Sometimes you need to hit rock bottom before you can receive the lesson life is trying to teach you.
The worst place you can be stuck is right before rock bottom.
Not painful enough to change, just comfortable enough to stay the same.
I'm glad that I got arrested in the summer of my freshman year of college.
What happened? You ask?
After my roommate's girlfriend left him for another guy he wasn't feeling too great.
He needed to slow down. The first available option to do that was, you guessed it, the magical green leaf that people indulge in.
Myself, my roommate and two other friends sat in my car in the parking garage across the street.
We laughed and joked until one of the friends looked in the rearview mirror and said, guys, there's a bike cop behind us.
That's not funny man, I responded trying not to freak out, but when I looked for myself, he wasn't lying.
Since this has nothing to do with reading, let's get to the point.
My roommate and I got arrested, we were booked, questioned about who sold us the drugs, and sent back home that night.
The next morning, I didn't think of it, but months later in 2016, when I was back home working my summer job as a lifeguard, I found a letter in the mailbox.
It had a government sigil on it.
Before I had time to think, my heart sank into my stomach.
My parents weren't home, so I ran inside and opened it.
I had two options. One is go to court and probably become a convicted felon for smoking an illicit drug on a school campus, or two, enroll in a drug diversion program where I'm tested every week on a random day.
Oh, and the program costed a few thousand bucks that I did not have as an incredibly burl college student.
My mind was shattered to pieces.
Every negative outcome rolled through my mind like film.
I didn't know what to do, I couldn't tell my parents, I didn't have the money, I couldn't become a felon.
My life was just starting.
All of this for smoking and laughing with my friends?
Really? The worry turned to anger, the anger turned to defeat.
Then, an idea. I was into fitness at the time and I remembered a book recommendation from a YouTuber I enjoyed learning from.
It was called The Power of Now.
Spirituality? That's for hippies.
But I was desperate. I would do anything to help my mind navigate the situation.
So, every single morning for about an hour at a time, I would sit on my patio and drink a terrible cup of coffee.
My uncle at the time would drink the coffee in the blue container, kind of like Folgers, but it was the blue one.
And he had this into it. He loved that stuff.
He would not shut up about it.
It's just the gas station coffee that he liked.
And I kind of grew to enjoy it, but that's what I'd do.
As I read the book, the lessons hit hard.
So hard that I couldn't help but imagine how much knowledge I had been missing out on for the rest of my life.
Knowledge that could have given me the tools to live a better life.
The funny thing is, is that if I hadn't had hit rock bottom, the lessons wouldn't have hit the same.
My mind wouldn't have received those lessons.
I would have just thought it's a stupid hippie book for spiritual people.
But the cool thing here is that you don't have to hit rock bottom for it to have the same effect on you.
Before this time, the last books that I actually chose to read were things like the Magic Treehouse series or the Alex Ryder series, because those were just genuinely interesting to me.
And then in high school, as many of you know, you're forced to read specific books that you may or may not care about.
They aren't books that you chose to read.
Maybe you liked them. Maybe you didn't.
The people who did like them probably grew up with a reading habit and sustained that habit.
People who didn't enjoy them probably just grew to hate reading.
And that's just the point.
Schools probably made you hate reading, and thus they made you hate learning.
If you hate learning, it's safe to say that you have lost a lot of zest for life.
Learning is a fundamental human drive.
Without it, activities aren't as enjoyable, conversations aren't as meaningful, your days feel repetitive and lifeless.
You don't see your future changing much from the present.
But what if I told you there's a life changing habit hiding right under your nose?
The problem is that most people are still clones of the school system.
They're on a life trajectory that they didn't set.
If you want to create a fulfilling career, have better relationships, become more intelligent, rediscover life's depth, and slow down in this busy distracted world.
Read. Reading is how you acquire new knowledge.
Reading is how you expand your worldview.
Reading is how you spot new opportunities.
Reading is how you train your focus.
Reading is how you absorb ten years of experience in eight hours.
When you're bored, pick up a book, not your phone.
You don't need a reason to read.
You don't need a reason to change your life.
You don't need a reason to spend your time on this earth being focused, fulfilled, and clear-headed.
But as we all know, that's not the reality of the modern world.
Let's start with the fact that most people don't realize what they're missing out on.
Now, stick with me because this may get abstract, but if you understand the lessons, their effects can be profound.
