Weeding Beliefs

Overview

• 🤗How my job slowly turned to dissatisfaction

• 🧠Figuring out what the problem was

• 💗Fixing it

🤗Two decades of passion

I’ve been in a fortunate place the last two decades.

When I was sixteen I got to experience being on a PC in the library at my school. I loved it.

I’ve always loved complex and technical things. Understanding how they are put together, what makes them work, reverse engineering them.

It’s something that came very naturally to me and in fact its something I’ve had to work hard to undo. I now force myself to read the instructions as I want to reverse engineer everything.

After my school bought PCs my lovely grandmother was kind enough to buy me one when I was sixteen. She really set me up for life with this single purchase as I started beavering away on it. Among playing way too many computer games I taught myself how to program and this led me to University and to a career in Software Engineering.

This was very fortunate as the need for Software boomed when I started and although I never lived in areas that had a high concentration for Software, I managed to get into positions that paid well.

I’ve always been excited to go to work on Mondays because I loved what I did. Truly for twenty years, I’ve been paid to do my hobby.

You could look at this as being a good thing because in theory, you will go extra miles when it is your passion. If you did a job that you disliked it would be hard to keep the motivation to continue.

I started to view my job as a hobby and I was paid to do something I loved. This for a long time was having your cake and eating it. The reason was my profession was starting to become in demand and there were few people who could do the job of software engineering.

With time however, social media, push for diversity and awareness of salaries in software started to draw people into to the field.

Supply and demand direct the price of things. And with time the rise of rates became flat and stagnant for a decade

😬Subconscious Dissatisfaction

Surprisingly to me, I’ve started to notice dissatisfaction. Verbalizing my lack of enthusiasm for software more and more.

Why would be the case? I cracked open the deep thinking with meditation and long isolated walks.

Upon doing deep introspection, I believe the dissatisfaction could be arising due to a few factors including:

• Not compounding my daily activities. A realization and a subsequent article that I wrote - a compounding life. The observation that only my investments were compounding and not my daily activities. This observation and realization hit me really hard. It really knocked the wind out of my sails. Since then I’ve really started to look for change.

• Reduced Learning. I love learning, stretching myself and growing. It feels that the amount of effort to how much I learn is disproportional compared to the early days in my career. You would call this diminishing returns. I read about marketing, sales, real estate that really excites me. I feel that if I switch jobs, the amount of information and experience I would get would be enormous - in a short period of time

• Burning my precious time driving. Driving to a workplace. This causes me great annoyance that I can do my job at home, yet I am forced to drive for 1.5 hours a day, risking myself to sit in a gray box to do the same work as I would at home. It also pulls me further from having a compounding life

• Supply/Demand imbalance. The rates for software are stagnant or going down…

• Impractical Nature of Long Term Work. At some point it would be pointless to work in the capacity and manner that I currently work and would make more sense on focusing on investing.

• Expecting the Universe to bend to my whims rather than me adapting to it. This last one burns me over and over. I can see it, I am aware of it, however I have to be vigilant in not letting it creep into my life. Unpacking this - it is me using words like “I should have”, “they should let me”, “I deserve …”. Alex Hormozi uses the word “Unreasonable” in the context of “It would be Unreasonable to think that If I did 50 sit ups and push ups a day, I wouldn’t have some new muscle definition by the end of the year”. The same goes with - It would be unreasonable to think that I should expect the Universe to treat me as a special snowflake and I should be paid disproportionately to the value I output.

All of the factors that I have identified above are leading to discontent. I feel a burning itch to pivot, however I need to make a few things happen before hand. My dissatisfaction lies with wanting to do more, to learn more, to compound more and to ultimately grow wealth quicker.

🧠Careful Analysis of Beliefs

I mentioned Hormozi, he is a great tutor. People don’t have to have been born 2,000 years ago and wear robes to be considered great thinkers.

One thing he made me aware of was Self Limiting Beliefs.

