Can Your Worldview Accelerate Your Progress?
We talked about the importance of identifying our limiting beliefs. If certain beliefs can hold us back, what beliefs could propel us forward?
The typical worldview in our society and media is that life is an ongoing competition for limited resources - budgets, projects, promotions, funding etc. “You snooze, you lose.” Founders panic when they see headlines such as “Start-Up Funding Falls the Most It Has Since 2019”. Employees are crushed when their colleague gets a promotion, because they won’t. I adopted this scarcity mindset by osmosis. I had regrets about the opportunities I missed. The things I should have done differently haunted me, sometimes for years.
Finding out that the vast majority of my beliefs are not objective truths and my human brain constantly seeks evidence to confirm my beliefs was revelatory. If that’s the case, I might as well adopt beliefs that lead me to live as the person I want to embody, rather than keeping beliefs that constrain me.
Changing long-held beliefs takes awareness, time and frequent reminders to ourselves, but nowadays I constantly practice looking at events in my life through the lens of my chosen worldview - my set of core beliefs. I examine the assumptions behind my reactions to everything in life, and actively work to shift these assumptions when they contradict my worldview. I’m also open to changing my worldview if I realize it doesn’t serve me.
I’d like to share three of my beliefs not to get you to adopt them, but to prompt you to actively define the worldview you want to have in order to become a truer version of yourself - instead of living by a default worldview you may have adopted unconsciously.
The world is abundant rather than scarce. It’s not a zero sum game where people compete on limited resources, but an ever-expanding opportunity for creative people. For example, if there’s one management position open, a scarcity mindset means it’s game over if I didn’t get it, as I used to believe. An abundance mindset means choosing to believe there’s an even better opportunity I don’t yet know about waiting for me if I take the news gracefully and continue to put my best foot forward. Neither is right or wrong, but the latter is closer to how I want to show up in the world and is more likely to inspire me to identify or create more opportunities.
The world is for me rather than against me. “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe. From that one decision all others spring”, said Einstein (maybe). I’ll get confirmation either way, so which option serves me better - living as if things happen for my benefit or to my detriment? Believing the universe is friendly means that there’s some growth opportunity or a redirection to a better path in every situation, I just have to see it. We all heard the stories of survivors of brutal experiences who went on to have massive positive impact on the world, or people who hit rock bottom and that sparked an idea that brought immense success. It doesn’t have to be on a grand scale - it could be as mundane as seeing the fact that someone annoyed me today as an opportunity to practice patience and empathy. I live a privileged life and haven’t experienced anything remotely close to the hardship some people have, so the following question may be naive at best, but I’ll ask it anyway: Even in the worst circumstances, does it serve us to believe that the universe keeps fighting against us or that it’s trying to help us overcome those circumstances? I choose the latter.
Things happen just the way they should. Instead of comparing myself to others and seeing only where I fall short, or lamenting the time I wasted or the mistakes I made, I tell myself this is exactly how things were meant to happen - because they did. If things didn’t happen that way, I wouldn’t have some of the good things in my life. I may not have gotten to this moment of awareness that I can consciously choose my perspective on life. I may not have learned some of the things I did when things were not going well. I could have had some massive achievement followed by a Sliding Doors moment (younger readers, watch this movie).
How would you define your worldview? Which parts of it are beliefs that don’t serve you and could be replaced with more empowering beliefs?
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