 In this video, I'd like to talk to you about the idea of life's call to action and the up and down cycles that happen between the idea of play and adventure versus rest and learning. This is a kind of off the cuff idea, something I'm theorizing as I speak that's been on my mind for a while and the idea goes like this. So in life, there's the basic fundamental level of living which is called being alive. Being alive is the literal lowest level of living that you have and what characterizes it is the continual attraction to the path of least resistance and the complete giving up on the idea of progress or self-initiated improvement. A person who's just barely living, just alive, just goes about his day, whatever dictums he's been taught, whatever environmental influences were instilled upon him is what he's going to behave like. So there's no initiative, there's no personal volition. You're just why you've been born to be, kind of like an animal or a machine. And this person responds simply to his environment and to immediate stimulus. He goes by the group narrative, whatever is being taught at the time politically. So if this person was born in Saudi Arabia, he would be a very devout Muslim who believes in everything they teach and if he was born in India, he would be, sorry for the ignorance, but I have no idea what the main religion is there, but he would be that and that would be his life and again, if he's born in America, he's simply the average American without any opinion of his own besides that which has been dictated by media, newspaper, popular culture, etc. That's the lowest level of living you have and of course this person is opportunistic like all people, but from a kind of a dirty perspective where if you offered this person a million dollars and you could press on a button and get it and somebody would have to die to get it, but you'll never have responsibility for it. This person is almost guaranteed to press on that button or again any kind of chance of self advancement without effort. This person will be extremely opportunistic and will most likely go for it, but obviously you who's listening is not that kind of person, but why? What makes you different from that person and what I like to look at it, the way I like to look at it is you're a person who's been called to action, so a deep voice inside you told you that it's time to go and venture into the unknown and you got up and you ventured. So every time you did that, and of course it's not something that happens once, you did that multiple times, sometimes did it in cycles within cycles, so that means you went out to explore and you found a cave, of course a metaphorical cave. Now exploring the cave is a lot scarier than exploring the just the unknown territory because the cave usually has snakes in it, so are you going to go in there? Because sometimes the call to action says don't do it because you're not there yet, so you're going to die, don't go in there, but sometimes the call to action says you can go further if you'd like, you can go to the next level, very similar to a startup that can get offers to be sold for a large sum of money and it's already ventured into the unknown, that's why it's a successful startup, it did that properly, but also it has now the chance to venture again into the deeper unknown by actually going even deeper and risking everything further because now we have something to lose versus just starting from nothing and the startup chooses not to get bought off and basically go on the safe path but to continue and go even further and sometimes that startup will fail, a big example is I believe it was the CEO of MySpace was offered I think $100 million, again I might be completely making up the numbers but this is the general skeletal frame of the story so he was offered a lot of money and he thought no, I have the biggest social network in the world and a couple of years later Facebook comes and now MySpace is worth next to nothing and there was also another example of I think it was a famous fashion company, again I'm sorry but I don't recall the name and you can look it up though and what happened was the owners thought the company won't really go far, he sold it for I think a couple hundred thousand dollars maybe a couple million dollars and eventually that company became one of the most renowned fashion companies in the world worth billions, again I don't remember which company but what ended up happening was the guy killed himself because he refused to take the call to action and actually go for it, step into the unknown so whatever call to action I've had between age 20 to 22 I took and that's a very rare state for a person to be in where every time their intuition tells them you have a chance to explore and grow you know venturing to the unknown and to the dangerous and you actually go there that's very very rare and the more of these ventures you took the deeper your wisdom will be you know assuming you'll survive because some people don't but the problem is that you'll also become less less you know become disenfranchised with life so the myths of life and the things you've been taught begin falling off you know whatever preconceived notions you had of life of you know people have people are for example people people are just good people are good and there's no evil there's only unconscious behavior that starts to kind of disappear you know just follow the the script you know marry get a job that starts to fall off although it is noted I want it is important to know that in the United States if you are married finished school and I mean didn't have kids before you were married and you're married didn't finish school and you have a job for over a year the odds of you being poor are less than 3% so there's a 97% chance that you'll be at least in the middle class but that aside the preconceived notion of you know just work have a pension blah blah blah you'll retire happy and with money that falls to the wayside etc etc I know various foods that foods that you thought are good for you you get disenfranchised in relationships where you find out that women are evil but men are also evil not all of them of course but many more than you thought again goes to infinite lengths you just get pummeled and pummeled and I used to think that this was a good thing I used to think that the call to action like you know you'll take the call to action and it doesn't matter as long as you survive because because you're going to become wiser and you know be more effective etc but this is what I did just as an example and you know in my case it worked out because even though I did go through some pretty rough shit in the last few years I got way wiser than I would have ever been able to you know I became humble and grounded so I'm I retained all of the knowledge of the effectiveness I had but I also again became humble and it took me a year almost a year to process all the bad shit that happened to me because it was that bad and I'm not talking about like a childhood trauma I'm talking about as an adult that took me a year to get over the traumas that I went through but I came out stronger and like happier than ever and wiser than ever and I wouldn't take anything back but the problem is that again this is something I learned relatively not too long ago when I read Mein Kampf if you probably know the book it was basically Hitler's autobiography and he wrote it while he