PNTV: Mind Hacking by Sir John Hargrave (#304)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Mind Hacking by Sir John Hargrave. Mind Hacking subtitle How to change your mind for good in 21 days John Hargrave is a funny guy. He's a comedian and also a tech geek. He created one of the earliest humor sites out there. He's since gone on to write a couple of books. One of our members recommended this one and it's awesome. Surprisingly awesome, actually. Super funny, as you bet, from a comedian writing it. And also really, really practical. Making the idea of getting our minds right something we can approach as a big game, which is some of what we're going to talk about today. So Philosopher's Note, bunch of my favorite big ideas. We're going to look at five of my favorites here. The first, we'll start with Mind hacking. So the basic idea of the book John uses our mind and a computer. A computer is a metaphor for our mind, right? We can either be just a normal user of our mind, our computer, right? Or we can be a super user. We can be a hacker. And he defines a hacker as essentially someone who's super passionate about optimizing code, right? About figuring out the best possible way to do something. Most elegant, beautiful, powerful way to write code. That's a hacker in its purest sense, right? Whereas the normal user is like, whatever, I'll just do the basic bare minimum. So we want to be hackers, we want to be optimizers as we approach our mind. And we can think of it like Jedi concentration, development. He says that ultimately, at the end of the day, your mind is where all of your power comes from. He says we need to do two things to train like a Jedi to get our minds right. We need to reclaim our attention and we need to retrain our attention. If you want to be a Jedi, right, and get the concentration levels of a true Jedi, you need to reclaim and retrain. Reclaim is basically to reduce all of the distractions. So all of the things that are taking you away from being present, all of the push notifications, your email notifications, your obsessive checking of email, checking in on every single thing that comes into your level of awareness, you need to reclaim that attention because it's paper cutting you. As we talk about again and again and again in episodes like Deep Work and solving the procrastination puzzle and the procrastination equation, we talk about how distraction is one of the key ways to destroy your motivation and overall sense of Flourishing. So you need to reclaim your attention by removing distractions. John says spend an hour looking at all the ways you allow yourself to be distracted and remove those distractions. Unsubscribe from all the newsletters. You don't need to get right. Turn off all the notifications. Learn how to go into airplane mode on your smartphone. Right. Reclaim your attention. That's part one. Part part two of being that Jedi concentrating superhero human is to retrain your attention. This he calls mind games. You need to play mind games to cultivate your concentration. Nothing is more important, as we discuss all the time, than being able to put your mind where you want, when you want. There's a word for, for this type of practice. It's called meditation. Only he doesn't call it meditation. He calls it mind games. You need to approach building your concentration muscles like you do playing a game. He's got a ton of different variations of how you can play these mind games, and he strongly encourages us to do it on a daily basis. 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes a day. Show up and play your mind game. He says the rest of the book is based on you doing this. Put playing your concentration mind games. One of the funny ones is to imagine you sit down. Normal meditation. You sit down, you get all comfortable, all that good stuff. We talk about it in detail in Meditation 101. You're focusing on your breath in his little exercise. And then when a thought comes up, which it inevitably will do, you blast it like it's an alien with your attention. You focus your mind on that thought. And when you focus your mind on that thought, it dissolves. You blast that alien. That mind game is called Alien Blasters. It's got a bunch of other funny ones. But the idea here is approach it like a game. This isn't a big deal. And then when your attention wanders, don't get upset about it. Celebrate the fact that you brought your attention back and counted on your finger. Oh, wow, I did it once. How many times am I going to be able to do it during this meditation? Make it a game. Build your concentration Jedi style. Second big idea is debugging your mind. You need to debug your mind. So if you're a hacker looking to optimize code, you need to get rid of all the bugs, right? If there's bad code where there's a loop that's just not working, it's not doing the thing you want it to do. You need to, as a mind hacker, get into your mind and figure out how to get rid of that. Right. And optimize it with a positive loop. He says we all have different mental bugs. Sometimes they're hard to find because they've been programmed over years and decades. But the easiest way to start is to look at areas of your life that just aren't working. Where