Mind OS
Key Takeaways
- We All Have a "Mind Operating System": Just like a smartphone, our minds run on an operating system built from genetic inheritance and lifelong conditioning. This system determines our automatic behaviors and priorities without our conscious awareness.
- The Lower Brain's Agenda: Our primitive brain's core programming is to seek efficiency (routine), avoid pain, and seek pleasure. While essential for survival, this "default mode" can hold us back from higher-level growth and achievement.
- Humility is a Superpower: An unexpected encounter highlights that we are all "beggars" in some sense, reliant on help from others and a higher power. Cultivating humility opens us up to growth and deeper connection.
- You Can Reprogram Your Priorities: You have the power to consciously decide what is important to you. By establishing a clear agenda or "credo," you can command your brain to look for opportunities and solutions that align with your higher goals, just as planning a move to Hawaii created a clear path forward.
- Discomfort is the Price of Growth: Breaking free from old routines and achieving "escape velocity" from your current limitations requires facing discomfort. This is a necessary part of leveling up in any aspect of your life.
- Conduct a Self-Audit: To understand your current operating system, take an honest look at your daily behaviors and perform "thought downloads" to see what's really going on in your mind. This will reveal if your actions align with your stated values and help you identify "bugs" to fix.
Good morning. This is Bryce Peterson, and you're listening to Actually, You Can, episode 93: Mind OS.
Top of the morning, everybody. The sun has not quite risen over here for us in Hawaii yet, I think maybe in about 20 or 30 minutes. But the roosters are going to town. They've been going to town for the last 30 minutes. About every seven seconds or so, you'll hear a rooster going off about this time of day, and we're so used to it anymore that we just don't even really notice it too much.
So, yesterday was kind of a fascinating day, particularly in the evening after my workday ended. I was walking across the street to the parking lot, really looking forward to going to see A Christmas Carol that evening with the family. And by the way, I have a little bit of a cold right now, so that's why I sound so nasally. It's okay; we can look past that, right?
As I was walking across the street, I noticed that there were some security guards from the hospital talking to someone who kind of had the appearance of being sort of forlorn, with a blanket draped over them. I kind of got the vibe that they were having a little bit of trouble. And I thought to myself, "Well, that's kind of crappy for them."
And I was moving on in my own mind to what I was looking forward to doing that night. Friday. I love Friday nights. They're one of my favorite times of the week. And as I get across the street, I hear, "Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me." I turn around, and there's this lady standing there. It's the person that the security guards were talking to. She's got a clear plastic bag in her hand with some clothes and just kind of looks like she's been through it. And she's like, "Can you give me a ride, please? To the bus terminal. These guys over here are harassing me and bullying me, and I just need to get out of here."
And I thought to myself, "Oh, I just kind of wanted to go home." That was my initial thought. I'm like, "Oh, I've been picked. The universe has picked me, right?"
I said, "Uh, you know, hey, look, there's actually a bench right up the street a couple hundred feet. I will be happy to walk you up there. Let's just get you over there. I know the bus comes up here routinely, and you can catch the bus there. Oh, let's walk you up there." And she's like, "No, no, no, please. That's too close to these guys who were pushing me around, and they're just making fun of me because I was sick last night. I was in the hospital. I just got to get out of here."
And I said, "I see you've had a rough night. The thing is, I feel a little uncomfortable giving someone a ride I've never met before. So, what's your name?" So we introduced ourselves, and I said, "Look, why don't you go ahead and show me on this map I'm pulling up on my phone? Show me where you want me to take you." And it wasn't terribly far out of my way. It was down by the coastline, and I know there's a bus terminal thing down there, so I thought, "Okay." I said, "Okay, I will take you to that spot down there. Let's go ahead and do that. That's all I'm doing though. We're going straight there, and then I gotta leave. I gotta do some things."
