0:01 All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the 90day reinvention. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the reality audit, future contrast, reasons and cost, numbers of change, reverse engineering, controlled environment, the feedback loop, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one on any of this, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with its respective document that we're going to go over, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about reality audit. So, before you change anything about your life, before you set a goal, before you make some huge 90-day plan and decide that you're going to wake up at 5:00 a.m. and go to the gym six times 0:59 a week and read 50 books and somehow become a completely different person overnight, you need to know where you actually are, right? And I know that sounds almost too obvious, but most people skip this. They know they're unhappy with something. They know they want more money or they want to look better or they want to or or they feel behind or they know they're wasting too much time. But that's still very vague and you can't really change your life from a vague feeling that something should be better, right? You need an actual starting point. And this matters because there are really two separate questions in any transformation. Where are you now and where you're trying to go? Everything we're going to do in the rest of this whole video depends on those two answers. So if either one of them is unclear, then every goal, habit, routine, and plan that you build afterward is going to be based on guesswork. And there's actually a really useful parallel here with something called control theory. In engineering, a fe feedback system measures the current state, compares it with a desired state, 2:00 and then uses the difference between those two to decide what needs to change. So you don't need to understand the engineering behind it. But the useful idea is simply that correction requires you to compare yourself to something. If you don't know your actual state, there is nothing accurate to compare your desired future against. Now for this video, I want to evaluate your life across four broad areas. Health, wealth, love, and relationships and self. So I like these four because almost everything you care about can kind of fit somewhere inside of them. and they force you to look at your life as a whole instead of obsessing over one area that's currently taking up all of your attention. So health includes your body, your fitness, your energy, your sleep, what you eat, how strong you are, how feel how you feel physically and whatever else genuinely matters to you in that area and you don't have to use somebody else's standard here. If you care about running a marathon, then that's different from somebody who wants to build muscle, right? The important thing is that you know what good health means in your own life. Wealth includes your income, savings, debt, career, 3:01 business, skills, earning ability, financial security, your relationship with money in general. And again, you need to judge your actual situation. Somebody earning a h 100,000 a year while spending 110,000 a year has a very different problem from somebody earning 30,000 a year and saving half of it. Right now, next is love and relationships. And this includes your romantic relationship if you have one, dating if that's relevant to you, your friendships, your family, the amount of quality and quality of connection you have with other people and whether the relationships around you actually feel healthy and meaningful. And then self is basically your relationship with yourself and your own life. Happiness, confidence, peace of mind, learning, mindset, spirituality, meditation, reading, travel, personal growth, your sense of purpose, the way you spend your free time, the way you think about yourself. all of these things. It's the area that doesn't cleanly belong to health, wealth, or relationships, but still matters enormously to whether you actually like the life you're living, if not the most. Right now, once you've got 4:03 these four areas, give yourself a score from 0 to 10 in each one. And I want you to do this quickly enough that you don't turn it into some philosophical exercise where you basically spend 20 minutes trying to decide whether your health is a 6.3 or a 6.7. The number isn't really scientifically precise, right? And that's fine. What matters is that it forces you to make a judgment instead of hiding behind words like okay, decent, could be better, or not that bad. And the more important part here is being honest, right? Don't grade yourself based on your potential. Don't grade yourself based on what you're planning to do next month. Don't give yourself credit for the business you're going to start or the weight you're about to lose or the books you're planning to read or the relationship you're definitely going to fix soon. Great. the life you're actually living right now as it is warts and all. And I would also be careful about grading yourself against other people. You could be earning more than almost everybody you know and still still give wealth a five because your own goal is much higher and you know 5:04 you're underperforming relative to your ability. You could also have an average income and give yourself an eight because you're financially secure. Maybe you're saving a lot. Maybe you're investing. [clears throat] You're progressing and money isn't causing problems in your life at the moment. So, the score needs to mean something to you specifically. And here's where we make the exercise a lot more useful. Now, I don't want you to write the number and move on. Underneath every score, I want you to write the evidence for it. So, if your health is a four, then why is it a four? Maybe you're 30 lbs overweight. Maybe you slip sleep 6 hours a night. Maybe you haven't trained consistently in 2 years and your energy is terrible. Okay, now we have something real to [clears throat] work with. If wealth is a three, maybe you're earning 2500 a month and have no savings and have $8,000 in debt and currently have no plan for increasing your income. The emotional statement starts turning into actual information that you can use. I'm doing badly financially becomes I earn this amount, I save this amount, I owe 6:05 this amount, and I currently spend this many hours per week increasing my earning ability. And that's much more useful because now we can actually work with it. And this is one reason numbers become so important throughout this whole process. Numbers remove a lot of the room we have for selfdeception. Right? You can argue with yourself about whether you're working hard, but it's much harder to argue with the fact that you did 3 hours of focused work across an entire week. And now I want to introduce a distinction that we're going to keep using throughout the rest of this video. So you need to separate your current state from the behavior that helped create or maintain that state. So your weight is a state. Your income is a state. Your savings account is a state. Right? The quality of your relationship with your significant other or family or friends is a state. How many books you've read this year is a state. Then underneath that are the things you're repeatedly doing. your food intake, how often you train, how many steps you take, how many hours you spend working 7:06 on valuable skills, how many offers you make, whether you save money, whether you initiate time with your partner, whether you read, whether you spend 3 hours a night scrolling, those are behaviors. And so this distinction is important because people very often try to directly change a state that they can't directly perform. So you can't wake up today and perform losing 20 pounds, right? You can't perform making your relationship amazing. you can't perform earning $100,000 this year. Those are outcomes that emerge from other things you repeatedly do, which means eventually we're going to have to identify what those things are and put our attention there. So, underneath each of your four scores, I want you to ask one more uncomfortable question. What am I currently doing that contributes to this score? And you have to be careful here because the point isn't to pretend you control every variable in your life. You don't. Luck exists. other people exist. Health problems exist. Economic conditions exist. There are things you didn't choose and things you cannot immediately change. But within that 8:07 reality, there are still behaviors you control. And those are the ones we care about. So if you hate your body, what are you repeatedly doing with food, training, sleep, movement, and alcohol? If you hate your finances, what are you doing with earning, spending, saving, learning, selling, or creating? If your relationship feels distant, how much focus time are you actually spending with your significant other? If you feel mentally stagnant, how much of your week goes towards learning, thinking, reading, writing, reflecting, trying new things, or doing anything else that develops you? And this is where people sometimes discover that their problem isn't really a lack of knowledge, but because they already know what would improve the area. They've just built a week in which those actions barely happen. And that's again useful information because now we're diagnosing the actual problem instead of collecting more advice. There's another another layer here that I think matters which is don't only look at where you are. Look at the direction you're moving your trajectory. Two people can both have the 9:09 same score today and be in a completely different situation after uh after a while because one has been improving for 6 months and the other has been declining for 6 months. Right? So next to each score, you need to write whether you're improving, staying roughly the same, or getting worse. So health might be 6 out of 10, but you might be improving. Wealth might be a seven, but you might be declining. Your relationship might currently feel great, but you've stopped spending meaningful time together, and you can already see where that's going. Current results, of course, matter, but your direction tells you what those results are likely to become if nothing changes. And this is a subtle difference, but it's incredibly useful because transformation isn't only about fixing obviously bad areas. Sometimes you need to intervene while something still looks okay because the behavior underneath it has already changed and you're on a bad trajectory. So, by the time you're done with this first exercise, you should have something very simple in front of you. Four areas, four honest scores, evidence explaining each score, the behaviors 10:10 contributing to those scores, and the direction each area is currently moving in. And that's your baseline. And don't try to fix any of it yet. That's important. Right now, we're just observing. People rush into solutions because solutions feel productive. You realize your health is bad, for example, and you immediately start choosing a diet. You realize you're broke and immediately start watching videos about making money. But diagnosis comes first. If you misidentify the problem, you can work very hard on the wrong thing for the next 90 days. So, first you understand reality. Then you decide what reality you want instead. And then we can work backward and build the behavior required to close that distance. That's the sequence we're going to follow for the rest of this. And this creates the obvious next question. If this is where you are now, where exactly are you trying to be 90 days from now? Saying better is obviously not enough. Saying healthier is not enough. Saying richer, happier, more confident, more disciplined, more successful isn't enough either. We need to define the 11:11 other side with the same level of honesty and specificity we just used to define the present. And we're actually going to define two versions of it. The future you want and the future you're trying to avoid. So let's talk about future contrast. So [snorts] now you know where you are. You've scored the four areas. You've looked at the evidence. You've looked at the behaviors under underneath those results. And you've looked at the direction each area is moving. So the next thing you need is really the other side of the equation. Where are you actually trying to go? Right? And this is where I want you to get much more specific than people usually get when they talk about vision. Because a vision like I want to be successful or happy or healthy or rich or confident, whatever, gives you almost nothing to really work with. It sounds good, but you can't really build a 90-day plan from it. And so, what I want you to create first is a clear picture of your life at the end of those 90 days. So go back through health, wealth, love and relationships and self and describe what you want each one to look like by day 90. So some of these changes 12:12 can be very large. Some might be very small and that's completely fine. The point is that you know what improvement actually means in each area instead of carrying around this blurry idea that everything should somehow just be better. So with health, maybe you want to reach a certain weight or train a c certain number of times per week, sleep a certain amount or maybe run a certain distance. With wealth, maybe there's an income number, a savings number, a debt number, a client number, or some business result, right? With your relationship, maybe you want one proper date every week, more time together without phones, fewer unresolved arguments, or a specific trip you've been just saying you'll take, right? And with self, maybe you want to finish more books, for example, five books, meditate 60 times, learn basic Spanish, travel somewhere, journal every day, or spend more time doing things that actually make you enjoy your life. But I don't want you to stop at goals. There's a difference between knowing what you want to achieve and knowing what you want your life to actually feel like while 13:13 you're living it. So after you write the measurable outcomes, you need to zoom out a little and describe the life around them essentially. So, what does an ordinary week look like 90 days from now if this goes well? How do you spend your mornings? What kind of work are you doing? What do you spend your time with? Who do you spend your time with? What are you no longer constantly worried about? What feels easier because you finally dealt with something you've been avoiding. And I think this part is important because a goal can be technically successful and still create a life that you don't want, right? You could make more money and hate the way you have to earn it. And this happens more often than not, right? You could become leaner and create a routine you know you can't maintain. You could become incredibly productive and realize you've stopped seeing everybody you care about and all you do is work. Right? So when you build a future, don't only ask what you want more of. Ask what kind of life those goals are supposed to create. And basically your goals need to agree with each other. If your wealth goal requires 14-hour work days, while your 14:13 relationship goal requires three hours together every single night, and your health goal requires 2 hours in the gym every day, you don't have three goals yet, right? You have three competing fantasies. So, we'll deal with prioritization later, but you should start noticing those contradictions. And then there's another layer underneath the results, which is who you need to become for those results to make sense. And I mean that if your life genuinely looks different 90 days from now, then some of your default behavior will probably be different, too. You'll have different standards. You'll have different things that will feel normal. And certain decisions won't require the same negotiation anymore. So, you need to ask what type of person naturally produces the life you just described. And if you want to be significantly fitter, maybe that person trains even when the session won't be amazing, right? It's not crazy to think. Or maybe they plan their food instead of constantly improvising. 15:14 Or maybe they treat sleep as something that really matters to them, right? If you want more money, maybe that person makes offers every single day. Maybe they get better at a valuable skill or follow up with leads or track the numbers and stop avoiding work that can actually lead to revenue. And the reason I like thinking about identity this way is that you don't have to sit around trying to convince yourself that you're already this completely different person. You create evidence. If you say you're becoming disciplined and then you repeatedly do disciplined things, then you have evidence. If you say you're becoming someone who finishes what they start and you keep finishing things, you have evidence. So the identity starts becoming believable because your own behavior keeps supporting it. And this is also why I separate an outcome vision from an identity vision. So one tells you what you want to have. The other tells you what kind of behavior has to become normal for that outcome to last. So you can hit a goal temporarily 16:14 through extreme effort and pure willpower and just brute forcing things and then immediately fall back because nothing underneath it really changed. So if you lose 20 lbs and still live exactly like the version of you who gained the weight, then the result is pretty fragile. The deeper transformation happens when your normal behavior starts matching the life you're trying to keep. Now we do the opposite and this is where the exercise gets a bit more interesting. You write the future you don't want. So you can call it an anti- vision like Dano or a negative vision, whatever you want. The name really doesn't matter. What matters is that you stop treating inaction like a neutral choice. And you start with a very simple question. If I change absolutely nothing for the next 90 days, where am I likely to be? Same habits, same work, same food, same spending, same relationship pattern, same screen time, same excuses. Just continue the current trajectory forward 3 months. And don't turn this into some dramatic horror story where everything really 17:15 collapses. Make it actually believable. And that's actually more useful. Maybe you're still $5,000 in debt. Maybe you've gained another few pounds. Maybe you've published nothing, right? Maybe you've spent another three months talking about starting the business. Maybe the relationship isn't destroyed, but you're a little more distant because you continue doing nothing about what both of you already know is wrong. Possible consequences usually create more clarity than exaggerated ones. So, make sure they're actually realistic, right? And then follow that thought a little further. 90 days gives you urgency. But the larger issue is what repeated behavior eventually becomes, right? So if the same pattern continued for one year, 3 years, 5 years, what does it lead? Where does it lead? And this is where the anti- vision becomes more than just a scare tactic. It you're looking at a trajectory. People usually think about compounding in positive terms. Money compounds, skills compound, relationships compound, fitness compounds, but neglect compounds as 18:16 well. And if you consistently spend slightly more than you earn, the problem grows. If you repeatedly avoid difficult conversations, resentment grows, right? If you stop exercising and slowly gain weight every year, a small annual change becomes a very different body over over time. And if you waste 2 hours at night just doom scrolling, the individual night barely matters, but thousands of hours absolutely matter. And so this is basically inversion applied to your own life. So instead of only asking what would make my life better, you ask what would reliably make it worse. And Charlie Mer talked a lot about inversion as a way of solving problems by turning them around. And I think this is one of the best places to use it because sometimes it's genuinely easier to see what you need to stop than to immediately know exactly what you should start. And you might not know the perfect career yet, but you might know that spending another year learning nothing useful probably isn't really helping you. You might not know the perfect training program, but you might know that never exercising exercising isn't getting you healthier 19:18 either. You might not know exactly how to create an incredible relationship, but you probably know what repeatedly damages the one you have. Or you probably know that you need to work on your communication skills. So sometimes the negative answer gives you the first useful useful direction. And there's also a reason I'm making you write both of these instead of just creating some positive vision of your future. In very simple terms, a huge amount of human motivation comes from two directions. We move towards things we want and we move away from things we don't want. And psychology often describes this as approach and avoidance motivation. So you can be pulled towards pleasure or pushed away from pain or usually some combination of both. So if you only write the future you want, you're using one side of that and I want both working at the same time. So the positive v vision gives you something to move towards. You can see the body you want, the amount of money you want to earn, the kind of relationship you want, the person you want to become, the life you actually want to wake up to and that 20:18 creates desire and it gives the work a reason beyond simply fixing problems. But the anti- vision does something different. And it reminds you what happens if you keep choosing the behaviors that created your current situation. And maybe the consequence is staying exactly where you are. Maybe it's slowly getting worse. Either way, now doing nothing has [clears throat] a cost attached to it. You're no longer comparing effort with comfort. You're actually comparing the cost of changing with a cost of staying the same. And I think this is where the exercise becomes much more powerful because on different days, different things will move you, right? we don't have the same sources of motivation every single day. Sometimes you'll be excited by what you're building and you'll move towards it because you genuinely want it. Other days that future will feel very far away and what moves you is remembering what you refuse to go back to or continue becoming. And one pulls you forward while the other gives you a reason not to retreat. And this becomes especially important because the future reward is 21:19 still 90 days away while the easier choice is available to you right now. So your phone is here, right? The food is here. The couch is here. Avoiding the difficult conversation is easy right now. Skipping the workout is super easy right now. So part of this entire process is making the future psychologically relevant enough that it can compete with whatever feels good in the next 10 minutes. So the anti- vision gives the current decision a consequence. You're reminding yourself that continuing the old behavior also has an outcome. Doing nothing doesn't freeze your life exactly where it is. Time keeps passing, right? And so by definition, you're most likely getting worse. Your patterns keep repeating and eventually repeated choices turn into a direction whether you consciously pick that direction or not. And there's actually another useful idea from psychology here called mental contrasting which is associated with the psychologist Gabrielle Utingan. The basic idea is that imagining a desired future by itself can feel great, right? But pairing that future with the 22:19 obstacles in present reality forces you to confront what actually stands between you and the outcome. And that's very close to what we're doing here, although we're taking it a little further. We're looking at the desired future, the unwanted future, and eventually the exact behaviors that separate the two. And I like this because it keeps the vision from becoming fantasy, right? You aren't sitting there imagining your perfect body, perfect business, perfect relationship, perfect life, and then feeling accomplished because you spent half an hour thinking about it. You're rather using the vision to expose the gap. Here's what I want. Here's what I have. Here's what happens if I keep doing what I'm doing. And now, what has to change? And if you zoom out, this is really what the whole 90-day process is going to become. You've got three versions of reality of your life in front of you right now. your current life, the life you want, and the life your current trajectory is likely to produce if you don't intervene. And that gives you an actual choice. The present gives you this is where I am. The desired reality 23:20 gives you this is where I want to be. And the unwanted one gives you this is where I'm likely to end up if I keep repeating what created the current situation. And once those three are visible at the same time, it's harder to pretend you don't know what you're choosing. You're making a choice, right, with every single action. And most of the next 90 days will probably feel pretty normal, but the ordinary choices start making more sense because you know which future they support now. And one thing I would not do here is write a 40page vision document and spend the next week trying to perfect it. You don't need to know where you're going to live in 17 years or what color your future kitchen is. Right? We're working with 90 days. So keep the horizon close enough that you can actually make real decisions from it. And what matters is that the future is specific enough to guide your behavior and emotionally meaningful enough that you actually care. And once you've written both sides, the future you want and the future you're refusing to drift into, we have one more thing to do before we start turning all of this into numbers. 24:20 Because wanting something is still different from being willing to do what it costs, right? And so the next question is why any of this matters enough for you to keep going when the first week of motivation wears off and whether you've actually accepted the price of the life you just wrote down. So let's talk about reasons and cost. Now you have two futures in front of you. You know what you want the next 90 days to create. And you also know what your current trajectory creates if you don't change anything. But there's still a problem. Those are descriptions. They tell you where you want to go and where you don't want to go. They still don't tell you why either future matters enough for you to keep doing difficult things when you're tired, when you're distracted, when you're annoyed, busy, bored, or just not feeling particularly motivated that day. And that's important because your goal doesn't exist in isolation, right? Our goals, they compete with other things all day. Social media is giving us a reason to scroll because scrolling feels good right now. Netflix is giving you a reason to keep watching. Staying in bed has a reason behind it, right? Ordering 25:22 food instead of cooking has a reason behind it. Avoiding the difficult piece of work has a reason behind it, too. Because avoidance gives you immediate relief. So, when people say they need a stronger why, I think this is what they often miss. Your goal isn't competing with nothing. It's competing with dozens of other rewards that are much closer. And psychologists use the term temporal discounting for part of this. Basically, we tend to value rewards less when they're further away. So losing 20 lbs in 3 months is very abstract for us for our brains. Eating something you want right now isn't right. It's very current. It's very much in the now. And so building a business over 90 days is again far away. Watching another video on business is available in 1 second and it will give you the relief of pretending that you're actually doing something. So part of what we're doing with the vision, the anti- vision, and now the reasons behind them is making the future matter enough that it can influence what you do in the present. And so I want you to write three different reasons here. The first 26:23 is why you're where you are now. The second is why you genuinely want the future you described. And the third is why you refuse the future you don't want. And those questions sound similar, but they do very different jobs. First, why are you here? And I don't mean this in some philosophical sense. I mean literally, why does your current life look the way it looks? Go back to the audit and look for the decisions, the habits, the assumptions, the environments, and repeated patterns that actually produce the scores you gave yourself. And maybe you kept restarting your diet every Monday. Maybe you never stayed with one business model long enough to get good at it. Maybe you stopped initiating anything in your relationship. Maybe you spent years consuming information while produ producing almost nothing. You need to understand the path that got you here because otherwise you can accidentally recreate the same conditions inside a very new plan. And the goal here isn't to sit here sit there basically blaming yourself for everything that has ever happened to you. It's really to extract information as much as of it as possible. What kept repeating? Where did 27:22 you usually fall off? What did you keep avoiding? Which decisions looked small at the time but kept producing the same result? So your path becomes useful once you can identify the patterns inside of it. And second, why do you actually want what you wrote in your vision? Like most people can't even answer why? And keep pushing past the first answer. If you want more more money, why? Like it's not just to have more money, right? If the answer is freedom, what kind of freedom? Freedom to leave a job, freedom to support your family, freedom to travel, freedom to stop worrying every time an unexpected bill appears. Like if you want to lose weight, why is it health? Is it attraction? Is it confidence? Is it performance? Is it self-respect? Whatever it is, there is no morally correct answer here. I would much rather you write an honest reason that might not sound morally amazing than some noble sounding reason that you don't really care about. And third, why don't you want the anti- vision? What specifically are you no 28:22 longer willing to tolerate? Maybe you're tired of breaking promises to yourself. Or you're tired of looking at your bank account and knowing you've been avoiding the same problem for years. Or you're tired of feeling uncomfortable in your body. Or you're tired of saying that you're going to create something and then watching another month disappear while others pass you by. Right? Whatever it is, write the real reason. You want something on the page that still feels true when the excitement of starting is basically gone because it will be gone eventually. you will feel bored. It won't feel as exciting. And so, you still need to have something on the page that still feels true. And one thing I've noticed is that people often stop one layer too early when they do exercises like this. They'll write what they want to that they want to make more money because they want financial freedom. Okay. But what does financial freedom actually change? Like what exactly do you need the financial freedom for? or they want to get fit because they want confidence. 29:24 Okay, but why do you need that confidence? What does confidence let you do or stop doing or they want a better relationship because they want to feel closer? Why does that matter to you? And just keep going until the answer stops sounding like something from a self-development book. And you can think about this almost like moving through levels of why. Right? At the surface, you usually find the visible goal. Under that, you find the practical benefit. And under that you often find the emotional reason or a value or something connected to your identity. So I want to earn $10,000 a month might become I want control over my time which might become I don't want my entire life determined by whether another per person gives me permission. So there's the same goal but a much deeper reason once you've actually written why you want the result. Write what you're willing to pay for it because nothing comes for free right every meaningful change has a cost. It's either time or effort or energy or discomfort or money or uncertainty or 30:25 boredom or repetition or missed opportunities or saying no to things you enjoy or doing things you're bad at or doing things you don't feel like doing. You don't get to choose whether the goal has a price. It always does. You only get to decide whether you're willing to pay for it. And so make the price explicit before you actually start. If your goal is to get significantly leaner over the next 90 days, maybe the price includes tracking food, right? Maybe it means eating less pizza. Maybe it means feeling hungry sometimes. Maybe it means walking when you rather sit down. Maybe it means training consistently or eating few fewer spontaneous meals out or repeating fairly boring meals because they make the plan easier. If you want to grow a business, maybe the price is rejection, outreach, sales calls, making content, publishing when nobody watches, learning something difficult, spending nights working when somebody else is relaxing. Maybe it does, right? And this is important because otherwise you can accidentally want the outcome while rejecting everything required to produce it. You can't want something and at the 31:26 same time not do the things that will get it. And that's a strange place to live. You want the body, but you don't want to control your food. You want the business, but don't want to sell. You want the skill, but don't want to be a beginner. You want to have savings, but you want to be spending your money every time your paycheck comes in. Right? You want a better relationship but don't want to have the uncomfortable conversations. At some point the question has to become very simple. Do I want this enough to accept what comes with it? And there's an idea from economics that fits here really well which is opportunity cost. Whenever you choose one thing, you're also giving up whatever else you could have done with the same time, money, attention, or energy. So when you say yes to a serious 90-day goal, you're automatically saying no to some other things. And that's not an unfortunate side effect of commitment. It's what commitment literally means, right? If you decide you're going to spend 90 minutes every evening building a business, those 90 minutes can't also be spent gaming or 32:27 watching TV or going out or scrolling or doing five other projects. If you want to train five times per week, those hours have to come from somewhere. If you want to save a certain amount of money, some other spending has to lose priority. And this is why I want you to decide these things deliberately instead of discovering the trade-offs halfway through and acting surprised. And this also gives us an early warning about trying to reinvent every part of your life at full intensity all at the same time. You can have everything you want. You just can't have it all at the same time always. Right? You can improve all four areas over 90 days, but you probably can't make all four of them the number one priority. Priorities are only called priorities and they only work because something gets more resources and attention than something else. Otherwise, it's not a priority. So, I would choose one maybe two areas where you want aggressive change. The other areas still get standards, right? They don't get abandoned, but they might run at maintenance or you know, you might be improving them slower than the others 33:28 while your primary goals get more of your time, attention, and energy. Maybe wealth is the main the main transformation while health stays at four workouts, decent food, and enough sleep. Maybe health is the main transformation while your business keeps running at a stable baseline. That's a much more realistic plan than trying to become world class in every area by Christmas, right? And I actually like thinking about life and seasons for this reason. A 90-day period can have a theme, right? You can decide that this season is heavily weighted towards building the business or getting in shape or fixing your finances or rebuilding yourself or strengthening a relationship. That doesn't mean the rest of your life stops mattering. It means you've decided where disproportionate effort is going for a while. And at the same time, I would set minimum standards for the areas that aren't your main priority. And this will prevent one transformation from basically destroying everything around it. You might decide that even during an aggressive business period, you still train three times per week, sleep 7 hours, have one proper date with your 34:30 partner, and keep Sunday afternoon free for family. And those aren't necessarily goals you're trying to maximize. They're floors you don't want to fall below. And I think this distinction between goals and standards is really useful because a goal can give you something you're trying to reach. A standard can tell you what you're no longer willing to go beneath. And your main area might have an aggressive 90-day target, right? The other areas can have minimum standards that just keep your life from becoming completely lopsided while you pursue it. So, at this point, I want you to look at the page and make a decision. You know where you are. You know the future you want. You know the future you don't want. You've written why both of those matter. You've looked at the price, the trade-offs, the main priority, the minimum standards you're going to protect. And now you can actually decide whether this is a goal you're committed to or just something that sounded nice when you imagined the result. And if you're not willing to pay the price, then you need to change the goal. Seriously, make it smaller, extend the timeline, choose something else, whatever it is. That's much better than 35:28 writing an impressive goal you already know you aren't willing to organize your life around. And now we can finally take all of this emotional and conceptual stuff and turn it into something extremely concrete. Knowing why you want something still doesn't tell you what to do tomorrow morning, right? We need to take the future you just described and convert it into numbers. Because once a go the goal has a number, we can actually measure it. We can reverse engineer it. We can calculate your pace and eventually work all the way backwards until you know exactly what you need to do today. So let's talk about numbers of change. Now we finally turn the vision into something you can actually work with. Up until this point, we've been dealing with direction, meaning, identity, pain, pleasure, tradeoffs, and all the reasons you care about changing. And that's important because numbers without meaning can turn into a dead plan you stop caring about after a week. But meaning without numbers creates the opposite problem. You care deeply. You know what you want and you still have no clear way to tell whether you're actually moving towards it. So from here on out, every major 36:27 90-day goal needs some form of measurement attached to it. And when I say measurement, I don't mean every goal needs to become some obsessive spreadsheet where you track 47 different things every morning. I'm talking about you need enough specificity to know what success actually means. So I want to get healthier is a direction but it's not necessarily a target. I want to lose a certain amount of weight or improve a certain performance metric or train a certain number of times or reach a specific health marker gives you something you can actually evaluate and measure. So a really useful test is whether at the end of the 90 days two different people could look at the goal and agree on whether you achieved it. If the answer depends entirely on how you feel that day, it's probably still too vague. So, take each important goal and ask what number would make the outcome concrete. Meaning, if the goal is financial, maybe it's monthly income, maybe it's savings, maybe it's debt reduction, maybe it's clients, maybe it's revenue or cash reserves. If the goal is learning, maybe it's books, pages, hours of deliberate practice, lessons completed or test score. If 37:28 you're building something, maybe it's videos published or sales calls completed or products shipped or applications sent or customers acquired, right? And yes, even areas that seem hard to qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu qu quantify can usually become more concrete if you measure the behavior underneath them. So you probably shouldn't reduce love to a relationship score of 8.7 out of 10 and pretend the decimal makes it scientific, right? But you can decide that you want one uninterrupted date per week or 30 minutes of focused conversation or on most days or one weekend away during the 90 days or whatever behavior actually represents a better relationship for you. The same goes for the self category. Happiness itself is difficult to turn into one perfect number. But the things contributing to it often aren't right. days meditated, pages read, hours spent on hobby, days without work after a certain time, trips taken, time spent outside. You need to make the parts you're intentionally changing visible so that you can actually act on them. And this is where we need another 38:28 distinction because not all numbers do the same job. Some numbers tell you whether you got the result. Those are what people often call lagging indicators, right? They show up after the behavior has already happened. So your body weight is mostly a lagging indicator. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Money and savings is a lagging indicator. Your number of customers is a lagging indicator. Books completed is a lagging indicator. They matter because they're ultimately the result you're trying to produce, but there is a limitation. You can't usually directly perform them, right? And then you have leading indicators. These are the things that you can actually do that should increase the probability of getting the lagging results. And so this distinction changes the way you think about goals because you stop waking up every morning trying to somehow perform the outcome. So if your 90-day goal is related to your body, you might track training sessions, you might track daily movement or sleep or food intake or protein or whatever variables actually matter for your plan, but you can perform a lower number on the scale today, right? You can perform the 39:29 behavior that makes that result more likely to happen over time. And so the exact same logic works in business. Revenue might be the result, but revenue depends on other things, right? How many offers did you make? How many sales conversations happened? How many pieces of content did you publish? How many qualified leads entered the business? Those numbers sit closer to your behavior and to to being in your control. And so if the goal is, for example, five books, books completed is the lagging number. Pages read is the leading number. And I think this is one of the most important ideas in the video because your attention should spend much more time on the number you can control today than on the number you hope to see later. Otherwise, you end up constantly checking outcomes that change more slowly than your behavior does. And so, say somebody wants to grow a YouTube channel. They can check subscribers 15 times a day, but checking doesn't really create subscribers, right? It's not what produces subscribers. Their controllable work might be publishing two strong videos per week or writing 30 title variations before choosing one or 40:31 reviewing retention after every upload or spending a certain amount amount of hours improving ideas and packaging. So subscribers still matter but they're the lagging indicator. They're not today's job. So I would literally separate these on the page. Write the outcome number at the top and then underneath it write the numbers you believe produce it. Result above, inputs below. essentially. And there's an important warning here. Don't attach a number to something just because numbers feel objective. The metric should have a reasonable relationship to the outcome. Otherwise, you can become incredibly consistent at measuring the wrong thing. So maybe somebody wants to become a better writer and decides to measure words written. That's useful up to a point, right? Because more writing gives it gives them more practice. But if they start producing 5,000 terrible words every single day purely to hit the number, then the measure stops representing the thing they actually care about. So the number was supposed to serve improvement. Improvement wasn't supposed to serve the number. And there's a well-known idea called Goodart's law 41:32 that basically warns about this. Once people optimize aggressively for a measure, the measure can stop being a good representation of the goal. So you see this everywhere. Companies chase clicks instead of satisfied customers. Where students chase chase grades instead of understanding. Creators chase views and slowly make content that they don't even want to make. So choose numbers absolutely but keep asking whether the number still represents the result you actually want. So as you can see on the image, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And so another useful thing happens once you start turning your goals into numbers. You discover that some outcomes depend on other outcomes. And this is where goals start forming a hierarchy and dependencies. So let's say you want to save $5,000 over the next 90 days. Great. That's measurable. But then you do the math and you realize your current income barely covers your expenses. Suddenly saving $5,000 isn't really the first problem, right? Increasing income is upstream of the saving goal. And maybe increasing income has its own dependency. Maybe you need 42:33 more clients or more clients might require more sales calls. More sales calls might require more leads. more leads might require more outreach or better content. And now you've moved from I want $5,000 in savings to a chain of causes that you can actually work on. And this is why numbers are so useful. This is why math in general is so useful. They expose hidden constraints. A vague goal lets you pretend everything is one problem. A measured goal, on the other hand, forces you to ask what has to become true first. And so I would also avoid becoming weirdly precise when reality doesn't justify it. Right? Some goals need exact targets. Others can work better with a range, right? You might want to train between four and five times per week. You might aim for safe a savings range depending on your income. You might publish between 8 and 12 videos depending on your complexity. The point is clarity, right? You might eat between 1,500 calories and 2,000 calories to lose weight. So, in other words, make the target specific enough to guide your behavior while leaving room for reality. So, if one number 43:35 changes because you learned something new, that's okay. We're going to build feedback into this later. The plan isn't sacred, right? The direction matters more than pretending that your first estimate was perfect and right on point. And so, by the end of this exercise, every major 90-day goal that you've put on there should have a small scoreboard attached to it, right? It should have a number attached to it. Not 20 metrics, just a few numbers that tell you what you're trying to produce and whether you're doing the work that should produce it. So maybe health looks like this. One outcome target at day 90 and then three or four weekly or daily behaviors underneath it. Wealth might have one income or savings target and then outreach sales activity, hours of focused work or whatever actually drives your result. Self might have books completed with pages per day underneath it. Relationships might have a qualitative goal supported by a few concrete behaviors you can actually repeat. Right? And now we finally have what we need to work backwards. Because once the goal has a number, we can stop staring at day 90 as one giant outcome 44:36 sitting in the distance. We can divide it into months, weeks, and days. We can calculate pace. We can identify how much has to happen by the end of month one, what needs to happen this week, and eventually what you need to do today. And that's where a 90-day transformation stops feeling huge and starts becoming very small. A set of small actions that you can actually repeat. So let's talk about reverse engineering. So now we have the outcome, we have the numbers, we have the behaviors underneath those numbers, and the next steps is really where this starts becoming a real plan. Because instead of standing on day one looking forward at this huge 90-day transformation and wondering how you're supposed to pull it off, I want you to mentally jump to day 90 and work backwards from there. So if this result has to be true 90 days from now, what has to be true by day 60? What has to be true by day 30? What needs to happen this week in order to make what has to be true by day 30 a reality? And eventually what does that mean you 45:37 actually need to do today to make the weekly goal happen? And that's really the whole idea. You keep shrinking the time horizon until the goal stops feeling like this giant future event and turns into something small enough you can act on today. So a year can feel very abstract. 90 days already feels more real, right? A week feels very real. Today is impossible to hide from. And so the simple framework I like to use for this is actual becoming timeline and habits. ABTH. So your actual is where you are right now. Becoming is the measurable result you're trying to reach. Timeline is how long you're giving yourself to get there. In this case, it's 90 days. Habits are the repeated actions that are supposed to close the distance. So, basically, where I am now, where am I trying to get to, by when, and what [clears throat] do I repeatedly need to do for that change to happen? That's it. Once those four things are clear, your most goals become much easier to think about because you're dealing with very concrete 46:38 things, right? You're dealing with distance, a deadline, and a set of actions. So the basic math here is very very simple. You take becoming minus actual and that gives you the gap that you need to close and then you spread that gap across the time you have available through the simple process of division and you get your daily habit. So simple example here with books or reading because it's very easy to understand. Let's say you want to read 10 books over the next 90 days, right? If we use 200 pages as a rough average for a book, that's about 2,000 pages. So, you're starting at zero, you're trying to reach 2,000, and you have 90 days. Becoming minus actual. Obviously, 2,000 minus 0 is 2,000. Then you divide that result by the timeline. [clears throat] 2,00 divided by 90 days is about 22 pages per day. Suddenly that big vague goal of read 10 books is no 47:40 longer sounding like a big vague goal. Today's assignment is basically 22 pages. And you can do that right tomorrow another 22. And if you keep doing something that small for long enough, the thing that looked impressive at the beginning becomes the natural consequence of a pretty basic, boring, ordinary day. And this is one of the biggest changes I want you to make in how you think about ambitious goals. Don't keep emotionally interacting with the entire goal every single day. You don't need to wake up thinking I have to read 10 books. You just need to read today's pages, right? You don't need to build the whole business today. You just need to complete whatever part of the process belongs to today. Once that's done, you can relax for the day. Huge goals become much less intimidating once you've reduced them to the smallest unit. And so I wouldn't go directly from 90 days to today and ignore everything in between. Obviously build checkpoints. 90 days is roughly 3 months. So you need to ask yourself where should where you should be after like 1 month or 2 months 48:41 or 3 months, right? And then break the first month into weeks. Maybe by day 30 you should be at roughly one/ird of the way there. By day 60 roughly 2/3 and by day 90 you're complete. Right? if it doesn't have to be perfectly linear and a lot of goals won't be but you need some way of knowing whether you're roughly on pace because imagine you're trying to produce 30 videos in 90 days and you get to day 60 with four videos published right you don't need to wait until day 90 to discover the plan isn't working the milestone tells you much earlier so you're behind pace which means you still have time to change something so what you're essentially doing here is you're taking the 90-day goal which is 3 months right you're taking that goal you're dividing it into checkpoints for all three months. So month one, month two, month three. Now those monthly goals are then divided into four because of the four weeks in each month. So now you know exactly what you need to do each week in every month. And those weekly goals get divided into 49:43 seven. So now you know what you need to do every single day because there's seven days of the week. Now, if you only want to work on your goals Monday to Friday, then you divide the weekly goal into 5 days instead of seven and then you can take Saturday and Sunday off, for example. And this is how you do it. And I want to put a little warning around the math. Not every goal should be divided by 90 and treated as if life moves in a perfectly straight line. Some things accumulate very cleanly, right? pages read, money saved, assuming your income is is fairly stable, training sessions completed, practice hours, outreach sent. Those are easy to divide. But other results are a bit lumpy. You might want to make $30,000 in the next 90 days. That doesn't necessarily mean you're supposed to make exactly $333.33 every single day, right? You could make nothing for 2 weeks and then close a $10,000 client. You could have a slow first month and then something starts working. The outcome still has a number, but the path towards that number isn't always smooth. So for those kinds of 50:44 goals, reverse engineer the process instead. If $30,000 requires roughly 10 customers, and 10 customers historically require 30 sales calls, and [snorts] 30 sales calls require 150 qualified leads. Now, we have something much more useful. And notice the difference here because we're not doing some motivational math where we divide some humongous number by 90 and pretend the universe owes us that amount every single day. No, we're trying to find the actual causal path from today's behavior to the result we want, right? Provided that we don't stop doing the daily behavior. Also, don't force every goal into a daily habit just because daily habits sound disciplined, right? Some things should happen every day, but some things make more sense weekly. For example, training sessions, right? Some things happen once. Reading might be daily. Training might be four or five times per week. A date with your partner might happen once a week. Reviewing your finances might happen every Friday. Right? Booking a trip might be a one-time action in those 90 days. And some goals aren't really 51:46 habits at all. They're more so projects. So, if the goal isn't naturally repetitive, just break it into deliverables instead. So, the principle is still exactly the same. We're moving backwards from the finished result until the next action becomes obvious. And once you know the actions, set some form of reminders or have them on some kind of to-do list where you can see them every day. If you're more of a digital minimalist, you can just use a whiteboard for this as well. This is a step that people typically leave out all the time. They'll say, "Okay, I need to train four times per week, read 30 pages a day, work on the business 2 hours a day, and have one date per week." Great. But when? Because if the answer is whenever I have time, you don't really have a plan yet. Put the important actions into the actual week you're already living. Maybe you train Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at 1:00 p.m. Maybe you read before bed. Maybe the first 2 hours of your workday go towards the business. Maybe Friday night is reserved for your relationship. Obviously, you don't need to schedule every minute of your life unless your brain works like that. But the important 52:47 behavior should have some kind of home. And this is incredibly useful because of something called implementation intentions. So an implementation intention is a specific if then plan that essentially links a situational cue to a goal- directed behavior to help you reach a goal. Psychologist Peter Gwitzer introduced this strategy in 1999 and basically it bridges the gap between simply wanting to do something and actually taking action. So the if part identifies a precise cue such as a specific time, place or situation. The then part states the exact immediate action you will take. So instead of only saying I intend to do something, you connect the behavior to a specific situation. So if this happens, then I do this. When it's 7:00 a.m., I go for a walk. When I finish dinner, I read. If I'm offered something that conflicts with the plan, I already know what I'm going to do. So you essentially have frontloaded the decision. You make more of the decision before the moment arrives, which means you're not asking yourself to renegotiate the plan every single time. But before you get excited 53:48 and fill every empty square in your calendar, do a capacity check. How much time does this plan actually require? Because your goals don't happen in some separate universe where work, sleep, errands, relationships, family, commuting, cleaning, eating, and unexpected problems disappear for 90 days, right? If your plan requires 4 hours every day and you only have 90 minutes available, then the plan doesn't really fit. So, you need to change the goal, change the timeline, remove something else, or find a more efficient path. And this is also related to what's often called the planning fallacy. We tend to imagine future work happening under cleaner conditions than it usually does. So next week looks strangely empty in your head and then you actually put sleep, meals, work, commuting, appointments, errands, and relationships and everything else onto a calendar and basically realize, oh, I don't really have the 35 completely free hours I imagined I had. And so because reality is messy like that, I also like adding a hedge to the plan. And by hedge I basically mean don't plan around the exact minimum amount of work required 54:50 for you to succeed. Plan above it so that the plan can absorb mistakes, bad days, delays, and randomness. So essentially, you're making it inevitable for you to hit your goal. So if the math says you need to read 22 pages per day, maybe your target becomes 30. If you need 100 cold emails per week, maybe you plan for 150. If you need eight videos published over the next 90 days, maybe you build enough time and capacity to actually make 12. So you're deliberately creating a gap between the minimum required and what you're actually aiming to do. And the idea is very similar to a margin of safety. So engineers don't usually design a bridge so that the absolute maximum expected load is also the exact point where the bridge fails, right? You leave room. Investors use the same idea when they talk about buying with a margin of safety. Your goal should work the same way. If your entire 90-day plan only succeeds when every single assumption is exactly right and perfect and every week goes perfectly and you never miss a day, then the plan 55:52 is incredibly fragile. You haven't really created a plan for real life, right? But rather for perfect conditions. So, because the math we did earlier is based on averages, 22 pages per day assumes you read every single day. A 100 outreaches per day assumes every week looks roughly the same. $10,000 per month might assume a certain close rate or a lead volume or deal size. But averages hide variation. That's why they're called averages. So one day you'll read 40 pages, right? Another day you'll read none. And one week your business runs perfectly, the next week three things break at once. So the hedge is there because you should expect some amount of variance instead of acting surprised every time life doesn't behave like precise math. And another way to think about it is that the minimum tells you what has to happen mathematically while the hedge increases the probability that it actually happens in reality. So if you need exactly 1,000 pages and you plan to read exactly 1,000 56:52 pages, one missed reading session really puts you behind. If you build the plan around 1300 pages, you now have 300 pages of room. So maybe you use all of that margin because life gets messy. Maybe you don't need it and actually finish your goal early. Both outcomes are better than discovering on day 84 that your plan had absolutely no room for error. And hedging doesn't always mean simply doing 30 or 50% more. You can hedge in different ways depending on the goal. So you can hedge the volume, meaning you aim above the minimum amount of work. You can hedge the time, meaning you try to finish before the actual deadline. You can hedge the capacity, meaning you leave empty room in your week instead of scheduling yourself at 100%. Or you can hedge the assumptions themselves and plan for worst case scenarios. So if your business plan assumes a 30% close rate on sales calls, maybe you build the plan so it still works if you only close 20%. So, you're trying to make the plan robust, right? You don't want success to depend on one 57:54 exact prediction being correct. If a slightly worse month or one missed week or one unexpected bill or a few bad days completely destroy the goal, then the system was too frag fragile to begin with. But obviously, you also need to use some common sense here because you hedge the plan where adding margin is a sensible and safe thing to do. You don't take something psych physiologically demanding and just make it 50% more extreme. So if your fat loss plan requires a reasonable calorie deficit, don't say, "Okay, I'll hedge by eating 50% less." Right? If you're if you need 7 or 8 hours of sleep, you don't hedge by sleeping five. That's not a margin of safety anymore because it isn't safe, right? So for things like reading, outreach, practice, content preparation, savings, studying or finishing projects, you can often hedge with extra volume or by finishing early. For things involving recovery or food or physical training limits or anything where more can become harmful, the better hedge is usually more time, more consistency, fewer 58:54 points of failure, and a plan that's easier to stick to. So whenever you finish reverse engineering a goal, you need to ask yourself what happens if reality is 20 or 30 or even 50% messier than you're actually expecting. If the whole plan collapses, then you need to add margin. So your plan shouldn't only work in the best case. It should still have a decent chance of working when life behaves like life. There's another way to make the plan survive in perfect days, and that's to create a minimum version of certain habits. So your target might be an hour of reading, but the maybe the floor is actually 10 pages. Your target might be a full workout, but on the day where everything goes wrong, the floor might be simply showing up and doing a shortened session. So your target could be 2 hours of focused work, while your absolute minimum is 30 minutes. And this way, you're making some progress even on the days where you're technically falling behind. So the minimum isn't what you're aiming for. That's important, right? If you make the minimum too comfortable, you're you'll start negotiating everything down to the floor. The purpose is really to protect continuity 59:56 when the alternative is doing nothing at all. And so you want a bad day to become a smaller day, not necessarily a zero day. And now before you move on, run the whole thing backwards and forward once. Start with a future result and ask whether the 90-day target makes sense. Then ask whether the monthly milestones roughly lead there, whether the weekly targets support those monthly milestones, and whether the daily or weekly actions support those weekly targets, and whether those actions actually fit into your life. And then you flip the question around. If you repeated this week for roughly 13 weeks, would you have a reasonable chance of producing the result you wrote at the top? That's it. And ideally, by the time you're finished, the plan should actually feel a little boring, and that's a good sign. The goal can still be exciting. The transformation can still be huge. But today's actions shouldn't really require any decisions from you every morning. You know the numbers. You know the pace. You know the habits. You know when they happen. You know the minimum. You know the buffer. And now the transformation isn't this 1:00:56 vague thing you hope happens over the winter, right? It's basically 13 weeks of executing a fairly simple week over and over again. And this is exactly where the next problem appears. Because having a perfect plan doesn't mean you're going to follow it. You can know exactly what to eat and still order something else. You can schedule the workout and still stay home. You can know that you're supposed to work for 2 hours and somehow still end up scrolling for 45 minutes before you've even started. So once the plan itself is clear, the next thing we need to change is the environment around the plan. We need to make the behaviors you want easier to repeat and make the old defaults hard to go back into, right? And basically stop relying on willpower. So let's talk about controlled environment. So now you have the plan, you know the result, you know the numbers, you know the weekly pace, and you know what you're supposed to do today. This is usually where people make a mistake. So they assume that because the plan is clear, execution is now just a test of discipline. And obviously discipline matters. But you're making 1:01:58 this much harder than it needs to be if your entire environment is constantly pulling you in the opposite direction. So, if you're trying to read while your phone is buzzing next to you, or trying to lose weight while the easiest food to eat in your house is junk food, or trying to work while YouTube is open in another tab, and trying to save money while every app on your phone is trying to sell you something, you're basically asking yourself to win the same argument with yourself hundreds of times over the next 90 days. And a lot of behavior is contextual. You walk into certain rooms, see a certain person, open a certain app, reach a certain time of day, and almost automatically you start behaving the way you normally behave in that situation. And that's why changing your life while at the same time not changing anything in your life and keeping every cue, default, distraction, and routine exactly the same can feel very difficult. You're trying to essentially create a new behavior inside an environment that was built because of old behavior. So, this is where I like the idea of disappearing for a while. 1:02:58 But I don't mean you need to fake your death, delete every person from your phone, move into a cabin, and emerge 3 months later looking like Batman. That's not the point, right? I mean disappear from the parts of your old life that keep recreating the person you're trying to stop being. So, for 90 days, become much less available to distractions, habits, environments, and commitments that have nothing to do with the life you just said you wanted. And this happens through subtraction, not addition. People usually respond to transformation by adding more. But sometimes the fastest improvement really comes from removing the thing that keeps interfering with what you already know you need to do. And you probably don't need a better time management system, right? If you just delete the 3 hours of doom scrolling you're doing every morning. You just got 3 hours back. And so this is where the principle of entropy comes in. Entropy can seem complicated, but it's actually pretty simple. It measures disorder in a system. So, picture your apartment or or house for example or your car. If it's 1:04:00 neat and organized now, well, that's low entropy. But if you leave it alone and don't do anything, the disorder creeps in, right? Clothes on the floor, stuff everywhere, that's entropy increasing. And so, this tendency towards disorder is actually a fundamental law of physics. This disorder is the default. Order is always artificial and temporary. Disorder happens naturally while order takes energy. So left on its own, the universe tends toward chaos. And so systems naturally become messier when nothing is actively maintaining them. So your schedule fills up, your inbox fills up, your room gets cluttered, your attention becomes shallower, random obligations appear. So this 90-day period can't only be about installing good behavior. You also need to keep removing the noise that slowly accumulates around it. So go through your normal day and look for anything that repeatedly competes with the plan. Actually watch yourself for a few days. What pulls you away from the work? What makes the diet harder? What makes you 1:05:00 stay up late? Where does an hour disappear without you even noticing? Which people, places, apps, routines, and situations reliably lead to behavior you already decided you don't want. You need to constantly scan your environment and essentially eliminate absolutely everything that goes against the plan. Basically, what keeps making the wrong thing easy or at the very least available? Because sometimes the problem isn't that you're incapable of doing the right thing, right? The wrong thing is simply sitting directly in front of you all day long. And once you identify those things, start changing the amount of friction around them. So you make the behaviors you want slightly easier and the behaviors you don't want slightly more annoying. And this sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But those changes in friction really matter because you're making these choices over and over again every day. So for the things you want to do, you need to reduce as much friction as possible in doing the things you want to do. And then you need to reverse it for the things you're trying to reduce. You need to increase friction as much as 1:06:01 possible. So log out of social media, delete the app, block the website, don't keep the food in the house, you know, turn off the notifications, whatever. Just don't rely on yourself to basically stare directly at temptation and keep saying no every single time. And the point is that every extra step creates a moment where the automatic behavior gets interrupted. And sometimes that's all you really need to do to make a different choice. So in the Odyssey, for example, Odysius knows that when he hears the sirens, he won't be able to trust his future judgment. So he uses something called a pre-commitment. So he has his crew essentially tie him to the mast beforehand. And he doesn't wait until temptation arrives and then try to resist it, right? Why spend all that energy in the first place when you can prevent it from the get-go? He changes his options before the temptation even exists. And you can use the same logic. Your motivated self can make decisions that protect your unmotivated self. And you're basically saying, I know there will be moments during these 90 days 1:07:02 where I won't feel like doing what I currently know is right. So, I'm going to make some of those decisions now. And the deeper principle here is to stop making every good behavior a fresh decision. Decisions are expensive because every decision opens the possibility of a choice that depends on your willpower and your ability to think clearly in that moment. But thinking is a very expensive process for our brains. So, every time you're doing this, you're essentially creating the choice of yes or no. Should I train today? Should I read tonight? Should I eat this? Should I work now or later? Both willpower and crystal clear thinking are actually exhaustable resources. By the end of the day, they get weaker. And so, if you're asking those questions every day for 90 days, multiple times a day, you'll eventually slip. So, you need to create these defaults wherever you can. These are my training days. This is when I work. These are the meals I usually eat. This amount of money gets transferred automatically into savings. I read before bed. The exact defaults really 1:08:02 depend on your own goals. But the point is that ordinary days should require as little decision-making on these habits as possible. And then you need to look at your information environment. Your environment includes everything entering your head too, right? Your feed is an environment. The podcasts you listen to are an environment. The group chats you're in are an environment. Your YouTube homepage is an environment. The people you follow every day are occupying part of your mental space whether you consciously think about it or not. So for these 90 days, clean up your information diet as well. And that doesn't mean you can only consume self-improvement content. That can become another form of procrastination in and of itself. The point is to stop flooding your attention with things that make the plan harder to follow. And one thing I would not do is really remove everything and leave a giant empty hole in your day. Empty space has typically the tendency to refill itself with whatever is easiest. So if you delete social media but have no idea where you're what you're going to do instead, 1:09:03 there's a decent chance you will reinstall it 3 days later, right? So you need to replace the old default with something that serves the new direction. The time you used to spend scrolling could become walking or reading or training or working or cooking or seeing people or or learning something or even just sitting there and letting yourself be bored for a while. And the replacement doesn't always have to be productive. You're still allowed leisure time and relaxation. You're still allowed fun, but you want it to be cho a choice rather than losing 2 hours to something you barely remember afterwards. And so your social environment matters, too. But when I've talked about this in the past, I think people sometimes take it way too far. You don't need to cut everyone out of your life because they aren't waking up at 5:00 a.m. and building a startup. That's ridiculous. But you have to notice where your social environment repeatedly conflicts with what you've decided matters to you now. And I think it's common sense, right? If someone is recovering from drug addiction, for example, would you tell them to still hang around the people that they spent time with when they were addicted? The 1:09:59 same people that probably got them hooked in the first place. So yes, most likely some people will have to be cut. Yes, you might have to say no more often for 90 days. Yes, you might have to tell your partner or your friends that certain hours are protected for you. Yes, it might mean not getting drunk with your drinking buddies every weekend, right? Yes, the things you want have a cost. And maybe there are people you genuinely need more distance from because every interaction pulls you back into behavior you're trying to leave behind. And most people are stingy with their money and extremely generous with their time and energy. That's so backwards if you really think about it. No, the point isn't to isolate yourself, but you have to become more deliberate about access to your time and energy for your own good. People normalize behavior for each other. After all, if everyone around you spends money, the second they earn it, that that starts feeling normal. If everyone trains, training feels normal. If everyone complains about their relationship, complaining feels normal. If everyone is building, reading, creating, learning, or taking their work seriously, that changes your 1:11:00 reference point as well. And yes, repeated exposure absolutely changes what feels ordinary. And these people are out there, right? There are people for whom these habits which seem so difficult for most people are just an ordinary day. So as you might have guessed this connects back to the identity part from earlier. One of the most straightforward ways to change your identity and self-im images by just accumulating more evidence and your environment helps you produce that evidence a lot more consistently. So you make the workout easier to start. So you train. Training gives you evidence that you're someone who trains. That identity makes the next workout feel a little more natural. You make reading obvious, so you read. Now you're building evidence that you're someone who reads every day. The behavior supports the identity, and the identity makes the behavior easier to repeat. And over 90 days, that loop can become surprisingly strong. And there may also be periods inside those 90 days where you genuinely need to become a little boring. Even though generally speaking, I really don't think that's the right word to use here. But it's funny how we've turned 1:12:01 every self-destructive habit equate to fun and not participating in them makes you boring. But I digress. So yes, that would mean fewer nights out, fewer random plans, less explaining what you're doing, less constantly telling everyone the person you're about to become. Just actually work on it, right? Sometimes talking about the plan gives you the emotional reward before you've done any of the work. So you tell everybody you're starting the business, getting shredded, writing the book, changing your life, and then part of your brain almost feels like something already happened. Make sure doing the thing stays more important than performing the act that you're doing. So look at this whole section as environment design rather than self-control. You're trying to build a normal day where the things that move you forward towards the vision are easy to begin, easy to see, and difficult to forget. While the things that pull you towards the anti- vision require more effort, more intention, or aren't available in the first place. And there's a really simple test for whether you've done this well. Imagine you have completely a completely average Tuesday. 1:13:02 You're not unusually motivated. You're not feeling terrible either. You're just normal. Does your environment naturally move you through most of the behaviors in the plan? Or do you still need to fight yourself every single step of the way? If the answer is the second one, then you need to keep redesigning. But even with the right environment, you still can't assume the original plan is going to work exactly as you expected for 90 days. Some habits won't stick. Some numbers will move faster than you thought. Others won't move at all or would move slower. You might execute perfectly and discover that one of your assumptions was completely wrong. And that's completely fine because the last part of the system is really [clears throat] feedback. And it's one of the most valuable parts of the system because without feedback, you won't know whether you're making progress or not. So, we need a way to tell the difference between a plan you aren't following and a plan that simply isn't working and then adjust without turning every bad week into another complete restart. So, let's talk about the feedback loop. So, now the system is running. You know what 1:13:59 you're trying to achieve. You know what you're supposed to do each week. And you've built your environment around actually doing it. So from here, your only job is really to run the plan so that you can get real information and feedback from it and then pay attention to what happens and then improve as you go. So you act, you get a result, you learn something, you adjust and then you act again. That's the loop. And so the plan you made at the beginning is still based partly on assumptions. Once you start executing, reality starts replacing those assumption with actual information. And I like treating the entire 90 days almost like a scientific experiment. You have a theory about what should produce the result. Then you give that theory a fair test. If you believe a 100 outreaches per week should create enough sales conversations to reach your income target, then you run that process and look for look at what actually happens. Maybe the outreach gets almost no replies. Maybe people reply but they don't actually book. Maybe they book but they don't buy. Those are completely different problems, right? And the 1:14:59 feedback tells you where the system is actually breaking. And that's the useful version of trial and error. You try something, you observe what happened, you learn from it, you make a change when the evidence gives you a reason to, and then you run another cycle. So you're not jumping from one strategy to another because something didn't work immediately. The goal is to become less wrong every time you go through the loop. And so one of the most important distinctions in this whole process is the difference between an execution problem and a strategy problem. They can produce the exact same disappointing result, but they need completely different solutions. So, let's say the plan says five workouts and you complete two. The strategy hasn't actually failed. If the plan says 100 outreaches and you send 30, you still don't know whether 100 would have worked. So, the plan, the strategy hasn't failed. If you planned to read 30 pages per day and averaged eight, the problem isn't the reading plan yet. The first thing to fix is your ability to execute what you already decided to do. Right? That could mean changing the schedule, lowering 1:16:00 friction, protecting the time better, removing distractions, or making the behavior easier to repeat. Because the plan is five workouts. You only completed two. That doesn't mean the plan doesn't work. You didn't follow the plan, right? So once the execution is actually there, that can change things. If you do the work consistently and honestly and the expected result still isn't happening, then the method itself deserves attention. At that point, blindly doing more of the same thing and expecting a different result is well, you already know. So, you need to change the mechanism. And this is why the leading and lagging indicators from earlier matter so much. They let you actually trace the result backwards instead of reacting to the final number. So, if revenue is low, you can look at sales. If sales are low, you can look at calls. If calls are low, you can look at bookings. If bookings are low, you can look at leads. If leads are low, you can look at outreach or content or ads. You keep moving backwards through the chain until you find the first place where the numbers are not behaving the way they need to behave in order for you to hit 1:17:03 the goal. So once you find that point, that becomes the thing you work on, just the bottleneck. There is no reason to rebuild the whole system because one part is underperforming. Just fix the part that is constraining everything downstream. However, you also need to be patient here because you can't treat every small fluctuation like a meaningful signal, right? A number can move for reasons that have nothing to do with whether your plan is working or not. Body weight moves around from day to day, for example, right? Revenue can be uneven. One week you make nothing, the next week you make more than you did all of the last month. One video can do badly even when the overall content strategy is getting better. Your mood can be terrible during a week where you're objectively actually making progress. So if you react to every individual data point, you'll constantly change things before you've learned anything. So when the number naturally moves around, look at the trend instead. Use averages, compare weeks, compare months, give repeated behavior, enough time to actually produce something you can actually read and evaluate and look for patterns. And the other thing you're 1:18:00 watching is whether you're moving at roughly the pace you planned for. So you already created milestones when you reverse engineered the goal. Now those milestones become checkpoints. If you're supposed to be around onethird of the way there after the first month and you're close to that, good. Then you just need to keep going. If you're way ahead, then you have useful information. If you're way behind, you also have useful information. The point of the checkpoint is to discover the gap while there is still enough time to do something about it. And I would do one proper review every week with just enough time to look at the week honestly and what actually happened. So start with the measurable part and look at the result numbers, the leading indicators, the pace and the behaviors you said you were going to perform. That gives you the objective layer. You know what happened before you start inventing stories about why it happened. And then you write down your wins, your lessons, and your improvements. Wins are what went well and what you actually followed through on. Lessons are things that the week taught you that you want to remember. Improvements are the things 1:18:57 that need to change next week. And I also like having more wins than improvements. Roughly two wins for every improvement because the review shouldn't become a weekly ritual where you only collect evidence that you're failing. And over time, those reviews start building a record of how you actually operate because you might start seeing that you always struggle with a certain habit on a certain day or you notice that something in your environment consistently makes you more productive. You notice that you underestimate how long a certain kind of work takes or anything like that. This is where the plan actually becomes a lot more effective because you're now learning how your own system behaves. And that's really what improvement starts to look like after a while because your estimates get better. Your workload gets more aligned with your capacity. You know what tends to derail you. You know what kind of goals need more hedging. You know which behaviors actually matter and which ones just looked productive on paper. And so the plan becomes more accurate because you're calibrating it against your own experience. And when you do make a change, keep it contained 1:19:54 to just changing that one thing. If one variable is clearly causing the problem, then just change that variable and don't change anything else about the rest of the system. And then just see what happens. If you change 10 things all in the same week, you might improve, but you won't really know why. And you won't really know what created the results. And this is also why constant restarting is so destructive. People have one rough week and they typically immediately declare the whole thing dead. They start a new routine, a new goal, a new app, a new challenge, new version of themselves. And then two weeks later, they do it again because they didn't do it perfectly. Every restart wipes out part of the feedback loop because nothing is stable for long enough for you to actually understand it. And so over the 90 days, the role of feedback will change a little bit. The first month will mostly be about establishing the system and learning whether the plan actually fits your life. The second month is where you should be getting better at spotting bottlenecks and making smarter adjustments. than essentially optimizing. And the final month is usually more about protecting 1:20:54 what's already working, closing whatever gaps remain and then finishing properly. And so people often get sloppy near the end. They see progress, they feel good, and subconsciously they start feeling like the goal is already complete. And the last 20 or 30% still counts. If the first 60 days were about building momentum, then the final 30 are where you actually protected. And you no longer need to constantly wonder whether you're on the right path. You now have evidence, right? You know what you're doing. You know what the numbers are doing. You know where the system is weak. And you know what changed when you adjusted it. And once you put all of these pieces together, you realize the 90 days are really just a repeating cycle. You execute the week, you review the week, you learn from the week, you adjust what needs adjusting, and then you run it again. And that's really the entire process. And beyond these 90 days, that's really the entire process of self-improvement. The final thing left is really to create your plan and start working on it. And if you want help figuring out exactly what you should focus on, building the plan around your actual life and then having 1:21:55 someone work with you one-on-one as you execute and adjust it, that's exactly what I help people with. So, you can work with me one-on-one and we can build this around your specific situation instead of you trying to figure out everything by yourself. And if that sounds useful, then there's a link below that you can book a call and we can see if it makes sense for you. With that said, let's cover the review. We cover the overview, the reality audit, future contrast, reasons and cost, numbers of change, reverse engineering, controlled environment, the feedback loop, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, score your health, wealth, love, and relationships, and self from 0 to 10. Write the evidence behind each score, where each area is heading, the future you want, and the future you refuse to keep moving towards. Then, choose one or two main goals for the next 90 days. Attach numbers to them. Separate the outcome from the behaviors that produce it and work backwards until you know what needs to happen each month, each week, and each day. And then finally, build your environment around the plan. Start immediately and review the numbers 1:22:55 every single week. And keep what works, fix what doesn't, and stay with the process long enough for the results to compound. With that said, I hope this brought a lot of value to you and your life if it did. Make sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel, let me know in the comments what you're going to work on over the next 90 days. And if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. As I said, if you want this training along with the document we went over, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching. Thank you for the support. And I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how once you understand neuroplasticity, your life will change forever. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is 1:23:49 first the unfinished brain, the cost of adaptation, experience before identity, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, receive this training along with its accompanying document, or join my free newsletter. All three links will be in the description. Make sure to check them out. And with that said, let's get started. So, let's talk about an unfinished brain. So, one of the strangest things about growing older is that you gradually develop this idea of who you are. And then you start treating that idea essentially as permanent. And maybe you've always struggled with discipline. So, you consider yourself an undisiplined person. Maybe you've spent years being quiet around strangers, so you assume you're naturally shy. And after enough years of behaving in familiar ways, those descriptions can feel like facts. But how much of what you call your p personality is something you've learned through experience. And how much could it still change? So think 1:24:51 about how much children change as they grow up. And [clears throat] we've taken this as a default, right? And we even have a phrase for it that children are like sponges. They learn languages. They develop abilities. they become capable of things they couldn't do a few years earlier. And somewhere along the way, we start assuming that adults have more or less finished developing, right? But your brain doesn't really suddenly lose its ability to learn when you turn 18 or 25 or 30. It continues responding to what you do and what you experience. And that's what I want to explore in this training. Because once you understand how your brain adapts, you can start looking at your habits, abilities, and even your sense of identity a little differently. you begin to see why certain patterns can feel so natural and why changing them can be difficult and what actually helps you develop something new. And there's an experiment involving 5 days of blindfolding that actually shows you just how surprisingly adaptable an adult brain can be. So your brain is constantly working with the 1:25:51 information available to it. And when that information changes, the brain can sometimes adjust much faster than you would expect. So in one fascinating experiment actually researchers wanted to know whether the part of the brain normally involved in seeing could begin helping with touch. So they tested this on adults who could see perfectly well. They blindfolded a group of adults for 5 days and basically taught them to recognize braille characters with their fingers. Imagine suddenly having to navigate everything through touch while your eyes provide no useful information. Would your brain simply keep doing what it had always done or would it start adapting? That's what they were trying to understand. And so after those 5 days, something remarkable had happened. The visual cortex, the area that normally is involved in processing what you see, was now helping the participants recognize things through touch. So researchers could even interfere with that area and make their burial recognition worse. The region was 1:26:52 actually contributing to what they were doing. The most surprising part happened when the blindfolds came off. Within 24 hours, that extra involvement of the visual cortex and touch was no longer detectable. And yet, the participants hadn't simply forgotten what they'd learned. Their brains had adjusted to one set of circumstances and then adjusted again when those circumstances changed. So the researchers thought this rapid change probably involved connections the brain already had becoming more or less active depending on what was needed. So the experiment doesn't mean that entirely new parts of the brain grew in 5 days. It shows that even an adult brain can change how it uses its existing networks in response to experience. Now this ability is called neuroplasticity. Basically, your brain can change the way it cells communicate, how strongly certain connections work and which networks help you perform different activities. And these changes are actually influenced by the things you learn, practice, and experience. So, your brain is a living 1:27:52 system that continues adapting throughout your life. It has to because your circumstances, demands, and abilities keep changing as well. So, your brain contains billions of nerve cells called neurons, which communicate with one another through connections. And when you learn to practice something, the strength of communication between certain neurons can actually change and some connections become more effective while others become way less influential. And that's one of the ways learning becomes possible in the first place and why repeated experience can actually make a task easier over time. Sometimes the change involves how different parts of the brain work together. In the blindfold experiment, for example, an area normally associated with vision became more involved than touch. And that kind of adjustment is called functional reorganization. The important thing is that the brain can use its networks differently as you experience change. Now, some adaptations happen quickly, as we saw with the blindfolded participants. Others happen gradually through months or years of learning, and some of those longerterm changes can even be detected in the 1:28:51 brain's physical structure. One of my favorite examples comes from people learning to drive taxis in London. So to become a licensed London black cab driver, trainee have traditionally had to learn something called the knowledge. So they memorize roughly 25,000 streets along with thousands of places across the city. And they have to know those roots well enough to navigate without constantly checking a map. It's an enormous learning challenge that usually takes years. So scientists became interested in what that much practice might do to the brain. So, in a study published in 2011, researchers actually scanned aspiring taxi drivers brains before and after their years of training. And this was important because they could look at the same people over time instead of really simply comparing experienced drivers with everyone else. So, the people who successfully qualified showed an increase in gray matter in part of the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory and navigation. And so, the trainee who didn't qualify and the people who weren't doing the training didn't show that same increase. So years of learning 1:29:51 London streets were associated with a measurable change in the brains of the people who mastered the task. And what's interesting is how specific that change was. So these people were practicing spatial memory for years and the difference appeared in a region involved in spatial memory. So we can't look at a scan and know every cellular change that took place of course but we can see that sustained learning was associated with changes in the brain itself. Now put those examples together. Five days of a completely different sensory experience changed how the brain handled touch. Years of learning an extraordinarily difficult skill were associated with changes in brain structure. Different experiences, different time scales, but the same broad lesson. Your adult brain still responds to what you repeatedly do at the end of the day. And I think that matters because so much of what we call ability is influenced by practice. If you've never spent much time developing a particular skill, your current performance tells you very little about what might happen if you actually did train it. And so, there's another side 1:30:52 to this that I find especially interesting. Your brain has been adapting your entire life. That includes when you weren't deliberately trying to improve anything. You've practiced certain behaviors, repeated certain thoughts, and responded to familiar situations in familiar ways. And over time, some of those patterns may have become so normal that you consider them part of who you are. What exactly has your life been training you to become? So, let's talk about the cost of adaptation. So, your brain doesn't know which changes you would personally consider improvements. It just adapts to the experiences you repeatedly have, including the ones you might later wish you'd had less of. So, if you spend years practicing a particular response, it can become increasingly familiar whether you deliberately chose it or not. And sometimes that familiarity is exactly what makes personal change difficult. So a big part of this is something called automaticity. Basically when you perform the same behavior in the same circumstances over and over and over again you can gradually start doing 1:31:52 it with less conscious effort. So think about how little attention you need to give certain activities once you've done them hundreds of times like brushing your teeth for example. Your brain has learned what usually happens next. So in a study on everyday habits, researchers asked people to repeat a small behavior in the same situation each day. Over time, many of those behaviors began to feel more automatic. And the interesting part was how differently that happened from person to person. So there wasn't one magic number of days when a habit suddenly formed, right? The more useful lesson is that what you repeat and the circumstances you're repeated in matter. And so repeated behavior can also become connected to the situation where it usually happens. So it can be a particular place, time or routine that starts prompting a familiar response and eventually you may find yourself doing something almost before you've consciously decided to do it. And so the situation itself has become part of the habit. And that's useful when the behavior serves you, right? Imagine needing to relearn how to type or brush 1:32:52 your teeth every morning. But the same process can make undesirable behaviors a lot easier to repeat. So you can know that something isn't helping you and still find yourself doing it simply because the circumstances were so familiar. And there's a great experiment that makes this surprisingly easy to understand as well. Researchers gave people popcorn at the movies. Some of it was fresh and some of it was stale. Now you would expect people to eat less popcorn when it tastes bad. And for people who didn't usually eat popcorn at the cinema, that's generally what happened. But the people who regularly ate popcorn at the movies kept eating roughly the same amount even when it was stale. They weren't necessarily enjoying it. They were in the place where they usually ate popcorn and their familiar behavior just continued. So when the researchers changed the setting or made people eat with their other hand, that automatic response became weaker. So even a small change in the circumstances could make the old habit less likely to take over. And that's the power of a learned association. The cinema had become connected with eating popcorn. 1:33:54 And for people with a strong habit, being in that environment encouraged the behavior even when the food wasn't appealing. Think about how often you understand what you should do but struggle to follow through. You know that you want to work instead of procrastinate. You know that you want to remain calm instead of getting irritated or practice something instead of avoiding it. Yet when the usual situation comes around, the usual response shows up too. And so knowing better can change your intentions without immediately changing what you've practiced doing. And habits don't necessarily disappear just because you've decided you no longer want them. Familiar surroundings can keep prompting an old response, especially when you've repeated it for a long time. And that's why changing the circumstances and practicing an alternative can be so useful. And I think this becomes even more important when you start confusing familiar behavior with identity. If you've procrastinated for years, as always, you might conclude that you're simply a lazy person. If you've spent years avoiding difficult conversations, you might decide that you're naturally incapable of confrontation. And 1:34:52 eventually, the story you tell about yourself can make those behaviors feel even harder to change. And so, of course, people really do differ in temperament, abilities, and circumstances. But the way you've behaved up until now also reflects what you've learned and practiced. So describing yourself as someone who can't change may be giving your past experiences a lot more authority over your future than they actually deserve. And so your beliefs about yourself can influence what you do next. If you think you're terrible at learning languages, you might avoid practicing. If you avoid practicing, you probably won't improve much. Then the lack of improvement feels like proof that you were right all along. And so your belief influenced your behavior. And your behavior helped reinforce the belief in the first place. And the longer a pattern continues, the more natural it can feel. So you know how you usually react, what you usually expect, and what you usually do. And so behaving differently can feel very strange at first, even when it's exactly what you want. So you've simply had a lot more experience with the old 1:35:52 response. And that's why you can read a book or hear an idea that completely changes your perspective or watch a training like this and still catch yourself behaving the same way the next day. Your understanding may have changed in an hour, but your habits have been practiced for years. And that doesn't make the new understanding worthless. It just means that there's another part of the work to do. So, you need experience behaving differently. Sometimes that means changing the situation that triggers an old habit. Sometimes it means practicing a new response in the same situation again and again. And sometimes it just means accepting that something can feel unnatural while you're still learning to do it. And so your past experiences have helped shape the patterns you have today. Your future experiences can help you develop new ones. So rather than waiting for a sudden internal transformation, you can actually start by changing what you repeatedly do. Learn something you've avoided. Practice a response you haven't mastered. Give yourself opportunities to experience evidence that challenges the way you've always seen yourself. Let's talk about experience before identity. 1:36:53 So, one of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to change themselves or improve themselves is waiting until they feel different before they start behaving differently. They wait to feel confident before taking action as a confident person. They wait to feel disciplined before being consistent. They wait to be capable before attempting something difficult. I understand why because acting differently can feel unnatural when you've spent years behaving another way. But remember the London taxi drivers. They developed their abilities through learning. They didn't need to feel like expert navigators or expert taxi drivers before they began. So your brain learns from what you do. So you can begin developing a new ability long before that ability feels natural. You don't need to consider yourself articulate or to start practicing speaking. You don't need to see yourself as disciplined to start building a routine. Those experiences are part of how you become better at those things in the first place. And as you get better, your understanding of yourself can change, too, because you start collecting real experiences of doing things you previously thought you couldn't do. And 1:37:54 I think that evidence matters more than repeatedly telling yourself that you're a different person while continuing to live exactly as you did before. So, how do you actually make those experiences useful? Well, practice matters, but the kind of practice matters, too. Neuroscientists have actually described several principles of experience dependent neuroplasticity, including repetition, the difficulty of the task, and how closely your practice matches what you're trying to learn. Give your brain meaningful experience doing the thing you want to get better at. It's that simple. So, start with attention. When you're learning something unfamiliar, you need to notice what you're doing and what happens as a result. Paying attention helps you catch mistakes, recognize patterns, and make changes. And as you gain experience, parts of the activity can gradually require less deliberate effort. So practice the actual ability you want to develop. If you want to speak more clearly, practice organizing your thoughts out loud. If you want to make better decisions, practice evaluating options and reviewing what happened 1:38:54 afterwards. Reading about an ability can help you understand it, but at some point you just need experience performing it. And make it difficult enough that you still have something to learn. It's comfortable to repeat the things you you're already good at. Everybody likes doing that. And there's nothing wrong with maintaining an ability, but developing something new usually means spending time at the level where you're still making mistakes. And that's how you actually discover what you haven't mastered yet. So, a mistake gives you information. You expected one result and you got another. Now, you have something to learn from. You can look at what happened, change your approach, and try again. And this is especially clear when you're learning a physical skill. But feedback and adjustment are useful in many other areas of learning too. And you need feedback. Otherwise, you might keep repeating the same mistake without even realizing it. Feedback can come from watching your own performance, measuring your results, or having someone more experienced point out what you're missing. So, the goal is to really make your next attempt a little more informed 1:39:52 than your last one. And this is one of the main reasons why people sign up for coaching, for example. Now, learning a new skill is one thing, but changing a familiar response can be harder because the situations that trigger that response may still be part of your everyday life. And you might genuinely want to behave differently, but the moment something familiar happens, your old habits are right there waiting for you, right? So, you need to pay attention to when the pattern shows up. What usually happens right before it. Where are you? What do you normally do next? Understanding these circumstances will give you something practical to work with rather than simply hoping you'll have more willpower the next time. So, choose a specific response to practice instead. So, for example, if you want to stop avoiding difficult conversations, just decide how you'll begin one when the opportunity comes and then repeat it. Some days, the old response will still come more easily, especially if you've practiced it for years. That's completely normal when you're learning. The point is to keep gaining experience with the alternative until it becomes more familiar and 1:40:52 easier to access. There's also something important that happens after you practice. Your brain continues processing and stabilizing aspects of what you've learned even when you're no longer actively working on the task. Scientists call this memory consolidation. It's one reason taking breaks and getting enough sleep can matter so much when you're learning. So in one study of a simple finger movement skill, people improved after a night of sleep even though they hadn't spent that time practicing. Now that doesn't mean sleep magically teaches you a skill. It means some learning continues to develop after the practice itself. And sleep can support that process. That's why recovery deserves a place in your approach to to learning in the first place. You need the attention and energy to practice well. And you also need time to retain what you've learned. More practice isn't automatically better if you're too exhausted to pay attention or make useful adjustments. Now, think about what this looks like over time. You begin with your current abilities and habits. You repeatedly put yourself in situations where you practice something different. You notice what 1:41:53 works, make adjustments, and gradually become more capable. And along the way, you gain experiences that can change what you believe about yourself. I believe you should stop waiting to feel like a different person before you start acting differently. Your current abilities and responses reflect years of experience, and you can keep developing through the experiences you choose to pursue. Of course, neuroplasticity doesn't guarantee that every change is possible or that everything will be easy. But you can take a more deliberate role in your own development. And as you learn new skills, practice different responses, and discover what you're capable of, your understanding of who you are can begin changing with you. So, with that said, let's cover the review. We covered the unfinished brain, the cost of adaptation, experience before identity, the review, and finally your action items for the day or the next few days. First, identify one ability, behavior, or personal characteristic you've been treating as fixed. Think about how your past experiences, repeated behaviors, and opportunities to learn may have contributed to its development. And then separate what you 1:42:55 currently know about yourself from what you're assuming will remain true in the future. Then choose one specific ability or response that you want to develop and begin deliberately practicing it. Make sure your practice involves the actual behavior you're trying to improve, includes an appropriate level of challenge, and gives you opportunities to recognize mistakes and adjust your approach and focus on accumulating meaningful experience through consistent effort. Then finally, pay attention to these circumstances that encourage your existing patterns. And then deliberately create opportunities to practice the responses you want to develop. Review your progress. Use feedback to make adjustments and allow enough time and recovery for learning to actually occur. As you accumulate new experiences and develop new abilities, allow your understanding of yourself to evolve alongside them. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this and I hope it brought some clarity. If you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this video along with its accompanying document, make sure to join the free community again from the link 1:43:54 in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching. Thank you for the support. I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how your authentic self is a scam. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the authenticity trap, the program itself, the construct itself, the review, and then your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. We help entrepreneurs, professionals, creators, and high performers across all sorts of fields to basically help them improve every aspect of their life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self. If you want this training along with its respective document that you see on the screen, make sure to join the free community from the link in the 1:44:48 description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve every aspect of of your life, uh meaning health, wealth, love, and self, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the authenticity trap. So in 2003, two behavioral e- e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e econ economists Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein published a study that quietly changed how we understand human decision-m they looked at organ donation rates across Europe and they basically found something strange. Countries like Germany and Austria are culturally almost identical. same region, similar values, similar education levels. And yet Germany's organ donation rate sat at around 12%. While Austria was over 99%. The difference had nothing to do with generosity or morality or awareness. It came from one thing. In Germany, the form required you to opt in. In Austria, the form required you to opt out. Almost 1:45:51 nobody in either country actually made a choice. They just kept whatever was already selected for them. Now, the researchers called this the default effect, and it shows up everywhere. Retirement plans, insurance policies, software settings, privacy agreements, when something is pre-selected, people overwhelmingly just stick with it. Even when a better option is available, even when the stakes are enormous, the default always feels like the natural choice. It feels like what you would have picked anyway. And that feeling is almost always wrong. Now this training is about one specific default that almost nobody thinks to question. The one that is running your identity. The collection of beliefs and emotional patterns and self-concepts that were installed in you before you had any say in the matter. Most people call that collection their authentic self. They protect it. They honor it. They build their entire lives around it. And they never once ask whether it was actually chosen or just pre-selected. There's this thing in the self-development world 1:46:51 right now that honestly nobody's questioning. And it's the idea that you should just be yourself and be authentic and find your true self and lean all the way into it. And the whole culture has basically turned into turned authenticity into something sacred, something you don't touch, something that you protect at all costs. And look, on the surface, maybe it sounds right, but what if the version of you that feels so real was actually assembled from pieces that were never yours to begin with? What if your authentic self is just the default setting on a form you never realized you could change? And what happens in practice is that people take this advice and they turn it into a reason to stay exactly where they are, the authenticity one, defending every pattern they have as just who I am. and they treat their anxiety or their avoidance or their stuckness as some kind of fixed trait that can't be questioned. The problem with that is growth literally requires you to become someone different, to become someone 1:47:51 unfamiliar, someone you don't fully recognize yet. And this whole authenticity thing makes the unfamiliarity feel like you're betraying yourself. So, what ends up happening is people use the word authentic as protection against anything that feels uncomfortable and they walk away from it genuinely convinced they're making the wise call. And the self-help space keeps feeding this, right? Honestly, every other post is about honoring your truth and trusting your inner voice and returning to yourself. And the assumption running underneath all of it is that somewhere deep down there's like this pure, untouched, original version of you just waiting to be uncovered. Now, that version doesn't actually exist, though, right? What most people call their authentic self is really just the loudest collection of habits and beliefs and emotional reactions they've picked up and repeated over the years. And they've run those same patterns so many times that the pattern started to to feel like truth, like something solid and permanent, which is exactly where the trap closes. Now, the real damage 1:48:52 here is the kind you can't really see easily. You just keep living the same year again and again and you call it stability. You keep running into the same seating and calling it your limit. You keep pulling in the same results and calling it just how things are. And the whole time you're actually guarding a version of yourself that was put together by accident most of the times. Nobody tells you this is happening. You could spend 10 years being authentic, quote unquote, and never once realized that you were really just being loyal to programming that somebody else installed. And that's years, real years of potential poured into maintaining a story that was handed to you before you could even evaluate it. Now, if you actually trace back the beliefs and preferences and emotional patterns you identify with, you'll most likely find that almost none of them were actually chosen. Your parents, your peers, people you love, etc. gave you some kind of a worldview before you could even talk. School gave you a template for what success is supposed to look like according to them. Your earliest social 1:49:54 experiences wired you to chase approval or dodge rejection in in very specific ways. And then culture and media and religion and your friend group just layered more on top of all of that. And none of it was really optional. You didn't get to review any of those beliefs before they went in. Nobody pulled you aside at 5 years old and asked what kind of operating system you wanted to run. Essentially, it just happened. And and that thing the thing that makes it so powerful is that all of it landed before your conscious mind was even online. And this is exactly why it feels so real. You genuinely can't remember a time before these beliefs existed. So they don't feel like programs. They don't feel like embedded things from others. They feel like facts. And from that point on, you just spend the rest of your life assuming those defaults are who you actually are. and never once stopped to ask whether any of it was really deliberate. Once you identify with a belief once you actually see it as part of you, you'll defend it with 1:50:55 everything you've got. It's the consistency bias. You need to be consistent with your beliefs, right? And so you'll defend them. Uh you can tell someone their fear around money is a learned pattern and watch how fast they push back. You can point out that someone's shyness is installed software and they'll take it as a personal attack. That's how deep the programming goes. It's in the body, the nervous system, the reflexes. You physically wired yourself around those patterns over years and years of repetition. And when you add the label authentic on top of all of that, it gives you those it gives those patterns a kind of armor. Now, they're not just habits anymore, right? They're your identity. They're you. They're part of you. And questioning them starts to feel like you're questioning yourself. So, you end up protecting the very thing that's really keeping you in place. and you call it being honest with yourself. And that loop is almost impossible to recognize when you're actually inside of it. So the version of you that you've been honoring, like we've been saying, has a built-in ceiling, right? Every belief carries a boundary with it, a 1:51:55 restriction, a constraint. Every identity can only hold a certain range of outcomes. And if your identity was assembled from limitation and fear and stories you inherited from other people, then the ceiling on your life is lower than you think it is. And it's a lot of the times someone else's seeing because you've inherited those beliefs. So think of your self-concept again as a thermostat. It's constantly regulating your life to match an internal setting. You start making too much money and something in you pulls it back down to the familiar range. You start getting too much attention and you shrink yourself to match the version that feels safe. And that reset is what people experience when they say things like, "Every time I get ahead, something pulls me back." Nothing external is pulling them back. Right? The internal setting is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And that pattern will keep repeating for as long as the identity stays the same. New strategies, new goals, new habits, new techniques, new tactics, all of it eventually bends to fit the shape of whoever you believe you are 1:52:55 underneath. And every time you tell yourself you're just being realistic about your limits, what you're actually doing is locking that ceiling right where it is. You're treating a line you drew yourself as if it were a wall that somebody else built. And that ceiling only stands because you gave it permission to stand. You agreed with a belief that was handed to you probably decades ago. And now that agreement runs your entire life, which means the ceiling can move. The moment you stop treating your current identity as something sacred and fixed and start treating it as something editable and constructed, the whole thing opens up. So let's talk about the program itself. So, what makes this all so hard to see is that your life right now is a perfect readout of your internal program. Every result you're getting, every relationship dynamic you keep falling into, every frustration that keeps showing up on repeat, all of it is the outer expression of whatever is running on the inside. And the code has been running for so long at this point that 1:53:56 the readout just looks like objective reality to you. Your bank account is feedback. Your energy levels are feedback. The kind of people you keep attracting is feedback. Your friends, your friend group is feedback. All of it points back to one place, which is the set of beliefs you accepted as true somewhere along the way. Most of them before you were old enough to evaluate any of it. And most people just look at the readout and try to change the numbers directly. They go after more money, more fitness, more connection. They treat the symptoms. The readout doesn't actually change until the source changes, though. You can push your results around all day long and the moment you stop forcing everything snaps right back to where it was. And the reason you can't see this clearly, the real reason is that the programming controls your perception itself. It tells your brain what to notice and what to skip over. So the very tool you need to diagnose what's going on is already compromised by the thing you're trying to diagnose. 1:54:56 Your brain is filtering millions of data points down to a handful every single moment. And the shape of that filter is determined by your beliefs. So you literally cannot perceive opportunities or connections or possibilities that fall outside whatever your current self-concept allows. And like we said with the thermostat, that creates a self-reinforcing loop. You believe something, your brain filters for evidence that confirms it. You see that evidence and the belief gets stronger. Round and round it goes. And the entire time it genuinely feels like you're just observing the world as it is. Which is exactly why people say things like, "I've tried everything and nothing works for me." They haven't tried everything, right? It's impossible. They've tried everything that their current identity allows them to see. The approaches that would actually move the needle are invisible to them because those approaches live outside the filter. And the frustration builds from there and it starts to feel like the whole system is rigged and you've pe seen people and you've heard people say that the system 1:55:57 is rigged like other people have access to something they don't other people don't have anything special right they just have a different filter running a different set of beliefs installed and those beliefs let them see doors that you and I could walk past every single day without even registing registering they're there and building on all of that there's something even deeper going on which is that everything you expect tends to show up. You think you're predicting how things are going to go, but what you're really doing is creating the outcome in advance. Every expectation kicks off a chain of behavior and body language and energy and tiny decisions that end up producing the exact results you anticipated. If you go into a situation expecting rejection, you hold back just slightly. You communicate with a little less certainty. you carry a different energy and the other person whether you believe it or not picks up on that and responds accordingly and whether they pick up on that consciously or unconsciously is a different story but they do pick up on it and they respond accordingly. 1:57:00 Then the rejection happens and it just confirms what you already believed was going to happen. So you never catch your own role in it while it's playing out. The whole chain is invisible in real time and all you register is the end result. And that result becomes one more piece of evidence that your original belief was supposedly right, that the world works this way, that this is just how it goes for you. And the same mechanism works the other way, too. If you walk into something into something expecting to be taken seriously, you show up with a completely different posture, a different voice, a different kind of presence. People respond to that. They give you more room, more attention, more weight. You're putting out a signal at all times, whether you realize it or not. Your beliefs shape that signal. And the world is just responding to whatever you're really broadcasting, which means you've got far more influence over your outcomes than anyone ever told you. The influence just lives at a layer deeper than most people are willing to look at or mess with. 1:58:02 And it actually goes even further than your own perception. Your beliefs, they don't stay con contained inside you. They leak out into everything around you, into everything you do. The way you hold yourself in a room, the way you talk, the way you respond under pressure, all of it. And all of it is broadcasting something. And the people around you pick up pick up on that and mirror it back without even realize realizing they're doing it. And researchers actually proved this decades ago. In the famous Rosental experiment, teachers were told that certain random students had been identified as gifted. The teachers didn't consciously change anything about how they taught. They just naturally smiled more at those students. They challenged them a bit more. They gave them a bit more feedback. And the students IQ scores actually went up. These were random kids. The only thing that changed was the expectation. And the expectation changed the behavior and the behavior changed the measurable result. And your environment is doing 1:59:04 this to you every single day. The people around you are responding to whoever they believe you are, which is really whoever you believe you are. And then you respond to their response and the whole thing locks the current version of you in place. And that loop only breaks when you change the signal you're putting out. When you start holding a different belief about who you are, people start treating you differently. And that new treatment feeds back into the the new belief and it makes it stronger. And this is also why your environment matters so much more than most people give it credit for. If you're surrounded by people who keep reflecting your old identity back to you, it takes enormous energy to maintain a new one against that current. You need people and spaces around you that already reflect where you're going. Every conversation that pulls you back into the old story is a drag. Every relationship that keeps reinforcing reinforcing the old ceiling is weight you're carrying for no reason. And honestly, the fastest way to shift your identity is really to shift your environment. Get yourself around people 2:00:05 who already see you as the version you're in the process of becoming. So, with that said, let's talk about the constructed self. So, now we get to the part where the whole thing kind of flips, right? If your current self was never chosen and it was really just assembled from other people's beliefs, opinions, or expectations, then there's nothing sacred about holding on to it, you're allowed to change it. You're allowed to edit it however you please. You're allowed to throw the whole thing out and start from scratch if you wanted to. And doing that isn't dishonest. It's actually the most honest move you can make. And most people are just sitting there waiting for permission to change who they are. They want somebody or something to tell them that it's okay to drop the old version. They want evidence first. They want proof that the new identity is going to work before they're willing to commit to it. The waiting is the trap, though. The proof always comes after the shift, never before it. So, you don't need permission for this. You need a decision. One clear, firm, non-negotiable decision about who you're going to be going forward. Everything 2:01:06 else follows from that. And the people who've actually made real transformations in their lives, if you study them, they all did basically the same thing. They picked their identity on purpose and then built everything else around it. The traits, the beliefs, the emotional baseline, all of it was designed deliberately. Steve Jobs did this. Muhammad Ali did this. Conor McGregor did this. They all declared who they were before a single piece of evidence existed to support it. They spoke from it and moved from it and lived from it until the world eventually caught up. And this isn't some special ability that only famous people have access to. The mechanics are the same for anyone. Choose the identity, speak from it, move from it, feed it, protect it. That's the whole process. And what's really interesting is that building a new identity works through the exact same mechanics that build the old one. Repetition, emotion, and evidence. The only only real difference is that this time you're running the process on purpose instead of absorbing everything by accident. So, you take the new belief and you repeat it. And I don't mean some hollow affirmation that you mumble while 2:02:06 you're brushing your teeth. I mean you say it with actual weight behind it. You think it deliberately throughout the day. You let it run through your decisions and your conversations and the way you carry yourself and you constantly keep it at the back of your mind, at the back of your head or front of mind if you want if you prefer that phrase. You constantly keep it there in whatever you do. The subconscious doesn't actually care whether something is true yet. It cares about frequency and emotional charge. Saturated with the new belief enough times and it starts accepting that belief as the new default, the new normal. And the thing that matters most here is consistency over intensity. A moderate belief that you hold every single day will outperform a massive emotional declaration that happens once and then fades by the following week because you don't really believe it yourself. And along with that, logic alone won't shift identity. Emotion is what does it. You need to actually feel the new version of yourself in your body. What it's like to be that person. How that person stands, breathes, walks 2:03:08 into a room. You anchor the whole thing in physical sensation, not in intellectual understanding. A few seconds of real genuine full body feeling will do more than hours of intellectual repetition ever could. Your body doesn't process words, it processes sensation. So build moments into your day where you deliberately drop into that state. It could be music, movement, visualization, whatever puts you in the felt experience of the person you're constructing. Make it a practice. And then alongside of that, you start collecting what I'd call micro proof. Small moments that suggest the new identity might actually be taking hold. It could be a compliment, a small breakthrough, a shift in how someone responds to you. You write these down. You come back to them. You build the case one piece at a time until the weight of evidence tips towards the new version of you. Every piece of microof adds to the foundation. enough of them stack together and you've got something solid underneath you, something that holds real weight and there's a point and you can predict exactly when it hits where the new belief becomes easier to 2:04:09 hold than the old one. It just clicks into place and that will happen if you keep stacking and don't and don't stop. And as a personal story here, a lot of you don't know this, but I was about 120 to 130 kg in my when I was 15 years old. And I started doing this basically without knowing what it was, without having a name for it where I started telling myself that I will get leaner. I am leaner. And I started eating healthier as a result of that. And I started repeating that every single day and acting from that place. Acting as the person that will get lean, acting as the person that will lose weight. That happened. And then eventually I got to to my dream weight at that time. But I was super overweight in my opinion at least for someone that's 15 years old. And I had health issues because of it. This is what you do. You start to believe something about yourself and then you collect microof. My microof was honestly the fact that I could run for 2:05:10 longer. My microof was the weight dropping obviously and the fact that I was eating healthier and at some point being that person became easier than being who I was than eating all the crap that I was eating at that time. And I started believing that I was this person, that I will eventually be there. And I saw myself there already until it just became reality. Now, it required effort of course, but it became reality. And then there's the final stage, which is where the new identity stops feeling like something you're performing. And like I said, it starts feeling like it's just you. You don't have to remind yourself of it anymore. You don't have to force anything. The beliefs are embedded. The filter has completely shifted. The thermostat like we talked about earlier is set to a completely different temperature now. And it's very hard to change that again 2:06:14 or I mean to go back to what it was. You can change it deliberately using this process, but it's very hard to go back to where you were because you've fundamentally changed who you see yourself as. And from [clears throat] there, you can never go back to to that person because the habits, the identity of this new version of you is now you. It's now part of you. Going back to the old version will require a lot of effort. And so this is where a lot of people get confused. Honestly, they think embodiment means acting the part perfectly, nailing it every time. What it actually means is that the identity has settled deep enough into your nervous system that your default reactions, impulses, and thoughts are now coming from the new operating system without you having to think about it. So, you stop saying you're becoming someone. You just are that person. The gap between what you intend and what you actually express closes on its own. Conversations start to feel different. 2:07:14 decisions come easier, things start showing up in your life, and you don't waste time questioning whether you deserve them or not. That's what embodiment actually looks like in practice. And for this to fully land, the old identity has to die. You have to starve it, right? You stop telling the old story. You stop rehearsing old limitations with people. You stop bonding with others over shared struggles that just keep reinforcing who you used to be. And there might be grief that comes with that, which is completely normal. You're letting go of something that's been familiar for a very long time, even if it was limiting you the whole way through. Feel the grief and just keep going. The old self leaves a gap when it goes. And the new self can fill that gap, not through effort or willpower, but just by being the one you've been choosing to feed this whole time. And once the new identity fully integrates, it holds. Like I said, your brain will fight to maintain it the same way it used to fight to maintain the old one. The same mechanisms that kept you stuck for years now keep you elevated. The 2:08:16 system works exactly the same way, just at a higher setting, which is the whole point. And this time, the difference is you've chosen it. That's the real foundation of all of this. Not goals, not habits, not strategies, identity. Everything else you build sits on top of it. And the deepest freedom you'll ever find in self-development is realizing that your identity was always a construction regardless. It was always editable. you just weren't told you had the editor open the whole time. So, with that said, let's go over the review. We talked about the overview. We talked about the authenticity trap, the program self, the constructed self, the review, and finally, your action items for the day or the next few days. First, take three beliefs you hold most highly and most tightly about yourself and trace each one back to where it actually came from. If the answer is that you've always been this way, that's not an answer. You can go further. Find the moment it was actually installed. You'll find it was most likely borrow. And then pick one new belief about yourself that 2:09:17 has zero evidence behind it yet and write it down. And then say it every day with real conviction behind it. And then act from it. And start collecting whatever scraps of micro proof show up that it might be true. Stack the evidence until the scale tips. Identify one pattern or one story or one environment that keeps reinforcing your old identity and then cut off its supply. Stop rehearsing it. Stop bringing it up. Stop giving it to your attention. The old self dies the moment you stop feeding. With that said, as I said in the beginning, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with this respective document, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, I hope this was valuable. If it was, let me know in the comments. Like the video, subscribe, and I'll see you next time. Thank you for being here. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see 2:10:16 from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how to create a self-image so powerful reality has to obey. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be discussing more specifically is first the overview itself, the unchosen verdict, assuming the new self, hardening the assumption, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. So without further ado, let's get started and talk about the unchosen verdict. So back in 2017, two Stanford researchers named Octavia Zart and Ali ran the kind of study that should honestly be way more famous than it is. They pulled together survey data on more than 60,000 adults and tracked what happened to them over the next two decades. And what they found pretty much flips how much most of us how most of us think about cause and effect. The whole thing hinged on one simple question that they asked people which was basically whether you'd say you're more active, less active, or about as active as others your age. And that was it. One 2:11:17 little self-rating. And notice that it's not asking what you actually do. It's not asking whether you are active. It's asking what you think about what you do. So people answered it casually the way you'd answer anything on a form. So nobody was performing or overthinking their reply. And that's what makes it so useful because it caught the real underlying belief. And then they looked at who was still alive years down the road. And the pattern was pretty hard to ignore. People who figured they were less active than their peers had a 71% higher risk of dying than the people who saw themselves as more active. It was the same span of years, but very different odds. Now, you'd think that this is just fit people outliving unfit people, plain and simple. But that's the twist. The effect held even after they accounted for how much everyone actually moved. So two people with the exact same activity, one who felt active and one who felt lazy, didn't get the same outcome, [snorts] which tells you the 2:12:17 belief itself was doing the real work, right? Not just reflecting the facts underneath it. The story these people told themselves about their own body somehow leaked into how those bodies aged and their self-image was rewriting their biology. And by the way, once again, we're talking tens of thousands of people followed for up to 21 years. When a pattern holds that steady across that many lives for that long, it almost reads like a law. Now, part of why these verdicts last so long is that they show up looking like objectivity. You don't experience I'm not the successful type as a belief. You experience it as just reading the room correctly. And that's the trick because a verdict you mistake for a fact is one that you'll never really think to question. And it always feels like you're just being honest with yourself, like you're the realist in the room who sees things clearly. But a lot of what we call clear honesty is really a conclusion we stopped examining. Honesty about the facts and loyalty to a 2:13:18 verdict feel identical from the inside. Worse, the verdict starts feeling like a core part of who you are. So questioning it feels almost like betraying yourself, almost like questioning yourself. And that's how it protects itself by hiding inside your sense of identity. You defend it like it's you when really it's just a habit of thought that you picked up. And there's even a strange comfort in the old verdict because at least it's familiar and it asks nothing new of you, right? A low opinion of yourself can feel safer than the risk of expecting more and getting let down. So we cling to it not because it's true, but because it's known. It's familiar. And sometimes it can even be comforting because it's familiar. But where did this verdict even come from? Because you almost certainly didn't author it. Most of these self-conclusions got installed young by people and moments that you actually barely remember and then you just kept renewing it. The first step to really dismantling it is to see that it 2:14:18 was handed to you rather than chosen by you. So, a throwaway comment from a parent or a teacher or a kid in the schoolyard and suddenly a verdict got planted and you've carried that for 10, 20, 30 years. And you absorbed it before you had any defense against it, before you even had any logical defense against it, let alone emotional. So, you believed whatever you were told about yourself at that time, and you've been obeying it ever since. And life seemed to basically repeat that lesson because now every stumble looks like proof that the verdict is right. So it got reinforced again and again until it felt carved in stone. But repetition of a lie just makes a familiar lie, not a true one. Right? And the freeing part is that an inherited verdict, an inherited self-image can be returned the same way you'd return something that was never really yours to begin with. You 2:15:19 don't owe loyalty to a conclusion the 10-year-old version of you accepted on bad evidence. The moment you realize you can actually hand it back, you're already halfway out. And nobody's coming to give you permission to think better of yourself, for example, right? Which means you have to grant it to yourself. And even if they did, even if people did give you permission, it wouldn't mean anything because ultimately deep down you're looking for that permission from yourself. So why does any of this matter to you sitting there watching this? Because the same quiet verdict is running underneath and everything else you do, right? And everything else in general. Think about the version of you that's filed yourself under bad with money. Like it's just a fixed fact about you. For example, right? That verdict then shapes which opportunities you even reach for, whether you even try to save money. You talk yourself out of rooms you're qualified to walk into. And it shows up as the email you don't send, the business you don't start, the raise you don't ask for, the person you don't ask 2:16:20 on a date, all of it justified as being realistic. But realism is often just an old self-image. You might rationalize it as caution when it's really a belief about who you are. And over time, that quiet, not the money type assumption, for example, becomes a ceiling that you stop noticing because you've lived under it for so long, it feels like the sky. And that's the assumption hardening into fact. Persist in it and life politely agrees. And watch closely and you'll catch the verdict wrecking things right when they start working because deep down it can't let you outgrow it. Right? This is your self-image. And you can't outgrow your self-image. You'll overspend. You'll underpric or you'll walk away from the good thing. All to keep the old story intact. And the belief would rather be right than let you win. And same thing happens in relationships where so many people carry a buried verdict that they're too much or somehow not enough. 2:17:23 Whatever you've decided about your own love ability tends to become true. And people feel the verdict you're broadcasting. Even when you say nothing, people can see what your self-image is. And people will look at how you treat yourself and treat you accordingly. And it steers who you chase, who you settle for, and who you write off as out of your league. And none of that feels like a belief in the moment. It just feels like the plain truth, right? But it's a choice you made once and you forgot you made it. And then and then life hands you experiences that seem to actually confirm the verdict, which only digs it in deeper. So the [clears throat] belief keeps feeding itself a steady diet of evidence. And that's the loop we're here to break. So underneath money and love sits the deepest one of all. The self-image about whether you're you're the kind of person things tend to work out for. And that 2:18:24 single assumption colors how you read every outcome in your life. Win or lose, you bend the meaning to fit the story you already hold. And two people get the exact same break. And one calls it luck while the other calls it the start of something. All based on the image underneath. So your self opinion is the lens. And the lens decides what you even see. And if you change the lens, the same life starts reading completely differently. And this is the master verdict, the master self-image, the one feeding the money story and the love story and all the rest. If you get this one wrong, it will poison everything downstream. If you get it right, the whole system starts to shift at once. So let's actually talk about assuming the new self. So if an opinion can move something as stubborn as your lifespan, then the obvious question is what happens when you change the op opinion on purpose. And this is where we start rebuilding. Seeing the pattern means nothing if you keep living 2:19:25 by the old one. The good news is you assigned the label in the first place which means you've got every right to reassign it and the first thing you need to do is to start catching the self-t talk in the act. Most of these opinions about yourself come out in moments where you barely notice them. They hide inside throwaway lines you say a 100 times a day without even paying attention. So you've got to start treating those lines as data. Listen for the little tells. The I'm just not discip I'm not I'm just not a disciplined person. The money's always been tight for people like me. The I always attract the wrong ones. Almost any sentence starting with a word I that functions as a description of yourself needs to be examined. And each one is a verdict pretending to be a fact. And every time you repeat it, you sign the renewal contract. So pay attention to how you c how casually you actually say them almost fondly like they're just part of your personality. And it's that casualness that is exactly what makes them so dangerous because you 2:20:27 never stop to question them. We defend the beliefs we've stopped noticing. And the more you've said a line, the more it feels settled and obvious, which is the trap. Familiarity gets mistaken for truth all the time. So the goal is to make the familiar feel strange again. And once you start hearing them, you can't unhear them. And that's the whole point of this step. You begin to notice the verdict casting its vote in real time right before you shrink back or play small. That gap between the thought and the action is really where your power is. And in that pause, you finally get a choice you didn't have before because the belief was invisible. Now it's on the table naked and you get to decide whether to keep it. So ask yourself if you actually chose this verdict or if you just inherited it and never returned it. Nine times out of 10 you'll find it was handed to you. And then comes the deliberate part where you consciously hand yourself a new verdict to live from. And no I'm not talking about some fake 2:21:28 positivity or chanting at the mirror. It's rather picking the self-image you're going to assume is true and [clears throat] operate from. So, same mechanism the study caught, just pointed somewhere better. And you don't wait to feel like a disciplined, capable, lovable person before you assume you are one. You assume it first and let the feeling catch up because that's the order it actually works in. So, carry yourself like it's just plain fact in how you speak and how you decide and how you show up. The body and the choices come into line with whatever self you're assuming. And that's the machinery the Stanford data exposed. Hold the same assumption across money, love, and work instead of only being confident in one area of your life. And you'll see how all of these areas start changing because a divided self-image leaks, right? You want the new fact running everywhere at once. And then get clear on the exact self you're assuming. Describe the person you're actually becoming. Write it down somewhere. And 2:22:30 the more detailed the picture, the easier it is to step into. and decide how this new self walks, talks, spends, and responds when things go sideways down to the small stuff. Because those details are going to be the costume you put on until it stops being a costume. And specifics are really what make the new identity feel real. And if you're a bit more creative or just want to play around with this, one thing you could do is to research how writers develop characters for their books. And you're essentially doing the same thing. You're describing a new character. you're going to be stepping into and treating it as a fact. But the most important thing that will make the new character feel real is that you've got to act from it before it feels true, not after. So behavior is the loudest voice you can cast for a new self-image. It's way louder than anything you tell yourself in your head. So you let the actions of the person you're becoming come first, and you let the feeling arrive late. 2:23:32 And every time you behave like the version of you you're embodying, you hand your own mind a piece of evidence it can't easily dismiss. And the belief starts having a track record. And a self-image with receipts is a lot harder to argue with. So it will feel fake and uncomfortable at first, which is exactly the sign that you're actually doing it right. Because the old self is supposed to protest. That friction isn't a warning to stop. It really It's just the gap between who you were and who you're assuming you are. So, you need to push through it enough times and then the new self will stop feeling borrowed. And then one day you act from the new verdict without having to force it. And that's when you know it's taking root. Each aligned action makes [clears throat] the next one easier and the old self quieter. Now, what you rehearse in imagination is also what you're quietly assuming is true. So before you can act from the new self, it can help to live a scene of it 2:24:32 in your mind vividly as if it already happened. So pick a short simple scene that would only be real if the new self were already true. Like a friend congratulating you or a glance in the mirror that finally feels right. And then just run it again and again and again until it feels natural and lived in. And try to incorporate all five senses. and you're not picturing the future. You're remembering it forward. So keep in mind, one vivid run is not really enough. The same way one healthy meal doesn't make you healthy. So you need to return to the scene daily until it feels more true than the doubt. And persistence in the visualization is just persistence in the assumption. So what you're really doing here is changing who you believe you are, not just what you're trying to get. Goals chase outcomes, but identity changes the person the outcomes happen too. And life tends to deliver to the person. For 2:25:34 example, when you assume you're the type that works out and eats healthy, you start working out and eating healthy and the results follow. The outcomes you're after arrive because your behavior has changed and your behavior has changed because the self underneath it has changed. That's how a belief becomes a life. And you also start reading events through the new self-image. So a setback becomes a detour instead of more proof that you're doomed. Same event, totally different meaning. Totally different next action. The story you hold decides what the moment means. Like Tony Robbins says, change your story, change your life. So people respond to the self you're assuming because they're reading the self-image you carry. If you walk in as the new self, the room treats treats you accordingly and people treat you accordingly. Your self-image leaks out of everything you say or do. And when you show people how you treat yourself, they're going to trust you that you should be treated that way. And they're going to treat you that way, too. So, 2:26:37 with that said, let's talk about hardening the assumption. So, a new self-image that shows up for one afternoon and then fades by dinner changes absolutely nothing, right? and it doesn't change it in your body or anywhere else for that matter. The whole idea is really holding the assumption long enough that it starts feeling like a fact. So remember the study tracked people for up to 21 years which is a brutal but useful reminder of how this really works. So these verdicts didn't shape lives in a weekend, right? They did it through years of quiet repetition. So you have to respect the the time scale that belief actually runs on. And that means you keep assuming the new self even when life hasn't caught up yet because the lag is normal. The old self-image took years to harden. So you need to give the new one room to do the same. Rushing it is how people quit right before it actually starts working. And you're essentially trusting a result you can't see yet, which is the hardest kind of trust there is. But that's 2:27:39 literally what persistence in an assumption means. Hold it before the proof, not after. And if you find this hard, keep in mind you already do this all the time. You already trust invisible outcomes all day long without calling it faith. You board a plane trusting an engine that you've never inspected yourself. You swallow a pill trusting chemistry that you can't see really working inside you. And you leave your money in a bank trusting a number on a screen. So the capacity is already in you. And you're really doing all you're really doing now is applying that same trust to your own self-image. So say the new verdict, live the new verdict, decide from the new verdict over and over until it's automatic. Repetition is what moved the needle in the data. And that's what will it will what will move it for you. Boring maybe, but that's the mechanism. Now, one thing to watch out for is the slow slide back. So the old self-image doesn't leave easily. It waits. Under stress especially, you'll feel yourself 2:28:39 reaching for the familiar self-image like an old coat. So, you need to catch the drift early and steer back before it grabs a hold of you. And when you notice you've slipped, you don't beat yourself up because if you do, you're really just hardening the old self-image. You just calmly reassign the new self-image again. The skill isn't about never slipping up because it's impossible. It's a coming back to your choice fast, to what you choose fast. Every return makes the new self a little more default. And one thing most people skip is that you don't have to hold the new self-image on willpower alone. You can stack your surroundings to do the some of the work, right? The voices you listen to, the people you sit with, the inputs you feed yourself, all of them brainwash you for one self-image or another. So you want to build a world that keeps reminding you of the new you, even on the days you forget. And be honest about what you're actually letting in. A steady diet of doom and 2:29:42 people like us never make it will undoubtedly sabotage you the whole way. And what you consume becomes what you assume more than we like to admit. So curate the inputs and you protect the belief. And treat your attention like a diet. Since your mind is basically digesting everything you feed it, swap the inputs that put you down for the ones that confirm the new self. And over weeks, that change in mental diet will also show up as a change in self-image. And the company you keep matters even more. And I've said this many times, but other people reflect a version of you back at you constantly. So spend enough time around people who see you as the new self and that reflection starts feeling normal. Surround yourself with the right mirrors and the verdict almost holds itself. And notice who pulls you back towards the old story and who calls the new self forward because both of those types of people are shaping you. You become the average of the opinions the people 2:30:44 around you hold about you. So choose your mirrors on purpose. And here's a little practice that punches way above its weight, which is using the drowsy minutes right before sleep to plant the new self-image. In that soft half asleep state, your guard is down and suggestions sink in deeper than they do all day. And Neville Goddard called something close to this the most fertile ground there is. And I think he's right. So, as you drift off, hold the new self. Maybe a short visualization or a single mantra that you just say as if it's already true. Just let it be the last thing your mind is actually holding. Because whatever you fall asleep assuming tends to get a little more hardened by the morning. And if you do it one night, it's nothing. But if you do it every night, it becomes a slow, steady drip that puts the new self-image into place. And it's almost effortless, which is exactly why people underrate it. But if you stack enough nights like this, you will wake up as some someone slightly new. Now once the assumption holds steady in one area, you'll feel it 2:31:45 want to spread and you should let it. And the same patient repetition that reshaped how you see your discipline will start reshaping your money, your love, and your self-worth, too. It's one self-image underneath all of them. So strengthening it anywhere strengthens it everywhere. So confidence you build in your work quietly bleeds into how you show up in your relationships because it's the same you. And that's the upside of a unified self-image. The winds compound across your whole life. One self, many rooms. In each area that starts agreeing with a new self makes the next one easier to convince. So proof stacks and the assumption gets harder to shake. And that's the loop working for you now instead of against you. And eventually the new self stops needing constant defense because life keeps handing you evidence for it. It settles into the background the way the old one used to. And that's exactly when it's truly yours. So, with that said, let's cover the review. We covered the overview, the unchosen verdict, assuming 2:32:46 the new self, hardening the assumption, the review, and finally your action items for the day or the next few days. First, spend one full day hunting the self-image you've been carrying across money, love, and worth, and write down every casual line you catch yourself repeating. Then pick the new self- image you're going to assume as true. And then start carrying yourself from that today before you feel ready and before the proof shows up. And then finally, run a short vivid scene of the new self every night as you fall asleep. Return to it fast every time you drift and hold it long enough that life finally starts agreeing with it. