Advice for young people

(part 1&2)

Lessons:

  1. Life needs to be lived to be understood. We are born like blank slates, knowing nothing and completely ignorant and then we get bombarded by life, life is not an intellectual pursuit, life is here, it is embodied, you're in it, you're feeling it, there is pain, there is suffering, intense pleasure and joy, it takes most people a long time to get the enormity of what life is. So much to do, to learn, to explore, so many mistakes to make, so many traps to fall into. When you're a blank white paper anything can be written on it (the challenge is that the individual and the collective are intertwined that it's both a blessing (technology, comforting lifestyle, entertainment, books...) and a curse (if you blindly allow yourself to be programmed by your culture and society - this will rob you of your happiness and potential to use your mind to really ace life)
  2. Life is enormously complex, there are many dimensions to it, so many variables, and the most important variable is who you are
  3. Life can get much much worse than you ever imagined and life can get much much better than you ever imagined
  4. You will have to both learn and figure out how life works but also learn and figure out how you work and how you fit into life and nobody can tell you that because you're uniquely you (Leo will give general advice, but you will still need to customize your life to you, nobody can tell what you should be, only you know what is best for you, if you want to be this or that, only you know what brings an emotional response out of you...)
  5. You gotta be true to yourself, be willing to honor your uniqueness
  6. Life is a self-discovery process. Be original. Don't copy others, don't try to copy the success of others, don't try to jump on trends in society...make a long term investment to develop your own internal success by discovering your authentic passions, motivations and values. Find your own voice and style.
  7. Figure your life for yourself, be introspecting, you gotta wonder at some point (Why am I alive, Why am I here at all, am I just here to repeat somebody else's life or am I here to do something new? Leo suggests that you're here to do something NEW...Why am I here to do? - Don't look for that answer from somebody else, turn inwards ) Spend more time reflecting and turning inwards and ask yourself deep questions about life rather than getting answers from other people. What do I want? What do I desire? What am I passionate about? How can I be more passionate about life? Why was I chosen to be here? How to live a good life?
  8. Quickly pick up on lessons.
  9. The quality of your life hinges upon the quality of your mind and how you use your mind. The people that earn the most money and are the most successful in our society they are not manual labors, construction workers, they are the deep thinkers, strategist, visionaries, inventors and the creators. Master your mind, most traps are the traps of the mind, the enemy is yourself. If you want to ace life, you need to take responsibility and ownership of your mind and how you're using your mind and by introspecting seeing how your mind is contributing to the kind of results that you're getting in your life. The mind doesn't want to look inwards it likes to projects outwards. Reality is weird and twisted thing that it seems as if we're in a physical material tangible world and it seems as if stuff is happening to you, that in fact is an illusion, your mind is projecting and creating reality, it is not simply that there is a reality and you were born into it. Your thoughts, emotions, belief systems, ideologies are all creating the kind of reality that you see out there. Your mind is playing an active creative role not just in how your personal life unfolds but it is generating all of reality. And when you're conscious of that it is no longer your reality, but your creation.
  10. Take the process of learning and understanding extremely seriously. (#1 Key: Start Questioning Everything. Ask high quality questions. Always be questioning what is life and how it works. 26min) The point of questioning is not to get the answer, the point is to go through the process of questioning and thinking through it. If Leo gives you an answer but you don't go through the process of deriving it from yourself, you're not gonna get the value from it. Sometimes it will take you years of curiosity and passion to discover an answer to a question.
  11. Have something in your life that you're deeply passionate about. Find a few things that you want to develop your life around. Go beyond finding a job, develop a career and even beyond that to developing a life purpose (check the Leo's life purpose's course). 1/3 to 1/2 of your waking hours of your life will be devoted to work, so it makes sense that you wanna have a lot of passion in your work. You want to feel like your work is meaningful.
  12. Meaning is something you create. If you find something meaningful, then that is what you're gonna do. Meaningful is whatever you say it is.
  13. You want to be useful to mankind. Be useful to society on your terms not on societies terms.
  14. The rarer you are compared to other's around you, the more valuable your skill set is, the more they are willing to pay you to help them and to partake in whatever creative work you're doing. And on this basis you can build a relatively comfortable life with freedom and such that you don't have to worry about money.
  15. Develop high quality desires. There are low quality desires (desire for heroin) and high quality desires (desire to be selfless). Purify your desires. Desire is much more important than knowing how to do something. All tangible things are accomplished only through desire.
  16. Life is something precious. Life is a miracle. Life is amazing and you have been blessed with it. My life is important. Reality is incredible, tune in for a second that you were born as you think you were, in the conventional sense, you exist, here you are, you're a part of reality, you're participating in this subjective experience of reality, put your awareness on that be WOW, it is a miracle that I was even born. Notice how lucky you are to be living where you are, that you have decent health and a lot of time ahead of you.
  17. Your obligation is to make the most out of your life. How do I live a good life? What do I desire, what is worth while doing, what is meaningful to me, what do I want out of life.