The biggest self-help lie

There's a popular lie in self-help that's been told since the beginning, and it's often packaged in cute little phrases. Success is 100% mindset. Whether you think you can or can't, you're right. Mind over matter. You can do anything you put your mind to. Mindset is the opioid of the self-help world. It's something so ingrained in the culture that it's rarely ever questioned. keys to motivation, accomplishment, and even achieving your dreams. Now you can change what you are, you can change where you are by changing what goes into your mind. Now while it is true that how you see the world affects your happiness, motivation, and your satisfaction, it's not as simple as so many people make it out to be. So I want to share an alternative to the common advice we hear around mindset. But first let's break down the reasons why this advice falls short. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. More on them later. First, and I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but no, you can't do anything you put your mind to. Reading one book on card counting and trying to beat the casinos, I wouldn't try it. Venturing off by yourself to a remote part of Alaska with no experience battling the elements and hoping it works out, not a great idea. Committing your life to being in the NBA even though you're under five foot tall, I don't love those odds. There are some things in life that are truly impossible or nearly impossible. Thinking that your belief system will make you the exception is more a sign of delusion than strength. So whenever someone said to me, it can't be done, I heard it can be done. And when they said it's impossible, I heard it is possible. I'm not saying that we should shoot down people's dreams or tell children that they can't be astronauts. I mean, imagine if someone went back in time and convinced Arnold Schwarzenegger that he would never grow up to father a child with his live-in housekeeper. I mean, these are our heroes, people. You know, what do you want me to say? But just because it's important as humans to pursue crazy goals or difficult dreams doesn't mean that positive thinking alone is going to get you across the finish line. One of the most important challenges to the mindset-is-everything narrative comes from the authors of scarcity, the true cost of not having enough. Authors Elder Shafir and Santil Malanathan detail in their research how scarcity, whether it's lack of money, time, or sleep, doesn't just make life logistically harder. It actually changes how your brain functions. When people are under conditions of scarcity, their mental bandwidth shrinks, cognitive capacity drops, planning, impulse control, long-term thinking, all the things self-help tells you to just do better, become immeasurably harder. The authors write, because we're preoccupied by scarcity, because our minds constantly return to it, we have less mind for the rest of life. In some studies, financial stress temporarily reduced cognitive performance by the equivalent of losing a full night's sleep. Telling someone to fix their mindset is a lot like telling someone who's depressed to just think positive. Great advice. I wish I thought of that sooner. If you think you can will yourself to better mental health, you clearly haven't struggled with mental health before. Mindset is often a reflection of your genetics, history, and environment. That's not to say that people can't improve their outlook in life. They can. It's just that for some people, it's going to be more difficult. If you're juggling bills you can't pay, working two jobs, raising kids, and running on four hours of sleep, you're not failing because you didn't have the right mindset. Your brain is operating under an immense load. Scarcity shifts your focus towards the most urgent problem in front of you, which makes it harder to think strategically about the future or to just think positively. While I've certainly faced challenges in my life, nothing prepared me for becoming a parent, and specifically the sleep deprivation that came from hourly wake-ups for 10 months straight. I can tell you firsthand, there is literally no amount of positive thinking that can compensate for months of broken sleep. You can't manifest your way out of exhaustion. Simply changing your mindset or outlook won't magically put you on the path to bettering your circumstances. When you're waking up at midnight, 2am, 4am, and again at 6am, the problem isn't belief. And this experience... permanently changed how I think about self-help because during that period of my life, I didn't need a new affirmation to change my outlook. I just needed sleep. For some people, self-help books and motivational videos can absolutely pull them out of a rut. For others, what they actually need is therapy, medication, support, more income, fewer hours at work, better childcare, social safety net, a better environment. Do you want to do some editing with Dada? You don't? That's okay. I don't want to edit either. In my case, it wasn't a magic phrase that improved my mindset. It was solving the sleep problem. It was trying different methods. It was getting support. It was finally changing the conditions. Once the environment improved, my mindset followed. There's another big reason that the mind over matter advice not only falls flat, but can actually do more harm than good. More on that in just a minute. As a solo creator I have to be very selective about the tools I use. That's why I use Squarespace. They're my sponsor for this video and a tool that's helped me do everything from build my newsletter to launch my courses. Here's why I always recommend it to other creators. With Squarespace, publishing your first website is so easy, it's stupid. From getting your custom domain name to building your website, they make it so simple that even someone with no experience in code or design can do it. And that pretty much sums up my experience. If you want to keep it really simple, you can just answer their prompts and they'll build your site for you. Or if you're more of a perfectionist, you can move things around until it's pixel perfect. It's not just about