So, we get in the car, and we head down there, and she falls asleep right away. And she wakes up during the ride. She had mentioned a couple of times that she wanted a snack and asked if I had anything to eat. I didn't have anything with me. She was surprised, noticing evidence of there being kids riding in this van—we got toys laying around in here. She thought for sure there'd be some food here. I just didn't have it. You don't want to keep food in your car; you don't want bugs to take up residence in your car.
And then she fell back asleep. So I thought, you know, I'm just gonna take her to the bus terminal. So I did, and as soon as we get there, there's quite a few folks that have a similar look about them, just kind of forlorn. And you just get kind of like a wandering vibe from them, you know? And she rolls down the window before even getting out of the car and is asking somebody if they have a cigarette she can spare. And they didn't, but they let her take a drag off of theirs. So she's sitting there smoking in the car next to me for a few seconds, and I help her undo the seatbelt, and she gets out. And then I say goodbye and take off and head home.
I thought to myself, you know, it's interesting that this would happen at this moment because it's been a long work week for me. The nature of my job is such where it's much more physical. I'm basically on my feet all day. I'm walking around the lab a lot, doing a lot with my hands. It's just, you're switching gears in your mind a lot. There's a sense of urgency around everything that you're doing. As compared to my last job, you could sort of sit and reflect on how to approach it, and you didn't have a lot of in-your-face interruptions at any given moment. So that was a very nice thing about that. I was working from my bedroom before, so fewer distractions, definitely. So I was physically tired, just really quite worn out.
But that night, the Lord knows I'm going to go see this play, A Christmas Carol, about—well, we know what it's all about—about not overlooking people in need. And I thought, isn't it interesting that that happens right before I'm going to go see that play? And I also reflect on the idea, "Are we not all beggars before God?" We really are. King Benjamin points that out. We are all beggars before God. We all rely on him for our support, whether or not we decide to attribute the blessings on our lives to him. It's still a fact; we're still all beggars.
The number one trait, it seems, that the Lord wants us to obtain and cultivate in this world is humility. Think about that for a second. Humility. I don't recall specifically if it was Moroni or Mormon who said it, but they talk about an interaction that they had with the Savior and things that they were taught by him. And they say, "He told me as a man speaketh to another in plain humility." The Savior describes himself as "meek and lowly in heart."
This opportunity to give a person a ride that I'd never met before is relatively unique. I've never done anything quite like that before. And it almost felt like a test. I mean, it wasn't necessarily a test, but it was an opportunity, nevertheless. I'm not saying that every time... can we appease every single request that is brought before us? No, we're not asked to run faster than we have strength. However, I'm grateful for the experience, and I'm grateful to be reminded that I personally am a beggar before the Lord, and I always will be. I cannot accomplish anything meaningful in this world without his assistance. Everything that's of any substance in my life is because he's helped to bring that about for me. He's allowed me to make those decisions, and he's given me guidance on whether or not the decision I was making was good or bad or an appropriate path to take. But he's definitely helped to cultivate and nurture that.
And so I will bring up A Christmas Carol, which the production was really very nice and very well done. I will discuss that a little bit as I go through my primary subject matter intention, which is MindOS, the mind operating system.
At this day and age, we all carry these devices in our pockets that we have sort of learned... we've become very reliant on them, right? But that's another subject for another time. They have these operating systems, and quite famously, the iPhone, which it sort of feels like really got the smartphone popularized, wasn't the first, but it certainly seems to be the more prevalent thing that people use. The iOS, right? iOS version 18.2 or something like that. And by the way, have any of you actually ever read all of the terms and conditions? I'm just curious if anyone's actually ever done that. I've started before, but I've never actually made it to the end. It's... what are you gonna do, right? At some point, maybe I'll be pinned to the wall over it. "Hey, it says right here you agreed to all this stuff," and I'll be like, "That was in there? I had no idea."
