Speaker 1: I need to tell you something about books that no
Speaker 1: one really says out loud. Most books don't change your life.
Speaker 1: Most books give you a little dopamine here a feeling
Speaker 1: smart for a week, and then you forget ninety percent
Speaker 1: of what you read and go back to operating exactly
Speaker 1: the same way you did before you open page one.
Speaker 1: You've experienced this. You read a book everyone raved about,
Speaker 1: you nodded the whole way through, you told someone it
Speaker 1: was really good, and then three months later you can't
Speaker 1: remember a single idea from it that actually changed how
Speaker 1: you live. That's not your fault, that's just most books.
Speaker 1: They inform you without transforming you. They add to your
Speaker 1: knowledge without changing your operating system. The ten books I'm
Speaker 1: about to share with you are different, not because they're
Speaker 1: the most popular or the most impressive on a shelf,
Speaker 1: but because each one broke something in my brain. Each
Speaker 1: one gave me a single idea, one idea that fundamentally
Speaker 1: changed how I make decisions, how I see other people,
Speaker 1: how I understand myself, or how I moved through the world.
Speaker 1: And those ideas didn't stay on the page. They followed
Speaker 1: me into my actual life and rearranged it. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to summarize these books. Summaries are not that helpful.
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you the one idea from each
Speaker 1: book that hit me the hardest, explain why it matters,
Speaker 1: and show you what changes when you actually absorb it.
Speaker 1: Ten books, ten ideas, each one building on the last.
Speaker 1: By the end of this video, you'll have a framework
Speaker 1: for thinking, deciding, and living that took me years and
Speaker 1: thousands of pages to assemble. And I'll tell you now,
Speaker 1: Book number nine is the one that ties all the
Speaker 1: others together. It's the one that made every other book
Speaker 1: on the list makes sense. It's the oldest book on
Speaker 1: the list by about three thousand years. I'd say, stay
Speaker 1: for it, let's go. The first book on my list
Speaker 1: is How to Decide by Annie Duke. Here's the lesson.
Speaker 1: You were confusing the quality of your decisions with the
Speaker 1: quality of your outcomes, and it's destroying your judgment. This
Speaker 1: is the book I wish I'd read before I made
Speaker 1: every major decision in my twenties, not because it tells
Speaker 1: you what to decide, because it exposes the fundamental error
Speaker 1: in how you evaluate your own decisions, an error you're
Speaker 1: making every single day and don't even know it. Here's
Speaker 1: the error. You judge your decisions by what happened after.
Speaker 1: If the outcome was good, you assume the decision was good.
Speaker 1: If the outcome was bad, you assume the decision was bad.
Speaker 1: This feels so obviously correct that you've never questioned it.
Speaker 1: But Annie Duke, a former professional poker player who went
Speaker 1: on to study decision science, dismantles this completely. She calls
Speaker 1: it resulting judging a decision by its result rather than
Speaker 1: by the quality of the process that led to it.
Speaker 1: And resulting is everywhere. You took a job and it
Speaker 1: worked out, you think, great decision. Your friend took it's
Speaker 1: the same job and it didn't work out. Bad decision.
Speaker 1: But the decision was identical, the information available was identical,
Speaker 1: the reasoning was identical. The only difference was what happened next, which,
Speaker 1: in most real world situations involves a massive amount of luck, timing,
Speaker 1: and randomness that had nothing to do with the quality
Speaker 1: of the choice. Here's why this matters so much. If
Speaker 1: you judge decisions only by outcomes, you learn the wrong
Speaker 1: lessons from your own life. You abandon good strategies because
Speaker 1: they had bad results. You double down on bad strategies
Speaker 1: because they happened to work, you become superstitious instead of strategic.
Speaker 1: You let randomness rewrite your playbook. The shift is this,
Speaker 1: start evaluating decisions at the moment you made them with
Speaker 1: the information you had at the time, not with the
Speaker 1: information you have now. Ask yourself, given what I knew then,
Speaker 1: was that a reasonable choice? If yes, a bad outcome
Speaker 1: doesn't make it a bad decision. I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1: Let's say you analyze something perfectly as an investment. You
Speaker 1: got really strategic about it, you look to every part
Speaker 1: of it. You finally put some money in and it
Speaker 1: didn't pay off. You would say it was a bad
Speaker 1: decision to invest or that your process was flawed. But
Speaker 1: let's say you just threw in some money into something
Speaker 1: because you felt like in you felt some moment that day,
Speaker 1: and it turned into a great decision. You'll say, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm a lucky person. I'm just going to do that again.
