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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I want to talk about how to unleash your ambition you the key idea that I want to get across to you in this episode is that if you're an ambitious person or even if you just have an inkling of ambition within you then it's your job at whatever cost it takes to figure out a way to realize that ambition and that it's your job to play big rather than play small because in society if you don't unleash your ambition through your own sheer will then what's going to happen is that you're going to get sucked down into the muck with everybody else and that's going to be a real disservice that you do to humanity because we need more ambitious people doing ambitious things one of the themes throughout my entire life that I've struggled with this has been a theme for me since I was in my teens all the way up till today is basically I had this ambition inside of me like in here this passion this desire to go create something to shape and impact the world to leave a legacy behind I had something like that right but it was so unrefined it was so unstructured and I had no idea how to take the say ambition and how do I actually do something with it in the real world and that for me has been like the defining theme of my entire life is like learning how to take this abstract ethereal creative drive that was in that my muse and then figure out how do I actually get that muse to have traction in the real world because in the real world once you know you come up with all used dreams and ideas you have and all this lofty cool stuff I can maybe plan a sort of business or you plan to start a charity of your planet you know go change the world in some way that's all good on paper in your mind when you're daydreaming it but then when the rubber meets the road it's like you have to actually start a business you have to hire employees you have to know what you're doing you have to have uriens you have to have knowledge you have to have marketing skills you have to be able to make money so the thing is self-sustaining you have to be able to manage the whole thing you have to be able to avoid all the different obstacles that are there you have to know how to compete with in a very competitive and global marketplace so there's a lot of moving parts right and if you get any one of those wrong the whole thing just self destructs not even that but it doesn't even get off the ground it just stays like a dream in your mind so that's been a real struggle for me and what's really challenging about that is that when you first start in life you know when you're in your teens or early 20s you don't really know how this stuff really works and the world can be quite ruthless quite cutthroat especially the business world so how do you get something going and it's like how do you even change the world if you don't do it through a business or through you know some amazing career that you start it's hard to even think of what it would be like you need you need some sort of organization through which you can have this change happen and what happened to me is that when I got my first job out of college it was a pretty good job I got a game design job up in Boston and this was my first job and so it was an interesting experience for me kind of really eye-opening experience so I go to Boston I moved to Boston from California and I'm working there for about a year and when I start noticing as I'm looking around me looking at the people around me some of them are more ambitious some of them are not really ambitious at all and I kind of compare myself to them and think about the grand ideas that I have and I had already a lot of ideas before I even went and started that job but ultimately you know I had my own ideas that I wanted to implement which wasn't what I was doing at that job at that job I was on implementing somebody else's ideas right I was like the grunt laborer for some other leader and there's nothing inherently wrong with that except for me it was a problem because I felt like I had something to say I had a bike a voice that needed to be expressed self expression needed to happen that was that creative drive that was my ambition but when I told myself the time is like well Leo I mean you can't just expect to go out there and create it you know your own game company you can't create your own studio just yet you have no experience so go in this career and just kind of like be the grunt worker for five or ten years save up some money build up some experience and then eventually you'll get promoted up the ladder and you know the standard career track and eventually maybe you get to work on some cool ambitious project that you've always dreamed of so just kind of bide your time and wait for 10 or 20 years for that to happen that's what I told myself that was my original plan because I didn't know how to start a business I didn't have the capital or the the experience or the expertise all I had was like cool ideas but no knowledge of how to implement those ideas so I had to kind of subject myself into that system I felt I had to follow that system but what I discovered is that if you're a really ambitious person and you have a very large vision for a business or a product or a project that you want to start or a novel you want to write or whatever you want to do however you want to impact the world if you've got a great vision like that it's going to be very difficult for you to subjugate yourself and be the grunt worker for somebody else's vision very difficult and subjecting yourself into the system into the bureaucracy into society quote unquote you know the structures that have been set up for you by other people that have come before that might not be your best move because what I found myself doing is I was kind of like dumbing myself down I was taking that talent and that actually the most valuable thing I had was that ambition and that creative force I was taking that and I was just kind of denying it and suppressing it just so that I can be a good worker for somebody else and I think that um I would bet I don't know I haven't done statistics or taking surveys but I would bet that there are thousands tens of thousands of very ambitious uh like bright people out there that could transform the world if only they figured out how to take this ambition it actually channel it into something concrete and not get sucked into the system because once you get sucked into system all those grand ideas you have they basically become mediocre and the status quo takes hold and the system the system doesn't fight for higher ideals the system doesn't really fight for truth or for justice or for beauty or for changing the world or for helping humanity that's not what the system fights for the system fights for