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hey this is Leo for actualised already and in this video I'm going to talk about open-mindedness alright let's talk about open-mindedness what does this mean and what does this have to really do with anything how is this pertinent to your life well this is actually a video that I've been very very excited to shoot and I really want to actually make this video very powerful because to me open-mindedness is I would say one of the most important personal characteristics that you need to cultivate to be good at personal development let me go a little bit into the backstory of this why this is important and then we're going to talk about how this applies really directly to your life and why if you're not extremely open-minded that you're not getting the results that you should be in your life it's really hampering your growth so we need to open you up the more we open you up the more we can grow you faster it's like an accelerator for your growth as a human being alright so how does this how does this actually work what's the connection for me personally this is one of my biggest strengths you know I've done a lot of thinking over over the years about what are my strengths as a human being you know what am I really here for what's my purpose and all this other stuff and what I really discovered is that one of the strengths that I just naturally have for whatever reason I was maybe born with it or whatever is I have a very very open mind like it's very very difficult to offend me and I'm very curious about lots of different perspectives and ideas now why is this important for personal development well for me I think I've gotten some abnormal results for personal development in the last five years much more abnormal than most people like I've gotten some pretty extraordinary salts I've been able to create my own business and become financially independent my business over the last four or five years has generated over a million dollars in revenue and that was all pretty much passive income I was able to quit my job and work for myself for the last five years which has been amazing I've really worked on my nutrition I used to be 65 pounds overweight that handled I've really worked on my fitness going to the gym working out hard weightlifting I know it looks skinny now but I used to be actually pretty good at weightlifting until I had other priorities that I'm now focusing on what else food addiction getting totally unhooked from food addiction relationships with women I was so so so bad at attracting women keeping women finding a girlfriend I had to work really really hard to figure that stuff out so these are just like some of the examples and the reason I'm saying this is because you know I look around I have friends I have other people that I know and I just don't see them getting these kinds of results and the reason that they're not getting them isn't really because I'm that special it's simply that I think that I have this personality characteristic that's unique that I don't really see in other people what I see other people doing is I see other people getting very easily offended at different perspectives and different ideas and what happens is that they grow up they you're open to certain environments certain culture certain family then they go to college they get certain conditioning and influences there and added colors again to work and then they kind of just get stuck right by that point it's like a freight train it's got so much momentum that it's just like going and going going and if you want to change this trajectory it's very difficult and that person might be stuck in some sort of way of thinking with his beliefs and his perspectives and as kind of opinions about life and then that person is very hard - very hard to develop I mean how do you improve your life for me to improve my life in all these different areas with business with health and food with relationships with improving my own thinking patterns all this stuff took incredible open mindedness because where I start from when I do my development is I start here and then I look up and I see oh I need to go way up there and I need to see it like the next level up but see most people they're not willing to even see that level their ego won't let them because to see this other level you have to have a certain like foresight you have to say wait a minute I could be wrong here my beliefs could be limiting me in some way I could be holding myself back I could be ignorant in this situation what I could totally suck in this field that I'm trying to master or develop right you have to be able to be like brutally honest with yourself and to me that was very important from childhood like I I made like a really firm like commitment that I would never ever be dishonest with myself with myself right you cannot be dishonest with yourself because if you can't be honest with yourself then how are you gonna grow how are you gonna spot your own faults see it's not gonna happen I'm almost like super super honest with my own faults sometimes that backfires on me but in the end I think it's really been important for me to grow and to get my results right you guys want results what I'm telling you if you want results talking about all this stuff is nice but if you're not willing to open your mind and take a look at radically different perspectives from what is in your life right now then you are going to stay stuck I mean very radically different see I see people getting easily offended all the time and to me this is a both laughable it's it's funny but it's also very sad it's funny to me because as I think it's very shallow it's extremely egotistical to get offended at anything there's no reason that you should be getting offended at anything and and because for