The first reason to read is that you can only cook with what's in the fridge.
I got this from another channel.
If you just look up reasons to read, you'll find that channel.
Those are the only types of videos that he creates.
Your mind won't notice new life-changing opportunities if it doesn't have the goals that open your mind and expand your awareness.
If you surround yourself with people who want to acquire certain credentials, like a college degree to get a high-paying job, your mind will only notice information and ideas that help you reach that goal.
But if you were to consciously reeducate yourself with new books, you would be exposed to novel ideas that allow you to create new goals for yourself.
Your awareness surface area expands.
You begin to connect new ideas in your life.
You notice an opportunity that you wouldn't have cared about or noticed before that motivates you to start something like a business.
Then and only then can your mind notice higher-level ideas that allow you to see progress in that domain.
So, if you are introduced to the idea of starting a business and you have the information from the book that connected the ideas in your mind that gives you clarity to actually act on that, you start acting and then from there, you make a bit of progress.
So, you're in the beginner stage and then you can start to notice intermediate-level strategies that would have just been annoying things popping up on your feed before.
You'd see Alex Hormozzi videos or potentially my videos or anything on social media saying like, here's how you land a client with this specific strategy.
Here's a sales strategy.
Here's this. All of the content, the good educational content is closed off to you until you actually start the thing.
And this goes for more than just social media content.
This goes for anything.
And once you start doing that, once you start paying more attention to that content on social media, you start to reprogram your mind because the algorithm starts to show you more of that content.
So, you're further conditioned into a better identity of starting a business and seeing progress and not going down the conventional path.
So, social media and the algorithm can be either used to enforce very bad habits or very good habits.
The point is this. Life probably passes you by because you are exposed to the same information day after day.
Life hasn't changed much for you since you achieve the goals society set for you.
You can only cook with what's in the fridge.
And if your fridge doesn't expand, you eat the same boring meal every single day.
Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
That can actually be a very good thing for when you're on like a diet and you need to eat the same thing every day to maintain clarity in your mind.
But if you're eating the same mental junk food every single day and you're gaining mental fat, or if you're eating the same regular junk food every day and you're gaining actual fat, that's not a good thing.
Now, with this same phenomenon, when the algorithm changes for you and you start to notice more of that information, or when you just start down a new path in life, it compounds more than just that.
Conversations with your friends start to shift.
Your search history goes from something you probably shouldn't be searching to things like best business models of 2024.
Then you get a little taste of what life could be.
You will probably fail the first time around and the second, as that's just how it goes.
But your potential will always be there.
Even if you quit, it won't stop nagging you.
There's no going back. The thing with this is, and why this is happening is that the goals that your mind operates on have fundamentally changed.
They've changed from what your parents, teachers, and society have assigned to you and programmed into your brain to something that you chose to do through discovery, through reading, and finding an opportunity that you can act on for yourself that you found, right?
That's the entire difference is discovered versus assigned or chosen versus assigned, but you have to discover it first in order to choose it.
So the point again, you need a new goal, you need to self educate to reach that goal.
That simple process alone will be responsible for much of the joy in your life.
True education is about curiosity and discovery, not memorization and conformity.
And just as a subtle plug, many of you know, we're building a second brain app called Cortex for writers and creators, but really it's for anyone.
But the entire point of it is to create your fridge or to have a database of intellectual property that is your own.
We help you store ideas, cultivate your own ideas and discover new ideas through connections, we are building a brain for you to have.
So I'm just teasing that because public launch or soft public launch is aiming for mid September, but full public launch probably won't be until November.
So if you're interested in that, check the link in the description, join the email list, and you'll be notified.
Point number two, point number one was you can only cook with what's in the fridge.
Point number two is that the mind is a muscle that must be trained.
Many people obsess over physical health, but rarely care about mental health.
Well, they care about mental health, but use band-aid solutions to solve their disorder and consciousness.
Mental health is about sense making, understanding and clarity.
Anxiety and depression, even if they stem from a chemical imbalance, I'm not saying this will cure it, are the product of a narrow mind focused on a familiar past or predictable future, often negative.
So whether it's the chemical imbalance causing you to focus on something so narrow and not being able to see the big picture to make sense of the situation that you're in, that's where anxiety overwhelm all of these negative things stem from.
It's when you are solely focused on the negative thing, meaning you can't see the puzzle.
You're focused on one pixel of a beautiful image and that pixel just happens to be blurred and pixelated and ugly.
