Are you always going for the home run? The big win?

One of the most useful steps in the 67 steps is the step where Tai compares business/life to baseball.

The most important aspect of business is to not lose money. Money lost is the result of mistakes. Mistakes are the results of hasty actions, or actions that try to go from zero to sky high in one fell swoop.

Like a baseball player who tries to hit the ball so hard every time as to be able to have a home run…

Most people I talk to have no skills, no plans, no idea… but when I ask them what they are up to, they talk about the sky-high.

Most people want to raise their vibration to 500+ right away…

But they are bleeding energy everywhere. They have no idea what they are doing, and their numbers in the Starting Point Measurements suggest that even to get to 200 is going to take a lot of work.

By the way, 200 is a nice place.

But why is it that hardly anyone ever raises their vibration?

That includes teachers I watch… like Tai… steady at 170 vibration.

I had a little more time than usual to listen to more than one step of the 67 steps.

I had a few insights and I heard a few things in this new context: why are people learning anything?

Insight #1: When you listen to something, you have no control over the speed of the material.

You may not even notice when you didn’t quite understand what was said. But even if you did, going back and re-listening that little piece you missed is a pain in the neck, so you don’t do it.

Contemplation, cogitation (a kind of chewing it activity) is impossible, or near impossible.

Your vocabulary remains the same… the missing words, the unclear words, the “approximate” words went by so fast they are forgotten, overwritten by words you know.

I got an email from a long time client. She was asking if it’s OK for her son to listen to audio books… while she and her daughter actually read books.

I measured their vocabulary, and found that the son has 200 words he can use accurately, while the daughter and the client can use 300. Now, all of these are really puny numbers, but the daughter is two years younger than the son!

So while it’s ok to listen to audio books, you get only enjoyment, and no growth.

Growth is marked by the growth of your accurate vocabulary. An accurate vocabulary is the sign of an accurate world view.

A lawyer sent for his Starting Point Measurements. His accurate vocabulary measured 300. He sent me three vicious emails and demanded his money back, or he will report me for fraudulent activity.

I knew he would… Source told me. But I wanted to test: testing is my m.o.

Now, how can a lawyer have only 300 words?

The words I measure are really a measure of your accuracy with regards to the world, yourself, and others. I know about 10,000 words in English. But my accurate vocabulary that signals my accurate seeing the world 4,000. Whatever that means… lol. Honestly, it’s a measure. It is easier to compare numbers than it is senses or feelings. Compare with others, compare with yourself… Many of the measurements in my Starting Point Measurements, starting with the measure: your vibration. Or your overall intelligence.

Made up. But makes life easier, because now you can measure.

Or your cell-hydration. If your cell hydration is 3%, does it mean there is hardly any water in your cells? Probably not. Maybe it means that you are only 3% above the level when your cell dies of drying out. Maybe something else.

I am a vehicle. I am a measuring stick. I didn’t create the universe, and I am not giving you, at least not in the Starting Point Measurements, my own puny personal knowledge. I give you the results of muscle testing while connected to Source, who/what gives me the numbers.

But… but… but… I have an increased level of power to diagnose, help, and guide people when I know their numbers. And that is the point.

Those number are not absolute, they are relative. Relative to norms, relative to desirable, or whatever.

I am OK with that. The reason I offer the $1 strategy sessions so you can see what and where you can put some energy in to improve your lot in life and to feel better about yourself.

Insight #2: I just read an article and it brought a sudden clarity: the biggest issue of humanity is the lack of humility.

As I have said in other articles, we all have a self that is real, and a self that is imagined. I call the second “your delusional self”. Others may call it “the ego”, but I don’t think calling it that is accurate… there is a whole lot more to ego, your delusional self is just a part of it.

The problem with the delusional self is this: it fancies itself different than it is. It thinks it knows a lot, it thinks everything is a 1-2-slam dunk, it never thinks that there is a method to everything, that systems, processes, are important. It doesn’t know that it’s stupid. It really doesn’t.

Your other self does, but your other self is weak and is under the tyranny of the delusional self.

We could say that the delusional self is like the mind parasites in the Mind Parasites book: you can tiptoe around them, but once you wake them up, you cannot be allowed, won’t be allowed to do things that you need to do to become worth a damn.

My work is cut out for me. My main job is to bring the two selves closer, so you can grow. So you can have humility.

So far I have some little successes, but only time will tell if the methods I am implementing are going to be useful.

