details on how to do these things like exercise most effectively for a particular goal may be insightful, oftentimes I could simply ask a person, “What do YOU think you need to do?” and they’ll tell me many of the right answers.
Some may have the knowledge they need to eat more greens, stop being so hard on themselves, and spend less time keeping up with the Kardashians, but this doesn’t really mean a lot of jack shit if they don’t do anything with that knowledge.
It’s not what you know that matters, it’s what you do with what you know that counts.
Realize this: You know plenty already – probably too much for your own good.
We live in an information age in which you can Google anything, and yet all that does is create more overwhelm because now it’s not about what you know, it’s what to do with all that knowledge. It’s made even worse when you hear one thing from one source and something contradictory from another source. More information may simply lead to more confusion.
I could write a book called 1,001 Ways to Be Happier, and it would be almost worthless. Who the hell wants 1,001 things to do? Who wants to sift and sort through all those ideas? As Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins would say, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.” How are you going to decide which of those things are relevant to you? When do you pick doing one over the other since you can’t do them all at once? The irony is you’ll probably get overwhelmed, upset, and depressed just trying to figure out how to be happier when there are so many ideas out there.
Wisdom isn’t just about knowing what to do, it’s also about knowing what to ignore.
This means that it’s far more important for you to learn how to use the information you have than to get new information and knowledge. Much of what you read in this book is a “reminder” about what you know but may forget from time to time.
Let that sink in. Would some of your time be better spent figuring out ways to remind yourself, when it matters most, of what you already know, instead of trying to get new knowledge? How many times have you known what to do or not do to get a desired outcome, but simply didn’t remember it when it mattered?
I could present hundreds of “new” ideas to you in this book about how to make your life better, but while that may make me appear to be a creative genius who presents all kinds of new cool facts, at the end of the day you may be worse off for it. It’s better for you to be presented old ideas for how to better your life and explore them in brand new ways so you can actually follow through with them, than learn new concepts that don’t actually do anything to fix the underlying causes of the challenges you face.
Breakthroughs don't usually come from looking at new ideas. They more often come from looking at old ideas in a new way.
However, consider what you really “know.” Just because you know the rules of chess doesn’t mean you’re a good chess player. A master chess player can look over my shoulder during a match and help me by saying, “You can move that pawn there. Then you can move this rook there. Then you can move the knight over there.”
I could respond with, “Yes, I know I can move those pieces there,” but it doesn’t mean I have any clue why I would make those moves. The master sees something I don’t – the principles and strategies behind the moves. I’m aware of what can be done on a chess board, but that doesn’t mean I know how to effectively use that information.
Knowledge is understanding what’s possible. Wisdom is understanding how to apply those possibilities effectively.
If you come across anything, including something in this book, and dismiss it by thinking “Yeah whatevs… I know that already,” that’s your bullshitting brain trying to keep you stuck. It’s a subtle form of pride, and pride is quite possibly the most subtle and powerful force that keeps you from reaching your potential as it focuses your mind on what you already know and do instead of what you can discover and do to grow even more.
Pride is the ultimate impediment to reaching your potential.
Rather than looking at something you already know and dismissing it because you have awareness of the concept, you can now see that you have a choice here to start digging deeper into what you may not know around a concept by considering these things:
Am I actually doing this thing I know?
How could I do it better?
Am I doing it the best way or the right way?
Am I doing it at the right time? What about at the wrong time?
Was this once a good idea, or is it no longer serving me?
Why am I doing this? Is that a good reason?
How can I remember to do this when I need to?
How can I remember not to do this when I don’t need to?
Is there an easier way of doing this?
Who can show me new ways of approaching this?
I’ll offer some generally good advice here like, “Be grateful. Count your blessings each day. Spend a minute here and there throughout the day asking yourself what you’re grateful for.”
Wha
t do you think and feel when you read that?
I can only imagine this concept being a “holy shit, who would’ve thought of that!!” insight for a complete dolt. It’s not groundbreaking information. You were probably told this many times as a kid – and yet for some reason it still gets mentioned in self-help books.