And so you're like, what is going on until you zoom out and you see the beauty of everything.
When you feel lost, it's usually because you're in a chaotic life situation that you don't have the knowledge or skill to make sense of.
You can't see a way out. You aren't where you want to be because you can't lift the mental weight that allows you to get there.
You don't have the knowledge or skill that allows you to be in that position in life.
The mind is the operating system for reality and most people are running on Windows 98.
Many others have devolved into a pager that beeps when they need to have a negative reaction to something that challenged the lines of government rhetoric in their software.
You change your life by reprogramming your mind.
Read more books that challenge your beliefs, expose you to how much you don't know, and encourage you to change your behavior in a way that benefits your own life and others.
Don't expect to do a mental 315-pound bench press on your first try.
Pass over the ideas you don't understand.
Your mind will slowly connect the dots because that's just what the subconscious mind does.
So number one is that you can only cook with what's in the fridge.
Number two is the mind is a muscle that must be trained.
Number three is that the best way to end bad habits is to replace them.
You can only have so many habits in your day.
One for your mind, one for your body, one for your work, one for your relationships, minimum.
If you were to stop right now and audit your day, how many of the habits you unconsciously performed are actually helping your future.
When we observe society, it's easy to assume that the number is close to zero.
That means zero of the habits that you don't know that you are doing are helping your future.
From there, it's even easier to assume that one, they aren't happy and two, they will be the same person in the same position with the same mind in 20 years.
That's not pretty. Everyone knows that staring at a TV at night, soaking in that unnatural blue light that is probably contributing to skin cancer because you are also avoiding sunlight and melanin production that helps prevent that without getting burned.
A lot of nuance to that. That's a very deep topic.
Go on an esoteric search for light health, but we all know that isn't good staring at a screen.
In that case, swapping that habit with reading could make you see a dramatic change in your mental health and it could just potentially save your life in the future.
I know I'm exaggerating here, but it's a potential.
Bad habits aren't just bad because they take away time from having good habits.
They slowly erode every other aspect of your life.
Bad habits aren't neutral in their effect.
They are exponentially bad just as good habits when consistent are exponentially good.
It's like as they would say, 1% better every day.
The power of tiny gains, like this image of James Clear's graph from his book, Atomic Habits.
The one thing that I would disagree with here, I understand the math works out where it's like 0.99 to the power of 365 equals 0.03.
I understand that you'd like plateau.
I'd argue it's not that simple.
It compounds. Like if you're gaining weight, more weight, more weight, more weight, you don't just like plateau.
Like you just keep eating more until you decide to reverse it.
It's either you get very fit and then it kind of plateaus.
I feel like it's kind of the opposite.
But if you keep gaining weight, it's so much harder to dig yourself out of that hole.
And that's more that goes for more than just gaining weight that goes for any life situation.
You just tack on all of these responsibilities and little things that make it so hard to dig out.
The questions now are, what do I read that makes me want to adopt this habit?
How do I read to get the most out of this habit?
And what are some tactics I can use to make this habit change enjoyable?
It's not if you read, it's what you read and how you read it.
Have you ever contemplated the meaning of the word intention?
It's rather powerful if you use it as an operating principle for your life.
In Latin, intentio means to strain, stretch or stretch out.
So to live an intentional life, what are you stretching towards?
What are you struggling for?
Like a muscle being stretched and strained to build muscle, endurance and strength, living with intention is how you build muscle in the mind by simply engaging with life.
Because of that, it becomes much more meaningful.
When you stretch towards a goal that you choose, your mind demands nutrition to fuel that growth.
Then and only then can books help you.
If you aren't doing anything unconventional with your life, reading won't help you much.
At a minimum, the intention to change your life must be there.
Intention signals a mind that's ready to receive instead of react.
So why is this necessary?
Because every single person interprets a book differently.
One person with the goal of becoming a better CEO can read philosophy and the ideas will be applicable to his endeavors.
Another person can want a better relationship, read the same book, and see progress in that domain.
With that, any book, conversation, article, or information can help you achieve a goal.
You don't have to limit what you read.
But there are types of books that will help you much more than choosing something random.
So the first type of book to read is just one that challenges you.
A challenging book is the perfect metaphor for diving into the unknown.
You don't know what to expect.
You have difficulty making sense of it all.
But you take it one step or one page at a time.
Things start to make sense.
