Commit to consuming the video, book, article, paragraph, thing, or whatever piece of content you’re consuming only once, and attempt to understand it perfectly from the first time, without repetition or going through it again in order to understand it better or more. Even if you didn’t manage to focus or understand everything in the first time, it’s okay, you can come back to it any time later on. Just leave it now after you’ve given it a single chance, after you’ve consumed it only once without any repetition or replaying, regardless of the level of your comprehension or understanding of it, and then move on to the next video, article, paragraph, book, piece of content, thing, or task. No remake. Get what you can in a single attempt then leave. Novelty trumps quality and understanding when it comes to consuming videos, reading books, …etc. Don’t worry about your knowledge being inaccurate or incoherent, because repeating a single paragraph or video countless times over won’t guarantee you accurate knowledge either. It’s coming across new stuff that contradicts with your previous beliefs or misconceptions that wakes you up to the truth and corrects the mistakes in what you think or believe is factual or true. Just keep going, watching, listening, or reading, and whatever you manage to understand from the first time should be enough, and whatever that you didn’t get or manage to understand from the first time or attempt, don’t stop, repeat, or go back because of it. Just keep moving as if you’ve understood everything.

You have no idea how slow you are, or how trapped you are. Let’s imagine you’re immortal, you’re rich, you’re unkillable, you live in a planet with no impending doomsday global warming status, we’ve got star trek level of technological advancement, your wife really loves you…etc. And imagine whether or not you’ll be suffering due to the same reasons that you are right now. Imagine if the answer was yes. That’s how we should think about or approach our issues or problems in the realm of well-being, success, personal development, self-help, or happiness. What if our ancestors really left us with nothing that could benefit us in this realm? We’re on our own. And all they tell us is stay always hydrated and follow your passion. Imagine if this was the case. You don’t have to imagine that, because this is what the real world is like right now. You tell them you can’t get out of bed in the morning, and they tell you it’s all about the journey. It’s because you hate your job. It’s because of your mindset. You’re not grateful. They ask Gary Vaynerchuck for example, how does he get the energy to do all that he does and his stunningly ridiculous, unrelated, false, and useless answer is bruh, I’m grateful. 400 trillion to one. You get the idea. We’re being scammed, and no one cares about helping us. We’re on our own. If we don’t figure that shit out ourselves, no one else will. None will fight this war in our stead. Don’t get me wrong, I love Gary Vaynerchuck, and I consume his content on a regular basis, but he may be genuinely unaware that what he says has nothing to do with addressing what the question was all about, but entirely bypasses the fact that the question was about burnout and sudden exhaustion due to actually trying to do what he does not just what he says. In other words, how can we become more productive and achieve more without failing to do so because of being exhausted prematurely, or too early, or before becoming too exhausted to meet our expectations of ourselves or meet our new higher standards? How can we raise our mental fitness or endurance? But the end result is: we’re still without an answer that we can utilize to raise our energy and become more productive. But nevertheless, I’m not questioning his intentions. At least he’s trying to help, and he does it mostly if not entirely for free. I’ve personally learned a ton from him. And a lot of what he says is good and works. It’s just that he should learn more, and try to tell us more that could benefit us, not the same 22 pieces of advice over and over again as if he doesn’t have the potential to discover more on his own that could take his life and the life of his listeners to a whole new level. As if the tiny bits of information that he recirculates every now and then contain all the ancient wisdom that you’ll ever need to become amazing, or at least as legendary as he actually is right now. Not enough bro, not enough. I know you can do better. You can finish up what Tony Robbins is all about in about 30 minutes (give or take a few years), and still he didn’t give us a serious answer to his famous question of is this all there is that ultra rich and successful people ask themselves, but he finds it suffice to say success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. Yeah but how can we become fulfilled? His answer – just like the answer which is being pushed by many others – is to find what fulfills you and do it. So helpful. Which could be translated to literally nothing. Whatever the answer is they don’t have it, and they’re not even trying to find it because they figured out that it’s all about the journey. Who cares if you ended up nowhere? You should’ve enjoyed the ride when you had the chance! They believe that you can be happy anyway by focusing on fixing your thinking patterns and perspective, so they’ll remain happy and positive for no reason, and they’ll keep inducing this state, regardless of whatever reasons that may try to shake them away from this mindset or despite everything around them and in their lives trying to make it pointless to try to change anything or impossible to try to feel good or be happy, that is, regardless of how bad the external or real world actually is. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it blames no one for your problems but you. Please everybody realize that we have no self-help body of knowledge that could make a difference in anyone’s life. It’s all acceptance. It’s all a mind game, a word game, an attention game, instead of actually being about figuring out what our problems are, or what could actually deliver positive change to our lives for real. They tell you to meditate and preach how this is life transformative although it crushes your creativity and intellect in every way imaginable. They tell you the answer to all your problems or depression is to get exposed to enough sunlight, ingest enough fish oil, and get enough physical exercise. We’re sad because of our diet. You’re in an abusive relationship where you’re the victim, well, they tell you fix your communication skills, stop assuming the worst out of everybody, instead of quitting this relationship. It’s your fault. Always. And even if it isn’t, you’re supposed to stay forever in this torture or concentration camp because it’s better for the kids. From where did they get that kids are better off with parents who hate each other, and that being raised under a narcissist and a victimized spouse is the best childhood imaginable they could ever get. You get the picture. Their answer to everything is always offer the audience nothing. Emptiness. No difference between before and after trying to implement the solution, except if you’re into delusion, where everything would start to gradually feel better because they said so. They’re telling you social media is a curse and responsible for one hundred percent of your apathy and failure, although it’s the only thing preventing us from hitting rock bottom, assuming we didn’t hit it already or assuming we are not stuck at rock bottom almost all of the time already. Because it’s easy to criticize the cool new thing that is being enjoyed by virtually everybody. It catches your attention when they tell you that you’ve been living your life the wrong way. You’re an addict. To a drug? No, you’re just communicating with others from a distance. Makes perfect sense. The same thing has been said about gaming. Why don’t they say it about music? I don’t know. Some people can’t live without it though. Makes a perfect candidate to be demonized for profit by popular people and scientists. They said the same thing about TV but for some reason they missed saying that about music. Oh, they can’t because of classical music. They can’t say we’re worse because of classical music. So they’ll stick to saying kids these days. They listen to awkward or weird music. Their new music is just pure noise. What are these kids cheering? Virtually all their solutions are targeted at depriving you of reward because according to them, immediate gratification is all bad, and it makes you lazy, spoiled, weak, dependent, childish, entitled, and incompetent. They think that suffering and pain are good things that are essential for your growth and development, or that make you stronger or tougher. This is despite the fact that virtually all your problems are due to a chronic deficiency in reward, or a perpetual state of not being rewarded enough.

It’s time we laid the foundations of what our ancestors called self-help, because it’s almost non-existent at this moment in human history.