preserving itself and that usually means especially in a business context that usually means like earn some money entrench your monopolistic position within business and just kind of like make sure that you survive it's not about thriving it's just about surviving it's about doing the same thing it's about not incurring too much risk it's about not shaking the boat that sort of thing right but that's all mediocrity and what happened to me is that I was naive and I didn't really know anything and so I just kind of subjected myself to that system thinking that just that that was my only option that's the way that things were going to have to go and that eventually I kind of had the hope that it would all work out but I saw differently about a year and I started to see differently after I spent a year in Boston because I saw that man you know um it would kill me inside he would like kill my soul inside if I didn't pursue my ambitions for real and I had this really critical decision point right to say to myself [ __ ] I can stay in the system and hope the system takes care of it for me but I know that it probably won't I know that probably all the system will do is lead to mediocrity and more of the same and that's not what I want I couldn't live myself with that if I did that so um so I had to just embark out into the wilderness on my own to see how I can make my ambitions real and that's when doing and that led to me starting my first business very interesting that I have a client now that I'm coaching and he's also a game designer and he's facing a very similar problem to me and the issue with him is that he's a very ambitious and really hard-working very creative guy and I can see from coaching this guy now for over a year I can see that this guy has so much potential if we just took him and we gave him a company gave him his own studio gave him his own team this guy would produce a project that would you know really advance the industry that he's working in because he's just you know he's got that in him you can just tell from people and they got that in them this guy has it but the problem is is that he's stuck in the system he's working within a studio system and there he has to deal with the you know the corporate higher-ups and all the finance people the business people and yadda yadda yadda he has a lot of red tape it has to work through and that red tape is suffocating him and it's not letting his greatest talents and abilities come forth even though he's still doing a good job there and you know he rather enjoys working there to an extent um but to me I you know I listen to him and I just think to myself man what could this guy accomplish if he just had the tools and the know-how and he really went out there on his own and kind of uh went all-in I call that going all-in when you just decide to say you know what [ __ ] it [ __ ] the traditional system I'm going to go carve my own path in life and yes that's dangerous yes that's risky but that's where the coolest [ __ ] happens that's where you can really make a difference in the world that's where you can earn your greatness because there you have to be a true leader and you can't rely on these systems anymore and that's scary to do that'll scare the [ __ ] out of you if you really consider doing that in your life but here's what I told them I told them this if you have more ambition and a larger vision than everyone around you then that means you have to be the leader the leader in a very kind of like deep and it fascinating sense when you study leadership what you discover is that leadership is not just someone who stands up and assumes power or takes power or someone who has the most money and therefore becomes the leader of the of the tribe or the company or the country it kind of seems like that might be the way it works but actually it doesn't what happens is that leadership is driven by evolutionary forces and the person with the greatest vision and with the most ambition that's the person who naturally rises to the top and becomes the leader because that's the person that others can rally around they can rally around his vision so if you're in a job right now or in a career right now where you honestly feel that you have a greater vision for the company or for the industry or for the project then your boss does or then you're you know Board of Trustees does then that's a sign from the universe that you've got that muse inside of you've got a gift to share with the world and what I want to tell you is that it's your responsibility to honor that because not everyone has this some people listening to this to this episode this might not apply to them at all they might not have this ambition I'm specifically talking to people who do have this ambition or a semblance of it right usually it starts off as just a little like intuition a little hunch little clue a little bit of passion that you have it not might be well formed and you might not have any idea how to actually make it real but something is there something is pushing you forward and if you don't realize that then a part of you is going to die and your whole life is going to be much less than it should be you're not really gonna live a fulfilling life if you do that so he who has the greatest vision is the leader and if that is you then you must position yourself as the leader now this doesn't mean that you go depose your boss or start a fight with your board of trustees or whatever sometimes it means that you have to leave the organization that you're in what I felt like when I was in Boston is that I felt like I was a small fish in a small pond but that I was destined to grow into a huge whale of a fish that would be bigger than the pond so what that meant for me is that [ __ ] I mean yes right now I can still swim in this little pond because I'm still a little like a fish I don't have that much experience yet but I can already see that I'm growing fast like really fast because I'm ambitious so that means I got to jump into a much bigger pond ideal I gotta like go into unlimited boundless ocean of opportunities where I am completely at the helm directing myself and that's what I ended up doing and it's paid off enormous Lee for me in ways that I couldn't have even even anticipated back at a time right but that was a very scary thing to do not easy and it was risky and who knows maybe I just got lucky and things worked out for me in a sense I did have some good luck but also I like to think that I did apply principles and I did apply hard work to the problem you know and I did work for it so there's kind of an element of both of those in there but either way you're you are taken risk when you do that because you're going into uncharted waters and who knows what lurks in those uncharted waters maybe there's a Leviathan there that will gobble