Why "Designed Mind"?

Why Designed Mind? Why focus on Mindset?

Mindset is the key that unlocks life.

Some people seem to operate on a different level than everyone else. They plow through adversity with minimal struggle. They achieve significant successes with seemingly little effort. They may not even seem smarter or more capable than anyone else, yet still their life seems to fall into place over and over again.

Their secret is their Mindset.

Uber productive people don’t think, “I’m going to try to do eighty-five things today.” They go about their day and eighty-five things get done. Emotionally and mentally strong people don’t often have to think about being strong. Throughout life they have experienced adversity that has wired them in a way that makes them more resistant to the heavy weights of the world. They don’t have to be strong because it is embedded in their Mindset that this is who they are. They may not even know that their Mindset is the genesis for everything they accomplish, but I assure you that their achievements are all based on the Mentality that they carry with them everywhere they go.

By taking the approach to focus on creating a Designed Mind, or a Mindset Mentality, you can physically, mentally, and emotionally craft who you want to be in such a way that it drives you towards your goals in a way that feels like you’re operating on instincts instead of effort.

What Is Mindset?

There are a lot of ways to frame “Mindset.”

In his seminal book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen Covey often uses the term “paradigm.” Lots of people use the term "perspective.” These words don’t capture everything within a Mindset. Nor does attitude, demeanor, philosophy, or any other synonym you might find in a thesaurus. While these terms are adjacent to Mindset, they’re not as complete. They’re all elements of a Mindset.

More accurately, they’re all a product of a Mindset. Mindset is the origination point of all of our perspectives, attitudes, priorities, behaviors, and decisions. The things we believe in and do are the output of our Mindset. If we have a good Mindset - one that is aligned with our goals and desires - then it will lead to the natural flow of actions and decisions in accordance with our goals. When we have a negative mindset - one that is not aligned with our goals and desires - we become irritable and self-defeating.

Like any good engineer or doctor, when trying to find a solution to a problem or sickness, we want to target the issue itself, not the symptoms it’s creating. Treating the symptoms leaves the root cause in place and it’s only a matter of time before those symptoms flare up again. This intuitively leads us to focus on Mindset.

The wonderful thing about Mindset is that it isn’t a machine that doesn’t accept inputs. We can absolutely influence and craft our Mindset to be aligned to anything we want to do in life. By consciously crafting our Mindset, by creating a Designed Mind, we can design a life that happens more by flow and momentum than by sheer effort or willpower (these are vastly overrated as mechanisms to achievement as you’ll see in future newsletters).

What’s the benefit of a Designed Mind?

Life happens for you, not to you.

When you take an active role in designing your Mindset, the rest of life begins to flow in the direction you’ve set without much intervention (once you’ve done the upfront work, of course). In a way, you could say that designing your Mindset automates the rest of your life. You don’t have to think about making decisions because you instinctively know and feel the right decision. You don’t have to do mental gymnastics to talk yourself into doing what you know you’re supposed to do because you’re the type of person who does it.

Think of it as installing new software for your brain. Up until this point, you’ve been running on You1.0. You’ve spent however many years running that software. It’s gotten you this far but if here isn’t where you want to be then you’ve got the wrong software installed. It’s time for an upgrade. You2.0 is the software in your brain that reprograms you to think, decide, and act in the ways you want to be to achieve the things you want to do.

If You2.0 software is designed to save for retirement, then it spends its time searching for ways to invest while eliminating excess spending habits. If You2.0 is programmed to get fit and lose weight, it prioritizes healthy habits like portion control, exercising, and drinking water, while mitigating the desire for junk food. The new software doesn’t have to fight to do these things because it’s just part of the embedded code.

How do I start?

You already have.

Becoming aware of the power of your Mindset is a major first step. You’ll begin to notice when your Mindset doesn’t align to the things you want to do.

Want to start a workout routine but can’t seem to get your brain motivated? Want to start waking up at five a.m. but can’t keep yourself from hitting snooze until seven? That’s your brain telling you it’s not where it needs to be to do those activities.

Over the next few weeks I’ll give you the tools and tricks to get your brain to go where you want it to go, and eventually to operate on autopilot to do the things you want to do.

I’m excited you’ve chosen to take on Mindset Mentality. I’m thrilled to share in this journey with you. Thank you for making it this far. I’m hopeful your future self with thank you, too.

Now I ask you: If you knew you could not fail, what would you attempt to do?