the study of success

Your power is in your perspective; how you view the world.

This is because your perspective is the sum of all your beliefs. And what are beliefs? Literally operating instructions for your mind. They’re like the code in a computer, telling it how to process the information that it receives from sensors, hardware, and from you. Here’s why…

Beliefs are what enable us to encounter a situation, be presented with a number of different ways to react, quickly scan them all and their most probable outcomes, develop an emotional reaction to each choice which comes from our experiences and beliefs, and make a decision.

When confronted with a situation, our beliefs cause us to experience emotional reactions to our choices for how we react, which are kind of like the automatic feedback that we have to help us make really quick, efficient decisions, without having to analyze a situation from start to finish. The actions we take are a result of choosing the best-feeling outcome. What that ends up being depends on our beliefs.

Beliefs are literally the autopilot epicenter of our brains. Our beliefs and experiences allow us to spend most of the day doing what we need to do without really ever having to think all that much about anything. 

Good Thought vs. Bad Thought

If our beliefs are beneficial, this is great. If they are harmful, we will consistently make small-minded decisions. They’re not bad decisions, they’re just decisions that cause us to avoid opportunities and growth. Most beliefs are rooted in a desire to survive, and the brain prioritizes information that helps us avoid harm over information that helps us to potentially grow or succeed. 

With the number of beliefs we have, the number of decisions they help us make each day, and how they are all so interconnected, unless we take the time to sit back and realize that they are the epicenter of most of our problems, the vast size and influence of them means we may never grow up from them. The problem with most beliefs is that they’re just not relevant to us, or to who we are now. They’re fragments of history and perspectives other than our own. We adopt those beliefs hoping to learn from the experiences of our own and of others and avoid harm or loss, but instead of having taken what the moment taught our or themselves and using it as feedback and letting it go, we’ve written a narrative that says that whatever happened was bad and should be avoided and we should tell people about it and never forget it.

Origin

Many people, even those who are very upbeat and easy-going, struggle with beliefs that don’t serve them well. That’s because our beliefs lie very deep within us. Most of them come to us in childhood, and, like an organism, influence and produce new beliefs, leaving their signature on each new belief. These seminal beliefs shape our early view of the world, and give us the lenses that we subsequently use to interpret and come to our own conclusions and beliefs about the world through. Much of this is rooted in cognitive bias – the idea that the brain selectively looks for and retains information that confirms and agrees with information and discards information that challenges or is to the contrary. We truly are a product of our surroundings, as our existing beliefs give fuel to the fire of new beliefs created in a similar image.

Many of these beliefs come from parents, grandparents, teachers, and other authority figures we come to trust, in a well-meaning but somewhat misguided attempt to shield us from harm. While we may end up not making a bunch of potentially problematic decisions, we also develop a fear of the world or a kind of complacency where we are constantly looking out for things that may harm us to avoid. Much of our innate desire to survive is a component of nature, but I can’t help but say that a lot of it is taught, too. 

Many particularly limiting beliefs come in the form of wanting to avoid guilt and shame, specifically from religious beliefs. Religion isn’t entirely bad in and of itself, but the “alphabet soup interpretive theology” that has become a petulant and ravaging scourge on humanity has caused all of us to take on a lot of beliefs that don’t serve ourselves, our neighbors, or the world in the least out of fear of recourse from a divine being, most of the time simply because something has been misinterpreted throughout poor translations over time, or even worse, only half the story has been told. 

Many more damaging beliefs come in the form of stereotypes, another sign of cognitive bias rearing its ugly head. In an effort for our minds to understand the world and create a vast web of beliefs that empower us with quick reflexes and fast decision-making abilities, we often selectively notice and remember instances that support an idea that isn’t entirely truthful. We experience something, a situation with a set of conditions. We experience it again. We hear about other people who have experienced it. We rationalize and make a generalization and create a stereotype. We let dumb luck, chance, and coincidence influence the judgment we end up making.

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1. Having a perspective that benefits you is key to success in anything.
2. Our perspectives are our views of the world, made up by our beliefs; the perspective is the collection of all of them summed up together.
3. Beliefs are nothing more than ideas that hold some resonance within us that we have internalized.

