After I Read 650+ Books On Success, Here's What Will Make You WEALTHY | Tom Bilyeu

Reading has left a massive impact in my life and it can for you, too. And in this episode, I'm going to tell you some of the major life lessons I've learned from reading books and I'm going to help you determine which books might be best for you, as well. Let's get into it. Here is what I've learned from reading an obscene amount of self-improvement books. Number one, you have a lot a lot of really dumb beliefs that you have mistaken for objective truth. Everybody gets trapped inside their own minds. Nobody more so than me. And because we all get trapped inside of our own minds, if you really want to make change in your life, the first thing you're going to have to do is recognize what those beliefs are, unwind them, and then you can begin to layer the new beliefs in. And that's the second thing is you need to build up a set of beliefs that's going to take you where you want to go. Now, we live in what many people refer to as a post-truth world. Well, I'm here to tell you, boys and girls, that the truth is going to slap you about the head, neck, and chest. As much as you would like to avoid it or hope, pray, pretend that it isn't real, we are all beholden to the way the world works. And the world works in some kind of way and we all filter everything through our brain. And that is the third thing that you are having a biological experience. There is a reality to be faced. So, let me thread the needle between these two things. So, you're going to be building up this set of beliefs and you're going to be doing it in a way that recognizes the truth of the way that the world is, including your own biology. So, what do I mean by you have to layer on beliefs? So, you have all these false beliefs that you're mistaking as reality. You're going to recognize those. You're going to begin unwinding them. Now, you're going to figure out what the truth is. The truth, very simply, is that which most efficiently moves you towards your goals. Now, what do I mean by that? So, if you think in the beginning, there was Newtonian physics, and that helped everybody understand how the planets were revolving around the sun. It helped describe the motion of large bodies, as they say. But then, Einstein came around, and even though Newtonian physics opened up the world and answered a lot of questions and moved us a step closer to the truth, and at that time, you could have said, "Hey, Newtonian physics are the truth." And you would have been effectively right. It was the most effective thing that we had to move us forward. Now, instead of it being a post-truth world, when we realized, "Oh, actually, Einstein has a version that allows us to even more efficiently move towards our goals." So, for instance, we could not have had GPS with Newtonian physics. It wasn't until we had relativity and special relativity that we were able to get so precise that we could nail down someone's position at speed to within a couple of feet. So, it required us to get even better at predicting the outcome of our actions. And so, when people ask me what the truth is, what I tell them is, whatever belief allows you to most accurately predict the outcome of your actions. Now, that doesn't mean that you're making it up. It means your ability to predict the outcome of your actions is tied to what is real. So, the reason that you're more able to predict the outcome of your actions when you understand, in the case of physics, Einstein's general relativity and special relativity is because it gives you a higher degree of accuracy. So, it isn't that Newtonian physics were wrong, they were directionally correct, it's just that we're always refining. Now, as most physicists will tell you, there's actually something beyond Einsteinian physics. I think that's how you would say that. And that is what they call the theory of everything. So, there's a gap between relativity and special relativity and quantum physics and nobody quite knows what that thing is that's going to bridge all of that together. So, even though we're not all the way the progress that we've made from Newtonian from like uh the Bible tells us everything that is true to Newtonian physics and then to relativity and special relativity and now there's going to be something even beyond that and each time that we get closer to the truth, we're able to predict more and more things. That's how you need to think about unwinding the poor beliefs that you have, which are moving you away from your goals because they do not give you a frame of reference with which you can most accurately predict the outcome of your behaviors and your actions. And so, you're trying to then strip those away, get to the ones that more efficiently move you towards your goals. And again, the only reason that you're going to be moving more efficiently towards your goals is because that belief is more accurately aligned to the way the world actually works, including your own biology and your brain and the way that you distort and interpret the world. Your brain, unfortunately, is not designed to give you an accurate representation of the world. Your brain is designed to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids. And the difference between what evolution thought would be most useful to you alive long enough to have kids that have kids and what actually is most useful in a modern context, there is a gap and that gap leads to things like obesity, um diabetes, Alzheimer's, all that kinds of stuff because all of our impulses lead us to behave in a way that made sense when food, for instance, was hyper scarce, but now that that food is not hyper scarce, we find ourselves in a position where we're just constantly overeating and people get themselves in trouble. So, once you begin to realize, "Oh, wait a second, just following the impulse to eat is not a useful way to determine whether I should consume something or not." So, I'm going to refine my beliefs around that that sometimes I'm actually going to ignore hunger or I'm going to get a better understanding of macronutrients and how they act as signaling molecules. And so, in the case of diet, this is a bit like going from not knowing anything to Newtonian physics, right? Then to getting all the way to like the really fancy stuff where we're able to use food science to do things like a fasting mimicking diet, so on and so forth. So, just to re-anchor us, you start with all of these beliefs that are cobbled together through run-ins with your family and what they believe to be true, run-ins with failure in life, embarrassment, your friends, pop culture, all of that stuff and that steers you to want things, to think of the world in a certain way, to love certain things about yourself, to hate certain things about yourself, all of that, which is creating this jumbled mess in your mind of how things should be, which is further complicated by the biology of having a brain that was created slowly and blindly over millions of years of evolution. And as you begin to understand things like and this is not This again is a partial truth, but it will get you directionally in the right direction, that the brain is comprised of three layers, again, only directionally accurate, and you have what they call the lizard brain at the center, all instinct, all the time. Then you've got the mammalian brain, all emotion, all the time. And then the outer layer, you have the um human brain, we'll call it, which is the um the part that is able to process higher-level cognition. And so, when you understand that you have a brain, directionally, that's made of those three layers, then you can begin to realize, "Oh, so I don't just need to, just like I'm not going to use hunger as the determining factor as to whether or not I eat, I'm going to have a more nuanced understanding of my biology and why I might feel hungry even when I don't need calories. Uh I'm not just going to listen to my emotions. I'm going to realize that my brain works in some kind of way, and I need to layer in a belief system about how the brain works that allows me to more accurately predict the outcome of my actions. So, instead of just being emotional, which is going to lead me to a sub optimal um pattern of behavior, where people get angry at times where building a bridge would be a more appropriate response, or even just calming yourself down, or they are fearful in the face of uh an opportunity, take speaking in public, for example. Much of my um success at Impact Theory has been built on my ability to speak in front of a camera or in front of a live audience, uh but nonetheless, I had all kinds of fear, especially in the beginning of doing that. And so, recognizing, "Oh, that fear was meant to keep me alive when uh I was a part of a hunter-gatherer band of people, and I had to be very careful about pissing off uh anybody that was in charge and I could find myself isolated and so I had to fight through that emotional layer to get to a cognitive logical layer that allowed me to come up with a belief that it was okay if I failed. It was okay if I risk things and embarrass myself. It's even okay if I get pushed out of one group, I can always find another. Right in a modern context, all of that makes a lot more sense. And so as we refine our thinking and build this new set of beliefs, we can actually get closer again to predicting more accurately the outcome of our behaviors. Now there's an amazing economist that I encourage you all to look into, a man named Thomas Sowell, and he sums up this idea that I'm trying to get across here in self-development, which is all about it. The quote is, let me give it to you. This is a paraphrase, which is very very close to exact. The last 30 years have been marked by exchanging what worked for what sounds good. In your life, that's the goal. You want to exchange what sounds good, what seems like it should be right, for what actually yields the results that you're looking for. And that becomes the barometer where you can judge is what I believe true or not. So for instance, if I have a belief that says, "Hey, I should follow my emotions wherever they lead. Everything happens for a reason after all. So I have this emotion for a reason, I should act on this emotion." I do that, I alienate people and I'm not able to build my company. Okay, well that's a problem cuz my goal requires that I build this company. So what am I going to do with my set of beliefs? Well, I ran that experiment by believing, and let's just say that's how I was raised, that if you have an emotion, it happens for a reason and you should live your authentic life and enact that emotion. Cool, I try that. I'm not able to keep a group of people around me. I'm not able to build a team. I'm not able to keep myself or other people focused. I'm not able to stay on task or get people excited, and therefore my company just never goes the way that I want to go. Okay, well, I the prediction of my behavior was that I would be able to step closer to my goals, that I would be able to get people around me, galvanize them because I was so authentic that people are going to stay and move forward. Cool, tried that, it doesn't work. So, now how do I try that next thing? That next thing is going to be, let's