how to gaslight yourself into a new reality.

Introduction & Overview

00:00All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how belief engineers your reality. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the science of belief, the self-fulfilling loop, the belief audit, useful and untrue, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days.

00:25Before we get started, if you want to work with me, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with this training, make sure to join the free community again from the link in the description. And if you want weekly tips on health, wealth, love, and self and how to improve in each one of those areas, then make sure to join the newsletter again from the link in the description.

00:49Now, without further ado, let's get started and talk about the science of belief. So, so in 2007, a

The Science of Belief

00:56psychologist named Ali at Harvard ran a study on hotel maids that quietly changed how researchers think about the relationship between belief and the body. Now, these women were doing physically demanding work every single day. You could imagine it.

01:06Holding vacuum cleaners up the stairs, scrubbing bathrooms, flipping mattresses, burning calories basically, at a rate that exceeded the surgeon general's recommended daily exercise. But when researchers asked them, most of them said they didn't really exercise at all.

01:25They didn't think of their work as exercise. It was just work. So, Crumb did something simple. She took half the maids and told them the truth that their daily work already qualified as significant physical exercise and showed them exactly how many calories each task burned and also reframed what they were already doing as a legitimate workout.

01:43Now the other half got no information at all. Sadly for them, nothing else changed. Same hours, same tasks, same hotel, same routine. Four weeks later, the group that had been told their work was exercise has had lost weight. They had lowered their blood pressure and also reduced their body fat percentage.

02:02The control group that didn't know anything, doing the exact same physical work, showed no changes whatsoever. Now, think about that for a second. It was the same physical activity, same bodies. The only thing that really changed was what they believed about what they were doing.

02:20And their bodies responded to the belief, not to the activity itself. Now, that's a peer-reviewed finding from one of the most respected universities on Earth. Right now, the belief didn't add a single extra step to their day. It didn't change the workload, the intensity, or the duration of the work.

02:40It changed the meaning they assigned to the work. and the meaning change the physiological response which tells you something that most people still drastically underestimate about human biology. Studies like this aren't rare or isolated. They show up constantly in research and they point to something that sits underneath every conversation about health performance and potential.

02:58What you believe about what you're doing might matter as much if not more than

The Placebo Effect and Neurochemistry

03:07what you're actually doing. Now, if that's true for hotel mates who didn't even know they were really exercising, what is it doing in the areas of your life where you are conscious of your beliefs? What beliefs are you carrying about your work, your body, your potential that are quietly shaping your results without you ever questioning them?

03:24Now, the placebo effect is absolutely a real thing, and this is what all of this is alluding to. And it's not some fringe curiosity that scientists shrug off because it actually produces measurable physiological changes in the brain and the body that can be tracked, scanned, and replicated across studies.

03:43Now, this isn't about people imagining they feel better. This is about actual shifts in neurochemistry that happen when someone believes something is going to help them. And here's another study from the same researcher, Aliia Crumb, that makes this even harder to dismiss.

03:55She gave participants the exact same 380 calorie milkshake on two separate occasions. On one time, the label said it was 620 calories and that it was an indulgent shake. The other time the label said it was 140 calories sensible shake. Same shake, same ingredients, same calories, 320.

04:17They just didn't know it. The only thing that changed was what the participants believed they were drinking or 380 calories, excuse me. And the only thing that changed was that what the participants really believed they were drinking. Now, their ghrelin levels, the hormone that tells your brain whether you're hungry or full were tracked and they responded to the label, not the shake.

04:41When they thought they were drinking something indulgent, their grein dropped sharply, which is the body signal that says, "You've had enough. you're satisfied. When they thought it was a diet shake, their ghrelin barely

The Milkshake Experiment

04:55moved, which left them feeling unsatisfied and still hungry. So, their hormones responded to the story on the label, not the substance in the cup, not the actual objective calorie amount. And that's a measured hormonal response that is being dictated by a belief.

05:08Which means your body isn't just passively processing what you put into it. It's actively interpreting what you believe you're putting into it and adjusting its chemistry accordingly. And it goes even further than hunger hormones. In a pain study, patients were told they'd receive a powerful painkiller through an IV drip.

05:26They reported significant pain relief. Their brain scans showed reduced activity and pain processing centers. And by every measurable standard, the treatment was working except the machine was never turned on. nothing nothing was really flowing through the IV.

05:44The belief that medication was coming was enough to activate the brain's own endorphine system and produce real measurable pain relief. But the part that really matters is that when the patients were told that the machine had been off the whole time, the pain came back almost immediately.

05:57The belief created the relief and the removal of the belief destroyed it. Which tells you that the mechanism here isn't passive or accidental. It's a direct causal change from what you believe to what your body does. And this doesn't just apply to physical health because you see the exact same pattern in the psychological research on motivation, resilience, performance, and basically every domain where humans are trying to do hard things.

06:24Belief acts as a kind of internal command system where your brain interprets the belief as a signal to start allocating resources differently and adjusts hormone levels, modulates immune responses, and essentially reorganizes itself around the expectation that things are about to improve.

06:42Now, the part that should

The Nocebo Effect

06:48unsettle you a little bit is this. because this mechanism doesn't really only work in your favor. The placebo effect has a dark twin, if you want to call it that, that is called the noibo effect and it's just as powerful and it's still running in the in the background, but it's running in the opposite direction.

07:04So when people believe something will harm them or that they won't recover or that a treatment will produce painful side effects, their bodies often comply with that expectation just as faithfully as those hotel maids bodies comp complied with the belief that they were exercising.

