Gravity of the mind.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

I spent this weekend at one of world’s finest Universities, Yale, for a hackathon. It was really amazing.

I made progress with my skills in making web applications and learned more and more about entrepreneurship. I was with some of the brightest people my age, and it was very humbling. While I made progress on a number of skills, one of the biggest lessons I took from this weekend was during a discussion I had with a friend.

More specifically, it was while I was on a rickety-old bus that nearly blew a tire on the highway, not in the beautiful gothic buildings.

It’s really funny how it’s usually something along those lines, isn’t it?

The conversation we were having was originally about habits and dieting. We talked about how when people do something that deviates from the norm, like a diet for example, the natural tendency is to go back to how the majority of people eat. Even when people know it may obviously be a poor logical choice for themselves and those they love, they chose to conform to the biggest accepted social norm around them. How crazy is that, for a a race that refers to themselves as creatures of logic?

“Mitch,” you might say, “but that is basic social behavior. That’s called conforming to a norm.”

Sure, but that’s not what is so interesting to me. It is how similar conforming to social norms looks like the behavior of gravity between two objects.

For the case of the dieter, the large social norm of eating normally pulls on your smaller social action like the gravity of a larger object pulls on the smaller. You cheat, you deviate, and suddenly you find yourself back orbiting around the majority. For someone that does not eat carbs, I feel this sort of pull all the time in a college (carb) town. Sometimes I fail (thanks to Canyon Pizza), but recently I have been working hard to fight it.

From what I have found, the only way out of this is to give ourselves a consistent mental diet that correlates with where we want to be. Maybe that mean you move somewhere to where your goal is already the social norm, or maybe it means that you read a self-help book about where your want to be. There are several ways to achieve this, and one is not necessarily better than the other.

It’s about opening up a gravitational pull to the core of the social change we want to make. You need to make a pull that is stronger than the norm around you in order to release ourselves of the majority. You need to create an artificial pull around you until you can hit that critical mass. It’s all a mental game, but a tough one.

Maybe, if it’s strong enough, you’ll attract others to do the same. Maybe, if it’s strong enough, you’ll be a leader of a social change. Maybe, if it’s strong enough, we can realize that the pull of the majority is not something worth paying attention to.

In the words of Mark Twain:

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”