2 Hours for the NEXT 20 Years of Your LIFE | Jordan Peterson Motivation

Sit in

your

bed one day and ask

your

self, what remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular basis to completely ruin my

life

? And if you're really asking that question, you should want to know the right answer because that's actually what you're asking. The question means that it doesn't mean just saying the words, it means that you have to decide that you want to know that you will find out so quickly that it will make your hair stand on end. There is no better Path to self-realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good you can conceive and commit to it and then you might as well ask yourself, and this is definitely worth asking, if you really have something better to do and if not You do it well, why would you? anything else if you orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day works and in fact I think that is in line with what we have come to understand about human perception because what happens is the world revolves around your goal. because you are a creature that has a goal, you have to have a goal to be able to do something you are a creature that aims, you look at a point and you move towards it, it is built into you and that's why you have a Aim well, let's say your goal is the highest possible goal, then that shapes the world around you, it organizes all your perceptions, it organizes what you see and what you don't see, it organizes your emotions and your

motivation

s, that's how you organize yourself. around that goal and then what happens is that the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems and if you solve them properly then you stay on track towards that AP and you can focus on the A of the day and so on like that. you can have your cake and eat it too because you can, you can point to the distance, the far distance and you can live the day and it seems to me that's what makes every moment of the day overloaded with meaning, that's how because If all that what you do every day is related to the highest possible goal that you can conceptualize well, that is the very definition of meaning that would sustain you in your

life

and then the problem comes back to Noah, well, all hell is about to break out.

Let go and chaos is coming. It's like that's happening in your life and you want to do something that you think is really valuable because that's what's going to keep you afloat when everything floods and you don't want to wait until the flood. It comes to start doing that because if your ark is half built and you don't know how to captain it, the probability is very high that you will drown, ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened. to you for everyone who asks, finds and whoever knocks is opened that sounds quite optimistic again, but again I think it is a description of the structure of existential reality and what I mean by when I am in my clinic I Practice and I observe, and this is also the case with my students.

Let's say people's lives are not what they would like them to be and then you ask why we forget about tragedy and catastrophe because that's obvious and I'm not going to argue that, although the degree to which you cause your own tragedy always is indeterminate, I would never say that every terrible thing that happens to a person is something they deserve. I think that's a very dangerous assumption, especially since everyone gets sick. and everyone dies, but one of the main reasons people don't get what they want is because they don't really realize what it is and the probability of you getting what would be good for you, let's say what that would be. .

You can even be better than what you want, because you know that you can easily be wrong about what you want, but maybe you can get what would really be good for you. Well, why don't you do it? Good, why don't you try. You don't try. Think carefully, this is what I would like if I could have it and I don't mean that you manipulate the world to force it to give you goods to gain status or something, that's not what I mean, I mean something like imagining that you are taking care of yourself like you're someone you really care about and then you thought, "Okay, I'm taking care of this person." I would like things to go as well as possible for you. life has to be like that for that to be the case, well people don't do that, they don't sit back and think, okay, you know, let's figure it out, you have one life, it's hard, obviously, it's like 3.

Years from now you will be able to have what you need, you have to be careful, you can't have everything you can have, which would be good for you, but you have to find out what it is and then you have to aim well for it. My experience with people has been that if they figure out what would be good for them and then aim for it, they understand it and it's weird because they don't know it. It's something strange. It's not that simple because I know you can formulate an idea about what would be good for you and then you take 10 steps towards it and you discover that your formulation was a little wrong and then you have to reformulate your goal, you know, so you're like this a as you move towards the goal, but a big part of the reason people fail is because they never set the criteria for success and therefore, since success is a very narrow line and the probability is very unlikely that you get it. stumbling upon it randomly is zero, so there is a proposition here and the proposition is that if you really want something, you can have it now.

The question then would be: what do you mean by really wanting? and the answer is that you reorient your life in every way possible to make the probability of that happening as certain as possible and that's an idea of ​​sacrifice, right, it's like you don't get everything, obviously, obviously, but such Maybe you can have what you need and maybe everything you have to do to get it. is asking, but asking is not a WI or today's desire, it's like you have to take it very seriously, you have to think that it's okay, like I'm taking stock of myself and whether I'm going to live properly in the world and I was going to configure myself in such a way that the being justifies itself in my estimation and I do not mean, as a severe judge, what exactly I would point to, so the problem is not so much the blindness of others, although there is so much blind kindness among others, as it exists for you, but the problem here, the advice here, the description here is that you must first worry about what is interfering with your own Vision and you must leave other people alone in relation to that, etc If your way of being in the world is if you just acted better, things would get better for me or if you identify evil and catastrophe as something that is out there that someone else needs to fix or from someone else's response, someone else is responsible, then you are not going to fix that and you are going to remain blind to the things you are doing and not doing that make things not go well, so it is better to think that it is okay.

I'm probably blind in many many ways. and maybe there are some ways I could rectify that because chances are you're blind in all sorts of ways. I mean, in fact, it's practically certain and that's why it's more useful to think about how I'm wrong. In this situation there is this old idea that you go to the abyss, it is an idea that you can look into the abyss, you look for a long time and what you find in the abyss is a monster that is the dragon at the bottom of the abyss, let's say that It is Satan himself.

In fact, but if you dig into that as deeply as you can, what you will find is that you find your father fragmented in a comos condition, in a dissected and separated condition, and then you revive that well, what does that mean? something means that if you look in the darkness you will find the light, that's one thing that means and that the light really stands out against the darkness, but that the light is found in the darkness, so that's a very interesting thing, it's a narrative search. but it means more than that, it means something fundamental, so we know, for example, that if you leave your current state of predictability and security, you put yourself in a new situation, you will learn well, you will incorporate new information, so that is a cognitive thing. , but that's not all that happens, what happens is that new genes activate inside you and they code for the production of new proteins, what happens neurologically, new parts of you activate, so the idea is that If you can move towards more and more of you get turned on, get turned on and then the question would be: what would you be if everyone who could get turned on was turned on and the answer would be? you would be the resurrection of the ancestral father that is what you would be and that is why Christ says I am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the father except through me what that means is that if you take the unbearable burden of being voluntarily then that transforms you into the ancestral father and that is true and that is incredibly optimistic, it is very interesting because it is incredibly dark, well, the world is characterized by suffering and malevolence of a depth that is virtually beyond comprehension , but if you choose to understand that what you discover in that is the light that destroys the darkness and well, that is really something to discover.

There is no discovery that is more profound than that. That is the search for the Holy Grail or the Philosopher's Stone. that if you really want something you can have it now the question then would be what do you mean by really wanting and the answer is that you reorient your life in every way possible so that the probability of that happening is as certain as possible and that is an idea of sacrifice true, it's like you don't get everything obviously obviously but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking is not a whim or today's wish is like you have it to take it very seriously, you have to think that it's okay, like I was taking stock of myself and whether I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to configure myself in such a way that the being justified itself in my estimation and not I don't want to say, as a strict judge, exactly what I would point to.

You could try this. This is a form of prayer. Sit on your bed one day and ask yourself what remarkably stupid things I'm doing on a regular basis to completely screw you over. "Expand my life and if you really ask that question but you have to want to know the answer correctly because that's actually what it means to ask the question, it doesn't mean just saying the words, it means you have to decide that you want to know yourself." You'll notice that it comes out so fast it will curl your hair. You are perfectly capable of thinking.

Only God knows how you are perfectly capable of performing immense feats of imagination, dreams and fantasies. Only God knows how you do everything. that what if you asked yourself about the best possible outcome for you could you get an answer so that we can fix things we have to understand that we have to assume that burden of ultimate responsibility not only as if it were ours which it is, but as if it were not There was nothing better we could do and you have an ethical obligation to lift the heaviest load you can conceive and that is the ultimate call to adventure in life, you need meaning in your life for everyone. suffering and to make yourself strong enough to resist malevolence, where is the meaning? rights impulsive pleasure and happiness without responsibility responsibility oh who would have guessed that it is not part of the narrative what makes life worth living is taking back its catastrophe and embrace it and carry it and realize through that process who you are when I talk to the public about the relationship between responsibility and meaning, they inevitably fall silent, there is no, there is no creak, there is no cough, it is as if the secret is that the secret is that it is the voluntary adoption of responsibility, Well, that's the central message of the West, it's like taking up the cross and carrying it, you know, and everyone's been told that, but they don't know what it means because it hasn't been articulated enough for it to become something practical.

It's like, look at the terrible responsibilities you have right in front of you, your family is suffering, you're in trouble, there's trouble in the world, it's like all of that is there and all of you. What you have to do is all you have to do is take responsibility for it and then you will have what you need. It is something so magnificent that happiness pales in comparison, so it is a thin, grumpy happiness and the young people know they are chasing hedonistic pleasure. and you know, it's not surprising, but there's nothing in it that holds you up and all it does is make you cynical, it's like that's it, there's another one night stand, another binge party, you know, and it's not that has nothing against, in principle, against some of that exuberant look of youthful hedonism, universities have become party places why well because that is what students find best to do there well that is not good what they find best What you want to offer is a reason not to celebrate, it's like you don't have to understand that you come to this class with a hangover, you're not going to be able to get it, you're not going to be able to write correctly, you're going to pay a price for that hedonism that is, and the price will be too high for you to do it. supports is like oh well, enough hedonism for me then like I have something important to do, that's the way to get out of it before you can be a painter who can paint what is beyond mere memory, you have to instill that skilldisciplinary and a lot of that is painful repetition and hard work, it's the president's sacrifice for the future, but once you achieve that, things open up, that's why we have disciplines, right?

I mean, the words aren't there by accident, you have to limit yourself first and then you can expand it outwards, and that's part of it. of the maturation process that is part of the sacrifice of childhood, let's say that in childhood you are nothing more than potential but it is not realized and you do not know how to realize it and then the question is, how do you reach a point where you give yourself Realize the potential and the answer is that you sacrifice almost everything to one Direction and that's what happens with growing up, is that when you are a teenager and a young adult you have to sacrifice everything that you could have been as a child. being the only thing you're aiming for but then that opens up aimlessly it's nothing aimless it's poorly said if you had a why you could stand it anyway most people find the meaning of their life through responsible responsibility .

