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[Music] if you haven't already check out my second new youtube channel called actualized clips you'll find the link down below in the description all right in this episode i want to focus upon something very basic for just basic self-help so we're not going to get into some advanced crazy spirituality here just basic self-help this this will change how you live your life right look fundamentally what we're doing here is we're doing personal development we're self-actualizing you're trying to build a better life for yourself ignoring spirituality for now you're just trying to build a better life for yourself you're trying to figure out what life is and i don't mean at a metaphysical level although hopefully you're interested in that i talk about that elsewhere but your you need to at least be able to figure out what life is so that you can navigate it for purposes of survival and for purposes of just thriving if you want to thrive in your life if you want to build a great life for yourself you have to figure stuff out how do you do that well of course you can listen to people telling you answers but the problem there is that you don't know who to listen to because just to know who you should listen to because there's a lot of people you can listen to and frankly a lot of idiots out there who you could be listening to so who do you listen to how do you determine that well you have to sort of bootstrap your own understanding of life even if you just want something like a material result like more sex or more money there's a lot you don't understand about how to get sex and money getting sex and money actually is pretty challenging to understand how to do that it takes you years of trial and error and experimentation and experience and lots of failure to figure out just how to achieve that most of these results that people want but usually don't get it's because getting them is very counter-intuitive that's a theme we've discussed in the past in my episode called the counter-intuitive nature of life but what i want to talk about here is i want to connect really like four different things i want to talk about experience i want to talk about experimentation i want to talk about trial and error and i want to talk about failure because these four this is like the the quadrilogy what's what's uh we have a trinity what would be like a uh the the quattro of trent of trinity i don't know how you'd say that doesn't really roll off the tongue very well so we have this quattro um and uh and this is crucial really for for mastering your survival and for personal development so the key really to life is experience you need experience to be good at something in life and in essence learning is just experience i have episodes in the past where i i give you different perspectives on what learning is we've talked about learning as making distinctions we've talked about learning as behavior change we've talked about learning as i'm even forgetting at this point i've called it something else i've called it observation right learning equals observation so we've got those three and now we're bringing sort of the fourth piece learning is experience learning is experimentation learning is trial and error learning is failure i was actually this idea for this for this topic came up for me because first of all i've just been reflecting on how much experience has played a crucial role in my own understanding of reality and whatever mastery of life i have and i'm not claiming to be some master but i have some degree of it you might say and whatever degree that i have is all thanks to experience basically i have more experience of life than most people although and in those areas where i don't in those areas i'm not mastering life and so i do have those areas so don't think that i have experience across the board there are there are many areas in which i'm deficient in my experience but also i was specifically thinking about this topic from the from the point of view of science because i was thinking to myself after i released my my big three-part series deconstructing the myth of science part one two three i was thinking about it some more and like because i'm always thinking about science i'm always thinking about what is science how does science work because it's it's extremely significant uh but i was thinking about like what what is the essence of science i'm trying to boil it down to its essence and i talk about that in that series but um i sort of gained a new perspective on it and really if you want to boil science down to its nub what it is is it's science is trial and error that is science see we like to tell ourselves that science is a sophisticated method where you propose a hypothesis then you test it then you verify it uh through some sort of objective measures that maybe there's some sort of consensus building with a community of other like-minded scientists and they verify your data they repeat it or they don't it's falsifiable or it's not falsifiable and all these sorts of concerns but really this is this is it's too much it's too much this is not really what science is this is a sort of a the idea of science the myth of science that they've constructed within academia and that they teach to to middle schoolers and to high schoolers and to lay people but this is really not what science is because you see you have to ask yourself where did that method and that formulation of science come from and you have to really trace it back and you have to ask yourself like how did the very first humans create anything like science at all um and don't worry this is not an episode about science i'm just we're gonna we're gonna go into some practical stuff here but just to set this up like think about it humans at one point were basically like apes living in the forest or in the savannah we were a little bit smarter we had better hands and tools and stuff and dexterity bigger brains but how did we come to understand anything about nature or the world at all if this doesn't blow your mind you're not using your mind it's mind-blowing stuff just the fact that we could know anything at all is mind-blowing so how did we figure it out where did it come from because there was no god who told us how to do it we had to bootstrap it ourselves and there was no scientific method and people think like oh well we just used the scientific method no it didn't exist it so didn't exist you see that when humans first started figuring out nature they didn't even know that something like science was a valid possibility the idea that you would like pick up a rock and you would throw it up in the air and then observe it fall up or rise up and then fall back down and then you would repeat that as an experiment and you would test that over time and then you would find patterns and draw conclusions from that or you would falsify stuff or validate stuff this this itself had to be discovered somehow it took mankind tens of thousands of years just to discover that people people completely take this for granted it was not obvious that that's how you study nature it was not obvious that that kind of method would produce valid results and in fact it's still not obvious that it does you sort of assume that it does but what if it doesn't what if you can't study all of nature in that way what if you need some other way what would be an alternative way see people don't even think about this but anyways the way that we bootstrapped ourselves knowledge-wise as humans epistemically is basically it wasn't through some sort of grand philosophy it was basically through very dumb brute force trial and error you just fumble around with stuff until accidentally eventually you notice a pattern like you walk outside of your cave every day and you don't notice anything special but you walk out every day after day after day after day after day and every time you walk out you look at the sun sunrise you see the sun is rising and rising and rising and rising and rising it all looks the same and so you're just you expect the sun to rise every day and then one day you notice after a thousand days you notice wait a minute the sun isn't rising at exactly the same place on the horizon it shifts a little bit like one day it rises left of the mountain the next day it rises right of the mountain like there's a mountain range there in the distance and and then you start to look at that further and then more days pass and every day you walk out you look at it and you notice actually the sun is is moving every day it's moving a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left and then you keep watching it and watching and watching and watching and watching it for years and then eventually you notice that wait a minute yesterday it was moving to the right and today it's moving to the left it changed directions and then you keep watching and watching it and watching it and watching it for another year and then you find another day on which it reaches sort of its apex of moving to the left and now it starts moving to the right and then you do this over and over and over and then you develop some sort of sense of what the sun is doing it was just an accident basically you discovered this by accident and really this is the history of most of science most of science is not done by these geniuses who can see far into the future most scientific discoveries they're actually pure accident just trial and error people fumbling around in the lab doing stuff a lot of scientific discovery some of the greatest ones were like the stupidest things they involved no intellect and no theorizing or any kind of conceptual activity it was literally like somebody accidentally spilled some some liquid from a flask it dripped into another into another petri dish and then something happened the next day they noticed it it's like oh we discovered a cure for bacteria or infections or i don't know whatever i mean there's many of