Did you choose not to choose anything because this is just a silly story in a book you’re reading and you’re wondering what the hell the point of this is? Did you tell yourself what you choose doesn’t matter because there’s no evidence to make one choice more reasonable than another? Did you check in with your intuition, or just think logically that because this is some stupid thing in a book it doesn’t really matter what you choose?
Did you want to skip past the story to just get to the point? Are you so quick to get to the point that you don’t choose to explore your own thinking by playing along, even though that’s the whole point of reading this book in the first place?
What if I said any choice you make would lead to your destruction? Would any choice you make matter? Of course not, because it’s a made-up bullshit story. Or at least, that’s one way of looking at it. That’s one partial truth. You see, from another perspective, the choice you made does matter, even in a made-up story, because that choice teaches you something about yourself. You can learn about yourself from each choice you make, whether it’s a choice you make in a story, a game, or the real world.
In this story, I decide the outcome for you. The outcome, no matter what you choose, is this: You’ll be destroyed by monsters.
The story has nothing to do with making a choice that avoids your destruction. Here’s a newsflash: You, or at least your physical body, is headed for destruction in the real world – guaranteed. I already know the end outcome of your life is your physical body dies. You know it too.
In this made-up story, the ultimate outcome of your destruction was already decided for you, but you still had a choice in how you played along. In real life, the outcome of your eventual physical destruction by death is already decided, but how you play in the meantime is still your choice. If the monsters in the story are simply metaphors for sickness, injury, or old age that can kill you, is there really much difference between this story and real life in terms of your eventual destruction no matter what choices you make?
If you were manipulated into thinking you only had a couple choices, consider this…
Did you let my careful use of language which asked, “What’s THE alternative?” make you think there could only be one other alternative? Notice how the word “the” creates a subtle implication in your mind there can only be one other option.
Side note, do you think politicians ever use subtle language tactics to manipulate your thought process? “You’re either with us or against us. You either choose this, or the alternative is you hate freedom and want to murder puppies.” By the way, if you think manipulation is always bad, remember nothing is good or bad outside of context. There are plenty of good ways to manipulate yourself and others, which could be called ethical persuasion.
What if I would have asked, “What’s AN alternative?” Would that have shifted your brain into considering more than one or two other options? Do you feel how the simple switch to asking “What’s an alternative?” subtly creates a context that there could be more than one option? I could have even set you up with, “What are some other alternatives?” and I guarantee you may have started to see more choices.
Now if you weren’t manipulated by my clever use of language to get stuck in those few choices and did come up with a crafty out of the box choice – so what?
Did you do that because I had warned you I would try to trick you earlier in this book? If I didn’t give you fair warning I would mess with you, would you have been on guard and chosen the same?
And does it really matter if you didn’t pick one of the options I gave you and went off somewhere besides either of those paths? Do you know the full story of the outcomes? All I said was either way you’d be destroyed by monsters, which is true no matter what choice you made. But did I say that picking the right side or left side would lead to immediate destruction?
What if both those sides had totally awesome parties going on filled with Vegas-like shenanigans (or whatever your cup of tea is)? You could’ve lived a long, full life hanging out on either of those paths and the monsters only would come and destroy you after you’ve had your fill of awesomeness. If you went anywhere besides those two paths, monsters may have quickly gone to your location and taken you out. While you’re out in nowhere land thinking you’re super smart because you didn’t take the beaten path, you totally missed out on a helluva party. #JustSayin #ShouldHaveBeenThere #ItWasCrayCray
In this BS story, I get to say you’re destroyed no matter what, and you have no choice in that matter – just like in real life you could be destroyed at any moment even if you do everything right. This is as much about the choices you don’t have as the ones you do. In this life you have many choices, but avoiding your eventual death is not a choice you can make. Avoiding risk is not a choice you can make. Avoiding mistakes is not a choice you can make. Avoiding pain is not a choice you can make. Perhaps even avoiding fear is not a choice you can make.
You can’t choose to go through life without making assumptions, being wrong, and having people disapprove of you. These are all monsters that you will face that will injure or kill your ego no matter what choices you make.
This may seem to make any choice meaningless, except when you consider that the choices are not about the outcome of survival of either your physical body or your ego. It’s about how you’re shaped by those choices, and how you shape the rest of the world with those choices. Did you forget that you might not be alone in this story? Did you forget that it’s not just about what you experience, but all the other people you meet and impact going down either of those roads or anywhere else?
In a story with arbitrary consequences made up by the story teller, the choices you make can never be truly good or bad from a final outcome perspective. I can always make the outcome undesirable if I want.
This does differ from real life where you’re typically given a little more evidence based on past history, what’s presented before you, and some degree of understanding how things work. It’s not so far off from reality though in that what you’ve led yourself to believe is possible may be far more limited than what is actually possible.
