All right.

Hello and welcome to this training.

As you can see from the title,

what we're going to be covering today is how belief engineers your reality.

And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more

specifically is first the overview itself, the science of belief,

the self-fulfilling loop, the belief audit useful and untrue,

the review and your action items for the day or the next few days.

Now, before we get started,

if you want to work with me, make sure to book a call

from the link in the description.

If you want this document along with this training,

make sure to join the free community again from the link in the description.

And if you want weekly tips on health, wealth, love and self

and how to improve in each one of those areas, then make sure to join

the newsletter again from the link in the description. Now,

without further ado, let's get started and talk about the science of belief.

So So in 2007, a psychologist named Ali Akram at Harvard ran

a study on hotel maids that quietly changed how researchers

think about the relationship between belief and the body.

Now these women were doing physically demanding work every single day.

You could imagine it holding that vacuum cleaners up the stairs,

scrubbing bathrooms, flipping mattresses, burning calories basically at a rate

that exceeded the Surgeon General's recommended daily exercise.

But when researchers asked them, most of them

said they didn't really exercise at all.

They didn't think of their work as exercise.

It was just work.

So Crum did something simple.

She took half the maids and told them the truth, that their daily work

already qualified as significant physical exercise

and showed them exactly how many calories each task burned and also reframed

what they were already doing as a legitimate workout.

Now the other half got no information at all.

Sadly for them, nothing else changed.

Same hours, same tasks.

Same hotel, same routine.

Four weeks later, the group that had been told their work was exercise

has had lost weight.

They had lowered their blood pressure and also reduced their body fat percentage.

The control group that didn't know anything, doing

the exact same physical work showed no changes whatsoever.

Now think about that for a second.

It was the same physical activity, same bodies.

The only thing that really changed

was what they believed about what they were doing.

And their bodies responded to the belief, not to the activity itself.

Now, that's a peer reviewed findings from one of the most

respected universities on earth right now.

They believe they don't add a single extra step to their day.

It didn't change the workload.

The intensity, or the duration of the work.

It changed the meaning they assigned to the work,

and the meaning

changed the physiological response, which tells you something that most people

still drastically underestimate about human biology.

Studies like this aren't rare or isolated.

They show up constantly in research, and they point to something that sits

underneath every conversation about health, performance, and potential.

What you believe about what you're doing might matter

as much, if not more, than what you're actually doing. Now,

if that's true for hotel

maids who didn't even know they were really exercising,

what is it doing in the areas of your life where you are conscious of your beliefs?

What beliefs are you carrying about your work, your body, your potential

that are quietly shaping your results without you ever questioning them?

Now the placebo effect is absolutely a real thing.

And this is what all of this is alluding to.

And it's not some fringe curiosity that scientists shrug off

because it actually produces measurable physiological changes in the brain

and the body that can be tracked, scanned, and replicated across studies.

Now, this isn't about people imagining they feel better.

This is about actual shifts in neurochemistry that happen

when someone believes something is going to help them.

And here's another study

from the same researcher, Allie Crum, that makes this even harder to dismiss.

She gave participants the exact same 380 calorie

milkshake on two separate occasions on one time.

The label said it was 620 calories and that it was an indulgent shake.

The other time, the label said it was 140 calories.

Sensible shake.

Same shake.

Same ingredients, same calories, 320.

They just didn't know it.

The only thing that changed was what the participants believed they were drinking.

Or 380 calories. Excuse me.

And the only thing that changed was that what the participants

really believed they were drinking.

Now they're grinning.

Levels the hormone that tells your brain whether you're hungry or full or tracked.

And they responded to the label, not the shake when they thought

they were drinking something indulgent, their ghrelin dropped sharply,

which is the body signal that says you've had enough.

You were satisfied when they thought it was a diet shake their gram,

and barely moved, which left them feeling unsatisfied and still hungry.

So their hormones responded to the story on the label,

not the substance in the cup, not the actual objective calorie amount.

And that's a measured hormonal response that is being dictated by a belief,

which means your body isn't just passively processing

what you put into it is actively interpreting what you believe

you're putting into it and adjusting its chemistry accordingly.

And it goes even further than hunger hormones.

In a paint study, patients were told they'd receive a powerful painkiller

through an IV drip.

They reported significant pain relief.

Their brain scans showed reduced

activity and pain processing centers, and by every measurable standard,

the treatment was working except the machine was never turned on.

Not sick.

Nothing was really flowing through the IV.

The belief that medication was coming was enough to activate the brain's own

endorphin system and produce real, measurable pain relief.

But the part that really matters is that when the patients were told that

the machine had been off, the whole time, the pain came back almost immediately.

The belief created the relief, and the removal of the belief destroyed

it, which tells you that the mechanism here isn't passive or accidental.

It's a direct causal change from what you believe to what your body does.

And this doesn't

just apply to physical health, because you see the exact same pattern

in the psychological research on motivation, resilience,

performance, and basically every domain where humans are trying to do hard things.

Belief acts as a kind of internal command system,

where your brain interprets

the belief as a signal to start allocating resources differently

and adjusts hormone levels, modulates immune responses, and essentially

reorganizes itself around the expectation that things are about to improve.

Now, the part that should unsettle you a little bit is this.

Because this mechanism doesn't really only work in your favor,

the placebo effect has a dark twin, if you want to call it that.

That is called the nocebo effect,

and it's just as powerful and is still running in the

in the background, but it's running in the opposite direction.

So when people believe something will harm them or that they want to recover,

or that a treatment will produce painful side effects, their bodies

often comply with that expectation just as faithfully as those hotel needs.

Bodies complied with the belief that they were exercising.

