This is the second part of the 3-part series around the topic. Please read the first part if you haven’t already: https://anticodeguy.com/articles/red-pill-your-career-from-replaceable-employee-to-irreplaceable-creator-part-1/
The Neuroscience of Self-Direction
The Power Of Focus
I’m actually not a fan of goal-setting, such worn-out techniques. But from a neuroscience perspective, this thing is explained very simply and banally.
I think you’ve heard, maybe played, a game about focus. You can try to play it yourself. Usually, it’s conducted at various trainings on different topics. But it consists of the following.
You need to sit down, close your eyes, regardless of where you are, or stand up, anywhere you’re currently located, close your eyes and then on command. You can obviously command yourself. Wait for a moment, open your eyes and try to count the number of green objects or objects where there’s green color.
Then close your eyes and wait for some time, think of a new color, open your eyes and count objects, for example, of red color, then blue and so on. Until it becomes obvious what’s happening now.
If you’ve never done this exercise, I highly recommend doing it. Here’s what it involves: As soon as you close your eyes and you’re told to find specific colors, you think there are no green objects around me, there’s nothing green here. Where do I look for them? I’ll count, probably about zero.
Then you open your eyes and somehow can find them. And so you find one, a second, a third, and objects become much more than you imagined. Then you’re given the red color. You say, well, there’s definitely no red.
Most likely, the leader or whoever is running this game saw that there are green objects around, so they suggested it. Actually, it doesn’t even depend on the color you choose.
The point is that as soon as you focus on something specific, your brain will be directed to find what you desire. What you focus on, it will begin to see. It’s a survival mechanism.
Ancient Hunters In Concrete Jungles
When we have a task to focus on something, for example, on prey, if we need to get food, as happens with predators around us, everything else simply ceases to exist. The only goal is prey. Because your survival directly depends on it. Whether you will eat today or not.
For humans, it’s about the same. When, for example, danger comes, the focus narrows very much, nothing else interests you. A huge portion of adrenaline is injected into the blood, which spurs your actions to preserve your life, protect yourself, find yourself in a safe situation, in a safe place, or get rid of the opponent. Narrow focus.
Moreover, this happens even unconsciously, you don’t necessarily need to think about it consciously. The subconscious does all this work, it regulates the body, injecting the necessary hormones into the blood, regulating temperature, muscle work. Read my article about the “Hidden Superpower You Possess: How To Use Your Subconscious To Solve The Hardest Problems In Your Life”.
Stories where, during an adrenaline rush or when your life or your child’s life is threatened, incredible strength appears that cannot be achieved in a normal state – this is not supernatural, it’s simple regulation of the body, which stores these resources and reserves of emergency energy needed precisely for such cases.
We’re used to living in a fairly luxurious state in modern society, where we almost never have situations in life that directly threaten it. Of course, all this is relative, but if we take it as a whole, it’s much safer to live now than it was, for example, 20,000 years ago.
I think this doesn’t need explaining, but the fact is that this is an extremely short period for changing human physiology evolutionarily. And the brain is quite plastic, but it’s still too little time to evolutionarily make it different. Therefore, all these tools remain functional.
Direct You Life
So what about the goal? When you have this goal, some direction, the subconscious, as it searches for, say, colors and objects that you suddenly begin to see, even if it seemed there were none around you, begins to notice this. This is the power of focus.
When you focus your consciousness, your subconscious also focuses on it, and it begins to build corresponding neural connections and search for that very path that will lead you to the intended goal, for example, to find the red color.
It works exactly the same with goals. Once you implant in your subconscious the idea that you need to achieve a goal, it begins to subconsciously look for ways to achieve this goal, even if you’re not actively thinking about it.
Cognitive science confirms that focused goals direct our perception and cognitive resources in ways that make achieving the goal more likely. The classic Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (or frequency illusion) illustrates that when you focus on something (e.g. a color or a new word), you start noticing it everywhere – not because it suddenly exists more, but because your brain filters in what it previously filtered out.
If you think about it actively, it accelerates the process. If you get as much information as possible about how these paths to this goal can be built, then this process will go faster. So there’s no magic, no esotericism. It’s simple neuroscience.
A similar mechanism was very well illustrated in Christopher Nolan’s film “Inception,” one of my favorite movies that I can rewatch again and again. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend watching it.
The trick of the film is that such an idea can be implanted through a dream. And this is done not just in a person’s consciousness, but directly in their subconscious, because dreams are the result of subconscious work, as neuroscience shows today.
