An admixture of mindset and media
They say you can’t change that past. Is that true? Is the past even real? Given what science has shown us about false memories, should you even believe the story of your past?
Even if the past is real, how can you change your perception of the past.
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“You have one year left to live.” Those words did not come from my doctor. I said them to myself. I have neither a terminal illness nor death wish, and with my luck there are several decades are high highs and the lowest of lows coming.
Yet I wanted to know: What if I only had one year left to live? What would I do? How would I make my choices count?
Travel the world. Release a timeless book. Meet everyone you want to meet. Let everyone you love feel the love. Write as much as you can and talk as much as you can. Run yourself to the point of exhaustion and then some. You only have one year left.
Time is defined by our relation to it. The more you do, the more time you’ve had. The less you’ve done, the less time you’ve had.
Give one man one year and another man one month. Objectively speaking a year is a longer than a month.
If you spend a year doing nothing, that year will have seemed short. If you spent a month going hard to fulfill your dreams each day, the month will have felt long.
Most time management books start from the premise that you need to learn to balance how you spend your time. This is wrong. Chances are you need more balance because there’s too much bullshit in your life.
Rather than manage your time, ask how to spend it more efficiently.
Are you a time spender or a time investor? They say that time is money, which is wrong. Time is more than money, although as with money it’s useful to ask: Are you a spender or an investor? Are you a consumer or a producer?
Spenders fritter away time on entertainment. While leisure is necessary, time spent watching sports or television or movies is not cumulative. Ten years from now those shows you watches won’t leave you with anything to show for.
Our memories are our investment in time. My only regret is not spending my time more wisely. America’s greatest trial lawyer had an impossible criminal case. It was his first trial in decades. My friend Norm Pattis was going to watch the trial and had a hotel room. All I had to do was buy a plane ticket. I saved $250 to miss out on a lifelong memory.
Spend your time on memories. I can sit for hours remembering trips I’ve taken, fights I’ve been in, money I’ve made, lives I’ve impacted, and yes, the women. Spend your time on women, too, but not too much time.
Avoid black holes of time. Drama is a black hole and dramatic people will suck you in. My only ambivalence about life is a concern I set a bad example. My “drama” online has no emotional impact on me and is pure entertainment. It’s an enjoyable and effective part of my career. “I hope the guys don’t think any of this is serious,” I say to myself often.
Keep away from narcissists. There are few among us with an ego that will never be full. They require constant validation – which means endless time. Anyone too polished or charming should be avoided. Never trust a man who is perfectly put together – and any woman who obsesses over Instagram likes and Snapchats is sure to take far more than she gives.
Your time should be spent on habits and skills that are cumulative. My podcast attracts people to my writing and my writing attracts people to my podcast. Both attract people to my books. Marketing, public relations, and even design courses build my podcast, blogs, and books.
“Is this activity going to form a memory?” My god those hours spent on Internet message boards and social media proving to everyone how right I was! I have no idea what sort of bullshit I argued about online. Wasted time.
You often think cranky people are mean. In truth we value our time. I don’t have time for nonsense. I don’t have time for stupid questions. No, I’m not going to explain myself or give you sources. Go ask Google.
Sometimes the best way to spend your time is to waste it. One of the tragedies of growing older is we stop “kicking it.” I’ve “wasted” many nights goofing off with friends and family. During college friends will come over after the gym. We’d stay up late talking philosophy, women, and poetry.
Now we don’t have time to talk to anyone. We are too serious. Too busy.
Being too serious is the biggest waste of time of all.
Actively engage with the world and those around us. Don’t read a book. Imagine the book is a coach trying to bring the most out of you. Do not passively read. Actively engage with the subject matter.
Seek out the elite. Unless you were born into a rich family, this means you’ll need to read a lot. Books and long articles are where the best advice will be found. An article that won’t take several minutes to read probably isn’t worth reading.
Your physical health impacts how you engage with time. A sick or weak body can’t make the most out of each minute.
Engage the moment. Treat whatever you are doing as the most important activity in the world. There is no place else you’d rather be. There is no one else you’d rather see.
Like most people I often times “smart phone it in.” I am glib, inattentive, and dismissive. I don’t pay attention to what people say or make eye contact.
What if today is the last day you’ll look into your child’s eye or hear your best friend or father’s voice?
Hitting it hard for a year has taught me a lot about time.
What would you do if your choices mattered? How would you live in you had a few moments remaining in your life? How would you make each choice count?
To get the most out of your time, you must get the most out of yourself.
Reality as we know it can be described in two ways – hard and soft. Hard reality is physics. If you jump from a building, you’ll break your bones. These immutable laws govern airplane travel. (Have you noticed a lot of weird stuff is happening with airplanes lately?)
Soft reality is where we spend most of our lives. Our reality is socially constructed and dictated by culture. Do this, don’t do that. Nearly every risk in the modern Western world is emotional and psychological.
