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Hey, this is Leo for actualised.org. And in this video, I want to ask the question of whether personal development is actually necessary to becoming successful? Or do the most successful people not even use personal development? The question that's been on my mind lately is whether personal development is actually something that successful people use to achieve their success. And if it's actually not, like, I want to take a no bullshit, look at this, if it's actually not the case, that successful people that we see that earns lots of money, they get the fame and the power and create powerful lives for themselves that they don't use personal development, then in what sense? Is it right for me to be up here, espousing the benefits of personal development, when these people get their success without using these techniques without following these, these kinds of principles without studying this stuff? Because honestly, look, this stuff takes a lot of your time and effort to be watching all these videos. And beyond that, to be going out there trying these different exercises that I have, you do sometimes, you know, maybe meditating or journaling, or one of the other exercises in my videos, or going out there reading lots of books, you know, this is a investment of your resources, and time and energy and effort. And this is not always easy work. So in the back of your mind, there's always this question of, is this really paying off for me? And is there a better and easier way to do it? Because honestly, I mean, I'm not here, proposing self help, just for the sake of self help. If there's a quicker, easier way to get there, let's use that approach. So let's take a look at that. Is self help necessary? on first blush, I mean, what what comes to mind as people like Justin Bieber, like Justin Bieber, he's a successful guy. He's got celebrity status. Now you might live laugh at that and say, Well, Justin Bieber, he's like a bad example. But I mean, you have to ask yourself these kind of questions. You've got a lot of people in society that you see especially portrayed in the media, celebrities, musicians, actors, famous business people. So you've got a lot of these people out there. And they're the ones that we usually say that, okay, that's clearly a successful person. Now, the question is, does that person use self help? And I would have to say that no, probably many of those people don't use selfhelp. Not in the kind of deliberate sense that we're using it here, where we're very consciously sitting down, and strategizing, and like going deep and introspecting. And doing all this kind of work. I would say that most of the time, people don't do it. Now, of course, it's a little dangerous to talk about these people, because we don't know their lives intimately. And I mean, what do I know about Justin Bieber, I know very little about him. I don't know much about him. But I'm guessing if we just take the kind of stereotypical idea that we have in the zeitgeist about how Justin Bieber lives his life, we're probably not thinking that he's sitting there, studying Tony Robbins books, and meditating, and really introspecting and, you know, doing all this kind of like deep inner work on himself. We're thinking that that's probably not the way that he lives his life. Now, of course, he's a young guy. So in some sense, maybe that's, that's something that will come later in his life. But still, it's interesting to ask yourself and to think about, you know, well, if he can be successful doing it his way, why am I spending all this time doing it Leo's way, or doing it the self help way, or Tony Robbins his way or whoever else you'd like to follow in the, you know, in self help. And beyond Justin Bieber, you know, we can take a look at people like Elvis, Kurt Cobain, Robin Williams, these are all very successful people. We can take a look at people like Steve Jobs. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, of virgin. Also, you know, people through history successful people like Howard Hughes, Pablo Picasso, Walt Disney, Rupert Murdoch. I mean, you name it, you can rattle off a list of hundreds of people. And what's interesting is that if you actually go and study these people, you'll find out that they had really screwed up dysfunctional lives. A lot of them did. Not all of them. Like I don't think that Bill Gates has a dysfunctional life. I think that he has actually a very even keeled emotionally mature, healthy, kind of a psychologically healthy lifestyle. But a lot of the people on this list, they have very turbulent, inner turbulent lifestyles are turbulent too. That's why you see a lot of times celebrities, getting into fights, getting DUIs, getting drunk getting caught withdraw. Dogs or hookers or, you know, like all this kind of stuff goes on. And it's well known in the celebrity tabloids. And a lot of that stuff is true. And that's actually very interesting because what happens is these people, they achieve success. And they achieve fame and they achieve power. And they achieve a lot of recognition status in society. But then it's like their psychology isn't mature enough to handle it. Now, this isn't true across the board, there are many actors and celebrities, and musicians who are very even keeled and nicely grounded. And you admire those, when you're seeing an actor being interviewed, for example, you know, on one of the late night shows, or on Charlie Rose, or on CNN or somewhere, you can tell if they're kind of like an all over the place psychologically immature human being, or they're like a very grounded human being. They actually go out there, they study stuff, they read books, they're intelligent, beyond the fact that they got some success with their movies or whatever. And not just intelligent, not just book smarts, but also it's that emotional intelligence. It's the IQ and not the IQ, the EQ, right EQ for emotional intelligence. Well, it's that