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[Music] this episode's going to be very practical so pay attention this will change your life right here this one simple idea the idea is i want you to notice that there is a category or class of things which can be achieved in your life only through a slow steady consistent investment into that thing over a period of years on a daily basis that's it that's the entire notion if you grok this notion this notion will change your whole life this is so significant i'll share a lot of examples here to illustrate what exactly this notion means but again what i'm saying is that there are certain things that you can accomplish in your life only if you invest on a daily basis every single day for years a little bit at a time which ultimately accretes to some amazing result that you cannot get any other way you cannot purchase it and you cannot build it overnight and there is no magic pill you can take that will leapfrog that process for you the way that everybody wants and in a sense this is the ultimate key to success in life is to realize this notion that i'm talking about to realize how significant it is and to realize that the the most valuable things in life are those things which are built in this fashion through long-term investing in yourself and they cannot be gotten any other way and the key mistake that most fools in life make go see my episode what is wisdom where i explain technically what a fool is what i explain in that episode is that fools are impatient people that's one of the characteristics of a fool a fool wants something very valuable very cheaply and quickly a fool doesn't want to work for it a fool can be convinced that something highly valuable in life can be gotten without this process of patient steady investment so one of the areas in life where the biggest fools are caught into serious and painful traps is when it comes to investing and i mean just financial investing like on wall street see fools want to get rich quickly the wise want to get rich slowly because if you get rich quickly you're going to lose that richness very fast whereas if you get rich slowly you're going to be able to solidify that and build upon it and it's going to be solid like granite and another thing that i said about fools is that fools build build their castles on foundations of sand the fool is more interested in the castle than the foundation they don't dig a deep enough foundation and their castle collapses they can't build their castle very high and then they're they're constantly working because their foundation is constantly sinking and so they spend their whole life redoing things over and over and over again like they chase get rich quick scheme after get rich quick scheme after get rich quick quick scheme and they keep failing and failing and failing thinking that one of these schemes one day will make them super rich and will allow them to live the easy life whereas it would have been just easier bite the bullet and just actually work hard slowly patiently for a decade or so and then you can actually build up some serious wealth that way but when you're just chasing um then you know easy opportunities then you're not gonna you're not actually going to become successful that's what the fool doesn't understand it's a trap the fool doesn't see the trap so the point here is to help you to adopt a sort of life philosophy and attitude of patience of investing in yourself and building up yourself and your life and those aspects of your life that are most important to you slowly patiently over years and decades and this is how you will make yourself successful this is how you will make yourself deeply satisfied and happy in life and only in this way and to resist the temptation for shortcuts and to resist the temptation to try to outsource this to somebody else this is your primary responsibility this is why you're alive is to do this this is the heart of self-actualization and personal development so now let's get into some examples to illustrate what i mean so what's one example of something that can only be developed over a long period of time working on it very consistently and patiently well one example would be education if you care about education if you care about understanding the world if you care about knowledge if you want to be intelligent and smart this is not something you can go and purchase off a store shelf there is no amount of money that will make you well educated now of course money helps it helps have money um in this process but it's not going to do it for you nor can you get educated in a weekend or even in a single year there is no thing that you can do this weekend that will make you well educated to become well educated if you're serious about it what that means is that you're going to be investing in your education time and energy mostly every single day for a period of decades there is no single book you can read that will make you well educated there is no single class you can go to there is no even university program that you can go to that will make you well educated that's not going to be sufficient to be well educated is such a big thing but it's also a rather sort of nebulous and abstract thing after all what does it mean to be well educated it's hard to even define what that means to me it means a lot more than just having a degree or going to a class a solid education requires thousands of hours of investment so how do you become really well educated you read every single day and you do it for decades and you listen to podcasts or to videos and you listen to lectures and you contemplate and you take notes and then you read some more and you go to classes and maybe you go to school maybe you go to university and then that's not enough you continue after that as well it's a sort of commitment to lifelong learning and you keep doing that for a long time and then at some point you become very well educated but it's going to take thousands of hours and nobody is going to do it for you you can't outsource it to anybody and nobody's going to push you really to become very well educated sure your parents might push you to get good grades or they might push you to go to university and to get a degree but that is not the same thing as being well educated and even your teachers your teachers will push you to do your homework assignments and they may push you to study or cram for an exam and they may even inspire you or push you to learn some field or some some aspect of a field if you have a good teacher but a teacher is not going to really be there holding your hand and guiding you towards becoming a well-educated human that's something only you can do on your own if you develop that vision and then you work towards it every single day and if you don't work towards it every single day then you won't become well educated and then you will see other people in the world who are well educated now granted it's rare to find a really well-educated person but they exist they're not that rare uh you will see those people and you will look at their results in life and you will envy their results you will want their results and you will wonder all you know how how lucky that these people are so smart or so intelligent or so well educated how do i become that way and you're gonna look for a shortcut like what book can i read tell me the magic secret well the magic secret was two or three decades of constant daily contemplation reading studying note taking doing it over and over and over and over again and see but you don't want to hear that because now you've wasted 20 30 years of your life whatever you were doing not investing in your education and now you want the end result you want to find some way to buy it or to outsource it or to get it quickly and of course the answer is you can't that's exactly why being well educated is so valuable it's worth so much so the real answer was for you to travel back in time and to invest 20 30 years of your life becoming really well educated of course you can't do that now maybe you're still young enough that you've got another 20 30 years of your life left and you can invest that time to become well-educated but will you see it's going to be harder now because you're going to feel like you're behind the curve and you are of course you're going to feel like you've wasted a lot of your time and of course you did you didn't invest and also you see the earlier you invest the greater chance of compounding returns on your investment so somebody who invests 30 years into becoming well-educated at the beginning of his life that person is going to get much more benefit from that investment than somebody who invests 30 years towards the end of his life because the whole key with this sort of investing strategy that we're talking about investing in yourself is that you spend 10 20 30 years building up something you build it up you become really well educated now of course you don't stop you can keep doing it but basically then after a certain number of decades you can coast off of that success for the rest of your life it pays dividends forever that's the beauty of it that's why you want to get it done as quickly as early as possible you want to start investing as early as possible the longer you wait the less payoff there's going to be now that shouldn't discourage you from i mean investing at all it's better to be late than never but it's better to be early than late there's this uh popular sort of cliched adage in um software development where they say that you know if you have 10 women you can't make a baby in nine weeks it still takes nine months what this means is that there are certain things in life that have sort of a natural developmental process that takes a certain amount of time no matter how many women you get together and how hard you tell them to work they're not going to produce a baby faster than nine months now this kind of of