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a Leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about setting proper expectations for success [Music] this episode here is a cornerstone of success if you don't understand this topic about setting proper expectations I guarantee you you're going to be frustrated and you're not going to be able to seed in many areas in your life including self-actualization work and enlightenment work it's amazing how much expectations matter they affect your ability to follow through and your ability to succeed just having the wrong expectations can spell the difference between success and failure do you know what the most common failure point is for I would say every human being on earth who has ever undertaken any kind of project or endeavor why did they fail because they underestimate the time energy cost and emotional labor that their project or endeavor requires to be actualized it's just that simple just having the wrong idea about the timeline of your project whether you're building a house or you're building a business or you're trying to get enlightened or you're trying to make money or you're entering a new relationship or you're trying to raise your kids or you're trying to make your marriage succeed why do you fail in all those things because you underestimate the time energy cost and emotional labor involved and consistently what I see in people and what I see myself so of course I'm talking about from my home direct experience and if you validate what I'm talking about in this episode against your direct experience you'll start to see that everything I'm saying here is very valid what we usually do is we accept something for nothing we expect big growth big life changes big paydays big business successes big military victories amazing relationships with our kids we expect all this for nothing and then we wonder why we don't get it well it's because there cost associated with all these things and especially I want you to become aware that if you want something that's rare and valuable that is not widespread through society for example high-quality marriages that's a rare and valuable thing or you want a business that sustains itself and pays you a passive income so you can travel around the world and work remotely that's a rare and valuable thing you don't see every guy on the street with that kind of thing that immediately should tell you that there is a pretty heavy cost involved with creating that situation in your life and then it's going to be up to you to investigate what that cost is and whether you are willing to pay that cost and that's something that people very naively just don't do I mean this is this is just such basic stuff it's such common-sense stuff that I hesitate to even call it foundational but I mean it is foundational because without this you can't have any success the consequences of wrong expectations are that you get easily frustrated with your project and your progress and therefore you quit prematurely another consequence is that you're never able to really accomplish anything in your life nothing big do you notice that pattern in yourself where you try to do something big with your life but it just never happens and then just fall back down to your default position and maybe you look back through history and you see all this is a trend I keep failing to make big things happen in my life well this is probably why probably because of your expectations I mean there's other factors of course it's not the only factor but it is a very basic and important factor that I that I see people struggling with so if you're struggling with success take everything on here that I'm saying very seriously so let's just give you a couple of examples to highlight the absurdity of some expectations that people have about things so for example what if I came to you and said hey I expect to become a doctor and you say okay great what's your plan and I say I'm going to become a doctor in one year you would laugh at me you would already be able to predict that I would fail because my expectation is so out of whack with the reality the situation of becoming a doctor the reality is that if you want to become a doctor you're going to spend a good eight years in medical school and that's just to get to starting to do your residency doing your rounds and I mean that's just to get to the very newbie phases of being a doctor so that's you know you're you're off by a factor of eight now when your estimates are out by a factor of eight chances of catastrophic failure are are very high above 90% what if I came to you saying that I expect to build a 100 story skyscraper all by myself and you say what do you mean all by yourself don't you have a team a team of people and workers no it's just going to be me I'm going to build the whole thing you see that's never going to work I already failed with that expectation because what I should have done is I should have done my research and realized how many man-hours does it take to build a hundred story skyscraper I don't know I haven't on the research but I can tell you it would be longer than a human lifetime so it's that's a project that's impossible to complete by yourself impossible there's no way you can do that and it's not just a factor of not enough time but also just to lift those heavy beams and to put them in place requires at least two or three or you know a team of people work in that you can't do that as a solo human being what if I came to you and said that I expect to be an amazing world-class pianist piano player in one year of practice again you would just dismiss me as as a total newb I have no chance of succeeding in that and I would get very frustrated with my practice if I expected to play the piano as good as the greatest world masters because he out here I would be six months as