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, let me know. If you want to work with me oneonone, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. Again, if you want this document along with this training, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next 2:33:46 one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how the people you hate are a reflection of you. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the invisible rule book, the opposite lens, selective integration, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description if you want this training along with its respective document. Make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the invisible rule book. So, I want to start with something you've probably experienced many times, which is you meet somebody and one trait in them bothers you far more than it seems to bother everyone else. Maybe they talk 2:34:43 openly about their wins. Maybe they say no without explaining themselves. Maybe they care a lot about money or ask directly for what they want. Or maybe they take up a lot of space in conversations. Or maybe they seem unusually comfortable disappointing people. And you don't just notice it, you judge it. And there's heat behind the judgment as well. So the first thing I want you to separate is ordinary dislike from disproportionate judgment. You can dislike someone being late because it wastes your time, right? And there may be nothing deeper to examine than that. But when a behavior does very little direct harm to you and still produces a long internal argument about why respectable people should never act that way, I would pay attention because your reaction may be telling you something about one of your own rules. And that doesn't mean every judgment is secretly projection. And I don't [clears throat] want to turn this into a cheap trick where every irritating person becomes a teacher by definition. But some behavior really is dishonest or cruel or careless or selfish. Right? But 2:35:46 the useful clue is disproportion. If the emotional charge that it generates in you seems larger than the actual consequence or you keep thinking about the person long after the interaction ended, there may be more information in the reaction than you first assumed. So for example, arrogant may actually mean willing to talk openly about their accomplishments. Selfish may mean willing to prioritize personal needs. Greedy may mean comfortable wanting more money. Difficult may mean willing to disagree. Cold may mean willing to say no without producing a long explanation. So once you get specific, you can actually notice that there might be a useful capacity and it becomes easier to see. And what I've noticed is that every strong moral judgment that you repeatedly make about other people can become a restriction on your own behavior. So if you believe people who talk about their success are obnoxious, you'll hesitate when it's your turn to talk about your work. If you believe ambitious people are greedy, you may start policing your own ambition. If you believe people who set boundaries are selfish, you'll keep saying yes after 2:36:46 you already know what that you want to say no. And a lot of these rules are actually inherited. And the difficult part is that inherited rules rarely feel inherited. They feel moral. and you experience humility, generosity, politeness, loyalty or restraint while the same rule may also keep you from stating your own value or asking clearly or protecting your time or disagreeing honestly or pursuing a larger goal. So you experience the restrict character essentially and Carl Young gave us an idea for this problem through his idea of the shadow and this is where his work becomes a bit more useful than the watered down idea that whatever annoys you is secretly you. So in memories, dreams, reflections, while writing about the difficulty of seeing our own national and psychological pecularities from inside them, he actually arrives at the line everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. [snorts] And the word can specifically matters. Young isn't really saying that every criticism is false or every irritating trait 2:37:47 belongs to you in exactly the same form. He is pointing towards the possibility that another person can reveal something about your own psychology precisely because they create enough friction to make an invisible rule visible. So in simple terms, you build an identity partly by deciding what you are and what you're not. Right? And the traits you reject don't simply disappear because you rejected them. You still notice them. You still react to them. So sometimes the person who embodies one of those traits affects you so strongly because they're actually displaying a capacity that you've taught yourself never to use. yet you secretly want. So imagine you've spent years building your self-image around being easygoing or humble or selfless or reasonable or maybe lowmaintenance. Those qualities might genuinely matter to you and at the same time your identity can become so that assertiveness feels aggressive. Visibility feels vain. Desire maybe feels greedy. Refusal feels selfish. Confidence feels arrogant. And you haven't merely chosen values at that point. You've also removed whole categories of behavior from what you 2:38:47 allow yourself to do. So identity operates at a different level from a single behavior. For example, if you merely dislike one sales tactic, you can choose another tactic. But if you believe a person like you should not sell, should not promote themselves, then the restriction reaches much further. Right now every behavior associated with visibility has to pass through an identity test before you can even consider whether a behavior would help. And that creates a strange kind of internal conflict. You can consciously want the outcome and still reject the behavior that produces it. You might want more clients while not allowing yourself to promote your work. You might want stronger relationships while condemning vulnerability. And you might want more freedom while condemning boundaries. So from the outside it can look like procrastination or a lack of discipline, but underneath it you may simply be refusing the traits your goal actually requires. And Young also wrote about projection where material you haven't fully recognized in yourself can shape what you perceive in somebody else. So William James gives us also a useful bridge here from depth psychology 2:39:49 into the psychology of attention. In the principles of psychology, he writes, "My experience is what I agree to attend to." And so James was talking about selective attention. But the connection here is important because the judgment doesn't merely tell you what exists in front of you. It also tells you what your mind selected, emphasized, and treated as important. So a better question is whether the trait you're condemning contains a useful capacity that you've made unavailable to yourself. So take somebody who irritates you because let's say they promote themselves constantly. You may be completely right that they exaggerate or maybe they dominate attention or they turn every conversation back towards themselves. And one, have you actually examined why any of those seem bad to you? And two, none of that stops you from asking whether they also possess a willingness to be seen that you lack. Right? You can reject the exaggeration and still study the visibility. And those become separate judgments once you learn to separate the trait from the way that the person expresses it. And being able to distinguish between these things is 2:40:49 important because otherwise you're forced into a false choice. Either you stay exactly as you are or you become the person you dislike. Of course, you're going to resist when those seem like the only two options. Once you separate the capacity from the expression, you get a third option. You can keep your values and [clears throat] expand your range at the same time. And so this becomes extremely useful when you look at what your judgments actually cost you. So a rule against selling yourself can reduce how often you share useful work. A rule against asking for help can make your needs harder for other people to understand. A rule against becoming rich can actually affect what you charge. A rule against selfishness can make boundaries feel morally wrong. And a rule against conflict can make you agreeable to the point where you completely lose yourself. So I wouldn't ask only which traits annoy you. I would also ask which outcomes keep failing because you've prohibited the behavior that would improve them. And every rule needs a boundary because the same principle can 2:41:50 help in one context and hurt in another. So for example, a rule like be humble may work beautifully when it stops you from exaggerating your importance. However, the same rule stops helping when your humility becomes invisibility and you can't really put food on the table because that rule goes against the concept of actually marketing yourself. Be generous, for example, can improve a relationship. But the same principle becomes destructive when generosity means never having a limit to how much you actually give. So good rules still need boundaries. So a useful strength can also produce the opposite result when you push it too far. Modesty can become self- eraser, right? Hiding yourself from the world and not giving it your gift. Essentially, patience can become avoidance. Loyalty can become tolerance. Independence can become an inability to receive help. The problem usually starts when you turn a useful principle into an absolute identity rule. And so the question I want you thinking about in the next section is very simple. What useful behavior have you made unavailable because you associated it with a person that you never wanted to become? Once you can 2:42:52 answer that, the judgment becomes information that we can work with. So let's talk about the opposite lens. So the method I use for this is something I call the opposite lens. You take one judgment that carries real emotional charge. You name the exact trait underneath it and then you build the strongest honest case that you can for the useful opposite position. Now, I'm not telling you to force yourself to admire the person because you aren't pretending the behavior has no downside, but you're testing whether your current rule is too absolute by essentially giving the other side space to make an argument by not rejecting it immediately by being slightly more open-minded. But keep in mind, a weak counterargument will change absolutely nothing. So if you believe self-promotion is bad and you write one sentence saying maybe promotion is sometimes useful, you haven't really challenged the rule. So you need to steel man the other side. Build the version that a thoughtful person who disagrees with you would recognize as fair. Explain why visibility can serve the audience, why useful work needs needs distribution, 2:43:54 why hiding can deprive people of something that would genuinely help them, for example. So Charlie Mer actually turned this kind of deliberate opposition into a standard for thinking. In poor Charlie's Almanac, he says, "I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do." And that's a standard, right? Because it's unusually demanding. And that's exactly why it belongs here. Most of us can produce reasons for what we already believe almost indefinitely, right? The opposite lens asks you to do the harder intellectual work and make the case you've spent years avoiding until the other side sounds like something an intelligent person could actually believe. And Charles Darwin had already built a version of the same safeguard into his scientific life. In his autobiography, he describes what he called his golden rule of immediately recording facts and observations that opposed his conclusions because, as he put it, contrary facts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones. Now, keep in mind, most of us collect facts and observations that 2:44:56 actually support our beliefs. He did the exact opposite. So, a strong mind can become better at defending whatever it started with. So, he created a practice that forced this confirming information to remain available, which is exactly what you're going to be doing when you build the strongest case for a trade you've spent years condemning. Now, however, I do want to emphasize the word honest, because this exercise will fail if you secretly make the opposing position kind of ridiculous. If your rule is that saying no is selfish, for example, don't defend some exaggerated version where you essentially ignore everyone and care only about yourself. Defend the strongest, best version of the trait. Right? Let's say you think some people are selfish because they can easily say no without explaining themselves. A clean no can prevent resentment. It can protect promises you already made. It can make your yes more credible because people know you're capable of actually saying no and refusing. So once the opposite case becomes reasonable, your original rule will lose some of its absolute authority. Now the useful move here is really to increase resolution because 2:45:58 you don't need to replace one rigid belief with its opposite, right? You're trying to increase resolution instead of selfish versus selfless. You begin seeing healthy self-interest, exploitation, generosity, martyrdom, reciprocity, boundaries, and context as different things. You have more distinctions, and more distinctions give you more choices. You start seeing the full spectrum of the trait. And choice is the real goal, right? You don't need to permanently become more assertive, for example. You do, however, need access to assertiveness when the situation calls for it. Right? You don't need to become boastful, but you do, however, need access to visibility. So, the lens works when a trait stops feeling morally unavailable and becomes something you can use when the situation calls for. So, if you're wondering why this changes anything, the simplest answer is that you're breaking the link between a behavior and the meaning you're automatically attached to it. In 1960, Peter Wson published on the failure to eliminate hypothesis in a conceptual task. A study that was basically 2:46:59 designed to see whether people would actively test possibilities that could prove their own hypothesis wrong. And the pattern he found was pretty uncomfortable to say the least because many participants kept searching for confirming instances instead of trying to eliminate their theory. And Darwin had noticed the same vulnerability in himself and Munger later turned the answer into essentially a rule. So the thread running through all three is very simple. Your mind doesn't automatically give opposing interpretations equal treatment. Now before the opposite lands, promoting yourself may equal arrogance in your mind. Asking for help might equal weakness. Rest might equal laziness. Wanting money might be equivalent to greed. But once you force yourself to build a serious case for another interpretation, the behavior can carry more than one meaning. And [snorts] that gives you enough psychological room to choose it without feeling that you've betrayed your identity. So, Epictitus said, "Men are disturbed not by things but by the views which they take of things." And that means your reaction depends partly on the meaning you assign to what happened. The same behavior can carry very 2:48:00 different meanings depending on the belief and identity surrounding it. So, the same action can mean very different things depending on the belief around it. Two people can both say no to an invitation and one does it because they don't care about anyone else. The other does it because they already committed their time somewhere more important. So if you collapse both actions into selfishness, you lose the ability to judge behavior by context. So when you work through the opposite lens, move through the levels deliberately. Start with the behavior itself. Ask what the person is literally doing and then examine the belief you attached to the behavior. Then examine what performing the behavior would imply about your own identity. And most of the emotional charge tends to become clearer once you see which level actually carries most of the feeling around it. For example, imagine you avoid talking about your accomplishments. The behavior is pretty simple. You don't share them, right? The belief might be that good people let results speak for themselves. The identity rule might be that you're a humble person and humble people never draw attention to themselves. Once you 2:49:00 separate those levels, you can keep humility as a value while changing the behavior and the belief. And at this point, you need to force the idea into observable behavior. So don't judge whether the exercise worked by how intellectually elegant your new argument sounds. Look at what becomes easier after you've done it. Can you now name your price without overexlaining it? Can you actually take a compliment without adding three sentences to minimize your value? Can you decline something without inventing a false excuse? Like the first sign is reduced friction. A behavior that once felt morally wrong might start feeling merely uncomfortable now. And discomfort is pretty trainable. A moral rule on the other hand is much harder to cross. So you're trying to move the action from I can't be this kind of person towards I can choose this behavior when it serves the situation and when it serves me and then test the new interpretation in real life. If you argue that clean boundaries can improve relationships, then use one boundary and actually observe what actually happens. If you argue that promoting yourself can be useful, then share your work. You might make more money as a result, by 2:50:00 the way. So you're collecting real evidence now and real evidence can update the rule. And this isn't to say that if a trait triggers you, it automatically makes the trait good. And it certainly doesn't mean you should copy the person who triggered you. Obviously, human behavior has context. Your judgment can contain projection and still contain accurate perception and truth at the same time. So the question should be, what useful capacity might be hidden inside the trait I dislike? If somebody lies confidently, for example, the capacity isn't lying, right? It may be composure under pressure. If somebody dominates every conversation, the capacity isn't domination. It may be willingness to speak without editing every sentence. If somebody seems selfish, the capacity may be actually protecting their own priorities. You extract the useful cap capability only. And your values still matter. In fact, this method works better when you keep them. You're trying to stop confusing a value with one narrow behavioral expression of that value. So, imitation copies the surface. Integration understands the function and once you 2:51:00 understand what problem the trait solves, you can actually solve the same problem in a way that fits your standards, your values, your personality and the situation in front of you. So with that said, let's actually talk about selective integration. So once you identify a trait and loosen the rule around it, don't ask yourself how to become more like the person you dislike, but rather what specific capacity they have access to that you currently struggle to use. Because capacities are trainable. Personalities are way too broad. And you can train directness, self-promotion, refusal, ambition, patience, warmth, detachment, or even decisiveness without rebuilding your identity around somebody else. And like I mentioned earlier, a simple way to find the useful capacity is to ask what problem the trait solves when it works well. So self-promotion obviously solves obscurity. Assertiveness solves unclear expectations. Boundaries solve over commitment. Ambition creates direction and purpose. Right? Confidence can 2:52:01 reduce hesitation. Once you understand the function itself, you can actually design your own version of the behavior. And this protects you from the most common mistake, which is treating the trait as one indivisible package. For example, the loud person may combine confidence with poor listening. Confidence is useful. Poor listening, not really. Right? You don't need a whole package. You're looking for one capability that currently sits outside of your normal range. Integration should still look like you. So you take the function and express it in your own style and then you use the smallest dose. So for example, if you avoid visibility, you just publish or share something, anything, just one thing. The point is to basically produce an experience your old rule didn't predict. And I don't know if you've noticed, but every rule we make for ourselves carries this kind of implicit forecast. So if I say no, people will reject me. If I charge more, people will think I'm greedy. If I promote myself, people will think I'm desperate. If I rest, I'll 2:53:01 become lazy. You can argue with those predictions forever, but eventually you need to just test them. Action gives you data that thought alone can't give you. And so when reality differs from the forecast, actually pay attention to it, right? If you say no and the relationship turns out completely fine, that's important to notice, right? If you name the real price and the other person either buys or at the very least reacts exactly the same as people reacted to the old price, that's pretty useful information. You just broke a limiting belief. If you share your work and somebody thanks you for it, it's absolutely amazing, right? None of these scenarios are impossible. They will happen and you're essentially giving your mind new evidence about what the behavior means and what actually happens when you use it. And over time, I'd measure progress by actual behavioral change. So you want more ways to respond to life, not one new personality that replaces the old one. A [snorts] mature person can be warm and firm, ambitious and ethical, generous and have boundaries, confident and coachable or teachable, patient and decisive. The 2:54:02 point is flexibility. You can keep your values while gaining access to behaviors that your old identity once prohibited. And many traits only look incompatible because you've defined them too crudely. Humility and self-promotion can coexist, right? Kindness and confrontation can coexist. Two things can be true at the same time. Black and white thinking is called a heristic/bias for a reason. So character adds one more filter. The question isn't only whether a trait gets results. Ask whether you can use the capacity in a way that aligns with your values. You want the useful strength governed by character. So I I would also review your strongest judgments periodically because your reactions will change as you change. A trait that once enraged you may stop carrying much charge after you integrate its useful part. Another trait may suddenly become visible because you've grown into a new set of goals. So, your blind spots change with your circumstances. And look, this isn't something you have to do every day or every time someone irritates you. However, if you do notice a disproportionate reaction to someone 2:55:04 in yourself, I would get curious and just journal about it. Like, why does this person make you so irritated? Why do they have the power to make you so emotional? Why are they living in your head rentree? And keep the review simple. Write down the person, the exact behavior, the label you gave it, the useful capacity underneath it, the rule you may be enforcing on yourself, and one clean behavior you can actually test. And that will give you enough structure to think about it without turning it into an endless project. And then actually try to implement it and watch for concrete change in your behavior. And that's basically it. And this is the larger point I want to leave you with, which is that the person who irritates you may still be wrong, quote unquote, whatever that means. They may still behave quote unquote badly. You don't need to romanticize them, but your reaction can still contain information about you. And once you understand that, judgment becomes way more useful because you can actually examine it before obeying it. And some of the traits you've spent years condemning might actually contain capacities you now need for the next stage of your life. How sad 2:56:05 would it be if you never actually explore them just because of some preconceived notions? So you don't have to admire the person to learn from the information your reaction produced. That process also makes your values genuinely yours. Right? A value that survives examination become stronger because you chose it after seeing the alternative. And a rule that falls apart after scrutinizing it was probably never as fundamental as it felt. Either outcome helps. you become clearer about what you actually believe and more capable of actually acting on it. And so the trait you hate is not absolutely always the trait you need. That would be too simple. The more useful idea is that the trait you hate may contain a capacity you need, especially when your reaction is disproportionate and repetitive and connected to an area where you keep feeling stuck. So your job is to find the capacity, remove the moral prohibition around it, and learn how to express it without becoming the person you judged. And who knows, you might end up understanding the person and maybe even liking them. So, with that said, 2:57:06 let's go over the review. We talked about the overview, the invisible rule book, the opposite lens, selective integration, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, for the next few days, notice the moments when somebody's behavior creates more emotional charge than the situation seems to justify. Then, write down the person, the exact behavior, and the label you immediately gave it. And just stay specific. Don't write arrogant if what you actually mean is talks openly about accomplishments because precision is what lets you find the useful capacity underneath the judgment. Then choose one recurring judgment and run it through the opposite lens. Build the strongest honest case you can for the useful version of that trait, including the problems it can solve and the situations where it becomes valuable. And then keep going until the opposite position feels genuinely reasonable, even if you still prefer your original value or style. And then finally, identify one clean capacity inside the trait and test it in a small real situation. Pay attention to what actually happens because the goal is to replace an inherited prediction with 2:58:07 evidence you actually gathered yourself. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching. As always, if you want to work with me oneonone, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with this respective document, then make sure to join the free community again from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description or the first pinned comment. With that said, once again, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be talking about today is identity integrity. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself. identity, coherence, behavioral proof, standards and selfrust, identity under pressure, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one- on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you 2:59:04 want this training along with its respective document, make sure to join the free community again from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about identity coherence. So before we talk about how to actually make your identity stronger, I want to separate two things that sound similar because I think this is where a lot of identity work gets confused. So you can create a new identity very quickly, right? You can decide that you're becoming more disciplined, ambitious, confident, healthy, focused, patient, whatever it is, you can write it down tonight and start acting differently tomorrow. However, that doesn't automatically give you a strong identity. A strong identity takes longer because your mind needs enough clarity, consistency, and real experience to trust that this description of you actually means something. And so, you can see this when you feel completely certain about yourself for a few days and then one bad 3:00:04 result changes your whole opinion of yourself. You felt strong because the identity felt intense. You had motivation, emotion, and conviction behind it. But then reality changed and the conviction disappeared with it. And so intensity tells you how strongly you feel something right now. But it doesn't really tell you how stable that identity will remain across different situations. So I would define a strong identity in a more useful way. You know who you are. You can explain what that means in behavior. Your life repeatedly gives you evidence for that understanding. And normal changes in your mood or circumstances don't cause you to completely reinterpret yourself. And you can still learn and change your mind. You just don't recreate your entire self-concept every time something goes wrong. And if you want one simple model uh to keep in your head throughout this training, think in four parts. You need clarity about who you are. You need evidence from how you actually behave. You need standards that make the 3:01:04 identity practically meaningful. And you need delusional stability when life gives you information you don't like. So clarity, evidence, standards, and delusional stability. Now, you could have enormous clarity with no evidence and end up fantasizing about yourself. You can have evidence with no clear identity and fail to integrate what you've accomplished. You can have standards with no stability and abandon them after very small setbacks. You can have stability with no willingness to update and become rigid. and you need the whole structure. So there's actually a useful term for the first part in the of this in psychology called self-concept clarity. And Jennifer Campbell and her colleagues use the term for the degree to which people hold their beliefs about themselves clearly and confidently with internal consistency and stability over time. And that's important because notice what they're actually measuring, right? They're not asking whether you think highly of yourself, but rather whether you actually know what you think about 3:02:05 yourself and whether that understanding stays reasonably coherent. And so you need to get specific. You need to decide what kind of person you're trying to become and what that means in observable terms. So if you call yourself disciplined, you need to define what disciplined people actually do. So you need to get clear on your terms. If you call yourself honest, you need to define the situation uh or situations where honesty is important. If you call yourself ambitious, then you need to define the behavior that makes the word true. And so vague language lets you preserve any self-image you want without actually testing it. You can call yourself hardworking while consistently avoiding the hardest work. Right? You can call yourself confident while arranging your entire life to actually avoid rejection. The clearer your definition becomes, the easier it becomes to compare your self- description with what you actually do. And you also need to look for contradictions inside the identity itself. For example, you might think of yourself as independent while constantly needing reassurance. Or you say you 3:03:08 value freedom while building a life around commitments that you actually hate or resent. So you don't need perfect consistency because human beings are complicated. But if you completely contradict yourself repeatedly, that creates a lot of confusion about who you actually believe you are. So write down the five to 10 qualities you want your identity to contain and then ask what each quality requires from you. And after that just look at where two of those qualities conflict. So you need to decide how you want to handle those conflicts before random circumstances make the decision for you. And this is where we can go a little deeper because you don't really experience yourself as a random list of traits, right? You connect your values, your memories, your choices, your goals, your relationships, your habits and beliefs into some kind of an understandable hole. And William James was writing about the breadth of the self all the way back in 1890 when he argued that what we experience as self extends beyond private thoughts into the things, relationships, reputation, and work we experience as 3:04:10 ours. So your identity therefore gets stronger when more parts of your life tell the same story. So start looking for alignment across areas that people normally separate. So your calendar says something about you. Your spending says something about you. Your body says something about you. The work you repeatedly produce or do says something about you. Your friendships, your environment, your speech, and the way you respond when something becomes inconvenient all contribute information. And so you need enough agreement between them that your identity stops depending entirely on what you tell yourself. And this is why I like the word integrity here. I mean integrity in the older sense of wholeness and consistency. Your words and actions start agreeing more often. Your private standards and public behavior start agreeing more often. The person you describe and the person somebody could infer from just watching your life start getting closer together. And that agreement gives the identity substance. You also need to integrate 3:05:10 the parts of yourself that don't fit the ideal version perfectly. A strong identity can include the fact that you procrastinate sometimes, right? Or that you become insecure or that you make bad decisions or that you lose motivation or act below your standards. So you don't need to pretend those things never happen. They do and they will happen after all. So you need an interpretation of them that preserves accuracy without turning every weakness into your entire identity. And this is very important, right? The failures we have only become descriptive of our identities or our characters if we let them. And so you need to say things accurately and objectively. If you miss several workouts, all it tells you is that you miss several workouts. All it tells you is something about your recent behavior. It doesn't automatically tell you that you're fundamentally incapable of discipline. So you don't need to turn one local fact into a global conclusion about your character. Right? Now there's also one more piece here because clarity 3:06:11 can become dangerous if you confuse consistency with never changing your mind. That's not what I mean. A strong identity should actually make revision easier because you don't need every old belief to survive in order to feel like the same person. So you can discover that one of your goals was actually wrong or that you don't want it anymore or that one of your values was actually inherited from someone else and it's not something you really value or one of your self-escriptions was inaccurate. Then you can change it deliberately. And I think one of the best tests is asking whether your identity helps you see yourself more accurately or merely helps you feel better or worse about yourself. Sometimes those overlap, sometimes they don't. So you need enough self-respect to interpret yourself generously and enough honesty to notice when your behavior keeps contradicting the description. So build an identity you can respect and believe at the same time. And don't choose the smallest description that your past can already prove because then nothing really changes. Don't choose a description so disconnected from your behavior that you 3:07:12 know you're performing for yourself. But rather choose a demanding identity, something that is just above your reach right now. and then start creating the evidence that makes it increasingly true. So let's talk about behavioral proof. So once you've made the identity clear, you run into the second problem. Your mind eventually asks for proof or at least some kind of confirmation that the identity is real or at the very least that it has potential. And you can repeat a description of yourself hundreds of times and that might influence your attention or expectations and behavior, but you still live with the record of what you actually do. And that record is important. So if you constantly call yourself disciplined while your behavior repeatedly says avoidance, then you're asking yourself to trust trust something that keeps changing and something that you keep contradicting. And so psychologist Daryl Wem actually gives us a useful way to think about this through self-perception theory. So his basic argument was that 3:08:12 when our internal states feel unclear, we sometimes infer what we think or feel by observing our own behavior. So when we don't know exactly how we feel internally, we actually start looking outside of us at our selves essentially uh and observing our own behavior to figure out how we actually feel. So we infer what we think or feel by observing our own behavior much like we would infer something about another person by watching what they do. So by watching the behavior of someone else, we can figure out if they're sad or angry or happy, etc. And sometimes we do the same to ourselves. That means that your actions can function as information about you too. And this is what he said. Individuals come to know their own attitudes, emotions, and other internal states partially by inferring them from observations of their own overt behavior andor the circumstances in which this behavior occurs. So if you think about that, identity work starts looking a 3:09:14 little different. Every meaningful action becomes a piece of self-nowledge. And when you do the difficult work you said you would do, you learn something. When you avoid it again, you learn something too. So your mind doesn't need to consciously narrate the lesson every time. Repeated behavior makes some self-descriptions easier to believe and others harder. And this is why behavior needs to carry as much weight as affirmations once you know the direction you want to move in. So use language to choose the identity, but use behavior to substantiate it. So you should absolutely speak to yourself in ways that support the person you're becoming, but you also need to give those words a growing history behind them. So as you can see from the image, what you do turns into an observation. So I keep doing X, which then turns into you inferring information about yourself. So I must be X. And then it turns into self-perception. This is who I am. So make the proof small enough that you can actually produce it frequently. So if 3:10:15 you want to become someone who writes then write. If you want to become someone who trains consistently then train. If you want to become someone who keeps commitments then start keeping commitments. It's those repeated behavior whose meaning is clear that create that identity or that allow you to infer information about yourself. And so Albert Bandura's work on self-efficacy focused on people's beliefs about whether they can actually execute the actions needed for a particular result. And he actually identified previous successful performance as one of the major sources of those beliefs. So you look at your own previous successful performance to find out if you can actually do something. And these successful experiences are often called mastery experiences. you believe you can do something more easily after you've actually done it, even if it was just once. And I want you to notice the order here because people often reverse it, right? They wait until they fully believe in themselves before de demanding difficult behavior from themselves. And while that can work and 3:11:16 you can work on changing your beliefs and limiting beliefs, a lot of the times it might be just easier if you just start acting regardless and basically let belief catch up. And so in many cases you need some behavior first. You act while the belief is actually incomplete. You survive the discomfort. You produce a result. And now your next attempt begins with more evidence than the first one did. And that gives you a much more valuable form of confidence. You're no longer essentially trying to feel certain because you've convinced yourself that failure is impossible, but rather you feel more capable because you've repeatedly handled situations that used to make you doubt yourself. And the confidence has a history which then gives your mind something concrete to actually reference to. And this also changes how you should choose challenges. So if everything is too easy, you get very little information about your ability and capacity and your ability to handle difficulty. If everything is impossibly hard, you may keep collecting experiences of failure without ever developing the capabilities 3:12:18 you actually need and the capacity you need. So choose work that requires something from you but still gives you a realistic chance to actually follow through and for you to actually complete. And this is also one of the most reliable ways to actually enter flow in anything you do. It's the challenge. And the challenge needs to stretch your current ability just enough to demand your full attention without actually exceeding it so dramatically that you become overwhelmed and you completely leave it. So you need to increase the demand as your evidence grows. Don't start with humongous demand. Don't start with a task that requires a much bigger capacity from you. Start with something that you can actually meet and then from there just increase it just a little bit so you reach for it so that it's just a bit outside of your comfort zone. And here's where this becomes also interesting over time. One action rarely changes your identity much because one action has too many possible explanations. So you worked hard once because you were excited, for example. That could be 3:13:19 easily explained if it just happens one time. You can always attribute it to something that happens. You trained once because you had time. You said no once because you were angry. So you set a boundary in an angry state. That's a bit easier than when you're not angry, right? And repetition removes more of those alternative explanations. Eventually, the pattern becomes just harder to dismiss. So you should actively collect that evidence, especially while you're changing because your mind has a strong tendency to remember information that fits familiar interpretations. And so don't assume you'll automatically notice every sign of progress. At the end of the day or week, either recall or write down specific behaviors that support the identity you're actually building, like what did you actually do? And if you're building discipline, record the commitments you kept. If you're building courage, then record the uncomfortable actions you took. If you're building patience, then record the moments where you slowed down and where you were patient. You need enough 3:14:21 concrete evidence that your mind can't honestly say nothing is really changing. And over time, just start weighing these patterns more heavily than isolated moments. So, if you trained four times this week and skipped one session, you have mathematically and objectively more evidence for consistency than inconsistency. So stop saying you're inconsistent just because you missed one session. If you avoided every difficult task and completed one easy task, that's a bit of a different pattern, right? In that case, maybe you need to work harder. So look at the distribution of your behavior instead of selecting whichever single moment supports the mood you happen to be in. And this protects you in both directions. You stop destroying your self-image and your self-esteem over one mistake. And you stop exaggerating your progress because of one good day. The point is accuracy. Accuracy gives you control. And when you're in control, you can change things. So you want your identity to become increasingly difficult for your own mind to dispute because a large enough sample of your life keeps 3:15:22 supporting it. So for example, I have gone to the gym for around 10 years now and I simply see myself as someone that goes to the gym. Does that mean I haven't missed a single session? Of course not. I've missed entire weeks and entire months in the past. However, I still have a lot more evidence to show that I am simply someone who goes to the gym regardless than the opposite. And so, even if I miss a whole month of going to the gym, I don't really think to myself, "Oh, I'm just not that kind of person anymore. I never think that because I know that I'll return the moment I can." And so at some point the new behavior takes less psychological negotiation because your past behavior makes the next action feel way more consistent with who you already know yourself to be. This is exactly what I was talking about with the example here with the gym. I just know that I'm going to return to it immediately as soon as I have the chance because it has become part of my identity. And so Daphna Oerman's identity based motivation work 3:16:23 helps explain part of this. Her model proposes that people become more ready to take actions that feel congruent with an active identity and use those identities to interpret what situations mean. So when you repeatedly behave in ways that support a certain identity, you're doing more than completing isolated tasks. You're actually changing which behaviors feel relevant and natural to you. And so if you increasingly experience working on your business as something people like you just do, you will need less debate each time the opportunity to work on your business appears. And this is why identity can eventually simplify behavior because you still need effort. You still get tired. You still face competing incentives. You still might miss a month of going to the gym. The difference is that the action now has a clearer meaning. You don't have to decide from zero every time because your existing self-understanding already gives one option more weight. And the relationship runs both ways. Your identity influences your behavior and then your behavior gives you evidence 3:17:23 about your identity. And that evidence strengthens or weakens the self-description which changes how the next situation feels. So you can create a self-reinforcing pattern here. And you need to understand that this mechanism works for useful identities and destructive identities alike. And that means you can't and shouldn't leave the direction accidental. Decide which qualities deserve reinforcement. Then build repeated behaviors that make those qualities more true. Do not spend years collecting evidence for identities you hate simply because those behaviors feel familiar. Familiarity tells you what you've repeated, not what deserves another repetition. So with that said, let's cover standards and selfrust. So now we've got clarity and we've got evidence. And this brings us to the next part. You need standards. Without standards, an identity stays only descriptive, right? You know how you want to see yourself and you might even have evidence for it. But every new situation still requires another negotiation on what to do or not to do. 3:18:24 And standards reduce that negotiation because you've already decided what certain parts of your identity require from you. So a standard answers the question given the person I have chosen to be or become what behavior do I accept from myself here in this situation that could be about work it could be about health money relationships learning honesty punctuality how you speak what you consume how you react when you're angry or anything else you care about so you need to define your standards and make them specific so that you can tell when you met them or not I work hard is not a standard, right? On the other hand, I complete the important work I planned before I spend the evening consuming entertainment gives you something you can actually evaluate. So, keep the number of serious standards small. If you create 50 absolute rules for yourself, then you haven't created any. In my opinion, you've mostly created 50 new ways to disappoint yourself. So, 3:19:24 choose the standards that actually express the deepest parts of the identity you want. Let ordinary preferences remain preferences and reserve strong standards for behavior you genuinely believe should define you. So you also need to know which standard wins when two standards conflict. You might value hard work and plenty of rest or value honesty and kindness or your business and your relationship. And real life creates these trade-offs. So by saying no to something you say yes to something else and vice versa. by saying yes to something whether you realize it or not you say no to other things. So decide which principles have priority under which conditions otherwise you'll call whatever you wanted in the moment one of your values after the fact. Now we get to selfrust and I think this part gets underestimated constantly. You trust another person when their words reliably predict what they'll do right and what they do reliably predicts what they say. 3:20:24 So your relationship with yourself works similarly. If you repeatedly make commitments to yourself and repeatedly ignore them, then you learn that your own declarations have very little predictive value. Eventually you can decide on another goal and feel almost nothing because some part of you has heard this before and your brain basically goes, "Yeah, right. Here we go again." So you need to restore credibility with yourself first and you do that through fulfilled commitments. Now, the reason most people don't really trust themselves is because they take on way too much. They commit to 67 things. And when they inevitably start feeling overwhelmed and manage to only meet one of these commitments, they start seeing themselves as a failure or at the very least someone that can't be trusted. So, you need to start saying fewer things and doing more of what you say. Less is more. Go slow to go fast. Stop talking the talk, but never walking the walk. I hope you get it. So if you tell yourself you will complete something, treat that statement as consequential. I'm not saying you need to become obsessive or 3:21:25 punish yourself when the circumstances genuinely change, but you do need to stop making casual promises to yourself that you already know you probably won't keep. Otherwise, don't make the promise in the first place. And lower the individual commitment itself before you violate it. So you can commit to 30 minutes of work you will actually perform instead of four hours that you'll avoid. So commit to three training sessions you'll complete instead of seven that you'll abandon. So you can increase the demand later. At the beginning, your first job is just teaching yourself that your word predicts action. So you can even just say, "I'm going to work out for 5 minutes." As long as you do it, that's the most important part. And when you break a commitment, just repair it. Stop putting yourself down and creating a whole moral drama around it, right? You're just wasting your time. At the same time, don't pretend it never happened, right? Identify why you broke it. Decide whether the standard was actually reasonable. Correct it. Correct the plan if if it's necessary and then keep the next commitment. You strengthen 3:22:26 selfrust through reliable behavior after mistakes as well. So the less amount of time you spend sitting and beating yourself up over it, the faster you correct the behavior. The faster you correct the behavior, the less one miss can become a new pattern. So if you skip something important, return at the next possible opportunity. Just don't create some arbitrary rule that one mistake means you must start over on Monday or next month or next year. Your identity develops from the overall pattern and so your response to the mistake becomes part of that pattern as well. Now after a while some actions will stop feeling like equally valid options because they conflict too strongly with the person you understand yourself to be. Now, so you will still feel tempted. You will still choose badly sometimes. The important change happens when your default interpretation moves from deciding whether the standard matters to deciding how you're going to honor it in this specific situation. And so this 3:23:27 reduces repeated decision-m because you've already decided what matters. Now your job is to just apply it in the moment. And that's one reason standards can produce a stronger sense of identity than goals alone can do. Because the standard governs your behavior before the outcomes actually show up. So you can pursue a fitness goal while still seeing training as optional whenever your motivation is actually low. While someone with a training standard has already defined regular training as part of how they live and so they don't really care about motivation. So the goal gives you direction. The standard is for the boring ordinary days between the days where your progress feels exciting and when you feel motivation. And those boring ordinary days will be more than the ones where you feel amazing and super motivated. So keep standards that increase your respect for yourself. And I don't mean standards designed to impress somebody else or create the appearance of extreme discipline. I'm talking about following the standard should make your life more 3:24:27 consistent with the values you actually have. If it does, keep it. If you're maintaining it only because abandoning it would hurt some uh image you've become attached to, then look at it again and possibly remove it. If you don't really care about it, you're allowed to remove a standard intentionally. That doesn't mean standards are meaningless. It means you probably need to change them consciously instead of violating them repeatedly while continuing to pretend they matter to you. either honor the standard or just revise it because living indefinitely between the two weakens the relationship between what you say matters and what you actually do. And James Clear said it, it doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the results but not the process is to guarantee disappointment. And so after enough repetitions, selfrust will start becoming one of the strongest supports underneath that identity. You know, you 3:25:27 can change plans without abandoning yourself. You know, you can feel bad and still behave according to your goals, standards, and values. You know, you can make a mistake and return. You know that when you make a serious commitment, there's a strong chance your behavior will follow. And this is probably the cleanest way to really think about selfrust. Your own word becomes a personal law. It becomes a predictor of your future behavior. And every serious goal requires you to rely on a future version of yourself. You make a plan today that only works if tomorrow's version of you carries part of it forward. Right? So you need to be able to trust yourself. You need to be able to trust the future version of you if every plan you make today depends on them. So the stronger that relationship becomes, the less every decision feels like a negotiation between completely different versions of you. Yesterday's intention, today's action, and tomorrow's expectations start agreeing way more often, and you experience more continuity across time because your 3:26:28 behavior gives those different moments something to actually share. And weirdly, this gives you more flexibility. You can change the plan because you trust yourself to distinguish a deliberate, thoughtout change from avoidance. And you can rest because you trust yourself to return to work. You can loosen a rule because you know you won't automatically use that freedom to abandon every standard you built. You can miss the gym for a month and know that you will return to it because you trust yourself. And that's a much stronger place to operate from than constant self-control. Discipline, planning, and structure are still extremely important. But now they're supported by a history of reliability. you've spent enough time behaving in ways that make your own intentions credible and believable. So with that said, let's actually cover identity under pressure. So now we get to the part that really shows whether the identity has become strong. You need to see what happens when the circumstances stop supporting it. Anybody can feel super disciplined during a perfect week, 3:27:29 right? Anybody can feel confident after several wins. Anybody can feel capable while everything they attempt works. The more revealing moments come when life makes the behavior harder than usual. And this is partly explained by a reversion or regression to the mean. An unusually good or bad result is often followed by something closer to your normal level simply because extreme outcomes are difficult to repeat. So your best week will probably be followed by a more ordinary one or an even more difficult one. and your worst week will probably be followed by some improvement even when nothing fundamental about you has really changed. And so don't use one extreme result as the final measurement of your identity. A drop after an exceptional performance doesn't automatically mean you've lost your discipline, confidence, or ability. Look at your average behavior across enough time to see the real pattern and judge whether your baseline is gradually moving in the direction you want. So don't treat those moments as interruptions to identity work. They are 3:28:30 part of identity work. They show you how much of the self-escription depends on favorable conditions. If the identity disappears every time your circumstances become difficult, then you've actually learned something important. Watch what changes first. Does your behavior change while your identity stays stable? Does your self-t talk change immediately? Do your standards disappear? Do you reinterpret your entire past because of one current problem? It will tell you which part of the identity still needs a lot more support. And you should also expect variation. Our behaviors change with fatigue, stress, incentives, environment, emotion, and thousands of other factors. So a strong identity doesn't require the exact same performance every day, but rather enough continuity that the temporary variation doesn't completely determine what you believe about yourself. And this is why I always think in terms of ranges. If you always demand one perfect expression, you give yourself hundreds of reasons to label yourself as a failure because most of the times you 3:29:31 will either overshoot or underperform a specific target. So you need to define an acceptable range. A disciplined person can have a lower output on a packed day. A healthy person can eat something they didn't plan. A confident person can feel nervous in certain situations. It's all about ranges and keeping the 80/20 in mind. Once you understand that traits and identities express themselves across ranges, you stop grading your entire identity on whichever moment is currently most vivid. And Oysterman's identity based motivation research gives us another useful insight here. People don't only use identity to decide what actions fit them. They also use identity to interpret difficulty. So when an action feels connected to an important identity, difficulty can mean the action matters and deserves effort. When the action feels incompatible with an identity, the exact same difficulty can become evidence that the behavior isn't for someone like them. And so to a big degree, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. 3:30:32 That means you have to actually train the meaning you assign to difficulty. So if your conclusion after every hard workout is that you're not athletic, the identity is pretty fragile. If every difficult piece of work tells you that you lack talent, you'll keep abandoning identities before you accumulate enough experience to inhabit them. So difficulty often tells you that something is just difficult. It doesn't automatically mean anything about your identity. So you don't have to automatically promote it into a statement about who you are as a person. And Steve Jobs became famous for what his colleagues called his reality distortion field. When engineers set a deadline or a technical demand was impossible, he often refused to accept their interpretation and acted as though the result could be achieved. For example, when Apple needed an extremely durable glass screen for the first iPhone, Jobs pushed Corning to manufacture enough Gorilla Glass within 6 months despite being told that the timeline could not be met. Corning reorganized their whole production and 3:31:32 delivered it. So Jobs didn't really make the difficulty disappear. He rejected the assumption that difficulty proved impossibility which pushed people to search for options they had already dismissed. So you need to be clear on whether the difficulty is diagnostic before you interpret it. Sometimes it is. If you repeatedly struggle because you lack a skill, well, you would be better off developing the skill first and then returning to the task at hand. If the plan is unrealistic, then you probably need to change the plan. If you genuinely hate the goal, then you maybe need to reconsider the goal. You still use the information, but you keep the conclusion proportional to the evidence. And you need to normalize friction during identity change because new behaviors often demand more conscious effort before they become habitual, smooth, and dare I say, easy. And that extra effort that you have to put in the beginning doesn't really mean the identity is false. You just need to keep working until you have enough information to distinguish temporary unfamiliarity from genuine misfit. And 3:32:33 make sure to give the identity enough time to actually acquire history. Because people often judge a new self-concept after a handful of attempts and then they compare that awkward beginning with an old identity supported by years of repetition. Well, of course, the old pattern feels more natural, right? It has vastly more practice behind it and way more time. So keep producing evidence before you actually make a final judgment. And this is where I want you to adopt one distinction very deliberately. Treat events as information before you treat them as conclusions. So a bad result contains information. A missed commitment contains information. Rejection contains information. Failure contains information. It's all just data points. You should absolutely look at it. it. What you shouldn't do is immediately convert a specific event into a total conclusion about yourself and keep the scope of the conclusion equal to the scope of the evidence. If a project fails, then the evidence directly tells 3:33:34 you that the project failed and that's it. Right? It doesn't tell you anything else objectively than the fact that the project failed. And you can investigate like the what, the why, the how, but you still need a lot more evidence before you conclude something broad about your entire capacity or personality or identity. So clean up the language you use after setbacks and don't make eye statements willy-nilly left and right. Describe what happened with enough objective accuracy that the identity doesn't absorb information the event never actually gave you. And this doesn't mean protecting yourself from uncomfortable truth. Sometimes repeated outcomes really do reveal something about you that needs attention. But the key word is repeated. When the same behavior appears across situations over time, despite serious attempts to change it, take that pattern seriously. If a pattern keeps contradicting the identity, you need to do something, right? Just change the behavior or develop the missing capability or change the environment or lower the standard for now. Don't keep repeating a cool 3:34:35 sounding identity just because. And the last piece is really recovery. Perfection gives you very little useful measure because nobody maintains perfect behavior indefinitely if ever. So recovery gives you much more. How long does one bad decision affect the next one? How long does one bad day affect the next week? How much behavior do you lose because you decided the first deviation meant something bigger than it did? Build the habit of actually returning. You missed the behavior. Acknowledge it. Learn whatever you need to learn. Return to the standard and that's it. You don't need some dramatic recommitment every time. That just tells you the system still isn't really reliable enough. So practice recovery as deliberately as you practice the ideal behavior. When you break a standard, notice how long it takes you to resume it. Shorten that period. And if it took a week before, then try to make it 2 days. If it took two days, then make it the next available opportunity or in the next hour. Eventually a miss stay stays a miss instead of turning into a new 3:35:36 pattern and eventually you never miss. And this is the version of identity strength I actually want you to build. You know who you are and what you need to do with clarity. Your behavior gives you repeated evidence. Your standards make the identity operational. Your word has credibility with yourself. And when reality gives you an outcome you didn't like, you learn from it and get on with your life without letting one piece of information rewrite the entire identity. And that gives you a self-image that stays stable and flexible enough to keep learning. You just know what you value. You know what you usually do. You know what standards you hold. You know how you respond after mistakes. And you have enough history with yourself that those things actually mean something. So with that said, let's cover the review. We covered the overview. We covered identity coherence, behavioral proof, standards and self-rust, identity under pressure, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, write down the five qualities you most want your identity to contain. 3:36:38 Define each one in behavioral terms. Remove vague words you cannot evaluate and decide what each quality actually requires from you in ordinary life. Then choose one behavior for each important quality and start producing evidence. Keep the commitments realistic enough that you can repeat them. Then record the specific evidence every week. And your goal is to make your self-escription increasingly supported by your actual behavior. And then finally, pick the standards you refuse to keep renegotiating. Then measure how quickly you return when you break one. Learn from the miss. Correct whatever needs correction. And resume the behavior at the next reasonable opportunity. and then build an identity that can survive an imperfect life without becoming inaccurate or unstable. With that said, I hope this brought a lot of value. If it did, make sure to let me know. Subscribe to the channel, like the video. If you want to work with me oneon-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with its training, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the 3:37:38 description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, once again, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching. Thank you for the support, and I'll see you in the next one. All right, hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how to instantly shift reality in your favor. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is the nature of reality, the persistence of the past, reconstructing reality, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, or if you want this training along with its accompanying document, or if you want to join the free newsletter that helps you improve in every aspect of your life weekly, then all of the links will be in the description, so make sure to check them out. With that said, let's get started and talk about the nature of reality. So, in the early 20th century, there was a man by the 3:38:39 name of Neville Goddard who became one of the most influential teachers of what we now call manifestation and the law of assumption. And one of his central ideas was that your imagination and consciousness essentially play a fundamental role in determining the reality you experience. He believed that your external circumstances ultimately reflect the states of consciousness that you habitually occupy. And although this sounds a little strange initially, there's actually an interesting connection between his philosophy and human perception, psychology, and identity. Now, Neville frequently spoke about what he called the fourth dimension, which he associated with imagination and possibilities that haven't yet manifested in the physical world. He distinguished between our physical reality which includes our observable circumstances and our internal reality which includes our imagination, beliefs, assumptions and expectations. And according to Neville, these two aspects of reality are intimately connected. So he believed 3:39:40 that our internal states of consciousness precede our external circumstances and that whatever we consistently assume to be true eventually expresses itself in some way or another in the physical world. And in his book, the power of awareness, Neville developed what he called the law of assumption. Essentially, he proposed that whatever you consistently accept as true about yourself eventually becomes reflected in your experience of reality. And the process of actually changing your life begins when you deliberately assume the identity of the person you want to become. And this is also where the concept of living in the end comes from. Because Neville actually encouraged people to mentally experience their desired reality as though it had already happened. Becoming familiar with the thoughts, feelings, and assumptions of someone who has already achieved what they desire. Now, there's actually an interesting psychological connection here because the way we experience reality is influenced by far more than the information our senses receive. So, your brain continuously interprets information through your existing 3:40:41 knowledge, memories, and expectations. And researchers study this through theories such as predictive processing, which examine how the brain uses previous experiences and expectations to interpret incoming information. So in a very real sense, your experience of reality is influenced by what you've already learned to expect. And you see this when two people experience the exact same event, but actually interpret it differently. One person experiences rejection and essentially interprets it as confirmation that they're incapable or unworthy. and they start thinking thoughts such as, "Why does this always happen to me?" Another person interprets the same rejection as an opportunity to learn and improve. Both of those experience the same event, yet their interpretations, expectations, and assumptions influence how they feel and what they decide to do afterwards. And I think this is something we massively underestimate because we often experience our interpretations as objective descriptions of reality. We interpret failure as proof that we're 3:41:42 failures or temporary difficulties as evidence that our circumstances will never improve without really recognizing that these are just conclusions we've drawn from our experiences. And since your brain uses previous experiences to interpret new information, the beliefs you've developed throughout your life influence how you perceive situations in the present. So if you've repeatedly experienced rejection, for example, you become more sensitive to signs of rejection in situations where another interpretation is equally reasonable. And over time, your existing beliefs influence what you notice, how you interpret it, and what you remember afterwards. There's another connection here with a psychologist by the name of George Kelly, who developed something called personal construct theory in the 1950s. And one of his central ideas was that we interpret reality through our own personal systems of meaning which we develop throughout our lives. And he called these systems personal constructs. And he believed that they influence how we understand our experiences, anticipate future events, 3:42:44 and ultimately how we behave. Now, what's particularly interesting about Kelly's work is something he called constructive alternativism. Essentially, he proposed that there are multiple possible ways of interpreting the same event or circumstance and that the interpretations we're currently using are always open to reconsideration. And I think there's something quite profound about this because many of the things we believe about ourselves are actually conclusions we've drawn from previous experiences. But if those conclusions are interpretations, then we can reconsider them and begin relating to the same experiences differently. Kelly also believed that our personal constructs influence how we anticipate future events. And this is where his work connects with Neville Goddard because both thinkers recognize the importance of the assumptions we hold about reality. Neville approached this through a spiritual philosophy while Kelly approached it through psychology. So when you change the meaning you've assigned to your past experiences, you begin changing what you expect from your future. And those expectations then 3:43:44 influence the opportunities you notice, the decisions you make, and the possibilities you consider available to you. Now, I want to take this one level deeper because your identity plays an enormous role in all of this, right? And when I talk about identity, I'm referring to the collection of beliefs and assumptions you hold about who you are, what you're capable of, and what's possible for someone like you. So, you develop these assumptions through your upbringing, experiences, successes, failures, and interactions with other people. and the inputs you have, right? The books you read, the content you consume, the TV programs, the music you listen to, etc. Eventually, you become so familiar with them that you stop recognizing them as assumptions and simply accept them as facts about yourself. For example, if you've repeatedly struggled with discipline, you eventually develop the belief that you're naturally an undisiplined person. And once you accept that identity, you start interpreting your behavior through it. So whenever you struggle to follow through, you see it as further confirmation of who you are. And because your identity influences what you expect 3:44:46 from yourself, those expectations influence your behavior. So you become less willing to try, less persistent when things become difficult or more likely to interpret setbacks as reasons to give up, which reinforces your original belief. But this is where things become interesting because if your identity consists partly of assumptions you've developed throughout your life, those assumptions can change, right? You can reconsider what you believe about yourself and reinterpret previous experiences and deliberately begin identifying with a person you want to become. And when you start relating to yourself differently, you also start making different decisions and responding to your circumstances differently. And that's part of what I mean when I talk about shifting your reality instantly. You can begin changing how you interpret your circumstances, what you assume about yourself, and how you choose to respond right now. But if that's possible, why do our external circumstances sometimes remain exactly the same even after we've genuinely begun changing internally? So, 3:45:47 let's talk about the persistence of the past. Here's where things get a bit more interesting. Because even when you can consciously decide to change your life, you find yourself continuing to experience the same circumstances, problems, and patterns you've experienced for years, right? One of the reasons for this is that your past experiences have actually conditioned you to think, feel, and behave in certain ways. You've developed assumptions about yourself and the world through years of repetition. And many of those assumptions have become so familiar that you barely notice them anymore. So even when you want something different, you find yourself automatically responding to life in ways that reinforce what you've already experienced. So your mind tends to rely on familiar patterns because you've practiced them repeatedly. Right? If you've spent years expecting rejection, for example, you instinctively anticipate it whenever you encounter any uncertainty about somebody's response. And because that expectation feels familiar, you mistake it for an accurate prediction of what's going to happen. Now, psychologists refer to related 3:46:48 processes through concepts such as automaticity and learned associations. So, essentially, repeated experiences make certain thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors increasingly automatic. Which means you continue reproducing familiar patterns without actually consciously deciding to do so. And this is why simply deciding that you want to become a different person doesn't necessarily produce lasting change. You genuinely want to become more confident, disciplined, successful, or emotionally secure, but you've spent years practicing the complete opposite, a different way of thinking and behaving. And so those patterns have become familiar through repetition. And changing them requires you to repeatedly practice something different. Now, every time you respond to a situation according to your previous assumptions, you essentially strengthen the same patterns you're trying to change. And if those responses produce familiar outcomes, these outcomes become additional evidence that your old assumptions were correct. Now, Neville Goddard had a particularly interesting way of understanding this. He believed 3:47:48 that the external world reflects the states of consciousness we've previously occupied, which means the circumstances we're currently experiencing correspond to assumptions we've held in the past. Changing your internal state doesn't necessarily mean your external circumstances will immediately change alongside it. There's a period during which you're beginning to occupy essentially a new state of consciousness while continuing to experience circumstances associated with your previous one. Many of your current circumstances are consequences of decisions, habits, and behaviors that happened long before today. Right? Your financial situation, for example, reflects years of spending and earning and financial decisions. Your physical condition reflects months or years of habits. And so even if you begin making different decisions immediately, the consequences of your previous decisions don't simply disappear. And I like to think about this as momentum. When something has been moving in a particular direction for a long time, changing its direction requires time and 3:48:50 continued effort and your circumstances have a similar kind of momentum because many of the systems and relationships in your life have developed over an extended period. This is also closely related to what some manifestation teachers describe as an echo effect, where your external circumstances appear to lag behind internal changes you've made. Within Neville's philosophy, you understand those circumstances as reflections of previously occupied states. From a psychological perspective, you understand part of this delay through the time it takes for new behaviors to produce different outcomes. And here's where people often run into trouble. They begin changing their assumptions, imagining a different future, and behaving differently. But when they look at their circumstances a few days later, everything appears exactly the same. So they conclude that nothing has changed, and they return to their previous assumptions and abandon the process before they've given their new behavior enough time to produce meaningful results. And this brings us 3:49:50 to another important principle in Neville Goddard's philosophy, which is the ability to maintain your desired state of consciousness even when your external circumstances appear to contradict it. Now, Neville encouraged people to persist in the assumption that their desired reality was already theirs rather than continually allowing their present circumstances to determine what they believed was possible. Most people allow whatever happens externally to dictate how they feel, which means their sense of identity and possibility changes with every success, failure, or temporary setback or whatever basically happens in the outside world. And you can think about how easily we identify with whatever we're currently experiencing. If you're, for example, struggling financially, you begin identifying as someone who's bad with money. If you're having difficulties in your relationship, you start believing that you're unlovable. And when you repeatedly identify with those circumstances, you end up treating temporary experiences in the external world as essentially permanent 3:50:51 characteristics of who you are internally. So one of the things you can practice is really separating your present circumstances from your identity. You can acknowledge that you're experiencing some difficulties whether financially or otherwise without really assuming that you're inherently incapable of becoming financially successful. You can experience rejection without concluding that you're fundamentally unworthy or bad at sales or whatever. Your circumstances provide information about your current situation, but they don't necessarily determine who you're capable of becoming. Now, Neville took this principle further by encouraging people to persist in their desired assumptions regardless of what their senses were currently showing them. So he believed that consistently returning to an imagined state would eventually bring that state into physical experience. So if you abandon your intentions whenever you experience a setback, you never sustain the behaviors necessary to produce meaningful change. So the goal is to develop enough internal stability that temporary circumstances don't continually 3:51:52 determine your assumptions about yourself. You can acknowledge what's happening. you can learn from it and make whatever adjustments are necessary while continuing to identify with the person you're working toward becoming. And once you understand this, you begin approaching change a bit differently. Instead of essentially constantly looking at your present circumstances to determine whether your internal transformation is working, you actually should start paying attention to the assumptions you're practicing and the decisions you're making and the identity you're reinforcing through your behavior. Because although you can't necessarily control how quickly your external circumstances change, you can begin changing how you relate to them and how you respond to them right now. And I think this is especially important because people often underestimate how much time they've spent developing their existing patterns. If you spent 10 years believing something about yourself, you shouldn't be surprised when that assumption continues influencing your behavior after a few days of trying to change it. Right? You need to repeatedly return to your desired identity until 3:52:50 the new way of thinking and behaving becomes increasingly familiar. And every time you respond according to your new assumptions, you're giving yourself another opportunity to practice that identity. And over time, those repeated experiences help make your new responses more natural while your behavior begins creating different consequences in your external life. So the question becomes, how do you actually do this deliberately? How do you identify the assumptions that are influencing your current reality and then choose a different identity and begin experiencing that identity internally before your circumstances change? And how do you translate that internal change into something you can practice consistently? That's what we're going to cover in the next section where I'll walk you through a process I call the reality reconstruction process. It's essentially a four-stage framework for deliberately changing your perception, identity, behavior, and the patterns you reinforce through your everyday experiences. So, let's talk about reconstructing reality. So, now that we understand how our assumptions influence 3:53:53 our experience of reality and why our external circumstances don't always change immediately, the question becomes how we can actually use this knowledge to change our lives. And for that I want to introduce that four stage framework I call the reality reconstruction process. So the four stages are perception, identity, embodiment and reinforcement. And the idea is pretty simple. You begin by recognizing how you're currently interpreting reality deliberately choosing a different identity. Start living from that identity and then you reinforce it through repetition and experience. So as you can see on the image, perception, identity, embodiment, reinforcement. Now, the first step is to really become aware of the assumptions you're currently operating from. So, you choose an area of your life that you want to change, whether that's your finances, relationships, health, or something else. And you ask yourself what you currently believe about yourself in that area. What do you expect to happen? What do you assume is possible or impossible for someone like you? And then you pay particular attention to the assumptions you 3:54:54 experience as obvious facts. things like believing that you're naturally bad with money, that relationships never work out for you, or that you're simply not a disciplined person. Those are limiting beliefs. These are precisely the kinds of assumptions you want to examine because you've probably stopped questioning them. Now, once you've identified those assumptions, begin questioning the interpretations that support them. So, remember George Kelly's idea of constructive alternativism. The same experience has several different interpretations, and the interpretation you've been using isn't necessarily the only reasonable one. So instead of automatically treating a previous failure as evidence that you're incapable, try to consider what else it means. Maybe you lacked experience or used the wrong approach or simply encountered circumstances that didn't work in your favor. Right? There's a thousand different other interpretations and perspectives. The goal is to develop a more useful and accurate understanding of your experiences. So your past stops limiting what you consider possible. Now the second stage is to deliberately 3:55:55 choose the identity you want to occupy. And this is where Neville Goddard's philosophy becomes particularly useful because he encouraged people to begin assuming the state of their desired self before their external circumstances changed. So rather than continually identifying with who you've been, you begin developing a clear understanding of who you want to become and you focus on that. And the important part is that you make this identity specific enough that you can actually recognize what it would mean to think, feel, and behave from that perspective. So you start by asking yourself who you would be if the change you desire had already happened. What would you believe about yourself? What would you expect from your life? How would you approach the situations you're currently struggling with? And what would feel natural to you if you genuinely identified that as that person? For example, if you wanted to become financially successful, you begin considering how someone with a healthy relationship with money approaches their earning, spending, learning, and making decisions. You're essentially practicing a different perspective on yourself and 3:56:57 your circumstances. Now, Neville placed enormous importance on imagination because he believed that imagining an experience allows you to occupy a desired state of consciousness before it becomes physically real. And one of the most recognizable practices was really to imagine a short scene that implies your desire has already been fulfilled and then experiencing it from your own perspective rather than watching yourself as an outside observer. So you imagine a conversation for example when someone congratulates you on achieving your goal or a familiar moment in which your desired circumstances have become completely ordinary and you try to experience the scene as naturally as possible including the feelings and assumptions associated with it. And the purpose is to really become increasingly familiar with the identity and experience you're deliberately cultivating. Now the third stage is where you begin bringing that identity into your everyday life. Because it's one thing to imagine yourself as a different person and it's another thing to actually approach your circumstances 3:57:57 from that perspective. Now, Neville called this living in the end, which means continuing to occupy the state of someone whose desire has already been fulfilled. And practically speaking, one way to develop that state is to begin thinking, making decisions, and responding to situations in ways that are consistent with your desired identity. So throughout your day, whenever you encounter a situation that would normally trigger your previous assumptions, you ask yourself how the person you're becoming would approach it. If you're developing the identity of someone who is disciplined, what would that person do when they don't feel motivated? If you're developing confidence, how would that person respond to rejection or uncertainty? And then whenever possible, you actually behave according to that identity. you take the action or have the conversation or follow through on the commitment or respond differently than you normally would. You're giving yourself experiences that help make your desired identity increasingly familiar. Now, something important to understand is that you won't always feel like the person you're trying to become. There will be moments when your previous 3:58:58 assumptions return, when you feel insecure, or when your circumstances seem to contradict everything you're practicing. And that's completely normal when you're trying to change patterns that you've basically reinforced for most of your life. So the important thing is to keep returning to your chosen identity rather than treating every uncomfortable thought or temporary setback as evidence that nothing has changed. You can acknowledge your current feelings and circumstances while continuing to make decisions that support the person you're becoming. Both things can be true at the same time. And finally, the fourth stage is really reinforcement, which is where you begin strengthening your new identity through repetition and experience. Because every time you interpret something differently or respond according to your chosen identity or follow through on a decision you previously would have avoided, you're creating another experience that supports your new assumptions. And over time, those experiences can help you make your new way of thinking and behaving feel increasingly natural. So, one thing I would encourage you to do 4:00:00 today is to start noticing evidence of your internal transformation even before your external circumstances have changed significantly. Maybe you're responding to rejection differently or following through on your commitments more consistently or approaching opportunities you previously would have avoided. Those changes matter because they show you that you're beginning to behave differently. And the more deliberately you recognize those changes, the easier it becomes to develop confidence in your new identity. So you're no longer relying entirely on imagination or intention, you're accumulating experiences that demonstrate your ability to think and behave in ways that are consistent with the person you're becoming. At the same time, you want to remain responsive to what actually happens in your life. If something isn't working, examine your approach and make adjustments where necessary. Because maintaining an assumption doesn't require you to ignore useful information or to continue doing something that clearly isn't producing the results you want. And that's really how the four stages work together. You 4:01:00 reconsider your perception, deliberately choose an identity, begin embodying it through your everyday decisions, and reinforce it through repeated experience. And then as your understanding and circumstances evolve, you continue refining the process. And while your external circumstances take time to change, you can begin changing your internal relationship with the reality right now. So with that said, let's go over the review. We covered the nature of reality, the persistence of the past, reconstructing reality, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. So first, choose one area of your life that you want to change, whether that's your health, finances, relationships, or something else. Then write down three assumptions you currently hold about yourself in that area. Then you begin questioning each one of them. Where did it come from? What experiences led you to believe it? What other interpretations are equally reasonable? And then you identify at least one assumption you're ready to reconsider. Then define the identity of the person 4:02:02 you want to become. Write down what the person believes about themselves, what they expect from life, how they approach situations differently, and include as much detail as possible. And then every day spend a few minutes imagining a short scene that implies you've already become that person. Experience it from your own perspective and begin making that identity familiar to you. For the next seven days, deliberately practice living from your chosen identity. Whenever you encounter a situation that would normally trigger your previous assumptions, ask yourself how the person you're becoming would respond and act according to that. At the end of the day, write down one example of where you responded differently, what you learned, and what you'll continue practicing tomorrow. With that said, I hope this brought value to you. If it did, let me know. Like the video, subscribe to the channel. If you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. You can also join the free community where you can get this training along with this accompanying document. And you can join the free newsletter. Again, links 4:03:02 to all of them are going to be in the description. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is ambition and laziness. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first ambition and avoidance, the planning high, the four forms of being stuck, honest action, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. So before we get started, as always, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with this document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about ambition and avoidance. So you can generally be incredibly ambitious and still be lazy or at least look lazy. And 4:04:04 I think this is where a lot of ambitious people get very confused because in your head there's no lack of ambition whatsoever. You think about the business you want to build or the shape you want to get into or the book you want to write or the person you want to become and you genuinely care about these things and you might think about them every single day, right? Yet when you look at what you've actually done over the last few months, there can be this uncomfortable gap between the size of the life you keep imagining and the amount of real work you've done to actually create it. And that gap is basically what this entire training is going to be about. So the same goal most likely keeps coming back over and over and over again for you. You rethink the idea. You watch another video about how somebody else did it. You organize the plan again. Maybe you even get really excited about it again. And for a little while it feels like you're back on track. And the problem is that you can 4:05:06 spend a huge amount of time psychologically engaged with a goal without actually doing any of the work that changes your situation or brings you closer to the goal. And I think one of the easiest ways to see the difference is to just look at what exists afterwards. Did you produce anything? Because your production gives you evidence that you actually touched the real work, right? another outline, another productivity system, another hour thinking about how you're going to do the thing can be very useful obviously, but eventually you reach a point where the planning stops producing anything except more planning. And William James understood this feeling surprisingly well. In an 1888 letter, while struggling through the enormous project that eventually became the principles of psychology, he wrote that there was nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging of an uncompleted task. And I love that line because unfinished work doesn't always feel like an activity. You can carry it around 4:06:09 mentally for months and part of your attention stays attached to it. So you keep thinking about something you aren't actually completing. And this is also why I don't think calling yourself lazy is particularly useful because it feels explanatory because it gives the problem a name but the name doesn't really tell you what really happened. You wanted [clears throat] to do something and then at some point for some reason you stopped doing it. And the better question is why? The reasons can be of course different depending on the task and the person, but once you collapse it into laziness, you lose the information that you actually need. And people are very good at turning repeated behavior into an identity. For instance, you procrastinate a few times and eventually the thought changes from I keep delaying this project to I'm a procrastinator. And once you start describing yourself that way, the label can become part of how you interpret 4:07:10 every next moment. And what happens next is normal resistance that anyone could experience shows up. But now it feels like confirmation that this is simply who you are. And this is when it has become essentially a part of an identity. And then you look for evidence to essentially prove that it is part of your identity. you're using confirmation bias against yourself. And there's another part of this that I think is even more interesting, which is the imagined version of the goal can feel incredibly rewarding before you've done anything to earn the result. So you imagine the body, the money, the audience, the book, the relationship, the skill, whatever it is, and your mind can jump straight from where you are today to the finished version. And you don't have to experience the boring middle in imagination. You don't have to be bad at the skill. Nobody rejects you in your [clears throat] imagination. Nobody sees the weak first attempt. 4:08:13 You get the emotional experience of the destination while essentially skipping most of the costs that create that destination. And psychologists Hazel Marcus and Paula Nurius call these imagined future identities possible selves. Meaning the versions of yourself you believe you might become, want to become, or fear becoming. And those possible selves organize motivation. You don't only want the result. You can picture yourself as the writer, the entrepreneur, the athlete, the creator, the partner, or whatever identity the goal really represents. And a possible self can motivate you because it gives your effort a direction, right? But you can also spend so much time mentally inhabiting that future identity that the image starts doing some of the emotional work the behavior was supposed to do. So you feel close to becoming the person before you've accumulated much evidence that you are becoming them. And a lot of the times you feel close to 4:09:15 becoming the person while doing absolutely nothing to really become them. And there's research that gets surprisingly close to this. Peter Gwitzer and his colleagues studied identity related intentions and found that when other people noticed those intentions, participants sometimes acted on them less intensely. [clears throat] In one of their experiments, public recognition appeared to give people what the researchers called a premature sense of possessing the desired identity. The point is that symbols of progress, not actual progress, those two are very different, right? Symbols of progress and actual progress aren't always the same thing. And you can see how easily this happens. You decide you're going to become a creator. So, you make the channel or open up the Instagram account. You buy the camera. You redesign the page. You think about the brand. You tell people what you're building and what you're starting. And then you spend hours consuming content about creators. And every one of those 4:10:15 things can have a legitimate purpose, right? At the same time, every one of them can let you feel connected to the identity while postponing the part where you have to repeatedly create videos or create content and put it out there. And once the real work begins, the emotional situation changes. Right now, you have to actually spend time. You have to repeat the boring actions. You have to discover what you're bad at. You might publish something and watch it fail. You might train for months before your body even looks different at all. You might make an offer and hear a no. And so the imagined future didn't require any of this, which is why the transition from imagining the goal to actually earning it can feel much worse than you expected. Yet those co costs contain most of the information you actually need. Imagination can give you direction but only contact with real reality gives you feedback and feedback is what allows you 4:11:17 to improve. So sometimes you know exactly what to do. You want the result. Nothing complicated is going on and you simply need to do the work even though you don't feel like doing it. But when the same important goal has been coming back for months or even years and you've already tried telling yourself to work harder, then there is something deeper going on in my opinion. So imagine four people who all look exactly the same from the outside because none of them are really moving, right? None of them are really taking action. One has three serious options and can't commit to one. One already knows what to do and keeps choosing comfort. One says they want the goal because the identity or outcome sounds attractive while their behavior keeps rejecting the actual work. Another person thinks continuously, collects more information and essentially waits for everything to look perfect and guaranteed before taking action. If you 4:12:18 call all four of these people lazy, you've described the surface but completely missed the underlying mechanism. And this is why advice that changes somebody's life can do absolutely nothing for somebody else. And when you mismatch what the real bottleneck is and what solution you actually need, you can actually strengthen the problem. So I want to change the question. When you avoid an important piece of work, you need to look at what the avoidance did for you in that moment. And that can sound a bit strange because we usually talk about procrastination as if nothing happened. But you did get something. Part of you got a real value from actually procrastinating. And psychologists often look at behavior in terms of function. Meaning you don't only ask what somebody did. You ask what consequence kept the behavior useful enough for them to actually repeat. And that's a better way to look at procrastination too. If avoiding the task repeatedly gives you relief from 4:13:19 one particular kind of discomfort, for example, that relief tells you something about why the pattern keeps going, why it keeps repeating. And so, for example, you can take two people who keep delaying writing a book, right? So, the first p person genuinely wants to write. They have several ideas that they care about and keeps hesitating because choosing one means that they will give up on the others for a while. The second person loves being able to think of themselves as something who is going to write a book, but every encounter with the actual activity feels dead to them. And they both have the same unfinished book. Yet they don't have the same problem. And after a while, this affects a lot more than your productivity. You keep making promises to yourself and watching your own behavior essentially ignore them. And one broken promise doesn't mean much. But because everybody misses days, everybody changes plans, everybody gets tired, gets sick, or realizes that a goal maybe was stupid. 4:14:21 But when your own intentions become unreliable enough that you stop taking them seriously at all, then you have a problem. You say you'll start next week and some part of you already knows that you're lying to yourself. And so selfrust is built from evidence in exactly the same way that trust with another person is built from evidence. Right? If somebody repeatedly tells you that they'll meet you and repeatedly doesn't show up, eventually you stop planning for it. And you can do the same thing with yourself. You mentally prepare another plan. Yet your past behavior has taught you to completely discount discount it. And so once that happens, your ambition can actually start shrinking to protect your self-image. You essentially stop setting deadlines. You stop dreaming for more. You call every serious commitment an experiment. You keep goals vague enough so that you can't actually clearly fail them. Or you keep changing the target because a moving target never gets the real chance to give you a definitive 4:15:22 answer. There's a second cost too. Every time you have a skill or leave a skill during the uncomfortable beginner or intermediate phase, you essentially lose the repetitions that would have made the work easier later. So, you constantly keep restarting the hardest part. And then you return months later, you notice that you still aren't very good and you use the missing skill as another reason to not do the thing. You feel unprepared because you haven't really practiced. And you haven't really practiced because feeling unprepared keeps making you leave. And William James understood the cost of constant deliberation more than a century ago. In the principles of psychology, he writes, "There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but an indecision." He then goes on to describe how exhausting life becomes when ordinary actions repeatedly have to become these conscious constant debates. 4:16:22 And so deciding has a cost. But keeping every decision open while it feels like freedom is actually a prison and has even bigger costs. And economists describe one part of this with opportunity cost. So every real choice cost you the alternatives you didn't choose. And if you spend a year, for example, building one business, you can't spend that exact same year giving your full attention to three different businesses, right? So if you commit to one skill, you lose time you could have spent mastering another skill. And the cost exists because your time on this earth is finite. And so ambitious people struggle with this even more than they admit. Sometimes you aren't really scared of choosing a bad life. 4:17:24 You're having a hard time actually letting go of several imaginary good lives that you can't live simultaneously. And eventually you have to choose what you will spend your time on and allow the alternatives to remain alternatives. And so by the end of this training, you should be able to look at one goal you keep avoiding and see what is actually happening at the moment you pull away. And I'm going to break that stuckness into four forms that I think cover a huge amount of what ambitious people casually call laziness. And those four forms are called choice, comfort, refusal, and overthinking. And each one produces a similar visible outcome which is that you don't act while each one requires a different response. So before we get to those though, we need to understand the 4:18:25 sequence that keeps bringing you back here because I bet that you don't just wake up and consciously decide to abandon something that is important to you. You become excited about an idea. You imagine what it could become. You create a plan. You begin moving, you hit a cost that you didn't experience in your imagination and then your behavior changes afterwards, right? And later a new idea or a new version of the plan makes you hopeful again and the entire thing starts over. So that gives us an interesting question. If you genuinely want the result, why do you repeatedly avoid the actions attached to it? And we need to know what happens between wanting the future and refusing the next step. And that's why the next part matters so much because before we diagnose the four forms of being stuck, we need to actually look at one of the strangest parts of ambition itself. So 4:19:27 let's talk about the planning high. So now we need to talk and look at what actually happens between getting excited about a goal and slowly pulling away from it. Because there's usually a sequence there. You picture a future you really want. That picture gives you hope, energy, maybe even a sense of relief and then you start planning, right? For a little while everything feels possible again. And then the plan eventually meets reality and reality requires some effort or some uncertainty or feedback and suddenly the emotional experience completely changes and I call this the planning high cycle. You imagine the future, you feel better because of that future. Real work introduces an actual cost and then you start moving away from the part that creates that cost. And the interesting thing is that the first part of this cycle is actually pretty useful, right? You need 4:20:29 imagination to actually choose a direction. You need to be able to picture something that doesn't exist yet and then want it. Otherwise, you'd never start anything ambitious in the first place. This is the beauty of ambition. Being able to see something out there that doesn't or something in your mind's eye or in your imagination that doesn't exist in reality yet and deciding to go for it, deciding to make it happen, regardless of the consequences, regardless of what people think. This is the beautiful part about ambition. The trouble though begins when imagining and preparing give you so much reward that you can stay there a longer time a lot longer than the goal actually needs. And for example, you can keep improving the p picture pretty much forever. You clean up the business model. You rethink 4:21:30 your training split. You research the perfect camera. You reorganize the plan one more time. And every decision makes the future feel a little more defined. So, it feels like you're actually getting closer. Even though the distance between you and the actual result has barely moved, you're still in the same place. So, you need a clear line between useful planning and planning as avoidance. And mine is pretty simple. A useful plan eventually tells you what to do next. And once you know that next action, any extra planning has to justify itself. If another hour of thinking really changes the action, fine. If you already know what to do and you're still rearranging the plan, then something else is really going on. And this is where Peter Gwitzer's work on implementation intentions, which I've now mentioned in multiple videos, can be applied pretty well. He makes an important distinction between having a goal and deciding how that goal will actually meet reality. And in his 4:22:31 research, implementation intentions take the form of linking a specific situation to a specific response. Basically, an if then statement and deciding in advance that when situation X occurs, you'll do behavior Y. And the point is to reduce the amount of fresh decision-m that is required when the moment actually arrives. And you can see how specific that gets, right? I'm going to become a writer is a goal. I'm going to take writing seriously is still mostly an intention. When I sit down at my desk after breakfast, which is at 7 a.m., I'll work on the current chapter for 45 minutes. Now, you've connected the future to a real behavior in the present. So, a plan becomes useful once it cuts down the ambiguity around what you'll actually do. And in 2006, Golitzer and Pascal Sheeran pulled the results of 94 studies on implementation intentions. And they found that plans in this if then form 4:23:32 had a medium to large effect on whether people actually reach their goals. And that's a big effect for something that takes you about a minute to actually write down. So ambitious people mix up detail and usefulness all the time. You can write out a 20page strategy document and still be unsure what to do today. While a oneline if then plan can do 10 times more because it closes the gap between what you've decided and actually taking action. And you need just enough structure that the first important action is clear and then you should be off to the races because your plan will change anyway once you start actually doing the thing. Most of the time we plan and then reality completely changes the situation because we can't predict everything that will happen. We can't predict the humongous variable that reality is that the real world is right. We can try we can try to predict all sorts of scenarios and sometimes we 4:24:32 do. Sometimes we're spot on and a lot of times we're not. A lot of times the exact thing that we didn't plan for and that we couldn't have predicted happens, right? So your plan will change anyway most of the time once it faces reality. And there's also another reason planning can become addictive and this one is a bit more subtle. A future goal can make the present feel better before the present has materially actually changed. It's almost a form of daydreaming. So if you feel behind, confused, dissatisfied, or disappointed with yourself, a new plan gives you direction again. Now there's this imagined way out. There's a version of you who figured it out. There's a sequence. There's a future. And for a while that alone can relieve 4:25:33 some of the discomfort and pain that made you want to change in the first place. And sometimes inspiration is simply inspiration. Other times the timing tells you a lot. You hit a difficult part of one project and suddenly another project seems unusually attractive. And so your current business for example stops growing and a completely different model starts looking interesting. This is the found a perfect example of shiny object syndrome, right? You struggle with a skill and then start seeing your current limitations and suddenly learning another skill feels a lot more exciting and you're jumping from one to the next the moment you hit difficulty. A new idea gives you a fresh start because it has no history yet. And that's why it feels so attractive. It's new. You haven't failed at it. Nobody has turned it down, right? You haven't found the boring parts, the repetitive parts, 4:26:34 the monotonous parts, and nobody has really tested your ability at it. So, you can picture yourself succeeding in full detail because reality hasn't had a chance to disagree with you yet. And so beginnings naturally contain a lot more uncertainty and possibility and discovery than maintenance does or improvement does. Novelty releases a ton of dopamine. And so the first stages of a goal often give you a lot more excitement, new information and very obvious improvements which is really what incre which which what creates the dopamine and it gives you a lot more changes and feedback and our brain loves that. And so later stages of any goal or a skill require a bit more time and repetition. They require a bit of boredom and monotony and just doing the thing over and over again. You practice the same thing again and again. You improve something by one to two% which a lot of 4:27:36 the times is barely visible espe especially with the inner critic being there. and you solve problems that look suspiciously similar to the problems you solved last month. So, you start finding it quote unquote boring. And if you only interpret excitement as evidence that you found the right path, then most of the time you'll think you're on the wrong path. Normal repetition will start to look like evidence that you found the wrong path. normal boringness of anything, normal monotony of becoming masterful, masterful at something. And so you'll quit things all the time because your standard is excitement. And a lot of the times with anything that's useful and worthwhile, the excitement fades. 4:28:37 So I want you to pull three things apart. wanting the result, wanting the identity, and wanting the activity enough to keep doing it over and over and over again. And those three things can overlap, but they aren't identical. You can want the body and hate almost every form of exercise. You can want to be known as an author while having very literal little interest in writing. You can want the freedom associated with entrepreneurship while disliking everything associated with entrepreneurship like selling, decision-making, uncertainty, responsibility, duty sometimes. And you obviously don't need to love every part of a goal. Any entrepreneur can tell you that they don't absolutely love every single part of being an entrepreneur. That's fine. I think people sometimes push this too far and assume that the right work should constantly feel intrinsically rewarding. In fact, a lot of the times it doesn't. Most meaningful things contain boring, frustrating, administrative, and super repetitive parts. 4:29:38 The question is whether you want the underlying activity enough or value what it serves enough that you're willing to repeatedly pay those costs. And this gives you another way to interpret what happens when the excitement fades. Loss of excitement doesn't automatically mean the goal is wrong. Sometimes it means the goal has finally moved from the first stages of novelty into the later stages of mastery. And that's actually valuable information because now you're discovering whether you want the real version enough to continue. And sooner or later, reality tests every meaningful plan you make. You write a chapter and it doesn't sound very good. It does it isn't very good. You record the video and hear how awkward you actually sound. Right? You make the offer and nobody buys or you go to the gym for weeks and realize the body you pictured is going to take a lot longer than you expected. And at that point, the goal starts 4:30:39 telling you the truth about your current ability, about your assumptions, about how much work is actually left, about where you could improve. And Steven Presfield has a name for this moment in his book, The War of Art. And he calls it resistance. And right at the start of the book, he writes, "Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands resistance." And Presfield almost personifies it and writes about resistance like it's a literal force. Almost everybody who makes the things knows that wanting to create something and actually doing the work feel completely different, especially after you especially after you put it out there into the real world and people can get to criticize it, right? And so the version you haven't lived yet gets to stay flawless in your imagination because nothing has really 4:31:39 tested it yet. The moment you act and you start engaging with the messy reality, the distance between your current ability and your imagined ability becomes very visible and very measurable. And so before you write, you can imagine yourself as a great writer. But once you write 10 pages, you have 10 pages of evidence of how good of a writer you actually are. And before you sell, you can imagine that your offer is the best offer in the world. But once 50 people have declined it, you have information you now need to analyze. And that information can feel threatening because the goal often has attached more than the outcome itself. You've attached identity to it. Maybe you think you're intelligent, creative, disciplined, entrepreneurial, talented, different, destined, or or destined for something bigger. Right? real work can temporarily challenge those identities because the first evidence is almost never as 4:32:40 flattering as the imagined one was. And it shows you that even after everything everything you thought about yourself, you most likely still have a lot of space to improve, a lot of room for improvement. And in bird by bird, Annne Lamont or Lamont writes about perfection perfectionism and she says perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. She connects it directly to the difficulty of allowing yourself to produce the messy first draft that real writing actually requires. And the reason I like this idea here is that perfectionism can easily look like preparation. You keep preparing because preparation lets the final version of whatever you're doing remain perfect in your imagination. And it's an illusion because if you get yourself to actually put it out there, the final supposedly perfect version, 4:33:41 you'll see that it wasn't so perfect after all. At least not know everyone because perfectionism is is completely relative. And even though it was perfect in your imagination, putting it out out there in the real world, it will get criticism. And so you then will realize, oh wow, there's a lot of things I can improve on even though I worked on this for months. And the first attempt at anything always destroys that perfection. The minute something becomes real, meaning it actually exists in reality rather than just in your imagination, it becomes perfectly imperfect. And if you fuse the quality of the first attempt with your actual identity as a person, that imperfection can feel very personal, which is why a lot of people don't release things and ship. You have to admit to yourself that you are not perfect. And so your work won't 4:34:43 be perfect either by definition. So you need to keep feedback local meaning keep the feedback to the thing itself and separate it from yourself. Real feedback is usually very specific like that. Right? Your ego is the part of you that wants to take one specific result and turn it into this sweeping statement about you and your whole future. And you shouldn't let it. And once you keep feedback specific, the work becomes far easier and you don't quit as much because not producing something perfect doesn't mean that you should quit because it no longer means that you are not perfect. It just means hey there's a lot of things I can improve and if I really care about this then I'm going to keep improving. So the work becomes a lot easier after a while because you attempt something, reality gives you feedback, you iterate on that feedback, you iterate one thing 4:35:44 and you try again. It's super basic, but it's the mechanism behind success in nearly everything. At some point, knowledge has to meet performance or you will never really discover what you actually know and what you need to improve at. And you can think about this as a simple feedback loop. Action creates an outcome. The outcome gives you information. You use the information to adjust the next action. And then you repeat. And if you remove action from that loop, you also remove most of the feedback, which means your mind has no new facts to work with and starts recycling predictions. And so this also changes the kind of confidence you build over time because planning can give you a lot of emotional confidence because the future looks logical and coherent and if everything goes to plan everything will be perfect. Practice gives you evidential confidence because you've now seen yourself handle 4:36:44 the work. You've now seen and receive the the feedback and the criticism that you might get from it. And those feel very different. One depends heavily on how convincing the future looks in your imagination and thanks to our biases and heristics, we can make it look very convincing. The other comes from having actually done enough repetitions of the work, having done the work that you no longer need to imagine whether you can go through the process and that you no longer have to imagine what you need to improve on. Because when whenever we well whenever we actually imagine the future, it's always ideal, right? It's always idealistic. We don't have to improve in anything. But the real world doesn't work like that. And once you get hit with that, you often can't take it because you realize, oh, it's not as easy as I thought it is, and I wanted it to be easy. But a lot of worth things that are 4:37:46 worthwhile are not. And this is where the cycle often turns. Reality gives you information you don't necessarily like and you move towards something that feels easier or changing the plan or reworking the initial plan. Basically, anything but actually doing the uncomfortable work of improving. And none of those things even have to be inherently bad. Most of the times it's some form of productive procrastination, which is exactly why they can be so convincing. Useful activities become avoidance when their real function is to really move you away from the uncomfortable part you already know you need to face. And comparison can intensify this because you're usually comparing your unfinished work with somebody else's visible result and then you compare that finished artifact with the mess you're currently producing. And obviously your current work will look worse. You're looking at two different stages of development. Somebody that has gone through the difficult parts and learned 4:38:46 a lot and improved a lot and you at the very beginning wondering whether you should actually go through that difficult part and you start to feel behind. And feeling behind creates discomfort and discomfort makes a fresh plan look a lot more attractive because a fresh plan restores the feeling that you found a path forward that make might take you to their level faster. And suddenly the answer seems to be another shiny ob object. But you're really looking for shortcuts. Yet life doesn't have those. And anything worthwhile doesn't have those. And that's how the planning high can repeat without feeling repetitive. The details change. The surface level details can change, but the underlying sequence doesn't. The new future, the new excitement, the new plan, the rework, avoidance, new future. That's the cycle. You experience each cycle as a new chapter because the surface 4:39:48 changes while the behavioral pattern underneath it is basically identical. On top of that, some people label every moment of recovery as as laziness and they burn themselves out. Other people call avoidance rest because the word sounds healthier. But real rest should make it easier for you to return to the work. You sleep, you walk, you spend time with somebody you care about, watch something, you take the evening off, and afterwards you have more capacity to do more work. We sleep so that we can wake up and engage with reality again. Right? Escape and avoidance leave a very different kind of residue. You're still mentally attached to the task while refusing to touch it. You doom scroll while thinking about what you should actually be doing. You consume advice about the exact thing 4:40:48 you're actually avoiding doing. You finish the rest, quote unquote, with less time, roughly the same energy, or maybe even less, and a lot more guilt. So real recovery depends on what happens after it. Does the break restore your ability to return to the work or does it become another way to postpone returning? So you need some honesty here if you want to be able to tell whether you're recovering from the work or hiding from the work. And when you can see the cycle, your past attempts have a lot to teach you because you can now look for the precise moment things went sideways. Most people only remember how it ended up feeling, but you need to look at what you actually did in order because that will tell you where the pattern kicks in. So, you need to pick one big goal you keep coming back to and think about the last few times you really went for it. And now you need to find the first spot where things go the same way every 4:41:49 single time. And then make a guess you can actually test. If your reason is right, what should help? And a guess is more useful when it could be proven wrong. Say you think you're stuck because you don't know enough, then learning what's missing should get you moving. If you learn it and right away you start looking for something else, then not knowing enough probably wasn't the real problem. So sometimes the reason you put things off is really boring. Maybe you just slept badly. Maybe you're distracted. Maybe the task sucks. Maybe you'd rather watch another video. There doesn't have to be some big explanation be behind every task you skip. Only dig this deep when the same big goal keeps coming back and the normal fixes don't really work anymore. And even this can go too far. At some point thinking about why you're avoiding the work turns into one more way to avoid it. So this always has to bring you back to reality. Make your best guess. Pick one thing that should help you if you're right and then actually try it. 4:42:50 And if you repeat the planning high cycle long enough, [clears throat] it can train you to prefer start starting again and again over actually sticking with the thing. So you become extremely good at getting excited, at getting yourself hyped up. You become good at research, at planning, at imagining, at naming, at organizing, at starting. And then the project enters the stage where progress depends mostly on repeated contact with the work. And your mind interprets the drop in novelty as essentially a drop in potential. And the exciting part begin the exciting beginning starts feeling like evidence that something is right and normal work starts feeling like evidence that something is wrong. So do you see the paradox it creates? Every worthwhile pursuit becomes ordinary and boring at some point. Mastery contains an enormous amount of sheer [snorts] repetition. 4:43:52 And repetition rarely gives you the emotional intensity of actually discovering the goal for the first time. When we discover a goal for the first time, when we come up with it for the first time, it feels exciting and new and like everything is possible. But when we actually get into the work of it, into the weeds, we realize there's a lot of repetition in order to get to that goal. And this creates an interesting trade-off between exploration and exploitation, a problem that appears in fields like economics and decision theory. So exploration means testing alternatives and looking for better possibilities. Exploitation means taking the best option you currently know and investing enough into it to receive the return. Too little exploration and you can stay with a bad path forever. Too much exploration and you never remain anywhere long enough for the results to actually show up, let alone compound. And this is basically learning. You can 4:44:54 you can uh change the terms. Exploration is learning. Exploitation is actually taking action on what you learn. And a lot of ambitious people often overvalue exploration because exploration makes them feel intelligent. You're researching possibilities. You're keeping your options open. You're learning, right? And all of that can be genuinely valuable. Eventually though, one possibility has to receive disproportionate time and attention [clears throat] and effort or none of your possibilities ever become particularly developed or become reality. So a very interesting example of this comes from Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who worked out how the planets move. In 1611, his first wife died and so he decided to marry again. Being Kepler, he treated it like a research project. And over about two years, he seriously considered 11 different women. He weighed their families, their money, their looks, 4:45:55 their character, and what his friends thought of each one. And he even wrote a long letter to a friend going through the candidates one by one, trying to make sense of his own indecision. Now, the funny part is that the fifth woman was the one he really liked. Her name was Susanna Royinger and he kept going anyway even though he liked her because there was always a chance that the next one could be even better. So he spent months on candidates 6 through 11 and some fell apart, some he talked himself out of, some his friends talked him out of and in the end he went back to Susanna and married her in 1613. By most accounts it was a good marriage. Now, mathematicians later studied this exact kind of problem. They call it optimal stopping and people sometimes call the answer the 37% rule. You spend roughly the first third of your options just looking. So, you learn what good 4:46:55 looks like and then you commit to the next option that beats everything you've seen so far. With 11 candidates, that means you look at the first four and pick the next one that's better than all of them. [clears throat] For Kepler, that was number five. And the math would have had him married more than a year earlier. And that's the whole trade-off in one story. Kepler's first few dates were useful, right? They taught him what he actually wanted. And after a point, though, every extra candidate just cost him time, energy, and effort, and risked losing the person he'd already found. And all the good parts of a marriage come later, right? from years of showing up for the same person and learning about the other person. Both of you learning about each other. The same goes for your business, your skill or your book. Explore long enough to learn what good looks like, but then you need to pick one and give it enough of your life so that it can pay off and it can have a life of its own. 4:47:56 And this actually brings us back to opportunity cost from the first section. So a serious choice choice creates a loss because you could have done something else with that time. Planning can temporarily protect you from feeling that loss because every possibility remains mentally available. Commitment ends that comfort. So you choose one project and suddenly the projects you didn't choose become real sacrifices instead of hypothetical alternatives. And what almost nobody counts is the cost of planning and never choosing. Now planning feels free. It feels like something we can just do and it doesn't cost us anything because we haven't yet started. It feels like you're getting ready. So it never shows up as a loss in your head. Yet every month you spend weighing options is a month none of them get a real try from you. So Kepler's search, for example, cost him about 2 years. 4:48:56 Your planning costs you something too and it's often the biggest cost of all because time is the one thing you can't get back. Now researchers have a name for this. In 2009, Shane Frederick and his colleagues called it opportunity cost neglect. So people make choices without thinking about what else they could do with the same money or time unless somebody points it out. So, for example, in one study, people choosing between a pricier stereo and a cheaper one picked the picked the cheaper one more often when they were reminded that it left them a few hundred for something else. Nothing about the prices really changed. Seeing the cost spelled out really changed the choice. And there's a related bias called omission bias where not acting feels safer than acting even when it costs you more. Put those together and you can see why weeks of planning feel like nothing. Nobody's spelling out what those weeks cost to you. And so you need to overcome 4:49:59 the omission bias by actually taking action. And that's one reason commitment can feel strangely bad even when the choice is good. We tend to assume that a correct decision should remove doubt, but it often doesn't. A lot of the times you choose and you feel doubt regardless regardless of what you would have chosen. You can choose a business and still wonder about another one. You can choose one career and still feel curiosity about the life you didn't live. Hell, you could choose a partner and still wonder about what's out there. I think a lot of you have felt that, right? The existent the existence of an attractive alternative tells you that the choice had opportunity cost. But it doesn't automatically tell you to reverse it. And so if you follow this far enough, this whole training becomes about finitude. You have a limited number of years. And your imagination can generate far more possible lives than those years can 4:51:00 actually contain. And at some point ambition has to become exclusion and sacrifice. You have to allow some good possibilities to remain unrealized so that another one gets enough of your life to become real. And so before we move into the four forms of stock, I want you to see the sequence in your own life. You imagine something better. That future gives you energy. You plan the work becomes real. Reality introduces cost and feedback. You either use that information to improve or you move away and eventually find another way to feel hopeful again. And so the cycle restarts. The exact point where you leave it tells you what kind of problem you're actually dealing with. And so if you repeatedly pull away when several good possibilities compete for your attention, you're dealing with choice. If you know exactly what you want and what you need to do, but you keep choosing the easier option, you're dealing with comfort. If your actions 4:52:02 repeatedly reject a goal while you keep talking about about it, you're dealing with refusal. And if you remain trapped in thought because no amount of thinking produces enough certainty to act, you're dealing with overthinking. And so from the outside, all four of those can look like procrastination and laziness, while internally they're doing very different things for you. So they need different responses. So now we're going to take the vague experience of feeling stuck and actually split it into those four different mechanisms. And once you can tell which one you're actually dealing with, the question becomes about what exactly is stopping you from taking action here and what response would actually change it. So let's talk about the four forms of being stuck. So in every case, there's something you say you want and some action you aren't really taking. That's the visible part. Right underneath it though, you might be unable to choose. 4:53:02 You might be protecting comfort. You might be refusing a goal you no longer truly want. Or you could be thinking long after the thinking has stopped helping you now. Choice, comfort, refusal, and overthinking. [clears throat] Right? And you should use these as explanations for one specific moment. They describe what happened around one goal at one point in time and have no trouble acting at all somewhere else. Keeping it to one goal in one moment gives you something specific to change. So remember the question from the first section, what did avoiding the action do for you? Choice lets you keep your alternatives open. Comfort lets you avoid an immediate cost. Refusal lets you postpone an uncomfortable truth about what you actually want. And overthinking lets you postpone action while still feeling as though you're responsibly dealing with the problem. So the behaviors can look very similar while the functions of those behaviors are very different. And each explanation 4:54:04 changes what would help in that specific scenario. So if choice is the problem, then reducing the decision and gathering the right evidence and information should help. If comfort is the problem, then changing the immediate conditions and acting should help. If refusal is the problem, then honesty about the goal should help. And if overthinking is the problem, then another hour of thinking probably won't help very much. So these forms can also turn into each other. You can begin with choice because three directions genuinely interest you. And after you choose one, comfort can become the problem because now you actually have to do the work. Six months later, you might discover that you chose the path for reasons that no longer matter to you, which turns the problem into refusal. Or you can respond to any of those uncomfortable moments by thinking about them until you've created overthinking on top of the original issue. So don't obsess over finding the perfect solution. Pick the explanation that best describes 4:55:05 what happened most recently and then test the response that should help. If it changes the pattern, great. If it doesn't then you learn something and you can update the explanation. And this is basically biasian thinking applied to yourself. You start with a best guess. You take an action that should produce a certain result if the guess is right and then you observe what actually happens and then you update. So you don't need absolute certainty before acting because action itself produces some of the certainty and evidence you're actually waiting for. And so the bottleneck of choice happens when you have several real options and you keep trying to preserve all of them. And I want to emphasize real options because there's a difference between indecision and ordinary distraction. If you're deciding between three careers you genuinely want, three business models that could all work or several important directions for the next few years of your life, you have an actual choice problem. And the difficulty comes 4:56:06 from the fact that choosing one path doesn't only give you something. It also closes access to something else, at least for now. And we usually assume that having more options should make life easier because more options gives you more freedom. And that makes sense up to a point. Barry Schwarz opens his famous talk on the paradox of choice by describing what he calls the dominant assumption that the way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. And his whole argument begins when he asks what happens after choice becomes so abundant that deciding itself becomes costly. And Sheenaar and Mark Leer tested part of this experimentally in a now famous series of studies. And in one field experiment, shoppers were more likely to stop at a display with 24 jams. Yet they were substantially more likely to actually 4:57:06 buy when the display offered only six. And so their later experiments found similar effects with chocolates in academic work. The point isn't that six choices is some magical number. Is that expanding the option set can eventually increase the burden of choosing enough that motivation and follow through actually suffer. And what makes choices especially difficult is that several options can all be good. And that's where opportunity cost becomes emotionally important. If one option is obviously terrible and another is obviously right, you barely experience the decision as sacrifice, right? The hard decisions are the ones where choosing something meaningful requires giving up another meaningful possibility. And so your mind can also keep generating the life you would have lived under the option you didn't choose. And economists call this kind of alternative a counterfactual. In simple terms, it could be said it's the source of the feeling of FOMO. You choose the 4:58:08 business and wonder how the career would have gone. You choose the career and wonder what would have happened if you had built the business. The unchosen option always stays psychologically untouched because you never lived inside of it to discover its boring parts. its compromises, its frustrations and failures, and that creates a strange comparison. Your chosen path becomes real, which means it hits the inevitable messiness of life and accumulates problems. The unchosen path always stays hypothetical, so you can keep comparing the difficult reality you actually live with an optimistically edited possibility that never had the chance to disappoint you. And if you don't notice that asymmetry difficult difficulty can make you reopen decisions that were perfectly reasonable when you made them. And I personally think not being aware of this creates a lot of suffering for most people. You end up measuring your life against a version that only exists in your head. 4:59:09 And the real one loses every single time. And it doesn't matter how good your choice was. Your real path has bad days, boring stretches, and actual problems that you will have to fix and fires that you'll have to put out. The path you didn't take has none of that, right? Because you never had to live it. And you imagine only the good parts of it. Because imagining or predicting the one scenario in which it all goes well is obviously a lot easier than imagining or predicting the countless of ways it could have gone bad. So you walk around with this quiet feeling that you got it wrong. You need to understand that the comparison is rigged, right? Your brain is playing tricks on you. The other path probably had just as many problems. It could even have more, maybe even bigger and worse. You just never got close enough to actually see them and you can't imagine them. You can 5:00:11 only imagine the good scenario. So when choice is the problem, you need a way to reduce uncertainty enough to commit. And I would start by separating reversible choices from irreversible ones. And that's one of the most useful decision-making mental models I know because we tend to give small reversible decisions the same emotional weight as decisions that genuinely change our lives and businesses and so on. So you can use this in your favor. If you can test an option cheaply, then test it. For example, you can take one class before changing your career or you can sell the offer to one person before rebuilding the company around it. or you make 10 videos in the format before deciding your entire channel should use it. So you work with real information wherever possible. Imagined information always preserves every option while real life experience begins eliminating them. And so then you put an end date on the decision. You keep overthinking because there's always permission to reconsider your choice tomorrow. Cut that out. Give 5:01:14 yourself enough time to gather the facts that matter. decide and then set a review point in the future. Until that review point arrives, you stop thinking about it and reopening the whole decision every time your mood changes. Right? Then once you choose, you also need to understand that commitment changes the question. Before the decision, you're asking which part part or which path deserves an attempt. Real effort, real time, real energy. After the decision, you need to ask how to learn as much as possible from the path you chose. How to make it the path? How to make it the right path? So, you can't keep using the standards of exploration after you've entered the commitment phase, after you've entered the exploitation phase. And that doesn't mean stubbornly staying with bad decisions forever. As we discussed, you have a review date. Decide beforehand what would justify actually changing the direction and then just accept the fact 5:02:15 that a good decision can still contain doubt. It always does. You can miss the path you didn't choose, right? You can remain curious about it. None of those feelings require you to reopen the decision or change paths because then you will change the path if you do it. You'll change the path and you'll wonder what if you had stayed with the first one. So it just means you chose between two things that both matter to you or made sense to you. That's all. Now the second form is comfort and that's a lot more straightforward. You know what you need to do. You know why you want the result. You aren't confused about the options. You simply don't want to pay the immediate cost of doing the thing right now. And behavioral economists describe part of this through something called present bias. It basically means we tend to overweight immediate costs and rewards compared with future ones. And so the future version of you gets the body, the money, 5:03:17 the finished project or the improved skill. The current version of you has to close YouTube, go outside, make the call, write the paragraph, or tolerate feeling incompetent for a while. And that creates a very predictable conflict. And notice how unfair the comparison is. The benefit is often delayed and abstract. The cost is immediate and concrete. Six months from now, you might be much better at speaking on camera, for example. Right now, you have to actually record a take that you don't like. A year from now, the business might be stronger. Right now, you have to contact somebody who might ignore you. Your nervous system experiences the immediate event with far more intensity than the distant reward. And this is why waiting until you feel motivated can actually trap you. Motivation often arrives after some of the friction disappears after the after you've started receiving evidence that you're making progress. 