course seems obvious but a lot of times we we fool ourselves into thinking that we can get something done faster by by pushing it or by funneling more resources into it sometimes that's the case but not always certain things in life like if if you're trying to build a house if you have one person building that house one worker that house let's say will take three years to complete if you have two people it's probably going to take one a half years to complete if you have three workers working on it you can probably do it in a year if you have four you can do it like in eight months and so it makes sense to put more people on the problem but after a certain point there's going to be diminishing returns simply because if you have too many people working on a small house there's going to be too much interference so if you take a hundred people to work on you know a single family home uh you might say well we can get it done in a day right no you can't maybe on a calculator you could do the math and you can kind of keep you know adding people and keep subtracting days and you can actually on your calculator get to a point where you think you can get a house built in one day but you can't because there's all sorts of overhead costs you know it takes time to deliver the lumber it takes time to move things around there's a there's sort of friction between different people on the workplace if you have 10 people working together that might be optimal for a single family home if you have a hundred people that's no longer optimal if you have a thousand people it's going to be worse than having 10. so why am i telling you this um because your mind is going to want to trick you to try to take these sorts of shortcuts so another example is in the area of business or another way to put it is building a brand building a high quality brand is not something you can do overnight and it's not even something you can do in a year building a brand is a decades-long process or more of gradual investment into your brand whatever the brand is patiently building a reputation in the marketplace of you know high quality products or services that you're offering honing your brand to making sure that it's fitting within a certain narrow niche within your marketplace and serving that niche very very well and just even for yourself as a business person who is running that brand even for yourself to identify exactly what your brand is and isn't you might say well that's just kind of theory you should be able to just sit down and do that no that actually takes you decades of work to do to really hone your brand and to understand what it is exactly you're selling and who you're selling it to and what is part of your brand what's not part of your brand and this leads to something very valuable in the end if you go through this whole process over a period of a decade or more and do this because most business people are so concerned about just returning a quarterly profit that they're not deeply investing in their brand and in fact a lot of times they cannibalize their own brand in order to extract profits a lot of the giant companies fall prey to this usually what happens in a in a company's development cycle or even in a brand's development cycle is that initially there's some sort of visionary founder who works really hard to build up the brand in the first 10 years then that brand is built up and it it gains a loyal following a fanatical following from its customers because that visionary produced something really cared about the brand and was really interested in customer service and delivering the highest quality product or service and that elevated that business and that brand above all the others then once that brand became well established usually it's sold off to some giant corporation who then milks that brand and then exploits all the loyal customers screwing them over by delivering inferior products right this is this is how most modern business works uh there are a few exceptions like for example think of the brand like nintendo nintendo is an old company nintendo's over 100 years old it used to be a trading card company back in japan in the old days before the the war and so forth um and then it turned into arcade games and video games but nintendo has has spent decade after decade cultivating this massive brand of iconic characters iconic names uh iconic games and uh and they just do it consistently over and over and over and over again and that's what makes nintendo a multi-billion dollar brand you can't build something like that overnight and it takes a real commitment and vision and a very patient approach to what you're doing and consistency on a daily basis building and building inch by inch by inch by inch that brand see we have this attitude and the more foolish you are the more you have this attitude of wanting some big result quickly like leo tell me what i could do to become enlightened tomorrow or leo what can i do to break out of wage slavery tomorrow or by the end of the year and something like enlightenment or something like breaking free of wage slavery and becoming totally financially independent these would be two more examples of things that you cannot just buy or outsource or get done very quickly without being patient about it these are things that require long-term consistent investment this means you have to have a vision you have to have a plan you have to follow through on that plan you have to be very disciplined about it every single day chipping away at it and you'll be very patient and then you can achieve a result like being totally financially independent and then you can bask in that result and you can enjoy that result for the rest of your life for example i quit a relatively well paying career in video game development in order to go off and become financially independent to break free of wage slavery because to me i perceive that as one of the most important pillars of my life i knew early on when i first got my first job out of university i knew early on that there was nothing more important in my life than to become free of wage slavery and so when i understood the value of that i was willing to do anything to make it happen so i even quit a great career that i was planning my whole life i quit that because this was such an important thing for me to develop and then i invested in it patiently over months and years and then today i'm free of wage slavery and i probably will be for the rest of my life and i can coast on that and it's such a rewarding aspect of my existence that most humans will never experience and to me that's very sad because i know a lot of people would love to experience it wouldn't you love to be free of wage slavery for the rest of your life how do you achieve a result like that well i can't give you the exact step-by-step formula you have to figure out the the minutia of it for yourself because this is not a scalable solution not everyone can be free of wage slavery so you have to be very creative and clever about going how you go about it but uh but the biggest mistake that i see people making who try to do it and fail and most of them fail is uh is because they're not patient enough and they're not willing to invest long term bit by bit by bit by bit over a period of years and decades to do this they're not patient enough to build a brand or to build a really solid business instead they're looking for a shortcut they're looking at cryptocurrency or the latest fad or they're jumping on this or you know oh podcasts are popular today let me go make a podcast like oh youtube is popular let me go on to youtube this kind of stuff and with this sort of attitude when you're just chasing and you're just desperate for some result and you want it quickly you're not willing to work for it see when you're not willing to work for it and you want it quickly what that really reveals about your attitude and your mind is that you don't truly appreciate the value of the ultimate goal because if you really appreciated the value of being free of wage slavery you would be happy to work for 10 years to do it to achieve it but see most people you tell them well i can show you how you can break free of wage slavery but it'll require 10 years of consistent daily work are you going to do it and they'll say oh 10 years that's that sounds hard and they won't do it and then of course what's the surprise of course then they're going to be wage slaves but see to me the idea of being free of wage slavery was so valuable it had almost infinite value in my mind because the way i thought about it was like this if i can have complete financial independence i could be completely free creatively to do whatever i want creatively and to me as a creative person that was the most valuable thing i could be completely creatively autonomous i wouldn't have to have a boss i wouldn't have to listen to customers i would have to listen to anybody i could literally work on any kind of project that i want if i want to make a game i can make a game if i want a movie i can make a movie if i want to pursue awakening i can pursue awakening you know whatever i want i could literally do now what's the value of that to you versus what's the value of that to me to me the value of that is infinite you can't put a price tag on how valuable that is to be free of a work schedule to be able to sleep and wake up whenever i want to be able to work whenever i want to be able to take a vacation whenever i want i could take half a year off whatever i want i could not work for five years and then come back and still be fine see that kind of freedom what is that freedom worth to you most people undervalue that freedom they might say well that's worth a million dollars but actually it's worth way more than a million dollars what you can do with that freedom that freedom is worth hundreds of millions of dollars if you use it properly now of course most people would piss that