Kapil Gupta & Naval Ravikant - All Dialogues Compilation | The Truth Seeker Podcast

what's interesting about talking to you couple is that you're not for everybody in fact it's quite the opposite the things you think about and the way you speak really only applies to a very small set of people this discussion is going to be unique in multiple ways and one of those is that it's just not going to make sense for most people it doesn't mean that you should try and have it make sense to you it's not something to aspire to it's not some graduate level course it just doesn't have interest for most people but

again it's not advanced it's just different another way in which this differs is that i'm nervous to have this conversation and normally i'm not that nervous about podcasts or conversations in fact i'm very confident about them in this case i'm a little nervous because all the questions that i want to ask you and all the things that i want to discuss with you are intensely personal if i'm not genuinely interested in the answer then i'm not really asking the proper question i'm just showing off for the audience i've been working with you couple for years

now i forget how long actually it's been quite a while and i'm not proud of that it's actually a failure right because whatever i need to figure out i should have figured out by now why do we still have to keep going over the same old ground but the territory that you're walking or the things that you're interested in and your take on them is so unique that it takes time to even just understand the vocabulary and the grammar of how you speak and how you think and how you behave and how you view the

world there are a couple of key words we can start with i'm going to start with the hardest one it's hard because it's the most unique it's a word that you use over and over and i don't think other people really understand what you're saying even i still barely understand what you're saying i have some concept of it but it's a mental shift that is so important that i think it's really important to understand and to examine carefully what you mean before we get into the rest and that word is prescriptions let's talk about prescriptions

prescriptions are how-to's they are hacks and they are techniques and methods various methodologies to get somewhere when you talk about something from the standpoint of a mechanical behavior turning on a computer riding a bicycle prescriptions are useful the problem is that whenever you venture into the realm of art in any form be it in business or sports or even in the setting of finding peace in your life or freedom or arriving at enlightenment or all of these so-called spiritual pursuits those things cannot be prescriptionized if you attempt to prescriptionize them what happens is the prescription

becomes the new god you begin to try to live up to the prescription in the beginning you had a place to go i want to go to x then you introduce an intermediary the prescription this is how you get to x then what will happen is that your mind will begin to focus upon the intermediary and it will enter into a deal which it never signed up for that deal is that for the rest of your life you will attempt to satisfy the intermediary in all domains you have many people who do great things the

buddha attained enlightenment you have michael jordan and tiger woods doing amazing things in golf and elon musk and various individuals who do great things in business and even yourself if you take what those people did and you write a book and said that these people did x if you follow that you will not become them you will not i've found business biographies to be useless for building a great business they're good for inspiration i can read steve jobs bio and be inspired but i can't be steve jobs and if i want to be amazing at

something then i have to find my own way there for mechanical things how to's work but when you're trying to operate at the top of a field or when you're trying to do something creative how to's don't work beyond the most extreme basics when you're first starting something it is actually a mechanical endeavor you're just figuring out how to drive a car but when you're trying to figure out how to race around a track faster than anyone else then all coaches and techniques and prescriptions have to fall by the wayside and you are at the

edge of the art that's correct now the problem is conditioning when there's only been one loudspeaker in a person's ear for his entire life then that is his norm and that is the only language that he knows that paradigm of how to is so embedded inside the culture it is so deeply embedded inside the cortex of the human brain that the idea of omitting it or the idea of even challenging its existence is completely off the wall it is so otherworldly and antithetical that it takes years to even get to the point where the idea

of prescriptions being a impediment to whatever you seek begins to dawn people consider you to be a spiritual guy on twitter and in my understanding you're not like that at all spirituality is a pointless word it's about utility it's something useful does it get you where you want to go you're always talking about extreme performance and that's why your brand is said the performance it's a seeking performance essentially and seeking the truth that gets you to the highest performance in all things whether it's business or sports or peace of mind this drive towards utility reality

truth performance they somehow wander into spirituality people interpret them in spiritual ways but it feels like spirituality is so cluttered with nonsense that it gets lost your model makes sense if one realizes that it's designed to go after extreme performance if you want to be the best in the world at anything you cannot follow prescription if you want to be okay at it then sure you can follow prescription if you want to learn how to lose a pound a month and get in decent shape then you can follow a calorie counting worksheet but if you

want to be a shredded bodybuilder or an olympic athlete you're not going to get there through how-to's you're going to have to create and forge your own path that is unique to you would that be a good way of putting it well what i will add to that is that one does not have to want to become the greatest in the world if you look at the lives of human beings there is intense struggle the guy who works three jobs doesn't want to work three jobs he may not want to become tiger woods but he

wants to be beyond being forced to work three jobs what keeps him working three jobs is prescriptions the futility of prescriptions does not just harm one who wants to become world class it gravely harms the one who simply doesn't want to struggle the way i think about it in the business world is that hard work has very little to do with effectiveness the grocery store owner or the person working at a restaurant might work 60 80 hours a week and that might be all elon musk is working but elon's making a lot more money because

of his specific knowledge knowledge that cannot be taught but can be learned on the job if you have a strong enough desire because elon is doing the right things he is far more effective in earning power and the right things at least in business can't be taught because it's a moving target it can only give very vague principles that inspire people to head in the right direction but i can't teach you how to make money or trade the stock market it's like when people ask you for stock tips no one who's any good at stock

trading gives actionable investment advice in a public forum because all the details are too hard to convey i can always tell people who ask for stock tips they're not really serious about investing people who ask for book recommendations aren't really serious about reading people who ask what business should i build aren't really serious about entrepreneurship people who say what career path should i take they're not really serious about their career when someone's asking for a how-to and anything they aren't actually that serious about it if they were truly serious about it they would figure it

out but then that leaves the paradoxical question well how do i figure it out take the person who quote made it and became world class in whatever he did if he went back and retraced his steps and did everything again the same way but this time he did it by mimicking himself he would fail even he wouldn't be able to do it what has to be understood is that where greatness comes from it's a very murky affair it is non-linear it is unpredictable perhaps nature and the universe set it up this way that you have

to jump in and once you jump in the soup and you're being bombarded through all sides and you live in confusion and you have no idea which way is up if the obsession is there then what happens is through some messy process you find a way you see light at the end of the tunnel you forge a path through the jungle that was not done according to a how you were flailing the entire time so there was no how to flail when you come out through the tunnel and someone asks you how you did it

you have no idea the thing that's almost laughable is when you ask a great athlete can you show me how you did that they won't come on and say i have no idea they will provide you with some semblance of an answer which is a non-answer and what they will do is because there's a gun point to their head and their backs against a wall they will create the highlights when the human being who watches that follows the highlights he misses and the reason that he misses is because it's all the small things i can't

watch roger federer play tennis and swing the rocket the same way nor will any description from him on how to swing the rocket get me to swing it the right way then we go to intellectual efforts we start asking warren buffett while he invests in a company and there he can try and create a mental construct as to how he thinks and how he invests in the company but there are just as many details to warren buffett's activities when he decides what to invest in and how he lives his life and how he thinks as

