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[Music] all right i got a new meditation technique for you it's a very simple very effective meditation technique it's somewhat counter-intuitive and it builds upon a previous episode that i released about satisfaction the title of that episode is the root solution to people pleasing and loneliness so a lot of people like that episode and some people even asked after that episode like how do i embody that how do i practice just being satisfied alone by myself not needing any kind of external validation or stimulation for my source of happiness so this meditation is really a companion to that episode you could think of this as a part two i wanted to do this episode separately because this is going to be hands-on and it's not going to be a bunch of theory here we're going to get into actually doing it it's going to be sort of i'm going to try to keep this short and sweet so but just to set us up here for the practice the point of this meditation is to take back your control of that reward mechanism that we talked about in that episode so usually for your happiness you're relying upon rewards from somebody else somebody loving you or having some sort of external material conditions go your way whether it's sex money or some material possession that you want to acquire or other people giving you praise things like that and so what we want to do is we want to develop a practice of just literally sitting and being without doing anything and just basking remember that idea of basking in the present moment and just being deeply satisfied with it and that's it it's literally that simple but of course the trick is that you have to practice it and the trick is that your mind doesn't like just being satisfied with existing with being with existence your mind wants something more your mind wants to do stuff your mind wants to think stuff you want your mind wants to fantasize it has ambitions it has fears and problems that it wants to turn away on endlessly and uh all of that takes your happiness away it robs you of your natural joy so let's do the practice right now are you ready set aside all your distractions set aside a good 10 minutes to do this practice with me here i'm going to guide you through it and give you some pointers all right so set away all distractions and let's practice this so the idea is that you're just going to sit there with your eyes open and you're not going to try to manipulate or control anything in your experience you're just going to sit there you're not going to try to stop thoughts or trying to achieve any kind of awakened enlightened state or any kind of mystical experience or anything like that you're just gonna sit and you're going to fully be satisfied allow yourself to be satisfied with this present moment and that's it can you do that try it right now i'm going to try doing it along with you here so what you should notice is that as you're actually doing this it's a little bit of a shift it's a subtle shift in your awareness whereas normally your mind wants to think about the future or go into the past to bring up problems because our problems exist either in the past or in the future we lose touch with the beauty and the calm and the peace that is present right now and we take what's here right now for granted we overlook its beauty because it's not relevant to our survival plans and goals and problems so make that subtle shift of bringing your awareness into the present right now and sort of proactively start to appreciate the present so if there's one thing you're doing in this meditation and i'm going to be calling this the satisfaction meditation if there's one thing that you're really doing the only thing you're doing is you're nudging yourself gently nudging yourself to be satisfied with just this so just try to nudge yourself to be satisfied with just this right here what might help you is just to notice if there's just a sort of a a positive joyful feeling in your body of maybe comfort if you're sitting comfortably you can actually find some joy and satisfaction in that although of course don't hinge your satisfaction on that feeling of comfort because if you sit there for long enough you might become uncomfortable and you still want to be fundamentally satisfied so basically what we're trying to get you to do is just be satisfied with existing just with existing and furthermore now when you start to get a little bit of satisfaction don't get me wrong it's not going to be some sort of ecstatic pleasure that you're in here we're not seeking for ecstatic pleasure just satisfaction it's like ah this is nice it's just nice to just sit and to be peaceful and to not have to be chasing anything or thinking about anything or trying to solve something with your mind or trying to reach some sort of enlightened state or attempting to be spiritual or mystical forget all that drop all that let that go for now you can do that later and during this moment this period for 10 or 20 minutes you're going to be doing this meditation you're just going to be satisfied and you're just going to focus on that satisfaction so actually hone your mind into that feeling of satisfaction and as you do that what you're going to do is you're going to almost create like a sort of a positive feedback loop where your consciousness of the satisfaction will start to feed on itself by noticing the satisfaction and by focusing on it you'll sort of be satisfied with the satisfaction so to