More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Adams
Read between
September 7 - October 1, 2023
Usual Frame: I want to do (something). Reframe: I have decided to do (something).
Usual Frame: The effort is so big and daunting I can’t even start. Reframe: What’s the smallest thing I can do that moves me in the right direction?
Usual Frame: Do what you are told. Reframe: Do what you are NOT told but maybe someone should have.
Usual Frame: Learn what you need. Reframe: Learn continuously, especially skills that work well together.
Fitness is one of the most controllable variables for success, so control it completely. It’s like free money. Fitness has a ripple effect that benefits everything from your career to your personal life.
You only need to be better than most of the people with whom you work. And the bar for that is low.
Usual Frame: I need to come up with a good idea. Reframe: I need to release all my bad ideas as quickly as possible.
Usual Frame: Your mood is determined by your internal thoughts. Reframe: You can improve your mood by completing meaningful tasks.
For most kinds of writing—from humor to business—the best sentence is the simplest one that gets the message across. If you use words that a twelve-year-old would understand, you will sound like the smartest person in the conversation. As a bonus, your ideas will stand out more since they’re not buried in word debris. Simple sentences are better in every way. They are more persuasive, easier to remember, and easier for others to consume. Don’t fall into the trap of mistaking long sentences and brainy jargon for genius-level insight.
You are a blank canvas. You get to paint your life by changing your actions. If you want to become a kind person, do kind acts. If you want to be capable and successful, build a talent stack, and so on. If you see yourself as the ball that is batted around by life, that’s how things will play out. But if you take authorship and design systems for improving yourself in key areas, you can carve your name on reality in ways you probably never imagined possible.
You only get triggered to insult someone when your argument has been dismantled and you feel the need to act out.
He told me he once had a psychedelic experience in which he realized the sensation of cold was nothing but a signal from his body to his brain, and unless there was a risk of frostbite, it was nothing to fear. Now he simply disconnects the signal whenever he wants, and the cold registers as a sensation, but it is not alarming or uncomfortable.
By that view, you are nothing but a victim of a random and often cruel universe. That’s no way to go through life. I recommend flipping that worldview using this admittedly weird reframe. Usual Frame: My feelings are the result of my situation. Reframe: How I feel is my choice. The
Usual Frame: I hate someone who deserves it. Reframe: Hate is nothing but punishing myself for the misdeeds of others.
Usual Frame: You are the center of your universe and the highest priority. Reframe: Viewed from space, everything looks small, including your problems
Unfortunately, you can’t subtract thoughts. Brains don’t work that way. You can, however, stay so busy that you don’t have time to ruminate on all the bad news. Over time, the memory of the bad thing will fade. You might need to create some new experiences that thrill you so much you can’t think of much else. But hey, wouldn’t that be fun anyway?
Most of the world either doesn’t care about you at all, or they like you and don’t judge. The latter group might even make you feel better if you screw up. The point is that worrying about what others think of your performance is living in an imaginary world in which people both care about you and judge you.
Usual Frame: People judge me, so I feel bad when I mess up. Reframe: People only care about themselves. They don’t care what dumb thing I did recently, even if they mention it.
We work for a variety of reasons, but work is only one part of a larger system for reducing stress. I don’t earn money just to have it. I earn money to make my life more pleasant, which includes reducing my stress about surviving.
Usual Frame: Why me? Reframe: God needs you here for something important.
Usual Frame: There are good days and bad. Reframe: All days are useful in different ways.
As I mentioned earlier, history doesn’t exist in any physical sense. It’s only a concept. Stop imagining the past controlling you with its invisible hand. Your past is non-existent. History is a dangling artifact of chemical and electrical reactions. Your past was real when it happened, but today it is 100 percent imaginary. Once you internalize that truth, you are free. You control the present.
If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you live in the future. But if you are at peace, you are in the present. I heard another version that seems to fit the times better: If you are angry, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. In reframe terms, it looks like this. Usual Frame: I am angry because something happened. Reframe: I am living in the past. and . . . Usual Frame: I am anxious. Reframe: I am living in the future (but not in a good way).
Your history and the dreams you remember have a lot in common in the sense that neither of them exists in the world of today. It makes no difference that your past happened in the real world and your dreams did not. From the perspective of right now, neither history nor dreams exist. They both round to zero. You probably already believe your dreams are not important. It’s a small step to say the same about your history; it once existed as events in the present, but today your history does not exist. And by virtue of not existing, it does not touch you.
If you struggle to keep your mind in the present and want to avoid negative thoughts, remember that it isn’t possible to stop your mind from having thoughts in general. If you succeed in thinking less about your ugly past, new thoughts will flow in to fill the void. You don’t want those new thoughts to simply transfer the negativity you feel about the past to negativity about your future. Put conscious effort into imagining a wildly successful future for yourself. Picture the outcomes you want. Imagine a future in which everything goes your way and things turn out amazing.
My point is that humans reflexively assign meaning to things when there is none.
That’s the direct way that cleaning your room helps—success breeds success—and no matter how small you start, success can build on itself.
Usual Frame: Be yourself. Reframe: Become a better version of yourself.
A toxic person would be rewarded by watching you fail so they feel superior.
I was baffled by the phenomenon of the always-late until I heard an expert explain that people with ADHD are not “distracted” as we commonly believe; they have time blindness. They live in the now, meaning they act on the most interesting or critical thing in their immediate surroundings instead of doing what they need to do to satisfy their future hopes and plans. They are blind to the existence of their future selves whenever they’re in the moment.
