Do you have the job you dreamed of as a kid? Do you have the ideal partner you always thought you'd have? If not....why? Why don't you have the health, wealth, love, and happiness you have always craved? Enter Outwitting The Devil by Napolean Hill.
Hill is the father of personal development and author of "Think and Grow Rich" - the first self development book about how your thoughts control your reality. In this book Hill sits down and interviews the Devil about how he is able to control the minds of men, woman, and children. And though the book was written in the 1930's it is hauntingly applicable to today. The first method of control is called "Hypnotic Rhythym".
School, Church, and Government all lull you into complacency by not teaching you how to think for yourself.
If you are like me, you wake up one day asking yourself how you got to where you are. Why'd you choose the career you did? Why did you pursue the relationships you did? And why the hell do you believe all the things that you do? Most of our lives are on autopilot. We were never taught, or learned for ourselves, just how to think properly. We look to the next diet guru to tell us what to eat. We look to the government and president to fix our financial problems. We look to churches to ease the discomfort of uncertainty for what happens after death. We are looking completely outside ourselves for answers. We are full of fear and can't tolerate uncertainty. One of my mentors always says:
"The Wolves Eat The Sheep"
Everyone is looking to be told what to do. We all just want someone to tell us things are going to be OK and give us some type of direction. Since we desire certainty and direction the schools, churches, and governments give us exactly what we want. They are the wolves who give us a path to follow. They lull us with hypnotic rhythym with fear and a desire for completion. But there never is completion. After grade school you go to college, then you get a job, maybe get a promotion, retire, and thennnn you die. We are all chasing an illusion.
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.” - Fight Club
Those who can rise above the uncertainty are the wolves, or in this book friends of the devil. Wolves can think for themselves and tolerate uncertainty. Wolves get what they want out of life.
How To Become a Wolf?
You have to learn how to think for yourself. How to make your own decisions. If you have blindly followed your parents, advertisements, and other authorities your whole life it can be scary to venture out and decide what you actually want to believe. Questioning belief systems are no joke and barely anyone actually does it. This is why wars start - an inability to try on a different perspective without judgement. Our brains don't want us to question beliefs, its calorically expensive and we want to save calories. So start small.
Make tiny decisions every day. As many a day as you can stand. As simple as "I decide to put my right shoe on first". You need to train your brain to trust your decision making ability.
"Neurons that fire together, wire together."
When you slowly build that self trust muscle especially in regards to decision making you can actually sit there and when someone offers you a piece of advice you can take it or leave it. Now I'm not sayin' don't trust experts. We don't have enough time in the day to try everything out for ourselves. But blindly accepting advice is the hallmark of a sheep and the quality of your life will be reduced if you don't question things as soon as possible. (You could argue that a sheep doesn't know they are a sheep so why's it matter but just indulge in the imperfect analogy for me). I do know that I think the deathbed forces these questions to come up anyway so we might as well deal with them now while we have the capacity to change things.
I think the scary part is that Hill wrote this in the 1930's saying the school system was fucked. Saying that the religious institutions blindly pass on idealogies without questioning them. It's been almost 90 years since than and nothing has been done. So what now?
-Dylan
