4 Mindset Changes That Massively Improved My Life

Key Takeaways

hey what's going on guys so this week's video is going to be a little bit different than most the other videos that I've done on this channel because for the most part the videos that I do have a pretty set in stone topic I try to keep a pretty narrow focus on whatever I'm talking about but for the last four months I've been keeping a note in Evernote just called five self-improvement tips and I put that number there arbitrarily but um I came up with something that I thought was interesting to me there was just something that I felt was like a mindset change I made a long time ago and it's really improved my life and that gave me an idea for a video where I would just sort of list out some of the subtle or maybe not so subtle mindset changes that I've made over the last decade or so since I graduated high school that have really improved things for me on a daily basis and I was going to wait until I had a longer list to do a video on these sort of mindset hacks but I think the four that I have now which I've just sort of added over time as I thought about them uh make up a pretty good list So today we're going to go over four mindset hacks or mindset changes that I've made slowly over the past 10 or so years that have really improved my life and if you can adopt even just one of these into your own life I think you're going to notice a marked improvement as well so let's get into it mindset hack number one is to become okay with being the worst person in the room and by that I mean like the worst person at whatever skill you're trying out this fear of being labeled as the worst person in the room or of looking bad in comparison to everyone else keeps people from pursuing the things they want to do or it keeps them from increasing the difficulty or moving to the next level in something they're already pursuing and if you can become okay with being bad at something or comparatively bad or if you can become okay with being worse than everyone else in your peer group then you start to compete in a higher league and when you are the worst person in the room that means that there's nowhere for you to go but up and everyone else around you is somebody who you can learn from so example of putting this mindset into action that immediately comes to mind for me is from last summer when I started doing downhill mountain biking now downhill mountain biking especially the lift access version where you literally put your bike and yourself on a ski lift and you go up to the top of a mountain and then ride down is a pretty difficult and risky discipline in mountain biking in fact my friend Martin actually broke his finger doing it uh back in the fall uh I started this in the summer and I started off being pretty bad and I noticed that all these people kept passing me up on the trails and I kind of felt self-conscious about my abilities at first then I realized that if I just challenged myself to follow these people who were better than me I actually would get better more quickly and I found that this actually did happen I was more afraid to do things like go off of jumps or take the trails at a higher speed when I was alone but when I was following somebody there was like this competitive Instinct that kicked in I found myself pushing myself a little bit further and really challenging myself to keep Pace with this other person who was better than me and this mindset actually paid off on the very first day that I went mountain biking cuz I went with my cousin to a bike park in Boulder Colorado and there was a jump that I just could not get myself to do every single time I would go up to the jump I would hit the brakes I would stop and I have to take my bike lift it up and walk down uh past the jump I was just too scared to do it and my cousin who was a little bit better at mountain biking than I was not a ton but a little bit said all right this time we're going to go you're going to follow me I'm going to hit this jump and you are going to hit it with me and watching him do it and knowing there was this expectation that I was going to have to rise to the challenge because he was doing it as well forced me to do it and I actually hit that jump and afterwards it became easy so again if you can become comfortable with being the worst person in the room even if it's a self-perception kind of thing then you are going to allow yourself to compete in a higher league and you're going to expose yourself to people who are more skilled and who can bring you up to speed more quickly and one last thing that I do want to note when it comes to this mindset is that for the most part people are kind of self-absorbed so say if you go to the gym and you are out of shape or you're lifting the least amount of weight out of the gym people aren't going to make fun of you because they're there to do their own thing they aren't there to judge you so just keep that in mind when you start a new hobby or you start trying to improve yourself in any way if you're around other people who are doing the same thing they're probably focused on their own goals and their own efforts all right mindset hack number two is to treat real life goals kind of like video game levels and the reason that I have this on the list is that when we play video games at least when I play video games I am 100 % okay with dying or failing because I know that in just a few seconds after dying I'm going to restart the level I'm going to try again and the process of dying over and over and over again in some cases is part of the experience it's part of the fun one of my absolute favorite video games in the world is called Celeste which is in my opinion one of the best Platformers ever made and if you go look at my death stats for every level in the game they are ridiculous in fact I think in one of the levels I have over a thousand deaths but because I've gone through that level and died a thousand times I can now basically speedrun it and the process of doing so looks really cool and is really fun to do and I know that all those deaths are part of the learning process every single time I made a mistake I got a little bit better I got a little bit more knowledgeable about what to do in that situation I made an adjustment now in real life a lot of times we feel like we have to get things right the first time whether it be out of embarrassment or whether it be out of the fear of wasting too much time but that's not how things are it's just like a video game if we can treat things as a learning process even if they're failures then we become more open to going through that learning process and we become more able to gain those skills the fear of failure is something that really holds people back so if you can start viewing yourself as a video game character at least in so far as you're allowed to fail certain things maybe not allowed to fall into pits of spikes but you can fail certain things then you're going to sort of move past that mental roadblock mindset hack number three is to become okay with confronting harsh realities or bad news and this is a mindset hack that I got from the book good to Great by Jim Collins this is a fantastic Business book I think anybody who is in the professional world or an entrepreneur should read this book and there is a quote from an executive of the company