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Hey, this is Leo for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about how balance is crucial to personal development. I want to start off by telling you a little story in another land and another time, there was a father and his young boy, now the father wanted to teach the boy, the highest lessons of wisdom about life. So he knew a wise man, one of the wisest men in the realm. And he wanted to send his boy there to learn from this wise man. So he did. And he told the boy go and meet with the wise man and ask him what is the secret to happiness. And so the boy went, and the boy wandered through the deserts for 40 days and 40 Nights, to get to the palace of the wise man. Now, the boys were surprised by this, because this palace was high in the mountains. And it was this giant, opulent palace. As he walked in, he saw beautiful women and men, and they were talking and there was these beautiful tapestries on the walls, and everybody was busy. And he was surprised because the boy thought that this was going to be some sort of like, ascetic saint. And here it was this worldly wise man. So he had to wait for two hours just to get an audience with the wise man. And the boy came up to him and said, My father sent me here. He said, You're the wisest man in the realm. Tell me the secret to happiness. The wise man looked at him, and he said, I'm too busy right now, kid. Come back in two hours, walk around, make yourself a guest in my palace. Enjoy the grounds. Come back. And, and then we'll talk in two hours. And so just as the boy is going off, the guy says, wait, wait, wait a minute, take this spoon, and he hands him a spoon. And then he takes true two drops of oil and puts them in the spoon. He says, hold that spoon for me. And when you come back in two hours, have the spoon and the oil, make sure you don't spill any. And the boy thought, well, this is kind of a weird request, but Okay, fine. And So off he went, didn't bother questioning the wise man. And so he walked around. And this was a giant palace with stairs and different floors and different places to go, and many different rooms and gardens and all this. But the boy he was walking around, he had to be very careful not to spill any oil from the spoon. So he spent the next two hours walking through the palace, very carefully focused on that spoon. And then he came back. And so he comes back to the wise man. And the wise man says, So tell me what you saw of my palace. How did you like it? And the boy said, Well, I didn't really get to see much of it because I was walking around. But I was always looking at the spoon the whole time. So I didn't see anything. And the wise man said, but look, my palace, look at the look at the magnificent gardens, you know, took 10 years for the gardener to architect this beautiful garden. And you know, the animals we have out back and all the interesting people that are around and the delicious food and the tapestries and the paintings and the sculptures you didn't see any of this and the boys like no, because I was focused on the spoon. And the Wiseman said, Okay, so here's what I want you to do. Go back and this time, spend two hours actually looking at all the magnificence of my palace, and then come back and we'll talk about that. And so off, the boy went with his spoon, and he walked around the palace, and he was amazed at the things he saw. He's never seen these sorts of things in his whole life. He saw beautiful animals and sculptures and tapestries and paintings, and handsome man and sexy women, talking and interesting conversations and books and libraries. And all this stuff amazed him and finally he comes back in two hours and greets the wise man. And the wise man asked him Okay, so you saw some of my palace. But where is the oil in your spoon? And the boy looked down at a spoon and He completely forgot about the oil in the spoon because he was so bedazzled and mesmerized by all the beautiful stuff he saw that he just completely forgot. And so he was a little embarrassed and he admitted this to the wise man. And the wise man looked at him and said very well then, here is the only advice that I can give you. The secret to happiness in life. You want to know what that is? You It's to observe and bask in the magnificence of everything you see around you. All the while keeping the oil in your spoon. That's the story. That's the story from Paulo Queloz best selling book, The Alchemist, a little excerpt from that. I paraphrase it, I'm not quoting it, I'm just paraphrasing it for you here, I thought that would be a nice way to start off this discussion of balance. Because balance really is something that you will discover is a fundamental component of your development. And I don't just mean that in the sort of, like, platitude sense of like, oh, yeah, we all sort of know that we need to keep our life balanced, keep everything in balance. And that's just it, right? I'm not here to give you that kind of obvious advice. What I'm amazed by as I grow more, and I develop the quality of my consciousness, and I learn more, is just how critical and fundamental balances to getting your life, right. And also how critical it is to understand how balance really works. And why it works the way it works. If you're going to be developing yourself, because you're reading all these books, and you're listening to all this advice from different people, or from myself or from whoever, or maybe even you're giving advice to people, you know, after a while you get good at this stuff, you start to see things that other people don't know and try to give advice to your friends, to your family and so forth. Maybe you even become a coach or a teacher at one point. That's all good stuff. But if you don't understand how balance fits into the equation, you're going to make some mistakes. So what I want to tell you about balance, is that balance is an interesting thing, because balance can't be taught. That's what's interesting about it. And the best analogy I can give you this for this is imagine if you had a child, and you wanted to teach that child how to unicycle. And you were a great unit recycler. Because he spent a lot of time learning. And so what do you do you decide like, Okay, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna write all of my best wisdom and advice and techniques for how to unicycle successfully, I'm going to just write it down in this big fat book, it's going to be the unicycling encyclopedia, and I'm going to give this thing to him. And I'm going to assume that he's going to become as great a unicycle as I am. Well, we know that that's going to go terribly wrong, right, because you can't expect someone to learn how to unicycle. From reading an encyclopedia, even if you describe in perfect detail, the full technique for unicycling and all the do's and don'ts, and you give all the best advice and guidelines, and you lay out all the dangers and pitfalls and traps that exist in unicycling, what's going to happen, as soon as that kid gets on that unicycle within two seconds, he's gonna fall off, right probably flat on his face the first time, and the second time, and third time and the fourth time and the fifth time, and maybe the 100th time, he'll be able to ride straight for 10 seconds before falling off, and he'll fall off again. And so he'll just have to go through that process. Now, does that mean that reading a unicycle encyclopedia is useless? No, that can be very valuable. But with unicycling, the whole trick is in the balance, it's learning how to balance. And that's how life works. And that's why personal development is a tricky and challenging thing. And that's why