Ludvig Sunström's Blog, page 14

Breaking out of Homeostasis: The Lifestyle

Summary of the main points of my book Breaking out of Homeostasis: The Not-So-Magic Pill of Self-Development.

Learn what it means to break out of homeostasis (BOOH) and how the lifestyle that most people lead is harmful to their brain, body, and ultimately their long-term growth.

Learn why you can’t trust your brain and body as much as you think you can.

Introduction

Homeostasis is the process by which all the things about you (your brain and body) remain the same.

Homeostasis is embedded deeply into every living being as a mechanism for saving energy. We cannot survive without it. But at the same time it is a major pain in the ass – the biggest obstacle – to realizing our true potential (I know that sounds corny, but it’s absolutely true). Homeostasis is one of the main reasons why people are inherently lazy.

Homeostasis has a lot in common with heuristics in the sense that we humans cannot survive without either one of these  evolutionary mechanisms, but at the same time they limit us greatly if we are not aware of  to what the extent we actually are affected by them.  In my experience there are very few people that have any idea about this stuff and as a result they live their lives on autopilot to a higher degree than those people those who do know about it.

There are both good and bad things about this autopilot of operating as it saves us a lot of energy, by allowing us to get by with thinking less and doing less.

But we don’t need to save energy… We have it in abundance in modern society, so ultimately homeostasis isn’t very rewarding for an intelligent and ambitious person.

You will not be able to become a remarkable human being if you do not understand and gradually overcome some of these obstacles that are wired into you.

Overcoming those obstacles is the purpose of living a lifestyle that is conducive to break out of homeostasis.

The following are the key attributes of living a lifestyle that is conducive to Breaking out of Homeostasis:

To Exert More Energy than You Have to in Today’s Easy Society

This means to put in more effort than your brain or body wants you to. Everything else stems from this first principle and is some sort of variation of this.

Activating your Brain as a Default State

As opposed to wanting to mentally go to sleep like most people.

This means constantly thinking and exercising one’s mind by following goals or doing other things that have to do with activating the brain.

Instead of dumbing yourself down to get comfortable in the short-term you put yourself through things that are challenging and initially painful but end up making you comfortable and happy in the long-term as a result of becoming more intelligent and being able to stay focused on things for a longer amount of time. It’s impossible to be bored when you are focused.

The three main ways of activating the brain are that of intense focus, triggering adrenaline, and using drugs.  The two first alternatives are to prefer but the third one is still a hell of a lot better than not activating your brain at all.

Using your Brain and Body Instead of Letting it Use you

YOU have a brain and a body, they do not have you.

To think or not to think

To act or not to act

These are choices that go completely unanswered by many.

It’s possible to dumb yourself down and avoid thinking or taking action very easily in modern society and it’s very tempting to do just that as it has become the norm.

Trusting their Brains Way too Much

This is one of the main reasons why transformative and lasting change is hard and improbable to most people.

One of the most fundamental truths about human beings  is that they want to maintain homeostasis and do the things that require the least amount of energy and discomfort.

Because people don’t understand this it means that they have no idea of why they do many of the things they do.

Because they trust their own mental and emotional feedback too much they are unable to change for at least three major reasons:

Change happens gradually and it takes a while to adapt + The Plateau
Your prefrontal cortex
Your brain’s reward system

1. Change Happens Gradually and it Takes a While to Adapt.

It takes a while for homeostasis to shift in the long-term and it takes a while to develop a habit or a new hormonal pattern. This means you almost always MUST overcome an initial inertia where you lack motivation or feel very uncomfortable.

You must persist through this period on a plateau while not trusting in the feedback given to you by your body and brain and act on the belief that you have the ability to adapt to the situation.

If you are consistent in forcing yourself through this initial period, things will change soon. Let me illustrate this by two examples:

Exercising. It is very uncomfortable and painful at first and your body wants to quit due to wanting to maintain homeostasis and remain comfortable, passive, and save energy. But soon you notice that if you up the ante a bit every session you get stronger and your body adapts to it.
Intermittent fasting. Most people who try IF fail due to not sticking out the initial period on the plateau where your hormonal patterns have to adjust to your new eating schedule. This can take 1-4 weeks. Most people quit the second it feels uncomfortable and go off running to eat a snack like weaklings.

The principles behind the two above examples can be applied to any type of change, and this is explained by…

The Plateau

Whenever you are on the verge of breaking out of homeostasis  you will get uncomfortable and your brain will try to trick you in any way it can to make sure you don’t do it.

It will come up with all sorts of fucked up thoughts about how you absolutely should not continue down the path of action that you’re currently headed toward.

This is the brain’s last resort to keep you in homeostasis by means of convincing you through excuses and rationalizations.

The brain is going to tell you all sorts of fucked up things in order to get you to slow down and not break out of homeostasis.  It might tell you that everyone will hate you, that you might seriously hurt yourself, or it may get you to freeze up in fear.

If you do not know that this is simply standard procedure for how your brain maintains homeostasis you will definitely react to this, think that it’s true, and stop. But that’s the wrong action because you can’t trust your brain in this situation.

What you’re doing is probably not dangerous at all, but your brain will frame the situation in such a way to get you to stop so that you don’t change, because change requires a ton of energy, and your brain doesn’t want that. It is only concerned with saving energy.

On the flip side, EVEN if you truly understand this, it’s still going to be tough to pull through due to…

2. The Prefrontal Cortex.

Very few people are able to endure this discomfort because their brains are in poor shape from getting influenced by constant information and instant gratification. Their willpower, their ability to stay motivated and focused are all at a low level as a result of not activating their brains enough. This hampers their prefrontal cortex.

Prefrontal cortex.  The prefrontal cortex is a part of our brain that really sets us apart from other species because it has enabled us to learn things and adapt to circumstances quicker than other animals. The PFC is imperative to willpower, motivation, decision making, and staying focused at a task by sustaining concentration.

It is nearly impossible to become a highly capable person without exercising it somehow. Sadly, very few people in our society have any idea of this and as a result they don’t practice it much.

Many people do things that are harmful to the PFC – multitasking and constantly checking social media are prime example because both diminish your focus and lower your ability to concentrate in the long-term. They also fuck up your brain’s reward system, which I’ll get into in the next section.

Without focus, willpower, and motivation – how are you going to get anything done?

You’re not.

There are two major reasons why the prefrontal cortex is incredibly important to practice:

First of all, fundamentally speaking EVERYTHING significant ever accomplished by human beings have stemmed from focusing on a task for a long period of time. Einstein didn’t exactly come up with his theory of relativity in the course of a day. If he hadn’t been able to focus on thinking about it consistently every day for a very long period of time he probably wouldn’t have conceived of it and we wouldn’t know who he is.
Secondly, any value you are able to create for yourself or others stems from learning things and adapting to circumstances. A company that cannot adapt to the trends of the market is going to perish quickly. A person who cannot learn the things he/she needs to learn to perform in order to accomplish his/her goals is going to become unhappy.

Without exercising your prefrontal cortex you’ll become a less competent person and as a result you will have a harder time in life, it’s really as simple as that.

3. Brain’s Reward System

The brain’s reward system plays a major part in determining the actions that you take on a daily basis.

