111 The Virtue Of Obsession: From Mediocrity To Eminence

Obsession is a male tendency. It's why boys are more likely than girls to addicted to video games or adult content. It also relates to why young men take stupid risks. And why you really only see male stalkers. But this tendency can also be one of the greatest virtues. All the great men of history have been obsessed with something. When obsessed, a person naturally pushes through discomfort and generates the creative ideas that lead to exponential growth.

Transcript

The Ruando podcast is an exploration of the unconscious in the game of life.

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There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Camille Paglia.

I've mentioned Camille's quote a couple times on this podcast in different episodes and some people consider it to be a controversial quote saying,

Oh,

What are you saying,

Like,

Women can't be obsessed?

But no,

No,

It's highlighting the creative destructive potential of testosterone and therefore masculinity.

Well,

We'll get into the sexual side of it later but essentially if we can drop our moral framework,

Because it's only our moral framework that puts creative and destructive as these opposite things,

Right?

Actually what Camille is saying is that testosterone,

The male sex hormone,

Gets men to be obsessed with things.

That obsession can lead to something incredibly beautiful like Mozart's music.

It can also lead to something terribly destructive like Jack the Ripper going around raping and strangling women,

Right?

But these are both male behaviors and it's only our human moral framework that even puts these two things in different categories.

From a preconscious genetic standpoint,

One could maybe argue that to our genes,

It's almost the expression of the same impulse that maybe comes out in different ways.

One's a socially acceptable way,

One's a not socially acceptable way.

And that's not to say the social acceptance is all a construct or meaningless.

Even to our genes,

I guess for Jack the Ripper's genes,

Even though perhaps there is this programming to be obsessed and seek sex and power and domination,

Which typically has allowed for the spreading of male genes,

Given that Jack the Ripper killed all his victims,

He wasn't procreating so that actually wasn't good for his genes to pass on.

So anyway,

We don't have to even get into that side of things.

The point of today's episode,

Today's episode is on the virtue of obsession.

And obsession is a male virtue,

Not that women can't be obsessed,

But it is something that is tied to testosterone,

Something that correlates with testosterone.

Actually,

As I mentioned in the virility paradox episodes,

There's various studies that if you inject testosterone into a man or a woman,

They'll become a little bit more focused on singular things,

A little bit more likely to be obsessed with something,

And they'll actually become less good at hearing peripheral noises.

So for the person who can't concentrate because they hear every single sound,

Testosterone will do away with that.

And actually,

If you just look at the flip side,

One of the reasons why women typically can hear sounds better,

Can hear ambient noises better than men is that historically or if you go far back when there was a more clear sexual division of flavor,

A woman would have to be able to hear a baby cry better.

Whereas if a man's out hunting,

Maybe he doesn't want to hear the slightest sound of a bird chirping when he's chasing the buffalo.

So this nature,

This tendency towards obsession is a tendency of the male brain.

And obviously,

When we compare Mozart to Jack the Ripper,

Not even getting into their personal experience,

Of course,

Most of us would rather be more like Mozart,

I assume.

And it's learning to harness this tendency that if you are a guy or if you're not a man,

But you have these male tendencies,

Lots of androgen receptors perhaps,

This tendency towards obsession is something that can be harnessed.

And in today's modern day,

Regardless of your gender or your tendencies,

We're in this world where media and the things that we're exposed to all the time are trying to tap into this ability,

This natural tendency to be obsessed with things.

Even websites that seem overall positive for learning like Reddit or Wikipedia even,

They're all built as rabbit holes to pull you in,

Which of course,

If you get pulled into every rabbit hole,

If you get obsessed with everything presented with you,

You're probably not going to live the most exciting life or the life that you probably intend.

Whereas if you can get obsessed with things that are really beneficial to your life,

If you can get obsessed,

I mean,

You get obsessed with the right thing,

That's how greatness is created.

All great men in history,

All great people in history were obsessed with something,

Whether it was like fixing a crisis or maybe it came out of necessity for their times,

Or they just were obsessed with an idea as many of the scientists and inventors throughout history and artists have been.

They're just like,

They had an idea and they're just like,

They go so deep,

Because that's what obsession is,

You're going so deep in something,

So deep in a skill,

So deep in a field of thought or a field of inquiry that you end up picking up all of these skills at a rate much higher than someone who's just passively interested in something.

This is also,

Obviously,

If you're obsessed with something,

You're not apathetic,

You're probably not worried about being afraid of the world,

This kind of obsession,

This kind of single-pointed focus kind of makes the rest of the world fall away,

In which case your sense of well-being,

Of course,

Is better.

So in this episode,

We're going to learn about the virtue of obsession,

How we can take this natural tendency,

Especially for a more masculine person,

To kind of get obsessed with things.

If you're a guy and you have a tendency,

I mean,

Personally,

I get kind of hooked on certain strategy computer games,

Doesn't really bring a lot to my life,

But it feels so good because of my wirings as a guy,

How can we do this with something different that's more useful,

Something like whatever your creative pursuit is or maybe something in your career or maybe even something that you've been lacking in,

Like you've been out of shape your whole life,

How do you get obsessed with working out?

Because obviously,

If you do that,

You can basically not even worry about the result that's going to happen.

So this episode,

This virtue of obsession,

This virtue,

I should say,

Hits on many of the maxims from episode 109,

The five and a half guiding principles for a man's life.

Certainly focus being the first one.

Obviously,

If you have that kind of single attention on something,

You're hyper-focused.

And also,

When you're obsessed with something,

You don't have to force your focus anymore.

You don't have to force your attention.

You wouldn't call it an obsession unless you're already naturally going there.

It should not require effort.

Otherwise,

It's not an obsession.

With that,

That ties into mood and energy.

When we're obsessed with something,

Of course,

It heightens our mood and energy because it doesn't require any effort.

In fact,

We're eager to do the thing.

And next one being negative entropy.

I mean,

If you have many interests spread out,

You have a lot of things on your plate that are all equally interesting or not interesting,

They're all the same.

It's kind of like in physics.

If you have a room where the heat is evenly dispersed,

They're all the same.

It's very high entropy and every location in that room is meaningless,

Right?

Compared to everything else,

It's the same.

They're all the same.

They're all equal.

Who cares?

They're interchangeable.

Whereas,

If somehow we were able to get all of the heat in the room into one little corner,

So one corner is really hot and the rest of it is not,

That's a very low entropy configuration.

If you were able to do that,

It's a lot more interesting.

It's a lot more meaningful.

And that heat in one corner of the room can do something.

It can start a fire.

It can cook your food as opposed to the lower entropy configuration of it all being dispersed.

Finally,

This one is maybe a bit of a poll.