freedom away so if you're gonna piss it away maybe it's maybe it's only worth fifty thousand dollars to you if you're gonna do nothing but play video games and smoke weed and jerk off with that freedom but to somebody who who really has uh their [ __ ] together that freedom is worth so much and then depending on how much you value it and how much it's worth to you that determines how hard you're gonna work towards it how patient you're gonna be with it another example for you is with actualize.org that's my brand actualize.org see when i began actualize that already eight years ago my vision for it was very advanced from the very beginning my vision for it was that i was going to cover profound topics about the nature of reality and the mind and psychology and epistemology and metaphysics and philosophy and spirituality like i had all this plan from the very beginning although i didn't know all the details of it but um uh i had a huge vision for it and i knew that it was going to take me years and maybe even a decade to build up this catalog of content and videos that would all interconnect together every episode would end with would interconnect with every other episode synergizing and doubling its value see if if one of my episodes has x number of value to you or to anybody when you then link it with a second episode it doubles its value when you link it with a third it doubles its value again and in this way its value compounds so when you link hundreds of them together what you get by linking hundreds of of them together is much more than just a linear sum of every episode in isolation because what we're doing here is we're building this big picture that's very deep and interconnected and the more interconnections you have you have these sort of network effects like you get with a social network like with facebook these network effects are non-linear which means that if you have 10 people on facebook only 10 people facebook is not very valuable when you have a hundred thousand people it's it's more interesting now you got something going now you've got a little bit of a network effect you've got friends and acquaintances interesting stuff is being shared with a hundred thousand people but still it's very limited when you got a million people now it gets really interesting now when you got a billion people that's a whole um a whole new ball game when you have the entire world on facebook so you need to be good at sort of spotting these non-linear payoffs that you can get with your investments so that's sort of what the actualized brand is built upon and um the videos are all supposed to interconnect in a very profound way for those who want to interconnect them all who are willing to watch them all and that will produce a certain effect on your mind and it will produce a sort of level of personal development that you can't get from reading any self-help book or from any other single self-help teacher and we're we're interconnecting so many different kinds of perspectives scientific perspectives and spiritual perspectives and religious perspectives and philosophical perspective and all these different people and models and we're interconnecting that produces something that's way more than the sum of its parts and see i had that vision 10 years ago but every episode that i was releasing in the early years was not actually delivering on that result you see my early episodes were not very deep or not very profound i didn't even have the skills the speaking skills or even the intellectual skills developed yet to be able to talk about and interconnect all of the profound stuff that i talk about now it took me a good eight years to develop this capacity and that is now something deeply valuable to see this is one of those things that's sort of abstract but it's profoundly valuable that you cannot buy or get anywhere else it's something truly unique that had to be built over a period of a decade and that turns into a unique selling proposition that then i can sell to you and then i can get value back from you see but to give you val to get value from you first i have to give you a lot of value to give you a lot of value i have to generate that value somehow how did i generate that value very very patiently building it out over years and it was very frustrating at the very beginning because i had this idea of of all the amazing content i was going to shoot and release but i couldn't do it yet because i didn't have the skills i didn't have the intellectual capacity yet i didn't have the levels of consciousness yet i didn't even have the speaking abilities yet to do that all that had to be built over time my own mind had to be built over time but see the one thing that allowed me to do that is that i saw the value of it i had enough vision to see the value of it and to work towards it on a weekly basis and that's what i did i basically have been recording videos these kinds of videos every single week for the last eight or nine years of my life very consistently but it's more than just recording videos it's also i spend even more time just constantly thinking about how to interconnect all these ideas in my own mind organizing different topics for what i'm going to cover what kind of videos i'm going to shoot creating lists i have lists of hundreds of videos that i'm simultaneously working on that i'm brainstorming on i've been brainstorming on them for years and then from there i can then pull out a topic create a video release it to you and it seems maybe to you it seems like oh this is something leo just did over the weekend it seems that way actually this is something leo's been doing for a decade and that makes it much more powerful than some youtuber just saying like oh let me just record some video i just had an idea yesterday let me just record a video about it today you can do that but you're not going to get the same kind of depth and then how are you going to compete and i mean you can't there's a lot of shallow [ __ ] on youtube so you can certainly compete that way i'm not saying you can't but i'm just saying that you won't be able to develop something like what i've developed as a brand with actualize.org if you want to develop a really powerful brand you got to be thinking about it 10 years into the future and then chipping away at that so that each video you're releasing is not just a standalone video yes it can stand on its own any one of my videos can stand on its own but the real power of the videos is when you combine them all together when you string a hundred of them together what you get is much more than the sum of its parts now don't get hung up on just the fact that i'm talking about making youtube videos i'm really not i'm talking i'm giving you a specific example about a much more abstract principle here you can apply this in any kind of business that you're working on if you want to be building a powerful business this is how you got to think you got to think long term you got to think strategically and you got to think in terms of how are every little piece and product and service that you're combining together or releasing on a weekly monthly basis how are those all going to add up to something that's larger than some of its parts that's where you get the network effects that's where you get exponential value and then that's where you can build a lot of wealth and also make a huge impact on the world if that's what you care about see for me i was never in this for the wealth i didn't start a youtube channel because i said oh everyone's starting youtube channels and i want to get rich doing it no for me it was about the impact that i saw that i could have on people on people's minds and related to that is another thing that i've been developing which is even more important to me than my brand and this business or this channel really see what i've been doing um i don't know if you realize this or not but sort of the secret to what i've been doing over the last 10 or even longer 20 years really is that i've been developing one of the most robust and interconnected maps of reality that any human has ever developed and i've been doing it inside my own mind that means when i was reading a book or when i was doing some philosophy or when i was contemplating or meditating or whatever taking a psychedelic or watching a podcast or watching an interview or listening to some teacher or going to some workshop or whatever reading a bit of self-help all of those were little things i was doing you know that could stand on their own that could benefit me and my improve my life a little bit but really what i was doing is i was taking all those little pieces and i was combining them all together to figure out what the hell is going on in reality making sense of everything with the idea being that if i do this for 10 or 20 years i will have such a profound and deep understanding of how reality works that this will be like a superpower that i have that nobody else has no scientist has this no doctor has this even a lot of spiritual people don't have this because the way they do spirituality is not with that kind of intention they're doing spirituality for some sort of shallow singular goal like they want to feel happy or they want to escape suffering or pain or they want to just awaken and all they care about is just awakening and nothing else or they just want to be a buddhist and they just follow the buddhist path and nothing else they only care about understanding buddhism and nothing else you see this produces a very narrow understanding of reality and it's not the same thing as what i'm talking about so i've spent the last 10 years or more integrating literally hundreds of different perspectives interconnecting them in my own mind from scientists to new agers to religious people to political ideologies and you know social sciences hard sciences psychology philosophy nonduality sociology developmental psychology spiral dynamics chaos