Speaker 1: This distinction separating decision quality from outcome quality will make
Speaker 1: you a sharper thinker than ninety nine percent of people
Speaker 1: you know, because almost everyone is letting hindsight rewrite their judgment,
Speaker 1: and hindsight is a liar dressed as a teacher. Book
Speaker 1: number two is Finding Your Element by Ken Robinson. Here's
Speaker 1: the lesson. You were not designed for one purpose. You
Speaker 1: were designed for an intersection, and you've probably been looking
Speaker 1: in the wrong place. Everyone wants to find their passion.
Speaker 1: Ken Robinson's work helped me realize very early in my
Speaker 1: life why that search feels so impossible. Because you're looking
Speaker 1: for one thing, a single calling, one career, one label,
Speaker 1: one answer to what will you put on earth to do?
Speaker 1: And that framing, that framing of a single discoverable purpose
Speaker 1: is why you feel lost. Because for most people, the
Speaker 1: purpose isn't a single thing. It's an intersection. Robin calls
Speaker 1: it your element, the place where natural aptitude meets personal passion.
Speaker 1: Not aptitude alone. Plenty of people are good at things
Speaker 1: they hate, not passion alone. Plenty of people love things
Speaker 1: they'll never be good at. The element is where the
Speaker 1: two overlap. And here's what Robinson understood that most career
Speaker 1: advice ignores. The element is almost never found through introspection.
Speaker 1: It's found through exposure. You can't think your way to
Speaker 1: your purpose. You have to collide with it. You have
Speaker 1: to try things, fail at things, stumble into rooms you
Speaker 1: didn't plan to enter, and pay attention to the moments
Speaker 1: when time disappears, when the work stops feeling like work
Speaker 1: and starts feeling like breathing, And those moments will never
Speaker 1: happen in the place you expected them to. The reason
Speaker 1: this book changed my life is that it gave me
Speaker 1: permission to stop searching for one thing and start paying
Speaker 1: attention to what was already happening at the edges. The
Speaker 1: skills I was developing over here, the curiosity I couldn't
Speaker 1: explain over there, the conversations that energized me that had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with my job title. Robinson showed me
Speaker 1: that the element isn't found by narrowing down. It's found
Speaker 1: by paying attention to where your different interests, skills, and
Speaker 1: fascinations collide. Mine happened to be monk teachings with media
Speaker 1: and with management, and when I worked in business. The
Speaker 1: intersection is the purpose, and you've probably been standing in
Speaker 1: it for years without recognizing it because it doesn't match
Speaker 1: the single label format the world told you to look for.
Speaker 1: Book number three is The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin.
Speaker 1: Here's the lesson. Your brain was never designed to hold
Speaker 1: the life you're asking it to hold, and every ounce
Speaker 1: of mental clutter is costing you intelligence. This is the
Speaker 1: book that made me understand why I felt stupid on
Speaker 1: my most productive days and sharp on my laziest ones.
Speaker 1: And the reason was embarrassingly simple. I was using my
Speaker 1: brain wrong, not metaphorically, neurologically. Daniel Leviton is a neuroscientist
Speaker 1: at McGill University, and his core argument is devastating in
Speaker 1: its clarity. Your brain's processing capacity is finite and measurable.
Speaker 1: Every decision you make, what to eat, what to wear,
Speaker 1: whether to answer that text, where you put your keys
Speaker 1: uses the same neural resources as your most important creative
Speaker 1: and analytical work. Your brain does not have separate budgets
Speaker 1: for trivial decisions and important decisions. It is one budget,
Speaker 1: and you are blowing most of it before noon on
Speaker 1: things that don't matter. The research he sites is staggering.