I think it is the fundamental religion. truth of the idea that life is suffering, it is suffering because we are mortal and fragile and because we are also subject to malevolence at our own hands and at the hands of others, it is a constant existential problem and that can make you bitter and can becoming hopeless and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and prone to abusing substances of various kinds as medication or an escape, it can bode well for you in many ways and I am suggesting to people that there is a way out of that and the way out is to face it frankly. and take responsibility in your own life and try to make the world a better place and that you need to do that and that if you don't do it.

I don't do that to make things go wrong. I think the deck is stacked against everyone to some extent because life is very difficult and we all die that way, but some people have it harder than others and all of us have it very difficult sometimes. our lives are like that, what is the alternative, you take responsibility for that and try to fight uphill because the alternative makes everything worse, find something in your life that is worth doing, that the fact that you are going to suffer is justifiable, yes , life is hard. Do not hesitate and if good luck comes to you then you should be grateful for it and if happiness manages to manifest itself you should also be grateful for it then you will wonder what is the best antidote to the discomfort of life and you.

I could say it's comfort and I guess that's what you act like when you swaddle a baby, but a better antidote is something like the Adventure to Excellence and that's a much better antidote to suffering than the mere absence of suffering, so I don't want to say that the mere absence of suffering is nothing. I have been a psychotherapist for 20

years

. I've seen things you can't imagine, horror shows you can't understand, and people who have been hurt in so many ways, in so many dimensions, it's like they're bitter. If they are resentful, if they become violent, these things do not help, they have to fight uphill despite their excess burden and it is responsibility, not guilt, it is the female crucifixion and that is best exemplified.

The best representation I have seen is that of Michelangelo. Pi, you know it's a statue of Mary, uh, and she has the body of Christ as an adult in her lap and he's broken and destroyed, and you know she's showing that. That is the courage of a mother to allow that to happen, but not only that. to make it easier make it easier where are you going kid where are you going where are you going well why is it dangerous out there it's like yeah no joke it's more dangerous here if you stay with me for a long time then you might lose your body in the world but if you stay here you lose your soul, you know, I mean, it's a pretty competitive world, there's a lot of competition for young men in particular, there's competition for status and limited resources and for the attention of women and just because you're nice doesn't necessarily mean do particularly well in those competitions.

I would like to say that everyone should be smarter, but I don't know how they could be smarter. We don't know anything about how to improve intelligence and I assume we do. I don't really know anything about how to improve industriousness either, but I can tell you that people who are industrious come up with a strategy to solve the problem at hand and then do their best to stick to the strategy and so, for example, if you sat down today or tomorrow for a couple of

hours

3

hours

and you filled out a Google Calendar, whatever you use with a strategy for studying and a list of when all your assignments are due and whatnot and when you go If you sit down and study, then no you will be in a position where you will have to study 10 hours a day desperately just before you realize that an important exam is beautifully expressed that love is the highest ideal to achieve and the truth is that it is a servant I TR I thought about that for a long time, this hierarchy of Ideal and that of truth, that bitter truth, let's say that this cynical truth is that it can break the shackles of naivety and, in reality, a burned cynicism is a moral improvement over a blind man. naivety, although one is somehow positive, but only because he is protected and the other is bitter and dark, but even better, but you are not done yet at that point, you have barely begun.

I think the optimal thing is that we exist to have something like a game. Adventure, we are made for an optimal challenge, that is partly why we like to play because in the game you find an optimal challenge, it is almost like the definition of the game and therefore if you can organize yourself and the world of optimally then you have adventure and maybe you have the adventure of a lifetime and if you can do that brilliantly then you can do it with the spirit of play, that's what you need and want. I saw endless repetition in my clinical practice and in my private life when my eyes were open.

The consequences of not telling the truth are like any hell you might fall into by opening your mouth when you have something to say that isn't popular. It's nothing like the hell you'll fall into if you lose control of your own tongue. and mind and as I said in my clinical practice, I never saw anyone get away with it even once, so all you have in a situation like that is what the truth is, now you know, of course, just You have your approximations to the truth, but that's better than nothing, so you should be afraid of what's right and you should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deception, that's what you should be afraid of, what happens, you know, rubbish in the trash, goes the old programmer's saying. and then you'll fill your head with nonsense and no one will catch your attention but you, but you can steal that voice if you try hard enough, just wait until you get into real trouble, you know one day the time will come. where you have to make a decision and the decision is the difference between life and death o Worse between life and the death of another person o Worse between health and suffering that is worse than death and because you have committed yourself to such degree that you won't You will be able to trust your judgment and you will make the mistake that you shouldn't make and then you will be finished and that will absolutely happen.

Yeah, well, I mean, you compare what's great with what's tragic. Yeah, I mean, what else could you do? do and then you say well, how do you find the good in your own life and part of that is you look at it? When am I doing something that relieves my suffering? It's true, you have to ask that question. Honestly, one of the things you ask them to do is say, "Well, why don't you just watch for a week like you don't know who you are and just see when you're not so miserable and then let's see." If we can figure out what it is that you are doing in that situation that is dispelling the sadness, okay, okay, there is something about that that is healing and that is something that the healing is related to, well, you could say that your purpose it's like Maybe part of the reason you're depressed is because you're too isolated and now we can work on that so let's see if we can increase the amount of time you spend with your friends by 20% or maybe you need a un couple of new friends or maybe you need to work on your comedy material, you know, because you can compare it to the tragedy of life.

You said that a harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that as a volunteer. controlling how people should become more dangerous and more articulate is definitely, I would say it's the main set of weapons, so physical prowess is something and it's nothing, the physical confidence that comes with that as well, but it's what same replicated at the level. of the ability to communicate and think, that's a much broader battlefield and opportunity, you want to take your rightful place in the Kingdom, it's like straightening your tongue, man, getting it under control in the highest sense possible, There is nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal. competence and being able to articulate being able to think through Marshall your arguments correctly is a battlefield metaphor having everything in order all your information directly knowing Marshall your strengths it is possible to have too much responsibility take on too much responsibility for yourself you can Surely yes , you definitely know that Dovi said that every man was responsible for everything he did and everything everyone else did, which is a bit of a crazy statement, but it's also true in a sense, you have indefinite responsibility. and you have an indefinite capacity to take on that responsibility, but that doesn't mean it can't be overwhelming and then I would say the antidote to that is to not be alone in this as your responsibilities increase and your opportunities increase.

You have to delegate more and more, it's important that you do as much as you can, but there's enough for everyone to do, so you could say, well, the heroic path is the one that leads to Universal Redemption, and that's true, and You might say, well, that's up to you. That's right in a sense, but the problem you just described may be unsustainable, right, you can beat yourself up for not doing it well enough and it's up to you, but it's not just up to you, so it's not just up to you. you delegate and you help build people around you so that everyone is working in the same direction, it is an effort, it is a multiplier effort in any case and you make sure that they get credit, credit is not exact, credit is good enough , it's not exactly right, the rewards are according to their efforts and you can distribute that if you can do something routine for someone and analyze it for someone else, tell them here is a small kingdom for you and it doesn't have to be small and it's something that it can grow, but there is a kingdom here for you, so you can go away and do the

next

thing you need to do, which is extremely important, you know, and you might think that there is a kingdom and then it is divided into little kingdoms, and so on, the more you walk away.

They are lower in the hierarchy, the smaller the kingdom, but that's only true if you think the world is a zero-sum game because you can also think of it as a place with an indefinite number of the largest possible kingdoms and I think why do we think this? It's exhaustible in a sense what we're doing doesn't seem exhausting, you know, those are the limits of the growth mindset, it's like economists don't believe in that UC, they think well, no, we can just become more efficient, which We certainly are. much more efficient than we were before and those grains of efficiency when they are not being interfered with are increasing at a more than arithmetic rate why do you think people have a tendency towards those zeros? some mentality yes, well I mean there are elements of life that has a zero sum element to it, I mean if you are competing with another man, for example, to marry a particular woman, that is a zero sum game if you just think that the game includes you too and that woman, so that you can set up circumstances that are zero-sum, but taking that metaphor of the zero-sum game where there have to be winners and losers because there are a finite number of resources is assume that the rules of that game are the rules that govern all games, the set of all games and that is simply not true, there are games that can be multiplied infinitely, I mean, you can invent a new game, people do it all the time, the man who invented Katan, which is a game that I really like, it's a very popular board game and it didn't exist until he invented it now, you know, thousands and thousands of people play it and he made a fortune with the.

It's like that game never existed, so there doesn't seem to be any limit to the number of games we can invent and it's a complicated problem because we're on one planet and some resources are more zero than others, but we haven't really encountered with no real Zero Sum limits in terms of our likelihood of living abundant life on the planet. We have managed some resources very stupidly. We've done a very poor job of managing ocean production, for example, we have to be smart with our resources, but that doesn't mean it's zero-sum and it certainly doesn't mean the world is a zero-sum game and that's a Malthusian idea. .

You know that the population will grow until it consumes all theavailable resources and will collapse precipitously, and then why? Do we think it's apocalyptically okay because things come to a sudden end? People die. People contract deadly diseases as if the world you so carefully built can be blown apart at any moment by a randomly occurring genetic mutation that causes cancer that kills you as if life has an end. fundamentally apocalyptic aspect and we understand it because we are self-aware and so it is very difficult not to apply that type of apocalyptic reasoning to things like such the world is going to burn down the climate is too hot what about uncontrolled positive feedback loops because that's what climate guys are afraid of it's like, hey, they happen, how do we put our apocalyptic thinking together?

That's a good question, man, that's a good question, we do it with the truth, that's how we do it through dialogue, through investigation, through exploration, through discipline, all of that. . the logos is the antidote to the apocalypse and so what does that mean? Love and truth are the antidote to the apocalypse. No, the planet has too many people. The truth at the service of love. What do you mean by that? Well, it's a hierarchy of virtue, I would say you know there's an old idea that God is the sum of all that is good. I don't think any one is exactly the right metaphor, it's more like imagine that there are eternal varieties truth beauty justice love courage strength compassion think of all those things as virtues then virtue is what all virtues have in common, that is the relationship of God with good or you could think about how that would manifest in your life, that could be the pursuit of good and that is the pursuit of good that unites everyone

next

.

