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

You have within yourself your own reality distortion field . What you consider “possible” and “impossible” for yourself are just ideas. They’re loops that can be reprogrammed. You can find the boundaries of what you consider possible and consciously widen them. You can achieve the “impossible” by training your mind to believe otherwise .

Thinking “anything is possible” does not mean it’s possible next week or even next year. We need to make a plan for what we can achieve, and do the work to make it a reality. (We’ll cover this in Part 3.) But an attitude of “anything is possible” is the foundation from which we should begin. As the great author and naturalist John Muir proclaimed, “The power of imagination makes us infinite.”

This is so much bigger than just reprogramming your negative thought loops. If you were learning to program and all you did was debug other people’s code, you’d lose interest pretty quickly. But being able to build something completely new and amazing is the joy of hacking, and mind hacking is no different. As Mark Zuckerberg said about programming, “If you can code, you have the power to sit down and make something and no one can stop you.” 4Your life—your future —is a wide-open vista.

Consciously reshape your thoughts, and you can actively reshape the world around you . Once you think about it, anything is possible.

The Infinite Loop

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drugstore, but that’s just peanuts to space.” 5

So begins the famous interplanetary travel guide The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , preparing the adventurous traveler for the nearly unlimited variety of experiences available while hitchhiking around space. From the breathtaking beaches of B’bbahl (where time flows backward, so it is possible to leave your two-week vacation earlier than you arrived) to the Nightclub at the Beginning of the Universe (where you can watch the Big Bang unfold beneath a pulsing disco beat), anything is possible in space.

Similarly, your mind is a vast unexplored landscape—we might even say infinite , since there is no limit to what can be imagined. It is a universe of possibilities, a limitless horizon of potential. Our minds have unlimited imagining power . This is not just some phrase to put on an inspirational poster underneath a photo of a man hanging on to the talons of an eagle in flight. It’s a simple and obvious fact. Your mind is as big as you can imagine it to be .

Dr. Ellen Langer, the longest-running professor of psychology at Harvard, came up with an ingenious experiment to test the effects of imagination on aging. She first created an environment straight out of the 1950s, down to the smallest details: a black-and-white TV playing Ed Sullivan clips, an old-fashioned radio playing Perry Como. Then she recruited eight men in their seventies to live in this environment for five days.

When they entered this virtual reality, Langer asked the seniors not just to reminisce about their younger years but to make a psychological attempt to be the person they were in 1959. In other words, to imagine they were young again . “We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” she told them, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” 6

Throughout the experiment, as the senior citizens talked about current events (events of the 1950s), they were encouraged to talk about them in the present tense. There were no mirrors, no current photographs, nothing that would spoil the illusion of being young again.

The results were astounding. At the end of their stay, the elderly subjects were tested on a number of age-related factors, from memory to dexterity, and were shown to significantly improve versus a control group. A panel of independent judges said they sat up straighter and looked younger. Although it seems impossible, even their sight got better . As the New York Times Magazine reported, they “had put their minds in an earlier time, and their bodies went along for the ride.”

Our minds are as large as we imagine them to be. We instinctively know this when we refer to a “small-minded person” as someone who is petty or bigoted, and “an exceptionally large mind” to talk about someone like Stephen Hawking. Indeed, Hawking is a terrific example of someone who did not allow his physical handicap to limit his greatness. How many of us, if confined to a wheelchair with nothing but a few eye movements to communicate, would approach the world-changing creative output of Hawking?

I’ve been lucky enough to work with a number of entrepreneurial advisors. What the best advisors do is continually expand your sense of what’s possible: they take your initial number, then add a zero. If you want to grow a $20 million business, they encourage you to think about a $200 million business. I’ve found this a useful concept as we’ve grown Media Shower, our content marketing company: Keep adding a zero . Always think about the next level of scale: from 100 to 1,000 customers, from 1,000 to 10,000 customers, from 10,000 to 100,000 customers, and so on.

After I got sober and began identifying my problem loops, I started to think about how I was going to reprogram those loops. As I realized my reprogramming could become as big as I imagined, it became an intellectual challenge for me to think up the biggest loops I could. While I suppose an infinite loop would technically be the largest, I found the idea of an exponentially increasing loop to be more exciting. Now, each night before I go to sleep, I reprogram my mind with this loop:

> My ability to bring amazing things into the world is exponentially increasing.

What will this simple thought bring over a lifetime of repeating it? I intend to find out.

You can believe that your mind creates your internal reality, and to a large degree your external reality as well. Using imagination, you can learn to not only be happier and think more positively but to create bigger and better things for yourself and the world: to create your own “reality distortion field.”

Thinking big, however, is easier said than done! Developing big plans requires programming your best possible future, a pleasurable technique of mind hacking that you’ll learn next.

[2.2]

“If you can’t conceive of things that don’t exist, you can’t create anything new. If you can’t dream up worlds that might be, then you are limited to the worlds other people describe.”

—Robert S. Root-Bernstein and Michele M. Root-Bernstein, Sparks of Genius 1

What do you want?

Perhaps you have relatively modest dreams, like graduating with honors, or finding your soul mate, or becoming a millionaire. Maybe your ambitions are greater, like eradicating a major disease, or building a world-changing charity, or running a nation. Or perhaps we’re really thinking big together: inventing a new branch of science, or colonizing other planets, or improving the mental state of the human race.

It’s easy to figure out what you don’t want: they’re the things you’re always complaining about, to yourself and everyone else. But do you know what you want ? Have you written it down? If you get the dreaded job interview question “Where do you see yourself in twenty years?” will you have a thoughtful answer, or will you draw a blank?

In a fascinating study by psychologist Laura King, 2college students were asked to write for twenty minutes a day about their “best possible future self.” She challenged them to stretch their imaginations to envision the biggest, best-case scenario for their lives. After just a few days, the test subjects who spent the time imagining a positive future were significantly happier and more positive than a control group. Another longer-term study by King showed that writing positively made them healthier as well, with fewer visits to doctors. 3