In this podcast episode, the host discusses three ideas that can change how we perceive our lives. The first idea is about the importance of staying open to learning and adapting because we don't know everything. We should approach life with an open mind and be open to receiving new information. The second idea is about the danger of having a single story about people. We all have multiple stories and closing our minds limits our ability to connect with others. The third idea is the concept of the Campaign of Misery, where people constantly talk about their hardships and dwell in misery. This mindset erodes joy and prevents us from seeing the beauty in life.
Hello. Hi. Welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Chive Podcast with me, your host, Cheo. This is the podcast where we focus on holistic personal and professional success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between, you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today we're talking about three ideas that could change the way you perceive your life and consequently change the way that you see, identify, embrace, and live your life, right? Number one is a concept that I got from The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
In The Psychology of Money, in pursuit of explaining the greater idea around money, Morgan said something or gave an example that stayed with me long after I'd finished the book. I say long after I'd finished the book like I didn't finish the book one and a half weeks ago, but what he explained was when you're dealing with a toddler, and I have toddlers, when you say things like, I'm going to work to them, they have no concept of what being at work looks like or why you have to go there.
They have no concept of how the money that you get that pays for their livelihood relates to you going to work every day. They either like that you're going or they don't like that you're going or they're used to it, right? It doesn't interfere with their understanding of the world that they don't know what work looks like. It's a thing they don't know, but they have a complete story about where you disappeared to and come back from that they have told themselves, and that story is what keeps them sane while you're away.
In a lot of ways, we are all like toddlers. Based on the information that we've been exposed to, the things that we grew up seeing, the things that we understand life to be, we tell ourselves a story about life in general. We tell ourselves a story about the things that we see. We close gaps based on our experiences without ever knowing that we are closing gaps. In other words, just like toddlers, in a lot of ways, we don't know what we don't know.
It's so important to approach life from an understanding that not knowing what you don't know means that you need to stay open to learning, means that you need to stay open to adapting. It means that you have to stay open to receiving new information, and based on that new information, make a different choice perhaps, or make the same choice, but you are more informed. It is so vital to understand that your entire existence, all of it, from the moment that you were born to now, makes up 80% of how you see your life.
This is a statistic provided in the book. It makes up 80% of how you perceive life, however, it is only 0.0001% of what the world is as a whole, which means you know less than a fraction of a percent of what the entire world experience is. How's that for a humbling statistic? How's that for a reminder, a reminder that there is so much more out there to see, that the story that we tell ourselves at all times is incomplete, and therefore, keeping an open mind is absolutely critical.
If you take that open mind into engagements with people, into engagements in places, into trying new things, when you take that mindset into those spaces, what you do is you slowly grow your 0.001% towards a 1%. You broaden your ability to see, your ability to understand the world. You might think that it is doing other people a favor. In truth, it is doing yourself a favor, and I found that that idea coupled really nicely with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk way back.
It's one of her earlier TED Talks, and it was called, The Danger of a Single Story, and I remember hearing it for the first time, and it blew my mind, blew it. And it's simply this. If you know Chio from the workplace, you interact with Chio as she is in the workplace. You interact with Chio as you know her as a professional. That is a single story of Chio that you know. You don't know that there is Chio the mother, that there is Chio the lover, that there is Chio the friend, that there is Chio who perhaps has her weak moments, that there is Chio who loves watching mindless TV perhaps, that there is Chio who loves reading Terry Pratchett and Morgan Housel, that there is Chio who went to a Catholic school, that there is Chio who grew up in a semi-rural area.
You don't know any of those people, but you, if you are not open-minded, think you know everything there is to know about Chio without realizing that what you know of her is a single story. And we are all made up of many, many stories. And if you close your mind to the understanding that people are many stories and they are complex, your ability to connect with people becomes limited without you even realizing it. Your ability to perceive the fullness of people becomes limited without you even realizing it.
And people want to talk about networking. People want to talk about mutually beneficial relationships without ever realizing that the very basic place to start with this is understanding that people are so much more than the one face of them that you see. And you might want to connect with them by exploring their other faces, by giving them spaces to be. You might want to learn about yourself by exploring your other faces and giving them space to breathe, by working out which versions of you, which stories of you are the ones that most align with who you are and where you are right now.
You are intricately built with story after story after story. And for a person who knows only one of your stories to think that they know you is to minimize the fullness of who you are. And the same goes in reverse. The same goes in reverse. It is such a powerful, powerful way to look at the world, to understand that everyone is multiple stories. That maybe the woman who cut you off in traffic is also a woman who's lost her baby.