have they developed it? Have they developed mastery over their own emotions, over their own thought patterns? Have they worked out stuff from their childhood in their past that holding them back? It's really interesting. It's interesting, I actually I read a, I read a whole book that was written by one psychologist who went through and he profiled, I believe it was like 15, or 18, great, successful, powerful people throughout history. And he took a look. And one of the and he gave like a mini, bio quick bio of every, every one of these people. What was interesting was that a lot of these people had the most dysfunctional lives, you could possibly imagine that they were still successful. They were earning lots of money, they were millionaires, or even billionaires. How could this be? Well, I think one thing that we, we just assume we take for granted when we start this personal building journey is that success and happiness, that those are correlated. And then if you get success, happiness will come along with it. Well, in fact, that's not the case. And in fact, there actually is no correlation between success and happiness. There are many people in society who are extremely, extremely successful, but have the most screwed up lives, the kind of lives that they might seem kind of cool. On the surface, they might seem glamorous, when you're not actually in that person's shoes. So it might seem cool, like, oh, that celebrity, he gets to go on tour, travel around the world and perform on stage, like all this stuff. But then when you actually go and like take a microscope, and take a look at what's going on in that person's life. And you actually examine the feelings and the emotions, that person is feeling the kind of thoughts he or she is having, you discover that it's like, Oh, damn, like, there was no way that I would want to be that person. Even if that meant getting millions of dollars, and getting to travel around the world, which seemed nice and glamorous. But inside this person was so dysfunctional, that you would never want to actually be him. And of course, this person, if you give him a self help book, he's going to wipe his ass with it, he's not going to care, right? Self Help throw it away. Now, that kind of attitude, that's the kind of attitude that well, it's the difference between just kind of like, Fly By Night success, and deliberate and conscious success, the way that we're creating it here for ourselves. Here's how I see it. Basically, some people they succeed in spite of themselves. Whatever it was, you know, we've got a population, that's hundreds of millions, several billion people out of that population, inevitably there's going to be a couple of people that have you know, the right circumstances a line, maybe they've got a little talent that challenges nurtured when they're very young, they get a lot of practice and they become a good musician, good performer, maybe their their parents really encouraged them, where they really push them to do whatever they want to do, and they become really good. Like they master one thing, and that's tends to be the case with with a lot of these people is that they, they focus on a master one thing, whether they become a really good singer, or a really good musician or really good stock trader, or whatever it is that they like they focus in and they put all their chips into that one basket. And success comes sometimes it's well deserved success, sometimes a little bit accidental, you know, maybe like with a with like a child actor, they just kind of get discovered accidentally, of course, they work really hard for it to I'm not saying that these people just landed their success by luck. That's almost never the case. But I think what might be a lucky factor in all this is that these people are lucky to succeed in spite of The screwed up psychologist they have. So maybe they're immature, maybe they don't know how to handle money. They don't know how to deal with addictive behaviors. They don't know how to weed out negative habits. They have bad traumatic childhood experiences. And so all these things, these are things that we would say in personal development terms, that this is going to rob you of your performance in life. Now, that's kind of naive to say that because you can point to examples, especially like with musicians, or like really artistic people, where you can say, well, this person has such a screwed up life. You know, he's like a, he's a total deadbeat alcoholic. And he's a bad father. And he's really mean to people. And he's abusive, and he has fits of anger. But he writes the most brilliant novels. Or this musician here, she's really bad with money. And she's really bad with her relationships. But she's selling like multi platinum albums, and she's touring across the country. What's going on there? Well, in fact, if you just want success, if that's all you care about, and you define success as money, and fame, which is generally what we think when you think about success, if that's what you define, and also maybe like, being really well, well established in your industry or in your career. So if we decided the find success is that, well, you can achieve that and still be really deeply dysfunctional on the inside. So when you see these kinds of people, your mind might make the argument that, well, these people are doing pretty good, even though they're not doing self help. And it's true, they probably aren't doing self help. But also, you got to take a look at the longer view and the bigger view. So when you're looking through that TV screen, this person for that 30 seconds that you're looking at him or her, they seem like they've got everything together. But that's like a very fake, artificial little flame that you're looking at their life through. In fact, you don't really know what it's like to be that person. And I can bet you for these people who have these dysfunctional neurotic tendencies in their life, and they haven't worked them