am I brought into my process of becoming a master pianist I'll be playing the piano I would be comparing myself to Mozart and Beethoven and the greatest piano players of all time or composers or whatever and and then of course I would be comparing myself and I'd be saying I'm not even close to that and I would become so demoralized that I would just quit I probably quit less than a month into the whole process what about expecting to turn a profit in your business in under one year if you're starting a new business that's also a very ridiculous expectation if you expect that some people they start a business and they say oh well my business is going to turn profitable in a year so because of that I'm gonna I'm gonna buy a bigger house I'm going to take out a loan and I'm going to get a new car just like they're already spending the money they're expecting to get but of course they're grossly under estimating how long it'll probably take them to really become profitable in their business usually by a factor of three or five might take you three or five years to do that rather than one now that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to start a business it just means you need some realistic expectations based on what's actually statistically common in the marketplace I would bet you that if you did the statistical analysis every single business ever started in the last 50 years you would see that the average for a business aterna profit was was probably more than than three years and that should ring some alarm bells for you in your planning and in your strategizing if you're an entrepreneur starting a new business what if you expect to become enlightened from going to one meditation retreat oh boy you're in for a for a rude awakening they're not going to happen what if you expect to master and understand all of life from having one enlightenment experience oh boy you're also in for a rude awakening you're going to be very disappointed it's not going to happen what if your affecting to self-actualize from just sitting there watching all of my videos over and over and over again as if watching my videos is really growing you ignoring the part where I tell you that you need to do one percent Theory to 99% action and that all this stuff has to be embodied you're also going to be very disappointed going to be wondering why why am I not growing why do I know all this stuff but then I'm so frustrated and depressed and and I feel so bad about myself and I'm procrastinating all this yeah of course of course you award about that what else could you have expected obviously that's the case if all you do is read books about how to disassemble car engines that does not mean that you are qualified to actually disassemble and reassemble a car engine just from reading a book the book is a good first step but then you need lots of practice disassembling engines piece by piece one at a time probably starting from little engines just taking apart one little part and then putting it back and then take a second engine to parts out put them back and then make sure it all works and then you do that a bunch of times and then you you take a big engine you do it once the big engine you probably fail a couple times on the big engine you need somebody else to come fix your screw up for you and then through that process then you'll be qualified no matter how many books you read won't be enough or let's say you're expecting to lose 50 pounds by your wedding time which is a month from now or something using some kind of gimmick like a diet pill of course you're going to fail of course because you're not really seriously thinking about the foundations of what it takes to become successful in anything in life you're just skimming the surface of it you're a dilettante the expects patience that you set determine your level of perseverance which means when you will quit how quickly you will quit and of course perseverance is one of the most important factors in how successful you become in any endeavor that you undertake and in your life as a whole that's going to directly correlate to your ability to persevere so if you want to really be able to stick with stuff and not to quit you need to be able to set very realistic expectations because if you set unrealistic expectations then you get blindsided by reality blindsided by the marketplace blindsided by your emotional reactions you're going to quit because it's going to be so frustrating and demoralizing for you and that's probably the biggest reason that people fail in life is because of this think of some time in your life where this is true for you you could probably think of it does and think of the times where you were able to succeed why did you succeed it's probably because you had some realistic expectations you really understood the the significance and the challenge that was ahead of you and you prepared yourself for that mentally you put in the proper plans and strategies and you were able to succeed you avoided being blindsided by reality expectations also determine how you judge yourself and your progress if you think you're not progressing fast enough in your meditation practice with self inquiry with personal development with your business or any other aspect like your life purpose always you have to go back to the drawing board and ask wait a minute do I have the right expectations where should I be compared where other people are usually in this sort of process see because if I'm trying to become a doctor and I start to judge myself for not being a very good doctor and I'm only one or two years into my medical practice hey that's totally normal that's okay but if I somehow get the wrong idea that it's not normal and then I'm behind the curve then I'm going to quit or I'm going to think that there's something wrong with you and sort of judge myself I'm