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[Music] in this episode we're going to be talking about the fee counter-intuitive 'no supply f-- one of my most important principles which simply states that life is counterintuitive life is counterintuitive now that's a very simple principle and if I just said that to you in a five minute video and you heard that you would just go about life and you wouldn't understand the depth of what is being said here because something very powerful and deep is being said here which is why we need to go through a long list of examples to help illustrate this for you and I've been alluding to this principle a lot in my work in the past where I tell you that all this facet of life is counterintuitive in that facet right there is counterintuitive and I keep saying that but we need to really hit it head-on I first became aware of this principle when I learned it from Evan pagan who talked about it in the context of being successful in business and also female attraction and in those two fields it's a it's a quite an important principle and we'll talk about those two fields but then what I saw is that I as I was studying personal development and applying it for the last five years and thinking about it a lot and communicating it to a lot of people I just kept seeing more and more and more examples of how this principle is found everywhere throughout life and it was just a mind-blowing for me and I kept a list a list of all the examples it's a very very long and juicy list that I want to share with you so that's mostly what we'll be doing today success basically in anything is counterintuitive whether it's in business in attraction in relationships but also things like with emotions and with spirituality and basically every every facet of life you see the fool the fool assumes he already knows everything and he just sort of stumbles his way into some new domain of life and because he assumes that he knows everything already and there's really nothing new that would ever surprise him he always takes the most obvious route does the most obvious things and ends up falling into every trap and stumbling on to every landmine and then of course that's why he becomes a failure and so to really become successful you have to learn to rethink the most obvious routes that people take in life because of course most people are not successful most people get very mediocre results and they struggle and they hit their head against the wall over and over and over again and they just don't know well I don't know that life seems so hard and life seems so troublesome and problematic and full of suffering and full of evil all these things in it just see that then they project that out into the external world and I think that life just is that way no it only seems that way because you're taking the obvious foolish routes and you're not considering the counterintuitive 'no sub life you must really learn to appreciate just how tricky reality is reality is a very very tricky thing very very deceptive so the key lesson from this episode is that you always want to be looking for that counterintuitive move that you can make in every important situation in your life whether it's with business with your career with getting hired for a job with attracting the right person for a relationship or with your spirituality or when you're meditating always be looking for that counterintuitive move if these counterintuitive moves that separate you from the herd now before you give I give you the whole list of examples less let's mention an interesting point here about the word counterintuitive so I'm using the word in the sort of colloquial sense but really it's a misnomer because actually it might seem like well Leo so so you've got something against intuition so if I'm following my intuition in life that somehow means I'm gonna live a bad life I'm gonna be a fool and actually it's quite the opposite what I want you is to follow your intuition more so then why does the word counterintuitive use in this in this case well really what the word counterintuitive really means it's more like actually counter logical what it means is it's the most logical solutions usually those end up being the wrong ones the intuitive solutions actually require you to already take into account that things aren't gonna obviously work out in a straight linear path so really what we mean when we say counterintuitive is we mean counter logical we mean it's the opposite of common-sense we mean that it's the opposite of what you would naively expect going into a situation we mean that it's there's something misleading and something non-obvious about this facet of reality that needs to be understood in order to achieve success here we also mean often that it's the emotionally difficult thing to do in many cases usually the counterintuitive thing is emotionally difficult and the the logical or obvious thing that's the emotionally easy thing that were sort of wired to do and also what counterintuitive usually means is that it requires a sort of a cognitive leap and perspective stepping outside of your existing perspective in order to to get a good result so why is this topic of counter intuitive is so important well because wisdom itself is counter intuitive and one of the things that I love most of all is wisdom and people who love wisdom are by definition philosophers and that's really what actualizado is is it's a modern version of philosophy and philosophy is not just abstract ideas about stuff philosophy is about how to live the good life it's also the pursuit of truth how do you structure your life such that you live the best kind of life that is philosophy and that requires wisdom and that is counter intuitive stuff and so since most people what they're looking for life in life is they're looking for a good life but then they don't take into account the wisdom and the counterintuitive nature of wisdom then they end up getting the wrong kind of life and then they suffer another precedent and they they get all the wrong kind of results and they can't get success where they wanted what I want to teach you is how to get good at spotting wisdom and another sort of corollary principle that I want to share with you is that the more wise of teaching is the more counterintuitive it is the more a fool will look at it and say oh that's not wisdom that's idiocy and that's precisely how you know that it's wise because to a fool it looks like foolishness but to a wise person it looks like deep wisdom psychology I want you to notice is especially counterintuitive if you studied various research that has been done in psychology various psychological studies that have been done over the last hundred years let's say within universities in academia you know they keep coming up with all sorts of psychological studies that produce counterintuitive results where people behave in ways that you would think that they wouldn't behave but they behave that way and it's because psychology runs your whole life it's so important to understand psychology but then psychology is so counterintuitive and the Nats what gets you into trouble is the psychology that you bring into every situation in life the psychology of money the psychology of relationships the psychology of business the psychology of marketing the psychology of your career the psychology of all of your emotions that's what we're really interested in when we're talking about creating the good life and also think about how reverse psychology works you know on a child to use reverse psychology to get them to do something that they didn't want to do and that's very counterintuitive isn't it like when you tell a child to brush his teeth he doesn't want to do it and sometimes he doesn't do it just to spite you so you can use reverse psychology of awe don't need to brush your teeth and then maybe he will of course maybe he won't but uh that's reverse psychology so that gets a little idea of or talking about and also think about being a great strategist the greatest strategist what were they they were highly counterintuitive thinkers and I of course encourage you to do a lot of strategic thinking I have a whole episode what am I most popular called how to be a strategic [ __ ] where I talk about how to do this just that but think of for example Sun Tzu's the art of war what does he talk about there he talks about military strategy and all of it is about being tricky and being counterintuitive and out thinking your opponent not just using brute force so now let's get into the examples this is where the meat of this topic lies so first of all in business it would be intuitive to try to maximize your profits at all costs and you think that would make you the richest and the most successful in business but actually the counterintuitive move in business is not to pursue maximum profits because by pursuing maximum profits what happens is that you end up leading your company into bankruptcy or into decay that's what happens with businesses who purely pursue maximum profits it actually hurts the brand in the end by trying to cut corners everywhere it's counterintuitive not to cut corners the obvious thing to do is to cut corners and to pay your employees the lowest possible wages but then we know what happens with these companies in the long run sure the short run they might make some money but in the long run they always get out competed by the companies who build a stronger brand who aren't just doing it purely for profit also another example from business is trying to appeal to everybody with your marketing if you try to come up with a product the way that most naive business people do when they first start is they try to create a product that appeals to everybody everybody in the world is gonna love my product and I don't want to possibly alienate everybody so I'm gonna add all these features into my product such that it appeals universally to all and then when you do that usually what happens is that nobody really loves your product because your product gets so diluted by trying to appeal to everybody so when you're marketing a really good idea is to have a very specific market that you're trying to hit maybe like women who are in their 40s who are mothers who have children that might be a very specific type of niche that you're marketing and you could help with a product specifically for those kinds of women you know whatever their issues and problems are you can go do your research and find those and then whatever that product is you know it'll resonate with that particular market really really well whereas of course everybody else won't care about that product at all but that's going to be enough for you because all you really care about is just hitting a residence with that particular niche and that's a lot of what smart business strategy is about another example of this in business there's many these examples in business but another one is sales have you noticed if you try to do sales that if you're desperate to get a sale you usually end up losing the sale which is quite counterintuitive and if you're new to sales you might think well man why aren't people buying for me it must be because I'm not pushing my product hard enough so you go out there and you push it even more and even more and then what you realize is that wait a minute it's the opposite of how I thought it works the more desperate I am to make the