3 Ideas that can change your Life

About the book

All changes are based in ideas. Ideas give us new perspectives and from those new perspectives we’re able to change our behaviors.

In this small report, Mark Manson has put together three ideas that have influenced his life and which he believes can influence yours.

1. The Two Minds
2. How to 80/20 Your Life
3. Believe Not What’s True, But What’s Helpful

He didn’t come up with these ideas himself. If you look around hard enough, you’ll see them pop up in all sorts of places, from business, to NLP, to generic Self Help, to various forms of therapy. This is just his take on them and some of the ways he has applied them.

1: The Two Minds

If you’ve ever meditated , even a little bit, you’re familiar with the experience, where you closed your eyes and tried to shut your mind up, even if for 30 seconds, and despite your best efforts, the spigot of thought vomit just kept pouring out.

The thing is, that “mind chatter” never stops. It’s always going on in your daily life.

A lot of these eastern philosophies aim to “quiet” that chatterbox of a mind that we have. Practicing these sorts of techniques have a benefit.

That benefit is what I call the “Two Minds.”

When you close your eyes and try to eliminate any thoughts (and fail miserably like the rest of us), obviously your mind is thinking. But if your mind is thinking, then who is observing the mind thinking?

Whoa... 🤯

When you did the exercise and your mind kept wandering back to what you had to do at work tomorrow, who was it that was watching your mind worry about work tomorrow? It was your mind watching your mind. In Zen they refer to this as the “Thinking Mind” and the “Observing Mind.” The two minds.

It’s a common concept in Buddhism and new western therapies such as Acceptance-Commitment Therapy (ACT) are catching on to how useful it is and how it can solve a lot of our everyday emotional problems. I’ll break down the Two Minds further and then show how they can be applied to solving many of the emotional problems we deal with in our everyday lives.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it. Whatever you do, do NOT think about a pink elephant. Don’t think about a pink elephant holding a blue umbrella with his trunk. Don’t think about a pink elephant once over the next two paragraphs.

OK, not only did you picture a big pink elephant with a blue umbrella, but you were watching yourself think about a pink elephant while you were reading the past two paragraphs. Your Observing Mind was watching your Thinking Mind indulge in pink elephants repeatedly, despite the fact that it was telling your Thinking Mind not to indulge in said elephants.

Our Thinking Mind is like a horny dog on a leash that keeps running after things and if we aren’t used to using our Observing Mind, then our Thinking Mind drags us along with it.

If our Thinking Mind starts obsessing about reaching level 30 in Diablo or the last episode of Mad Men , our Observing Mind is helpless to reign it in. The same goes for emotions. And that’s actually where most of our suffering comes from – not from the negative emotions themselves, but from the fact that we’re helpless from getting sucked into the negative emotions.

“How do I stop feeling so jealous?” or “How do I stop feeling so angry?” or “How do I not get nervous in this situation anymore?” The answer is you don’t. You can’t control your Thinking Mind. Those emotions pop up and will continue to pop up.

💡 The trick is to not fuse with those emotions when they arise.

In Zen, they advise that instead of saying, “I am angry,” to say, “I feel anger.” Instead of saying, “I am nervous,” say, “I feel nervousness.” Instead of saying, “I am jealous,” you say, “I feel jealousy.” It may seem like a subtle difference, but try it. Think of a time recently when you felt a negative emotion, a lot of anger or nervousness or insecurity. Now, instead of thinking, “I was angry at my brother,” think instead, “I felt anger towards my brother.” You HAD anger, but you weren’t controlled by the anger.

These days I’m often able to sit down and write 5,000 words or more in a single day. I still feel the same anxiety. I still hear the same thoughts (“I need to eat first,” “I should take a nap,” “I’m not in a writing mood right now.”) But now instead of identifying with these thoughts, I acknowledge them: “I feel nervousness about writing today.” “I have the thought that I need to eat first.” “I have the thought that I need to take a nap first.” And then I turn to my Thinking Mind and promptly tell him that it’s full of shit and that I don’t need a damn thing except to sit my ass down and start writing . We all produce excuses and negative emotions involuntarily.

Guess what? That’s NEVER going to change.

I don’t care how many positive thoughts you conjure, what kind of therapies you do, negative thoughts and emotions are natural processes of the human brain. You can’t get away from them. None of us can. What you CAN do is accept them. Defuse from them. And then act despite them.

The trick is to accept them and then let go. This is a skill and it is a process, but it cannot be practiced until you recognize that there are two minds and you only control one of them.

Review session 1

Here are some exercises you can do that will help you separate your two minds and therefore take more control of your behaviors despite your thoughts and emotions.

Disidentify & Possess

Whenever you feel a strong emotion or thought, disidentify with it and then take possession of it. “My boss is not an idiot. But I am having the thought that my boss is an idiot.” “I don’t hate my ex-girlfriend. I am feeling hatred toward my ex-girlfriend.” “I am not lonely and depressed. I am feeling loneliness and depression.” Language is very powerful. Notice when you disidentify from these emotions and thoughts in this way it: 1) implies that they’re temporary states, and not permanent conditions and 2) forces you to take responsibility for them. They’re nobody’s fault, they just are.

Thank Negative Thoughts

Thank your Thinking Mind for negative thoughts and emotions. This is a technique from ACT and it is effective. It may sound absolutely nuts, but it’s effective because it FORCES you to accept your negative emotions instead of fight them. “Thank you Thinking Mind for feeling nervous before my date tonight. It will keep me on my toes!”