speak and that will build on itself and so just allow that to build just sit there and become ever more deeply satisfied for me how that feels when i'm sitting here being satisfied it's like there's a satisfaction in not having to do anything and then the more i focus on that the more satisfying that becomes just not having to do anything and then it's just a matter of staying within that satisfaction for as long as you can and try to keep your mind there because your mind will want to wander your mind will tend to wander off into your problems or the to-do list for tomorrow that you got at work or how the satisfaction stuff is just a waste of time and it's not doing anything productive your mind will get very sneaky and tricky and it'll it'll try to break you out of the satisfaction you might start getting ideas like well wouldn't it be nicer wouldn't this moment be improved if i had some sex on top of it or if i had some drugs on top of it or if i had a mystical experience on top of this or if um my friends were here and we were partying right so your mind is going to be imagining sort of like better scenarios than the present moment and as long as you're gonna be doing that and you're gonna be falling prey to those fantasies then you're not gonna be satisfied so you have to let those go and just be satisfied with this don't want anything other than this what's here stop trying to chase for a better experience so do this right now as i'm talking and try to refine your ability to do this it takes some practice now if you practice this consistently and for long periods of time eventually what will happen is that that satisfaction can turn into a into a very deep satisfaction and pleasure and ultimately even bliss and it can turn into love too why love well because if you're properly doing this then what you'll start to notice is you'll just start to fall in love with existence itself you'll just fall in love with being conscious of being conscious of being conscious of your satisfaction of being conscious of existence just the love of existing that's ultimately what it all boils down to that's the that's the rock bottom of this practice is just a love for existence itself see ordinarily we ignore that as we go about surviving in the world we lose touch with just the joy of existing because we're trying to solve something we're trying to chase something down we're trying to improve how existence feels well in this case we're not trying to improve anything we're just existing and we're just being conscious of our existence and we're taking satisfaction in that and it's a it's not a deep ecstatic pleasure it's just a mild form of satisfaction at first but if you do this for hours and hours and days and weeks and months and years you can train that up and build it up into actually ecstatic levels of joy but don't expect that and don't go chasing for it so one of the things that i like about this satisfaction meditation as we're going to call it from now on is that personally for me one of the things that i get hung up on when i try to meditate is that i have this tendency to want to chase some sort of mystical experience and this really with my meditation especially if you've done psychedelics you know the kinds of amazing crazy high states of consciousness that are possible but that are not accessible to you right now and so when you're meditating or you're doing yoga or something you're it's sort of like there's a tendency to want to like you're sitting there anticipating okay when is my enlightenment going to happen or when am i going to reach that mystical experience when is something cool going to happen and that trips you up because that's a future oriented sort of fantasy that you're trying to reach and usually you never reach it so uh what helps me to override that tendency that interferes with my meditation is to just focus on being satisfied so in the past i would meditate in order to achieve something really when i meditated in the past i would be meditating towards enlightenment towards awakening towards a mystical experience and while of course you can do it that way um it can also cause interference and become counterproductive because then you're looking towards the future and really what you want is you want to be more present and it also becomes frustrating because you can sit there and meditate for an hour not reach your enlightenment not reach your awakening not have your mystical experience and then you feel bad after that hour because it's over and then you're like ah damn nothing happened this sucks i'm just wasting my time like how can i speed this up what am i doing wrong how can i meditate better and see then meditation just becomes another sort of means to some end not an end in itself so what we're doing here is we're sort of we're turning it inwards and kind of circling it back around so that the meditation is its own end so you're not meditating to get somewhere meditation is just satisfaction in this case see because if you're trying to chase some higher state with your meditation that always ensures that you're never going to be satisfied with the majority of meditation can you see that because the very definition of unhappiness and or dissatisfaction is that there's something in your mind that you imagine you should have but that you don't currently have and you'll only be happy once you get it that ensures you're going to be unhappy until you get that thing so the counter-intuitive move here is to short-circuit