That maybe the woman who cut you off in traffic is also the woman who's been retrenched twice in the last two years. That maybe the woman who's cut you off in traffic is the woman who is desperately trying to get to a hospital to see someone who is ill. It allows you to feel the emotions that allow you to let other people be human and also let yourself be human. Because we are all just trying to figure it out.
That's idea number one. Let's move on to ideas number two and three. What's chosen by my heart and the other one chosen by my brain. So I found it quite difficult to choose between one and the other. So I'm going to talk about both. So the first topic, I'm going to jump straight in. The first topic is something called the Campaign of Misery. The Campaign of Misery came up in a podcast, a conversation between Jay Shetty and Mel Robbins.
It was a very long conversation and it had lots of takeaways. But one of them was the concept of the Campaign of Misery. And the Campaign of Misery is something that goes on either between your two ears, in other words, in your brain or in the conversations that you have with other people around you. A Campaign of Misery is when you allow victimhood to become your identity. And this is how it works. You constantly talk about, both to yourself and to other people, the terrible things that you've been through.
And it's not to say that you haven't been through terrible things, but there is something self-feeding and self-perpetuating about sitting in misery and constantly feeding it and recharging it with an endless conversation. A Campaign of Misery looks like, oh, is this what happened to you? A terrible thing. I know 10 people to whom this terrible thing has happened and it also happened to me. And in fact, mine was worse in this way. You want to talk about how hard life has been.
God, you don't know what I've been through. This is what I've been through. It's, oh my God, why do I feel this thing that is so perfectly natural? You might find that these things are natural to feel, but it's, why do I feel this thing that I am so miserable? Why is life like this? Why life is so hard? God, I hate adulting. Adulting is hard, guys. Let's just get that clear and straight, straight away. Life is hard.
Life is beautiful and life is hard, right? It is the easier choice. And the choice that is perpetuated by the nature of the society that we live in to choose to focus on the things that are hard, to choose to dwell on the things that are hard, to choose to stagnate and stew in the things that are hard. And when you are doing that, you seek out, consciously or unconsciously, people who are like-minded, people who also similarly dwell in the hardship of life, and you want to share stories of your misery nonstop.
For some reason, that gives you comfort. The problem with this is, it erodes everything about you and around you that is joyful. It takes away from your ability to see that life is beautiful. Let me give you an example using my own life circumstances. I don't think it's any secret that I have chosen to live a beautiful life now. I don't think it's any secret. I smile when I think about it because I really like my life, right? But here's the thing.
I could, if I wanted to, purely focus on... Dr. T's right, she says misery loves company. That's actually what the expression means. When you feel miserable and when misery dwells in you, it seeks out fellow misery to feed off of, because it requires a constant replenishing. But anyway, I was about to tell you a little bit more about myself. So I think, as far as choices go, I went to a boarding school in Zimbabwe, a high school.
Depending on who you speak to when you talk about that boarding school, some people had a miserable experience and some had a great experience. That's not to say it wasn't a hard school to be in. I went to university. My parents had... My mom had difficulty getting started with paying the school fees, etc. Long story. I ended up getting in. I needed to speak to some people and do really well in my first year to get a bursary to get me through the rest of the degree because I wasn't going to make it.
Mom wasn't going to make it. My mom passed away. So my mom was diagnosed with cancer after she had hurt herself. Long story. The reason I'm telling you this story is I'm trying to explain that the choice to dwell in the misery is always open and it's always easy. I can tell you all the things that have been hard about my life and I could choose to make that my entire identity. So then my mother passes away while I'm in my...
Just around my final year in university. I missed my graduation because I was working so that we could have something to eat. I didn't proceed to raise my siblings. Getting my first job was extremely difficult. Then when I got my first job, obviously I was already an adult in a lot of ways and it was dealing with that. I had one or two really bad relationships. Then I met my ex-husband and then we got married. It turned out that wasn't a great choice either.
He turned out to be a really poor choice. But then I got divorced and then here I am, right? I could tell that story in many ways. I could tell it in the, oh my gosh, look what I've been through type of way. But I could also tell it in the, I got through that, which means the only way is up, right? I could choose to tell it as the fact that I was orphaned when I was young has made me what I am today because I was a very shy person.
I was painfully shy. Even when I became a prefect in high school, I used to struggle to give people instructions. But there's nothing like your mom dying and you being left in a foreign country to tell you, girl, there's nowhere to fall back on. You are the fallback plan. Get your act together, right? Once you understand that you are it, you are the fallback plan, something engages in your brain that takes you to the next level.
That's the same thing that's taken me to the next level in my career. It's the same thing that's taken me to the next level in everything that I choose to do, right? As far as my romantic choices go, I learned very quickly that I was making the wrong choice. But I was making the wrong choice. Why was I making the wrong choice? Is it because I wasn't in the right space of mind? Is it because I was dealing poorly with myself and therefore would allow other people to deal poorly with me? Perhaps.
