today we're going to talk about how to develop consistency in your life as a gamer now if you're a gamer chances are you're trying to level up your stats like motivation or discipline or willpower or building habits because if you can do all that you will be consistent the problem with consistency has nothing to do with net motivation or discipline or willpower the core problem with developing consistency is that you don't know who you are you think you are living your life but you're not living your life you are constantly spawning into some random dude's life and it once you realize this your ability to develop consistency will become way easier so this was originally a discovery that Yogi in the Himalayas made thousands of years ago that the source of suffering and problems in our life has to do with aidia or ignorance of our true selves and this is actually the case in your life too because you kind of know that you're not the same person every day right you may have dreams of oh man remember that one day that one week back in March of 2023 when I woke up and I did everything that I was supposed to do man if only I could be like that person and every day you wake up and you wish you were that person but the problem is that you're not that person that the you actually fluctuates quite a bit and if we want to understand how to develop the right consistency in life we have to understand how to live life hey just a quick note a lot of people will ask discuss what do I do next and that's why we built Dr K's guide It's a comprehensive resource that distills over 20 years of my experience both as a monk and as a psychiatrist and it's designed in a way that's tailored to fit your needs so if you're interested in better understanding your mind and taking control of your life check out the link below so this is something also that I think Gamers will be pretty good at because we can sort of look at okay how do we win in a video game how do we get good at a video game what are the general principles and how can we apply that to to life so let's start by understanding so if you want to play a game and you want to be good at it you have to understand the flow of the game you have to understand the kind of direction of the game right so there's the early game and in the early game we sort of level up and we prep things so that we can hit our mid game Power Spike and then once we have our mid game Power Spike then it's just about not screwing up and closing out the end game right you've got your advantage then you can kind of close things out the problem is that much like your Pub matches when you're playing your life there's no in consistency there right your early game is like yeah I'm going to like not pay attention in high school I'm not going to develop good study habits therefore I'm going to go into my mid game of like college and 20s with a significant disadvantage and since I have a significant disadvantage this part of my life is really going to suck and then I'm kind of going into my late game of like 31st birthday and now we have this like trash of like an early game and mid game and then we kind of Wonder oh my God like how how did I get here right we're playing the game of life with some like Elon Musk Elden ring build which is like hey I got a level up let me just dump a point over here and dump a point over here oh that item looks cool like I'll start using that item this is the way that we're living life there's no consistency because we have no sense of the flow of the game and this is the other problem is that if you really stop and think about it you're not playing the game of life as one person in fact that's the whole problem is that you wake up on a different day and you're actually like a different person so the key thing that we need to understand is that if you want consistency you have to start by understanding that you don't exist Beyond today that your life is actually a multiplayer game where random people are waking up in your life and get to live life one day at a time now you may say but Dr k no these are all these people are me no this is the problem this is what the yogi said this is a Vidya you don't know that this isn't actually you you're just a random person living this life one day at a time and that may sound weird but think about it for a second right because what do you love to do you love to screw over tomorrow you right so here you are on a given day and it's like okay well like today I have to like go through the mail and I have to do laundry and oh yeah I have to fill out those applications for college but do you actually do those things no of course not why not you tell yourself I will do it later but it's not the you that has to do it later it's that next guy or girl who has to do it later I'm going to leave this for the noob tomorrow and so you spend your life enjoying today and then you wake up tomorrow and then who do you get mad at do you get mad at yourself sort of you get mad at the dude that came before you right because that person damn it why didn't that guy do this crap that needed to be done instead I'm waking up today and I have all this stuff that this person yesterday did not do so if you really stop and think about it the basic problem with life is that you don't recognize that you only get to live for this moment in time this is the only time that you get to be in charge and this is why you are so neglectful right because if we sort of look at it when people have no conception of the future when they have no sense of stewardship what do they do they screw things over for the next person and this is exactly how we live our life I'm going to do this today because tomorrow me can clean up this mess and so the you actually f U Ates quite a bit and this runs deeper than the mind right so we know that desires fluctuate emotions fluctuate the problem is that it runs deeper than that it's not just at the surface levels of the mind it's your values it's your choices it's the life that you're crafting you can wake up on January 1st 2024 and decide this is the year that I order a uh learn to play a musical instrument and then you order a musical instrument and then since you're an Amazon Prime member it shows up in 2 days and two days later it's January 3rd and you're like you know what but I don't want this anymore the person that you are has changed so what do we do about this how do we start to live a life of of consistency if we ourselves change every single day and this is the first thing to understand is that so far you've been trying to build a consistent life assuming that you are the same every single day but the whole point and you know this is that you're not the same every day right this is why you are so attached to a former version of yourself so many people in our community are like man I wish I could go back to being this person that I used to be I wish I could I wish I could have learned what I am today I wish I could have learned that 10 years ago and then my life would have been completely different if you really stop and look at your experience of life you recognize that there's a lot of fluctuation in so what do we do about this so the first thing to sort of really tunnel down into is that if you live a life temporarily if you're just inhabiting your body for one day what would your life actually look like and this is where chances are you would kind of screw things up right this is why public toilets people piss on you know piss all over the public toilet because they don't have ever have to use it again this is why public toilets are such a mess because there's no sense of stewardship