Tom Bilyeu explains how The Matrix taught him that beliefs shape reality. He was stuck thinking he was dumb, taking easy jobs, until he recognized the belief itself was the cage. Change what you believe about yourself and your behavior follows.
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Now I felt this unease that I was talking about that I could do more, but I was stuck. And I didn't know what I was trapped in. In 1999, a movie came out called the Matrix. That movie ended up giving me the intellectual framework to think about what was happening in my life because there was something limiting me. There was something that made me feel adrift. And this gave me the vernacular to think about what it was. And in the movie, they talk about taking the red pill. The red pill, its only promise. Its only promise is the truth. That's it. It's not saying that it's going to make things better. It's simply going to reveal the way that the world really is. And that, for me, was incredibly intoxicating. And I took the red pill intellectually. And what I began to realize is that the mind is the Matrix in and of itself. Now there's people that will debate whether we actually live inside the Matrix, whether we're actually in a simulation. And it's a fun conversation, but I honestly don't care about the answer Because I can tell you right now, today, in this moment, I promise you, the Matrix has you. If you guys know David Foster Wallace's concept of this is water to a fish, water is so ubiquitous, it ceases to exist. Now, we all have that same thing, and it's playing on us and it's keeping us from becoming who we want to become. And that thing is our mindset. It's our belief system. It is so ever present, it is so ingrained into the fabric of who you are and the way that you process, you don't even notice it. You don't even know that it's real. And this is the thing that impacts your life. It is your inability to see that your mindset controls everything, that it is water in and of itself. Now, when I heard this from Shakespeare, I realized that once you become aware of the water, you can change everything. That you can go from a scared lost kid into coma to whomever you want to be. And in understanding that, things began to become possible, there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And if that's true, then belief itself is a construct. And if belief is a construct. Belief. If belief is a construct, then like any other construct, it can be manipulated and changed. And at any moment, this is so important, at any moment, you can choose to believe something new about yourself. Now, the weird thing about belief is as soon as you change that belief, it becomes true. Why that is, I will never quite understand. What weird quirk of human evolution has left us in a space where simply believing it makes it true? If you think you're dumb, guess what. You're dumb. Truly. And you will act in accordance with that belief. And that should scare the shit out of you because it scared the life out of me. And I saw myself heading down a path that I did not want to be on because. Because I believed that I was dumb. I had a fixed mindset. I used to only apply for jobs where I knew I'd be smarter than the person interviewing me because I did not want to feel badly about myself. But you can imagine the types of jobs that I got. I once lovingly referred to myself as the king of remedial jobs. And I actually had pride in that. Because what I built my sense of pride around was getting the job, was always being smart, was being right. And none of those things were moving me towards my goals. Now, if you don't know this quote, live by it. One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery over oneself. That's Da Vinci. Da Vinci did amazing things with his life. I wanted to do equally amazing things with mine. And if that's the game that we're playing, if I can construct my belief system, if I can choose at any moment to believe something that's more empowering than I was believing the moment before, and that. That will actually find its way into my actions, allow me to do things that I couldn't do the moment before then. It's like that moment in the Matrix where Neo realizes he knows kung fu. And that's like, as funny as that is, that's how I think about life. To me, the very fundamental purpose of life is to find out how many skills can acquire that have utility and then put that utility to the test in service of something greater than myself.
