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hey this is Leo for actualised org and we're continuing on with my blueprint series over 100 of the greatest personal development concepts of all time distilled from over $100,000 of all the personal development material books and seminars that I've studied and continued study so the concept that we're covering in this video is called information intake what is it why is it important and then let's get into the body what is it this concept simply means that if you want to be successful and really fulfilled in your life then you got to watch out for what kind of information you're taking in to your body and to your brain specifically so what kind of information are you feeding yourself are you feeding yourself high-grade information or low-grade information most people out there are feeding themselves low-grade information from sources like TV tabloids newspapers internet bloggers and columns gossip these sorts of sources these are bad sources so you gotta watch out for where your information is coming from that's what this concept is as far as why it's important well hopefully you can tell that if you're going to be feeding yourself bad information then you're not going to be able to get good output from your system think of yourself as a system you're a mind and your body and just like if you feed yourself low-grade food you're gonna get low grade performance physically the same is gonna happen with your mind if you want to be out there and you want to be a creative person and I don't mean just creative in a sense of artistic been the larger sense of creative I mean creative creating an awesome life for yourself and of course also being creative at work and going world-class and doing something really powerful with your life to be creating an awesome life you need good source material because the the old maxim is true garbage in garbage out and that's why it's really important to watch the sources of information in your life for me personally this has been a really important principle that I've implemented and I actually got this idea from Steven Chandler's book a hundred ways to motivate yourself highly recommend that one so let's get into the body of this and I really want to start by reading a quote and the quote is this the world of people goes up and down and people go up and down with their world warriors have no business following the ups and downs of their fellow men love that and that's from Carlos Castaneda and his book The Wheel of Time it's actually a really powerful book where he talks about the difference between the layman and the warrior and he has this idea of being a warrior or a shaman and that warriors act differently they have a certain purpose that they're driven by and that they live more detached from the world and they live detached from the affairs of the everyday man and so that's really why I think information intake is important is because really number one the biggest problem is that when you're taking in low-grade information it makes you reactive and low consciousness and that's the exact opposite of what we want for you because if you want to create an exciting awesome life then you need all the high consciousness that you can get I know personally for me I'm very very particular about what kind of information I let into my system into my mind into my environment I don't want any low grade sources of information you know why because we already live in a fairly negative social environment the media is negative the people that we hang around with unless you're hanging out with an exceptional social circle they tend to be negative friends family coworkers those can be negative sources always you know second-guessing you doubting you giving you reasons for why you can't accomplish something or flat-out giving you false information false beliefs reinforcing false beliefs keeping you in your comfort zone so this is what negative information does for you right and it also makes you fearful it makes you scarcity based thinking that there's not enough to go around and so when you're inundated with all this type of information all this evidence your mind tends to capitulate after a while it says you know what they're right I should be afraid of this I should be afraid of the economy going bad and I should be afraid of World War 3 and I should be afraid of a zombie apocalypse and I should be afraid of losing my relationship and I should be afraid of starting a new business because now it's not a good environment and I should be afraid of going and doing something exciting and new and traveling someplace so all these things kind of keep you in your box and that's what you want to avoid with negative or low-grade information as I like to call it so specifically what do we really mean here by low-grade that simply means cut out television cut out cable news cut out traditional newspapers cut out tabloids Facebook Twitter gossip from your friends pessimistic friends if you're hanging around a lot of pessimistic people in your social circle you're socializing with pessimistic people cut that out and then of course mindless internet browsing and I'm sure that there's other sources of negative information out there but that's a pretty good list to start with make sure that you eliminate those or at least watch your your exposure to them because well quite frankly a lot of those sources are very very negative and very limiting and you don't want to be limited by those beliefs personally myself I don't want to be I don't want to be letting any sorts of information or beliefs or facts into my into my consciousness into my awareness that's gonna be limiting my potential so for me I'm looking for high quality sources of information and what are those well high quality source information in the abstract is gonna include things that are true accurate holistic complex ideas these are going to be scientific psychological or artistic in nature the advice and the