How To Actually Fix Your Life (You're One Shift Away)

Your life feels terrible because your mind is filled with beliefs that interpret it as terrible. But here's the truth that psychology points to. You are in the perfect position to change your life.

But the thing is, most people don't know this. They don't know that being in a terrible position is the perfect place to be to change. And since they don't realize this, they get stuck in that position for months, years, maybe even decades.

Now, you may feel like you're stuck in a career you hate. Or you may be in a constant battle with negative emotions. Or you may just feel like you're constantly spinning your wheels trying to make something work but getting demotivated because you keep starting from zero.

Thankfully, there was a little known breakthrough in psychology in the mid 20th century which showed that human values, motivations, and thinking evolve in predictable stages over time, both individually and society. Meaning, when you understand what stage you're in and the exact conditions you need to make progress, what seems impossible now becomes inevitable. Your mind literally reconstructs how it processes reality.

Now, what we're going to go over is unlike any of the self-help band-aids that only offer temporary motivation, but seem to fail always because they offer temporary relief. They don't change who you are at the root level. Instead, we're going to go over the sequence that your mind needs to go through in order to change.

Now, I've personally spent the past four years of my life or so trying to understand and integrate this entire theory into my own worldview. And it's taken some time to do. Now, I'm not going to say, "Oh, you're going to learn all of this in the course of this video.

" I'm going to set the stage. I'm going to plant the seed of awareness in your head and give you different points to pursue in your own time. But this entire field that we're going to go over once you understand it and once you make it a part of you will change everything.

So that's where we start. The theory that changed human potential forever. And that theory or that breakthrough in psychology is called the levels of existence theory.

It was developed by Dr Claire W. graves which went on to influence other theories such as spiral dynamics which was popularized by Don Beck and Christopher Cowen the nine stages of ego development which we've discussed previously in the how to become more intelligent than 99% of people video and the AQA model by Ken Wilbur which is an expansion on all of the above that synthesizes them all together. So you can see this AQAL graphic which combines spiral dynamics, nine stages of ego development and then it adds different quadrants.

And this alone is just a ton. This is an entire map of psychological and human development as a whole as far as we know. Now for the sake of this video, we're going to focus on the spiral dynamics model which states that human value systems or world views evolve through stages in an upward spiral.

The thing with value systems or worldviews is that they influence our decision-making. They influence how we interpret the world according to ourselves and make sense of it. So in other words, our worldview or these stages, whatever stage you land in is kind of your big picture operating system for reality.

So these stages are the structure for how we think. But this doesn't only apply to the individual. We're going to go over the applications for the individual in our personal lives.

But this also happens at the collective level or the societal level. And when you understand this, it helps you make sense of a lot of today's things like political battles. So between red and blue, who's going to win the political battle?

Why do we get so upset at the other party? And a majority of the time it's because you have that kind of worldview. It also helps you make sense of work culture and why we work 80 hours a week.

Now there are two tiers here. There's tier one and tier two and there's different stages within each tier. The first tier is what they call the old paradigm and tier two is the new paradigm.

So a new way of thinking that has recently emerged and very few people or societies have gotten to. Now, my goal with this video is to give you the resources and tools and knowledge to be able to identify which stage you're in and the sequence to get to the next stage so that you can achieve higher forms of success and achieve more mental peace so you're not so reactionary and you're not uh chasing specific status symbols like working a job for the rest of your life. So first let's start with the tier one stages and we'll label these as first tier thinkers which is the majority of the population.

These stages are largely driven by survival and motivated by deficiency needs. Each of these stages believes that their worldview is the right or only way to think like red versus blue politics or business gurus teaching their e-commerce model as the only true way to go about it which I'm guilty of this too. Lastly, these stages tend to react to life.

They live by their programming and respond to situations in predictable ways that often seem scripted. Like how talking to a devout Christian can seem like talking to the Bible or how talking to a rigid Democrat can seem like talking to the news channel on TV. Now, of course, as we've discussed previously when discussing previous models is that none of these stages are bad.

Everyone goes through these stages in one way or another. Just because you label someone else as this specific stage, oh, you're so attached to your religious beliefs and you think it's stupid. I guarantee that you've gone through that stage either in the same domain, the religious domain or another domain of your life.

