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hey this is Leo for actualised org and I want to talk about your greatest demon and by extension also my greatest demon as an example that we can generalize here across many different cases so what do I mean I think every one of us has at least one major demon that we're dealing with something that keeps plaguing us something that keeps haunting us from the past what is that for me for me what it was is reconciling business and the concerns of business and trying to make a profit with business and reconciling that with upholding higher value such as creativity or beauty and trying to get those two to reconcile because when I got into my first career which was game design there was this this big tension at least in my mind between the fact that on the one hand I see these beautiful projects that I could be working on and creating if only I had the capital to do it if only I had the autonomy to create a freedom to go out there and do it if I only had the power so for me I always felt like it was a real shame that there's this beauty out there that could be created but the means to create it you have to go and really dig around the muck to get the beauty out of it because you have to go in and deal with real-life business matters you have to deal with money problems scheduling problems hiring people firing people all that stuff that you don't want to deal with if you're a creative artist you just want to focus on like the beauty of your craft well you have to do it because you can't create the beauty unless you've got the funding for it especially with games that's not something you can really do individually it's something that you do in a large team environment so you need to to really get the capital down and get the business side down in the marketing side down and a lot of times what happens is in that process the business side of the marketing side and the money actually takes over and it's like the the value of beauty that you were after in the first place it gets sacrificed and where it should be the highest value and the money and the business and the marketing should be serving that like propping it up what happens is that there's an inversion and you get the business and you get the money and the beauty is like it's somewhere down below like you lose you lose sight of the excellence of the product that you're trying to create because it's all focused on cutting corners to make more money or it's about the profitability of the company or how that project fits into the larger schedule that for example a publicly traded company has because they're not publishing one game they're publishing hundreds of games so they need to make sure that that one game fits into their overall scheme of producing a certain return for the stockholder or whatever other objectives they may have and so for me that was always like oh that was like a dagger in my heart when I saw the business side overtaking the artistic side like that was literally dagger in my heart and that's why I quit the industry is because I didn't want to be a part of that to me that was just totally out of integrity for me and I think that actually that's a big problem in a lot of creative businesses is that you can get this inversion going and that you need to really put in a lot of a lot of emotional labor and willpower to make sure to stay vigilant and make sure that that that that inversion doesn't take place so for me that was one of my biggest demons and what I did at that time is I kind of I said you know what I'm gonna quit I'm not gonna I'm not gonna put up with this and so I went off and I did my own thing with internet marketing and there I didn't have the problem I kind of skirted the problem because with internet marketing either what I saw no Beauty and I saw no creativity in it for me it was just a means to make money and so okay that was that but the problem was that I really kind of ran away from from the problem I didn't really fix the problem because the problem in large part stays in your mind it's a mental ship that you have to make right these demons that we have they're internal demons and as I'm talking about this you might be saying well how does this apply to me well first of all if you're creative have a person I'm sure you can find a direct correlation between what I'm talking about and the problems that you face at work and with your clients with your business whatever but also this applies to other demons that you might have whether you have demons about your health or you have some demon from the past about not being able to to get the kind of relationship that you want being unlovable or whatever that might be or maybe some kind of demon that you have about about how how you're using money how you're hoarding money or how you're spending it too too liberally or maybe a demon about about family or something in the past from your from your family life and how that maybe is impacting your family now how you're raising your kids whatever that might be the point here being is that sometimes we get these choices where we can run away from our demons and we can kind of ignore them where we can sweep them under the drug and you know I'm not gonna say that you should never do that sometimes you have to do that because you are not strong enough to face that demon and sometimes your mind and your body recognize that that you're just not strong enough to face it and then you have to go away and you have to build up your strength go into training mode train yourself up and then come back and face it you know Joseph Campbell and is a hero with a thousand faces he talks about the hero's journey and that's really what each one of us is going through is this hero's journey and on this hero's journey the hero has some ideal that he's fighting for but he's faced with obstacles and Joseph Campbell's calls them threshold Guardians and these are the things that you run up against that are really like serious roadblocks and make you seriously doubt whether you're going to be able to go through on on whatever it is that you were trying to try to achieve and so that roadblock that threshold guardian can take the shape of many different things it could be lack of finances running out of money when you're starting a business or it could be that that killer craving for chocolate that you get or ice cream when you're on on like a 30-day diet and you're trying to maintain a clean diet for 30 days and then on that last day you get that big craving and you can't resist and you succumb to it right that's a threshold Guardian that's keeping you from from achieving your weight goal or maybe you've got some sort of Guardian threshold Guardian with with people maybe there's a person in your life that's holding you back or maybe there's someone in your life telling you that you can't if your parents told you that you can't do that you can't do this you're not capable you're not going to be smart enough you don't have the skills you're too crazy it's too risky so maybe there's someone just feeding you with disempowering beliefs and different disempowering thoughts and so you have to somehow counter counteract a circumvent that in order to get through otherwise you're gonna stay stuck so we always have these kind of moments and you know you don't know if you can surmount that threshold not always will you surmount it sometimes you get defeated by that Guardian and what you do is you have to go back kind of lick lick your wounds rethink your approach train yourself up and then go back and