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hey what's up this is leo for actualize.org and today we're covering the topic of living a big life all right so there's a distinction that i got from brandon burchard uh his experts academy seminar and the distinction that i got is one of living a comfortable life versus living a charged life so what is this distinction well a comfortable life is the kind of life that you imagine is the one that's going to make you the most happiest and that's probably the kind of life that you're living right now so a comfortable life is you've got your career down you're you're pretty good with your finances you've got a good family situation maybe you've got a good relationship you've got a good marriage a good family situation and you're just kind of comfortable and now you're in this place where you can just kind of relax unwind you have time to do to chill out to lay back and you're happy you're kind of like in heaven you know maybe the kind of life that you would have if you won the lottery and you didn't have to do anything anymore that's like the comfortable life the charge life is the life where you're out there and you're pushing your comfort zone you're doing things that are scary you're doing things that seem a little bit out there adventurous and are not things that you would normally do things where you're pushing yourself you're learning new things you're taking risks that's the charged life and that kind of life you're on your edge you're excited sometimes you're a little bit afraid other times you're thrilled because you're able to to to persevere through your limits other times you hit up against those limits and you fail and you fall down and you have to go back you have to reevaluate you're always learning new things that's the charge life the question is what kind of life are you living are you living a comfortable are you living a charged life well i want to challenge you to live the charged life because even though the comfortable life seems like it's going to be the most pleasant i think what you find after you either have gotten there or after you do a lot of personal development work then you tend to see that that's an illusion and that you're not really that happy when you're living a comfortable life you're much more happy when you're living on the edge with this charged life and so to help you understand this i will exercise all right and i want you to do this along with me so you're going to pause this video do this exercise and the exercise is very simple what are the top five things that you're most proud of in your life from birth up to this point in your life take a look run run past your personal history and take a look what are the five things you're most proud of all right go ahead and just make a bulleted list of five things and i'm doing this too i already did this exercise so i'm going to share my results with you and then we're going to compare and we're going to get some interesting insights out of this so pause the video right now go ahead and do that exercise and i'm going to give you a second and then you can come back and we'll talk about it all right i hope you did the exercise you did it right this is another actually a tangent that i'm going to go off here on is this idea that you have to do exercises there's a tendency to want to just listen to me talk and talk and talk or if you're reading a book to read the book read the book read the book and then not do the exercises or not do the things that they're telling you to be doing or if you're at a seminar if they're telling you to do exercises there's a tendency to not want to do those you have to do that what i found big one of the biggest lessons that i've learned from personal development if you want actual results from listening to all this stuff and not just be doing a mental jerk-off then you have to be doing the stuff you have to go out there and implementing the theory and at the very least what you should be doing is doing the exercises really you should be doing more than just the exercises you should be going out there then and then applying everything you're learning in your in your life but i hope you did that exercise it's really really important if you didn't then you're only getting about five percent of what you could be getting from what i'm talking about or from reading a book or from going to a seminar so do that exercise that's where 95 of the gold is all right so if you've gone through and you listed the things that you're most proud of the five things then you probably got a list similar to mind and for me i'm going to quickly rattle off the list and i'm going to go into a little bit of detail on some of these sub points but not all of them so for me the top five things were first my education the education that i got from high school and from college and the way that it's carried over for me to today second point is the the game project that i worked on after college called lost spires and it became successful and ultimately led to my getting hired as a game designer uh with otherwise no experience in one of the best studios in the world and so that was huge for me the third point is pick up getting involved in the pickup community learning about how to get better with women dating women relationships those sorts of things so getting involved with that has given me huge payoffs that i can't even begin to enumerate right now the fourth point was losing 65 pounds in five months which i did back in college and there i decided to take my fitness and get into shape get my nutrition into shape because before that basically my whole life i grew up overweight 65 pounds overweight and i was that way through high school and through college caused a lot of problems for me and then i got that taken care of and i still have the the results of that today after about eight years so that was one of the most proud moments of my life and then the last one is after i did get that game design job in boston i spent about a year working there and then i decided to leave it to quit and to start my own business for me that was a really really challenging decision it was a big inflection point in my life and i'm really proud of the fact that i made that decision went through the struggle of starting my own business which led me to kind of where i am today financially independent and able to to work for myself and do these cool things that i do that most people don't have the opportunity to do like shoot this video and so those are my five points the question is what are your five points and the more important question is and this is the second part of the exercise that i want you to pause the video and go out and do is i want you to go through this list and rate on a scale of one to ten how challenging each of these five points was for you so by what i mean here is you're gonna rate it on a low scale you're gonna rate if something was very easy for you to accomplish then you're gonna rate it like a one or a two and if