Robert

But is this authentic? Why go through all of that? If you get into a relationship with one of those girls eventually everything will have to come out. I use to have a similar problem as you and OP, but these days I just forget trying to look older and I just stay as myself. It makes me way happier.

Another huge insight I had recently was that I'm so confused because I DO NOT want to admit that I'm confused. And also I don't understand enough about life. I thought I knew what I wanted and I had my life completely figured out. But I don't.

Right now I feel uncertain. I see people doing amazing things and it's extremely inspiring. I get inspired when I see other people do amazing things, whether it's an artist, musician, athlete, scholar, enlightened being, or anything else. I see it and it inspires me, but right now I have a hard time believing that I can accomplish what I want. Maybe I really can't. Maybe I just have to peacefully accept this. It would be completely okay if that was the case. I would seriously not be angry, I just want the truth. I was given great advice by people who posted in this journal: "imagine, imagine" "have a stronger vision." But I've been doing that for years and I'm still not where I want to be. I'm just not doing good right now. I have no problem staying where I am. I just don't want to waste time trying if I really can't do what I want to do. So I want to make a true decision. I want to either give up completely on my life purpose or I want to go forward and never doubt myself ever again. I'm sick and tired of the doubt. I don't want to doubt at all. I want to be able to believe in myself regardless of what's happening to me. Leo said in his life purpose course that the hero's life purpose journey feels like you're hacking through the woods. It's not all fun and games like you expect when you first start. When I first started I expected my life purpose to be constantly exciting. Leo and George Leonard are so right when they say constant excitement isn't the master's path. Which road do I take? Do I just give up and stop all this struggle? Or do put in all the effort I've got, permanently? I don't know, we'll see. My life is empty right now so I have time to contemplate a lot more, so I will update this journal when I make a true decision. I need to really decide and never look back.

Right now I still feel lost and confused. It's like I've been running through a maze, going in circles and not finding a way out, and now I just want to sit against a wall and give up. It's like I've been hacking through the woods and I'm out of energy now. I'm considering just staying where I am and letting the wolves eat me. Forget getting shelter. I realized the other day that I'm going through my next existential crisis. This hasn't happened since my Dark Night Of The Soul 3 years ago. I don't know what the result of this will be. I know it will grow me, that's obvious. But I don't know what's gonna happen. We'll see.

@Aquarius That might be true, I probably need a stronger vision. I've been wanting to update my vision for a while now, too. It's been a long time since I've done that. I need to get on it! And thanks for the other advice. There's no reason why I should do what doesn't feel right. I need to accept, and stop beating myself up. Thank you so much!

Okay, I'm seriously considering giving up on my life purpose altogether. I'm about to take it out of my mind altogether and just do nothing for the rest of my life. After all the work I've done already, all the planning, visualizing, dreaming about it, telling some people I would do it, reading, note taking, taking the life purpose course. After ALL OF THAT. I'm about to just give up on it. Life is so short. It's just too much work. I don't know. I might take a week or so and just think about it then make my permanent decision. Maybe I will update this journal when I make a true decision.

Right now I'm lost and confused. This hasn't happened to me in so long. I remember when Leo came out with a video "How To Deal With Confusion" or something like that, and the techniques actually worked for me. Any time I became confused after watching that video I would be able to deal with it. I would admit that I'm confused and then take care of my mind problems. But recently I just couldn't do it as easily as I did before. I've been staying confused. As for being lost, ever since I completed Leo's life purpose course and been doing personal dev for a while, I haven't felt lost in life at all for the most part. There were some things I still wasn't succeeding at, but I never felt really lost like I'm running through a maze/forest and can't find my way out. Right now that's happening. It's so weird... I thought I was doing good. I'm just gonna continue emptying my life. Empty as much as I can.

It depends on what you want. Is spiritual enlightenment what you want? If so, then you need to give up your entire life. Period.

@taleen Thank you!

My life is already pretty empty and minimal but I'm gonna have to empty it more. I'm gonna have to cut off so much more stuff and slow down the pace of my life purpose by like 75%, I think. Idk, we'll see. I'm starting to get excited.