there are to roger federer's body running around a tennis court hitting a ball the details are not transmissible they're not copyable you can be inspired to try it yourself but without that sincerity that obsession you won't get there not only are the details not transmissible the details are not even knowable ah so warren and roger don't even know it themselves absolutely not no great artist knows the things that you do greatest are the things that you know not how you do them i would argue that you're not even there when you do them you're not

consciously thinking about it i find that when i'm speaking i do best when i'm not thinking about what i'm going to say and i don't even hear what i'm going to say until it comes out of my mouth you become as surprised as the audience as to what you're going to say that is just pure what does pure mean pure is not morality and pure is not good there's not good and bad that's a whole other topic itself that's actually the next topic i want to get into that's another set of assumptions that everybody has

that to understand you have to be left by the wayside what we're doing here is we're trying to focus on what is true and that means we're going to speak as honestly as possible which means we're going to be vulnerable which means we're going to say things that are socially unacceptable and we're going to say things that are potentially surprising and it's very difficult to speak truth in a public forum and why is that because there's an internal dialogue which says that a person wants the audience to understand there's definitely that there's also a piece

of it that society is a set of collective lies that we all believe in so we can get along it allows us to establish lowest common denominator consensus so we don't all kill each other and we can cooperate but there are these shared fictions that we have to maintain for that society to function which is fine there's a cost to that and the cost is borne by the individual it all comes back to dna not genetic dna dna in one's sensibilities the way that he is wired and for some people's dna what society thinks is

almost an insult if we don't discuss truth here then what's the point of having a conversation if there's any compulsion that the audience should understand and it doesn't mean that i go out of my way to try to be arcane and abstract but it isn't about anyone understanding it's about speaking the truth now that we've established that prescriptions don't work and that we're here to discover the truth and we're looking past good and bad and right or wrong and we're just trying to figure out the answer let's pick the first thing that we're going to

dive into freedom what does freedom mean to you freedom is freedom from the mind the only reason that any human being is not free is because of his mind it is the mind which creates his tortures it is the mind which creates his anxieties it is the mind which creates his conflicts it is the mind which creates his rules all that he is confined by all that he is imprisoned by is the mind not anything else when i was young i wanted freedom but i wanted freedom in the sense of i didn't want to be

trapped in the house i wanted to be able to live where i wanted i wanted to be able to make money i wanted to have a girlfriend i wanted to go to a place where i could do whatever i wanted whenever i wanted that's what i wanted in my mind freedom was just getting away from physical constraints and material constraints i got all that stuff i traveled with the whole world i ate all the food i made all the money i got all the things that i wanted in life yet the quality of my life

did not change that much the quality of my moment-to-moment experience didn't change that much that's because i hadn't changed that much my internal experience was still very much the same every time i got something i wanted the next thing and wanted the next thing and one of the next thing all the same pains and tortures and miseries were still there maybe some were better obviously it's better to be rich than to be poor it's better to be healthy than to be sick but beyond a certain point my baseline level of peace had not changed that

much then i started making the transition to what you're talking about realizing that a lot of these traps were in my mind but you just jumped all the way you're saying no it's all from the mind from the very beginning yes any freedom that leads to the desire for more freedom is not freedom if there's a bleed you don't clean the tributary vessels you want to look at the source of the bleed even if it took someone 30 years to learn the source of the bleed to learn the truth about what freedom really was it

would be far more effective to begin that journey at this very second as opposed to doing it piecemeal because that'll take 900 years it is not abstract to say that freedom comes from the mind what it is is revelatory the belief is that anxiety and fears and pain arise from circumstance that they arise from other people as long as that belief is invested inside of someone he will spend his life trying to change circumstance and that will be a monumental waste of life and you only get one so quite frankly there isn't enough time to

go piecemeal it is far better to not understand than it is to go piecemeal because then you're going down a tributary and that tributary leads to other tributaries very soon you're way off course what we're really talking about here is that all of the problems that we struggle with we tend to externalize we tend to solve them in the external world and there are certain ones that are practical in the external world do i have food do i have shelter those kinds of things but beyond a certain basic level a lot of the problems we're

trying to solve in the external world are actually internal problems and even if we manage to solve the current manifestation in the external world the new problem will just pop up tomorrow in the external world everyone's looking for truth whether they profess to look for truth or not and the evidence for that is that everyone is looking for a way out of their problems if they weren't then there wouldn't be 14 000 prescriptions on every single corner from spirituality to self-help the very fact that those things exist and the very fact that they are populated

by millions means that there's an enormous appetite for relief from problems this relates back to prescriptions no human being actually wants to be told what to do there's something within a human being which rejects the idea of being told what to do quite frankly even when you do give prescriptions most don't follow it and they will beg you for years to get the prescription and when you give it they won't do it people look at that and say see you've been given the prescription you didn't follow it that's your fault no it's not the fault

is believing that that's what they really wanted it's not no one wants prescriptions freedom really is what everyone is looking for it is just that they've been sold many lines they've been sold many lies that it's about meditating and it's about practicing mindfulness and it's about doing all these things and none of those things are wrong it's all about the question if your question is i like to feel better for 20 minutes a day it gives me a sense of peace what can i do there's nothing wrong with that if the question is i really

want to have peace in my life i don't want to have problems every single day my entire life is spent putting out fires i don't want that anymore that's a different question and those prescriptions are invalid for that so what is the most important question i would begin with the one that's most acute for a given individual now broadly speaking everyone's problem is problems anxiety fear concern worry conflict confusion this persistent non-specific anxiety is probably the single most common human condition that most people are trying to get away from yeah and the naive version is

i have anxiety because i don't have enough money so i need to go make more money then the slightly more sophisticated version is boy i wish i could just get over the anxiety of feeling like i don't have enough because practically speaking i have enough but at some reason i'm still anxious so i'd love to get rid of that anxiety what's the next level after that it's a more fundamental level the next level is zero the idea that someone should get rid of anxiety is the problem the problem is not how do i get rid

of anxiety the way is actually to learn where anxiety comes from the people who have conquered anxiety are the ones who had a clear understanding of what it is and where it came from the solution to a problem is never the solution it's always the problem the solution to any problem lies squarely deep within the problem there are not two things there's only one everyone is taught to look for solutions and they believe that the solution is independent of the problem but ingeniously nature has hidden the problem inside the solution and maybe it did it

because it wanted human beings to look inside the problem the definition of the problem is the key can we go through a specific example absolutely so in the case of anxiety a person asks how do i get rid of anxiety their problem isn't that they have anxiety the problem is that their anxiety will never end as long as they look for a solution to it well if i don't find a solution then i'm always going to have anxiety that's correct the solution is to go backwards is to look what actually is this anxiety but a

name on it when does it arise what part of your body does it arise in in what situations does it arise know the face of anxiety not run from it like a boogie man is this something that's been solved on an individual basis there's no solving it is simply the understanding the solution to any problem lies diving deep into the problem the answer lies in the anxiety every single thing that i say is fraught with peril because the prescription givers have hijacked the english language they've already attached an image to every single word that i