Three core beliefs there, and a fourth one here that will really unlock for you the essence of perspective.

4. Our beliefs cause us to experience emotional reactions to situations, which are kind of like the automatic feedback that we have to help us make really quick, efficient decisions, without having to analyze a situation from start to finish.

Perspective, Beliefs, and Success

Simply stated, as it was above, your perspective is the collective sum of all of your beliefs. It is how you view the world. Nothing more, nothing less. From the moment we are creating memories, we are building and refining our perspectives. Unfortunately, many of the beliefs that we have are what is holding us back from making the types and kinds of decisions we need, to move forward in our own individual success journeys.

Many of these beliefs originated in childhood, when we were first learning about the world. We developed our own, but we also adopted a lot of beliefs from people who passed them down to us – parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, and other sources of influence. Beliefs are a great thing to have, as they allow us to make the majority of our decisions each day on autopilot, if you will, with little to no cognitive analysis. The key to success is ensuring that you have the right ones.

Example: you encounter a situation, you’re presented with a number of reactions, and you develop an emotional reaction to them, based on your belief of what would happen with the outcome of one versus another. There’s no real analysis of the situation, just an impulse, a reaction or multiple reactions, an emotional response to those, and a decision made. Logic only enters the equation when our beliefs don’t provide a conclusive emotional to how best to react, and even then, logic is still based on our past experiences and other contextual, related beliefs. 

Beliefs tell us, through the subsequent possible reactions we can make, and our emotional impulses to each of those, what the best course of action to take is. They are the source of almost everything automatic about us. They get us up, or they shut us down. They make us take the leap, or they make us stay home.

Some beliefs are positive, but many are not. Some parts of our gardens are flowers. Some parts are weeds. Our goal is to constantly be preening, watering, fertilizing, and sowing new seeds.

Beliefs Can Help Or Hurt

Since beliefs hold so much power over our destiny, it’s helpful to understand why and where these beliefs come from.

Our beliefs and our perspectives begin forming the moment that we begin to experience our worlds and see the relationship between cause and effect.

As human beings, we’re capable of developing our own beliefs, even at a young age. That being said, most of us don’t reach full autonomy until our early adult years, and as a result, as young children, we pick up a lot of our beliefs and habits – the majority of them – from our family, friends, and the people who surround us. In effect, we become unique but mostly mirror images of those around us. As time goes on, we form new beliefs, continuously unfolding from new experiences and ideas that our minds mesh and align with existing beliefs and our perspective as a whole. Our understanding of the world is based on the context of our upbringing.

As young adults, we begin to start questioning some of them, and forming our own, and changing some, too. And then, as independent adults out in the world on our own, we have the full power and capability to change our beliefs and our perspectives to best suit our needs, but too often we are so concerned with survival and day-to-day tasks that we get on autopilot and stay there, and have lives that reflect the sum of our beliefs, our perspective. The key is to change that, but first, let’s look at where they come from. I find it helpful to illuminate where a lot of the beliefs surrounding success come originate, as they are complex, and often buried very deep, and elicit very visceral emotional reactions from us.

Types of Beliefs

In the beginning, almost all beliefs come from other people, and then we form our own new ones based off of our experiences coupled with the existing ones. It’s almost like an organism, like algae or a moss. It starts with one, and then replicates and spreads.

Contextual Beliefs

Many of these original beliefs are rooted in the observations and explanations of others; essentially, a belief that you hold to be true that came from someone’s interpretation of a situation.

Think of the teaching a young child about the world, especially one in that 2-7 year old stage that _____ psychologist ____ Piaget called the “preoperational” Piaget stage, where they are so impressionable.

We all know they are full of questions. Curious. Wanting to understand. They see things and they ask who, what, where, when, why? This is how they develop their independence, by training their brain to understand and make decisions.

The child might’ve been there with someone, they were curious about what was going on, and the adult explained the situation to the child from their perspective and the child accepted it into their belief bank for future interpretation. Or the child might’ve been elsewhere, but heard the adult talking about it in vivid detail, and saved it for future use.

Either way, the child took the adult’s word for it. These kinds of beliefs are intellectual hearsay, so to speak. They are chinese whispers. By accepting and internalizing this belief, you’re literally choosing, by default, to see the world the way this person saw it, whether right or wrong.