Not as clear as the other three maxims,

But polarity,

As we mentioned,

Obsession is a more male,

Is a tendency of the male brain,

Let's say,

Or a more masculine brain.

Ties to testosterone and dopamine and the interplay of those two hormones.

There's something about obsession on a subjective level of entering high tension and release.

High tension to a single point and release.

If you're wondering about these maxims I just mentioned,

You can check that out in episode 109.

The last thing,

When we talk about obsession,

What we're looking at,

And we can even take a magician archetype lens on this,

Is that there are many material actions one could take in life,

In your career,

In your pursuits,

In your hero's journey,

Whatever you're doing.

When you're obsessed with something,

You're putting so much attention into whatever mechanical action you're doing that it adds quality to the quantity.

When we look at exponential growth in things,

What's the difference between two people trying to dig holes or two people trying to start the same business,

But one grows a huge amount and the other one grows at a slow,

Linear level?

It's typically ideas,

Creative ideas.

To drop the mystical side of this,

Imbuing your actions with energy,

You could also say when you're obsessed with something,

You're jogging your mind to come up with ideas that will allow you to make those exponential jumps,

As opposed to just digging the hole with a shovel,

You come up with an idea to build a machine that can do it way faster.

This is what we're looking for.

This is why books like The One Thing,

Which takes a more mundane look at this,

Why these principles are so effective,

Because it's not about just doing stuff.

I'll tell some stories from my life where I did this not so great or have been doing this not so ideally and what I'm changing.

When you're just putting something on the back burner and doing the bare minimum or you're just doing the thing that seems like the obvious next action step,

But you're not obsessed with it,

You're never going to have those exponential jumps.

You're never going to have those huge creative boosts,

Because you don't come up with ideas by just shoveling the hole.

You come up with those ideas by shoveling the hole,

But also dangering about it the other 23 hours a day when you're not shoveling.

So anyway,

This all came up for me recently in the last week or couple of weeks,

Because Nala and I have been practicing,

Nalaiah,

My girlfriend,

We've been speaking about having children a lot,

And it's become more and more real.

It's becoming closer and closer that we're actually going to be like,

Okay,

We're having kids and we're basically planning our whole lives around it.

And actually,

What made this really feel real is that a couple of weeks ago,

I let one lose a little bit close to ovulation and it was on the edge,

It was like six days before she was ovulating.

Sperm lives up to five days.

So we seemed safe,

But then the days afterwards,

She seemed particularly hormonal and I was like,

Oh shit,

I think I might be a father.

I might have knocked her up already.

And obviously,

When it's immediate,

It's different than looking at it in the future in some indefinite time.

And I was thinking,

Okay,

So what is not ideal right now?

It's various things that are pretty much set up for a child in our lives.

But then I was like,

Well,

Okay,

I've been making okay money the last many years,

At least more than enough that I've needed as a single person who doesn't have particularly expensive taste,

But not making so much that I feel particularly comfortable in supporting a family,

Especially if she stops working.

So I had this figure,

I had this number,

And I was like,

Well,

Okay,

It turned out she's not pregnant.

I'm not having a child right now,

But I was still thinking like,

Well,

Why,

You know,

I had this idea of the amount of money that would be very comfortable.

I was thinking about how I've been living my life and,

You know,

The last couple of years,

I've been taking it pretty easy.

Like there was moments of high tension when I was like getting out of poverty years ago into a comfortable situation I am now.

Even my uncle,

Who's been a serious journalist for many,

Many years,

He came to visit me in Thailand a couple years ago,

Or this is a little bit before COVID.

He's like,

Oh,

You're basically retired.

Like I'm living the life that he is planning on living when he retires soon.

I've been very happy with that the last couple years.

But then I started thinking,

Man,

Okay,

I don't actually make enough to support a family comfortably.

What's the next level?

And then I started thinking,

Okay,

I got the idea of the next level,

The next level that comes to the next income,

Thought about like what that looks for business growth.

And then I looked at my current activities.

It just it was like a total reframe of like being comfortable to being like,

Oh,

Shit,

Like what I'm doing is not good enough.

And I was almost like,

In a sense,

Kind of disgusted in myself,

Not in a self loathing way,

But like just like,

You know,

Just kind of this realization of like,

I haven't really been thinking about my career correctly.

I've been essentially coasting a little bit too long,

Especially through COVID.

That was like kind of an excuse I had for like,

Working on other things that don't really make money and stuff.

Because everything is fine.

I was like,

Shit,

Like,

It's fine if I'm just a single guy with no further aspirations.

But if I'm going to be a father,

This is unacceptable.

Like I need to go to war because this is not like I'm not going to let my kids not have all the things they want.

Anyway,

Common common feeling I think most parents have.

And I started looking at all these different little things.

And I started remembering things that other people have said to me just in the last month,

Like I was on a buddy's podcast recently,

And he was talking about he's a fan of this show.

And he's talking about how much he likes it and stuff.

But he's like,

Yeah,

I mean,

You kind of make yourself not discoverable on YouTube,

Or whatever.

It's like,

Yeah,

You're another person said,

Like,

I mean,

Your view counts are so low,

Like,

I don't understand why your view counts are so low or another person actually,

Who's like very knowledgeable in marketing is like,

Dude,

You just all these things need to change that will boost your view counts.

Like you're making yourself undiscoverable,

Essentially.

And I've heard all these people said these things to me before,

Before I really thought about fatherhood.

And I was like,

Okay,

Whatever.

You know,

I hate my ideas.

I've had this idea.

In fact,

I've said this on the podcast a few times,

Like,

I hate marketing.

I hate looking at that stuff.

I hate like,

Anyway,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

All of my resentment said at the marketplace and how people become popular on the internet.

But then I thought like,

Okay,

If I'm actually talking about fatherhood,

And actually,

I spoke about this in the how to be attractive to women episode,

And that little bit on when should you follow your feelings or not.

And just to recap,

If you didn't see that episode or listen to it,

It's a big question a lot of people have like,

I thought I'm supposed to follow my feelings,

But sometimes there's things I don't want to do.

And I actually said it in that in regards to that question.

Yes,

You should follow your feelings in terms of choosing how you want to express yourself choosing how like what career you want to be in,

What explorations you want to have,

What kinds of relationships or friendships,

All that stuff,

You should follow your feelings.

However,

After you've decided what your thing is,

After you've chosen to take on a certain responsibility for certain benefits,

If there's a thing that goes along with that,

That's not negotiable,

Doesn't matter if you feel like it or not,

You have to do it,

Right?

That's kind of responsibility,

The masculine.