use when i say that you have to look into the anxiety where that will go is thanks to the spiritual jargon what they'll say is i must face my anxiety no no you don't oh that means that i must watch my thoughts no no you don't why because if you do that you'll be doing so prescriptively will simply become an automaton who sits there and watches his thoughts and then you will say i've watched my thoughts nothing changed i went into the anxiety i faced it and nothing changed the prescription is so subtle that any

attempt to follow it removes you from the solution even as you're listening to my words it isn't about finding out what i'm telling you to do it is about understanding and through understanding you can take your destiny in your own hands and even when i say that i don't mean to motivate you by telling you that you can take your destiny into your own hands forgive me a thousand apologies i have no interest in motivating you because if i motivate you then you will get raw raw and say yes i too will do that now

and you'll fail it is about very quiet very serious examination of what actually is being said never just listen to the words people send me all these messages saying what is we mean no prescriptions you see that's a prescription don't follow prescriptions it's not about prescriptions go into the source of why it was being said for yourself it is never about the words it's where they come from this is what makes these conversations so difficult even inspiring other people is hard because if they're inspired inspiration doesn't last it fades it's like reading inspirational quotes or

motivational posters you spike up and then you crash back down there are times where i've actually inspired people to go and start a business and i regret it because if they're not inspired naturally they're not going to sustain it for a long period of time without me around well it isn't about them i would say that the only real problem would not be whether their inspiration is sustained the real problem would be if there's a desire to inspire them that's the non-starter i desire my part to inspire them that's right there is no other that's

another one i can't say two words without it being a whole nother thing but let's get into it there is no other i've said life is a single player game you're just competing against yourself you're mostly arguing having conflict with admiring looking at yourself you're born alone you die alone how you interpret things as purely through you how you view the world is purely through you that's what i mean by it perhaps you mean something deeper than that there is no other means that there's no problem outside of yourself and that all conflict is self-conflict

these things in which pain arises from a circumstance are only caused by the circumstance the circumstance does not cause pain it reveals it if someone's intention is that i wanted to inspire him that's a problem if the intention is that i didn't care to inspire him or not then that's not a problem the problem arises in the individual because if he tried to inspire then that came from a place of ego ego isn't bad but if a person tries to inspire someone they're really trying to attain significance in their own mind that isn't bad either

the problem is it creates problems that's the quote badness if you did not care whether you're inspired or not then you'd be free and freedom isn't good either it's just that freedom does not create problems so a simple example if i'm on twitter and i send out a tweet and i do it to get compliments i get a whole bunch of compliments i like those i go and i click like on all the compliments then i get a few insults and the insults sting and i feel bad it only takes one insult to cancel out

dozens of compliments mood wise just the way the human mind is built after you've done this for a long enough time you realize that it's because i'm liking the compliments that the insults hit me they're hitting some deep fear that they might be true if someone calls me a hippopotamus i don't care it's not real but if someone says oh you're trying to play fake guru that might hurt because sometimes i am trying to do that and so if it reveals something about me some conflict and some pain that already existed then it hurts just

by understanding how compliments puff me up i can realize that insults bring me back down and the freedom comes from realizing that it's not good or bad i can continue to make that trade but at least now i'm aware why i feel bad when i see an insult all of that would circle back to do you really want to know are you the type of individual who really wants to know and understand where these things come from because you have a longing for getting over that for good one doesn't necessarily have to go through the

understanding it's helpful to have these kinds of illusions because that's how we function in society you could argue society conditioned us that way so that we could be functional in normal society but as you understand more of these things one of the interesting things i've noticed is as you peel the onion it has to be done genuinely otherwise it's not real otherwise just another pleasure chase even genuine isn't a rule there's no need to be genuine that isn't good like humility it isn't good to be humble nothing is good yeah if i'm engaging in self-improvement

and i'm feeling good about it then my mind will eventually be occupied with this new image of being the guy who's good at self-improvement and i've just created another trap for myself it's all a shell game that's exactly right one thing i've noticed is that one of the ways in which i know that i am finding truths out is that problem is solved for good that's exactly right i don't have to revisit that same problem again because that problem is solved for good both my internal state and my external state quote unquote improve they change

improve is a big word so the more they change internally i'm quieter and externally my life is less complicated you have brought up a seminal point which is it is not about the journey it absolutely is about the destination you want to get to the point where you don't have it anymore you aren't looking for treatments you're looking for a cure there is a destination it isn't about spending the next 90 years getting assaulted and then feeling better getting assaulted and putting tiger bomb on it it is about wanting to get over it destinations and

journeys that's another lie it's not about journeys it's about destinations now destinations require journeys but everything that you do in your life is defined by the destination the moment that you leave your house every single day you have a destination and the destination creates the avenue this is one of the social lies where everyone says about the journey the journey is the reward yeah the journey is the thing that you're actually on that's where you are right now but if you don't get to a destination you sort of wasted your time well if there was

no destination no one would begin any journey if there was no compulsion to arrive anywhere then nobody wouldn't begin any kind of journey at all it is just that most people's destination is the prescription wearing the orange colored robe and then sitting in front of the incense and having the self-image that i'm a yogi and that i am meditating and i am doing all the spiritual things and that becomes a destination in itself that i have achieved that self-image where i view myself that way so what is a worthy destination oh there is no worthy

it is not about enforcing rules there are no rules rules are to be avoided at all costs if one is sincere because wherever there's a rule there's insincerity it's like stoicism it's a rule it can't go anywhere it's more self-image creation everything begins with the truth what is the truth the truth is that in a human being's life he has problems that's the truth in a human being's life he has specific problems some problems that are more acute for him than for his neighbor his most acute problems are his living reality they're not abstract they're

not spiritual they are in his face and he lives in that every single day that is where to begin so one begins very concretely with one's own problems there are real problems that everybody faces and if you have a genuine desire to solve these problems once and for all the way to do them is not to follow some routine or build up some image of the person who solves problems it's to examine them for the truth no matter how unpopular or how untransmissible or unexplainable it might be and if you look for the truth and

you find it you'll know you've found it when you've solved the problem and if we go back to zero for a second zero is the understanding that problems can be solved forever society believes in journeys society believes in endless treatments forever practice practice practice practice practice forever when the whole game has been set up to practice forever then there is no conclusion there is no arrival of anything there's a way for people to see that if you look at how we think about spirituality and solving problems internally it is considered to be oh i'm just

going to work on it forever i'm going to go see a therapist forever i'm going to meditate forever i'm going to read forever i'm going to talk to a counselor or to a coach forever i'm going to work on it i'm on the path i'm on the journey but if you go into very practical things like making money nobody says i'm going to work forever no they're like i want to make a pile of money right if i'm starting a company i want the company to be successful i want the company to go public or

