Trickle Down Mindset: The Missing Element in Your Personal Success (2 page)

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“Alchemy is the process of transforming something common into something special.”

― Jason van Orden

You are incredibly lucky!

You’ve just found the philosopher’s stone. Thousands of medieval alchemists looked for it in vain for centuries. Now it’s within your reach. It is your personal philosophy. It is the single most important factor to your wellbeing and happiness. It’s the key to your life and your purpose on this planet. It can transform anything you touch into gold. Mind you, money is not the only indicator of success. Currency represents the multitude of exchanges that take place at any given moment in our society. If you can present your achievements in monetary value, everybody immediately recognize its worth.

For example, my personal philosophy allowed me to shed some fat and become the fittest I have been in my life. I didn’t monetize this experience very much. I published a book sharing my experiences, but I priced it at only $1 and after several months, I was able to give the book away for free. I created a free Lift plan and wrote a few articles about weight loss. I didn’t make a lot of money from those activities, but being fit and healthy indirectly provided me with thousands of dollars. Because I changed my diet and exercise regime, I had a lot more energy than before. I was able to marry my day job with simultaneously writing and publishing books. For over a year now, I’ve been working 13+ hours almost every day.

You may be deep in debt or obese, but you need to take care of your mindset first and pursue weight loss or new investment techniques next. Without a philosopher’s stone, all your attempts to transform lead into gold are in vain. Assuming you persevere in your quest long enough (which is a bold assumption without the right philosophy), you will surely receive
some
results. But with the right mindset in the first place, those results will multiply.

Ditch other worries. If you are not in the place you’d like to be in your life, focus on fixing your personal philosophy. Do it and you will see results in all other areas as well.

Of course, you may also neglect it. You have free will. What you do with your life is up to you. But neglect developing your personal philosophy and you’ll probably doom yourself to a lifelong struggle. If you don’t consciously work on your philosophy, it will be developed naturally by external agents: the content you consume, the data input habits you’ve developed, your past experiences and how they shaped your interpretation of external events, and most important, the people around you.

If you aren’t satisfied with your life, I urge you: start working on your personal philosophy immediately. Yes, you can do it. You can learn to govern the way your mindset develops in the same way you learned to govern your hand movements. You decide whether or not to reach for a hamburger or a salad. You can also decide what you read, what you watch, what you listen to, and with whom you spend your time.

Your brain is bombarded with millions of impulses all the time. It is busy interpreting them all the time. You can take control of the natural processes of absorbing and interpreting the outside data.

Of course, it is impossible to consciously examine every smell, color, movement, noise, gesture, and the thousands of other impulses you gather every second. But you can filter them with the net of your beliefs and convictions. You can incrementally model them and influence your personal philosophy that way. It’s doable. Your beliefs may be changed when examined by facts.

Initially, I gave my new philosophy a chance, tracked my efforts, and compared the effects against my previous beliefs. I didn’t believe I could save more money. I had honed my savings management skills for years. I knew my numbers by heart: the interest rate of my savings, the mortgage rate, the respective monthly cost of food, clothes, medications, and so on. I planned monthly budgets. Then I exposed myself to new ideas and opened my mind enough to try them. Within a few months, my savings rate skyrocketed from 4.5 percent to 20 percent. My beliefs shifted a bit.

So, is developing your personal philosophy something you feel inclined to do? Is it for you? That’s for you to answer. I’m just doing my best to encourage you to start. This book is designed for you if you have been struggling with achieving your goals for too long. If book after book, seminar after seminar, has not helped you get what you want, it’s time to try something different. If you strive to change, amend your philosophy first.

It is easy to do, like everything else in your life. If you want to write a book, its creation depends on thousands of keystrokes. Each single keystroke is easy to do. However, it’s also easy to not do.

Chiseling your personal philosophy depends on multitudes of tiny decisions: Averting your eyes from the TV when you cross the living room or sitting on the couch for five minutes. Spending five minutes gossiping, or reading a blog post. Saying a short prayer or numbing your mind playing video games. Each decision depends on your will. Each is made now. You aren’t facing an infinite number of decisions. They are in your future. All you need
now
is to make a single, simple, tiny decision. It’s in your power.

Should you give it a try? Tell me, what do you have to lose? Only your old lousy personal philosophy, which hasn’t served you very well so far. You risk becoming someone else: someone more successful, someone more fulfilled, someone who is doing more for themselves, the community, and the world. If you have some reservations about transforming into someone else, think about Jim Rohn’s story. Do you really think one more farm boy struggling to stay afloat for the rest of his life would be a better thing for the world? Or in your opinion, did he choose well pursuing something more?

In the end, you are the only person who can answer all these questions.

Knowledge Items:

- If you strive to change, amend your philosophy first.

- It’s as easy to do, as to neglect.

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“Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.”

― Socrates

What is a personal philosophy?

For now, this simplistic definition is enough: “
A system a person forms for conduct of life
.”

I will go deeper into this later on.

Now let’s consider what this definition implies. It applies to a person, a human being. If you are one, you qualify.

Everyone has a personal philosophy. We are constructed that way. No matter if you are a CEO of a Fortune 500 company or a housewife and mother of six. It’s an integral part of human construction. It’s not even like a kidney or leg, which you can live without. And just as having a leg or kidney is not an indication of success, the same is true with personal philosophy. Rockefeller had his own and a couch potato also has his own, which states: “I value beer, TV, and my couch more than anything else in my life.” This sentence is at his core and dictates his thoughts and actions. It shapes who he is.

