flowboy

@Chadders Oh Nice, I’m in the mental health space too. can relate to everything taking ages compared to expectations, so frustrating. No I’m in Austria. My customers are a mix of US and Europe

@manuel bon You’ll be fine as long as you seek out the right friends. My friends are all highly ambitious entrepreneurs, or in some way doing something unique with their life. The ones who don’t, I don’t hang out with anymore. Over time I found I have nothing in common with their mindset, so it’s hard to relate. Friends with the wrong mindset will hold you back. So will family. So habits like talking to your brother or father or mom every week and get their advice on your life, will have to go. Build your own masterminds and circles.

No one who is emotionally healthy cares about this stuff. Do you have the basics handled? Fulfilling career Place of your own Relationship or active dating life Friends Healthy lifestyle If not, my suggestion is to focus your energy there, and after you've got all that, see if you still care about this stuff.

@28 cm unbuffed I sympathize, sometimes I go through a phase where I just dislike women and how they work. But for me at least, it passes. So the answer to how to solve that problem: Heal your childhood trauma (can take years, but it will also make you a happier person) Doing this will give you more nuance and be less attached to these black and white beliefs about women that you got from your psychopathic mother. Doing this will make you emotionally healthy, which makes you attractive to & gives you access to a whole new class of women: those who are not dumb, childish, too emotional, or doing bullshit. They are there, but they can't see you and you can't see them at the moment. This is because of the perception bubble caused by unresolved childhood trauma. I know you probably don't want to hear this, but hey... it's the truth as I have lived it.

@Jannes I actually spoke with him yesterday. The only thing he is very certain to recommend to people is journaling. When journaling, his aim is to: become really honest about what he is currently feeling make sense of his history make sense of what he was feeling during childhood and become really honest about that That does mean that the veil of having had a good childhood with really great parents has to be lifted. Most people idolize their parents, and even if they don't, they're not aware of 99% of the pain that they experienced in childhood due to subtle emotional neglect. The conscious mind tells a story like "it was all pretty nice, some things were not so nice, but overall decent childhood. Guess I don't remember some early years at all. Huh, weird" and this story has to be slowly discovered to be absolute bullshit. And that's painful, people don't want to even go there, you have all these mental defenses to contend with. Personally, I've had really good results with a targeted journaling approach based on present day feelings and tracing them back, which is what I teach.

@Jannes There's no use for a brain scan for these things. No doctor would approve it, there would be nothing to see. And even if you could see cognitive deficiencies like this on a brain scan (which you can't), it's not like there's anywhere to go from there. Childhood trauma is the likely culprit. I also had the outsider childhood trauma in my young years, and grew up with severe ADHD. Never knew that these were linked until I started doing trauma release, and I'm noticing that my ADHD has basically gone away, and I'm much more balanced and competent in all areas, where I would be more unbalanced before. And that makes sense, because the issue is not underdeveloped areas of your brain, they're underutilized. That's because to repress trauma, the brain is literally creating barriers around the area linked to the traumatic memories. No communication gets through. Those areas also are linked to certain capabilities. That's how people end up "left brained" or "bad at math" or emotionally unintelligent. It all balances out after releasing childhood trauma. But: working through childhood trauma is really, really uncomfortable. You really have to want to become your real self, your original potential, no matter what the emotional labor cost. Daniel says it best:

It was a blog post, not a video. But this is probably even better for you:

That's awesome, kudos! You get good at what you're interested in and do a lot. Whatever you can't do well, you can get other people on your team for.

@Sabth I've seen you dismiss every idea with "that's too hard, I can't do that" or some version of that. Did you check out the mindset link I posted to one of your other threads about this? It's time to decide on a path and take action. As far as I know, you aren't even applying for jobs yet

I have, with reasonable satisfaction. Here's some tips I learnt: Post multiple ads on upwork. Use different variations of categories, keywords and description. To catch more fish Devise tests for the applicants to do. What they say means nothing. The tests have to be as close to the actual work as possible. Have calls with the 5-10 who passed the test. On the call, have them do a live demo of what they can do. That could mean using remote software like TeamViewer so they can do it on your computer and you can see how fast they are. It's best to have all these calls in one day. Prefer people who are fast and understand things quickly Hire the one who is efficient at the job, NOT the one you feel a personal connection with (I made this mistake) Let the other ones down easy and keep a good relationship. You might need them as backup. Figure out a deal that works for you and them. This could mean pay by commission, per task, or offering studio time for example. Prefer performance incentive over paying by the hour, certainly before they've proven themselves Sell the vision. They should want to grow with your company and want to get a full time, better position when you can afford it (which means you need to convince them of your future growth potential) If one gives you trouble, drop them fast and get one of the other 5-10 finalists, before somebody else snaps them up.

