Notes 1

After The Dark Night, The Sun Shines Bright

How to turn change into opportunity for leadership. There are steps for turning challenges into opportunities. After the dark night, the sun shines bright. Unless we experience darkness, we will never value the light. Everybody has experienced or is experiencing some kind of trouble or anguish of some kind. Sometimes it is a lonely place to be in. You get the feeling of being alone and disconnected. Worry and doubt seem to be ‘solutions’ when in reality they only make you sink further into the hole of misery.

The truth is: you are never alone! Worry and doubts are not the answer and always remember that this period of darkness will pass! But the first thing you must do is to recognise your situation for what it is. In reality it is nothing but one of the many experiences that we have signed up for on this journey we call life. And whether we know it or not, God is always with us on the journey with all its ups and downs.

Unless we participate in life’s battles we will never succeed. We must approach all our problems in life as opportunities to grow and learn. Just as the one who wants to build his body needs to exercise, so must we go through problems in life for our souls and characters to grow.

Just as lifting weights makes our muscles stronger by overcoming resistance, our souls need some resistance as well to become stronger. We are here to learn lessons; and many more lessons are learnt through defeat than through victory. This does not mean that we are here to fail; far from it. We are here to win; but oftentimes victory is not complete without lessons learnt and no matter how much we wish otherwise, most lessons are learnt through our defeats more than our victories.

Hard times should be learnt from and accepted as a part of life but should never lead to unhappiness. Faith in ourselves and in a power higher than us is the key element to both happiness and success and through that, moving from darkness to light. Let that peace, hope, happiness, contentment, love, joy and abundance consciousness permeate our subconscious minds so that our circumstances appear to manifest these into our living reality.

To climb the highest mountain, you often go through a series of hills and valleys before you can reach the summit. For that to happen you must keep on moving, navigating the valleys and thorns as a matter of course in order to reach the goal. Let us take life in our stride and deal with whatever cards life has dealt us. No matter how hard it may seem, faith can truly move mountains and you can overcome every difficulty or obstacle in your path.

It is only when we have known the darkness, do we realise the value of light. Despite seeming elusive at times, light could be just around the corner. Like the light at the end of the tunnel, or the dawn that follows the darkest night, or the sun that appears from behind the clouds – your light is there, too, even though it plays hide-and-seek. These are the moments in life when you need to sit down and reflect, take stock of where you are, who you are and what it is you are here to do.

When you believe that you will find light, when you believe that the darkness is only a phase and treat it as nothing more, your light will become visible and you will shine as a beacon of hope to many.

If I had that day the be good great you know I knew you’re useless and horrible so you’ll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero and if you hit it even with 50% accuracy another rule is well aim for 51% the next week or 50 and a half percent for God’s sake or because you’re gonna hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward and so that’s one way that you can work on your conscientiousness.

It’s a plan of life you’d like to have and you do that partly by referring to social norms that’s more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale but the way other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about as if you don’t really know who you are because you know what you’re like you won’t do what you’re told you won’t do what you tell yourself to do. You must have noticed that it’s like you’re a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work for you. You don’t know what you want to do and then when you tell yourself what to do, you don’t do it. 

Anyway so you should fire yourself and find someone else to be but my point is that you have to understand that you’re not your own servant. So to speak you’re someone that you have to negotiate with and you’re someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to and that’s hard for people because they don’t like themselves very much so they’re always like cracking the whip and then procrastinating and cracking the whip and then procrastinating. It’s like God, it’s so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time and you know what that’s like because you probably waste like six hours a day and I think we did an economic calculation about that a while back. Your time is probably worth 50 bucks an hour, something like that. I mean you’re not getting paid that now but you’re young and so this is investment time and what you do now is going to multiply its effects in the future

So let’s say, it’s 50 bucks an hour which is perfectly reasonable so if you waste six hours a day and then you’re wasting about two thousand dollars a week or about a hundred thousand dollars a year. So go ahead but that’s what it’s costing you every hour and you need to know what your damn time is worth. So let’s say, it’s not fifty bucks its thirty whatever maybe, it’s a hundred, it’s somewhere in that range.