You do the things that make you feel good  – things that flood your body with stimulating neurotransmitters and hormones –  and you avoid  the things that make you feel bored or uncomfortable.

Boredom can be defined as being in a state of deficiency in terms of these stimulating hormones and neurotransmitters, where dopamine  is the most prominent neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.

As soon as you encounter a new experience your brain’s reward system is going to determine how this thing made you feel. Depending on whether you felt good or not your brain will want to either reproduce the same experience, or it will try to avoid it.

What do you think it does to your brain’s reward system when you pursue instant gratification and multitasking?

It floods your system with E.G dopamine and makes you feel good. Your brain quickly realizes:

“Oh, I can feel good and stimulated by doing XYZ, and it was REALLY EASY too. From now on I am only going to do XYZ because that is going to make me happy!”

But you cannot entirely trust your brain’s reward system to find out what is going to make you happy and competent in modern times because our society is so different from when we were cave men.

When we were cave men the brain’s reward system was probably a really good indicator for our survival. The things that made us feel good – for example sex and food – were really important for our survival and these things were usually scarce so it made sense to focus on getting them.

And it made sense to conserve energy too.

In modern society this is not the case. There are many, many examples of this, some major ones are:

An abundance of food, especially unhealthy processed food that stimulate you in the short-term but make you feel bad in the long-term as a result of harming your brain and body.
Sugar. Sugar feels great to consume as it gets you stimulated instantly, but it is immensely unhealthy. There is probably no single “substance” in the world that does more overall damage to society than sugar. Cave men did not come across much sugar at all. According to Mark Hyman human beings evolved eating no more than a few spoonfuls of sugar per year – equivalent to 1-2 cans of coke – and that came from eating berries. Imagine what it does to your brain’s reward system to eat more sugar than that every day, which is what most people do.
Porn. You can sit by your computer and get huge amounts of dopamine by masturbating to ten different women without having to put in the work to become worthy of such a woman in real life.
Multitasking. Porn is really the most powerful example of multitasking because by watching a new video before finishing the last one you get a lot more stimulated. Checking your phone, Facebook, and email for notifications while you watch TV is another powerful example of multitasking.

Ultimately, these things raise your threshold for stimulation and you will soon feel bored if you don’t do it constantly. This lowers your ability to  focus and sustain your concentration on one task at a time and as a result your prefrontal cortex gets weaker.

This becomes a negative spiral that makes you weaker and weaker until you become a complete loser who is completely run by his brain as it wants to maintain homeostasis.

The only way to break this pathetic cycle of addiction is to rewire your brain’s reward system to get addicted to the things that are good for you in the long-term and find ways of activating your brain so that you are producing these positive hormones and neurotransmitters without having to become a pathetic fiend to instant gratification and multitasking.

With a shitty reward system you’re not be able to accomplish anything significant because you’re not going to draw any enjoyment from the hard work required to produce something of real value.

Conclusion

The end result of this logic is still the same as most other philosophies of self-development and success:

Put in the effort, challenge yourself, follow your goal and you will live long and prosper

But the reasoning is different.

By learning this you will see how it all connects in a feedback loop that is either positive for you or negative. Things stay the same by means of homeostasis and it’s very hard to change this if you don’t understand the power your brain and body have over you.

You will not get the motivation, courage, energy and willpower to break out of homeostasis consistently unless you believe in the validity of the theory behind it. It’s too uncomfortable.

In this case you might say that unless you know the WHY  then you will not give a shit about the what or the how.

You must have a reason for doing the things you do or you will not do them at the end of the day. There has to be a light at the end of the tunnel to chase after when things are miserable in the present, which they definitely are on the plateau.

But ultimately, it’s worth it.

It’s worth it not being a confused weakling who reacts to his brain and body at any whim of wanting to maintain homeostasis.

It’s worth it to avoid being unconsciously influenced by bullshit things.

It’s worth it to activate the brain and become focused; to produce positive neurotransmitters and hormones in your body without having to get it from outside sources of instant gratification.

It’s worth being strong, capable, self-reliant, and happy.

RESOURCES:

Check out the book here. It’s free.

The post Breaking out of Homeostasis: The Lifestyle appeared first on Startgainingmomentum.

How I got Ripped in 2 Years by Following These 12 Principles

It takes time and effort to get ripped. It won’t happen magically overnight. These are the most essential principles that I’ve lived by and followed for the past two years in order to get ripped.

After having read this post you shouldn’t have to read anymore about this stuff. Now you should focus purely on following through and taking action.

This post has been a long time in the making. It came out a bit larger than expected: 3300 words. Here’s a summary of the principles you will learn:

Consistency is Key: Condition yourself into going whenever possible.
(Intermittent) Fasting: Eat 1-3 times a time. Try different fasting methods to find one that works.
Alcohol Rule: If/when you go out drinking don’t eat anything.
Lifting Heavy Weights: Compound Exercises: Keep it below 10 reps and don’t do isolation exercises or machines.
How to Spend your Leisure: ABF: Flex your body as much as possible!
Track Results: Write down results, feelings, or take pictures. It adds up quickly!
The Four Parts of a Workout: Pre-workout ritual, lifting weight, recovering between sets, and resting.
Get Good Sleep: Sleep in a pitch black room and make sure you properly exhaust yourself.
Skip Cardio: It won’t make you ripped or build muscle.
Protein and Diet: Eat 1 g protein / pound or 2 g protein / kilo.
Experimentation: Do a hair analysis to find out how well your current diet is working for you.
Philosophy of Rippedness: Go five more minutes, enforce the mindset of a champion!

It was actually quite challenging to write this post because most of the stuff in here –even if it may seem like a lot to take on – is automated. I do a lot of this stuff without having to think about it anymore, so it was a little hard to remember all the strategies that I use.

Before I get into how I got ripped in 2 years I need to inform you that you can get very, very advanced in theory of bodybuilding, nutrition, diet, and health, but that’s not what I’m going to do in this post. I’m aiming to simplify as much as possible!

Besides, these areas of research are subject to a lot of contrary claims – there is relatively little conclusive research. As far as I know, one of the very few things that everyone agree on is that the more muscle you have the higher your metabolic baseline will be and the more calories you burn every day as per automation.

It’s easy to drown in information about what or how you should lift, diet, or carry on with your life in order to get ripped, but ultimately I would not take the advice of anyone who is not ripped him/herself. Especially not if they are trying to sell you on some weird product.

Ok, let’s get into it…

1. Consistency is Key

You must be consistent. You must go to the gym rain hail, or snow.

You must go even when you feel tired to enforce the habit of consistency.

I’ve never had any trouble being consistent – which is probably explanation for why I’ve gotten away with doing a lot of unhealthy things from time to time and yet remained ripped.

I don’t take breaks unless I am over-trained or sick, and that is rare.

Here are two smart tips for being consistent:

Finding smart times to work out preemptively: when you know you will be super busy for maybe 1-3 days in a row, make sure you do a killer workout session before so that you can use that time to be sore and recover. That should be one of your mottos: always be sore when you know that you cannot go to the gym!
Find a good time that you can stick to: Find some time a day that works with your schedule so that you can be consistent. It is a lot less mentally demanding to go the same time a day every time than it is to go different times, because this increases the likelihood of making it a habit. For most people the best time for working out is around 4-7 PM assuming they woke up at 8 AM.

