Transcript for:
Strategies for Personal Development

here's how you get ahead of 99% of people in 6 to 12 months become brutally aware of two things the first is what you don't want the second is where you will end up if you keep doing the same things in life observe the masses and see where mindless action leads it's not pretty At All by any means when you do this when you observe the masses sit with your thoughts think them through don't just close your mind off and take what you see on the surface and accept it as reality that's not how this works that closed-minded surface level living is what got you into this situation in the first place you need to think deeper it's easier to know what you don't want from experience and observation than it is to know what you want from imagination and just thinking and having all of these Grand ideas for your future and don't get me wrong here I'm not writing those things off those things are good they are not bad do not label any of what I'm saying as good or bad test it through your direct experience many of you know that I'm very big on creating a vision for your future but the best way to do that is by also creating an antiv Vision having a negative thing something that you despise something that will get you angry because negative energy is very very potent it can be used and transmuted to actually achieve what you want in life it's like when you're going to the gym I'll be walking on the treadmill as a warm-up and I'll just think of what my life would be without the gym where could I end up if I don't put my all into that workout and somehow I just get very very pissed and I can feel that energy and not being pissed isn't bad negative emotions aren't bad they exist they are what they are and they should be used not suppressed but used for good so to create your antiv vision sit down with a notebook become a mad scientist draw out everything sit with a notebook for 30 minutes and just draw out everything your entire future but start with the anti Vision write down every single thing that you do not want in this life what do you not want to look like what do you not want your future to be what do you not want your day to look like on an everyday basis and from that it will be much clearer to you what your vision will actually be because it's just the opposite of those things and so when you look at your antiv vision after creating it or as you're writing it you should feel uncomfortable you should feel very uncomfortable with the possibility of where you could end up in life if you do not take control of your life and so with that discomfort you should laser in on one big goal laser in on your vision for the future and this should be meaningful because your antiv vision is usually meaningless it comes from mindless action it comes from not doing anything and letting entropy take hold in and just drag your life into chaos that's what entropy does that is the supreme law of the universe if you do not create order for your life you will decline into chaos so in that same notebook with that vision for your future and your antiv vision plan out be the mad scientist that is going to work on the project of your life create a plan create a strategy for exactly what you are going to do on a day-to-day basis week by week every single thing you're going to do for the next week and write it out get extremely specific create the order so you do not be a victim of entropy next disappear and whenever I say disappear like disappear for 6 months people take it literally almost every much of what I say is metaphorical and exaggerated to get the essence of the message across I'm not saying disappear like your physical body is just going to disappear I'm saying disappear from the things that don't belong in your life cut them out is can be people games apps or even bad habits just become aware of the things that are holding you back and there are multiple ways to do this but with the process that we've discussed and what's worked best for me is to just rip the Band-Aid off get rid of them all you don't need to explain yourself here to other people that are going to be messing you hey bro where'd you go just disappear in other words break your addiction with feeling like [ __ ] because that feeling feeling like [ __ ] has one cause and that is well it has multiple causes but we're talking about mental here not physical which would be attributed to something like nutrition or food but mental mental energy that you are expending on people and things that don't give a [ __ ] about you and direct that mental energy that you now have into your vision for the future because you have created a system that will prevent entropy in your life the thing that will take you from anti Vision to Vision the system there and to maintain a system to prevent entropy you need energy in this case mental energy to actualize or manifest that Vision if you want to call it that last make a habit of the boring fundamentals But realize that the boring fundamentals are not boring because most successful people they take the same repetitive actions on a day-to-day basis in a game in like a game that mimics the real world you are logging on and you are repeating the same thing over and over to slowly level up over time right you're you're killing monsters you're going through dungeons you're doing the same thing to stack experience so you need to transfer that into the real world and move the levers that will actually take you towards your goals these are fundamentals these are principles these aren't tactics and so understand that these are not boring they seem boring on the surface when you look at someone else doing it day and day out like oh this guy Dan he writes for 30 minutes every morning oh that's that seems so boring but it's Mastery over misery it's like how Sushi chefs they take years to perfect the preparation of rice and it comes in stages like a tennis player you first learn how to hold the Racket and there is a very specific way to do that well and then you move up to the next stage which is how do you angle the racket how do you hit the ball and you have to practice these things over and over and over again like how you were learning to walk until it becomes effortless or unconscious so you open up more mental energy to move on to the next thing that will take you ahead of the people that are trying to just get a result that would usually take 10 years to get in 2 weeks that's just not going to happen and so the question that everyone asks like when you start something new is okay when will I see this result like a tennis player when will I be able to compete and stop asking that question because you're going to get an answer that you don't want to hear and it's going to throw you off track it takes years it takes an entire lifetime of trial and error to create a project as I said become a mad scientist the essence of science is trial and error so to perfect a project your life that you are building out it is going to take a lifetime get comfortable with that thought so this entire process that we just went over of realizing what you don't want creating a strategy and launching yourself into the opposite direction and prioritizing long-term success in Mastery is the origin story you will hear this in every origin story of a successful person so flip the switch inside of you new year is coming up flip the switch inside of you and build a foundation that will carry you into the life you want have you ever had a taste of the optimal Human Experience you know that feeling when nothing really matters you feel extra confident you feel like you could take on the world and you feel like you were immersed you are at one with the task that you are compl pleting whether it be a sport a game or just writing at your computer some people call this state the Flow State and that is a state of consciousness where nothing else matters except for what is right in front of you what your attention is immersed in you lose the sense of self-consciousness and self-centeredness that leads to anxiety or boredom or just suffering in general as many of the spiritual teachers and ancient Masters would say so when you tap into this state you you cease to care what other people think become one with the task you are engaged in and know exactly what to do next how well you are doing and gain a deep sense of satisfaction from it so as we'll talk about later pertaining to self-consciousness and self-centeredness leading to anxiety and boredom the way that you end this kind of suffering is by learning to control your attention which is heavily influenced by the ego or the self so when you become self-conscious through attention you notice something and you become self-conscious because you're comparing it to something you tend to highlight the differences between yourself and the thing that you are comparing it to and so this split in attention causes you to use precious mental energy which could be focused directly on the task at hand or whatever you were trying to accomplish like when you see a pimple on your skin in the mirror and then an idea you don't even have to be in direct contact with someone who has clear skin to have an idea of what clear skin is and the perception of clear skin and then the desire popping up to want clear skin but you not being able to have it because of the pimple on your face so you start to compare ideas of what should be rather than accepting things as they are and refocusing your attention so the question is how do we gain control of our attention and the answer is by treating life like the game it is so my generation and other Generations but mostly my generation from what I've noticed is notorious for transferring Obsession from video games to real life or just business success because games business or just constructions of the external World in other words The Matrix they present a desirable hierarchy of goals they have a structure that frames your attention they introduce a challenge to narrow your attention further and they require a player to have the skill skill that meets the requirements to play the game so what few people understand is that you can create a game out of any situation in life as long as you can mold your mind to create the certain aspects that a game entails and if that game is fun to you then life becomes more enjoyable because you start playing rather than being played and so the importance behind this is that we're in a world where it's create or be created so if you can't mold your mind to create your own reality or create your own game that you play and you have fun playing in life then your mind will be molded and it already has been molded to play external status games that Society has created for you and these are things like going to college getting a job or just taking another structured approach to life that someone else has laid out for you but that may not be the best fit for you and it just leads to unnecessary suffering and pain and just not not enjoying your life because you're living you're following the steps that someone else has presented to you and that may not align with the goals that you personally have in this lifetime because that's just the thing Sovereign living or autonomous living or just being independent in building your own thing your own way of survival is difficult it's uncertain right and the mind craves order it craves certainty so if there is a path that is easier or more certain or more secure for someone to take that's where the masses flock that's where 99% of people flock and so the purpose of this video is for awareness I know a lot of you have similar values and goals as mine and that is to build your own thing be independent and break free of the Matrix if you want to frame it that way but to just live an enjoyable life on your own terms so let's Dive In by talking about the macro game of life so when you're playing an open world strategy game like World of Warcraft there's a few patterns that we can recognize the main ones being stacking gold choosing a profession leveling up your character and the progression that goes along with those things but those are just the common ones that's everyone kind of knows that you've heard the metaphor of life being a video game before so let's take it a bit deeper and let's really paint a picture here of what's going on the system is rigged you can't change it but you can learn it that is how you rig yourself in the system's favor so the conventional path to success has already been programmed into the collective psyche before we know it due to the curse of knowledge humans wanting to know more and learn more and learning being the foundation of the human experience that what we that's what we do as we age is we just learn new things over and over again and we don't question those things so before we even know it we're already in pursuit of winning the game that other people have laid out for us and that is usually in favor of maintaining the game itself right being trained into the game to keep it going and 90% of the time it just doesn't work out that way you think that the the secure path is secure but 90% of people or however many percent of people just end up with way too much anxiety way too much stress way too much overwhelm and and they get trapped in this jail or prison of their own doing and so why is this or this video important because times are changing they're clearly changing more people are going remote more people are choosing to do their own thing the the flaws in the system itself are revealing itself and the programmers can't patch the game fast enough who are the programmers I have no idea but the just School curriculums in general can't keep up with the Creator economy who are giving out they're educating people on how to do their own thing and not get trained into the conventional employment system that the school is directly tied with and other things like banking like whatever your beliefs are about Bitcoin or crypto or decentralized currency there's a problem in the system and somebody saw that and so now they are individuals and small teams are Building Solutions to create a better banking system for people or just a better Financial monetary system and then the same thing with like huge agencies where Freelancers who have a great skill set and understand digital tools and skills they're coming in as Freelancers or contract workers and big companies and just random people in in general are hiring them to do those jobs rather than just hiring them as an employee so there's those the people that are actively trying to solve the problem of this faulty system and then there are those that in a video game would be classified as an NPC or a non-player character they're the people that just do what they're told they go along with the system they never question it and they kind of just are there right so in a video game it's the town's folk it's even like the the environment people so the bosses in a battle and just others that keep the game interesting for players it allows it allows the game to maintain its structure and keep on going and then the people that question the system and understand it from a big picture can actually play the game and navigate the game and have their own success within that game so that was one thing where the game is already there the game is already out there and programmed onto the collective psyche or the hard drive right but the next thing is that there are infinite paths that you can take in an open world strategy game like World of Warcraft so here's a graphic and I thought it was pretty clever creating this where on the left you have birth on the right you have death in the middle line you have now and so you can see the path that you've taken up until now and that is your experience and then the slightly darker circles that have all the different paths on the right those are the paths that you can take to hit that green Little Dot that I've labeled as success or winning the external game winning the game of the external world because in World of Warcraft you have a series of choices that you get to make what your character looks like what kind of player they are like a warrior Mage Rogue Etc what profession they want to specialize in the quest path that they want to take to level up whether they play solo or with a group what Guild they join to help them level up faster and a series of other personal choices that allow them to play the game in an interesting way right it's like people choos what sport they play when they are growing up or uh people that are trying to start a business what skill they learn or what business model they choose they're all viable but they take a different skill set and they lead people down a different path it's like I always say with the onep person business model is that your brand is your goal in life right so if my goal is just the good life or Financial Freedom or something big and Broad like that my unique path is what makes my brand unique right how I'm going to achieve that goal is going to be vastly different vastly unique my story is going to be my brand it's going to be What Separates Me from everyone else and it allows me to create my own personal Monopoly or mental Monopoly as we'll te talk about in the next video so it's like if five people were standing at the bottom of a mountain and life being infinite mountains so five people standing at the bottom they reach the first Peak well first they look up and they all draw different