One of the things you should be asking yourself is when you spend an hour was that well what have I paid someone 50 bucks to have had that hour and if the answer is no. It’s like well maybe you should do something else with your time and it depends on whether or not you think that your time is worth while but the funny thing about not assuming that is if you assume your time isn’t worthwhile what happens is you don’t just sit around sort of randomly in a state of responsibility list bliss. What you do is you suffer existentially and so that seems like a stupid solution to know if you take people and I’ve told you this and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals, their self defined goals.

If you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they’re afraid of, they get stronger and you don’t know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for ten years if you didn’t avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by the death by your own definitions right within the value structure that you’ve created to the degree that you’ve done that what would you be like well.

There are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades long periods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward and they’d get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don’t know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well in part perhaps the reason that you’re suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you’re not everything you could be and you know it and of course that’s a terrible thing to admit and it’s a terrible thing to consider but there’s real promise in it because it means that perhaps there’s another way that you could look at the world and the number another way that you could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you now and then the second part of that is well imagine that many people did that because we’ve done a lot as human beings we’ve done a lot of remarkable things and I’ve told you already I think before that today for example about 250,000 people will be lifted out of abject poverty and about 300,000 people attached to the electrical power grid making people were lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate that’s ever occurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin and that’s been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000 the UN a plan to have poverty between 2000 and 2015 and it was accomplished by 2013 so there’s inequality developing in many places and you hear it lots of political agitation about that but overall the tide is lifting everyone up and that’s a great thing.

We have no idea how fast we can multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it because my experience is with people that were probably running at about 51% of our capacity something mean you can think about this yourselves. I often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day. In efficient studying watching things on YouTube that not only do you not want to watch that you don’t even care about that make you feel horrible about watching after you’re done that’s probably four hours right there know it you think well that’s 20-25 hours a week it’s a hundred hours a month that’s two and a half full work weeks it’s half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth twenty dollars an hour which is a radical underestimate it’s probably more like 50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you’re wasting 20 hours a week you’re wasting fifty thousand dollars a year and you are doing that right now and it’s because you’re young wasting fifty thousand dollars a year, is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because I’m not gonna last nearly as long and so if your life isn’t everything it could be you could ask yourself well what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you. You be who knows how much more efficient ten times more efficient, 20 times more efficient that’s the Pareto distribution. You have no idea how efficient efficient people get it’s completely it’s off the charts. 

Well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that’s another thing people do all the time, not only do they not do what they should to make things better they actively attempt to make things worse because they’re spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or homicidal or genocidal. All of those things, all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package. If people start really really trying just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that so there’s this weird dynamic that’s part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment both of which are major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt and that’s the thing that’s interesting too is that and like one of the another thing I’ve often asked my undergraduate classes is there’s this idea that people have a conscience and what the conscience is, it’s this feeling or voice you have in your head just before you do something that you know is stupid telling you that probably you shouldn’t do that stupid thing you don’t have to listen to it. 

Strangely enough but you go ahead and do it anyways and then of course exactly what the conscience told you was going to happen inevitably happen so that you feel even stupider about it than you would if it happened by accident because you know I knew this was going to happen. 

I got a warning it was going to happen and I went and did it anyways and the funny thing too is that that conscience operates within people and we really don’t understand what the hell that is. So you might say well what would happen if you abided by your conscience for five years or for ten years. What sort of position might you be in, what sort of family might you have, what sort of relationship might you be able to forge and you can be sure that a relationship that’s forged on the basis of who you actually are, is going to be a lot stronger and more welcome than one that’s forged on the basis of who you aren’t now. Of course that means that the person you’re with has to deal with the full force of you in all your ability and your catastrophe and that’s a very varied thing to negotiate but if you do negotiate it well at least you have something you have somewhere solid to stand and you have somewhere to live. 

You have a real life and it’s a great basis upon which to bring children into the world, for example, because you can have an actual relationship with them instead of torturing them half to death which is what happens in a tremendously large minority of cases. Well, it’s more than that too because and this is what I’ll close with and this is why I wanted to introduce social nets as ratings to you, because it isn’t merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you’re going to live out your own genuine being.