I usually wake up 5-7 AM and go around 11-14 PM and follow up with a huge post-workout meal to break my fast after around 15-20 hours.

2. (Intermittent) Fasting

I could write about this forever, but I won’t.

There are at least five reasons why you should be doing intermittent fasting:

It temporarily switches on ketosis , which means that you will start running on fat instead of glucose as your body’s main source for energy.
It increases the amount of growth hormone that your body produces. This is good for many reasons other than building muscle.
It provides mental clarity and increased focus as a result of increased ghrelin levels.
It probably reduces the risk of getting cancer.
It saves you time that you could be working or learning things. It makes you more productive. Time is money – don’t spend that time eating.

Here are the most popular ways of doing it:

Every day eating during 8 hours and fasting for 16 hours.
Fasting for 24 h once a week.
Fasting for 48h once a week or every two weeks.

Personally, I eat 1-3 meals a day and fast for the rest of the day. My feeding gap is 8 hours and my fasting period is ca 16 hours. Then I usually fast for 24 or 48 hours once a week as well. I recommend drinking water mixed with L-glutamine to get protein without breaking the fast. L-glutamine is also very healthy for your stomach because it is used to regenerate your stomach lining. I used to have a shitty stomach, but now it’s quite good thanks to drinking glutamine every day.

(For more info on IF check my links in the resource section at the bottom of the post… And NO fasting does not break down your muscles. In that case I would have died by now. If you seriously think believe this you need to get educated.)

3. Alcohol Rule

If/when there is a day that you will consume alcohol, here’s what you will do:

Make sure you don’t drink in vicinity of having eaten – a couple of hours should be fine. This way you get drunk more easily and won’t have to consume as much alcohol.
Drink only straight liquor to minimize carbs and sugar.
Don’t eat anything after having consumed alcohol. Alcohol is seen as a poison by your body and will be attended to first, this means that it gets precedence by your body’s metabolism and that everything you eat while you are drunk will be stored as fat.
Minimize fats (even healthy ones) during the day that you know that you will drink. Fats contain a lot of calories and take a long time breaking down.

Alcohol isn’t really that bad in itself, but the food you may indulge in prior to or after drinking is the “dangerous” part that is counterproductive to getting ripped.

Check out this post by Martin Berkhan if you want to read about this more extensively.

4. Lifting Heavy Weights: Compound Exercises

It’s all about compound exercises.  Getting ripped – like every other skill – is about figuring out what the fundamental 80/20- activities are.

Lift free weights and don’t go over 10 reps, don’t use machines. Unless you’ve got some injury of course.

Here are the most important exercises that you should be doing some variation of:

Whole body (back & core):

Deadlift, stifflegged deadlift, squat, clean, and clean and jerk.

Legs:

Squats, front squats, and lunges.

Upper body:

Benchpress, dips, pullups & chins, and shoulder press.

5. How to Spend your Leisure: ABF

ABF – Always Be Flexing!

Here a number of exercises you can do anytime a day – like when you’re sitting in class or at work, when you are reading, and when you sit in front of your computer. The point is to get in the habit of tensing your muscles as often as you can.

Tense neck & jaws. “CHEW” imaginary food until your jaw or neck get tired. Warning: doing this in a public environment will make you look retarded.


Stomach vacuums & tense stomach. Stomach vacuum is when you suck in your stomach as hard as you can for as long as you can. Combine that with flexing your stomach frequently. Especially when you are in the gym – always flex your stomach while doing exercises.


Flex all muscles in your body, especially chest and arms..Very easy to do while sitting by the computer. Good way to burn calories when “sitting still” and good way to keep alert as well. You’ll get better control of your body too – in the beginning you might not be able to flex only one chest muscle for example.

So if you ever see me stretching or flexing, now you know why. I don’t even think about it most of the time because it’s so deeply ingrained in me by now.

6. Track Results

It can be a good idea to keep track of your results in the gym and to write down your progress:

How much did you lift each session and how did it feel going there and when leaving the gym?
It can also be smart to measure bodyweight and to take pictures of yourself pre-workout and post-workout and keep a collection. Not only to measure, but also for motivational reasons and see how far you’ve come. It adds up and gets noticeable after some months.

But beware of missing the essence of what you’re supposed to be doing, don’t track results for the sake of tracking. Always have a purpose in mind. When you start mindlessly tracking for the sake of tracking you tend to do it purely from a state of habit because you are used to it, but it is only a waste of time.

7. The Four Parts of a Workout

You should mentally define what an optimal workout looks like. To help you with this there are really four parts that a workout can be divided into:

Pre-workout ritual: this is when you get yourself into a state that is conducive to working out. You shift your focus onto your body instead of having it in your head. You can do this by visualizing your sets or dancing around a bit. You might drink some coffee or stimulant to boost your energy. I usually drink coffee, L-glutamine, and creatine. The point is to feel awesome and get in the zone and get stoked to lift some weights and love it!

(This first one is really important. You need to condition your brain into associating positive emotions with the gym!!! Also, you will have a lot more fun and get MUCH stronger if you are in a motivated and focused state. The amount of focus and presence that you can infuse into every repetition REALLY matters: a set done absent minded will not yield the same payoff as a set done with strong intent!)

2.   Lifting: When you lift you want to be focused fully on your breathing and tensing as many muscles in your body as possible.

3.   Rest properly in between sets: When you have just executed a set it is important that you face the pain and breathe properly. Many people don’t do this and walk around not quite letting the body adapt to the stress that has been imposed on it. By doing so they are failing to recover properly and will not maintain allostasis –the state in which the body optimally adapts to stress.

4.    Rest and recovery post workout: It is a good idea to rest for at least 5 minutes after the workout if you went at it hard. You also need to…

8. Get Good Sleep

In this post I went into detail about how to get good sleep hygiene and the main things to avoid. You need to form a ritual that serves as cue for you to get tired, and you need to be consistent with doing it. I struggled with this for a long time, but now that I’ve got it down it’s very nice.

Here’s a summary:

Exert some damn energy and make sure you truly are tired by the end of the day. Most people are too passive and sedentary. Stop trying to conserve energy – spend it!
Sleep in a pitch black room. That means no light at all. Your brain is smarter than your eyes are, it will detect the least amount of light and that will diminish your production of melatonin .
Don’t consume stimulants several hours prior to going to bed.
Open up a window to get fresh air.
Avoid sitting by LED screens at least one hour before bed. Don’t go immediately to bed from doing some activity, read or meditate for at least 5 minutes to prepare the body for sleep.

9. Skip Cardio

Cardio does very little for you in terms of losing fat or building muscle. Cardio burns surprisingly few calories. You will burn a lot more calories by lifting heavily or by doing some sort of interval training than you will from doing steady state cardio.

Point being, don’t do cardio unless you enjoy it. Don’t do cardio if your goal is to get ripped, it is time inefficiently spent.

