Four Beliefs Empowered People Left Behind
De-condition yourself from assumptions engineered to keep you powerless
The industrial system produces disempowered people. Most adults train children to meet deadlines, pass tests, and please others. We’re bred to become employees or managers, not autonomous people eager to create. We learn to value compliance and validation more than personal freedom or sovereignty.
Empowerment is about de-conditioning yourself from limiting beliefs and mass-media brainwashing. It comes when you identify the behaviors that lead to corrosive inner conversations and put a stop to them. When you learn to trace a thought process to its reverberations in your life, you win. You gain a sense of freedom and power over your emotional life.
Here are the beliefs you’d be wise to unhook from.
I need to check my phone immediately after waking
“Culture is not your friend. It’s an impediment to understanding what’s going on.” Terence McKenna
When you wake up and immediately refresh your email or check social media, you forget about the power of reflection and intentional action. You send the subtle message that your intentions matter less than the world’s campaigns. This message travels right into your subconscious and gives rise to a sense of doubt.
And as you know, actions compound. Do something today, for a week, for a month, for a year, and it soon dominates your life. Ten years from now, you’ll wake up to find that you let other people set the mood of your life.
Remember that people pump billions into making addictive products. Worse, your cognitive performance diminishes for approximately 22 minutes every time you get interrupted. Over time, you’ll corrode your ability to do deep work. This is a problem because deep work is the door way into the flow state. Without flow, you can say goodbye to fulfillment.
Make the morning a time for yourself. Or as Tim Ferriss puts it: make before you manage. You’ll feel more generous if you honor your own inclinations before anything else. Over many years, an hour of practicing something meaningful will massively improve your talent for it.
Imagine where you’ll be five years from now if every day you invested in what you love. Viewed from this angle, an hour on social media seems even more wasteful.
My paradigm is no different from reality itself
“I’ve got death inside me. It’s just a question of whether I can outlive it.” Don DeLillo
Two people can experience the same thing but hold wildly different views about it. Everyone processes reality through a paradigm. A web of narration, assumptions, and attitudes filter your reality for you. Disempowered people mistake their paradigms for reality itself. They believe that the way other people see the world should inform the way they see it.
Other people’s limits become their own. They read news and feel a sense of obligation to suffer. It overrides their personal incentive. Local violence, closing schools, and DDT in the salmon. It’s all scary. But these people believe that the sky is falling and the world is falling apart. What’s the point of caring about anything, they ask themselves.
The truth is that your beliefs are artifacts of your paradigm. Nothing more. When you understand this, you gain tremendous freedom over your worldview. The coordinates of your experience are beliefs, not hard-and-fast rules. They hold no inherent truth. You don’t need to bow at their feet or go down with the ship. You decide what’s for you.
A good practice: if an assumption evokes a negative emotion, take it as a sign that it’s not for you. You’re free to adopt only the beliefs that feel good. Really.
Change is a matter of setting goals and rising to meet them
“Your manifestation is bored waiting for you.” Joseph Alai
If you’re not where you want to be, you might set a goal and strive for it. You’ll push, force, and jolt yourself into activities that get you closer. You’ll exhaust yourself, and maybe you’ll meet the goal.
Or perhaps you won’t meet it at all. Time will pass, and you’ll still be where you are now. And you’ll tell yourself that you never wanted change any way. One thing is certain: focusing on goals alone ignores a significant part of the equation.
As James Clear wrote: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Rather than selecting an aim and meeting it, focus on optimizing a process. Beyond this, realize that all change happens first at an identity level.
You meet a goal when you become the sort of person who naturally attracts an outcome. The person who sets a goal doesn’t live to see it met. You become a new person in the process. Without identity-level shifts, nothing changes.
Self-love is conditional
“Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.” Nassim Taleb
Is undivided care for the self fundamental to being healthy? Or is it better used as a reward for overcoming a challenge? Both beliefs can backfire.
You’re overwhelmed. If you decide to drink wine and bathe seven times a day, you won’t outpace your need for self-care. You’ll remain in the same position for decades. At the same time, if you aren’t willing to act in ways that simply feel right, you might be the puppet of an early wound.
Self-respect fluctuates based on whether you meet your own expectations. Perhaps. But self-love is different. You need it as a baseline. Without it, you’ll pace in circles your entire life.
Humans spend their lives shifting goal posts. The person who views being productive as non-negotiable will never feel satisfied. It won’t matter how much validation or success they receive. They’ll learn to require more.
When you make self-love a fundamental part of your experience, you become playful. And that playfulness translates into a greater finesse in your work. The people who read, listen to, or otherwise consume your creations will feel the pressure if you create out of scarcity. They won’t like it.
If what you produce doesn’t determine whether you love or hate yourself, people will respond. They’ll feel at ease with you and with themselves. Pleasure begets more pleasure. When you make enjoyment your primary obligation, boom. Life becomes more fun for all of us.
“When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.” Alan Watts
The quality of your life depends on the quality of your beliefs. When you realize that it’s more important to have useful rather than universally agreeable thoughts and assumptions, you get free.
You’re under no obligation to view reality like the media or your complaining great aunt wants you to. Accept this, and you may even gain the power to alter other people’s view of reality. But you’ll probably just let them be.