Absolute Motivation - LET THEM UNDERESTIMATE YOU - The Most Powerful Motivational Speech Video Compilation

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

Let them underestimate You. Before you watch this video download our app - https://motivateme.gg/ This is for the ones passed over, dismissed, counted out. Not because they lack power— But because ...their potential is still hidden, waiting to erupt. Let them underestimate you. Let them question your value. Because when you rise—when you reveal what’s been burning inside— They’ll be stunned into silence. This isn’t just motivation. It’s truth: You don’t need their approval. You need your fire. ♠️ Our channel members: / @absolutemotivation ✏️ Featuring some of the most motivational speakers in the world. 🤝Special thanks to all our partners, not just in this video but all our videos. We love you. 📱Maintain your motivation. 💡 Our official website: https://absolutemotivation.net 👕 Our official merch: https://absolutemotivationshop.com/ 👉🏻 Thought-provoking editing tapestries: @AbsoluteMotivation 📸 Instagram: @absolutemotivationofficial Our speeches are created by, remixed or licensed to Absolute Motivation. For licensing information, message navidbakhsayesh@gmail.com 🔊The music in this video: The music is licensed via the fantastic teams at: Musicbed Artlist Really Slow Motion Audiomachine 🎥 The video footage In this video: All video footage used is licensed through either CC-BY, from various stock footage websites, or filmed by us. All Creative Commons footage is listed at the video's end and licensed under CC-BY 3.0. Film and TV shows used in the video are interwoven with the video's narrative, related to the video's topic, and corresponding to FAIR USE. #selfimprovement #absolutemotivation #motivation #PutInTheWork #Grind #HardWork #SelfDiscipline #Mindset #Confidence #SelfDiscipline #Motivation #Focus #Mindsett #LetThemUnderestimateYou #MotivationalVideo #ProveThemWrong #RiseUp #MindsetShift Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:02 Your growth frightens those with no plans of changing. You've changed, we heard. That's what they said when we started to grow. We now have a clearer vision. We have a smaller circle. We're going. We're growing. We're hunting.
Starting point is 00:00:19 You just don't know how it's going to finish. And that's what makes it hard. It's the uncertainty of like, what if I give up everything that I've done in my life for nothing? And then all of a sudden, if I knew that, then I wouldn't be willing to make this trade. But in retrospect, when you do have the thing, you're like, of course I was, like, if I knew that this was going to happen, I would... It's a sure thing now.
Starting point is 00:00:37 I would happily make the trade. But you don't know. And so you're just putting the money down and they're rolling it, but you get to find out if you hit black five fucking years from it. When you get up in the morning and you decide to get out of bed, you stepped right into that box. You stepped right into that box of shame. Then you tried to make another step to the side. And you stepped into the box of insecurity. How many of those boxes do you constantly step in every single morning?
Starting point is 00:01:05 Because what happens is when you step into those boxes, you want to attract other people that use their guilt. You want to track the other people who use their insecurity. You want to track the other people that use their shame. You want to track the other people that are scared because they make you feel comfortable right into that box. And you keep calling those individuals. You know why you keep calling those individuals?
Starting point is 00:01:28 because they make you feel comfortable. Because I think we measure ourselves by how much we got kicked down and never measure ourselves by how tall we had to stand back up. We always like to look at the fact that we got hit down as the point, as the failure,
Starting point is 00:01:48 as the bad thing. But we always forget a key point of trauma and failure and hardship is the getting back up. Why do we never? talk about our getting back up? Why do we never remember our getting back up? Why do we not remember how we picked ourselves up off the bathroom floor and stood up as though we were an army? We stood up as though we had the strength of someone 10 times bigger than us. We stood up with more strength than what we
Starting point is 00:02:20 thought we had and we kept going. And it's this question that keeps scrolling around my mind, which is just why do I always acknowledge my pain, but I never acknowledge my strength. And it's like I was never taught to celebrate myself. Your path won't be a straight line, and that's okay. What would you do if you couldn't fail? What could you do and what would you do if the dreams, the aspirations, the desires that you have,
Starting point is 00:02:54 the vision that you have for your life was possible? But there was no impossibility to your life. accomplishments to your goals, to your endeavors, who would you be? The illusion of safety, the illusion of security, the illusion that tomorrow is guaranteed is what's holding you back, is what's keeping you stagnant from fulfilling your destiny, from fulfilling and accomplishing your purpose. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. Your health is not guaranteed. Your youth is fading away in real time. And unless you enjoy your life, unless you do something about it, nothing will change. Be bold, be courageous, be audacious, with your goal.
Starting point is 00:03:30 and your dreams because they're up to you. It's only up to you in order to accomplish them. So my question to you once again is what would you do if you couldn't fail? Who would you become? What would you do? And what type of life would you be willing to live? On the other side of fear, on the other side of uncertainty, that life is waiting for you too, my friend.
Starting point is 00:03:53 You can't wish your problems away. It won't get easier. It won't happen faster. and you won't get closer by wishing. The magic you're looking for is in the hard work you've been avoiding. Stop wishing, it was easy. Start working to make things happen. There's something inside me. I don't know what it is.
Starting point is 00:04:24 I wanted to feel something besides the feet. This is where you've got to push past your limits. If you don't, then your path ends here. You need to love pain. The struggle of coming back is beautiful. The pain that's going to come, it's going to come in waves. I'm tired, Alfred. So a lot of this isn't your fault why you do some things you do, why you feel the way you feel.