these sorts of examples you can find throughout throughout the history of science and uh and at first it seems like oh well these are these are just anomalies these are just lucky coincidences and this is not really what science is this is these are like the exceptions to science and then when you think about it deeper this is what i was thinking about in regards to this topic because i was thinking about this deeper and i realized these are not the exceptions to science this is the heart of science and of course by science i don't just mean what's done in a laboratory i mean how you come to know anything at all about anything like really remember when you were a kid remember when you were five years old or eight years old and uh you were just playing with toys or you were sitting in the car looking out the window observing the birds or the sun or the trees or whatever and you were like a little scientist you were wondering what things are how they worked you were connecting dots you were noticing patterns things were mysterious to you and then they stopped being mysterious you started to understand them grasp them in some way and sometimes you misunderstood things and then the error of that was pointed out to you by adults or just by your own experience and then you you course corrected and you adjusted and you figured stuff out and other things you didn't figure out like maybe your parents abused you and you didn't figure out why and you still don't know 30 years later you don't know why why do your parents abuse you you don't know the signs of the psychology behind why it happened to you or why the kids school bullied you you still don't know you still don't understand and that puzzles you and frustrates you and maybe it plagues you to this day but other things you do understand like you understand the rain you understand clouds and you understand the sun to some degree and how that works and how the weather works and other things like that but what i'm talking about is i'm not talking about so much about the stuff or the ideas and knowledge that adults programmed you with that's not interesting i'm i'm more interested in how you figured stuff out for yourself like try to remember some original insights that you had about the nature of nature where you actually figured stuff out for yourself adults didn't tell you and then maybe in fact later some adult told you or maybe later you read a book and then what you read in the book just confirmed what you already discovered for yourself about how parts of life work so what was happening there experimentation was happening experience was happening trial and error was happening a lot of failure was happening like you taught yourself how to walk somehow how'd you do it through fumbling around and just experimentation until you figured out how stuff worked of course you also have sort of strong instincts for that biologically um as as a little baby or toddler um so that's not the best example but try to come up with some examples where you actually learned some stuff or discovered some stuff on your own through a process of experimentation and trial and error that's really the essence of how to figure anything out and most science is done this way through sort of a brute force process where you just try a bunch of stuff and then something something happens you discover something once in a while pretty rarely most of the stuff you try fails and it's not interesting and it's not worth very much but then once in a thousand times something very worthwhile is discovered and then you remember that and then you share it with others and that sort of becomes science and then what happens is that retroactively humans and academics and philosophers sort of concoct a scientific method that is projected backwards in time to make the whole process look much smarter and more intelligent than it really was and then we fool ourselves into thinking that we're using this process to discover new stuff when really mostly we're being stupid and we're discovering new stuff a lot of times just brute force and accident so anyways enough about science back to your life in your life to achieve a great life what you really need is you need massive experience with life and you can deliberately do this you can deliberately live your life and set up your life in such a way that you gain more experience than other humans you control how quickly you gain experience you control how you set up the circumstances of your life where you place yourself in life will determine how much experience you get and a lot of times what people do is they get into a sort of a comfortable rut and they're not building experience very quickly and in this way they stagnate and they become so comfortable that they might even grow uncomfortable with any new experiences and then they're not able to progress very far in their life and especially if you want to go beyond the center of gravity of development of your culture and your society then you have to seriously expose yourself to radical new experiences a very wide gamut of experiences beyond that of most people around you this is crucial and there are many ways to expose yourself to new experiences i mean it really depends on what you're interested in sort of mastering and understanding but like you can expose yourself to new sexual experiences to new intimate relationship experiences to new friendship experiences like just think about the kind of friends you've had in your life think about the diversity of those friends what cultures they were from what kind of books they've read what kind of interests they had what kind of relationships they were into what kind of business activity jobs and career they had it was probably very narrow most of your friends were probably very like-minded to you they watched the same entertainment the same media they read the same books they live in the same place in the same city even and so you didn't get a very rich gamut of different experiences whereas think about what would happen if you were like traveling around the whole world if you decide to spend the next five years traveling around the world and developing friendships deliberately with people from every different culture different religion different philosophies different age ranges not just your age but older ones imagine if you befriended somebody who was 80 years old like you went to a nursing home and found some you know some board out of his mind old man who had a lot of life experience you know he traveled the world maybe he was even like in world war ii or vietnam and uh maybe he he had three marriages and he had five children and you know he had three bankruptcies and he had uh you know two ordeals and battles with cancer that he survived through and now he's 80 years old in this nursing home got nobody to talk to and maybe you befriend this guy and you pick his brain and you learn from all of his experiences and you learn from all of his mistakes you know you ask them you know what were your biggest mistakes in life what were your biggest regrets what do you wish you would have done differently what did you do correctly and so on and so forth and that's just like one person uh but imagine if you befriended people who spoke different languages different uh practice different spiritual schools and techniques uh from all around the world just imagine how much more diverse your experience set would be like this alone could completely change your life in fact not could it it absolutely will but it takes effort to do that to set that up for yourself and it's not like i'm wagging my finger at you here because i myself in this particular department am deficient i'm not a very social person and um and there's costs to that like if i did decide to devote the next five years of my life traveling around and being super social with all these different people and picking all their brains that would that would have a transformative effect on my life like it's obvious that that's the case hopefully you can see that but it's it's a matter of like of course also you can build experience in many other ways so it's a matter of picking and choosing you know what fits you your personality style i'm very introverted so that doesn't really fit me that well although there's a case that can be made that precisely because it doesn't fit me so well that's what might grow me the most sometimes you want to work on your strengths other times you want to work on your biggest weaknesses it's a little tricky to figure out you know which which is right for you and i have spent time in my life periods in my life where i was extremely social i didn't meet lots of people thousands of people and i really pushed myself so there was moments like that in my life and maybe there will be more of that in the future i'm just throwing this out as an example though it's kind of an easy obvious example but but that's just relationships and friendships what about what about experience with different kinds of intimate relationships like maybe you've experienced with monogamous relationships but not with polyamorous ones or maybe you've experienced being very promiscuous but not committed and monogamous and there's there's value in exploring that whole terrain and this now connects with a previous episode i did about learning equals making distinctions remember that one so there i specifically talked about i even gave you an exercise to go to the grocery store buy a bunch of different apples and and you know taste them all do a taste test and make distinctions between different kinds and flavors of apples well look that is in a sense what you're doing when you're exposing yourself to more experience because not only are you exposing yourself to more experience then you're applying that exercise of heightening the contrast between distinctions and making conscious distinctions between things and then this is where you really start to make powerful distinctions and you start to