Trickle Down Mindset

by Michal Stawicki

  If you have an opportunity to talk to someone you know that transformed his or her life, I encourage you to do so and track the changes he or she noticed in the way they thought or interpreted external events.

  As with everything else, a personal philosophy may empower an individual or rob him of his power. “Failure stories” also have their origins in personal philosophy.

  Again, look around you. I’m sure you can think of some person you know well who is not in the exact place they wish to be in life. You want to convince yourself that this personal philosophy theory is not just a theory, but truth. So the more vivid the example you choose, the easier it will be to notice that internal philosophy, not external circumstances, drives one’s actions and the outcomes.

  Take the worst drunk, the worst ladies’ man, the poorest guy you know. How could it be that his neighbors, from the same district or country achieved a totally different quality of life? Hadn’t they similar dysfunctional families? Didn’t they attend the same schools?

  Where the circumstances are similar, the only explanation for the differences is the human factor. A personal philosophy. Think of Jim Rohn’s, Sophie Bennett’s, or Bob Proctor’s stories. Weren’t their peers in very similar situations, coming from very similar backgrounds? But only they became millionaires.

  Don’t the vast majority of people struggle to keep their heads above water? How many of them do you think will become millionaires? If it all comes down to external factors, if the power of the mind is not important, then all of them are in an excellent starting position to become millionaires. However, the power of mind does matter. It’s the only reason those role models succeeded while their peers didn’t.

  In fact, you are probably better suited for success than they were. If you have a college education, you are ahead of Jim and Bob. If you are not sinking in debt, you are ahead of Sophie Bennett. If you have ever published a short story, you are ahead of J.K. Rowling. According to a pervasive opinion—that external events and circumstances determine your fate—you should become a millionaire sooner rather than later.

  But it’s a false opinion. It’s only when you change your internal structure, the way you observe the world, process information, and interpret that information, that you gain power. It’s that simple.

  The main difference between successful and unsuccessful philosophies lies in the attitude toward yourself and the world. If you perceive the world as a place of struggle and yourself as a victim of your past, the society you live in, or the job you have, you are closing yourself, preventing yourself from change. On the other hand, if you feel responsible for your actions and their results, if you believe the world was created to serve you not to oppress you, then you are willing to come out of your comfort zone to seek new clues and ideas. Comfort zones and complacency are the allies of failure. Openness and the ability to step out of your comfort zone are signs of success.

  I experienced this firsthand. Before my life transformation, I considered myself a partial success at most. I had managed to graduate from a good university, to start and support my family, to develop my spiritual life further than my closest relatives, to keep in reasonably good shape for a white-collar worker. But all of those small successes in different areas were not driving me ahead but rather keeping me in one place. I was almost satisfied with what I had achieved and I was scared that I could lose it. Lose my job, lose my wife, lose my faith.

  I lived with feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. I didn’t dare to dream big, so I didn’t look for sources of new ideas or points of view. To avoid mulling about my experiences, I deadened myself with a hefty dose of computer games and fiction reading. I preferred to spend my time in fictional worlds rather than doing something about the real one.

  All of this was happening because my personal philosophy was wrong. I wanted more from life, but I wasn’t willing to pay the price. I wished for more resources, but I didn’t believe I was capable of getting and keeping them. Hence, I was withholding myself from reaching outside my comfort zone. In order to soothe those conflicting desires, I chose entertainment over work, amusement over discipline.

  As you can see, this mix of conflicting ideas wasn’t moving me forward. It was a source of constant struggle and frustration. That personal philosophy was only enforcing those negative emotions and I saw almost no positive results.

  On the other hand, after my transformation and the shift in my mindset, everything seemed to be more fulfilling. I had the same job, the same apartment (while writing this book I bought my first house), the same long commute, and I burdened myself with dozens of new disciplines. It should have been less comfortable and enjoyable. But it was the opposite. I took joy in practicing my disciplines. I love to write or interact with other bloggers. And, most important, I see the results. I’ve changed my attitude and I’ve changed the outputs I got from my actions. Six published titles. A few thousand visits on my blog. Comments and emails from my readers. My English has improved. I achieved my target weight. And so on, and so on. I’m less comfortable, but happier.

  The crucial issue in amending your personal philosophy is to import, digest, and assimilate the bits of others’ philosophies as your own. Listening to millionaires is hard for non-millionaires. Sometimes they sound like they live in a totally different world. For the common folk, many of their teachings seem to consist mainly of wishful thinking or of assertions that are just not true: “there is abundance for everybody,” “you are 100 percent responsible for everything that happens in your life.” You see in the news children starving in Africa, so where is this abundance? You lost an arm in a car accident because some drunken jerk decided to drive straight at you. How the heck are you responsible for that?