But nevertheless, these operating systems have specific capabilities that we can accomplish certain tasks because of it. It's because of the operating system in the phone that you can do anything, right? If it's not present, we can't do anything. It's not like an old-school telephone where you just turn it on and dial a number and use it. Oh, it's far more complicated than that. And I don't even know what all goes into it, but it's configured in a certain way. It has rules established of what is allowed and what is not. Important. It pays attention to your behavior, and at certain times of day, if you go to perform a search, it knows what you tend to search at that time of day and it serves it up to you. "Oh, it looks like on this particular day at this time, you're normally looking for the voice recorder app or the Gospel Library app, et cetera. Or the My Little Pony app." I'm just saying that it could do that, not that mine does. But it seems to know what is important to you.
And here's the thing. Our minds, although more capable than the iPhone operating system or any smartphone operating system, our minds have rules. There are rules that our brains have sort of inherited genetically, but I would suspect that by and large, these operating systems in our minds have come through our conditioning throughout our lives. It happens so gradually that we don't know the operating system is being created, but it is certainly there. And wouldn't you like to know what that is?
Our brains essentially take commands from us. We tell our brains what's important, and then it looks for evidence to support that, and it looks for things that are aligned with what's important to you. And in the case of this lady that approached me for a ride, we could say her priority was to get away from these security guards who were, in effect, asking her to leave the premises. I've seen a lot of people sitting around outside the hospital in the past, and they didn't have any security guards there. So there must've been a reason why they were there. So they had a priority, right? She had a priority, and she was willing to do whatever it took to get out. She was willing to approach a stranger, ask them for a ride somewhere, totally unashamed of asking for anything that they need, right? So the mind is trying to serve you. It's trying to please you. It's trying to give you what it thinks that you want. Our brains are such powerful tools.
The thing is, we have the option of changing what we've decided is important, though. We really do. But we need to remember something. Our lower brains have a bit more of an ancient and more deeply rooted and instinctual agenda. And I'll bring this up a lot because it's very important to be aware of. It's part of the operating system, you might say. It was part of the original operating system, like way back in iPhone's original operating system back in, like, 2007. I'd be willing to bet there are certain things about that software architecture that are still present in the current day. I'm not a programmer, but I'd be willing to bet there are certain things about it that just are always going to be present. They're just fundamental priorities at a basic level that have to be there.
And so the lower brain's agenda—and I love thinking about it this way because it just makes so much sense to me—is to be efficient. That is to say, establish a routine and pattern of things. We want to automate decisions. Neural pathways will be laid down so that we don't have to use higher-level cognition to make so many decisions. You know, we want to routinize life so that we can expend the least amount of energy possible but stay alive. That's number one. We gotta be alive, and we need to do it expending the least amount of energy possible. We want to make as few decisions as possible. Decisions require energy, and we all kind of get to the point where we experience decision fatigue. Decisions are so uncomfortable for some of us that we can hardly figure out what socks to put on or what to order for lunch, as though that decision had an incredibly lasting impact, right? And number two is to avoid pain. Avoid pain because pain is death. Number three is to seek pleasure. Those are the three fundamental things of the operating system, always, and they're not going to change. That's the lower brain's agenda, and you're alive because of it. Okay?
If you get to the point in your life where push comes to shove, your brain's going to figure it out. Like this young lady that asked me for a ride, her lower brain, I got the sense, was calling all the shots. It was just fairly evident to me that she's just sort of running on default mode, and we all do that sometimes. It was pretty evident that that's what was going on for her and the place where she was coming from. We've all had moments where that's kind of what we're up to. We're just sort of in survival mode. It's just survival mode, and it's not always fun to be in survival mode. It can be thrilling, but it's not always enjoyable, right? Because it's easier to have feelings of dread and such when we're in survival mode. That's just how it is.
But as the iPhone software advanced from year to year, they come up with new abilities for things; they're adding features, adding capabilities. And we do have higher-order thinking available to us. We can sort of see the future in a way. We can synthesize or play out scenarios in our mind. "Okay, if we want to accomplish thus and so, if that's what's important and something that we want to achieve, that in order to do that, we need to do X, Y, Z. Let's do this before that, et cetera, et cetera." And look back on your life and see where that higher-order thinking has taken you from point A to point B, so on and so forth.