try it again or maybe there's an alternate path that you can take that's what I kind of did is I went on an alternate path but you got to realize and this is what I just realized today is that like now is this like this thing is cropping creeping back up for me because now I'm starting a new business with this personal development stuff that I'm doing with actualised org and I'm starting to see again this tension because now this is something again that I really care about so I see the beauty in it and higher-value here is to produce amazing content and just if I could just like produce amazing content and have it spread itself like that would be awesome I could focus all my energy on that and that would be upholding this like pristine ideal value of beauty and excellence that I'm going for on the other hand then I see the nitty-gritty of what has to happen for that beauty to actually shine through for these videos to go out there and to become popular and become successful in to the site to become profitable and sustainable for that to happen I have to worry about the marketing side and the business side and lately what I've been doing is I've been focusing so much on the marketing side the business side and starting to get the same worries that I was getting five years ago when I was getting into game design it's the same problem basically creeping back up because I never really dealt with it in the first place I just kind of changed directions so now I'm running up against it here because now it's like well if I'm putting all my time into the marketing that in the business I might have to cut corners and sacrificing the quality of what I'm producing I don't want to do that that would be an inversion of what I'm going after on the other hand I can't just be focusing only on on the beauty of the quality of the product because you can create an amazing product and nobody is going to know about it and I don't want that to happen I've been down down that road before the past various projects so I recognize the importance of the marketing it's making that thing balance out that's tricky and I'm starting to realize this is something I still have to work through internally because no matter where I'm gonna go even if I quit this endeavor and I go do something else I can see that because I do have this value of upholding beauty and excellence and producing really high quality material it's always gonna be a problem no matter where I go no matter what business or career I'm in there's always gonna be problems and then the kind of nitty-gritty get your hands in the mud aspects of business and marketing that I'm have to deal with there's gonna be money issues I have to deal with there's gonna be maybe hiring issues partnering up with other people and getting relationships into place all of that and I need to figure that out for myself so that's something I'm still working on that's one of my biggest demons so in conclusion what I want for you is to take this example and say what can I draw from this and what is your biggest demon right now think about that and think about where you've been avoiding it and sometimes it's okay to avoid it but you don't want to avoid it for too long or you don't want to turn away from it too many times you have to avoid strategically if there's a strategic reason for you to avoid something right now then that's fine but I don't want you to use that as an excuse and to just like settle into your comfort zone now and say that you're never going to come back to it because chances are that this thing is gonna come back and it's gonna bite you in the ass again and again and again and if you think that just because right now you can stick your hand head in the sand like an ostrich that you can do that for the rest of your life no you're not gonna be able to do that at least you're not gonna be able to do that and stay fulfilled at any kind of reasonable level you're not going to be happy because you're going to know that you're out of integrity with what you want to pursue I think this is one of the challenges of living to your full potential and living a really charged kind of life is that you have to tackle these obstacles sometimes they're really big and they require real mental shifts real changes to your mental reality model of the world because you have a mental model of how you think the world works how things should be how your values are and that that thing is gonna have to change you're gonna literally have to evolve into a new you your ego is gonna have to take some bruises to get you to that next level and I don't want you to be putting that off too long because sometimes you tend to put it off and then you sweep it under the rug for too long it becomes really difficult you procrastinate on it and you'd lose years of your life not living the kind of life that you want not getting the kind of results that you want right and you're really kidding yourself if you think they're gonna have a happy life if you're going to just forget about that if you're just going to brush it under the rug it's not gonna happen it's not it's gonna happen is it you're gonna keep keeping your head against the wall again and again and again and again maybe let's say let's say it didn't figure this problem out with with the business and the beauty thing if I didn't figure that out right now then I would probably really hurt my business and then eventually maybe I would quit the business and then maybe a few years later I would have to like start a new business or go work for somebody else or do whatever to to make money and eventually I would run into that same problem again and so I would have wasted a couple of years killed a good project by avoiding that and that would be me kidding myself because right now it's kind of easy to say I you know I can just like put that off I don't need to deal with it but no I have to deal with it to move on to the next level for me so I want you to figure out what is it that you need to deal with that can get you to the next level for you and get really serious with yourself see yourself I want you to picture this like fast-forward 10 20 years and picture yourself hitting your head against that wall again and again and again I guess is this problem you're doing it because you didn't fix it and so stack up all the pain that you're gonna get from that and all the potential that you're sacrificing and leaving on the table over the course of the next 10 20 years and weigh that against the pain of dealing with this problem right now right the pain of 10 to 20 years is gonna be much larger when you add it all up than just nipping this thing in the butt right now so deal with it now if you can if you're in this position of strength and you're feeling relatively comfortable right now go ahead and do it fix it so that it doesn't keep haunting you and then you're advancing to the next level and then you're gonna feel amazing you're gonna be giving your gifts are gonna be sharing what you what your potential is and then you're probably gonna have some other demon that's gonna crop up after that but don't worry about that now focus on slang one demon one threshold guardian at a time all right mrs. Leah I'm gonna sign off go ahead post your comments I love hearing from you guys especially on this topic this one's really fascinating to me and share this and like it please I want this content to spread that's why I release it for free and then of course go to actualised org for more videos and articles just like this one and also sign up to the free newsletter you