theory fractals quantum mechanics like i mean like evolutionary theory interconnecting all that stuff and my my hunch was behind all this that if i was able to integrate all this stuff together that i would get something that's more than just the sum of its parts it would be more than just having a phd or a diploma it would be more than just having a career as a scientist or as a philosopher it would be more than just reading a list of books it would be way more than all that and that this would be extremely valuable both to me personally just for living my own life in a better way but it would be extremely valuable in sharing that with others like you it would be worth millions of dollars and so that's exactly what i've been doing over the last 10 years of my life you see rather than investing in bitcoins although i have a little bit of bitcoins uh full disclosure but rather than you know chasing after bitcoins or chasing after stocks or chasing after money or chasing after podcast success or youtube success really what i've been doing is i've been investing in the most important and valuable thing that i have which is building my mind see in this mind is literally contained one of the most sophisticated understandings of the entire universe that exists on this planet now that might some sound narcissistic and arrogant to say that but i put it so starkly because that was my vision i tend to have pretty high visions when i do something i can't really motivate myself to do it until unless i i think that it's really awesome to do that means it has to be like a really awesome achievement it has to be something really amazing rare unique and powerful otherwise to me it's not worth doing and see nobody in society will tell you that this is something you should be doing or that this would be valuable to do in fact most people will tell you that this is foolish to do it's a waste of time and i've had a lot of people tell me to stop doing it on a daily basis people tell me to stop doing it but that's what it takes to to really accomplish something amazing in the world is that you have to keep doing it despite all the naysayers you keep doing it and doing it and doing it every single day pushing towards your vision because you you feel that it's going to be something significant and something important and you don't look to external validation to to tell you that what you're doing is right you have to look within your intuition your higher self will tell you what you're doing is right and i'm not done with my project there's still a lot more of this project going on i still have a lot more to understand and to to interconnect and so my idea was that if i was going to interconnect more and more different perspectives that eventually this would lead to something extraordinary and you see this is one of those things that is so abstract like even to get this idea imagine getting this idea in your mind what i was just describing and then to actually work on it every single day for 10 or 20 years with no external validation that means you can't go to your parents and ask them hey should i do this is it a good idea because if you ask them they'll tell you no it's stupid that's what they'll tell you so this requires a certain independence and a leadership quality to do this and vision and then patience and then doing it every single day consistently a little bit and then telling yourself every single day that by doing this you're working towards something important and not to quit and that it's going to be worthwhile because you're going to have days where you're doubting yourself you have you're going to have weeks where you want to quit and just go follow all your friends and do all the stupid stuff that they're doing or somebody's going to criticize you or somebody's going to naysay you and then you're going to take that criticism and and an injunction to quit to to uh you're gonna let it get to you and then you're gonna wanna quit and you gotta push past that and stick hold tight to your vision see this is what creates the most significant kinds of success in life your ability to do that now i'm just giving you examples from my own life i'm not saying you have to do this i'm not saying this is what you need to be doing maybe you don't maybe you have the kind of mind that doesn't want this or doesn't need this or maybe you have a different priority in your life that's fine um don't get hung up on the details so one of the things that really juices me up and gets me one of the secrets i guess i could say behind the passion that i have for life is that intuitively i'm always making these kinds of investments in my own self and after years of doing this it becomes very rewarding this is how you create a deep sense of meaning in your life whether you're doing it with your business or with your family or with your spiritual work or with your you know your your education or your mindset or your understanding of reality whatever you're doing it with this kind of patient investing in that which you intuit is going to be deeply valuable based upon your own values not the values of somebody else what's another example of this for example um of course we're gonna we're gonna get to spirituality here in a moment but before we get to that how about just something more simple like emotional mastery hopefully you can intuit as early as possible in your life that emotional mastery the development of emotional mastery is going to pay dividends for the rest of your life if you can develop it and the faster you can develop it the better but also you should see that developing emotional mastery is difficult you can't master your emotions overnight or even in a year this requires a lot of deep introspection work mindfulness work dealing with your shadow stuff um dealing and facing fear and anger and jealousy confronting these in an honest way journaling about them reading about how emotions work this is a whole project this project can take you 10 20 years of your life perhaps practicing different methods like the sedona method letting go of emotions just even learning how to label your emotions for example when you're angry learning to label oh that's anger and when you're afraid oh that's fear and when you're jealous oh that's jealousy and when you're um feeling guilty oh that's guilt and then and then you can you can research and learn different coping mechanisms and different sorts of you know strategies for how to jiu jitsu jujitsu with those different kinds of emotions so like when you're angry you can maybe learn the strategy of like okay let me just take a few deep breaths pause and take a few deep breaths like that or maybe when you're afraid you notice that your hands are tensing up and they're getting sweaty or your leg muscles your thigh muscles are tensing or your gut is tensing and maybe you even have a little bit of like irritable bowel syndrome from your fear and then learning to let that go you have to become mindful of it first then you let it go and maybe you learn some relaxation techniques and then when you're sad or when you're depressed learning some coping strategies for that like what do you do when you're stuck in a depression or you're stuck in in sort of a a lazy unmotivated state and a sort of an apathetic state or when you're feeling nihilistic and you feel like nothing matters and everything is meaningless and maybe you even want to kill yourself what do you do see most people have not developed any of this stuff this is not taught to you in school of course and yet think of how valuable it would be if you actually developed this kind of emotional mastery or with being happy see how do you be happy most people just are kind of winging it they're doing stuff desperately to to gain happiness but it doesn't give them any happiness all that happiness is fleeting and yet they keep doing it over and over and again again for the rest of their lives and their their miserable and depressed when it doesn't work so investing time researching what is happiness and then learning how to make yourself happy and how to maybe enjoy how to be satisfied building up that muscle as i've talked about in my satisfaction meditation episode that would be part of emotional mastery you see all this would take you years and decades to develop and you would have to work on it yourself of your own initiative because nobody's going to do this for you you can't buy you can't outsource it and if you haven't developed this in the early part of your life it's going to get harder to develop it later in life because you're going to build a lot of bad negative habits you're going to build a lot of dysfunctional coping mechanisms for how to deal with your emotions then you're going to have double the work to unwire all those and then to wire in new ones in the future so the earlier you do it the better and also just it's gonna pay dividends you see when you develop this emotional mastery you're gonna have the rest of your life to enjoy it to enjoy a life that is not filled with a bunch of anxiety and panic attacks and fear and anger and jealousy and all this sorts of insecurity and victim mentality and uh bitterness and nihilism so how much is emotional mastery worth to you is it worth a million dollars is it worth 10 million dollars so how hard are you gonna are you willing to work for it are you willing to work every single day for the next 20 years are you gonna do it see and see this is what determines the difference between a high quality person and a low quality person a high quality person is one who is going to work for the next 20 years to develop it and actually will develop it and then that is what contributes to the quality of that person whereas the low quality person is going to be lazy is going to slack off he's not going to be consistent he's going to do it for one weekend and then he's going to quit and go play video games and go jerk off and go smoke weed and go