There was a study done a while ago……., some scientists got together in America. They did a little study with fish and they put a Perch at one end of a fish tank…. and they put the Minnows at the other end of the fish tank and the Perch swam up and down eating the Minnows.
Then the scientists dropped a bit of glass in the middle of the tank and the Perch would race over to get his food and he would bang his face on the glass screen and he would think “I don’t like that”…. so he’d go back again.
Then when he got hungry, he would have another go and he would race along the tank and he would bang his nose on the glass again…. and for days he would be up and down banging his nose, not getting fed just banging his face on the glass.
And eventually his mind got conditioned; “It’s going to bloody hurt if I keep hitting my face on that glass, so I won’t bother.”
Then they took the glass away.
The Perch never went near the Minnows ever. He assumed, wrongly, that the glass was still there and if he went up to it, it would hurt. He had been mentally conditioned.
That’s how we are…..if I go in that direction it’s going to hurt, it hurt last time so it’s going to hurt again, I’m not going to do it. You get mentally conditioned not to do stuff.
If you’ve read my Cash On Demand material, you’ll have seen me writing about a study that was done on fleas. Did you know that a flea can jump 200 times its own height? Amazing thing, imagine that… 200 times your own height…..
They put a glass on top of a flea and instead of jumping up 200 times his own height – the flea could only jump as high as the glass – he hit his head each time he jumped – so he became mentally conditioned. Then they took the glass away and instead of jumping 200 times its height – it only jumped as high as the point where the glass had been – the point where it would have hurt.
It had been limited to think that it could only then jump that height.
We have to take those beliefs away! You can jump 200 times your own height, as a metaphor. This year and I don’t want to sound boastful, it’s not my style, but this year I will probably earn 200 times the national average wage because I removed all those obstacles….. and you can do the same. At my last Bootcamp I played a great song, Heather Small’s ‘Proud’. The line that does it for me is this:
You can be so many people if you make that break for freedom.
You can be so many people – you can jump 200 times higher…..
The above is an extract from Andrew Reynolds Bootcamp presentation to his Cash On Demand students.