10. Protein and Diet

Eat about 1g protein/pound – that’s about 2g of protein/ kilo. Experiment and see how much protein your body is capable of consuming. People are not born equal in this regard, some people can assimilate more protein than others – it’s an unfair advantage. If you consume more protein than your body can assimilate you tend to get gassy or perhaps feel a bit slow. You want to be on the sweet spot so that you consume just about enough every day without feeling bad. For me that is pretty close to 2g protein per day.

You should carefully measure how much protein you eat per day at first, then soon it becomes very easy to know. By now I can guesstimate quite accurately how much protein I get for every meal I eat whether I cook it myself or eat out, it’s like a sixth sense of sorts.

In this post I wrote extensively about what I usually eat and why I eat it, going into nutrition and so on. The key points are to eat a lot of spinach, broccoli, eggs, and meat while minimizing unnecessary calories that usually stem from carbs and sugar.

11. Experimentation

One of the best investments in terms of money and time that you can make to improve your long-term health is to do a hair analysis (Read mine as a PFD!) to examine your vitamin, mineral, and heavy metals levels. This will give you great feedback on what to include or remove from your diet. You will quickly find out whether you are deficient or over the top in something. You could also do a blood test, which is better but more expensive.

I learned a lot from my hair analysis (check picture above). The most important thing I learned was that I had too much mercury in my body. That could’ve been very bad in the next coming years had I not fixed it. I stopped eating so much canned fish after that.

In either case you should not skimp on these things, remember: this is your long-term health we are speaking about!

Ultimately you have to find out what works for you in terms of diet and lifting. No two bodies are the same, and just because XYZ works well for me or someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you.

The same is true about food. There are some pretty accurate fundamentals for how and what to eat, but it can differ between individuals. It also has a lot to do with stomach health, some people have much better digestion than others do. Some people can eat a lot of gluten, milk, and processed food without being negatively affected by it. It’s unfair. Deal with it.

12. Philosophy of Rippedness

Here are some essential mindsets and mental habits to implement:

5 more minutes. When you want to quit or go home do at least one more rep. Beat your brain. Never let your brain get the last word, don’t give into its weakness of wanting to quit. Condition yourself into going a bit further when you want to give up.


Disregard your surroundings. Be loud. Scream. Be a beast. You are not there to look good to others. You are not there to dress up and show off your gym clothes or tattoos. You are there to lift some damn weights and to improve your mental and physical strength. You are there to enjoy the beauty of concentration that comes from perfectly executing the repetitions. Mind over matter.

Conclusion: The Hill is the Steepest in the Beginning

It gets gradually easier the more muscle you build and the less fat you have.

This is partly explained by the fact that the more muscles you have the higher your basal metabolic rate will be, and the less body fat you have the less of the hormone leptin you will generate: this makes you feel less hungry. (leptin is a hormone that regulates the amount of calories you need every day – it makes fat people crave more food, despite not really needing it from a survival standpoint)

This is why it’s hard to get ripped but easy to maintain, that’s why you should do it ASAP in life before you get too busy living your life purpose.

You may not have the time to get ripped later when you go really fucking hard and want to be the best in the world at your area of expertise.

Summary of Principles:

 

 

 

 

Consistency is Key: Condition yourself into going whenever possible.
(Intermittent) Fasting: Eat 1-3 times a time. Try different fasting methods to find one that works.
Alcohol Rule: If/when you go out drinking don’t eat anything.
Lifting Heavy Weights: Compound Exercises: Keep it below 10 reps and don’t do isolation exercises or machines.
How to Spend your Leisure: ABF: Flex your body as much as possible!
Track Results: Write down results, feelings, or take pictures. It adds up quickly!
The Four Parts of a Workout: Pre-workout ritual, lifting weight, recovering between sets, and resting.
Get Good Sleep: Sleep in a pitch black room and make sure you properly exhaust yourself.
Skip Cardio: It won’t make you ripped or build muscle.
Protein and Diet: Eat 1 g protein / pound or 2 g protein / kilo.
Experimentation: Do a hair analysis to find out how well your current diet is working for you.
Philosophy of Rippedness: Go five more minutes, enforce the mindset of a champion!




RESOURCES:

Here’s three summary posts I’ve written before about two of the most famous books about intermittent Fasting.

Part 1. Eat Stop Eat – 24 hour fast once a week.
Part 2. Fast-5 diet – ca 5 hours to eat every day and 19 hours fast.
Part 3. My general take on IF and miscellaneous stuff.
Here’s Martin Berkhans website about lifting, dieting, and intermittent fasting. In my opinion this is one of the best sites out there in terms of time invested.

Here’s Mark Sisson’s blog about primal living, paleolithic diet, and all things health-related. This site is huge, it is one of the best sources for information out there, but be warned: you can easily drown in information. Don’t read more than you necessarily have to, beware of information overload.

Here’s the first out of seven summaries that I’ve written about the Ultramind Solution, which is a pretty good book about nutrition, lifestyle and living healthy. This book is helpful, but I wouldn’t read it if I was only interested in lifting.

Part 1.

Here’s some motivational reading and mindsets to immerse in from Arnold Schwarzenegger – the champion.

PS:

Remember, your goal is to get strong and ripped, not to learn all the (quasi)theories from guru XYZ. In this post you have all the information that you need. This information literally took me over a year of hardcore studying and experimenting to learn.

If you apply these principles I guarantee you that you will see some massive results within a year.

Don’t take on all of them at once, but apply a new one every week or so in a manner that is appropriate to you.

The post How I got Ripped in 2 Years by Following These 12 Principles appeared first on Startgainingmomentum.

Social Engineering Applied in Daily Life: Part 2 – How I’ve Used it Lately

In the last post about social engineering I gave a bunch of basic information of how it can be put to work. In this post I’ll show how I used it lately by illustrating three recent examples: at an airport, bluffing to get into a club, and getting a much better phone subscription.

These examples are highly arbitrary really, what matters here is the underlying principles at play in each situation. You can easily apply the same methods I’m explaining here immediately in your own life.

Practical Examples of Social Engineering
1.      At the airport asking for a pencil.

Me (to middle-aged man in airport):  Hey could I borrow a pencil, I just got a great idea!

Man: Sure, what kind of idea?

Me: A chapter for my book!

Man: Wow. Here, let me give you this pencil!

Now, I didn’t deliberately use social engineering here. But I used it skillfully without thinking about it. Had I just asked randomly at a crowd of people for a pencil I doubt I would’ve gotten it; they would likely just have ignored me or thought I was annoying. When I said it I was very enthusiastic and the old man immediately felt it was something important and wanted to be of help.

2.      Bluffing to get into a Club.

I was standing in line for a club/venue and had stood there for about 15 minutes (so I had invested a bit into it) until I got to the front. Only then do I see a sign indicating that tonight only people with special invitations or reservations could get in.

Most people would just walk away at this point or figure that they give it a half-assed attempt.

But I quickly decided I was simply going to just go with it. I’m not going to let my 15 minutes go to waste. So when I got up to the guard and he asked me for reservations I simply stated my name and bluffed that I’d made a reservation two days ago; I did this in a business-as-usual kind of manner as explained in the previous post.

