Joseph Maynor

This question is inspired by Leo's vid "3 Steps to be ruthlessly effective at anything." Leo talks about finding one high-yield practice that gives good results and then running with that to get success with some endeavor. I want to see what high-yield practices people do that gives them the majority of their results in personal development. Mine: lifestyle minimalism. I've really exploited this hack to make room for what I should be working on.

I need to develop some ground rules regarding my phone usage. I'll do that now. This is a great reminder. This is one of those little time robbers where the pennies add up to big debts. A way to waste your life away. I even need to schedule time to be on this forum, because this is helping me and giving me some support. Like 30 mins per day only at a certain time. For me after work is probably best.

Work on not getting triggered emotionally by other people. You can't change them, and you don't wanna be experiencing negative emotions from them. That's a good personal development goal for you. Also examine what thoughts you are projecting onto them that have nothing to do with them. Oftentimes we project thoughts and emotions onto other people. Your annoyance probably says more about you than it does about them. Change yourself, that's all you can do.

3 great ones for the novice. These helped me, so I am giving what I actually used and benefitted from. Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins Success is a Choice by Rick Pitino 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by William Covey

Marijuana addiction is brutal. So is alcohol. Then you have caffeine, food (especially junk food and candy), music, internet, and over-thinking/theorizing. However, the good news is all you gotta do to get this overcoming addictions hack wired-in is stop doing them. The good news is the problem doesn't really require an act, but an omission. So, paradoxically overcoming addictions is both hard and incredibly easy at the same time. Maybe you don't find music to be an addiction, but make your own list. I gave my list as an example. Overcoming addictions is really a necessary element of personal development practice. It's something I've made a lot of progress on. And sobriety is just the tip of the iceberg. There's many more "soft-addictions" to identify and overcome, and I'm hoping Leo will make a video for that subject. And in my experience, especially with drugs, you gotta go 100% clean, which means abstaining is probably the only sustainable strategy. Err with that, since you can't fail or backslide with that option. You'll solve the problem permanently so you can move on to shore-up your next practical personal development hack for your life.

Bear with me here. I'm gonna do kind of a core-dump of thoughts to consider here: Is having no filter a problem? I.e., I'm gonna be me, I'm not putting on any pretenses. What about learning to be interpersonally strategic? Is acting roles necessarily a bad thing, say when you are working your job? What to make of fears of being a fake person, fears of selling out, or fears of losing authenticity? Can you play the role of being something without being that? Are you really sacrificing anything by strategically playing roles? Is having no filter a bad or destructive thing? Esp. for business. Is it better to operate on more of a need to know basis, developing a huge filter, and being more interpersonally strategic? Is being authentic all the time a sustainable or even wise strategy to use across the board? What are some pitfalls with this strategy? Should we strategically play roles to get what we want? And does that by necessity hurt our authenticity? Does the actor hurt himself when he strategically plays roles?

Man this is tough. These are those moments in life where you learn what people mean by "nervous breakdown". I don't think I fully understood what that phrase meant until I hit rock bottom myself. When your life gets pulled-out from under you and you're left standing there like wudda I do now? And you're looking for a friend, but they are few and far between. That's some tough medicine. I hate to be hedgy about my answer, but it takes time, like 30-45 days to start to make real progress. You gotta get over that first bout with strong negative emotions. Then you gotta do the whole soul-searching stage where you try to figure out what went wrong. Then after a while that cloud of depression starts to wane and you can start to re-gain some confidence. Finally after about 30-45 days you should be able to be back on your feet and back at working your life again. But even then you're still kind of wounded -- but you're stronger and smarter now. It's these rock-bottom moments in life that grow you the most. And you realize how few your true supporters really are. So there's plenty of take-away from this, and this will cause you to shed a skin and mature which will improve your whole life. It's hard to remain a child when you are forced to grow-up. That's one of the effects of these situations: You gotta fix it all by yourself. I like Leo's answer to go off alone to the woods. You need time and space to get your new path started. You gotta forge a new trail. Plan it out.