Starting point is 00:05:01 But no one's coming back to save your ass. Everything about discipline. Everything about discipline and every day. And every day, every day, every day. like you know train sleep eat repeat if you feel that pain please keep that pain you feel the pain then feel the more you're going to move with the pain that's where success is if your life was a movie and it started now what would the hero of your life's movie do right now it's time to make a decision it is time to decide who you're going to
Starting point is 00:05:42 going to be. There's a moment when every boy realizes no one's coming to save him. Achieve failure. Achieve failure. If you can do that, you can also win. Driven human beings are going to always feel like they're behind. Motivation comes and goes. When you're driven, whatever's in front of you will get destroyed.
Starting point is 00:06:10 There's nobody coming. There's nobody coming to save you. There's nobody coming to help you. coming to help you. You are the only one that's going to be able to save you. You know what? If they misunderstand you, let them. If they doubt you, let them. Two type of champions for me. Like there are champions who prepare themselves to win. There are the other ones who prepare themselves to dominate. You are able to get up every morning, have no passion, no drive, no motivation, no shit. It still get up with that.
Starting point is 00:06:48 kind of fire. You will be successful in life. I guarantee you that. I know my own destiny, uncle. Is it your own destiny? Or is it a destiny? Someone else has tried to pause on you. So I applaud you for your dreamy, for you're running toward your dream. I applaud you for believing in yourself. Winners define themselves by what they made happen and losers define themselves by what happen to them. The question is not, are you worthy to reach your goals? The question is, are your goals worthy enough of you? Why do we do things against our better judgment? This is an age-old question. When we know what to do, why don't we just do it? And particularly in today's age, where we have the world's information in our fingertips, we don't have the excuse of not knowing
Starting point is 00:07:49 what to do anymore. Who doesn't know basically how to lose weight? Okay, maybe the specifics, but we basically know that chocolate cake is not as healthy as a healthy salad. Who doesn't know that? Who doesn't know that if you want to have better relationships with people, you have to be fully present with them? Who doesn't know that if you want to do better at your job? You have to do the work, especially the hard stuff that other people don't want to do. We know these things.
Starting point is 00:08:08 So there's no excuse anymore to say, well, I just didn't know how. Google is right there for anyone to use. What we're lacking is the ability to follow through. We're lacking the ability to avoid distraction. Getting ahead in life is not just about doing the right things. avoiding not doing the wrong things. And that's what becoming indistractable is all about. It's about whatever it is that you say is important to you in your life. How do you make sure you do those things? Well, if somebody says something out loud, it's 10 times more powerful than
Starting point is 00:08:39 if they think it. That negativity is a multiple of four to seven times more powerful than positivity. So think about that. If I say something out loud, it's 10x. If it's negative, it's four to seven times more powerful. So when I say negative things out loud, it's 40 to 70 times more likely that that will happen or cause a result that won't be good for me than if I just didn't say anything. We've been in a moment of failure. It's because I was sort of really scared of what people would think. I was living the same. I was living in some other guideline, you know, some other path that somebody told me, like, oh, you have to go to college and then start a business and be successful. And once you're successful, you're smart, and no one should ever know that you're stupid. So I was afraid to let
Starting point is 00:09:26 people know that I didn't go on this straight path. So that's the ordinary world. And then, you know, in the Ark of the Hero, you go from the ordinary world to the extraordinary. The extraordinary is when I admit failure and now I have to go on this very unusual path to find my way back. And that's going from the ordinary world to the extraordinary. And then along the way, you have bigger and bigger problems and you meet your new friends and people who will help you until finally you have the greatest crisis of all and you bring it back to tell the story. Like you bring it back and you have a podcast or you write an article or whatever and that's the full arc of the heroes.
Starting point is 00:10:08 Yeah. For me, fear, the things I'm scared of, I'm like, come on. You know, it's calling me. It says, hey, come play over here. It's an indicator. It's a good indicator, not a bad indicator. into come play with me okay so I either have fear because it's really dangerous yeah let me get to the edge of this thing I'm gonna get on the other side of that thing I'm probably gonna be scared
Starting point is 00:10:28 because I don't know what it feels like to fall you know this many floors and hit maybe it does maybe there's no big deal about maybe dying's not even a big deal but I don't have the experience I don't consciously have there so you know I used to be like I can't buy a $78,000 000 house I was terrified the first house I bought I don't know what I'm doing this this is the problem then you're not going to have the experience experience if you don't move through the fear. And a lot of people do it once and then they don't do it again. You got like, it's not going away.
Starting point is 00:10:59 It's just going to, you're going to get used to, you're going to get used to the ski boots. You know, the first time you put them on in there, freaking banging your shins. Like, I can't man, but you just wear into them. So interest curiosity is, is that open quality that we've been talking about. that's really about being curious about the journey. Like, oh, you know, look at this grain of wood. Isn't that, you know, and not just isn't that interesting intellectually, but just really letting our senses rip
Starting point is 00:11:30 and just letting that feeling of curiosity come pouring for it, pouring out. Think about where you could be in 10 years. You don't have to know how to get there. Elon Musk hasn't solved all the problems to get to Mars. But when he talks about why he's here, when he talks about that vision, he's talking 10 years ahead, because it explains how many of these big minds are literally applying envisioning to build their businesses,
Starting point is 00:11:58 and that the envisioning concept is more important than talent or venture capital or ideas or execution. It starts with envisioning. Everything else flows from there. Realism is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of pessimism. The people with the most consistent track records of success don't think in terms of what is. They think in terms of what could be. Of when they get to work, they say they're going to do something.
Starting point is 00:12:26 They say they're going to work on that big project. They're going to stop procrastinating and do that thing that they've been planning to do right after they check email, right after they scroll that Slack channel, right after they do that quick thing they need to talk with a colleague real quick. And so 30, 45 minutes later, they still haven't started to do the thing they plan to do. I call it pseudo work. I kind of need to check email, right? I kind of need to do that stuff.