It feels good. You make connections.
Dopamine spurts into your brain and progress is being made.
Soon enough, you can't put the book down.
The ideas are life changing.
Your mind is flooded with potential.
I should start that business.
I should learn that skill.
I shouldn't be distracted right now.
I'll go on a walk instead.
A challenging book teaches you more than just the ideas in the book.
It teaches you one of the most important processes of life.
Progress. You begin to understand that progress is not linear.
Nothing happens, then everything happens.
One moment, you're lost in the darkness.
The tension builds until the star explodes and creates atomic nuclei that spreads across the galaxy.
All of the little candles you lit along the way start to light up the room as a whole, allowing you to see that new domain of life with clarity and focus.
A challenging book won't always make sense.
That's obvious. It will overwhelm you.
And it's silly to think that you're not supposed to feel overwhelmed when you're learning something new.
Realize that confusion and overwhelm mean your mind is searching for answers and trying to learn.
Don't stop it. So the first type of book to read was reading a challenging book.
The second follows a Naval quote because I love Naval, which goes, read what you love until you love to read.
Because the principles of habit formation apply to more than just books.
When you get started in the gym, it's stupid to go in blindly, hopping to random machines hoping that you will enjoy the process.
First, you research programs that align with your goals in life.
If you're a busy person, a six-day high-volume bodybuilding split probably won't be enjoyable for you, but a three-day minimalist program would be perfect.
Some will argue that's not optimal for muscle growth, but your goal isn't only muscle growth.
You choose the program that is optimal for your goals, not someone else's.
That's a really important point is that everyone is trying to follow these optimal routines and teachings online, where it's like, what's the best gym routine to make the most muscle?
What is the best morning routine to get the most work done?
That's fine, but you're only paying attention to one goal in your life.
And if you don't have other goals, then you're just, it's the same thing as society assigning you a goal and you not being yourself or doing what you want.
You have to understand your own values and goals and what you're trying to achieve in life.
Then and only then can you choose a goal to pursue and start to experiment with different processes to actually do that thing.
And what you may now understand is like, you're looking up a program to build the most muscle or lose the most fat.
But if that doesn't account for the context of your life or your situation and really take that into account, so the program is tailored to you, you're not going to be able to be consistent with it.
You're not going to be able to adhere to it.
Therefore, it's not optimal and you're not going to gain the most muscle.
If you were to go with something less optimal, quote unquote, in the general sense that fits your lifestyle to perfection, you're going to build more muscle, you're going to adhere to it for the long term and consistency is key with that.
So that's the entire game of life is lifestyle design and picking the very few habits and routines around those habits that you can perform day after day for the rest of your life to become exponentially the person you want to become.
But even then it goes beyond that.
Once you have the program, you may get into the gym and realize that you just don't like a certain exercise.
And so you decide to skip leg day all the time.
And so this is your chance to take it even further and make it unique to you, make the process or routine unique to you.
And so when you're going to the gym and you don't like a certain exercise, that is your that's a problem, right?
Identifying problems.
It's all just problem solving all the way down all the way up.
So you have to solve that problem.
So you start researching potential exercises that you can experiment with.
And now when you go into the gym, you have something fun to try, you're looking forward to it.
And even if you don't like it, you just swap it out again.
So not only now, if you're not just hopping from random machine to random machine, when you go into the gym, and that's causing chaos in your mind, you are going into the gym, you know what to do, you know what to try, you're going in with confidence, you're clear, you're not focused on what other people are thinking of you, you have exercises that you're looking forward
to do. That's check number two for getting into flow and actually enjoying the process.
And because of that, you see progress faster, which is feedback, and more flow, more enjoyment, so you get obsessed with it, and you stick to the process, you don't just start a habit and go in blindly and not know what you're doing and end up hating the process.
The same thing goes for reading.
So like exercises in the gym, you need to choose books that truly interest you.
And if they don't interest you, you need to be quick to experiment and swap it out and just not read anymore, or not do the exercise anymore.
But that's not to say you skip leg day as a whole, you keep doing leg day, but you find an exercise that you like to do.
So that was number two is read what you love until you love to read.
Number three is read books that make you more intelligent.
What is intelligence? Intelligence is not about how much you know, it's about how much you understand.
And since I supposedly can't stop using the vault quotes, if you understand it, you don't need to memorize it.
If you don't understand it, you don't want to memorize it.
