The irony of the human existence is that we pride ourself at our cognition above other animals, yet we are nothing without our emotions.
Arts and folklore created through millenia out of its 'emotional' essence of it, the pride and distaste of it, heavily reliant on how much it influences us emotionally.
Memory, the sense of auto-biographical self, moments that we cerish, all of it are either the one that's something fascinatingly emotionally affect us beautifully or something that we hate so much we wish we could've just forget about it, a sort of pain and trauma full of tears and remedies.
Irony and irony, then through some strings of chances, from birth to environments, a human can be consistently lucky and some can consistently unlucky in conditions that does not require absolute reasoning in order for it to happen.
The attachment of oneself towards life and its belief through his self-accountability and passion, varies from different person to person.
Through a flick of a finger in a broad daylight, sometimes the world that we think we know, might reveal to us in a totally different form than we originially thought.
I'm always interested in reading stories of entrepreneurship, I think most importantly because I think it's hard but also because I've had my fair share of experience in it.
I want to dedicate the mix of my personal experience and a story that I've heard.
There's a person who pitched her company, she's 19, her story goes something like this
My name is Tania, I'm 19 years old from Baltimore Maryland and I'm here seeking $400,000 for 10% equity in my company.
In elementary school everyone looks forward to playing outside during recess, me too until on the playground I was bullied for something I couldn't control and hated my bushy thick unruly eyebrows.
The torture of my peers was exhausting until I finally decided to make my haters my motivators and embrace my beautiful brows I searched for brow products but nothing worked for me so what did I do decided to make my own introducing to Tania speaks organic skincare a powerful plant-based brow gel ...
... So when I was making my formula I thought maybe it could heal my eyebrows because I cut my brows I could not take it anymore I cried to my mom every day can I please get my brows service I wanted these bushy caterpillars off of my face and she would not allow me she said you're too too young to get your brows done so I decided to cut them myself with a sharp razor I had to go to the hospital I had to get stitches it was a traumatic experience wow I went to the stores tried to find something to grow them back and nothing worked and so I just started researching natural ingredients like what works to grow hair what works and it was just very random and I would ask her to just bring stuff home any type of ingredient and I would just mix it together and that formula started to work for me.
Okay so last year I did a million dollars in sales ... and this year we have done 1.4 million.
Ok basically amazing story, full video here. What got me really intrigued was I thought to myself 'hmm, interesting, fear-induced motivation.' In which I want to say that I also had my fair share of my fear-induced motivation.
My life was never a smooth sailing, as much as it appear to many people that have known me. I admit that I've done a major fuckup in choosing my bachelors and I don't want to work in an industry that I'm already enrolled it, the way to escape it is to prove myself that I'm something more than the industry-specific degree to my name after I graduate, it all feels like a race against time as I need to juggle between academic duties and proving myself outside my scope.
It motivated me to create a startup and generate a bunch of ideas after 'class'. I had a 'drive', a sustaining one, that made other asked me 'why would you bother working on a startup while academic dilligence are already very demanding?' Ofcourse there are other contextual motivation like 'school is boring', but I couldn't lie I also fear not having a 'flexible' job outside the scope of my major that is 'life-science-focused', I like programming and the whole 'value-creation' out of startups thing.
Long story short, I practically inlove with the whole startup-creation thing, but the raw sparks into it was actually primarily fear that I wouldn't be able to escape a career outside my major. The more detail story can be found on my 2020 Article.
'Fear-Induced Motivation' is a great word because as I watched the pitch, it was framed that Tania raw drive and motivation was sparked out of her torture towards bullying out of her undesired physical attributes, going into school become so unbearable that she wanted to escape from the 'impending fear out of bullying', that drove her to create her own formula towards her organic skin-care solution. It can also almost be said that had the bullying never occured, she would have had a drive to put such intense fiery passionate emotions towards 'refashioning' her face and thus her products.
This is where I coined the term 'Emotional-leverage'. Everyone must have know what 'fear' feels like at some point, but does everyone feels the same way about 'fear' universally? How about the tense and contextual manner on how the fear arises? Since every experience is unique to each its own, we can leave it probably not thus 'fear-arriving context' must also be very context dependent and the intensity to it is also context dependent then.
'Emotional-Leverage' is not always a 'absolutely' good thing, much things like how 'leverage' is defined, it just add heights into what's already there and you can't leverage a zero.