paths on how they're going to reach that first Peak and then there's just infinite mountains to climb but once you reach that Peak you can look down and you can help people navigate that path up in a better way right that's what business is is helping people solve their problems or climb the mountain in a faster way to achieve their desired outcome which is reaching that Peak that you've reached so the next thing that was there you can take infinite paths to achieve success but the next one is that leveling up increases the complexity of the self so in the real world the the main spiritual problem is that people never change they identify with their beliefs their jobs or just another finite aspect of the external constructed world and then once they've reached that point of just like static not wanting to change they don't learn anymore they don't stack more skills they don't level up to the point of more opportunities being available to them so by improving your skill set by learning and executing and taking on challenges it allows you to take on higher level challenges and by taking on higher level challenges you give you open up room to take on a lot more or have a lot more opportunities because that knowledge and experience expands your awareness of what is actually possible so in a video game it's you level up to a point eventually let's say you reach the max level you can navigate the world freely stress free you can do whatever you want you can fly across the map you can teleport you can do all this crazy stuff now this is all metaphoric IAL pertaining to the real world but just by Inc consistently learning and increasing your skill level and taking on challenges in like going up the ladder of challenges then you're able to take on you're able to do so much more in this world and pick your battles from then on so as you develop yourself you gain more ability to create order from chaos you have the power to create a game out of more situations in life and so that overall structure that we just talked about all of those things talking about it in terms of like World of Warcraft or an open world strategy game that represents the macro game of life but it goes a bit deeper and we can talk about the micro games of Life on like a situation to situation basis so the first thing we need to do is set a hierarchy of goals so games present the big goal of winning but then they also have Clarity on how to reach that goal with sub goals like quests because if there was only the one goal of winning and you had no idea how to get there then the game wouldn't be fun because as humans we have the ability to aim with our minds into the future like monkeys they can they can throw their poop but it's usually hurled just like straight at the ground they usually don't hit something that is straight in front of them but humans on the other hand with skill and practice and time someone can throw a football 50 yards out and hit a bullseye on a Target now the same is very similar with the mind and creating a vision for your future and then slowly leveling up until you are able to create that Vision so we don't want to be poop hurled at the ground like how monkeys do we want to have a vision that we can build towards but if we don't want to get overwhelmed by this Grand Vision for our future then we have to create sub goals in order to get there so I would recommend that you sit down with a pen and paper or you can use my power planner which is free Link in the description to create the first iteration of your vision understand it's an iteration it doesn't have to be perfect then create a 10-year one-year and monthly goals again these don't have to be perfect just get the first iteration out and you can come back to it have a place for weekly Direction and reflection and then align your daily priority tasks with those and now with these written down this is important and most people don't understand why because they've never done it but it's important because writing these things down it's like an anchor we talked about two videos ago how I remember everything I learned that you should learn and build in unison need something to build so that you have something to apply your learnings to and then your awareness starts to register more opportunities for what you're building right because humans compared to animals that survive on a physical level we survive on a conceptual level right we try to survive our beliefs and other things that we've identified and attached with so it only makes sense that we would try to survive a project or we would try to survive our vision for the future and because of that since that is at the top of our mind we are going to notice things that we can apply to that vision and then clarify it further and continue striving towards it so that was setting a hierarchy of goals but next we need to understand the frame of the game so your perspective or your worldview is the frame in which you view reality it's like a camera so the field of view even if the background is blurred constrains what registers in the frame itself so by molding your perspective itive in any situation you allow yourself to perceive what used to be a huge problem as a minor Road bump because if I'm so dead set on the hierarchy of goals that I've created my vision for my future and the goals related to that and my attention is narrowed in on that then it's going to be difficult for uh a distraction to register in the camera itself right or in the perspective itself so in a video game there are two things that help create order or order Consciousness or create this Frame of the game something that you need to focus on and narrow in your attention on so the first thing is rules every single video game has a set of rules that you must follow and when we play the game this allows us to use our limited conscious attention or Focus to remain focused on the here and now while keeping our vision or the end goal of winning in the back of our head this is important because in Psychology when you are kind of projecting into the future or you have a a desire something that that you do not have that is when dopamine spurts into your brain but when you are focused on the here and now that's when the Here and Now chemicals like oxytocin serotonin and other neurochemicals like that that's when those spur into your brain and so if you read the book The Art of Impossible by Steven Cotler it doesn't say this directly but it it mentions that flow the flow state is kind of a neurochemical cocktail of all of these different neurotransmitters going to your brain and this can be accomplished by exactly this so in the real world your rules are your values right that's on the macro scale on the micro scale you can create different rules like when you're going on a walk and you just you set rules to never step on a crack right or to walk 2500 steps or something like that and so in terms of values when you act in alignment with those values and you constrain your attention to the things that are in alignment with those life becomes a bit more enjoyable and so on the micro scale of everyday situations Clarity comes from eliminating environmental distractions right and that pretty much means creating a frame so like when you're trying to do deep work and the common advice is to close your browser tabs set a timer like Pomodoro have clear steps for your work and use things like noise cancelling headphones and so like how I mentioned with creating rules for going on something like a walk because I used to hate going on walks even though even though I knew how healthy it was for me to do so you can create little rules for that to either turn what used to be mundane situations into enjoyable or to just gain perspective and start enjoying situations that you would normally hate because let's say you hate watching sports I don't like watching sports right I just don't like football I don't understand it and that is the exact point I don't understand the game if I knew the game and was able to manipulate my attention to follow what's going on in the game then I may be able to enjoy it or if uh your spouse or your wife or your girlfriend she likes going out and looking at antiques uh just on like a Saturday afternoon and you don't want to do that and you're just dragging your feet the entire time and you're like oh I don't want to be here I don't like doing this but she creates a game out of it she's like oh I like the price on this one I like the look of this one and she's in there having a very enjoyable time in some degree of a flow State and you can do the same thing if you just zoom out gain some perspective and create your own game out of it whatever that may be even if it's as simple as like finding the stupidest rock you can find or finding the stupidest antique right and then you both have your own fun playing your own game so that was rules the second thing is mechanics so if you haven't played a game before it's it's not going to be that fun your aim is going to suck you'll have to practice on lowlevel challenges and you're going to look at top level players and you're going to be a struck about how good they are at playing the game so every game has a specific way for you to change Channel more of your senses thoughts and prior experience to play it better so in a video game it's pressing a series of keys buttons or Mouse Clicks in board games it's the effectiveness creativity or forward thinking that goes into your strategy in sports it's the conditioning of your body and how you move it in accordance with the goal and in all of the above it's your perception of the situation or your frame of the game that allows you to choose in a way that moves you towards winning and so another form of information is feed back feedback is important here to know how well you're doing in the game because all of this Games Etc it's ordering our Consciousness it's giving us structured information to pay attention to and our mind likes that and so if you do something and you know that it was the wrong move or you made a mistake then your perspective or your frame widens to the point of allowing distractions to penetrate that field and then if you give attention to that distraction then you're going to be off the game and you're not going to enjoy it as much and so how do we improve our mechanics or just our skill relating to the game and it's practice of course right when you're playing a video game like World of Warcraft people log in every single day to perform a repetitive series of tasks they go and farm for gold they create their armor or they mine for ore or they Farm XP by going through dungeons over and over again so you have to program the specific mechanic in your brain to the point of where you're getting results with less effort in other words habit formation so if you can automate to an extent the decisions that you make on a daily basis that are conducive with your hierarchy of goals and achieving your end Vision then success kind of becomes inevitable so we've talked about setting a hierarchy of goals and creating a frame for the game that you're playing now this is arguably the most important part is the delicate balance between anxiety and boredom so here's another graphic this one is adapted from mihi chickp mihi with his books flow and the evolving self highly highly recommend you check those out but you can see here that in the top quadrant there's anxiety or self-consciousness in the middle there's flow or selflessness and then at the bottom there's boredom or self-centeredness and on the right Axis there's skill level and on the top I mean on the left axis there is the challenge level so the skill challenge match is extremely important here so when you start playing a game especially when you haven't read the rule book or you've never played before is it going to be fun no of course not and even if you knew the rules it's still going to take time for you to grasp what's going on in the game so this is why I always recommend just starting right just start something if you don't know how you just start with what you know and then you learn on the go and get real world experience do not get trapped in tutorial hell I this is one of my less popular videos but it is the most important is how I remember everything I learned because if you were a level one in World of Warcraft and you were fighting a level 50 would it be fun no you'd lose immediately but the thing here as we know is that you can create a better frame for that game right if you just have to if you're level one and you have to play against the level 50 how can you mold your perspective to create a better frame for that game like if you instead of beating the level 50 as your goal what if the goal was to see how fast you could lose against the level 50 then it'd be kind of fun and you'd be interested in playing the game and it's the same thing with something like chess right if if you are just starting out playing chess and you're going against like your friend who's been playing for years or like you decide to enter a competition for some reason without having ample experience and years of practice under your belt it's just not going to be a good time so the lesson is if your skill is high and the challenge is low you're going to get bored and if your skill is low and the challenge is high you're going to get anxious and the boredom stems from self-centeredness your focus breaks from the task at hand and something else comes to mind that you'd rather be doing another desire right so if you're bored at work it's usually because you're not immersed in the task that your work presents and you're sitting there bored thinking self-centered about the better things you could be doing with your time and the anxiety comes from self-consciousness so if the challenge is too high and your skill is is too low your attention is going to turn towards the concept of self and again you're going to allow distractions or problems to penetrate your awareness or your conscious field and then your attention just starts going downhill from there so as an example it's like if if your skill is too low you're going to start thinking these thoughts where it's like wow I'm not as good as I thought or wow I really need to work on my back swing or in a more practical situation it's like that girl is way out of my league do you see how this is more self conscious here where you are paying attention to your current skill level in relation to the skill that is required to play the game so how do we prevent this it's like the very start of the video video where I mentioned that people don't change they don't evolve they aren't constantly learning and constantly building it has to happen if you want an enjoyable life you need something to immerse your attention in and continuously progress at that throughout life and develop yourself into a complex being that can take on bigger broader and bigger and broader challenges and just have more opportunity in the world that you can pick and choose and play games at this point in our history it should be possible for an individual to build a self that is not simply the outcome of biological drives and cultural habits but a conscious personal creation mihi chiet mihi so I remember the first time I downloaded World of Warcraft when I was a young kid probably like 15 years old and I spent spent a straight 2 hours just creating my character and playing around with how I wanted him to look while also considering the game itself so I think about the Minor Details of what race I can be we don't really have that choice but metaphorically paint a picture for yourself uh what race I would be what class I would have was I going to be a warrior a mage uh a priest did I want to be a tank a damage character A Healer how did I want my hair to look how did I did I want to be a human did I want to be an orc did I want to be something like that and then also while I was paying attention to that I was also paying attention to how it was going to favor my personality or my play style in order to actually win the game and the challenges associated with winning the game and it's the same thing like when you hit Level 15 or something and you can start like riding a horse or you can choose your profession right what was I going to beat was I going to be a blacksmith was I going to be an armor Creator I forget what they're called but like you create armor was I going to be a leather worker a cloth worker forget a tailor or was I going to be like those people that like put gems together and make other cool weapon powerups and so once I made that choice it opened up a series of talents and traits that I was able to choose after that and then once I had leveled those talents or traits to a specific point I was given more choices that weren't originally available to me right I I was able to do more dungeons I was able to raid with my friends I was accepted into certain guilds because they had certain requirements for what they needed did they need a Healer did they need more damage did they did they need a tank what level or experience were those people and what were they accepting and so touching on this again of how learning is the foundation of the Human Experience when we are young we don't know any better and we learn these things just through repetition they are conditioned into our psyche and a self a concept of the self is created that we didn't really have much control over so learning through any medium influences our thoughts and our