Well, what is that exactly? Well, it's kind of like believing that it would be better for all things to flourish to the extent possible. When I was a doctor, I thought that was the good thing in me, to serve the best to my clients and I think the desire for that to happen that's love, so that's the desire that you say, well, you take a human bent, broken, miserable, malevolent, hurt, corrupt, weak, frustrating, disappointing, all those things we can impose on ourselves because of our inadequacies, it's like it's easy. Dismiss that and part of that dismissal is what drives the notion that the planet has too many people and that we are cancer on the face of the Earth.

It's like it's not easy to love that, but what do you want? Do you want the broken? that people rise up from their brokenness instead of despising them for it and then you orient yourself towards that and try to bring that out of people and you yourself continue to face challenges willingly you pay attention at a pace that works for you you develop your confidence that really is stabilizes the environment around you, so it's actually less predictable and less threatening, plus you accumulate that evidence and get the social support to do it, that's your best path forward if you do what you're asked to do, which en Lift your eyes above the daily mundane, selfish and impulsive issues that might beset you and try to enter into a contractual relationship with that which you might hold in the highest regard, whatever it may be, to aim high and make that important for above everything in your life. life that strengthens you against the vicissitudes of existence like nothing else can and I truly believe that is the most practical advice you could ever receive, the way you strengthen your faith in life is to assume the best, something like that and then act . with courage in relation to that and that is equivalent to expressing your faith in the highest possible good, it is equivalent to expressing your faith in God and it is not a question of saying it well.

I believe in the existence of a transcendent deity because, in a sense, who cares? Who cares what you believe, I mean, you could and all that, but that's not the problem, it's not the problem, the problem seems to me to be how you act, the problem is not what you believe, like it's a whole of facts, but how you behave. Yourself in the world, the purpose of thinking is to let your thoughts die instead of you, it's a brilliant notion, so the idea is something like you can conjure up a representation of yourself, you can conjure up a variety of representations. potentials of yourself in the future. you can establish how those future representations of yourself are likely to prevail or fail. you can call out the potential use in the future that will fail and then you can embody the ones that will succeed. you do it well simultaneously.

Conjuring a representation of your current self. state and determine for yourself, due to your undue suffering, what elements of your pathetic self must be abandoned so that you can move towards that future and the goal at which you aim with that work and that sacrifice which is the fundamental question what is what are you trying to do? you are trying to improve the future we believe that the future can be improved we believe that it can be improved as a consequence of our sacrificial work and then, once again, what are the limitations What are the necessary limits for that?

I would say we don't know. We have conjured up this remarkable idea. The future exists. We can see it even if it is only potential. We can adjust our behavior in the present to do so. to maximize our chance of success in the future what is the best way to do it right the idea is something like don't hesitate to offer the maximum sacrifice if you want the future to turn out well ultimately what is it that you could hire, let's say if you were willing to give up all that is weak and unworthy of you, the proper attitude of sacrifice produces a psychological state and then a social state that is a manifestation of that attitude that decreases the probability of the world going to hell and increases the probability that people do it. live a meaningful, high-quality private life in a society that is balanced and able to support that and none of that seems questionable to me.

I also don't think it's something that people don't know, you know, people have told me that many times. that when they listen to me speak they are hearing things that they already knew but didn't know how to say is something like that and this is one of those things that I think is exactly like that that is, I think it is at the very core of our moral knowledge, which is our behavioral knowledge and our perceptual knowledge. I mean, let's understand this clearly: moral knowledge is not a trivial matter, it is knowledge about how it is that you orient yourself in the world, there is no more deeply necessary form of knowledge, well, it is predicated.

If we continue with something that is exactly like that, we know that we have to make sacrifices, we know that we have to aim for what is good, so why don't we aim for what is best and make the necessary sacrifices to achieve it? put that into play I think it seems to me that in a certain sense that is obvious the question is why don't we do it but there are also answers to that life is hard and it hurts people it is full of limitations and some of them are arbitrary and some Of them are unjust and others are worse some are malevolent, which is even worse, it is not surprising that that combination of vice can turn people against the self, but I think that even when that happens and even when people have the type of history that if they revealed to you that you would say well, no wonder you turned out that way, people who turn out that way still know it's wrong, they still know that no matter how deep their own suffering is, no matter how arbitrary Whether it is their own suffering, no matter how much it is caused by the malevolence of others as well as the tragedy of existence, that this does not in any way justify them distancing themselves from good and I think everyone knows that I think they know it implicitly even if they do not allow themselves to do so. know it explicitly and I think that if you violate that idea, then you violate yourself and end up in the position of Cain, which is the position of the man who has been given a punishment that is too great to bear, now that we are able to make sacrifices in abstraction, just to conceptualize a future in which we want to let go of the things that prevent us from moving forward and free ourselves from the chains of our original preconceptions seek pleasure follow your impulses live in the moment do what is convenient a mountain is something that you have to climb and you have to go up to the Pinnacle of a mountain and the mountain is up on the right and the mountain extends to the sky and it is a long journey to specify the right place on the highest Pinnacle and that is symbolic because, of course, it is a pinnacle that you are always trying to reach, just as you are always trying to aim, you are always trying to climb.

Upwards, at least that's the theory, depends to some extent, of course, on your definition of upwards. You are supposed to act again to represent the highest. good that you are capable of now that will transform your life to some extent into an archetypal Adventure, there is no way around it because when you try to climb a higher Mountain, say, or aim for a higher Goal or something like that, then the things to around you will become more and more dramatic and it is important that this happens out of necessity, obviously because if you are aiming for something difficult and deep and you are really working on it, then your life will become perhaps more and more difficult and deep, but that could be okay, that may be exactly what you need as an antidote to the implicit limitations you face as a human being.

The good father is precisely someone who is willing to sacrifice his son for the highest good. You have a moral obligation as a parent. By encouraging your child to go out into the world correctly and be who he can be to be the best he can be, and by doing so, he is encouraging him to seek the good, he is sacrificing it for the good that you have. You're not selfishly keeping them to yourself. You're telling them that they can go out and live their life and live it properly. You don't want for your son. What do you want for him?

You want for your son. What would be better? for him and for the world and you let him go in precise proportion to your desire for that to happen when you have a baby, you do everything for the baby because the baby can't do anything for himself, but as the baby matures and is increasingly able to do things for himself, then you step back, step back, and every time the child develops the ability to do something, you allow him or encourage him to do it and you don't interfere, you know that, so if your child has difficulties to achieve it. well dressed obviously there are times you help them but above all you let them learn so they know how to do it in the future that is better for you and it is certainly better for them there is a rule if you are working with elderly people in a nursing home and the rule it's kind of like not doing anything for any of the guests, let's say they can do it for themselves because you compromise their independence and then as a mother you stand back and stand back and let your child hit. him or herself against the world and you fail to protect them, but by not protecting them you encourage them and the nobles to the point where you are no longer needed, now they may still want to see you and it would be wonderful if they did.

The point, but the point is that you are supposed to remove yourself from the equation by encouraging your child to be the best person possible and you sacrifice your desires, all your desires, for your personal desires, even your desires for your child in relation to you because you want it to move towards the world like a light, like a light on a hill, that's what you want if you have common sense and therefore you can't keep your children at home because you need them if you don't know what you're doing , you don't know where you are and you don't know where you are going and if you are in a place where you don't know where you are or where you are going you are in danger because it is uncharted territory and only God knows what is hidden in uncharted territory if you are so confused and disoriented that you do not know where you are or where you are going, there are predators of the spirit that is much worse than the snakes that are waiting for you and the probability that you will go from anxiety without direction, without hope, without joy, to nihilism, corrosive bitterness and fantasy genocidal at the fundamental end is very high, it's like well, I just want to be happy, it's a slogan, it's the most common slogan of our time, I would say, and it's such an absurd slogan, it's like, what do you mean? you just want to be happy, that's all, that's all you want, that absolute impossibility you want, endless happiness, no matter what you do. and that is all you want, it is not exactly a small request, let's say, because it is the same as asking to dwell permanently in Paradise, it is something like that and then it is also not true, that is not what you want if Do a careful analysis of what people mean when they say they just want to be happy.

What they mean is that they don't want to suffer stupidly. We are much more concerned about not experiencing an excess of negative emotion than we are about experiencing an excess of positive pleasure, so first of all, we don't mean that we just want to be happy, we mean , please no. It doesn't make us too miserable and it's fair enough, that's reasonable, but even on the happiness front, even on the lack of misery front, that's not true, it's like it's not at all obvious that we want happiness, It's not even obvious that we want happiness. absence of misery, what is really obvious is that we want an adventure, we want an adventure that is ascompelling that makes the misery of life not only justifiable but worthwhile.

You want to look back on your life and know this to be true. You want to be able to tell yourself even considering a month or a week or a series of days. You want to be able to say it was really hard but you know it was worth it and I think that's what you want out of your life. it's kind of like you know that was difficult but it was worth it and that meant that the adventure was so great that it justified the difficulties and then the question is and here is the question where do you find the Great Adventure of your life? really, well, why CU you don't know what's going to happen if you tell the truth, it's a mystery that's going to be revealed to you and that's an adventure because you literally don't know what's going to happen.

It happens, you have to stop knowing what is going to happen and then you have that adventure and then what is also the case is that it is you who is having the right adventure because if what you are doing is truly living, that is your that truth is you and that means that whatever happens when you tell the truth is your adventure and then you think, well, I'm using deception, it's like, well, maybe you do, but maybe deception is using you and then maybe it's the spirit of deception is having the adventure of your life and then you might ask yourself why are you so miserable and unhappy and the answer would be well, the spirit of deception is having the adventure of your life you're not even there because if You are not living in the truth, you are not there, obviously what is there is the spirit of deception and you might think that that is your deception, but I would be very careful in thinking that because there have been centuries of meditation on the nature of the spirit. of deception and the answer is not that the spirit of deception is you, the answer is that the spirit of deception is something that possesses you, convinces you that it is you and that is not something you want to fall into the clutches of the world . a certain sacrifice and that is what the crucifix represents and European cities were built around a church and the church was built around an altar and the altar was built around the idea of ​​sacrifice, so the sacrifice, the sacrifice suitable, it is in the center of the community. that's what that idea means now you could ask what is the appropriate sacrifice and the answer is something like the voluntary willingness to bury your cross and then you could say well what is your cross and the answer is well, that's the catastrophe of your life, right, that's the fact that you're going to be betrayed, the fact that you're going to die, the fact that you're going to feel pain, the fact that your loved ones are going to see you suffer, the fact that the mafia is going to come after you. you.