get some emotional control. I get my emotional control. Wow, now instead of believing that everything happens for a reason, that that emotion is somehow the authentic way that I should be living, I realize, nope, I have this tri-layered brain. It's going to cough up emotions that aren't necessarily going to help me. I need to rely on that third layer of brain, be more logical, figure out what it is that's going to move myself forward again towards my goals, and then try that. So, what if instead of enacting my emotions, I figure out what is the thing that I need to do to get people excited to work with me, to how do I most clearly articulate how we're going to move forward together? Uh does emotion help me in that? Does it not? Sometimes it does, by the way, and sometimes it doesn't. And so, when you are focused entirely on stripping away beliefs that don't work, instituing beliefs that do work, recognizing that you're fighting against your evolutionarily derived brain, and that you can then refine your belief system through this experimentation process of trying things, seeing the feedback that you get, adjusting the knobs until you're actually living in accordance with the way the world really is, and now you're able to make progress. That really is self-development. That's why you're going to hear people say that progress is a foundational pillar of human happiness, which comes from Tony Robbins, which I think is absolutely brilliant. You're going to hear people talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that's all about understanding the way that the brain works and trying to help you get to fulfillment. You're going to hear people talk about fulfillment, and that's all about understanding the result that you get in your brain from a neurochemical standpoint when you get that belief system in alignment so that you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors. When you can do that, now you can begin to shape your world into the thing that you want. Now you can begin to recognize that all of us are having to necessarily adhere to the formula of empowerment as I lay it out, which is me just doing my best to understand what nature has given us from an evolutionary standpoint, which is that you must work really hard in order to turn your potential into skill set so that you can do something that you love that gives you more energy than it takes, that allows you to serve not only yourself but other people. That is fulfillment. That's how we get there, and that is what I've learned from reading a gazillion books on self-improvement. May it serve you as well as it has served me. Let me tell you right now that there are few things more important to your success than reading. Now, when I say reading, I mean reading, watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts. Uh and by the way, when I also say reading, I almost never, and I'm talking less than 2% of the things that I read in my life are actually read by running my eyes across words on a page. I do almost everything in an auditory fashion. So, I'm doing audiobooks on Audible, uh using Speechify to read PDFs, all of that. You can even now get Speechify to read web pages for you. So, I find that it's far easier for me to get in a lot of time reading. I read about 2 hours a day on average, 365 days a year. Um and the way that I'm able to do that is I'm reading in all of my transitional moments. If I'm brushing my teeth, if I'm moving around the house, if I'm lifting weights, working out, whatever. I am reading the entire time. Again, reading YouTube videos, podcasts, documents, whatever. So, it's critically important to do all of that because the whole point of the way the human psyche and brain is designed is for us to leverage culture in order to develop ourselves. So, if you look at every other species, they all have to make a choice between hardwiring everything so that you're doing everything instinctually or learning from your parents, from the culture around you. As you go up the food chain, the more flexible the cognition is of the animal, the more likely they are to be thriving. Obviously, humans are the ultimate apex predator. Uh it's a cool way to think about it from my perspective, uh but certainly we are the most successful species. I think even by certainly by biomass, I don't know if it's by number, but definitely by biomass, humans are the most successful creature on planet Earth. We um outperform ants and other insects, which may have more numbers than us, uh but certainly we reign supreme in a lot of different ways. And the reason is that we are the most able to flexibly organize ourselves. So, you can get ants that can organize themselves or bees that can organize themselves in huge groups, but they can't do it flexibly. So, we can come together and do this. There are multiple people in the room right now as we're filming this that do different aspects of this. Certainly, the company even more so, cities, states, countries. This is all people organizing themselves, but we can come together for a show. We can come together for government. The number of people that would be required to publish a book, the people that are cutting the trees down, developing the paper, developing the ink, or an e-reader. The number of people that would have to come together to create the the physical item, the software, all of that. So, humans can come together in very flexible ways. They can be in multiple groups throughout a single day in their life. So, the whole point, the whole very thing that makes the human species that successful, is our ability to learn from a cultural standpoint. Now, the ultimate way to do that is to find some medium where we can transpose knowledge across time and space. And books were that first revolution. Well, I guess first there were stories. So, what you could say orally, not nearly as effective as being able to put things down in print. So, you've got the Gutenberg revolution as the printing press comes online. Then, you've got the next major one, which is the internet, and there will of course be more beyond that. AI is massive. I think Web3 is going to be massive. So, there are these technological moments that allow this information to go far and wide. And right now, if you really want to get information in rapidly, you're going to be reading books, watching YouTube, listening to podcasts. It is massive. So, the whole point is to be able to transform your potential into skill set. And so, I want everybody to understand why this is so important. You don't read a book to check a a You don't read a book to impress your parents. You don't buy a book to have it sitting on your shelf to impress people. You read a book to get good at something. To get so good that people can't stop you. I really want people to understand this. I'm going to crawl through the screen. Skills have utility. They let you do things that other people can't do. They let you beat things. They let you out compete. They let you grow. They let you push yourself. They let you get to the point where you cannot be stopped. No matter how much people might hate you. You can get so good at something that even if they want you to fail, even if they're willing to go after you and systematically try to destroy your ability to succeed, they can't because you can out perform. As the legend, may he rest in peace, Kobe Bryant said, "Boos b o o s boos don't block dunks." Boos don't block dunks. Kobe practiced so much, so relentlessly, so unceasingly, so much more than everyone else that he was able to compound his natural gifts and turn himself into an unstoppable scoring machine. Think about this. The greatest scouts in the world were paid a lot of money to scour the world, the entire world, to find the best players on the planet. And then those best players on the planet were given the best coaches on the planet, paid a ton of money with the sole intention of stopping Kobe Bryant from scoring on the basketball court. And yet, despite all of that, he scored 81 points in a single game. That's why I read. Because you can get so good at something, given the way that the human mind is structured, you will learn from that. Those things that you learn will become capabilities. Those capabilities will allow you to do things that other people can't do. And whether it's build a company, be a better parent, be a better teacher, whatever it is that you're trying to do, you can get extraordinarily good at that thing. Now, I don't believe that I mean, it's just mathematically obvious. The vast majority of us, the vast vast vast vast vast majority of us, are never going to become the greatest of all time. The truth is hitting your career goals is not easy. You have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else. But, there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency, so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day. You'll not only get control of your time, you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal. To help you do this, I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any high achiever needs to dominate. And you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description. All right, my friend, back to today's episode. What I want you to focus on is the reality that you can get 100 times better. And if I'm right, and you can get 100 times better at anything, and you may have a worse starting point than somebody else. It's just a reality. It's the way the the talent pool goes, boys and girls. Genetics are a lottery, but only 50% of your outcome seems to be, and this is science, so you can look it up. Type in to um Professor Google, what amount is what amount of success is tied to genetics and what is tied to effort, maybe it's the right way to look at it. And every time I've looked that up, every research paper I've looked at says it's roughly 50/50. So, 50% is the hand that you're dealt and 50% is the effort that you put in. So, when I say that you can get 100 times better, I'm I'm talking about the 50% of effort. So, you may start at a deficit. I am god-awful at basketball in a way that you can't imagine. One of the most embarrassing moments of my life happened on a basketball court and I just I'm terrible at it for whatever reason. So, me 100 times better at basketball, I'm still not going to be probably not even going to be a star high school player, but I'm certainly not going to be a collegiate player and I'm definitely not going to be in the NBA, but I can get 100 times better than I am now. And if you think about any aspect of your life being 100 times better, making 100 times more money, being 100 times more effective in your relationship, being 100 times better parent, being 100 times better lover, whatever it is you're trying to do, getting 100 times better is radically transformative. And certainly that idea took me from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car to building a billion-dollar company. That's learning. Reading books is about learning. Reading books is about turning your potential into actual usable skill set. And turning your potential into actual usable skill set is about the recognition that boos don't block dunks. And I'm sure you've all heard a lot about how the world is against many of you. [ __ ] that noise. Even if it's true. And let's just say that it is. The world is out to get you. The world wants you to fail. The world is going to do everything it can to bring you to your knees. What are your options? Give up. Give in. Pursue politics. which a lot of people do, or you can make yourself so good that people can't stop you. If I may offer my advice, get so good that people can't stop you. Because you cannot control other people. Who the [ __ ] knows what they're going to do, how they're going to try to treat you well. But man oh man, if you get a hundred times better than you are now at anything that matters, you are so much better off. And that you can control. You can control how many books you read. You can control how much of what you learn you put into practice. You can control your effort. And since it's what I call the only belief that matters, since when you put energy and effort into something, into getting better at something, you will actually get better, that's the juice. Read, boys and girls. Read as much as you can, as fast as you can, in the areas that are as important to you as humanly possible. And then put it to use. If you do that, you can have any life you want. Get after it. If you want to be wealthy, successful, you want to make all of your dreams come true, there are a couple of foundational topics that you should be researching. Number one is mindset. You've got to get control of your mind. The thing that you're going to battle with the most in life, I promise, is your own mind. It's your own mind. Your mind is going to [ __ ] with you. And the reason that it's going to relentlessly toy with you is its job is not to make you wealthy and successful. Its job is to keep you alive long enough to have kids and have kids. That's just it. You have to understand the nature of things. Boys and girls, understand the nature of things. That's the second point. Understand the nature of things. If you want to get wealthy, what is the nature of that? You have to add value to the world. You have to add so much value that people would rather have that thing that you've created than they want their money. And you have to get a lot of people at scale to believe that. If you do that, if you add value to the world, there will always be room for you. Read the book by Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery. It is [ __ ] incredible. This man was born into slavery and became extraordinarily successful. What was his punchline? Get so good at something that the world values that there's always a place for you. There's just no better advice than that. Go after it. Figure out how your brain works. Understand that you're going to be going up against that over and over and over. Figure out how to get good at something so that you can add a tremendous amount of value to the world and make sure that you're understanding the nature of things. When you understand the nature of improvement. Oh, improvement is about having the energy to stick with something long enough to get through the boring [ __ ] that is skill acquisition because if you really want to acquire elite-level skills to get 100 times better, you are going to have to practice things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over with massive amounts of intention in order to actually get good at that thing, to hardwire it in your brain, to go through a process called myelination so that it actually gets easier to do that thing. That's why the more you repeat something, the easier it becomes to do it. And if you're repeating something well, so that you are putting disciplined practice into something, you will improve at that thing. It will actually get wired into your brain. You will be able to do it better and more efficiently, and you'll be able to make the kind of progress that you want to make. But that requires that you understand the nature of practice so that you can get through boredom. It also requires you to understand the nature of passion. It's an energy loop between you and other people. So, humans are both the shout and the echo. We are the shout, the thing you do, and the echo, the way that people respond. Passion is when you get so good at something that when you do that thing, so good at something people value, that when you do that thing, the echo back from people is, "Oh my god, do that more. That was amazing." That's going to make you feel some kind of way, and it's going to feel really [ __ ] good. And when you get that feeling, and it feels really good, you're going to want to do more of it. And so, you lean in even farther, and you push yourself to get even better. And so, you get an even bigger response from people, which makes you want to go even harder, which makes you get even better, which gets you a bigger response from people, which makes you want to go even harder. See how you get into that loop? And so, now all of a sudden, the reason people tell you to follow your passion is because you're going to have the energy to fight through the boredom in order to actually get good at something so that you can get in this ever-increasing feedback loop. Understand the nature of it. Don't stop at the bumper sticker, follow your passion. That's the bumper sticker. Why? Why follow your passion? What's the point? The point is to get in that energetic loop where you shout, you get the echo that gives you the energy to keep going, which allows you to push through the boredom of repetition, which allows your brain to myelinate, which is literally a fatty tissue being wrapped around the connection points between the neurons in your brain, which allow the signal to travel more efficiently. That's the nature of getting good at something. Now, when you understand the nature of it, you don't also get beaten to death by confusion, because that's one of the things that stops people. Is they don't know if putting the energy and the effort into that thing is actually going to yield results. And when you don't know that, you don't have what I call the only belief that matters, that if I put time and energy into getting better at this thing, I'll actually get better at this thing. So, if you want to be wealthy and successful, know thyself. Know thyself. Figure out what you're about. Figure out how the brain works. Understand the nature of things. Now, once you get that foundational nature of things, then you can begin to layer on the specifics of what you want to do very specifically, and that is going to be different for everybody. It is very different to want to be a tennis player than to want to be a swimmer. Both sports, but still wildly different in terms of the thing that you're going to practice, in terms of the thing you're going to repeat, in terms of the thing you're going to myelinate. Getting really good at swimming only to enter the US Open make it to no sense. So, get that foundational layer, understand yourself, get control of your emotions, know how the brain works, understand how to deliver value to the world, understand the nature of things, then pursue them doggedly, then watch yourself improve, then you're going to be able to add the value to the world, such is the nature of wealth, that you're able to get the money that you want. And the same with success. Success demands that you outperform other people. It's that simple. How do you win the Super Bowl? By playing better football. How do you win the World Cup? By playing better football. Huh? Huh? No? So, you have to get better at the thing that you want to get better at. That's just the way that it works. So, that's it. Know thyself. Know the nature. Do the work. Add value. Get the results. That's it. If you really want to get good at something, you are going to have to get deeply efficient. So, if you want to be taking in knowledge faster in your books, the easiest way is to speed it up. So, part of the reason that I take in information orally, a u r a l, through the ears, is that I can speed it up. So, Audible, for instance, allows you to go, since I cap out at 3x, I don't know how much higher it goes, but it goes even higher than 3x. Um, and that allows me to intake information a lot faster when I'm reading a book. YouTube will allow you to go to 2x. If you're watching anything on YouTube slower than 2x, you are missing a trick. Speed things up. And look, in the beginning, it you won't be able to do it. You're not going to be able to leap straight to 2x or 3x in a book. And by the way, the reason I read books at 3x, some by the way. I will slow some books down if the information is really dense or really complex. So, don't be embarrassed, but you do want to be pushing yourself. Find out where your limit is, cuz retention matters more than speed, but I find that you can really push your intake when you're taking it in by listening. So, you're going to start at, let's say, 1x, push to 1.25, when that feels normal, push to 1.5, when that feels normal, 1.75, so on and so forth. Do not settle until you get to the point where no matter how much you listen to it, it's just not coming in, and you need to then back off a step or two, back down. That is critical to being able to um exponentially increase the rate at which you're able to take in information. The other thing that you're going to want to do is read in swarms. So, what I find is people slow themselves down because they're trying to take meticulous notes, and they never get the gist. So, in the beginning, I'm reading for the gist. What's the gist here? Give me the idea of what's happening. And then I'm going to read three, four, five, six books on the subject. I'm going to follow people on YouTube that are talking about this thing, and I'm going to begin to get a rough idea of the whole thing. Different angles, different voices. How are multiple people approaching this topic? That's really important, and depending on what the topic is, you may also want to get want to get into disconfirming evidence, but that doesn't have anything to do with speed, so we'll leave that outside of this for now. So, you're taking in information, you're taking it in as fast as you can actually hold on to the information. You're pushing yourself to get faster. You're just trying to get the gist in the beginning, understand who the players are, understand what the terms are, what the big concepts are. Reading in swarms, multiple books, listening to multiple people on YouTube, podcasts, whatever. So, now you've got like a rough idea of what the whole shebang is. Then we're going to pick, is there an area where we really want to get deep expertise? Then we're going to start drilling in. Then we might slow down. Then we might start taking notes, or probably even more importantly, this is what I do. I read as a gist, then I force myself to talk about it with other people so that I have to articulate the ideas. In fact, even right now as I'm recording this episode, I'm actually concretizing the ideas that have been sort of floating around in my own mind. I'm making them far more concrete by explaining them to other people. So, you want to get to the point where you can explain things to other people in a very simplistic fashion. As Einstein said, if you can't explain it simply, chances are that you just don't understand it very well." So, you want to