5:04:17 And if you require the emotional state first, you can wait indefinitely for a feeling that the action itself creates, right? And so comfort also gets misunderstood because people imagine it as enjoying yourself. And often it just means reducing discomfort. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're enjoying yourself. You might not even be having fun while avoiding the work. You can spend an hour just scrolling and feeling guilty the entire time and still keep scrolling scrolling because stopping would mean you have to return to the task. That creates more immediate discomfort. And so that reduction in discomfort can reinforce the behavior. You approach the task, discomfort rises, you leave the task and then the discomfort disappears and your brain learns from that sequence and hard codes it essentially. Leaving works in the short term and if you repeat it enough times, the discomfort starts showing up earlier because your mind has learned that approaching the task predicts something unpleasant. And then the avoidance itself can make 5:05:18 the task even bigger, which perpetuates the cycle. For example, you skip one workout, but now it becomes a week and you eventually face a larger problem than the one you originally escaped, which increases the desire to escape it again. And so when comfort is the problem, you already know what to do. So you just need to change the immediate situation so that doing the right thing becomes easier and escaping becomes harder. So you need to reduce friction for the action you should take and increase friction around the distractions. And this is called environment design. We sometimes talk about achievement as if every decision happens inside a vacuum. It doesn't. Right? You act inside rooms, around devices, around food, around people, inside routines, and under whatever options are immediately available and change those conditions and you change how much effort the decision really requires. And you can also use what economists call a commitment device, meaning you make a choice now that restricts the easier option available to 5:06:18 you later. So for example, if you want to go to a workout class, you book it ahead of time. You're essentially arranging the environment while you're calm so that the later version of you that might face temptation has no room to negotiate. So you put yourself in a position where your back is against the wall and you burn the bridges. And if you want to do that right now, then make sure to book a call from the link in the description. Now, the deeper goal here is to stop treating discomfort as some form of evidence that something is wrong. Most of the things we want in life will require discomfort. As we've discussed, I would even argue that's what makes them desirable. The biggest part of any useful work will feel inconvenient and uncomfortable while you're doing it. Sometimes it feels boring. Sometimes you'd prefer to stop. That's not even something you should factor into your decision as to whether you should do the work or not because it will always be there regardless. And you actually want some contact with discomfort because that's 5:07:20 how you learn that you can take action while it exists. That's when you exercise your agency as a human being. If everything you do is done to remove every unpleasant feeling before action begins, you remain dependent on perfect conditions, which means you never really take action. So a better system should reduce unnecessary friction while still leaving enough difficulty that you develop the tolerance for ordinary everyday resistance. The only measure you should care about first is binary. Did you do the thing you said you would or not? That's it. And that's the measure here, right? You can optimize and analyze the quality once being consistent consistent has become consistent. Trying to perfect the first action will always give comfort another sophisticated excuse to delay the work. Now the third form is more uncomfortable because it's more so about whether the 5:08:22 problem is the goal itself. Sometimes your behavior keeps saying no to something your words keep say saying yes to and you tell everybody you want to do the thing yet every time life gives you the opportunity to actually take action on it you repeatedly do something else. Herman Melville actually wrote one of the strangest literary versions of refusal in Bartalby the scrivener. Now, Bartleby begins as this unusually productive copist and then starts refusing ordinary requests with the same calm sentence again and again, which was, "I would prefer not to." Now, the story ends up much darker and stranger than the point I'm making here, but that phrase captures something I think people experience a lot. Sometimes you keep making up reasons around a much simpler preference that you just don't 5:09:22 want to admit to yourself. So maybe you want the status attached to the goal, but you dislike the work that is actually required to maintain it. Or for example, your parents wanted you to have a certain career. or a younger version of you chose it because money or safety or admiration or belonging mattered enormously at the time and maybe those reasons were completely valid and then they no longer describe your life now. So admitting that creates a cost because goals become part of your identity at some point. You've told people who you are. You've invested time. Maybe you've built a reputation even around the goal. And so leaving the goal can feel like losing a piece of yourself, like losing status or a part of yourself or admitting that an earlier version of you was actually wrong. So it can feel 5:10:22 psychologically easier to essentially continue saying yes to that goal while your behavior handles the refusal for you. And self-determination research actually explains the distinction between motivation that feels autonomous and motivation that feels controlled. So, broadly speaking, people persist differently when they experience an action as personally endorsed compared with when they actually experience pressure, obligation, guilt, or a need for this external approval. And so, two people can perform the same behavior for very different reasons. So this is where I where you need to essentially start paying attention to the word should and it takes different forms every time. I should want the career. I should finish the degree. I should build a bigger company. I should stay with this identity and self-image because I've spent so long creating it. 5:11:23 And sometimes should reflects a real duty. So you might actually have responsibilities to your family or employees or clients or people who depend on you. Sometimes limiting beliefs are hidden within the word should. The point is to really find out whether you're honoring a real responsibility or a lot of the times protecting an image that no longer deserves the cost for you. Now goals can also outlive the reason that created them in the first place. So maybe you chose something at 20 because it solved a problem of the 20year-old version of you, the 20year-old problem. You just wanted to get rich no matter the personal cost. For example, and 10 years later the problem has changed and the goal remains the same. So if you never consciously revisit your goals, your present life can remain organized around a decision that you made a long time ago 5:12:25 made by a person with different fears, incentives, different values, different information, different knowledge, different experience. So if refusal is the main problem for you here, you need to stop trying to motivate yourself for a minute and finally be honest with yourself. You need to essentially tell the truth to yourself about the goal that you have. Do you want the result? And if so, why? Why do you keep avoiding the work? If nobody ever praised you for actually achieving this, then would you still want the goal? And if so, why? And you need to be honest with yourself here because the idea isn't to keep keep pretending. You might find out that you absolutely do want the goal, but you've been refusing one particular part of it. And that's fine. Now, the problem is pretty clear, right? Do you want the goal? So, you deal with a specific cost that you don't necessarily like. Or you might find out that you don't 5:13:26 want it anymore at all. And that's also fine. Both the goal and the work associated with achieving it is something you don't actually want anymore. then you need to end it and finish the obligations you owe. Tell the appropriate people and then just deal with the consequences. And yes, you might find this harder than I make it out to be. And that could be true. But ask yourself, what's really harder over the long term? Is it being brutally honest with yourself right now, knowing that it might sting for a moment? Or is it harder to live for another 10, 20, 30 years pretending you want something you actually don't and never really reaching the result because you actually don't want to do the work associated with it. And this is where the famous sunk cost mental model can be applied. Time you already spent is obviously gone. Money you already spend is gone. 5:14:27 These costs can obviously teach you something, but you can't recover them by spending another five years on a path that no longer makes sense. So the rational question concerns the costs and benefits always from this point forward. So today is always the day you should be looking forward from. You can't look at the past costs and think to yourself, I should spend more because I've spent so much already. So people find that much harder when the sunk cost is their self-image and leaving a goal can feel manageable of course but leaving the story that you're the person who was always going to achieve the goal can hurt a lot more and that's why the bottleneck of refusal can really stay under the surface for so long even after the reasons for the goal have completely disappeared. And so you don't need permission to stop pursuing something at the end of the day. The only permission you need is 5:15:28 your own. Some of your ambitions deserve another serious attempt. You actually do need to put in some effort and action and time and energy into them and maybe even money. But some need a different form and some belong to a person you no longer want to be. So you need to stop spending present effort maintaining a future you would no longer deliberately want or choose. And so the only result of that in the end is regret. You're digging a hole for yourself and nobody's really asking you to dig that hole. You decide whether you can you let go of the shovel. Now the fourth form of stuck is when you stop or when you keep thinking after thinking has stopped producing anything useful. Now this one is especially deceptive for intelligent people and ambitious people because thinking or what they think of thinking what they think is thinking 5:16:30 feels intelligent. And the key word here is feels right. You tell yourself that the decision matters, that you're being careful, that you still need to understand one more thing. And sometimes that's completely true. Thought can obviously be useful. Real thought, but it does become a problem when each new round of thinking actually gives you the same information in basically slightly different words. So Shakespeare actually described this long before psychologists started studying rumination. In Hamlet, after pages of thoughts surrounding action, uncertainty, death, and consequence, Hamlet says that the native hue of resolution is sickly or with the pale cost or cast of thought. And he's basically saying that thinking too much drains the life out of your drive to act. The native hue of resolution is the natural color of determination, like the flushed face of someone who's ready to 5:17:32 go. And the pale cast of thought is the pale color that overthinking actually gives it. So your drive starts out strong and red-blooded. And the more you think, the paler and sicker it gets. And in the next line, Hamlet says, "Big plans lose the name lose the name of action, which means that they never actually happen. In short, the more you think, the less you do." So you need to distinguish reflection from rumination here. Reflection can change your actions. Obviously, rumination keeps circling the same material without really changing what you know or what you'll do. So, after you think, you need to really ask yourself, what is really different now? Do you actually have a new fact, a new piece of information, a new option, or a meaningfully different view of the situation? If you do, then great. You can keep thinking if it's still producing something. But if the output is the same thing expressed with different words, 5:18:34 thought probably isn't what you really need. And research on on rumination by Edward Watkins and his colleagues found that more abstract self-focused rumination can actually impair problem solving compared with a more concrete mode of thinking about experience. So in one study involving depressed participants, concrete self-focus improved social problem solving relative to abstract rumination. So essentially how you think about your problems matters. So big vague why me type of thinking makes you a lot worse at actually solving them. But thinking about the specific details of what actually happened makes you better at it. So the level of thought matters. So abstract thought means asking questions like why does this always happen to me? What does this say about me? Am I making the wrong life decision? Will I regret it? Does this prove something larger about my 5:19:34 abilities? And those questions can become enormous because they're extremely vague if you think about it and don't necessarily have a finish line. Concrete thought, on the other hand, moves closer to the situation and objective reality. So what did actually happen? What information am I actually missing? Who could give me that information? What decision has to happen now? And what decision can wait? So you reduce the size of the thinking until reality becomes clear again. So you're no longer thinking in these abstractions. And a lot of overthinking is really an attempt to obtain certainty from a situation that can't provide it. Some information becomes available only after you take action and that creates a hard boundary for thought. If the missing information literally doesn't exist yet because it depends on future events, then thinking harder can't necessarily 5:20:34 generate it, right? You can estimate, you can reduce the currently obvious risk, you can speak to people. Eventually though, you inevitably reach the part that only action can answer. And this is why experiments matter so much. They essentially turn these unknowns into real observable results. And tests create information that thinking by itself can't. Information that you can now use and inform your next set of actions based on. And sometimes you need to interrupt the loop physically before you can actually think clearly again. Right? You can go outside, you can move, you can sleep, you can eat if you haven't eaten, and then give your thinking an end by just deciding, knowing that whatever you decide on, of course, closes all other possibilities, and that's okay. And then act on the action that will produce new 5:21:35 information. And by this point, you've probably recognized yourself in more than one form. And these aren't neat boxes because behavior is rarely neat. and organized. So the rule of thumb is action in short. Every path still ends in action somewhere. So if you take something from this training, this is what you should take. Choice eventually requires a decision. Comfort requires doing something uncomfortable. Refusal requires you to be honest with yourself and finally deal with the consequences. Overthinking requires ending the loop and engaging with reality. So if you're still unsure which form you fall into most, then you need to invert the problem. Ask what you would need to keep doing if you wanted the pattern to actually continue for another year. An inversion works because it's often easier to identify what reliably preserves a problem than to see the 5:22:36 solution. So Charlie Mer used this style of thinking constantly. If the direct question feels complicated, then you just turn it around and study what would make failure almost inevitable and then you stop feeding those conditions. And after that, you just move. You don't want the framework essentially to become another planning high, right? This framework that we've been talking about. You choose the best fitting explanation. You test, take action, and test. And you now have the four forms and the logic behind each one. And the next section is really where this will become something you can actually use. We're going to take a real goal, reconstruct what happened the last few times you tried, identify the point where your behavior changed, match that point to one of the four forms, and then choose an action that should produce new evidence if your explanation is right. So with that said, let's actually discuss honest action. So now we need to 5:23:38 actually use this, right? you understand yourself better. You have four interesting categories. Maybe you recognize a few patterns and nothing changes. So, you need to pick a goal that keeps coming back while your effort keeps disappearing. Don't pick your entire life. Just write down the last time you tried to move towards it. And then take the most recent attempt and reconstruct what actually happened. Keep it boring and factual as much as possible and keep it to the actions because actions give you something you can actually inspect. Your brain will immediately want to mix observation with explanation. So you'll write that you lost motivation or got overwhelmed or realized the idea wasn't right maybe, but we don't know that yet, right? That's a story that you're trying to explain it with, right? What somebody watching a recording of your week could actually see. So just the event itself, what did you do? What happened next? Where did your behavior change? And that explanation should come after the observation. So we are first trying to 5:24:39 observe and then we're trying to find the explanation not together. So in science before you can actually explain a phenomenon you need to describe the phenomenon accurately. Otherwise you end up building a theory around a story that you told yourself. So for now you're basically gathering behavioral data on yourself. You're looking for the repeated sequence before you decide what the sequence actually means. And then you find the first moment where your behavior changed. And this is usually more useful than looking at the point where the whole thing died because by that stage five other things have happened. So you need to go backwards until you find the first fork in the road. So maybe you were taking action and then something happened and after that your action started going somewhere else. It's as simple as that. What happened immediately before that? Did you have to choose between two directions? Did the task become uncomfortable? Did another person or people have the opportunity to judge your work? Did you reach a boring, repetitive stage? Did you begin 5:25:41 questioning whether you even wanted the goal? Did you start researching something you already knew enough about? And then look at what you did immediately afterwards. Avoidance usually has a replacement behavior right after. You research, you reorganize, you scroll, you work on another thing. And so the next behavior can tell you what the previous action was helping you escape. And then make sure to include basic reality in the timeline. How are you sleeping? Were you actually sick? Did something happen in your relationship? Had you already been working for 12 hours? Because that context obviously matters. Like always first check the obvious things, energy, time, skill, information, environment, resources. Because if the obvious constraint explains the behavior, then solve the obvious constraint. Intellectual people sometimes prefer complicated psychological explanations because complicated explanations can feel more interesting and more intelligent. But sometimes it's as basic as I didn't sleep well, so just fix your 5:26:44 sleep. And there's an old rule for this called AAM's razor. And it's named after William of AAM who lived in the 1300s. And it says that when a few explanations won't fit the facts, then the simplest one is usually the right one. So start with a boring explanation and then fix that first. If the problem's still there afterwards, then you could dig deeper. And so actually pause here if you're watching this and write the timeline and don't just nod along because the example sounds familiar. The rest of this works a lot better when you actually have a real sequence in front of you. So, pause the video here and just write it down. Now, once you can see the sequence, make your best guess about which of the four forms showed up at the break point. So, choice means that several legitimate directions kept you from actually committing. Comfort means the next action was reasonably clear and you 5:27:45 repeatedly chose immediate ease. Refusal means that your words kept endorsing a goal your behavior seemed to reject. And overthinking means that thought kept repeating without materially changing what you knew or what you did. And I want you to treat the answer like a hypothesis. So a a hypothesis makes a prediction and can therefore be tested. If you decide you're simply an overthinker, that becomes another identity and you don't have to test anything. It's really again a mental shortcut so that you can avoid the effort of actually thinking. If you say overthinking seems to be what happened here, now we can test whether a solution aimed at overthinking will change something the next time it actually happens. And this is basically the spirit of Carl Pauper's idea of falsifiability applied in a very informal way. So a useful explanation needs some conceivable result that would make you reconsider it. If every 5:28:45 possible outcome confirms your theory, then you don't have much of a theory, right? You have a story that can explain anything after it happens. And so you need to write down what should happen if your diagnosis is right. If choice is the issue, then a test and a deadline should reduce the paralysis. If comfort is the issue, then changing the environment and putting a concrete action on the calendar should increase your follow through. If refusal is the issue, then examining the goal and whether you actually want it or not anymore should clarify whether you actually want to recommit or leave it. And if overthinking is the issue, then reducing thought and getting new information through action should help more than another private analysis session. And you need to keep the explanation attached to the goal and the event only. So don't attach it to yourself or your self-image or identity. You aren't a comfort person. You chose comfort around this specific action. You probably don't choose comfort around 5:29:46 every action. You aren't somewhere someone who can who can't make decisions, but you struggle to choose between these options. You probably don't struggle in other areas. I keep emphasizing this because language can make temporary behavior feel permanent and part of who you are as a person. And you need to always be careful what you speak on yourself and be very intentional when using I statements. So the more specific the description, the easier it becomes to change. For example, I delayed recording because I didn't want to hear a bad first take. Gives you several options, right? I'm chronically lazy. turns the whole thing into an identity problem which is very vague as well and makes the solution a lot harder to find in the fog of that statement. Also, different stages of the same goal can produce different forms. So, choice might prevent you from actually selecting a business model. Comfort might show up once and once you have to actually make sales calls. Overthinking might appear after your first few calls go badly and later you 5:30:47 might find that you don't want the model at all. So, you need to keep updating. And now we get to what I think is the most important part of the entire framework, which is to match the response to the cause. So if you do nothing else from this training, remember that you need a solution that should specifically weaken the mechanism keeping this particular pattern going. So if it's choice, then you stop trying to solve the decision entirely in your head. Identify the main activity behind each serious option and then test it where where possible. If you're choosing between making YouTube videos and writing long- form essays, for example, just produce both for a short period of time and then decide. The purpose of the test is to turn those imagined options into actual experienced options so you know what you actually prefer. And then choose the decision date before you run the test. Otherwise, every experiment can produce another experiment. So at some point you need to say that you have enough information to make a reasonable decision with the knowledge that's available to you today. 5:31:48 Now once you choose don't reopen the entire decision every morning, right? You can schedule a review date which gives you permission to reconsider later without really requiring you to reconsider constantly. And this is where the reversible versus irreversible decision model comes into play. So if the choice can be changed later at a tolerable cost, then you should often decide faster because reality can correct you. So save your thinking for decisions where the downside truly is difficult to undo. And your goal during the commitment period is to collect better information. If it's about comfort, then put an action on the calendar and actually make it specific. So record the video, send 10 messages, go to the gym, write 500 words, whatever it is, just pick something where you can actually answer yes or no afterwards. It should be that binary. And then remove the obstacles before the appointment actually begins. So if your phone derails you, then you need to remove it 5:32:50 if you know that it does. If you waste 20 minutes setting everything up, then prepare the space beforehand. If you keep changing the task, then write the task down before the session. Make the good action easier and the actions that you don't want to do harder. And then treat it like a real appointment with yourself. So there should be a time and a place. And those create a much clearer behavioral test. Did you show up to the time and place and do the thing or not? If you did, good. Now we have evidence. If you didn't, again, we have evidence. And for comfort specifically, nail down consistency before you obsess over the quality. So people often use quality standards to avoid doing the thing. You spend three hours just trying to create the perfect first video when what you actually need is 20 imperfect videos that show you what you need to actually improve. So set a minimum. And the minimum isn't necessarily your target. It's the floor that protects continuity. So you can always do more once you become consistent at being consistent. 5:33:53 And at the same time, don't reduce the action until it becomes meaningless. Of course, if your problem is avoiding sales calls, then obviously writing the names of prospects in a notebook might technically count as progress and you could still end up doing absolutely nothing. So, your action needs to make contact with the thing you've been actually avoiding. Now, if it's refusal, the work changes because pushing harder can simply increase the amount of time you spend forcing yourself towards something you don't actually want. So, you need to go back to the previous section and be honest with yourself with the goal in front of you. So if the goal survives but fear is the problem, good. Don't abandon the goal. Then deal with a feared component and keep the goal and work on the actual point of refusal. If the goal itself isn't something you want anymore, you could still decide to continue for practical reasons like duty, money, or an obligation obligation you accept. But that's different from pretending you deeply want something you no longer want. And don't keep renewing a major goal 5:34:54 with weak reasons. So choose it again deliberately. Change it or end it. That's it. Your old decision doesn't deserve more time and more effort simply because it already received time and effort. This is the cost fallacy. So your mind naturally wants that investment to mean something a lot of the times. But the past cost doesn't become recoverable because you add another future cost to it. It's a fallacy. If it's overthinking, the solution has to interrupt the attempt to think your way into being 100% certain about everything and essentially waiting for perfect conditions. So change what you're physically doing. Write down the missing information you need and then decide what whether that information can actually be obtained before you act. Sometimes the answer is is yes, sometimes and often times the answer is no because the thing you want to know only becomes knowable later after you've actually taken the action. So once you identify an unknowable unknown, then stop demanding that your thoughts should 5:35:54 produce an answer and then do a test that you would be okay with being wrong about. And this is basically the logic of experimentation. You want reality to start contributing actual real information to a problem that your mind has been trying to solve by itself. And then put an end point on the thinking itself. Give yourself a specific period. Gather the information that actually matters and then act. Sometimes you correctly pinpoint the form of stuck and still choose the wrong solution. So a problem can live in your environment, your behavior, your skills, your beliefs, your identity or the larger purpose behind the goal in general. And people waste huge amounts of effort trying to solve one level with tools designed for another. So if you genuinely want to work and every distraction is within reach, then you need to change the environment, right? If the environment is fine but the task is vague, then just make the task more specific. It should contain an actual verb. And if you keep acting but repeatedly fail at the same point, then 5:36:56 you might have a skill issue, right? Stop trying to push through missing competence. And learn the skill, drill it, get feedback, and then repeat it enough times that your cap capability actually increases. Sometimes your behavior keeps collapsing because of the interpretation you attach to normal feedback. So, one bad video means that you're bad on camera in general. One poor sales month means that the business doesn't work or that you're bad at sales in general. One difficult week means that you chose the wrong path. Here, the action can be perfectly clear while your interpretations keep turning local problems into global conclusions. So, one result usually proves far less than the madeup story about it says. One rejected offer proves that one person didn't buy. That's it. It doesn't prove nobody will ever buy anything from you. So you need to keep your conclusions proportional to the evidence. And then you look at what will change the actual evidence. More repetitions, 5:37:57 better feedback, a better offer, better sales training, a different approach. Beliefs become much easier to update when you actually connect them to something reality could actually show you. And after you test, you need to review what happened. So this is the part people skip because once they take action, they either celebrate celebrate the win or beat themselves up about the quote unquote failure. So think of the whole process as a circle. I call it the pattern loop. Record what happened, name the form it took, match a response to it, and then act. And then review what changed, and that review becomes the next thing you record. So each lap essentially teaches you a bit more about how you work and then when your first explanation turns out to be incomplete you just go around again and if the solution works then repeat it so that you can see whether the effect actually stays. If it doesn't then you need to return to the timeline and what looked like comfort could actually be fear. Maybe solving choice exposed 5:38:59 refusal behind it. Maybe reducing your overthinking revealed that you simply don't want the goal. But that doesn't mean the original explanation was useless. Sometimes solving the problem reveals the next problem. And each time you go through it through the loop, it gives you a better better information. And then keep the score connected to the solution you actually used. So if you pinpointed comfort, then the first score isn't whether you built the milliondoll company, it's whether you did the uncomfortable action. If you pinpoint the choice, then the score is whether you gathered enough evidence and actually chose. Measure the thing you're actually currently trying to change. And this is basically the difference between a leading indicator and a lagging indicator. So the final outcome can take months or years. The behavior that contributes to that final outcome can often be measured today. It can even sometimes be measured this minute. So, you can't directly control whether your business reaches $100,000 in profit this 5:39:59 month. That's a result. You can control whether you publish the next video or create 20 ad creatives and put them out there, right? And that protects you from using slow outcomes as an excuse to abandon good behavior too early. You want the you want to judge the action before enough time has actually passed for the outcome to respond. Track both, but know which one you're currently capable of influencing directly. Most of the time it's the leading indicators that we can only influence in any way. And then set a review date and stick to it. Reviewing every day obviously turns into constant renegotiation. And never reviewing also keeps you stuck in things that stopped working. So when the date comes, just look at the facts and then decide what's next and just keep going. Adjust and change the explanation or the end goal. And there are three mistakes that I want you to watch out for because all three can make this framework become part of the original problem. The first mistake is studying the model instead of 5:41:01 actually using it. Smart people obviously love this part because understanding yourself feels like progress. Once you have a plausible next action, you should do it. That's it. Reality will correct your guess faster than more analysis. And then the second mistake is taking a proxy action. So you say you you say comfort is the problem and then you organize the workspace. You say you need to sell, then you rewrite the offer again. That's a proxy action. You say you need to publish and then make a content calendar instead of actually publishing. Right? Those actions can be useful, but if you have to be honest, did you actually make contact with the thing you were actually avoiding or were you just avoiding again? And the third mistake is turning the four forms into identities. So actually turning them into I statements. I am this. I am someone that can't take this comfort for example or I am someone who is constantly looking for comfort. 5:42:01 [snorts] Now if you repeat this process, your own words will start becoming more credible to you. So you say you'll do something and increasingly you either do it, deliberately change the commitment or consciously end it. And all of these are fine. And now we can come back to where we actually started. You can be incredibly ambitious and still appear lazy because ambition only tells us something about the future you desire. It doesn't automatically tell us what happens when that future requires you to actually take action, decide, tolerate a discomfort, be honest with yourself, or act without having full certainty. And Sauron Kerkagart wrote in his journal in 1843, it is perfectly true as the philosophers say that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition that it must be lived forwards. And I think that's almost a perfect summary of what we're actually doing here. You look backward because the past 5:43:01 gives you a pattern. This gives you information. But you still have to live forward because understanding the pattern doesn't make the next decision for you. So if you forget everything else, remember the pattern loop, record what happened, name the form, match the response, act, review what changed, and then go around again. And sometimes the process will lead you back towards the goal. Sometimes it will tell you to change the goal. Sometimes it will tell you to let the goal die. And those can all be good outcomes because the purpose is to to stop living in the gap where your imagination keeps choosing futures that your real life never actually receives. So your mind can imagine far more lives than you'll ever have time to live. A possible life only becomes your life when you give [snorts] it actual time, energy, and effort. And giving something your time and energy means giving less time and energy to something else. And that's the cost we all have to pay. Choice costs alternatives. Action costs 5:44:03 comfort. Honesty can cost an identity. Decisions cost certainty. There isn't a plan that removes those costs completely. The difference between you and the people you admire is that they paid the cost to be the boss. Essentially, what you can do is decide which prices are worth paying for you, which costs are worth paying for you. So the next time you get excited about some big future, enjoy it, right? Genuinely make the plan. Think about what could happen. And then when the plan inevitably meets the part that requires something from you, take action because that's the moment that truly matters in the end. Give the future you keep thinking about an actual chance today. So with that said, let's go over the review. We went over ambition and avoidance, the planning high, four forms of being stuck, honest action, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, pick one goal that 5:45:03 keeps coming back while your effort keeps dropping off. Write down your last few attempts in order using only what you actually did and then find the first point where your behavior changed. And that break point is what you're looking for. And then choose the form that best explains that moment. Use choice when several real options kept you from actually committing. Use comfort when the next step was clear and you picked what was easier. Use refusal when your words said yes and your behavior said no. And use overthinking when your thinking kept going without giving you anything new. And treat your answer as a guess that you can actually test. And then match the response to the form and take one action within the next day. So for choice, run a test and actually set a decision date. For comfort, put the action on your calendar and clear as many of the obstacles as possible. And then for refusal, be honest about whether you still want the goal. For overthinking, stop the loop and get new information through an experiment or a 5:46:04 test. And then review what changed and go around again. With that said, I hope this was valuable. If it was, let me know in the comments. Subscribe, like, and if you want to work with me, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with its respective training, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching. Thank you for the support. And I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is why you should never start a goal from zero. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the weight of zero, the 20% start continuing instead of starting the review and your action items for the day or the next few days. So before we get started, if you want to work with me oneon-one, make sure to book a call from 5:47:05 the link in the description. If you want this training along with its respective document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the weight of zero. So, you've probably set a goal at some point in your life that genuinely mattered to you. Maybe it was about your body. Maybe it was about your money, your relationships, your craft, or who you wanted to become as a person. And somewhere along the way, despite caring about it, despite knowing it mattered, you stopped. And that pattern repeats for almost everyone across almost every area of life. And it's because nobody ever explains the invisible thing that can quietly kill goals before the work even begins. Now, most people assume the problem is effort. They think if they could just want it more or work harder or stay disciplined for longer, the goal would happen. So, they keep doubling down on 5:48:07 effort, which is the one thing that wasn't actually the issue. And when effort alone doesn't fix it, then the shame shows up, right? You start feeling like the problem is you, like other people have something that you don't. And that story is comforting in in a bit of a dark way because at least it gives you the failure. Uh it gives the failure an explanation even if it's the wrong one. And so the truth is much less personal. There's a specific psychological weight that crushes goals in the first stretch. And almost nobody is taught how to handle it. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. And it changes how you approach every goal from then on. So the weight is very invisible, which is part of why it's so deadly. You can't fight what you can't name. So people keep trying to muscle through a force that they don't realize is even acting on them. And because the force is invisible, well, the diagnosis is almost always wrong. People blame motivation or their time or their energy or their environment and sometimes 5:49:07 themselves when the real culprit can sit one layer underneath all of those quietly steering the whole thing. Which is why the same pattern keeps repeating across years. Same kind of goal, same kind of stall, same kind of guilt, different decade. And that cycle is really just a missing piece of understanding. Now, with that in mind, I want to walk you through a study that explains the whole thing in a way that almost that's almost embarrassingly simple once you see it. So, back in 2006, two researchers named Joseph Nunes and Savier Drez, and I might be butchering this name, ran a now famous experiment at a car wash. And what they found is small on the surface but massive underneath. And it quietly rewrites how you should think about every goal in your right your life. So here's what they really did. They handed one group of customers a loyalty card that needed eight stamps to earn a free wash. And they handed another group a card that needed 10 stamps, but it came with two 5:50:08 stamps already filled in for free. So if you look at the math, both groups had the exact same amount of real work to do. Eight stamps, right? Same reward at the end, which is obviously the free wash and same effort required. But nothing about the actual goal changed between the two groups, right? It's both of them had to reach eight stamps in order to get that free wash, except one had eight from the get-go and the other one had 10 with two already filled in. Now logically both groups should have had similar completion rates because the work was equal, the prize was equal, the path was equal. A purely rational view of human behavior would predict no meaningful difference between them. But human behavior is almost never purely rational. And what happened next is really the part that should make you sit up a little because it quietly explains years of stalled goals in your own life. Now, the group that started with two stamps already filled in completed the 5:51:09 card almost twice as often as the other group. Same workload, same reward, wildly different finish line and finish rate. The only thing that really changed was the feeling of having already started. So, researchers also noticed those people moved faster, not just more often, but with more urgency. that that tiny sense of advancement seemed to inject momentum into the actual behavior almost like a battery getting charged up. Now, beyond speed, they also showed more stamina. They stuck with it even when things got slow or boring. The progress they'd already seen kept feeding them in the background long after the initial excitement faded. So, the lesson buried in that study is the single most important thing I'm going to teach you in this video. People are dramatically more likely to finish a goal when they feel they've already started one. And the actual distance to the finish line didn't really change. Only the perception of progress changed. And it's that perception alone that 5:52:11 almost doubled the completion rate. And what that tells you is that your brain doesn't really respond to the objective size of a goal. It responds to where it thinks you are on the path. If you feel close, then you push harder. If you feel far, then you stall. And so distance in the mind is emotional before it's logical. A goal that feels miles away gets treated almost like a threat even if the actual workload is reasonable. So your motivation gets drained before you've even tried. Closeness flips that completely. The moment a goal feels reachable, your brain leans in. You get curious, energized, focused, and willing to keep going through small obstacles that would have stopped you earlier because you feel like you're closer to completion. And so once you see this pattern, you start spotting it everywhere. Fitness, business, learning, relationships, recovery, money, anywhere a long-term outcome is involved, perceived progress runs the show. Now, with that study in sitting in the background, let's talk about what zero 5:53:11 actually does to you. Because I think this is the part that almost nobody explains. So, start starting at zero% is not a neutral starting position. If you think about it, it's an emotionally loaded place that works against you from day one. Now, a goal at 0% feels far away in a way that your brain can barely tolerate. You [snorts] look at the gap between where you are now and where you want to be, and your mind basically decides the climb is too much. So, you stall, you scroll, you delay, and you tell yourself you'll begin tomorrow. So, when a goal sits at zero, it has no shape yet. There's no first move. There's no obvious anchor. There's no clear thing to grab onto. And it's that vagueness that makes it really easy to walk away because nothing about it really feels urgent or real. Without a clear anchor, your attention just basically scatters towards e easier things almost automatically and you end up busy with small wins that don't necessarily move you anywhere meaningful and the actual goal really slings slowly 5:54:13 into the background of your life. Now, vague goals also breed quiet doubt. You start wondering if you're even cut out for it. Uh if it's the right goal, if the timing is off. None of that's real analysis. That's just your mind looking for an excuse to really escape the discomfort of zero. And so, distant goals get processed almost like threats. Your body basically tightens. Your motivation drops. Your willpower starts leaking before any real action happens. And that's why you can feel exhausted just thinking about something you haven't even started yet. So you avoid the goal without consciously meaning to. You clean, you organize, you plan, you research, you reorganize and plan again. You know, anything that feels productive without necessarily forcing you to actually face the climb to actually work on the goal. And then on top of the avoidance comes a layer of quiet shame because you know you should be taking action on the goal but you're not. And that small gap between what you're intending to do and what you're actually doing becomes its own private kind of 5:55:14 pain. Now zero also messes with you with how you see yourself in relation to the goal. When the progress bar feels empty, you don't feel like someone actually pursuing the goal. You feel like someone hoping for it, which is a much weaker position to operate from than actually seeing yourself as somebody that's taking action towards the goal. So you start treating the goal like something you're outside of looking in. And it's that distance that turns the goal into a fantasy rather than an actual project you're working on. And fantasies almost never get built, right? Because nothing about them demands action today. So it seems like you're just daydreaming. And from that outsider position, every move feels oversized. You hesitate to make the first call, to write the first draft, to take the first set, to send the first message. And these small steps start to feel enormous even when they're objectively tiny. So you also start comparing yourself to people already deep into the same goal. They look further ahead in you than you, more 5:56:14 capable than you, more deserving of the result. So you sit on the sidelines a little longer and just watch. And then there's the pretender feeling because even when you do start, part of you suspects you don't really belong yet because the progress bar still reads empty. And that little voice quietly drains the energy out of every early action you take. Which is why so many goals get abandoned in the first two weeks and then restarted from scratch a month later. Because a part of you still wants the goal, but every reset places you back at zero. And every time you do that, the weight of zero gets a little heavier. And here's where most self-improvement advice gets this completely wrong. And this is the part I really want you to pay attention to. Most people are told that the answer to the weight of zero is more discipline, more motivation, more grit, more drive. And that framing is a trap and it keeps you stuck for years. Telling someone to push through zero is like telling someone to lift a piano with their teeth. It can be done technically, but it's a terrible plan. Willpower is a 5:57:17 real resource, sure, but it's a limited one, and it was never designed to carry the full weight of a long-term goal. Lean on willpower too hard and you burn out fast. You get a few intense days, maybe a strong week, and then you crash. And after the crash, you blame yourself instead of the strategy you started with. And so the goal quietly dies under a pile of guilt and shame. Now, pure willpower is also very fragile. It one bad sleep, one stressful day, one emotional hit, and the whole plan collapses. A goal can't survive on a system that breaks the moment life gets normal. So the real move is really to stop being at zero in the first place. And that's a totally different game. And it's the game that actually works. And it's also what uh the Nunes Andreas finding was quietly pointing at the whole time. Goal progress is mostly perception. Momentum is really just a feeling. It's perception. How close you feel matters almost as much as how close you actually are. So if you shift the 5:58:17 perception, then the behavior follows. That's not a trick. That's just how human mind handles long long-term effort. So the work is upstream. Before you push, you set up the climb in a way that doesn't require superhuman drive. You build the conditions that make movement feel natural because forcing yourself into motion will always lose to designing yourself into it. So conditions beat character almost every time. If you put a disciplined person in a bad setup, they'll struggle. If you put an average person in a brilliant setup, then they'll glide. Right? Goals get achieved by good design, not just good intentions. And this is the leverage point most people miss. You don't need to become a different person to hit your goal. You just need to stop standing at zero because zero is the actual enemy here, not you. So let's talk about the 20% start. So the whole thing comes down to one thing, which is that you never let your brain experience a goal as 0% complete. Not even for a single day at the start. You want to 5:59:18 walk into every goal already feeling like the process is underway. The same way those car wash customers felt the moment they saw two free stamps sitting on their card before they done anything. That feeling of being already in motion, already having momentum is really what carries you through the first stretch, which is exactly where almost everyone else quits. So instead of fighting the heaviness of a fresh start, you want to remove the heaviness entirely by refusing to begin at zero. You want to be fixing a completely different problem here. So the core principle is simple enough that you can carry with you for the rest of your life and apply to anything that you want to. You're almost never truly at zero on a goal that you actually care about if you really think about it. Even when it feels like you're standing at the very bottom looking up. The reason it feels like zero is that you've never gathered your real progress into one place where you can actually see it. Once you understand that, well, the whole problem stops being about motivation and it really is about 6:00:19 perception. So most of your real progress stays completely hidden from you, scattered across months or even years of quiet effort that you never really bother to count. You've thought about this goal more times than you realize. Most likely, you've tried small pieces of it. You've learned hard lessons from the attempts that didn't work. You've gathered tools and most likely a lot of knowledge about it along the way without ever ever tallying any of it. So your brain looks at the goal, finds no organized evidence of movement or progress or momentum, and defaults to reading the whole thing as empty. Meanwhile, the truth is usually sitting closer to 20%, you just haven't looked properly. So your past attempts count for far more than you give them credit for, even the ones you'd rather forget about completely. Every failed try handed you specific information about what doesn't work, which narrows the path and makes the next attempt sharper than the last. And that accumulated knowledge is real, usable progress. And it lives in you right now, whether you acknowledge it or not. So if it's still 6:01:20 if it's there regardless of if you acknowledge it or not, well, you might as well acknowledge it, right? Because it moves you closer to the goal. you tend to file those attempts under wasted time when really they were tuition you already paid. So your existing assets count as well and there are almost always more of them than you'd guess on first looks. Think about the skills you already have, the people you already know, the tools and resources and knowledge already sitting around in your life waiting to be used. None of that is zero. And yet you walk straight past all of it on your way to convincing yourself you're a total beginner. When you actually stop and count it, the picture shifts in your favor a lot quicker. So, the first move is this reframe, and it's a genuinely powerful one. Once you actually do it instead of just nodding, you stop asking what you have to do from scratch, which is the question that makes everything feel impossibly far away. And rather, you ask yourself what's already true that points you towards this goal, which immediately starts filling in part of the progress 6:02:21 bar before you've even lifted a finger. And it's that change in the opening question that changes the entire emotional weight of the goal. And this is where you sit down and you actually take a genuinely honest inventory of everything that already counts in your favor. You write it all down on paper or a screen, no matter how small, scattered, or unrelated each pe piece feels in the moment, and you actually look at it and see that you've made a ton more a ton of progress without even actually acknowledging it. The simple act of seeing it gathered in one place does something real. and almost physical to your sense of momentum because you're not making anything up. You're finally just collecting all of the progress that was already there. And it's that inventory that then becomes proof. And proof is exactly what your brain has been wanting this entire time. And once you can physically look at 10 or 15 things that you know you've already begun, well, the goal stops registering as a cold, intimidating beginner start. And you'll see it as the continuation of 6:03:22 something that's already been moving for a while despite that the fact that it might be have been slower because you haven't necessarily been collecting any of the evidence that you've made progress which is a completely different thing to wake up to. Right? And continuation you'll see is dramatically easier to sustain than beginning. Now a simple four-part process turns any goal you have into a 20% start. And you can run the whole thing in about 15 minutes today. And each step is designed to build real visible momentum before your willpower is ever asked to carry the load. You move in order from gathering what already exists to shrinking the first action to making everything visible to locking in the right frame. And done together, these four steps make the goal feel like it's already rolling downhill. So first, you build your inventory of existing progress, which is the foundation everything else rests on that we just covered. You sit down with the goal clearly in mind and you list out everything that you already have working in your favor right now. It 6:04:22 could be past attempts. It could be hard lessons. It could be relevant skills. It could be useful resources and knowledge. It could be helpful contacts. And any small action you've already taken all belong on this list. Now, the longer and more honest the list, the stronger the foundation you're building underneath the goal. So the key in this step is just brutal honesty pointed in your favor for once, which is something most people never practice. You're usually painfully honest about your shortcomings and weirdly blind to your strengths and progress. So flip that same harsh honesty towards your assets instead. And when you do, you'll be genuinely surprised at how much is already sitting there fully real and completely uncounted. Fully objectively true, right? We're not making anything up here. we're actually taking objective truth and just pointing your attention to it. And so that surprise is the moment the goal starts to feel survivable. So aim for at least 10 items on this list, even when some of them feel almost embarrassingly tiny. Volume 6:05:25 matters more than you think here since a long list of small things creates a far stronger sense of progress than a short list of impressive ones. So the sheer quantity is doing real psychological work by itself because it builds the weight of momentum item by item. So you keep adding and then resist the urge to filter for what sounds good. And don't dismiss the small stuff because dismissing it is the exact mistake almost everyone makes. A single book you read on the topic or one honest honest conversation you had about it or one relevant tool you already own and know how to use that can help you towards it. Each of those is a stamp on your card. And the whole point of the car wash study is that stamps add up faster than logic says they should. So you need to treat the tiny wins as fuel. And let the list stay messy, raw, and imperfect because it isn't a polished document that anyone else will ever read, right? It's a private evidence. It's private evidence assembled for your 6:06:26 own brain. So completeness and honesty matter far more than neatness or presentation. If anything, the rough overflowing version works way better than a clean ones because it feels alive rather than curated. So, just get it all down and just keep moving. Second, you compress the very first milestone until it becomes almost laughably, embarrassingly easy to complete. Don't point yourself at the whole goal since obviously the whole goal is precisely the thing that makes your brain freeze up and and stall. Instead, aim at the smallest possible first move, first action that proves the process is real and gives your mind its first genuine taste of motion. And that first taste matters far more than the than its size suggests. So make the first step so small that skipping it would feel almost silly, like talking yourself out of something that takes 2 minutes. It could be one paragraph. It could be one short walk around the block. It could be one message sent to the right person. The size of the step is really not the point here and never 6:07:27 was. The real point is the simple act of getting the wheels turning at all. And once they're turning, keeping them turning is a much easier job. Now, whatever first step you choose, make absolutely sure you can finish it today before you sleep. No exceptions. So, same day completion matters enormously since it converts the goal from a floating idea in your head into something you've already physically acted on in the real world. And so that single finished action quietly rewrites your entire relationship to the goal because you go to bed as someone who has started, not someone who plans to. Now third, you make the progress visible because progress your brain can't actually see barely registers as progress at all. So as we discussed, progress is to a big degree perception. Momentum is to a big degree perception. So if you can't if you don't have ev evidence that in any way shows that you've made progress or creates that per perception of momentum then you won't feel like you're 20% there already. So a simple checklist 6:08:30 or a habit trackger or a calendar streak or a basic page or a rough chart all work perfectly well for this. The exact format doesn't really matter that much as much as the fact that you can look at it and see movement with your own eyes. So, pick whatever you will actually use and stop optimizing the tool. And keep in mind, your brain genuinely needs to see the movement. It it does it shouldn't be just thinking about it in the abstract, which is a distinction that a lot of people miss entirely, right? A visible tracker takes effort that would otherwise be invisible and turns it into something concrete you can physically look at and point to. And so every single time you glance at it, you collect another small free hit of momentum without doing any extra work. So put your tracker somewhere you'll genuinely see it every day, not somewhere where where it will quietly disappear from your attention. So a tracker buried in a drawer or a forgotten app does absolutely nothing for you. It beats the whole purpose of 6:09:32 what we're doing here. Uh no, no matter how nicely you set it up. So one sitting on your desk, your wall or your phone's home screen will keep the sense of progress alive in the background of your daily life because visibility at the end of the day is what keeps the momentum from going cold. Now once [snorts] you've got a few marks down in a row, a streak will start to form and streaks turn out to be weirdly almost irrationally powerful. You start not wanting to break the chain you've built even when your motivation is lower on a given day. And that small nagging reluctance to lose your run really becomes a quiet engine that keeps you showing up. And it's a gentle pressure, but it works. And so that visible progress also feeds your brain the exact feedback it was starving for back when the goal felt frozen and flat. No feedback means no fuel, which is the real reason a lot of motivation flat lines around week two for most people. And so this single step directly repairs the most common failure point in the 6:10:32 entire goal pursuit process, right? Keep the feedback flowing and the engine keeps running. And if you look at video games, there's constant feedback uh on our actions. Why? Because feedback to a big degree is addicting. And so you need to give yourself that feedback for your goal all the time. And you make it a bit more addictive to to keep running towards that goal. Now, fourth and finally, you tell yourself the plain truth, but in the right frame, which turns out to matter way more than the truth itself. So, you basically, you're not starting from nothing here, right? You're continuing something that's already in motion. And that's the frame that you should look at it from. That small change in framing carries a surprising amount of weight, and it quietly changes how heavy every future action feels. Now from here on you're just maintaining momentum rather than manufacturing it. Right? So the way you frame the goal inside your own head directly shapes how heavy it feels to 6:11:34 take action on it. So continuing something that's already moving feels a lot lighter, natural, and almost obvious to keep doing. Starting something from a dead cold stop feels heavy, intimidating, and easy to put off until some better day that never arrives. So that same exact action has a wildly different emotional cost depending on the frame and the words you use for it. So this step also quietly repairs the identity problem we talked about earlier in the section where you stop being the outsider standing at the window hoping that the goal happens for you someday and you're now someone already in the thick of pursuing it which is a far stronger and steadier place to actually take action from. Right? And acting from that identity makes every step afterwards feel like it belongs to you. And so this is not about necessarily lying to yourself, right? Or pretending that you're somehow further along than you genuinely are, which can be a real risk worth worth naming because fake confidence built on nothing 6:12:35 solid really collapses the inst the instance reality tests it and it usually collapses at the worst possible moment. The entire power of this approach comes from organizing the genuine real progress and momentum that you've just been overlooking. Never from inventing progress that simply isn't there. Right? Keep it real and it will hold. But most people just don't pay attention to to the progress they've already made, to the momentum they've already made, to their strengths. So everything you place on that progress bar has to be real. It has to be verifiable and actually yours like actual real past effort, real existing skills, real resources, real lessons learned, real completed actions. You can point to real, you know, books read, etc. It can be anything. The strength of this entire method lives in the gathering of true progress that you've been ignoring, not in manufacturing a flattering story that won't really survive. So real inputs are the only 6:13:36 thing that produces a durable output here. And so there's a big important difference between perceiving your progress accurately and quietly deluding yourself about it. One approach gathers evidence that genuinely exists and simply hadn't been counted yet. The other manufactures a comfortable fantasy that feels good for a week and then it completely gets destroyed by real life. So the first builds durable momentum that you can actually stand on while the second sets you up for a harder, more demoralizing crash down the line. And so real progress also keeps yourself trust fully intact because you're not lying to yourself. And selfrust is everything over the long run if you ask me. When you only count what's actually true, you genuinely believe your own tracker when you can look at it when you look at it each day. So that belief is precisely what gives the whole method its staying power across months and even years of pursuit. If you break that trust with yourself with inflated numbers or fake progress, well, the entire system stops 6:14:36 working. The entire [clears throat] system loses losses purpose. So the honest reframe is the one that actually holds up under pressure when things get hard and the early excitement is basically long gone. So, you're not almost never at zero because you're cleverly fooling yourself into feeling good. You're almost never at zero because real legitimate progress was genuinely there the whole time, just scattered around and never counted and never looked at and never paid attention to. And that's a fact about your situation. I'm not trying to motivate you here or or uh lie to you. Your actual job is then pretty refreshingly simple, which is to gather that scattered progress together. pull the loose pieces in one single visible place where your brain can finally register all of them at once. And that one act of gathering is really what flips the goal from frozen and intimidating to moving and approachable. Nothing about your circumstance has changed. Only your view of them did. And so once you've gathered 6:15:39 all of that in front of you, the goal has already begun, right? you've already begun work with no exaggeration required, no lying to yourself required, no faking required. And again, it's not wishful thinking. It's an accurate, honest read of exactly where you already stand, which is, as it turns out, when you look closely, was never actually zero in the first place. You just hadn't done the counting yet. You just hadn't paid attention to your own progress yet. So, the goal was always closer than it was. So let's talk about continuing instead of starting. So starting and continuing are not the same act, right? Even though they look identical from the outside, starting is where all the fear lives. All the doubt, all that weird resistance that makes you suddenly want to reorganize your desk instead. Continuing is just moving something that's already moving, which it which your brain treats as a completely different thing and much lighter job. So, [snorts] think about where the 6:16:39 resistance actually shows up in your life because it's almost never in the middle of doing something. It's usually at the start. The hardest day of any workout plan isn't day 40. It's day one when the whole thing is still cold and theoretical. The same goes for writing, building a business, learning a language, fixing your finances, all of it. Once you're rolling, the friction drops off a cliff, which tells you the real enemy was the start, not the work. And so, this is basically inertia. The same way it works with anything physical you've ever pushed. Getting a heavy thing to move from a dead stop takes way more force than keep it in keeping it moving once it's going. And your goals behave the same exact way. And your willpower is really the force you're spending. So if you can skip the dead stop entirely, you save the biggest chunk of your energy you'd otherwise burn. And so that first push is brutal precisely because nothing's helping you yet. There's no momentum. There's no streak. There's no visible progress. nothing pulling you forward. So, you're carrying the whole load alone. And it 6:17:40 feels heavy because it's genuinely heavy in that moment. And most people read [snorts] that heaviness as proof that they're not cut out for it when really it's just physics. And so after that first push, everything starts to help you instead. Your trackers got marks on it. Your streak is alive. Your brain's getting feedback. And the goal feels real now. All those forces start pulling in the same direction as you. So the work that felt impossible on day one feels almost ordinary by day 10. And so the trick, if you want to call it that, is to never actually experience a real dead stop. You walk in already having gathered your progress, already feeling momentum, already standing at 20% instead of zero. And that way, the brutal first push is mostly behind you before you consciously begin because you're not starting the engine from zero. You're not starting from cold. you're picking up something that's already worn. And so when you skip the dead stop, you skip the part where most goals die. Most people never fail at the work itself. They fail at the beginning, 6:18:41 at the ignition of it. And that first cold morning where everything feels too far away. So take that moment off the table and you've already beaten the odds. It honestly feels like cheating to a degree, except it's completely legitimate. And so from there, you mostly glide. And gliding is sustainable in a way that grinding never is. Right? You're not forcing your way through with with raw discipline. You're riding momentum that you set up on purpose. And that's the difference between people who finish and people who keep restarting. One group designed the glide. The other keeps trying to start from zero. And so there's another layer to this that's actually worth noting, which is how continuity changes the story you tell yourself. Because when you're continuing, you're not some hopeful beginner anymore, right? You're a person with a track record, even though it might be a smaller one, but there's a track record nonetheless. And that track record becomes part of who you are. And people protect what feels like part of them. So the goal stops being something 6:19:42 you're chasing and is now something you're just defending. And your streak does a lot of heavy lifting here because once you've strung together a handful of days, breaking the chain starts to feel like a real loss, almost painful. You don't want to throw away what you've built. So you show up even on the days that you don't feel like it. And it's that little bit of loss aversion that ends up being one of your most reliable tricks here. And slowly the way you talk about yourself also changes without you forcing it because now you're no longer trying to get in shape or trying to build the thing. You just start saying you do it right. And that quiet change and self-description is also one of the strongest signals you're going to finish. Once the goal becomes part of your identity, quitting would feel like betraying yourself. And most people won't do that. So, let's zoom out for a second and and be honest about what's really at stake because this is bigger than one goal, right? The weight of zero isn't just costing you this particular 6:20:44 thing that you're after right now. It's been there costing you across your whole life, goal after goal year after year without you ever seeing the pattern. Every time you stalled at the start and blamed yourself, the real culprit was just an empty progress bar that nobody taught you how to fill. So, if you look back honestly, you'll probably spot the same shape repeating over and over. There was a goal you cared about, a strong start in your head, and then a slow fade as the distance to the finish line wore you down. And it happened with different goals in totally different areas, which rules out the idea that it was about the specific goal. The common thread was always you standing at zero, feeling the weight, and and basically backing away. And the cost of all these abandoned goals adds up to something that can be genuinely heavy over the years. Not just the goals themselves you lost, it's the slow erosion of trust in your own word. And so every restart from zero chipped away a little more at your belief that you actually can follow through. And it's that that erodess your 6:21:46 selfrust and then makes the next goal even harder to start, which is a nasty loop to be stuck in. And that loop is exactly what this whole approach is really built to break rack right at the source. You stop starting from zero. So you stop stalling at the start. So you stop quitting in week two. Which means you start finishing things. And finishing things slowly rebuilds the selfrust you've been bleeding out. So the real promise here goes way past whatever goal you're holding in in mind today. If you learn to fill the progress bar before you begin, then you've got a tool you'll use on every meaningful goal for the rest of your life. Whether it's health, money, relationship, skill, the whole lot of it really bends to the same simple principle once you internalize it. You're not going to try to win once. You're changing how you approach every goal from here on out. And so these wins compound in a way that changes your trajectory over time because each finished goal makes the next one feel more possible since now you've got proof 6:22:48 that you're the kind of person who finishes and your confidence is up and that growing pile of proof becomes its own permanent 20% start on everything new you attempt. So the people who master this don't just hit one goal, they they start hitting most of them. And underneath all of that, what's really being rebuilt is your belief in yourself. Not the fake hyped up kind that fades by Tuesday, but the earned kind that comes from actually doing what you said you would. And that belief is the most valuable asset you'll ever build. And it's the real prize hiding behind every individual goal because everything else downstream is downstream of really trusting your own word again and doing what you say you're going to do. And once that momentum is rolling across your whole life, well, stopping starts to feel way stranger than just continuing. You become someone in motion by default with progress bars filling everywhere you look. And honestly, that's a completely different way to move through your life than starting cold over and over again. It's lighter, steadier, and far more like the person 6:23:49 you actually wanted to be. So, if we bring it all the way back down to the ground to what you actually do with it starting tomorrow morning, you can pick one goal that genuinely matters to you, and you refuse to let yourself begin at zero. You gather all the real progress that's already there. You shrink the first step until it's super tiny. You make it visible and you tell yourself the truth that you're continuing rather than just starting over from scratch. And that's the whole thing. And it's more than enough to change the outcome. So the beauty of this is how genuinely simple it is to actually put into practice, which is rare for for a lot of stuff that actually works. There's no complicated system to learn or to or or some kind of an app you need to buy or morning routine to overhaul before you're allowed to start. You just count what's real. Take one small action today and keep the progress where you can genuinely see it. Simple works, right? And the best part is you can run the whole thing today in the next 15 minutes with a goal you already have. You don't have to wait for Monday or the new month or some perfect moment 6:24:50 that's never going to show up anyway. The progress is already sitting there waiting to be counted. So, the only real question is whether you'll go count it. There's genuinely nothing stopping you from starting your 20% right now. And once you've done it even once, you'll feel the difference immediately. And it's hard to go back after that. The goal that felt cold and far away suddenly feels already underway. And it's that change that's the whole point. And it's available to you the moment you decide to gather your progress instead of staring at the climb. So go do it and let the goal feel like something you're continuing rather than something you're dreading and starting from scratch. So with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview, the weight of zero, the 20% start continuing instead of starting, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, pick one goal that matters and list at least 10 real things that prove you've already started. And then read the list back to yourself. Choose the smallest possible first step and finish it today before you sleep. 6:25:51 So, the goal stops being an idea and actually becomes something that you're acting on. And then set up one visible tracker you'll see every day. And from now on, treat every goal as something you're continuing rather than something you're starting from zero. Because most of the time, you're most likely continuing to go anyway rather than starting from zero. With that said, if you want to start your 20% right now, you can book a call and work with me one-on-one. If you want this document along with this respective training, then make sure to join the free community. And if you want weekly newsletters on basically how to improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. All right, hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the intelligence paradox. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the intelligence trap, the advantage of ignorance and intelligent stupidity. 6:26:52 After which we're going to cover the review and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now before we get started, if you want to work with me, as always, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with the respective training you're watching, then make sure to join the free community again from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the intelligence trap. So, you probably know someone who by almost every reasonable measure, isn't particularly intelligent, let's say, and they don't seem to understand things as quickly as you do. They haven't read nearly as many books. They don't spend much time analyzing their decisions and honestly sometimes you listen to them talk and wonder how they've managed to accomplish anything at all. And yet somehow they're doing better than you. They're making more money. Maybe they're building a successful business or 6:27:53 businesses. They're getting opportunities or they're accomplishing things you've been thinking about doing for years. It can be genuinely frustrating especially when you know that you have the knowledge, you have the skills, and perhaps even the ability to do a much better job. So naturally, you start wondering how that's even possible and whether intelligence is actually as valuable as you've always assumed because we've spent most of our lives believing that being intelligent gives us an advantage. And in many situations, it absolutely does. And there are good reasons we value intelligence so much. It helps you learn faster. It helps you notice patterns, solve difficult problems, and think ahead. And all of that can be useful. But the strange part is that those exact same abilities can sometimes make it surprisingly difficult to get yourself moving and taking action. And the very same abilities that help them understand the world can also help them convince themselves to do absolutely nothing. And you see, one of the things that makes 6:28:54 intelligence so useful is your ability to reason. You can take information, you can consider different possibilities, you can draw conclusions, you can construct arguments for why something should or shouldn't happen. And the better you become at reasoning, the more sophisticated those arguments can become. Now, where that ability can work against you is where your reasoning doesn't operate in some perfectly neutral little vacuum, right? You have fears, you have preferences, things you want to avoid and conclusions you already hope are true. And psychologists call one part of this motivated reasoning. Basically, you can start with a conclusion you like and then become very good at finding reasons to support it. It's almost as similar to confirmation bias. So, when you're afraid of doing something, your mind can produce perfectly reasonable sounding explanations for why you should avoid it. You tell yourself that you need more experience, that the market isn't ready, that the timing is wrong, that you should probably learn a little more. And 6:29:55 you're most likely going to find evidence for all of those, or that there are still too many things you haven't figured out. And the tricky part is some of those reasons might actually be true. I mean, maybe the timing really isn't the best. Maybe there is something you could learn first. That's precisely why it's so easy to miss what you're doing. You might be using completely legitimate facts to defend the decision you already wanted to make anyway. And because your explanation sounds reasonable, you never have to really confront the fear that was influencing you in the first place. And there's even a related idea in psychology called intellectualization where somebody deals with an uncomfortable feeling by retreating into analysis and abstract explanations. So instead of actually feeling your feelings, you're trying to intellectualize them. you're trying to analyze and explain them logically. And you can see how that might happen when you're facing a decision that scares you, right? Instead of dealing with the experience itself, you get to 6:30:56 keep working on a problem in your head and you can spend an enormous amount of time examining a problem intellectually because examining it feels relatively comfortable. You're doing something familiar, something you're good at, something that gives you a sense of control, and that makes you feel comfortable, right? Actually doing the thing that you need to do is a different story. Now, you're putting yourself in a situation where somebody might reject you, right? Where your work might not turn out as good as you thought it is. You might make a mistake. You might find out that you aren't as good as you thought. And that's uncomfortable in a way that just keeping on learning and keeping on trying to find more information really isn't. So you keep thinking, you keep researching, you keep refining your understanding and because those activities are genuinely useful in the right circumstances and sometimes in the moment itself, you can convince yourself that you're making meaningful progress even when the one thing you actually 6:31:57 need to do remains completely untouched. And the uncomfortable part is that being good at reasoning doesn't guarantee you'll recognize when you're using it to fool yourself. Right? You might be able to make a brilliant argument for why something is a bad idea while having very little awareness of why you wanted to reach that conclusion in the first place. So, especially when you've spent weeks developing that argument, that happens even more so because you've worked through every detail. Maybe you've even talked about it with people. Maybe it's now part of your identity in one way or another. Now you're quite attached to the conclusion. A conclusion that you don't even know you're attached to. And questioning it means admitting that all that thinking might have led you somewhere wrong. And so you start defending your explanation. You know how to make a case for it. And testing whether it's actually right will be a much less comfortable exercise. And that's how you can end up doing an enormous amount of thinking without making much progress. Cuz let's say you 6:32:58 want to start a business. You research the market. You study the competition. You read about sales. You work on the offer. Maybe you build a whole plan. And all of that looks productive, right? You're learning things. You're putting in time. You can point to what you've done. But eventually, you have to do something that involves another person, for example. You have to make an offer. You have to have a conversation. You have to find out whether anybody actually wants what you're planning to sell. And now there's a very real possibility that the answer won't be what you hoped. And suddenly you discover another subject you should probably research before you begin. Then another and another. And the problem is that every additional piece of information creates the possibility of discovering something else you don't know. Right? As we're learning new things, we tend to find more things we don't know much about that we need to learn about. And so that gives you another reason to postpone the decision. So you can spend months becoming increasingly knowledgeable about entrepreneurship while gaining very little experience actually being an entrepreneur. You're gathering all this 6:34:00 theoretical knowledge and never really trying to apply it because applying it would be uncomfortable because then you would most likely find out that all that time, effort, and energy you spent on acquiring the theoretical knowledge might have been unneeded because now reality is very different, right? Reality doesn't move in these neat theoretical frameworks at all times. And what's funny is that the more you learn about something, the more complicated it can start looking. Cuz when you know almost nothing about a subject, there were maybe three or four things you thought you needed to figure out. But now, as we're learning and we're finding new things we don't know much about that we still need to learn, now you've got exceptions. Now you've got edge cases. Now you've got all these other details that you didn't even know existed. So you start seeing why one approach works for one person and fails for another. And then you realize two very experienced people can give completely 6:35:03 different advice because they're dealing with different situations. So naturally your original idea of how simple everything was begins to change and now you're overthinking even more. Now being aware of those things can absolutely help you. But the problem is when you take that awareness as a sign that you're still not ready. And every time you learn something new, you've suddenly got another question that apparently needs answering before you begin. And that's where you can get stuck because noticing uncertainty and getting rid of uncertainty are two different things. You can understand the risks perfectly well and still have no idea exactly how it will turn out. And some of that information simply doesn't exist until you actually try. You get that information only after you take action on the information you already gathered. And something else happens when you're good at thinking through complicated situations. You can see a ridiculous number of possibilities. And every decision has alternatives, right? Every 6:36:03 alternative comes with its own upsides, downsides, and sub alternatives and things that could go wrong. So the more you think about it, the more there is to think about. While someone who keeps things relatively simple might find an option that seems good enough for now and they just start, right? Someone who's particularly analytical can keep looking because they can always think of another option that might be better. So one option leads to another option and then that option comes with three new problems and three other options and each of these problems suggests another possible solution. And before long, you've basically spent so much time trying to figure out what you should do that you haven't actually done any of the things you were considering. And psychologists have a distinction for this. It's maximizing and satisficing. So a maximizer tends to look for the best possible solution or option, while somebody who's satisficing is willing to choose an option that meets their requirements right now and just go with it. And you can probably see how those two approaches lead to very different 6:37:04 behavior. I mean, if you think about what it would be like to approach every single decision as if there were one perfect answer out there and it was your job to find it. Imagine that. You want the business model, the best niche, the best strategy, the best product, the best investment. And then, of course, you also want to know whether you're making the best possible use of your time. So, you keep comparing, evaluating, and reconsidering your options because somewhere out there, at least in theory, there could always be something better. And to be quite honest with you, in theory, there is always something better out there. There always is the possibility that there is something better out there. But you're going to waste a huge amount of time and a lot of your time and effort and energy on actually finding it. Because even when you find it, you're going to look for the next thing that's even better. And since you can never examine every possible alternative, you struggle to reach a point where you feel completely 6:38:04 satisfied with your choice. And Herbert Simon, the economist and cognitive scientist who actually developed the idea of bounded rationality, pointed out something pretty obvious. We never have all the information all the time or unlimited mental resources. So in most real decisions, we simply can't work out the objectively best choice among every possible option. And that's why Simon explored the idea of satisficing. You decide what a good enough outcome would look like and then you find an option that meets those requirements and then you make a decision. You don't have to solve every possible version of the problem first because you're going to just be spinning your wheels for a pretty long amount of time because even if there's something better out there, finding it takes a lot of time and time has a cost. Even though it looks free, at some point you can spend more resources trying to improve the decision than you would ever gain from that improvement. And in the end, you turn 6:39:04 out to be in a net negative, right? And this is something people actually often forget when they're trying to make the perfect choice. The time you spend deciding is time you could have spent actually doing the thing. And economists call this obviously opportunity cost. Basically, whenever you choose one use of your time or money, you're giving up the next best thing you could have done with it. And that applies to research and planning just as much as it applies to spending money. So, let's say you spend 6 months deciding which business to start. Well, that's also 6 months when you could have been speaking to customers already or learning how to sell or making mistakes and basically finding out what you're good at. And those six months don't just disappear from the calculation. Maybe all that research does help. Right? Maybe it helps you choose a better business. Fair enough. But you still have to ask whether the improvement was worth everything you gave up to get there. Right? The outcome, the the gain you get from all that time, energy, and effort 6:40:05 and money that you spent on this should match the effort, time, energy, and money you spent, right? Or at the very least, you know, you should at least break even on that. and at the very least try to gain more. But a lot of the times that's not the case, right? We spend a huge amount of time, money, effort, and energy on something and then a lot of the times it turns out we could have stopped 3 months earlier and we would probably be further ahead. And on top of that, you can start making fairly ordinary decisions, a lot more complicated than they need to be, because you've got the ability to think of all these different possibilities. So, naturally, you start accounting for them, even the ones that aren't particularly relevant to what you're actually trying to accomplish. And maybe you start preparing for an objection, let's say, that nobody's made or a scenario that has a very small chance of actually happening. Technically, sure, 6:41:07 it could happen, but does it really change what you need to do today? Probably not. And yet, you can spend an entire afternoon trying to solve it. And because you can imagine the problem, you start feeling like you're supposed to have an answer for it, right? So, your preparation keeps getting bigger. And the point at which you'll finally feel ready keeps getting pushed further away. And somebody who approaches things more simply at least might just deal with a problem that's actually in front of them. If another problem comes up next week, they'll deal with that next week. And in plenty of everyday situations, that approach works perfectly well for you, too. You already do this as well. And obviously, there are situations where you should think everything through very carefully. So, if you're performing a surgery, let's say, or designing an aircraft, you can't just shrug off a serious risk because the consequences are completely different. But if we're talking about testing a new offer or making your first video, you're dealing with a very different kind of decision. Now, I'm not saying it's easy 6:42:09 for everyone. I'm just saying the consequences are a bit different and the kind of decision is different, right? And you can often change your mind. You can make adjustments in those things and you can try something else. So, spending weeks trying to predict every outcome can cost more than simply testing the idea. So if you really look at what you're trying to get from all this analysis, it's often some kind of a guarantee. You're asking life to give you a guarantee. You want to feel certain you've made the right choice before you've made it. You want to know the effort won't be wasted or that there isn't some much better opportunity you haven't discovered yet. But of course, life doesn't have guarantees, so you keep on looking. And you can only take predictions so far at the end of the day. You can look at the evidence. You can think about the risks. You can compare the options and still make a reasonable judgment. And there's still going to be some part of the outcome that you won't know because we 6:43:11 can't see so much further into the future. And a lot of the times you can plan for every scenario and the one that you didn't plan for happens because you just couldn't see the events transpiring in the sequence in which they did. So especially when other people were involved, right? You can make an educated guess about how a customer will respond to your offer or whether an audience will like something, but until you actually put it out in front of them, you're still guessing. And that means you could spend another month thinking and still be missing exactly the same information. At some point you just have to interact with the situation to find out. And there's another part of this that I think goes a lot deeper which is it has to do with how you see yourself. Because some people grow up being the smart kid, right? They get praised for understanding things quickly, for getting good grades, for knowing the answer when everybody else is still figuring it out. Others 6:44:13 actually don't grow up being the smart kid, but they really want to. So, so they grow up overcompensating. And when that happens often enough, being intelligent can actually start becoming a really important part of who you think you are or who you think you should be. So now it's something you're proud of. and understandably so. But over time, you might also start feeling like it's something you have to keep proving to yourself and to others. You're supposed to be the person who gets things right. Right. Who figures things out, who doesn't look completely lost. And that's where things get a little uncomfortable because if your self worth depends on always coming across as capable and intelligent and always knowing exactly what will happen, then trying something you've never done before suddenly becomes a huge risk to how you see yourself. And psychologist Carol Dwek explored some of these dynamics through her research on implicit theories of intelligence, which she later popularized in her book Mindset. So broadly speaking, people 6:45:13 with a fixed mindset tend to view intelligence as a relatively stable quality, while people with a growth mindset believe they can develop their abilities through learning and effort. And so when somebody feels like they have to keep proving how intelligent they are, anything unfamiliar can start feeling a little threatening because there's a chance that they'll actually struggle and that other people might actually see that happening. So a mistake suddenly feels like something much bigger than a mistake. You start wondering what it says about you as a person, about your identity. Are you really as capable as you thought? Were people wrong about you? Were you wrong about yourself? And that's a pretty uncomfortable place to put yourself. So you might actually find yourself choosing things you already know you're good at so that you don't have to face that. You can perform well. people can see that you're capable and that you can perform well and you never really have to find out how you handle being the beginner in the room. And researchers 6:46:15 who study achievement motivation make another distinction that's useful here, which is performance goals and mastery goals. So with performance goals, you're focused on showing that you can do something well or at least avoiding the appearance that you can't. With mastery goals, you're more focused on getting better at the thing itself. And so depending on which you care about most, you can end up making very different choices. Now, there's nothing wrong obviously with wanting to do well or wanting people to recognize that you're good at something. In fact, social recognition is a human need, right? The problem is when protecting that image starts determining which challenges you're willing to take on. And so you end up gravitating towards situations where you can pretty much guarantee you'll look competent. you know the answers, you've done the work before, and there's very little chance somebody will catch you struggling. And so, the annoying part is that the thing that would actually help you grow might be the thing you're avoiding because that's the thing you can't do well yet, right? And that's the 6:47:17 thing where you'd have to admit you don't know what you're doing. So, psychologists also talk about something called self- handicapping. And this is way more common than you would think. But basically, people sometimes create an excuse for a possible bad result before they've even tried. So they essentially don't necessarily commit 100% to something because if they do and they fail, then they'll have to explain to themselves that they put 100% into something and they fail. They don't want to put themselves in situations where they have to face that fact. So they do the opposite. They self- handicap. Maybe they don't prepare properly. Maybe they don't fully commit because then if things don't work, they can blame the obstacle instead of having to question their ability. They can say, "Well, I didn't commit fully. I wasn't really trying, so I didn't really fail." Because if you give something your absolute best effort and still fail, that's uncomfortable information, right? 6:48:17 You have to deal with what your current ability actually looks like. But if you never really commit, you get to tell yourself you could have succeeded if you had really committed. And that means you can keep believing in this enormous potential you've never actually had to test. And really, if you're going to learn something you've never done before, you have to expect a period where you're just not very good at it, right? How else would it work? You haven't developed the ability yet. You get on a sales call and you don't know what to say. You write something and it's nowhere near as good as the stuff you love reading. You try to build a business and make a decision that turns out to be completely wrong. That's what an early attempt often looks like. Right? If you've always been the person who picks things up quickly and who understands things quickly and gets gets skilled at things quickly, these experiences can feel especially frustrating, right? because you're used to understanding things quickly. You're used to doing well and suddenly you're 6:49:20 in a situation where you can't perform at the level you expect from yourself, which means you should also explore what those expectations are. And there's a temptation to go back to the part you're already comfortable with. So you read a little more, you think a little more, you work on a plan a little more, and the actual practice that would help you improve keeps getting postponed. And naturally, this can develop into a sort of perfectionism because you want your first attempt to reflect your actual potential. Think about that. You want your first attempt at something to reflect your imagined potential. You want people to see how capable you are and you don't want them judging you based on work that basically falls below your own current perfectionistic standards. So, you keep working on it privately. You keep trying to get rid of every weak part before you let anyone else see it. And I mean, you can see the problem, right? You're trying to perfect something without letting it meet the 6:50:20 people or situations that would tell you what actually needs improving. And you may have developed high standards long before acquiring the practical abilities to actually meet them. Right? You might want to write like Stephen King, but you haven't developed the practical abilities to actually write like Stephen King yet. So, you might be able to recognize exceptional work. You might be able to explain what makes it exceptional and you can identify everything wrong with your own attempts while still lacking the experience necessary to produce work of that quality consistently. And because you can see exactly how far your work is from that standard, it can get pretty discouraging because you understand what good looks like. You just can't produce it yourself yet. And that gap is very frustrating. And eventually you might stop sharing anything at all because every attempt feels like proof that you're not good yet or at the very least as good as you think you should be. And when you put 6:51:20 all of this together, you can see how somebody who's genuinely intelligent can end up accomplishing very little. Right? They have good reasons for delaying, a long list of options to consider, and a pretty strong incentive to avoid situations where they might look inexperienced. Everything has an explanation. The only missing piece, the only missing thing is progress. So they keep working on the plan and every time you're about to begin, there's just one more thing to figure out. It's familiar work. You can do it well and it feels a lot better than figuring out whether the plan actually works. And from the outside, you might actually think that you're doing great, right? You're constantly learning things. You have ideas, notes, strategies, maybe a ridiculous number of books on the subject. And you might even be the person everyone goes to for advice. And yet when you look at what you've actually attempted, there isn't really much to point to. So there's another version of this where you become very attached to your own potential. You know you could do something impressive 6:52:22 or at least you believe you could and that possibility becomes part of how you see yourself. You're the person who could build a great business, write a book, become exceptional at something. And as long as you don't have to actually try, you get to imagine that future going exactly the way you want because nothing has happened yet to force you to confront the parts you might be struggling with. Because the moment you really commit, you start discovering what you can and you can't do right now. You find out which parts are hard and where your knowledge is actually missing and just how much practice it's going to take. So, weirdly enough, staying the person who could do something can feel safer than becoming the person who's actually trying to do it. And psychologists have a term for some of this, self-worth contingencies. It refers to essentially things that your sense of worth depends on. And if being competent is one of those things, then performing badly at something can feel like a judgment about you as a person, even when it's really just a 6:53:22 judgment about that particular attempt. So now a mistake that somebody else might shrug off starts feeling like a very big deal. It's uncomfortable. It's embarrassing. Maybe even a little threatening to how you see yourself. And before you know it, you're spending more energy trying to avoid that feeling than you are improving the thing you actually care about. Meanwhile, somebody who's less concerned with looking smart might just ask the stupid question, right? They'll just try something they don't fully understand. they'll get it wrong and then just ask themselves or ask in general a mentor or a coach or whatever what happens. They don't need the first attempt to make them look impressive. They just do and try again. And there's simply less pressure on them to maintain that image of being the person who always knows what they're doing. They don't really care. So, they're willing to find out where they actually stand. they can enter the situation without first needing a guarantee that they'll perform well because in fact they don't really care whether they perform well or 6:54:23 not because they know that over time they're going to improve anyway. And once they've done that they have a choice. They can ignore the result or they can take what happened seriously and use it to get better. And most of the times a lot of the times they just use it to get better. Especially if the outcome is not what they wanted. they don't really think about. They don't overanalyze. They're like, "I did this. The outcome is not what I wanted. Let me try again." And that's it. So, the next time you notice that you've been postponing something for ages, ask yourself what you're actually waiting for. Because a lot of the times there's nothing much there, right? So, is there a piece of information you genuinely need? Is there a real obstacle you have to solve? Or is the thing you're waiting for simply the feeling that you want have to be inexperienced when you begin? Because that feeling might not arrive first, right? You have to go through the awkward beginner stage before you can feel ready for the work. And that's how somebody who knows less can end up 6:55:23 getting much further cuz they may be worse at explaining what they're doing and why they're doing it. They might have a less sophisticated strategy and yet they've actually started. They're actually engaging with reality. they are actually doing something. They're willing to do something before every question has been answered. And because of that, they encounter situations the person who's still preparing hasn't even reached. They're willing to do something before all of that, right? And of course, some of those people make terrible decisions. Some get overconfident and then they take risks they don't understand and then they pay for it. But the ones who learn from what happens make adjustments and just keep going and that's it. And they end up developing practical abilities that somebody who's been preparing forever still doesn't have. So what exactly are these seemingly less intelligent people doing that sometimes gives them such an enormous practical advantage? So let's talk about the advantage of ignorance. 6:56:26 So, why do these seemingly less intelligent people sometimes end up accomplishing more than people who are considerably smarter than them? Well, I think one of the explanations is that they approach the world with far fewer assumptions about what they can and cannot do because they haven't really spent years studying every possible reason something might fail. They haven't developed elaborate theories about why the market is too competitive, why their idea probably won't work, or why they need another six months of preparation before they're qualified to begin. They just see an opportunity, they have some idea of what they want to accomplish and basically what the first step is and they decide to try and that's it. And because they understand less about the subject, they often experience the problem as being much simpler than it actually is. So someone who has studied business extensively might see dozens of interconnected problems involving positioning, competition, pricing, customer acquisition, fulfillment, retention, and 6:57:26 profitability. Meanwhile, someone with very little business knowledge might simply recognize that people have a problem and who knows, they might get potentially paid and make money if they solve it. That's how they think about it. So they go out and see if anyone will actually pay. And as soon as somebody responds, as soon as somebody pays, they're actually now dealing with a real person with real questions, which is a completely different situation from imagining how the business might work, right? They're already making the business work and suddenly they have these specific problems to solve. Somebody thinks the price is too high, so now they have to figure out pricing and they learn as they go. Somebody becomes a customer, so now they have to basically deliver what they promised. So they learn fulfillment on the go. They're learning things in the order that the work actually demands them to learn them. And there's also something interesting about how prior knowledge influences the way we approach problems. Because every time you learn something, you develop expectations about how the world works. You begin assuming that 6:58:29 certain approaches are effective, that certain things are impossible, and that particular rules should be followed, and that certain outcomes are more likely than others. And most of the times those expectations can be useful. They help you basically avoid mistakes other people have already made. The funny thing is that sometimes they can also stop you from trying something or anything for that matter. And trying something that might actually work in your situation because you've already decided the rule applies without ever really testing it yourself. So someone with less experience may actually approach the same problem without those assumptions. They try something because they haven't learned that it's supposedly a bad idea. And occasionally they discover that the conventional explanation was incomplete, that circumstances have changed, or maybe even that an approach everyone else dismissed can actually work under certain conditions. And in Zen Buddhism, there's a concept commonly referred to as shin or beginner's mind. Shriu Suzuki 6:59:31 explores it in his book Zen mind, Beginner's Mind, where he discusses approaching practice with openness, curiosity, and a willingness to learn. And you can apply that idea as well. As you become more knowledgeable, you need to keep questioning what you think, you know, because once you're convinced you've got the whole thing figured out, you stop really looking for evidence that might prove you're wrong. And when something doesn't fit what you already believe, it's very easy to dismiss it as an exception. And so a beginner has a much easier time admitting ignorance because they have no particular reason to pretend otherwise. They expect to encounter things they don't really understand. They expect to ask questions or make mistakes and discover that their initial assumptions were wrong. And that willingness to remain uncertain gives them opportunities to learn that someone who's overly attached to being knowledgeable can completely overlook. Now, another reason these people can move so quickly is that they often have a very different relationship with confidence. So, when you don't fully understand how complicated something is, 7:00:32 you can underestimate the difficulty that is involved. You might assume that starting a business is relatively straightforward and simple and that acquiring customers will be easy or that becoming successful simply requires finding the right opportunity and working hard enough. And because you don't anticipate all these obstacle obstacles you'll eventually encounter, you're willing to begin with relatively little hesitation. And that's probably good, right? Because you're beginning because at the end of the day, you're actually doing something rather than overanalyzing what could go wrong. And this brings us to the Dunning Kruger effect, which psychologists David Dunning and Justin Krueger investigated in their 1999 paper. Their research examined how people with relatively low ability in certain tasks could actually substantially overestimate their performance and their ability. Partly because recognizing their mistakes requires some of the same knowledge and skills that are needed to actually 7:01:33 perform the task well. So think about what that means in practice. If you're completely unfamiliar with the subject, then you may lack the knowledge to actually recognize the weaknesses in your own understanding. You can feel reasonably confident in a conclusion because you're unaware of the considerations that would make you question it. And once you develop greater competence, you begin noticing the mistakes and the exceptions and the complications that previously escaped your attention. So as you become more knowledgeable, you often become better at evaluating your own abilities. You begin distinguishing between what you genuinely understand and what you merely assume. and you recognize where your knowledge ends and you become more careful about making claims that extend beyond it. And that's valuable intellectual development, but it can also make you considerably more conscious of everything you still have to learn, which can freeze you. And so someone who hasn't developed that awareness can simply begin. They don't spend as much time questioning whether 7:02:34 they're actually qualified. They don't really care about imposttor syndrome, whether their strategy is optimal or whether they have enough information to make a decision. They just assume they can figure things out and that assumption encourages them to take action. And then obviously reality has something to say about all that confidence. They discover that certain parts are much harder than they expected, that things can go wrong, that people will say no. And now the question becomes whether they're going to learn from those experiences or just keep making the same mistakes. Now someone who already understands those risks might hesitate a lot longer. Right? And that's where the difference comes from. Are you using your knowledge to prepare for the next step or are you using it as another reason to avoid taking that step? There's also a difference between believing that you'll succeed and believing that you can handle the process of actually trying to succeed. Because when you begin something unfamiliar, you genuinely don't know whether you're going to succeed, whether your initial approach will work. You 7:03:36 don't know how many mistakes you'll make or which obstacles you will encounter or how long it will take to become competent at something. And you can still decide that you're willing to deal with those uncertainties. Psychologist Albert Wendura developed the concept of self-efficacy, which refers to people's beliefs about their ability to organize and actually carry out the actions required to manage particular situations. And one of the major ways people develop self-efficacy is through mastery experiences, meaning they actually attempt things. They overcome difficulties and acquire evidence that they're capable of influencing outcomes through their own behavior. And through that process, you can begin building confidence before you've achieved the final result. Because you make an attempt, you encounter a problem, you figure something out, and discover that you're actually capable of dealing with a lot more than you previously believed. And every time you successfully handle a difficulty, you acquire another piece of evidence about your ability to respond to future challenges. But after you've 7:04:37 handled enough problems, something starts changing because you begin trusting yourself to figure things out when they happen. And you actually have this skill. You're already applying this in some areas of your life. You still don't know exactly what's coming, but you've got the actual experience to look back on when something unexpected comes up. And this is where actually doing things gives you something that obviously sitting around thinking simply can't. At some point you have to find out whether what you believe matches what's happening out there cuz you can predict how someone will respond. Sure, but eventually you need to put your idea in front of them and see whether they do actually respond in the way you thought they would. And think about any skill that involves other people. You can watch someone who's excellent at it and understand why what they're doing works. And that's great. But when you're the one in the conversation making decisions in real time, you suddenly realize that there are parts of the experience that watching never really prepared you for, 7:05:38 right? And this is the difference between actually watching sports and being an athlete. You can understand sports. You can understand a specific sport and everything about it. And yet doing it is a very different thing cuz the real ability comes when you can actually apply all that knowledge in the moment. In the case of sales, in the case of conversations with people and so on, people will interrupt you. They will misunderstand what you're saying. They will ask something you weren't expecting. And you have to figure out what to say while it's actually happening, which is a very different skill from knowing what somebody should have said afterwards. And after a while, you start noticing where you keep getting stuck. Maybe it's the same question, the same hesitation, the same part of a conversation. So now you've got something specific you can actually work on. So essentially an experiment is a way of finding out whether your explanation holds up, right? You have an idea about what should happen. You try something and then you compare the result with what you expected. And if it turns out differently, you've got a reason to look more closely at your 7:06:38 assumptions. And that's exactly why scientists test hypothesis. Something can sound perfectly logical and amazing and still turn out to be wrong. You can put together a convincing explanation account for all sorts of details and then run the experiment and discover that the world doesn't actually behave the way you thought it would. And that's when you go back and examine what you actually missed. Maybe the original explanation was incomplete. Maybe there was another factor involved. You change the explanation, test it again, and then you gradually get a clearer picture of what's actually going on. And you can do a version of that with a business offer or a video or pretty much any skill you're trying to develop instead of endlessly wondering whether something will work. You just find a reasonable way of trying it and make sure you're paying attention to the result. And so there's a connection to besian reasoning here which deals with how we should update our beliefs when we encounter new evidence. So the basic idea is that you begin with some existing estimate of how likely something is and then you receive 7:07:40 additional information and then you revise that estimate according to how strongly the evidence supports different explanations. So let's say you believe there's a good chance people will pay for a particular service, right? You have reasons most likely for believing that. Perhaps you've identified a problem or studied the market and seen other businesses offering something similar. And so your belief remains an estimate based on the information that is currently available to you. But once you start making offers, you actually obtain evidence. Right? You're now not estimating. If several qualified prospects actually express interest, your confidence in the idea goes up. But if people consistently reject the offer, your confidence goes down and you need to reconsider some part of your original understanding. And perhaps the problem isn't sufficiently important at all. Perhaps your pricing was wrong. Perhaps you're approaching the wrong customers. And that's basically the habit bias in reasoning 7:08:41 encourages. You don't treat every new piece of information as the final answer, but you do let it change how confident you are. So a few conversations might not tell you everything obviously, but they should affect what you decide to do next. And when something doesn't work, you now know that something in your approach needs attention. So the real question is what exactly produced that outcome? Because just saying I failed doesn't really give you much to work with. And of course, a failed attempt doesn't automatically tell you what caused the failure. You still have to distinguish between different explanations because a business might fail because the offer was weak, because the execution was poor, because the timing was unfavorable or because of circumstances that had relatively too little to do with the original idea or the business itself and more to do with you. So, you need to think carefully about what the outcome actually tells you. And once you figured out what probably went wrong, you can change something specific the next time, right? And then the whole experience becomes a lot easier to deal with 7:09:42 because now the result doesn't have to prove that you were right from the beginning like you wanted to. And another thing happens when you keep doing something. You start recognizing situations. Things that felt unfamiliar the first few times become pretty obvious now. And you're no longer having to think through every tiny decision from scratch. So, an experienced salesperson can sometimes recognize a prospect's hesitation before they've even said anything, right? Let alone before they have explained it. An experienced writer can actually recognize that a paragraph isn't really working without immediately being able to explain every technical reasons of reason of why. An experienced entrepreneur can most likely notice weaknesses in an offer because they've encountered similar problems repeatedly, right? They've developed judgment through actual exposure to situations that require them to make decisions and observe the consequences, not just to theory. But you do have to pay 7:10:43 attention. I mean, experience gives things for you to learn from. But if you just keep doing the same thing without examining it, you can get very good at repeating your own mistakes. And that's why deliberate practice and feedback makes such a difference. Now, there's also another advantage here that has less to do with knowing things and more to do with sticking to something. Some people choose an approach that seems reasonable and then they actually give it enough time to work. Which sounds super simple, but just think about how often people fail to do exactly that. Just choose something and then stick with it. So, let's say somebody starts a business and works on it for a while and then discovers another business model that looks even more promising. So, they switch. A few weeks later, there's another opportunity and they switch again. And every time they actually do that, they're starting over in areas where they were just beginning to develop some understanding because there's always another opportunity, right? There's always something else you could learn, another strategy you could try, another direction that looks 7:11:43 exciting, another person you could be in a relationship with. If every new possibility makes you abandon what you're currently doing, you never give anything really a fair chance. But when you stay with something that actually has potential, your experiences start building on each other. You know the people, you recognize the problems, and you can use what happened last month to make a better decision this month. And researchers studying decision-m, reinforcement learning, and related fields often discuss a problem called exploration versus exploitation. And I talked about it in my previous video, but exploration involves searching for new possibilities and gathering information about alternatives, right? Exploitation involves using what you've already learned to pursue an option that appears promising. And of course, you don't want to blindly commit to the first idea you have. You need to look around. You need to understand your options and make sure you're not ignoring evidence that the whole thing is a bad idea. But at some point, you have to choose something and actually do it. Otherwise, you become incredibly knowledgeable about all the things you 7:12:45 could pursue without ever finding out what it takes to make one of them actually work. And I think this can be especially difficult when you're a naturally curious person because exploring new subjects is fun for you. You're constantly discovering things that sound exciting. And I get that. I'm the same way. But the more directions you split your attention across, the less time you've got to develop any one of them. And so at some point you just have to choose one and explore it and go deep on it while keeping your exploration going in some ways so that you satisfy that need for curiosity. A lot of goals are actually pretty ordinary when you look at what you actually have to do every day. You find an approach that makes sense and then you keep showing up and over time that gives you an amount of experience that somebody who's constantly switching approaches simply won't have. So take content creation, let's say, right? You can know loads about thumbnails and storytelling and retention, but you 7:13:45 still have to make the videos right at the end of the day. And until you publish something, you don't know how well you can actually apply those ideas. Meanwhile, somebody who's publishing regularly has real work to look at. They can see how people responded. They which parts worked and what they like to do differently. they have something concrete to improve. And now, of course, simply making more things doesn't mean you're automatically getting better at making those things. You have to look at what you're producing and actually try to improve something with each attempt. But the repetition also gives you opportunities to learn, right? It's just that you still have to choose to use them, right? And this is where Simon's idea of satisficing becomes useful again. You decide what would count as a good enough choice and then you just find something that meets those requirements and you move forward and that's it. You don't open the whole decision every single day. Every time somebody recommends a different option. Let's say you're choosing a skill to 7:14:46 learn, right? You enjoy it. There's a reason for developing it and you've got a realistic way to actually practice. Those are reasonable criteria. You can choose it and just get started. And then once you've actually spent time doing it, you can judge the decision with much better information because now you know what the work is like and how quickly you're improving and whether it's taking you somewhere worthwhile. Now, there's another distinction here that I think helps explain a lot of this and it's the difference between understanding something when someone explains it and actually knowing how to do it because those two things can feel almost identical when you're learning even though they require very different abilities. So you can acquire an enormous amount of knowledge through reading books and watching lectures and studying research and listening to people who have already mastered the thing you're trying to learn. And I strongly believe in doing those things. I read, I study, I research, I spend considerable amount of time trying to understand how things work. There's 7:15:46 tremendous value in learning from other people's experiences, especially when their knowledge can help you avoid mistakes or understand something that would otherwise take you years to discover. independently. When you learn from somebody else's explanation, they've already done a lot of the work for you. They've figured out which parts matter and organized the ideas and given you something that you can actually understand without having to discover every detail yourself. And that's incredibly useful. It's the closest thing we have to downloading to your brain. But then you have to actually go out and apply it. And suddenly there are all these little details that weren't part of the original explanation. And you have to recognize when the principle applies and what changes in your situation and what to do when the example doesn't quite fit. And you have to just do the thing while accepting that you're going to be bad at it for a while or while accepting that there's always going to be room for improvement. Michael Pani actually explored this 7:16:48 distinction in his book, The Tacet Dimension. and Palani argued that human knowledge extends beyond what we can explicitly describe in words. So we actually possess forms of understanding and knowledge that influence our performance even when we struggle to explain precisely how we're using them. And he famously expressed this with the observation that we can know more than we can tell. So think about knowledge that you can easily communicate through language. You can explain a mathematical formula or describe the steps of a process or define a concept or teach someone a particular rule and we generally refer to this as explicit knowledge meaning knowledge that you can actually articulate and communicate in a direct form. But there's also tacet knowledge and that includes the practical understanding, judgment and abilities you've developed through experience which you may struggle to 7:17:48 actually fully express in words. So you can recognize something, respond appropriately or perform a complicated activity without actually being able to provide a complete verbal account of everything that contributed to what you did and to your performance. And in practice, these forms of knowledge actually interact. Obviously, there's not one that is better than the other. What you learn through instruction can of course influence how you approach experience. And what you discover through your own experience can change how you understand something you've previously studied. And you can return to a book you've read several times and suddenly understand a particular idea much more deeply because you finally encountered the situation the author was describing. And I bet this has happened to you. You read something, you don't understand it fully. A year or two later, you go back to the same book and suddenly you understand it 10 times better because now you've had these experiences that give you essentially this underlying knowledge that is 7:18:50 experiential knowledge that can kind of support the theoretical knowledge you had read. And so you start actually connecting these two and connecting the ideas. you have a way better understanding of what you read. So, think about riding a bike. You could understand all the physics involved. You could probably explain balance and steering better than most people. And you might still fall over the first time you get on one, right? Because understanding the explanation and doing the thing is very different. Understanding the explanation doesn't really give you the physical ability immediately, right? You have to actually get on the bike and you have to fall a few times and figure out those little adjustments as you're moving. And once you've learned, you're not sitting there calculating angles and forces every time you turn. You just know how to respond. It's just becomes almost part of you, right? And it's similar with, for example, driving a car. At first, it's very awkward and weird. [clears throat] 7:19:53 And over time it becomes second nature almost and you don't think about everything. And it's similar with a lot of professional skills. You gradually start seeing things that somebody new to the field wouldn't even notice. You recognize patterns. You pick up on small cues. And sometimes you even struggle to explain how you knew what to do. And this is what I think some people call intuition. And so to return to our earlier example, let's compare two people who want to become good at sales, right? One spends six months studying sales psychology, reading books, memorizing scripts, learning objection handling, and examining how successful sales people conduct their conversations. The other spends those six months actually speaking with prospects, making offers, handling objections, and trying to improve after every conversation. The first person might develop a more sophisticated understanding of sales theory. They might be able to explain why certain techniques work, why they might be able to identify types of 7:20:53 objections, and describe the structure of an effective conversation in a lot of detail. The second person has spent 6 months dealing with actual customers. They've experienced rejection, encountered unusual questions, learned how different people respond, and developed greater familiarity with the practical demands of selling. They're accumulating knowledge that emerges through direct interaction with the people they're trying to persuade. Now, imagine what would happen if the second person also studied sales theory and deliberately used the knowledge to interpret and improve their experiences. They could recognize patterns a lot more accurately. They could identify weaknesses in their approach. They can avoid repeating mistakes that other salespeople have already learned how to solve. They have become essentially their own coaches. And that's where intellectual ability and practical experience begin working together. And most people do one or the other, right? And there's a funny thing that happens when you've actually consumed a lot of material on a subject. Everything starts sounding familiar. You know the 7:21:54 terminology, you've heard the explanations, and you can follow somebody talking about it with no problem. So, it's very easy to feel like you really know the subject, but recognizing an explanation when someone presents it to you requires a different skill from actually producing the explanation independently. And producing an explanation independently often requires something different from applying the underlying knowledge successfully in an unfamiliar situation. But then try explaining it from memory or using it to solve a problem you haven't seen before. You'll find out pretty quickly which parts you actually understand and which parts you were just able to recognize while somebody else was explaining them. And that's useful information because now you actually know what needs to work, right? You can go back to the book, the lecture, or whatever you're studying and this time you've got a specific question that came from trying to use what you learned. So when you actually think about everything we've covered, you can see where the advantage comes from. Somebody who knows less might start a lot sooner. They 7:22:55 might commit to something reasonable. They begin collecting experiences that a more knowledgeable person is still trying to anticipate. And that early start can lead to things you simply can't plan for. You meet people, you discover problems you didn't know existed, and opportunities come up because you're actually involved in the work. There's also a social dimension to this. When you actually put your work in front of people, you actually give them something they can respond to. So potential customers can actually look at your offer and employers can examine your abilities. Audiences can discover your content. Other people can recognize what you're attempting to accomplish and decide whether they actually want to participate, collaborate, or support you. And those interactions can create opportunities that someone who remains invisible simply cannot access. So by just putting yourself out there, you're creating this exponential success. even if you're not the best. Because you might meet someone who introduces you to a valuable connection or discover a problem people are willing to pay you to solve or receive feedback 7:23:57 that changes your understanding of an entire field. And all because you've made your efforts visible to other people. And after enough of those experiences, the person who began knowing less might end up being the one who's more capable because they've had time to actually develop abilities that the person who kept preparing hasn't practiced yet. We also have to recognize that we tend to notice the people whose boldness eventually produced success. The equally inexperienced people who made terrible decisions and failed often receive much less attention. And that's a survivorship bias where we draw conclusions from the examples that remain visible while overlooking the ones that disappeared. So the people worth studying are the ones who combine their willingness to begin with an ability to learn and adapt. And obviously just starting isn't enough. Some people will make the same mistake for years. The ones who make progress are really the ones who notice what's going wrong and actually change their approach who combine theoretical knowledge with the experiential knowledge who seek feedback and actually 7:24:59 apply that feedback. People who seek somebody to give them that feedback too in the first place. And so that raises another question which is what happens if the person who's actually willing to begin is also really good at thinking. What if they can analyze the situation, understand the feedback, and learn from the experience relatively quickly? Well, they could use those abilities to figure out which experiments are worth trying and why something did or didn't work instead of just relying on guesswork. And because they're willing to change their minds when the evidence changes, the knowledge they've accumulated starts becoming more and more useful in practice. So now you can see how those two qualities might actually work together. You can be thoughtful, careful, and knowledgeable and still be perfectly willing to make a decision without knowing how it will turn out. And that's what we're going to be looking at next. What would happen if you actually combine the intellectual abilities of a highly intelligent person with the willingness to act, experiment, and look foolish that we so often observe in people who succeed despite 7:26:00 knowing very little. So, let's talk about intelligent stupidity. So, what would it look like if you were really good at thinking things through, but you were also perfectly willing to try something before you knew exactly how it would turn out? Well, you would have someone who can use their knowledge to make a reasonable decision and then find out whether that decision was right. And I think that's a much more useful way to think about being intelligent because we tend to assume that if someone understands a subject really well, they must also be good at it. And sometimes that's true, but think about how many things in life depend on more than understanding. You've got to deal with people, make uncomfortable decisions, keep showing up, and figure out what to do when the situation doesn't look anything like the example you've studied. So, you could be brilliant at understanding difficult ideas, and still freeze up when you have to make an offer or have a conversation that might go badly. And the problem isn't that you're somehow unintelligent. Those are different abilities and you haven't 7:27:02 necessarily practiced them. Meanwhile, somebody who isn't particularly impressive academically might be excellent at dealing with people, making decisions, and following through on what they say they're going to do. And depending on what they're trying to accomplish, those abilities can be incredibly useful. And so, there's a concept in psychology called practical intelligence. And the basic idea is that people differ in their ability to deal effectively with the practical demands of their environment. And this includes recognizing what a situation actually requires and making appropriate decisions and using their knowledge to accomplish things under real world conditions. So think about the difference between answering a question on an exam and trying to solve a problem in your actual life. On the exam, somebody has already decided what the question is. And usually there's a pretty clear way of determining whether your answer is correct. in business or in relationships. Half the challenge can be figuring out what the real problem is in the first place. And so once you figure that out, you still have to decide what deserves your attention, how 7:28:02 somebody else might respond, and whether an idea that sounds great on paper is actually going to work in practice. It's messy and that's just part of dealing with real situations, with reality. And interestingly, philosophers were thinking about something similar thousands of years before modern psychology even began studying intelligence. Aristotle discusses a form of wisdom called fonacis which we generally translate as practical wisdom or prudence and is concerned with deliberating well about how to act in the particular circumstances of human life. You see Aristotle actually distinguish different forms of intellectual excellence including theoretical wisdom, technical skill and practical wisdom. So you can understand universal principles, possess specialized knowledge and know how to produce certain things. while still needing judgment about which actions are actually appropriate in a particular situation. And practical wisdom concerns that ability to reason well about what you should actually do because knowing a general principle doesn't automatically 7:29:04 tell you how to apply it in every situation. You have to consider the circumstances, the available options, the consequences, the purposes you're trying to achieve. And so two situations can appear almost identical while requiring completely different decisions because one important detail changes how the principle should be applied. And Aristotle actually understood that experience has a role in developing that kind of judgment. You can learn a general principle from somebody else but you don't necessarily recognize when to apply it until you've encountered enough real situations. And that's something you develop over time. So the way I see it, you want both. You want to be someone who understands the principles behind what they're actually doing. And you also want to be comfortable getting involved before you've mastered everything. So you study the work, you do the work, and the experience gives you a better understanding of what you actually studied. And once you've chosen something to work towards, your intelligence can help you figure out which skills are worth learning and what information you actually need and which problems deserve your attention first. 7:30:06 And you can save yourself a lot of unnecessary effort that way. And when you start actually doing it, you use that same ability to look at what happened and figure out what needs to change. You don't have to keep repeating the bad approach just because it was your original idea. And that's ultimately the combination you're looking for. You understand what you're doing. You keep getting better at doing it and you can use that understanding when it actually counts. Now, to get there, you're going to have to become comfortable with something that a lot of intelligent people actually really dislike, which is being inexperienced. Because if you're doing something you've never done before, you're going to misunderstand things. You're going to ask questions that might seem obvious to somebody else. And yeah, sometimes you're going to do a pretty bad job. And that's what learning looks like in the beginning. And if you're used to being the smart person in the room, that can feel surprisingly personal. We've already talked about why you're trying to learn something, but part of you is also trying to protect this self-image of being someone who always knows what 7:31:02 they're doing, which are two opposing things, right? You can be learning and always know what you're doing. The two are antonyms. So, you need to separate how well you're doing right now from how you see yourself. Being bad at sales when you've barely done sales doesn't mean anything particularly about you, right? It means you haven't developed those skills yet. Same thing with writing, making videos, or pretty much anything else. And when something goes badly, you can actually look at what happened. Did you actually misunderstand the person? Did you miss some information? Was there a particular skill you needed that you didn't have? Great. Now you've got something to work on. And that means being willing to start at the level you're actually at. You're going to encounter people who know a lot more than you. And honestly, that's useful. You get to learn things that would have taken you ages to figure out on your own. And that means you need to become comfortable asking questions that might make you appear inexperienced. You need to ask people to explain things you don't understand. You 7:32:02 need to ask them how they developed their abilities, why they made a particular decision, and what mistakes they learned from. If someone uses a concept you're unfamiliar with, you need to admit that you don't understand it and ask them to explain or look it up. So, you also need to become willing to accept correction. When someone identifies a weakness in your reasoning or points out something you've overlooked, examine what they're actually saying. Determine whether the criticism is accurate and whether it reveals something you need to improve. Because the ability to actually recognize that someone else understands something better than you is itself an extremely useful ability. And where it makes sense, you need to let people see the work while you're still learning. Because when you keep everything private, you're also keeping yourself away from a lot of the feedback that would help you improve it. Imagine if I never started making videos until I thought I was perfect. I would probably never start. So you can see a similar idea in Plato's apology where Socrates describes questioning people who had reputations for wisdom and discovering 7:33:03 that some of them believed they understood things they couldn't adequately explain. So Socrates recognized that his awareness of his own ignorance gave him an advantage over people who confidently claimed knowledge they didn't possess. And you can see what Socrates was getting at. If you're comfortable admitting that you don't know something, you can go and figure it out. But if you're busy pretending you already know the answer, you're not really giving yourself that opportunity. So you should be able to say, "I don't know. Can you explain that?" without feeling as though you've just failed some test. That's a normal thing for anyone to say. And the same goes for your own ideas. You might spend weeks thinking something through, feel completely convinced you're right, and then encounter information that completely contradicts it. Well, now you've got to decide whether you're going to examine that information or protect the explanation you become attached to. Because when you've invested a lot of time in an idea, criticism can actually feel personal. It's almost as if somebody's criticizing all the effort you spend developing it. But the amount of effort you put into an 7:34:03 explanation doesn't tell you whether it's actually true. So, you should be willing to revise what you believe. You can still trust your ability to think while admitting that one of your conclusions turned out to be wrong. you're learning at the end of the day, right? That's what you're supposed to do with new information. And when you do spot an error, you can actually be glad you found it because now you've got the chance to correct the decisions and learn again and correct the decisions that were based on it before you waste even more time doing the wrong thing. So, what does this actually look like when you're actually making decisions? Well, the first thing is that you need to recognize that different decisions deserve different amounts of thought. Sometimes you should absolutely sit down and actually research something carefully. Other times you could answer the question much faster by just running a small experiment because think about it some decisions are going to affect your life in ways that are really difficult to undo and other decisions are things you can change tomorrow if they don't work out. It doesn't make sense to approach both with the exact 7:35:01 same amount of preparation. And Jeff Bezos actually discusses a similar distinction in his 2015 shareholder letter where he describes type one and type two decisions. Type one decisions have serious consequences and are difficult to reverse, so they deserve careful consideration. Type two decisions are reversible, which means you can make them relatively quickly and observe what happens and then change the direction if necessary. And this gives you a practical rule. If the downside is serious and hard to reverse, then yes, think it through properly. If you can try something, see what happens, and then change direction without much damage, then there usually isn't a good reason to spend weeks trying to predict every possible outcome. For example, you can test a video title, contact a potential customer, or experiment with the way you organize your work. If it doesn't work, okay, you learn something and you try another approach. You haven't committed your entire future to that one decision, right? And what I would recommend is really deciding beforehand how much information you actually need. What would change your 7:36:03 mind which risks do you genuinely need to understand and what would count as enough preparation for this particular decision? Because without some kind of standard, you can always find another reason to keep researching. So let's say you've actually spent another hour reading about the thing you want to do. Ask yourself, what specific question was that hour supposed to answer in the first place? Can you actually name one? And is there an answer going to change your next decision? If not, then you might already have enough information to get started. You can just get started. Obviously, if you're missing information that could seriously affect the cost, the safety, or obviously the consequences of what you're doing, go and find it first. But a lot of the times that's not the case. And once you can make a reasonable decision and manage the downside, you should just start testing your understanding. And there's also another way to make your attempts more useful. Before you try something, figure out which assumption you're actually testing because otherwise something happens. You look at the result and you're not even sure what it tells you. So you choose 7:37:02 something reasonably small that gives you information about that particular assumption. Something you can actually observe and learn from rather than guessing about what went wrong. And ideally decide what the different results would mean before you begin. Because once you've actually spent a lot of effort on something, it's incredibly tempting to explain away a bad outcome. You can keep insisting that your idea was right even when the results are telling you to reconsider it. And there's also a connection here to Carl Pauper who wrote Conjectures and Reputations. And one of the questions you can take from his work is pretty simple. What would have to happen for you to admit your explanation was wrong? Because if every possible outcome somehow counts as evidence that you're actually right, you haven't really given yourself and your belief a serious test. So before you try something, think about what kind of evidence would genuinely make you reconsider it. Say people repeatedly reject your offer. At what point do you actually change the offer then or the audience or your assumptions about the problem? And when you get that evidence, you've got to be willing to 7:38:01 actually respond to it. There's no price for staying loyal to a prediction just because you were the one who made it. A lot of people get attached to their own decisions and predictions because they want to be right, but that doesn't make sense. Be wrong, [snorts] right? You want to get rid of the explanations that keep failing you so that the decisions you make afterwards are actually based on something more reliable. And then when we're actually talking about developing skills, there's another thing to remember. Just doing something again and again doesn't guarantee you're going to improve. If you've had the same problem for the last 50 attempts, another 50 identical attempts probably aren't going to magically solve it, right? Psychologist Anders Ericson studied expert performance in the role of deliberate practice, which basically involves structured activities designed to improve specific aspects of performance. And a person identifies a skill they need to develop and then works on tasks that challenge their current abilities and then uses that feedback to correct weaknesses. So, you need to figure out where you're 7:39:01 struggling. Pick one specific thing to work on and get some kind of feedback on it. And then make the practice difficult enough that you actually have to improve, but focused enough that you can tell whether you're getting better. And if you want help with this, by the way, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. And this is another area of where being intelligent can actually help you. You can analyze why you're making the mistake, come up with a better way of practicing, and actually make each attempt more useful. And that's a much better use of your brain than finding another reason to postpone practice. And as you keep doing that, you start noticing certain problems coming up repeatedly, right? You also begin recognizing which parts of the subject you don't understand as well as you thought. And now when you go back to the book or a lesson, you're going back with a very specific question. You've actually encountered the problem. You've seen where your understanding stops being useful. So you can pay attention to the part of the explanation that actually answers it. And over time, those experiences give you something to draw on when you encounter a new 7:39:59 situation. You've seen similar problems before. You understand what happened, and you can now make better informed decisions. And eventually, a lot of the things that used to take you ages to figure out become familiar. You now recognize the situation. You can make a decision. You can just move on. And you've developed actual competence. So, how do you put all of this into practice? Well, you can start with something you've been putting off for a while. Maybe you've spent months studying it and you know roughly what you need to do, but somehow the first real step keeps getting delayed. And that's the thing to look at. Whatever it is, identify the actual thing you've been avoiding. And then think about the explanation you've been giving yourself. What are you supposedly missing? Is it more confidence, more knowledge, better circumstances? Try to actually put it into words instead of leaving it as this vague feeling that you're not ready. Because once you've named it, you can actually evaluate it. And this is why a lot of people avoid naming it in the first place. Is there genuinely something you need to figure out before 7:40:59 the next step? Or are you just uncomfortable with the possibility that your first attempt might just go badly? And then choose a small action that will give you something useful, something you can finish. Observe and learn from. You don't have to turn this into another six week plan for how you're eventually going to start. And once you've chosen an approach, give it a fair chance because if you're reconsidering the whole thing every time a new idea comes along, you're never going to find out what your original decision could have produced. So decide ahead of time how you're actually going to work on it or how many genuine attempts you're going to make before you actually stop and evaluate whether the approach is working. And then keep track of something meaningful. Maybe it's how many attempts you made or just some kind of number. And then remember that the first few attempts can tell you a lot about your current ability to execute. They don't necessarily tell you whether the entire strategy is worthless. You just need enough experience to tell the difference. And after each attempt, just take a few minutes to think about what you expected and what actually happened. 