 So, there was a period in my life when I basically tried to be a self-help guru and pretty much failed. Now, to recap what happened and why it happened and how it happened. So, I was in my teenage years and if you're following this channel, you already know that since forever, since as far as I remember myself, I always wanted to make a difference. I always wanted to help people and inspire people. But I think there is this phenomena that when we want that but we are not really capable of doing that, we sometimes start to push for it and I noticed it in myself and in that stage of my life and I noticed it later when I figured out what's happening. I noticed it in other people. It's when people want to help others so bad that they spend very little time in actually getting the right life experience or the right skillset or knowledge and then they go to others and try to teach them what they just learned and that's how it was. I think I was around 14, 15 when I started to feel like I really wanted to make this happen and if I would have conversations with people and if they would tell me that they're having some problems and they were like, you know, my age but I guess in teenage years you do have some life issues and challenges and I tried to help them out so bad, you know, I was trying to give them the right advice and I was, you know, talking my tongue off. And I was also, you know, reading the books. I was also thinking a lot, drawing mind maps, working on myself. But obviously still, you know, I was my teenage myself. I had very little experience and I didn't overcome the same problems that they came and I didn't have the right knowledge and skillset to help them but I was trying so bad and I was pushing that and it didn't really, you know, it kind of felt like they would be inspired at that moment or sometimes they would appreciate it but then I didn't see any change really and it was kind of, I was puzzled so what is happening? Then my journey continued and my drive was still so bad that I was also, you might know I was doing Aikido martial art, kind of a philosophical martial art and I decided that instead of studying I would pursue the path of Aikido and right after, soon after school, after summer vacation ended, after I finished high school, instead of university I went to Switzerland to train in a martial arts dojo and Aikido yoga meditation dojo which was very spiritual school as well. Like there was a lot of meditation, a lot of spiritual talk and after those three months that I spent there training every day and then I was doing a lot of work extra on my own, reading a lot of books and meditating and contemplating and it really felt, it really inspired me and elevated me so much that after those three months when my first initial committed trip ended and I came back to my home country, Lithuania I felt so elevated, I felt so inspired and I felt so changed but I came to a conclusion, I came to a notion that maybe now it's time for me to teach maybe now I have so much knowledge, now I'm definitely much better and now I'm ready to teach everyone the truth of life and I don't think I was ever extremely pushy, I never demanded people to follow what I do but I was also to reading a lot of self-help books which now I look down upon, like Tony Robbins, Robin Sharma, the monk who sold his Ferrari and I read everything, I was like, for a couple of years I went nuts I kept reading all those books and the advice that they were giving it sounded good, now that I look back I think most of the advice there is superficial it doesn't create core changes, it just makes you feel good at the moment or it makes you make a change for like a week or two weeks and then you feel like it's better things are better but then usually you just fall back to it and they don't take the responsibility, they usually the self-help gurus blame you for not being able to apply their suggestions, their advice but actually that's not really the case, the case is if the advice would be really solid it would be much more likely that you will be able to follow through I think their advice is flawed usually most of it and then eventually you try to apply it and it doesn't have a high percentage chance that it will work I think it's a very low percentage actually, the possibility that that advice applied will work but you usually blame yourself, you're like, oh I wasn't able to apply it but now that I look back I think most of the advice was not that good in those books not really mature, not really solving the real problem or creating a significant change but it felt like I was like, okay these guys are recognized, they're popular clearly they know what they're talking about and I was passing on their knowledge and so I had a bunch of that type of knowledge in me and one day I went to my high school which I already finished and I met one of the teachers which I had a great connection with and she heard my story about going to Switzerland and doing this yoga and spiritual thing and meditation and Aikido and she saw my passion and inspiration and she was like, yeah maybe you want to come to class and share your story with other students they may find it interesting, I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah and I think I started drinking my Kool-Aid at that moment because I was telling that story and everyone had their jaws dropped and I was so passionate and there's this almost mystical martial arts school and I was kind of mixing in life advice in between and I saw that it affected those kids, they're like 16, 17, 18 years old and I saw that they were that moment inspired and that made me even go deeper into my delusion that I'm ready to save people and to give something incredible to them and so I started meeting more and more of those kids and I even organized a couple of workshops and I was like, okay, I'm