gonna start to feel guilty mr. ask myself oh why why am i such a bad doctor why am I not as good as everybody else out there why am I not able to succeed maybe there's something wrong with me they may have bad genetics or whatever what in fact all it is is just your expectations are out of whack expectations also of course determine how good you feel about your work when you set unrealistic expectations then you need to rush through your work because you have a cramped deadline and then of course they don't have time to really savor your work you start to cut corners in your work and you don't feel good about that and you feel like you're still behind the curve expectations determine how much and how hard you practice and practice is critical towards developing mastery in any domain of life and determine how you strategize and make plans when you expect something to be easy and effortless and quick you don't have the urge to put a proper strategy in place you don't through the think through the logistics of the problem because hey it's just an easy thing we'll just kind of fly by the seat of our pants and things will just work out and you can see how the disastrous this is for example in military situations so military campaigns need to be very careful about their expectations because when you expect when in general for example or a leader expects an easy victory over their opponents well oftentimes they get destroy just completely obliterated on the battlefield because they haven't really thought through what it would take to invade a city or occupy a country see well you see this especially with many of the wars that United States have started in the last century with Korea Vietnam the Iraq and Afghanistan wars all of this you see the problems here right is that people make it sound easy and we get tempted into it because like oh well America has a very strong military we can defeat everyone with our advanced technology and in a sense that's true but it's also very deceptive because even though you have advanced technology you do very quick blitz sort of invasion okay fine you can you can blow up some tanks but then what what plans do you have in place then see then you get into a disastrous quagmire and then it all backfires on you well that's just another further example this and you know when we were invading Iraq we were promised it's just going to be easy it's going to be a breeze we're going to we're just going to destroy the Iraqi troops within a couple of weeks and we're just going to walk through Iraq and people will be showering us with flowers and roses and rainbows and butterflies and then everything will just be peachy right I mean this is ludicrous it's ludicrous so learn your lessons from that and apply it to your own life and notice where in your own life you do that see when you think that a situations going to be challenging then you need to prepare then it's like how do I gather my strategic resources what kind of resources do I need do I need more money do I need to save up money do I need to like save up energy do I need to read books do I need certain resource do I need to talk to some experts don't you to get some legal advice do i what do I need see do I need to allocate time when you clear out my schedule do I need to stop watching TV and smoking pot and eating pizza all these become important considerations when you're really serious about understanding the the full consequences of a big goal because what we're really talking about here is I have a giant goal for my life I want this thing here or this amazing thing here I want enlightenment I want a great marriage I want a PhD education ok fine yeah you want that but are you willing to work for it are you going to put the right strategies in place that's mostly the difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that unsuccessful people they have big dreams but they're very sloppy with their follow-through and with their strategy and with their expectations it all begins with wrong expectations you know by the way why experts and experience is so valued in business so for example if you're if you're looking at job posts on monster.com or some kind of resume website right where they're asking you for your resumes you're trying to apply for jobs you know that some companies they always value experience and they always say ok we need a guy with five years of experience in this or we need a girl with 20 years experience than this and then of course they pay you appropriately for that why is that it's not an accident it's because an expert someone who has lots of experience can tell you what it really takes to succeed within some project or endeavor and they can be relatively accurate about that whereas a noob will underestimate the situation by factors of 5 or 10 or 100 that's why noobs are dangerous noobs are dangerous in the military noobs are dangerous and government noobs are dangerous at every field of life and if you're a noob at something that's okay just all you need to really to not make that a catastrophe is just to recognize that that your expectations could be really off the mark and then you can take steps which I'll tell you here in a minute how to correct that how to avoid the biggest problems with being a noob but that's why CEOs and military generals and scientists and engineers all these people they are valued by how many years of experience they have because it's through the brute force of experience where reality has slapped these people really hard before they were noobs they got slapped now they become experts after years of doing this reality has robbed them of their fantasies and has allowed them to now fine-tune their expectation filter in their minds so now that they set realistic expectations here's an example that's that is really good like let's say you're building a house if you go