Episode 971 Scott Adams: A Micro Lesson on Affirmations. Can You Program Your Reality?

Hey, everybody, come on in here. Do you want something weird? Do you want to have a really weird 30 or 40 minutes? You came to the right place. You will be tantalized in the brain area. You'll be amused. You might be shocked or amazed. You might think the whole thing is just too weird for you. You never know what's gonna happen in the next 30 or 40 minutes, but it's gonna be good. Those of you who stay to the end, you may never be the same. For sure. You'll be a little older because, you know, 30, 40 minutes, but maybe even better than that. We'll see. I don't want to over promise. All right, today I'm going to talk to you about a thing called affirmations. Now, affirmations, I think, mean different things to different people. So I'll give you my explanation. I'm not talking about the affirmations where you look in the mirror and tell yourself that you're a good person and, you know, gosh darn it, people like you. That's the cartoony version. Now, the real version isn't much less cartoony than that, but it's different. And the real version is that you just write down or repeat in your mind. You could do it out loud, I suppose, 15 times a day, some specific kind of an objective that you have. And the idea is that somehow, and it's the somehow that we'll talk about, that's the fun and weird part. Somehow simply repeating or writing down your objective 15 times a day seems to make it happen. Not every time, obviously. Full disclosure, I've been talking about this topic for decades, and so lots of people have tried it and they've reported back to me. A number of people say they had great results. Other people said they didn't. I didn't do any kind of a scientific poll, so I can't tell you how often it works or doesn't. I feel like people would more likely tell me if it worked. So I probably have a, you know, oversized sense of how. How often it worked. But I will tell you the story from my personal perspective. Some of you have maybe heard it or read about it, and that will form the basis upon which you can judge my credibility. So I'll tell you how I was introduced to this idea, how I used it, what happened. Then I'll tell you a little bit more about the technique. Just takes about a minute. And then we'll talk about what kind of a universe gives you even this conversation. So we're going to get weird after we Talk about it. Okay, so first of all, I wrote about this, just for background, in three different books. The Dilber Future in 1997. God's Debris in Fiction Form, 2001 came out on 9,11ish that week. Bad timing for a book. And then more recently, it had failed almost everything and still went big. If you wanted to just get the. The closest explanation to what I'll be giving you today, it would be in this latter book, how to Fail. So I was a young man in my 20s, and I had a friend who was in Mensa. So Mensa is the high IQ organization. And she was very smart because you have to be to be in there. And she read a book. I don't remember the title of the book, but she was talking to me on the phone about it one day, and she said it taught something called affirmations. And it was this idea of writing down 15 times a day what you wanted. And she said that she tried it skeptically, and a series of coincidences happened, like just bizarre coincidences that caused her to get the thing that she was affirming that she was writing down. And I think she tried it a few times, and she talked about somebody else's experience, and she said, you know, why don't you try it? Now, keep in mind I'm highly skeptical. Maybe you'll think otherwise when we're done, but, you know, I'm not a believer in any kind of supernatural power, luck, magic, horoscopes, you know, pretty much none of it. Yeah, I'm just completely skeptical. So how did she talk me into trying something that has no scientific basis whatsoever and seems like absolute crap? Well, did I mention she was at Mensa? It turns out they're very persuasive. So here was her. It doesn't cost you anything. And if it works, you'll be able to basically rewrite your reality. And you might even recognize the technique from Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs was trying to hire. Was it Scully? He was trying to hire him to be the president, and he didn't want to go. And Jobs said, do you want to sell? Because Scully was head of Pepsi at the time. He said, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or change the world? And he basically resigned that moment, I think. Not quite, but. So that's the power of contrast. So she used the power of contrast on me. Doesn't cost anything. Could change the world. I wish it hadn't been so simple. And also, I was. I was an experimenter. I was a seeker So I would look into almost anything and always will. So no matter how weird the claim, I'll look into it a little bit. I'll check it out. I'm probably not going to be convinced that your seance is real or that you're bending a spoon with your mind. I probably won't be convinced, but I'll look into it. I've got an inquiring mind. So I thought, I'll give it a shot. And she gave me this specific advice. She said, pick something that you know is not going to happen anyway, because what would be the point, right? You'd get your thing that you had been writing down 15 times a day. And then you'd say to yourself, well, that probably would have happened anyway, you know? So she said, pick something unlikely. So I picked something I thought was pretty unlikely, which was to. I'll keep this rated G in case somebody's watching it later. I wanted to, let's say, date a specific woman that I didn't even