information is going to be actionable something that's not idle philosophy it's gonna be thought-provoking it's going to be high consciousness it's going to be positive it's gonna be empowering it's gonna be uplifting and it's gonna have some vision to it it's gonna be motivating it's gonna be inspiring these are the kind of sources of information that I want so that's in the abstract what you're looking for but you know where do you go and find this stuff so specifically high quality books seminars workshops a bunch of different information products right now we're kind of in the information product era where there's literally an information product out there on almost any part of life that you want to master whether it's relationships or learning how to be better at Photoshop learning a language learning how to start a business anything you want and even within each of those categories there's information products that are very very specific to specific types of issues and problems that you're facing and of course it could also be artistic things right going to a museum and seeing great art or going on on a trip to the Grand Canyon and seeing something beautiful and inspirational there so it doesn't just have to be straight self-help advice type of stuff it can also be that artistic stuff but make sure that it's higher quality right just consider the difference between going to a museum for for your Saturday off go into a museum and seeing some nice art or going to the zoo and seeing some some beautiful nature some animals they're seeing that versus spending that time browsing random blogs on the internet or looking at your Facebook feed or watching TV all day or watching the news getting stuck in one of those marathon news watching sessions I've been there so just consider the difference and consider what happens to you psychologically when you're always immersed in the negative versus this empowering stuff that I'm talking about when you're immersed in the negative then you go into a low consciousness state right your mind shuts off you become comfortable you also get reinforced with all these ideas about all the problems that are out there in the world and you start to feel bad about prospects you start to feel bad about your prospects you start to feel about about society's prospects the world's progress prospects whereas when you're reading or immersing yourself in this empowering positive type of information then all of a sudden you're you're optimistic you have a vision for what you could be you have a new vision for what society could be you have a new vision for what the future of humanity can be and that's really awesome and it also makes you think right a lot of the stuff if you're reading the right type of information that it's going to be thought-provoking it's going to be inspirational it's gonna teach you more about yourself teach you more about the world and of course we want it to be accurate and objective we don't want disinformation so that's basically the rundown of good versus bad types of information personally for me how this has worked is that I've really over the last I'd say four years since I really learned about this idea I took it to heart and this was one of the first self-development principles that I really started to implement very consciously because I thought that he made a lot of sense and I was very very I'm an analytical type of guy and I like to read a lot of stuff and it made sense to me that I should really start to make a shift because I was already reading some things that were good but I still had a lot of sources of negative information like I was watching tons of cable TV I was watching a lot of news I was watching a lot of political shows and those can just be so negative and so low consciousness that they're the exact opposite of what I wanted for myself and I knew that if I wanted to be this living this awesome kind of life where I was living a high consciousness kind of life then I needed to shift that balance and I should replace all those negative sources with positive sources so really it's just a process of replacement and this is not too hard to do cut out TV replace TV with reading books replace TV with watching if you like to watch stuff start watching shows that at least are making you think that at least have some artistic merit to them you know watch the Discovery Channel if you're gonna watch TV watch something like the Discovery Channel or the History Channel instead of reality TV or cable news right at least start with that shift and then once you make that shift maybe you can progress from Discovery Channel to something even more like I like to progress and I progress to watching the teaching company lectures which is an awesome resource of college lectures that you can basically watch on DVD on all sorts of topics science history psychology math whatever you're interested in you could find amazing topics on it and then you can watch those instead of TV so a really good way to do that news some people might dispute me here on news and say that well isn't news given making you more worldly is it isn't it making you more aware of what's happening out there in the world and kind of educating you and you could say that in some sense it's nice to listen to the news now and again to be aware of what's happening in the world you know if there's a new war going on you probably want to know about it if somebody gets elected or unelected you want to know about that some catastrophe happens maybe learning about that but I would actually say that you're better erring on the side of caution not watching any news at all I haven't watched news in about three or four years at all like nothing I don't care about it at all what you start to notice is that it's really not a problem if something big does come up your friends will come and tell you about it you'll hear about it through the grapevine but what I've also noticed is that it's really nice to take your mind off of it