Going Full Monk Mode (Wall Street Style)

[Nilsi]

As we approach the final stretch of the year, the advertising realm ignites with fervor as companies set their sights on mapping out their marketing budgets for the impending year. Being a sales guy in said industry, I’m not just a bystander; I’m an active participant, embracing the exhilaration that’s akin to the frenzy of a horde of hyperactive children on Christmas Eve.

This year is nothing short of pivotal for me, marking my debut in this domain. Consequently, I’ve resolved to seize this tumultuous period by the horns. Starting Monday, I embark on an intense three-month meditation journey. During this time, I will ruthlessly disconnect from the internet, stripping away social media, news, and music, while relentlessly eliminating all non-work-related chatter and thought from my life.

My approach won’t be rooted in overworking myself (which I’m sure most of my colleagues will inevitably do), as I firmly reject that notion. Instead, Monday through Saturday will be a symphony of fitness, work, and rest, with Sunday dedicated to fasting, deep meditation, and unwavering contemplation, all focused resolutely on work-related objectives.

In addition to these stringent lifestyle adjustments, I’m undertaking a 90-day practice of semen retention, harnessing my sexual energy for one singular purpose: PROFIT. Ensuring a robust 9 hours of sleep each night and adhering unwaveringly to an animal-based keto diet will fortify my physical and mental vigor, sustaining a perpetual state of ketosis throughout the entire three-month period.

Although I’ve flirted with similar challenges in the past, this audacious endeavor promises to transcend all previous attempts. It’s a relentless, high-stakes experiment, driven by the singular desire for substantial profitability $$$  

[Nilsi]

Just now, Nilsi said:

As we approach the final stretch of the year, the advertising realm ignites with fervor as companies set their sights on mapping out their marketing budgets for the impending year. Being a sales guy in said industry, I’m not just a bystander; I’m an active participant, embracing the exhilaration that’s akin to the frenzy of a horde of hyperactive children on Christmas Eve.

This year is nothing short of pivotal for me, marking my debut in this domain. Consequently, I’ve resolved to seize this tumultuous period by the horns. Starting Monday, I embark on an intense three-month meditation journey. During this time, I will ruthlessly disconnect from the internet, stripping away social media, news, and music, while relentlessly eliminating all non-work-related chatter and thought from my life.

My approach won’t be rooted in overworking myself (which I’m sure most of my colleagues will inevitably do), as I firmly reject that notion. Instead, Monday through Saturday will be a symphony of fitness, work, and rest, with Sunday dedicated to fasting, deep meditation, and unwavering contemplation, all focused resolutely on work-related objectives.

In addition to these stringent lifestyle adjustments, I’m undertaking a 90-day practice of semen retention, harnessing my sexual energy for one singular purpose: PROFIT. Ensuring a robust 9 hours of sleep each night and adhering unwaveringly to an animal-based keto diet will fortify my physical and mental vigor, sustaining a perpetual state of ketosis throughout the entire three-month period.

Although I’ve flirted with similar challenges in the past, this audacious endeavor promises to transcend all previous attempts. It’s a relentless, high-stakes experiment, driven by the singular desire for substantial profitability $$$  

That being said, see you guys come December!

[ZenSwift]

Looking forward to your results

[r0ckyreed]

@ZenSwift What a badass signature. I love it!

[caspex]

If you keep a journal about it I'd greatly appreciate it.

[ZenSwift]

On 9/1/2023 at 9:54 PM, r0ckyreed said:

@ZenSwift What a badass signature. I love it!

Appreciate it @r0ckyreed

[UnbornTao]

Let us know the challenges you encountered when this period is over.

Edited November 3, 2023 by UnbornTao

[Davino]

On 1/9/2023 at 10:17 PM, Nilsi said:

I’m undertaking a 90-day practice of semen retention, harnessing my sexual energy for one singular purpose: PROFIT.

It's powerful but you need to have some knowledge and practices to work with sexual energy. 

