Trickle Down Mindset: The Missing Element in Your Personal Success (4 page)

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“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”

― Epictetus

In April 2014, I read
Catalyst,
which argued using solid scientific research that confidence is the mysterious, hard to define, but game-changing factor that “reacts with our strengths, shapes what we achieve and who we become.”

They described in detail how overconfidence becomes aggression and lack of confidence makes you an underdog. They also gave some very convincing examples on how having steady, well-grounded confidence can have a positive impact on every aspect of your life.

And they were right. Real, heartfelt confidence is a game changer. A man who knows his worth and acts with steadfast confidence will achieve more and become more. However, they didn’t take into account where the confidence is born. It starts in your mind.

Confidence doesn’t just automatically happen when you know you are right or strong or experienced. Besides, if you are like most people, you rarely allow yourself such thoughts and beliefs. Doubt and hesitation are more likely to preoccupy your mind. You need a solid set of beliefs supported by your experiences to draw confidence from. In other words, you need the right personal philosophy.

If part of your personal philosophy is the belief that people are generally selfish and strive for “I win, you lose” situations, you cannot act with confidence. Confidence is acting with trust, as the etymology of the word shows. You may be an expert in your field and have long years of experience that should support your self-confidence, but with such a philosophy, you are doomed to fail.

One of the aspects of your worldview is how it affects every new input you receive. Personal philosophy filters the ideas you are exposed to. It works almost like a conscious counterpart of reticular formation in your brain. Your whole being depends on how your brain processes external information. It constantly registers, analyzes, and saves every sensory input and abstract concept. You must absolutely trust your most basic coping mechanism to maintain your mind’s integrity (read: sanity). You can’t constantly doubt your every past experience, memory, or belief.

Your brain is lazy. It doesn’t enjoy the mysteries of the universe. It prefers to stay dormant, without any challenging ideas. It avoids thinking as much as possible. Hence, it does everything in its power to stop you from facing a cognitive dissonance. And rightfully so. It can threaten the stability of your personality. Unfortunately, in our age, the brain overdoes this function, defending you not only against revolutionary ideas but also against a fuller life.

If your present philosophy doesn’t serve you well, you should get new data sources and interpret the data from a new perspective. If you are a believer and read an atheist’s post for the first time in years, beware the attitude “he is a moron; I know better.” If you are an atheist and went to church for the first time since you were a teenager, don’t judge the people there as “cretins, who are talking with the figments of their imagination.” Those are your old convictions and they don’t introduce a new perspective. They just create a mental firewall against new ideas. If someone who preaches a different point of view is a moron or a cretin, then you are not obliged to pay attention to his jabbering, are you? And instead of probing the new philosophies, you will just consolidate your present one.

Your set of beliefs is filtering the ideas you come into contact with, labeling them, and discarding the vast majority of them, which are not well aligned with your present philosophy. These conflicting ideas are just simply ignored most of the time. That’s why they don’t challenge your existing beliefs. Your brain looooooves coziness and laziness. This mode of operation allows it to dispose of adversaries before they even show up.

The other magic your brain does to maintain your status quo is to interpret things. It is trying to interpret all the events, experiences, and feedback from others in a way that amplifies your existing philosophy. Think of the issue of global warming. Did you heard of the infamous
Climategate
? The scientists who believed that the rise of the average temperature correlates with human activity tried to ignore data that contradicted their vision or interpreted it in a way that was in accordance with their views, which is what your brain does automatically.

To maintain your cognitive integrity, the brain literally disrupts reality. In the same way global warming believers extended the date range to fit their worldview, your brain receives a bit of reality and grinds it into a pulp that is familiar to you. You are a Democrat and a Republican politician did something right? He had some ulterior motive for sure! You are in the union and you’ve heard that some corporation gave their employees in China an unexpected bonus? Ha, they felt guilty, that’s why!

Your brain pulls out every trick, uses any excuse to maintain the status quo. It doesn’t care much about logic. It can be employed to your advantage. You can use logic and reasoning to dismantle such a flawed philosophy and install a better one in its place. I would even argue that falsifying the evidence is your brain’s last resort. It has more subtle ways to distort reality. The most powerful one is cutting you out from the sources of input that it considers to be dangerous to your existing philosophy. Is this periodical a Republican mouthpiece? Don’t read it. Is this TV station Democrat-friendly? Don’t watch it. Turn your attention to the “right” sources, the ones that fully agree with your mentality.

By picking up the data inputs for you, it avoids the cognitive dissonance. You “know” that they preach idiotic ideas in the media, so you skip them. You “know” which media tells the truth, so you consume its content. Simple, but effective. The lazy brain doesn’t spend an ounce of effort to fight off the cognitive dissonance; it saves you the precious energy.

Knowledge Items:

- Your brain constantly interprets all the events, experiences, and feedback from others in a way that amplifies your existing philosophy.

Action Items:

- Examine the media you consume AND those you don’t. What’s your reasoning behind these choices?