you up but if you are this type of ambitious person what I'll tell you is that you need to stop waiting for permission you need to stop with the false modesty you know that false modesty where you say to yourself oh well maybe my ideas aren't so good after all oh well maybe I need to like wait a little bit more time bide my time maybe my boss does know more than me maybe I should just take a backseat to him that sort of thing you have to stop that you have to honor your news you don't need to bide and do more time in the corporate system that's not what you need what you need is you need to go off on your own and release yourself from all the red tape so that you could do it your way the way you envision it not the way the status quo the entrenched system envisions it because if you're working within that system you're going to be handicapped for your entire career and that's going to be frustrating and gnawing at you for your entire career because you know that if only people did it your way then the world would really change then the industry would really change then something beautiful would really materialize well if that's the case go fight for that you have to fight for it it's not going to happen spontaneously it's not going to come easy it's going to come with a real fight a real battle and that's why you have to steel yourself and take on the challenge of being the warrior be the warrior in life make that choice that's a choice you make that's not something that just kind of spontaneously happens or falls on your lap you have to make that choice if you have gifts inside of you some talent some vision some higher ideal that you could be fighting for and you don't share that with the world not only are you robbing yourself but you're robbing the whole world of those gifts you have to do that you have to fight for that so stop holding yourself back stop playing small and start thinking real hard about the highest leverage thing you can do it I'm going to tell you what that is right now the highest leverage that a person like you can the highest leverage action that a person like you can take is to position yourself to share your gifts now that's an abstract thing I'm telling you to do position yourself to share your gifts sounds like well Leo that sounds nice but how do I do that yes you got to go and figure out how to do that for every one of you it's going to be different because your gifts are different and because your position in life is already different so you're starting from place and you get from A to Z and how you're going to get there who knows you can't even predict it let alone me try to predict it for you but what you need to do is you need to like sear this idea into your mind right this high-level abstract idea that what I should be doing every single day of my life until it's complete is finding a way to position myself so I can share my gifts so that there's no more red tape around me so I'm totally liberated to do what I need to do to let this news come forth that should be your number one priority in life that should be the thing that you're spending all your time thinking about when you're waking up in the morning you should be thinking about it when you're brushing your teeth you should be thinking about it when you're in the shower you should be thinking about it when you're on the toilet you should be thinking about it when you're eating your lunch you should be thinking about it when you're doing some menial job for your boss you should be thinking about it when you're having dinner think about it when you're watching television be thinking about it when you're going to bed think about it it's this thinking process that generates new ideas and that's exactly what you need is you need some powerful new ideas about how you could position yourself maybe for you this means going to start your own business maybe for you this means selling your house and moving to a third world country and then working from there maybe for you this means telling your boss to go [ __ ] himself maybe for you this means some you know some other alternative I don't know there's many alternatives depends on what kind of gifts you got to share for me what it meant is that I have to go off and start my own business just so that I can raise the money that I need to then start the next business which will be the one that's actually right for me so my first business wasn't designed to be the one it was designed to be a stepping stone to the one and that's exactly how I used it although it was a lot more difficult in practice than I make it sound here because what happens I took that first stepping stone and it's really hard to say no to a successful business once you've already got it which is something that I had to wean myself off of so I can go on to the next thing right because as they say the enemy of the great is the good and that's what was happening here but I did say no and eventually I went off and I started actualized already and that was for me where all of this was leading to but when I first started this journey I had no idea I didn't even know about personal development when I started my first business and I had no idea that eventually that would lead me to starting actualized I don't know idea and that's part of the beauty of life and the beauty of taking on this journey is that you get to discover even cooler things that you can imagine right now because once you move to the next stepping-stone and the next one your horizon expands and all of a sudden you can see even cooler goals and even cooler possibilities for yourself so what I want you to do right now is I want you to imagine the payoff if what you do is you position yourself to share your greatest gifts what would the payoff of that be in your life think about that can you picture that ten years from now twenty years what's going to be the payoff and here's key question that I want to give you and by the way this thing that I'm asking you to think about about the payoff this is something you should be thinking about constantly not just once while watching this video but like constantly you need to be like psyching yourself up in this you need to be stewing and marinating the juices of this some amazing this vision for the for your future you got to be doing this and here's a key question that you should probably spend some time really thinking deep on what could I accomplish if I went all out what could I accomplish if I went all out because I can pretty much guarantee that right now you're not going all out what if that ambition you had one of those greatest gifts that you had what if you shared them fully with the world what would happen then what if you expanded yourself what if you decided to transform yourself transform your entire identity in the direction of this one cause of