How to Free Your Mind

Scott Ely TedX Talk

I was invited to give this TEDx Talk at Northwestern University on May 15, 2015. The theme of the event was Beautiful Chaos.

Transcription

Good afternoon. I hope can live up to that introduction. I should have set the bar low and asked these guys to say something like “Scott Ely is alive and lives in Chicago.”

So how is everybody feeling? You have enough mental energy left for one more talk? I promise I’ll make it as engaging as I can—more like a conversation—but I am going to try to make you think. I’m going to question that mental capacity that we just said we have we all have some left off because it’s important to take a look and see if you’re chained by chaos.

By “chained by chaos,” I mean all these things we put into our lives that hold us back and take our time. Our collective trains of thought are derailing and it’s likely there’s going to be no survivors, unless we intervene. But what if your mind could be as free as the feeling of standing at the top of a mountain? What if you could make it through this whole talk without wanting to grab your phone even once to check your email? What if the “more” you want out of life was as simple is as not being held back by these chains?

So let me ask a quick question: Who here wants less out of life?! Good … nobody, that would have made my talk a lot more difficult! We all want more out of life. We all want more fun, more travel, more excitement, more impact; but we let these things hold us back. The problem — and the solution —lies in your adaptive brain. For the nerds, its neuroplasticity.

We’ve got this great thing from evolution where we have the ability to adapt and restructure our brain as needed. It’s a very powerful thing but it can easily be hacked and it gets manipulated all the time on multiple levels. And a lot of times it’s being manipulated by that person that’s looking back at you in the mirror. They pull some on the most insidious of Jedi mind tricks on you.

So we’re going to take a short journey today through the path to finding more from your life. The destination is up to you. But a path to the solution exists, if you’re willing to free your mind. But let let me step back and tell a quick story about how I start seeking more in my life.

Back around the year 2000 I was working in software. It was a fun time to be and software and technology because it was the first dot-com boom, so there was a lot of money and fun and travel. I was living overseas at the time and I’d just moved from London to Amsterdam where I was working for new start-up. And then one night, everything changed.

Everyone has their own story about when the 9/11 attacks happened. I think what it did was amplify whatever you had going on with you already and made it made it a lot worse or a lot better. In my case, I was already feeling a disconnect. I’d been living overseas for a couple years, far from my family, and when those attacks happened, I was very disconnected. I couldn’t get in touch with anyone and the company I was working for was supposed to have had an office in tower two, so there was this impact of almost having lost friends.

I was already feeling this disconnect with a bigger vision in my life, so it just drove all those feelings deeper. And the weight of that event made me change course. So I made the decision that night that I was going to resign and change everything. Within six months, I’d moved back to Chicago and that started a decade and a half journey of trial and error. I know these images go fast, but that’s how it felt for me, so I wanted you to feel the same! And, also, no one wants to get stuck watching someone’s slideshow from their journeys …

But this started a decade and a half journey of travel and experimentation that took me over 50 countries, building multiple startup companies and lots of mistakes. It was
definitely a journey of trial and error because you don’t get reward out of life without taking the risks.

Now, your journey will be different than mine. There’s probably a lot of academics in here, probably some artists, taking completely different paths. But every day is a choice. Every day is a different crossroads for what you do with your time. If you’re in control of your mind, than those decisions can be intuitive. So, the problem is both deep and wide. But I’m going to focus today on one piece of it that I call “purge the chaos.”

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So we all know about different types of chaos we have in our lives. Some of us are addicted to the Internet. We are on social media nonstop. A recent Nielsen study showed that the average American spends 11 hours of every waking day consuming some kind of electronic media. So the problem with this is that when you’re consuming, you’re not thinking. And if you’re not thinking, then who’s in control? And that number is only going up.

So, it gets worse because when you aren’t thinking, you start to not want to think for yourself. A study published recently in the journal Science highlights this. They took a set of subjects to see what would happen if they put them in a room by themselves to think, on their own, without any kind distractions at all. This was a series a tests, but the one that was the most interesting to me was one in which they administered a painful electric shock to their brain before the test started.

Now most subjects said that it was so painful they would pay money to not have the the the shock administered again. But then what happened was, when they put them in the room for 15 minutes — with no phones, no music, no distractions, nothing — 67% percent of men, and 25 percent women, still chose to shock themselves multiple times!