party with friends and go have a bunch of sex and do the easy life and then before you know it 20 30 years will pass in that person's life and they will be 40 years old 50 years old and they will have nothing to show for it because they've pissed away 40 years of their life down the path of least resistance and they've invested nothing in themselves and they have nothing to show for it they don't have a house they don't have a savings account they don't have emotional mastery they don't have any spiritual development they don't have any education they don't have any um brand they've built any business that they've built they don't have any skills that they've built that are highly valuable they don't have any artistic or creative skills they don't have any business skills they don't have any marketing skills they don't have any speaking skills they don't even have a sense of humor because even something like a sense of humor is a great example of something that you have to build over years i've spent years developing a sense of humor if you think i lack a sense of humor that i lack a sense of humor you should have seen me ten years ago before i started shooting these videos how uh how shy and how how serious i was how humorless i was uh i had to spend a lot of effort to develop my sense of humor and i had to practice it on a daily basis sometimes on my forum you see me cracking jokes or being humorous uh even in serious situations i'll sometimes crack a joke and sometimes people wonder oh leo leo's being an [ __ ] why is he doing that actually what you don't understand is that i'm actually practicing my sense of humor developing that because i know that by the time that i'm 50 years old i want to have like a really good sense of humor and the only way i can get it is by practicing it for 10 20 years in every chance that i can get so if i see a chance to crack a joke i'll take it now i'm not saying i have an amazing sense of humor i'm saying it it's it's not about how good you are in some absolute sense it's it's always relative to where you were in the past right so where i am today is is a thousand percent better than where i was 10 years ago i'm not comparing myself to stand-up comedians i'm comparing myself to where i was and also to where i want to be and my journey's not done there's still a lot of work i can do on my sense of humor you see but a lot of people they take this approach of like well leo how do i become humorous by the way i have a video i have a long hour long video that says how to be funny it gives you my formula for how to become funny and develop a sense of humor but how many of you will first of all sit through an hour of that recognize the value of it to even sit through an hour of it most people they wouldn't even value this topic enough to sit through an hour video explaining how to become humorous that's a fail right there but even even then you know at the end of that video i give you a bunch of exercises that you should be doing every single day to develop your sense of humor how many of you have done that for a year every single day for one you for even just one year straight none of you almost none of you i guarantee it and then you come to me and say oh leo how do i be funny tell me how to be funny you can't become funny overnight becoming funny requires retraining how your entire brain looks at reality if you're a serious person if you're a shy person who isn't very witty isn't very playful with others socially isn't really good at cracking jokes or being humorous if that's your starting point if your starting point is sort of a zero it's going to take you years to change that now some people are just more intuitively humorous and then they don't need that much work uh but see but most people when they talk about how do i become more funny they don't see the value of that what is it worth to you to become more funny is it worth a million dollars is it worth 10 million dollars to you if it isn't you're a fool you're under uh estimating the value of having a good sense of humor you can use a good sense of humor to charm people to charm women and men to get laid but not just to get laid it's much more significant than that you can use it to land a job for example at a job interview if you have a great sense of humor and you're able to be charismatic and outgoing and kind of bubbly at least for that hour or two of the job interview you'll impress them so much they'll give you the job and if you're a business person and you're doing business deals having a great sense of humor could make the difference between closing a 10 million dollar business deal or losing it with a great sense of humor you can develop a great social circle with a great sense of humor you can open doors that would be otherwise closed to you you can charm all sorts of people you can charge sale you can charm sales people with a great sense of humor you can go into a used car dealership and you can buy a car for a thousand dollars cheaper than they would have sold it to you if you didn't have that sense of humor and and none of that even goes to say how it makes you feel on the inside when you have a sense of humor i mean it's just fun life just becomes more fun socializing becomes more fun going out with friends becomes more fun partying becomes more fun being with girls if you're a guy becomes more fun you just enjoy your life more what is that worth to you so see once you understand how valuable it is then you won't whine and [ __ ] and moan so much about investing a couple of years of your life working for maybe 20 minutes a day developing your sense of humor by doing various kinds of exercises that you could be doing you can't buy a sense of humor you can't go to walmart and buy a sense of humor and you can't develop in any kind of cheap or easy way i i literally had to re-program how my mind thinks and seize situations in order to become more humorous it's actually much more profound than most people realize it's not about memorizing a bunch of jokes it's about looking at the world in a playful manner anyways if you find that valuable then go check out that episode how to be funny of course we should now talk about the example of spiritual work so all of the biggest fruits of spiritual practice such as enlightenment awakening or even just happiness or a sense of liberation freedom or a sense of peace and tranquility or maybe some emotional mastery that comes along with it as well or shedding your suffering and your depression and your anxiety and your self-hatred and what other other demons you have um getting rid of your shadow becoming more loving you know accessing infinite love accessing god accessing higher intelligence accessing profound wisdom from the universe that you couldn't access otherwise or even spiritual powers like cities classic cities yogic powers that could be developed even things like um telepathy clairvoyance and so on that many materialists don't even believe are possible you know healing powers and so forth um see these are all the fruits of spiritual work that everybody would love to have immediately like if i if i published a course tomorrow that said how to have cities in one weekend how to develop clairvoyance and omniscience and telepathy and all this in one weekend or how to access infinite love in one weekend this i could sell a million copies of this course tomorrow everybody wants that but of course i'm not going to create a course like that because developing these powers and and so forth and accessing these these fruits of spiritual work this takes decades of patient consistent daily practice and self-investment rather than some sort of weekend course if you're sitting there thinking like oh man but leo can't you release a course like that i would love that tell me how to get these fruits from spiritual practice well but that's what actualized rug is actualize.org is that the problem is that this is such a deep domain of of work it's so broad and deep simultaneously that you don't even realize that all these episodes that i'm releasing are helping to guide you towards that and that if you actually would do the [ __ ] work you'd maybe experience some of the fruits see are you willing to sit and meditate every single day for an hour or two for the next 10 years to develop some of these fruits most of you aren't which is why you'll never get the fruits which is why you keep watching my videos and you get no results and you'll keep getting no results until you wise up and actually discipline yourself to do the practices that i have talked about many many times that you stubbornly refuse to do because you're lazy and you just want the result and you don't want to work for it what does accessing infinite love um what is that what is that worth to you is it worth five million dollars what does becoming conscious of god what is that worth you how about understanding the the entire origin of existence what is that worth to you to most people these things are worth nothing and therefore they're not willing to even expend a weekend working towards it so then is it a wonder that most people are spiritually bankrupt in our society they are just like most people cannot invest 10 years building a brand in their business they cannot discipline themselves or motivate themselves to spend ten years building up their spiritual bank account they're bankrupt and then they want some quick solution like how to be happy how to find love how to have a bunch of sex how to be attractive how to be masculine how to get your health back all of these things you can do but these require serious long-term investment in yourself there are no quick solutions for these things those things that have quick solutions those solutions are already generally well known and you can buy them and you already have bought them the most valuable stuff is the stuff that people haven't invented a mechanical solution for there's no technology or gadget