this one goal or purpose this one ambition that you have if you became the vehicle for that and you pushed it all the way through to its fullest possibility what would happen would that lead to a cool life would you rather be living that kind of life or the kind of life you're living now or you're settling and you're letting the system guide you remember that the system is not designed to guide you greatness the system is designed for the average unambitious human being who's just stumbling his way through life in a herd of sheep being one of those sheep and that whole herd is going to walk off a cliff in the very end that's what the average person is doing that's what the system is designed for the system is not yet designed for the higher virtues of life the system is not designed to promote beauty and truth and excellence and elegance and love and artistry the system is not designed for this so if you want to tap into that and that's the most beautiful thing you can tap into in life I think is that those higher virtues you have to do that on your own you have to chart your own course you can't follow someone else you can't rely on anyone elses course right that has to be self driven self-motivated and if you're one of those rare individuals that has an inkling of that a seed of it within you then I'm really excited about helping you to unleash that out into the world that's really the whole point of actualized org all these different topics that I cover from relationships to how to be happier how to overcome your depression really for me all of it is about this and the whole point of building up a powerful psychology and a powerful personal life is not so that you enjoy a cushy life I don't care about you enjoying a cushy life what I care about you doing is going out there and finding that thing that you're going to fight for making you a warrior and your personal life should only be as good as it needs to be to empower your fighting abilities in this cause that's what I'm interested in and I think that the most important element to all of that is life purpose if you don't articulate very clearly what your life purpose is and what exactly you're shooting for and you don't align that with your top values and your top gifts if you don't even know what your top gifts are then you've gotten really no chance no chance of succeeding here it's going to be very difficult even after you identify your life purpose but until you do you've really got no chance you're just stumbling around in the dark and so much of your ambitions are going to be leaked out into empty space it's going to just going to radiate like heat and you're never going to be able to get it back again and that's a frustrating feeling so that's why I worked really really hard on this life purpose course the ultimate life purpose course I just released it I'm real excited about it because I think there's so much possibility there if I can find those people out there that have that seed of ambition in them and then get them to realize all these amazing psychological principles very deep and profound principles that if you start to apply those to that seed what it is it's like taking an acorn planting it and then watering it every single day and you water it and water it and water and use you soak it in these up juicy principles and what happens is that it starts to grow you see it growing and at first it's just like a little seedling and then a little sapling and then it grows bigger and bigger over here and then all of a sudden you know before you know in a couple of years in five years and ten years it's just giant magnificent oak tree and people come up to it and they look around and they see it's a this is amazing it's this huge oak tree where did it come from well it all came from that seed and it came from this watering process that you apply to it every single day very methodically um and that's what I'm excited to do in my own life that's what I'm currently doing in my own life and I'm really excited to share that process with you because I I know that once you once you get a taste of that you see how amazing life becomes when you are growing this oak tree you are that oak tree right if life is miserable or frustrating for you it's because what you are is you're an oak tree but you're planted inside this little pot and you never receive any water or any sunlight and so what you are is you're like this little wilted stunted little one-foot oak tree that should be a 30 or a 50 foot oak tree so I think it all starts with life purpose and that's why this ultimate life purpose course was really designed to do is designed to help you to figure out what your greatest gifts are what your greatest values are what your greatest strengths are as a human being what you actually want out of life because you got to be very clear on all that but then what I talk about is also very practically okay how do we take all those things which are very abstract and ethereal and start to actually get you taking action on them so that you could go out there and carve your own path in life and that's not just about techniques a lot of that is about instilling you with mindsets that can make you self-sufficient and ground it right because when you're off in the woods hacking through the dark woods with a machete what you're going to discover is that there's no one there covering your back you got to do it all yourself and when you're doubting yourself or you're feeling afraid or you know you think it's not possible or maybe you think you've lost your way that's when you need these principles kicking in that's what you need that self-sufficiency that backbone which is what I help you to develop in this course right and that backbone is grounded in timeless classic psychological principles many of which are counterintuitive and many of which we were never ever taught not in school not by our parents not by our employers because by and large again the system all of that is the system the system is not designed to grow you into this giant oak tree the system is designed to grow little saplings many many many of them millions and billions little saplings but not to get that sapling to grow into its full potential that takes work from you that takes a concerted effort a battle from you a choice to go on that journey because if you don't make that choice you're never going to go all right that's it if you're just a course go ahead check it out there's gonna be links down below or at the end of this video so you can find it on actualize that org um what I want to leave you with is just again this idea that if you're ambitious you owe it to yourself to fight for that ambition to be unleashed see you soon all right this is Leo I'm signing off post your comments down below click the like button and share this video with a friend you