07:29So, in clinical trials, patients who are warned about potential side effects of a drug experience those side effects at dramatically higher rates even when they're taking a sugar pill, their bodies produce the pain, the nausea, the fatigue, not because of any chemical substance, but because the belief that harm was coming triggered the exact physiological response they were afraid of.

07:48Now, researchers have documented cases where patients who were misdiagnosed with terminal illness deteriorated and died on schedule and they were misdiagnosed only for autopsies to reveal that they never had the disease in the first place. The belief killed them.

08:09And that sounds like something out of a horror movie, but it is in the medical literature. And you don't need a dramatical dramatic medical scenario to see this playing out because the noibo effect runs quietly in the background of most people's lives every single day.

08:22Like every time you tell yourself, I'm terrible at this or this is never going to work or people like me don't get opportunities like that, you're running an oibo on yourself and your body and your behavior respon respond accordingly. Now, this is why belief selection isn't just a nice to have personal development exercises.

08:41genuinely urgent because it's not just that empowering beliefs help you. It's that dis-empowering beliefs are actively harming you right now and produce stress hormones, suppress immune function, and kill your motivation and focus and narrow your perception of what's really possible.

08:58Most people have never

Why Belief Selection Is Urgent

09:04calculated the real cost of the negative beliefs they carry around because those beliefs feel like just being realistic or not getting your hopes up. But the noibo research shows that those supposedly harmless beliefs are producing measurable physiological damage that compounds over time.

09:17And the uncomfortable asymmetry here is that you don't get to opt out of this system. Your beliefs are producing effects whether you're conscious of them or not. So the only real question is whether you're going to be deliberate about which beliefs you're running or whether you're going to let whatever was installed by default keep running unchecked in the background.

09:40Now people who believe they are capable of achieving a task are measurably more

Self-Efficacy and Confidence Research

09:47likely to achieve that task. It's almost common sense, right? That's decades of re research in self-efficacy and cognitive psychology and behavioral science all pointing in the same direction. The belief doesn't guarantee the outcome, but it dramatically shifts the probability.

09:59So people who believe they are capable of dealing with setbacks and problems are measurably more likely to actually deal with those setbacks and problems because the belief changes how they interpret difficulty which changes how they respond to it which changes whether they push through or collapse.

10:20When you believe you can handle something, you interpret obstacles as temporary and solvable rather than permanent and defining. And that interpretation difference is where the entire game is really won or lost. Now, the belief doesn't remove the obstacle.

10:38It changes your behavioral response to it. And that shift in response is what eventually determines whether you get past it or get buried by it. And there's a version of this that goes beyond just task level confidence and becomes something more like a life operating system where you hold a deep almost irrational belief that you're capable of accomplishing anything you fully commit to.

10:59Not dabble in just actually fully commit to not try halfheartedly, but truly commit to with everything you have. And is that objectively true? Probably not. There are almost certainly things you couldn't achieve no matter how hard you tried.

11:17you're probably not going to play in the NBA and you're probably not going to win a Nobel Prize in physics. There are limits unless you actually have committed to those and have the skills. Uh so don't take this the wrong way. But does believing this make you more likely to take on difficult challenges to push through the long and discouraging middle parts of any ambitious project and to eventually succeed at things you might have given up on otherwise?

11:35Absolutely it does. And that's the part that actually matters. Right? This belief might not be true in some objective

Useful But Not Objectively True

11:48verifiable sense, but it is extremely useful because it produces actions that increase your odds of success. And in a weird way, the belief makes itself more true by just existing. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not because the universe magically responds to your thoughts, but because your thoughts change your expectations and actions.

12:07Now, your expectations change your behavior, and your behavior changes your outcomes. And so the belief that started as not technically true gradually becomes more and more true through the actions it actually generated which is a loop that most people never consciously recognize or leverage.

12:20Most people experience this loop unconsciously and accidentally sometimes in their favor and sometimes against them. And the whole point of understanding it is to start running it on purpose instead of leaving it to chance. So once you see this mechanism clearly, you realize that choosing your beliefs isn't delusional or naive.

12:38It's strategic because the beliefs you adopt directly shape the probability of the outcomes you experience. Your beliefs literally shape your outcomes. Your beliefs shape your expectations. Your expectations shape your actions. And your actions shape your outcomes.

12:52And the takeaway here isn't that you should really lie to yourself or ignore reality. is that in the space between I know this for certain and I have no idea, you have a choice about which beliefs to lean into. And that choice has real consequ con consequences for how your life actually plays out.

13:11The belief you carry, the beliefs you carry aren't neutral passengers in your mind. They're active agents that influence every decision you make, every risk you take or avoid, and every moment where you either step forward or pull back. And that means belief selection isn't some fluffy feel-good exercise.

13:32It's one of the most consequential things you can do for yourself because it sits upstream of literally everything else. Now, with that said, let's talk about the self-fulfilling loop. So, now that we've established that belief produces real

The Self-Fulfilling Loop Explained

13:49measurable effects on both the body and the behavior, the question becomes, what's the actual architecture of how this works? Because it's not magic and it's not random. There's a very specific sequence that runs every single time a belief turns into an outcome.

14:02And once you see the loop create clearly, you can start engineering it instead of stumbling into it. Now the loop runs like this. Belief shapes expectation. Expectation shapes behavior. Behavior shapes outcome and outcome reinforces or destroys the original belief.

14:19Which means the whole thing is circular and self- sustaining once it really gets going in either direction. So when the loop runs in a positive direction, you believe you can do something. So you expect to make progress. You expect to get it done.

14:32So you take action, so you get results. And that reinforces the belief. It strengthens the original belief, which makes you expect even more progress next time. When it runs in a negative direction, you believe you can't do something. So you expect failure.