  Abundance and responsibility are suddenly not so compelling when you ponder such facts, are they? But when you overcome this internal resistance, when you stop judging and embrace such attitudes as your own, they start to make sense. But first you need to assimilate them into your worldview. They must be yours to believe them and to start acting upon them.

  Different cultures and people find different ways to express the same ideas and beliefs. Take the Catholic faith for an instance. The liturgy in the center of the African continent is different than in Poland or Ireland. The core beliefs are the same, but the way they are expressed through dance or song is different. You also need to incorporate foreign ideas into your internal realm in a unique way. You must believe, or to put it more strongly, you must know that those ideas are true for you and your life.

  In the New Psycho-Cybernetics, Maltz Maxwell gives multiple instances of the power of belief over reality. He was a plastic surgeon. Many times, changing his patients’ physiognomy changed their relation to themselves. But he also met people who looked in the mirror after the operation and said that they didn’t see any difference. Their internal self-image was stronger than the image they saw with their own eyes. Those people were hypnotized by their faulty self-image. Under hypnosis, people can do extraordinary things or cannot do the simplest activities. Shy people can become bold and strong men cannot raise their hands from the table. The difference lies in what their minds perceived as truth. If the hypnotist convinced them they were bold or weak, they acted accordingly.

  You may be able to do the ‘impossible’ or be unable do the ‘possible.’ It depends entirely on what you consider true. That’s the reason you need to accept foreign ideas as your own. You simply can’t achieve the same things other can because your beliefs stop you from trying.

  You must believe that the idea is true before you act upon that idea.

  You must open up to it, wrestle with it, ponder it, and if necessary, modify it. Then you can accept it. Once accepted, it becomes a part of your system of conduct of life. Only then can it start to generate different actions and different results.

  That’s the explanation regarding the phenomenon of people attending the same seminar, reading the same book, or participating in the same course. Those who succ
eeded embraced the new ideas. Those who didn’t change their way of thinking didn’t achieve different outputs in their lives. That’s why the attitude of the majority of successful people is characterized by open-mindedness.

  One of my friends is a top expert in the field of computer networks; he is in the top 1 percent in the world. He has numerous professional certificates and earns a lot more than me. I’ve known him since childhood. He has a very scientific mind. He worked at a university for several years before pursuing a career in the private sector. He is very down-to-earth. But when I talk with him about the Law of Attraction or some experiments about the impact of the conscious mind on physical reality, he doesn’t react with skepticism or disbelief. All he earnestly says is, “It’s outside of my field of expertise. It may be true. I don’t have enough data to confirm or reject the idea.”

  That’s a successful attitude.

  Knowledge Items:

  - Every success and failure story has its origin in an individual’s personal philosophy.

  - Comfort zones and complacency are the allies of failure. Openness and ability to step out of your comfort zone are signs of success.

  - You must believe that the idea is true before you act upon that idea.

  Action Items:

  - Choose a person you know whom you consider a success in a given area. Why do you think this person is successful? Was it luck, talent, upbringing, character, physical resources? Really? Don’t you know other people in this area who had the same or more yet didn’t perform as well as your role model?

  - Choose a person you know whom you consider a failure in a given area. Perform investigation similar to that above.

  The Law of Nature

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  “Failure is a few errors in judgment repeated every day.

  Success is a few simple disciplines practiced every day.”

  ― Jim Rohn

  There are laws of nature, but we are able to overstep the universe’s boundaries. We are not birds, but we can fly. We are not fish, but we can travel through the oceans. We are not polar bears, but we can live in the North.

  However, it’s not enough to want to overcome nature. We need to spend an incredible amount of conscious effort to achieve it. It may be very easy to buy a plane ticket, pack several things, sit on the plane, and fly to another place, but there are thousands, if not millions of man-hours supporting this simple act. The hours inventors spent on figuring out the concept of putting man in the air; the hours engineers spent developing the technical details; the hours workers spent in the manufacturing plants; the hours the pilot spent on learning his craft; the hours the technical crew spent on maintaining the plane etc.

  And all a bird needs to do is flap its wings.

  This reveals another law of nature: Whatever you do, whatever you spend your time on, you excel at it. This law applies to animals too and even plants. But they just do what they were created to do. They excel at survival, finding food, seeking a mate, cooperating in a pack and so on. Fish excel at swimming and birds at flying. I don’t know if they chose to do this because they are best suited for those tasks or they just followed their instincts blindly. The fact is that they spent their time doing those activities and they excel at them.

  You can choose what you will excel at by choosing how you spend your time. If you spend it griping and complaining you will become a master griper and complainer. If you spend it writing, you will become an excellent writer. It’s as simple as that.

  The definition of the law of nature is “a generalization that describes recurring facts or events in nature.”

  For example, the laws of thermodynamics are the laws of nature. Have you ever seen an object whose temperature was raised on its own without the energy input from an external source? I don’t think so.