it was really challenging for you to accomplish and you rate it a nine or a ten and if it was something average then you rate it somewhere in between so from one to ten go ahead pause the video right now and give a rating a ranking to each of these uh each of these five points that you've got and then come on back all right cool so you gave each of your five points a rating and now if you did this exercise what might have shocked you kind of what like what shocked me when i did it was that my ratings for each of these were off the scale they were like nines and tens all these things that i'm really proud of what i've discovered is that the reason i'm really proud of them is because they were hard you know i did have to take some take on some risks to do them i had to go outside my comfort zone i had to do things that i didn't know that i was capable of and i had to grow and learn a lot in order to accomplish each one of these and i didn't know that i was going to be able to accomplish them so this is what i mean by living a charged kind of life right it's the things that you're most proud of in your life and the things that grow you the most the things that give you the best long-term payoff in your life are the things that are really difficult and these are not the things that you can just coast through life and accomplish and get these are the things you have to work your ass off for and these are the things you have to toil for and you have to put out emotional labor to get and sometimes you don't get them and sometimes you do and so this exercise keys you in on that because there is this naive tendency to think that living the easy life is where it's at that's where you're gonna be the most happiest you know just sitting on your couch getting stoned or playing video games or watching tv if you could just do that your whole life then wouldn't that be nice wouldn't that be comfortable but that's not what life is really about and if you want to accomplish um the greatest things that you can accomplish with your life if you want to contribute really to your life if you want to get those peak experiences that sense of contribution those really exciting peak experiences that you could be getting the reason that you're not getting more of those right now is because you're not challenging yourself enough and each of us has had moments in our lives where we've challenged ourselves to accomplish something more where we had a vision of what we can do where maybe external circumstances just forced us to go out there and work really hard each of those cases now we feel really proud of because we did have to grow we didn't have to learn new stuff and now we're proud of it and when you're going to be on your death bed you're going to be lying there it's these moments that you're going to be really really proud of and the difference between going to be having a successful life at that point and having kind of a mediocre life full of regrets is going to be how many times did you challenge yourself how many times did you step up to your highest potential how many times did you did you choose that path of growth versus that path of comfort and if you do that a lot then you're gonna have an exciting life and if you did that a little then you're going to have a regretful life and honestly your life is not going to be as happy as you think it is it's going to be quite miserable because when you're sitting there watching that tv or sitting there getting stoned or whatever it is you're doing you're in that comfortable little little spot deep down inside you have that guilt that guilt of knowing that you could be doing more that guilt of knowing that you're not really living your full life you're not getting the most out of life when you're living like that and that is what i want you to avoid to avoid that kind of problem to avoid that midlife crisis down the road you want to stop that right now and the way that you do that is you realize that in life not every day but a lot of times you get these inflection points you get these decision points where you get to decide am i going to step it up am i going to take that path of growth or am i going to stay in my comfort zone and take the path of comfort and abraham maslow talks about this and this is one of the ways to really develop and become self-actualized and to work on your self-actualization is to learn to spot these inflection points and you can have they can be little they can be small or they can be big the ones that i talked about here for me personally were big right these like for example starting my own business that was a very critical inflection point in my life and i remember just like it like it was yesterday i remember standing there in my apartment in boston and thinking about whether i should quit my job because i had a good job whether i should quit that and i had a lot of promise there and cut that path off or whether i should go and start my own business which i didn't know whether it was going to be successful i knew i had to work really hard at it and i also knew that if i was leaving this job then i would never be coming back to uh to the game development industry because i already had the best job that i could have there what more could i ask for if i if i didn't find that satisfying there's no other job in the game in this industry would have worked for me so for me that was really tough choice but ultimately that there i decided that uh the path of most growth for me would be to do the business because that was something new that was something scary that was something unknown and so i went off and i did that and i'm really proud for having done that today got a lot of a lot of benefit from it from my financial independence now but also from all the business experience that i've gotten and now the fact that i have the the freedom the free time and also the the money to to start my new business which is shooting these videos and doing personal development research and doing coaching so that was huge huge huge for me and the same goes for really the other all the other uh four points that i mentioned my point here being is that sometimes you get those big inflection points sometimes you get little ones every day you have an opportunity to look at your life and see okay here i could have pushed myself a little bit more i could have choose chosen that growth path a little bit more and instead maybe you can see that you're choosing the comfortable path all the time and if you are doing that then i encourage you to challenge yourself start challenging yourself more you can't always be perfect at challenging yourself sometimes you're going to be tired sometimes you're going to feel weak and you're just going to give in to that temptation to to veg out but in general by doing this exercise i hope you can see that those moments where you did challenge yourself those were big and that's how you create a really powerful amazing life and the people that have those kinds of lives they got they didn't get them