Get Out of My Head Page 2

  Just as we helped our clients see that they had historically undersold the true value of their real estate assets, I came to realize I was not just underselling my mind, but actually giving it away entirely for free to anyone who asked—and to many who did not. What’s more, by giving my mind away for free, I was effectively relegating myself to the status of a renter in my own mind. Here was the one asset in life that I should own, the only asset I ever really could own, and yet I spent my time accessing only the remnants of what was left after others had taken what I’d given away all too freely.

  Perhaps even more tragically, my mind wasn’t an asset I’d had to spend a lifetime building up wealth to acquire. Unlike physical real estate, which we must work for years to be able to afford and own if we’re not born trust fund babies, mental real estate doesn’t require financial wealth or hefty loans to acquire it. We’re all born with the same incredible inheritance of riches when it comes to our mental real estate. We own it free and clear from the day we are born. And yet, we seem to default to squandering this inheritance. Indeed, as we grow older and supposedly wiser, we often give away our mental resources more readily, forcing ourselves into the position of becoming renters of our own minds.

  But just because we have become renters—rather than owners—of our minds does not mean we have to stay that way. We all have the ability to take back our time and energy and reassert ownership of our truly most valuable asset. And while doing this requires at least as much work and dedication as it takes to acquire and accumulate physical real estate, the outcome is ultimately in our control, and the payoff is well worth it.

  Ancient Wisdom

  As with so many of my “original” thoughts and insights, I soon discovered I wasn’t the first person to come to the realization that my mind was like valuable real estate that I was giving away too cheaply. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, “Everyone is the unconscious proponent of some philosopher.”1 In this particular instance, the originators of the concept beat me not by a few years but rather by a few thousand. They were the ancient Stoics, and their way of looking at the world, at life, and at human potential could not be more relevant for us today.

  As Seneca stated so well in the first century of the common era, in his essay “On the Shortness of Life”:

  Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers. [italics added]

  Though these words were written thousands of years ago, they likely still apply to most of us. Think about it. Have you ever let someone get under your skin, thinking back to a snide comment or act on their part for hours, if not days, afterward?

  Have you found yourself at home, supposedly having dinner with your family, while your mind remained completely at the office as you replayed some event from earlier in the day?

  Have you ever found yourself lying in bed and unable to sleep on a Sunday night because you can’t stop the movie in your mind of all the things that you’re going to be responsible for in the coming week?

  These are just a handful of the limitless examples that illustrate the common state Seneca lamented because when we hand over our minds, we are indeed handing over our lives. When we give others control over our minds and, in turn, our minds have control over us, we’re incapable of living our lives on our own terms. We’re robbed of experiencing and enjoying life as we want to, and instead we live in reaction to others. All of these behaviors are completely normal—they are also unhelpful and completely unnecessary.

  Why, you might ask, in the twenty-first century, should I bother turning to what a few old men said thousands of years ago?

  Sure, the time the ancient Stoics lived in was different from our own. There was no electricity. There were no planes, trains, or automobiles. There weren’t mobile phones or computers, and no one talked about the threat of artificial intelligence or machine learning taking over humans’ very purpose for existence. And yet, the human condition, especially the mental condition, remains the same. These philosophers’ insights on what holds us back as humans, and how to break those mental chains, are just as relevant now as they were then—and perhaps more so, as I hope you will see. These old men are not our masters, but they can certainly be masterful guides.

  In our own time, as people humblebrag about their busyness with worrying regularity, Seneca is there to remind us that this is not just a problem of the modern world: During his own time, he noted that a common complaint was “I have no chance to live.” His response? As he writes in “On the Shortness of Life,” “Of course you have no chance! All those who summon you to themselves, turn you away from your own self . . . Check off, I say, and review the days of your life; you will see that very few, and those the refuse, have been left for you.” In other words, when you spend all your mental energy in ways that others want you to spend that energy, you steal precious time from yourself.

  Still not convinced?

  Then hear it from someone closer to our own time. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and the former president of Y Combinator, the startup factory that was an early backer of companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, Instacart, Dropbox, and more, advised his followers on Twitter, “Don’t let jerks live rent-free in your head.”2

  Not there yet? Then take this from the most prescient pop philosopher of our time, Taylor Swift, who laments in her song “I Forgot That You Existed” that, rather than moving on, she spent too many days thinking about how a former lover did her wrong, wrong, wrong, with “free rent, living in my mind.”3

  The point is, you’re not alone if you feel like you are a mere tenant of your mind, having to rent the remnants of what is left after everyone else has taken their share of it. Everyone from ancient philosophers to some of the most well-known and successful people of our own time has dealt with this problem. The good news is, it’s as common as it is avoidable, preventable, and addressable.