thoughts influence our Behavior meaning that anything you learn or consume is going to impact either directly or indirectly how you act and move within this world and what opportunities you perceive as available to you so winning the game of Life business or any present moment situation you are in is dependent on how your character perceives and acts within that specific situation so if we want to achieve or create the life of our dreams then we have to create the character or the player that will lead to that outcome so how do we create our character first it's by integrating everything that we've talked about in this video you need an intrinsic hierarchy of goals you need to understand how to frame not only your life on the macro scale and the micro scale in everyday situations and creating rules for you to narrow your attention and and focus on that and then you need to consistently learn practice learn practice or learn build learn build in order to increase your skill set and take on higher challenges and then the second thing is through self-education and self-reflection because thankfully we live in an age where all information is at the tip of our fingers if you have a problem you can usually find some form of a solution to it on the Internet or just in a book or something like that and so you find these ideas as you're creating a better life for yourself and encountering problems on the way by just consuming valuable information and not getting distracted and sometimes you have to SI sift through dirt to find gold you have to read things that you weren't necessarily interested in and those that get bored doing those things will normally just distract themselves instead because they aren't interested and so with that self-education or just consistently learning self-reflection is how you guide future decision making because it is impossible to have 100% certainty in the actions you take now and how they're going to impact your future right cause and effect you don't immediately have the effect of your actions you just have to take them and then when you do to take those actions the only way you can know if they were good or bad you you can know if they're good or bad by taking advice from someone else or kind of comparing it to someone else's results but the only way you're truly going to know for certain whether they were good or bad actions is through self-reflection and then pivoting from there because even if you took advice from someone else or you know what your actions are going to leave lead to you're operating from a completely different worldview in a completely different environment from whoever gave you that advice or wherever you learned it from right if you're taking advice from uh Socrates from hundreds of years ago for right now in this environment where money rules the world it may not be as practical as you think and you still need to filter through direct experience so let's do a quick recap on what we talked about games are a way of ordering Consciousness to the point of obsession when you're obsessed you stop caring what people think and play to win according to your values games are enjoyable and every situation in life can be mentally molded into a game if you want to avoid mental turmoil your skill needs to match the challenge that any situation presents your perspective will determine the information available to you and if it's not structured you will misperceive it yourself a concept is the player with time you want to create the character that can win the games that it is best at so I hope you all enjoyed this video I had a lot of fun with this one and yeah let me know what you think about life being a game and if anything resonated with you in the comments be sure while you're down there to like And subscribe and with that I hope you enjoyed this video again and have an absolutely incredible rest of your day peace when I was in college trying to become a fitness YouTuber of all things I came across a popular book title by Tim Ferris the 4our work week I'm sure every single one of you know that I've never read the book but when I first saw the title I interpreted it as the 4-Hour Work Day and so ever since that the idea of a 4-Hour Work Day stuck in the back of my head throughout my life college experience uh business failures and everything leading up until this point so along the way my subconscious mind was kind of munching on Creative problems because I perceived anything more than 4 hours of work a day as a problem and this alone changed the direction of my life and really everything I do and all of the decisions that I made now when I say that 4 hours of work a day or anything more than that was seen as a problem I don't mean like it was the end of the world I just mean that I knew that I was able to achieve some form of success with only 4 hours or less worth of work per day and so my mind naturally wanted to come up with Solutions relating to that whenever my work extended Beyond 4 hours of work a day so in business as I've talked about many times four it's like when you just start out and you're getting into freelancing or you start an agency or you learn a skill it's very wise to start a service-based business first something where you are in direct control of the Outreach right you aren't riant on an audience or paid ads or something like that to drive traffic to a product and instead you have a skill and you create a valuable offer and you iterate on that with time until you can charge more and more and more and eventually you reach out to people you start Landing clients maybe you're building an audience along the way and then that is able to fuel your client acquisition but it gets to a point where you have an audience that's large enough to productize right and systemize so that you can still maintain a 4-Hour workday but if you continue Landing clients without doing that you can see where the problem starts to arise right because then you've built yourself into some form of a new 9 to-5 where you have a bunch of clients you're making a good amount of money but there's still a cap there's still a limited amount that you can make without just working 16 hours a day and so this is what I mean by perceiving it as a problem and consistantly working to evolve which we'll talk about soon and systemize that so when I got to a certain point where I realized okay it's time to start moving in a New Direction because if I keep like I can't just take on unlimited amounts of clients I have to be able to deliver and do other things so that's what I did is once I reached a certain point I took on less CL I productized my service and I had built an audience to the point where I could sell that product and that required much less work on my hands so in business it comes from systemization of your workflow so that you can work faster and more efficiently and it comes from eliminating things that just don't make too much sense to do or delegating or Outsourcing low-leverage tasks and working on the things that you actually want to work on right you can Outsource the things that you hate and so for the past 3 years I would argue that 90% of my days were under 4 hours of work a day uh I'm not saying that this is absolutely foolproof and that you're not going to go over four hours of work you're going to be able to like you can work as long as you want right I like to like right now I'm probably working six hours a day maybe but I do see that as a problem it's not affecting me in a negative way but I know that at some point I'm going to have to systemize in order to maintain a specific Baseline while working 4 hours a day so as an example of that is if I'm making $20,000 a month or let's say $10,000 a month and then I hit a new high of $20,000 a month because I saw an opportunity and I started adding on more work let's say 6 hours of work a day in order to reach that then I have to systemize and come back down a little bit so then you keep moving your Baseline up so your 4 hours of work are going a longer way and making more money or whatever the end goal is whether it's money or not to the point of you being able to make a lot more money while only working 4 hours of work a day it's like bulking and cutting when you bulk and you're eating in a caloric Surplus and you're in a state of growth and in this case business growth you're going to tack on a bit of fat in your business the things that kind of bog you down and make you have to work more and so when the cutting season comes and you want to cut back to let's say 15% body fat in business and be able to sit there comfortably while working 4 hours a day that is necessary you don't just get stuck at one single part of the journey you evolve and so to preface before we dive into some evolutionary psychology and philosophy before we get into the Ten Commandments of the 4-Hour workday I want to preface that if you have a job this is mainly for people that are creators right and they have more time on their hands but if you have a job this is going to have to be limited to like 1 hour a day and maybe 4 hours on the weekend if you have that time and if you just don't give a [ __ ] about starting a business right now you can use this for your work as well when I was working a job at a web design agency I would usually knock out my work in like 2 to 3 hours and then I would just screw around or work on my business for the rest of the time so all of this is about saving time on the things that you're working on to free up more time for the more priorities in your life so why is this important there are a few things and the one being that there are a few qualities that separate humans from other beings like one of them that has fascinated me is how humans survive more so on a conceptual level while animals survive on a physical level like you wouldn't see a giraffe getting offended because it doesn't have the same beliefs as you and so if you are trying to survive the idea or belief of the 4-Hour workday that is going to be much more powerful for actually making it happen right you kind of have to identify with it in a good way right this is what spiritual teachers tell you not to do where it's do not attach your ident identity to something because that becomes a part of yourself and you're going to work to survive it and if that is static then it is going to cause some form of unnecessary suffering in your life but this can be spun for good and you can create a positive identity that is going to lead to a better future and the struggles and pain that you face are going to be learning experiences for creating a system that is better for uh better and more conducive for reaching your desired lifestyle and so that's the first thing the second thing that fascinates me about humans versus other beings is their depth of focus our depth of focus is crazy and it goes a lot deeper than I can go into in this video but so in Psychology there is the task positive network of the brain which happens when you are focused on an external string of tasks this is good for productivity there's also the default mode Network which happens when you take your focus off of the external so something like work and you focus you bring your focus to the internal and this opens your awareness and allows better ideas to fill your brain or negative ideas but this is good for creativity and so this balance between narrow external focus and more internal open Focus we can look at a graphic that I've made before called the focus Matrix because there are negative aspects to focus right it's not all productivity and creativity there's unconscious narrow or open focus on the left which you can see leads to stress anxiety reactivity annoyance feeling lost feeling uncertain feeling overwhelmed and then on the right there's conscious narrow and open Focus which is more efficient task oriented uh associated with the flow State present creative relaxed and joyful so keep this in mind as you're going about all of this because it's a helpful guide when you become aware or conscious of your current state so if you feel lost or you feel stressed or you feel anxious there's a reason behind that and you can uh work towards moving your focus in the other direction towards something positive usually by eliminating distractions and focusing on the task at hand evolution is forced on us by the fact that systems fall apart with time unless they become more efficient We Can't Stop and remain in the same place even to remain still we must advance so this is another reason why this productivity system is important is that humans we have a natural desire to know more the curse of knowledge we have an endless thirst to learn things that will Aid in our survival and so with our unique minds and with this knowledge we build systems to solve problems that lead to better outcomes in all domains of life Society culture personal life whatever it may be as an example it took a lot of energy physical energy to carry water and plow Fields so we used our creative ability and our minds to create a solution like a tractor and a system for being able to use that energy more efficiently so let me introduce you to the supreme law of the universe which is entropy some call this Nature's tax and in brief entropy is the measure of disorder in a system so you have to understand that the productivity system that we're going to be creating here is important for the survival and evolution of our work because we create systems to Aid in evolution so a system it has an end goal or an outcome and then it has a process or steps in order to reach that outcome and systems unless fueled with a specific energy or the energy has to have specific qualities to it so in your body you can fuel your body the system of your body with junk food but that energy isn't very quality it doesn't really meet the demands that your individual body needs and so when you fill it with clean Foods or or whatever uh healthy diet that you can fill it with and give it the proper nutrients through that energy helps upkeep your body so in something like prod productivity is when you're trying to reach the outcome of a stable and revenue generating business then you are going to have to fuel that system with the correct energy in the forms of focused prioritized action and so another fun fact is that these systems lay over each other they're just layers upon layers right like a paragraph is a goal to the system of sentences and words are a system that create sentences so we'll dive into this more in a future episode but just start thinking of everything as a system notice the goal notice the steps on how they're going to get there and then notice the energy required to maintain that system without it falling apart so an example would be a librarian right you have a library they have a system for organizing books and making them easy to find and then they have steps for themselves or the employees to continuously uh rent out take back in and organize the books in a way that makes sense and reduces that system from tending toward disorder or chaos but if you have a home bookshelf and you take out one book and then another and they end up scattered around the house and you never put the energy or effort necessary to maintain order in that system or if you don't have a system for organizing it at all then the attention the mental energy as well necessary to maintain that system in the order in your mind is going to fail so this isn't only the system that is external but it is how your mind interacts with that system because that's how you order Consciousness that's how you bring Clarity to your mind and allow yourself to act all right so let's dive into the 4-Hour philosophy or my Ten Commandments for focused work okay so let's talk about the 4-Hour philosophy in short we already mentioned this but humans survive on a conceptual level so if you identify or you hold the idea of a 4-Hour workday in the back of your mind somewhere and Associate yourself with being able to work 4 hours a day then you're going to try to survive that identity you're going to feel threatened when something threatens that belief or that system of yours and you are going to work to try and survive it and be able to make better decisions in a way that allows you to productize systemize or just maintain 4 hours of focused work a day so why 4 hours one these conceptual systems or beliefs or ideas that we're trying to survive with our mind they require mental energy they require attention and at the start this is going to be very draining right you aren't going to have a way of organizing your mind to the point of being able to act on this consistently you have to test and refine and iterate and from personal experience and anecdotes from friends and just scientific studies it seems like 3 four five 3 to 5 hours of focused work a day is what humans can have before they need to just give their focus a break because as with everything literally everything you need to train it it's like a muscle focus is a muscle you're not going to be able to do it very well at the start you're going to be able to focus for like 20 minutes and then you're going to have to take a break and come back and train that with time until all of this becomes habit because one thing that forgot to mention earlier about systems is that once they are refined once they have been repeated or conditioned into your head and formed those grooves in the neural networks of your brain they become automatic they become routine and normal to you and that's