even if you listen perfectly to everything I say to all the other teachers and books and material that's out there, and you take all the courses, and you go to all the classes, that you will still have to actually roll up your sleeves and find the right balance for you in this work in your life. That's the challenge of this work. But also that's the beauty of it, because you're doing something custom for yourself. You're not living a cookie cutter life. If you're really serious about growing your consciousness, and personal development. And that's why this work is so hard. Because someone who is a pretty good unit cycler tries to give you the hints for how to unicycle successfully. It's frustrating for the teacher, because it's like, well, what do I say I want to help you out. But if I tell you to go left, and you go too far left, you're gonna fall down. And if I tell you to go right, you're gonna go too far right, you're gonna fall down. So it's like I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't see. And there is something valuable in giving you some advice. You know, at some point, you're leaning too far to the left and you need to go right and sometimes you're leading to for fault. to too much forward need to go backward a little bit. So those hints are good. And there's also general principles to unicycle that I'm sure are important to learn in order to do it successfully. But this idea that you can just take advice and apply it in a rigid manner. And then also just try to give that advice to everybody else, also in a similar manner, and expect it to work for everybody. That's not realistic. And what I want to do now is I want to, I want to really drive this point home, because I want to, by giving you some examples, some concrete examples of what I mean by balance, and the delicate balancing act that is doing personal development, you should be noticing if you've been doing this work for a year, or two or three, whether meditation or working on your business, your life purpose, try to lose weight, trying to get success in relationships, or developing emotional mastery, you should be noticing that the real challenge in this work is finding that right balance. And not just in the abstract, but specifically for you, what's the right balance for you. So let's give you a list of some of these examples. These I find some of the most common, some of the most generalizable examples that everybody I think will face on this path in one way or another. So the first example I have for you is the balance, finding the balance between complacency and laziness, versus being neurotically disciplined. So a lot of people are very complacent and lazy. And a lot of my advice is geared to those sorts of people to kind of wake them up to get them motivated. So some people are in that boat, right? They can't get themselves to get up and actually like work on themselves work on their career work on something that is important to them. They don't have a sense of purpose or motivation. So that would be leaning too much to this side over here, the complacency side. But then there are some people who are chronic overachievers, maybe they develop that in school, because their parents put a lot of pressure on them. And now they have this neurotic need to achieve, to be successful, to go after money to go after fame to do this to whatever. And they're very disciplined about it. And in fact, they're so disappointed, they become neurotic. And so now they're on this end of the spectrum, and it's a spectrum. And you got to find what the right balance is for you. And so sometimes you'll hear me talking about how people are neurotic. And so maybe that refers to you. And maybe I talked about how, hey, you should maybe start to love yourself, accept yourself a little bit more, because you're overly discipline, your discipline is forced, your motivations are externalized. So maybe you should try to get some more authentic motivations, got some intrinsic motivations. But see, now for the lazy complacent person, that becomes a problem. Because when that lazy person hears that advice about the neurotic, he's like, Oh, well, so I'm lazy and complacent. So I guess yeah, let me follow that advice, Leo. And let me just accept myself as I am in love myself for being lazy. And then you're lazy your whole life is the, or the neurotic person takes the advice meant for the lazy person. And he says, Well, if I'm just going to sit around on my couch all day, and if I'm not going to work 15 hours a day. And if I'm going to allow myself a vacation once in a while, then I'm just going to be like that lazy person. So I got to stick it to myself and be extra disciplined. And so you see, in both cases, the person is misinterpreting the advice, because he's not seeing that he's on a unicycle here. And his life is this long journey, this long winding journey that he has to carefully balance and navigate. And then it goes wrong. By the way, I find that balance is one of the rarest, rarest qualities of human beings to have immaculate balancing ability to know when too much is too much. And too little is too little. And when it's hurting you in either direction, and to not be too much to one side or too much to the other side, which tends to be the problem with most debates with most arguments, with most positions people take with most ideologies is that it's not that the ideology or the position you take or the belief you have is utterly false. It's just that it works in certain situations, and it doesn't in others, and you need to be flexible enough to find the balance and you need to develop that balancing ability. Otherwise, your life's not gonna go well. You're gonna fall into one trap or the other. And there are traps strewn about everywhere. So that was one example. Let's keep going. How about finding the right balance between being gentle with yourself versus being harsh with yourself or with others? Sometimes you might think like, Well, my kid is not doing good in school. So what should I do? Should I be gentle with him? Or should I be harsh? Should I chastise him and really kick him in the ass to get great, good grades? Or should I be compassionate and understanding and give him his space? That's a tough balance to find. You'd be wrong if you went with only one approach, or only the other approach. And you weren't context sensitive, right? Sometimes, the kid might need a good kick in the ass, if he's just being lazy, or whatever, and he doesn't see the value of education, maybe you got to go kick him in the ass. Not physically, I mean, but metaphorically. So you got to be able to harsher with him. And maybe if the kid is really struggling in school, you see that he's trying, but he's just struggling, and he's still not doing it. So there's some deeper other kind of problem there, then you're being harsh with him about that, like, if he has a learning disability, being harsh with him is not going to solve it, that's only going to exacerbate the problem, in which case, you got to be gentle, you got to understand that your kid might have limits that you didn't have when you were in school. So you can't just impose your standards and your abilities onto your kid. Right? This is a classic problem that parents face, especially fathers, as fathers can be more harsh with their kids, and they tend to not understand, you know, weaknesses that their children might have. So this is another example. And of course, that's what the kid but also applied this to yourself, some people are way too harsh on themselves. And some people are way too lenient on themselves. So this kind of goes to the paradox of self acceptance versus growth. Should you push yourself to grow, or