Finding the right mindset is key

It is so easy to give up when things go wrong. It’s actually a natural reaction that somehow makes us look for a safe, easy place whenever we feel reality has become too much for us. We’d rather find rest in failure than try to find new, improved ways to succeed, because the latter implies hard work. And the world provides us with enough cheap distractions to simply spend our entire life not aiming high and believing we are doing ok. But we are not. That’s why it is so important to find the proper mindset beforehand. And that mindset must say: moments of failure and loss are part of every process, and motivation must stay strong as long as you keep your goals in mind. In other words: whatever happens, you have such strong faith in your goals that nothing can make that foundation tremble. This is the right way to become invulnerable and always stay motivated.

Motivation from the bottom: every little thing counts

There is a very useful trick that will make it a lot easier to get motivated even if things aren’t going as expected. It is the idea of being in the process of building something o a daily basis, step by step. You can think of it this way: if you manage to earn just 10 cents of a dollar today, and you save that small income as your only possession, somebody could come and laugh at you and your tiny, almost non-existent fortune. But if you earn that amount tomorrow, and the day after, and you keep doing that every day for months or even years, then you are on the right path to be rich one day. And the best part is: your daily routine to earn just a small amount of money will be full of motivation and energy because you will remember the bottom you come from and how far you’ve already managed to climb. It’s as simple as that: trust the process.

Never dwell on negativity and failure

It’s always easier said than done, yes, but you need to learn to let go and forget. The ability to cope after any sort of misfortune is essential for those who want to succeed in life. Why? Because everybody goes through difficult times eventually, even those that look the happiest (or even the luckiest). There are things in life we simply cannot control, and bad luck may come from time to time. But don’t forget: even those that have managed to build successful careers have had to overcome all kinds of problems and barriers, but they somehow had the right attitude towards it: they knew problems were just temporary and did not dwell on them. Thus, knowing failures and disappointments are just a part of life allows you to get over bad things quickly. And what you get from them is a lesson, a valuable one, instead of fruitless and long lasting sadness.

Welcome to this new blog at Harvard from a science passionate and multi-language student. In Factual my mission will be to discuss science-based facts in order to bust all those myths that populate the Internet nowadays.

Why this? Because this is the era of disinformation. Anyone with a computer and Internet connection can start writing, and the majority of people will believe it only because it is written on the Internet, as Dr. Gilbert found in 1993.

That year, Dr. Gilbert conducted a study that sought to determine our attitude when we received information. He put forward two possibilities:

By default, we believe what we read. And we only begin to doubt it when we find some evidence that we may be wrong.

Or, on the contrary, after reading an information, we judge it. if it seems correct, we believe it.

Even thought the second option seems the most logical, Dr. Gilbert found that when people are distracted or in a hurry, such as we are in this society, they tend to assume everything they read is true, as their judging ability is impaired.

Without time to think, people simply believe what they read.

This is why amongst some personal thoughts about education in English and Spanish, in this weblog you will also find some myth-busting from an evidence-based point of view in personal development (where people are more prone to believe everything they read), technology and marketing.

Source: Gilbert et al., You cannot believe everything your read. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1993 65(2)