So, you had the same exact worldview. So, it's not wise for you to judge it because you were there too and that's not an ending point for them. That doesn't mean that you can't question those beliefs and attempt to change them in yourself so you can take better actions toward a better future.

I'm just saying it's it's natural for people to have these types of ways of thinking. The trap here is just getting trapped in any given stage and not knowing or seeing the potential to go to a higher better stage in a sense that unlocks more complexity in your mind and allows you to find more interest and enjoyment and success in life. So the first stage is the beige stage which is just the survival stage in a sense.

And we're not going to talk about that much because they're just focused on survival needs, right? It's like a baby when they're born up until a specific age. Like they just want to survive.

They're not they're not really coherent in any ways. If we go back way back in history, this is like the beginning of humanity in a sense is just trying to survive according to our instincts like animals. Now, stage two is the purple stage, which is similar.

It's the safety and community. So, once you realize, oh, there are other people, you form a tribe, you form a family, that's the only thing that matters to you. That's your entire world.

you don't care for anyone else, anything else. That's what the purple stage is. Now, I'm assuming most of you aren't in that stage.

It's around 10% of the population and I believe it's mostly in just underdeveloped countries. So, if you're watching this, if you're in an underdeveloped country, then this may apply to you. Now, stage three is red, which represents power and action.

And while this stage is mostly populated with developing nations and like gang territories, the teachings of it are important as we'll find out soon. This was a key stage for the great empires like the Roman Empire in the past. It highly represented this red stage.

But as a society, we've largely evolved out of this. But the thing with these stages is that while they may be your baseline worldview or way of thinking, you never really leave any given stage. you transcend and include their properties and you are never really in one stage.

So if you are in a particularly stressful period of your life, you can tap into this red stage of power and action quite easily for the sake of commanding some form of power or authority. If you watch sports fans get angry at a TV and start yelling when their team starts to lose or when a political party is about to lose to the other, you can directly observe how people instantly change how they think and start attacking the other side in an attempt to regain power. So, while most people don't live in this red stage, a lot of people still tap into it because it is so recent and familiar to them as a way to gain that power and win any given game or battle that they're playing.

Now the next stage is stage blue and this is where we get to we start getting to the majority of the population here and stage blue represents order and purpose. Blue thinkers value structure, rules, clear purpose and stability often assigned to them by some external source like the value code of a religion or productivity system. One prime example here are Bible thumpers who outsource all of their decision-making to a strict doctrine like Christianity or Islam.

In the domain of work and careers, blue values stable jobs with clear hierarchy. They follow company policy to avoid risk. They want certainty.

So stage four is like the certainty stage. They trust in some form of external order or system like a belief system or a corporate system to give them certainty. Now stage five which is the orange stage which represents achievement and success.

So, I would argue that most people watching this video are in stage orange predominantly. Orange thinkers value individual achievement, rationality, and personal success. They are the goal setters, self-helpers, and those focused on winning at all costs.

And in terms of religion or spirituality, this is where most people start to question tradition for the sake of personal growth. Many become atheists, and many just don't know what to believe and don't care to find out until later stages. Now, a lot of people have pinned Jordan Peterson in the orange stage when he started going back to like his Christian roots.

So, I don't think religion in that sense comes into play too much here. Although it could it to me it seems like a transition point for a lot of people just from the patterns that I've noticed. But if you've watched someone like Jordan Peterson's development over time, you can kind of see that he went out of the orange stage, became more of a multi-perspectal thinker, weaving together different metaphors and stories and his talks and lectures.

And then one day he kind of just took a turn and went straight back to Christianity and then started preaching that as a whole. And while I'm sure he still has the added nuance that he's speaking in myths and metaphors, which I believe he said before, a lot of people don't know that. So it starts to attract a lot of the stage blue, stage orange people, and sometimes stage red who just want the power and authority so on and so forth.

So there can be dangers there in who you are or who you put off to be attracts a certain stage to you and you may or may not want that because then that reinforces your own belief system. Now in terms of work and career, the orange stage is where people tend to fall into two camps. So pursuing their own side hustle or entrepreneurial venture or climbing the corporate ladder, both provide a sufficient amount of challenge.