7:41:59 So any observations like what surprised you, where did you get stuck, what worked better than you expected, then any corrections you could make, any improvements you could make. So choose one thing to change next time. And if you're not sure why something happened, then figure out what you could look at or test to get a clearer answer. And then you try again. That's it. You don't need a ridiculously complicated system. You just need a way of noticing what happened and actually doing something with the information. You should start paying more attention to whether you're becoming capable of doing the work rather than whether you look intelligent while you're learning it. Are you making better decisions? Are you recognizing mistakes sooner? Are you getting better at the skill? Those are much more useful things to measure than whether everybody thinks you're naturally gifted. And if somebody points out something you genuinely got wrong, cool. That's amazing. Now you've actually got a chance to correct it. You have a chance to learn something new. You don't need to turn that moment into a judgment, right? Because that's ultimately how you get good at things. This is ultimately 7:43:00 how you learn. You go through the experiences that beginners go through. You learn what you can from them and gradually stop being a beginner. So coming back to where we started, why do people who seem less intelligent sometimes accomplish so much more? Well, they just start. That's it. That's the whole explanation. And some of them keep learning from what happens until they've developed abilities that a person who was still thinking about it hasn't even begun to practice. You can be extremely intelligent and still spend years trying to make the perfect decision or protect the image you have of yourself. All that ability to think doesn't automatically solve the problem of actually doing something. But imagine combining the two. You use your intelligence to make a thoughtful decision. You act on it and you allow what happens to change your understanding and knowledge. And that's how your knowledge becomes more useful and compounds on itself. So, you need to become willing to be inexperienced at things, to make an attempt that might not be very good, to admit when you misunderstood something, to make a 7:44:01 correction, and try again. Because nobody gets to skip the part where they're learning how to do it. And really, when you think about it, being willing to look stupid, admit that you don't know something, question your assumptions, and learn from experience might be one of the most intelligent things and one of the most fun things you can do in this life. So, with that said, let's cover the review. We covered the intelligence trap, the advantage of ignorance, intelligent stupidity, the review, and finally, your action items for the day or the next few days. First, choose one thing you've been postponing despite already having enough knowledge to begin. Write down the reasons you've been giving yourself for delaying and examine whether those reasons represent genuine obstacles or simply make it easier for you to avoid uncertainty. Then, determine what information you actually need to make a responsible decision. acquire whatever is missing and just establish exactly what you're going to do next. Then take the simplest meaningful action that allows you to test your understanding against reality and actually do it. Decide what you're trying to learn from the attempt. Pay 7:45:01 attention to what actually happens and use the results to determine what you should do differently. And then finally, commit to your chosen approach long enough to actually develop experience. After every attempt, examine what worked, what failed, which assumptions were incorrect, and what you need to improve. And then apply those lessons during your next attempt. And make a deliberate effort to become comfortable asking questions, admitting ignorance, accepting correction, and appearing inexperienced. And use your intelligence to improve the quality of your actions, and use your actions to improve the quality of your understanding. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this and it brought a lot of value to you. If it did, please let me know. Subscribe to the channel. Make sure to book a call from the link in the description if you want to work with me oneon-one. If you want this document, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for 7:46:00 watching. Thank you for the support. And I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the loop you don't know you're in. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself. the loop, the illusion, the fear, the exit, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. We work with entrepreneurs, creators, professionals, and high performers in all sorts of fields to basically help them master every aspect of their life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self with one complete system. So, if you're interested in that, again, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with this document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve in every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from 7:46:55 the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the loop. So, there's something you've probably been doing every single day for years and you know it's a problem and you've tried to stop and you most likely couldn't. You've tried screen time limits. You've tried grayscale mode. You've tried deleting the apps and reinstalling them a week later. You've told yourself a hundred times that tonight would be different, that you'd put the phone down after 10 minutes, that you'd read instead, and it never stuck. And what I need you to understand is that it wasn't a failure of willpower. Every single attempt you made made to cut back was a failure of method. You were trying to resist something you still believed was giving you something. And that's a fight that nobody wins. Now, there's a different approach. It doesn't ask you to resist. It doesn't give you rules or limits or clever hacks. It shows you something about the habit itself that you've never seen clearly before. Something you probably already suspect on some level, but nobody has ever laid out for you plainly. And once you see it, the desire 7:47:56 to scroll just goes away. The want itself disappears. And that's exactly what this training is going to do. There's one sentence, one line that makes the entire illusion collapse. You know it's true before you even can before you can even argue with it. And after that, stopping becomes the easiest thing in the world. And by the end, you're going to understand exactly how the loop works, what scrolling actually gives you, and the answer will surprise you, and why every fear you have about stopping is the trap itself talking. Once those three things click, the exit is already open, and you won't have to do anything to really stop doom scrolling. So sometime something something probably happened today, right? Or yesterday or honestly every single day for the last few years. And it's so normal now that you've barely even you barely even register it. You sat down somewhere, maybe on the couch, maybe in bed, maybe at your desk during a break and you picked up your phone and there wasn't a notification you needed to check. There wasn't really a message you were waiting for. You just picked it 7:48:58 up for some reason. And then 30 minutes later, maybe an hour, you put it down and you felt a kind of hollow, kind of drained feeling like you just lost time that you can't get back and you're not even sure what you saw. That right there is the exact loop we're talking about. And until you understand how it actually looks and how it works, you'll keep getting pulled back. Now, the way this whole thing operates is honestly so simple that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And that simplicity is actually what makes it so effective at keeping you stuck because your phone creates a feeling of low-level restlessness. The subtle sense that something might be happening somewhere, that there's something to check or see or to catch up on, and then it offers itself as the solution to that exact feeling. So you pick it up, you scroll a bit, and the restlessness fades for a moment, and then it comes right back stronger than before, which is how you end up scrolling for an hour when you only meant to check one thing. Now, that underlying tension you feel when you 7:50:00 haven't looked at your phone in a while isn't natural, right? Think about it. And it's worth really understanding that because most people assume it's just boredom or curiosity when actually it's a trained response that your phone put there over months and years of repetition. Now, every single time you reach for your phone in an idle moment, you reinforced the connection between nothing happening and check the phone. And now that connection fires automatically, almost like a reflex without any conscious decision on your part. And the tricky part is you genuinely believe you want to scroll, right? that some part of you is choosing it. When in reality, you're just responding to a discomfort that the phone itself created, which is the same mechanism behind basically every habit loop ever studied. Now, this happens dozens of times a day for most people. And each time it happens, the loop gets a little tighter, a little more automatic, a little harder to even notice it is happening. So, when you pick up the phone and start scrolling, that restlessness goes away for a moment. And that [clears throat] brief 7:51:01 relief is really what your brain registers as enjoyment, as satisfaction, even though you're not actually gaining anything from the content you're consuming. And the relief never lasts, right? It typically lasts for maybe 30 minutes and then you're back at it again, which is honestly the most important thing to understand here. And the reason it never lasts is that the scrolling itself regenerates the restlessness. So you're stuck in a cycle where the cure keeps recreating the problem. And over time you need more scrolling to just get the same amount of relief. Which is why what used to be a 5 minute check has probably become a 30 minute 30 minute one or an hourong session for most of you watching this. Now what makes this loop so hard to break is that it's almost completely invisible while you're still inside it. Right? And by the time you notice what's happening, you've already lost the time, already spent the attention, already drained the energy. And that invisibility is honestly the loop's greatest weapon. Everyone around you is 7:52:01 doing the same thing which makes it feel completely normal, completely harmless, just something people do. And that social normaly is one of the strongest forces keeping the loop intact because you never really question a behavior that literally everyone you know shares. So you look at other people scrolling on the train in waiting rooms at dinner and it basically confirms that this is just what life looks like now which makes it almost impossible to see it as a problem. Nobody talks about this as an addiction and that silence gives it a kind of permission a free pass that alcohol or cigarettes or drugs don't necessarily get even though the mechanism is functionally the same. And then on top of that most of you your scrolling happens without any conscious decision at all. And that's actually the defining feature of the loop. The fact that you don't choose to enter it, you just find yourself already in it. Sometimes midcroll before you even realize you picked up the phone. Now, there are specific moments that tend to pull you in, like transitional moments between tasks or the first few seconds 7:53:02 of boredom or right when you wake up and right before you sleep. And once you start noticing these triggers, you'll see how mechanical and predictable the whole thing really is. After enough repetitions, scrolling stops being something you do and really starts feeling like something you are, like someone who just needs their phone around. And that shift from behavior to identity is where the loop gets really entrenched. And that's exactly why the first step, the most important step, is really simply seeing the loop for what it is clearly and obviously without any judgment because you genuinely cannot exit something you don't know you're in. And most people have been in this loop so long that they've completely forgotten there's an outside. Now the moment you start recognizing the pattern in real time, catching yourself mid-reache, noticing the restlessness for what it actually is, everything starts to change slowly and that change doesn't require any willpower or discipline or any special technique. It's just you seeing the loop that creates distance from it. And that distance is where your freedom lives because the loop only works when you're 7:54:03 fully inside it, when you're not noticing it, when you're fully identified with the urge, fully on autopilot. Now, the thing that people consistently underestimate is how much time this actually takes from from them across a week or a month or a year. And when you add it up, even a conservative estimate puts most people at somewhere between 2 and 4 hours a day of pure scroll time, which across a year is literally over a,000 hours. Can you imagine that? Those hours compound and obviously in ways that you can't notice day-to-day, but they show up in the things that you never got around to. The projects that you maybe didn't start, the books you didn't read, the skills you didn't build, and when you zoom out, the cost becomes very real and very concrete. [snorts] Every hour spent scrolling is an hour that could have gone towards something you actually care about. And the painful part is that you know this. You're right. You feel it. you you've probably told yourself 100 times that you'll cut back. And it's not just the 7:55:04 time either. Scrolling drains a specific kind of mental energy, the kind you need for focus and creativity and real engagement with your life, which is why you often feel tired after a long scroll session. Even though you are technically doing absolutely nothing. Now, the drain happens so gradually that you don't even feel it as a single loss. to just slowly become someone with less time, less energy, less capacity for the things that actually matter to them. And you assume that's just how life is now. And the really difficult part, and I say this from experience, is that the damage accumulates so slowly that you don't feel it happening. And by the time you do notice, you've already lost months or years to something that gave you absolutely nothing in return. Now, most people when they're honest with themselves already know they scroll too much. they already feel some version of regret or frustration about it and that feeling itself becomes another trigger for the loop because guess what you do when you feel bad? You pick up the phone. So if you project the current pattern forward 5 years or 10 years, the 7:56:07 amount of life that goes to the scroll is genuinely staggering. And that projection alone should be enough to make you want to understand how to get out. Now none of this is accidental by the way. The platforms that serve you this content have spent billions of dollars and employed thousands of engineers specifically to create and m maintain this loop. And understanding that context matters as well because it means you're not weak for getting caught on it. You're just up against a system that was designed from the ground up to keep you exactly where you are. The infinite scroll, the autoplay, the algorithmic feed that learns exactly what keeps your eyes on the screen, all of it was built with one goal in mind. And that goal is your attention. Measured in minutes, by the way, sold to advertisers and optimized relentlessly. These algorithms know you better than you know yourself in some ways because they've tracked every pause, every like, every share, every moment you lingered on something for an extra second. And they use all of that data to serve you 7:57:08 exactly the kind of content that keeps the loop going. And the reason this matters is that when you understand the loop was designed intentionally and strategically by people who profit from your attention, it becomes a lot easier to stop blaming yourself for falling into it and a lot easier to decide you want out and to opt out. Now, your time and attention are literally the product being sold, which means the longer you scroll, the more money someone else makes. And the system will never let you will never tell you to stop because stopping is against its financial interest. Now your interests and the platform's interests are fundamentally misaligned. And once you really get that, once you understand that the app is trying to extract as much of your attention as possible, the whole experience starts to feel different. And knowing this doesn't automatically break the loop, but it does something crucial. It separates you from the loop. It makes you the person observing the trap rather than the person stuck in it. And that separation is where everything starts to 7:58:08 change. And so the whole thing feeds on itself in a way that most people never fully grasp until someone lays out plainly. And here it is. The phone creates discomfort. The phone then relieves the discomfort. The relief creates more discomfort. You reach for the phone again over and over and over, hundreds of times a day. thousands of times a week until the loop feels so natural you mistake it for your own personality. Each scroll session doesn't just satisfy the urge, it strengthens it. Which means every time you give into the impulse, you're making the next impulse harder to resist. And that compounding effect is why people feel like the habit gets worse over time, even when they're trying to actually cut back. Each scroll session doesn't just satisfy the urge, right? It strengthens it. So the brain is doing exactly what it's designed to do here, reinforcing behavior that produces relief. And the tragedy is that the relief is manufactured by the same thing causing the discomfort in the first place. So 7:59:09 the reinforcement is essentially training you to stay trapped. And this is why the loop speeds up over time rather than slowing down. The more you scroll, the more you need to scroll and the faster the cycle turns, which is how something that started as a harmless 5-minute check 3 years ago has now become the dominant activity in your day. Now, the only way to break a self-free and forcing loop is really to see through it. And that's what the rest of this training is going to do. We're going to look at what you think scrolling gives you. We're going to look at what actually keeps you doing it. And by the end, you're going to understand something that changes everything, which is that there was never anything to give up in the first place. This is the same approach that's been used to help people break some of the most deeply ingrained habits on the planet. You don't fight the urge. You don't try to overpower it. You show the person clearly that the thing they're hooked on isn't actually giving them anything. And once they see that, the desire just disappears. No willpower required. We're doing exactly the same thing here with scrolling. We're removing the desire itself, which 8:00:10 is the only thing that was ever keeping the loop alive. So, let's talk about the illusion. Now, most people who scroll a lot know on some level that they're doing it too much, right? They feel the time loss, the drain, the lowrade guilt afterwards, but they keep doing it anyway. And the reason they keep doing it is that they genuinely believe scrolling gives them something. And maybe it's entertainment, maybe it's relaxation, maybe it's connection, a break from the stress of real life. Now, that belief, that sense that you're getting something valuable from the scroll is the single biggest thing keeping you stuck. So, let's actually look at what scrolling gives you honestly and carefully. The first thing that most people would say is that scrolling is entertaining. That the content is funny or interesting or engaging. And on the surface, that seems obviously true. But if you actually pay attention to how you feel during and after a scroll session, the picture looks completely different. Try to remember what you watched the last 8:01:10 time you scrolled for 30 minutes. Really try like actually go back in time and try to remember what you watched. Now most people can't recall more than one or two things if even. And even those are vague, right? Because the content is designed to be consumed instantly and forgotten immediately, which is generally not how real entertainment works. The sheer amount of content you're exposed to in a single session means nothing really gets processed deeply. Nothing sticks. Nothing actually enriches your thinking or your mood or your understanding of anything. And that's a pretty strong sign that what you're experiencing isn't entertainment in any meaningful sense. Now, real entertainment, the kind that actually leaves you feeling good, requires some engagement from you, some investment, some interaction with the material. And scrolling is the opposite of that. It's pure pacivity, which is 8:02:11 why it leaves you feeling flat instead of fulfilled. And the worst part is that this fake version of entertainment starts to replace the real one. Because after enough scrolling, your attention span shrinks to the point where a book or a movie or even a long conversation starts to feel like too much effort. And so you default back to the scroll. Now imagine a life like that, right? Where you can't even look at art anymore. You can't read. You can't watch a movie. You can't even listen to music that is not constantly stimulating. And here's what makes this even clearer. The longer you scroll, the less enjoyable it gets. And everyone knows this from experience, that feeling of scrolling past 10, 20, 50 pieces of content. And nothing is quote unquote hitting, right? Nothing is satisfying. But you keep going anyway because stopping somehow feels harder than continuing. That experience of scrolling and 8:03:12 scrolling and looking for the one good video that will make the session feel worthwhile, that's not entertainment. That's searching. And the fact that you have to search so hard for satisfaction is proof that the satisfaction was never really there in the first place. So compare that to watching a movie you actually love, a film, or reading a book that grips you or having a real conversation with someone who makes you laugh. Those things fill you up. Scrolling empties you out. The difference is obvious once you start noticing it. Now, the second thing people believe is that scrolling helps them maybe relax. That it's a way to unwind after a long day or decompress during a stressful moment. And this one is maybe the most danger dangerous illusion of all because it feels so true while being so wrong. Scrolling is one of the most stimulating things you can do to your brain. And that's the exact opposite of relaxation. Every new video, 8:04:12 every new image, every new piece of text is a micro hit of novelty that your brain has to process. And after hundreds of those in a row, your nervous system is more activated than it was before you started. There's good research showing that excessive phone use raises cortisol levels, which is your body's stress hormone. And that means the thing you're using to quote unquote relax is actually making you more stressed, more wired, more unable to genuinely calm down. And this is especially true at night when most people do their heaviest scrolling right before bed at the exact time your body needs to be winding down and instead you're flooding it with blue light and rapid fire stimulation which is why so many people have trouble falling asleep and wake up feeling unrested. Now what scrolling actually does is numb you. And numbing feels like relaxation if you don't look too closely. But there's a massive difference between the two. Obviously, relaxation restores your energy. It should. That's what the whole idea of 8:05:16 relaxation is. Numbing just suppresses your awareness of how drained you already are. And when the numbing wears off, all [clears throat] that fatigue and stress is still right there, sometimes worse than before. A lot of the time, scrolling is really just avoidance stressed up as leisure, a way to not think about the thing that's actually bothering you. And the problem with avoidance is that it never resolves anything. It just delays the discomfort and usually makes it grow. So real relaxation looks like going for a walk, sitting in silence, having a conversation that makes you feel seen, or doing something slow and intentional. And the fact that those things sound quote unquote boring compared to scrolling is actually more evidence of how warped the loop has made your sense of what feels good. And so what ends up happening is you scroll to quote unquote rest and then feel more tired than when you started. And then because you feel tired, you scroll some more. And the cycle just 8:06:17 keeps feeding itself in this way that makes genuine recovery almost impossible as long as the phone stays in your hand or even in the room honestly. And over time, this creates a kind of energy debt where you're always slightly behind. You're always slightly more drained than you should be and you start to think that that's just who you are now. That's your baseline energy level. Someone who's already always tired when really it's just the scroll eating your capacity to recharge. Now, people who cut their scroll time consistently report better sleep, more energy, better mood, and a lot more mental clarity within the first week. And that tells you everything about what the quote unquote relaxation of scrolling was actually doing to them. Now, the third claim is that scrolling keeps you connected. That social media specifically helps you stay in touch with people um or know what's going on in your community or it makes you feel like you're part of something. And this 8:07:18 one has just enough truth in it to be convincing, but the version of connection that scrolling provides is so thin and hollow that it barely even counts. Now, most of what people call quote unquote connection on [clears throat] social media is actually just passive observation, right? You don't actually connect. You just observe what's happening. Watching other people's highlight reels, reading their updates, seeing their seeing their photos. And none of that really involves the actual ingredients of real human connection like vulnerability, reciprocity, presence, or even genuine attention. What it often produces instead is comparison. This quiet measuring of your life against the curated version of other people's lives. And not the good kind of comparison where you become motivated because of it to change your own life. The worst kind of comparison where you actually feel more sad because your life is not up to par. And that comparison almost always leaves you feeling worse, which is the opposite 8:08:18 of what connection is supposed to do. And study after study has confirmed that heavy social media use correlates with increased loneliness. And at some point, you have to take that data seriously because the thing that's supposed to connect you is measurably making you more isolated, more lonely. Most of what gets posted online is a performance, carefully selected version of someone's life. And engaging with performances all day trains you to perform, too. which moves you further from the kind of honest, messy, real connection that actually matters with people. Now, the really concerning part is that scrolling doesn't just fail to provide real connection, it actually replaces it. Because the time and energy you spend scrolling is time and energy that could have gone towards the people physically around you or towards reaching out to someone in a real and meaningful way. Think about how many times you've chose you've been sitting next to someone you love and both of you were on your phones. 8:09:20 These days you could be sitting with your grandma and [clears throat] be both of you will be on your phones. That moment right there is the cost of the illusion. The real connection that was available and wasn't taken. Real relationships require depth. They require showing up fully and paying attention to being and being present. And scrolling trains you to do the exact opposite. It trains you for shallow, rapid, disposable engagement, which is fine for content consumption, but it's absolutely devastating for human connection, right? And then then there's the last one, which is probably the most honest reason people give. They scroll because they're bored. Nothing else to do. And this is where the framework we've been building really clicks into place because the boredom you feel when you're not scrolling isn't real boredom. It's withdrawal from the scrolling. Like we talked about with a loop. The phone trained you to feel restless without it. 8:10:20 And that restlessness feels exactly like boredom. But it's not. Real boredom existed before smartphones. And people dealt with it fine. They daydreamed. They thought about things. They noticed their surroundings. They wrote. They created art. They sat with themselves. That aversion of boredom was actually useful. It was often where creativity and self-awareness came from. The boredom that scrolling creates is very different. It's an artificial itch that only exists because of the habit itself. So the more you scroll, the lower your tolerance for stillness gets, which is how you end up unable to wait in a line for 2 minutes without pulling out your phone. And that inability to sit with yourself for even a short time isn't boredom, it's dependency. The good news is that this recalibrates pretty quickly once you stop. Within a few days, maybe a week, your ability to be comfortable with nothing happening comes back and what used to feel unbearable starts to feel normal again and even pleasant. You'll start enjoying 8:11:21 nothing happening. And here's what matters about all of this. When you stop using scrolling to fill every empty moment, you get something back that most people have completely forgotten they had, which is the ability to just be, to sit down with your own thoughts, to let your mind wander, daydream, process without needing constant input. Almost every creative insight, every good idea, every moment of genuine clarity happens in those quiet, unstimulated moments that scrolling has completely eliminated from most people's days. And getting those moments back is worth more than any real or short could ever give you. And beyond creativity, there's something even more basic at stake, which is your relationship with yourself. Your ability to know what you actually think and feel and want. Because you can't hear any of that over the noise of the constant constant content consumption. And the silence that comes when you stop scrolling is the same silence where self-nowledge lives. That capacity to be just with yourself, undistracted and unmediated, 8:12:23 is honestly one of the most important things a person can have. And the fact that an app on your phone has quietly taken it from you without you even noticing is reason enough to walk away from the scroll for good. And if this is hitting home for you right now, if you can feel the weight of how much of your time and energy and focus has quietly been going to something that was giving you nothing back, I want you to know that getting your attention back is really just the first domino. I work with entrepreneurs, creators, professionals, high performers who want to master every area of their life, health, wealth, love, and self with one complete system. And reclaiming your attention is one of the first things we fix because everything else depends on it. So, there's a link in the description to book a call and it might genuinely be one of the most important conversations you have this year. So, if you're interested, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. Now, let's talk about the fear. So, at this point, you probably see the loop, right? You probably see the illusion. And if those two things are landing, 8:13:25 then there's only one left keeping you in it. And that's fear. Fear of what happens when you actually stop? What do you do? Fear of missing out, fear of boredom, fear of being disconnected, irrelevant, or left behind, fear of having to sit with yourself without a screen to hide behind. And this is honestly the most important section because the only thing that actually makes it difficult to stop is really fear. The actual stopping is easy. It's the fear around the stopping that makes it feel impossible. So, let's go through every fear you might have and really look at each one. The first one, and probably the biggest fear, is that you'll miss something important. that while you're not scrolling, some piece of content or news or trend will pass you by and you'll be out of the loop. The social one this time. And this fear feels incredibly real and urgent, even though when you actually examine it, it falls apart almost immediately. Think about all the content you've consumed in the last month of scrolling. I'm talking about specifically short form kind of scrolling. That's why we're talking 8:14:25 about doom scrolling, but it can relate to long form content as well. How much of it was actually important? How much of it changed anything about your life or your decisions or your understanding of the world? Probably a very small part of it or almost none of it. The vast majority was instantly forgettable. And the tiny fraction that might have been valuable you could have found in 5 minutes of intentional searching instead of hours of passive scrolling. Anything genuinely important will reach you through other channels, through conversations, through the news, through people telling you about it. And the idea that you need to constantly monitor an infinite feed to stay informed is just a story the platforms need you to believe to keep you engaged. And honestly, the quality of information you get from intentional cho chosen sources is so much higher than the what the algorithm serves you because the algorithm optimizes for engagement and not for truth or usefulness. So you're actually less informed from scrolling, 8:15:25 not more. Now, there's also the specific anxiety about not being current, not knowing the latest thing, not being able to participate in whatever conversation everyone's having right now. And that anxiety, I understand, but the thing it's protecting you from being slightly behind on a trend is so inconsequential in the actual context of your life that it's almost funny when you see it clearly. Trends move so fast now that even if you scroll for 4 hours a day, you still can't keep up with everything. Which means you're already missing most of it. And somehow [clears throat] your life continues to function perfectly fine despite of that. the things that actually matter in your life, your health, your relationships, your work, your personal growth. None [clears throat] of those things are affected by whether you saw a trending video or not. And deep down, you already know that. Like, I don't have to be telling you any of this. 5 years from now, you will not remember a single real you watched this week, but you'll remember what you did with the hours you got back. And that's the only math that actually matters here. 8:16:27 Now the second fear is that life without scrolling will be boring. That you'll have all this empty time and nothing to do in it. Nothing to fill it with. And like we covered in the illusion section, this fear is really just withdrawal disguised as some kind of prediction. And it's worth understanding that distinction clearly. The first few days without heavy scrolling will feel uncomfortable. True. That's honest. That discomfort, first off, was caused by the thing itself. But that's the withdrawal from the constant stimulation, not evidence that your life is actually boring. The discomfort passes. It passes faster than you'd expect. And what's on the other side of it is a version of your attention that you probably haven't experienced in years. People who cut back on scrolling consistently report they're rediscovering their interests that they might have even forgotten they had. picking up books again, going for walks, having longer conversations, starting projects they'd been putting off. And none [clears throat] of that 8:17:29 happens because they suddenly became more disciplined. It happens because they freed up the time and attention that scrolling was consuming. Now, the truth is that life without constant scrolling is richer. It is fuller. It is more textured. It is more present. And the only reason that sounds unbelievable is that the loop has been running for so long, you've forgotten what unmediated experience actually feels like. And beyond the adjustment period, there's something genuinely valuable about being able to sit with nothing happening, about being comfortable with stillness. And that's a capacity most people have completely lost. But it comes back quickly. And when it does, it changes the texture of your entire day. Some of your best thinking happens when you're not doing anything at all. You You've probably had moments where you were just taking a walk and you got a crazy amazing idea when you're just sitting or walking or waiting. And scrolling has stolen those 8:18:29 moments so completely that most people literally don't have a single unstimulated minute in their entire day. There's a kind of peace that comes from not needing constant input. And it's something you can actually feel in your body, a loosening almost a settling uh quiet that you didn't even know was missing until it comes back. And the beautiful thing is that this peace isn't something you have to build or earn or work towards. This peace that we're all looking for comes from just letting go of this phone. It's already there. It's been there the whole time. The scroll is just covering it up. Now, the third fear is social. The worry that if you're not on the platforms, you'll lose touch with people, maybe fall out of some groups, maybe become the person that doesn't know what anyone's talking about. And this fear has a little bit of truth to it in the sense that yes, some surface level social awareness comes from maybe from 8:19:29 scrolling, but the trade-off you're making for that awareness is enormous. The kind of information you get from scrolling is so shallow that losing it barely counts as a loss. And what you gain in return, which is the time and presence to actually connect with people in real ways, is so much more valuable that the trade isn't even close. You might have to be slightly more intentional about staying in touch, like actually texting someone instead of just seeing their story or calling someone instead of liking their post. And those intentional actions are worth 10,000 times more than passive consumption when it comes to real human connection. And honestly, if a relationship can only survive through mutual scrolling of each other's feeds, that relationship was already pretty empty. And redirecting that energy towards the people who actually matter to you in real and substantive ways is one of the best things you can actually do for your social life. Now, the deeper version of this fear is about belonging, about feeling like part of something. And the truth is that scrolling gives you a 8:20:31 simulation of belonging without any of the real substance. And the more you rely on that stim simulation, the less you invest in real communities and relationships that could actually give you what you're looking for. The most connected people you know, the ones who seem most at ease socially, most grounded in their relationships, are almost never the ones glued to their phones. And that's not a coincidence. Real belonging requires presence. and presence requires attention and scrolling consumes both. Every meaningful relationship in your life would benefit from you being more present and less distracted. And quitting the scroll doesn't disconnect you. It frees up the exact resource your attention that real connection demands. So you're not losing connection by stepping away from the scroll. You're upgrading the kind of connection you already have from passive observation to active participation, from shallow to deep. And that upgrade changes everything about how you feel in your relationships as well and how close you feel with people. A lot of people that 8:21:32 say they don't they don't have any friends, they have plenty of friends. They're just too busy scrolling to notice. And then there's a sneakiest fear of all. The one that most people don't even realize they have, which is the fear of who you'll be without the scroll. After years of this beha be behavior, it becomes part of how you see yourself, part of your daily rhythm. Right? And the idea of just not doing it anymore feels weirdly like losing something even though intellectually you know you're losing nothing. This is just habit talking. And habits feel feel like identity when they've been running for long enough, but they're not you. They're just patterns. And patterns can change. And the person underneath those patterns, the person who existed before the scroll is still there and honestly probably wants out. Now the attachment to the behavior feels real, but it's the same kind of attachment a smoker feels to cigarettes. It feels meaningful because of the repetition and not because of the value itself. And once you see through the 8:22:33 attachment, it loses its grip entirely. On the other side of letting go of that identity is a version of you that has their attention back, has their time back, has their energy back, and that's a return to something you were always supposed to have. Now, the fear of change itself is real and deserves respect. But the change we're talking about here is small in practice and enormous in impact. And most people who make it look back and they really can't believe that they ever hesitated because the life on the other side is just so obviously better. Every person who successfully cut their screen time will tell you the same thing. That the fears they had beforehand turned out to be almost entirely imaginary and that the first week maybe it was a bit strange. Maybe it felt a bit uncomfortable but after that they couldn't imagine going back. And ultimately, this is a choice between a known discomfort, which is the quiet drain of the scroll that you're already living with every day, and an unknown discomfort, which is a few days of adjustment. 8:23:34 When you frame it that way, the decision becomes pretty clear, right? So, if you're sitting here right now and you can feel the fears losing their grip, if you can see the loop and the illusion clearly and you're ready to actually do something with the time and energy you're about to get back, that's exactly what we help people do. We work with entrepreneurs, creators, professionals, high performers to build one complete system for mastering their health, their wealth, their relationships, and their relationship with themselves. The scroll is honestly just the starting point. There's a link in the description. You can book a call if you want to talk about mastering every area of your life and how that looks like for your specific situation. With that said, let's continue with the exit. So, here's where we actually talk about stopping. And if you've been paying attention up to this point, the stopping part is going to feel almost anticlimactic, right? [clears throat] And that's by design. The whole point of everything we've covered is that the hard part was never the quitting. The hard part was believing that you were 8:24:35 giving something up. And you're not. You know that now. The loop isn't giving you anything. The entertainment, the relaxation, the connection, all of it is really an illusion. The fear of stopping was just the trap's last defense. And now that you see all of that clearly, the exit is just walking through a door that's been open the whole time. The only thing you actually need to stop is clarity. a clear and honest understanding of what the scroll was and what it isn't. And if you followed everything up to this point, well, you already have this clarity. So, what remains is really just the practical side of actually changing the behavior, which is genuinely easier than you think. And it starts with a single clean decision, not a vague intention to scroll less or cut back. A clear definitive decision that you're done with mindless scrolling, that you see it for what it is, and that you don't want it anymore. And the firmness of that decision is what matters more 8:25:35 than any technique or or strategy. The reason willpower approaches [clears throat] fail is that they leave the underlying desire intact. You still want to scroll, but you're forcing yourself not to. And that internal conflict is exhausting and obviously unsustainable because you're constantly going to have to fight yourself. This approach removes the desire. So there's no conflict, there's no struggle, there's no force. And this is where our thesis line lands. The only reason you want to see the next real is because you watched the last one. So the last one you watched, whenever that was, that was your final mindless scroll. Not because you're depriving yourself, because you're done with something that was never giving you anything. And here's something important. This isn't about never using your phone again or never watching a video again or going off the grid. This is about ending the mindless habitual loopdriven scrolling that eats your time and attention without your conscious consent. Intentional use is completely different 8:26:36 from compulsive use. And you get to keep the former while letting go of the latter. Using your phone to call someone, to look something up, to watch something specific you've chosen. All of that is fine and normal. What you're stopping is the open-ended algorithm-driven scroll session where you hand your attention over to a machine and let it decide what you see for the next 45 minutes. The difference between intentional and compulsive use is control. And control is exactly what the loop took from you, right? And getting it back is what this whole thing has been about from the start. Now, the actual mechanics of stopping are embarrassingly simple. And that simplicity is the point because every complicated system of rules and limits and screen time trackers is just another way of staying in the loop while pretending that you're addressing it and doing something about it. So delete the apps. Seriously, not temporarily, not as a detox because you don't need them. And keeping your keeping them on your phone while trying to stop scrolling is like 8:27:37 keeping cigarettes in your pocket while trying to quit. You're setting yourself up to fail on purpose. You can still access those platforms through a browser if you genuinely need to, but the friction of opening a browser, logging in, and actually going to the site is enough to break the autopilot loop, especially after this training, especially after you know the truth. And that friction becomes your best friend in the first week. Deleting the apps is also a signal to yourself that you're serious about this, that this isn't another half-hearted attempt. And that signal matters psychologically because it aligns your environment with your intention. and you want your phone to be a tool again, something you pick up for a reason and put down when the reason is done. And removing the infinite scroll apps is the single fastest way to make that happen. Now, look, you're going to have more time than typically. The time you used to spend scrolling will open up and for the first few days, it will feel weird, like something's missing. And that's where having a few simple, loweffort alternatives already helps. a 8:28:37 book by your bed, a walk after dinner, a conversation instead of a scroll. Nothing complicated, just something that's actually good for you in the space where the scrolling used to be. Now, the weird feeling passes within a few days, usually faster than that. And after it passes, the alternatives stop feeling like alternatives and start feeling like your life, the one you were living before the phone took over, except now you're actually present for it and you're actually enjoying it. And over time, maybe a few weeks, you'll start noticing things that are hard to explain but very real. Your attention span gets longer. Your mood stabilizes. Your sleep improves. Your thinking gets clearer. All of those things compound on each other in ways that make the old scroll sessions look completely insane in hindsight. And this is what life actually looks like on the other side. And I want to be specific about it because vague promises don't really help anyone. And the actual lived experience of someone who stepped out of the scroll is remarkably different from what the fear told you it would be. Your mornings change first. Instead of reaching for 8:29:38 your phone before your eyes are fully open, you just wake up. You lie there maybe for a minute. You think about your day. You get up and start moving without that foggy, already drained feeling that comes from 30 minutes of scrolling before you've gotten out of bed. There's a mental sharpness in the first hour of your day that most people haven't felt since before they got a smartphone. And that sharpness sets the tone for everything that follows. Your day starts with your own thoughts, your own plans, your own priorities instead of whatever the algorithm decided to show you. And that shift from reactive to intentional changes how you how the entire day unfolds. Your evenings change, too. The hours between dinner and bed stop being a scroll blur and start being actual time. time you can use for things that matter, conversations, projects, rest that actually rests you, right? And the cumulative effect of getting those evenings, hours, and nights back is something you genuinely have to experience to understand if you don't remember it anymore. Real rest, the kind where your nervous system actually calms 8:30:40 down, becomes possible again once the scroll is gone. And the quality of your sleep improves in ways that affect everything else. your mood, your focus, your patience, your relationships, and maybe most importantly, you get space back. Mental space, emotional space, the kind of quiet internal room where you can actually process your day, think about what matters, and feel like a person rather than a content consumption machine. So, you start being present for the small moments that used to disappear into the scroll. A meal, a sunset, a conversation with someone you love. None of those things are dramatic, but they're real. and real is something scrolling never was. Now, the last thing to address is whether this sticks, whether you can really stop for good or whether you'll inevitably slide back. And the answer depends entirely on whether you understood the earlier sections. Because if you really see the loop, really see the whole illusion of this, really see the fear for what it is, there's nothing to slide back to. If you do find yourself picking up the 8:31:40 phone and starting to scroll out of habit in the weeks after stopping, that's normal. And the response is simple. You just notice it, remember what you know about the loop, and put the phone down. And hopefully, you delete the app. No starting over, just a gentle correction. So, be easy on yourself about it. The habit was reinforced thousands of times over years, and it takes a little time for the autopilot to fully shut off. But every time you catch yourself and stop, the autopilot gets weaker and eventually it goes quiet altogether. The first few days are the most important and after about a week, most people report that the urge to scroll has dropped dramatically. And after two or [snorts] 3 weeks, it's mostly gone, replaced by a completely new normal and some other habit that feels so much better that going back seems almost unthinkable. Now, long term, the key is remembering what the scroll actually was. not entertainment, not relaxation, not connection, a loop, a trap, a system designed to extract your attention for 8:32:40 profit. And as long [snorts] as you remember that clearly, there's no temptation to go back because there's nothing to go back to. The platforms will keep trying. Of course, that's their job. They'll send notifications. They'll suggest new content. They'll optimize their algorithms. None of it works on someone who's actually seen through the illusion. The spell only works if you don't know it's a spell and you know now. And so you're not giving anything up. You're not sacrificing enjoyment or relaxation or connection. You're stepping out of a loop that was taking all of those things from you. Every minute you spent scrolling was a minute stolen from your actual life. Getting those minutes back isn't lost. It's the exact opposite. With that said, let's go over the review. We talked about the overview, the loop, the illusion, the fear, the exit, the review, and finally your action items for the day or the next few days. First, spend one full day noticing every time you reach for your phone without a specific purpose and just observe the loop and action without trying to change 8:33:40 it and just jot down every time you grab your phone so that you can get a specific number of the amount of times you actually grab your phone for no reason. Because that awareness alone will change your relationship with the behavior more than any rule or limit ever really could. Then remove every infinite scroll app from your phone today, not as a test or a trial, but as a permanent decision. And notice how the first wave of discomfort passes much faster than you expected it to. And then finally, use the time you get back for one thing you've been putting off, just one. whether that's a conversation, a walk, a book, or a project, and let yourself feel what it's like to spend your attention on something that actually matters. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it was helpful. If it was, let me know in the comments. Like the video, subscribe to the channel. If you want to work with me oneonone, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with this training, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve in every 8:34:39 aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. Once again, thank you for being here. Thank you for the support and I'll see you in the next one. All right, hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is selective blindness and the lost art of strategic ignorance. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the trap of total awareness, training your blind spots, sustaining the narrow gaze, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me oneon-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with its respective document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the trap of total awareness. So, we've been 8:35:39 told pretty much our entire lives that seeing more is always better. That the sharpest person in the room is really the one who notices everything and misses absolutely nothing. And honestly, on the surface, it sounds right because how could paying attention ever be a bad thing, right? But there's a difference that almost nobody really talks about between awareness that makes you more focused and awareness that scatters your focus across a dozen targets at once. And most of us are drowning in the second kind and don't even realize it because the overwhelm feels like engagement and engagement feels like prog progress even when it's not. So the modern world has turned information access into something that feels like power. But for most people it actually functions as a slow acting poison that quietly dissolves their ability to commit to anything for longer than a couple of weeks. So you scroll, you research, you stay informed and all of it feels productive because your brain genuinely feels busy processing input. 8:36:40 But being busy and making progress are not the same thing. And what makes this so difficult to catch is that the majority of what you take in on any given day has almost nothing to do with the one thing you're supposedly working towards. And yet it occupies real mental bandwidth that you never fully get back. So your attention is finite. It's truly finite. And every notification, every trending topic, every casual, oh, you should look into this conversation is really pulling from the same reservoir of focus that your actual meaningful work depends on. So, by the time you actually sit down to do the thing that matters, the tank is already running low before you've even started. And the sneaky part is that consuming content about your goals or watching breakdowns of other people's success or watching videos on business strategy or whatever creates this convincing feeling of movement, almost like a mental rehearsal that tricks your brain into thinking you've done something when you haven't. And it compounds too because one piece of irrelevant information is pretty 8:37:42 harmless on its own, but hundreds of them per day stacked across weeks and months creates a fog that makes it genuinely hard to remember what you even sat down to do in the first place. And it goes well beyond just digital because even legitimate opportunities can function as distractions when they pull your energy away from the primary commitment you've already made to yourself. A good option is still a distraction if it's not the right option for where you are right now. And most people never learn to make that distinction because good feels close enough to right that they don't question it. So the person staring at 10 possible paths forward is in a very real and measurable way less free than the person who only sees one. Because the cognitive load of evaluating and comparing 10 directions burns through the exact energy you would need to actually walk any single one of them with conviction. So every time you entertain an alternative, even casually, even just keeping it on the radar, like most 8:38:43 people like to say, you're quietly chipping away at the internal certainty that makes execution on the main thing feel effortless. And so being smart actually makes this problem worse. The more perceptive you are, the more patterns you notice, the more connections you see between things, and all of that mental horsepower becomes a liability when it's pointed in every direction simultaneously. Smart people often struggle with focus more than anyone else because their minds are genuinely capable of engaging with so many things at once that narrowing down feels like a waste of their own ability. And there's this tendency, especially among ambitious and driven people, to turn simple decisions into elaborate multivariable analysis because the analytical brain wants to account for everything before committing. But the truth is you can't, right? that perfect information never arrives. It never has and never will. And the pursuit of total clarity before you take action is really just a sophisticated version of 8:39:44 procrastination. So you tell yourself you're being thorough. You're telling yourself you're being strategic, being responsible, but what you're actually doing is rehearsing the decision instead of making it. And each additional hour of deliberation just adds more weight to a choice that was honestly pretty clear from the start. And the cruel irony is that your ability to see nuance and complexity, which is a genuine strength in many contexts, becomes the exact thing that keeps you stuck when the moment calls for simple, decisive, unglamorous, forward movement. And there's a version of this that hits creative people especially hard as well because genuine curiosity, the kind that makes you interesting and good at what you do, also makes everything look fascinating when you should be boring yourself with repetition and consistency. Because curiosity without boundaries is really just wandering. And wandering can look romantic from the outside from time to time, but it doesn't really always move you forward to your goal. So new projects, new 8:40:44 tools, new frameworks, new approaches, they all trigger that little dopamine hit of novelty that makes the current work feel stale by comparison, even when the current work is the exact thing that would change your life if you stayed with it for another 6 months. So real mastery, the kind that actually pays off, requires you to find fascination inside repetition rather than looking for it in new stimuli, which is basically the opposite of what your curious brain naturally wants to do. And it doesn't help that the world around you is actively reinforcing the idea that total awareness is a virtue, something to aspire to and perform publicly. Staying informed has essentially become a kind of a social currency, especially in professional and entrepreneurial circles where not knowing the latest trend or development or platform shift feels almost irresponsible. So the problem isn't just internal, it's environmental. You're swimming against a current that treats your deliberate ignorance as negligence. And a huge percentage of information consumption isn't actually about 8:41:46 learning or improving at all. It's about signaling. People read and share and discuss things not because the information changes their behavior, but because being seen as informed validates their identity as serious, competent, relevant people. And when you opt out of that performance, you're not just changing a habit. You're stepping outside of a social game that most of your peers are still playing. And that's why it can feel difficult. And in a lot of circles, knowing things has become a status marker that operates almost identically to material wealth, where the person who can reference the most recent study or article or market move is treated as the most credible voice in the room, regardless of whether any of that knowledge has translated into actual results for them. And once you see this dynamic for what it really is, a status game dressed up as intellectual seriousness, it becomes much easier to opt out of it without feeling like you're falling behind because you realize that the people who seem most informed are often the ones producing the least. And there's [snorts] also a 8:42:46 quieter, more personal version of this, which is the feeling that you should be aware of what's happening in the world as some kind of moral obligation. That deliberately tuning things out makes you selfish or privileged [snorts] or disconnected. And that framing is powerful because it wraps the habit of overconumption in the language of responsibility, which makes it almost impossible to question without feeling like a bad person. But awareness and action are not the same thing. And the person who is deeply informed about 12 different problems while solving none of them is not really any more virtuous than the person who ignores 11 and makes real progress on one. So the end result of all of this unchecked seeing, all of this awareness without filters is really a strange kind of sophisticated paralysis where you know a lot. You've considered everything and you do almost nothing. And it doesn't look like laziness from the inside, right? It feels like you're preparing yourself. It feels like due diligence, but from the outside and from the vantage point of 8:43:46 your future self looking back, it's really just standing still with extra steps. So the tragedy of this is that the people stuck in this loop are usually the ones that with the most potential because they wouldn't be overwhelmed with options if they weren't genuinely capable of pursuing several of them successfully, right? But capability without actually committing to anything just produces a really impressive list of thing you things you almost did, which is honestly worse than having no options at all. Because it's worse to have all these options and not take action on any of them, right? It's worse than having no options at all. And there's a kind of movement that isn't actually going anywhere. And you've probably felt it that sense of being exhausted at the end of the day without really being able to point to a single thing that moved the needle because all of your energy went into processing rather than producing. And the longer this goes on, the more it shifts from a temporary phase into a permanent mode of operating where the gap between what you know you're capable of and what you've 8:44:48 actually done just keeps widening until it becomes its own source of anxiety. And I'm saying all of this from personal experience, by the way. I was the same way for for years on end. And what's wild is that most people in the state are actually waiting without realizing it for some kind of permission to really stop looking around and just focus on one thing. And this was me. They want someone or something to narrow the field for them to tell them that what they're thinking about doing is actually valid and that they can actually do it because choosing feels like closing doors and closing doors feels like a loss. But that's exactly the shift we need to talk about next. Because the skill of deliberately choosing what not to see is something you can actually develop. Nobody's coming to make the choice for you. And the longer you actually wait for clarity to arrive on its own, the more you're training yourself in the habit of hesitation rather than the habit of decision. And the good news, and it really is good news, is that this pattern breaks the moment you stop treating awareness as universally positive and start treating it as 8:45:48 something that needs to be managed, directed, and sometimes deliberately shut off. So, let's talk about training your blind spots. So, if the problem is too much sight, too much seeing, then the solution isn't really just willpower or motivation or any of the standard advice about staying focused. The solution is developing a genuine skill, a practiced ability to not see certain things on purpose, to build real blind spots where open windows used to be. And that probably sounds strange, maybe even irresponsible because we've been trained to believe that ignorance is always a flaw. But there's a massive difference between ignorance that happens to you and ignorance that you choose, right? And that chosen version is one of the most powerful tools you'll ever develop. knowing what to close your eyes to. Now, Greg McKon put it well in Essentialism where when he wrote that if you don't prioritize yourself, someone else will, right? And what we're really talking about here is the most aggressive form 8:46:48 of prioritization there is. So, the first real move and action here is an audit and an audit of every single information source that currently has access to your attention. So newsletters, group chats, social feeds, podcast, news outlets, even certain conversations with certain people. All of it needs to be evaluated not by whether it's interesting or valuable in the abstract, but by whether it directly serves the one thing you've committed to right now. And right now matters because something can be genuinely useful for a future version of you while being actively harmful to the present one. Right? So, start by listing every recurring input in your daily or weekly life and be honest about it. Because most people dramatically underestimate how many streams of information they're passively absorbing. The podcast you listen to on your commute, the industry newsletter you skim but never act on, the group chat that occasionally has a good link buried under 40 messages of BS. All of these cost something, even 8:47:49 when they feel free. And each source carries what you might think of as an attention tax. A small but real deduction from your daily focus budget that happens whether you consciously engage with it or not. Not just by knowing it exists, just by knowing it exists and might contain something relevant. So the question to ask about each one isn't is this good content or could this be useful someday? Because that would make almost anything useful someday, right? You can keep basically everything if you if you evaluate it through that question, but rather has this directly contributed to progress on my primary goal in the last 30 days? And if the answer is no, it should go right. And where it gets uncomfortable is what you need to cut will be genuinely good stuff sometimes. High quality content, smart people, real opportunities, maybe this channel. You know, the discipline of subtraction, which is what we're really practicing here, isn't really about eliminating junk. Eliminating junk is easy, and you should have already 8:48:50 done it. The hard part is eliminating good things that aren't the right things. And most people never get past this step because it's good though. Feels like a sufficient reason to keep something around. So, a useful podcast that doesn't serve your current trajectory is still a distraction. It's just a high quality distraction, right? which honestly makes it more dangerous than a lowquality one because it's harder to justify removing. So expect to feel genuine a genuine sense of loss when you start cutting and don't treat that feeling as a sign you're making a mistake. It's actually confirmation that you're sacrificing something real, which is exactly what meaningful focus requires. Now, the moment you start actually doing this, actually going dark on certain inputs and closing off certain channels of awareness, you're going to hit a wall of emotional resistance that's stronger than you'd expect. And it will show up as anxiety, as fear, as this persistent lowgrade feeling that you're missing something important. And you need to understand that this feeling is the trap itself. 8:49:51 It's not a signal to reverse course. Your nervous system has been conditioned to treat information gaps as threats because for most of human history they were. But in the current environment where information is infinite and attention is scarce, that ancient wiring works against you. Not only that, but information is easily accessible. You don't have to really look for it that much. So the specific fear that comes up most often is some version of what if I missed the thing that would have changed everything? And it's worth sitting with that for a second because it reveals a hidden belief that your success really depends on finding the right piece of external information rather than executing consistently on what you already know. And that belief is really doing more damage than any single distraction ever could. Yes, you probably already have enough information to make serious progress on your primary goal right now today without learning a single new thing. You've probably consumed enough information to do that. And the compulsion to keep gathering 8:50:52 more is really functioning as a buffer between you and the discomfort of actually doing the boring thing. So there's a point and most people passed it a long time ago where additional input starts producing diminishing returns that eventually go negative. where knowing more actually makes you less effective because it introduces doubt and complexity into situations that call for simplicity and action or into situations that are way more simple than the content out there might make them seem. And so there's another layer here which is the social layer of resistance which is its own beast because the people around you will absolutely notice when you stop keeping up with certain conversations, trends and updates. And some of them will interpret your deliberate ignorance as arrogance or even laziness or disengagement. And that pressure can be real and you shouldn't pretend it doesn't exist. But people who are used to you being the person who knows about everything will feel a kind of essentially dissonance when you stop 8:51:52 performing that role. And someone will actively try to pull you back into it because your awareness validated their own habits of overconumption. And you don't need to explain your entire philosophy to everyone, but you do need a simple non-defensive way to redirect conversations that try to drag you drag you into territory you've chosen to ignore. Something as basic as I'm just not tracking that right now is surprisingly powerful when you say it without apology. And over time, the people who respect your boundaries around attention will self- select into your inner circle. And the ones who don't will drift away, which is actually one of the hidden benefits of this whole practice. Now once you've started cutting and pushed through the initial wave of resistance, there's also a deeper piece of work that makes the whole thing sustainable, which is fundamentally changing the story you tell yourself about what it means to not know something. Because right now for most people, I don't know about that carries a subtle emotional charge of egoistic inadequacy. Meaning it starts 8:52:53 from the ego or maybe they feel like they're falling behind. And as long as that associ association stays intact, your blindness will always feel like something you're enduring rather than something you're choosing from a position of strength. So you need to pay attention to how you talk to yourself about your own ignorance, even internally, right? Because the words you use shape the experience. There's a world of difference between I have no idea what's going on with that spoken with a hint of shame and the same sentence spoken with genuine almost amused indifference. The content is identical, but the posture is completely different. Right? And it's the posture that determines whether your selective blindness feels like you're being deprived or whether you're being liberated. So when someone brings up a topic you've deliberately chosen to ignore, and you can say, "Yeah, I'm not tracking that with the same energy you used to say, I don't watch that show," which is casual, unbothered, or completely at peace with the gap. You've essentially crossed a meaningful threshold in this practice. And the goal 8:53:55 is to really reach a place where your not knowing feels like a flex rather than a flaw. Where it communicates seriousness of purpose rather than laziness or disconnection. And the only way to get there is by consciously rewriting the internal narrative every time the old story of inadequacy tries to reassert itself. And at an even deeper level, this reframe touches on your relationship with certainty and control. The compulsion to stay informed is often rooted in a belief that more information equals more control over outcomes. And loosening that belief, genuinely accepting that you really can't control everything. And that trying to is itself a form of self-sabotage is really what allows selective blindness to stop feeling risky and you're going to start feeling more grounded. Right? And there's a version of this that looks almost like surrender. Not in the passive defeated sense, but in the strategic sense of a person who has 8:54:55 decided that they would rather go deep into uncertainty on one path then stay shallow across many paths where the illusion of control keeps them comfortable but stuck. So practically what does this actually look like dayto-day? Well, it looks like building a small repeatable structure that makes ignorance the default rather than something you have to effort effortully maintain. Because if staying blind requires willpower in every moment, you'll fail. Right? The goal is to set up your environment in your routines so that irrelevant information has to genuinely fight to reach you rather than flowing in freely while you fight to resist it. So your physical and digital environment should be engineered to reduce input, not maximize it. This means things like turning off notifications uh not one by one as they annoy you, but wholesale as a blanket policy and then selectively turning back on only the tiny handful that are directly tied to your current primary work. Most of the 8:55:56 information you consume arrives not because you actively sought it, but because the default settings on your devices and platforms are designed to push it on you. So changing those defaults is really the single highest leverage envir environmental intervention you can really make. And your physical workspace matters too because visual clutter and ambient noise function as low-level attention drains that really accumulate throughout the day. So a clean sparse environment is about creating really a space where your eyes and your mind have nowhere to wander. So if you absolutely need to check certain sources or of course stay updated on certain topics then batch that consumption into a single narrow window maybe 30 minutes maybe an hour in the morning uh rather than you know grazing on it throughout the day and just checking information while you're supposed to be working. The difference between those two approaches is is enormous because batching preserves the contiguous blocks of uninterrupted focus 8:56:57 that are where all the real progress happens. So think of it like this. Information consumption when you do it should feel like a deliberate task with a start time and an end time essentially, not like a background process that's always running and occasionally pulling your attention away from whatever you're doing. And when the window closes, it should close for the day. You'll feel the pull to keep scrolling to follow for to follow one more thread to check one more thing. And that pull is the exact muscle you're training against. So every time you close the window on time, you're strengthening the same capacity that makes sustained focus possible in every other area of your life. So let's talk about actually sustaining the narrow gaze. So everything we've covered so far, the awareness trap, the cutting, the resistance, the environmental design, all of it is honestly the easier part. The harder part is really sustaining it over weeks and months and years because selective blindness isn't a decision you make once and then coast on. It's an 8:57:59 ongoing discipline that gets tested constantly by new opportunities, by new platforms, by new videos, by shifting circumstances, by your own restless mind, looking for something fresh to chew on. And the initial commitment feels almost big and decisive, right? But the real work is in the thousands of quiet moments afterward where you choose again to keep your gaze narrow when everything around you is begging you to look up. So, your peripheral vision, metaphorically speaking, never actually turns off. Even after you've cut inputs and built routines and restructured your environment, your mind will keep catching glimpses of things happening outside of your chosen lane. And each glimpse is a small test of your commitment. Sometimes it's a friend's success in a different field making you wonder if you picked the wrong thing. Sometimes it's a market shift that seems like it might change everything. Sometimes it's just boredom, plain and simple. The kind that makes your current path basically feel small and repetitive 8:59:00 compared to the vast interesting world you've deliberately stopped tracking because the grass is always greener. Right now, the dou the doubt that really shows up in these moments isn't a sign of weakness or poor planning. It's a completely natural response to the discomfort of voluntary constraint. Every person who has ever committed to something long enough to achieve mastery has felt this exact same pull. This whisper that maybe the grass is greener somewhere outside the fence you've built for yourself. So expecting the doubt, preparing for it, and treating it as part of the process rather than an interruption of the process is what separates people who sustain focus from people who restart every few months with a new strategy and a fresh burst of enthusiasm that fades just as fast as the last one. In fact, the presence of doubt can actually serve as an indicator that you're going deep enough for it to really matter. Because if you had shallow commitment, well, that never really triggers this kind of resistance. 9:00:01 If you're not periodically tempted to abandon your narrow path, you're probably not narrow enough. So, learn your specific triggers, the situations and emotional states that are most likely to send your attention scattering in all sorts of different directions. Now for some people it's stress which makes escapism through information feel soothing. For others it's success which creates a dangerous confidence that they can now handle more inputs without losing focus. And for a lot of people it's simply the transition between tasks. Those small gaps in the day where the mind reaches for stimulation because it doesn't know how to just be still for 90 seconds. So once you've identified your personal trigger patterns, you can build specific responses to each one, which are small predetermined moves that redirect your attention back to center before the peripheral pull gains enough momentum to carry you off course. And this is really the one place where heightened self-awareness actually helps you rather than hurts you 9:01:02 because you can turn that perceptiveness inward. Watch your own attention the way you used to watch the market or the competition or the news and get genuinely skilled at noticing when your gaze is starting to drift before it fully breaks. And the moment of drift, that first flicker of curiosity towards something outside of your lane is cheap and easy to correct. The moment after you've already clicked, already engaged, or already spent 20 minutes down a rabbit hole, that's expensive. And the recovery time is always longer than the detour itself. And then there's the people factor, which honestly never goes away entirely, which is the world is full of well-meaning individuals who will constantly, sometimes aggressively try to broaden your field of vision because they genuinely believe they're helping. Have you seen this? You should really look into that. I can't believe you're not paying attention to what's happening with dot dot dot. You know, these aren't obviously attacks of some sort. These are invitations, and that's 9:02:03 what makes them so hard to decline because the person offering them usually cares about you and truly thinks more information will serve you. But over time, you'll develop a kind of social shortorthhand for these interactions, ways of essentially acknowledging the person's intention while firmly declining the input. And the key word there is firmly because ambiguity here is is pretty deadly. If people sense that you're maybe interested that you might look into it later, they'll keep bringing things to your door and each item they bring is another small crack in the wall you've worked so hard to build. So something like, "I appreciate that, but I'm deliberately not tracking anything outside of X right now works because it communicates intentionality. People respond very differently to deliberate ignorance than to accidental ignorance. And so framing your boundaries as a strategy rather than an oversight will change the entire dynamic. And you'll have to say some version of this many times to the same people which can feel tedious and even a little socially awkward. But think of it 9:03:04 as training their expectations the same way you've trained your own. And understand that the awkwardness fades once people internalize that this is just how you are now, right? That this is your new standard. Now, the deeper move, if you're willing to make it, is gradually restructuring your social environment so that the people closest to you share your understanding of focus and don't constantly test it. Now, this doesn't mean cutting people out of your life, but it does mean being thoughtful about who gets the most access to your time and attention and whether those people amplify your commitment or quietly erode it. So you become, whether you like it or not, a kind of the average of the attention habits of the five or six people you spend the most time with. So if those people are scattered and constantly chasing new information or constantly consuming, some of that energy will seep into your own behavior, regardless of how strong your personal systems are. On the flip side, your own discipline in this area will start to influence the people around you. And you might be surprised 9:04:04 how many of them are actually quietly craving permission to also be a bit ignorant to what's happening to also narrow their own focus, but didn't know it was an option until they watched you do it. Now, something that doesn't get talked about enough in the focus and discipline space is that what you choose to be blind to should actually shift over time as your goals evolve and your circumstances change. Selective blindness isn't obviously a fixed state. It's a living practice. And so treating it like a one-time setup leads to its own kind of rigidity where you're ignoring things out of habit rather than being strategic about it. The whole point of this is intentionality. So periodically stepping back to reassess what belongs inside your field of vision and what doesn't is really part of the discipline, not a violation of it. So the key is to recalibrate on a schedule you decide in advance rather than in the moment when something shiny catches your attention. Because the moment of temptation is the absolute worst time to evaluate whether your current boundary 9:05:05 still makes sense. Something like a quarterly review where you actually sit down and honestly assess whether your blind spots are still serving your current trajectory gives you the space to make clear-headed adjustments without abandoning the practice altogether. And during that review, the questions are simple but need to be answered. Right? Has my primary goal changed enough that my current blind spots are blocking relevant information? Is there a new input that has genuine strategic value for where I'm heading now, not where I was 6 months ago? And most importantly, am I being tempted to reopen my awareness because something has actually changed or because I'm just tired of the constraint and because I want some cheap dopamine. So the discipline here is really in keeping the review contained and purposeful rather than letting it become an excuse to fling all the doors open again and go back to consuming everything. So you're adjusting the scope of your blindness, not completely removing it. And that distin distinction matters enormously. So as you grow and as your work deepens, the things that 9:06:06 deserve your attention will naturally evolve. And being responsive to that evolution is really a sign of maturity in this practice. So the person who has been selectively blind for a year is not the same person who started and their blind spots shouldn't be identical either. So sometimes recalibration means expanding your awareness slightly in one area because maybe you've reached a stage where a specific new input has become genuinely relevant. Let's say you started with a marketing agency. You started a business just marketing agents, but a year later you're now deciding that the marketing agency will focus specifically on gyms. Well, now some new information might be helpful so you can understand how to serve gyms better, right? So being able to do that deliberately, adding one window while keeping the rest closed is the advanced version of this skill. And sometimes it means going even narrower than before because you've realized that some of the inputs you initially kept are no longer serving you. And cutting deeper actually feels natural now in a way that would 9:07:07 have felt extreme when you started. And where all of this pays off, where the sacrifice of vision turns into something tangible and undeniable. So the rewards of sustained selective blindness don't show up linearly. They compound. They are very slow at first and then all at once in a way that makes them makes the early months of discipline feel almost laughably small compared to what eventually arrives. So the person who has spent a year with a genuinely narrow gaze has built something that the person bouncing between 10 priorities for the same year simply cannot match. Regardless of how talented or motivated that sec second person might be. They might be the most talented person in the world. Still they won't be able to use that talent if they're scattered across 20 different directions. You know what you develop through sustained narrowness, focus in other words, isn't just skill or knowledge, though you get both. You develop a kind of depth of understanding that only comes from prolonged immersion 9:08:08 in a single domain. A feeling for the subtle patterns and hidden dynamics that are completely invisible and to anyone still operating at the surface level of that broad awareness. And Cal Newport talks about this in his work on deep focus. the idea that true expertise requires a kind of cognitive intensity that is fundamentally incompatible with scattered attention. So the people who reach genuine mastery in any field didn't get there by knowing a little about a lot of things. Maybe they did, but they got there by also knowing an unreasonable amount about one thing. And the unreasonable part is only possible when you've cut off the competing inputs that would have diluted your immersion. So you go wide and you go narrow. You go wide and you go narrow essentially over time. And after enough time in this mode, you will develop what feels like intuition, but is actually pattern recognition built from thousands of hours of undivided engagement. A gut sense for 9:09:10 essentially what will work and what won't. And the way I like to uh describe pattern recognition is being able to see through walls because you're able to see things that others don't. Um, and people who spread their attention thin simply never access that. And maybe the most surprising outcome of all of this is that sustained selective blindness eventually produces a kind of freedom that actually feels almost paradoxical. Because by choosing to see less, by choosing to be ignorant, on purpose on certain topics, you end up seeing more clearly. By closing doors, you open the one door that actually leads you somewhere. By sacrificing breath for at least a while, you gain a depth that makes everything you do a lot more powerful. It makes it more resonant and more genuinely yours than anything that ever came from trying to keep every option alive at once. And so there's a specific kind of confidence that only grows in the soil of deep commitment, a quiet certainty that doesn't need 9:10:10 external validation because it's rooted in the lived experience of having gone further into one thing than most people are willing to go into anything. And [clears throat] over time, well, that selective blindness will not feel like sacrifice at all and will feel more so like the most natural expression of who you actually are. And you'll be able to just turn it on and turn it off almost like a laser pointing at in a specific direction because any moment you want to go deep on something, anyone you want, any moment you actually want to focus on something, you know exactly what to do. Just cut off everything else but that thing, which is maybe the clearest sign that you've crossed over from practicing it into genuinely embodying it. and everything you gave up to get here, the options, the breath, the social pressure, the discomfort of not knowing what everyone else knows, all of it starts to look like a lot less like sacrifice, and a lot more like the smartest trade you ever made because what you got in return is something that most people spend their entire lives looking for without ever finding it. So, 9:11:11 with that said, let's cover the review. We covered the overview, the trap of total awareness, training your blind spots, sustaining the narrow gaze, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, sit down today and list every single recurring information source in your life. And then eliminate anything that hasn't directly contributed to your primary goal in the last 30 days, regardless of high quality or interesting it is. Then create a strict daily information window of 30 minutes or an hour or less and batch all of your catching up into that single container, keeping the rest of your day deliberately and unapologetically blind to everything outside of your lane. And then choose one person in your inner circle and have an honest conversation about what you're doing and why. Not to ask for permission, but to establish the boundary out loud so it becomes real and harder to quietly abandon when the pressure builds. If there is a person like that in your life that is constantly sending you short form content, reals, etc., set the boundary. 9:12:12 With that said, thank you for being here. I hope you enjoyed this. If you want to work with me oneonone, then again, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you enjoyed this, let me know. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how your focus is being stolen. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the focus war, the pendulum pull, the energy leak, the escape, the review, and your action items for the day over the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me oneon-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. What we do is we help you improve in absolutely every area of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self through one system. So, if something like that interests you, again, book a call from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the focus war. So, as you may or may not know, your focus is the most expensive thing you spend each day. Your 9:13:10 life is built out of what you keep paying attention to again and again. Your body is built from attention. Your money is built from attention. Your skill, your business, your relationship, your confidence, all of it comes from the same place where you point your attention to. So, if your attention stays shallow, your life stays shallow. You can do a 100 things in a day and still feel like nothing moved. And that's where a lot of people are right now. They're active all day. They're checking things all day. They're busy all day. They're thinking all day supposedly. And still the part of them that knows the truth is not really impressed. And every poll has a price. A message costs more than 10 the set 10 seconds it takes to read it, right? A scroll costs more than the 5 minutes you you think you scroll for. The real cost is the state it leaves behind, not the thing itself. You came back to work, but you're not fully back, right? And if you do that enough times and the whole state, the whole day starts to feel weak. You were there but you were split. So yeah, this is a war for your focus. And I know it sounds a little dramatic, but if you look at your life honestly, 9:14:11 you'll see that it is true. Tell me it's not true. Almost everything around you wants a piece of your mind before you even decide what your mind should be used for. Apps want access. People want access. News wants access. Drama wants access. food, fear, comparison, gossip, random thoughts, all want access. And so the world treats your attention like it's open by default. If you don't make it private, everyone and everything will walk in. And this is why people feel tired on most days without really doing much. Their mind has been touched by way too many things and your attention turns into money for other people. If you stay on the platform, someone gets paid. If you react, if you click, if you watch, if you scroll, if you argue, if you refresh, if you return, the system did its job. And these tools are bu built to bring you back. They don't need you to make a strong choice. They just need you to make a weak one over and over and over again. And you can't treat them as harmless anymore. If something keeps 9:15:12 taking your focus and gives almost nothing back, then it's too expensive for your life. So, whoever controls your attention slowly controls your day. Whoever controls your day slowly controls your standards. And whoever controls your standards slowly decides what kind of life you get used to living. So, if your phone decides when you think, you're not really free. If other people's messages decide what matters, you're not really leading. If the feed decides your mood, then you've handed over way too much of your agency. This is not about hating technology, of course. This it's that's too simple. This is about using tools without becoming trained by them. You can own the device. You can go on the platforms and still be the one not be the one being handled by it. You can be in control. That's the part people don't want to look at. And a serious life needs a serious direction. You need to know what your mind is for today before the world tells you what to care about. And if you don't choose the mission, the day will choose one for you. it will usually be smaller, louder, and easier 9:16:13 than the thing you actually need to do and less important. So, the first move is really simple. Take your mind back before the day gets its hands on it. And the hard part is that distraction rarely enters as distraction. It usually enters as something reasonable. It looks like a quick check, a useful video, a bit of research, a harmless reply, a small break, or a better way to prepare before you start. Fake work is one of the cleanest forms of distraction. It lets you feel productive without making you face the task that would actually prove something. So you organize the notes, you adjust the setup, you rewrite the plan, you clean the desk, and you tell yourself you're getting ready. Then the real work never happens. You keep pushing that away. Preparation has a place, but when preparation keeps replacing taking action, it becomes a hiding place. So learning can become the same thing. You watch another video, you read another post, you save another idea, and you build another list of things you might use one day. And there's nothing wrong with learning if 9:17:14 you're doing it at its scheduled time. But you have to know if you're doing it to just basically escape the actual work. The mind loves this. It gets the feeling of growth without the risk of output because you're essentially learning. So the test is really simple. Did the input make you act or did it just make you feel like someone who acts? So the deepest damage is really fragmentation. That's the thing I want you to really get. You can lose the whole day in small pieces and still never see one big moment where you clearly threw it away. So 5 minutes here, 12 minutes there, one message, one check, one thought, one urge, one little argument in your head. None of it feels fatal in the moment. And then the evening comes and you feel behind. And you don't know exactly where the day went, but you know it didn't go where it was meant to go. And that pain is is very useful. It means part of you still knows there was a better day available. So serious work needs depth. It needs you to stay with one thing past the first layer of boredom, doubt, and 9:18:15 restlessness. And most people leave before the work opens up. They stop at the exact point where the mind is about to become useful. If you stay a little longer, the work changes. And I've had I've made videos about this. The first rough thoughts pass and then the fake urgency fades and then you start getting something real. And this is where you stop acting like focus is a mood. Focus is trained. It is a skill. It is protected. It is spent with care. It is made normal by how you live. So look at one day and be honest. What had access to your mind? What did you keep checking? What did you react to? What did you avoid while pretending to be busy? Your screen time will show you a big part of it. Your guilt at night will show you the rest. So don't turn it into shame though. Just look. A clear look is already a form of power. And once you see where your attention is really going, you can stop being vague about the problem. Now you're not just saying you need more discipline. You're seeing the actual forces that keep pulling you away. And that brings us to a deeper 9:19:17 layer. The issue is not only distraction. The issue is that your mind keeps getting recruited by patterns that are stronger than your current awareness. So let's talk about the pendulum pull. So a pendulum is really any force that pulls a group of people into the same emotional rhythm. It can be an app, it can be a trend, it could be a scene, it could be a group chat, a culture, a habit, a belief or an old version of yourself. A pendulum is a pull essentially. It get it gets stronger when people give it attention. It gets stronger when they react to it, talk about it, fight with it, defend it, chase it, or fear being left out of it. Outrage is a pendulum, for example. Gossip is a pendulum. Party culture is a pendulum. Hustle culture can become a pendulum. And to a big degree, it is. Even self-improvement can be one when it turns into endless watching and no action. So, the thing doesn't need to be evil. It only needs to be strong enough to pull you away from what you said mattered to you. And you know you're inside a pendulum when when you feel 9:20:19 pulled to participate even though you already know it will not help you. So you check even though you don't want to check. You reply even though you don't need to reply. And that split is important. One part of you knows better, right? Another part of you is already taking the action. So the work starts in that gap. That's where awareness has to enter before the old pattern completes itself. You need to interrupt the pattern. That's why they're called pattern interrupts. So a p a pendulum usually recruits you through something small. It doesn't need to destroy your day in one move. only needs to get your attention for a moment and then let your own habit do the rest. One notification for example or one image or one memory or one comparison, one bit of news, one tempting thought, one open tab that should have been closed an hour ago and then the chain begins. Contact creates emotion. Emotion pulls attention. Attention creates action and action strengthens the habit. So if you wait until the action stage, you're already late. You need to catch the pool closer 9:21:20 to its first contact. And you've seen this in your own day. You sit down to work, you touch one small thing, and suddenly your mind is somewhere else. And then you come back with that stupid feeling. The task is still there, but your energy has completely changed. And that is the lesson. The pendulum didn't just take time. It changed your state. And emotion is the hook, right? Plain information doesn't hold people for long. Fear holds them. Anger holds them. Desire holds them. Pride holds them. Envy holds them. Shame can hold them. Urgency also. Anger is one of the easiest hooks because it makes reaction feel useful. It makes you feel like you have to correct someone before you go back to your own life. And this is why a lot of copywriters use specifically anger to capture attention. It's one of the best tools. It's one of the emotions that captures the most attention as well as fear. And then your best energy gets spent on a stranger or a comment or a 9:22:22 group chat or an argument that does not deserve your morning. And you may win the point and still lose the day and that I think is a very very bad trade and a lot of people make it daily. Desire is another hook and lust as well. You start thinking about the body, the money, the recognition, the relationship, the lifestyle, the future version of yourself. Now, desire can help you move. It is really the engine behind taking action. You want something, so you take action to get it. But it can also trap you in fantasy. You feel the reward without actually doing any of the work. So, you need to bring desire back to action fast. Want the body, then train. If you want the money, then sell. If you want the life, then build. Otherwise, desire becomes another leak. Now, belonging is a strong pull as well. People will lower their standards just to stay connected to the room they're used to. They'll act less ambitious, less serious, less disciplined. They'll downplay their achievements. They're going to be less honest just so they don't feel strange 9:23:23 around people who never chose the same path. And a weak group makes weakness feel normal. They joke about being lazy. They mock effort. They call discipline extreme. And they make drifting feel like a shared identity. And when you starts changing, when you start changing, the group feels it. Sometimes the pressure is very loud. And more often it comes through jokes, comments, distance, and small attempts to basically pull you back down like crabs in a bucket. And that pressure tells you something. It shows you whether the group supports your growth or only supports the version of you that stays familiar. And you need to choose your pendulums with care. Some pools drag you down. Some pools make you feel normal. The right room will change what you expect from yourself. So, a serious training group can pull you up. A business circle can pull you up. A mastermind can pull you up. A coaching program can pull you up. A room where high standards are normal can make your old excuses feel embarrassing. So, don't only ask if a place feels good. Ask if it pulls you overtime to a better place. 9:24:24 And if you want a place like that, then make sure to book a call, by the way, or you can join our free community. Now, the strongest pendulum is often your old identity. That old version of you knows your escape routes. It knows what you reach for when you're actually tired, what you avoid when you're scared, and what story you will tell yourself when you're about to quit. And the old identity likes familiar pain. It would rather repeat a known loop than step into a higher standard that feels exposed. And that's why someone can hate wasting time and still waste the same time every single night. The new life asks for effort before it gives you comfort. The old life gives comfort first and takes the price later. So always do the hard thing. And when you try to focus, the old identity starts to negotiate. And you can check this first, you know, or start after lunch or clean the desk or watch one thing. Make a better plan. wait until tomorrow. All these thoughts, these thoughts don't 9:25:25 sound insane. That's why they work. They're they sound very reasonable. You don't beat them by holding a debate. You beat them by having a standard that ends the discussion very quickly. And that standard is I'm going to do it now, for example. Now, awareness breaks the bull. Not all of it, not forever, and not in some magic bullet way. It gives you a small space where choice can actually enter. And that's enough to begin. So you need to name the pendulum in plain words. This is the this is comparison for example or this is fear or this is anger or this is boredom or this is lust. This is fake urgency. This is anxiety pretending to be planning. Naming it gives you distance because the moment we name something, the moment we put our attention on something and we name it, we're creating separation from that thing. So naming it gives you distance. you stop being fully inside the urge. And that small distance is where your control starts to reappear. 9:26:27 It may only last a second at first, but a second is enough to turn away. And look for what happens before you actually fall into it. What time of day is it? What state are you in? What are you avoiding? What emotion keeps showing up first? What are you procrastinating on? There is usually a clue. It can be tiredness. It can be hunger. It can be stress. Uh it could be unclear work, it could be loneliness or a task that feels too big. And there is a framework for this called halt. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Typically, when we're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, we would get pulled into one of these pendulums or partake in some kind of uh bad habit. And once you know the clue, you need to prepare for it. Stop acting surprised by by the same entrance. Now, the cleanest move is really often withdrawal. Don't fight the pool longer than you need to. Don't perform your exit. Don't make a 9:27:28 speech. Just stop feeding it. Delete the app. Mute the account. Leave the chat. Block the site. Stop checking the person. Turn off the source. Do it quietly and just move on. The less drama you add, the less you make it a performance, the less energy you give it. A lot of strength looks boring from the outside. is just a person refusing to feed what weakens them and then give your mind somewhere to go cuz empty space alone won't save you. The old pole will come back if the mission is not clear. So you need to have a purpose here. Work, train, you know, walk, write, record, read, sleep, recover, or speak to someone. Do something that puts your attention back into your life. And that's the next layer. Once you stop feeding the pole, you have to fix the leaks that left it left behind. So, let's talk about the energy leak. So, every distraction leaves a leak behind. That's the piece people miss. They count the minutes, but they don't count the energy or the mood or the inner noise or the strange dull feeling that comes 9:28:29 after too many little breaks in attention. You watch one video and now that idea keeps running. You read one comment and how you're and now you're arguing with it in your head. You check one message and now your state has completely changed. Then the real work has to compete with that mess. It has to compete with a mind that has already been pulled in three directions. So the cost is not just time. The cost is the quality of the mind you bring back. And energy is mental, it's emotional, it's physical and it's directional. If those are split, then the day gets weak even if you still have time left. So a scattered person can work for eight hours and produce very little. And a focused person can take one clean hour and make the whole day count. And open loops drain you in the background as well. So unfinished tasks or unclear plans or unread messages or half-made choices and things you keep meaning to handle, all of those things stay active in your mind. You may not think about them directly or all the 9:29:29 time, but part of you is still carrying them so that you don't forget. And this is why a simple day can feel very heavy because it's not always the work in front of you. the pile of unfinished stuff behind it. Like maybe it's you needed to reply to a client or pay a bill or finish a a script or some make a decision that you keep avoiding the message you don't want to answer. All of these are examples. Now, none of these may be huge by themselves, but together they create this humongous pressure that makes focus way harder. So, you need to close those loops fast. finish them, schedule them, delegate them or delete them or write down the next step in a place that you can actually uh look at and just finish the tasks and the mind calms down when it knows the thing has a place. So don't carry what can be captured. Don't keep revisiting what can be just decided now and left. Another one is comparison. Now 9:30:29 comparison drains energy in a very quiet way. You look at someone else and then your mind starts measuring your life against theirs. And a few seconds later, you're no longer in your own work. And that's the theft. Your attention leaves your next action and goes into their body, their money, their channel, their relationship, their life. And it may feel like research. It may feel like motivation. It may feel harmless. You can find thousands of different rationalizations for it. But the test is simple. Did it make you act or did it make you stare and compare? Now comparison can be useful if it becomes fuel. Right? If you can see the gap, take the lesson and raise your own standards and then return to your ta tasks and take action then it can be useful. But don't live there. Visit for data and then you leave. Their life is not the place where your life changes, right? Your next action is. So too much input will kill your output. And this is a big one for people who love learning, thinking, self-improvement, business, 9:31:30 psychology, spirituality, and all of that. Myself included, by the way. You can become addicted to insight and still avoid execution. So books, videos, podcasts, courses, notes, and ideas can all become a refined form of hiding. You feel like you're growing, but your real life still looks the same. And you can spend years like this. And input feels safe. Nobody judges your private notes. Nobody rejects a plan you never ship. Nobody will criticize you for learning really. And this is why smart people can stay stuck for years. They keep feeding the mind and starving the life. And you essentially become a starving artist. So you need to put a rule on it. Every serious input needs a real output. A page, a post, a script, a decision, a sale, a change, a system, or some kind of a better behavior. Or if you just love reading and you just love learning, then just schedule it for it for schedule it on your calendar. Figure out a time block in your day uh 9:32:31 that you can do it in, but just leave it for then, right? Don't let it bleed into your work. So knowledge has to become some form of action or at the very least it needs to be scheduled at a pl at a time where it won't get in the way of you taking action. Otherwise, it becomes a no. it becomes noise, right? If it doesn't change what you do, be careful how much respect you give it. And your body is also part of focus. You can't run your body into the ground and then expect your mind to obey like a clean machine. The mind sits inside the body. So the body always has a vote at the end of the day. So bad sleep will make your distraction a lot stronger. Bad food will make your energy very unstable. No movement will make the mind dull. Too much stimulation will make it will make the quiet feel painful when you're sitting quietly and working. And this is this is basic. Yes, most people still don't do it. A lot of productivity 9:33:31 problems are body problems with with a with an excuse. The person says they lack focus, but they slept badly, ate badly, sat all day, and fed the mind noise from morning to night. What are you expecting of yourself? So when focus collapses, you need to return to the body first. Drink water, walk, breathe slow, breathe slower, uh eat properly, get some light, clear the space and sleep like it actually matters because really it does. The body gives the mind a floor and then once the body is more stable, the work becomes less dramatic. And lack of clarity also drains focus. A vague task will make the mind search for escape. If the work is unclear, then the distraction becomes way more attractive. So build my business is very vague. Outreach pro to prospects very vague. Right? The first page of the offer is very clear, right? Reach out to 10 prospects is very clear. Reach out to 10 prospects and start at 12:00 p.m. is even clearer. Get fit is vague. Walk for 9:34:34 45 minutes after lunch at 100 p.m. is very clear. So clear action gives the mind less room to escape. Vape work creates friction before you even begin because you don't you still have to figure out figure out where to begin. So you are doing work before the work essentially and then people call that friction low motivation. So you need to always define the next visible step. Make it so plain that even a tired version of you can start. Open the document or write the title or record the first take or send the first message or put on the shoes. Start the timer. All of those are clear. A small clear start beats a grand vague plan. And guilt can either wake you up or drain you as well. So it depends on how you use it. If you use it as a signal, it helps you repair the day. If you use it as an identity, it becomes another loop. So at night when you feel that quiet guilt from wasting the day, don't turn it into a story about being, you 9:35:36 know, a failure. Read it as data. Use that guilt to propel you forward the next day. If a standard was missed or a promise was broken or a part of you knows you didn't show up, then that's good. Now you get to repair it. Don't sit there and bleed energy into shame and write down what pulled you, what it cost, and what you'll do tomorrow. Keep it short and keep it useful because this will give the mind some closure before you actually go to sleep. And then rest. You don't need to punish yourself all night. You just need to wake up actually have some a good night of sleep and then wake up and be ready to move and take action. So with that said, let's actually cover the escape. So now we need a way out. And I don't want this to become a deep idea that makes you nod and then change absolutely nothing. So you need a simple protocol that you can use in the moment right when your attention starts getting pulled. So a protocol matters because you won't always be in a in the best state, right? You will be tired, you 9:36:36 might be bored, you might be stressed, you might be tempted, you might be lonely, you might be hungry, angry, lonely or tired or unsure. And that's exactly when the old loops come back. So you don't want to improvise in that stage. You want the next move already decided. And the protocol gives you that. It makes focus less emotional and a lot more mechanical. And so the steps are very simple. You name the pendulum. You remove the feed. You close the loop. You reclaim the body. You choose the mission. And you enter the container. So you use them in order when you can. And if you only remember one step in the moment, use that one. One clean interruption can save the day. So first you need to name the pendulum, right? Don't make it mystical. Just say what is pulling you in plain words. Like you're telling the truth to yourself without trying to sound smart. And for example, it could be comparison. It could be urgency. It could be boredom. It could be lust. It could be outrage. It could be anxiety or it could be avoidance. The label gives you distance like we discussed. And you stop being fully 9:37:36 inside the urge. And that small distance is really where your control begins. You don't need much at first. You just need enough to turn. And you need to be blunt because soft names keep those loops alive. If you're checking analytics every 10 minutes, don't call it work, right? call it reassurance or boredom or urgency or comparison. It could be any of those, right? And yes, that may be a bit too honest for you. It might be uh it might sting a little for a second, but it gives you power. Now, you can actually deal with a real thing. Then second, you need to remove the feed. So, if something keeps pulling you, you need to stop feeding it. You need to stop giving it access. Don't keep it within reach and then act shock when it wins. So, put the phone in another another room or close the tabs or block the site or delete the app or turn off the internet if you have to. Just don't rely on strength and willpower when design will solve it faster. And then make the wrong thing 9:38:37 harder and the right thing easier. And mute the chat or leave the group or stop checking the person. Stop explaining your goals to people who keep weakening them. You don't need to have some kind of a dramatic exit from that. You just need less access. Give them less access. Your attention should not be available to anyone and anything by default. And then third, close the loop. If something is pulling you because it's unfinished, put it somewhere clear instead of letting it sit in your mind. So write it down and one line is enough, right? Then write the next action beside it. For example, it could be reply at 4 or pay the bill tonight or finish uh one section after lunch or decide the title after the draft. That's it. Your mind relaxes when it knows the the thing has a place and that it's next on the list. And some loops need a decision right now. So make the smallest clean decision you can make now. A small decision beats beats worrying for for 3 hours. So worry keeps 9:39:40 keeps you circling. decision gives the mind a place to to actually land. And then fourth, you need to reclaim the body. So if your state is scattered, don't just sit there staring at the same screen and trying to think away and to focus. Change your state first. Stand up, walk for 5 minutes, breathe slower, you know, drink some water, clear your desk, clear your room, and then come back. And yes, it's basic. That's why it works because a scattered body keeps a scattered mind alive as well. So bring the body down and the mind gets easier to direct. And you're not trying to become perfectly calm. You're just trying to get enough control to begin again. You don't need perfect focus to start. You just need a little bit. You need a enough focus to take the first clean action and then the action itself starts to help. Then you're then you're building momentum. Then fifth, choose the mission, right? Choose the purpose. It could be one mission, not a huge list, not a fantasy version of the day, just one clear win for that day that will make the day 9:40:42 count. So ask what actually moves your life forward today. And you probably already know. It's usually the thing you've been circling around. If you keep avoiding it, then pay attention. That that means the task may be the real mission. The important thing often feels heavier than the easy thing. Always do the hard thing. That doesn't mean it's wrong. It means it matters, right? And then define the finish line. Make it visible and concrete. You need to record. If you, for example, you need to record videos, then record the first 20 minutes. That that could be a finish line. It could be write the first section. It could be send 10 messages to potential prospects or clients or finish the outline, train, walk for 10,000 steps. Any of those. When the finish line is clear, the mind has less room to bargain. You now know what you need to get done. You have a goal. And sixth, enter the container. And this is the actual work block. So one task, one timer, one clean space, and no input until the block is done. So I would 9:41:43 start with anywhere between 25 or 45 to 90 minutes. And then pick a time you can actually respect and respect it. So that means no messages, no phone, no tabs, no checking, no quick look anywhere. Just the task, the timer, and the next line of action. And if the task doesn't require internet, then turn off your internet. And then expect resistance in the first few minutes because it will definitely come. But don't make it mean anything, right? The old pattern will ask for relief. That's normal. Just ignore. Ignore and stay on task. Stay long enough for the wave to pass. Most people leave right before focus starts getting easier. Typically, those those urges disappear within 5 to 15 minutes. And then the protocol only works if you actually repeat it. So, one focus day is good, but it doesn't make a person, right? Repetition makes the person. So, use the protocol before the day starts. Name the likely polls, remove the obvious feeds, choose the mission, and enter the first block before the world 9:42:43 gets to you. And that's easier if you wake up a bit earlier. And that changes the whole tone of the day because you make the first move. Now, if you wait until you're already scattered, well, the recovery will be a lot harder. And then you use the protocol again at night in review what pulled you, what leaked energy, what worked, what needs to change tomorrow. And that makes every day basically a feedback loop that improves the next day. Even a bad day becomes useful if you extract the lesson, if you extract the pattern. You don't need perfection. You just need to notice the feedback loops. And over time, this will become who you are. You become harder to pull. You still feel the urge, of course, like any other human being. You still get tempted. You still have weak moments, but you don't obey them as easily. And real discipline is really proven in those small moments when the phone stays away, when the tab stays closed, when the message waits, when the internet is off. The mission gets another clean minute. And this 9:43:44 doesn't always look impressive from the outside, and that's fine. A lot of real strength is very quiet. It's those private victories that we have. It's just you keeping your word when nobody claps. And freedom is not having endless options pulling you all day. Freedom is being able to choose one direction and stay with it for long enough to build something. Like we said at the start, your life follows your attention. So protect it, train it, spend it well. Your focus is too expensive to keep giving away to forces that don't care what where your life ends up and really don't care about your own well-being. So with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview, the focus war, the pendulum pull, the energy leak, the escape, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, track your attention for one full day. And then write down every force that pulls you away from your real work. And then choose one major pendulum and cut the feed today by deleting, blocking, muting, leaving, or moving it out of reach. And finally, pick one mission for tomorrow. set one protected 9:44:46 work block and use the escape protocol before the day has a ch chance to actually steal your focus. With that said, as I said in the beginning, if you want to work with me one-on-one on any of this or to improve any aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, then make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with this document, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve in your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for the support. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. All right, hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is closing the unfinished. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the unfinished mind, counting the unfinished, the three endings, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want 9:45:44 to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with its respective document, then make sure to join the free community again from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the unfinished mind. So, there's this story from Greek mythology about a king called Tantalus who basically ends up punished in the underworld standing in a pool of water with fruit hanging above his head. And the punishment is basically that he can see everything he wants. It's right there. He can almost get it, but every time he reaches for the fruit, the branches move away. And every time he bends down to drink the water, it disappears. So he basically just keeps reaching over and over again. And he never gets the fruit. He never gets the water. And more importantly for what we're talking about here, he never gets to stop. And obviously, you're probably 9:46:45 not standing in the underworld reaching for fruit. But I think there's a version of this that almost everybody does. You keep returning to something without ever bringing it anywhere. You think about the conversation that you need to have and then you don't have it. You think about the decision you need to make and then you leave it open. You remember the thing you started months ago and then you tell yourself you really should finish it at some point and then a week later you remember it again and then a month later. So you don't only pay for something when you finally sit down and actually deal with it. I mean that's the direct cost of time and energy, right? But you also pay every time it comes back into your attention. And maybe it's for only 10 seconds, maybe it's for 5 minutes. Maybe you start thinking through the whole thing again. And if something has been coming back for months or years, you've probably spent a lot more time on it than the final action would have taken. For example, you can have a message that takes 2 minutes to actually answer. and somehow you think about answering it 20 times before you finally do it. And that's 9:47:47 kind of ridiculous when you actually look at it that way, right? You've already started the task 20 times in your head and you just never finish the physical part. Now, Oliver Burkeman wrote a book called 4,000 weeks. And the title comes from the rough number of weeks that you get if you live an average human lifespan. And I remember first hearing that number and thinking, "Wow, that's actually not that much if you really think about it. And it gets a lot more interesting when you look at it from that angle because some of the things you're still thinking about right now have already been sitting there for a meaningful percentage of your life. And Burkeman says, "The great irony of all of our efforts to avoid facing finitude to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options is that when people finally do choose in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result. So you can have something that would take an afternoon to finish and somehow carry it for 3 years and the actual work might 9:48:48 actually be something like 3 hours for example. And the unfinished version of it has been actually showing up in your life for more than a thousand days. And normally we only count the 3 hours that it would take to finish the the job because that's the part that looks like work. But the time that we've spent not doing it is work in and of itself. And you'll probably find a few things like this in in your life after this video. Things that you've basically carried for so long that you almost don't notice them anymore. They've just become a part of the background of your life. And you see the thing, you remember the thing, maybe you feel a little bit bad about the thing and then move on with your day. In the 1920s, a psychologist called Bluma A Garnick was studying memory. And the basic finding she became known for was that people tended to remember interrupted or unfinished tasks better than completed ones. And this became known as the Zarnic effect. So every unfinished task is constantly running in 9:49:49 your brain and secretly draining your life force in a way. Things that you haven't finished can stay easier to bring back to mind, right? And honestly, you don't really need a psychology degree to recognize this in your own life. Nowadays, it's almost common sense. Finish something properly and there's a good chance you stop thinking about it, right? Leave it halfway done and it has a reason to come back. Leave a conversation unresolved and the next time you see it in person, there it is again. Leave a decision open and every new piece of information can restart the whole thing. So, when I say unfinished throughout this training, I'm mostly talking about the things that keep returning. And you probably have hundreds of things in your life that are technically incomplete and you don't you couldn't care less about them. They're irrelevant. I'm talking about the ones that keep coming back and that are actually relevant. And this is important because otherwise this turns into obsessive completion for the sake of completion, which is not the point here. I don't think that's the point at all. I've abandoned books halfway through and never thought about them again, for 9:50:49 example. That's fine. That book isn't really taking anything from me, right? Another situation might come back three times in the same day though and that might deserve some attention. And so David Allen uh built a lot of getting things done around a similar observation. If your head is responsible for remembering every commitment you've made, every task you might need to do, and every little thing you don't want to forget, you keep having to remind yourself over and over again. And Allan calls these open loops. Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is is an open loop which will be pulling on your attention if it's not appropriately managed. So his answer is to capture it somewhere outside of your head that you actually trust. And the key word here is trust. Uh and it's probably the most important part because writing something down on a random piece of paper and then losing the paper doesn't help you very much, right? Neither does having notes scattered across five different places or apps that you never actually review. You have 9:51:49 to know that if something matters, it's going to come back in front of you at the right time. And then you don't have to keep reminding yourself just in case. And this is also why making a proper list can sometimes feel weirdly good before you've actually done anything on the list. Nothing really changed in your reality yet, but you just stopped needing to hold the entire vague mess in your head at once. Now you can actually look at it. And there's another part that is important and that's the interruptions. So Gloria Mark has actually spent years studying attention and interruptions at work. And one of the things her research has shown is that getting interrupted can leave you take taking quite a while to fully get back into what you were actually doing. And she's also found that a lot of interruptions are actually self-interruptions. So sometimes nobody called you, nobody walked into the room and your phone didn't really buzz or anything. you just interrupted yourself. And unfinished stuff can absolutely become one source of that because you're working and then you remember the email or you suddenly think about the decision 9:52:50 again or the conversation from last week just comes back and you start replaying it and you might only leave the work mentally for a minute, right? The interruption doesn't have to be long. But then you have to remember where you were, what you were thinking, what you were about to do next, and how the thing and now the thing basically in front of you feels slightly harder to get back into. And on top of that, there's research that shows that task switching costs you anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes. Meaning, it takes you anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes to actually get back on track and get back into the flow of what you were doing mentally at least. And I noticed this myself when I'm trying to work on something that requires a lot of thought. If I keep switching away from it, even for little things, I can still work for hours and somehow feel like I never really got properly into it. I never really made any proper progress. And the day starts to feel full because I was mentally active the whole time. But when I look back at what I actually accomplished or 9:53:52 moved forward, it's a lot less than I expected. Now, obviously, unfinished situations aren't the only reason that this happens. You might be tired. You might be distracted. You might have too much work. Maybe you really do need better discipline. I just think we jump to discipline a bit too quickly sometimes when there are five other things sitting in front of it that we could optimize for or optimize. And this is probably the biggest thing I want you to understand before we get into the other stuff. Most people only count what they did. They don't really count how many times they started thinking about something without doing anything with it. And so then they look at themselves at the end of the week and go, why am I so tired? Why am I getting so little done? Why can't I focus? Why do I keep procrastinating? And this might sound familiar, right? And they may have been mentally starting the same 10 unresolved things all week. Which means before you add more, I think it's worth looking at what you can 9:54:52 close. So if you're trying to build five new habits while you've got a whole bunch of old commitments and decisions and conversations constantly coming back into your attention, then you might just be adding one more thing you have to remember. So the question now becomes pretty obvious. What exactly is still open in your life right now? And how much of it have you been carrying without ever putting all of it in one place and looking at it properly? So let's talk about counting the unfinished. All right. So this is basically where you actually need to do something. So take a blank page or open a blank page somewhere and for about 10 minutes just write down everything that keeps coming back into your head that still feels unfinished in some way. And don't try to solve any of it yet. Don't try to organize it. Don't turn it into some kind of a productivity exercise. just get the stuff out on a piece of paper and or a digital piece of paper and I would start with uh last week like what did you keep thinking about? What did you remember at inconvenient times? 9:55:53 Which person kept coming to mind because there's something you still need to talk about? What task did you remember and then immediately postpone again? What decision did you almost make for the 10th time and then you didn't? And then put the stupid little things on there, too. Like the super small easy things to forget because uh they're often easy to dismiss and yet they still drain energy, right? The appointment you still haven't made, the thing you need to return, the drawer you emptied and never finished sorting, the room that you started cleaning up but you didn't, and the five minute email. And if it keeps coming [clears throat] back, it goes on the page. And then you'll obviously have the bigger stuff as well. Maybe you're thinking about changing jobs. Maybe you're unsure about a relationship. Maybe there's something in your business that you know you need to deal with. Maybe you started a major project and then just lost interest halfway through. Just put all of it on that piece of paper or digital piece of paper. And 9:56:55 when you think you're done, just sit there for a bit longer. Usually a few more things will show up once you get past the obvious ones. And sometimes those are actually more interesting because they're the things that you've gotten good at completely avoiding and dismissing and ignoring. And you haven't forgotten them exactly, but you have basically learned how to move away from them quickly whenever they appear. And look, a long list doesn't automatically mean you're lazy or undisiplined or bad at finishing things. Everybody has these unfinished things. It just means you found a lot of situations that your mind still treats as relevant. Great. Now you can actually work on them. And keep it specific and simple. Write down the situation. You need to dock to X, right? You need to finish Y. You need to decide about Z. Book the appointment, cancel the membership, whatever it is. You can think about the deeper part once you can see the whole page. Now, when I look at these kind of 9:57:56 things, I find it useful to separate them into three different groups. And I think these catch most of what we're trying to deal with deal with here. And they make the page easier to think about. So, you've got unfinished things, you've got unresolved things, and you've got undecided things. And unfinished is the easiest one. You started something and you never finished it. For example, maybe you started a course. Maybe you started some coaching. Maybe you started cleaning something. You started a project. You opened a document and got halfway through. Maybe you started writing an article. Maybe you started making a YouTube video and you didn't. You bought all the equipment for something and then stopped. Somewhere in your head, you you might still be treating that thing as something you're going to come back to. So ask yourself a very simple question. Do you actually still want to finish this? Not should you, not what would other people say, not would finishing it make you look consistent, but do you actually still want the outcome, the result of that thing enough to spend more time on it? 9:58:58 And what you'll find is that a surprising number of these old tasks that you have keep occupying mental space because you just never updated the original decision and you actually don't want to do it anymore. And that's completely fine. Like you can leave things And physical stuff makes this more obvious because you keep seeing it, right? If you walk around your house, for example, like you walk past the halffinish thing or you see the trash in your room or you see the box sitting there and each time it can remind you of an old intention to actually get that done. And sometimes getting rid of the object is part of closing the intention. Maybe you just completely need to get rid of it. And then you've got unresolved situations. And here typically another person is involved. and the conversation you keep rehearsing for example or something you're angry about or something you feel guilty about or the appointment you need to make u the dentist you need to visit like these can hang around for a very long time because seeing the person gives the whole thing fresh material and you can 9:59:59 have entire conversations with somebody who isn't even there you say your part you imagine their answer and then you come up with a better response like who hasn't done this in the shower for example Or maybe you get annoyed at what you imagined they would say and then nothing really happened. You didn't really have the conversation. You did a lot mentally, but you still have exactly the same information you had when you started. So sometimes the answer is to actually have the conversation if it's a conversation that you need to have. Sometimes the conversation isn't available anymore or is genuinely better left alone. And that happens too. You can also give yourself mental closure to mental closure to some things. The important thing is that you eventually decide which one you're dealing with because waiting forever for the perfect conversation or moment to have that conversation is not going to happen. And then you've got decisions. And this is this one can be a bit sneaky because thinking feels productive and you can sit there for an hour comparing options or 10:01:02 thinking about the decision you need to make and where which direction you should go in and you can do that for hours and think that you actually worked on the decision and in reality you didn't. Right? Two days later you start from the beginning and do the same thing again. And mentally, you're just basically going back with the information you got from last time, if you even remember it, and you never actually reach a decision. And after a while, you're doing lots of thinking without getting any closer to any closer to to making a decision. And so sometimes that's completely reasonable because you're missing information. Okay, then stop trying to decide and actually figure out what information you need and then make the decision and actually get the information because a lot of the times you know you need more information and yet you don't go out to get the information you need. So other times, if we're being real, you already know what you're probably going to do and you just don't like what comes after the decision. Maybe you know you need to 10:02:05 end something. Maybe you know you need to spend the money. Maybe you know you need to tell somebody no more analysis doesn't really help at that point because the hard part isn't understanding the options anymore. You're not gathering any more information or trying to weigh out the options. You're just not doing anything. And so once you've sorted the page, look at each item and ask what has actually changed recently because of all the thought you've g given it. And you'll find out you've just been doing a lot of overthinking and not actually doing much. And this is a much better question than just asking how old something is. Because old doesn't automatically mean bad. Some things genuinely take time. I'm talking about looking at whether your thinking is producing new information now or new action or some kind of movement in general. And if you've been thinking about something and each round honestly gives you something useful, then fine. Obviously, maybe you're learning, maybe you're gathering 10:03:06 actual information and evidence, maybe you're working through a difficult difficult period or conversation, maybe your position is changing. Just keep going. Thinking can obviously be productive in those cases. But if you could copy paste your thoughts from 3 months ago into today and almost nothing changed, I would pay attention to that because at some point you're no longer discovering anything, right? And one really simple thing you can do is write down the conclusion you reached the last time you thought about it and then the next time it comes up, read that first because if you've got nothing new to add, then you don't need to run the whole debate again. And I would also look at what the situation has actually given you back lately. Has it actually moved your life forward at all? Like has anything happened because of all of this attention and thought energy that you've put into it? and look at the things that have been taking thought for a long time while producing basically nothing in return. And you're allowed to stop wanting something. And I know this sounds obvious, but actually a lot of 10:04:08 people are weirdly bad at updating their old commitments and just quitting on things. You wanted to learn something two years ago. You wanted to build something. You wanted a particular outcome. That doesn't automatically mean that the c current version of you still wants that thing, right? And James Clear uh actually puts it really well in his book and he says, "It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire to crave the results, but not the process is to guarantee disappointment." Now, economists call this some cost, right? the time, the [clears throat] money, and the effort you already spent are gone either way. And they matter as part of your history, obviously, but they don't force you to keep spending more, right? And what matters for the next decision is what continuing costs you from here and what you still expect to get from it. And now the page usually 10:05:09 starts getting a lot clearer, right? You'll see a few things that keep coming back constantly and you can actually do something about them. and you start there. Don't begin with the biggest item just because it looks important. Look for the things with actually that might be small but with high recurrence and a clear next action. And also look for the things that unlock other things. So dependencies. So maybe three items on your page are actually all waiting on one conversation or on one decision. So maybe you need to have that conversation or decision or whatever be so finally so that you can actually unlock the other actions, right? And maybe one number would answer two different decisions, right? Maybe you keep avoiding a project because one specific part is unclear. So deal with that part first and the rest of the list might change on its own. And if you get to this point and realize the same few mindset patterns are showing up everywhere in your work, your relationships, your health, the way you make decisions, that's also the kind of 10:06:09 thing we work through with people one-on-one. So, if you ever want help with it, the link to book a call is in the description below and in the pinned comments. Now, with that said, let's actually talk about the three endings. So, now we need to basically stop analyzing the list and actually give things an ending. And I use three basic endings for this. So, you do something about it, you give it a time and date in the future to do something about it, or you let it go. That's basically it, right? And there are obviously variations inside those, but almost everything on the page gets much easier once you stop asking the vague question of what should I do with this and start choosing what actually happens next. So, first some things simply need action. And you know exactly what needs to happen. If the next action is already clear, more thinking probably isn't going to give you much. And I like batching the small ones because you can clear a surprising amount of things in one sitting of tasks. And you might have six things that each take 5 or 10 minutes, but you've thought about all 10:07:10 six dozens of times. So give yourself an hour and just get rid of the whole pile. And just remember that simple and quick doesn't always mean easy. If you keep avoiding something small, there's probably a reason. Name the reason. And once you know what you're actually avoiding, the task usually makes a lot more sense and becomes a bit easier. And when another person is involved, your part may end before the whole situation ends. So you can say what you need to say. You can finish your part of the whole thing and let them deal with theirs, right? You can ask the question. You can make the offer. You can't control what the person does with it. And this is basically the old stoic distinction Epictitus made. Separating what depends on us from what doesn't. You control what you say, not how they respond. And decide where your part ends. Otherwise, someone else's silence or indecision can keep the situation o open in your mind forever. Closure can simply mean doing what was yours to do. Doing your part of the whole thing. Then 10:08:10 there are things that matter, but you genuinely can't or shouldn't do them now. Fine. Then give them an actual date and time. And I mean an actual date, at least a date. If you can do a time, because soon and next month and when things calm down are basically nothing. There's these are not dates, right? It's not an actual point in time. So, if you know you will deal with something on a specific day, you don't have to keep deciding when to deal with it every time it actually pops up into your in your head. And this falls apart pretty quickly if you schedule things and then ignore your own calendar. So, don't do that, right? Your mind has no reason to trust the date if you do that. So if you say Friday, actually deal with it Friday or deliberately move it for another date when Friday comes. But don't just pretend the commitment disappeared. And this is one reason weekly reviews work so well. Actually, you know, there's a regular moment where everything comes back in front of you. So you don't have to keep manually 10:09:11 remembering all of it throughout the week. And don't schedule 20 things just because you don't want to choose. That's just literally moving the same problem into your calendar. Some things deserve a date. Some things just need the third ending. And sometimes the thing you're scheduling is actually a decision because you need more information first. And that's okay, too. Just decide what you're waiting for and what information you need. And this will change the whole feeling of indecision because now it's actually a decision. There's a reason the question is still open. And maybe you'll decide after you test something for 30 days, maybe you need to have some meeting, maybe you need a number, maybe you need to talk to someone, whatever it is, write that down. And then when your brain tries to reopen the whole question the next time, you can remind yourself that nothing relevant has really changed yet. And then there's the ending people usually struggle with the most, which is stopping quitting. And look, you can quit and you can stop on things. You can 10:10:13 decide you're not finishing the thing, right? You can decide you're not pursuing the outcome anymore. You can change your mind. And no, that doesn't mean that you've given up, quote unquote, or that you're some kind of a failure because you didn't finish the thing. Imagine if I did that. Every time I didn't finish a book, I would probably constantly be calling myself a failure. And no, you can stop things when they're no longer valuable for you. And a lot of unfinished situations stay open because people think the only ending is completion. So they keep carrying something they stopped wanting a long time ago. And maybe you don't finish the course. Maybe you don't finish the coaching. Maybe you close the old business idea. Maybe you never become good at the hobby you bought all the stuff for. And that's okay, right? The version of you who started something had a reason. Fine. Respect that. Respect that reason that you had at that time. But you still don't owe that past version of yourself unlimited future 10:11:14 time. Again, this is the sunk cost fallacy. You can look at the situation now and decide again whether you actually want to or not. Every day you get to make a new decision. And when you drop something, actually close it. Like take it off the list. Delete the reminder. Get rid of the object if you don't need it. Tell somebody if they're affected by the decision. Make your environment agree with the choice that you just made because otherwise you're going to keep getting the reminders for something you already decided is over. And that's basically the same as keeping the task alive in your mind. Now, obviously, you need to be careful here when other people are depending on you. You can't owe somebody money or work or an answer and then decide privately that you're just releasing the situation and they don't get what what they deserve from you or what what you owe them. If you have a responsibility, actually deal with a responsibility first. Where a conversation still makes sense, actually have it. And try to go in remembering that the version of the conversation you've rehearsed in your head is most 10:12:15 likely still imaginary. The other person may say something completely different, something you didn't predict or something you didn't expect. And at least the real conversation gives you new information. And sometimes there genuinely is no conversation to have. The person is gone. contact would be inappropriate or weird or you already said what needed to be said and then the work becomes deciding what you're still waiting for and whether you actually need that thing in order to move on. And once you close a few of these, don't immediately fill the space with 10 new commitments. Otherwise, you're missing the whole point. Create some space in your life and let there be some space, right? Pick something you actually want more attention going towards. And maybe it's your work, maybe it's your relationship, maybe your health, maybe one project that's been getting a diluted version of you because you've been splitting your attention all over the place. Maybe it's nothing, and you just want to enjoy some silent time. Like, I'm not going to promise that clearing a page will suddenly fix your sleep, double your output, and make make you feel like a new person immediately. 