Being a loser. I've made a lot of progress here, but here goes. Ruining my own life by not taking the actions that I know I should be taking because I am too weak and spoiled to get my stuff together and do it for real. Always finding some reason to postpone my dream until tomorrow. Letting my negative emotions weigh-me down. Enacting self-fulfilling prophesies or death-wishes because a part of me feels very at home in failure, in quitting. Part of me feels very used to being depressed, comforted by it in a way. Like the forlorn loner talking to himself, off by himself in his own mind, in his own displaced world. Being a loser addict, not capable of being responsible in this dog-eat-dog world. Like the perpetual College kid who never grows-up, never having to worry about making money, distracted by his own constant theorizing and thinking. Now that spoiled-brat guy is dropped into this world and has to pay real bills, has to get his own act together for real. Happiness means change, and change is scary. Like I said, I've made huge progress with this, but I wanted to give you an honest answer to a question that made me think. For some people being practical comes easy. For me, being in my head and philosophical comes easy. So, I really had to change some basic wiring in myself to start getting practical results, which I have. There's nothing worse than feeling like you are an alien on this Earth.

@Emerald I tried being 100% authentic all the time and almost everybody started to hate me. Because I just said what I wanted to all the time. Your response is very wise. You can't just operate without any filter at all unless you are independently wealthy and don't care about offending people. In other words the advice to be authentic is kind of dangerous advice. I'm not saying anybody gave that advice, including Leo, but I found out that my implementation of that advice in my life caused me some pretty bad results.

I think the first step is to become very mindful about the emotions you are actually feeling throughout your day. Maybe take a trip out of town by yourself for 3 days and become highly aware of the emotions you are actually feeling throughout your day. Before you can fix the problem you gotta see the nature of the problem you have. I am doing this work now, and I am surprised at how much anger, fear, grief, and apathy I have in my life right now. It's huge. So, now I see where I am so I can now make a plan of action to solve the problem. But the point I wanna make here is take a look at your real emotions that you have throughout the day. I didn't realize I have so many negative emotions all the time that are weighing-down my life. It's like using a dipstick to check the oil in your car. Get that realistic understanding of where your emotional life sits, because if you're like me, you are not yet fully aware of this. It helps to go away somewhere by yourself to do this work. You gotta extricate yourself from your life to get an objective assessment of your current emotional life. I am traveling by myself right now so now I see my emotional life in high-relief, and it's like yikes! I got a big problem with negative emotions ruining my life too, and I never realized the extent and true nature of my problem until now. Not fully. Begin with awareness.

I think there are some universal hacks. I am working on happiness now in my life and getting a lot of results. I find these tips from Leo in his video "How to Feel Happy" to be really useful and I am working on getting them wired in my life: 1. Gratitude; 2. Optimism; 3. Stop Overthinking; 4. Eliminate Addictions; 5. Build Deep Relationships; 6. Savor Life's Joys; 7. Meditation; 8. Get Into Flow; 9. Goals and Life Purpose. And then the other one I want to list is getting your triggers handled so you get your negative emotions and neuroses handled. I have a huge imbalance between negative emotions and positive emotions right now. I'm working on reversing that ratio, while at the same time trying to remove triggers as well. Chase the positive feelings and de-program the negative feelings from your life. But at the same time, paradoxically, don't need the positive feelings. Learn to be happy just inhabiting emptiness, inhabiting being. Another source of happiness I've found is the realization that you are causing positive growth to your life. That you are creating positive change for the better to your life.

I'm realizing that the more I treat my life like an engineer would treat creating or optimizing some system, the easier it becomes to change my life. Creating and programming-in modules, strategically, in light of the theory, allows me to tweak my own life like a programmer tweaks a machine. Personal development work is almost like anti-malware software in the sense that you want your life to be giving you the results you want and not to be hung-up on bugs or slowed-down on irrelevant processing. You wanna be running smooth and happy, on point, and getting the results you want. So, I find that systems thinking, even thinking of myself as a system, has really allowed me to optimize my life by breaking it down into sub-systems or modules, like the way an engineer approaches optimizing a machine. And this kind of "probing and plugging" paradigm has allowed me to create some great results. We are just complex systems that need to be optimized, and we alone must craft the modules and infrastructure and get them plugged -into our own lives. I realize now that this systems thinking is a meta-narrative that I find useful in my personal development. It allows me to chop myself up into manageable variables which then can then be isolated, optimized, and measured. I like to merge the scientist with the poet in my life. So, the new video is right up my alley this week Leo! I feel so caught-up finally, like I am right where I need to be right now. I find that working on infrastructure has really improved my life. Find infrastructure that implements your ground-rules. Your ground-rules are the things that you need to do to get what you want and to give-up what you need to give-up. Implementing infrastructure, often by trial-and-error -- like plugging modules into my daily routine like an electrical engineer might test different circuit possibilities -- has given me a ton of results. Find what works, and then bam! you get that module plugged-in and handled and now you can go work on the next module to perfect the next optimization to your life. And you work your way up the exponential curve of results. That way you solve problems permanently instead of having to keep circling-back -- you can move on to the next hack, next optimization, and get the next module designed, built, and finally wired-in. So, I find this kind of systems-thinking useful and practical in personal development.