14:47So you either don't act or act halfheartedly so that you can save your ego. Uh so you get poor results and those results confirm the belief that you couldn't do it which makes the next attempt even less likely. Now most people are running this loop on autopilot with beliefs that they basically inherited from childhood.

15:07They absorbed from their environment or they adopted unconsciously based on a handful of experiences that they never properly really examined. And the loop just keeps reinforcing whatever was already there. So you didn't really choose most of the beliefs that are currently driving your behavior, right?

15:27They were installed by parents, by teachers, by peers, by culture, and a few emotionally charged experiences, most likely that your brain decided were evidence of how the real world works. Now, the first step to changing the loop is simply becoming aware that it's there, that it's running.

15:47because you can't really redirect something you can't see. You can't really redirect something that also you don't really believe in. But most people genuinely don't realize that their outcomes are downstream of their

Expectations as a Perceptual Filter

16:00beliefs they've ne of beliefs that they've never really questioned. So expectation is where the loop get its gets its uh real power because expectation is the bridge between a belief that you hold in your mind and the actions you take in the real world.

16:17And you can believe something abstractly, but it's when that belief generates a felt expectation, a sense that something is going to happen that your behavior actually starts to shift. So expectations act as a perceptual filter essentially, which means they literally change what you notice.

16:29They literally change what you pay attention to and what you interpret as relevant. So two people can be in this exact same situation and see completely different things depending on what they expect to find. So someone who expects to find opportunities will notice openings.

16:48Uh they will notice connections. They they will notice possibilities that someone who expects failure will walk right past without ever registering. And this isn't this is demonstrated in attention research over and over again. and it's connected to your RA, your reticular activating system.

17:06So, someone who expects things to go wrong will notice threats, problems, and risks at a much higher rate, which means their decision-m gets dominated by avoidance and caution even when the objective situation doesn't warrant it, unless they're an action taker who just makes sure that none of these threats, problems, and risks really happen and they basically hedge their bets.

17:25But expectations also change how you prepare for things. Because if you generally expect to succeed at something, you prepare differently than if you expect to struggle. And that preparation difference alone can be the thing that actually determines the outcome, which then reinforces the belief, which then reinforces the expectation.

17:45So when you expect a positive outcome, you invest more time, more energy, more focus, and more creativity into the process because your brain has already decided that the payoff is coming. So the effort feels justified and sustainable. You're just doing the part because you know you're going to get the outcome.

18:04When you expect a negative outcome, you unconsciously start conserving resources. You start pulling back effort. You start hedging your bets and you look for exit ramps. All of which virtually guarantee that the failure you were expecting in the first place is going to happen.

18:23Right? And there's a behavior layer after that

Behavior, Compounding, and Early Wins

18:29which is where beliefs and expectations finally meet reality. Right? They are finally actually acting on the fabric of reality. And this is the part that most people skip when they talk about mindset because they act like believing something is enough on its own which obviously it's not.

18:41Belief without behavior is just daydreaming. But belief with behavior is where the compounding effects and uh start to happen. Right? So, the behavior that beliefs generate isn't usually big or uh dramatic. It's really the quiet daily consistent kind of behavior that doesn't make for good Instagram posts, but absolutely makes for good outcomes over time.

19:06It's the boring things that you do that repetitively things like showing up when you don't feel like doing the work even when the results are slow. Doing the work even when it's boring and you don't really want to do it. And that is going to lead somewhere worth going.

19:19Right? And staying in the game long enough for the compounding to kick in now. Most of the behavior that changes your life is, as I've said before, very boring and repetitive, unglamorous, and monotonous. And the only reason anyone sticks with it is because they believe at some level that it's going to lead somewhere good.

19:46Right? Belief is the fuel that keeps you doing the mundane things long enough for them to matter because without it you'll quit the second that things get a bit boring or uncomfortable or your progress starts slowing down which happens to literally everyone at some point even I mean it's actually a good sign if your progress slows slows down because it means you've learned a lot your rate of learning has slowed down it means you're becoming better but every action you take generates feed feedback and that feedback either strengthens or weakens the belief that started the whole loop

20:21which is why early wins are so psychologically important not because they prove you've made it but because they give the loop momentum. So small wins early on create a feeling of progress and that feeling reinforces the belief which strengthens the expectation which improves the behavior which generates more wins and suddenly the loop is running at full speed almost without conscious effort.

20:44Conversely, if you go too long without any feedback or evidence that things are working, the belief starts to erode, the expectation fades, the behavior drops off, and the loop basically collapses and starts working in the opposite direction a lot of the times, which is why smart people

Engineering the Loop on Purpose

21:02design their process to include frequent visible markers of progress even when the big goal is still far away. Now the whole point of understanding this loop is to really move from being a passive participant to an active engineer of it. Because once you realize that the starting point is the belief and everything else cascades from there, you can basically start being intentional about which beliefs you install and and which beliefs you reinforce.

21:32And belief selection isn't about lying to yourself or ignoring reality. It's really about recognizing that in the gray area between definitely true and definitely false, there are beliefs you can choose to lean into that will produce better behavior, better outcomes, and ultimately a better life.

21:44And most of the beliefs that matter exist in this gray area. They're not pro provably true. They're not provably false. They're just stories you tell yourself about what's possible. And the story you pick has a massive downstream effect, massive down downstream consequences.

22:02So being intentional about this doesn't make you delusional. It makes you strategic because you're simply choosing to occupy the version of uncertainty that gives you the best chance of getting where you want to go. Now once you've selected a belief, the next step is really reinforcing it through action and evidence.

22:20Because obviously beliefs that aren't supported by experience and by action will eventually decay because there's nothing reinforcing them. No matter how much you try to affirm them, the fastest way to strengthen a belief is to act on it and watch what happens.