to get acquired or to generate so much cash flow that while i'm still alive i can spend that cash in the money making contacts we're extremely practical we want to make that money while we're still young enough and alive enough to spend it but in the internal context we get all spiritual and start talking about maybe the next life maybe in heaven or in hell or in my reincarnated life or i'm just going to keep doing my self-work and my self-improvement until the day i die and it's considered acceptable to never arrive at destination there's

a very simple truth as to how to arrive at getting over your problems without having to lift a finger you've got my ears it's all about exposure if a person sat on his couch for the next 50 years his internal environment from his mind to his brain everything within him is a direct resonance it's like a tuning fork it responds to the inputs same as a microphone if that human is exposed to truth on a regular basis his ears don't even have to hear it consciously something inside of him will internalize that truth and that

will become his new norm a human being becomes his environment and that is why it's absolutely critical to savagely and surgically arrange one's environment in a way that is in accordance with where he wants to go no one does that if a person is exposed to truth on a regular basis now not prescription it's got to be straight truth then that becomes his norm that becomes the way that he thinks his brain begins to rewire itself there isn't a single amount of work that needs to be done there isn't a single amount of psychotherapy that

needs to be done no medications the human body treats itself it all depends upon the input it is all about one thing and one thing only exposure you become that which you are most consistently exposed to in a modern context the people who are very interested in truth and in conquering the mind and internal freedom tend to coalesce on reading the same books thinking about the same things listen the same podcast talking the same people even though prescriptions don't work and no book is going to make you conquer the mind and listening to any podcast

is not going to give you internal freedom eventually at some point it does soak in you're attracted to what you want to be and as you immerse yourself in it you have no choice but to become that over time it's like in wealth creation if you want to start a company you go to silicon valley or you go to a pool of entrepreneurs you spend enough time around them you hang around the tech business long enough and you'll be in the tech business you hang around a bunch of techies you'll be talking tech all day

so we're naturally drawn to certain things and if we can immerse ourselves in them it creates inevitability to the future and to take it to the next level it's about titrating that environment because any environment from silicon valley to anywhere else while it has the benefits it will also have the detriments it's about titrating out all that is not wanted and titrating in all that is it can very much be fine-tuned like a buffet i want to talk to you about a specific issue i've noticed with myself i've known this for a while but it's

just really bad i don't fully understand why it persists even though i see it every time i am figuring something out for myself and i'm going down a good path of figuring it out as an example i was reading something recently it was resonating with me and every time i read a sentence then i would get into thought about what that meant how that applied i would have my own interpretation it was going well naturally i found myself in my mind's eye lecturing it to other people teaching it to other people this invariably happens with

me as soon as i start figuring something out or understanding it i start turning it into a tweet or a podcast or some lecture tell other people and i see this over and over again in my mind why is it that i keep converting everything into an instruction for somebody else why does it not feel real unless i'm teaching someone else why does that matter so there's two things that are wrong with that one is of course a social thing which is you should be humble and figure things out for yourself and why are you

trying to tell everybody what to do that's the societal inflicted one i care less about that the one i care more about is you can't give society the raw truth on almost anything the moment you have to turn it into something in your mind that is being taught to others you're actually weakening it you're introducing falsehoods and caveats you're not facing the raw truth necessarily but that doesn't matter because the greatest desire always wins and if the desire to share it and to turn it into a teaching is there it's there if you genuinely want

to get over that then the quickest way there is guess what to allow yourself to teach it because any suppression is regression it's just more self-conflict it's another should and it's slowing things down yeah so just go right through it don't even go through it just understand that if you do then you do the very fact that you caught yourself doing it is enough there's no need to do any more when fire burns as long as it's allowed to burn it'll eventually burn out i do not want to engage in self-conflict i'm now very aware

of that when two parts of my mind start fighting each other there is this tendency that we all have to favor one versus the other oh this is the good part this is the bad part this is the angel and this is the devil the shoulds and the shouldn'ts are pure poison never try to reel your mind in give it free reign your greatest weapon is the understanding and the awareness of where it's going not watching your thoughts like a mechanical automaton it is just the understanding that you know where the mind is going and

that you do see yourself doing this that sight itself has already poked a hole in that behavior let's talk about using the mind to understand the mind because this is where spirituality gets very confusing some people believe that you're failing if your mind is even running they're trying to suppress the mind others believe that there's a right way the mind should work in a wrong way the mind should work the right mind should suppress the wrong mind that's a classic call it the christian or muslim or jewish view which is these are good thoughts and

those are bad thoughts then there's the self-inquiry nature which is i think a little bit what you're saying which is the mind can be used to understand the mind but not necessarily interfere with it it all depends upon where do you want to go without that there is no conversation and the reason why all these philosophies exist is because that question hasn't been asked right they're trying to accomplish different things everyone dives into the prescription everyone's impetus for entering the game is the should and the good and the bad and the should not that's the

impetus the impetus has to be where do you want to go because the answer to that question will create the path so let's say i choose freedom okay if someone truly wants freedom and the truth behind that is freedom from the mind the idea of trying to understand the mind with the mind that's intellectual it's irrelevant that's just a mind-created phenomenon understanding is at a certain place and we're not going to label it with any anatomy we're not going to call it mind there is a capacity to understand and whether that's one part mind or

two parts mind or zero parts mind it's irrelevant that'll just take you on another path forget it the understanding will come from a certain place it's almost like sincerity and genuineness and seriousness creates its own organ so freedom comes from the understanding of where things come from not the conscious attempt to end them at least for me the problem is oh i'm more free than i used to be so i'm making progress looking for progress is essentially looking for pleasure it is the pleasure of self-image which says i'm in a better place now than i

was before and that's why i get excited when i get some progress it is not about prescriptionizing and turning it into a rule that pleasure is bad that isn't truth truth is the understanding that the pursuit of all things in a human being's life are motivated by pleasure there's nothing wrong with that nothing wrong with it at all it's a motivator but is it effective if you're trying to get to freedom no it's a different path and it isn't a wrong one pleasure you will always be on the lookout for when the ship will come

in as long as one is always on the lookout for when the ship will come in his attention will necessarily be on the horizon so it's hard for me to have freedom when i'm recording little gains and i'm creating this image around this person who is recording gains and getting better that traps me that image i'm always thinking about that i'm always experiencing that pleasure then there are setbacks so if i suddenly get angry or unhappy or i don't have my freedom for a moment or i think i'm not done at my freedom that pleasure

gets withdrawn and i'm truly unfree i'm trapped again yes that is the game of the mind you're back in the mind that's why freedom really is beyond the mind it is freedom from the mind what you have just described is a game of the mind now whatever game that is whether it's a spiritual game or a materialistic game doesn't matter as long as the mind has you captured playing a certain game it's fine it rests in harmony knowing that it's got you a friend of mine said that no technique of the mind will free you

from the mind but at the same time we're talking about approaching this through truth and understanding isn't that just the mind again that's doing the understanding or it's something beyond the mind that is understanding where there is sincerity and where there is seriousness that is its own instrument of examination this is naval rabbicon i'm here with couples with gupta and we're just having a conversation as two friends who like to explore topics fairly deeply uh and in a way that we're just trying to understand the truth and the truth is a word that gets thrown

