Nilofer Merchant

Brain Tattoo

By Nilofer Merchant on Apr 25, 2013 09:22 am

(image source: TattooArtists.org)

There’s an idea I’ve held inside my brain, like some kind of brain tattoo, indelibly stamped. It’s been there for some 30-years now. It goes something like this: “You’ll feel better when it quits hurting”. I’ve applied this to all sorts of things from business to personal. It came to mind as I was scaling organizations, or launching products on unreasonable schedules, or dealing with people issues. And for sure, it came to mind whenever I was trying to change some personal habit, especially fitness-related stuff. Though I credit it for a certain kind of perseverance and resolve, I realize it also forms a blanket ideology that everything worth having also has to be hard.

To have a braintattoo is to let an idea or construct inform everything.

Tattoos were once considered permanent, but no longer. It’s now possible to remove them, even if partially.

I’m thinking the same must be true for Brain Tattoos. To remove a brain tattoo would be to remove a belief system you no longer wish to inform everything else. Perhaps that belief system served for a time, but it no longer does. Perhaps it is an outdated notion. Perhaps you have grown beyond it.

Certainly I’m ready to let go of the “it must be hard” brain tattoo. But then, I started to wonder if I could choose a tattoo to imprint on my brain, what would it be?

What would yours be?