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[Music] how to be decisive or alternatively we could call this how to stop being indecisive creating the good life requires a long series of clear high quality decisions so indecision in is one of your greatest dangers and enemies in this work the quality of your decisions will determine the quality of your life your decisions will make or break you many people waste and ruin their lives simply through indecision and stalling out and the bottom line is that you cannot afford indecisiveness if you are going to be self-actualizing that's not a luxury you have here are some examples of decisions within personal development that you'll commonly run across in this work for example should you work on your life purpose first or on your dating should you work on your career first or get into spirituality how long should you delay getting into spirituality how good should your finances be before you feel comfortable taking meditation retreats should you get more education or should you jump straight into working what are the pros and cons of doing that how hard should you work how much time should you allocate between work family life and relaxation or enjoying yourself enjoying life should you change careers if you find yourself in a career that doesn't suit you should you leave a relationship should you take psychedelics now or should you wait till you're more mature until you're older and maybe till you're done with setting up your business or your career how should you store or invest your savings that you're making from your business and your career should you sleep with this person who you know isn't right for you which business idea should you start with which passion should you follow if you have like two things in life that you're passionate about let's say you're passionate about music and you're passionate about filmmaking which one or should you do both of them at the same time which meditation technique should you commit to or should you use multiple techniques should you get married should you have children and win and to whom of course very critical question critical decision should you distance yourself from your family if they're not the healthiest people and they're not into personal development or their values online with your values should you take three months off of work to meditate where should you live where should you settle down this is just a brief list of the kinds of decisions that you'll have to be making throughout your life to create the good life of course there's these are sort of like very basic decisions uh your decisions can become much more specifically tailored to whatever life purpose you're following and whatever specific objectives you have in your life and your spiritual work and your relationships in your dating life in your business career and so forth here's the trick though is that many decisions you make are made by default through inaction and stalling or not deciding for example you might find yourself in a job that you don't like that doesn't align with your values and that you're not passionate about that you don't find meaningful and you could make a decision to say i'm not going to put up with that and i'm going to do the work to transition into a different career into a better job in starting my own business or whatever that might be but what most people will do because making that decision is difficult and scary and uncomfortable what they'll do is they'll just stall they'll just wait it's like well you know i can still i can tolerate this it's not my job isn't isn't so bad i mean it's not like slave labor it's all right you know my boss is pretty nice and i get decent salary and it's all right and then you just kind of stall for a year and another year and another year and before you know it a whole decade goes by and you're just stalling and uh and really what you're being here is you're being indecisive by default your life is going to go down a certain trajectory like a freight train on rails this default trajectory is what will happen when you don't make bold clear decisions it's when you just kind of settle for the path of least resistance you don't think creatively outside the box you don't push yourself you don't have any ambitions and you just kind of like go through the motions of life but this is not going to create a great life to create a great life you must take some bold decisions and switch tracks of this freight train your life has a lot of momentum behind it this momentum has been set by the first 20 years of your upbringing your culture your family situation whatever career or job you happen to fall into however you're surviving all your survival patterns those are established in the first 20 years of your life those are cemented into your brain and your mind and your psyche and then but what what gets cemented there is not something great or extraordinary or anything even close to your full potential as a human being this is just kind of like default basic stuff right like when you're born society programs you with a very basic operating system that just allows you to survive socially culturally economically a little bit usually and that's about it that's like all you get you don't get something amazing you get something mediocre and just kind of like passable maybe comfortable if you're lucky so to create the great life you're going to have to make a series of bold decisions a series of track changes to this freight train these bold decisions will be scary and uncomfortable you will tend to stall on them justifying to yourself that what you've already got is good enough you know after all why why risk it but what you have to remind yourself is that the default not making these bold decisions will never lead you to your highest potential actualizing your highest potential requires pushing your comfort zone without bold decisions you will tend to just get stuck in a rut of complacency and what's called the derp state owen cook from rsd calls it the derp state i like that particular framing you're just uh sleepwalking through life is another way to state it i've talked about that in the past sleep walking through life wasting years of your life just kind of going through the motions treading water and missing out on massive new growth opportunities and experiences these bold decisions expose you to new experiences to new challenges which force your body and mind to adapt and to grow here are some of the biggest decisions i've made in my life just to give you an idea of what i mean by these bold decisions early on in my life i chose the passionate life to work hard in my life to be ambitious that's the decision i made when i was young i knew i didn't want a mediocre life and that was one of the most important decisions i've ever made what that meant for me in my life is that i worked extra hard i've had to work more more than most people work but that's compensated by all the fruits that i got from that over time by investing through hard work since my teenage years you know doing it for a couple of decades that snowballed into something that now is a pretty amazing and rare kind of life that most people don't don't have and couldn't really even dream of getting another big decision i made is focusing seriously on my education when i was young i didn't waste my time socializing and doing stupid [ __ ] going to parties drinking and smoking weed and whatever else like i really focused on academics this built a very good foundation for me that has served me well all the way until today i'm coasting on that hard work that i did with my academic pursuits and that was a conscious decision i made because what happened was that up until about ninth grade i was kind of going through the motions of school i wasn't that serious about school i mean i got decent grades and so forth but like i wasn't really serious about like education i was just kind of doing what everybody was doing and uh and that was that and then in ninth grade there was a shift where i realized like why am i sitting around in these classes with these fools around me who are not taking their education seriously um and then it kind of dawned on me like i gotta get serious about education and so like i upgraded the classes that i enrolled in into like a bunch of very challenging ap classes honors classes um science and math and all this history and all this sorts of stuff and like i really challenged myself academically and also i started learning philosophy on my own i started reading books on my own um thinking about deep existential topics on my own uh and really educating myself basically and uh that was like that was a very deliberate decision and if i didn't make that decision back then man like my life would be so much worse today than it is i'm so glad i made that decision another decision i made is to focus on my life purpose early on in my life versus socializing so i deliberately made a decision to not socialize to not have a bunch of friends to not have girlfriends to delay having sex all these things i deliberately put all that off because i knew that i wanted to focus on my life purpose for the first five to ten years of my young adult life and that served me very well because i was able to get my career on track i was able to get my first business going i was able to make myself financially independent the way i wanted to i was able to gain my creative autonomy as a creator that was so much more important to me than having sex or having fun with friends or having a bunch of friends now that was a trade-off i sacrificed for that and in certain ways i would even regret doing that but also on the other hand i don't regret it because of what i gained right you there's stuff you gain and stuff you lose so this is the challenge of making these decisions is that a decision is not always all upside there's usually trade-offs and there's usually downsides to choices you make but you have to find those choices that align with your deepest values even though there's certain trade-offs we'll we'll get to that in a moment let me give you some more examples of other decisions that i made another bold decision i made is when i entered university i was planning to become an aerospace engineer so i went into aerospace engineering as my major i finished two years of the foundations of sort of engineering training a lot of science a lot of physics a lot of math and and then two years into it i decided that this is not like i i looked into the future i saw that being an engineer was not appropriate to me it didn't fit my values um and that i i needed to cut my losses even though i invested so much time into it already i needed to cut my losses and transition into a different life purpose and a different career and so i did that and that was also a very deliberate decision i can still remember to this day the very day where i made up that decision that i told my family about it and um we talked we discussed it then i switched majors and uh into philosophy from engineering i went into philosophy and then i went into game design so that was so important because if i stayed with engineering and if i became an engineer i would have been so miserable so miserable that would have been completely the wrong career for me and the wrong major so that was a good decision another bold decision i made is to about the same time as i switched