be able to un- understand things so well that you can explain them in a very simple fashion. So, we're reading in that swarm, we're taking the time to explain it to other people. Things that aren't quite sinking in, we're going to take time to journal out, figure out what is it that I'm missing here, try to explain it to yourself. In fact, that's a really good stage. If you're not comfortable speaking in front of other people, if you're worried about looking stupid, which I would highly encourage you to abandon immediately. Do not worry about looking stupid. You can always get smarter over time. You can always refine your thinking. Just because you said something out loud one time, does not mean that's what you have to believe for the rest of your life. Only fools allow themselves to get put into that trap. Constantly be refining your thinking. If I go back and watch a video from 5 years ago, odds are I'm going to be embarrassed by the way that I was thinking about things because I've pushed my thinking. I've exposed myself to more knowledge. I'm getting as much data, disconfirming evidence as I can, sharpening it up, going back to an earlier question that I answered. I am constantly asking myself, "Does this piece of information allow me to more accurately predict the outcome of my actions, yes or no?" If yes, then odds are it is a more true thing than whatever I was believing previously. Okay, so that's what we're doing. We're reading in swarms, we're getting the gist, we're going deep where we want, we're explaining things to ourselves if we're worried about talking to other people, we're explaining things to other people once we get comfortable to get there. We're making that more concrete in our own minds, and then we're going to be looking for areas of overlap. So, how does this thing that I learned about World War II apply to what's happening right now, right? Things like that. It is freaky. In fact, man, I know this is off the subject a little bit, but guys, read a lot of different topics. It is startling how things in one area that you would never think would connect over here end up connecting. And I am almost certain that this is factually true and not just apocryphal. But I believe that Nobel prizes are most frequently won by people at an intersection of two fields. So, biology and chemistry, physics and chemistry, whatever the case may be. An intersection of two fields because that's where really unique things happen. And the only way that you're going to be able to do that is by having broad knowledge. Now, that doesn't mean that you just want to be a dilettante across a gazillion things. You definitely want to um go deep in certain areas. But man, you want to have a handful of those areas that you've gone pretty deep into. You don't want to isolate yourself to just one thing. Now, if you're trying to get really successful, the more you can hyperfocus on one thing. So, there I recognize the flirtation with contradiction that I'm making here. So, you're going to have one thing that you're certainly going more deep than others. But you're actually going to get better at going deep on that thing if you've got other areas that you've got some pretty impressive knowledge in. It really really will help. Okay. That's how you do it. That's how you get books in your mind faster in a way that sticks so you can accumulate more knowledge. I know a lot of people out there, if you're new to the building your knowledge game, one of the things that you're struggling with is reading a lot but not making progress. So, one of a couple things could be true. First of all, if you're reading things that don't matter to you, then odds are that it's not sticking. And so, you want to make sure that you're reading in topics where you have a goal associated with that topic. So, reading that thing really matters to you. That is one of the most important things you can do is get a hyper amount of clarity around what your goals are so you know exactly what books you need to be reading in order to bolster your skill set so that you can move forward. Most people lack the clarity and because they lack the clarity, they're not reading they're not excited about the things that they're reading and when you're not excited about the information that you're intaking, then forget it. It's never going to stick. The next thing is, if you're not progressing, I promise a big part of this is that you're not deploying what you learn. Most people are afraid of embarrassing themselves. Stop immediately. Stop worrying about [ __ ] embarrassing yourself. It doesn't matter. What matters is on a long enough timeline, you can be anyone at anything if you're willing to go and [ __ ] up. But most people are so afraid to make mistakes, they're so afraid of looking stupid that they're paralyzed. They're indecisive. They won't move. I make mistakes all the time and it's embarrassing and it still sucks. It's not fun. But what I know is that I will get better and people may laugh at me in the short term, but they all give up. They all give up. Everyone stops. Everyone quits. Everyone quits. Whenever I encounter somebody and they are wasting time making fun of me, the one thing I know that [ __ ] is going to quit. Because if you've got energy to waste time making fun of somebody, your priorities are so FUBAR, you are trying to self-soothe yourself from feeling like an idiot by making fun of me. So I don't waste time on what somebody like that thinks because I know that skills have utility. If I can I have this goal. I have massive amounts of clarity about what my goal is. I'm reading this thing not because I'm going to check a box, but because I'm going to turn potential into usable skill set, which is going to let me do something which allows me to outperform other people, but it requires that I deploy it. It requires that I use the things that I'm learning so that I can make them concrete in my own mind, so that they become a skill rather than an idea. Don't collect ideas, collect skills. Push yourself. Figure out how you deploy all this stuff. How do I actually use this in my real life? What is it good for? If it's not good for anything, you're not going to have the energy to keep learning about it, and you're not going to make the the progress that you want. So, make sure I got my goal. I care about the thing. I'm reading this not to check a box. I'm reading this to get good at something, and then I'm deploying it to make sure that it sticks so that I'm making progress, and I don't care if in the moment I make a mistake. I don't care if in the moment I fail. I don't care if in the moment other people think I'm ridiculous. I don't care if they think I'm stupid because I am acquiring knowledge, and knowledge stacks. Knowledge stacks. You get good at this thing. It allows you to understand this thing, which allows you to understand that thing, which allows you to understand that thing, and each one of those things is minor unto itself. But just like a Lego piece by itself is not very interesting, you can build virtually anything you want with Legos. But you have to be willing to take the time to put them together and have people look at the incomplete thing and say that that doesn't make sense. I don't see it. I don't understand what that is. That's going to take too long. Why are you doing that? Legos are stupid. But when Legos are knowledge, it will change your life. But you've got to be willing to deploy it. So, don't waste time lamenting your stupidity, your frustration at being slower than other people. It just is what it is. Focus all of your time and energy. I have a goal. That goal makes demands. Those demands require that I get better at something that I'm not currently good at. And I'm going to read about it and then use it because it is only in the using that I will make progress. So, if you do that, if you follow that formula, learn in the morning, use in the afternoon. Not research for 6 months and then try. Learn in the morning, use in the afternoon. Or learn during breakfast and use immediately after breakfast. The faster you can begin using the things that you're learning, the faster you will make progress. And remember, progress is iterative. It's not overnight you go from nowhere to somewhere. You go from one step to the next step to the next step, one foot in front of the other, and you make these tiny little incremental bits of progress with every new thing that you deploy after learning. But if you don't deploy it, if you don't use it, one, it's not even going to stick because a lot of these ideas are just going to go in one ear and out the other. You're really only going to retain what hits you emotionally and what you use. And if you want it to hit you emotionally, there better be a goal driving you to read that thing. When you read something, I remember one time I was on an airplane. This was the craziest [ __ ] ever. I was reading the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And I'm going through the book and he's talking about how uh hey, there's a secret to this book and I'm going to give you that secret to the book. And I'm oh my god, Think and Grow Rich. I want to grow rich. This is amazing. I'm broke at the time. So, I'm reading, reading, and reading. And every page is like I'm telling you the secret. I'm telling you the secret. I'm telling you the secret. And I'm like, what? And about I don't know, page 52 in, he's like, I've told you the secret to this book on every single page without fail. And if you don't yet know what it is, you're in trouble. And I was like, what has he said on every page? And I was on an airplane. And I remember it finally dawned on me. The only thing that he had said on every single page was if you believe you can, you can. And if you believe you can't, you can't. And I was like, holy [ __ ] I got goosebumps all over my body. I remember I looked up and looked around the plane cuz it it transformed me as a human being. You can draw a line in the sand, me before realizing that piece of information, me after realizing that piece of information. And it felt it rocked me so hard, some weird part of my subconscious was like, surely other people just felt that. And I looked around to see if anybody else was feeling what I was feeling. Of course they weren't cuz I was the only one reading the [ __ ] book. But, that's how hard it hit me. And when you have an emotional reaction on something like that, you remember it. But, you've got to want that information so badly. I was so desperate at that time to get rich that I was like, oh my god, I need to understand what's going on in this book. I was desperate for that information. And when it hit me, when I learned the thing that that book was trying to teach me, it rocked me to the degree that I remember to this day where I was sitting, what it felt like when I realized that thing. And I will never forget the lesson. If you believe you can, you can. If you If you think you can, you can. If you think you can't, you can't. It's just facts. So, understand that. You have to have a goal. There has to be a reason in order for that thing that you're learning to hit you emotionally and then you're way more likely to remember it, deploy it, deploy it with immediacy and aggression. Don't be afraid