I think self-actualization is more like a process than a destination. If you think you've arrived, you missed the point. There is always an improvement you can make to remove some obstacle or perform some optimization to your life. There is a positive change you can always identify and shore-up with some kind of infrastructure to improve the results of your life. That optimization process, strategically implemented is self-actualization. Self-actualization is a lifestyle more than it is a definition. It's an attitude towards optimizing your own life. So, none of us are self-actualized. We all sit at different points in 3-dimensional vector-space away from a common origin point, and our vectors are all pointing in different directions. That's what a static snapshot looks like. The question is, how do we strategically change our coordinates to optimize our own vector as it currently sits.

Will Durant. I recommend everybody read "the Story of Philosophy" -- listen to the Audible version. Also check out his 11 volume magnum opus "The Story of Civilization". That's also available on Audible. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read "the Essays". Also available on Audible. Read "the Divinity School Address", available online for free. These works changed my life. I'd like to carve a middle ground between Will Durant and Ralph Waldo Emerson myself. That's what inspires me. The factual mind marries the poetic mind; fact and symbol had a baby. Not to stereotype either man, since both were very complex.

Here's what I do. I practice 1 hour of meditation daily, which includes: 20 minutes of concentration practice, 10 minutes of do nothing meditation, 10 minutes of active release meditation, 10 minutes of awareness focus meditation, and 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation. Then, throughout the day I embrace emptiness and try to maintain awareness. This becomes more and more sustainable when your daily meditation practice gets really locked in. But be mindful of distracting yourself from being in emptiness. You wanna learn to embrace that emptiness and be mindful of objects as they come through your input portals to keep your monkey-mind from having you go down too many crazy rabbit-holes. When you are aware of the nature of the inputs the monkey-mind can't sabotage you as frequently. This is why mindfulness meditation is so important and useful in practice. It's a bubble-burster. You will realize -- that's just a thought, it has nothing to do with that person. And the pre-neurotic issue drops away. The rabbit hole never has a chance to form in the first place. So you can use mindfulness to prevent obstacles like rabbit holes, overthinking, and negative emotions, as well as other neat stuff like auto-correcting problems.

Give us a practice that you do daily that you would recommend that other people do. One from me -- I take a full bath (not shower) every morning and that helps relax me for my day. It is one little hack that surprisingly has paid large dividends to me. Just that little luxury of taking a bath instead of a shower every morning. If meditation, please specify or describe the kind of meditating you do. How do you act or not act while meditating? Just saying meditation doesn't tell me much.

Well, I've figured it out already, but the last category that I had to figure out and deal with is the category of "Soft Addictions". I think you should do a video on that subject. It would be very useful and is needed. Until I investigated this, I had no idea how many I had. And it's like -- if you don't identify the problem, you can't deal with it. So, if I had been aware much earlier in my life about Soft-Addictions, I would have been much better off in my personal development. But I'm glad I am getting it handled now, and I'm getting huge results from doing this work of identifying and removing soft-addictions.

I've totally gone away from the harsh-discipline approach. I think I had to do it long enough in my life to realize that it didn't work for me. I work 100% on positive motivation and I outline very clearly the mandatory adversity I have to face to implement my life purpose, and I try to actually relish taking that adversity because I know that that is what is causing my growth, and the reward of increase in my positive emotions and a decrease in my negative emotions. When it comes to facing my mandatory adversity, I do use a kind of stern discipline when I have to, but I try to be loving when I do it. Maybe like the way that a loving mother carefully disciplines an unruly child. I find that self-love and patience and care for myself work much better than the harsh-discipline approach. I am actually getting amazing results using this approach right now in my life. It's kind of counter-intuitive, and I was paradigm-locked on the harsh-discipline theory myself for a long time. It's paradoxical that the way to achieve self-control is not by use of force but by use of love. But if you think about it, it all comes back to positive motivation being more sustainable than negative motivation.