By the age of 7-11, children are still very focused in concrete thinking, but are beginning to think logically about things, and then by 12 and on up, they’re beginning to put these beliefs to use, and developing new ones all on their own, now that they’re thinking abstractly and reasoning about hypothetical problems. But so much of their world thus far has been based upon and interpreted through the lens of the beliefs they started with, and the idea of changing isn’t really on their mind.

Biased Beliefs

Many beliefs also don’t paint the whole picture. A lot come from their commitment to a religious lifestyle and the subsequent “alphabet soup theology”, where people pick and choose what a sacred book says to align with their perspective. There are prosperity preachers. There are also pious, minimalistic living preachers.

Stereotypical Beliefs

Many more come from stereotypes, and that’s especially prevalent when it comes to success. All _____ are _____. These are very deep-seated beliefs and typically are passed down from one person to another, but sometimes come about organically when we observe an individual, with a certain identity, acting in a certain manner, and then see this happen again, and again. These are especially prevalent in those early stages where we’re trying to develop a structure and hierarchy for everything we experience. We make assumptions, we go off of them, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Yes, almost all schoolbuses are yellow. If you see a yellow bus, it’s probably a school bus.

Success is a trait or quality we aspire toward, and so it’s something we can be judged for, as well as others, and when people see others and observe them and interpret them, especially successful people, existing beliefs and jealousy can be a catalyst for additional beliefs.

• • PART THREE – refinement
  • Our life is a constant and never-ending feed of thoughts, ideas, and experiences that have the potential to result in new beliefs. There are beliefs that we inherit from others, and there are new ones that we create based on our present perspective and what it tells us about ourselves and the world.
  • Each new belief of our own is a subsequent rationalization of what we’ve just experienced based off of what we’ve experienced before.
  • The only way to change our beliefs and subsequently our perspective is to consciously introduce new ideas, evidence, and experiences to subtly reshape, shift, and mold our perspective into something new. Giving ourselves new, sometimes contradictory facts and evidence to base our emotional responses and therefore our decisions off of.
  • There’s two things here. One is to dissociate from the perspectives we’ve held, and also any feelings of loyalty we have, and the second is to start introducing new material.
  • Many times we feel like we are being unloyal to our family or friends when we change our perspectives and our subsequent actions because they will result in very obvious clashes. You still believe that, but I now believe this. They worry about people taking it the wrong way, being offended, being hurt, etc. They worry about loved ones feeling like they’re not good enough for the person anymore, Or that they are unintelligent.
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Improving Your Perspective 

• • • One of the greatest things you can do is read about other successful people. Realize they will have good and bad traits. Pick up the positive and leave the rest as just another part of their story and their journey. Look at where they’ve had challenges and how they’ve succeeded. You’ve had your rough spots, they have too, and yet they’ve still succeeded.
    • Find people who’ve had it worse off than you and see what they did to succeed.
    • Find a mentor to spend time with.
    • Turn off the news – your perspective comes from your beliefs, which come from what you observe – garbage in garbage out – shut out what’s not good for you, and make extra time for what is. When you control what you see, you control what you believe. Some people say not to keep your head stuck in the ground, that you should be aware of the world around you. Yes, but not if it ends up affecting you. Keep tabs on your emotional response to what you observe. Let that be your guide. Seek and find that which makes you happy. This is your perspective, not someone else’s. If it’s really that big a deal, you’ll hear about it through the grapevine. If it’s truly important, and very few things are, it’ll find its way to you.
    • Cut out negative people. Your perspective is your beliefs which form from what you see. Bad news = the world is going to pits.
    • Surround yourself with quotes that empower you.
    • Surround yourself with people who believe in you and encourage you. Get an accountability partner. Talk with someone who has their head on straight.
    • Use affirmations
    • Keep a log of when things go write and people and situations defy your beliefs
    • Meditate, so that your mind can be a clear and fertile and positive soil for good things to happen and new ideas to grow
    • Consider seeing a psychotherapist for cognitive behavioral therapy if you really struggle with this.
    • Beliefs literally shape how we interact and react to our worlds.