You might ask yourself: what does a pixelated picture of a mini-Loch Ness Monster in the bathtub have to do with assumptions? If so, then your question was based on an assumption. (The answer: absolutely nothing.)
I thought some framing might be helpful here: I have approached this blogging process primarily as a journal, not as a way of teaching. It’s an interesting exercise to straddle a couple of different roles here as I write this blog. Primarily, I’m looking to share the experience of taking a taste of my own medicine and seeing what it’s like to follow the advice I helped to write as one of the two co-authors. At the same time, I can’t help but notice some opportunities to help others get more value from the process, and I would be remiss not to mention those. I’m curious to see how this blogging process continues to evolve as I move through the experiment. This thread of curiosity—about my own patterns, about others’ experiences, and about new tools like AI—has quietly and unexpectedly become a part of the experiment!
Today was my first weekday working on the 30-day cycle. I started out this morning and got halfway through the exercise before having to stop to go work on something else. I’ve also had to squeeze in the exercise in between watching my email inbox and taking phone calls. This has been a really good reality check on the sustainability of daily blogging. Sheila and I designed this process so that people would be able to fit it inside of their everyday lives. A big part of our motive was wanting to give people a way to experience what’s possible from a transformational seminar or 3-day weekend without having to leave their hometowns or spend any money. While I don’t think it is possible to replicate every aspect of an in-person experience—especially the live interaction with an expert and the experience of getting to meet other people—it is very much possible to identify simple behavioral changes that can noticeably shift one’s experience of life. That was what we wanted to bottle up in this product.
It’s been interesting observing the Monday morning experience in particular, because I was thinking about how at the end of a weekend seminar, Monday morning is the time when the seminar buzz has either worn off or is rapidly diminishing. Seminar letdown is very common at this stage. I’m happy to confirm that there is no seminar letdown with the process of following a workbook. The side benefit of not getting a “high” is that there is also no crash. We start out in the trenches and get right to work without fanfare or plane tickets, and we don’t have the pressure of other people asking about what big changes they can now expect from the big expensive seminar we just attended. I’m as curious as ever to see how the emotional landscape continues to unfold over the rest of the next 30-day cycle.
As for today’s exercise in particular, I broke down my lists into perceptions, assumptions, inherited beliefs, and factual observations.
Examples:
- assumption: Writing all has to be done by me
- inherited idea: If it’s easy to write, it’s not valuable (or the value of my writing is measured in how much I suffered to write it)
- perception: I am a good writer
- factual observation: I am afraid to say out loud that I am a good writer
The biggest pattern that I could see was noticing how I have created a story in my head about writing. Most specifically, I have come to believe that writing is not a good way to make money. I have a lot of past-based evidence to support this story, including having spent the better part of a decade trying to make a living as a writer and failing. It also took some effort not to flip into a different mental mode of trying to solve or fix these assumptions. That’s a big part of day three and is also a common thread throughout many of the exercises. It is important to learn how to notice what we are thinking without trying to change our thinking on the spot. That said, my mind did keep flipping to thinking about how I could find counter-evidence for some of these assumptions or find ways to prove to myself that they aren’t actually true. I also noticed that I had a tendency to identify negative assumptions and perceptions only, not positive ones, even though positive assumptions could be just as damaging as negative assumptions. For example, I might assume that if I am excited about an idea, everyone else will be equally excited about the same idea, leading to disappointment when reality doesn’t meet expectations. The goal is to clearly identify and give specific language to the ideas we have internalized, for better or worse.
As I was journaling about my experience, I found myself wondering how these insights might evolve if I layered in a new tool I hadn’t used when Sheila and I created the original workbook: AI. I asked ChatGPT to help me identify any blind spots, and it gave me a couple of really gold nuggets. I’m starting to become curious about how we could potentially design future 30-day experiments with AI in mind from the beginning. The same curiosity has also led me to wonder about creating a custom agent specifically for the 30-day experiment. One blind spot identified by ChatGPT was the assumption that I have to choose between writing for money or writing for love. I think the other important point to note about identifying assumptions, perceptions, and beliefs is that they are not necessarily false but also not necessarily true. I think the exercise became more valuable for me when I could manage to focus less on assessing the truth or falsehood of what I was writing down and simply observe what my perceptions were. I’m noticing that there is value in simply becoming conscious of my assumptions, as this will now help me remember to do the same thing throughout my day. Perception is not necessarily reality, but it can be…