to engineer from engineering to philosophy i was like 21 years old i made the decision to really get my weight under control i was overweight for most of my life up until that point and then i became very serious about working out i became serious about controlling what i put in my body what i eat i didn't immediately shift to a very clean diet i still ate a bunch of junk food and stuff like that but um but it was i made a significant very very dramatic change within five months i lost 65 pounds got to my current weight that i'm basically at right now and um and i've kept that off ever since and and that really became my my journey towards cleaning up my diet significantly then over the next 10 years i cleaned up my diet so significantly again i don't know where i would be i might even be dead at this point if i kept eating the kind of food i was eating back then and treating my diet and my health so recklessly the way that i was back then so that was a great decision also that had a huge impact on my on my dating life a huge impact on my self-esteem and confidence my self-image a lot of those issues were resolved through that change the next big bold decision i made was i went to game design i became a professional game designer for for a few years and then as i was doing that i had another sort of epiphany where i realized that working for anybody having a boss of any kind was completely unsuitable to what i wanted out of my life it contradicts my deepest values my creative autonomy and ambitions and so i knew at that point that i had to figure out how to be my own boss so i made a very bold decision to quit my game design job i was working in a great studio one of the best in the world on you know a triple a project and i i i quit in the middle of that which was very difficult to do because i spent i spent years developing my skills as a game designer and landing that position was very challenging i just broke into the game industry design industry as a designer entry-level designer that's that's very difficult to do at the studio that i did it at like uh almost unheard of and then i i said no to that and i can still remember to this very day the very day that i decided to quit in my own mind and and just how significant that that changed the whole trajectory of my life and it it put me into a situation where i had to fend for myself i couldn't rely on a paycheck from anybody i wasn't getting a salary from anybody like i had to make my own way in the world financially and that began my journey of learning about business about marketing about sales that was a challenge like that really pushed me that was especially difficult for me because i wasn't like i i despised marketing sales and business what i'm truly like i'm very creative at heart right to me what's most important is the creativity i don't care about the money i don't care about the business all that [ __ ] i don't care about that only to the extent that i need it in order to be creative so in that sense i had to care about it but uh anyways i had to go and like teach myself all that very quickly to become financially independent and then to to fund my own creative efforts in the future that was so crucial to where i am today and my ability to start actualize.org and all that kind of stuff so starting my first business was a huge bold decision uh the next one is after i succeeded in that i did internet marketing for a while built websites and did web development type stuff i did that for like three or four years became fairly successful at that started earning six figures from that and became financially well-off learned about business learning about marketing all that kind of stuff and then i realized that this internet marketing stuff like it's um it's really the work of the devil i have to get out of this industry even though it earns good money it's uh it's leading me down the wrong path and it's conflicting with my deepest values and so i again i made a very clear decision that i'm going to move out of that and then i was looking for that what that next thing was going to be and eventually that led me to starting actualize.org and that was also one of the best decisions that i've made in my life because if i stayed in internet marketing uh i would have compromised my own values so much and i would have become depressed and miserable and i would have lost my passion and then i wouldn't have really been able to do the kind of work that i'm doing today the next big decision i made is moving to las vegas at that point i was living in dallas texas and i wanted to work on my dating skills i couldn't really do that to the degree that i wanted to in dallas so i moved to las vegas that was a difficult decision i remember i had a life coach at that point that i was working with who was helping me and i remember like i was so stressed out over that decision i didn't know should i move what if i move and it's gonna i'm gonna hate it what if it's the wrong decision blah blah all this kind of stuff we talked about it for days and then eventually i just said you know what um if i don't move i'm just gonna stay here and i've already been here for like five years living in dallas so like it's just going to be the same old thing again it's like i'm going to stagnate or i can move to this new city new possibilities new adventures new experiences new friends new people living off on my own away from family from everybody and i saw the potential for growth there and i just said you know what even if it's going to be a decision that i'm regret i'm still going to do it because it's going to grow me so much so i chose the growth decision and that worked out well for me the next big decision i made is after i launched actualize.org and i was having early success over the first few years with doing sort of self-help videos and getting traction with that then i had to make a decision of like do i focus on the marketing and sales aspects of my business or do i focus on creating deeper content to create deeper content meant that i have to spend a lot more time researching developing myself studying and really going into like you know depth of unders like deepening my own understanding of these psychological and spiritual topics that i talk about i could go that direction but then i won't have time to do all the marketing and salesy stuff or i could do all the marketing salesy stuff and then the videos are going to be kind of shallow and just kind of like you know mainstream self-help type stuff because i won't have enough depth from which to speak and teach and the videos will also be much shorter and they're not gonna they're not gonna contain as much depth to them so i made a decision to focus to forget the marketing stuff and salesy stuff and to focus on the depth of the videos and i did that for like three or four years and basically i'm still sticking with that decision to this day now in a certain sense like that was difficult decision because i literally gave up millions of dollars i could be making millions of dollars more i could be millions richer right now if i if i went with the marketing and sales decision but to me what what that doesn't align with my values my values require me to go for depth and profundity of understanding that's one of my top values is understanding and depth so i'm very glad i made that decision i didn't kind of sell out or just make shallow content and really focused like on my craft and my depth of understanding myself and reality and consciousness and all that spirituality um so even though i lost a lot of views and i lost a lot of potential subscribers and a lot of you know money and you know success and fame all that was lost i mean also i had to make the decision to give up a lot of sex because see like at that point i was living in las vegas i could be going out i could have been going out like every day every night every weekend to clubs you know hooking up with girls i could have been doing that i could have had sex with hundreds of girls over like five or six years that i was you know really going to depth on on deepening my content i could have been doing that in addition to doing all the salesy marketing stuff i gave all that up for the depth of the videos right that was also a conscious decision um which sometimes i regret honestly but on the other hand you know i um i would never give up the depth of what i know now and the levels of conscious that i've accessed for any amount of sex um but uh but that that was a difficult decision as well the next big decision i made is buying my house um i'm very frugal and conservative with my money and so that was the biggest item that i've ever purchased in my life um and that turned out to be a great decision too and then one other decision that i made bold decision is i decided some i don't remember exactly where this happened in my life but i decided somewhere in my life probably pretty early that i want to be a prolific creator i want to like just be creative all the time put out a ton like i want my body of work to be massive i made a clear decision about that that's what i wanted and that i wanted to be a massive value provider i want to just shower people with value that was also a very deliberate decision that i've stuck to so these are just some examples of bold big challenging decisions that i've made this is not to brag or anything this is just to show you like how it actually works so i'm not saying you have to make these decisions yourself i'm just giving you an example um and then the question is going to be like what are going to be these big bold decisions for you they might end up looking very different than my decisions but this gives you an idea and really my whole life where i am today has been defined and shaped by these what this was like 10 about 10 to 12 major decisions that i made in my life now of course i've made a lot of minor decisions but these like 10 or 12 really high quality decisions have made my whole life like it's actually quite amazing when i think about it like that i haven't thought about it like that until i started thinking about talking about this topic here with you um so i want you to start to think like you know these major bold decisions you don't need hundreds of them to transform your life a good dozen if they're the right decisions at the right time aligning with your values and their big significant decisions that expose you to a lot of experience and really push you beyond your comfort zone this will make or break your life there's other decisions that i'm still you know contemplating for the future like you know i've thought about quitting actualize.org organ going to meditate for just like six months straight not even talk to a single human for six months just like go balls to the wall with my spiritual i haven't made that decision yet but that would be a bold one i could make in the future another decision i've been thinking about is like renting an rv or buying an rv actually rather than renting it buying an rv and then traveling around the country like literally every city in the u.s visit all of it see all of it interact with people meet people that would be like a very different lifestyle than the one i've been leading for the last 10 years um another bold decision might be moving to a different country and experiencing that experiencing what it's like to live in a third world country for example that would be a