to an inexperienced architect and you have this dream for building your dream house and you say okay I want I have a million dollars to spend to build my dream house and you plan all this out you spend months architecting with him this dream house a noob architect will go along with that whole procedure for you and then and then try to build your house for you whereas if you go to an expert architect the first thing he'll ask you is okay what's your budget a million dollars okay tell me basically what you want or expect to be able to build for a million dollars and you you tell them well I want to I want to sauna and a hot spa and I want a garden with koi fish and I want this many acres of land and you know I want big screen TVs and I want 20 rooms and the guy will tell you no that's going to cost you five million dollars not a million five million you have five million and you say no all I got is two million tops okay so he'll say then scrap your project because it's not going to happen you're going to be in for a rude awakening what's going to happen if you go through with this project is you're going to have a half-built house which is then going to get foreclosed on in its half-filled state it's just going to be a ghost house because you're not going to be able to complete the whole thing see that's where an experienced architect is very good because an experienced architect could put your expectations into line and of course you as the as the inventor of the your dream house with no architecting experience and maybe you've never built the dream house before in your life of course you have the most ridiculous expectations for what you think you can accomplish with a million dollars you're going to completely underestimate what it takes to build your dream house probably going to take five times more than you think it's going to take a lot longer than you think a lot more planning this is a very common the reason I mentioned this this dream house example it's an extremely common area where people get blindsided people who try to construct their own homes did you know the consistent story from them is that it takes five times more time five times more money and five times more hassle than they ever imagined it would take not to say you shouldn't do it just to say have the right expectations that's all we're talking about here managing your expectations is especially important for solo projects if you're working in a big company usually that corporation organization will already have some experts who will temper your expectations of course they're not perfect a lot of times they're wrong but when you're just working on yourself by yourself on some project you want to start your own small business your own blog you want to let's say do some kind of art project like you want to write a novel you want to compose a music album you want to shoot a documentary you want to shoot a feature movie in all those situations you're doing that little solo project sort of thing notice how easily people give up on their solo projects extremely easily because they have no other enforcement mechanisms if you're working at a job with hundred people there's a lot of pressure on you to perform there whereas when you're by yourself it's so easy to quit to give up unless you're understanding the things that I'm talking about here and of course this is very true for consciousness work so if you're trying to get enlightened if you're doing self inquire if you're doing meditation if you're doing any kind of contemplation work if you're just doing any shadow work on yourself any kind of therapy work whatever yoga all this stuff these are like solo projects that you're doing for the most part you have to really manage your expectations the scope of your projects must match your will and your resources and this is why I like to shock people sometimes with harsh examples of how long it takes to accomplish some of the stuff that can be accomplished with personal development for example I commonly say that enlightenment takes a thousand hours plus and I get criticism from this especially from enlight people they were criticized me they'll write me little clever comments they all Leo you're misleading people telling them that enlightenment takes a thousand hours plus what nonsense is this what book did you read this from well you got to understand my perspective and also the audience that I'm speaking to when I say that yes technically enlightenment doesn't have to happen in a thousand hours it could happen right now in five minutes and that's what they'll tell you all you're already enlightened in five minutes you can just realize it it's so easy that's only half the perspective that's really coming from the enlightened person yeah once you're enlightened it's super easy but that doesn't help a noob what a noob needs to hear is they need to hear the reality they need their expectations properly set and the fact is that if you do a statistical analysis of all the people who do meditation and who become enlightened through whatever means you I mean I haven't done this so I don't know but I'm willing to bet good money that it would be a thousand hours plus to get enlightened that's just the fact and the reason I like to cite that fact even though sometimes it makes enlightenment look a little daunting like all thousand hours leo why do you make it look so challenging because the greatest danger we're doing enlightenment work is false expectations it's thinking that enlightenment just like this flimsy little things like all enliven people think that all they hear about Lyman and then they expect that they will attain immortality and realize the nature of all of God in all of reality in all of its infinity that they'll just realize that over one weekend give me a break people have devoted their entire lifetimes to this that's how