sale the more people don't want to buy for me why is that well it's because when I'm desperate to sell something what that sub communicates is that I think that my product doesn't have that much value which is why I'm pushing it so hard because if I really believe that my product had a lot of value I wouldn't need to sell it so desperately I would just let people come to me and that's counterintuitive another domain where there's a lot of counterintuitive examples is with attraction especially if you're a man trying to attract a female man how many hours have I spent thinking about this topic and and struggling my way through this topic with female attraction he's so so counterintuitive when you start off as a guy and you're not successful with girls and you're trying to attract some girls you're trying to date what you first try is the nice guy approach you try to be extra nice because you think well ah she wants a guy who's gonna treat her well and so you do that but as you do that you repel all the girls and none of them want to be with you and this is so frustrating and so backwards because what we then see is we see the [ __ ] and the jerks getting all the hottest girls and you wonder how could that possibly be how can these women be attracted to like the the scummiest guys and then what you realize is that actually it's because in trying to be so nice and trying to supplicate to women what that sub communicates is that communicates that actually you're a low value guy because if you were a high value guy you wouldn't place so much value on the girl you wouldn't play so much value on her looks and you wouldn't you wouldn't bend over backwards to try to attract her and women are very very sensitive to that so as soon as they see a guy who's trying to bend over backwards to attract her she's immediately gonna get turned off it's the same thing as trying to be very desperate to make a sale your sub communicating low value another very counterintuitive thing is that the less committed you are to a girl the less you care about her the more she'll get attracted to you like it's it's just it's so uncanny the way it works and I had to spend hundreds of hours like rewiring my entire brain so that I don't fall into these most obvious foolish traps in order to get better at attracting women another one with women is that bragging and boasting you would think that bragging and boasting about your nice car and all of your money and the house that you own and how successful you are at work that this would attract women and it does the exact opposite it makes you less attractive so again I had to spend hundreds of hours reprogramming my mind to stop me from boasting and bragging as an attraction strategy in fact what you discover when trying to attract women is that the opposite thing works so if you're talking to a girl for the first time and you want to attract her start talking about like how low quality of a guy you are kind of tongue-in-cheek you know you can tell her that you work at Walmart and that you uh you live out of a cardboard box and that will actually attract her because what she sees there of course when you're doing this tongue-in-cheek she sees that you're you're you're so confident in yourself that you don't need to brag about how nice your car is and all of this you sort of trust that if she's gonna get attracted to you she'll get attracted just to your authentic personality and then sure enough she does because you don't come off as desperate and needy and try hard now of course don't get the wrong idea here that now you have to be an [ __ ] to women in order to attract them you have to really distinguish between the attraction phase and the relationship phase so you don't want to be an [ __ ] and treat your your girl badly in the relationship phase but during the attraction phase which actually lasts for a very short period of time the attraction phase is like only an hour long from the moment where you meet the girl to the moment where she makes a decision that she wants to sleep with you or that she even would that moment where she gets sexually attracted to you that particular moment that's where you don't want to come off as overly nice and then after she's attracted to you then you can be quite nice to her and she'll still love you in fact she wants you to be nice to her in the relationship it's really just about the attraction component that we're talking about in fact I sort of came up with a super counterintuitive rule for myself where if I'm talking to a really hot girl my rule is that the hotter the girl and the more I want to attract her the smaller that I tell her that my penis is it's the funniest thing it just cracks me up and it works so well it's amazing how effective this rule is and you can test this for yourself by going to a strip club if you're a guy and finding some really attractive girls at the strip club like supermodel level of attractiveness of girl and then just try to get the strip or just by talking to her get her to naturally get attracted to you and what she'll notice that if you sit there bragging about how how awesome you are and how big your muscles aren't everything she won't get attracted to you but if like if I'm talking to a really hot strip or what I'll do just just to entertain myself is I'll start telling her like the worst things about me starting with how small my penis is and so the hotter she is that the smaller I tell her my penis is and and then also I'll start telling your like how crappy my job is and how bad my car is and all of this and so you know you do all this of course kind of in a tongue-in-cheek way it has to come off natural and then just like you you noticed immediately how attracted she gets to you because she senses that you're not trying to do the ordinary obvious thing that every guy tries to do with her see you're doing something counterintuitive and it's just amazing it it blows your mind and it's difficult as a guy it's difficult to rewire your brain to work this way right you have to you have to really be confident in yourself to be able to do that another example is investing with investing it's counterintuitive to buy when the market is crashing most people who invest are fools and what they do is they buy stock when the market is at the high everyone's crazy about buying so they just get into the wave and then of course the market crashes soon after that and then they get worried along with everybody else as the markets crashing they're all getting worried and now they're selling off selling off selling off and so this is the exact opposite strategy that you want if you want to earn money in the stock market you got to be buying when the market is crashing and everyone's terrified that's when you buy and when everyone's enthusiastic and the market is doing great in the economy is doing great that's when you sell and that's how you earn money but you're probably gonna lose a lot of money before you learn that lesson which is why investing is such a dangerous game to play another example is hedonism this is a great example just a crystal clear example of counterintuitive miss in life by seeking physical pleasure in life you would think that that would lead to the best life possible but actually that leads to the worst life it leads to enormous pain just ask a heroin addict for example and it's very counterintuitive to the point where I mean you spend a good chunk of your life you spend decades in your life chasing physical pleasure whether it's sexual or food and fine cuisine or luxury and travel or shopping and all this sort of so you spend your whole life basically chasing this and it still doesn't click for it for most people that it's just creating more suffering and more pain it doesn't work the whole strategy is backwards and then that's where you open yourself up to spirituality which is the opposite of that which is why soap you people understand spirituality because spirituality as a whole is very counterintuitive and we'll get to specific examples of that as we go along here but let's talk about perfectionism first that's another great example by seeking to be a perfectionist in your work have you noticed that your work suffers you would think that I would get the best work if I was this anal perfectionist right no wrong it backfires how about with being a good parent it's very counterintuitive not to lecture and criticize your child the most obvious thing that parents do is when they see the child doing something wrong they start to criticize the child judge the child tell the child no and then they lecture to the child as though the child will understand your lecture and of course the child usually wants to do the exact opposite of what you lecture them just despite you what the parent needs to realize is that the child actually needs to learn from making mistakes and that what you want to encourage in your child is a sense of exploration you want your child to explore life and to learn the lesson that failure is not bad but actually good through failures how you make all your biggest lessons in life but if you are the kind of parent who chastises your child all the time by the time your child goes off on their own they're gonna have this ingrained programming from you that failure is terrible and awful and that they're gonna be judged harshly for it and then of course they're too scared to actually live life because they're so afraid how about with being cheap I love this example do you know people who are so cheap that by trying to save pennies in the end the end of losing dollars I know some people like this some people like this in my family even a really good example for is is when you're buying products like a really cheap person will not want to spend ten or twenty two extra dollars to buy a higher Brent quality brand like blender for example because they just want the cheapest thing so instead of buying the hunter dollar blender they're gonna buy the the cheapest $50 blender but then that cheap $50 Brenda blender ended up breaking the next year whereas the $100 blender will last you for a good ten years and so in the long run by buying the cheapest lowest brand products you end up actually losing money and I have a really good example of this a few years ago I went to a 99-cent store in my neighborhood and I've never been to a ninth 99-cent store ever in my life until that point because just I avoid cheap stuff for this reason but I said you know what let's just go and see what they got there so I was walking through it and just kind of like looking around and at that time I needed some post-it notes I was out of post-it notes and usually I buy the brand post-it notes which are pretty expensive it's like ten dollars for for a pack of though and here I see some generic non brand post-it notes for 99 cents and I'm like okay that's that's good it's a pretty good deal so I grab a pack of those I bring it home thinking that I got a good deal and then I start taking off the first post-it note and I realize that as I'm taking off the note the note actually has such terribly low quality adhesive that it it doesn't even come off the notes don't even separate properly they actually tear and leave like various kinds of sticker marks on each other and it was so terrible like you can't literally you couldn't pull them apart the way you can with a regular post-it note it was so terrible I had to throw the whole package into