I’m Begging You To Ignore Your Reality

The Concept That Changed How I Think

The concept of ignoring reality made me change how I think about pretty much everything.

There is an equation that runs your entire life.

Every single domain. Health. Wealth. Love. And happiness.

And most of us, including myself, have had it backwards our entire lives.

Every single decision you’ve made or pattern you’ve fallen into is built on a sequence that was already decided from the very start.

Once you understand that sequence, which I believe you will by the end of this article, a lot of the stuff that just doesn’t make sense to you will suddenly click.

The Default (Backwards) Equation

Let’s talk a bit about the default equation. This is how most people live:

They experience an event (the external world)
The mind creates a thought about the event
That thought creates feelings
You act based on those feelings
All of that generates more of the same kind of reality

It’s a loop that you are a part of but what you may not realise is that you’re the one giving the loop the permission to continue. All of it happens on autopilot.

Which is why sometimes at the end of each day, you may feel like nothing has changed.

Nothing in your life seems like a choice which is why the same things keep repeating.

People are stuck living the same life because of this “loop” and it can go for years and even decades.

The cycle feels obvious and natural which is why nobody even questions it.

When a bad thing happens, of course you would think negative thoughts. It’s just your natural reaction to the world.

But that is the exact trap.

If you think negative, you will feel negative.

If you feel negative, your actions will be negative because it’s coming from a negative place.

And because life is cyclical, reality will remain the same.

You’re basically allowing the outputs of life dictate the inputs. Which means you stay trapped in the same result.

Your reactions are reinforcing the very reality you’re trying to escape.

Your finances. Your health. Your relationships.

Absolutely everything.

The very reality you experience today is based on old data. Data that’s already finished.

It has nothing to do with what’s possible for you going forward.

This means that your current circumstances are an energetic history. A record of where your internal state was at some earlier point in life.

I want you to really understand this.

People look at that record and treat it like live feed. They treat is as it’s happening right now.

But there’s a delay between when you change internally and when that change shows up externally.

If you’re judging your progress by what you see in front of you right now, you’re looking at evidence of an older version of yourself. It’s very misleading.

Your current reality isn’t a final judgement of who you are or what you’re capable of.

A lot of ambitious but unsuccessful people already know that their future is probably brighter than their current reality, but they’re most likely not aware that their current reality is just a result of what happened years ago.

You are free to write a completely new reality starting right now.

I’m writing this article because this is one of the most liberating realisations you can have in life.

Inputs determine outputs.

Writing better inputs is the only thing that moves the needle forward.

Changing that one variable separates people who are stuck in the same patterns and people who change effortlessly.

You don’t change your life by wrestling with reality. You change it by changing what goes into the equation first.

External events and circumstances turn into thoughts. Thoughts turn into feelings. Feelings turn into action. And ultimately there is no exit point.

If you think the same way, you will get the same result.

Life can literally feel inescapable. At every point of the chain the next step feels like the only logical response to the one before it.

If nothing is changing in your life, it’s because you assume that the outside world is causing you to think, feel, and act the way that you do.

Which is actually not your fault, we were all conditioned since childhood to believe that our thoughts and feelings are caused by what happens to us.

So, no wonder why you blame other people and things, right?

You don’t even register it as a pattern, let alone a pattern you could change.

That’s why the first step is to acknowledge the default equation.

You can’t change something you haven’t noticed.

The ideal order of the equation is the reverse of what you’ve been taught.

It’s why certain people create results almost magnetically and others grind away for years and make no result.

The ideal equation looks like this:

thought > feeling > action > new circumstances (reality)

The key difference here is that you’re ignoring reality.

You’re the one choosing the starting point instead of letting your external environment choose it which makes you in control of the chain.

Let’s move on to to the first step.

Step One: Become Fully Conscious & Aware Of The Default Equation

For the love of God, please don’t skip this step. You can run a single loop for decades without ever realising that you’re the one sustaining it.

This applies to everything.

It shows up in your relationships (you keep attracting the same kind of person or dynamic)
It shows up in health (you fall back into the same patterns no matter how many diets or programs you try)
It shows up in your overall general mood and energy

Why?

Because all of those things are outputs of the same equation.

Once you see this pattern in one area of your life, you will be able to see it everywhere.

The same mechanism playing out across every single domain.

If you’re not happy with your life, great.

The reason your life looks the way it is now is understandable, explainable, and changeable.

It is the outcome of a set equation. And the good thing is, equations can be changed.

But only if you see them.

How? It’s very straightforward.

Start paying attention to the specific moments in your day when external circumstances dictate how you think.

Then notice how that style of thinking is shaping how you feel.

And of course, how those emotions then go on to shape your behaviour.

Recognise in those moments that you’re running the default equation, the old sequence. The equation we don’t want to use.