deep of a pursuit this is people have pursued this for twenty thirty forty years like a full-time job and you think you're going to do it in one weekend in five minutes give me a break that's a totally wrong expectation to set to people when you give that peep people that expectation which is what a lot of the NiO at bitings do which is some of the criticism I have against people like a cart Ola and so forth who I mean their teachings are totally valid but when you're mainstreaming enlightenment like that what you got to do is you got to hide the fact that it takes a thousand hours because nobody wants to hear that you see and that's a general trend within our culture that's a general reason why I like to fight these sort of high figures because I like to be conservative and I like to I like to set your expectations proper that's a rare thing because every single marketing course will tell you and teach you to mislead your customers expectations we do this as a culture and marketing is very terrible this is a very negative influence it leaves people on it unable to pursue mastery to self-actualize or to to go off and and achieve success is a very big problem see because what marketing does is it exploits your false expectations because good marketers know that the easiest way to sell you a bunch of crap and to earn a lot of money for themselves is by convincing you that the thing they're selling you is quick easy and emotionally effortless and that you can just pay some money you can be completely brain-dead you'll have to do any kind of critical thinking and they'll just give you a solution and you're done and you can forget about your problem because that's the easiest way to sell the people if I offer you that kind of magic pill solution you're going to buy whatever I'm selling now of course you're probably going to be disappointed when you realize that life doesn't work this way and you cannot become a successful self actualizing conscious human being through this sort of process and this is a very a very negative influence that marketing has on a culture it might be a more negative of an influence than religion has on our culture and a lot of a lot of scientific and atheistic people say all well religion such a negative influence on our culture what about marketing what about Commerce it's such a misleading force and it's really hard to even run a business it's hard to even sell self-help products and information when you are honest with people about what it takes for them to then get the results that you can get and people can get some amazing results from self-actualization and consciousness work and meditation but they are constantly misled and lied to about what it really takes to do that constantly because they know that if you're told the truth you won't do it now a case could be made that Hayley oh you know it actually is a good idea to lie to people about how long it takes the enlightened and how much work it takes because if they knew up front they would never even start so we got to trick them into it well you could make that case I mean if you want to if you want to teach enlightenment in that fashion okay I you know that would be your approach I personally don't like that approach I'd rather be more straightforward with people about it because I think that if I set false expectations a lot of people will fail now of course people can criticize me and say well DeLeo you're setting very conservative expectations and you're making it sound so hard it's so difficult that no one's even going to do it and therefore you're going to scare a lot of people off yeah that's that's some of the pros and cons of the different approaches to teaching in different ways that's why different teachers have different styles of teaching because they resonate with different pros and cons and I'm not particularly saying that my method is the the one true best method I'm just saying that this is one that I have sort of favored from my own reasons because this is kind of how I like to be taught how I like to learn personal development I personally find it very offensive and highly unethical when people teach me something but then withhold the real effort that it takes to accomplish the results that they are talking about in their advertising so in their advertising it will always talk about all look at this woman who lost a hundred pounds eating our Subway sandwiches or whatever or it's like all look at this person who's made a million dollars doing our marketing scheme our affiliate pyramid marketing scheme you see oh look at this person like our character Lee he just got enlightened overnight one you know one thing happened in a BAM you got enlightened but these I don't even care about these kinds of examples because these are exceptions you can't base a sound life strategy on these kinds of examples these are freaks these are accidents you base your life strategy on the averages what I'm interested from a marketer if marketer was really honest he would say here are a thousand of my customers and out of a thousand of my customers to get the result that I'm promising here the average was that they put in a thousand hours of work that would be honest that would be honest marketing but of course nobody does that they do the exact opposite of that highly misleading so when I talk about business for example I often am conservative with my expecting I try to set for you for your business I tell you know think three five years down the road it might take you that long just to get it going or when I talk about life purpose I talk about in in five or ten-year time frames where it's like think about your life purpose five ten years down the road not one year down the road because in one year even though you can get good results in one year it's just the wrong expectation it's the wrong timeframe and it leads to