10:13:17 Maybe the effect is big. You know, maybe it's subtle. It depends on the person. You can test it yourself by closing the things that keep returning and seeing whether your attention feels different afterwards. Most of the time, you'll probably feel really good about it and you'll feel a lot better. And then do this again whenever you start noticing that the same vague feeling is appearing again of too many things being open. Maybe that's monthly. Maybe you do a quick version every week. Just check what's what's what keeps coming back and decide what still deserves a place in your life and give the rest an ending. With that said, let's cover the review. We went over the overview, the unfinished mind, counting the unfinished, the three endings, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, give yourself 10 minutes today and write down everything that keeps coming back into your attention that still feels unfinished and then or unresolved or undecided. and don't solve it while you're writing. Get the page first. Then go through the list and mark what you 10:14:18 started and never finished, what still feels unresolved with another person or situation, and what you simply haven't decided yet. And then circle the few things that keep coming back most often. And then take those circled items one at a time and decide what happens next. Do something, give it a real date or consciously let it go. and then watch what happens over the next few weeks and see how often those old situations still come back. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it brought a lot of value and I hope you can take something with you. With that said, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with its respective training, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, as always, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, 10:15:15 what we're going to be covering today is how journaling fixes your mind. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself. Then your mind is broken and you don't even know it. The repair mechanism, the clear mind, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. And if you want this training along with its respective document, then again, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve in every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about how your mind is broken and why you don't even know it yet. So your mind, the thing you use to make every single decision, process every emotion and interpret every experience, is running on old conditioning where patterns you absorbed years ago, most of them during childhood or adolescence, 10:16:18 are still running your daily life without you even knowing it. And even though you think you're making conscious choices and you think your reactions are rational and you think the way you see the world is accurate, for the most part, you're wrong. Because the mind you're living with right now carries flaws, blind spots, and loops that most people go their entire lives without ever stopping to examine. Now, your mind runs on patterns that were formed during the earliest and most formative periods of your life. And those patterns made sense at the time. They were adaptive responses to the environment you were already in. But most of them are completely mismatched to the life you're living now and they're causing problems you can't really see because you've never stepped back far enough to actually examine them. So the patterns form during a period when you had very little understanding of the world and very limited tools for processing experience, which means your core operating patterns were essentially designed by a child's brain. and you've 10:17:18 been running on that child's logic ever since without really updating it. And these patterns persist because they're wired deep into your mind below the level of conscious awareness. Which means you can't just decide to change them through willpower or positive thinking. They require a specific kind of sustained examination to even become visible, let alone to modify. And the patterns are invisible precisely because they've been running for so long that they feel like reality rather than interpretation. And you can't question something you don't even realize is a choice. Which is why most people live their entire lives inside patterns they never chose and never examined. And the mismatch between old patterns and current reality is where most of your problems actually originate. Where the anxiety, the self-doubt, the procrastination, the relationship difficulties, the self-sabotage that you experience aren't random malfunctions. They're the predictable output of patterns that were designed for a completely different context. 10:18:20 Anxiety, for example, is often an old patterns response to perceived threat in a situation that your adult self can clearly see is not that threatening. But the pattern fires anyway because it was installed at a time when similar situations actually were threatening. And the pattern doesn't know the difference between then and now. And self-sabotage is usually a pattern designed to protect you from a specific type of failure or rejection that was genuinely dangerous in an earlier context, but now it's just preventing you from taking risks that would actually move your life forward. And you can't override it until you understand what it's trying to protect you from. And beyond individual patterns, your mind also runs loops, meaning recurring cycles of thought, emotion, and behavior that play out the same way every time they're triggered. And those loops can run for years or decades without you ever realizing that you're stuck in one. So if you look at your life honestly, you'll probably notice that certain situations keep producing the same outcome and that you most likely get into the same situations over and over 10:19:22 again where you keep ending up in the same kinds of conflicts or making the same kinds of mistakes or feeling the same kinds of frustration. And that repetition is the signature of a loop that's running below your conscious awareness. So recognizing the loop is the first and hardest step because the loop has been running for so long that it feels like normal life rather than a pattern. And most people [clears throat] need some form of a structured self-examination like journaling to even see it because the loop is literally the lens through which they see everything. So they can't see the lens itself. And so the cost of running these loops without awareness is enormous because every repetition of the loop wastes time, energy, and opportunity. And the cumulative cost over years and decades of unconscious looping is genuinely staggering when you finally add it up. And every loop has a trigger, meaning a specific external or internal event that activates the pattern and starts the cycle. And identifying the trigger is the key 10:20:24 to interrupting the loop because once you can see the trigger, you can catch the pattern before it runs its full course. And the trigger is usually much simpler and more specific than you'd expect where and it's usually simple where it might be a certain tone of voice or a specific type of feedback or a particular time of day or even a physical sensation. And once you identify it, you can start noticing it everywhere, which gives you multiple opportunities per day to actually practice interrupting the loop. And the gap between the trigger and the response is where all the power lives. Because in that gap, you have the choice to run the old pattern or to do something different. And expanding that gap through awareness is literally the mechanism by which you rewrite your own operating system. And so the most concerning part of all of this is the blindness. Meaning you can't see your own patterns and loops from inside them any more than a fish can see water. And that blindness is really what keeps most people stuck in the same cycles for their entire lives despite genuinely 10:21:25 wanting to change. Now your mind has a built-in bias towards confirming its existing patterns. We've talked about this many times. Meaning it actively filters your experience to reinforce what it already believes. And that confirmation bias makes it extremely difficult to see evidence that contradicts your established patterns. Which is why change feels so hard even when you're trying. And so your mind runs everything you experience through a perceptual filter. Meaning it quietly decides which details of reality you notice and which ones of reality you ignore. And it works both ways. It shows you evidence for your existing beliefs and hides evidence against them. And the result is a closed loop where your pattern creates your perception and your per perception reinforces your patterns. And every day that you operate inside the pattern without examining it, the pattern gets slightly stronger and slightly more entrenched. Which means the cost of inaction compounds in the same way that the benefits of journaling compound just in the opposite direction. 10:22:25 And most people's strategy for dealing with their broken mind is entirely external. meaning they try to change their circumstances, their relationships, their jobs, and their environments, hoping that a change of scenery will somehow fix the internal patterns. And it never works because the patterns travel with you. So, you've probably seen this in yourself or in people, you know, where someone changes their job or relationship or even their city and within a few months, they've recreated the exact same problems in just a different context. And that's because the patterns that created those problems were never addressed. they just got a new backdrop. So they worked on the symptom rather than the root of the issue. And the fix has to be internal. Meaning you have to address the patterns themselves rather than the situations they create. And that internal work is exactly what a properly structured journaling practice is really designed to do. So let's talk about the repair mechanism. So if your mind is running on broken patterns and you can't see them from the inside, the 10:23:27 way you fix it is deceptively simple. You write not randomly, not when you feel like it, not about whatever pops in your head, but with structure and intention using a practice designed to surface the unconscious. Make the invisible visible and create space between stimulus and response. which is exactly why journaling is the repair mechanism. The one practice that lets you find what's actually broken and fix it at the same time. Now the first thing journaling does for your mind is externalization. Meaning it takes the thoughts and patterns that are running inside your head and puts them outside of your head when where you can actually look at them. And that simple act of moving something from internal to external changes your relationship with it. Because the moment we put attention on something, we create separation from it. So once a thought is on paper, you have distance from it and that distance allows you to observe it to examine it objectively rather than being inside it. And the difference between thinking a thought and reading a thought you wrote 10:24:28 is surprisingly large because reading gives you the perspective of an observer rather than the participant. And you're no longer identifying yourself with the thought. And the observer perspective is really where insight lives. Because when you're inside the thought, you can't evaluate it. You just experience it. But when you're looking at it from the outside, you can ask whether it's true, whether it's useful, and whether it's really serving the life you want to build. And those questions are impossible to ask from the inside. And so the externalization also brings clarity where thoughts that felt overwhelming and tangled inside your own head become manageable and structured on paper. And the act of translating them into words forces you to organize them in a way that often reveals their actual structure for the first time. There's also an immediate psychological relief that comes from externalization where the cognitive load of carrying those unexamined thoughts decreases. Right? And cognitive load really if if 10:25:31 it's too high, you basically can't do anything and you can't focus, you can't concentrate because there's all these open loops at the back of your mind. And so if you start examining those thoughts, that cognitive load decreases the moment you put them on paper. And that relief frees up mental resources that were previously being consumed by the unconscious processing of unresolved patterns. The relief creates mental space and then that space is essential for the deeper repair work because a mind that's fully occupied with unexamined noise doesn't really have the capacity to do the kind of focused self-examination that pattern change requires. And the relief compounds over time where each journaling session clears a little more cognitive debris. And then after a few weeks of consistent practice, the baseline of level of mental clarity is noticeably higher than it was before you started. And so that elevated clarity becomes the new normal. 10:26:33 Now the second thing journaling does is enable pattern recognition. Meaning it basically allows you to see through walls. That's how I like to uh to see it. It gives you enough data points over time to see recurring themes, to see patterns, to see triggers, not just in yourself, but also in the world and in other people, and to see loops that are otherwise invisible. And this pattern recognition is the core diagnostic function that makes everything else possible. Pattern recognition requires data. In order for you to be able to recognize a pattern, you have to have seen it many times. And to have seen it many times, you need data. Each journal entry is a data point. And when you accumulate enough data points, the patterns start to emerge on their own where you notice that the same trigger keeps producing the same response or the same belief keeps showing up in different contexts. And those noticed patterns are really the targets for repair. So there's a threshold of accumulated 10:27:34 entries. Usually around two to three weeks of daily journaling, you get those where the patterns start to become visible and before that threshold really the individual entries might seem disconnected and unremarkable. But once you cross it, the connections start to jump out at you. Especially if you do a monthly journal as well on how the month went. And basically how you do that one is by looking at all the weeks before that and all the days before that and looking at your own patterns over the past few weeks, over the past four weeks. And then on a monthly basis, you can notice your patterns, right? And so the depth of pattern recognition increases the longer you journal where the first patterns you notice tend to be surface level and obvious, but after months of practice, you start seeing deeper and deeper layers of pattern that were completely invisible at the beginning. And once you see a pattern, naming it gives you power over it. Labeling it gives you power over it because you've now created separation. In order for you 10:28:34 to label something, you have to have put your attention on it. And the moment we put attention on something, we create separation from it. And that means we can have power over it. Where an unnamed pattern runs your life automatically, but a named pattern becomes something you can actually observe. you can choose to engage with or not and gradually modify through conscious repetition of a new response. And so the act of putting language to a pattern literally changes your brain's relationship with it where the pattern moves from the automatic unconscious processing to the conscious deliberate processing system. And that shift in processing is the mechanism by which awareness creates the possibility of change. And so naming the pattern also creates a sense of ownership where instead of being something that happens to you, it becomes something you're aware of and responsible for. And that ownership is the first step towards choosing differently. And the third and most powerful thing journaling does is really provide the mechanism for actually 10:29:35 rewiring the patterns. Meaning it doesn't just make them visible cuz I mean even that would be enough by itself because the moment we have awareness over something we tend to change it change it if it's if it's not serving us but it doesn't just make them visible. It gives you a structured daily practice for gradually replacing those old broken patterns with new functional ones. And that rewiring is really where the real repair happens. So rewiring requires repetition. And the daily journaling practice provides exactly that where each day you observe the old pattern and you note it and you label it and you choose a different response and record the outcome. That daily cycle of observation and choice is really what gradually weakens the old neural pathway and strengthen strengthens the new one. So the rewiring only works with consistency. Meaning you can't journal about a pattern once and expect it to change. You have to engage with it day after day, catching it at the trigger, choosing differently, and then recording the evidence of the new response. And 10:30:36 that sustained engagement is really what produces the real neurological change. And the rewiring takes time as well, usually longer than you'd like, where deeply entrenched patterns might take months of daily work to fully replace, but the progress is visible in the journal if you're looking for it. And that visibility sustains you through the long metal phase where the change feels slow. And so the journal provides the evidence that the rewiring is actually working which is essentially essential for sustaining the effort where you can look back through your entries and see that the pattern fired three times this week compared to seven times last month and that quantified progress is what keeps going when keeps you going when the change feels invisible from the inside. Visible progress is one of the strongest moderators for sustained behavior change and because it gives you feedback. And so the journal provides it automatically through the accumulated record of your entries and seeing the trend line of improvement over weeks and months is really what transforms the journaling 10:31:36 from a daily chore into a practice you can actually look forward to. And so the evidence of progress creates momentum where each successful interruption of an old pattern makes the next one easier. And each documented win reinforces the belief that change is possible. And that belief momentum cycle is really the engine that drives the entire repair process forward. So now that you understand what journaling actually does to your mind, the last piece is really knowing how to physically do it. And the good news is that journaling isn't one fixed thing where the specific format you use matters far less than the simple act of getting what's stuck inside your head out into the open where you can finally look at it and create separation from it. So you've basically got four ways or five let's say to to do this practice and honestly any of them work as long as you actually stick with it. So pick the one that fits how you naturally like to express yourself and don't overthink the choice. So the first one is a video journal. So where you 10:32:37 just turn on a camera, you look into the lens, and you start talking to yourself like you're explaining your life to someone who genuinely wants to understand it. And there's something about watching your face while you speak that pulls thoughts out of you that staying quiet never would. And you don't also have to just look at your face the whole time. You can look around, of course. You can look into the distance and think, but and it feels a little awkward at the start, but most people will find the camera makes them more honest than they expected, especially if you know that the video is just for yourself. So looking at yourself while you talk creates a strange kind of accountability where it's much harder to lie to your own face than it is to lie inside your own head. Right? That visual feedback keeps you grounded in what's actually true for you. And over time, that honesty becomes the whole point of the practice. On top of that, video gives you something that other methods don't, which is the ability to go back later and actually watch yourself working through a problem. And not only that, but see how you looked at the time, how you had dressed at the time, 10:33:38 what what mental state you were in because you can often see that just by the way you look and your energy and your frequency. you can catch the expressions, the pauses, and the tone that plain text would wouldn't be able to, right? So, you end up with a far richer record of where your head really was at. And that said, video does carry the most setup of any method where you need a decent lighting if you want or a bit a bit of privacy and the willingness to see yourself on a screen. Um, for some people that extra effort is well worth the depth it brings, but also don't overthink it. like just turn on your computer camera and just start talking to it essentially. And for others, it's the very thing that stops them, which that's completely fine because there's other ways in, right? The next one is audio journaling, which is basically the same idea except you drop the camera and just use a voice recorder talking through whatever whatever's on your mind while it captures every single word and is the 10:34:40 lowest friction option for of the whole bunch where you can just do it walking, driving or lying in bed with the lights off. And for a lot of people, that ease is exactly what makes the habit actually stick. And talking out loud tends to unlock a kind of natural flow that writing sometimes interrupts where one thought rolls straight into the next without you stopping to fix your grammar. And that interrupt uninterrupted stream often surfaces connections that you would never have reached on paper. So audio can be the fastest route to a genuine insight. On top of that, the near zero setup removes the most of the excuses your mind likes to make about not having enough time. you just hit record and start speaking wherever you happen to be. And that low barrier is often the difference between a practice you keep and the one you quietly abandon. Now, there's finally the the classic written journal where you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and translate the noise in your head into actual words on a page. And 10:35:40 this is the most deliberate of all the methods where writing forces you to actually slow down and organize your thoughts. And I think it's still beneficial. Uh it's probably has its own benefits that the other ones don't because of that specific um feature of it which is to literally slow down and organize your thoughts and think about what you want to write down in a way that obviously talking never does because uh when you're just talking you can just you know yap for for hours on end if you wanted to. So that slower pace of writing is very often where the deepest insights end up showing themselves because you have more time. You actually slow down and you're doing it a bit more intentionally. And the act of writing also imposes an order on your thinking where you have to decide what comes first, what follows and how it all connects before any of it makes sense on the page. And that force structure is itself a form of clarity. So even messy writing tends to leave you clearer than 10:36:43 when you started. Now, written words also sit still in a way that spoken ones don't, which means you can read them back slowly and study them almost like they belong to someone else. And that distance is exactly where the observer perspective lives. And the observer perspective, like we touched on earlier, is where the real insight happens. So beyond that, a written record is the easiest of all to search, to scan, and revisit months later when you want to track how a pattern has shifted. You can flip back through weeks of entries in just a few minutes. So, the written journal quietly doubles as the cleanest long-term archive of your own progress. Another option that's just basically a version of the video option is um and it catches a lot of people by surprise is treating journaling like a meeting you book with your with yourself where you actually open up Zoom or Microsoft Teams or you know Google Meet or whatever. Honestly, any software that lets you run a call, you start a session with no one 10:37:43 else in it and then you just record yourself talking the whole thing through. It's the same as the video version, except now you the the feeling is as if you have a meeting with yourself. And it works almost exactly like video journaling. Like I said, only you're borrowing tools you probably already use every single day for work. And because the recording saves on its own, you walk away with a clean file of the entire session without fiddling with anything extra. And the big advantage here is that you're using software you already know inside out. So there's no new app to learn and no fresh habit to build from scratch. You just open the same tool you'd use for any work call and just point it at yourself instead. And that familiarity also strips away one more habit um and one more bit of friction that might otherwise stop you from before you even start. On top of that, meeting software is built to capture and store calls cleanly, which means you get a tidy video file. Often you also get the audio file and often an automatic transcript uh the moment you 10:38:45 hit end. So that hands you both the spoken session, the audio version and the written record in a single move. So, in a way, this method quietly bleeds into the hybrid approach we're about to get into. Uh, and finally, the hybrid approach where you simply combine a couple of the formats to capture the strengths of each. And the most common version is recording yourself on audio and then transcribing that recording into text afterwards. Uh, and that way you get the ease and flow of just talking plus the clarity and searchability of having everything written down. So, if you genuinely can decide which method suits you, I think this is usually the smartest place to begin because you it allows you to blend formats. Blending formats lets you sidestep the main weakness of any single one where the audio handles the speaking and the text handles the reviewing. So, you're no longer forced to trade flow for clarity or clarity for ease. And that balance tends to make the whole practice far more sustainable over the long run. And these days, turning audio 10:39:47 into text takes almost no effort at all. Transcription tools do the heavy lifting for you in a matter of seconds. You just talk freely. The words appear on the page and you walk away with a searchable record without the strain of writing it all by hands. So the hybrid really does hand you the best of both worlds with very little added work. So with that said, let's cover the clear mind. So what does it actually look like when the repair work produces results? When you've been doing this practice long enough that the old patterns have been identified, named and gradually replaced with patterns that actually serve you. And I call it the clear mind which is not some kind of a enlightened state. It's just what happens when you stop living from old conditioning and rather from patterns that you've cons consciously chosen. Now the first thing you notice when the operating system starts to clean up is a persistent clarity of thought that wasn't there before where the mental noise decreases 10:40:47 the emotional reactivity. The mental noise decreases and the emotional reactivity calms down and you start seeing situations clearly rather than through the distortion of your old patterns and unexamined beliefs. And so your perception becomes cleaner meaning you start seeing things as they actually are rather than as your patterns told you they were. And that cleaner perception affects the every area of your life from how you interpret conversations to how you assess risks to how you make decisions about what matters. And so the accuracy of your perception starts to improve dramatically where you stop misreading situations. You'll stop projecting old experiences onto new ones and you'll stop reacting to what you think is happening rather than what's actually happening. And it's that perceptual accuracy that's one of the most practically valuable outcomes of the whole process. Cleaner perception also means faster processing where you spend less time second-guessing, less time interpreting, less time caught in uncertainty. And so that speed comes from the reduced interference of old 10:41:49 patterns that used to distort and slow down your thinking. There's also a quality of mental stillness that develops where your mind isn't constantly churning through unresolved thoughts and unexamined fears. And that stillness isn't emptiness. It's it's readiness where your cognitive resources are available and focused rather than scattered across a 100 unfinished processes. And the stillness naturally produces greater presence where you're actually in the moment rather than mentally replaying the past or rehearsing the future. And it's that presence that improves the quality of everything you do of your whole life from conversations to creative work to physical performance anything. And the stoness also means greater cognitive capacity where the mental resources that were previously consumed by pattern maintenance and unconscious processing are now actually available for intentional use. And it's that freed up capacity that suddenly uh is is like feels like you have all of a sudden more room to think. Now [snorts] the second 10:42:52 thing you notice is a fundamental change in how you respond to life where the old reactive patterns get replaced by chosen responses and you start operating from intention rather than impulse which changes the outcome of virtually every interaction and decision you make. Now the gap between stimulus and response which the journaling practice has been expanding for months now becomes wide enough that you consistently have time to choose your response rather than defaulting to the old pattern. And that consistent choice is really what it it means to be in control of your own behavior. And that gap is real freedom. Not freedom from external constraints. Freedom from your own automatic reactions. And that internal freedom is really worth more than any external change you can make because it means you're operating from your own choice rather than conditioning every every time. And that power that comes from responsive rather than reactive living is really difficult to overstate. Every situation becomes an 10:43:54 opportunity to choose the response that serves your goals and your cap your identity rather than the response that your old patterns would have automatically produced. And so your emotional regulation improves significantly as well where emotions still arise and they should of course you're human but they no longer hijack your behavior and you can feel something fully without being compelled to act on it impulsively. And it's that regulation that is the direct result of the awareness and pattern interruption skills the journal has built. You're not suppressing emotions. That's important to say, by the way. you're feeling them with full awareness and then choosing to how to respond from a piece of place of clarity rather than reactivity. And that's a completely different thing from the emotional numbness that some people mistake for regulation from the coldness uh that some people think is regulation. And the regulation also builds genuine resilience where difficult experiences still affect you but they don't 10:44:54 destabilize you. And the recovery time from emotional disruption gets shorter and shorter as the clean operating system becomes more established. And the third thing that happens is a deep alignment between your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions and your values where the internal contradictions and conflicts that used to create friction and confusion get resolved through the ongoing process of self-examinations and pattern repair. And what's left is a coherent integrated way of operating that feels natural and sustainable. And the coherence shows up in everything from the consistency of your daily behavior to the clarity of your communication to the stability of your emotional state. And people around you notice even if they can't name what's different. And that coherence is really the external manifestation of internal alignment. People trust coherent individuals more almost instinctively because coherence signals reliability. It signals integrity. And that increased trust open do opens doors 10:45:57 in your relationships and your career that were previously closed or invisible. And coherence also saves enormous amounts of energy because you'll no longer be fighting internal contradictions or maintaining inconsistent identities in different contexts. And that saved energy now becomes available for growth, for creation, for contribution. And so the alignment eventually reaches a level where the journaling practice itself starts to feel less like a repair tool and more like a maintenance tool where you've addressed the major patterns in the daily practice is now just fine-tuning and optimizing rather than identifying and fixing and just catching things on time. And that transition from repair to just optimizing yourself is one of the most satisfying milestones in the entire process. The maintenance mode is really where the compound effects really accelerate because you're building on a clean foundation rather than constantly repairing a broken one. And the improvements start stacking on each other in a way that wasn't possible when your mind was still cluttered with broken patterns. And from that 10:46:59 maintenance position, you can start expanding into territory that would have been impossible before and take on challenges, explore ideas, and build things that require the kind of mental clarity and emotional stability that only a clean operating system can sustain. So with that said, let's cover the review. So we talked about the overview. We talked about your mind is broken and you don't even know it. We talked about the repair mechanism, the clear mind, the review, and finally your action items for the day. Tonight, sit down with your journal and write out the three patterns or loops that have caused you the most problems over the past year. And be as specific as possible about the trigger, the response, and the outcome of each one. Then give each pattern a simple name that captures its essence. And starting tomorrow, note every time one of those named patterns activates during your day, tracking the trigger and whether you manage to essentially choose a different response. And then finally, 10:48:01 practice expanding the gap between stimulus and response by pausing for three full breaths whenever you notice one of your named patterns activating. And then journal about what happened during that pause each evening. So, with that said, if you want to work with me one- on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with this document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve in every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, I really hope you enjoyed this. I hope it brought a lot of value. If it did, let me know. Thank you for being here. Thank you for the support. And I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be discussing today is the honest hour. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be covering more specifically is first the overview itself, your life and hours, deciding what matters, the honest hour, the review, and your action items for the 10:48:59 day or the next few days. Without further ado, let's get started and talk about your life and hours. So, I think one of the reasons people struggle so much with time management is really that we talk about time as if it's some separate resource sitting outside of our actual lives. We talk about saving time, wasting time, finding time, making time, and somewhere along the way, it becomes very easy to forget that what we're actually talking about. Now, your time is your life. More specifically, your life only ever reaches you through whatever hour you happen to be living in right now. You don't experience your life as one big 80year block. you experienced this morning, this afternoon, this conversation, this hour. And by the end of this training, I want you to have a very simple way of deciding what an important hour of your life actually is for, using it deliberately, and then looking back at it honestly enough that the next one gets better. And once you really think about it that way, a lot of the way we normally treat our days starts looking a bit strange, right? You wouldn't casually throw away a month of your life, yet it's surprisingly easy to 10:49:56 throw away an hour because another one seems like it's coming right after it. And there will be another morning tomorrow. There will be another Monday next week, at least so we think. There will probably be another chance to write the thing, make the call, train, spend time with somebody you care about, or finally deal with whatever you've been avoiding. So, the individual hour doesn't really feel expensive while you're inside it. But the problem is that tomorrow arrives with its own hours, and those hours already have demands waiting for them. You still have work. People still need things from you. Your phone still exists. You still get tired. New problems appear. So when you keep moving something important into a future day, you aren't moving into some empty place where it will finally be easy. You're really moving it into another normal day that will ask you to make the same decision again. And that's why I'd start by getting very literal about this. Once an hour passes, you can learn from it and you can use what happened to make a better decision later. Though you can't put something different in that original hour, whatever happened during that time 10:50:51 became the actual content of that part of your life. If you worked on something meaningful, that was your life for an hour. If you rested because you genuinely needed rest, that was your life for an hour. If you spend the whole thing half scrolling and half thinking about something you never began, that was your life for an hour, too. And every one of these hours leaves something behind. Sometimes it leaves a finished page, a workout, a conversation, a decision, some recovery, or a problem that finally moved. Sometimes it leaves you with more pressure because the thing you meant to do is still waiting for you. Sometimes you barely remember what you did at all. Either way, the hour produces a result. And I think that's much more useful way to look at time than simply asking whether you were busy because something always gets the hour. If you spend it answering messages, you've made that trade. If you write the messages, wait, right? If you spend it with your partner or your family, the work stays unfinished for a while. If you sleep because you're exhausted, something else gets pushed back. None of this makes the choice automatically good or bad. It simply means you cannot put two 10:51:49 different lives inside the same 60 minutes. So deciding what gets the hour actually matters a lot here. And I want to include rest very deliberately here because this can become another productivity lecture very quickly where every hour should be filled with work. That's not what I'm saying. An hour can be well used because you worked hard. An hour can also be well used because you stopped working hard. If you're exhausted and you need to eat or walk or lie down, see somebody you love or simply leave yourself alone for a while. Do that. Half resting while you keep checking work usually gives you unfinished work and poor rest at the same time. So the real question starts changing. Instead of only asking where your time went, you start looking at where your attention went while the time was passing. Because those two things aren't always the same, right? You can technically spend an hour at your desk while your attention moves between the documents, your phone, your inbox, some unrelated thought, and whatever else you decided to check. The clock says you worked for an hour, but your actual work may have received 15 or 20 decent minutes. And you already know what this 10:52:46 feels like. You write a little for a while, check something, answer it, come back, reread the paragraph, remember what you were trying to say, and eventually you get going again. Then something else pulls you out. The hour feels full because your mind stays active the entire time, while the thing you really cared about barely moved. You were present for 60 minutes. The task didn't receive 60 minutes of you. And some work simply needs you to stay there long enough. Writing is an obvious example because the first thing you really write usually isn't the best thing you can write. You need enough uninterrupted time to get past the obvious version. Notice where the thought is weak. Find the cleaner explanation and actually finish it. The same thing happens with difficult decisions in conversations. You need enough attention for your thinking to actually develop instead of repeatedly returning to the beginning. Which is why I wouldn't begin by trying to create a perfect schedule. I'd begin by watching what your hours already look like. Pay attention to when you think clearly, when you struggle, when your mind keeps getting distracted, and what happened 10:53:45 before that period began. Maybe you work well early. Maybe you need a slower morning. Maybe you get your strongest two hours in the afternoon. The exact pattern doesn't really even matter as much as finally admitting that your hours are different from each other. You have hours where difficult thinking feels relatively natural, and you have hours where even simple work feels heavier than it should. Sleep changes that, too. Food changes that, stress changes it, the kind of work changes it. So, if you keep giving your hardest tasks to the periods where you consistently have the least capacity for it, you'll keep turning a timing problem into a discipline problem and wondering why you can't force yourself through it. Hey, really quick. If you're still watching this video, that tells me you're serious about actually making a change in your life. So, if you want my help personally, click the link below and book a call. We'll look at where you are, where you want to go, and what's been keeping you stuck. And if we believe that we can actually help you, we'll show you exactly what working with us would look like. And if you're not ready for that yet, that's completely 10:54:42 fine, too. You can join the Omniscient community for free where you'll get access to more of our free trainings and you'll be able to connect with other people that are also doing this work. On top of that, you can join the free Omniscient newsletter where I send you ideas and strategies that I don't always talk about here on YouTube. So, if any of that interests you, all links are below. But if you're ready to take this seriously, book a call. And with that said, back to the video. And with that we move on to deciding what matters. So once you start seeing your life in hours you run into the next problem very quickly. You only have so many good hours and a lot of things can make a reasonable claim on them. That means you need some way of deciding what deserves your best attention today. And I think this is where ordinary to-do lists often fail because they flatten everything into a list of tasks. Answer an email can sit right beside finish the script or do the sales call or buy something you need can sit beside having a conversation. you've been avoiding for 3 months. They're all technically tasks, though they clearly don't carry the same weight. So, when something is asking for 10:55:40 an important hour, I want you to ask what that thing actually leads to. If you write this section, what does that help you finish? If you finish the script, what does that allow you to publish? If you publish the video, what are you hoping the video eventually creates? You keep going until this small action connects to something you genuinely care about? Because that connection tells you why this particular hour deserves protection. Maybe you're writing because you're trying to publish one genuinely useful video and that video supports the business you're trying to build. Suddenly, the paragraph in front of you has an actual place. You aren't really choosing between writing and checking your inbox as two random activities. One action moves something that matters to you while the other can probably happen later without changing much. And the same logic works outside of work. Maybe the hour goes to training because staying strong and healthy matters to you. Maybe it goes to sitting with somebody you love because you've barely seen each other all week. Maybe it goes to doing absolutely nothing productive because you've worked too much and you know you need to recover. 10:56:33 The point is that you know why you're giving this part of your life to this particular thing and you can work from the other side as well. Start with something big you say you want and keep bringing it down until you reach something your body can actually do. So a better business is very vague to work on. More booked calls is still an outcome. Maybe that outcome needs a useful video. The video needs a script. Maybe the script needs one section. Now you finally reach something that can occupy an hour because you can open the document and write the section. A lot of procrastination begins because people never really make that final move. They have a goal, maybe even a plan, yet the actual hour arrives and the instruction is still something like work on the business or get healthier or fix the relationship or make progress on the course or make progress in my studies. Your brain still has to decide what any of that really means before you can begin. And when the task feels difficult already, that extra ambiguity really gives you a very convenient place to stall. So bring the thing close enough that you can see the first physical action. Open the document and write the 10:57:34 opening section. Put your shoes on and begin the workout. Call the person, read the contract, and write down three questions you need answered. Read the contract and write down three the three questions you need answered. Once the action becomes that clear, you've removed the surprising amount of the resistance that came from simply knowing where to begin. Of course, clarity doesn't magically make you want to do everything, by the way. Sometimes you know exactly what matters, and you still find yourself doing things that look useful because they let you stay close to the important work without actually doing any of it. You keep researching after you already have enough information. You reorganize the outline when you need to record. You watch another explanation of something you already understand. You answer small things because finishing them gives you a quick sense that the day is moving. And I've noticed this is why avoidance can be so hard to catch on yourself. You often don't look lazy while you're doing it. You look responsible. You may actually be working hard. The problem is simply that the important thing remains untouched and eventually you finish the 10:58:27 day tired from doing plenty of small little things while still knowing the one thing you cared about didn't really move. The video might fail. Somebody might reject the offer. The conversation may go badly. You may find out that your current ability isn't where you thought it was. Planning and preparation feel safer because they delay the moment where reality can actually answer you and give you feedback. At some point though, the uncertainty only disappears after you do the thing and see what actually happens. And this gets even harder when you have too many genuinely important things at once because now you aren't choosing between something meaningful and something pointless. You're choosing between several things that all make sense. You want to grow the business, maybe train properly, maintain your relationships, learn something, finish another project, and deal with the other normal responsibilities of being alive. You can care about all of those things while still admitting that they cannot receive your best hour today. And I would think in terms of what needs more from you during this particular period of your life. Maybe one project needs a serious 10:59:25 push for the next few weeks. Maybe your health has been neglected and needs to move up. Maybe something personal needs attention before you keep throwing yourself into work. You aren't deciding what matters forever. Just what deserves a larger share of your limited attention right now. And that also means leaving good things alone sometimes. And this is uncomfortable because we tend to think productivity means fitting more things into the day. In practice, a lot of meaningful progress comes from choosing fewer things and actually giving them enough time. So if five projects each receive a distracted little piece of your week, all five can stay alive without any of them really moving very far. And one clear priority gives you a much easier answer when the next good hour appears. So let's talk about the honest hour. So now we can finally get to the actual honest hour because everything before this was really preparing one decision. You know that the hour is part of your life. You know that some hours carry more attention and energy than others. You know that important things need to connect to something you care about and come all the way down to a physical action. The 11:00:23 honest hour takes all of that and turns it into a simple practice. Before you begin, you decide what this hour is for, what you can realistically finish inside of it, and what you need to remove so the hour has a fair chance of becoming what you intended. And then you keep the answer very specific. Writing is too vague. Working on the video is too vague. Write the opening section gives you somewhere to actually begin. Record the first part of the training gives you a clear action. And personally, I like giving the hour a finish line as well because an hour feels very different when you know what completion looks like before you start. So that finish line could be one section completed. It could be one conversation had. It could be one sales call had. It could be one workout finished. It could be one decision made. It could be 45 focus minutes on something that generally cannot be finished today. You don't need to complete the entire project in an hour. You need to know what success for this particular block looks like because otherwise you can work for an hour and still leave unsure whether you did what you came here to do. Right? So make the beginning obvious as well. Leave the 11:01:22 documents open. Put the notes where you need them. Know which paragraph comes next. If you're training, know what the first exercise is. If you need to call somebody, have the number ready. I want as little negotiation as possible once the hour starts because the beginning is usually where a vague intention turns into another 20 minutes of getting ready to begin. Proper planning prevents poor performance. Remember that. And once you've chosen the hour, just make it easier to keep that choice. Right? This is where I think people ask too much from discipline. They leave every distraction available, keep the inbox open, put the phone beside them, and then spend the hour repeatedly proving that they can resist all of it. That's not how discipline works, right? You can make this much simpler. Just remove the things that you already know pull your attention away before the work starts asking for your full attention. That's it. If the phone causes problems, just put it somewhere you can't really reach automatically. Yes, putting your phone on silent can help, but if your silent phone is sitting six inches from your hand, it can still pull your attention 11:02:18 and pull you out of the work because you know it's there. So, physical distance actually adds a few seconds between the impulse and the action. And sometimes those few seconds are enough for you to notice what you're doing and stay with the work. But keep in mind, even then your attention will still wander. And that part is normal. You remember something unrelated, for example, or think about a message or get bored or suddenly feel the urge to check something. When that happens, just come back without turning it into a judgment about your ability to focus. That's really it. Just read the last sentence, continue the set, return to the conversation, whatever you were doing. The hour doesn't require perfect concentration. It just requires you to keep giving it your attention, to keep giving your attention back to the thing you chose. And the part that gives the honest hour its name happens when the hour ends. You look at what actually happened. Did you do what you said you were going to do? Did you get halfway through? Did you spend 20 minutes distracted? Was the task too large? Did you pick the wrong time of the day? Did something genuinely important interrupt 11:03:11 you? You're collecting a small amount of truth about how you actually use your life. And I'd write the answer down in one or two plain sentences somewhere in a notebook or on a document or even you could create a tracker on Google Sheets and just do it there. I finished the section. I got halfway through because I kept checking my phone. I underestimated how long the task would take. I worked well for 40 minutes and then my energy fell off. I couldn't focus because I barely slept. Keep it factual enough that tomorrow's version of you can actually use it. And better yet, you can actually give it to AI after some time and have it analyze how you spent your time and have it analyze what your biggest distractions were. And then basically ask it to give you a recommendation of exactly what to cut off, right? So once you've done that, change something based on what you saw, right? Move the task earlier. Maybe make the next block smaller. Put the phone in another room. Eat before you write if you've noticed that helps. Give a particular type of work more time because 1 hour consistently isn't enough. You slowly learn how your own attention works by watching yourself in 11:04:08 real conditions instead of endlessly designing an ideal version of your day. And I think that's the most powerful thing you can do here because at the end of the day, you will be in more control. Even if you get distracted often, even if 30 minutes of your 1 hour go to scrolling, you will know that ahead of time. You will know that about yourself. Even if you don't want to work on the scrolling problem, you at least know that an hour for you really means 30 minutes of work or less. And from there, you can actually plan out your day way more accurately and you'll be in control of your time because you know what your distractions are. And after you've done this for a while, something else also begins to happen. You start building a record of what you actually do when you say that an hour matters. You don't need to rely entirely on how motivated you feel or how disciplined you think you are. You can look at the work you completed, the workouts you did, the conversations you finally had, and the blocks of time where you came back after getting distracted. Your own behavior gives you evidence. And I think this matters because your expectations about 11:05:03 yourself come partly from watching what you repeatedly do. If you keep making promises to yourself and moving them, you begin to expect another delay. If you regularly choose one realistic thing and follow through, you begin to expect that as well. You're simply paying attention to the pattern your actions keep showing you. Which is why I'd keep the promise small enough that it actually gets implemented in a normal week. Nobody's really asking you to focus and work perfectly for 12 hours. Just start with one hour that actually matters. one hour where you know why the task matters. You know exactly what you're doing. You remove the obvious distractions. You do the work and you tell yourself the truth afterwards. Once you can do that reliably, you can decide where another deliberate hour would improve your life. And this is the part I want you to carry with you after this video tomorrow isn't going to arrive as some giant new life with unlimited time inside of it. It's going to arrive as another morning made out of individual hours. And one of those hours is probably going to be better than the others. And when it arrives, you can let whatever is loudest take it from you, or 11:05:59 you can decide in advance what that hour is for, and give one important part of your life, the time it actually needs. That said, let's cover the review. We talked about your life and hours, deciding what matters, the honest hour, the review, and finally, your action items for the day or the next few days. First, pick one hour tomorrow that you know you can realistically protect. Choose the part of your day where your attention is usually good enough for something that matters, and then decide in advance exactly what that hour is for. Then bring the task down to one clear action and decide what done looks like for that block. Remove the obvious distractions before you start so you don't spend the hour repeatedly negotiating with them. And then when the hour ends, write down what actually happened in one or two honest sentences. Keep what worked. Change one thing that didn't and use that information when you plan the next honest hour. With that said, thank you for being here. I hope this brought a lot of value. Make sure to book a call if you want to work with me oneonone. And with that said, I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this 11:06:54 training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the only way to build focus that actually works. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the escape reflex, attention progressive overload, the focus conditioning protocol, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one on any of this or any other aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, or self, then make sure to book a call from the link in the description. Now, with that said, let's start and talk about the escape reflex. So, most people sit down to work, they last about 6 minutes, and then they grab their phone and figure that they're just not wired to concentrate. And I get why that story sticks. It's also wrong. And once you see why, you can't really go back to believing it. So, let's go after that story first. The one where you're just not a focused person. It treats your attention like your eye color. It's just something you got at birth and you're stuck with for good. Believe it 11:07:54 for long enough and you actually stop signing up for anything that asks for real concentration at all. Now, calling it your wiring is awfully convenient. If you were born this way, then there's nothing to fix and no work to do. And since you never actually put the belief to the test, well, it never gets disproven. But the thing that kills that excuse is that you can probably lock into a movie for 2 hours or a game, video game for example, or talk with someone you care about for 2 hours, no problem at all. It's the same brain. It's the same person. Completely different result. So, you know how to be focused, you know how to pay uh attention, you know how to concentrate. It's just the things that you're doing that are different, right? The only thing that changed is that none of these things ever bored you. The movie, the video game, talking with a specific person, those might not be boring. And that's why you pay attention. Right now, look at what that movie and game thing 11:08:55 is actually telling us. It's telling us that your focus breaks. The second the work stops being quote unquote fun. Right? When the task gets dull or you hit something you don't know how to do, that's when you finally break that focus, right? Your mind goes looking for for the door within seconds. And that timing is the whole tell in my opinion. The the way the urge to bail turns up right as things get hard. What's really going on is your brain trying to get away from discomfort. The instant it basically feels it. Boredom, confusion, same problem with no obvious next move. It all gets treated like a tiny emergency that you've got to escape. And once you call it discomfort, well, the phone stops being the real problem. It's just the easiest way out of the room. Take it away and people still find a snack or a chore or another task or some so-called research that's really just running. [snorts] Thing is, that easy way out gets easier every single time you actually take it. Each quick hit of 11:09:55 something new teaches your brain to expect a little reward the moment things go a bit boring. And if you do that for a few years, a plain hour [clears throat] for of of real work starts to feel almost unbearable. And that craving for a reward, the second things go flat is really exactly why flipping between tasks feels productive when it really isn't. You bounce across five things. You feel busy. You feel the effort. Meanwhile, the one task that needed real depth and needed to get done never actually got touched. So, there's one more trigger hiding in all that um in all that switching and it's the sneaky one nobody really talks about. Half the time it isn't even boredom. People just hit a spot where they don't know the next move. The work goes a little foggy and that blank feeling reads as a fair reason to walk away. And [snorts] not knowing the next step disguises itself essentially as a distraction every time you feel the pull towards your phone and you go blame your willpower. Truth is the work just got a bit unclear and your mind grabbed the closest excuse to 11:10:56 leave. But that blank foggy feeling is the one thing almost nobody can really sit in for more than a few seconds. Not being able to stand boredom is I think one of the biggest hidden reasons focus falls apart. We've trained ourselves to treat one dull moment like a problem that we have to fix this very second. If you stack all those triggers up and you get one little loop running the whole thing, I call it the escape reflex. Discomfort shows up. You essentially feel the urge to escape. You give in. You get that hit of relief and your focus comes out a notch weaker than it was before. And the sneaky part of that loop is the relief sitting at the end of it because every escape pays you back right now. this second and that instant payoff is really what keeps you running uh running it [clears throat] again. Your brain feels the relief, files it as a win, and then takes away one lesson that leaving felt good. Now, once you watch the loop play out like that, your current attention span suddenly makes 11:11:57 sense, right? And you realize it isn't permanent. Whatever you can focus for today is just to read on how you've been training yourself day after day for years. For most people, that number has been sliding downwards for a decade, one escape at a time with nobody really keeping score. Every escape is basically one rep in the wrong direction, and they pile up into the attention span you've got right now. Stay with a hard thing, and you bank a rep for focus. Give in, and you bank one for escaping. 10 little escapes a day works out to a few thousand reps a year. Nearly all of them teaching you to basically leave the task that you're doing right now for something else, something a bit more stimulating or fun. And there's good news in here. Even if it doesn't feel like it at first, you trained into this attention span by accident, one skipped rep at a time without ever really deciding to. And that also means it answers to deliberate practice the same way any skill you've ever picked up did. So building a better one on purpose is really the whole idea here and it's 11:12:59 exactly where most advice gives up on you. Sticking your phone in a drawer or using fancy timers or the perfect playlist, all of that just makes focusing easier for a minute. It's all treating symptoms of the problem rather than the root of a problem. None of it really trains the real thing, which is staying put when work turns hard. Now, those little helpers aren't necessarily useless. And I'm not telling you to throw them out. They lower the friction sitting around the work for sure, but they just never touch the muscle that keeps you in the seat once the boredom kicks in. They never really, as I said, look at the core issue. And that muscle, the one that keeps you sitting there, is really what the rest of this whole training comes down to. There's a way to train it on purpose the same way you'd build any other kind of strength strength. And that's where we're going in next. So, with that said, let's talk about attention progressive. Now, picture someone walking into a gym for the very first time. Nobody hands them the heaviest bar in the building and asks them to basically rip it off 11:13:59 the rack, right? But that's exactly what we do with focus. Sitting down after years of scattered attention and expecting four clean hours of focus on command. It doesn't work like that, right? Hold to hold on to that gym picture. It runs through this whole section. Focus works like a muscle under a load and it grows the same slow un unglamorous way that strength does. You take on a bit more than you're used to. You recover and next time you can handle a bit more and you do that over years. Expecting 4 hours on day one is the exact reason people quit and then label themselves broken. They reach for a load they were never really ready for. They fall apart around minute 20 and then call it prove that they're hopeless. Start that same person at 15 minutes and they'd have walked away feeling capable instead. So, it's really about expectations here. The real mechanism is almost dumb in how simple it is. You pick one task, you shut off the easy exits, and you stay put a little longer than it feels comfortable. Then the urg 11:15:00 urge to bail shows up. You turn it down once and you do the same thing tomorrow. And here's the part part I really want you to slow down on. The timing is really everything. The most valuable stretch of any session is the few minutes right after you want to quit. Everything before that was doing something that still felt okay. So the comfortable stretch at the start barely counts as training. It's easy. It's pleasant. And it builds almost nothing. The work that actually changes you really starts the moment boredom or frustration shows up. That moment of restlessness is the rep that pays. 10 minutes right there beats two easy hours earlier in the day. That uncomfortable stretch is really the only part your brain actually adapts to. And once you know the after the urge rep is really what counts. The real question is how you run a session and people fall into three styles, right? One's comfortable, one's forced, and one's the one you actually want. They look almost 11:16:01 identical on the outside though. So the comfortable style is the one most people slip into without ever realizing. You work right up until the first real urge to stop and then you stop. You never spend the second under the load that would actually grow your focus. Then there's the forced focus where you chain yourself to a fixed block no matter how you feel. It does build more than coasting does, but push it too hard too often and you start dreading the desk. You start dreading the work because you're forcing yourself to do it. And within a couple of weeks, you basically quit the whole thing altogether. Then the fix for both is really the third style, adaptive focus. And it's the one I'd bet everything on. You push a little past your breaking point. Then you nudge that point further out week by week. You get real growth without really crashing every session and quitting in week two. And this only works once you know where your breaking point actually sits today. So for the first few sessions, just notice the minute you 11:17:01 usually want to quit. That number is just your starting line and you push a hair past it, a few minutes past it. Pushing just past that line and no further is really what keeps this going for months. You grow without burning out and bathing by week two because one small win you can basically repeat daily and it takes you further than one brutal session you never touch again. So adaptive focus finally gives you something real to actually grow and it helps to picture two separate dials, not one. So duration is how long you stay on a single task. Depth is really how fully your head stays inside it while you're there. And this is what people miss when we when they used forced focus. For most of that time, they're not really in the task itself. They're they're not really paying attention. They're forcing themselves to sit at that desk and try to work, but in reality, they're not doing anything productive. So, those two come apart way more often than most 11:18:02 people think. And I think that gap is where most fake productivity lives. Someone sits at the desk for 3 hours while checking their phone every few minutes, long duration, almost no depth, and the output gives them basically away every time, right? It's they don't really produce anything in that time. They're not really concentrated. they're not really actually focused. That kind of shallow stretch can feel busy and produces almost nothing worth keeping. The person stands up drained and somehow empty-handed. So 45 genuinely unbroken minutes of real focus will always outproduce those three hours, right? Always. Because in those three hours, while you can say, while you can brag to your friends that you've done 3 hours of quote unquote focus, you didn't really produce much. So, what you're chasing is both dials climbing together. Longer stretches held more fully week over week. And a good month takes someone from 20 shaky minutes to a clean unbroken hour. And so, you have to 11:19:05 measure it so that you can actually watch it happen. Now, none of this means much without any real numbers. So, here's a run you can actually follow. Start at 20 minutes for the first 3 days. Move to 30 through the back half of week 1. hit 45 in week two and 60 in week three and then land around 75 to 90 by week four. The only rule that matters is that the time has to be genuinely unbroken. Now unbroken is exactly where people cheat without admitting it. Right? So you need to sit near your work while mo most people sit near your work near their work while their mind drifts off every couple of minutes and that earns you nothing. Right? Only the minutes where you're genuinely locked in get to count towards the total. So holding yourself to unbroken time gets way easier with the one tool I want you using from day one, which is the distraction tab. You keep a single sheet of paper next to you. You can put it on your desk as you work. 11:20:08 And every time you feel the pull to switch, you gra or grab your phone or, you know, get up for for a snack, you make one mark and you just stay put. That's it. That's the whole exercise. Now, that one mark turns an invisible reflex into something you can actually see and the urge stops being some force that just happens to you. It's a tick on a page now and you can actually count them at the end of the day. Now, counting the urges does something genuinely motivating over the next few week weeks. The marks start thinning out. They become less and less or they get easier to brush off when they do come. And by week three, you're looking at proof in your own handwriting that the training is actually working. So with that said, let's cover the focus conditioning protocol. So by now you can probably feel the catch, which is that raw willpower falls apart inside a life built to pull you away. Everything in our day-to-day lives is really built engineered to pull our 11:21:10 attention away. Why? Because our attention equals money. So you can't outmuscle surroundings that train distraction into you all day long. So instead of leaning on willpower, you build a setup that handles the four things that actually decide a session. The task, the room, the reps, and the recovery. So it starts with picking one clear target before you actually sit down, which is you set a target. Something vague like work on my business or study gives your mind nothing to really lock on onto. A real finish line should be concrete, right? It should be measurable. For example, a thousand words written, one chapter read, you know, the first 10 minutes of the edit done, whatever you're doing, 20 problems solved. If you're, you know, solving ma math problems, a fuzzy intention drains you before you even start. So, every few minutes, your your mind will have to stop and decide what to do next. And that deciding is its own tax. You're 11:22:11 essentially doing task switching again because you're moving from doing to deciding what to do and it burns the energy you wanted for the work. A visible finish line takes all that deciding off the table. So you know the second you're done and you know whether you actually hit it. Most people are surprised how much of the urge to wander really disappears once the once the target is that clear. Now with the target set, you clear the easy exits out of the room before you start. The phone goes in another room. the desk gets stripped down to just the task and you tell the people around you you're unreachable for the next certain amount of time. The whole point is really to make leaving cost something. So a half second impulse can't really drag you out of the chair. Now clearing exits also means setting up everything you need before the clock starts. Water notes whatever the task calls for. I mean you should have water next to you at all times. All of it should be sitting ready. And that way you never really get the little gift of an excuse to stand up 11:23:12 and fetch something. The the excuse to go and get some water. So with a room handled, you add a fixed starting ritual. You run the same way every single time. Your mind learns by association. So a repeated opening sequence will start to signal that deep work is actually coming. And believe me that this actually works. same place, same time when you can swing it, same short set of moves to begin. So the ritual stays deliberately tiny, a few moves and nothing more. You do a couple of things that basically become your ritual for stepping into deep work. You clear the desk, you write your one target at the top of the page, you set the timer, you take five slow breaths, and you begin right away. Those all of these can be uh part of the ritual, and you can make your own. I'm just giving you examples here, but anything anything that puts you into that mindset of deep work is coming. So for me, a lot of the times it's really just what I said, five 11:24:12 slow breaths before I work and I just go. Sometimes I set a timer for the amount of time that I want to work. And the sheet of paper that I put uh my tally on is always right next to me. And it it shouldn't be a drawn out 45minute morning routine wedged between you and the actual work. So running that same little sequence over and over is really what's going to give you uh more power later on. The moves stop being random and start acting as a cue that your brain recognizes. And after a couple of weeks, the ritual alone starts pulling you into focus before you've even thought about. So keeping it short matters also because uh a long ritual just turns into another way to stall right you don't want to whole productivity routine before you actually you know get to work an elaborate setup becomes a respectable looking reason to basically keep not starting five moves and then you're working five seconds 11:25:13 five uh you know different things you could do u not even five things you know you could just have five breaths that's And once the work is moving, the real training shows up at the very very at the first strong urge to really escape. And that urge is the entire moment everything else was built to get you to. You stay on the task five more minutes. And those five minutes are the actual rep. Those five minutes past the urge are really where the whole thing is one. Five becomes 10 over a few weeks. 10 becomes 20. And it never has to feel, you know, dramatic. Each time you basically are proving to yourself that the urge can show up and you can keep working straight through it. So training past the urge has a limit as well. Um blowing past it is its own mistake. This was never meant to be you grinding yourself into dust. In fact, if you actually try to do more than those five 11:26:13 minutes, you're doing yourself a disservice because it becomes another way for you to find an excuse to actually not do the focus session because you know that you can't believe yourself. You know, you can't trust yourself. So, when your attention has genuinely collapsed, forcing it back keeps failing and you'll stop. you'll recover and you run a fresh session later. So, knowing when to stop protects the quality of every rep you've banked because foggy half their repetition trains sloppy focus just as surely as sharp work trains depth. So, grinding through a death session does more damage than walking away and resetting would. And also, if you've told yourself you're going to be focusing for 30 minutes and in in reality you do, you know, 65, you can't trust yourself anymore. Anytime you tell yourself, I'm going to focus for 30 minutes. You won't do it. You won't actually start because you know, you'll 11:27:15 tell yourself, I yeah, I always say 30 minutes, but in reality, I always do 2 hours and then you won't start. So, you can't you can't trust yourself. Better to say 30 and actually do 33 than to say 30 and do two hours. So, this is a risk almost nobody plans for. Every minute of half focus grinding teaches your mind that sitting there and drifting counts as work. Push through 20 foggy minutes and you've just rehearsed distraction with your full effort behind it. Walking away properly means real rest. The kind that resets you instead of feeding the same urge. So, a short walk, some quiet, maybe, you know, getting some food if you need it, a bit of water, a bit of movement, eyes off into the distance, checking your phone, and calling it a break doesn't really count, and you know it. Now, recovering well sets up the last piece, tracking a few honest numbers. After every session, you write down four things. The time you planned to focus, the time you actually pulled off, the 11:28:16 number of urges you felt, and what you actually produced. Those four numbers stop you from grading a session on how it actually felt and you start grading it on how it actually went. Right? So going on feeling alone is where most people misjudge everything. A session can feel like a slog a lot of the times and still turn out excellent work because the page shows you what your mood was hiding. So all of it folds into one plain idea that you can walk out of here with today. You build focus the same way you build strength. You pick a load, you stay under tension, you recover, and you come back a little stronger. So, if you want help turning this into an actual setup that actually fits your days, that's exactly what we map out together on a call. So, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. With that said, let's cover the review. We went over the overview. We went over the escape reflex, attention progressive overload, the focus conditioning protocol, the review, and finally your [clears throat] action items for the day or the next few days. 11:29:17 First, pick one task with a finish line you can actually see before you start. Put your phone in another room and clear the desk down to just that one task because that ambiguity is really what feeds the urge to wander. So, you need to kill it up front. Then watch for the first real urge to escape and treat it as the start of the work, not the end. Right? This is the mistake most people do. When they treat when they find that urge, they just stop working. That's where when the work starts. Stay with a task for five more minutes the moment you notice the urge and put one mark on your distraction sheet. Those five minutes are the rep that actually builds everything. And then run the weekby- week progression that I mentioned and track your four numbers every session. Push a little past your breaking point each time so that the capacity keeps climbing. And if you want this built around your real days, book a call and we'll map it out together. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it brought a lot of value. If it did, make sure to subscribe for more of these. Uh, 11:30:19 if you want this training along with this document, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And once again, if you want to work with me oneonone on any of this, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. Thank you for being here. Thank you for all the support and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the productivity engine. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the productivity lie, the core engine, the multiplier stack, the review, and then your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me oneon-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. We work with entrepreneurs and high performers from all sorts of different fields to help them master every aspect of their life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self with one complete system. With that said, if you want this training along with its respective document, make sure to join the free community from the link 11:31:17 in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve in every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the productivity lie. So, there are thousands of books, courses, videos, and articles on productivity, and you probably know a lot of them. And I've personally also gone through more of them than I'd like to admit. The tools, the apps, the morning routines, the time blocking systems, the Pomodoro technique, the Eisenhower matrix, the 8020 principle applied to 47 different areas of life. And after consuming all of that, what I can tell you with total confidence is that most of it is really noise. the actual principles that drive real output are surprisingly few, surprisingly simple, and almost entirely ignored in favor of things that are more exciting to talk about. So, the productivity industry has a massive incentive to make things seem more complicated than they are because really complexity sells solutions to that 11:32:19 complexity and simplicity doesn't. Which means the market is really flooded with over complicated systems that create the feeling of productivity without actually producing much of anything. And there's a deeply ironic loop where people spend hours consuming productivity content instead of doing productive work. And the consumption itself feels productive because you're learning and optimizing. But the learning and optimizing are just a sophisticated form of procrastination if it never translates into actual output. Right? So reading about productivity has become a substitute for being productive where the information gives you a sense of progress and control without requiring you to do the uncomfortable thing that would actually move your life forward and your business and so on. And the returns on productivity content consumption diminish rapidly after you learn the basics where the first 5% of what you learn accounts for probably 90% of the value. And everything after that is increasingly marginal optimization that produces almost no additional output. 11:33:20 Now there's a concept called second order procrastination that explains exactly why this loop is really hard to break. And it starts with a simple observation. First order procrastination [clears throat] is obvious. you avoid the task and do something clearly unrelated like scrolling or watching TV and you know you're avoiding it. But second order procrastination is when you avoid the task by doing something that looks like progress towards the task and your brain genuinely can't tell the difference. So reading a book about writing feels like you're working on your writing and studying a course on sales feels like you're improving your sales and consuming productivity content feels like you're becoming more productive. And none of those things are actually the task itself. They can help, sure, sometimes. However, they're not the task itself, but they can make you feel as if you're doing the task itself. The mechanism works because your brain rewards the feeling of forward motion, not actual forward motion re. [clears throat] So the feeling of forward motion and anything that 11:34:20 triggers that feeling gets filed as productive even when the output is basically zero. So the deeper layer is that second order procrastination is actually harder to fix than first order procrastination because the person stuck in the loop has evidence that they're working on it quote unquote and genuinely believes they're making progress which removes the guilt signal that would normally force a correction. And closely related to that is really the idea of metawwork which is any work about work rather than the work itself. At the most basic level, there's the task, right? The thing that produces output. Writing the article, making the call, building the product. Then there's everything around the task. Organizing your tools, planning your schedule, setting up your system, researching the best approach. That surrounding layer is called metawwork. And meta work feels identical to real work because it does involve work. It does involve effort and thinking and decision-m. And your brain processes all of that as productive activity. But the critical distinction is that metal work has no output of its 11:35:23 own. It only has value if it leads to faster or better execution of the actual task. And most of the times it doesn't because people get stuck in the meta layer indefinitely. Real work is finite. It produces something and then it's done. Meta work is infinite, right? There's always another system to build, another tool to test, another method to learn. And that infinity is exactly what makes it so dangerous because you can spend your entire life optimizing the approach without ever making the approach produce anything. And the complexity itself becomes a barrier where people get paralyzed trying to implement a system with 17 moving parts when a system with two or three moving parts would produce better results simply because they actually follow through on it consistently. So, the most productive people I've ever observed or studied tend to operate on extremely simple systems. And their advantage isn't in the sophistication of their approach. It's in the consistency and intensity of their execution on a small number of high leverage activities. Or 11:36:24 they might build a bit of a more complex system at first, but then they don't change it unless something really breaks. Right? There's people that actually constantly are optimizing their system, constantly optimize their to-do lists and and so on and their digital kind of project management when in reality you could just start doing the work regardless if the system is perfect or not. Just it's better to just keep it simple and do the work, right? And complexity induced paralysis is one of the biggest productivity killers there is where you spend so much time setting up and maintaining and tweaking the system that you never actually do the work the system was supposed to support. And another big lie in the productivity space is the misdirection of attention towards the wrong variables. Most productivity content focuses on time management, tool selection, and habit formation. And while none of these are irrelevant, they're not the bottleneck for most people. The real bottleneck is almost always energy management or 11:37:25 decision clarity or your relationship with discomfort. Your output is far more dependent on your energy level than how well you manage your time. And a single hour of high energy focused work will produce a lot more than 4 hours of low energy work. Which means the first thing you should be optimizing for is when and how you generate peak energy states rather than how you organize your calendar. Your body runs on roughly 90-minute energy cycles called ultradian rhythms. And working with those cycles is one of the simplest and most impactful changes you can actually make where you work intensely during the peak and rest deliberately during the dip instead of trying to maintain a flat medium effort state all day which for most people is not even possible. And your energy inputs matter enormously as well. meaning sleep quality, nutrition, movement, stress management. All of these are the actual foundation on which all productivity is really built and ignoring them while obsessing over time management is really missing the force 11:38:26 for the trees. So protecting your energy is just as important as generating it, which means learning to say no to energy drains, to dopamine drains as well. Whether that's unnecessary meetings, toxic conversations, decision fatigue from low stakes choices, or environments that subtly subtly deplete you without you even noticing, right? And the other variable that most people never talk about and it almost never gets talked about in productivity content is your relationship with discomfort. Because the productivi the productive action is almost always the uncomfortable action. And if you haven't trained yourself to move towards discomfort rather than away from it, no system in the world will really save you. Procrastination is almost always discomfort avoidance in one way or another, whether you're actually noticing it or not, where you're not actually too busy or too tired or too distracted. You're just avoiding the feeling that comes with doing the things that matter. And the that avoidance pattern usually points directly at the highest leverage 11:39:27 activity you should be doing. So building discomfort tolerance is a trainable skill like we talked about in the previous piece where each time you move towards the hard thing instead of away from it, you increase your capacity to do it again. And over time the threshold of what feels uncomfortable raises so that things that used to paralyze you now are just routine. So after stripping away all the noise and the misdirection, what you're left with is really a handful of principles that actually drive output. And no, these are not amazing. They're not new. They're not going to sell a million books. They don't sound cool, but they're what works. And they've been validated by decades of research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and peak performance. And the people who implement them consistently consistently outproduce everyone else by a factor that's almost embarrassing. So, the research on what actually makes humans productive has been remarkably consistent for the last 30 years. and the core findings haven't really changed much, which tells you that these principles are fundamental and anything that's been true for three decades is 11:40:29 probably worth your attention. So, the studies also replicate across different populations, industries, and context. Meaning, these aren't niche findings that only apply to knowledge workers or athletes or creatives. They apply to human cognition in general and performance in general, which makes them universally applicable to your life regardless of what you do. So the gap between knowing these principles and actually implementing them is where 99% of people fall down because knowing that deep work for example produces results is not the same as actually doing deep work consistently and the implementation gap is the real productivity problem for most people. So here are the actual principles that drive most of your output right the core engine. I'm going to lay these out plainly without the usual storytelling padding because the value here is really in the principles themselves and in your willingness to implement them and adding complexity to make them seem more impressive would be doing you a disservice. So the single highest leverage productivity behavior supported by research is deep work 11:41:31 meaning sustained periods of focused attention on a cognitively demanding task without interruption or distraction. And the research from Cal Newport and others shows that this type of work produces output that is orders of magnitude higher in quality and quantity than any other mode of working. The optimal deep work blocks is somewhere between 60 and 120 20 minutes based on the research. Now most people can sustain two to four of these blocks per day maximum which means your real productive capacity is about four to 6 hours of deep work per day and everything else is really maintenance, admin and recovery. So protecting those blocks is really the most important thing you can do for your productivity because a lot of people can schedule them and yet then they get distracted and they allow the world to pull them in a thousand different directions which means they should go on the calendar first and everything else should schedule around them if you're optimizing for productivity specifically. And interruptions during a deep work block should be treated with 11:42:33 the same seriousness as interrupting a surgeon during an operation. Now deep work capacity is also trainable. Meaning if you can currently sustain 30 minutes of focused attention before your mind wanders that's your starting point and you build from there gradually adding 10 to 15 minutes every week or two until you can basically sustain 90 plus minutes of unbroken focus. The best way to do this by the way is to sit down when you work set a stopwatch and notice the first time you get distracted and then look at that stopwatch. It's going to tell you 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 20 minutes. Usually, it's somewhere around that time before you actually get distracted. Just jot that number down somewhere and next time try to beat it basically by let's say 5 minutes or 10 minutes. Now, deep work by definition means also single tasking, doing one thing and one thing only. And the research on multitasking at this point we all know is pretty unamiguous at this point. It doesn't work. It reduces your output quality by up to 40% and it increases 11:43:35 the time to complete tasks by up to 50%. And every tab you have open is really attacks on your cognitive performance as well. So the cost of context switching is much higher than most people realize where every time you switch between tasks, it takes an average of 23 minutes for your brain to fully re-engage with the original task you were doing. So imagine you're writing, let's say, a newsletter and you get distracted to check your phone. It takes 23 minutes for your brain to go back to the original task in reality. Which means that checking your phone for just a second during a deep work block actually costs you nearly half an hour of productive capacity. And single tasking requires genuine discipline in today's environment because everything around you is designed to pull your attention in multiple directions simultaneously. So the person who can actually resist that pull and stay on one thing for 90 minutes straight has an almost unfair advantage over everyone who can't. And it gets easier with practice where the 11:44:35 first week of strict single tasking feels almost painful because your brain is basically addicted to the stimulation of actually switching tasks. Every switch basically gives it a bit of dopamine. But after two or 3 weeks, the single focus mode starts to feel natural and the productivity gains become so obvious that you never want to go back and the single tasking starts to give you more dopamine than switching tasks. So the second core principle is really working in cycles that match your body's natural energy rhythms. So ultradian rhythms basically the research on ultradian rhythms shows that your body cycles through roughly 90minute periods of higher and lower alertness throughout the day and aligning your work with those cycles produces dramatically better results than the traditional work for 8 hours straight approach which by the way most people don't actually do. So identifying your personal peak energy windows is step one. And for most people, the highest cognitive peak occurs within the first few hours after waking up, assuming you've had adequate sleep, with a secondary peak in the mid 11:45:38 afternoon. And scheduling your most demanding deep work during those peaks is the single biggest structural change that you can make to your day if it's possible. So spend one week tracking your energy levels every hour on a simple 1 to 10 scale, and you'll see your personal rhythm clearly. And once you have that map, you can basically restructure your entire day around it so that highv value work lands in those high energy windows and low value tasks fill the dips of energy. And matching task difficulty to energy level means you stop trying to do creative or analytical work when your brain is in recovery mode, which eliminates the frustration of feeling like you can't focus when really your body is just telling you that it needs a different type of activity or a break. Now the recovery periods between cycles are also not optional and research shows that deliberate rest between work blocks actually improves the quality but also the speed of the subsequent work block. Meaning rest makes you more productive and more efficient rather than less. So 11:46:38 skipping it is like skipping sleep and expecting to perform well the next day. Now, the type of recovery also matters where scrolling social media or checking your email during a break actually increases your cognitive load because think about it, you basically have to process information, right? So, you'd be doing yourself a humongous disservice if you did that in your rest period. The most effective recovery activities are just walking, breathing, brief meditation, or simply sitting quietly without input. All of which allow the brain to genuinely reset. And you might have noticed online videos popping up of people literally just staring at a wall for 30 minutes or so. That's a break. That's an actual break for your brain. So the recovery period doesn't need to be long. It can be 15 to 20 minutes between 90minute blocks. That is usually sufficient. And the key is that the recovery is real and complete rather than a half break where you're still mentally mentally processing work related information. Now the third core 11:47:39 principle is ruthless elimination of everything that isn't the task that isn't high leverage. Research consistently shows that most people's output comes from a very small percentage of their activities and the rest is really filler that creates the feeling of productivity without producing actual results. So obviously as with almost everything the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule applies to productivity as well where roughly 20% of your activities produce roughly 80% of your results. And the implication is that you could eliminate the majority of what you do and your actual output would barely change or probably even improve or increase because you'd have more energy and attention for the things that actually matter. So the first step is really identifying your high leverage 20% which requires honest assessment of what actually produces results versus what feels productive. And those two categories overlap far less than most people would like to admit. So cutting the low leverage 80% requires real courage sometimes as well because it often includes things that maybe feel 11:48:41 urgent, things that maybe other people expect of you or things that you've all always done and letting go of that in favor of a radically simplified workload feels risky even though the math clearly supports it and you end up more productive and more efficient. However, if something is important yet not the main thing, you can try to delegate it, right? So, for example, cleaning your house. It's not the main thing, yet it's important, and we all have to do it. If it's possible for you, try to delegate it. Hire a cleaner, for example. And you can do that with a lot more tasks than that than than you think. Now, for the administrative tasks that can't be eliminated, batching them into dedicated time blocks compared to spreading them throughout the day will prevent them from fragmenting your deep work and protects your peak energy for the activities that actually move the needle. So, schedule all your admin, email, communication, and low leverage tasks into specific blocks, usually in your low energy periods, and refuse to engage with them outside of those 11:49:42 blocks. And that single structural change will probably add one to two hours of productive deep work to your day immediately, right? So maintaining the boundaries between deep work and batched admin requires enforcing them strictly especially in the beginning when the habit of actually checking your email for example every 15 minutes is still strong and the discomfort of not checking will pass within a few days as the new pattern establishes itself. Now with that said let's cover the multiplier stack. So you have the core engine running meaning the work blocks energy match scheduling ruthless elimination. The question becomes how do you multiply the output even further? So the answer is what I call the multiplier stack which is a set of identity level and environmental upgrades that amplify the effect of the core engine and turn good productivity into extraordinary productivity. Now the first multiplier is your physical environment. The research on this is very clear. Your environment has a measurable impact on 11:50:44 your cognitive performance, your focus duration and your creative output. and optimizing it for deep work is one of the highest return investments you can actually make. So your workspace should be designed for one thing and one thing only and you should be only doing that one thing on that workspace, right? Which is the execution of deep work. That means removing everything that doesn't serve that purpose including visual clutter, accessible distractions and any environmental cue that triggers nonwork behavior. Now, the research shows that visual clutter competes for cognitive pro processing power. Meaning, every object in your visual field that isn't related to the task at hand is slightly degrading your focus. And a clean, minimal workspace, as much as you can, at least isn't an aesthetic preference. It's a performance optimization. And if possible, having separate spaces for deep work and for everything else creates a powerful contextual cue that your brain learns to associate with focused concentration. So that simply entering the deep work space begins to shift your cognitive state 11:51:46 towards focus before you've even started working. Now the digital environment matters just as much as the physical one. Meaning your phone, your computer, your browser, and your notification settings are all either supporting your deep work or actively sabotaging it. And most people's digital environments are configured for maximum distraction by default. So turn off every single notification that isn't genuinely urgent, meaning nearly all of them. And the research shows that even notifications you don't act on still disrupt your focus because your brain registers them. It needs to process them and then needs to find out whether they require action or not. So use digital tools deliberately where you have specific apps and sites that are allowed during deep work blocks and everything else is just blocked or removed. Now this isn't about willpower. It's about really designing a digital environment that makes distraction harder than focus. Now the second multiplier is your internal state meaning your emotional, physical and mental condition at the time of work. And the research shows that working from an optimized state 11:52:47 produces dramatically better output than working from a depleted or scattered state even when the same amount of time is spent. So starting each deep work block with a brief state priming ritual, even just two to three minutes of, for example, focused breathing or intention setting measurably improves the quality and the duration of the subsequent focus session. And the investment of 3 minutes to gain an additional 30 to 45 minutes of peak performance is maybe the best time trade that exists. Right? So specific breathing patterns like bo box breathing, 4 seconds in, 4 seconds hold, 4 seconds out, 4 seconds hold, have been shown to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and shift the brain into a state that's optimal for sustained attention. And this is a free tool that's available to you at any moment without any equipment or training. You just breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, breathe out for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, and repeat. Now, setting a clear intention for the block, for the work block, meaning a specific 11:53:49 outcome that you want to produce in the next 90 minutes gives your brain a target to lock onto and also dramatically reduces the wandering and unfocused start that most people experience in the first 15 to 20 minutes of a work session. Usually that happens because people don't know exactly what they want to complete or what they want to achieve in that work block. So maintaining the state throughout the day also requires attention to the basics that most productivity content ignores. Meaning adequate sleep, 7 to9 hours for most adults, proper hydration, most people are chronically dehydrated, regular movement, even 10-minute walks between blocks, and stable blood sugar, avoiding the crash and spike cycle of processed food. Sleep is the single most impactful performance variable that really exists. And one hour of lost sleep degrades your cognitive performance more than most people realize with research showing that going from eight hours to 6 hours of sleep produces cognitive impairment equivalent to being legally drunk. Now no amount of 11:54:52 product productivity optimization can really compensate for that if you're working as if you're drunk. If you're working with the brain of someone that's basically drunk, right? So the consistency of these maintenance behaviors matters more than uh any occasional uh heroic efforts where maintaining 80% quality sleep, nutrition and movement every day for a year will produce vast vastly better performance than alternating between perfect weeks and terrible weeks. Just aim for 80%. And the third multiplier which ties everything together is really the identity level shift from someone who's who tries to be productive to someone who simply is productive. Right? When productivity is part of your identity, high output becomes your default state. And the daily execution of deep work and energy management stops being a battle and starts simply being how you operate on a day-to-day basis. And the automaticity of identity level productivity means you spend far less mental energy on the metal work of 11:55:52 deciding what to do and when to do it and whether to do it. And all of that energy gets redirected into the actual work itself which further amplifies your output. Now the identity evolves as your capacity grows where what starts as I'm the kind of person who does 2 hours of deep work a day naturally escalates to three and then four as the evidence stacks and the identity solidifies and the whole system becomes self-upgrading over time. And when productivity is integrated into your identity, it just becomes resilient to disruption. When you see yourself as someone who just does the work every single day, you can't be disrupted. Meaning, you can travel, you can change jobs, you can face crisis and deal with life chaos without really losing the core of what makes you productive because the identity persists even when the specific routines temporarily break down. And when routines do break, which they always will, the productive identity automatically begins rebuilding them. The same way a disciplined identity automatically reinstalls discipline 11:56:53 after a disruption. And that automatic rebuilding is what separates the people who have permanently high output from the people who cycle between productive phases and unproductive ones. Now over the long term, the identity multiplier is one that produces the largest compounding effect because it ensures that all the other principles, the deep work, the energy management, the elimination, the environment design are all being executed consistently year after year. And that consistency is really what turns ordinary principles into extraordinary results. With that said, let's cover the review. We went over the overview, the productivity light, the core engine, the multiplier stack, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, schedule your first 90-minute work block for tomorrow morning during your peak energy window with phone off notifications disabled and one single task to complete. Then, list every recurring activity in your week. Identify the 20% that produces 80% of the results and then cut or batch everything else into a single daily 11:57:54 admin block. Finally, spend 30 minutes today redesigning your physical workspace for deep work by removing every object, device, and visual element that doesn't directly serve focus concentration. With that being said, once again, if you want to work with me one-on-one, then make sure to book a call from the link in the description. We work with entrepreneurs, creators, and high performers across all all sorts of different fields to help them master their health, wealth, love, and self with one complete system. If you want this training along with its respective document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. Again, I hope this brought a lot of value. I hope it helped. If it did, make sure to let me know in the comments. Like the video, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one. Thank you for being here. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is 11:58:54 the price of becoming serious. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the need to leave, the weight of sacrifice, the return to life, the review, your action items for the day or the next few days. And with that said, if you want to work with me oneonone, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with this training, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the need to leave. So, there are seasons in your life where a normal life will keep you normal, plain and simple. Meaning, if you keep doing the same things you've always done, you'll keep getting the same results. And that's just how it goes. Your normal life has a real pull on you. And if you keep giving it your mornings, your nights, your attention, and your little private excuses, you'll keep showing up as the 11:59:56 same person you said you were done being. And that pull looks like reaching for your phone before your feet even hit the floor in the morning. Or the yes to going out in the evening when you already know you need to go to the gym the next day in the morning. or eating clean until 8 at night and then blowing the whole day in the kitchen. Each one of these is small enough to defend, which is exactly why keep people keep defending it. But those small things get serious once they repeat. Your body starts expecting comfort before effort. And after a while, the work feels heavier than it needs to. And you've essentially trained yourself to be interrupted, soothed, and answered way too quickly. So you'll feel the cost as irritation with yourself. You'll say you want a different life and then watch another day prove the same old thing all over again. It's a rough feeling, but it's a useful one if you sit with it instead of running away from it. And it points you straight to where the lie is. So, here's the thing. You need a season 12:00:57 where you leave some things alone for a while. Meaning, just as many distractions as possible need to be cut off. And nobody's asking you to vanish forever or turn into some cold person who hates their life, but rather you make your life intentionally simpler for a small stretch of time so that your main goal can finally get enough of you and your attention to actually matter. And you keep the things that make you stable like sleep, obviously, training, work, and a handful of real relationships that make you more honest. And maybe prayer or reflection if that's your thing. Everything that keeps you well stays exactly where it is. And the cutting starts where the scatter begins. So what goes is the extra stuff you already know is costing you. Late nights, cheap pleasure, random availability, the need to explain your plan to people who won't live with a consequence if you waste another year. And the annoying part is that yes, the old life will won't always look bad. 12:01:58 Some of it will look normal. Some of it will look friendly, even healthy from the outside. And that's exactly where you trick yourself if you're not paying attention. You'll tell yourself you're being reasonable. And a lot of the time, you're really just leaving room for the old patterns to just come back. Balance is good in the right season. I'm not knocking balance, but in a building season, balance can turn into the word you hide behind when you're scared to go allin. And going out might be fine later, right? And the same goes for dating and the extra social time. Right now, the question is simpler than that. It is is the thing pulling the energy away from the main thing that you need to be doing from the one goal you said matters most to you right now. And that question gets uncomfortable if you answer it honestly because you'll notice a lot of what you're holding on to is simply expensive for the season you're in. Once the price is actually visible, the decision to set something down for a while gets much easier to make. And so once you see the cost, the choice 12:02:59 becomes pretty simple. You decide what gets access to you before the day starts making its demands. Your first hour, your last hour and the best part of your mind get chosen in advance and whatever was draining that loses its claim. And so your morning's probably got to get boring for a while. You need to wake up, leave the phone alone, sit with the goal, and get the first real piece of work done. It's not fancy, but there's less room for the day to run you before you've chosen who you're going to be. And your evening needs to have that same respect because a lot of people lose tomorrow at 11 tonight. They stay up too late. They scroll too long. They answer things they that could have waited. Then they act surprised when the next morning feels heavier. Look, once you've made the choice, life gets simpler. Simple still costs effort, but at least the effort finally gets one direction. You protect the few things that strengthen you and repeat them until the discipline stops feeling like some big event. It's just how you are every day. And from the 12:04:01 outside, it might look like kind of plain, you know, it might look boring to to the to people outside of of yourself, right? Fewer plans, less explaining, and a lot more alone time with work that nobody sees yet. And that's fine. A lot of real becoming looks unimpressive while it's still happening. And this is where you meet the actual material. The body that wants comfort, the page that you keep avoiding, the training session that you don't feel like doing. And underneath all of it, that hour of work where nothing dramatic happens except you don't leave. So the first proof won't always show up on the outside. It's the fact that you kept the day. You said you'd do something and you actually did it without needing some big feeling to carry you there. And the smaller life starts to feel weird at first, too, right? Because it's a lot simpler. It's a lot more it's a lot less stimulating. And so less input can feel like emptiness when when you're used to being stimulated constantly. But after a bit, 12:05:03 you'll start seeing what was actually running you. And you'll see that cravings show up and you'll see what cravings show up and when. And so certain people will turn out to pull you out of yourself. And that will get very obvious very quickly. And what you reach for when your work becomes a bit more difficult and when you feel lonely and when nobody's checking will tell you the rest. So seeing that will hand you back some control. It's not going to be perfect. You're still human and you'll still have off days, but you'll stop pretending the problems some mystery when the same few things have been basically sitting there in plain sight for months. So with that said, let's actually cover the weight of sacrifice. So, here's the concept underneath everything I just said, and it comes straight out of chemistry. There's a thing called activation energy. And before two elements can actually combine into something new, there's a specific amount of energy that has to get crossed first, right? And the key word here is crossed, right? You can add small 12:06:05 amounts of energy slowly, patiently over a long stretch of time, and nothing will happen. The reaction only cares whether you've hit that threshold, whether you've crossed that line. If you sit below that line, all the patient effort dissipates as if it never happened. And the moment you cross it, the whole thing fires at once. So, you need to think about like think about it like lighting a fire. You can hold a match near a piece of wood for a long amount of time and still get absolutely nothing. Why? Well, the wood isn't gradually getting more ready the longer you wait because there's a specific temperature it needs to reach before it actually catches. And until it gets there, nothing's happening no matter how patient you are. So, time spent trying was never the variable that mattered. Concentration is what crosses that line. A burst of heat, focused and sustained, aimed right at the thing that needs to change. So, personal change works the exact same way. Most people treat it like a slow accumulation problem, figuring that a bit more 12:07:07 consistency, a bit more discipline spread across a few areas will eventually stack up and show results on its own. And sometimes that's true. Other times, nothing changes because the efforts spread across too many things to ever concentrate into something that actually crosses the line. So think about how your energy actually moves through a normal day. The goal gets some of it. So So do the late night. So does the phone first thing in the morning and a dozen other small pleasures. Every one of those things pulls from the same limited supply and that supply keeps getting divided up. So no single area ever really builds up enough to matter. Life stays roughly the same. And you can see clearly you can see this clearly uh in someone who's been trying to change for a long time. They've had the realizations. They've read the books. They've set the goals. They've watched the videos. They've started the routines. In two years in, they're still more or less the same person. Their life is still more or less the same. The total energy pointed at the goal never built up enough to cross the line. And every step forward had something pulling 12:08:09 the supply back. So the leaks are rarely obvious. Honestly, most of the time they're very hidden, which is what makes them easy to ignore. 15 small things that drain the supply, each with a reasonable excuse. each looking harmless on its own. But together they keep you permanently under the line. So close enough to feel like progress while the reaction never actually fires, while you never actually cross the threshold. [clears throat] So you stay divided. One part of you keeps reaching towards who you want to be while another part still feeds the old version. So removal is what closes that gap. You take enough off the table that the energy finally has somewhere to build until something actually changes. And the real question is how you seal all the leaks and point enough of the supply at the one thing that actually needs to change. A new habit or a better morning routine won't get that done on its own. What does it is a season, a deliberate contained stretch where you cut back what your energy is pointing 12:09:09 towards so that the concentration can finally build and the reaction can actually fire. I call it the hermit season. And it's a joke to a degree, but not really. So, it's a set period where you gather what's been spread across everything that wants a piece of you and point it at the one thing that needs it most. Just long enough to cross the threshold and let the reaction begin. And that's really what it comes down to. Sacrifice, right? Plain, unglamorous, repeated removal of the things keeping you under that line. Most people hear the word and picture punishment. Really, it's a lot simpler than that. It's just the toll that you have to pay to cross the line. And once you pay it, the energy finally gets to build. And that's what produces the change that consistency alone never really gets you. So the desire doesn't disappear. By the way, it will ask for the food, the phone, the night out, the little escape. A serious season just teaches you that the desire can speak without getting obeyed, which is a humongous difference. 12:10:11 Most people just obey every desire they have. And that gap between the urge and the action, that's where a lot of the real work begins. So your body will probably complain when the old comfort gets cut, right? That's fine. It just means it's been answered too fast for too long and now it's adjusting to a different order. The complaining usually lasts a week or two and then it starts to quiet down as the new rhythm settles in. And your mind will try to bargain too. It will find very reasonable arguments for why this one time doesn't count, why you deserve a break, why the rule can bend today. You can hear the argument out, let it finish talking, and then do the thing anyway. So, every time you do that, you get a bit stronger in a very practical way because the gap between the urge and the action starts to widen. And that gap is really where your real choices live because you went from getting an urge to immediately satisfying that urge regardless of how short-term it is. And now you're actually creating space between the urge 12:11:12 and actually you satisfying the urge if you satisfy it at all. So you might not see it in the mirror or the bank account right away, but you'll feel certain things that used to own you start to feel optional now. And so the physical world world pays you a lot later. That's just how it works. You can eat clean, train, work deeply, cut the obvious leaks for weeks before you actually see the result you were hoping for. And that delay is exactly where most people quit. And still, you're entitled to the work towards a goal. You're not entitled to the outcome. So, at the end of the day, you might not even get the outcome in in this specific season, but you're not entitled to the outcome anyway. You're just entitled to the work. And so, most people quit in that stretch where, you know, they're doing all the things that they need to be doing and yet you don't they don't see results still. And they do the right thing for a bit. They look around, they see nothing dramatic has really changed in their lives, and they 12:12:14 decide it's it's not working. However, something is working, right? You're building the ability to hold the standard without needing instant proof. And basically, you're training your mind for delayed gratification. And that skill is what every later result gets built on. And here's the part that I think most people skip too fast. The inner change happens before the outer change happens. Right? Before the outer evidence shows up. You can sacrifice something today and see nothing happened today. No money, no transformation, no sign from the outside that anything changed. And yet something did, right? What changed is small but real. You kept one promise and broke one loop. A craving rose. You got you watched it and you let it pass without it becoming the ne next action. Nobody sees that, right? it only you know about that it's private but if you repeat it enough your relationship with yourself will genuinely change you'll start [snorts] trusting yourself in a way that's hard 12:13:15 to fake through affirmations or just mindset content right it's the kind of trust that comes from watching yourself do the boring difficult useful thing when there's no reward in the room and nobody's really tracking you and self-respect works the same way meeting a standard when the old comfort was right there available with nobody around to catch the slip builds it in a way that talking about standards won't. And so at some point this gets almost spiritual. You're giving up something real before the higher thing has fully shown up. The old pattern gets cut while the new one still feels unstable. And in a way, you're making an offering to a future version of you before that versions arrived to confirm it was worth it. And that takes a kind of patience most people never train. And the act, it's the active kind of patience where you keep doing the work. You keep protecting the day. We're not talking about passive patience. You keep doing the work. You keep protecting the day. You keep saying no to the obvious leaks. And you let the time handle what effort 12:14:15 alone can't. So the physical result comes eventually, usually later than you'd like. And once it starts, it tends to move very, very quickly. And the proof shows up in pieces, right? You'll sit longer with discomfort than you used to and you'll recover faster when you basically relapse or slip. And all of that is real and it compounds week over week. And so there's a real cost here as well. Some things won't get as much of you during this season. You'll miss some things. You'll feel lonely at times. And you'll watch people around you doing the exact things you're currently saying no to. And some part of you will feel the weight of that gap. And that loneliness doesn't need to turn into a whole story, right? You don't have to make it bigger than it is. It's mostly just the sound of your life getting quieter. And the old distractions are now gone. The new self hasn't fully shown up yet. And so there's a stretch in between that can feel a bit empty. But that stretch is simply the space the new thing needs to 12:15:16 grow into. So you still need to take care of yourself in that in that inside that space. So serious season isn't, as I said earlier, it's not punishment. It's not self-punishment. You still need sleep. You still need movement. You still need some human connection and enough honest reflection to stay to stay clear. The stable things stay in place the entire season. What goes is the familiar stuff that was keeping you weaker than you should be. And so if the cuts are making you brittle, anxious, or so isolated that you're starting to spiral, then something's off with the plan. The whole point of the season is to make you more capable. So if you're cutting stuff that is eroding basic functioning, then you've you've drifted away from the purpose of of the season. Adjust what you're cutting and leave the standard itself alone. So the version of sacrifice that actually works is almost boring. No dramatic announcements, no public declarations, no performance of seriousness. You just know what has to go, you let it go, and you get back to 12:16:17 the work. And there's a pull to tell people to announce the season to explain the changes to tell people you're in this mode um in this hermit season to get some recognition and approval and validation for your commitment. Don't do that. That's the same part of you that wants approval. And if you feed it now, it will eventually be the thing that breaks the season. To whoever genuinely needs to know, let the rest show up in the results. Tell whoever tell whoever genuinely needs to know and let the rest show up in the results. Now discipline compounds when you keep making the same choice without any fans. Right? Wake up, you train, you do the work, you protect the night, and you review the week. You point a plain life hard in one direction for long enough and it will surprise you with what it produces. So with that said, let's actually cover the return to life. What happens afterwards? So this kind of season isn't necessarily meant to last forever, right? You pull back so you can come back with more to 12:17:18 give. And when you return, you'll be less easily moved. You'll be less hungry for approval from people who weren't there while you were doing the work and more capable of holding on to the thing that you said you wanted. The season needs a target though, right? If you're just being serious with no actual clear target or goal, it's just bas it can turn into avoidance. So you need to get specific about what the season is actually for. So what h what helps with that is having a rough timeline as well. So 30 days to clean up the inputs and restore some basic order. 90 days to build real work capacity a year if the goal is big enough to to need that kind of runway. The length doesn't really have to be perfect or uh humongous, but the season needs some kind of a shape. It or it will fade back into normal life without you ever noticing. And you can set the dates from this date to this date. And you'll want to track a few things during this phase. Uh it's it's just enough data that you stop being able to lie to yourself about how it's 12:18:19 actually going. So you need to track sleep. And I think you need to track this first since everything else degrades once your sleep is off. So a simple note of when you went down to sleep and when you got up is enough to catch any drift before it costs you a week. Another thing is whether you showed up to the gym or not or if you [snorts] found a reason not to. Right? The record matters more than the quality of any single session and a visible streak makes the next excuse harder to believe. The next one is whether you showed up to the gym or you found an excuse not to. It's simple yes or no. Then what you eat should be tracked as well. And what you eat decides how much energy the goal actually gets. So write down the meals that went off plan and what was happening right before them and then a pattern will show up within a couple of weeks. Another one is real hours spent on the thing that actually matters. But count only the time where the work was actually moving, right? And you'll actually be surprised at how few of those hours a busy day really 12:19:21 contains. The next one is how much of that work was genuinely concentrated versus distracted and halfpresent. So I've always said that an hour of focused work will always outperform 6 hours of distracted work. If not by quantity of work than by quality for sure. And so tracking the difference will show you what your real capacity looks like right now. And the next one and final one is what you reached for when your your work started getting a bit more difficult or boring or hard since that will tell you basically where your distractions are. It will tell you where your mind wanders to anytime it feels bored or you know or finds the work hard. And so note the time of the day and the trigger and then the same two or three culprits will most likely keep showing up. Now once the season's done its work, pleasure gets to come back in and you relate to it differently from a more grounded place and you might not even see the same things as pleasure anymore. A meal can 12:20:23 just be a meal again. A night out can be just a night out. You'll be the one doing the choosing this time and you'll feel the difference almost immediately. And so the same thing can be fine in one season and genuinely expensive in another. Going out, dating, spending loosely. None of it is evil on its own by itself. It comes down to what season you're in, how often it repeats, and whether it's pulling you from the thing you said was your actual priority right now. So you need to bring things back slowly and only the ones that actually serve the life you're trying to build. Right? Some things were cut for a season and once you've been away from them for a while, you'll see exactly what they were costing you and and you don't want them back anymore. And you won't need to tell anyone you changed. You'll have lived through a stretch where the day matched what you said. And that does something that you know, it does something to your relationship with yourself that you don't necessarily have to express at all. You'll just know. At first, it will feel more like evidence than confidence. You'll know that you can hold a standard for yourself when 12:21:23 it's inconvenient and you already have. And you'll notice more follow through. Hard task will hold you longer before you find a reason to leave them. And more of what you start will actually get finished. So the work won't need to feel good anymore before it actually gets your full attention. And you'll catch the old excuses while they're still forming. The distractions will get more visible faster, and you'll need less emotional buildup before you actually do the thing. And some people will notice and respect it. Others will feel uncomfortable with it and try to pull you back towards the version of you they they actually understood. Others will not notice anything at all. You don't need to manage any of those directions or reactions. Right? Less access is usually enough. Less less explaining, less willingness to play the old role just to keep things comfortable and to keep the boat from rocking. You don't need to tell anyone anything about it. you just stop and the relationship finds its new level on its own. After a while, you'll also gravitate towards people who 12:22:24 make you better and more honest. The ones who actually help you squander your life while calling it fun will stand out sharply once you've got and the ones that help you squander your life while calling it fun will stand out very clearly uh once you've got some distance from it. and the space between you and them will grow on its own. So don't over complicate the beginning. Don't wait for perfect conditions or a full plan. Pick the goal, pick the length, name the three things you're cutting and three things you're protecting. Write them down and then just start living it. Start taking action on it. That's basically what a hermit season is. Keep it simple enough to actually do. One make goal, three cuts, three protected things, and one weekly review where you actually look at the week's trade and make one or two adjustments. That's it. You don't need any more structure than that to start. And make the cuts specific. They or or or they won't you won't actually make them. So social media as a cut means absolutely nothing. So write down no phone in the first hour 12:23:26 or the specific social media platforms you're uninstalling from your phone. The same goes for eating better, which becomes no food outside of the plan, right? And going to bed earlier, which becomes lights out by 10:30, unless something's genuinely wrong. So, the things you want to protect need that same specificity. A sleep window sitting on the calendar, a training slot you've already blocked off, a work session with a phone in another room. You just make each one concrete enough that you can tell clearly whether you kept it or not. And by the way, if you want support doing this kind of work, rebuilding your life from the inside out, that's what I do with people. So, we'll look at where you are, where you want to be, what's standing in the way, and we'll build a step-by-step plan to get there together. So, if that sounds like something you're interested in, book a call from the link in the description. Now, the first few days will probably feel off, right? You're removing things that have been shaping your state for a long time and and your mind and your body won't cooperate right away. And so, you need to let it be uncomfortable. You need to 12:24:27 keep the day simple enough to repeat and serious enough to matter and just see what happens after two weeks of actually living this. And after that, you just keep going. You keep the cuts. You protect the structure. You review the week every week and you let the season do what it's there to do, which is to keep the main thing the main thing to keep you focused in one direction. Now, with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview. We covered the need to leave, the weight of sacrifice, the return to life, the review, and finally your action items for the day or the next few days. First, pick the length of your season and name the one goal it exists to serve. Then remove three things that have been crushing your discipline, attention, or self-respect. And finally, build the day around sleep, training, focused work, and one weekly review. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching. If you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly 12:25:27 newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. Again, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. All right, hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the 1,000 hour rule that decides who actually wins. As you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the lie, the knowledge crisis, the new advantage, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one on any of this and improving every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. And with that covered, let's get started and talk about the lie. So, there's a belief sitting underneath almost everything you've ever tried and dropped. And it goes like this. Talent decides, and you are either dealt with it or you weren't. So, you've probably never said it out loud, but you felt it every time something got hard. 12:26:25 and a small voice asked whether you were really just built wrong for this. Now, that belief is doing more damage to your life than any real shortage or of ability ever could. So, try something that almost never nobody actually does. Take a skill that you admire in someone. Take someone that you admire and a skill that you admire in them and then ask how many hours they actually put in before they were any good. not the highlight reel that you see today, not after they've mastered it, but the silent years before it. The real number is almost always going to be in the thousands. So, the moment you see that, your 10 or 20 hours that you've put into something will stop looking like you're not good at it, and you'll most likely realize that it's just a warm-up, basically. So, somewhere around week three, a very specific feeling shows up for most people. You've put in real effort. you expected something back for it and the mirror or the the bank balance or the blank page says no. Now that silence feels like a verdict on 12:27:26 you, but it isn't one, right? It's the distance between when effort goes in and when results come out. And that distance is always going to be longer than anyone warned you. Now, sit in that silence long enough and the mind goes hunting for an exit. It almost never picks the true reason, which is that you you're simply early. It reaches for something far more permanent instead. The story that you don't have what it takes. And once a person believes that, walking away stops feeling like quitting and starts feeling more so like accepting reality, like they're being realistic, which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Now, picture someone 6 weeks into the gym. They've trained hard. They've eaten clean. Uh they check the mirror every single morning hunting for a visible change, but the body has barely begun. muscle and fat move on a six-month timeline timeline, not a week one. And nobody really hands new lifters that that memo. So, a person who is genuinely on track talks themselves into believing 12:28:28 they're they're a lost cause. And a first-time founder as well runs the same script in a different outfit, right? They launch maybe a product. They pour maybe 50 scattered hours in. They read the market silence as a final grade on whether they're cut out for any of this. When in reality, 50 hours barely covers learning your own customer's language. Real businesses get measured in years of unglamorous iteration. And almost nobody really signs up for that timeline with their eyes open. And here's why why that timeline actually stays invisible. Looking straight at it means admitting the thing will take far longer than the story in your head. And that story is comfortable. So the founder skips the clock and grabs the easier explanation that a smarter person would have cracked it by now. The confidence drains. Then the project dies and then the real culprit plain unfinished time never actually even gets named. Now sales might be the clearest test of this whole lesson since it keeps score uh out loud and in public. A beginner makes 30 cold 12:29:28 calls, let's say, collects 30 versions of no, and decides they're just not a good salesperson. What they can see is that the skill barely begins to click until somewhere in the thousands once you've heard so many objections that none of them actually rattle you anymore. 30 calls isn't a verdict. It's barely the introduction. The cruel part is the early reps pay nothing and nobody watches them happen. There's no applause. There's no commission. There's no visible sign you're actually moving at all. And those exact reps are at the same time what separate the person who eventually closes uh in their sleep from the one who actually taped the resignation note to the wall at call 30. Now the work that matters most is really the work that feels the most pointless while you're while you're inside it. So that sales uh uh really what sales really trains is your tolerance for delay. Most people can do the hard thing once and far fewer can keep doing it while the scoreboard stays frozen at at zero for weeks on end. And that tolerance for an 12:30:29 empty scoreboard is really the skill living underneath the skill and it's the one that quietly decides who's still standing at hour 300. Now watch anyone trying to become a better speaker and you'll see it. Day one, they maybe expect clean, confident sentences and instead they actually ramble. They lose the the threat twice and then they walk off certain that they're just awkward by nature and that they're just a bad speaker. And what they're really missing is that fluency gets built on a huge stack of clumsy reps. The bad meetings and the worst small talk, none of it with an audience. You don't skip that stack, right? You build it in private. And every clumsy conversation is really doing the work that the speaker refuses to count. In the moment, it feels like evidence p piling up against you. But if you turn it over, each fumble removes a rough edge you couldn't have found any other way. So sounding awkward for a few hundred hours isn't really a sign you're failing. It's the entire entry fee, basically. And every good speaker alive has paid it. So your own mind runs a 12:31:31 trick on you here. 10 bad attempts start to feel like a the complete picture. So you reach a a lifelong conclusion off of a sample far too small to actually mean anything. And those early reps were most likely guaranteed to be bad for everyone who ever got good at anything. Right? Reading them as proof of your ceiling closes the case before the real evidence has even shown up. And underneath all of these stories really sits one piece of plain arithmetic. People invest 10, 20, 50 hours and expect the the result that for almost any real skill only appears somewhere near a thousand. Set those numbers side by side and the mismatch is almost funny because what's happening is you're essentially demanding a,000 hour outcome on a 50-hour deposit and then calling the shortfall a lack of talent. Right? So I call this the 1,000 hour problem. And once you see it, you start 12:32:32 spotting it everywhere. It's the invisible reason behind a staggering number of abandoned goals. People misjudge the true size of the task before they take a single step. They set their hopes up against a number that was basically never realistic in the first place and then they quit feeling like failures when they were only ever early. So the math beat them and they took the blame themselves. Now sizing is the first half of the trap. The number you guess at the start shapes every decision that actually follows it. So if you guess small and you commit small, well, you ration your effort and then you feel robbed when the when a fraction of the work hands back a fraction of the result. The whole disappointment traces straight back to one bad estimate that you made on day one. set the scale wrong and ordinary difficulty really starts feeling like a personal emergency. The the work was always going to feel heavy this early. It's just part of it. That's simply what 12:33:33 the front end of mastery feels like for everyone alive. A person expecting easy at the beginning reads that as that heaviness as a sign that they're broken or that they're not good at it. you know, know the real scale ahead of time and the same heaviness turns into proof that you're exactly where you should be. So name the real number before you begin and if anything overexaggerate how much time it will take you and take it as truth. If you do that the entire experiences experience changes shape because now slow progress stops registering as failure and you start seeing it more so as receipt for work you already agreed to do. The hours don't get any lighter. They just stop frightening you since you were expecting every last one of them. Now, people who who last are almost always the ones who knew the price going in. They keep stacking hours through the boring middle while everyone around them demands a refund the second it stops being fun. Same skill, same difficulty, wild wildly 12:34:36 different ending. One group budgeted for a,000 hours. The other thought they were buying a quick win. So now that we've covered the lie, let's actually talk about the knowledge crisis. So effort is only half the story. And the other half is really the part that almost nobody is talking about. Even if you fix your expectations and commit to the hours, a second force can still waste every one of them. It has nothing to do with it with discipline or how badly you actually want it. It's about the world you're trying to learn and and how completely that world has changed underneath us all. So go back even 40 or 50 years and the hard part of getting good was really just access. You needed the right book. Your library might not stock or the right teacher who might live three towns over or the one room where the people who actually knew things happened to gather. Knowledge was guarded. It was scattered and it was slow to reach. If you could get to it at all, you were already ahead of nearly everyone else. So when 12:35:38 information is scarce, you treat every scrap of it as precious. You find one good book and you read it three times over. You hang on every word from every single mentor you managed to find. Since there was no second opinion a click away, right? So scarcity for forced focus on people mostly through a flat lack of other options. Now, for most of history, having access plainly meant having an edge, a better library, a wealthier school, a tie to someone who knew the craft, and you genuinely knew more than the person beside you. And that advantage was real, and it held steady for generations. Then it evaporated almost overnight. Everything flipped. And the strange part is how few people updated their behavior to match. Information is now infinite. It's free. and it's sitting one search away at three in the morning, right? Every lecture, every framework, every expert breaking down every skill, all of 12:36:39 it is instantly in reach. The bottleneck that defined learning for centuries simply disappeared. And what replaced scarcity is overload. And overload is its own kind of problem. If you pick one skill, let's say copywriting, and you'll surface thousands of books, tens of thousands of videos, and an endless feed of creators, each insisting their method is the only one that works. And it looks like pure opportunity. It stops more people cold than scarcity ever did. Now, the deeper problem is that abundance turns into noise the instant you need a direction. So, one expert might swear by an approach and the next swears by its opposite, and both sound completely certain. So you stand there holding more information than any human could use and somehow you still feel further from starting than when you knew nothing at all. More has some somehow become worse. And this is where the modern learner actually gets stuck surrounded by everything and able to commit to nothing. So two separate 12:37:41 problems are landing at the same moment and together they're basically lethal. If you pull them apart and you understand why so many genuinely capable people never get good at a single thing, you can see it in that basically right. So solve them and almost everything else opens up. Now we already met the first problem which is the sheer size of the hours. People walk in assuming a short road and a cheap skill and that one misjudgment ends most attempts early. On its own it wouldn't it it would be survivable. is the second problem that turns the first one deadly. So underestimating size means you expect the payoff long before the hours could possibly produce it. You set the timeline by how motivated you feel instead of by what the skill actually demands of you. And when the payoff misses your invented schedule, it feels like talent betraying you when in truth the clock was just never going to bend to a guess. So the 12:38:42 second problem is sharper and far more modern. You don't know what to learn. Everything is laid out in front of you and none of it tells you which slice matters for your exact situation right now. So what happens is you freeze before the first real step and you become unsure which thousands hours are even the right ones to start counting. And not knowing which hours count poisons the whole abundance. Every path looks looks basically defensible. Every creator points somewhere different and choosing wrong feels expensive enough that people choose nothing. And the fear of sinking a 100 hours into the wrong thing stops them from basically sinking one hour into anything. Now a frozen learner rarely stays frozen for long. The paralysis turns into bouncing. A book this week, a new guru the next, then a course, a system, a framework, a fresh start every Fortnite. Each switch feels like progress since it 12:39:43 basically arrives with a fresh hit of motivation, but the hours never really land in one place long enough to count and you end up holding a pile of beginnings and almost nothing finished. Add up a few years of that and the outcome is brutally specific. A head packed with knowledge, maybe if you even took action on that, and almost no skill to show for any of it. And you can explain a dozen frameworks and execute none of them since explaining and doing are completely different things and only one of them ever got practiced. So skill forms in the exact opposite way scattered learning does. It needs hours stacked in one place repeated and aimed at a single target for long enough to compound on themselves. Spread the same hours across 20 interest and not one of them ever crosses into mastery. the total time can be identical while the outcome is nothing alike. Now, Michael Simmons, he's a a writer by 12:40:43 the way, has been making a version of this argument for years. The way he frames it, the old bottleneck was getting access to information, and the new bottleneck is really making sense of it. And I'm paraphrasing here, but that flip is the whole game right now. The scarce resource stopped being knowledge and became judgment. And David Deutsch pushes the same idea somewhere deeper into how knowledge grows at all. As I read him, real progress comes from building good explanations and a pile of raw facts does almost nothing standing on its own. The modern flood hands you infinite facts, but what it can never hand you is the sense of which ones matter and what to build out of them. So the real bottleneck today comes down to one ability, choosing what to ignore. The person who can filter the noise down to one skill and one path has already cleared the wall that stops everyone else cold. Win that fight and your hours finally get to land where they actually count. And that at [clears throat] last 12:41:44 is where the good news begins. So let's talk about the new advantage. So here's the part that should genuinely excite you. A new advantage has opened up inside all of this chaos. And it doesn't belong to the people you'd assume. The smartest and most gifted hold no special claim on it. It's available to absolutely anyone. And the wild thing is how few people ever reach down and take it. Almost everyone assumes the edge goes to talent to the naturals who make it all look easy. We picture some inborn gift doing the heavy lifting while the rest of us watch from the sidelines. It's a com comforting story since if winning takes a gift you weren't born with, then sitting out was never your fault. Comforting and almost entirely wrong. Leaning on talent as the explanation lets you off the hook in the most flattering way available. The winners were simply built different. So your own stalling was never really in your hands. 