#growth The "thoughts → feelings → actions → results → ...thoughts" loop is a commonly referenced model for how we as humans behave. It's pretty basic but it has its uses. I want to add two more items to the loop, faith and beliefs. "Beliefs" is sometimes referenced along side "thoughts" in the typical loop, but they can be worth distinguishing. Below is the loop, and we'll work through it together. ![[faith-results-loop-with-habits.png|210]] My version of the loop I first mentioned is fairly straightforward: Your thoughts determine your feelings, your feelings determine your actions, and your actions determine your results. And once you have results, you experience those results through your feelings, and your feelings then influence your thoughts. We call this _learning_. Faith and beliefs are similar to thoughts, but are much more powerful. Your beliefs are the things you belief in and can for the most part prove to be true. _Monkeys are a lot like humans_ is a belief. Faith is even more powerful. Faith is something you _know_ to be true, deep down inside, despite not being able to prove it. _[[Omens|The world conspires to do me good]]_ is a faith. Your beliefs and faith are important because they have a strong effect on your thoughts. Your faith molds what you believe, and your beliefs mold what you think. So what does all this have to do with _experience_? Well, we all learn through experience. So far I have mostly talked about the downward motion of faith → beliefs → thoughts → feelings → actions → results. But there's an upward motion as well, and it all starts with our experiences (the results). That upward motion goes like this: experiences → feelings → thoughts → beliefs → faiths, although it's very rare for an experience to shake something as foundational as our faith. At each place in the loop, our experiences may not be strong enough to influence the tier above. This is all incredibly important to me for one reason: People will often tell you how important experience is in order to be good at something. _"Once you have done this for a few years you'll get it."_ They are right, but learning from experience can be an incredibly inefficient way of learning something. But now that we understand the loop, we know how to short-circuit the need for experiential learning. When we're struggling to understand something, it's because our thoughts are not coming together. Someone explains something, and it just doesn't make sense. Our thoughts are pretty malleable, so when we don't understand something it's typically because our beliefs are inconsistent with the new idea. This is usually when someone says "just try it and you'll see". They are saying that your experience doing the thing will be so strong that it will affect your belief system. With an understanding of this loop, you can ask the right question to short-circuit the need for the experience. You can ask "what beliefs do I hold that are preventing me from understanding where they are coming from?". When you figure out the answer to this question (usually with some back and forth between you and other person), you can adjust your belief system about how the world works, and magically the thing they were explaining will be totally clear to you. Practice this often. Try to understand the difference in the belief systems between you and your mentor, and you will be able to learn from their experiences rather than having to take the time and emotional drain to go through it yourself. Granted, when you do something yourself you tend to learn a whole lot of adjacent things along the way, and these can be incredibly valuable. Lastly, I will mention habits. Habits are another way to short-circuit the results loop. The book [[Atomic Habits|Atomic Habits]] hammers this home, and the author is dead on (there's a reason this book is so popular). We can use habits to get results without having to think about what we are doing. The habitual processes we put in place for ourselves are incredible effective at getting results, good or bad. If you want repeated results and don't want to go through the process of thinking too much about it, implement a habit and after 20 times you'll be getting the results you want without having to think twice.