around a lot um so i'm not even sure exactly what that means uh definition that i like to use is that you know uh there are multiple definitions in fact this might be a good question how do you know when something is true in my mind very often i know something is true just because it feels true to me uh it feels very true you you know it when you hear it even if you don't like it um another definition i've used is that truth is that which has predictive power you can use it to

predict the future a little bit uh the more accurately you can use something to predict the future the more true it is but i'm sure you couple have very different definitions so why don't you give me a definition or two of how you know something is true i very much agree with your first answer which is that it it relates very much to feel um often times when you hear truth uh the the inner sensation that you get of um of a resonance is beyond the intellect and i think that is a uh a great

sign because oftentimes we'll feel something that someone says and we'll feel it viscerally as soon as it is said and we will have a heart at the very same time we'll have a hard time intellectually framing it and understanding it and that that is a very good sign that something is true because in very many ways we are beings in spite of our intelligence um we tend to uh use our intelligence as uh the the machinery with which to process things however that's a very limited domain intelligence and so when it cuts straight through that

into the essence of something something within our core for which we have receptors so to speak um seems to grasp that and i think that's a that's a very good sign of truth and and very often it can sometimes it just leaves you silent sometimes it actually creates an emotional response especially if it's aimed at your identity or your ego you know like little kids have a way of telling truth in a way that adults don't like a little if you're fat a little kid would cook and say hey you're fat right in a way

that adults won't and sometimes i can provoke a reaction from an adult because they're not ready for that that level of truth you're not supposed to go around saying society it's not socially acceptable anyway yeah i don't get caught up in definitional games too much i wanted to get into a specific topic which is you recently wrote a discourse about hard work which i thought was really really interesting and you know i have a bunch of views and hard work maybe i'll start off with a very high level like i think hard work is important

but i think hard work is an effect of something that you know needs to be done like if you need to do hard work to get something done that you care about then you work hard but a lot of what i see going on these days is hard work for its own sake and i think we live in a very different era than one that we evolved in we live in an era of almost infinite leverage and that means like when you are working your decisions mean they echo larger so there's code working for you

there's people working for you there's money that's working for you so there's there's machines working for you it isn't just that you're standing there with your bare hands and tearing at something your tools were tool uh bearing creatures and so because of all these tools available our judgment matters much more than hard work so even though i think sometimes you do need to work hard and you should never shy away from it if that's what it takes to succeed in whatever you want i do think that it gets overplayed in society so that's kind of

my view on hard work but i think it's probably a little more conventional than yours so i just wanted to explore it together with you a little bit how do you think about harvard i think hard work is yet another example of a prescription to be honest with you i think it's done largely out of anxiety i think hard work is done largely out of fear i think one of the common things that you will often hear in the world of sports and business is that if if you're not working hard and the next guy

is and if you're only putting in four hours he's putting in 12. and so hard work has become its own game it's like meditation meditation becomes a competition so the thing that you were really seeking actually becomes replaced by the game of hard work and hard work like effort becomes sort of its own goal and when and that seems to be the pattern behind things is when you follow a prescription or an intermediary then that intermediary tends to replace the ultimate goal and that becomes your new game so hard work it isn't you know the

person who needs to work hard will work hard but it isn't that he needs to be told to work hard and he needs to strive towards working hard i think hard work is the result of something i think whatever needs to be done when a person has a sufficient and requisite degree of desire he will do and from the outside that will come off and reflect his hard work to those who are looking but but it isn't the opposite it isn't that it isn't that if i work hard then i will get this because then

that introduces what i call a gap and that gap is that i must introduce some step in the middle that i am being promised that if i if i fulfill that step that some powers that be or some some force out of the universe will grant me what i want because i have satisfied that step and i think that's that is the default i think that is the the way that everyone looks at things and is being taught to look at things um many things are named and and in the naming problems exist and problems

arise so if someone wants to become the the you know arrive at the top of their field you know does that mean that they don't work hard no but they would never view it as working hard they would view it as i will do whatever needs to be done to get there and i don't consider that work necessarily yeah necessities you know you look at the experts and to them what what may look like hard work from the outside to them is play from the inside that's right in fact one of the things i really

think people should focus much more on is figuring out what feels like play to them what looks like work to others that's right because that's your superpower and that's where you'll just outperform everybody you know i see with startups all the time i see lots of people who work really hard but still fail uh and often you know the most common reason is they just pick the wrong thing to do uh the world is a big place it's very hard to figure out what's going to work before it works uh product market fit this thing

that gets thrown around uh coined by mark andreessen uh it's a it's a very difficult thing to achieve so you're trying to predict what a market wants you're trying to build a product exactly to the market and sometimes hard work alone won't get you there i think what you choose to work on and who you choose to work with and actually kind of how badly you want it which is more than just working hard or more important than just the raw hours you put in there are lots of people running restaurants and uh you know

kind of meat space businesses not in the startup world who outwork startup entrepreneurs uh but yet they don't succeed or if they do succeed with much lower numbers or much lower magnitude right and i i and i would say that a large a large reason for that is that society has been has been uh sold romantic ideas romanticism is a very big part of things um society very much seems to value effort effort is a big deal and effort is um sort of a a um sort of an arrival of sorts uh for for society

that look how hard i work look how much effort i'm putting in and therefore i'm doing i am doing the right thing by by doing that and and the problem that arises from that oftentimes is those who are very efficient are demonized because very often you will find in every domain those who don't work nearly as quote hard as everybody else but they get 10 times the results and they're considered to be lucky and so i think i think if you look at i like to pattern things around nature and if you look at nature

it doesn't work hard if you look at gravity it doesn't work hard if you look at a tree and a leaf falling off of a tree it doesn't work hard if you look at the water going down a river it doesn't work hard so everything everything moves according to its own rhythm and whatever necessities are there they're there and therefore they need to be worked around but working hard is an added extra romantic step in order to put another feather in the cap which says i succeeded by working hard yeah it's also i think there's

a sometimes i also think of work as a set of things that you have to do that you don't want to do if you want to do it it's not work so example is like you know you might be grinding at work for 10 hours and it's it's suffering it's painful and then you get home and to relax you play video games but to an alien watching from the outside playing a video game is more intense than whatever you're doing at work you're running around with a gun shooting at people you're jumping over collecting mushrooms

gold coins whatever it is that could be construed as hard work but because you want to do it because you can lose yourself in it uh there's not suffering so i don't think it's people get burned out on work they just get burned out of work they don't want to do which is a form of suffering so not and every thing that you need to do not every step of it is going to be pleasant of course uh but it's really important to align yourself and work where you're not suffering so when i find like

engineers who are out trying to be sales people or sales people who are out trying to be engineers it's better to team up with someone who really enjoys the other side of it and stick to what you're good at and you know team up so that that's where that's why i think founding teams are very powerful where you have one person who can build and one person who can sell uh because then neither one feels like they're doing hard work each one is doing what they enjoy uh but together the company from the outside looks

