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0[WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH ALL YOUR SPARE TIME?]
So, if you keep looking at this and feeling bad, and you spend an hour a day doing it, that’s 365 hours a year, and over 10 years, that’s 3,600 hours you’re going to spend doing this. Does that sound like a good plan? And they go, “Well, of course not,” and I go, “Hey, wait a minute, it’s your plan. Not mine.” And when you say that to people, they have to stop and consider that they are doing it on purpose; it just doesn’t feel that way.
The ways they’ve tried to stop it haven’t worked. They’ve tried to stop something rather than continuing it - by thinking you go further. Look at the same movie and whenever you get to the end, run it backwards. It looks silly.
You put circus music with it. It seems silly. You shrink it down so it’s smaller. It seems silly. You reduce it down and replace it with something you’d rather do for those 10 years.
Look at the next 10 years. If you don’t look at those 58,000 waking hours as if you’re going to do something with them, then you’ll just keep doing what’s familiar, whether it’s depression, whether it’s obsessive compulsive disorder, any behavior that I consider to be stupid. It’s not until people look at it and they feel stupid that they’ll stop doing it. They have to look at the commitment they’ve made to engaging with behaviors that don’t work.
[BEING STRATEGIC]
With the Internet, with globalization, the world is in a constant state of change. Suicide rates seem to be going up. We tend to spend a lot of time going over and ruminating over the worst kinds of things and being terrified of the future. We don’t only feel bad about what’s happened, we feel scared of what’s going to happen because we can’t predict it. Helping people think more effectively isn’t simply a case of understanding what to do, it’s also handling the potential problems or challenges that might arise. Most people are pretty good at setting goals, but they’re not very good at the next step, which is understanding what they need to do to get there and what is going to get in their way.
In the area of personal development, often people will say, “Oh, I want to achieve this and I’m going to read The Secret, I’m going to repeat the mantra, ‘I want it, I want it, I want it’, and then go, ‘why isn’t it here?’” That’s because they didn’t do anything and when they tried to do something, something that they could have predicted ahead of time cropped up and they didn’t know how to handle it because they weren’t being strategic.
Thinking on Purpose is also about how to be more strategic. Understanding not just where you want to go, not just where the trajectory of your life is going at present and how to move it over, but also what are the potential things you need to deal with. You need to plan ahead to be disappointed and you also need to plan ahead to be scared. In order to be scared of speaking in public, you need to be planning ahead for all of these people looking at you a certain way. You need to be able to be ready for that so when you are there, you’re already ready for it and you’re able to overcome it.
Looking at the problem, the problem is that we don’t use our brain to think on purpose. When people say to me – and this is the magic phrase – “It’s just that I thought it would be easier. It’s just that I thought she would like me.” When people do that they’re not really thinking. They make up an idea, they make the memory of the idea and they keep thinking that idea rather than watching what’s going on. The more we spend our time doing this, the more we truly are wasting the currency of our life.
