Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living? —Bob Marley
Since we were born, we go to school to learn things we don't care about to get a job we don't care about to wind up in a life we don't care about.
The Conscious And Subconcious Mind
When a child is born, between the ages of 0 to 8, they don't have a mind of their own. They lack what many spiritual teachers call "The Thinking Mind." The ability to filter information through the lens of their conscious mind.
Before we move on, I will take you through briefly why you need to be aware of what role your subconscious mind and conscious mind play in your life.
The Subconscious Mind
To fully reinvent yourself and take complete control of your life, it is important that I make you aware of how your subconscious mind holds you back from focusing on the goals that will help you reach greatness.
Your subconscious mind house all the limiting beliefs programmed inside your mind from your childhood.
Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality. —Earl Nightingale
As we've discussed earlier, children between 0 — 8 years cannot think for themselves. This is the reason why children trust easily. This is also why most adult don't question what they are told and follow blindly what society tells them to do. They have a hard time differentiating between what is real from what is not real. You can literally tell a child you'd fetch them the moon and they'll believe you. Reality is obstructed at this age.
Conceptual survival: The human phenomenon where our survival instincts have transcended the physical realm and are included in the mental__. We work to survive ideas, concepts, and beliefs that form our sense of self.
Most people have goals which have been set through repetition and conditioning of the mind through information dumped into their subconscious mind from their childhood into their adulthood.
What most people do not understand, unless they’ve delved into psycho cybernetics, philosophy of mind, human potential, systems thinking, spiral dynamics and developmental psychology, is that the subconscious mind is responsible for everything else that is happening in your body and your life. It’s responsible for all your behaviors.
Your subconscious mind consists of the things that are below your level of awareness and below your awareness threshold that are operating on you.
These are the habits that you have. These are the beliefs that you have. This is the self-image that you’ve cultivated and what you think about yourself, your capabilities, your limitations, your weaknesses, and your strengths.
This is also going to include your map and model of reality. It goes deep here. This is basically your model of reality and what you think is right and wrong, what is possible and impossible. The stuff that motivates you on a deep level is all subconscious.
We tend to think that that’s conscious, but that all sits below the level of awareness unless you’ve done a lot of introspection and personal development work.
What tends to happen is that your subconscious is driving a lot of what you do throughout your day. I would say that 95% of the things that you do throughout your day are done subconsciously or even unconsciously.
When things are happening subconsciously, it means that when you’re executing your morning routine or when you’re even having a conversation with a friend, you’re not breaking a lot of the things and behaviors that are happening there down in your mind and saying, “Okay, I need to pull out the toothbrush, put the toothpaste on it, stick it in my mouth, scrape it around for five minutes, then pull it out and rinse.”
Now do you see how your subconscious mind plays a major role in your life? If you are not aware of what is going on in there.
Reprogram Your Mind
Your mind is the operating system for reality.
When you learn how to think, you learn how to effectively navigate situations for the most advantageous outcome to your life and others. In other words, when you learn how to think, you get what you want out of life.
Your mind will view situations through that lens and register potential solutions for the problem. You can find these solutions on social media, in books, or anywhere really.
This is why I encourage people to read high impact books. Read self help books.
My guess is that you'll encounter information that will challenge your current conditioning. Force you to ask questions, pursue deeper understanding of the world, challenge the status quo and drop limiting beliefs and ideologies.
The State Of The Masses
Most people are poor.
They are not just poor in pocket.
Most people are poor because of how they were brought up both in school and at home. They can't solve their own problems and so they can't improve their life.
They rely on everyone but themselves. This leads to a dull, mechanical, and mindless life.
If you think you’re going to achieve your dreams without addressing your childhood programming, your limiting beliefs, you’re kidding yourself.
As Robin Sharma puts it, “Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.”
The Conscious Mind
When you are trying to become a new person, who you are is fighting who you want to become, and that’s painful. You will go through a period of growing pains until your new identity solidifies.
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” —Socrates
Any given situation has too much information for the conscious mind to process (we are capable of processing around 50 bits of information per second).
The identity, or character, you’ve cultivated with time will limit what information you process that is available to the perspective that you have access to.
