If you want to understand why most people never actually achieve their goals and really struggle to do anything great with their lives, you need to understand this.
Learned helplessness is a psychological condition where a person or animal learns to behave helplessly in a particular situation even when the opportunity to avoid or escape it is available.
It occurs after an individual has experienced repeated aversive stimuli, examples being pain or failure, that they cannot control.
As a result they come to believe that their actions have no effect on the environment and they give up trying to change their circumstances.
You probably know a few of these people.
You probably have that friend who believes they just can't do anything and it's kind of depressing because you just look at them and think like, dude, can't you see that this is possible if you look at it from a different angle?
That's a lot of what we're going to talk about but you see this everywhere online.
It just seems like people don't try anymore.
And there's a deep reason behind this, extremely deep.
They're presented with opportunities to start a business, meet new people, or change their life as a whole, and their unconscious, automatic, and programmed response is, sounds like a scam.
I can't do that because...but what if it doesn't work?
This is a critical flaw in their self development.
It's called selective skepticism.
Their mind and can't see a potential future where they do well.
Their beliefs trap where their thoughts can go in this small little bubble.
Their attention can't transcend the problem.
And if your decisions create your future, you can see that this only leads to a mediocre life.
So the brutal truth is this.
You haven't failed enough.
You gave up too soon and you didn't learn how to view failure as the only path to success.
Now, success is mostly about winning the internal battle between your lower and higher self.
It's a mind game. And you lose that game when you accept that negative outcomes for your life are the only outcomes.
You win this game, this mind game, when you cultivate a mind that can thrive in any situation.
So that's exactly what we need to learn how to do.
And I have a few tricks for you in this video.
The first is how to become a strategic thinker like the most successful people in history, so we'll break down the seven principles.
The second thing is how to simulate failure before you even start with the pre -mortem technique so you can prepare your mind to do hard things.
But first, before we do any of that, we need to start from ground zero, because you need the belief before you can actually act.
This video, the first one -third or half of this video is meant to reprogram your mind.
I'm going to try to install the right beliefs and ways of thinking about how your mind works so that when you actually go to create a strategy or achieve your goals, you can actually do it and your mind doesn't immediately think, I can't do that.
So let's get into that.
Let's get into winning the mind game.
And we'll start from a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, if I said that correctly.
What is your aim in philosophy to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle?
So you have a project that you want to complete, you have a goal that you want to achieve, you have some idea for a life that you want to live.
It could be making millions of dollars, marrying a person you couldn't see yourself without, losing weight, learning a skill, or anything else that leads to growth, because humans have an intrinsic desire to break out of one shell, then the next, then the next.
Now here's the thing, everything is a mind game within one big mind game.
In order to play the mind game, you must understand how the mind works.
from there you need to create a strategy to win that game.
You need to become a strategic thinker.
So we're going to go a bit deep before we talk about practical steps.
Because if you don't understand the root cause of why you fail to achieve big things, then the practical steps aren't going to help you at all.
You've already gotten all of the practical steps, you've watched all the YouTube videos, has it gotten you anywhere?
Maybe, maybe not. So stick with me and really try to understand this.
To start dissecting your mind so we can understand it, we need to understand the first thing, which is how your mind interprets reality.
Most people are pursuing the unconscious goals that their parents and society put into their head.
They are playing the game of being a useful worker rather than a free and fulfilled individual.
People try to play the game of starting a business or losing weight with the programmed mind of an employee or overweight person and wonder why they fail.
They don't understand that to achieve anything in life, you must become the person who both sees that as a possibility and has the skill to achieve it.
To reinvent yourself, you need to understand this.
The mind makes sense of the world in stories.
A story, or game, provides the mind with a frame to maintain order and clarity.
It gives you fulfilling steps to take toward the end goal, and if you don't understand the story you're living out, or the game you're playing, you can't make sense of your place in the world.
You lose purpose, entropy ensues, and you get lost in chaos.
How your mind interprets reality is largely dependent on your identity, or who you are, and your identity is a web of ideas, and goals, and beliefs, and values that act as this mental filter.
And as we'll discuss in a few minutes, there are nine stages of ego development, and each of those stages kind of comes along with goals, beliefs, and certain things that occupy your mind as you grow through them.
