Know your enemies
If we, in the past, needed courage to face the dangers of lions and other predators we encountered on the savannah, we, in the present, need plenty of courage and the right strategy to fight the enemies that reside within us.
These enemies can roughly be separated into three categories:
- Those linked to our biology, made for saving energy, obtaining pleasure and escaping pain instantly. For example: stupidity, procrastination, laziness, pessimism, boredom, cowardice.
- Those linked to our limiting beliefs, such as: victimisation, insecurity, resignation, lying, inattentiveness, weakness, frustration, addictions, irresponsibility.
- And those linked to the need to be right, which seek to justify the other two. Example: if my tribe says it, then it is true; I cannot do it; I am not capable; I have always done it this way; it is not going to work; I will work on it next week... and so on.
All of those are “murderers” of any purpose. And the weapons to fight them are open-mindedness, responsibility, resolve, discipline, courage, overcoming, persistence. These are to be trained with methods that use imagination, focus and action, in order to convert “murderers” into allies, making one kill the other.
Knowing and being able to handle your enemies is one of the main keys to changing your life.
Start by listing the distractions that lead you away from what you must do in order to fulfil your purposes in life. Also list for how long they keep you busy, how much of your time they take up, and other information that clearly shows the price you pay for each of them. Then, you can study various proposals by authors who deal with this subject, like James Clear, and use them to come up with recipes for combating these enemies.
Know your allies
Find your light
Delve into your unconscious to find the secrets about yourself. You are capable of being the artist of a good life.
Discover how to reshape your thoughts. When you gain control over your thoughts, you will be one step closer to enlightenment.
We all go through times of hardship, in our personal relationships, in our health, at work.
We search far and wide for things that are actually inside us. It is no surprise that books like The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Richest Man in Babylon or The Alchemist have sold millions of copies.
These books tell stories about this subject.
Everyone relates to them, but few manage to apply these lessons to their personal lives. Why is that? Because we attribute greater value to things said by someone in a faraway country than the things we feel within ourselves.
The French thinker and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said: “The circuits of social fame will be more effective the greater the distance from the object of said fame.” In other words, we would value the opinion of someone far away, in a distant country that we do not even know, rather than our own feelings or the things said by those close to us. This is because the farther away the solution is, the less risk there is of feeling threatened and insignificant.
The mentor does not represent a significant competitor. This leads to more attentive listening. And this makes it more likely for inspiration to arise.
This also explains why we seek miracles or cures in remote regions. We attach more value to those we do not know.
People have, in our perspectives, the value that our imagination attributes to them. Not the value of their actual abilities.
Waste no time. Look within yourself, and you shall find all the answers. Look not for those who teach—look for those who inspire.
There is just one teacher you can learn from: yourself. Sow confidence, joy and inspiration. Do this now. Never say that you cannot do it. If you think that, try to find the solution. If you cannot find it by rational means, ask yourself the necessary questions just before you go to sleep. Your unconscious mind will work all night to find the answers. “Never go to sleep without asking your subconscious something.” If you do not get it straight away, insist, persist—the answer will come and bring with itself the confidence of realising that it always works, sooner or later. Some call this response an “insight”, a vision, or help from above, the divine power that dwells within us manifesting itself. The power of the unconscious, the power that made its existence possible.
Your greatest power is your ability to choose. Choose happiness, health and abundance. Align these choices with your thoughts.
Habits
For millions of years, the biology of living beings has put its efforts in automating as many processes as possible, creating habits.
The more automatic life becomes, the less energy is needed for survival. As a result, more than 95 per cent of the things we do, of the decisions we make, are automatic, are engraved in our unconscious.
Developing habits of thought, habits of action or habits of behaviour is the most effective way of achieving any change.
Anything in life is achievable by spending energy.
The best way to reduce this price and increase the effectiveness of the work to be done is to develop appropriate habits. Can you imagine how it would be like if you had to relearn your morning chores every time you wake up? You would have to learn how to get up, to walk, to get dressed and to brush your teeth. Counting from these examples alone, how many years would it take? It would take you about a year just to learn to walk. Can you feel the importance of habits in your life?
However, we also acquire habits that do not suit us.
Good habits usually require more energy because the reward comes in the medium and long term; bad habits, on the other hand, take less energy to acquire since they have an immediate reward.
The motivation to act is directly proportional to the expected reward and inversely proportional to time.
