Zig, Zag, ZAP!
Are you the type of person who assembles Ikea furniture without reading the instructions or try and complete a task without preparation. Letting your mind play and sort of “zig zag” your way into the right answer? So am I. And in it, you likely tapped into a deeper intelligence than all have but most are unaware.
Psycho-Cybernetics calls it the “Automatic Success Mechanism” and its a simple and effective way to flow not force your way to your goals faster and more effectively than any other method on earth.
Speaking from personal experience, I am quite the procrastinator but my procrastination takes form in a way that feels productive to me: learning.
A couple days ago I shared with you the time I was in college and read 100+ books while simply making use of those wasted seconds between waiting for things. The seconds most people take to switch on TikTok or Instagram Reels or their dopamine-button-scroller of choice.
Those small seconds added up into 100+ books. But, for me especially, it’s not necessarily a good thing. Let me explain…
Everytime I read a book, I took seconds out of taking action. It was fine back then when I was clueless but these days, reading for me has to be more purposeful. I don’t just ‘rush in’ to any topic I want and read everything. In fact, it’s probably just as bad as the guy/gal that scrolls TikTok for 33 hours a day. It doesn’t move you anywhere.
And yet, my immense belief of “getting knowledge is better than nothing”. Not true.
I briefly touched on this already but after a while, you reach a point where more knowledge works backwards, you start to encounter more and more contradictions and your stable base gets shaken and ruptured like an earthquake on a fault line.
What’s better is ACTION. In fact, I’ll be on the guy who takes action more than the guy who ‘learns’. And here lies the massive inadequacy of the modern educational system in preparing us for the future.
I recently helped a girl finesse this introductory quiz for a course she was taking in community college this summer. And, while we tried to guess the answers I had the brilliant idea of uploading the PDFs to Claude AI and simply asking it.
The funny part was one particular question — apparently in this class the use of AI is not allowed. Reminds me of the math teacher that didn’t want us using calculators growing up.
And I get it, Critical Thinking is important but modern problems require modern tools. Perhaps it IS beneficial for her to not use AI until she’s mastered the foundations, but who am I to tell. At the very least if here grades mean a sliver of importance to her future career and education, then NOT using AI simply puts her behind everyone else that DOES use it.
But, I digress.
The main point is: sometimes the work we think we are doing that ‘feels’ productive, is just our lame excuse at avoiding the things that really move the needle forward.
It would be like going to Ikea, buying the furniture, reading the instructions and throwing away the furniture. Sure, you now know how to assemble a Zigeunerschnitzel but if you never DO, did you get the use for it that you intended or just loaded your mind with useless gunk?
This is by no means my way of disregarding the internal work that goes towards all things success-related. In fact, I think the internal work is MORE important than any external result. But, with no accurate way to measure (How do you measure ‘happier’?), the external results are our only tools of measurement and our only tools of making REAL internal change.
Body follows the mind.
No faster way to changing mind, than moving body.
In one psychological experiment,
participants were asked to hold a pencil in their teeth, holding their mouths in a smile-like position.
Others, were asked to hold the pencil in between their lips in an “O” neutral or slightly frowning position
While holding the pen, participants were asked to rate how funny they found various cartoons.
The Results: People who held the pen with their teeth (forced smile position) rated the cartoons as significantly funnier than those who held the pen with their lips. The physical act of smiling, even when artificially induced, seemed to enhance their experience of humor and positive emotion.
The Theory: This supported the facial feedback hypothesis - the idea that our facial expressions don't just reflect our emotions, but can actually influence and create them. When we smile, it may trigger neural pathways that promote positive feelings, creating a feedback loop between expression and emotion.
Okay, to put my professor hat down because I think you got the main point → to change mind the fastest and most effective way, you must change body.
And, to get to the main point of today’s letter ‘waiting’ to get the right talent/skill/right character is overrated.
Things must be applied, lest they are forgotten.
It’s been a couple weeks since I started writing this daily email consistently again. And, each day I sit down I find it easier and easier to write and put words to paper. I find it easier to add a little humor and let my words flow in a way that is entertaining but also useful.
Did I take some courses and ‘learn’ about email writing? Yes, of course.
But, I don’t remember 99% of it. I’m simply going off the cuff because all that information is neatly stored in my subconscious mind and is subtly influencing the work. I don’t have to actively think, ‘now here I gotta add a joke, here I gotta tell a story, etc.”
My mind seems to find its own rhythm and flow, and I’m subtly understanding what my readers want more of through the likes, comments and feedback.
Make no mistake, this is as much for me as it is for you. My writing is an outlet for me, it helps sort my thoughts and it makes the rest of my day better and more pleasant, but I come at it with no agenda. Just a simple step for my “Automatic Success Mechanism” (you remember that, I mentioned it right at the beginning, … I’ll explain more coming shortly)…
I have a little ritual that ‘primes’ my brain to write emails and each time I do this ritual, my neural connections get stronger and I often don’t sit for even a second with a blank page anymore.
This is the power of doing. Whatever you stop doing, you get slower and less effective at. Whatever you keep doing you get better and more effective at.