was imprisoned for going against the government basically that's when his deep-rooted anger became even stronger and he the book was sort of a manifesto of Hitlerian ideology what I found extremely shocking and deeply disturbing about the book was that up until that point I didn't really know too much about Hitler and this was his again his autobiography so it was very personal he wrote it from the way he thought and felt you know Hitler the the the personification and people you know when they talk about him they're like yeah he's the bad guy and the complete dehumanization like he's not a person he's you know something else but things we can all be Hitler's and this is how I discovered it through the book where he was started as a really good person he had something that everybody has in common at least everybody that watches these videos one thing was that he was very passionate and motivated which many of you are another thing was he was very patriotic so he really believed in the country which again many of you are and thoroughly he was very good at public speaking which which many of you are or at least many of you want to be and the book Mein Kampf at least the first it's a 12% of it just you get to see how you know after you go through the first 10 15% of the book that's where he kind of starts turning evil but up until that point it really was I actually have to say I empathize with him like I really I agreed with most of his ideas when he was saying how the the extreme left but which basically ruled Germany at the time Germany at the time it was corrupting the state by making people unpatriotic and completely demolishing the middle class and you know most of his ideas were very sound he would often debate people about these ideas and what happened was he got better and better and eventually he got so good at debating that he would win all the time and he once he started winning people started getting violent towards him so one time in his office they literally pushed him down the stairs and and attacked him physically because he won the argument and they couldn't fight his argument so they had to use fists so this leads me to again the idea of a call to action because Hitler also had a lot of calls to action where he you know he could have kind of stopped at many points but he always chose to do the hard thing and to go into difficult situations into scary situations not of evil just out of his sense of righteousness out of wanting things to be better out of honest passion and he saw stuff that he did not want to see so he at least that's what he claims I can't verify it what I'm gonna say now I can't verify it myself and I'll have to learn about it more and again I'm saying this as a Jew who both my both sides of my family my mothers and my dads both their grandfathers got you know butchered and burnt in the Holocaust so just keep that in mind but he says that Jews were he was anti he's against anti-Semitism in the beginning and then he discovered after a lot of investigation that the people who were destroying the state which again legitimate that these people these organizations the news organizations the political organizations they were all led by Jews so he said the there was not not one organization that didn't have Jews and was political in that sense and there was not a single organization that had Jews that was not anti-state and again I'm specifically referring to the social democratic society that was the ideology that was so-called democratic but it wasn't really democratic it was just called that way to make it sound good and again he even though these ideas were probably correct he did you know go on to murder kids and women and gays and gypsies so you know I'm not in any way supportive of him but where I'm going with this is his call to adventure led him to become what he became you don't you're not born like that he wasn't born evil and secondly he wasn't born effective so that's deeply disturbing and and just beyond belief that idea that the only way he could become that effective and that evil was by first of all going further than anyone else in investigating the unknown and his call to act and going with his call to action which is where you gain your new skills and also he went so deep that what he saw completely corrupted him because when you go into the unknown and answer the call to adventure you will be tempted many times with the growing temptations often to let go of your principles to become again disenfranchised with humanity because when you go into the unknown you're going to see things that you did not want to see you're going to see betrayals you're going to see absolute misery of course you're also going to see a lot of times wonderful things and the call to adventure always starts from a place of positive intentions so it starts from a vision or hope but where it leads you you don't know so you choose how you play your life you choose it whether you play your life safely or or you allow yourself to get exposed to danger and again danger means that you leave your partner that you've been with for 10 years because you know it's not the right partner you just know deep inside and you go after that call to adventure or you open that business that is just in your bones to do or maybe the opposite maybe you'll leave everything behind you just start traveling with the tiny amount of money you've saved everybody has their own call to adventure and these calls keep coming and sometimes bigger sometimes smaller sometimes you take a call to adventure and again you get another call to adventure while you're on a call to adventure which is your chance to go even further on more dangerous territory again the force the going the field versus the cave so i've been in the fields i've been in the caves and i've also been in pits full of monsters on some occasions and every time you go there and survive you come out scarred but wiser as long as you again keep your humanity and your sanity currently my calls to adventure called me to develop my relationship with my girlfriend to the furthest extent possible so to go against my commitment issues and my ideas of you know squeezing the lemons while they're ripe and actually deciding to commit to one person no matter what so not having that option to just get up and leave that's one call to adventure that i took on another call to adventure was going back to making these videos and the way it called me was the idea that it's time to commit and that's why i committed for to my girlfriend that if i don't make 30 videos in the two weeks i allotted myself i would have to smash my phone close my youtube channel and eat a huge ball of usabi and i'm at the last eight videos i have three days to do it and it seems that i'm going to get to that goal get to that goal pretty much 100 percent guarantee and now that i did that things started happening again so tons of coaching calls are booked i've already done a few coaching calls things have started to change opportunities have started to come up so when you take up one call to adventure other calls to adventure start showing up and things accelerate and you can choose to move to an even higher level if you so choose or you can keep going the safe route and see where that leads you although that on the long term may be less safe some of the time and again this is why it's such a philosophically difficult topic because the more i study it and study