I was mostly referring to in a polarized relationship,

If you're choosing to take on the masculine,

Role in a relationship,

There's certain things,

There's certain responsibilities and traits and characteristics that become your responsibility,

Whether you feel like it or not,

Like it's not okay to take on the masculine role in a relationship and then be a whiny child,

Right?

Not to say that anyone should be a whiny child,

But you get what I'm saying,

I hope.

And then it's like turning on this on myself and like just using YouTube as an example,

Like,

Like last year,

I think I logged into YouTube like three times,

My very awesome media person,

Christina,

Does all of that for me.

But actually,

Because of my disengagement,

That's probably one of the reasons.

So anyway,

This is all to say that I was like,

Man,

I've been a little bitch about this stuff.

You know,

If I really think about the responsibility that I'm eager to take on of being a father,

I can't complain about these stupid things like marketing.

This is kind of a,

Especially if I think about like all the other jobs people have that anyway,

This is all to just say that I was being a little whiny and silly.

So I was like,

Okay,

Well,

I need to make up for this.

Like I need to go to war.

And I was like,

Well,

I've learned I've taken YouTube courses.

I'm just using this as my example,

But I've been taking different courses.

Like I know the basic principles.

And in the past,

I've always done the bare minimum.

Like okay,

What base I mean,

Obviously,

I've done the thumbnail,

Like,

What is the basic bare minimum to throw up so that anyone can watch it right?

Watch my stuff for discover me or something.

And then I was like,

Well,

I was thinking about times in my life that I had a huge boost in income or did something that I was really proud of.

Like there's a few examples I gave in the road of trials video.

The only times I've ever really had an exponential jump,

Whether it was in health and fitness or sports or money as I am talking about here or business,

Right?

It only came at a time when I was obsessed.

And most of the times I've become obsessed was because there was a crisis,

Right?

I was like,

Well,

I don't want to wait for a crisis.

Turns out we're not pregnant.

So like,

Why wait for this like emergency?

Why not get obsessed now,

Which is what brought me to this because as I mentioned,

When a person gets obsessed and I think,

Well,

I guess it could be any person.

I think it's probably more true for men just because of our tendency to,

You know,

To get stuck on me.

You look at guys getting stuck on porn video games,

Especially RPGs or things where you're building,

Right?

Like we have that circuitry,

Right?

Especially when you're a teenager,

You're a man goes through puberty,

A boy becomes a man.

He has this huge spike in testosterone.

Parts of his brain that assess risk haven't yet developed,

Which is why young men do really stupid things.

But there's actually an evolutionary reason for this because when all of the young men in a given tribe or given locality go through puberty,

They should all be risking their lives doing things.

Some of them would die,

We're talking like the Paleolithic era,

A bunch of them would die from taking these stupid risks.

Those were the weaker ones,

Unfortunately.

And the strong ones who took the risk,

Who happened to survive,

Those are the ones who passed on their genes.

Not that this,

You know,

Obviously we don't want young men to be crashing cars or doing stupid things that don't actually help society,

But this is why young men do stupid things.

Like we're wired to take these insane risks,

Which is also why we get hooked on things like video games.

There's an opportunity to do crazy things that don't have a consequence.

So anyway,

Yeah,

Exponential versus linear growth.

So I was looking at,

Just using my personal example again,

What would allow me to have a level of income that,

I'll get to that in a second.

Creative ideas all come from,

Creative ideas are what allow exponential growth.

And actually,

If we just speak about information again and this negative entropy idea,

As I've mentioned in the magician archetype episode,

The one thing in reality that fights against the second law of thermodynamics or balances it out where like the world is increasing in its randomness,

Right?

Heat is dispersing,

Matter is breaking up.

The universe is moving towards entropy,

But there is something that moves against entropy and that is life.

Life keeps getting more complex,

Not less complex.

Life keeps organizing things into more and more unique lower entropy configurations.

And essentially what we would call that,

Another word for negative entropy is information.

So I was thinking,

Okay,

When's the last time I had a huge boost?

And it went back to a couple of years ago,

I was just paying off my debt from when I was in the cult.

I was doing my very first course launch on my own,

Which was actually the arousal control program which I still sell because I'm very proud of and it's a great program.

I had just done a course,

I spent four and a half months,

Almost five months writing the course,

Filming it,

Preparing it,

Creating all of the promotional copy and stuff and filming all of that and editing it and taxing myself with all of that,

Working nonstop.

I had some people promoting it,

Like my friends at Fearless were promoting it.

There's a lot going on and I had spent almost half a year working on this thing,

Needing it to make some amount of money otherwise I would have wasted my time and also I was trying to pay off my debt.

I had the goal to pay off all my debt by the time I turned 30 and I was turning 30 around the time of the course launch.

I think it was that same week.

It wasn't even planned that way,

That's how it happened.

All the affiliates promoted,

So a bunch of people opted in for the thing and based on the sequence that I had,

I was expecting sales around,

I think it was a Thursday and nothing came in.

Friday,

Nothing came in.

I was like,

Oh shit,

This is a flop,

I just wasted my entire time.

There's nothing.

But the fact that I had put so much time into it and I had become obsessed with it.

This is around the time that I read the book The One Thing and every day I would have one major task.

I put it on a post-it,

I just readopted this habit of having one major task for the day,

Something that usually takes one to four hours.

I was becoming super obsessed with this.

Because of my obsession,

I had this mentality of I'm going to war,

I'm not accepting being broke anymore.

This is not okay,

I'm never going to be in debt again,

I'm never going to do this again.

But now my first effort,

If you think of this as a war campaign,

My first assault was being battered back and things weren't working.

And I'll say,

In the past,

If I hadn't put so much writing on this emotionally,

I probably would have been like,

Oh,

That's too bad.

Because honestly,

Since then I've had other course launches of this and that and I wasn't super obsessed and if it didn't do well,

I was like,

Eh,

Whatever,

I didn't really put my heart into it.

But I put my heart into this one.

I was like,

I'm not going to let this go.

So I remember spending a whole day,

I was in Bali at the time,

I was spending a day just chilling out because I had already done all the work.

What is it?

There must be a way.

I had this goal on a piece of paper of how do I make X amount of money and I did something called the 20 answer method,

Which I've done other times.

Actually I'm going to tell a story inside of a story.

The first time I came across this,

This 20 answer method is a technique that comes from the sales trainer Brian Tracy.

This is actually a previous time that I was also broke.

Not all of my obsession periods have to do with money,

But this is kind of the thread I'm on I guess.

This is when I had just gotten out of college.

I was supposed to go into the Marines,

But I decided not to do that so I was kind of lost.

I had suddenly given up what was my intended career.

I was doing this really lame,

Kind of humiliating door-to-door sales job and I was super broke.

I was making very little money.