Now stage six is green, which represents community and harmony. And stage green holds a special place in my heart because I remember when I first got into college, that was after like my rebellion phase and I became some kind of a hippie. Like all is good, man.

Everything's good. And I feel like that was my first glimpse into green, but it wasn't like a solidified stage for me because it was like me being a hippie for the sake of status. I feel like a lot of people go through the same thing.

I forget if that's called spiritual bypassing or or whatever it's called, but uh spiritual nobility where like you start learning about spirituality in general or like eastern thought and you realize, oh, this is a a different solution to what I was raised in. So, I'm going to switch my entire belief system over to that and consider that the one right way and still be in kind of the stage blue phase where now instead of just being a Bible thumper, I'm like a spirituality thumper that's arguing against the other one without realizing that both perspectives or worldviews are valid. So, green values connection, consensus, and meaning, and they're often progressive, postmodern, and focus on universal love found in academic centers for better or worse.

Now the main problem with stage green is that something comes into play which Ken Wilbur calls a perspectival madness. A perspectival means like no perspective is the right perspective. So in essence a perspectival madness occurs when individuals or societies recognize the validity of multiple perspectives which is good but then fall into a relativistic trap where they cannot or will not integrate these perspectives or make value judgments between them which is problematic.

So these are the people that most people just call postmodernists or even like the the far-left. And I would argue that these aren't postmodernists, right? They aren't true stage green or higher.

Stage green is what was supposed to be postmodern, but it's kind of become like this bastardized version of itself. To me, this eight perspectival madness is uh when a lot of residue from blue and red come into play because they want to dismantle hierarchies or dismantle privileged perspectives. The problem here is that they don't do as they say, right?

They they think that no perspective is right, but that in and of itself is the perspective that they are putting off as the one right way. So in essence they are hypocrites. So when they try to dismantle these hierarchies, these oppressive hierarchies or privileged perspectives, they end up being hypocrites.

They end up doing the same thing because in doing so they create their own value judgments. They create their own hierarchy of oh hierarchies or privileged perspectives are bad. They're lower than what I think is higher.

And then when you ask them okay well what's higher? They don't have an answer. they don't have a solution because hierarchies are built in to the fabric of reality.

There are two types of hierarchies. There are the dominator hierarchies which yes are bad. It's like a cancer cell in a body that starts to dominate uh all of the molecules and cells and atoms down the hierarchy in it.

And then there are actualization hierarchies which are a lot better. Those are what we want. When you think of nature, there are hierarchies.

That's just how it goes. A plant lives within a larger ecosystem and that entire ecosystem contains a bunch of lower pieces of the hierarchy. So stage green is arguably the most problematic stage in today's society.

Causes a lot of political upset. But after stage green, we get into the tier 2 stages. So these are the second tier thinkers.

The key shift between tier one and tier 2 is that the first tier stages believe they have arrived at the correct worldview and try to push that on others often unconsciously. The second tier stages however recognize that each stage is a necessary and valuable part of human development with each stage having its appropriate responses to their life conditions. So, I'll throw up a complete graphic of spiral dynamics in general.

And this is just super cool to look at because the more you look at it, the deeper it gets, especially if you understand spiral dynamics in general, I like to look at the entire spiral where the the colors representing each stage on the left are there. But on the right, you can see that there's like a blend or like a rainbow of color for each stage, which shows, I guess, which um like residue from each stage starts to take over more. So, I don't know how correct this is, but you can see in green how there's a lot of red to the side of it.

So, maybe when green starts to think that no perspective is the right perspective, that's when the red and the power and authority start to come into play. I don't know if that's correct, but it kind of makes sense to me. So stage seven in tier two is the yellow stage which represents integrative flexibility.

Yellow thinkers value systems thinking and adapting solutions to context. They understand that the content of a situation is highly dependent on the context like how the word jump takes completely different shape when used in two different sentences. The man jumped on the trampoline and the man jumped to conclusions.

So think about that and apply it to every situation, word, action, thought in your head and the rest. Politics, work, life, relationships. If you can tap into this stage of thinking, life gains significant depth.

Now the cool thing about this stage is that they can start to combine multiple approaches and various perspectives. So in productivity, they can balance structure from blue with innovation from orange and purpose from green to craft a custom path that works better than any of them in isolation. They aren't team you don't need a routine or team you need a routine.