by sitting on the couch they didn't get them by just listening to a video or reading a book they got them by going out there and actually living life challenging themselves doing adventurous things doing things that are outside their comfort zone doing things that are not in their personality stereotype so really pushing themselves right and i think that's what we admire about people like that is when we see people out there killing it when we see people out there doing crazy stuff that that is uh out of character for them on some level we're rooting for them because we know that that's the kind of life that we want to live and there's a tendency to want to live your life vicariously through them but that's a problem right that's really what tv is kind of like is that you watch tv and you might watch a show about somebody doing something cool on tv and you kind of resonate with that but then you're what are you actually doing you're sitting at home eating popcorn watching that show when instead you should be out there doing that kind of stuff in real life you should be engaged when you're engaged that's how you create excitement that's how you create motivation so if you're not motivated if you're not feeling like your life has a lot of meaning if you're not feeling like your life is as fulfilling as it could be if you feel like you're in a dead end job if you're in debt in relationship uh if stuff is just boring for you and you're not getting the sense of thrill that you see other people getting and you're wondering why this is it you're not challenging yourself enough and the first challenge that i'm going to put up for you is do this exercise really think about it think about points in your life where you chose to go the growth route versus the the comfortable route and see what kind of difference your life would would uh would have what kind of difference in your life there would be if all those growth choices that you chose if they were all comfort choices so what if your life was all comfort really think about that how great would your life be i'm willing to bet that your life would be pretty horrible right now you wouldn't do that you wouldn't make that trade-off because even though those challenging times were really challenging you had to work your ass off for them and sometimes you had real moments of anguish and self-doubt and frustration in the end whether you made it through or maybe maybe you didn't even make it through maybe you just quit whatever you still got something out of that you pushed yourself right you were on your edge you learned something about yourself and that grew you for me there's no way that i would go back and make some of these changes back in high school and college i chose to really step it up with my education and to really work hard and study for me that was huge because that built and cultivated a love of learning for me that i still have right now and in fact that's why i'm doing personal development research and i'm shooting these videos is because i love to learn i love to analyze i love to see what kind of things i can understand about the world and then how those can be used to make a better life for myself so for me that really started back in uh in high school and in college by challenging myself just really step it up and and become a really good student and then of course uh other things that i got involved in these other points that i'm proud of from the game project that i worked on after college which allowed me to uh to create my first real successful game put it out there see the sense of contribution that i got from it put a lot of smiles on people's faces get over a hundred thousand downloads of that game and ultimately got my my dream job from that that was huge for me i would not trade that for anything and and then getting involved with pickup was also huge for me led to my better understanding of of women got me more self-confidence got me even further involved with personal development because a lot of people that i met in the community were self-development junkies so that got me involved with that um just very very rewarding rewards that i'm still seeing to this day from all that and of course my health losing 65 pounds in five months for me at the point when i decided to do that i had been overweight my whole life very overweight and it was a it was a big question as to whether i was going to succeed i tried dieting in the past and it hasn't worked for me and then at that point i just decided to commit and to really be disciplined about it ended up going to the gym improving my diet and losing 65 pounds in five months pretty good result i would say and i was able to keep that off uh up to this day haven't really fluctuated much in my weight since that was eight years ago now and the health benefits that i got the energy benefits that i've got uh have been huge the confidence the boost that i got from being more comfortable with with how i look liking myself more those things were all huge and that would not trade those for anything in the world so i'm really happy with that decision and then of course starting my own business i already talked about how huge that was for me because that allows me to be doing what i really love to do right now and i'm so so grateful that i that i made that decision and went through the pains of starting my own business and learning how the business world works so those are my personal proudest moments uh i'm curious to hear what yours are and i want you to sit there and recollect and think a little bit and wax nostalgic about what you're most proud of because i think you'll find that when you get a visceral sense for the importance of pushing yourself and doing those challenging things then when you're faced with those choices the comfort versus the challenging versus the comfort choice when you're faced with those in the future you're going to lean more towards the challenge and that's going to lead to the kind of exciting life that you want to be living all right so i'm gonna sign off here i encourage you to do this exercise if you haven't done it by now pause right now still not too late go ahead and do it really really important that you do the exercises and then i want to hear from you i want your comments tell me what are your five proudest moments tell me how challenging those were for you were they really challenging were they kind of average or they really easy maybe they were easy i want to hear about those if you've got them so go ahead and leave some comments and also of course as always go to actualize.org.com for more videos exclusive videos got a great newsletter that's totally free um more articles like this and then all of course for every video that i'm shooting whether you find this on youtube or vimeo or other places you can get the full text article and exercise files and things like that cool downloads on actualize.org just go ahead and run a search for and you'll find you'll find the exact article page alright this is leo signing off