Speaker 1: The average person makes approximately thirty five thousand decisions per day,
Speaker 1: thirty five thousand. Most of them are micro decisions you
Speaker 1: don't even notice, but your prefront or cortex notices every
Speaker 1: single one, and each one drains the same tank that
Speaker 1: you need for the work that actually matters. Here's the
Speaker 1: idea that rewired me. Every piece of information you're holding
Speaker 1: in your head instead of writing down every decision you're
Speaker 1: making in real time, instead of making in advance, every
Speaker 1: open loop you're tracking mentally, instead of externally. All of
Speaker 1: it is taxing your working memory and reducing your available
Speaker 1: IQ literally, not figuratively. You're making yourself measure dumber by
Speaker 1: trying to keep everything in your head. The fix is
Speaker 1: not productivity hacks. The fix is externalization. Get everything out
Speaker 1: of your head and into a system, any system. Write
Speaker 1: down the decisions, automate the routines, put the keys in
Speaker 1: the same place every day. Not because your type A,
Speaker 1: because every micro decision you eliminate frees up neural bandwidth
Speaker 1: for the thinking that actually matters. The most organized people
Speaker 1: in the world aren't organized because they love order. They're
Speaker 1: organized because they understand the neurological cost of disorder and
Speaker 1: they refuse to pay it. Book number four is the
Speaker 1: Courage to be disliked. Here's the lesson. You're not living
Speaker 1: your life. You're living your fear of other people's judgment,
Speaker 1: and it has cost you everything authentic about you. This
Speaker 1: is the book that makes you angry first and feel
Speaker 1: free second, because it's central argument attacks the one thing
Speaker 1: most of us have built our entire identity around and
Speaker 1: we don't even realize it. The book is structured as
Speaker 1: a conversation between a philosopher and a young man. The
Speaker 1: philosopher draws on the work of Alfred Adler, the third
Speaker 1: giant of psychology alongside Freud and Young, whose ideas have
Speaker 1: been largely overlooked in the West but are foundational in Japan.
Speaker 1: And Adler's central claim is the one thing that will
Speaker 1: make you want to throw this book across the room
Speaker 1: before you realize it's true. All problems are interpersonal relationship problems,
Speaker 1: every single one, not most all. Your anxiety about your career.
Speaker 1: That's anxiety about how other people will judge your career.
Speaker 1: Your dissatisfaction with your body. That's dissatisfaction filtered through how
Speaker 1: you believe others perceive your body. Your reluctance to pursue
Speaker 1: the thing you actually want. That's calculation, unconscious, instant, and
Speaker 1: devastating about what pursuing it would cost you in other
Speaker 1: people's eyes. Adler called this separation of tasks, and it's
Speaker 1: the single most liberating frame I've ever encountered. The idea
Speaker 1: is this, in any situation, there are your tasks and
Speaker 1: there are other people's tasks. Your task is to live
Speaker 1: according to your values, to do your best work, to
Speaker 1: be honest, to act with integrity. Other people's task is
Speaker 1: to have their opinion about it. Their judgment is their task,
Speaker 1: not yours. And the moment you start doing your tasks
Speaker 1: while also trying to manage their tasks, their perceptions, their expectations,
Speaker 1: their approval, you lose the ability to do either one. Well,
Speaker 1: here's what makes this so difficult. Dr Naomi Eisenberger's fMRI
Speaker 1: research at UCLA, the same research that showed social rejection
Speaker 1: activates the brain's physical pain matrix, explains why we're so
Speaker 1: enslaved to the opinions of others. Disapproval doesn't feel like
Speaker 1: an option, It feels like a threat. Your nervous system
Speaker 1: processes the possibility of being disliked using the same neural
Speaker 1: hardware it uses is for physical danger. So when I
Speaker 1: tell you to stop caring what people think, your brain
Speaker 1: here is stop protecting yourself from harm. No wonder, it
Speaker 1: sounds impossible, But here's what the book showed me that
Speaker 1: changed everything. The freedom you're looking for, the freedom to
Speaker 1: pursue what matters to you, to be who you actually are,
Speaker 1: to stop performing and start living. That freedom has a price,
Speaker 1: and the price is being disliked, not by everyone, but
Speaker 1: by some people, the people who preferred the performing version
Speaker 1: of you, the people whose expectations you were carrying, the
Speaker 1: people whose approval was running your life without your conscious permission.
Speaker 1: You cannot be free and universally approved of at the
Speaker 1: same time. Those two things are mutually exclusive. Every authentic
Speaker 1: life in human history has been built on the willingness
Speaker 1: to disappoint someone, And the person you're most afraid of
Speaker 1: disappointing is almost certainly the person who's approval has been
Speaker 1: costing you the most, controlling you the most. The courage
Speaker 1: to be disliked is not arrogance, it's not selfishness. It's
Speaker 1: the prerequisite for an honest life. An honest life, Adler
Speaker 1: would argue, and I now believe, is the only life
Speaker 1: that doesn't eventually collapse under the weight of its own performance.