They are team do your own thing. In spirituality and politics, they are integrative. They transcend group boundaries and pull truths from each perspective.

Like how some are starting to merge eastern and western thought for a more impactful and comprehensive approach to meaning making. Now stage eight, which is the turquoise stage, represents holistic flow. Turquoise thinkers value global consciousness, holistic views, and interconnected systems.

They build businesses with a triple bottom line, people, planet, and profit. Taking on a much higher responsibility relating to their interconnected impact on the world. This is something we actually discussed in chapter 3 of my new book, Purpose and Profit.

You can read the PDF free or grab the paperback, but we talk about this in the unignorability of money chapter. So, even stage eight, the people in stage eight, they don't reject the need for money. They don't go live off in the woods.

That's one path you can take. Yes, but you can also have a business. You can be in this capitalist system, so to say, at this very holistic, higher stage.

Now, all of the stages that we just discussed follow a general trend. With each increasing stage, we expand our circle of concern from egocentric to cosmoscentric. Meaning, first we only care about ourselves, then our family or tribe, then the world, and so on as our mind develops to house more meaning, complexity, and responsibility.

And lastly, relating to these stages, they move up in a spiral fashion, hence the name spiral dynamics. Each stage, starting at beige, oscillates between self-expressive and self-sacrificing, so self-centered or other centered. At the beige stage, one is focused on pure survival and fending for themselves.

And in the next purple stage, one seeks safety and community. In red, one seeks personal power, while blue seeks order and purpose and something like organized religion, and so on and so forth. So, it goes back and forth between focused on the self and focused on uh how the self relates to the other.

So, we went over all of those stages, but stick with me here because this what we're going to talk about now relating to memes, not those kinds of memes, is very important for just general understanding and then we can get into how to actually reach the next stages in our life. So, we're going to start with a quote from Lord and Savior Mihi Chick Mihi. There are other patterns of information that compete with one another to maintain their shape and transmit themselves through time.

For instance, languages are engaged in competition as our religions, scientific theories, lifestyles, technologies, and even the elements of that realm of consciousness we have come to regard as the self. This is the prime definition of memes. And no, not the memes that you endlessly scroll on your phone, even though those are memes.

Memes are like genes but for consciousness or mind. Memes are units of cultural information that spread from person to person. One prime example that some may love or hate is the woke mind virus that Elon Musk has vowed to destroy.

To me, this is the exact apectal madness that Ken Wilbur has coined for those in stage green. This is the aperspectival madness is what Elon Musk calls the woke mind virus. Now, memes are fascinating because they reveal one unique characteristic that no other being has.

While both animals and humans attempt to survive and reproduce on the physical level, so they attempt to spread the information in their genes, humans also attempt to survive and reproduce on the conceptual level. They attempt to spread the information in their mind with memes. Genes didn't cut it anymore for increasing our chances at survival.

So by some process that I'm not fully aware of, we evolved to the level of mind. We invented language. We invented religion.

We invented tools and technology like planes and clothes and fire that allow us to survive in almost any condition unlike animals who can only thrive in their niche. So as an example, just try swapping out a polar bear and a lion in their different environments and see how they do. But then you put a human in both and they can survive because we are tool builders.

And so language is a tool that allows us to communicate and build other tools. All of this stuff is just interconnected like crazy and it's just really cool to think about and study. The hidden process behind the world you live in right now is thanks to one little thing, the self.

The strange loop of us thinking about our own consciousness in relation to others. In terms of survival, humans feel the threat of someone challenging their beliefs. We feel the need to defend ourselves when a piece of our identity is under attack.

Like our political position or religious beliefs or any other thing we consider a part of our lives, like our partner deciding to go to the gym, which exposes your insecurity of not following along because you're afraid of the pain that comes with change. Your old self may die. What I mean by that is that if you're lazy and overweight and then your partner decides to start going to the gym or bettering themselves, most of the time, unless you are more developed, you will probably feel insecure.

You'll feel pain. You'll feel like the a part of you, your partner is going to change. And so, if you don't change with it, then that threatens yourself.

