你不是不够自律，是旧身份在拼命求生

00:00At some point, usually in your 20s, you'll notice that the people around you stop believing in themselves. And no matter how hard you try, you can't save them. By all means, do not let it infect your mind. Stay on your path. So, I was mulling over that thought for the past few days, and the more I think about it, the deeper the problem goes. I can't help but notice that people between the ages of 20 and 35 just get trapped in this vicious cycle. You get motivated by some external source, a video, a book, a conversation, whatever. You feel like this is your moment, so you go all in. You start the business, you start working out, you start learning the skill.

00:39But then, like clockwork, 2 days, a week, 2 weeks later, you fall off. You so easily go back to the life you swore you despised. It's as if you were addicted to it, as if you preferred it over the life you just said you wanted, as if the desire to change your life was just another form of cheap dopamine that you couldn't resist. So, life goes on. You get another hit of motivation. You start again from zero. The cycle repeats. You get frustrated, but not enough to solidify the change. Then you wake up 1, 2, 10 years later. What's going on? Why is this such a common thing? Why is it so damn hard to change your life?

01:14And I'll tell you why, and it's not anything that you've heard before. Maybe you've heard of it before, but you haven't really understood it, or else you wouldn't be going through this cycle. And another video about productivity, or self-help, or motivation, or discipline, or dopamine isn't even going to solve half the problem. You've obviously watched enough of those, and nothing's changed. We need to dig much, much deeper into the mind. We need to understand the composition of the mind. We're actually going to break that down. It's like, you have how the body is formed, but how is the mind formed? Do you ever think about that?

01:46How is like the intangible parts of your mind just acting like a puppet master over your actions every single day, to the point where you're not not in control, like you can't even change your life. So, by the end of this video, I hope that you will have what you need to adopt the traits of a highly successful person. Specifically, a person with this admirable quality. A person who works with tremendous intensity on things that matter to you, and more importantly, a person who is strangely unbothered when those things don't work out. So, if you actually attempt to understand what's in this video, because the first part is dense, you're probably going to fall off within the first part.

02:22But, if you actually try to understand it rather than just try to hoard the knowledge like you do every other video, your life will look drastically different in 3 to 6 to 12 months. So, the first thing we need to do is we need to understand the composition of the mind, because that's why it's so hard to change. And your mind is a collection of survival strategies. This is where it gets dense. This is where it gets complex. Don't fall off, because understanding this will change just how you view life in general. Now, survival is the mechanical, often unconscious, engine behind every thought, emotion, and action. Everything you think, feel, or do is rooted in survival.

02:59I repeat, your entire human experience right now is directed by survival. This is one of the most important topics you can understand to change your life, because it's the root of what's keeping you the same. You hear the word survival, and you're like, "Well, I don't live in the past. Like, I'm not about to be attacked by uh another tribe. What does survival have to do with this? My basic needs are met." I'm not talking about that kind of survival. And the thing here is that you cannot win this survival game. You can only transcend and include it. You can only learn how to play it. Trying to win this game is the ultimate source of suffering.

03:34Now, there are two types of survival here that we have to understand, and most people only understand what the first one is. The first one is physical survival. So, like animals, we attempt to reproduce the information in our genes. This is largely solved in today's world, and most reading this aren't worried about getting eaten or dying from starvation. And then there's psychological survival. We also attempt to reproduce the information in our consciousness. We feel the drive to preserve our non-physical identity, the ideas, beliefs, practices, and worldview that shape our mind. So, to understand this, we have to understand the gist of what evolution is.

04:08So, billions of years ago, some self-replicating molecules existed, and some of them replicated more successfully than others, and the ones that happened to build protective structures around themselves, so cell walls, then cells, then multicellular bodies were better at replicating than others. So, over billions of iterations or natural selection, we have genes that are very good at building bodies that can survive. And then, human consciousness became a thing. I don't know how. Don't ask me how. That's not what we're here to talk about. But the same process continued. So, we have genes, which selected and self-replicated, and then we have memes.

04:47And this is the difficult part because when you think of memes today, you think of memes on your phone, like your friend sends you a meme. But what a meme really is is a unit of culture that is spread from mind to mind. So, think words or language or concepts or the beliefs that your parents passed down to you that you didn't even have the time to question because like you didn't know any better as a kid or when you went to school and you were you were rewarded for getting good grades and punished for getting bad grades or if throughout your entire childhood you were told to go to school, get a job, retire at 65. And in today's world, with AI and things accelerating so quickly, that's not beneficial for your future, but so many people are stuck in that paradigm.

