Why to understand the mind

You use your mind all day, every day, to do everything. And so does everyone around you.

Your mind can either use you, or you can use it. But you can only use your mind if you understand how it works. In this post, we’re going to cover the basics, giving you a clearer understanding of the benefits of being a master of your own mind.

To be in greatest control of the mind, and to help other people do the same, it takes three things:

• Self Awareness - understanding how your unique mind works

• Self Regulation - choosing to do the best thing, not the most impulsive thing

• A new and vastly-better form of confidence - being confident in your logic, not your knowledge

So, let’s unpack a few quick ideas on each, but let’s start with how we approach everything in this newsletter and in our work, and why. You will never achieve self awareness, regulation, or this confidence by following recipes, tactics, or tips. You will only achieve it through a true understanding of the mind.

Chefs vs. Cooks…

In my work with companies and teams, I lean heavily into the metaphor that our work is like culinary school instead of cooking classes. Yes, you can take cooking classes to learn recipes about how to do the things you want to do, but if you go to culinary school, you will actually understand how things work. What this means is that culinary school will turn you into an independent thinker, able to handle any situation, even if you haven’t ever learned a recipe in advance.

Learning recipes and tactics is faster at first. It feels empowering and rewarding. You can easily learn a recipe and use it in an hour. In culinary school, on the other hand, an hour would teach you almost nothing. You’d still feel lost…you might even feel more lost than you did an hour earlier, having even more questions than you did before because you’re now heading into more depth and complexity than you realized was there.

So the dopamine of learning recipes is pretty compelling, right? Recipes are faster than learning real comprehension, right?

No. Learning recipes feels fast, but it’s slow, inflexible, and ultimately a lot more confusing than learning how things actually work.

Let’s look at how things look 10, 20, or 100 hours into culinary school. After 10 hours, the culinary students are really starting to get it. Multiple principles are starting to click into place, and the students can easily see how to make that recipe that the cooking class made. But the chefs are starting to feel an advantage that the cooks don’t: they can use principles to make dozens of, hundreds of, thousands of, (and truly infinite) recipes. They can make anything they want, any time they want. They can make things up, and they will work.

Wouldn’t that feel nice as you manage people, motivate people, communicate, seek clarity, develop strategy, and make important decisions? Wouldn’t actual understanding instead of formulaic recipes feel incredible?

Recipes only feel faster for the first little bit. After that, comprehension is always faster, smarter, better, more creative, boundless. And when it comes to understanding your mind, that’s what you want to shoot for.

Self Awareness

Self awareness is all about understanding how the brain works, in general, and then how your unique brain works. The reason we want self awareness is so we can become intellectual instead of instinctive creatures. Every single thing that happens around you will cause an instinctive response in your brain. If I asked you a state capital, asked you a political opinion, or snuck up and scared you, your brain will instantly generate an instinctive, automatic response.

The intellectual response is what comes next, and is entirely optional. Your intellect is like an instinct approval and override system. It can look at what your brain wants to do, and determine whether or not that is actually what you should do.

People who lack self awareness can’t (or just don’t) do this. They unwittingly work under the assumption that their instincts are correct, and they don’t activate this second intellectual process that could catch mistakes and make better decisions. That’s why self-unaware people seem to be so reactive and reflexive, and why the CIA, for example, calls people “laughably predictable.” Low self-awareness makes people creatures of instinct, stuck as the passenger instead of the drive of their own mind, without even realizing it.

About 90% of people lack self-awareness. Being self-unaware is not something people choose. It’s actually just the default settings most brains ship from the factory with. If you want self awareness, you have to, at some point in your life, go into the settings and manually activate it. We’ll show you many ways to achieve that as we keep publishing more posts, but it all starts with understanding this one simple thing that you will do constantly as a self-aware person: self awareness is when you use your intellect to start seeing, analyzing, approving, or overriding your instincts.

And that last part, approving and overriding, is all self-control really is.

You won’t always get it right, much like a professional basketball player does miss free throws. Being perfect isn’t the point. Being elite is. And self control is the most inherently-elite thing imaginable: simply exercising it instantly puts you in the top 10% of human beings.

Your New Confidence

Self-unaware people have confidence that their instincts get things right, automatically. They trust that letting their mind do what it wants to do will yield good results, and this viewpoint might even be backed up by a lot of success in life. People who have a great job, who have made a lot of money, and who have a big following are supremely-confident in the instincts that got them there.

But what are instinctive people leaving on the table?

It’s true that certain people’s instincts are awesome. People can be hilariously funny, fast to create structure and order based on repeating what they’ve done in the past, sensitive to risk, prone to take control, and all of these things might have yielded success in the past. But if intellect took that second look along the way, they’d be even funnier, even faster to create better structure and order by slightly deviating from the past, able to take risk sensitivity and eliminate many of the false negatives and positives they got wrong, and more discerning with when they do and don’t take control of situations. This could easily have added 10%, 20%, 100%, or 10x to their successes.

Easily.

It’s temping to read something like that and assume that all of this extra thinking would slow you down or paralyze you. That is actually not true. In fact, this take is just a perfect example of a reflexive, instinctive reaction that intellect wouldn’t ever agree with. Many, many people have reactions like these, designed to rationalize their instinctive behavior, and make the mind feel better. Here’s the truth, instead: thinking, even for just a few minutes or even a few seconds, can dramatically improve almost every single instinct a person has.

While that might be hard to see in ourselves, have you ever looked at another person and thought to yourself, “Why didn’t that person think about that for just 5 seconds before they made that decision or said that out loud?”

Of course you have. And that applies to all of us.

Your new confidence is going to be rooted in knowing that you have the uncommon ability to choose even better actions using your intellect. You’ll know that your plans came from your intellect instead of your instincts. You’ll know that you can catch yourself before making mistakes while everyone around you rationalizes why we should head right off a cliff.

For people whose confidence is currently rooted in their instincts, this can be tough, but the results you’ll start getting right away are huge and reinforce why confidence in your intellect (your ability to figure it out) is so much better than confidence in your instincts (the idea you already have the “right” answer reflexively).

Why do we want to understand the mind? Because it gets us significantly better results, 100% of the time.