The fact that criminals may be preferred to you, etc., are all the potential catastrophes of your life and then the sacrifice is the idea that you have to let your, what would you say, you have to let your narrow ego go. enough that you pick up all that voluntarily and then that transforms it and I think that's literally true. I think that is what all the psychological evidence points to is that if you adopt a posture of voluntary defiance even in relation to tragedy and malevolence that is the path to Transcendence you have something to say that you are not saying if you do it then it is your fault this It's your fault it's your problem and you could say well I'm too scared to talk it's like Fair enough, how scared are you not to talk?

You know, people often tell me, they congratulate me for my bravery and I think you don't understand, I am not brave, no, I don't like conflicts, I am much more. I am more afraid of losing control of my tongue than I am of the consequences of saying what I have to say because I know what happens when we allow other people to control our tongue. It's not good, it's not good, it's hell itself, and of course it's problematic. suffer the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune when you say what you have to say it's okay try not to say what you have to say okay that will be okay in the moment it's like yes in the moment but unfortunately your whole life is.

Right now, practice developing skillful advancement ability in a way that simultaneously encourages others you're cooperating with to do exactly the same and that's not an arbitrary spirit, it's not arbitrary because if that doesn't happen. then nothing blooms and if it happens then everything blooms. It's also not relativistic in a sense because you have to do that no matter what you're doing, no matter what you're doing, if you're doing it that well, you're doing it. Whatever it is that you're doing well, in fact, that's in a sense how you would define it well. If you give up enough psychologically, you will reduce your losses today and of course that is the right thing to do. you can, you can clarify yourself, you can give it up in abstraction so as not to represent the pathology and then nothing dies in actuality, but that still means that you have something to give up, you want to start a process of active participation.

With the dragon that fundamentally burned you, the psychophysiological pattern of active engagement is the opposite of the psychophysiological pattern of involuntary stress, and therefore, if you can practice the embodiment of that voluntary engagement, then that posture can become dominant and that is the posture that you want to master because that makes you move forward voluntarily into the world and so on and that in all likelihood that will work I want to be free to do whatever I want okay wait a second which eye are you talking about are you talking about the mature eye that sees next week and next month and next year and 10

years

from now and that takes the community into account or are you talking about the narrow, impulsive, hedonistic, selfish eye that only wants exactly what he wants now and what makes you think that? when you defend that hedonism that you are not simply falling under the dominion of an impulsive and short-sighted demon, so to speak, if you look at music, for example, music operates according to very sophisticated rules and is therefore ordered and restricted , but beyond that.

The rule rul rules system presents an almost infinite range of possibilities and therefore we get this feeling. I think that, according to Rouso, any restriction of order is a limit to freedom when what we should hypothesize is that with the optimal set of rules. principles you obtain the most desirable freedom and it is not freedom from everything and it is not freedom to do anything, it is certainly not a narrow hedonistic freedom because that backfires on you like the next day. I think that's why people are so obsessed in a sense with finding the ultimate meaning.

This is a good story, so you can imagine two people laying bricks, they're building a gigantic wall, and the person thinks, "Oh my God, you know what?" "This wall is going to need 100,000 bricks. I'm putting one at a time." time and I'm wasting my life trivially adding to this gigantic brick wall and what I'm doing is absolutely miserable Brick by Brick and the other person thinks that in 300 years this will be a cathedral and that's why the person in the second The state is doing exactly the same at a local level laying bricks, but each brick is related to a very high goal and that means that the reward that accompanies the laying of the brick is proportional to the goal of the entire behavioral process, so if you have goals and you have no goals, then you cannot provoke any positive emotions and if your goals are fragmented, which is also what happens if you have no goals or your goals lack Unity, if your goals are fragmented, then no given behavioral manifestation can provoke any dopam energy. reward because it is not a step forward towards anything desirable one of the things well, I wrote about this in my first book, particularly about putting your life and putting your house in perfect order, it is as if you lose one of the things that you can do It's looking around you and seeing what direction you could take locally, fixing something, finding something that you can do that improves the things that you would do, and there's humility in that too because, especially if you're in a low energy state, it's like God. mine, you know I don't have enough energy to prepare dinner.

It's like you have enough energy to put a fork on the table, and sometimes people are so depressed that that's all they can do. Can you take a small step forward? No. It doesn't matter how small it is. Implement a micro routine, even something like washing a cup and putting it back on the shelf, and you know that's a good thing because you have a shelf and there are cups on it, you've already decided that's an appropriate way to live. is having your coffee cups on a shelf, if you continue cleaning the cup and placing it on the shelf, then you will have taken steps towards a valuable micro goal: you will get a dose of dopamine that transforms into adrenaline and gives you energy. partly what the dopamine system is doing, so imagine that the purpose of the dopamine system is fundamentally to elicit a satiating reward, but then the satiating reward is something that needs to be approached in steps to maintain the

motivation

needed to get closer. the satisfying reward you have to mark each of the steps with a pleasure marker small things are not small you can have the cognitive appraisal that doing something local like cleaning your room is small but it is not at all obvious that it is like that It is not so trivial Tidying up your immediate environment can easily be the springboard to tidying things up on a broader scale.

In fact, it's probably the springboard needed to do it and you can give yourself a pat on the back, especially if you're depressed a little bit louder than you might otherwise say, you say, you know, you say, well, this is trivial, but I do it. I did, it's like no, if you're moving forward, that's not a small thing, just keep doing it, that's what you'll get out of. In this freeze or withdrawal mode, if you are in the zone of proximal development, you are pushing your skill development one step forward and it is something you can actually handle.

Imagine you have someone who is habitually avoidant and maybe they are avoidant because when they are possessed by negative emotions, they become hyperaware of their internal state and they panic and then they freeze or they withdraw and they do it constantly and then they are in this terrible emotional state. negative all the time because every time they see a stimulus that is associated with withdrawal, they get trapped by these interceptive sensations and then you say, well, let's reverse that, instead of being trapped by that, you're going to expose yourself to that voluntarily, you'll see if you do it repeatedly with People not only stop being afraid of the things you're showing them and exposing them to, but they're also more likely to approach other things they're afraid of.

It is much more likely that, in fact, this is not the case. exactly it seems that people are less afraid, it seems that what happens is that they learn to be braver. One of the cognitive phenomena that greatly influences neuroticism is self-awareness, so when you fall into anxiety, then this internal obsession arises. which has to do with the panoply of sins in a sense, what parts of me are malfunctioning and need to be eradicated and what are the things I used to do with my socially anxious clients so that they would enter a social situation often with their eyes downcast along the way and they would concentrate so intensely on their own internal sensations that they would fail to make eye contact with anyone they were talking to and then they would feel uncomfortable because they were not reading the signs that they could have read if they had.

They would just stare and then the conversation would become disjointed and then they would get anxious and fall into themselves and then one of the things I taught them to do was not try to calm themselves down but try to calm the other person down so that When you walk into a social situation, pay more attention to the other person, just focus your attention outward and if the person had any social skills, sometimes they had clients who had no social skills and so they were socially anxious because they didn't really know. how to behave socially, so they had to be taught social skills, but some of them had the skills but didn't activate them because they were so neurotically obsessed with their own inadequacy that they didn't pay attention to the cues that would elicit the appropriate response. answers and all they had to learn to do was look and then they would automatically respond because they knew how to have a conversation.

You see the reason why socially anxious people are so interoceptive is that it's involuntary and right, they get caught up in the negative emotion and then that produces this intense obsessive interoception that might not happen if they did it voluntarily that's why exposure therapy It works so well in psychotherapy it's like well I'm afraid of something and if I get close then I'm possessed by a negative emotion well that's if you get close accidentally I'll make you get close to it on purpose and what you're going to find is that, To the extent that you do it on purpose, that response will be stifled and that happens, it is extraordinarily reliable.

Imagine that you anticipate something and then you make a mistake now, the question then is how significant is the mistake that the depressive takes that punishing response, let's say it is a consequence of a failed anticipation and he cannot link it, he simplyit takes away all their future potential and then they are in a depressive pit you learn too much from failure that binding problem is really complicated one of the general rules that is extremely useful that is socially instantiated it is innocent until proven guilty, so you could say when those thoughts come up because they are contradictory and accusatory thoughts, you could say well, that's part of the realm of possibilities, but when your child does something bad that is minor, you don't say you're a rotten child, you tie it up and say, look.

Boy, there are a lot of things you are here. doing the right thing, but in this particular example of specific situation, here is the minimum that you did incorrectly and how to modify it and it is a very good habit of mind to approach yourself and other people, that is, well, what is the minimum crime? what do I commit? I'm responsible for In This Moment and that's part of this miracle of the presumption of innocence and especially without evidence, a lot of what I did in my clinical practice with people who had a depressive temperament was help them defend their arguments.

Maybe you are as bad as you think you could be, but maybe not, let's take the opposite argument and limit the repair to the absolute minimum that should manifest itself, sometimes when you make a small mistake, it is actually an indicator of a flaw in your character, but most of the time it's not and you certainly can't respond to that all the time because then you'd never be able to make a mistake without completely erasing yourself. You want it to be as local and precise as possible. as you can and that is also one of the advantages of getting out of a state of anger or anxiety because a state of anger or anxiety is low resolution and global, so it will be globally accusatory, so you have to specify it and think that it is okay . well, what is the minimum behavioral transformation needed to ensure that similar mistakes are not repeated in the future?

