Shadowing Practice: You Can Accomplish Anything You Want - Robert Greene Motivation - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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How does one accept oneself if they're not successful yet?

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How does one accept oneself if they're not successful yet?

And how do you accept who you are in the moment, even if you're struggling right now?

The thing is, it's not success that's so important in this world, to me at least.

The feeling that I think we should aim for is a feeling of fulfillment, such as I had dreams when I was a child,

things I wanted to accomplish, things I believe I am capable of accomplishing, And I haven't given up on that.

And I'm still struggling to reach some of those goals.

And I'm on my way.

When you're in your 20s, it's easier to have that belief because there's still time and this is the time ahead of you.

And even if you've made some mistakes or had some bad jobs, you can still hope for that.

It gets harder and harder as you get into your 30s

and your 40s to believe that when you have followed the wrong paths in life and you have a sense of, God, things aren't going right.

I'm not gonna have the success that I wanted.

I know personally I was 37, 38 before I got a chance to write the 48 Laws of Power, which is very late in life.

And I got very depressed by that.

But I never gave up on myself.

So the thing that you want is you don't wanna give up on your dreams, on your hopes for the future,

because that will age you very quickly and that will have cascading effects on your health, both mentally and physically.

Now if you're in your 60s and you're at that point, it's a little harder, but there's still things you can do.

There's still things you can accomplish.

You've had incredible experiences.

Perhaps you've raised some children.

Perhaps you've had some adventures.

Maybe you could write a book.

Maybe you could mentor people and teach people.

But you want to have a feeling like you're aiming towards something

that your life has a purpose and a goal and a meaning to it.

There's a very great book that many people have recommended and I've recommended called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

And basically, he was put in a concentration camp, I believe Auschwitz, the worst circumstances any human being can ever imagine.

And he emerged from that as a psychotherapist with a form of therapy called logotherapy.

And he noticed

that the people who survived the most horrible circumstances a human

being could ever be put into were those who had some reason to stay alive, some project they wanted to do, something that they wanted to accomplish,

They wanted to stay alive for their family that were still not in a camp.

They wanted to stay alive because they knew they had some great discovery that they were, or a book that they were going to write.

And they had a purpose and a goal and a feeling of meaning, even within all the suffering.

So if you're struggling and you're suffering, you can't give up.

You can't just resign yourself to it.

You can't just say, ah, that's just my life.

I've just got to accept it.

No, you've got to have some hope.

You've got to have a goal.

You have to feel like there is some purpose to what I'm going through

and I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to aim for it.

I'm going to have a goal.

I'm going to have a purpose.

And that will give you energy

and that will get you out of any rut that you're in

because a lot of the ruts and the feelings of inadequacy are created by the fact that you're not doing something.

You're not active.

You're not tempting things.

At some point in life, you're just struggling too much and things don't look very good.

How do you accept that?

You have to accept the fact that being alive is like this insane privilege.

And you are alive.

And you are breathing.

And there are people in this world who are doing worse than you are.

I have moments where I feel very almost self-pity for my stroke.

But then I think of all the people around the world who have it so much worse than I do.

You know, I have a house.

I have a comfortable living.

I can't feel sorry for myself.

So think of the people who have it much worse than you do.

That there is something beautiful about your life, about being alive and kind of returning to some of the simple pleasures.

One of the simplest pleasures that anyone can have is either with their children or for me,

with pets and animals and cats and dogs and just being around them

and just observing how weird and strange they are and to be living with another species in your house.

Every day I look at my cat who's right there on the floor next to us

and I'm just amazed that I get the privilege of spending time with this animal.

So finding these kind of simple things that you still have can help you in no matter how horrible your circumstances are.

So those would be kind of the advice I would give to people on that.

I remember law, I think it's law 18, I'm just having a look at it.

Isolation.

Do not build fortresses to protect yourself.

Isolation is dangerous.

Solitude is not a defense because it cuts you off from valuable information, allies, and opportunities.

There's a difference, isn't there, between being lonely and being alone?

Because being alone is one thing, but the state of loneliness feels like it's a slightly different proposition.

Well, it's the difference between you feel very unhappy that you're not connecting to other people.

We're a social animal, right?

And you feel like people don't like you, they don't respect you, that you can't interact with them on a level that's meaningful.

Whereas the feeling of being alone for me, wow, I don't have to be around ugly, idiotic people.

I can just be by myself.

I can read a good book.

I don't have to interact with people whose ideas I don't like.

I can just be myself and be as weird as I want.

Wow, what a relief.

I'm so happy being alone.

Now, I'm not like that all the time.

I would be terrible.

But sometimes I do feel that way.

And that's the difference.

And that's a good thing.