05:31The memes that compose their mind and dictate their actions are not aligned with what's going to lead to success in today's world. But the thing about these memes is that one, they compose your mind. If your genes kind of compose your body or dictate how like what your body can do, then memes do the same thing for your mind. So, ideas, beliefs, habits, practices, traditions, other things of that nature. And the thing with memes, if I haven't already said this, is that they're just like genes. Like they have naturally selected over time and culture through creation and destruction to the point where the memes inside of our head, their sole goal is to persist.

06:13Their sole goal is to go on, to survive, to self-replicate. That's why the memes that compose who you are right now don't want you to change, and they're going to try to avoid changing by all means possible. We'll learn more about that soon. Now, one important survival mechanism of memes are institutions and ideologies. We create larger structures like religions or nations or political parties and corporations that have the goal of protecting, perpetuating, and replicating the beliefs and values they were founded on. Religions want more members, nations want more control, and corporations want more customers. So, a religion that tells its adherents to have children and convert other people to the religion is obviously going to spread and replicate faster than a religion who just tells people to not have kids and stay quiet,

07:01obviously. And I promise we're getting to a point here because what I'm saying is that the memes in your head, who you are, how you act, are shaped by those memes or the information or the language or the words or the identifications or the concepts or all of these that composed your mind. It's really hard to put together. These things are fighting for survival because they're like genes. They naturally self-replicated into what they are today. So, just like the example I just gave with the religion that tells people to have more kids and to convert other members applies to other things as well. It applies to political ideologies.

07:33It applies to brands, conspiracy theories, jokes, fashion, the clothes that you wear, video games, which video games you play, which video games you identify with, the culture within that. Coffee, alcohol, whether you're team Apple or team Android or team Claude or team chat GPT or team anti-AI or team keto or team carnivore or team vegan. And really anything else. And now these are things that are outside of you, right? The point that I'm trying to get at here and why I talked about the complicated things such as memes. You don't really need to understand that. What you need to understand is that everything is a religion.

08:09Your morning routine is a religion. Your political opinions are a religion. Your identity as a gamer, a lifter, a minimalist, a stoic, a craft beer enthusiast, they're all religions. And with social media and global access to information, we're experiencing the religionization of everything. Very few people actually do things because they want to anymore. Almost everyone's life is built around actions that allows them to fit in to the digital tribe or the digital culture. So, our bodies are built by genes to replicate genes. Our identities are built by memes to replicate memes. And again, a meme is a unit of culture that spreads from mind to mind.

08:49And its only goal or observed goal, when you look at what a meme does, is it tries to persist. It tries to survive. So, I think you get it, right? I think you understand that your mind is trying to survive. So, how does this actually relate to getting stuck in this vicious cycle of trying to achieve a goal that you say you want to achieve, but then just falling off and kind of getting stuck in getting motivated, falling off, getting motivated, falling off. What does it have to do with that? It has to do with the fact that your mind is a self-deception machine. When you try to pursue a goal that would fundamentally change who you are, so your self-image, your identity, it's hard to conceptualize that there is a mental body, that there is a you because you think your body is you and

09:38that you're just you, but it's a composition of these ideas, beliefs, world views, etc. that were conditioned into your head by your parents, teachers, and peers, and that you never really had the chance to question because you didn't know any better as a kid. You haven't observed and examined what is this like web of ideas that actually composes who I am. And so when you try to change who you are, it's very difficult to notice because your mind doesn't want you to notice, right? The memes in your head are trying to survive and replicate. So your ego starts throwing out defensive reactions left and right. Your mind starts to flood with anxiety, fear of failure, irrational thinking, and the closest distraction that will give you a quick hit of comfort.

10:17It's like an addict going through withdrawals, and those things, the anxiety, the fear of failure, really your old identity trying to claw its way back, is kind of synonymous with like in the past, if you were attacked, or even now if you're held at gunpoint, or you're about to die, your body goes into fight or flight. The same thing happens to your mind because your identity, or your psychological body, is trying not to die. Now the thing here is that this is just a natural thing. This is how we've evolved to be. So the cool thing about being human is that you can zoom out and detach from this stuff. So how do you actually zoom out, see the composition of your mind, and then make tweaks?