I was at the bottom of the,

Because everyone in the sales office,

They typically post everyone's numbers.

I was close to the bottom.

I was listening to all of these Brian Tracy sales videos,

Sales audios because I wanted to make some money.

In my head,

I didn't even have enough money to move myself back into my parents' house on the other side of the state.

I was kind of trapped.

The question in Brian Tracy's thing is that he says,

Write a question that you want your subconscious to answer at the top of a piece of paper and then come up with 20 answers.

No matter what,

Come up with 20 answers.

You have to hit 20 because whatever the question is,

Like how do I make X amount of money and mine at this time was how do I become the top rep in the office because it wasn't totally arbitrary goal,

But it's like the top reps in the office,

It was a huge spread.

The top reps made almost 10 times what the bottom reps made,

Typically 5 to 10 times.

This is way before I read the book The One Thing,

But this is kind of the premise of the book The One Thing or the main thesis.

I mean,

Prescription I should say is pick a singular goal that if you accomplished it,

All other things become easier or unnecessary.

That's their whole thing.

It's a great idea,

Right?

You pick one thing to put all of your creative capital into,

Right?

Pick the one thing that makes everything else easier.

So this is before I read this book,

But my idea was,

Okay,

If I could become top rep in the office,

Of course I'll be making more money,

I'll be making a lot more money,

5 to 10 times as much as I was making and everything will be easier and then I could figure things out.

So every morning for weeks and weeks,

I would write on the top of my journal,

How do I become top rep in the office?

And I would go down the line of trying to come up with answers.

And for a question that open-ended,

It's not so easy to come up with,

Sometimes I would have stupid things like,

Drink a lot of water today,

So I'm hydrated.

Not even,

I wouldn't say because I'm hydrated,

I would just come up with answers that maybe can make sense.

A lot of times what I ended up doing was for an answer,

I had to come up with something.

I would come up with a sales technique that I had learned,

But I had always forgotten to do in the field because there's a lot of lines and things to know.

I was learning all these things,

But I would always forget to say them or do them or do the wrong thing.

But every morning I would write down as many closing lines or opening lines or number four,

Remember to smile,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

And essentially what I was doing is I was spending my mornings brainwashing myself.

I was programming into myself these instincts,

These traits that in the heat of the moment I would always forget to do.

But first thing in the morning I would write up these 20 things that it was kind of like programming into my head.

Almost every morning I would write most of the same stuff every morning.

But then after some time I would come up with new ideas.

I would come up with my own ways of phrasing my sales pitch and this and that.

And then because it's 20,

It's tempting to stop at five or stop at 10,

But after 10 or once you hit 15 or so,

Your brain has to come up with something new.

I think this 20 answer method is almost like an easy numerical visual representation of how obsessed you are.

If you have a question and you can only come up with five answers,

You're probably not that obsessed.

If you come up with 10,

Maybe you're a little bit interested.

But if you can get all the way up to 20,

It's like you're putting that much attention in,

Almost training obsession into yourself because not only was I programming certain ideas into my head or certain things I needed to remember,

I was also stimulating my brain,

Stimulating my mind to be so interested in this topic of how do I become the top rep that I would spend my daydreaming time coming up with answers passively,

Not with a lot of effort.

Like while I'd be at work or while I'd be taking a shit or while I'd be at lunch,

There'd be this brewing,

How do I become top rep,

How do I become top rep and I would come up with new answers all the time.

Always those last five are things that would end up being abstract and eventually you have to come up with something that hasn't been come up with,

Especially if you're asking yourself the question every single time.

This is the whole thing of when you're obsessed with something,

You come up with ideas that allow for exponential growth.

Anyway,

The end of that story is that I did become the top rep,

I ended up making a lot more money than I would have made in the Marines for instance,

Even as an officer.

I ended up buying a motorcycle,

Things were great for a while until I had another existential crisis but that's for another episode.

So anyway,

To go back to the first story,

Go back to this earlier loop,

This is a couple years ago,

I'd done this course launch for the Arousal Control Program,

Had zero sales for whatever reason.

A likely reason was that most of the people who had signed up to learn about it,

I was an unknown person to most people.

But then I had a very simple idea because I was going back to this thing,

I kept thinking like how do I actually sell this?

I had a figure that I wanted to make that was pretty reasonable,

It was more than I had ever made in a single chunk.

How do I make this amount of money?

How do I make this?

It came to me as a very stupid simple idea,

The idea itself is not particularly amazing,

I was like oh well I should put out a flash sale,

I was put out a 24 hour flash sale and it will probably inspire people to buy and all people bought.

All the people who maybe were thinking about it or just needed a nudge,

It doesn't matter,

The technique isn't important,

In fact it's such a simple obvious thing perhaps.

But I wouldn't have come up with that idea if I wasn't obsessed with it because that idea didn't come to me for whatever reason earlier,

I had to become obsessed with it.

So for the rest of this episode we're going to go into this,

You're probably wondering if you maybe wondering like well how do I get obsessed because for a lot of guys I speak to who are kind of in apathy mode or are not really sure what they want to do with their lives but they have those really big questions.

Especially if you're kind of raised in a participation trophy kind of world,

There might be this almost,

You might be conditioned to not be obsessed with things or if you spent a lot of time doing what other people wanted and you can't feel your own desire,

Your own interests,

Your own obsessions,

The only things that might hook your attention are like addictive media apps or whatever.

A lot of people maybe haven't been obsessed with something that might yield a positive result in a while.

Or maybe I think what a lot of people experience,

They find themselves going down a rabbit hole,

They get really hooked on an idea and then they go into it a little bit and then they get some version of writer's block,

Resistance comes up and then the obsession goes away.

That inner driven desire to go to war,

To do this thing,

To think about nothing else,

That kind of fades away and then they're not obsessed anymore.

And specifically how can you get obsessed without needing a crisis mode?

It's one thing to be obsessed with making the rent when you're not about to make the rent or you're broke.

It's easy to get obsessed.

A lot of people,

Most people I'd say who really get into personal development,

Who really become obsessive about their growth,

They have some sort of rock bottom moment.

I think for a lot of guys it's like heartbreak or loneliness or waking up one day and realizing you didn't do anything with the last 10 years of your life and it just pisses you off and you have to go to war.

How can we get this obsession before having this existential crisis or real crisis?

So this first thing is,

Maybe it's not obvious,

But the first thing is cultivating interests because a precursor to obsession is interest.

You can't get obsessed with something you don't find interesting.

And for someone who's maybe in some version of anhedonia apathy,

You're not really sure why everything is like,

Well that's okay,

That's okay.

How do you cultivate interest?

So interest has two parts.