out. These people's lives are miserable, you can be very sure of that. And, you know, take examples, take a look at someone like Elvis Presley. Take a look at someone like Cobain. Take a look at someone like Robin Williams. Now, these people these are successful, known iconic figures in popular culture. But when you read their biographies, and you take a look at like what actually went on in their lives, while you see how dysfunctional they were. We all know about Elvis is binging and his inability to control his his addictive behavior. I mean, he was a really talented person, he earned millions of dollars. He was he was basically adored by the entire by the FBI entire world. And yet he couldn't resist. He couldn't resist eating a 5000 Calorie sandwich with bacon and cheese and grease and all this like nasty stuff. And basically he died because of that. He paid for it with his life. Take someone like Kurt Cobain overdosed on drugs. Also a very like dysfunctional figure, even though well respected and loved for his music, and his talents in music. So see there what's going on. You've got someone who's really developing a talent and I'm not I don't like using the word talent because it makes it seem as like, oh well. Elvis Presley was born a great singer Kurt Cobain was born a great singer. I don't think that I think that they worked really hard to achieve that. But see what they did. They just put all their chips into that one basket, the rest of their life was highly unbalanced and dysfunctional, and that ultimately caught up with them and led to their demise. Same thing with like someone like Robin Williams, or take a look at people further back in history, you can take a look at, for example, read the biography of Howard Hughes. Or take a look at Pablo Picasso's life. Or I like to look at Walt Disney. Walt Disney is a great example of someone who very creative, you would think he's like a creative genius. And he had this this imagination that was amazing, the imagination of a kid. And he was so persistent. He embodied the qualities, a lot of the qualities that we espouse in personal development, it at the same time, there were stuff in his life that just was very dysfunctional. For example, His relationship with money, he's an ability to, to hold on to money he was struggling through with money throughout the entirety of his life, always, even when he was making millions from his movies and other stuff that he was doing with Disney because of just the way that he handled money. It wasn't really good his his basically his vision and his dreams always outstripped his his funding. So that led to constant struggle and tension all Always in his life. Also, he was like a chronic chain smoker and drinker that ultimately caught up to him. That's why he died. He died of cancer, I believe. And so see, it's things like this, when you just focus on one area of someone's life, it seems like oh, they're amazing, like this kind of amazing, creative genius. But actually, if you take a look at his whole life, you probably wouldn't want to live that yourself. So I see this tendency, and it's important not to get thrown off track by this and discouraged by this and tell yourself something like, well, these people for them, it's so easy. Why does have to be so hard for me? Actually, no, it's, it's not like that, because you're comparing apples and oranges. See that person? It's easy for him because he's not doing anything to work on himself. So yeah, and that sounds, it's easy. But where's that going to lead him ultimately, and he might be super successful now. But where's that going to leave him ultimately, for a lot of these people, it literally leads them to their graves. That's what it does. Or if it doesn't anticipate that catastrophic. And this is something that's even less visible, is that they just suffer silently, and live very miserable lives. And you can see that with a lot of celebrities. And actors, too, if you read their biographies, and you read kind of their interviews that they that they do, and they talk, they talk about more of their private lives and their details, you see that a lot of them live very miserable and dysfunctional lives. So, in a sense, these people are lucky. They're lucky because they succeed, despite their dysfunctions. Now, you got to ask yourself, Is that what you want? Is that how you want to live your life? Is that how you want to succeed in your life? Do you want to succeed only in one little, small area that looks really nice on TV. But when you're actually living it, it doesn't feel nice? It doesn't feel right, it feels miserable and stressful and very dramatic. Do you want that drama in your life? If you're okay with that, that, hey, you know what, if all you want is money and fame, and you want to go out there and earn it and achieve it, you can go do that. And you could ignore a lot of this stuff. Maybe you'll succeed, I actually think that there's a good chance that you won't succeed, but because what will happen is and I think that's what happens for most people, most people they get brought down by their neuroses before they can even reach that high level of success that some of these celebrities and actors attain. So for every one, Elvis Presley, or Kurt Cobain, that overdoses at the height of his career, there's probably 1000s that we will never hear about, you know, 1000s of artists, performers, singers, musicians, that never even get to any kind of level of recognition or status or wealth, because their frailties bring them down much earlier. You know, and the most common example is that you know, what, people who don't do personal development are just so goddamn lazy and complacent in life. They don't even have the energy to get themselves up in the morning to go work to become good at singing or acting or whatever else. They don't have the persistence to do it. Some people kind of get that naturally from their environment. I don't know if they're born with it, I think