The Success Series Part 3 — Planning to Fail: Why Modern Advice on Success Misses the Point

Before going headlong into part 3 of this series I recommend starting your journey at The Success Series Part 1 — Confessions of a Chronic Procrastinator or jumping in at The Success Series Part 2 — Why Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to Be Successful to get a grasp on where we stand. Or just don’t listen to me and start reading below, totally your call.

I have read an uncountable number of self help books, articles, posts and tips from the pros and unqualified alike on how to accomplish your goals and how to stop procrastinating your dreams away. It has all amounted to the same inevitable outcome and sent me through the same self help relapse cycle every single time. It always starts with short and exciting burst of motivation and promises of change which quickly fizzle out while I gradually watch myself creep back into old patterns of behavior. I have never experimented with addictive substances because I know first hand how easy it is for me to fall back into destructive patterns of behavior when it comes to productivity, and a drug addiction would be bad for my dating life. After going through this destructive cycle of self help, excitement motivation, promises of change and then relapse into old habits I always come away feeling like there is something wrong with me. All this self help must not be working because there is just something inherently wrong with me. I don’t have what it takes to be successful, I must have just been born without that special pizazz that makes successful people successful. I’m missing an ingredient. I should just accept the fact that I will always be average and keep my expectations reasonable to save myself from all this disappointment. It’s really exhausting to keep going through the same cycle over and over again and not feel like you are making any real progress.

Over many years of torment and soul searching over this topic I have never been able to completely accept the fact that I couldn’t be successful, despite all the trouble I have gone through trying to improve myelf. There had to be a key to breaking through, a key to understanding how some people made it so big, and how so many let there dreams slowly wither and die by the wayside. Through pure arrogance and stubbornness, I refused to accept there is something wrong with me and that I couldn’t make it, so I began a long process of research and experimentation, trial and error, making myself a human guinea pig in a series of sometimes productive, but always ridiculous, human experiments I have called the last four years of my life. After many years of frustrating ups and downs with success, depression, motivation and self-loathing and taking turns running my life, I realized that before I could answer the question I was asking, “how can I become successful” I first needed to answer the question what was holding me back. I needed to address and understand that distracting voice in my head that would inevitably derail my efforts to success and lead me down a path of compounding depression, procrastination, self-loathing, more depression, more procrastination and on and on it went. I needed to face this voice directly, understand what it is, how it works and how to overcome it. Only then could I really make meaningful change in my life.

After years of searching I finally discovered there was a real, evolutionary explanation behind this distracting voice, which I go into thorough detail in The Success Series Part 2 — Why Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to Be Successful. I discovered that the voice keeping me from my dreams was actually my limbic brain, an ancient artifact in charge of keeping me alive that was now, with nothing better to do, wreaking havoc in my life. Now that I understood what was causing so much trouble in achieving my dreams the next step was uncovering how it managed to do so with such extreme effectiveness. The second part of my self examination and experimentation was to closely observe all the various ways my limbic brain was distracting me from achieving my Milestone Accomplishments so that I could better detect when I was being led astray by my own brain and focus my efforts on counteracting my limbic brain’s many productivity temper tantrums.

The Limbic Brain Temper Tantrum Cheat Sheet: The Ways Your Brain Tries to Keep You From Success

Just to set expectations in the right place this section is going to be structured as a list. I know that in earlier parts of this series I have bashed lists, a la buzzfeed, but it was more about what the lists where saying and not against the actual formatting style. Below we will discuss all the different strategies I have uncovered my own brain using to try to keep me from accomplishing my Milestone Accomplishments. I have broken them down into a list because it’s the easiest way to use as a cheat sheet to quickly identify when your limbic brain is trying to work against you. We will defeat our enemy by first understanding him.