The biggest initiative, I feel like the biggest project that my wife and I have worked on that we were able to achieve over the course of about a year, was relocating to Hawaii. That required a lot of decisions to be made, but once we knew that's what we were going to do and that's what we had prioritized, things were able to align. If you can imagine having a rubber band kind of pulled tight at both ends and then pulling up the center of it, each side of that rubber band would go up to that point, and things just aligned. So we knew what we had to do, when we had to do it, and made all those decisions. But there were so, so, so, so many decisions that had to be made. But once we had prioritized the importance of a particular thing, once we had established the agenda, our brain was able to go to work for us and plan that out. And then we just had to decide to execute the plan.
Remember, the lower brain, if left to its own devices, will run your life. It's kind of like gravity. It's pulling constantly, and if you want to escape from that gravity, if you want to achieve—I've talked about this in a prior episode—escape velocity and get to new heights, it requires input, decision-making, and thrust on your part to press forward. And it's not necessarily going to feel good. Discomfort is the price that we all have to pay to move to the next level of what we're trying to do. And it feels uncomfortable because it puts us into an unfamiliar place. We're breaking out of a routine, doing something new, and that's not going to feel pleasant in every sense of the word.
But I invite us all to take a look at what our operating system is. What is important to us? For joining us, sit down and write that down. What are your priorities? What's your personal credo, if you will? Part of the experience in working with me in Undaunted, which is the coaching experience I created, is to establish a personal credo. What are the principles that you want guiding you? And this doesn't have to be complicated. I would say the more simple, the better.
But wouldn't you like to know what's most important to you? Take a look at the behavior that you're engaging in on a weekly basis, daily basis. Is what you're saying is important to you actually what your behavior would say? If someone from the outside looking in were to follow you around with a clipboard and write down everything you're doing and everything you're saying, what assessment would that be? You be that person. You take stock of what's going on there and reveal to yourself what your current operating system is. What do you want your next operating system to have? Why do you want it? And how specifically are you going to bring that about?
And then take stock of that on a regular basis. Perform thought downloads. A thought download is where you literally spill everything out of your mind that you've been thinking recently. And you don't have to share that with anyone. This is just for you to kind of take a look at what's going on upstairs. Are there some bugs in your operating system, some glitches that need some attention? And we would just refer to them as glitches if they're not in alignment with what you're trying to achieve. Are those thoughts that you're having serving you? Are they rooted in doubt and fear, which comes from the agenda of the lower brain? Or are they rooted in a place of inspiration and your own personal intuition, which just flows very naturally to you when not clouded by the storm of thoughts that goes into our mind? Thought downloads are a great place to get a snapshot of what's going on for you.
Taking a look at the story of A Christmas Carol—and I'm so glad that Charles Dickens followed his intuition about that story and that he wrote that and that it was able to come into the world the way it has and persist the way it has. And plays have been made, musical versions, non-musical versions. Ours was a musical version that we saw last night. And you see very plainly what was important to Mr. Scrooge. He was operating from a place of scarcity, and that the only thing that was important, the pinnacle, transcendent apex, the zenith of human experience would be to have enough money and to have it be more and more and more and more and more every time. And if you didn't have more and more and more, then you were failing, and anyone who wasn't achieving that was a failure and worthless, right?
And then he's given this opportunity to get eyes on the path that he's taken and reflect. He's able to examine the kind of operating system that he's been living in and coming from and what ultimately it's going to translate into in the future, right? I mean, what a fascinating story that came into the mind and soul of Charles Dickens. Such a blessing to the world.
We can all do this. We can make adjustments to what is important to us. There's not one right way to look at life. You don't have to make any changes. You're not doing it wrong, but you don't have to do it the way you've been doing it. You don't have to. The way you're doing it isn't necessarily the right way. There are just other ways to do it. You can switch it up.