Speaker 1: Book number five, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnman
Speaker 1: the lesson. You have two brains and they're lying to
Speaker 1: each other, and the one you trust most is the
Speaker 1: one that's wrong most often. This book showed me that
Speaker 1: the machine I was using to navigate the world, my
Speaker 1: own brain, is far less reliable than I believed. Conman,
Speaker 1: who won the Nobel Prize in Economics despite being a psychologist,
Speaker 1: which would tell you something about the importance of his work,
Speaker 1: spend decades with his research partner Amos Twersky mapping the
Speaker 1: systematic errors in human judgment, not random errors, systematic ones,
Speaker 1: predictable ones, errors that repeat across every culture, every education level,
Speaker 1: every IQ bracket. His framework is deceptively simple. You have
Speaker 1: two cognitive systems. System one is fast, automatic, intuitive, and effortless.
Speaker 1: It's the system that reads facial expressions, finishes sentences, and
Speaker 1: makes snap judgments in milliseconds. System two is slow, deliberate, analytical,
Speaker 1: and effortful. It's the system that does math, evaluates evidence,
Speaker 1: and makes complex decisions. Here's the problem. System one runs
Speaker 1: the show approximately ninety five percent of the time, and
Speaker 1: System one, for all its speed and efficiency, is riddled
Speaker 1: with biases. It uses mental shortcuts, heuristics that are often
Speaker 1: useful but frequently catastrophically wrong. It anchors the irrelevant numbers,
Speaker 1: It confuses how easily. It can recall something with how
Speaker 1: likely that thing is. It substitutes easy questions for hard
Speaker 1: ones without telling you it made the swap. The real
Speaker 1: devastation is this System one doesn't just make errors. It
Speaker 1: makes errors and then delivers the answer to System two
Speaker 1: with absolute confidence. You don't feel the bias operating. You
Speaker 1: feel the certainty. The intuition arrives and it feels right.
Speaker 1: It feels like truth. And System two, which is supposed
Speaker 1: to be the fact checker, is lazy. It mostly rubber
Speaker 1: stamps whatever System one delivers, because engaging System two is
Speaker 1: metabolically expensive. Your brain would rather be wrong effortlessly than
Speaker 1: right effort fully, the single idea that changed my life.
Speaker 1: The feeling of certainty is not evidence of accuracy. The
Speaker 1: strength of your intuition about something, how right it feels,
Speaker 1: how obvious it seems, how confident you are, has almost
Speaker 1: no correlation with whether you're actually correct. Canman proved this
Speaker 1: across hundreds of studies. Confidence is not a signal of truth.
Speaker 1: It is a signal of cognitive fluency. It means the
Speaker 1: thought was easy to produce. That's it. After this book,
Speaker 1: I started treating my strongest intuitions with the most suspicion,
Speaker 1: not the least, because the moments when I feel most
Speaker 1: certain are precisely the moments when system one is most
Speaker 1: likely to hijacked. The process and the question I now
Speaker 1: ask myself before every important decision. Am I sure about
Speaker 1: this because I've thought it through? Or am I sure
Speaker 1: about this because it feels easy? Has saved me from
Speaker 1: more bad cause than any other mental tool I own.
Speaker 1: Book number six is called Flow by Mihai Chick sent
Speaker 1: me Hi, here's the lesson. Happiness is not a destination
Speaker 1: or an emotion. It's a state of absorption that you
Speaker 1: can engineer. This is the book that's the happiness question
Speaker 1: for me, not by answering it, by making me realize
Speaker 1: I'd been asking the wrong question entirely. Most people spend
Speaker 1: their twenties chasing happiness as if it were a place
Speaker 1: they could arrive at. If they got the right job,
Speaker 1: the right relationship, the right body, the right bank balance,
Speaker 1: they'd arrived, they'd feel it. The pursuer would be over
Speaker 1: Flow takes it differently me and Heichik sent me high
Speaker 1: as psychologist whose name I practiced pronouncing for longer than
Speaker 1: I'd like to admit. Studied happiness for decades, not by
Speaker 1: asking people if they were happy, by interrupting people throughout
Speaker 1: their day and asking what they were doing and how
Speaker 1: they felt in that moment. Thousands of people, hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of data points across cultures, demographics, and income levels.