the trash after five minutes of trying to separate them it was so frustrating and that's that's when this this idea of getting cheap was really shown to me another example of this is is with cheap food people think that although I don't have the money to invest in organic food and high-quality meat and all this you know I'm just gonna like eat ramen noodles that's the cheapest way to go right but then what happens thirty years later forty years later when you've got heart disease and cancer and all this other crap that comes with eating this low-quality pesticide filled food food filled with lead and Mercury and all of this what are your medical expenses gonna be is it still gonna be cheaper than after you pay fifty thousand dollars for some sort of surgery see but people don't factor that in because they're too cheap when you actually factor it in and for example you factor in the cost of eating low-quality fruits and vegetables which are filled with pesticides which all get sucked in and lodged into your brain tissue and then your brain tissue is filled with lead and Mercury and if you've read the studies on letting mercury you know how that decreases your cognitive performance might give you all sorts of conditions like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and all the sorts of stuff and headaches and it just makes you less energetic and it makes you less creative think about the cost of that long-term for example in your career if you're a creative type of person if you're an artist if you're a business person you rely on your creativity to make a living imagine the cost of of that over the next 30 years of reduced creativity let's say your creativity is reduced by 10% because of all these heavy metals and pesticides in your brain what's that gonna cost you over 30 years another great example is education it would seem obvious that people with the highest degrees and the most formal education would be the smartest ones the most conscious ones and that turns out to be very false and actually counter-intuitively formal education especially like getting master's degrees and PhDs oftentimes this makes you dumber and less conscious because you get way too stuck in your logical mind how about evil evil is a super counterintuitive topic by trying to stop evil you end up creating evil if you ask the average person on the street how do we rid the world of evil what will they say they say well let's just find all the evil people and kill them or put them in jail that will stop all the evil but that's precisely what will create the world's evil it's trying to do that the counterintuitive move is to love evil not in the sense that you actually love the killing of children for example or the starting of genocides but that you have such a deep understanding of life and how counterintuitive it all is that you see that hating evil just as more evil on top of the evil hating evil ends up backfiring if you want a real solution to evil you love the evil to death and also is very counterintuitive to love one's own sins to death usually people who are very worried about sins they don't want to be sinners and so when they find sins within themselves they think that the best thing to do is to I should call themselves a sinner than just her to hate themselves think of themselves as an evil one and try to get rid of the evil by hating their own evil but of course all this does this just adds gasoline to the fire and it it multiplies your sins because then what your psyche does is it has to suppress and deny all of that and then projects it out into the external world which of course creates more evil the counter to does move is to love your sins to death melt your sins away with love now just look take this one last example that I was talking about this this example of evil just think about how significant this example is think about how life transforming this is if every human being on the planet grasped that by trying to stop evil they are actually creating evil and by trying to hate their own sins they're actually increasing their own sinfulness if they grasp that think of how much suffering would be saved in the world think of how many lives would be saved we're talking about millions of lives being saved just from this one counterintuitive example so even though we're going down this list relatively quickly here and we're covering all these examples don't fall into the trap of thinking that oh well yeah Leo you're just giving me a list and it's kind of nice but what am I supposed to do with it it's like no no no no do you understand how powerful each one of these examples is these are life transforming examples we have to really grasp the counterintuitive nasaw this you have to really grasp how you're doing it wrong and then you got to work on embodying it it could take you 10 years to learn how to just embody this one counterintuitive example with evil another example is with avoiding work a lot of lazy people they try to look for shortcuts and they try to avoid hard work but counter-intuitively when you do that you end up doing twice as much work in the end another example is with control and manipulation it's counterintuitive to give up your manipulating and trying to control people that's one of the biggest mistakes that people make with other people is that they try to control them and this creates all sorts of problems and then when you let go of control counter-intuitively you see your relationships end up going much smoother and for parents you know this is a very big insight stop try to control your children so much that's so counterintuitive because it's apparent you know you want the best for your children so of course you think that well if I want the best and and I know so much I know so much more than they do that I'm gonna I'm gonna control them to become the best they can possibly be and when you do that ironically you end up making them weak and reliant on you and then they are presenting you because you're not giving them the autonomy they need to to struggle through life make their own mistakes and then flourish how about the example of get-rich-quick schemes this one's a really obvious one people who chase get-rich-quick schemes end up never really building true wealth and these get-rich-quick schemes they're promising to make you a lot of money very quickly but what you discover after you try a series of them is that each one basically fails and you waste five or ten years of your life chasing all these schemes plus you waste a bunch of your money buying all these different schemes of course they're never free and then what do you have to show for it in the end nothing but failure and disappointment and then you build up this idea that well I could never succeed in business yeah because you're trying to do these get-rich-quick schemes which never work how about the example of the 8020 rule especially when it's applied in business the 8020 rule says that 80% of your results comes from 20% of your effort what that means for example in business is that 80% of your profits come from only 20% of your products it means that 80% of the work you do is only responsible for 20% of your profits whereas 20% of the work you do is responsible for 80% of your profits so the counterintuitive move is to focus on the top 20% of your work and your profits and to cut everything else as much as you can but most people what they try to do is they try to be good at every percent of their business and this ends up losing the money how about rationalism is a good example the rationalist by being so fearful of illogicality x' and superstitions he thinks that he's gonna live the most truthful kind of life by being a strict rationalist and so he's gonna avoid all sorts of new-age and mystical thinking but by trying to avoid magical thinking the rationalist ends up cutting himself off from the magic of life because counter-intuitively life turns out to be magical rationalist just don't get this how about the example of trying to be cool you ever tried to act cool what do you realize you realize that by trying to act cool you actually end up being such a try-hard that it's very obvious to people around you that you're not cool what it means to be cool is to like not care when you care about being cool you're automatically not cool anymore and that's very counterintuitive how about with patience a lot of people are impatient and so they try to get stuff done quicker faster and they think that by doing stuff faster they're gonna end up getting double the result but often times by trying to do it too fast you end up having to redo things and then it ends up actually taking longer than it should have you just did it with patience this is sort of a more general principle about the get-rich-quick schemes how about people-pleasing it's very counterintuitive that by trying to please people they end up respecting you less not more a lot of people pleasers don't understand this see because if you really respected yourself you wouldn't be going around trying to please people all the time so if you're not respecting yourself why would others respect you how about what the example of negotiation in a negotiation if you want to be successful you need to come into the negotiation not needing whatever is being negotiated and that's really counterintuitive because usually the whole point of going into negotiations because you need something and it's likely oh but if I don't need this house or I don't need this car then why am I even negotiating for it exactly that's your negotiate you need to negotiate for a position of strength for a position of detachment that's how you get leverage in a negotiation is that you just sit down at the table and not need the car not need the house not need the loan see you know what they say the irony with loans is that if you need a loan you'll never get one and if you don't need a loan then everyone will want to give you one that's so counterintuitive if you go desperately interest into a negotiation you're going to get the worst possible deal and the only way you really learn that lesson is by negotiating going into a few negotiations and getting totally hosed and then it starts to click in your mind how counterintuitive negotiations are how about with life purpose a lot of people get hung up chasing money in life in their career and in their business and they think that well Leo I can't follow my passion in my life purpose because I got to worry about paying the bills and I got to worry about money but what I have actually discovered is that the most money I've ever made personally in my life is what I was following my passion not when I was chasing money because when I'm chasing money that D motivates me because I'm not passionate about money I'm passionate about my passion I'm passionate about doing my art and so on lining yourself with your passion ends up being sort of a counterintuitive strategy that actually ends up earning you more money in the long run because it's it's by being super passionate about something even though it's not the most lucrative thing in the end that passion will whitout because you'll be able to produce some amazing art or some amazing work that you just could not do if you were only in it for the money how about with losing weight a lot of people struggle to lose weight and that's because it's so counterintuitive because most people they think well I'll just I'll take