The French economist Frédéric Bastiat provided a clear explanation of the issue when he wrote this: “Mostly, when the first consequences are favourable, the later ones are disastrous, and vice-versa.” And this: “Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter its later fruits turn out to be.”
Developing habits is also a way of trading the pain of a strenuous task for the pleasure of the produced result.
Studies show that, for more than half of the hours we stay awake, our thoughts wander, we lose concentration, we lose focus—essentially, we are distracted. Suppose you needed surgery: would you want to be operated on by a doctor who is 50 per cent distracted? Certainly not, but that is what happens to all humans—they are distracted most of the time. So, how can you trust a distracted professional?
It is the quality of the developed habits that sets a good professional apart from a bad professional. These are the habits that make up their “autopilot”.
When you drive from home to work, your mind wanders for most of this time. You change gears, brake or accelerate without thinking about it. It is automatic, for it is your unconscious that controls your actions. This is because you have repeated these actions so many times that they have turned into habits.
Your hypothetical surgeon’s hand will be guided by the set of habits they have acquired over many hours, repeating the same actions, as if they were a robot.
The thing that sets a great professional apart is the time they spend perfecting know-how, acquiring mastery of “knowing how to get it done”.
Good and bad habits can also be related to the company that we keep. A large proportion of the habits we acquire were not our own choice; they were acquired by imitation, without realising it. Our desire to belong to the family and society in which we live, to be respected and approved, leads us to imitate those closest to us, in the first place, as well as the majority, in the second place, and the powerful ones, in the third place.
Habits are acquired by the repetition of “getting it done”.
To do this, we need to invest energy in the short term in order to save it over the long term. Having a habit means having an ally in our unconscious.
Not all of your habits are the best way to solve problems. Controlling the quality of your habits is a ticket to freedom.
No habit will be interesting forever. To invest energy in improving a habit is not only to strive for excellence, but also to use the novelty effect to keep these habits interesting.
Maintaining the habits that are important to us requires making sure they are not forgotten. It requires turning them into routines.
Improving acquired habits means focusing on small mistakes, so as to learn from them and prevent them from turning into failures. This is like investing in the bank of life: we deposit a certain amount of energy, over which will earn interest that can be spent to sustain the quality of our well-being. It is like paying tribute to ourselves.
There are people who develop the habits that they really need, at great cost, such as getting up early to go to work. Once they have achieved this, they nonetheless choose to get up late at the weekends. This is like taking two steps forwards and one step back. Even worse is using holidays to destroy all the good habits developed. It is a pointless waste of energy and a way of sabotaging self-confidence.
Have a dogma: “never go backwards, not even a swing”.
Routines
There is a difference between habits and routines.
You need to develop a habit in order to do what you do not enjoy, but that should or must be done; you need to give it your efforts, overcome, persistence. Once you have developed a habit, its regular repetition gives you joy and causes no pain.
Routines are collections of habits, rituals.
The development of virtuous routines is not only a way of preserving habits, but also a way of incorporating behaviours that we want to convert into new habits. Routines are part of the system, the process to achieve any purpose.
If you developed the habits of showering, shaving and brushing your teeth, this is your process to keep yourself groomed.
Embracing meditation before, during or after this routine facilitates the creation of this behaviour, which is so necessary to those who seek a better life. Introducing a certain behaviour, that we wish to turn into habit, into routine, is like carrying a friend who needs help until they can walk on their own.
Repeat this as a routine, always at the same time. Do not quit it, even if you are on holidays, or if it is Saturday or Sunday.
Life offers you no possibility of standing still. You either keep moving towards your purpose, or you slip back towards mediocrity.
“Do not let an enemy settle in your tent”, as the Arab saying goes. If you let that happen, it will be harder to drive the enemy out. Do it like this, and you will realise the difference.
To develop habits, you need to overcome the resistance and arguments put up by your brain and by the world in order to dissuade you. This is a difficult task that can only be achieved by overcoming obstacles in a disciplined way.
Our brain works all the time to avoid pain and seek pleasure. These are the conservative forces of the species. The brain evaluates, decides and acts in favour of what is greatest. If it will bring more pain, it should not be done. If it will bring more pleasure, then it should be done. Most of the time, these decisions are unconscious. Knowing how to balance this equation is one of the great secrets to achieving any goal.
When the habits to be developed please the unconscious, they are much more effective. They strengthen confidence. It is like resurrecting ancestral genetic memories, which cause new neural structures to emerge or consolidate. This process is supported by a number of scientific studies. For this reason, training based on our non-explicit intelligence produces more significant results.