do you have pain? Is it in your relationships with your health? Maybe depression or anxiety or some addictions? Or your bank balance? What areas of your life can use some help? Right. Look at one, whichever one you want to work on, and then see if you can figure out what story you're telling yourself again and again and again. We need to debug the thought loops, the negative thought loops that are creating that experience for you. It was interesting because as I was preparing for this, I've developed the habit of a positive thought loop. Before I do one of these videos, I get excited about it. I just recorded the MP3, which we share with our members after doing the PDF this morning. And then I go through setting up the studio and getting everything ready, donning the black shirt, all that good stuff, and I say to myself, I just noticed I didn't even do it deliberately. This is going to be awesome. This is going to be awesome. This is going to be awesome. Literally, it was going through my head. It was a positive thought loop. Now, that motivates me to have fun with this and hopefully help one person with one big idea. But if I had a negative thought loop of this is going to suck. Oh, man, I can't believe I have to do this today. This is going to be such a bummer. I hate doing those. What a pain. Guess what? I would never do these. Negative thought loop, positive thought loop. We need to debug the negative thought loops. So for health, for example, you might have the story of I hate exercising. If that's your negative recurring thought loop, guess what? You're not going to exercise. You need to identify that and switch it, pivot it, hack it, debug it, such that you start saying things like, hey, exercise gives me energy, doesn't take away energy, gives me energy. And you might even get to the point where you say, I love exercising. Positive thought loop. Much more likely to exercise than I hate exercising. So figure out what negative thought loops you have in your life and see if you can turn it into a positive thought that's debugging your mind. Third big idea is the best version of you in 10 years. So he cites some great research that we come back to again and again and again on creating a vision of your best self in 10 years. Research has been done on college students where they're asked to write for 20 minutes a day the best possible version of themselves in 10 years. Think about everything coming together, right? You work hard, you put all these ideas into place. You're finding ways to give your gifts and service to the world. Living with a little more virtue. Get a little bit lucky. What's your life look like in 10 years? What does it look like? Who are you spending time with? How's your energy level, what's your bank balance look like? How are you making a difference in the world? What do you do for fun, where do you live, etc. Get a vision of what your best self looks like in 10 years. In our last episode on Living Forward, we said that our vision for our future needs to have pull power. It needs to make us excited if we want to be motivated. Right? That's an excited version of us looking at our 10 year vision, moving toward it now in the research studies, just a few days of doing this Best Selves diary led to better mood, it led to better health, all the things that we want to experience. So this is one of the key ways to build our optimism and hope muscles is to imagine your best self in 10 years. What do you want? John jokes. He's like, look, seriously, spend five minutes doing this. If you can't get yourself to spend five minutes on something that could literally be the difference between a life of, as he says, sorrow and frustration vis a vis true happiness and fulfillment and actualization, then you need to check in on your priorities. So five minutes, I strongly encourage you to figure out, just spend five minutes. Doesn't need to be perfect. Doing it is better than thinking it needs to be and just getting it done. First version, barely good enough is one of the ways he describes it. Another technology idea, right? Just barely. Good enough. Doesn't need to be perfect. Done is better than perfect. Take some time, map out where you want to be in 10 years. Fourth big idea is Ben Franklin. Super inspiring. You probably know at this stage that Ben Franklin set himself up with these different virtues that he wanted to optimize. He, he called it his moral perfection project. Moral perfection, that was the game that Ben Franklin, as one of the earliest mind hackers, was playing. 13 virtues that he wanted to cultivate in his life. Mapped them all out. I want to cultivate my humility, my temperance, my silence, my industry. Thirteen of them, right? We chat about them briefly in the note. I need to cover his autobiography as well. And then he created this little Grid, right? Where he had his 13 virtues listed like that. And then he'd have these little boxes. They're listed here, right? He'd have these little boxes Monday through Sunday, and he'd check it out and he'd say, judge himself. At the end of every single day, did he pass or did he fail on each of those virtues? And each week he'd spend focused on one in particular. So 13 virtues, four cycles through over the course of a year, he'd be able to focus on this virtue for a week while still looking at how we've done the others, focus on the next one and go through that moral perfection project. Incredibly inspiring. If you were going to identify what virtues you wanted to embody in order to create this ideal future for yourself, what would your virtues be? What? