…And How Much We Actually Don’t Get.
Cheesy movies like Legally Blonde is usually not my type, but I am in Costa Rica and since here you do all that you don’t do in NYC, I did see it. Around the happy end the “believe in yourself” clich?© pops up. Normally if you are not wetting your eyes at such deep wisdom you would be laughing your ass off. I don’t know why but I did try to think about what that phrase really meant and why people say it.
We’ve all been told that if we believe in ourselves, all will be good and we’ll get what we are after. Thousand of times it has zoomed by my ears. And probably eactly for that reason I never thought about it and why (if it is true) it worked. I see the following logical explanation, but there might be plenty others: if you don’t think that you are good enough, you would be more willing to quit, so at the face of a tough moment when despair lures on you, actually not believing in yourself gets you to “I can’t make it anyway, why bother the suffering” as opposed to “I can do it, but I have to get through this crap first”. Thus, solely what you think of yourself may determine whether you are going to get through the Dip or not.
I have always known that, but I have never really reflected on it, so it has never had any meaning to me. Therefore it has never affected my life in any way (Well let’s see how that works now 🙂
A bigger question spins off from this matter: Are we so ignorant that we suck information without really thinking about it, as a result of which we don’t get to live life to its fullest?
I think the answer is yes. And that immediately gets us to the point that you have to constantly analyze anything that you might think is of any worth or interest to you. Try this one “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. What associations does it evoke? What experiences tell you that it is true/wrong? Is it true after all? Why? What kind of mentality does it promote? Is this the mentality you are after?
I have been reading a very strange book that tells the story of the greatest merchant in the world. There are ten two-page chapters that you are supposed to read at wakup, at lunchtime and at bedtime for a month before moving to the next one. At first this seems retarded. It is in a sense brainwashing because you are repeated the same thing over and over until you believe it. I am sure people just breeze through them like a regular book but I tried this rereading thing. I did 10 days instead of a month. I also wasn’t just reading them – I read every word carefully and asked myself at every moment, “what was the author thinking when he was writing that sentence?” I was paying attention to what he MEANT to say, not only what was said. Those two unusal behaviors resulted in a very interesting phenomenon: because of what other things I have read during the day or the things I have experienced, every time I read the same chapter, I saw it in a different light. Every time I reread it I discovered new things in it, I unravelled it more and more and combined it with my personal experience and analysis. It was incredible to understand how much we actually miss by merely reading something and not taking time to understand what it is.
This is true of every kind of information that goes through us. There are plenty of success stories (Marc Cuban), how-to explanations (Paul Graham), data and interpretations (Marc Andreessen) and all kinds of advice out there. But unless you actually pause your life and think about them, they will not be of any value (and some of those can be truly life-changing).
Well, I want to start a startup, but anything you do is equally dependent on how much thought you put in it. Do I have to say what you should do now?