  Have you seen someone who repeatedly made small errors in judgment and became successful in that particular area? I don’t think so.

  You might have observed something like this because we can defy the laws of nature. However, we usually achieve this by utilizing other laws. Human cannot fly on their own, but the use of aerodynamic laws means we can soar into the sky.

  There are serious testimonials from people who claim to have levitated. The Catholic Church reports that saints were able to do so. Does it mean the laws of gravity didn’t apply to them? I don’t think so. We just cannot explain right now how it happened. I’m quite sure that there is some underlying “law of sainthood,” which allowed them to soar nonetheless.

  The law of errors and disciplines in normal circumstances applies to everybody. CEOs and the unemployed, fathers and kids, saints and sinners. What does this have to do with the subject at hand? Simply put, I think you should take this into account when developing your personal philosophy. It would not be sensible to forget about it any more than it would be sensible to forget about gravity.

  You are of course free to construct your own philosophy in any way you wish. For example, your financial management may come down to, “I’ll keep buying lottery tickets and someday I’ll get lucky.” Savings and earnings may not be included in such a philosophy. However, the chances of actually making such a strategy a success are easy to count. It’s one in many millions. Your personal philosophy may ignore the law of errors and disciplines and still bring you to the point you desire. The chances for that are just very, very tiny. Minuscule.

  Any personal philosophy that doesn’t take this law into account is flawed. That’s why it’s important to develop the right habits. They determine how you spend your time, your life. They drive your actions. And in the end, they culminate in your life’s achievements.

  Small errors repeated over time become our bad habits. Tiny disciplines repeated over time become good ones.

  Small errors and disciplines determine everything in life. They are applicable to every single area of life—health, wealth, spiritual life, relationships, happiness, education. You won’t find a single exception. Jeff Olson made those two statements the core of The Slight Edge.

  What is so special about this book is that Jeff framed its core message into a practical life philosophy. It made his book a bestseller. It is one of the personal development books that focus on foundations not on pep talks or fancy techniques. He didn’t start a marketing campaign. He just passed it on to a few close friends. They in turn did the same to their friends. And more people kept asking to read it. The Slight Edge turned out to hold a solution for many people because it helped common people improve their lives.

  The first edition was available for purchase only via a 1-800 line, and people kept calling and ordering it. So Jeff kept improving the book. The most recent edition (November 2013) includes the stories of readers who transformed their lives thanks to upgrading their personal philosophies with The Slight Edge philosophy elements. These testimonials confirm that this is not a fancy theory presented by millionaires to explain their success. Average, common folks who live in accordance with this law are getting results. Your action doesn’t have to be perfect or grand to help you achieve what you want. It just needs to lead you in the right direction and be consistent.

  I’m one of those “average Joes” whose stories are included in The Slight Edge. Reading it, I realized that this law is true and I can use it to my advantage. Or rather, I can work in accordance to this law.

  You wouldn’t be reading this book if not for that realization. Before my life transformation, a good chunk of my personal philosophy was the belief that not much depends on my actions. I was afraid that my efforts to get more out of life would be in vain. I would work my ass off just to get exhausted. My dreams couldn’t come true.

  But I reminded myself of the instances where I did something consistently and got the results. It wasn’t a massive action, but it was focused and stretched over a long period of time. I studied during the whole holiday break one year before finishing high school and was able to pass all the final exams without breaking a sweat. I showed up to every universi
ty lecture and received a scholarship. I did one series of pushups every day for a few years and I extended my limits. I was eventually able to do more than 120 consecutive pushups.

  This realization has shaken my small world. Something clicked in my head. My personal philosophy shifted into “time plus effort equals results.”

  I developed tiny disciplines, which I practiced consistently: tracking my expenses, tracking my calorie intake, writing, speed-reading. I observed some results almost immediately. Within a month, I was reading almost 50 percent faster. In seven months, I reached my dream weight. Those rapid results kept me going with the disciplines I couldn’t have believed would have ever brought me results. Like making money on my own.

  I’m a lifelong employee. I started working during my university studies to support my family. I worked in a factory on a production line. I worked as a warehouse man. I did small IT gigs including websites or movie pre-production. After I completed my studies, I was employed as an IT specialist. I’d had five full-time employers since beginning my career. No one ever complained about the quality of my work. In 2008, the project I was working on was stolen from us by the Belgian part of the company. My team was dissolved, most of the guys were laid off, but they kept me to the very end until they could no longer afford to pay me. I’m far from the picture of an ideal employee, but I’m a good enough worker. I could imagine myself pursuing a corporate career.

  But my personal philosophy didn’t include an ounce of belief that I could make money on my own. In my teenage years, I was involved in multi-level marketing and it finished fast and hard. I dreamed about millions, but I didn’t earn a dime. For me that was proof that I was unable to generate an income on my own. It was set in my mind as firmly as the knowledge that sun rises in the east.