We don’t know for sure yet, but in general, it happens unconsciously. And if we can reach this subconscious and directly implant an idea there, some goal, then we can just wait, and the person will find ways to achieve this goal themselves.
Being Flexible
So, basically, this is where the journey along the beaten path begins. You set yourself a beacon. How to get to it is still unclear, because you’re in the middle of a field, you turned off that path that all other people follow.
It’s not clear how this field will lead you and in which direction. But if somewhere in the distance you have a beacon, some light, then this will serve as the direction in which you need to go. This is the very thing you need to focus on so as not to lose your way.
Yes, your path may be thorny, you may have a huge number of obstacles. After the field, there may be a forest, then a river, then a sea that will need to be crossed, but in the distance, that same beacon that you set for yourself will continue to shine. This is the very goal that needs to be achieved.
And you go relentlessly towards this goal, and the main thing here is not to change it along the way. Rather, it can be adjusted, and this is probably a very correct story, because you can’t know for sure where this path will lead you, and your goals, interests, your life will change.
We are very flexible beings, and there’s nothing predetermined here that will be carved in stone. Goals can be flexible. A person by their nature is flexible, and if you have a goal from which you don’t deviate, it’s wonderful and excellent, and this will serve as an excellent method.
We can see many examples of successful people who narrowly specialize in some one task, goal, hit this point ten thousand times. Thomas Edison immediately comes to mind, for example, who didn’t invent the light bulb, but discovered ten thousand ways how not to create a light bulb.
This is also a working mechanism, but changing goals, changing your direction, adjusting it during life – this is normal, because you won’t know from the very beginning where you need to go. Your interests will change, you will receive new information, something will appear as new inputs, the situation around you will change, you will make new decisions.
And this is wonderful. The main thing is not to forget that a person is a flexible creature, and our brain becomes rigid over time if we don’t teach it, don’t train it to constantly adapt, learn, and not be that rigid.
Seven Notes For All Songs
“Creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” – Sir Ken Robinson, education reformer
The next point is what does the matrix, education, and so on have to do with it. The thing is, as I’ve already said, there are certain scenarios in the matrix that are prescribed by that very education. This is that well-trodden path built by other people.
If you follow it, the result will be absolutely predictable. You’ll end up exactly like other people. If this path suits you, okay, you can follow it and live a perfectly good life according to the norms that society has invented.
If you feel that this is not your path and you want something else, then, as I’ve already mentioned above, you need to take a different path and compile your own list of skills and disciplines that you need to study to achieve your goal.
What these skills are, what these disciplines are, I can’t tell you, because your path will be different from mine. I think you know what music is, I don’t need to explain that to you, and you’ve heard more than one song in your life, probably at least two. Maybe even three, or if you’re lucky – four.
But you also know that there are only seven notes on a musical staff. And, strangely enough, based on these seven notes, we can create an almost infinite number of combinations and create new melodies.
But such notes, disciplines, or skills that you can study to change your life, there aren’t just seven in the world, there are many more. There aren’t even seventy or seven hundred, there are many more of these skills.
Now imagine how many possible paths, outcomes, careers can be built by combining these skills. Besides skills, there are also interests. It’s not just seven notes; there are also various instruments you can play. These are precisely your interests.
By combining these notes and instruments, we get an infinite variety of musical compositions that we listen to, that we gladly use in life, that make us happier.
And your task is to write your own composition, to select that very combination of skills and interests that belong exclusively to you and no one else, and to write your own song that you will play.
To Listen Or To Create
It’s important here to transform from a listener of music written by someone else into its creator. This is the second step. To understand that you have a certain set of skills, interests that you focus on, that you study at school, at university, in your specialty.
And if this is the same set of skills that another person has, who, for example, graduated from the same specialty with you, then obviously you are interchangeable. Obviously, the two songs that you will play, using the same notes in the same combination on the same instruments, will sound different when you play them, but they will still be perceived roughly the same.
They will be perceived differently by other people, but the melody itself will not change because of this. It will be the same song you’re trying to play, the same song already written by someone else.
You take a certain template and play it on your musical instrument. If another person plays on the same musical instrument, possessing the same sciences, but essentially the same notes and on the same instrument, then the result of performing this song will be very similar to yours, which is actually what happens in life.
We follow the same road, and the result turns out to be approximately the same. If you want a different result, you need to at least first learn to play these notes, learn to combine them with each other, possibly using the same skills, interests, and instruments that you own for now, but then adding something of your own.
And that’s gradually how any learning happens. First, you imitate other people, other people’s songs, and then, when you have already developed the technical skills, you can come up with your own.