11:01How do you reprogram it so that the opposite happens? And this is the key point. This is the mind-blowing part if you get it. What if you felt threatened when you stopped pursuing a meaningful goal? So much so that achieving the meaningful goal didn't require much discipline because it's just a part of who you are. It's what your mind wants to survive. It's what your mind wants to do. So with that complex section out of the way, we need to actually get into the meat of what's going on here. We have to understand this survival game and we need to understand how to leverage it in our favor. And if it helps, just think of this as the mind game, right?

11:41This is the mind game of life. And most people don't play it because they are a slave to their mind. And the characteristic of being a slave to your mind is that you don't even know it. You don't know you're a slave. So, you need to become the master, so to say, instead. So, we'll start with this. Effortless self-discipline happens when the desire to become the highest version of yourself outweighs the desires of the lowest version of yourself. Now, the key point that I want you to understand here is that the core difference between winners and losers is that losers are afraid of success, while winners are afraid of mediocrity.

12:16As an example, the person who does not identify as a fit person will feel threatened when they make the commitment to be healthy. You may not consciously identify as an unfit or unhealthy person, but you identify with the preferences, habits, and abilities, or the properties of the self of your mind that an unfit person would have. So, when you try to change and become a healthy person, your mind starts sending warning signals because it's threatened. It starts asking questions like, "What happens to going out and partying with my friends? What happens to the late night snacks while watching Netflix? What happens to relaxing on the couch instead of going on a walk?"

12:54All of the little things start to surface, even if you're not consciously aware of them. Like, "Oh, what happens if I have to eat this bland food? You're telling me I can't add an entire stick of butter to this thing because it tastes better?" What if you never had a slab of butter in your food before in your entire life? What if you didn't even know that thing existed? Would you resist that change or would you eat the bland food? Or would the bland food be good to you because that's all you know? And so, if you're trying to be healthy, when the opportunity comes to go out or relax on the couch or add the slab of butter to your meal, are you actually going to be able to break that deeply ingrained pattern?

13:30The thing here is that the fit person would be threatened by the opposite. This is the key to changing your life in general. And this would baffle the unfit person because they don't understand it. They can't understand it. So, if a fit person travels to a place where they're not in their normal routine, or they don't have access to the same healthy food that they would eat, or their meal plan, or their diet plan, and let's say the only place they can eat is McDonald's, if that was their limitation, then they almost like spontaneously combust. They think they're going to lose all their gains in an instant. Every single negative thought starts to flood their mind of like, I've worked so hard for this.

14:08This is who I am. I'm a fit person. I If I touch this one single seed oil, then I die because I've studied all of the people on Twitter and Instagram talking about how seed oils are bad, and I've adopted that as a part of my identity. It's a meme that's trying to replicate and survive, and I've joined this tribe, and I want to feel as if I fit into that tribe. So, if I eat even one seed oil, I'm cast out from the tribe, and my mind is wired like my ancestors was. Me personally, I can't distinguish then from now, so I feel like I'm at threat. I feel like I'm going to die. Even though I don't specifically say that, that's what my body and mind feels.

14:45And because my body and mind have evolved to this point, it's going to fight tooth and nail to keep me the same, keep me the fit and healthy person that I identify as. Now, if you don't care about being healthy or unhealthy or whatever it is, almost everyone wants to make money. The same thing applies to every single domain of life. This is life. So, the businessman or someone who starts a business and is actually good at it, and it has become a part of their identity, they would feel like a failure if their revenue started to go down. So much so that they would do anything to get it back up. They're going to study, they're going going learn, they're going to talk to people, they're going to try to identify the bottleneck in their business.

15:24They're going to implement new things. They're going to fire people. They're going to do whatever they can to get the revenue going back up. They're going to compete with other people. They're going to copy other people's features, so on and so forth. They wouldn't be able to sleep at night until that problem is resolved. And now, some of this I'm being hyperbolic. This is the really extreme cases, but even in the subtle cases, it's enough to influence your behavior to the point of staying the same, which is the problem that we're trying to solve here. So, how did you actually get to this point in your life right now to the point where you can't change?