huge growth opportunity potentially another one is starting or joining a spiritual community maybe for you that might mean joining one for me that might mean starting one i don't know i'm still toying with that that's a very dangerous idea starting or joining a spiritual community those can be notoriously bad so i've held off on that but lately i've been thinking about like you know how do i take my work and my stuff to the next level how do i challenge myself and the way that i would challenge myself is of course i still got like inner spiritual work to do on myself uh but really the challenge for me would come next like a lot of growth would come for me if if i was pushed to lead an actual spiritual community in a conscious way that that would really you know test all the theory and all the stuff that i've been learning kind of independently and kind of just embodying on my own trying to embody it in a community setting that's a whole next level so just some ideas bold decisions will thrust you into new situations and expose you to massive experience and they will force you to become stronger basically you're not going to grow very much in your life unless something is pushing you to grow something has to be forcing you now that could be some external pressure like you know someone in your family dies and now you have to work extra hard to pay the bills it could be something like that but really that's not ideal what's ideal is for your own ambition to push you for your own ambition to have you make bold decisions that put you into challenging situations that then force you to become tougher and to grow and if you don't do that if all you're doing is just sitting at home and reading books and watching spiritual videos that's not going to be enough to actualize your full potential you need some kind of medium that's going to push you forward that you're working in you need some kind of challenge um some sort of sort of like larger objective remember we talked about the hero's journey i have an episode called the highest hero's journey we also talked about the hero's journey a lot in my life purpose course if you've checked that out so if you remember with the hero's journey the hero's journey begins with a bold decision the hero has to accept the call to adventure he has to accept the journey and usually the hero in a good proper hero's journey story refuses the call multiple times until he's forced into it forced into accepting the call so i want you to think about where in your life have you been stalling and refusing the call of your hero's journey because he it seems as though like well yeah the hero's journey sounds so exciting and adventurous why would the hero refuse the call but see that's kind of a cartoon version of the hero's journey the reality of the hero's journey is that to accept the call this is usually you're accepting something uncomfortable scary difficult and your mind doesn't want to accept that because your mind is lazy and it's comfortable where it is so what i'd like you to do is to contemplate the following question what is the default trajectory of your life right now if you don't make any more bold decisions going forward if all you do is you just keep doing and following the trajectory or track that you're on what is that where's that track gonna lead you contemplate that and ask yourself is that going to be the actualization of your highest potential is that going to be something that you're truly satisfied with and then contemplate the next question what are some bold decisions you could make to shift this default trajectory into something higher i want you to become very mindful of how you stall out your life by being indecisive now when you're making decisions what's really going on is that each decision you make is based on honoring certain values every decision is saying yes to one value and no to some other value now the problem is that most people are making decisions unconsciously you need to start making conscious decisions you've got to be become very conscious of what values your decisions are honoring because usually when you make a decision it's not explicit in your mind that oh this decision here like my decision to go to a party is honoring the value of blank whatever that is usually it's like usually or like my decision to order a pizza and sit on the couch and veg out for 10 hours watching netflix reruns of some show and and eating a whole pizza that's honoring a certain value and that's disordering some other value and then the quality of your life is really just a direct reflection of the decisions you make and whether they're honoring your top let's say 10 values and as long as you're making decisions that are dishonoring your top 10 values then you're going to have a miserable life and you're going to hate yourself and you're going to hate your life and eventually it's going to lead you to depression and even suicidal thoughts so the idea here is very simple make decisions that align with the principles of self-actualization what we call the good life truth love consciousness and self selflessness this and also with health this would be the recipe for creating the good life now why is making decisions so important is because you need to focus your energy as much as possible at one point this is a core principle of strategic thinking it's called the concentration of force or focus remember i have an old episode called how to be a strategic [ __ ] very aptly named uh it's all about strategic thinking there i outlined the principles of strategic thinking it's a very important episode go watch that um and one of the first principles of strategic thinking is the concentration of force it's also about how you're allocating your finite resources see creating greatness requires focus and you have finite resources at your disposal your resources are basically time energy money and your health these are your resources how are you going to allocate them what are you gonna transmute those resources into if anything at all how are you gonna invest them what are you gonna get for them for your time your money your energy your health what are you gonna get in return over the next 10 or 20 years now i've talked about this topic of investing in the past and i have a few more episodes i want to shoot about that because it's such an important topic because people are generally such poor investors in their own lives so making good decisions is really about making good investments and what are the best investments you can make in your life it's honoring your top values which of course means you have to know what your top values are which is something that i go into a lot of depth on in the life purpose course so check that out if you're unclear about what these values are and how to find them the course takes you through a step-by-step process for how to find your top values so i have a previous episode called why valuable things require development over time that's an episode about investing uh go watch that and connect it with this episode because really your decisions are decisions to invest your finite resources into the things that should matter most to you in your life the things you find most meaningful the things that are most aligned with the things you love in your life and since you have finite time you have to understand that there's a there's a thing concept called here opportunity cost whatever you're doing in your life you know if you're going to a party if you're getting a girlfriend if you're getting married if you're starting this business rather than that business if you're doing meditation versus yoga versus psychedelics versus something else all those things present opportunity costs because when you're doing one of those things you're not doing something else that you could be doing when you're meditating for an hour every day that's one hour a day you're losing are you investing it well are you meditating well or are you going to spend the next 10 years meditating in a half-assed manner half asleep not really gaining any spiritual benefit from that but you're going to invest you know 365 hours a year times 10 years that's three and a half thousand hours we'll get get invested in this meditation practice what else could you have done with three and a half thousand hours that's a lot it's a lot of hours see um likewise with everything else you're doing in your life so you have to do a sort of an audit or an inventory of your life how you're investing your time and are you making good decisions and good investments and is there something better you could be doing with that time how else could you be investing it notice that high paying jobs require being good at making important decisions quickly sometimes people say like you know under the capitalist system these ceos and corporate bigwigs they they make so much more money than their you know low-level employees and in a certain sense it's it's obscene how much the differential in salary and income is between you know the top executives versus the grunt level workers it is obscene it is gross and it is unfair and unconscious but what is being missed there by a lot of socialist type and progressive type of people is that actually you know one of the most valuable things in life is not hard manual labor it's actually the quality of the decisions you're making so some of these ceos and corporate bigwigs actually they're able to generate genuine value a lot of genuine value by being really good strategic thinkers big picture thinkers visionaries and being able to make very important decisions quickly on these decisions can hinge thousands of lives billions of dollars and many other important things and the reality is is that most people would not be able to fit in these jobs and to execute these jobs because they're just so bad at making decisions they would screw it up and they would run these companies into the ground so it's not simply that the the ceo or something is in this privileged capitalist position it is also that he or she has developed the skills necessary to make important decisions sometimes they make bad decisions and nobody is going to be making important decisions perfectly all the time of course many of these ceos make bad decisions but overall um you know if you give the average person this position they're going to screw it up royally so being able to make high quality decisions requires quite a lot of development ignorant people fools cannot make high quality decisions making good decisions requires wisdom vision experience discipline integrity holism big picture thinking education a sense of history a lack of bias a clear undistorted perception of reality the more twisted your mind is the more ungrounded your mind is the more you're lost in fantasy and ideology the more close-minded you are the worse you're going to be at seeing reality accurately and then you won't be able to make high quality decisions so here's an exercise i'd like you to do at home ask yourself this question what are the best decisions you've made in your life make a list then make a second list what are the worst decisions you've made in your life and after you get both these lists i want you to compare them and ask yourself what made the best decisions so good and what made the worst decisions so bad that's a homework assignment for you okay moving on so i've also talked about the concept of integrity