MartinHamilton.com
For those who don’t think they can’t be a successful creator in the attention economy and/or for the super lazy people out there who can’t gather the energy right now, don’t feel bad. You have a place too.
It’s the feeling we’re after.
The shiny object or goal provides a feeling. We buy a new car not just for transportation, otherwise we would buy the cheapest and most efficient. Instead, we want a car we feel good driving. It matches something about our belief system and self image. Everything we do is either out of necessity, like going to the bathroom and not enjoyable, or out of supplying a feeling, a craving to our physiology.
Have the mindset of taking action. That is your character.
John Wooden
“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
Imagine having a goal to meet by the end of the year but during your journey you find another way of satisfying that feeling of what you think you would feel like when you have met your goal. Now it’s decision time. Can you live with the fact that you’ve met your desired feeling but not achieved the material factor the goal will obtain?
I think the decision is to continue onto the goal you’ve set if it is one that benefits other people. If it’s a purely selfish goal then stop and enjoy the feeling, otherwise carry on towards the mark you previously set.
Think in terms of a principle outlined in chapter 13 of the book Atomic Habits entitled “How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule.” In it the story about how a ritual of just get into the taxi is portrayed like this…
Twyla Tharp is widely proclaimed as one of the greatest dancers
and choreographers of the modern era.
Her ritual is not the stretching and weight training she puts her
body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The
moment she tells the driver where to go she has completed the ritual.
Getting into a taxi is a simple act, but doing it the same way each morning
habitualizes it, making it repeatable and super easy to do. It reduces the
chance that she would skip it or do it differently. It is one more item in
her arsenal of routines, and one less thing Twyla has to think about.
Getting into a cab each morning may be a small action that seems irrelevant to talk about, but it’s a prime example of the 3rd law of behavior change; Make It Easy.
This is just one method you can use to get closer to your goals, and it’s just a matter of circumventing your mind’s natural attempt to use the protective force of the amygdala to sabotage your future self’s accomplishments.
I’ve landed on quite a few US Navy aircraft carriers and they always have a safety net to catch objects, equipment, personnel, etc. from falling into the ocean. With all the planning and prepwork things still go wrong. The idea of the safety net is analogous to creating the daily short and simple ritual that is your launching pad to the mindset of getting things done the rest of the day.
A simple repeatable act doesn’t have to be boring
I’m one that gets bored easily. Working 20 years in the aviation business placed me in the middle of constant routines and schedules that had to be met or I could lose my job or ultimately people could die in a crash.
Sometimes I would purposely avoid repeatable tasks in order to break up what I used to call monotony. I brought this fact up to one of the top business trainers on the planet, David Meltzer.
His answer to this problem was that routines don’t have to be boring. Hearing that from him changed the way I went about creating my day.
The dilemma of the push pull of the Universe
The mind craves order because it’s asking you to do things that create order from disorder. That is to collect insight from curiosity and create with it – that is your human edge. Other beings don’t change the direction of evolution like we do.
Too much order, certainty, and living in the known becomes dangerous for your psyche with time. Eventually, it craves disorder. It sort of explains why husbands and wives who have everything, and live a near perfect life, fool around on each other. If you were on “vacation” for too long, it ceases to be vacation, you want to go back home and work.
Understanding this is advanced learning. Most will never realize this is a natural phenomena. The key is to understand it while being able to handle it when it happens and moreover, be able to work around it so the effect isn’t so shocking when it occurs. I’ll get more into that in my courses later on.
I read a book recently that helps with mindset and can change your life. It’s entitled the Expectation Effect. Check it out. Your mindset truly can change your world.
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