You can't trick your mind

It's too busy tricking itself

So it’s Thursday night, and I like to publish on Friday mornings. Ideally, articles are written over a few days during the week. But this week, the canvas is empty and I’m tired. I’m also trying to prepare for a keynote presentation, which is actually what I’m working on right now.

Because the mind can be a really annoying piece of expletive, and it doesn’t currently want to stay focused on the task at hand, I’m trying to trick it into having a great idea for how to structure the keynote by not focusing on it.

Like what happened this afternoon, I took my daughter for a bike ride. We have a great time on our rides, she loves it and I get some time with her plus exercise. Yet halfway around the lake we were riding around my mind spat out this nugget:

‘To embrace the future, focus on now’

So the mind randomly spits out intriguing philosophical quips about being in the moment. Yet in the moments it’s meant to focus, it does everything it can to avoid being in the moment!

Alas, one of life’s great ironies.

I am yet to get a brain spark for the keynote.

So tricking your own mind isn’t actually possible. Of course not, it designed the trick so it already knows!

Then again, perhaps my mind tricked itself into writing an article??

Fortunately, either way, I now have an article. So this attempt to ‘trick myself’ is a successful failure. I’ll take that.

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