22:34So take the action that the belief implies even if you don't fully believe it because the action will generate evidence and the evidence will then strengthen the belief in a way that no amount of thinking or journaling ever could. no amount of repeating it to yourself every morning ever could.

22:52So collect and pay attention to the evidence that supports the belief, not in a confirmation bias, ignore everything else kind of way, but in a deliberate effort to notice the signal that the loop is working because your brain will default to noticing the negative unless you actively direct its attention to the positive.

23:04Now with that said, let's talk about the belief audit. So now you understand the science, you understand the loop, and you understand

The Belief Audit

23:17what that your beliefs are producing real effects whether you're paying attention to them or not. And the next question becomes obvious. What beliefs are you actually running right now? Because most people have never really sat down and honestly examined this.

23:30And that's a problem because you can't engineer something you haven't inventoried. So start by looking at the four areas that matter the most. your health, your wealth, your relationships or your wealth in work, your relationships, and your sense of self.

23:46For each one, write down the two or three beliefs that are currently driving your behavior in that area. So, what do you actually believe about your body, your discipline, your ability to stay consistent with training and nutrition? If the honest answer is something like I always fall off after a few weeks or I just don't have the genetics for it, that's a nobo running in the background and it's costing you more than you think.

24:15In terms of wealth in your work, what do you believe about your ability to earn, to build, to create something valuable? If there's a quiet voice saying people like me don't make that kind of money or it's too late to start, that belief is shaping your behavior every single day.

24:35And the loop is reinforcing it every time you hesitate or play small in terms of your love and relationships. What do you believe about your worthiness of love? your ability to connect, your capacity to show up fully for the people in your life, to be a good friend, to be a good son or daughter, to be a good uh wife or husband, to be a good dad or or mom.

25:00These beliefs are often the most deeply buried and the most damaging because they were usually installed earliest and have had the longest time to compound. And then for the aspect of self, what do you believe about who you are at the core?

25:19About your potential, your intelligence, your resilience, your spirituality, your right to take up space and pursue ambitious things. This is the identity and spirituality layer and it's the most powerful one because beliefs at this level don't just influence what you do.

25:36They really determine what you think is even possible for someone like you. whatever that means. So once you've written them down, write rate each belief on a simple scale. Is this belief producing useful behavior or is it keeping me stuck?

25:54And don't over complicate it. It's a yes or a no. Basically, it's a useful behavior, positive behavior or

Rating Your Beliefs

26:05negative behavior. That's it. And you'll almost immediately know uh which beliefs are really serving you and which ones are quietly sabotaging you because the evidence is already visible in your results. So the beliefs that are serving you will have clear evidence in your life.

26:23You'll be able to point to actions you've taken, risks that you've embraced, progress you've made that traces back directly to what you believe about yourself in that domain. Now, the beliefs that are sabotaging you will also have clear evidence as well, right?

26:42It's the noibo. It's it just won't look like evidence at first. It will look like avoidance, procrastination, half-hearted attempts, and a pattern of starting things but not finishing them or not even trying really. All of which are downstream

Writing Replacement Beliefs

27:01symptoms of a belief that's running the loop in the wrong direction. So for every belief you've identified as sabotaging, you write down the belief you need to hold in order to produce better behavior. Not the belie the belief you wish you had, not some affirmation you saw on Instagram or on Pinterest, but the specific belief that if you genuinely held it would change the way you show up tomorrow morning.

27:30Now the replacement belief needs to be specific enough to actually generate different behavior because vague beliefs produce vague actions. Right? I believe in myself is really useless. I am a god is useless. I believe that if I train consistently for 12 weeks, my body will respond is a belief that produces a specific action.

27:47And that specificity is what gives the loop something to work with. Now, the best replacement beliefs are once you can basically test through action within the next seven days because like we talked about earlier, you need feedback. Beliefs that aren't supported by experience will decay.

28:07They need feedback. They need to feedback in order to be reinforced. So, the fastest way to install a new belief is to really act on it immediately and then let the evidence start building. So if the gap between your current belief and the replacement is too wide, you'll most likely reject it.

28:25And this is why sometimes setting humongous goals works in the opposite way. Um you will most likely reject them and and the beliefs and whether we're talking about beliefs or goals whatever you most likely reject them and it won't take hold.

28:39It won't produce change. So in that case, use a graduate graduated approach. Meaning don't jump from I'll never be successful to I'm destined for greatness, which is also pretty vague, by the way. Start with I'm capable of making progress this week if I show up consistently.

28:57I'm capable of getting 10 responses this week from potential clients if I just put the work in and let the evidence build from there. or I can get five responses this week or I can lose half a pound this week of fat if I just go to the gym and dial in my nutrition.

29:19And then the evidence will start compounding. So once you've identified your replacement beliefs, look at your environment and

Environment as a Belief Reinforcement System

29:34ask whether it's reinforcing the old belief or the new one. Because the environment around you, everything you have around yourself, the people, the objects you have around you will be reinforcing something, right? They're reinforcing a belief.

29:46Otherwise, they won't be there. Um, they came to be because of a belief. And so, they're reinforcing that same belief. So, the people you spend time with, the content you consume, the physical spaces you operate in, your daily rituals and routines, all of these act as belief reinforcement systems.

30:03And if they're set up to support the old belief, the new one won't really survive no matter how many times you write it in your journal. So the people around you are one of the most powerful belief reinforcement mechanisms you have because their expectations of you become your expectations of yourself, often without you even realizing it.

