Learning a new mindset

One thing that Gideon and Mark Joyner discuss is how it’s actually very hard to "learn" a new mindset. It’s not something you can just sit down and do in an evening. Changing your mindset is something that happens over time through action. If you take action and get results, your belief system is more genuine than if you just keep "telling " yourself something. So before you try to drastically change your mindset, simply change your actions and your mindset will change as you go.

The (un)importance of passion

A lot of people stress the need to work on something you’re passionate about. However, Mark Joyner believes that passion is just a useful tool when pursuing your goals. If and when you hit snags in your business, a passion for your subject will keep you going. If you lack passion, you’re more likely to give up when you hit a tough obstacle. Mark notes that many great businesses have been built on things that their founders didn’t care about. The founders were simply detatched and machiavellian about it. Historical evidence indicates that passion is not a requirement for success.

On the negativity of others

Mark reminds you not to be brought down by the negativity of others who don’t believe in what you’re doing. At the same time, though, you should recognize that sometimes these negative comments can have a legitimate point. Make sure you dispassionately evaluate all criticisms and see if there are any useful things to learn from the criticism.

Getting to your goals: backwards planning

Mark Joyner’s new system, Simpleology, addresses situations where you might know WHAT you want to achieve, but you don’t know HOW to get there. You see a tremendous gulf between your current state and your desired state. Even though you might be trying lots of things, you can still see no way to bridge this gulf, and this makes you sad.

Simpleology teaches backwards planning. How to take your desired state and then try to think of what you would have to do "just before" attaining this state. What action would you take right before you reach your goal, that finally pushes you to reach it? Once you have that figured out, you just keep repeating the process. What would you have to do *just before* this second-to-last action in order to achieve it? And before that? And before that? Keep working backwards and the steps you need to take will become more obvious. It will also help you zero in on areas where you really don’t know how to bridge the gap between two states. When you identify these gaps, you know these are the ones you really need to focus on: not how to get to your FINAL end goal, but how to achieve this smaller goal. This makes the process a lot less daunting.

And then once you’ve developed this plan... you actually need to carry it out!

About focusing your attention

One common pitfall that Mark identifies is the simple task of getting up in the morning and checking your email. This is a very big trap according to Mark, because it can dictate how you spend the rest of your day. There might be someone making demands, there might be a goofy YouTube video to watch. Before you know it you’ve spent an entire morning just dealing with the contents of your inbox. By NOT checking your email first thing in the morning, and instead spending some time focusing on what you want to achieve today to move you closer to your goal, you’re able to get this work out of the way much faster each day. Most people only do 15 minutes of real work each day. So by sitting down and removing distractions, you could get two hours of work done instead, and that will rapidly move you closer to achieving your goal.

Mark recommends you ask yourself two questions when you do things:

• Is this action bringing you closer to your goal, or further away from your goal?
• Is this action increasing or decreasing your power?

Everything you do falls along these axes, and most of the actions people are performing move them towards the negative end of the spectrum.

Procrastination

Mark says there is no such thing as procrastination, and this is something he focuses on in Simpleology: The inescapability of action and reaction. You’re always in action, and there are always reactions. Even if you’re sitting in front of the TV, you’ve made a conscious decision to sit there. That was an action. While you’re sitting there your backside is probably getting bigger. That’s the reaction. Even when you’re not working, you’re still working, but you’re not working on things that will bring you closer to achieving your goals. Once you make this realization, it’s quite liberating.

The "Slave Cycle "

The slave cycle is the cycle where you get up in the morning and go to work because, at a basic level, you need to earn money to eat. You go to a job you hate and do work that sucks the life energy out of you. Then you go home and sit in front of the television because you don’t have any energy to do anything else. While you’re sitting there, the television is brainwashing you, telling you that you’ll be happier if you buy things and eat rubbish. The rubbish they advertise (and you eat) actually poisons your body and steals your energy, and your energy drops even lower so you can’t pull yourself away. This is the reality for most people in the western world.

Simpleology’s idea is to get people out of this cycle so that we can focus on the things we need to do for humanity. At the moment humanity is fighting on all these imaginary lines. We’re dissipating our energy, stuck in the slave cycle. If you can remove the need to wake up in the morning and go to work out of desperation, you’re able to give people the energy to do better things. We have the technology to remove this sort of subsistence lifestyle... we just need the global will to do it. Once people have complete control over their financial life, they will quickly get bored of sitting on their butts being fed grapes... they’ll want to go out and build some value for their children and grandchildren.

To this end, Simpleology has some software and tools to help break you out of this zombie cycle. It provides you with tools for figuring out what you’re going to achieve each day BEFORE you check your email. It reminds you every hour to take a short break, get up, move about and eat a little food to keep your energy up. It keeps nudging you back in the right direction, so that in the end of the day you have more energy to do what it is you need to do.