For most of my life, if you’d asked me what peace of mind looked like, I probably would have pictured something cliché, like meditating on a Tibetan mountaintop with the Dalai Lama. I never imagined I’d find it so much closer to home, thanks to a cognitive neuroscientist named David Vago.
There’s a simple four-letter word that has torpedoed more great ideas and paralyzed more ambitious people than anything else in history. That word is fear.
We’ve all heard it a thousand times: success is all about being in the right place at the right time. It’s a comforting thought, suggesting that big breaks are a matter of luck or circumstance. But this idea is also incredibly dangerous. It teaches us to wait for success to come knocking instead of building it ourselves. It makes us believe that our situation matters more than our substance.
Before you can successfully start a side hustle, there's often a crucial mental shift that needs to happen first. Think of it as a reboot for your perspective. The framework I'm about to share is anything but accidental; it’s built on over 3,000 hours of deep research into neuroscience and cognitive psychology, designed to give you the mental tools needed when starting a side hustle while working full time.
We are living in an era of unprecedented information. In the last fifty years, the dawn of the digital age has caused an explosion of knowledge and data. Every single day, we collectively generate about 1.15 trillion megabytes of new data—a fact I found in a quick 45-second Google search. To put that in perspective, we create more new information in a 24-hour cycle than all of our ancestors did over millions of years.
Most of us have a few scattered memories from early childhood, maybe a birthday party or playing outside, probably from around age four or five. What we can’t recall, however, is how our brains actually operated back then. It’s easy to assume they worked just like they do now, but that couldn’t be more wrong.