Right now I don't feel good. I don't feel bad, but I just don't feel good. I don't feel as good as I'm suppose to feel, or how I know I CAN feel. I wanna feel more peace, happiness, joy, and calmness. I also wanna feel amazing in my mind and body. It's easy to reach higher consciousness states. I reach so many amazing states. The hard part is making them permanent. I make a lot of progress and experience amazing fucking things, but nothing is permanent. I always go back to how I was before. How do I solve this? I don't know. I know I can find out, but that takes forever. I always research stuff, contemplate, etc., but the shit takes fucking forever. I don't want my life to be researching 24/7. My life is all work, work, work. Get money just to live and then more personal development. This needs to change. I need to make more space to just relax. The only problem is that in order to relax properly and figure myself out I have to spend so much time learning just to do it. I can't wait until the day that I master myself. It will be amazing. I will actually feel good.

@taleen Thanks for caring. @Shin Thanks for the support, Shin. I agree with you about imagining. It's important. And I was thinking just earlier today that I need to visualize more. I don't have toxic people in my life, really. It's just different people that I meet / interact with, such as acquaintances and stuff like that who get in my way. But I know I must overcome this. Again, thanks guys!

Right now I feel like I'm back to normal. I just finished crying, so I'm good. Sometimes you need to just let stuff out. I feel like I'm back to normal, but I also feel confident. I need to train more. I need to transform myself. I know I can do it.

I try to avoid talking about my life purpose to everyone, but every time it comes up in a conversation where, for example, someone asks me about my future, I kinda tell them a little about my life purpose and then they always give me these fucking stupid ass reactions. I know they view me as a failure already. But maybe I'm the stupid one. Maybe I really am wasting my fucking time.

Read whatever you want, whenever you want. I constantly switch books I read because different things keep my interest at different times. Sometimes I'll read several chapters of a book then not pick up the book again for months because I'm too busy applying stuff. But as I apply stuff from that one book I might also be going through some other books, maybe for a different area of life. This works amazingly well for me. Don't put rules on when you read. That's too mechanical.

@littleBIG You should finish the course before asking any more questions. Leo covers a lot in the course, so you might get answers later in the videos without having to use this forum. But just to answer your question for now, whatever you choose as your domain of mastery must be something you plan to... master. Don't choose skating if you don't plan to master it / become world class. Only choose it if you will be among the pros.

Of course that can be a value! It's one of the best values to have. Just don't fall into the academia trap. Value learning/education for the purpose of growing yourself, not for grades, degrees, or anything like that.

The only tangible results you'll see immediately after taking the course will be the actions you take from executing on what you learn. If you're someone who starts the course with nothing, not having a clue what his life purpose is, then you shouldn't expect success until years later. Life purpose is about the long-term, not the short-term.

@LaucherJunge Don't listen to anyone who tells you that you can't find the love of your life. You can. You just have to desire it strongly enough and you have to take the right actions in order to make it happen. A lot of people try to say that it's not possible to get what you truly want, or they say you have to settle for less or do pickup or something lame like that. But these people are just spreading around false information. Ignore these people and go find the girl you want. It is possible. You are not insane at all!