learn differences between things and this allows you to gain mastery over life so imagine if you were able to have lots of reference experiences with japanese culture chinese culture middle eastern culture australian culture american culture european culture and making distinctions between all of those first of all imagine how much richer your life would be for that but secondly this would make your your mind have to be have to become more complex to be able to accommodate that no simplistic worldview would be able to hold all those different diverse reference experiences and you would start to make some powerful distinctions there [Music] but there's a lot of ways again like i said that you can gain experience like you can put yourself into a difficult entrepreneurial environment where you have to start a business i did that in my in my mid-20s that was one of the best things i've did for my growth is exposing myself to that the experience of building a business the experience of marketing and sales most people don't expose themselves to these things and of course the reason most people stay in their comfort zone is because when you're exposing yourself to radical new experiences beyond what you're used to beyond what is the norm of your society or your childhood or your family situation that you grew up in all of that presents cognitive dissonance because it challenges your worldview your mind to open up and to try to understand things that are outside of what you understood before because your world view is going to only be as large as the experience set that it was fed that it had to accommodate because your mind is pretty lazy your mind doesn't think too far ahead your mind basically just struggles to make sense of the limited experiences you've had of life and then if you want to really stretch your mind out you got to expose yourself to new experiences then that forces your mind to grow and that that's difficult that's challenging sometimes it's scary it's uncomfortable it makes you struggle it makes you confused you're lost you don't know how to make sense of things sometimes your view of the world is flipped upside down like maybe you were raised as a fundamentalist christian and then you go live in the middle east in an arab part of the world and uh you live there for a few years and it it it makes you completely now question your christian worldview because now you have this additional set of reference experiences from your you know living in an arabic culture and now you start to question your cultural norms your etiquette your moral system what you consider good and bad and right and wrong your political views you start to question these things or what you can do is you can retreat and you could say oh this i don't like this and you can you can fly back home and entrench yourself even deeper into your old ways and beliefs you see so just very practically not in some sort of deeply philosophical manner but just very practically if what you want is an amazing life then create a plan a long-term strategy for exposing yourself to more experiences wider experiences more foreign experiences and just gain more experience in anything or even if you're not going to go very wide you can also take this concept narrow and deep as well like for example let's say you want to become a musician okay well what's stopping you from being a great musician basically it's your lack of experience you need so much experience with music to become a master of music and i don't just mean listening to different genres of music i could even mean like even within a single genre of music you can go so deep on that genre you can gain so much more experience than you presently have you can gain so much more experience with different musical instruments or even with the same musical instrument and you can keep going deeper and deeper and deeper and so what happens is as you're gaining this experience you're also of course playing around with stuff you're experimenting so the experience you're gaining ideally it's not just passive it's not like just like you get on a on a boat and you sail around the world and you gain passive experience by looking at different cultures and reading different books that's that's great of course but active experience means that you're in a situation and you're also trying to manipulate it too and that's when things get really interesting because when you start to manipulate any situation that you lack experience in what happens you fail a lot it's frustrating you don't get the results you expect you discover that getting the result you want is much harder than you imagined and here most people quit and they retreat back into their comfort zone but what you need to do is you need to persevere past that and keep pushing yourself past the failure motivate yourself to to go past the failure um because there's usually sort of a steep learning curve with most things that are of any uh value in life you push past that and then you gain more experience by failing and failing and failing and by failing and observing your failing right so remember i said learning equals observation so you fail and you observe how you failed and why you failed and then you make distinctions about what constitutes failure and success in that particular area so maybe you're sitting at the keyboard you know at the piano sort of so to speak and you're a musician and your little playing little melodies constructing them whatever so it's one thing to just to be listening to music and making distinctions with music it's another thing to actually be creating music experiencing what it's like to be pressing the keys hearing different sounds and making decisions like oh that sounded awful and all this here i played a few notes here that actually sounded pretty good it'll be getting a little melody here whatever and then you start to build on top of that but then you fail again and you fail again and the first piece of music you compose is going to be garbage but maybe there's going to be a little five second segment of it which is going to be pretty good but the rest of it the other three minutes of it are gonna be garbage um but just by doing that and completing it you can look at it you get experience by looking at what you created and then you can judge it or kind of assess it and see like well what are the good parts what are the bad parts what's the difference between the good part and the bad part and then how can i do better next time and then this is sort of this feedback process of learning and this is experience and this is ultimately what you need to to master life any area of life it doesn't matter what it is relationships sexuality business marketing social skills attraction skills spirituality computer science physics hearts and crafts painting music making film whatever it is so the problem is that most people there are several problems most people they don't select early in their life a domain or two or three or four that they are going to build some deep experience in instead what they do is they sort of dabble around and they don't have a plan for developing deep experience in anything and because of this they end up working in a wage slave job at starbucks for the rest of their life and they can't break free of it because to look to earn good money in society uh either you got to be a scammer or some sort of manipulator and you got to exploit the money out of somebody which i don't recommend you do i've talked about this in my uh escape how to escape wage slavery episode um but the other way is that you have to actually add value so in this method you're you're leeching value from the world you're basically stealing this is the stealing method and by the way this is how the majority of the money in the world is is actually made it's through stealing the majority of the money and wealth in the world is stolen um and who's it stolen from it's stolen from those people who actually provide positive value in the world and the way they provide positive values they they develop some sort of deep skill in something and how do they develop that deep skill through massive experience and trial and error and experimentation failure and that's why it's much easier to steal than it is to do something constructive and creative because when you steal the people who steal are the ones who actually don't have any deep expertise in anything except maybe stealing itself it's just sort of a paradox but um and you actually you can you can develop deep expertise in stealing you can get very very sophisticated and clever with stealing and hiding the fact that you're even stealing anything you can make stealing look like it's a like it's an art form or something some sort of positive act but anyways we're gonna guess that um let's focus on something positive here so how do you positively create something in the world well basically to earn more money you need to have higher skills this is what's preventing you from getting a high paying job is your lack of advanced skills if all you know how to do is sweep the floor and scrub a toilet then that's the kind of job you'll get if you have some better skills like maybe you know how to take restaurant orders and serve food in a friendly manner then you'll become a waiter and you'll earn more than scrubbing toilets and then if you have some higher skills than that like maybe you know how to build a website through html coding and javascript and whatever php then you'll earn even more than a waiter uh because that's you know you're getting you're getting into high creativity now with those kinds of skills and those skills take time and effort to build it's difficult to learn all these different programming languages and then the more complex the programming language is the more you're going to get paid for it so you're going to get paid more for knowing php than you will for html because php is hard to learn and you're gonna you're gonna earn more as a c plus