An example would be checking your bank balance. If it’s lower than you what you want it to be, that is going to create a thought.

“I’m not where I should be” or “I spent too much last week”.

That is going to create feelings of heaviness.

It all happens in half a second on autopilot without you making a conscious choice in the process.

That entire little experience creates a lower state. And you go about your day carrying that energy into every conversation and decision you make.

The speed is important. It’s almost invisible.

By the time you even think about the thought, you feel the emotions associated with it, and you’ve already reacted.

Then you’re just living in the output of that reaction. This isn’t just about money. It happens a dozen times a day.

I also want you to be aware of micro-reactions. Even though it don’t seem like a big deal, reactions accumulate.

By the end of the day, you run the default equation 50-100 times without even realising it.

Self-awareness and just the act of noticing alone is powerful as every time you catch the thought, you’re interrupting a compounded process.

Overtime, those interruptions add up.

Think about your recurring problems like apps running on your phone. They’re just in the background, sitting there quietly and consuming energy. Every time you open one of them, you give it your attention and emotional investment.

You’re telling the system “Keep this one active. This one really matters!”. And so, it stays in the loop. It’s the reason why some problems follow you around for years even though you feel like you’ve dealt with it.

You only have so much emotional bandwidth in a day and if half of it is going to background processes that are just recycling old patterns, then you have that much less bandwidth to create something new.

A powerful move is to stop opening the app. Stop engaging with the older patterns when it pops up. Let it sit there without clicking on it and eventually it will time out on its own.

These patterns can only sustain themselves when you feed them your attention and energy. Withdraw the input (your emotional reactions), and the pattern loses its hold because there is nothing feeding it.

Be very selective of what gets your cognitive and emotional energy.

The most underrated skill in personal development is the ability to recognise a thought rising and choosing whether to invest in it or let it pass.

Here’s a practical exercise. We can call this the equation check. A Few times a day, pause and ask yourself: “Am I reacting to my reality or am I creating it?”

The moment you catch the thought that’s driving your reaction, you’ve already stepped outside the loop for just a second. And that second of awareness is where the change becomes possible.

In the old equation, there is no pause. So, between every thought and reaction, learn to insert a tiny gap.

We’re fundamentally changing the mechanics of the process. Between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space is your freedom and power to choose.

Do it throughout the day. The default equation is active all day long. So, your awareness practise needs to be distributed across the day too.

Step one is the foundation. Give it all the attention it deserves.

I want to be completely honest with you. This is difficult.

Maybe the most difficult thing you’ll ever do in your life because your nervous system is built to read reality first and respond second.

It’s the survival mechanism that has kept humans alive for hundreds of thousands of years. And what we’re doing here is operating in a way that is counterintuitive.

That’s why it takes real practise, patience, and the willingness to be bad at it for a while before it starts to become more natural.

The first step is where you build the capacity to override a system that has been running unchecked your entire life. It’s a big deal.

Those who take this step seriously and practise it are the ones who make the other two steps work better.

Those who skip it or treat it as obvious are the ones who end up back in the same loop six months later confused on what happened.

Step Two: Change The Equation

The only way you can create a reality you want is to stop paying attention to the reality you don’t want.

Stop complaining about your problems. If you don’t know already, complaints compound problems.

I used to talk about my problems to other people a lot. It was one of the biggest mistake I made.

Not because you shouldn’t open yourself up to other people. But because complaining is admitting your problems have importance.

Complaining is the act of bringing energy and attention to a manifestation in our reality that we want to change, and we don’t change something by bringing energy to it, we change something by starving it out.

Experience is important. If you don’t experience what you don’t want, you can never really know what you do want. So, experience isn’t the enemy here.

The problem is that we pay too much attention into the reality that we don’t want and speak that reality into existence over and over and over again.

It’s like playing the same song when you don’t want to listen to it. Don’t act against the problem, act against the solution.

It’s all about becoming a part of the solution, it’s not becoming a part of solving the problem.

Now, what do we do if we don’t go by the default equation? We change it. Deliberately choose your own thoughts to generate the reality that you desire before there is any evidence of it.

Most people skip this step entirely or do it halfway. What matters here is the direction of the equation which needs to be changed.

The default is that you wait for something good to happen, your mind thinks a positive thought about it, and then you feel good about it.

The new equation is to choose the thought. Choosing your thoughts will actually generate the feelings you want. Create the internal state deliberately and let reality organise around that.

This is you writing the equation by hand instead of letting external circumstances fill it in for you, which completely changes what comes out on the other end.

It will feel a little crazy at first. And it should. Generating thoughts before anything has even happened is a crazy move. But that’s the entire point.

You need deliberate action. Because the default system is always going to want to read reality first and respond second.

For example, if you sit with your thoughts and feelings of financial security. If you let your body relax into how you would think at that point and what that would feel like in your body, chest, shoulders, and your breathing, your nervous system will respond to that signal the same way it would respond to an event.