On an even more subtle level, in real life you may have some type of inner or intuitive guidance – or you may even call it spiritual guidance that exists beyond you. You can’t explain why, but you sense one choice may be better for you than another. We’ll get to this later.
For now realize that all of these stories and examples can teach you a lesson, but they’re not the “whole” story. They both are and aren’t an accurate representation of real life decision making. The fact that I’m eliminating variables you may face in real life is not meant to deceive you, but get you to focus on and consider various parts of your thought process in detail. Never forget though there is always a bigger picture.
Here’s some questions to ponder at any moment...
What do I choose now and why?
What did I learn from that choice?
What choice am I not seeing that exists?
What choice do I feel matters that really doesn’t?
What choice do I think exists (such as how to avoid destruction) that doesn’t truly exist that I can now let go of worrying about?
Now you have a choice. To reflect upon this choose your own journey story, and ask yourself what choice did I make and why? Remember, choosing not to choose is a choice. What did you learn about yourself from this?
After you’ve gotten a lesson from this, consider this simple fact: Even in a completely made up story, where perhaps no choice you make will lead to a desired outcome, and with no particular evidence to support one decision over another, you still learned something.
Making a choice in this hypothetical story, from one perspective, “doesn’t matter” as it’s not real. It’s made up. It’s imagined. Yet, despite the seemingly illogical nature of making a choice in a story or game, the simple act of choosing something and exploring that choice taught you something about yourself. It expos
ed something that you were previously blind to. If you choose to, you can have a real shift in your understanding simply by “playing the game of choice.”
Shackling Yourself In BS
“Joe, we’ve decided to sell you your dream Lamborghini at a crazy price of $50,000. You’d be crazy not to take this deal!”
Joe lowers his head in disappointment. He says, “I’d love to take the deal, but I don’t have the money.”
The car dealer looks curiously at Joe, “Bro, are you kidding me!? You’re getting an amazing deal! When else would you ever get a car like this for this little money?”
Joe acknowledges this. “Yeah, I know. I’d love to take the deal, but I just don’t have the money. I mean if I could wave a magic wand and make the money appear, I’d buy the car, but it’s not in my account. You just can’t talk me into having money I don’t have. I can’t buy the car.”
“Jessie, your dream body is only three months away,” the slick fitness sales rep says. “Simply sign up for our program, and you’ll be given the diet and exercise plan to get you more fit than you’ve ever been.”
Jessie’s excited, but a little hesitant. “Sounds great!! But… uhh… how much time does this take?”
The fitness rep replies, “Well, for the kind of results you want to achieve, it’s as little as an hour a day, 5 days a week, plus another 2 hours a week meal prepping. And that’s only for the next three months before you can cut back to maintenance.”
Jessie’s stomach starts to sink. “I know that’s reasonable for some…but I really don’t have that kind of time. I’m a single mother raising three kids, and I work a full time job. Plus I don’t have the energy or the discipline for a program like that. This is something I can’t do.”
Are either of these people bullshitting themselves?
Excuses
Remember, nothing is inherently good or bad outside of context, and that means excuses can be good and perfectly reasonable under certain circumstances.
So are any of these excuses valid? Are any of these excuses BS?
Let’s look at Joe, who’s offered a crazy deal on a Lamborghini…
He doesn’t have the money. Like, literally, for reals, not even close to that much money in his account. Open bank statement, money not there, end of story. Calling BS on this would seem a bit insensitive to the truth of his reasoning, right? I mean, surely some excuses are valid.
Yet we already realized whether you need to breathe to live can be either true or false depending on how we looked at the statement. Now let’s dig into the practical way this plays out in our day to day lives.
If you were Joe, what would some alternatives be that you could take to still buy the Lamborghini?
Think about it…
Make your choices…
Pause your reading until you come up with at least two.
The first thing that comes to mind for myself, and many people when buying a car, would be to see if he could get a bank loan or make payments to the dealership. Don’t have the money? Just borrow it!
Now this may seem obvious because it’s so commonly done. It’s at the forefront of our minds to use a loan as a way to overcome an obstacle like not having enough money.
If you thought of this, congratulations! You’re capable of overcoming literal objections using common sense. You probably didn’t even need to read anything in this book to come up with that idea. Welcome to not being totally hopeless at life. There is hope for you yet. ;) #NoButSeriouslyYouAreAwesome
Just for a moment, consider if this solution really is “common sense” and if so, why? Is it “common sense” because we’re born into the world already understanding you can take loans for things, or rather because it’s so commonly done in our society that the solution is obvious? Is it that the problem doesn’t even seem like a problem because of what you’ve been surrounded by in your environment? That is, people commonly take car loans. This is something very important to consider… and we’ll dig into it more later.