It's like if you have a leak in your roof, you don't have to dig a new foundation, you can just fix some shingles and you could think straight. The rain is coming, so you have to tear down the whole house. Well, no, and you might panic and run around because water is coming in, but it's still a bad idea to dig up your foundation every time a trivial maintenance issue arises. So one of the things that is very useful to learn is: well, this is just a trivial maintenance problem and one of the advantages of that also is that if it's not the collapse of your entire being, let's say, and it's a maintenance problem trivial maintenance.

We are much more capable of activating that courageous response to anomaly that is part and parcel of exploratory behavior and ultimate success, so part of the trick of many types of why I would say religious training companies, certainly meditative companies They are something like how to do? You tell yourself a story as a true story, albeit a story that actually works, in which you can confidently address what is blocking your path. How do we come to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and, more importantly, our potential? One of the first ways to get to reality. to know yourself is to understand that you don't know that you can learn to observe yourself as if you were observing a stranger, so you must understand that you don't know who you are and that is not easy to understand because you think you know, but then you know, Remember, you can't control yourself very well, you're not very disciplined, you're full of flaws, maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think, but it's hard to get down low enough to understand how. profoundly the case is that you don't know who you are now, that too has an advantage, which is also that you also don't know who you might be, and therefore the discovery of what you know is a reward for the horror of determining it. who you really are then you observe yourself you observe yourself as if you were looking at a stranger you observe what you say and listen you think carefully about what kind of person would say that and how I react emotionally when I communicate that way The way you know It's just that it makes me feel stronger and weaker.

Are you filling me with shame? Does it help my confidence? I'm lying? Am I fooling myself and other people? Am I adopting this party persona designed to impress and to amuse and it seems like nothing more than self-centered narcissism, what are my dark fantasies, what are my aggressive fantasies, what am I willing to do, what am I interested in spontaneously pursuing? , what I do? I procrastinate and why I'm not willing to do what I think is good what I congratulate myself for achieving and what I berate myself for not facing and implementing those are all incredibly complicated questions and you don't know the answers to them, so that's a start. and then in terms of potential, you'll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are, especially the darker parts of yourself, because then you discover your potential for Mayhem, there's real utility in you know that discovering that you are dangerous is a very useful discovery, it is actually something that strengthens you because the first thing that an understanding like that can produce is the ambition to incorporate that danger into a higher order personality and that can make you ruthless which can turn you into someone who can say not when you need to say "I know you know", that can turn you into someone who will not avoid necessary conflict and that is incredibly useful and that is one of the potentials that you could discover, the other thing that what you need to do to discover your potential is , well, challenging yourself, you know, it's like taking a look at yourself and thinking about what's not so good that you could improve, that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve, you know and set a small goal, You know, maybe you're not studying anything and you're in college or maybe you're at work and you have this stack of papers there, you know?

I didn't look at that damn pile for a month and you know you should and you get upset at night because you're avoiding that, it's like maybe you think I've avoided that pile of papers completely for a month. I'm quite the coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hiding in that stack of papers. How about tomorrow I just put that stack of papers in front of me on my desk and I like to take a look at it for 15 seconds to see if I can? do it, it's like you set a goal for improvement, you know it's a humble goal, there are things you could do to improve and you know what they are, and there are small steps you could take that would put you in that direction. and then the question is: are you big enough to take those small steps?

Do you know that you are able to deal with the fact that you have fundamental flaws to the point where you have to break things down into almost childish steps in order to handle them and The answer to that is yes, most people have things that they avoid, You know, and those who are afraid, so I would say that, to a certain extent, it is everyone's luck, people vary in the degree to which they have conquered that and you do meet them. There are people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined, but most of the time they discipline themselves exactly this way, it's through slow incremental improvement and then you challenge yourself, it's like I can do this.

It would be better, then you figure it out and then you think well, is there something a little bit bigger and more challenging that I could do that would be better and you try it and you find out and as you try it and you find out you generally get better at it and you can assume bigger tasks and bigger challenges, you know you take responsibility for yourself, that's part of standing tall with your shoulders back, it's like Take On The World, man, but only on the level you can handle when you're ignorant, partial, deeply imperfect and immature, is where it all starts that you don't want to take, you don't want to bite off more than you can chew, but that doesn't mean you can't struggle with a part of reality, you know a part that is small enough to to have a good chance for Victory and then you gain victory over or a small part of the chaos and then you are the person who is victorious over the chaos.

You're just a beginner, but that's what you are and then maybe you can get incredibly good at it and you do it by humbly challenging yourself to the level at which you are capable of functioning. It's easier to understand if you think about a child you are trying to raise properly and you want that child to help you reveal your full potential. Whatever that is, whatever that means, and what you need to do is not impose a series of impossible tasks on them in the hope of undermining their self-confidence, form a relationship with them that is based on their interest. in their highest mode of being and then you offer them challenges that are precisely optimized for their capacity so that they can do them, but they have to strengthen the two elements of their capacity: what they can do and what and how much they are able to transform what they can do . and an optimal challenge is to take you to the end of what you can do and then to the mastery of how you can transform.

You have to be humble and wise enough to understand that you may have to aim pretty low, especially in those places where you are not performing well and it may be so embarrassing that you can't, that you can't reach Fathom, that that's really what that you are, you need the loss of that arrogant ego because it is precisely what is interfering with your forward movement. I know that it is part of the confrontation process, mythologically speaking, that stops moral progress. You are too proud of who you think you are to realize what you are like so you can change properly.

You don't want to sacrifice that part of yourself. It is probably associated with some delusion that helps you maintain a positive self-image, although very fragile, you know that, in the absence of genuine effort, it is not advisable, so you know yourself by observing and paying attention, it is not thinking exactly, It is not imagination, it is just looking like You are as if you were a snake because a snake observes in cold blood without any emotional reaction just to see what is there, it does not allow what is wanted or desired to interfere with what is observed, so you look at yourself like this If you don't know who you are, that's the beginning and then you continually challenge yourself to see how far from yesterday you can move today and tomorrow and to continually experiment by expanding the domains of not only your competence but also your ability to increase . that competition, the upper limit is proportional to the moral effort you put into it, the more it is guided by the highest of all possible visions, the alliance with the highest of all conceivable possible goods, the more it is accompanied by truth in the speech and action, the more you will develop your potential and I believe that potential will be as Unlimited in the Upward Direction The More Unlimited in the Upward Direction then it is Unlimited in the direction that leads people to the political and social hells that so often characterize the world. . that we inhabit and that is why you too, I suppose that you have to be willing to undertake that as an adventure because it is incredible to bear that type of responsibility of response it takes a person out of the ordinary it takes them out of themselves but there is a deep meaning that is held in it and it is and there is nothing better you can do, everyone in their right mind knows that there are a million ways to do things wrong and one way, if you are lucky to do things right, and hence the notion that it is a very, very narrow path that you walk if you are doing things right, that is wisdom, that is the line between Chaos and Order that you are supposed to be constantly right, it is a very, very thin line because if you are a little too far in One Direction then it's too much chaos and if you're too far in the other direction then it's too much order and both are not good, the balance has to be exactly right and you can feel that and I really think you can feel that and I think it's your deepest instinct and I mean biologically I don't mean that metaphorically.

I believe that your psyche is willing to exist in a cosmos that is composed. of the order of Chaos, I think that's why you have the hemispheric structure that you have and then when you feel like you're meaningfully engaged in the world, when the terror of your mortality is gone and you're engaged and it's Timeless, that's the deepest thing. The instinct that you have tells you that you are in the right place at the right time and then what you do is you practice being there, practice being there and that is that narrow place that is so hard to find, you wander around it, maybe if you have luck. you can look you can look this is an experiment observe yourself for two weeks like you don't know who you are because you don't observe yourself for two weeks and you realize that there will be times when things will be good, they will be raid correctly for you, it's not easy notice it because when they do an AR foray like that, you're so engaged that you don't exactly realize, you know, but you'll see, oh, I'm in the right place, okay, how?

I get here, what am I doing right? Do you know how this could happen more often? I wish this happened more often. How would I have to behave for that to happen more often? And then you practice that and then maybe instead of 10 minutes a month or 10 minutes a week it'slike 15 minutes a day and then half an hour a day and then an hour a day and then 4 hours a day and maybe if you're extraordinarily careful, you get to a point where you're like that a good proportion of the time that you're not. You own your own house, there are spirits dwelling within you, which means you have a will and can exercise a certain amount of consciousness. control over your being, but there are all kinds of things going on inside you that seem to be beyond your ability to control your dreams, for example, that's a very good example, or your impulses, for example, you might think are so foreign to you. that they're not even you don't even want them to be a part of you but, more subtly, even how about what interests you what forces you to like where exactly that comes from because you can't evoke it? of your own free will, you know, so if you're a student and you're taking a difficult course, you might say to yourself, "Well, I need to sit and study for 3 hours, but then you sit down and that's not what happens, you attention goes away." everywhere and you might say well, whose attention is it?

So if it goes everywhere because you say it's your attention, it's like it's your attention, maybe you would be able to control it, but you can't, then you might think well, Jen just. exactly what the heck is controlling it and you could say well it's random, it better not be random. I can tell you that that happens to some extent in schizophrenia, there is an element of randomness in the sense that it is not random, it is driven by the action of phenomena that I think are better considered as something like subpersonalities, you can't get interested in something , interest manifests and catches you, that is something completely different, so what is it that catches you and how do you conceptualize that it is something divine?

The power, well, as far as you're concerned, it's divine because it grabs you and you can't do anything about it, so there's a calling in you to what drives you and what interests you and sometimes that might be. very dark and sometimes not, but your interest drives you to move forward and therefore the idea that what takes you away from your country and your father's house and the comforts of your childhood home is something that It is beyond you and you listen and listen. to that is exactly right and you can say well I don't want to call that God, it's like it doesn't matter what exactly you call it, it doesn't matter what it's called, it still is and if you don't listen to it, that's the other thing if you don't you hear it and I've been a doctor and I've talked to enough people now, as old as me, to know this absolutely if you don't hear that thing that calls you forward.