I want to take another example by showing another pitch, but this one is just the result, because the pitch was too long:
Investor: I get this is hard, It's hard to be an entrepreneur. i'm saying this to you to try to help, the one mistake almost every entrepreneur makes that we have to overcome is we lie to ourselves we tell ourselves that it's a great idea the problem with your idea is it's a feature not a product i hope you get there but i'm out i wish you the best buddy
Pitcher: hold on hold on hold on hold on i just have to say one thing. Like, i have put my blood sweat and tears into this i have done this while being a college basketball player while being a full-time computer science major a student a a leader on campus all these things i've been able to do all this in the back of the bus on the after away games when we're traveling back from DC. I'm coding in the airport before games. I'm coding--
Investor: Brian you know what stop patting yourself in the back and stop feeling sorry for yourself. I've spent 36 hours straight coding teaching myself differently so is robert so is barbara it's part of the deal except that hard work struggle and sacrifice is part of being an entrepreneur don't feel sorry for yourself go get the job done i'm not patting myself in the back i'm just telling you my i'm telling you my story you're gonna go in the real world it's about investing in the entrepreneur it's about investing in the entrepreneur as much as the product right i understand you identified a need you gotta create a real product in a real world go ahead and prove us wrong you know how many times i've been called wrong and an idiot and every single one of those times is maybe hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars you just got to go prove it.
This is where 'emotional-leverage' backfires as a form of disappoinment. The emotions that have been poured into 'blood, sweat, and tears' but 'result' didn't materialize as it is expected to 'form'.
Which is very interesting, now its potrayed that both the 'greatness' and 'downfall' of men (humans) are driven by the strings of their own emotions. Through sacrificial metaphor that is basically 'leveraged-emotions', the pitcher can describe on how much work he has put into his company, but yeah then again, result is never guaranteed. But I'm not here to talk about result, I'm here to talk about how motivation arises and how it can scale at a contextual manner.
Let's start by walking on understanding 'emotion regulation'.
Base, Intensity, and Epigenetics
When I coined 'emotional-leverage' it's important to understand that you can't leverage a 0, you can only leverage what's already there. This is where I define 'base emotions' in where I would define primarly stems from four components: Happiness, Sadness, Fear, and Anger.
Context wise, we can observe what's going on in the brain, on how it process 'current emotions' and also 'future-perceived emotions'. I'm going to narrow down the scope to 'fear-derived' emotions and its whole relation to our nerves as we don't per se choose to fear, it arises within us. When you wake up in the morning to find a giant snake on the ceilling, do you choose to fear? Much like any phobias and the emotions ingrained within, we do not choose to feel, rather it arises within us, it's autonomic in nature and thus came the name 'the autonomic nervous system' as it 'regulate itself' without needing our conscious consent. You don't choose to beat your heart, your hear beats for you.
The leverage of it all, is also very context dependent, say for example the most well-studied phenomena called the fight or flight:
When you're under stress, your heart rate tend to increase, your breathing tends to be rapid, your pupils tend to dilate, your bladder tends to relax, all orchestrated autonomously, but still very context dependent. What i mean by context dependent is that, put two adults on a room, the one never see a cobra before while the other is a zookeeper, the adult that never see a viper does not how to react and is scared of the fangs, while the zookeeper may handle it with care and is not as stressed as the inexperienced one.
This is the same with 'fear of dogs', some people 'fear dogs irrationally', while they may have different contextual experience with dogs, the self can't help it but to feel scared based on prior contextual fear that it wants to escape from it.
While some people love dogs and some people fear dogs, both of those behavior are very context dependent. The emotions that 'materialized' is out of context that it arises as a measure' from the brain that is very context dependent: a person who fear dogs, does not fear of what the current dog as it is, rather the fear based on prior experience that gets extrapolated into the future perceived emotions, until it diminishes the bias, it can be calm and play with the dog. The other fella who love dogs may came from its prior knowledge and expected feelings about dogs that made it brave enough to approach the dogs with low to minimum repercussions or fear. This is where I define the 'acclimatized' brain.
The beauty and ugliness of this 'self-defining brain' out of experience, is that it is truly flexible and adaptive to its environment, but the inner workings still show as it phsyiologically and physically manifest itself.
Epigenetics just shows that out of the environment that we lived in, it can affect our inner working biology:
Research into the neural underpinnings of fear and fear-related pathology has highlighted the role of the amygdala. For instance, bilateral damage to the amygdaloid complex is associated with decreased appreciation of danger and recognition of fear in humans, whereas enlarged amygdala volume is associated with internalizing syndromes.
A key region of the brain that is known to play a crucial role in processing fear is the amygdala. It mediates the ability to associate emotional significance to a formerly neutral stimulus. Subsequently, the amygdala triggers a host of adaptive responses to threatening stimuli, for example, by regulating the magnitude and duration of serotonergic responses, which in turn trigger behavioral inhibition.
The amygdala is also implicated in the neurobiology of pathologic fear. That is, disorders that are commonly related to a fearful temperament such as major depressive and anxiety disorder are associated with greater amygdala volume.
