SDS 318: Amazing

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast ladies and gentlemen, super pumped, super excited to have you back here on the show because I have something very interesting to share with you today. So about six months ago or so, I was talking to one of my mentors whom I catch up with about two or three times a month for a 30 minute call and I noticed something. And I’d been noticing this about him for a while now that every single time I ask him how he’s doing, how is it going, how are things, the first thing that we get on call, he always says “Amazing”. I say my normal stuff like “Kirill, how are you doing?” And I would say, “Oh great, good fine.” Every single time I’d ask him, Ivor, how are you doing? He’d say, “Amazing. My life is fantastic. Everything’s great. I feel so energized, so good. I feel fantastic and amazing.” Every single time he would use this word ‘Amazing’.

So about six months or so, I decided to try that out for myself as well. So I started saying that and for the past plus minus six months, every single time somebody asked me, how are you? How are you doing? How are you going? I would always answer “amazing”. In fact, just now I was on a phone call with someone and first thing, on the call, they asked, how are you? And I’m like, “amazing”. And what I’ve found for myself is that for the past six months, the quality of my life, the quality of my, or just the amount of happiness and joy in my life I have has been increasing. And of course I can’t say there’s 100% attributable to this one habit or routine that I have of saying amazing, there are other things that I work on myself, I focus on being happier, uncovering problems that I have in my psychology and fixing them, improving and getting rid of things I’m stuck on. Of course there’s lots of contributing factors, but I’m 100% sure, 100% sure that this one little change, just saying ‘amazing’ every single time somebody asks me has been a massive contributing factor to this overall feeling of how I feel.

And the reason for that is twofold. There’s two main reasons why I am 100% sure. First one, there is a great talk on Ted by Amy Cuddy called “Your body language may shape who you are”. It’s got 55 million views. So this talk is predominantly about body language, but nevertheless, there’s a comment there that she makes about ‘fake it till you become it’. So even if you don’t feel amazing, even if you don’t feel fantastic, there’s a reverse feedback loop in your brain. Instead of first feeling amazing and then saying that you feel amazing as a consequence, if you manage to constantly say that you feel amazing, you’ll brain will readjust and make itself feel amazing, make you feel amazing. There’s a reverse feedback loop. It’s called ‘fake it until you become it’. You can check out the talk about Amy Cuddy, it’s about body language, but the same applies in this principle absolutely, for sure.

So basically you can program yourself to be happy. But you might say, well, how can you program is yourself to feel amazing if you are in a very bad situation, if everything around is falling apart, if you don’t have the things that you want, you can’t accomplish something. You’re in a very poor place. There’s a lot of responsibility or you have a lot of debt or whatever else. There’s a lot of subtle factors. Well, this brings us to that reason number two, I really believe that this works because how you feel inside has nothing to do with what’s around you or what’s on outside. Full stop. Period. That you can have all the riches in the world and feel miserable. You can have nothing, you can be very poor, you can be a monk in Tibet and feel amazing.

So how you feel inside has absolutely no correlation with the things around you. Like we might think there’s a correlation, but how many people do we know who are super rich, super famous, have everything that anybody could possibly wish for? And are completely miserable. Well, how many stories do we know of people who are in a very difficult situation, who are very poor, who maybe have lost loved ones or friends or limbs or they’re just in a very devastating state and they still feel happy and they still feel joy. They still feel good about themselves, still feel amazing, deep down inside. Plenty of stories of both kinds and that just sounds to show that this race that we’re in to make a lot of accomplishments, to gain a lot of material possessions, to gain status, fame, wealth, whatever it is. It actually is like smoke and mirrors.

It’s misleading us. It’s making us think “Oh, once I have all these things, or once I accomplish this and that, once I become an amazing data scientist, or once I run this marathon on whatever, then I’ll feel amazing”. You might feel some kind of sense of accomplishment or some kind of sense of fulfillment from that. That’s ultimately most like it’ll be short lived. Your feeling of amazing can come from within and come at any, absolutely, any state. You can be the richest person on the planet, you can be the poorest person on the planet. You can be in a great, wonderful place with amazing nature and environment or you can be in the most scariest, darkest corner of the planet. Doesn’t matter. You can feel amazing from within. Absolutely disregarding what is around you.

And I’ve learned that more and more on my own. I’ve searched a lot. I’ve looked for different ways that I can improve my happiness. What can I do? What can I accomplish? What do I need to do to be happier, to feel better? But ultimately what I’ve learned over the past years is that it just comes from within. It’s a choice. It’s a choice you make to feel amazing in absolutely any state. How wonderful that will be? If you could just no matter what’s going on, no matter how difficult life gets, you, yes, there’s some element of stress and it’s useful to be stressed sometimes to get things done, to look objectively at situations and resolve problems and so on. But how wonderful would it be if 90% of the time you could just feel amazing no matter what? I really believe that’s possible. And if you do too, if you believe that, if you choose to believe that you can accomplish that.

So my goal for you this weekend is try this out. When next time somebody asks you, how are you, how are you feeling? How you going? How are you doing? How’s life? Instead of saying, “good, great, fine”, or “bad”, or whatever else you normally say, say “amazing”. Or whatever, the version in your language is, pick a word that means the same thing in your language, for the people that you interact with and just commit to saying that word for at least the next three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and see how that goes. See how people react, how people respond and really mean it. Don’t just say amazing but really mean and say, “amazing. My life is great, my life is wonderful”. People might be surprised, especially if they know you. They might say, well, how can your life be wonderful? You’ve got this really big problem going on or you have this massive loan.

Or they might be surprised, they might not say anything, but they might be surprised and look, observe their reactions, observe how you feel and I am 100% sure that you are going to start even feeling different. Even just by the end of these three days you’re going to start feeling a slight shift. If you do, if you do enjoy the feeling that you get inside, then continue. Continue for the next week, next month, next six months and see how you go. Like for me it’s had a massive impact and I really wish the same to absolutely everybody, everybody and anybody can feel amazing at any point in time, no matter what’s going on around. Things will bring us down sometimes, but at least 90% of the time we can feel amazing.

So my friends, I wish that to you, give it a go and I can’t wait to see you back here on the SuperDataScience podcast the next time. And until then, feel amazing and happy analyzing.