When he said he couldn’t find my name I acted as if I was angry and outraged. The guard got a bit uncomfortable and explained that they had had issues with their website’s booking system lately and that that was probably the issue here. He then let me in.

I win.

Key point – decisiveness matters. Companies want happy customers. Clearly indicate that you are unhappy, even if bluffing.

Had I taken the half-assed approach of trying to act “nice” and told him:

I didn’t know about the reservation rule this night, please let me in anyway because I have waited for 15 minutes!

It is highly unlikely that he would have let me in. The reason for this is twofold:

Firstly because I am showing that the fault is on my side and that I am the one who made the mistake and not them. The guard thinks he is doing his job by disallowing me entry – those were his basic orders tonight.  By admitting to know about this rule and breaking it, even if just now, I am asking the guard to take a risk on my behalf. He has little to gain, but a lot to lose from doing this. On the other hand, by taking the bluff approach I am framing the situation in a way that tips these scales in my favor; now he has more to lose than he has to gain from letting me in.
Secondly I am making it very easy for him to say no to me. I am basically asking his permission to get in, coming from a place of low value. People instinctively dislike people of low status and are inclined to say “no” on autopilot – and I am eliciting this type of behavior from him by acting in this manner. It is way easier for the guard to say no to me if he knows there won’t be any bad consequences (which is what I am indicating by admitting that I know I messed up) than it is if I am upset and may potentially file a complaint against him or the club.

So, in theory it seems like a nice thing to be honest, but in practice it only proves that you are ignorant about human social psychology.

3.      Getting myself a much Better Phone Subscription

The dynamics of this one is very similar to that of the club example.

I called up customer service of my phone company and threatened that I would go to one of their main competitors. I then gave the customer service guy a detailed description of how much better the other company’s subscription was than theirs and why I liked it. I provided a seriously valid reason WHY I would leave. “Because” being the magic word.

Well, lo and behold, suddenly the guy presents me with a secret subscription deal that is HALF the price I currently have, and I get free unlimited Internet. That’s almost a third of the price I paid before. It’s incredible how these phone companies play us for suckers.

Obviously they only pull out this sort of deal to the customers they want to keep the most, and when they are sure that they will lose them otherwise.  There is no way the phone provider companies could get away with charging such over prices unless everyone else wasn’t doing it. It is a massive cartel-like thing.

The interesting thing was that the guy was very close to trying to withdraw the deal from me once he got me on the hook. He was a great salesman and almost succeeded, but not quite. He was trying to Jedi mind trick me into forgetting his magic deal, but no dice. I win.

The key point was that I very clearly indicated that I was upset and was going to leave. I did not even ask for a better price, it had to come from him or it wouldn’t have been convincing on my part. In short, he perceived he had more to gain from helping me and keeping me as a customer than to let me go.

If you do not rebel and test the limits and show that you cannot be pushed around you will continue to pay a marked up price when it comes to these sort of things.

Why and how does Social Engineering work?

Because people want to be helpful and/or benefit themselves.

If you can make it seem like they are doing you a favor or that they are helping you somehow, and making you happy – for example by providing an arbitrary reason – most people will go along with what you’re asking so long as it doesn’t involve risk to them.

Identify with their position

Also, it is very important to recognize what position the other person has, and how strongly invested he or she is into the interaction or situation at hand. For example, a cop isn’t paid well enough to risk his life single-handedly chasing after a bank robber. He has way too much to lose.

Similarly, an employee on the support or sales side of a company typically has more to lose by an angry customer potentially wanting to file a complaint against him or the company than he has from stepping slightly over his boundary of what he can agree to.

Always take into account the role of the other person. It helps if you have personal experience in that line of work.  Think about what, and how much, the other person has to lose if something goes wrong, and how much he or she has to gain by helping you.

I dislike the notion of social interactions which some people have; namely that there is an ongoing combat of frames going on between two or more people in which there is a definite victor based on whose ego is the most forceful.  We’ve all met people like this – the annoying argumentative person who makes everything about “winning” and is on a constant paranoid struggle to maintain his or her image by having to always be right about everything.

Recognize that most people are sheep

If you are in a queue and you see people getting ahead you will soon notice that there are two types of reactions.

The first is that of people who are crudely pushing through the queue. They will usually be confronted with bad social feedback, but ironically enough they usually get away with it.

The second is that of people who are more skillful. People do not even notice it because they act so smoothly and project such authority. This makes the ordinary “sheepish” people unconsciously assume that they are simply entitled to do so. They will likely not think about it – it won’t register in their minds.  But even if it registers in their minds they will rationalize it as it being some important person – maybe the owner of a club or some rich guy with connections.

You won’t be able to pull it off if you are insecure

But in probably 70% of the cases you will be able to do it simply by going for it.

You will be surprised with the kind of stuff you can get away with if you simply do it. But most people are too afraid of breaking any kind of social conventions. Therefore they do not suspect that others can do it.

You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.

 - COLIN POWELL -

Recommended reading: Kevin Mitnick – The Art of Deception

Boring, but good book. Goes into much more advanced social engineering.

 

Question:

Got any personal examples of ballsy social stuff you have done lately?

The post Social Engineering Applied in Daily Life: Part 2 – How I’ve Used it Lately appeared first on Startgainingmomentum.

Social Engineering Applied in Daily Life: Part 1

We humans are social animals and as such we are manipulative in various ways whether we know about it or not. Every day we influence our surroundings and the people around us somehow at random.

Why not do it deliberately with some skill?

Women are the ultimate social engineers. Your mom is being unknowingly manipulative when she wants you to stay home after you finish high school despite you wanting to move out.

Why do we do it?

Because our emotional parts of the brain distorts the rational parts and make it seem as though it was the rational part’s idea to do something, when in truth most of it stems from our genetic programming or primitive desires. We often mistake the cause for the effect, and think that we are way more rational than we are.

Or maybe I am completely wrong about this, and simply using this as an excuse to justify deliberately manipulative behavior.

You decide.

Social Engineering

Social engineering is the ability of making other people do what you want them to do in order to aid your goals.

There are many methods, more and less complicated, for employing social engineering in different situations. In this post I will only go into the more common and practically applicable ways that people should use more often, thus I am not going to go into advanced schemes of identity theft or fraud etc. Besides I don’t have any experience of doing that, so it would be poor advice.

When we hear a word like social engineering we tend to imagine some mastermind planning his next strategic moves from the confines of his secret lair; or a CEO controlling his entire work force from his office by means of some secret method.

The typical geek perceives it as some magic pill that can be used to his advantage –a secret weapon for making everyone else to do his bidding. But he is deluded because it doesn’t work like that.  We can be more skilled communicators and more efficient at handling other people, but we can’t ever “manipulate” everyone into following our orders like a puppet master.  It simply does not work like that.

Social engineering should be considered a practical skill that more people need to use. It’s really about the basics of understanding human social psychology.

Who uses Social Engineering?
Spies, hackers, criminals.

For obvious reasons these types use social engineering as a way of getting access to classified company information or other information that can be of benefit to their criminal goals. Identity theft or getting hold of financial information comes to mind.

I used to watch Burn Notice a couple of years ago. Michael Westen, the spy in the featured post picture, is something of a genius at social engineering. I got plenty of cool ideas from watching that show that I experimented with.