know. Somebody who was in the company. It was a big company. I didn't know her, didn't know where she worked, didn't know her name. Just somebody I'd seen in the hallway a few times and decided, oh, my goodness. But I picked her as the object of my affirmation because she was so far out of my league. Just sort of wasn't even close, you know, if I'm being properly modest. Wasn't really close. The two of us should never have gone on a date. But we did. And it was because of a series of coincidences that I won't get into. But they were weird ones. Weird, weird coincidences that we even met. I mean, how do you just meet the one stranger in the whole planet you want to meet and just. I didn't even try. It just happened. And then the next thing you know, we're in the elevator at the same time, and the next thing you know, I go to lunch. There she is. Next thing I know, we're on a date. And when it was all done, what did I say to myself? Did I say to myself? Those affirmations worked really well. I got something that I knew could have never happened in any other way. Did I say that? No, I didn't. No, I didn't. What I said to myself was, huh, I guess I have more game than I thought. Who knew? I guess I had more buying power than I thought. So, of course, the experiment was a complete failure because the very thing that she told me to do didn't work. I didn't pick something that I couldn't later convince myself I'd gotten through my own great good looks or talent or something else. So I was like, ah, inconclusive experiment. So not long after that, I got in a bet with somebody at work about whether I could retake the GMATs, the test you take for your to see if you can get into a school to get your mba. And that I would retake the test because I'd taken them before and I had not scored very well. Scored in the 77th percentile, I think, which is not good enough to get into a good school. If I recall, I might have been a little hungover when I took the GMATs the first time. That's the story I'm going to go with. So just go with that. And the person I had the bet with had scored, I think, in the high 80s and was taking one of those review courses to beef up her ability to get an even higher score. And so she should have gone from like 88 to something higher. But they do tell you that you can't really raise your score that much. It's not really iq, but there's not a lot you can do. You can study the tests. And I was telling her, you know, those review classes, they're not going to help you at all. And she said, oh, yeah, they will. I said, no, I don't think you will. I think it's a scam. She said, no, no, these. It's going to make a big difference. So I made a bet. The dumbest thing I've ever done, maybe. No, I've done a lot of dumb things. One of the dumb things I've done, I made a bet. I said that I will take the test at the same time you do, because I was thinking about taking it again anyway and I will score your score even though I was in the high 70s, you were in the high 80s and you're taking a special class to get into the 90s, which you would need to get into Berkeley because you wanted to go to Berkeley. And you'd have to get into somewhere in the low to mid-90s to get into Berkeley at the time. So it was the dumbest bet because what were the odds that would happen? So I used my affirmations and because I had taken the test before, I knew what the little output looked like. The mail that you get that says, here's your score and it says in this little box. And I decided that I would pick as my target for my affirmations, 94. So in order for this to happen, I would somehow, without taking any kind of a review course, magically go from 77 to 94. Now, I don't know if it's ever been done, but that's a really big ask, right? So I thought that is sufficiently impossible that if that happens, I'm going to say, maybe there is something here. So I visualized the exact mailer, assuming it would be similar to the one before. It turned out it was. And I just imagined seeing a 94 in that percentile thing. But I did take some practice tests just on my own, because that was okay. I didn't have a tutor or anything. I was just taking the practice tests. And every time I took a practice test, I scored high 70s percentile, just like the first time. So I'd take another one and about the same, and every one right in that zone. I'd take it in the morning, I'd take it with coffee. I'd take it under every condition, a bunch of practice tests, and every time, high 70s. So it wasn't looking good for Scott. The day comes, I take the test, she takes the test. Time goes by, and I go to the mailbox, and there's the result. I go back to my little apartment, my moldy little apartment in the Haight district of San Francisco, living there by myself, Very sad place. And I opened up the result, and I looked for the little box where I knew the percentile would be. And there was a number. It was 94. And I looked at it, and I thought, I'm obviously looking at the wrong box. Am I looking at, like, a code or something? Is it a code? This actually says 94. And I looked at it and I thought, it can't actually be 94. Like, not literally 94. And I would look at it and I'd say, I think it is. And for hours, this actually happened for hours, I would look at that piece of paper, and I would sit just all alone in my little apartment in San Francisco, and I'd set it down next to me, and I would lean back and I'd think, I'm not sure that just happened. And I'd have to pick it up and look at it again. And I kept doing that all night. I just kept picking it up and looking at it and saying, I. What have I done? So I ended up going to Berkeley and getting my mba. Almost an