So in clinical trials, patients who are warned about potential side

effects of a drug experience, those side effects add dramatically higher rates.

Even when they're taking a sugar pill.

Their bodies produce the pain, the nausea, the fatigue

not because of any chemical substance, but because the belief that harm was coming

triggered the exact physiological response they were afraid of.

Now, researchers have documented cases

where patients who were misdiagnosed with terminal illness

deteriorated and died on schedule, and they were misdiagnosed

only for autopsies to reveal that they never had the disease.

In the first place. The belief killed them.

And that sounds like

something out of a horror movie, but it is in the medical literature,

and you don't need a dramatic, dramatic medical scenario

to see this playing out, because the nocebo effect runs quietly

in the background of most people's lives every single day.

Like every time you tell yourself, I'm terrible at this, or

this is never going to work, or people like me don't get opportunities like that.

You're running a nocebo on yourself and your body and your behavior.

Respond and respond accordingly.

Now, this is why belief selection isn't just a nice to have personal development.

Exercise is genuinely urgent because it's not just that

empowering beliefs help you.

Is that disempowering beliefs are actively harming you right now.

And produce stress hormones, suppress immune function and kill your motivation

and focus and narrow your perception of what's really possible.

Most people have never calculated the real cost of the negative beliefs

they carry around, because those beliefs feel like just being realistic

or not getting your hopes up.

But the nocebo research shows that those supposedly harmless beliefs are

producing measurable physiological damage that compounds over time.

And the uncomfortable asymmetry here

is that you don't get to opt out of this system.

Your beliefs are producing effects whether you're conscious of them or not.

So the only real question is

whether you're going to be deliberate about which beliefs you're running

or whether you're going to like whatever was installed by default.

Keep running unchecked in the background.

Now, people who believe they are capable of achieving a task

are measurably more likely to achieve that task.

It's almost common sense, right?

That's decades of free research and self-efficacy and cognitive

psychology and behavioral science all pointing in the same direction.

The belief doesn't guarantee the outcome, but it dramatically shifts

the probability.

So people who believe they are capable of dealing with setbacks and problems

are measurably more likely to actually deal with those setbacks.

And problems, because the belief changes how they interpret difficulty,

which changes

how they respond to it, which changes whether they push through or collapse.

When you believe you can handle something, you interpret obstacles

as temporary and solvable rather than permanent and defining.

And that interpretation difference is where the entire game

is really won or lost.

Now the belief doesn't remove the obstacle.

It changes your behavioral response to it.

And that shift in response is what eventually determines

whether you get past it or get buried by it.

And there's a version of this that goes beyond just task

level confidence and becomes something more like a life operating system

where you hold a deep, almost irrational belief

that you're capable of accomplishing anything you fully commit to.

Now, dabble in just actually fully commit to not try half

heartedly, but truly commit to with everything you have.

And is that objectively true? Probably not.

There are almost certainly things

you couldn't achieve, no matter how hard you tried.

You're probably not going to play in the NBA,

and you're probably not going to win a Nobel Prize in physics.

There are limits unless you actually have committed to those and have the skills.

So don't take this the wrong way.

But does believing this make you more likely to take on difficult challenges,

to push through the long and discouraging middle parts of any ambitious project,

and to eventually succeed at things you might have given up on otherwise.

Absolutely it does.

And that's the part that actually matters, right?

This belief might not be true in some objective, verifiable sense,

but it is extremely useful because it produces actions

that increase your odds of success.

And in a weird way, the belief makes itself more true by just existing.

It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy,

not because the universe magically responds to your thoughts,

but because your thoughts change your expectations and actions.

Now your expectations change your behavior,

and your behavior changes your outcomes.

And so the belief that started as not technically true

gradually becomes more and more true through the actions it actually generate,

which is a loop that most people never consciously recognize or leverage.

Most people experience this loop unconsciously and accidentally,

sometimes in their favor and sometimes against them.

And the whole point of understanding

it is to start running it on purpose instead of leaving it to chance.

So once you see this mechanism clearly, you realize

that choosing your beliefs isn't delusional or naive.

It's strategic because the beliefs you adopt directly

shape the probability of the outcomes you experience.

Your beliefs literally shape your outcomes.

Your beliefs shape your expectations.

Your expectations shape your actions and your actions shape your outcomes and

the takeaway here isn't that you should really lie to yourself or ignore reality.

Is that in the space between I know this for certain and I have no idea.

You have a choice about which beliefs to lean into.

And that choice has real consequent consequences

for how your life actually plays out.

The beliefs you carry,

the beliefs you carry aren't neutral passengers in your mind.

They're active agents that influence every decision you make, every risk

you take or avoid, and every moment where you either step forward or pull back.

And that means belief selection isn't some fluffy feel good exercise.

It's one of the most consequential things you can do for yourself,

because it sits upstream of literally everything else.

Now, with that said, let's talk about this self-fulfilling loop.

So now that we've established that belief produces real, measurable

effects on both the body and the behavior, the question becomes,

what's the actual architecture of how this works?

Because it's not magic and it's not random.

There's a very specific sequence that runs every single time

a belief turns into an outcome.

And once you see the loop

clearly, you can start engineering it instead of stumbling into it.

Now the loop runs like this.

Belief shapes expectation.

Expectation shapes behavior.

Behavior shapes outcome and outcome reinforces or

destroys the original belief, which means the whole thing is circular

and self-sustaining once it really gets going in either direction.

So when the loop runs in the positive direction,

you believe you can do something, so you expect to make progress.

You expect to get it done.

So you take action so you get results and that reinforces the belief.

It strengthens the original belief,

which makes you expect even more progress next time.

When it runs in a negative direction,

you believe you can't do something, so you expect failure.