“Conduct of life” is not some gimmick, a smart technique, or a trick you can pull out of your sleeve and use to improve a specific situation. The right personal philosophy will help you in all of life’s situations. The wrong one will hinder you.

And it’s a system, “a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method.” It’s not karma or magic. It’s not fate or destiny beyond your influence. Like every system, it has a set of rules.

I consider that personal philosophy’s system to consist of your
past experiences
and
their interpretation
in your mind, plus your
input sources
and
an internal interpretation
of them.

These are
the
only
things in the universe you need to work on to change your future. The only things you really have the power over. Change your input sources, change the interpretation you give to the incoming data, and it will change you.

The definition says that a person “forms” her philosophy. You do it all the time and have been doing it almost since you were born. You have your senses and they are constantly absorbing information. You process the data and give it meaning all the time. Your existence itself utilizes those components. It is as natural as breathing.

Your essence, your thoughts, and actions are also dictated by your philosophy, the way you conduct your life. Yet, it’s overlooked.

Have you heard of this concept before? Maybe, if you were studying personal development diligently. Did you know the definition of personal philosophy prior to reading this book? Then you are a part of an elite minority.

But hearing about it is not uncommon. Even realizing the concept on your own is not such a big deal. All in all, it is like using logic to draw the conclusion that air is indispensable for humans and that we are all equipped with lungs to utilize it.

However, here comes another, less obvious question: Did you consciously form your system for conduct of life? Did you try to leverage it to get more of what you consider important in life? If you really did, then I’m surprised you are reading this book. Because it seems that people who do this are enormously successful and satisfied.

As you can see just by browsing the titles of self-help books, we don’t usually seek methods to fix our whole lives. When something hurts us, we react and look for the solution for that particular pain: how to have more time, money, use them better, get fit, look well, and so on.

And you are probably not much different than the majority. You’ve never thought that if you created a specific mindset, you would get all of that and more.

What usually sells are solutions to our problems, remedies to our pain. A brilliant time management system, motivational system, goal-setting system, and so on. But people fail in applying that advice because they don’t possess an efficient internal system to conduct their lives.

My blunt theory is that the personal development industry took this approach for one of two reasons:

1.
They care only about money.

People who produce such materials don’t care about the real effectiveness of their programs. Application of their teachings depends solely on their customers. They pay and don’t get the results? Who cares? Nobody coerced them to reach into their wallets. They are probably losers anyway if they can’t utilize such a brilliant system.

2.
They assume that the question of personal philosophy is already answered.

Most people who provide personal development content are practitioners. They don’t theorize much. They either are not aware of their successful personal philosophy or they take for granted that anyone who is attempting to improve his or her life is doing it with the right attitude. But assumptions are dangerous animals. If not tended to properly, they bite. And a lot of people get involved in studying personal development, while only a handful see tangible results from their studies.

I’m fully convinced that a lot more people would get better results if the focus were put on the personal philosophy first and on various different techniques later on. You can see this if you take a look at the personal development bestselling book lists. Books that are focused on the timeless principles and the right mindset are forever alive:
Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius;
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
, by Franklin Covey;
The Slight Edge
, by Jeff Olson;
Think and Grow Rich,
by Napoleon Hill;
As A Man Thinketh
by James Allen; and
Man’s Search for Meaning
by Victor Frankl. Other books, which ignore the question of mindset or don’t treat it seriously enough, are gradually forgotten. Why? They don’t provide the results, not because the programs they contain are trash, but because people with average personal philosophies can achieve only average results.

The human brain is a gigantic filtering mechanism. You register
100 million impulses from your senses
every second. Your brain remembers every single image, sound, smell, and body sensation you experience throughout your life. Your memory capacity is practically infinite. But in order to keep our feeble conscious mind sane, the part of the brain called the reticular formation filters out more than 99 percent of those memories. This way your ego is not overloaded with the raw data and can focus on higher-level activities like abstract thinking.

What penetrates your conscious mind is the carefully chosen set of data that your brain thinks is relevant to you or crucial for your survival. For example, sudden noise has a wide motorway reserved for your filtering mechanism. It almost always goes through filters and causes an automatic fear reaction.

Think of this mechanism as a board of directors presenting a carefully chosen set of data to their CEO. You are the smart CEO and your brain is the pack of dumb managers. They provide you with the data they expect will be of interest to you. For example, if a CEO is a profit-driven, they won’t hassle him with the “unimportant” data about employees’ (dis)satisfaction levels. However, they will readily present him the marketing and sales data. It’s not that the managers don’t know or don’t care about huge employee rotation rates. They were taught by their CEO in the past that that kind of information didn’t interest him. If he asks for that data, though, they will readily provide it.

Your brain is doing the same thing. It took all your up-to-date life experiences, emotions, and thoughts and put them into your personal philosophy, your “system for conduct of life.” And it provides you with the data that’s in accordance with this philosophy.

Only if you start asking different questions will you get different answers. You must ask your board of directors for methods suitable for improving your life, and you must do it with the proper attitude. Not: “Why this is happening to me?” but “How can I use it to my advantage?”

Knowledge Items:

- Personal philosophy is a system a person forms for conduct of life

- Everyone has one.

- People with an average personal philosophy can achieve only average results.