to fail or look stupid because no matter how dumb you look in the moment, knowledge stacks and in a long enough timeline, you can beat anyone at anything. It's not literally true, but it's so directionally correct, you should live your life as if. If you are on a quest to learn as much as you can, but you're having a hard time focusing, I'm going to tell you right now that focus is a muscle and you've got to put in the time and the energy to get better at focusing. Now, how do you do that in a world where the phone and the infinite scroll has taught you to seek a dopamine response every 3 and 1/2 seconds. This is a real thing by the way and you do need to be very careful about it. One, I would say that going on a dopamine fast is a really good idea, but my official answer is that you need to practice meditation. The reason that you need to practice meditation is meditation is really just an exercise of focusing that happens to have this knock-on effect in calming you and all of that. But really, the nature of meditation is you're simply returning back to the breath. You are noticing when your mind begins to wander and you're returning back to the breath. And so you're sitting there and you've got your monkey mind and it's running wild and it's chasing thought after thought after thought. But you can, once you realize that your mind is racing, you can come back to the breath. You can recenter yourself in the here and the now. And as you do that, you're going to find that the amount of time that you're able to stay focused in the present, on your breath, is going to get longer. What is up, my friend? Tom Bilyeu here and I have a big question to ask you. How would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of 1 to 10. If your answer is anything less than a 10, I've got something cool for you. Let me tell you right now, discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful, boring, which is what kills most people, or possibly scary or even painful. Now, here is the thing. Achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging, stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring, and it will get boring. Building your levels of personal discipline is not easy, but let me tell you it pays off. In fact, I will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline. All right, I've just released a class from Impact Theory University called How to Build Ironclad Discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you. All right, click the link on the screen, register for this class right now, and let's get to work. I will see you inside this workshop from Impact Theory University. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Peace out. Then, when you get good at that, and you can start stretching that out longer and longer. You can meditate, and it won't be uninterrupted by thoughts, but you can meditate for a longer period of time with longer gaps between thoughts, being able to bring yourself more quickly back to the breath, that when you're reading, you're trying to accumulate that knowledge that's going to serve you so well that you're able to come back to what you're reading and stay focused because you're taking time every day to sit yourself down and practice the art of focusing. Now, if you do that, and you get good at dopamine fasting so that you don't need a dopamine hit every 3 seconds, all of a sudden, it all works in your favor, and you're able to really do deep work. I believe that's Cal Newport's phrase. You want to do that deep work. You want to be able to get lost in something where you're really focusing down. And then, if I can add a little bit of Tom Bilyeu magic on top of this, I'm going to say you need to be a hardcore [ __ ] You need to make demands of yourself. You need to force yourself to focus. You need to get some fury in your diet. So, that as you begin to wander and you're on something that you need to stay focused on, you tell yourself, "Hey, focus. No, you can't get up and go get a drink of water. No, you do not need to eat. No, you definitely don't need to get on your phone and check something. You're doing this thing. You have a goal. Your goal is made demands. You are going to stay focused. You are going to do this thing if it [ __ ] kills you. You're going to buckle down, strap in, and get it done. Set a time frame. I'm not going to do anything for the next 22 minutes, whatever, other than finish this thing. I'm going to get this thing done by this time. And then, celebrate your victories and punish your failures. Do not let yourself off the hook. If you say you're going to do something and you don't do it, you need to be able to punish yourself. Now, I'm not talking about beating yourself into oblivion or doing something that diminishes your sense of self, but I am saying that when you say you're going to do something and you don't do it, then that should sting. That should sting inside yourself, inside your own mind. If you were going to um allow yourself to take a break if you got the thing done in a certain amount of time and you don't hit it, then don't take the break. If you were going to praise yourself internally uh for doing it and you don't do it, then you don't praise yourself. You admonish yourself. You say, "Like that sucked. That was dumb. I said I was going to do it and I didn't. Why didn't I? I need to get better." And you need to push yourself to improve. At some point, you get the life that you accept from yourself. And you've got to have standards and hold yourself accountable to those standards. That means you have to know how to reward yourself. It means you have to know how to punish yourself. And that you shouldn't be spending more time punishing yourself than rewarding yourself, even if you're getting off the rails. Beating yourself up too much becomes corrosive, becomes self-destructive. But if you don't know how to wield that weapon well, you will never be able to push yourself as far as someone like me that can do both. I know how to effectively reward and punish myself. And it's not some big thing. It's just internally. I know I didn't do what I said I was going to do. Simple as. Now, I will also tell my wife, "Hey, I said I was going to do this thing and I didn't do it, and that sucks, and I hate doing that." Because I want her to be impressed with me. I want my friends to be impressed with me. And so I'll tell them. Do whatever it takes. But make demands of yourself. If you don't make demands of yourself, you will not achieve what you could achieve. But so many people are afraid of feeling bad about themselves for even a second. You have to love yourself. But you're not going to be able to love yourself to success if you're failing. It's just real. You won't have respect for yourself if you don't do things that you believe are worthy of success. You won't have self-worth if you don't believe that you're doing things that make you worthy. It just is what it is. And so if you really want to be successful, make progress, learn. You've got to hold yourself accountable. And then you've got to do the things to build that muscle. It is a muscle. You can get better at it. So never waste time worrying about where you are. If you're easy to get off track now, don't think that that's somehow a permanent state of being. Recognize you just have to get better at that thing. Hold yourself to a standard. Push yourself to improve. Do the things that are necessary to actually turn potential into skill set. That's the magic formula. If you have dyslexia, know that it is going to be more difficult for you to learn some things, but that dyslexia is also bordering on a superpower. I highly encourage you to do research on dyslexia. There's an obscene amount of entrepreneurs that are dyslexic. Richard Branson has talked about this. There's something about the way that dyslexia organizes the mind that allows you to connect very interesting ideas and to problem solve in a very unique way. So, yes, there are things about dyslexia that are going to make things way harder. Written language is going to be very difficult. But, understanding that it also gives you a unique way of approaching the world, which is why so many people with dyslexia go on to be very successful. Now, dyslexia can be the great destroyer of dreams because if you're dyslexic, people will often confuse you for somebody that's dumb, basically. And they're going to tell you that you're not good at learning. The reality is you're just not good at learning in the typical way. But, doing things in typical way is irrelevant, especially today. So, if I were dyslexic, I would be taking in all of my information orally. So, I would be listening to things. But, now you've got Audible. You've got YouTube. You've got Speechify. All things that allow you to take in information by listening. So, these days dyslexia is not the brutal thing to overcome that it used to be. It's still not easy and anything that makes things more difficult for you is not going to be fun. But, I think that in this case, frame of reference is everything. You have dyslexia, so what? Address it, find a way to get the information in in an auditory fashion, and then recognize there's a superpower side to this. Go research it so you can see how to put it to use in your own life. I think that that will be incredibly effective. So, take a page out of Jocko Willink's book, and you have dyslexia, good. Good. Now what? Go do the things you need to do to get better. Period. End of story. Don't waste a single second crying a tear over the fact that things are harder for you. So [ __ ] what? We all have something that sucks. We all have things that are hard. Get better. Address the issues. Do whatever it takes to get around this obstacle. Move forward with aggression. All right, you ready? We are going to play a game here. You and I are going to pretend that you have 30 days to accumulate as much knowledge as humanly possible in order to move your life forward. Here's what you're going to do. First and foremost, get sleep. I don't know what it is about people. I'm Captain Hustle. I love hustle porn, hustle culture, all of it. But let me tell you right now, you must optimize your cognition. So, you're going to get sleep. You're going to sleep as much as you need. That is going to prime your brain to take in the information. Second, you're going to get your diet right. There is no way that you can think clearly if your diet isn't right. Now, what that is exactly is beyond the scope of this answer, but I will tell you that there is plenty of information on my own channels about how to optimize your cognition through diet. Go check it out. The next thing that you're going to do, exercise. The crazy thing is read the book Spark. If you get somebody's heart rate up, whatever they do immediately after that is going to be the thing that they're able to intake the best. So, whatever your hardest class is, you want to do after getting your heart rate up. So, you work out, get your heart rate back down to baseline, and then that next thing you do, you're going to be primed to intake this information. Boys and girls, boy, oh boy, do I wish that you didn't have to think about your body when trying to optimize your mind, because I find the body really boring. But, the