accident, really. It was based on a bet, strangely enough. So it wasn't long after that that I thought, what's the limit to this thing? Like, what else Couldn't it do? And is it really doing anything or am I just imagining this? What? Get to that part. So I set myself a goal of getting rich in the stock market. Now remember, I had no money, so it would be hard to get rich in the stock market. You know, I had maybe $1,000 that I could put into the stock market and I didn't even have an account. So one day, as I'm doing my affirmations, I wake up. I sat straight up in bed in the middle of the night with this thought in my head, to buy stock in Chrysler. Now, Chrysler at the time, I'm not good on my years, but Chrysler at the time was bankrupt. So, you know, they owed the government a bunch of money and a lot of people were betting they weren't coming back. So their stock was just, you know, right at the edge of oblivion. So out of all the stocks in the world, how many stocks do you think there are? Say 10,000. 10,000 stocks maybe. I did zero research, woke up, sat up and thought, buy Chrysler for no reason, hadn't read an article about it, nothing. And so I tried to open an account with Charles Schwab and my paperwork got lost and it took too long. And then in the time it took me to try to open up an account using snail mail and stuff getting lost, the stock had gone up, I don't know, a bunch, 20%, let's say. I forget the exact number. And so by the time I got my account opened, it had already gone up a lot. And I thought, oh, it was a good idea, but I just missed it. So I didn't buy it because it had already gone up. And then it kept going up. And those of you who are old enough to remember what was the best stock of that entire year out of 10,000 Chrysler, it was like the number one story stock and of 10,000 stocks. And I picked it randomly or was it random? Maybe there was something floating around in my head that just came together, I don't know. But I didn't get it. I didn't get rich off it. So I thought, well, I'll try it again. So I thought to myself, all right, I'm just going to do the same process, except now I have my account open and one day I picked up a newspaper and I flipped through it and there was an article about this software company called Ask A S K. I don't know what happened to them, but at the time it was sort of a hot new technology looking thing back when you, you know, that was a New and. Or it became Ask you maybe, I don't know. And no, it was Ask Computer. So it's a different company than Ask Jeeves. So it was an Ask Software company. I forget the details. But anyway, the point is I didn't know anything about this company. And I just thought, I'm going to buy this with no anything, no research. I, I buy this stock, it goes up, I don't know, 10% in a week. And I think I'm a freaking genius. Look at this. Twice in a row I picked a good stock. So I sold that stock, made pocketed a quick 10%, I think I made probably I netted 100 bucks in a month. Not a month, in like just a week. And I'm thinking to myself, hey, I think I have something here. I've got a tiger by the tail. I just made $100 without doing anything remotely like work in a week. I mean, hey. The second part of the story is that that stock didn't stop going up when I sold. Went to the moon. And it was again one of the storied stocks of the year. It wasn't just the stock. It was like a story that people would write about what's up with this stock just going to the moon. So both times I didn't trust to stick with the thing that I was being guided toward, or so it felt, or it wasn't an illusion. So I thought to myself, let me try something else. It wasn't long after that that I tried. I, Scott Adams will be a famous cartoonist. And that's actually the form of it. I'll teach you in a moment. And I became a famous cartoonist. And then I did. I, Scott Adams will become a number one New York Times best selling author. And then I did. And there was also a time that I lost my ability to speak. Mostly you know the story. So for about three and a half years I couldn't speak properly because of a condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which was incurable, an incurable problem. But do you hear me? So obviously it wasn't so incurable, was it? Long story short, I searched the world and found a guy who had an experimental fairly newish surgery and fixed it. But that was the subject of my silent affirmations that I would someday speak perfectly. Now, of course, I don't speak perfectly. So affirmations are sort of directional. Let me show you what the process is. Then I'll tell you the fun. The fun part is, is there anything to it or is it just complete BS and You can decide, all right? The how of it is easy. You just write or repeat that thing that you want and use this form. I put your name in there. Scott Adams will be a syndicated cartoonist. You could say you'd be wealthy. You could say you'll find love. You could say you'll be healthy. You could say you'll move someplace, you'll start a family, whatever it is. If you're too specific and you'll recognize this for me, talking about systems versus goals, you don't want to be too specific because you don't want to say, for example, I want that specific promotion because what if there's a better one? You know, you might get the thing that you're affirming, but maybe there was something better that popped up in the meantime. So try to keep your affirmations, you know, fairly general. Now, an exception would be, there's nothing better than being a syndicated cartoonist. If you're a cartoonist, you know, if you're going to be a cartoonist, this would be the best one, you know, of the types of