Challenge Any Limiting Beliefs About What is Possible by Continuing to Update the Human Operating System Every Year
I believe that one thing we should do every year without fail is to update the human operating system every year and take inventory of our beliefs and test our beliefs to see if they may need modifications and/or alterations. If we all challenged ourselves to become a better person every year, the nature of such a challenge would require a constant annual analysis of our current beliefs and a consideration of the possibility that some of the core beliefs we presently hold may be wrong. In other words, we would be intent on ensuring that we update the human operating system every year, without fail. Growth is not just about accumulating more knowledge, but it is about having the wisdom to recognize the error of some of our core beliefs, changing them, and consequently understanding how to apply newly acquired knowledge to improve our lives. Had I never gone through the process of killing my ego and my Ivy League-obtained arrogance when I was young. After I graduated from university, I really thought that I was quite clever and already understood how the world worked, and it wasn’t until years later that I eventually understand how much I didn’t know. If I never opened my mind and my belief system to new ideas that sounded crazy when I was just 21-years of age, I still would have no clue as to how the global finance and monetary system really works, and my belief system today would still revolve around all the lies I “learned” in business school. Because of the behavioral conditioning that occurs in institutional academia today, even when many of us encounter new knowledge that can significantly improve our lives, most of us will dismiss this new knowledge and unfortunately fail to apply it if we fail to update the human operating system every year. The fact that most of us spend zero time inspecting our core beliefs every year means that we will never be able to upgrade the most important operating system we use every single day of our lives – our brain.
Imagine if we were still using the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office), the first computer OS (Operating System) invented in 1951, on our computers. How limiting would the continued use of a computer OS from 1951 be to our ability to complete our work tasks? Or let’s leap forward by two decades and upgrade our OS from LEO to DOS-11, invented in 1971. Even though the DOS-11 OS was lightyears ahead in complexity of LEO, if we were all forced to still use the DOS-11 OS today, I don’t know a single one among us that would not complain about being taken back to the stone age of computing in the ability to complete tasks. If we fast forward 14-years, Apple introduced to us the first Mac OS, then lauded as a revolutionary leap ahead of the DOS-11 OS. In other words, computer companies are continually updating software, with very significant upgrades every few years, but yet we, as humans, fail to update update the human operating system every year, often stopping to do so since graduation from high-school. Consequently, we often operate on the same OS ten, twenty, thirty and even fifty years later!
With the May 2017 wanna cry ransomware attack infecting hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, unfortunately, sometimes computer software OS upgrades are downgrades, as software upgrades contain deliberate exploitable hacks for the alphabet agencies worldwide to spy on all of our daily computer activity. However, patches are constantly released to close these exploits even though new exploits likely will constantly be embedded in future software “upgrades”. As humans, our hackable exploits are manipulation of our emotions to cancel out our logic, independence, sanity, and critical thought. We must realize that every year, these hackable exploits are programmed and further embedded deeper and deeper into the OS of our brains, and yet most of us put forth little to zero effort to close these exploits, which could be accomplished simply by choosing to update the human operating system every year. To the contrary, we should expend a considerable amount of energy every year to close these exploits in our brain that are being used to divide and conquer us today. I believe that it is our refusal to address these exploits in our brains that has created today, in my opinion, the most divided state of humanity during my lifetime. Please click here if you wish to view a video about this topic.
For example, just ask some of your friends to relay to you, one deeply held belief they wholeheartedly embrace without doubt, and ask them if they can remember at what age they came to embrace these three beliefs. Depending on your age, you may find that your friend has held this belief for 5 years, 10 years, or even 30+ years. Then ask them how many times in their life have they ever challenged this deep-rooted of belief of theirs once they embraced it. Can you image if you kept the same computer OS you purchased at age 10 or 18 for the rest of your entire life? Yet, this is how we treat our own OS, our brain, when we never update it by challenging any of our beliefs. As well know, failing to update our computer OS will eventually lead to critical failure, and I believe that our failures to challenge our brains with updates every year also lead to critical failures in our humanity and abilities to express critical thought and intelligence.
As I stated earlier, most of us are often born into beliefs dictated us by society that we would never believe were we born into a different country, culture or religion. However, truth has no boundaries when it comes to nations, religion, cultures or race.