12:42:46 Your own fate was never really in your hands. It feels generous to yourself in the moment and in practice it hands away the one thing that was actually within your reach. Drop the talent story and the real advantage comes into view. It's focus. The plain ability to lock onto one skill and stay there while everyone else scatters. In a world built to fracture your attention into a 100 pieces, sustained focus has grown rare enough to be a genuine edge. Can you imagine that? And unlike raw intelligence, it's something you actually get to choose. Strip away the talent myth and what's really left rewards stamina more than brilliance. The gifted starter who jumps to a new shiny thing every month loses to the ordinary person who simply keeps showing up. Patience that stays put beats talent that wandered off. And the whole thing belongs to whoever flatly refuses to leave. So str the strangest part is this 12:43:46 edge sits almost completely unclaimed. That's the thing. Everyone's busy chasing the next method, the next tool, the next creator promising a shortcut while the simplest move of all staying puts ignored. And the opportunity is sitting right out in the open with almost no competition for it. And that's precisely what makes it so valuable right now. Now claiming it comes down to four different things. and they're so plain they'll almost feel like a let down. None of them is clever, and you've likely heard each one on its own before. No single step carries the power by itself. But doing all four at the same time is what almost nobody manages. And that's where the whole thing lives. So, the first move is to really choose one skill and actually commit to it. Not three of them with two backups waiting in case this one disappoints. one clear target that you'll stay with through the dull middle stretch where nothing seems to move. That single decision will silence most of the noise instantly 12:44:47 since the moment you've chosen, the moment you've actually committed to something, 90% of the internet stops being relevant to you. Now, the second move is to ignore almost everything else on purpose. Thousands of sources can exist without a single one of them holding a claim on your time. This is far harder than it sounds because every piece of content out there is engineered to feel urgent and essential because it gathers attention and learning to let it scroll past unread is what protects the hours you've already decided to spend. So ignoring well is itself a skill that almost no one bothers to practice. Every source is competing for your attention and most of them deserve a polite no. So treating your focus as the scarce resource that it is, the thing to defend instead of spend freely is really the real work hiding underneath learning anything in this era. And most people are waiting for permission to skip things. So here it is. You do not have to read every book or finish every 12:45:49 course to get good at one skill. The fear of missing out is the exact hook that keeps people consuming forever and mastering nothing. And the cure is simply deciding that missing out is allowed on the things that you don't need right now. You might need these books or these courses in the future, but you don't have to finish every book or every course right now if it's not helping you get to where you want to get. The third move is to accumulate hours, the unglamorous engine of the entire thing. You put the reps into your one chosen skill and you let them build build week after boring week. Boring is the operative word and it's also the whole point. Consistency that looks t tedious from the outside is exactly what compounds into something rare. A single session looks like nothing and on its own it it's it it is basically nothing. Run a few hundred of them in the same direction and they stack onto a level of skill most people never get near because no single hour does the heavy work. The 12:46:50 accumulation does. And that only happens when you keep hour adding hours long after it stops feeling productive. Now the fourth move and the one that nobody likes to hear is you stay in the game. That's basically it. Plenty of people own every ingredient they need to get good and never find out. Leaving early right before the result had time to actually show its face. staying in long enough to see it through turns out to be the rarest part of the whole formula. That's why I've made videos on how to outwork everyone by just being bored. And nearly every one of these stories ends the same way with an exit that lands just a little too early. Someone quits around hour 50, still waiting on a result that was always scheduled to arrive near hour a thousand. and the ability was sitting there the entire time fully within 12:47:51 reach. Their patience just ran dry before the payoff could. So, one of the most important skills you can master in today's world is to be quote unquote bored. Now, back in [snorts] the day, our bored today would not even be considered being bored. Now bored means not checking Tik Tok for 10 minutes and working on one thing for a prolonged period of time. Now quitting at hour 50 is a timing error, right? It though it almost always gets read as a talent verdict. The person hits a completely normal low and then mistakes it for permanent proof that they can't do this. They were far closer than ever than they ever let themselves believe and they walked away anyway. So, it's never been easier to quit than right now. And that's no accident. The world around you is engineered to scatter your attention. And nearly everyone in it is overloaded 12:48:52 or distracted and they basically restart for the 10th time this year on everything they decided to do. And in that environment, simply staying with one thing starts to look almost strange, which is exactly why so few people pull it off. Become one of the few who can hold focus that long and you're holding an almost unfair advantage. Reach hour a thousand while everyone around you keeps restarting at hour one, and you've effectively won before most people have ever begun. That's the entire promise of the 10,000 hour problem or 1,000 hour rule turned right us right side up. And it's open to anyone willing to pick up one thing and stay with it and just be bored. Essentially, just do it for a boring long amount of time. If becoming that person is the life you actually want, the smartest first move is to not attempt it alone. So, book a call with us and we'll help you choose the one skill worth your next thousand hours and 12:49:54 map out which one of those hours genuinely count for where you are today. Because getting the direction right early can really save you years of pouring effort into the wrong lane. Today comes down to a single decision. The line between another fresh start and the last one you'll ever need. You already understand the problem that almost no one around you can even name. acting on it. That part is really sitting right in front of you waiting on you to choose. So with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview, the lie, the knowledge crisis, the new advantage, the review, and finally your action items for the day or the next few days. First, pick the single skill you keep circling back to and commit to it before you buy one more book or one more course. Write it somewhere you'll see it every day so that the decision stays made and that one choice will strip out most of the noise on its own. just stay stick to it regardless of if you know whether it will work out in the future because at the end of the day it always works out for the person that stays long enough 12:50:55 with it. Then cut your sources down to the few that directly serve that skill and let the rest go. Give yourself permission to skip everything else. No guilt and no FOMO. Defending your focus is really what finally lets the hours add up. And then finally, put real hours into that one skill every single week, especially the weeks it feels like nothing is moving. It's in those weeks that it's the most important. Track the running do total so you can watch it climb past the point where doubt usually wins and stay in long enough to reach the number that actually pays off. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, make sure to subscribe, like it, comment below to let me know what you'd like to see next. And again, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. We'll work on every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, or the one that you're most focused on right now. With that said, thank you for being here, and I'll see you in the next one. All right, hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the 12:51:56 title, what we're going to be covering today is the inchworm theory. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the performance range, expanding the front, raising the back, compressing the range, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me oneonone, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training with its respective document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want these trainings sent to you as a newsletter every week, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and actually talk about the performance range. So, if you spent any serious amount of time trying to improve yourself, you've probably noticed something a bit strange. You can have periods where you feel incredibly disciplined, focused, healthy, productive, emotionally stable, and completely in control of yourself. And then a few days later, you can still look at your own behavior and wonder how 12:52:55 you somehow became the person who basically procrastinates, overeats, avoids difficult conversations, wastes time, or just falls back into habits you thought you had already dealt with. And most people think they need more discipline, more motivation, or another system. But there's a much more useful way to actually understand what's happening. And Jared Tendler developed an idea called the inchworm concept in his book, The Mental Game of Poker. And although he originally used it to explain performance in poker, I think it gives you one of the clearest models for understanding self-development in general. So the basic idea is that you don't have one fixed level of performance. You have a range and at one end you have your best per performance what tender tendler calls the a game and at the other end you have your worst performance. So your C game and most of your actual life happens somewhere between those two points. So you live more so in the middle. And once you see yourself this way, a lot of confusing things start making a lot more sense because you can now reach a new high 12:53:56 without actually changing very much because one exceptional performance only proves that you can actually access that level sometimes. And you can also go through a period where you don't hit any exciting new highs and still make enormous progress because your worst behavior keeps improving. So you're working on your weaknesses. And so the second form of progress gets ignored constantly in self-development because people naturally pay attention to breakthroughs, personal records, big wins, and moments where they feel like a completely new person. But in this training, I want to show you how this range actually works, why real improvement requires you to work on both ends of it, and how to use the model across your health, wealth, love, and self or health, work, relationships, and inner life. And we'll start by making the range itself clear. From there, I'll show you how to push your best performance forward, how to raise the level of your worst performance, and finally, how those two processes work together until your whole baseline changes. And by the end of this, you should have a much cleaner way to judge whether you're actually improving and a 12:54:56 practical way to decide what you need to work on next. So again, most people think about personal growth as if they have one level. They look at how disciplined they are, how productive they are, how good they are in relationships, or how mentally strong they are. and they try to give themselves one answer. Jared Tendler's inform concept though gives you a much more useful way to think about it. As we said, you perform across a range. On your best days, you have what Tendler calls your A game. On your worst case, the worst days, you have your C game. And most of your life happens somewhere between those two. So once you understand that, you can stop judging your entire level from whichever version of yourself happened to show up today and start improving the full range deliberately. So you already know that this from experience. There are days where you can focus for hours. You make good decisions. You train properly. You probably communicate well and feel like you finally figured yourself out. You feel on top of the world. There are also days where the same person procrastinates, overeats, becomes reactive, wastes money or loses perspective over something small. And 12:55:58 you didn't necessarily become a completely different human being between those days, right? You move to a different part of your current performance range. And that variation matters because you can waste years trying to eliminate it completely. But human performance changes with stress, sleep, emotion, pressure, context, and dozens of other influences. So some variation will always exist. But the useful question becomes how good the full range is. If your worst realistic performance keeps improving, a bad day starts producing outcomes that your old self would have considered respectable. And this also gives you a cleaner way to judge progress, right? You can look at your best recent performances, your average performances, and your worst recent performances separately. If you only measure your highest point, you can convince yourself that you've transformed after just one exceptional week. If you only measure a terrible day, you can convince yourself nothing has changed, even though your entire baseline has improved. Now, Tendler describes this range at like a bell curve because most performances cluster 12:57:00 somewhere around your normal level while fewer performances sit at the extremes. So, you don't need statistics to use the idea, right? You only need to notice that your life contains recurring highs, recurring lows, and a much larger middle where you usually operate. And that middle matters because real development gradually moves the whole distribution forward. So, say you're working on fitness. Your A game may include training consistently, eating according to plan, sleeping well, making sensible decisions around your food. Your C game may include binge eating, skipping several sessions, abandoning structure altogether. So, if 6 months later your bad week means that you still train twice or still eat enough protein and recover quickly, then your progress exists even if you haven't reached a new peak that month, right? Because you've improved your worst game. And so this explains why people constantly underestimate their own development. They expect growth to feel like a permanent new high. So whenever their performance drops, they assume they went backward. In reality, you may have 12:58:01 reached a new game uh a new a game months ago and spent the same time since then making the that level more repeatable. And you may also have removed several old seg behaviors without giving yourself any credit because removing a bad pattern creates a lot less excitement than achieving something new. And when you start reading progress through the range, those periods make much more sense. So a new peak proves possibility. If you close your biggest deal, hit your best lift, or stay composed through a difficult conversation or experience an unusually focused week or any unusually great behavior, you just know that level exists inside your current capability. It just means that you have that in your capacity. That's probably your agame at the moment. And that matters. Although one peak tells you very little about it being reliable, right? It doesn't take tell you anything about you being able to repeat it or how often you can repeat it. It just means it's in your capacity at the moment. You haven't established a new normal simply because you access 12:59:02 accessed it once. The next question becomes whether you can reproduce that performance under ordinary conditions. So can you focus that well when your motivation drops? Can you communicate that well when you're actually irritated? Can you ma manage money sensibly after an emotional week? and you start seeing development as the process of making strong performances less dependent on ideal conditions. So your worst performance on the other hand tells you something different, right? They reveal the mistakes, the triggers, the habits and the weaknesses that still have enough power to pull you down. And that information can feel unpleasant because your Came usually contains behaviors you'd prefer to identify as exceptions. But Tendler's model makes them useful data, right? If a pattern keeps appearing at the back of your range, you have found one of your next development targets. You have found a weakness that you can improve. And I like this framing because it removes a lot of the drama from failure. You can look at a bad performance and just ask 13:00:02 what still breaks down when your capacity drops and how can you improve it. Maybe you stop planning, maybe you become impulsive, maybe you avoid difficult work or maybe you withdraw from from people. You now have something concrete to actually work and improve without turning the entire event into a judgment about who you are as a person. And once you see yourself as a range, improvement splits into two different jobs. You can push the front forward by learning, experimenting, taking on harder challenges or bigger challenges and reaching levels you haven't reached before. So pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. You can also pull the back forward by removing recurring mistakes, correcting weak habits, and making your lowest level less destructive. So, Tendler's inworm concept says real progress needs both movements because each one solves a different problem inside the range. And this is why he calls it the inchworm theory because you're moving your back and your forward and so and your front. So, the front contains your emerging 13:01:03 ability. You develop it when you learn a better sales process or train with a better technique or communicate with more maturity or build stronger emotional control or deepen a useful practice. You're discovering what you may eventually become able to do consistently. And that part of growth feels exciting because you can often point to a clear new result, right? But you need periods where you deliberately exceed your current normal level for that to happen. And that may mean attempting a heavier lift at the gym. It may mean taking on a larger project. It might mean working through a harder conversation. Or it might mean practicing a skill at a level that exposes your limitations. And those attempts create information about what your next level actually requires. Even when your first attempts look inconsistent. The back contains your recurring weaknesses. You improve it through correction, repetition, boundaries, routines, preparation, and just an honest analysis of your weaknesses and what keeps going wrong. So you're reducing how bad your bad performances can actually become. And 13:02:05 that sounds less glam glamorous, but it often produces the most stable change because you remove behaviors that repeatedly erase your progress or bring you back down. So if you regularly lose 2 days after one bad decision, shortening that spiral to 2 hours can matter a lot more than adding another productivity technique. If you regularly overspend after an emotional trigger, removing that behavior can improve your finances without necessarily having to increase your income. So, you raise your floor whenever you make an an old low less likely or less intense or shorter in terms of duration. And those two jobs naturally alternate, right? You reach forward, you discover the new discover a new capability, you notice the weaknesses that make it incon inconsistent, and you spend time correcting those weaknesses. And once your baseline catches up, you can reach forward again from a stronger position. And Tendler named the concept after the movement of an inchworm. Although basically the practical mechanism here is simply this alternating improvement 13:03:05 of your best and worst performances, working on your strengths and working on your weaknesses. In short, so before you try to improve anything, you actually need to define your current range. Meaning, pick one area and basically describe what your A game actually looks like through observable behavior. And then describe what your C game looks like when things go badly. And avoid vague labels like disciplined or confident or spiritual or successful or healthy because those are not observable behaviors, right? They're not necessarily specific. They're very vague and you can interpret them however you want. So you need to write down what you can actually what you actually do what you avoid what decisions you make and what results tend to follow. And in health your agame may mean that you train according to plan or eat in a way that supports your goal or sleep enough and get and keep basic routines even when your schedule changes. Your C game might mean that you binge or abandon your training or stay up far too late and let one poor choice turn into several days of poor choices. That 13:04:05 description gives you both sides of the work immediately. Now, your next target may have very little to do with reaching a new physical peak. Your next target might you might decide that even during a bad week, you just want to work on still going to the gym and completing two training sessions and keeping keeping food within a reasonable range. And that change raises your minimum, right? It raises your minimum standard that your life falls back to under pressure. In wealth, same goes for that area, right? Your A game might include focused revenue producing work, sensible spending, strong sales conversations, decisions made with longer time time horizons, but your C game might include avoiding important work or making emotional purchases or chasing random opportunities and shiny objects or spending several days reacting instead of producing. Again, you can now separate expansion from correction. And so you can do the same in relationships. You can do the same when it comes to yourself and inner life. Your agame may 13:05:07 include perspective, emotional steadiness, self-awareness, and regular practices that basically help you think clearly. So like meditation for example or thinking or journaling etc. While your C game may include anxiety spirals or comparison or self-doubt or completely abandoning the practices that usually stabilize you. And so the point is to see both ends without pretending that either one alone defines you. Right? So with that said, we can move on to actually expanding the front. So now that you can actually see the range and you know it exists, you can work on the front deliberately. So your agame grows when you do something you couldn't reliably do before. You produce at a higher level, solve a harder problem, tolerate more pressure, communicate with more skill, or reach a result that used to sit outside of your normal capacity and comfort zone. And this matters because raising your floor without expanding your ability eventually just gives you consistency at the same level. If you just keep working on your weaknesses, without working on necessarily reaching for more, you're 13:06:08 just going to stay at the same level. So, you still need new skills, harder standards, and experiences that show you what your next level could look like. And you usually discover your front through exposure to difficulty. So maybe a business owner, for example, would learn something new when they sell to a more sophisticated buyer or lead a larger team or make a decision with more money at stake. Someone in fitness could learn something new when they train beyond their current capacity and have to improve technique, recovery or programming. Difficulty reveals the next limitation clearly enough for you to actually work on it. And so you need to keep the challenge specific because obviously vague ambition creates vague feedback. Wanting to become more productive tells you almost nothing. Trying to complete a defined piece of difficult work with fewer interruptions is very specific and gives you something you can actually observe and work on. And you can see where concentration breaks, what distractions actually appear, and which part of the process currently limits you. You also move the front by adding knowledge and technique. 13:07:08 So sometimes your current ceiling exists because you genuinely don't know how to perform better yet. And you may need a better sales skill or better training method or a better way to handle conflict or a deeper understanding of your own emotional patterns. Whatever it is, good information expands the set of actions actually available to you. And so information only matters once you actually express it through behavior. Read the book, learn the method, study the example, but then put yourself in a situation where you have to actually use it. And you want to know whether the idea changes what you can actually do in real conditions because that's what moves the front range. Right now your first performance at a new level will usually look unstable. You might reach for it once but fail to repeat it for weeks. Right? And this is very observable at at in the gym. You might reach a new uh personal record on the deadlift, let's say, or bench press, etc. And then you might not hit it for a few more weeks. And you may understand the skill in calm conditions and lose it completely under pressure. And that 13:08:09 inconsistency makes sense because you're operating at the edge of your current range where the behavior has very little support from repetition yet. Right? So you need to tr treat the first successful attempt as evidence that the level is possible and then study what allowed it to essentially happen and ask what was different when you performed well. Maybe you prepared more thoroughly. Maybe you started earlier. Maybe you slept better. Maybe you removed some distractions. Maybe you practiced before the important moment or slowed yourself down during a difficult conversation. You're looking for conditions that helped produce the performance so you can actually recreate them deliberately and see which ones actually matter. And you need to repeat the performance under slightly different conditions. If you can only access your agame when everything feels perfect and you have the perfect conditions, you still have a fragile skill. You want enough repetitions that you understand which parts came from real capability and which parts depended on unusual circumstances. And eventually you need 13:09:10 to test the skill while something makes it harder. Try to communicate while you're frustrated. Try to keep your nutr nutrition reasonable while you're traveling. Try to focus when you feel less motivated. Right? Try to go to the gym when you feel a bit tired or manage money more carefully after a stressful period. Pressure shows whether the new behavior has started moving from the edge towards the middle of your range. And this is where self-development culture can distort the process. I think new peaks feel awesome and rewarding. So keep people keep chasing another peak before the previous one becomes stable. They change routines. They collect strategies. They start new challenges and constantly search for the next insight because movement at the front is easy to notice and it feels exciting. Meanwhile, the same old sea game continues underneath all of it. And so their weak weaknesses keep pulling them back and you can become incredibly knowledgeable and still lose control in the same predictable situations because you never spend enough time correcting 13:10:10 the back of the range. You just keep collecting more in the front of the range. And new information gives you an immediate sense of progress. You can finish a course. You can save a new system. You can buy a new program. You can get into coaching and or understand a concept and feel like something changed. Sometimes something did change. Although your behavior has to prove it, right? If you keep accumulating front-end knowledge while the same low-level behaviors repeat, you have created a wider gap between what you know and what you can reliably live. And so that gap can become psychologically uncomfortable because your standards rise faster than your baseline. You know that you know what excellent performance looks like. So your C game feels even more frustrating when it actually happens. And this is one reason experienced people can feel strangely disappointed in themselves. Their awareness has moved forward while parts of their behavior still belong to an older level. And when that happens, the answer may be to just stop searching for another technique for a while. Stop searching for more knowledge and 13:11:11 actually work on what you already know. Right? Use what you already know and watch where it breaks. Let your worst recurring failures tell you where to actually work. You can return to expansion once the weaknesses that keep interrupting your progress and keep sabotaging your progress have become smaller, less frequent or easier to recover from. And you can make the front end development practical by choosing one ceiling target at a time. Pick a performance you can almost reach. Define it through actual behavior and numbers so it's measurable or a measurable result in general and give yourself enough attempts to learn what it requires. And then you're trying to extend your current capability by a realistic amount and then understand the skills behind that improvement well enough that you can actually begin repeating it. So, in health, you might raise your fitness ceiling by completing a harder training block or improving a specific lift or learning to maintain nutrition through a more demanding period or developing better recovery habits or getting to a place getting to 13:12:13 a physique you haven't gotten to before or a body fat percentage that you haven't gotten to before. The exact target depends on your goal. The important part is that you can point to a new level of performance that your previous normal wouldn't produce consistently. And in work, you might complete deeper sessions of concentrated work, handle a larger project, improve the quality of your content, or sell at higher level. Whatever it is, again, you need to choose something observable. You should be able to look back after a month and know whether your front moved. In relationships, a higher ceiling may mean you can discuss a difficult issue without becoming reactive and defensive or communicate a boundary clearly or state a boundary in the first place or stay present when the other person feels emotional or recover from conflict with more maturity. Those are skills you can practice and observe which makes relationship growth much easier to develop deliberately. And in your inner life, in yourself, you might deepen meditation. Improve your ability to notice emotional reactions before actually acting on them. Increasing that 13:13:13 space between thought and action, right? Between emotion and action. Spend longer periods without compulsive distraction or just maintain perspective through stress. These improvements will expand what you can handle while remaining deliberate and aware. Now, with that said, we can move on to actually raising the back. So this is the part of the inchworm concept that I think most people completely neglect. Your life depends heavily on how bad things get when they get bad. Meaning when you're tired, stressed, disappointed, distracted, emotional, or simply having a difficult period. Anybody can look impressive under perfect conditions, right? Your floor though tells you what remains when conditions deteriorate. So if you raise that floor, you protect more of your progress because your worst days stop producing the same level of damage that they used to produce. So think about how much progress people lose through a small number of repeated Came behaviors. Someone works hard for a few weeks and then spends money impulsively. Somebody 13:14:14 saves money for months and then spends it on something that they won't even use. Someone trains consistently and lets one binge turn into several days of abandoning their diet. Someone builds a good relationship and repeatedly creates unnecessary conflict when there is jealousy and they get triggered, right? The front may be improving the whole time, but the back keeps creating expensive reversals and self-sabotage. So, measure those lows by by their actual cost. How much time does the pattern take from you? How much money does [clears throat] it cost? How much does it affect your body, your work, or another person? How long does it take you to return to a normal afterwards? Once you see that cost clearly, floor raising becomes a serious development project instead of some basic cleanup. You now know the cost of this and not doing it. So you don't have to eliminate the came pattern instantly and completely to make pro progress. You can reduce just how often it happens or reduce its intensity or shorten the recovery time. If you used to abandon a routine for a week and now you return to 13:15:15 the routine the following day, then the floor has moved, right? If you still become reactive but catch yourself before turning it into a major argument, then the floor has moved again. And I especially like measuring recovery because people often ignore it. You may still have a bad morning, bad conversation, poor workout, or weak work session. It happens to everyone. The question is what you do afterwards. A developed person can still perform badly, although they often recognize the drop faster and return to their normal level with less wasted time. And so your C game usually repeats, meaning the exact situation changes, but the underlying pattern tends to look familiar. Maybe you avoid work when you feel uncertain or overeat when you feel deprived or spend money when you want relief. Or maybe you become defensive when you feel criticized or compare yourself when your confidence drops. Look for repetition because a recurring failure gives you something much more useful than a random mistake, right? It gives you a stable target for development. and try to start by identifying what tends to happen before 13:16:17 the behavior. Meaning, you may notice particular emotions or environments or people or thoughts or physical states that make the pattern more likely. And you don't need a perfect psychological explanation here. You just want to have awareness to recognize the sequence early while you still have room to choose what happens next. And write down the earliest sign you can actually notice. Maybe your attention starts scattering. Maybe you begin bargaining with yourself. Maybe you feel the urge to avoid a conversation. Whatever it is, an early warning signal gives you a chance to actually intervene before the full Came behavior takes over. And you need to decide your minimum response in advance. So when the new [clears throat] pattern actually begins, what will you actually do? You might still take the walk or complete one important task or eat a normal next meal or delay a purchase or tell the other person you need time before continuing the conversation. And keep the response simple enough that you can use it under the exact 13:17:18 conditions that usually make you perform badly. And this is where baseline habits earn their value. So a baseline should survive a bad day, right? If your minimum routine only works when you feel disciplined or organized, then it's not your minimum routine. It's your A game, right? It's not your C game. It belongs closer to your A game. So, your floor rises when you create behaviors that remain realistic under pressure and prevent a temporary drop from becoming a complete collapse. And raising the back often depends on removing behaviors instead of adding more things to do. So you might already know enough about fitness and simply need to remove the bench pattern, right? You might already know enough about money and need to just rem remove that impulsive spending. You might already understand communication and need to remove the habit of replying while highly reactive or uh the habit of becoming defensive. So this kind of progress can feel strangely uneventful because you're not really achieving anything new or it doesn't seem like it. 13:18:20 you're more so measuring fewer mistakes and fewer reversals and fewer destructive episodes. You're more so removing rather than adding and so you need to make the bad pattern harder to perform where you can. So keep less tempting food around if for example certain foods reliably trigger your binges or remove easy access to spending if you repeatedly make impulsive purchases or create distance before responding when you know you become uh destructive in conflict. So you don't need to prove your willpower every time if you can actually change the conditions around the behavior. And you can also prepare for predictable weak periods. So if for example when you're traveling it disrupts your health habits then try to decide what your minimum routine will be before that. Right? If you're uh if stressful launches damage your sleep then you need to decide what you'll protect during those weeks. And preparation will turn a known weakness into something you can actually manage. So some C game behaviors eventually disappear from your realistic 13:19:22 range. You might still be capable of them in theory. You know, everybody is capable of certain Came behaviors, although they no longer show up often enough to define your current floor. They're no longer part of your C game. And that's a meaningful threshold because the old low has now stopped consuming attention and recovery time. It's no longer your old low. and you can spend that energy on the next weakness that now sits at the back of your improved range. So, a useful floor audit asks one question. What do I repeatedly do at my worst that makes everything harder afterwards? What's the one domino that would make everything easier? So, keep your answer behavioral. We want to look at actions specifically. Don't write that you become lazy, weak, insecure, undisiplined or toxic. Again, this is not necessarily actions. Write what you actually do. You avoid the task for 3 days. Let's say you spend money when you actually plan to save it. You keep eating after you're full. You 13:20:22 withdraw instead of communicating. You keep snacking and grazing throughout the day rather than actually just eating your defined meals. Those are the things that we can actually work on, right? That level of specificity gives you something that you can actually change. and then pick the C game behavior with the highest cost or the highest frequency. So you don't need to repair every weakness at once. Once one recurring habit or behavior or action might create a disproportionate amount of damage across your whole life. So removing it is so removing the big domino is really what can improve your average performance without changing anything at the frontier. So for example, if binge eating repeatedly wipes out days of good nutrition or deficits, uh you need to work on the binge pattern before adding another advanced diet strategy, right? Before adding anything. So if procrastination repeatedly turns one difficult task into several lost days, you then you need to build your correction around starting. So you need to define the smallest version of the 13:21:23 task, for example, or remove the main distraction or create a rule for returning after a week session. Whatever it is, you're essentially teaching yourself how to fail less severely when your motivation drops. And if reactivity creates the most damage in your relationship relationships, then you need to work on the moment before the reaction. So maybe you need to notice the physical and emotional escalation and then create a pause and return once you can actually once you're calm and you can communicate clearly. Or you can learn advanced relationship theory later. Right? First remove the behavior that repeatedly causes the the bigger cost. And if comparison and anxiety create long spirals in your self aspect, then you need to focus on shortening them. Reduce the inputs that reliably intensify them. return to a stabilizing practice more quickly and just watch how long it takes before you regain perspective. So your floor rises when the same trigger loses its ability to control several hours or several days of 13:22:24 your life. So with that said, let's actually talk about compressing the range. So when you work on both ends, your best performances move forward and your worst performances move forward as well. So your full range improves in general and you also tend to become more consistent because the distance between a normal day and a bad day becomes smaller. So you become capable of more at the front while making the back less destructive and your average performance improves almost automatically when your lows improve. Imagine that your best work stays exactly the same for a month while your worst work becomes much better. Your average output still rises. The same applies to fitness, finances, relationships, and emotional regulation and whatever you want. You can improve the life you can actually experience by improving what happens on ordinary and difficult days. What happens when the lows inevitably come. And this creates a form of stability that peak chasing cannot give you because now you trust 13:23:25 yourself more because you have evidence that a bad mood or a difficult week or an unexpected problem no longer really destroys all of your structure. and you know you may perform below your best and still remain within a range that supports your goals. So over time this actually changes how you see yourself because behaviors that once required major effort become part of your normal range. So you no longer need an exceptional week to really prove that you can do them. You've repeated them under enough conditions that they now appear in average and even weaker performances. And that's when your development starts feeling a lot less like occasional access to a better version of yourself and more so like a genuine change in what you reliably do. So use behavior to make that judgment. If your old aame required perfect conditions and your current C game now includes several of those same behaviors, then you have a strong evidence that your range has moved. So you don't need to feel transformed every 13:24:27 day. you just have recent behavior that can show you that the old level has become more normal. And this also changes how you interpret periods where you don't necessarily reach a new peak. So sometimes you've stopped expanding the front because your attention has moved to integration and correction and your results may look flat from the outside while your worst performances improve underneath them. And you can easily misread that as stagnation if you only celebrate new highs. But the inchworm framework gives you another possibility to investigate. Maybe your back is catching up. So you need to look for signs of consolidation during those periods. Like are you actually repeating the skill more often? Do you recover faster when you slip? Have you have certain mistakes become a lot less common? And [clears throat] can you maintain decent decent performance under conditions that used to derail you? Those are the changes that can show you that a skill is becoming more reliable even if your maximum result hasn't changed recently. And this is where patience becomes a lot more practical, 13:25:29 right? Because you aren't waiting passively for another breakthrough. You're strengthening what you already developed until it survives ordinary life. And once your baseline rises far enough, the next front end push starts from a stronger position and usually exposes a more advanced set of limitations. So eventually you reach a point where the back no longer needs most of your attention. The old mistake has become rare. Your minimum standards hold and recovery happens a lot quicker when something goes wrong. And that gives you a clear signal to reach forward again, to attempt to go outside of your comfort zone again, to choose a new ceiling target and restart the cycle from the stronger range you now have. And you can run this process across every major area of your life. Although I would avoid trying to overhaul every area at the same time. So pick the domain where your range currently creates the most cost or where your improvement matters most to you. And then map the A game, map the C game, 13:26:30 choose one front-end target, and choose one backend weakness. And that will give you a complete development cycle without turning self-improvement into a giant collection of disconnected goals. So, here's how I would actually use this. Choose one domain and review the last month or two as honestly as you can. Identify three examples of your strongest performance and three examples of your weakest performance and look for the behaviors that repeat on each side. From there, define one a game behavior you want to expand and one C game behavior you want to actually reduce. And then from there, keep those two targets long enough to see whether the full range begins moving. So for the agame target, ask yourself what level sits just beyond your current normal and then pick something difficult enough to require development but also realistic enough that you can actually practice it repeatedly and then work out that what skill preparation information or condition will help you access that level more often. And then give yourself repeated attempts. So review what worked 13:27:32 after a strong performance and what broke after weaker ones. And you're trying to move the new behavior from a rare peak towards ordinary performance through repetition and correction. For the Came target, ask which recurring behavior creates the most damage. And then from there, when your performance drops, actually identify the trigger, the earliest warning sign, and the minimum response you'll use. and then measure whether the behavior has become less frequent, less intense or shorter over time. And then revisit the range regularly. So your old A game may eventually sit near the middle of your current range, right? You have improved and your old C game might appear from might disappear from your realistic behavior. So when that happens, you need to map the new range again because your development has exposed a new front and a new back for you to work on. And keep alternating. Reach forward until you discover a new level. Strengthen and correct until your baseline catches up. And reach forward again once the improvement becomes reliable. And that's 13:28:33 the practical value of Tendler's inchworm concept. It gives you a way to basically improve without confusing a temporary peak with transformation or a temporary low with failure. With that said, let's go over the review. We talked about the overview, the performance range, expanding the front, raising the back, compressing the range, the review, and finally your action items for the day or the next few days. First, choose one area of your life today, and write down your current aame and C game through specific observable behaviors. Use recent examples. Keep the descriptions honest, and make sure you can clearly see what you do at your best, what you do at your worst, and which behaviors currently define the middle of your range. Then pick one front-end target and one back-end target and decide which new capability you want to develop at your best. Then identify the recurring Came behavior that creates the most cost when things go badly and keep the pair focused enough that you can actually practice and review both of them without turning this into another giant self-improvement project. And then finally, track the range over the next 13:29:34 several weeks and judge progress from both ends. Right? Notice your new peaks. notice fewer or smaller lows and pay special attention to faster recovery after weak performances. So when your old aame begins showing up as ordinary behavior and your old came becomes difficult to recognize in your current life, then you need to map the range again and begin the next cycle. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it brought a lot of value. If it did, make sure to let me know in the comments. Subscribe to the channel. If you want this training along with its respective document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. If you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. And if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. With that said, thank you for being here and I'll see you in the next one. All right, hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the crossover effect and delayed returns. And as you can see 13:30:35 from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the truth about time, the trap of short-term thinking, the law of compounding choices, second order consequences, the hidden mechanics of memory, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. What we'll help you do is gain clarity on exactly what to do in every area of your life. meaning health, wealth, love, and self. And if you take care of those, we believe that happiness takes care of itself. So again, if you're interested in something like that, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. And with that said, let's actually get started and talk about the truth about time. So everything in your life runs on cause and effect. A cause is anything you do, an action, a choice, a repeated behavior. An effect is the result it produces. The state, the state of your body, your bank account, your skill, your relationships, your mind. 13:31:36 Every effect has a cause. In the old hermetic text, the Kibalian put it as a law when it said, "Every cause has its effect. Every effect has its cause. Everything happens according to [clears throat] law. Chance is but a name for law not recognized." So, this is as much of a physics concept as it is a spiritual one. And once that really lands, a lot of what looks like randomness in your life starts to dissolve. Nothing in your life simply happens on its own. What you're experiencing right now is not random. It's not luck. And it isn't something being done to you. It's output. And output can always be traced back to input. Now, that tracing only runs one way, though, from effect back to cause. And what makes it so hard is the time that sits in the gap between the two. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietze named this exact trap when he wrote, "There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause." He was pointing at one of the mind's oldest 13:32:37 mistakes. We notice what shows up last and we call it first. Mostly because results are more visible and recent, while the cause that produced it happened quietly, often months or years back, and then it faded out of you long before the effect ever arrived. You treat today's symptom like today's source and you keep wondering why nothing changes at the root when the root was planted in a season you've already have forgotten. Now the only place you have leverage is at the level of the cause. You can't reach out and grab an effect directly. You can't will yourself leaner, richer, calmer, or sharper. You can only choose the causes, the inputs, and let them produce their effects. Marcus Aurelius pointed at the same spot in meditations when he wrote, "Our life is what our thoughts make it." Placing the cause right where you actually have a say in it. Now, most people spend their lives trying to fix effects while leaving the causes 13:33:37 untouched. And that's why nothing changes for them. And every effect becomes a cause of its own. The result of today's choice becomes the starting condition for tomorrow's. So causes and effects linked to into long chains. each one setting up the next. A single decision is never really single. It's the first push in a sequence that keeps running long after you've forgotten you started it. It's the butterfly effect. It's the big domino. The cause and effect are almost never sitting next to each other in time. We're wired to expect that they are. Do the thing, get the result right away. So, we judge our lives by what's happening now and assume it's the product of what we did recently. It almost never is. What you're living through today was set in motion by causes you started running months or even years ago. And the causes you're setting in motion today won't surface as effects until far down the line. So, short-term thinking is a trap because it 13:34:38 can't tolerate that delay. Small choices compound into something enormous because the delay gives the chain of cause and effect time to multiply. Second order consequences matter because the real effects of a decision arrive way later than the first obvious one. And your own memory works against you because by the time an effect lands, you've forgotten the cause that created it. So most people evaluate their life by looking at what they're doing right now and comparing it to what they're getting right now. And that feels logical. It's also almost always wrong. Because the way time and effort and results actually work together looks nothing like that. And there's a graph that shows you what's really happening. And once you see it clearly, a lot of things about your life will start making sense. So the simple graph below shows a horizontal axis representing time moving to the right. Two lines start at the same point on the left side and from there they move in completely opposite directions as you 13:35:38 can see. Now the first line tracks how well you remember the actions you took. Right after you do something, your memory of it is high. The workout from yesterday, the hard conversation you had last week, the decision you made on Monday morning, all of it is still vivid. All of it is emotionally present and easy to recall because it just happened. But that line slopes downwards over time pretty steeply because our memory of the boring mundane everyday things we do is pretty weak. Understandably so, unless something really emotion emotional happened. So within a few weeks, most of what you actually did has already faded from conscious recall. And it isn't the big moments that disappear first. obviously is the small ordinary ones. The Tuesday morning you followed your habit when you really didn't feel like it, for example, or the low stakes evening you chose the harder thing instead of the easier one. Or the session that felt completely unremarkable at the time in the gym. You 13:36:39 know, those small forgettable decisions are almost always the exact ones doing the real work underneath the surface of your life by the sheer fact that there's more of them. So compounding in the background, they're compounding in the background and your brain systematically discards them more and before they ever get to feel significant. Now the second line tracks something completely different. It tracks the actual results you get from your effort. The real world return that shows up in your body, your skills, your finances, your relationships, your mindset. And this line moves in the opposite direction from the first one. So early on the return is near zero, not because nothing is happening, but because nothing has had enough time to compound into something visible yet. And there's almost always a significant gap between when you put in the effort and when the effort surfaces as a result that you can actually see or feel or point to. And that gap is the most 13:37:40 disorienting part of building anything real in your life. Whether it's a physique or a business or a skill or a mental emotional way of being. The effort comes first. The return comes later. And there's nothing in between except the quiet invisible phase where most people give up. Now eventually the two lines cross. memory of the effort has dropped and the return from that effort has risen. You're living inside results generated by work you've mostly forgotten which you've probably done months ago or years ago. Which is exactly why progress often feels like it appeared from nowhere, like something finally just clicked when in reality it was being built by the entire time below the surface day by day by your actions. The cause and effect relationship between your actions and your results isn't a straight line moving in real time. It's a delayed loop. And that 13:38:41 delay is the single most important thing to understand about how growth actually works. So think about anything meaningful you've ever built or changed in your life. None of it showed up the day you decided to start. There was always a lag. sometimes weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years between when you put the effort in and when you could actually see it reflected in your reality. A body doesn't change the week you start training. A skill doesn't click the first month you practice it. A mindset doesn't shift the first time you try thinking differently. During that lag, the process is still running. The growth is genuinely happening, just not in any way you can see or feel or measure in the short term. Which is what makes this invisible stretch so disorienting for most people who haven't been shown this graph and don't understand what silence actually means and don't understand the nature of cause and effect. Now, most people interpret that invisible stretch as proof that nothing is working. And so they stop right at 13:39:43 the moment when the effort is closest to delivering. walking away from something that was about to change their trajectory entirely with no way to know how close they actually were. And every decision you make today is a cause without a visible effect yet. It's sending a signal into your future that will come back as a result, but it won't bounce back until long after you've moved on and mostly forgotten you sent it. So the ease you feel in your life right now that you might be feeling in your life right now was bought by effort. you barely remember making. Same goes for the opposite. The hardship you're experiencing right now was most likely caused by something you did a long time ago. And the friction you're dealing with right now was accumulated by small decisions that felt low stakes and harmless at the time. What you're doing today is writing the script for what you'll be living inside in 3 to 5 years on the ordinary days when nothing feels particularly important. 13:40:46 or at the very least months ago. So that distance between cause and effect is what makes small daily actions feel almost impossible to take seriously. They seem disconnected from any real consequence because the consequence hasn't arrived yet. But believe me, it's coming. It just always takes time for good or for bad. There's a specific kind of confusion this creates that most people spend years inside without ever understanding what's causing it. You look at your life right now and try to figure out what you did recently that caused what you're experiencing. And you're almost always looking in the wrong window. Your current results aren't a reflection of last week or last month. They're a reflection of what you were doing 2, 3, 5 years ago on the most ordinary days when nothing felt urgent. The best results in your life right now were earned by choices you barely remember making. The compounding was happening and consistently in the background, and 13:41:46 by the time it surfaced as something you could point to, the inputs had long since faded from memory. And the same is true for what's not working. The difficulty you're living in right now was almost always seated years ago on days that felt inconsequential and easy to let slide. days where the cost of the small bad decision felt invisible in the moment. And when people can't trace their current reality back to its actual causes, they blame whatever is nearby, the circumstances, the timing, other people. And James Allen cuts straight through that habit in as a man thinkketh when he wrote, "Circumstances do not make the man, it reveals him to himself." which is the exact reversal almost nobody realizes. All of it feels genuinely true from the inside, which is the most disorienting part of not understanding this graph. The cause is almost never where you're looking for it. It's buried much further back in the 13:42:47 pattern of small invisible choices that compounded over time into the reality you're currently standing inside. And once you really absorb that, you will change how you relate to the present moment. You'll stop trying to diagnose your life by examining rec recent history. And you start paying much more careful attention to what you're planting right now for the future. Fully understanding that today's inputs are tomorrow's outputs. And the graph eventually flips for everyone. And the direction it flips depends entirely on what you fed it. For people who kept building their life, the crossover point is where everything seems to change at once. Results compound into more results. Effort that felt invisible starts showing up everywhere. And the work you barely remember turns out to have been the foundation of a life that now feels almost effortless. And people on the outside will say it happened fast, that you changed overnight, that your success came out of 13:43:49 nowhere. Because what they can see is only the emergence, not the long invisible phase that preceded it. But you'll know if you've been paying attention that it was built one ordinary day at a time, one boring day at a time with no applause and no confirmation in the quiet stretch before the lines crossed. Now for people who were stopped building because they didn't realize the cause effect relationship of their actions, the crossover goes the other way. The weight of forgotten small choices arrives all at once. And it's enormous and hard to trace, which is exactly what makes it feel like something happened to them rather than something they built. And that's not a comfortable thing to say, but it's the most useful thing I can offer you in this training. The life you headed towards is being constructed right now by you through decisions that feel too small to matter. The urgency isn't about panic or 13:44:50 pressure. It's the quiet focused urgency of someone who understands that today counts. That this ordinary moment is part of the graph and that the line is always moving in one direction or the other based entirely on what you're feeding it. So with that covered, let's actually talk about the trap of short-term thinking. So, if the graph is this clear and if patience and long-term consistency are obviously what the math rewards, then why doesn't everyone just do that? And the answer is more biological than it is about character. We've been literally wired to think short. And the world we are living in has done everything it can to make that wiring stronger. Understanding this isn't just interesting, it's necessary because you can't escape a trap you haven't identified. Your brain has a deep built-in preference for immediate returns over delayed ones. And this isn't a weakness or a personal failing you should feel 13:45:52 bad about. It's an old feature of the system, one that made sense in a completely different environment. And it is actively working against the kind of life you're trying to build, which all requires long-term thinking. So the dopamine system works the same way here. It's drawn to fast feedback. It gets activated by clear, immediate, tangible results. And it genuinely struggles to assign real emotional weight to something that's going to pay off in 2 years. So researchers call this temporal discounting, the brain's tendency to place less value on future rewards the further out they are. A win you can feel this week registers as more real than a win you'll have in 5 years even when the 5-year win could be 50 times larger. The math doesn't matter to the emotional system. Proximity does. So, the modern world has made this considerably worse by flooding your environment with fast, reliable dopamine hits so that 13:46:55 your brain's baseline expectation for how quickly satisfaction should arrive has completely collapsed. Every notification, every refresh, every instant delivery recalibrates your sense of a normal reward timeline downwards until anything that takes more than a few weeks starts to feel like it isn't working. And the result is a nervous system that has been trained to expect results faster than reality actually delivers them. And then to interpret the absence of fast results as evidence that something is wrong. You eat clean for 3 days and the scale doesn't move, so you decide it isn't working. You meditate for a week and still feel anxious, so you drop it. You work on your craft for a month and the numbers don't move, so you convince yourself the approach is bad. None of those conclusions have anything to do with whether the direction was right. They're just evidence that your calibrated timeline is shorter than the actual payoff timeline. And the action was fine. The direction 13:47:55 was fine. The mismatch was between when your brain expected the reward and when the reward actually arrives. And until you deliberately recalibrate that gap, you'll keep abandoning things that were working. So short-term thinking creates a specific and very durable [clears throat] cycle, one that's self-reinforcing and genuinely hard to see clearly from the inside. And it goes like this. You start something with genuine effort and good intentions. You don't see fast results. Your brain interprets that as a failure. You quit and move to the next thing. You start with that same energy, the same timeline expectation, and the same calibration. you get the same outcome, the same exit, and over years, you end up with a scattered trail of halfbuilt things and a growing belief that you're just someone who doesn't follow through. And that belief becomes its own problem, separate from the original one. Now, 13:48:56 you're not just dealing with impatience. You're dealing with a self-concept that says, "I don't stick with things." And that identity will keep pulling you off course even after you've intellectually understood the patient side of the equation. But the identity is the product of the loop, not the cause of it. Most people who struggle with follow through aren't fundamentally inconsistent people. They've been consistent in other things, right? So they've been operating inside a calibration mismatch for so long that they've started to misread their own character. And the loop is especially hard to break because each individual exit feels completely reasonable. There's always a good enough reason to stop. The strategy might have felt off. The timing wasn't right. The results weren't there. None of those reasons are entirely false. They just aren't the full story. Steven Presfield named the real force sitting underneath them in the war of art. He said resistance is 13:49:59 experienced as fear. The degree of fear equates to the strength of resistance. And that fear is what sounds as a sensible reason to walk away. Now, short-term thinking is extraordinarily good at disguising itself as rational decision-m. It doesn't feel like impatience. It feels like intelligent course correction, like you're being smart and adaptive rather than reactive and impatient. The honest test is simple. Are you leaving because the direction was genuinely wrong? Or are you leaving because the results weren't fast enough for your preference? Those are completely different situations requiring completely different responses and most people never stop to distinguish them. Now, beyond the quitting cycle, short-term thinking also distorts where you put your daily attention. And that's arguably the most costly problem of the two because when you're calibrated for short timelines, you naturally zoom in on the micro level. You obsess over 13:51:02 individual workouts. You obsess over individual sessions, over individual focus blocks, over individual posts, over individual days. Constantly checking for evidence that what you're doing is paying off right now and something you can point to. But individual data points on a long-term trend are almost meaningless. Individual data points on a long-term trend are almost meaningless. Any single day tells you almost nothing about whether you're on the right track. You need dozens, hundreds of data points before any real signal emerges from the noise. And by the time you have enough to make a real assessment, you usually already quit. So when you're that zoomed in, you end up reacting to things that don't actually matter. You adjust and tweak and pivot based on information that's too granular to be useful. And you burn energy and create instability in processes that just needed some more time. 13:52:03 And there's also a framing problem worth naming. Short-term thinking makes every slow day feels like feel like a wasted day. Every quiet stretch feels like stagnation. Every period without visible progress feels like something has gone wrong. Slow days aren't wasted days. The quiet stretches are often when the deepest compounding is really happening. When habits are becoming automatic. When skills are being absorbed below conscious awareness. When the foundation is settling into something solid enough to actually build on. None of the none of that looks dramatic from the outside, right? None of that looks big, but it's those big it's those ordinary boring days that make the majority of our days when we're working towards something. So if we're trying to escape the ordinary ones, the if we're trying to escape the regular day, the ordinary day that is going to be there regardless of what we're working towards, then we might as well just give up on actually 13:53:06 going for that thing because the majority of our days will be like that. Someone building for the long term understands this. A day where nothing visible happened is still a day where something invisible continued. That consistency is the entire mechanism. That's what grows the green line day after day regardless of whether anyone's watching. So getting out of the short-term track requires more than willpower. It requires a genuine shift in what you treat as meaningful as a meaningful signal of progress on any given day. Right now, your brain treats fast visible results as proof that something is working and their absence as proof that it isn't. That calibration needs to change. The new signal should be whether you ran your process today, whether you kept your commitment to the direction, not whether the results showed up yet. Victor Franco caught the same turn in man's search for meaning when he wrote, "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. And the situation you can't 13:54:07 change here is how long the returns actually take to arrive. So did you do the thing? Did you run the system? Did you make the decision your future self will thank you for? That's the only feedback that has any real predictive value on a daily basis. And the sooner that feels genuinely satisfying rather than like a consolation prize, the more durable your consistency becomes. And this is the deliberate kind of dopamine rewiring. You're redirecting what counts as feedback. You're training your brain to find its satisfaction in the process and the long-term results rather than in the outcome. Which means choosing to reward the one thing you can fully control instead of chasing the one thing you can't. So the other practical shift here is deliberately expanding how far out you evaluate progress. So if right now you're evaluating on a weekly basis, try to do monthly basis. Try quarterly instead of monthly. 13:55:07 When you zoom out that far, you stop reacting to the noise and start re seeing the actual trend. If you're already doing quarterly, try to evaluate progress based on a year. If you're already doing a year, then try to do it on 3 years or 5 years. Look back 12 months from right now and honestly assess how different you are. In most cases, if you've been doing any version of the right things with any version of consistency, the change is larger than you expected precisely because it happened so gradually. You never had a single moment where you could feel it accumulating. That evidence when you actually look for it honestly is really what builds genuine long-term trust in your own process. And you'll stop hoping it works and start watching it work in retrospect. That's a completely different and much more stable relationship with your own effort. And again to quote Steve Jobs here, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. So you need to trust that 13:56:09 somewhere in the future the dots will connect while you keep doing the actions that are required of you today. So with that said, let's cover the law of compounding choices. So, the thing nobody tells you about long-term consistency is that the payoff isn't linear. It doesn't grow at a steady, predictable rate that you can track monthtomonth with any real confidence. It grows the way compound interest grows, invisibly and slowly for a long time and then suddenly and dramatically all at once. Understanding this will change how you relate to every single small decision on every single ordinary day. Compounding works by reinvesting its own returns, right? So each cycle builds on the one before it, which means the growth gets faster over time rather than staying flat. So when you make a good decision today, you don't just get the benefit of that one decision in isolation. You slightly improve the version of yourself 13:57:11 who makes tomorrow's decision. And that slightly improved version makes a slightly better decision tomorrow. If you run that pattern out over months and years and you produce results that look wildly disproportionate to the individual inputs that built them. So the problem is that in the early stages when the compounding is just getting started the growth is so small it's genuinely invisible. You're making marginally better decisions and getting marginally better results. and marginally better is nothing you can see or feel or point to on any given day. So it doesn't feel like it's working and that feeling is completely understandable and completely misleading at the same time. So run 1% daily improvement out over a full year and you end up roughly 37 times better than when you actually started. That's how exponential growth works. And that's why the early phase feels so dishearteningly flat while the later 13:58:11 phase feels almost effortless by comparison. And compounding is completely neutral about what it compounds. It doesn't care whether you're building something good or something destructive. Something destructive can also compound. It multiplies whatever you feed it with the same mathematical certainty and the same indifference. So, one skipped workout doesn't maybe feel like much, but 20 skipped workouts spread across a month compound into a softer body, a weaker habit pattern, a slightly diminished belief in your own follow-through, and a slightly harder time getting started next time. Each of those effects then feeds into the next cycle. So, the question isn't whether your choices are compounding, because they always are. The only question is which direction they're compounding in. And the honest answer to that on any given day is either you're building or you're eroding. There is no neutral. There's no day that just passes without leaving a mark somewhere on the graph. [clears throat] So good decisions rarely 13:59:12 stay contained to the domain where you made them. They spread across your life in ways you didn't plan for and you can't always trace back. So when you commit to a daily process and actually keep that commitment, you don't just get the direct benefit of that process. You build a stronger nervous system for keeping commitments in general. The discipline you develop in one domain starts showing up in your work, your eating, your sleep, your relationships, your ability to handle pressure. Each upgraded behavior strengthens your capacity for the other upgraded behaviors. Going to bed on time makes the early morning easier. The early morning makes the workout easier. The workout makes the afternoon more focused. The focused afternoon makes the evening calmer. Everything is one chain and the chain runs in both directions. This is the hidden leverage of process level investment. You think you're building one thing, but the compounding is happening across your entire life simultaneously in ways that are too slow 14:00:13 to detect dayto-day and too significant to miss yeartoyear. And how you do one thing is how you do everything. Because of that, the same ripple works in destructive directions, too. One area where you're consistently making poor decisions will pull down adjacent areas you weren't even monitoring. A poor sleep routine leaks into your discipline. Poor discipline leaks into your nutrition. Poor nutrition leaks into your mood and focus. A degraded mood and focus leaks into your relationships and your output in your business or work. It all connects and the leak that started in one place eventually shows up everywhere. And by the time the damage is obvious, you've usually forgotten where the chain even started, which makes it almost impossible to fix correctly. You're treating symptoms at the far end of the chain whose origin is buried months behind you. There's a specific point in the compounding curve where everything seems to change at once. And understanding how that works is what keeps you from 14:01:14 quitting right before it happens. For a long time, growth is happening, but entirely below the surface, invisibly in ways your instruments can't detect. Your skills are sharpening. Your habits are becoming more automatic. Your knowledge is getting more integrated. You're acquiring more knowledge. At the same time, none of it shows up yet in any external metric you'd point to as proof. And this is [clears throat] the phase where doubt is loudest. This is also where the impatient part of you will be the loudest, whispering that it's time to pivot or try something new. And the disciplined part of you keeps building anyway, understanding that invisible growth is still growth and that the threshold is getting closer with every day you stay consistent. Every day you keep going during this phase, you're shortening the distance to the breakthrough. But there's no way to tell from the inside how close you actually are, which is part of what makes this space genuinely difficult to navigate without a clear framework underneath you. So then at some point that feels sudden, 14:02:15 even though it absolutely isn't, the growth breaks the surface. Results start showing up faster than you can account for. And things that were hard become easy. Opportunities appear that weren't there before. And this is what looks like overnight success from the outside. And it genuinely appears that way because the long invisible phase happened somewhere nobody was watching, even you. What the world sees is the emergence, not the thousands of ordinary days that built it. And what separates people who sustain that emergence from those who squander it is whether they understand what actually caused it. If you think it was timing or luck, you won't know how to maintain it. If you understand it was compounding, you know exactly what to do. Keep doing what you were already doing. And this all points to the same practical conclusion. The most important question in your life right now isn't strategic. It's daily. Are you making the decision today that your future self will be grateful for? Not the plan, not the vision. the actual 14:03:17 decision in this actual moment on this actual ordinary day when nothing feels urgent and the results are nowhere in sight yet. That question, if you answer it correctly, on enough ordinary days is the entire game. The breakthroughs and emergences that look dramatic from the outside are built from the accumulated residue of correctly unanswered on ordinary days. Nothing more and nothing less. And that's honestly what makes this hard to hold on to. There's nothing exciting about it. There's no single insight that changes everything. There's just the daily choice made over and over until the graph does what graphs do when you keep feeding them the right inputs. So the practical standard for a good day then isn't did something good happen to me today. It's did I run my process today? That's the only metric that actually that's actually within your control. and the only one with any real predictive power over a meaningful time frame. 14:04:19 Everything else, the results, the feedback, the visible signs of progress, those are outputs. They're lagging indicators that you influence but don't control. Your process is the one input you fully own. And the more you make it the center of your daily evaluation, the more stable and compounding your trajectory becomes over time. Consistently running your process and watching the results eventually arrive builds a kind of trust in the system that becomes its own resource. You'll stop needing external validation to stay motivated. You'll stop needing the results to conver confirm the effort. You just know the math is running and that knowing is something impatients will never have access to. So with that said, let's actually cover second order consequences because it relates to this. So, one of the subtler reasons people stay stuck in short-term thinking even after they intellectually understand the compounding framework is that they keep evaluating their decisions based on the first thing that happens after them. The immediate 14:05:20 [clears throat] consequence, the obvious one, the one your brain was built to track by default. You do something, you get something immediately. But most of the real consequences of any decision aren't the first ones. Whether those consequences are good or bad, by the way, doesn't really matter. They're the second ones, the ones that show up later and the third order ones and the fourth order once in places you weren't actually even watching in ways you didn't even anticipate. Every decision you make has at least two layers of consequences typically more. Even though the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and so on order consequences are get increasingly more difficult to actually see and track. Now the first layer is immediate, visible and easy to track. The second layer is delayed, indirect, and almost always more significant than the first. You eat the cake and the first order consequence is that it tastes good and you feel temporarily satisfied. The second order consequence compounded over months and 14:06:21 years of that same pattern is a body and a set of habits that don't match the life you're trying to build. So your brain tracks the first layer automatically and without effort. It's immediate, clear, and emotionally present. The second layer requires active effort to hold in view, which is why most people never develop the habit of looking for it at all. When you only track the first layer, you keep making decisions that feel fine in the moment while building a reality that will feel neither fine nor good when it actually arrives. So the same principle works for good decisions. And this is where it gets practically useful. The first order consequences of a good decision is often uncomfortable, boring, unrewarding. Sometimes it feels hard to do. You meditate and nothing dramatic happens in this moment. You journal and it just feels like writing things you already knew. You go to bed on time and miss whatever you you would have done with the late hours. Those are the real first order costs of good decisions and they feel like almost nothing in return for 14:07:23 real effort. But the second order consequences compound and they always show up eventually. Clarity, focus, emotional regulation, the quiet confidence that comes from keeping your own promises. Whatever it is, that edge other people can't really quite explain. None of it shows up immediately and all of it is real. So you can see on the image that you take an action and you get first order consequences. They're obvious, immediate, short-lived. And then the second order ones, they are delayed, hidden, but they are compounding. Whether they're good or bad doesn't really matter. One of the most common and costly mistakes that people make is abandoning a direction at exactly the wrong moment. And second order blindness is almost always what's driving it. When someone quits a strategy or a routine or a process, they're usually misdiagnosing the situation. They're treating the absence of first order returns as 14:08:25 evidence that the direction is wrong when in reality they just haven't waited long enough for the second order return returns to mature. Now the results aren't missing. They're just in the loading phase. You know when you turn on a game when it says loading you don't just quit the game, right? You just wait. The compounding of the effort is still accumulating below the visible surface. And the moment you quit is often the moment you are closest to the breakthrough with no way to know that from where you were standing. This is worth watching carefully in yourself as well. If you find yourself about to change course, ask whether the evidence is actually telling you the direction is wrong or whether it's just telling you the timeline is longer than you expected. Those are completely different situations requiring completely different responses. And a lot of the times the results we want typically appear after a way longer time 14:09:26 frame than what [clears throat] we expected at first because in the beginning we're not competent enough to be able to estimate an accurate timeline. And what turns out as we start doing the thing and as we become more competent competent in the thing we do and we learn more about it, we start to find that it will take us longer than we expected. And then some people are fine with that and others quit and look for the next thing and then they start the next thing and the same pattern repeats over and over and over again. Every decision you make is sending a consequence into your future. And it will be it will come back regardless of whether you're thinking about it or not. Some consequences come back in days, some in months, some take years to fully land. The return always happens on its own schedule with no regard for whether you remember the original decision or feel ready for what it's bringing back to 14:10:26 you. Second order thinking is the practice of deliberately thinking further ahead than your brain naturally wants to and asking not just what happens next but and then what and then what and what after that until you've traced the real consequence of the decision you're considering rather than just the first visible one. Now there are no neutral decisions. Every choice is either sending a positive or a negative consequence into your future. Even the ones that feel like nothing at all. The decision to scroll for another hour instead of sleeping feels completely neutral in the moment. Nothing bad happened visibly, right? Nothing changed. But the second order consequence is a slightly more wired nervous system, a slightly worse tomorrow, a slightly weaker habit of protecting your recovery. All of which compound over time into something that is definitely not neutral. And it's always the nothing decisions, the ones too small to feel significant 14:11:27 that accumulate into the biggest outcomes. The grand dramatic choices in your life are the ones you remember and evaluate carefully. The small invisible ones are the ones that actually run your trajectory. So, one of the most powerful changes you can make is to start paying more careful attention to the decisions that feel like they don't matter. Understanding that those are often the ones compounding the hardest in whichever direction they're pointing. Every decision is the beginning of a chain. The length and direction of that chain is really determined entirely by the quality and consistency of the link you're adding right now on this ordinary day when nothing feels particularly important. So you don't get to choose where the chain ends up from here, but you always get to choose the next link. And that link added to the ones before it and all the ones that will follow it is how the whole thing gets built or 14:12:30 dismantled one quiet choice at a time. Which means you're more responsible for where you end up than it's probably comfortable to fully accept. And you're also more capable of changing direction than you probably feel in the moments when you're most stuck. The chain is always being built. The only question is who's deciding what goes into it. Now once you understand second order consequences, you can start using them deliberately. And that's where the real leverage in this whole framework lives. When something goes well in your life, you need to trace it back. Not just to last week, but to 6 months ago, a year ago, further if you can find the small, forgettable decision that started the chain in the first place. And that trace tells you what actually works in your specific life with more accuracy than any general principle could. You're building a map of your own cause and 14:13:30 effect patterns. One that's more reliable than any other outside system because it's built from your actual data, your own. What decisions consistently made over time have produced the best second order consequences for you specifically. And once you can see that clearly, you stop guessing about what to do. You replicate the inputs that produce the best outputs and you become much more careful about the inputs that trace back to the worst ones. And you can also run the thinking forward before making a decision. Ask yourself what the second order consequences are likely to be, not just the first one. And this effectively removes the natural delay from the equation, at least partially. You're borrowing your future perspective and applying it in the present. So you can make the decision your future self would actually thank you for rather than the one that just satisfies the immediate preference. And it takes time to develop a as a habit like any real skill. But 14:14:34 over time it becomes more automatic and the quality of your daily decisions will improve significantly from that single shift in how you're thinking about consequences. So with that said, let's cover the hidden mechanics of memory. So, there's one more piece of this that ties everything together and that most people completely overlook. Memory. Specifically, the fact that your memory of what you've done doesn't just fade over time. It fades in a very specific, very predictable patterns that directly undermine your ability to trust your own process, take credit for your own results, and maintain the consistency that the entire compounding framework really depends on. Now, memory doesn't fade evenly. It decays in layers. And the layers that disappear fastest are often the most important ones for sustaining long-term motivation. The small daily inputs, the ones that are actually doing the compounding, are the first to go from your memory. You won't remember the specific session from 6 weeks ago. You won't remember the 14:15:35 evening you chose the hard thing on a low stakes Tuesday. You won't remember the decision that started a chain you're still benefiting from today. Those memories fade fast. What tends to stay in memory longer are the emotional peaks and valleys, the dramatic failures, the exciting winds that are usually very big and very noticeable, the high charge moments. And those moments, while real, aren't representative of what built your results. Your results were built by the quiet, unglamorous middle, which your memory will systematically discard. So over time, your memory of your own effort and consistency becomes systematically distorted. And that distortion is almost always in the negative direction. You end up with a self-image that under represents how consistent you've actually been and over represents how often you've fallen short. And that distorted self-image creates real behavioral consequences. If you believe you're inconsistent, you're much more likely to give yourself permission to be inconsistent. If you believe your 14:16:36 effort doesn't stick, you're much less likely to trust a long, slow process with no immediate visible return. The belief becomes self-fulfilling not because you're fundamentally inconsistent, but because the belief gives your brain a script to follow, and the brain follows scripts with remarkable efficiency and no awareness that the script was built on faulty data. And so, the source of the belief in many cases isn't your actual behavior. It's a corrupted memory of your actual behavior. You're running a selfnarrative built on data your brain has already edited out. And this is why people who stop certain addictions because they're harming them tend to start them again. Their memory deletes the part of why they started why they decided to stop the addiction in the first place. all the bad results that they got from that addiction and starts putting on a rose color rosecolored glasses on top of the addiction and you start forgetting why you decided 14:17:37 to stop in the first place. So, one of the most practically important consequences of how memory works is that people routinely fail to give themselves accurate credit for the work they've actually done. So the weeks you showed up when nobody noticed or the habits that you maintained in the dark with no feedback and no proof or the hours you locked in the invisible phase before the results arrived. Your brain has mostly filed those away under not important enough to retain. But they happened. They're the foundation of everything that real that you've built. So when the results finally show up and they feel like they came from nowhere, that feeling isn't entirely irrational from the inside without the memory of the inputs, the outputs really do look like they appeared on their own. And when they do, people either attribute them to luck or to some vague sense of finally that doesn't connect back to anything specific. So learning to make that connection deliberately, tracing your wins back to their actual inputs, even when the 14:18:38 traces faint, is a genuine skill. And it closes the loop between your effort and your outcomes in a way your brain won't do automatically on its own. And without accurate credit for your past work, your motivation for future work becomes unstable because you can't sustain effort for a process you don't believe in. And you can't believe in a process whose results you keep attributing to things outside of your control. And this creates a subtle but corrosive cycle where your genuine progress undermines your belief in your own agency which makes consistency harder which produces less progress. It's almost entirely driven by the mechanics of how memory handles the quiet and glamorous work that actually builds things. And the way you break it is simple in theory and requires real a real discipline and practice. You know, you document, you track, you create external records of your effort and your process that your brain just can't edit or discard. So that when the memory fades, the record remains and tells the true story. 14:19:40 So there's another memory dynamic that's less discussed, but equally important. As you build things over time, your progress normalizes and what was once genuinely hard becomes your new baseline, which is excellent for performance and destructive for sustained motivation. You used to struggle to wake up early. Now you do it automatically. The discipline you built to make that happen was real and cost you something real. But it is no long it no longer feels hard. Which means your brain no longer registers it as an achievement. And what your brain doesn't register as an achievement, it stops generating motivation to maintain. And this normalization means that a significant portion of your growth is always invisible to you in real time. The things you've already built feel ordinary. The things you haven't built yet feel distant. Your subjective sense of your own progress is systematically understated by the very success you've already achieved. So periodic reviews help with this. When you look back at where you were a year 14:20:42 or two ago and actually compare it honestly to where you are now, you briefly unnormalize your progress and can see it clearly again. In other words, stop and smell the roses. That comparison is one of the most more effective tools for sustaining long-term drive precisely because it reveals what the daily experience actively hides from you. And the practical implication here is that gratitude for your own progress isn't just a feel-good practice. It's necessary. It's a functional one that counteracts normalization and keeps the evidence of your compounding visible and emotionally present, which is what sustains the effort that keeps the compounding going. Build a regular habit of looking back, not just forward. Spend genuine time reviewing what you've built as well as planning what to build next. That balance will keep you from outrunning your own sense of progress and helps you sustain the consistency that everything else in this training really depends on. And every time you 14:21:43 connect where you are now to the specific work that got you here, you're anchoring your future effort in real evidence rather than hope. And evidence is a much more durable foundation for consistency than motivation alone will be. Memory is unreliable in all the ways we've just covered, which means you need external systems to compensate for what it gets wrong. Write things down, not just your goals or outcomes that you want and the things that you want in life, but your process. Log the days you showed up. Record the decisions you made. Note the small things you chose to do or not to do with as much as possible with enough context that you'll be able to read it later and understand why it mattered at the time. You know, if you told me now that 10 years ago or so at this point, I was calling cold calling a 100 businesses a day from Google Maps. 14:22:43 I wouldn't believe you, but I have the proof. I have my notebooks in which I put the numbers in their emails and scratch them off every single day. So, this will create a body of evidence that exists outside your brain, one that can't be edited by the memory distortions we've talked about throughout this training. When you can look back at a log and see 47 consecutive days of showing up, of calling a 100 cold calling 100 businesses a day, your brain can't tell you that you're inconsistent. The record contradicts it with something much more reliable than feeling. And over time, a good log also [clears throat] reveals patterns that your in the- moment experience would never surface on its own. What conditions produce your best decisions? What triggers lead to the choices you later regret? That pattern information 14:23:43 is only visible in the aggregate, which means it only exists if you've been recording. So build a regular review practice alongside the documentation. Weekly is useful for catching drift early. Monthly is useful for assessing your trends. Quarterly is useful for the bigger picture and for reanchoring your current effort and the progress you've already made. Each of these reviews should reconnect to your present your present to your past in a way that your raw memory won't do on its own. They prevent the amnesia we've been talking about throughout this whole section. and they keep the cause and effect chains visible and traceable rather than letting them dissolve into vague feeling over time. They also give you the information you need to actually improve your process over time rather than just repeat the same thing over and over and over again and expect a different result. You can see what worked, where the compounding was strongest, and where you left the most potential on the table. That's the information that turns a decent process 14:24:45 into one that compounds far faster. So, with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview, the truth about time, the trap of short-term thinking, the law of compounding choices, second order consequences, [clears throat] the hidden mechanics of memory, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, start keeping a daily or a weekly log of your process rather than your outcome so that you build an external record your memory can't edit or discard. Noting the decisions you made, the habits you ran, and the moments you chose the harder thing when the easier thing was right there waiting. Next, deliberately push your evaluation horizon out further than it currently sits. moving from weekly to monthly or monthly to quarterly or quarterly to yearly or yearly to every 5 years. And give your compounding the time it actually needs to become visible before you draw any conclusions about whether it's working. And when something goes right in your life, trace it back as far 14:25:46 as you can to the small decision that actually started it. And when something feels off, do the same in that direction. Building the habit of connecting your current reality to its actual causes rather than its nearest and most convenient circumstances. Basically, connect the dots. So, I hope you enjoyed this. Uh if you if you did, uh make sure to let me know. But I think that if you really watch this training and pay attention and if you even rewatch it if you need to, it can absolutely change your life. It changed mine. So, make sure to take this seriously. It will change your life if you actually apply it. With [clears throat] that said, if you want to work with me oneonone to improve every aspect of your life, to become clear on what to do in every aspect of your life, health, wealth, love, and self to gain clarity, then make sure to book a call from the link in the description. Again, I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, let me know. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your support. Thanks for watching. and I'll see you in the 14:26:47 next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how to control energy before it turns into your reality. As you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the energy precedes reality principle, the control layer, engineering your energetic output, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, then make sure to book a call from the link in the description. We work with entrepreneurs, high performers, and professionals to basically help them master every aspect of their life and every pillar of their life, which in our opinion, or in my opinion, is health, wealth, love, and self. And happiness takes care of itself when you take care of these pillars. With that said, if you want this training along with this document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description where we publish all of these trainings along with their respective texts. And if you 14:27:47 want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the energy precedes reality principle. So a lot of people think reality creates their energy. Something good happens so they feel good. Something bad happens so they feel bad. And their entire emotional and energetic state is really just a reaction to whatever is going on around them. And that's the default mode and it's completely backwards. So the actual sequence, the one that every high performing person eventually figures out is that energy comes first. Your internal state precedes and shapes your external reality, not the other way around. Now, the conventional understanding of the energy reality sequence is that external events determine your internal state. And almost everyone operates from this assumption without ever really questioning it. And it feels very 14:28:48 obvious um and it feels obviously true that most people would never really think to examine whether there's another way the sequence could work. Now the default sequence goes like this. Something happens in your external world. You react emotionally to that event and the emotional reaction then determines your energy for the next period of time whatever that is. And that energy influences your behavior which then influences your results which creates the next external event and the cycle repeats. And when you're operating from the default sequence, your entire life is very reactive where your energy is basically determined by whatever happened most recently. And good days are the ones where good things happen to you and bad days are the ones where bad things happen to you. Very common sense, right? And you have almost no control over the overall trajectory of your experience. And the default sequence puts you in a position where your state 14:29:49 is always at the mercy of basically external forces. Meaning you're essentially a passenger in your own experience. And that passenger position is so normalized that most people don't even realize that there's actually an alternative. And the inversion of the sequence is basically recognizing that your internal energy state can be set independently of external circumstances and that the energy you bring to a situation essentially shapes the situation far more than the situation shapes your energy. So when you set your energy first before any external event, your energy becomes the cause rather than the effect. And this is a fundamental shift in how you relate to your own experience where you move from being shaped by reality to shaping reality through the energy you bring to it. And you've actually experienced this inversion already. Even if you didn't label it this way exactly. You've had days where you woke up in a great state, right? And 14:30:49 everything seemed to go well. Even if things weren't going well, it seemed like they were going well because now your perception is different because of your energy. And days where you woke up in a terrible state and everything seemed to go wrong happened too. And the difference wasn't luck. It was the energy you were carrying into each interaction and each decision that day. And so the mechanism by which energy precedes reality is actually quite straightforward. when you break it down and it operates through perception, behavior and also social dynamics. All of which are directly influenced by your internal energetic state in ways that compound throughout the entire day. Now, your energy state directly filters your perception. Meaning, when you're in a high energy positive state, you literally see opportunities and connections and possibilities that are invisible to you when you're in a low energy negative state. And this perceptual filtering 14:31:51 means that the same objective reality looks completely different than depending on what energy you're bringing to it. Right? So the brain's reticular activating system selectively highlights information that matches your current state. Which means a confident high energy person and an anxious depleted person will walk through the same room and see completely different things. Or they might see the same objective reality, the same exact things, but they will perceive them differently. Their interpretation of whatever is happening in that room will be very very different. And because their interpretation is different, they will get different results. And so these different perceptions, perspectives, and interpretations lead to completely different actions and completely different outcomes. And the perceptual filtering compounds throughout the day where a high energy morning typically leads to seeing an opportunity that leads to a positive interaction that then reinforces the high energy that 14:32:52 leads to seeing the next opportunity. And that upward spiral is essentially the mechanism by which energy creates reality in real time. And so your energy state directly determines the quality and character of your behavior. Where high energy [snorts] states produce decisive, creative, proactive behavior. And you've probably experienced this. While low energy states produce hesitant, reactive, and avoidant behavior. And the behavioral difference alone is really enough to explain a massive divergence in outcomes between two people in identical circumstances. So the quality of your work and your conversations and your decisions and your presence is directly proportional to the quality of your energy when you're doing them. And this means that managing your energy is actually the highest leverage productivity strategy available. Higher leverage than time management or skill development or any other optimization. And so consistent high energy behavior over time produces compound results that also look like 14:33:54 talent or luck to outside observers but are actually just the accumulated output of someone who's been showing up in a peak state day after day after day. And so there's also a societal interpersonal kind of dimension to energy where the energy you carry into any interaction directly influences how other people respond to you. And this social effect also amplifies the individual effects of perception and behavior into something way larger. So energy is contagious in social settings. Meaning the person with the strongest frame and with the strongest energy in any room tends to set the tone for the entire interaction. And when you consistently show up with high, clear, intentional energy, you naturally influence the energy of the people around you, which changes the dynamics of every interaction in your favor. And so this energetic influence operates below conscious awareness, where people 14:34:54 don't think about why they feel more engaged in your presence or more open or more collaborative around you. They just do. And that unconscious influence creates opportunities and connections that would never emerge if you basically showed up in a depleted or reactive state. And so the social reciprocity of energy also means that when you bring high energy into an interaction, people tend to match it and bring their best as well. Which means your energetic investment creates a multiplied return through the elevated responses of everyone around you. And over long time horizons, your consistent energetic state determines what you attract into your life. Meaning, the people, opportunities, and circumstances that show up tend to match the frequency you're operating at. And at the very least, even if they don't, you perceive them in that way. So, you're better off regardless. And so, this attraction dynamic is one of the most powerful and most misunderstood forces in my opinion in personal development. Now, people in 14:35:56 opportunities that match your energy are naturally drawn towards you, while those that don't match tend to fall away. And this natural matching process operating over months and years gradually reshapes your entire life to essentially reflect whatever energy you're consistently putting out. And it relates a lot to the mirror principle where who you are is what you will get, right? And this matching dynamic also means you bear a real responsibility for your energetic state where the life you're living right now to a significant degree is a reflection of the energy you've been consistently carrying and putting out. And accepting that responsibility is uncomfortable but also very necessary for real change. And while it's uncomfortable, it is freeing as well. Because if you had the power to get your life to the position it is in right now, then you also have the power to change. Right? So [snorts] with that said, let's talk 14:36:57 about the control layer. So energy precedes reality. That's the principle. Now the question is how do you actually control your energy? How do you set it deliberately rather than letting it be determined but by whatever happens to you? And the answer is that energy control is a skill. It's something you build through specific practices applied consistently over time. And the practices are not really complicated. They're just rarely taught and even more rarely applied with the discipline that they actually require. Now, the first step in energy control is awareness. Meaning, you develop the ability to accurately perceive your own current energetic state at any given moment. And while this sounds very simple, most people go through their entire day without ever checking in with their own energy level. And I think that lack of awareness means that they can't manage what they can't see. And Charlie Mer said something similar where or at least it's attributed to him where you can't improve what you don't measure. Right? 14:37:57 And I'm paraphrasing here, but you get the gist. Building a practice of regular energy monitoring throughout the day where you pause every hour or two and honestly assess your current state on a simple scale will give you data that most people never have. And most people don't even think that they can do this. And that data will reveal patterns, triggers, and rhythms that are the foundation for energy management. And the monitoring also reveals your personal energy patterns, meaning the times of day when your energy naturally peaks and dips and the activities that energize versus deplete you and the triggers that shift your state in predictable ways. And so understanding those patterns is what will allow you to design your day around them rather than fighting against them, which [clears throat] a lot of the times is an exercise and futility. And recording the monitoring data in your journal will also create a record that reveals micro macro patterns that are invisible in the moment like how your sleep quality maybe affected your energy the next day or for 14:38:58 example how certain types of social interactions consistently drain you. And those macro patterns are the most actionable insights for longer term energy optimization. Now awareness also includes identifying your specific energy triggers both both positive and negative meaning the people situations thoughts and environments that predictably shift your energy in a particular direction and knowing these triggers will give you the ability to either seek them out or avoid them deliberately. So identifying your top five energy negative energy triggers and creating strategies for handling each one, whether that's avoidance or reframing or preloading a positive state before the exposure, eliminates the most common sources of energy depletion in your daily life. And equally, identifying your top five positive energy triggers and deliberately incorporating more of them into your daily routine creates a base level of energy that's higher than most what most people experience. And that elevated baseline will make everything else in your day work better. For me, that's for 14:40:00 example working out. I do it every single day because of that reason, right? It's a positive energy trigger for me. My whole day just feels better. And you know, you can prove that by by countless of studies and research uh where working out does in fact increase your energy. And so you need to find yours. Maybe that's working out. Maybe it's something else. But once you have awareness, the next step is really developing the ability to deliberately shift your state. Meaning you can move from a low energy depleted state to a high energy resourceful state through intentional practice rather than waiting for external circumstances to change your mood. Now the fastest and most reliable way to shift your state is through your body. Meaning changes in your physiology directly and immediately change your em emotional and energetic state. Tony Robbins said something similar here where he said motion 14:41:01 creates emotion. Right? Even 2 minutes of intense physical movement whether that's jumping or walking briskly or doing push-ups produces a measurable shift in your neurochemistry and your subjective energy level. And this is the fastest state change tool available faster than any mental technique or affirmation. On top of that, deliberate breathing patterns like box breathing where you have four counts in, four hold, four out, and four hold, meaning seconds, 4 seconds in, 4 seconds hold, 4 seconds out, and then 4 seconds hold again for calming or rapid breathing for energizing. All of those will give you precise control over your autonomic nervous system, which is the master switch for your energetic state. And so learning to use that switch deliberately is one of the most valuable skills you can develop and you can by using your breath. Now the mental dimension of state control also involves choosing your focus 14:42:02 deliberately. Meaning you direct your own attention towards thoughts, memories and mental images that produce the state you want rather than letting your attention wander into whatever happens to be most salad or most most anxious at the most moment. Now, your energy follows your focus with almost perfect correlation. Meaning, whatever you're paying attention to is determining your state. And this means that managing your attention is managing your energy. And the ability to redirect your attention from depleting thoughts to energizing ones is a direct lever on your energetic state. And the a deliberate morning priming practice, for example, where you spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of your day intentionally setting your own focus on your goals, your identity, and your gratitude will establish an energetic foundation that carries through the entire day for the rest of the day. And this is just one example here. Now, the third piece of energy control is maintenance. Meaning you build daily systems and habits that sustain your 14:43:04 energy throughout the day rather than allowing it to crash and requiring constant recovery. So the foundational energy habits are sleep, nutrition, movement, and hydration. And yes, they sound super basic, but most people are underperforming in at least two of these four. And so the cumulative effect of poor sleep or poor nutrition or insufficient movement or dehydration or a combination of any of those is an energy deficit that really no mental technique can actually overcome. Sleep is the single most impactful variable for daily energy. And so improving your sleep quality by even 15 to 20% through consistent sleep times for example or reduced screen exposure before bed or using some kind of blue light blockers in a cool dark room will produce a dramatic improvement in your baseline energy that will compound across every aspect of your performance for the rest of the day and for the rest of the week honestly. Um, and you might have noticed 14:44:04 that even one bad night of sleep kind of d can derail your whole week, right? And you can't catch up on sleep. Now, daily movement, even 20 to 30 minutes of moderate exercise produces neurochemical changes that elevate your energy for the entire day. and the energy investment of the exercise session will pay back many times over and increased productivity, clarity, and emotional stability throughout the remaining hours. So, you might think that you're wasting time when in reality, movement is a multiplier. Now, building deliberate recovery periods into your day, like short breaks between uh deep work blocks or a brief afternoon reset, will also prevent the progressive energy depletion that most people experience as the day goes on. And those recovery periods will also allow you to maintain a consistently high energy level from morning to evening rather than experiencing the typical afternoon crash. So working in rhythm with your ultradian cycles, 14:45:06 meaning 90 minutes of focused work followed by anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes of genuine rest will maintain your energy at a sustainably high level throughout the whole day. And also this rhythmic approach will produce more total output than the conventional approach of powering through until you crash, which for a lot of people is not really a lot of focused work anyway. So the quality of the recovery matters as much as the duration. And I've mentioned this a lot of times where genuine renewal activities like a brief walk or some stretching or even just sitting quietly and staring at a wall with zero inputs produce much better energy restoration than so-called breaks that involve social media or email or I don't know some watching videos and so on which are actually energy draining disguised as rest. Now with that covered let's move into engineering your energetic output. So you understand the principle energy precedes reality. You've developed the control layer, awareness, state 14:46:07 management, maintenance. Now the final piece is learning to engineer your energetic output for specific situations and goals. Meaning you don't just maintain a generally high energy. You learn to calibrate and direct your energy with precision towards the outcomes that you want to produce. So different situations call for different types of energy. Right? If you're having a laid-back conversation with a friend, you're not going to be acting in the same way as you do on a sales call, hopefully, right? And learning to calibrate your energy to match the needs of each specific context is what separates someone who generally who's generally energetic from someone who's strategically powerful, where the right energy in the right situation produces outsized results that raw intensity alone can never achieve. So a creative work session, for example, calls for a more relaxed, open, exploratory energy, while a negot negotiation call maybe needs more grounded, clear, assertive energy. And a relationship conversation 14:47:09 calls for a warm, present, receptive energy. So the ability to shift between those modes deliberately matching your energy to the context rather than bringing the same energy to every situation is a sophisticated skill that produces dramatically better outcomes across every area of your life. I can't tell you how many times I see it where entrepreneurs work all day. They're on sales calls. They have negotiation calls etc. They maybe are on their computer writing all day and then they go with that same energy to their family and then they wonder why there's a mis so many misunderstandings between them and and their significant other for example. It's not the same, right? You can't just completely you can't switch so quickly. So you're just carrying the same energy you carried all day into your from your business into your relationship and it doesn't work that way. Energy mismatches like bringing aggressive energy to a 14:48:09 creative session or scattered energy to a focused task or what I just mentioned are one of the most common and most costly mistakes people make. And most people don't even realize they're doing it because they've never learned to distinguish between different types of energy or to calibrate deliberately. And the calibration starts before the activity begins where you take 30 seconds to a minute or a bit more maybe 5 minutes to set your energy for the upcoming task or the upcoming situation. Applying that same priming principle to individual activities throughout the day rather than just the morning. And learning to modulate your intensity, meaning how much energy you're bringing to any given moment, prevents the common pattern of burnout that comes from running at maximum intensity all the time. And the ability to dial your energy up for key moments and dial it down for recovery periods will create a more sustainable high performance over months and years. So identifying the two to three moments in your day that benefit most from peak energy and then 14:49:12 deliberately saving your highest intensity for those moments rather than spreading it evenly across the entire day will produce a much larger total impact from the same total energy budget. and energy conservation during low-lever activities. Meaning you consciously dial down your intensity during, for example, admin work or some chores around home or errands or routine tasks and and transitions will preserve your capacity for the high leverage moments that actually matter. And that conservation mindset will treat your energy as the finite resource it is. And now beyond calibration, you can also learn to direct your energy towards specific outcomes. Meaning you use your energetic state as a tool for manifestation in the practical non-mical sense of the word where the energy you bring to a goal shapes the actions you take and the opportunities you see and therefore shapes the outcome. So combining a high energy state with 14:50:13 detailed visualization of your desired outcome will create a powerful alignment between your internal state and then your external goals. Right? And this alignment is the mechanism by which intention translates into action and action translates into results. So the key to effective visualization is really feeling. Meaning you don't just see the outcome in your mind. You feel the energy of having achieved it in your body. And that felt sense creates a motivational pull towards the outcome that's far more powerful than just intellectual, you know, logical goal setting alone. And incorporating this visualization plus energy practice into your daily routine, even for just 3 to 5 minutes creates a sustained energetic direction that accumulates over time and then gradually pulls your behavior, your perception, and your circumstances into alignment with the outcome. You're actually holding in your energy. And so you can also learn to transmit your energy intentionally in social situations. Meaning you deliberately use 14:51:13 your energetic state to influence the dynamics of a conversation or a meeting or a presentation or a sales call etc. And this transmission capacity is what separates people who are merely energetic from people who are genuinely influential. This is what we used to also learn in sales when I was in sales is that sales is to a big degree a transfer of energy, a transfer of state. Right? The foundation of energetic transmission is presence. Meaning you're fully in the moment with your attention and your energy focused on the person or the people you're with or the situation you're in. And that full presence is filled by everyone else. And it creates a quality of connection that distracted, scattered energy simply cannot produce. And I had big trouble with this because I would always be in my head when in reality I was never present on on these calls for for a for a big amount of time. And so 14:52:13 that is also a skill by itself. learning to be there, learning to be in the moment, not thinking about what you're going to say next, but actually listening, actually taking everything in. And so energetic transmission at scale is, I think, what leadership is to a big degree, where the leader energy sets the tone for the entire team or organization as well, for an entire company. I think to a big degree culture in a company is really a transfer of state and energy and developing the capacity to hold a strong clear intentional energy in group settings is I think one of the most practically valuable skills that you can develop for any professional context and the long-term path of energy mastery is learning to maintain a consistently high clear intentional energy state as your default where the elevated head state isn't something you have to manufacture every morning, but something that arises naturally from the practices, the identity work, and the self-awareness 14:53:13 you've built. As the practices become more integrated into who you are rather than things you do, the energy management becomes automatic, meaning you don't have to think about controlling your energy anymore because your default state is already high, clear, and aligned. And that automatic high state is the compound result of everything we've talked about here. the awareness, the state control, the maintenance, the calibration, the direction, and the natural high energy state feels effortless in a way that manufactured energy will never do where you're not really pumping yourself up or forcing positivity. You're simply operating from a baseline that's been elevated through consistent practice, which is what we really want. We don't want to be faking our high energy. We want to create it and and basically raise that baseline so that we can always be high energy. And that effortless quality is both the sign of and the reward of genuine energy mastery. And so the natural state is sustainable 14:54:14 in a way that force high energy isn't where you can maintain it indefinitely because it's not being generated through willpower or stimulation or trying to hype yourself up or downing 1,000 milligs of caffeine or whatever. It's arising from the depth of your self-awareness, the clarity of your identity, and also the alignment of your daily practices with your values and goals. And the ultimate expression of energy mastery is living in a reality that you've shaped through your consistent energetic output where the people around you, the opportunities available to you, the circumstances of your daily daily life, all of them reflect the energy you've been putting out for months and years. And that reflection is proof that the principle is real and that the works. So at this level, you're no longer managing your energy to cope with reality. You're using your energy to create reality. And the distinction between those two things is the distinction between surviving and truly 14:55:14 living, between reacting to what happens and authoring what happens. And so everything we've talked through here, the principle that energy perceives reality, the awareness and state management tool, the calibration and direction of your energetic output, all of it points to one thing. Learning to control the energy you put into the world before it turns into the reality you live in, and that's the whole game. So with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the energy precedes reality principle, the control layer, engineering your energetic output, the review, and finally your action items for the day or the next few days. First, start tracking your energy state three times per day, morning, midday, and evening in your journal, noting the level, maybe 1 to 10, maybe 1 to 100, the quality, and also the primary influence on each reading. And then do this for two weeks to establish your personal energy patterns and identify your biggest drains and biggest boosters. Then design a 10-minute morning energy priming routine that 14:56:15 includes physical movement, deliberate breathing, and visualization of your desired state for the day. And then commit to doing it every morning for 30 days before evaluating the results. And then finally, choose your three highest leverage activities this week. And before each one, spend 60 seconds deliberately setting the specific type and intensity of energy that that the activity requires. And then journal afterwards about how the preset energy influence the quality of your output. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it was valuable. If you want to work with me oneon-one, as I said earlier, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. We work with entrepreneurs, professionals, high performers in different fields to basically help them m master every aspect of their life meaning health, wealth, love and self with one complete system. If you want this training along with its respective document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. Again, 14:57:15 thank you for being here. I hope this was valuable and I'll see you in the next one. >> All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the architecture of frequency and how to shift yours permanently. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, first principles, the human frequency, the frequency loop, the five layers, the protocol, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with the training you're watching, then make sure to uh join the free community again from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about first principles. So frequency at its most basic means how often something repeats within a given period of time. Right? 14:58:18 That's it. A heartbeat has a frequency. A thought pattern has a frequency. A habit has a frequency. And that definition changes the whole frame because frequency is just a repeated pattern before it is anything else. Right? And you can see it on the image here. And the whole point of frequency is repetition. And that's what makes it so powerful as a lens for basically understanding your whole life. Whatever you do once is really an event. Whatever you do repeatedly is a pattern. And patterns, not intentions, are really what shape the direction of your life over time. So everything in nature runs on rhythm and cycle. Your heart beats, your lungs expand and contract. The sun rises and sets. Seasons rotate. And your thoughts, your moods, your choices, your reactions, they all cycle, too. And the question is just whether you're aware of the cycle that you're running or not. So 14:59:18 frequency gives structure to something that otherwise feels random. And when someone says they feel stuck or they keep attracting the same situations or they can't seem to break through, what they're really describing is a frequency, a pattern that keeps looping. Not because the universe is punishing them or something like that, but because repetition is how life organizes itself. So the foundation is one insight. Your life isn't shaped by your one-time decisions or your best moments or your worst moments. It's shaped by what you repeat most often, most consistently, most unconsciously. And if you want to go even deeper, the word frequency has roots in actual physics, obviously, which is worth touching on briefly. In physics, frequency describes how often a wave oscillates per unit of time. You can see it in the image. So higher frequency means the wave oscillates faster and carries more energy per cycle. Lower frequency means slower 15:00:20 oscillation and less energy per cycle. And so now obviously I'm not going to pretend that human beings are just electromagnetic waves. uh that would be oversimplifying it. Even though the principle does transfer a lot more cleanly than you would expect because a person who repeats highquality states of being or clean thoughts or regulated emotions or honest actions or disciplined habits, that person is operating at a faster, more energized internal rhythm and the people around [clears throat] them can actually feel it. what you're really broadcasting through your frequency is a signal and the quality of that signal depends on what you're repeating internally. So if you're repeating anxiety or resentment or avoidance and self-doubt, well that signal is going to be noisy and scattered. If you're repeating clarity or groundedness or honesty or discipline, then the signal is clean. And people respond to signal quality whether they realize it or not. So 15:01:22 frequency isn't just a metaphor and to a [clears throat] big degree it's a mechanism and the mechanism works whether you believe in it or not whether you're spiritual or not whether you've ever heard the word vibration or not. And the mechanism is pretty simple. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity creates identity. Identity creates behavior. Behavior creates results. Results reinforce the identity. And then the loop keeps going. So most people's frequency runs on autopilot, which is exactly why it's so hard to change. Your repeated thoughts or emotional reactions or interpretations or choices in moments of stress or temptation, all of that happens largely below the surface. So you don't consciously choose to be anxious every morning. It just happens because the pattern is already there. Now your current frequency is your default. It's what's your what your nervous system, your psychology, and your daily environment have been training you to repeat. And defaults 15:02:23 don't change because you want them to. They change because you install a new pattern that eventually overrides the old one through sheer repetition and realworld evidence. So, your nervous system doesn't really care about your affirmations or your vision boards or your spiritual ambitions, right? It cares about proof. It cares about what you actually do repeatedly under real conditions. And that's the only language it speaks. And the first step towards changing your frequency is really just honestly seeing what your current one actually is. [clears throat] And most people skip this. They just want to jump straight to the high frequency stuff without ever really naming what they're currently repeating. But you can't leave a place you refuse to acknowledge you're in. If you are unconscious and you don't know you're in a room, how are you going to exit it? So, as you can see, the quote is during our dreams, we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do 15:03:25 we know it was a dream. And so, honest assessment is really the entry point for any real frequency shift. And that means looking at your actual daily patterns without sugar coating. And what you actually think about most of the day is extremely important here. Like what are your emotions or thoughts that you return to most often? What do you do in your free time? That's your frequency. And this is essentially quote unquote diagnosis. You're just reading the data and the data is always in the repetition. Once you can read it clearly, you can actually start to change it. And it takes some courage to actually look at your own patterns because most people would rather keep the story that they're just unlucky or that, you know, life is unfair. And [clears throat] they would rather believe that than just face the possibility that maybe their daily actions and repetitions, thoughts, emotions, and actions are building exactly the life they keep complaining 15:04:26 about. And this brings us to maybe the most important distinction in this whole training. And there's a massive difference between a frequency state and a frequency baseline. So a state is temporary. A baseline is just what you keep returning to. And so the goal here isn't to just visit a higher frequency once in a while. The goal is to raise the baseline. And almost everyone has experienced a temporary frequency shift at some point, right? You have a great workout, for example, or you meditate or you listen to a powerful podcast or you listen to some music that you like or you have a deep conversation and for an hour or two you feel elevated. You feel clear, alive, maybe motivated, but then the effect wears off and you return to whatever your nervous system considers normal. And that decay back to normal is exactly what a baseline is. It's your default resting state after the highs 15:05:28 and lows average out. And unless you change the underlying patterns that maintain that b baseline, no single experience will shift you permanently, no matter how powerful it feels in that moment. And so this is where most people get confused about frequency work because they think the goal is to feel good more often. And sure, that's part of it, but the bigger goal is to change what your system treats as home to make a higher state your resting place. And so your baseline frequency is determined by the sum of your daily repetitions rather than the peak moments. Or so for example the morning routine, the quality of your food, what you scroll through at night, how you talk to yourself in moments of of difficulty, who you spend your time with, all of that accumulated over days and weeks and months is really what sets your baseline. And the honest measure is the emotional average across a whole week, minute by minute. Not your best or 15:06:31 worst hour, not your best or worst day, but the average. And that average is really your baseline. That average is your frequency. And your baseline has gravity. It pulls you back. And that's why people can have incredible breakthroughs at a retreat or a seminar and then three weeks later they're basically back to where they started because the baseline hasn't really changed. So the daily repetitions that maintain the baseline haven't changed and so the system resets. So raising your baseline takes genuine patience and consistency. It's not some one-time awakening. It's the slow steady replacement of low frequency repetitions with higher ones until the new ones become your default and the old ones start to feel foreign. So the model is pretty simple. Frequency means repetition. Your personal frequency is the sum of what you repeat in body, mind, emotion, behavior. And your 15:07:32 baseline is the default state that all of those repetitions maintain. So a frequency shift isn't really a mood change or some kind of a peak experience. It's really just a permanent change in your baseline which is achieved through consistent replacement of the patterns that hold the one old one in place. And so the model is very simple. You don't need to understand quantum physics or chakras or manifestation. Just look at what you repeat and decide whether those repetitions are building the person you want to become or maintaining the person you've been. And from here the work becomes pretty direct, right? The specific layers where your frequency lives, the exact mechanism that keeps it locked in place, and the actual protocol for changing it. And you'll be able to look at your own life, name your current frequency with total honesty, and know exactly what needs to change for the baseline to move. And the reason we started with the first principles is that it gives you a foundation that you can always come back 15:08:33 to when the noise gets super loud. When some new technique or trend or teacher makes this more complicated than it needs to be. Frequency equals repetition. That's the anchor. Everything else is detail built on top of that one truth. Now, whenever you feel confused about the work, just come back to that single question. What am I repeating? That question will always cut through the noise and show you exactly where you stand and what needs to change next. And whenever you feel lost about what to do next, the answer is always the same. Change one repetition. Just start with one, then another, then another. And the direction is always forward. And the method is always the same. Just replace what you repeat. Now with that said, let's actually talk about the human frequency. So when we talk about a person's frequency, we're talking about the repeated pattern of their inner and outer life, their body 15:09:34 state, their emotional default, their thought loops or habitual behaviors, their standards, their self-image, all of it cycling together day after day, creating what we experience as who they are. Now your frequency as a person is a composite, right? It's not just one thing. It's the combined effect of your physical state, your emotional regulation, your attention patterns, the stories you tell yourself, and the actions you actually take on a daily basis. And these five things are stacked on top of each other. And together, they create the signal that you put out into the world and the reality you experience internally. Now, these five layers are important, but for now, just know that your frequency isn't onedimensional. It's layered. And sometimes the reason a person feels stuck is that they're trying to change one layer while the other four are still locked into the old pattern. When all five layers are pointing in the same direction, something changes, right? You feel coherent. You feel alive, clear, 15:10:35 powerful. And when they're in conflict with each other, you feel scattered. You feel heavy, confused, or drained. And that internal conflict is what most people are actually experiencing when they say they feel low frequency. And that word coherence is actually the most accurate word for what high frequency really means in a person. A high frequency person isn't someone who always who's always happy or always calm or super spiritual. They're just someone whose inner world and outward behavior are aligned. So they think, they feel, and they act in the same direction, and there's very little internal contradiction happening. So a grounded person feels solid and real without necessarily performing, right? Their presence carries weight and that feeling you you get from them was coherence. Their internal signal was clean and you felt it without them having to say a word. The opposite pattern is also easy to feel. Someone 15:11:37 talks big but acts small. They preach love but they live in resentment. They claim abundance, but they panic over every expense. That's incoherence, [snorts] right? The signal is noisy. And no matter how much spiritual language they wrap it in, the body knows and other people know or can at least feel. And most importantly, their own nervous system knows. So coherence is really just a form of truth. If you think about it, your outside matches your inside. Your words match your behavior. your standards match your choices and that kind of alignment is rare and that's exactly why it's so magnetic when you encounter it in another person. Now every person is broadcasting something all the time through their body, their language, their energy, their choices, their presence and the quality of that broadcast depends entirely on the coherence of their internal patterns. So a clean signal comes from a person whose 15:12:37 repetitions are aligned. A noisy signal comes from a person whose repetitions are in conflict with each other. So other people pick up on your signal whether they're consciously aware of it or not. And you felt this yourself. You walk into a room and some people feel safe, grounded, and trustworthy while others feel draining, anxious, or off. And you can't explain why. That's frequency perception. You're reading someone's signal without knowing you're doing it. Now, most communication is non-verbal anyway. So your posture, your eye contact, breathing rate, facial tension, pace of speech, the way you occupy space, all of that is frequency data. And all of it is shaped by your internal repetitions, by the patterns that you've been running for enough time that they've become your default way of showing up. And this also explains why you're drawn to certain people and repelled by others. You're attracted to frequencies that either match yours or represent the frequency you're moving towards. So, in other words, it's at its 15:13:40 resonance. You resonate with them. And you're repelled by frequencies that conflict with yours or remind you of the patterns that you're trying to leave behind. And that word resonate comes from the Latin resonare or which means to sound again. Re means again and sonare means to sound. And in the physical sense, resonance happens when one vibrating object causes another object with a compatible natural frequency to vibrate more strongly. So the second object responds because something in it can receive and amplify the original signal. And that gives us a useful way to understand human resonance because you're not literally vibrating of course but when another person's presence, values, emotional state or a way of living matches something already active inside you, it sounds again in you. You feel recognition. Something in them activates, strengthens or gives expression to something in you. And sometimes you resonate with people 15:14:42 because their patterns match your current frequency. They feel familiar because they reflect who you already are. Other times, you resonate because they embody a frequency you're moving towards. So, they awaken a possibility that's already forming inside you, which is why certain people can feel magnetic before you can logically explain the attraction. And the opposite is dissonance. When someone's signal conflicts with your values, nervous system, or direction, the interaction feels noisy, tense, or off. And you may also feel repelled by people who mirror patterns that you're trying to leave behind. So resonance is more than liking someone. It's the experience of their pattern, finding a compatible pattern in you and making it sound more cleanly or clearly. So if you want to clean up your signal, the path is integrity. And by integrity, I don't mean morality in the traditional sense. I mean structural integrity. The alignment between what you think, what you feel, and what you do. Every time you break your own word to yourself, 15:15:43 every time you compromise your own standards, every time you say yes when what you actually mean is no, you create a fracture in your integrity. And each fracture adds noise to your signal. And over time, enough fractures and the signal becomes almost unreadable. So you feel confused, lost, disconnected from yourself. It's the natural result of too many internal contradictions stacked up on top of each other. And this fracture is essentially cognitive dissonance at the identity level. Now, cognitive dissonance is the psychological tension you feel when two parts of your experience contradict each other. So, you believe you're honest, but you lie. Let's say you value boundaries, but you keep saying yes. You see yourself as disciplined, but repeatedly break promises to yourself. And your mind wants those pieces to agree. So, it tries to reduce the tension. And you can do that in two ways. You can restore integrity by changing your behavior to match your values or you protect the old behavior 15:16:44 by rationalizing it, lowering your standards or rewriting the story. And that second response is what creates the fracture. The contradiction remains but it gets buried under justification. As these unresolved contradictions accumulate, you stop trusting your own words. Your self-image says one thing. Your behavior provides evidence for another. And that creates the internal noise in your signal. So cognitive dissonance is really the immediate tension caused by contradiction. So the fracture is what happens when that contradiction becomes a repeated pattern rather than something you resolve. So integrity repairs it because your beliefs, your words and actions begin producing the same signal again. And the repair is the same as the problem just in reverse. So one kept promise at a time, one align choice at a time, one moment where you honor your own word or standard instead of betraying it. And slowly the fractures heal, the signal clears, and you start to feel like yourself again, maybe for 15:17:46 the first time in years. Now, there's another part to this that's really important, and it's the difference between understanding frequency and actually embodying it. So most people who engage with this kind of content already understand these ideas to different degrees, right? You've heard about vibration, energy, manifestation, mindset, all of it. You could probably explain it to someone else, but your daily life doesn't always reflect any of it. And the gap between knowing and being is enormous. And that gap is where most people live permanently. So, a concept only becomes real when it drops into your body and your behavior. Until then, is basically just information. And information on its own doesn't change frequency. You can read every book on mindset and still live in anxiety, fear, scarcity, shame. So the knowledge alone doesn't really do anything until it becomes embodied through practice. [snorts] And embodiment is about installation. So it's about taking an idea and practicing 15:18:48 it so many times in so many real situations that it stops being something you know and starts being something you are. And that's the change from concept to character, from understanding to identity. And the test of embodiment is always behavior. How do you act when you're stressed? How do you react when you're triggered? What do you choose when no one is watching? Those moments are what reveal your actual frequency, not the frequency you talk about or the frequency you you aspire to have on your best days. So, this process takes longer than people want it to. The spiritual marketplace always sells quick shifts, instant transformations, overnight frequency jumps. And sure, sometimes you can have a sudden insight that actually changes how you see absolutely everything. And from there, it changes your whole life. But the embodiment of that insight, the integration of it into your daily patterns. That's a slower process. And there's honestly no skipping it. So your real frequency is your private frequency. It's what 15:19:49 happens when nobody is watching. When there's no reason to perform or to pretend. The person you are at 11 p.m. when you're tired, alone, and faced with a choice between discipline and comfort. That person is your frequency. Everything else is performance. So being honest about your private frequency is uncomfortable, but it's the most powerful thing you can do for your growth. Because most people have a public frequency that they perform and a private frequency that they hide. And the goal of this work is to close that gap entirely to make your private self and your public self the same person. Now your life is a mirror of your private repetitions, right? Your relationships, your health, your finances, your emotional state, your level of fulfillment. All of it is reflecting back to you the sum of what you repeat when no one is looking. And that reflection doesn't lie. And this is a good moment to talk about what fake frequency actually looks like. Because the personal development and spiritual space is absolutely full of it. 15:20:51 Fake frequency is when someone adopts the language, the aesthetics, the rituals, the surface behaviors of a high frequency person without actually doing the internal work that produces real coherence. They say the right things, they post the right content. They use the right words. But underneath it, the same old patterns are running untouched. And this is sometimes called spiritual bypassing, which is when someone uses spiritual concepts to avoid dealing with their actual emotional reality. They skip the grief, the anger, the fear, the shame. They jump straight into I'm aligned, I'm abundant, I'm grateful without ever processing what's actually living in their body and mind. And the result is a brittle, fragile kind of positivity that actually cracks the moment life puts any real pressure on it. And you can see some examples here of spiritual bypassing. So toxic uh positivity, spiritualizing personal problems, escapism, neglecting 15:21:52 boundaries, bypassing anger and grief. So bypassing is avoidance. It feels like progress, but it's actually just a more sophisticated way of running from yourself. The patterns underneath stay exactly the same. They just get buried deeper and become harder to access. And eventually bypassed emotions completely collapse because they come back harder, louder, more disorienting than they would have been if you just felt them honestly in the first place. So as Bessel Vander Kulk titled his book, the body keeps the core and it doesn't forget [clears throat] just because you decided to raise your vibration over it. Now the other version of fake frequency is aesthetic frequency. And this is where someone builds their entire identity around the look and feel of being high frequency without any of the substance behind it. So the crystals, the sound baths, the cacao ceremonies, the curated feed. And look, none of 15:22:54 these things are bad on their own. They're not at all. I'm not saying that they're tools. But when the tools become the identity, the real work gets replaced by performance. And real frequency is invisible. It shows up in how you treat people when you're frustrated and how you handle disappointment. And whether you keep your word when it's inconvenient, and how you act when you're angry. That's the substance. Everything else is just supplemental and up to taste and choice. So the test is simple. remove all the spiritual language, rituals, and aesthetics from someone's life and the real frequency should still be felt. Would their presence still be grounded, honest, and clean? If yes, it's real. If everything they have depends on the packaging, then it's probably not. So, it takes some work to strip away this spiritual performance and just be an honest, grounded, disciplined person who does the daily work without needing an audience or a label for it. That's the type of person you should be. 15:23:54 That kind of simplicity is the highest frequency move there is. So let's talk about the frequency loop. [clears throat] So frequency sustains itself through a loop. Why does your current frequency feel so sticky? Why is it so hard to actually shift even when you understand the concept perfectly? The answer is that frequency runs on a loop. And until you see the loop clearly, you'll keep trying to change results without changing the mechanism that produces them. And the loop is simple. Your internal state shapes how you perceive reality. Your perception creates meaning. The meaning trigger triggers an emotion. The emotion drives a behavior. The behavior creates a result. The result generates evidence. And the evidence reinforces the identity that produces the original state. Then the cycle starts again over and over hundreds of times a day mostly 15:24:54 below conscious awareness. So the reason this loop is so hard to break is really that it's mostly invisible. You don't consciously decide to interpret events through a lens of scarcity or victimhood or self-doubt. It just happens automatically because the loop has been running for so long that it feels like reality, not like the pattern you're generating. And the loop moves fast. By the time you've perceived something, assigned meaning to it, felt the emotion, and reacted, the whole sequence might have taken less than a second. And that speed is what makes it feel like reality. It doesn't feel like a choice. It feels like just how life is, like life is just this way. And each cycle of the loop deposits a bit of evidence into your identity bank. So one reaction isn't your destiny of course right but thousands of identical reactions day after day month after 15:25:57 month year after year that's how an identity gets built that's how you solidify a self-image and that's how a frequency gets locked in place. So identity is the anchor point of the whole loop because everything starts from the identity and circles back to it or the self-image in other words. If your identity says that you're someone who always gets overlooked, then you will perceive situations through that lens. You will assign meaning accordingly and you will feel the emotions that match. You will behave in ways that confirm it and you will also collect evidence that reinforces it. So the loop isn't random. It's organized around who you believe yourself to be. And identity isn't just what you consciously believe about yourself. It's what your nervous system has accepted as true based on accumulated evidence. So you might consciously tell yourself that you're confident and worthy, but if your body has been collecting evidence of rejection and failure for 20 years, then 15:26:58 the nervous system's version of your identity will override the conscious one every time. And this is exactly why affirmations alone don't work for most people. You're trying to overwrite a deeply installed identity with words. But the nervous system doesn't speak in words. It speaks in experience in repeated real world evidence. If you want to change the identity, you have to change what you do consistently until the new evidence outweighs the old. And perception is important because it's honestly the most overlooked part of the loop. Two people can experience the same exact event and walk away with completely different frequencies simply because they assigned different meaning to it. So one person loses a client and thinks it's proof that they're a failure and another person loses the same client and sees it as useful data about what to adjust next. It's the same event but totally different frequency outcomes. So your perception is filtered through your 15:27:58 current identity. You literally cannot see things that your identity doesn't allow for. So if you believe you're unlucky, you will notice and remember every piece of evidence that supports that belief and unconsciously filter out everything that contradicts it. And that confirmation bias is the mechanism by which the frequency loop stays locked. And interpretation is always a choice, even though it doesn't feel like one. It feels automatic. It feels like the truth, but it's actually a habit, a well practiced interpretation that's been repeated so many times, it lost the feeling of being a choice. And one of the most powerful things you can do in frequency work is learning to increase the amount of time between an event and your interpretation of it. And recognizing that the interpretation is not the event. So you can intervene in the loop at any point. You don't have to change everything. You just have to interrupt the cycle at one link consistently so that the whole thing starts to shift. So 15:28:59 change the body and the state changes. Change the attention and the perception changes. Change the interpretation and the emotion changes. Change the behavior and the evidence changes. Change the evidence and the identity starts to change as well. And so the question is where to enter the loop. And honestly the best entry point is different for everyone. Some people respond best to physical intervention, changing sleep, food, movement, breathing, etc. Others respond better to attention management, changing the way they consume what they consume and what they focus on. Others need to start with behavior, just doing the right thing repeatedly until the feelings follow. So, the smart move is to just experiment. Just try intervening at different points in the loop and notice where you get the most traction. Where does the change feel most real? Where do the old patterns lose their grip the fastest? And that's your entry point. So trust your own feedback on this. And once you found one entry point that works, you can start stacking 15:30:02 interventions at other points in the loop. So change the body and the behavior and the attention all at once. And then the loop starts breaking down much faster than if you were only working on one layer. But here's the thing that really matters, and this is the part most people miss entirely. You can't shift your frequency permanently without changing the evidence your nervous system is collecting. So you can have peak experiences, breakthroughs, epiphanies, and moments of total clarity. But if you return to the same behaviors, the same environment, the same daily patterns, your nervous system will keep collecting the same evidence, and the old identity will snap right back into place. So the nervous system needs proof, real tangible, repeated proof that the new frequency is who you actually are now. And proof only comes from action, from choices made under real conditions, and from showing up differently in the exact moments where you used to default to the old pattern. And each new piece of 15:31:02 evidence is small on its own. One of anything is too little. But accumulated over days and weeks and months, they become the new evidence base. And eventually the nervous system updates, the identity shifts, and the baseline moves. And so there's a tipping point in this process. You won't know exactly when it happens, but there comes a moment where the old frequency starts to feel foreign, where the old reactions feel like they belong to someone else, where the new patterns feel like home. And that's when you know the baseline has actually changed. So your old frequency has gravity. It pulls you back. And this is completely normal. It doesn't mean that you're failing or something like that. It doesn't mean that the work isn't working. It means that those deeply installed patterns just won't disappear overnight. They just fade slowly through consistent replacement. And there will always [clears throat] be days where the old pattern pulls hard and you fall back into it. That's just 15:32:04 part of the process. So relapse and frequency work is just feedback. It shows you exactly where the old pattern still has a hold and it shows you which triggers are still active and which environments are still pulling you down and which parts of the identity haven't fully updated yet. So just use it as data and don't spiral about it. Now with the risk of sounding cliche, every relapse contains a lesson inside of it if you're willing to look at it. So what triggered the fall? What was the first small compromise that led to the bigger one? What pattern were you running on autopilot? All of these are lessons. And that kind of review is extremely valuable. And as I've always said, the measure of growth isn't whether you relapse. It's how quickly you recover in the big from the relapse. Basically, how quickly you return to the thing. In the beginning, a bad day might turn into a 15:33:05 bad week. Right? A few months in, a bad moment might only last an hour before you catch yourself and choose differently. So that compression of recovery time is one of the clearest signs that your baseline is actually moving. And your environment is one of the biggest sources of gravitational pull. The people you spend time with, the spaces you live and work in, the content you consume, the conversations you participate in, the norms of your social circle, all of that is either supporting your new frequency or pulling you back towards the old one. So, you're influenced by your environment far more than you think because willpower can't necessarily override a consistently low frequency environment. If everyone around you operates in chaos, complaint, mediocrity, and reactivity, you'll eventually calibrate to that level, no matter how strong your intentions are. It's just how social calibration works. 