Starting point is 00:12:47 But if I plan to do something else at that time, it is just as much of a distraction. So anything can become a distraction as well. And the reason this is so pernicious is that we are slaves now to the urgent at the sacrifice of the important when we do that. And in today's age where technology is so pervasive and so persuasive, I mean, it is designed to be persuasive and we want it to be persuasive. We want products to be engaging. then it's easier than ever to get distracted.
Starting point is 00:13:15 And I think it's not so much to say fit your life into an arc on purpose. You should just ask yourself maybe, am I the hero of my journey? Like, what can I do today to have even in a microscopic way something that is a mini call from a mini ordinary to a mini-extourinary.
Starting point is 00:13:38 I think it's an interesting challenge. A, your language is powerful, But number two, your behavior is way ahead of your success. And so many people let their feelings dictate what they do as opposed to throw your behavior out there. Russell Wilson's 5'10. He shouldn't be playing pro football, but he behaves like the best quarterback in the country.
Starting point is 00:14:00 And he's done that since before he was at that level, and then his feelings and emotions and his skill caught up to that behavior. What I do, not how I feel about my past, is going to determine who I am in the future. And that's what I think neutral thinking is. I think neutral thinking isn't just thinking. I think it's behavior and I think it's language. And so your behavior is what's going to change you.
Starting point is 00:14:24 But you also have to start by asking yourself, what do I want and why do I want it? Why don't I have it? When you wake up, when you have this transformation, when you go from Elon Musta, Elon plus the wisdom of Ariana, in that metaphor, you start opening yourself up to so much more.
Starting point is 00:14:41 Now, the first aspect of the dark side of vision is this imbalance, but I want to tell you about another aspect, and that second aspect is cultural programming. The visions that we are pursuing don't come from us. They come from outside us. I became an engineer, not because I wanted to be an engineer, it's because I'm an Indian male, and if you're an Indian immigrant, you learn very early in your family that your parents value education,
Starting point is 00:15:08 you're going to come back with A's, all A's, not one B or one one one. see and that there are only four options in your life. You become a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, or a family embarrassment. Why do we do anything? What's the nature of human motivation? And when when you think about it, most people will tell you some version of carrots and sticks, that it's about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This is Freud's pleasure principle. But neurologically speaking, that's not true. That in fact, we do not do things in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. That neurologically speaking, we only do things for one reason. And that avoid discomfort. Physiologically, we know this is true. If you go outside and it's cold,
Starting point is 00:15:48 that's not comfortable when you do, you probably don't cope. And when you go back inside, now it's too hot, that's not comfortable, you take it off. If you're hungry, you feel hunger, pangs, you eat. And when you're stuffed, oh, that doesn't feel good, you stop eating. So physiologically, we feel this all the time. This is called the homeostatic response. The same rules apply with psychological sensations, not just with physiological sensations. So, when you're feeling lonely, check Facebook. When you're uncertain, you Google when you're bored, check the news, check sports scores, check Reddit, Pinterest, whatever, all of these things cater to these uncomfortable sensations. So that means if all human behavior
Starting point is 00:16:23 is spurred by desire to escape discomfort, that means, as you said, time management is pain management. Even if I'm going through a difficult challenge, even if I'm going through a reorg and a business, you know, if I still feel like, okay, this is not optimal, but there's something I can do, then I'm helpful to myself. And when I'm helpful, I'm hopeful. And when I'm helpless, I'm hopeless. We have to believe that we can influence our future. You know, we've got to believe.
Starting point is 00:16:54 I believe that no matter what I'm facing, I can influence my future. That just because my first marriage didn't work, that doesn't mean my second marriage won't. But it's incumbent upon me to be better. What are you going to do to be different going forward? So many people think the self-help industry is about things you do.
Starting point is 00:17:12 I think one of the things that makes athletes so incredible is what they're willing not to do, what they're willing not to say, but they're willing not to eat, what they're willing not to consume, but they're willing not to watch. What are five things you cannot do right now that will instantly make your life better?
Starting point is 00:17:34 If you want to do something extraordinary, you have one job. Leave your fellow humans in awe. You probably don't think of your life in this manner, I now invite you to think of your life in this manner. Your entire life has been nothing but an attempt to exert control over some part of your internal or external environment. You do not have control.
Starting point is 00:18:07 You never had control. You never will have control. You only have the illusion of control. The thing that I find most interesting and the thing that I think a lot about is who are we sort of at our core? What are we? Are we changeable? Are we malleable? The whole nature versus nurture thing is really come to define my life. It doesn't matter who you are today. It certainly doesn't matter how you were born. The only thing that matters is who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there. Legacy is planting seeds in a garden that you'll never see.
Starting point is 00:18:46 the capacity to strengthen and increase your hunger is the one common denominator amongst the most success in people you know Richard Benson's a good friend of mine and Pierre Goober Steve Wynn all these guys they've never lost their hunger most people are hungry to achieve a certain amount make a certain amount of money and then they get comfortable and relax or to get a certain level of fitness and then they relax hunger is the ultimate driver because if you're hungry you can get the strategy, you can get the answer. If you can't model it, you can find it. I would lay in bed for up to four hours a day every single day because I couldn't motivate myself to get out of bed. I didn't have a job and the only thing that would get me out of bed, 15 years before I'm capable of
Starting point is 00:19:35 building a billion dollar company, the only thing that got me out of bed was shame because I had one failed misunderstanding. I believed that my talent and intelligence were fixed traits. Because what's happening in the mind seems invisible. We can't see it. We don't understand what's happening. And so
Starting point is 00:19:59 as shame was the only thing that would drag me out of bed, I didn't understand that the same thing I believed to be true of my body was true of my mind. What you build yourself Self-esteem around matters. So what I want you to realize, the thoughts are invisible waves. When you turn on TV, it takes invisible waves, and depending on the channel, you're going to see a love story or an adventure or a drama or a comedy. So what I've tried to do in this area beautiful state is simple.
