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

Helping other people also makes you accountable. If you are helping someone else get sober, you are putting yourself in a position where you don’t want to let the other person down. It strengthens your resolve to stay sober yourself, as you’re now the role model! Without question, one of the best things about being a parent is that it has made me a better person. I strive to live a life that is worthy of being emulated, since I know my personal example is likely the biggest help I can give my children.

When you help other people, you also alter your self-concept. You slowly move from “a drunk who gets drunk” to “a recovering alcoholic who helps alcoholics to recover.” With mind hacking, we’re trying to change who we are, and nothing changes us more quickly than playing the part . If we’re trying to stay sober, it’s hugely beneficial to serve in a role where we have to stay sober.

These benefits come to you, no matter what you’re trying to achieve with mind hacking. Look for opportunities to collaborate where you can actively help others . If you’re trying to start a business, get involved with an entrepreneurial networking group. If you’re trying to lose weight, try weight-loss support groups like Weight Watchers. If you’re trying to develop the next killer app, attend mobile developer meetups. And always with the spirit of service : not What will I get out of this? but What can I give to this?

When getting my MBA, one of my favorite classes was called Leadership and Influence. In that class, I learned the powerful concept of reciprocity , the idea that if I do something nice for you, you will be favorably disposed to do something nice for me. This is why we write thank-you notes, and why we feel awkward when someone gives us a holiday gift and we don’t have a gift in return. It’s deeply embedded in our society, possibly even in our biology.

You know the “mystery box” in certain video games that will reward you with some mystery surprise? Maybe it’s a power-up, or bonus coins, or even an extra life. Every time we help someone else, it’s like dropping a mystery box that will later bring us some small unexpected reward. Helping people makes them want to help you.

Even though it’s called mind hacking, we can’t keep it all in our minds. We’ve got to collaborate, because helping others helps ourselves.

MIND GAME

Share the Dream

Share one of your positive loops with someone else: a friend, relative, or other trusted confidant. Be brave! Research shows that sharing your goals with someone else makes you more likely to achieve them. 13

Write down this person’s name on the practice sheet at the end of the book.

You’re Soaking in It

The mind hacking program is open source because we want it to be collaborative. But radical collaboration, like the kind that fueled Wikipedia, is radically scary. If you think it was an easy decision to post this entire book online, months before Mind Hacking was available in stores, you’d be wrong. Traditional publishing wisdom says that this is crazy, but I credit my publisher for having the courage to try something new. (“Times were tough growing up,” my editor Jeremie likes to joke. “My father was a door-to-door Wikipedia salesman.”)

Crowdsourcing the book, however, has made it so much better. (The first version, for example, was written using only vowels.) We’ve had thousands of people read Mind Hacking , and they’ve given us feedback ranging from typos and fact-checks to major structural changes. Like Allen Downey’s programming textbook, this has let us quickly iterate and test new versions of the book, seeing where people get “stuck” and pulling the difficult material forward, like Downey’s analogy of pull-out bleachers.

The takeaway: Don’t collaborate halfheartedly; strive for radical collaboration. Swallow your pride, take the attitude of a student, and just get yourself out there . Stretch yourself! You’ll learn all kinds of surprising things when you connect with other people, like what you thought would be obvious often needs extra explanation.

For example, by far the most common question we’ve received from our test readers is “Do you mind if I share Mind Hacking ? I know someone who really needs to read this book.”

So, for the record: YES! Please share this book!

For heaven’s sake,

Collaborate!

[3.5]

Whether You Wish to Model a Flower in Wax;

to Serve a Relish for Breakfast or Supper;

to Plan a Dinner for a Large Party or a Small One;

to Cure a Headache;

to Bury a Relative;

Whatever You May Wish to Do, Make, or to Enjoy,

Provided Your Desire has Relation to the Necessities of Domestic Life,

I Hope You will not Fail to ‘Enquire Within.’

—Editor’s Introduction, Enquire Within upon Everything 1

In the mid-1800s, Enquire Within upon Everything was a popular encyclopedia found in many Victorian homes. It covered everything a modern family could possibly need to know, from the rules of etiquette to drafting a will. The first editions contained thousands of concise instructions on problems like getting rid of the bad smell in a freshly painted room (burn a handful of juniper berries) to how to administer an opium enema (three grains of opium, two ounces of starch, two ounces of warm water, then pass out).

You can imagine a bright, curious child being absolutely spellbound by such a treasure trove of information, particularly before the invention of screens. Young Tim Berners-Lee, growing up in England in the 1960s, was lucky enough to have a copy of Enquire Within in his household, and he spent hours poring over its how-to instructions on parlor games, natural remedies, and household tips. There was something inspiring about this massive collection of random advice presented in a coherent structure.

After graduating from Oxford in the 1970s with a degree in physics, Berners-Lee landed a contract job at CERN, the mother of all physics labs. In his research, he repeatedly found himself frustrated by needing some small bit of information that his mind refused to serve up, and his thoughts would frequently drift back to Enquire Within upon Everything . If only there was a way to present all the world’s information in some readily available format, so you could instantly pull up any random fact you needed!

This was the vision that formed in his mind—all the world’s information, readily accessible—but it was only the first part of the vision. The second part was that, by getting all the information into computers, we could then use computers to help us crunch all that information. Once all the information was catalogued— all the information—computers could show us how to make our work more efficient, our relations more peaceful, our lives better.

Berners-Lee didn’t just sit around dreaming: he made a decision to act. His first attempt was a simple program that had pages of information called “cards,” and hyperlinks between the cards. 2This system served two purposes: it let him share his projects with other CERN research scientists, but it also allowed him to easily access their projects. It was collaboration in action. Thinking back to the Victorian reference guide, he called the program ENQUIRE.

ENQUIRE, like Nupedia, was ultimately not a success: it wasn’t open enough. There were constraints around the types of information that could be linked, which turned out to be a deal breaker. “One had to be able to jump from software documentation to a list of people to a phone book to an organizational chart to whatever,” Berners-Lee recalled, once again invoking the mysteriously prophetic word “whatever.” 3