Words matter, even when you’re talking to yourself. Every word is like a package of programming code that alters your brain circuitry. But some words are weak, and some have more energy. Here’s a perfect example.
you think a lack of willpower is why you make bad eating choices, you won’t have any tools for fixing your situation because willpower isn’t real. What can you do to increase your willpower—grimace harder? We have no mechanism for adjusting our willpower because willpower is an imaginary concept. What we have instead of willpower is competing preferences, nothing more. If you prefer delicious food today over having a healthy weight tomorrow, you will eat that delicious food. Willpower never comes into play. It’s simply how we describe events after the fact. An empty concept. Unlike willpower,
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Usual Frame: I want food, so I must be hungry. Reframe: I want food, so I might be tired. If you think hunger is only caused by an empty stomach, you might be surprised to learn that not getting enough sleep mimics the same feeling of hunger. If you have ever experienced a day in which eating didn’t seem to satisfy your hunger, you might be trying to solve the wrong problem.
My hypnosis teacher taught the class that humans are not rational creatures; they are creatures who rationalize decisions after they make them.
Life Is an Adventure I heard this reframe from Dr. Jordan Peterson. It matches one I’ve been using for a few years to great effect. Usual Frame: Life is about avoiding pain while pursuing happiness and meaning. Reframe: Life is an adventure. Life is full of discomforts. If you think your purpose is to avoid discomfort, you will be unhappy because there is no real hope of succeeding. Problems are part of life. But if you frame your life as an adventure, your temporary discomforts will feel as if they belong in the game to keep it in
Instead, I recommend asking them to repeat back your argument to demonstrate they understand it. If they can—which would be rare—they can be persuaded. Most people will change the subject to escape the trap. Perhaps the main benefit of this reframe is that you neutralize the frustration when dealing with people on the other side of issues. Once you realize they’re not the sources of their own opinions—and probably can’t explain their own opinions with any clarity—you’re free to see them as victims, not opponents. I don’t get stressed when a victim of brainwashing disagrees with me. I feel bad
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In related news, we have a growing appreciation of something called neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to create new pathways and new behaviors in any number of ways. In other words, your brain is programmable if you learn how to access the user interface. With this book, I have been teaching you how to write and insert code (programs) into your brain. That’s what the reframes are—software upgrades to your brain. And they cause physical changes to your brain, just as any other learning experience does. Once you accept the programmable nature of your own brain, you can get serious about
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If you are just the result of outside forces and genes you can’t control, that doesn’t provide much motivation. But if you are the author of your own experience, you understand you can create your life one day at a time. The reframes in this book are the code that lets you do just that. Find the reframes in these pages that best match the “dangling wires” in your brain and watch how quickly they get reattached. I find it useful to think of brains as having operating systems, like computers. Your human operating system is your reflexive pattern for interacting with a new situation. You might
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The core argument for our reality being a simulation is that as soon as any advanced species—including humans—develops the skill to create such a simulation, they would surely make more than one. Maybe millions. And the simulations themselves would evolve to make their own simulations. So the odds of us being the one original species and not one of the millions or trillions of simulations are low.
Usual Frame: Reality is objective, and science helps us understand it. Reframe: Our so-called reality is a simulation created by a higher intelligence. Alternate: You are in a video game, and you have certain problems to solve to get to the next level.
Or maybe we’re an afterlife of some long-deceased species, looping through this same history for infinity. I expect to leave my digital personality in something like that before I go. Wouldn’t my hypothetical creator—if humanlike—do the same? Or maybe we are avatars (characters) in some sort of massive video game in which the way one wins is by producing the most kids, making the most money, or creating the most positive change.
like to think that being aware you are simulated allows you to author the game as you go. In other words, you can focus intensely on what you want—and that alone will hack the simulation to produce the change. As noted in the Introduction, some call that affirmations. Some call it positive thinking. Others call it the Law of Attraction. All I know for sure is that the people who believe we live in a Simulation seem to get a lot of what they want compared to those who have other filters on reality.
If your view of reality is limited to the common view of cause and effect, you might feel relatively helpless to change anything in your life. But if you use affirmations and your dreams appear to come true against the odds, you open up to new possibilities. Or it feels as if you do. And that can be just as satisfying. My current view of reality is that I am in some sort of simulated environment, and I am projecting a subjective bubble of reality everywhere I go just in time to make me think it all seems real. If you and I meet, we can have two different realities and later leave with two
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Usual Frame: Reality is objective. Reframe: There might be an objective reality, but human brains don’t have access to it.
The specific technique I use involves visualizing what you want and repeating it or writing it down fifteen times a day. There is nothing magic in the details of how you do it. It doesn’t matter how or when you do it or even how many times you repeat it. What matters is your intensity of focus on the desired outcome. I say that because in my experience the potential futures I could see most clearly for my own life seemed to be the futures that happened. I don’t know if that is because of causation or coincidence, but I choose to treat it as real. My point is that one can live inside a fully
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If you want to influence yourself or others—and in so doing author your own reality—you need to know what buttons to push on the user interface of the human brain. If you think brains operate on an operating system of rational thought, you are both wrong and probably frustrated at a world that appears to make no sense. If you take the hypnotist’s view that humans are irrational 90 percent of the time, you are ready to see the buttons on the user interface to reality.
One way to understand the toxic effects of social media is that it changed how we see ourselves by comparing us to the top social media celebrities in the world instead of our sloppy friend Bob, to pick a random name. You might be a superstar compared to sloppy Bob, but how do you stack up against the most attractive and successful people in the world? That’s who you are unintentionally competing with when you make social media a big part of your life.
Drop your antiquated notions of a rational world that only needs a bit more knowledge to make us all hold hands and get along. Instead, reframe life as a dashboard of persuasion buttons you can push as needed to persuade others—and to train your own brain to author your reality.
Usual Frame: I fail at 90 percent of the things I try. Reframe: I only need to succeed 10 percent of the time.
Usual Frame: Manage your time. Reframe: Manage your energy.