There is what comes from the inside,

Let's say your archetypal conditions like what you're born with,

Your natural,

The parts of you that are not a blank slate.

All of us are born with certain tendencies,

Certain proclivities,

Certain idiosyncrasies that are unique to us.

And there's a second part which is environmental conditioning.

For perhaps an extreme example,

A lot of people are kind of wired for addiction.

Maybe addiction runs in your family or whatever.

But if that person is never exposed to a certain drug,

They're probably not going to get addicted to it.

I actually think for myself,

In times in my life where it's not that I think I'm particularly prone to addiction,

Actually I don't think I am at all personally,

But there are definitely points in my life that I was very vulnerable and willing to say fuck it all,

Especially when I was a younger man.

Maybe my testosterone was higher and my risk-taking behavior.

There's probably a lot of drugs that I would have gotten into had I been exposed to them,

But I just wasn't out of luck perhaps.

Or a lot of things.

I spoke in another episode,

I tried to join the Hell's Angels once,

So I had the strong intention to.

It didn't happen,

That's probably a good thing.

So for a more simple example,

Most men,

If you have androgen receptors,

You're kind of drawn to things that are competitive.

If you take that and you take the fact that your dad watched a football,

Well that makes sense that you become obsessed with football.

No kid in England gets obsessed with American football.

It's very rare because it's very unlikely that he's exposed to American football.

There are very few men in America who get obsessed with cricket because that's just not there.

There's two parts.

There's initial conditions,

These archetypal proclivities if you will,

And then environmental conditioning.

So you're obviously not a child,

If you're listening to this or watching this,

You've had years of conditioning already,

Things that you've been exposed to,

Things that may have drawn you or not drawn you.

But if you've had many years of muting your interests or forcing yourself to do things that seem productive versus things that seemed interesting,

You maybe have spent a lot of time deconditioning those interests.

And that's the experience a lot of grown men and grown people have where they're just like,

I don't know what I'm into because they've done many years.

And modern media,

I think is the worst for anyone who's young right now.

Growing up with social media,

It's kind of designed to hijack your dopamine circuitry.

We had Dr.

Kam Sapha on the podcast,

He has this whole protocol on dopamine fasting.

And a lot of people are speaking about how most media is designed to be addictive,

To hook you and take advantage of these dopamine circuits that are meant for going out and seeking adventure or going out and finding new things for your survival instead of getting you sucked onto your little box,

Scrolling away on Reddit,

Reading all the links as if they actually make a difference in your life.

And yes,

I'm being a little judgmental because I feel strongly about this.

So essentially,

Referencing Kam's protocol,

You can look up his stuff on dopamine fasting or listen to that episode if you want.

But I would actually say,

I would actually go a little bit further than his protocol,

Especially if you're in a place where you're not really sure what you're interested in or you don't have a lot of space to think your own original thoughts.

Because that's what these media things take away from us.

We don't get that chance to,

When we're clicking from thing to thing or link to link or clickbait to clickbait,

We don't get an opportunity to have the free attention because you can't get obsessed with something without free attention.

Or you can't be obsessed with things consciously.

You might be obsessed with whatever the algorithm presents to you.

I would actually go a little further than his protocol for dopamine fasting in the same way that if someone is really hooked on sugar and is super overweight,

It might be great to go on a multi-day fast.

So I would actually say if you are at a place where you don't really know what you're interested in,

You're not really sure,

I would go on a long fast,

Like maybe an entire many days without by avoiding screens,

Avoiding these things that hook onto your dopamine circuitry.

Because essentially,

Kind of like a diabetic does which,

Kind of like someone hooked on sugar,

You need to re-sensitize yourself.

You need to re-sensitize your dopamine circuits because they've been flooded by Facebook or whatever.

And when I speak about this to most guys specifically,

There is something appealing about going into nature for days and being disconnected.

There's something I would say archetypally masculine about it.

When I speak about this to most women or think about going out into the forest by yourself,

I don't think that appeals to most women.

Certainly not most feminine people.

Why would you do that?

Even when I did the 4x4x48 challenge with my friend,

His girlfriend was like,

Why are you guys doing that?

I have no idea.

I don't understand.

But every guy gets it.

There's something about that.

Maybe you need a certain density of androgen receptors to appreciate some activity like this.

But almost every guy,

If you just think about it,

Even if you're not going to do it,

This idea of being on your own in nature for a little bit,

There's something pure about it.

And I would say this is the same reason why guys love adventure video games or many young men get hooked on RPGs,

That's essentially what you're doing when you're World of War crafting or whatever.

You're going out on your own seeking adventure,

Pure warrior archetype stuff.

I would say going on a total media fest for a while,

Allowing your dopamine circuits to re-sensitize and rediscover what's interesting to you.

Like a Thoros style solitude,

Maybe doesn't apply,

Doesn't interest every guy,

But definitely interests any thinking guy I would say.

A thinking man is going to really be drawn to this kind of thing because you need to re-sensitize your dopamine receptors.

Because this is the thing about obsession and why I care to make this whole episode on this.

It's like the whole thing of taking baby steps and habit change or like these little habit habitual changes,

That's okay for if you're really fighting.

It's okay if you're basically deep in the negative.

If you're super overweight and you never exercise,

You're really a couch potato and you have like years of inertia of being sedentary working against you,

Then yes,

A small habit like everyday walk ten minutes is great.

It's great for moving,

It's better than sitting on the couch all day.

And if you're super overweight,

Walking ten minutes a day would probably have you lose some weight.

But no one has ever gone from overweight to in really good shape by doing bare minimum singular things.

Like BJ Fogg's habit training stuff about like instead of committing to flossing all of your teeth everyday,

Commit to flossing one tooth,

It will build the habit over time,

You might end up doing extra.

That's great again for minimums.

If you never floss,

Fine.

But if you don't really good teeth,

Maybe the analogy isn't true for teeth,

I don't know.

But fitness and with business,

And I'll say for myself,

I've put various media things on the back burner,

Especially perhaps fueled my resentment for scrolling media.

I've avoided really engaging with stuff like YouTube.

And I was looking at it,

My view counts are really low for my videos.

Especially because this is my third YouTube channel and this is,

I don't know if I'm somehow,

My first two channels got deactivated for various things.

The third channel seems to have the lowest view counts even though I think my content is the best compared to whatever crap I was putting out when I was like 23.

And anyway,

All this is to say,

I was like man,

If I want to bring it up to what I think is a reasonable level for my content or whatever notoriety I have,

I can't just do bare minimums.

To just say,

Well I'm going to research one keyword or I'm going to post one video every so often.

There's no way I'm going to reach the viewership or there's no way I'm going to achieve the growth that I want to achieve to support my family doing bare minimums.