Even stupid Tai Lopez is saying things like I paraphrase: “in 67 days the knowledge of the greatest thinkers will be downloaded to your brain”.

Bah humbug. Even if you knew the 67 steps word for word, it would make NO DIFFERENCE whatsoever.

The 67 steps is a life-course, a mini MBA, and most of life is attitude, doing, and thinking. Knowing words has nothing to do with it.

I have a student whose aspiration is to be a guinea pig and be taken from sky high delusional self, utter failure in business, to someone who can take themselves to a level where they can do business, earn money, and be worth a damn. I work with him about two hours a week. I tell you: it’s hard work to break through the delusional self.

Everybody has a delusional self. The important measure is the gap between the two selves. My two selves have a gap of 7~8% between them.

The bigger the gap the less chance you have for learning, growing, hearing feedback, and being a decent human being. The lawyer from yesterday who threatened me has a gap of 99%. Of course he didn’t take the feedback well. I don’t blame him. To the delusional self the Starting Point Measurements does sound like b.s.

I am quoting here a part of the article I liked…

The Key to Learning Almost Anything: It’s not intelligence.

You’ve all met a know-it-all in your life. You know how they grate on you. You know people who are brash and overconfident, stubborn and myopic. And, so many modern ills can trace their roots back to it: When you hear people say things like “America is the greatest country on Earth,” or “Why would you need to go anywhere when everything you need is right here,” or you come across the hubris it takes to run the world banking system right into the ground, or commit billions of dollars in seed funding to apps that don’t directly solve our world’s most vital challenges?—?but instead allow us to anonymously find out which one of our office coworkers has a crush on us. You’ve seen it: It’s pride gone pathological.

We’re told to market ourselves, to stand out, to strive, to achieve, to be louder, to be perfect, to optimize, to have goals, to be popular, to be a brand. But we are all very, very ordinary, and it is the desire to seem exceptional that agitates our ability to really, truly learn and listen. This pathology of pride human peacocking that prevents us from stepping through the gates of knowledge and into the room of enlightenment. It causes us to become drunk on our success rather than strengthened by it. We cannot learn in this state.

To truly learn or master anything requires humility. Cultivating intellectual and spiritual humility increases academic performance from primary school up through college. The Scientific Method is almost entirely rooted in humility. It requires first acknowledging that there are things that we do not know, or that the things we know are wrong, and then acknowledging that others will one day know more, and then filling our knowledge gaps. It requires an open mind, a willingness to question everything, and a commitment to embracing failure and being wrong. When I was reading how to shoot a basketball, I started at the beginning, went through the most basic of steps, questioning and relearning everything that I had done previously, before building back up.

“The fool who knows that he is a fool is for that very reason a wise man; the fool who thinks he is wise is called a fool indeed.”?—?Dhammapada

Humility is often talked about in the biblical sense, as an offshoot of meekness, as a pole apart from the vices and sins of overconfidence: avarice, vanity, arrogance, grandiosity, snobbery, jealousy and so on. But humility is more than the absence of excess pride. Humility is also the absence of memory and expectation.

What I mean by an “absence of memory” is believing that change is a truth, the past is a mirage, and that therefore it is possible (and likely!) that our minds and souls can be changed and molded. That by opening ourselves up to novel experience, seeking out growth, and by considering views and points that aren’t our own?—?views held by people with different life experiences who may or may not agree with us— and by considering activities outside our comfort zone and being persistent enough not to disengage from things that are difficult, we will know true humility. Where we are is not where we will stay. We are not defined by our skills or limitations.

What I mean by an “absence of expectation” is focusing on the present instead of the future, on process instead of result, and on valuing mastery over appearing smart. It means giving up the pursuit of being the “best” at something?—?there will always be someone better. It means extinguishing the desire to prove what we know. It means rejecting the idea of instant gratification or success, rejecting wholesale defense of our point of view, and checking our ego at the gates. To become humble, one must truly detach from the self, and let knowledge and experience wash through us the way the reefs soak up the ocean.

“Be humble, be harmless,
Have no pretension,
Be upright, forbearing;
Serve your teacher in true obedience,
Keeping the mind and body in cleanness,
Tranquil, steadfast, master of ego,
Standing apart from the things of the senses,
Free from self;
Aware of the weakness in mortal nature.”?—?Bhagavad Gita

Saying “I got it already, thanks” is a myopic algorithm, and one that does a disservice to both the learner and the teacher. Not only do we miss out something new and valuable, but we miss out on the potential of relating to someone, of connecting with them?—?as what we are really saying when pride gets in the way and we dismiss additional information is “this is not valuable, you are not valuable.” Disease of the ego increases our ignorance and loneliness. It’s the stem-rot of the brain and the heart.

