The Secret Life Principles that Successful People Hide Part III

57) the next principle is systems thinking you need to become a systems thinker and learn to think in terms

of systems learn to see systems at work everywhere and develop awareness of the

ecological interconnectedness of things. Get introduced to systems thinking and explain all of this stuff if you don't know what systems thinking is there are books you can read about it in my book

list that's a pretty deep topic hmm people who aren't systems thinkers

aren't very good at solving bigger problems they tend to think of problems

in the world very simplistically in black-and-white ways and I think that every problem is just you know has one

root cause or something like that we're usually in a system where you have a lot of factors that are coming into play you

have various kinds of feedback loops that you need to think about systems tend to work in counterintuitive ways oftentimes you're trying to change a

system the thing you do to change the system ends up worsening the problem rather than improving it so it's

because of this, this is important this is gonna help you to contribute to the world that you

want to make because almost anything that you're gonna be interacting with within the world that's of any interest is gonna be a complex system of one form or

another especially if we're talking about large groups of people businesses

societies cultures those are all systems

58) another core principle is to be a good citizen and be conscious of your ecological footprint

you are part of a larger whole you're like one ant in an ant colony and you need to become

conscious that you are an ant in an ant colony and that you're connected to a colony that your existence is not

something you do independently you do it as part of the entire collective that you're a part of and you need to seek to

educate yourself about how that works part of that is systems thinking because this colony is a system but also you

need to teach yourself about what impact are you having on the larger culture and the larger working of

this colony that you're in are you contributing to the lowering of its consciousness or the raising of its

consciousness are you contributing to the problems or are you helping solve the problems are you being a good

citizen that requires a lot of education teaching yourself about politics and

governance and and how collective ego works how ecology works and your environmental impact even when you're

walking down the sidewalk eating icecream what are you gonna do with the rapper are you gonna throw it on the ground or

are you conscious of how you're contributing to that are you conscious of how when you're driving your car you're contributing to air pollution are

you conscious of how you know you are a citizen of the United States for

example contributes to the wars that the United States starts overseas are you conscious of your role in that

or are you just blind to that are you conscious of the kind of food that you eat and how that impacts the environment

and animals and and other human beings are you conscious of the products that you buy and how that impacts third-world

countries where these products might be developed under sweatshop conditions you take responsibility for

that and you strive to be a good citizen otherwise what you get is you get a kind

of a crummy society that's unconscious a kind of society that you don't want to live in.

59) another core principle is to be strategic

You need to be able to be patient with your plans you need to lay out plans that have a long time horizon think 5 10 years down the

road plan stuff out in your life and be strategic about it so that you're moving towards the things that you want

and you need to have some short-term goals meeting from goals long-term goals etc you need to be able to go through

multiple stepping stones to reach some kind of goal a lot of people it's like they want something but then that's

something is over here and they're over here they don't see a path to there and they're not able to create the stepping stones to move their way up and

most of the biggest things in life that you want to acquire are gonna

require multiple stepping stones to inch your way towards them you're not gonna be able to just leap and get it in one step.

60) the next core principle is that happiness is only possible with

enlightenment so if you're not enlightened don't kick yourself too much

for not being happy it's not possible happiness comes with

enlightenment now that doesn't mean you can't improve your level of happiness of course you can and you should you should

work to increase your happiness as much as you can even though you won't be able to lock in your happiness without

enlightenment you don't even know what true happiness is without enlightenment but also what this principle

demonstrates why Lightman is so important because what you ultimately want is happiness and the only way

you're gonna get it through enlightenment so don't put and light it off for too long

61) The principle is that no material possessions will ever make you happy this is impossible this is like a

loss is exerting and reliable than Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's equations of e equals mc-squared this is more certain than that no

material possessions will never make you happy no matter what it is cars houses money yachts but not just that also the

stuff that you normally wouldn't consider material like relationships family knowledge the acquisition of

knowledge travel you think travel is not material well I'm including all of that

under the label of material here none of that stuff will make you happy guaranteed impossible the sooner you can

accept that ah the much better your life will go if you haven't you

understood this principle you're gonna be chasing for many many years you're gonna waste decades of your life the

62) The next related core principle is to be happy all by yourself train yourself to be happy all alone

just sitting and doing nothing doesn't mean you have to be a loner for your whole life you can socialize and have fun with

friends that's okay but if you can't be happy just sitting on your couch doing nothing you really can't be happy all

the other stuff is just temporary little boosts little shots of adrenaline and

excitement little drugs really that are

distracting you from doing the inner work you have to do to just be happy sitting there by yourself on a couch for

an hour or two or a whole day or all week

63) the next core principle is to keep your life is simple and Spartan don't over-clutter your life not just with objects

but also with all kinds of social obligations and commitments to family and a

bunch of kids and all this now that doesn't mean there's a problem with having kids and family of course you can

have those things but just be mindful of the fact that any time your life sort of

frees up your ego mind tends to want to fill it with just any kind of

distraction or activity what you want to do is you want to minimize your life and I have a whole video called lifestyle

