Happy New Year, everyone! For your 2023, I’ve got a radically different recommendation for a New Year’s resolution, and it won’t interfere with your resolution that you already had in mind. Whatever your 2023 New Year’s resolution is—hit the gym three times a week, drink less, read a book a month—you’ve definitely put some thought into it, and you should go for it! I won’t try to steer you away from it, nor will I ask you to commit to something that will make it difficult to stay committed to your original resolution.
The radically different thing about what I’ll recommend is that there’s nothing enduring about it. You can do it once, for just an hour. Not an hour a day, not an hour a week—one hour. Period. And that one hour could change the course of your life forever. It sounds ludicrous, but I’ll draw on a metaphor to lend my grandiose promises some credibility. Imagine a commercial flight leaving Washington Dulles International Airport for Shannon, Ireland. If that flight turns just 18 degrees to the right (that’s only 5% of a full circle), it will fly to Spain instead. If no corrections are made along the way, that one action of turning 18 degrees right at the beginning of the flight will land you in a different country, with different food, different language, and different culture. Turn 80 degrees instead of 18, and you’ll end up in Brazil, a different continent and different hemisphere. You’ve turned less than a right angle’s worth, and you’ve completely changed your destination.
What singular action could possibly measure up to this metaphor of life-altering course change? I’ll walk you through it. First, choose one belief or thought about your life you’ve taken as patently true. Spend some time on this, because it may be so deeply ingrained that you might not even recognize it as your own thought. Whatever thought or belief you choose, it must significantly affect the way you act in the world. It could be as simple as a belief about relationships that you haven’t rethought since childhood, or it could be as profound as your underlying philosophical worldview. You know best which of your thoughts most heavily impacts your actions in the world.
Once you’ve identified the thought or belief, rethink it. Seriously give other perspectives on your thought or belief a chance. Think about them deeply—how might they be true, or at least partially so? Are there any other tenuous thoughts or beliefs you hold that have kept you from giving these other perspectives a fighting chance? Suspend (dis)belief for a moment and examine what the implications would be if you were wrong about those tenuous thoughts, which have prevented you from giving those alternate perspectives a shot. At the end of the hour, feel free to keep going if you’re on a roll and still knocking down barriers. If instead you’ve had enough at that point, it’s okay to drop it.
When you spend an hour this way, one of a few things will happen. In giving other perspectives on your belief an honest chance, you may discover that they’re even weaker than you had thought, in which case your previously held belief is reinforced. Wonderful! You can now move forward in your life with greater confidence. This is Victory Scenario #1.
On the other hand, you may discover that those perspectives are a lot stronger than you had previously given them credit for. Even if your newfound appreciation is insufficient to overturn your own perspective, but you may find yourself in a much more compassionate state when interacting with people with other perspectives. Fantastic! This is Victory Scenario #2.
Lastly, you may discover that the strength of those other perspectives is greater than your previously held belief. You may rethink yourself into a new belief, and if you’ve done well in choosing which belief to examine, how you live will change, almost certainly for the better. Superb! This is Victory Scenario #3.
This New Year, don’t just do something different. Try thinking something different—it just might change everything. You really stand to lose nothing by giving it a whirl, except perhaps ruts, vicious cycles, and general stuckness. And maybe—just maybe—you’ll get hooked on thinking differently.
-Parmenides
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