Starting point is 00:20:28 You start to feel the stress, you see it as thoughts going by, and then you focus on something to appreciate and joy or love. Appreciation of love and joy, destroy something. You can't be grateful and angry simultaneously. It's possible. You can't be worried, fearful, and grateful simultaneously. So I tell people gratitude is one of the emotions to cultivate that will destroy the suffering.
Starting point is 00:20:51 Stop trying to control your life. You can't do it. Think instead in terms of controlling the experience of your life. A lot of the time in your life, you have the ability to decide what you are going to experience. Mental chatter is an internal monologue that you have going on in your heads all the time. It begins right up when you get up in the morning is with you throughout the day. Mental chatter has always been a part of your life.
Starting point is 00:21:35 Most of the time we try to ignore it, we suppress it, we work around it, we try to live our life as best we can in spite of our mental chatter. That is a huge mistake. And the reason it's a huge mistake is because we build our lives with our mental chatter. We create the world that we live in with our mental chatter. we live in a real world, but we don't. We live in a construct. We live in the matrix. And whether you realize it or not, each and every one of you has something that sits at the core of how you feel about yourself.
Starting point is 00:22:20 And from that, your identity, your sense of self-worth, your self-esteem, it is all built around that thing. Now, when you think about my job as a parent, as an entrepreneur, as an athlete, as a speaker, as a whatever you want to be, You've got to get so good at that thing that when people see you do it, you make them experience the most potent human emotion, and that is all. To get that good is a terrifying journey of self-discovery and confronting who you really are, because you cannot make change until you acknowledge where you're actually at. the most important decision of your life is deciding whether you're truly committed to being happy no matter what because life is going to throw all kinds of
Starting point is 00:23:16 curveballs at all of us the one thing that's in common in this lifetime is extreme stress but it's just true someone you're going to care about is going to die someone's going to take advantage financially if you're not careful you're going to find yourself in a position the government might change the rules
Starting point is 00:23:30 and you can't do what you're doing before someone call like I got in the call saying you've got a your brain. Those days alter you. So the greatest gift you could give yourself besides making this life about love and making his life about giving because to give you have to keep growing is, I believe, to make that decision and say life is too short to suffer. We are all very good at shooting second arrows at ourselves. How many times have you laid yourself low? How many times Have you berated yourself or taking some damn full action in retrospect? How many times have you compared yourself unfavorably with someone else?
Starting point is 00:24:15 We don't just shoot second arrows. We shoot third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seven arrows at ourselves. The important thing for you to note is the second arrow is always delivered. by means of mental shadow. What you don't recognize is the stuff that you believe which you have not subjected to the same scrutiny is equally false, and that too will crumble. So the question to ask yourself is not, is this true or false,
Starting point is 00:24:56 right or wrong, good or bad, the question to ask yourself is, does this model work for me in my life now better than what I am currently using. You get to build yourself in any direction you want, in any way to become anything you want. There will be an extraordinary price to pay. But you can go in any direction. Now I don't think that we're born in blank slaves, but we are so close to that to worry about
Starting point is 00:25:34 about where your limits are is to miss how much you can improve. So focus on how much you can improve. There's an amazing quote by Alexander Soljanitsyn, the author of the Guleg Acapelago. And what he said was, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. The most important decision any human being has to make is whether they live in a friendly or a hostile universe. decision the most important decision anyone has to make because neither of those two states is empirically true but either will immediately appear true once you decide to believe it
Starting point is 00:26:15 that the secret to life is to get outside yourself and find a way to add value to others there's nothing that's more fulfilling than doing something beyond yourself i think more of things makes me proud to be a human being as human beings will be more for others that they care about than they'll ever do for themselves And when you tap into that, you have more energy to anybody else. You have more joy. You have more excitement because, as I always say, life supports whatever supports life. Motive matters. The idea of being obsessed with learning, growing, and adding value to me is the most important
Starting point is 00:26:47 in life because, you know, the only way we're happy is by making progress. You know, we grow and we feel alive. We give and we feel ten times more alive. But you've got to grow to have something to give. Brick by brick. Day after day, I transformed myself. It was not an uncovering of something that was real and already there. It was simply acknowledging, I am a hopelessly average human.
Starting point is 00:27:14 But humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. So I can change. It can become whatever I want. And I just became single-mindedly focused on how much I could grow. And now that I was getting value and self-esteem out of, growing instead of out of being. Everything in my life changed. Because if you want to do something extraordinary,
Starting point is 00:27:39 you have one job. Leave your fellow humans in awe. I think that we're actually animals, that we have an animal nature, and that we have to become human. And we become human by overcoming some of these deep-rooted animal forces within us. These forces within us that we can't control,
Starting point is 00:28:13 such as the fact that we can't control our own emotions, our own anger, our own frustration, or we feel envy, or we're caught up in the emotions of other people. I call those forces primal forces human nature, and they can create sort of negative patterns of behavior, the dark side of what we see in the news, etc. And we all have them ingrained in us, because with the way we evolved millions of years ago
Starting point is 00:28:40 served a very definite purpose for our survival as a species. But the savannas of East Africa is not the offices in Silicon Valley or a 21st century America. The world isn't the same. We are not built to adapt to this new technological environment we're in. We still have that lizard brain, those animal parts of our nature. So, for instance, law number one is about how we're basically irrational creatures.
Starting point is 00:29:07 We think that we're rational, but really our emotions govern us. We feel something before we ever have an ideal or think it. We have to become rational through this process that I lay out in my book. So I don't mean to say that we're negative because humans are obviously incredible. Look at what we've created. It's outrageous if you think about who we were millions of years ago and where we are now. We're obviously capable of incredible achievements.