cartoonists you could be. So shooting for the top is not so bad. Because what if I'd gotten close? Well, maybe I still could have made a little money or whatever, but there's nothing better in the world of cartooning than being a syndicated cartoonist. So in that case, I could be kind of specific. If you're trying to win a, you know, win an Oscar or something. Yeah, go ahead. You know, I. I don't think those are terribly important, but if you want to. So people ask me, you know, does it matter where I write it? Can I type it? Can I chant it? Can I sing it? None of that matters. It's only about focusing on the thing that you want and visualizing it. It's also very important to visualize. If you don't visualize it, you're not putting the most active part of your brain into the game. Now, here's the part where you should be saying to yourself, why would this work? Based on your complete lack of science and logic or anything that would connect this to the real world. Why would chanting or writing something down have any effect on the real world? That's the fun part. Does it? Here are some ideas, and I'll let you decide which one you like the best. One of the possibilities is that somehow these affirmations change the basic nature of reality itself. Can we agree it's not that one? Can we just stipulate we don't have to talk about it too much? Because, you know, I may have a different view of reality than you do. My view is that we don't have access to it. There's got to be some base reality. But we have. We live in our own filters. Most of you know that's my view. So I don't see it happening. I don't see reality changing. I see maybe our filter changing. That's the part we can see and deal with. But you probably don't think reality changes because you wrote something down. So I think we'll agree it's not that one. Okay. The other one could be selective memory. Maybe it doesn't work at all. What if I'm just good at stuff, which explains why I had some success? And what if I just forgot the ones that didn't work? Now, those of you who read this book know that I have many, many failures. In fact, you know, 10 to 1, 10 to 1 more failures and successes. So how do I explain that I'm acting like this works when 10 to 1 it didn't? That's what you're thinking, right? Well, here's the thing. I didn't use affirmations on almost any of those things. I only used it on the ones that worked. Now, you're going to have to take my word for that. But there's a reason for that, and I'll get to that. So hold on. There's a reason why I only did it on the ones that worked. So another possibility is that when you're doing affirmations is you're tuning your brain. There was a study on luck by this guy, Dr. Weissman, and he wanted to see if people had luck. You know, is luck a real thing? Now, most of you are ahead of me, right? Luck is not a real thing. Everybody's going to have the same luck if you're really controlling the experiment. Indeed, that's what he found. Everybody has exactly the same luck. But he did this experiment that was very revealing. He had people divide themselves into groups that considered themselves lucky and groups that considered themselves not lucky. And he gave them all the same newspaper. And he said, look through the newspaper and count up the number of photographs. Now, the people who considered themselves unlucky counted them up, and on average they got the right number. That was 42. And it took them several minutes to complete the task. The people who considered themselves lucky, even though really nobody was any luckier than anybody else, but they considered themselves lucky, they also got the right number. On average, 42 photographs, but they were done in seconds. Whereas the people who thought they were unlucky it took them minutes. The difference was that on all the newspapers for both groups and the second page, in big writing, it said, stop counting the photographs. There are 42. The people who considered themselves unlucky didn't see the time saver because they were looking for photographs. They didn't expect anything to be there except what they were looking for. The people who would consider themselves lucky are always looking for luck. So what he found is that if you open your mind to the possibility that you could get lucky, you actually will notice things that will make you appear lucky. And if you ask people about their success stories, drill down a little bit. If you know anybody who got successful in an outsized way, you're going to find this point where they noticed something or there seemed to be some kind of a luck or coincidence. But if you drill down, maybe they were just tuning themselves to notice it. You know, maybe they just set their filters and it wasn't luck at all. They just set their filters and there it was. Reticular activation is a big word. I saw that in some. In a corporate training program once. And it's just the idea that you're familiar with the fact that if somebody calls your name in a crowded room, you can hear it easily, even if there's a lot of background noise. So if you're in a crowded room, you'll hear Scott, and you'll be like, what the heck? Why is the one word that I could hear clearly in that mumbling was my own name. And that's because your brain tunes for things that are important to you. So if you use affirmations, you're really tuning into a specific objective. And in my case in cartooning, I noticed something on television one day that led me down a trail to find a cartoonist who gave me the advice that turned me into a cartoonist. So I actually had to notice something. