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

Method #3: Self-Simulation

There’s a final hack for running effective mental simulations: Imagine yourself in the third person .

When I’m preparing for a speech, I don’t see it through my own eyes, looking out at the audience. I simulate it from the audience point of view, as others would see me. I hear it and feel it like I want others to hear it and feel it. In other words, instead of imagining yourself from the first-person or virtual reality POV, it’s more effective to see yourself as others would see you, like a movie, with you in the starring role.

In a study by Lisa Libby from Ohio State University, the researchers called one hundred registered voters the day before the 2004 U.S. presidential election. They asked each of their test subjects to mentally simulate driving to their local polling location, standing in line, filling out the ballot, and turning it in. For half the group, they instructed them to see themselves voting from the first-person perspective (like an extremely boring version of Halo ), and the other half from the third-person perspective (like C-SPAN).

When the researchers followed up after the election, they found just over 70 percent of the first-person group went to the polls, while a whopping 90 percent of the third-person group followed through and voted. 19It may be that third-person mental simulations have a stronger impact on your self-perception, making you more likely to follow through in the real world. Or it may be that seeing yourself in the “mind movie” encourages a higher-order level of thinking. However it works, it’s one more protip I hope you’ll find useful.

MIND GAME

The Simulator

After completing your daily concentration game and writing down your positive loops, spend sixty seconds doing a mental simulation on one of these loops, using one of the techniques mentioned here:

• Shall We Play a Game: simulating the steps involved with getting to your goal

• Block and Tackle: simulating specific difficulties and how you will overcome them

• Self-Simulation: seeing yourself in the third person

Check off the day’s simulation on your practice sheet.

So far in Mind Hacking , we’ve focused almost exclusively on our own minds. All the tools and techniques we’ve learned, however, have been in preparation for the final two sections, in which we show how to actively make change in the “real” world. What is the mysterious process by which all this mind hacking alters reality?

Now that our minds are humming like a Cray supercomputer, it’s time to connect them with the minds of others. If you think one computer is powerful, imagine what it can do when it’s hooked up to the cloud.

[3.4]

The first version of Wikipedia was a failure.

Jimmy Wales was a web entrepreneur who had found modest success with an online content company called Bomis. Wales had a lifelong interest in knowledge—as a child, he pored over Brittanica s and World Book Encyclopedia s—and he funneled some of the Bomis cash into a far more ambitious enterprise: a comprehensive online encyclopedia called Nupedia.

He hired his friend Larry Sanger as editor in chief of Nupedia. Wales and Sanger had met on a discussion forum, where they debated the philosophy of Ayn Rand (Wales was a fan, Sanger was not). The two men had something of the “odd couple” dynamic of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak: Wales was the hard-driving entrepreneur who majored in finance and worked briefly at an options trading firm. Sanger was a doughy, balding academic who had a PhD in philosophy and played the violin.

Wales was largely hands-off: it was Sanger who made all the countless day-to-day decisions, including how Nupedia would be set up. Sanger’s specialty was epistemology , the study of knowledge, and he came from the academic community, with its peer review systems and high standards of quality. As he designed the online encyclopedia, his challenge was to allow online collaboration in a way that still maintained overall quality .

Nupedia, he decided, would be written by volunteers. But unlike Wikipedia, which lets anyone create or edit an article, Nupedia would only accept volunteers who were scholars or subject-matter experts, greatly limiting the available pool of writers. Moreover, Nupedia had a seven-step review process before an article would be accepted. Each submission was reviewed by professional editors—preferably with a PhD—before a page could be published.

This painstaking peer review process was meant to ensure that only facts made it through the filter: they were competing, after all, with esteemed reference sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica , legendary for their quality and attention to detail. The approval process was so tedious and slow, however, that in the three years of its existence Nupedia only published twenty-five approved articles .

After a year, Sanger and Wales were frustrated with the lack of progress. When they learned about wikis—online documents that anyone could create or edit—they launched a wiki version of Nupedia, which they originally thought would simply help people create “rough drafts” for Nupedia. The Nupedia community of professional academics recoiled at the idea of collaborating with the masses: an encyclopedia that would let anyone submit content? Without a degree?

So Sanger created a separate domain, Wikipedia.com(the .org would come later), and sent out his now-famous request to the Nupedia discussion list. “Humor me,” he said. “Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” 1

While many of the Nupedia contributors refused to participate in the collaborative experiment, others did. It launched in January 2001, and within days, Wikipedia had published more articles than Nupedia. By the end of January, the site had six hundred articles; by March, that number had doubled; by May, it had doubled again. By the end of its first year, users had created over twenty thousand encyclopedia entries . Thanks to its “radical collaboration,” Wikipedia went into hypergrowth mode, while Nupedia was eventually shut down with its original twenty-five well-researched articles.

Sanger is, in my mind, the unsung hero of the Wikipedia story. Wales will likely be remembered as the founder of Wikipedia, but Sanger did all the heavy lifting, handling the countless political problems of managing an online community. (If you’ve never done it yourself, it’s like childbirth: you can’t imagine it unless you go through it.) Reflecting on the success of Wikipedia, Sanger observed:

Radical collaboration, in which (in principle) anyone can edit any part of anyone else’s work, is one of the great innovations of the open source software movement. On Wikipedia, radical collaboration made it possible for work to move forward on all fronts at the same time, to avoid the big bottleneck that is the individual author, and to burnish articles on popular topics to a fine luster. 2

In other words, this radical collaborationnot only allowed more pages to be created, it allowed more people to work on them, for a longer period of time. Articles could be polished in public, rather than only publishing when perfect. It’s difficult to appreciate now how utterly counterintuitive it is to allow rough drafts to be published in a definitive reference work like an encyclopedia. But Sanger says this “early collaboration” was also critical to Wikipedia’s success:

We encouraged putting up their unfinished drafts—as long as they were at least roughly correct—with the idea that they can only improve if there are others collaborating. This is a classic principle of open source software. It helped get Wikipedia started and helped keep it moving. This is why so many original drafts of Wikipedia articles were basically garbage . . . and also why it is surprising to the uninitiated that many articles have turned out very well indeed. 3