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December 31, 2017 - January 13, 2018
Just as a programmer can program a computer to do specific tasks by understanding its code, you can program your life and the world around you to improve, enhance the way you live and the experiences you
have in this lifetime.
Realizing that the world you’re living in exists inside your head puts you in the driver’s seat. You can use your own mind to deconstruct the beliefs, systems, and rules you’ve been living with.
What if life was not meant to be safe?
What if we accepted that things will go wrong—but that this is simply part of life’s beautiful unfolding and that even the biggest failures can have within them the seeds of growth and possibility?
Safety is overrated; taking risks is much less likely to kill us than ever before, and that means that playing it safe is more likely just holding us back from the thrills of a life filled with meaning and discovery.
Law 1: Transcend the culturescape.
The dips contain amazing learnings and wisdom that lead to sharper rises in the quality of life afterward.
Life has a way of taking care of you no matter how dark it can sometimes feel—I promise.
It all starts with questioning the accepted rules of the culturescape. My friend Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, famously said: If you can’t win, change the rules. If you can’t change the rules, ignore them.
The evidence shows that we inherit and transmit behaviours, emotions, beliefs, and religions not through rational choice but contagion.
A Brule is a bulls**t rule that we adopt to simplify our understanding of the world.
And for many, the desire to belong to a family or tribe overrides our rational decision-making process and gets us to adopt beliefs that may be highly damaging.
When you aren’t suffering for your paycheck, you’re likely to be more engaged and committed to what you’re doing.
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
All of us have both the ability and responsibility to toss out the Brules that are preventing us from pursuing our dreams. It all starts with one thing: questioning your inherited beliefs.
Law 2: Question the Brules. Extraordinary minds question the Brules when they feel those Brules are out of alignment with their dreams and desires. They recognize that much of the way the world works is due to people blindly following Brules that have long passed their expiration date.
Apply the five-question Brule Test for a reality check, and decide whether it’s a rule you want to live by or a Brule you want to bust.
The Christian idea of original sin is another example of fundamental mistrust of humanity. It has caused so much guilt and shame for so many people who feel undeserving of success and good things in life. Original sin is an example of a relative truth. It’s held by one particular segment of the world population; i.e., it is not universally held across cultures. There’s no scientific evidence that we are born sinners, so it isn’t absolute truth. Yet it negatively affects millions.
Always have faith and trust in humanity. I like to remember Gandhi’s words: “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are
dirty, the ocean does not bec...
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Place your happiness first. Only when you’re happy can you truly give your best to others—in society, in relationships, in your family and community.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Here’s what I want you to know. Some say the heart is the most selfish
organ in the body because it keeps all the good blood for itself. It takes in all the good blood, the most oxygenated blood, and then distributes the rest to every other organ. So, in a sense maybe the heart is selfish. But if the heart didn’t keep the good blood for itself, the heart would die. And if the heart died, it would take every other organ with it. The liver. The kidneys. The brain. The heart, in a way, has to be selfish for its own preservation. So, don’t let people tell you that you’re selfish and wrong to follow your own heart. I urge you, I give you permission, to break the
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Level II: You learn to create your own version of the world within the culturescape. Within your world (the bubble around you), you can choose to eliminate and filter incoming Brules. Think of the little Xs as the Brules of the culturescape. You’re rising beyond it by creating your own bubble within the culturescape where YOU make the rules. At this higher level, your tool for influencing the world and creating your own
growth is a practice I call consciousness engineering. Think of it as the interface between you and the culturescape around you. You decide what to let in or reject. You’re engineering how your consciousness is shaped and influenced.
If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking. —BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Consciousness engineering is an operating system for the human mind. And the beauty of it is that—like the best hacks—it’s really simple.
But while your beliefs make you, your beliefs are NOT you. You can use consciousness engineering to swap out old beliefs, swap in new ones, and take on new understandings of the world that might serve you better.
Uninstall your BOS (Bullshit Operating System)
Replacing outdated models of reality is essential. Our models of reality do more than just create our feelings around an event or life in general. To an astonishing extent, they seem to influence the reality of the world that we experience every single day.
What you think and believe about the world shapes who you are and your experience of the world around you. Change your accepted models of reality, and dramatic changes will happen in your world. For example, researchers Ellen Langer, PhD, and Alia J. Crum, PhD, set up a study, reported in 2007 in Psychological Science, in which they asked 84 hotel maids how much they exercised. You’d think that with all the physical work involved with cleaning hotel rooms, they would have answered, “A helluva lot!” But although they cleaned about fifteen rooms a day, one-third said they didn’t get any
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Law 3: Practice consciousness engineering. Extraordinary minds understand that their growth depends on two things: their models of reality and their systems for living. They carefully curate the most empowering models and systems and frequently update themselves.
Once you understand the consciousness engineering approach, you can view yourself as a highly tuned operating system ready to install new hardware (models of reality) or new apps (systems for living) when needed.
As you think of your personal growth, think of consciousness engineering as that trunk. The two big branches are models of reality and systems for living. Everything you study in personal growth will either be a model (a new belief about money, for example) or a system (say, a new exercise or diet routine). These things cling to the two big branches.
For each category below, rate your life on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “very weak” and 10 being “extraordinary.” Don’t think about each item for too long. Often the first impulse—your gut check—is the most accurate.
Our beliefs are like unquestioned commands, telling us how things are, what’s possible and impossible and what we can and cannot do. They shape every action, every thought, and every feeling that we experience. As a result, changing our belief systems is central to making any real and lasting change in our lives. —TONY ROBBINS
Our models of reality are often unknown to us. Some models we know we have. For example, I know I believe in the importance of having a calling, in the power of gratitude, and in being kind to the people I work with. But we also have models of reality embedded deep within that we’re mostly unaware of. What you know you believe is much smaller than what you don’t know you believe.
LESSON 3: When you replace disempowering models of reality with empowering ones, tremendous changes can occur in your life at a very rapid pace.
It’s as if we have a meaning-making machine in our minds that kicks in and creates Brules about every experience we have.
We add meanings to every situation we see and then carry these meanings around as simplistic and often distorted and dangerous models of reality about our world. We then act as if these models are laws.
While the bad news is that our models of reality can cause stress, sadness, loneliness, and worry, the good news is that we can upgrade them.
The placebo effect, as it’s generally known, can be so powerful that all modern drugs have to be tested against a placebo before they are released to the public.
Our beliefs about our bodies seem to have an uncanny impact on how we experience our bodies—for good or bad.
Bottom line: Your beliefs can influence both you and the people around you. What you expect, you get.
Law 4: Rewrite your models of reality. Extraordinary minds have models of reality that empower them to feel good about themselves and powerful in shifting the world to match the visions in their minds.
Remember, our meaning-making machine never turns off—it doesn’t stop just because we aren’t kids anymore. There are always opportunities to help others develop new beliefs and get rid of old, destructive ones.
Shelly’s advice is, at the end of any situation like that, ask your child, “Billy, what happened? What was the consequence? What can you learn from this?”
Shelly makes it very clear. Don’t ask Billy, “Why did you do that?” Why questions corner a child and put the child on the defensive. For one thing, the child is emotional, and even many adults can’t answer why in the grip of emotion. For another, it’s not appropriate to expect a young child to be psychologically savvy enough to dive into his own mind and accurately answer why he did what he did.
What questions allow you to get to the root of the problem and work to heal it faster.