that what happens is that just you know, Adam, like I said, the billions of people that exist, inevitably there's going to be a couple 100 Or a couple 1000 That just, you know, grow up with a with a good work ethic, or are really passionate about music. So they go on, they put a lot of their energy learning music. But see, is that you you got to ask yourself, Is that me? Because if that's not you, then how are you going to engineer your own success, you have to have a plan for yourself. And this is where I think that self help and personal development is actually a really good idea. And probably the best strategy and the best shot that you've got at becoming successful. You know, if you're as successful as I mean, if you're as skilled a musician as Kurt Cobain, you're a talented a singer as Elvis Presley. You know, go ahead and go and seize the bull by the horns and take your success. But you're probably not that are you? You're probably a bit complacent. You're probably not a master of anything. Extraordinary. In the world, you're probably not the world's greatest singer. You're probably not the world's greatest musician. You're probably not the world's greatest mathematician. You have to work towards that. If you want it. If you want to work towards it, and if you've got problems with money, that's going to hold you back. If you've got problems with anger, that's going to hold you back. If you've got a problem with bad habits like smoking or drinking, that'll hold you back. If you're depressed, that'll hold you back. If you're eating such horrible food, that you're feeling sluggish and low energy all the time, that's going to hold you back. If you have health problems that's going to hold you back. If you don't know how to run a business, that's going to hold you back. If you don't know how to maintain relationships, both intimate ones, and friendships, and business relationships, that's going to hold you back. If you don't develop a strong work ethic that hold you back, if you don't figure out how to cope with procrastination, and waning motivation, that'll hold you back. If you don't deal with your childhood issues, with your parents, and your siblings, all that stuff, all that nonsense from the past, it's still churning around in your brain, and is causing you to believe all sorts of weird things about the way life works, that will hold you back. If you don't understand the difference between success and happiness, that will also hold you back. There's a lot of pitfalls that you will fall into if you don't study this material, which is I think, why it's really important to study it. And it's almost like you can imagine this metaphor, like we've got a landmine ahead of us a giant landmine we'd walk five miles to a landmine, a landmine field. And, and I tell you, Okay, go, you're walking five miles for this field of landmines. Now, if we have a million people, and I tell them all to go go, inevitably, a few of them are gonna, just by fluke luck, run through all the mines and survive. But do you want to take that chance, because it's your life, you've only got one of them. You don't care about other people, you only care about yourself? No, you don't want to take that chance. So in this case, you want to get all the metal detecting equipment that you can get. And that's kind of what I see person development as metal detectors, you get a bunch of them all different kinds for detecting all kinds of different landmines that are potentially out there in the field of life that you're going to be walking through. And there's a lot of them, you've got landmines in relationships, you've got landmines, with your finances, with business with handling success and fame with happiness, lots of lots, lots of different landmines. And we're tackling one of them here, which is this distinction, confusion between success and happiness. That's one big landmine, a lot of celebrities, it seems like they think they're gonna they're gonna get success and money. And then that their, their inner psychology will just naturally take care of itself. Well, it doesn't. In fact, when you get lots of money and success, and fame, what that does is it puts your psychology to the test, because all of a sudden, you don't have that many limitations anymore. You don't need to go to work. No one's forcing you to do this. You don't have to do that. You've got enough money to literally construct the kind of life you want a lot of people what they do is they construct this very shallow, miserable existence, and they just like cage themselves, and they pursue the things in life that they think are like amazing, but actually what they are, they're very shallow and unfulfilling. So this is why I think that self help is a really good strategy. And I think that it's important that your strategy is sustainable. And it's also about becoming a well rounded human being. Notice that these people that fail catastrophically, people that commit suicide, stuff like this, they don't have well rounded lives. And the biggest thing they're missing is the psychology component. Psychology isn't right, there is neurosis in there, and then neurosis leads to their downfall. So, self help is really about fixing that neurosis, pre empting it, not letting it ruin your life. So I think self help is really good. And even though it is, I think, artificial, I don't think it's natural to be doing self help. Most people don't do self help. You know, people in Amazon, they're not walking around with the self help book. They're living life by the seat of their pants. And that's fine. But I don't like that because it's like, it's out of my hands, right? Too much chance too much randomness. I don't like to have too much chance and randomness in my life. Because I've only got one of them. I don't care about millions of other people. I care if I succeed, I don't care if I'm that, you know, I don't want to be that hoping to be that one lucky statistic. I want to make sure that my