Okay, so I've decided to just dive right in and start my own self-actualization journal. I figured that if I'm seriously committed to personal development I wouldn't have a problem making a post every now and then to document my progress and record my insights. I'll start by introducing myself in case anyone decides to read this. My name is Robert, as you can probably tell from my username, and I'm 20 years old, as you can probably tell from my profile. I've been into personal development for a little over a year. That might seem like a small amount of time to a lot of the people on this site, but I feel like I've made some amazing progress. I've overcome some really deep and dark depression, I've become more knowledgeable, I've become less neurotic, I've become conscious of my ego, and so much more. My life purpose is to create evocative fiction in order to tap into the best version of people. I've found that the ideal medium for me to realize this purpose would be comics. So, yes, I'm an aspiring comic book writer. I've been extremely passionate about storytelling ever since I was like 15 and I knew I wanted to positively impact the world since I was 16, but I didn't have a strong life purpose until getting into personal development and stumbling across Leo's life purpose course. Hopefully, this new world of self-improvement will be the difference in what makes me successful and fulfilled (because looking back on my life previous to all of this makes me realize that I would have definitely failed miserably at my calling if I continued on that route). This journal will be where I will write about everything related to my personal development. Not only do I think it would be good for me to become more conscious of myself, but it also might be able to help out someone else if I share all of the epiphanies and insights I get over time. Recent Insight #1: Commitment is overrated. I recently listened to a several-hour-long CD set called Your Wish Is Your Command by Kevin Trudeau. Although there's a lot of things I find to be flawed within the CDs and I'm not a fan of Kevin Trudeau as a person, I still managed to have 2 epiphanies while listening. One epiphany is that commitment can be so goddamn overrated. For example, if you decide to commit to a certain self-help course because you want the maximum results, one question you should ask yourself is why you have to get the maximum results from that specific course. There are probably many other courses or resources that you don't know about which have potential to help you even better than the course that you decided to commit to. Always keep this in mind. Life is complex, the world is vast, and there are so many amazing things that are off your radar screen. Be flexible. Apply yourself to whatever is necessary to help you, but still keep a lookout for better opportunities! Commit in a disciplined way, not a neurotic way. Recent Insight #2: Misfortune can be a good thing. Another insight from Your Wish Is Your Command. Something really unfortunate can happen to you, but that one misfortune could be the cause of something even more amazing. I can even look at my own life and find this to be true. I've been though a lot of suffering in my life, and through that suffering I started to look for answers. The answers I found then introduced me to this beautiful thing called personal development. I know that if I was never abused and had a great family and a better upbringing, I probably would have never searched for answers. I would have been comfortable enough to follow the sheep and stay ignorant. The world is unpredictable! Think positive! Maybe getting fired from your job could cause you to find a job that you like a lot more. Maybe your car breaking down could be the difference in whether not a car accident occurred that day. Maybe. Remember that you don't know what good situations a bad situation can bring.

Today is one of my days off, so I'm gonna make this quick post while I have the time and energy. I've been feeling really grateful lately. Aside from the times I just look around and feel a deep fascination with the richness and mysteriousness of life, what I appreciate most is that personal development has made me aware of who I am on a spiritual level. I remember when I first understood the truth of who I am; I was extremely depressed, angry, and scared, and these feelings lasted for a good 3 months. I experienced the "dark night of the soul." I felt like the biggest victim in the world - everything in life was shitty, meaningless, and part of one giant hellhole. As a result, I ended up deleting all of my comic book work: all of my scripts, idea documents, concept art, etc. I deleted years worth of work because of how shocked and emotionally unstable I was. However, lately I've been so damn happy I got that shit over with as soon as I did, and I'm glad that I pretty much started over from the beginning with all of my stories. One of the reasons is that when it comes to screenwriting, I'll be able to understand the narrative art from a more truthful place, especially when it comes to characterization. It's extremely rare to find a fiction writer who understands spirituality. A vast majority of these writers create characters based on a completely false understanding of the conceptualized self. This gives me a whole area where I have so much more potential than a lot of other people. I would even argue that it is impossible to master characterization without understanding how the ego works. I've kept my word from one of my previous posts in this journal that I won't be focusing on my life purpose at all until I become financially independent. However, I still think about it and can't wait to actually start living it. Over the past week, it has evolved to something which I find to be a lot more meaningful to me. Basically, it involves me wanting to contribute to evolving the consciousness of people. The previous version of my life purpose was to just make people aware of how they can become better in general, but I've found that moving people to higher levels of consciousness is what I should be more specific about and people will inevitably become better as a result of that evolution. Recent Insight: Overcoming one thing leads you to new challenges. As for my own personal development, I've noticed that every time I resolve 1 thing, 10 new things come up. Not that I regress in my development, it's just that I become aware of more areas I can improve on. In other words, as I develop myself, the new person I become gives me a completely different perspective. It's similar to when snow on a car's windshield blocks the view. The issue is that the snow is in the way, but after you deal with that issue and have the snow wiped off, you notice new things on the horizon that might stand in your way. It really is true that personal development never ends.