should just accept yourself? Well, really, it depends on the situation, and finding the right balance for you heard about finding the right balance between left brain and right brain. Some people are way too left brain or super rational and logical to the point where they no longer have the emotions necessary to really ace life. And some people are so right brained, that they then lose track of the facts, and then they become ungrounded. So that becomes a problem. So finding your balance there between logic and intuition. That's important. It's very rare to find a person who is really good at being able to use both his left and his right brain without being overly dominant in one or the other. That's quite rare. And also a person who's good at ramping up the left brain when necessary for a specific task, like if you're doing mathematics, okay, ramp up your left brain great. And then ramping up the right brain, when you are doing something more intuitive. Like maybe you're in a relationship to rev up the right brain, or you're doing spiritual work, or you're sitting down to meditate, at that point, you shut off your left brain. See, but being able to be that flexible is a rare thing. And it's not something that you're just born with, it's something you cultivate, that's what development is about. That's what growth leads to is that kind of flexibility. Of course, you can help by having an open mindset and understanding that this is what you're trying to do in life is to develop this balance. How about finding a balance between suppressing emotions versus expressing emotions? See, some people they're very expressive with their emotions, as soon as they feel sad or angry or pissed off, or whatever, they just let you know about it. And a lot of times in dysfunctional ways, so maybe they get fits of rage. And then you tell that person well hold on, don't, don't express your emotions so much. And then what they do is they swing the pendulum to the opposite end of the spectrum, and then they suppress their emotions. Because they think that, well, if I'm not going to express my emotions, the only other option is to suppress them. So they go into suppression mode. And some people are constantly suppressing their emotions, they've been suppressing their emotions their entire life. And so they have now problems because they can't even bring up serious issues in relationships, for example, or at work, because they're constantly suppressing everything, not just from other people, but also from themselves. They can't even be honest with themselves about how they feel. And basically, they've never even felt different emotions in their body, they don't even know where hunger is in their body, they don't know where sadness is in their body. So both of these are problems, you got to find the right balance there. For some of you, you express way too much. And for others of you, you suppress way too much. And for many people, it's both you do both way too much. So where do you find that balance? bleah telling me how to find the perfect balance. But you see the problem with that question. How am I going to tell you it's like me telling you, when you should turn left or right, or leaned forward or backward on a unicycle? You know, it all depends on where you're going and what situation you're in specifically, and it's going to change from moment to moment. That's an ability you have to cultivate through trial and error. but also through learning and wisdom, it is possible to learn this stuff. It's not just all purely trial and error. How about the next balancing? Issue? Rejecting theory entirely, versus being lost in theory, this is a balance that a lot of people get wrong. So a lot of academic types and scientific type people, they get lost in theory so easily that, you know, they can spend the whole life reading books and forget what life is about. That's a problem. Also, maybe some people in business, they might get so theoretical about their business, that they forget about the practical elements of their business. And so they crash their business into the ground because of that. Their theoreticians. Other people, on the other hand, they say, oh, theory theory is all just theory theory is pointless, you know, who needs theory, it's all about action. Let me go out there, just take action, action, action, action, action. But if you go out there and take action all the time, without knowing some of the theory, you know, the theory is important. So again, you get the balance wrong, you got to find the right balance. And a lot of times, it's a problem with spiritual people, as they say, Well, you know, Leo, reading all these books, like you say, and studying all these different traditions and mystical, different mystical sects and stuff, this is all pointless, it's all just more theory. You're failing to see the right balance, right. And also, a lot of times, notice that people will use this as a cudgel to create straw man arguments, and create false debates by creating these false dichotomies like, well, you should never read another book again in your life. Or like, well, you should only sit and meditate. That's all you should do. Or well, you should only do personal development, you know, spiritual work, or you should only do business, and you should do no other stuff. Or you should only do this and not do that. Right. And when you create a kind of straw man, an exaggerated version, that's what a straw man is, it's an exaggerated version of the opposite position. That of course, it looks like, yeah, you can see all the problems with being extreme. But there's problems with every extreme. There's also problems with always being in the middle. So I'm not just telling you to always be in the middle, that's also not the solution. You see. It's the dynamics or equilibrium that you're going for. How about career and life purpose, versus spirituality? Talk about balancing that. So some of you have taken my life purpose course. And now you hear me talking about spiritual topics and enlightenment. And you might be wondering, well, yeah, what should I do? Should I pursue my life purpose? Or go after enlightened? It seems like these things can be contradictory at times. Yeah, in the same sense that when you're on a unicycle, you know, left and right can seem contradictory. They pull you in opposite directions. And sometimes you got to go one way, sometimes the other way. What do you do? Do you say perfectly in the middle? No, not necessarily. It's not what I'm advocating, what I'm advocating is that you find the right balance for you. There needs to be a balanced struck between business and spirituality, what that balance is for you, I don't know, that's your work to find out. And I'm not saying that even you know what that balance is. Because you can't know until you start to get in there, roll up your sleeves and actually do some trial and error and see what comes out. That's all part of the process of getting to know yourself self discovery, finding out your authentic values, motivations in life, the more you understand yourself, the better you will be able to guesstimate or Intuit what these balances for you should be at certain points in your life. Also, another balancing act is pursuing enlightenment versus personal development. A lot of people who get into this work get into it for personal development, which is more success based type stuff, you're working on your health, your relationships, your career, that sort of stuff. You want to solve some emotional issue that you have like your depression, whatever. Okay, great. But then you learn about enlightenment. And so Leah, what should I do now? Should I do? Should I forget about the personal