failure this just really as simple as that and it contributes to this to this culture that we have this this this kind of get-rich-quick mentality which I hate I just hate this mentality and what I hate the most is how much it is employed within personal development which is the most disgusting and unethical thing I think that that personal development as an industry does is is it employs these these sleazy tactics the low consciousness tactics that exist everywhere else and they are somewhat understandable you know if a low consciousness tactic is used to market some Wall Street product to me like a stock or something I can understand that Wall Street is all about low consciousness earning money but when it's marketed by a self-help guru or buy by an enlightened master or by a meditation teacher that is now that's to me that that's so out of integrity with what this work is really about if to realize that our minds are lazy your mind is lazy and therefore what that means is that we will constantly underestimate the costs of our projects the timelines the schedules we get cocky about these things we get cocky about entering into wars we get cocky about how to make big significant changes in our lives which is not to say that these things necessarily have to be hard or take long just have realistic expectations I see that one of my jobs in this whole process of guiding you in this field of self-actualization is to correct your expectations based on all the research that I do now how do you set the right expectations for yourself it's actually quite simple there's just a couple of steps you need to do which newbies don't do and they're very common-sense steps so number one do research into the thing you're trying to succeed at whether you're trying to build a house or a great marriage or anything else or get enlightened do the research study the people who have already succeeded in these fields in these like-minded projects and endeavors and just see what it took them get fascinated about the behind-the-scenes of everything in life and especially the stuff you're trying to succeed at so what I mean by behind the scenes is one of the things I used to love I don't watch movies that much anymore but when I used to watch a lot of TV and especially DVD movies and stuff I would love to get a DVD movie and then more than the movie I would love to watch the making of of the movie maybe you can resonate with that it's amazing I would get more enjoyment watching the making of looking behind the scenes how is the movie actually made like I remember watching the behind the scenes of James Cameron's Avatar or George Lucas's Star Wars like that's infinitely fascinating to me I'm actually by books about Star Wars I would read in detail how did George Lucas write the script where the stories come where all his ideas come from were of what we're all sources and it's just amazing the study that's a how did I'll come together what were the business aspects of putting together Star Wars is it's a pretty crazy story of how it came to came together it almost didn't come together he had to she had to go through hell to make that stuff work it was really difficult so when you read that the reason the behind the scenes are so important to what I'm saying here this is actually a tactic for you try to set right expectations is because when you look behind the curtain at how the magic trick is achieved you see all the guts of how the sausage is made you see that process and you go wow oh my god I didn't even think about that oh so much more work than I thought and time and again you discover this if you study amazing musicians amazing and actors or amazing business people or you know amazing artists you look at their process and you see that it's so much more work than you ever thought it was to produce that little thing because you know when you see a nicely polished movie on the on the theater screen it's only like 90 minute movie and you would say well how long help how hard could it be to make a 90 minute movie just 90 minutes I mean if you divide that 90 minutes into seconds you know it's it's only like what a thousand seconds or something so that much and then you know you think that well how much can a second of movie cost does it really cost a million dollars but then when you take up into account of budget of a movie like Avatar which I think had a budget of like over 100 million dollars you see that and then divide that by how many seconds the film is and then you get a sense of how many millions of dollars a single second of film footage costs it's it's absurd right it it's like oh I never thought it was like that and then you get to see the process of these people go through and that's very eye-opening and then that aligns your expectations properly so I always encourage you to go out there and study all the people that you admire get down and nitty gritty into their process see what they actually had to do to succeed our culture presents very false notions of how they succeeded oftentimes our culture makes it look easy read biographies - it's also important when you read biographies of successful people you learn also sort of the guts of what it took for them to do what they did their thought process what kind of plans they made their attitude their problems with money their problems with handling logistics that's all very important stuff how do they persevere a lot of biographies talk about perseverance you talk about fear they talk about failure a lot and these are all things you got to learn if you want to become successful talk to experts don't just read the but actually try to go interview somebody in your field like you want to become a musician go interview a musician you want to become a film director interview a film director you want to become enlightened go interview an enlightened person talk to them