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How to Achieve Success by Mastering Your Mindset, Cultivating Anti-Fragility and Overcoming Frustration

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Modern Philosophy

How to Achieve Success by Mastering Your Mindset, Cultivating Anti-Fragility and Overcoming Frustration

Unlock Your Hidden Potential and Achieve Your Highest Goals by Cultivating a Positive Mindset, Developing Persistence to Adversity, and Overcoming Roadblocks to Success

Franklin O'Kanu
Feb 11
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How to Achieve Success by Mastering Your Mindset, Cultivating Anti-Fragility and Overcoming Frustration

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Photo by Regis-Hari Bouchard on Unsplash

Introduction

A couple weeks back, I took part in Richard’s Grove GOAL Setting workshop. If you are unfamiliar with Grove, his concept of the TRIVIUM, this ancient method of solving problems, drew me to his work almost ten years ago.

Having gone through Autonomy, I’ve gained some very insightful lessons that have helped me in my career, as I’ve mentioned in pieces such as “welcome to Unorthodoxy.”

But the following insights regarding mindset mastery, antifragility, and frustration into fuel, stuck with me for weeks after the course. Here’s how these concepts can change your daily outlook in this socially engineered, ocularcentric society we live in.

Within this article, the reader will learn the following insights:

  • How improving our mindset improves our lives

  • The concept of Antifragility

  • Eliminating the aggression that results from frustration

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Mindset Mastery

One point that was driven home for me was that our world is changing rapidly. We see this in my article about inflation and the next three years. 

To this day, the following phrase stuck with me:

“There used to be low risks in assuming the truth in the media; now, there are enormous risks in assumptions with long-lasting effects.”

The first thing I could think of was the pandemic – and how individuals who got all 5 shots may have a 35% increase in fatality or how continuing to engage in an occularcentric society will increase mental health concerns. 

As a millennial, this is a vastly different world than we knew growing up, and this may not have been what was expected – and due to this, when these challenges, obstacles, and problems arise, the vast majority aren’t able to tackle it – which leads to confusion and frustration, day in and day out.

man wearing white top using MacBook
Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

The good news is there’s only ONE thing we need to do to solve these daily problems that we encounter and remove confusion and frustration – and that’s to improve our mindset. By improving our mindset, we can improve our lives.

We can’t solve problems from a mindset of confusion and frustration. Nevertheless, if we improve our mindset, we solve problems and climb to new heights. That’s why we focus so heavily on mindset topics in our philosophy section here at Unorthodoxy.

Grove states, “improve your mindset, improve your life.” The next stage is what kind of mindset we should adopt. 

How to Be Antifragile

Grove introduces us to this book named “Antifragile” by Nassim Taleb. The book contains studies and research on our changing world, which we echo in the first passage. Since the world is constantly changing and unpredictably increasing, this is the new normal. 

With the amount of information that changes daily, we need to learn how to benefit from randomness and chaos. We need to adopt an antifragile mindset. This is the same concept I describe in my 100-day challenge. 

One thing to note is that antifragility is slightly different than resilience. Resilience is overcoming challenges – but antifragility is welcoming the challenge and finding a way to grow from it.

We need to know one thing about challenges and how we react to them, which takes us to our last concept.

Transform Frustration into Fuel

One thing that we do have to realize about challenges and problems is that they lead to frustration. In the 1930s, scientists studied this phenomenon – although it’s pretty simple, its impacts are groundbreaking.

According to simplypsychology.com: 

“Frustration is a feeling of tension that occurs when our efforts to reach a goal are blocked. According to this theory, proposed by Dollard (1939), frustration often leads to aggression.”

Sounds simple enough, but Grove breaks this down even more straightforwardly. We need to be mindful of aggression from frustration because aggression puts us in a survival mode – a fight or flight response.

And problems can never be genuinely solved from this mode of thinking. That’s why we need to be mindful of our thoughts vs. thinking. 

Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis - Simply Psychology
Catharsis: relieve the emotional tension by identifying your obstacle

Once we realize that we are frustrated, we need to recognize that our goal is being blocked. By being aware that our goal is being blocked, we can be insightful about overcoming this challenge and getting back to reaching our goal. 

Nassim Taleb states the following quote: “if you can’t transform your stressors into fuel, you’re doomed.” Suppose we cannot transmute our stressors into fuel. We just keep on accepting the challenges that life brings our way. In that case, we, indeed, are doomed.

This world we inhabit is consistently changing, which will continue to result in stressors and sources of frustration. Failing to deal with this new normal will leave us behind. 

This is the message of the tyrant king – transmuting the ego in our heads to free up that psychic energy. And this is also the premise of Nassim’s book, transforming stressors into fuel you can use to propel yourself forward.

By embracing an antifragile mindset, you can better expect and thrive in the unexpected. 

Conclusion

I recommend checking out Grove and his work at Autonomy. Here’s the link to the Goal Setting course I took.

By understanding that our mindset is critical, especially in this socially engineered world and society, we control the one thing we can control – our mind.

By embracing the mindset of antifragility, we begin to expect problems. However, more importantly, by realizing that issues and the frustrations that come can be overcome, we become more aware of potential opportunities and begin to live our best life.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Ashe!


Questions to Think Upon

  1. Is our world being engineered in a direction that negatively impacts us?

  2. If this is the case, are we in the right frame of mind to address the many problems that come our way?

  3. Could we benefit from a mindset course that would change our outlook?

Unorthodoxy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for reading Unorthodoxy. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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How to Achieve Success by Mastering Your Mindset, Cultivating Anti-Fragility and Overcoming Frustration

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2 Comments
Earle
Mar 13Liked by Franklin O'Kanu

I listen to Richard Grove's Grand Theft World podcast every week (you should too). I just started reading Antifragile last week. I'm reading this. Clearly, the universe is speaking to me. You, too, I'll bet.

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