plus programmer then you probably will with php because c plus plus is harder to do generally speaking and you can do more with its more robust language there's there's more stuff you can do although you can earn quite a lot through php as well um but but anyways this is sort of what you find is that the the higher the skill you can develop in a thing of course it also depends how valuable the thing is sort of innately some skills you can develop very highly like maybe you can develop the skill of poetry very highly but poetry isn't very marketable so you're not going to earn that much as like a poet although you could you could become a world-class poet you know if you build your skill high enough but generally speaking if it's a skill you're building is something that people want to buy not like poetry um like music film writing programming these are all great fields that you could earn millions of dollars in if you really really really develop your skill the problem is that of course it's very difficult and labor intensive and even monotonous to develop skill in these things and it takes years years and really a decade or more to develop a really solid skill in any one of these fields and this is really the thing that is holding you back the most i think from succeeding in your life is that you simply haven't been deliberate about training yourself and practicing enough to develop skills to high levels and the reason this is is because it takes a long time to develop these skills and it takes commitment and you have to chip into it invest into it over a long period of time every single day every single week for months and for years and for a decade or more and in general people are very bad at doing that without any kind of support structure so like the reason you have mathematical skills because you spent 12 years in school being forced to learn mathematics the reason you have language skills whatever they you know you have writing speaking is because again you spent 12 years forced into this system of sort of factory farm education where you were forced to learn the writing skills and the speaking skills and still even after these 12 years your writing skills probably suck because writing is a very very deep skill set to build and school doesn't teach it barely at all i mean it teaches like the basics but it doesn't teach you how to be a great author of anything um that's something you have to do on your own and so see the problem is is that people are very poor at coming up with a vision of who they want to be what they want to achieve in life like 10 years 20 years down the road and then working towards that every single day they simply lack the clarity to do that and without the clarity what's gonna happen is that you're gonna like dabble around and stuff you're gonna do a little bit of writing for a week then you get bored with it as soon as it gets difficult as soon as you see how shitty of a writer you are you're gonna quit and you're gonna say oh maybe maybe writing is not my thing i'm gonna go do music then you try music for a month and then you realize how bad you are at that how difficult that is then you quit that and then you you go and you play some video games then you say oh maybe i'll become a video game developer and then you try your hand at that and then you realize holy video game development is harder than writing and and and music combined it's it's it's way harder than both of those things and then you you you know you move on to something else and you keep doing this and then but you don't have anything see you haven't actually built anything in your life and therefore you're you're a rather useless human you can't actually create something amazing that's the fundamental problem you want to know why you're poor if you're poor and why you struggle to get rich it's really quite simple it's not because capitalism is holding you back um and you live under some oppressive system no it's more like just you you literally don't know how to create anything amazing you can't discipline yourself to do it you can't motivate yourself to do it you don't have the vision to do it and you don't have the skills to do it and you don't have the experience to do it and you're not able to persevere past the failure that will come in trying to do that thing because even if you have high skills and you attempt to do something that's creative and amazing you're gonna run into a lot of failure even with high skills and you have to have the ability to persevere past that and to do it anyways and to actually generate that result so what i notice is that people are very bad the average person is very bad at generating any kind of amazing result but they're very good at generating mediocre results uh like like monkeys at a typewriter just punching keys they're pretty good at that and so that's why most people end up working at the at these wage slave grinding jobs like at the amazon you know warehouse you know packaging boxes or waiting tables or scrubbing toilets or doing some sort of menial administrative work stuff like that right because these these these jobs don't require a lot of skill or the skill they require is pretty easy and quick to learn you can learn it in six months whereas the kind of skill you need to be a brain surgeon takes maybe 10 or 20 years to learn and it costs a lot of money to learn it too likewise learning the skill of how to build a business this takes years and decades to perfect that skill and it costs a lot of money too you need courses books trainings you need social connections you need to talk to the right people learn from them a lot of these a lot of these skills you can't just learn totally from scratch by yourself you really need to to network with people who are in that industry who know some of the tricks of the trade that you can learn with them from them otherwise it's going to take you too long to learn it yourself so my biggest advice to those of you who are young a lot of you watch me in your in your early 20s is that if you haven't already done this you got to get like dead serious i mean dead serious about building this kind of skill set in something at least at least in one or two or three areas this is what you're going to use to climb out of the whole of wage slavery this is what you're going to use to build a great life for yourself and if you don't do this you're basically screwed you're going to be struggling with money for the rest of your life because you're not a you're really the bottom line is that you're not a valuable member of society if you're born into this world and you're part of this society which you inevitably are there's really only two choices either you're going to be a drag on society and you're going to be dragging society down or you're going to be lifting society up and you can't lift society up unless you develop a robust set of experience and you develop some some valuable skills that society values and even though this is challenging to do it's much more preferable to help pull society up than to be a drag on society by by not having the right skills by not being able to produce an amazing result so just ask yourself this what area in life am i able to produce an amazing creative result in is there any maybe you can write some great sales copy some amazing sales copy okay great maybe you can edit a youtube video in a great way okay great there you you've got something maybe you can compose a song that's amazing you got something there but i would bet that most of you listening can't do this in any area at all and that's the fundamental problem so what's the solution to that well the solution is to realize that if you don't correct course and you don't get serious dead serious about building some of these skills you're going to be screwed for the rest of your life you're not going to have a great life no matter what else you do the these we're just talking about very fundamentals here these are the fundamentals of survival um everybody needs this and so then then the trick just becomes about becoming very clear about what you want to build that is because you got to focus so you got to stop dabbling and you got to actually build something concrete be able to generate at least one amazing creative result in one area of life whether it's filmmaking painting music singing dancing i don't know jujitsu making videos editing videos making video games at the gym public speaking writing coding being a leader pick at least one thing and then master that thing and by the way i talk about this in much greater detail and length in my life purpose course so if this topic is resonating with you and you want some actionable steps on how to do this and how to really pick which one of these things is right for you that's what the life purpose course is for it's over 25 hours of exclusive content that's not available elsewhere on the channel so check that out i kind of hold your hand and guide you through the entire process of how to figure this out for yourself um because ideally you're going to pick something that you're passionate about and not just any random thing in fact ideally you pick the thing that you're most passionate about and not just any random thing and you build that skill uh so for me in my life just to give you an example what it's been for me is as early in my life i there were actually quite a few things that i was sort of interested in building skills in uh one was in game design i spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to design a great game a fun a fun game fun video game um i built skill skill in that i've built skill in web development i spent a lot of time developing websites and doing graphic design for front ends of websites and also learn how to do some back end coding and stuff like that that's that's been very useful for me i used as a from bootstrap my my first business and my my early success having those skills was was valuable and it still serves me today