The Success Series Part 2 — Why Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to Be Successful
Before diving deep into part 2 of this series I recommend first catching up on The Success Series Part 1: Confessions of a Chronic Procrastinator for some context and background.
One of the great struggles of my life is being able to clearly verbalize the things I want in life, but when it comes down to actual doing something I constantly fail to put in the work it takes to achieve what I want. In order to really understand the paradox of how this can happen, how we can know exactly what we want in life, but fail to dedicate the required time to achieving said things, we need to start by looking into how the human brain works. Specifically, how the modern brain is actually two (actually three, but third isn’t relevant for our discussion) very different organisms with two very different goals in mind. The modern human brain is composed of three major evolutionary segments, in order of age: the oldest, reptilian brain, the middle child, limbic brain and the brand new, shiny neo-cortex. In an effort to be concise, and because I’m not an anthropological neurologist, we won’t discuss the reptilian brain today. It does a bunch of useless things like keeping our heart beating and organs functioning properly; real boring stuff, but I digress. Today, we will focus on understanding the limbic brain and neo-cortex. Here we…
