Think Straight: Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life

by Darius Foroux

However, James doesn’t say we can control our consciousness. When we sit down and observe our thoughts for a few minutes, we will notice that a lot of things flow through our mind. The thoughts are just “there.” Nothing we can change about that. But since we have free will, we can decide which thoughts we focus on. Hence, we can influence the direction of consciousness. This realization is critical to the way we live. It’s the difference between “I can’t help but feel this way” and “I feel this way because I decided to feel this way.”

If we want to think straight at all times, we must stay grounded, look at facts, listen to other people’s perspectives, and only then draw practical conclusions.

We’re always so quick to judge and draw conclusions based on our assumptions. We’re all human beings. We make mistakes. We change our minds. And we assume things that are not true all the time. That’s normal. What’s not normal is to let your mind go out of control.

His most important idea is that we should question the source of our beliefs, not the belief itself. Because most of our beliefs are based on our or other people’s perception.

William James describes the idea of pragmatism as follows: “The attitude of looking away from first things, principles,

'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.” Thoughts should serve a useful purpose. If they don’t, they’re useless. That’s straight thinking.

The point is that there are multiple ways to achieve your goals. Also, if

everyone is doing one thing, that often means you shouldn’t.

Like Steve Jobs said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to

trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” If you want the dots to connect in the future, you have to make sure you form dots in your brain. The only way you form dots is by learning, doing, making mistakes, reflecting, or anything you can do to feed your brain with the input it needs to give you the output you want.

A heuristic is a strategy we derive from previous experience with a similar problem.

“trial and error,”

“social proof.”

“familiarity.”

When faced with decisions, I ask myself: “Will the outcome of a decision change the way I live?” If you ask that yourself consistently, you’ll find that you automatically filter out useless information and only make decisions that have an actual impact on the outcome of your life. You force yourself to use whatever works—what’s useful. And what impacts your habits.

Do what works for you.

Those type of thoughts are not helping us. But we all have them. So how do you get rid of them? Well, I’ve learned that you can’t get rid of them. Remember? We can’t control our consciousness. We can only control what thoughts we follow through on.

It’s better to be aware of your thoughts and decide what you will ignore, and what you will give importance to.

When I want to quit, I still listen to it because sometimes it is a sign. But more often, it’s just fear. And I refuse to surrender to it. And neither should you.

Only think about things you can control. That automatically eliminates about 99% of your thoughts because there’s very little you control in life.

In the case of reflection, you’re doing something useful. But other than that, every thought about the past serves no purpose. From that point of view, it’s useless.

Ever fantasize about the future? That’s also useless. I’ve discovered two main types of useful thoughts:

Thinking about how you can solve problems.

Understanding knowledge.

The way you view the world is completely subjective because we all have cognitive biases.

A cognitive bias is a systematic thinking error that impacts judgments, and therefore, our decisions.

“attentional bias.”

confirmation bias.

There are only good-informed and bad-informed decisions.

What if you can’t rely on facts? Well, sometimes you just can’t find facts, or you have to make a quick decision. In those (very rare) cases I prefer gut feeling. Whatever you do, never waste your thoughts on other people’s ill-informed opinions and guesses.

we, as human beings, ultimately rely on our interpretations of reality. There’s no way to confirm reality objectively. That doesn’t mean nothing is real and that we’re all living in a big dream. We just have to realize that facts are not the same thing as the truth.

“It’s a common belief that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s triggering a knee-jerk emotional response to something that happened long ago.”

What I’m trying to say is that when someone asks you a question, it’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” You can also say that to yourself. I’ve often been too hard on myself because I didn’t have an instant answer to my personal problems. That doesn’t make you dumb. It makes you human.

“Why do I even want to come across as smart?” If you really think about it, it doesn’t matter what others think of you. I think it’s always better to take your time to think. If others think that makes you stupid, they are the ones who are.

“Please give me a day or two to think about it.” That’s all you need.

When I reach a wall, I know I’m close to the next stage of my development. Instead of giving up, I’m happy. All I need to do, is to take a break, rejuvenate, and let my mind recover. I hang out with my friends.

“Conquer yourself rather than the world.” ― René Descartes

There’s a simple solution to devalue the value of money. I live by these five rules:

You’ll find that the moments you’re not thinking are just as important as the times you are actively thinking.

If you’re standing inside the maze, you’ll probably start walking towards the middle, right? That’s what you should do when you’re in a maze. However, this maze is different. The prize is not in the middle, it’s outside the maze. But you can only see the goal if you take a helicopter view. It’s impossible to see the goal from within the maze. And yet, that’s how most of us live. We do things conventionally because that’s “how it’s done.” When you stop doing things the way they’re done, you’ll start doing things how you get it done.

I learned three things. Always double check. Small things can become big things. And don’t play favors.

Either way, there’s no point in asking “why” when you deal with obstacles, challenges, or mistakes. Instead, think about what you can do to overcome or prevent the things that are holding you back.

But the most important lesson I’ve learned was that you don’t regret what you did in life, you regret what you didn’t do.

The only useful purpose I can think of for looking back is to learn. You can draw many lessons from looking at your past.

Effective thoughts? Effective actions. To clarify what I mean, I’ve made a list of what I think are effective thoughts: Making your life better Growing your career and business Visualizing your future Thinking of new ideas Solving problems Coming up with fun things to do with your partner, family, or friends

There’s only one end goal to all of this: Inner calm. No matter what you experience in life, and no matter what happens to you, your mind should stay calm under all circumstances.

If we live our lives every day with that idea in mind—that we should strive for doing/creating useful things that matter to others—we end up spending our time on things that actually make a difference. When you do that, life automatically has meaning—to everyone.