success is like locked in stone. And so for me, that's why personal development is so important. That's why stuff like meditation is so important. And journaling, and eating right, and working on your relationships and all this kind of stuff. Because these will be landmines that you will deal with whether you want to or not, you're going to come across those. Just be careful not to get caught in the mental masturbation effect of personal development. I think this is where there can be a really good argument to say well, you know what, what about just going out there and like, acting instead of Instead of sitting here and theorizing, reading all these books Leo, why don't I just be a person of action, a man or woman of action, I'll go out there, and I'll just act, I'll do it, you know, instead of talking about, I'll just do it. Whatever needs to be done, I'll do it. And actually, you know what, I think that if you can take that attitude, that's a really great attitude. That might, in fact, be the best strategy. Because if you just lock yourself in a room, reading all these self help books that will produce a mental masturbation effect. And you will feel like you've got all these amazing ideas, but then you're not getting any success in your life. Even though you think that you read all the stuff, you're like, you're knowledgeable, but that knowledge doesn't guarantee success, because success requires action taking. And that's one of those things that some of these celebrities and actors are really good at. Maybe they're they don't know exactly, you know, all these theories and concepts and principles and techniques. But actually, what they have is they have this kind of intuitive ability to go out there and take action. And they also have kind of an intuitive understanding of psychology. And that serves them really well. And if you just compare, let's say, one person, person A, who locks himself in a room for two years, and read self help books, and then Person B, who doesn't read any self help books at all, but just goes out and takes action every single day, which one of those is going to be more successful. And by success, I mean, more money, more fame, more status, it's definitely going to be person B, not person, a person name, I know a bunch of good stuff, he might be able to preach at you. But he's not going to have anything to show other people to get success and fame for because it's all in his head. Whereas this person, he's actually been taking action. And even though he might have been taking wrong actions, because he's been kind of fumbling around not knowing the best practices. But in the end, action is worth about 10 times more than theory. Which is another reason I think, why we see that some people become really successful just because they're really good action takers. So be careful not to get caught up in this mental masturbation effect. Another point that I'll mention is that a lot of these actors and celebrities, you see the arc in their life is that they start off immature, with lots of problems, they're not able to handle their success. And sometimes that literally kills them, or drives them to depression or something really traumatic happens as a result of that. But also, sometimes what happens is that these persons be these people, you know, they commit their mistakes, but they're on this kind of growth curve. And over time, they're growing and they're learning. Maybe they go take therapy, maybe they actually do go pick up a self help book and read it. Maybe they actually go do meditate, they take yoga, you see these kind of transformations. And these are the actors, and celebrities and business people who tend to then actually come out on top. Because they're maturing, they're learning through that process. And, you know, I'm sure that if you go and you interview lots of older Hollywood actors, you're going to see that actually, they've probably read quite a few self help books by this point. I can't imagine that they wouldn't. Because the stuff is helpful, these techniques are really helpful. You know, practicing meditation is really helpful. It helps you with your life, eating a healthy diet that helps you with your life. I'd be surprised if some of the older actors are eating much healthier than they were 20 years ago. I'd be surprised if they're not meditating. I'd be surprised if they're not talking to their friends about some of these psychological concepts and stuff. Because like it's important, this stuff really helps you it helps to optimize your life. So keep that in mind when you're thinking about this stuff. Alright, this Leon signing off, these are my thoughts about whether self help is artificial or natural. Go ahead and post your comments down below. Click the like button. Right now for me if you liked this video, helps it spread around also share it on Facebook, the more this video spreads around more these videos are popular, the more free videos I can keep releasing to you guys. And finally, come sign up to my newsletter right here at actualized. Org. It's a free newsletter, where I release new videos every single week. I have also cool ideas planned for my subscribers that won't be possible on YouTube that I'll be releasing in the months to come. So come check out my website, sign up to the newsletter. It's free. And there you're getting all the wisdom that you need all the mindsets, techniques, strategies, to master your life to get on this journey of self actualization. To me this is the most rewarding journey in your life is working on yourself understanding yourself on a deeper level in all the different facets of life that you want to master become a really well rounded person assuring that you get not only the success, the money and fame you don't, I have nothing against that I love that stuff. I like money. But also balancing it out with the happiest and fulfillment that you get the Self Mastery, those kinds of things too. So sign up and you'll be all set