30:26If you're trying to install a belief about being capable of building something extraordinary, but everyone around you treats ambition as naive or delusional in in a bad way, uh then you're fighting a losing battle. So your daily rituals, the things you do first thing in the morning as well, the way you start your work sessions, the way you end your day, these are all as well moments where beliefs get reinforced or eroded.

30:56For example, if you believe that you're super busy and you don't have time for your relationships because of your business, well, that will get reinforced in the morning. It will get reinforced in the evenings. um and design them intentionally, right?

31:14Stack the deck in favor of the belief you're trying to install. So, if you're trying to have more time for your family after working on your business all day, then design your rituals in the evening to basically showcase that to reinforce the belief that you do have time for your family, for example.

31:38um and and make the old belief harder to access by removing the triggers and the cues that keep activating it. Now, this isn't a one-time exercise. So, you need to run this audit regularly, ideally every week or or two, uh every month at least, uh for some people they multiple times a week.

31:58Um because beliefs shift and and new ones get installed without your permission and old ones creep back in the moment you stop paying attention. Uh so the audit is how you maintain conscious control over the one thing that sits upstream of everything else in your life.

32:18So a lightweight version of this can be done in 10 minutes at the end of each each week or if you have 10 minutes every day. And I I will doubt that no people won't have 10 minutes at the end of their day. Uh you could do it every single day and just ask yourself three questions.

32:31What belief drove my best

The Weekly Belief Check-In

32:37behavior this week or this day? What belief held me back today or this week? And what's the one belief I want to strengthen next week or tomorrow? And it's that that's it. Literally simple, fast, and it keeps the loop running in the right direction.

32:51And it makes you aware of all of these things. And the important thing is to write it down and not do it in your head, but on paper or in a document. And actually write them down with the dates. And the writing forces clarity. And clarity is what really turns a vague intention into a concrete belief that your brain can actually work with.

33:16So each time you do the audit, sit down and actually write and look for evidence that your chosen beliefs are producing results. And I would even say write those that evidence down as well. Small wins, moments of courage, actions that you took um that you wouldn't have taken 6 months ago.

33:38and collect these deliberately almost like you're collecting testimonials for yourself because they're the fuel that keeps the positive loop spinning and makes the belief more doable over time and durable and beliefs don't change overnight and anyone who tells you otherwise is really most likely selling something.

33:56So the the loop needs time to build momentum. it. Give it at least 30 days of consistent action before you evaluate whether a new belief is working because the early period will feel uncertain and uncomfortable and that's okay. The discomfort isn't a sign that the belief is wrong.

34:14It's a sign that the old pattern is losing its grip. So the so expect the resistance because your your old beliefs have momentum. They've been running the loop for years, sometimes depending on how old you are for decades, and they won't go quietly, right?

34:35There will be days where the old story feels more real and more convincing than the new one. And that's fine. The new belief doesn't need to feel true right away. It just needs to produce better action, and the feeling of truth will follow the evidence.

34:48Like everything else worth doing, uh, this compounds and it takes some time. The first few weeks will feel like you're pushing a boulder uphill. But once the loop catches and the evidence starts reinforcing the new belief, the whole system starts accelerating on its own.

35:05And what felt forced at the beginning starts to feel like who you actually are. Now, with that said, let's talk about useful and untrue.

Useful and Untrue

35:18And I've made a small spelling mistake here. So, here's something that ties all of this together in a way that might make some people uncomfortable, but it's worth sitting with, which is a very large percentage of self-help advice is basically just various methods of sneakily inducing beliefs in people.

35:39Think about it. Giving them concepts and ideas that are just plausible enough to be true, but also not really disprovable. And the genius of it is that it works. it works anyway. The conceptual packaging and the language around an idea is often more important than the idea itself because it's the packaging that creates the belief.

35:59And it's the belief that influences your actions and your actions influence your results, which is the whole chain we've been talking about. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, think about any popular self-help concept that's changed how you operate and think.

36:12Chances are it wasn't really really the literal truth of the concept that helped you. It was the way it reframed your thinking. Maybe it gave you a new lens or it made you feel like you had a handle on something that previously felt chaotic.

36:27And this is why it's so important to continuously learn, read books, take courses, work with coaches, and expose yourself to new ideas and ways of thinking. Because I will, this is a side note here, but each new mental model you acquire gives you another lens or perspective through which you can view your situation and the world.

36:46And the more of those you have available, the more freedom you have to choose the interpretation that actually serves you instead of being stuck with whatever meaning your default conditioning assigned. So the mechanism isn't really truth. We're not talking about being about finding truth here.

37:05It's belief. And belief doesn't require truth to function. It just requires enough plausibility to get your buy in. And once it has your buy in, the loop we talked about kicks in and starts producing real results. Now, most of the criticism of the self-help industry is that it might be pseudocience and that it's not true.

37:24To which the honest response is, yeah, some of it might be, but that's not really the point. It's not trying to be true in the way that a physics textbook is really trying to be true or a history textbook is trying to be accurate. It's trying to be useful and those are fundamentally different goals.

37:44The critics are applying the wrong standard of evaluation because they're judging self-help by its correspondence to objective reality when the actual value of self-help is it in its ability to shift belief which shifts behavior which shifts outcomes and then reinforces the belief.

38:02The question isn't is is this true but does believing this produce better results better actions in my life? And if the answer is yes, then it's doing its job regardless of whether it would pass a peer review. Now, it's all just basic evolutionary biology if you think about it.

38:20Your brain was never designed to perceive reality accurately. And most of us don't actually perceive reality accurately as much as we'd like to think that we do. Even the people that are trying to be objectively the most accurate, they still have their own biases.

