Джон Харгрейв - Mind Hacking [How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days]

I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me .

By developing the skill of imagination, you can learn to picture what you want , not just what you don’t want. Just as a technology hacker finds a new use for an existing gadget (turning a leaf blower into a homemade hovercraft), you can construct new ways of thinking about yourself and the world. By choosing to think in larger, more positive terms, you begin to rewrite your personal reality in a larger, more positive direction. Your life gets not unimaginably better but imaginably better.

Now, imagine that Morpheus is standing beside you, offering you the choice between two pills. Which will you take?

Homemade Plato

I liked The Matrix better the first time, when it was called The Allegory of the Cave . It was a screenplay written by the ancient Greek dude Plato, and because the original story was a little confusing, I’ll simplify it for modern times.

In The Cave , there are a bunch of prisoners chained to seats inside a movie theater. They’re forced to watch the world’s most boring movie: just the projector shining white light on the screen. Their heads are locked forward, like in A Clockwork Orange , which is a movie they never see. In fact, they never see any movie, just light and the occasional shadow.

This is because the prison warden is also the projectionist, and he paces around in the projection booth, frequently walking in front of the projector as he shouts at them. Sometimes his girlfriend comes over and they argue or have sex, so all the prisoners see is shadows and light, and all they hear is the distant sound of bickering or moaning.

After a few years of this, the prisoners begin to think that the shadows are the prison warden, or his girlfriend, or the other people that stop by.

“But how do the prisoners eat?” you might ask. “How do they go to the bathroom? Wouldn’t they figure it out?” Plato’s screenplay had a lot of plot holes, I’ll admit. That’s probably why it was in turnaround for thousands of years. But it gets better.

One day, one of the prisoners breaks free. Our protagonist sees the projectionist and his mind is blown. He walks out the doors of the theater and into the lobby. Popcorn! Candy! Starbucks! He walks outside, into the mall. His eyes are dazzled by the overhead fluorescent lights. He can’t make sense of any of it. It’s so utterly different from his light/shadow reality that he struggles to come to grips with this “reality behind the reality.”

Eventually, he goes back into the movie theater and tries to tell the other prisoners what’s out there. “There’s this crunchy yellow stuff you can eat, called popcorn !” he raves. “And this hot brown liquid called coffee ! You buy it all with money, which is valuable green paper !”

The prisoners look at each other and begin to whisper, “Clearly, he’s gone insane. Let this be a lesson to all of us: Whatever happens, do not leave your seat .”

The premise behind Plato’s Cave (I don’t think he ever wrote Cave II: The Redemption ) was that most of us take physical reality at face value, but underneath, there is another world, a world of ideas . The ideas, in fact, are the true reality—they are, in a sense, more real than what we call “reality.”

Think of how much of your personal reality starts in your imagination. You want to spend a night out with friends, you plan it out in your head first. If you desire to build a company, first you build it in your mind. Before you produce meaningfully, you produce it first mentally. Your mind is the workshop for your life .

The British physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was the Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day: an immensely popular science writer who became a household name during the 1920s and 1930s due to his clear, humorous explanations of difficult scientific topics. He liked to describe the universe not as a purely physical reality but as something more like a “great idea.”

It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference. 2

It is still difficult to accept the view that “everything is of mental character.” But once you accept that your mind is where your life starts, everything gets so much simpler. To change your life, change your mind. And once you change your mind, you can change your life in any way you can imagine.

Thinking of your world as a “great idea” really is a great idea.

The Reality Distortion Field

“Illusion is first of all needed to find the powers of which the self is capable.”

—Paul Horgan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

In February 1981, Bud Tribble, one of the key software developers on the original Macintosh computer, welcomed one of Apple’s new employees, Andy Hertzfeld, by telling him they were scheduled to ship the Macintosh software in just ten months.

“Ten months?” Hertzfeld remarked. “That’s impossible.”

Tribble agreed. “The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek ,” he explained. “ Steve Jobs has a reality distortion field .”

It would make sense that a guy named Tribble would use a Star Trek reference. He was referring to a two-part episode entitled “The Menagerie,” in which the crew finds a planet called Talos, whose inhabitants are able to create virtual realities in the minds of other people—or, as Tribble later put it, creating “their own new world through sheer mental force.”

Tribble went on to explain this “reality distortion field” to his new employee: “In [Jobs’s] presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”

Note that this was a veteran developer making this claim, not some woo-woo weirdo. Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating—until he saw it for himself. Hertzfeld later wrote:

The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it . . . but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature. 3

Jobs’s “reality distortion field” was a personal refusal to accept limitations that stood in the way of his ideas, to convince himself that any difficulty was surmountable. This “field” was so strong that he was able to convince others that they, too, could achieve the impossible. It was an internal reality so powerful it also became an external reality. Whatever you may say about Jobs, he was a master mind hacker.

To use Tribble’s phrase, Jobs created his “own new world through sheer mental force.” Now, compare that with our typical approach: when confronted with a new idea, we quickly assess whether it seems feasible for us. I’m terrible at talking to people , we fret to ourselves at a club, and sit in the corner. Or: I could invest my money in that stock, but knowing my luck, I’ll probably lose it all .

We might tell ourselves, I’m a lousy runner , or I’m no good at math . We might say, “Everyone in my family got divorced, so I will, too,” or “I come from a long line of engineers, so that’s why I don’t do well with emotions.” Think back to the problem loops you identified in the previous section. Most likely, these are limitations you’ve placed on yourself, or others, or the world—limitations that exist largely in your mind .