Intelligence is holistic.
When we say someone is very intelligent, what we mean is that they have a higher ability for holistic pattern recognition.
They can make sense of the world by connecting the dots, they have a deep sense of insight that leads to intuition, allowing them to make intelligent decisions.
On that note, intelligence is not book smarts.
Book smarts are often used as the disguise to overanalyze risk and not act on anything or do anything with your life or pursue a new goal or dive into the unknown.
That is quite dumb. So by doing that, you become narrow minded on the risk, and you can't see anything outside of it.
So you're only focused on the risk, you only talk about the risk.
That's all there is you program yourself into a stupid identity, not intelligent at all.
Intelligence is not getting trapped in parts, but swimming in holes.
Someone who has studied a popular business strategy may be effective at that.
But the person who has a deep understanding of business as a whole, big picture, will be able to create their own strategy and sustain their success regardless of how the industry changes.
Intelligence stems from generalism, not specialism.
Being a specialist often puts you in direct competition with other specialists, confining your mind to that specialist frame prevents you from learning and connected domains that allow you to be creative.
Intelligence is holistic, creative and metaphysical.
So what are the best books to read that cultivate that sense of intelligence?
Books that open your mind, books on holism, creativity and metaphysics.
As many of you know, I love Alan Watts, and he is an incredible example of being able to connect the universal to the practical.
So here's a long quote of his.
And these basic ideas I call myth, not using the word myth to mean simply something untrue, but to use the word myth in a more powerful sense.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
Now, for example, a myth in a way is a metaphor.
If you want to explain electricity to someone who doesn't know anything about electricity, you say, well, you talk about an electric current.
Now, the word current is borrowed from rivers, is borrowed from hydraulics.
And so you explain electricity in terms of water.
Now, electricity is not water, it behaves actually in a different way, but there are some ways in which the behavior of water is like the behavior of electricity.
And so you explain it in terms of water.
Or if you're an astronomer and you want to explain to people what you mean by an expanding universe and curved space, you say, well, it's as if you had a black balloon.
And there are white dots on the black balloon.
And those dots represent galaxies.
And as you blow the balloon up, uniformly, all of them grow and grow farther apart.
But you're using an analogy, the the actual universe is not a balloon with white dots on it.
That, my friends, is intelligence.
Now, a lot of people also ask for my reading list.
So let's give seven books that I can't stop reading.
These are ordered in a sense where I feel like they will lead to the most pattern recognition.
And the reason I recommend these is because I'm a firm believer that reading the same five books that truly impact you is worth 50 books of knowledge.
The thing here is, and especially relating to Alan Watts is that I used to fall asleep listening to Alan Watts lectures on YouTube.
This is why I love YouTube premium is because you can just turn off your phone and listen, right?
I could literally feel my mind opening.
Life was better because of that.
I noticed more in life. When I listened to Alan Watts, he was so good at just like making you zoom out and forget about all of your worries.
And so that's what big picture thinking or opening your mind is.
Those, these are the types of books that I recommend if they can cause this for you continue reading them because they just lead to a better life simply by the fact that they open your mind that is so much deeper than we think it is.
This is also why I create incredibly long newsletters or incredibly long videos is because I'm not trying to narrow your mind on one specific task or goal or whatever it is in a 15 to 20 minute long video.
I'm trying to give your mind ideas to attach to all of the little ideas that 90% of people will think are just useless in this video telling me to cut the fluff.
The 10% of people they will take all of these different little ideas and it will open up room for more opportunity in their life.
You come here to learn about reading, but you are completely changing the ideas that your mind operates on.
And a lot of people that watch these are just writers and creators like I teach in my courses.
So people are looking for ideas and I'm giving them to them.
You can take these ideas and you can build on them.
And this is another reason we're building cortex.
The second brain software is to allow you to write with connected ideas.
So I'm not going to read through this, but you can see this testimonial from someone in our boot camp.
The boot camps closed. I'm not trying to pitch you on that right now.
I'm just trying to show you that there is such a thing as multidimensional writing or interconnected writing or just articulation or being able to do this, right?
This is a skill that can be trained as open mindedness and making connections and using that to write.
And I would argue that Alan Watts would be a customer of cortex when it's live.
So here are the books that I read and reread often.
One is the art of impossible by Steven Kotler, a practical and scientific book on achieving the impossible flow by Mihalych accept me high for understanding how to sustain enjoyment in your life.
