every time you watch or you consume a piece of content you read a book if you think what behavior I'm going am I going to change as a result of this if the answer is nothing you wasted your time and you pretended to be learning but you were really entertaining yourself if you see that you have an empty calendar most people assume that if someone asks you for that time it's therefore theirs and it's only not theirs when someone else has claimed it which means means that your time only belongs to other people and then
you're surprised by the fact that your investment of time has yielded nothing for you when you've given the only and most valuable asset that you have to everyone else who often give a very poor return on it for you and so in the beginning if you don't have money the only thing you have is time and so that is the only thing that you it's the only currency you can spend to improve yourself or get closer to your goals and so if that's the one currency you have then why on Earth would you give it
away the life that I'm living today is a result of the work that I did 6 and 12 months ago and so if you to look at my calendar 6 and 12 months ago then you might extrapolate out to what I'm doing today but just like people want the immediate reward they also see their current condition as a result of the behavior they're doing today like this is where I think the the benefit of quote visualization comes into play I don't see it as much as a benefit for like oh I have to imagine this
thing to happen happen but I think it's more powerful to think I'm doing this thing today and I'm imagining it happening so it's an approximation of the feedback loop that you want to have and so it helps you substitute and get through the period where nothing's actually happening the difference between experts and beginners is that experts have more ways to reward themselves in a given condition and so if you think about an expert salesman there are so many interactions they can have that they are good at that they can find rewarding and positively reinforcing and
and so the goal is to develop enough skill that your external environment and conditions can deliver enough positive feedback that it can become self- sustaining there are some roles like sales and editing where there's a lot of people who are music where people become passionate because there's enough fast feedback loops in the beginning where they can try something and then get good a master musician can pick up any instrument and have positive feedback loops everywhere and so the more you master or any skill the more ways you can win and so it allow and that's
ultimately what makes the rich get richer is that because everything is so positively reinforcing because they start to develop skills then they do more and more of it and as they do more of it the rich get richer the better get better the better become best and then everyone who's starting out is like how on God's Earth does this guy have this work ethic but it's really that he has high levels of skill and all right I'm going to go in attention here about I think it's going to be worth it so I think about
everything in terms of skills and I have more or less divorced myself from the words like feelings psychology uh intuition whatever I've just I've just taken it out of my vocabulary and simp character traits and tried to focus ruthlessly on what are the actions that I can take to become patient and if you say hey be patient what does someone do right they have to figure out what to do in the meantime that's the definition of patience if you say hey be more charismatic the problem with that directive is that it's a bundled term and
so I say charismatic but it what it really means is 12 skills underneath of it that means that when you walk into a room stand up straight when you walk into a room look everyone in the eyes when you walk into a room announce yourself speak louder Shake people's hands hands and look at them while they're talking when someone talks nod your head if you do all of these 12 behaviors or 15 behaviors people begin to describe you as charismatic in the path of personal development we want to become more of these things but we
haven't chunked down the bundle term into the series of behaviors that create the description that people will then call us later and I think by breaking things down then it's not like oh I'm just not not that insert character trait it's really oh I have not mastered these 12 skills because there's this huge disconnect between what people want how they describe what they want and what it takes for that to occur I would encourage you if you have either negative traits that you're trying to get rid of or positive traits that you're trying to acrew
or become more like to Simply demystify It by breaking it down into the behaviors and when you do that you'll realize that though there may be many variables go in that there are lots of little things that it takes they're usually not nearly as complex as you'd think and so then you just start looking at it as a checklist and saying okay people think I'm arrogant when I begin my conver begin talking to them about how much money I make okay so I have two options I can either be around people who like talking about
money and don't see it as arrogant or when I'm around people who I think have a high likelihood of that and I care about their opinion for some reason then I won't begin that way if you have a belief and you can't explain why you believe it it's not yours it's someone else's and most people walk around parting other people's words for the vast majority of their lives and so they basically act as recorders where they clicked record at at one part of their life and then they click play in another time of their life
and they're just clicking record play record play record play over and over again and the reason there's that in my opinion that Other Self that's behind it is because none of those words are yours and so it makes sense that people feel alone and they feel like they're acting because they never say what they think and if we go back to motivation the question is what quote motivates people to do this or or to behave in this way and so most times it's fear of something right and so they're afraid of something in their minds
but when you actually play it out which is one of my favorite frames in the world which is let's take this to the hypothetical extreme or let's play it out two more two more plays two more turns and most times you end up getting way closer to what you really want the moment after the bad thing that you think will happen happens and so we we've discussed that that there's so many amazing things that have happened in my life and your life and many people's lives that happened immediately after they get out they have something
bad happen that gets them out of that realm of just barely good enough but not really and so we have this fear of disrupting the just barely good enough but not really but you're also already miserable and so the fear of disrupting your misery feels ridiculous the only thing we have to lose is the current misery of mediocrity that we're trudging through every day and so worst case you're just also still miserable but maybe you won't be mediocre anymore because at least you won't be like everyone else but there's also a possibility that you are
not miserable and also not mediocre and by doing that you might also just start seeing who you really are because I think a great portion of our identity comes from the proof that we give ourselves of the things that we've done and said in the past and so if we want to build towards a different version of ourselves then it begins with acre stacking evidence that aligns with that future self and so in some ways break the plate take the shot get rejected look because when you do that then again the worst case is you
have a broken plate but you didn't like that plate to begin with let's say you wanted to start a podcast in the past and you did three episodes and then you fell off and then they think I told you so stop with these dreams stop with this crazy content stuff you're never going to become an influencer or whatever your goal is replace influencer with what whatever your thing is the thing is is that you are still closer having done three than having done zero and so it's just about directional corre Ness and realizing that criticizers
are more often correct but when it matters most incorrect