reality is that is the way it works. And if you don't recognize the need to get your body in order so that you can optimize your cognition, you are always going to struggle to take in information in the most efficient way possible. This is my secret weapon. Sleep, amazing diet, and working out. Okay, now that we've primed the body, now we can get into really intaking the information. As always, it starts with a goal. You don't want to be taking in random ass information. What are you trying to do? Figure out what your goal is, get a hyper amount of clarity. Then, we're going to figure out what are going to be the books that we need, or again, when I say book, I mean books, YouTube, podcast, articles, whatever. We're going to intake that information. We're going to intake it in swarms. So, we're going to pick a topic or two that really matters to us, that's dictated to us by our goals. We're going to read in a swarm. We're going to figure out what that topic is all about. Once we get the general gist, which we will define this way. First, you need to figure out what the terms are. Until you understand what the terms are, you're not going to be able to go deep even if you want on that topic, because you don't know the way to identify the people that really understand that topic because the 101 stuff is going to talk really broadly. If you want to get into the deeper stuff, you're going to need to know the terms. So, we're going to read in swarms, we're going to figure out what the terms are, we're going to figure out who the players are, okay? Terms and players. Now, when we know the the players being the people, who are the people that are really talking well about this? We're going to find the people that we really resonate with and we're going to go deeper into the world, whether it's on YouTube, podcasts, books, whatever. We're going to go deeper. We're going to start searching by those terms as we begin to learn them to figure out who all the players are. So, high-level, we're going to start with sub-optimal people, just is the way that it is, but they're going to start talking in the terms that we need. Then, once we have the terms, we're going to start going deeper. We're going to figure out who the real experts are that speak to us. Then, we're going to really drill down into those. Once we're drilling down into the topic and we know who the real people are that are meaningful in the space, we're going to seek disconfirming evidence. Do not trick yourself into learning a side of an argument. The whole point of moving ourselves forward with knowledge is to get to the point where we can more accurately predict the outcome of our actions because the knowledge that we're intaking is closer to the truth of how the world works. That's how we're going to determine the value of information. Does it actually allow us to do the thing that we want to do more effectively? Yes or no? If yes, keep going down that path. Now, the only way to get there is to seek disconfirming evidence, to make sure that what you understand actually works. The reason that people are afraid of disconfirming evidence is it can shake your worldview. It makes you feel less cool. People learn things because they want to feel cool. That's the wrong reason to learn things. You never want to learn something because it makes you feel cool. You want to learn something because it actually makes you cool. And the way that something makes you cool is it makes you capable of outperforming everyone else. That's the juice, man. I get it. We all want to love other people. We all want to hold hands and be happy, and I love that [ __ ] I love getting along. I love teamwork, but the reality is if you want to accomplish something extraordinary in your life, that's about getting better than other people. That's why it's extraordinary. It's extra ordinary. It's above the ordinary. It's better than that other [ __ ] It's not mid, okay? We are pushing ourselves into rarefied air, boys and girls, and that is going to require us to really figure out what is true and what is true is defined as that which allows me to more accurately predict the outcome of my behaviors. Because when you're really able to go, "If I do this, I'm going to get this result." That's how you get to success. And the way that you're able to do that is by taking on knowledge that is based in the way that things really are. And if you're just trying to construct a worldview that's going to sound good on Twitter, you are going to get [ __ ] slapped by reality. You're going to encounter the way the world really works, the way that people really are, the way that your industry really works, the way that business is, however you define success, the way that it really is. Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face, so says Mike Tyson. The punched in the face is reality. So, you better have a set of skills that allows you to get punched in the face, recompose yourself, and keep going. And the only thing that is going to do that is the thing that's the closest to the truth. And I say the closest to the truth because it's really hard to know objective reality. So, we get as close as we can by saying this is my goal. And then, when I believe this and act this way, it moves me closer to that goal. Cool. Now, we know that we're aligned with the way that the world actually works. And so, in our 30-day challenge, we are going to be relentlessly optimizing our cognition, reading in swarms, finding out the words, the players, then going deep on those things, seeking disconfirming evidence so that we can make sure that what we're learning is actually real, and we're going to deploy that knowledge relentlessly every day. We're not going to wait till the end of the 30 days. We're going to start deploying it right away. Does this really work? Do I understand it? Can I explain it to myself? Can I explain it to other people? When you're able to do all of that, you will make tremendous progress. And then, last but not least, we're going to push ourselves to intake that information as fast as humanly possible. Get that information in. Get some urgency in your life. Push yourself. Hold yourself to a high standard. And make sure it's in pursuit of something you actually care about because then this whole game is fun. And you can get out there and really do something amazing that gets you into that passion feedback loop, where you're able to add value to other people's lives in a way that's really fun for you, that keeps you wanting to go harder, push yourself, move faster, seek that disconfirming evidence, deploy that knowledge, make sure that it's real, refine, refine, refine, fail, embarrass yourself, all in the name of getting better with each Lego piece of information until finally you were so good at something you care about that people can't stop you, no matter how much they try. And if you spend 30 days doing that, it'll be the 30 greatest days of your life. Enjoy. All right, everybody. Until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you need some extra hacks to help yourself focus and think critically and strategically, check out this clip where I talk about how to enhance your cognition. What's up, everybody? Let's talk about one of the most important things that you can spend your time on. Brain optimization. I am joining you from the gym, which is my least favorite part of brain optimization, but it's an absolutely critical part. There are many things that you can do to get your cognition at the highest level possible, and I often hear people thinking that they can grind their way to a better performance. And while working long hours is certainly one of the strategies that you can run to get ahead in life, I will say you have to be very careful not to spend extra hours in a sub optimal cognitive state. And that's what most people do is they think the first thing to go is sleep. The second thing to go is exercise. The third thing to go is diet, things that we're going to be talking about today. And the reality is that the first thing you want to do is optimize your cognition. So that all of the hours that you're spending on your chosen pursuit are things that are done at the highest possible level from a cognitive standpoint. Now, nobody wishes more than me that you did not need to pay attention to the body, that you could simply live this entirely cerebral life and get everything going that way. But the reality is that you cannot separate the organ of the brain from the rest of your body. This all works in concert, much to my dismay. So, if you want to be thinking quickly, if you want to be thinking clearly, if you want to be at your best, feeling good, operating at a high level, the reality is you must focus on cognitively optimizing. That's what we're going to talk about today. One of the most important things that you can do is to get yourself in shape. Now, I am not a fan of working out. In fact, it is very fair to say that I really don't enjoy working out. But, when I think about getting my brain in shape, one of the most important things you can do is get your blood pumping. Now, I'm also not going to lie, there are cognitive benefits psychologically, if nothing else, to also being strong and looking good. None of those are going to hurt your feelings, but the real reason that I spend my time in the gym is that you're sending a very particular signal to your brain when you're working out. And so, you increase the production of things like BDNF, um brain-derived neurotrophic factor, if I remember all of the letters correctly. But, basically, you're sending Miracle-Gro to your brain to make sure that you're creating the optimal neurochemical soup that you need in order to be performing at a high level. It really has big impacts on memory. And so, getting in the gym, getting your blood pumping, getting yourself in good shape is going to be a critical part of getting rid of brain fog, making sure that you're incredibly sharp, and making sure that you're creating the growth factors in your brain that you need to enhance your memory. And that's going to be a big part of it. So, I personally go into the gym roughly five times a week. There are definitely times where I might miss a day, and there are some weeks where I might add a day. But, on average, it comes out to be about five times a week. You can do any kind of different split that you like, but I personally find that weights over cardio is one, it's far more pleasurable for me, and the best workout is the one that you will actually do. And so, I'm far more likely to stick with a routine that is revolving around weightlifting. Now, I will often do the weights at a cardio pace, so I'm moving very quickly in the gym from thing to thing to thing, not a lot of rest between periods, which has a twofold effect. One, I'm going to move quickly through my workout, so the amount of time that I need is very low, and then the other part of that is that I'm actually getting that cardio workout. My heart is pumping, it's a very intense workout, and that way it allows me to basically combine the two things. But some people prefer to do cardio, and certainly getting yourself in cardio shape can be very advantageous as well, certainly for heart health, for your vasculature, all of