that whole thing and just to say why can't i just be satisfied right now and then actually practice that turn that into a practice almost like a challenge you set for yourself it's like how satisfied can i be with nothing special how satisfied can i be with just raw existence as it is without needing to change it and this turns out to be true happiness true happiness is nothing other than being satisfied with exactly what is happening right now whatever that might be that's the root of happiness any other definition of happiness involves you chasing some future state which means that you're going to be actually unhappy so how does this connect with people pleasing and with loneliness as we've talked about in that previous episode well with people pleasing you're not satisfied with how things are you need people to give you approval or love and so you tend to do a lot of work for other people to get their praise and to please them and that's become an addiction for you and so of course you're never satisfied even when you do get the praise it doesn't last and it doesn't deeply fulfill you so the solution that to that is to do this practice and just to ground yourself in just being satisfied just with existence and then when it comes to loneliness it's a similar situation with loneliness in a sense what you're doing is you're imagining that this moment could be improved by having more people around you people to talk to to be intimate with to share experiences with and so forth and while that's fine there's nothing wrong with that per se if you do this practice of just being satisfied just sitting there and existing then what you'll notice during that period when you're doing this practice is that you're not lonely you're alone but you're not lonely because you're just satisfied with existence and you don't need anything more and then of course so see you can turn this into a formal practice where you sit down and do this for 20 minutes a day or 60 minutes a day however long you want you can do an entire week-long retreat just sitting and being satisfied and nothing else regardless then when you go out into the world and you're doing stuff by yourself maybe you go traveling you go drive somewhere you go to a restaurant whatever you're doing see after a while you build up that muscle and now you could just be satisfied you can sort of apply that satisfaction meditation into real life situations even when you're standing in line at the grocery store it's a long line maybe there's some problem with the cash register so it takes a while you're standing for five minutes waiting ordinarily you just sort of be pissed off and annoyed why this thing is not happening faster but if you're doing this practice you can just sort of stand there and just let that go and just kind of go into your satisfaction meditation and just be satisfied standing there in line and if you find yourself alone in a situation you can also be satisfied just with that with being alone now be careful i'm not suggesting that this is a license to become a recluse and never to socialize and never be to be intimate with other people that would be a mistake i'm simply saying that you develop this skill this capacity for deep satisfaction which helps you to be non-needy and detached and then during other parts of your day and of your life you can go out and you can socialize be with people and so on and that will actually deepen the satisfaction you get from those instances when you do socialize so i want to warn you here it's very important when you're practicing the satisfaction meditation that you don't secretly try to use it to achieve a mystical state or enlightenment it's like yeah i'm doing this practice i'm trying to be satisfied but leah where's my awakening it didn't happen if you've still got that sort of lingering attitude somewhere in the back of your mind you're not doing it right you got to let that go just be satisfied now you might say well leo but if i'm just sitting here satisfied and that's all my meditation is then sort of will i ever reach my enlightenment and my awakening well i mean there's no guarantees really no meditation can guarantee that you ever will there's no guarantee that if you push for enlightenment and awakening that you'll get it either and in fact what you'll notice if you have done a lot of pushing is that it you notice how counterproductive that can be so if you've done meditations where you've sat for months and for years pushing pushing pushing hour after hour after hour and it still hasn't happened for you or it happens very infrequently for you then um obviously your method isn't working so maybe it's not working because counterintuitively that pushing is actually sabotaging your ability to be in the present moment because you're you're chasing you're chasing some future fantasy which is not what awakening is so counter-intuitively when you let go of the chasing it might seem like oh well now i'm not being as productive spiritually speaking but see if you make spirituality about being productive that is already a corruption of what spirituality is spirituality really is just the ability to to be satisfied with whatever is and to be conscious of it and to cultivate your love for existence itself that is not some future state you got to achieve that's something you got to practice right now that's what this meditation is helping you to do now you might say well leo but what if i can't be satisfied right now well the challenge is