So you either don't act or act half heartedly

so that you can save your ego, so you get poor results.

And those results confirm the belief that you couldn't do it,

which makes the next attempt even less likely.

Now, most people are running this loop on autopilot

with beliefs that they basically inherited from childhood,

they absorbed from their environment, or they adopted unconsciously

based on a handful of experiences that they never properly really examined.

And the loop just keeps reinforcing whatever was already there.

So you didn't really choose most of the beliefs

that are currently driving your behavior, right?

They were installed by parents, by teachers, by peers,

and by culture and a few emotionally charged experiences, most likely,

that your brain decided were evidence of how the real world works.

Now, the first step to changing the loop is simply becoming aware

that it's there, that it's running,

because you can't really redirect something you can't see.

You can't really redirect something that also you don't really believe in.

But most people genuinely don't realize that their outcomes

are downstream of their beliefs.

They've set of beliefs that they've never really questioned.

So expectation is where the loop get it's gets.

Its real power, because expectation is the bridge between a belief

that you hold in your mind and the actions you take in the real world.

And you can believe something abstractly, but it's when that belief generates

a felt expectation, a sense that something is going to happen,

that your behavior actually starts to shift.

So expectations act as a perceptual filter essentially,

which means they literally change what you notice.

They literally change what you pay attention to and what

you interpret as relevant.

So two people can be in this exact same situation

and see completely different things depending on what they expect to find.

So someone who expects to find opportunities will notice openings.

They will notice connections.

They they will notice possibilities that someone who expects

failure will walk right past without ever registering.

And this isn't

this is

demonstrated in attention research over and over again.

And it's connected to your raz your reticular activating system.

So as someone who expects things to go wrong will notice threats, problems

and risks at a much higher rate, which means their decision

making gets dominated by avoidance and caution

even when the objective situation doesn't warrant it.

Unless they're an action taker who just makes sure

that none of these threats, problems, and risks really happen.

And they basically hedge their bets.

But expectations also change how you prepare for things,

because if you genuinely expect to succeed at something, you prepare differently

than if you expect to struggle.

And that preparation difference alone can be the thing that actually determines

the outcome,

which then reinforces the belief, which then reinforces the expectation.

So when you expect a positive outcome, you invest more time, more energy,

more focus, and more creativity into the process

because your brain has already decided that the payoff is coming,

so the effort feels justified and sustainable.

You're just doing the part because you know you're going to get the outcome.

When you expect a negative outcome, you unconsciously start conserving resources.

You start pulling back efforts, you start hedging your bets,

and you look for exit ramps, all of which virtually guarantee

that the failure you were expecting in the first place is going to happen.

Right. And

there's a behavior layer after that,

which is where beliefs and expectations finally meet reality, right?

They you're finally actually acting on the fabric of reality.

And this is the part that most people skip when they talk about mindset,

because they act like believing something is enough on its own,

which obviously it's not.

Belief without behavior is just daydreaming.

But belief with behavior is where the compounding effects and, start to happen.

Right?

So the behavior that beliefs generate isn't usually big or, dramatic.

It's really the quiet, daily, consistent kind of behavior that doesn't make

for good Instagram posts, but absolutely makes for good outcomes over time.

It's the boring things that you do that repetitively.

Things like showing up

when you don't feel like doing the work, even when the results are slow,

doing the work, even when it's boring and you don't really want to do it,

and that is going to lead somewhere where it's going right. And.

Staying in the

game long enough for the compounding to kick in.

Now, most of the behavior that changes your life is, as I've said

before, very boring and repetitive, unglamorous and monotonous.

And the only reason anyone sticks with it is because they believe at some level

that it's going to lead somewhere good, right?

Belief is the fuel that keeps you doing the mundane things

long enough for them to matter, because without it, you'll quit.

The second that things get a bit boring or uncomfortable, or your progress

starts slowing down, which happens to literally everyone at some point even.

I mean, it's actually a good sign if your progress slow slows down

because it means you've learned a lot, your rate of learning has slowed down.

It means you're becoming better,

but every action you take generates feedback, and that feedback either

strengthens or weakens the belief that started the whole loop,

which is why early wins are so psychologically important.

Not because they prove you've made it, but because they give the loop momentum.

So small wins early on create a feeling of progress,

and that feeling reinforces the belief which strengthens the expectation,

which improves the behavior, which generates more wins, and suddenly

the loop is running at full speed, almost without conscious effort.

Conversely, if you go too long without any feedback or evidence

that things are working, the belief starts to erode, the expectation

fades, the behavior drops off, and the loop

basically collapses and starts working in the opposite direction.

A lot of the times, which is why smart people design their process to include

frequent visible markers of progress, even when the big goal is still far away.

Now, the whole point of understanding

this loop is to really move from being a passive participant

to an active engineer of it, because once you realize

that the starting point is the belief and everything else cascades from there,

you can basically start being intentional about which beliefs you install and

in which beliefs you reinforce.

And belief selection isn't about lying to yourself or ignoring reality.

It's really about recognizing that

in the gray area between definitely true and definitely false,

there are beliefs you can choose to lean into that will produce

better behavior, better outcomes, and ultimately a better life.

And most of the beliefs that matter exist in this gray area.

They're not provably true.

They're not provably false.

They're just stories you tell yourself about what's possible and the story

you pick has a massive downstream effect that massive down downstream consequences.

So being intentional about this doesn't make you delusional.

It makes you strategic

because you're simply choosing to occupy the version of uncertainty

that gives you the best chance of getting where you want to go.

Now, once you've selected, I believe the next step

is really reinforcing it through action and evidence.

Because obviously beliefs that aren't supported by experience

and by action will eventually decay because there's nothing

reinforcing them, no matter how much you try to affirm them.