me like it's very easy to see why that's happening and I'm gonna take you through the mechanics of that in a minute of what's actually going on there it's not what it seems like but it's also sad to me because I know that because that person gets so offended so easily that they are avoiding exactly those things that are going to promote their growth because what they're getting offended at are the things that their ego doesn't want to admit to them to itself so it's bullshitting yourself I see people bullshitting themselves all the time and then actually what they do is they project it back out onto other people so you yourself and then what happens is that you don't tell yourself that you're bullshitting what you have to do then is that your mind has to go through all these contortions bending over backwards to accuse other people of all sorts of wrongdoing you can get angry at people you can get depressed you can play the victim you can post nasty comments you can say nasty things you can sign petitions and you can start rallies and revolutions and you can do all of that simply to avoid looking at yourself being honest with yourself looking within because it's so inconvenient for you it's so uncomfortable well to me when I was when I was really young just for whatever reasons I said that you know what I'm never gonna myself at least not consciously I'm gonna say very very vigilant to that and then it served me extremely extremely well because what that means is that I will find flaws within myself and it doesn't matter how painful it is I don't care how much it hurts my ego I'm willing to look inside you need to be the same way if you're not this way then your progress is gonna be very slow and at some point you're gonna hit a ceiling you're just gonna hit a ceiling because there's maybe certain things that you're not willing to acknowledge within yourself and you're not willing to take responsibility for very very important now actually this idea of getting easily offended this is funny to me and very interesting because I think that this is actually a very powerful gauge of your personal development level here's how it works this is like a law of personal development and some of you might not believe it but here's how it is is the degree to which you get easily offended or offended at all is the degree to which you're not well developed as a human being so if you take this to its maximum conclusion then a completely self developed human being if one even exists but someone who is extremely well personally developed right someone who really understands themselves that person will never get offended at anything no offending will happen to him or her I'm gonna tell you why that is to understand that let's take a look at what are some of the things that people easily get offended by well people easily get offended by topics like religion and politics oh man religion religion is huge people get so easily offended when you badmouth their religion or questioned their religion or say something that's heretical according to their scriptures or their religious views right any other perspective they're not willing to consider and in fact any other perspective they perceive as being threatening to their faith that is hugely hugely crippling to their life that shows complete closed mindedness so that's that's everything that you need to be against if you're trying to become self actualized and personally developed the next is you know people get people get offended by things like murder rape racism now these sound like very negative things and I don't wanna come off as saying like well these are nice things these are negative things and I'm not in any way condoning them but it's one thing that there are bad things it's another thing that you get easily offended by them a lot of people will get easily offended by it and what that actually is is a defense mechanism because they're not acknowledging certain things within themselves sex that's another one people get so easily offended by sex I was just posting a video about how to improve your sex life with a girl how to make a girl squirt and I got a lot of people posting offensive not offensive but comments that they were offended and it was funny to me because you could just see that someone's mine is closing closing down closing down closing down it's like shutting down to what's out there in the world how about criticism of your work a lot of people get offended when someone criticizes their work in any sort of way so as anything negative or even just like giving a positive constructive criticism so many people are bad at taking constructive criticism for this reason their ego can't handle it how about things like comments about how you look how you dress someone tells you that they don't like your hair they don't like your your shoes they don't like your jacket or they think that you're overweight or they think they're underweight or something like that a lot of people get offended by that for obvious reasons you understand why that happens I mean like I don't feel I don't feel good when someone makes a negative remark about my physical appearance either but then again I'm not completely personally developed so I get offended at things but much less so than most people and the reason is because I'm very open minded I don't care if it hurts my ego to me that's good see this is where most people get it wrong they think that if it hurts their ego that it's bad they don't even see it that it's their ego that's really functioning here and that's what's really happening is that the reason that you're getting easily offended at any one of these things or any other millions of other things is that your ego it has a certain worldview right in your brain literally as you're growing up you're constructing a worldview a model