kind of how you automate the path to the good life is just by continuously layering system over system in your life that is going to lead to a better future and so another thing is that when you limit yourself to only 4 hours a day that kind of acts as a pseudo deadline right it's not as power powerful as having like a real world deadline that you actually have to meet but just limiting yourself to 4 hours and knowing that you don't have to work more than 4 hours it will shrink time and according to Parkinson's law where work matches the time or whatever it is you're going to try and fit your work within those 4 hours so that was why 4 hours the second thing is vision and identity so this is for a future video entirely because it's such an important topic but you need a vision for your future and the way that I like to paint this is that you need a minimum viable Vision like a minimum viable product in business you just need to get it out so that you can make connections when you have certain experiences and are able to associate ideas with that and make it better with time you can do the same for your vision for the future so write out the following and be as specific and detailed as you can who you want to be what you want to do for work where you want to live what your ideal day looks like how you will contribute to humanity what people you will surround yourself with network and Social Circle and feel free to let the stream of Consciousness keep going with this and so the point here is to set a foundation for the goals that you're going to try to be achieving on a daily basis with your productivity system what you're going to be working towards because that's a huge problem is that people just don't have an intrinsic goal that they're trying to achieve they go and they adopt the goal of someone else because it's Clarity that someone else has created like a job or something else and then they give their mental energy to that and align their work with that and then eventually they're so deep in this meta system called society that their attention is just enslaved in that and they don't have any time to go and create something for themselves so it's going to take a lot longer so commandment number three is to Outline Three priority tasks so this is situation dependent I can't tell you what your lever moving tasks are going to be but what you need to do is you need to understand what you are trying to achieve from a very big picture not not technical details so if you want to start a Creator business or a oneperson business like I've talked about multiple times you could go and watch my videos because they are big picture rundowns and then you can start testing from there and so in terms of my levers for my stage in business again this is contact dependent and situation dependent based on what's going to move you to move you towards your goals dependent on what stage you're in stage of development you're in in business so my first priority task is always writing content I wake up and I write my newsletter and tweets and threads for 45 minute blocks each so about two 45 minute blocks 90 minutes total 45 being my newsletter and then 45 being like tweets threads posting to other platforms Etc because writing forms the foundation of literally everything I do if you want to learn how I create content and how I script things how I write tweets how I grow other things like that check out the 2-hour writer Link in the description the second priority task is generating traffic because with content what I'm doing is I'm creating content I'm attracting people I'm putting media on the internet that will hopefully bring people to follow me and then potentially buy my products and just dive deeper into the free content that I give out but generating traffic because this is true with any social media platform that you start on you're not going to have much traffic at the start nobody's going to see your content so you need to focus most of your effort on just generating traffic to your content whether that be networking in the DMS or making friends with people that will potentially share your uh posts or just replying to Big accounts like if I went and replied I I set Bell notifications for every single YouTuber that has a high subscriber count and I went and commented on those every single morning and I blocked out time to do that in my focused work then I'm going to be moving a lever because I'm bringing traffic to my profile and my content over time and so right now I'm doing this on LinkedIn and sometimes other platforms like sometimes Instagram mostly LinkedIn because that's my the platform that is lagging the most for me and so I'm putting more effort into growth rather than just monotonous content creation there so number three is promoting my products because I have to make an income if I want to do this full-time and so with consistent traffic being generated from the content and my efforts into growing those actual platforms then I can start to lead that traffic into either free products to build Authority more and just give out free value or I can lead them into something like the tour writer or digital economics or modern Mastery for those that want those things in specific and my products are good and I put a lot of time into them so it only makes sense that I promote them so more people get results from them so at my phase in business those are the three things that are most important to me and of course there are auxiliary tasks that I have to complete but those are usually towards the end when I have like a an hour to spare before my 4 hours of focused work are up so commandment number four is to gain Clarity on those lever moving tasks most people think they need motivation when in reality they need Clarity and so every weekend let's say Saturday Sunday I usually swap a few of my lever moving tasks for clarity generating tasks so uh on Sundays I outline my newsletters I'll plan my week I'll do things like that I'll write down ideas for tweets ideas for Threads ideas for Content what I need to do to keep things moving with my products like modern Mastery what's the content going to be in there and a bunch of things like that and then outside of those that are hard scheduled I usually go on multiple walks a day which I use for clarity so in the afternoon at like 11: I'll go on a 30 to 45 minute walk and I'll just listen to lectures and I'll generate ideas for content and sometimes I'll even write on my phone right if I'm not in a busy area I can just go on a walk and like outline stuff on my phone and so I talk about this balance a lot in my Phil empty use video which I'll link here that's about my whole daily routine rather than just focus work routine and so the main question to ask here is how can you use 1 to two hours of your week to set yourself up for seamless work sessions so commandment number five is time blocks and breaks so the Pomodoro Technique is very popular because it's it's very good but I found something different that works well for me so at the start before any of this becomes habit you should very heavily consider writing this on your calendar you need to make it real you need to take it out of your mind and you need to put it somewhere physical whether that be on your calendar in a notebook on a sticky note on your uh computer you just need to make it known because you're forming a new habit here it's going to take some work and so what I like to do is I usually like to schedule things in 90-minute blocks and so what I'll do is I'll sit down with my priority task let's say it's writing content and I'll set a timer I have one back there it's like a little kitchen timer I'll put 45 minutes on it and I'll Press Start and then I'll write without any distraction that timer when that timer is on there's no tabs open it's it's just like what I need only to get the writing done and then once that timer goes off I'll re-evaluate okay did I complete this what's next and I'll set the timer for another 45 minutes and then once those 90 minutes are done I'll go I'll get up I'll go walk outside either a 30 minute walk or if I'm not feeling like doing 30 minutes then I'll go for 10 minutes the main thing is to just get up and realign and bring your intention and attention to a new priority tasks so commandment number six is to manipulate deadlines deadlines narrow your attention and the more narrow your attention is the less likely distractions are going to register in your awareness and it's the same thing with the negative side of the spectrum we saw the focus Matrix graphic earlier where on the left unconscious focus when it's narrow when you're narrowed in on a problem nothing else is going to distract you from that problem no other problems are going to pop into your head unless you like see one problem then that leads to the next and you're like oh no and your focus starts to open up and you're drowning in all of these problems but on the positive side of things when you have Clarity on what you're trying to do and you are narrowed in on one specific task and no distractions can penetrate just because you're so immersed in it that's when you start to kick into flow so you can see the deadline as a challenge as well and so 4 hours of Total work and then 90minut time blocks with those 45 minute timers those are kind of like pseudo deadlines those also narrow your attention you can also put something tangible on the line when you really need to get something done so one thing that I've done that just works miracles is public deadlines another reason to build an audience whenever I launch a product I'll usually do it pre-sale and then what I'll do is I'll have it all mapped out of course but I'll put a promotion out and when I get the first sale that means like okay it's [ __ ] go time and if that deadline is like a month out then I have a month to get everything done and usually close closer to when that month comes that's when I'm spending like 12 hours a day just unbroken Focus for my computer getting [ __ ] done and so get creative with this it's going to take a bit of uh thinking and creativity but how can you add a deadline to your important work so commandment number seven is to manipulate your environment so your environment and everything leading up to your focus work sessions need to come into play here or at least you just need to be conscious of them so if you're doing Focus work in the morning which I recommend which we'll get into to are you setting yourself up to be undistracted by the time that you get to your desk do you have a routine of okay I'm going to do this brush my teeth take out the dog make coffee and get straight into work cuz when you have that that allows you to get out of bed so much easier because you're not sitting there wondering okay what should I do I have 30 minutes to spare until I start working I'm just going to sit here and then I'm going to waste time and then I'm going to be over on my work time etc etc and so that helps reduce decision fatigue going into the work itself but but then when the work itself comes up you have to make sure and prepare for potential distractions so if it helps to put your phone on the other side of the room do that if it helps to wear a hat to narrow your attention which actually does help wear a hat if it helps to wear noise cancelling headphones try it out test it none of this is set in stone and it's life is a process of iteration and growth and evolution and so as long as you're working to make this process better for yourself you're going to be in a good spot as long as you're becoming aware of the problems that that are preventing you from working in efficient 4 hours and working to change and improve those problems then you're doing fine so the question is how can you manipulate your environment to conserve mental energy for your priority tasks and now commandment number eight which is my favorite is wake up before distractions because there seems to be uh two main perspectives when it comes to like the hustle and grind culture just waking up early is that uh some people are very Pro waking up at like 4:00 or 5: a.m. and then some people are very Pro I get up whenever I want and then I start working and then it gets done and you can do whichever you want try it out but unless you try waking up early I wouldn't talk smack about it or just like write it off entirely the hours of like 5: to 7: in the morning are sacred there is nothing that can distract you it's very peaceful even if you're a night owl and your brain is in more of that default mode Network open Focus State because you're very sleepy you you can set priority tasks related to creativity rather than just being hyperproductive during that time because in those sacred hours no one's going to be calling you no one's going to be texting you even if they are it's so early that you don't feel obligated to respond uh the day isn't going to be started you're not going to be getting invites to lunch you're not going to be really uh pressured to eat because you're like oh I haven't eaten breakfast yet or I haven't eaten lunch I need to get that done and then I'll come back to work so wake up before the distractions commandment number nine is to prioritize rest quality work does not exist without quality rest it's that simple but as we've discussed previously rest is not the modern notion of self-care the thing that is perpetuated by mediocre people online so rest does not mean Netflix wine and bubble bass those have their place of course but rest equals regenerating mental energy through non-w work related activities an example of some of these are going to the gym going on a walk socializing with friends writing in your Journal reading a good book or just trying out a new hobby whatever takes your focus off of work and allows you to bring it more intrinsic to the things that you want to do so in reality anything that doesn't support your work or mediocrity or a cheap dopamine addiction and so another important thing here is that when the 4 hours are up you stop working dead stop you do not work any longer unless the priority tasks uh move over or spill over and then you're working to systemize that back into four hours of work but if it's just busy work and you going on your computer to accomplish little tasks here and there that that can wait you need to get into the habit of stopping work and not focusing on work this is so much more important than I can make it seem in this video because if you're constantly focused on work and in that stressed survival State you are not going to open up your mind for Creative problem solving or any of the spiritual things in life that make life good and enjoyable and living in the present moment if you're con constantly focused on work by definition you are not present so if you have to work more than 4 hours or else your business will explode and fall to the ground then that's a problem fix it with systems and commandment number 10 is to make your process more efficient so if you have a problem whether while you're working or if you're working over 4 hours then those problems should try to be solved with creativity and systemization this is another important thing why it's so so so so important to not focus on work when you're not working because then you open your mind to the ability of creative problem solving that's when your subconscious mind sends the Insight or idea to your conscious mind and you have that aha moment it's like in the shower when you're having a shower thoughts and you have the best idea in the world it's because you're not focused on work so let's take for example when I had a lot of client work and I couldn't my my work was spilling over 4 hours in that case I had to build a larger audience so have more traffic create a product that doesn't require my time promote and improve that product until it's sustainable and take on less clients with my new free time and you would be correct in assuming that this isn't instant nothing that I talk about is instant life isn't instant you have to be patient with this and you have to be on this path for life so a bonus number 11 is to leverage digital tools we live in a world where we're so blessed we're Extremely Blessed because once you have the the money to invest in automation software or just a software that will make your business a lot easier I highly recommend doing so it's like instead of sending manual DMS in order to reach out to people you can build an audience fuel your email list and then buy a software that allows you to create email sequences that mimics what sales Outreach would look like in the DMS and then you can focus so much more of your attention on building actual leverage through content and then fueling that newsletter and email sequence to the point where you don't have to send in DMS to get clients or make sales and then when it comes to systemizing scheduling content content you can use something like tweet Hunter which I use to schedule my tweets and then those get turned into other content so that's a way of scheduling and me just being able to go into my phone type in a tweet and schedule it immediately and then forget about it I don't have to go back and post or even get on Twitter and one thing I do highly recommend is to write all of this out in notion if you aren't using notion you should just start now because it's going to take a long time to learn or just get used to uh the structure of it and you're going to have to go back and refine things here and there but just