The Simulation can thus be understood as being of two types – hard and soft. The hard simulation is the computer we live in. (Read, “What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?“)
The Simulated Hypothesis reality, which is less scary than it seems, is an argument about whether the world came about via a Big Bang, from God (or gods), or whether some sufficiently advanced being created the world we live in. The hard simulation theory, also known as the Simulated Reality Hypothesis, goes like this:
A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors. They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds. So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds.
Watch: Elon Musk, Are We in a Simulation?
https://youtu.be/xBKRuI2zHp0
Discussing the Simulation draws a lot of eye rolls and sometimes even anger, which doesn’t make sense on a logical level.
God could have created the Simulation. Or some architects might have. Just as there’s room for God in the Big Bang, there’s room for God in the Simulation.
Lesser intellects dismiss the Simulation theory as nonsense. Those people aren’t to be taken seriously as they’ve never thought deeply about the issue.
Watch this video and you’ll see that dismissing the Simulation theory doesn’t show people how smart you are.
Simulated Reality
As computers grow more powerful and complex, the plausibility of simulating an entire universe grows less absurd. In fact, many now believe that our universe could be a vast computer simulation. In this video I explore the relatively new field of digital physics, the plausibility of a simulated universe, and how we may one day create our own universe.
The paradox of the simulated reality hypothesis is that any sufficiently complex society capable of forming simulations would be able to hide the code from its inhabitants.
Scott Adams works around the paradox as follows:
If we are simulations, we should expect to see two additional qualities in the universe as partial confirmation:
1. We should expect that we can’t travel past the boundaries of the simulation.
2. We wouldn’t be able to observe the basic building blocks of our reality.
Sure enough, we meet both criteria.
We can’t travel beyond the edge of the universe without exceeding the speed of light, which is theoretically impossible. That’s what you would expect in a simulation. You would have some sort of rule of physics to keep the simulated people from traveling beyond the edges. Here I’m assuming the universe is expanding at the same rate as the light that is traveling in all directions, so we can never catch up to it.
The hypothetical creators of our simulation would also try to prevent us from discovering that we are not made of anything real. And sure enough, when science looks at our basic building blocks at the quantum level, all we have is probability and strangeness.
One issue with Adams’ reasoning is he may be viewing the fact that we don’t know something (how subatomic particle behave with certainty) as proof that we must therefore be in a simulation.
Of course there is nothing wrong with his reasoning, because none of us can prove we live in a Simulation, or that we don’t live in a Simulation. (Read, “How to know if you’re a real person or living in a simulation.”)
Elon Musk made similar posts as Scott Adams noting, in response to an article about Schrodinger’s cat, “To conserve computing power, a simulation would only render an object when it is observed.”
To conserve computing power, a simulation would only render an object when it is observed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 19, 2018
When asked is someone would hear a tree fall in an empty forest, Musk explained, “A simulation probably wouldn’t spend computing power on sound.”
Yes, if there is no listener, a simulation probably wouldn’t spend computing power on sound
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 19, 2018
When I speak about the Simulation I’m usually referring to the “soft” one, or what the post-modernists called “socially-constructed reality,” or “narratives.”
Or what Jordan Belfort called the “bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve” your dreams.
There is a Narrative About You, and you believe it.
Maybe your parents told you the narrative, or someone in school, and you believed it.
Or you had a bad experience, and this experience became your identity rather than a data point.
There’s even a term for this – Imposter Syndrome.
Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved.
A person with Imposer Syndrome is running a a hardware script, and has accepted passively the beliefs of the software.
“We are all unpaid actors in some giant script that we didn’t write.” – Kanye West.
Watch, Yes, We are Living in a Simulation.
Your mind has been programmed by people who don’t care about you. The government which wants you to obediently die in wars. The media which doesn’t care about truth.
Or maybe your mind was programmed by people who cared about you and didn’t know any better. The parents who did their best but were clueless. The teachers who tried but never had any idea what was happening in the real world.
The first step to freedom is recognizing:
Your sense of self or “I” is a creation – or what Anil Seth calls a hallucination – of your perceptions. The sensory information coming into the brain hasn’t changed at all. All that’s changed is your brain’s best guess at the causes of that sensory information, and that changes what you consciously hear….
We don’t just passively perceive the world. We actively generate it. The world as we experience comes as much from the inside-out as from the outside-in.
My Mindset Master Class is more than Gorilla Mindset. Gorilla Mindset was the beginning. The Power of Mindset Master Class gives you the skills and tools you need to break out.
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“We are all unpaid actors in some giant script that we didn’t write,” Kanye West said on the latest episode of a late-night talk show, and the conversation gets deeper.
Well Kanye’s monologue gets deeper. The host was out of his depth, and couldn’t ask any interesting follow-up questions.
Some of you may have an opinion on Kanye, and I’d ask you to set that aside, because a lot of people have an opinion on me – one that is not only wrong, but is deliberately manufactured to be wrong.
Maybe Kanye has been lied about? Could you make room for that possibility.
A lot of people have said that Kanye is talking about subjects we discussed in this article.
Conversations about:
– The Simulation,
– Shame and fear,
– Scripts, mindset, and story telling.
Which is why I’m recommending the interview.