Women

Women, being physically weaker than men, learn from an early age to use various means to get other people – especially men – to do things for them. Paradoxically they really dislike when it works out well. Women hate men who ‘fall for their tricks’.

Gold-digging women in night clubs can compared to playing poker:  if you cannot spot the sucker at the table, you’re the sucker.

Headhunters

A headhunter wanting to employ people from another company is not going to be handed the list of employees and their information without having to use some trickery. Employees are usually the most valuable asset of a company and when employing someone you think of it as a long-term asset, you don’t want to offer expensive training for someone you know is going to leave you after a year. Headhunters are shunted for the same reason, companies do not like headhunters messing with their employees.

Headhunters need to get around this and be a bit socially resourceful. For example they can call up a company office pretending to be part of another division and ask for the initial information they need. Then they call up another office with this new piece of information providing further credibility of their identity. Within a few calls they may be given access to the list of employees that they wanted to get hold of and can then proceed to contact the individual people.

How can Regular People use Social Engineering?

Here are a few examples of how you can use social engineering to benefit you in normal situations of life that you will definitely encounter.

Be Enthusiastic

By being enthusiastic you increase your odds of getting people to respond to you socially whether that be over the phone or in real life. People like to be part of any type of positive vibe; be a bringer of good news. And vice versa, people instinctively shy away from negative or boring people.

Business as Usual

The business-as-usual approach is useful and sometimes necessary when it comes to pulling of things that you need a high status to do, things such as:

Walking into restricted areas where you really have no business being (sneaking into VIP). You must be able to act as-if, otherwise it will not work. It’s like your level of persuasion or charisma in an RPG game.
Bluffing about things to get past gatekeepers.

The business as usual approach is boosted by…

Pushing through

This one I use a lot.

Walk straight through queues, parties, VIP sections, or similar type things.

Just walk straight ahead and do not look to the sides. Be calm and act casually. Usually nothing happens, but if someone asks you what you’re doing just say something like:

I live here.
I’m on my way to see Carl.

Provide a “valid” (arbitrary) reason and it will usually work so long as you say it in a normal manner without stopping.

Focus on One Person

Whenever you are in an interaction make sure you don’t disperse your attention to too many people. Focus on one or two people, making it harder for them to say no.

Provide a “Valid” Reason for what you are Doing

You might be thinking “but a cool guy never needs to explain himself, only weak people do that!”, but that is a bit of an inflexible perspective.  I’ll show you what I mean – the end can justify the means. It depends on whether you care more about looking good or about getting something done.

It has been proven in several studies (commonly mentioned in sales books like Influence by Robert Cialdini) that by providing a reason you are much more likely to get the other person to do something for you, or to accept the thing you are currently doing given that they pose resistance.

Most people care little (less than you think) about what you do. You can get away with doing a ton of weird things in social situations given that you are cool about it (act like it’s normal for you) and provide a reason for what you are doing.

For example if you need to speak privately to a girl in a club it’s very easy to just take her by the hand (business as usual or enthusiastically) and start walking. If she asks what you’re doing (doesn’t happen that often) you need to provide some reason. But it doesn’t matter what the reason is, the words are not important. You simply need to defuse the situation and override the logic – “because” is the magic word.

On the other hand, if you are asking for a favor over the phone and cannot use emotions as efficiently, then the reason becomes much more important and you will need to have a valid reason. In part two I’ll go into this much more and provide three recent examples of how I used social engineering. One of those examples is that of using some of the tools in this post to negotiate my way into a phone subscription for less than half the price of what I previously paid.

Click here to read part 2.

Question: have you used any of these strategies lately?  If you have a personal example please share it in the comment section.

The post Social Engineering Applied in Daily Life: Part 1 appeared first on Startgainingmomentum.

5 Practical Ways of Becoming Motivated

Motivation is a mental state that one has to practice; it is not something you either are or aren’t. By using the 5 practical ways of becoming motivated you will slowly, but gradually, increase your level of motivation so long as you are consistent in using these tools daily.

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

– ZIG ZIGLAR –

 

There are a ton of general things you ought to do in order to increase your level of motivation, things such as eating healthy, going to the gym, sleeping well, and focusing on your goals. However, in this post I want to show you five less known practical ways of becoming motivated that I use, or have used with positive results.

Do not underestimate the power of these five practical ways of becoming motivated, even if they might seem a bit unconventional or weird. You will not wake up magically motivated one day, you need to practice this stuff. Seriously.

I would estimate that it’s going to take you 1-5 hours to finish these exercises the first time. Then you will need to rehearse them daily, but it will not take more than a few minutes per day at that point, unless you want to rewrite some of this stuff.

Keep a Whiteboard

The first thing you’re going to do is to go and get yourself a plastic whiteboard to put it up on your wall. You will also need some pencils and an eraser. Together it shouldn’t cost more than $15-100 depending on size and quality. In either case it will be one of the best investments you ever make in terms of value for money. If you can’t find one in a local store close by you can always order one here, together with some pencils and an eraser here.

The reason why you absolutely need to purchase a whiteboard is because it is the easiest possible way to keep focused on goals and write up thing to remember or things you want to reflect on several times daily. Here are some ways of using a whiteboard:

Write down bullet points of a speech or a presentation and stand facing the whiteboard while rehearsing the speech to make it easier to memorize the speech. Soon you will have memorized it and won’t need to look at the bullet points.
Write down goals of different sorts (daily, monthly, yearly) and review them daily.
Write down inspiring quotes or phrases that you want to reflect on.
Draw cool things when you feel like being spontaneous or if you’re having a party.

Ultimately, the reason why the whiteboard is such an essential tool to use as a way of becoming motivated is because simply by reviewing your whiteboard a few times a day you will force extra repetitions and remember your goals much better. By remembering your goals you will inevitably be more motivated. Forgetfulness is the number one reason for failure in any category of your life, it doesn’t matter what aspect we are talking about. It is when we lose sight of what we were supposed to do that we slip, and then it is easy to become demotivated and feel bad because we fucked up.

Therefore, remember before you forget.

Make it a rule to review your whiteboard whenever you enter or exit your room.

Do it for Future you

Here’s a picture of future me.

The second thing you’re going to do is to enter this website and create a picture of the future you.

After you have created one or more photos that are realistic enough and don’t look completely hilarious (a lot of photos turn out funny on that website), you will put go and print these photos. You will then tape them to your wall above the whiteboard where you keep your goals and other motivational stuff.

The reason you want to do this is because this helps you envision what you will look like 20 years from now; and any stupid action you take now will have to be paid for by future you. The actions you take today will impact future you.

If you are having trouble remaining motivated or responsible to yourself, perhaps you can do it for future you?

After all, future you has done nothing wrong to you, so don’t screw up his life by acting unintelligently – he has done nothing to deserve such treatment.

Don’t fuck it up for future you!

Write an Obituary

The third thing you’re going to do is to write your own obituary. The reason why this is a good exercise for increasing your motivation, as well as your clarity, is because it forces you to envision your future actions. Here are a few things you may want to consider when writing your obituary:

How do you want your life to turn out, what do you want to be remembered for?

