Divergent desires. How to help your higher-self win.

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One of the challenges we’re going to have to overcome in entrepreneurship, in business, is going to be when it comes to divergent desires. When one part of us wants to behave a certain way and another part of us wants to behave a different way, how can we work this thing so that we are making the right choice? the choice that we make when we’re alert, when we’re attentive, when we are thinking from a higher place rather than the choices we might make based on emotion, based on comfort, based on pride, greed, lust,

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whatever it might be. So, how how can we do this work? How can we improve our chances that we make the right choices, the right decisions? Because again, business is all about making the right decisions. And if we can improve our ability to do so in moments where we might want to not make the right decision, we can see a better outcome in the future. All right? So there’s going to be or let me give you an example first. So an example of divergent wants. Let’s say you want to start waking up

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earlier. You see the benefits of it. You can be more productive in the morning. Whatever it is, you just start to you want to wake up earlier. And another part of you or or say you go to bed and you wake up the next morning, your alarm goes off and it’s 4:55 a.m. in the morning. And another part of you wants to stay in bed. It wants to stay in the warmth of your sheets. It wants the comfort. It wants to just sleep in um till when you normally sleep in. In that moment, we’re dealing with divergent

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goals. One is a goal is a is a is a divergent or one desires um a path that you decided on based on rational thought based on the higher self of your potential and what you would like um for your own um self, right? One that you know is better for you. The other desire comes from emotions, from our lizard brain, from um those desires, right? So, how can we create? How can we make this desire the one that is um the one that you want the one that you truly want to take, the one that your higher self wants to take. How can

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we make that the default outcome? And there’s two ways to go about this. Um both are valid and both both are useful and I think we should be working on both. The first is the willpower method. It is just training your willpower like a muscle in order to make those decisions. And how I see it is when you deal with these divergent desires, these divergent wants. Let’s say one the desire that you want to take, the one that is, let’s say, like eating healthy versus eating a donut. Let’s say your

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desire to eat a donut is way up here and your desire to eat healthy is kind of down here. This gap is going to have to be bridged through willpower. And so the question is how can we start developing our willpower, right? And there’s a lot of theories about willpower. For example, some people might say, hey, willpower is stronger in the morning. Um that’s why when you go into the later um at night, you’re more likely to make um like more willpower mistakes. You’re more likely to relapse on something

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you’ve been trying to avoid and so on. Um, so here’s a couple of ideas that I found very truthful for myself and I would recommend that you go and check it out. Try it out yourself and see how it works for you. The first is going to be that willpower builds up along the way. Small wins when I make small willpower decisions, a decision to wake up a bit earlier, wake up on the first alarm, wake up um and instead of scrolling, just come out and do whatever. um that builds small wins build make your bed that’s why making

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your bed was such this um such a movement for a while because making your bed was a small win. So momentum builds throughout the day. Can you start off how can you set the conditions such that you can start with small wins and setting conditions alludes to the second method. So willpower on one method and um creating better conditions such that you don’t have these temptations that the default outcome is going to be your um higher self desire. But anyway back to point one. So building how can you create small wins

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throughout the day. The second one is the idea that willpower can you can develop your willpower as you go on in time. So, an infant might not have that much willpower, but if you’ve been working on this thing, if like a muscle, if you’ve been training it, if you’ve been constantly pushing yourself to make harder decisions, things that are more difficult, going to the gym when you don’t feel like it, um taking a cold shower, all these things where you might not want to, where you know it’s

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beneficial for you, that is an opportunity for you to stretch and exercise your willpower. And so when it comes to those bigger and larger gaps, you’re able to exercise more willpower into it. A lot of the times the people who haven’t done that work aren’t able to bridge that gap when it comes to divergent desires that are too um diverse in levels of desire. The third one is going to be mindfulness is going to be awareness of what’s going on in this internal conflict in your mind. And meditation, mindfulness

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meditation is a great exercise for this. You can do five minutes a day, five minutes every other day. But the point is to become very aware of these subconscious thoughts that are going on. And what you’ll realize is a lot of these thoughts are conscious, but they’re just largely igno ignored. They’re like background noise. And when you tune into this background noise, you can see the common patterns and thought processes going on. and the emotional desires, the reptilian brain, the

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reptilian reptilian mind that wants a lot of these desires with attention and awareness, a lot of that just disappears. So the desires for whatever it was before um comes down and while your desires for the right thing to do um maintains itself. So you need less willpower to bridge that gap. All right, so that’s the willpower method. um if you aren’t going out there, if you aren’t making small wins, if you aren’t pushing yourself to make harder and harder willpower decisions, and if you

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aren’t um practicing mindfulness on a regular basis, I do think you’re missing out on a lot of the ability to overcome a lot of emotional um decision-m. The second thing that uh I briefly went over is going to be how can we create the conditions so that we don’t have to have this huge gap in willpower. And this is the I would argue um just as important if not more important than the willpower method because what if we could create conditions where you never had to rely on willpower and because the

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world isn’t perfect that’s never going to be the case. There’s going to be times where your willpower is tested, which is why it’s so important to also develop your willpower. But at the same time, can we create the conditions so that you don’t have to um have your willpower tested at critical moments. So when we blend the two, we actually find that we want to test our willpower. We want we want it tested, right? So that’s why I I recommend you introduce like small willpower tests for

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very um like low risk things like I don’t I don’t say go and test your willpower um trying out drugs or something but try it for something like instead of at at the grocery store. You can buy something healthier and kind of resist uh getting something that you want to get something that isn’t healthy for you. And back to point one resistance. So I would include this as number four. Resisting is one of the strongest things you can do when it comes to developing willpower. It’s not doing something that

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is like going to the gym is very good. Yes. But also resisting something is also in itself just as valuable as doing something. So when when I say like test your willpower, res also resist um doing things that you know you shouldn’t be doing. All right. Um, so back to number two. How can we create conditions for willpower? And this is going to be the shift is how can we let’s say we want to wake up earlier in the morning. How can we create the conditions such that we’re going to want to do that as the default

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action? And it could be things like just sleeping in earlier. As simple as that. sleeping in earlier and making it so for for the next couple days you’re going to sleep in earlier. So you make it so that you naturally wake up at 4:55 and and then in the future coming days you can start, you know, pushing back when you sleep so that you can um now not wake up like you get what I’m saying? Like it’s not like you’re waking up without an alarm anymore, but you can have an alarm assist you to wake up. You

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can still get the amount of sleep that you need, but you fixed it. Like you’ve you’ve gotten to this place where now that becomes the default, right? the willpower to get up out of bed at that time um is reduced because your desire to stay in isn’t as strong as before. There’s less inertia there. And I could go on and on about all the different ways to do this, but there’s not it’s not going to look the same. And I think you get the idea that you need to start identifying these patterns.

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Start figuring out what are the how can I create the conditions to make my choice better and start to creatively take that approach. Um that is the most important part to the creative process of it. The process where you go and experiment and try is going to be much better than um anyone telling you hey this is how you should fix your sleep. This is how you should get your um whatever it is. this is how you should start doing whatever um habit it is because there’s so many conditions that need to be improved like

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this that if you just rely on people telling you how to do it, you’ll never figure out the process itself of how to arrive at those conclusions yourself. Um so that is going to be arguably much more important. All right. So, um, kind of long-winded today, but I thought it was very important because we’re going to be faced, you’re going to face so many situations where you have divergent wants, divergent desires, and your willpower is going to be really tested. And in those moments, it’s going to

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really define um your ability to make good decisions. So, hope this video was helpful. Go make better decisions and I’ll see you in the next one.