because even when there are calamities and important things happening in the world the fact is that you want to be able to focus on things that you're creating think of yourself as a creator in your life your creative force and all the attention that you're using thinking about something that you have no effect on then that's you wasting your resources those resources could be put better to whatever it is that you're specifically doing in your life right if there's a war in Iraq or if somebody gets elected to office or there's some scandal my involvement in that is quite limited so I think that unless you have a direct tie a causal there's a causal chain between what you're doing and the event that's being broadcast then you really have no business immersing yourself in it even knowing about it if it's that important you'll hear about it through the grapevine but for example some war in Iraq unless I'm in the military to me that's not my business my business is to focus on what I'm doing and that's a really powerful shift to make so go ahead and really think about whether the news that you're watching is really doing you that much good and if you're still skeptical about outdoors you to do a 30-day challenge where you totally cut yourself off from the news and then actually see don't make this a philosophical argument see it do it try it and see if it actually gets you better results I can guarantee you that it will because you're gonna focus that energy towards something much more productive it's gonna get you more to the high consciousness level that you want to be at all right so that's kind of what I did is I I weeded myself off of cable news I we did it myself off of paper news any sorts of news cable television totally I don't own cable anymore if you told me that five years ago I would say that you're nuts that I did this but I made that shift I've made that transition because it was important to me and now I slowly immerse myself more into books in two lectures on and DVDs and documentaries and selectively watching movies not through cable because the problem of cable is that you can always get hooked on it but I do it very selectively I'll pick the movies that I want to watch but generally I do a lot less of that and now I'm doing more reading and getting high-quality information there so that's basically it the prescription here is really to be very mindful of the kind of information that you're getting right and we talked about media but also it bears repeating that you can also get negative information from the people around you depending on how social you are I'm not that social person so for me that's not a big issue but if you are very social be mindful of that be mindful of the kind of people you're hanging around with at work be mindful the kind of people that you're hanging around with in your social circle when you're going out at night or whatever it is you're doing your your friends and you know what if you've got very pessimistic friends that are limiting you or you've got family members that are really limiting you in the kind of information that are feeding you then you might want to consider cutting them off or having a heart-to-heart with them or at least spending less time with them or doing something to make sure that that information is not seeping into your consciousness and dragging you down because that can be a very negative source as well all right what you're going to find if you do this is you're gonna find that it becomes easier to actually do personal development it becomes easier to stay up stay up on your goals it becomes easier to live a high consciousness life because if you're always dragged down for example right now if I had cable TV in the house if I was always looking at newspapers if I had a circle of negative friends and I had an addiction to Facebook and Twitter and internet browsing if I was doing all that stuff you'd be very hard for me to live a charged kind of life I could not be creating the business that I'm creating I could not be out there studying the kind of stuff that I'm studying and I could not be having the kind of influence I want to have and for me when I imagine the kind of ideal life that I'm living ten years from now none of those things that I just mentioned are in it I just don't have time for it they're not valuable enough and they're ruining my state of consciousness instead I see myself reading amazing books and talking with amazing people joining mastermind groups of people that are really smart people that are really positive and people that are out there and achieving something with their life rather than looking at a cable news political show about people just point fingers at each other and blaming each other and saying how terrible the world is and how everything is going hell right so think about where you want to be and think about the goals that you have ultimately and what your highest vision is for yourself and do you see yourself really having room in that kind of life and that kind of vision is there room for cable TV is there room for news is a room for Twitter is there room for for pessimistic friends probably not all right so I'm gonna leave you here go ahead and do a little bit of analysis reflect on your life and then commit to making some changes commit to doing something to shifting that balance so you've got more of the positive and less of the negative right because we don't want you to be reactive we don't want you to be reacting to the world we want you to be influencing the world yourself all right so I'm signing off go ahead and post your comments I want to hear about how this topic and this concept has played a part in your life and what kind of changes you're going to make also if you like it go ahead and share this like it make sure that it spreads around I love to to have this material available for free so that means I wanted to spread as far as I can so they can helps most people all right this is Leo signing off you