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

The small, repeatable goal of staying sober freed up all that mental energy. It was like I had been swimming with a cinder block chained to my waist, and I was able to remove the padlock and let the cinder block drop free. I was then able to focus all that newfound energy back on my own negative loops, gradually untangling the knots of buggy code, then reprogramming my mind to achieve more positive and constructive goals.

Each day I practiced my concentration exercises, each time I repeated my positive loops, I was pushing the swing a little higher. Like a pendulum, I found the system gives you energy back, swinging you higher and higher. I began making goals for the real world, expanding my business, my network, my vision of what we can achieve together. Once you find the natural cycle, you can gradually add energy to increase those cycles.

With this book, with this crowdsourced system of mind hacking, my hope is that you can begin pushing your own swing higher and higher. And not just you but thousands and millions of mind hackers worldwide. I can think of no higher swing than all of us learning how to harness the human mind together.

Increasing Your Willpower

Let’s say you make a tiny goal of walking for five minutes a day. No I’m going to the gym every day until I can fit in a size 1 dress , just I’m going to park my car at the far end of the parking lot at work . And because this is a LASER goal, you can actually achieve it.

After a few weeks of accomplishing your goal, you’re feeling pretty good. You find yourself saying, Hey, I’m already walking; may as well walk around the parking lot once more before I go home . You tell a friend about your little experiment, and the two of you start doing it together.

Then you find yourself thinking about how to log your walks. You spend the money for an exercise tracker, and now you and your friend start sharing data with each other. Maybe you start setting daily goals and sharing them via social network.

Now you’re taking longer walks over lunch, and soon you’re finding that you have more energy and you’re less winded than when you started. You realize you’d be even less winded if you stopped smoking, so you buy a box of nicotine patches and start drinking a lot of water instead.

After a few weeks, you have even more energy, so you take the money you were spending on cigarettes and buy a cheap gym membership. You and your friend now meet before work, and you find that the early-morning workout actually helps you get more accomplished on the job.

After another few months of this, your boss dies of a meat-related heart attack and, noticing the amazing job you have done, senior management promotes you to his position at a 21 percent raise. Now you’re not only feeling better, you’re making more money and you have more power.

You begin to see ways of improving your small team, so you begin implementing some of the methods of mind hacking that you’ve learned here. After six months, your team is transformed into the highest-performing team in the company, and senior management begins to take notice.

At this point, you realize there is an amazing opportunity in this market that your company does not see. You quit your job and create an app that quickly grows to one hundred million users. Within a year, a Chinese tech company offers to buy your app for one hundred million dollars, or a dollar per user.

With that money, you join a group of investors trying to create a crowdsourced solution for worldwide peace. Recruiting the world’s thousand richest people, the group pools together trillions of dollars, eventually overcoming the world’s war budget and establishing planetary happiness.

So you see, the five-minute walk was time well spent.

This is what author Charles Duhigg calls a “keystone habit.” Often, creating one positive habit—always through a series of LASER-like goals—will start a domino effect with other positive changes. You often see this happen with recovering alcoholics: within a year, they’ve not only stopped drinking but quit smoking and lost weight, and are having the best sex of their lives. It doesn’t always happen this way, but it happens often enough to notice: one positive change can have cascading effects through your life.

In Willpower , Baumeister and Tierney point to new research studies showing that willpower is a kind of energy, a battery that can be recharged. They outline various methods of increasing willpower, such as exercise, sleep, and concentration, which in turn increase your power to act. Similarly, the Mind Games throughout this book are designed to increase your mental energy, which will increase your willpower, which will increase your ability to make meaningful change in the world.

The swing goes higher and higher.

The Final Frontier

Here’s a final question to ponder: Who are you?

We started out by establishing that you are not your mind. But if “you” are not your mind, then who—or what— is the “you”?

Thinking deeply about this question will reveal a weird recursive loop. If “I” am watching “me,” then who is the “I” who’s watching that ? It seems to echo back into infinity, like:

• The long tunnel of reflections when you stand between two mirrors

• The “infinite video loop” that occurs when you point a video camera at a monitor displaying the live feed

• Audio feedback, which is sound from the speaker being amplified by the microphone in a self-reinforcing loop

• Recursive acronyms (like Richard Stallman’s GNU, which stands for GNU’s Not Unix, but then what does GNU stand for? )

• Fractals, which are made of patterns that repeat themselves at any scale

• Much of the work of M. C. Escher, such as the two hands drawing each other

• The Department of Redundancy Department

• Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

Who are you? You’re the one viewing “you.” But then who are you ?

Here is where we enter the realm of the philosopher and the mystic. But I want to encourage a more scientific, exploratory approach to this question. Embrace the question like a geek. After all, recursion (bits of code that can call themselves) is a central idea of programming: to calculate factorials, for example, we create a function that can continually call itself, until all the factorials have been determined. “To understand recursion,” as the geek joke goes, “one must first understand recursion.”

Finding the real “you” shows you the limits of our current models. There is no satisfying logical answer to the question, because the “you” seems to always jump one step outside your objective mind. Even if you’re a crazy-smart logic genius who can hold six levels of recursion in your head, you’re still an infinity away from solving the problem.

Finding the you behind “you” is the ultimate mystery. Star Trek was wrong: space is not the final frontier. This is the final frontier, this exploration beyond the mind. We’ve been calling this infinite frontier “you,” but that’s as far as words can take us. We cannot put a name on it, because to name it is to bring it back into the realm of the mind. If we try to describe its attributes, we are only pulling away pieces of it, like taffy. What is behind the mind?

This is what we have been leading up to, what all this work is about. As you learn to get your mind out of the way, to control it rather than being controlled by it, something else opens up. The “you” that’s now controlling the mind—that mysterious frontier—is ultimately what we’re after. Throughout this book are scattered clues that explain the nature of this frontier. They are hidden in every chapter. If you search for them diligently, you will find them. It is, I believe, life’s most satisfying search.