goals:
exit plan
finish formatting and prepping novel for publishing
get products in store ready for testing
interview people
Commitment to purpose. Means to me, giving up the rejection of doing those things that successful people and coaches say to do. I came out of a period, lets call it the first forty years of my life, where I wanted to create and to be successful at creating but didn’t and wasn’t. I’m attributing that to my refusal to do the things I was being told I had to do. I was telling myself stories that I was making real. What do I mean about that?
We all tell ourselves stories about who we are and what we do and why we do it. These stories are analogous to the computer programs, the apps, our operating system runs. The os being our personality which is a collection of beliefs, values, habits and tendencies. These are all various mixes of nature and nurture. And what do I mean by that?
Brain structures, physical thresholds and limitations and how they interact with society and culture.
The stories I was telling myself, and I think everyone has some variation on this, were limiting me. I was inventing rules that I felt I had to follow or inventing boundaries out of which I could not reach. This is a fixed mindset. Neuroscience tells us that our brains are plastic and elastic. Elasticity is the ability for something to deform under stress and then when the stress is removed it bounces back into shape. This is how our personality persists over time. One day we are being yelled at and push down and we bow down and do what we are push to do but the next day when that stress is removed we bounce back and behave like we always have. Imagine the time spent with a personal trainer. While with them you exercise hard and you do things you would normally do. The next day you go back to what you’ve always done. Plastic means you can bend permanently without breaking. Or at least permanently until the next plastic deformation. This is what happens when you believe in and exercise a growth mindset or it happens under extreme trauma (which thankfully I haven’t had) or very gradually over time as you absorb habits and beliefs from around you. And that’s an interesting topic to go into as well, but I’ll leave it for now. So the stories you tell youself and that other people tell you can, over time, mould you to fit them and then keep you elastic rather than plastic.
What stories did I tell myself?
How did learning about Mindset change that?
What does this mean for my creativity and how can if affect yours?
Back to commitment and purpose. I read mindset and that book goes into different areas of your life, like career, relationships, academia and creativity and I recognised areas where I was fixed. It was hard to spot at first but I’ve also been practicing mindfulness and so through my meditations and contemplation, you should do that too, I started to see these stories and how they kept me from achieving.
One story was “oh yeah I know all that. It’s common sense and obvious. Writing my goals down isn’t necessary for me, I remember them. Getting peer review is not needed I know where I suck already.” And so on. When I dropped 7 grand to go to a three day business coaching course, to be coached, my wife and I talked about these very sorts of stories and we both committed to each other that we would put into practice the things we were taught. That accountability to each other worked, just like they say it will but we had perviously told ourselves it wouldn’t, and so the stories were broken down. I changed in that moment.
More mindset
Write now: dispirited by reading better authors. Feels competitive and compares to people with greater skill and imagines they were born that way.
imposter syndrome is fixed
High performance habit: peer review and feedback
Coupled with mindfulness