To view this email as a webpage, click here​

In 1944, an absolutely fascinating study was conducted.

Fritz Heider and Marianne Simme showed a group of people a short video that included two triangles, a circle, and a square.

It’s only 90 seconds long, but I can already tell how you’ll probably respond.

I don’t want to spoil the outcome, so please watch.

It doesn’t even have audio, so you can watch anywhere, and think about how it makes you feel.

We Love Stories

Now that you’ve watched it…what’s going on?

As explained in David Eagleman's “The Brain - The Story of You”:

We humans LOVE stories and will automatically apply narrative and emotion and feeling to inanimate objects even if they don’t exist:

Heck, I wrote Level Up Your Life, about looking at your own life through the lens of the famous “Hero’s Journey” narrative structure.

(By the way, I reacquired the rights to my book, and will be putting out a revised version of it in 2025!)

I can’t think of a more important and relevant example of this than our relationship with food.

Let’s say you ate a donut for breakfast this morning.

If you’re currently “on a diet,” then you might have a narrative or apply a story to this decision:

Here’s the thing: Even though we’re wired to apply narrative and story to everything…

We can decide that not everything needs to be a story, or a narrative. Especially when those narratives aren’t serving us.

Is this story serving you?

Sometime around 170AD, the emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius wrote a note to himself in his journal (We now know this journal to be called Meditations.)

In that journal, he wrote a reminder that’s as relevant now as it was back then:

Every day things happen around us, or to us, or we make a decision or take an action, and our brains react to those things in a way that will dictate how the rest of our day will go.

Let’s look at our donut example from before. What if we decided this doesn’t “have to turn into something?”

Just because our brains invent a narrative doesn’t mean we need to accept it as truth. Remember, “the past isn’t set in stone.”

In both events, the same event occurred.

In one instance, we let past stories dictate our future behavior. In the other, we decide to question that narrative, decide to not let it “turn into something.”

What’s a story that’s no longer serving you, and how can you change it today?

-Steve​
​

​​​​

Level Up Enterprises Inc. - 1831 12th Ave S. Unit 271, Nashville, TN 37203
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​