I remember once I was on an airplane, and I saw a young woman who was by herself.

And I could sense that it was driving her crazy and she had to use her phone to never feel alone, right?

Even in the middle, when we're flying over the ocean, she had to, like, somehow connect onto the internet and be sending emails and texts and anything.

And I got this kind of desperation in her, this intuition, this feeling, that being alone was just horrifying for her.

You know, and I think that's not a good thing.

I think it's a terrible thing.

So, yes, isolation is bad.

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You need to be net.

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You're a social animal.

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You're meant to be around other people.

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But if you can't be alone, you can't ever figure out what makes you different and what makes you unique.

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So you have to be able to play both sides of the game.

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To listen to that voice inside, to turn inwards.

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It is hard to turn inwards when you never have moments of solitude, I guess.

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When you were, you said you were suicidal in your earlier years.

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Yeah.

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What lifted you out of that state?

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Well, I had a girlfriend who was very understanding, who helped me a lot, so I wasn't completely alone.

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And then a little tiny voice inside of me was saying, you are, you have interesting thoughts.

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You're a strange person, Robert.

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I've always been strange.

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I never was like other people, even in high school.

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I was always something off about me, which could be made me lonely, which could make be a problem.

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But I kept saying, there's something different and off about you, right?

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And you have skills as a writer.

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It's going to happen someday.

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Don't give up, don't give up, don't give up.

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Keep trying, right?

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And so finally, I'm 35, 36 years old.

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I was in Italy at the lowest point of my life.

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And then I met this man there who was a book packager, Joost Elfers.

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And he asked me if I I had an idea for a book.

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And suddenly, just, I almost get emotional just thinking about it.

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Everything just shifted inside of me.

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It's like, yeah, I could write a nonfiction book.

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And I just improvised what would turn into the 48 Laws of Power.

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He got so excited, he said, I will pay you to write the, the, the, the, I forget what the word is,

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to sell it, you know, and then I'll pay you to live while you write it.

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And so suddenly it went from darkness to light because I had a purpose.

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and all of my misery, you know, I could take all of the bad bosses I had,

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all of the horrible psychotic bosses who were so stupid and so political and so manipulative, and I could go, wow,

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I've got all this material to write the 48 Laws of Power.

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All my worst experiences can go into this book.

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It all has purpose for it.

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I'm not saying that's going to happen to everybody, But I was literally at that moment before it happened, pretty much near rock bottom.

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And I asked my wife, what would have happened if this didn't turn out?

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Would I have committed suicide?

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Would I, if I'd gone the same path and gotten into,

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done some hack job, I'd probably be incredibly overweight and alcoholic and I might have already died of a heart attack?

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Or maybe I would have found my way to something else, but it was a really, really low point in my life.

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Purpose.

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Yeah.

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It's crazy how it can lift you out of darkness, it can turn the lights on.

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Yeah.

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It's just so unbelievably hard to find for so many people.

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I mean, you're not going to find it in your bedroom necessarily, sat there thinking.

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But you know, opportunities come.

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You just have to be ready for them.

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So I had this opportunity that came to me.

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And you might say, well that's lucky, that's never going to happen to me.

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But it will happen to you.

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You're just not ready for it.

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You're just not recognizing it.

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Some person will cross your path that can lift you out of what you're doing, who can connect you, but you're not paying attention.

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You're not ready for it.

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You don't think you deserve it.

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So there is opportunity every day of the week.

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It's around you is what I'm trying to say.

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There's so many studies, and there was one on TV by, I think it was Darren Brown, I think it was Darren Brown,

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the illusionist, that show certain types of people are pessimistic towards opportunity.

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And when you do studies where you, and there's one particular study where they have a newspaper

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and they give it to one group of people who I think are pessimists and one group of people that are optimists,

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and the researchers say, when you find the 100-pound voucher or $100 voucher, just come back to us.

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And what happens is they scroll through the newspaper

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and the pessimists never find it but on the first page of the newspaper, it says, stop, go to the researchers now, you've won $100.

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The optimists find it.

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And Darren Brown did a similar thing, the illusionist, in the street where he put, I think it was like a 50 pound or $100 note in

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the middle of the street as they were walking down the street.

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And the optimists find it, they see it, but the pessimists just walk right past it.

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I think it was a winning scratch card potentially.

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And that really opened my mind to like my state, my mental state, my psychology is determining whether I see these opportunities Yeah.

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Or totally miss them.

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And then it's almost a standward spiral because then I'll think, God, I'm such an unlucky person.

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Right.

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Without realizing that I'm playing a really important role in creating my own fortune or misfortune.

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Right.

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Yeah, I have a chapter in The Loss of Human Nature about the nature of your attitude creates your circumstances, which is sort of the same thing you're saying,

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which is there are two kinds of attitudes that I talk about.