that stuff is incredibly important to maintain well. Diet, exercise, and sleep are going to be the magic trifecta with a little bit of meditation thrown in. We're going to cover all of that. But then finding, if you're going to do that split, how much can you mix it up? Now, I am particularly bad about mixing up my workouts. I'm just going to be really honest. But having some sort of split, so you're not doing your full body every time, is going to be better. So, the way that I break it up is for me, I do a push, pull, legs, abs split. So, it's a three-day cycle that I rotate through. So, I typically start with my back and biceps, so that's going to be your pull. And then I go to chest, shoulders, triceps on the following day, that's going to be your push. And then I do legs and abs on a separate day. And that's the basic split that I use in my gym. I work out roughly 45 minutes, sometimes an hour, sometimes I might be able to get out a bit faster. Sometimes I have to get out faster if I've got a lot going on for the day, but that is the basic cycle. Put in the work, you will definitely get the results. All right, meditation is one of the most important things in my life. It would be very fair to say that it changed my life. That is for sure. It might It's a little bit of an exaggeration to say that it saved my life, but it certainly saved my sanity. And I resisted doing it for a long time, and I'm very glad that I finally met Mark Divine who told me to stop being ridiculous and to start meditating, and it really was a game changer. So, managing your neurochemistry is one of the single most important things you can do, and understanding how to shift back and forth between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. So, sympathetic is the fight or flight response. So many of us that are hard charging, you're going to spend so much of your time there, and it really does have some sort of cumulative effect. So, that after a while, you just feel on edge all the time, the sense of, you know, something is wrong. You just feel antsy, unsettled, and that can get really unbearable in your life. And meditation is a magical way that nature has given us where you can reset that to absolute zero to where you feel completely calm and creative and anchored. It is truly a phenomenal gift of evolution that simply staying in a comfortable position, which I'm literally sitting exactly how I sit when I meditate. I breathe from my diaphragm, down at your belly, and that by bringing your thoughts back only to the breath, back to your breath, nice and simply, back to the breath. It's going to wander. Your mind is going to wander. You're not doing anything wrong when your mind wanders. That is the nature of the human mind. So, don't worry that you have what they call the monkey mind, that your mind is constantly bouncing around to all these thoughts, many of them negative. Just when you realize that your mind has wandered, come back to the breath. Now, I use headphones when I meditate and I play the sounds of nature. Typically, my favorite is a thunderstorm. There's something about hearing the rain and the occasional crack of thunder that just keeps bringing me back to the present moment, right there with the sound of that rain, the sound of that thunder, the rhythm of my breath. And then, I find when I maximize the pleasure of each part of the breath cycle. So, there are four parts to the breath cycle. There's the inhale, the inhale hold at the top, the exhale, and the exhale hold at the bottom. And then, you just repeat that cycle over and over and I'll do a couple cycles here so you can see. Now, oftentimes people will talk about making each part of the breath cycle four equal parts. I have found that optimizing for the pleasure of each part of the breath cycle is a far more useful way for me, everybody needs to try for themselves, but a far more useful way for me to get what I call that background radiation, that anxiety, that stress, all of that down to zero. And so, this is what it looks like for me. I sit cross-legged just because I find it comfortable. You don't need to. Whatever's comfortable for you. I put my hands in my lap. I have found there's something weird about touching my hands together ever so lightly that I don't know if it creates like a circle of energy. I don't know. It sounds cheesy, but that's how it feels. And then, I close my eyes. And again, I would normally have my headphones over my ears listening to the sound of a thunderstorm. And then, I just start my breath. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, but whatever feels right for you. So, this is what it looks like for me. All right. Can't help but be relaxed doing that even just right now here on camera. And the key thing is you'll notice that for me I hold at the top of the inhale for a very brief period of time. But then I hold the exhale for much longer period of time. And the only reason that I do that is that it feels better. And so finding that rhythm for you is going to be the key. And then I meditate for the exact amount of time that it takes me to get completely calm and creative so that I have no background radiation, no sense of stress, no sense of anxiety. Sometimes it takes 2 minutes, sometimes it takes 45 minutes. Now, it's never taken me longer than 45 minutes even at the most stressed out and anxious I've ever been in my life, which is extraordinarily stressed. Uh, it's never taken me more than 45 minutes to get to complete equanimity. And that is worth its weight in gold. Now, my wife does not enjoy meditating, but she does enjoy drawing where she gets into a very meditative state. Now, I think that if she let herself off the hook and stop thinking that there's ever going to be a time where her mind uh doesn't wander off on the things and just realize that's part of it and you just come back to the breath and you're going to get better at it over time, that she would get additional benefit from traditional meditation, but having something, anything in your life that's meditative, maybe it's the the maybe it's drawing, maybe it's cooking. Whatever your thing is, finding something that makes you feel absolutely calm and creative. Find that thing. At a biological level, it's going to help you, and few things will help you optimize your cognition better than meditation. So, develop that practice. I promise you'll reap the rewards. All right, welcome to where the battle is won or lost. Now, all of the things that we're talking about today are important for cognitively optimizing, but very few will have the deleterious effect of failing to get your diet right. As somebody who went through a brief period where I could not understand what was going on, I had brain fog, I was tired, it literally felt like I had lost my will to fight. It was crazy. It was the weirdest period of my life as it relates to diet, that is for sure. And the culprit ended up being pecans. I still can't believe that that is true, but I know that if you're not feeling good in life, uh at a physiological level, the first thing you should do is ask, "What am I eating a lot of?" and then cut that out. It is shocking how much your diet impacts your cognition. So, now what I'm showing you is basically everything that I eat. Now, full disclosure, if I make any error in my life, it is that I don't eat a wide enough variety of foods, but I'm going to be honest with you about what I eat. So, this is my Monday through Friday diet in its entirety with the exception of jicama. I don't have any jicama, but I do eat a fair amount of that. All right. So, the vast majority of my calories, um so I eat a lot of meat, and the vast majority of my calories, this is a sponsor, but they're a sponsor because it's real. So, Lisa and I, um in trying to fix her gut, needed a good source of grass-fed and grass-finished meats. Um so, we get our meats almost exclusively from ButcherBox. Uh, again, they are a sponsor, but that is not why I eat them. Uh, I eat a lot of eggs. So, intake calories, um, a fair amount from eggs. And then, between the different meat sources that we get, I have found that consuming a lot of vegetable matter does not sit well with me. I'm perfectly willing to accept that if I were to transition my microbiome slowly over time that it may work. Uh, but I have not found that advantageous, but I do eat a fair amount of green leafy vegetables. Three of my favorites right here. You've got bok choy, you've got, um, kale and collard greens are ones that I particularly enjoy. I also eat a lot of carrots. And then, for a snack, I'll have berries. So, it's something very sweet, almost always either blueberries, raspberries, sometimes blackberries. Um, but those are the ones that I eat. Olive oil, extra virgin olive oil is the, um, the only oil that I use. So, be very, very thoughtful about, um, getting vegetable oil. So, vegetable oils, A, they rancify even just sitting on the shelf, and then they have a very low flash point or smoke point. Um, so you can damage the fats in cooking. I use olive oil, um, largely because it has a high smoke point, so it doesn't tend to get damaged in a normal cooking process. Of course, if you cook it too high or too long, it can. Um, and I probably get about, I don't know, 60 to 65% of my calories, um, from meats. And if you throw in the eggs, maybe it goes closer to 70, 75% of my calories. Um, and that's all that I eat Monday through Friday. Now, on the weekends, I eat differently. So, on the weekends, I, um, have a fair amount of sushi. Uh, but it's mostly what I'll call clean sushi. So, it's things like baked crab hand rolls. So, it's basically crab, rice, and avocado. And that helps me mix things up. I'll also get some of the things you see here or maybe like a beef burger. I don't eat the bun or anything like that. It's literally just the patty, which I tend to mix with eggs or bacon. And yeah, that's my diet. Now, in terms of what I drink, I'm not sponsored by these guys. Just so happens that I mix cold brewed coffee cuz I don't like hot liquids. And again, no sponsorship or anything, but I drink Perrier water and I mix them together. And that's very weird for people, but I don't like the idea of being addicted to caffeine. So, I like to keep my caffeine intake very very low. So, what I do is I take one of these and I normally have an empty one and I'll pour some from the full one into the empty one so that I get about a third of the coffee. Then I mix with the water and I continue every drink that I take, I add more water until it reaches a point where I can sort of just barely taste the coffee. And the only reason I do that is that when you don't drink anything other than water, it gets a little bit tedious. So, one, I like the sparkling water and two, I like to mix it with the coffee just to get a little bit of a different flavor. And the reason that I chose coffee is I didn't want to drink anything that humans haven't been drinking for thousands of years. That was the idea. And that actually made a big difference in my anxiety levels once I cut out all of my um artificially sweetened beverages. So, I was drinking a lot of zero calorie monster and a lot of diet coke and I miss them and they're amazing. And to anybody that drinks them, I get it. Um but I had begun