create a new page right create a new page and write down what you're going to do tomorrow for those 4 hours of work that is going to be your first system right steps and then the next day come back refine it what didn't work what do I have to do differently today do that for a week and then note common patterns and you can turn it into a weekly system and then abide by that and refine it with time so my challenge for you to end this video is to actually apply this information you may be watching this YouTube video to learn something or just for entertainment or whatever it may be but for hour work dayss are more than possible I've proven that and there's many people that Leverage The Power of the internet to do that and you'll be you'll only be able to discover whether you can or not through direct experience it doesn't matter what you think is possible about 4our workday or not you if you think it's impossible you don't have the awareness or experience that allows you to believe that it's possible and make it a reality for yourself so that's the main thing go back through this you can find the actual written version of this video uh in the description under the coet you can take note of all 10 of these Commandments you can write them down in notion with your systems and just start tinkering what are you going to do for the next day week whatever it may be gain Clarity on it and start acting here's how to do a hard reset on your life in 30 minutes this is a process that I run through when my life gets a bit too messy it's those times when I start to think back of when life was better like when things just get bogged down and you don't feel like you're living the same life that you were or when you aren't making as much progress as you previously were and you're thinking like what am I doing different like what's going on uh why do I feel this way and your routines start to fall apart and little tasks work their way in unconsciously and you're you just feel like you don't have any time or are unable to do the work that you used to do really well so the first thing we're going to do is take note of how we feel throughout the day and for all of this you're going to have to pull out a piece of paper or a notebook I recommend buying a journal just having one on hand to write things down is so so so important uh you can download my free Power planner and uh print that out if you want to use that to help do this and plan your weeks but you're going to note two things down the first thing is exactly what you are doing on a daily basis every single thing just write it down as you're going about the day what are you doing what are you thinking about uh what do you feel like you have to do etc etc and then the second thing that you're going to write down is exactly how you feel during these times right and you're get very specific with this because you're putting your mind on paper your mind is very complex and if you don't have accurate data on your paper you're not going to be able to move on to the next step in a way that allows you to do it very well and effectively so the next step is to prioritize remove and restructure because the reason you aren't getting results or the reason you feel like life isn't as good as it once was is because you either feel too pressed for time which is usually the cause of stress right you're in this very narrow State and you just feel like you don't have any time but in reality you're just sitting there thinking you don't have any time when you could actually be doing the thing that you're putting off second thing is that you just don't have the energy to get results living in that stressed out State takes a lot of mental energy to actually like narrow your focus in whether you're paying attention to just random thoughts or other things that takes a lot of uh precious mental energy that you don't you weren't structuring in a way that is conducive to getting more results and then the last thing is that maybe you've just stopped doing the things that get results I see this all the time in business it's like hey I'm not reaching out to get clients why am I not getting clients and it's like you kind of are answering your own question there you're just not doing the thing that actually gets results and so look over what you wrote down in Step One what can you change so with this you're going to kind of just create your own structure here and you're going to like Circle things that will get you results or you're going to write down the things that get you results and you're going to prioritize those and then you're going to remove the things that snuck in there or the things that snuck into your day and don't deserve to be there and could be draining mental monetary or even physical energy and then you're going to restructure specific tasks and obligations so get the chaotic structure of your mind onto paper and reorganize it and then step number three is to create a weekl long plan because as we talk about in many videos this is the supreme law of the universe is entropy it comes into play in almost every situation in your life and that is why you are in this state of chaos is because of entropy the organization of your life and therefore your mind the thing that you have to keep organized and use to move throughout life tends towards disorder if you aren't performing this whole mental housekeeping thing of writing down everything that's on your mind restructuring reorganizing it literally taking your mind mind putting it on paper and ordering it in a way that makes sense and allows you gives you Clarity to execute and so by not doing this it's dangerous because you can pick up bad habits along the way and so bad habits are difficult to break and that's for another video or buy a book on habit formation but you can make the process of eliminating these bad habits a lot easier with Clarity just prioritizing Clarity in your life so take 10 minutes and on a new page you're going to write down every single thing that you're going to do over the next week and this shouldn't sound crazy or difficult it takes 10 minutes and it will help you so so so much but just doing this alone reduces the friction that allows you to make better decisions so write out exactly what you're going to do for your morning routine uh what tasks you're going to complete during your focused work routine what you other specific tasks and obligations that you have to get done like meetings and how those are going to lay out in your day and then write out exactly what you're going to do in between that time and your nightly routine and with this as with almost everything we talk about like this isn't a quick fix this isn't an instant thing like you're not going to be some people will write this down and they'll have a great time and it'll work really well other people you're you're going to have to experiment you're going to write things down and then as you're trying to execute on it you're going to hit a problem and then you're going to have to deal with that mentally and you're going to have to go back to what you wrote down change it for the next day to something that you think will work better better trial and error and then over time throughout the week you just get into this Flow by solving the problems that come up along the way and then you have a system that over the next month you can just do every single day and it becomes that much easier and then eventually that becomes habit and preferably you are doing the things that move you towards your purpose or your vision or the highest version of yourself and so that's really it for this one I thought this would be helpful uh come with the start of the New Year I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions but I do think that now is as better time as any to actually start doing this but uh setting a new year's resolution or a goal or just anything when you decide to make a change it isn't going to be sustainable unless you have absolute Clarity to on how to reach that goal unless you have a system that you can repeat daily and make it a part of your life and base your identity around it in alignment with the higher version of yourself so you're working to try and survive or actualize that highest version because humans survive on a conceptual level and we try to survive the things that we identify with so if you identify with the highest version of yourself or your purpose and create a system that allows you to act in alignment with that then eventually that you become that if you can spend 8 hours building someone else's dreams you can spend 1 hour building your own one of the most powerful ideas I've been thinking about recently is bringing your ideal future into the now and what I mean by that is performing the same actions that you would in your ideal lifestyle but on a much smaller scale so let's say I want to write for 2 hours every morning for the rest of my life then what I'm going to do I already do that right now but what I did in the past is I am going to start writing for 5 minutes day 15 minutes a day 30 minutes a day 1 hour a day and slowly increasing over the years until I can sustain the 2hour A Day writing lifestyle because frankly it doesn't make sense to wait and put off what you're already going to be doing because I'm assuming what you're going to be doing is going to be directly attributing to the work you are going to do or your life's work and so if you're not already doing those things then you it's going to be much more difficult when you decide to find start doing them and already you're already going to have to start small and taper up so if you don't have the time right now to write for 15 minutes every day you're not going to have the time in the future if writing is going to be what you're doing for work and so the way that you dissect what actions you should be taking is what we're going to talk about soon this whole video is dedicated to deep work and actually executing on the tasks that you're going to be doing but slowly tapering up until you can do them longer and so the reason I want to write for the rest of my life is just that right I realized my ideal future and I realized that I'm going to have to be writing anyways if I want to continue writing into the future um I also realized that writing was not the first thing right you have to try things and start to execute on fundamental tasks in order to understand what it is that you want right because at first my desires were selfish they still kind of are but I knew that I had to make money somehow in order to sustain or or build a future lifestyle for myself and so with that I started on social media before that I did freelancing and other things and through that trial and error and realizing okay I don't like client work I don't really care for web design anymore I did at the time but I outgrew it and now I'm getting into this writing thing and I'm learning all about it and I love it right and I would have never stumbled on that unless I had already been working towards my ideal future so whether it be you start writing for 15 minutes every single morning or you just start working on the things that will bring you closer to your ideal future that way you can figure out what you don't want and allow that to act as a self-corrective compass into figuring out what you actually do want and then once you find that that's the best place to be right then you can just execute execute execute until you can make it further AP part of your day because it becomes seamless at that point right when I came across writing and understood that it is the foundation of all media and it is how I get my products and services in front of people and build a name for myself I also realize that it helps me clear my mind it helps me harness my creative ability I started stacking wise behind this one action so that when I woke up it was almost automatic that I just got straight into writing so the next thing is that when you bring your actions from your ideal future or the things that are going to actualize your ideal future into the now and start executing on them you begin to invest mental energy in a goal through focus on that goal so you are investing energy in that ideal lifestyle that you are trying to create and the more you do this whether it be 15 minutes a day or an hour in a day or 4 hours a day you're investing energy or currency in a metaphorical sense here and so the more you do it the more you feel obligated to do it that's how you build momentum and that's how you find passion you don't just find an action that you are super passionate about instead you start investing mental energy into a goal you do the actions that are required to get to that goal and then you cultivate passion along the way because you discover things that you wouldn't have discovered without that direct experience and so when you don't work on this goal you will feel as if you are wasting that currency you're wasting that investment and so then again your body and your mind are going to tell you hey I need to get back to doing this goal I can't get distracted or else I'm not going to feel the progress the momentum the passion that I felt before and that's how you sustain a passionate fulfilling and momentum full life and so another thing that comes into play here is my law of conceptual survival conceptual survival is the human phenomenon where our survival instincts have transcended the Physical Realm and are included in the mental we work to survive ideas Concepts and beliefs that form our sense of self so if you identify or you create this goal that starts to form your perspective and how you view the world and start acting in alignment with it and in investing mental energy into that goal or your future identity you start to slowly build that identity right and by conceptual survival we are trying to survive our concept of self and so our actions are going to align with that the more that we do these things the more that you are consistent with the Deep work that are we are going to talk about here and so with this when you view your daily situations from the lens of your future self or from the lens of the goal that you were working towards you are going to see life in a completely different light right you're going to be scrolling on social media and a post that you normally wouldn't have stopped and looked at is going to stop your scroll and it is going to help you in the actualization of that goal like a Fitness Post is going to grab your attention more than some mindless cheap entertainment post and the same goes with conversations you're going to listen from the lens of your goal and be able to filter what they say from that so you can spot the things that actually help you move towards that goal so the the main lesson here to end this little section of the video is that if you aren't working towards your ideal future you working towards someone else's because either way we are goal oriented creatures and if you do not create your own goal and start to invest energy in that identity you're going to invest energy into the identity that is assigned to you like being a college student or having a corporate job title or being a retired at 65 years old dude and your actions are going to follow to survive that belief whether you conscious or want to frame it as this whole conceptual survival thing or not and so next we're going to talk about the holistic daily routine fill your brain in the afternoons with books learning and socialization empty your brain before bed with journaling planning and meditation use your brain in the morning with creation output and focus you need dedicated time every single day for creativity productivity and experimentation that is what's going to help you achieve your goals because you need the mixture it can't only be productivity without experimentation and being able to refine along the way or you're just executing on tasks that have been laid in front of you and so the first objection that comes to mind here is that you don't have enough time Dan I don't have enough time and that's fine I'm not asking you to spend 4 hours a day on this or 6 hours a day or 8 hours a day I'm asking you to spend the minimum amount of time you can because if you don't then you aren't creating your future life like if you aren't dedicating time and actually blocking out and focusing for that time in order to move levers towards your ideal future then you're not going to create it it's that simple and you don't you shouldn't feel like you need 2 3 hours at the very start of your journey like a young dude who has no responsibilities if you have a wife and kids then yeah you're going to have to start with 15 to 30 minutes and work up from there and it's going to take a bit longer because that's the thing a lot of people don't realize this or notice this is that your psyche isn't wired for Modern Life right it's not wired for being under fluorescent lights going and sitting in a cubicle right think of it like a monkey in a cubicle I know you're not a monkey but a monkey would suffer in a cubicle because its psyche is not wired for that we need to hunt and in this age what I mean by hunting is novel dopamine sources or meaningful dopamine sources or importance something new in your life discoveries creativity that's what hunting is is being able to find something new take it create something with it and that feels so good and so many people don't have that benefit in their life so if Modern Life has become normal to you the