That threatens all of these little this little web of ideas that you're trying to reproduce and survive, the memes. Now, what does this all have to do with spiral dynamics? Well, in spiral dynamics, there are these things called V memes, like little exponential I don't even whatever superscript V memes, which stands for value system memes or just worldview in general.

So, each stage of spiral dynamics is like a larger bigger picture meme. And memes as a whole represent why ideas resonate with us or not. Your values, which are beliefs, standards, points of reference, or other elements of identity, shape what is important to you and what is worth noticing.

So if you value health and have a standard for it, that makes you feel threatened. If you disobey it, like missing the gym for a week, you will notice opportunities that help you solve that problem. Now, if you don't value your health or financial stability, you will continue to notice things that keep you in that position.

Opportunities will fly right under your nose because dopamine won't fire for the sake of your continued survival in the direction of optimal health or finances. The spiral dynamic stage you are in determines much of what you notice in reality in the opportunities available to you. And the higher stages you reach, the more you can tap into the stages beneath.

Meaning you have both the ability and wisdom to spot opportunities for varied versions of success and achieve them with grace as you move up the spiral. The question then is, how do I move up the stages beyond the one that makes me feel trapped? And the good news is, you are in the perfect spot to change.

So, finally, we get to learn how to unfuck your life after we have all of the evidence-based stuff out of the way. So, we'll start with a previous tweet of mine to set the scene. Subtle reminder that you're supposed to feel overwhelmed.

It means you're doing something new. You're taking a new path. You're learning, growing.

You branched into the unknown. It will be frustrating. You will feel lost.

It will be painful. But staying the same is even worse. So first we need to understand the sequence of change.

How does life feel as we're changing or going into a new stage? So once you can see that big picture, you can be okay with the sequence of change. So there are four phases to expect as you move from one stage to another.

The first is the alpha stage and this is where life is good and normal. There is order. The second is the beta stage where doubts arise as you enter a new phase and doing the same thing only makes it worse.

Then there's the gamma phase where you feel lost. Things are chaotic and turbulent and this is where you can get trapped and you feel like there's nowhere to go. Then the delta stage.

So things are vibrant. You make quick progress and reach a new baseline and this is where you learn the most and feel the growth. And you've probably experienced that sequence either with noticing it or without noticing it or it happened so long ago that you don't even remember it.

So in my own business, things feel stable for a bit then I feel as if something needs to change or I notice that my systems aren't serving me as they usually are. I notice this in revenue, engagement, customer satisfaction, etc. Then things start to get chaotic and I'm stuck between what I was doing and experimenting with things I don't completely understand yet.

And eventually things start to work. order starts to come back. I hit record highs in revenue knowing that I'll see a subtle dip back down to a baseline.

And funnily enough, I I noticed this sequence before even studying spiral dynamics. We actually discussed this in a previous video on how to work 12 hours a day on your purpose or something like that. And it stated these stages.

So the first is perplexity where you feel lost after a period of consistency. And then curiosity. So you become curious as to how to reach the next level.

Then intensity. So you experiment until you find that one thing. Then progress surges and then consistency.

So you reach a new baseline until the cycle inevitably repeats. Now that's all great, but how do you actually prime yourself to go into the next stage or go through that sequence? Now as we go over these six steps to actually changing or unfucking your life, so to say, I found something pretty cool that you can do with AI.

And the incredible thing about this is that you can feed it all of this information on spiral dynamics and you can speak to it as something like a coach or a mentor to help you identify what stage you're in. And that way it can speak to you in the stage that you're at and help be your kind of strategic advisor for moving on to the next stages and going through those phases. Because if you're trying to do this yourself, you are much more biased when you're taking a look at what you do and who you are.

So if you have this neutral external party who you can train on this crazy spiral dynamics theory to help coach you through life, that's insane. So to do this with AI, I created this document that you can duplicate with the link in the description and it has all of my notes on spiral dynamics and everything involved. So, this is what you're going to use as context.

Right now, what you do here is one, there's a Loom video that you can use. This is best done on desktop until our mobile app is ready. But what you're going to do is you're going to navigate to chat.

You're going to go to the plan category and do the life reset map first because in order to do this well, the AI needs to understand where you're at in life and what your goals are and what your problems are and what your vision is and all of those other things that allows you to be pinned down to a specific stage or a few different stages. So, we're just going to walk through this, but the prompt and everything else is right here. So you go up to chat, you go to plan, and then the life reset map.