like it's working really hard and as we know in a billion dollar company the employees aren't working any harder than a million dollar company they're just doing the right thing and the right people are doing the right things in the right way and and i think one of perhaps the the the key element of hard work which i must say is an elephant in the room which is rarely discussed in the world is that hard work is considered to be a door prize it seems to be sort of the preparing of the bed of failure

i think that a lot of times hard work is done in order to have an excuse for the mind when the mind comes attacking and says how come you didn't make it and if a person is armed with the ammunition that i have worked hard then he has an answer for the mind whereas if he just had on the couch and did nothing he would not have that ammunition so many times people do hard work in order to have an answer for the mind because they know they're going to fail anyways and externally if i'm

an investor in a company it fails the entrepreneur worked hard that feels more forgivable socially than someone who's just like oh i tried it i took a shot the market didn't want it i gave up quickly i used to have an engineer who worked for me who was absolutely brilliant and he would create great products and he would work an hour two hours a day and then he would very blatantly sit around watching qriket matches or playing uh counter strike which was this online game while all the other people in the office were just looking

at him and he just looked really lazy and people complained to me about him all day long but he added tons of value by creating the right product the right way at the right time yeah so he could get away with it uh and he didn't have this pretense of sitting around the water cooler and talking uh or going to meetings he didn't want to waste time on those things he basically either enjoying himself or he was working on what he thought was effective and i think his talent to some extent allowed him to get

away with it but just given the the era that we live in talent matters so much more than hard work uh yeah and he would exemplify that yes and it's interesting because all the books that have been coming out in recent years from from outliers to uh all the books related to talent being secondary to hard work in the 10 000 hours and everything it's the exact opposite message um that that hard work supersedes talent and i think that's a separate sort of discussion but but there is you know there is a truth to the

fact that um humans tend to do many things in order to satisfy those who are watching them and they also do tend to do many things in order to satisfy the idea of having tried and romantically failed failure is also something that is considered not only okay but almost lauded now you know as i as i say these words i'm certain that some in the audience are getting ready to say that one must fail in order to succeed and quite frankly i've never looked at that as failure i i've when i when i say failure

i've always looked at it personally as ultimate failure not getting to where you want to go ultimately everything besides that to me i call experimentation i think everything is everything is experimentation there is no failure along the way yeah i agree i mean especially i think the speed of iteration is what drives learning so you know in gladwell and others they say 10 000 hours of grinding i think it's quite that simple if i do the same thing for 10 000 hours that's not going to be very effective if in 10 000 hours i run

100 experiments that's great but it's not as effective as if i ran a thousand experiments or 10 000 experiments so the speed of iteration matters that said it's still not hard work alone because i could play golf for ten thousand hours and that would never be tiger woods tiger woods played golf for 10 000 hours yes it was hard work but it was also for the sheer love of it like he enjoyed every you know he enjoyed most of those days most of those times uh and it was sort of in his nature and character

by some point to not look at hitting the the you know golf links of hard work he looked at that as the thing that he both wanted to do that day so this idea of suffering and sacrifice all that's romantic and it levels the playing field a little bit i think it also misleads us it misleads us into thinking that everybody can be everyone one interesting uh hypothesis i heard is that in modern society one of the reasons we have more unhappy people is because of the myth that everyone can be everything excuse me so

yeah so if you think you can be you know larry page or steve jobs or jeff bezos or mark zuckerberg but you didn't make it it's because you didn't work hard enough and then you feel lousy about yourself whereas the reality is like their talents uh intersected in the right way at the right time and they put in the hard work for the thing that they were meant to create and your talents are going to intersect in a completely different way in a different place at a different time and a lot of life is just

searching for what it is that you're uniquely good at and where and when to apply that thing that's exactly right the the last line that you mentioned absolutely i think is is the key um i don't you know this sort of may sound sort of really counter-intuitive but i don't think anybody fails because of not working hard enough i don't think that creature exists i think that people fail because they didn't really want it i don't think that that a sufficient degree of desire exists in a given person but because he just didn't do quote

do enough work that he failed i don't really buy that i think i would say that if he didn't do the quote work or do the leg work or do whatever needed to be done it's because the desire you gotta look more upstream i think the desire wasn't there i don't think the desire is bursting through you and you choose to hold back that desire and not do it i don't i don't i don't i don't think that's the case yeah i've always had a belief that companies don't fail when they run out of the

cash they fail when the founders and team run out of energy when they basically say okay we're done here uh at some level you have to give up on something and just because and it's pragmatic there are other things that you want to do more by that point uh but if you have an unswerving desire to do something then usually you'll get it yeah although i think i think in this modern age we tend to have too many loosely scattered imitative desires correct um there's that great old chinese thing like man who chases two rabbits

catches none yes um so a lot a lot of it is just about cultivating your desire and being ready well there there's the want with the small w then there's a want with a big w yeah i'm reminded that antoine is an exupery line where he basically said something like if you want to uh you know build a ship and hit the high seas then don't gather the men and start giving orders and chopping the wood and building a fire and you know building a ship instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless

sea yes and and that is a lot of the role of a leader it's to inspire people absolutely another great definition i once heard was that you know management is telling people what to do leadership is getting them to want to do it themselves correct yes i think a leader is far more hands-off than what sort of the business world tells him he should be i don't think it's about managing anybody i think it really is becoming someone that others look at that leader and see in him what they would love to see in themselves

yeah i was actually talking to a founder the other day of a company that's now worth almost 10 billion dollars and he's done obviously quite well and i asked him like what would you do differently if you were doing it again and he said he would micromanage people less which i thought was really interesting i did not expect that answer i thought it would be some other answer about how he could have been even bigger but he actually just felt like he made a mistake by constantly trying to order people around and well and i

think and i think and i and i think it also matters how what you just said is going to be heard because oftentimes things are heard through the lens of morality and right and wrong and correct and incorrect and good and bad and so that might be heard as you are right it is wrong to micromanage people you should leave them alone and and i would say that and i would say it's far more and i'm sure that he meant it this way as well that it's far more that it wasn't that that was quote

wrong or immoral that that was ineffective exactly exactly yeah uh you know so when we get to morality for example uh one of the things that silicon valley likes to talk a lot about is 10x engineers and now it's been broadened a little bit to be a little more politically correct 10x performers but it is true that you can have individuals especially when they're leveraged through code or capital like on hedge fund managers or engineers or even on the sales side where someone can literally accomplish 10x what the next closest person in the organization can

and the easiest way to see this as founders a founder can build a company one founder can build a company that's a thousand times more valuable the next founder and so there's kind of this idea of 10x performers and obviously it can't be through hard work because they're not doing 10x that work that's impossible everyone's working hard so then we pay lip services the idea of 10x performers and everybody wants to hire them but then we go around paying them 1x or 1.1 x or 1.2 x because society doesn't want to hear this idea of