You will pay for it as you cannot imagine that you will have everything bad in life in your life and nothing good and first you will know that it was your fault and that you wasted what you could have had, so this is not just a call but a warning, a One of the things I've noticed in my life is that nothing I've done was in vain and by done I mean putting my heart and soul into, you know, like trying everything. my effort that always worked now didn't always work the way I expected it to work work that's a completely different topic but the reward was always positive something of value always accrued to me when I made the sacrifice that it is necessary to do something worth going to somewhere you don't understand you have to go to the unknown and that is the first command of God to go to the unknown because you already know what you know and that is not enough unless you believe that you are enough and if you are not enough and you do not believe that you are enough then you have to go where you have not distanced yourself enough from your family to be able to establish your independence and that is not because there is something wrong with your family but it means getting away, you know, I talk very often to people whose families have provided too much protection and they know it themselves and that means they are deprived of the need and you have to move away from your dependence to allow the need. to propel you forward and that is to become independent and mature, you know, we have been fed this endless diet of rights and freedoms and there is something about it, there is something about it that is so pathologically wrong and people are starving for the antidote. and the antidote.

Truth and responsibility is right and it is not because that is what you should do and some I know better or someone knows better from you what you should do. Sense is that that is the secret to a meaningful life and without a meaningful life then all you have is suffering and nihilism and despair and all that and self-loathing and that is not good and men need to stand up and take responsibility. the responsibility if you are able to reveal the best of yourself in the world that you would be an overwhelming Force for good and that any mistakes that could be made along the way would disappear along the way if you sincerely pursue what God directs you to pursue, Let's say that everything is possible and that's how we do it.

We don't know the limits of human endeavor, we really don't and it's premature to put a limit on what we are, what we're capable of, so you know you're already something and maybe you're not that bad in your current configuration, but you could Wondering if you had done nothing for the next 30 years except preparing yourself exactly what you would be able to do and you might think it's worth finding out, but of course that's it. taking responsibility there is a lot in the world to fix everything that bothers you about the world and yourself must be fixed and you can do it.

I have a friend who lives in Montreal. His name is James Simon. He is a great painter and has taught. He helped me many things. He helped me design my house and beautify it. I bought some paintings from him a couple of years ago and he did this series of paintings where he went around North America and stood in different places and then painted. the view from here down is his feet planted in different places on roads in the desert in the ocean, yeah, well, you know I was trying to make a point and the point was that wherever you are, it's worth paying attention and That's because you know it.

So all these places that he visited looked exactly where he was standing on the side of the road in the desert, kind of mundane in a sense, but then he spent maybe 40 hours on that painting, you know, and it's a very, very realistic painting. , with good light and what it tells you as a painter is that it's worth paying attention to everything an infinite amount but you don't have enough time and then the artist does that for you well the artist looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and then it gives you that vision and then you can look at the painting and it reminds you that everything there is is right where you are and that's a hard thing to understand, but it's actually true and that's what I've been telling people online. in various ways and at conferences that should start fixing the world by cleaning your room how you would like your life to be how you would like your character to be in 3 to 5 years if you were taking care of yourself as if you were taking care of someone you you really care, so you have to split yourself into two people and treat yourself as if you were someone you respect and want the best for.

That's not easy because people don't necessarily respect themselves and they don't necessarily want the best for themselves because they have a lot of self-loathing and a lot of self-hatred, a lot of guilt. I think you have an obligation, it is one of the highest moral obligations. treat yourself as if you were a valuable creature how you would like your friendships to be treated because it is helpful to surround yourself with people who are trying to move forward and, more importantly, who are happy when you move forward and not happy when you move forward. back, not when you fall, that's not what I mean, but when you do self-destructive things, your friends shouldn't be there to cheer you up.

You look at the world through a story that you can't, you can't. I can't help it and this the story is what gives value to the world or the story is what you extract from the value of the world world you can see it either way you're somewhere and it's not good enough right, that's the human Eternal The situation wherever you are is not good enough and to some extent that is actually a good thing because if it were good enough there is nothing you can do so maybe it is a good thing that it is insufficient and that could be the reason why sometimes Sometimes having less is better than having more and I don't want to be a paana by that I mean, I know that there are deprivations that can get to the point where it is completely counterproductive but it is not always the case that starting small is you, if you start With little, you start with more possibilities, it's something like that, so you always go from what is unbearable in the present to a better future, and if you don't have that, then you have nothing more than a threat and a negative emotion.

Don't have any positive emotions because positive emotion is generated in the conception of a better future and then the evidence that you yourself generate that you are moving towards it, that is where the positive and satisfying meaning of life comes, so you want establish this structure. rightly, it's very, very important and what it means is that you want to go somewhere that's good enough to be worth it and you can ask yourself that and well, we know what's wrong with life. It's riddled with suffering and insufficiency and deceit and evil, all of that is obviously fine, what would make the journey worth it?

Or you can ask yourself if it is okay to bear this burden, what would I have to strive to achieve and if you wonder? that's knocking and the door will open, that's what it means, if you ask yourself that then you'll find an answer and you'll think you'll get away from it, you'll think well there's no way I can do that. Well, you don't know what you could do, you don't know what's possible and you're not all that you could be, so only God knows what you could, what you could do, have and give if you sacrificed everything for you have to sacrifice what is. most valuable to you currently what is holding you back and only God knows what that is certainly the worst thing about you certainly is that and only God knows to what extent you are in love with the worst thing about yourself The idea that what you should do if you feel resentful of the nature of your being or if you suffer too much for your own life, let's say, is to fix the damn thing, like trying seriously for a year, even trying for a week, trying not to do things. you know you shouldn't try not to say the things that you know are false and just watch what happens, you might as well try because you say well I'm in for a year, you know I'm going to do it.

I do things right and then I stay back and watch how things develop and maybe reconsider at the end of that year. It's like try, try. I mean, I'd say I've gotten thousands of letters so far. of people saying hey, I tried you know and hey, you know, it worked. I read this great line in a play by TS Elliot called the cocktail party and in it this woman comes up to a psychiatrist and says: you know I'm having a really hard time, I'm suffering a lot, my life is not going well and then She says, uh, I hope there's something wrong with me and the psychiatrist says what the hell do you mean by that and she says, well, that's what I look like.

In that, either there's something wrong with the world and I'm just in it and that's how it is and then what am I going to do about it because it's the whole world or maybe I could be lucky and there's something wrong with me that's causing everything. this unnecessary suffering and if I wanted I could fix it I could learn and I could fix it and very well. I've been thinking about it for a long time and I think well if your life isn't going the way it should. That's right, you know you can find someone else to blame, which is quite convenient for you and also relatively easy or you might think okay, I don't like life, I don't like the way my life is going , maybe I don't like life in general because it is tragic and contaminated. with evil how can I know if my judgment is correct and the question is well have I really done everything I can to straighten out my life because maybe I shouldn't be judging its quality or the quality of life itself or being itself by Does it matter if I haven't done everything I can to straighten out my life, so there is a task, the element of humility is that it took me a long time to understand why there are religious mandates that support humility, to even understand what the word really is.

It means in that kind of technical sense and it means something like this: it means that what you don't know is more important than what you know, so what you don't know can start to be your friend. You see people are very defensive about what They know, but the thing is you don't know enough and then you can say you don't know enough because your life is not what it could be and neither is anyone's life. the people around you, you just don't know. enough and what that means is that every time you find some evidence that you're ignorant, someone points it out to you, you should be happy about that because you're like, oh, you just told me I'm wrong, that's cool, like maybe I have to do it.

Sift through a bunch of nonsense to understand the real message you're telling me, but if you can actually somehow tell me where I'm wrong and then maybe give me a hint on how not to be wrong like that, then I wouldn't have to be so wrong anymore, that would be a good thing and you can embark on that adventure by listening to people and if you listen to people, you willThey will say incredible things if you listen to them. and a lot of those things are little tools that you can put in your toolbox as Batman and then you can go out into the world and use those tools and you don't have to blindly fall into a hole as often, hence the element of humility.

It's good, do you want to be right or do you want to learn? And it's deeper than that, do you want to be the tyrannical King who already has everything figured out or do you want to be the continually transforming hero or fool? That matters who's getting better all the time and that's actually a choice, you know, it's a profound choice and it's better to be the fool who transforms himself and who is humble enough to befriend what he doesn't know. and listen when people Talking and listening is a transformative exercise. If you listen to the people in your life, for example, if you really listen to them, they will tell you what's wrong with them and how to fix it, and what they want, they can't even help.

It's if you start listening because people are so surprised if you actually listen to them that they tell you all kinds of things that maybe wouldn't even have been their intentions, things that they don't even know and then you can work with that and The other thing that's very interesting is that every once in a while you have a meaningful conversation, you have a good conversation with someone, you walk away and you think, wow, you know we really connected and I know more than when I came out of it. conversation and during the conversation you are really absorbed in it and that feeling of being absorbed is a feeling of meaning and the feeling of meaning is engendered because you are having a transformative conversation, then your brain produces that feeling of meaning for you to say oh Yes, this It is exactly where you should be, here and now, it is the right place and the right time for you and that is a great place to occupy, so a good conversation where people listen has exactly that nature and the reason why it has that nature is because in fact, it is transformative, it is one of the truisms of clinical psychology.

If you're a clinical psychologist, a big part of what you do is just listen to people, it's like you know they come in and they're not happy and they'd rather not do it. be something like that, you say well, why do you think you might be unhappy and they don't know that they have some ideas that they might have to ramble on for a year before they figure out why they're not happy and they get rid of a bunch? There are a lot of reasons why they thought they were unhappy that are not true and then you get to the heart of the problem and then you could ask them if you could have what you want so that your life would be okay, what would that be like?

Then they have to ramble a lot about it because they don't really know it, but listening will clarify them because people think by talking and to think you have to have someone to listen because it is very difficult to think, almost no one can do it. think and even people who can think can only think about a limited number of things, but almost everyone can talk and you can hear yourself talk and if someone listens to you, then you also have a contrast for your thoughts, because you can observe the person when you're talking and see if you're bored or if you're amused or if you're absorbing all those things, for example, if you're arguing with your wife, say, or with your husband at a big party. she's going to want to win that's stupid because CU you don't want what you want you want to defeat your wife in an argument oh well great like she's going to disappear tomorrow no problem but how are you going to like living with her defeated and miserable for the next week , that's not good, so you listen and think, well, this is what I think you said and maybe even make it a little stronger and more elaborate than in the case of the original expression so that you can get the damn argument right because You don't want to win you want to solve the problem that's winning How do I decide if my inner voice is healthy or not and how do I keep it healthy?