It isn’t only your fate, it’s the fate of everyone that you’re networked with and so you think well there’s nine billion seven billion people in the world we’re going to peak at about nine billion by the way and then it’ll decline rapidly but seven billion people in the world and who are you, you’re just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do but that’s simply not the case, it’s the wrong model because you’re at the center of a network you’re a node in a network. Of course that’s even more true now that we have social media. You’ll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they’ll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion and so that’s how you’re connected and the things you do there like dropping a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can’t fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don’t do are far more important than you think and so if you act it way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might say well that’s better than living a meaningless existence it’s better for it to matter but I mean if you really ask yourself would you be so sure if you had the choice I can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price I pay is that nothing matters or I can reverse it and everything matters but I have to take the responsibility. 

That’s associated with that it’s not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path now when you say well nihilist suffered dreadfully because there’s no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the advantages they have no responsibility so that’s the payoff and I actually think that’s the motivation say well I can’t help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed. It’s like maybe you’ve just allowed them to collapse because it’s a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr so that’s a pretty good deal. All things considered especially when they are when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world well, what Solzhenitsyn figured out and so many people in the 20th century, it’s not just him even though he’s the best example is that if you live a pathological life you pathologize your society and if enough people do that then it’s hell really really and you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the four tit fortitude to do that and you’ll see exactly what hell is like and then you can decide if that’s a place you’d like to visit or even more importantly if it’s a light if it’s a place you’d like to visit and take all your family and friends because that’s what happened in the 20th century how to think about motivation, well think about it from the hypothalamic perspective so we could say one thing that motivation does is set goals we could say that emotions track progress towards goals and I’m gonna use that schema even though it’s not exactly right so you say well motivation determines where you’re gonna aim so if you’re hungry you’re gonna aim it something to eat and then that will organize your perceptions so that you zero out everything that isn’t relevant to that task which is almost everything you concentrate on those few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward when you encounter those things that produces positive emotion as you move through the world towards your goal and you see that things are laying themselves out that facilitate your movement forward those things cause positive emotion and if you encounter anything that gets in the way then that produces negative emotion and it can be like threat because you’re not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way it can be anger so that you move it away it can be frustration disappointment grief those would if you had a response that’s serious to an obstacle it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence you know so you walk down stairs and I don’t know the contracting company is set a wrecking ball through your kitchen it’s like that’s going to be disappointing you’re not going to keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble that little frame is going to get punished out of existence and some new goal is going to pop up it instead and you know one of the things we’re gonna try to sort out is how do you decide when you’ve encountered an obstacle that’s so big that you should just quit and go do something else because that’s not obvious you know and you can you can get into counter productive persistence pretty easily so we don’t know how people solve that problem it’s a really complicated one so anyways we’re gonna work on that scenario your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival that produces a frame of reference so it’s not a goal it’s not a drive and it’s not a collection of behaviors it’s of little personality and the personality has a viewpoint it has thoughts that go along with it it has perceptions it has action tendencies all of that you can see this in addiction most particularly so one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time and that’s because when they’re they built a little alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves or a big one it might maybe it’s 90 percent of the personality and one of that one of the things that component consists of is all the rationalizations that they’ve used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people and so the addiction has a personality you know and so when the person is off ma-maybe they’re addicted to meth or something like that where we know the addiction is more it’s more short-term powerful that I would say than an alcohol addiction they’ll say anything and that the the words are just tools used to get towards the goal and if they happen to be deceptive whatever it doesn’t matter they’re just practical tools to get towards the goal and then when you get towards the goal and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that you reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug then the next time your even a better deceiver and liar so okay so we’re gonna say motivations one way of thinking about as they set goals but it’s not the right way of thinking about it they produce a whole framework of interpretation and so we’re gonna think about that framework of