So what does this mean? Well, for one thing, it’s probably a statement on which gender is smarter … come on, guys! One guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes! But he’s the subject of a completely different talk…

But what it does mean is we’re addicted to these distractions. We don’t like to be with alone with our own thoughts. They interviewed the subjects afterwards and most them said it was really uncomfortable to sit alone with their own thoughts.

So let me take bring it closer to home right now with something you’re probably suffering right now as you sit here. So it’s the last talk today, a great opportunity to end the event on a high note. But it’s also a challenging slot because, especially if you’ve been here all day watching talks, you’re suffering from something you don’t even realize which is called decision fatigue. It also goes by the more psychobabble sounding ego destruction. Which, incidentally, would be a great band name!

But what this means is that your brains are tired. And this isn’t a physical exhaustion. It’s not something that you realize is happening. But what happens your brain is starting to break down; and when that happens, you start to avoid making decisions or make bad decisions. So you have a finite amount of willpower everyday to keep away things that you don’t want in your life.

So a study a parole judges showed that if you went to your parole hearing in the morning, you have a 70 percent chance of getting your parole called and getting out of jail, all other things being equal. If you go in the afternoon, you have only a 10 percent chance of getting out of jail.

Why? Because the judges have decision fatigue as the day wears on, and don’t realize it, so they’re automatically starting to shut down to decisions rather than to make bad ones. We can we can all relate to this. We all have had that meeting or class in the afternoon that you just couldn’t make it to you because you’re just worn out. Or maybe you gave the iPad to your kids (or your spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend!) because you just couldn’t have one more conversation for the day?

What happens is at that point, you’re primed and ready to make bad decisions. And the more chaos you have in your life, the more of these distractions that you let in early in the day—constantly on social media and watching things and reading things—the early you’ll hit this point of decision fatigue. At that point, you’re primed and ready to make decisions that are going to benefit other people, and not you. Because the media
companies, politicians, drug companies, etc … they all know this hack!

So I’m excited to share what I’ve learned about hacking back through my own journey and through a lot of research. But I need to first quickly tell you about a break up that I had in my life. So we’d been together for several years and it had been at lot of emotional ups and downs. It was a difficult relationship. But I’d made my mind up there was it was over and I knew that I had to do the right thing and end the relationship. So I finally got up the the guts to make the call and my heart was beating fast when she answered the phone and said, “Welcome to Comcast, how can I help you?”

If you’ve ever tried to break up with your cable provider², it’s not easy at all I encourage you to give it a try! So what this was was part of an input purge, where I went through — as a life experiment — and removed, one at a time, all the distractions in my life. Email, text messaging, friendships, cable, all these types of things; and I’d go through them, one at a time, and remove them completely. Then, I’d go and add back in only what I thought I actually needed after that.

So I’d love you guys to give this a try if you’re up for a challenge. Pick one thing that’s a distraction in your life and remove it completely for week. Now, don’t just replace it with another distraction! But pick something like … maybe you are a social media addict … or maybe you watch a lot a TV … or maybe you are on work email constantly.

So pick one thing that’s not going to affect your career and remove it for a week. Get buy-in with your family and tell everyone what you’re doing. Then document the time that would have been spent doing that thing, and also document what you do with that time instead. And see if you can start to work on this “more” this more that we all say we want out of life. Maybe plan that trip that you’ve always been talking about instead. Pick something, remove it and see what happens…

So how do I do this? Well I’ve been doing this for a couple years now so, I do it monthly where I remove new emails and other things like subscriptions that are just becoming noise in my life. But then, annually, I’ll do the more difficult things. So I’ll look at relationships because those can suck a lot of your emotional time too.

Then sometimes I’ll get extreme. Now you don’t have to go this far with it, but as an example, last year I started working on a project related to to this topic. I had a lot of chaos in my life; one of my businesses just had a lot of things that I couldn’t control. So I figured out a way to extract myself because I really wanted to focus. So I removed myself from the business and I left the country — I like to travel internationally — and I took a trip to Guatemala for a couple weeks. I was completely off grid— no wifi, no phone, nothing.