to have that technical knowledge um and now i've sort of transitioned into just pure understanding and into public speaking basically um so like what's really really powerful is if you can build a skill that's kind of rare that most people don't even consider to be a skill like for example the skill that i stumbled into that most people wouldn't even consider a skill like nobody would teach you how to do this in any school or in any program but basically i've i sort of pioneered the skill of understanding reality itself i sort of stumbled upon it i was interested in it that's the most passionate thing that i was into in my life was it was difficult to figure it out because it was so abstract but like my entire life i i spent thinking about the nature of reality and how life works and how everything fits together interconnects and then i spent literally hundreds of hours explaining it to myself in my own mind why people behave this way why is there evil why is there good you know what is reality and how does knowledge work how does science work how does science fit together with with religion and how does that fit together with mysticism and spirituality and what does it mean for politics and this how does it all fit together and so as i was explaining all this and i was doing this even back in high school back in my college days you know long before i was doing it professionally through actualize.org but basically this is the skill of philosophy and see most people wouldn't consider philosophy to be a skill or even if they do they would think like well that's a useless skill it's just mental masturbation and who's going to pay you money for that i don't know i make pretty good money doing what i do but you see it it like it had to be developed this is something that had to be developed over over years and really a decade i spent the last decade mastering this skill and i still haven't really mastered it i'm still working on that and also figuring out how to articulate my insights so i i've always had profound insights the challenge in most of my most of my challenges how do i articulate it in a way for other people to understand that's useful to other people and see so if you're attracted to my content why is that because there's a certain depth of understanding that you get here that you don't get anywhere else you see and so really what i'm selling is i'm selling my skill of philosophy that i've cultivated within myself and this is not a skill that you can go to any school that will teach you how to do this even the idea to that this could be a skill that you could develop and monetize even that idea is like maybe one in a 10 million people in the world had that idea and actually follow through on it maybe even less which is why when you find my content you really resonate with it and you well either you hate it or you love it but if you love it then then like you can't get it anywhere else right sure there are other teachers out there but you can't quite get the skill that i'm putting forth here anywhere else not in this way and so you stick around and maybe you pay some money whatever buy course hopefully um maybe donate or something right see this is what i'm talking about um but this took an enormous amount of experience an enormous amount of trial and error like there are many videos that i recorded that i never published why not simply because they didn't meet my standards like i would consider them failures i would record it i would look at it and i'd be like nah i don't like it something about it isn't quite right it wasn't masterfully articulated i missed some important points or i made some bad points or whatever and and then i had to reshoot some videos i reshot five times in total completely because when i record one of these videos i don't do any you know cuts or takes like if i do a two hour talk it's two hours and if i up anywhere along the line that's it is i have to redo the whole thing right but what that taught me is how to be on point for two hours straight so that i'm not relying on some sort of editing process and at first it was very very difficult i had to re-record most of my episodes twice or thrice in the early days and it was quite frustrating um when i started but i knew that if i kept going eventually i get to the point where i'm at now where now it's rather effortless i can talk for two three hours rather effortlessly the biggest problem i have is just like i get tired after after two and a half hours of talking just it's physically exhausting um but see that's something i developed and and recently i've been thinking about this and i'm like i'm asking myself the question like how can i take my skill now to the next level um and i have some ideas about how to do that you know more contemplation on the sort of back end on the but sort of on the front and i've been looking at actually analyzing sort of micro analyzing different public speakers that i respect and admire and actually trying to like incorporate some of their some of their mannerisms and some of their ways of speaking how to modulate your voice up and down i was thinking about like how do i change my vocal tonality should i talk soft should i slow down um whatever right so all those things i can adjust and over the you know the next five ten years i hope to you know fine-tune all that stuff to become really great at the sort of the front end of the the speaking just the the literal vocalization of the insights because that's like half the equation is how do you verbalize the insights and then how people take it they could take it positively or negatively depending on what mood i'm in depending on what voice i use and so forth and uh you know i can use different rhetorical styles i can cite more examples or less examples i can use stories and allegories i can make jokes and make things more funny and more interesting and more dramatic i can spice things up or i can be more sort of like spiritual and energetic sort of that eckhart tolle osho thing where just i just kind of stare at you with my eyes more anyways these are all things variables that i can fine-tune into the future but see thinking about that five ten years into the future i can build towards that this is not something i can just wake up with one day or accomplish in a single week these are patterns in my way of speaking and thinking and talking and even the way i use my hands and the way i use my eyes and the energy i exude this takes five or ten years to make a significant transformation with that it's almost like you know you got crooked teeth you got to put braces on it and you got to slowly every day you're you're moving your you know if you're doing that invisalign treatment thing that they do it like every session you know you're moving it millimeter by millimeter by millimeter over a course of a year to realign your teeth well but the problem with that is that you have to have a vision of where you want to realign them to if you don't have a vision of how you want your teeth to look as like the end goal and you're not able to work at it you know millimeter by millimeter every day you're never going to get there your teeth will always be crooked and so it is basically with your life but we've almost narrowed this down too much towards sort of a career skill i don't want to limit the discussion to just how to build career skills although that's ridiculously important and most of you would benefit enormously from implementing this very practical thing in your life develop a strategy for what kind of skills you want to build career-wise and how you can generate some amazing results that will that will totally open up your life and uh one of the ways in which it will open up your life is simply that once you do have some marketable skills you will be able to land a fairly well paying job maybe you won't be earning six figures or maybe you will but even if it's not six figures you'll have enough where you're you're pretty comfortable and in fact you'll have a little bit extra that you'll be able to use to then so you can use that cache to further expand your acquisition of experience really what we're talking about here is we're talking about self-investment what people suck at is investing in themselves long term they waste money on on games and cars and other frivolous materialistic things when really all the money you get where do you invest your money sometimes on my forum i see people saying like oh i gotta spare five thousand dollars i gotta spare ten thousand dollars what should i invested in should i invest it in bitcoin should i invest it in trading cards or pogs i don't know what do you wanna invest in all that is dumb what you want to invest money into is yourself building your skills building your experience base building your uh your knowledge base so that might look like buying books or courses or seminars that's a great way to invest in yourself because those pay for the rest of your life dividends or travel that expands your experience base or networking events going to a conference a lot of times these professional conferences can have a fairly pricey cost of entry like a ticket could cost a thousand dollars to a a convention i remember when i was young i went to the i don't go to conventions that much but uh you know these days but like when i was young i went to the gdc which was the game developers conference that's held in san francisco every march and it's like a trade conference for serious game developers it's not it's not like e3 where it's a bunch of games for the public this is like there's no games there for the public this is just like basically uh it's like a week of serious workshops about the craft of designing games the business the marketing side of it the coding side of it the game design side of it the story telling side of it and you can you can meet people there who are like industry luminaries and famous people like i met i met the um i went there for how many times did i go