doesn't have to be a formal interview just talk to them pick their brain ask them questions about the behind-the-scenes process it's really amazing to take in the light master sit down with them and then ask them okay so tell me the guts of your journey how did it really happen not the polished up version that you put on the back of your book but how did it really happen and then that really tells you oh okay that's why it's so hard because yeah this guy spent like 10,000 hours in agony meditating and now he's so damn enlightened well of course of course and of course I'm not there yet because I haven't I haven't gone through that I wasn't that hardcore you see these people who are deeply enlightened they're very hardcore people and I go yeah of course of course I didn't achieve enlightenment in 1 year or in two years of self-inquiry of course of course wrong expectations very importantly also to set the right expectations is to just at some point you have to realize and give up this whole notion of quick fixes stop looking for quick fixes stop asking for freebies I was at the supermarket the other day just buying some food too much much opping and I hear over the loudspeaker some lady comes on she says attention all customers right now we have some store special if you go to the back of the store we are giving out free gifts to people come get your free gift right now and a bunch of people around me ran to the back of the store to get their free gifts and I completely ignored it and just went about contemplating whatever I think I was listening to actually some some audio book or something I was listening to my audio I just kept listening to it I didn't even it didn't even cross my mind to go there but because I needed some bananas I had to go through that part of the store anyways so I just went there to grab my bananas not to get some freebie and then of course I know what the game is right the game is that they get you to come there to get their freebies but then of course they pitch you on some other stupid and the freebie they give you it's not something you even need all those people that were getting those stupid one dollar freebies or whatever they just got suckered suckered into standing there and wasting their time in their mental energy listening to this marketing pitch for a stupid freebie it's because people have this mentality of quick fixes I don't want quick fixes I don't want anybody to fix anything for me I don't want it to be easy that's a that's an attitude I've cultivated almost to an erotic degree where sometimes people do actually offer me freebies and stuff and I just say no when actually the freebie could have been helpful to me so in a sense maybe yeah maybe I've gone too much in the opposite direction but I see most people most people are just like they're clipping coupons and this is this whole coupon clipping mentality you know just uh from a very pragmatic common sense perspective if a business is offering you freebies why is it doing that is it doing that to be nice to you know when a business offers you freebies it's because they're earning more on the freebie from you then you are from getting that freebie you see how it works so generally speaking whenever you get those kind of offers just ignore them focus on what you're doing in your life focus on your life purpose focus on your meditation practices focus on the that you can control not what other people hand out to you and lastly how do you set right expectations make conservative estimates you know someone on the forum on the actualized forum asked me there's a long thread there with personal questions that people ask me and somebody asked me Leo in one of your past videos you talked about your own life and you said that you expect to live till like sixty years old and then the question was why did you say sixty years why do you say that you're going to only live to 60 most people live to 70 or beyond because I'm making a conservative estimate you see the problem with most people is that they assume that they're going to live forever and if they have all the time in the world to accomplish all their dreams and I know that that's a trap so I counteract that by the in conservative estimates so when I think of myself that I'm going to live for 60 years okay hey that tells me I'm already past the halfway mark I'm 32 past the halfway mark uh that gets me to action because I don't want to be 59 and and then still have a bunch of that I want to accomplish in my life you see and also because I know that when I'm going to be 60 I'm going to have less energy and it will have less mental capacity I'm going to have more diseases and medical conditions I might be alive but I might not be able to think or to walk by that point see so yeah you technically people live till like what they're 77 or something that's roughly the average I think in the United States average lifespan like seventy five seventy sevens like that but you got to wonder what condition are those people in after let's say they're 65 are they're really doing anything with their life most of them aren't many of them are in wheelchairs can barely walk in nursing homes in hospital beds so I mean at that by that point you don't really have much life left you're just sort of like just hanging on by that point now of course doesn't have to be that way if you have a good diet and good exercise and take care of yourself and you're a bit lucky then you can push way past that you can be very active even in your 70s and so forth so nothing it can't I'm just saying that's some conservative estimates so that hey you know when I get to 60 or 70 and I'm still alive and I'm still kicking and I'm still active and I still have energy I'm not in a hospital hooked up to some IV thing then I can be pleasantly surprised I give you happy about that I could really enjoy that