The fastest way to strengthen a belief is to act on it and watch what happens.

So take the action that the belief implies,

even if you don't fully believe it, because the action will generate evidence,

and the evidence will then strengthen the belief

in a way that no amount of thinking or journaling ever could.

No amount of repeating it to yourself every morning ever could.

So collect and pay attention

to the evidence that supports the belief, not in a confirmation bias.

Ignore everything else kind of way,

but in a deliberate effort to notice the signal that the loop is working.

Because your brain will default to noticing the negative

unless you actively direct its attention to the positive.

Now, with that said, let's talk about the belief audit.

So now you understand the science, you understand the loop,

and you understand what?

That your beliefs are producing real effects.

Whether you're paying attention to them or not.

Then the next question becomes obvious what beliefs are you actually running

right now?

Because most people have never really sat down and honestly examined this.

And that's a problem because you can't engineer something

you haven't inventoried.

So it started by looking at the four areas that matter

the most to your health, your wealth, your relationships, or your wealth

and work, your relationships and your sense of self.

For each one

right down, the 2 or 3 believes that are currently driving your behavior

in that area.

So what do you actually believe about your body, your discipline,

your ability to stay consistent with training and nutrition?

If the honest answer is something like I always fall off after a few weeks, or

I just don't have the genetics for it,

that's a nocebo running in the background, and it's costing you more than you think

in terms of wealth and your work.

What do you believe about your ability to earn, to build,

to create something valuable?

If there's a quiet voice saying, people like me

don't make that kind of money or it's too late to start.

That belief is shaping your behavior every single day,

and the loop is reinforcing it every time you hesitate or placement

in terms of your love and relationships,

what do you believe about your worthiness of love?

Your ability to connect, your capacity to show up fully

for the people in your life?

To be a good friend.

To be a good son or daughter.

To be a good wife or husband.

To be a good dad or mom.

These beliefs are often the most deeply buried

and the most damaging because they were usually installed

earliest and have had the longest time to compound.

And then for the aspect of self,

what do you believe about who you are at the core, about your potential,

your intelligence, your resilience, your spirituality,

your right to take up space and pursue ambitious things?

This is the identity and spirituality layer, and it's the most powerful one,

because beliefs at this level don't just influence what you do,

they really determine what you think is even possible for someone like you.

Whatever that means.

So once you've written them down, right

rate each belief on a simple scale.

Is this belief producing useful behavior or is it

keeping me stuck and don't over complicate it.

Say yes or no.

Basically, it's a

useful behavior,

positive behavior or negative behavior.

That's it.

And you'll almost immediately know

which beliefs are really serving you and which ones they're quietly sabotaging

because the evidence is already visible in your results.

So the beliefs that are serving you will have clear evidence in your life.

You'll be able to point to actions you've taken, risks

that you've embraced, progress you've made that traces back

directly to what you believe about yourself.

In that domain.

Now, the beliefs that are

sabotaging you will also have clear evidence as well.

Right?

It's the nocebo is it just won't look like evidence at first.

It will look like avoidance, procrastination, half hearted attempts,

and a pattern of starting things but not finishing them.

Or not even trying really, all of which are downstream

symptoms of a belief that's running the loop in the wrong direction.

So for every belief you've identified as sabotaging,

you write down the belief you need to hold

in order to produce better behavior.

Now, the ability to believe you wish you had not some affirmation

you saw on Instagram or on Pinterest, but the specific belief that

if you genuinely held it would change the way you show up tomorrow morning.

Now, the

replacement belief needs to be specific enough to actually generate

different behavior, because vague beliefs produce vague actions, right?

I believe in myself is really useless.

I am a God is useless.

I believe that if I train consistently for 12 weeks, my body will respond

is a belief that produces a specific action, and that specificity

is what gives the loop something to work with.

Now the best replacement beliefs are once you can basically

test through action within the next seven days

because like we talked about earlier, you need feedback.

Beliefs that aren't supported by experience will decay.

They need feedback.

They need to feedback in order to be reinforced.

So the fastest way to install a new belief is to really act on it

immediately, and then let the evidence start building.

So if the gap between your current belief

and the replacement is too wide, you'll most likely reject it.

And this is why sometimes setting humongous goals

works in the opposite way.

You will most likely reject them.

And and the beliefs and whether we were talking about beliefs or goals, whatever,

you most likely reject them.

And it won't take hold. It won't produce change.

So in that case,

use a

graduate graduated approach meaning don't jump from I'll never be successful

to I'm destined for greatness, which is also pretty vague by the way.

Start with I'm capable of making progress this week.

If I show work consistently, I'm capable of

getting ten responses this week from potential clients.

If I just put the work in

and let the evidence build from there.

Or I can get five responses this week,

or I can lose half a pound this week.

In fact, if I just go to the gym and dial in my nutrition

and then the evidence will start compounding.

So once you've identified your replacement beliefs, look at your environment

and ask whether it's reinforcing the old belief or the new one.

Because the environment around you, everything you have around yourself,

the people, the objects you have around you will be reinforcing something, right?

They're reinforcing a belief, otherwise they won't be there.

They came to be because of a belief.

And so they're reinforcing that same belief.

So the people you spend time with, the content you consume,

the physical spaces you operate in, your daily rituals and routines.

All of these act as belief reinforcement systems.

And if they're set up to support the old belief,

the new one won't really survive, no matter how many times

you write that in your journals.

So the people around you are one of the most powerful belief

reinforcement mechanisms you have, because their expectations of you

become your expectations of yourself, often without you even realizing it.

If you're trying to install a belief about being capable of building something

extraordinary, but everyone around you treats ambition

as naive or

delusional and in a bad way.