one of these diets and try to lose weight as quickly as possible they look for the diet that will lose as many pounds as possible on them and then what they discover is that it doesn't work it's these these yo-yo diets that just frustrate you by by helping you shed some weight but then you get it Gannett back on because you're not really changing your eating habits and your relationship to food you're just using some kind of gimmick and then you end up staying fat or even getting fatter or just getting frustrated and demotivated and then you know after you've tried 10 or 20 of these diets over the years and you stop even believing there's possible to lose weight that's just because you're doing it wrong how about with pursuing goals this is so counterintuitive and this is a life-changing insight right here little goals are actually harder to accomplish than big goals why because a big goal comes with a big vision it's inspiring and it's motivating it will actually motivate you to get up early in the morning and work on it because you'll be inspired with a little goal you would think well a little goal is easy because it involves less work yes sort of logically thinking about it that's what it looks like but actually a little goal if it's so little that it doesn't inspire you then it won't make any difference in your life and therefore you won't be motivated to do it that's why it can be easier to lose 50 pounds that it is to lose 5 pounds because 5 pounds makes no difference you won't even notice it in the mirror 5 5 pounds you can't build a strong vision for losing 5 pounds but building a vision for losing 50 pounds that's very significant because you know 50 pounds will make a substantial difference in how attractive you look how people react to you and all this stuff and that will inspire you to actually do it motivate a meditation rather not motivation meditation is another great example of counterintuitive news sometimes people say all léo but I don't have time to mow to meditate because I'm so busy I'm working all the time and you know the classic advice that they give you about that is they say well the less time you have to motive to meditate the more you need it so if you don't have the time to meditate for 20 minutes then you gotta meditate for 60 minutes and that's very counterintuitive it's very counterintuitive to spend an hour a day meditating for most ordinary people because they look at that and they think that it's a waste of time like Leo what's the point of meditating you mean I'm just gonna sit there for an hour and do nothing and think about nothing why wouldn't it be better if I just sat there and thought about stuff for an hour I would be more creative but the answer is no you won't be more creative if you want to be smarter and more creative try not thinking not thinking makes me the most creative person when I do one of my solo 10-day meditation retreats out in the woods somewhere all by myself doing nothing for ten days I have the most creative ideas I'm so creative is hard to even continue to meditate that's how creative I get see most people didn't understand this because it's so counterintuitive it's also very counterintuitive that doing nothing is hard most people think that doing doing stuff is hard and that doing nothing that'sthat's easy any fool can do nothing oh yeah try it have you tried to do nothing for 10 days straight if you haven't this is one of the most powerful techniques for personal growth ever ever sit for 10 days and do absolutely nothing and by the end of those 10 10 days you will have like levelled up your life by by 20% it's amazing and it's also very very difficult you'll notice that doing nothing for 10 days straight is the hardest thing you've ever done in your life and if you're not devoting at least 10 days a year for doing nothing you're really missing out on how much you could be growing in fact really you should you should probably schedule at least 2 retreats per year where you just sit and do nothing for 10 days straight 2 of those if you really want to be growing but see s so counterintuitive most people they won't be able to to come up with the right justifications in their minds to actually be able to schedule that because they'll say oh yeah Lea that sounds nice but you know I got family obligations I got work business money this that I got all this stuff I don't have time to to schedule ten days of doing nothing right because you're doing the emotionally easy thing you're doing the most obvious thing you're doing the most logical thing which is why you get mediocre results in your life it'll take you many years before it clicks at all I really got to schedule these retreats they're the most important thing in my life the most important chunks of time on my calendar during the year are my two do-nothing 10-day retreats see but it takes a lot of failure before you learn that that's a counterintuitive move creativity is very counterintuitive have you noticed this that it's counterintuitive that you're the most creative when you aren't actually trying to be like when you sit down at your desk and you want to write a book or you want to do something like that and be creative on command you have you noticed that you're not very creative but when you're not trying to be creative when you're just like in the shower or on the toilet or cooking food or just driving your car you're the most creative on the weekends I'm the most creative it's so counterintuitive I always have my best insights when I'm not trying to have my best insights usually on the weekends usually when I'm driving in the car to the grocery store or something like that which is why I keep a little post-it notes in the car so they can write down mine my best insights but that took me a long time to learn because it's so counterintuitive it's also counterintuitive to be a man most guys most juvenile guys they think that to be a good man they need to act macho and it doesn't click for them yet that by acting macho they're actually coming off as an insecure beta a truly strong man doesn't need to act macho and in fact embracing your feminine side makes you stronger as a man and that's very counterintuitive and it's counterintuitive for people who are stuck in stage Orange smile dynamic stage Orange and that stages is rather masculine for them to move up into stage green because the stage green is more feminine and then guys get worried about this hello well am I going to become some some weak feminine soy boy I don't want to become that I want to be more macho and so they resist going into green but what they don't realize is that by integrating the feminine side they're actually become much stronger as a man another example is with rest and relaxation it's counterintuitive that rest actually improves the quality of your work it makes you more creative another example is tithing money you know certain religious traditions especially I think Christian ones there's a principle there a long time honored principle of giving away 10% of your money every year to charity or something like that and you know many people who are struggling with money they would say well yeah Leo if if I had a million dollars if I was earning a million dollars a year yeah I would give away 10% no problem but you know Leo I'm just earning 30,000 when I'm earning 30,000 giving away 10% you know that's gonna that's gonna make it hard for me to earn more money and to make my my ends meet but but what you don't realize that when you're when your hoard your money and you're so stingy with it that you don't give it away to charity what happens is that that's actually sub communicating to your own mind that money is scarce and so you're actually operating from this scarcity mindset whereas when you're giving away 10% of your income every year what that communicates to you is that money is abundant and then I'll just get more it's not a big deal but you know it's it's it's difficult it's counterintuitive to actually do it try to actually want for one year try to actually give away 10% of your income that's so hard to do unless you've you've trained yourself to do that it's so counterintuitive especially if you come from a sort of a uh huh a history like I did for example where money was scarce in the family and and so I had to kind of like learn to be frugal and learn to be conservative and not to waste my money you know it's very difficult for me to convince myself to give away 10% of my income like super super difficult very counterintuitive but then I also noticed that because I don't give away that much money then I notice that I find myself in this scarcity mindset even when I do have a lot of money it's so kept money is such a counterintuitive topic I have a whole episode called money psychology where I talk about many of the counterintuitive facets related to money and that's directly proportional to why people stay in poverty and never really are able to amount great wealth because their psychology is backwards how about the example of creating a good portfolio to get my first job I had to create a good portfolio I was a video game designer and so the intuitive thing for me to do was that I thought well let me get all the work I ever did and put it all as this port floats gonna be the most comprehensive portfolio of my work and then what I discovered is that it didn't work it was terrible it was a terrible portfolio if you want a great portfolio we need to do we need to pick the top 5% of your work and hide everything else your portfolio needs to be small but like really really well polished and then your portfolio becomes impressive and then people will hire you how about the example of giving credit that's super counterintuitive the the conventional way of thinking is that we don't like to give credit to other people because that we think that that debt takes credit like away from us and I've had to struggle with this for example when I when I shoot my videos because a lot of times you know I'm researching many sources a lot of my information comes from hundreds of different sources and sometimes I get insecure about like giving credit to a source that I got a piece of information from because I think that well but if I if I say that I got this information from such as a source people will think that I didn't create it myself it wasn't an original insight that I had but then so I notice that in myself I noticed that sort of like contraction of me wanting to kind of like own these insights but then I also that that that notice that makes me sort of a weak person and so counterintuitive I need to be more generous and actually credit more and then counter and truly what happens that when you credit people properly and you credit excessively what actually happens that people who are watching and listening to those hey oh look this person is a really like honest and reliable person and he's so confident in himself that he doesn't care about giving credit to others and then actually that makes you look the best it makes you look very credible when you give credit to other people counter-intuitively that's so counter intuitive and that's something I've always struggled with and one of the challenges I face with actually is our organs because I do pull from so many sources a lot of times I don't credit all the sources that I pull from honestly partially it's because of my own insecurities but also other times it's because often