I have heard this said before; that you are shaped by your internal monologue. I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks and here’s my take on it:
Yes and no.
Or, it’s easy to have an internal monologue that dissuades you from doing things – “I could never do…” but I think it’s equally possible to have an internal monologue that deceives you. I’ll endeavour to give examples of both from my own life so you can see if I’m making any sense.
Firstly self deception: I have two examples.
“I am very busy”. On the face of it this is true – it’s very easy for me to convince myself and anyone who’s listening of this, simply by listing the projects I’m doing at the moment:
Writing a travel book
Buying a house
Writing a speech
Doing a photography degree
Wow, look how busy I am! It’s a wonder that I can even find the time to write this blog post. Except if I delve a little deeper, yes all the projects I listed above have been started. But when was the last time that I actually did something for one of them? I’ll tell you – it’s probably been over two weeks since I sat down and actually put some effort into my book or my speech. Longer for the others (to be fair the house thing is in the hands of solicitors at the moment so I have nothing to do).
What do I do with my evenings (other than craft startlingly insightful blog posts)? I pretty much sit and bum around on the internet looking at tech sites and watching things on BBC iplayer or 4od.
Yet I still have an internal monologue of “Wow I’m really busy”
That’s the first deception.
Second: I’m really health. Compared to some people I am, but not as much as I’d like to believe. I’ve been using a tracking website called 42 goals and I make a record of all gym visits, swimming sessions, cycle rides and ‘naughty food’. Fact is I’ve been having a lot more ‘naughty food’ and been going to the gym a lot less that I tell myself. In fact this month I’ve had 16 ‘treats’ – that’s getting pretty close to an average of one a day.
OK that’s how I have been deceived by my own thoughts. This was my main driver for writing this post so I don’t have an eloquent positive story to tell, for this reason I’ll pass it over to someone with a more compelling story to tell:
Admittedly I can already swim, but only really the breast stroke. Which is arguably the easiest stroke available, with the possible exception of doggy paddle. Swimming the crawl is something that I’ve never been good at, last time I tried I got about 10m down the pool before I had to stop and go back to breast stroke. This was until last Thursday.
I had seen Tim Ferris talking about how to swim (among other things) in his TED talk. More specifically he was making the point that teachers generally don’t break down the stoke into the simple and important bits. Later I discovered that this technique is called ‘Total immersion‘ swimming. Tim also has a blog post about it here with videos.
I’ve only done one half hour session, under my own tuition (yes that’s right, I’m teaching myself) but already I can do a few lengths quite easily. The art of breathing without slightly drowning isn’t one that I’ve perfected yet, giving me quite a few lengths that end half way across the pool with me coughing and spluttering – however I feel I’ve already made some pretty good progress. Even though I am mainly focused on getting my stroke right and breathing without water-in-lung I have completed a length or two with a surprising and satisfying head of speed.
You may or may not have noticed that it’s been a heck of a long time since I last posted anything. I’d like to blame writes block, struggling to come up with insightful and genius words to share and inspire.
Sounds like a good excuse yes? Well it’s not the truth, it’s more like writers apathy. I just kept putting off the task or wasting time on something largely pointless. Recently, I have been intending to write something – Sharpen the nib, get my eye back in – but I’ve come across a different and all together less expected writers affliction.
Writers amnesia.
Literally that, I forget to write a post! Here’s an example: I’ll walk to work, mind wandering as it often does. At lunch I’ll think to myself I’ll write something for my blog. This seems like a very good idea this becomes part of my ‘plan for the day’. Unfortunately lunch time comes around, and if I’m lucky I’ll have a niggling feeling that I was going to do something. Invariably I’ll read some photography or tech website. That must have been it.
Then after lunch, when I’m doing work and stuff, I’ll remember. Too late, I’ll do it when I get home. Then after I’ve taken some time making food (which usually grabs my attention quite fully) I go upstairs, turn on my computer and…. well watch some shows read some more websites generally get on with forgetting to write anything.
So how did I remember today?
Well I’m trying out a free service called Remember the milk, this is essentially a web-hosted to-do list. So far it’s pretty good, and without it you’d probably never see these words. With luck it’ll keep me remembering a whole load of other important things!
Slowly and surely we are sinking into the darkness of a British winter. This will be my first in two years, not that I’m boasting or anything.
Having spent last winter in New Zealand where it was summer I am really feeling the cold as the days shorten here in Plymouth. How I’m going to deal with things when the temperature actually gets down into single figures I have no idea, it’s entirely possible that I’ll try and hibernate until spring. Bears do it and have you ever seen an unhappy wild bear? Exactly.
I hear that this winter, so far, has been very mild compared to last year. I admit that although I’m not a massive fan of the cold I do rather enjoy snuggling in my nice thick duvet. Sure that undermines the undoubtedly manly demeanor that I project into the world but it’s a hit I’m willing to take. It would be great to see some crazy snow – that was the only bad thing about missing last winter!
How many people do you think enter the lottery with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? Zero, nill, nothing. Surely no-one would enter the lottery with these numbers, or any consecutive numbers because they’ll never come up. Statistically though a consecutive run of numbers like this has the same probability of occurring so why do we instinctively mistrust it? Instinct is the nub of the problem, we have not evolved to have any natural understanding of odds. So we go on what we’ve experienced instead – this is actually why people enter the lottery in the first place. Saying that there is a one in fourteen million chance of winning the lottery doesn’t help anyone, we can’t imagine what this actually means. Our experience of the lottery however is that most weeks someone wins, and every week the numbers are ‘random’ i.e. something like 3, 5, 17, 20, 35, 47.
To some extent the media coverage skews our judgment, you never hear a news report saying ‘and last week 7 million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand people didn’t win anything in the lottery’.
Or to put it another way lets assume that eight million people play on a weekly basis. To give equal coverage of winners to losers with a ten second skit on each the news would need to be two and a half years long, every week. Even a one second clip of the winner with a thumbs up and every other entrant just looking bored or morose the full coverage would still last for ninety-two days.
So going back to a consecutive string of numbers. I think this is actually one of the few times that everyone has an instinctual understanding of the odds, but they are not just the odds of a straight coming out of the lottery machines, they are actually the odds of any combination of numbers coming out. Essentially what I’m saying is that if you’re unwilling to play the lottery with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 then you shouldn’t play because that bad feeling you get about the chances of those numbers winning are actually your chances of winning regardless of which numbers you choose.