that you can actually pay a 10x performer 10x so what happens is 10x performers all end up leaving and starting their own companies because they're not getting paid 10x otherwise the only way to do it so we have a few socially acceptable areas where you can get paid 10x basically if someone else is not making the decision if you made it by yourself or for yourself or you at least steered the ship long enough that you managed to capture more of the value for yourself then you get to be a 10x performer but i think

one of the things that's utterly broken in the startup ecosystem is that we all know and acknowledge that 10x performers or higher 100x thousands exist especially within certain circumstances and situations yet we do not compensate them at those levels because it is socially unacceptable to do so [Music] that one's worth covering another discussion it's a longer discussion but i think that it's just an example of how you know real truth is hard to speak because it offends people it hurts the sensibility of equality it hurts the sensibility of how the world ought to work it

has hurt your sensibility of morality but you can always fix things in other ways it's better to acknowledge how the world actually works and then figure out maybe how you want to change it as opposed to live with your head in the sand uh and everyone has to speak the same way in the same language and the same coded words uh and you may actually end up just denying how the world actually works that process you end up deluding yourself yes yeah i think that i think humans seek truth to some degree so long as

it has conditions it must fit within the framework already established or it's not accepted and so the so the problem isn't that the truth is wrong the problem is that there's too many frameworks there's you know every everyone's walking on eggshells because so many eggs have been created you know morality to what is correct what is right what is what is fair um than societies and institutions created around the very idea of enforcing fairness you know quite honestly the jungle in the wild is far more fair and equitable and moral than any fabricated society in

this world i think we'll end on that thank you council yes sir it's easy for me to go about being indifferent to my day when my day is easy but when my day gets hard especially in the context of a business like when i'm having to think a lot about people and persuasion and uh and plots and traps and strategies and competition the mind just gets very busy and as the mind gets busy emotion seeps in yeah yes okay so i'm going to so i'm going to interrupt you i'm sorry because i'm going to lose

what i want to say as soon as you say four words i'm already in okay so um so what i'll say is this the problem there is the need for indifference you are holding indifference in some character you have to chase right and it can't you it can't be a rule nothing can be a rule there are no rules burn your books there can be no scrolls no 10 commandments there can be no rules whenever you attempt to live up to anything you fail and the reason that you fail even if you live up to

it you will fail because you are trying to force yourself to get to an idea and and the greatest athlete the greatest individual in any sport or business allows the game to come to them all things must come to you you cannot be the chaser so you're just immersed yes it is it is it is an evaluation an examination and an observation and i hate the word observation because everyone's going to consciously and intentionally observe in a prescriptive manner and then it goes and then goes nowhere but but it is it is a it is

it is a constant examination of where one is what one is doing what feelings one is feeling without any sense of prescription you're not doing it in order to get better you're not doing it for a reason other than you desperately wish to learn the truth you want to see your way all the way to the end you do not want to work your way to the end it's understanding i like that word i like the word understand because i've always loved to read i've always loved to figure things out i love the aha moment

when i understand something but this is understanding internally rather than externally it's understanding all the conditioning and the reactions we have exactly not chasing indifference or anything else all those things indifferent right so indifference is a byproduct it's just like humility just like presence it's just like mindfulness it's a byproduct it's not all there are all those names only have relevance when you have arrived and you're looking backwards it's like the lights on the highway when you're going straight it's they're white but if you're going the wrong way they're red okay so all those names

are fine and they won't hurt you as long as you've arrived and you're looking backward then you can name all you want if you name them prospectively you will get attached to the name and you will chase and arrive nowhere the idea of humility is a false idea just like all ideas and and it's kind of like the the acceptance thou must accept that things are impermanent well let's compare that to humility i mean um humility only exists because one has not seen reality so every every opera every attempt to be humble is false it

is a charade okay when someone so basically humility says this okay you think you're great you think that you're this you think that you're that but you should tone that down and not express it so much because that doesn't look nice okay that's humility all right now but the truth is that if that same person who thought he was so great and so forth if he saw the reality of things and if he saw how much he doesn't know not by humility but by actual if you recognize that i know a drop i know it

very well but still i know a drop and there's an ocean that i don't know he would not have to resort to humility it would be a it would be a natural realization of ignorance there would be no humility yeah the real humility is a byproduct of understanding it's not something to be sought directly absolutely but then there's only need to be humble right yeah that's right yeah business trying to show that you're less than you believe yourself to be for a social construct purpose it's just like being meditative like you can't be meditated like

i tried this for a year i tried to be present i tried to be meditating oh yeah and and and it's what remains when there's nothing else it's not something that you seek directly right that's right it's what remain it's what remains when you're kind of not interested in anything else then you're meditating by default and it's effortless as opposed to when you're trying for it so even to the extent that i do meditation what i found works for me is i sit down and for me a lot of times meditations are just my mind

eating me alive it's coming at me with all the things that are unresolved and then as i go through them one by one i resolve them then for a little bit of time my mind is clear because i've resolved the things that i wanted to fight about and that's you know there i get maybe a taste of meditation not something you speak directly yeah you started that statement with what works for me okay so so when you when you go and you try to open a a door with a you you have a a bunch

of keys and you take one of the keys and that key doesn't work so that means what does it mean it didn't work that means the door wasn't unlocked that's what that means and then another key does work what is it what do you mean by work well that means it worked because it unlocked the door so then there was there was a direct intention there uh the the arbitrator being that the door unlocked or did it not so the question here is when you started the meditation when you started the explanation with what works

for me what is the what is the arbitrator what works to do what what is the what is the goal the the i mean the goal so yeah maybe this is walking into a trap here but i don't care you don't judge the goal is to have a clear mind right okay which approach yeah and uh is it a goal unto itself uh actually why not because when i have a clear mind what ends up with freedom bliss joy peace equanimity whatever you call it it's a good feeling it just means you're in the moment

you're not worried about anything you're freed from anxiety you're freed from the future which is which is my demon so that that's to me is useful the problem with meditation is that it's not permanent right yes but what it what it does give me it gives me an hour a day by myself to work through my thoughts uh and it gives me an hour a day of as an introvert you know when i'm surrounded by kids and family and work and media and entertainment and all the distractions of our society it gives me an hour

to just introspect um so i don't think there's any such thing as a good or a bad time spent alone with your eyes closed right whether it's blissful and joyous and peaceful whether it's meditative or whether it's just your mind's eating your life you're battling with it trying to figure things out as long as you're engaging in self-examination it's all it's all it's all good so so this is what i'll say to that there's no right or wrong there's no you should meditate or you shouldn't meditate there's no rules here okay um i approach things

from the standpoint of understanding you know uh so what i will say is this what to me what meditation is is is a an exercise in management okay it is that one gets too stressful or whatever it is therefore he needs an hour separate from that stress and to you know to sort of to cleanse and to take a break and to have so meditation basically is a form of uh is a pleasure chase okay now part impartial with what i just said i have to say things so often the same breath because i know

