I'm 37. If I was 20 again, here's how I'd fix my mindset

Summary

I’m 37. if I could sit my 20-year-old self down and hand him one thing, it wouldn’t be a business strategy or a book list. it would be a frame for the mind.

there’s a Donald Hall essay called “strings too short to be saved” about his grandfather’s habit of saving useless bits of string in a drawer. that’s what most of us do with our beliefs. we keep limiting stories in the drawer because we don’t realize we’re allowed to throw them out.

then there’s a study where participants were told they had either a “good gene” or a “bad gene” for endurance, randomly assigned, no actual genetic test. the people who believed they had the good gene outperformed the others by margins that shouldn’t be possible from belief alone. that’s how much the mind drives the result.

so the lesson I’d give 20-year-old me:

1. audit the stories you’re carrying. most of them aren’t even yours, they’re inherited.
2. throw out anything that doesn’t serve where you’re going.
3. actively feed the mind. positive, logical, evidence-based inputs. not affirmation theater, real reps.
4. assume mindset is 80% of performance and most of it is invisible to you right now.

I would have saved years if I’d known.

Transcript

what i’d tell my 20-year-old self about mindset

As of today, I’m a 37 year old entrepreneur. Who’s hit the Inc 500 two different times. That means me along with my team are building some of the fastest growing privately held companies in the U S but my success has been super slow because my mindset suck. So if I could go back to my 20 year old version of myself, here is what I would tell him to fix his mindset so he could have success faster. And I hope it helps you out as well.

The first thing I would want him to know is that his ideas are what are holding him back. His ideas suck. He’s holding on to ideas that do not matter. So I’m going to read a short passage from my book, killing comfort that illustrates this point. And hopefully you get what I’m saying when it comes to the ideas.

So in 1961, poet Donald Hall published a book entitled strings too short to be saved about his childhood summer spent in New Hampshire. In one story hall recalls a man was cleaning the attic of an old house in new England and he found a box which was full of tiny pieces of string on the lid of the box.

lesson #1 , your ideas are holding you back

There was an inscription in an old hand that said string too short to be saved in that simple illustration hall captured a metaphor for much of our lives. For what purpose would you hold onto a string that could serve no utility in your life? Likewise, we cling to stories and ideas that do not help us.

Most of us have too many strings too short to save. Now I could get into specific instances of the ideas that I was holding onto. I had a scarcity mindset. I thought entrepreneurship wasn’t for me. It was for other types of people, people who were maybe higher performers than me. I had all of these ideas about success in money that were not right.

So I could go back to my 20 year old self and say very specifically like, Hey, work on your abundance mindset. But that’s not what I would need him to know. I would need him to know bigger picture. He’s holding onto a lot of ideas that do not matter and that he needs to let go of them. That is the biggest thing. We all have these ideas.

”strings too short to be saved” , a metaphor for mental clutter

We have these ideas about money, success, marketing. That was another big one I had. I thought marketing was not for me. I was not a marketer. I cannot market my product or service. I’m a coach. I’m something else. I’m not a person who can market all of these ideas. It’s just idea after idea story. I’ve told myself stories.

I’ve been told over and over again, slowing me down, taking me three months here, six months here, two years here to overcome these ideas, these limiting beliefs. If you know that you are holding onto ideas, anytime you think that you can achieve something, anytime you have an idea about the negativity of posting on social media or whatever idea you have, it is probably holding you back.

common limiting beliefs about money, marketing, and success

I know that is what was holding me back. It was my ideas and the stories I told myself. So the first thing I’d want him to know right off the bat is you are full of ideas and stories that are not serving you to be successful and you need to let them go. And once you can let go of those ideas and stories, you can start to succeed a whole lot faster. Okay?

The second thing I would want my 20 year old self to know is how powerful the mind actually is. Now I’m not trying to get too woo here, but the mind is incredibly powerful. It’s kind of in the same vein as the ideas. The mind can slow you down, but it’s also how you think about things, how powerful the mind is. So again, going back to the book, I’m going to read a scientific study that talks about the power of the mind.

