#77 - Overcoming Self-Imposed a Cognitive Limitations
Hey everyone and welcome back. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha. On today's daily call, I want to talk about overcoming self-imposed and cognitive limitations. I know that seems like a lot, but I think it’s going to be an interesting concept and topic. Also, today is my daughter’s fourth birthday which is very crazy. I can’t even believe she’s four already. Actually, she’s 16 to some degree, but I’m sure it’ll get much worse as she gets older and into the teenage years. But she’s a wonderful person, I love Molly to death and she makes me laugh all the time, so happy birthday. Again, today, we’re talking about overcoming self-imposed and cognitive limitations. What does this basically mean? This basically means that self-limitations are imposed on us by our brain and people don’t know this. I geek out about this stuff a lot because I’m a student of success, I’m a student of habit, I’m always trying to look for ways to improve and I love the whole self-improvement, self-awareness type of feel right now. One thing that I've read is that our brains end up or basically, they stop us before we can do 40% more. This is more evident in like a physical manner more than anything else. Our brains are designed to one, keep us safe, food, shelter, etcetera, like all the natural cavemen characteristics, but it’s also designed to minimize its use, its design to run on the minimal viable operating system. When you overwork your brain, it hurts and your brain tells you that something is painful or it pushes back and tries to impose limitations on you. We see this often with habits. Habits are a great representation of our brain trying to do things in an orderly systematic fashion without using or expelling a lot of energy. That’s why oftentimes, habits can be great or they can be bad. Your brain has no idea if one is good or bad for you. You can have a good habit, you can have a bad habit, but as soon as you create a habit, your brain kicks into auto drive and does it for you automatically. The reality though is that our brains stop us and give us signals before we can actually go further. Again, in a physical manner, this means when you’re working out or when you’re running, you get that pain in your legs or that pain in your side. If you’ve ever run before, you get that runner stitch in your side and it feels like your stomach is just kind of like crunching together. That’s really your brain telling you to start slowing down, to realize that you’re starting to hit some sort of wall or a limitation. Obviously, we should respect that, but just realize that we can actually go more. We can do more. We can go further than what our brain is actually telling us to shutdown. In the cognitive space, so just mentally thinking about our growth, our brains naturally look for exits. Our brains naturally look for things that are common, comfortable, easy. They rarely will let us without imposing some sort of limitation or pushback, get us into the uncomfortable or unreasonable or nonconformity type of situation. This is just naturally happening, this is just part of who we are and so, we have to recognize that this happens, that we get uncomfortable and our brain tells us, “Hey. This is kind of weird. We’re not conforming to the social norm or not following the herd mentality.” This can happen in a bunch of different areas. What we want to do is we want to ignore the uncomfortable and frankly get used to it. Now, one thing that I’ve done that has helped doing this is doing things on a more daily repetitive basis. One thing that I've recently started doing is I’ve started recently just randomly going up to strangers and starting a conversation with them. I typically actually don't do that. Although you guys might seem or think that I do that a lot because I do this podcast and I do videos, I’m actually very much of an introvert type of person. I don’t randomly go up to people and just start talking to them. But that’s an insanely uncomfortable situation for me and I've actually found that it’s actually very liberating. I actually do like people when I actually meet them. It’s just that actual transition from meeting them to not. I think that if you realize that your brain has these limitations and it’s self-imposed or really kind of subconscious, I think it can really help you because you start getting used to being uncomfortable. It starts pushing your boundaries. It starts pushing you out of a normal routine. Maybe find something today that is not normal, maybe a little bit uncomfortable and start doing it for just a week. Start maybe just doing something that’s a little bit different than your normal routine just to get you used to thinking differently, acting differently and get your brain into a different pattern interrupt which ultimately I think might help serve you more. As always, hopefully you guys have enjoyed this podcast and if you have any questions or comments, let me know. Until next time, happy trading!