So the invitation is to really take a look at what's important to us and to those priorities once we see what they are. What does the evidence show are our priorities? And then what do we really want our priorities to be? You tell your brain what's important, and that's what it's going to start serving up to you. You'll be able to get intuition and tap into things that are in alignment with what's important. If you're just trying to survive, if that's what's in our minds, then our brains are just going to serve that up, and that's all we're going to get. And that's kind of tiring and boring and not as much fun, if you ask me.
If we have higher-level priorities, how do our families fit into those priorities? Our relationships, the true riches in the world, I feel, are the relationships that we have with each other, with our Heavenly Father, with the Savior. Those types of relationships, wow. That's where the riches are. Do our priorities include that? What other creative pursuits can we have in life?
MindOS, baby! Take a look at yours and decide what's next. That's it for now.
Top of the morning, everybody. The sun has not quite risen over here for us in Hawaii yet, I think maybe in about 20 or 30 minutes. But the roosters are going to town. They've been going to town for the last 30 minutes. About every seven seconds or so, you'll hear a rooster going off about this time of day, and we're so used to it anymore that we just don't even really notice it too much.
So, yesterday was kind of a fascinating day, particularly in the evening after my workday ended. I was walking across the street to the parking lot, really looking forward to going to see A Christmas Carol that evening with the family. And by the way, I have a little bit of a cold right now, so that's why I sound so nasally. It's okay; we can look past that, right?
As I was walking across the street, I noticed that there were some security guards from the hospital talking to someone who kind of had the appearance of being sort of forlorn, with a blanket draped over them. I kind of got the vibe that they were having a little bit of trouble. And I thought to myself, "Well, that's kind of crappy for them."
And I was moving on in my own mind to what I was looking forward to doing that night. Friday. I love Friday nights. They're one of my favorite times of the week. And as I get across the street, I hear, "Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me." I turn around, and there's this lady standing there. It's the person that the security guards were talking to. She's got a clear plastic bag in her hand with some clothes and just kind of looks like she's been through it. And she's like, "Can you give me a ride, please? To the bus terminal. These guys over here are harassing me and bullying me, and I just need to get out of here."
And I thought to myself, "Oh, I just kind of wanted to go home." That was my initial thought. I'm like, "Oh, I've been picked. The universe has picked me, right?"
I said, "Uh, you know, hey, look, there's actually a bench right up the street a couple hundred feet. I will be happy to walk you up there. Let's just get you over there. I know the bus comes up here routinely, and you can catch the bus there. Oh, let's walk you up there." And she's like, "No, no, no, please. That's too close to these guys who were pushing me around, and they're just making fun of me because I was sick last night. I was in the hospital. I just got to get out of here."
And I said, "I see you've had a rough night. The thing is, I feel a little uncomfortable giving someone a ride I've never met before. So, what's your name?" So we introduced ourselves, and I said, "Look, why don't you go ahead and show me on this map I'm pulling up on my phone? Show me where you want me to take you." And it wasn't terribly far out of my way. It was down by the coastline, and I know there's a bus terminal thing down there, so I thought, "Okay." I said, "Okay, I will take you to that spot down there. Let's go ahead and do that. That's all I'm doing though. We're going straight there, and then I gotta leave. I gotta do some things."
So, we get in the car, and we head down there, and she falls asleep right away. And she wakes up during the ride. She had mentioned a couple of times that she wanted a snack and asked if I had anything to eat. I didn't have anything with me. She was surprised, noticing evidence of there being kids riding in this van—we got toys laying around in here. She thought for sure there'd be some food here. I just didn't have it. You don't want to keep food in your car; you don't want bugs to take up residence in your car.
And then she fell back asleep. So I thought, you know, I'm just gonna take her to the bus terminal. So I did, and as soon as we get there, there's quite a few folks that have a similar look about them, just kind of forlorn. And you just get kind of like a wandering vibe from them, you know? And she rolls down the window before even getting out of the car and is asking somebody if they have a cigarette she can spare. And they didn't, but they let her take a drag off of theirs. So she's sitting there smoking in the car next to me for a few seconds, and I help her undo the seatbelt, and she gets out. And then I say goodbye and take off and head home.
