Hey friends,
I'm in an exciting period of life at the moment. I've just completed my degree, and I'll be starting full-time work in a couple of weeks.
As much as it's a nice feeling to be finished with university, it's a little daunting to think that this is life. There is no more waiting for the next thing. The formal education journey is done––for the time being at least. And now, here's life. This is it. I need to live it well.
After a busy final semester, I've had a few weeks to breathe before starting work, which has been lovely! I do find it difficult to sit around and not do much, but I've been trying to embrace some rest and relaxation.
I've spent these few weeks catching up with friends, going for walks, exploring my suburb some more, reading good books, listening to music, watching movies and shows, and thinking about the absurdity of life.
One book I read this week was How To Be Confident by James Smith. It's a good book. It doesn't exactly teach you how to be confident––it's more of a summary of well-known psychological concepts and anecdotes from author's life.
It’s structured as subheadings of a theory followed by the definition and explanation, which reminded me of uni assignments a little bit, but there was some useful knowledge in there!
I thought I'd share with you five key messages from the book that stood out to me. This is just a small picking of the lessons from the book, but these are some of the ones that connected with me the most.
- 💪🏼 Just like growing our muscles, there needs to be a certain amount of overreaching to grow our confidence. To grow our confidence, we need to regularly push it to the edge of our comfort zone by taking small, calculated, consistent, and targeted risks and challenges. Whether it's speaking up in a meeting, meeting new people, or sharing ideas, our confidence is like a muscle that needs to be trained.
- 🫣 We need to take ownership of our mistakes and failures to learn from them. Self-serving bias, where winning is at our credit but losing is not our fault, is a natural tendency to protect our self-esteem in the short term. But owning both wins and losses, acknowledging our role in every outcome, makes it easier to learn and improve for the long term.
- 🙅🏻♂️ Stemming from our brain’s natural bias toward self-preservation, we’re hard-wired to think we’ll fail before we even try. We’ve evolved with a mental alarm system that triggers when we face anything uncertain or challenging. But by taking small steps outside our comfort zone, setting realistic goals, and focusing on effort rather than outcome, we can train our minds to see challenges as opportunities rather than threats. Over time, we can shift from fearing failure to anticipating growth.
- 🔄 Inaction creates an open loop which will take up your mental resources. This phenomenon, known as part of the Zeigarnik Effect, describes how our minds tend to fixate on incomplete tasks, leading us to constantly think about them until they're finished. Closing these loops—by taking action, making decisions, or setting plans—frees up our mental bandwidth, reducing anxiety and allowing us to focus better.
- 👋🏼 The lessons we need are often in the tasks we’re avoiding. These are usually the things that push us out of our comfort zones that we avoid because they bring up discomfort, fear of failure, or uncertainty. But it’s in facing these that we gain the biggest insights that help us grow. Each time we face what we tend to avoid, we get a little stronger and better equipped for future challenges.
I think these messages stuck out to me as they involve asking questions of ourselves and they encourage us to understand ourselves better. The key to all five of these messages is becoming aware of how they impact us.
How am I stretching my confidence muscle? What’s one small, manageable risk I can take this week to push my confidence just outside its comfort zone?
Do I always assess setbacks and identify my role in the outcome? What have I learned this week about how I can improve?
Am I assuming failure, or do I believe in myself? What does it look like to approach challenges around the learning potential rather than fearing failure?
What’s one unfinished task or decision that’s draining my mental energy? What’s one simple action I can take to move it closer to completion?
What am I currently avoiding? Why? What growth opportunity might there be if I were to face it?
I hope one of the messages or questions were useful for you. Feel free to hit reply and let me know what one is most relevant to you––I enjoy hearing from you.
Have a great week!
Ben x
p.s. Hood St pooper tells police he 'needed to go'
👀 This Week's Standouts
📺 YouTube video - I've bumped into Derren Brown's mentalist/illusionist work a few times over the past decade, and this week I was glad to stumble across a TED Talk by Derren titled Mentalism, mind reading and the art of getting inside your head. Derren's work is unbelievable. Like, literally. It looks like magic, but of course, and as Derren admits, he's tricking us. I've found PDFs of two of his books online (Pure Effect and Absolute Magic) that I've put on my reading list. He is fascinating.
🎬 TV show - I hadn't watched a TV series for so long, so in an effort to slow down and chill out this week, I watched season one of Yellowjackets on Netflix. It is a very strange show, but I liked it. It follows a team of girls' soccer players after their plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness. While they struggle to survive, their sanity slips away and weird stuff happens. It's a psychological drama/mystery/thriller of sorts. It's a good watch for the spooky season!
🎙️ Podcast episode - Allegedly, humans evolved in tribes, immersed in nature for over 300,000 years. Our brain chemicals (dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins) were developed to enable us to thrive in this environment. Modern neuroscientific research suggests our rapidly evolving lifestyles are creating huge chemical imbalances in our brains leading to stress, anxiety and depression. On Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal, self-proclaimed brain chemical expert TJ Power says we must rediscover the actions required to rebalance our brain chemistry allowing us to thrive. I've become a bit more mindful of my brain chemicals recently––particularly in the way my phone addiction is impacting me––so this episode was really interesting. I'd like to study this stuff further.
📕 Book - I picked up Just One Thing by Dr Michael Mosley on clearance at The Warehouse a couple of months back. I saw it on my shelf this week and ended up reading it in one afternoon. The book lists small, simple things you can introduce into your routine which could have a big impact on your mental and physical health. Dr Mosley goes into the science behind each habit which was interesting and affirmed some of the habits which I had been anecdotally introduced to elsewhere. Here are some of the ones I'm experimenting with: put the shower on cold for 10 seconds before I hop out, go for a brisk walk within two hours of waking up, extend my overnight fast to eat 9am-6pm, stand on one leg while brushing teeth, sing loudly for five minutes a day, and get some more plants for my room.
📱 LinkedIn post - Donald Trump visited a McDonald's restaurant in Pennsylvania the other week. McDonald's internal communication to employees after the visit was brilliant. It's an example of values-based framing combined with clear actions for franchisees, employees and suppliers, to avoid political conflict and get a win. An awesome example of navigating a delicate middle ground in a situation like this.
✍🏻 Quote of the week
All the grit, persistence, and motivation in the world won’t do you any good if you’re working on the wrong thing. In fact, it will do the opposite.
Choosing what to pursue is more important than choosing how to pursue it. Make sure you’re facing the right direction before you start running.
What are you putting most of your energy and focus into? Is that the best place to put it? Is it moving you towards your desired life or away from it?
By Mark Manson in his newsletter.