15:53It's so hard to change. You keep locking in and falling off. Well, when you were young, people expected you to act, think, and behave a certain way. Your parents were influenced by their parents and culture. Your parents' worldview was passed on to you as a child. You started growing up, maybe you rebelled a bit, but you couldn't escape the subtle programming from your teachers, peers, and even worse in today's world, social media. You could effectively search up any information on the internet and program yourself into being a part of a tribe whose general actions aren't beneficial to a meaningful future. Literally, the places that you hang out on the internet could dictate the entire outcome of your life, and you don't pay any attention to it.

16:33You just let all of these things unguarded go into your mind. And I mean, think about how just insane that is, right? You have this house that you live in. Are you just going to leave the door unlocked? And then, are you going to, like, I don't know, let everyone come in and party and just ruin your house and then leave or even just stay? Are you going to let people live in your house? Are you going to let 100 people live in your small apartment with you on your bed at like it just doesn't make sense. They're going to eat all your food. They're going to do every That's what's happening in your mind. But, the good thing is is that you can flip the script here.

17:07You can just turn it around. Not easily, but you can turn it around. You can change from a person who is threatened by success to a person who is threatened by failure. So, the thing here is I want to teach you how to weaponize your survival mechanism in your head and you'll get results from that, but you have to understand that you will still suffer until you transcend the game and that's what we're going to talk about in the last section of this video. Now, with that said, this isn't going to happen overnight. You're going to go through withdrawals. You will have relapses, but these things are what I found to be the most potent for recreating yourself.

17:41These aren't exhaustive, these aren't all of them, these might not even help you specifically, but these are what helped me. Now, all of these four things overlap and synergize with each other. So, one leads to another and they stack. So, the first thing is that you need a reason with extremely high gravitational pull and when that fades, you must find another because the most intense periods of my life came after I stumbled across a very intense reason to change. It was a reason with such an intense pull that I couldn't focus on anything else but actualizing the positive trajectory of my life. And the thing is, this reason doesn't last forever.

18:17You can quickly find yourself back in a rut months later because you let autopilot take over and it's difficult, it's very difficult to force this reason. I've talked about related topics on my YouTube channel a few times and whenever I put out a video, I can't help but think like, this just isn't going to hit for some people. This isn't going to hit for the majority of the people that watch this because they're not at the right they're not at the right phase in life in which this information will cause that spark to change. People try to do that all the time. They try to just force themselves into action or force themselves to think everything and they still can't change.

18:54So, what has to happen here? You have to find the reason in a book, a conversation, or experience that happens at such a perfect moment that everything clicks for you. You have to discover it by breaking out of the familiar past and predictable future because for most people, right when they wake up, they are met with a thought that triggers a behavior, and instantly they are now operating as the past version of themselves. You think about the commute to work, which was stressful for you in the past, so you bring that feeling into the present, and now you're stressed and narrow-minded. Then the cascade continues. You experience the feelings and behaviors of your past, which create a predictable future that you don't want.

19:33You get stuck in this loop of living yesterday today. You don't do anything new. You don't break the pattern. And so, only in the unknown, only in the things that you haven't experienced so far, or at least internalized or made repetitive, is where you will find the novel insight that will launch you into the next phase of life. So, how do you start to live in the unknown? That leads to point two, which is that you need to become brutally aware of who you don't want to become. Now, in my opinion, the most powerful visualization exercise you can do is this. For the next day, look at all of your current actions. Look at them all.

20:08What you do when you wake up, what you do throughout the day, what you do at night. Now, sit with a pen and paper and write down exactly where your life is going to end up if you keep doing the same thing. And if you're honest with yourself here, the answer, preferably, would disgust you. And that disgust can be used as this ultra-potent fuel to slingshot you in a positive direction for quite a long time until you need a new reason. So, none of this is permanent. You aren't going to find your quick little fix that's just going to solve everything for the rest of your life. That's not how life works. Nothing is permanent.

20:42Now, the problem here that I've seen and experienced is that most people are just dishonest. This visualization of where they're going to end up in life doesn't really hit them. So, why doesn't it hit them? It's because the self doing the exercise is the self being evaluated. You are asking the current identity to honestly assess where the current identity is heading, but the current identity has a survival interest in not seeing this clearly, because seeing it clearly would mean death. So, you soften the blow. You rationalize it. You imagine future variables that may rescue you. So, changing right now doesn't really matter.