Before getting into the details it’s important to quickly demonstrate just how powerful of an opponent we are going up against here. Our limbic brain is tremendously powerful, and will employ any method of dirty fighting to uphold it’s two core principles of survival: constantly seek instant gratification and conserving energy for only survival related activities. In order to do this demonstration, take ten minutes to go somewhere quiet and without distraction. Sit or lay comfortably and close your eyes. Now imagine you are standing on top of a platform that is only one square meeting large (roughly 3 square feet). The platform is raised 1,000 meters off the ground straight up into the air. From this height the wind blows ferociously and you are trapped on this small platform with no way down. Let that image really soak in for a second. Now imagine yourself walking to the edge of the small platform and hanging your toes off the edge. The wind is blowing you precariously back and forth, nearly pushing you over the edge. Stand there for a second, balancing on the edge of this tremendous platform. You take a deep breath and slowly lean forward, plunging yourself off the platform and into a free fall straight towards the ground below. Now open your eyes and consciously monitor a couple of things. First check your heart rate. You will find that even though a completely imagined situation your heart rate has risen. Check your breathing, you may be breathing faster and more shallow than normal. Feel your palms, you may have sweaty or clammy palms now. Notice any muscle tension you may have, you may be holding your shoulders or neck tense, or clenching your jaw. You may be experience a general sense or feeling or anxiety in your chest or stomach. Take a moment to assess your physical state and mentally note anywhere you appear to be reacting to the imagined scenario. This is how powerful our limbic brain is. Despite knowing this is a completely imagined scenario and not being in real danger your limbic brain can force your body to react without your control. Even after constantly reminding yourself the situation was not real, it takes a while for all the physical responses to subside. This is because your limbic brain is much more powerful than your neo-cortex and cares very little what you have to say about the situation. Take a moment to accept the fact that we are going into advance self-improvement territory here, and from here forward there is not going to be any easy advice or sugar coated answers. The key to overcoming such a powerful enemy to achieving your Milestone Accomplishments is to understand how and when your limbic brain is working against you. Being able to identify the patterns and strategies it uses to distract us will help us better fight against it’s powerful control over our body and mind. Below are the methods I have observed over the past several years that my limbic brain uses to distract me, in order of least severe to most severe. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but an example of my personal hurdles. I suggest spending time to identify your own personal patterns.

“Manana mind”, creating a warped reality of time — One of the most harmless, but overall effective ways our minds keep us from accomplishing things is by giving us a completely unrealistic sense of time. Our limbic brain loves to trick us into thinking that time is an endless resource and that it’s okay for us to start doing all the things we want to do tomorrow. This ends up turning into a systemic procrastination of getting something done that can last for years, one day at a time. I have wanted to have a six pack for, probably 10 years now, and I still don’t have one because every time I think about it my brain tells me, “yeah, let’s do it!….tomorrow, we will definitely start on that one tomorrow, we should get a good night sleep and prepare for tomorrow when we accomplish our dreams!”. Effort successfully thwarted. Your limbic brain doesn’t care if you plan to do something tomorrow, it’s only concern is that you don’t do it right now. Limbic brain — 1, Tyler — 0. Then that same script plays in my head the next day, until it’s ten years later and I still don’t have a six pack. Seemingly harmless but dangerously effective in its subtlety. This simple strategy keeps many people from accomplishing things their entire lives. To say it’s not effective is to misunderstand how smart our limbic brain is.

Creating a false sense of urgency — almost the opposite of the first strategy, our limbic brain will create a false sense of urgency for tasks that are unrelated to what we want to actually be doing. These tasks tend to be meaningless and require little effort to do. The best example of this is having my phone near me when I am trying to concentrate on something. Every time my phone vibrates or lights up my limbic brain creates an intense sense of urgency, as if the text message is from the Queen and the world is going to end if I don’t read it right now. This will ultimately derail anything I’m trying to do as I will either constantly pick up and check my phone or spend more time concentrating on not checking my phone than actually doing what I set out to do, which is totally okay with your limbic brain as you are essentially halted to doing nothing. Same as above, generally harmless in nature but dangerously effective.