to try at first your mind might resist it might say well i can't be satisfied because i have a project due tomorrow i got to take care of the kids i got to pay the bills i got to reach my enlightenment or whatever and therefore i can't be satisfied well the whole trick here is that you have to notice that those are tricks of your mind you have to let those go just let those go remember my episode that i released a few years ago called the power of letting go go watch that one because that comes in handy here you have to let go of that just let go of needing things to be different and just allow yourself to be satisfied with what's here right now and focus your attention on that satisfaction itself and enjoy that satisfaction so really what's powerful about this meditation unlike other meditations is that when i do other meditations the problem that i run into is that i start doing the meditation but i don't actually enjoy the meditation i'm doing it as a mechanical technique which i usually don't like i find it boring or i'm doing it because i told myself that i have to do it because eventually it's going to lead to my enlightenment or something or it's going to lead to happiness in the future but i'm not happy when i'm doing it and so then it becomes difficult to sustain the practice because it always feels like a chore it feels like i'm some it's something that i'm doing for the future to get some kind of result that i think i'll want that will make me happy and that becomes counterproductive so what's nice about this satisfaction meditation is that the whole point of it is that you have to be happy now so it's just about practicing being happy right now you're not trying to be happy for some other purpose but just to be happy in a sense you can frame it like this for yourself in your mind like if you truly are sitting here right now and you allow yourself to be happy and satisfied do you even need enlightenment do you even need a mystical experience i mean in in the end what more do you want but satisfaction isn't that what you imagine you would get if you were enlightened or had your mystical experience or whatever why are you chasing these experiences because you want to be satisfied and you believe they will satisfy you well let's short circuit that and just go straight to the satisfaction you don't need to jump through all these hoops just go straight to satisfaction and be satisfied and so if you practice this you will notice that there is a bit of a subtle shift in that before when you meditated you didn't really enjoy it but now when you meditate it's subtle but now you actually enjoy it it's not a chore and it's not a grind and then you actually look forward to this portion of your day where you will sit and just be happy for the next 30 minutes of course for many of us this is this is harder than it sounds because our minds are geared in such a way after you know 20 30 40 50 years of survival that has gone ingrained in our minds our minds are so geared now that we don't even allow ourselves to be happy for no reason because in a sense that's counterproductive to survival if we take some hot shot millionaire or ceo or wall street type of person and we tell him to just sit for 30 minutes and just be happy what is going to be his most common objection to that he's going to say something like but that's just a that's just a waste of time if i can be happy doing nothing then how can i keep doing the stuff that i do on wall street or with my business or why would i be chasing millions of dollars that's going to rob me of my motivation for doing all that activity and that's exactly right but the counterintuitive part is that that's not a bad thing that's a good thing that's actually what you want because all that activity that you're doing on wall street and with the millions with your business and all that has it really made you happy no it's just led to an endless treadmill of chasing chasing chasing and if you keep that up you're gonna waste your whole life chasing stuff and never being satisfied so when are you going to wise up and realize that that's not going to work something fundamentally different needs to happen so it's when you realize that that then maybe you'll be open to the satisfaction meditation you'll actually start practicing it and you're only going to be doing it for 20 30 minutes at first maybe an hour the rest of your day you can go about being productive and doing stuff and chasing stuff but during this short period of your day you're just going to allow yourself to be satisfied and then you'll see that as you practice this and get better at it it will have a spillover effect into other areas of your life it will make you happier by definition because you're directly going to the source of happiness itself and then if you really practice it intensely it can turn into a deep joy bliss and love you can just become so satisfied with sitting in the present moment not needing anything feeling like the present moment is complete that it can start to bring tears to your eyes just it's a kind of joy that most people uh easily overlook because it's not like a a sharp peak in pleasure it's not like a drug high or an orgasm it's just like a a very moderate but even keeled steady rock solid contentment and what you realize after a lot of years in your life spent chasing peaks by partying by drinking by having lots of orgasms by masturbating by doing drugs by eating fancy food and owning fancy cars and earning millions