Starting point is 00:29:35 We're also the most brilliant social animal on the planet. We're capable of cooperating and working on. teams to a level that no other animal has ever reached. So there's obviously another side of the story. But to become greater, to become truly human, we have to overcome these forces that I lay out. So for instance, we are built to constantly compare ourselves to other people.
Starting point is 00:29:58 We're always thinking of what the other person has and how we are in relation to them. Are we getting as much attention as that other person? It started off when we were children. Are we getting more attention than our siblings from our parents? parents. So we're continually comparing ourselves in rank, in power, in status to the people around us. And this is deep force within us, and it's constant every day, every moment. You don't realize if you're going through that. And social media, it completely exacerbates this tendency in human
Starting point is 00:30:30 nature. Another is the contagiousness of emotions, which is extremely powerful. We tend to think of ourselves as autonomous human beings that were independent that we I feel affection or anger or frustration on my own we don't realize how deeply we are affected by the emotions of the people in a group this is the viral effects emotions are extremely contagious before the invention of language we humans had to be able to communicate to one another through just picking up the moods of other people and if there was a threat to our group or our tribe the ability to feel fear and angle together bonded us and helped us survive. But that doesn't serve much function in the world today
Starting point is 00:31:15 where viral emotions can be very dangerous and very, we see a lot of that on social media. I'm really worried about people nowadays. But now my worry is that people are so immersed to their smartphones and their technology that they don't understand people. They're not observing people. And this has been documented in studies
Starting point is 00:31:35 that young people, for instance, levels of self-observation, and narcissism have been growing steadily since the 1970s. We are the pre-eminent social animal on the planet. Our survival depends on how we relate to other people, whether we understand them on some level. And I find a lot of people, increasingly in the world, are really bad at observing just basic elements in human psychology.
Starting point is 00:32:04 The position I'm in now, I'm a consultant to a lot of very powerful famous people. I'm not going to mention any names. People fly me out to consult the CEOs, political people who are very powerful and even in other countries. And the number one problem I find that they have is an inability to understand the people they're dealing with.
Starting point is 00:32:26 They hire the wrong partners. They hire the worst assistance who end up ruining their lives. These are people who are technically brilliant. They understand their field. They understand marketing, et cetera. but they don't understand basics about people around them. And they make terrible hires or they marry absolutely the wrong person for them in their lives.
Starting point is 00:32:46 Their emotions are, you know, their personal relationship bring them down. So this is like our Achilles heel and I think it's gotten worse in the world today. So my anger was that people are so focused on technology, but that we need to focus much more on human nature, on understanding people. That's the primary skill that you need in life. There is something deeply ingrained in each individual person, a particular individual nature that we all have, and that causes us to go into compulsive patterns of behavior. I have this problem myself.
Starting point is 00:33:22 I notice each time I write a book, I'm telling myself, I'm going to make this book short, I'm not going to ruin my health, I'm not going to do so much research, and every goddamn time I still go through the same process, I can't break this pattern, okay? And everybody has them. Where does it come from? Some of it comes from our DNA, from our genetics, things we can't control that we've inherited from our parents. Some of it comes from our early attachment.
Starting point is 00:33:50 And some of it comes as we get older and we interact with teachers and mentors and various people who create a certain way we view ourselves. If people keep telling us that we're not really worthy, that we're not good students, we internalize that and we end up becoming like that. So it's a mix of things.
Starting point is 00:34:09 You know, each person has a mix of these qualities, and you have to kind of untangle the various strands. And you're right. What I'm saying is you're a mystery to yourself. You don't know who you are. You have patterns of behavior, and you're not even understanding that. You don't know why you're angry. You think you're angry because that person said something mean to you
Starting point is 00:34:33 or did something wrong. But in fact, your anger probably stems from things. from deep, deep within from your childhood. And you're not reacting to that person, but to actually your parents and what they didn't give you. You know, the origin of wisdom, according to the Greeks, was know thyself, right? And I believe that very firmly.
Starting point is 00:34:53 That knowledge about who you are is an end in itself and will help you in so many ways become that human being that I think we all have the potential to become. So I'm a great believer in baby steps in learning how to do things on a day. basis. So normally when we feel an emotion or we have an idea, we don't examine it. We just assume that's, that's, you know, it's just natural. We came up with that on our own. I want you every single day to be examining yourself and to look at yourself. Why do I have that idea? Why am I feeling this sudden emotion? And it's not easy. It takes, it can take time and it can take degree of introspection that you're not comfortable with. but if you begin to look at yourself and question why do I feel this way
Starting point is 00:35:43 and examine it and look at perhaps other sources of it then you can begin this process of understanding instead of just simply accepting that you feel or have this certain idea so question yourself stop assuming that everything you do is so brilliant and smart and right and imagine that maybe your ideas don't come from yourself Maybe you're feeling some political anger or whatever comes from the fact that you're just assuming it from other people.
Starting point is 00:36:13 You're following things on Facebook and you're getting swept up in some viral emotion. You want to think that you're completely independent and autonomous, but maybe you're not as independent as you think. I want to change how you look at people. Normally, everything is personal. Oh, they said that. Oh, they don't like me.
Starting point is 00:36:32 Oh, he likes me. I'm not getting attention. cut that off. I want you to look at people as facts of nature as things like a rock or a stone or a plant. This is who they are.
Starting point is 00:36:45 And I want you to observe them and accept them for who they are and deal with them as individuals. You will be free of all that emotional baggage that you carry when you take everything so personally. I think altering your perspective how you look at people
Starting point is 00:37:00 will have a radical influence on all aspects of your life. You hear this a lot. I mean, it's very common, especially in self-help motivations. I need to be motivated. You have to have willpower. Grit and perseverance are huge and important.