Speaker 1: What he found destroyed the conventional model. The moments when
Speaker 1: people reported the highest levels of fulfillment, joy, and aliveness
Speaker 1: were not moments of relaxation, leisure, or reward. There were
Speaker 1: moments of deep absorption in a challenging task, moments where
Speaker 1: their skill level was perfectly matched to the difficulty of
Speaker 1: what they were doing, not too easy, not too hard,
Speaker 1: but right at the edge of their ability. Let me
Speaker 1: explain this. If you're doing something where your skills are
Speaker 1: above the challenge, you'll feel bored. If you do something
Speaker 1: where your challenge is above your skills, you'll feel lost
Speaker 1: and confused. But if you have your challenge and your
Speaker 1: skills match, you will experience flow. So in any given situation,
Speaker 1: you either have to increase your skills or increase your challenge.
Speaker 1: MIHI call this flow state. The people who experienced the
Speaker 1: most flow and therefore the most moment to moment happiness
Speaker 1: were not the wealthiest, not the most successful, or the
Speaker 1: most celebrated. They were the ones who had structured their
Speaker 1: lives around activities that demanded their full attention and pushed
Speaker 1: the edge of their capability. This means happiness is not
Speaker 1: something you achieve after the work is done. It's something
Speaker 1: you experience during the work, if the work is the
Speaker 1: right challenge and the right skill. Book Number seven is
Speaker 1: The Lean Startup by Eric Rice. Here's the lesson. You
Speaker 1: don't fail because you built the wrong thing. You fail
Speaker 1: because you built the perfect version of something nobody asked for.
Speaker 1: This is the book that cured me for the most
Speaker 1: dangerous mindset you can develop in your twenties, perfectionism disguised
Speaker 1: as preparation. Here's what I used to do. I'd have
Speaker 1: an idea for a project, a business, a piece of content,
Speaker 1: a life change, whatever, and for weeks, sometimes months, I'd
Speaker 1: be perfecting, refining, trying to figure it out, making sure
Speaker 1: it was exactly right before I showed it to anyone.
Speaker 1: And then when I finally revealed this polished, meticulously crafted
Speaker 1: thing to the world, the world would shrug, not because
Speaker 1: the execution was bad, but because the premise was wrong.
Speaker 1: I'd spent months building a beautiful answer to a question
Speaker 1: nobody was asking. Eric Rice calls this the fundamental startup fallacy,
Speaker 1: and it applies to far more than startups. It applies
Speaker 1: to careers, creative work, to relationships, to every domain, or
Speaker 1: you're building something you hope other people will value. The
Speaker 1: fallacy is this, you assume you know what people want,
Speaker 1: You build the complete version in isolation, and you treat
Speaker 1: the launch as a single high stakes part or fail moment.
Speaker 1: That model fails at a staggering rate, not because of
Speaker 1: bad execution, but because of untested assumptions. Rise of solution
Speaker 1: is the minimum viable product, the MVP, and the MVP
Speaker 1: is not, as most people think, a worst version of
Speaker 1: your idea. It's the smallest possible version that lets you
Speaker 1: test whether your core assumption is correct before you invest
Speaker 1: months or years building on top of it. It's not
Speaker 1: about lowering your standards. It's about learning before you build,
Speaker 1: rather than building and hoping you learn. Here's the idea
Speaker 1: that rewired me. The fastest path to something great is
Speaker 1: not perfecting. It's exposing your imperfect thing to reality as
Speaker 1: early as possible. Listening to reality, says Back and iterating
Speaker 1: ship it ugly, ship it in complete, Ship it scared
Speaker 1: because a mediocre thing that has been tested against the
Speaker 1: real world will evolve into something greater faster than a
Speaker 1: perfect thing that has only been tested against your own assumptions.
Speaker 1: This applies to everything businesses, for sure, but not just products.
Speaker 1: That conversation you've been rehearsing in your head for weeks,
Speaker 1: have the messy version. Now that career change you've been
Speaker 1: planning in a spreadsheet for six months, Run a small
Speaker 1: experiment this week. That creative project you keep perfecting in private,
Speaker 1: Publish the rough draft, the video, the podcast, whatever it
Speaker 1: may be. Let reality be your editor. It's better at
Speaker 1: the job than you are. Book number eight is The
Speaker 1: Righteous Mind by Jonathan Hyde. You can tell I've read
Speaker 1: this one a few times. I've lost the cover. Here's
Speaker 1: the lesson. You don't use reason to form your beliefs.