see my episode what is integrity integrity requires being decisive why is that well because integrity is pretty rare most people do not have very high integrity and so if you have some kind of vision for a great life for having a great impact on the world for your life purpose for being creative artistic whatever and then you go about trying to execute on that vision you're going to need integrity to execute on that vision and everybody around you your friends your family your co-workers and just random people who are observing you they're all going to start criticizing you nitpicking what you're doing creating doubt in your mind and infecting you with their own lack of integrity you are going to have to stand up for your top values in the face of an of an unconscious world and an unconscious society remember we are living right now in the dark ages the dark ages did not end a thousand years ago we're still in the dark ages and if you want to bring some light into the world you're gonna have to contend with the darkness that's gonna try to snuff out the light most people live like animals along a path of least resistance most people are not decisive they're not clear they're not living according to their values they are not ambitious they are not seeking to bring light into the world they are not making decisions for themselves they are letting society and culture decide for them by programming their mind with memes and ideology and most people have very little integrity because all they're doing is they're just struggling to survive they're just doing the thing that will allow them to survive to the next day and throughout the next week they're not thinking very far they're not interested in developing themselves they're not interested in health and holism not individually but also not collectively they're not properly educated they're not very conscious they're not doing spiritual practices they're not eating healthy none of these things they're just chasing their base instincts cravings and desires and avoiding their deepest fears that's what's controlling most people they're like puppets on strings and even the ones that think that they're above it they're still puppets on strings the ones that think that they're contrarians that are challenging mainstream society those people are especially puppets on strings they're doing all that unconsciously with very little integrity so if you want to be a high integrity person a high consciousness person you're gonna have to hold yourself to a much higher standard because society other people they will not hold you to a high enough standard because their own standards are so low you're going to have to set the standard for yourself and for everybody else around you this is what it means to be a conscious leader and to set this standard and to live by this standard to meet this high standard of your own you're going to have to make some bold decisions and you have to stick with them in the face of all the darkness that surrounds you all the ignorance and unconsciousness that surrounds you all the group think and the mass paranoia and hysteria the culture wars and all the distractions all the petty human [ __ ] that's around you this is all going to be trying to distract you and tempt you to break your integrity and you have to make a decision you know one of the most important decisions you can make in your life is whether you want to be a high integrity person or not being decisive gives you a sense of direction and clarity of mind and peace of mind it's very relieving to know what you're doing in your life what your ultimate mission is the big picture because then that informs what you're doing on a micro level once you've got the macro level figured out you can easily figure out what you got to do at the micro level every single day and when this is all aligned with your top values it's it's very fulfilling it's very rewarding and it gives you a certain groundedness and stability in the face of chaos and distraction and hysteria that's all around you you know you got a purpose you got a mission you're on it your mind is clear you know what your values are you know what the right decisions are you know you're going to be a high integrity person this gives you enormous peace of mind to know that you don't need to compromise on these things and that you know where you're going that's one of the benefits of being decisive when you're indecisive you're wishy-washy you're like a leaf blowing in the wind you know anybody can pull you in one direction or the next every every little you know bump in the road every little hysteria in the news cycle it's got you all riled up and you're running around you know you're ungrounded you're very easily influenced and misled you cannot create a good life without being clear about what you want first of all you have to be clear that you want to create the good life most people don't know what they want they're very unclear and in fact clarity itself should be a core value of yours i'm going to have a whole episode in the future just about the value of clarity because it's one of those values that usually people don't think about when they're thinking about their values but clarity is a very powerful potential value because clarity is what allows you to be decisive you can't be decisive unless you know what you really want out of life once you figure that out being decisive is rather easy so i recommend that you make a sort of principal decision to never be squishy unclear mumbly and wishy-washy not in your language or your communication not in the decisions that you're making in your life not in the projects that you're undertaking not in the people you're choosing into your to allow into your life or or not like be clear about all those things set that as a goal for yourself is that kind of inner clarity and then once you have that clarity that's what's required to also become a conscious leader because most people are unclear so what they need is they need somebody to follow who is clear and i'll have an episode about conscious leadership in the future coming soon as well have you ever even sat down in your life and made a decision about who you want to be like what kind of character do you want to be when people look at you or they talk about you behind your back what do you want them to say about you what do you want them to perceive your highest values to be and then what kind of actions would you have to take how would you have to carry yourself so that people felt your values without you even having to explicitly tell them what your values are they just know what your values are because of the way that you carry yourself and the way that you embody them in your life so think about that sit down and spend a couple hours just thinking about what kind of character do i want to be how do i want others to perceive me do i want others to perceive me as somebody whose top value is money or sex or laziness or depression or judgment and hatred or dogmatism and closed-mindedness or lack of health think about that decide what you want in your life and decide what you definitely don't want in your life for example decide that you don't want hard drugs in your life decide that you don't want to be a cheater decide that you don't want to be a thief decide that you don't want to be taking shortcuts decide that you don't want to be eating junk food decide that you don't want to be chasing get rich quick schemes decide that you don't want to be a leech on society and a value leech upon the world decide that you don't want to be a net drag on the environment for example these are all decisions you could make now i'm not telling you what to decide you can decide whatever you want these are just examples of things you could decide that you definitely don't want and then you can cut those out of your life permanently also what's what's nice about being decisive is that when you're indecisive this actually wastes a lot of mental energy because you're kind of like in the in this gray area where you're not sure like maybe you're in a relationship but you haven't decided clearly that you don't want to be a cheater therefore you're tempted to cheat and maybe sometimes you do cheat sometimes you don't cheat and so this whole like tug of war in your mind of like should i cheat shouldn't i cheat should i cover up my cheating what should i say how should i lie about it and then like you're you're doing all this and even if you're not cheating let's say you hold off and you don't cheat but just the fact that you're thinking through all this stuff and that you're even allowing the possibility of cheating to be part of your reality this is already wasting a lot of your mental energy that you could and should be using towards much higher things similar like with eating junk food for example when you haven't made a clear decision to cut out all junk food in your life your life is actually much harder because everywhere you go you're tempted by junk food you know you go to the airport you're driving down the street you see some some billboard for some new burger or whatever or some new ice cream flavor um or a new bag of chips that they're selling at you know at the gas station or something and you just instinctively reach for it you get a craving for it because you haven't made the decision to be a model of health of healthy eating in your own life you see and so you're wrestling with this and then sometimes you're able to resist the junk food other times you pig out on it you eat a little bit or eat too much then you feel bad about that you feel guilty then you gain some weight you get on the scale you look at your weight now you're not happy then you have to go on a sort of a diet and so you're kind of yo-yoing back and forth and once you lose the weight then you feel like you can allow yourself a little bit of a cheat day here and then you go and you pig out again and the whole cycle begins all over again and you're wasting so much mental energy on this that you really should be channeling towards your spirituality your self-actualization work towards your meditation practices towards your you know explorations with psychedelics towards your business towards your family towards your spouse kids and so forth so indecision wastes a lot of energy it's not efficient to be indecisive what are the biggest causes of indecisiveness first and foremost it's a lack of clarity a lack of self-knowing and self-understanding you see when you're born into this life you don't know anything about yourself it's very funny very kind of paradoxical because you are yourself but you don't really know your own personality i'm not even talking about that you don't know like your god self forget that uh you don't even know your personality you don't even know it takes it takes decades for you to discover your own personality it takes decades for you to discover that you're an introvert or an extrovert or an ambivert or that you're um [Music] you're a thinker or you're a feeler or that you're highly intuitive or that you're very intelligent or that you're very you know gifted athletically or that you have a certain strength or a certain talent with people you're like you're a great communicator you're a good leader or maybe you're a good lover or maybe you excel at um you know working with with technical data and numbers you know whatever it is it takes you a long time