Stereotypes are great mental aids. You can avoid wasting precious energy on small everyday decisions and concentrate on the main things. But often the most important things are unnoticed and fall under the influence of a stereotype. We automatically miss important things, and then regret about what we have not achieved.
WHAT THINKING ERRORS PREVENT US FROM LIVING
What to do? Know the enemy by sight and use effective methods to fight him. We have something to fight for – our own lives are at stake. Let’s understand what are these stereotypes-traps that get in the way.
1. “As long as I have not chosen anything, all opportunities are available to me, the whole world”
This approach is fundamentally wrong: in fact, opportunities open up only after your choice, before it is just assumptions and dreams. It is the choice that allows you to make the first step and get “feedback” from reality, which will either destroy illusions or help you move in the chosen direction. We are talking about choice as the introduction of something fundamentally new into life, a way of creating the future: starting a business, giving birth to a child or a new turn in family relations.
2. “Someone else knows what I should do”
Why do so many of us love personality type tests, horoscopes, fortune-telling, and look with childlike delight at those who confidently explain what we are like and what we should be doing? Where does this belief in “external miracles” come from? The question is rather rhetorical, but, you must agree, you would probably like to get something like Jack Sparrow’s compass, which always shows only one direction: where exactly he, Jack, needs to go. But only we can find out where we should go.
3. “If you don’t make serious choices, you won’t make fatal mistakes.”
The flip side of the coin called “he who does nothing makes no mistakes” convinces us that the safest thing to do is to do nothing. But the fact is that the goal is abstract, and concrete is only the means to realise it.
Let’s say you want to open a business – this is your goal
The means of its realisation will be a specific advertising agency, which you will create. And even if at first you do not succeed in making it profitable, it is not terrible. You will be able to choose another, growing and less competitive market, buy a successful franchise and get the missing business skills.
Once you’ve chosen a goal and move towards realising it, you’ll realise whether the difficulty lies in the means or the lack of the right skill. Neither is fatal, it can be fixed.
4. “I’m 50, it’s too late to change anything” or “I’m 50, I still have everything ahead of me”
Seemingly opposite messages – so why are they in the same paragraph? As long as we are alive, we have time and resources. The question is how much, what they are and how to activate and use them as efficiently as possible.
It doesn’t matter how old we are or how long we have left to live
Life is a limited period of time and resources. It is a mistake to think that we can let everything go because there is a lot of time left or not enough time left. The question is how we want to live the remaining time and what we want to achieve.
5. “The main thing is to do something, and then success awaits us”
Vanity and aimless activity (what is called “shooting sparrows with a cannon”) rarely lead to results. You may achieve your goals – the question is whose and at what cost. Do not rush to “do something”, first choose from the possible and desirable, set a goal. Then all your actions will be accurate, and there will be enough energy for everything you need.
6. “Why change something if everything is fine as it is?”
Just imagine what will happen to your favourite house if you don’t change anything in it for ten years. At the very least, it will become dilapidated and not at all the way you loved it. Nothing in the world stands still. Lack of development inevitably leads to degradation. Even if we want things to stay as they are, we have to make efforts. And since effort is needed anyway, why not just maintain life, but regularly bring something new into it? The effort is the same, but the result is much more powerful.
HOW TO GET OUT OF THESE TRAPS
Trying to avoid them is futile. The best way is to learn to make choices. This will expand the boundaries of life so much that we will outgrow old limitations and misconceptions, and thus the problems associated with them.
It is about choosing something new, something that will not come on its own, without effort
A choice that we dream of, but are often afraid to make because it will change our lives. The ability to make a choice is genetically inherent in us as a way to realise the best of available opportunities. We just need to activate this ability in ourselves. Let your life be bright and full of those realised opportunities that you have chosen yourself.