So a lot of the times when you are just starting out in self -development or any kind of development pursuing anything more in your life, your identity wasn't created by you, it was created by your environment, by your parents, society, the culture you grew up in.
Maybe the the religion you grew up in or the things you grew up watching on TV or the news and we'll learn how to overcome that but for now you need to understand that the mind selectively allows information into your mind and your goals, beliefs, your identity shapes that, it shows it shapes what your mind can perceive.
In a very poor example, one person's mind could be able to see this camera, another person's mind wouldn't be able to see this camera, but you can think of that as information.
Obviously, you can probably see this screen right now but the words coming through some people are just missing the point completely of what we're talking about here and they're going to continue to miss the point because their identity and how they interpret the information doesn't land in their head.
You notice information that helps you achieve your goals, you notice information that aligns with what's important to you or your values, you notice information that confirms your beliefs.
So two different people at completely different levels of development with different goals can both read the same book or watch the same video and come to completely different conclusions about it.
The thing there is that those conclusions, what you get out of something is then used to make decisions and those decisions compound into a life of success or failure because your choices create who you are.
You make more choices that creates who you are that that determines how you perceive reality in a certain way to more make more decisions and then it compounds over time.
Do you see why this is important yet?
You fail at almost everything you do because you fail to interpret reality in a way that provides you with the information you actually need to succeed in any given situation you can interpret it in 1000 different ways.
Maybe five of those interpretations will help you succeed but your mind can't comprehend those five ways yet.
You can't make progress because your mind rejects the information you need to make progress and this goes far beyond just getting information from a book or a YouTube video or a course what is your relationship with failure do you see that as the only source of reliable information to base your decisions on or do you see it as a reason to crawl back into your hole and give up do you not realize that growth is like being a lobster yes a lobster that it is It's painful to grow too big for your shell, and if you don't remove it, the pain only intensifies until death.
If you do decide to remove it, which most don't, you will be vulnerable, you will go through a period of building a new shell.
And the shell here, is your identity, by the way.
Almost all of your pain, insecurity, and lack of progress boils down to you being trapped in the shell of your lower self that is doing everything it can to stay the same.
You refuse to open your mind or remove your shell so you can actually see that a better life is possible.
Now your identity isn't some set -and -stone thing that you were assigned at birth, along with your name.
It's a living, breathing, and evolving entity.
You aren't helpless.
You've just learned to be.
So now we understand how the mind interprets reality on a surface level.
But now we need to understand how to reach a new level of mind.
How do we adopt these new goals, these new values, these new beliefs, so that we can interpret reality in a new expanded way to notice more information that helps us actually achieve the things we want to achieve.
So here there are nine different stages of ego development, ego, identity, self.
We're going to consider those synonymous for now.
It's your interpretive filter for the world.
It's your storytelling engine.
It's how you make sense of the world.
But this is a concept by Susan Cook Groitter - the nine levels of ego development.
It's one of her research papers.
So the first three stages fall within the preconventional category.
There's three categories.
There's pre conventional, conventional, and post -conventional.
So in the pre -conventional there's symbiotic, impulsive, and opportunist, but we're not going to go over these because most people grow out of these stages by the age of 10 to 12.
In these stages you're just dependent on others to fulfill your basic needs.
There's no distinction between self and other.
You just think others are there for you to fulfill your needs.
That's about 5 % of the population.
Now the conventional stages is about 75 to 80 % of the population, so most people that fail to achieve the things they want in life are within these conventional stages.
The first is the conformist stage, where your identity is defined by your relationship to a group, like high school students focused on popularity or bible thumpers who never question their beliefs.
Conformists base their decisions around what the group does and obey authority.
Now, this isn't limited to high school students or Bible thumpers, it's limited to people who just conform to the group and can't think for themselves.
The next stage is the expert stage.
So these are skill -centric engineering types or the average scientist.
They are good at tackling complex problems and working on tasks, but they're bad at identifying if they are working on the right task or they're also bad at shifting their focus once they realize they're working on the wrong tasks.
And usually this is because they are still chained to a specific ideology or belief system from their past that they were conditioned into.
The next stage is the Achiever Stage, so this is the quote and quote pinnacle of development for the Western world.