What legacy will you leave behind?

Write a “Self-Commercial”

The fourth thing you’re going to do is to write a self-commercial. This is an expression I got from The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. One of the top five books of self-development in my opinion.

Writing a self-commercial is to write a concise, precise, and genuine affirmation about yourself and your core values. Here’s an example of what it might look like if your name is Brian Scott:

Brian Scott is a well-groomed, positive, and friendly person to be around. Brian Scott does not hurry, he takes care of things in order of importance and does not procrastinate. Brian Scott smiles at the first three people he encounters each morning because he knows that it is massively important to start the day correctly. Brian Scott does not expect people to do more for him than he is willing to do for them, he trades value for value…

It has to be highly personal and contain the things you care about most practicing – the things you need motivation to do. It should absolutely not take longer than 60 seconds to read or recite. Less is more here.

Use Powerful Physical Movements

The fifth and final practical way of becoming motivated is to use powerful physical movements. The reason most people (myself included) lose motivation is due to lack of motion. Experiment with the following physical movements to see which ones motivate and energize you the most:

Jump for 10-15 seconds.



Shake/vibrate your entire body.


Scream.


Tense your whole body and muscles – awesome for relaxing as well. Always do this intermittently when sitting by computer to stay alert
Dance.
Raise your arms above your head for at least 5 seconds in a cool way.
Punch/kick in the air. Use decisive movements!
Clap your hands loudly every once in a while.
Sprint for 10 seconds.
Breathe deeply into the abdomen and feel your genitals.

These are all good ways or staying refreshed throughout the day without mentally falling asleep.Mix and match, combine and find what works best for you.

Summary: The 5 Practical Ways of Becoming Motivated

There you have it, the five practical ways of becoming motivated: get a whiteboard and review it daily, print out a picture of future you and think of how your actions will impact him/her, write an obituary, write a self-commercial, and use powerful physical movements throughout the day to keep yourself energized.

Did you learn anything new that was able to boost your level of motivation?

If you have any practical ways of becoming motivated, please share them!

The post 5 Practical Ways of Becoming Motivated appeared first on Startgainingmomentum.

Make a Decision: Prioritize

 

Life is made up of choices – to decide on an option is to forgo of everything else.

It all comes down to your preferences in life.

What’s most important to you?

                                                                                  What do you truly care about?

What do you think will bring you the most contentment in the long-term?

Do you have something that you care about all the time, or is the extent of your desire limited to this moment? If you’re not doing it right now you either don’t care about it deeply enough, or perhaps you do, but you have ‘forgotten’ it due to being deeply in reaction to homeostasis.

Make a Decision

The word decision comes from the word incision, which means to cut everything else away.  When you make a decision you are forgoing everything else to focus on one thing.

Steve Jobs said that “focus is about being able to say no” to a lot of good ideas and possibilities to focus on a few great ones.  I agree with this statement for at least three reasons:

Spread out your focus shallowly on too many things and your results will turn out completely average in the long-term, regardless of any above average skill you may possess in that area of life.
Success is about ultra-consistency. It is hard to be fully dedicated, committed, and consistent to something if you are doing too many things. You will not be able to infuse the same kind of emotional intensity or passion into many things as you will with just a few.
As a personal preference I don’t do my best work when having to juggle too many activities, nor do I enjoy it as much as doing a few or possibly just one thing. I can spend half a day or even a day doing just one or two activities.

Nevertheless it can be freaking hard to make a decision when presented with many choices – such as when ordering food at a restaurant – not to mention making a decision in regards to your long-term life strategy.

It IS hard to be a focused person who says no to many things to pursue a few things more fully. The paradigm of depth over breadth is not exactly common in the Western world. People feel compelled to be like everyone else, it’s uncomfortable to stand out.

People want to both have the cake, and to eat it. They want both to be great at some skill and to have balanced lives. Excuse me, I mean, they want to be great at MANY things, while having balanced lives.

If they’ve heard about it, they want Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week so that they can do 1000 other things except working.

Gee, I wonder why it doesn’t add up.

There’s just way too much compromise and excuses.

There are too many distractions; and it doesn’t help that our culture is going through the worst time in history when it comes to having a short attention span and ways to pursue instant gratification.

Prioritize

 

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy at things which matter least

― JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE ―

I’m not going to kid you. It is unlikely that your priorities will be completely straightened out in the course of a day or a week.

But what you can do is that you can start to think in terms of Stephen Covey’s quadrant framework shown below. When you form the habit of doing this you’ll automatically identify things in accordance to the different activities and it will, over time as you learn it, drastically reduce the lag time spent in between decisions due to  being unclear about what to do and how the decision will affect you.

This lag time tends to be what takes up the bulk of people’s time actually. And not only that; the longer you wait the less sure you will become and the more risk that you will be distracted and just do whatever seems most pertinent at the moment – such as taking an unnecessary snack or watching an episode of some TV series or surfing Facebook.

So it becomes important to reduce this lag time.

Quadrant 1 activities are both urgent and important. These include deadlines or projects in school or your day job. These are the things that need to be handled first, but rarely produce anything of lasting value in the long-term.

Quadrant 2 activities are important but not urgent. This is where most people spend the least amount of their time. This includes activities such as learning and implementing new things, reading, studying, working out, eating healthy, meditating, and pretty much anything related to personal development. These are the things that will matter most and produce the most value in the long-term. Therefore you ought to spend a few hours daily in quadrant 2.

Quadrant 3 activities are urgent but not important. This is where most people spend the bulk of their time. This would include handling crises, responding to email or phone calls. A lot of GTD books (including The 4-Hour Workweek) are about becoming more efficient as well as reducing the time we spend in quadrant 3.

Quadrant 4 activities are neither urgent nor important. This is where instant gratification such as watching TV, playing video games, texting, using Facebook and social media, and gossiping fit in.. Stop spending time here.

Now it’s your Turn to Make a Decision and Prioritize

Make a list of the things that take up most of your time and prioritize them in accordance to the priority quadrant above. Form the habit of gradually spending more time on the quadrant 1 and 2 activities and less on the quadrant 3 and 4 activities.

By using this framework you will pretty soon change the way you think about things. You’ll become better at categorizing the importance of an activity and this will help you a lot in the long-term. It’s important to change the way you think, because everything stems from there!

What do you spend most of your time on?

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Eradicating the Magic Pill Mentality

Eradicating the magic pill mentality by breaking down its core components and seeing how you can shift your focus onto yourself and get started on the path to mastery and think in terms of long-term compensation rather than looking for an ‘instant solution’ to improve your situation.

Want to get a six-pack in just three weeks?

Want to earn a lot of money in a short amount of time using a secret strategy exclusive to the elite?

Want to get psychic powers and get any guy or girl to do whatever you desire?

“Yeah man, I want all that and throw in a can of coke and some pizza too!”

Shit, I suppose I would like that too… Or do I really?

Actually I don’t, because I have since long eradicated the magic pill mentality from my thought process.

Doing more with less

Historically speaking, humans have gradually learnt to do more with less. Not only is it part of our culture, but I would suspect it is also part of the evolution of life and is wired into our DNA so that we can find ways of doing things more efficiently. It is probably a part of the heuristic framework for how our brain has evolved to make decisions.

