The Most Important 150 Millimetres
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” (Anaïs Nin)
The most important 150 millimetres in your life is the average space between your ears. That’s roughly the distance across, ear to ear, and into that small space is packed every thought you think, every feeling you feel, every belief you hold and every pattern you run on repeat.
Here is what most people never quite realise. That small space quietly decides whether you build a life of success or a life of failure and destruction. Nothing dramatic needs to happen on the outside for either one. It is all being decided in there, in the 150mm nobody can see.
We Don’t See the World. We See Our Filter.
Picture two Stock traders sitting in front of a computer watching the charts on the exact same market as each other, the very same numbers on the very same charts. The optimist sees the stocks climbing even though its falling. The pessimist sees it crashing even as it rises higher and higher. Same data. Two completely opposite realities. How can that be?
Because none of us actually see the world as it is. We see it through the filter of our own thoughts, beliefs and patterns. As Anaïs Nin put it, ‘we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.’ In my book I describe how we take in information through our own filters. That filter, sitting right there in the 150mm, quietly decides what is even visible to us. The two traders were never looking at different markets. They were looking through different filters.
Where the Filter Comes From
Here is the part that stops people in their tracks. Most of that filter was never chosen. It was installed. In the book I explain the RAS (Reticular Activating System) as the mind’s own gate or a switch, which sits wide open until about the age of seven. In those early years the brain is a sponge, soaking up language, skills and, above all, beliefs about who we are, straight into the subconscious. Most of our self-limiting beliefs are formed before we ever set foot in a classroom.
Then the gate closes, and for the rest of our lives the subconscious works to protect what it learned, familiar or not, helpful or not. The lens you have been viewing your entire life through was largely ground into shape before you were old enough to have any say in it. That is not a life sentence. I call it, ‘Your Temporary Destiny.’ It is simply worth knowing because you cannot change something that you don’t know you have.
We Become the Sum of Those Around Us
The filter keeps being shaped long after childhood, by the company we keep. You have probably heard the idea, often credited to Jim Rohn, that ‘we are the average of the people we spend the most time with.’ I would put it like this: we become the sum of our closest friends, the seven or so people whose thoughts, beliefs and energy we marinate in day after day.
Their patterns and ours rub off on all of us. Their ceiling can quietly become our ceiling, their fears our fears, their view of what is possible our view of what is possible, all without a single word being said about it. Who we plug into becomes the very lens through which we come to see ourselves. It is worth asking, gently and honestly, whether the people closest to you are expanding your filter or shrinking it.
Success or Destruction, the Same 150mm
Success and failure are rarely just a matter of talent, or luck, or the world out there. They begin in that small space. In the quality of the thoughts running through it. In the patterns playing on repeat. In the beliefs installed young, and the filter shaped by those around us. Two people can stand in front of the very same opportunity, the same market, the same life, and one will build while the other breaks, purely because they are living inside two different 150mm.
You Can Reshape the Lens
Now the part that changes everything, and the reason I say the sky truly is the limit. Your filter is not fixed. The same brain that formed it is able to re-form it, at any age. You can question beliefs you never chose. You can change who you spend your time with. And through becoming the observer of your own mind, you can start to catch the filter in the act and slowly reshape it. This is the walk out of ‘The Tip,’ where an old filter keeps us seeing only threat and lack, and into ‘The Garden,’ where we begin to see possibility everywhere it actually was all along.
When you clear that space and consciously choose what runs inside it, the sky really is the limit. Not as a slogan on a poster. As a mechanism. Change the 150mm, and you change the whole of what you’re able to see, and therefore the whole of what you’re able to build.
A Question to Sit With
Look at whatever is in front of you right now, the opportunity, the relationship, the market, the situation, and ask yourself honestly:
‘Am I seeing what is actually there, or only what my filter is showing me?’
Then pick one belief, one pattern, one fear you have always taken as simple fact, and ask where it truly came from. You may find it was never yours to begin with. And the moment you can see the filter; you can finally begin to change it.
Have a great week,
Michael
📖 Where the F*ck Do Our Minds Go? → Get the book