Minimalism Check it out minimize your life stitch that you have room

several hours every day to do self-improvement and to meditate and do spirituality maybe do some psychedelics

this sort of stuff so you can work on everything we're talking about here right everything we're about the implementation of all these

principles require a lot of free time and work which most people waste on

various kinds of frivolous activities you know don't buy a house too big that you don't need because you're

gonna waste time cleaning that house maintaining that house doing all this stuff when buy a smaller house

instead, so that you waste less time doing that it says to spend more time working on yourself because

remember the really good stuff is the inner game. Changing the inner game is really what's going to make you happy

and satisfied and get you all the other stuff that you want not having a big mansion-house

64) the next core principle is that without practice exercises and techniques there will be no results

theory alone while important to know

what to do will not in itself produce many results like 95% of your results

will come from the practices and exercise and techniques not from the theory that doesn't mean the theory is

pointless the theory is very useful but you have to go beyond that and as far as techniques

go let me share with you the most powerful techniques that I have discovered very simple I'm not gonna hold it back from you psychedelics

meditation meditative yoga journaling

contemplation visualization and solo retreats are the most powerful techniques that I discovered in the last

five or ten years of doing this work for me now for you there might be other techniques but these are pretty solid

and consistent techniques these techniques have been proven by thousands and millions of people to produce some

of the biggest gains that you can get in your life so the biggest transformation

come from these techniques and notice that most of these techniques are inner techniques even psychedelics isn't it

seems like an outer technique but it's an inner technique it's an outer technique which triggers an inner

a philosophy or a system of any kind it's not meant to have any rigid principles or rules you're not supposed

to follow these sixty-four principles that I gave you like the ten commandments nothing like that because

that would violate principle number one which is ideology and dogma so I have to

be careful every time I speak that it doesn't turn into that and of course, I have to play my part but you have to

play your part because I can do everything in my power but then you could still turn what I say into an ideology or a dogma and in fact

that's what most people do so you have to be very careful not to turn actualize that organ to another

religion seems to be able to implement all

the stuff I talked about above you need to you need to be very intelligent

about it and you need to be very thoughtful and mindful and you need to be very context-sensitive you see it's

not a formula that you just kind of like follow it's not a robotic thing that you do it it requires consciousness it

requires active participation every single day that you're implementing this stuff and also of course the reason

I say this because these teachings have certain limitations it's still a perspective even though I cover

hundreds of perspectives that I compile together it's still a perspective it's still coming from me it's less certain the limitations and biases that

I have and stuff that I got to work through and of course of course it has that which is why you got to be careful

and you got to look at other sources and not turn this into an ideology so those

are the 64 principles now of course I have left stuff out these are the major principles of actualizing that work. Other topics

to include here but you know I've left some important stuff like physical health fitness nutrition and other I

think to encapsulate a lot of what I teach

just conclude by saying this this last thing and this you might think of like

as the final core principle is that life is complex and challenging life is

extremely deep but also very broad there are many many many facets to it

so just because you understand someone or two facets don't get too cocky and think that you've got it all there's so

much here to explore it's gonna take you your entire lifetime to explore and you still will have much left over for

future lifetimes and life is challenging which means that you have to appreciate

that you know I went into a lot of depth here and I've only kind of glossed

over the surface of these principles it will take you years to study and learn all of these principles don't get

intimidated by that just realize that yes that's because life is so complex and it is challenging it's difficult to

learn all this stuff which is exactly why most people have a mediocre life because it takes a lot of work and

energy and time to do stuff to study all this stuff to verify for yourself that

it's true you know it's one thing to just listen to me and believe everything I say that in itself will take you a couple of hours here at least but that's

not enough to go and verify each of these principles for yourself to corroborate and cross-reference with

other sources to triangulate the truth to get other perspectives to see where I might be wrong in all of this and then

to implement all that in your life will take years and decades but hey that's why you're alive and that's why

you got 80 years to live so that you can do this this is the meat of life right here everything else that

you do is just a garnish this is the main course so try to structure your

life in such a way that you're focused

on the main course and not the garnishes of life and also this should alert you

to the fact that there are no easy answers see there's no one technique no one

magic pill no one method that will solve everything for you because life is just

too broad for that to work so you have to

be nuanced no black-and-white simplistic answers here that's why my episodes are so long because you know the kind of

stuff you could fit into a five-minute episode just like what it's

not gonna make a dent in the real issues you have in your life it's only gonna be

rearranging the the chairs on the deck of the Titanic and I want to help

you to get to the root of things to get to the ultimate peak experience of those

mystical experiences you know to have it to handle all the bottom of the pyramid to get to the very top of Maslow's pyramid and to go even beyond

that that's where yeah that's where life gets really good that's what I'm passionate about teaching and

experiencing for myself and then of course you take that wisdom and bring it back down to the bottom pyramid

and you infuse the bottom with the top and then that's when your life becomes something special so we're gonna

follow these principles to create a really

powerful life I hope you can see the value of what's being shared here do not

take it for granted this day today from this information from now on if you

commit you can change the entire trajectory of the future of your life amazingly but it's not

enough just to make that commitment you're also gonna have to remember to work at it every single day from now on as well yes it's challenging but that's

why my eyes already exits

and also just to keep you motivated inspired and reminded that you've made

this commitment so stay tuned with me for more if for no other reason than just to have me remind you that this is

what you want because it's very easy to forget and to fall back asleep with all your friends and then before

you know it ten twenty years go by and you've pissed it all away and you have nothing to show for it and you're more depressed and miserable and regretful

than ever

you