You can think of it as self -help and business -focused people who want to make a lot of money and achieve a high level of status.
So 80 % I would say of educational content on YouTube or any kind of social media is focused on this, even if the youtubers like Alex Hormozi aren't solely if they don't have to be the same level of mind as you, but when they're teaching how to make money, how to make money, and you're going to them out of this stress and survival to attain some high level of status rather than some deeper meaning behind it, which there's nothing wrong with this right, you, everyone goes through these stages.
Everyone pursues status at some point, everyone pursues vanity at some point, You go to the gym for vanity and stay for the therapy.
So this isn't bad. It's just good to understand these so you can identify, OK, I'm here and there is something more and I can reach another level.
And at that level, there's a better life waiting for me.
You can identify these people, the people in the conventional stages of development by just talking to them, because when you talk to them, it's like they're kind of regurgitating religious beliefs or it's like you're talking to a TV or a mainstream news channel or you're like haven't I heard all of this before and like one of those popular self -help books that's how you can kind of identify who they are.
The main characteristic here is they haven't developed the ability to expand beyond a popular worldview and think for themselves.
So it's like monkeys copying other monkeys and you fail at achieving the goals you want to achieve because you expect that monkey who achieved what you expect to be able to do the same exact thing as them without critical or deep thinking or solving complex problems, and it just backfires because that's not how the mind works.
Now, the next three stages are the post -conventional stages, and this is about 15 to 20 % of the population.
The next stage here is the pluralist stage, where you question your beliefs and values and begin to adopt new perspectives, like a religious person who becomes an atheist or a hippie, or a corporate executive that realizes that grinding on work they don't enjoy for the sake of status isn't worthwhile.
trial. The next stage is the strategist, where they realize intuition is more powerful than logic and rationality.
Exploration, discovery and self -actualization start to take priority over achieving more goals and making more money.
And they have a vision for what humanity could be and understand the generalized principles of reality.
Now the last -ish stage here is the construct aware stage where you tap into a fifth dimension of thinking, the cognitive dimension.
You can see how the mind constructs meaning and begin to integrate more perspectives And you think from a more abstract layer.
Now the final and bonus stage is the Unitive Stage Which is about 1 % of the population and just for the sake of brevity I would recommend that you go and research that yourself to see what it's all about.
Now the point here Is that at each level of development your mind interprets reality according to the goals beliefs etc of that stage Now, if you fail to achieve anything worthwhile in your life, it may be because you're trapped in one of the lower, quote -unquote conventional stages.
You conform to a group without knowing it and your mind makes it very difficult to release the grasp from that thing because, again, it's like a lobster.
The pain that starts to get there removing the shell is painful.
It makes you vulnerable.
You don't want to do it.
Your mind fights back.
Your ego fights back.
Now, the thing here, the really unfortunate thing here is that this isn't a get rich quick type thing.
It takes years to develop through these stages.
So you may not be able to achieve your goals this year or in two years, it takes a while to reach the pluralist strategist and construct aware stage that kind of allows you to view situations from multiple perspectives, to pull the best information in and make the right decisions.
So, the question here is.
Even if it takes years, it can be accelerated.
Ken Wilber actually found, I believe it was through research, either way, go research Ken Wilber, read his books, it'll change your life.
But he found that the simple act of meditation, 15 minutes of meditation a day or more drastically increases how fast you can improve through these stages.
So, that's step one to going up, is just meditate more, practice mindfulness dive into that domain.
But aside from that, how do you move up?
How do you increase your level of development?
So we've learned how the mind interprets reality, we've learned the levels of mind.
And now the third thing is that mistakes are the only source of truth.
So there are two types of growth.
There's horizontal and vertical.
Horizontal growth is expanding within the level of development you are in.
You are learning, acquiring skills, and acquiring knowledge.
Now, vertical growth is transcending to a new level after a period of struggle, pain or wrestling with your own beliefs to the point of needing to adopt a new perspective to view the struggle from a new light so that you can overcome it.
It's like Einstein said, or supposedly said that you can't solve a problem from the same level of mind that created it.
You have to transcend, and if you don't, you're stuck with that problem, and you won't achieve the polar end of a problem, which is a goal.
So the key to growth is just that, a continuous self -education, skill acquisition, and not numbing yourself from the pain or problems that spring up as you get further in.