of how you think the world is and works this includes many of your beliefs many of your your preferences in life maybe your many of your various like cherished cherished cultural ideas all this stuff gets loved together it creates this mental model now you're running a long life and you're using this mental model to look at everything and this is a highly distorted perspective on reality but let's say that's the case and so you're just going through life and everything's fine but then what happens is that you come across something some fact out in the world that disturbs your mental model it rubs it the wrong way because your mental model can't cope with that fact it doesn't fit there's a cognitive dissonance going on and so when that happens there's really two choices you can either admit that wait a minute my mental model could be wrong how could I really mental model to adopt that new that new fact that was presented or you could do the opposite and you can say my mental model is completely right that fact is wrong something is wrong with that something is wrong with reality with the outer world and so you point the finger out there this is what 95% of people do is that they don't have the intellectual honesty and rigor and open-mindedness to say you know what I'm gonna take the responsibility for all these various facts that are coming in and I'm always willing to adopt mine to adapt my own mental model to fit the new facts this is really kind of a scientific perspective to living your life that's what science is about science is about just taking what is and working with it and then being comfortable admitting that it's wrong and taking on new facts and assimilating new facts and new facts and new facts and over time what happens is that that builds and builds and builds until finally you get a very very accurate like scary accurate picture of reality through scientific laws and all the stuff that we discover through the sciences now the opposite of that really is religion where religion entrenches itself its dogmatic it says no this is the way it is damn the facts damn the facts that I matter what's out there this is the way it is that's how you get someone like Galileo almost getting burned mistake and living the rest of his life in house arrest because the because the church the Catholic Church didn't want didn't want to admit that there was there's problems in their model their mental model about how the universe and astrology and and the planets are moving right that whole structure of how the the cosmos works just didn't work for them because Galileo's model was so radical from their model and of course they don't want to change their model they don't wanna admit that they're wrong so what do they do they burn the guy at the stake or they put them in house arrest you know there's if you're student of history you see numerous examples this is actually very scary and it's actually good to be a student of history here because when you are a student of history then you start to see what is going on here and how closed mindedness has has really robbed humanity of its great greatness and potential and this is due this is happening not just on a global societal scale but it's also happening within you personally because it all all societies are constructed out of people so this is happening because you are being closed-minded and this is very very important to drive home here is that you have to open your mind up because all that's happening is that your mental model it wants to stay the way it is there's kind of a biological natural impulse to to stay there but the better approach to life is to always be expanding and opening it up being willing to take that pain to me it's not even a pain anymore it's like a pleasure when I see a new fact that I don't understand a new perspective that's totally radical for me to me it's like oh Dan that's like that's cool a new chance to go out there and adopt my adapt my model to fit that new fact whereas most people would be like no damn that like that guy is stupid they would get angry at him or curse them or insult him or just say something negative and like criticize and judge see you want to avoid that if you live that type of life then you're gonna get stuck I mean how can you not get stuck because you're cutting off facts from your own mental model this creates an inaccurate mental model and it means you have to go around and you have to always constantly be protecting your model you have to fight for it see a secure person a really open-minded person doesn't need to feel like they need to fight that's why someone can come and criticize it work okay whatever and he goes on doing his work he doesn't need to fight for it someone comes in and tells him some new perspective on sex or politics or religion that might be very radically different from what he believes and he's like oh you know what yeah maybe that's true maybe there's actually something there she doesn't get offended even though it's very different someone comes and tells him something negative about himself tells them that he's fat or that he's he's wearing bad shoes or something like that criticizes his style of dress the person's like yeah okay maybe maybe so what right it's like so what why do you need to be threatened and fighting all the time see a dogmatic person is very easy to see them dogmatic person will pull out the pitchfork as soon as something comes up that threatens them someone says something about them something says some sort of little truth you know I leave comment little someone makes a little side comment at you and it seems innocent but then you recognize it there's like a really deep element of truth to it and you get offended and then you can get like bring out your pitchfork and defend yourself see like that's that's an adversarial