5 Doors:
Clarity (goals)
- Importance of goal setting and visualization (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
Desire
- Desire test: the thought of not achieving your goal must bother you or it's not a fitting goal
What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail
Belief
Belief barriers (fleas in jar, 4 min mile)
- But more important than accents, vocabulary, and behavioural quirks is the influence our environment has on self-belief. The greatest influence from our childhood is what our parents make us believe about ourselves. Some kids are lucky, like me. My parents always said I could do anything, be anyone, and I grew up believing that. The only thing that separated me from what I wanted in life was hard work. I believed that as a child and I believe it now - it's the truth.
- Other kids aren't so fortunate. Their parents might neglect them, ignore them, never be around, or tell them they'll never amount to much, that they're nothing special, that there are limits to what they can do in life, to who they can be. Such kids have difficulty in school not because they're incapable of performing well, but because they're incapable of believing they can perform well. Studies show that a child's self-belief has more bearing on academic success or failure than actual competence. And when these kids become adults, they spend decades trying to unlearn false beliefs, discovering that the world isn't flat after all, that what others have done, they can also do. Some succeed, others don't. That's why the greatest gift parents can give their children is self- belief. The beliefs kids develop and hold true about themselves become vital forces in their success or failure in everything they do in life.
- Choose people around you carefully as they will either help or hinder. Change your environment to change your self-belief
Knowledge
- It was through education, through putting something into your head, making your mind valuable. That was the secret. Some kids woke up that day, became conscious, and realized they were still children. What they regarded as cool was only cool in a child's world, and soon, very soon, they would become adults, and as adults, they wouldn't be cool anymore. Without college, education, career, they would be no better than the unthinking creatures on the ground, squabbling among filth, ignorance, and irrelevance. Get an education, is what the man had said. Go to college. Use your mind!
Fear
- The more I've thought about fear over the years, turning it over in my mind, analysing it, the more I realized that fear = progress. Whenever I felt fear, it meant I was making progress, I was moving towards my goals. And because my goals were always something new, something Thad never done or achieved before, I was always leaving my comfort zone behind and finding myself in a perpetual state of discomfort. Had I stayed stationary in life, in the same business, same country, same everything, then my fear would have departed. But it's impossible to achieve success without moving out of our comfort zone, and for that reason, it's impossible to achieve success without fear.
- cavemen who possessed a heightened sense of fear were more likely to survive and reproduce, it means we are the offspring of the most paranoid and fearful cavemen that ever lived. The brave and fearless humans who explored deep caves, ate unknown plants, slept in the open, and approached wild animals, are no longer part of the gene pool. What's left are the fear-soaked that make up genes of the Homo sapiens species as it exists today. In our climb from flint and fire to the modern age, fear has protected us - it has been a prerequisite for survival. But as our environment changed - as we migrated from caves to cities, no longer fleeing from predators or fighting frost and famine - our heightened sense of fear remained the same. We tend to forget that everything we are today, we inherited. We're still wired for survival, but living in a world where that wiring is working against us. And since there are no wild animals to fear, we direct our survival mechanism in other directions - the wrong directions to fear embarrassment, rejection, failure, criticism, and more.
- I sometimes think that the difference between animals and humans is not self-awareness, intelligence, or the presence or absence of a soul, but in what we fear. When an animal falls, its fear is centred on its wellbe- ing, survival. If they're injured, they may be unable to hunt, escape a predator, or protect their offspring - it might be the end for them. But if a human slips on a banana peel and goes flying into the air, feet up, arms flailing, onto their back in the middle of a busy street, their immediate fear has nothing to do with their well- being or survival, but with their self-image. Did anybody see me fall? they think. How embarrassing!
- [Kris: From author David McCraney: the great sociologist Brooke Harrington told me that, if there was an E=mc2 [energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light, Einstein's Equation] of Social Science, it would be: the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death. And, if your reputation is on the line, if the ship is going down, you'll put your reputation in the lifeboat and you'll let your body go to the bottom of the ocean. We saw that with a lot of reactions to COVID [coronavirus disease]. As soon as the issue became politicized, as soon as it became a signal-a badge of loyalty or a mark of shame to wear a mask or to get vaccinated-as soon as it became an issue of 'Will my trusted peers think poorly if I do this thing or think this thing or express this feeling or attitude or belief,' people were willing to go to their deathbed over something that was previously just neutral]
- [paraphrasing: Fear is inevitable. But realize that it's almost all learned by association and can be unlearned by association!]
- Fear can be fought with:
- Visualization
- Desire
- Be around those trying to accomplish the same thing
- Knowledge
- Backup plans
- Remembering that regret from trying is short lived. Regret from not trying is permanent
Fear
- The more I've thought about fear over the years, turning it over in my mind, analysing it, the more I realized that fear = progress. Whenever I felt fear, it meant I was making progress, I was moving towards my goals. And because my goals were always something new, something Thad never done or achieved before, I was always leaving my comfort zone behind and finding myself in a perpetual state of discomfort. Had I stayed stationary in life, in the same business, same country, same everything, then my fear would have departed. But it's impossible to achieve success without moving out of our comfort zone, and for that reason, it's impossible to achieve success without fear.
- cavemen who possessed a heightened sense of fear were more likely to survive and reproduce, it means we are the offspring of the most paranoid and fearful cavemen that ever lived. The brave and fearless humans who explored deep caves, ate unknown plants, slept in the open, and approached wild animals, are no longer part of the gene pool. What's left are the fear-soaked that make up genes of the Homo sapiens species as it exists today. In our climb from flint and fire to the modern age, fear has protected us - it has been a prerequisite for survival. But as our environment changed - as we migrated from caves to cities, no longer fleeing from predators or fighting frost and famine - our heightened sense of fear remained the same. We tend to forget that everything we are today, we inherited. We're still wired for survival, but living in a world where that wiring is working against us. And since there are no wild animals to fear, we direct our survival mechanism in other directions - the wrong directions to fear embarrassment, rejection, failure, criticism, and more.
- I sometimes think that the difference between animals and humans is not self-awareness, intelligence, or the presence or absence of a soul, but in what we fear. When an animal falls, its fear is centred on its wellbe- ing, survival. If they're injured, they may be unable to hunt, escape a predator, or protect their offspring - it might be the end for them. But if a human slips on a banana peel and goes flying into the air, feet up, arms flailing, onto their back in the middle of a busy street, their immediate fear has nothing to do with their well- being or survival, but with their self-image. Did anybody see me fall? they think. How embarrassing!
- [Kris: From author David McCraney: the great sociologist Brooke Harrington told me that, if there was an E=mc2 [energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light, Einstein's Equation] of Social Science, it would be: the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death. And, if your reputation is on the line, if the ship is going down, you'll put your reputation in the lifeboat and you'll let your body go to the bottom of the ocean. We saw that with a lot of reactions to COVID [coronavirus disease]. As soon as the issue became politicized, as soon as it became a signal-a badge of loyalty or a mark of shame to wear a mask or to get vaccinated-as soon as it became an issue of 'Will my trusted peers think poorly if I do this thing or think this thing or express this feeling or attitude or belief,' people were willing to go to their deathbed over something that was previously just neutral]
- [paraphrasing: Fear is inevitable. But realize that it's almost all learned by association and can be unlearned by association!]
- Fear can be fought with:
- Visualization
- Desire
- Be around those trying to accomplish the same thing
- Knowledge
- Backup plans
- Remembering that regret from trying is short lived. Regret from not trying is permanent