that will do this thing for you you have to build it manually that's precisely why it's worth so much because if if you could just push a button and it would be solved in a weekend it wouldn't be worth anything and you would already have that if there was some button you could push or some course you could take that would make you happy in one weekend everybody would push that button and buy that course and everybody would be happy already you see and if there was some button you could push that would make you enlightened everybody in the world would already be enlightened and if there was uh some video that i could release that would make you experience infinite love then everybody in the world would already be filled with infinite love and there would be no problems in the world there would only be infinite love so you have to be wise enough to see that what you really want in your life is always going to be walled off from you by your own willingness to exert the labor to get it and so when you realize that then you can actually get excited about doing labor because you realize that in a certain sense the more labor you put into something you can almost get excited about it because the more you invest the more you realize you're going to get back now of course you want to be smart about this you don't want to be investing labor into some dead end pursuit thinking that it's going to pay off you got to be investing in the right things there are some things you can be investing in that will never pay off for you and in fact it'll backfire so you got to be investing in the right things but as long as you're investing in the right things in a smart way and you're doing it effectively then you can get excited about the fact that you're investing in it like for example um uh lately i've restarted my yoga practice and uh with my yoga practice you know i'm getting more mature and i'm seeing the value of the practice more and more as i develop myself and like i'm more excited now than ever about doing my yoga practice because i realize that every hour i put into it that is directly investing into my own consciousness a little bit drop by drop by drop every single day and it doesn't seem like a lot you know a drop you know imagine sort of an eye dropper and you're dropping one little drop into a giant bathtub it's an empty bathtub and you're just walking in every single day and you're going drop and then you're walking away and then the next morning you're walking in there and going drop and then you're walking away and you're doing that every single day only one drop see most people would get very discouraged about this because they would see like they would look at the bathtub they look how big it is they look at the little drop they see how small it is and they say oh this is hope this is impossible um but to me this is kind of this can kind of be reframed i like to reframe this in my mind and to say like this is actually amazing because i know that everybody else is going to be discouraged by this process and is going to quit and all i have to do is just keep doing drop by drop by drop by drop by drop every single day and in 10 years i'm gonna have uh i'm gonna be the only person with a full bathtub and then people will wonder how did your bathtub get full what's the secret tell me the secret how can i fill up my bathtub in one weekend well you can't because all you have to work with is a is this little eyedropper see the human mind is a very stubborn beast it takes years and decades to rewire your mind how it works its belief structures and so forth you can't change these things overnight and so one of the mistakes people make fools make is that they undertake a strategy of a sort of a spasmodic obsessive strategy of like what they will do is they will try to you know they they won't use the eye dropper instead they'll get a giant bucket and they'll take the bucket and they'll try to you know throw a whole giant bucket into the bathtub all in one go and then it's going to backfire on them it's not going to work most that water is going to spill back out spill over them it's going to make a giant mess they're going to get discouraged by it and they're going to quit the next day whereas if you were just patient and you did drop by drop by drop very carefully every single day very accurately drop by drop by drop by drop you would fill your bathtub but you know a fool isn't patient enough to do that so the fool is just fumbling around and thinks he can just take a you know in one day or in one weekend he can just do something very rapidly that's going to change the whole situation and it doesn't work that way because your mind like i've talked about in the past in my eco backlash episode is like a harmonic oscillator it's an organic system it's a non-linear system that means any change you make to your mind like a pendulum that swings back and forth or like a spring you pull it back you let it go it does this it does a sort of oscillating motion that's how uh organic complex systems tend to work because they are homeostatic so the human mind is like that you can't achieve deep spiritual purification in one weekend or in one retreat you have to do retreat after retreat after retreat after retreat after retreat after retreat after retreat and then 10 years of that will radically change your mind but on a daily basis and even on a weekly basis you don't see the changes so much and that's what can be discouraging most people when they sit down to meditate they don't they're not sensitive enough to really feel the change that this makes there's a change that it makes on it on a temporary basis like on your temporary state for the next hour or for the next day that's irrelevant that comes and goes but there's also a secondary change it makes at a deeper structural level of your mind where it it purifies your mind a little bit but only a tiny bit like every every hour you meditate effectively maybe it purifies your mind by point zero zero zero zero one percent it's virtually imperceptible it's like a little drop in the bathtub uh and so it's easy to discount the value of that we want some kind of magic pill that will give us like a 10 increase or 20 increase in our consciousness or in our love or in our sense of humor or in our business but usually that's not possible let alone a 200 increase you know that's how these get rich quick schemes they fool you and even a lot of self-help teachers and seminars they will fool you telling you like come to this workshop and we will teach you how to fix your marriage in a weekend or how to rid yourself of insecurity and social anxiety in a single weekend or take this course and this will solve for you your all your money problems or all of your problems with attracting women and of course none of these can deliver on that promise and then you get discouraged by self-help you just get discouraged by business courses you get discouraged by all these books and other things you've read but you know what it's sort of your fault because the reality is that these books and courses are marketed to people like you because you wouldn't buy a book or a course or a product or a service or a workshop or a seminar or whatever you wouldn't buy it if the truth was told to you that it's going to take you 10 years to build this business it's going to take you 10 years to achieve your awakening it's going to take you 10 years to to solve your social anxiety because you're full and these courses and books and products are all targeted towards fools because there's not enough wise people to to make a business gearing your business towards the wise is not very smart it's if you want to make a lot of money gear your business towards the biggest fools so when it comes to spiritual work this is where you require the most patience and the most maturity and the most strategic approach and this is why most people have never felt the fruits of spiritual work they don't even believe there are the fruits like many of the fruits that i talk about or promise people will say that i'm crazy or that i'm a cult leader or that i'm imagining things or that i'm delusional to promise these fruits because these people have never they can't they're not their their worldview is so limited they can't even imagine the possibility of these fruits let alone never mind actually working towards them for years spiritual practice is some of the most challenging work that you can do it's the deepest kind of investment you can make in yourself and it needs to be done really over a period of decades you need to have a very patient attitude a very long time horizon a very deep vision to access these fruits for most people some people are more spiritually gifted they can do it faster but for the majority of people who are not especially spiritually gifted it'll it'll take years and decades now you might say that that's that's so negative and depressing actually no i'm delivering to you a very positive message is that in 10 years time you can experience incredible fruits in your life 10 years is not that long 10 years of your life will pass so quickly and one of the most depressing things that will happen to you is if you let the next 10 years pass without making any investments and then 10 years will pass and then you'll you'll realize what i told you 10 years from now on your 40th birthday or 50th birthday you'll realize what i'm telling you here and you'll say oh [ __ ] how i wish that i listened to leo and actually disciplined myself when i was in my 20s and in my 30s and in my early 40s to to make these investments because now i would be living the high life i would be coasting off the dividends i would be living off the dividends i could do a sort of early retirement early spiritual retirement rather than slaving away at this stuff when i'm in my 50s and 60s and i'm getting close to the end life really is about investing in yourself very deeply as early as possible