that people's minds are going to go to their preformed pathways and that preformed pathway is going to be so subtle they're not even going to recognize it which is that as soon as i said that it's pleasure chasing the feeling is going to be well oh it's wrong to pleasure chase no it isn't forget wrong and right let's let's talk about this for a second if you had only two years to live or one year to live so what i would say is that nobody would be managing anything people would seek cures right the reason

that the reason we manage things is because we know and we feel um rightly or wrongly correctly or incorrectly that we're going to be here for a long time and since we are then i can sort of use the scapegoat and sort of take that way and sort of go manage things and then jump back into the ocean of the momentum for everyday existence whereas to me and once again it's a dna thing what i am excited what what what really moves me is the idea of permanence what really moves me like i don't want

to feel good through meditation i have no interest in wanting to feel good and the reason i don't is because i know like you said i know it's i'm going to have to do it again and i want to do it again that isn't what that is what drives me what drives me is the permanent state so yeah i agree with that i mean to the extent like if meditation is getting me closer to unraveling parts of my identity and self that don't make sense if it's bringing me understanding and time with myself that helps

me see deeper then it's useful if it's just getting back to the same point every day for an hour a day it's useless then i might as well just go exercise and improve my body yeah that's right yeah that's right that's right yeah so it isn't me telling you that that's the way to do it i'm just no no no i get it i think you know a state in which i don't want to have to leave here again and do it again and again and again you know that that doesn't interest me it's kind

of kind of like i've never gotten excited by hole and once because i know that it's largely luck now if you do it twice in a row i'm interested because now i know that you have a system okay if you have a system i'm interested now because you figured something out that nobody else knows now my ears are perfect now i'm all in i'm listening i i would say that the interesting part for meditation for me is it's an hour a day where i just have to sit with myself and i have to work through

my problems and i have to self-examine and it's something that i think you do with every waking hour so i think for you it's not that useful you are constantly engaged in self-examination constantly uh most human beings are engaged in no self-examination because they're constantly distracting themselves from exactly that thing they're distracting themselves from the self because the moment they focus on self-examination there's a lifetime worth of things to examine that come bubbling up and eat them alive so they run away from it so for me having an hour a day having done it now

for a few months i've sort of caught up i've examined large parts of myself that have that have faded into the background and so now what remains when i sit is peace but then when i get up i am disturbed again and i'm disturbed because the real life is much more active emotionally active much more and i'm much more reactive to normal life than i am when i'm just sitting down with my eyes closed so now the challenge is how do i take this level of understanding even further examine further and start unraveling things that

make me reactive in everyday life not just in meditation i'm looking at starting this new business but there's this anxiety within me and the anxiety is like what if it doesn't work what if i waste another five years of my life what if i bring people along in this wild goose chase and they don't go anywhere what if i get trapped in this edifice that i construct and then i pull everyone into this ship and then i have to pilot it and then it's not going where it's supposed to go or it can't make it

there or there's no there there then how do i get off without like embarrassing myself having wasted everybody's time and money and and crashing it on the shoulders right so these are the kinds of things that i still struggle with uh anxiety anger and even when i think i'm super zen and calm and understanding it just arises and and it consumes me um so let's deal with the second one first um you know when you when you're a kid and you build had building blocks and you know you spent time building those legos or some

of them were lego some were just those loose building blocks that you build like a little tower out of uh you know you enjoyed building them right but yeah you know what you didn't enjoy half what you enjoyed ten times more than building them was knocking him down okay so what what i would say is that uh as as perverse as it may sound um i think that there is definitely a greater joy in destroying something then creating it um and and the the the key there is not having something destroyed while you are trying

to make it better but conscious consciously by your choice destroying it now that same building that you had made when it was a kid and your brother came and knocked it down well that's this absolutely not then you're gonna that's right but because it wasn't your choice now you were going to knock it down anyways but that didn't matter right that was that was your building to knock down okay i think it's the same thing here the biggest the biggest problem the biggest imprisonment with success and creation and art and whatever it may be is

ownership ownership is a huge problem because whenever there's ownership then what you're actually building is a self-image you're building a self-image along the same time that you're building the the the company and and that self-image is gonna pop sooner or later so the the ultimate way in which to create something is to do it um under the under the umbrella of self-forgetfulness because then you're really free and quite frankly you know you can wield the sword so freely when you yourself are are wearing armor when you yourself are exposed then you're going to wield the

sword very carefully and while some will say nothing is wrong with that the problem with that is that when you are wielding it carefully you will not be able to wield it with the a plum and the carefreeness that will allow you to achieve high arch when you have an armor on and you know that no matter what you do you're not going to get hurt by it then you can do whatever you want and within that sort of relative carefree and cavalier sort of uh approach magic happens so this is true this is true

if i was on twitter and i had no self-image and i had nothing to protect i would tweet 10 times as much and i would say all kinds of things that i can't say right or if i was writing yeah for me that filter doesn't exist um you know and to quite frankly hesitation destroys the joy it does you know to be proper and correct and uh and make sure that no one dislikes it there's no fun in that the the the joy is actually in the self-expression and so uh i think i think the

you know the attachment to the ownership of something and saying that it's mine um actually you are running with a parachute so let's go deeper into this which is uh if i'm running a business uh there's an image that i use to attract people absolutely and the business would be and to raise money and then if the business isn't going well and i say well that was turns out it's a bad idea so not knock the tower over or uh okay understand the good part the good part may be if i have no self-image we

need to pivot the business with something else uh you know we need to make do something very risky even though it could be harmful for by image we'll just do it anyway right because as you said will the sword with the armor but uh you know if i need to shut the business down if it's not going well if i need to tell people that it's not going well uh i'm just trying to work through this like it does hurt my image because i use my image to start the thing in the first place doesn't

it seem disingenuous to use your image to start something and then discard your image later well this is what i'll say um you know it depends what is okay with you and what is not okay with you so for instance um if the idea of being able to pivot whenever you want regardless of image if that let's say let's say that you could not pivot as freely because you were afraid that what that might do to to image now that would create an imprisonment so the only question that remains is is that imprisonment okay with

you um i think i think it really comes down to what level of success that you want and what things you are willing and not willing to be imprisoned by so if you were if you were going to pivot and you had to explain you know there's something in the nature of human beings that that respects whether they like it whether they want to or not something in the nature of human beings that that respects indifference many times uh human beings take cues from the human himself as to how he himself feels about it and

then they mimic that okay so for instance let's say the person says uh xyz let's say a comedian let's say he says xyz well let's go i was giving a speech to the business conference says xyz and then he says um oh you know what i shouldn't have said that i'm sorry that was that was wrong that was insensitive okay then the crowd was going to say wow that was really insensitive i can't believe he did that okay and let's say he says the same x y z and he said he doesn't give two cents

about it the crowd will mimic that as well it is the nature of the human mind to mimic is the nature of the human mind to use the individual as the standard by which for them to judge whether they should judge him or not that's right