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“I know how to learn anything I want to learn. I absolutely know that I could learn how to fly the space shuttle because someone else knows how to fly it, and they put it in a book. Give me the book, and I do not need somebody to stand up in front of the class.”

― Will Smith

So far, personal philosophy looks like a cure for every human suffering. It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? You may regard it as some intangible, half-mystical thing of the mind. But where are the tangible results? If this theoretical concept is so effective, it should have at least a small number of real case studies where it was implemented and delivered the results. So where are they?

Everywhere. Every single person who overcame her obstacles and hardships in any area of her life did so because of the shift in her personal philosophy.

Bob Proctor
worked at a service station for the fire department. He was in debt and had no hope for the future. He met a mentor who helped him to change his worldview and his life changed dramatically within a single year. He went from earning $4k a year to being an owner of an international company.

Sophie Bennett
was broke. She lived a life beyond her means for too long. When she was forced to sell her car, she decided to change. Within seven years, she was a millionaire.

J.K. Rowling
was a single mother with no evidence that her story about a boy who discovers his magical heritage was great material for a children’s book. But her personal philosophy drove her actions. She didn’t quit after the first or fourth rejection.

Beau Norton
discovered that his thoughts were creating his reality. His negative thinking was creating a reality that was also negative. His mindset slowly shifted to being more optimistic about life as he learned ways to improve himself. He started an online business and was able to quit his day job at the factory.

People often blame circumstances for their fate. You may be guilty of this bad habit too, if you are not very different from the rest of society. But look at the stories above. Struggles, hardships, and obstacles didn’t defeat those people. The external events and circumstances didn’t magically change in a moment. The only thing that changed at the beginning was their perspective. Their personal philosophy.

And you can see that it’s true in your surroundings, too. I’m sure you know someone who changed his or her life. Whether it was a successful business owner who had gone bankrupt, a young girl who launched a successful business after college, an alcoholic who managed to quit drinking, a recidivist who began an honest life after his last sentence, a woman who pulled herself together following a divorce, or an old man who lost 100 pounds. All these changes are the result of a change in personal philosophy.

If you have an opportunity to talk to someone you know that transformed his or her life, I encourage you to do so and track the changes he or she noticed in the way they thought or interpreted external events.

As with everything else, a personal philosophy may empower an individual or rob him of his power. “Failure stories” also have their origins in personal philosophy.

Again, look around you. I’m sure you can think of some person you know well who is not in the exact place they wish to be in life. You want to convince yourself that this personal philosophy theory is not just a theory, but truth. So the more vivid the example you choose, the easier it will be to notice that internal philosophy, not external circumstances, drives one’s actions and the outcomes.

Take the worst drunk, the worst ladies’ man, the poorest guy you know. How could it be that his neighbors, from the same district or country achieved a totally different quality of life? Hadn’t they similar dysfunctional families? Didn’t they attend the same schools?

Where the circumstances are similar, the only explanation for the differences is the human factor. A personal philosophy. Think of Jim Rohn’s, Sophie Bennett’s, or Bob Proctor’s stories. Weren’t their peers in very similar situations, coming from very similar backgrounds? But only they became millionaires.

Don’t the vast majority of people struggle to keep their heads above water? How many of them do you think will become millionaires? If it all comes down to external factors, if the power of the mind is not important, then all of them are in an excellent starting position to become millionaires. However, the power of mind does matter. It’s the only reason those role models succeeded while their peers didn’t.

In fact, you are probably better suited for success than they were. If you have a college education, you are ahead of Jim and Bob. If you are not sinking in debt, you are ahead of Sophie Bennett. If you have ever published a short story, you are ahead of J.K. Rowling. According to a pervasive opinion—that external events and circumstances determine your fate—you should become a millionaire sooner rather than later.

But it’s a false opinion. It’s only when you change your internal structure, the way you observe the world, process information, and interpret that information, that you gain power. It’s that simple.

The main difference between successful and unsuccessful philosophies lies in the attitude toward yourself and the world. If you perceive the world as a place of struggle and yourself as a victim of your past, the society you live in, or the job you have, you are closing yourself, preventing yourself from change. On the other hand, if you feel responsible for your actions and their results, if you believe the world was created to serve you not to oppress you, then you are willing to come out of your comfort zone to seek new clues and ideas. Comfort zones and complacency are the allies of failure. Openness and the ability to step out of your comfort zone are signs of success.

I experienced this firsthand. Before my life transformation, I considered myself a partial success at most. I had managed to graduate from a good university, to start and support my family, to develop my spiritual life further than my closest relatives, to keep in reasonably good shape for a white-collar worker. But all of those small successes in different areas were not driving me ahead but rather keeping me in one place. I was almost satisfied with what I had achieved and I was scared that I could lose it. Lose my job, lose my wife, lose my faith.