A brief history of everything by Ken Wilbur to make sense of the world in a holistic manner.
Awareness by Anthony de Mello, a refreshing and humorous series of lectures to help you not take life so seriously.
Becoming Supernatural by Joe Dispenza, which is potentially pseudoscience on but nonetheless impactful in its lessons changing your life by breaking the cycle of repetition in the familiar and the known.
Number six is the caballion by the three initiates, which is an introduction to hermetic philosophy and the patterns of reality.
Some say this is not a good book for hermeticism, but I enjoyed it quite a bit and feel like it's a good starting point.
Number seven is the way of the superior man by David Data, who is a student of Ken Wilbur, writing on masculine and feminine dynamics and spiritual growth.
My life would not be the same without these books.
And my book, the art of focus is kind of a synthesis between all of these because these books that I continue rereading, they shape my worldview.
So those are the ideas residing in my head.
So that's another point is that if you want to be more intelligent, smart, open minded, or whatever traits you want to have, you should cycle through the five to seven books that really change your life in that manner so that they can slowly become your worldview because worldview is just a web of ideas.
Another thing is that if you've read my book and felt it was rather dense or you just didn't get it, I would encourage you to read those seven books that I presented earlier as they could be considered a primer for it.
Here's how Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, reads five books a month.
One is choose more interesting books.
Two is schedule reading sessions like you schedule exercise.
Three is form a ritual and make it more enjoyable.
Four is do closing pushes to finish books in one sitting.
Five is take everything interesting off your phone.
In short, Cal Newport is an expert at removing distractions and making room for things that are more meaningful.
So you can take that and run with it.
And if you don't know what a closing push is, it's like when you have 50 pages left, then you just sit down and knock it all out at once, right?
Or if it's 100 pages, right?
So if your normal reading sessions are like 15 minutes, then you're going to stick it out for an hour that day to finish the book because no one ever finishes books.
So here's what I do. One is hunt for an idea or two, then put it down.
Because what I've noticed is that most books, you can get the gist of most books within the first two to three chapters.
Like that's how books are structured.
It goes from big picture.
So holistic, the entire book, what are we going to talk about to technical details, which is the process or actionable steps to get there.
So if you're looking for a process or actionable steps, then read further in the book.
If you're looking for exactly what that book is promising, then read the entire book.
If you're just looking for an idea is or to solve one problem in your mind, all you really need are the first two to three chapters of really any book to get the gist of it.
The second thing I do is to just go on a walk and listen to an audio book because I treat my walks as creativity blocks.
A lot of people struggle with the fact that they're just in their house.
They don't realize that everything is a distraction.
The reason that you don't feel like sitting down to read or you have so much resistance against it is because little distractions are popping into your head and you don't even realize it.
So go outside, put in your headphones, download audible, listen to a book.
And I'm sure there's some science behind this.
I've noticed it, but just moving your body and walking probably makes your brain more receptive to ideas.
The third thing that I do occasionally is to rotate different topics and genres for pattern recognition.
So I often read three books at a time, one physical, one Kindle, and one audio book.
I read it on physical to start to get the gist of it in the first few chapters.
If I feel like I want to highlight it and save it for later, then I download it on Kindle and I start reading back through, start highlighting things.
So those are saved to read wise, the app that saves the highlights, those are imported to my cortex.
So I can reference them later in my writing, like when you see the quotes in these videos pop up.
And then the audio book, I'll either listen to maybe a fiction book or I'll listen to the book that I'm reading digitally so that I can just repeat the ideas and understand them more and catch things that I didn't catch while actually reading it.
And so what this does is it allows my mind to have an array of ideas, big ideas, not just like a million social posts worth of ideas, I'm talking three big ideas.
So I can connect the dots between them.
The fourth thing you can do is to just have books lying everywhere.
So what you're doing is embracing the chaotic creative lifestyle.
You leave books on your desk, you leave books in the toilet, not in the toilet.
Yeah, you leave books on the kitchen counter, you leave it on the patio, you leave it, you have a bookshelf just in site, you leave it on your nightstand, etc.
So anywhere you go, there's at least that little temptation to figure out what the words on the page say.
Number five is to create a reading space that you love.
As I said earlier, I used to sit on my patio and read, I still do that, I just like to have a nice cup of coffee so I can take little breaks and like read along with it, or I'll have my lunch or something like that whenever I'm doing something where I would normally watch YouTube or scroll social media, I try to replace it with a book.