Your biology doesn’t check the source, it just processes the data it receives. There’s substantial research on this in neuroscience.

The basic finding is that mental rehearsal activates many of the same neuropathways as actual experience. It’s why athletes use visualisation.

When you sit down and generally feel into the state of the person who already has what you want, your biology is responding to that as if you already have it.

The beautiful part of this is that your body doesn’t argue with it. It doesn’t say, “you don’t have that yet”.

So, there is a morning practise I would highly recommend. Spend 5 minutes with yourself in the morning before you do anything. Before you talk to anyone, eat anything, or check your phone. Just sit with the version of you who already has what you want.

This isn’t visualisation. It’s thinking and feeling into a specific type of state. The internal experience of being the person who already lives the reality that you want.

The thoughts and feelings that would be present if your desired reality was your current one.

This is of course different for everyone. I don’t want you to picture something in your mind. I want you to feel the experience in your body.

If you do this consistently every morning, it becomes the state you carry into the rest of your days. You’re running the new equation from the start of the day.

One session or a few sessions of this won’t change much. But doing it every day for weeks and months will start to fundamentally change your baseline state. It compounds.

You will start to have a completely different internal state, which will show a completely different output.

Your thoughts and feelings determine the output of the equation and ultimately your life. Money. Relationships. Health. Opportunities. They’re all a downstream of an internal state that was held consistently enough for reality to organise around it.

Most people focus way too much on the external. They try to create what they want directly through effort and strategy.

But that doesn’t work because the underlying input (thoughts, feelings, and who you believe you are) hasn’t changed. The gains are always downstream. It’s always the affect. The thoughts and feelings are always the cause.

The moment this stops becoming a concept, but something you actually live by, you stop chasing outcomes and start managing your thinking and internal state which is the only lever that controls the output of the equation in a lasting way. It’s also the only part you can control.

During this, things can feel uncertain. It may look like nothing is changing. But the maths don’t lie. If an input is different, the output will eventually be different. That understanding will get you through the difficult middle part.

Step Three: Hold On To The Change Through The Delay

How do you pay attention to a reality that isn’t here yet? And how do you ignore the reality and all of the problems that are in front of you right now? It’s like being stuck between two different dimensions.

Here’s a key insight: Being able to accelerate the change that you want in your life is not about doing something different. It’s about not doing the thing that you’re doing that’s preventing the manifestation from taking place. This is the part where most people fall off.

When you start running the new equation in your life, your external reality doesn’t update right away. There is often a gap, delay, lag. Call it what you want. Most people interpret the delay as the equation not working. This step is all about patience.

It can take days, months, or even years. Essentially what you’re doing is living in two different realties. Your internal state says one thing and your external world says another.

This level of change causes tension. And tension is uncomfortable. I totally get it. But that’s also a sign that it is working. During the delay, your older reality is going to scream louder than ever.

But old outputs that show up during the delay aren’t new problems, they’re old ones already in transit. If anything, expect it. Expect your old life to be ever so present when you’re trying to change.

Think of it like an Amazon order. You pay, the money exists your bank account, but you still haven’t received the product. The same thing happens when you’re trying to change.

It can feel like the Universe, God, and life is testing you on whether you really mean it or whether you’re going to fold at the first sign of resistance.

Those who break through are the ones who can hold the new input even when the old output is still showing up everywhere around them. Holding is the real skill here. Not through concept or theory, but through practise.

The delay (as uncomfortable as it is) is the part of the process where most of the growth happens. You build the capacity to hold an internal state independently of external circumstances.

Your job is simply not to flip the equation back to the default. You don’t need to do anything else. You just need to hold position and keep feeding new inputs into the equation.

By following the morning practise from step two and the equation checks throughout the day from step one, you basically build a routine that supports the system automatically.

Let me make it clear. This isn’t about will power. It’s actual practises in place that keep the new input flowing even on difficult days.

Step one gives you the awareness to catch the default equation when it pops up.

Step two gives you the practise for setting up the new inputs.

Step three maintains the new inputs through a period where the old output is still visible.

Be very practical. When something shows up that looks like proof that nothing is changing, recognise it for what it is.

An old output that has already finished and is irrelevant to what you’re building now.

Don’t engage with it, bring your attention back to the internal state formed in step two.

That’s all.

Give your mind something specific to do in the moment of disruption. That puts the old output into context.

It shows that it’s not current evidence, but old data that’s being cleared away.

During this, don’t ask yourself questions like, “has my reality changed yet?”, that keeps you focused on the output.

Ask yourself, “have I changed?”. In any successful endeavour, the biggest result comes from you changing as a person. You know you’re building something real if you’re building it from the inside out.

That’s the only way anything lasting can be built. Not the other way around.