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, the 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 data, 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. 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 in Tacoma 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, unlike any
other concert 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
your 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 I believe 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 with getting the job. It was
always being smart. It was being right . And
none of those things are moving towards
my goals. Now, if you don't know this
quote, live by it.
'One can have no smaller or greater master
the 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 I can acquire that have utility,
and then put that utility to the test, in
service
of something greater than myself.