times I just don't even remember where I got some of these ideas because like I've studied so many sources it's hard to keep track of where you get all of your ideas and then they mix in with my own insights and so it's just sort of this massive hodgepodge although in my own commonplace book I do try to keep a list of my sources you know just so that I can credit people properly especially if I'm doing some kind of formal work like if I'm writing a book for example for my book I'm keeping a very detailed list of credits and sources another example is with solving problems have you noticed when you're working on a really challenging problem at work and you're just you're kind of going at it after hour after hour after hour and it just it won't solve and then counter and totally what you have to do is you have to leave the problem alone leave it alone go away for a few days come and then the problem is magically solved that's so counterintuitive but that happens precisely because you're more creative when you're not pushing yourself and forcing yourself to have to be creative so over the weekend while you're shopping for groceries the solution will just come to you because that's how creativity works the next example is love love is super counterintuitive most people think that love is me surrounding myself with lovely objects like I have a beautiful woman in my life or I have an awesome man in my life or I have beautiful awesome children I can love them and I have a beautiful dog and I love my dog and have a beautiful house and I love my house and so love is all about getting lovely stuff when actually it's the exact opposite of that love is not about giving and getting stuff love is about you being able to radiate love out into the world that's what true love means it's it's about rewiring your mind such that you're always giving more and more and more of yourself to the world and then you feel so good by doing that that then you feel the love you become the source of the love and then you don't have a scarcity mindset with love and then it's not easy to break your love because with a person you know with the average person their love is very easy to break all you have to do is take away that lovely object that they're attached to whereas a person who's always radiating love you can't break their love because they're the source of it and they're always radiating it which makes them the most loving and then people want to love them back because they receive so much love from them see whereas those people who are always wanting to leech love like a love vampire they're the ones who end up alienating everybody because nobody wants a loved vampire to be around them which leads us to the next example of relationships relationships are extremely counterintuitive because in a relationship the intuitive thing is to focus on getting your own needs met it's like I'm in a relationship with you so that you can satisfy me sexually and you can do all the chores that I want you to do and you can be there for me when I'm sad and you can you can fill all the voids in my life that's usually how people get into relationships and that's exactly the opposite of what you need to do if you want a great relationship you want to instead satisfy your own needs so much that you don't care about your own needs anymore and now you're focused on actually the needs of your partner now of course that really only works when your partner is willing to do the same so a lot of mistake that people make is they get into this kind of relationship where they they focus on fulfilling the needs of their partner but their partner is like a malignant narcissist and just keeps sucking and sucking and sucking and sucking so that's not going to work it takes two to tango in this in this relationship and so your partner also needs to be on that same level as you otherwise it's gonna get toxic another example is with emotional armor or psychological armor what this means is that psychologically we armor ourselves against the world every time that we get wounded or hurt from the outside or we suffer we create sort of a wall a piece of armor gets created whether it's in a relationship or in business or something like that you know someone's screwed you over in a business deal you're gonna do off some armor if someone cheated on your relationship and have armor and you're doing by doing this you you think you're gonna make yourself involve all but actually what ends up happening counterintuitive is that you you cut yourself off from life and from the world and from feelings and so the counterintuitive move in the situation is to actually surrender your armor and make yourself more vulnerable the best life is a vulnerable life and very counter-intuitively people don't understand this for example when they're trying to arm themselves with guns people say oh there's there's all these mass shooters running around and terrorists and all this chaos happening in the world so I need to amount a bunch of guns I need to build a gun arsenal so the logic goes but this is exactly backwards because actually statistically speaking if you own guns in your household the thing that's most likely to kill your family is your own guns not some terrorists or some mass shooter somewhere it's your own guns that's so counterintuitive and also by surrounding yourself with this arsenal of guns what is that really sub communicating to you and to to the rest of the world that you're scared and that you're actually vulnerable a vulnerable person a scared person needs a lot of guns whereas someone who's really courageous and has opened themselves up and kind of let go he doesn't need to surround himself with guns now you might say leo but what if someone comes and tries to rob you or shoot you what are you gonna do then well that's right that's what it means to really accept your vulnerability is you accept that you are vulnerable which means that someone can shoot you and you know what the fact is that even if you have an arsenal of guns someone can still shoot you the arsenal of guns won't defend you nearly as much as you think you will it will you see so vulnerable it is very counterintuitive and I notice that men suffer from this problem a lot because men try to act macho a lot so men don't like to admit that they're vulnerable and that's sort of what it means to start to embrace your feminine side more is to embrace your vulnerability admit that you're vulnerable because the truth is that you are we all are because you're alive and so long as you're alive you can die and that by definition makes you vulnerable freedom is also a very counterintuitive because a lot of people say oh well we need free speech and just freedom to the hilt everything has to be free and freedom freedom freedom freedom but then what they don't realize is that freedom too much freedom actually backfires and actually creates chaos so counter-intuitively by creating good government regulations you would think well that's not freedom that's infringing on my rights if we lived in the Wild West I could just own a gun I could just like have sex with animals and I could do anything there'd be no laws and everything would be just the best maximum freedom but maximum freedom is just complete chaos you don't really want freedom because if you really lived in some kind of crazy Wild West totally free society that would just be a survival of the fittest that's all that is it's like jungle it's like living in a prison the strongest person is gonna dominate all the weaker people in that kind of scenario so actually strategically creating regulations and rules maximizes freedom see so in a certain sense it might seem that regulating guns for example limits freedom but in a certain sense it doesn't it actually increases freedom because now you have the freedom to like walk through the park or send your children to school without worrying that they're gonna get shot see freedom is extremely counterintuitive and a lot of these staged orange people who are diehard advocates for freedom they don't understand this if you lived in a environment that was totally free you would be dead see the only reason you can even stay alive as an organism is because there are very tight restrictions on your environment you need a very stable environment which means unlimited environment in order to be able to live at all how about the example of overthinking a lot of people think that by thinking a lot they will make great decisions but actually counter-intuitively the opposite thing happens when you overthink a decision you end up making the wrong decision changing complex systems is very counterintuitive for example changing the environment or changing public policy with government or for example like take the Iraq war a lot of people thought that the Iraq war was justified because it helped to prevent terrorism from spreading that was basically the justification for the Iraq war but now in retrospect we see that its exact opposite the Iraq war actually helped to spread more terrorism and a lot of government action works exactly this way because government is very complex system and complex systems tend to be very counterintuitive speaking of government a lot of people get it in their head that it's possible to create a utopian government if only we got rid of the military if only we got rid of of all the all the corporate corruption and all the other problems in government we create this this pure utopia of hippie love and and and everyone would be enlightened and conscious and it would be wonderful and then in practice though these people end up creating the worst dystopian nightmares because they underestimate how counterintuitive all these systems are war and peace is also counterintuitive a lot of stage green hippies think that wall if we could just get rid of all the militaries in the world and all the guns then we would have peace but that's not how it works if you want peace counter-intuitively you actually need a very strong military that ensures peace stage green people don't fathom this they think too simplistically about war and peace now of course it doesn't mean that you need to go start wars I'm not saying that you can have a strong military and use it only defensively for peacekeeping purposes or you can have a strong military and use it very flippantly the way the United States does lately and then of course that doesn't ensure peace so there's there's right and right right and wrong ways to go about it how about self love also very counterintuitive it's counterintuitive to love yourself more when you fail usually what people do when they fail is they start to hate themselves they get really harsh with themselves they start to blame and criticize themselves but that just doubles down on the failure next time when you fail try to love yourself the way your mother might love you if you had a loving mother despite any of your failures and then see what happens see how quickly you outgrow your failures see how much stronger you and resource will you become how about ideals ideals are very counter intuitive people think that having high ideals and principles is really good but actually counter intuitively by having a lot of high ideals you're never gonna live up to your ideals so you're always going to be miserable and suffering because you've created this fantasy of these high ideals that nobody can possibly live up to because reality