[Nilsi]

As promised, I’m going to share my experience with you. Although it’s obvious, I want to preface this by stressing how IMPOSSIBLE it is to convey to you the depth of emotions and experience I went through and how meaningful these last few months were to me. But here we go:

For anybody who's unfamiliar with the profession of sales and what an average day in a call center looks like: just imagine you’re sitting in a cubicle for 8+ hours straight, calling up strangers (I work in B2B, so the strangers are mostly managing directors and CEOs of medium to large companies), trying to convince them that they need whatever product you’re selling (we’re selling out-of-home advertisement, aka billboards) and that they need it from you. This is, of course, a big challenge, since advertisement is something that any company is actively researching and implementing already, so the only lever you have in this game is making such a strong personal impression on them that they are convinced that someone this competent and charismatic must have something that’s different and more valuable than what they already have. Imagine someone like Barack Obama ringing up your phone to tell you about a metal fork and why you absolutely need one. You obviously already own a metal fork, and you know the concept of a fork, but since it’s the president and he’s taking the time of his day to call you and tell you about the metal fork he has, you would perhaps buy one from him. This is a bit like what my job is.

Now, the first two months of this experiment, this was literally what my life was about. Every single thought and action in my entire day somehow revolved around selling my product.

The thought of such a narrowly focused life probably makes you want to throw up in your mouth already… but at least the money was right… right?

Like an alchemist chasing fool's gold, I did all the goal optimization I could and jumped through all the hoops, only to make less money than I previously had (which is still good money, but definitely not worth sacrificing everything that makes life meaningful and valuable to it).

This was such a tormenting and humiliating experience for me because I knew how much I had to neglect and even hurt to live like this, and it didn’t even pay off.

All that pent-up frustration and stress eventually reached its climax in a kind of rude spiritual awakening that made me seriously question my motivations and life choices and shattered my childish idea of turning metal into gold by just zeroing in on that one narrow goal. This shift also drained me physically to the point of not being able to speak or eat and having the worst fever of my life.

Now that I was forced to take a break from work, I somehow had to reassemble my life and figure out where to take it from there. I basically just sat in my apartment and contemplated life for two weeks straight. What happened during that time is still a bit nebulous to me, but I re-emerged from my short hiatus with more clarity and sense of purpose than ever before. What became painfully obvious to me was that narrow goal optimization in the way I had done it will guarantee a miserable, shallow, and inhumane life and, in my case (thank god), wouldn’t even achieve the narrowly defined goal I had set out to optimize for. So, in a leap of faith, I decided to take the opposite approach and orient towards a life that would encompass all dimensions and facets of being and being human without trading them off against each other.

Far from embodying this holistic approach perfectly, I still gradually regained a sense of direction, and most notably, my relationships improved drastically.

All of a sudden, work felt like play again, and my colleagues became something I hadn’t known in a while: friends.

Even more shocking: I started to become really damn good at my profession. My conversations with customers became more authentic and noticeably enjoyable for both parties. The atmosphere in our office shifted from professional and reserved to friendly and familial. Even our team lead, who always loathed us and despised work, started inviting us to lunch and even organized a fancy Christmas party for us.

My entire experience of life shifted very dramatically very quickly, and I fell in love with reality to a degree that was absolutely shocking to me, even after 7+ years of serious contemplation and a ton of mystical and spiritual experiences.

As far as my once-cherished goal of making a lot of money goes: I made A LOT of money these last couple of weeks — so much so that I’m being hailed as THE new superstar in our company. And although this may sound shallow to some of you, I’m very fucking proud of myself for finally getting the success and recognition I was so relentlessly fighting for this past year.

Just to put this into perspective: I became disillusioned with academia at the tail end of 2022, dropped out of college in January of this year, applied for a career in sales without any prior experience, and landed the perfect job for my unique situation in March, to now having earned as much money in a couple of weeks as the majority of employees in my country earn in an entire year.

But that’s not even the best part. The best part was finding love again.

I found love for life, reality, and myself to a degree that would’ve made me sick to my stomach before. But I also found love — the human kind. The kind you feel for another person with whom hours in their company feel like seconds, whom you notice a shocking amount of your thoughts and dreams revolving around, who leaves a little void in your heart the moment they leave the door. Of course, I had heard that such a kind of love exists, but to actually have it happen to me is an absolute gift. And it’s not like I was running dry on love and gifts at that point.

I apologize for the overly sentimental and borderline cringe-inducing depictions of my experience, but I’ve gone through a lot this year and am still a bit overwhelmed by how it somehow all turned out so perfectly.