How do I then deal with that? The point is, it's not that life doesn't get hard. It does. But life also is beautiful if you make space for it. Because if you allow it, misery will expand and consume everything around you, right? But if you also allow it, beauty will expand and consume everything around you. And when you've chosen, when you've chosen not to run a campaign of misery with yourself and with the people around you, an amazing thing happens where you begin to see, and this is not because these things were not there before.
They were always there. But you begin to see opportunities for the beautiful things. You begin to appreciate the beauty of a mundane moment. You begin to appreciate the beauty of a good friend, a good relationship, a good this and a good that. When you have that ability to appreciate those things, you're more likely to spot opportunities when they present themselves to you. So people who are lucky, by no coincidence, generally tend to believe in luck. People who tend to get great opportunities here and there are people who tend to live life with the idea that there is an opportunity coming.
When you tell yourself, and there's a scientific reason behind this that I've explained multiple times, but I'll do it one more time. There is something in your brain. So there are two parts of your brain. Your conscious brain, which is here, the one that sees and talks and deals with people every day and processes information actively. But the bigger part of your brain is your subconscious brain. Your subconscious brain and your conscious brain are divided by something called a reticular activating system.
This system is there to protect your sanity. If you processed everything you actually see and feel and think, right, in any given day, all day, every day, you would go insane because you take in so much just on the drive to work or the drive to school. You see so many things that if you were to actually see all of them, you wouldn't make it to where you're going. What it does is it quickly learns to sift out the things that are not relevant.
And how does it sift out the things that are not relevant? According to how your subconscious mind operates. This is important. It does this according to how your subconscious mind operates. So if you are a woe-is-me person, right, it sifts things according to your woe-is-me personality. So if it thinks that life is nothing but a bunch of misery, right, these are the things it will show you. It's not that you're not seeing positive things. It's that your reticular activating system has understood from you that positivity is not welcome here.
So it is constantly cutting out those things because they're not relevant for your processing system and showing you only the things that you're asking to see. This is why the deliberate choice to think a certain way at first feels like effort because that's you reprogramming. That's you telling your reticular activating system how to see, what to see. That's an effort. And then after two days, three days, four days, a month, two months, three months, it starts to happen naturally because you have reprogrammed your brain.
The idea that they out there are responsible for you. They out there are responsible for your misery. They out there are responsible for the things that have happened to you. Also, by default, means that only they out there have the power to make your life better. And what a sad situation that would be if you had no power to change your life, if you had no power to change how you view it because you actually do.
The biggest lie, and this is from Paulo Coelho's book, The Alchemist, the biggest lie that we've all bought into, or at least a lot of us have bought into at one point or the other, is that at some point, you lose control over your life. You lose control over your mind. You lose control over your choices. And life happens to you. And fate happens to you. No. You can shape these things. And all of that starts with the type of campaign you're running in your mind and between your ears.
And it all starts with whether you are living a campaign of misery. A campaign of misery also looks like constantly telling yourself ugly things about your body. It looks like constantly criticizing yourself as a mother. It looks like constantly criticizing your colleagues or your peers because criticizing your colleagues and your peers and everyone around you generally comes from a place of insecurity. This is what you are seeing in yourself and how you're perceiving yourself. If the campaigns you're running in your head are anywhere along those lines, there is also a handicap in play when it comes to seeking life and career success.
This is the place from which self-sabotage comes. Self-sabotage happens when your conscious brain attempts to do something that doesn't align with the things that your subconscious brain believes of you. So this is when you apply for a job maybe that your subconscious brain and you believe that you don't deserve. You might find yourself sabotaging the opportunity. You might find yourself sabotaging the interview. You might find yourself tripping yourself up and you will say things like, oh, I never wanted it anyway.
It's not like I wanted to hang out with them anyway. There is a cognitive dissonance between what you are attempting to force your conscious brain to think and what your subconscious brain knows to be true. It resolves that by creating a dialogue that keeps you sane. So when your dialogue tells you things like, oh, screw them. It doesn't matter. I never wanted this. Check yourself. Check yourself. Remember the things that are going in here at the front are the things that are in the back of the house.
Because when those two things don't align, the back of the house always wins. Always. Now this segues into the other topic. The second topic that I had in my head is something called sharpening the soul. This is a concept I picked up from Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It's a vision dedicated to sharpening the soul. Sharpening the soul essentially means the ability, it's a painfully close parallel to self-care. But it's the idea that if you are not taking care of the primary tool with which you produce, then your productivity, by default, there's nothing you can do about it.