is over here but your idealistic fantasy is up there and people think that by having this idealistic fantasy that they're gonna they're gonna create that but in reality reality is different you're not going to create that you're just going to torture yourself how about the example of anger and now we're really getting to some very juicy and practical territory these next few examples I'm going to give you are all going to be emotional psychological examples and emotions are some of the most counterintuitive things that there are and also emotions are one of the most important factors in the quality of your life so anger is very counterintuitive most people think that by being angry all they're doing is they're just authentically expressing theirs their emotions but actually when you're being angry you're in denial of the fact that you've been hurt so anger is not an authentic expression anger is a is a smokescreen for actually admitting to yourself that you've been hurt and that's super counterintuitive how many years is gonna take you to learn that and stop being angry that'll take a lot of years if your anger prone how about with suffering suffering is one of the most counterintuitive things when we suffer the obvious thing that we do is we recoil and we try to kind of shut ourselves off from the suffering create that little piece of armor there and to distract ourselves from the suffering one of the most counterintuitive things you can do in life is to actually open yourself to the suffering and fully feel it with full mindfulness unconsciousness and really suffer it like really suffer it extra hard and from that actually you will be able to dissolve your suffering it's in the resisting of suffering that most suffering gets created that's so counterintuitive and so challenging to embody you can know this logically but then to be able to embody it in everyday life when you're actually in a moment of deep suffering that's really difficult that takes a lot of training and that's a lot of what spirituality is about and that's also why spirituality is so counterintuitive one of the ways is because you know this is a classic technique that spiritual masters and gurus and Yogi's have used for thousands of years is that they deliberately make themselves suffer by lying on a bed of nails for example or sitting and meditating on a hard rock in a cave somewhere this creates a lot of suffering but this is exactly what spiritually purifies them and ultimately makes them a happy person is because they went through all that suffering see that's so counterintuitive most people what they want is they want to do the opposite they want to surround themselves with a cushy environment where everything is perfect and idealistic and or ideal look rather and and and in that situation actually you become soft and you become weak and then even the littlest agitation will make you suffer enormously whereas the person who lives in a for ten years to him he can endure in enormous suffering and no problem because he's trained himself on it and that's the whole idea behind asceticism fear is also a great example of counterintuitive Ness a lot of people when they're faced with the challenging situation they'll worry about that situation and they'll think about it and they'll ruminate about all the stuff that can go wrong with it and the idea being that if you worry so much about it that somehow you're gonna prevent it but actually what it ends up happening is the exact opposite by law of attraction you end up attracting those things which you think about so if you're worrying and you're thinking about negative stuff you tend to attract that so if you're fearful about lack of money that tends to actually instill and program you with an with a poverty mindset and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you're fearful about love and you think you're gonna end up alone and that makes you needy and clingy when you do get into that relationship with your perfect partner you're gonna be so needy and clingy and so fearful of losing their love that actually you're gonna repel them away and they will leave you for your neediness and then trace the self-fulfilling prophecy that's why fear is so dangerous and so toxic what's really counterintuitive with fear is to face it head-on our natural inclination with fear is to try to resist it or distract ourselves from it is to avoid the thing that we fear the most and with spirituality just is that we have to go into the fear and face our greatest fears head-on and then through that we conquer our fears we realize that our fears all fear is just illusion but that's so counterintuitive because I fear does not appear like an illusion it appears like reality but then again that's precisely what an illusion is an illusion is an appearance which mimics reality but really isn't how about the example of arrogance it's counterintuitive to be humble have you noticed this or blame it's counterintuitive not to blame other people when something goes wrong how about criticism it's counterintuitive to listen to criticism our natural inclination when we get criticized is to again create armor and share ourselves off and to instead demonize the person who is criticizing us to invalidate their criticism because their criticism is pointing out some weakness in us that we need to work on and fix but of course we don't admit that we have a weakness the ego does want to admit that the counterintuitive thing is to actually listen to feedback and that's counterintuitive because it's emotionally difficult to do that because then you have to open yourself up to the possibility that other people might know more than you minimalism is another example it's counterintuitive that less is more minimalist design for example is actually harder than non minimalist design because it's actually very difficult to edit away all the fluff and trim all the fat off of your product or creation to get it to that perfect polished minimalist look or function usually what people do intuitively is they just they to try to lump a bunch of features into a product like if they're making a piece of software they're not going to create a a simple minimalist piece of software that does exactly what it needs to do they're gonna lump all these features into it he's gonna make it all bloated and make a terrible piece of software and also minimalism in your life is counterintuitive as well you would think that I would have the best life I surround myself with a bunch of cars and houses and yachts and and objects and and bunch of clutter in my house but counter-intuitively that actually makes your life worse because now you have to worry about all these things all these things can break they all need to be maintained there's costs involved with them you always have to be thinking about them whereas if you simplify your life down to just a few simple things just the bare necessities you actually end up having more time to do the stuff that really matters like meditate and do spiritual work and follow your passion and go traveling and having cool experiences rather than working through that mess of clutter that you have in your garage open-mindedness is very counterintuitive when I tell people to be open-minded radically open-minded the Communist objection I get is that Leo but if I'm open-minded that means I'm gonna believe crazy stupid ideas like flat earth but a flat earther is not open-minded they're actually close-minded by being open-minded you're gonna believe in Flat Earth you're just gonna open yourself up to exploring reality it's very counterintuitive that by opening your mind actually you reduce your likelihood of false beliefs because with an open mind you don't cling to any beliefs you don't attach to any of them it's the closed-minded person who is and so actually it's the closed-minded people who end up coming up with all the conspiracy theories it's the closed-minded people who are actually the flat earthers and who believe and all the kooky fringe ideas that are out there which are ridiculous those are the closed-minded people not the open-minded people selfishness is also very counterintuitive it's counterintuitive to live a selfless life because you would think that well the best life that I could live is one where I'm always concerned about myself and my needs and where I'm always getting more and more and more and I'm manipulating as much as possible to get everything that I want that's the best life right wrong exactly the opposite it's when you surrender that entire dynamic and you live your life to give to others to love others to help others to serve the world that's when you're gonna have the best life the selfless life projection is a very counterintuitive psychological mechanism projection is when we deny something within ourselves and suppress it and then we see it everywhere out in the world so for example if if I have homosexual tendencies as a man and I'm afraid and I don't like them and I think it's somehow wicked or sinful I'm gonna suppress that within myself and then I'm gonna I'm gonna be angry at all those homosexuals that I see out there in the world and that's super counterintuitive because your mind doesn't know that it's doing this suppression all of the mind knows is the mind just knows there's all these evil homosexuals out there who are corrupting our children in our society it's very counterintuitive to be able to to change your perspective to see that oh could it be that that stuff that I'm demonizing out there he's actually stuff that I myself and and climbed to do could it be that that this is why I'm getting triggered by it could it be that that's why I'm so angry at those people out there and sure enough that's how anger works it's a projection denial of course is another very counterintuitive psychological mechanism because when you're in denial you're of course in denial that you're in denial so most people who are in denial they kind of look inside and say well look but I'm not in denial so I must not be in denial but of course if you were in denial you would be so in denial that you would be in denial that you're in enough which brings us to example of self-deception self-deception works in the same way most people don't bother to introspect and look at their own self-deception most people they see self-deception out there which of course is just a projection if you're triggered by all the self-deceptive and the deluded people out in the world that's only because you yourself are self deceived but of course the person looks inside and says wait a minute leo I'm looking inside and I'm perfectly rational all my beliefs are scientific and valid I'm not self to see you but of course that is the self-deception that's so counterintuitive skepticism is also counterintuitive a lot of skeptics also do do this sort of projection game where they are skeptical about all the other stuff out there but they never turn their skepticism inwards it's very counterintuitive to be skeptical first and foremost about your own beliefs and ideas and your own skepticism rather than directing your skepticism as a weapon out at the world it's also very intuitive to think that everyone thinks like you and it's very counterintuitive to realize that actually no there are people out there who have a different type of brain who have a different type of personality who literally experience reality differently than me and think