And then all you do is one, you pick a certain model. So you can use Gemini 2. 0 on the free tier with 15 messages.

Or if you upgrade, you can use stuff like Claude 3. 7 or other models. So, uh, we're just going to go with Claude for this.

But, uh, you press enter here, and then it will ask you specific questions to understand what your vision is, what everything else is. And the beautiful thing about this is, I'm sure many of you remember my life reset template where it was just a template inside of Cortex that you could fill out. And the interesting thing about that is that with AI, it can guide you through it.

Right? For a lot of people, it's very difficult to know what you want out of life, to uh be able to create that first draft of your vision, goals, everything else. So, being able to have AI as your guide makes it a lot easier.

And so, once you finish this flow, what it does is it spits out uh my life reset map or you save it as a document. So, you can save it as a document after you actually complete that flow. You have all of your information here from your daily structure to your vision to implementation strategy for how to learn specific skills and goals.

And then uh we go to chat again. And what you can do here is press command K and then remove the chat filter. Go to spiral dynamics inquiry.

And then you can see down here command enter. So if we're over this and we press command enter, it will open it in a side pane. So now you can do these both at the same time.

The next step is to add both of these as context. So we're talking the life reset map. So my life reset map and the uh spiral dynamics inquiry.

So now it's going to reference both of these things. I'm going to change this to clot again and we're just going to copy paste this prompt in. So this won't work unless you add these as context, right?

Unless you have these documents in your workspace. So then you're going to take this the prompt, copy it, paste it. And one thing you can do here if you want is just delete this entire thing, right?

Uh because we don't necessarily want it to be picked up as context. But uh this is a template, so I'm not going to delete it because then I'll delete it for you. So if I hit send, you can see that it spits out uh quite comprehensive uh inquiry, right?

So assessment and growth plan. So initial assessment, your life situation success, you're primarily operating between orange and green with some elements of both present in your thinking. Let me explain what I see.

You're working in financial analysis. Okay, my life plan. Maybe I didn't do the life plan according to my own stuff.

So, I guess this is for a different person, but you show strategic thinking, individual achievement, you're seeking more meaningful work, you desire deeper connections, you value contemplative activities, decision, and then it asks questions that you can answer if you'd like. So, decision-m when making important life decisions, do you primarily do these? And you can just answer these and then keep going deeper and deeper and just understand yourself a bit more and how to transition from orange to green in this case.

And so it gives you this week's focus reflection exercise experiment with structure connection practice. Really cool. Uh so that's something that you can do and you can have this chat open or just can return back to it whenever you want to continue on with growth.

So, pretty cool in my opinion. If you enjoy that, try it out. So, now that you have the instructions for how to turn AI into kind of this personal coach, accountability partner trained on spiral dynamics, you're going to go through it.

You're going to go through the stages with that as your partner. So, step one in the conditions for change is just the potential to change because change must be possible if you want to reach the next stage. You need either the skill acquisition, resources, or environment that allows you to see the potential for change.

And this corresponds to the concept of horizontal development in Susan Cook Reiter's ego development theory, which again we talked about in the previous how to become more intelligent than 99% of people episode. And in order to move up vertically to a new stage, you need to develop yourself enough horizontally. This is why you can't just jump to a new stage like every week.

It takes years and years of horizontal development to get to the point where your mind is complex enough to be able to adopt a new perspective or reach a new level of mind. So this horizontal development to see the potential for change requires you to self-educate and practice and pursue goals and improve in the things you're currently doing in life. So if you're in a job you hate or you're just doing things that you don't like and you don't try to improve yourself at those things, then that is one potential trap.

Now step two after the potential for change is to solve unresolved problems because each stage presents a unique set of problems. I personally like to think of self-development as an endless series of problems that once solved increase the meaning and complexity making life more interesting as you solve them. I talk about that in the book purpose and profit.

Since the majority of you are in stages blue through green. And since we are focused on our personal lives, these will almost always involve the big three. Work, health, relationships.

All of these are interwoven and drastically impact one another. You can't perform your best at work or in your relationship if your health is impacting your mental and emotional state. Your health will take a hit if your work or relationships are too stressful.