Pitney Bose his name is a Fred Purdue that really stuck with me after I read this book in fact I think this might be the concept that stuck with me more than any other from this book and I want to read the quote to you here the quote goes when you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath you can either put the rock down or you can say my job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things even if what you see can scare the hell out of you the sad thing is a lot of people would rather avoid looking at bad news avoid looking at harsh realities than confront them and this causes a lot of problems some people know they probably didn't do well on a test so they avoid looking at the test results until they realize they've been kicked out of school or some people know their bank account balance is probably a little bit lower than they'd like it to be so they just don't look at it until there's an overdraft or until there's a bill that isn't paid in our quest to avoid pain we often avoid looking at things that cause us mental pain just because they are like the bearer of bad news the harbinger of bad news to come but the people who are truly successful are the ones who can confront these harsh realities because when you do when you don't shy away from them or pretend they don't exist then you can after you get over the emotional pain or the shock of seeing them formulate a plan for dealing with them so become okay with confronting these harsh realities yes it's tough yes you kind of never really get totally used to it cuz you always have that little part of your brain that just sort of wants to go do something else but you have to become able to push through that mental resistance finally I want to talk about the one mindset hack that I think has improved my life more than any other and it's simply building a sort of background Loop in my head that constantly asks where am I wrong or how am I wrong I'm always looking for my own blind spots this mindset hack was kind of forced upon me when I was a teenager When A girlfriend of mine actually broke up with me and she told me the reason that she left me was that I always had to be right every time we'd get into an argument or even just a conversation I always had to be the person with the last word I didn't really realize this at the time but when that happened the pain of being dumped was so great that I was forced to look at my actions to look at the way that I thought and I realized that yes I did have this implicit assumption that I was right in all things even if I would have never admitted it even to myself and I think a lot of people are like like this especially people who are generally successful in a lot of the things they do there's this sort of huis or Pride that develops in the back of our minds and sort of squashes any humility we have and it causes us to miss a lot of our blind spots or to assume things that aren't true so even though that experience was very painful I count it as a blessing because it sort of forced me to develop this assumption that I'm probably wrong in a lot of areas even when I think that I'm right about something there might be a blind spot there might be something that I'm missing so I ask myself what could I possibly be missing and a lot of times I try to put myself in the shoes of the person that I'm talking to and ask what is their perspective on this what could they see that I might not be seeing now I don't think you have to go through a super painful experience to develop this ability and I would say that a lot of its refinement came from reading books like Harry Potter and the methods of rationality or thinking fast and slow by Daniel conman or even some of the individual blog posts over on less wrong.com which was one of the original resources where I started learning about human rationality learning to notice my own confusion and my blind spots regardless of how you go about developing this ability once you do get better at using it and making it more habitual you're going to become a much more likable person because people will see you as not arrogant as open to noticing your own flaws and your own blind spots and aside from that it's also going to make you a better Problem Solver as Barbara Oakley talks about in her book A M for numbers there's this concept called aalong where the work that you've done to learn something earlier can sort of block the ability for you to consider new information because you have these very well-worn neural patterns that are pretty difficult to break out of but if you can build this metacognitive skill of constantly challenging your beliefs and looking for your blind spots you're going to be far less susceptible to this einon so going forward start trying to consciously challenge your beliefs start asking yourself how could I be wrong and in doing so you're going to become a much better Problem Solver of course if you want to boost those problem solving skills even further then the best way to do it is to practice problem solving on a daily basis and a great place to do this is at brilliant.org brilliant is an excellent learning platform for anyone wanting to improve their skills in math science and computer science and they take a very active approach to building all their courses meaning that whether you want to take a course on calculus or on math for quantitative trading in finance or on computer memory computer algorithms or gravitational physics you're going to find yourself immediately thrown into challenging problems that stretch your problem solving capabilities and stretch that lateral thinking ability that we've talked about in earlier videos additionally you're not going to find yourself bored by tons of introductory lecture material you're getting right into the problems right away so your interest in the subject is going to remain high the entire time and you're going to learn much more efficiently as well now in addition to their library of in-depth courses they've also released a new feature called daily problems where every single day they're releasing new problems that can wet your appetite and get you interested in new subjects such as how prehistoric humans track time or how you can cut amobia strip in half these problems take about 5 minutes every single day so you can build them into a habit and not only do they improve your problem solving abilities even further but they can get you interested in new topics that you hadn't considered before so if you want to try out that daily problems feature or you want to dig into one of their more in-depth courses and start learning right now you can go over to brilliant.org Thomas Frank to start learning for free and if you're one of the first 83 people to sign up with that link you're also going to get 20% off your annual premium subscription big thanks to brilliant for sponsoring this video and being a big supporter of my channel hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you did definitely give it a like you can also subscribe right there to get new videos every single week on this channel plus go right there to get a free copy of my book on how to earn better grades you can also follow me on Instagram at tomf frankley or last but not least click right here to get one more video on this channel thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next one