Then you're fighting a losing battle.

So your daily rituals, the

things you do first thing in the morning as well,

the way you start your work sessions, the way you end your day.

These are all as well, moments where beliefs get reinforced or eroded.

For example, if you believe that you're super busy

and you don't have time for your relationships

because of your business will, that will get reinforced in the morning.

It'll get reinforced in the evenings.

And.

Design them intentionally.

Right.

Stack the deck in favor of the belief you're trying to install.

So if you're trying to have more time for your family

after working on your business all day, then

design your rituals in the evening to basically showcase

that, to reinforce the belief that you do have time for your family.

For example, and make the old belief harder to access

by removing the triggers and the cues that keep activating.

Now, this isn't a one time exercise, so you need to run this on it

regularly, ideally every week or two, every month at least.

For some people,

the multiple times a week,

because beliefs shift and

and new ones get installed without your permission,

and old ones creep back in the moment you start paying attention.

So the audit is how you maintain conscious control

over the one thing that sits upstream of everything else in your life.

So a lightweight

version of this can be done in ten minutes at the end of each each week.

Or if you have ten minutes every day and I, I doubt that

no, people want to have ten minutes at the end of their day.

You could do it every single day and just ask yourself three questions.

Would believe drove my best behavior this week or this day.

What belief held me back today or this week?

And what's the one belief I want to strengthen next week or tomorrow?

And it's that. That's it.

Literally simple, fast.

And it keeps the loop running in the right direction.

And it makes you aware of all of these things.

And the important thing

is to write it down and not do it in your head,

but on paper or in a document.

And actually write them down with the dates and the writing forces.

Clarity and clarity is what really turns a vague intention

into a concrete belief that your brain can actually work with.

So each time you do the audit, sit down and actually write and look for evidence

that your chosen beliefs are producing results.

And I would even say write those that evidence down as well.

Small wins, moments of courage, actions that you took,

that you wouldn't have taken six months ago and collect

this deliberately, almost like you're collecting testimonials for yourself

because they're the fuel that keeps the positive loop

spinning and makes the belief more doable over time.

And durable.

And beliefs don't change overnight,

and anyone who tells you otherwise is really most likely selling something.

So the the loop needs time to build momentum.

It give it at least 30 days of consistent action before you evaluate

whether a new belief is working, because the early period

will feel uncertain and uncomfortable.

And that's okay.

The discomfort isn't a sign that the belief is wrong.

It's a sign that the old pattern is losing its grip.

So the so expect the resistance because your your old beliefs have momentum.

They've been running the loop for years,

sometimes depending on how old you are for decades.

And they won't go quietly. Right?

There will be days where the old story feels more real

and more convincing than the new one, and that's fine.

The new belief doesn't need to feel true right away.

It just needs to produce better action, and the feeling of truth

will follow the evidence like everything else worth doing.

This compounds and it takes some time.

The first few weeks will feel like you're pushing a boulder uphill,

but once the loop catches and the evidence starts reinforcing the new belief,

the whole system starts accelerating on its own.

And what felt forced in the beginning starts to feel like who you actually are

now. With that said, let's talk about useful and truth.

And I've made a small spelling mistake here.

So here's something that ties all of this together in a way

that might make some people uncomfortable, but it's worth sitting with,

which is a very large percentage of self-help advice is basically

just various methods of sneakily inducing beliefs in people.

Think about it, giving them concepts and ideas

that are just plausible enough to be true, but also not really dis provable.

And the genius of it is that it works.

It works anyway.

The conceptual packaging and the language around an idea

is often more important than the idea itself,

because it's the packaging that creates the belief,

and it's the belief that influences your actions,

and your actions influence your results, which is the whole chain

we've been talking about.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So think about any popular self-help concept that's changed how you operate.

Then think, chances are it wasn't really, really

the literal truth of the concept that helped you.

It was the way it reframed your thinking.

Maybe it gave you a new lens, or it made you feel like

you had a handle on something that previously felt chaotic.

And this is why it's so important

to continuously learn, read books, take courses, work with coaches,

and expose yourself to new ideas and ways of thinking, because

I will.

This is a side note here, but each new mental model

you acquire gives you another lens or perspective

through which you can view your situation and the world.

And the more of those you have available, the more freedom you have to choose

the interpretation that actually serves you instead of being stuck with whatever

meaning your default conditioning assigned.

So the mechanism isn't really truth.

We're not talking about being about finding truth here.

It's belief.

And belief doesn't require truth to function.

It just requires enough plausibility to get your buy in.

And once it has your buy in the loop, we talked about kicks in and starts

producing real results.

Now, most of the criticism of this self-help industry is

that it might be pseudoscience and that it's not true.

To which the honest responses.

Yet some of it might be, but that's not really the point.

It's not trying to be true in the way that a physics textbook

is really trying to be true, or a history textbook is track to be accurate,

it's trying to be useful.

And those are fundamentally different goals.

The critics are applying the wrong standard of evaluation

because they're judging self-help by his correspondence to objective reality.

When the actual value of self-help is in its ability to shift

belief, which shifts behavior, which shifts outcomes

and then reinforces the belief.

The question isn't is is this true?

But does believing this produce better results

that are actions in my life?

And if the answer is yes, then it's doing its job,

regardless of whether it would pass a peer review.

Now it's all just basic evolutionary biology.

If you think about it, your brain was never designed to perceive reality

accurately, and most of us don't actually perceive reality accurately.

As much as we'd like to think that we do, even the people that are trying to be

objectively the most accurate, they still have their own biases.

It was designed to.

Your brain was designed to keep you alive.

Your perceptions, your emotions,

your pattern recognition, your threat detection systems.