to discover that it takes you a long time to discover what you want in your life and what you don't want in your life like do you want to have a boss do you want to be your own boss what do you what do you want there um do you want to be a highly social person or or not um are you the kind of person that's like a family person or not are you a very materialistic person or not does does material stuff satisfy you or not are you very intellectual person do you need a lot of like books and learning and information in your life to feel happy or are you more of an artistic person or are you more of a salesy businessy type of person it takes a long time to discover all this and figure this all out for yourself especially because a lot of times we're traumatized when we're young and then so that trauma obscures because the trauma requires us to then come up with coping and defense mechanisms and then we confuse those coping and defense mechanisms for our own authentic personality and then we can have these defense mechanisms we can identify with them and we can think that those are really who i am but they're not those are just like those are just armor armoring that you've created to prevent yourself from being further hurt in your in your life and to reduce your suffering and pain but that's not the same thing as being you know authentic and really understanding who you are underneath all that armor for example maybe you were bullied in school and so now because you were humiliated and bullied in school you might think that you're not really a social person but that's not really because you don't authentically enjoy being social you actually do it's just that you've been so bullied and you have wounds around that and trauma that until you heal all that and remove all that armor then you're not a you're not going to able to be able to really connect with that authentic part of you that wants to socialize and connect with with other people right and so now you're socially crippled and you might even think that all i've just thought i'm a very shy introverted almost autistic-like person but it's not that you're really autistic it's actually that you're you're inexperienced because you got that early trauma and you're just socially inexperienced and that's something that you can work out but it might take you years to work through that trauma so clarity is gained by really observing and studying yourself and understanding yourself at deep ever deeper levels so that's the first cause of indecisiveness the next huge cause of indecisiveness is fear you fear making the wrong decision the next big cause of indecisiveness is just being lazy and hoping and thinking that things will automatically work themselves out it's sort of the passive approach rather than the proactive approach to life siding with passivity versus proactivity this is almost always the wrong move the next big cause of indecisiveness is a lack of responsibility you're not actually taking responsibility for making important decisions in your life you want somebody else to make it for you the next big cause of indecisiveness is placing too much importance on the decision it's ironic and paradoxical that a lot of these important and bold decisions even though they are important and bold and they will shape the whole trajectory of your life if you placed too much emphasis on their importance then actually that's going to make you indecisive because you're going to be like oh my god this decision is going to change my whole life i have to get it perfect and that perfectionism is actually going to get in the way of you making the decision again this actually is very connected to fear because really in this instance what you're doing is you're you're scared of making the wrong decision so it's important in your own mind to reframe decision making to take the fear out of it and here's how you can do that first by realizing that most of your decisions can be remade if you make the wrong decision usually you have enough time in your life to go back and change it and redo it and oftentimes making the wrong decision actually gives you the information that you lacked and the clarity that you lacked and it helps you to figure out your own deepest authentic desires and self for example when i got my first job as a game designer at that point i didn't know how deeply i needed to be my own boss it wasn't until i had a boss for a year that i realized the problem that i have at my core with having a boss it wasn't that you know i didn't like having somebody tell me like what to do and being somebody subordinate that wasn't my problem my problem was that i was deeply creatively artistically ambitious and i needed to get those ideas out right i had like a visionary core to me that needed to be expressed and i was not able to express that when i had a boss and my job was helping him to express his artistic core right this that that doesn't work for me somebody else can fill that role but i can't feel that rope fill that role and i didn't know that nobody told me this when i was young school didn't teach me this my parents didn't teach me i had to figure this out through trial and error so i made a decision to get this job but then i realized that was the wrong decision the right decision for me was to start my own business but i couldn't know that until i made this wrong decision so don't be afraid of making wrong decisions and failing as a result because actually failure is okay i have an old old episode that talks about how to reframe failure how to really think deeply about failure go search for it um very important one actually i should probably do a sort of a a new updated version of it because there's uh people really trap themselves with their fear of failure and people really have a low tolerance for failure and in this work to succeed at life and to actualize your full potential you have to fail so much you're not going to get through this without massive failure in fact you have to embrace failure and look forward to failure and actually find ways of failing faster get the failure out of the way and one of the ways you do that is you make decisions clear decisions rather than stalling stalling stalling stalling because you're afraid to fail another uh way to reframe fear of failure is to remember that most of your decisions are not going to kill you which means that you're going to be able to get a second chance and a third chance and a fourth chance and this is realistically how you're going to solve most your problems in life you're not going to solve them by making the one perfect decision right off the bat and then succeeding it's going to be like you're going to make the wrong decision you're going to fail fail fail fail five 10 times and then on just because of your persistence and your sheer dogginess and and you know your your commitment to your life purpose and self-actualization if you're persistent enough eventually like on the 11th attempt you'll succeed and it's not by accident you're going to succeed you're going to succeed because of those first 10 failures because each of those 10 failures are going to teach you important lessons that you're going to use to fine tune and to calibrate your approach until finally you get it right and you learn on the 11th time and then you succeed and so really you should look at the entire process as a process of success it's not that success comes on the 11th time it's that those first 10 those that was your success happening it's just that success has a long like a wind-up period another way to reframe fear of failure is remember that making choices even the wrong choices will expose you to massive experience and this is really good this is what you're going to use to then learn and grow yourself so just because you made a bad decision doesn't mean that it wasn't good for you see my episode called expose yourself to massive experience so the general rule is this if you have a decision to make and you're deciding between sort of the status quo your current default trajectory which is not going to expose you to any really new massive interesting experience that's going to grow you significantly versus a decision that is going to thrust you into a new situation and really going to challenge you choose the one that's going to challenge you this is almost always the best choice even if it ends up being not your ultimate destination it's still going to grow you and challenge you whereas if you just stay in your comfort zone what's gonna come of that you're just gonna you're gonna stagnate that's what's gonna happen so i would say all else being equal always err on the side of action proactivity and massive new experience like let's say you can stay at your current job that you've been working for the last 10 years and just keep doing the same old thing over and over again or you could take a risk and maybe some new job was offered in some new country that you've never been to before this would require you to relocate to take the risk of living in a different country maybe you won't like it maybe that job doesn't even pay as much money maybe you're not going to like that new job whatever but even if all that is true even if it's the worst case scenario that you don't like the country you don't like the job and so forth just the fact that you go through the process of moving there and going through maybe a year of working there before you decide to quit that that massive life experience you gain is going to be so much more valuable than just doing the same old thing you've been doing the last 10 years also most in most cases when you have a decision and you're not sure between which two to choose because it's so close like should i become a filmmaker or a musician i don't know i like both you can kind of get stuck in that because you make it in your mind you make it seem like you can only choose one but realistically what you can have what you can do in most times is you can do one for a couple of years and then if it doesn't work out you can switch and do that the other option that you didn't choose you can then explore that option so most of the time you can explore both sides of the fork that's what i'm calling the fork you can take the fork you can take both sides of the fork now what that's going to require is that's going to require working twice as hard see because the fear you have is like well what if i work out on being a musician for two years and then i realized that all that time and energy and effort was wasted because i don't really want to be a musician doesn't align with me and then i have to go to become a filmmaker i have to start from scratch that's going to require another two years i'm going to lose two years not really though because even that experience you gained with the music those two years of music and working on that you're going to be able to translate a lot of that over a lot of it's going to be applicable even to your your filmmaking and you're going to learn a lot about yourself in the process of making that music and you're going to develop some core skills like you're going to develop discipline work ethic you know a good morning routine waking up on time this kind of stuff you're gonna you're gonna learn you can learn those making music and then you can switch to filmmaking and those will still apply within filmmaking you see so um don't fret too much about making close