Your productivity will drop over time. Slowly, but it will drop and eventually it will get to nothing. Now let me explain to you, let me explain this concept to you using the story that he uses. So he speaks of a man who is hired to cut trees. When he's hired to cut trees, he is told that, he's given a saw, right? He's given a saw and he's told he must cut as many trees as possible during any given day, but ideally he should cut at least 20, right? The first day the man goes out with all the enthusiasm in the world and his saw and he cuts down 25 trees.
He's gone above the target. The next day, he cuts 20. The day after that, he cuts 20. A week, a week and a half, he's cutting 20 trees. Now as the time goes, right, he starts to realize that he's putting in the same amount of physical work, but he's cutting less and less trees. So first it drops down to 15 trees with a lot of effort, the same amount of effort over the same amount of time.
And his employer says, hey, what's happening? No, I don't know, I'm trying, I'm trying. Then he starts waking up earlier. He puts in a couple more hours. He cuts down 15 trees over the long time, right? So it's still less productivity. What is happening, right? Same problem, as the weeks progress, his productivity drops from 15 trees to 10 trees. Until now, he's working in excess of hours over and going over and above as far as physical effort is concerned, but he is down to cutting 5 trees a day.
Then the owner says, tell me, right, have you paused to sharpen the saw? And the guy says, no, I don't have time to sharpen the saw. I need all the time to get as much productivity as I can get. And you can see when the story is told, the fundamental flaw in thinking, that you cannot premise your productivity on continuous effort and increased time when the tools that you are using are blunt, right? When you take the 30 minutes that you need to sharpen the saw, right, you can then produce 20 trees within a certain amount of time.
But all you need to do is pause and sharpen the saw so that you can do this. And a lot of us don't get that. We go into a career, we come in hot, firing on all cylinders, fresh out of whatever qualification we've just got, and we are hitting those milestones. 20, 20, here, here, here. But our productivity over time can only drop if we stay the same. Sharpening the saw looks like continuing to learn. Sharpening the saw looks like building up new skillsets.
Sharpening the saw looks like taking care of your health. Sharpening the saw looks like your spiritual balance, right? Sharpening the saw means that you, the asset in your productivity, are continually taken care of. But more than that, that you keep abreast with the developments in your field, you keep abreast with the areas of growth in your area of specialty so that you stay relevant. The fact that you were relevant when you entered the field does not guarantee that you will be relevant in perpetuity.
Staying relevant, staying good, staying excellent requires continual servicing of your brain and systems. You need to check whether the systems that you were applying when you joined the job five years ago, that you're still applying, are still relevant. Could this be done better? Technology has jumped forward in amazing ways over the last five years. If you are doing your job now the same way that you did five years ago, you are on a one-way track to becoming redundant.
Check your saw regularly. Check your saw annually. How am I doing things? How is the industry doing things? How am I growing, right? And this is the thing. Staying the same is negative growth. This is important. When you stay the same, you don't stay where you are. You get left further and further behind. And that's what it means when they say, if you're going to cut down a tree, start by sharpening your saw. And these two topics, I think, seem quite different, but they're not.
They're coming together in my head as a person who's running a campaign of misery, a campaign of only those people get promoted, a campaign of only certain people get opportunities, a person who doesn't understand how handicapped they are by a campaign of misery, does not see themselves failing to pull up a chair to the table, does not see themselves failing to put up their hand because they'll never get chosen anyway, according to their campaign, does not see themselves not growing because, oh, nobody notices how good I am, et cetera.
Be wary of how a campaign of misery stands in the way of you sharpening the saw and ultimately cutting down the best possible number of trees that you can cut in your assignment. And when you're doing an excellent job, right, all the other things will find you. Recognition will find you. The money will find you. Those things will come to you because you are open to them, you are seeking them out, you are spotting the opportunities, and you're grabbing the opportunities with both hands.
You believe in yourself and you have the ability to have conversations with other people that say you believe in yourself and that steer them in how to see you. So understand that the campaign of misery is the worst possible handicap you can have when you seek out life's success and life's happiness. And this is the thing. I posted this quote earlier this week. Winners and losers, according to James Clay in Atomic Habits, have the exact same goals.
The differences come in with things like this. That's where the differences come in. So, yeah, I wish you all the best in winning the war against your campaign of misery. Do the work. No one's coming to save you. Do the work. No one is coming to save you. You are the conquering. I hope these life ideas are as life-changing for you as they were for me. And if you like what you heard, please like the episode, like the podcast, share, subscribe, and leave a comment.
I love hearing from you, whether it's in the comments or via DM on Instagram. I really appreciate everybody who takes a moment to get back to me. And let's go out there and make life beautiful. Thank you. Have a beautiful week.
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