Starting point is 00:37:28 And it's not that those qualities are not important. It's just that the way to develop them is different than what most people think. The people who appear to have the greatest self-control actually are just tempted the least. The way to get better willpower is to design an environment that tempts you less, but not to say,
Starting point is 00:37:47 let me just try harder. You build habits and in the beginning you develop fluency and skill and ability and things become easier. But after a little while, once a habit has been established, the downside of having a habit is that you can do it good enough on autopilot, which means that you start to overlook your mistakes. And that's kind of the challenge of continuous improvement. It's like a cycle. You know, it starts with awareness. If you're not aware of what your habits are or what your behavior is, you don't have a chance to change it. Then from that awareness, to get a deliberate practice where you have to effortfully try and work to get better. And eventually the thing that you were deliberately practicing becomes a habit and becomes
Starting point is 00:38:23 automatic. But once it becomes automatic, that's not the end. You have to return to awareness. Probably the ultimate reason that habits are so important. It's true, like habits can help you earn more money or be more productive or lose weight. But in addition to the external results that habits provide, they also shape your sense of self. They like are the engine or the avenue through which you learn to believe things about yourself. Like sometimes people will say stuff like, fake it until you make it. But fake it until you make it is asking yourself to believe something without evidence for it. And you can do that for a little while.
Starting point is 00:38:57 You can do it for a day or week. But eventually, I mean, there's a word for beliefs that don't have evidence by it, delusion. And if you're deluding yourself, then eventually you give up on that. But the power of doing a better habit each day or casting a little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in it. I think there are a few core habits that are going to serve everybody and certainly serve me well. So exercise is a huge one. The ultimate meta habit is reading because if you build a habit of reading, you can solve pretty much any other problem.
Starting point is 00:39:28 I don't learn how to be a better podcaster, you can read about that. You're not to meditate, you can read about that. You want to learn how to make more money, you can read about that. And so what you need is to develop a habit of reading and then whatever problem you're facing at the time, you have a method for solving it. Writing for me is huge. I don't actually know what I think about something until I write about it. You'll ask me something and I'll get an implicit feeling about what that topic is.
Starting point is 00:39:52 I'll have some intuition, a gut feeling about it and I'll say whatever that feeling is driving me to say. But I don't actually know if that's what I really think. Going for a daily walk would be a huge one. When your body is moving, it's very hard for you, one, to not be active mentally. Try to be closed off mentally and be dancing physically. It's very hard to do. It's really hard for your mind to be shut down. I wonder about your non-conscious mind being like a bottleneck sometimes.
Starting point is 00:40:20 And so if you're moving, if you're walking, it gives your non-conscious mind something to do. So you're like, it gets out of the way. And now you can actually, like, have this stuff arise or think in a different way than if you're sitting. Often when we set about to change something or to achieve something, the first step is almost always setting a goal.
Starting point is 00:40:41 This is coming from someone like, I was very goal-oriented for a long time. Sometimes I would achieve those, but then sometimes I wouldn't. And so I had this question like, well, clearly I'm studying goals from both, so that can't be the thing that determines it. And you see this a lot, that the winners and losers in a particular domain often have the same goals. So if the winners and the losers have the same goal,
Starting point is 00:41:03 then the goal cannot be the thing that distinguishes them, too. And the thing that distinguishes them is the process and the system behind the goal. But this is also important because achieving a goal often only changes your life for the moment. So it's like treating a symptom without treating the cause. And habits are a better solution in that case because if you fix the inputs, the outputs fix themselves automatically. You don't have to fight to have a clean room if you have clean habits. And I think that that's true in a larger sense as well. It will want outcomes.
Starting point is 00:41:33 They want to earn more money or lose wage or be not productive or reduce stress. but the outcome is not the thing that needs to change. It's the system that precedes it. And a lot of the time, advice is centered on cranking up the valve. It's like you need to try harder, you need grit, need perseverance,
Starting point is 00:41:49 and motivation, you need to overcome the obstacles in your life. And all those things are fine, but I think they're all short-term solutions. You might be able to do that for a day or a week, but I've never consistently seen someone sit to put the positive habits in a native environment. It's a really hard to fight that day and thing out.
Starting point is 00:42:05 So the solution, I think, is to reduce friction. There are a ton of ways you can do this. One way is just to scale the habit down, make it as easy as possible. Say you want to get in shape and you're like, all right, I want to run a couple days a week, but I know it should start small, so I'll only run for 15 minutes. But even that is like way bigger than what I'm talking about. I mean, it should be so small that in the book I call it the two-minute rule, you should downscale any habit to fit within two minutes. So it's like, all right, I want to go for a run three days a week. My habit is I put on my shoes and I step out the door. Anything else that happens after that is just bonus. Because what
Starting point is 00:42:43 you need to do is master the art of showing up. A habit must be established before it can be improved. Right? If you don't establish the habit, there's nothing to optimize. If you're not showing up at the gym every day, you don't even, who cares about what work out you're doing, you're not even there. Either person who shows up and puts their running shoes on every day before you worry about how far you're running, what kind of workout you're doing, all that type of stuff. If you feel good, if you feel satisfied right after you do something, then it's like this positive emotional signal and it's like, yeah, I should do this again. Behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated. Behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided.
Starting point is 00:43:20 And it's really about the speed of how quickly you feel successful. If it feels good, you have a reason to do it. Reading is sort of like this amount of habit that helps you solve all your other problems. Start more books, quit most of them, read the greatest ones. If you start more books, you'll be exposed to more ideas. If you quit most of them, if you quit the ones that aren't relevant to you, or aren't that good, or just aren't the high quality bar, then you have the chance to start even more.