development just do enlightenment? Some people argue that and other people just say no, forget about the enlightenment, that stuff's not very practical. Let me just do personal development. Who's right? Well, they're both wrong if they take extremist positions on this, because if you only do enlightenment, you're gonna have problems. And if you only do personal development and have problems, and I'm not saying split it down the middle half and half either find the right balance for you. For some people, at this point right now in their life. They need to do a ton of personal development, 10 years of personal development before they can even talk about alignment. And for some people, they've been doing way too much personal development. They're focusing on too shallow of stuff, success and whatever else and they would really benefit from doing some deep spirituality work and let go of their chasing of success. So depends, really depends. Another one is a balancing act. is working on yourself versus enjoying life. You might have noticed this one, where it's like, well, Leo, you know, working on myself doing all this personal development, that's hard work. I find that when I work on myself, I'm not enjoying life. And when I'm drawing, I'm going out with my friends and partying and stuff like that I'm enjoying life a lot, but then I'm not really growing. So what should I do? One or the other? will obviously there's a balance there somewhere for you. And it will probably depend on where you are in your life. Another balancing act is unconditional love versus being a doormat. So sometimes you tell people, okay, unconditional love, practice that. But then they become a doormat. And I think that being on practicing unconditional love means that you should tolerate abuse and theft and your friends, calling you names and insulting you and mistreating you and that sort of stuff. Of course, that's not what unconditional love is about at all. But people make that mistake, because they don't see this whole dynamic as a balancing act. You see. And then some people are way too assertive, so they don't practice unconditional love. Because they feel like well, if I start practicing international law, that's going to that's means I'm going to turn into a doormat. So I have to be hyper assertive all the time, I have to turn into an asshole. So you got to find the right balance there. Another delicate balancing act is being too stingy with your money versus being too wasteful. Some people are way too conservative and stingy, where they won't even invest $20 into a book that would really help them to change their life. I see people leaving me comments on their videos a lot where they say like, well, $20, I don't want to pay $20 for that I don't want to pay $100 for this, when that thing would really really help them, it would pay them back 100 fold. But they're too stingy for that. And then some people are way too wasteful with their money, of course, credit cards and all that kind of stuff that we know about. So you got to find that right balance for you. Also, with regard to money, there's a balancing act of chasing money versus neglecting money. Some people chase after money their whole lives. And that turns into a huge problem. And then some people do the opposite of that, which is that they neglect money and say, Well, money. Money's not important. Life isn't about money. Life is about art and love and emotions and relationships. That's what life is all about. It's about spirituality, man. We don't need money. And then you see this guy, and then he comes to you next month asking to borrow money because he can't pay his bills. You see, well, that was the other extreme, you got to find the right balance. You got to find a balance between being pragmatic and idealistic. That's something I've, I've struggled with this one for many years. How do I maintain my ideals, all the things that I hold as very important as my highest values, but also at the same time be a part of the real world, you know, I have certain ideals about how money is not supposed to corrupt, and how I'm supposed to be out there doing my art and following my passion, all this, but in the real world has real world obstacles to it to see. So I have to be able to get stuff done in business, I have to be able to get stuff done in my relationships, I have to be able to get stuff done when I sit down and meditate. And it's not always the ideal. Find the right balance. See, most people are either way too pragmatic to the point where they lose touch with their ideals. And they're just like husks of human beings. They waste their lives. Because if you're going to be pragmatic your whole life, you're basically a robot, you're not a human being. You've wasted your life. And other people are so idealistic, that yeah, they have these beautiful ideals. But then when you look at their life, tangibly, they're not manifesting what their ideals are, they might believe in free love and abundance for everybody and all this sort of stuff, but then they don't have abundance in their life, they're not actually able to love everyone freely and unconditionally. Those are just ideals, right? Because they haven't found the right balance. And it's in the balance that the real work happens. That's where it's really tricky, might take you 10 years to figure out that balance for you. And that's just in this one facet of your life. And there's many facets as we're exploring here. How about the delicate balance of contemplating death, versus becoming nihilistic? So I have some episodes that I shot in the past where I talk about how it's important to contemplate death. That's very important. If you want to live a meaningful life, you have to be thinking about your death. I think about my death, almost on a daily basis. But now, some people will, again, take that and misconstrued and go to the opposite extreme. And then they'll use this to become a nihilist or to become depressive or to justify inaction. Because now it's like, oh, Lee, I've been thinking about my death, like you said, added, I've been doing it and I've been constantly my death and it's like, Well, life is all meaningless. So there's nothing to do and it's all pointless, why should I even develop myself and yada yada yada. And you know, I'm now I'm feeling depressed because of this. Again, that's something you have to reconcile. It's something you have to work on. I've worked on this for years in my youth, on this specific challenge between nihilism and the and, and meaning finding meaning in life, and realizing that life has no meaning. And striking the right balance between that is challenging. Most people, they don't think about their death at all. Or they're the opposite. They think about how meaningless everything else everything is. And so therefore, they use it to justify inaction. And they're not passionate about their lives because of that. For me, I actually think I've reconciled this one pretty good. Because I spent a lot of my youth gears in my youth thinking about this when I was a teenager and doing philosophy. This was one of the core questions I had, that I really worked on, and I cracked this nut. Although I still have some more lingering work remaining, but I mostly cracked this nut to the point where I'm, I found that balance for me, where I don't need to concoct or fabricate meaning in order to motivate myself, in a sense, that that I realized that in the big picture is sort of meaningless. It's all sort of meaningless. But still, I can be very passionate about what I'm doing. Right. So I'm working to figure that out. That's a facet that I've resolved. And now I'm going to move on to working on other facets, finding