In the famous marshmallow experiment by Walter Mischel. He said that the 30% of the kids that didn’t eat the marshmallow, didn’t even look at the marshmallow. They kept doing other things, keeping their eyes off the marshmallow. Consciously, intentionally, and purposefully.
The marshmallow is ‘the thing’, the goal people want… and it is what actually causes them to jump the gun, to quit pursuing it prematurely.
I have read a lot about that experiment, I have even written about it, but I didn’t know that the ‘winners’ avoided looking at the marshmallow. that piece was missing for me, until now.
One of the challenges I face with my students and clients is their high desire number, and the Desire Trap…
This discovery I stumbled on, by accident, is the missing piece in helping my students with that challenge.
Watching that TED talk yesterday opened up something inside, that is still full of swirling fog, ethereal figures, and yet, I know that something from the invisible has been released.
I was getting busy going down the rabbit hole about the marshmallow test which is as much of a principle as any principle, although its portability is hard to see…
All principles are portable, just like fractals. That is the nature of reality: as above so is below, or was that the other way around?
If it is true, a real principle, not just a made up rule, it is true everywhere, but to recognize it you need to be able to connect the dots.
Connecting the dots requires you to have a wide cone of vision, so you can compare the two phenomenon in the same glance, or alternatively, have enough long term memory to store an image that you can compare with.
Most people never committed anything to long term memory, and even the capacity for storing something for long term has atrophied.
Another way to look at long term memory is looking an measuring how many things you can hold in your brain at any one time.
For most people (8 billion) that is one thing…
That means that when they change what they look at, what they looked at disappears. So they cannot compare two things that are not inside the same cone of vision.
The size of your long term memory, interestingly, will decide what size box you live in.
It takes me just one short interaction to know that… what you talk about indicates the size of your box.
What’s wrong with a small box, you ask? Nothing WRONG, but it is limiting. You cannot dance, you cannot have adventure, you have locked yourself in with the few people who are probably wretched and no fun.
Your love of animals, interestingly, shows that you are not fulfilled in your small box… But it only indicates, it doesn’t remedy… the size of the box you live in will not grow without serious effort.
Pain.
While I was an architect, my box got smaller… uncomfortable. While I was in Landmark Education, my box got smaller… very limiting.
Breaking out of those small boxes was painful, scary, and
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