And my goal is to just find one good idea.
That's it. Reading without writing is like eating without training.
The excess gets stored as mental fat, and you begin to feel sluggish, tired and overwhelmed.
Writing equals organized thinking.
Organized thinking equals effective communication.
Communication equals how to get what you want out of life.
Reading will only take you so far.
We've all met that person who has all the ideas in the world, but they haven't built anything worth following or paying for.
Why are you reading? Why have you made it this far in this video?
For some, it's about status.
You want to say you've read a lot so you can seem like you're doing something with your life to impress others.
That's fine, but if you haven't created anything that benefits humanity, the pursuit of status will leave you hollow.
You don't need to identify as a writer to start writing.
You, as a human, are a creator.
You build tools and solutions from the knowledge you acquire to survive and evolve, quite different from animals.
You already write every day, it's inherent to the human experience.
Writing is how we, as a species, survive.
We curved into rocks and wrote on papyrus to immortalize information that others can use to make progress faster and avoid dangers.
No other species has done that.
The ability to write is your edge.
And even further, people are passing down writing in the digital world now.
So if you actually have a goal and are able to focus when you go online, that can change your life.
You can find any information, but if you're just like being thrown around because you can't focus, you can't identify signal, you're drowning in noise because you don't have a goal or something to build and something to work towards that you can apply the information to, you're missing out on what technology has allowed for and you having any and all information at your
fingertips. That's only a bad thing if you can't focus.
You already write emails, texts and notes to keep your mind from going insane with the abundance of information that comes along with technological progress.
Thanks to the internet, anyone can now write at scale, build an audience and make a living with whatever skills or interests they cultivate that their audience can benefit from.
Now let's talk about where to write because when I was a kid, I always imagined that I would write a book.
I always wanted to. Then I forgot about it for 10 years in exchange for what I was told to do, which is go to school, get a job.
And that's what I did. That didn't really sit well with me at the time.
Like I knew that there was something more is like this inner voice that was just like, Hey, dude, like everyone's doing this, you can probably do something else, but it's just so uncertain.
So you do it anyways. Now, a lot of people tell me that they want to write a book, and that's awesome.
And a lot of people also tell me that they just want to do something else rather than the conventional path or plan that society set out for you.
The problem is that most people have these dreams, but they don't do anything that signals that they're trying to reach those dreams.
They put things off until they think it just happens the moment they decide to do it.
They think they just write a book the moment they decide to write a book.
They don't realize that to write a book, you need a plethora of prior ideas, you need to have iterated on so many freaking ideas.
They don't realize that to do your own thing, you need people who are willing to pay you for it.
Both require you to sit at your keyboard and type words in a specific sequence to reach that result.
For most people, the most affordable and accessible route to do this, thanks to technology, as this is only possible at this point in evolution, is on social media.
So think about this. If you want to be a writer, and most things on social media are writing, either if they're in a design or as a video script, or just as a tweet or a text on an Instagram post, you're writing.
How do you build an audience by attracting them to that writing?
So if you want to do something with your life, you need an audience.
If you want to write a book or write anything, or even build a product, you need to write, you need ideas to include in that thing.
Videos are just composed of ideas, then that turns into writing or video.
Anything ever that you create is composed of ideas.
So it just makes sense to start writing short and test the ideas and have them validated by the market, aka engagement on your phone and gaining an audience.
Then you set yourself up.
You have ideas that are profitable and you have an audience that wants that thing.
So you write short posts and threads to gain an audience, and then you start nurturing that audience with longer form newsletters.
And then before you know it, you have thousands of posts and hundreds of newsletters that are what create a book.
That's what a book is, like how atomic habits started out as one blog post or actually a large series of blog posts and how James Clear, he built an email list that allowed him to sell so many freaking copies up front.
He didn't need a publisher, even though he has a publisher.
He didn't need one social media and personal brands, or if you want to think about it in the way that it is, is just putting yourself online and open to everyone open for business.
If you do that, you don't need a publisher to write a book.
You don't need a record label to create music.
You have an audience. You are the audience.
You don't need someone to give you the audience.
That's not the only path you can take.
I'm well aware of that, but it is a very accessible path and it's one that everyone, yes, everyone can take.
So now what do we write about?
We talked about where to write.
Now what do we write? You don't need to pick a niche.
