The Optimal Mind

Have you ever wondered why there are dozens of new self-help, business and executive coaching books released every month?

Why is it that even when the material from these books, seminars and coaches seems useful on the surface, months later you may realise you haven’t actually integrated it into your life to the degree you might have wished?

Even books that dominate the cultural landscape for a few years seem to reliably fade from public consciousness, and the train moves on…

I’ll put it to you that most of this material shares the same basic assumptions about psychology and because of that each new piece of material feels comfortably familiar because it is sharing assumptions with other material you come across. And this new material claims it’s got a special herb or spice other material doesn’t have or has a buzzword like mindfulness, neuroscience, neuroplasticity or even AI in its title because it needs to justify its existence and seduce you into thinking that you are missing out on something or are “behind the curve” and will be left behind. But time often reveals many of these Emperors have no clothes.

And you may get some short term psychological sugar hit because even random action in a vaguely right direction can feel like something is happening (and occasionally it actually does). But things reliably stall or disappoint after a period of time and you resume your search for the breakthrough you are looking for whatever that is. As Einstein once said “things should be explained as simply as possible but no simpler”.

The quality of your life, the effectiveness of your strategies, and the level of your outcomes, performance, contentment and results in life are directly related to the quality of your assumptions.​

I’ll put a proposition to you. In all areas of your life, you are making assumptions you don’t even know you are making when trying to analyse, achieve or perform.

This is even the case for things you think are objectively true and largely immune to interpretation…

The boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius. But wait, you say, this is about as objectively true as anything can realistically be!

Is it?

Let’s look at the boiling point of water. It is 100 degrees Celsius. This is settled science, you say. You can walk around New York or Sydney testing that everywhere, and it is 100 degrees. Plus, you learnt it at school. Plus…

What assumption are you making when you say the boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius? You get some points if you say, “Well, the Celsius scale is an artificially created scale, so it is not ‘real’ in that sense”.

Give yourself another minute or two to ponder…

The assumption you are making that you most likely don’t know you are making when you proclaim that the boiling point of water is 100 degrees is…

that you are at sea level.

If you went high up in the Himalayas you will find that water may boil at 85 degrees Celsius or even lower, depending on how high you are. In fact, it is entirely plausible, depending on the degree to which Western ideas have been transmitted, that the children of that area may be taught that water boils at 85 degrees Celsius, and this will be proven empirically to them. As far as anyone who lives there is concerned, this will be a settled fact.

And if you are in a mission-critical situation in your life that depends on proverbial boiling water and you are a New Yorker in the Himalayas or a Himalayan in New York, you might get confusing, suboptimal or downright dangerous results because you are unaware of your assumptions and you don’t know what you don’t know.

For example, structured problem solving may be effective in managing low levels of stress but if you are highly activated, you will not in that moment be able to effectively use your frontal cortex and need to reduce arousal first to access the power of the technique. If you do not have awareness of this you will find problem solving seems to “help” in some circumstances but not so well in others and look for some other “magic bullet”.

As Twain said “it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” and I could add “just ain’t so” in every circumstance. It appears all development whether that is technological, societal, psychological, or any other paradigm shift is a process of uncovering hidden assumptions and upgrading them with ones that are higher resolution and therefore more functional in more circumstances. It is not about truth, it is about functionality.

The problem we have is that we can build very high-resolution theories and structures on top of very low-resolution assumptions and not make much headway towards what we are aiming at, or at the very least achieve frustratingly inconsistent results. My initial degree in Finance was partially a cautionary case study in this.

The optimal mind is about going those extra steps in uncovering what psychological and philosophical foundation your actions are built on and improving their quality. For example, if you assume a depressed mood is a sign of weakness, you will likely feel shame rising endeavour to “shoot this messenger” and try to get rid of this feeling somehow. However, if you assume a depressed mood is an evolutionary driven signal that something may have changed or something may need to change and that it is trying to get you to withdraw, process, accommodate, assimilate and integrate this into a higher resolution map of the world and come back online at a higher level of functioning, you will likely undertake a different set of behaviours. Your assumptions about anything are the single most important variable governing its impact on your present and your future.

The optimal mind is not about throwing out everything you have learnt or know about professional or personal development and growth and satisfaction. It is about getting more mileage out of what you already “know” and what you come across in the future.

Once you are in the groove, you may wonder why you didn’t do it before. The structural challenge is it is difficult to be independent of our own observations initially, so everything is obvious when it is obvious and not before.

If this has activated your curiosity have a look at the how can we help page.

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