my balance there. How about striking a delicate balance between being scientific, but not overly materialistic. Most people, when they become scientifically minded, now, they use that as an X against spirituality and religious people. And they expect everything to be scientific and fact based, with no paradoxes, and everything has to be super rational. Well, that leads to problems that, you know, I've talked about in the past. Other people are the opposite of that. They go down the spiritual mystical route, except they distort it. And they turn into a sort of hippie, ideal side type of thing. And now they're denying facts. They're denying science. And you're using that as an axe against science. So both of those are problematic, as you can see. And that entire debate is purely just a false debate as a distraction, you got to find your balance point there. How about striking a delicate balance between art versus marketing. If you're doing your life purpose, or you're running a business, and you're an entrepreneur, or maybe you have an artistic sort of career, then you've probably faced this challenge. And what I mean here is that, if you're an artistic type of person, like I am, you're creative. You want to create beautiful things with your work, then, you really value the arts, you have these lofty ideals. And a lot of times you have this tension, this sort of tug of war between art and marketing. Like you might want to write this profound artistic book, or paint a painting or make some music. That's very artistic, and you love it. But then it's so niche that is very difficult to market and your customers. There are no customers, because you're the only one who likes the art. So you got to sort of like say, Well, okay, yeah, I want to write this book, that's going to be super weird and artsy fartsy. But then I'm not going to be able to market it or to be successful at it, I'm gonna have no audience. I do want to have some audience because that's the whole point of me creating my art is so that I can have an impact on people. So if only one person reads my book, that's, that's kind of lame. So you say, Well, okay, I can go to the opposite opposite end of the spectrum. And I can say, Well, I'm just going to market the shit out of my book, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go take a poll, I'm going to do a survey of my friends and see, okay, what kind of book would they like me to write? Oh, vampires. Okay, I'm gonna write a book about vampires. Even though I don't give a shit about vampires. Just because I know that right now, vampire movies or whatever are hot. And so you know, people will probably buy it. And then of course, when you go down that route, a lot of times what happens that you write your vampire book, but because you weren't passionate about it, and you were only doing it to please lowbrow masses, that your book ends up being crap, it doesn't sell well anyways. Because usually you need to passion for something to be good. So you got to find the balance there. And that's also something that I've really struggled with for years and years and years. Finding that balance when I was doing game development, find that balance. When I was starting my online marketing business where I kind of swung my pendulum to the marketing side, and then swung the pendulum back with actualised.org. With actualize that org I was able to sort of find a balance and I'm still looking for that balance because even with actualized.org, even though it's like my passion business, and it is my art, I think of it as AP, I don't think of it as just like self help advice. It's my art. That's what this is. But also, I have to balance it with marketing. Like certain topics, certain titles, like come up with for videos, I have to think about every single title for the video and think like, well, how many people are going to click on this one versus that one, this video title is more true and honest and more artistically genuine, but then that one there will get me more clicks, more people will see it more people will benefit from it. So how do I balance that, I mean, I want to be helping people I don't want to be just talking to to chirping crickets. But also, I don't want to sacrifice my values too much, and I want to maintain my style. So that's a, that's a really tough one. That'll take you probably a decade to sort that out in your career. At least if you're the artistic type. You know, a lot of people, that's why we get the classic problem of the starving artists, the stereotype of the starving artist, what is that that's someone who's completely neglected the marketing, who just does arts for just the sake of doing arts. And that ends up being pretty lame. If you read biographies of artists who looked that way, it's not a very good kind of life. And then you know, we all know also about the marketing cocksuckers you know, the corporate marketing cocksuckers, who will market anything that has no artistic value at all, just purely for profit, and it could even be harmful and damaging to people, they'll still find a way to market the shit out of it and be, you know, raking in the cash. But then at the same time hurting people and paying the cost on the inside. Because those people know that they don't want to be a marketing cocksucker they want to be living up to higher consciousness values deep down inside, they want to do that. They just kind of sold their soul to the devil to the marketing devil. here here's another delicate balance that you need to strike is between rejecting culture and questioning culture. Versus studying culture. And finding the good and culture. I've ranted about culture in the past, in general culture can be a very damaging thing. A lot of negative stuff comes from culture and from groupthink and from social conditioning. So a lot of cultural baggage needs to be rejected. And maybe when you're first starting person development, you need to do a lot of cultural rejection. But then also you don't want to develop a chip on your shoulder, where now you deny and reject all cultures. And now you don't spend any time studying cultures and developing certain cosmopolitan myths about you certain worldliness. So how do you not get sucked into religion but at the same time still understand different religions? That's a tough balancing act. might take you a while to figure that one out as well. How about striking a balance between being brutally honest and being sort of weak and compassionate? So brutally honest people, you know, they're very insensitive, they just blurt stuff out and offend people. And then they say, well, but I'm at least I'm very honest. And and other people will say, Well, no, I tell a bunch of white lies. And I'm kind of weak in yellow bellied. I don't people tell people what they need to hear. Because I don't want to hurt their feelings. Finding a balance between that is tricky as well. How about relationship versus career? So this is a classic one that we've all seen in the movies, right? classic problem of guy works too much, but then neglects his family, or the opposite problem. You invest too much time in your family and all that kind of stuff. But then you have a crappy career, finding that balance is tricky. And different people will require different solutions to that problem. No, it's not the case that you just split that that that one down the middle. How about balance between exploring psychedelics and using it for growth, versus using psychedelics for escape, or demonizing psychedelics? Right, so I see a lot of people falling into one of these two extremes. They either like the idea of psychedelics and then they get on board and then they become psychedelic escapist, and