and doing it as much as humanly possible every single day this is what it takes to build a great life really you should have been doing it from age five sometimes people ask me leo i'm i'm 15 years old or i'm 20 years old is the stuff that you talk about uh suitable for me or or am i am i too young and my answer in my mind the answer is always you're not too young you're too old if you're 15 you already missed 10 years of doing this you already wasted 10 years of your life if you're 20 you already wasted 15 years of your life you could basically be like a spiritual master by the age of 20. if you start at five if you start meditating at five every single day for an hour you would be an enlightened master by the age of 20. but in our society in our culture you know people are so lazy and complacent these days that they don't even really begin serious development until like age 25 or 30. people piss away 30 years of their life and then then they come to me and they're they're sort of like wondering leo how do i fix all these problems please help me i'm so desperate it's too late i mean like it's not too late but i mean like you already pissed away the prime of your life now i'm not saying you shouldn't now invest i'm not i'm not don't make a limiting belief out of this and don't get depressed about this even if you're 50 or 60 years old and you just stumbled upon this content and you feel like you've wasted 60 years of your life okay fine um you can still i mean what else is there to do do the work it's like i said it's better later than than never um but are you gonna have some regrets about wasting a bunch of your life yeah you will because you did and so that's going to be something you have to work through so don't don't be that way most of you who watch me are pretty young um i know a few of you are older and i have i have sympathy for you it's not it's not easy doing this work if you're starting in your 50s and 60s i believe me i sympathize with you um personally i started this work young and i'm very grateful for that that that's mostly what i attribute my success to is that i started investing in my life when i was very young basically in my in my teens i was investing in my life back back in high school when most kids were screwing around and you know horse playing on the playground and smoking weed and going to parties and making out and doing all this sorts of stupid stuff you know going to football games i was busy investing in my life and today i get to coast on that and i get to coast on that for the rest of my life that's very enjoyable so i recommend for those of you who are young to start investing as soon as possible and basically wherever you are start investing as soon as possible be very strategic about your investments be very disciplined about your investments uh be very committed to your investments when you know you've got something good invest in it don't be shy about that be decisive and invest in it like your life depends upon it and be explicit about what you're investing in on a piece of paper actually write down the top five things you want to be investing over the next five or ten years of your life in your business and your relationships with your emotional mastery with your spiritual work whatever your finances whatever your you know your health and then paste that on your bathroom mirror so when you're brushing your teeth you're looking at that list every single day and it's reminding you of what you're really invested in that is what's going to make or break your life and then for the most part everything else that's going on in your life is just distractions if it's not on that list it's trivial it's almost irrelevant it's not going to really contribute to your success very much so i recommend you be very deliberate deliberate about this invest in skills too that's another thing i i've talked about this in the past but i haven't mentioned it in this episode but a huge aspect of this is figuring out what skills you're going to need professionally or even like interpersonal skills relationship skills financial skills what skills you're going to need and then build those skills and to build skills you need to train on a daily basis i have an episode called i forget exactly what it's called [Music] um i think it's called no growth possible without training no growth is possible without training go watch that episode is one of my underrated ones um but really it's it's just you got to train on a daily basis the same way that when you want to become an olympic athlete you train every single day that same attitude needs to be applied to spirituality to your finances to your relationships to your emotional mastery and everything else you got to train all that [ __ ] on a daily basis if you want to build something great with your life and when you start doing that that's when your life becomes meaningful and interesting it becomes sort of like the difference between just playing a first person shooter versus playing a deep rpg one of the most enjoyable aspects for me of playing an rpg like you know elder scrolls or something is that you get to invest in your character every time you're leveling like you know you're killing monsters but you're not just killing a monster like in a first person shooter you just kill a monster and that's it it's a one-off deal whereas what's beautiful in an rpg is that you kill that monster it gets a little bit of xp that xp adds to your level you get new levels you get new skill points you get to allocate those skill points you get new skills and that keeps building on itself and that becomes very rewarding where did these rpg game designers get this idea they basically copied it from real life but most people are not living their life like an rpg most people are living their life like a shallow first-person shooter where every day they just do a little bit of thing here a little bit of thing there it's just like a one-off thing it doesn't add up and build towards something meaningful after a long period of time try to design your life in such a way that every activity you're doing is gonna synergize and build towards some larger goal and in this way your life will become very rich and meaningful so you see like when i'm recording this video a couple of things are happening simultaneously for me and i've sort of designed it this way it's a great synergy first of all i'm releasing this video it's going to get monetized and it's going to earn me some money that's nice it's always nice to get some money from your work but that's not the biggest benefit i get from it but still you know if this video sits on youtube for the next 20 years you'll earn tens of thousands of dollars for me just this one video so that's pretty nice that means that this this hour and a half that i've invested up to this point to be talking about this this is going to get rewarded with thousands of dollars so that's pretty nice but also it's gonna like help many people out there it's gonna help tens of thousands of people to figure out their life and it's gonna add to them building a better life for themselves and ultimately some people from this video from taking this advice will become millionaires some will a few will become billionaires you know over the next 20 years and we're talking really big picture some people will become enlightened some people will experience infinite love some people will discover god some people will find their dream you know partner some people will fix their health problems so a lot of good will be done for society so that's great from my point of view building a better world but also as i'm talking i'm practicing and developing my speaking skills so that's good because that's going to synergize with the next episode and the next episode you know i do 100 more of these my speaking skills will double triple over the next 10 years that will make me a powerful public speaker in the future that will be very valuable because then i can use that to influence people and make the world even better and i can also enjoy the better my speaking skills become the more enjoyable it is you see after 10 years of speaking on camera not 10 but like eight years of speaking on camera um like doing what i'm doing now is the most fun part of my day it seems like i'm up here working really hard no this last hour and a half that i've been talking in my mind it seemed like five minutes it's nothing it's so easy what i'm doing right here is so effortless that's what's beautiful about it on the one hand it's very profound insight on the other hand it's the most effortless part of my day this is the easiest part of my day is sitting in front of the camera and talking that's what happens when you develop high skill in something and you're relatively proficient with it and you're strong in that area it also happens to be a strength of mine so you know you're building on your strengths you want to align what you're doing you want to align the skills you're building with your strengths not with your weaknesses so that's happening also as i'm speaking i'm hearing myself speak and i'm refining my own internal models of understanding of reality so every video i shoot helps me to understand myself and my own models better i also get feedback from from people once they you know post their comments and stuff that also helps me to kind of correct my models and adjust them and polish them up and ultimately that all contributes every episode i shoot really even though it helps you it helps me even more because it helps me to build up my model and my model is the most valuable thing that i have in my life and then this model that i build over the next 10 20 years is going to become so amazing that then i'll write books based upon it hopefully once i get to that point um i already am writing some stuff but it's really difficult to write it all down because it's so vast and deep and complex but eventually i'll get it into