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been doing affirmations at the time. Here's another possibility and a strong one, that you're not really causing something to happen, but rather you're finding out the hard way what things you're committed to. And you're probably committed to things that on some subconscious level you think you can do, you think you can pull it off. So I think we have this situation, this is just hypothesis that you might have a rational thought about what you can pull off in life, how well you can do, but you also have an irrational opinion of yourself. And the two of them are just always there. There's your rational one. Saying, I don't know if you can do that. Not everybody gets away with that. That looks pretty hard. But you might also have an irrational part that says, I got this, I got this. And so the hypothesis is that if you can put in the time to write down that objective, I, Scott Adams, or fill in your name will do this. And you actually could do that 15 times a day for a few months. That means that there's some part of you, probably your subconscious, if there is such a thing, that thinks you can pull it off because otherwise it's not going to let you do it. Remember I told you that there were all those things I failed at that you would think, oh, why wouldn't you want those to be more successful? I, of course, wanted everything I've been involved with to be successful. But there are some things that I wanted with a burning desire, if you know what I mean. There's some things I just wanted to work. Like, everybody wants everything to work. And sometimes I would want those things to work a lot. But that extra commitment of writing down 15 times a day, I've only done that of those things that had the extra meaning to me, I guess, and those were the things that worked out. So it could be that this is a backwards correlation. It could be the fact that you're even willing to Write it down 15 times a day is simply telling you something about yourself. And that's good. Maybe. Maybe that's good by itself. And then the more fun possibility is that Affirmations is part of the human interface for programming your filters on reality. Now, if you're programming your filters, that doesn't mean you have to program base reality. You're just programming the way you see it. So could it be that the only thing that happened in my stories is that I programmed my filter to believe these things happened to me? Maybe. Or did I program my filter to simply make opportunities more presentable? More not presentable, but more opportunities present themselves to me? Did I do something somehow with the affirmations? Well, here's the fun part. It's completely unknowable. I don't know. But here's my pitch to you. If you looked at this and you said to yourself, you know, this is probably nothing. It doesn't look like it has any more science than horoscopes, and it doesn't. It has no more science than your horoscope, but yet there's something compelling about it. And if there were anything to it, you might say to yourself, wow. Because if there's anything to this It's a big, big deal. And, and so I would pitch it to you this way. Doesn't cost you anything to try it. And if it works, could change the world. That's my pitch. It worked on me. If it doesn't work on you, well, maybe you have more control than I do or better priorities or something. But that's my pitch. I will not tell you that I believe in magic. I don't. I'm not going to tell you it's going to work for you. Clearly there are people it won't work for. But if you're going to play the odds, focusing probably has benefits. If I were to. If I were to tell you my, you know, sort of where I would break down, you know, what parts of this are probably true versus less likely to be true, I would say, you know, there's no chance it's changing base reality. There might be some selective memory, but I don't think that's the main thing. Definitely the brain tuning is the thing. If I had to bet, that would be the most active part. And I definitely think there's something about finding out what you're willing to work hard for and the affirmations or like a practice way to find out if you're willing to work hard for it. But I also think there's something to the fact that in some ways it's programming your filter on reality in some productive way. Now, since we don't know what base reality is, we're only dealing with this weird symbolic level where we think we're in the same reality, but we're not. We already talked about the fact that everybody's walking around in their own bubble reality. You've got your own religion. You think that the other political party is crazy. They think you're crazy. So we're all in our own little bubbles. Could it be that there's a way to steer your little bubble? Because keep in mind, if we're all in little bubbles and you can see it for yourself, I mean, people are living full lives within a reality that you don't even recognize. They believe mystical things, according to you. They. They're wrong about this. They can't tell if they're murdering or what. I don't want to get into any heavy topics, but we're in very different worlds all the time. And once you realize you're in different worlds, then you know that those worlds are at least a little bit subjective. And if you could change just the way you view your world from inside of your bubble, you don't even have to get out of the bubble as long as you can redecorate. And that's what affirmations might help you do. I guess you'll find out if you try. That's all for tonight. I'm going to keep it on this one topic. Some of these lessons might not stay on Periscope forever, but they will be on the locals.com platform forever. And I hope that answers some of your questions.