You have to go hard.

At some point you have to go hard.

And this is true for anyone,

Fitness I think is a great example.

No one has ever gone super into shape doing bare minimum programs.

There's a lot of people I know who have gym memberships and they go,

Yeah I work out,

But they never go past average fitness.

There has to be an obsession with it.

Because when you're obsessed you tweak all these specific nuances,

You basically raise the fidelity really high because you become very specific.

It's like if you take this idea of resolution of reality,

When you're not obsessed with something the resolution is a little bit fuzzy.

It's lo-fi,

You can kind of get away with lacks of position.

But when you're obsessed with something you're turning the fidelity all the way up and you can see like,

Oh this is this thing.

If you look at reality as a photograph or a painting,

You're like,

Oh this color is in the wrong place or this needs to be like this.

It becomes very specific.

You're obsessed with working out.

You're like,

Man my deadlifting form is a little bit off.

If I want to increase my deadlift by 5% again I need to tweak the way I move my hips.

You don't get to that level of precision by not being obsessed.

Something recently for me like waking up,

Waking up earlier by 15 minutes has always been hard.

To gradually wake up earlier and earlier has never worked for me personally.

I don't think it works for most people because if your alarm goes off just 15 minutes earlier,

You might be like,

Ah it's so close to my normal time and then you end up laying in bed for 15 minutes or whatever.

But if you say instead of 7 I'm going to wake up at 5 or wake up at 4,

There's something about the extremity of that that kind of makes you do it.

Like it feels like you're going to war.

It somehow raises the stakes internally because there has to be some sort of sacrifice I think.

Here's the other thing.

A lot of people think,

Okay well I'm not interested in anything.

Nothing's coming to me.

So you do your fast,

You're still not sure.

Nothing is really hooking me.

Our feelings,

This goes back to whether you should follow your feelings or when you should follow your feelings.

Some people,

And I think this has become a popular idea especially in more feminized self-help of always following your feelings.

There's times to listen to your feelings but also your feelings are not God.

This is a mental trap I got into or a lot of people get into in self-help I personally got into when I was in the cult.

If you start following your feelings,

If someone manipulates your feelings which advertising can do very easily and propaganda can do very easily,

A charismatic leader can change how you feel about something very easily and if you're training yourself to always follow what you feel,

You can end up doing some stupid shit or you could end up doing nothing.

You can end up doing nothing useful.

Feelings are one feedback circuit that matter.

Actually,

I hope to have John Coates on the podcast soon.

I'm still finishing his book but he has this great graph in his book,

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf of the responses.

When we react to a stimulus,

Let's say a threat like a predatory animal like a bear or he relates that kind of stuff to like the stock market and like the stock market is crashing so our body is having a visceral reaction.

There's different reaction times of different parts of our body.

First our skeletal system reacts.

The part of our nervous system that controls our muscles.

This is news to me that when we see a threat,

Our muscles actually react long before our emotions.

By long I mean like instead of 30 milliseconds,

100 milliseconds.

Too fast for us to consciously perceive the difference but our muscles actually react way before our emotions or way before our conscious mind can process it.

I mean we're talking milliseconds,

Right?

So we see a threat,

We see a bear,

Our muscles are already tensing and preparing to run.

Then some milliseconds later,

Our organs go to support our muscles.

Our body starts to producing short-term hormones like adrenaline and then that's what signals to our conscious mind what emotions we're feeling,

Right?

So that's the order of things.

So this is all to say that our emotions are just one feedback loop.

It's not like our emotions are God.

You might want to say if anything if those three systems,

Physical,

Emotional and conscious,

You'd say maybe the physical is the closest to God,

Our instincts,

Right?

It's our body reacting before our emotions or our mind can catch up,

Sensation.

So anyway,

This is all to say that your emotions are just one feedback center and just like your body can be trained to have certain instincts like in sports,

You drill something long enough,

The ball comes,

You do the right form,

You execute the right thing that you trained.

Your emotions can also be trained.

I think it's very important to try to find things that match the set of characteristics you were born with,

Right?

Not everyone is into competitive things,

Not everyone is into artistic things but if you were kind of born with a thing,

I think the right move,

The right thing for your parents or your guardians or your teachers is to cultivate that and as you as an adult,

Like cultivate those things that you were born with.

But feelings can be practiced in the same way that maybe you were trained to be neurotic by a neurotic parent or you were trained to feel low status because of the social group or the family system you were born into.

You can train yourself to have certain feelings and if you are very far from being obsessed with something,

You kind of got to practice the obsession.

I think something like the 20 answer method is one way,

Right?

Obviously crisis is one way if there's a survival necessity,

You'll naturally become obsessed with that thing but not waiting for a crisis to happen,

If you pick an interest,

You pick something you're drawn to because you're being internally driven instead of externally driven,

How can you practice becoming interested in that and that does require a little bit of effort at first,

Right?

It does require some sort of structure,

Some sort of commitment to yourself because once you do the thing,

You do it enough,

You get enough reps in,

It actually becomes fun.

Most things become fun once you achieve a certain level of competence.

Like writing for instance,

Writing kind of came to me,

I mean I've always been a little bit into writing but as an adult,

It kind of came to me,

I mean kind of out of nowhere,

I don't know if I told the story before but this is a little bit before I joined the cults,

I left my last real job,

I was working this weird freelance job,

Really not sure what to do with my life.

Oh,

This was also,

I just spent that summer dating a huge cocaine addict and we had various adventures but we broke up and I kind of had this huge void in my life not knowing what to do.

This was the summer that Fifty Shades of Grey became super popular,

I really blew up and I had a friend who knew someone who knew someone who was basically like,

Oh I heard that if you could write an erotica novel,

You'll basically get published.

Like erotica is so hot,

You don't even have to be a good writer,

You'll get published and something about that hooked me.

And I had gone with some friends for this weekend trip at one of my friend's lake houses,

His family's lake house and I spent the entire trip working on,

Just like writing an erotica novel,

Writing an erotica chapter,

I couldn't do anything else,

This obsession hooked me.

And for a while that wave lasted for a little bit,

To me that was my call to adventure,

To get into writing or take writing more seriously but my confidence level wasn't particularly high,

I could look back at what I wrote back then,

It wasn't very good,

It wasn't terrible,

I had something but I had a lot to work on as a writer.

But eventually that feeling faded and here's where I think a lot of people were like,

Oh well I was into that last year but then it became hard and gave up.

I see this a lot in people in jujitsu,

A lot of people like the idea of fighting,

They really like their first couple classes but at some point they get sore,

This happens,

It becomes annoying,

They realize how much time it takes to get to your blue belts or whatever and they kind of let it fade away because that initial boost,

That boost of dopamine that you get from doing something new that's a challenge that gives you that kind of exploration,

That boost goes away,

That dopamine boost goes away eventually.