Conceptual Perceived Emotions
The vmPFC is probably my most favorite part of the brain, let me explain through this citation:
Memory loss is the key symptom of dementia-related disorders along with impaired cognitive functioning such as language or reasoning. It is usually caused by Alzheimer's disease and other age-related dementia. Its prevalence doubles from a low rate in 60–64 age group to 40–50% of those older than 85 (Lobo et al., 2000). Dementia is a progressive disease, which has a detrimental impact on the quality of life for patients. To date, pharmacological treatments for dementia have limited effects and there are no known treatments that cure or delay the progression of this memory impairment (Doody et al., 2014; Salloway et al., 2014). Therefore, a novel non-pharmacological approach such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) is currently considered as an alternative treatment to reduce the symptomatic and progression of this memory deterioration (Hescham et al., 2013a).
DBS, a technique of minimally invasive surgical implantation of electrodes with delivering of electrical impulses into the brain, has been demonstrated to control a wide range of neurological disorders and neuropsychiatric diseases (Sesia et al., 2009; Temel et al., 2012b; Temel and Lim, 2013).
In line with these developments, evidence from recent studies suggests that DBS might enhance memory functions when particular brain areas are stimulated (Hamani et al., 2008; Laxton et al., 2010; Suthana et al., 2012; Hescham et al., 2013b). Of particular interest, DBS of the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex or the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) induced striking antidepressant activity in both patients and animal studies (Mayberg et al., 2005; Lozano et al., 2008; Hamani et al., 2010b; Kennedy et al., 2011; Temel and Lim, 2013; Lim et al., 2015b).
The first time I was annoyed when I hear about the vmPFC, is when I heard of the 'Marshmellow Experiment', I will quote from James Clear, Behavioral Psychology:
During his experiments, Mischel and his team tested hundreds of children — most of them around the ages of 4 and 5 years old
The experiment began by bringing each child into a private room, sitting them down in a chair, and placing a marshmallow on the table in front of them.
At this point, the researcher offered a deal to the child.
The researcher told the child that he was going to leave the room and that if the child did not eat the marshmallow while he was away, then they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. However, if the child decided to eat the first one before the researcher came back, then they would not get a second marshmallow.
So the choice was simple: one treat right now or two treats later.
The researcher left the room for 15 minutes.
As you can imagine, the footage of the children waiting alone in the room was rather entertaining. Some kids jumped up and ate the first marshmallow as soon as the researcher closed the door. Others wiggled and bounced and scooted in their chairs as they tried to restrain themselves, but eventually gave in to temptation a few minutes later. And finally, a few of the children did manage to wait the entire time.
Published in 1972, this popular study became known as The Marshmallow Experiment, but it wasn’t the treat that made it famous. The interesting part came years later.
As the years rolled on and the children grew up, the researchers conducted follow up studies and tracked each child’s progress in a number of areas. What they found was surprising.
The children who were willing to delay gratification and waited to receive the second marshmallow ended up having higher SAT scores, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills as reported by their parents, and generally better scores in a range of other life measures. (You can see the followup studies here, here, and here.)
The researchers followed each child for more than 40 years and over and over again, the group who waited patiently for the second marshmallow succeed in whatever capacity they were measuring. In other words, this series of experiments proved that the ability to delay gratification was critical for success in life.
I was astonished, as I grow older, I realized the moment why I created a startup and ultimately the decision that takes place, was arriving out of 'contextual perceived emotions' that may materialize in the future had I did not create the startup. But this is just like ANY strong decision that we make. Career-defining specifically.
My mother asked me yesterday, how come your other two brothers almost as if came to them as a late realization than how you chooses to be as motivated and as driven since your mid junior highschool. Since my mom was searching for an answer from me, I tried to answer most honestly by what I know.
Growing up, I never always had a 'strong & dire' motivation to study, quite the opposite, I didn't understand why people want to study and want to have good grades, studying is so boring, I would rather hang out with my girlfriend lmao.
A mother's love is relentless, like an undying torch, I observed it pretty unfairly that I framed it to be 'it doesn't matter how much I fuck up, things are probably won't go as south and tomorrow will go back to normal, doesn't matter how much I fuck up.' A naive sense but it's just how it is, my parents obviously groud me from time to time whenever I misbehave but after a prolonged grounding, things tend to revert back to the mean condition, lmao, so I break a lot of rules and disobey my parents guidance, hell a lot of time, if anything, I actually used to hate my parents irrational rules (what I used to deem irrational).