If you stop and start multiple times, it’s like cold-starting an engine. You’re gonna be worse when you start again, but you will be slightly better than when you did that the last time (are you keeping up with me? Good.)
The benefit compounds when you stick to it for a long time. When you LET it become automatic. Like how you walk, eat, blink, cook an egg, drive a car, and do all these complex things that felt so complicated and laborsome to you before.
So here lies the crux of the matter — you feel like you are navigating the world with missing information. We all do. We all have this fear of missing out on the next Bitcoin like it’s 2010. We all feel like someone knows something better.
I mean, our entire civilization as we know it was built off the ancestral passing of knowledge from one generation to the other…
But, it often seems to me that the modern world has flipped EVERYTHING on its head. The things that were encoded in our DNA to navigate this big blue ball of Earth, now seems to work against us to our detriment, and someone else’s benefit:
Fat in all foods to hijack our bodies ‘hoarding’ mechanism to store fat
The colors and rapid cycling of images for babies when they watch CocoMelon (which is literally like legal METH for babies)
The discrepancy between what people LIKE to watch vs. what has the highest ‘woke’ score in movies — its why Rotten Tomatoes ‘critic’ ratings and user ratings are vastly different and more or less useless now
I could go on… but you are seeing and feeling the great gap and divide aren’t you?
It almost feels like you have lost sovereignty over your own body and mind.
Like the modern world of humans is one big evolutionary killing machine perfectly designed for your compliance.
I pity the person who doesn’t have a single original thought in their mind, who lets their parents, siblings, friends, media, influencers, movie stars, etc. make every choice for them.
I mean, I can picture how their life will turn out — can you?
I see a fat, obese, unfulfilled, pill-crazy person in a hospital bed so physically immobile, so mentally numbed and brainfogged that they are so far gone from the years of abuse and ‘downloading of viruses in their head’ that they have NO escape anymore, they still live vicariously through the life of others. The poison is killing them but it has now become their oxygen, because if they looked away for just a moment. If they gave voice to the quiet observer that is their true WILL in their head a moment of thought, they would collapse like a 1000 suns because of the own brunt of their choices for looking at themselves in the mirror.
“Body Positivity”.
Look, I try not to talk about these things often. Because, to tell you the truth I don’t care.
To me, my attention is my currency. My sovereignty is my right on this earth. And, I exercise it for MYSELF, and leave you to your own devices at your own gain or peril.
Still, I can’t help but NOT care. I just don’t want to be preaching to someone who isn’t ready to hear the message. Who already feels a gut-wrenching knot in their heart and isn’t ready to face the discomfort yet. Who thinks it’s a ‘bad’ thing for them to face it. I won’t shine a mirror on someone who isn’t ready to look.
If that’s you. I don’t care what you do. Genuinely, I don’t.
I care in the grand scheme of things. I want you to be safe and fulfilled, but I don’t.
And so, let the world burn. I’m not here to save it. I’m not a savior.
But, what I am is… me.
And what I do… is be me.
And maybe, if I do so long enough… if I continue to evolve, if I keep going where I’m going, maybe some friends will find me along the way… and maybe, just maybe; others will begin to see a bit of their own selves through me when they look in the mirror. (at least, the best parts, I hope, I’m still a deeply flawed individual in many parts of the word)…
If you don’t feel ready. Good. Do it anyway.
If you feel the urge to wait, or ‘study’ or ‘get more information’… you’re playing a losing battle. You got AI, go ask it some stuff and make Version 1.
Version 1 doesn’t happen at all if you spend longer than a week thinking about it. The longer the vision STAYS an idea, it slowly suffocates until it dies.
Lucky for you, you don’t have to do much to turn idea to reality.
Because, it’s mainly a subconscious process. Take what I do for this email — ping a notification to your mind and let it read it, let it do the rest
“Hey, here is XYZ we gotta do.”
Then relax, detach, go on and do something else (if you feel so inclined).
Keep pinging that notification multiple times.
And, perhaps learn to direct your thoughts to the things that bring you joy.
I still wake up with a semi-racing mind, but I recognize the spiral more often than I don’t. I try not to waste ‘thought energy’ anymore. And give it direction with my mental notifications, or simply bringing my mind back to the present, or a simple mantra… for me its one word “success”.
It’s helped with intrusive thoughts especially.
Your therapist lied to you. You don’t need to ‘explore’ your flaws. You replace them. Some things are killed and choked when attention is withdrawn.
For my intrusive thoughts especially, I can just override with “success”. It doesn’t need to be explored. IN FACT, anything that does bring you in a state of fear or low-vibration often doesn’t need to be driven in deeper, ESPECIALLY if it brings in more fear. IF you can’t explore it without being swirled into it, than it’s probably not the right time to do so.
This was quite the rant. Again, read it passively. Don’t read into it too much (pun intended, haha). And, try the pinging method. Relax, detach, just send gentle reminders to your mind on what needs to be done, see if you get a message back — or some crazy 3am coke-fueled wave of inspiration that you ride for 4 hours like a madman.
I won’t judge.
_S