Your entire life is the culmination of thoughts in your mind.
Every single thing you did was first the result of a thought, which is an electrical signal that followed an "IF THIS THAN THAT" logic flow inside your brain. This then propelled your body to activate certain muscles to move certain limbs in a certain way to accomplish certain goals.
Pretty fascinating when you think about it like this.
You've followed this exact process millions of times in your life up to this point, and it is why you have the life you have today.
Let that sink in a moment.
Let's now reduce it to the foundational Principles.
Everything in your life is the result of your thoughts.
This is an irrefutable law of the human experience. And thus it is where you should be focusing your attention to optimize.
Few people do this. Few think about their thoughts, and even fewer think about upgrading their mindset and killing off bad thought patterns.
Yet this is a must if you want to be successful in life.
Success does not just happen. It is a result of directed action. Since all directed action comes thought, the way you think is connected to the results you get.
If you don't like the results you have as a whole or in a specific area, it's your thoughts you must diagnose and fix.
How to do this is a broad topic best saved for another day. That said, I'll leave you with one recommendation.
The first is to do this: stop telling yourself stories.
Most of us have stories about why we do things, why we get the results we get, why things make us upset, etc.
Start catching yourself in this faulty act. Then stop doing it.
You don't need a story about yourself. You don't need an opinion about yourself. You don't need to justify yourself.
The more you tell yourself stories, the harder it is to change them. The more likely you are to remain exactly where you are.
Most humans don't change. They end up living their entire lives doing the same things, thinking the same things. They become slaves to their thoughts.
Instead, observe yourself, like a biologist.
You are the scientists, and you observe yourself from outside yourself.
Then take in data, ask questions, test, iterate, test, tweak, learn, improve.
The more you can separate your Ego from your inner scientist, the more you'll be able to control your thought patterns.
This is the only way you can truly audit and adjust your thoughts: by becoming detached from them as much as possible.
It is a sale: the more inside your head you are, and the more you self-identify with your thoughts, the harder, if not impossible, it is to change them.
Most people become a slave to their thoughts. Most people have never even considered the idea of changing their mind, and in the rare times they do, it's often after years of minor conditioning, most of which is done at the subconscious level, within them completely unaware it's even happening.
What's even crazier about this faulty brain we have is how our memory changes so that we believe we always thought this way even when we've changed our minds.
It's quite a humbling experience to read over old Facebook posts, for example, that showcase your old way of thinking.