If I had to share one key lesson from all of this, it’s that you cannot reduce the infinite depth and complexity of life to some finite metric and expect to find a meaningful life in the optimization of that narrowly defined goal. So let’s conclude this mess with the most overused, pretentious-sounding but profoundly wise quote from Lao Tzu: „The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.“

 

[BlessedLion]

That’s fucking badass man, I usually do the same but with spiritual pursuits. 
 

it’s cool to see that same mindset and context put into making some cash, so you can have more freedom in life. Plus just getting after it like that and saying fuck all the distractions is so satisfying. 
 

Get after it 🔥

[Nilsi]

Just want to share this beautiful artifact of human greatness and dignity again — nowhere have I seen the spirit of what it means to be human expressed more gracefully as in this performance.

[BlessedLion]

10 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

As promised, I’m going to share my experience with you. Although it’s obvious, I want to preface this by stressing how IMPOSSIBLE it is to convey to you the depth of emotions and experience I went through and how meaningful these last few months were to me. But here we go:

For anybody who's unfamiliar with the profession of sales and what an average day in a call center looks like: just imagine you’re sitting in a cubicle for 8+ hours straight, calling up strangers (I work in B2B, so the strangers are mostly managing directors and CEOs of medium to large companies), trying to convince them that they need whatever product you’re selling (we’re selling out-of-home advertisement, aka billboards) and that they need it from you. This is, of course, a big challenge, since advertisement is something that any company is actively researching and implementing already, so the only lever you have in this game is making such a strong personal impression on them that they are convinced that someone this competent and charismatic must have something that’s different and more valuable than what they already have. Imagine someone like Barack Obama ringing up your phone to tell you about a metal fork and why you absolutely need one. You obviously already own a metal fork, and you know the concept of a fork, but since it’s the president and he’s taking the time of his day to call you and tell you about the metal fork he has, you would perhaps buy one from him. This is a bit like what my job is.

Now, the first two months of this experiment, this was literally what my life was about. Every single thought and action in my entire day somehow revolved around selling my product.

The thought of such a narrowly focused life probably makes you want to throw up in your mouth already… but at least the money was right… right?

Like an alchemist chasing fool's gold, I did all the goal optimization I could and jumped through all the hoops, only to make less money than I previously had (which is still good money, but definitely not worth sacrificing everything that makes life meaningful and valuable to it).

This was such a tormenting and humiliating experience for me because I knew how much I had to neglect and even hurt to live like this, and it didn’t even pay off.

All that pent-up frustration and stress eventually reached its climax in a kind of rude spiritual awakening that made me seriously question my motivations and life choices and shattered my childish idea of turning metal into gold by just zeroing in on that one narrow goal. This shift also drained me physically to the point of not being able to speak or eat and having the worst fever of my life.

Now that I was forced to take a break from work, I somehow had to reassemble my life and figure out where to take it from there. I basically just sat in my apartment and contemplated life for two weeks straight. What happened during that time is still a bit nebulous to me, but I re-emerged from my short hiatus with more clarity and sense of purpose than ever before. What became painfully obvious to me was that narrow goal optimization in the way I had done it will guarantee a miserable, shallow, and inhumane life and, in my case (thank god), wouldn’t even achieve the narrowly defined goal I had set out to optimize for. So, in a leap of faith, I decided to take the opposite approach and orient towards a life that would encompass all dimensions and facets of being and being human without trading them off against each other.

Far from embodying this holistic approach perfectly, I still gradually regained a sense of direction, and most notably, my relationships improved drastically.

All of a sudden, work felt like play again, and my colleagues became something I hadn’t known in a while: friends.

Even more shocking: I started to become really damn good at my profession. My conversations with customers became more authentic and noticeably enjoyable for both parties. The atmosphere in our office shifted from professional and reserved to friendly and familial. Even our team lead, who always loathed us and despised work, started inviting us to lunch and even organized a fancy Christmas party for us.

My entire experience of life shifted very dramatically very quickly, and I fell in love with reality to a degree that was absolutely shocking to me, even after 7+ years of serious contemplation and a ton of mystical and spiritual experiences.