  As the often-richest person in the world pointed out in his 2003 shareholder letter, “Owners are different from tenants.” Jeff Bezos was and still is right. Now it is time we all heed his admonition: “Here’s to not being a tenant!”

  Our Caveman Mind

  I imagine you might now be wondering why, if it seems that everyone agrees that letting others control our time and headspace leads to feeling miserable and overworked, this state of mental tenancy remains nearly universal. The answer lies in human evolution. As James Clear, the number-one New York Times best-selling author of Atomic Habits, points out in his essay “The Evolution of Anxiety: Why We Worry and What to Do About It,” for the vast majority of human existence our ancestors lived in an “immediate-return environment”4—meaning that for roughly 197,500 years of our 200,000-year existence as a species, we lived and evolved in a world where most of the choices we made had an immediate impact on our lives. Our ancestors were quite literally focused on their day-to-day survival—securing food and shelter and avoiding predators. As a necessity of existence, they were focused on the present moment.

  It was only relatively recently, beginning around 2,500 years ago, that our human ancestors found themselves instead living in a “delayed return environment.” As Clear explains:

  Most of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately. If you do a good job at work today, you’ll get a paycheck in a few weeks. If you save money now, you’ll have enough for retirement later. Many aspects of modern society are designed to delay rewards until some point in the future . . . many of the problems humans worry about are problems of the future.

  In other words, we’ve gotten used to spending our mental energy thinking and worrying about things that have yet to happen. Why is this such a problem? Simply put, because our brains have not evolved to solve the problems we face in this kind of environment.

  Let’s put some numbers behind this. The average person can read five words per second. In data terms, this means our conscious minds are able to process an average of fifty bits of data per second. To put this into perspective, human senses have evolved to take in eleven million bits of data per second from our environment. So every second we spend reading, that eleven million bits our senses take in are processed and condensed down to the fifty bits our conscious minds can absorb. Our brains have evolved to be able to process a relatively small amount of data to keep us alive—the ultimate measure of a species’ success in an immediate-return environment. In the savanna, it didn’t necessarily matter that the blue sky was starting to get cloudy, that the wind was picking up and getting colder, or that it was starting to get darker earlier in the day. All that mattered was that the rustling over there might be a lion. Our ancestors had to be able to filter those eleven million bits down to the truly critical fifty bits they needed to stay alive right now. They didn’t have time to think through the best time of year to plant crops in order to have sufficient food in several months; they had to survive the next few minutes, or even seconds.

  But now we are out of the savanna. Now we are in metropolises with totally different demands on us, and on our minds. And to put it mildly, our brains are ill-equipped for the world in which we find ourselves.

  That’s the bad news—and unfortunately the problem is only getting worse. Historically, we had to contend with just the data filtering through our senses in our natural environment. Now, data are being
created at a pace and on a scale never before experienced. I mean this literally: More data were created in the years 2015 and 2016 than in the previous five thousand years of human history combined. In 2017, more data were created than in the previous two years combined. And the speed of data creation has only accelerated since then. It’s no wonder our minds are stretched so thin.

  To go back to the real estate analogy, I was recently speaking with a friend, a successful investor in both physical real estate and the technology companies that are transforming the real estate industry more broadly. On the subject of COVID-19 and its damaging economic aftershocks, he lamented that between the 2008 financial crisis and what many suffered due to the pandemic in 2020 and beyond, we were going to see an entire generation of “perpetual renters” who will never have the financial means or stability to own their own homes.

  The overwhelming creation of data we’ve seen in recent years is creating the same situation with our mental real estate. One example of this is “doomscrolling”—the tendency to mindlessly scroll through bad news online—which has dominated how many people spend their “free time.” This is just one of many ways in which we’ve been complicit in creating a world of perpetual mind renters, who are unable to seize ownership of this most valuable and critical asset.

  If that’s the bad news, the good news is that just because being a mind renter is normal, is understandable, and is even scientifically explainable doesn’t mean that it has to remain our default state. Just as (in a perfect world) an apartment renter can become a homeowner by building financial wealth, so too can a mind renter become an owner of their own mind by building mental affluence.

  The even better news is that, unlike financial affluence, mental affluence is completely within our control. We’re not dependent on a privileged upbringing, or a boss to hire us or give us a raise, or even a customer to buy a new product we invented, to build our mental affluence. We all have the power and the ability to retake ownership of what’s rightfully ours. It really is that simple—however, achieving this is far from easy.

  Making It Real

  In this book I share the stories of some of the most successful and inspiring people I know who have gotten to where they are by successfully taking ownership of their minds. These people are modern Stoics: people who, despite all the biology fighting against them, have managed to avoid falling prey to mental tenancy and thus have been able to take ownership of their minds to great effect. They have gone on to succeed in corporate and startup environments, in the private and the public sectors, in the arts and in war (literally), in athletic and sedentary endeavors, and more.