How can I know if my inner voice is correct? or conscience is a healthy voice and not a voice that is the result of an unhealthy mind due to past experiences, that is a really interesting question, it is a question of consciousness. I continually ask my personality class attendees, let's say frequently or annually, if they heard the voice of conscience if they had a feeling, an emotion, an emotional state, let's say, or a voice that informed them when they had done something ethically wrong. and that perhaps made them guilty as a consequence and it was essentially a universal experience and that is the voice of society.

I guess that's one way to think about it, Freudians would consider it the voice of the super eagle Yung Carl Yung would take that conceptualization a little further, he would have considered it the voice of the self, which is partly the voice of the self. ethics that is derived from the broader community to the extent that that ethics is valid, say, but also in part the voice of the more fully developed self that is still striving to be born. One thing I could say is that you experience violations of your consciousness when you are not acting as the best person you could be and to some extent it is your higher self that is upgrading you for not developing in the right direction and that is me. seems like a reasonable way to conceptualize it now, the only question.

It could be how error-prone your conscience is, since you are not omniscient, you have to attend to your guilt, your self-loathing, your self-loathing and your shyness, you have to understand that the manifestation of those emotions could well indicate a moral defect of your part or a lack that must be addressed well at the same time keeping in mind that it is not easy to treat yourself fairly and that your conscience can torment you too rigid too responsible taking on too much weight denying yourself in a way that is not sustainable , etc., that a moral code, a moral way of being, can become too rigid and inflexible and, despite its putative upward aim, be somewhat counterproductive.

I think most of the way out of that. If there is one, be careful when you think, you have to see what your conscience says, you have to see how you respond, you have to catch that voice and its responses and you have to think it through, but most of that is done in dialogue with others. people. Instead of it being a consequence of an internal thought, you know if you have a dispute with your wife or your husband, your intimate partner, your brother, your parents, someone close to you and it is useful for each of you in the dispute to ask yourself yourself and the other person very seriously if you are at fault or if they are at fault and that you both can contemplate that you could be at fault and so could the other person and that it is in your best interest to determine exactly who was at fault . the error and where and maybe it's you two and maybe at different levels of analysis um.

I think the same could be said about his reaction to his conscience. It's not uncommon for me to talk to my wife, my kids, my parents, my friends, for that matter. about something I might be feeling maybe I'm guilty about something I'm self-conscious about something I'm angry about something um I feel compelled by my conscience to do something as a consequence of changing something it's very useful to discuss those things with other people to say look this is what that I think I did wrong and that's how I'm punishing myself but I'm not sure I don't do it in an exaggerated way and you collect other people's opinions and you listen to them carefully and Friends are extraordinarily helpful in that sense and that can help you gauge it, so I think that most of what we do to decide if our inner voice is healthy is discuss it with other people and I believe, as I pointed out in my last book, explicitly that a huge part of our sanity is maintained as a consequence of social interaction, so you cannot find your authentic self simply as a consequence of an inner journey.

I would say you are not, there is just not enough of you, you have to be informed. for the social world in general, what is the best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and to think well, a big part of that, I would say, is the habit, the maintenance, the development, the maintenance of good habits, yes you are neurotic if your tendency if your thinking tends in the nihilistic direction and you tend to fall apart organizing your life in multiple Dimensions is a good antidote it is not exactly thinking if you have an intimate relationship if it is not okay you could probably use one do you have contact with Close relatives? sibling members or children or parents or people who are even more distant relatives if not, you probably need it.

Do you see your friends a couple of times a week and do something social with them? Do you have a way to use your time productively? outside of employment are you employed? Do you have a good job or at least a job that is practically enough and that allows you to work with people you like working with even if the work itself is mundane or repetitive or sometimes relationships difficult? What you establish with a in a work situation like that can make the job worthwhile. Have you regulated your response to Temptations? pornography. Alcohol abuse. Drug abuse is under control.

I would say it differentiates the problem. There are multiple dimensions of achievement. of that which makes up a life and to the extent that it is possible you want to optimize your functioning in as many of those Dimensions as possible. Those are all the questions that I would decompose the problem in the best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and thinking. How can you differentiate responsibility from imposed guilt, well, I think you adopt genuine responsibility, let's say healthy responsibility. I think it is adopted more or less voluntarily. I mean there is also an element of need and compulsion in our lives because there are things that we have. to do to survive, but if you have explicitly formulated a set of goals and are pursuing them, then you have adopted the responsibility to act in a certain way so that those goals realize themselves, that is the responsibility you have adopted instead of responsibility that is being imposed on you assuming that you have thought about the goals and find your spirit in harmony with those goals. um, you can consult your resentment.

I think it is a very useful step if you find yourself angry and bitter about the things that you are responsible for doing, that is an indication that you might be operating under some harmful compulsion, that you are rebelling and that is the reason for the resentment against insistence. in you to act in a certain way, although it is also possible that you are simply immature and that you are rebelling against the discipline that is necessary to achieve the goals that you really want to achieve and that are valid and that you are actively involved in building, so you have to clarify it and some of that is a consequence of thinking over and over again. some of that is a consequence of conversations with other people that you are intimate enough with to have a conversation like that and maybe they have conversations with you about similar things if you are lucky that humans have built a mechanism, let's say it's like a game engine, you know there are game engines now that people have come up with their computing devices and you can take a game engine and you can generate games with it like computer games, so the game engine is a mechanism for producing games, that's what our brains are. as if our brains are game engines to produce games and So what happens is that when you think you produce an avatar of yourself, it produces a fictional world that that Avatar inhabits and maybe produces multiple fictional worlds in multiple avatars, that It is the you that you could be tomorrow, which is what you are doing when you are planning and you guide the Avatar through his potential roots and those that look good you keep and those that don't look good you kill and then you can embody the ideas that you keep and put them into practice and, hopefully, the idea is that. when you embody them, you are successful and they don't kill you.

You don't have a correct plan. If you're going for something, you should put a couple of alternate scaffolds next to you so you have somewhere to go. you want to be a doctor, well you could be a nurse, it's like not being a doctor, but it's better than cutting your throat, you're still doing 80% of what you wanted to do, so you want and want to think about this for your whole life, man, if you're going to take a high risk you need to lean on other areas so that if you fail the bottom doesn't fall out and you die, and it's also worth thinking about in regards to the setup of your Life in general is like If you focus solely on your career, you can advance a lot in your career and I would say that that is a strategy that a minority of men preferentially do, that's all they do, they work 70 to 80 hours a week.

They try their best in their career, they risk everything for the small chance of achieving an exceptional status in a limited area, but it is difficult for them, they do not have a life, it is very difficult for them to have a family that they do not know. how to take any leisure activity as if it becomes very one-dimensional now it may be that that one-dimensionality is the price you have to pay to be exceptional at something because if you are going to be something like a mathematical genius or a scientist let's say that it is as if you were in your lab you are in your lab all the time you work 70 hours a week or 80 hours a week you are intelligent you are dedicatedyou're one dimensional and that's how you can beat all the other people that are doing that's the only way but the problem is you don't have a life now if you love being a scientist and you have that kind of mental focus.

Well, first of all, you are a strange person and Secondly, you are going to pay for it, but it is better to have more power, but it is a risky business and you sacrifice a lot for it, you know, and I would say more often yes You are talking about having a healthy life. that's not what you do, you expand further to know that you have a family, you have some things that you do outside of work that are meaningful and useful to you, you have a network of friends, those three things By themselves, there are four things that they are enough to keep you well oriented and then if one of those things collapses, you will know that not everything works and the price you will pay for that is that the harder you try to optimize that balance, the less likely you will be to achieve it.

Be fantastically successful at any of them, but you may have a well-known strategy, when you look at your life as a whole, that could be a winning strategy. One of the things Carl Jung said: "I like it a lot." I thought that men sought perfection and women sought fulfillment, so perfection would be betting everything on one thing and seeking radical success, not all, not all men do that because they don't, but we are talking about extremes, at least with respect to the men who do. that the idea of ​​totality is rather I want is like I want one thing in my life to be 150% or I want five things in my life to be 80% well, there is much more richness in a life where you have five things operating at 80% % but you are not operating any of them at 150% and I truly believe that because I have watched men and women advance in their careers over a long period of time and just one of the things that I have noticed is that most of the Women in their 30s abandon one-dimensional careers, they don't do them, they don't dedicate the 80 hours a week that they would have to dedicate to master that particular area and that is not the case.

The reason they don't is because they decide it's not worth it and it's no wonder because why would it be worth it? You have to ask yourself if you want to be a top scientist, okay, really, really. that's what you want because that means that's what you do because you're competing with other people, you know they're smart, they're hardworking and if you want to be on top you have to be smarter and work harder than any of them. and working hard means working long hours, I mean, it also means working diligently, but in the final analysis it's also an additive question if I'm smart and hardworking and I can work 70 hours a week and you do 30, it's like 2 years. , I'm so far ahead of you that you will never, ever catch up and I think that's part of maybe also part of the reason why women are oriented that way more than men.

I think there are two reasons, one is that socioeconomic status does not play a role. women are more attractive in The Mating Market, but that makes men more attractive and the second is that women's time period is compressed, because men can always say "Well, I'll have kids later" and they can say that until they are 80 years old, while women. It's like there's no way, man, you have to get it, you have to get it when you're, say, 40, but probably 35, but definitely 40, because otherwise it's not going to happen and that's just fucking terrible, there's an element of sacrifice in right of maturation, you have to sacrifice the plural potentiality of childhood for the reality of a framework and the question is, well, why would you do it well?

