We work on jobs and resume’s and cars, houses and relationships… and we SAY we work on ourselves(though usually we just get defensive and shift a couple habits or facades) but we don’t design what is truly and precisely the best mental build. The thoughts we have, the thought habits we keep, what areas our minds jump to, and what strategies we set in place for problems and plot holes. So today we’re going to fuck with that. There is a range of mental function humans keep regular, let’s overhaul those so we don’t suck.
The input of new ideas is when we see different mental functionalities that better fit some new skillset. It can be in engineering where we learn that matrices are better fit than lattice structure, it can be in seeing that people communicate better when you ask for their reasoning rather than just telling them they’re wrong, it can be that seeing that waking up early and finishing a paper produces a better project than some bravado of an all-nighter; doesn’t matter what, the main factors are the same. Looking for proficiency, being defensive, integrating the new information and habitualizing the new thoughts so they become normalized and functional. The search for proficiency is a constant thing, even Stanford PhD’s do it and the smartest people know they know nothing in the vast scheme of ideas; so always ask for more and ask with skepticism and precision critical result-based thinking in mind. Allowing yourself to learn means accepting you don’t know everything and that you’ve surely not been a god or the best for a long time prior; that’s just fucking reality and if you don’t swallow it then you’re stupider than you could ever be for just making a cocky mistake, so welcome to Earth. Integrating the new information and habitualizing the thoughts is pure practice. Set up goals to do it a few times a months and seek practice in enough area’s for it to be fun and be successful while pushing yourself to grow.
Emotional shifts and clashes are important in developing yourself as a person. Relationships cannot be wonderful if you’re only as mature and emotionally intelligent as a high school kid. When our feelings are hurt, we hurt others, or we don’t get a result we want then we must decide to feel wrong and design a better way we want to feel. Use empathy and look at who feels what around you as well as look at who seems to feel some kind of way you’d like to feel. Without being able to analyze your own emotions and create new directions to take them, you will remain stagnant. Growth is the only constant and it’s where joy truly lays.
Having one’s beliefs confronted is something Americans especially struggle with. Try to keep in mind that Universal truths don’t take sides and that to learn, to gain wisdom, one must upgrade what they put faith in and continue to develop their own perspective on politics, spirituality, linguistics and art. Updating old systems and predications is how one goes from accepting and moves into innovating and being improved. Allow old beliefs to be challenged thus that they either hold water and are more valid for standing new tests or the whole machine(which is you) becomes better by getting an outdated and not as proficient system upgraded. Rebooting what you know is not an insult or a sign of weakness but how one stays relevant in an every-changing Universe.
Social networks growth and shifting your definition of yourself is the hardest in my personal opinion. We find most safety in our groups and we are ourselves… so growing who you are is scary and shake to the core because it is the core. And that’s OK, important, and vitally victorious. As new cultures and new people come into social groups the dynamics will change. Inertia here is fear, be read to make a new team based on goals and the setting not on what is comfortable in the past; that’s getting old on purpose, which leads to death interestingly. Who you are is not who you were and what you do is not what you did; since the world changes, so do you and that’s fun. Getting into a new role allows for new fun, letting go of any idea of loss is overcoming the farcical idea that something lasts forever. Enjoy reality or fight it and die miserably.
To change what your mind is, remains key but to set up a functional system ready for change is ironically unstable stability. Be open to staying open and don’t fear being wrong; fear being afraid instead of allowing yourself to learn. Having a handle on confidence that doesn’t