Starting point is 00:43:46 And when you find the great ones, read them twice, because the advice is incredible and it's potentially life-changing. Every human has a body, and every human has, like, a physical presence. So learn to use your body in some way to be more alive in the experience what that's like to be human. You just spend all day in your head or all day staring at a screen, you only kind of get half of what it means to be alive. Community connection, serving others.
Starting point is 00:44:13 Personally, I have felt most engaged when I've been working on a shared mission in a group of people face-to-face. But I think actually I find more satisfaction and more purpose in connecting with people face to this. I think greatness is contributing to a little bit. That's it, you know? Like the thing that has advanced humanity
Starting point is 00:44:34 over the broad span of time, is the collected knowledge that we've all accumulated, what we've had it again. It's like we've had a real, the start down's a very small snowball and just keeps rolling on this endless hill as humanity continues, and the cumulative knowledge gets bigger and bigger.
Starting point is 00:44:49 There have been, I think the numbers are there have been 107 billion people who've lived throughout history, and there are 7 billion alive right now. So the dead outnumber the living, 15 to 1. When you were born, you inherit all the lessons from those 107 billion people, right? And that's true all the way down the line, right?
Starting point is 00:45:07 Like we, the next generation always gets to advance based on this like ever-growing bundle that we acknowledge that we come up with. And so if you, at some point throughout your life, can add just a little bit to that bundle, the rest of humanity is better for it. What human life is, is when life was in the other forms of life that you see on the planet,
Starting point is 00:45:45 nature determined a certain compulsive, instinctive ways of fundamental. Once you become human, these lines have been removed. You can act consciously. That means what you call as human potential is not of any kind of measurable limit. It can go as far as you desire or as far as you have the courage to walk. So when we say human potential, unleashing human potential, it is not about reaching the peak. It is a trajectory.
Starting point is 00:46:17 Because what our life is is a combination of a certain amount of time and energy. Time is rolling away for all of us at the same pace. If you sit, it rolls away. If you sleep, it rolls away. If you do something, it goes away. If you don't do anything, it goes away. You're happy, you're miserable, it goes away. Time is running out for all of us. So it's only the energy that you can do different things with. If you bring your energies to a certain level of intensity,
Starting point is 00:46:46 intensity and possibility. What somebody does in 10 years, you may do it in one year. This means if you live here for 100 years, it feels like in people's impact that you have created, it feels like you lived here for a thousand years, simply because you have managed your life energies in a certain way. So for me, a human being being impactful means how conscious have you become? This is very important. Because if you're in compulsive cycles, then your energy gets wasted in so many things.
Starting point is 00:47:20 50% of the time is gone in maintenance. Remaining 50% what they have. If you look at every single move that they make with their body, their thought process, their emotions, you will see a whole lot of it is happening in compulsive cycles. If you are little sensitive to life, you will realize you are the biggest issue. you are the biggest issue in your life. But I would say for 90% of the human beings, their own body,
Starting point is 00:47:48 the compulsions of the body, the compulsions of their thought, the compulsions of their emotions, are ruling them most of the time. So when you yourself are a problem, well, you're on self-help. We need to come to a certain level of maturity
Starting point is 00:48:04 within ourselves. The most fundamental thing is our children need not look like us, do not think like us, need not act like us, need not be us in any way. A child is not a legacy. It's a life. Influence is not important.
Starting point is 00:48:22 What is important is the intrinsic intelligence finding its full potential. Not knowing is not a notion. It's a fact. It's not a notion. You really do not know a damn thing about this existence. Everybody assume and believe because it's comfortable to simply believe something. The very word belief means this, that I have concretized assumptions of which I know nothing about. Either you know or you do not know.
Starting point is 00:48:51 Where does the belief come from? When you pretend what you do not know as I know, that's belief. But you can't believe something all by yourself. So you need a hundred people around you. That's why always believers are in groups, seekers are alone. It is the nature of human intelligence. It naturally seeks. But people want to seek with the comfort of belief.
Starting point is 00:49:15 They want to be in the belief system and then seek. Fundamentally, if people understand that the source of human experience is within you, joy or misery, agony or ecstasy, pleasure or pain, everything comes from within you. If I understand the source of my joy and misery are within me, then you know what's the obvious choice? What happens in the world? There are many, many forces involved. What happens within me? It's 100% me.
Starting point is 00:49:46 100%, isn't it? If you don't take charge of this, then you're an accidental life. When you're an accidental life, anxiety is very natural. This is why consciousness means this, that you have taken charge of the instruments of life, which on most fundamental level is our physiological and psychological space. You're taken charge of this. Now your health, your happiness, your joy, your ecstasy, your misery, everything is in your hands.
Starting point is 00:50:14 You exercise them as you want. See, people have divided the universe. This is important, this is not important. This person is important for me. This person is not important for me. This is important for me. That's not important for me. Only when your attention and involvement is indiscriminate, does the universe open up to you.
Starting point is 00:50:36 Right now, if you make yourself miserable, you must understand you're sending a message to every cell in the body that I don't want to live. You might not have articulated it in your head yet, but when you become miserable, you notice suddenly your body seems heavy and it's like doesn't want to get up from this chair. When you're happy, you're willing to bounce at everything and do everything bend backwards if necessary. Why this is happening is the message is gone to every cell in the body this guy wants to die. So you want to die, you want to live, you want to die, you want to live. The body is getting confused.
Starting point is 00:51:14 Because you must understand this is a very intelligent body. Staking instructions from you. Every cell in the body has enormous sense of memory and intelligence. Because you're sending contradictory messages, you are not dead, you're half dead. You can give it any number of exotic names. Essentially, you have turned your intelligence against yourself. We can talk if inspiration is what you need, encouragement towards what you need, I'm willing to talk. But talks will not bring solutions.