You are the niche. If you want to watch a video on that, go watch the most profitable niche is you.
Your unique goals in life frame how you interpret and notice information around you.
When you read, you notice a completely different set of ideas than another person who reads the same book.
Your mind automatically tells you which ideas are important for your future.
So you write about ideas that help you achieve your goals.
You write about your goals and how you are achieving them so you track people with those same goals.
That's your niche, people who want to improve.
That combination alone makes you unique.
Stop focusing on your target audience or what niche to go into.
Start focusing on the essence of both of those.
You are trying to attract people you can help.
You can help people who have the same goals as you.
You write about the ideas, opinions and advice that give people the firepower to achieve those goals.
Then if you want to create a product or service to monetize the audience or just to round out your business or become a person who is in control of their income, digital economics, link in the description can help you with that.
That also has writing advice in it and teaches you that skill as well.
So we know where to write.
We know what to write. Now how do you write?
Naval treats Twitter as his note-taking platform.
He reads a book, finds an idea and shares it from his own perspective with his audience.
He finds the idea impactful so he's sharing it with the world and allows others who find it impactful to follow him because that's what an idea is.
An important idea that you find important helps you achieve a goal.
So if you're struggling like, oh, I don't know what goal to help people achieve.
I don't know what goal I'm achieving.
Just focus on ideas. It's that simple.
Stop thinking about your niche.
Stop thinking about everything.
Get ideas. Share them. That's it.
That's how you build a business.
Simple. Hunt for ideas.
Share ideas. A beautiful flow of information that benefits both yourself and others.
Aside from that, impactful writing is about behavior change.
Your job is to write arguments that persuade, not force or deceive people to make better decisions.
That's how you contribute to humanity because humans, our edge is to change the flow of evolution.
So you are either digging yourself into a hole and the people around you into a hole, or you are helping yourself, improve and raise your consciousness and evolve and passing down the lessons that allow other people to do this.
Or you are helping yourself and raising your consciousness and improving yourself and passing down the lessons to help those that are similar to you or can relate the most to you because that's how you learn the best from is someone who's in a relatively similar personality or position as you.
And so you're either raising consciousness or you're decreasing consciousness and it's a ripple effect of those around you.
And then the digital world that is amplified.
The best way to think of this is writing to yourself.
All of my posts and newsletters are to me.
My profile is my public journal.
I convince myself to make better decisions like to read more so those ideas get enforced as a part of my identity, a better more holistic identity.
If you get stuck writing about shallow and myopic topics like getting laid or making a quick buck and never thinking beyond that you will become that shallow and myopic.
I'm not saying don't write about these things.
I'm saying cultivate a philosophy of depth and meaning behind them through education and experience.
Write to your past self and encourage them to improve.
Show them how. Write to your present self and program them to do better.
Write as your future self and give your current self advice.
When you read, take notes of ideas that stick out to you.
Take note of aha moments.
Take note of actual advice you can experiment with and make your own.
And remember you aren't only sharing ideas you get from books.
Often you use those ideas to achieve your goals and share the mindset and skill set that helped you achieve them.
Writing doesn't have to be complicated as we discovered.
You don't need my two hour writer course or anything like that.
You don't need cortex to help you out.
These are simply tools and systems that allow you to experiment and potentially do it better.
So you get more results from it and you get to move through the trial and error process faster.
That's what passing down your teachings allows humanity to do.
That's how we evolve. That's why now we have calculators that can spit out a number super fast.
We don't have to do it manually anymore.
This is why we have website builders rather than a 10 person team to build a website in the past because the coding language wasn't as efficient.
So if you don't want the education in templates and you just want to write, you really enjoy writing, then that's perfectly fine.
That's awesome. Actually, it's a great habit to get into.
If you want to do something faster, then potentially check out the course because it can help you.
And if this is something that is tied to your future income in your life's work, then a small $150 is really not that much of an investment.
Now don't let me tell you how much is expensive to you, but just think of how much it could be charged or how much it could be the price set for.
I'm terrible at promotions.
Please buy my course, please.
But writing can just be writing.
You already do it. Just do it consciously in a way that benefits your future and others.
Thank you for watching this video.
If you need anything, links in the description, free courses, paid courses, other resources, fun stuff, newsletter, this version of the video in a podcast form.
If you like listening to it instead and the written form in the newsletter, you can join that.
That's all I got. Thank you for watching.
Bye.