Being a millionaire doesn't mean being rich anymore. It's a nice rainy day fund to have 1 million, but it certainly doesn't make you financially free for the rest of your life, unless you live an extremely simple life (you won't feel rich) 20-30 million you could call financially free, if you don't care about nice houses and cars. 100 million and up you can call rich. What's the percentage of decamillionaires?

I agree. Yes, it can feel disorienting. I've been there. It's also a sign that your brain is expending a lot of energy on repressed childhood pain, which is an invisible energy leak. This can make it so that there's not enough energy left to feel positive and excited about today.

I don't know anyone with debt. I'm Dutch. This is not meant as an offense to anyone in the US, but it appears to be more normalized there. Perhaps because of the student loans fiasco, perhaps because of the strange system of getting a good "credit score" by having credit cards, and borrowing and paying them off regularly. Where I'm from, nobody regularly uses credit cards, only when they are required for online payments (and we can buy almost everything online with a payment system that just links to a debit card - no debt necessary) We build a good credit score by never having had debt, which seems more logical and sound to me. Although if you can avoid the college debt trap (or pay it off quickly), and just not use credit cards, I don't see a reason why you couldn't avoid this problem altogether. Buying things on debt should just not be something you consider a possibility.

@Dima logach You should try each of them on their own for 1-2 weeks to find out what they do for you. Otherwise you'll be paying a bunch of money and not knowing which ones are valuable. This is how I ended up with: - L-phenylalanine - DMAE + Choline - N-Acetyl-L-Tyrosine - Vit B complex - Fish oil - Multivitamin - alpha-GPC You're not going to find information on how all these substances interact, only some anecdotes.

Tried it to supplement my nootropic / brain health stack, but it gave me zits. I've read that it can have benefits with schizophrenia, so I wouldn't be surprised if some other conditions are helped by it which could be related to birth trauma / early infant trauma, such as colitis, IBS, and the like. Who knows. Should be tried. I just stick to my regular B complex which has some of it but not a high dose.

@MarkKol I was just about to update this thread. After the success with apple cider vinegar for dandruff, I had an itchy spot on my skin somewhere that was probably a fungal infection. It was there for weeks until I put apple cider vinegar on it, after two times the skin renewed and it cleared up immediately. So, same thing. It works, it's cheap, try it.

1. If they feel the need to say "thank you", you've left a silence after your compliment, don't do that it feels uncomfortable. 2. My guess is that your issue is just that you're not kissing them. Why? They're on a date with you, you communicated interest and they didn't leave. Ergo, they expect you to make a move. If you have an okay conversation, flirt a bit and don't make a move, they'll unconsciously label you as a pussy and not want to go on a second date. On the other hand, if you make a move and they back away, that's good, you've shown that you're not a pussy, so don't address it just talk over it, as long as they don't leave, you can try again in 5-10 minutes. I've never been a pickup star but my dates have basically always gone well, this is why.

You're very close, slight tweak: play headgames with yourself which are actually cracking you up. Do things that amuse you, interact with people in a way that you think is funny. That way when you want to chat up someone interesting, you can just start right in the middle of the story of your self-created adventure.