This is going to feel really bizarre – expressing gratitude towards negative emotions. But I think you’ll find that it diminishes the power of the thoughts and emotions over time and actually impels you to take action despite them.

Make it Absolutely ridiculous

Finally, if you find yourself in the heat of the moment, or if there’s something that’s really nagging at you, try this out.

Take something that’s bothered you recently and hold it in your mind. Maybe it’s your girlfriend nagging you.

Distill it into a single sentence, such as, “I feel afraid of quitting my job.” Or “I feel irritated with my girlfriend.” Now close your eyes and imagine Bugs Bunny saying it, while chewing a carrot. Then Mickey Mouse saying it, while dancing and doing cartwheels. Pretend the Chipmunks are singing it to you in the form of a Christmas carol.

Make the thought look and sound absolutely ridiculous in your mind. Take your time and play with it. Try to make yourself laugh. After you’ve done this for a minute or two, stop. How do you feel? Chances are you feel much better about it and the negative emotion isn’t nearly as potent as it was before.

Separating your Observing Mind from your Thinking Mind is a habit that takes practice. But once you begin to do it, you’ll feel yourself becoming less and less of a slave to your thoughts and your emotions. You’ll take more control of your internal daily life and feel better about it.

In my opinion, this is the single most important step to developing self-discipline and acting despite whatever neuroses or mental hang ups you may suffer from. Once you’ve differentiated your two minds, you can begin to evaluate your thoughts and feelings from an objective place and decide which ones are helpful and which ones are hurtful (which is something we’ll get to in Idea #3).

Review session 2

2: How To 80/20 Your Life

For instance:

• What are the 20% of your possessions you get the most value out of?
• What do you spend 20% of your time doing that gives you 80% of your happiness ?
• Who are the 20% of people you’re close to who make you the happiest ?
• What are the 20% of the clothes you wear 80% of the time?
• What’s the 20% of food you eat 80% of the time?

Chances are these are easy questions for you to answer. You’ve just never considered them before.

When I first considered how the 80/20 Principle applied to my own life, I instantly realized a few things.

• A few of my hobbies (television shows and video games) accounted for 80% of my time only brought me 20% of my fulfillment.
• A few of my friends who I spent 80% of my time with I did not always enjoy being around (hence I was not happy in my social life).
• 80% of what I spent my money on was not useful or healthy for my lifestyle.

And of course, the 80/20 Principle can still be applied to productivity at work . What tasks do you spend 80% of the time doing that bring in 20% of the returns (i.e., checking email over and over, writing memos, taking a long time to make basic and unimportant decisions, etc.)? What is the 20% of your work that gets you 80% of the credit and recognition from your team or boss?

And finally, you can apply the 80/20 Principle to your emotional life and relationships as well. What are the 20% of behaviors that cause 80% of the problems in your relationships? What are 20% of the conversations that create 80% of the intimacy with your partner? These are important questions that most of us never even consider.

What changes could you make in your life today based on the 80/20 Principle? It’s not necessarily a rigid rule to live by, but think of it as a tool, a lens to view aspects of your life through. Sit down and think about it, maybe even write it out. You’ll likely be surprised the realizations you come to.

3: Believe what’s helpful

Two men were in a bar in Alaska drinking and talking about God (two things that naturally go together).

One of them said: “Look, there is no God and I’ll prove it. Just a few weeks ago I got caught out in that blizzard without any supplies. I was surely going to freeze to death. So I decided I would try out the whole God thing. I got down on my knees and prayed. I told him if he saved me, I would promise to always believe in him.”

The other man looked at him perplexed, “Well, you’re here, right? He obviously saved you!”

The man replied, “No he didn’t. Some Eskimos came by a few minutes later and picked me up to take me back to town. God didn’t do anything.”

This apocryphal story is passed around quite a bit as an example about how two people can interpret completely opposite meanings from the same exact story. How you perceive the above story, or any other story for that matter, depends on the beliefs you choose to accept.

Kind of like the glass half full, glass half empty thing.

The point is, whether we realize it or not, at some point we choose all of our beliefs. Sometimes we choose them consciously for very specific reasons. Sometimes we choose them unconsciously ( parents pushed them on us , or they met an unconscious need of ours). Everything we think and believe today at some point along the way we made the decision to buy into it, to decide it was true for us. This applies to everything.

Almost everything we know is secondhand and based on belief.

But even when it comes to experiences we have firsthand, recent psychological research shows that our perceptions of our own experiences are often unreliable. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has demonstrated that our memories actually remember very few specifics about experiences and that at later dates we “patch holes” of our memories with our assumptions and yes, our beliefs.

so what? What’s wrong with believing whatever we want? What’s wrong with having inaccurate memories and seeing in experiences what we want and not really knowing for sure what’s for certain or not? Why can’t we just go with whatever we feel like believing, with what we’ve always believed?

The problem is also something in psychology called the confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to only notice and observe phenomena that support our prior beliefs.

I realize that choosing what you believe is not as simple as switching on a dime. It’s a much more complicated process

What I’m trying to do here is plant seeds. The next time you feel stupid or insecure, ask yourself if that’s a useful belief to have.

The next time you feel incompetent or like you’re incapable of accomplishing something, ask yourself if that’s a useful belief to have. The next time you feel unattractive and undesirable, or that a situation is impossible, ask yourself, is that a useful belief to have. Because it doesn’t matter what’s true or what’s not. The truth is up for endless debate in most circumstances. So why not debate on the side that helps you?

Review session 3