decisions you can often do both just not at the same time right don't do both at the same time don't try to become a musician and a filmmaker at once what you can do what you should do ideally is say okay let's say i'm 90 passionate about being a a musician and i'm 85 passionate about a filmmaker about being a filmmaker therefore i'm going to go with musician i'm going to do that for a few years see how that works out if it's not working out then i'm going to go transition back into filmmaker let's say and then i'm going to do that and then if that doesn't work out then i'm going to find some third thing this means you're going to work a lot harder than most people but this will actually be good for you because you're also going to grow from that work don't be afraid of hard work don't be afraid of working more than everybody else is working around you it's going to pay off for you eventually now you might say but leo what if i make a disastrous decision shouldn't i be worried about that that's possible of course there's no guarantees that you won't make a disastrous decision however consider the following what if your fear of making disastrous decisions actually leads you into the disaster of not making any decisions at all stalling out the clock in your life and then just ending up with mediocrity why aren't you more afraid of that possibility because that is the most likely possibility the most likely possibility is not that you're making a disastrous decision is that you're going to make no decision at all and that will be the disaster of your life now you might say well leo that's not going to be a disaster that's just going to be kind of a comfortable cushy normal life don't be so sure about that because you see when you get stuck in a rut of a comfortable cushy kind of life it's okay for the first five ten years but then after ten years you got so sick of it you start getting depressed you stop going to work on time then you lose your job you start backsliding you start drinking you start doing drugs you start hanging around with the wrong people you get depressed you go on medication to treat your depression then you're addicted to that medication then you become suicidal and you lose all your passion for life you slowly slide down this slope of mediocrity this happens with a lot of people this is very common so this is something you should be genuinely concerned about don't be paranoid about it but it should be always in the back of your mind that if you're not going to be decisive then this is likely what's going to happen you're going to slide downward in your life into mediocrity and especially you should be worried about this if you're listening to my content right because you're going to see me growing over the years you're going to see me growing massively and talking about these cool things that i'm discovering and sharing these new insights and spirituality and all this and the business stuff that i do the creative stuff that i do you're going to see me growing massively but then you're not going to be doing it and if you're not doing it along with me then that's just going to make you feel even worse because you know your full potential i'm if you're sticking with me i'm i'm going to be highlighting to you the highest potential that you got as a living being but if you're not taking action towards that you're not living in a principled integras manner you're just you know going with the default trajectory with all your friends and family listening to me is going to make you depressed it's going to make you hate your life it's going to make you hate god because you're gonna wonder like leo why why isn't god giving me all these gifts that you keep promising well because you are god and if you're god then for god to give you the gifts that god can give you you have to give them to yourself you have to create them you get that god has no hands other than your own your hands are god's hands your mind is god's mind your goals are god's goals your decisions are god's decisions if you decide to sit at home for 10 years living off of you know government subsidies or your parents money living in their basement playing video games and eating junk food that's you as god deciding that that's the kind of life you want the problem is that you're making that decision unconsciously because nobody would consciously choose such a thing that's a decision made by default that's what you get when you don't make a decision that's what you get when you're indecisive so finally let's get to the core of this topic which is how to be decisive number one be willing to make mistakes don't be afraid of making bad and wrong decisions number two train yourself on minor mundane decisions before you go making bold decisions in your life because those are challenging to make first you can train yourself every day on little things throughout the day for example when you go to the restaurant with your friends and they are ordering something off the menu how long does it take you to decide what you want to order are you sitting there hemming and hawing and mumbling about oh well i don't know should i get the chicken should i get the fish i get the steak what should i get i don't know no train yourself from now on to make those little decisions quickly decisively this is probably the best method i know for how to train yourself to be decisive like practically how do you do it start with little decisions and force yourself to make them rapidly the stakes there are not very big that's what's nice with the little decisions you don't have to you know if you choose the wrong meal at the restaurant it's not a big deal force yourself to choose it quickly and then figure out what does it take for you to choose the right meals you can actually dissect that you can kind of see like what are what are your culinary values and what meals honor those values and then you can make good decisions based on that by knowing what you like what you don't like other little decisions even like for example when you're when you're driving somewhere let's say you gotta drive to you gotta drive to your dentist's office tomorrow right for an appointment now you could take one road or another road to get to the dentist let's say both roads are about equally long they take about the same time sometimes one takes a little bit longer it has some construction on it sometimes another road takes a little bit longer because it has more traffic on it depending on the time of the day right and you're you're in your car and you're about to drive to the dentist's office and you don't know which which which which road to take you don't know and you might sit there in your mind for a few minutes and just kind of like stuck paralyzed well now you've made you've set the intention that you want to become a decisive person in your life so make that decision quickly even if it's going to be the wrong decision make it quickly and train yourself to keep doing that and when you do that experience the kind of joy and relief that comes with being decisive versus the pain and suffering that comes with being indecisive about such things often times you should also notice that you're being indecisive about trivial things that don't even matter like in this case the difference between taking road a versus road b might be two minutes you might spend 10 minutes in your own mind wrestling with which road to take without realizing that actually it doesn't matter which road you take it really doesn't matter take the more scenic route take the route that takes two minutes longer and listen to some music and enjoy your day right rather than being stuck in your head beating yourself up about taking the wrong road be very mindful of that a lot of times you're forced with a decision which is actually very trivial it seems significant but it isn't therefore don't waste your mental energy on it just choose and go go with the thing you know get on with your life the third step for how to be decisive is deliberate about important decisions but once you've made your decision stick to it train the habit of sticking with it rather than the habit of backtracking so one of the worst things you can do is make a decision then the next day change your mind then the next day change your mind back again and do this over and over again it's like let's say you've decided to break up with your girlfriend because you think she's not right for you so you break up with her and then the next day you're like ah but but i really like her maybe she is right for me then you go back and then you say i know actually i was right the first time then you go back again like this this this sort of back and forth this crap it wastes a lot of time a lot of energy and um it creates a lot of suffering for you and for others in your life so train yourself not to do that it's sort of a a decision you make you make a decision that you're not going to be backtracking on your decisions and then you stick with it and you incur the cost that means if you make the wrong decision you stick with it you don't backtrack and you feel the cost of the wrong decision because actually you recognize that training this habit of backtracking all the time this is actually sort of an even worse meta decision that you're making and you don't want to do that the fourth point about being decisive is get really clear about your values your vision your life purpose and keep working on that and clarifying it you don't just do that once in your life then you're done you keep clarifying and massaging your values and and really poking and prodding at them over your lifetime until they get clearer and clearer and clearer and clearer and then when you're rock solid on that it becomes very very easy to make decisions it becomes easy to decide what kind of people you should have in your life or which kind you can't you shouldn't it becomes easy to decide you know where to go friday night it becomes easy to decide what kind of food you should or shouldn't eat and um what kind of business proposals you should entertain which kind you can't you know if somebody sends you an email promising you to make a bunch of money through some get rich quick scheme by collaborating with them you can quickly say no that's against my values i don't even need to think about it it's just contrary to my values and therefore no it's an easy no when you're not clear about your own values you become very easily manipulatable very easily influenced other people become your puppet masters the next point closely related to this is leverage your top values that you found using the life purpose course process that i helped you to go through use your top 10 values to help you make your decisions so literally into every important decision you go in there and you ask yourself okay my top 10 values where does this decision you know which of these top 10 values does my does this decision honor and which of them does it dishonor and if it dishonors more than it honors that's a bad decision easy and if it honors like your top three values that's an easy yes decision because you can't really get better than that if some decision is honoring your top three values what more could you want the next point is take responsibility for being a decision maker think of yourself as a decision maker and stop trying to outsource decisions to other people don't ask others to decide for you a lot of times