From that information, you will interpret life differently from everyone else. Unless you've consciously reprogrammed how you think about life. Which ultimately influence what opportunities are available to your awareness.
I made a post on my Facebook wall:
Interestingly, one user wrote, "Data is not free."
Conscious learning is the difference between reacting and creating, following society's goal vs setting and pursuing your own goal.
When you actively focus on solving problems and building new skills, you take control of your growth.
You learn the most when you:
- Get stuck on a problem
- Struggle to solve it
- Nearly give up
- Take a break
Then like magic — your subconscious mind solves the problem in the background and sends the solution to your conscious mind.
Conscious Learning
You need to immerse your conscious mind in the information that will program a new identity (and give you the knowledge to attack your goals).
Follow social media accounts that give specific information related to your goals.
Purchase 1-3 books on the matter and devour them.
When you have a goal that is top of mind you begin to perceive situations with intention.
Intention = what you are stretching towards.
Information becomes more relevant and applicable to your life.
You end the mindless distraction and consumption cycle.
If you don’t know what skill to learn, consider becoming a fullstack creator. It is arguably the most lucrative skill in the digital age. Myself and my students have proven that.
You can't change 20 years of mental programming in 1 month. It takes time and persistence. Yet most people expect it to be instant and so they quit after 2 weeks. And then complain about why they are unhappy and anxious about the future.
How To Not End Up Like Everybody
I had a curious mind when I was a kid.
I questioned almost everything that I was told to do.
I devoured books to find answers to questions people couldn't give solution to or because they were bored at my incessant questioning, didn't care to answer.
I am grateful for my programming, because it allowed me to get a leg up on my peers who listened and obeyed without question.
Formal education has its place, but people are losing trust in its ability to secure their future.
I would argue that they never had trust in its ability to secure a fulfilling future… But the option of ‘forging your own path’ seems even more uncertain. Why? Because it requires you to create certainty, not wait for someone else’s creation to be laid in front of you.
People inherently know that life enjoyment is a personal choice, but nobody wants to face that reality, so they outsource their quality of life to the exaggerated promises of schools and jobs.
It’s all too common for someone to spend 4-12 years and tens of thousands of dollars just to be placed in low-salary jobs that require a fraction of what they were taught in school.
It doesn’t stop there. Students often have to self-educate on the side if they want to advance in their career – so why not do that from the start?
The education system has its benefits, as all things do, but for those that want fulfilling work and an open schedule, a glorified piece of paper called a “degree” isn’t going to get you there.
It will be a stepping stone at best or a financial chain at worst.
Take Control Of Your Future
You need a project to build. There isn't any other way. The only way you can take control of your future is to turn a personal project into a product that people pay you for outside of an assigned path.
Nobody is going to give you the time. You must take it.
Block out 1 hour a day.
First thing in the morning.
Before the distractions wake up.
Spend this time on 3 things:
- Learning
- Practicing
- Building
Take courses, watch tutorials, build a portfolio, and build the requirements for your ideal future.
If you don't know what to work on, you need to reflect on your life. Pull out a notebook and write down:
- Exactly what you don't want in life
- A guess toward what you want in life
- What it takes to get from A to B
Break the path down into clear, actionable goals.
You have 4 areas of improvement:
- Mind
- Body
- Money
- Happiness
Your goals in life should stem from solving burning problems in these areas.
You don't need motivation, you need brutal honesty with yourself with how a lack of development is preventing a better life.
In business (how you will monetize the project you build) there are 4 eternal markets:
Health, wealth, relationships, and happiness.
By solving the burning problems in your life – problems that everyone else has – you set yourself up for a lifetime of profit.
It doesn't matter what career skill you learn that will be obsolete in 20 years. It matters what problem you solve with the tools available to you. Problems will never go away. The human economy will be composed of those who solve their own problems and sell the solution.
Stop worrying about what to learn. Start worrying about how adaptable, resilient, creative, and teachable you are. The only way to acquire these traits is to build your own thing, fail, learn, improve, and repeat until you create a life you are proud of.
Thanks for reading.
-Patrick