July 4, 2016, my girlfriend at the time and I settled in at this BBQ to play some beer pong, we rack the cups six-a-side, and I start tossing. I never made a cup. I must’ve threw the ball upwards of 30–40 times. I’d never been great at the game, but there was something about being 33 years old and unable to complete what felt like a basic motor function that sent me into a rage. I left that night sorta angry at myself, feeling defective and inferior, with my girlfriend rolling her eyes at me in the way that felt like icicles piercing through my body. I threw up my hands. I was humbled. But still not humble. Not yet.

By the time I learned true humility, several months later, while reading about how to shoot a basketball and discovering the shocking truth about my dominant eye, it was already far too late to get back out and play some pong with the lady who rolled both her dominant eyes at me that fateful day. My girlfriend had left me. I was humbled all over again, and realized I had many new things left to learn, about things that were far more important than how to sink a ball into a cup.

Article Source: https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-key-to-learning-almost-anything-2d6ac01b9e5f

And here is another article I loved and recommend…

Science Says This Is the Simplest Way to Remember More of What You Read
Hit pause. Reflect on the content. Excel. Repeat.

Whether it’s Facebook content, Bill Gates’ favorite book, or the latest critical business report, most of us enjoy reading or have to do quite a bit of it through the day. But in the rush to do everything in less time, you might be missing a crazily simple way to commit more content to memory:

Just go back and give yourself a little time to reflect on what you just read.

Now, when I say “reflect,” I don’t mean sit there pondering for an hour. I mean sitting just long enough to

Mentally identify the main points or concepts
Jot down some notes (you can’t write everything, so this forces your brain to choose what’s most important)
Consider the ramifications or implications of the content
Think about how the content connects to your personal preferences, personality, and experiences

Why it works.

As Allison Preston, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin, explains in this 2014 research study release,

We think replaying memories during rest makes those earlier memories stronger, not just impacting the original content, but impacting the memories to come. […] Nothing happens in isolation. When you are learning something new, you bring to mind all of the things you know that are related to that information. In doing so, you embed the new information into your existing knowledge.

With this in mind, when you give yourself a few minutes to rest and think about what you just ingested from the page, you’re allowing your brain to better connect the new information to what you’ve already done or understand. And because the brain is wired to respond to emotions quickly and efficiently, connecting them to memory formation and the interpretation of facts and rational thought, if you can allow yourself to really acknowledge and respond to what you feel during your reading reflections, you stand a better chance of the new memories being more powerful and easier to retrieve.
The myth of lost time.

I can hear you protesting from here.

“I barely have time to use the restroom! How am I supposed to take time to reflect on what I read?”

I get it. But when you can remember information from your content better, you actually can end up saving time. You don’t have to go back and look up as many facts or ideas, and whether it’s rubbing elbows with some big shots at a conference or explaining your rationale for a new process to your team, you can apply the information on the fly better. From this standpoint, reading reflection is an efficiency booster and worth the few brief minutes it takes.
More ways to level up.

To really get the most out of your reading and reading reflection, there are a few other add-on tricks you can try. You might want to

Read some of the content aloud or draw images for the main ideas. The brain doesn’t process the different types of sensory information in isolation from each other, so honing in on auditory or visual information might help you process the content.
Read when you are more rested. Fatigue can negatively influence your ability to focus, so pick a reading time where you feel energized.
Eliminate distractions. While turning off phone alerts or shutting your door are obvious distraction points, don’t forget about other factors, such as room temperature, hunger, and your position in your chair.
Be clear about your goal. Knowing the purpose behind what you’re reading can make it easier to feel motivated and engaged with the content.
Go for a hard copy. Researchers from the University of Oregon found that online content is harder to recall. One theory is that the disappear-reappear nature of online content is distracting, but the loss of tactile information, such as the feeling of the page, might contribute, too.

No matter how long your reflection time might happen to last, just read. Read anything. It’s by far one of the easiest things you can do to boost your intelligence and stay on top of your game.

Article source: https://www.inc.com/wanda-thibodeaux/science-says-this-is-simplest-way-to-remember-more-of-what-you-read.html

Read the original article: Setting your sights sky high… getting not even dirt