I lived with feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. I didn’t dare to dream big, so I didn’t look for sources of new ideas or points of view. To avoid mulling about my experiences, I deadened myself with a hefty dose of computer games and fiction reading. I preferred to spend my time in fictional worlds rather than doing something about the real one.

All of this was happening because my personal philosophy was wrong. I wanted more from life, but I wasn’t willing to pay the price. I wished for more resources, but I didn’t believe I was capable of getting and keeping them. Hence, I was withholding myself from reaching outside my comfort zone. In order to soothe those conflicting desires, I chose entertainment over work, amusement over discipline.

As you can see, this mix of conflicting ideas wasn’t moving me forward. It was a source of constant struggle and frustration. That personal philosophy was only enforcing those negative emotions and I saw almost no positive results.

On the other hand, after my transformation and the shift in my mindset, everything seemed to be more fulfilling. I had the same job, the same apartment (while writing this book I bought my first house), the same long commute, and I burdened myself with dozens of new disciplines. It should have been less comfortable and enjoyable. But it was the opposite. I took joy in practicing my disciplines. I love to write or interact with other bloggers. And, most important, I see the results. I’ve changed my attitude and I’ve changed the outputs I got from my actions. Six published titles. A few thousand visits on my blog. Comments and emails from my readers. My English has improved. I achieved my target weight. And so on, and so on. I’m less comfortable, but happier.

The crucial issue in amending your personal philosophy is to import, digest, and assimilate the bits of others’ philosophies as your own. Listening to millionaires is hard for non-millionaires. Sometimes they sound like they live in a totally different world. For the common folk, many of their teachings seem to consist mainly of wishful thinking or of assertions that are just not true: “there is abundance for everybody,” “you are 100 percent responsible for everything that happens in your life.” You see in the news children starving in Africa, so where is this abundance? You lost an arm in a car accident because some drunken jerk decided to drive straight at you. How the heck are you responsible for that?

Abundance and responsibility are suddenly not so compelling when you ponder such facts, are they? But when you overcome this internal resistance, when you stop judging and embrace such attitudes as your own, they start to make sense. But first you need to assimilate them into your worldview. They must be yours to believe them and to start acting upon them.

Different cultures and people find different ways to express the same ideas and beliefs. Take the Catholic faith for an instance. The liturgy in the center of the African continent is different than in Poland or Ireland. The core beliefs are the same, but the way they are expressed through dance or song is different. You also need to incorporate foreign ideas into your internal realm in a unique way. You must believe, or to put it more strongly, you must know that those ideas are true for you and your life.

In the
New Psycho-Cybernetics,
Maltz Maxwell gives multiple instances of the power of belief over reality. He was a plastic surgeon. Many times, changing his patients’ physiognomy changed their relation to themselves. But he also met people who looked in the mirror after the operation and said that they didn’t see any difference. Their internal self-image was stronger than the image they saw with their own eyes. Those people were hypnotized by their faulty self-image. Under hypnosis, people can do extraordinary things or cannot do the simplest activities. Shy people can become bold and strong men cannot raise their hands from the table. The difference lies in what their minds perceived as truth. If the hypnotist convinced them they were bold or weak, they acted accordingly.

You may be able to do the ‘impossible’ or be unable do the ‘possible.’ It depends entirely on what you consider true. That’s the reason you need to accept foreign ideas as your own. You simply can’t achieve the same things other can because your beliefs stop you from trying.

You must believe that the idea is true before you act upon that idea.

You must open up to it, wrestle with it, ponder it, and if necessary, modify it. Then you can accept it. Once accepted, it becomes a part of your system of conduct of life. Only then can it start to generate different actions and different results.

That’s the explanation regarding the phenomenon of people attending the same seminar, reading the same book, or participating in the same course. Those who succeeded embraced the new ideas. Those who didn’t change their way of thinking didn’t achieve different outputs in their lives. That’s why the attitude of the majority of successful people is characterized by open-mindedness.

One of my friends is a top expert in the field of computer networks; he is in the top 1 percent in the world. He has numerous professional certificates and earns a lot more than me. I’ve known him since childhood. He has a very scientific mind. He worked at a university for several years before pursuing a career in the private sector. He is very down-to-earth. But when I talk with him about the Law of Attraction or some experiments about the impact of the conscious mind on physical reality, he doesn’t react with skepticism or disbelief. All he earnestly says is, “It’s outside of my field of expertise. It may be true. I don’t have enough data to confirm or reject the idea.”

That’s a successful attitude.

Knowledge Items:

- Every success and failure story has its origin in an individual’s personal philosophy.

- Comfort zones and complacency are the allies of failure. Openness and ability to step out of your comfort zone are signs of success.

- You must believe that the idea is true before you act upon that idea.

Action Items:

- Choose a person you know whom you consider a success in a given area. Why do you think this person is successful? Was it luck, talent, upbringing, character, physical resources? Really? Don’t you know other people in this area who had the same or more yet didn’t perform as well as your role model?

- Choose a person you know whom you consider a failure in a given area. Perform investigation similar to that above.