Speaker 1: You use your beliefs to select your reasons, and everyone
Speaker 1: you disagree with is doing the same thing. This is
Speaker 1: the book that changed how I debate and disgust things,
Speaker 1: how I listen, and how I think about every person
Speaker 1: I've ever dismissed as wrong. Jonathan hy is a social
Speaker 1: psychologist to Nyu, and his central argument is one of
Speaker 1: the most humbling findings in modern psychology. Moral reasoning is
Speaker 1: not what you think it is. You think you arrive
Speaker 1: at your moral and political beliefs through careful thought, evidence, evaluation,
Speaker 1: and logical analysis. You don't. You arrive at them through intuition,
Speaker 1: a fast, automatic emotional response, and then you construct rational
Speaker 1: sounding arguments after the fact to justify what you already feel.
Speaker 1: Height's metaphor is devastating. Reason is not the driver, it's
Speaker 1: the press secretary. The driver is intuition. The press secretary's
Speaker 1: job is not to seek truth, it's to defend the
Speaker 1: position the driver already took. And the press secretary is
Speaker 1: brilliant at its job. It can find evidence for anything,
Speaker 1: It can construct a compelling case for any position, not
Speaker 1: because the position is correct, because that's what press secretaries do.
Speaker 1: This means that when you're in an argument with someone
Speaker 1: about values, about any charge topic, you're not watching two
Speaker 1: rational minds clash. You're watching two press secretaries perform. Neither
Speaker 1: one is seeking truth. Both are defending the intuition that
Speaker 1: was already there before the first word was spoken. But
Speaker 1: here's the part that should change how you engage with
Speaker 1: everyone you disagree with. Height identify six moral foundations care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority,
Speaker 1: and sanctity that function like taste buds for moral judgment.
Speaker 1: Different people in different cultures wait these foundations differently. Liberals
Speaker 1: tend to wait care and fairness heavily, and discount loyalty, authority,
Speaker 1: and sanctity. Conservatives tend to wait all six more equally.
Speaker 1: Neither configuration is wrong. They're different moral palettes. And the
Speaker 1: person you think is insane, the person who's view who
Speaker 1: make no sense to you, whose positions seem cruel or
Speaker 1: naive or backwards, is not operating without morality. They're operating
Speaker 1: on a different combination of the same moral ingredients you use.
Speaker 1: They're tasting the same meal with a different tongue. After
Speaker 1: this book, I stopped trying to win arguments, because winning
Speaker 1: an argument means convincing someone's press secretary, which changes nothing. Instead,
Speaker 1: I started trying to understand which moral foundations the other
Speaker 1: person was weighing most heavily. What are they actually protecting,
Speaker 1: What value are they afraid of losing? What do they
Speaker 1: care about that I'm not seeing the moment you understand
Speaker 1: someone's moral foundation, even if you disagree with their conclusion,
Speaker 1: something shifts. They stop seeming like an idiot to you.
Speaker 1: They become a person navigating the same complex world with
Speaker 1: a different moral instrument panel. And that shift from dismissal
Speaker 1: to understanding is not weakness. It's the beginning of actual wisdom.
Speaker 1: Book number nine is the Bargo Gita. Here's the lesson.
Speaker 1: You have the right to the work, but never to
Speaker 1: the fruit of the work. And this single idea makes
Speaker 1: every other book on this list makes sense. I told
Speaker 1: you at the beginning to stay for this one. It's
Speaker 1: a conversation between a warrior named Origin and his charity,
Speaker 1: a Krishna, who also happens to be God. Origin is
Speaker 1: standing on a battlefield about to enter a war, and
Speaker 1: he's paralyzed not by fear, but by overthinking his calculating outcomes,
Speaker 1: weighing consequences, trapped in the infinite loop of what if
Speaker 1: I'm wrong? Sound familiar. Christian's instruction to Origin, the central
Speaker 1: teaching of the entire text, is contained in one verse,
Speaker 1: chapter two, verse forty seven, and it is, without exaggeration,
Speaker 1: the single most powerful operating instruction I have ever encountered.
Speaker 1: You have the right to your work, but never to
Speaker 1: the fruit of the work. Let not the fruit of
Speaker 1: action be your motive, nor let your attachment be inaction.
Speaker 1: Now think about that again slowly, and let me explain it.