relationship with reality with life instead of doing that why don't you just say okay yeah maybe there's something there let me look inward let me see because it might not be very comfortable right in the moment but you know what if I keep this process happening it's gonna be like a scientific process running on myself I'm gonna get better and better and better over time and this is what personal development is is its growth its gradual growth so each little offensive thing that happens to you that's actually an opportunity for you to grow but you need to see that if you're always defending yourself if you're finding that you have to do this then what that really shows it doesn't show that you're you're trying to really defend something it doesn't show that you're a crusader see a lot of times people will say well I'm a crusader for my religion I defend my religion I need to defend my Pope my political party I need to defend my culture that's not really what's happening that's actually complete what's happening is that you're defending your own mental weakness that's all that's happening and then you're coming up with excuses it's your ego you need to really see through that whole illusion it's your ego that's there and it's like it's like the puppet master pulling the strings and you're just like the little puppet that's doing whatever the ego is saying just so that the ego can feel a little bit more comfortable and all that is showing is that the ego is actually extremely fragile for you your worldview is extremely fragile that means that any little thing can come in there and disturb it but with a very open-minded person with a very developed person that's not the case they have a very robust mental model of the world and one of the one of the key features of that mental model that they have is that they could be wrong always always always they admit that they could be wrong they could be mistaken they could be deluded they could be tricking themselves because they know how tricky the mind is they know how powerful the ego is they're not immune to the ego the ego is working on them but they admit right they admit that they could be wrong which is important because the other type of person the close bond does have a person will never do that and in fact what they'll do is they'll come back at you and say well what if you're wrong what if you're wrong let me worry about whether I'm wrong see an open-minded person always takes that burden and that responsibility on himself I am constantly second-guessing my theories my models my understanding of reality constantly never mind saying this is the way it is and I've spent in an ordinate ridiculous crazy amount of time building my models very methodically much more so than other people so if I'm doing that and I'm still doubtful about certain things how doubtful must most people be who aren't spending hundreds thousands of hours researching this stuff studying philosophy and science and religion and and personal development they should be much much much more doubtful except they're usually much much more dogmatic and certain that they're right and of course all that is is that it's their ego protecting the fragility of their system so this is actually a very very good way to gauge someone's personal development is just you know toss them a little toss a little sarcasm a little comment try to rub them a little a little bit the wrong way and see how easy do they get angry how easy do they get upset how easily do they get offended because if they do you can quickly tell that they're not really self developed at all their mental model is very very fragile and you do not want to be that person because that person is very limited in life and they're going to run around along that track just automatically unconsciously running along that track and it's gonna be very hard for them to grow in all the areas in life that they need to grow in order to become calm and happy and successful and peaceful in life so the conclusion here is that take responsibility for your own offenses use them as vehicles to promote your own growth and really really value open-mindedness if you are a student of personal development and you want to go far in this open-mindedness this is the key characteristic that you have to develop and cultivate within yourself all right this is Leo I'm signing off go ahead post me your comments down below please like this please share it and of course come check out actualized org sign up to my newsletter I'm releasing new free content every single week exclusive articles videos other goodies that I have planned I have a lot of research that I'm doing and I'm gonna be bringing lots of new stuff to you what I'm doing here is I'm helping you to develop a very very robust mental model of your life and of reality a kind of model that will allow you to create whatever you want in your life from money to relationships to an awesome career passion energy all that stuff to get to it the best ways to get to it is to have accurate mindsets correct models understanding the stuff then you know how to act in what to do that's why I'm so passionate about making models that's why I'm so passionate about studying all this stuff because to me there was no way that I can get all the results that I've gotten unless I did this I had to kind of like bootstrap myself and I found a lot of very very powerful mindsets and I want to share all those with you and I want to keep you on track with your own dreams and your own goals so that you are gonna accomplish them and actually realize that I don't like just talking about this stuff I like seeing it happen in your life in my life like I want to actually see the results and I want you to see the results I want to prove to yourself right so sign up and I will help keep you on track you