  Their stories demonstrate the possibility and power of mind ownership. They illustrate how, if you want to own your life, it’s not enough to just own the time on your calendar; you must be able to decide and control where you mentally are during any given block of time. These success stories don’t suggest you keep the entire world out, living in selfish isolation in order to take back ownership of your mind. Instead, they show that you can (and should) still invite guests into your mental real estate, and you can even rent your mind to others—it’s just that doing so must be an active decision, not a passive default state. In fact, by giving up this mental real estate mindfully you can make more of your mind and your life—including your career and your relationships—than you perhaps ever thought possible.

  When it comes to life as a mind renter, there are three main groups we find ourselves passively renting from rather than consciously deciding when and how to rent to: other people, events and circumstances beyond our control, and different versions of ourselves. This is why Get Out of My Head is structured as it is. Part I, “Mind Renting and Other People,” is about how to stop renting from others what you already own. Part II, “Mind Renting and Circumstances and Events,” takes this a step further, recognizing that it isn’t always people who are the problem. Sometimes, even oftentimes, it’s “life” and its unpredictability and uncontrollability that get in the way. Part III, “Mind Renting and Ourselves,” wraps up by tackling the most pernicious, and the most difficult to overcome, of the three groups from which we’re renting headspace: different versions of ourselves. These other versions of us could be imagined versions, past or future versions, or versions we think we should be; the flavors are almost limitless. However, the commonality is that none of these versions are the “us” of now, the only us that actually exists and can ever exist.

  Each chapter will introduce the most common mental tenancy problems faced with these groups, and then provide actionable solutions to overcome them. I’ll also share my own corresponding “aha” moment—how I got something so wrong, and the negative impact it had on my life, personally and professionally—to make it easier for you to identify the commonalities with your own current situation. Each chapter then explains the Stoic principle of mind ownership that breaks the negative cycle and habit, discusses the scientific reasons why this principle is true and helpful, and features the principle at work in historical and contemporary examples of some of the most successful and impressive people ever to live.

  The hope is that all of this will elicit your own “aha” moment, one in which you achieve your own flash of clarity in identifying both a problem and what the potential solution can look like. But we won’t stop there—the purpose of this book isn’t to just share the information (G.I. Joe was correct when he said that knowing is only half the battle). As Shannon Lee writes in Be Water, My Friend: The True Teachings of Bruce Lee:

  Sometimes it’s easy to have a revelation and forget to incorporate it into your life. Aha moments are awesome! They feel really good, and while you may think about them often, that doesn’t mean you follow through on them and live them proactively.5

  This is why every single chapter closes by providing a tactical tool, worksheet, or framework that you can start applying right now in your quest to transition from mind renter to mind owner. If knowing is half the battle, the other half comes from action. The tools that close each chapter provide the action plan you’ll need, but only you can begin to implement it in your own life.

  Let the Games Begin

  Up to this point, you may have unintentionally resigned yourself to life as a mind renter. It’s a very natural state, and in fact the default state for our brains at this period in human history. Now, however, you know that the “default” is not the only answer. It’s also not the right answer. By picking up this book, you have already demonstrated that it’s no longer the answer for you.

  As James Baldwin said, albeit in a different context, until this point you have been “playing the game according to somebody else’s rules, and you can’t win until you understand the rules and step out of that particular game, which is not, after all, worth playing.”6 It’s time to step out of this game designed by someone else and start making your own. In the game that’s your life, it’s time you play to win.

  PART I

  Mind Renting and Other People

  CHAPTER 1

  They’ll Never Buy the Cow If You Give Them the Milk for Free (Know Your Value)

  You can’t expect others to value you if you don’t know how to value yourself.

  It was Memorial Day weekend, and I sat hunched over my computer screen. The timing was, theoretically, perfect for me to get some work done. My wife was at the pool with our daughter and our friends enjoying the sunny weather, some hot dogs, the company, and likely a cold beverage or two. That meant I had all this time to myself to work.

  In front of me were multiple Excel sheets and too many open browser tabs to count, each containing the data I sought. Slowly, manually, laboriously, I copied that data piece by piece into the relevant Excel sheets. As my eyes watered from staring unblinkingly at my computer screen, I kept myself going with the knowledge that this would be the basis for what would become my company’s annual “Rented Report of the Best Places to Invest in Vacation Homes.” Ever since reading about how Barbara Corcoran credited her “Corcoran Report” for helping her business take off, I thought a similar report for our sector could help do the same for my business. That had been months ago, but there was no movement toward the creation of such a report in my company. Until now, that is.