repetitive NPC automaton lifestyle do you know what an automaton is like a little robotic uh doll thing that's what most people are if this modern life becomes normal to you you are by definition trapped in The Matrix which is a metaphorical term for you are just enslaved and a slave to routine and many of you are familiar with how I structure my days so I will keep this brief you need three activities to pursue your goals full force one that fills your mind you need education ideas and novel resources you can apply towards your goals this will lead to intrinsic motivation one that empties your mind you don't want to be trapped in a chaotic bubble of thoughts and useful ideas that's exactly how you make zero progress write things down and one that uses your mind you need a vestel to focus your efforts with your ideas and the clarity to execute build your future so this video is going to be focused on that last Point using your mind with deep work now I've talked about that entire process before in my previous video the three-step productivity framework it's about the fill empty use framework so check that out if you're interested who you are what you think feel and do what you love is the some of what you focus on Cal Newport so now we're going to talk about the need for deep work Cal Newport is the author of the book deep work I have it somewhere out in my living room I've never read it but I have been doing my own version of Deep work for the past 10 years really I'd say probably six years actually productivity is about getting the most effective work done in the least amount of time possible productivity is not about seeing who can work the longest and then wear that as a badge of honor that they can show their friends co-workers and peers that's just a status game in a world of notifications ample options and overwhelm deep work is frankly no longer an option it is a necessity you have to block out time to work on your future or to work on your business or just to avoid conversation notifications or distractions as a whole you need to sit back you need to channel the creative Firepower that you've gained through your consumption or your education or your skill acquisition and you need to focus Focus that into a vessel AKA a business to act to reap the benefits from that business in the form of money connections and just resources in general and then be able to have that as currency that you can trade up towards a better life for yourself deep work is how you build out your dreams in record time so now we're going to talk about the priority ladder and with this with the priority ladder you can drastically change your life in 6 months with 1 hour a day of focus focused work 1 hour that's it do not think that you need anything more than 1 hour one meaningful project one day at a time so with the priority ladder it it's pretty it's just that it's a priority ladder where there's priority 1 2 3 and four and they are all not only decreasing in challenge but also increasing in the amount of distraction potential that there is right so Priority One is just absolute laser focused on building out your vision with through a project and then priority four is something like maintenance task where you are responding to emails uh responding to messages and doing other things like that where you are more open to actually potentially being distracted because there's nothing after that right there's no creative work that you have to do so we will start with Priority One now Priority One this is this pretty much built my entire life right for as long as I can remember even into my younger years I always always had one project that I was working on pretty close to first thing in the morning now it's always first thing in the morning like right now I'm writing my book because that is a new project right is it is not something that I have to consistently work on right now like it's not something that I have to maintain or update always it's something new and so that's what the first priority should be right so if you have not built anything and you only have 1 hour a day to spare this is the 1 hour time block that you use this is where you're focusing your efforts on the levers that are going to lead to creating your vision for the future and then once that is done so for beginners it's probably going to be something like starting a social media brand learning how to write with my two-hour writer or digital economics course and then as you break through the perception threshold that we talked about in a previous video where it's very difficult at the beginning but slowly becomes more pleasurable with time where it's going to be difficult and your mind is going to perceive it as more difficult than it's going to be and that perceived difficulty is going to increase and you until you hit that breakthrough right and then you're able to systemize things and then it just flows a lot smoother and then you can fit so much more into that hour right your first hour of focused work isn't going to be that focused you have to stick it out and refine your system with time and then once you start seeing results from that first hour of work then you move that into the second priority time block so you can start working on something new right so then when we move into priority 2 that's where your lever moving tasks go so in this case for me it's like uh replying on social media or creating content mostly creating content because that's like how I feed my system right and it's creative work it's something that I do not want to Outsource and then what people before when you move that up to the second priority you're going to start something new in Priority One because that is what's going to keep meaningful dopamine flowing and that is what's going to maintain momentum along this path until you systemize that and then you bump it up another priority right so for the the next thing that most people should do after starting a social media brand and once they start seeing results with that and it becomes a lot more efficient for them to keep up with that then you're going to start building a service or a product so that you can monetize and then once that's done you move that up and start reaching out to people but then you can start building out a funnel or something else and then all of these things slowly like build on each other over time the third time block is also for Lever moving tasks or creative tasks or meaningful tasks right so the things that you don't want to Outsource I will never Outsource my writing at least I hope I won't maybe I will um but in terms of like just writing in my date I'm not going to Outsource it as a whole the third time block is just to continue keeping the momentum going on whatever you're building and all of this can also apply to like a corporate job or just any work that you have you have to structure your days with this method and so the fourth time block or the priority 4 is for maintenance tasks and for me that's like checking messages responding to messages checking emails responding to emails um checking the modern Mastery community and interacting there this is where I expose myself to people right it sounds kind of weird to say it that way but it if you expose yourself to messages or your phone or notifications way too early in the morning that one Rogue thought that you get from it that you think isn't of importance when you first see it like oh I can touch my phone in the morning and work just fine no you can't it's going to pop up and then that alone is going to split your focus and then that opens up room for entropy where your mind starts going to all of these different thoughts without you knowing it that's the thing you probably think it's normal right now for you to do that and you think that you're doing the best most efficient work you are but you're not so you push back all of the conversational and maintenance task to the fourth priority and now with all of these I like to structure these anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes long time blocks for priority 1 2 3 and four each and then in between I'll take a break I'll make breakfast I'll make lunch I'll go on uh a 30 to 40 minute walk and listen to something in my ears usually closer to the last ones but in a nutshell that's really it there's no reason for me to go over exactly like all every little hack that I do because the the entire Joy of all of this comes through experimentation creating a way that you like doing and just testing different techniques so that's a technique that I'm giving you that you can test and then you can pull some of the good things from it put it into your own day and slowly refine that over time until you live a completely self-made lifestyle if you will so if you enjoyed this process first I encourage you to implement it second I encourage you to like And subscribe and comment um comment if anything stuck out to you or what you're going to implement uh cuz I'm curious to hear which parts stuck out the most there early last year I came across an American philosopher that was touted to be the most conscious man alive this guy's name is is Ken Wilbur and since then I picked up a few books from him including a brief history of everything and Cosmic Consciousness and a few others I've skimmed through them and I was instantly hooked he his teachings on holism Consciousness in general and just his integral Theory really made a lot of philosophical Concepts click for me and as I researched more I found uh something interesting many of you know David data the author of The Way of the superior man and Mark mans who is the author of The subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] so both of them were former students of Ken Wilbur and David daa clearly went on to use what he learned to help explain uh modern sexuality and masculinity in his books and Mark Manson had a more interesting story where he saw the rise and fall of Ken Wilbur I read on uh his blog you can probably find it somewhere it's called the rise and fall of Ken Wilbur but uh mark Manson was an adamant student of his he was really loving what he was learning he was supposed to go to some seminar or workshop and out of nowhere Ken Wilbur kind of turned on his audience he said some weird questionable things and then he kind of just disappeared from the scene and the long long story short of Mark Manson's article on this is that even the most conscious beings are still human we still have egos and so Ken is now back in Action he's showing up up on some Niche podcast I would recommend you go and give some of them a listen because they are very intriguing and I feel like if you like my content you'll like theirs quite a bit it's a lot more stimulating than mine is just because I haven't reached that level of thought or articulation yet and even though Ken Wilber did make some questionable remarks and he turned on his audience there's still a lot that we can learn from him it's the same thing with Alan Watts where uh like Alan Watts many of you know of him but some of you don't know that he died or he was the victim of alcoholism right so he drank alcohol and a lot of people have uh different perceptions and perspectives around alcohol but the the point is is that the medium and the message are separate and that even spiritual people are human too and they have their vices and they're battling with them and in my opinion Alan Watts's alcohol problem still aligned with his philosophy and so without going too deep into this I would encourage you to uh research these things for yourself follow your curiosity and question things don't form hards set beliefs on these things that most people would label as bad because we live in a world of Relativity and there are no absolutes except for the absolute and so the purpose of me framing this entire video this way is that I want to introduce you to a concept of Ken Wilbur and what he calls a hon h o l n a hoon is the unit of everything it is both a part and it is a whole like how an atom is a ho in itself but it is also a part of a molecule or how the molecule is a whole but it also a part of a cell and then going all the way up about humans and how they are holes in themselves but they are also a part of society Society a whole part of a culture culture a whole part of a Nation Nation world world galaxy galaxy Cosmos Cosmos God and so they span in infinite directions and this really helps paint a picture of um what some people call relativism or relativity where everything is connected right everything the thing that joins these Hons together is relationship so as Alan Watts would say existence is relationship and you're a smack in the middle of it because humans are not only a part of society but I'm a part of this room I'm a part of a family I'm a part of friendships Uh Wood is not only a part of a tree it is part of a chair it is used to build houses and so we can start to paint a picture here that holons or really anything ideas figments of Consciousness units of thought is what Alan Watts would call them these are the building blocks of creative problem solving and this is not only limited to things that are material or tangible ideas are also holons thoughts emotions they are holons they are part of a whole and a ho in themselves and this is how humans make sense of the world we create limits or distinctions in this case they're called holons and how these distinctions work together and how they're very context dependent or goal dependent and they're very useful when you start to actually notice these distinctions or Hons like with an emotion how can you follow that relationship to its source and understand it on a deeper level so that you can overcome that emotion if it's like a negative one and so this is best understood through philosophical contemplation just letting thoughts trigger thoughts and going down a rabbit hole of curiosity and Discovery so this is a practice that you can do on your own but we can do one right now let's say the ho on that I want to choose is honey so if I want to dissect that or just understand it on a deeper bigger picture level I can use my mind to follow it so there's the process of making honey the bees associated with pollination the beekeepers and if they're making a living wage whether any harm is being done to the bees the manufacturing and distribution process of the honey how the honey impacts human health when consumed and onward toward Infinity you can take any single one of those words in that list even the bullet points themselves and just start connecting dots and so in business as an example the one person business that we talk about you are a whole that includes your interests your interests are part and a whole of you but they are also a part and a whole of your Niche and then your Niche is a part and whole of the market and then markets are kind of parts and holes of social media and so if you're struggling in any domain of life that usually means there's a problem right that you're struggling through and you can usually pinpoint that problem and you can start to to zoom out and see the bigger picture of how it connects with other things and so this is why multi-perspectival understanding and open-mindedness is so important is because it allows you to solve creative Problems by connecting the dots this is something we're going to go a lot more in depth into in the next video which is going to be called like the greatest trap of the 21st century which is closed-mindedness cheap dopamine distraction Etc so now let's get into the interesting stuff which is modern enslavement or society as a pyramid scheme nobody I want to be trained into a job I hate work for 40 years and get angry at a TV until I die 90% of the population does exactly that wake up it's not too late so notice how holons are hierarchical they transcend and include one another like how humans or the emergence and and they emerge as well right so something emerges and then it transcends and includes what is under it so a human for example transcended and includes animals right we include the physicality and survival nature kind of in a metaphorical sense the physicality yes but the the survival is conceptual in our case of course we have physical survival but we also uh include conceptual survival and spirit emerged right that is the main difference is is Spirit emerged and humans have the ability to uh sense it which is pretty much the connection of Minds through the intangible like how a sports team has team spirit and they share that Spirit or energy uh going into a game and it allows them to win like if they have low Spirit low team spirit and another team has high team spirit you'd be surprised in how much the game can be swayed in any direction of winning or losing so everything is structured as a hierarchy and there are two types the first are Dominator hierarchies which is what gives the word hierarchy a bad reputation so these consist of pyramid scheme esque structures then the second are natural hierarchies or act ual iation hierarchies which is an order of increasing wholeness such as particles to atoms to cells to organisms or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs the hole on one level becomes a part of the whole of the next so you can see the wisdom in how Society kind of mimics this hierarchical structure but society would fall under the definition of uh a dominator hierarchy and of course this is context dependent but in like when we think of society this is what we think about and