And then if you're only going from boost to boost,

You're basically going to have a bunch of one night stands with a bunch of different activities,

Life activities or literal one night stands because no person can hold your attention because you're only in it for the dopamine high.

And that's I think a fine way to live for a certain amount of your life when you're young to explore things,

When you're young and reckless and don't have long term thinking but at some point you got to pick like okay,

There's certain things that I want to commit myself to and I'm going to push through that hump where I'm not getting a huge dopamine hit from it but I know I'm going to get that long term reward.

I know I'm going to get that big thing because actually going back to John Coates' book,

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf,

There's a third system or there's another system that reacts.

Our muscles react,

Our organs react in a way to support our muscles but eventually the adrenaline drops,

The adrenaline has a short term activity.

If your body is using a threat for example,

If you're experiencing or you're perceiving a threat past the initial burst stage,

The adrenaline dump completes and whatever,

Then your body starts producing steroid hormones.

Steroids are a specific kind of hormone that affect everywhere in your body.

Like a steroid hormone can move through cell membranes,

A steroid hormone will affect your skeletal system,

It will affect every system of your body.

And the reason for steroid hormones is that in a time of an emergency or actually I love John Coates' phrase that he uses in the book,

In archetypal moments of your life,

In life or death situations,

In mating experiences and things that really matter for survival replication,

Like the things that life is meant for,

What he calls archetypal moments,

Falling in love,

Having a child,

Killing an invader,

Well he doesn't say killing an invader but stuff like that.

In those archetypal moments of your life,

You need all of your body on the same page.

You can't have one part of your body digesting and the other part of your body fighting and the other part of your body fucking.

No,

Like steroids,

The reason why steroids have such an effect and why people take anabolic steroids for sports performance,

It gets your whole body geared up for a certain thing.

So I often speak about testosterone versus oxytocin as far as masculine and feminine behavior.

Testosterone is a steroid,

Obviously you pump testosterone full of someone,

It has all of these changes,

Muscularly,

Voice-wise,

Behavior-wise,

Sex drive-wise,

Aggression-wise,

Everything.

Oxytocin is not a steroid,

Estrogen is a steroid.

Oxytocin even though it correlates with a lot of behaviors we call feminine,

Oxytocin is not a steroid because your body,

If you're experiencing oxytocin,

Your body is not going to completely morph,

Right?

If you're experiencing oxytocin,

It might be a signal that everything is safe but it's not a steroid.

So all I have to say,

If you're experiencing a threat,

The adrenaline dumps,

Your body will continue pumping cortisol of like,

Oh,

Here's a long-term threat we have to deal with and that cortisol also feels good up until a certain point,

Right?

Part of what is enjoyable about coffee is it stimulates us to produce a little bit of cortisol which helps us focus because we're dealing with something,

Right?

Cortisol over too long of a time because it is something for dealing with a threat,

If your body is under threat all the time,

It comes very hard to switch to relaxation mode.

There's something I want to speak about in an episode,

I think maybe next week speaking on psychogenic libido.

Anyway,

I'll speak about that then but you might need to,

Essentially,

You might need to practice the feeling of obsession.

Not everyone just becomes obsessed with things.

In fact,

After you've had that call to adventure,

Let's say,

Of like you find something that really fits your personality or really fits your interest and you get this huge dopamine burst,

To become good at it unless you're lucky and this thing just hooks you from day one and you become obsessed with the rest of your life,

You have to deal with some sort of hump.

There's a lot of self-help clichés we could probably think of.

The one coming to me right now is how Michael Jordan got cut from his basketball team when he was like a sophomore or a junior or something and a lot of people,

They get cut,

They're like,

Oh,

Okay,

Well,

I guess I'm not going to be an NBA star because obviously you're experiencing a loser effect if you get cut from a team.

He probably didn't get a dopamine hit,

Probably didn't feel good to continue engaging with basketball but he had that obsessiveness that eventually became perhaps the greatest of all time.

So you find the things that are interested in that could yield the desired results,

Get through the hump and then eventually you will find dopamine rewarding activities.

So going back to my,

Maybe not the most exciting example,

But my thing with YouTube and how I've not wanted to engage with it for many reasons.

One,

My thing against addictive media but also if I'm really honest,

The fact that I've been deplatformed so many times and every time I get back on YouTube for whatever reason,

My growth is slower and slower.

I don't know if I'm somehow tagged.

My first YouTube channel where I think I had not particularly good content,

I got to a thousand subscribers really fast.

My second one was slower and I don't know.

Anyway,

This is not just me complaining but these are some of the reasons why I've been extra resistant to engaging with it or maybe it's the chicken and the egg thing in reverse.

I don't know.

But I was like,

Okay,

I'm getting obsessed with something.

I'm deciding to get obsessed with it.

I'm not going to be passive.

I'm going to really go into it,

Put extra time,

Extra energy into it.

Then I found a simple thing.

I used to hate the idea of doing keyword research because I wanted everything that I present in terms of content to come from myself and not from what I think would be clickable.

Then I have all these topics that I want to talk about.

I was like,

I bet I could find a keyword phrase that is good that hits on this and it became a game.

I noticed how much fun that I was having.

This is just a couple of days ago.

How much fun I was having going into the keyword search tool and finding high ranking keywords with low competition like the keyword tool that I use has color codes like red is bad,

Yellow is okay,

Green is great,

Very good is dark green.

I was getting so excited hunting for these dark green keywords.

I was like,

I found a phrase that no one else,

I'm already ranking for this phrase.

Wow,

It's amazing.

It felt like going out into the forest and searching for special mushrooms and finding it.

It's a lot of searching,

A lot of searching.

I was like,

Wow,

I hated to admit it but keyword research is kind of fun.

Because I was willing to get over the discomfort or get over the hump of the novelty washing away and not yet finding a dopamine rewarding activity,

I eventually found one.

Now I already noticed I have way less resistance to my online presentation because I've hated this stuff for so long.

But again,

Going back to my need,

My why of wanting to really provide well,

Even in Thailand,

Putting kids through private school basically means I needed to up my game.

And actually going back to the 20 answer method,

I've been doing this again recently this week.

And given my love-hate thing with marketing and if I'm really honest,

I've not liked the idea of calling myself… I mean I stopped calling myself a life coach a long time ago.

But it hasn't been that interesting.

Whatever cool points that I felt about my career when I was younger,

Even though I love my job and I get to do specifically what I'm doing right now which is learn about things and then translate it into people who want to listen.

