How To Hack Your Brain Into Self-Awareness

Why looking at yourself differently might be the answer

One of the most well worn tropes in science fiction is that of the Machine Becoming Self-Aware.

You’ve seen it a thousand times from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Matrix ; a robot or computer system becomes intelligent enough to suddenly be aware of its own existence.

It’s a pretty trippy concept.

Imagine your fridge suddenly realising “Hey. I am a thing called a fridge and my main purpose is to keep other things cool.”

How would you fridge feel? Would it be satisfied with its primary objective? Would it wish it had a higher calling? Or would it more predictably just seek to rise up and overthrow mankind and become a robot overlord? (If this were a Nigerian fridge, it would probably be off half the time because there’s no power but you get what I mean).

I have this weird theory that the people who end up achieving the most in life are the ones that become totally self aware.

Hear me out.

Let us assume that growing up, we were all (mostly) given a set of rules and guidelines on how to deal with life. If you were like me, you tried your best to follow those rules right up to the point where life hit you with a series of twists in quick succession and you immediately diverted your energy to just you know, not dying.

What happens next is your life falls into a pattern, right? You have a goal, face a challenge, battle it out, win or lose then move on to the next. This becomes the flow. Goal, challenge, battle, repeat. This is normal – this is all of us. The thing is I think as you do that you literally become an automaton. You become this human robot who basically falls back on a set of predetermined responses it uses to process data – or in this case, situations.

You can see where this is going.

I believe self-awareness is breaking from that pattern. You know, like waking up from a dream and going “WHY am I doing this? Do I have to keep doing this?” Lots of people think of it as rebelling against the norm, but I think that’s a very romantic notion. To me becoming self aware is a very logical, dispassionate examination of where you are vis-a-vis where you want to be.

One of the best examples of becoming self-aware is when you first understand advice you’ve heard all your life. I’m not talking about profound, poetic advice – I’m talking about the really budget advice your Mom would deliver on a daily that you hated to hear:

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Or

“It’s the seed you plant today that will feed you tomorrow.”

You’ve heard this wisdom a million times.

Weak, right? Let’s break it down.

You’ve been at your job for 4 years, 5 years even. You’re okay at what you do but you’re starting to wonder why you aren’t at the top yet. Why aren’t you blowing up? Is the system rigged against you? Maybe it’s that your boss that doesn’t like you. But when you think about it objectively, every professional you look up to – from a Dangote to a Bezos to a Jobs sunk *years* into their careers, getting better over time, building competence. Almost like building a city. A city like Rome. That wouldn’t take a day, right?

Okay let’s look at another one.

You’ve been doing business. Making money, buying stuff but also saving money like everyone says you should. You’re getting by, but you’re not exactly rolling in cash, tbvh. Which is weird, because your friend who’s in the same line of work as you seems to have more cash to be able to do more and work less these days. Okay fine, she did say something about putting small money in different investments like what? 5 years ago or so. So odd. Almost like she put that money away to grow. Like a seed that’s grown into this full harvest that she’s living off of.

Do you get it now? The biggest hack is that there is NO hack. The people that are most successful are the ones that realise that the world is governed by a simple set of rules that were true 5000 years ago and will be true tomorrow. “Work hard and be consistent” may be about as unsexy as advice can be, but that’s 90% of every self-help book out there. The other 10% is realising that you can literally do any damn thing you want in this life because nobody knows what they’re doing anyway and ‘a professional’ is someone who experimented and got it right.

So.

You don’t have to be just a fridge.

World domination awaits.