of dollars in the stock market by doing all these things and having these big payoffs you know gambling and winning jackpots all these are these are sort of dopamine peaks and they always crash and they always lead to dissatisfaction because you can't sustain those peaks that's a trick of your mind a fantasy to think that you can sustain those peaks you can't there's not enough winnings you can do on wall street or at the casino to sustain those peaks and in fact there's actually uh some scientific evidence behind this they've done research and there's actually two different reward systems in your brain your imaginary brain two different reward systems there's a dopamine circuit which rewards you for sharp changes positive changes in your survival situation like if you stumble upon a thousand dollars on the sidewalk that's going to spike your dopamine but then that's very a short-lasting thing it'll get spiked you'll feel very happy for the next day or two and then you'll drop back down this is the case with lottery winnings with jackpots with big payoffs and victories in business with finding a new romantic partner these are all basically dopamine spikes with drugs of course and then there's a separate totally different reward circuit in your mind in your brain that rewards you for um it's not it's not a spike it's just a an even keel sort of satisfaction that you experience and that's the circuit that you're developing when you're practicing this satisfaction meditation the satisfaction meditation is not dopamine based and most of us have gotten addicted to the dopamine hit even if we're not doing drugs when you're people-pleasing that's a dopamine hit when you're socializing with your friends that's a dopamine hit but when you're just sitting there satisfied and you feel complete with the present moment that's something else and that can be sustained that can last and also that can be amplified by by sort of creating a positive feedback loop where it feeds into itself and then that can be brought up and taken beyond just mere contentment to actual states of bliss and joy and love but that takes quite a bit of practice so start practicing it's very simple uh in fact it's so simple that most people will overlook it and dismiss it and just pooh-pooh it as like oh well that's some sort of you know silly hippie stuff what i want is the real tangible results in life but and you think that that's you being smart no that's actually you being stupid that's not gonna work if it worked that's what i would be teaching you but it doesn't work and of course if you're not convinced of that then spend the next five or ten years of your life trying desperately chasing those dopamine peaks and you'll realize it doesn't work and also you can read the literature on how dopamine works when you read it they've done animal studies they've done studies on humans entire books have been written about this sort of dopamine hit stuff there's a lot of good research on it these days what you'll realize is that it can't possibly work because that's not how the dopamine system is is geared that's not what it's designed for the dopamine system is designed to keep you chasing a carrot on a stick that you will never reach you know how they hold up that carrot on a stick in front of a donkey and the donkey keeps chasing it forever never reaching the carrot that's kind of like what you're doing with dopamine that's what the dopamine circuit is for so no wonder most people are not satisfied in life because they don't actually practice satisfaction and nobody taught them the difference between these different kinds of you know reward circuits that exist and the fact that you have to actually build up your ability to be satisfied with just being an existing that's a muscle that is atrophied from most people especially these days because you know video games movies youtube videos viral content comedy drama vr games porn all of this stuff this all provides dopamine hits gambling loot boxes beating somebody in a first person online shooter like fortnight this gives you dopamine hits and it doesn't last that's why you always are looking for the next game no video game has ever satisfied you in your life you play it for a week or two and then you're on to the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one so when are you going to learn your lesson when are you going to wise up you see you need some sort of root solution to this happiness problem otherwise you're going to always be unhappy now even though i say this this does not mean that you will sit on your ass for the rest of your life and do nothing i still recommend that you go out there and you work on your business work on your finances don't be a slouch develop a strong work ethic and so forth develop relationships if you want them most probably need them to feel sad to feel you know deeply satisfied with life um you can do all those things but that needs to be the icing on the cake not the cake itself the cake itself is this practice here and then you're going to try to carry it over into all those other domains so that when you go to a park you can really be at the park and enjoy the beauty of that park for those 30 minutes that you're there you can be satisfied at the park because see if you don't cultivate this satisfaction muscle at all your situation can get so bad that even when you're in beautiful and extraordinary situations you will take them for granted and still be unsatisfied have you ever