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Go nuts. 13 virtues would you aspire to create in your life? And what's the number one virtue that would be most important for you to embody? John's got some awesome exercises to help us identify all this stuff. But think about it. For me, you could probably guess it's arete. That's the meta virtue that I'm so excited to cultivate moment to moment to moment. Can I show up as my highest self, which drives all the other kind of micro virtues, if you will. Ben Franklin, remember him? Ultimate mind hacker, super inspiring moral perfection project. How's your moral perfection project look? And then the fifth big idea is what's in the way. So John tells the story of Pete Carroll and his Seahawks and a leading sports psychologist with whom Pete worked in order to create such an extraordinary organization. With the Seahawks, basically they had dinner together and they were talking about what they could do, and Pete said, hey, how about we build a masterpiece together? What do you say? Let's do that. Let's create a masterpiece. And this guy, I think his name is Gervais, Michael Gervais, would come in and he'd do a number of different things. One of the stories that John shares in the book is that he would have his athletes imagine themselves performing at their absolute best. Peak performance, right? High stress situation, whatever. Peak performance. What did it feel like to be at their best? Who were they at their absolute best? And then he would say, what gets in the way? Where they would focus is what gets in the way of you being that best version of yourself more and more consistently. It's an amazing thing. So we want to hold this ideal vision of ourselves with reality and with the things that get in the way. And John talks about Gabrielle Oettingen in her research, you remember Whoop, right? We need to have our positive fantasy for the future, but we can't stop there. Science is unequivocal. That actually doesn't work. We need to rub it up against reality and see the challenges. What gets in the way of us showing up as our highest self more consistently? Think about it for yourself. Imagine you performing at your best, having an absolute masterpiece day. What does that look like for you? What does that feel like? Who are you? What are you doing when you're at your best? Then think about what gets in the way of you being that more consistently? What kryptonites do you have? What negative behaviors do you have that you. You need to debug such that you can more consistently show up at your highest self? If you feel yourself moving into that negative behavior, then you'll do this. Implementation Intentions, which we've talked about in a number of contexts. Check out habits101 for more on how to install those habits and debug the negative ones. But think about that ideal. What gets in the way? What's your plan to deal with it is a way to become a Jedi superhero. Remember Ben Franklin? Seeing these moral exemplars is what a number of teachers call them, right? And studying their lives is deeply inspiring. It gives us a sense of what's possible within us. So do that more and more often and know that if they can do it, you can do it. What's the best you look like in 10 years? Take those five minutes to journal it and then show up consistently hitting that rock, getting a little bit more clarity. Debug your mind. Whatever areas of your life you might be struggling in, know that there's a negative loop underneath it. If we can get in there and debug that negative loop, install a positive loop, we can improve that part of our lives with not just the attitude, of course, but the consistent action as well. And then Jedi concentration. Who doesn't want to have the concentration of a Jedi? You gotta reclaim all the distract, all the energy that's being leaked, right? And you need to retrain via your mind games, whether that's Alien Blasters, whatever you do, work on your concentration. It's your mental fundamentals. We've got eating, we've got moving. We've got sleeping. Concentration is the fundamental, I used to say. And we need to train our minds now. It's eat, move, sleep, concentrate, focus. Center your mind. It's where concentrate means to focus your mind at the center point of your choice at will. No greater challenge and no greater opportunity in today's world than to do that mind hacking. Thank you John and hope you enjoyed this quick look. If you did, I think you'll like the book. If you're a geek kind of technology guy or girl or married to a geek, I think this might be a great book to introduce yourself or others to these types of ideas. Hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube, so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. 10 bucks a month Join the Optimal Living Membership Program. 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