As far as my once-cherished goal of making a lot of money goes: I made A LOT of money these last couple of weeks — so much so that I’m being hailed as THE new superstar in our company. And although this may sound shallow to some of you, I’m very fucking proud of myself for finally getting the success and recognition I was so relentlessly fighting for this past year.

Just to put this into perspective: I became disillusioned with academia at the tail end of 2022, dropped out of college in January of this year, applied for a career in sales without any prior experience, and landed the perfect job for my unique situation in March, to now having earned as much money in a couple of weeks as the majority of employees in my country earn in an entire year.

But that’s not even the best part. The best part was finding love again.

I found love for life, reality, and myself to a degree that would’ve made me sick to my stomach before. But I also found love — the human kind. The kind you feel for another person with whom hours in their company feel like seconds, whom you notice a shocking amount of your thoughts and dreams revolving around, who leaves a little void in your heart the moment they leave the door. Of course, I had heard that such a kind of love exists, but to actually have it happen to me is an absolute gift. And it’s not like I was running dry on love and gifts at that point.

I apologize for the overly sentimental and borderline cringe-inducing depictions of my experience, but I’ve gone through a lot this year and am still a bit overwhelmed by how it somehow all turned out so perfectly.

If I had to share one key lesson from all of this, it’s that you cannot reduce the infinite depth and complexity of life to some finite metric and expect to find a meaningful life in the optimization of that narrowly defined goal. So let’s conclude this mess with the most overused, pretentious-sounding but profoundly wise quote from Lao Tzu: „The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.“

 

Very profound sharing. Thank you. So beautiful and way to find this love for life in your unique way 

[CARDOZZO]

@Nilsi Thanks for sharing, amazing.

It was a necessary experiment to see what you could become on the way to the top.

You should live like a renaissance man basking on deep creativity/love.

Edited December 17, 2023 by CARDOZZO

[cjoseph90]

wow this is inspiring, thank you for sharing. Bravo to you for actually taking action and doing what you set out to do  despite the challenges,. I hope to do something like this also, much respect to you

[Miguel1]

To your update:

Beautiful. Just pure. Reminds me of a phase in learning pickup and dating I had years ago.

Now I'm focused on mastering money-making and I will most likely have phases like this again.

Edited December 18, 2023 by Miguel1

[Carl-Richard]

@Nilsi Damn, good job. I especially like the insight about holism 😉😚

[SeaMonster]

Yeah, I would have told you had I seen this thread.

A balanced life is the goal; the more you over-focus on one aspect of life, the more your life will turn to shit.  The unconscious mind will simply rebel and make you sick and miserable.  I'm glad you found this out for yourself, though; it was a valuable experiment to run.

Edited December 18, 2023 by SeaMonster

[Carl-Richard]

3 hours ago, SeaMonster said:

I'm glad you found this out for yourself, though; it was a valuable experiment to run.

When you find it out for yourself, that's when it truly sticks.

[Nilsi]

18 hours ago, SeaMonster said:

Yeah, I would have told you had I seen this thread.

A balanced life is the goal; the more you over-focus on one aspect of life, the more your life will turn to shit.  The unconscious mind will simply rebel and make you sick and miserable.  I'm glad you found this out for yourself, though; it was a valuable experiment to run.

I understood this concept very well on an intellectual level; yet, in my hubris, I convinced myself that it didn't apply to me and that I could brute-force my way to success.

I had thought that, even if my life turned to shit in some areas, at least I would achieve some material success. The most shocking revelation, however, was that this more holistic reorientation also led to business success.

I'm not certain how broadly this principle can be applied though. In theory, narrow goal optimization should still be able to achieve its intended goal. By some divine chance, it didn’t work for me, giving me the opportunity to rethink my approach to life.

Edited December 19, 2023 by Nilsi

[28 cm unbuffed]

On 18.12.2023 at 2:10 AM, Miguel1 said:

To your update:

Beautiful. Just pure. Reminds me of a phase in learning pickup and dating I had years ago.

Now I'm focused on mastering money-making and I will most likely have phases like this again.

 

On 18.12.2023 at 2:10 AM, Miguel1 said:

To your update:

Beautiful. Just pure. Reminds me of a phase in learning pickup and dating I had years ago.

Now I'm focused on mastering money-making and I will most likely have phases like this again.

@Miguel1

Edited December 20, 2023 by 28 cm unbuffed