people will send me a message hoping that i can decide something for them like leo should i break up with her or shouldn't i leo should i do this thing or should i do that thing leo should i take psychedelics or should i wait a few years leo should i pursue this life purpose or is that life or should i pursue this passion or that passion first should i start my business now or should i finish my education first should i go pursue awakening today or should i wait to get my finances in order don't ask me these questions assume responsibility for making these decisions remember you're the ceo of your life not me the next point is don't stall or procrastinate decisions train yourself to make decisions as they arise the next point is observe the consequences in suffering that comes from backtracking and stalling on important decisions observe the inner turmoil it creates observe how it drains your mind how it causes you to overthink over worry and fear like what's nice about training yourself to become decisive is that it also gives you sort of a cool and calm and groundedness amidst chaos that's an attractive quality it gives you confidence that doesn't mean that you're always gonna be making the right decision it means that even if you're making the wrong decision you're still going to do it in a cool collected way and you're not going to be lured in by backtracking and you're not going to be procrastinating you're not going to be afraid of these decisions you're going to confront these decisions head on with responsibility and it's going to be relatively easy for you to do so because you're very clear about your values unlike most people so it's not i'm not just telling you that you're going to be making decisions kind of like randomly really quickly based on nothing just in order to kind of like project an air of confidence and decisiveness this this is kind of like a fake way of going about it i'm not telling you to become like that um fundamentally you're going to be grounded in your values you're going to know your values so well that you will be able to make really high quality decisions very quickly in most situations and they're going to be very accurate but it's going to take you time to train yourself to get to that point right you're not going to start there this this is an aspect of your character that you're developing is decisiveness it might take you five or ten years of incremental work to get to that level of like really solid precision level decisiveness very authentic decisive confident um sort of manner it's going to maybe take you 5-10 years to develop that you're going to start today and you'll start with these little decisions and then make make your way up to bigger ones that's something you're going to develop and then kind of like envision to yourself how awesome it's going to feel once you reach that level the next point is observe the consequences of not being clear using introspection that method that i have a video on called developing introspection i also have a couple of other videos one called learning equals observation another one called learning equals behavior change so those come into play here um you're going to learn how to be decisive by observing the consequences of your indecisiveness and lack of clarity get that you're also going to learn in this case how to be decisive by changing your behavior through the observation then you're going to ask yourself how do i got to change my behavior to become a more decisive person that's the key question how do i have to change my behavior to become a more decisive person look ultimately becoming more decisive is it's not rocket science it's pretty simple you become decisive by making lots of decisions and kind of pushing yourself to make them quicker and to observe the consequences of making them to observe the ways in which you procrastinate and resist making these decisions and to and to observe and to kind of line up force your decisions to line up better with your top values which you're clarifying all the time so by doing this combination of things this is how you become decisive and this is something you practice over we i mean you don't need to practice it every day because some days you won't have any important decisions to make but like you'll be practicing it on a weekly basis over the next you know five to ten years and then if you keep doing that eventually you'll become a much more decisive person and then you'll become a lot more confident and people will look up to you and will respect you a lot more when you develop this capacity it's very similar to developing the capacity of a sense of humor i have an episode called how to be funny where i give you a step-by-step process for how to develop a sense of humor you could actually do that you're not just born with a good or bad sense of humor you have to develop it and there's a method you can go through to actually train yourself to develop a much higher sense of humor i outlined that in that episode well you can go through a similar method to train yourself to become decisive the more decisions you make the more consciously you make them the better you're going to get it at it also what will help you in this process is to put yourself into positions where you have to make lots of important decisions the most obvious place where this can happen is at a leadership role at your job push yourself into leadership roles management roles and so forth these roles come with more responsibility and more decisions a lot of times people don't take these management jobs because actually they're not good at making decisions making decisions is stressful um and so people just you know stay in the lower positions then they earn less money they also grow less it's not easy to be a good manager also train yourself to make decisions before problems arise you want to be preemptive with your decision making so you know a classic example of this is always use condoms decide to always use condoms that's a really good decision to make because it's too late once you have a pregnancy scare it's too late or for example quitting the wrong career if you're in the wrong career and you sense it quit as soon as possible don't stall on it because the problem is going to get worse and worse and worse over time preempt the really worst case of this situation by quitting within the next six months because if you stay there for five ten years that's when it's gonna get really bad you gotta foresee that for example if you're involved in a criminal lifestyle maybe your family is involved in some criminal activity you got to see that this is not going to lead anywhere good and you got to make a decision to to exit this lifestyle distance yourself from these kinds of people this family these kinds of friends that you have or if you're involved in it yourself you need to plan an exit strategy because you know there's serious problems are going to arise if you keep doing this so far you've been lucky maybe you haven't gotten caught yet but eventually you'll get caught and it'll be disastrous so make a decision preemptively to get out here's another distinction you should make is between shallow decisions versus deep decisions a deep decision is one in which you've deeply contemplated unders and understood why you should or shouldn't do a thing why a thing is right or wrong for you right so a shallow decision might be like you're you're walking down um the street and you see a food stall with some junk food there like they're selling greasy pizza and you feel you feel a craving for that pizza but you say you know what no i'm gonna go eat something healthier you know further down the street there's a healthier type of food i'm gonna get that instead and that's but that's just like a little one-off like shallow decision you just made it's not very deep by a deep decision i mean like you sit down and you really contemplate like okay let me think about all the stuff that i'm putting into my body on a daily basis all the food that i put into my body what is this going to have what impact is this going to have like on my life what are the most important things in my life let's say for me the most important things are my my creative work my business my life purpose let's make let's say maybe time with my children if i have them right maybe these are my top four priorities and then i have to connect and say like well how does eating this junk food all the time how does that connect with serving my top values and then you realize wait a minute it's contradicting those values right because if i'm eating junk food i'm not going to have as much time to spend with my kids because i'm not going to be feeling so good i'm not going to have enough energy maybe i'll die younger there's that i'm not going to be as creative and artistic because also my brain's not going to be functioning as well and so forth and you know and so forth it contradicts your top values and so when you sit down and deeply contemplate this then you can ask yourself well what if i make a decision to not eat junk food ever again not because just like i don't want to be fat or something or because i don't want to have a stomach ache one day not because of that but because i want to honor my top four values let's say and this is conflicting with that and it's undermining my top four values therefore i'm going to decide for the rest of my life never to touch pizza ever again that would be a deep decision that's what i mean by a deep decision where you really think through like what the full consequences are long term and towards your ultimate overarching life purpose and vision for your life and your top values and who you want to be as a character in life and then based on that you say no to a thing or you say yes to someone some other thing that is aligned with that for example make a deep decision not to drink alcohol that would be different than a shallow decision a shallow decision is like you know what um i had a hangover last night so tonight i'm not going to drink because i don't want another hangover that's a shallow decision that's like a one-off kind of thing because a few weeks will pass then you'll you'll go drinking again because you didn't really think through what drinking does to you a deep decision about drinking is when you think about all the impact that this drinking has on your liver on your health on how you feel about yourself on how you're able to communicate with others the kind of problems that arise when you drink too much the amount of money that you spend over your lifetime on drinking and the effect it has on your brain and the bad example it sets for your for your children and your friends and maybe the kind of danger gets you into when you're driving drunk occasionally from from the bar back home because you don't have a a ride right but you're incurring some risk there and then you think about all the hangovers you're gonna have in your whole life and you think about all the vomiting you're gonna do and you're gonna think about all the extra calories it's gonna add you know all that alcohol and how fat it's gonna make you and how it's gonna conflict with your deepest values and how it's gonna conflict with spirituality and meditation you're going to skip days of meditation because you're going to be too hungover from drinking to meditate right so like when you connect all of that then you can make a deep