I thought to myself, you know, it's interesting that this would happen at this moment because it's been a long work week for me. The nature of my job is such where it's much more physical. I'm basically on my feet all day. I'm walking around the lab a lot, doing a lot with my hands. It's just, you're switching gears in your mind a lot. There's a sense of urgency around everything that you're doing. As compared to my last job, you could sort of sit and reflect on how to approach it, and you didn't have a lot of in-your-face interruptions at any given moment. So that was a very nice thing about that. I was working from my bedroom before, so fewer distractions, definitely. So I was physically tired, just really quite worn out.
But that night, the Lord knows I'm going to go see this play, A Christmas Carol, about—well, we know what it's all about—about not overlooking people in need. And I thought, isn't it interesting that that happens right before I'm going to go see that play? And I also reflect on the idea, "Are we not all beggars before God?" We really are. King Benjamin points that out. We are all beggars before God. We all rely on him for our support, whether or not we decide to attribute the blessings on our lives to him. It's still a fact; we're still all beggars.
The number one trait, it seems, that the Lord wants us to obtain and cultivate in this world is humility. Think about that for a second. Humility. I don't recall specifically if it was Moroni or Mormon who said it, but they talk about an interaction that they had with the Savior and things that they were taught by him. And they say, "He told me as a man speaketh to another in plain humility." The Savior describes himself as "meek and lowly in heart."
This opportunity to give a person a ride that I'd never met before is relatively unique. I've never done anything quite like that before. And it almost felt like a test. I mean, it wasn't necessarily a test, but it was an opportunity, nevertheless. I'm not saying that every time... can we appease every single request that is brought before us? No, we're not asked to run faster than we have strength. However, I'm grateful for the experience, and I'm grateful to be reminded that I personally am a beggar before the Lord, and I always will be. I cannot accomplish anything meaningful in this world without his assistance. Everything that's of any substance in my life is because he's helped to bring that about for me. He's allowed me to make those decisions, and he's given me guidance on whether or not the decision I was making was good or bad or an appropriate path to take. But he's definitely helped to cultivate and nurture that.
And so I will bring up A Christmas Carol, which the production was really very nice and very well done. I will discuss that a little bit as I go through my primary subject matter intention, which is MindOS, the mind operating system.
At this day and age, we all carry these devices in our pockets that we have sort of learned... we've become very reliant on them, right? But that's another subject for another time. They have these operating systems, and quite famously, the iPhone, which it sort of feels like really got the smartphone popularized, wasn't the first, but it certainly seems to be the more prevalent thing that people use. The iOS, right? iOS version 18.2 or something like that. And by the way, have any of you actually ever read all of the terms and conditions? I'm just curious if anyone's actually ever done that. I've started before, but I've never actually made it to the end. It's... what are you gonna do, right? At some point, maybe I'll be pinned to the wall over it. "Hey, it says right here you agreed to all this stuff," and I'll be like, "That was in there? I had no idea."
But nevertheless, these operating systems have specific capabilities that we can accomplish certain tasks because of it. It's because of the operating system in the phone that you can do anything, right? If it's not present, we can't do anything. It's not like an old-school telephone where you just turn it on and dial a number and use it. Oh, it's far more complicated than that. And I don't even know what all goes into it, but it's configured in a certain way. It has rules established of what is allowed and what is not. Important. It pays attention to your behavior, and at certain times of day, if you go to perform a search, it knows what you tend to search at that time of day and it serves it up to you. "Oh, it looks like on this particular day at this time, you're normally looking for the voice recorder app or the Gospel Library app, et cetera. Or the My Little Pony app." I'm just saying that it could do that, not that mine does. But it seems to know what is important to you.
And here's the thing. Our minds, although more capable than the iPhone operating system or any smartphone operating system, our minds have rules. There are rules that our brains have sort of inherited genetically, but I would suspect that by and large, these operating systems in our minds have come through our conditioning throughout our lives. It happens so gradually that we don't know the operating system is being created, but it is certainly there. And wouldn't you like to know what that is?