going to teach about life so come down this hour here and there and I was laying out all my stuff but to be honest though when those kids would ask me some questions I would have some superficial answers from the books, from my contemplations but some of those answers I could notice and deeper in myself if I would look I was like, I don't really know the right answer and my answer isn't really sufficient here and another thing that happened is I was making a break from coming back to continue my Aikido training in Switzerland and at that moment I started to feel like my mood was going down and I started to feel actually lost myself because I was trying to teach the truth of the universe to kids but barely younger than myself but I didn't see any real significant change and I think, I don't know if that was necessarily doing that period or in and out of it but there was one significant thing that happened to me is I met some of the people I used to try to motivate back in the day when I was 14, 15, 16 and some of them when I would meet them they would tell me oh man, actually you know, you actually really helped me out that day and I was like, really? Yes, yes, this is great, this is great this kind of approves me, this shows that I'm actually that I actually know what I'm talking about and I would inquire so what was it? Tell me so I could put that in the book of fame in my mind and be like, okay for now and this is the best advice ever and every time that happened they would tell me that I told them something that I wasn't even aware of that I told them it was something that I considered to be completely natural it seemed like common knowledge for me because the rest of the information I was really trying to push hard I was like, let me tell you this, this author said this and this guy said this and you know, Buddha said that and none of that stuck with them but then I would casually say something on the back of my mind I was like, oh yeah, yeah, by the way, you know I did this and this worked for me and those were the things which actually had some impact on them the things which were effortless the things which I didn't really even care about and that made me think and I started to realize that, you know, actually I came to this hypothesis which I kind of believe still up to today that if you really want to offer value to others you either need to just, it's either just showing example you know, living your best life and letting people see, look at you and take what they want by themselves or the other aspect is just the other aspect is becoming so familiar with your own material with your own life experience learning so much and becoming so comfortable at that developing such a deep depth of knowledge that you wouldn't even care about that anymore and you would practically try it out you would practically apply it and then that would become common knowledge for you and you would be so sure of it that you wouldn't even you know, you wouldn't think about it twice you wouldn't even try to persuade anyone you would just be sharing something that, you know is a day-to-day thing for you which works for you and there's a chance that maybe somebody will take something from that themselves but then if I look back at my self-help guru days it was all so much about pushing it was all so much about trying to convince others that I know the truth that eventually pretty much none of that really worked because none of that really was my own none of that even worked for myself that I believed in it just because some other self-help guru guy told me about that and I even actually to be honest I noticed that happening even with some self-help gurus even like big-time self-help gurus today I look at their advice and I see recognition of my own type of self that dynamics that I used to have that day I noticed that in them it's just like it's a lot of nice sounding thoughts and you know, fluffy advice which isn't really the core solution like the best of the stuff that I found for myself that works for me pretty much is mentioning almost no self-help guru book at best it's a book of some expert which shows a very specific field and he dove, they deepened it used scientific evidence, scientific research did tests and proved that it works for a lot of people and you know he offers a couple of bits of pieces of information where you're like oh crap that makes sense and you apply it and it works but all those self-help gurus including myself at that day trying to play the god of life or the source of knowledge that they know everything they know about their total advice and they know about diet and they know about fitness and they know about habits and they know about psychology it's like dude no you're just digging the surface and trying to push some basic random information into people's minds that's not the way to go and so that was my conclusion, that's what I learned that I was doing and my counter solution was stop doing that, focus on a direction and just keep digging and if you watched my previous video you know that this is not a coincidence that I'm telling this story because I realized I need to do the same again and I decided I will share a story here and there but for the rest of my time oh my goodness it's all about digging, digging, digging standing on the top of the shoulders of giants learning from the best of the best reaching the end of what was already discovered and then seeing if maybe maybe I will slightly be able to add something on top of that but that's a huge, huge endeavor so far as far as I think it's the only good way to really create something unique and valuable and not just really a couple of self-help guru books and pass on the knowledge while you're yourself lost and confused so I hope this video was useful thanks for watching, let me know what you think in the comments