experienced that i'm sure you have i've experienced it sometimes you know the situation is perfect like maybe you're left you're with your romantic partner and you two are sitting on a mountaintop and there's a beautiful sunset and you know you've spent the whole day hiking up up to the mountaintop you're gonna plan to be there for the sunset and here it is the sunset is happening it's only gonna last for the next 10 minutes you know sunsets don't last very long and you're sitting there with him or her and it's like the perfect moment the weather is perfect the sun is perfect the timing is perfect the person is perfect but you're still not happy think of a time when that happened to you everything is perfect but you're still not happy and when you're in that situation it's like a double dose of unhappiness because you're unhappy but you know the situation is perfect and that you should be happy and so now you're unhappy that you're unhappy and so you're double unhappy because then you start to sort of wonder and almost go into this mode of fear where it's like well if i can't be happy when all the stars are aligned for me what chance do i have to be happy at all ever because this is as good as it gets as far as the stars aligning because they're not going to stay aligned forever and then you're just going to become even less happy see so that's when it gets real bad and that's actually when a lot of people will kill themselves or get really depressed is when everything is going perfectly and they're still not able to be satisfied and then they're kind of puzzled as to like well why is this and then they they think like well it's going to be this way forever i'm going to be depressed forever now because nothing will make me happy well that's because nothing can make you happy other than your own self the only thing that can make you happy is training up your satisfaction muscle to the point where you're just satisfied with existence you've fallen into the trap of trying to arrange existence in such a way that it pleases you that's the key trap stop trying to do that so much you can do a little bit of that you know like if you're if you're homeless on the street obviously you got to take care of some of your affairs so that you can have shelter and then that's fine nothing wrong with that but but that quickly leads to diminishing returns and then spirituality is really just about developing that satisfaction muscle with the present moment and then carrying that over into every moment of your life as much as you can you're going to fail at it a lot it's going to take a lot of practice but as you practice this over years and decades you'll become more content with life you'll become more at peace and then if you do this seriously you should start to experience some mystical states and even some satoris and awakenings as you just sit there not even chasing for them not even wanting them but they will start to automatically happen to you simply because you're fully surrendered to the present moment and the present moment is absolute truth this is god this is spirit right here it's just a matter of becoming more conscious of it and also see it's really hard to reach a deep mystical state or an awakening when you don't enjoy the process because it does take hundreds of hours sometimes thousands of hours of sitting and just being present in order to reach those so how do you plan to to keep that up if you're not enjoying the process so that's another tip that i have for you with your meditation practice regardless of what meditation practice you're doing or how you frame it in your mind whether it's the do nothing technique or the counting your breaths or whatever you're doing try to enjoy it enjoy the process that's crucial don't lose sight of that if you're starting to regret it and grind through it and hate it then that's a signal that you're doing it wrong adjust your method reframe how you're thinking about this meditation practice in such a way that you can enjoy it and then try to bask in that enjoyment for as much as you can because in the end if your spiritual practice isn't aligned with joy and satisfaction of existence then there's something deeply askew there can you see that spirituality is not supposed to be this grind and in general i would also i would broaden that lesson out beyond merely meditation practice to the entire process of self-actualization and personal development and really even work as well like in the past when i did work my paradigm was just work grind through the work suck it up and achieve the result that was my paradigm a lot through school and through college and then beyond that for the next 10 years really that's how i worked it was not a healthy not a very functional way i mean i accomplished a lot of stuff but it was not a very functional and it's not ultimately a sustainable way to work what you want to do with your work with your business and with other areas of your life with your personal development too is you want to enjoy the process make the changes that you need to make to your work to your business to your relationships to your family life and to your personal development to the way that you read books for example to the way that you listen to videos such that you enjoy it see you can there's two different ways you can go about watching my videos at least at least two one is you can get in your mind like oh i've stumbled upon this gold mine of information from leo it's like hundreds of hours of