Our brains essentially take commands from us. We tell our brains what's important, and then it looks for evidence to support that, and it looks for things that are aligned with what's important to you. And in the case of this lady that approached me for a ride, we could say her priority was to get away from these security guards who were, in effect, asking her to leave the premises. I've seen a lot of people sitting around outside the hospital in the past, and they didn't have any security guards there. So there must've been a reason why they were there. So they had a priority, right? She had a priority, and she was willing to do whatever it took to get out. She was willing to approach a stranger, ask them for a ride somewhere, totally unashamed of asking for anything that they need, right? So the mind is trying to serve you. It's trying to please you. It's trying to give you what it thinks that you want. Our brains are such powerful tools.
The thing is, we have the option of changing what we've decided is important, though. We really do. But we need to remember something. Our lower brains have a bit more of an ancient and more deeply rooted and instinctual agenda. And I'll bring this up a lot because it's very important to be aware of. It's part of the operating system, you might say. It was part of the original operating system, like way back in iPhone's original operating system back in, like, 2007. I'd be willing to bet there are certain things about that software architecture that are still present in the current day. I'm not a programmer, but I'd be willing to bet there are certain things about it that just are always going to be present. They're just fundamental priorities at a basic level that have to be there.
And so the lower brain's agenda—and I love thinking about it this way because it just makes so much sense to me—is to be efficient. That is to say, establish a routine and pattern of things. We want to automate decisions. Neural pathways will be laid down so that we don't have to use higher-level cognition to make so many decisions. You know, we want to routinize life so that we can expend the least amount of energy possible but stay alive. That's number one. We gotta be alive, and we need to do it expending the least amount of energy possible. We want to make as few decisions as possible. Decisions require energy, and we all kind of get to the point where we experience decision fatigue. Decisions are so uncomfortable for some of us that we can hardly figure out what socks to put on or what to order for lunch, as though that decision had an incredibly lasting impact, right? And number two is to avoid pain. Avoid pain because pain is death. Number three is to seek pleasure. Those are the three fundamental things of the operating system, always, and they're not going to change. That's the lower brain's agenda, and you're alive because of it. Okay?
If you get to the point in your life where push comes to shove, your brain's going to figure it out. Like this young lady that asked me for a ride, her lower brain, I got the sense, was calling all the shots. It was just fairly evident to me that she's just sort of running on default mode, and we all do that sometimes. It was pretty evident that that's what was going on for her and the place where she was coming from. We've all had moments where that's kind of what we're up to. We're just sort of in survival mode. It's just survival mode, and it's not always fun to be in survival mode. It can be thrilling, but it's not always enjoyable, right? Because it's easier to have feelings of dread and such when we're in survival mode. That's just how it is.
But as the iPhone software advanced from year to year, they come up with new abilities for things; they're adding features, adding capabilities. And we do have higher-order thinking available to us. We can sort of see the future in a way. We can synthesize or play out scenarios in our mind. "Okay, if we want to accomplish thus and so, if that's what's important and something that we want to achieve, that in order to do that, we need to do X, Y, Z. Let's do this before that, et cetera, et cetera." And look back on your life and see where that higher-order thinking has taken you from point A to point B, so on and so forth.
The biggest initiative, I feel like the biggest project that my wife and I have worked on that we were able to achieve over the course of about a year, was relocating to Hawaii. That required a lot of decisions to be made, but once we knew that's what we were going to do and that's what we had prioritized, things were able to align. If you can imagine having a rubber band kind of pulled tight at both ends and then pulling up the center of it, each side of that rubber band would go up to that point, and things just aligned. So we knew what we had to do, when we had to do it, and made all those decisions. But there were so, so, so, so many decisions that had to be made. But once we had prioritized the importance of a particular thing, once we had established the agenda, our brain was able to go to work for us and plan that out. And then we just had to decide to execute the plan.
