Future Me Advisor

Your Mindframing Guide For Your Tiny Experiments

According to Marty McFly in the classic 1985 movie Back to the Future, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”

Now that we live in the future, in a world where there is more information available at your fingertips than you could ever consume, at a time where it only takes a click to pick the brains of the most brilliant experts of our era, it can indeed seem like anything is possible. One just needs a bit of imagination and determination.

Why is it then that we struggle so much to accomplish our goals? That we start many projects but only finish a few, if any? That we spend so much time procrastinating instead of learning and creating?

And why do 92% of people never achieve their New Year’s goals while others seem to more easily manage to stick to their plan?

My theory is that it’s all about having the right or the wrong mind frame—sometimes called “mindframe” in one word or “frame of mind”—for the task. You can have the best tools and strategies, but if you don’t have the right mind frame, things are not going to work.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a mind frame is a mental attitude or outlook. It’s more than just a mood, it encompasses the particular way someone thinks or feels about something, and deeply influences one’s behaviour.

What I find interesting is that mind frames are always presented as states in which the individual is bound to be. A mind frame seems to be a passive state.

It influences how the individual thinks and acts, but we rarely discuss how the individual can influence their mind frames.

And this may be what is wrong with our approach in setting, managing, and achieving our goals. Instead of shaping our mind frames in a way that plays in our favour and makes it easy for us to progress and feel fulfilled, we see positive mind frames as lucky aids, and negative mind frames as inevitable obstacles.

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What I like about mindframing compared to other learning frameworks I’ve tried is that it really encourages you to make—to produce content, build applications, and in short apply what you learn as soon as possible to solidify it. It’s more of a making framework.

First, let’s have a look at the tools you need. Many frameworks “require” to buy this special notebook or whatever tool will make you more productive. For mindframing, you just need something to write. I use a combination of a notebook and just my text editor.

There are four steps to the mindframing method:

1. Pact
2. Act
3. React
4. Impact

Which, you may notice, conveniently spells out PARI, which means “bet” in French. Now, let’s go through each of these briefly.

First, you create a pact, either with yourself or with others. I’m personally a big proponent of learning and building in public, but if you feel like you have the mental resilience and emotional strength to keep yourself accountable without sharing your goals with others, that’s fine too. There are also cases where you may not want to build your product in the open for other practical reasons.

A pact—which I could have called a contract, but CARI doesn’t mean anything in French—means in this case that you are committing to regularly spend time working towards your goal. It does not define the nitty-gritty of what you will do, or how long each session needs to be, just that you will be dedicating time on a regular basis to actions that will make you progress towards that goal.

A great example is #100daysofcode. Code newbies make a public pact to code every single day for a hundred days in a row. It does not matter for how long, what exactly they will do—it could be following a tutorial, building a small thing, reading some documentation, reaching out to a mentor with some questions—but they need to do at least one thing every day that contributes towards their goal of learning how to code.

Second, you need to act. This is usually the hardest part in most learning frameworks, which are complex and require you to go through lots of content in a specific order, study for a predetermined amount of hours per week, then complete some specific assignments. Way to feel discouraged.

With mindframing, you are in control of your learning process. The only thing you could do wrong is to do nothing. Open a book and read one page? That’s progress. Watch a tutorial video? That’s awesome. Listen to a friend sharing their thoughts about a coding event they attended? That counts too. There is no small contribution towards your goal. Each step you take brings you closer to the person you want to become.

Third, you need to react. This is when you start really internalising the concepts you have previously engaged with by creating your own content. I know it can sound daunting to start producing content at this stage. You feel like you’re such a newbie—who are you to share your thoughts about a topic that’s so new to you?

But this is one of the most efficient ways to learn, with the added bonus of helping you connect with people who are also interested in the topic. This could take many forms: a blog post, a short podcast, a live stream, a thread on Twitter, an email to your list. This article is actually me consolidating lots of the stuff I’ve been learning in the past years. Reframing and explaining your thoughts to someone is a great way to consolidate yours.

Finally, you need to work on a project with impact. Once you feel familiar enough—which means that you can grasp the concepts and can articulate them, but still feel very uncomfortable using them—you should start creating something bigger. If you’re learning how to code, time to try building your first complex application. If you’re studying ancient history, time to write longer essays about a little-studied topic and submit them to relevant publications. If you’re studying music composition, time to create a collection of original pieces.

These will probably not be very good at first, but you will learn an incredible amount by pushing yourself to not only be able to explain concepts, but by having a deep enough understanding to create something of your own.