What You Do After Change Defines You
An intense life experience makes the subconscious red hot like metal, and whatever you do in the six to twelve months after it hammers a new shape into you that stays once the metal cools.
Dandapani describes leaving the monastery after ten years with a thousand dollars, some clothes and a MacBook, and how long it took to stop living by monastery rules nobody was enforcing. He explains why the subconscious hardens after about twenty five and only reshapes during intense experiences, and how he deliberately controlled his first eighteen months in the world because he knew his mind was red hot.
What this talk covers
- The hardest part of leaving was realizing he was no longer a monk but a householder, after going straight from university into a cloistered monastery through the most formative years of his life.
- He stayed months at a friend's Hindu temple property and would walk to the edge of the land and stop, because monastery monks did not leave, even though no rule bound him any more.
- The subconscious is very moldable in the first twenty five years, which is why he spends so much time with his daughter, and after that it changes mainly through intense experiences such as divorce, death or a business failing.
- The subconscious is like metal: once solid, the only way to reshape it is to heat it red hot and hammer it, and an intense life experience is what makes it red hot for roughly six to twelve months.
- Knowing this, he made sure his first year to eighteen months out held only experiences that would impress his mind positively, including changing the subject whenever an entrepreneur started describing their struggling business.
Once it solidifies, the only way to change it is to heat it up, it gets red hot, and then you can hammer it into a shape.Dandapani
Questions
-
Because the subconscious is red hot then and takes on whatever shape is hammered into it. For roughly six to twelve months after a divorce, a death, a business exit or a near-death experience, the impressions you make go deep, and they set once the metal cools.
-
He describes someone who works a government job for thirty years, retires at fifty five and decides to take a year off. The deepest impression planted right at that moment was to relax and do nothing, so for the next forty years they are still taking the year off.
-
Shifting out of being a monk. He had gone from university straight into a cloistered monastery under vows, so he knew how to be a monk and not how to live in the world. He stopped at the edge of a friend's property because monks did not leave, and had to give himself permission to buy a bar of chocolate in the afternoon.
Transcript
952 words · 4:48
So you leave, you land in the mainland of the US and in LA, no assets, no possessions outside of a thousand bucks, some clothes and a MacBook. What part of you from the monastery did you have to abandon in order to survive this quote unquote real life or was it a part of you that you had to embrace in order to survive?
I think it was because I had gone from university straight to the monastery. The most formative part of my life, you know, in my mid-20s, mid-30s, where everyone's going out and experiencing the world and doing stuff, was in the monastery. So it was very cloistered.
We were in there, monks under vows. So I think the hardest part was coming out and realizing I'm not a monk anymore. I'm a householder, a family person, that I wanted to be a family person, that I will be, embracing the ways of the world.
And that was very difficult to shift out of that. And I spent quite a few months staying at a Hindu temple that belonged to a close friend of mine. And quite a few acres, the property, and I stayed there for a few months.
I would never leave the property. I would walk to the edge of the property and stop there because the monastery monks didn't leave. And even though there was no rule, I could do whatever I wanted.
I didn't. So there's so much of that thinking that I had to adjust because I just knew how to be a monk. I didn't know how to live in the world.
three meals a day, not snacking in between. There was no snacks in the monastery, so we had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So I just never snacked. I just ate three meals a day. I just didn't know any different. And then even going out and seeing a bar of chocolate or French fries and going, oh, that looks good. It's like, oh, we don't snack. And then
giving myself permission to go buy a bar of chocolate and eat at three o'clock in the afternoon like, yes, baby. What was your favorite thing you tried? Like was it chocolate?
Was it like getting back into this quote unquote society, right? Now you can snack, you can do whatever you want. What was your favorite thing you did?
I'll give a slightly longer answer to the mind because it'll help answer this question. The subconscious is very moldable in the first 25 years of life and that's why I shared with you,
you know, I'm spending so much time with my daughter because I want to shape it. And after like 20, 25 years old, we get very much stuck in our ways.
And when the subconscious only changes after that, when we have intense life experiences, we go through divorce or death, business failing or something like that, then you see people making pivots.
Leaving the monastery for me was a intense time. And the subconscious, you can look at it as a piece of metal, for example. Once it solidifies, the only way to change it
is to heat it up, it gets red hot, and then you can hammer it into a shape. So when someone goes through an intense life experience like a near-death experience or, you know, divorce, whatever it is, you could say it
becomes red hot. And whatever they do in the next 6 to 12 months, roughly, exactly, changes the shape of that. And then when the metal cools down, it takes on the new shape. So when I left the monastery, I realized it was the most difficult decision I'd ever
made in my life. My subconscious was red hot. Whatever I did in the coming months after I left the monastery would deeply impress my mind.
So I made sure that the first year, year, 18 months of my life in the world, I only had experiences that would impress my subconscious in a positive way. I knew I wanted to have my own business, work for myself. I would never talk to any entrepreneur that had a failing business.
As soon as someone was telling me, like, oh, it's so difficult, I fail, it's a struggle, I would just change the conversation. Because I didn't want that to be the early impressions in my mind. And so I was very, very careful of what I did.
didn't even snack. I still don't rarely snack. I do with my daughter, you know, I hang out with her. But I think it's important for, you know, even leaders to understand that when we go through it, you see this, I work with a lot of entrepreneurs that exited such an intense time, right? They build a business 15, 20 years, and then they exit their business.
You could say now their mind's red hot. Whatever you do right after really impresses. So So I tell, be so conscious after that for the next six to 12, 18 months of what you do. You see people who retire, and they say, you know, I've been working a government job
with this for 30 years, retired at 55, now I'm just going to take a year off. And you know what they do for the rest of their life? They just take the year off. They can't get out of it.
And for the next 40 years till they die, they're just taking the year off. Because the deepest impression that was planted right after was, I'm just going to relax and do nothing. And then you just get stuck at that.