Until one event, I realized that things may not revert back to normal, mostly due to my late realization of my family financial problems, it's pretty dramatic but I believe most people experienced this at some point, THINGS ARE NOT GOING TO BE JUST FINE. It rang to me like a bell. I don't have a stable financial household, it's constant struggle and constant lending, I just never realized it. Until I realize this I was like 'oh so that's what the point of money to sustain a living that comes from career.'
I started to assess myself way more carefully, there's no promised rose garden, everything is like a probabilistic waves, it may happen or it may not happen, but nothing is promised, if I kept flunking, I will probably ended up homeless and I can imagine myself being homeless lmao.
This is where the fear of becoming a homeless drive me towards studying lmao, because I fear being homeless, lmao. The rest of history I got good grades, dire motivation to study and self improvement, etc etc.
The message that I want to tell here is that, even if it's all biologically orchestrated, through defining 'What the fuck is fear', and 'fear-induced motivation', it all can be leveraged to our benefit.
We come to understand through the arising phenomena of alzheimer's and dementia, a sense of self and where it comes decision making through adept mental forecast of the self, it is regulated and SELF ENFORCED by the brain. As it is the ROOT of our behavior and motivational drive, be really careful at your naiveness, emotions, and drive, as the growth of the vmPFC is to be exercised, to be honest, more importantly, emotional awareness.
As it is truly true, through the arrival of 'actions' it all comes with an underlying 'perceived emotions' within it, or rather 'motives'. And it truly works like a muscle:
Throughout lives, individuals manifest idiosyncratic ways of regulating their emotions. These characteristic patterns of habitual emotion regulation usage have been shown to be related to consistent patterns of affective responding, social relationships, and even overall life satisfaction. Recent work suggests that individual differences in emotion regulation usage have neural correlates that are evident in the way individuals automatically process emotional stimuli. These findings suggest that the way individuals regulate their emotions day in and day out meaningfully impacts neural processing, and might, over the longer term, influence the structure of these underlying brain regions.
Recently, this work has been extended to cognitive behaviors. For example, longitudinal studies have found that acquiring large amounts of knowledge, learning a complex motor skill, or engaging in aerobic exercise cause an increase in local gray matter volume. Although prior studies of use-dependent brain plasticity have largely focused on changes in cognition and behaviors, recent cross-sectional work has shown that individual differences in personality traits, emotional expression, temperament, and emotional intelligence also relate meaningfully to regional brain volume. In addition, it has recently been demonstrated that an eight week mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention also affects regional gray matter volume.
Expressive suppression is an emotion regulation strategy that requires interoceptive and emotional awareness.
Scatter plot showing the positive relationship between frequency of expressive suppression and bilateral anterior insula volume from ROI results.
In addition to its primary role in supporting interoception and emotional awareness, the insula also serves as a relay point between the brain regions involved in emotional responding, such as the amygdala, and other regions involved in cognitive regulation, such as the prefrontal cortex. Thus, in addition to monitoring an individual's outward emotional expression during expressive suppression, the anterior insula would be strongly innervated both by bottom-up signals regarding inward emotional state, and top-down signals indicating regulation goals.
The insula is one of the most volumetrically stable regions of the brain, thus even a slight alteration in volume implies a profound effect on mental processing. The current finding of a .3% variation in anterior insula volume (as a proportion of TBV) between individuals as a function of their use of expressive suppression is striking. It may be argued that individuals who engage in frequent usage of expressive suppression do so to manage the high levels of negative affect in their lives, which would then regularly engage the insula.
The findings from the present study demonstrate that individual differences in usage of expressive suppression positively correlate with the volume of the anterior insula. The anterior insula is thought to support emotional and bodily awareness, both of which are engaged during the suppression of emotional responses. This is the first study to demonstrate that habitual engagement of expressive suppression relates meaningfully to anterior insula volume. Further work is needed to explore the longitudinal relationship between long-term usage of expressive suppression and gray matter volume change.
Emotion Regulation and Brain Plasticity: Expressive Suppresion use Predicts Anterior Insula Volume
If emotions, specifically 'fear' can be anthropomorphized as a horse.
The horse can kick us unremorsefully and debilitated our body, rendering us to unable to move. But by acknowledging the horse and understanding 'why the fuck the horse is there' as a mean understanding our emotions, we can tame the horse, as the human and its emotions are an undetachable essence of what makes up the human being.
We truly are nothing without our emotions.
Yes, we can still be rational animals, but whats good that it gives to be JUST taking in what the eyes allow us to see without having able to experience emotions of joy in life?
What good is thinking without knowing what makes us smile?
What good is living without the ability to smile?
The horse is always your friend.
Now turns the horse into a unicorin with leverage (or whatever), I'm so done with writing fiction stories as of now lmao. Yeah but that's basically it, that's the message.