On the one hand, there is non-explicit intelligence, represented by the advocate of willingness, of energy saving, who has been defending its client for more than four billion years. This advocate focuses on the threats of the past and fights anything that leads to energy consumption. It attacks any proposal for growth that requires effort. It thinks about the short-term consequences: you can use energy only to survive; you shall not use it to do anything else. The reward has to be immediate. It always wants to be right. It looks for all the ways in which something cannot be done. It uses passion as a defence strategy. It goes on the offensive, day and night, relentlessly, with strong, crystallised, fossilised arguments.
Nowadays, as the media is able to reach every corner of the planet, it spreads the most elaborate arguments, coming from the most diverse political agents and interest groups, which call for the right to everything and the duty to nothing, providing an encyclopaedia of half-truths to feed the sophist in us. The advocate of willingness has allies among your relatives and friends, as these people would rather not experience the humiliation of witnessing your victory. They will always wish to see you as “the underdog, the loser”, rather than having to endure the pain of the envy they will feel when they witness your victory.
This advocate of willingness also has an ally in your reward system, which gives you immediate joy when you decide to stay in bed, to buy superfluous things, to eat what makes you fat, to live off someone else who provides. Today, this advocate goes as far as invoking genetic predisposition as the most sophisticated argument to ensure your inertia.
Few of this advocate’s clients save themselves. Most are condemned to frustration, boredom, anguish, depression and, in a few cases, a slow death in a meaningless life.
Then there are those clients who break free, who grow tired of suffering or decide to learn. They change their attitudes and hire the advocate of quality of life.
This advocate can also be called advocate of courage. It is much younger—it is only one hundred thousand years old. It analyses the barriers that prevent you from doing what you need to make progress; it also analyses the long-term consequences, focuses on solutions and uses creativity.
This advocate has allies in imagination, determination, discipline, courage, confidence, overcoming and persistence.
It argues that happiness is worth it, that it pays off to live a comfortable and meaningful life. It is an investment that yields dividends, paid for by the pleasure that arises from the journey to victory. This is an advocate that operates because it has its focus on the future and knows how to imagine it in advance. This advocate knows that true virtues are tested and thrive only in hostile grounds; it does not fool itself with immediate pleasure. It is aware of the extent of the guilt felt when you take the easy path of inertia, procrastination, laziness, etc.
It knows that to kill time is to kill yourself slowly. It knows that nature favours discipline, overcoming, courage and determination, and that the joy of these things is more intense and lasting when you work to grow and overcome obstacles. It uses your inner voice in your favour, making sure that you do not forget the path you have set out on. The advocate does not fear the modern world, nor technology, because it seeks to take charge and it does not give in to slavery.
The first advocate works with ancient threats, while the second advocate works with new ones. The former resides with the elephant, while the latter resides with the jockey.
But there is a judge beyond the bounds of this debate. It is called nature.
Nature is unforgiving. It rewards all the constructive things that we do to evolve. We derive lasting pleasure from our victories, our successes, the moments when we beat our own thresholds, when we are altruistic, or when we build good relationships, when we make ourselves worthy of trust. In short, we are in joy when we build our integrity on valuable codes of ethics and morals.
On the other hand, nature punishes us with anguish, with boredom, with a lack of meaning in life, with suffering, when we move away from evolutionary needs, committing excesses in life—as Sören Kierkegaard describes it, “seeking immediate pleasure, trying to fill a persistent existential void”. This anguish increases as we realise that pleasures cannot fill the emptiness of our existence, culminating in despair, depression and sometimes death.
Be aware of the habits you have: those you wish to preserve and those you wish to rid yourself of.
List everything you do on a daily basis, sequentially, in as much detail as you can. What you see serves as a stimulus for action. What you hide helps you ignore that which should not be done.
If you wish to stop smoking, hide the cigarettes away. If you wish to eat better, stock up your fridge with healthy food.
Start small, make a commitment to never back down. If you think that reading a book is good, find the best time of day to do it; read a page before or after some other routine. Repeat it, day after day, until it turns into habit. Soon you will be reading more pages at a time, and what used to be difficult will now be easy and enjoyable.
Make neural associations based on what you want and what you do not want. Associate the things you want with something that gave you pleasure, joy. Associate the things you do not want with something that caused you fear, sadness or disgust.
Focus on repetition, not on quality.
Make it a satisfying habit. If you are reading a book you dislike, switch to another one, or take the opportunity to practise persistence and read it anyway.