21:17So, for this exercise to work, you have to be able to receive the honest answer. And what helps is just grounding this in reality. So, you have to observe society. You have to observe the people around you. That's very potent. You have to find an anchor for where your life is going to end up. That could be in your parents. That could be in a random person at the grocery store. That could be a person at the gym. If you live in a city, just go walk out in the city and look at how lifeless people look. And another thing that is the real requirement here, which again is hard to fake, is that you need something that has already created a crack.

21:51So, when you actually do that exercise of visualization, it just splits you open. So, what creates the crack? For most people, something catastrophic has to happen before they actually make the real decision to change. So, their car has to break down before they realize how broke they are and that they're not able to afford it and so they have to actually do something to make more money to be able to fix it or for that not to happen again because they hated the experience so much. Or you have to have something like a health scare. Like maybe you need to have a heart attack. I'm not saying go and do that, but a lot of people they have that and they're like, "Oh I need to be healthy."

22:27Or something else happens like a parent or a loved one dies and it just hits you really hard. Or a very common example, when you're a kid and you go through a breakup and you're just like in emotional turmoil and so you decide, "I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to get jacked and so on and so forth. I'm going to make sure this never happens again." And obviously that doesn't solve the problem. But you get the point that someone's behavior and habits can change very fast once they go through a catastrophic event. Now, point number three is that you need to change your environment faster than the identity can recalibrate because your old self is partly stored in your surroundings.

23:05The people you follow online, your bed, your routine, the people you hang out with. That's a big one and points to why so many people aren't where they want to be in life. Your identity is often programmed socially. The same person in two different friend groups will behave like two different people. More so, when you log on to social media, you also become a different person. So, a simple move here is to just wipe your phone or throw your phone in a lake and get a new one and start from scratch and you'll really be able to notice the threat response then. Well, "Well, what about all my contacts? What about all my apps?

23:37What about all my accounts?" It's like you're so tied to these things and you should be in many cases. Like I would do the same thing. I'd be like I I wouldn't know what to do if my phone just randomly got lost. Actually, right now, that's happened to me before. And the last time it happened, the last time I had to actually switch my phone, I really wanted to. I just started from a clean slate. If people needed to contact me, they would contact me. If I needed to contact people, I'd figure out a way to do so. If I needed something, I'd get it. But, if you decide to do this, wipe your phone. Only download what's necessary.

24:09Do just that. If you need to do something, then do it. Go through the friction of doing it. Don't make it this easily accessible thing. On a side note there, I just hate the fact that anyone can get a hold of you nowadays. Like literally anyone can just like text you or message you or email you or do whatever. That shouldn't happen. Like we're not wired for that. So, if I don't respond to an email that you sent, that's why. Personally, I think that social media should abolish the comment section. Not because there aren't good comments, but because that's the most toxic part of social media, where people go and identify with things so strongly.

24:45Like people don't even have a chance to form their own opinion because they're just bombarded from all angles. And now maybe we shouldn't abolish the comment section itself, but like something needs to happen. And most people can't handle themselves in the comment section. I'm not talking about my comment section, but when I look at comment section, it's very entertaining because it's just a war zone. Now, aside from wiping your phone, another difficult thing that a lot of successful people do is they just take a sabbatical. They just go for a week, often to the woods, or they rent an Airbnb at this remote location, just them, themselves.

25:21All they bring is their laptop. A lot of creatives do this if they want to actually re-spark their creativity and have better ideas for something important that they're working on, like if they're writing a book. But, this is something that you can do to immediately just remove yourself from your environment and form new habits and behaviors. Now, beyond that, if you want to change your life fast, the most useful thing you can do is immerse your mind in the environment of your future self. Bathe your psyche in the opinions, beliefs, and education that person would have without judgment. So, when I was first getting started in business, I was just curious about business, right?

25:56I didn't know where to start, I didn't know where to learn, I didn't know what kind of business to start. And I searched for courses, and I took a few, and they didn't really make sense. It's like I took a digital marketing course, and it taught me about Mailchimp and other things. I'm like, "What do I do with this?" Like, I don't know if that makes sense to you guys now, but like as someone who knew nothing prior, it's like, "Why am I learning Mailchimp? What What do you mean emails? What do you mean lead magnet? I have to do this stuff for what?" It just didn't make sense. So, it wasn't until everything that I read, every video that I watched, every person that I followed online, and all of the conversations I had revolved around business and starting a business.