book form and i'll use it to make even deeper videos and i'll use it to make even deeper talks and um and so that becomes very rewarding to me so see when all of these things synergize in this way that's when you get the most meaning out of life and out of your work so try to set your life up that way like for example most people when they listen to a podcast or an audio book to them it's just like a one-off thing okay i've listened to it kind of nice okay and then they just kind of move on and it's disconnected from everything else that's going on in their life for me if i listen to a podcast or read a book to me that's going into my model that's adding to my model that's refining my model so it has much more significance than it would to an ordinary person also it helps me to then deepen my videos deep in my work it helps me to help a lot of other people um that makes it much more valuable there are these sorts of synergistic effects and so what i want you to understand is that this did not happen by accident i designed it this way and i'm not saying you have to copy me because you're you you have your own unique values skills strengths and weaknesses and talents and proclivities and biases that are different from mine i'm just giving you an example of how you can kind of build your life with these sorts of different synergies we have to sit down and actually think about what kind of things will synergism synergize in my life in the same way that if you're if you're playing a deep rpg you rpg gamers all right uh and you like to min max the [ __ ] out of your characters the way that i do what you do like one of the most fun parts of any new rpg that you sit down to play is like before i even play it i will sit there for a few hours just brainstorming and strategizing what kind of character i want what kind of classes and subclasses and starting skills and you know what kind of strengths and weaknesses you can usually select these at the beginning of your you know of your game how do i want to you know build out my characters so that uh for the rest of the game all of my skills and characters are going to synergize with each other in a good way well if you're doing that for your rpg characters why aren't you doing it for your life why aren't you doing it for you so figure out what things you're going to be investing your skill points in and remember there's trade-offs just like in a good rpg there's trade-offs you can't have it all you have limited you have finite time you have finite resources and energy and you have finite money it's all about how strategically are you going to allocate those things and also unlike an rpg where with an rpg usually you have like a blank slate you can literally choose any character any stats anything you can kind of do whatever you want it's a little bit more challenging with life because you're born with a certain set of conditions so imagine like if you started an rpg normally you could choose to be an orc an elf a goblin a troll a you know a human a dwarf or whatever you can select one and each one has their own strengths and weaknesses already baked into that class or that race but you don't get to do that in life in life you're just born as a [ __ ] orc that's what you are you're an orc you can't change your orkness or you're a dwarf and that's what you are and maybe you don't even like being a dwarf but [ __ ] you're a dwarf you got to deal with it and so now the question is okay i'm a [ __ ] dwarf i don't want to be a dwarf i want to be an elf but [ __ ] i'm a dwarf okay um but i am what i am now i gotta make what's the best i can make of this how can i be the best dwarf that i could be what skills do i need to synergize what classes and subclasses do i need how do i got to allocate my points to become the best dwarf and when you do all that and you align it really well eventually what you'll realize is that being a dwarf isn't so bad and then you'll actually grow to love being the dwarf that you are it might take you a few decades or maybe you were lucky and you were born as an elf the way that you wanted to be i don't know you know we're all a little bit different so you have to customize you have to very much customize what's going to be happening in your life to to what you are and you know uh part of the challenge of this whole thing is that you know in an rpg it's it's it's very easy because like you know you're a dwarf you're an elf whatever it's a clear label it's a clear image it just tells you but when you're bored as a human you actually don't even know imagine that you're a dwarf but you don't even know that you're a dwarf maybe it's like that story you know what is that that that goose or that uh swan baby swan that was born to a bunch of ducklings you know and um and it thought that it was a duckling because all the other ducklings were ducklings but it's like a swan and a swan kind of looks like a duckling when it's small but it's not when it's big it's kind of like that as a human you're born and you're undifferentiated you don't really know what you are yet and it's going to take you 20 years 30 years just to figure out you're a [ __ ] dwarf and the way you can hasten that process though is by doing a lot of deep introspection the more you introspect the more you contemplate the more you study the more you study different perspectives the sooner you will realize you're a dwarf and then the sooner you will realize the best way for a dwarf to live and it's when you align yourself with your dwarfness and you become you don't need to become the best dwarf you can be you just need to get on the path towards becoming the best dwarf you can be just just getting on the path and walking the path is already enough to start feeling good about yourself what really sucks is when you're out of whack so much you're so out of alignment that you're like you don't even know you're a dwarf and you're living like an elf even though you are a dwarf and then so you're like a dwarf trying to live like an elf envying the elf not realizing you're a dwarf and then that's when things don't click for you so i hope this talk has sobered you a bit and has gotten you to appreciate the importance of investing deeply and patiently into yourself now your job is to figure out exactly what those investments should be and then of course to follow through on that it's not enough to listen to this you got to follow through on it all right that's it i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check actualize.org that is my website that is my brand on there you will find the book list with reviews of over 200 different of the best books that i've read in this field that will help you to develop yourself and to figure out a sense of direction in your life they will help you to figure out who you are and then how to live your life accordingly also you can find the life purpose course speaking of figuring out who you are and how to live your life and how to align everything in your life towards your dwarfness that's exactly what the life purpose course is all about it's over 25 hours of exclusive content that is not available on the free channel a lot of original concepts there in the course that you'll only find in the course that will hold your hand and guide you in a very practical way with exercises into figuring this out for yourself figuring out who you are what your strengths are what your weaknesses are and how to align your career and what you're doing in your life with that you can also find my blog where i'm posting videos links resources insights on a weekly basis check that out it's free if you'd like you can support me at patreon.com actualized i appreciate your support it helps me to stay financially independent and lastly you can find my second channel called actualizedclips that makes this content a little bit easier to digest and to share and to review i want to warn you that every teacher that you study under whether it's me or anybody else is going to have biases some of these biases can be very negative some of them can be positive some of them can be can be neutral some of them don't really matter but regardless you're never going to find a human that that doesn't have biases even if they're enlightened and awakened and all that they're going to have biases the more you listen to them the more the biases will get baked into you their biases will get baked into you and they will limit your sense of possibilities and so some of you can over consume my content you know consume all of my content sort of religiously and then what i want to warn you against there is that if you're doing that i mean it's fine to watch all my content i recommend you do but you have to also balance it out with other perspectives with other teachings and teachers with other books and so forth because otherwise you're going to you're going to get my biases and you're going to let my biases limit what's possible for you and that's going to become a problem for you it's very important that on this journey you stay true to yourself to your values to your uniqueness customize the things that i talk about to you some of the things i talk about are not going to apply to you don't try to make them fit if they don't fit some of the topics that i cover i cover them from my own personal interests and my personal interests may not align with yours so make sure that with with my content the important thing is not that you get hung up on that on the little details and on the you know specific examples the important thing is that you get the big picture you learn the overall principles and then you use those not to become a copycat version of leo but to become yourself authentically fully yourself while applying some of these broader life principles to help you to do that do you see the difference i'm not trying to create a bunch of copycat versions of myself in you so watch out for that trap and as long as you do then stay tuned for more