38:37It was designed to your brain was designed to keep you alive. Your perceptions, your emotions, your pattern recognition, your threat detection systems, all of it evolved not to show you what's actually true, but to show you what's useful for survival.

38:50So useful and untrue isn't some philosophical trick you're learning for the first time. It's literally how your brain has

Evolutionary Biology and Cognitive Biases

39:03been operating for hundreds of thousands of years. Now, Daniel Cannaman's uh work on cognitive biases and huristics show that the brain is essentially a shortcut machine. It doesn't process reality objectively and then give you a clean readout.

39:15It takes fragments of information. It fills in the gaps with assumptions, logical fallacies, biases, heristics, and and presents the result as if it's the whole picture. Every bias you've ever heard of like confirmation bias, anchoring, the availability heristic, these aren't bugs in the system.

39:32They're features that evolved because they were useful, not because they were necessarily true. Your answers ancestors didn't survive by carefully analyzing whether the rustling in the bushes was a predator or just the wind. They survived by assuming the worst and then running, which is another useful and might be untrue belief that kept them life alive long enough to pass on their genes.

39:58So going for accuracy could have gotten them killed. Speed and usefulness kept them breathing, right? The difference now is that the threats have changed, but the operating system really hasn't. You're still running survival software in a world that rewards strategic belief selection.

40:17Which means the question isn't whether you're going to operate on useful but untrue beliefs because you already are. The question is whether you're going to do it cons consciously or let a 200,000year-old threat detection brain make those choices for you.

40:29So the people who think they're being rational or objective by only believing things that are empirically verified are actually misunderstanding their own biology because their brain is already filtering, distorting and constructing reality based on usefulness, not truth.

40:48The other thing is a lot of these empirically verified things that they might believe and get changed over time. they change, new new research is done, new findings uh happen and the what they believed before as being the objective objective truth is now not anymore the objective truth.

41:08So they never really believe the objective truth in the first place. The only difference between them and someone who consciously selects their beliefs is that the conscious person knows that what they're actually doing. So the feeling that you're seeing reality as it is is itself a useful and untrue belief.

41:25The belief that you're you're looking at only objective reality and only objective truth uh can be seen as useful and untrue. Your brain creates the illusion of objective perception because that illusion is useful for navigating the world, not because it's an accurate description of everything that's actually happening at the level of physics, neuroscience, or information processing.

41:52Once you really internalize this, it it frees you. You're not tricking yourself by choosing empowering beliefs. You're just redirecting a system that was already running on useful and untrue beliefs

Charlie Munger, Mental Models, and Maps vs. Territory

42:05anyway, and you're now pointing it somewhere that serves you. instead of somewhere that was optimized for avoiding lions on the on the savana. Now, there's a principle that the smartest operators across every field already understand intuitively, even if they're never really articulated this way.

42:22Every framework, every model, every theory you use to really understand the world is just a map. It's not the territory. The map is never the thing itself. The statistician George Bach said it best when he said all models are wrong and some are useful.

42:41That single sentence contains basically more practical wisdom than most philosophy textbooks. Because think about how the most successful investors, strategists, and builders actually operate. They don't sit around debating whether their mental model is true in some ultimate sense.

42:55They ask whether it's useful enough to really act on and then they act. Charlie Munger built one of the greatest investment track records in history. Not by seeking capital T truth, but by collecting what he called a lattis work of mental models, useful frameworks from different disciplines that he could apply to different situations depending on what the moment called for.

43:19Now, Mer didn't really care whether each model was perfectly true all the time. He cared whether it was useful in the right context and he had enough of them that he could always find the right lens for the situation in front of him. And it's the same principle we've bu we've been building towards this whole time.

43:32The person with one model is trapped by it because they're forced to see everything through a single lens through one single perspective. The person with 20 models has freedom because they can choose the interpretation that produces the best action, the best action for the specific situation they're in.

43:49So belief selection isn't about finding the one true belief. It's about having a rich enough collection of beliefs and of perspectives and mental models and lenses that you can always find one that serves you. And this maps directly onto everything we've covered.

44:09The science of belief, the self-fulfilling loop, the belief audit. These are all maps as well. They're not perfect representations of how reality works at every level. They're useful representations that when believed and acted on produce better behavior and better outcomes.

44:28And that's all a map needs to be. Even scientific theories work this way. Newton's physics isn't really true in the way most people think because Einstein showed it breaks down at high speeds in extreme gravity, but it's useful enough to land rockets on the moon.

44:41So, we keep using it. The theory gets replaced when a more useful one comes along, not when someone proves it's false in some abstract sense. So, your personal beliefs operate on the same principle. They don't need to be capital T true to generate real results.

Marcus Aurelius and Stoic Philosophy

45:01They just need to be useful enough to change your behavior in the right direction. And the results will speak for themselves. And if you think this is a modern idea, the Stoics figured it out 2,000 years ago. Arcus Aurelius, arguably the most powerful man in the world at the time.

45:14Emperor of Rome at the peak of its influence, spent his private evenings basically writing to himself in what we now call the meditations. And one of the core themes running through the entire text is that you have the power to revoke any impression at any time.

45:27You choose what things mean to you. You choose which thoughts to entertain and which to dismiss. He wrote the things you think about determine the quality of your mind, which is essentially the self-fulfilling loop. He wasn't interested in whether his beliefs mapped perfectly onto objective reality.

45:47He was just interested in whether they produced virtue, action, clarity, and the kind of inner stability that let him govern an empire while barbarians pressed every border. And the Stoic framework was built around a single distinction. What is in your control and what is not?

46:04Your circumstances, other people's actions, the weather, the economy, none of that is really in your control. But your judgments, your interpretations, the meaning you assign to events, that is entirely yours. And that's where the entire game is played.

