Why do I believe that I won’t have a 9-5 job in my career after 2U? Or that a career doesn’t have to be limited to those hours?
Well, we’re basically imposing the remnants of the factory style economy with the modern workforce. In certain contexts, that may make sense. But with such a global economy now and a digital world, we have to start shifting away from a 9-5 job. I think COVID has accelerated that timeline.
I’ve already started practicing this with 2U of working on the weekends. Now with the coaching business, there’s no real days off. But it feels like every day is a day off AND that there are no days off lol.
Limiting our careers is a way of limiting ourselves. Especially with a socially constructed concept like time and hours. Those may be used as a proxy for daylight hours also. But I get a good amount of work done before and after daylight. Which the digital age has allowed.
In an increasing number of contexts over time, I’ve not followed rules set down by others. Or I should say brules. The more people tell me I need to follow those timings, the more I will rebel and not do that.
In my context at 2U right now, I get a lot of my actual OKR work done before 9 am. When I’m free from distractions, Slack messages, emails, etc.
Can you imagine how much more creativity and ideas I’ll have when I don’t have a 9-5 job? Every day might feel like a weekend. I get to set my own schedule.
Oh, I guess that’s another reason why. I know myself well enough to know that I don’t want to follow anyone else’s schedule. I decide when I have meetings. When I read, journal, talk to friends and family, when I do deep work.
The more I am in charge of my income sources, the more time freedom I have. The people who have m any sources of income are able to dictate their schedule with more intention. A 1-1 relationship / linear thinker might see the many sources of income and see the limitation placed by having to manage all of those. And they are right. AND I see all those income sources and see more freedom with my systems thinking mindset. That once I have an income source, I’m going to be looking to systemize it so that I don’t have to be in it day-to-day to make money. I’ll pass it off to someone I trust to run that for me. We’re both right. It’s just whatever we believe, we’re right.
How can the same situation have different results? When someone sees this [diagram in pic] and sees overwhelm, I see self-reliance.
It may be also due to literal limiting beliefs of those hours, coming back to the question. If someone thinks the value they can provide professionally has to be contained in that time frame, then there may be other limiting factors at play.
It would be interesting to see if there was any correlation between people who’ve held 9-5 jobs for a majority of their lives with other limiting beliefs. Would they also have limiting beliefs about $, relationships, their own potential, etc.?
The longer that someone has a single source of income, do they potentially have more limiting beliefs? How would you even measure limiting beliefs?
To quantify limiting beliefs, we need to first quantify beliefs. How does one quantify beliefs? What about my Belief Tree idea?
[see pic]
So the deeper the belief, the more ingrained it is. And the deeper it is, the less and less conscious it is, relatively presumably.
“I believe in Beliefs A&B” is what someone might think consciously. But underneath that is Belief 1. That might be there because of early childhood experiences or something.
But why is that there? There may be a Belief 0 even deeper than that that is caused by a previous life, for example. That’s in the sub, even perhaps the superconscious parts of our “mind.”
This still doesn’t directly quantify it though.
There’s an obvious assumption here by depicting this in a tree; and that is it necessitates a 1-1 relationship between beliefs. In reality, it’s an intricate web, a neural network. But for the sake of simplicity, we can deduce beliefs down to which underlying belief is the most prominent or causes it most directly.
So let’s say there are 3 beliefs coming down from one branch. Then that would have more “weight” or a higher number than one with just 1 belief branch coming from it.
We can also have Life Domains overlaid on top. So if you have each Life Domain and beliefs specific to those, then when you combine those, you can see the overlap in beliefs. Because one belief may represent itself in one form in a career life domain and the same underlying belief may show through in a relationship life domain slightly differently.
From there, what about the limiting piece? For each belief, every level, we can assess where on a scale / spectrum / sphere they may be with respect to that belief. There may be different values on that spectrum though depending on the type of belief it is. Like one may be a decaying-fixed-balanced growth-vain growth mindset spectrum. One spectrum may be comfort-learning-danger zone layers.
If we first did these Belief Trees within the context of the Life Domains, then expanded to layer on all the Life Domains, then we could clearly see how many beliefs overall stem from other deeper beliefs.
Once that’s all laid out, then I can answer the question I set out of finding any correlation, or at least any relation, between limiting beliefs across life domains like career, relationships, $, society, etc.
Then scaling this up, if we did this with enough people, we would then be able to quantify beliefs on a mass scale. Which means we can find and pinpoint underlying, conscious, and non-conscious (to steal James Clear’s terminology) beliefs to address them systemically at the root cause instead of addressing the symptoms.
That’ll also clear up, or at least provide more alignment on definitions of beliefs before addressing them. Which is the first step in providing any effective solutions.
I suspect even step 1 of mapping my own beliefs in this framework will take years, perhaps decades. Once I complete the career life domain one though, I can probably start formulating it.
Personal Belief Tree. Global Belief Tree. And any scale in between, like community, ideology, race, country, etc.
Now that would be interesting.
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