You increase your level of development by making mistakes, realizing them, not ignoring them or suppressing them but leaning in to them, and self -correcting toward the evolving string of goals you are trying to achieve.
Now here's the main problem.
Most people try and try and try to just fail and fail and fail because they try to match someone else's map to their territory.
Courses, books, podcasts, teachings, advice.
They don't realize that these things are maps.
They are guides, not truth.
They are useful, but only if you understand that they are nothing but a candle off in the distance that guides you through a dark room.
They do not determine the direction of your steps or if you stumble into a pit of snakes.
Further, you do not have access to someone else's state of mind.
You do not have access to how they perceive the world.
world. You do not have their same exact identity.
So, this leads to one crucial and counterintuitive realization.
Mistakes are the only source of truth.
Not the thoughts in your head, not the advice of a billionaire.
Failure is the only teacher that is absolutely 100 % tailored to your situation.
Failure has a signal to noise ratio of 100 to 1, but you hate failure, you let it rule your life.
You ignore it, and dig your head into more courses, books and podcasts.
Yes, everything you learn that is not derived from mistakes is derived from theory.
It is derived from a map.
It is but a conjecture formed through the interpretation of mistakes made by another person.
And that leads to the question, how do you make better mistakes in the right direction and learn from those mistakes in a way that leads to success?
And lastly, for the end of this video how do you fail before you even start?
So you can start learning immediately.
And so now you understand the mind.
You understand growth.
You understand how you perceive the world, which is extremely important for, now, becoming a strategic thinker and creating a strategy for your future.
So we'll start with a quote from Lawrence Friedman.
Strategy is not a lengthy action plan.
It is the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.
And that's just the thing.
Most people's lives are mediocre due to a lack of strategic thinking.
Because most of them aren't in the strategist -stage, that sixth, seventh level of mind.
But you don't have to be there to create a strategy.
You can do that. You can create a strategy to get to any of those stages.
Now successful people, on the other hand, are highly strategic.
They don't just let life happen to them.
They reject the default path they were assigned.
They choose the game they want to play, both for their ideal life and the games that allowed them to get there.
They become the person that can win that game through skill acquisition and learning.
So, to win any game that you choose to play, you need a strategy.
Now, for all of this, I'm going to be speaking, but on the screen, I'm going to be filling out a template -slash -worksheet for creating your own strategy.
So, again, you can download that with the link in the description.
And if you decide to use Cortex for your note -taking, your second brain, for saving external highlights, for capturing ideas, for writing, for whatever it is that Cortex can help you with, if you download the desktop app on Mac or Windows, and you press alt or option C, what that will do is open up a floating chat window.
So as you're watching this video, you can take notes inside of there, or you can press option D and that opens up a floating note.
This has been one of the features that people really like about Cortex, so you can open up the strategy document floating next to you as you go about watching this video.
So now the first thing you need is strategic intent.
You need direction.
You need a new goal from which your mind perceives the world.
So first, think of everything that you hate about your current life.
The job, the body, your routine, how you feel, start somewhere.
And then second, think of a few potential possibilities for your future life.
Starting a business, being fit and energetic, living out YOUR ideal day.
Now don't dwell on this, and write a few things down and continue.
Choose the macro game you want to play.
Now the point behind step one, the first pillar of strategic thinking, which is strategic intents is to just create an aim an overarching filter something to work towards and this starts to frame your mind to notice the right information in alignment with that intent so you pick up the right information you aren't just going about learning certain skills blindly your intent frames what you learned go watch the last video on how to learn anything ten times faster than anyone to understand this better the second step is self -analysis because you need to understand yourself so that you can work with your
strengths and overcome your weaknesses.
Because with this, your identity clearly isn't serving you here.
That's why you're watching this video.
So to become aware of the different parts of your identity, we need to do a SWAT analysis, sw .o .t strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
So for strengths, what comes easy to you?
What are your strengths and talents?
And if you respond with a cop out answer of nothing like, Oh, I can't do anything.
I'm not good at anything.
feeling, you are lying, and already can't see past the reactions your lower self is feeding your mind to spit out like a robot.
Think harder. Now for weaknesses, what are you notoriously bad at, and how is it impacting your progress?