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One is an attitude that's closing, that's constrictive, that's narrow, and there's one that's expansive and open.

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You could call that pessimistic and optimistic.

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But the closed attitude is you're only seeing life through this narrow little spectrum where everything is bad,

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people don't like you, there's hostility all around you.

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And what that means is you're not seeing reality, you're creating reality, you're creating that reality.

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You're seeing it and that's what happens to you.

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The expansive attitude is, life is amazing.

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All these incredible things are possible.

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I have hope.

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Any moment there could be an opportunity.

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And that's not reality either.

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But you're gonna create that reality by feeling that way and taking, seizing an opportunity, the smallest crumb of an opportunity,

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you're gonna create those good circumstances.

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So by your attitude, you create the bad things that happen to you in life.

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Decide what is truly important to pursue, okay?

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It's kind of a vague question because what are you pursuing?

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I mean, in your days off, when you're in your leisure time, it probably means like your career or what's important to you or what matters.

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I'm gonna try and look at it from that angle because I can't tell you what to pursue in your daily life, what gives you pleasure.

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But I do know this, we humans don't operate by instinct.

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We operate by thinking, by rationality, by our willpower.

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So we're not directed.

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So we don't wake up in the morning like an animal might that has its needs it's going to take care of.

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It doesn't have to think, it just does what it does.

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We have to think, we have to go, what am I going to do today?

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You know, where am I going to go?

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Who am I going to see?

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I mean, if it's not in your work, or even if it's your work, how am I going to get to work?

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What am I going to do?

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And that kind of freedom can be overwhelming, right?

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And it can actually be very frustrating and very paralyzing.

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I know as an analogy, as someone who's slightly OCD, I have to admit, if I go to the market and there's like a thousand products I have to choose from, it drives me crazy.

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I have to think too much.

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I can't decide which one I like.

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And so life is very difficult when you don't have any direction.

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We don't have any filter telling you what matters, what's important and what's not important, because there's so many things to choose from out there in the world today, particularly now.

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So the critical thing you want is to know the main, the most important thing that you're pursuing in life,

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which in my books you'll know is I call your life's task, right?

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You know deeply who you are, what excites you, what kind of career you want, the kind of things you want to study, the skills you want to develop, the business you want to create,

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the book you want to write, the film you want to make, etc. Okay, you have an idea about that.

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It's like an anchor in your life.

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It's like giving you radar are.

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So every time someone comes into your life with something, say, hey, come on, let's go do this, or let's go travel here, or let's try this.

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Your mind goes, uh-uh, that's not important.

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It is not related to the goals in my life that truly matter.

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This is what matters to you, okay?

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So you have to understand that life is very, very short.

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It goes by so fast, you have no idea.

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I can't believe that I'm in my 60s right now, because to me, I'm still in my 20s.

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It just went like that.

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It's going to happen to you.

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You don't realize it's going to happen to you, okay?

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So having a sense of what really matters, which is what you were meant to pursue in life, your destiny, your life's task,

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and for that purpose, I urge you to read Mastery in the first chapter, Discover Your Life's Task.

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Without that sense, you're going to be floundering.

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You're going to be wandering.

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You're not going to know what your priorities are, what really matters, what not to waste time on, okay?

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Because we live in a culture with an infinite variety of distractions

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and that's our danger that's really the danger you know you

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get on the internet you click click click you're you're going here here here here all these different places right

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and you're not focused you can waste your time on a

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thousand different things it's destructive it's destroying your brain it's like sugar it's rotting out your system

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because you're not able to focus you're not able to prioritize you don't understand what matters what's trivial what's banal

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and what really matters and what really matters in life, I believe, is fulfilling your destiny, knowing what you were meant to create in this world and going in that direction,

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which is your life's task.

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When you figure that out, everything fits into place.

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I know, I mean, I'm a bit of an extreme example.

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I know I have a book to write, right?

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And so, so many other things that could bother me and distract me, I just cut it out because it don't matter.

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I have a sense of supreme priority and that's what knowing your life's task will give you.

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Shadowing Practice: You Can Accomplish Anything You Want - Robert Greene Motivation - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

Speaking Goals for This Clip: Building Confidence Through Purpose-Driven Language

Phrase Bank: Reusable Expressions for Resilience

Fix Your Weak Spots: Mastering Emotional Intonation

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing Practice: You Can Accomplish Anything You Want - Robert Greene Motivation - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Speaking Goals for This Clip: Building Confidence Through Purpose-Driven Language

Phrase Bank: Reusable Expressions for Resilience

Fix Your Weak Spots: Mastering Emotional Intonation

What is the Shadowing Technique?