15:34:06 So, part of frequency work is environment design. Deliberately choosing the spaces, the people, the inputs, and the routines that support the frequency you're building. And this isn't about being elitist or cutting people off unnecessarily. It's really about being honest that your environment is one of the biggest variables in whether the shift sticks or not. And protecting your frequency doesn't make you arrogant or cold. It makes you responsible about your own life because you can love people without letting their patterns destabilize yours. Right? You can be compassionate without absorbing everyone else's chaos. Boundaries are frequency protection. They protect you and your frequency. And they're not optional if you're serious about this. Now, awareness is the single most important skill in all frequency work. Real functional momentto- moment awareness of what pattern you're running. Now, 15:35:07 the loop only has power over you when it runs unconsciously. If you can't notice that you're in a loop, you can't really change anything. So awareness is the meta skill. The moment you see it mid loop, you've already weakened it. And that's the opening that everything else enters through. So the skill you're developing here is the ability to catch yourself in the middle of a loop before it completes. You notice the thought forming. You feel the emotional trigger starting. You see the habitual behavior about to fire. And in that moment of noticing, you have a choice. You've created space. You can complete the old loop or you can do something different. Right? And this ability gets stronger with practice. And honestly, it starts out being pretty weak for most people. In the beginning, you might not catch yourself until after the loop has already completed, right? And you reached you or you reacted, you spiraled, you made the old 15:36:07 choice. And only afterwards do you think about what actually happened. But that's still progress. The noticing is getting faster. And eventually you'll catch it mid loop. And eventually you'll catch it before it even starts. So any form of genuine meditation or mindfulness practice can strengthen this ability directly. And it strengthens your observer capacity, your ability to watch your own inner process without being swept away by it. And that observer capacity is the meta skill that makes every other part of this work possible. And so once you develop this awareness, you can you can no longer pretend that your frequency is happening to you. You start to actually see in real time that you're generating it through your choices, through your reactions, through your interpretations, through your habits, through your attention. And that's both the hardest and most freeing realization in this entire process because it means you're responsible and it means you have power. 15:37:08 Now ownership is the bridge between understanding and change. You can understand the loop intellectually for years without changing anything. But the moment you take full ownership of the fact that your frequency is your creation maintained by your daily repetitions, something unlocks. the victim narrative can completely fall away and the blame falls away. And what's left is a clear, honest relationship between you and your patterns. And that ownership is the beginning of real freedom. Freedom from the unconscious repetition of patterns that no longer serve you. Freedom to choose, to build, to become the person your current frequency has been preventing you from being. So with that said, let's go on and talk about the five layers. So frequency lives in five layers. There are five layers stacked on top of each other and each one contributes to your overall frequency. They are body, attention, emotion, meaning identity. 15:38:09 And we touched on these earlier and now we're going to be breaking down each one in full detail so you can actually use this essentially as a diagnostic tool for your own life. So these layers are stacked, meaning each one influences the one above it. If your body is disregulated, your attention suffers. If your attention is scattered, your emotions become chaotic. If your emotions are chaotic, you assign distorted meaning to events. If your meanings are distorted, your identity falsifies around a false narrative. So, the whole stack is connected and the bottom layers influence the top ones more than most people realize. And that's why body and attention are at the bottom of the stack. As you can see here, they are the foundation. And a lot of people try to change their identity or their mindset at the top of the stack while completely ignoring the foundation which is body and attention, right? And that that approach can still work but these structural problems could keep reasserting themselves. Now the 15:39:11 reverse is also true. When you clean up your lower layer or layers, it cascades upward automatically. So fix your sleep and suddenly your emotional regulation improves. fix your attention and suddenly your interpretations become more accurate. The cascade effect is real and it's one of the fastest ways to basically shift your overall frequency by starting from body all the way up to identity. So fixing the foundation first and the reason we're breaking we're breaking these into separate layers is so you can actually diagnose with specificity where your frequency is actually getting stuck. So most people feel off or low because but they can't really pinpoint why. And this framework gives you a diagnostic tool. You can check each layer body first, then moving up and identify exactly where the leak is. And once you know the layer, the intervention becomes 15:40:12 obvious. And precision is really important here because telling yourself to raise your vibration is way too vague to act on. But saying, "My sleep is wrecked and that's killing my emotional regulation," that's very specific, right? And it's specific enough to actually work on it more importantly. And that's a frequency problem that you can do something about today. And in general, when multiple layers are off, start with the lowest one. Just fix the body before the mind. Fix the attention before the emotions. Fix the emotions before the stories. The bottom up approach creates the fastest cascading improvement because each lower layer supports everything above it. Now, the first layer is your body. And honestly, this is probably the most neglected layer in the entire spiritual/personal development space. Everyone wants to talk about mindset and energy and vibration, but very few people want to talk about the fact that your body is literally the hardware that everything else runs on. If the hardware is effed up, nothing will really fix the 15:41:15 experience. And so, your nervous system is the master regulator of your internal state. When your nervous system is disregulated through, for example, chronic stress or poor sleep or inflammation or chemical imbalance or overwork or unresolved stuff stored in in in your body, your perception of reality literally shifts and things feel more threatening. Your emotions feel bigger. Your patience shrinks and your capacity for higher frequency states drops dramatically. And sleep is probably the single most important frequency variable that almost nobody takes seriously. So when you're sleepd deprived, your prefrontal cortex, the the part of your brain responsible for impulse control, for planning, for emotional regulation, for clear thinking, goes partially offline. So you become more reactive, you become more impulsive, more emotionally volatile, and more likely to default to old patterns. And one bad night is obviously not that big of a deal, but 15:42:15 chronic sleep deprivation is a guaranteed frequency killer. So regular physical movement is also not optional for high frequency. Your body was designed to move and when it doesn't, everything stagnates. Everything feels stuck. Energy drops, mood drops, clarity drops. Even 20 to 30 minutes of deliberate movement per day, whether that's walking or running or lifting or stretching, changes your baseline state measurably and it compounds over weeks. And next is what you eat. And what you eat is literally what your brain and nervous system are built from. Processed food, excessive sugar, chronic alcohol, and nutritional deficiencies all directly affect your mood, energy, cognitive function, and emotional stability. So, you can't eat poorly and expect to feel like a high frequency, high performing person. The body doesn't work that way, and no amount of mindset work can really override that. And your body also runs on chemistry. 15:43:19 So dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, adrenaline, testosterone, estrogen, GABA, oxytocin, these are physical chemicals that directly determine how you feel, how you think, how you behave. And your daily habits are constantly adjusting the balance of these chemicals for better or worse. So dopamine is really the one to pay super close attention to here because the modern world is essentially a dopamine hijacking machine. Social media, porn, junk food, constant no guilty, rapid switching between tasks and stimuli, all of it spikes your dopamine in ways that your brain was never designed for. And the result is that after they shoot your dopamine up, your baseline dopamine actually drops, which means that normal life starts to feel flat. It starts to feel boring, unsatisfying. And all the delayed gratification activities, which is which are most activities that are actually good for you, don't feel satisfying anymore. And 15:44:19 that's why a lot of people don't even want to read a book. They can't even finish a longer video of 20 to 30 minutes. And that flatness is a frequency problem rooted in chemistry. So a dopamine reset where you deliberately reduce high stimulation inputs and let your baseline actually recalibrate is one of the fastest ways to raise your felt frequency. Fewer screens, less no volty chasing, more boredom, more silence, more sustained attention on single tasks. And honestly, if you can just live like this, which is pretty easy once you do it for a couple of weeks, just literally reducing the screens, reducing the amount of novelty you're constantly chasing, reducing the, you know, spikes of processed food, alcohol, etc. Having allowing for more bor boredom, for more silence, for longer 15:45:21 tasks, longer sustained attention on single tasks, for delayed gratification activities like reading a long book, for example, if you just live like this, your dopamine will just the baseline will actually rise And it's uncomfortable at first, but within a week or two, normal life will start to feel vivid again. Colors can [clears throat] come back will come back. Small pleasures will return. Motivation will stabilize. And you won't have to stare at a wall every day for 20 minutes to get yourself to work. And so breath is the body layer variable that actually bridges the conscious and unconscious. And you breathe automatically but you can also control it deliberately. Now slow deep diaphragmatic breathing directly activates the parasympathetic nervous system which is your body's rest 15:46:22 and repair mode. So fast shallow chest level breathing activates the sympathetic nervous system which is your body's threat response. And most people breathe wrong all day without realizing it. And that one pattern alone is really enough to keep them locked in low frequency states. So a simple daily breath practice, even just 1 minute of slow nasal breathing in the morning can shift your baseline state more than most people would believe. And yeah, it's not complicated, but it works reliably and it's free. Now, breath is also your fastest anchor back to a regulated state in moments of stress. So, when you feel yourself getting triggered or reactive or overwhelmed, three to five slow exhales through the nose can actually bring your nervous system back online within 60 seconds. And that's a simple frequency tool you always have access to anytime, 15:47:24 anywhere. Now, the second layer is your attention. And this is one this one is arguably the most consequential layer of for momentto- moment frequency because whatever you repeatedly attend to becomes your reality. If you spend 3 hours a day consuming fear-based content, your emotional landscape will be dominated by fear. If you spend 3 hours a day in focused, meaningful work, your emotional landscape will reflect that instead. So the equation is that direct. And most people's attention diet is terrible. And they don't even realize it. They scroll through fear-based content on social media. They watch ragebait news. They consume hours of shallow entertainment designed to overstimulate and undernourish. And then they wonder why they feel anxious, empty, and unmotivated. Your attention diet is your frequency diet, right? Whatever you feed your [clears throat] attention is what grows inside your inner world. 15:48:27 And inputs are food for the mind. Just like your body reflects what you eat, your mind reflects what you consume. So highquality inputs create highquality inner states. Lowquality inputs create lowquality inner states. It's not that complicated, right? But it requires some discipline because the lowquality stuff is [snorts] really designed to be addictive and easy. And most likely your whole circle is talking about it. And so when you cut those things out like series and shows that are trending and popular right now, a big part of your you you might feel a bit more, you know, you won't be as in tune with your circle as as typically. And that's okay, by the way. It's okay to not be to not be tuned in with the latest trendy show on Netflix. And one of the most useful exercises you 15:49:29 can do is really an honest attention audit. Like for one full day, actually track where your attention goes hour by hour. How much time on your phone? How much time on social media? How much time in meaningful conversation? How much time in focused work? How much time on your computer? How much time in silence or reflection? The numbers will almost certainly surprise you. And that surprise is the starting point for change. And there are apps that can do it for you both on your computer and your phone. And even if there weren't, you can track it yourself if you want to go the manual route. On the other side of the spectrum, sustained focus on meaningful work is one of the most reliable frequency elevators that exist. When you're deeply engaged in something that matters to you, fully present, fully absorbed, your internal state changes completely. So time feels different. Your sense of self shifts. You feel alive and purposeful. And that state, which some people call flow, is essentially a direct result of deep attention and some challenge. And it's 15:50:31 available to you every day if you protect the conditions for it. And deep focus requires depth. It requires you to stay with one task for long enough that the shallow mental chatter can quiet down and the deeper engagement to show up from that. Now, most people never reach that level because they interrupt themselves every few minutes with a notification, a tab switch, a quick check of their phone, some notification from the other room, TV blaring in the background. That constant interruption keeps you locked in surface level processing which feels scattered and draining. So, protecting your focus is protecting your frequency. And that might mean putting your phone in another room. It might mean blocking your or even deleting websites and apps. It might mean creating a physical space that signals to your brain that it's time to work deeply. Whatever it takes, the ability to sustain attention is increasingly becoming the rarest and most valuable skill in the world and is 15:51:33 directly tied to your frequency. Now, attention is also the root of presence. So when you're fully attentive to the current moment, to the person in front of you, to the task at hand, to the sensation in your body, you're by definition operating at a higher frequency than when your mind is scattered across 12 different worries and fantasies. So presence is high frequency. Distraction is low frequency. It's really that simple. Now, the third layer is your emotional baseline. the emotions you live in most of the time, your resting emotional state. And this is where frequency can be actually felt, right? You can have the cleanest body, you can have the sharpest attention in the world, but if your default emotional tone is resentment or anxiety or shame or fear or numbness, your frequency will reflect that. So, everyone has an emotional default. It's the state you return to when nothing particularly good or bad is 15:52:33 really happening. For some people it's anxiety. For others it's boredom. For others it's lowgrade irritability. For others it's contentment. And that default is really the result of years of emotional repetition. And changing it is one of the most transformative things you can do for your frequency. So the first step is really just noticing what your emotional default actually is. So most people are used to their default state that they don't even register uh and they don't even register it as an emotion anymore. It just feels like normal. But normal isn't neutral, right? Normal is your most practiced emotional frequency. And so naming it, whether it's resentment, fear, sadness, restlessness, numbness, or something else, is really the starting point for changing it. Again, you can't change something you don't know about. And once you notice the default, you can start to actually trace the pattern that 15:53:33 maintains it. So you can trace what triggers it, what reinforces it, what thoughts feed it, what behaviors express it, what environments activate it. And the default doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's held in place by a whole ecosystem of supporting patterns. And you need to see the ecosystem to change the default. So your emotional baseline can shift through suppression or repression or avoidance or override. Feelings need to be felt. Grief needs to be griefed. Anger needs to be acknowledged. Fear needs to be faced. The way out is through, not around. People who try to skip the step and jump straight to positivity end up with an emotional backlog that eventually explodes. And so emotions have a natural cycle. They rise, they peak, they complete complete and then they dissolve if you give them the time. The problem is that most people interrupt this cycle. They suppress the emotion before it actually completes either through distraction or numbing themselves or rationalizing or 15:54:35 performing a different emotion. And incomplete emotions don't go away. They just accumulate. They become the background noise of your whole emotional life. And that noise is what keeps the baseline low. So giving yourself some space to actually feel your emotions without judging yourself, without rushing, without needing to fix them, without telling yourself no emotions, without trying to be cold. It's one of the most powerful frequency practices that exist. It's not spiritual. It's honestly basic psychology. It doesn't look impressive, but it clears the emotional backlog and creates room for your natural state, which tends to be much lighter and much cleaner and clearer than most people expect once they the accumulated weight is released. And so emotional honesty is the price of admission for real frequency work. If you can't be honest about what you're actually feeling with yourself, at least you can't really change it. You'll just keep layering performance over pain. And 15:55:35 basically the gap between your real frequency and your projected frequency will keep growing until something actually breaks which eventually it will. So the fourth layer is meaning and this is where things get pretty interesting because two people can experience the exact same event and end up in completely different frequencies based solely on the meaning that they assigned to it. So someone loses a job and one person interprets it as devastating failure while another interprets it as necessary opportunity. So the event is exactly the same but the frequency outcome is totally different. So your interpretations are the invisible architects of your life. Every event that happens to you passes through an interpretation filter before it becomes an emotion. And that filter is built from your identity, your past experiences, your beliefs, and your habitual thinking patterns. So most of the time you don't even realize you're interpreting. It feels like you're just reacting to what happened. But there's 15:56:36 always an interpretation between the event and the reaction always. So learning to notice the gap between the event and the interpretation is one of the highest leveraged skills you can actually develop. It's the space where freedom lives. And in that space, you have the opportunity to choose a different meaning and therefore a different emotional outcome and therefore a different behavioral response and therefore different evidence for your identity. The whole cascade changes. So the tricky part is that interpretations are almost habitual. You've been interpreting certain types of events in certain ways for years, maybe decades. So the interpretation fires so fast that it feels like it is what it is. It doesn't feel like a choice, but it actually is, right? And with practice, you can learn to catch the interpretation before it locks in and just ask yourself whether there's a more accurate, more honest way to read the situation and a better way to react. 15:57:39 So on a bigger scale, meaning also shows up as the stories you tell yourself about your life. The story of why you are the way you are, the story of what happened to you, the story of what's possible for you, the story of what you deserve. These stories are frequency architectures. They determine what you can see, what you believe is possible, and how you interpret almost everything that happens to you. And so everyone is running a narrative. The question is whether you chose it or whether it was inherited. Now, most people's life narrative was written by someone else or by their pain. And they're living inside of it without questioning it. So, rewriting your narrative is really about honestly examining the story and then keeping what's true and updating what's no longer accurate or useful. So, you aren't the same person you were 10 years ago. But if your story hasn't updated, you might still be living from that old version of yourself. and you might be making choices that match a person you've already outgrown. 15:58:40 And the fifth layer, the one that sits at the top of the stack and governs everything beneath it is identity or self-image. So I personally use these terms interchangeably. And your identity is the master frequency, right? It is the organizing principle around which your perception, emotion, meaning, behavior and entire life experience revolves. Everything else in this framework, body, attention, emotion, meaning all of it feeds into it and is shaped by identity and or self-image. So change your identity or self-image and everything downstream changes too. Keep the same one and everything stays locked. So identity or self-image is easiest to build through evidence. And there are other methods, but evidence is the most straightforward one. You become the person you keep proving yourself to be through repeated action. And if your daily choices keep proving you're 15:59:41 disciplined, you're honest, you're clear, you're powerful, then your nervous system begins organizing around that identity or self-image. And the loop starts to reinforce the new frequency instead of the old one. So the evidence doesn't have to be huge, right? In fact, small and consistent proof is actually way more powerful because you start collecting these data points and these data points accumulate into a new identity over time. And like compound interest, the effect accelerates. So each new piece of evidence makes the next one easier. And at first it's pretty difficult. After a a month, a while, it starts to feel more natural. And after 3 months, the new pattern starts to feel like who you are. And that's the compounding effect of identity level evidence. And it's the most powerful force in this entire framework. So the flip side is also true. Every time you act in contradiction to the identity you're trying to build, you 16:00:43 deposit evidence for the old one, right? you if you consistently contradict the new self-image, well, the old identity will pull you right back to where where you started. And that's why consistency matters more than intensity in this work. So, showing up every day at 70% beats showing up once a week at 100. And ultimately, frequency shifting is identity or self-image work. Right? Deeper than mood management or energy healing or vibe. It's becoming a different person at the level of repeated daily evidence. The person who sleeps well, who eats clean, who moves their body, who protects their attention, processes their emotions, chooses empowering empowering meanings, and acts from integrity, that person will naturally operate at a high frequency without having to try. The frequency is just the byproduct of the identity. And this is what makes it sustainable. You're not forcing a high state all the time. You're building a 16:01:44 life that naturally produces one. And once the identity clicks, maintaining it becomes easier than maintaining the old one was because the new identity is actually aligned with who you want to be now. And there's no internal friction or or cognitive dissonance anymore. And there's a point in this process where the shift becomes essentially irreversible. And the old identity feels so foreign, so uncomfortable, so misaligned with who you've become that actually going back to it would require as much effort as leaving it took in the first place. And that's when you know the work is done when going back feels almost impossible. So with that said, let's actually cover the protocol. So the first principles, the human frequency, the loop, and the five layers all lead here, right? the practical step-by-step protocol for shifting your frequency in a real and lasting way. The actual process broken down into actions, you can actually start today. So, it's deliberately simple, five steps, each 16:02:46 one corresponds to a specific phase of the shift. And while the steps are simple to understand, they require consistency and honesty. And that's always the gap in this kind of work, actually executing on on the things. So, the steps are in a specific order for a reason, and each one builds on the one before it. And I know skipping steps is tempting, especially for people who've already done a lot of personal development work and feel like they're past the basics. But the basics are the basics for a reason. They're the foundation that everything else stands on. So, this is a daily practice, something you do in some form every single day until the new frequency becomes your default. And it's a commitment to yourself. and try to trust the process even when it doesn't feel like it's working. The first few weeks are the hardest and the least rewarding. So, you're planting seeds that haven't sprouted yet. And so, the temptation to quit or to switch to something newer and shinier will be strong, just resisted. 16:03:48 The compound effect only kicks in if you stay long enough to let it build. Now, most of the early progress is going to be invisible. It's happening underneath the surface in the rewiring of neural pathways in the slow recalibration of your nervous system in the quiet accumulation of evidence. So you won't feel dramatically different after one week but the infrastructure is being built and once it reaches escape velocity the change happens very fast. So in physics, escape velocity is the minimum speed an object needs to break free from the gravitational pull of the planet or other massive body without needing additional propulsion. Below that speed, gravity eventually pulls it back. Above that speed, it can finally break away. Once it crosses that threshold, it can keep moving outward instead of falling into the same orbit again. 16:04:48 >> [clears throat] >> So your old frequency works in a sim similar way. It's familiar thoughts, emotional emotional reactions, habits, environments, and identity all exert a kind of psychological gravity. So you can have one powerful day and move away from the old pattern temporarily, but if you haven't built enough momentum, the old baseline pulls you back and you return to the same orbit. So every repeated action adds velocity. every kept promise, every regulated response, every clean choice and every piece of evidence strengthens the new pattern. And at first, most of that energy goes into resisting the pull of the old identity. So progress can feel slow. But eventually the new evidence becomes stronger than the old conditioning and then the new behavior starts producing its own momentum. And so the old baseline loses its hold and staying in the new frequency becomes easier than returning to the old one. 16:05:49 And that's the escape velocity in this work. It's the point where enough consistent repetitions have accumulated that the new identity begins sustaining itself. You will still have to keep moving, but you're no longer spending all of your energy fighting gravity. So with that said, make a clear commitment to yourself before you start. 90 days. That's the minimum timeline for a real baseline change. 90 days of commitment, not necessarily 90 perfect days, right? There will be stumbles. There will be hard days. But what matters is that you keep showing up and you keep choosing the new pattern more often than the old one. Now, step one is naming your current frequency with total honesty. Not what you wish it was, not what you're working towards, what it actually is right now, today. It could be scattered, needy, resentful, numb, fearful, heavy, avoidant, desperate, rushed, ashamed, angry, confused, whatever the honest word is, write it down and say it out 16:06:50 loud. And the map of consciousness by David Hopkins can work well here, which is what you see on the image. And this is not self attack. Otherwise, you're actually dropping straight to the bottom of the of that map above of the map by David Hawkins. You're going straight to shame. You're just trying to quote unquote diagnose. A doctor doesn't judge you for having a broken arm, right? They name the condition so they can treat it. And that's exactly what you're doing here. You're naming the frequency so you can address it. And be as specific as you can. Low frequency is too vague. What kind of low frequency? Where does it live? What does it feel like? When does it show up? The more specific the name, the more useful the diagnosis becomes and the clearer the path forward gets and try to identify which of the five layers the frequency is rooted in. Is it a body problem? Is it an attention 16:07:50 problem? An emotional backlog? A distorted story? an outdated identity. Usually, it's a combination, but there's almost always one primary layer that's driving the others. And once you've named the frequency, write down the top five daily repetitions that maintain it. So, these are the patterns that you run on autopilot that keep regenerating the old state. Maybe it's doom scrolling for an hour before bed. Maybe it's skipping meals and then binging. Maybe it's avoiding difficult tasks. Maybe it's staying up past midnight every night. Maybe it's constant comparison on social media. Whatever your five are, just write them down. And then be brutally honest. And this isn't about the patterns you already know are bad and have been meaning to change someday. It's about the patterns you do every single day that you've normalized to the point where they feel like nothing. And these normalized patterns are usually the biggest frequency anchors and they 16:08:51 typically hide in plain sight. And look at how each pattern connects to one of the five layers. The doom scrolling is an attention problem. The poor sleep is a body problem. The avoidance is an emotion problem. The comparison is a meaning problem. The self-sabotage is an identity problem. Mapping patterns to layers gives you a clear strategy. And then step two is choosing your target frequency. Again, use simple words. clear, grounded, loving, powerful, clear, devoted, disciplined, open, abundant, calm, alive, focused, free. Or you can use the map by David Hawkins. So, pick one word that actually captures the essence of the person you're becoming. And this word becomes your organizing principle for every decision you make going forward. And does this choice move me forward towards that frequency or away from it? That's the question you should be asking yourself. So one word is better than five here. You want a single reference point that 16:09:52 your nervous system can anchor to. If you pick too many words, the signal gets diffused and your brain doesn't know what to prioritize. So choose the one word that if it fully embodied itself in your life would make the biggest difference. And then choose a word that resonates both in your mind and body. and say each candidate word out loud and notice which one creates the strongest felt sense. Which one makes you take a deeper breath? That's the one. Sometimes the body knows before the mind does. And commit to this word for at least 90 days. Like I said, don't switch every week when it gets hard or when a shinier concept comes along. The whole point is to give one frequency enough time and repetition to actually harden. So switching words is just another form of scattered attention, which is the pattern you're actually trying to leave behind. And once you have the word, spend some 16:10:52 time imagining it and imagining what a person with that frequency looks like in daily life. How do they wake up? What do they eat? How do they speak? How do they handle stress? How do they treat people? What do they say no to? What do they say yes to? Just getting clear on what the target actually looks like because you can't build something you haven't defined. And don't picture yourself on a mountaintop at sunrise. Keep it practical. Picture yourself at 7:00 a.m. on a regular morning or at 3 p.m. when you're tired or at 10 p.m. when the old patterns are calling. Those are the real test moments. What does the target frequency look like in these moments? And then translate the vision into specific behaviors. If the word is clean, what does clean look like in your morning routine? What does clean look like in how you eat? What does clean look like in your digital consumption? What does clean look like in your conversations? Get specific so that you 16:11:53 can actually follow the instructions without having to think about it. And step three is removing or reducing old three old repetitions that anchor your current frequency. So go back to the list you made in step one. Pick the three patterns that have the strongest grip on your frequency and commit to eliminating or dramatically reducing them over the next 30 days. And prioritize the patterns that affect the lowest layers first. So a body level pattern like chronic sleep deprivation or daily alcohol consumption will have a bigger cascading effect than a thought level pattern. So fix the foundation first and the upper layers become much easier to shift through the cascade effect. And some patterns need to be cut cold scrolling in bed, corn, late night junk food, alcohol, and or at least at the very least on week nights. These are patterns where gradual reduction usually doesn't really work because the pattern itself is designed to override your willpower. Now for those, remove the 16:12:54 trigger entirely. phone out of the bedroom, apps deleted. Remove the option and the choice becomes easy. And then other patterns can be reduced gradually. If you're eating poorly, you don't have to overhaul your entire diet in one day. Just start by replacing one meal, then two, then three. And the key is consistent direction. Each week should be measurably better than the last, and the moment momentum will build on itself. And this is critical. Never remove a pattern without replacing it with something. An empty space will always be filled by the old behavior unless you deliberately put a new one in its place. So if you remove scrolling before bed, you need to replace it with reading or journaling or a breathing practice. If you remove [snorts] late night eating, you need to replace the ritual with a herbal tea or a walk, for example. So you need to fill the vacuum intentionally or the old pattern will will fill it for you. The old pattern will just return if you 16:13:55 don't do anything with that space. So the whole point of clearing up that those patterns is to make room for the better ones. Right? And it works better as an upgrade than a deprivation. You're not taking something away from yourself. You're trading a low frequency repetition for a high frequency one. So the reward is different, slower, deeper, maybe less stimulating at first, but over time the new pattern starts to feel more satisfying than the old one. And you will wonder why you held on to the old one for so long. And give yourself patience here. The first two weeks of any pattern change are the hardest. Your brain is literally rewiring and is going to protest. Cravings, restlessness, irritability, boredom, all of that is normal withdrawal from the old pattern. So just push through it. The discomfort is temporary and the new baseline is permanent. Now step four is installing three new repetitions that anchor your target 16:14:55 frequency. And these are the daily practices that will start generating evidence for your new identity. And they should be specific, doable, and directly tied to the target frequency you chose in step two. So think of them as the building blocks of the person you're becoming and start smaller than you think you need to. The goal in the first 30 days is just consistency. So a 5 minute morning breathing practice that you do every single day is a lot more powerful than a 45minut routine that you do three times and then leave because life got in the way. So build the habit at the scale that you can actually maintain and then expand your capacity from there once the pattern is locked in. And this is a non-negotiable. Make these three practices non-negotiable. They happen every day regardless of how you feel, how busy you are, or what life throws at you. And that non-negotiability is itself a frequency practice. It trains your nervous system to trust that you follow through. And 16:15:56 that trust is the foundation of the new identity you're building. So anchoring at least one of your three practices to the first hour of your morning is highly recommended. How you start your day basically brainwashes you for the rest of the day and it sets the tone for your entire frequency that day. So if your first hour is reactive, scrolling, rushing and chaotic, that states state tends to carry forward. And if your first hour is intentional, grounded and clean, that state carries forward instead. And frame these practices as evidence collection. Every time you complete one, you're depositing proof into your nervous system that the new identity or self-image is real. And over time, these deposits accumulate into critical mass of evidence that tips the identity from old to new. And this is the actual mechanism of lasting change. And it works every single time if you're consistent enough. The term critical mass comes from nuclear physics. So critical mass is the minimum amount of material needed to sustain a nuclear 16:16:57 chain reaction. So below that amount, too many of the particles needed to continue the reaction escape. So the process loses energy and actually dies out at critical mass. Each reaction creates enough activity to trigger the another one allowing the process to basically sustain itself. And the same principle works here. One action creates a small piece of evidence, but on its own it's usually isn't it just isn't enough to sustain a new self-image. The action happens, the effect fades, and basically the old identity remains dominant. So you're still below critical mass because the new evidence is it is too isolated to keep the chain going. But each repetition adds more material. One kept promise makes the next promise easier to keep. And that second action produces more evidence which strengthens the new identity which makes the third action more likely. Now the actions aren't just accumulating. They're beginning to basically cause one another. And the behavior creates 16:17:57 evidence and the evidence strengthens the identity and the identity generates more of the behavior and more of the evidence. So critical mass is the point where the new pattern starts sustaining itself. You no longer need the same amount of force, motivation or conscious effort because the loop is now working in your favor. So the new identity produces the actions that keep proving the identity. And what began as something you had to push becomes something that carries its own momentum. So, make sure to track your consistency. A simple daily checkbox is enough. Seeing an unbroken streak of completed practices does something very powerful to your sense of self-image. It makes the new frequency feel real and solid. And take a moment to actually acknowledge each completed practice, just like an internal nod to yourself. Moments of recognition like that will reinforce the neuropathway and make the practice slightly more automatic the next day. And it's a small thing, but the compound effect of these acknowledgements adds up over weeks and months. 16:18:57 And keep in mind that nobody else will acknowledge you for the things you did, right? So at least give that [clears throat] acknowledgement to yourself. And step five is collecting daily evidence. And this is the step that turns everything from theory into reality. So every single day, you need at least one concrete piece of evidence that proves you're becoming the person you chose to be. one promise, one meal, one conversation, one boundary, one moment where you chose the new pattern over the old one. And that evidence is what moves the baseline. So at the end of each day, just write down one to three pieces of evidence you collected that day. Just specific moments, specific choices, specific behaviors, and this log becomes your evidence trail. And over weeks and months, reading it back to yourself will show you how far you've come. Especially on the days where progress feels invisible and you're tempted to think nothing is changing and the evidence compounds. So in the first week, finding evidence might feel forced. By the end of the first month, 16:19:58 you'll notice evidence everywhere. The new identity starts to generate its own proof automatically, and the critical mass has been reached. Actions that used to require willpower now start to feel natural. choices that used to feel hard start to feel obvious. That's the compound effect and it's the shest sign that the change is real. And when the evidence becomes automatic, that's when your baseline has officially shifted. You're not trying to be high frequency anymore. You just are. Your daily repetitions are producing it naturally and your body is calibrated to it and your attention defaults to it. So your emotions rest in it. And that's the shift. That's the jump, a new resting place. And every seven days, try to do a brief review of your week. Look at your evidence log. Look at your desk or look at your streak tracker. Ask [clears throat] yourself where did you hold the new frequency that week? Where did you fall back into the old one? And what one adjustment could make the next week better. And that will keep the process alive and evolving. And then use 16:21:00 the review to make actual adjustments. Maybe one of your three removal patterns needs a different strategy. Maybe one of your three practices isn't really clicking and needs to be swapped for something better suited to your life. The protocol is a living system. It should evolve as you do. And the weekly review is really how you keep it alive. And every 30 days, try to zoom out and assess the bigger picture. So compare your current frequency to where you started. Read your old evidence logs. Notice the patterns that have shifted. Celebrate the distance you've traveled. And that's basically it. This monthly milestone will keep you connected to the larger transformation and just prevent you from losing sight of the progress that you've made in the day-to-day of showing up. So, with that said, let's cover the review. We covered the overview, the first principles, the human frequency, the frequency loop, the five layers, the protocol, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, write down your current frequency and one honest word. List the five daily repetitions that 16:22:01 maintain it. and choose one target frequency word that will become your organizing principle for the next 90 days. Then identify and cut three low frequency repetitions from your daily life within the next 7 days, replacing each one with a deliberate highfrequency alternative so that the space doesn't default back to the old pattern. And then start a daily evidence log tonight. So, this will be where you record one to three specific moments each day that prove you're becoming the person you chose to be and then review it every 7 days to track the shift in your baseline. With that said, if you enjoy this, let me know. I hope it was valuable. If you want to work with me oneonone, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with the training, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, if you made it this far, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching. Thank you for the support. I hope it 16:23:01 brought a lot of value to you in your life. And with that said, I'll see you in the next one. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is relax maxing. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, then false relaxation, the cause match, earned recovery, relax maxing, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with this respective training that you're watching, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. If you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's actually get started and talk about false relaxation. So, for most of human history, people had to move their bodies to get what they needed or deal with problems as they came up. And they used to rest after spending actual energy. 16:24:03 Now though, today you can avoid most physical effort. You can fill every free hour with super intense stimulation and finish the day weirdly exhausted even though you might have not done anything really useful or anything that really expended any energy. So you stop working. You assume that means you're actually resting and you spend the whole evening giving your attention more things to process. And you can notice the difference after a hard workout for example or a long stretch of focused work. You've genuinely used some energy then. So resting afterwards feels pretty good. And your body might want food or warmth or sleep or a few minutes where basically nobody needs anything from you. And mentally, it's also easier to relax when you know what took the energy out of you in the first place. For example, a hot bath after a hard workout is pretty obvious, right? Your muscles are tired, your body has worked, and now the warmth gives you a chance to relax, and it feels good for an obvious reason. But if you've barely moved all day, that 16:25:04 same bath can still feel nice and at the same time leave you restless simply because your body may need movement before it's ready to actually relax. And the same basic thing happens after you've spent hours writing or reading or staring at a screen. Right? Closing your eyes for a few minutes can actually feel like a relief because you finally stop giving your brain more things to look at and process. The thing is we kind of call all kinds of things relaxation. So sleep, scrolling, gaming, breath work, food, drinking. Somehow all of these end up in the same category even though they do completely different things. So you need to separate relief, recreation, resolution, and recovery. That way, you'll stop expecting one pleasant activity to solve every problem. And you can enjoy entertainment for what it gives you and choose something else when you need something else. So, by the end of this training, you'll know how to work out what's actually making you uncomfortable and choose something that can help with it. 16:26:05 You'll know when your mind or body needs real recovery and when you might need to do something meaningful before rest will feel actually satisfying. And you can use the method before gaming, scrolling, eating, watching corn, drinking, or putting on another video. Basically, before any quick response you tend to call relaxation. And none of this really changes from one person to another. Your body needs time to recover after you use it. And your mind relaxes more easily when you actually finish something or decide exactly when you'll return to it. Technology can change how you feel within seconds, but it can't really send the difficult message for you or make up for lost sleep or deal with a feeling you keep avoiding. You can distract yourself for hours and the original problem will still be waiting when the distraction ends. So, put all of that together and you basically get the basic idea. Real relaxation either helps with whatever mode made you tense or helps you recover after you've genuinely used your mind or body. False relaxation, on 16:27:06 the other hand, just makes you notice the tension less for a [clears throat] while. So, a game, a drink, a meal, or a stream of videos can change how you feel without changing the situation that made you reach for it in the first place. So you might feel different for a few hours, but the thing that's actually bothering you never really changed. And where this gets kind of confusing is when we consider speed. Because video games can absorb you within minutes, right? Corn can create intense arousal instantly. Food or alcohol can quickly change how you feel. Short form content can give you something new every few seconds. These activities change how you feel very quickly and ask very little from you in the beginning. Speed can make a response feel right before you've checked whether it has anything to do with what caused the discomfort. So your mood changes very quickly, but the original need might still be sitting there unanswered. You can only pay attention to so much at once. So if a game or a video or a meal or a shopping session or a drink takes up enough of 16:28:08 your attention, you might stop thinking about the decision or feeling or task that was bothering you. But it hasn't gone anywhere, right? And once the activity ends, you'll notice it again, which is often when you feel the urge to put something else on or keep going a little longer. And this is how people overdo these things. And that temporary gap between feeling better and actually solving something is what I call the relief error. So you feel better while you're doing something, so you assume it gave you what you needed. Sometimes it did. Other times it simply took your mind off of the discomfort for a while. And now the relief still feels real and you can enjoy that. But take a look at what actually changed. What stayed exactly the same and how you actually felt once the activity ended. Most of the times it didn't do anything [clears throat] for you. Most of the times it just delayed what is inevitably coming. And you can test that gap in a very simple way. After something you call relaxing, sit for 2 minutes with no music, no phone, and nothing else 16:29:09 playing and see whether you actually feel relaxed or whether the original concern comes straight back. Also, try to notice if you immediately want another video or another snack or another round of the game or another alcoholic drink or something else to keep the feeling going. When something genuinely helps you recover, you can usually stop, right? You don't need to shower for hours on end. After about 30 minutes max, you probably feel relaxed after a 30 minute or an hour long bath. You feel relaxed. You don't need to do it for longer. And you certainly don't get an addiction to it, right? So when something genuinely helps you recover, you can actually stop and you can return to the rest of your evening without needing another hit of it or another hit of stimulation. So once you repeat that often enough, the whole thing can start feeding itself and this endless vicious cycle. You stay up late gaming for example, and you have less energy the 16:30:10 next day, which makes passive entertainment or gaming feel even more appealing again the next day. If you fill every quiet moment with short form content or music, then silence will start feeling harder to tolerate. So you reach for the phone again and put on some music or short form content. A lot of quick responses basically leave you dealing with effects that make you want the same response again. So they essentially feed themselves. So screens for example make that cycle very easy to see if you fill every free moment with some new short form content. Well, ordinary silence can start feeling very uncomfortable and then another video relieves a discomfort that repeated stimulation helped create. So video games add another layer because they tell you exactly what to do. They show you whether you're doing it well and they also give you a steady sense of progress. And of course that feels appealing when in contrast your real work is vague and you don't know where 16:31:10 to begin. But when you stop playing the real work still needs you, right? Sometimes the quickest way to reduce that anxiety is to do something about it or actually finish a small part of it before you play. And feeds are similar in that way and they keep the same cycle going by by basically giving you something new every few seconds with almost no pause between one thing and the next. So your attention keeps moving and never really gets a chance to actually relax or settle. And then you put the phone down and feel restless rather than relaxed almost immediately. So if you just try to notice that feeling, you'll realize that your brain needs less input, not more. Or you might realize there's something you've been avoiding that still needs your attention. And if the thing underneath all that stimulation is important, putting it off usually makes it worse, right? Entertainment can interrupt the discomfort that you're feeling, but the thing still requires an answer when the activity ends. And so now you have less time. You have fewer options and often a 16:32:11 stronger urge to escape again. So you're not really fixing anything that way. You're just delaying what is going to come anyway. And so I found that even just 15 minutes of just direct engagement can reduce this kind of tension way more effectively than hours spent trying to basically change my mood around it, which is really just avoidance. And you might not finish the whole matter in 15 minutes, but you can at least start gathering missing information. Or maybe you can decide what the next useful step needs to be or even just give yourself a date and a time at which you will actually start working on it and give yourself a deadline. So every one of these changes changes something and removes a little uncertainty. You can still enjoy entertainment afterwards and it usually feels a lot easier and better to enjoy because you've already done something about the actual concern behind your restlessness or behind your anxiety. So every time you repeat that sequence, 16:33:12 your brain gets a little better at actually expecting it. So you're making things worse by doing that. So if you answer every difficult feeling with a screen and your brain will begin expecting a screen whenever some discomfort shows up. Use food, gaming, shopping, corn, or alcohol every time you feel stressed. Well, the same response will start showing up faster the next time. And after enough repetition, the urge can show up before you've even worked out what you feel. A lot of the times, the urge to do those things just comes up before we've even had the chance to actually look at what is it that we're feeling that is making this urge show up in the first place. And people actually go for that automatic response of I'm just gonna start watching some short form content. I'm just gonna watch some corn. I'm just going to, you know, have a drink. I'm just going to go for a snack. And they just go for it automatically. And they 16:34:12 never actually stop to think, why do I want these things in the first place? Like, what is causing me wanting these things? And what will happen is you might start treating every form of discomfort as the same problem. And you're repeatedly teaching your brain what to reach for. Now, none of that means I want you to remove games or movies or food or other forms of entertainment from your life completely. A game can challenge you, right? Movies can well, they can move you or create a shared experience with someone. Those functions are enough by themselves. Problems begin when you use that entertainment to distract yourself from work or put off conflict or process grief or replace sleep. The activity can't perform those actions, right? Regardless of how pleasant it feels in the moment. So, you need to choose them deliberately, which means deciding what you want to enjoy and roughly how long you want to spend on it. Before that, decide what still needs your attention. 16:35:14 You'll sometimes keep going longer than you planned. And that's okay because you're human, right? But even then, the choice you made beforehand still gives you useful information. You can actually compare your intention with the result and then adjust the next time. And if something still needs your attention, just handle the next action before you begin or put it in your calendar for a specific date and time and ask for help when you lack information because your mind can release the concern more easily after you face it and record what remains. And recreation can then provide actual enjoyment during a period you have deliberately protected ahead of time. So that choice becomes much easier when you have a few different ways to actually respond because every uncomfortable feeling isn't really asking for the same thing, right? Sleep when you're actually sleepy. Go for a walk after sitting all day. You know, call someone when you actually feel alone. Sit somewhere quiet when your head feels overwhelmed and full. Handle a task when some uncertainty keeps 16:36:14 bothering you. Any of those. With all of these options available, you don't have to reach for the same activity every time you actually feel bad. Because for most people, the way they handle all of these things is through one or two activities that actually don't fix the underlying issue at all. They feel sleepy or tired, so they decide to put on a movie or play a video game instead of just going to sleep. they feel a bit restless because they haven't moved all day and they decide to go for alcohol, right? And that wider range will just give you a lot more choice once you can feel uncomfortable without reacting the same way straight away cuz you might still choose the game. You could still choose the movie or the snack or the shopping trip or the drink and that's completely fine. But now at least you know why you're choosing it. Another evening you might realize you need a walk or a conversation or 15 minutes of actual work or just going to bed early 16:37:16 and you can respond to what's actually going on instead of repeating the same routine. Which brings us back to the question underneath the whole section which is what does the discomfort actually require. Like sometimes your body needs relaxation. Sometimes your life requires action. You might also need to put actual meaningful effort before relaxing and recovering actually feels satisfying at all. Which brings us to a form of tiredness that many people never actually look at. Let's talk about the cause match. So, what are you actually trying to relax from? Is a question you should ask yourself [clears throat] because most people never answer that question, right? They feel bad. They don't know why or what the cause is. and the fastest thing that changes the feeling and they call whatever happens next relaxation. Cause match is a way to learn what works for you. So pay attention to what you're actually experiencing. Make your best guess about why and then try a practical 16:38:18 next step and the results can help you spot what makes a difference. So the easiest place to start is really your body. Simple physical needs can change your mood and make it hard to focus. And they're easy to misread as something deeper than that. For example, heavy eyes might mean you need sleep, right? It's that simple. Restless limbs might mean you haven't moved enough. Hunger can make you feel irritable and can actually make it harder to think. So check the obvious physical stuff before you build some complicated explanation around it. And once you notice a physical signal, do something that actually fits it. So, walk after sitting still for too long. Eat a proper meal when you're actually hungry and it keeps distracting. Take a hot bath when your muscles feel tense. Close your eyes after hours of reading or looking at a screen. Then look if anything changes. Your body will usually give you a pretty clear answer. And then just match the amount to how your body feels today. Work with the energy you actually have and change the plan if your body gives 16:39:19 you a different answer once you begin. And if the obvious physical checks don't explain it, then think about what your brain did all day. So a few hours of writing or studying can leave you with no patience for another complicated thought. In that case, maybe moving around or actually going to the gym and training would be beneficial. A day full of planning and decisions can do the same thing. And you might need less information and fewer choices for a while. Watching content can feel easy because you're only consuming it. But your brain still has to follow every new face, every sound, every topic, every change. And as you're watching it, you're still feeling emotions that are constantly changing because of the content you're watching. And if your head feels full after all of that, you could walk with no audio or lie down with your eyes closed or breathe at a comfortable pace or sit in silence if you can, which by the way, you should. You should be able to sit in silence with your own thoughts without reaching for something immediately. 16:40:20 Just keep it simple and give it a little time because your brain has already dealt with enough. So stop giving it more things to notice and more choices to make and more information to process after you've had a day full of processing information. And once you've checked your body and attention, check if there is an unfinished matter that keeps coming back. Because obviously if your mind keeps coming back to it, it still needs some kind of answer. So I have wasted plenty of time trying to relax from a task that required 20 minutes of direct action and that's all it needed. So if [snorts] there is the next action is to simply do the thing that changes the situation and you only need enough real progress to remove some uncertainty and give yourself a place to stop and the project can continue later and you know you didn't avoid it. But whatever you choose just make sure something changes outside of your head, right? Engage [clears throat] with reality. Save the page. Send the email 16:41:21 you know put tomorrow's material. Save the page, send the email, put tomorrow's stuff where you'll need it. Write down the next action and when you'll continue, and that's basically it. You can think about a problem for an hour and still leave it exactly where it was. But once you've done something visible, you know where to pick it up again, and you have fewer decisions to make when you return. And once you've done all of that, you may find that you genuinely can't do anything else right now. Maybe the thing has some external dependencies. decide when you'll check again and what you'll do at that point. And that's it. Use the options you have today. Write down the next step and let yourself rest. So, the larger task still exists, but you've reached the stopping point for now. Before that, though, make sure there isn't even one action that's still available, right? If there is, do it. And if it takes longer, then make sure to write it down somewhere so that you don't have to think about it all the time. If everything genuinely has to 16:42:21 wait, then let it wait until the time you choose. And you know why you stopped and why you're coming back now. So you don't need to keep solving the same problem in your head while you're trying to rest. And when the answer is genuinely no, just close the work. Like if there's nothing else you could do today, close the work. Write down what you finished, what still has to be done, and the first thing you'll do tomorrow. And then put away whatever you don't need. You no longer have to keep reminding yourself of everything because you've put it somewhere you can find later. And even after you've handled the practical side, you can't solve every uncomfortable feeling by completing a task. Sometimes you genuinely need to give the feeling sometime, right? Your phone can cut off sadness or anger almost instantly. And if you keep doing that, well, you're just suppressing it and it will come back stronger. So you just feel pressure and typically you assume you need distraction and I find it much easier to handle once 16:43:23 I can say what happened, what I needed and whether there's anything I can do right now. When the feeling itself still needs attention, then sit down and actually think about what you're feeling. It's that simple. And once the feeling becomes clearer, then think about what happened, what you felt, what you needed. Think if there's anything you can do now and keep what actually happened separate from the story you're telling yourself about it. And the answer might also be much simpler. If you realize you're lonely, then call someone. Because watching people online gives you faces and voices and this parasocial connection, but nobody's actually responding to you, right? Nobody's actually talking to you. Nobody's actually listening to you. Tell someone you trust what happened or ask for some company or make plans to meet and see what happens then. Or you may need the opposite and maybe you want some space because another person caused distress or maybe you're overwhelmed from socializing like then spend some time alone. Don't whip up your phone and 16:44:26 start watching random videos and Instagram res and so on. And after checking your body, your tasks, your emotions, there's still one possibility most people miss, which is you may feel uncomfortable because you haven't done anything. You may feel uncomfortable because you haven't done enough to need rest yet. And maybe you avoided work. Maybe you barely moved. Maybe you spent most of the day consuming things. And now you feel flat and restless. So you give yourself even more pacivity, even more videos, more snacks. So try using your mind or body for something that matters and see what happens. And this is easy to miss because you can think, you can learn, you can move, and you can do useful things. If you barely use those abilities for long stretches of time, you might end up bored and dissatisfied. And before you decide you're exhausted, just spend some time actually doing something that asks a little more from 16:45:26 you. Like read something demanding, practice a skill, you organize an area in your home or in your office that you use often or begin the work you keep postponing even like 5 minutes of it. If your energy rises once you start, then you might have needed some engagement with reality. And if you still feel drained and can barely think, then rest probably makes more sense. and then you can return to it tomorrow and start the day in a different way. Because if you feel drained and can barely think on a day on which you haven't done anything really most of the times it's for two reasons. You either didn't sleep enough or you spent all day consuming short form content and basically overloading your brain with online stimulation and with dopamine. What happens during that will give you the clue. If you feel clearer or more awake, then you can keep going. That means you needed some engagement with reality. You needed to do something hard. And if you can't, if 16:46:28 you still can't focus and your body feels genuinely tired even though you haven't done anything, then rest and come back to it tomorrow. And if you put all of this together, then the cause match becomes a practical feedback system. You identify the dominant kind of strain. You use the intervention that fits it and you pay attention to the result. So physical strain needs a physical response. Cognitive overwhelm usually needs less cognitive input. Unfinished work needs progress or closure. Emotions need attention to become clear, right? Loneliness needs connection. Social overload might need some distance and some alone time. underuse or in other words you not doing anything might need some engagement with the reality. So treat the first interpretation just as a hypothesis because you'll sometimes get it wrong but it's still useful because the failed intervention helps you distinguish one state from another. And then get 16:47:30 feedback. Watch what actually changes. You might be calmer. Your attention might be clearer. The unfinished task maybe stops following you around. The emotion becomes easier to name. Your energy might rise once you actually start moving and doing things. Those changes tell you whether the match was good. And then repeated feedback gradually makes the process more intuitive. So you start seeing several distinct states that happen to share some surface sensations rather than having one vague category just called stress. And that's the real goal. Relaxation stops being a collection of activities that are supposedly good for you and become a form of self-nowledge because now you can understand what kind of strain you're carrying, what created it, and what actually changes it. The real thing that changes. So, let's talk about earned recovery. And that test brings us to the other side of relaxation. You tend to rest much better after you've actually used your mind or 16:48:31 body. Maybe you finished a solid piece of work or maybe you trained hard or were in meetings all day or all of these on a single day. Maybe you did something that asked something from you and now the rest has a clear purpose. And you can do this without pushing yourself into exhaustion every day. You can just rest after you've done all of these things. So, one way to create that feeling is really to finish a piece of work before you move into recovery or relaxation and then just try to make it concrete or at least measurable because obviously working on the project gives you no real ending. Finishing the opening section tells you exactly when you're done. And it's much easier to leave work alone when you know what you finished, what still remains to be done, and when you're coming back. [clears throat] And before you stop, just write down the first thing you'll do when you're actually back. Put whatever you need somewhere easy to find and then choose a time to continue. And that way, you don't have to keep replaying the task in your head all evening just to remember 16:49:32 where you left off. And I find it much easier to sleep when I've already made that first decision for the next day. And that only works if you actually decide what enough looks like before you actually start. So, choose one thing you want to finish. Set a number of focused work periods or a realistic time to stop. And if you keep moving the goalpost every time rest gets close, then your original plan stops meaning anything. So you need to keep your promises to yourself. You keep working and part of your mind will stay stuck on everything you still haven't done. So that only works if you actually decide what enough looks like before you actually start. So you need to choose one thing you want to finish, a set number of focused work periods, or maybe a realistic time to stop. And that's basically it. Because if you keep moving the goalpost every time your rest gets close, then your original plan stops meaning anything and you won't be able to trust yourself. So keep the promises you make to yourself. Even with rest, 16:50:35 especially with rest, if you keep working, well, part of your mind will stay stuck on everything you still haven't done. So the same idea applies to movement. So use your body in a way that fits how you feel today. And then train when you have the energy and enough time to actually recover. Walk when your head feels full or your body feels stiff. Stretch when something feels tight. And after you've genuinely moved, food, warmth, stillness, and sleep tend to feel a lot more satisfying because your body has actually done something. And now those things are helping it recover and relax. And even then, you still need to match the effort to how you feel. So after a day of sitting, maybe a walk will be enough or you might need a hard weightlifting session. So the movement should help you feel better and make recovery easier, right? You should still be able to work and move tomorrow without feeling like you have to recover from the way you 16:51:35 tried to recover. And once you've done what you reasonably could for the day, then the next part is really letting the day end. Otherwise, you can keep moving the finish line and carry unfinished work through the whole evening. And you'll never finish every possible task or solve every concern and sometimes you'll waste a few hours. Everyone does and work is infinite. So meet the commitment you actually set, respect the stopping point and then let yourself rest cuz you still need sleep and basic care even on the days where very little went well. And that becomes a lot easier when you actually keep the promises you make about when you're going to continue and when you're going to stop. And if you regularly postpone something and never return, part of you knows that stopping may mean that you're abandoning it again. And that's why the task keeps coming back into your head while you're trying to relax. When you actually return at the time you chose though, the stopping point starts to feel real. And you can actually believe 16:52:36 yourself and you know you're pausing just for now and that you'll continue when you said you will. And if by any chance you miss the time you chose, then just pick a new one. Make the next action a bit smaller and then just begin again. It's that simple. Beating yourself up just adds more stress on top and at the same time still leaves the task undone. So it's completely useless and it doesn't do anything for you. What you need is just to prove that you can actually return after getting it wrong. And now look obviously sometimes the reason you miss it is completely human because of things like illness, maybe grief, maybe some poor sleep, maybe difficult circumstances in general. All of those can reduce what you can actually do. But in those moments, just give your body the cure it actually needs and then return to the task when you actually have more energy or just do the bare bare minimum. Because none of this should tell you to ignore your genuine limits or pay attention to how exhausted you feel or treat exhaustion as some kind of proof that you've worked 16:53:37 hard enough. Obviously, that's not the case. you're still a person with physical needs even on the productive days, even on the not so productive days. And honestly, on every day in between. So even with a clear stopping point, you might still feel guilty when you're trying to relax. If you do, you just need to really pay attention to it enough so that you can notice what it's actually pointing to. So if you neglected something real, then you need to actually do it or decide when you will. If you've already done what you reasonably could, then the guilt might just be some kind of an old habit of pressuring yourself because maybe you think that working super hard and actually feeling exhausted means that you've been productive. Just make a clear decision either work or don't. Nothing in between. Otherwise, you'll end up half working, half watching something and never fully doing either one. And once you've made the decision, just keep the boundary. When you're working, actually work. Once you reach the stopping point, then stop working. 16:54:39 That's basically it. Otherwise, you can sit on the sofa while your mind stays at your desk all day or your body is in the gym, but your mind is at your desk. You're not doing any of those. Well, just keep the boundary. Make it simple and do the thing you're doing. And then be present with the thing that you're actually doing. And with the work now done, you can think about what you've done and what now essentially needs recovery. After demanding mental work, you might need fewer inputs like we discussed. Maybe you need less information for a while. After physical activity, you might need some food or water or sleep. After an emotionally difficult day, or maybe even a day that was way too social, let's say, you just might want some time for yourself by yourself. You will relax much more deeply when your response fits what you've actually done. And you'll actually feel it helping and you won't be searching for something stronger or something artificial. And physical quiet may only be part of 16:55:39 what you need, right? Because after something emotionally difficult, you might feel better around someone you trust and you could tell them what happened or simply spend time with someone who doesn't ask much from you. Just keep the interaction simple and give yourself some private time afterwards if you still need to think about what came up. And whichever response you choose, there's a catch. You need to give it enough time to actually do something. Now, the first few minutes might feel a bit boring when you're used to flicking your thumb every few seconds and bombarding your brain with short form content, but stay there. Breathe. You know, walk around with no audio. Rest with your eyes closed. And your body might take longer to relax than a video takes to change your mood, but you should feel clear and capable afterwards. And as you stay with it, notice whether your breathing actually slows down, whether your muscles feel less tense, whether your thoughts become clearer. That's true relaxation. True relaxation 16:56:40 is having no worries, tensions, stress, or pain. And you can only feel true relaxation if you take care of the things that produce worry, tension, stress, or pain in the first place. Or you take care of the worry, tension, stress, or pain themselves directly. It's impossible to feel truly relaxed or anything else for that matter if you constantly distract yourself. So, can you stay still without immediately reaching for something else? Can you return to the rest of your evening or day with enough attention? Feeling good during the activity tells you it was rewarding. How you feel and function afterwards tells you whether you actually recovered. And then check the same things again 30 minutes later. Your body might need some time to respond. So don't judge the whole practice by how the first few minutes felt. I want you to judge the practice by what you can actually notice 16:57:40 afterward. If those later checks still don't show a clear pattern, then keep a short note for a few days. Write how you felt before the activity, what you actually chose, and how you felt afterward. Cuz there's nobody that can tell me that they felt overwhelmed from all they did at work, let's say, and they opened up their phone, they started watching a bunch of short form content or other things, and they felt better afterward. But with some of these activities that we're talking about that actually take care of the real underlying issue, you can get it wrong sometimes. Maybe you thought you need less stimulation, but in reality, maybe you needed some engagement in reality with the real world by moving your body or going for a walk. You might realize that something helps after focused work and does almost nothing after a day of sitting around. You might also see that certain activities leave you wanting more stimulation the moment they end. So once 16:58:43 you have a few entries, just read them together and look for patterns about what keeps happening. Maybe some walking helped you after hours at the desk and maybe some silence helped you after writing. Maybe gaming felt great after you finished something, but terrible when you're using it to avoid a task. So let those repeated results actually guide what you choose the next time the same feeding appears. And when you know what tends to help, turn it into a short routine that you can actually use when work ends. Look at what you finished. Write down the next action and clear away whatever you no longer need. And after that, walk or take a bath or do something else with very little stimulation, meaning actually relax. Give yourself time to relax naturally and gradually. and you know that the remaining work has somewhere to go tomorrow because you've already done what needs to be done. And the routine will not always fit perfectly, right? So 16:59:44 when life gets in the way, just keep some of the parts. Close your eyes and just breathe when you can't take a bath. Write down your next plan of action when you can't finish the whole task. Take 10 quiet minutes when you can't get a full hour. Use the closest option you have and just see whether it helps. And with that said, let's actually talk about relax maxing. So relax maxing is actually a much simpler thing than it sounds in my opinion. So it's not really a method with a sequence of steps you have to actually remember. It's really the practice of getting better at noticing what your body and mind are asking for and then just dealing [snorts] with the thing that is creating the tension in the first [clears throat] place. So real relaxation comes from resolution. So something is making you restless or worried or tense or uncomfortable or mentally overloaded or physically tired or emotionally unsettled or otherwise just unable to settle. You deal with that thing as 17:00:45 directly as you reasonably can and relaxation tends to follow naturally. So as I said earlier, true relaxation is having no worries, tensions, stress or pain. And you can only feel true relaxation if you take care of the things that produce worry, tension, stress or pain in the first place or you take care of the worry, tension, stress or pain themselves directly. So it's impossible to feel truly relaxed or anything else for that matter if you constantly distract yourself from those things. So most of us think relaxation is something we add on top of stress. You work all day, you feel terrible, and then you add Netflix, you add food, you add alcohol, you add scrolling, you add gaming, you add a bath or whatever you associate with switching off. Relax maxing starts one layer earlier. So you remove or you reduce what is preventing you from relaxing. The activity you do 17:01:45 afterwards matters much less once the actual source of the tension has been handled. And there's a difference between relief and resolution. Relief changes how aware you are of the discomfort. Resolution changes the thing producing the discomfort in the first place. Both of those can feel good and there is nothing inherently wrong with temporary relief, but they are not interchangeable because a distraction can make a problem disappear from your attention for 2 hours while at the same time leaving the problem exactly where it was. And that's why some forms of relaxation seem to work perfectly until they end. The video stops, the game closes, the food is gone, the buzz wears off, and the same concern immediately comes back. They keep delaying the inevitable return to real life. Your attention moved away from the source for a while and then just returns to it. But the real skill underneath relax maxing is learning to read yourself more accurately. Your body and mind are constantly giving 17:02:46 you information and some would argue that they rarely give it to you in perfect language. But I would say that we have simply lost connection to ourselves. You feel restless. Your concentration disappears. Something keeps coming back into your head. You feel heavy, irritated, flat, tense, lonely, wired or exhausted. Those states are signals. Most people just try to shoe them away, right? just distract themselves from these feelings, from what they actually feel. The real skill is really becoming familiar enough with yourself that you can tell what kind of signal you're dealing with and what you can do about it. Sometimes your body needs sleep. Sometimes it needs food. Sometimes it has been sitting still for far too long and just needs to move anywhere. Sometimes you have trained hard and the correct response is the exact opposite. So you don't need some complicated recovery protocol for everything, right? Train the awareness of your body to notice what has been used, what has been neglected and what would actually restore it. And 17:03:47 psychology has a word for part of this called inter reception. It [clears throat] is your ability to perceive what is actually happening inside your own body. And the interesting part is that receiving the signal and understanding the signal are different things, right? you can clearly feel agitation and still [clears throat] misinterpret what it actually means. So getting better at relax maxing means getting more accurate at that translation and then you respond proportionately and then you just respond proportionately. So a body that has barely moved all day will feel better after exertion. A body that has already been pushed hard will need some food or sleep or some light movement. The point isn't to collect more recovery techniques. It's to just become better at matching the response to the state you're actually in. And the mind does something similar. It tells you when it has had enough input. When something is unfinished and when you have been making 17:04:47 too many decisions and when you need some cognitive or mental stimulation and when you're avoiding something. Those states can all feel like mental fatigue. We can bundle all of them under mental fatigue. But they don't all require the same response and they're all very different, right? So if we bundle them together and just put them under mental fatigue, we don't get the chance to actually read what we need. So sometimes your mind has genuinely had enough. Like after hours of concentrated work, more content could technically be entertainment, but it's still more information to process. And in that state, actual quiet can feel very different from switching from productive stimulation to recreational stimulation. Less input becomes the recovery. Other times the mind keeps returning to one specific thing because that thing is unresolved. And you can feel this when the same task, conversation, decision or 17:05:50 responsibility repeatedly reappears the moment there is a silence. And that recurrence is useful information. You just deal with what can be dealt with. You move it forward. You make the decision. You have the conversation. You prepare what needs preparing. If nothing else can be done today, you just establish a real stopping point and leave it there. And this is also why distraction can interfere with relax maxing even when the distraction itself is enjoyable. If every uncomfortable state immediately gets covered by stimulation, you lose the chance to understand what the state was trying to tell you and you become very good at actually changing the channel and not particularly good at reading the signal. So most people are constantly numbing themselves. Content can do it, food can do it, shopping can do it, work itself can do it sometimes. Anything that reliably moves your attention away from discomfort can become a way of not having to understand the discomfort. And the important distinction is really the 17:06:51 function the activity is serving at that moment. And this is why periods without stimulation actually matters so much. Because when you remove the thing that keeps occupying your attention, whatever is underneath becomes way easier to notice. And sometimes that's physical tiredness. Sometimes it's an emotion. Sometimes it's a task that you have been avoiding. Sometimes it's nothing dramatic underneath at all. And your nervous system simply needs less happening for a while. Right? And none of this means entertainment is bad cuz I want entertainment to go back to being entertainment. You watch a movie because you want to watch a movie. You play a game because you enjoy the game. You eat something good because you want to enjoy it. The problem starts when recreation gets assigned to the job of resolving every uncomfortable feeling or state in your life. So the same activity can therefore be healthy recreation in one context and avoidance in another. The activity itself doesn't tell you which one it is. 17:07:53 It's just an activity. What matters is what it is doing for you and what you're using it for. Relax maxing makes the distinction much easier because you can handle the underlying need first whenever there is actually one. And so the same principle applies emotionally. Feelings also contain information. They don't always need to be analyzed for hours or obeyed immediately. And they definitely do not always need to be fixed, but they need enough space to become understandable. And if you interrupt every uncomfortable emotion immediately, you only ever experience the first vague layer of it. So greater precision changes what you can do. Loneliness is different from grief. Anger is different from shame, right? Anxiety about something you can prepare for is very different from fear about something you can't actually control. So if the state becomes clearer, the response becomes clearer with it. And sometimes the emotion points towards action. Sometimes there is no useful 17:08:53 action and the feeling just needs some time instead. Relax maxing doesn't mean eliminating every single negative emotion. It means stopping the automatic attempt to escape it so that you can actually understand what kind of response actually fits. And sometimes the source is external. Right? If the person, environment, responsibility, or pattern keeps producing the same tension, repeatedly calming yourself down afterwards is only half the job. There are situations where the most relaxing thing you can eventually do is to just change the situation. And there's also a version of this that goes the opposite direction. You can feel restless because you have done too much, but you can also feel restless because you have done too little. A day filled with pacivity can leave you very flat, agitated, and strangely tired even though you have barely exerted yourself. And in that state, more pacivity isn't always recovery. You might have to actually use 17:09:54 your energy, right? Your mind could need something difficult to engage with. You might need work training. You might need to work or train or create or learn or clean something or solve something or otherwise just put some energy through the system. And this is why I don't like treating stress as if all stress is inherently bad because your body and mind are built to respond to demands. And the simplest example of this is exercise. Exercise makes the relationship obvious, right? Exertion creates the need for recovery and recovery allows adaptation. Remove the recovery and the exertion gives you subpar results if any. So relax maxing is therefore not about becoming permanently relaxed. That would be a weird strange goal. It's about getting better at moving between exertion and recovery. It's about using yourself fully when the situation calls for it and relaxing fully and properly when 17:10:57 recovery is actually needed by matching the recovery to the cause. And there's one final layer. Sometimes you're uncomfortable because your behavior is out of alignment with what you know you should be doing or who you want to be. So no relaxation technique can completely solve a problem like that because relaxation is not the missing action. Realignment is. So, if you feel like you've been misaligned with who you want to become, and if you need one-on-one help with that, the link to book a call is below. So, that's really all relaxing is. Learn how your body speaks to you. Learn how your mind speaks to you. Notice what keeps disturbing your ability to relax. Resolve what can be resolved. Recover from what genuinely depleted you. Engage yourself with life and reality. and allow recreation to simply be recreation. Entertainment can simply be entertainment. The goal isn't to become better at distracting yourself from stress. The goal is to remove as much unnecessary stress, worry, tension, 17:12:00 pain, and unresolved friction as you reasonably can so that when you finally [clears throat] relax, there's actually less there that you need to escape from. So, with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview, false relaxation, the cause match, earned recovery, relax maxing, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Before you automatically reach for entertainment, remove the stimulation for 2 minutes. Notice what keeps disturbing your ability to relax, check your body, check your mind, check your emotions, and anything unfinished. And then respond to the signal as directly as you reasonably can. So, sleep if you're tired. Eat when you're actually hungry, drink water when you're actually thirsty, move when you've been sitting all day, reduce your input when your mind feels full. Contact someone when you feel lonely, or just deal with a task that keeps returning to your attention. If nothing else can be done today, then just write down the next action and decide when you'll return to it. And then give the response enough 17:13:01 time to work. Can you sit still without immediately reaching for something else? Do you feel clearer, calmer, or more capable afterwards? If not, then treat your first interpretation as a hypothesis and try a better match. And let entertainment be entertainment once the underlying and let entertainment be entertainment once the underlying need has been handled. I hope you enjoyed this. If it did, let me know. If you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with its respective training that you're watching, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how to dismantle stress forever. And as you can 17:14:02 see from the overview, what we're going to be covering more specifically is first the overview itself, the illusion nobody talks about, the machinery behind mental paralysis, the wisdom of weight and will, the path that runs straight through the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one to master every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, make sure to book a call from the link in the description or the pinned comment, and we'll talk about it. With that said, let's actually get started and talk about the illusion that nobody talks about. So, before we get into the mechanics and the philosophy and all the practical stuff, we need to talk about the one thing that tends to keep people stuck in stress cycles forever. And it's not it's not the stress itself. is the way you've been taught to think about stress because for most of us the entire framing is off and once you see how it's off everything else in this training will make a lot more sense. So most people tend to treat stress like it's 17:15:04 some external force that basically attacks them out of nowhere. Something that just happens to them when life gets hard. And that framing is probably the single biggest reason they never get free of it. The way stress gets talked about in self-help and popular psychology, you think it just rolls in without any warning, and there's nothing you can do but brace for it. But what's actually happening for a lot of people is something much simpler and honestly much more fixable. Stress in most cases is not the event itself. It's the mental spin you generate on top of the event. And that spin is where almost all of the real suffering actually lives. Now the most effective way to break free of any destructive mental pattern is never about fighting the pattern with willpower. It's always about realizing that the thing you are fighting is largely an illusion. And once you tr truly see through that trick, there is nothing left to fight against. And 17:16:05 stress for a lot of us tends to follow this exact same loop where something happens. You build a story around it. The story creates tension and then you spend all this energy trying to manage the tension without ever going back to question the story that start that started the whole thing in the first place. The moment you stop treating that mental narrative as hard fact and start seeing it for what it actually is, which is just another thought that popped up and feels convincing, a lot of the emotional charge tends to fall away on its own without you ever having to do anything. And I'm not saying you should pretend that your problems are fake or act like nothing is nothing matters and nothing is really happening. It's about noticing that your reaction to the problem is usually doing significantly more damage than the problem itself. And that gap between what actually happened and what your mind made of it is really something that you can genuinely learn to work with. And the beautiful part is that 17:17:07 once you see this mechanism clearly, you probably can't unsee it, which is the entire point of understanding it. Now the stress response you feel that tightness that lowrade lowgrade dread and that sense of something that something is about to go wrong most of the time it's not really pointing to any real danger in front of you. It's pointing at a future you most likely imagined a scenario your mind constructed from fragments of past experience and general worry about what could possibly happen next. Now, your body doesn't actually know the difference between a real threat and an imagined one. Which means you can sit in a perfectly safe room and flood yourself with the exact same chemicals you'd produce if something genuinely dangerous were happening right in front of you. Now, once you realize that, once you truly get that you are often manufacturing the very feeling you're trying to escape, it changes your entire 17:18:07 relationship with the experience. It's not something happening to you anymore. It's something you're doing to yourself and you can learn to stop. Now, there's something that gets missed almost every time people talk about stress. And I think it changes the whole conversation. There is a real and meaningful difference between chosen stress and imposed stress. And most people lump them together like they're the exact same experience when they're fundamentally not. So chosen stress is what shows up when you commit to something that actually matters. When you take on weight deliberately because the outcome is worth carrying it for. And that's a completely different animal from the stress that gets dropped on you without your permission. Now think about someone training for a competition or building a business from nothing or raising a kid. That stress is real. Nobody's saying it isn't. But the fact that you chose it on purpose 17:19:09 changes everything about how it feels. It's not suffering in the traditional sense. It's more like the soreness after a workout. The feeling that tells you that you're actually growing. And most people who feel this kind of stress would actually feel worse without it because it's connected to something they genuinely care about. Now, the problem starts when people forget they chose the hard thing and begin treating their own voluntary commitment like a prison sentence someone forced on them, which then tends to happen gradually and subtly over time. When the why behind the effort stays clear and present in your mind, the stress stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like fuel, like evidence that you're in motion and engaged with something real. Imposed stress is the other kind and it's the stuff that genuinely lands on you from outside without any say on your part. A health scare, a layoff, someone you trusted letting you down, circumstances 17:20:10 you couldn't have predicted and definitely didn't sign up for. Now, this kind of stress can feel heavier in some ways because there's no narrative of choice to hold on to. But even as a quick side strategy before we move on, there's something you can do with imposed stress that changes the entire feeling of it almost instantly. You take extreme ownership of it. Whatever landed on your lap that you didn't ask for, you look at it and you say, "This is mine now. I'm choosing to deal with this. I'm choosing to face it. I'm choosing to handle it on my terms." And what that does psychologically is move the experience from the imposed category into the chosen category. And yes, you didn't choose the event, but you can choose your response to it with full force and full commitment. And that change from passive recipient to active owner tends to dissolve a surprising amount of the heaviness that actually comes with feeling like life just happened to you. 17:21:11 And it can be as simple as saying, "I'm choosing this." I know it sounds simple and maybe even a bit funny, but if you open your mind and use it, it can put you in a completely different state. But even here, even with a legitimately imposed stress, the same principle still tends to apply. The event is the event. What makes it unbearable for most people is not the event itself. it, but the endless replaying and catastrophizing and mental looping that actually follows it. So, learning to separate the actual situation from your mental commentary about the situation is probably the single most useful skill you'll ever develop when it comes to dealing with things you didn't choose and can't control. And the moment you make that separation, even just partially, you start to feel like you have some say in the matter again, which for most people is what they actually needed all along. Now, here's where it starts to get 17:22:12 really interesting and maybe a little uncomfortable for some people. The stress you feel on a daily basis, that background tension that so many people describe as just being their normal state of existence is in most CA cases being generated by a story you're telling yourself that you've repeated so many times it doesn't feel like a story anymore. And the story tends to have a very particular structure to it. Something bad is happening or about to happen. I'm not ready for it. I can't handle it. And if I don't figure this out, something terrible is going to follow. So, the thing about this kind of internal storytelling is that it feeds on itself in a way that can be really hard to interrupt unless you know what you're looking for. You feel stressed, which makes you think something must be wrong, which generates more stress, which confirms the original feeling. And now you're spinning in a loop that has no exit because the proof and the 17:23:13 problem are the same thing. Now your brain is incredibly good at finding evidence for whatever it already believes. So once the stress narrative is running, everything you encounter starts to look like confirmation that you should indeed be stressed. So breaking the loop often just requires one honest moment of asking yourself whether the thing you're stressed about right now is actually happening right now or whether you're reacting to a projection of something that might happen later. And for a lot of people stress has become the default setting, the background noise they're so used to that they don't even recognize it as optional anymore. And it's basically like living next to a highway. After a while, you stop hearing the traffic, but it's still affecting everything. Your sleep, your mood, your ability to think clearly and be present. Just because something feels normal doesn't mean it's necessary. So, the possibility that you could exist without that constant baseline tension is something most 17:24:14 people have never actually considered. Not because it's unrealistic, but because they've never been shown that the tension is something they're generating themselves rather than something the world is inflicting on them. So, let's talk about what's actually happening under the hood when you experience what people call stress. Because understanding the mechanism itself is really what makes this whole approach work. So, here's how the cycle tends to work for a lot of people. You create tension by overthinking a situation. You then try some coping mechanism or distraction to relieve the tension. The coping works temporarily and then the overthinking returns because you never addressed the root of the problem. You only managed the symptom. The relief never lasts because you're treating what's on the surface while the thing underneath keeps producing more of the same feeling. Now, the root in most cases is not the external situation at all. It's your relationship to uncertainty and your 17:25:15 habit for of filling that uncertainty with worst case narratives. And until you address that habit at its source, no other stress management technique will do anything more than temporarily take the edge off. Now, most stress advice operates entirely at the surface level, at the symptom level, giving you tools to cope with the feeling of stress without ever helping you understand why you keep producing the feeling of stress in the first place. So, going deeper means looking at the assumptions you're carrying about what stress is and what it means about you and what it's trying to protect you from. Because in a lot of cases, it's not protecting you from anything real. And that can be a confronting thing to sit with honestly because it means taking some responsibility for an experience you've probably been blaming on your circumstances or your job or your relationships or just life in general. Now, the genuinely free freeing part of all of this is how simple it tends to be 17:26:16 once you see it. Not easy necessarily, but because seeing through a pattern you've been running for years takes some willingness to be uncomfortable for a moment, but it is simple. The stress was never the problem. Your interpretation of the stress was the problem. And interpretations can actually change. And that distinction from fighting the feeling to questioning the interpretation is what makes the difference between someone who manages stress and someone who actually gets free of it. For some people, this makes sense instantly, like a switch flipping. For others, it's more gradual, more of a slow uh dawning. Either way is fine. The point is that once the mechanism is seen, it loses most of its power. Now, everything we're going to cover from here on out, the philosophy, the psychology, the practical application, all of it sits on top of this one idea. Stress is not what it appears to be for most people. It's not an accurate reflection of how bad your life is or 17:27:18 how many problems you have. It's a reflection of how your mind is processing uncertainty and discomfort. And that processing can be updated once you see how it works. That's the foundation. And with it in place, the rest of this starts to make a lot more sense. So think of this section as the lens adjustment that makes everything else in the training come into focus. because without it, [clears throat] the ideas ahead might sound interesting, but they won't make sense the way they need to in order to actually change something for you. What comes next is going to go deeper into the specific triggers and patterns that tend to generate the most stress for people. And knowing that me that the mechanism is largely self-generated gives you a fundamentally different starting point for dealing with each each one. And it also means you can actually approach the rest of this with a little more confidence because you're not walking into a battle. You're 17:28:18 walking into a conversation with yourself about how you've been thinking. And conversations can always go differently than they have before. The promise of this whole training, and I want to be upfront about this, is not that you'll never feel uncomfortable or tense again or stressed again. That that would be honestly dishonest. The the promise is that you'll understand what's actually happening when those feelings show up. And that understanding alone tends to take away most of the power those feelings have over you. This is about getting real with yourself about what stress is and what's just thinking you've never actually questioned. And if that sounds like something worth exploring, then obviously you're already in the right place to hear the rest of what's coming. So let's talk about the machinery behind mental paralysis. So now that we've established what stress actually tends to be for most people, let's look at the specific things that actually generate it. Now contrary to what you might believe or think, it's not random. There are very 17:29:20 predict predictable patterns that create the overwhelming majority of daily stress. Once you know what they are, they become a lot easier to catch in real time before they spiral into something that feels unmanageable. Now, the first one is indecision. This one is probably responsible for more unnecessary suffering than almost anything else on this list. And the reason is built right into the world word itself. The Latin root desider literally means to cut off. To decide is to kill every other option. to take the scissors to every alternative path and commit fully to the one you chose. And most people simply will not do that because cutting off options feels like loss. And we are hardwired to avoid loss. We are loss averse even when the thing we're losing is just an idea we were never going to act on anyway. So what happens instead is you sit in the 17:30:21 middle not choosing not committing keeping your options theoretically open while burning enormous amounts of mental energy running simulations on which path might possibly turn out to be the best one. And that limbo state that permanent maybe is one of the most stressful places a human mind can live because it never resolves. There's no completion. There's no relief. there's just more weighing and more calculating and more worry about getting it wrong. And in that state, any decision will be the best one. So the irony is that by trying to avoid the pain of choosing wrong, you end up living in a state that's probably worse than any wrong choice could ever be. Because at least a wrong choice gives you feedback and movement and something concrete to work with. The real cost of indecision isn't that you might miss the best option. The real cost is that while you're deliberating, you're not doing anything at all. And 17:31:21 time is passing. And the stress of inaction is compounding in the background. And any choice will be better than making no choice. And even better, you can build the identity of a person that could could make any choice the best choice. Now, underneath most indecision, if you're honest about it, is some version of FOMO or opportunity cost anxiety. The fear that whatever you choose, you'll miss out on the thing you didn't choose. And that missing out will be worse than where you end up. But what actually tends to happen in reality for most people who stay in that holding pattern is they don't end up with the best of both worlds. They think they do. They end up with neither. They get the stress of wanting both things plus the reality of having committed to nothing. Or let's say they do decide to 17:32:22 chase both options. They somehow get both which is very rare but let's say they do but now they have to maintain both so they add even more stress to their lives. So keeping options open feels like freedom but it's actually a kind of prison because freedom without direction is really just spinning in circles and spinning in circles is exhausting. The truth that most people resist is that a committed wrong choice, whatever wrong even means, almost always puts you in a better position than an uncommitted right one. Because commitment generates momentum. And momentum generates clarity. And clarity is what you actually need to make better choices going forward. And there's no such thing as 99% committed. You're either fully committed or you're not. So, what you need to do here is simple, even if it's uncomfortable. Cut, decide, let the other options die. And watch how 17:33:24 quickly the stress lifts once there's nothing left to deliberate about. Now, the second big stress generator, and this one runs a little deeper, is conflicting desires. This is different from indecision about external options. This is about wanting two things simultaneously that genuinely cannot coexist in the same life at the same time. And the tension between them creates a low-grade war inside you that you might not even be fully aware of. So you want freedom but also security. You want to party all the time but also achievement. You want to be liked but also to speak honestly which by definition means that sometimes you won't be liked. You want comfort but also growth. These aren't just abstract philosophical tensions. These are real lived contradictions that tend to show up in every important area of life. And they're responsible for a lot of the stress that people can't seem to trace back to any single cause. 17:34:25 Now, the reason this kind of stress is so hard to identify is that it doesn't feel like stress about something specific. It feels like it feels generalized, like a background unease that's always there. What's actually happening is an internal tugofwar where part of you is pulling one direction and another part is pulling the opposite direction and you're stuck in the middle absorbing all the tension without ever resolving the pull. So the resolution here and it's not always comfortable to get to is radical honesty with yourself about which desire is the one you actually want. What need does it meet? Which desire is actually yours? And which one you inherited or absorbed from other people's expectations, your culture, your upbringing, or some version of success that was handed to you before you were old enough to question it. So, a surprising amount of what people think they want when they actually sit 17:35:27 down and examine it turns out to be stuff they were told they should want by parents or peers or media or some unexamined cultural script that's been repeated since childhood. And the moment you get honest enough to say, "This desire isn't actually mine. I was just carrying it because I thought I was supposed to," a huge amount of the inter internal conflict just dissolves. And for the desires, desires that are genuinely both yours where you really do want both things and neither is actually inherited. Well, the path forward is usually about integration rather than elimination. Finding a way to honor both in different contexts or at different times rather than trying to crush one in favor of the other. Sometimes this looks like seasons, periods where you lean more heavily into growth followed by periods where you maybe prioritize rest and accepting that rhythm instead of trying 17:36:28 to be everything at once all the time. And sometimes it just means giving yourself permission to want contradictory things without treating that as evidence that something is wrong with you because it's not. It's just what it feels like to be in a complex situation, a complex person with [clears throat] more than one dimension. However, you can't do everything all at once. Now, open loops are probably the most practical and immediately fixable source of stress on this entire list, and most people are drowning in them without realizing it. An open loop is anything you've committed to, thought about, or started that hasn't been completed, cancelled, or consciously deferred with a clear plan for when you'll deal with it. So, every unanswered email that you intended to answer, every halffinish project, every vague promise you made, every idea you had that you wrote down somewhere and then you forgot about, 17:37:29 each one of those is running in the background of your mind like a browser tab you can't see, but that's still draining your battery. Now, the thing about open loops is that individually any single one of them is trivial. It's not that big, right? It's not no big deal, but they do accumulate. And after a while, you've got 30 or 40 or 60 of these tiny unresolved commitments pulling at your attention. And the cumulative weight of them creates this feeling of being overwhelmed that seems completely out of proportion to what's actually on your plate. So, your brain, it turns out, is remarkably bad at letting go of unfinished things. There's a well-known psychological phenomenon around this where incomplete tasks stay active in your mental workspace and keep demanding processing power even when you're focused on something else entirely. It's called the Zarnic effect, named after the psychologist Bluma 17:38:30 Zarnic, who first studied it in the 1920s. She noticed that waiters in a restaurant could remember complex unpaid orders in perfect detail. But the moment that the bill was settled, the entire order vanished from their memory almost instantly. The brain treats unfinished business as priority that it refuses to close, and it will keep looping back to it and nudging you with low-level anxiety until the task is either completed or consciously resolved in some way. And this is actually a feature of our brain designed to keep important things from slipping through the cracks. But in a modern life where you might have dozens or hundreds of these threads open simultaneously, that feature starts working against us because your brain can't distinguish between a genuinely urgent incomplete task and a half commitment that you made 3 weeks ago that doesn't actually matter anymore. And so people walk around feeling exhausted and stressed and 17:39:31 stretched thin. And when someone asks them what's wrong, they say they don't know, don't really know. It's just everything. But it's not everything. It's 50 tiny somethings that were never properly closed. So the fix is almost absurdly simple, even though very few people actually do it consistently. You go through every open loop and you do one of three things with it. First, you list them out. That's step zero. Then you complete it right now if it takes less than a few minutes. or you schedule a specific time to deal with it if it's bigger than that or you consciously drop it entirely and accept that it's not going to happen and that's fine. That third option of dropping it is the one most people struggle with because it feels like failure or irresponsibility or it feels like they're missing out on something. Again, back to the FOMO. But carrying a commitment you're never going to actually fulfill is way more 17:40:31 irresponsible than letting it go. Because at least when you let it go, key point, you've made a choice and decided. Back to the previous one, you free up the mental space for things you actually will follow through on. So, you need to be able to decide once again. You need to cut off options and be okay with the quote unquote opportunity cost and the quote unquote fear of missing out. Now, the relief that comes from even a single session of closing open loops is sometimes so immediate and so big that people are genuinely shocked by how much lighter they feel afterwards. So, making this a regular practice or a weekly sleep sweep of open loops is probably [snorts] one of the most tangible things you can do to reduce your baseline uh stress level. And it requires zero philosophy or mindset work at all. Just basic mental housekeeping every Sunday. And building on that and on what we just covered with open loops, there's a 17:41:33 really practical framework that tends to cut through a lot of the noise when it comes to stress that follows you home from work or creeps in during your downtime. When you strip it all down, there are really only three types of things that cause stress to show up in your mind outside of your working hours. Each one has a straightforward path to resolution that takes the weight off almost immediately. Now, the first is something you forgot to do. So, it's some task or commitment that slipped through the cracks and now it's sitting in the back of your mind pulling at your attention during hours when you should be resting or present with the people around you. Now, the fix here is almost too simple to feel real. Write it down. That's it. Get it out of your head and onto paper or a screen and resolve to handle it first thing when you're back at your desk or when you can. That's it. The stress isn't about the task itself, by the way. It's about the fear of forgetting it again, which is an open loop again. Back to the open loops we discussed. And the moment you capture it 17:42:34 somewhere reliable, that fear dissolves. So your brain is not really a storage device. It's a processing tool. And the moment you stop trying to use it to hold on to every outstanding item and start offloading those to an external system, the mental load drops in an almost disproportionate way to how simple the action was. Now, the key piece here is the resolve, right? It's not enough to just write it down. You actually need to attach a clear intention to deal with it at a specific time. Because as we discussed, half commitments create almost as much background stress as forgotten tasks do. Now, the second is something you realized you messed up. This is the second source of stress. Maybe it was an email you sent too quickly. Maybe it was a deadline you missed, a conversation where you said the wrong thing. Whatever it is, the stress here comes from the gap between what happened and what you wish had happened. and it tends to loop endlessly 17:43:35 if you don't give it a clear resolution path. So you ask yourself one honest question. Is it fixable or not? If yes, you write it down and make a note to fix it as soon as you're able to. If not, you may need to make amends, but then you need to let it go. Meaning genuinely let it go. Carrying it around doesn't undo it and doesn't help anyone, least of all you. So most mistake mistakes honestly are more fixible than they feel in the moment. uh the stress inflates the severity and once you actually sit down to address it, you often find it's a 10-minute correction that your mind turned into a three-day ordeal. And for the ones that genuinely can't be undone, the practice of just making amends and then releasing it is one of the most freeing things you can do, not because it erases the mistake, but because holding on to it after you've done what you can is really just self-punishment. So every mistake you face directly and resolve cleanly becomes a data point that builds your confidence for the next one. And over time that pattern of 17:44:36 facing rather than avoiding will compound into a fundamentally different relationship with imperfection. A lot of the times also our mind loops on our mistakes or the things that we didn't do correctly um because it's trying to extract a lesson from those situations. And until you sit down and actually write down what the lesson was, what is the feedback you got from the whole situation? What is that lesson? What is that one thing or insight that you're going to take from it so that this doesn't repeat again? Until you sit down and do that, your mind is going to keep looping the same mistake on purpose. It's trying to make you not forget it because it doesn't want it to happen again. So, it keeps it at the front of your mind at all times. And the only way for you to stop that is by actually sitting down thinking about the mistake you made and extracting a lesson from it. And then from then on, every time that mistakes comes up in your mind, you can just basically tell yourself that, hey, we've extracted the 17:45:37 lesson here. We've extracted the insight. I can let this go now. It will not not repeat anymore. I found my lesson. and then your mind will calm down because now you have extracted the insight from the whole situation. Now the third source of stress here and this might seem crazy to think that it can cause stress but the third one is a new idea. Something that pops into your head unexpectedly, an insight, a creative spark, a connection you suddenly see between two things that maybe felt unrelated before. These feel different from the other two because they're exciting rather than anxiety producing. Even though anxiety and excitement kind of feel the same, but they can also create stress in their own way because your mind doesn't want to lose the ideas. It keeps circling back, rehearsing the idea, trying to hold on to it. So, what you need to do is the same as the first two. Just write it 17:46:37 down and commit to acting on it once you're back in a position to do something with it. Now, ideas are fragile and they're also valuable and your mind knows that, which is why it won't stop reminding you until you've gotten the thought down somewhere external. The faster you capture it, the faster your mind lets go of the need to keep rehearsing it. And over time, this will build a kind of trust between you and your own system. Your brain learns when that when something important comes up, it will be captured and dealt with. And that trust will reduce the baseline need the baseline need to keep everything running in your mental background. Now there's also a concept from Buddhist teaching that maps on to everything we've been talking about and it's one of the most useful frameworks for understanding stress or suffering that I've come across and it's called the second arrow. Now, the idea is that when something painful happens, that's the first arrow, and you can't always avoid first arrows. 17:47:40 They're just obviously part of being alive. But then almost immediately after the first arrow lands, you fire a second one at yourself. And that second arrow is your reaction to the pain, your narrative about the pain, your judgment of yourself for being in pain, and your anxiety about what the pain means for the future. And that second arrow in most cases does far more damage than the first one ever did. The first arrow might have be a rejected proposal, a difficult conversation, or an unexpected bill. The second arrow is the three sleepless nights catastrophizing about what it means, replaying the situation over and over, imagining worst case scenarios that haven't happened and probably never will. Now, the disproportion between the actual event and the mental response to the event is sometimes staggering. Once you start paying attention to it, a 10-minute problem can generate three days of suffering if you let the second arrow do its thing. And for many people, firing that second arrow isn't a choice 17:48:41 they make consciously. It's a deeply ingrained habit, something that happens automatically the moment discomfort shows up. And it takes real awareness to actually catch it before it launches. So the idea here is really straightforward, even though it takes some patience to develop. When something stressful happens, you try to notice the gap between the event and your response. And that gap can be very very small, maybe just a fraction of a second, but it's there. And in that gap is where you have a choice. You can let the narrative spin up and carry you away. Or you can feel the first arrow, acknowledge that it's unpleasant, and then deliberately choose not to launch a second and third and fourth. Now, that gap will get wider with practice, almost like a muscle that strengthens over time. And as it widens, you'll start to experience events more clearly, more as they actually are, rather than through the filter of all 17:49:43 the story you usually add on top. And what most people discover when they get even a little bit good at this is that the vast majority of stressful events stripped of the second arrow are actually pretty manageable, right? It was the story that made them feel impossible. And this connects to maybe the most practical insight in this entire section, which is the fundamental asymmetry between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. The amount of mental energy and stress that goes into worrying about a task, dreading a conversation, putting off an email, avoiding a decision, it's almost always, in real practical terms, significantly greater than the energy it would take to just do the thing, right? You spend 3 weeks stressed about a phone call that takes 11 minutes, maybe. You spend 6 months dreading a project that takes two focused afternoons. You lie awake at night over an email that takes four sentences to write. The weight of the anticipation is orders of 17:50:46 magnitude heavier than the weight of the action itself. And once you start noticing this pattern, you see it absolutely everywhere in your life and in the lives of the people around you. And this reveals something important about the nature of stress for most people. It's not really about how hard your life is or how much you have to do. It's always about how much you're thinking about what you have to do versus how much you're actually doing. So the stress to action ratio is almost always wildly skewed towards the stress side. Which means the solution in most cases is not to reduce what's going on your going on on on your plate, but to reduce the gap between deciding to do something and actually doing it. And what tends to happen once you just start is that the stress drops almost immediately because you're now engaged with reality. Instead of wrestling with your imagination about reality, you're dealing with what's actually in front of you instead of the 67 versions of of what is going on in your mind that your 17:51:48 mind basically generated while you were putting it off. So action is genuinely one of the most underrated stress reducers there is and it doesn't require any mindset shift or philosophical understanding. Quite the opposite. You just dumb yourself down and do the thing. And the relief is so immediate and so tangible that it almost feels like cheating. And it compounds too because every action you take closes an open loop which reduces background stress which gives you more mental energy which makes the next action easier to take and so on and so forth in a positive spiral that's the exact opposite of the negative spiral most people are stuck in. So with that said let's actually cover the wisdom of weight and will. So, we've looked at the practical machinery of stress, the patterns that generate it on a daily basis as well. But there's a deeper layer underneath all of this that philosophers have been grappling with for centuries. And understanding it 17:52:49 doesn't just help you manage stress better. It changes your fundamental relationship to discomfort or effort and the experience of being alive in a world that will never be fully within your control. And this section might feel a bit more abstract at first, but stick with it because it circles back to something deeply practical. So Arthur Schopenhau, the German philosopher who spent most of the 1800s being relentlessly honest about the nature of human experience, had this idea he called the will. And it wasn't willpower or determination the way we usually think of those words. It was something more fundamental than that. The will for Schopenhau was this blind, restless, never satisfied driving force underneath everything you do and everything you feel. This constant wanting and striving and reaching for the next thing that never stops no matter how much you achieve or acquire. So you get the job you wanted and immediately start worrying about the next promotion. You buy the house and 17:53:49 start thinking about the renovation. You finish the project and you feel empty until you start the next one. That's the will. It's working exactly as designed, which is to keep you moving, keep you wanting, keep you in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction that propels you forward whether you like it or not. In other words, you can also call it hideonic adaptation. And this is an incredibly important thing to understand when it comes to stress because it means that a certain amount of restlessness and dissatisfaction isn't something wrong with you. is the baseline condition of being a conscious creature with desires. There's something genuinely relieving about hearing that too for a lot of people because they've been operating under the assumption that if they just got their life sorted out enough, the tension would finally stop. But that's not the case. You'll still want more. And Schopenhau is basically saying, "No, it won't." And that's okay. The tension is the engine. The question is whether 17:54:49 you're going to be dragged around by it unconsciously or learn to work with it on your own terms. So Schopenhau's suggestion broadly broadly speaking was that awareness of the will was the first step towards freedom from its worst effects. You can stop the wanting entirely but you can stop mistaking every new want for an emergency. You can notice the pull without automatically following it. And that noticing is what creates space between you and the restless feeling that otherwise runs your entire life. So that space is really where peace actually lives. Not in the absence of desire, but in the awareness of it. Subtle but important distinction. And developing this awareness is honestly a lifelong practice. But even a small increase in your ability to notice the will doing its thing without automatically reacting to it tends to reduce your stress level noticeably. It also tends to generate a lot of compassion for yourself and other people because once you see that everyone is dealing with the same restless force the pressure to have it 17:55:51 all figured out starts to loosen considerably. Now Friedri Nichze on the other hand who came after Schopenhau and was deeply influenced by him looked at the same situation and came to a fundamentally different conclusion where Schopenhau said the will is suffering and the best you can do is learn to detach from it. Nie said something much bolder. He said the point isn't to escape the weight. The point is to become the kind of person who can actually carry it. Self-overcoming. That was his thing. Not running from difficulty, not transcending it through detachment, but growing larger than it through the act of facing it directly and deliberately. And this is where the concept of amorati comes in. The love of fate. the practice of not just accepting what happens to you, but actually embracing it as necessary as the exact material you needed in order to become who you're capable of becoming. And as Nietze put it in Twilight of the Idols, what does not kill me makes me stronger. And when 17:56:53 you apply that to stress, the entire dynamic changes, right? Stress will no longer be something you're trying to get rid of. You will start treating it as raw material, the resistance that makes the muscle grow. because without it there's nothing to push against and therefore no growth. So think about the people you most admire, the ones who seem genuinely grounded and capable and unshakable. None of them got that way by having an easy life. They got that way by facing hard things repeatedly and not breaking. And every round of difficulty added another layer of resilience that you can see and how they kept they carry themselves. And Nietze wasn't saying you should seek out suffering for its own sake or that there's something noble about being miserable. He's saying that when stress and difficulty and challenge inevitably arrive, and they always do, the choices between shrinking from it or using it as fuel for becoming more. And that choice made repeatedly over time, is what separates people [clears throat] who grow from people who just survive. 17:57:53 And this is an important distinction from passive acceptance. Nze wasn't a passive thinker. He didn't believe in lying down and taking it. Overcoming means actively engaging with the thing that's challenging you. Going towards it with full force using your will not to escape the difficulty but to transform it and transform yourself in the process. So while Schopenhau gives you the awareness and space, Nietze gives you direction and fire. And both are useful. Awareness so you're not blindly reactive. Fire so you're not passively dormant. Now the person who integrates both who can see the will for what it is and also choose to engage with life's challenges as opportunities for what for growth is probably the strongest possible position when it comes to dealing with stress or any anything else for that matter. Now Billy Jean King said it's a simply pressure is a privilege. Most people hear that and think it's just a nicer way to say toughen up. But the real 17:58:55 depth of it goes further than that. Here's the thing. You can you only feel pressure when the stakes are genuinely real. Right? And the stakes are only real when you've earned or created a position where your performance actually matters. If nothing is on the line, there is no pressure. It's not possible. Pressure requires that something meaningful depends on what you do next. Which means the very presence of pressure is proof that you're in the arena, that you're doing something that matters. So when you feel that weight before a big presentation or that tightness in your chest before a difficult conversation or that knot in your stomach before launching something new, that feeling isn't evidence that you're in danger. It's evidence that you're in a position where things matter. And that's not something most people should take for granted. The shift from seeing pressure as a threat to seeing pressure as proof of your position is one of the fastest ways to change your emotional state in a high stakes moment. And it doesn't really 17:59:55 require lying to yourself or pretending the pressure isn't there. It just requires seeing it accurately for what it is. And there's even something close to gratitude that can emerge from this perspective. Because the alternative to pressure, what is it? It's irrelevance or even boredom from not doing anything meaningful. And very few people who've tasted both pressure and irrelevance would voluntarily go back to the latter. So the key distinction that makes this useful is that it separates the feeling of pressure from the story about what the feeling means. The feeling is just activation. Your nervous system getting ready for something that matters. The story is usually something along the lines. So if you're going to fail, everyone will see you mess up. You're not ready. You're in over your head. And once again, it's the story that creates the suffering, not the feeling itself. Elite performers across every field, athletes, musicians, surgeons, entrepreneurs, tend to have a different relationship with pressure than everyone else. And it's not that they feel less 18:00:57 of it. They often feel more. The difference is that they they've learned to interpret the feeling as readiness. And the good news is that this interpretation is learnable. It can be yours. At the end of the day, it comes down to perception. And perception can be changed. It's a perspective you practice. And the starting point is just recognizing that pressure only shows up when you've put yourself in a position that is worth being in. So pulling all three of these together, Schopenhau, Nietze and the pressure is a privilege idea gives you a philosophical framework for stress. Schopenhau shows you that restlessness and wanting are the default human condition and that seeing them clearly is the beginning of freedom. Nichze shows you that the difficulty you face isn't just to be endured but to be used as material for becoming more. And the privilege frame shows you that the weight you feel is often evidence of a life worth living rather than evidence 18:01:57 that something has gone wrong. Now these three perspectives build on each other. Awareness first, then engagement, then gratitude for the opportunity to engage. And when you hold all of all three of them together, stress starts to feel like a companion that shows up whenever you're doing something that actually matters. These are ideas from some of the deepest thinkers in human history who wrestled seriously with the question of suffering and came out the other side with something genuinely useful. So take this into your next stressful moment and ask yourself what each one of these perspectives would say about what you're experiencing right now. And if nothing else, just knowing that thinkers far smarter than any of us struggled with the exact same internal experiences and found real ways through them is really grounding. You're not the first person to feel this, and the fact that it's been examined this thoroughly for this long should tell you something about both how universal it is, but also how workable it tends to be once you engage with it. So with all of that in the background, 18:02:58 let's turn to the most practical section of this whole training, the actual path through stress and out the other side. So let's talk about the path that runs straight through. So we've dismantled the illusion, we've mapped the machinery, and we've pulled in some of the deepest philosophical thinking on suffering and striving. Now it's time to talk about what you actually do when stress shows up. And the answer might might surprise you because it goes against basically everything you might know. You don't manage it. You don't cope with it. You don't breathe through it and hope it passes. You walk straight into it. There's a principle that shows up across traditions and disciplines from psychotherapy to martial arts to spiritual practice. And it goes like this. What you resist persists. The more energy you put into fighting a feeling, the more that feeling anchors itself into your experience. and refuses to leave. It's counterintuitive because everything in our conditioning tells us that the 18:03:58 way to deal with something unpleasant is to push it away, distract from it, overpower it somehow. But feelings don't work like that, especially stress. So the moment you declare war on it, you give it a permanent place in your attention. It lives in your head, rentree, in other words. So there's a real paradox here that tends to trip people up at first. Fighting stress is one of the most stress producing activities there is. You're tense about being tense, anxious about your anxiety, stressed about how stressed you are, and each layer of resistance adds another layer until you can't even remember what the original stressor was because now the dominant experience is just resistance all the way down. So, the amount of energy people burn fighting their own internal states is genuinely staggering. energy that could be going into creative work, relationships, building something meaningful, problem solving. Instead, it's all being funneled into an internal battle that by design can never be won through force. 