SAS #005: How to Achieve Your Ideal Future

3-min read.

“You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning Physicist and all-around troublemaker.

If you fool yourself you cannot make good decisions.

We fool ourselves all the time.

If you remain objective you make better decisions, calmly ride the ups and downs of your life, and are more likely to achieve your goals.

At the end of the day, we’re only human and can’t help but fool ourselves.

Luckily, if you understand the 5 reasons we’re not objective, you can fine tune your mindset.

And you will get closer to your ideal future.

The core reason we avoid being objective is we feel comfortable with our current worldview.

We've spent a lifetime building beliefs about ourselves and the world we'd like to keep.

It’s like we built a house made of beliefs. We carry it with us everywhere we go. And we don’t want anything bad to happen to it.

If we take in new information that contradicts our safe, comfortable home that’s upsetting.

The funny thing is you are safer when you are objective.

You can update your "home" to be stronger and you'll be ready to take on what the world has to offer.

If you pull the wool over your eyes, you set yourself up for a wake-up call.

And you actually improve your sense of safety when you are objective.

Here are the 5 biases that keep us in our comfy worldview, prevent us from making better decisions, and create a false sense of security.

“If I change my mind I will be less likely to get what I want!”

If you think you have all the answers, that’s just arrogance.

We resist changing our mind because we think we know best.

Remain humble and look at things as they are, not as you’d like them to be.

The exception is if you change your mind too much you’ll never get anything done.

Update your mindset when you learn relevant information.

“I don’t want to see the truth because then I will have to change my plan!”

Most of us hate being wrong. We rather keep our beliefs and have things go awry than accept new things and admit we were mistaken.

The irony is the outcome eventually proves we were wrong.

It's better to eat a slice of humble pie now than the whole thing later.

“I am comfortable as is, I rather let it ride in the short-term than put in the effort that will help in the long-term.”

In addition to loving comfort, we also hate certain types of work.

The work we dread the most is changing ourselves.

Most of us will take a short-term loss instead of putting in the effort it takes to course correct.

When you are on a long journey, a 1 degree shift in direction sets you on an entirely new course.

Slightly shift your course and you'll land in a new destination.

“I like myself the way I am. If I take in new information I may change into someone I don’t recognize.”

How we see ourselves is incredibly important to our self-esteem.

When we shift that, it opens us to uncertainty.

Will the new person I'm becoming be someone I like or understand?

Taking in new information doesn’t change who you really are.

It just changes the surface level information you use to navigate the world. Your core remains intact.

You are not what you know.

“If I become more objective and take those steps I will end up hurting someone else with my brashness.”

What a good excuse for not doing the right thing!

When you are objective other people will recognize you as reasonable. They want you to make good decisions.

If they don't, it's better to make them anyways and push those people farther away.

Being objective means doing our best to make good decisions.

It's uncomfortable at times, but in the long run brings more peace, better outcomes, and balance to our lives.

The good news is you don’t have to flip a switch and go from 0-100 on any of these.

You can slowly lean into being more objective and make better decisions without upending your life.

Practicing being objective will help you make better decisions at work, stay even keeled in your relationships, and help you know yourself better.

Be more objective in your decisions this week.

See how it makes you feel. Are you more balanced?

Notice the outcomes you get from being objective. Are they more aligned with what you really want?

I wish you luck. The universe is amazing enough as it is. We don't need to pull the wool over our eyes to make it something its not!

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Then, send this article to a friend or someone who would jive with it.