because I can leave it for the next person and if you look at your life and you lack consistency what's going on there you are leaving stuff for future you to deal with right you don't want to deal with it today and people may Wonder well why is that and this is where there's an interesting bit of Neuroscience that comes in so if you look at the human brain we've evolved to do this like have this problem with future discounting which basically means that we as a human species this is the way we've evolved value a dollar today more than $2 a year from now so we our brains are wired there's a part of our brain called the nucleus accumbens and it's wired to Value things that are immediate more than things that are distant and so if you sort of think about it for a second right let's say I've got two things to do I want to play a video game let's say it's Friday I've got to play a video game and I've got to fill out an application so my brain looks at this problem and says okay I've got these two things to do and due to future discounting I can do my work today and then I can have fun tomorrow but literally my brain values fun today more than fun tomorrow this is why we fundamentally as a species procrastinate so what do we do about this we have to understand that we are inheriting this life from the person who came before us and we are custodians of this life for the person who comes next see our life is not one where we exist from moment to moment to moment it's some weird body swap comedy and all of those body swap comedies what happens this person's Consciousness gets transplanted into this new body and what what does their life become their life becomes a playground of there's $10,000 in the bank account well I'm going to buy whatever the hell I want to because this person who will come after me will have to clean up that mess so we really have to accept this so I want youall to start living your life as if you're playing a video game but you're only playing it for 5 minutes at a time if you're playing a MOBA game and someone else is like in the bathroom and they're like oh no the que popped start playing the game for me how are you going to play that game even though you won't get the joy of winning are you going to start saying like Okay like lol I'm going to screw up this person's game and then they can inherit it 5 minutes from now and then what whatever no when you sit down to play the game if you really pay attention you're going to try to play the best game that you can even though you're not going to get the joy of winning then you step out of the seat your friend steps into the seat and then they take over and when that second person steps into the seat they are custodians of the game for five minutes they don't get to see the victory right they're only playing for five minutes they're swapping for someone else and then that next person plays the game when do games go wrong when someone who's sitting stops playing in 5 minute intervals when someone who's playing for the first 5 minutes and your enemies feed then they think oh my God the game is lost everything is screwed and then what do you start doing you start ining down mid and you start over the guy next who comes next and then when you respawn you're in this game but you've screwed things up for yourself even more see this is the key thing to understand when we connect our present day to some kind of outcome we recruit the nucleus we begin to tilt everything gets Tangled together and we actually lose control instead how should you play a game where you've you know gone 0 and two and mid and things are not going well okay I am a custodian of this game for the next five minutes how can I play this game to improve things for the person who comes next this is exactly how you should live your life so my my favorite example of this actually comes from outside of gaming so many years ago I used to love watching this show called Top Chef and in this this this one particular episode of Top Chef they had this really cool challenge where they had teams of chefs and there's a team of five chefs okay and they have to make a dish the only catch is that one person goes into the kitchen starts cooking for about 5 minutes and then they leave the kitchen the next Chef on the team comes inside it's almost like a relay race and they have to figure out what F Chef number one was thinking and then they have to sort of continue their process and then they leave after 5 minutes Chef number three comes in tries to figure out what's going on and then tries to do the best and move things along the interesting thing is that if you start living your life this way if you start by really acknowledging that you are not the one who gets to live the remainder of your life you don't get to win at the end you are just a custodian for today it will change the way that you live life ironically it will help you actually build consistency because if you just exists for today what kind of Life do you want to set up for the person tomorrow now some of y'all may say say but I don't care about the person tomorrow if I'm just living for today why wouldn't I be like the body swap comedy person and just burn through everything so this is where we have to understand another aside so this is where self-compassion becomes very very important and a lot of people misunder understand this they really struggle with things like motivation and stuff like that but if you really don't love yourself what is the point in making sacrifices for your life see we make sacrifices for things that are worth it so I can afford to eat healthy today or go to the gym or whatever if the person I'm doing it for is worth something right we sacrifice for those that we love and if you're in a situation in life where you don't love yourself why would you sacrifice for something that you don't love and this is why if we don't love ourselves it can become very hard to make sacrifices today for a better tomorrow because we don't care about the person who's inheriting tomorrow so we've got to be super careful about this particular pitfall at the end of the day if you want to live a life of consistency paradoxically what you really need to do is recognize that there is no consistency within you you just get to live today you don't get to decide what happens tomorrow because youve tried that right you tried that some time ago where you're like I'm going to play games today the person tomorrow can do the work and what happens when you wake up tomorrow the person is like ah I'm not going to do the work today I know I said I would do it yesterday but today I'm not going to do it and you punt things along punt things along punt things along so just accept that you don't actually live your life you are just a temporary custodian you're constantly spawning into this person's life and once you start doing that then ask yourself how do I want to live this life today am I going to set things up better for the person who's going to inherit tomorrow or do I want to be a hedonistic and create a mess for the person who is is inheriting tomorrow and the whole problem is that we end up doing the latter thing because we think that there is consistency because we think that we can make up for it tomorrow but that's impossible if that worked none of us would actually be here so I know it sounds bizarre but paradoxically understanding a little bit about gaming understanding the flow of game can help us understand this ancient principle of aidia or ignorance leading to suffering and problems in our life we just have to adapt it a little bit for the gamers in our [Music] audience