26:34That's the best way to learn. A course is very useful for learning structure knowledge, but the ins and outs and the opinions that all of the different angles are best learned by just like diving into a new environment where that's all there is. That's the beautiful thing about modern living today. In the past, you're just in your little tribe. Today, you can pick and choose. You can become anything that you want to because you can just plop yourself in the environment, deal with the discomfort, and you'll want to become that person because memes replicate. They want to survive. So, I would pick up tips and tricks from the videos, the books, the whatever.

27:10But more importantly, in this environment, if I wasn't building a business, I didn't fit into the environment. And so, that felt wrong. And so, inadvertently, I started a business so I could fit in. So, identity is created through learning. That's like the lesson. But the thing is that you're not learning if you're just reacting all the time or think you know everything so you're not actually absorbing all of the information. So, you must willingly expose yourself to perspectives that you disagree with and try to understand why they are right. Now, the fourth pattern here is that you need to increase the gap between impulse and response.

27:48And there is a meme going around a meme, an a a not actual meme on social media was going around where the background audio was like like break the pattern today or you'll repeat the loop tomorrow. And it was some like motivational thing. So, that's kind of what this is. Break the pattern today or you'll repeat the loop tomorrow. But the way that you detach from old patterns is to do nothing. You increase the gap because doing nothing is the only way that you can interrupt the survival mechanism in real time. Everything else from finding a reason to changing your environment happens outside the moment of the urge to remain your past self.

28:26Those things create better conditions, but they don't help you in the 3 seconds when your hand is reaching for your phone. And you can think of everything like you don't even notice it. It's not just your phone, it's everything. It's yourself. So, your job is to starve the old self that is trying to survive of the normal feedback it receives. And of course, this is a difficult practice, but you must observe and examine yourself throughout the day. Are you just repeating yesterday on autopilot? When you read an opinion or belief, are you going to solidify your own stance further by arguing with them in your head and saying how wrong they are?

28:59So, when you sit with this uncomfortable feeling without making a decision, you train your nervous system to tolerate the gap between impulse and action. From that neutral state, it's much easier to make a conscious choice in the right direction. Now, there are plenty of ways to train this gap. What I'm telling you here is something that's already been said many times before. There are very popular ways to train this gap, but they become popularized and kind of bastardized from what they're supposed to be. So, there's meditation, there's cold showers or cold exposure, there's fasting, etc. But, those things have become religions.

29:32That's the exact opposite of what we're trying to accomplish here. So, anything that helps you delay gratification is but just don't join the religion of doing the thing. Like, you don't have to have an opinion on whether or not cold showers are good or bad. They're just a tool for increasing the gap between impulse and response. But, outside of all of those things, I don't think you need to do any of those aside from meditation, but like that's what I'm trying to say here. The most impactful thing you can do is to practice some kind of a 24/7 meditation. You have to become the observer of the self that's trying to survive.

30:07You You try to operate from a higher level of mind, from a more expanded level. You attempt to get really good at that, at expanding and contracting your mind, because that's what it can do. You can zoom out very far. You can hold a lot of ideas at once, and then you can zoom in, and you can work, and you can get in the flow state, and blah blah, it's like creativity and productivity, and it's a spectrum, and you expand and contract between it. And the further you can expand, and the deeper you can contract, in that contraction, you can get more focused work done, or more deep conversations done. You're zooming into reality right here, right now.

30:43What's the task that I'm working on? The expansion is like it's you probably felt it before. And it's just like training a muscle, right? You expand and contract. Eccentric, concentric. That's how you build the muscle. But the problem here is that most people just live in a perpetually zoomed-in state. We call it survival mode. So, the goal here is to just notice it, do nothing about it, and then neutralize the impulse. You kind of wait until the calm has arrived, and then you make your own decision in the direction you want to go. You make your own choice. So, that's kind of how you can weaponize your survival is you start to identify as the person you want to become.

31:24You put yourself in that environment. You reprogram your mind so that naturally, almost automatically, you start just doing the actions that are going to make you that person. But the thing here is that you're still playing the game. You're still going to be stuck in this kind of cycle of suffering. So, that leads to the last section, and the most important section, is that winning the game is how you discover it's the wrong game. So, we'll start with this. The greatest trait you can acquire is to work with tremendous intensity on the things that matter to you, and more importantly, be strangely unbothered when those things don't work out.

