Change
We will start with the basic nature of change (aka what you are about to do) and the role motivation will play in your ability to commit to the process. Keep in mind that since you need to change to cure your ambition, there will probably be some conflict between what is encouraged behavior right now and what will be forbidden in the future.
It's like extreme plastic surgery; we have to break all the bones in your face, then put you in a special mask that remolds the bones as they heal so you come out looking like a real-life Snapchat filter!
Which is a real thing. Google it.
The world is insane.
Nobody likes change. Even those of us who claim we "crave variety" in our tinder profiles are biologically predisposed to avoid making major changes to our core personality or behaviors.
It's an icky undertaking, but you’re still reading this book, which means you haven’t learned how to give up everything yet. Thus, the process is necessary.
Also, you should eat more fiber. That’s not really a personality change, but I firmly believe everyone deserves to take great dumps, so I urge you to make the appropriate adjustments to your diet.
You can thank me later.
So what makes changing so hard? I mean, you totally kept your New Years resolution to drink more water for three and a half weeks straight! And, honestly, you totally could’ve maintained the habit, but you got a huge crack in your favorite bpa-free bottle and the water cooler at the office wasn’t refilled for three days last week and your roommate won’t replace the Brita filter even though you’ve done it practically every other time but she is too self-absorbed to notice all the stuff you do around the apartment so you refuse to deal with a single issue at home until she learns to take some goddamn responsibility for herself!
So yeah, change can’t really be that hard.
You would say that - fucking dummy.
And, yet again, you would be wrong.
Humans have a biological aversion to changing things like routine behaviors and personality traits. Even if we know a habit is bad for us, we maintain a subconscious death grip on it, the way a child desperately clings to their security blanket when they sense their parent wants to take it away, just because it’s covered in dog vomit. But whyyyyyyyyyy?
We develop behaviors starting at infancy that are aimed at fulfilling our basic needs. As babies, with zero life experience to draw on, we try random actions until any given moment doesn’t feel like a crisis anymore. We bank the things that work and try them out in other situations, storing the ones that continue to serve us well, and adding new ones over time. The more often we engage in a behavior, the more comfortable it becomes, and the more likely we are to continue to repeat it.
This process provides our brains with a general definition for what it considers to be normal, and brains like it when their meat robots are normal.
This made perfect sense back when we were engaging in daily wars with prehistoric beasts for the very right to exist as a species.
(You remember that time we did that. You and me, specifically.)
Each second spent on decision making could be the difference between life and death, so if a behavior kept you alive it was super convenient to have it programed into an autopilot mode so you could keep staying alive. If it didn’t keep you alive, then you didn’t try that behavior again. Because you were dead.
Even though our brains have evolved over time, there is still a primitive area that prioritizes staying alive at all costs, and equates that goal with maintaining whatever status quo has kept it alive so far. This area where all your habits are stored is called the basal ganglia. That’s not really important, I’m just emphasizing that science proves all this stuff is true and, also giving you a fun little factoid to hang onto for trivia night.
All of that makes it seem like change is impossible, but obviously it’s not or I would’ve just written a book on why you’re doomed to keep being your stupid self the rest of your life. But I didn’t. I am writing a book to free you from your aspirational nightmare of of an existence, and free you I shall.
What it does mean is that change goes against our nature as humans, so all the people setting resolutions and building new habits for themselves are essentially saying they don’t like being humans, which seems pretty rude to me.