How can you unlock a winning mindset? Perhaps rats can give us an idea of what to do. April Shprintz looks into a study about rats during the 1950s and reveals what they teach us about cultivating the right mindset.
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What Rats Can Teach Us About Mindset
I am so glad you’re here. If you’ve been reading for any period of time, you know I geek out on any scientific studies, anything about mindset, anything with psychology that can help us do and be better and have a more winning mindset. I found an old study from the 1950s that is incredibly powerful in the information that it gave us.
A Study On Rats From The 1950s
Now, it was done in the 1950s, it was done with rats, and rats died to get us this information. What I’d like you to do is pay really close attention because that will make their sacrifice worth it because what they can teach us is fucking amazing. In the 1950s, these researchers dropped rats into the water and they had no way out. Most of the rats gave up after about fifteen minutes and they drowned. When doing the study, any of the rats that they rescued before they drowned and then put back, they then swam for 60 hours.
April’s Real-Life Experiences
Not because they were stronger than the other rats, but because they now had hope. Think about that. People say strength is the only thing you need, but these rats proved that hope is so much more powerful than strength. I’ll give you a couple of examples from my own life. One, for those of you who’ve read Magic Blue Rocks or who have heard me talk about it before, you know that I grew up, it was super humble means, and I wanted to be a news anchor in a family where nobody even graduated high school.
Hope is so much more powerful than strength. Share on XCollege and then a big professional job. People thought I was crazy. They constantly told me, “That’s not going to happen for you.” What I saw was George Jefferson on television on the show The Jeffersons, where they had the song about moving on up and he lived in a penthouse and he owned all these dry cleaners.
For me, I had hope, no matter what all the people were telling me around me. It’s really amazing when I look back because all the things they said that we “couldn’t” do was true for them. That’s how their lives played out. For me, I had hope. I saw someone else who could do it. If you think back to years and years ago when they thought that no one could run a four-minute mile. It was impossible, couldn’t happen, yet Roger Bannister ran a sub-four-minute mile and then all of a sudden, lots of people started doing it because they had hope. Hope is so much more powerful from a mindset standpoint and a physical standpoint because your mind can overcome your body if you just have a reason to believe that it can.
Another personal example in my life, when my mother passed away, my sister was 44 years old. She hadn’t worked, she hadn’t driven, she hadn’t lived alone. She’d lived alone for a short period of time, but never owned a home or anything like that. She told me that what she wanted to do more than anything was not let any of her “disabilities” hold her back. She wanted to drive a car, she wanted to get a job, she wanted to live on her own.
Acquiring Hope From Other People
I said, “Yeah, absolutely, you can do that. You can do anything you want to do.” In that case, she borrowed the hope. She borrowed the belief from someone else, which any and all of us can do. Just think about that. The next time that you’re like, “I can’t do this. This is impossible,” what would give you hope? Would it be things that you’ve done in the past that others thought you couldn’t do, that you did do? That’s incredible. That gives you hope that you can do far more than anyone else knows, which, by the way, is completely fucking true.
Only you know what is possible for you. You know how you know what’s possible for you by what you want to do because you wouldn’t want to do it if it wasn’t possible. Usually, the naysayers are people who you wouldn’t trade lives with, and they’re people that you wouldn’t want to be them anyway. Why would you take their advice?
Look at other people who have done what you want to achieve. They will give you hope and show you that it is possible. Share on XNow, if you can’t think of something in your past that is as big or as crazy of a goal as you have right now, but you still need hope, then model others. Look at other people who have done it because anybody else doing something should give you hope that it’s possible for you because they’ve shown that it’s possible. If you have an opportunity to talk to any of those people, you can actually ask them how they did it, if it’s possible for you.
Guess what? Anyone who has ever done what you want to do is going to tell you it’s absolutely possible for you. They might say it’s hard as hell. They might say it requires commitment you’re not ready to make but it is absolutely possible. One last thing. If for any reason I happen to be one of those people for you, if I have done anything that you would like to do, which, big supposition there, you may not, but if I am, you can always reach out to me personally and privately on my website, WinningMindsetMasteryPodcast.com.
Down near the bottom of the page, there’s an Ask April section. You can literally voice a message that comes to me personally and it’s private and I will answer you personally. If there’s something that you want to do that people around you are saying you can’t and you want thoughts and advice on it, and you think I might be able to help, I am there for you always. Here’s to your success.