This fact alone demands a critical introspection of our beliefs and should be a mind-blowing realization. Most of us ignore life-changing knowledge even when we encounter and acquire it due to our blind acceptance of life paradigms taught to us and imposed upon us by others. After our OS is implanted with these “downgrades” in how to think, we fail to consider if this is the OS that will serve us best in life, with no introspection, no application of critical thought, and no testing of the validity of the OS implanted in our brains. In other words, our rejection of truth remains rooted not in logic, but purely in emotion and ego. Some of us remain ignorant of truth simply to appease our ego, so we will not have to admit we are wrong. Others among us willingly remain ignorant of truth simply to fit in with the hive mentality that our peers have adopted. I have made every self-limiting mistake, at some point in my life, of which I speak of in this fact sheet, so I can speak from abundant personal experience regarding the great susceptibility of all of us to making these mistakes.
Unfortunately, those with money and power in every nation also understand how to exactly manipulate our emotional constitution, and seek to maintain control over us by appealing only to our emotions and not logic. If any of you have ever had an argument with an entitled young adult that attempts to rebut you with a response of “I went to Harvard. Where did you go to school?” then you know what I mean. If any of you have ever had an argument with someone that is unable to rebut any facet of your fact and logic-based argument, who then cusses you out in frustration and walks away from you, then you know what I mean. Humility, and humility in large doses, is necessary for anyone interested in truth. If we remain among the majority of people that believe all of our core beliefs are correct and that “the other guy” is wrong, then I urge you to stop and think about the implication of this statement. If the aforementioned statement describes us, we literally are claiming that either:
(1) We have subjected all of our beliefs to rigorous, unbiased testing to confirm them as correct; or
(2) All of our core beliefs have originated from a group of infallible people.
Because both points (1) and (2) are literal impossibilities, this necessarily means that all of us have held some false beliefs for very long periods of our lives. If we admit this logical conclusion, but still do not care to change or challenge any of our beliefs, then this simply means that we truly are not interested in improving the aspects of our lives that can lead to richer, contextual, more nuanced experiences, and in attaining sustainable happiness throughout our lives. Remember, the easiest person in the world for us to fool is the one who stares back at us in the mirror every day, and if we are not extremely well-versed in the topics of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, we will even fool ourselves by believing we have tested our beliefs in many instances in which we have not tested them at all. As a quick example of one of the many fallacies I once believed when I was a teenager, due to a mind I had not yet learned to open, I once believe that I should avoid the consumption of avocados on a regular basis, even in moderation, because of an article written by a doctor that said avocados were high in fat and a poor food to consume and should be avoided at all costs.
Like most people, I performed no further research on my own, simply blindly accepted what a person of authority stated as truth, and avoided eating avocados for years. After all, a doctor must know more about this topic then me, right? However, today most people know that avocados are a relatively healthy food despite their high fat content, as avocados are a source of nutrition that helps lower the LDL, the artery-clogging type of cholesterol, in people that are relatively fit (Source: Zelman, Kathleen M. “All About Avocados.” WebMD, 13 June 2016. Accessed 1 February 2017. http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/all-about-avocados). Had I not been willing to correct this false belief of mine, I would still be avoiding the consumption of avocados today. And if you read our lengthier skwealthcademy curriculum brochure, you will know that most Americans in the 1930s throughout the 1950s, due to false advertising promoted by medical doctors beholden to the tobacco industry, not only believed that smoking cigarettes was a harmless activity, but actually believed that cigarettes were a cure for hypertension during pregnancy as well!
Throughout my life, I never stopped educating myself, and the bulk of my real education occurred outside of the institutional classroom setting. Knowledge alone is not power, because as I stated earlier, if we encounter useful knowledge, but cannot evaluate or understand how to apply this knowledge in a way that improves our lives, such knowledge is of low utility. This is the type of knowledge I received in the classroom. Secondly, any type of learning that impedes my ability to critically think is not educating me, but instead, dumbing me down. This is the type of “learning” to which I was exposed during the 20-years of my life I spent sitting in classrooms, so I consider 99% of this type of learning to fall out of the realm of education. In fact, though my thinking evolved tremendously from high school graduation to university graduation, from university graduation to graduate school graduation, and from graduate school graduation to life in the corporate arena, my thinking evolved the most, by far, when I left the corporate world and decided to become an entrepreneur. When I graduated from the academic world, I was still asleep and guided by the behavioral conditioning I had received during my 20-years in the academic world. Consequently, I sought and achieved employment as a Private Banker and Private Wealth Manager for one the largest banks in the US and a Wall Street firm in Beverly Hills, California. Only after I realized that my pursuits were making me miserable, and that there was little truth to anything I learned in classrooms of my MBA program, did I decide to quit the “American dream”.
Stay tuned for Part 3, in which I discuss my awakening, coming soon.