Now did you have any more, outside-the-box type of ideas?
If so, this means you didn’t let a momentary truth stop you from coming up with a possibility for a new potential future truth.
Opportunity is when possibility meets reality.
If you’re solely focused on what is, you can’t see what “could be.” To see opportunity, one must be both a realist in seeing what is here now while being an idealist with inner eyes for unseen potential.
What if he didn’t qualify for a loan?
No problem. Joe can make a few phone calls.
He may negotiate a deal with a rich investor friend to have her provide the funds for the loan. However, Joe has a clever idea to rent out the Lamborghini for photo shoots and to his investor friend whenever she wants to drive it, and eventually uses that to pay back the investor. Not only has he borrowed the money, but he can actually get creative enough that he doesn’t have to necessarily repay the loan out of pocket. #Winning #LikeABoss
How did I come up with this off the top of my head? Because I’ve studied and heard stories of entrepreneurs who often come up with crazy deals and solutions to challenges. If you’ve studied entrepreneurs, this may seem like a relatively rudimentary solution. However if you haven’t, it may seem really unorthodox. It’s my exposure to other people’s perspective that opens my mind to new possibilities.
One of the easiest ways to see new possibilities is to see things from other people’s perspective. If you can’t see a solution, look with new eyes.
Quite simply, this means the more you hang out with, study, and expose yourself to other people’s ways of thinking, the more you expand your own thinking – if you’re open to it.
Be sure to consider though, is it really “new eyes” if you start looking at things the way your friends, family, and co-workers, who are just as stuck as you, look at things? If you ask a friend who is poor, for money advice, what kind of “new” perspective do you think you’re going to get? It’s like teenagers getting perspective on the world from other teenagers. #Worthless
You may be familiar with the story of Richard Branson starting Virgin airlines. His flight was canceled, so he chartered a private plane, sold the extra seats to other passengers who missed the same flight he was going to take, and made his way to Puerto Rico.
Did he have the money or the resources to make this happen when his flight was canceled? No, but he realized that was his temporary situation. Whether or not it remained that way was his choice.
Would you have thought of that solution if your flight was canceled, or does a canceled flight mean you’re screwed? Does the temporary reality stop you from seeing a future possibility?
“It’s not the lack of resources, it’s your lack of resourcefulness that stops you.” – Tony Robbins
Richard was able to separate what was true in the short-term from what may be true in the long-term. You already do this with many things. It probably wasn’t a revelation that you don’t need to breathe in the short term. The question is, do you consciously separate your temporary situation from your long-term possibilities when looking at each of your excuses?
Separate your future possibilities from your current reality, and you’ll have countless options to choose. Always remember, what’s true now doesn’t have to remain true.
One bullshit brain trick is assuming that you’re going to be the same, or that your circumstances will be the same in a moment, a day, a week, or a year from now. The real insight isn’t just that your circumstances may change, they are guaranteed to change. Nothing in this universe remains stagnant. This is either scary or liberating, depending on how attached you are to your current circumstances.
If you really like your excuses, you can hold onto them because they’re often “true.” This approach, for better or worse, will work to keep your current reality relatively stable until it reaches an inevitable breaking point. The slingshot might be slow acting in some areas of life, but don’t delude yourself in
to thinking things will always be as they are now. Just ask someone who’s had a steady job, marriage, or healthy body swept away from them in what seems like an instant.
But if you don’t like your excuses, you can easily say, “Yeah, this is true for now, but I’ll be damned if it remains true. I’m going to choose to do something about it.” This approach of considering “what could be,” for better or worse, will work to change your current reality more quickly than focusing on “what is.”
You already switch between “what is” vs. “what could be” thinking regularly. It’s just that, when you really like your excuses because they keep you comfortable and “right,” you’ll keep yourself stuck in “what is” thinking. When “what is” gets too painful, you’ll naturally jump to “what could be” thinking.
“If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse.” – Jim Rohn
Being in enough pain about “what is” may even be the very reason you picked up this book. You recognized that, at least in some area of life, you don’t like “what is” and this got you thinking about “what could be.”
The question is, do you wait for circumstances to get so bad that you decide you need to switch your thinking, or are you proactive in choosing how you think regardless of circumstances? If it’s the latter, then you may have picked up this book not out of current pain, but rather because you’d rather prevent future pain and/or maximize fulfillment and contribution to the world by developing yourself to your greatest potential. It’s the difference between eating a nutritious diet to overcome existing disease vs. preventing disease.
Each way of thinking, whether “what is” or “what could be,” has its pros and cons. After all, a person could mistakenly assume they’ll make tons of money in the future and make poor financial choices out of over-optimism of what could be.
Break Through Your BS_Uncover Your Brain's Blind Spots and Unleash Your Inner Greatness Page 5