Yes. I think it is healthy practice to re-build your life from the bottom up. I keep very few possessions for this reason. I like to have a very basic grasp of my needs and satisfy them very carefully. Otherwise we basically just get distracted and over-saturated with addictions. That doesn't help us, it sabotages us. Additionally, I am working on not getting triggered by the distractions. I shouldn't be getting annoyed by the distractions. That would be optional adversity not mandatory adversity. I have a zero tolerance rule for optional adversity. So, I need to develop an exercise I can run to solve this little issue for me. It's not bad, but I still need to do a little work on not being triggered by the distractions. I should be able to get to that point. That's a new goal for me.

If I could only have one personal development book it would be "Mastery" by George Leonard, and I have read many personal development books. Maybe start with that one. Yeah, the books are important. But what is more important is practice. Practice, practice, practice. Getting your practice routine modules designed and implemented. And then strategically getting those modules plugged into your life at a reasonable pace so you don't burn yourself out. Patience is important in doing this kind of practical work. A ship doesn't turn on a dime. It takes a while to cause sustainable change in you, even with proper practice. One more piece of advice is to do the exercises in the books. The theory is not nearly as important as the exercises. You need to start to understand yourself very deeply and get very analytical with yourself as a newbie or intermediate level personal development traveler. The exercises get you directing your attention back towards yourself. Theory comes and goes and it sounds good and it is important -- but it's that practical work you do on yourself that causes a lot of growth for the newbie to intermediate personal development practitioner too. Looking back to when I was a newbie, I realize it was when I actually did the exercises in that Dr. Phil book "Life Strategies" that I made a lot of progress. I forgot the theory in that book, whatever theory it had. But doing the practical exercises in that book caused me to do a lot of real, actual, practical, sustainable, personal development work. I remember being really serious about it and typing out long answers and being very soul-searching on each question. I knew what I was doing was healthy work when I was doing it. And it stirred-up the bee's nest for me, and I had to keep doing more work. So, yeah having a ton of books might be useful, but also kind of not really too. If that makes sense. I find that there's a lot of repetition and fluff in the books, and the few gold nuggets there are are pretty well known about. But you gotta go see for yourself. That's part of the personal development journey. I'm not trying to dissuade anybody from reading the books, just trying to put all this in a realistic context. It's actual, practical work on you that counts in the end.

Chronicle and integrate within your past. This is kind of counter-intuitive, but it worked for me. Everything I say here I do myself, so none of this is speculative theory, this is how I actually practice. I do an exercise every night where I think about a piece of my past in detail for 10 minutes every night. And this is after I re-chronicled my entire past by outlining all my key memories, good and bad, putting the memories on 3x5 cards. Every night I take one of those cards and contemplate that memory, or year, or persons, or situation, etc. I do this for like 5 to 10 mins at night. Experience all those events again, including all the negative emotions. Paradoxically you want to both integrate within your past and drop your past. This will allow you to come to peace with your past, and you will not be as emotionally triggered by events in the present. I notice a lot of my suffering came from being triggered from my past. Leo's videos on emotions really helped me. I don't try to bury emotions anymore. That doesn't work. Paradoxically the way to rid yourself from emotions is not to run from them, but to lean into them, and observe the thoughts that are triggering the emotions and be mindful of the connection between the thought antecedent and then the emotional response. Practice releasing thoughts and emotions too, but the best place to get to is when your mind can think about a piece of your past history that used to trigger you but the negative emotional vortex is no longer there. That way you can practice do-nothing mindfulness, let your mind wander at will over that old terrain, but the painful emotions are no longer there. You have kind of de-programmed the emotion out of your psyche. That way you don't keep re-stabbing yourself with the same arrow over and over and over again. We all know what torture we put ourselves through when the monkey-mind does that. This is working for me. We might call this "the integrating within your past technique". I discovered it works in my life, and kind of discovered it by accident.