to notice a tie between having that and feeling anxious. And so, I decided to cut it out and just see if it would help and it helped massively. I'll say it probably reduced my anxiety by about 70%, which is massive. So, um that's been a a big win. So, this is it. Now, on the weekends, on a Saturday, I may have a full-blown cheat meal. I don't do it every weekend, but I absolutely do it when I'm in the mood. It tends to be something like Cold Stone Ice Cream, which I absolutely love. Um so, I'm very thoughtful about how often I do that, very thoughtful about monitoring my blood glucose levels. Uh in fact, literally just off camera is a new blood glucose monitor that I'm excited to try out. Um a continuous glucose monitor. And I think it's really important to understand what your average glucose level is, like where are you spending most of your time? Um and then another big part of my strategy is intermittent fasting. And so, I will intermittent fast 7 days a week. There literally isn't a day, even during the Christmas season, where I'm totally off the chain in terms of my normal diet. Uh even then, I'll do intermittent fasting. And I do that one for cognition. It is hugely valuable to staying sharp, to have these long periods of time without eating. And then usually one to two times a year I'll do an extended fast. And some of them might only be 24 hours, other times it might be up to um 72 hours. I've done a full 5-day fast before. That was miserable though, and I don't plan to be repeating that, uh unless some new evidence comes out that really shows that there's a huge difference between a 72-hour fast and a 5-day fast. Um I just found that it was like having the flu, I couldn't pay attention, it was just horrible. And I'm somebody who's keto adapted. So, for me to really struggle at the 5 days, like it it negatively impacted my business, which is something that I don't like to do. Um and certainly had a negative impact on my cognition. I find a 24-hour fast pretty amazing. Uh longer than that, and I do find that it has negative impact on my performance. Um so I do limit that, but every day, literally every day, um my average is probably about 17.5 hours. So that means there are some days that I'm doing, call it 19 hours, and then other days in the weekend uh where I'll do typically 16-ish hours, but in the wash it comes out to about 17.5 when you factor it over the course of a year. Um but that intermittent fasting is something that I do all the time, every day. It's just a natural part of my life. And the way that I do that is I have my last meal around 1:15 2:00 p.m. at the latest. And then I don't eat again until the following morning. And then I'll usually eat somewhere between 8:00 and 9:00. Um sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little bit later, depending on what I'm doing that day. But making sure that I get that average of 17.5 hours has been incredibly beneficial. So there's all kinds of health benefits, but in terms of its impact on body composition and cognition, it really can't be beat, especially when your diet consists of whole food. And that's the thing. Other than the olive oil, everything that you see here on this table is the thing that you would see out and about. So the bacon looks like the flesh of a pig as it is. And the eggs, obviously, are just whole eggs. The carrots, carrots. The berries, berries. The vegetables, vegetables. And so not eating processed food, eating whole food, where during the week, I'm going to guess 95% of my calories, even including a week where I cheat, 92 to 95% of my calories are going to come from whole food. Uh and that's that's been a huge win in terms of um how I feel, how I sleep, um cognition, all of it is vastly improved by whole food. So that's my easy advice to people is to eat whole food whenever possible. And that's my diet. All right, let's talk about the big daddy of all things related to cognitive optimization, and that is sleep. If I were going to say the two most important things that you can do to optimize your cognition is sleep and eat right. Those are the big ones. But sleep is the one that will impact you the fastest. You could mess up your diet for a day, two days, maybe even a week before it really starts to hammer you, but man, you miss one night's sleep and there is a catastrophic cascade of biological problems that will present themselves rapidly. So, somebody that gets, I think it's less than 6 hours of sleep a night shows the same kind of blood glucose response as somebody who's pre-diabetic. So, that gives you an idea of missing only part of one night's sleep can have that kind of massive cellular impact. So, being incredibly thoughtful about getting your sleep is super important. Now, as somebody who loves hustle porn and being hardcore and working an amazing amount, I do all of that with precious little negative impact to my sleep. I won't say that it never happens, especially not since I've gotten into NFTs. It is there has been some wobble in my perfect sleep record. Um but it's really minor. And the reason that I do that is to me, being tired is a unique ring of hell. I do not understand people who are prepared to go their entire lives fatigued. It makes everything worse. Your ability to enjoy your life goes down. Your likelihood of being depressed goes way up. Your likelihood of having metabolic disturbances goes way up. There There's so many things go wrong. And then of course, the most traumatically impacted is your ability to think clearly and think quickly. If you've ever gone even one night with bad sleep, let alone two or three nights, you can feel yourself declining rapidly in performance. In fact, if you take somebody that hasn't gotten any sleep and put them in a car, they have the same sort of delays that somebody who's intoxicated has. So, the impacts on cognition cannot be overstated. So, be very careful. If you're trying to be at your best and really perform at an elite level, the thing that you must do is get sleep. So, make sure that you're prioritizing your sleep. Now, how do we do that? How do we get sleep done in a high-quality way? Number one is you want to make sure that you're sleeping in a completely dark environment. So, no nightlights, hopefully no even like charging lights or things like that. Now, one way I do to make myself absolutely bulletproof, not only do I have blackout curtains, but I sleep with the blankets completely over my head. Now, admittedly, it didn't start for reasons of light pollution, but now as I get older, I'm actually grateful that I've had my whole life I've had this um pattern of sleeping with the uh blankets up over my head, which I know for some people is a just nightmare scenario, but for me, it's like I mean, if I'm honest, it's like sleeping in a womb. It's just to be completely encased is so wonderful and it makes me feel so relaxed. Absolutely incredible. Uh and then the other thing that I do is I use white noise. And so, to make sure that there are no little noises that are going to wake me up in the middle of the night, I have white noise, basically sounds like a fan, um but from a little machine that plays that consistent sound, and that helps me sleep incredibly well. And then, because my mind is so frequently in problem-solving mode, what I've found is that about 30 minutes before I go to bed, I switch into narrative mode. And so, I'm going to be reading a book. I use Audible, but I'm going to be listening to a book that shifts my mind out of problem solving mode into narrative mode. And then, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I keep next to me three pairs of iPod Pros so that I can put them in, I listen to the book, it makes sure that I don't go into problem solving mode, but I can stay there in narrative mode, and I turn the volume down just to the point where a little bit of pressure on my ear is required to hear them perfectly. And so, I'll put that bit of pressure, listen to the story, and then as I fall asleep, that pressure comes off my ear, and now I can barely hear it, and I fall right back to sleep. Now, I will give you the advanced tip, which is don't pick an audiobook that has a bunch of murder in it, because then you wake up to the narrator screaming and yelling, and that was waking me up. So, I had to learn the hard way that there's a certain type of book that's a good, engaging story, but doesn't have narration where, you know, there's yelling and screaming at any point in the story. And yeah, the last thing that I will say about my sleep is that I go to bed at the same time every night, which is 9:00 p.m. I treat it like a religion. I go to bed every night at that time, sometimes a few minutes earlier if I can convince Lisa. And then, the second part of that is that I don't set an alarm. So, I haven't set an alarm for the last, you know, 16, 17 years at this point. So, trust me, you can do amazing, incredible things in your life without needing to set an alarm. I get as much sleep as I need. Now, I don't have kids, so that is no doubt a big part of how I'm able to maintain that, but the more that if you do have kids, you can sleep closer to their sleep rhythms to make sure that you're getting as much sleep as you need. And let me tell you, if I had kids and I needed to go to bed at 7:00 p.m., I would go to bed at 7:00 p.m. So, I'm going to go to bed at whatever time I need to in order to get all the sleep that that need. If you need 9 hours, get 9 hours. Your brain shrinks in the middle of the night, which basically the inflammation is going down so that the glial system can flush everything out, get rid of any toxins that might be building up in the system, get rid of the amyloid plaques, which are very present in people that have Alzheimer's. Probably doesn't cause Alzheimer's, but nonetheless, it lets you know that it's doing something that we don't necessarily want sticking around. And I said the glial system, and I think I mean the glymphatic system. Somebody will have to fact-check me on that cuz I'm actually not sure which, but the brain shrinks nonetheless and allows you to clear out that system. Um so, being very thoughtful to get as much sleep as you need so that you can enjoy your life so that on a biological cellular level that you're able to run all your processes, so that you're able to do all the memory consolidation, all the things that go along with the ancillary effects to sleeping, and then making sure that you're able to think as clearly, sharply, and quickly as possible. And all of those things come down to the quality of your sleep, the quality of your diet, the quality of your exercise, and your ability to manage your psychological life, which we can do most easily through meditation. So, that in a bundle, my friends, is how you take care of yourself cognitively to make sure that you can deliver an elite level of performance day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. If you need more help putting together an action plan on how to improve yourself and your life, check out this episode where I detail one of the first major steps, stopping procrastination and kicking laziness out altogether. If you're not going in the right direction in your life and you want an action plan that you can use, it goes like this.