content now i gotta sit through all of it because it's all important wisdom and stuff and it's important to my life and i'm just gonna grind through it even though these videos are long and complicated i gotta take notes on it and so you can turn it into this grind and you can turn personal development into this grind where it's always about like i'm not good enough i got to become better i got to become more spiritual i got to be have a higher self-esteem i got to have less fear i got to be more loving i got to be more self-accepting and i got to be nicer to people and so it's like i got to do all these things but then you don't feel good about yourself because you feel like you're so below all these targets and ideals that you got to be hitting and you might be below it for years and you might try to grind through my videos in this in this fashion or what you can do is you can actually slow down and see the problem is that when you're grinding through something you tend to want to speed through it because it's a grind and you don't enjoy it so you want to get it over faster right like you want to get get done with work so you can go off and relax and enjoy yourself so there's that paradigm and then there's the other paradigm which is actually how can i change my work so i can do it in such a way where i actually enjoy it and then i don't need to be looking at the clock and waiting to punch out and to go do something i enjoy how can i enjoy what i'm already doing that might mean you have to really change your whole attitude towards work or towards your family life or towards personal development or towards watching my videos watch my videos in a way where you can actually enjoy it because in the long run you're going to watch a lot more of my videos if you actually enjoy them maybe that means going in a slower pace rather than burning through one video a day maybe you do one a week but you actually enjoy it you take time to pause to contemplate to think when you do that when you slow down and you really get in the rhythm with with a thing you go into flow and when you go into flow you lose all sense of yourself and it becomes effortless whatever you're doing becomes effortless when you're in flow you don't put a lot of expectations on it you don't put a lot of demands upon results and so forth you just go into flow but if you're very results oriented and you put demands on everything schedules and rules and uh even like with reading a book there's a way to read a book where it's enjoyable and there's a way to read a book where it's a grind uh i don't think i've ever shared the story but like about 10 years ago when i first got into personal development i very much had this achievement oriented mindset where it's like how can i develop myself as quickly as possible to hell with how it feels let me just you know achieve as much as i can in this field and then one of the reason one of the ways i thought i would do that is by learning to speed read so i got a speed reading book and i started going through the speed reading exercises and i thought to myself my plan was like oh what if i can master speed reading and i can improve my rate of reading by like tenfold i can read ten times as many books as i would normally read and think about over the next ten years if i could read ten times more books how many books you know hundreds thousands of books i would read and i convinced myself that this was a good idea and so i grinded through about a month of this speed reading practice it was like every day i had to practice speed reading for like 30 or 40 minutes or something doing these exercises they were tedious exercise that i really didn't enjoy doing and i was grinding it and grinding it for four weeks and then eventually it hit me the grind became so bad that it hit me like why am i doing this this is so stupid um i would much rather just read slow and normal and enjoy what i'm reading rather than speeding reading through stuff and then worrying about whether i remembered it correctly or understood it correctly because i'm going too fast trying to achieve something trying to get to the end of the book counting how many words per minute i'm reading at how many pages like this this is this is all actually keeping me from going into flow and so to this day i read pretty slowly but it doesn't really matter because the point is not to read x number of books in your life the point is to enjoy life if you have to read half as many books but enjoy it twice as much that's a win take the victory right stop living your life towards some sort of arbitrary numerical metrics like dollars in your bank account or number of cars you own or um how many books you've read i used to have this mindset where it's all about quantifying everything this is a very left-brained dysfunctional sort of stage orange approach to life and it doesn't lead to satisfaction numbers don't satisfy you unless maybe you're a mathematician numbers won't satisfy you and even for mathematicians numbers won't satisfy you in the in the ultimate sense so this is all food for thought uh and in general i want you to contemplate more deeply what happiness is you need to contemplate that if you ever want to be happy if you can't clearly articulate to yourself what happiness is how can you ever be happy and most people can't and it's not enough for you to believe what i say about happiness you have to actually for yourself derive what happiness is because happiness is not a belief it's not an