3 LIES you're told about the world

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10 min read

For most of us, our short time at school very quickly transformed from this place of learning and exploration and growth, to a ladder to be climbed.

If you want to move forward, or at least up in life, then you need to go to school and you need to study hard, so you can get good grades.

And this is going to allow you to go on to the next grade, and then the next, and the next, and one day you're going to look up, and if you play the game right, you'll be headed off to university.

And because you studied so hard, you were such a great student, the world tells you you're going to get a great job, and that it's going to take care of you.

It tells you it's going to pay you what you deserve, and you're going to get to live the life of your dreams.

Now, most people, they go through their entire life never stopping to question this, until one day they get to the very end of their road—when they're too worn out and tired to change, and they realized for the first time ever that their life had not turned out how they'd been promised…

That they had been lied to.

I don’t want this to happen to you.

So here are three lies you're told about the world that you cannot afford to believe if you want to achieve your greatness.

THE FOCUS LIE

The first is what I call the focus lie.

It's the lie that says you have a focus problem, and this lie is so pervasive that most of us just accept it at face value.

We accept that we're easily distracted by notifications on our phone, that we struggle with procrastination and staying on task.

But here's the thing, you don't have a focus problem, you have a focus management problem.

And I realized this for myself one day when I looked up after having played eight straight hours of video games.

It suddenly dawned on me that all those people who told me I couldn't focus, they were dead wrong. I could focus just fine, the problem is simply that my brain is a dopamine-seeking missile on a constant search for easy entertainment.

And realizing this, it changed how I approached the problem, and that has made all the difference.

See, I define focus as the ability to resist distractions, which is why I tend to think of focus like a muscle, and that the solution is generally just to try harder.

And this does work, but only up to a point, because eventually, your willpower is going to wear off.

And what I found is that the better solution is to simply design your environment in a way that makes it less likely for distractions to appear in the first place.

And once I figured that out, I stopped worrying so much about being focused, and instead, I just put my energy into cultivating environments and routines that were conducive to focus.

IF I JUST HAD SOME MORE

The second lie that the world tells us is the lie of enough.

Listen, humans have the ability to adapt to pretty much whatever the universe throws at us, and this served our ancestors incredibly well, because the universe was constantly throwing things at them that were trying to kill them.

So, back then, constant adaptation was a survival mechanism, and it's the one that enabled us to climb to the top of the animal kingdom.

Unfortunately, we humans adopted a bit too well, and we more or less solved for the problem of survival.

I'm guessing you don't spend much time every day worrying about how you're going to avoid dying, right? And yet, this is pretty much the only thing our ancestors ever thought about.

So, modern humans have a unique problem, it's no longer enough for us to simply survive, we want to thrive.

It's towards that goal that we turn our incredible powers of adaptation, so we seek that promotion, so we can make more money, and upgrade our car, and move into that nicer house, and go on those nice vacations.

And all along the way, we tell ourselves,

But the truth is, as soon as you reach the goal, your adaptation machine kicks in, and you move the goalpost on yourself.

Now, in my experience, the gap between where you are now and where you're trying to get never actually shrinks, and these goals, which we convince ourselves will make us happier, they don't ultimately move the needle.

This is called the hedonic treadmill, which is a simple principle that says we humans have a relatively stable baseline of happiness that's largely unaffected in the long term by external accomplishments.

So, no, that new car, that new house, that fancy watch, it's not going to make you any happier.

Now, here's the real frustrating part, despite the fact that we know we're on this treadmill, we can't actually get off of it.

There is no such thing as enough, we humans are just constantly seeking more and better.

But this doesn't have to be a bad thing, see, while you can't get off the treadmill, you can change what you're walking towards.

In my experience, there's only one thing worth walking towards in life, and it's not happiness, it's not status, it's not power, it's purpose.

Find the things in this life that fill you with a sense of purpose, and then go ahead and crank up that treadmill, because that is something worth pursuing, even if you never catch it.

CONSUME TO HAPPINESS

Alright, here's the next lie we're told about the world, it's the consumer lie.

The world is on a quest to make everything cheaper, quicker, and more convenient.

Our lives are filled with hypercaloric food and hyper-stimulating entertainment that's delivered to us in an instant, and it's all working to lull us into a perpetual state of pleasure.

And yet, despite lives that are so full, many of us have never felt so empty, so unfulfilled.

Now, I think fulfillment is one of the most interesting words in the English language.

The word fulfillment implies that there's a hole inside of us, something that's missing, and so each of us goes on our own personal quest to fill this hole.

But along the way, many of us go astray because we get tricked by the world that's telling us that the solution to fill this hole inside of us, is with stuff.

So, we consume more and more and more, and then we wonder why we feel so empty.

Here's the truth, you will never feel so empty as you do when you chase cheap dopamine.

These things are designed to lull you into a state of complacent mediocrity by encouraging mindless, passive consumption.

Listen, there is no such thing as cheap dopamine, you just don't understand the price you're actually paying.

The true price of passively consuming life is the person you could have become, the person you could have created.

And that right there is the secret to filling that hole inside of you, see, you can't consume your way to fulfillment, it can only be created.

And this is why I always say,

It’s going to be painstakingly difficult. But that makes it all the more rewarding.

So, I encourage you, consume less and create more.

THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE?