Why Mindset Alone Isn't Enough for Success

There's a popular lie in self-help that's been told since the beginning, and it's often packaged in cute little phrases. Success is 100% mindset. Whether you think you can or can't, you're right. Mind over matter. You can do anything you put your mind to. Mindset is the opioid of the self-help world. Your mindset. It's something so ingrained in the culture that it's rarely ever questioned. It promises the keys to motivation, accomplishment, and even achieving your dreams.

Now, you can change what you are. You can change where you are by changing what goes into your mind. Now, while it is true that how you see the world affects your happiness, motivation, and your satisfaction, it's not as simple as so many people make it out to be. So, I want to share an alternative to the common advice we hear around mindset. But first, let's break down the reasons why this advice falls short. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. More on them later. First, and I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but no, you can't do anything you put your mind to. Reading one book on card counting and trying to beat the casinos, I wouldn't try it.

Venturing off by yourself to a remote part of Alaska with no experience, battling the elements and hoping it works out, not a great idea. committing your life to being in the NBA even though you're under five foot tall. I don't love those odds. There are some things in life that are truly impossible or nearly impossible. Thinking that your belief system will make you the exception is more a sign of delusion than strength. So whenever someone said to me, "It can't be done, I heard it can be done." And when they said it's impossible, I heard it is possible. I'm not saying that we should shoot down people's dreams or tell children that they can't be astronauts. I mean, imagine if someone went back in time and convinced Arnold Schwarzenegger that he

would never grow up to father a child with his living housekeeper. I mean, these are our heroes, people. You know, what do you want me to say? But just because it's important as humans to pursue crazy goals or difficult dreams doesn't mean that positive thinking alone is going to get you across the finish line. One of the most important challenges to the mindset is everything narrative comes from the authors of scarcity, the true cost of not having enough. Authors Elder Shafir and Santiel Mulanathan detail in their research how scarcity, whether it's lack of money, time, or sleep, doesn't just make life logistically harder. It actually changes how your brain functions. When people are under conditions of scarcity, their mental

bandwidth shrinks. Cognitive capacity drops. planning, impulse control, long-term thinking, all the things self-help tells you to just do better become immeasurably harder. The authors write, "Because we're preoccupied by scarcity, because our minds constantly return to it, we have less mind for the rest of life." In some studies, financial stress temporarily reduced cognitive performance by the equivalent of losing a full night's sleep. Telling someone to fix their mindset is a lot like telling someone who's depressed to just think positive. Great advice. I wish I thought of that sooner. If you think you can will yourself to better mental health, you clearly haven't struggled with mental health before.

Mindset is often a reflection of your genetics, history, and environment. That's not to say that people can't improve their outlook in life. They can. It's just that for some people, it's going to be more difficult. If you're juggling bills you can't pay, working two jobs, raising kids, and running on four hours of sleep, you're not failing because you didn't have the right mindset. Your brain is operating under an immense load. Scarcity shifts your focus towards the most urgent problem in front of you, which makes it harder to think strategically about the future or to just think positively. While I've certainly faced challenges in my life,

nothing prepared me for becoming a parent and specifically the sleep deprivation that came from hourly wakeups for 10 months straight. I can tell you firsthand there is literally no amount of positive thinking that can compensate for months of broken sleep. You can't manifest your way out of exhaustion. Simply changing your mindset or outlook won't magically put you on the path to bettering your circumstances. When you're waking up at midnight, 2 a.m., 4:00 a.m., and again at 6:00 a.m., the problem isn't belief. And this experience permanently changed how I think about self-help because during that period of my life, I didn't need a new affirmation to change my outlook. I just needed sleep. For some people, self-help books and motivational videos can absolutely

pull them out of a rut. For others, what they actually need is therapy, medication, support, more income, fewer hours at work, better child care, a social safety net, a better environment. Do you want to do some editing with da? You don't? That's okay. I don't want to edit either. In my case, it wasn't a magic phrase that improved my mindset. It was solving the sleep problem. It was trying different methods. It was getting support. It was finally changing the conditions. Once the environment improved, my mindset followed. There's another big reason that the mind over matter advice not only falls flat, but can actually do more harm than good.

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website or domain. Thanks so much to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. You might think that blind optimism is a trait of highly successful people. After all, that's what we see in movies, motivational videos, and triumphant stories of elite athletes. Failure wasn't an option. They only imagine success in their mind's eye. If you can't control your own brain and your brain controls you, you're and all of that you learned from your own brain. You didn't Google this. I couldn't spell Google back then. Except inflating our belief system to think that you can do anything with the right mindset not only creates delusions of grander, it can also backfire and lead to an even higher likelihood that

you fail. Psychologist Gabrielle Oden has spent decades studying positive thinking and motivation. Her book, Rethinking Positive Thinking, details her research on the latest science of motivation. What she found was that pure positive visualization often backfires. Positive thinking turns out to be not as much as it is promised through the conventional wisdom. Basically, when people daydream about the lives they want to live, careers they want to build, goals they want to attain, and they don't acknowledge obstacles, they actually put in less effort and perform worse. The problem with motivating yourself through pure fantasy is that optimism feels a lot like progress.

You picture the applause, the success, the transformation, but when you visualize the reward and ignore the friction, your brain partially relaxes as if you've already achieved it. Her research showed that this kind of unchecked optimism can actually reduce effort. For those who rely on positive thinking, the first real obstacle that you face, ends up becoming a sign to quit instead of something that you can expect and plan for. She calls the effective alternative mental contrasting. So imagining success and the real obstacles in the way, it works because it grounds your effort in reality. This is pragmatic optimism. When you're overly optimistic, you fail to see the challenges that might get in your way. When you aren't optimistic

enough, that's when you get discouraged and you probably won't try to begin with. When I started this YouTube channel in 2017, I didn't think it was a guaranteed path to success. Hey guys, what's going on? Welcome. I think Am I recording? I am recording. We're going. We're doing it. Hey guys, welcome to the podcast. My name's uh this is not a podcast. this go. If you asked me back then the likelihood that I could turn this into a full-time living, I'd have said I had about a 15% chance. That was a high enough probability for me to try. It was also low enough for me to be realistic about the obstacles I was going to face.

Potentially years without getting any views, an endless cycle of self-doubt and negative comments, facing the steep learning curve of how to build a successful channel before there were really any content or courses on the subject. What's an imi? uh to ask me anything. So then Patreon members can ask me anything and then I'll make a little podcast answering people's questions. Oh, cool. That's really good. Yeah, I think you'll get a lot of people. Yeah, you have a lot of following there. A lot of people that are interested in your stuff.

Knowing the challenges I would face allowed me to put together a more concrete plan for how to tackle each. Because of some good old-fashioned grit, fortunate timing, and a lot of luck, my career as a YouTuber ended up going much better than I ever could have expected. And it never would have happened without a mix of positive thinking and a good dose of humility. Looking back, the path that I approached fits very well with the formula that Gabrielle Oden created as a solve for people who put too much weight on positive thinking. It's a four-step process that she calls Whoop. Each letter stands for a different step in the process. First, identify a specific, challenging, and attainable

goal or a wish, like I want to exercise three days a week. Then, visualize the best possible outcome of achieving this goal and how it'll make you feel. You might imagine yourself feeling better, more energized, and stronger. Next, identify the inner obstacles, the emotions, the bad habits, and thoughts that might get in your way, like the fact that you often get frustrated when you don't have enough time for your full workout. Finally, create an if then plan to overcome these obstacles. So, if you get frustrated because you don't have enough time, then you'll put on your running shoes and just commit to 5 minutes. Whoop works because it leverages positive thinking while also planning for all the things that might

get in your way. Instead of being surprised by doubt or laziness, you anticipate it and decide in advance how you'll respond. That simple if then structure reduces reliance on willpower and increases follow-through. It keeps hope intact while grounding your efforts in reality. So, if I were to edit the popular self-help catchphrases to be a bit more accurate, I'd say success is 33% mindset. Whether you think you can or can't, it's probably more about your environment and ability to plan for obstacles. You can do a lot of things you put your mind to. Your only limit is your mind, but also gravity. Goals aren't reached by belief alone. They're achieved by facing reality, adjusting

when things don't work out, and staying hopeful without being naive. That might not sound as catchy as mind over matter, but I think it's more honest.