Using compounding effort to make things seem insignificant — The truth is anything worthwhile is not going to be done in one sitting. You aren’t going to get in shape from one session in the gym, no matter how hard you try. It’s going to take many sessions, building one on top of the other, until you have long lasting results. Your limbic brain will purposely use this against you with a familiar thought pattern of, “if you aren’t going to get immediate results than what’s the point of this one exercise.” Your limbic brain has the ability to point out that just one session of the gym is relatively insignificant to the entire year it would take to get into shape, which statistically speaking is true, 1/365 is quite insignificant. This is that thought of, “one day skipping the gym won’t hurt, or one double fudge sundae won’t ruin my entire diet.” The reality though is it takes each and every one of those 365 gym sessions to accomplish your goal. This is a particularly dangerous thought pattern our limbic brain uses because what is says is not untrue, it’s just not relevant in that we are focused on the fact that one small action add up over time.

The entitlement trap — Boom, you have accomplished two solid weeks of amazing productivity and are on fire, you really deserve a break. All this hard work has been awesome, you deserve to take it easy for a bit and enjoy your amazing success. As Admiral Ackbar would say, “it’s a trap”. This is one of the smoothest ways your limbic brain will trick you into quitting by actually using your sense of accomplishment against you. In times of successful and repeated accomplishment the best thing you have going for you is actually momentum. It is what makes it easy to keep going, high on the string of accomplishments before it. Your limbic brain knows it’s not as effective against momentum and knows that its best way of derailing you is to keep quiet and let you celebrate your awesome accomplishments in peace. It will wait for this gap of effort, while you are celebrating your amazing productivity to strike. I can’t tell you how often I have done something awesome for a few weeks, took some time to celebrate and then after a week found it nearly impossible to get back on the horse. This is why I have for years gone up and down in weight, on an endless cycle of hard work, celebration, complete loss of motivation, weight gain, depression, back to hard work. I like to call it my BMI merry go round. Instead of completely stopping the momentum celebrate by doing a abbreviated version of your task for a few days. This will give you a sense of accomplishment that you can take it easy a few days but also keep the momentum rolling forward.

Manipulation of emotions — Now we are starting to get into the heavy hitting and dangerous strategies your limbic brain will employ to keep you from achieving your Milestone Accomplishments. These are beyond mere thought patterns and getting into your limbic brain actually using your mind and body against you. Remember that your limbic brain is the center of your emotions, and if pushed too far, it will use these emotions to get its way. This is an extremely powerful method of controlling our behavior because it effects the way we feel about things. Think about every time you force yourself to wake up early to go for a run or hit the gym, every time you sit down to start writing that book. Almost 100% of the time your body and mind don’t feel like doing it. This is where we have to keep a sharp eye on our limbic brain, as it disguises itself behind our emotions and how we feel. Here is how the pattern plays out in my head, “I should go for a run this morning because I really want to be in good shape, and I know the time spent outdoors getting my blood flowing will set me up for an awesome day. Buttttt, the problem is I don’t feel like going out into the cold, and it’s gonna be a whole hour of running which is probably going to hurt and I’ll probably get bored and I would feel much better and happier staying warm and comfortable in my bed.” This is straight up mind terrorism from your limbic brain, which is having a proxy war with your sensible neo-cortex through your emotions. Your limbic brain will hold the short term happiness hostage in an effort to get its way.

Creation of fear and anxiety — Now we are into serious mind terrorism. Fear and anxiety may be the most powerful and effective methods of distraction your limbic brain uses and the one pattern that most people can associate with. Fear and anxiety can be absolutely debilitating if not understood and are generally the point where one’s limbic brain wins the fight, and silences your opposing neo-cortex, trying to accomplish things. Fear and anxiety are two of the most difficult barriers to overcome, which is exactly why your limbic brain will use them when needed. Fear and anxiety can come about two separate ways for me, both equally effective. First is topic related fear, which applies directly to the thing you are doing. The second is non-topic related fear, which is just a random thought meant to incite fear and anxiety and stop you from doing whatever you are doing. Topic related fear is me sitting down to write a post and my brain filling my head with doubt and anxiety about what I’m writing. “What if people don’t like it”, “what if I get made fun of for writing such things”, “what if I become that guy that writes irrelevant things but thinks he so cool.” No fear worse than being that guy. These kinds of thoughts can be absolutely debilitating. The second, non-topic fear and anxiety would be sitting down to start writing and all of a sudden feeling a sharp pain in my back; probably just slept wrong, but then my limbic brain goes to work. “What if it’s back cancer, this is totally a symptom of back cancer, we better check WebMD for more info.” Four hours later I haven’t written a word and have already thought of how I’m going to tell my family that I have cancer. Limbic brain — 2, Tyler — 0. Dirty, yes. Effective, absolutely.