ideology so what is it well contemplate and figure it out for yourself through direct experience notice what happiness is when are you happy when are you not happy and what is causing that notice that and as you're practicing this meditation here this will help you in differentiating between authentic happiness versus these dopamine peaks of pleasure see that's two very different things make that crucial distinction don't get fooled by these dopamine peaks as though that's authentic happiness it's not those peaks that create suffering so another way to frame the question is is there a form of happiness that doesn't create a downward shift into dissatisfaction after it ends and if you do the satisfaction meditation maybe you'll discover that that's what this is that's what this is pointing you towards all right that's it so go practice that and post below in the comments how you feel all right i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website on the website you will find resources you will find my book list there are books there about happiness what kind of things make you happy and what kind of things don't happiness is a very counterintuitive thing you want to read some books on it and study it and in the future i'll post some books actually the reason i'm talking about dopamine right now is because i've actually been reading a book listening to an audiobook about dopamine and i'll add that to my book list in the future i've already done 10 updates to my book list and i keep doing more like on a on a yearly basis so that's coming um you can also find my life purpose course that will also help you to find satisfaction in your life what's unique about the life purpose when you find your life purpose and you set your life on track with your life purpose is that again the life purpose doesn't trigger dopamine hits the way that most other activities in life do the life purpose when you're following it it actually triggers this other reward mechanism similar to the satisfaction meditation so it leads to a deep contentment with your life so check that out as well that'll help you you can also check out my blog link down below in the description you can check out the forum sign up on the forum ask questions on the forum i answer lots of questions there's other people who answer questions there you can support me at patreon.com actualized and check out my second channel called actualizedclips with short 10 minute or less clips of my main videos making it easier for you to digest and to share so this episode now gives you a practice that you can do for the previous episode about people pleasing and about loneliness so the connection i want you to make here is that a lot of times i will talk about some abstract high level idea or topic like i did in the people pleasing and loneliness episode and i give you a few practices there but not a very tangible practice and then in this episode i gave you very tangible practice so what you need to do with all of my episodes because i'm not going to do all this for you is you need to take ownership of this situation of personal development and you need to develop practical techniques for implementing all of the high-level big picture abstract ideas that i talk about sometimes i give those techniques to you but a lot of times i don't don't just sit there and expect me to spoon feed you all the techniques i expect you to take ownership of that problem because you're going to have to because leo is not going to be there for you guiding you every place in your life with personal development you have to develop the capacity to stand on your own two legs when it comes to personal development which means you should be able to read a book or an online article or listen to a video whether it's from me or from somebody else or listen to some guru talking about some insight and it can be just a short abstract insight and then you need the ability to take that inside and say aha that's the insight that's the big picture idea that's the abstraction now how do i turn that abstraction into something i can implement in my life so that i can embody it so i can practice it and then brainstorm some different methods and then try them out and see which ones work and which ones don't this skill of going from the abstract to the concrete is crucial and many of you are lacking it it's crucial that you develop it and so this is a case of you know that old saying of um don't give a man a fish teach him how to fish that's the difference if i was giving you all the techniques it would almost be too easy i would be giving you fish but not teaching you how to fish so if you really want to get the most out of my work and videos then it's not enough for you just to sit there and listen passively as you cook your food or do your laundry or whatever or drive in your car that's good you can start there but then at the end of the video you gotta like pause take a few minutes with a sheet of paper just sit down and ask ask yourself okay so he talked about some high level ideas and some insights and some profound wisdom and stuff he gave me a model he gave me a theory it's just some philosophy it's some metaphysical stuff it's some epistemic stuff but then how do i make it practical in my life how do i implement this and then brainstorm some different ways and then start doing those and then that's where the results come from the results don't come from just listening to me idly so beware of that trap and stay tuned for more you