Hey friend,
In this episode, you’ll learn how to program your reticular formation area of the brain to spot more opportunities for achieving your long-term goals.
If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here. If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.
Welcome to The Daily Recall show. I'm your host, Vasili.
Today you will learn how to turn your someday maybe list from being a long forgotten dusty shelf of some vague ideas and dreams into a deadly weapon that can help you get more things done.
Let's begin from some brain science.
In your brain, you've got an area called a reticular formation. It serves as a gateway to your consciousness.
What do I mean by that? As you go through your day, you perceive a lot of information through your sensory channels - eyes, ears, nose, etc.
Reticular formation decides what information to send to your consciousness and what information to ignore. It's a filter for incoming information.
You might've already experienced how it works. When you buy something, like a pair of new shoes, you spend a lot of time trying out different models. And once you're happy and get out of the mall, you might have noticed that you pay more attention to other people's shoes than you were paying before you spent an hour in a fitting room. That's because your programmed your reticular formation area by focusing on those shoes when you were trying them out. Same idea applies to clothes, new iPhone, and a bunch of other stuff.
Here's an example for you to try.
Find an object of a vivid color and focus on it for a few minutes. Like a tennis ball. Right after that, you'll be more likely to notice anything of yellow color in the room for the next 15 to 20 minutes. That's how it works.
Let’s now connect this understanding of how reticular formation works to our someday list.
If you're anything like me, you've probably had a someday list for a while. It might be just a bucket list of things you wanted to do in life, like climbing Mount Everest or running a marathon. Whatever.
Those are the things that you cannot do right now, for some reason, usually because you lack resources, either time or money or knowledge. But you would really love to get your hands on them some day. That is why you keep them on your someday list.
If you were reading wisely, you might've already grasped the idea. By doing this someday list, we can actually program our reticular formation to become more conscious of things that might help us achieve our goals.
But it doesn’t work right off the bat.
The problem is that for most people a someday list is a dusty shelf of long forgotten dreams. It's irrelevant. It's poorly described. It's imprecise.
And if you have a list like that, then you reticular formation area cannot help you get closer to achieving those things. You gotta be clear on the outcome.
For example, if you've got "make a million bucks" on your someday list, the only way you can use your reticular formation area is when you’re walking down your neighborhood late at night and you glance at some dark corner and you realize there’s a million bucks lying there near the fence. That’s an exaggeration, but you’ve got my point.
Here's what you need to do instead. You need to take each item of your someday list and make it descriptive.
Ask yourself:
"Why do I want to get this? What’s the purpose of this thing? What’s the outcome I want to achieve here?"
Try to go from some vague lifelong bucket list points to interesting and ambitious things you'd like to achieve in the next few years. Don’t go too far into the future here. And once you do that, you will program yourself to become more conscious of useful things the world throws at you that can help you achieve your goals.
If you’re having trouble getting started, here's a simple question to begin with:
"If I only had X, I would love to do Y"
And X might be having more money, more energy, more resources, being in a different place, having a different job, any constraint. And Y is the thing that you would really love to start working on. For example, build your own business, or launch this specific product or start writing - anything you'd like.
But if you detail these goals, if you make them clear and concise, and if you come back to review them every now and then, then you can’t help but will start noticing opportunities that will help you get there.
Thank you very much for reading. See you tomorrow.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
#16 The Secret Power of a Someday List - The Reticular Activation Theory