i think i only went there once i went there once um back when i was starting my game career and uh i bumped into um alexey pagetnoff was actually the the original programmer of tetris the original tetris i bumped into him which was really cool um and and yeah you just bump into interesting people you get you talk with them you they give you ideas that you haven't even thought of before and it's maybe business connections too i almost actually landed a my first game design job i landed because of a connection that i made there at the game developers conference with one of the one of the new studios that was working on a new game so anyways so and the ticket for that cost like a thousand dollars plus you got to pay for hotel you got to pay for food you got to pay for air travel it's another like 500 bucks there or maybe even another thousand and so like to have spare money to be able to afford these kinds of experiences that expand your general experience of life in specifically a direction that you are interested in right so that wasn't just a random convention i went to that was like that was like my life purpose was to become a game developer at that point and so that perfectly aligned right but i had to have the money and the freedom to do that so that's what having a nice job will get you it'll get you the money and the freedom and some of the time off to be able to then um pick yourself up by your bootstraps even higher so you keep bootstrapping and bootstrapping yourself in this way until it sort of becomes this um very positive upward um virtuous cycle and if you don't have that in your life then it becomes sort of a downward cycle where you get stuck working a dead-end job you hate it you're miserable you're not passionate about anything you get more depressed and more depressed and you can't motivate yourself to really build any kind of skills and then you kind of spiral downwards and downwards you spiral into alcohol drugs weed porn hanging out with bad friends watching tv all day long playing stupid video games you just keep going down this spiral and spiral spiral and then and then before you know it you're 30 years old 40 years old 50 years old 60 years old and it's too late to build any skills and you're and you're so far gone you're so deep and to learn helplessness and victim mindset that your whole life has been squandered and then you're not even interested in expanding your experience base beyond merely even just career skills never mind career skills how do you get people interested in just traveling and exploring different cultures and religions and cuisines and whatever just expanding their their experience base with psychedelics with spirituality whatever it might be and then these people are ignorant in a sense we might say that ignorance really is just nothing other than a lack of experience in things people who are ignorant about politics just haven't read very many political books haven't listened to a lot of good political commentary haven't thought deeply about politics haven't really wrestled with the ideas therefore they are literally inexperienced with the ideas that they themselves hold in their mind so the key that will unlock all of your life very practically is gaining more experience and being deliberate about it having a plan having a strategy so that your experience is leading you towards something it's not just haphazard random experiences that are just kind of cool or fun or pleasurable it's not about the pleasure of it although of course you should try to enjoy the experience when you're having it but it all boils down to experience because reality is nothing but experiences we might say and this exposure to experience is also a very good antidote to the biggest epistemic problem of all which is belief and ideology and you know how much i speak about those things as negatives belief and ideology and self-deception what is the ultimate solution to all of the epistemic problems how do you become unself-deceived experience it's experience to know anything within reality you need deep experience with it and the deeper the thing you want to know the more experience you need because the more deceptive it's going to be and the more experience you need with the deceptions the more you got to fall into the traps get deceived then realize oh i've been deceived then correct yourself you know that that would be a failure and then persevere past that so perhaps the most profound area in life where people have the least experience is with epistemology with the functioning of their own mind you see that itself is one of these sort of abstract skills that you should be wary of as most people have no idea this is even a skill but yet this is one of the most important skills you can develop in your life is the abstract skill of becoming deeply experienced with the trickeries of your own mind how your own mind fools you how beliefs work how ideology works how you get trapped into different paradigms how your ego reacts how it emotes and why it's doing these things for certain survival purposes that are holding you back that are counterproductive out of fear and selfishness and judgment and hatred and all these other things we've talked about unconsciousness so basically becoming conscious of the functioning of your own mind and psyche and this is very different from just getting beliefs see like you can listen to some psychologists on youtube talking about psychology to you whether it's jordan peterson or somebody else you can even listen to me talking about psychology to you you can listen to me talking about spirituality to you or whatever but what's the use if you don't have the reference experiences for the things that are being said riley notice that there's a difference between like for example me teaching to you about the hero's journey and you sitting there learning learning it and listening to it that's not a very deep learning though because it's all just ideas and beliefs in your mind versus you actually going and experiencing the hero's journey for yourself like when i talk about threshold guardians or i talk about the belly of the beast or i talk about the wise old wizard these are all standard you know elements of the hero's journey or the holy grail when i talk about the holy grail of the hero's journey do you have a reference experience for that for what that means what is the holy grail you don't know probably and so to you this teaching is just like a cartoon whereas actually if you actually did go on a hero's journey and you actually faced some threshold guardians and they kicked your ass and you had to click your wounds and then you met a wise old wizard who taught you some lessons um that helped you along the way it gave you some magic powers maybe like five meow dmt that helped you along the way and maybe if you did go to the belly of the beast or the belly of the whale rather and and maybe if you did discover some holy grail you see this is this is this would be experience this is what would make you a true hero is the experience of that not reading about in a book not hearing about it from some crusty old professor who himself hasn't done it absolutely everything that you think you know about the world every single word that humans utter only makes sense to the extent that there's a reference experience to which that word is pointing to like when i say the word love you only understand what that means if you have a reference experience and your depth of understanding of what love is is limited precisely by your reference experiences maybe you loved your dog and then it died well that's like one experience of love that you had in your life and so if that's your only experience of love then how how rich is your understanding of love going to be when i use that word and if i'm talking about absolute love divine love god's love metaphysical love what is that to you that says nothing to you because you have no reference experience for it it's like a big blank in your mind it's sort of like when i say antarctica you have a vague idea of what antarctica is and means because you saw it on a map maybe you saw a video of it's somewhere at one point in your life snow mountains white glaciers whatever penguins and that's it like that's your whole experience and understanding of antarctica it's extremely limited and cartoonish whereas there is the actual antarctica that you could experience but that's like a blank and you're it's missing see that experience is missing in your mind so the word antarctica to you doesn't mean very much the way it would for somebody who's actually lived there for a few years in the cold with the penguins and whatever and so it is with all words in the human language especially with with many spiritual words words like god or samadhi or mystical experience or psychedelics or consciousness or nothingness or infinity see you have you have no reference experience for these things most most of you don't and so you're trying to understand these things but you're lacking the reference experiences you see so rather than just spinning your wheels trying to understand these things in some sort of conceptual manner what you have to realize is aha of course i'm lacking the requisite reference experiences and there's no amount of thinking that's going to solve that problem for me i have to go and discipline myself to do some practices to gain the reference experiences that these words are supposedly pointing to that i don't have like how do you know what an orgasm is only if you have a reference experience for it and see there are certain kinds of orgasms you don't even have reference experiences for you might be under the impression there's only one kind of orgasm because you've only had one kind see so the the limitedness of your reference experiences is sort of the limits of your reality and it is what closes your mind down so what i encourage for you very practically is look ahead five ten years into the future and