Do this exercise. This is how I do roles work myself. And I've made huge progress doing this work. Awareness alone is curative, so more specific information in your head about your role can help you arms-length the thoughts and emotions that entice you (suck you in) to play the role. You will find out what is triggering you to play the role. Then you can strategize about how to remove those triggers, or prevent them from being set off. Enlightenment is the work you wanna be doing simultaneously, because enlightenment really works to unsettle roles that have crystallized in your life. Part 1: Write the name of the role on the top of the page, and then freewrite until you fill up the entire page for each role. So, for example "The Know It All" The guy who always has to have an opinion. The guy who can't just let your opinion be yours and his his, he's gotta try to convince you otherwise. The guy who was put under siege. John put me under siege. Etc. ...And just keep doing this for the rest of the page. You gotta really open up and don't really censor yourself here! It's a core dump procedure. You gotta purge this stuff out. All your half-baked thoughts sprinkled in with connections to your life. Write quickly and briskly. Part 2: Answer these questions aloud without looking at your freewriting page. Read your freewriting page once thru though before addressing these questions, then set the freewriting page aside. Do these questions out loud like when you're walking somewhere. Give yourself time to ponder. Or go to the park and do this. (Modified from Leo's Worksheet in the Roles video.) 1. What is the role that I am/was playing? Describe the role. 2. What are the specific ways that I act/acted out this role? 3. When did I adopt this role? (Can I pinpoint the moment when I started to adopt this role?) 4. What was life like before I started acting this role? 5. How did I acquire this role? 6. What traumatic event(s), if any, created the need for this role? 7. Why do/did I need this role? What function did/does this role serve in my life? 8. What deep psychological need did/does playing out this role satisfy? How was/is this role protecting me? 9. How artificial and contrived was/is this role? 10. Which genuine aspect of me was/is this role suppressing? NOTE: Don't do more than like one role every 3 days. Give your mind a chance to wrap itself around each role. Pace yourself. You need time to do a deep dive into like 5 key roles before you can make real solid progress in roles work. That means you go through this process with like your top 5 to 10 negative roles.

You need to find out very specifically what the relevant, mandatory adversity is required for you to achieve your tasks that will cause your life purpose to become a reality. Eliminate all other adversity. Mandatory adversity should be directed towards a greater good, and it should be bought into and premeditated. Optional adversity is almost never good. It is unnecessary suffering. Life is hard enough facing mandatory adversity. It's like studying for the test versus being all over the place with your studying. I think Leo said strategy is about concentrating force on a point. Well, blow through your mandatory adversity like a champ and get rid of the optional stuff. It's kind of counter-intuitive, but personal development is like that in many respects. Make a list of 20 types of mandatory adversity that you resolve to face everyday and review it every morning. There's a practice I do myself. You should know and buy-into each category of adversity you choose to face. That way when you hit that adversity you can remind the ego that this is a category of adversity that we have decided to face.

Apply little hacks to your life like slowly taking control over an unwieldy machine. Get your daily routine instituted. Work on infrastructure as Leo calls it. Get your daily meditation practice wired. Work on developing a great morning routine. Get your diet wired in. Rid time wasting addictions from your life. Work on getting clearer about what you want by making lists. Basically, start to get your modules wired into a routine. And then look to remove stuff from your life that is dead-weight. But start slowly. Maybe aim to rig in one module per week. Personal development is just as much about practice as theory. Start practicing mindfulness all the time, not just when you are meditating. Theory is great, but practicing is just as great. Theory informs practice and practice informs theory, so they work in kind of a circle. One hand washes the other. Maybe it is time for you to start on the practice end of the pool and swim around over there for a while. That may work for you.

I think this is best determined by looking and not by theorizing about it. Mindfulness and awareness seem to denote a broader level focusing. Attention is where you can focus very specifically. So, you have an adjustment that basically institutes a broad focus, and then you have a knob where you can do more fine tuned focusing -- you might label that knob attention. But all this is story. The key is to meditate and learn how the mind sabotages mindfulness and how to make corrections for that. This work is best done by seeing and practice, not looking for definitions. Like the difference between actually driving a car and listening to somebody describe how to drive a car. Mindfulness is about driving the car.