Ryan Daniel Moran argues that people's beliefs and internal narratives shape perceived limits and outcomes. He explains that we adopt "thermostats" of expectation (using income as an example) which regulate performance, and challenges listeners to pursue goals that push beyond past expectations—i.e., to "think bigger" rather than only doing incremental work.
Alright, so let's talk a little bit about the topic of thinking bigger. So as I have gone into the pool of self development, you realize that all of your stories and thoughts are bullshit. And because all of your stories and thoughts are bullshit, you can reframe whatever thoughts and stories you want and find evidence to make them true. Our brains do that constantly where we decide what it is that we believe and then we find the justification for it. And most of our lives are run by these unconscious or subconscious patterns. Most of our lives are run by the beliefs that we have adopted. And then we continue to find evidence for them over and over and over and over and over and over again. And this is how we end up seeing the world. For example, one of my beliefs would be government isn't as efficient as markets. That's a belief of mine and I can give you a hundred different reasons about why that's true. And somebody who believes that government is more effective than markets would debate me and bring a hundred reasons about why that is true. The reality though is that they're all bullshit. Now how does this apply to this topic of thinking bigger? It applies to this topic because we have all, all adopted a certain belief about what we think is big or hard. We've all come to conclusions about what our capabilities are, what our needs are and our expectations are. And we now have all of these justifications for why those things are true. If you are making $80,000 a year, it is likely the result of you coming to the conclusion that $80,000 is, is possible and reasonable for you. And you have all these justifications about why that makes sense. It's very rare that somebody would make $80,000 a year and be sitting there going, you have no idea that they're so overpaying me. That usually doesn't happen. If you're surprised by something for long enough, you end up finding reasons to justify a lower amount and you end up going down. Tony Robbins talks about this like the thermostat. He says most of us have a thermostat in our mind of what our expectations should be. So in the topic of money, if our expectation is to make $80,000 a year and we're only making $50,000 a year, we tend to kick on the heat and raise up our level of performance in order to meet our standards and our expectations. But if we start making $100,000 a year, we start to turn on the cooling jets and cool things down and bring them down to $80,000 a year. So in our mind is a kind of thermostat. The question becomes can you change the thermostat? And how can you? So the question of are you thinking big enough? Simply comes down to answering this question. Are you thinking at the level that your past performance has led you to expect? Or are you building something that feels completely out of reach, knowing that there will be new capabilities and capacities that come into your awareness later as a result of you pursuing this much bigger project? And that question will determine whether or not you stay stuck or you stay in an ever growing pursuit of growth. If you are pursuing goals that simply require you to show up and do the work over and over and over and over again until you get there, I would challenge that you are not thinking big enough.