All of it evolved not to show you what's actually true,

but to show you what's useful for survival.

So useful

and untrue isn't some philosophical trick you're learning for the first time.

It's literally how your brain

has been operating for hundreds of thousands of years now.

Daniel Kahneman's work on cognitive biases

and heuristics show that the brain is essentially a shortcut machine.

It doesn't process reality objectively and then give you a clean readout.

It takes fragments of information.

It fills in the gaps with assumptions, logical fallacies, biases,

heuristics, and presents the result as if it's the whole picture.

Every bias you've ever heard of, like confirmation bias.

Anchoring the availability heuristic.

These aren't bugs in the system.

They're features that evolved Because they were useful.

Not because there were necessarily true.

Your answers.

Ancestors didn't survive by carefully analyzing whether the

rustling in the bushes was a predator or just the wind.

They survived by assuming the worst and then running,

which is another useful and might be untrue belief

that kept them life alive long enough to pass on their genes.

So going for accuracy could have gotten them killed.

Speed and usefulness kept them breathing right.

The difference now

is that the threats have changed, but the operating system really hasn't.

You're still running

survival software in a world that rewards strategic belief selection,

which means the question isn't whether you're going to operate on useful

but untrue beliefs, because you already are.

The question is whether you're going to do it consciously,

or let a 200,000 year old thread

detection brain make those choices for you.

So the people who think they're being rational or objective

by only believing things that are empirically verified,

are actually misunderstanding their own biology

because their brain is already filtering

the sorting and constructing reality based on usefulness, not truth.

The other thing is, a lot of these empirically

verified things that they might believe and get changed over time.

They change.

New new research is done, new findings, happen.

And the what they believed before as being the objective,

objective truth is now not anymore the objective truth.

So they never really believe the objective truth in the first place.

The only difference between them and someone who consciously selects

their beliefs is that the conscious person knows that what they're actually doing.

So the feeling that you're seeing reality as it is, is itself

a useful and untrue belief.

The belief that your

you're looking at only objective reality and only objective truth,

can be seen as useful and untrue.

Your brain creates the illusion of objective perception

because that illusion is useful for navigating the world,

not because it's an accurate description of everything that's actually happening

at the level of physics, neuroscience, or information processing.

Once you really internalize this, it frees you.

You're not tricking yourself by choosing empowering beliefs, you're

just redirecting a system that was already running on useful

and untrue beliefs anyway, and you're now pointing it somewhere that serves you,

instead of somewhere that was optimized for avoiding reliance on this.

On the savanna.

Now, there's a principle that the smartest operators

across every field already understand intuitively,

even if they're never really articulated this way.

Every framework, every model, every theory

you use to really understand the world is just a map.

It's not the territory.

The map is never the thing itself.

The statistician George Bok said it best

when he said all models were wrong, and some are useful.

That single sentence contains basically

more practical wisdom than most philosophy textbooks, because think about

how the most successful investors, strategists and builders actually operate.

They don't sit around debating

whether their mental model is true in some ultimate sense.

They ask whether it's useful enough to really act on, and then they act.

Charlie Munger built one of the greatest investment

track records in history, not by seeking capital T truth,

but by collecting what he called a latticework of mental models,

useful frameworks from different disciplines that he could

apply to different situations depending on what the moment calls for.

And Munger didn't really care whether each model was perfectly true all the time.

He cared whether it was useful in the right context,

and he had enough of them

that he could always find the right lens for the situation in front of him.

And it's the same principle we've built,

we've been building towards this whole time.

The person with one model is trapped by it, because they're forced

to see everything through a single lens, through one single perspective.

The person with 20 models has freedom because they can choose the interpretation

that produces the best action, the best action for the specific situation there.

And so belief selection isn't about finding the one true belief,

it's about having a rich enough collection

of beliefs and of perspectives and mental models and lenses

that you can always find one that serves you.

And this maps directly onto everything we've covered the science of belief,

the self-fulfilling loop, the belief audit.

These are all maps as well.

They're not perfect representations of how reality works at every level.

They're useful representations that when believed and acted on.

Produce better behavior and better outcomes.

And that's all a map needs to be.

Even scientific theories work this way.

Newton's physics isn't really true in the way most people think,

because Einstein showed it breaks down at high speeds in extreme gravity.

But it's useful enough to land rockets on the moon, so we keep using it.

The theory gets replaced when a more useful one comes along,

not when someone proves it's false in some abstract sense.

So your personal beliefs operate on the same principle.

They don't need to be capital T true to generate real results,

they just need to be useful enough to change your behavior

in the right direction, and the results will speak for themselves.

And if you think this is a modern idea, the Stoics figured it out 2000 years ago.

Marcus Aurelius, arguably the most powerful man in the world

at the time, emperor of Rome

and the peak of its influence, spent his private evenings

basically writing to himself in what we now call the meditations.

And one of the core themes running through the entire text

is that you have the power to revoke any impression,

at any time you choose what things mean to you,

you choose which thoughts to entertain and which to dismiss.

He wrote, the things you think about determine the quality of your mind,

which is essentially the self-fulfilling loop.

He wasn't interested in

whether his beliefs mapped perfectly on to objective reality.

He was just interested in whether they produced virtue,

action, clarity, and the kind of inner stability that let him govern an empire.

While barbarians pressed every order

and the stoic framework was built around a single distinction.

What is in your control and what is not your circumstances?

Other people's actions?

The weather, the economy?

None of that is really in your control, but your judgments, your interpretations,

the meaning you assign to events that is entirely yours.

And that's where the entire game is played.

And Marcus Aurelius didn't just theorize about this.

He practiced daily and writing under the most extreme pressure imaginable.