So we aren’t in the woo world too much. We can actually talk about what happens when you apply the power of the mind. So in 2018, 223 participants were recruited for a genotype study. They were signing up for a year long personalized health study where they learn about the best exercises and diets for themselves based on their genotype.

lesson #2 , the mind is more powerful than you realize

But in reality, they were signing up to be lied to. Participants across the studies were told they had either the good version or the bad version of specific genes related to exercise performance, obesity risk and other genes. So what was the lie? Half of the people with good genes were told they had bad genes and half of the people with bad genes were told they had good genes.

So the researchers were actually lying to the participants about the type of genes they had. The study was pretty straightforward from here. They would feed participants a standardized meal to control for performance related to macronutrient intake. And they took a baseline test. Then a week later, they took the test again after they were informed or should I say misinformed about their good or bad genes. In both studies, beliefs about one’s genes impacted both perceptual and physiological measures.

the 2018 genotype study that changed everything

In some cases, people who were told they had the bad version of a gene had worse outcomes in the second test than the first test. In other cases, people who were told they had a good version of a gene performed better in the second test than the first, regardless of their actual genetics. Having bad genes has been a longstanding excuse for decades. Plainly, a person thinks that due to their specific set of genes, they cannot make progress, but they actually can.

Now I’m not going to get into epigenetics and all these other things, but what we think actually controls the outcome. And that is the second thing I would have to have my 20 year old version. No. So in this study, people with perfectly healthy genes, genes optimized for performance were told you have bad genes.

And then they perform worse in the second test. The only information they were giving was a false information into the input system, our brain. So they hear they have bad genes. So they think that they have bad genes. They perform worse. I know the mind is powerful. You know, the mind is powerful. It is the most cliche thing that anyone could potentially say in the success world. You know, the motivational speakers talking about how powerful your mind is.

why belief shapes performance (even when the info is false)

But we all kind of agree with it. I always challenge you to think about what are you actually doing to feed your mind? And I’m not talking about reading. I’m not talking about journaling. I’m not talking about those things. What are you actually telling yourself to power your mind forward? Now, this could be an affirmation.

It could be just the simple truth of what you’re working on. I am doing X. So it will result in Y. Can you just tell yourself that over and over again, this isn’t fake it till you make it. This isn’t lying to yourself. It’s a simple, I am putting in the work on my marketing platforms. And so I will generate X amount more revenue this month.

It can be a logic based approach. Again, I’m not big into the woo world, but I am big into the power of the mind because every professional athlete, every high performer, every military special operator, every person I’ve ever known who has succeeded at some high level has an incredible mindset.

what are you feeding your mind daily?

And the reason some of them might not have some sort of mindset practice is because from whatever case their upbringing or just how they were born, they already have an incredible mindset. So sometimes you see really successful entrepreneurs who don’t talk about these things because they may have been born in a situation where they already have an incredibly powerful mindset and they don’t know it.

That’s why there are all these studies done on high performers. I dive into that more into this book. The reason high performers are the way that they are is because of how they think that is a majority of it. Yes, their genetics. Yes, there are physiological aspects to high performers and sports and all these kinds of things. But the mind is the most powerful aspect of any of this.

the true difference between high performers and everyone else

And I going back to when I was 20 years old, had a terrible mindset. I didn’t want to feed the mind. I was feeding it with scarcity thoughts. I was feeding it with anxiety, not how I would be successful. Now putting in the effort, just one foot in front of the other every single day eventually got me to where I wanted to go. But like I said at the beginning of this episode, my success has been slow. I’m very proud of my accomplishments today, but do I think I could have accomplished everything I have so far in much, much less time? Absolutely. And there are only two things.

I really feel like my 20 year old version of myself needed to know. And that was, Hey, your mind is incredibly powerful. Feed it the right stuff. Feed it the positive things. Get rid of the anxious thoughts. Don’t let those thoughts become who you are. And the second thing is you are full of ideas and stories that are not serving you ideas and stories around money, around success, around entrepreneurship, around every single thing.

final thoughts: let go of bad stories, feed a better mind

You had so many ideas and stories I had to root out and get rid of. If I could go back to him and let him know and help him fix those two things to have let go of ideas and stories that aren’t serving my purpose. And then to also really focus on the power of a mind and make that a daily practice, I would have succeeded so much faster.

And I hope that you can implement these things too, so you can succeed fast as well.