 The other day I made this video explaining that I was feeling discouraged, and then I showed how I kind of worked through that and get back to the point where I'm motivated again. And I got two very different responses to it. On one hand, I got feedback that made sense to me. This was from people who understood what was going on the same way I did. And it was basically like, yeah, when you're trying to accomplish anything, there's going to be difficulty, there's going to be challenges, there's going to be ups and downs. There's a totally normal part of it, right? Of course. And then you figure out how to get through the challenges, and then you make progress and blah blah blah. And on the other hand, there was this other perspective that didn't make sense to me at all. And there were two main things. First, it was, oh no, that's so terrible that you're going through difficulty and you're having challenges. Oh no. Oh, it's terrible. I see you're going through so much right now. You're going through such a difficult time. And I'm just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is a little much, dude. This is just normal stuff for me. Like part of doing anything from what I understand involves challenge and difficulty. And that's just a normal part of it. Of course there's challenge and difficulty when I'm trying to do anything worth doing. If I'm ever not experiencing challenge and difficulty, I feel like I'm not doing anything. I'm wasting my potential. So I didn't understand that perspective at all. And then the other thing that came with that perspective was, oh, here let me help you with meditation and new perspectives on life and stuff. And it basically boiled down to taking a present perspective, like just putting myself in the moment, taking a deep breath, maybe going into a meditative state where I'm watching my breathing, just putting my focus all right here in the present and on myself and turning up the ignorance of everything else to full. And I don't mean ignorance as in like, you know, being stupid or whatever. It's just like basically ignore the rest of the world. Ignore everything else. Just focus on where I am and it'll calm you down and everything will be fine. Now I do understand this technique. Yeah, if you just put yourself in the present and just basically, you know, just shut down all the problems you're thinking about. Yeah, it's very calming and it can help you chill out when you need to. The funny thing was that in the video where I was explaining the difficulty I was having and then I showed the solution, it was actually the opposite. Like, if you kind of pay attention, I was very in the moment. You know, I was doing things and I was starting to lose track of the big picture. Like, I started feeling like, am I just spinning my wheels? Am I not doing anything? I don't even know what I'm doing. And then over a few minutes, I was like, wait, okay, let me stop, back up, get out of just the present perspective. Let me look into the past and look at a bigger perspective and then I realized, oh, right here is where I am now. And like, in the past, I was way back there. I made all this progress. Oh, great. Now I can carry on focused on what I'm doing and just doing my little things and I know I'm making progress. So I actually had to expand my perspective to kind of like, to reset the idea that, oh, okay, I am going in a direction and doing something. And then I could get back to the narrow focus. So, and you know, from the one perspective, people totally got that. And in this other perspective, people totally didn't get that. And I think I have an idea now of what's going on there. So, I mean, it's a weird cultural thing. So a lot of our culture today takes advantage of like naturally occurring things. So, you know, we've built up all these instincts over thousands of years of evolution and whatever, or maybe you don't believe in evolution, whatever. We have instincts, right? And there are ways, and marketing people know all this stuff and take advantage of it all the time. There are ways to kind of shortcut instincts in certain ways to get people to behave in certain ways. Now, in school, and there's all this self-help stuff, there's a lot of stuff out there explaining to people how to do this thing where you basically kind of meditate, or just somehow put yourself into a present perspective, and then, you know, everything's fine and you can do things. The problem with it is that it's shortcutting a step before it. And the step before it is actually more important than that step. So when you're just focused on the present and what you're doing, it's great for accomplishing a task. So you need to weld something. You don't need to think about all the history of welding and the whole machine you're building. You just need to know this piece of metal needs to stick to this piece of metal. Just be in the present, focus here, and then you melt it together, and then you can move on to the next thing. So you just want to have a very narrow focus. So having a very narrow focus and just being in the present is very good for accomplishing tasks. What it is no good for at all is figuring out what task you should do. And that is more important than how well you do it. Let me just repeat that. What you do is more important than how well you do it. Let me just give you a stupid example. The greatest serial killer in the world is amazing at killing people, right? So are they more or less valuable than a mediocre gardener? The gardener isn't very good at what they're doing. The serial killer is amazing, so they must be better, right? Except the serial killer, what they're doing is actually taking value away from the world, destroying things. And while the gardener, even though they're not that good at it, they are producing value of some kind. They're growing something, they're increasing value in the world. So what you do is more important than how well you do it. And in case you haven't guessed yet, the step that comes before putting yourself in the present moment and getting good at tasks is the step right before that is figuring out what to do. Now to figure out what to do, you have to expand your perspective. You have to look into the past and say, hey, what's happened back there and how did that work out? What have I done in the past and how did those things turn out? And then you got to look into the future and say, okay, there's all these different futures. Which one do I want to aim for? And then you just have to expand your consciousness into the universe of ideas and the bigger you can expand it, the more ideas you have available to you, the more tools you have, the more choices you have, the more options you have, the more choices you have to direct what you're doing and direct your life. So when people are just going into this meditative state and putting themselves in the present, they're shortcutting that step. Now normally, I mean if you're not doing the meditation or whatever, artificially getting it somehow, you would have to figure out what you should be doing first. Take care of that responsibility and then when you get to the point where you are actually doing something, you have this good feeling because you've already solved what you should be doing. But you still get that good feeling even if you shortcut it. See, this is how instincts can be manipulated. And this is how people are manipulated a lot. So if you want to have control over your life, don't shortcut that step. Don't shortcut what you should be doing step. Don't ignore the world even though it's difficult to take a big view and try to look at as many things as possible. You have to look at some ugliness and there's some pain involved in looking at your own mistakes and all this stuff. But if you skip over that, you end up not having any control over your life. And then there are obviously a million other things around you that are happy to tell you what to do. So I think that's what's going on with this other perspective. I think there are a lot of people, and I don't want to make too many generalizations or anything, and I don't mean to crap on anyone. But this is a perspective you can have when you live in a city. Because when you live in a city, there's signs that tell you where to go. You walk on this line and you walk here. You stay to the right. You follow this sign. The street lights tell you what to do. There's advertisements everywhere telling you what to do. There's rules. There's codes. There's laws. There's just a million rules telling you what to do. Even what job you should have. You get the job that pays you the most money you can get. All these decisions are made for you in the city if you're willing to accept them. The problem with that, and then you can just stay in the present moment. You don't have to think about anything and go through the pain of looking at your own mistakes or problems in the world. You just focus on what you're doing and keep your head down and don't worry about it. The problem is, often people do that and then 50 years go by and they're like, wait, why aren't I where I want to be? Well, it's because you skip the step of figuring out what you should be doing and went straight to how can I do it better? They'll skip that step because you end up lost. Even though it's painful. Life's not supposed to be always easy. That would be a waste. I think I blabbered on enough.