The third is opportunities for growth, what can help you overcome your weaknesses and leverage your strengths.
This could be learning skills, taking courses, meeting new people, etc. And last, threats, what threatens your progress?
This could be friends inviting you out to a party, a lack of time, a fear of failure, whatever it may be.
Now with all of this, you can come back to it and add to it over time, because these may not come to you right away.
You can't just think through all of these things.
So you may have to come back to this note.
And by the way, if you aren't writing this down in the template yet, I did actually improve the strategic advisor prompt from the last video.
So if you want to chat with AI for it to break down and rip apart your entire strategy, You can pop that into an AI tool as well and just ask it for feedback on your entire strategy so you can go to that chat all the time and share your progress and it will help you overcome blocks and give you clarity on what to do next.
And here's an example of what this prompt spattered out to me when I told it I wanted to build an audience.
So it gets pretty granular and very clear on what you need to do.
It's very helpful. Now the third step after understanding yourself is just strategic preparation.
So the question is how do you change your identity so that you act on your strategy with ease.
And you start by immersing yourself in a completely new environment.
You change the books you read, the information you consume, the people you follow, and everything else to reflect the goal you are trying to achieve.
You open your mind to new perspectives and allow them to challenge your beliefs of what's possible.
So delete most of the apps on your phone, unfollow most of the people you follow.
Buy three new books, cue podcasts to listen to on a walk, invest in resources to learn the skills you need to learn.
Have pre -written messages that declines your friends invitations to go out.
Anything that does not align with your goals is by definition a distraction.
You need an environment that is solely conducive to you achieving your goal.
Now step four is concentration of force, because we understand ourselves, we have the direction we want to go, we don't have any distractions around us, and we're ready to learn.
So, now, we need to focus our energy on the goal.
And as we discussed in the last video, the only way to actualize a goal is to build a real world project, that's the only way to learn as well.
So a project is a vessel for making mistakes and overcoming those mistakes in a structured way.
So, you write down three to five projects you could build to achieve the goal, you choose the highest leverage project that has the most advantageous outcomes, and you map out the three to five priority tasks you can do on a daily basis to make progress on the project.
So an example of this, if you're trying to quit the job you hate, then a project related to that is maybe building a personal brand or starting a weekly newsletter or just starting a business in general, it doesn't have to be content creation related.
But social media is like the highest leverage thing right now.
That's where you attract people to your work.
So I have to toss it in here.
But if you want to learn how to write in a way that builds an audience around your skills or interest than check out 2 hour writer.
So now we have a way to channel everything that we have into just daily execution so step five is that discipline, disciplined execution.
So you need to replace your old routine with a new one because you probably fell into your current routine without knowing it and if your actions create your future you are falling into a future without knowing it and it's probably not one you'll care about.
So you execute your three to five priority lever moving task for one to two hours in the morning or 1 -2 hours at night.
I think this should happen in the morning because I personally don't think that anyone is a night owl.
Everyone is bound to their circadian rhythm, and by staying up extremely late, that disrupts your health more than you could ever know.
Feel free to go down the circadian and light health rabbit hole.
If you were to wake up and go on a walk in the sun every day and get more sunlight, you would be a morning person.
The next everything you do throughout the day should fuel your work.
work, what you read, what you scroll, your conversations, going on walks instead of distracting yourself, eating well.
The only thing on your mind should be strategizing how to overcome obstacles of the game.
And this will become seamless once we create a pre -mortem soon.
Now step six isn't really a practical step, it's more of a mental step, it's adaptability.
Because a strategy is like everything else in life, it is not static, it evolves with feedback.
feedback, you need to be able to identify when things aren't working, go back to your strategy, and experiment with something new and remember mistakes are the only source of truth.
Experimentation is how you make mistakes.
Thus, experimentation is the only way to achieve what you want in life.
It's going to be uncertain.
Because anything that is certain isn't a mistake.
It's not the source of truth.
If it's certain, it's the map or theory of someone else.
Now step seven is another unpractical step, kind of a mental step where you need to study the general principles of both the strategy you're trying to execute and reality in general.
