No B.S Friday: This totally changed the way I thought about the journey.
“There’s no bugs, only side-effects.”
This is a piece of advice that changed my life. I don’t know if this was exactly how it was worded, and I can’t remember where I first heard it, but you know, it was a long time ago.
I’m talking really early days in this journey. When I had more testosterone radicals than money.
And I was hungry to make my fortune, and everyone I admired said that you had to “work on your mindset”.
Mindset is really the key. Having completed that stage of the journey, I really see that that’s true.
And so I threw myself to ‘working on my mindset’ with a passion.
And that manifest in a particular work-program: “Find a problem with my mindset, and fix it.”
And that’s when I started to get a little overwhelmed.
I was lazy. How do I fix that?
I was unmotivated. I was undisciplined. I had issues with self-worth and self-confidence. I had trouble trusting people and trusting the world.
Ho-boy. There sure were a lot of ‘problems’.
And so I started to get very down on myself. How did I end up with so many bugs in my operating software? Why were there so many flaws, so many glitches.
So many ways the brain was just mal-functioning?
And that’s when I got a great piece of advice.
“There are no bugs. Just side-effects.”
The central idea here is that, generally, for most people, the brain does what it is supposed to do. It works perfectly.
If we don’t like what it’s doing, that’s not because the brain is buggy. It’s just that we don’t like one of the side-effects of the brain doing its thing.
Let me give you an example.
Say, we feel that we lack self-confidence. It’s tempting to think that ‘shyness’ is a glitch and a malfunction that needs to be fixed somehow.
But shyness is not a glitch. It’s a very rational expression of the brains core programming.
We are a social species. We need each other to survive. It’s an existential threat if we are ostracised from the tribe.
As a result, we are very sensitive to anything that might embarrass us and cause us to be ostracised.
Getting up and doing a tight five minutes of stand-up comedy is an extremely high-risk manoeuvre as far as the brain is concerned. In its estimation it’s potentially putting your life as risk.
As a result, it runs the ‘shyness sub-routine’ to stop you doing embarrassing things and getting yourself killed.
Shyness is a manifestation of a brain doing what brains are supposed to do.
If we don’t like that it stops us from networking effectively, then we have a problem with one of the side-effects of shyness.
There are no bugs, only side effects.
And so this totally changed the way I thought about the task of working on my mindset.
The goal wasn’t to ‘fix’ anything because nothing was broken. (And that also meant I could stop beating myself up for being broken.)
Rather, the goal was to channel the brains activity in a way that created side-effects that I liked.
I had to accept that my brain and I were perfect, and things just needed to be massaged a little to prime myself for the outcomes I wanted.
This felt massively different and massively easier than trying to somehow “fix” myself and fix my brain.
So that’s my offering today. Go easy on yourself. You’re not broken. Your brain is great.
You just need to tweak a few things to channel your brain functioning towards the outcomes you want.
It’s not as hard as you might think.
JG.
Kimberly Lewis says
Thank you