Have you ever attempted to do something, you knew what you wanted to do, like going to the gym, getting fit, generating leads, or eating healthy? But then you couldn’t get yourself going very far, you might take a few steps, but you more or less stayed stuck where you started. Those wants are essentially means to an end, where the ultimate thing you probably want is a change in state to feel empowered, energized, or any other positive emotion and feeling.
To get yourself to do what you want, you need to get specific on the outcome, then you need to break it down into specific behaviors that will show how to achieve it. For that reason, I’ll cover the ideas of chunks and abstraction, and how we can use them to do things that we want.
The first step is to get specific on what you want to do, otherwise, you won’t know when you’ve reached and achieved what you need to do. If you say you want to make money, well I can give you $1 and you’ve made more money, you need to be specific. Once you’re clear on what you want to do and achieve, then we need to understand how it relates to the concept of chunks and abstraction.
Let’s look at what going to the gym entails; get in the car, turn the car on, put the car in drive, drive to the gym, find a parking spot, lock the car, get a parking ticket, put the parking ticket in the car, walk to the gym, greet receptionist, scan entrance card, find a locker, undress, figure out you forgot in-door shoes, get annoyed, put stuff in the locker, lock the locker, go to the gym, figure out what exercises to do… And all this is before you actually start training at all.
As you can see, something as “simple” as going to the gym is built from many behaviors, and if you’re struggling with going to the gym, part of the reason might be because it’s such a complicated task for your mind that you get overwhelmed, and that’s because you don’t have the chunk for going to the gym. This brings us to the topic of chunks and abstraction, essentially an abstraction allows you to “remove” the previous steps from conscious thought and run it on autopilot so you don’t need to think about it. The steps still happen but you don’t need to consciously think about them because they have been abstracted away. When you send an email via Gmail you don’t need to think about connecting to the email server, open the SMTP port, send a request to the server, and route packets, all you do is compose an email and press send. Gmail has abstracted most of the things under the hood.
The same way we abstract technical solutions our minds can abstract tasks like going to the gym. When our mind does it, you can see it as a chunk. Our minds chunk multiple behaviors into chunks, so in the future when we need to do something we don’t need to think about the specific behaviors, we can just think about the chunk. But for you to create the chunks you need to deliberately do the behaviors necessary in the same order for your subconscious and intuition to chunk the behaviors into a flow. In the future, you’ll then be able to access this chunk without much thinking because the behaviors flow together.
Now you know that if you want to do something you need to break the chunk down into specific behaviors. With the specific behaviors, you’ll be able to do anything with relative ease. And as you keep doing the behaviors it’ll get easier and easier to do something.
Until next time!