One reason is that it happens to you, whether you do it or not, you can choose your damn limitation or You can let it take you by surprise when you are 30 or even worse when you are 40 and then that is not a happy day. You see, I see people like that and I think it's becoming more common in our culture because people can put it off. M maturity without suffering an immediate penalty but all that happens is that the penalty accumulates and then when it finally hits you, it just hits you because when you're 25 you can be an idiot, no problem even when you're looking for a job.

It's like well, you don't have any experience and you have no idea, yeah, yeah, you're young, you know, no problem, we can, that's how young people are, but they're full of potential. the same person at 30 it's like people aren't that excited about you at that point it's like what the hell have you been doing for the last 10 years? Well, I'm as aware as I was when I was 22, yes, but you. You're not 22, you're an old baby, right, and that's an ugly thing, an old baby, so that's part of the reason you choose your damn sacrifice because sacrifice is inevitable, but at least you can choose it and then there's something that is that.

Even more complex than that, in a sense, is that the problem with being a child is that everything you are is potential and has very low resolution. You could be anything but you are nothing, so you go and adopt a learning in general terms. and then you become, at least, something, and when you become something that makes the world open to you again, you know that if you're a really good plumber, you end up being a lot more than just a plumber, you know? You're a really good plumber, so you have some employees, you run a business, you train other people, you enlarge their lives, you're kind of a pillar of the community, you have your family, once you go through that narrow training period, it narrows you down. , it constricts you and develops you at the same time, then you can come out the other end with a ton of new possibilities at your fingertips.

Part of the right path of development in the last half of life was rediscovering the child you left behind. while you were being a trainee and then you become something and you get that potential back at the same time you're in the situation you're in now and that's not good enough and that's another thing that's interesting about people. are chronically dissatisfied with the way things are, that's fine because you wouldn't be motivated to keep going if you weren't chronically dissatisfied with the way things are, but it's kind of annoying, you know, because you might think well for What are they?

Are you not happy with what you have and the answer to that is usually CU? I don't know if it's going to last, so that's part of it and the other is well, if the situation changed a little, maybe I'd have more. options and some of them would be that they would last longer, they would be more stable, they would be more promising, so you can say that you should be satisfied with what you have, but in a sense it's a really stupid thing to say. human beings because no matter what you have, it's not going to solve your fundamental problem, so the problem is not going to go away and you can't kid yourself by saying well what I have is great, you could say I could have hell. of a lot less and that would be bad and most people have a lot less than me and I should be grateful for what I have that's fine that's perfectly reasonable but you're stuck in this chronic feeling of unfinished business and the reason for that is Well , you are permanently vulnerable, so how could it be otherwise?

Even if you have your problem solved, there are three or four people in your family who have in no way solved their problems, so the problem of problems never goes away. It's also good to know existentially because it helps you calibrate your life properly because you might be thinking well, if I had it all together, you know, I would reach a plateau of satiation and stability and then it would just be there, it's like no. That's never going to happen, it's never going to happen, so you better forget about it, well, maybe you want to push your damn rock up a hill, you know it's going to roll down again, it's like, what are you going to do, just sit there?

By the rock, it's okay to be active even if the problem you're trying to solve isn't fundamentally solvable, that doesn't mean it's not worth trying to solve and you guys should listen to this because I know what I am. talking about if you're creative, if you're a songwriter or another type of musician or artist or any of the other things you could be, finding a way to make money and then practicing your craft on the side. because you will starve, otherwise, for some of you that will not be true, but it is a small minority, your best option is to find a job that keeps your body and soul together and set aside some time so that you can dedicate yourself to your creativity. because then, as a long-term strategy, medium and long-term strategy, it's better to, you know, you hear a lot of people say things like everyone is creative, it's like that's wrong, okay, it's wrong, it's as incorrect as saying everyone is an extrovert in the first place. all you have to do is be really smart to be creative because otherwise you're just going to go where other people have already gone and that's not creative by definition so being quick and ahead of things really sets the tone. difference. and then you also have to have these divergent thinking abilities and that's part of your trait.

Structured and creative people are really different from the non-creative people you know in part because, for example, they are highly motivated to do creative things and experience novelty. pursuing aesthetic experiences and going to the movies and reading fiction and going to museums and enjoying poetry and and and enjoying music that is not conventional music, for example, these are not trivial differences and therefore it is real, it is a mistake make the proposition that everyone is creative, it is simply not the case, it is a matter of wishful thinking, it is like saying that everyone is intelligent, well if everyone is intelligent, then the term loses all its meaning because any term that can be apply to each member of a The AB category has absolutely no meaning.

You know, the other thing you want to think about here is don't think that creativity is such a good thing, it's a high risk. High return strategy. There are creative people in this room. You're going to have a great time monetizing your creativity, it's practically impossible, it's actually very difficult because, first of all, let's say you make an original product and you think the world will beat a path to your door if you build a better mousetrap, it's So. Complete rubbish, isn't it? Not true at all, if you make a good creative product you've probably solved about 5% of your problem because then you have marketing, which is incredibly difficult, and then you have sales and then you have customer service and then you have to build an organization and you have to do it, if it's really novel, you have to tell people what the hell it is, you know, we created this future creation program, it's available to people online, how do you market that? knows what that is and that's a real problem, if you write a book well, then you have the problem that another million people have also written a book, but if you produce something that is completely new and doesn't have a category that people don't You can search online, how are they going to find it and then you have pricing problems and it's really incredibly difficult to produce something creative and then monetize it and worse yet, if you're the creative person, let's say you have a spectacular invention, you have no money, Right, you don't have clients, those are big problems, so maybe you go and find a venture capitalist.

We start with family and friends because that's how it works: you raise money for your product, you raise money from your family and friends, that's that you have family and friends that have some money and they are going to give it to you and most people are not in that situation so it is a terrible barrier from the beginning and then of course you are putting your family and friends at substantial financial risk because the probability of your stupid idea making money is practically zero, even if it's a really brilliant idea and then let's say, well, if you outperform family and friends, you get venture capitalists involved because often that's the next step or an angel investor, there are steps to building a business, family and friends, an angel investor who is a rich guy. that you have come across somehow, who is it that is interested in this kind of thing and is willing to give you some money to get your product off the ground, how much of your product is that person going to take? most of it and it's not surprising, because you know you don't have money, how are you going to go to Bar to control your product?

He'll just tell you, well, do you want the money or not? And if your answer is no, then go ahead and do something else with your money, it's not like there's no shortage of things you can do with your money, there are a million things you can do with it, so you're not in a great place. negotiating position and then if you get venture capitalists involved they will take another big chunk and maybe if they are not very honest with you they will just throw you out because maybe at that point in the company's development you are nothing more than a pain in the ass because?

What do you know about marketing and sales and customer service and building an organization and running a business like you have no idea, so why do they need you so much, even if you succeed in generating a new idea and putting it into a business? you, as creator of theidea, you are going to make some money from it, it is very very low, so don't think that creativity is something you would want to curse yourself with, now you know that it is not all bad because it opens avenues of experience for creative people who they're not available to non-creative people, but it's definitely a high-risk, high-return strategy, so the overwhelming probability is that you will fail, but a small proportion of creative people succeed. spectacularly and it's like a lottery in a sense, you're probably going to lose, but if you don't lose, you can win big and that keeps a lot of people creative, but they also don't have many options because If you're a creative person, you're like a fruit tree that it bears fruit, so you don't really have it, you can suppress it, but it's very bad for you.

You know, the creative people I've worked with are if they're not creative, they're miserable, so they have to do it, but and you know there's real joy and pleasure in it and a psychological utility, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a An intelligent strategy is certainly not a conservative strategy to advance in life. What does it mean to think creatively? It goes something like this: Imagine I throw an idea at you and there's some chance that when I throw that idea at you, it triggers other ideas in your imagination so you can think of it as a threshold issue.

If you're not very creative, I'll give you an idea and almost no other ideals will be triggered and the ones that are triggered will be very closely associated with that initial idea, so let's say I throw an idea at each of you. and I asked them to think, tell me the first thing that comes to mind, okay, then the first thing we would see is that the first thing that comes to mind, in all likelihood, would be shared by many of you, okay, so you might think that's a common answer, right, and then it's a less creative answer and then there will be some things that will come to your mind that are so idiosyncratic that you're the only person thinking about it and no one can quite understand it.

That's not exactly creative either because for something to be creative it has to be novel and useful at the same time, that's a rough definition: creative, something creative is novel and useful, so you can think of yourself anyway. If they throw an idea at you, there's some chance that that coercives other ideas and if it coercives a lot of other ideas, that's like fluidity and if it coercives ideas that are quite distant from the original idea, something like that and you could track it. The distance when compared to the probability that other people have generated it is also another indication of creativity, so there have to be improbable or many improbable answers that are useful, that is what creativity means in general terms and then you can break it down into different dimensions, so that's creative thinking, but creative achievement would be the ability to take those original ideas and then implement them into the world and that's obviously a lot more different than just being creative.

Imagine what happens when you play Monopoly. What's going on? Everyone has the same amount of money. To begin with, then you start playing, it's basically a random game, well, some people start winning a little bit and some people start losing a little bit and then if you win the probability of you keep winning starts to increase and if you lose. your vulnerability increases as you lose and then maybe you have, say, six people playing Monopoly, soon one person has zero, what happens when they have zero? They are out of the game so zero is a strange number because when you get to zero you are out of the game so if you keep playing people start piling up at zero what happens at the end of the game? one person has all the property and all the money and everyone else has no rights.

That's what happens if you play. a trading game iterated to its final conclusion, is not necessarily a consequence of structural inequality, it is built into the system at a deeper level than that, which is why people talk all the time about how unfair it is that the 1 % of the population have the most money and 1% of the 1% have most of that money and 1% of the 1% of 1% have most of that money is a foregone conclusion of iterated business games. and we don't know how to fight this, we don't know how to take it away from the people who have it and move it down without instantly going back to the top.

Different people maybe, but still come back to the top because even the 1% gets very agitated. I think you have a 10% chance, if I remember correctly, you have a 10% chance of being in the top 1% for at least one year of your life and a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year of your life. least a year. in your life, which is in Canada and the United States, it is less so in Europe, so there is a bit of turmoil at the top end; It is not the same people all the time who have the money, but it is a small fraction of the people who have the money all the time. have all the money