Master this and you master life
In the weeks ahead, I’ll be unveiling more of my greatest lessons and insights — discoveries that have profoundly guided my journey through life. These are the very lessons I wish I had grasped sooner, ones I yearn for my father to have imparted.
My aspiration is for these insights to provoke contemplation, challenge your perceptions, and enrich our collective wisdom with positivity.
Today’s insight drives much of my thinking, and it’s centered around the notion that:
Our brains (and in turn, our realities) are no different than software code running on a computer.
Let me explain:
Whatever we have fed into our brains, in whatever way, forms who we are.
Every single experience, movie, interaction, compliment, insult, news article, friendship, thought, action = a line of code.
And all the lines of code together? They create our reality—our opinions, our thoughts. It’s a beautiful complexity that results in 8 billion unique individuals in the world.
But here’s the challenge: we all believe that WE are right. And, in our own way, we are. It’s our reality. Our conclusion. Our thoughts.
Yet, accepting this truth grants us immense power. For ourselves, it means realizing the power we have to choose our inputs and the power to rewrite the code of past inputs. And for others, it means acknowledging that their inputs were different and approaching every interaction with genuine curiosity to understand their perspective and, if needed, having empathy for it.
Failure to understand this truth leads to frustration, blame, and division. We become trapped in a cycle of believing that everyone else is wrong and we are right.
Consider Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas, the person throwing trash out of a window, the guy who steals a car, the Christian, the Muslim, the Trump supporter, the Biden supporter, the vegetarian, the meat-eater. None of them believe they are wrong. They each have their reality and view shaped by their unique set of inputs.
Losing an argument or watching a 5-minute YouTube video seldom changes someone’s reality. Changing someone’s output requires rewriting many lines of code.
Or, you can add two simple lines to your own code:
1. Everyone’s reality is different. Try to understand it.
2. Can’t understand it? That’s okay. Have empathy for its difference.
We all want to be understood more, but we don’t want to try and understand more. And that’s why we see chaos. We have little computer programs fighting all over to be right, without realizing that everyone is running different code.
More empathy. And then, even more.
Wesley
May 3, 2024 at 1:36 am
I tend to agree with this Marnus. We are all unique. I liked the analogy of code you used to describe our individual realities.
It is also quite amazing how , depending on how we manage and process our experiences, how they shape us.
Being of small build I was severely bullied at in my school days by certain individuals…. Made school life something I hated. The result if this is that the post school me was a hard person , stubborn and coarsely direct, someone who spoke his mind and took no nonsense from anyone.
As the years have passed i realised that this becomes tiresome, and i would rather show empathy, kindness and understanding towards my fellow man (to a point), after all one should never mistake kindness for weakness! I believe that!
Post school experiences like being hijacked and held hostage at gunpoint for hours on end also changed me in part.
We all have different realities based on our experiences; some are good, some not so good.
I am of the opinion, that if I can using what I have learned from my experience to help and better the life or emotional state of someone else, then what i went through was worth it.
Anyway enough rambling from me.
Take care
Wes
Marnus
May 15, 2024 at 10:32 am
Wow, thanks for sharing Wes. We all seem so different, yet we are actually all so connected. Sharing life experiences and lessons are so important. Glad that you survived the hi-jacking. What a terrible ordeal to go through. Much love brother.
Marilie Parsons
May 3, 2024 at 8:51 am
This resonates with me because I grew up in the middle of the Kalahari (closest town was Upington) and there you had to become so independent and need to figure out how to do things without help. Doing things without help was kind of weaved into my DNA. This was my computer code and believe system. It took me years to recognise it. I still am fairly independent, but it took a completely out-of-control situation (my twins born prematurely) etc to recognise that sometimes you just can’t do it without help and that you need to rely on experts to get the best results. Thanks for the share.
Marnus
May 15, 2024 at 10:30 am
It must also have been some sort of relief to realise that not EVERYTHING is on your shoulders all the time. People always say that kids changes everything and looks like this was also true for you.
Marcel vd Berg
May 10, 2024 at 8:31 am
I definitely agree with you on this, because it can be a fine line, if you murdered and did stuff to hurt people, fundamentally I’m not going to agree with you, but there is nations and groups of people that believe in it and doing it, so you have to go and learn the why behind why they are doing it.
But the thing we do the least of is to try and understand and listen to someone else opinion, you don’t have don’t have to agree with them or change your morals and believes, but try your best to find out where is the other person coming from, by doing that you will understand sitiations better, you will solve problems better and there will actually be more peace in a lot of places, but the great word in afrikaans “hardkoppig” says it all.
Marnus
May 15, 2024 at 10:18 am
Yeah, it can be so hard to understand someone else’s reality when yours differ so much from it. I read in Trevor Noah’s bio that when he grew up in the township, there was the belief that you can steal from wealthy people because they have insurance. I’m sure many people who kill can 100% justify it in their own minds. Fascinating.
Think it takes a special mind to understand more, and is personally something, I want to cultivate more of.