so societal entities like public schools or or the parts that make up the whole of society like public schools government corporate jobs and even some religious institutions which is more culture but still part and a whole those are also structured in this way so it's hierarchies within hierarchies and the main thing with this is that there are more people with less power at the bottom and then there are less people with more power at the top and so in a true pyramid scheme there are investors at the bottom bottom that enable this power distribution so you climb this ladder in any given situation if you're trying to climb the ladder like some people aren't trying to climb like the religious ladder right A lot of people aren't trying to become pastors but in in the sake of like a corporate job or going to school you're you're taught to climb the ladder through hard work and usually manual labor just hard hard work but it's going to be close to impossible to reach the actual top of the pyramid if you go about it this way you're usually going to get stuck in one level because if there's 10 people at the top and a million people at the bottom how are you those are just bad odds and so the people that want to break out of this pyramid scheme as structure have to create their own right they have to start their own business they have to start their own actualization hierarchy or create their own actualization hierarchy to escape a dominance hierarchy because the thing with this is that these are created every single day right they they trans send and include after creative emergence and so in in these pyramid schemes yeah money plays a role but money isn't the biggest problem the people at the bottom of these societal pyramid schemes are not investing money some of them are but they're investing attention so since humans survive on a conceptual level and if you identify or you like all that you know and all that you believe is let's say the job title that you adopt you're going to work to survive that identity with your attention right like for example it doesn't exist unless there is enough attention to give it life so in the case of like religious ideology or a business model like there could be a business model out there that we have no clue about because no one has actually done it or spread the word so that there is attention given to that business model to make it seem like it exists and it is something tangible that other people can go into but when people identify with their job title or their religion or something else it is upheld through attention and if that attention is threatened like if if if the attention is threatened then the existence of that thing is threatened and you are going to feel threatened like if someone says oh I don't like your sports team and you get threatened like you actually have a physical survival response is what I'm saying here that is what I mean and you are going to defend that belief over and over and hardwire it into your brain when in reality if you just zoom out gain a bigger picture you're those problems mean absolutely [ __ ] all so it's safe to say that power in our modern world comes from attention and we're talking about external power but we're also talking about internal power so being able to actually control your own attention and so another pattern to note here that we've talked about before is that these hierarchical structures also present a hierarchy of goals that help frame our attention or focus our attention or order our mind and with just a world of overwhelm uncertainty and like insecurity the masses flock to the thing that is going to be most likely to heal that uncertainty or order their mind which is usually one of these external hierarchy of goals like climbing the corporate ladder because they don't have Clarity on anything else they can do they haven't been exposed to another potential path that makes sense and have been given Clarity on how to actually reach that goal and take action on it so they either believe it's impossible or it's just not a possibility for them and so they go to the thing that has just been ingrained in our minds of what we should do and focus our attention on throughout the entirety of our lives and so this is the definition of modern enslavement I don't believe that like someone at the top is just planning being a puppet master I just it's it's just human nature and how nature is structured in this hierarchical manner and how we plan to focus our attention and over time these things becoming more and more normalized or conditioned into our brains to the point where we are born as slaves unless we take it on our eles to free or break those chains because social conditioning since the day you were born Narrows your mind to see the world the same as everyone else people have to be on the same page and so it becomes automatic for us to invest our psychic or mental energy into these hierarchy of goals not only to help maintain them because oh no if Society collapses then we all collapse it's not just going to collapse out of nowhere but you see what I mean is that it's like well someone has to do this job so someone has to do this and it's like that this is what creative problem solving is for if people actually woke up and wanted to create a better future for themselves and they decide not to go the traditional route then they're going to have to solve a problem and if enough people do this then the universe will correct itself we may go through some bad times but from a universal perspective when you look down it doesn't really matter it's just a part of the process of Life birth and death the collective societal vision for your future is to get good grades maybe get a high-paying job watch TV to ease your mind and maybe retire happily at 65 both with the unconscious seeking of status survival and approval and So eventually with the social conditioning or just conditioning in general all of this stuff becomes habit and we go on to mimic others right we become a product of others and we Chase these status games we spend our money on the fancy cars we invest our attention all day to make that money back and we never think to consult or create and then consult our own values Vision wants needs and potential impact on the world so we escape this modern enslavement one by becoming aware which I'm making you aware of right now and then the second thing is by creating your own actualization hierarchy to order your mind and create a better future for yourself and those around you because the actualization hierarchy will present a series of goals which are problems and increasing in creativity along the way and fulfillment and impact along the way that will will potentially spread to other people throughout the world so you have to work your way up and those the goals imply problems solve the problems over and over again and that is what you invest your attention in to help not only change your own life but then let that go on to impact other people as a whole and so you can opt for doing nothing you really can you can be a sheep you can be an NPC whatever however people label it you can opt for doing nothing but you have to understand that you are a human and that you are not going to escape survival if you opt for doing nothing you are automatically a slave you don't have to tie a negative connotation with slave right that's not necessarily a bad thing in certain cases it can be it can't be just don't take what I'm saying as absolutely literal in the the same interpretation that everyone is going to have like a slave from a thousand years ago we're talking metaphorically here in terms of the mind not physicality so I've been working on this for a long time this is going to be called the focus formula and it is how you take back control of your life so let's look at the graphic I made for this one I'm proud of this one but we'll dive into all of these steps right now just screenshot this if you want to have a way of remembering what we're going to talk about right now if you don't know what you want you will be told what you want and you will believe it so unless you have dissolved your ego completely entirely it doesn't exist and you plan to live out in the woods like a monk with no human connection whatsoever then you're going to to need a purpose and even then humans still have a purpose your purpose then is peace and you are just doing that so since success is relative and dependent on a hierarchy of goals you need to create your own so let's create the structure to order our minds and create a good life for ourselves so the first thing we have to talk about is purpose and the reason uh I'm creating this mainly and a lot of why I do what I do is because Mo what most people say in books and stuff it just doesn't really make sense right it doesn't make too much sense when people say oh you need a purpose there's no like how how do I find my purpose or something like that or uh you like you understand what a purpose is but you don't really understand what it is you know what I'm saying so for the sake of Simplicity purpose one there is not only one purpose you don't have one purpose right so there are lesser and greater purposes and you have to you have to achieve one purpose in order to unlock the next so to make this as simple as possible a purpose is a goal and a goal introduces a problem and so your purpose is the most pressing problem in your life right now if you have done absolutely nothing with your life your purpose is not to spread love and be selfless and good to the other to the world that it just doesn't work that way if you haven't self-developed and self-transcendent then it's impossible to be truly absolutely selfless so sit back and think what is your purpose right now what is the problem or the pain that you have been avoiding confronting if you're overweight and you need more energy and that's really dampening your life right like you can't walk downstairs you can't walk and keep up with your friends uh you can't even work a job like specific jobs in order to make more money then that is your purpose and you need to laser all of your attention in on that and solve it with what we're going to talk next but that is the thing that is your main goal that is your North Star at the moment and all of your actions will be aligned with that whether it be the food you eat or just the choices you make whether you go on a walk or you sit on a couch and the thing with this is is that you really have to sit and understand how that problem or pain is spreading into the rest of your life you have to become conscious of that in order to get absolutely fed up with where you are and then that energy that purpose will be much easier to one it will fuel you in the morning and you want to get out of bed but you have to get to that point you have to sit with it and marinate in it and stop ignoring the pain in your life or just another example is like mine I don't know if this was my first purpose but I as a kid I feel like a lot of you can relate I was just tired of not being able to get girls even though I wasn't trying right that's like every young dude's thing is you want to get girls and so my first thought like when I went through my first breakup it's like okay I'm going to get back at her for ju and just go to the gym and get jacked right and so that's why I went to the gym is because the biggest pain in my life as a kid it's funny now thinking back on your past purposes but that was the thing is I went to the gym because there was a big pain in my life and I wanted to solve that and the thing with this is is that's a lesser purpose but once you start solving that and once you do eventually solve that just with time it's not even immediate you may not know if it's solved or not then the next purpose presents itself because you're just slowly and consistently solving better problems for yourself so remember this is that one problems don't ever go away they just get better and they get more fun to solve right that's all we're doing that's all we're doing here is we're just constantly solving problems or avoiding problems and that's the cause of pain so we're either leaning into the battle the conflict the problem or we're sitting back and we're marinating in it and we're just not moving or uh aside from those two we are in the Pres present moment or we are meditating and we are practicing and getting ready for that next round of heat which is problem solving life unfolds in chapters like a book and each chapter presents a purpose that the next chapter leads into and you will feel lost heading into new chapters of your life your purpose isn't just going to be re readily available during the next like after you solved the first one or after you completed the first purpose the next one isn't going to show up you're going to feel lost we've all all gone through this and it's normal you just have to sit with it and this is a time where you would practice presence mindfulness and other things in preparation for that next round of intensity so if you aren't making progress then you are preparing for the next round of making progress and you have to be okay with that and you have to sit with it and self-reflect to understand okay what like getting hints at your next purpose it's like pieces of the puzzle right because you only know you don't exactly like know what a problem is right away maybe bugging you for a bit and you don't know what it is unless you self-reflect on what went wrong and what went right in your life it's like I may not know where I want to move next but if I reflect on my past and think about the places that I've been on vacation to or I've gone and visited and I can get a little inkling of like okay I want to live in a place that's a big city I want to be able to walk in some places this is how you create a vision for your future as you reflect and you start to piece together other piece of the puzzle based on your past mistakes and based on what went well so from your mistakes you understand okay I don't want to make that mistake again you can move in a better Direction like if I blow a bunch of money on a compulsive purchase like a car and then I can't afford anything for like 3 months that was a mistake and then it also presents a problem that could potentially be your next purpose or something that you need to solve right so if I can't afford the lifestyle that I want to live then I need to make more money so I need to start a business right I need to do or I need to increase my skill set in order to get a better job right it it allows me to make progress on something that I want and can be enjoyable if I have Clarity on how to do it and so if I start a business or I and then those present subsequent problems and then you have to solve those you have to lean into them if I don't know how to build a business then I need to learn if I know and I haven't done anything then I need to act like all of this stuff is so simple if you just get out of your head and understand here's a problem I need to solve it I need to also learn how to solve it and then I'm going to solve it and so the next time around that like there are no right or wrong actions here right where if I want to do something so surface level so status based like starting a business making a lot of money and getting a good car then I'm going to do that but then I have to self-reflect and see if that was a mistake because I can always come back and correct it I can sell the car I can make a better decision I can restructure my business I can restructure my lifestyle I just need the control to do that and if you aren't able to do that then that's a problem solve it if you have a job and you don't have any time on your hands that's a problem start a business do what you have to do and so if you're absolutely lost you're just absolutely lost with this whole purpose stuff then you need to ask better questions to yourself because questions dictate the quality of answers quality of answers dictate the quality of your life and so use these questions below as attention anchors right hold them in the back of your awareness because these answer these questions aren't answered answered with time I don't think any questions are answered almost immediately at least meaningful ones where you actually gain knowledge because you have to make mistakes and let struggle and pain lead to answers so ask the questions to yourself as we go about them and then experience life self-reflect and see okay in alignment with these questions what answers are starting to piece together from what I just experienced in life what do I really want out of life what is important to me what is the highest version of myself what does my ideal day look like what do I have to accomplish in order to get there does that solve a problem in the world and what product or service aligns with both what is the next phase of my purpose write these down so after purpose we have process we need to gain Clarity and understand how to achieve whatever purpose we have repeat the boring fundamentals that's how you get results but realize they aren't boring a sushi chef spends years is perfecting the preparation of rice a tennis player obsesses over the angle of their serve Mastery sets you apart in a world that can't see beyond the surface so what is the process that is going to allow you to achieve your goal so every goal is you if it's not like immediate like me saying this next word as a goal if it's further away from you then you need to gain