they use it to escape doing personal development work. So there's that group of people. The other group of people are the ones who have been sort of brainwashed school about how psychedelics are bad and evil. So they demonize them. They say, There's no way that psychedelics have any spiritual virtues. There's no way you can use them for growth, there's no way they can help you with enlightenment, none of that stuff would work. Right? So they take that position. And what's lost is that fine balance in the middle, which is what I always advocate was psychedelics finding that balance? How about finding a balance between cutting toxic relationships versus avoiding commitment? So this is a one that a lot of you look at wrong. I've talked in the past about how relationships can be toxic. And sometimes you got to just cut people out of your life. Like that guy right there. He's like a scumbag alcoholic who abuses, you cut that person out of your life, or he's a gambler, and he's wasting all your money, cut that person out of your life, because you're probably not going to fix his gambling problem for him, you see. So, some people then use that and they say, Oh, well, as soon as there any little problem in a relationship, it's like, oh, my girlfriend, she didn't want to do something that I wanted to do, she didn't want to go to the same restaurant as me. So I'm gonna cut her out of my life. And you know, my mom, my mom, she said something to me the other day, and I'm gonna cut her out of my life. And so like, you can take it to that extreme. You know, successful relationships do require a commitment. And if your commitment phobic, it's very easy to for you to take the wrong advice, and then use it as justification to continue with your commitment phobia. You see what both sides do. And this is just the general pattern of how the mind works. The egoic mind works a low consciousness mind works this way, is that it goes to extremes. And it uses the other extreme as the Boogeyman. So it's like, well, Leo, if I'm going to be cutting toxic people out of my life, that means that none of my relationships will have the commitment component. And that means all my relationships will fail. No, that's not what's being said. And, you know, somebody else might say, well, Leo, you know, if I start using psychedelics, that means I'm going to become some sort of like, heroin user, and I'm going to, you know, devolve into this and this and this and that I'm going to stop meditating. But see, that's the boogeyman, right? You're afraid of the other extreme, you're creating a straw man argument in your mind, you're thinking in terms of black and white. And that's not a very good way to navigate this complex, grayscale world that we're in. Requires nuance, requires balance, requires careful discernment. See, how about striking a balance between being focused on one school or teaching or set of techniques for personal development or spiritual development, versus being eclectic? i In the past, I've advocated a very eclectic approach to personal development and to enlightenment. And then some people criticize me for that and say, well, Leo, no, that's a problem. You're, you're misleading people. Because by telling them to be eclectic, they're going to study all this stuff. They're gonna study Buddhism, and Hinduism, and Christianity and all this, but they're not going to actually practice anything, and therefore they will never become enlightened. And that's true, that is a danger. There is a danger to that kind of over eclecticism where you just sample everything in a spiritual marketplace. But you don't find a set of techniques that you actually commit to. So that's the extreme there. But the other extreme is that you focus so much that all you do is you say, Okay, I'm just going to take this one technique, focusing on my breath, I'm just going to use focusing on my breath, I'm going to use the focusing on my breath to solve all of life's problems. And I'm going to use it to grow myself spiritually to the highest levels. Well, you're kidding yourself, if you think that's going to happen. You could focus on the breath, and you could become enlightened, just using focus on the breath as a technique. But there's more, there's much more, you're not going to become a well rounded person by just focusing on your fucking breath your whole life, you see, and so you will be unbalanced. And there are dangers on both sides. Which is why nuance is required. Which is why it's very easy to take any advice that you hear any book, or anything that I say, and to sort of demonize it by saying, well, but look at all these problems with it. Look at all these pitfalls, look at all these dangers. Right. But there's dangers everywhere. We live in a dangerous world. And personal development is a dangerous game. Not in the sense that you'll physically harm yourself. But it's dangerous in the sense there are many, many traps. And you're always at risk of falling into some trap. So criticizing some method or school or some technique or some philosophy, just based on the fact that there are traps associated with it. That's not a very valid criticism, because there's traps associated with everything, including criticism. One of the biggest traps is criticism. And, of course, what I'm talking about here with balance doesn't just apply to your personal life. I've mostly been been giving you personal life examples, but it applies to your business. It applies to the way society is run it applies to government. Do you believe that? government is too big, too bloated, too much bureaucracy, too much regulation? We need to cut that shit down. Okay, that's one extreme something ions, that's the case, sometimes government is too big of a bureaucracy, sometimes there is too much regulation. But to take that on as an ideological position is a problem. You also have the opposite end, right? You might believe, well, government needs to be bigger, because corporations are running amok, we need a lot of regulation, a lot of bureaucracy, higher taxes, all this. And so then that becomes your ideology, right. And then these people fight together all the time. And they're just ideological, and they're not seeing the nuance and that in certain situations, and certain times in history, we need government to be bigger. In certain situations, in certain areas. In certain sectors, we need government to be smaller. And it's all about finding the nuance there. So, I hope you can start to see the importance of balance here. Balance is not just some generic platitude as in like, oh, yeah, everything in moderation. No, that's not what I'm saying here. Hopefully, you can also start to see now why some of my advice may have seemed contradictory to you at times. It's like, well, Leo, in this one video, you told me that I should be more masculine. And in this other video, you told me I should be more feminine? Which one is that you're contradicting yourself? Well, now you see what's going on there at the meta perspective. And you might also have run into this problem, if you're reading a lot of books. If you have my book list, and you're reading that, you might also notice contradictions there between different authors, you might read something by some author, and that contradict something that I say, does that mean that he's wrong? And I'm right, or I'm right, he's wrong, not necessarily. I mean, in certain situations, maybe, maybe I'm wrong. But generally what is happening, if you take the meta perspective, zoom out a little bit, you're gonna see that well, he might be emphasizing a certain solution for certain type of person who has a certain type of imbalance in their life. And I might be emphasizing a