I'm writing this as I am still integrating my session from yesterday. Since I was very small, I had this recurring vision of my parents buying me an ice cream, and throwing it on the floor. In pure ungratitude. Boom. I don't want this anymore. It's a scenario I would play through in my mind, for no apparent reason, and then get predictably get emotionally shocked by the lack of gratitude and the sadness of throwing it away. "How could I even think such a horrible thing?!" Upon which I quickly tried to think about something else. This would happen regularly when I was 8, and to this day it still happened. I labeled it a "mind worm" and never gave it much conscious thought. Cue random-ass symptom number two: my girlfriend's sister has just adopted a 2 year old boy. Sweet kid. His parents couldn't take care of him anymore because of illness. And I don't like him. I like all the kids from that family, they're the sweetest, but this boy: it was almost as if I had decided to not like him before I even saw him. I only found out yesterday how this ties together. Set the stage: my girlfriend and I are talking and introspecting in bed on a lazy sunday. We touch on the topic of Inner Alchemists, making a website for it, and how much work it is. She comments that I seem to be spending 75% of my energy on what could go wrong. "Why do you do these complicated things for in case nobody likes your website? Why don't you assume people will like it?" (a response to me trying to explain google analytics) I feel myself slip into a spontaneous therapy session. "Because... if I don't have concrete things to fix, I have no hope." "If I have no hope, there's no point in living because it's never going to be good." "I would have to feel that my work is not good, because I'm not good." Why do you feel like your work can't be good because you're not good? "Because... somewhere.. along the way, I was rejected." (I have no idea why I'm saying this, it just comes to me spontaneously) I have a strong sense that my innocence was lost. Something good's been taken away from me. I was in paradise, then I got kicked out. What do you see? "I see.. my mom. She's not looking at me" Why is she not looking at you? "Because she's talking to someone. A family friend. An aunt. Or maybe A DOCTOR" A doctor? I have no idea why I said that, but it seems to lead somewhere. Where was your dad? "I was afraid of my dad. I really had forgotten that I didn't just love him and wanted to be with him, I also feared him when I was little. Because he got mad and threw things" What else do you see? "I see a machine..." My subconscious just gives me a single image of a patient monitoring device, floating above me. You said somewhere along the line you were rejected? "Yeah..." "Maybe I felt like I was being punished?" "Maybe I didn't know why I was in the hospital, and I thought I was there because I was bad?" "Maybe I felt I WAS BEING THROWN AWAY, THEY DIDN'T WANT ME ANYMORE" 😭😭😭😭😭 A huge emotional release follows as I start to sob and cry in a strange high pitched voice. FLOOD OF INSIGHT Immediately, my subconscious reminds me of the ice-cream-on-the-floor obsession, and it connects: I AM THE ICE CREAM. I must have carried that feeling of being rejected by my parents with me ever since the hospital stay at 8 months old (which I don't remember), and whenever it bubbled up, my subconscious twisted it into a vision of throwing away ice cream. If I had done the Gestalt exercise on that (how does the ice cream feel in this scene?) I could have decoded that years ago. Suddenly it becomes crystal clear to me why I have such a hangup around throwing things away. I have the worst time decluttering. I basically can't stomach it emotionally and need psychological support of another person to do it. As a kid, I used to think of teaspoons that fell behind the kitchen counter, no one would use them anymore, and I'd be on the verge of crying. I'm always trying to make the most of what already exists, even when starting fresh would be much more efficient. Which explains hanging on to my old badly written blog posts and coaching exercises and videos. My girlfriend tends to make this joke when she sees a cute dog: "Maybe we can ask them if we can have it, in case they don't want it anymore?" I CAN NOT stomach this joke, it's horrible and it triggers me. Now I know why. I am the ice cream. I am the thrown away clutter. I am the dog. These repressed feelings were projected onto all these. And.... I am the adopted boy. Now I see. Suddenly I understand why I dislike this adopted baby that Maria's sister has. I just disliked this 2 year old because he was adopted. My empathy was shut off. He must have felt rejected and "thrown away" by his parents, just like I did in the hospital scene. So I had to dislike him in order to not feel that. For the ones of you reading this thinking that I'm nuts, or pulling far-fetched theories together, or speculating: I understand, but you're wrong, and I can prove it to you. Do a guided childhood regression session. Give it your all. Do it three days in a row. There will be no doubt in your mind. This experience of crystal clear knowing WHY you have these weird hang-ups, it's something that can only come out of a deep feeling session. No amount of thinking or hypothesizing will get you to that certainty. But the certainty and insight is only a bonus. The real reward is in dissolving these emotional hangups. Which happens FAST once you do the emotional work. I already feel like I can love this kid, at least don't dislike him anymore. Even though thinking about his history makes me cry now. He must always carry that shadow of rejection by his parents. Even though he'll be able to repress it and have a pretty good childhood now, but it will haunt his shadow until he addresses it in therapy. I already feel more courageous about putting the website out there without having everything prepared. Other notable things from the experience: I also had a deep experience of what it's like as a baby to need love in order to live, how hopeless it is to know you can't do anything if you're abandoned. Touch = life, love = touch. To question what you've done wrong, thinking you're "bad", not being able to think a more complex thought than "this must be happening because they don't love me" Just because you're in a different place and your parents aren't there. It feels like a punishment and there's no ability to understand the reason, however justified Then I felt what it's like to need to suck on a nipple, and the direct line of nurture that goes from mouth to belly, and how total and all-encompassing that need is. And it's the same need that makes me want nicotine. I just recognize the feeling. So I'm pretty sure that nicotine addiction can be cured this way. Thank you for reading.

