Beliefs And Outcomes

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” – Wayne Dyer

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” -Richard Feynman

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” –Hamlet

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” -Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“One of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of my son Jack’s life or year or two of Jack’s life that I observed with parents is that they have this language around weather; weather being good or bad. Whenever it was raining, they’d be like, it’s bad weather. You’d hear moms, babysitters, dads talk about if it’s bad weather, we can’t go out or if it’s good weather, we can go out. So that means that somehow we’re externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So Jack and I never missed a single storm. Every rain storm. I don’t think we’ve missed one storm, other than one maybe when he was sick. But I don’t think we’ve missed a single storm, rain or snow, going outside and romping in it. We developed this language around how beautiful it was.

So now whenever there’s a rainy day, Jack says, ‘Look, Da-Da. It’s such a beautiful rainy day.’ And we go out and we play in it. I wanted him to have this internal locus of control. To not be reliant on external conditions being just so.” -Josh Waitzkin, Chess champion, Muay-Thai champion, author, The Art Of Learning

What you believe directly affects your outcome.

How so?

Take two people. Each has their own distinct set of beliefs or worldviews.

The exact same event happens to both of them.

The outcome they ascribe to the event stems from the meaning they give it. The meaning they give it stems directly from their beliefs.

Or for you equation fans out there…

Outcome = Specific Event * Meaning

Meaning = Any Event * Belief

A story that perfectly encapsulates this point…

When Thomas Edison’s factory burned to the ground in 1914, destroying one-of-a-kind prototypes and causing countless millions in damage, Edison’s response was “Thank goodness all our mistakes were burned up. Now we can start fresh again.”