Doing more with less is the foundation of technology, innovation, and improving our conditions of living. It is the basics of economics too as we learn to use fewer resources to produce more value and thus end up wasting less energy.  You could also see the economic perspective of doing more with less reflected in sayings such as: “buy low, sell high”.

Doing more with less has played a major part in getting mankind to where it is today. But the whole mentality (if you can call it that) of doing more with less can actually be harmful to us – especially when it comes to self-development, discipline, and long-term consistency; and this negative mentality runs rampant in mainstream society. I call this the magic pill mentality.

People who are operating under influence of the magic pill mentality tend to show two prominent types of thinking and behaving:

They think that they are more competent than they actually are.  When things aren’t turning out the way they want them to in life these people tend to search for external problems rather than looking internally to see if something is off, and then find the root cause.  If they are disliked by a person they might think that there’s something wrong with their clothes rather than acknowledging the fact that they have an unpleasant personality. They often mistake the cause for the effect as well.
Once they have identified that external thing that they think they need they tend to believe that their life would be perfect if only they had that thing. An extreme example of this might be a person who buys and then hoards physical items compulsively in hopes of completing himself.

In both of these cases of the magic pill mentality it is evident that the person does it to shift the away focus from themselves onto something else in order to remove the discomfort that arises when they get confronted with a situation that is in conflict with how they perceive themselves. You might say that they have a fragile ego structure.

People operating under the magic pill mentality think that they will achieve personal success and happiness by means of finding some secret arcane method for doing things rather than to actually put in the time and effort to get good at something and get what you deserve in return. (Why else do you think the industry and the marketing of the Law of Attraction has been so successful?)

Now, this takes us to…

The Law of Compensation

The law of compensation states that in the long-term you get what you put in. it’s as simple as that.

You can either decide to act in accordance with this and strain yourself to find ways of learning to produce some form of value to people and trust that it will pay off in the long-term. Or, you could attend a new seminar of how to manifest your desires every week until you actually do. If it was me I’d stick with option number one though.

Do you want to get really good at something and get compensated in accordance to that?

Then you must pay the price:

What are you willing to sacrifice in order to get where you want?
How much time and effort are you willing to put in?
What is your exit plan; at what point will you quit or take it easy?

I want to clarify that the law of compensation does not in any way contradict the saying to work smarter, not harder and to make use of various strategies for becoming productive, such as focusing on the 80/20.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that either one of these mindsets is “the correct” one rather than reconciling them with each other.  This tends to result in these people becoming either really dedicated and hard workers who still may not achieve as much as they’d like; or people who are smart and good at minimizing work but become rather lazy and lack real discipline and consistency.

What you want is a combination of both; to work hard and build discipline while also working smart and finding new innovative solutions to people’s problems.

The Solution to the Magic Pill Mentality

The solution to the magic pill mentality is to realize that it is all in your head.

It sounds like such an easy thing. As you are reading this you might scoff to yourself and think that it’s very obvious – and it might be to you. But it’s not to the rest of society.

Try talking a person who operates under the magic pill mentality out of his or her newest means of indulgence or “new thing that will complete him” and you will probably fail miserably because he has way too much emotional investment attached to the idea that this new cool thing he’s shallowly indulging in is going to change his life.

It is so obvious to everyone else that Sarah the fatty is going to fail miserably at her attempt of trying a new mysterious miracle diet. It is also obvious that Peter the slacker is going to fail in his multilevel marketing business. But they can’t see it because their egos are blocking it out.

Everyone else can see that the problems stems from their weak character and lack of consistency.

These people think that they want to get this next thing or fix that certain problem and get good at some activity AND THEN things will magically be great. But it’s not like that. The problem is located internally, not externally.

Think about it; how freaking boring life would be if you actually did have super powers and could make people do exactly what you desired?  There would be absolutely no challenge or uncertainty. Everything would be perfectly predictable – and predictability is really boring. You would quickly get tired of it and wish things were mysterious, challenging, and unknown again.

The thrill of living is in learning new things and improving, in overcoming your expectations and surpassing your limitations; to take on bigger and bigger challenges as your competence increases, and to break out of homeostasis.

The thrill of life is in the path to mastery.

The Path to Mastery

In the 60s-70s when Eastern Philosophy, Zen, and guru-worshipping became popular there were a lot of westerners who left for India and the Asian continents and decided to “become spiritual” and journeyed to stay in ashrams or to go on pilgrimages.

For some of these people – such as Steve Jobs – it turned out to be a life-changing experience and was considered as a success. But for many others the same thing was considered a “failure” because they had gone there in hopes of achieving supreme psychic powers or to become enlightened by spending time with a guru.

For the latter group of people spirituality, mysticism, and perhaps the idea of instant enlightenment, was the magic pill solution that would solve all their problems.

The key distinction between those who “succeeded” and those who “failed” was that the first group of people realized that the magic pill they were searching for did in fact not exist, so they stopped looking for it and as a result they shifted their focus onto learning how to become more appreciative of their immediate surroundings and how to think more accurately.

For many of these people meditation and mindfulness became their path to mastery –the one thing that they could practice consistently and learn to appreciate more and more as they improved.

And the other group who failed? They became upset for not getting what they wanted, went on searching for enlightenment or psychic powers or some other form of magic pill solution to solve all their problems. Eventually they ran out of money and had to go back home, full of disappointment and bitterness.

The moral of the story is this, you can either search aimlessly during an indefinite amount of time for a hidden treasure that you have heard about through hearsay, or you can start to practice something right now and eventually accumulate a treasure of your own in accordance to the law of compensation.

You can either work a shitty job, spend all your leisure on video games, social media, partying, and buying lottery tickets. Or you can use your few hours of daily leisure to learn some form of constructive skill that you think is interesting, and over the next couple of years become good enough at it to eventually turn it into your new job and in time rise to the top of your niche.

Or you could just stick to the lottery tickets.

Eradicating the Magic Pill Mentality

You eradicate the magic pill mentality by embracing the path to mastery as a way of life.

To walk the path to mastery is to find something you are interested in, stick to it and practice it consistently over a long-term perspective, and focus on yourself and your own development.  As opposed to those operating under the magic pill mentality you are now focusing on depth of experience and skill and not a lot of shallow experiences.

When you are walking the path to mastery you learn to block out negative influences – like mainstream media and social networks – and keep your focus from shifting onto external things, because you know where that leads. You’ve been down that path before and it wasn’t fruitful. Besides, you know plenty of people who are doing just that – and what are their results? What do they have to show for it?

You set goals in these areas of interests that are going to master. You start small.

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done. Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.

- BRUCE LEE -

In other words, you need to become really consistent in taking action.

After a while of living like this you will gradually eradicate the magic pill mentality and you will initially become disgusted when you see it reflected in society.

You will think twice when you hear or see some magic pill solution that appears too good to be true because you now know that you cannot get something for nothing. The law of compensation is always at work.

 

Recommended reading:

Ralph Waldo Emerson – Essay on Compensation

Jed McKenna – Spiritual Enlightenment: the Damndest Thing

 

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