Out of these three options, which one would you choose? What about now? In the next couple of minutes, you're going to understand why the answer to this question reveals why you have a tendency to consume personal development content, but then not actually implement it. And then you're going to learn the exact steps that I took to go from a consumer to a producer in just a week or two. And there's going to be some of you that want to click off of this video because it's not hypey.
It doesn't give you jump cuts. It's not giving you dopamine. And if you do have the urge to click off of this video, then you are the exact person that needs to watch this video until the end. This video gives you everything that you need and I seriously believe it can completely change your life.
And with that being said, I want to welcome you to episode one of the Mental Momentum Course. Now, I used to want big things. I had a grand vision for myself.
I wanted to have a clear picture of where I was heading, a grand vision that was difficult, that was bold, that would push me to my limit, and I wanted to be able to execute towards that goal on a day-to-day basis. I wanted to have that vision and know that every single day I was getting one step closer to that vision. I wanted to be able to understand reality, figure out how things worked, and be able to navigate reality to get things that I wanted.
I wanted to really take massive action, apply myself, and I wanted to... do hard things. I wanted to enjoy doing hard things. I really believed that in this one life that we're given, that was the recipe for success.
And I recognized that it wasn't about the destination. It doesn't matter where you are now or where you will ever be. What matters is the journey because you can have two different people. One of them can be in a great position and one of them can be in a bad position. But if one of them's making progress and the other one's regressing, sooner or later, they're going to swap positions.
So there's only one question that really matters and that is, are you better today than you were yesterday? And in order to do that, I had to start executing. I had to start taking action. I had to start doing something. It didn't even matter which direction I was going in, I just needed the ball to get rolling.
Imagine you're in a car and you're trying to change direction when you're at a standstill, you're not going to go anywhere. First you've got to just start moving and then you can worry about changing direction. I had to take action. I knew that I had to start executing.
So I would watch personal development. I thought that was the cure. I would create plans for myself.
I would create goals. I would create some kind of a strict schedule, mapping out every minute of my time and how that was going to get me to my grand vision. I did goal-setting exercises. I read blog posts. I watched so much YouTube.
Consuming, consuming, consuming personal development. Thinking that there was going to be something within that, some kind of a magic trick that I wasn't seeing. that was going to give me everything that I needed to make progress and to really start executing, to make progress that I'm better today than I was yesterday.
But what ended up happening was that I would learn something, I would implement it and it would work. For a few days I would feel incredible, I would feel like I was on top of the world, I could see the goal that I was going for and I knew that I was on the path to reach that. And then I would slip back into old habits and the cycle repeated, again and again. And again.
And what happened was when I said this is what I'm gonna do and then it didn't happen It really affected my mental state. So first of all, I promised myself tomorrow was gonna be different tomorrow would roll around and it wasn't different So now I'm lying to myself I lost trust in myself and when you lose trust in yourself you lose respect in yourself And how can you expect other people to respect you if you don't even respect yourself? So now as I was in a pit I It was almost worse the fact that I knew that I had a massive potential and I wasn't reaching it than if I just didn't realize I had a massive potential. I was in the worst of both worlds.
I knew I could achieve so much that I could really become an incredible person, make an impact on this world and live life to the fullest. But my actions were completely different to that. I was consuming, consuming, consuming and nothing was happening. And because I was in this position, I would try and escape. I would...
I would go to gaming, I would go to instant gratification activities, I would hide away in porn, I would hide away in Netflix, I would hide away in YouTube. At least the YouTube videos made me feel like I was being productive whilst I could mindlessly numb out the pain that I was in and just go away and hide in a corner. I didn't want to be present, I didn't want to live, I was wishing time to pass quicker than it actually was.
I was waiting every morning for the night to come so that I could go to sleep because that was the only moment. When I wouldn't have this feeling and then as soon as I would wake up I'd have a few seconds of bliss Before the reality hit me that I had this vision I had these goals that I wanted to achieve That my actions were the complete opposite of that and I just didn't know how to get out of this cycle So I thought, well, the answer must lie in personal development. And I'd learn about hacks like the five-second rule or the Pomodoro technique, and these things are great. But I knew deep down they weren't going to cause long-term change.
I knew that they were going to work for a little bit, then they were going to stop working. Or worse, I was just not going to implement them. And you can't benefit from something if you don't implement it.
I knew all of the knowledge. I knew all of the theory. I could talk to you about the habit loop.
about cue, routine, reward, I could talk to you about all of these different things. And what I failed to understand, the biggest mistake that I was making that caused me so many years of my life, was why our brain defaults to instant gratification activities, and how we can get out of that cycle. How we can break free from making progress for a short period of time and slipping back into old habits. And that goes up and down and up and down like a sick and twisted rollercoaster.
That's what I didn't understand. So in this video and in the next few videos in the Mental Momentum series, you are going to learn everything you need and we are going to actually walk you through the steps, not just learning the theory but actually taking incredible action together to help you go from a consumer to a producer, to help you make the transition from undisciplined to disciplined, from watching to doing to consuming to actually becoming the best version of yourself. Using your time wisely to recognizing you have a potential to actually going about the process of achieving that and here's how we're gonna do that together Dan O'Reilly ran an experiment where he had 100 MIT students pick which one of these three options they would purchase And then he removed the middle option, which is obviously the useless one It's the same price as the other one, but yet the results completely changed So in the first example, there was an option that was completely useless and but when that was there and when it was removed, the results that people chose were completely different.
