Self Reflection, Double Standards and the Discovery of Mindset Music

When discussing personal development with like minded people, ‘The Power Of Association’ is a subject I rarely fail to talk about.

This is basically the idea that you are impacted by your environment. Primarily the power of association has to do with people, but the concept is universally applicable.

The Power of Association

The fundamental principle is that whatever you surround yourself with will determine the type of input that goes into your mind. If it’s people then their vocabulary, habits and all manner or other things will start to be absorbed by you, by default.

You can try and argue that this ‘won’t happen to me’ because you know those people are negative and so you don’t let it affect you. The problem is that you have no choice. Your sub-conscious mind is taking in information from your senses at the same time as your conscious mind.

So simply by being around those people, your sub-conscious mind will learn from them, which will affect you for a long time after.

Movies

Extending this beyond people then, the importance of what you surround your mind with applies to other types of input too.

Movies for example. I personally choose not to watch horror movies. I don’t find them entertaining and I really don’t see any positive purpose to putting those kind of images into my mind.

You couldn’t convince me they have a positive purpose either.

While I don’t watch horror movies because of my belief in the power of association, I have since I was about 20, loved hip hop music.

Not because I think it somehow makes me cool or anything, rather, as an intellectual kind of guy I honestly love the amount of creativity the artists put into the wordplay.

When I hear a particularly clever bit of wordplay I tend to laugh out loud because I honestly find it impressive, it’s like high energy poetry.

It’s not only the wordplay that I like, as a young guy I find much of the content motivating. Often these rappers talk about overcoming odds, beating the competition, becoming successful and so on.

The only problem is its mixed in with a lot of less positive stuff.

Discovering My Double Standard

Despite my enjoyment of this wordplay, my deep belief in the power of association has always been there in the back of my mind.

Every now and again this belief would ask me if I was being a little bit of a hypocrite. It would say “so you don’t watch horror movies because you don’t want negative images going into your mind, but you’ll quite happily listen to rap music which contains lyrics about murder and the degradation of women?”.

I’m not going to lie, I couldn’t argue with it.

The biggest problem was I had no alternative. While I knew the negativity wasn’t doing me any good long term, I couldn’t let go of the benefits I derived from the motivational bits.

Sure I regularly listen to motivational speakers like Les Brown and Zig Ziglar but those audios are a different kind of thing.

Mindset Music

An idea came to me earlier this year when I was pondering this apparent double standard that I have. There’s this one particular hip hop artist named Rick Ross who refers to his style as ‘Maybach Music’, as in he makes tons of money and can afford Maybachs.

Given that my whole mission in life is leading people to freedom through personal development I thought “Why isn’t there something called mindset music?”.

You know, mindset music, music that has all the motivating and inspiring messages to condition your mind for the better, but without the drawbacks.

Vizzle

It didn’t happen immediately, the idea of mindset music came to me 2 months back, but about a week ago I came across this independent hip hop artists from the UK who goes by the name of Vizzle.

Guess what? ……. he makes mindset music.

No profanity, no violence and full of high energy messages that are on par with the motivation speakers that I play to myself every day to keep my mind strong.

If this was just empty words it wouldn’t have had an impact on me, but not only is he talking the talk he is clearly walking the walk.

A few hours spent going through all his YouTube videos tells the story. This guy has been working on his music since he was 14, he’s now 19.

Now you know what most 14 year olds are like, they dabble, get bored and move on to something else. In fact, that’s not exclusive to 14 year olds, that’s most people.

Dabbling is one of the most common reasons why the vast majority of people never achieve anything significant. Few people stick at anything long enough, to get good enough at it, to break through to success.

Vizzle is different. I believe what’s different about him is that he has found his purpose in life and he knows it. This is how he has been able to stick at it for 5 years.

Think about that, 5 years is a quarter of his life!

As someone who has studied success principles for nearly a decade, trust me when I say that is an achievement in itself and well worthy of recognition.

That’s not where it ends though. In the middle of June 2013, Vizzle released a full blown LP called Seasons 1 … for free. This is the first of four LPs he saying he’ll release.

The name ‘Seasons’ on it’s own should give you an insight into how well this guy understands success principles. If you’ve never heard of ‘the law of the seasons’ as it relates to personal success then I strongly recommend you go study it.

A question still remains in my mind though. Is Vizzle aware of the depth of understanding he possesses?

I’m torn between saying yes because his lyrics suggest he has a firm grip and no because such wisdom would defy his years.

I didn’t plan to write this article, it was kind of spontaneous.

I really could do with writing a follow up in which I dig into each track from the Seaons 1 LP and unearth the concepts he is putting across that makes his work worthy of a proud place in my new collection of ‘mindset music’.

As you may know though I’m hard at work on The StressControl System, and ‘The Power of Focus’ (another law of success) dictates that I give StressControl priority.

So the follow up article will have to take a back-seat for the time being until StressControl is launched or I find myself suddenly inspired.