totally differently than me and that this is the result of a lot of misunderstanding and miscommunication morality is also very counterintuitive if you truly want to be moral you got to make a counterintuitive move of giving up all morality all of your moral rules give them all away throw them away and then you will truly be moral but if you go around touting your own morality and telling people how moral you are and how immoral they are that immediately tells me that you're actually not embodying your morality because a truly moral person would never do that because true morality is not based on rules it's not a self image that you adopt it's not a list of 10 commandments that you follow that's super counterintuitive especially for stage blue people spiral dynamic stage blue does not understand this and this is actually why Spile dynamic stage blue ends up creating so much evil in the world because when you think you're so righteous and good and so moral you will go and kill people in the name of your morality which is precisely what creates evil so twisted happiness is extremely counterintuitive because by seeking happiness you are already unhappy to be happy you need to be happy with whatever is happening right now in the present moment and that's totally counterintuitive because most people think that to be happy I need to chase something or I need to create a circumstance in my life I need to get into a particular happy state to be happy and that's why they're never happy because they're always looking for happiness in the future when happiness can only be found in the present which means that you literally need to be happy when you're sad or you need to be happy when you're suffering and that's very counterintuitive most people don't think it's possible to be happy when you're sad or when you're facing a problem or when something's going wrong in your life but it is you just have to retrain yourself and that's very counterintuitive God and the devil are very counterintuitive most people think that well you couldn't have two more opposite things God is one thing the devil is the opposite right wrong God is the devil the devil is God but again good luck explaining that to a stage blue person on Spile dynamics death is also a very counterintuitive thing possibly one of the most counterintuitive things I've ever experienced in my life is the realization of what death is you think death is the worst possible thing that could happen to you it's the thing you fear the most death is the worst possible evil and yet when you actually experience it and realize what it is you realize that death is Nirvana death is love death is the greatest pleasure you will ever experience in your life and then that's so counterintuitive to people it's counterintuitive even to to realize that you can die and and still come back and talk about it enlightenment is extremely counterintuitive it's counterintuitive that the self is unreal it's counterintuitive that you were never born it's counterintuitive that by surrendering all knowledge you will actually end up having the deepest knowing of the universe through not knowing you will end up knowing that's super twisted our society treats not knowing as a negative when actually not knowing is the deepest wisdom that you can have not knowing that's what enlightenment is people think that enlightenment is that I get to know everything when actually it's kind of the opposite enlightenment is that you you realize you know nothing and through knowing nothing there's an inversion a going a full circle and then you realize that you also so in a sense know everything paradox is another counterintuitive one paradox people have a negative opinion of and they think that paradox is somehow illogical and somehow it's a mistake what they don't realize that paradox is a core feature of reality and that's very counterintuitive and that paradox is not a mistake when you're doing logic and you encounter paradox that's not a mistake that's because logic is full of paradoxes because reality is trans logical it's counterintuitive to sacrifice your queen in a chess game and that's actually what makes the greatest chess games I love looking at chess games you can actually find YouTube videos of this maybe I'll post a good example of this where some brilliant chess grandmaster the most brilliant ones they can see so far ahead and they're so counterintuitive in their strategies that they will sacrifice their greatest pieces and end up winning the game that's always amazing to watch it's like a stroke of genius and that's generally how you want to approach your whole life most people are so worried about losing their queen in life that um they end up losing their King in the end and you want to opposite you want to surrender your greatest pieces and really focus on on the stuff that needs to be protected and through that you will end up winning it's counterintuitive to explore other points of view it's counterintuitive to assume that all religions are true most people assume that all religions are false and that's wrong all religions are true and that's very counterintuitive it's counterintuitive to question materialism it's counterintuitive to to have a long time horizon it's counterintuitive to become a monk and to reject food sex alcohol partying and success and to go live in a cave it's counterintuitive to consciously seek out pain for the purposes of spiritual purification it's counterintuitive to put yourself in the challenging situations it's counterintuitive not to multitask most people multitask focusing is very counterintuitive focusing on just one thing it's counterintuitive not to let go of emotions most people hold on to emotions it's counterintuitive to see failure as an opportunity most people get derailed by failure get demotivated turn into victims it's counterintuitive to be inclusive most people want to be exclusive it's counterintuitive to embrace change most people want to resist change and deny change it's counterintuitive to give your product away for free in business like I do with actualize don't worry I guess it's super counterintuitive the way that I do my videos because I got put I put some of my deepest stuff out there totally for free the kind of stuff that most people would charge hundreds and thousands of dollars for in the self-help industry I give it all away for free and that's super counter to it it's also very emotionally difficult to do that it's scary to do that because then you got to worry about money it's counterintuitive to question assumptions it's counterintuitive that bombing terrorists doesn't solve terrorism it's counterintuitive that prohibition of alcohol doesn't stop alcohol but actually increases demand for alcohol or for other kinds of drugs which is why the drug war is such a miserable failure it's counterintuitive that micromanaging produces worse results worse work than if you actually trained your employees to work independently it's counterintuitive to admit when you've been wrong or made a mistake most people want to deny it it's counterintuitive to ask wait a minute how could I be deluding myself it's counterintuitive to notice your own hypocrisy your own self biases and your own double standards usually we just notice the hypocrisy and self biases and double standards of everyone else but not ourselves we see their selfishness but not our own selfishness we see their corruption and evil but not our own corruption and evil it's counterintuitive that hard manual labor pays less than white-collar work I remember when I was young when I was a teenager like this this really bothered me for some number of years I remember I just I couldn't understand why the people who are like working out in the fields picking strawberries in the heat for 12 hours a day and like the construction workers who are building bridges in the dirt on the side of the highway in the heat why do these people earn the most money why is it that the CEO earns the most money that was so counterintuitive to me I just didn't understand that because I would I kind of assumed that the harder the work was the moat the more despicable the work then the more they should pay you for it because nobody wants to do it and actually it's kind of the exact opposite of that it's so weird he's counterintuitive enough to justify yourself people love to justify themselves it's counterintuitive not to try to change people oh man in relationships that's one of the number-one mistakes is trying to change the other person it's counterintuitive not to judge it's counterintuitive that money sex fame and success don't produce happiness it'll take you several decades to learn that lesson if not longer it's counterintuitive that achieving your goals does not produce happiness that's so counterintuitive because you think that the whole point of me pursuing my goals is to become happy and then you realize after you've done it for a long time that it never works no matter which goals you achieve you're always still unhappy because again happiness is never found in the future it's always only found in the present and you will never be happy until you deeply deeply fathom that on a cellular level it's counterintuitive to be playful and humorous during serious times it's counterintuitive to select a good romantic partner most people select the entirely wrong romantic partners both men and women do this women will select the biggest [ __ ] who's the worst for her and Men will select the most attractive and beautiful woman that they can who's also probably the worst for him it's counterintuitive to stay positive in a negative situation it's counterintuitive to love those who harm you it's easy to love people who never did you wrong would you still love me if I harmed you of course not you would hate me most you would the only reason you think you love me is because I'm doing everything to help you and as soon as I stop helping you even for a second you're gonna start to hate me that's how it works for most people it's counterintuitive to forgive it's counterintuitive to study many different religious traditions it's counterintuitive that Yogi's and monks understand deeper than academics and PhDs it's counterintuitive that you're not your body it's counterintuitive that abstract metaphysical questions actually have enormous practical consequences it's counterintuitive that truth is directly accessible you would think it wouldn't be but it is no mind is also highly counterintuitive the state of no-mind you would think that if you were in a deep state of no-mind all the time that this would make you the least effective person in the world and you would be bad at your job and you would be bad in your relationships and you would be blad bad with your planning and your decision-making actually the exact opposite you are the most effective in a state of no-mind which is why professional athletes they train themselves when they're going through their routines or like a martial artist when a martial artist is in the ring and they're fighting or a boxers fighting what do they do they sort of psych themselves up in such a way that they enter a state of meditation and no mind their mind is silent so that they can just execute they can be in total flow no thinking going on they are one with their actions rather than having to logically think through every little detail of their actions and in fact when you tell an athlete who is going