Beliefs = Brain + Lane (Adapted To Tech)
Originally a philosophy from the dating & pickup field, brain + lane could be a massive competitive advantage in tech…

There’s a lot of uncertainties in tech. A LOT. Basically the only thing that is certain is the fact that it will change everyday.
If you’re in tech then I’m making the assumption that you chose this lifestyle perhaps because fast paced change is the right environment for you. If that’s the case, then you may be able to find some real value in this pickup philosophy of brain + lane.
Have you ever approached a girl in a bar setting, you said all the right things, you stayed centered as a man, you maybe even got her to laugh, but for some reason you still couldn’t get her attention & attraction?
Did you do something wrong?
No. She wasn’t ever going to sleep with you. And I want to clarify that by saying it’s not actually you who she couldn’t sleep with — it’s the “you” that she sees in her mind that she wasn’t ever going to sleep with.
Why is this? What is the discrepancy that stands between her image of you & who you actually are? It has solely to do with those two factors: her current brain chemistry & lanes of opportunity that she sees for herself right now.
I’m going to start with the second piece of this first.
A girl in a nightclub is like a real estate investor who sold off everything at the top of the market in ’07 & went shopping with his winnings during ’08, ’09, and ’10 — she has more lanes of opportunity than you could ever even understand.
So our brains are wired to automatically & subconsciously recognize these lanes of opportunity & react accordingly. This is why you’ll see some very attractive girls with a sugar daddy. She found a lane of opportunity that outweighed everything else in her mind: free rent, unlimited free dinners, and a shopping budget started to cloud the excitement & love that she may be able to experience elsewhere.
So the next factor is brain. What if that same girl reads one of the many studies about sugar babies, scammers, and just people who are looking for a hack instead of doing the work? You get educated on the fact that getting free things actually messes with your brain chemistry, forces you into a place where you’re very disengaged with the world, and leads to a lot of bad future habits. All of the sudden, a lot of new lanes are going to start opening up.
So the point is your beliefs are just a temporary vehicle to get you to the next (and hopefully more evolved) belief. The two factors that play into those beliefs are brain + lane. What is your brain’s current understanding on the world and what lanes are available for pursuit in that world?
So how does this apply to tech?
As I said at the beginning, tech is such a fast moving industry that you have to live in change if you want to be successful. Adaptability is the trait that will win in the next decades.
So what I recommend is that you take a more hyper-focused & proactive approach to adaptability. You are going to need to change your beliefs many times probably in the next 12 months if you are going to stay in business.
Take Twitter — they wouldn’t allow themselves to change their beliefs & as a result, they’ve lost a lot of attention. They weren’t willing to change their brains & pursue the new lane of an algorithm. Even though all of the data in the world pointed to the fact that twitter is a firehose & needs an algorithm to quiet it down, they wouldn’t adopt a new belief. They remained in their, “I just think…” phase that wasn’t grounded in reality.
So the proactive approach that you can take to technology is in your brain development. If you truly want to rise above your competitors then you’re not going to do it by consuming the same content that they are.
When I’m with a girl at the bar who is not giving me her full attention, I flip the script completely. Instead of coming off as a the typical superficial bar douche, I go the complete opposite way and start talking about my record at the board game bar, the nuances of social dynamics, ancient Rome, and all of the other nerdy topics that come to mind. And it works.
If you study areas that are completely outside the realm of technology, then you’ve taken yourself out of the “bubble” of tech & you’ll start to see things that people inside that bubble are completely blind to.
It’s crazy to me how many times I’ve been able to re-invent the wheel for marketing campaigns because I was able to look at the problem differently. And you develop this ability by having fundamentally different beliefs about the problem. Because when you you study Pablo Escobar, Marcus Aurelius, or Tyler Durden (the pickup artist), it gives you an entirely different scope on the problem.
Once you step outside of your own bubble then you start to look at people within that bubble who have massive blindspots. A perfect example — in my industry I see people all the time who directly rip off Gary Vaynerchuk’s content. They put their money on legacy & community as they tell the masses to use Facebook ads, get on Snapchat, DM influencers, and now start a podcast. They feel like they’re building an empire, but they’re blind to the fact that they’ve switched from platform to platform without building a true community anywhere. A much more focused approach would require them to go learn from a ton of different sources, take bits & pieces from each source, and put together & stick to a long-term strategy.
However, what I’ve noticed is that while I look at all of those people with a blindspot, they do the same to me, AND THEY’RE RIGHT. They look at me and see my blindspot that I’m missing out on a ton of eyeballs by not putting my content everywhere.
So if you, as a founder, are going to develop different pairs of lenses to view your business problem, make sure that you also have a righthand man who can keep the tech lenses.
Just remember, it pays to be different.