The Mentality Prison

Well just in case you don’t know what mentality is then just understand that it is the way you think, and it can be different from one person to another but generally you can classify persons in different groups. You have the pessimists who always think negatively, the optimists who always think positively the narcissist and many other groups. In society, we tend to see different groups emerge based on status, you have the hardworking people who believe that everything is possible and you have the unlucky persons who feel like things are never going to work out at all. You can really see all the diversity in the way we as humans think on a daily basis, I’m not sure if we are predisposed to think in a certain way or if its the experiences we go through which shape our thinking but experiments have shown that even when you put two persons under the same conditions, their way of thinking could be totally opposite. This is to say that you can’t really mold a person’s mentality into what you want, all you can do is expose them to the right stimuli and hope for the best.

Stuck on What you believe

It's often difficult for us to explore new ideas because we are afraid of change, once we know and understand something, challenging that idea can be a very scary process, it will be like losing our stronghold which will put us on shaky grounds and nobody wants to be on shaky grounds. Mentality can be a real prison, and you see a lot of that in religious groups like Christianity, there are so many churches out there who spread the Gospel of Christ under different names and yet, it feels like they are talking about different things. Each person is just convinced about what they know already, and trying to put a different idea into their minds is virtually impossible. In the same way, a person who believes he is unlucky will have a hard time trying new things simply because he thinks they will never work for him and the opposite is true as well, a person who has been very successful will also have a hard time understanding why others aren’t successful.

We are all prisoners to the way we think and the things we believe in.

Different Ideas might be better

The term better here might be relative to every individual, for some it means having more money, while for others it means being happier in their current life. We seldom see the need to alter our current behaviors, a good example of that is our parents, who don’t see the need for technology, they say to themselves that “my phone works fine already, I don’t need a smartphone”, “my tv works great, I don’t need a flat screen” and so on. They are scared to try new ideas but us from the younger generation we understand how these new ideas could be better or worse, in this specific context. Having a smartphone won’t just allow you to make free calls (which definitely isn’t the case with the older phones) but they offer so much more than that and are very easy to learn as well. In that case, you see that your parents are just scared of trying new ideas which will challenge what they already know. Of course not all ideas are good ones but the point I’m trying to make here is that they don’t even want to take that chance on anything new.

Locked up in your mentality

Being convinced about something isn’t always bad, but its becoming increasingly so when you refuse to even take a chance on new ideas. I’ve already been in companies where they still use papers, they use MS-WORD and calculators to process their whole accounting systems on a windows 7 operating system. When you ask them why they haven’t upgraded yet, the answer is “windows 7 is the best operating system”. Its mind-boggling to see people do so complex tasks so inefficiently and go through all the stress for nothing. A simple excel sheet could spare them days of work and yet “they are stuck in their mentality”.

Another instance where you really see people get stuck in their mentality is when it comes to society and jobs, while others see jobs everywhere, others have no clue about what they could possibly be doing. When I go out on the streets, I just see job opportunities everywhere, I see businesses begging to be started, I see persons in desperate needs to recruit, I see a thousand of jobs just moving from my workplace to home, but another person will tell you that he has no clue about what to do, he’ll tell you why all businesses are going to fail, why there is nothing that works and how the town has nothing to do and the unemployment rate is so high. Again, I’m not going to judge on the way either person sees things, but I want to point out how stuck each of them is on his way of seeing things and how difficult it is for them to see from the point of view of the other person.

There are many other examples I could cite to really illustrate all of this but I think you get the picture of what I’m trying to say.

Breaking free

How can you get a person to see things the same way as you do? It starts first by challenging all of our preconceived ideas, challenge everything you know or you think you know about yourself and life in general. Expose yourself deliberately to new ideas and push your reasoning beyond any previous limits, who said you can’t be a billionaire? why can’t you be one? how can you be one? Ask yourself the wrong and the right questions and find a way to the correct answer.

Exposing yourself to alot of ideas implies reading a lot, talking to many persons, trying out different things and failing. Like that person who only sees businesses everywhere, reach out to people in need and try to understand why things didn’t work out for them. In the same way, that person who doesn’t see anything to do, reach out to successful persons and try to understand where you went wrong. These days its easy to go from nothing to something so you can’t really say you are doomed from the start, as long as you have two hands and two feet and a brain on your head, the sky is your limit.

In the same way when it comes to other things in life, it could be easy to just toss it away like insane and not even give it the benefit of a doubt but I’ll advise you at least take a chance to consider the other person’s point of view and prove to yourself and probably to the person why it is wrong. The earth isn’t flat because I say so, the earth isn’t flat because I can clearly see the sun rising and setting following a logic.

Conclusion

Whatever leads you to a better life is worth considering, I try not to shut down all ideas instinctively, but I do take the time to consider why I might be wrong or why the other person might be right instead of rejecting everything which challenges my own opinions. Trying out new things can be difficult and scary at the beginning, its like learning a new language, at the beginning it feels like walking in the dark but once you have a grip on some few things, the whole experience becomes better, and you can mold it into your liking. In the same way, I try out new ideas and shape them into what best suits my personality, I take the good out and leave the bad.

Thanks for reading!

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