He was running the largest empire on earth, dealing with plague,

war, betrayal, and the constant threat of assassination.

And his response was to sit down every night and deliberately choose

which beliefs to hold and which to release.

That's the belief ordered.

It's 2000 years before we gave it the name.

So this isn't really new, and it is in French.

From evolutionary biology to modern cognitive science to ancient philosophy.

The same principle keeps showing up.

The human mind was never built to perceive truth objectively.

It was built to construct useful interpretations

that drive effective action in the moment.

The only variable is

whether you're doing it on purpose or letting it happen by accident, right?

When evolution neuroscience, the greatest investors and the Roman emperor

who held the fate of millions in his hands all converge on the same insight,

I would say it's probably worth paying attention to.

The insight is pretty simple.

You can choose your beliefs by what they produce,

not by whether they're true, because truth is a moving target

nowadays, and usefulness is what actually changes your life.

And this is the foundation for everything that comes next.

Because once you accept that useful not true

is how you how the mind has always worked, you stop resisting belief selection

and start treating it as a serious, consequential,

life altering practice that it actually is.

Now, before this starts sounding like an argument

for living in a fantasy world, I want to be clear about something.

The goal should always be to move closer to objective reality,

not further away from it.

So I'm not arguing against that reality exists.

It's knowable.

And your life gets better.

The more accurately,

accurately you can perceive it,

navigate it, and respond to what's actually in front of you.

That's not up for debate, right?

There is a reality that exists independent of your feelings,

your wishes, and your interpretations and your job is to understand

it as clearly as possible and act accordingly.

But the thing that most people miss when they hear the useful

and untrue framework is that it doesn't contradict objective reality.

It actually serves it

because

the reality of being human is that there is always a gap

between where you are and where objective truth lives.

You never have perfect information.

You never have complete clarity.

And in that gap, which is where you spend the vast majority

of your waking life, you need something to act on.

You need a working belief that gets you moving

right, that gets you taking action.

And the argument isn't that you should pick

a comfortable delusion and stay there forever.

The argument is that in the space between ignorance and certainty,

you should pick the belief that drives you towards more truth,

towards more certainty, not the one that keeps you frozen.

And you can think of it this way.

Objective reality is the destination.

Useful beliefs are the vehicle, the belief.

I can figure this out might not be objectively provable

in the moment you adopt it,

but it drives you to investigate, to experiment, to test, to gather

data, to iterate on which moves you closer to objective reality.

Don't know. See or belief?

I'll never understand.

This does the exact opposite.

It stops any form of inquiry.

It keeps you further from the truth in your word before you adopted it.

So which belief is more aligned with objective reality?

The one that moves you towards reality makes you take action with reality,

or the one that makes you give up before you get there.

This is the reconciliation that most people never make

because they think useful and untrue means abandoning truth.

It doesn't.

It doesn't really mean that it means being strategic about

which beliefs you hold in the interim.

Precisely because truth matters and you want to get closer to it.

So the best useful beliefs are the ones that maximize your contact

with reality, that push you to engage, to test, to learn,

to update your understanding based on actual evidence.

So if I believe makes you more curious, more investigative, more willing

to test your assumptions and update based on what you find,

then it's moving you towards objectivity, right?

Even if it's not perfectly true in the moment you adopt it.

If a belief makes you less curious, more avoidant, more certain,

without evidence, then it's moving you away from reality because

you're not actually doing anything.

You're not really engaging with reality

regardless of how realistic quote unquote, it sounds.

So the real danger was never useful and untrue.

Beliefs.

The real danger it is beliefs that masquerade as just being realistic

and masquerade as being true or objective,

while actually keeping you disengaged from reality.

So, like I'm not smart enough.

Feels like humility, but the system.

But so I'm not smart enough can feel like humility.

The system is rigged.

I can feel like awareness.

But both of them function as exit ramps from engagement with the real world.

From reality. Right? It makes you just give up.

And that makes them the most anti reality beliefs you can hold, in my opinion,

because they reduce your contact with reality instead of increasing it.

So the

standard shouldn't be that a belief is perfectly, precisely true.

Right now the standard should be.

Does a belief drive you to engage with reality more deeply?

That's more rigor.

Test more rigorously, learn

more aggressively, and improve more.

And if yes, it's serving reality, even if it's not fully true yet,

even if it hasn't been fully verified yet.

If no, it's a liability, no matter how rational it sounds on the surface.

And this is exactly how science itself works.

Every hypothesis starts as a useful but not yet proven belief, right?

I think this molecule might cure this disease isn't necessarily true

when the researcher adopts it, but it's useful because it drives

the experiments that eventually determine whether it's true.

If the researcher instead believed there's probably no cure,

nothing ever happens, and the truth never gets discovered, right?

Useful beliefs are the engine of truth seeking, not the enemy of it.

So treat your useful beliefs like software versions.

They're not permanent.

They're the best you have right now,

and you upgrade them the moment you find something better.

The commitment isn't to the belief itself, it's to the process of moving

towards truth.

And useful beliefs are simply the best vehicle for making that journey.

And the practical takeaway from all of this

is that most things in life are genuinely hard to know for sure,

so you might as well defer to believing whatever is most helpful

for you and the people around you.

And I'm not talking about you being lazy with your thinking.

It's just the smart way to operate

when certainty isn't available, which is almost always.

Now, that might make the more scientifically minded people,

a bit uncomfortable, because there's this deeply held assumption that every belief

needs to be empirically verified before you're allowed to hold it.

But there's something,

but here's something obvious that we all tend to overlook.

We already operate on useful and untrue beliefs

all the time in basically every area that matters to us.

Think about money.