31:58So, if you're smart, you've noticed just that, that we've replaced one survival game with another. Meaning, we replaced one source of suffering with another. Because sure, learning how to stress yourself into becoming a hyper-successful businessman or building a an aesthetic physique is better, in my opinion, than stressing yourself into this endless loop of stress of being overweight and broke. But the problem is this. The business owner will be unhappy until they hit a certain level of money, like a hundred million dollars, but even once they hit that number, they still have the same identity. So, if they don't increase that amount, the money, and continue working, they will remain unhappy.

32:37It's the same old story when someone is working at a startup or a corporation or building a business for most of their life, and then they sell the business for a huge payout, they have this existential crisis. They're like, "I don't know what to do with my time. I'm depressed. I have all this money, but it's not making me happy." But that's kind of the thing is that you kind of have to experience it before you can transcend it. And the same thing happens for, let's say, a bodybuilder. Here, I'm using health and business as like major examples because that's a lot of my life. So, the bodybuilder, as an example, won't be happy until they get their pro card because that's their goal.

33:13But unless they have a shift in who they are, they will continue moving the goalpost until they have that existential crisis and they're forced to change after a period of a deep depression. And so, this is a crucial piece that so many people are missing is like you think you want the lives of the business and fitness influencers on social media, but if you look a bit closer, you can see very clearly that they are covering up their lack of fulfillment with more work. So, the goal then is to play the survival game because there is a great deal of fulfillment that comes from continuous growth, and life is a if you stagnate, but you must also transcend the game.

33:48You must also remain largely unbothered when things don't work out. So, the question then is, how does one become unbothered? And the hard thing there is that you can't try to be unbothered. You can't try to be cool and lax because the bothered self attempting to become the unbothered self is just another survival strategy. The person who says, "I'm going to detach from outcomes" has just made not being attached to outcomes the outcome they're attached to. So, it becomes the axis of their suffering. This is like a huge spiritual trap. It's like you read one spirituality book and then you kind you see that and you're like, "Hmm, this is like a higher form of being.

34:29If I just act like I'm that person, then people will perceive me as this like high and wise person, but you haven't put in the years of work to naturally become that. And that's the big trap. It's premature transcendent. So, I kind of just yanked your tail this entire video. And I was kind of hesitant to put this section in the video because what most people want on YouTube and in content is just like give me the actual strategy. Give me the cheap dopamine hit now. Give me the higher form of the cheap dopamine hit by watching a video [snorts] that promises them a lot of success so they can feel as if they know more than the other person,

35:08or they can feel as if they're making progress when they really aren't. Because in relation to this video, most people have to be deeply attached to something before their attachment becomes visible enough to see through, right? There is no quick fix to that. What you can do, however, for the sake of giving you something to do, is this. First, just continue increasing the gap between impulse and response. Work your psychic muscle. Expand and contract the mind and be aware of it. Become very familiar with what those states of consciousness feel like. Second, distinguish pain from suffering. Pain is a feature of life.

35:43Suffering is the identity's refusal to accept the event. Becoming more conscious and open-minded doesn't remove pain, but it removes the second layer. The businessman whose revenue drops still feels the punch, but he doesn't have to feel the subsequent spiral of this shouldn't be happening to me. I feel like a failure. My life is ruined. The intense and unbothered personality is powerful. It is near the pinnacle of human development across both material and spiritual planes. They are a walking contradiction. They fear mediocrity enough to work hard and they're unbothered enough to not collapse when things don't work out.

36:18It is the mark of a mature mind to be able to hold two opposing forces at once. I hope that you are able to one day master that state. Until then, thank you for watching. If I were to pitch one thing to you, it would be the paid version of my Substack, which is a library of AI prompts, writing strategies. When I say writing strategies, it's mostly like, how do you take your ideas and put it into a form that other people want to read, watch, study because if you're pursuing your life's work, you need to attract people to your life's work. So, that's kind of what it is and then marketing strategy. So, how do you actually take what you know, package it up into something valuable and get paid for it.

36:56And I recently added on, I'm going to be doing monthly live streams of breaking down other successful people, creators. They're going to be coming on. So, Max Bernstein just came on before I released this video and he went over his cognitive fingerprint, is meant for people who feel like they have nothing to say or feel like they don't have ideas worth putting out into the world. And what Max does is with the help of AI is to help uncover the things that you do have to say and you just can't find them because they're stuck inside of your head. So, if you're interested, join that. There may or may not be a discount in the link in the description just for people who finished the video.

37:35But aside from that, like and subscribe. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.