And this proves one simple point. Humans do not just pick one number as a number. Everything is compared to other options.
We don't just view the price as a price. We compare it to the other prices that we see. We hook, we have a default price and we compare all of the other prices to that point.
It's why discounts work so well. Even if the discount is fake, even if the discount's made up, Our brain anchors the value of the price to what we believe the price was before, so that when that price is reduced, we think that is absolutely an incredible deal. Our brain views everything not objectively, but relatively to the other options that we have laid out on the table.
And this is exactly what's happening with dopamine. Imagine you're at a table in front of you, and there are two options, chocolate or carrots. Your brain's going to compare the chocolate to the carrot to which one's going to give you the most dopamine, and we're going to cover this in a bit. extensively in the upcoming videos but very simply the brain compares the chocolate to the carrot and nine times out of ten you're gonna go to the chocolate because comparatively the chocolate gives you more dopamine than the carrot the chocolate seems like a better option to your brain to your default evolutionary brain than the carrot so you're gonna go for the chocolate and we have these options constantly throughout our life we have the option to consume personal development content These new bright shiny objects that feel like they're going to absolutely change everything. And then on the other side we've got the option to actually do and actually take action on those concepts.
And when we compare the two our brain's just going to go for the one that gives us the most dopamine straight away. It's going to go for the consuming over producing. Consuming is easy.
You can sit on your phone. You can learn. You can feel like you're being productive. Doing is difficult. You've got to move, you've got to exert energy, you've got to exert willpower, you've got to apply yourself.
And that's going to be difficult. But now the problem that we're living with is that the society nowadays has taken this problem between the chocolate and the carrot and it's put it on steroids. Because now instead of chocolate, we have the option for porn and McDonald's and instant gratification.
We have Facebook, we have Instagram. All of these things are carefully engineered to release as much dopamine per minute as possible. And now the carrot looks even worse. The carrot, comparatively to all the other options we have, it's almost impossible for us to do.
And that's not your fault. That's just the society that we're living in. It's making it more and more and more difficult to do the hard things.
Just think back to previous generations. You can see your grandparents, or at least I can, sitting there and reading books for three, four, five hours. You can see prisoners going and doing exercise and reading books and really applying themselves.
Why can they do that, but we can't? Well, it's because comparatively, our grandparents, they don't have the other options of YouTube or Facebook or Instagram, so to them, reading that book is what gives them the most dopamine. And prisoners, they don't have the option of all of those things, so you see them... applying themselves and working out. Everything is comparative and that is the reason why you find yourself endlessly consuming and not doing.
So let's solve that problem. See our body craves stimulation. We'll get deeper into the science of dopamine and dopamine detoxing later on in this series but for now your body craves stimulation and that's what gets you to move forwards.
That's what gets you to take action. So what we're going to do over the course of the upcoming weeks together is we're going to remove the option for your brain to get easy stimulation. We're going to make your brain and manipulate it so that it is so hungry that it finds immense pleasure in the carrot. You're going to be motivated to do the hard things, motivated to really apply yourself.
And it's just like the carrot and the stick. The carrot is the thing that pulls you forward. And if we can change that carrot so that your brain finds it more and more and more, you know, pleasurable or stimulating your brain, you know, requires that and demands that and has urges for a carrot, not the other stuff, but for the carrot, that's how we can get you to start taking immense action like you've never seen before. You see, when you fast from food, you get hungry.
And then finally, when you taste food again, it tastes absolutely incredible. There's times that I've done a 24 hour fast or a 48 hour fast and whatever the food is, even if it's boring, it tastes absolutely incredible. We're going to be hacking this and applying that to your brain.
Removing the dopamine, doing a dopamine detox, a dopamine fast, so that finally when you get it again, all kinds of dopamine feels incredible, so that doing the hard things are the things that feel absolutely incredible. And how are we going to do that? Well, that's what the Mental Momentum course is for. Together, we're going to be doing a dopamine detox and we're going to be building up from there. Dopamine is digital heroin, and when we can remove it from your life, incredible things can start to happen.
So what is this playlist? Well, this playlist is my contribution to those people who used to be in my situation because I can understand the pain that you're in and I can understand how difficult it can be. So over the course of the upcoming weeks, I've created an accountability system so that you're more likely to stick with it. I've even created a subreddit so that you're more likely to surround yourself with positive people. This is going to be some kind of a movement where together we are all able to come and move and change these bad habits.
We're able to execute them. And really go from feeling out of control to feeling in control of your future so that you are the one that decides what life you want to live and you know that whatever you set your mind to, you can get there because you can finally execute towards your goals. Now, the YouTube algorithm shows you videos that it thinks that you like to watch. So if you want to change your life through a dopamine detox, then like the video, subscribe and comment saying, I'm in.
And what that's going to do is the YouTube algorithm is going to know you like these videos and it's going to show you the rest of this series on your homepage so that you don't miss out on this opportunity to change your life through a dopamine detox. So like the video, subscribe and comment saying I'm in and I'll see you in the next video in this series.