18:05:00 And this is why so many people feel exhausted without having done anything particularly demanding with their day. They haven't been productive tired. They've been resistance tired, which is a completely different kind of fatigue and one that rest alone doesn't tend to fix. Now, the alternative, and it sounds almost too simple to be real, is to stop resisting, which doesn't mean to passively lie down and accept a bad situation. That's not what this is about. It's to stop fighting the feeling of stress and instead redirect the energy towards engaging directly with whatever the feeling is pointing at. So, you feel stressed about a conversation, you need to have, stop managing the anxiety and go have the conversation. You feel stressed about a financial situation, stop distracting yourself and actually look at the numbers. You feel stressed about a decision, stop waiting around and actually commit to something. Whatever it is, take make a choice. Make a decision. The way through stress is almost always through the thing causing the stress, not around it, not over it, 18:06:02 not under it, directly through it. And the moment you move toward it instead of away from it, the stress begins to lose its foundation because the stress is almost always coming from the avoidance of the situation, not the situation itself. You've had the capacity all along. The only thing that was missing was the willingness to face it head on rather than sideways. And this brings us to a more active version of the same idea. Don't just stop resisting, but actually lean in. Force yourself on the thing that's causing you stress with full deliberate engagement. It will stop feeling as powerful once you're moving through it. Most stressful situations lose a significant portion of their intensity the moment you engage with them directly and with full focus. The stress lives in the gap between awareness and action. It lives in the maybe I will and the I should probably and the I'll deal with this later space. Close that gap and the stress has nowhere to to exist. So, the 18:07:02 relief is often immediate. You know the feeling. You finally do something you've been putting off and the first thought is always the same. Why didn't I just do this sooner? And the answer is that your mind made it seem bigger than it actually was. And you believe the projection instead of engaging with reality. And every time you lean in and discover that the thing was more manageable than your mind suggested and weaker than your own will, you build a new pattern. The gap between awareness and action becomes a little smaller. And eventually, for many people, it becomes almost reflexive to move toward discomfort and get the priceless feeling of winning than to ignore it. Now, I'm not saying you should pretend to feel fearless or pretend you don't feel nervous or uncomfortable. The feeling is fine and normal. The idea is to not let the feeling dictate your own behavior. You feel the stress and you move anyway. You feel the discomfort and you engage anyway. It will eventually become the strongest version of yourself, acting in spite of the feeling rather than waiting for the feeling to 18:08:03 pass. And at some point, you'll actually learn to love that feeling. Real courage, the kind that actually changes your life, isn't the absence of fear. It's the decision that something else matters more than the fear. Courage can't be the absence of fear. Courage literally means over to overcome fear. So if there is no fear, there is no courage. And what you do repeatedly becomes who you are. And the person who consistently moves towards difficulty rather than away from it develops a relationship with stress that most people can't even imagine. Now, speaking of identity, this is one of the sneakiest things about chronic stress that almost nobody talks about. Some people, and this might be uncomfortable to hear, are genuinely attached to being stressed. It's become part of how they see themselves. Stress is their proof of importance, their evidence of a big life, their badge of 18:09:04 busyness that signals to the world and to themselves that they matter and that their time is valuable and that they are serious people doing serious things. They've attached stress to their sense of worth as people. So, think about how often people lead with how stressed they are in casual conversations. How are you, you ask? And they respond with, "Oh my god, so busy, so stressed. It's been insane. And there's almost a competitive element to it in certain circles where the more overwhelmed you are, the more important you seem. And all of that, consciously or not, creates an incentive to stay stressed because the stress is performing a social/ psychological function that has nothing to do with the actual demands of your life. Stress as a status signal is so deeply embedded in c certain professional and other cultures that people feel genuinely uncomfortable when they're not stressed. As if something must be wrong. As if they're not doing enough. As if calm equals lazy or irrelevant. 18:10:05 This is the exact same dynamic that plays out with any deeply ingrained habit. Part of a person's identity gets wrapped up in the pattern itself. the routines, the familiar discomfort, the way it shapes your day and your social interactions. Letting go of the habit literally means letting go of a piece of who you thought you were. And that's scary even when the thing you're letting go of is clearly hurting you. So, what you need to do is really to just ask yourself whether your stress is actually about your circumstances or whether it's performing a function in your identity. Are you stressed because your life demands it? Or are you stressed because on some level you've decided that stress is what you are supposed to feel? And if it's the second one, which for many people it tends to be at least partially, then no amount of life optimization will fix it because you'll just find new things to be stressed about to maintain the identity. And this is probably the most confronting idea in this whole training because it asks you to take responsibility for something you've 18:11:06 probably been blaming on external factors your entire adult life. But it's also maybe the most liberating because the moment you untangle your identity from your stress level, you give yourself permission to exist without the constant fake busyness. So ask yourself, if tomorrow morning all of your stress disappeared completely, would you know who you are without it? And now the heart of everything we've been building throughout this training. Most real stress, meaning the stress that comes from actual events and actual circumstances that you need to deal with, is surprisingly manageable for most people. It just is. You get the news, you feel it, you deal with it, you move forward. That process, painful, painful as it it might be in the moment, painful as it might be sometimes, tends to resolve itself with reasonable speed once you 18:12:07 actually engage with reality. What isn't manageable, what makes people feel genuinely stuck and overwhelmed and like they can't breathe is the thinking about the stress. the layer upon layer of story and narrative and projection and catastrophizing and self- judgment that gets piled on top of what was originally a fairly straightforward problem. So, if you really think about it, it's a distraction. Stress is a distraction. The overthinking isn't working on the problem at all. It's a way to avoid the problem while feeling like you're doing something. Your mind stays busy. So it feels like you're doing something but nothing actually changes in the real world. Instead of facing the discomfort, you stay in analysis because it temporarily reduces the fear of action. Even though it increases long-term stress. So thinking about all the possible scenarios gives you the sensation of control. If I think enough, I'll prevent the bad outcome. 18:13:10 It drains your attention and your confidence and it delays the only thing that reliably lowers stress. Direct engagement with the thing in front of you. Engagement with the real world with reality as it is. Like we talked about earlier with the second arrow. The stress stress itself is the first arrow, right? You're thinking about the stress is the second, 3rd, fourth, and 47th arrow. And by the time you finished thinking about it, the original stressor has been magnified to a degree that bears almost no resemblance to the actual situation you're facing. You started with a problem and ended with a crisis. And the only thing that changed between those two was the amount of mental activity you layered on top. So you need to learn to recognize when you've moved from dealing with an actual problem to dealing with your own thinking about the problem. Not because thinking is bad. Thinking is obviously necessary, but controlled repetitive thinking that generates emotion without generating solutions is not useful to anyone. A 18:14:12 good rule of thumb is if you've been thinking about the same thing for more than a few minutes without arriving at a new insight or a concrete next step, you're not problem solving anymore. You're just looping. And the loop itself is the stress. So the stress is almost never the thing. It's always the resistance to the thing. That's why I said stress is a distraction. The thinking about the thing, the avoidance of the thing, the identity wrapped around the things. Strip all of that away and what you're left with is usually just a thing, a situation, a task, a conversation, a number, something concrete and finite that you can engage with directly and deal with and then move on from. The most effective way to break any cycle isn't necessarily to find better coping strategies for the discomfort. It's to understand that the discomfort was manufactured by a pattern you thought was protecting you. And once you see that, it's over. Most of what you're feeling isn't the weight of your life. It's the weight of your thinking about 18:15:12 your life. And that's an invitation to experiment with the possibility that you've been making this harder than it needs to be for yourself. Most people have. And the moment you stop making it hard, well, it tends to stop being hard. So the illusion is that stress is an accurate report on the difficulty of your circumstances. The reality is that stress is mostly a byproduct of how your mind is processing those circumstances. Indecision, conflicting desires, open loops, resistance, identity, attachment, overthinking and looping. These are the actual generators and every single one of them is something you have influence over once you actually see them. So the path forward is simple. Even though it's not always easy, decide, commit, close your loops, stop resisting the feeling and start engaging with what's behind it. And question whether your stress is serving a function in your actual identity. And above all, learn to catch 18:16:12 the moment when you've moved from dealing with a real situation to running in circles in your own mental stories about it. Now, keep in mind, this is a practice. Some days you'll catch it instantly and the stress will dissolve immediately. Other days it will take you an hour or a week to realize you've been looping. Both are fine. The direction matters more than the speed. The direction is always the same. Towards the thing, not away from it through the discomfort, not around it. Into the reality of the situation rather than into the fantasy about what the situation might become. Engage with reality. Stress for most people and in most situations feels essential. It feels like it's keeping you safe, keeping you alert, keeping you responsible. But when you actually examine it honestly, most of it is just mental noise that's costing you far more than it's actually giving you. And seeing that is the way through. Not fighting, not managing or coping or 18:17:12 distracting, just seeing without the layers. That's all it tends to take for a lot of this to just change. And if you're still skeptical, that's perfectly fine. Skepticism is healthy, and honestly, I welcome it. If you weren't skeptical, I would find it weird. All I'd suggest is that you try it once. Pick the thing you've been most stressed about this week, engage with it directly, and notice what happens to the feeling the moment you move towards it. That experience will tell you everything you need to know. So, with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview, the illusion nobody talks about, the machinery behind mental paralysis, the wisdom of weight and will, the path that runs straight through the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, pick the one thing you've been putting off, the decision, the conversation, the task that's been sitting in the back of your mind, generating lowgrade tension for days or weeks, and commit to doing it within the next 24 hours without negotiating yourself about the timing. 18:18:15 Then sit down and list every open loop you're currently carrying, every unanswered message, unfinished task, half-made plan, and vague commitment. And close each one by completing it, scheduling it, or dropping it entirely. And the next time you feel stressed, pause long enough to ask yourself whether you're reacting to an actual situation or to a story you built on top of the situation. and see what happens when you engage with the situation directly with actual reality instead of wrestling with the story. With that said, if you want to work with me one-on-one, as I said in the beginning, on improving every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, make sure to book a call from the link in the description or the pinned comment. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it was helpful. And thank you for the support. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how to unlock fourthdimensional thinking. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking 18:19:15 about more specifically is first the overview itself, thinking beyond the visible, the fourth dimension of cognition, operating from a higher order, the review, and then your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, then make sure to book a call from the link in the description. We help entrepreneurs, high performers, and professionals in all different fields. basically master every aspect of their life or the four pillars of life meaning health, wealth, love and self. So again, if this interests you, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training along with its respective document, then join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters on how to improve in every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, then make sure to join the newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about thinking beyond the visible. Now, most people think in three dimensions. They see what's in front of them. They process the past. They typically plan for the near future. And then they make 18:20:14 decisions based on the information that's immediately available and obvious. It's normal. It's pretty functional. And it's also the ceiling that I think keeps most people stuck in patterns that they can't see their way out of. Now, fourthdimensional thinking is really what happens when you develop the ability to think about your own thinking, to step outside the system you're operating in and see it from above and then make decisions based on dynamics and trajectories that are invisible to the person who's still inside the three-dimensional frame. Now, there are distinct levels of thinking and most people operate at the first or second level without ever realizing there are more. And the jump from one level to the next is really one of the most sign significant cognitive upgrades available to a human being. And each level gives you access to a fundamentally different quality of understanding and decision-m. Now first level thinking is reactive meaning you respond to what's directly in front of you based on habit, emotion or obvious logic. And most of your daily decisions are first level decisions which is fine 18:21:15 for basically routine tasks but completely inadequate for the important choices that shape the direction of your life. First level thinking is automatic and it requires almost no deliberate effort which is both its strength and its limitation where it allows you to move through routine situations very efficiently but it also means you're making important decisions with the same cognitive depth that you use to choose what to eat for lunch which as you can see doesn't match. And first level thinking only engages with the surface uh level of any situation. Meaning it sees the obvious cause and the obvious effect but it misses the deeper dynamics, the hidden variables, the second order, third order, fourth order consequences and so on. And the second and third order consequent consequences often matter more than the obvious ones. Now, second level thinking is analytical, meaning you deliberately think through the implications and the consequences of a decision before making it. And this is where most educated, 18:22:15 thoughtful people operate most of the time. And it's a significant upgrade from first level thinking, but it still has a ceiling. Second level thinking is really still fundamentally linear, meaning it follows the same chains of cause and effect in a sequential way. And while it can think several steps ahead and it can't easily see circular dynamics or emergent properties or systemic patterns that don't allow don't follow a straight line. And so second level thinking still operates within the existing frame. Meaning it can optimize within a given set of assumptions but it can't really question the assumptions themselves. And that inability to question the frame is what keeps second level thinkers stuck in situations that no amount of analytical optimization can really fix. Now third level thinking is systems thinking in my opinion meaning you start to see the interconnected web of relationships, feedback loops and also emergent dynamics that underly any complex situation and this is where cognitive capacity takes a real jump where you stop seeing individual causes 18:23:16 and effects and start seeing the system that actually produces them. Now at the third level you start seeing patterns across domains essentially where the same dynamic that plays out in your relationships. You can now see plays out in your work and also plays out in your relationship with yourself. And recognizing these crossdmain patterns gives you leverage that's impossible to find when you're really looking at each domain in isolation. So insights transfer across domains at this level. And honestly, insights transfer across all domains if you really look for that. Where understanding a feedback loop in your energy management gives you also tools for understanding a feedback loop in your creative process. And that transferability means every insight has multiple applications and your understanding deepens exponentially rather than linearly. And so you start seeing emergent properties meaning outcomes that arise from the interaction of multiple factors rather than from any single cause. And this understanding of 18:24:16 emergence is really what separates genuinely strategic thinking from merely analytical thinking. Now, third level thinking also gives you the ability to see structural constraints, meaning the hidden rules and assumptions that basically shape the situation in ways that most people never really notice. And seeing these constraints is the first step towards actually changing them, which is something that first and second level thinking can never do because they operate within the constraints rather than seeing them from the outside. Now the structural constraints are invisible to anyone operating below the third level. Right? The same way the patterns in your mind are invisible until you journal about them for example. And making these invisible structures visible is one of the most powerful cognitive capabilities you can actually develop. So until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate. Right? Paraphrasing, but it's very similar to what we're saying here. And once you see these structural 18:25:17 constraints, they become choices rather than facts. Meaning you can decide to operate within them. You can modifi modify them or you can transcend them entirely. And then that agency over the rules of the game rather than just the moves within it is a fundamentally different kind of power. Now the jump from third level thinking to fourthdimensional thinking is the biggest jump of all. Uh and it's one that most people never really make. And it requires a specific kind of cognitive development that goes beyond intelligence or education and enter the territory of self-awareness, metacognition and what some people call wisdom. Now the fourth dimension is the metacognition. Metacognition taken to its deepest level. Meaning you're not just thinking about thinking. You're observing the entire apparatus of your cognition from a position that's outside of it. As weird as that sounds. And from that position you can see biases, you can see assumptions, you can see frames, you can see limitations that are 18:26:18 completely invisible from the inside. Now the observer position is the culmination of consistent inner work where journaling, pattern recognition, and identity level shifts all develop your capacity to step outside of your own experience and observe it almost as if you're looking at a video game character. And that capacity is the foundation of fourthdimensional thinking. And that's why internal work is a prerequisite for this level of thinking because you can't think beyond your co your own cognitive frame if you've never practiced observing your own cognition. And daily journaling and self-examination is literally one of the practices that you can do to make this level accessible. And accessing the fourth dimension isn't a permanent state that you achieve once and then forget about. It's a capacity that you develop and strengthen and you have to maintain through practice where you can shift into fourthdimensional thinking when a situation requires it and then return to normal processing for routine decisions. 18:27:19 It's that flexibility that makes it practical rather than you know theoretical. Now, the more you practice accessing this level, the easier and faster the shift becomes. And eventually, you develop an almost automatic ability to zoom out to the meta level when a situation calls for it. And that automatic meta awareness is one of the defining characteristics of people who operate at the highest levels of any field. And the fourth dimension becomes more available as your internal clarity increases. Which is why having a clean mental operating system is really so important because a mind full of unexamined patterns and emotional noise simply doesn't have the bandwidth to access this level of cognition. So with that said, let's actually talk about the fourth level or fourth dimension of co. So what actually happens when you access the fourth dimension? What does it feel like? What does it give you? And how is it qualitatively different from even the highest level of conventional thinking? 18:28:21 Well, I'm going to break it down in concrete terms. The defining feature of four-dimensional thinking is really just perspective. Meaning the ability to see any situation from multiple vantage points simultaneously, including vantage points that you're not currently occupying. And this is multiperspectal awareness that gives you a completeness of understanding that single perspective thinking can never achieve. Unlike lower levels of thinking where you can shift between perspectives sequentially, first looking at it from your angle, then from theirs, fourthdimensional thinking holds multiple perspectives at the same time. You can argue both your own point and the other person's point and a third party's point at the same time. Which means you can see how different viewpoints interact and influence each other in real time. And that simultaneous awareness will reveal dynamics that sequential perspective taking misses. And this simultaneous perspective holding is what allows you to navigate genuine complexity where situations with many stakeholders or 18:29:22 many variables and many interacting forces can only be understood from a position that holds the whole system in view rather than examining each piece in isolation. And paradoxically, holding more perspectives at once actually produces greater clarity rather than greater confusion because the multiple viewpoints triangulate on the truth in a way that any single viewpoint can't. And that triangulated clarity is one of the most distinctive and valuable outputs of fourthdimensional thinking. You basically develop idiosyncratic thinking. And so fourthdimensional thinking also gives you a fundamentally different relationship with time where instead of being stuck in the present moment looking forward and backward you can see the entire trajectory of a situation past, present and future as a single unified pattern. And that temporal perspective allows you to make decisions based on where the trajectory is heading rather than just where things are right now and where you would want them to go. Now seeing trajectories rather than snapshots means you can anticipate where a pattern is leading 18:30:24 long before the outcomes become obvious. And that anticip anticipatory capacity gives you a massive advantage in decision-m where you're acting on tomorrow's reality rather than reacting to today's. [clears throat] And so the temporal perspective also gives you genuine patience where you can see that the current difficulty is a natural and necessary part of a larger trajectory that leads somewhere good and that seeing removes the anxiety that comes from interpreting a temporary setback as a permanent problem. Now the second feature of four-dimensional thinking is a heightened awareness of your own cognitive process. Meaning you can observe in real time how your mind is processing a situation. What biases are active? what assumptions are shaping your perception and what information you might be missing. And that real-time self-awareness is what prevents the cognitive errors that plague lower levels of thinking. At this level, you can actually watch your own biases operate in real time where you notice yourself gravitating towards a 18:31:25 particular interpretation and you can pause and basically ask whether that interpretation is being shaped by evidence or by a pre-existing frame. And that ability to catch your own biases mid-p process, mid conversation, mid whatever is extraordinarily rare and extraordinarily valuable. And real-time bias detection also allows for real-time correction, right? Naturally, where you don't have to wait until after a bad decision to realize your thinking was distorted. You can correct it in the moment before the decision is made. And that preemptive correction eliminates a huge category of errors that most people only recognize in hindsight. And this level of cognitive self-awareness also produces genuine intellectual humility where you become deeply aware of the limitations of your own thinking and the many ways your perception can be actually distorted. And that humility makes you more open to information that challenges your current view, which further 18:32:25 improves the quality of your thinking. And you can also observe the frames you're using to interpret reality, meaning the underlying assumptions and categories and mental models that shape how you see a situation. And seeing those frames gives you the ability to change them deliberately rather than being unconsciously controlled by them. Now, most people are locked into a single frame for any given situation. And they don't even realize that that the frame exists at all. So not only are they stuck there, they're not even seeing they they don't even know that there is a frame in the first place, but at the fourth dimension, the frame becomes visible and therefore becomes a choice. And the ability to choose your frame, to choose your perspective is to a degree one of the most powerful cognitive capabilities that exists. And being able to shift between frames rapidly means you can actually see any situation through multiple lenses and choose the lens that gives you the most useful understanding. And at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter which one you choose because if you achieve 18:33:26 fourth level thinking or fourthdimensional thinking, you realize that all of them are equally true to a degree. Right? And that cognitive flexibility is really what produces the insight and the creativity that look almost magical to people operating at lower levels. Now the third feature of fourdimensional thinking is integration. meaning the ability to hold contradictions, which a lot of people actually don't know how to do. Being able to argue two points at the same time, their own point and an opposing point, and understand both, to hold contradictions, to hold paradoxes, to basically be the devil's advocate sometimes and seemingly incompatible truths without needing to resolve them into a single simple answer. And this integrative capacity is really what allows fourthdimensional thinkers to navigate the genuine complexity of real life without oversimplifying it. Real life is full of paradoxes, situations where two apparently contradictory things are both 18:34:27 true at the same time. Now people that don't have access to fourthdimensional thinking, they don't see that. They don't see that two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time. And lower levels of thinking need to resolve the contradiction by picking a side a lot of the times which always loses information. When you pick a side, you always lose information. While four-dimensional thinking can hold both sides simultaneously and see the deeper truth that contains them both. And so holding paradox a holding holding paradox produces a richness of understanding that resolution can never achieve where the answer to many of life's most important questions is actually both right rather than either or. Either or is another kind of fallacy a lot of the times where it's black and white thinking. It's all or nothing thinking. Right? Things don't have to be mutually 18:35:28 exclusive. things can be true at the same time and the ability to sit with that both without anxiety is I think one of the hallmarks of cognitive maturity and this integrative capacity is deeply practical where in business in relationships and in personal development the most effective strategies often involve holding two seemingly contradictory priorities simultaneously like being ambitious and patient or being disciplined and flexible. And fourthdimensional thinking makes the that dual holding natural. And integration also produces a sense of wholeness in your understanding where instead of having separate compartmentalized models for different areas of your life, you have a unified understanding that connects everything. And that unified understanding produces decisions that serve all areas of your life rather than optimizing one at the expense of another. So the coherence of the unified understanding means your 18:36:30 decisions in one area naturally support your goals in other areas. And that cross-domain coherence is one of the reasons fourthdimensional thinkers seem to produce results that are disproportionate to their effort because everything they do is aligned and mutually reinforcing. And paradoxically, the integrated understanding actually produces simpler decisions where the complexity is in the understanding and the decisions themselves becomes clear and obvious and that simplicity on the other side of complexity is I think one of the most satisfying experiences in cognitive development. So complexity the complexity is typically is in the is in the understanding and the decisions themselves become very clear and very obvious after some time. Now, operating from a higher order is the next step here, right? How do you actually develop fourthdimensional thinking and start using it in your daily life? The answer is that you build 18:37:31 the foundation through consistent self-awareness work. And the transition to fourthdimensional thinking is really less about adding a new skill and more about deepening and integrating the skills you've most likely already been practicing. Now the foundation for four-dimensional thinking is built through self-awareness practices. This could be pattern recognition, identity work, perceptual training and the transition from those practices to genuine fourthdimensional cognition is a natural extension rather than a separate skill. Now a journaling practice is I think one of the most important foundations here because it develops the metacognitive capacity that fourthdimensional thinking requires. And every time you journal about your own patterns or your own reactions and your own frames, you're essentially strengthening the observer muscle that makes the fourth dimension accessible. and deepening the journaling practice specifically towards metacognitive observation. Meaning journaling not just about what happened and how you felt but about how you were thinking and what frames were active and what mental models you were using and what biases 18:38:33 might have been active at that time and what assumptions were operating is the most direct path to developing fourdimensional capacity and asking meta level questions in your journal like what assumption am I making that I haven't examined or what would this situation look like from a completely different frame or what am I not seeing that I should be looking for all of that trains your brain to automatically move to the fourth dimension when a situation requires it. Now, contemplative practices like meditation or focused reflection develop the observer observer awareness that four-dimensional thinking requires as well where the ability to watch your own thoughts being caught up in them without being caught up in them is I think the same ability that allows you to watch your own cognitive frames without being trapped in them. Even 5 minutes a day of simply observing your own thought process without engaging with the content. Just watching the thoughts arise and then pass like waves essentially builds the metacognitive muscle that makes four-dimensional thinking possible. And the mental stone 18:39:35 is that contemplative practice develops the idea of a clean mental operating system creates the cognitive space that is needed for higher order thinking to even emerge because a noisy mind simply can't access this level of cognition. And of course there are other practices here that you could implement but they go beyond the scope the scope of this training and also a lot of people don't even do this. A lot of people don't even just sit down to journal what happened, how they felt, but also any of the biases that might have been happening, any of the mental models that they might uh have been adopting in that moment, any of the assumptions that they were making. And so this is enough for now. meditation [snorts] and journaling. If you start doing this and you improve, then you might start want want to start looking for other practices that will deepen this even more. But for now, the practical development of fourdimensional thinking happens through deliberate 18:40:37 application, right? in real situations. Meaning you take the metaccognitive capacity you've built through journaling and meditation and contempl contemplation for example and you actively apply it to the decisions and challenges you face in daily life. So start by choosing specific situations where you deliberately shift into fourthdimensional mode. It could be important decisions, interpersonal conflicts, it could be strategic planning sessions. It could be during those situations. It's it's during those situations that practice you need to practice observing your own thinking process, questioning your frames, holding multiple pers perspectives simultaneously and looking for the hidden dynamics that lower level thinking would miss. Now the shift into four-dimensional thinking often starts with a deliberate pause, right? Where instead of reacting immediately to a situation like you normally would, you stop and create space for the meta level awareness to actually activate. And the thing is, yes, it requires a bit of effort in the moment. It requires you to remember that you actually want to be doing this. Um, but it becomes easier 18:41:39 over time. And that pause between the stimulus and the reaction, uh, between the stimulus and the response is is really where it all happens, right? And the quality of the questions you ask yourself during that pause really determines the quality of the thinking that follows. Where of course surface level questions produce surface level thinking. But questions like what's the system that's producing this outcome? Or what frame am I operating from that's shaping how I see this? Why am I even arguing this point in the first place? These kinds of questions produce fourthdimensional insights. And as the practice becomes more natural, you expand it into more and more of your daily experience where you spend increasingly more of your waking hours and at least partial metacognitive awareness. And that expanded awareness gradually becomes a persistent background mode that enhances everything you do. Now over time, the 18:42:40 fourthdimensional awareness becomes semi-automatic where you don't have to deliberately invoke it. It's just running in the background. And that background meta awareness is what people are describing when they talk about operating from wisdom rather than just from intelligence. And the integration [snorts] of fourthdimensional thinking into your daily life also doesn't mean that you're constantly in deep metacognitive mode. Of course, that's not very possible that you're constantly aware of everything that you're thinking and feeling and all the assumptions that you're making and how you got to a certain conclusion. But it does mean that you have access to that mode whenever a situation calls for it. And the axis becomes so fast and so natural that it feels like an extension of your normal thinking rather than a separate process. And so the practical impact of four-dimensional thinking on your life is profound where the quality of your decisions improves dramatically and your ability to navigate complex situations also increases and your relationships deepen and your capacity for genuine creativity and original 18:43:41 thinking expands in ways that are difficult to describe to someone who hasn't experienced them. and your decisions become more and more precise and more effective where you're accounting for variables and dynamics that most people don't even see. And the long-term outcomes of your decisions also improve dramatically because you're making them from a position of much more compute understand complete understanding. And so the decisions also come with more confidence where the uh multi-perspectible understanding and the awareness of your own cognitive process gives you a much higher degree of certainty that your reasoning is actually sound. And that confidence reduces the second guessing and the decision anxiety that consumes so much of most people's mental energy. And paradoxically the decisions also become faster over time rather than slower. Right? Where the fourthdimensional awareness actually allows you to rapidly assess a situation. It also allows you to identify the key dynamics, assumptions, mental models, biases, and arrive at a clear decision without the prolonged deliberation that complex 18:44:41 decisions usually require. And fourthdimensional thinking is the source of genuine creativity and original insight where the ability to actually see familiar situations from entirely new perspectives and frames and to in integrate those ideas across domains produces thinking that's genuinely novel rather than just a recombination of existing ideas. The original ideas that emerge from fourthdimensional thinking often feel obvious in hindsight, which is the mark of genuine insight, where the answer was always there, but it was invisible from any perspective lower than the fourth dimension. And finding it often feels like you're seeing something that was hidden in plain sight. And so the creativity that comes from this level of thinking is what allows you to make a genuine contribution where instead of repeating what others have said or doing what others have done, you can actually produce something that's authentically new and genuinely valuable. And that capacity for original contribution is I think one of the most satisfying outcomes of the entire 18:45:41 developmental journey. Now with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview, thinking beyond the vis visible, the fourth dimension of cognition, operating from a higher order, the review, and then your action items for the day or the next few days. First, spend 10 minutes today sitting quietly and simply observing your own thought process without engaging with the content. Just noticing how thoughts arise, what frames they carry, and what assumptions are embedded in them. And in your next journal session, add three metal level questions to your reflection. Like, what frame was I operating from today? What assumption did I make that I could question? And what would this situation look like from a completely different perspective? And what would the situation look like from three completely different perspectives? and then choose one important decision you're currently facing and deliberately apply four-dimensional thinking to it by holding multiple perspectives simultaneously identifying the hidden dynamics and the structural constraints and observing your own cognitive process as you work 18:46:43 through it. Now, with that said, I hope you enjoyed this a bit different from the usual content. If you did, make sure to like the video, subscribe, comment below what you'd like to see next. Uh, if you want to work with me one-on-one, again, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. Once again, if you want this training along with its respective document and text, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, thank you for being here. Thank you for the support as always, and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the 30-day financial repair plan. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, then financial visibility, monthly constants, daily tracking, monthly control, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Before we get 18:47:41 started, if you want to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description or the pinned comments. If you want this training along with its respective document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve in every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about financial visibility. So, if you have 30 days to fix your finances, your first job is really not to become an investor or download a budgeting app or start watching videos about the market. Your first job is way, way, way simpler. You need to find out what your life actually costs every single month down to the regular payments, the repeated categories, and the small charges you normally ignore. Now, most people think they know what they spend, but they usually only know the obvious pieces. They know their housing cost, maybe their phone bill, maybe a few debt payments, and then everything else falls in the blurry, vague, normal life 18:48:44 category. And that's where a lot of financial stress comes from. One purchase rarely is the problem. One subscription rarely ruins the whole month. The pattern of repeated money leaving without being planned or accounted for is really what slowly creates the feeling that you're working, earning, trying, pushing, and still somehow staying in one place. So your goal in the first few days is really to just remove all that mystery. You're not judging the numbers yet. You're just collecting them so that the month becomes a bit more visible. So you open every place where money moves in and or out. That means checking accounts, card accounts, saving accounts, payment apps, business accounts if you have them, and any other account that receives income or pays expenses. You want the full picture. And don't lie to yourself here or close your eyes to some things. Don't judge the numbers either. You've been ignoring them for so long precisely because you've been judging yourself about them. And then look back 60 to 90 days. Now 90 is best. That gives you 18:49:44 enough history to see what repeats, what changes, and what is draining money. You do not need a year of data to begin. And do this without shame. You're not opening your accounts to punish yourself. Now, once the accounts are open, start with subscriptions and recurring payments. This is the easiest place to create instant clarity, and it is usually where people find money that has been leaving for months without any thought behind it. And then put every recurring payment into a spreadsheet. Add the name, the amount, the billing date, the payment method, the category, and a simple decision column where you mark it as keep, cancel, reduce, or review. And keep the sheet simple enough so that you can actually use it over the long term. Then include any streaming services, apps, software, memberships, insurance, storage, gyms, paid communities, business tools, phone add-ons, and old trials that have become real bills. And if it repeats, it belongs on the list. If it feels too small to matter, it still belongs on the list. Then add the subscriptions 18:50:46 together so you can see the monthly subscription cost as one number. And this is very important because a few small charges feel harmless by themselves, but the total shows you what they're actually doing to your life. Then put the billing dates into your calendar. The point is not to scare yourself with reminders, but to see the payments before they come through. The point is to see the payment before it hits so you can actually plan around it so you know that it's coming. When the date is visible, the payment won't feel surprising or like an interruption. Too many people go to a restaurant and can't pay the bill because some subscription hit them that day. It becomes part of the plan if you know that it's coming right and that one change I think will remove a lot of that unnecessary stress because it makes you feel like you're back in control. Now once recurring payments are visible, separate the fixed costs from everything else. Now fixed costs are the expenses that are mostly already decided before the month begins. So they form the baseline your income has to carry before you make any optional decision. This includes 18:51:47 housing, utilities, you know, phone, internet, insurance, loan payments, minimum debt payments, transport passes, child care, tax set aides, business tools, medical costs. Anything else that repeats with a predictable amount. So, your categories may look different, but the principle is the same. Anything that comes back every month in the same amount needs a place. And you want one plain answer here. how much money is already accounted for before you buy food, go anywhere, see anyone, or spend on anything flexible. And that number will tell you how your month looks before it even starts. If your fixed costs are too high, life will feel tight before you make a single normal purchase. And that pressure is the baseline showing you that too much money is already being committed. Then add fixed bills to the calendar as well. payment dates, due dates, renewal dates, debt payments dates, and pay dates all belong where you can actually see them on your calendar. If it affects your money, it shouldn't live only in your memory. So, seeing dates helps you 18:52:49 notice crowded periods. Maybe the first week of the month is heavy and you need to plan for it. Maybe several charges hit right before payday. You need to know that in advance. And a monthly budget tells you the total. A calendar shows you the timing. And you need both if you want the month to feel actually manageable. Now once subscriptions and fixed costs are in front of you, make clean decisions on what to keep, what to reduce, and what to remove. Do not leave everything as a v vague maybe. So keep the expenses that clearly support your life, work, health, learning, relationships, or actual real enjoyment. You just need to stop paying for things that no longer do anything for you and cancel anything you forgot about, don't use, don't value, or would not choose again today. If you have not used something in months, just cut it. And reduce anything that matters but costs too much at the moment. That could mean downgrading a plan or negotiating a bill or changing providers or removing extras you never use. Now, for anything unclear, give it one short review 18:53:49 window, meaning let's say a month in which you decide whether to keep it or not, whether you're going to use it or not. Realistically, use it this month or cancel it at the next reset. And then put the review date in the calendar. If you don't put the date on the decision, the decision will probably disappear. Scarcity loves vague intentions. So by the end of this part you should know your subscription total, your fixed monthly costs, your payment dates and which recurring charges are staying and that's the first layer of control. Now this first section creates the base for everything else. Once the repeated payments are known, the month already feels different. You can see what's coming. You can see what is unnecessary and you can see what has to be paid before any flexible spending begins. And the relief does not always come from saving money immediately. Sometimes the first relief comes from finally being able to see the whole picture. Finally being able to see the shape of the problem because a problem wellstated as we all know is a problem half-solved. From here the work becomes more 18:54:49 practical. After the recurring payments and fixed costs are clear you move to the categories that normally feel variable. So after the fixed costs are clear turn the variable categories into monthly cost constants. You need to stop treating normal expenses like unpredictable surprises. Give them planned amounts before the month begins. I know you think that a lot of your expenses are variable, but if you look back in time and you look at the average, you'll see that they're actually very constant. So, groceries, eating out, transport, personal spending, gifts, household items, clothing, health costs, business expenses, entertainment, random purchases, all of these feel variable when they have no number. But they don't need to stay variable. You can decide the monthly amount up front. The way you do that is by going back in time. So a constant doesn't mean that the exact same purchase happens every week. It means that the category has a clear monthly limit. You can choose what happens inside the category, but the category itself has a number. And this will remove a lot of that daily negotiation. You're just watching the 18:55:50 category against its planned monthly amount. So you look back 60 to 90 days again and write down what you spent in each variable category. This could be groceries. This could be any other variable category. It could be going out, for example, to eat at restaurants. It could be dates. Use your real transactions, not your memory. So, actually open up your bank account. Look at what you've spent over the last 90 days on these categories because memory will usually make you look way more disciplined than numbers do. So, let's say one category was $430 or euros one month, 510 and 10 the next, and 470 the next. Then you have a range now. is between 430 and 510. If I were you, I would choose the highest number here. So, the highest realistic number is usually the safest starting point for that category. Now, highest realistic number doesn't mean an outlier month where everything went wrong. It means the upper edge of what's actually normal. And that will do is it will give 18:56:51 you the highest amount that you can spend for that category based on your actual historical data for that category. So let's say it's 510. If you spend less than 510 this month on this specific category, then you're pleasantly surprised, right? So it's better to plan for the worst case scenario here. Now once the history is visible, choose a monthly constant for each flexible category, each variable quote unquote category. This is where the spreadsheet becomes more than a list of all transactions and becomes the plan for the next month. So, let's say if food at home has been landing between $800 or euros and 1,000, then you might set the monthly constant at 1,000, right? And then you know ahead of time, this is the highest you can spend based on your actual historical data. Or you can choose a lower number if you're intentionally reducing the category. And the number should be chosen before the month starts, though. That's the key. So, you can split the monthly number into weekly amounts if that helps you in 18:57:52 any way. So, a $1,000 or euro monthly food budget can become roughly 250 per week. Now, that makes pacing easier and gives you some earlier feedback if it helps. And if the number is too low, you'll find out quickly. It means that the plan [clears throat] needs either more money in that category or a real behavior change to support the lower number. So, eating out, hobbies, entertainment, clothing, gifts, personal purchases. These seem variable, but they need the same treatment. Now, these categories aren't necessarily bad. They just need a planned amount, so they don't quietly take money from your savings or your debt payoff or your stability. A planned lifestyle amount will give you permission to spend without guilt. And the money is already going to be assigned so you can enjoy it without the pretending that the category doesn't exist. Now when the category is used up, the category is used up. That's it. That is where the PL plan becomes real cuz sticking to the boundary is the real test here. It might be hard at first, but it will become a habit over 18:58:52 time. After every variable has a constant, add everything together. Fixed costs plus subscriptions plus variable constants equals your real monthly cost of life. This number is one of the most important numbers in your financial life. Your monthly life cost tells you what it costs to keep your current life running. And I think most people don't know what that number is. They just know vaguely the rough amount, but you're going to know with precision. So it includes the boring things, the necessary things, the flexible things, and the recurring things. It's not your dream budget. It's the real cost of the life you're currently living or choosing to live next month. Once you know this number, you can see whether your income can support your life. you can see what needs to change. This number may feel uncomfortable at first and that's fine because a number that hurts a little is still more useful than not knowing at all. Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to personal finances. So monthly income minus monthly life cost gives you 18:59:54 your financial gap. If the number is positive, then you have room. If the number is zero, then you're surviving, but you're not really building. Basically, if you're breaking even. If the number is negative, then your life currently costs more than your income can support. If there's a negative gap, don't judge yourself on it. This is why you've been most likely overspending, cuz you're constantly judging yourself on your spending. It's really just a math problem. You can now see the amount that needs to be fixed through lower expenses, higher income, or both. Now, a positive gap needs an assignment. Money with no assignment tends to disappear into convenience or upgrades and small choices. So you need to give the surplus a job before the month starts. You need to put it somewhere, especially if you have the habit of spending all the money you have. If your income is stable, then use the after tax amount that reliably arrives. If your income changes, then use the most conservative number you've gotten so far. Don't build your life on your best month. Build it on your worst one, meaning the lowest amount you've 19:00:55 gotten so far in terms of income. I know this sounds crazy, but believe me, it will give you a lot of peace of mind. Now, if your income moves up and down, use the lowest recent month or a careful average. This makes the plan feel less exciting, quote unquote, on paper, but it's going to be much more predictable in real life. And then keep extra income separate in the spreadsheet. So, when extra money comes in, just assign it to savings or debt payoff or investing or emergency fund or taxes or business growth or buffer. Don't let it disappear into any unplanned spending. Now, once income and life costs are clear, set a savings target. Start with what the gap actually allows you to start with. Being super motivated to save as much as possible is good, but it doesn't replace the math. So, a savings goal that ignores the numbers will become another reason you feel behind. So, if your income is 4,500 and life cost 3,800, then you have a gap of 700, right? A 500 savings target may work here. A500 19:01:56 savings target means you need to cut 800, earn 800 or choose a different target for now. And then keep keep some room if possible. A plan with no buffer breaks when normal life happens. So even a small margin can keep the month stable and stop one unexpected expense from ruining the whole plan. Now when the gap and savings target are clear, the next move becomes obvious. If you want to save more, pay debt faster, or invest consistently, you either need to reduce your expenses, increase your income, or do both. That is the real truth underneath most personal finance advice. Now, if you need to make cuts, start with low value spending, meaning forgotten subscriptions, unused services, overpriced bills, loose eating out, convenient spending, and careless categories. Cut where the pain is low and the savings are actually substantial. Now, if a category needs to come down, build support around it. What does that mean? Well, if for example, your eating out needs to come down, then plan meals, set weekly limits, remove 19:02:57 saved cards, shop with a list, delay non-essential purchases, or create a simple rule that makes the new number easier to follow. The goal isn't an amazing month that you can never repeat again. The goal is a normal month that works and you can actually repeat over time. Now if cutting is not enough then income becomes the focus obviously better work more clients stronger offers extra hours sales freelance projects or a stronger business model. All of these can be options and they may matter more than squeezing another tiny amount out of reducing one category. So this is where the spreadsheet also gives you power. You can see whether your problem is spending income or both. That keeps you from wasting months trying to solve the wrong problem. Once every variable has become a constant, the month will no longer feel like a mystery. You know what life costs, you know what the income supports, and you know what target is actually possible for you. So with that said, let's cover daily tracking. So once the budget exists, open the spreadsheet every single day. 19:03:58 Even if you spent nothing and made nothing that day, open it and mark the day. If you can't get yourself to do this one habit, I don't know how you're going to get yourself to save money and fix your finances. So this is foundational. If you can't check a spreadsheet once a day for 5 minutes, then I don't know what you're expecting of yourself. This is the habit that keeps the whole system alive. So a budget you don't check is useless. It may look organized. You may look cool in front of your friends and people and sound smart, but it's not guiding your behavior, right? Daily tracking is what turns the budget into feedback you can use while the month is still happening. Now, for expenses, enter the date, category, description, amount, and payment method. Keep it simple because you're obviously not trying to create a complicated accounting process here. We're just talking about tracking our income and expenses. You're keeping the month visible. For income, enter the date, the source, the description, and the amount. If no money came in, just mark the date complete anyway. The point 19:04:58 is the daily touch point. Then, choose a time that fits your life. Morning for the previous day works really well. Evening for the same day works also well. Right after checking your accounts works. The exact time matters less than making it a daily action. Now, most people don't even check their bank accounts every day, let alone going on a spreadsheet and actually entering the amounts they spent. If the tracker is too complicated, you'll stop using it, by the way. So, keep the categories consistent. Keep it simple. Keep the sheet easy to open. The best system is the one you still use when you're busy, tired, or not in the mood. So keep it keep the sheet somewhere in your favorites on your computer or on your phone easy to access. Every entry will give you proof of what actually happened on the day before or on this day. And that way you gain a lot more clarity around how much you're actually spending. Now the spreadsheet should keep running totals as well. You want total spend this month, total income this month, current profit or loss, remaining budget, remaining savings 19:05:58 target, and remaining category amounts if possible. This lets you compare the plan against reality before the month is actually over. So if a category is at 70% used halfway through the month, then you know. If personal spending is moving too fast, then you know. If income is behind, then you know. The value is really seeing the number early enough to be able to adjust. Finding out on date 10 is useful. Finding out after the month ends only explains what already happened. And you can only use it if you change the next month. A running total changes how you think about spending because you'll see that purchases aren't separate little moments. You'll start seeing that each purchase is a bigger picture inside the month. Now add a simple projection. If the spreadsheet can do it, if you have spent $1,000 or euros by day 10 and the month has 30 days, the sheet can now show you that your current pace is leading you to spend maybe $3,000 in that month. That warning will give you some time to change the outcome. And when the 19:06:59 projection is visible, you can also slow down while there is still time. You can delay a purchase. You can move a meal out. You can reduce your personal spending. You can use what you already have. You can move money from one category with some room left. So, you still have choices in the middle of the month. That is the whole point. You're not waiting for the damage report after everything is finished. Now, the budget tells you what should happen. The tracker tells you what is happening. The calendar tells you when it's happening, right? You need all of those if you want the month to stay honest. The budget gives the month a shape before it starts. It decides the constants, the targets, and the limits. It gives you your money a structure you can follow. And the tracker compares that structure against daily life. It shows you where your plan was accurate and where it was too optimistic. And that feedback will make the next month a lot better. The calendar also shows you exactly when it's happening, so you know ahead of time. If a category is always over budget, then you learn something useful. Maybe the number is unrealistic for this 19:08:01 season of your life. Maybe the behavior needs to change. Maybe the category needs to be split into smaller subcategories so you can see where the issue really is. Now, daily tracking lets you correct the month while you're still inside it. You see the movement while there is still time to respond within the month. If spending is high, then you reduce the remaining days, right? You pause non-essential purchases. You use the information to make a calm decision instead of waiting for anxiety to force one on you later. And if income is lower than expected, you'll notice it early as well. And that may mean reducing spending for the rest of the month. It might mean following up on some invoices or making more offers or picking up some extra work or delaying anything that is not urgent. Now, I know the daily tracker may feel annoying at first. That's normal. Useful habits often feel very awkward at first before they start feeling calming. So the trick is to make the habit so simple and so easy that you can repeat it every day. Don't add an emotional story to every purchase. Just enter the number and the category. A coffee is just a 19:09:02 number. A grocery trip is just a number. A bill is just a number. This spreadsheet is just there to show you what's happening in reality. So if you miss one day, enter it tomorrow. If you miss 3 days, catch up from your transactions in your bank account. Missing a day is not the problem. Quitting the habit consistently and completely is the problem. The discipline is opening the sheet every day. As the running total becomes normal, your behavior will start changing just by the fact that you're actually seeing it. Right? What gets measured gets improved. So you see the month as one connected number. You become less likely to spend blindly when you can actually see exactly what the spending is doing to the plan. And so this is how saving becomes practical. You save by watching the month while it's still happening and making small corrections early enough to matter. The running total keeps the target in front of you. So you'll become someone who knows where the month stands. You won't need stress to remind you to check the numbers. You already have a daily practice and a daily place where the 19:10:02 truth shows up. And your daily tracker should be also connected to the budget, not separate from it. Right? The daily entry should feed the monthly totals. and the monthly totals should compare against the planned con constants. That connection is really what makes the spreadsheet useful. Use the same category names in the tracker that you used in the budget. If the budget says food, transport, subscriptions, personal, business, and debt payments, then the tracker should use the same categories, the same labels. Each category should show planned amount, actual amount, and remaining amount. That way, you can actually see whether the category is healthy, tight, or already over the limit. and the remaining amount is the signal. If it's high, you have room. If it's low, then you should slow down. If it's negative, then you need to adjust another category or accept that the month is over the plan. And then track the savings target too. If the target is 500, then the sheet should show whether that 500 has been moved, protected, or slowly eaten by overspending. Savings should not be whatever is left after the month 19:11:03 happens. If anything, you should be paying yourself first. So move savings early if your situation allows for it. And if you wait until the end of the month, the money may be gone. So if you move it early, the rest of the plan has to actually adjust around your savings target. And don't touch them after you've put them away. You can't touch them. Do anything else but touch the savings. And this is how you stay on track. The budget sets the direction. The daily tracker shows the movement. The calendar shows you when. And the running total tells you whether you need to speed up, slow down, or change the plan. Now, with that said, let's cover monthly control. So, at the end of each month, you do a full money review. A review of what happened, what worked, what did not work, and what needs to change for the next month. Compare plan spending against your actual spending in each category. Fixed cost should be close to exact. Variable constants will show you where the plan worked and where the number needs more room or a better boundary. And if food was planned at 1,000, let's say, and it came at 1,200, 19:12:04 that's useful. If eating out was planned at 500 and it came at 700, that's even more useful. The difference points to the next decision. Now, one strange month doesn't define your life, right? Three months in a row is a pattern, though. This is why the review gets more valuable the longer you keep doing it. And then compare your planned income against your actual income as well. I think that's even more useful. Many people only review spending, but income is half the picture. A good plan needs to know whether the money coming in is reliable enough to actually support the money going out. So if income was lower than expected, the next plan needs to reflect that. And if income was higher than expected, then assign the extra before it goes into random spending. Now after the review, update the constants for the next month. The plan gets more accurate as the numbers become clearer and as you stack more data. So, some categories may need to go up. If a category is genuinely too low for your real life, pretending otherwise creates frustration and repeated overspending, 19:13:05 it's better to be accurate and in control, regardless of how your ego feels about it. A realistic budget is better than a strict budget that doesn't work every month. So, if your transport, food, health costs, or business expenses are consistently higher, the number needs to respect that. The money has to come from somewhere. So raising one category means lowering another category, saving less, earning more, or accepting a different timeline. The trade-off is the value of clarity. You can finally see the cost of each decision, which means some categories may need to go down. If your spending is higher than your goals allow, then choose the categories that can actually be reduced. The goal is alignment. You may decide to spend less on eating out or entertainment, subscriptions, personal purchases, convenience spending. Pick the areas that give the most savings with the least damage to your real life. That's what makes the plan easier to repeat. Then keep the calendar connected to the spreadsheet, right? Bills, subscription dates, 19:14:06 paydays, saving transfers, debt payments, weekly reviews, the monthly reset, all of those belong to where you can actually see them. If it affects your money, it belongs in the calendar. Now, the calendar shows timing. The spreadsheet shows your totals. Together, they show you what is coming and what is happening. On payday, assign money immediately. Bills, savings, debt payments, planned categories, and buffer all get their place. Money that sits around unassigned is really easy to spend without noticing. So, choose one weekly review day and one monthly reset day. and where possible make the right payments and transfers happen automatically. Saving transfers, debt payments, predictable bills, all of these can reduce mental load. This works best after the numbers are correct though. So do not make everything automatic before the plan is clear. The automatic movement needs to match the numbers. Clear numbers come first. Even automatic payments need checking though. So the daily tracker and calendar keep you 19:15:06 aware without forcing you to manage every movement from memory. That's the balance you want. And by the end of 30 days, you want one clear answer. Is your current life financially sustainable? If the money gap is negative, then the next focus should be correction. Cut the lowest value expenses. Cancel what doesn't matter. And look seriously at your income. The goal is to stop the monthly loss first. A negative gap needs action. Once you can name the exact amount you're short, the problem becomes specific enough to work on, right? So, if you're short 400 a month, you know the target. You need 400 less in expenses, 400 more in income or a mix of both, possibly more than that, too. Now, if the monthly gap is around zero, then you're surviving, but you're not building anything, right? That means that one expense can actually push the month into stress. The next focus is really creating margin. So start with a small target. Even a small monthly buffer will change the feeling of your finances. Break even isn't necessarily bad, but it puts you in a fragile place. 19:16:07 You want the plan to create space so one normal problem doesn't turn into a crisis. Now if the monthly gap is positive, then the next focus is assignment and increase. You try to increase the positive gap and assign it to a job. It could be savings. It could be debt payoff. It could be investing. It could be emergency fund. It could be business growth. All of those should be decided before the month actually begins. Now, surplus money shouldn't float around without a purpose because you'll spend it, especially if you've been undisiplined with your finances. So, if there's no emergency fund, build one. If high interest debt is draining you, then attack that. If the basics are stable, then you can start investing or put the money in a business. By the way, if you want help turning your numbers into an actual clear plan, this is a natural place to book a call from the link in the description. Some people can do it alone. Some people move a lot faster with some guidance. Now, the real win is not one good month though, right? The real win is a repeatable month. A repeatable month becomes a repeatable 19:17:09 year. A repeatable year is where your finances actually start changing. So, at the start of each month, update the constants, check the calendar, confirm your income, set the savings target, and make sure the tracker is ready. This should be a normal reset every month. Each month teaches you something. So you learn which categories are too low, which habits are costing you, which income sources are reliable, and which goals are actually realistic. After a few iterations, it will feel like you're doing it on autopilot, and you won't worry about money ever again. So stability comes from repetition. You need one clear process that you keep improving. Now after 30 days you should know your recurring costs, your fixed baseline, your variable constants, your monthly income, your savings target, your financial gap, and your daily tracking rhythm. That's the foundation. Now, you may not be rich after 30 days. That's not the promise. The promise is that you'll no longer be guessing where your finances are going and what's happening. Once the foundation is in place, then investing, debt payoff, 19:18:09 business growth, and bigger wealth goals become much easier to handle. you finally know what the month can actually support. So, with that said, let's cover the review. We talked about the overview, financial visibility, monthly constants, daily tracking, monthly control, the review, and finally, your action items for the day or the next few days. First, open your accounts and create the spreadsheet today. Pull the last 60 to 90 days of transactions. List every subscription, fixed bill, variable category, and income source, and get the real numbers in one place. Don't wait for the perfect template before you start. Then turn every repeatable part of your financial life into a planned monthly number. Fixed costs get listed, variable categories get constants, income gets entered conservatively, and the gap gets calculated before the month even begins. And then finally, open the spreadsheet every single day and enter what came in and what went out. And if nothing came in or out, then make sure to still open the spreadsheet. Watch the running totals, compare them to the plan, and adjust while there's still 19:19:10 time. That daily visibility is really how the 30-day reset turns into a month you can actually manage. With that said, I hope this brought a lot of value. I hope it helps you. If you enjoyed this video, let me know. If you want to work with me oneonone, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this training with its document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters showing you how to improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, thanks for [clears throat] watching. Thanks for being here and I'll see you in the next. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is how to talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview, then the rich inner life, the deep attention, the social energy, the real conversation, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Before we get started, if you want 19:20:10 to work with me one-on-one, make sure to book a call from the link in the description. If you want this document along with its respective training, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description. With that said, let's [clears throat] get started and talk about the rich inner life. So, some people can really talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere. And not because they were born extroverted and not because they walk around with perfect lines in their head, but rather because they understand something most people miss. And it's this. When you struggle socially, it's almost always one of three problems. You're either empty internally, meaning you've got nothing to contribute. You're absent externally, meaning you're not actually listening. or you're anxious energetically, meaning you make normal moments feel weird. That's it. If you fix those three, then conversation becomes almost natural. So that's 19:21:11 exactly what we're going to do in this training is basically fill yourself with life, become deeply present with people, and learn to lead the emotional frame. To talk to anyone, you need two opposite skills at one. You need to become interesting and interested. So meaning you need to become interesting enough to have something to give and interested enough that people feel safe giving themselves to you. Everything in this training feeds one of those two skills. So we start with interesting and there's a reason for that. A lot of social advice out there is pure technique and technique without substance often turns into manipulation pretty fast. So you can't reflect, contribute or connect if there's nothing in you to draw from. So the substance comes first. So be an interesting person in the first place. What does that actually mean? Read books, learn, know a bit about everything. Work on those skills of having interests, going deep on them, and also poking around in things that you're not currently interested in, 19:22:13 things other people are interested in. So the logic here is pretty simple, right? If you learn more, you'll know more. And if you know more, you'll be able to have more conversations. and better conversations by definition. There's no technique that replaces that. So the deeper way to think about it is conversations are easier when you're actually alive. When you read, when you explore, when you experiment, when you build skills, when you travel, when you study human nature, when you form opinions, your mind grows more hooks. Essentially, someone mentions business and you have a thought. Someone mentions health, you have a thought. Someone mentions childhood, movies, money, habits, you have somewhere to go. And nobody's asking you to become a walking encyclopedia. But the goal is to become multi-dimensional, multidisiplinary, in other words. And you felt the other side of this. If your internal world is empty, every conversation feels like pressure. If your internal world is rich, conversation feels like sharing. So [clears throat] it's the same room, the 19:23:14 same person, completely different experience. The part almost nobody points out is the same curiosity works in both directions. So if you're interested in books and podcasts and films and ideas, you'll also be interested in people in their lives, in their worlds, in what they've seen that you haven't. That the private interest that you have, the private curiosity that you have in your own time and the public interest and curiosity are really one skill. That's why I keep saying interesting and interested because together they are together as one thing. Right? Now being interesting was never about collecting random facts. Right? A boring person consumes passively. An interesting person metabolizes life. They don't just tell you they read a book. They tell you the book made them realize why so many people avoid ambition. For example, they don't just tell you they went to Italy. They tell you what they noticed about how people over there relate to time. Let's say they don't just tell you they like fitness. They tell you fitness taught 19:24:16 them that self-respect is mostly built through private promises. There's a difference there, right? You've lived something. You've thought about it. You've digested it. And part of metabolizing life is really developing the ability to have an opinion. And to have an opinion, you obviously have to have done some research first. So you need to have read the strongest case for a thing, the strongest case against it and sit with it until you actually know what you think. So your opinions don't need to be rigid, but they can be considered perspectives that are still flexible, right? You can hold them firmly and at the same time not be attached to them so that you can update them when you learn something new, right? The other part is collecting stories. Your experiences, your failures, your lessons, the stuff you've watched other people go through. If you get 20 real stories in your back pocket, you'll never stand there searching for something to say since half of the conversation is really just trading experiences anyway. And look, books are 19:25:17 just one door into all of this. You can learn from podcasts, from documentaries, from long interviews, from video essays, from films if you're watching them with attention. You can even learn things from music if you listen closely. One conversation with a historian on a podcast will leave you knowing things you didn't know that morning. A documentary hands you a whole world in 90 minutes. All of it goes in the same pool that you'll be drawing from later. And most of it costs you nothing you weren't already spending on a screen. Right? There's also a shortcut most people never use and it's other people's obsessions. someone across the table is maybe into wine or chess or marathon training or watches or collectible cards, whatever. Ask them about it. Their answer becomes your education and you didn't even have to open a book. And not only that, but there's a conversation right there and you'll walk out of dinner with material that would have taken you a month to read upon. One question did that, right? It's the 19:26:17 cheapest education there is. and you'll probably make a friend in the process because most people love talking about the thing they're obsessed with. They almost never get the chance in their day-to-day life. So, the person who finally asks becomes memorable by default. And all that input still needs your own life mixed into it though. A project that failed, a hard conversation you actually had, you know, a year you never want to repeat. Without that layer, your knowledge sounds like a book report on someone else's life. And people can hear the difference. People relate to each other through struggle, through what they've gone through, right? As well, through their experiences. It doesn't have to be only struggle, but often we more authentic when we share our struggles because we're willing to be vulnerable. And by definition, if you are vulnerable with someone, they will be vulnerable with you by definition because you've now shared something that could hurt you and they can pick up on that trust. And most people would reciprocate with the same 19:27:19 kind of trust. And then you push it wider. Be a bit of a polymath. Learn what artists care about, what athletes care about, what founders, parents, and academics care about. Even when none of it really pulls you or interests you at first. Every world you visit gives you another door into another person. And the people you want to talk to live in all of those, right? And this is where it gets fun because a polymath is interesting because they can connect ideas across different worlds because they're multi-dimensional. They're multidisciplinary. They take something from business and they apply it to relationships. They take something from fitness and apply it to confidence. They take something from biology and apply it to business. They take something from childhood and apply it to ambition. And if you can do that in a conversation, people will lean in because you just showed them that their own life can be seen from multiple different perspectives from an angle that they probably never actually looked 19:28:19 at. And practically, this is a very small daily habit because you can just develop it by reading a bit more widely for literally 20 minutes. You can watch one thing that teaches you something once a week, right? You can once a week spend an hour on a topic you normally scroll past. And if you do that for 6 months, you'll literally never run out of things to say and ideas because you'll be living a life that constantly gives you something to say. You're going to be walking around coming up with lessons and stories and interesting things to talk about on your day-to-day life because anything that happens in our day-to-day life, any piece of information we get and we're surrounded by information, all of that can be turned into insight, into a perspective, into a lesson that then you can take and have real conversations with people about. But it requires you to have that skill of synthesis or being able to spot these things so that you can turn them into ideas. And that's a skill that you 19:29:21 can develop over time, right? You can develop it by being interested in life, by actually intentionally looking for the lessons that you typically would skip past. And one more thing on the inner life, and it's the part that a lot of people forget, is you ask what draws them to it, right? Your opinions eventually show up as taste, what you admire, what you skip, what you take seriously. And taste tells people how to think without you having to announce it. And so a conversation gets noticeably better when someone in it can actually say what they like and actually explain why. So someone brings up a creator or a city or a way of living and you ask what draws them to it and you offer what you notice in it. Maybe one detail they hadn't considered. And now it's a real exchange with two people actually in it. One thing to watch out for here when it comes to taste is a lot of people confuse taste with some kind of a ranking system where they put themselves above other people or they put other 19:30:23 people below them. Right? If your taste mostly works as a ranking system for the people around you, they'll feel it no matter how polite you keep the wording. And nobody likes to talk with somebody that sees them as inferior because of quote unquote taste. taste built from genuine attention reads completely differently and that's the version people actually want to hear and that people can actually learn from and that you can learn from others right now with that said let's talk about the deep attention. So now you're interesting and here's the twist and it's the second big idea of this training. You stop trying to be just interesting and you become interested. And I know we just spent a whole section building your depth and now I'm telling you to kind of put it away. But the more you try to prove you're interesting, the less interesting you become because people can feel when you're fishing for admiration and validation and approval. The real move is really to use your depth and service of their expression. And Dale Carnegie 19:31:24 wrote in How to Win Friends and Influence People, you can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. And the simplest version of this is almost embarrassingly simple. You take anything someone says and you just say it back to them. Literally repeat their sentence. Now, someone tells you, let's say they've been overwhelmed with work lately, and you just say it back. Overwhelmed with work. And they'll keep going every time. And two things just happen there. One, they feel like you understand them because you repeated what they said. So they are getting the idea that you're listening, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to repeat it. And two, it prompts them to expand on what they said, which makes you more interested in the process. People like people who [snorts] are interested in them. People love talking about themselves. So the more you give to them to do it, the better the conversation goes for both of you. And there are actually four levels of listening. And it's worth knowing which one you're on. Level one is waiting. 19:32:26 Where you're not really listening, you're waiting to talk. Level two is reacting, where you hear their words and you jump in with your own story. Level three is reflecting, where you mirror back what they said so they feel understood. And level four is revealing, where you catch the deeper emotion or the pattern underneath the words. So someone says that let's say they feel like they need a change and the level four response is that it sounds like they're outgrowing the version of their the life they've built so far. That's the level where people look at you like you just read their mind. So you can reflect their words and then reflect how it seems to you that they're feeling as an addition to that. Both of those are good, not one or the other. And none of these levels work if you're not actually there, right? You won't even be able to catch those nuances. You won't be able to catch their words and maybe how they 19:33:27 feel, right? You don't need to interrogate people. You don't need to entertain them. You don't need to relate everything back to yourself. You just need to show them that you're actually here. And that means no halfbuilt reply forming in your head while they're still talking. Your response grows out of what they just said. And trust me, people can tell the difference immediately. And so your body reports on you before you actually say a word. So your eye contact, your posture, how rushed your movements are, how rushed your words are. If your body reads tense and hurried, no sentence you say will fully override it. So you need to be calm first bodily. And so a settled body also buys you a better pace. You don't owe anyone an instant answer, by the way. Like a short pause before you reply makes the reply feel considered and it tells the person their words actually landed somewhere for you. And in fact, a short pause before you speak makes everything after 19:34:28 the pause, everything you say after the pause sound way more profound and interesting. And so then there's the skill that beats every compliment technique ever written down. Whenever you want to give a compliment to someone or recognize someone for something, [clears throat] notice things about people that they think nobody notices. And that's easier than you might think. The calm way someone explains a complicated thing, for example, or the fact that they think before they answer, or that they clearly care about doing things properly. Name something like that out loud and it lands harder than any clever line because it's evidence you were actually paying attention to them. And the only way to notice those things is to really be present and interested in the other person, which is exactly why everything before this matters. Now, the trick with compliments is to point at what the person chose. So, anyone can see a nice jacket. Fewer people notice taste, 19:35:31 discipline, restraint, or the way someone just made a hard topic simple. Choices carry more of the person in them. So complimenting a choice tells them you actually looked at them at their character as a person. So when you give a compliment to someone's choice in something, you're going way deeper than, "Oh, you look amazing today." Right? One rule keeps this very simple. You're not trying to flatter. You're trying to notice. So you say it because it's true and you happen to catch it. People can smell the difference from a mile away from between fake flattery and actual noticing. The real version becomes one of the best moments of their day if you actually catch something specific about them about how they decided to dress today. the colors they chose, maybe the shoes they chose, maybe something they just said, maybe the way they're speaking, maybe what they did recently, right? A lot of things, choices that 19:36:34 people make are really compliments about their character as a person. And that can touch them deeper than just saying, "Cool jacket, bro." Right? Now, for the thing that kills the fear of running out of things to say, every sentence a person says contains multiple doors. So you need to imagine a conversation as a hallway essentially and the sentence that they say is basically the hallway and there's multiple doors to enter in that conversation. Somebody tells you they just moved here because they needed a change after their last job. Look at how much they just gave you, right? Where did they move from? What kind of change? What happened at that job? Were they burned out? Are they someone who changes their environment when they feel stuck? What are they hoping this next chapter gives them? Six doors in one sentence at least. Right? You never have to invent a topic from nothing. You just have to hear what's already being 19:37:35 offered. And this is something called conversational threading. Now, the reason people panic mid-con conversation is that they're inside their own heads composing their next line, thinking about what to say next while the other person is standing there handing you doors and you need to come back out of your head into the actual sentence and conversation in front of you. Become interested again in the person. Be there and the material is always there. And look, if you're in your head, you're dead. Right now, one warning. Interested can turn into an interview if all you ever do is really just ask them questions. It can feel like an interrogation, right? At some point, you have to add something. And this is why becoming interesting was step one because the rhythm you want is you mirror, you add, and you invite. So, you reflect what they said, you add the thought, a story, or an observation from your own life, and then you invite them to keep going. So, you're in a transition period. I feel like those 19:38:36 phases are strange because you're between versions of yourself. Does it feel like that? That's for example one clean turn of the loop of what we were talking about. You reflect, you add, you invite. And you can run it all night really or all day, depending on when you're meeting the person. Now, another way to remember this is the triple A. Acknowledge, you add, you ask, right? You acknowledge what they said, you add something to the conversation, and then you ask the next next question. It's the same rhythm, just a different handle. So, you acknowledge what they just said, you add something of your own, and you ask the thing that keeps them going. So, pick whichever version sticks in your head because mid-con conversation, you won't have time to go looking for it. Right now, with that said, let's actually cover the social energy. So, everything we've covered so far is really what you say and what you hear. And this third piece really decides how all of it gets received. And most people have never once thought about it. Your 19:39:36 energy as a person affects the energy of the people around you. Right? Kind of common sense, but a lot of people forget about it. Your energy is other people's energy. If you walk in tense, other people will tense up. If you walk in rushed, well, people will feel rushed. If you walk in open and grounded, people will relax without knowing why. You're silently answering a question for everyone you meet. What kind of interaction is this allowed to be? And this is the mirror principle, right? And it might be the single most important concept in the whole training. If you're judgy with people, people will be judgy with you. If you're scarce with people, people will be scarce with you. And on the other side, if you're open with people, if you uplift people, they'll be open and uplift you right back. Generous gets generous, right? Whatever you bring into the interaction is usually what gets handed back to you. So check what you're bringing. A lot of the times people complain about being judged all 19:40:37 the time and at the same time they're being judged other people and they're not noticing the hypocrisy. And scarcity looks like needing them to laugh at every joke or to validate every point you make or to confirm that you're liked. The moment you need something from the interaction, the other person feels pulled into managing your self-worth and the whole thing kind of tenses up. Nobody relaxes around someone who's silently keeping score. On the other hand, abundance is the state you're after, right? And is built on selfrespect. You give attention freely without needing [clears throat] an immediate return. You pour into other people's cups because yours is overflowing and it will be overflowing if you have self-respect. You'll be able to show interest without chasing, right? You'll be able to contribute without performing and acting and you'll be able to walk away from a flat interaction without it meaning anything about you. You're not going to take it personally. People can breathe 19:41:38 around that and they'll show you a version of themselves that the needy version of you would never have met. Another way to think about the mirror is every conversation has an invisible invitation and your energy is the one writing it. So you're telling people who they're allowed to be around you before you've said anything of substance. Some people make others feel small, judged, boring, and some people make others feel funnier, deeper, smarter, comfortable, more alive, safe. You need to become the second kind. And that might be the deepest version of talking to anyone there is. Think about what different energies broadcast. Neediness puts pressure on everyone in the room. Judgment makes people defensive. Rushing them makes them feel like an item on your list, right? Open, grounded, and not needy. That combination lets people breathe, and you can feel a room loosen when somebody carries it in. So, the real goal is to become the kind of person people like themselves more 19:42:38 around, right? People like themselves more around you. People remember how they felt about themselves in your presence far longer than they remember your best sentence or line. So make them feel funnier, smarter, more alive, better about themselves. And they will look for you in every room you share after that. That's literally it. Leave everyone you meet better off than before they met you. And the mirror also explains why judgment kills conversation. If you're judging people left and right, if you present yourself as a judgy person, what does that tell the person in front of you that you'll probably judge them too in private when you're not together? And that's goes for everything, not just being judgmental. So, they hand you the edited version of themselves, the save version, the boring version, so that there's nothing you can judge them on. People don't open up around the person with the sharpest opinions, right? They open up around the person who can hold complexity without instantly condemning it. Meaning people 19:43:38 are complex. People are more than one thing. If you label people in this black and white all or nothing kind of thinking, you're taking the easy way out really because black and white thinking requires zero thinking really. It's the easiest form of thinking. It's just labeling things as black or white, all or nothing, etc. It's either this or that. That person is either smart or they aren't. The best conversation lists run a generous interpretation of people. So if someone's awkward, maybe they just need a second to warm up. Maybe someone's quiet, maybe they're just being observant. Someone's intense. There's probably something they deeply care about, right? They're maybe passionate about the topic. The generosity creates room. And room is really where connection actually happens. And no, this doesn't mean having zero standards. It means your standards don't leak out as constant contempt for people. And watch what tearing other people down does to the person listening. Right? Every time you 19:44:40 mock someone who isn't in the room, the person who is in the room learns where their own name might end up. So if you mock vulnerability, well, they'll hide theirs. If you punish honesty, well, they will go fake on you, right? Never decide that something is awkward. And I mean that literally. If you think it's awkward, the other person will think it's awkward. If you don't think it's awkward, they won't either because your energy is other people's energy. Awkwardness lives in the interpretation of the moment way more than in the moment itself. So, a silence isn't really awkward until someone decides it is. And more often than not, it's ourselves that decide that and then the other person takes it that way. They follow our interpretation. Because if we did something and we ourselves think it's awkward, we're telling the other person what to think about what we just did. So a failed joke isn't awkward if you keep moving. A direct compliment isn't awkward if you say it cleanly and 19:45:41 let it sit and you don't find it awkward yourself. And this is the wild part. The most confident people are saying the same things as the most awkward people. Same sentence, just different nervous system and different interpretation of the moment. One person says they like your jacket and immediately apologizes for saying it. Oh, that came out awkward. Oh, that was too direct, maybe. And they start apologizing. The other person says they like your jacket, adds that it has a cool shape, and then they move on. What shape does a jacket have? Doesn't really matter, but they're confident in the way they say it. And so the content is nearly identical, but the difference is that the second person doesn't apologize for existing. Which brings us to the principle underneath all of this. The frame is stronger than the words. People respond less to your exact words and more to the energy that tells them how to interpret those words. If you treat your words as embarrassing, they'll feel embarrassed and they'll feel embarrassing. Treat them as [clears throat] normal and they'll feel normal. Treat silence as comfortable and 19:46:42 it becomes comfortable. Confidence at its core is really refusing to abandon yourself when social tension shows up. You said the thing, let it exist and you continue. And the last piece, anyone, anytime, anywhere means all kinds of people, right? And talking to anyone was never about running the same personality at everyone. It means being adaptable without being fake. You reach the intellectual through ideas. The artist may be through taste or art. The entrepreneur maybe through ambition or talking about businesses, the athlete through discipline, the child through play. Social intelligence is range which goes back to the inner depth. Meeting different people in different worlds without losing yourself. And the without losing yourself part is really what keeps range from turning into people pleasing or acting fake. Your pace can change, your topics can change, your humor can change, but your values don't. 19:47:43 If you hold those still, you can bend everything else as far as the moment needs. And notice how this loops straight back into section one. Right? Just like I said, the reason you can talk across worlds at all is the rich inner life you built. Every book, every documentary, every topic you explored gives you a door into someone's world. And this is really what all that reading was for and all that learning which is by the way a continuous process. You don't just stop at some point. You need to continue being an interesting person. You need to continue learning, continue being curious in your private life by yourself, reading books, watching documentaries, you know, learning about the world, but also in your social life, being interested in other people, being curious in other people because you can learn something from anyone. So with that said, let's actually talk about the real conversation. So what's all of this actually for? Right, the last big idea, and it's the one that separates this 19:48:44 from every charisma hack video on the internet. The highest level of conversation is not extraction, it's contribution. You're here to leave the person slightly better than you found them. Sometimes that means making them feel understood. Sometimes it means helping them clarify something, making them laugh, making them feel less alone, or reminding them of their own potential. How beautiful is that? Even a two-minute exchange can do one of those, right? The most underrated contribution is accurate understanding. People get looked at, measured, compared, and interrupted all day long. Give someone 10 minutes of actually being followed, actually being present with them, and the conversation rises past small talk on its own. And what you walk in carrying decides which of those you'll make. If you come to give, well, you'll start hearing what would actually serve the person in front of you. It shows up in your timing, in your questions before you've even noticed it happening. So, 19:49:45 replace the question of what do I say next with a better one. What is here right now? like what is actually happening? What is this person excited about? What are they avoiding? What emotion is sitting under their words? What are they actually saying that they're not saying? What's funny about this moment? What's interesting in this room? The first question traps you in your head. What do I say next? The second ones put you back into the moment where all the actual material lives, right? And this is the shift from performance to presence. The best conversationalists aren't searching for lines. They're paying attention to aliveness, to life. And when you're paying that kind of attention, the right thing to say tends to show up on its own because it's usually sitting right there in front of you. And people won't remember the the cleverest thing you said anyway. They'll remember how much of themselves they were able to reveal around you and how you made them feel. So, if you carry one framework out of this whole training, make it this one. To talk to anyone, go deep. meaning d e 19:50:48 p depth empathy energy presence depth is the rich inner life the reading the opinions the stories the range as a person empathy is the deep attention reflecting people noticing them making them feel accurately understood energy is the frame staying open and abundant and refusing to declare moments as awkward and then presence is this last piece staying with what's alive right in front of you what's actually happening here in real life, not in your head, but in front of you. Right? The four work as one skill. Depth gives you something to say. Empathy tells you when to say it. Energy decides how it gets received. Presence keeps you in the moment where the other three get used. If you miss one, you'll feel it. All technique and no substance or all substance and no delivery. And none of it clicks in a day. By the way, this is a continuous process. The first conversations where you actually try this will feel a bit mechanical and that's fine. Give it a 19:51:49 few weeks of real use and at some point you'll catch yourself mid-con conversation fully in it. No script anywhere in your head and you'll realize the whole thing has gone automatic as it should because this is natural. We've lost the art of conversation over time. But this is natural. This comes natural to us connecting with other people on a deeper level. So, it's not you learning anything new. It's just you relearning something that you've lost. Maybe this whole video described you. Maybe this is the exact thing that's been holding you back in dating or in friendships or in business or in how expressed you actually are dayto-day. And you know that there's more in you than than what comes out of your mouth in the room. And the honest problem is that you're not sure what to focus on first. And that's the exact thing we help with. We help ambitious people turn confusion into clarity so they know exactly what to focus on, what to fix, and what to do next across their health, wealth, relationships, and self or mindset. So, 19:52:52 if that's you, book a call from the link in the description and we'll map that out for your real life with your real situations. With that said, let's go over the review. We talked about the overview, the rich inner life, the deep attention, the social energy, the real conversation, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, this week, feed the inner life on purpose. 20 minutes of reading a day, one documentary or a long interview or a podcast, and one hour on a topic you'd normally not be interested in. You're building the supply you'll be pulling from in every conversation from here on. In your next three conversations, do two things. Repeat one sentence back and watch what happens. Then run one full mirror, add, invite, loop. That's basically it. Don't try to use everything at once. Just those two with full attention. And that will teach you more than rereading this training 10 times. And then if the real problem is that you don't know what to focus on first, book the call below. Because as I 19:53:52 said, we help ambitious people turn confusion into clarity across their health, wealth, relationships, and mind. So you walk away knowing exactly what to focus on, what to fix, and what to do next. With that said, thank you for being here. I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you for the support. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is the freedom equation. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself. The three currencies, the three freedoms, the freedom exchange, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. So with that said, let's get started and talk about the three currencies. So in 1748, Benjamin Franklin wrote one of the most famous lines ever written about work and money. He said, "Remember that time is money." He was making a practical point to a young tradesman about opportunity cost because every hour he chose not to work also carried the income he could have earned during that hour. More than 19:54:53 250 years later we still think this way. We measure what we earn, what we spend, what something costs, how much somebody makes, and how much wealth somebody has. Yet, I think that way of measuring wealth leaves out two of the most important resources you have. money became incredibly easy to measure because you can attach a number to it. You know roughly how much you earn every single month. You open your bank account and see what you have and you can look at the price of something before deciding whether you can actually afford it. Time and energy which are the two other currencies feel less precise. So people tend to spend them without applying the same scrutiny even though both can constrain your life just as much as the lack of money can. So think about how differently you react when somebody asks you to spend €500 or dollars compared with asking you to give up an entire day. You immediately evaluate the financial cost because the number makes the sacrifice obvious while you can give away hours through obligations, inefficient work, commuting, unnecessary meetings, or 19:55:54 tasks somebody else could do and barely register that you paid for them. And you can make the same mistake with energy because nobody sends you a statement showing you how much concentration, patience, motivation or physical capacity you spent this month. You only notice the consequences once your work gets worse. You avoid things you normally care about or you reach at the end of the day with enough time left on paper and very little usable capacity left to do anything with it. So researchers actually explored part of this problem in a 2017 paper called buying time promotes happiness. Across samples totaling se 6,271 people in the United States, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands, people who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction. And an experiment found that working adults felt happier after spending money on a time-saving purchase than after spending the same amount on a material purchase. And I like this study because it makes the exchange visible. Somebody gives up one resource they possess, money, and receives another resource they value, 19:56:54 time. The researchers focused on well-being while I want to take the logic further and use it as a way of thinking about your whole life. Because you're making exchanges between resources constantly. So what would happen if you evaluated your life with the same seriousness that you evaluate your finances? You'd have to account for everything you're spending, which means you'd need to recognize that you actually operate with three currencies every single day. You have money, you have time, you have energy, and every meaningful decision consumes some combination of the three. Now, money is the first currency because it gives you purchasing power and lets you store some of the value you create today for use later. You can save it, invest it, exchange it for goods and services. You can give it to somebody else and use it to acquire resources that would otherwise require your own time and effort. Because we already understand money reasonably well, most people spend years trying to increase this one currency and assume that doing so will eventually solve everything else they care about. You can accumulate money in a way you cannot accumulate hours from 19:57:53 your past. Right? If you earn more than you spend, you can carry the difference forward and build savings, investments, assets, or ownership that continue to affect your future. That makes money extraordinarily useful because the work you did years ago can still give you options today if you preserved or invested part of the value it created. Once you have enough money, you can also use it to change the demands placed on your other currencies. You can pay someone to clean your home, take a faster form of transport. You can hire help inside a business. You can live closer to something you use every day or choose a more expensive solution because it requires less of your own involvement. The problem appears when you maximize money while treating every other cost as irrelevant. You can accept additional responsibilities, longer working hours, more travel, worse sleep, constant availability, or work that occupies your attention long after the workday has ended because the financial reward looks good when you isolated from everything you had to give up to earn it. And this is also why I don't want to turn the framework into an argument that 19:58:53 everybody should become an entrepreneur because the structure applies regardless of how you earn. A salaried employee with a predictable schedule, enough income, good boundaries, and generous flexibility may have a better overall arrangement than a business owner earning much more while remaining responsible for everything the business needs every single day. So, you can use the same reasoning when considering a promotion. The salary increase can matter obviously and so do the additional hours, responsibility, commute, travel, stress, and expectations that come with the role. You want to see the whole exchange before deciding whether the extra money actually improves the life you're trying to build. And you can apply it inside a business as well. An entrepreneur can celebrate a higher revenue month while personally taking on additional delivery, calls, management, and decision-making until the business produces more money while requiring more of the person who actually owns it. Revenue increased, yet the owner may have made himself poorer in the other currencies. Now, time is the second currency and it has one property that 19:59:55 makes it fundamentally different from money. You receive a limited amount of it. You spend it continuously whether you mean to or not. And you cannot preserve yesterday's unused hours for later. That makes time extremely valuable. Although people regularly treat an hour as cheap when no price tag appears next to whatever is consuming it. And so every obligation claims part of your available time before you decide what to do with the rest. Work takes some, right? Basic life maintenance takes some, relationships take some, and the commitments you voluntarily accept take some. Once those hours belong to someone else, your freedom over that part of the day disappears regardless of how much money you have sitting in an account. And this is why two people with similar incomes can experience completely different lives. One person may control when they work, finish most of it within a few concentrated hours, and have large parts of the week available for relationships, health, learning, or whatever else matters to them. Another person may earn the same amount while giving almost every useful hour to work and recovery from work. And 20:00:56 I would therefore evaluate time through control as much as quantity. Having four free hours that you can reliably decide how to use gives you something different from having four unpredictable hours scattered around obligations, interruptions, and other people's demands. Both schedules contain the same number of hours mathematically, while one gives the person far more usable choice. And so researchers sometimes use the phrase time scarcity or time poverty to describe the feeling that you don't have enough time for everything demanding your attention. People were able to reduce some of that pressure by exchanging money for time. And so you already make these exchanges in small ways. You pay more for direct flight because it saves several hours. You order something online because going to the store would take longer. you pay for software or professional help because doing the job manually would consume part of your week or choose housing partly because of how much commuting time the location creates. The useful question is what you do with the time you actually recover because buying back 20:01:58 an hour only creates potential. You can use that hour to earn more money, train, sleep, read, spend time with somebody you care about, think, or simply have fewer obligations pressing against each other. The value comes from what the that recovered hour allows you to actually do afterward. And energy is the third currency and I think people overlook it most because time can remain available after your ability to use that time well has already dropped. You can technically have 3 hours free and still like the concentration to write the physical capacity to train properly or the emotional patience to have meaningful conversations with somebody. Your calendar says you have time while your actual ability to use that time has changed. And when I say energy here, I'm using the word broadly and practically. I mean your usable physical capacity, your ability to concentrate and think clearly and the emotional capacity you have available for dealing with people, uncertainty, responsibility, and even stress. Those forms of capacity affect one another, which is why a physically exhausted person often produces worse 20:02:59 cognitive work and why prolonged mental strain can actually affect everything they do afterwards. And this matters especially when you judge productivity by hours alone. 10 hours spent working tells you almost nothing about the quality of those hours. If your concentration declined halfway through, you kept switching between tasks, or you spend the final part of the day doing work that somebody with more energy could have completed far faster. And it matters outside of work, too, because you can create a life that looks successful economically while having very little usable capacity left for the parts of your life the money was supposed to support. You might have enough income to travel, enough free time to train, and enough flexibility to see people you care about, yet still struggle to enjoy any of it because your work consumes most of your mental and physical resources. So once you treat energy as something you spend, you start evaluating decisions differently. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, recovery, boundaries, removing unnecessary obligations, and simplifying parts of your life become resource decisions because they affect how much usable 20:04:01 capacity you have available for everything else. Some activities also cost far more energy than their duration suggests. A 30-inute task that you dislike or avoid for hours and keep thinking about afterwards and repeatedly return to can consume more of you than a longer task that you can perform with focused attention and finish cleanly. The clock captures duration while your experience captures the real demand. And that gives you another reason to look carefully at what you agree to because a commitment can appear affordable financially and manageable in terms of time yet still be expensive once you include the stress preparation, switching, recovery, and attention it requires before and after the actual event. So now you have the first half of the freedom equation. You have three currencies and the practical mode is really to stop looking at them separately. From here on, I want you to evaluate important decisions by asking what they cost across money, time, and energy because the answer can look completely different once all three appear on the same page. And by the end of this training, you'll be able to use 20:05:01 those three currencies to evaluate your current life. Understand the three freedoms they can create, and deliberately exchange the resources you have for greater control over how you live. Start by giving yourself a score from 1 to 10 for each currency based on your current reality. Give money a high score if you have strong income reserves or access to financial resources relative to your needs. Give time a high score if you have meaningful amounts of usable time under your control. And score energy according to how much physical, cognitive, and emotional capacity you can actually use during an ordinary week. and ask whether a reasonable unexpected expense would meaningfully destabilize you in terms of money, whether you can fund the things that matter to you and whether you have the financial resources left after your basic obligations. You don't need a perfect financial model here because you're trying to identify relative abundance and scarcity before we make the framework more precise. Then, when it comes to time, look at how much of your week you genuinely control once work and unavoidable responsibilities 20:06:02 take their share. I'd pay particular attention to whether your free time arrives in usable blocks because several fragmented periods can look generous on a calendar and still give you very little room for work that requires concentration or experiences you want to enjoy without rushing. And finally, look at what you can actually do with the hours you have. If you repeatedly reach your free time without enough concentration to think, enough physical capacity to train, or enough patience to engage properly with other people, your energy score should reflect that because the theoretical availability of time doesn't really solve the underlying constraint. And so once you score all three, identify the currency that currently limits you most. You might have plenty of time and energy while lacking the money required to make meaningful changes. You might have strong finances and good health while your schedule belongs almost entirely to work. Or you might possess both money and time while your current workload, sleep, stress, or health leaves you with very little capacity to use either one. That lowest score gives you a working priority because improving the resource 20:07:04 you already possess in abundance may change very little. earning another 10% can matter, of course, although somebody who already has enough money in almost no time may benefit far more from using some of that money to remove obligations from the week. And this is where the framework gets much more interesting because your currencies can interact. You can spend money to recover time, spend money and time to improve energy, invest time and energy to create more money, or accept a temporary cost in one area because the exchange creates something you value more later. We still need one more piece before you can judge whether any of those exchanges are actually good. Because having resources only matters when you know what you want those resources to give you. So let's talk about the three freedoms. Hey, really quick. If you're still watching this video, that tells me you're serious about actually making a change in your life. So if you want my help personally, click the link below and book a call. We'll look at where you are, where you want to go, and what's been keeping you stuck. And if we believe that we can actually help you, we'll show you exactly what working with us would look 20:08:05 like. And if you're not ready for that yet, that's completely fine, too. You can join the Omniscient community for free where you'll get access to more of our free trainings, and you'll be able to connect with other people that are also doing this work. On top of that, you can join the free Omniscient newsletter where I send you ideas and strategies that I don't always talk about here on YouTube. So, if any of that interests you, all links are below. But if you're ready to take this seriously, book a call. And with that said, back to the video. So once you know what your three currencies are, the next question is what you actually want from them to produce. Money, time, and energy are important because they give you options. And those options affect how much control you have over your own life. I'd reduce that control into three freedoms that matter across almost every lifestyle. Financial freedom gives you control over your dependence on income. Time freedom gives you control over your schedule. And location freedom gives you control over where you need to be. I'm using freedom here in a very practical sense. You have more freedom when fewer external conditions determine what you 20:09:06 have to do, when you have to do it, and where you have to be while doing it. You can still choose structure, responsibility, work, commitment, and routine. But you choose them from a stronger position because your life doesn't collapse immediately if one condition changes. You also don't need to think about freedom as something you either have or don't have. Most people sit somewhere on a spectrum because somebody can have strong location freedom and weak financial freedom or excellent financial freedom while having very little control over their weak. That's exactly why separating the three gives you a clearer picture than using one vague word like success. And this also changes the way you think about accumulating resources. If you spend years increasing money without knowing which freedom you're trying to create, you can end up optimizing an input while barely improving the life around it. The whole point of the equation is to connect what you have with what you want your life to allow. So financial freedom means reducing how dependent your life is on continuous earned income. You have more of it when your savings, investments, assets, ownership, or 20:10:08 income structure give you room to make decisions without immediately needing another paycheck, another client, or another sale. Someone with a high income can still have weak financial freedom if their lifestyle, costs, debt, obligations, or business model force them to keep earning at the same pace just to maintain everything. And that's why income and financial freedom can move differently. A person earning $300,000 per year with very high fixed costs may feel far less financially secure than someone earning much less with low expenses or large reserves and income that doesn't depend entirely on daily personal effort. The first person has more money coming in while the second person may have more room to say no, to wait, change direction, or even walk away. So, one useful way to think about this is through runway. Ask yourself how long your current life could continue if your earned income disappeared today. Somebody with several months or years of expenses covered has a different level of freedom from someone who needs next month's income to meet next month's obligations, even if 20:11:08 both people currently earn the same amount. And fixed costs matter here because every recurring obligation raises the amount of income you need before you feel free. So a larger home, expensive car, debt payments, payroll subscriptions, and lifestyle expectations can all be perfectly reasonable choices, but they also create a financial floor you now have to keep supporting. And so the source of your income matters as well. If every dollar depends directly on your presence, your time, or your personal output, then your financial freedom still relies heavily on the other currencies. Income from ownership systems, investments, licensing or work that continues producing value after the initial effort can reduce that dependence. Although every structure comes with its own trade-offs and risks, a salaried role can still create strong financial freedom if the person saves aggressively, keeps expenses under control, invests consistently, and builds enough reserves to make work optional for meaningful periods. You don't need a business to create financial freedom because the mechanism depends on the gap between what your 20:12:09 life requires and what your accumulated resources can actually support. A business owner can also have weak financial freedom if every month starts from zero and the owner personally has to generate the sales, deliver the work, manage the clients, and solve the problems. The business may produce a high income while remaining tightly attached to the owner's time and energy. Which is why revenue alone tells you very little about actual freedom. Now, when it comes to time, time freedom means having meaningful control over when you work, how much you work, and what receives your attention during the week. You can still work a lot and have high time freedom if those hours are largely chosen, flexible, and adjustable. Another person can work fewer total hours and still have weak time freedom because those hours break the day apart, remain unpredictable, or depend on somebody else's schedule. So, control matters a lot more than raw quantity. A person who can decide to move a work block, take a morning off, protect an afternoon, or rearrange the week has more freedom than someone whose calendar looks lighter, but has very 20:13:11 little authority over when things happen. That flexibility affects relationships, training, travel, creative work, recovery, and almost every other part of life. So, you should also pay attention to fragmentation because scattered obligations can make a week feel more constrained than the total hours suggest. A call in the morning, another in the afternoon, and one commitment in the evening can leave large gaps between them while still making the whole day difficult to use for anything demanding or immersive. Predictable time also carries more value than uncertain time. If you know every Friday afternoon belongs to you, you can actually plan around it. If free time appears randomly depending on cancellations, workload, or somebody else's availability, you technically have hours available but very little confidence about when those hours will exist. And this is why I define time freedom through autonomy. The important question is how much authority you have over the shape of your week. You may choose to spend that authority on work, family, training, study, or nothing at 20:14:12 all if you wanted to. And that freedom sits in your ability to make that choice without needing permission from a manager, client, calendar, or operating requirement. Somebody can voluntarily work 60 hours during an intense period and still have more time freedom than somebody working 35 hours under rigid conditions because the first person can reduce the load when priorities change while the second person may have no ability to move or compress the schedule. And you can measure this by looking at how many parts of your week are genuinely fixed. Work shifts, meetings, school schedules, caregiving, commuting, appointments, and recurring responsibilities all create structure. structure isn't automatically bad, but you want to know how much of your week you control before calling yourself time free. So, next up is location freedom. And location freedom means having meaningful control over where you need to be in order to maintain your income and your responsibilities. Some people can work from another city or country with almost no disruptions, while others have jobs, businesses, family duties, 20:15:13 property, or operational responsibilities that tie them closely to one place. Neither arrangement is automatically superior, but they create very different sets of options. Location freedom matters most when you actually want mobility. If you enjoy where you live, have strong relationships nearby, and have no desire to travel or relocate, you may care much less about maximizing it. Still, having the option to spend several weeks elsewhere, move if circumstances change, or stay near family when needed can become valuable, even if you rarely actually use it. Now, remote work can increase location freedom, although the label alone doesn't guarantee it. Some remote jobs still require specific countries, time zones, working hours, or frequent travel, and some businesses can technically operate online while the owner remains tied to local staff, clients, equipment, or regulations. Your legal, financial, and personal circumstances matter, too. Visas, tax residency, family commitments, healthcare, property, and schooling can all affect how freely you can move. The 20:16:14 point is to evaluate your real mobility based on the conditions of your life, not based on whether your laptop can technically connect from another country. I'd also separate location freedom from constant travel. Because people often confuse the two. They think that if you have location freedom, you must be a digital nomad. No, not necessarily. You can have enormous location freedom and choose to spend almost the entire year in one city. The freedom exists because you could leave, stay elsewhere, or relocate without destroying your income or your responsibilities. In fact, some people use location freedom to create more stability because they can choose the environment that suits their life best and remain there voluntarily. The ability to move gives them bargaining power over where they live, even if they rarely exercise that option. Other people willingly reduce location freedom for something they value more. They may accept an in-person role because it accelerates their career. Stay near family because those relationships matter to them deeply or build a location dependent business because the opportunity justifies the constraint. 20:17:15 The framework doesn't judge the exchange. It makes the exchange visible. So now you can score the other half of the freedom equation. Give yourself a number from 1 to 10 for financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom based on the control you actually have today. You want to judge the life you're living right now because imagine future freedom doesn't really help you see which part of the system currently needs attention. So score financial freedom based on how dependent you are on continuing to earn at your current pace. Look at your savings, investments, fixed expenses, debt, income stability, and how long you could continue your current life if earned income fell sharply. Somebody with moderate income and strong reserves may score higher than somebody earning much more with almost no margin. and then ask yourself how easily you could leave a bad job, lose a major client, take several months off, or absorb a meaningful financial shock. The easier those decisions become without creating panic or immediate instability, the stronger your financial freedom probably is. You also want to ignore status while 20:18:15 scoring this. A high salary, expensive lifestyle, or successful business can look super cool and impressive from the outside while creating heavy dependence behind the scenes. So score the actual degree of financial control you have, not the image associated with your income. Now next up is time. Score time freedom based on how much of your week you can genuinely shape. Look at your fixed working hours, meetings, commitments, commuting, recovery demands, and how easily you can move things when your priorities change. A calendar with open space matters, but control over that space matters a lot more. So ask whether you can actually take a day off without creating major problems. move work into a different part of the week, protect several hours for something important, or reduce your workload temporarily when life requires it. Those questions reveal much more than simply counting how many hours you actually work. If most of your schedule depends on other people, deadlines, shifts, or constant availability, your time freedom is probably lower than it looks. If you can decide when your most 20:19:17 important work happens, and how the rest of the week gets arranged, your score should reflect that autonomy as well. Then location freedom. Score that on how many real geographic options you have. Ask whether your income continues if you leave your city, whether your responsibilities can move with you, and how difficult it would be to spend a month elsewhere or relocate if you genuinely wanted to. Then include the constraints that actually matter in your life. Family, legal obligations, property, employees, clients, healthcare, or even a partner's work can all reduce mobility. and you want the score to reflect those realities. You can also weight this score according to how much location freedom matters to you. Somebody who values deep roots in one place may deliberately accept a lower score here and remain completely satisfied while another person may treat geographic mobility as one of the central conditions for the life they want. So once you place all six scores next to each other, you start seeing something much more useful than a simple income number. Right? You can see where 20:20:18 you have resources without freedom. where you have freedom without much resource abundance and where one weak area might be limiting everything else. Someone can have money at 9 out of 10 and financial freedom at four because their obligations keep them dependent while someone else can have money at 6 and financial freedom at 8 because their expenses and income structure give them far more room. Those mismatches tell you where the interesting work begins. High time resources with low time freedom may mean that your schedule stays fragmented or controlled by others. High money with low location freedom may mean your income depends on a physical business, office, or client base. Strong energy with weak financial freedom may mean you have the capacity to build something but haven't yet converted that capacity into financial security. And this gives you a much better diagnosis of the problem because you stop trying to improve everything at once. You can identify which currency you have available, which freedom you care about most, and which current constraint keeps the two from connecting. You may also realize that 20:21:18 the freedom you thought you wanted isn't the one creating the biggest problem. Someone can spend years chasing location freedom because it sounds attractive, while their real frustration comes from having almost no control over their time. And fixing the schedule may improve their life far more than moving countries ever would. So, at this point, you've mapped the inputs and outputs. You know what you possess across money, time, and energy, and you know how much control you currently have across finances, schedule, and location. The final section is where we connect them because the practical value of the whole framework comes from learning how to deliberately exchange one currency for another and use those exchanges to increase the freedoms you care about most. So, let's talk about the freedom exchange. So, now you have the full map. You know the three currencies you can spend and you know the three freedoms those currencies can help you create. Now you need to stop treating those six things as separate scores and start looking at the exchanges happening between them because nearly every meaningful decision in your life changes more than one category at once. You give 20:22:19 something up, you receive something back and the quality of the decision depends on whether that exchange moves you closer to the life you actually want. You already make these exchanges constantly even when you never name them. You accept a higher salary and give up more time. You spend money on convenience and recover energy. You move somewhere cheaper and improve your financial freedom while reducing access to certain people or opportunities. You take on a demanding period of work because you believe the temporary cost will create more options later. The problem begins when you only notice the most visible side of the exchange. Money usually gets your attention first because it comes with a clear number. While the time, energy, or freedom attached to the decision stays vague. Once you put every part of the exchange on the same page, choices that looked obviously good can become much less attractive. And you also have to judge an exchange based on your current situation. Spending $1,000 to recover 10 hours may make perfect sense for someone who has strong financial resources and 20:23:20 almost no time. while the same exchange could be reckless for someone with weak finances and plenty of available hours. So, the same decision can be smart for one person and completely unnecessary for another because the currencies they possess are very different. And I'd call this currency conversion in a way. You deliberately use the resource you currently have in abundance to improve the resource or freedom you currently lack. The idea sounds pretty simple, but it gives you a practical way to act on the scores from the first two sections because your lowest number no longer becomes something you merely observe. It becomes something you can try to improve by asking which stronger part of your life can support it. And if money is currently your strongest currency and time is your weakest, you can use money to remove low value demands from your weak. You can also outsource repetitive work, pay for faster transport, choose convenience when the recovered time matters, hire support, or pay someone with better skills to complete something that will take you far longer. You still have to evaluate the return because spending money to save 5 minutes rarely 20:24:22 changes your life. While spending money to recover several hours every week can really alter the shape of your schedule. And I look for recurring exchanges first because a one-time convenience helps once while removing a repeated task can return time to you every single week for months or years. You also want to decide what the recovered time is for. If you save 5 hours and fill all five with random low value activity, the exchange produced very little. If those hours go towards focused work, relationships, training, recovery, study, or simply creating a less crowded week, then the money produced something you actually care about. If time is your strongest currency and money is your weakest, you can invest some of that time into building skills, doing additional work, creating assets, improving your earning ability, or pursuing opportunities that may increase your financial resources later. And this exchange makes sense when your schedule gives you capacity that currently produces very little value and you have a clear way to direct it towards something useful. So learning 20:25:22 becomes especially valuable here when the skill has a direct connection to earning opportunity or leverage. You can spend hours reading broadly and enjoy it. But if your actual goal is financial improvement, you should probably favor skills that people already pay for that improve your performance in your current role or that help you create something valuable for yourself. This exchange also takes longer because time spent today rarely turns into money immediately. You may need months of practice or applications or networking, content, sales activity or even just business building before the financial side changes meaningfully. And that delay matters because you need enough time and energy to sustain the investment before you expect the return. So if your weakest currency on the other hand is energy, you may need to spend both money and time to improve it. You can protect your sleep a bit more, reduce unnecessary commitments, improve your nutrition, train consistently, create more recovery, do some blood work, deal with health problems, or even change parts of your work that keep producing stress and exhaustion. None of 20:26:25 those changes feel productive in the narrow sense of earning more. Yet, they can improve what you're capable of doing with every other hour afterwards. And so somebody with enough money and free time can still struggle to build anything meaningful if their concentration and physical capacity remain low. So improving energy can therefore increase the usefulness of both other currencies because the same 2hour work block becomes more productive and the same free evening becomes more enjoyable when you have the capacity to use it properly. I'd also look for energy losses you can remove before trying to add more recovery practices. Some commitments require very little clock time and still consume a large amount of attention before and after them. So if one recurring obligation keeps creating stress out of proportion to its value, removing it can improve energy without requiring another habit, purchase or complicated routine. So once you understand conversion, you can use the framework before making major decisions. Whenever an opportunity or a commitment or a purchase or a move or a role or a 20:27:25 lifestyle change appears, you just write down what it costs you in money, time, and energy and then write down what it changes in financial time and location freedom. You're trying to make the hidden parts of the decision visible before excitement, status, fear, or habit pushes you into an exchange you never properly evaluated. So, say you receive a promotion that pays 20% more. The financial gain is obvious. It's 20% more. But the role may also add responsibility, extend your working day, require more meetings, increase travel, or make it harder to take time off. Once you include those costs, you can decide whether the additional money actually creates enough future freedom to justify what the role asks from you now. And the answer may still be yes, because the promotion could improve your skills, reputation, savings rate, or even future opportunities enough to make the temporary cost worthwhile. In that case, you're consciously accepting lower time or energy freedom for a period because the exchange supports a larger goal you care about. But you may also decide that 20:28:27 the salary increase doesn't justify the added demand because money already scores highly for you and time scores really badly. That decision can look irrational if you only measure success through income. While it makes perfect sense once you remember that another currency currently limits your life a lot more. Now take the opposite example. You own a business and consider hiring someone to handle work you currently do yourself. That decision reduces money in the short term because payroll increases. Yet, it may recover several hours every week and reduce the number of small decisions, interruptions, and responsibilities that you personally carry. If the person eventually handles the work without your constant involvement, the hire can increase time freedom and potentially location freedom as well. you may become less necessary to daily operations, which changes the business from something that only produces income into something that also gives you greater control. The exchange only works if the recovered time or energy actually exceeds the management burden you create. A poor hire can cost 20:29:27 money and still require your attention, while the right person can remove a whole category of work from your week. That's why you judge the complete exchange after implementation instead of assuming delegation automatically creates freedom. You can also use the same model for lifestyle decisions. A more expensive apartment close to your work or gym may actually reduce financial efficiency while returning several hours of your time every week. Moving to a lowerc cost country may increase financial freedom, but it might reduce access to family, professional networks, or even just certain opportunities. So a cheaper choice can carry a large time or energy cost and an expensive choice can sometimes produce a better overall arrangement. Your own values matter because you decide which freedom deserves priority. Someone who wants to travel for several months each year will probably assign more value to location freedom than somebody who wants to raise a family near relatives and remain deeply connected to one community. So the framework helps both people because it forces them to make 20:30:28 the exchange consciously. Your priorities can also change over time. You may accept lower time freedom while building a career, studying, growing a business, or even raising young children, and later decide that the same exchange no longer serves you. So, a decision that made sense during one period can absolutely become expensive once the goal that justified it has already been achieved. And this leads to one of the most useful parts of the whole framework because freedom often develops in stages. Yes, you may need to sacrifice some freedom temporarily to increase a currency and then use that stronger currency to buy back more freedom later. The important part is really knowing which stage you're in and having a clear condition for when the exchange ends. Because temporary sacrifice can turn into a permanent lifestyle very easily when you keep moving the target. Someone with very little money may reasonably spend large amounts of time and energy increasing income first. They may work more, learn new skills, take on extra responsibility, or build something alongside their existing work because 20:31:29 financial scarcity currently constrains nearly every other option they have. But at some point, another dollar can become way less valuable than another hour. And once income and savings reach a level that gives you stability, continuing to maximize earnings may actually create a smaller improvement in your life than using part of that money to really just reduce workload or increase your flexibility. And you need to notice that moment because people often keep playing by an old priority after their situation has changed. Someone who spent years solving a money problem can continue maximizing money even after time has become the real scarcity simply because earning more has become familiar and measurable. And so the same thing can happen with any currency. You may spend years protecting your time and eventually realize that your lack of income now limits your choices. You may chase location freedom and later decide that stability, community, or a specific opportunity matters more to you. Periodically rebalancing the equation keeps your current goals connected to 20:32:29 your current reality. And I'd revisit these six scores every few months or after any major change in your life. You don't need complicated tracking. Just write down your money, time, energy, financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom. Score each from 1 to 10 and then compare the results with the last time you did it. And then look especially for a score that moved because of a decision you made. If hiring increased time freedom but hurt your financial freedom more than expected, you learned something. If earning less improved energy and time without creating meaningful financial stress, then you learned something there, too. The framework becomes more accurate as you compare your predictions with what actually happened. There's also one question I'd use whenever you feel stuck between two options. What am I giving up? What am I receiving? and does this exchange improve the freedoms I actually care about? That question forces you to see the decision across all six dimensions. And it prevents one visible benefit from dominating the rest of the calculation simply because it happens to be easier to measure. So 20:33:30 start with what you're giving up. Include the obvious financial cost and the less visible costs in time, attention, physical capacity, flexibility, and mobility. You don't need to turn every decision into a spreadsheet, but major choices do deserve enough thought that you can name the real price before you commit. After that, name what you expect to receive. Maybe you get more income, fewer responsibilities, better health, more flexibility, stronger career options, or greater geographic choice. Keep the answer concrete enough that you can later judge whether the exchange actually delivered what you expected. And then finally, ask how long the exchange lasts. So, a demanding six-month period with a clear end can be very different from accepting an open-ended arrangement that permanently consumes the same amount of time and energy. Duration changes the cost, and it also tells you when you should reassess whether the trade still makes sense. And then compare the exchange with the life you say you want. If you claim time freedom matters deeply to you while repeatedly choosing more income at the cost of your schedule, your 20:34:32 decisions are producing a different priority from the one you describe and that might be creating a lot of cognitive dissonance, which is more cognitive load. That doesn't make the decision wrong, but it gives you honest information about what you're actually optimizing. Now, your calendar, expenses, commitments, and workload reveal your real exchanges much more clearly than your intentions do. Look at where your money goes. what occupies the week, what repeatedly drains your energy, and which obligations you cannot easily change. Those things show you the equation you're currently living. From there, you can decide whether you want to keep it. You may look at the six cores and realize that your current arrangement already serves you well, or you may see one area that has stayed low for years while you keep accumulating more of something you already have enough of. So, with that said, let's go over the review. We talked about the overview, the three currencies, the three freedoms, the freedom exchange, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, write down the six parts of the freedom equation today. Rate your money, time, 20:35:33 energy, financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom from 1 to 10 based on your current reality. Don't use the person you expect to become in a year or the life you think you should have. Use the actual finances, schedule, capacity, obligations, and mobility right now because you need an honest starting point before you can make a useful decision. Then find the lowest score and ask whether it actually matters to you. If it does, identify which of your stronger currencies could help improve it. You may have money available to recover time, time available to build money, or enough financial and time resources to make energy your priority. Pick one bottleneck instead of trying to improve all six categories at once. Then make one deliberate exchange during the next week. Cancel or delegate something that consumes disproportionate time. Spend money to remove a recurring demand. Dedicate a block of available time to increasing your earning ability or protect time and resources for something that restores your capacity. Write down what you expect to give up and what you expect to receive and then review the result afterward and decide 20:36:35 whether you'd make the same exchange again. With that said, I hope this brought a lot of value. If it did, please let me know. If you want to work with me one-on-one, as always, make sure to book a call from the link in the description or in the pin comments below. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching. And I'll see you in the next one.
