The Restlessness

File under Avoid the Machine

I wanted to go back to a few posts ago when I talked about purchasing, and subsequently giving up on, the Mega-Memory system.

Source

Why would I give up so easily? Mr. Trudeau tapped into a hidden insecurity of mine that I was motivated to overcome, or at least so I thought. I “had” to have it, remember. “Why would I abandon it?” was the nagging question. There were two reasons that I slowly realized:


1. The effort to achieve my desired endstate was boring
2. I didn’t really care about the endstate after all

These reasons are actually part and parcel of each other. The second reason is the cause and the first the effect, but I’ll talk about both because the effect is what is most tangible to us.

Somewhere into the first tape the system lost its allure. It wasn’t magical anymore, it really just turned out to be common sense. Using memory association to remember things was not created by Trudeau, nor was it rocket science. And with that realization came the feeling that these exercises were silly and that I could have done this on my own. Strike 1. But I persisted. I continued on to the exercise of remembering things spatially and memorized the layout of furniture in the apartment as directed. It was during this task that I began to question how this would help me in solving the understanding of my issue. There was a disconnect. I was forgetful, but at no time had I ever forgotten where my couch was. I was now perceiving these activities as rote exercises that had no bearing on my endstate. I was having a Karate Kid moment where Daniel-san was painting some old dude’s fence and waxing his car with no concept of how that would help him beat up Johnny. I began to feel these exercises were a waste of my time and I didn’t have Miyagi to push me through. Strike 2. And then in Tape 3, carrying that baggage, I gave up. I realized that I was forgetful, but obviously I wasn’t that bad because I just graduated college and I had a job. I was comfortable with where I was and I just didn’t really care about the program anymore. The work to achieve it was not worth the effort for an endstate I was only marginally interested in in the first place.

Truly, deep down in our core, being content with our state, and thus being unwilling to change, is a major reason why we fail when sometimes we convince ourselves we are so determined to succeed. But it’s not the only reason, and there are two other reasons why we may have failed that we'll get into next.

Daily Antidote
Ask yourself: "What happens if you don't achieve your desired endstate?"
 
Song of the Day
I think we succumb to these self-help 'fixes' because of a restlesness we feel in our lives.  In honor of overcoming that feeling, the song of the day is Langhorne Slim's 'Restless'.