Speaker 1: You have the right to the work. You control the work,
Speaker 1: You control the process. You don't control the result. The
Speaker 1: work is where all your focus should be, because the
Speaker 1: result is something you don't have full control over. Here's
Speaker 1: what this looks like in practice. It doesn't mean you
Speaker 1: don't care about results. It doesn't mean you don't have goals.
Speaker 1: It means you do the work with everything you have,
Speaker 1: full effort, full presence, full integrity, and then you open
Speaker 1: your hands. Whatever comes back comes back. If the result
Speaker 1: is what you hope for, good. If it isn't, also
Speaker 1: good because your self worth was never attached to it,
Speaker 1: your identity was never riding on it. You did the work.
Speaker 1: That's the only thing that was ever yours. Most of
Speaker 1: us can't do this. Most of us need the result
Speaker 1: to validate the effort. I work so hard so I
Speaker 1: deserve the outcome. But when we work that way, we
Speaker 1: often get depleted if we don't get the outcome. The
Speaker 1: Geita doesn't say stop wanting. It says stop needing the
Speaker 1: result to be the way you want it to be.
Speaker 1: To award it, but don't need it to be the
Speaker 1: way you want it to be, because the moment you
Speaker 1: need it to be a certain way, you've handed your
Speaker 1: piece to a variable you don't control. Book number ten
Speaker 1: is Breadth by James Nestor. Here's the lesson. The most
Speaker 1: powerful tool you have for changing your mental state is
Speaker 1: not in your mind. It's the thing you've been doing
Speaker 1: wrong forty thousand times a day. I'm ending with this
Speaker 1: book because after nine books about the mind, how it thinks,
Speaker 1: how it decides, how it deceives, how it suffers, this
Speaker 1: book lands you back in the body, and that's exactly
Speaker 1: where you need to end up. James Nestor is a
Speaker 1: journalist who spent years investigating something so basic, so overlooked,
Speaker 1: so absurdly fundamental, that the fact we ignore it should
Speaker 1: embarrass us. Breathing the thing you do approximately twenty thousand
Speaker 1: times a day, the thing you've never been taught to
Speaker 1: do correctly, the thing that is, according to the research
Speaker 1: nest To compiles, the single most direct lever you have
Speaker 1: for altering your nervous system, your cognitive function, your stress response,
Speaker 1: your sleep, and your emotional state. Here's the finding from
Speaker 1: the book that I think about every single day. Nestor
Speaker 1: participated in a study at Stanford where participants had their
Speaker 1: noses completely blocked for ten days, forcing them to breathe
Speaker 1: exclusively through their mouths. Within days, not weeks, their blood
Speaker 1: pressure increased, their heart rate variably tanked, their stress hormone spiked,
Speaker 1: their sleep quality collapsed, their cognitive performance measurably declined. They
Speaker 1: experienced anxiety, brain frog and exhaustion from changing nothing in
Speaker 1: their lives except the pathway through which air entered their body.
Speaker 1: Then they switched back to nasal breathing and every single
Speaker 1: metric reversed. This should stop you in your tracks. Nasal
Speaker 1: breathing versus mouth breathing. That was the variable, and it
Speaker 1: shifted everything to science is extensive. Nasal breathing filters and
Speaker 1: humidifies air, increases nitric oxide production, which dilates blood vessels
Speaker 1: and improves oxygen absorption, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and
Speaker 1: engages the diaphragm in a way that mouth breathing does not.
Speaker 1: The body is the foundation and The single fastest way
Speaker 1: to change the state of your body is the thing
Speaker 1: you're doing right now as you watch this without thinking
Speaker 1: about it. The breath. Slow it down, breathe through your nose,
Speaker 1: extend the excel five seconds in seven seconds out the
Speaker 1: way you breathe while you work, while you drive, while
Speaker 1: you speak, while you work out will change your life.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad you watch this video. I hope that
Speaker 1: you will take a moment to dive into one of
Speaker 1: these books this month. Let me know in the comments
Speaker 1: which one you're excited to read. I can't wait to
Speaker 1: see what you learn. Thank you for being here. Remember
Speaker 1: on forever in your corner and I'm always rooting for you.
Speaker 1: If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with
Speaker 1: doctor Daniel Ahman on how to change your lif by
Speaker 1: changing your brain. They don't do things until someone's mad
Speaker 1: at them to get it done. They need stress in
Speaker 1: order to get stuff done, and that just makes everybody
Speaker 1: around them stressed.