A dollar bill is just a piece of paper with ink on it, right?

There is nothing objectively valuable about it.

Its entire power comes from a shared, useful,

and untrue belief that it's actually worth something,

and that belief is so deeply embedded that entire civilizations run on it.

The global economy,

your salary, the price of your house, all of it rests on a collective agreement

to treat something as valuable that has no inherent value whatsoever.

Nobody demands empirical proof that a dollar is really worth a dollar.

We just act as if it is.

And that shared belief makes the entire system work.

So holding useful, not true beliefs isn't.

Some radical philosophical position is the default human operating mode.

And the only difference is whether you do it consciously

and strategically or unconsciously and randomly.

Now this framework judging beliefs by their usefulness

rather than their correspondence to some abstract reality,

gives us a genuinely practical way to think about how to build your life

because it frees you from the paralysis of needing to know whether something

is really true before you're willing to take action,

it gives you permission to adopt beliefs that serve you to lean into frameworks

that produce better behavior, and to stop waiting for certainty

before you start moving, because certainty almost never comes,

and the people who wait

for it tend to really stay exactly where they are.

So judge ideas by the actions they inspire and produce,

not by their literal accuracy of believing you can accomplish anything you commit

to makes you more likely to succeed, then you might as well believe it,

because the truth of the belief matters less than is utility,

and utility is what actually changes your life.

So where does all of this leave us?

It leaves us with something simpler and more powerful than any single framework.

Nothing has inherent meaning things, events, circumstances, setbacks, wins.

None of it comes preloaded with significance.

We as humans like to give stuff meaning and significance, but things just happen.

The meaning is always, always assigned by the person experiencing it.

And that assignment can happen at any point in any direction for any reason.

You choose.

This is the layer underneath everything we've talked about so far.

Because belief doesn't just appear out of thin air,

it grows from the meaning you assign to your situation,

to your identity, to your potential, and to your past.

Change the meaning and you change the belief.

Change the belief.

And like we said earlier, you change the expectation, the behavior,

and eventually the outcome.

So think about Alexander the Great, for example.

By any rational standards, a young king from a small northern Greek

kingdom has no business trying to conquer the entire world.

But Alexander assigned a meaning to his life that was so enormous, so total.

He literally believed he was a God, that it reorganized everything around it

his risk tolerance, his decision

making, his ability to inspire thousands of men to march into territory.

No Greek army had ever been into.

The meaning he chose became

the engine that made the impossible feel inevitable.

Julius Caesar, another example, did the same thing he crossed the Rubicon not

because the odds were really in his favor, but because he had already decided

what his life meant and retreating didn't feel, didn't really fit that story.

So he became dictator in perpetuity.

For a while, he decided that what his life meant acted accordingly,

and then ended up holding the most absolute title Rome had ever given anyone.

The meaning he assigned to himself and his mission made

the boldest possible action feel like the only logical one.

And that's the thing about meaning.

Once you truly assign it, it doesn't just influence

your behavior, it eliminates the alternatives.

And this is the real principle underneath all the science,

the loops, the philosophy.

You are the one who decides what things mean.

Not your circumstances, not your past, not the people around you.

You assign the meaning, and the meaning generates the belief, and the belief runs

the loop, and the little loop produces the life at its core.

This is incredibly simple.

Just decide what your work means to you.

Decide what your setbacks mean, decide what your potential means,

and then watch how that decision ripples forward into everything you do.

Because it will, whether you're conscious of it or not.

And in practice, this means regularly auditing

not just your beliefs, but the meanings underneath them.

Asking yourself whether the significance you're assigning to

your situation is producing the behavior and outcomes you want,

or whether it's quietly keeping you small, cautious,

and stuck in a version of reality that doesn't really serve you.

Ultimately, this

is all about taking full ownership of the one thing you actually control,

which is the meaning you assign to your experience.

You're thinking most people let meaning happen to them.

They inherit beliefs and meaning from their environment.

They absorb it from their culture.

And never one stop to ask whether the story they're living inside is one.

They actually choose the people who do stop and ask, the ones who deliberately

assign meaning that drives bigger action and deeper commitment.

They tend to be the ones who build lives that look impossible

from the outside, but feel inevitable from the inside.

So don't let the meaning be an accident.

Don't let your circumstances tell you what they need you tell them.

Take the meaning that makes you dangerous, useful, and alive,

and then commit to it hard enough that the loop has time to do what it does.

Because the loop always works.

It works for people who assign an empowering meaning,

and it works for people who assign limiting meaning.

The only question is

which direction you're going to point towards.

So with that said, let's cover the review.

We talked about the overview, the science of belief,

the self-fulfilling loop, the belief audit useful and untruth,

the review and your action items for the day or the next few days.

First, sit down and identify 3 to 5 core beliefs

that are currently driving your behavior and the areas of your life

that matter most.

And honestly assess whether those beliefs are producing

the outcomes you want or quietly keeping you stuck.

Choose one belief that you know would produce better behavior

if you fully adopted it right down.

Write it down, and commit to acting as if it's true for the next 30 days,

paying close attention to how it changes your expectations, your

effort, and your results.

And then finally, design a daily practice of collecting evidence

that supports your chosen belief, whether that's journaling wins, tracking

progress, or simply noticing moments where the belief led to better action.

Because the loop needs fuel to keep running

and evidence is the best fuel there is.

With that being said, if you want to work with me one on one on

all of this, make sure to book a call from the link in the description.

If you want this document along with this training,

make sure to join the free community again from the link in the description.

And if you want weekly emails on how to improve your health, wealth,

love and self,

and make sure to join the newsletter from the link in the description.

As always, thank you for being here.

Thank you for watching and I'm going to see you in the next one.