I recommend learning to love challenge, because it's where satisfaction comes from. Which is what you are looking for.

@shree If you had enough money in the bank to never "have" to do any work again, is this what you would be doing? If so, keep going. Not everyone starts with a lofty impactful purpose, but they develop one later. In fact, I've heard and read many biographies, and my impression is that most people who would end up having a great impact, started out for selfish reasons (getting a certain level of financial success), then when everything was going so well, a grander mission needed to be invented and it tends to fall into place at the right time. I think the idea of an objective valuation of your impact is invalid as a concept. Even if you were to save entire humanity from some disease, you could look at it a different way where that disease would have made us stronger if you hadn't. For example. Value of impact is personal. But the impact has to be challenging enough to be motivating. So if you're not challenged and motivated, back to the drawing board it is. It could be that the impact you really want to have, is not something you believe you can do, or doesn't fit with your current identity. But people can change, skills and knowledge can be acquired, and identities can transform. Everything is malleable. No reason you, with your Creativity and Originality, couldn't come up with a way to use electronics for bioenergetics or spiritual development of humanity like your heroes.

Agreed. I'm in my first year or my third year depending on how you look at it (pivoted several times, held steady since december '22), and it's a real battle wrought with many mental ups and downs (totally sure this is going to work - this will never work I'm wasting my time) - and that's not even counting with the battle with myself I have to fight in order to be consistent and prioritize correctly. I'm glad I didn't stay in higher education as I view that path generally as more time to remain innocent, and marinate in a mindset of following society's authorities and trusting them over your own ability to make things happen, as well as it delays the time to find out how brutal and lonely the path really is. If I could do it all over again, I'd start from my parents' basement when I was 18 instead of ten years later working a job at the same time. Swallow the tough pills early and have more time on my hands. But alas, I wasn't that audacious back then. What type of thing are you building?

MJ DeMarco - The Millionaire Fastlane MJ DeMarco - Unscripted If you're already a businessperson, these books will seem cringe, but if you have no idea how getting rich works and you need your mindset updated - they're excellent. The point of reading such a book is to go from having no idea about the path to wealth, to having a pretty good understanding of what type of endeavours could lead there, and what type of thing you want to start. Also How To Get Rich by Felix Dennis was highly recommended by a podcast I follow - haven't gotten into it myself yet.

Makes sense to me. Yes I’m not referring to how I claim every guy *thinks* about it, some of us respect women very much and do everything right. Still I’m referring to the way it *feels*: we can enjoy the experience without any emotional investment, and we tend to get surprised that it’s not that way from the other side. I also don’t mean that sex can’t be special and more meaningful with a special person, of course it is. There are two kinds of sex we can enjoy, with or without a connection. They’re different but both are enjoyable and we don’t regret them generally. So that’s different for women usually, where it feels more like a huge upfront emotional investment and the casual pleasure is not enough on its own to make it worth it. It has to be a really great person, who is really interesting and there is long term potential. Generally speaking. There are exceptions, such as women with a particular kind of childhood trauma which makes them seek out casual sex for validation or as a patch for loneliness. But they don’t tend to feel great afterwards, it’s just a compulsion. And there are women who have a lot of masculine energy in them who tend to enjoy casual sex much more because of that. A misunderstanding women often have with men, is “if it feels important to me, it must feel just as important and special to you”, and that hurts when it’s not true. But I have also fallen into that, where I really wanted to build a connection and it was just a casual encounter for the woman, which felt more special to me. The best way to avoid that pain is really still to make sure someone is invested emotionally before doing it. That’s hard for many people because they have a need for validation, companionship and also simply for physical touch. So the ideal way to go about it is usually only feasible with a great childhood, or having done some deep therapy, or just a lot of discipline.