Starting point is 00:51:44 They will bring some clarity. Solution will come only when you take a proper inward step. Because I'm not interested in how much somebody is doing. I'm very interested in how they're doing it, because that's what changes the quality of who we are. Because the content of our life will not change our life. It is the context of our life, which changes our life. But there's no such thing as this is my life and that's your life. This is a living cosmos.
Starting point is 00:52:15 Everybody is free to capture as much as they want. If you capture substantial amount of life, your very presence will become a significant life. Otherwise, you will become a mediocre life. This is the important thing. It's not the knowledge you gather in your head. It's not the muscle that you gather in your body. It's the life. How much of a life of you?
Starting point is 00:52:38 This will make you significant in your very presence. If world gives us an opportunity, we'll do something impactful. Otherwise, we have just a significant presence. Beautiful does not mean just a beautiful view of the ocean or something else. Beautiful means human life here is pleasant within every human being. The question is not about what I wear, what I drive, where. what I drive, where I live, but how I am within myself. Human experience is constant.
Starting point is 00:53:13 Whichever generation you are, you can either be blessed out or misery. What we can do in the world is subject to many realities of the times. But how we can be within ourselves is always a possibility. So what is always a possibility must be manifested. Whether you will run faster than Mr. Bolt or not. Whether you will climb Mount Everest or not. This is not the point. Those things are subject to individual tastes and individual likes and dislikes.
Starting point is 00:53:45 But will your experience of life on this planet be pleasant or not? At least this one thing we must determine that every human being's experience of life on this planet is pleasant. That much we must do and it's doable. What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? How big would you play if you knew that you could survive any heartbreak, any breakdown, any betrayal? What would you do if the things that you were afraid of you knew were absolutely nothing? They were all opportunities for you to get stronger in your faith, stronger in your resiliency. What would you do?
Starting point is 00:54:37 Who would you love? How big would you play? Where would you leap? And the bigger question is how would the world benefit differently? How would the world benefit differently because who you've decided to be? How would the world be a better place to live? Because fear didn't have you standing on the edge. What would you do if you were told that you get to do it afraid?
Starting point is 00:55:05 That you don't have to wait for the fear to leave? That when you get an action, the fear has to dissipate into the nothingness that it always was. What would you do? How would life be different? How would the world be a better place to live? I came to challenge you to play in the biggest field you've ever played in. I came for you to challenge the fear that might be inside of you and to redesign and reprogramming. You look at it long enough.
Starting point is 00:55:36 You be with it intimately enough and it has to dissipate. You are the designer of your destiny. You are the author of your autobiography. You write the story. of your life. No one can write your financial story. No one can write your spiritual story. No one can write your emotional story, but you. The pen has always been in your hand. The pen has always been in your hand. I say write a story that's going to be damn good to read. And when you do that, you will have to reprogram the fibers of your being. You will have to become someone you've never
Starting point is 00:56:14 been before. You want to go somewhere you've never gone? You got to do something you've never done. You got to say something you've never said. You got to go to a place in you that you've never even been. You get to redesign. You are your Michael Angelo. You are your greatest sculpture. And you get to recarve and you get to up-level as much as you need. You're not sentenced to this life this way. You chose it. Newsflash. You get to design it any way you choose. You're not sentenced to your future. You have an opportunity to your future.
Starting point is 00:56:52 What do you want? And how do you want it? And if it doesn't make you a little afraid, then you ain't playing big enough. Your knees are supposed to knock a little bit. Your teeth are supposed to chatter a little bit. They're supposed to be at least two butterflies in your stomach. At least. Because if not, you're playing inside your comfort zone.
Starting point is 00:57:10 And we mistake the fact that we're supposed to be comfortable, 24-7, well let me tell you something. Comfortable is equivalent to complacent. I'll choose inconvenience every day, any day to make a difference on the planet. I don't mind being mildly to moderately to significantly inconvenience to leave my fingerprint on this planet. So I just came to talk to the game changers and to the change agents who are willing to confront any part of you that's not speaking to your madly, wildly, wildly amazing future. confronted. I came to talk to the change agents that are interested in evicting any fear that doesn't speak to your wild future. I just can't. I came for that. I came for you to confront it, for you to get a little angry at it, for you to get a little pissed off at it. Say, wait a minute,
Starting point is 00:57:59 I've been letting you drive me all this time and you are a story that I made up about the future that doesn't even really exist. When you said I might get hurt in the next relationship, you made up a story about the future that doesn't even exist yet. And you're powerful. And any story you make up is true to you. But it's only true to you. And then you live out that story because you want to be right. You don't want to be wrong.
Starting point is 00:58:24 You want to be right. So you make up a story. You project it in the future. And then you live it out until it's true. See, I told you guys. I told you guys you'll work really hard to make that story right. I just want you to know that. So I just stop by to invite you.
Starting point is 00:58:39 to design a new story. I stopped by to remind you that the pen has always been in your hand. That no one else can write your story, but you. And I don't know about you, but I want to write a story that when I get ready to sit down in my final years and there's nothing else I could do, that I go back and I just want to read my story.
Starting point is 00:59:05 And I go, wow. I remember when I was afraid. And then I know on the next page, I jumped anyway. And then I read the next chapter and go, whoa, that really scared the heck out of me. And I know what's going to happen on the next page. I did it anyway. I want to write a story full of leaping and running and jumping and serving and playing full out and falling and skidding my knees and scraping my face and hurting my heart.
Starting point is 00:59:32 Because if that's the only way I can hurt and fall and scrape is to play full out, then I'll take the hurt. Because what I'm really afraid of and what you're really afraid of is getting to the end of your day, to the end of your life and having something left to give.

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