publishing your website, though. With Squarespace, you can also launch an online store, take client bookings, launch a blog, and review analytics all from your dashboard. This really is the great thing about Squarespace. It's that it grows with you. Most people start out with just a simple landing page, but later they can use it to launch their newsletter, create a paid course, start a membership, or even launch a full-scale content hub. If you want to see why I trust Squarespace to design, develop, and publish all of my websites, then go to squarespace.com. That's where you can start your free trial. And then when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash mattdiavella to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thanks so much to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. You might think that blind optimism is a trait of highly successful people. After all, that's what we see in movies, motivational videos, and triumphant stories of elite athletes. failure wasn't an option they only imagined success in their mind's eye if you can't control your own brain and your brain controls you you're and all that you learned from your own brain you didn't google this i couldn't spell google back then except inflating our belief system to think that you can do anything with the right mindset not only creates delusions of grandeur it can also backfire and lead to an even higher likelihood that you fail Psychologist Gabrielle Odingen has spent decades studying positive thinking and motivation. Her book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, details her research on the latest science of motivation. What she found was that pure positive visualization often backfires. Positive thinking turns out to be not as much as it is promised through the conventional wisdom. basically when people daydream about the lives they want to live careers they want to build goals they want to attain and they don't acknowledge obstacles they actually put in less effort and perform worse the problem with motivating yourself through pure fantasy is that optimism feels a lot like progress you picture the applause the success the transformation but when you visualize the reward and ignore the friction your brain partially relaxes as if you've already achieved it. Her research showed that this kind of unchecked optimism can actually reduce effort. For those who rely on positive thinking, the first real obstacle that you face ends up becoming a sign to quit instead of something that you can expect and plan for. She calls the effective alternative mental contrasting. So imagining success and the real obstacles in the way. It works because it grounds your effort in reality. This is pragmatic optimism. When you're overly optimistic, you fail to see the challenges that might get in your way. When you aren't optimistic enough, that's when you get discouraged and you probably won't try to begin with. When I started this YouTube channel in 2017, I didn't think it was a guaranteed path to success. Hey guys, what's going on? Welcome. I think, am I recording? I am recording. We're going. We're doing it. Hey guys, welcome to the podcast. My name's, uh, this is not a podcast. It's like a... If you asked me back then the likelihood that I could turn this into a full-time living, I'd have said I had about a 15% chance. That was a high enough probability for me to try. It was also low enough for me to be realistic about the obstacles I was going to face. Potentially years without getting any views, an endless cycle of self-doubt and negative comments, facing the steep learning curve of how to build a successful channel before there were really any content or courses on the subject. What's an IMI? To ask me anything so then patreon members can ask me anything and then I'll make a little podcast answering people's questions Yeah, we'll see Knowing the challenges I would face allowed me to put together a more concrete plan for how to tackle each. Because of some good old-fashioned grit, fortunate timing, and a lot of luck, my career as a YouTuber ended up going much better than I ever could have expected. And it never would have happened without a mix of positive thinking and a good dose of humility. Looking back, the path that I approached fits very well with the formula that Gabrielle Odingen created as a solve for people who put too much weight on positive thinking. It's a four-step process that she calls WHOOP. Each letter stands for a different step in the process. First, identify a specific, challenging, and attainable goal or a wish, like, I want to exercise three days a week. Then, visualize the best possible outcome of achieving this goal and how it'll make you feel. You might imagine yourself feeling better, more energized, and stronger. Next, identify the inner obstacles, the emotions, the bad habits, and thoughts that might get in your way, like the fact that you often get frustrated when you don't have enough time for your full workout. Finally, create an if-then plan to overcome these obstacles. So, if you get frustrated because you don't have enough time, Then you'll put on your running shoes and just commit to five minutes. Whoop works because it leverages positive thinking while also planning for all the things that might get in your way. Instead of being surprised by doubt or laziness, you anticipate it and decide in advance how you'll respond. That simple if-then structure reduces reliance on willpower and increases follow-through. It keeps hope intact while grounding your efforts in reality. So. If I were to edit the popular self-help catchphrases to be a bit more accurate, I'd say success is 33% mindset. Whether you think you can or can't, it's probably more about your environment and ability to plan for obstacles. You can do a lot of things you put your mind to. Your only limit is your mind, but also gravity. Goals aren't reached by belief alone. They're achieved by facing reality, adjusting when things don't work out, and staying hopeful without being naive. That might not sound as catchy as mind over matter, but I think it's more honest.

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