3 Minute Monday
Hi friend,
“Use your emotions as advisors, not as masters.” — Gurwinder Bhogal
It will take you many years of self awareness or meditation or mindfulness or introspective work or checking-in with yourself plus failures, arguments and embarrassing situations before you can create a sufficiently robust Mindfulness Gap to no longer be at the mercy of your emotions every time they arise.
Sure, they’ll pop up but you’ll be able to take a brief pause before being swept away by them.
The next step after you’ve started to master that is the one I want to talk about today.
Presuming that we now have a tiny bit more control over our responses than we did before, finding the sweet spot between emotion and rationality is a tough balance to strike.
How should we change our view of the world if we learn a new concept that seems accurate?
What if our emotions and experience are screaming at us to ignore the psychological studies we just learned and go with our felt sense instead?
Is this not the reason for learning the concept? So that we reality-check ourselves when our emotions try to take over?
Aren’t we going to die some day in the not too distant future? Shouldn’t we just do whatever “feels” right?
What sort of a psychotic individual has multiple advisors debating this stuff in their head in any case?
This discussion is worthy of an entire library of writing but here’s the most rough-hewn solution I’ve found:
In cases where you are a beginner, you have less experience to draw upon, so outsourcing your decision making to frameworks, concepts and the experience of others makes sense.
This is why we learn before we start doing things.
You cannot rely on your experience when you have no experience.
For reference, I think I stopped being a beginner at most human life things when I was about 32 and have now fully stepped into the illustrious realm of The Amateur.
As your experience increases, you can begin to rely on your felt sense more than predetermined rote solutions.
Duh – obviously Chris. I use experience more as I get more experience? How revolutionary.
The issue you need to check here is the Vestigial Pattern Bias:
The successful, deliberate approaches we learn during our development can become a prison which stops us from becoming more free-flowing and at-ease when we become developed.
The tools that get you from 0-50 are not the same ones that get you from 50 to 90, or 90 to 95.
But we found success with this approach in the past so we cling on to an overly rational, deliberate approach.
We hope that applying pure cerebral horsepower to a situation will fix it, without realising that our subconscious has aggregated the thousands of hours of experience we’ve clocked up now.
And not using that experience is keeping us in the same league we’ve always been in.
Whether it’s judging a relationship, handling a new client, playing rugby, disciplining your son, working out whether to rest or train tomorrow, or anything else, letting go of deliberateness and having faith in your experience is a liberating way to play whatever game it is you’re trying to win at.
When you have no lessons, learning one new thing is a huge change.
When you have 10,000 lessons, one new thing should be integrated proportionately.
MODERN WISDOM
I do a podcast which has had 70 million+ downloads. You should subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
This week’s upcoming episodes:
Monday.
Gurwinder Bhogal – 16 more concepts to understand human behaviour. Cognitive biases, group think, the biggest lesson I learned from Rogan & more. Don’t miss this.
Thursday.
Steve Magness – one of the world’s best athletic & executive advisors on how high performers develop elite resilience and toughness.
Saturday.
Lee Cronin – how did life on earth originate? Is there life on other planets? What is life anyway? Why are we conscious if we’re just bags of atoms?
THINGS I’VE LEARNED
1.
#MeToo has hurt women’s careers.
Women’s productivity fell post-#MeToo, largely due to fewer collaborations with men.
A study of research collaborations involving junior female academic economists shows they started fewer new research projects after #MeToo.
The decline is driven largely by fewer collaborations with new male co-authors at the same institution.
The drop in collaborations is concentrated in universities where the perceived risk of sexual harassment accusations for men is high.
That is, when both sexual harassment policies are more ambiguous, exposing men to a larger variety of claims, and when the number of public sexual harassment incidents is high.
The results suggest that #MeToo is associated with increased cost of collaboration that disadvantaged the career opportunities of women.
#MeToo was important to raise awareness, but the intent was not to impose costs on women’s careers.
— Marina Gertsberg
2.
Fat Americans can’t fight.
Eight out of 10 young Americans are ineligible to enlist in the U.S. military.
Primarily due to obesity, but medical issues and criminal record are also factors.
h/t Rob Henderson
3.
Gurwinder’s Theory of Bespoke Bullshit.
Many don’t have an opinion until they’re asked for it, at which point they cobble together a viewpoint from whim & half-remembered hearsay, before deciding that this 2-minute-old makeshift opinion will be their new hill to die on.
— Gurwinder Bhogal
LIFE HACK
Share Spotify Podcasts with Timestamps.
When listening to a podcast on Spotify, press the Share button in the bottom right.
There’s then an option to “Share from **time**”.
No more telling people to skip to a certain section of a podcast, just share from where you’re at right now.
Big love,
Chris x
Never miss an episode by pressing Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
PS
We got merch designs back and they’re unreal. Hold on tight.