46:17And Marcus Aurelius didn't just theorize about this. He practiced it daily in writing under the most extreme pressure imaginable. He was running the largest empire on earth, dealing with plague, war, betrayal, and the constant threat of assassination.

46:37and his response was to sit down every night and deliberately choose which beliefs to hold and which to release. That's the belief audit 2,000 years before we gave it the name. So, this isn't really new and it isn't fringe. From evolutionary biology to modern cognitive science to ancient philosophy, the same principle keeps showing up.

47:02The human mind was never built to perceive truth objectively. It was built to construct useful interpretations that drive effective action in the moment. The only variable is whether you're doing it on purpose or letting it happen by accident.

47:14Right? When evolution, neuroscience, the greatest investors, and a Roman emperor who held the fate of millions in his hands all converge on the same insight, I would say it's probably worth paying attention to. The insight is pretty simple.

47:27You can choose your beliefs by what they produce, not by whether they're true. Because truth is a moving target nowadays. And usefulness is what actually changes your life. And this is the foundation for everything that comes next. Because once you accept that useful not true is how you how the mind has always worked, you stop resisting belief selection and start treating it as a serious consequential lifealtering practice that it actually is.

47:57Now, before this starts sounding like an

Useful Beliefs Serve Objective Reality

48:02argument for living in a fantasy world, I want to be clear about something. The goal should always be to move closer to objective reality, not further away from it. So, I'm not arguing against that. Reality exists. It's knowable. And your life gets better the more accur accurately you can perceive it, navigate it, and respond to what's actually in front of you.

48:20That's not up for debate, right? There is a reality that exists independent of your feelings, your wishes, and your interpretations. And your job is to understand it as clearly as possible and act accordingly. But the thing that most people miss when they hear the useful and untrue framework is that it doesn't contradict objective reality.

48:46It actually serves it. Because the reality of being human is that there is always a gap between where you are and where objective truth lives. You never have perfect information. You never have complete clarity. And in that gap, which is where you spend the vast majority of your waking life, you need something to act on.

49:05You need a working belief that gets you moving, right? That gets you taking action. And the argument isn't that you should pick a comfortable delusion and stay there forever. The argument is that in the space between ignorance and certainty, you should pick the belief that drives you towards more truth, towards more certainty, not the one that keeps you frozen.

49:26And you can think of it this way. Objective reality is the destination. Useful beliefs are the vehicle. The belief I can figure this out might not be objectively provable in the moment you adopt it, but it drives you to investigate, to experiment, to test, to gather data, to iterate.

49:42All of which moves you closer to objective reality. The noibo belief, I'll never understand this, does the exact opposite. It stops any form of inquiry. It keeps you further from the truth than you were before you adopted it. So which belief is more aligned with objective reality?

50:00The one that moves you towards reality, makes you take action with reality or the one that makes you give up before you get there. This is the reconciliation that most people never make because they think useful and untrue means abandoning truth.

50:18It doesn't. It doesn't really mean that. It means being strategic about which beliefs you hold in the interim precisely because truth matters and you want to get closer to it. So the best useful beliefs are the ones that maximize your contact with reality that push you to engage, to test, to learn, to update your understanding based on actual evidence.

50:38So if a belief makes you more curious, more investigative, more willing to test your assumptions and update based on what you find, then it's moving you towards objectivity, right? Even if it's not perfectly true in the moment you adopt it.

50:52If a belief makes you less curious, more avoidant, more certain without evidence, then it's moving you away from reality because you're not actually doing anything. you're not really engaging with reality regardless of how realistic quote unquote it sounds.

51:11So the real danger was never useful and untrue beliefs. The real danger is beliefs that masquerade as just being realistic and masquerade as being true or objective while actually keeping you disengaged from reality. So like I'm not smart enough feels like humility but the system but so I'm not smart enough can feel like humility.

51:33The system is rigged can feel like awareness but both of them function as exit ramps from engagement with the real world from reality right it makes you just give up and that makes them the most anti-reality beliefs you can hold in my opinion because they reduce your contact with reality instead of increasing it.

51:52So the standard shouldn't be that a belief is perfectly precisely true right now. The standard

Money, Shared Belief, and the Default Operating Mode

52:04should be does a belief drive you to engage with reality more deeply, test more rigor, test more rigorously, learn more aggressively and improve more. And if yes, it's serving reality even if it's not fully true yet, even if it hasn't been fully verified yet.

52:18If no, it's a liability no matter how rational it sounds on the surface. And this is exactly how science itself works. Every hypothesis starts as a useful but not yet proven belief. Right? I think this molecule might cure this disease. Isn't necessarily true when the researcher adopts it, but it's useful because it drives the experiments that eventually determine whether it's true.

52:45If the researcher instead believed there's probably no cure, nothing ever happens. And the truth never gets discovered. Right? Useful beliefs are the engine of truth seeking, not the enemy of it. So treat your useful beliefs like software versions.

53:02They're not permanent. They're the best you have right now. And you upgrade them the moment you find something better. The commitment isn't to the belief itself. It's to the process of moving towards truth. And useful beliefs are simply the best vehicle for making that journey.

53:20And the practical takeaway from all of this is that most things in life are genuinely hard to know for sure. So you might as well defer to believing whatever is most helpful for you and the people around you. And I'm not talking about you being lazy with your thinking.

53:31It's just a smart way to operate when certainty isn't available, which is almost always. Now, that might make the more scientifically minded people um a bit uncomfortable because there's this deeply held assumption that every belief needs to be empirically verified before you're allowed to hold it.

53:51But there's something but here's something obvious that we all tend to overlook. We already operate on useful and untrue beliefs all the time in basically every area that matters to us. Think about money. A dollar bill is just a piece of paper with ink on it, right?

54:06There is nothing objectively valuable about it. Its entire power comes from a shared useful and untrue belief that it's actually worth something. And that belief is so deeply embedded that entire civilizations run on it. The global economy, your salary, the price of your house, all of it rests on a collective agreement to treat something as valuable that has no inherent value whatsoever.

54:31Nobody demands empirical proof that a dollar is really worth a dollar. We just act as if it is. And that shared belief makes the entire system work. So holding useful, not true beliefs isn't some radical philosophical position. It's the default human operating mode.

54:48And the only difference is whether you do it consciously and strategically or unconsciously and randomly. Now this

Nothing Has Inherent Meaning

55:00framework judging beliefs by their usefulness rather than their correspondence to some abstract reality gives us a genuinely practical way to think about how to build your life because it frees you from the paralysis of needing to know whether something is really true before you're willing to take action.

55:11It gives you permission to adopt beliefs that serve you, to lean into frameworks that produce better behavior, and to stop waiting for certainty before you start moving because certainty almost never comes. And the people who wait for it tend to really stay exactly where they are.

55:28So, judge ideas by the actions they inspire and produce, not by their literal accuracy. If believing you can accomplish anything you commit to makes you more likely to succeed, then you might as well believe it. Because the truth of the belief matters less than its utility.

55:46And utility is what actually changes your life. So where does all of this leave us? It leaves us with something simpler and more powerful than any single framework. Nothing has inherent meaning. Things, events, circumstances, setbacks, wins, none of it comes preloaded with significance.

56:05We as humans like to give stuff meaning and significance. But things just happen. The meaning is always always assigned by the person experiencing it. And that assignment can happen at any point in any direction for any reason you choose. This is the layer underneath everything we've talked about so far.

56:22Because belief doesn't just appear out of thin air. It grows from the meaning you assign to your situation, to your identity, to your potential, and to your past. Change the meaning and you change the belief. Change the belief. And like we said earlier, you change the expectation, the behavior, and eventually the outcome.

56:40So think about Alexander the Great for example. By any rational standard, a young king from a small northern Greek kingdom has no business trying to conquer the entire known world. But Alexander assigned a meaning to his life that was so enormous, so total, he literally believed he was a god that it reorganized everything around it.

56:58His risk tolerance, his decision-making, his ability to inspire thousands of men to march into territory no Greek army had ever been into. The meaning he chose became the engine that made the impossible feel inevitable. Julius Caesar, another example, did the same thing.

57:16He crossed the Rubicon not because the odds were really in his favor, but because he had already decided what his life meant, and retreating didn't feel didn't really fit that story. So, he became dictator in perpetuity for a while. He decided that what his life meant, acted accordingly, and then ended up holding the most absolute title Rome had ever given anyone.

57:40The meaning he assigned to himself and his mission made the boldest possible action feel like the only logical one. And that's the thing about meaning. Once you truly assign it, it doesn't just influence your behavior, it eliminates the alternatives.

57:53And this is the real principle underneath all the science, the loops, the philosophy. You are the one who decides what things mean. Not your circumstances, not your past, not the people around you. You assign the meaning and the meaning generates the belief and the belief runs the loop and the l loop produces the life.

58:10At its core, this is incredibly simple. Just decide what your work means to you. Decide what your setbacks mean. Decide what your potential means. And then watch how that decision ripples forward into everything you do. because it will, whether you're conscious of it or not.

58:29And in practice, this means regularly auditing not just your beliefs, but the meanings underneath them. Asking yourself whether the significance you're assigning to your situation is producing the behavior and outcomes you want, or whether it's quietly keeping you small, cautious, and stuck in a version of reality that doesn't really serve you.

58:47Ultimately, this is all about taking

Review and Action Items

58:52full ownership of the one thing you actually control, which is the meaning you assign to your experience, your thinking. Most people let meaning happen to them. They inherit beliefs and meaning from their environment. They absorb it from their culture and never once stop to ask whether the story they're living inside is one they actually chose.

59:12The people who do stop and ask, the ones who deliberately assign meaning that drives bigger action and deeper commitment, they tend to be the ones who build lives that look impossible from the outside but feel inevitable from the inside. So don't let the meaning be an accident.

59:23Don't let your circumstances tell you what they mean. You tell them. Pick the meaning that makes you dangerous, useful, and alive. And then commit to it hard enough that the loop has time to do what it does. Because the loop always works. It works for people who assign empowering meaning and it works for people who assign limiting meaning.

59:48The only question is which direction you're going to point it towards. So with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview, the science of belief, the self-fulfilling loop, the belief audit, useful and untrue, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days.

1:00:02First, sit down and identify three to five core beliefs that are currently driving your behavior in the areas of your life that matter most. And honestly, assess whether those beliefs are producing the outcomes you want or quietly keeping you stuck.

1:00:20Choose one belief that you know would produce better behavior if you fully adopted it. Write down. Write it down and commit to acting as if it's true for the next 30 days, paying close attention to how it changes your expectations, your effort, and your results.

1:00:33And then finally, design a daily practice of collecting evidence that supports your chosen belief. Whether that's journaling wins, tracking progress, or simply noticing moments where the belief led to better action. Because the loop needs fuel to keep running, and evidence is the best fuel there is.

1:00:45With that being said, if you want to work with me one-on-one on all of this, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with this training, make sure to join the free community again from the link in the description.

1:00:58And if you want weekly emails on how to improve your health, wealth, love, and self, and make sure to join the newsletter from the link in the description. As always, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching and I'm going to see you in the next