decision not to drink ever again likewise you can make a deep decision not to cheat in relationships a shallow decision not to cheat would be just like you know like oh i find her really hot but like ah i would feel guilty if i cheated so i don't cheat this one time it's like yeah but that's just like one time the next time maybe i will cheat if i find something hotter right it's not a deep decision a deep decision would be like do i want to be the kind of person that cheats because cheating involves lying do i want to be a liar what would it mean if i said yes to lying how is lying going to impact my top values and what kind of example i set and also my ability to have a family to have children to maintain a deep intimate relationship with a spouse all this sort of stuff is that going to be possible if i'm the kind of person that's going to be tempted to lie and then to cheat right you think through all that and you say oh okay then easy it's easy now to say no to cheating how about a deep decision not to exploit your customers or a deep decision to set boundaries in relationships a deep decision never to allow yourself to be to have your values violated your deepest values violated in a relationship a deep decision not to chase get rich quick schemes if you're involved in business okay so now you understand shallow versus deep decisions here's some things i want you to contemplate write down some of these questions these are going to be very good homework assignments for you so first of all contemplate do you want to be a decisive person or do you want to be an indecisive person actually think about that think about the pros and cons also think about what it's going to take the work it's going to take to become a decisive person because it's going to take work you have to retrain yourself do you want to do that work is it a worthwhile investment for you contemplate that and then make a deep decision if you want to be a decisive person as you're thinking about that contemplate what indecisiveness will cost you over your whole lifetime you need to drill into your mind that indecision is much worse than making the wrong decision it's also much worse it's going to cost you much more in the long term than it will to just train yourself and discipline yourself to become a decisive person the work you do to become decisive in the end is going to be less than all the misery and [ __ ] that you put up with by being indecisive for the rest of your life think through all that don't just listen to me mindlessly think through it your mind has to gain traction with these ideas you have to like think them through almost like logical proofs or mathematical theorems you have to think through them and understand why the math turns out to work the way it works also contemplate this why have you been indecisive in your life if you think of yourself as an indecisive person and indecisiveness has been a problem your whole life ask yourself why also think about what have been the costs the trick with this is that you probably don't even realize the full cost of your indecisiveness there have been many bold big important decisions in your life that you've stalled on or ignored making that would have massively improved your life and you don't even know what those are because you've just been stalling and being indecisive for so long you don't even know how amazing your life could have been if you've been making better decisions and being more decisive so kind of you have to kind of like go back and think about like where could my life be if i was really bold and decisive you need some vision here also contemplate this what are some really good decisions that i could make for my life and also the opposite what are some really bad decisions that i could make in my life and then contemplate what decisions have i been stalling on then i want you to contemplate how can i make better decisions and i want you to contemplate what makes a decision good actually do this as your homework assignment this will gain you valuable insight beyond just the theory that i give you here it's going to be more powerful than hearing it from me making great decisions also ties in with intuition and wisdom i have two episodes about that i have one episode called how to harness your intuition go look at that another episode called what is wisdom go look at that developing your intuition your creativity your wisdom and exposing yourself to massive experience will make you a really good decision makers decision maker these skills and capacities will all synergize together and in the future i'll have an episode about how to be very creative i'm very passionate about studying how to become creative and what creativity is it's a tricky topic but also very important one so look intuition creativity wisdom and massive experience all these three things or four things will synergize together in addition to your intention and your decision to become decisive in your life so in conclusion decide to push yourself rather than waiting for life to push you your most powerful decisions will actually be so strong they won't even feel or seem like decisions at all at least that's how it should be there are things in your life i want you to notice that you have decided that are so non-negotiable for you that they don't even feel like decisions for example like for me for me that would be living a life with passion and purpose and not wasting my life to me that's absolutely non-negotiable i can't live life without that it's so non-negotiable that it's it's even wrong to call that a decision because when you say it's a decision it's as though like there was an alternative option and there never was for me it was obvious since i was like seven years old that that's what i want from life and it's this kind of decision that is the most powerful decision the kind that leaves no alternative another one for you is rejecting the easy life rejecting the path of least resistance never doing a thing just because it's the easiest of all the alternatives that was also a decision i made early on in my life that was really not a decision but it's shaped the whole trajectory of my life that's non-negotiable for me it's invalid in my own world view to do something just because it's easy you have to do the thing that's right not the thing that's easy another one for me was the pursuit of philosophy truth and profound understanding to me this is non-negotiable there is no life for me without this it's this or death that's how i frame it in my own mind so in that sense it's not even a decision it's so aligned with my top values that i couldn't imagine living life without this i don't even understand how people can live life without this it doesn't compute in my world here um but you see there's a lot of power behind that when you take something so seriously there's so much power behind that it grounds you so deeply it tells you the direction it's sort of like the the absolute compass of your life these examples i'm giving you right now these are sort of like the ultimate compass that runs in my life i have other values besides this that are a little bit more negotiable but these are just absolutely non-negotiable and then the last example is awakening so when i heard that such a thing exists as awakening before i even had one when i first heard about it like 10 years ago or so for me in my mind it was absolutely clear that i needed to have it i needed to experience it i didn't even know what it was i just know i needed it and there was no there's no alternative there was no options like well should i pursue awakening or maybe i should go chase girls or earn more money it's like i don't know like maybe i'm a little bit leaning towards i'm mostly leaning towards awakening but part of me is like wanting to chase it was like no like awakening it's like not non-negotiable right there's no alternative to that that's what you need if you really want to wake up it's that that level of commitment and clarity that you need um so i suggest you you contemplate your deepest values very deeply find the ones that are non-negotiable for you and stop compromising on those make some permanent decisions about honoring those top values of yours and if you're still confused about what i'm talking about here with top values and you're wondering how to find yours that's what my life purpose course is for it's over 20 hours of exclusive content that is not featured on the main channel that shows you how to find your top values and how to align your life with that so go check that out if you haven't alright that's it i'm done here check out my website check out my blog check out my patreon page check out the forum check out my book reviews list check out the life purpose course check out all this stuff i have more stuff coming in the future i'm working on some new courses coming in the future so stick around for all that and lastly i want to tell you this look if you found my work if you found this channel these videos you've been very lucky extremely lucky you stumbled upon this channel by fluke luck you are like one you won the lottery 100 000 people will stumble upon these videos by fluke luck everybody who stumbles upon my content does so through fluke because i don't i don't go out there advertising or anything like that if you found my content on youtube or or itunes or whatever it's through fluke luck understand this um you were very lucky but that's not enough you were lucky to find the content now you got to work the content you found a gold mine of life transforming information these ideas concepts perspectives will transform your whole life if you apply them properly and you really work them but it's very easy for you to squander your good fortune here it's not enough for you to be lucky in this work you were lucky to stumble upon the possibility of this work now you've got to actually listen to all of it contemplate it do the homework assignments journal about it think deeply about it start applying it in your life and you've got to be consistent with it on a weekly basis for years and decades without that you're not going to get the results so the biggest honor you can pay to my work is by doing it i'm receiving more and more comments from people on the forum on youtube on instagram on you know through email and so forth i'm receiving more and more comments from people telling me that this work they've been following it for like five years eight years three years whatever and they tell me that it's transformed their life so i'd like you to think about that possibility to take that possibility seriously and to become one of those people because the majority of people who watch my content they're not going to be those people i would like to say that everybody experiences that but they don't because it takes a lot of work and it's only going to transform your life to the degree to which you take it seriously more than just a passing hobby of listening to this kind of material while you're cooking you know dinner or doing your laundry it has to be something deeper than that it's for those people that i do this work for the people who are going to take it seriously those few who are going to take it seriously i'd like you to make a decision now perhaps one of the biggest decisions you'll make in your life whether you want to be one of those people that decision is up to you the results are up to you you