different solution for a different type of person who has a slightly opposite imbalance in their life. You see, and even within what I say, I can shoot one video here talking about one solution for one type of person. And then tomorrow, I can shoot another video talking about another solution for another type of person with a slightly different imbalance. And they might be opposite solutions, right? Because these people are leaning too much to the left or too much to the right. So they require opposite medicines, in a sense, right, you have to tailor the medicine to the person. That's one of the limitations of these videos, actually, if I was coaching you, if I was doing life coaching one on one, that's one of the benefits of life coaching, I don't coach anymore, but if I do coach somebody and I have in the past, is that the benefit of that relationship is that we can talk about issues specific to that person, I don't really know what your issues are, I'm sort of guessing I'm averaging. Right. And that's what a, that's what a teacher sort of has to do. In the end, you're the ultimate arbiter of what advice is right for you, and what advice is not right for you, even the most enlightened master, you could think of can give you a piece of advice, which will not be right for you. Because he doesn't know you as well, as you do. See, the Buddha himself could give you wrong advice, not because he doesn't understand things. But just because his focus, his priorities, his values, his position in life is different from yours. And he can't really anticipate he can sort of ballpark you, but he can't truly know. Which is why you can never outsource this stuff to anyone else. Balancing is not an act, you can outsource. You have to do it if you want to get the results from it. And what I want you to see here is that the the real work in this work, where we're doing the heavy lifting is when we're learning to navigate all this stuff for ourselves. And we're struggling with it. We're looking for easy answers. But of course, there are no easy answers. When you're learning to navigate. There are no positions to take your position list, you're confused, you're lost, you're struggling, you're doubting yourself, you're second guessing yourself. You don't know which device to follow. Should I follow that book or this book? Or what Leo said in this video in that video, what should I do? Accept that. Accept that confusion. But keep moving forward. Don't stop the mistake when people get confused that they get paralyzed and they stop. You got to keep going. So I've already mentioned this point, but I want to stress it again. Don't mistake balance as splitting everything down the middle. It's not like that at all. Balance is you can think of it in two ways. There is a static form of balance and a dynamic form of balance. static balance is where you think like okay, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to find The perfect balance between my career and my family life. And when I find that, I'll know what that is, and that's it, we're done. Problem solved. Probably not going to work that way, especially if you're planning on growing throughout your life, as you grow, you will need to modify that position, even if you've solved it once, you will need to change it in the future. So this is what I mean by dynamic balance, you can never get on a unicycle and go down some winding road and just coast. That's what people are doing when they're looking for a static balance, or when they think of balance as a static thing. It's sort of like they want to just unicycle down a mountain. And not consider the context, you know, the terrain that are going down, you have to keep your eye on the terrain at all times, and counteract any sort of obstacles that are there. That's what dynamic balance is about. dynamic balance means that you know, for the next five years, you're going to be working on your business. And then once that's handled, you're going to work on your love life. And then once that's handled, five years later, you're going to work on your spirituality. And when you're working on your spirituality, maybe your business is going to suffer. Maybe you're even going to quit your business entirely when you're working on your spirituality. But then you become enlightened, and then maybe you go back into business, or whatever, you know, that's what dynamic balance looks like. So recognize that. Balance is different for different people. But balance is different, not just for different people. But even for you it's different, the balance for you will change depending on what stage of your life you're in. And as you move from your 20s, to your 30s, to your 40s and your 50s, and so on, you better believe that balance adjustments will be necessary, big balance adjustments. That is if you're growing. People who are not growing, they can stay in one spot. But then you don't want to be there. This, this tendency to just stagnate in one spot. This is the worst place you can be in in life, I think, personally. So what I'm trying to tell you is that you need to customize everything you're learning all the theory, to your personality, to your genetics, to your unique strengths and weaknesses, to wherever you are in life. How are you feel about life? Maybe right now you don't feel like starting a business, maybe you will in five years. But right now you don't Okay? Well, in that sense, then maybe working on your business isn't the right thing for you go work on your spirituality, or whatever else you're interested in, you know, family life, you generally have to follow your motivations and your motivations, they don't stay constant your whole life. It's not like you're just like, motivated by family, constantly, from your 20s to your 60s, or you're motivated by business constantly, from your 20s, your 60s, or you're motivated by spirituality that we know, it's like in your 20s, you might be motivated by business and in your 30s, maybe by spirituality in your 40s by family life and so forth. So it's all about finding what works for you. And realizing that what works for you may not work for other people. And what works for other people may not work for you. Because you are individuals. And the metaphor that I came up with for this is the metaphor of the mixing board. Think of life like a giant mixing board. I have an example here of a little mixing board that I have that I use sometimes for audio. I'm not using it right now. But see what's interesting about mixing boards for mixing audio, this is a tiny one. If you've seen someone like MTV, they, they're huge. They have hundreds of these little knobs, right. And these knobs they just spin around one way or the other. But what you got to think of is that your life is like a giant mixing board. Imagine one of these but with 1000 knobs. And now bounced does not mean that the knobs are set to zero. dead center on all the knobs, depending on the type of song you're composing, depending on what you want out of your music, you know, is it classical music? Is it rap? Is it hip hop? What are you? What kind of song do you want? Right? You got to twist and turn all these different knobs to different positions for your specific objective. And so that's what your life should be like. That's how you should think of it. When you start to think of your life like this, and you start to think of other people's lives like this in this manner. Then you become less ideological, you become more tolerant. You become more cosmopolitan, because you see like, hey, yeah, you know, my mixing board is cranked this way. My child's mixing board is crazy some other way. And my wife's mixing board will be great another way and my bosses