through their routine to start to think about how they're doing their routine you ask them hey can you tell me what you're doing that actually kills their performance that's so counterintuitive it's counterintuitive that a chemical like five amino DMT can produce enlightenment and yet it can it always just makes me giggle when I see enlightened masters and Yogi's and teachers and various Buddhists and Christians and so forth when they hear about five Meo DMT and how it produces enlightenment they all say no leo is faking life but it's not real enlightenment so counterintuitive you can't understand five Meo TNT unless you've actually done it and experienced it for yourself I know enlightened masters who will deny the power of five Meo DMT and claim that it can't possibly produce enlightenment because enlightenment is not a chemical well guess what five mm you know DMT really isn't a chemical either that all gets recontextualized once you're inside the trip and the last thing is that it's counterintuitive that you are God how's that for a [ __ ] counterintuitive mind [ __ ] that you are God super counterintuitive especially for stage blue people who believe that they can't possibly be God because God is the thing that created me but that's too deep to go into here and to explain so anyways that's the whole list there's a lot of stuff there I would encourage you to listen through this list again because I went through it rather quickly now of course you might say well Leo this is a 90 minute long video so that wasn't quick it's still very quick for the amount of content that was packed into this list I could spend 90 minutes talking about every single item on this list and in fact in some cases I have many of my episodes what they do is they take one of these items from this list and then they just go into an hour or two of elaboration on it talking about this counterintuitive point and then when you learn about that at such a depth then you say aha oh now I understand what I've been doing wrong in my life in this facet of my life and why I've been not getting the results I want it's often scary to do the counterintuitive thing it's scary to go against the naive common sense that you have it's scary to go against the heard and it's scary to go against your own fear ignoring fear in itself produces fear that's how sticky fear is and it's scary to go against your sort of base biological instincts in programming so it's not enough just to know about these counterintuitive moves you also have to be able to execute the move see it's not enough for example to know that you should be facing your fear you have to actually face your fear which is a whole nother step now most people don't even know that they have to face their fear in order to conquer their fear but even if you learn about it it's still not enough you got to go one step further on all of these points there's always a deeper step to go down it's the one you're resisting and hit so why is reality so counterintuitive well it's a tricky question the way that I explain to myself is that reality is nonlinear which means that it tends to fold in on itself it's got a lot of interconnected variables and these variables end up sort of folding in on themselves the output from one system ends up being the input to another system and this creates all sorts of chaotic and twisted dynamics which is why naively changing a system which is nonlinear often produces the opposite result systems often backfire which is why good intentions are not enough you must also understand how these systems actually work which is where Systems thinking comes in and if you want an understanding of what that means go check out my episode intro to systems thinking where I explain that in a lot of detail and also I have a whole subcategory on my book list with specifically books about systems thinking go check those out those are some very profound books that will move you up to stage yellow inspire dynamics so let's conclude by giving you my top five most counterintuitive moves in life if you can manage to accomplish these you will live remarkable profound life that almost no human being ever lips precisely because they never it never occurs to them to do this so number one is to pursue truths that all truth at all costs even at the cost of your survival and your self agenda very counterintuitive to do that a lot of people tell themselves that they pursue truth but they actually don't they confuse the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of their self agenda and these are two almost polar opposite things you need to separate these out and to be able to pursue truth even when yourself an agenda is threatened in that process number two is to live selflessly commit your entire life to living selflessly for others and for the world and not just to satisfy your own little petty needs step number three is to love unconditionally don't limit your love to any one person or any one thing radiate love love the stuff that normally people would hate love that number four is to don't seek material pleasure in other words reject hedonism super counterintuitive and number five is to die die while you're still alive face your own fear of death head-on and experience what death really is which does not mean suicide so no suicide don't physically harm yourself ever take good care of your body but pursue death face it and find out what lies on the other side of death that's possible to do and if you do it you will live an extraordinary life so in conclusion always remember to be looking for that counterintuitive move even though I gave you a long list here by no means is this comprehensive in fact what I want you to do is I want you to in your notes in your commonplace books perhaps if you're keeping one which you should be start to make your own list you can use my examples but then create your own list of where you find the counterintuitive moves in life if you're an artist if you're a programmer if you're a film director if you're you know an academic or a scientist or whoever you are wherever you work if you're a businessperson start to make a list of counterintuitive moves in that domain and also in the other domains of life and that will help you to really grasp this topic deeper alright that's it I'm done here that's the end please remember to click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org that's my website there you will find the book list my life purpose course my blog with various exclusive insights that you won't find anywhere else and the forum and the last thing that I'll say is that you have to be very careful with these teachings with actual eyes that are on teachings actualized Org is not to be confused with an ideology nothing I say is to be turned into an ideology nothing I say do I want you to believe on blind faith that's a very nasty trap I'm telling you these things because I want you to verify them for yourself these things are things that I have verified for myself in my experience or that I'm in the process of verifying you know some of these things take a while to verify you don't verify it in a day sometimes it can take you a year or five years or ten years to verify something like enlightenment for example or one of these other points you know so got to work at it but then you got to verify it so actually has that Org is based on the principles of empiricism you're testing stuff out except rather than expecting other people to test it for you and to deliver the results to you you're you're doing the experiment internally on yourself you're testing out your own emotions you're testing out anger and sadness and fear and suffering and you're actually checking easly is what Leo's saying really true about fear and anger and suffering and is it really true if I take ten days off and do nothing that I'll be creative is that really true you you don't know until you do it I mean it all sounds nice when I say it I can convince you of anything I can come up here and spout all sorts of [ __ ] and convince you of it just because it's easy to convince the mind all you have to do is spin a good story and the mind will get easily suckered into anything so you have to test this stuff don't just believe me and just because I'm saying this don't don't say all well yeah because leo is saying that this stuff could be verified that means that ah that that it must be true then no go verify it what you might discover is that it's not true for you because you have a different personality you have a different brain type you how you see the world in a different way than me you make different assumptions than me you have different experiences than me you live in a different part of the world than me right and maybe you also discover just mistakes I make mistakes and more often than just making mistakes I discover deeper and deeper truths so stuff that I said five years ago a lot of that stuff it's true in a sense but also like I've outgrown that now that teaching could still be helpful for you depending on what level you're at but you know I'm always out growing my own teachings because that's how it is so you've got to really verify this stuff for yourself don't just get seduced by my sweet words don't get seduced by my stories and my reasoning or any of that none of that makes any difference at all all stories all reasoning all logic all evidence all it's all [ __ ] none of it makes any difference the only thing that matters is what you can verify in your own direct experience is it true for you is enlightenment true for you it doesn't matter whether I'm enlightened or not that doesn't help you at all is it true for you do you know what the word is pointing to is it true for you that chasing food and sex and money and cars doesn't make you happy check check you must check because that's the only way you learn like doing math the only way you learn math is by doing math you will never learn math just by listening to lectures about math so really hold yourself to this this is I'm telling you this is probably the number one key in order to get actualized at org information to actually be working in your life you must be verifying it testing it embodying it all the time and constantly being on the lookout like a hawk for your mind just taking this information on as a belief system that's how religions get created and if you're not careful you will turn actualize that org into a religion that's your doing not my doing I've told you from the very beginning that everything I say is nonsense all of my words are just words they're just beliefs and concepts and ideas they're just Maps they're not the territory I've told you that from the very very beginning but have you actually grasped that and are you actually now doing the work that is required if you understand what that really means make sure that you are so we don't get this religious ideology nonsense going and stick around for more and the idea behind actualize that org is that I give you all this conceptual information but then yeah you got to do all the hard work of embodying it and also verifying it and through that your life transforms and if you don't do that nothing really changes but there will be a lot more concepts to come still tons and tons of topics that we haven't covered not even remotely covered that will change your whole life but only if you act on them so stick for those two out for those and make sure you act you