In work, this could be changing your career or reframing your mind to find work more enjoyable. In relationships, this could be having difficult conversations. In health, this could be something as simple as starting with daily 15-minute walks.

The thing is is that all of the problems or issues in your life, if they are within your control, which a lot of them are, do have solutions. It's your job to identify those problems, self-educate, and experiment with solutions until you discover the one that works. And this also increases your potential to change.

Now step three is kind of like a minor step at least in my opinion and that's felt dissonance with your current worldview. So one prime example of this is someone like Chris Williamson who used to be one of the very busy just filled his days was always busy that was his way of life and it was very difficult for him uh to reach his goals with that mindset. So he had to learn how to rest more.

We talked about this in the podcast I did on modern wisdom. So he saw rest as a weakness until recently where he realized the flaws in the always busy lifestyle. And this is the same for many people who are raised in a specific belief system in church and then they question it sufficiently and realize that they they feel the distance between it, right?

That's just a condition for change. The same thing could happen with a job where you just get to the point where like the dissonance between what you want to do and what you're currently doing is just way too much. And so the way to accelerate yourself to the next stage is through self-reflection and questioning.

So questioning what you're currently doing if you want to do that for the rest of your life. And you need to be honest with yourself about the potential to change. Now step four is the insight point and awareness of other approaches.

So you feel the dissonance with your current worldview or with whatever you're currently doing. Whether that's working too much, working at a place you don't enjoy, doing things throughout your day that you don't like doing, being with a partner you're not supposed to be with, being inside of a belief system that you don't really resonate with anymore. You get to the point because the the felt dissonance changes what kind of information you notice and search for in reality.

you start consuming different uh news sources or accounts on social media or reading different books and like the information kind of just comes to you and you eventually reach the point where you're like, "Oh, I was wrong. I can do this instead. " And then you start working towards that.

So, an example is that those obsessed with productivity realize that rest can increase the quality of their output. Their work style may change, but their work sees a notable increase even if their overall volume decreases. We're going to talk about this in the next video.

I don't know what it's going to be called, but I'm going to rip apart a lot of the arguments relating to, oh, you need to grind 12 hours a day when you're just starting out and you don't have 12 hours a day. So, we'll talk about that in the next video. Step five is to eliminate, bypass, reframe, or neutralize barriers.

Because once you are stretched between two opposite poles, which is your old way of life and the new approach you want to take, you will encounter obstacles on the path. If you're an aspiring writer, you may fall into the trap of perfectionism. You start projects and then quit because they are never good enough.

And with this specific obstacle, you would need to reframe your relationship with perfectionism. You need to realize that the only way to get better is to start with something you find embarrassing, knowing that others actually don't care that much and improve as you continue practicing the craft. And step six is more of a guideline than a step.

And that's to expect periods of confusion and long learning curves because all of this is up in the air because nobody can tell you what to do. They can only tell you how they did it. And that lacks regard for your value system, your current stage of development, your personality, beliefs, identity, goals, and the rest.

That's why AI is so powerful nowadays is it can tailor any information to your situation if you talk to it. So, the purpose of education at this point, this entire video is just for awareness. There is no step-by-step that you're going to find online that's going to instantly work for you because that's not how it works.

All education for you anytime. Anything you read at all in books or on YouTube is for awareness. It's not for doing anything.

And if you do do something, that's also for awareness. Everything's for awareness until you're so clear that you can just do it. So, I will end with the fact that the path will be confusing.

It's not supposed to make sense just yet. When you're doing something new, you aren't supposed to be anything other than lost because you're flailing in the middle of the ocean until you learn how to swim or build a boat. So, I hope this video was deep and useful for you.

I hope you learned something. I hope you felt something. I hope you can do something with it or at least take some kind of new direction in your life.

So, if you want to try out Cortex, this entire video was researched, written, and scripted inside of Cortex with the help of AI, not in my writing, but in the research. It made it so much easier to research spiral dynamics rather than flipping through a book or going through all of these different articles on the internet when I could just ask specific questions when I had a knowledge gap relating to spiral dynamics. And by doing so, I learned spiral dynamics that much more, right?

Writing it, writing and researching is a great way to learn. So you can check that out. Link in the description.

Like, subscribe. That's it. See you in the next video.