Clarity by attaching a string of goals to it like a quest in a video game that helps narrow your attention block distractions and gets you obsessed with solving it it gives you Clarity it orders your mind and so from those deconstructed goals from your purpose let's say my purpose is I need to just get fit in the gym then what's the process goal number one is I need to learn how to go to the gym goal number two is I need to understand uh what I actually need to do what food do I need to eat what equipment do I need to buy and if my goal is specific right which we'll talk about in a bit like gaining 20 lbs of muscle in my first year right I have to learn in order to understand and gain clarity on that goal and understand what's actually possible and then align all of my actions with that goal and execute as a process repeating the boring fundamentals so you need to study the principles of these things in order to actualize or achieve your goals and so you also have to understand that this process is going to change with time and as you learn and experience more because the process of Mastery or just anything like a acquiring a skill it comes in stages of beginner intermediate Advanced and possibly even more in between that like a beginner in the gym is not going to be doing the same workouts as an intermediate or an advanced lifter in the gym same as with business you're not going to be hiring employees as a beginner you're going to be acquiring skills learning direct Outreach learning direct response marketing understanding how to grow on social media understanding what you want to talk about creating your Niche etc etc and then intermediate is more so like maintaining that we talked about stage 1 through three creators in the onep person business road map so that's an example but but you see what I'm saying here and so every stage will have its own lever moving actions that you need to take on a daily basis in order to bust through your purpose and if you need help with this use my power planner it's free download in the description it'll help you take your vision for the future break it down into yearly monthly weekly and daily goals with priority tasks and that's what we're talking about next is priority making better decisions so the best way to frame your actions whether it be on a daily or even like a higher goal like a monthly goal is performance versus vanity so we're favoring performance here so instead of trying to gain uh 50 followers a day which if you've been in the social media game you know that as a beginner that's kind of like iffy like it's it's not guaranteed right you don't have control over it so your mind is much more likely to become disordered and overwhelmed and anxious about actually taking action so what you can do instead of trying to gain 50 followers is writing 1,000 words a day and of course this has to be aligned with what you're actually doing or it can be write three highquality tweets a day or one Instagram post a day and 20 replies under an account to get more followers to your actual page and so this is such such such a big realization is that you at this moment in your life are manifestation of your past choices all of them have compounded into who you are today and your future self is going to be a manifestation of the choices you make from this moment on until then and so making better decisions comes much easier when you have a purpose and process to frame your attention into and make decisions in alignment with so the first thing you do to start making better decisions is to bring your purpose to the top of your mind this will help you filter signal importance from noise distraction so if it isn't conducive to achieving your purpose then it isn't important unless you've been convinced that it is by someone else so the next thing you can do for making better decisions is gaining multi-perspectival understanding so you can do this in many different ways and we've talked about this before and we'll talk about it more in the next video but for the sake of brevity because this video is already getting really long is uh to adopt the perspective of the highest version of yourself right what do they look like what do they want to do with their life you have to have a vision for your future and you have to adopt the perspective of that person you have to transfer your consciousness into that person and see what decision would they make like if I'm a bodybuilder I can pretty much understand why a bodybuilder would decide to eat chicken and rice aside from going out it's because they have a a goal to achieve a meaningful goal to achieve a purpose so how can you view the situation that allows you to perceive it in a way that is conducive to action and that's the thing is to perceive a situation in a way that allows you to act in alignment with your purpose problems are only problems if you interpret them as such from your narrow perspective if you don't feel like getting out of bed zoom out and see your problem for what it is there's some people that don't have legs they have to be let out of bed are like they don't give a [ __ ] if you don't feel like getting out of bed they can't even get out of bed there are people that don't even have a bed or food to cook and eat in the morning so you have a purpose to actualize and you need to perceive the situation and the way that allows you to act to act actually actualize it so do that so a note about this the the Focus Formula the little graphic there that we created is that this does not only apply to your life this applies to every single goal you plan to actualize if you're working on a project right or you're writing an article it's the same thing you need a purpose for that article you need a process for writing it and you need priority actions to take this is like a global framework for framing your attention and eliminating distraction and not having all of these problems that are unimportant their noise distract you from what's important in your life and actually impacting the world on a deeper level so this is that image is your reality okay you need to internalize that and you need to sit with it and marinate in it and understand the good and bad of not achieving it you have to understand what is going to happen if I do not achieve this purpose and it's not pretty at all observe just just sit and follow rabbit hole into the worst possible scenario of where your life could end up and then also do the opposite the flip side of the coin what is the best case scenario of if you actually actualize this purpose and then the next and then the next and then the next what will happen where will you be in life and then dance between those two as you're going about life and if something else pops up to try and distract you then you need to sit with it and you need to filter it through a purpose filter and understand okay is this important and how am I going to act according to this problem that just showed up and so typical distractions like social media the news and other things they don't [ __ ] matter in your life and the reason they matter to a lot of people and they base their identity around that is because they do not have a purpose to bring their attention back to they do not have a hierarchy of goals to frame and structure their attention to create a better life for themselves the harsh reality is that how you spend your 20s will make or break your future of course there are outliers but for the vast majority of people this holds true dopamine and modern Comforts have become so normal that 99% of the population is docile just way too comfortable and heavily risk averse the solution is simple so here are three steps to Future proofing Yourself by the time you turn 30 life hits you like a truck it is not hard to observe this fact in society your time dries up and your habits compound they are much harder to break if you didn't take care of your health it will catch up to you and you will lose more time if you didn't start a business you need more effort to get out of a job it will take longer to get out your mental Peak starts to decline in your 30s you don't have the knowledge and experience that comes from forging your own path people miss out on that one a lot I'm 26 I can only speak so much here right uh I'm not 30 so why am I even talking about this but I can attest to the fact that people have told me that I am more wise than 50-year-olds or other people that don't have the experience like how much can you actually learn and know if you just do the same thing every single day for 50 years of your life and of course you have commitments so a house spouse work and possibly children and again this isn't the case for everyone and if you are in your 30s don't let this discourage you right face reality you will have to put in more effort for a longer period of time than a 20-year-old would have to it is what it is start doing it now but being young presents the most traps so there's social conditioning in other words you may not even realize the Trap that you've dug yourself into by the time you're 25 26 27 you may not have watched a video like this or some other video of people trying to make you aware of the life you have not lived yet your life and another trap is of course the dopamine laddin entertainment the stuff that we naturally gravitate towards right when you're bored where does your attention go it goes to your phone you open up Instagram you don't even know it 5 minutes later you're just scrolling and you're watching some random reel and then of course there is Comforts new modern Comforts like video games Netflix and just other things that cross over with the dopamine cheap entertainment that make people not want to Branch into the unknown and discover new things and find new opportunities for them eles and become aware of their potential so thankfully the solution is simple but not easy the first step is to build your body most successful people that I've talked to have always started with some form of exercise right I started in the gym that was my first Obsession I did it for vanity reasons I wanted to get jacked I wanted to look good so I could get women and that's what almost every single at least dude that I know started with that are now business people and vastly successful in more areas than just good looks because the gym specifically teaches you that you have to put effort into reality in order to get something out it teaches you that you are not entitled to [ __ ] anything the gym is literally the opposite of cheap dopamine it is Meaningful dopamine that you see through progress effort hard work and you get results because of it and so the other thing is that looks matter whether you think it's fair or not right I know there are people that are less fortunate uh they have there's genetic outliers there's other things like that do what you can but for people that are fortunate to be able to improve their looks to the absolute maximum why are you not doing that it's the same thing with business right attention grabbing attention is the first step to being able to display your value right so you have to catch attention with content in order to convert into money in the real world you have to catch attention with your looks your demeanor how you present yourself to the world and then that's when they discover who you are and your skill set and other things and if you don't look good you're taking a big chunk away from what can introduce you to new opportunities in the world people just respect you more when you look good and you've put effort into your body regardless of if you're still objectively ugly right if you don't look good but you've put effort into building yourself up people recognize that you attract more attention from highlevel people and of course there is a line where vanity can hurt your self-image right you can get trapped in that mental thought Loop but that's just an aspect of living with purpose and that can be learned and overcome through a mindfulness practice right when you're pursuing anything whether it be looks money whatever there's Al there's always something you can compare yourself to when you're moving forward and making progress in the world that is where suffering is born out of desire and so you need to learn to manage that it doesn't mean you just just avoid it completely and not expose yourself to experience through actually moving through the world and making progress you have to do both peace and progress practice both skills and lastly you can look good and not be a narcissistic [ __ ] and we start with building the body because you can start right now you don't have to wait until oh I have this certain skill set in order to make income from my business no you go to the gym right [ __ ] now and the benefits of it transfer over into clear thinking a strong mind mindset and just more physical energy when you prioritize your body your mind and finances follow because you're improving the vessel from which those things come so the second thing after building your body is to build your mind your level of Mind dictates your quality of life right your level of mind is pretty much your perspective how high and open of a perspective you have from which you interpret the problems in your life if you have a low level of mind and you are focused on a problem within that level of mind like paying the bills and Oh no you're trapped in this mental thought Loop and then you don't learn the skills and gain the experience necessary to increase above that to view the problem from a lens that does not bother you right because your problems don't go away you just get better at perceiving them and with this you don't need to understand every single part of a nice car in order to have a nice ride but with the mind it doesn't work like that you have to understand your mind in order to use it and in order to drive it and that alone will dictate the quality of your Human Experience in and of itself so schedule time to study philosophy study spirituality study metaphysics study psychology study epistemology study stages of ego development study spiral Dynamics study the mind this is a lifelong pursuit of Mastery you will become powerful so on top of that we need to use our mind to make progress in reality so we adapt to the modern landscape by creating a vision for your future deconstructing it into goals acquiring Knowledge and Skills and making small daily improvements focus on your health wealth and happiness I also have a video called society as a pyramid scheme how to take back control of your life something like that but that's a great video for breaking that process down more now step number three we built our body we're building our mind build your business that's step three entrepreneurship is for everyone I just went on an entire 10-minute rant in the last video so go watch that and I can handle objections all day about this but entrepreneurship is for everyone you are an entrepreneur right now you have value to provide and you provide it to some people all you need to do is put that value on the Internet or in front of people with a price tag on it and boom you're an entrepreneur strip your mind of the limiting beliefs of what you think entrepreneurship is and just start contributing to humanity and getting paid for doing so that's entrepreneurship by helping other people so business business is how you Channel your interests skills and expertise to impact others at scale and as Alan Watts would say sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing and if you want to live a fulfilling life you need to leverage all five intrinsic drivers curiosity purpose passion autonomy and Mastery you need to create and have full control over the lifestyle you wish to live business is how you get there and no you don't need to start a billion dollar company the internet has leveled the playing field for skill and knowledge acquisition and just being able to build a product and put it in front of someone Evolution has led to this point of Us coming full circle to how our ancestors were entrepreneurs and were just you just all work in your little community and it's like a little Utopia that you live in and now it's much more larger scale and Global so you don't need a$1 billion company you need a oneperson business you need a specific set of skills that you learn the ones that you want to learn learn you generate traffic on social media by putting yourself in public as a personal brand and it's as simple as this you create a product that would have helped your former self right or would have helped you get to where you are faster because personal development is about solving your own problems business is about solving other people's problems so if you solve your own problems and you create something to help you with that like a planner if I need mental Clarity I'm going to create a plan or a journal and then I'm just going to sell that to others set a goal find a problem learn learn how to solve it document how you solved it distill it into a replicable process give it to others that want to be helped do it offline and it's called growth do it online and it's called business that's it so in your 20s to make the most of them you realize your potential by becoming aware of the rut that you are digging yourself in just by the default state of humanity that's how you're born we're Consciousness is chaotic unless we order it don't waste your 20s build your body build your mind build your business and like comment subscribe peace