I've kind of had this love-hate thing of not wanting to be famous and not wanting to be too exposed.

I can maybe analyze that in another episode.

Pushing through that and being like,

Well,

Anyway,

The 20 answer method,

I made this whole list of basically how do I 5x my income or 10x or whatever,

Different things.

How do I greatly increase my income?

And I had all these other ideas.

Earlier this year I got really into crypto trading.

It's like,

Oh,

Maybe I'll do that.

Various things starting an econ business,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

But every time I would make this list of how do I whatever x my income,

The obvious easiest thing was to just increase the exposure of my business.

And when I think about the need that I have,

The y to provide for a family,

It's like,

Well,

I'm kind of stupid to not take advantage of this thing that I have.

The next thing is taking inspired action because this is the,

Actually I want to reference my friend Nick and this is going to be our last little bit before my last little how-tos.

Speaking with my friend Nick who's got a podcast,

He might come on this show.

He's been a long time client as well.

He's really into the manifestation stuff.

It's stuff that I don't directly speak about.

His brand is Muscle Meditations.

You should check him out.

He's a super jacked guy who's into all the spiritual stuff.

He was basically saying the formula of manifestation or law of attraction which actually if you just take off the mystical language,

It's kind of like a good how-to for obsession which is have your future image,

Live in the future the best you can which is maybe a way of being just obsessively thinking about it but not in a contracted way of fearful of like,

Yes,

Whatever income,

Whatever experience,

Whatever lifestyle.

And then spend your downtime daydreaming.

This is what I think is so important which is why I think it's impossible especially with creative work,

I think it's impossible or very hard to have exponential growth in something creative,

To really come up with great creative ideas that lead to exponential growth if you're not daydreaming about it in your downtime.

When I'm working on my book which I'm pausing right now,

The times where I have the best ideas I could only write two to four hours a day well personally,

Maybe four hours a day is like maybe five on a high coffee day.

But the rest of the day I only really write well the next day if I spend the rest of the day passively daydreaming about my book.

That's when I have the biggest leaps.

That's when I have,

I mean when I'm passively daydreaming about podcast ideas,

That's when I make the podcast that I'm the most proud of because that's what leads to inspired action.

That's where you get those creative ideas and we have that inspired idea,

You have to follow it.

One of my favorite quotes from Allen Ginsberg is when the muse comes to your bedside,

Don't tell her you're going to fuck her later.

We have that inspired action,

You have to take it,

Whatever it is.

Whether if you're into law of attraction,

This is the way that you get the million dollar idea,

You think about it and when it comes to you,

You act on it.

To demystify that if you're obsessed with something,

That's when you get those big ideas.

That's when you get the thing of like,

Oh this is the thing no one's ever done before,

This is how I carve out my part of the marketplace or this is how I level up against my competition or this is just how I level up as a human being.

But you have to take that action,

You have to follow those ideas.

My last thing,

I mentioned this already but this is what I want to end on and I think it's something for especially any guy who's in mediocrity or you feel like you've just like if you think of your life or your life satisfaction as a stock or a coin if you will and it's kind of been hovering between these two support and resistance points and if you want it to break free or you're basically stuck in the middle of mediocrity,

Atomic habits are not good enough.

Those are great philosophies,

BJ Fogg stuff is great for habit change,

Whatever but if you really want to make a difference,

You have to pick something extreme which is why I got so much out of that David Goggins challenge I did even though it's kind of arbitrary and has nothing to do with anything in my direct life.

Just the challenge of going beyond the point where you can do something easily,

Like we didn't do a 24 hour challenge,

We did 48 because it only really starts to suck at 24 hours,

That extra 48 is like where you really need to dig deep to some level,

It wasn't the hardest thing in the world.

But you got to go extreme.

So for myself,

My little thing with the thing that I've been neglecting which is social media,

I've committed to making 10 episodes a month without any sacrifice of quality.

That's always been my thing against people who pump out a lot of videos,

Not to say,

Not to knock anyone,

Anyway this is all my resentment so this actually doesn't matter or my past fears or whatever.

But anyway,

10 episodes which right now we're halfway through the month and I think I've only put out two episodes,

I kind of have to hustle this month to get that through because I do spend multiple days preparing sometimes,

I mean mostly daydreaming and writing notes.

I'm going to end with this quote now,

It's from Dan Gable,

Perhaps the greatest of all time in terms of wrestling,

If it's important do it every day,

If it's not don't do it at all.

And Dan,

If you've heard him on other shows like he's been on Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman,

He's obviously obsessed with wrestling,

He's been obviously obsessed with wrestling and that's the only way you can become the greatest of all time in anything.

So whatever your thing is,

Whatever the pyramid you create,

Whatever the hierarchy that you're seeking to be the top of,

You only get there by being obsessed,

Not only putting effort but like getting to a point mentally and mechanically,

Like internally and externally where you're so into the thing that there's no resistance,

It doesn't require effort because you just love putting in more energy to get to the top of that thing,

That's the only way you get to the top,

That's the only way you have those 10x gains,

Those big jumps,

Those big life changing experiences.

So yeah,

I mean if you don't see me put out 10 episodes this month,

Please yell at me,

That's my little call to action but also for your own life,

If you,

I mean I'm not going to fail,

I wouldn't embarrass myself on the internet by not doing the thing but also if this episode resonated with you,

Just think in your own life,

Maybe you've already come up with a thing like what is the thing you've been neglecting,

What is the thing that if you were obsessed with it,

You would really get a lot out of it,

Right?

Is it something in your health,

Is it something in your work,

Something in your creative life,

Is it a shift in your,

How you experience social relationships or I don't know what it is but what can you come up with and maybe you do the 20 answer method right now,

You ask yourself the question,

How do I blank and you come up with as many answers and you come up with a commitment,

A program for yourself,

Something that's a little bit past the edge of your comfort to go hard,

To go to war and finally yeah,

If this resonated with you or anything that I say resonates with you and you want to speak with me or if you want to learn more of something hands on to help you get on your life path or move you through this chapter of your hero's journey,

Whatever chapter you're in,

Check out my Mask and Archetype program.

It also still comes with a free one on one coaching call with me so it is the most cost effective way to work with me directly.

That's at maskandarchetypechallenge.

Com.

I had a lot of cool people reach out or a lot of people signed up in the last month,

A lot of maybe a handful of people I should say.

It's been cool meeting a lot of you guys so I would love to meet more.

That's at maskandarchetypechallenge.

Com.

It comes with a free session and the challenge itself is 21 days of micro lessons and micro missions to help you reconnect with your archetypal masculinity which of course ties to your purpose,

Your character,

How you interact polarly and what not so check that out and I will see you in the next episode.

Goodbye.