I'd rather undershoot with my estimates than overshoot because imagine you think you're going to live till 80 and then tomorrow you get in a car crash and you're going to be lying your hospital bed for the rest of your life that happens too so be careful a lot of people die in car crashes a lot of people have heart attacks a lot of people have brain disorders now it's important that you don't take everything I'm saying in this episode as meaning that you now need to set low expectations or to not dream big I'm a big advocate of dreaming big but in a realistic way with the understanding that a big dream requires big strategy and big planning the bigger your dreams the more realistic and pragmatic you have to be realistic doesn't mean your dreams have to be low and small and like everyone else's it just means that you recognize that to make a big dream real takes a lot of work and you gotta take take it very seriously it's not a flimsy thing get truthful about what it's going to cost you and then really ask yourself are you willing to pay that cost and balance out your optimism and idealism with realism and pragmatism this is another example where balance and personal development and in life in general is so critical striking this dynamic balance between the two and I can't tell you exactly how to strike that balance because for that you need lots of experience life lots of experience in your domain that you're trying to master lots of experience in your life to find out what's too optimistic and then what's too too realistic in the sense that see if you're too realistic the problem with that is is that then you underestimate what you're able to accomplish so if you look out and you see that everyone else is taking ten years to become enlightened you say well it's going to take me ten years and then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so don't let it limit you is the point that's that's a see that's funnel that's subtle how do I teach that to you I don't know I'd have to I'd have to do a mind meld with you you'd have to suck in all my life experiences from my mind into your mind to do that so unfortunately doesn't work that's why you need to put this stuff into practice and then through trial and error through the mastery process you yourself will become an expert in the areas that you need to become an expert at and in life generally speaking now the last question that I want to address here is some people might think the leo what about this idea of having no expectations so it sounds like what you're setting saying here is rather than idealistic expectations I should have realistic expectations but what about the possibility of no expectations at all might not want sight not that be better that's an interesting question I think if you're an advanced practitioner of personal development and consciousness work maybe you've had enlightened experience or two then you might be leaning towards this idea of like well how about I just approach my next project with no expectations at all with sort of a blank Zen mind that could be a valid strategy although I still think that you can get into trouble there I think that for most people that wouldn't work simply because it's very hard to have no expectations you need some serious spiritual practice to get to that point in first place so for most people definitely won't work as a strategy but then even if you get to this place have no expectations I'm just trying to imagine like how would that work if I'm trying to build like a serious project like a skyscraper or a big software development project could I really have no expectations when I start a business or I want to construct a house with no expectations I just I don't I don't see that that approach would work because you need to you need to budget you need to plan your energy your time your resources you would need to have at least a rough idea of how long it's going to take you to accomplish this project because if you literally have no expectations that sort of means that you don't know whether it's going to take you like a month to build your house or ten years to build your house and you're cool with it either way now I mean I mean maybe you can get so Zen that you don't give a if it takes you a month or a year or ten years to build your house but uh but I think the real world will just make that impractical because if it takes ten years to build your house well um it's just not going to work for you I think your project will just probably fail so I think that you even if you could get the Zen attitude you still need to study specifically the kind of expectations that are realistic in the domains where you are trying to manipulate reality and create the kind of result you want see success is different from Zen Zen is about accessing existential truths and absolute reality and then the game of success is all about manipulating reality and if you want to successfully manipulate your reality then you got to play by those rules and you can have to plan to strategize alright that's it I hope I've convinced you the importance of expectations and that you take this to heart and start to realign some expectations you might have especially when it comes to self actualization to actualize org and to maybe your psychedelic experiences and also to all your enlightenment and annotation practices all right I'm out of here please click the like button for me put your comments down below share this episode of the thread and lastly come check out actualized I road right here my website I've got a forum on there where you can ask questions and get help for your problems my blog that I'm not updating quite often these days and putting some cool insights on and life purpose course is there book list is there and more resources to come in the future so stay tuned and stick around for more episodes you