Rewriting The Past
Yesterday, I wrote about seeking small victories.
Seeking small victories is something that’s great for your psychology.
We want to create positive feedback loops to become more productive and more successful. We all know this.
If you’re working hard, learning new skills and moving forward, then you’re probably going to have small victories. You’re going to be creating all kinds of positive stuff in your mind.
However, you can take it up a notch if you like. The way to do this is by rewriting the past.
Rewriting The Past With Your Current (And Future) Skill Set
As I said above, if you’re moving forward in life by learning new skills and generally undertaking some sort of self-improvement measure, your brain will probably feel pretty healthy.
Unfortunately, a ton of people are held back even when they’re moving forward. We’re all a mess of neuroses created by past experiences. Think about the guy who never had a girlfriend because he got turned down flat when he was fourteen years old. Think about the guy who gets into drug dealing and general bad lifestyle decisions because a teacher told him he’d never make anything of himself.
To some extent, we’re all shaped by our pasts, and for whatever reason, those negative things stick and have more of an effect than they have any right to; your social skills, school grades or lifestyle choices at fifteen shouldn’t define you at thirty-five.
So, on the one hand we can move forward and change our brain by positive action.
On the other hand, we’ve got a lot of stored up personal experiences (particularly failures) that hold us back.
In order to navigate through these competing things, we need to do what most people fail to: Put the two together to create something better.
The Past Isn’t Real Anymore
In pretty much every business book you’ll ever read, there’ll be some disclaimer about how you should expect failures along the way. This is reasonable.
The gurus will tell you that 90% of businesses fail. That could be true, I don’t know.
They’ll tell you that it took some billionaire guru five bankruptcies before he hit a winner.
They’ll tell you that every mistake is a learning experience.
This is all great advice, but it still leaves you with a ton of failures that etch themselves onto your brain.
You can say, “My first website was a complete and utter failure but I learned a lot from it,” and it’s still going to irritate you to think about it.
I’ve never heard anybody recommend going back to the things that irritate you and changing them or putting them right. It’s a powerful, powerful thing to do though.
Let’s say you really wanted to learn to skateboard when you were a kid. You even convinced your parents to get you a skateboard for Christmas. There you were on the morning of Boxing Day all dressed up in your winter clothing on the pavement outside your house.
You get on to the skateboard. It wobbles a little. You push off.
… you fall flat on your face.
Your elbows are grazed, there’s a massive cut down the side of your leg. You would be crying, but you’re at that age where you never cry because you feel like you’re a grown-up now.
You go inside, clean yourself up and put that skateboard in the top of your wardrobe, never to come out again until you leave for college and your parents get rid of it.
Occasionally, you’ll see some skateboarding teenagers at the local park, flipping and kicking and you’ll wish you’d gotten your skateboard out of the cupboard at least once and had another go. But you’re tool old now, right?
Wrong.
Rewriting The Past With Your Current (And Future) Skill Set
Let’s presume you are moving forward in your life and picking up new skills. you’re better equipped now to complete any challenge than you were when you were younger.
This isn’t just a weird self-help rant.
I had a project years ago that just wasn’t ever going to come to fruition. It involved skills and knowledge and confidence. These were all things I didn’t have.
Skills like sales, marketing and the confidence to know I could approach people with an idea and not have them laugh in my face.
The fact that I couldn’t do that project is something I’ve never let go. It occurred to me yesterday that what was stopping me a few years ago isn’t stopping me any longer.
Essentially, there’s a neurological niggle in my mind that I can fix by achieving what I wanted to do years ago.
The Practical Bit
You might have got a bucket list of things you want to get done but won’t ever be able to.
You’ve probably also got a list of things you wanted to do but haven’t done – and now you feel it’s too late.
Make a list of all of those things.
Write down why you couldn’t do them.
Then write down what’s changed since you last thought about doing it.
You’ll find some things that you still can’t do. Don’t worry, shelve them for the future.
You’ll find some things that you can do an approximation of. Do that.
You’ll find some things that you can outright just do without a single problem.
Do them.
Final Thoughts
This is a bit off-the-beaten-track for this site, but it’s still relevant.
After all, writing is one of those things that a lot of people want to do but have a million excuses for.
Outside of that, a lot of people are held back by stuff that happened in the past. There are tons of things that people recommend; therapy, meditation, breathing and yoga, quitting Facebook, buying a motorcycle.
If those things help, then great. But I like shortcuts. If you’ve got a hang up about something you didn’t do in the past, then chances are doing it is probably the quickest shortcut to fixing yourself.