Consider -

your reality is a product of your perception and your perception is filtered and shaped by your beliefs. Your beliefs are addressable and able to be swapped should you be aware of their existence.

The first port of call for me addressing this dissatisfaction is to catalog and go through and review all of my beliefs. Some could be working towards good, some could be self limiting.

Dissatisfaction can be caused from holding an invalid belief that became solidified.

Beliefs aren’t some yellow pages that can be thumbed through, quickly and simply but do take a lot of thought and reflection as they could be not visible by your conscious. They may not be a concrete idea or concept, or more just weak “feelings”.

After a few months of deep thinking and probing everything I identified the following beliefs that are affecting my thinking:

• The Universe should adjust for me:

  • I shouldn’t have to drive to work - This pisses me off massively, but the truth is the needs of the world don’t care about what I want. Business’s shift towards work from home is a thing. It sucks. The world you live in is like a sea. Tides move everything up and down. You are going to get displaced and you are subject to it’s whim. It has a current too. You can choose to swim against the current. But it’s not advisable. Why not swim with the current and be a lot happier?

  • I should be able carry on doing my passion (regardless of demand) - I was lucky enough to have two decades of passion giving me income. The reality the value of my profession has stagnated. Taking into account inflation - it’s going backwards and doesn’t offer compounding returns.

• I should be retired now - Perhaps I’ve been victim to Fixed mindset (I assume many people are) but I’ve had an internal sense of superiority or feeling special over other humans. My brain’s current default state is that I am above certain things and work is one of them.

• I need to be a business owner of an growing, scaling business - Being midlife and having a lot of outgoings and an active family, it is hard to pivot and to take chances. I’ve been beating myself up for not doing more and having more active business.

💗Fixing the Issues

Finding the weeds from the set of beliefs involves

visualization.

Imagine going to sleep, in your dreams your mother dies. It feels real, lucid. Your heart rate is up, you are upset, fearful, you wake up in tears and a complete mess.

Suddenly, you then realize she is, in fact alive. The opposite set of feelings hit you as hard as a heavy wave. Relief, happiness, joy. The feeling of turning back time and bringing your mother back to life is visceral, real.

You’ve likely experienced this. Two realities so real, so accurate flip flopping from one to another in a small period of time. The wonder is, they are all in your head.

Now the same too is applicable to thinking and beliefs.

Take the identified weeds remove them and imagine the oppsite.

With the removed “truths” gone from your thoughts - how do you feel? Alleviated?

It can take some time to root out those invalid beliefs. It took me many months of reflection and thinking.

Take the time to root out the self-imposed imperfections in how you see the world. Do you feel lighter, brighter, happier? If so, you likely have found the culprits.

With them identified, write them in a Guide Book for you to refer to in the future. I check mine every day. All the lessons and truths I have learned, I remind myself every day.

For me my issues were identified above and I felt a lot of relief from simply holding the opposite opinion or removing them.

To talk to specifics I realized that I would be happy swapping out my passion being “Software” for the passion of “the game of creating money”. The game of creating money is a lot less restrictive as doesn’t constrain me to one type of earning. It still focuses on the journey rather than the destination - the game of creating money rather than “having lots of money”. This Video helped me lift and shift this belief.

😳Definition of Insanity

“The act of repeating the same actions over and over again, expecting a different outcome”.

If you find yourself feeling more and more frustrated - it could be that you are expecting a different outcome without changing some of the inputs.

Make changes first in how you think, secondly in the actions you physically take. Make sure to change something if you are not happy.

Everyone is born the same, a naked crying baby. Most people have arms, legs can move talk and do actions.

The difference between people homeless on the streets and Billionaires is in their head and how they think. The universe around you feeds you information. Your senses take them to your brain and your perception filters and forms them into your conscious. The pipeline between stimulus and response is fully changeable.

The first step is being aware.

Don’t be unreasonable in your thinking.

I hope this helped someone.