Welcome to Things I Wish I Knew Earlier Sunday!
Before we get to the ideas, I made you something.
It is an ebook called Top-100 Must-Read Books for Professional Creators, and it contains a detailed list of the best books I’ve ever read on topics central to every entrepreneur: history, business philosophy, the creative process, psychology, sales, and productivity.
And I am excited to offer it to you for free. Simply click on this link.
If this ebook is as valuable to you as I hope it is, the only thing I ask in return is for you to share the link with your friends who you think would benefit from this resource as well.
Now, here are 3 ideas I found to spur your creativity this week.
The stories that we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it are controlled hallucinations about reality
Turns out reality itself is very complex. Infinitely complex, in fact.
Since our brains aren’t equipped to process an infinite amount of complexity, we turn the facts we do have into stories about how reality works.
My first exposure to the power of stories was in a 19-page section of Yuval Harari’s masterwork Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
This book made such an impact on me that it is the very first recommendation in the ebook we just discussed.
His idea was that our human ability to tell stories enabled us to super-charge our trajectory toward becoming the rulers of Earth because all-of-a-sudden we could cooperate in groups larger than 150 people (which up to that point was the largest a tribe could become due to a cognitive limitation called Dunbar’s number. Read more on that here.)
But once we learned to tell stories, we could cooperate in exponentially larger numbers than that.
He cited stories about gods, nation-states, corporations, and money as categories of stories that cohered groups, amongst others. The main reason these stories worked is that they told participants in the stories how to treat everyone else in the group, even if they didn’t know those people personally.
This was revolutionary because stories allowed participants to trust total strangers to behave in predictable and reliable ways.
For example, you can walk into any Starbucks in the world and expect to be treated in the same way by the staff and receive similar products. That is because Starbucks, at its most foundational level, is a story. A story that you believe and participate in as a Starbucks customer.
This week, I finished Will Stor’s book The Science of Storytelling, which took my understanding of the power of story to a whole new level.
Yes, we live and work inside of stories, just as Harari showed. Stories make up our social landscape.
But it’s deeper than that. Will Stor believes that our brains are storytelling machines. He thinks that is the fundamental function of brains.
One of the big ideas in this book is that our brains are always constructing and updating a theory of control for reality.
The idea is that every person tells themselves a story about how they control themselves and their environment. And one of the most interesting things that can happen in a story is when some event, or fact, disrupts a character’s assumptions about their ability to control the environment.
Since the environment is infinitely complex, our theory of control is never completely safe.
“Every now and then, actual reality will push back at us. Something in our environment will change in such a way that our flawed models aren’t predicting and are therefore specifically unable to cope with. We try to contain the chaos, but because this change strikes directly against our model’s particular flaws, we fail. Then, we can become conflicted. Are we right or is there actually a chance we are wrong? If this deep identity forming belief turns out to be wrong, then who the hell are we? The dramatic question has been triggered. The story has begun. Finding out who we are and who we need to become means accepting the challenge that story offers us. Are we brave enough to change? This is the question a plot, and a life, asks of each of us.” -Stor, The Science of Storytelling
Our stories are controlled hallucinations about our ability to control reality. The story of your life is iterating, optimizing, and updating your theory of control over time.
Now THAT is a Big Idea.
Beliefs are micro-narratives that the brain constructs through observing millions of little instances of cause and effect
I have been fascinated by beliefs and their formation for as long as I can remember.
I was raised to accept a particular set of beliefs. As a young adult, I rejected many of those to find my own. And as I have matured into adulthood, I have re-discovered many of the beliefs I left behind.
What are these fragments of us called beliefs? And how are they formed?
If the story of your life is your personal theory of how you control your environment, then beliefs are the smaller story strands that weave together to create your Master Story.
Stor teaches us these beliefs are constructed over time through observing millions of little instances of cause and effect. This process is in addition to the beliefs that we are taught from our parents and surroundings.
In fact, we iterate and optimize on the beliefs we are taught through this process of observation. Sometimes what we observe runs so counter to what we are taught that our observations shatter those beliefs and break the strand entirely.
This can be a very scary experience. But it can also trigger massive growth.
Because, at the end of the day, reality is what it is. When our beliefs aren’t serving us by reliably predicting what reality is and will be in the future, the best thing we can do is leave those beliefs behind and adopt new, and better, beliefs.
This is actually what personal growth looks like.
The final thing I want to mention here is that our beliefs shape our understanding of in-groups and out-groups.
Our beliefs have never been under the amount of external pressure that they are under at this time in history.
The true war being waged at the highest levels of society is a war of stories.
“Think about the people closest to you. There won’t be a soul among them with whom you’ve never disagreed…the further you travel from those who you admire, the more wrong people become until the only conclusion you are left with is that entire tranches of the human population are stupid, evil, or insane. Which leaves you, the single living human whose right about everything, the perfect point of light, clarity, and genius who burns with godlike luminescence at the center of the universe.” -Stor, The Science of Storytelling
When you are prompted to hate others, take a step back and ask yourself if you are justified in being so confident that your story is the right one.
Or are you just terrified that you are wrong?
To become a world-class reader, learn to read like an eagle scanning for prey
Our stories are shaped by what we know, which means the more we know, the more confident we can be that our stories accurately map onto the complexity of reality.
The best way that I have ever found to gather more information, ideas, and facts is by reading books.
So I want to leave you on a lighter note with a quote from one of the most prolific readers of all time, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Peers said that he read like an eagle scanning for prey. He didn’t feel he owed the author a debt for having written the book, so he didn’t feel obliged to finish every book he read.
With that freedom, he scanned thousands of books, plucked ideas from hundreds of books, and read a handful of books over and over.
And lest you think this an out-dated strategy, you can read what the great angel investor Naval Ravikant has to say about reading here.
“Well, learn how to tell from the beginning of the chapters and from glimpses of the sentences whether you need to read them entirely through. So turn page after page, keeping your writer’s thought before you, but not tarrying with him, until he has brought you the thing you are in search of; then dwell with him, if so be he has what you want.” -Emerson
World-class readers read with their purpose in the forefront of their mind and skip, skim, and scrape only the golden nuggets that best serve them and their goals.