interpretation and then emotions emerge inside of that so that’s it so the world is framed motivation set goals you could say the world has to be framed so motivation sets that frame whose goals emotions perceptions and actions and then actions track progress so positive emotion says you’re moving forward properly towards your goal and if you encounter something you don’t expect you stop that’s anxiety it’s like oh we’re not where we thought we were and so we don’t know what to do so we should stop because we don’t know where we are what we’re doing stop frozen and then the more powerful negative emotions like pain they might make you get out of there so emotions forward stop reverse that’s your emotions within that motivated frame so and that’s another example of how your mind is embedded in your body you know emotions are like they’re they’re offshoots of action tendencies that’s that’s the right way to think about it because action is everything fundamentally so what are some basic motivations most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus by the way and that tells you just how important a control system it is the other thing that’s useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines so you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it’s not on too much but if it’s on in any serious way it’s like it it wins so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the Dominion of your hypothalamus is to never ever be anywhere where it’s action is necessary right you don’t want to go into a biker bar because you might find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary you probably don’t want that you don’t want the panic you don’t want the terror you don’t want the frenzied fight you don’t want any of that you don’t want to have to run away in absolute panic so you just don’t go there and then a huge a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them and so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control and everything to do with staying where you belong the myth of mental illness by Thomas says s-said asz it’s a classic you should read it if you’re interested in psychology read it like it’s a classic and he basically said most people have problems in living they don’t have psychological problems and so I’ve experienced despite my love for the psychoanalysts very frequently what I’m doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work you know and you can parameterize that it’s like what do you need how about some friends that people kind of like that how about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust that maybe has a future that’d be good how about a career that puts you in a dominant Sarki somewhere so at least you’ve got some possibility of rising some possibility of stabilizing yourself and our schedule in a routine because no one can live without a routine you just forget that if you guys don’t have a routine I would recommend like you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine you need to pick a time to get up whatever time you want I’d pick one and stick to it because otherwise you dis regulate your circadian rhythms and they regulate your mood and eat something in the morning I had lots of clients who’ve had anxiety disorders I had one client who was literally starving very smart girl she there’s very little that she liked she kind of tried to subsist on like half a cup of rice a day she came to me and said I have no energy I come home all I want to do is watch the same movie over and over what like is that weird and I thought well it depends on how hard you work you know it’s a little weird but whatever it’s familiar you’re looking for comfort so I did an analysis of her diet it’s like 3/4 of a cup of rice it’s like you’re starving eat something you know you’ll feel better so she modified her diet and you’re all her anxiety went away and she had some energies like yeah you got to eat so schedule that’s a good thing man your brain will thank you for it it will stabilize your nervous system with it’s a bit of a plan that’s a good thing you need a career you need something productive to do with your time you need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol most particularly alcohol because that does even a lot of people you need a family like the family you have your parents and all that would be nice if you all got along you can work on that that’s a good thing to work on and then you know you probably need children at some point that’s life that’s what life is and if you’re missing you know you may have a good reason to not be operating on one of those dimensions it’s not mandatory but I can tell you that if you’re not operating reasonably well on four I think I mentioned six if you’re not operating reasonably well on at least three of them there’s no way you’re going to be psychologically thriving and that’s more pragmatic in some sense than psychological right human beings have a nature there’s things we need and if we have them well that’s good and if we don’t have them well then we feel the lack and so behaviorists behavioral psychologists concentrate a lot more on that sort of thing you know it’s practical strategizing make a career plan figure out how to negotiate cuz that’s important figure out how to say what you need figure out how to tell the truth to figure out how to listen to your partner in particular because if you listen to them they will actually tell you what they want and sometimes you can give it to them and maybe they’ll return the favor and if you practice that for like 15 years well then maybe you’re constantly giving each other what you want well hooray that would be good and then there’s two of you under all circumstances and it’s better to have two brains than one because people think differently because of their temperament mostly and so the negotiation is where the wisdom arises and it’s part of the transformation the psychological transformation that’s attendant on an intimate relationship and one of the fundamental purposes of a long-term intimate relationship. Where to find everyone
https://cjlewis.blog/2018/06/05/jordan-petersons-life-advice-will-change-your-future-must-watch/

A living person sinks and a dead person floats in water.