I can dismiss this idea of “be grateful” with a flippant “No duh. I know this already. OMG, I can’t believe this person is talking about being grateful. Like, for realsies, who doesn’t know this stuff?”
Or alternatively, I can look at this exact same concept of “be grateful” and explore it deeper. Here are my real-world feelings as I explored gratitude recently.
I started by asking, “Am I doing this now?”
Boom! #NailedIt
I’m practicing gratitude every single day as I spend a couple minutes after I wake up jumping on a mini trampoline and considering what I’m grateful for.
Awesome! So I pat myself on the back and say, “Way to go, Derek! You’re totally rocking it. You should like, write books about this or something, ‘cause you’ve really got this whole personal development thing down, and you practice what you preach.” #RockStar #IImpressMyselfAtTimes
But not so fast…
“Am I doing this the best way?”
Well shitballs…
What used to be a practice that filled me with overwhelming feelings of gratitude has now become a near emotionless routine. I just think of a few things I’m grateful for and then go on about my business. “Practice gratitude” has become a to-do item on a checklist instead of an experience. I used to be able to generate such a strong feeling of gratitude when thinking about what I was grateful for that I’d be moved to tears. Now I just hurry up and get it done with so I can have my morning coffee.
In other words, telling myself “Yeah, I already know about gratitude” and thinking I’ve been practicing it was a nice pile of BS. It’s BS because, while it was technically true that I was practicing gratitude, I wasn’t truly experiencing the practice fully and generating strong feelings of gratitude – which is really the whole effin’ point of it anyway, right?
“What” I was doing didn’t matter if “how” I was doing it wasn’t impactful.
Yes, I was doing gratitude, but was I really “doing” gratitude? It’s like flippantly saying “I love you” out of habit to someone you care about as you walk out of the door vs. grabbing them by the shoulders, pulling them in, starting into their eyes, and with every fiber of your being radiating love as you profess, “I love you.”
Both are saying, “I love you” from a technical standpoint, but they’re clearly not the same act.
I didn’t stop there…
“Am I doing this when it matters most?”
Ugh… most of the time I just ask, “What am I grateful for?” in the morning as part of a routine. When I’m stuck in traffic, waiting in a long line, or the shit hits the fan, and I’m facing a serious crisis, the whole “be grateful” thing often flies out the window.
If someone says, “Be grateful,” I can choose to file that into the “been there, done that” part of my brain or proactively choose to explore it as though I’m experiencing the concept for the first time ever. Had I simply said, “Yes, I already know to practice gratitude, and hell, I even do it,” I would have missed a deeper lesson on how I was bullshitting myself.
Consider this…
What is an area of life that you’ve gotten complacent in? How can you do this even better?
Another common bullshit brain trick is this – New information is more important than old information.
One may overvalue things that seem new and exciting over the old tried, true, and sometimes downright boring. To reach your potential sometimes means repeating old ideas and tasks over and over again until these things become engrained. It’s not always fun and exciting. I get bored myself when I hear the same concepts repeated multiple times, but more often than not, I get more value out of being reminded of old ideas than learning something new.
So now you have a choice. When you hear things you like “be grateful” or any other idea you may have heard before, will you dismiss it as something you “already know” or use this as an opportunity to get deep and profound lessons as you explore the old idea in brand new ways?
No one will make the choice for you. You must decide for yourself if you wish to look at things in a new way. Only you can choose to let the words “I know that” be a trigger to explore the concept even more deeply.
My role as a guide is to present things in a way you may not have seen or heard before. I can attempt to help you prioritize and organize the information you already know to give you better perspective. I may even share a few new ideas you haven’t ever considered before.
However, the words in this book still have no power to shift your perspective unless you’re willing to choose to see things differently. Your role as the reader and chooser of how you live your life is to be proactive in answering these questions and coming up with your own questions to ask.
“I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it.” – Morpheous – The Matrix
Your learning, your breakthroughs, and your revelations are your responsibility. Don’t just wait for others to show you a new way when you can choose, at any moment, to look at things a new way to be your own greatest teacher.