Remember, the lower brain, if left to its own devices, will run your life. It's kind of like gravity. It's pulling constantly, and if you want to escape from that gravity, if you want to achieve—I've talked about this in a prior episode—escape velocity and get to new heights, it requires input, decision-making, and thrust on your part to press forward. And it's not necessarily going to feel good. Discomfort is the price that we all have to pay to move to the next level of what we're trying to do. And it feels uncomfortable because it puts us into an unfamiliar place. We're breaking out of a routine, doing something new, and that's not going to feel pleasant in every sense of the word.
But I invite us all to take a look at what our operating system is. What is important to us? For joining us, sit down and write that down. What are your priorities? What's your personal credo, if you will? Part of the experience in working with me in Undaunted, which is the coaching experience I created, is to establish a personal credo. What are the principles that you want guiding you? And this doesn't have to be complicated. I would say the more simple, the better.
But wouldn't you like to know what's most important to you? Take a look at the behavior that you're engaging in on a weekly basis, daily basis. Is what you're saying is important to you actually what your behavior would say? If someone from the outside looking in were to follow you around with a clipboard and write down everything you're doing and everything you're saying, what assessment would that be? You be that person. You take stock of what's going on there and reveal to yourself what your current operating system is. What do you want your next operating system to have? Why do you want it? And how specifically are you going to bring that about?
And then take stock of that on a regular basis. Perform thought downloads. A thought download is where you literally spill everything out of your mind that you've been thinking recently. And you don't have to share that with anyone. This is just for you to kind of take a look at what's going on upstairs. Are there some bugs in your operating system, some glitches that need some attention? And we would just refer to them as glitches if they're not in alignment with what you're trying to achieve. Are those thoughts that you're having serving you? Are they rooted in doubt and fear, which comes from the agenda of the lower brain? Or are they rooted in a place of inspiration and your own personal intuition, which just flows very naturally to you when not clouded by the storm of thoughts that goes into our mind? Thought downloads are a great place to get a snapshot of what's going on for you.
Taking a look at the story of A Christmas Carol—and I'm so glad that Charles Dickens followed his intuition about that story and that he wrote that and that it was able to come into the world the way it has and persist the way it has. And plays have been made, musical versions, non-musical versions. Ours was a musical version that we saw last night. And you see very plainly what was important to Mr. Scrooge. He was operating from a place of scarcity, and that the only thing that was important, the pinnacle, transcendent apex, the zenith of human experience would be to have enough money and to have it be more and more and more and more and more every time. And if you didn't have more and more and more, then you were failing, and anyone who wasn't achieving that was a failure and worthless, right?
And then he's given this opportunity to get eyes on the path that he's taken and reflect. He's able to examine the kind of operating system that he's been living in and coming from and what ultimately it's going to translate into in the future, right? I mean, what a fascinating story that came into the mind and soul of Charles Dickens. Such a blessing to the world.
We can all do this. We can make adjustments to what is important to us. There's not one right way to look at life. You don't have to make any changes. You're not doing it wrong, but you don't have to do it the way you've been doing it. You don't have to. The way you're doing it isn't necessarily the right way. There are just other ways to do it. You can switch it up.
So the invitation is to really take a look at what's important to us and to those priorities once we see what they are. What does the evidence show are our priorities? And then what do we really want our priorities to be? You tell your brain what's important, and that's what it's going to start serving up to you. You'll be able to get intuition and tap into things that are in alignment with what's important. If you're just trying to survive, if that's what's in our minds, then our brains are just going to serve that up, and that's all we're going to get. And that's kind of tiring and boring and not as much fun, if you ask me.
If we have higher-level priorities, how do our families fit into those priorities? Our relationships, the true riches in the world, I feel, are the relationships that we have with each other, with our Heavenly Father, with the Savior. Those types of relationships, wow. That's where the riches are. Do our priorities include that? What other creative pursuits can we have in life?
MindOS, baby! Take a look at yours and decide what's next. That's it for now.
Services |
CompanyAbout
Site Map |