ask yourself what kind of investments do i wanna make into cultivating powerful reference experiences how do i have to expand my current set of experiences that will help me to be the person that i want to be in 10 years what does that practically look like where do i have to travel to what kind of people do i have to talk to what kind of conventions and conferences do i have to go to what kind of work do i have to do what kind of practice do i have to do do i have to meditate what kind of meditation do i need what kind of uh what kind of mystical experiences am i missing do i need psychedelics do i not do i do i need to sleep with certain people or befriend certain people do i need to just build technical skills with drawing with painting with music with coding with speaking with writing with thinking and then especially ask yourself what kind of abstract skills rare skills that most people don't even consider think of as skills do i need to build do i need to have more experience with how my own internal mechanics of my mind work with psychology and then get to work building those reference experiences expanding your experience set and as you're doing that of course you're also going to be experimenting so experimentation goes hand in hand with experience the more you experiment and tinker around in these different areas the more experience you'll gain and of course failure goes hand in hand with this and really trial and error as well because when you first start out you're not going to know what the right things are to do and that's okay you don't need to know all the right things what will compensate for that is your perseverance and your passion as long as you're passionate about it and you're going to persevere past the failure and you're able to coach yourself and almost cheerlead yourself through the failures reframing your failures as just part of the process and as a stepping stone towards your ultimate success and your ultimate vision then the failures will not be serious obstacles you'll keep pushing and going and going and growing and actually it's the failures that are going to ultimately generate your success you have to completely reframe how you think about failure most people when they go into a project or into some sort of thing that they want to gain experience and first of all they're not even thinking about it as an experience gaining opportunity they're thinking about it how do i get a result like maybe you're a desperate guy who's lonely and wants to get laid and you're a virgin uh and you're like 25 years old and so you hear about pick up and you go to the and you just think about okay so i'm going to go to this club here and then i'm going to like talk to 10 girls and maybe one of them will like me and i'm gonna take her home and she's gonna become my girlfriend you're thinking of it in those terms you're thinking about like the girlfriend that you're gonna get from from doing some action whereas really that's the wrong way to think about it the way you want to think about it is this is a an area in my life where i'm lacking an experience the problem here is not that i don't have a girlfriend the real problem is i don't have experience so what i'm doing here is i'm not hunting for a girlfriend i am immersing myself and gaining a massive amount of experience i'm gonna over expose myself to experience in this domain because i'm lacking in it clearly i'm lacking the skills and then you go you go do that and then and you're doing it for the experience not for the girl and then the girl is just a side effect of that and so the reason that's so powerful is because when you're doing this you're going to you're going to lose a lot of girls and so if you're getting hooked up on you know hung up on every girl that you're going to lose that's going to dump you or not text you back or you know ditch you on a date flake on a date whatever your like your heart is going to be broken all along the way and that's going to happen anyways but even if you're after the experience but but what helps is when you frame the whole thing in the context of like this is a journey of me gaining experience and that even all these cases of girls dumping me and screwing me over and not texting me back and whatever that's all failures but also experience and trial and error and experimentation i'm going to experiment with this whole process and learn from all those and and in the end it's not going to be about the final girl that i get it's going to be about the the entire process of gaining experience and how that's going to grow me and change me and so it is into anything you go into right like you might go into a project where you want to like create a indie film and you're just you're just so focused on how do i create this film how do i get this film out how do i earn money with this film and you're just focused on a single film and your vision there is too small because that single film can easily fail and in fact it probably will fail any business you start is likely going to fail any serious project you undertake is likely going to fail so how do you compensate for that and still become successful well your idea of success can't be hinged on any single project or any single person or any single job it has to transcend beyond that to the mastery of the field that that that's in so your goal should not be to release one successful film your goal should be to become an amazing filmmaker and to acquire the skills for doing that and then this one film you're working on right now that's just a stepping stone towards that and if it fails it doesn't really matter because you're going to go on to to the next film and you're going to make it even better based on the failures of this current one and if it does succeed great you'll you'll take the money from that and you'll funnel it back into your own skill set and then you'll use it to make it even better filled next time and you'll learn from your success and also from the failures that were there as well because even with every success there's ways you could improve it and do it better next time same thing with with intimate relationships you know most people when they get into a relationship they're so blinded by their infatuation with this other person that to them the relationship is like well this is the one the one ultimate relationship and it becomes about the relationship rather than building the skills that are necessary to be successful in just any relationship in general like if what you really want if your goal is to have a great marriage with children let's say you're a woman you don't want to sleep around you don't want to be promiscuous you just want to like a nice marriage you want to land a great guy and you know how hard it is to find a great guy but you're hopeful and maybe you're going to get lucky and you will bump into that great guy he'll approach you one day while you're sitting at a coffee shop or whatever and then you'll hit it off together and then um and then you'll marry him but you're not thinking about this properly because yeah you can marry him but then um do you have the communication skills to maintain that marriage do you have the relationship skills do you have the sexual skills that needs to be built and you're fooling yourself if you think that you're going to just build that from the ground up with your dream partner once you meet them that's not gonna happen uh especially because like if you really do meet your dream partner you're gonna fall so head over heels in love with that person you're gonna be so intoxicated for the first year of that relationship you're gonna forget all about the the fundamentals of building communication skills and relationship skills and setting boundaries and building emotional awareness becoming aware of the internal mechanics of your psyche and ego and how it manipulates this relationship and how it is acts needy and selfish and all this which eventually will lead to its destruction you're going to forget all about that because you're just going to be running off the fumes of of passion for the first year and then by the end of that first year it's going to be too late because already boundaries will have been crossed mistakes will have been made that can't be revoked and your marriage is is is doomed before it even began if you really care about that then you should have spent the first 10 years of your life building these skills practicing practicing practicing practicing reading contemplating making distinctions training your mind training yourself training your body for what you ultimately want this is what it takes to become successful in a thing see it takes attention to detail it takes a certain meticulousness a certain forethought and planning it takes a vision it takes a perseverance and commitment it takes going through this rather mundane process of practice and see now now it's very clear why the majority of people are not successful and never will be because they simply can't discipline themselves to go through this level of meticulousness the other skill that i sort of develop is um so i talked about this philosophy skill but another sort of distinct skill there is just studying my own mind and how it deceives itself i've spent 10 20 years doing that like really observing my own self biases and making distinctions there about what is really going on inside my own mind and this wasn't done just by reading a bunch of books it was done by actually working with my own psyche and my own emotions and introspecting and there's so this is such a deep skill set that you can literally spend all your life building this this skill set you might call the skill set mindfulness although that might mean other things for you know in certain contexts but like mindfulness is a great skill to build there's a lot of these amazing skills to build the problem is that building most of these skills is pretty tedious it's not it's not exciting it's not like watching