Manifestation of physical pain — If emotional warfare isn’t doing the trick, your limbic brain has another strength it can deploy in your central nervous system. If unappeased and in the mood to throw a particularly destructive temper tantrum your limbic brain can actually manifest physical pain to stop you from doing things. This general comes about when doing something physical but can happen in other situations. For me this happens when running. I love to run, it always clears my head and makes me feel better and is a great way to stay in shape. In times of particular disagreement with my choice to run I sometimes feel like every single part of my body hurts. My legs hurt to run, my knees, my feet, my teeth hurt to run, it hurts in my hair to run. My limbic brain will incite pain anywhere it needs to get me to stop exerting effort. This will generally subside after about 10 minutes of running, but getting through those 10 minutes is sometimes gut wrenching, especially when pain is general a sign of something we should stop doing. During this 10 minutes of pain my limbic brain is essentially having a 3 year old meltdown in the grocery store. Drama is a crucial ingredient in this strategy. My limbic brain is doing everything it can to convince me I’m going to die if I don’t stop running. Now, I am not encouraging anyone to exercise through actual and legitimate pain that persist or gets worse as you exercise, but your limbic brain intentionally uses our fear of pain to try to prevent us from doing things.

Full scale, existential crisis nuclear meltdown — Now we have finally arrived to the full scale, nuclear warfare of motivation. To date, this is the most intense and debilitating strategy my limbic brain has ever used, and despite knowing exactly what my brain is doing, it’s nearly impossible to overcome quickly. For me this generally comes on due to the combination of three key ingredients: (1) fatigue from lack of sleep, (2) a particularly poignant failure and (3) having spent an inordinate amount of time on a certain activity. The combination of these three things sets my limbic brain up for a devastating attack that has brought me to the depths of depression and self loathing, reducing me to a shell of a human that barely meets his survival needs. Now, this has only happened twice in my life, but is of such intense severity an experience that I will never forget, and will always, secretly fear in the back of my mind. The existential meltdown will render any goal, activity, plan or notion completely irrelevant by blanketing me in a deep and dark layer of, “we are all just going to die anyways so why does anything matter.” While nihilism has its use in productive life, complete and utter disregard for anything because we are all just going to die anyways is a rough way to go through life. While this experience is not something that is enjoyable in any sense of the word, some of the most profound and long-lasting changes in my life came from being smashed to a pulp by life and having to rebuild. Sometimes you have to embrace the darkness to better understand the light, as they say. “…and as the Phoenix rises from the ashes so to will you rise from this.”

Now, as mentioned, this is in no way a comprehensive list of all the ways your limbic brain can distract and derail us from our Milestone Accomplishments, but it is an illustration in one of the most important parts of overcoming our fears and distractions and accomplishing all the things we want. We have to understand and be able to identify when our brain is working against us. We have to be able to identify the strategies our limbic brain is using to prevent us from the things we know we want. By understanding the methods, patterns and strategies that it uses we can better fight the good battle to success and fulfillment in life, and stop being blindly led astray by our ancient and temperamental mind. Now that we better understand our enemy it’s time to formulate our strategy for success, to build our blueprint to achieving our Milestone Accomplishments. To finally stop being afraid of greatness and doing what it takes today to be our ideal self today. The next evolutionary step of mankind is not to keep surviving, we are already too good at that. The next step is to tap into the endless wealth of progress and knowledge in our neo-cortex and stop being so distracted by our ancient, limbic brain. Survival of the fittest is no longer an anatomical progression but an intellectual one. Continue the Success Series to Part 4 — Planning to Fail — Overcoming Ourselves and Achieving Success in Today’s World.