how the bible stories go into that the stories of buddha the myths of greece and even the earliest cultures the mesopotamians they all share those call to adventures the disney movies pretty much every single movie you can see you can watch every um book that's a fiction or even just people's real life there's always the call to adventure and through those mediums again literature films myths you get to see various projections of the archetypes of what happens on those calls to adventure so hitler is your classic villain story if you watch any movie or read any book or check out any myth story about a villain's origin you'll find the same exact template you'll find a person who started out with extremely promising characteristic which again hitler had very very deep sincerity and innocence which hitler believe it or not you can read his book and see started out arguably more innocent and good with good intentions than anyone he that was in his life the the kids in his school the teachers his parents he was the the chosen one you could say the person who was super smart yet extremely sincere and ethical while everybody else was you know the regular dumb idiots that you know you get in life and that person gets corrupted by the things he sees you know he loses things in hitler's case it was him not being able to get into art school and again getting beat up and you know don't even get started on what happened in the wars of Germany so he got seriously disenfranchised and just succumbed to anger and you know that because how do you know he became a bad guy well because when Germany was losing when they were fighting in the war then instead of choosing to allocate the people who were working for him in the death camps maybe to fighting or instead of using the Jews and the gypsies and the gays in the death camps and actually using them for work and labor he chose to keep systematically killing them not only that he actually accelerated the pace the more Germany came to its eventual defeat so when he saw that they were about to lose he put more focus and effort on killing Jews than winning the war while blaming his generals for being incompetent and that is the true sign of him being evil in my opinion so the journey might very well corrupt you or it might make you a hero because had he chosen to go the respectable route and help Germany from a place of sincere positive intentions rather than his rage we might have we might all have been right now praising Hitler because he would have saved Germany but again when you go into the unknown and you see things that you can never unsee and you lose beliefs that were foundational for your sanity well if you don't quickly adapt you could very well fall into insanity and this is a very optimistic note but also a very cautionary note that you never know so if you've been delaying your call to adventure now would be the time to start because arguably you could say that life is not worth living without the call to adventure depends on how you look at it I mean if a dog has no moral agency and no way to choose how he lives except the way he's been brought up and the way his genes make him be is it a life worth living perhaps but if a human with the capacity the actual ability to take this initiative and to be more and to actually create in this world if that person chooses to relinquish that capacity and only live like a dog instead of his natural ability of change now is this life worth living if you have a car that is a Ferrari and you only use it to go to the grocery store or and never go beyond 30 miles per hour it's kind of wasted so value is relative to potential value or to potential capacity for more value and as a human your capacity for increasing value and growing is infinite or at least nobody ever found it yet because even the most successful will tell you that they can do more and you know they're on a whole different level so the best motivation to do it at least for me assuming that you don't have to do it because again sometimes necessity is the best motivation to going to the unknown but assuming you can live a fairly comfortable life without doing it my motivation was simply the fear of regret and knowing that I would never or almost never regret anything that I've done but I would deeply regret everything that I didn't do because it's like watching a long movie and when you reach the end of the movie the characters had so much developing so maybe a romance was developing between your favorite characters but it never came into fruition maybe the bad guy who you really wanted him to get punished by the good guy he got away with it or you know you never saw the actual relief of the punishment missed opportunities missed potentials are the worst thing ever because they're the only thing that you can never fix because an 80 year old man sitting back and looking at his life and seeing all the the calls to action that he could have taken but didn't he can never fix that and you know you may think it won't really matter but when you actually get there you'll know that it did and how do I know that it's because all those how did I start the video with all those just the live people who are not who never went that far and never even took more than a single call to action all these people have been statistically proven to have one dominating regret which is I regret not doing what I wanted to do not saying the things I wanted to say not being with the people I wanted to be and not following my dreams that is the single biggest regret in all populations of the dying basically that's the biggest one so if that's what normal people tell you the people that you know you'd consider turned off the people that never cared for going to the call of adventure then what do you think you'll feel because you're even more sensitive to that they maybe didn't even notice the call to adventure they just noticed it a bit and then let it go but you're hyper sensitive to it so whatever your call to adventure is I think it's time for you to go at it to go a bit into the unknown and try something new you know live it's exciting and if you're already on a call to adventure keep doing that keep doing that thing that made you take the walk in the first place and if you're in a call to adventure and you're being called to higher levels think very carefully before going into the cave and if you do then remember that the main thing you should be defending is your ethics because an ethical person that goes in the cave will survive but somebody who loses their ethics the moment you lose them you're gone because ethics there's something that is almost impossible get back once you've chipped your ethics by doing unethical stuff you've done it it's like once you're a drug addict you're always a drug addict so maybe you don't do drugs anymore but the temptation will always be there because it's just part of your identity now and even part of your brain so in this note I'll conclude this unscripted rant about destiny and calls to adventure I hope you gain a lot of value from that and let me know in the comments if you have anything to ask or add to this topic and if you're a relatively new viewer I recommend subscribing if you haven't and also checking out my free ebook on business my paid ebook that's the autobiography of my life or just go on a coaching call with me which for now is free hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you soon