☕️ saturday mornings #22
changing the future, failing frequently & real-life mind control
Hi all,
Happy Saturday. I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been pondering, learning and exploring over the past few days.
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✍️Quote I’ve been thinking about:
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
― David Graeber
I was watching a really interesting presentation from a futurist last weekend and he pointed out that although “the future” can often seem like some vague, far-off or obscure concept, in reality the future is a result of the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis.
🎨Picture I loved:
Failing Frequently
I’ve been reading a lot of interviews with world-class performers (leaders, investors, athletes, etc.) and if I were to extract one key takeaway it would be that ultra successful people aren’t afraid to fail, and deal with and bounce back from failure incredibly well.
Not being afraid to fail sounds like a cliché but I’d implore you to ask yourself this: “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?”
Or perhaps, a more impactful question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”
It was only through sitting with these questions for a while that I realized how much of my life is governed by a fear of failure, or fear in general.
😎Challenge for the week ahead:
21-day No Complaint Experiment
Will Bowen, a minister from Kansas City, created a thought experiment. He had a hypothesis that your choice of words determines your thoughts, which then affects your emotions and actions.
As such, he believed if someone wanted to change their thoughts, they can work backwards by consciously adjusting their choice of words.
The logic is simple. Fix the words → fix the thoughts.
Mr. Bowen then designed a test to prove or disprove his hypothesis. He gave his congregation in Kansas a purple bracelet to wear with one simple rule: each time you complain you must switch the bracelet from one wrist to the other. His challenge was to go 21 days without complaining. If you slip up, it’s back to zero.
It is simple but effective metacognitive awareness training.
The results from his experiment were impressive. To date, over 11 million people globally have tried the “21-day No Complaint Experiment”, with thousands of people claiming it changed their lives.
I’m not one to buy into the hype, so I’ve decided to try the experiment myself.
But, it’s important to outline some basic definitions and how this challenge could tangibly impact someone’s life.
What is a complaint?
I disagreed with Mr. Bowen’s elaborate definition of a complaint. When trying to drive life change, I’ve learned complexity kills.
In my case, I’m trying to stop criticizing, condemning or complaining (taken from rule one of Dale Carnegie’s famous book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”) .
These three terms can be collectively defined as: “speaking negatively about an event, person or situation without outlining a corrective plan.”
Note, I’ve added my own twist to the definition at the end. In reality, life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Bad stuff happens. So, if I catch myself complaining, it has to be followed with corrective next steps to fix the problem. This forces me to search for solutions for troubling problems and become more action-oriented.
Why do I care?
You may be thinking to yourself, “good for him to try it out … but he’s crazy”.
The benefits of this experiment, if we take thousands of people’s word for it that it actually works, are not trivial.
First, no one wants to be a pessimist. There’s a mountain of evidence to show optimists lead better lives. Optimistic people have a 70-85% chance of living longer, get sick less often, have better relationships with friends and family, are 40% more likely to be promoted, and experience better financial health than their pessimistic counterparts (Harvard Business Review, Forbes).
In fact, research from Stanford University has shown that complaining shrinks the hippocampus, an area of the brain that’s critical to short-term memory storage, problem solving and intelligent thought.
Furthermore, when you complain, your body releases the stress hormone cortisol which can lead to elevated weight gain, high blood pressure and heart disease.
All around, not good news.
I think if most people had the choice, they’d choose optimism. However, myself included, many people feel they don’t have that choice: some days pessimism prevails.
This experiment is designed to help hardwire optimism into your brain. Over time, conscious action transforms into unconscious action and positivity becomes automatic. An unconscious default.
One thing I’ve noticed so far is how difficult this challenge is. I didn’t realize how much I complained until I paid closer attention.
For many of us, complaining can be an unconscious and automatic thought pattern.
Well-documented scientific research supports this, as a global EQ firm found “when you repeat a behavior, such as complaining, your neurons branch out to each other to ease the flow of information. This makes it much easier to repeat that behavior in the future - so easy, in fact, that you might not even realize you’re doing it.”
Linking the logic of this experiment to the “Four Steps of Conscious Mastery”, a framework used widely in professional sports, as someone becomes aware of their tendency to complain they move out of stage one and into stage two “conscious incompetence”.
As they test the experiment and actively note how much they criticize, condemn or complain, they’d move into stage three “conscious competence”. Then finally, if science tells us anything, they would move into the fourth stage of mastery “unconscious competence”, where you don’t have to continue the experiment as consistently speaking positively becomes a default.
Four Steps of Conscious Mastery
To me, the “No Complaint Experiment” is a low-risk experiment in trying to get the upper hand in my battle with pessimism and negative emotion, which does nothing but worsen my relationship with both myself and others.
I can’t see any measurable downside, so I figure it’s worth a shot.
For those interested in the more sophisticated applications and results of the no-complaint thought experiment, you can order a copy of A Complaint-Free World by Will Bowen, or you can read the first chapter for free and check out his website.
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
And, as always, please give me feedback by replying to this email. Which topic above is your favourite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Thank you for reading. Your support means a lot to me.
Have a lovely weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas