In 1984, 20 years old Jerry White and two friends went camping in the Golan Heights in Israel. During hiking, White stepped on a landmine, which blew away his left leg and mangled his right. White spent next one year in recovery and rehabilitation in an Israeli hospital.
During a grueling year of hospital recovery, gripped by anger and deep depression, White received a visitor who had also lost a leg to a minefield in Lebanon. The man’s prosthetic leg was so effective that White couldn’t tell which leg was real.
“What you have is a nose-bleed,” the visitor told White, “you’ll get over it. The challenge is in your head and your heart, not your leg”. With help from peers and a support network, White gradually changed focus of his thoughts from anger to how he was in a unique situation to help others in similar situations. White co-founded the Landmine Survivors Network in 1995, an organization dedicated to helping landmine victims rebuild their lives. He reframed his suffering as a unique opportunity to advocate for the removal of landmines and support for survivors. For his work, White received the Nobel peace prize in 1997, just 13 years after that fateful day in Golan Heights.
Pain and suffering are as much part of being human as love and compassion. But the stories we tell ourselves about those tragedies can cause our suffering to outlive the actual event by decades.
Imagine it’s Sunday evening. You are watching a funny movie with your family after dinner. Everyone is laughing and the air is light with happiness. Then, a sudden thought breaks through: I absolutely hate the job I have to go to tomorrow morning. Instantly your internal reality shifts even though your physical environment hasn’t changed – the movie is still funny, your family is still laughing. While others are happily enjoying the evening, you become stressed and unhappy with just one thought. That is the raw power of a thought.
We live in our world of thought and our perception of reality is created from the inside out through our own thinking. The root cause of our suffering is our own thinking… I am not saying that this is all in our head and that it isn’t real. Our perception of reality is very real. We will feel what we think and our feelings are real. That is completely undeniable. However, our thinking will look like an inevitable, unchangeable reality to us until we begin seeing how our reality is created. If we know that we can only ever feel what we are thinking, then we know that we can change our feelings by changing our thinking.
Thus, we can change our experience of life by knowing that it comes from our own thinking.
Joseph Nguyen in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think
To change our thoughts, we have to practice Thinking Squared (Thinking2)—the act of thinking about our thinking.
Thinking2 requires you to step outside of your own mind and be a dispassionate observer of your thoughts. You watch each thought as it forms, and once fully formed, you examine it with curiosity, but no judgment. And you assess how that particular thought is impacting your reality.
It seems improbable, but we are often one thought away from transforming our experience of life. The interpretation that we assign to everything that is happening around us is up to us, if we can master thinking about thinking.
The Mindset
When a specific chain of thoughts goes unobserved, it repeats. When it repeats, it hardens into an automated behavioral pattern: a mindset. There are 4 common mindsets that can be visualized on a two-axis matrix (curiosity and ambition).
Cynical mindset: This is when we have lost all curiosity and ambition in life, and we feel there is no point in trying. We notice faults in everything around us with a passive helplessness. We sit on the sofa going through negative news that feeds and justifies our cynicism, and we spend a lot of time debating the negatives of the world with others.
Escapist Mindset: In the escapist mindset, we are still curious, but we have decided to let go of our ambitions. We are trying to do everything we can to escape our responsibilities. That can take the form of retail therapy, binge watching, or dream planning our next vacation instead doing something right now to change our lives. Our brain seeks low-stakes dopamine loops to satisfy its innate curiosity without exposing itself to the vulnerability or fear of failure that accompanies actual ambition.
Perfectionist Mindset: In this mindset, we try to escape uncertainty through work, so we have high ambition, but low curiosity. This might look like self-coercion, toxic productivity, and overworking. Our goals are driving all of our decisions. We clench our jaws and go through life feeling that if we manage to achieve the next goal, then we can be happy. We don’t like mistakes and we refuse exploratory paths because doing so reintroduces the threat of failure. Performance outweighs learning in this mindset.
There is a 4th alternative, the experimental mindset, where your curiosity and your ambition are both high.
Experimental mindset: In an experimental mindset, you’re open to uncertainty. You see it as an opportunity to explore, to grow, and to learn. Failures are viewed as data points for development. Ambition is fueled by an internal thirst of knowledge rather than external pressure, and it is centered around discovery and fun.
How to cultivate experimental mindset
Transitioning to an experimental mindset relies on simplicity of the scientific method. You look at your life, formulate a research question, and design a tiny, time-bound experiment to gather data.
What’s great about this approach of trial and error is that even though you may not know where you’re going, you can trust that you’re going to grow through each cycle of experimentation. Each tiny experiment will lead to either taking a step in the right direction or correcting a step from going into the wrong direction.
To run an experiment, you select one specific action and lock in a strict duration: “I will do X action for Y amount of time.”
You do not stop halfway through if you don’t like the early results. You finish the timeline, track your internal feelings via a simple journal entry or a phone voice memo, and analyze the data at the finish line to decide whether to persist, pause, or pivot.
Here are examples of tiny low-risk experiments:
Health: I am going to run for 20 mins 3 times a week for 3 weeks. I am not committing to lifetime of running. At the end of the three weeks, I’m going to decide whether this is what I want to keep doing or if I want to experiment with another way to move my body.
Work: I’m going to write an internal newsletter every week for the next six weeks where I share the most interesting things I read that week. At the end of those 6 weeks, I will decide if I want to keep doing it.
Adventure: I am going to try rock climbing in the local indoor climbing gym for 2 days a week for 4 weeks. At the end of those 4 weeks, I will review my notes, my learnings and my gut instinct to decide if I want to continue or explore another adventure.
We are all capable of shaping our mindset, and our lives, by observing our own thoughts and learning from our tiny experiments.