Now to get started on the reality portion I would recommend studying the philosophy of mind or hermetic philosophy, so read the book the cobalion for just the seven laws of the universe, just dive down that rabbit hole as well because those are like the fundamentals of reality in general and what's allowed but to achieve mastery in what you're doing you repeat the boring fundamentals, You live in a plateau for the most of your life and most people tried to escape that plateau By numbing their mind with cheap pleasures or cheap stimulation or food or scrolling on their phone And then they get trapped
there in that plateau.
They never continue to make upward progress Slowly because they want to achieve rapid progress really fast So you master the fundamentals when you are learning a skill or you're doing your priority tasks in the morning those are usually the basics, just done with taste and style so you need to continuously study those, refine those, practice those every single day.
For something like writing a newsletter or social posts it's the hook.
A lot of people fail in this regard and I see them fail because they start off by following the fundamentals and the principles of good writing and then they try to do it in their own voice in their own way and there's nothing wrong with that, you just have to bake your own voice into the principles.
You stopped writing compelling hooks, People stop paying attention.
People stop caring.
And then you got mad of like, okay, well people only like it when I'm this attention grabbing person.
You have to grab attention.
It's aside, the point.
Okay. Moving on. The pre -mortem technique.
How do you fail before you even start on this strategy so that you're much more likely to follow through with it?
Because that's most people's problems.
They just can't start.
So a quote from Michael Porter is that the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
So we need to figure that out because most people don't fail because they can't complete their project, they fail because of internal, psychological thought processes that take control of their focus and lead to the belief that success isn't possible.
So a few examples here are paralysis by analysis, by over -researching or not taking action, losing sight of the big vision due to others' opinions, lack of complementary skills like writing an audience building to be able to find customers for your work or your business whatever you're starting, financial insecurity to the point of accepting that you need to focus on the job you hate burning out and not having a coping mechanism that refreshes you getting bored with the mundane work that gets results the desire to do something fancy and high status instead of something that you enjoy or gets you
out of your situation because the thing here is that when you're in the middle of a project when you're deep in it, you're stressed your automatic when you're stressed your mind narrows further.
You're kind of temporarily regressed into a lower state of yourself.
It's like we go over those nine stages of ego development then you can be in the highest stage you can be construct aware, Unitive Master Mystic, but when your head is stuck in a bucket of water and held there you're going into survival mode and you're gonna kick and flail like an old caveman that's pinned by a beast and that's kind of what it's like being in the middle of the project you're so consumed by the project.
So the best way around this or at least to help with this is the pre -mortem.
A pre -mortem is a strategic thinking tool that identifies failure points in any project before it even begins.
So here's what you do, this is also included in the worksheet and I'll also show screen recordings on the screen of me filling it out.
The first thing is to imagine spectacular failure.
So visualize your strategy failing horribly.
What does it look like, and where does your life end up?
This is like the anti vision that I have talked about many times before.
We have the strategic intent, which is like the vision, and then we have the anti vision which just helps you frame that so much more.
The next thing is to list the causes of failure.
failure. So brainstorm all possible reasons for the failure.
Include psychological reasons like personal weaknesses, self -sabotage, lack of knowledge or skill, and external factors like not having enough money.
Then next, you prioritize that list of failures.
Reorganize the list and place the most threatening at the top.
Then last, you brainstorm solutions.
For each cause of failure, brainstorm potential solutions.
You can ask Kai or Cortex AI as strategic advisor to help with these.
So now you have all of this awareness, you understand how the mind works, you have a clear action plan to achieve your goal.
Now it's literally on you.
If you can't do it, it's because you're failing to integrate something that we talked about in this video.
So I hope all of that was helpful.
An update on Cortex, is that we're going to have more models going in, like clod 3 .7, chat, cpt etc. Mobile app is almost there, getting there.
Global capture is also almost getting there which is awesome.
So in short, with a keyboard shortcut you'll be able to press the keyboard and it will capture the link of anything that you're on, automatically transcribe that to your workspace so you have anything that you'd want to learn, all of your writing, all of your ideas in one place that you can reference and synthesize with AI.
So think of it as both an AI -powered note -taking and bookmarking tool, but it's actually useful because you can go back and find those bookmarks and use them for anything that you create.
So like, subscribe, let me know if you enjoyed this video, you can also find to our writer one person business launchpad with the links in the description.
Thank you again. Bye.
