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

Here’s a mini-version of King’s experiment: Close your eyes and imagine your life in ten years, with your best possible outcome. Try to picture your best possible future in vivid detail. Where will you live? What will you do for work? For fun? Will you have a partner? What kinds of friends will you have? How much money will you have? What will your mind look like?

Go on. Close your eyes and see what you find. I’ll wait.

Most people have a vague idea of what they want out of life, but they’ve never taken the time to imagine it. If you ask them point-blank, they might give you a vague answer like “More money,” or “Happiness,” or “A pony.”

Instead of captaining their own ship, most people float wherever the waves take them. How is it that something as important as our future , the thing that should matter above all else, gets so little attention? I believe the answer is simple: imagination is difficult .

When I try to imagine the exercise above, it’s like seeing a series of images flashing through my mind, but dark and hazy, like a grainy video. If I feed more questions into the stream, I get more pictures. For example: In my best possible future, how do I want to feel? Who are my celebrity friends? How many zebras do I own? Have I learned to levitate? Each one of these brings a series of accompanying images, slippery and fluid. It’s hard to hold on to any of them, as they’re instantly replaced with something else.

Worse, my mind keeps wanting to change the subject, to follow some other train of thought—the disobedient dog again. So keeping it focused on the object of my imagination, to persist without giving up , is quite difficult.

I challenge you to spend the next five minutes really picturing what you want your life to look like in ten years. If you can’t invest five minutes thinking about what you want to become, you have to seriously question your priorities. These five minutes could mean the difference between a life of confusion and sorrow and a life of happiness and fulfillment. What could be more important than that?

In fact, unless you live your life under the assumption that riches, relationships, and rock stars are going to suddenly fall from the sky, it’s just an obvious fact that you’re going to need to figure out what you want from life. And the way you figure that out is in your mind. You imagine it .

Take five minutes and imagine. I’m patient.

Does your experience agree with mine? Did you find it incredibly challenging to spend five minutes in imagination? It’s odd that something as important as your personal future—arguably the most important thing in your life —would be so difficult to focus on. But that’s the way it is with imagination.

Imagination is hard mental work. To really imagine well, in my experience, is as difficult as actual physical work. Note: I am not talking about following the “mind movie” or being caught in a daydream; I’m talking about actively imagining, focusing your mind on creating a clear mental picture. It feels more like work. It feels like moving things around with your mind, creating mental schemas or blueprints or plans.

In mind hacking, we learn to identify the “feel” of imagining, and not to shy away from it but to actively engage in it, with persistence and playfulness. It should feel like manipulating mental objects: real manual work, moving things around. Imagine digging, or sculpting, with your mind. Only through exercising this active visualizing component (like a muscle) can we build up its power and strength.

One Click, One Idea

In 1997, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was having lunch with Amazon’s first employee, Shel Kaphan, and his programmer Peri Hartman. Websites at the time were still clunky, and Bezos was obsessed then, as he is now, with making it as easy as possible for customers to order products from Amazon.com. He issued them a crazy challenge: Invent a way for customers to order from Amazon with a single click . 4

The idea of “1-Click Ordering” is now so natural that we barely notice it. Back then, the idea was nuts. This was a time when the idea of ordering products from a website still made many people nervous. Will my credit card be stolen? How can I see the products first? What if I need to return it? Ordering online seemed risky and weird, much less ordering with one click .

The development team worked like mad to develop the single-click ordering feature. When they showed the first prototype of 1-Click to Bezos, it ended up requiring twelve clicks . They explained to Bezos there were certain steps you simply couldn’t eliminate: a customer had to give Amazon a mailing address, for example, and a credit card number. Customers needed a confirmation screen so they wouldn’t place an order by accident.

“One click,” Bezos replied.

After many more hours of deliberation, the team came back to Bezos with an improved prototype. This one allowed customers to save their mailing address and credit card information in their accounts (another crazy idea for the time), then make a purchase with one click. But they still needed one more click to confirm that the customer wanted to make the purchase.

There was still just one problem: their one-click ordering system required two clicks .

“One click,” Bezos demanded.

Finally, the team hit upon the solution: let customers place the order with one click, and if they placed it by accident, let them easily cancel the purchase. It seems obvious in retrospect, but good ideas always do. As soon as Amazon showed it was possible, other online retailers rushed to copy the idea. The idea that had recently seemed impossible now seemed indispensable to online success.

And in fact it was. Thanks to the power of that idea, and many others like it, Amazon grew to dominate the online retail industry. And it all started in Bezos’s frighteningly large imagination.

We have a strange attitude toward imagination. When we see it in geniuses like Jeff Bezos, we call it “vision.” When we see it in children, we call it “cute.” When we see it in ourselves, we often call it “a dumb idea” or “a crazy thought.” In reality, however, it’s the same skill: the skill of developing a clear mental picture .

Bezos used nothing but his imagination to transform reality. What did he actually do ? His developers did all the work. Trust me that Bezos was not mocking up wireframes and writing functions. All he did was create a clear mental picture in his mind of what he wanted, then ride the development team until they got it done.

Let’s picture the world of ideas, the world of imagination, as being something like the working memory of a computer. This is a state where the computer is holding a great deal of data “in its head.” It hasn’t been written to a hard drive or saved to the cloud—if you pull the plug, you lose it all. It’s a kind of mental workspace.

Our minds provide that same mental workspace, a place where we can dream, develop, and refine the ideas that will eventually shape our physical world. Imagination is not just a toy for children; it’s the blueprint for reality. And in fact we use imagination every day: to decide where to meet our friends for dinner, or how to tackle a difficult algorithm. It happens up here before it happens out there.

How is it that we do not teach this in schools? There are no high school Imagination teams, no standardized tests for Imagining, no extra credit given for drawing a picture of an insane motorized animal on your biology homework. You do not get an A in history class for writing a short story where Eleanor Roosevelt fights Nazis by shooting lasers from her nipples.