Warning: Your Knowledge Is (Potentially) Dangerous
You may already be familiar with or become very comfortable with the intellectual concepts outlined in this book.
Four-value logic? Got it.
Consider the context for everything so you don’t get stuck in half-truths? Second nature.
Know some ways to effectively motivate and persuade yourself and others? #NailedIt
What you know, however, should (potentially) scare the shit out of you.
Here’s why your knowledge can be potentially dangerous…
What if the greatest opponent you face is within yourself?
Is that really so hard to believe?
Is anything more capable of masterfully deceiving you better than your own mind?
Ask yourself, have you ever tricked yourself with plenty of logic and good intentions into doing something ultimately harmful to yourself or another?
Have you ever looked back and said, "I knew better, but still I talked myself into it... Or out of it?"
Isn’t the recognition of how self-sabotaging your own mind is a reason you’re reading a book called Break Through Your BS?
Even if the greatest opponent you face is outside yourself, do they have any true power over you unless they convince your mind to buy into their story? Does a terrorist actually succeed if they don’t get you to feel terror? They may have physical control over you, but even the cruelest dictators can’t gain significant power unless they get some people to buy into their agenda by twisting their minds to follow them willfully.
If you are very persuasive and intelligent, and yet still admit you’ve made some poor choices, what you’re really saying is that you’re capable of persuading yourself with intellectual arguments into doing destructive things while making it all seem like a good idea.
No one has been able to deceive me more effectively than myself. My darkest moments came from my own mind turned against me.
After I learned about persuasion, I was able to write a bestselling book and help people get healthier and fit. I was able to coach friends through many of life’s challenges. I was able to motivate myself to do things like workout consistently, build a successful business, and have even more amazing and deeply connected relationships. I used this knowledge for good as I’m not a psychopathic person who would ever use knowledge of persuasion and mental manipulation for bad.
The problem is that just because I wouldn’t be tempted to use this knowledge to hurt another, it doesn’t mean I was free from hurting myself. I started finding very convincing a
rguments to myself as to why “what I do doesn’t matter. The world doesn’t need me. My life has no meaning. People would be fine without me. What’s the point? I might as well just give up.”
I can provide very convincing reasons to justify all of those sentiments if I want to. Remember that almost everything is a partial truth from a certain perspective. It’s partially true to say “The world doesn’t need me.” If I play that game, and I can certainly choose to play it if I want, I will be damn good at providing convincing arguments to back it up and strategically ignore any other mitigating elements of truth that go along with it.
Fortunately, I wasn’t ever suicidal or outwardly self-destructive – but that can easily happen for those whose minds have taken control and turned against an individual. I was, however, strongly apathetic due to my own mental tricks turned against me. I wasn’t necessarily giving up on trying to do good in the world, but I was severely slowed down until I broke out of my own self-imposed bullshit.
Applied knowledge is power. The knowledge of persuasion is power. But never forget the knowledge you possess, when turned against yourself, has the power to destroy you. Everything you learn about yourself and your brain has the potential to set you free, but it also has the potential to turn against you and drive you deeper into delusion.
Like the force in Star Wars, the more you can use your knowledge and intelligence of persuasion for good, the more you can also use it, and ultimately may be tempted to use it, for harm. And sometimes the only target of that attack is yourself.
Just because you learn of ways that you may be deceiving yourself doesn’t mean you’ll automatically stop doing them. Just because you know all the “mind tricks” your brain plays doesn’t mean you’ll be set free. Just because I know how a chess master beat me doesn’t mean I can defeat them. And your mind is a damn good chess player that will use every technique you learn to break your illusions to turn around and create brand new, even more convincing illusions.
This may sound strange, but consider that who “you” are and who your mind is are not one in the same. If you are your thoughts, then who is aware of those thoughts? If you are your mind, then what is it that’s aware of your mind? Learn to separate “you” from the ego-based thoughts and mind you have but are not limited to.
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