tv or playing your favorite video game so see most people what they do is they they like with their free time what they do they use the majority of their time just to pay their bills and then the rest of the free time they use just to get a little bit of emotional uh excitement as a compensation for the you know the boring choring chore work that they did for their job just to pay the bills and so it just becomes a cycle of like grinding meaningless work for half the day and then the other half the day is just recuperating from that grindless soul sucking work and and you do that through some sort of low consciousness means such as video games or tv or youtube or or porn or weed or whatever and then where where is their time and room within that cycle for actually developing your skills in something there's not developing skills takes takes patience it takes energy too i mean after you after you spend eight hours of grueling grinding soul-sucking work for your boss you come back home are you really going to be motivated to build some skills no you just you want to veg out you want to eat a pizza and grab a bucket of ice cream and sit down in front of game of thrones and just watch a season of it until you got to go to bed and then restart the whole thing because because what are you gonna look forward to tomorrow you just gotta you know in the morning you gotta wake up early and then go back and do the whole the whole grant eight hours of grind again of meaningless soul soul draining grind and then the cycle continues and it's very difficult to break out of that cycle i know i've been in that cycle it's very difficult to break out of that cycle but then again if you don't you basically have surrendered your entire life the earlier you are the easier it is to break out of this cycle most of you who watch me are in your early 20s and 30s you still have plenty of time to break out of this cycle or even to avoid the cycle entirely that would be the ideal is that you have this stuff planned out so early in your life like when you're 18 20 years old you've already got everything planned out and you've already been building skills for the past five or even 10 years really you should be building these skills you should be doing what i'm telling you here from the age of like 10 or 12 really so that by the time you're 20 you've already built up a massive amount of skills and you can already produce amazing creative work like i see some people online who are who have such amazing creative skill like i love i love to look at digital illustration and art i've actually been thinking of of doing some actual like projects some some paid commercial projects within digital illustration and i was i was looking to hire some some some good digital illustrators and sometimes i just look through portfolios of illustrators motion designers graphic designers and so forth um 3d modelers and like i just i just see people with such incredible talent and i just i just look at that and i say like these guys figure it out very very young it's clear that these people had a clear idea of like i want to do motion design motion graphics or i want to be a 3d modeler or i want to be an animator or i want to be you know a game developer or a you know a concept artist and they just did that year after year after year at the year they became so good their work is so amazing that hiring this this person is a no-brainer you look at this person like of course i would hire this person i would hire this person in a minute it's just and and these people can charge like high rates these people can charge 100 to 200 an hour for their work and you're glad to to pay them that because you know that hiring this person you're going to get an amazing result if you need that kind of person for your project this is how you want to position yourself as that kind of person and there's really nothing today that is stopping you from doing that because most of the skills you want to learn today there's a youtube channel that's for it that will teach it to you whether it's drawing music painting programming or if not a youtube channel there's a website if not a website there's a course there's a paid course there's a free course there's conferences there's books there's manuals like it's easier than ever to learn these skills the problem is that no one is going to do it for you no one is going to tell you that you should be building these skills this is something only you can decide for yourself as the chief executive of your life only you can make these big picture decisions for your life your mommy and daddy are not going to come and knock on your door and tell you that you got to learn these skills only you can do that and only you can figure out what skills do i need what skills fit my personality fit my strengths fit my passions fit my you know my vision of where i'm angling to as a human being how much experience do you have with life the less experience you have the less capacity you have the weaker you're going to feel the more you're going to feel like a victim people who feel like victims don't have a lot of experience and also they're not good at reframing failure so they give up too easily failure is like your greatest friend if there was if there's one thing you got to do if you're doing basic life improvement or self-improvement is you got to learn to reframe every failure that's just a stepping stone towards larger success you got to put it into a bigger picture context you're not going to become successful by just doing small successful things that leads to major success you're gonna become successful by failing a lot a lot a lot a lot it's gonna depress you it's gonna it's gonna demotivate you and you have to push yourself you gotta get back up you gotta be be your own cheerleader no one's going to cheerlead you and you got to keep getting back up and trying and trying trying of course you don't try the same thing you you adjust based on the failures right because the failure tells you what you did wrong if you analyze it if you observe it carefully within your failure you will find the keys to what's going to potentially succeed in the future and this trial and error process allows you to fine-tune what you're doing until you you hit upon something that clicks and then finally it makes sense to you the thing you were failing at now you understand why you were failing at it you know you were making these films and nobody nobody was watching them and they kept getting shitty reviews and you keep asking yourself every time you released a film and it failed you you kept asking yourself why does nobody want to watch my movie why does it keep getting bad reviews you know why isn't anybody interested in in it when i when i talk about it well and then you analyze that and you find those things you know what are the points well it was the wrong topic it was the right the wrong actors the wrong writing the wrong script the wrong genre the wrong whatever and eventually you figure that out but in the process you're gonna have to change yourself too you see because this is the ultimate secret is that the reason that people don't expand their set of experiences is because it kills you when you've expanded your experiences enough your ego can't maintain its old self it's going to collapse parts of your ego are going to fall away and that is a painful process we don't like change because change is essentially a form of death the more the change the closer it is to death so now you understand the importance of experience what are you going to do to proactively strategically methodically develop the kind of experiences you need in life make a list and think outside the box don't just go for the sort of standard cliche experiences of like oh i'm going to travel to paris or whatever i mean maybe that's good for you i'm not saying don't do that but like think deeper and think more abstractly too the material experiences per se are not the most important and then if you want help figuring that out then check out my left purpose course all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website there you'll find my blog with exclusive stuff that i'm posting all the time you'll find my book list uh with hundreds of books that will help you to expand your experience base they will point you in various directions that you can go to acquire more experiences they will especially help you with inner experience developing that my life purpose course is available there of course you can find that you can support me if you'd like on patreon.com check out the second channel actualizedclips and this really takes us into the concept of mastery what i've been talking about here is mastery and mastery is something i've covered in life purpose course mastery is something i have an old old episode on it's one of the earliest episodes i shot when i'm still shooting stuff outside um like six or seven years ago check out my my mastery episode read the book mastery by george leonard it's part of my book list uh that was one of the most important self-help books that i read early on as i discovered the self-help domain and it it really emphasized the importance of getting good at something the difficulty is finding what is that thing that you really want to get good at and then committing to it and i know it can be difficult especially if you have a lot of different passions you might be wondering like well leo how do i choose which one of those is the right one can i have multiple am i allowed to split my energy between two or three different passions well we discuss all that in life purpose course and help you to figure out how to focus how to focus on that a specific one and how to gain clarity about that so to gain clarity on this requires figuring out what your top values are and that's a big component of the life purpose course so really i can't explain it better than what's explained there so if you're serious about this go check that out you