will be another way and you know In my community, the city I live in the country I live in will be tweaked this way. And some other communities, some other countries, some other races, people will have it tweaked another way. And that's okay. Because I realize that, you know, we're different. We need different things at different times. And we're always playing and fine tuning and adjusting, at least if we're doing it right. The problem with most people is that their mixing board, you know, what happens, by the time they get into their mid 20s, by age 25, all these knobs that they were playing with when they were a kid. And when they were in high school, and in college, they all get set, they're set in cement, and they never change again. And then those people become very ideological about which way their knobs are set. And they want everyone else's knobs to be set just like them. And don't you dare touch my knobs is their position for the rest of their life. And even if you touch that knob, even just a little bit, they start to scream and moan and yell and resist, and they can even get violent with you. And, of course, what kind of life is that, that's not going to work. So I want you to be cognizant of differences that people have. And be careful about criticizing other people's situations and processes. Some people need to go through a very different process than you in order to grow. You know, some people were abused when they were kids. So that person who's been abused, or raped, or who was growing up in college, in under a communist dictatorship, or who's whose parents were tortured, or who lost their mother or their father in a car accident, or to cancer, or who was like a military brat, and traveled from military base to military base for their whole life, or maybe their house was destroyed in a fire, you know, someone who's experienced them like that will need to go through a very different process to grow, to become enlightened, to spiritual purify themselves to, to be able to be in good relationships, to be able to hold down a good job, to be able to have a life purpose, they're going to need to go through a different process most likely than you. And even if they experienced similar things to you, they might still need a different process. Because they might be more left brain, you might be more right brain. They might be more intuitive, you might be more logical, they might be more scientific, you might be more spiritual, you know, who knows. So keep that in mind. Use this point to under to really deeply understand this. This should melt away a lot of the tendency that you have to debate, and also your desire to engage in debates or even to listen to debates. So one of the big reasons that there are debates within personal development, or even non duality, about which method is best, which technique is best, should I do this? Should I do that? Or in politics or whatever, there are these debates, because people disagree. But they're not really disagreeing on substance. They're disagreeing on a difference in balance. But they're not recognizing that what they're disagreeing on is a difference in balance. They act in the debate as though there's this one set of knobs, which is perfect for everybody, this is the right balance we should have, we should have this exact balance for all of science, or for all of spirituality, or for the entire country, or for my entire family, we should have just this perfect balance. And of course, this perfect balance happens to be exactly the one that I think is perfect for me. Of course, that's how the ego thinks, right? Whatever ego likes as its perfect balance, whatever makes the ego happy. It'll want to then did that dictate that to everybody else? And it'll think that there's these significant differences of agreement between people, actually different people, usually, they don't disagree on the fundamentals. They disagree mostly on the details, difference and balance. And that difference in balance is often dictated by their shit, the shit they have going on their life dictates the balance. And that's why people get defensive and ideological because, as you well know, we need less government. The reason we need less less government is because government was a problem in my life. And I can tell you how the government abused my daddy and my daddy's daddy and my, my great, great grandparents, they were refugees from a dictatorship. So we need less government. Okay, that's your background. That's where you're coming from. And so your knobs are tweaked a certain way. You know, somebody else is coming from the opposite end of the spectrum. They were under two lakhs of a government corporations ran amok and, you know, some corporation poisoned their kids and their kid died because some corporation didn't have strict enough regulations and sent them some medicine that wasn't properly vetted by the FDA or whatever, and their child died. And so now you're telling this guy that they need to tweak their knobs to reduce government regulations with the FDA, and they're going to tell you to go fuck yourself, because they have a different set of knobs. See? So to really see this romantic perspective takes a lot of the edge off of a debate, because you sort of see through the debate as just a game, it's a game, it's a distraction from the real work of finding the right balance for you. And your concern should not be about other people's balances, but your own. If everyone takes care. Just think about this, if everyone took care of their own mixing board, every single mixing board in the entire world will be perfect. Let's see what we do. Rather than doing the hard work of dialing in our own mixing board, we what we do is we we neglect our own and we say hey, let me play with your mixing board. I think your mixing board should be like this, and like that, and like that, and like this. And we go around doing that. And then meanwhile, our mixing board is fucked up. And if you think about it, that strategy, if everybody is working on everybody else's mixing board and not their own, then that guarantees a flawed mixing board for everyone on Earth. And so now you start to see the big picture of what's really going on and how important balances. Alright, that's it. I'm done here signing off. Please click the like button for me, post your comments down below, share this episode with a friend. And lastly, come check out actualize that org, this is my website, I've just released and launched my blog, internet insights, go check that out. There's a lot of exciting stuff that I'm posting there a lot of stuff that I can't really share in the videos, because it's sort of miscellaneous sort of off topic. But I'm really excited, like I felt really jazzed up in the last couple of weeks working on this blog, putting a lot of posts out there, and I have a lot more in the pipeline. I'm gonna be releasing a few every week. So if you're really serious about this work, you'll you'll dig some of those insights and also check out my forum, check out the life purpose course check out the book list, all this stuff will take you deeper into this work. And the most important thing, though, is that you stay with me commit to taking action on this work, commit to learning more theory, because you need the theory. That's the foundation for you to take the right action based on because a lot of the theory you learn from your parents and your school was completely ass backwards. And so you can't even take the right actions because you don't have the right theory. So that's what's coming in the future. Deeper episodes, more of the principles that you need the big picture you need to understand in order to master your life.