Within a week, the fog had completely cleared and I’d nailed down an outline to the book ¹ … which led to me starting to want to talk about the idea … which led to this talk. You don’t need to get extreme like this, but these life experiments build on top of each other as you start to do them.

Let’s get back to the core, though, which is why would you even want to do this? It comes back to that “more” we all say we want out of life. Will you look back at your life from your death bed and say, “I’m really happy that I binge watched three Netflix series that weekend?” Or, that “I watched every single NCAA game, even the terrible ones?” Or, would you rather have spent that time planning that trip, or working on that book outline, or planning that new startup that you say you want to do, or figuring out what you’re going to do after college, or one of these type of things. It’s up to you. The the time is yours. It just depends, how many hours do you think you have left … and will you always have more?

So it’s not that I don’t do anything. I just restructured these things and each of these input purges changes the way you think about your life. So it’s as process of rebooting, rewiring and rethinking the way you live your life. So you’ll add things back in differently. As an example, I do email in a batch process now for only a short amount of time every day so that I don’t let that suck my attention all day long.

I mentioned that the problem is big and wide, so this piece—this “purge the chaos” part — is one piece of a bigger solution. And it’s a critical one because we get consumed by all these inputs that we have into our lives. But each one of these little experiments is a is a flame in a bigger revolution to try to free your mind from the things that are keeping you from what you want to do with your life.

I’ve done over hundred of these experiments now over the over the last few years since I started documenting them and about 25 percent of them result in what I call an “upgrade.” It’s some sort of change in your life that’s valuable. So it’s usually a habit change where you watch TV in a different way, or do email in a different way or something like that.

But it’s also a philosophical thing. In science, Thomas Khun called these “paradigm shifts.” You’re not just answering the question differently … you’re asking a completely different question. For example, it’s not, “why am I watching what I’m watching,” instead it’s maybe, “should I be doing something else with this time instead?” So it’s a fundamental change to the assumptions you have about the way you live your life and the questions that you’re asking.

Now this may sound exotic and fun and travel and startups and all this; and it’s been a it’s been a blast! But it’s also very difficult, and every day is a fight to dissolve your boundaries and and push the limits of what you can do. I mean, I’ve had countless nights of worrying where the next dollar was going to come from in some of my startups.

And my trips — the boundary expanding trips — weren’t like being on a cruise ship hopping into the all-you-can-eat buffet line! Those were difficult trips spending a couple weeks in a jungle living with families and no running water. And those trips were the ones that really meant something to me; the ones that resulted in one of those deep upgrades of the way I see the world and live my life.

And this book¹, I’m really excited about it, but it’s also terrifying. It’s terrifying to think about putting something out there that people are going to criticize. But this is expanding my life in different directions; and I feel that it’s worth doing.

So one of these experiments that didn’t have anything to do with big huge upgrading of my life was just a fun one. My buddy Mike and I decided to see if we could start a band in our 30s. Now, most guys when they hit their thirties are quitting their bands! So we tried to go the other way. We were casual guitar players but we decided to at first experiment to see if we could do an open mic. Then we took it to the next level to see if maybe we could start a band. Then maybe we could get paid to do a gig. So it was a series of experiments. We’re pretty good now, we’re booked all summer and we get well-paying gigs. But I can tell you, that when we started … we were terrible! And I’ll never forget the looks on people’s faces at that first open mic; and those were our friends. And sadly, there’s video to prove it…

Neuroscience research shows that you will probably have forgotten most of my talk within the next couple days. But what I hope you remember as I leave the stage is this: That “more” that we all want out of life is available to us. But it’s more more and more hidden by the layers of chaos that we’ve introduced.
This chaos sucks our time and makes it difficult to accomplish what we want in life.

Because time, and our valuable brain cycles are ours to take back. But who’s in control of your mind? It’s the most important thing. Break those chains and free your mind … and then you can start to evolve faster towards the “more” that we all want out of life. Thanks for listening.

[1] The book concept evolved into a philosophy and science fiction podcast called Evolve Faster instead, which has already published the equivalent of about 5 books worth of original fiction and nonfiction writing by the end of the second season.

[2] While cord cutting is normal today, at the time of this life experiment (around 2007 or so), it was unorthodox and difficult to do because streaming was in its early adoption phase.