@Emerald Wilkins I'm gonna be honest, to me it sounds like you don't know your target audience at all - you listed four different topics (spirituality, psychology, personal development, and awareness of social under-currents), and then you talked about extra stuff for people who aren't interested in your main topic. This is where I think the problem lies. One way you can find your target audience is to do this exercise I learned about niche selection. What you do for the exercise is start with the main broad topic that you want your channel to be about (such as spirituality), and then narrow down that topic as much as you can just to see a variety of more specific potential niches to build your brand around. Here's an example: You might want to start with "spirituality" and then narrow that down to "spirituality for beginners." And then you might want to narrow that down to "spirituality for women beginners." And then you might want to narrow that down to "spirituality for women beginners who have been abused in the past." And then you might want to narrow that down to "new age spirituality for women beginners who have been abused in the past." Here's another example: You might want to start with "psychology" and then narrow that down to "psychology for teens." And then you might want to narrow that down to "psychology for teens with depression." And then you might want to narrow that down to "psychology for Christian teens with depression," and so on. Just an example. There's an infinite number of combinations you can use. Maybe you don't want to go as narrow as the examples I gave. Maybe you just want to do something only as narrow as "spirituality for beginners," but even so, your niche should help you cultivate and maintain a stronger brand as long as you narrow down your topic in some manner. Yeah, so when you're more certain about your audience, cut out stuff like this if necessary. If people aren't interested in the main topic of your channel, don't do videos targeted towards those people.

Okay, so its been a little over a week since I last updated this journal. I've noticed that there's so much shit that I learn, do, and think about on a daily basis, so it would be impossible for me to type all of my experience and insights without spending several hours typing each day. I wish I could write more here... but whatever. I started this new job the other day, and so far it's not too bad. I'm gonna try to increase my hours as much as possible in order to save up as much money as possible. I plan on using that money to invest online so I can make more passive income. I need to have enough capital so I can take consistent action towards investing, instead of having to wait every 1-2 weeks for a paycheck to come in. This is especially important for the passive income method I'm most interested in at the moment: affiliate marketing. I'm gonna have to take consistent action to set up certain systems over the course of months for affiliate marketing, which means I will need enough money to last me for months. I should have enough money saved up by June. While working at this new job, I was reminded of how clueless most people are about certain aspects of life. I got a good first impression from almost all of the people I work with, but so many of them seem so damn clueless. There was this one guy in particular who I'm cool with and I really like, but there was something he said that made me shake my head. I was working, doing my job, and this guy was headed somewhere but stopped at me for a quick, casual exchange of words. Since I'm new to the job, he asked me what time my shift ends. I told him 3:30 a.m. and then, although I forgot what he said exactly, he said something along the lines of: "Oh man, what are you gonna do at 3:30? Watch TV, I guess." And then he continued to walk to where he was headed to. This stood out to me because it shows that most people don't know about self-actualization. Anyone who was hugely into personal development wouldn't think of watching TV as the only thing you can do in the middle of the night. Although I love some of my TV shows and I still watch the good ones every now and then, it was the way the guy talked about watching TV that stood out to me. He said "Watch TV, I guess" as if someone can't be starting an online business in the middle of the night, or meditating in the middle of the night, or watching something more healthy in the middle of the night such as self-help videos. The guy just came off as so clueless about self-actualization. People need to wake up! There was also this other dude who caught my attention. He started the job about the same time that I did. I'll probably sound like an asshole to anyone reading this, but this guy seemed like a pothead when I first saw him: the way he talked, the way his eyes looked, his demeanor, everything. But what caught my attention is when we were having this conversation about the society we live in and he brought the word "conscious" into the conversation. I stopped him when he said that word and asked him what he meant by it (since the word can mean a few different things.) He told me that he couldn't explain what it meant and I said I thought so because that's a really deep word. There was an awkward phase in the conversation until I asked him straight out if he was "awake" - as in aware of his ego - and he said yes. He got hype for a second until I dropped the news to him that I didn't have a similar experience to him because of DMT but instead because meditation, lol. The conversation ended there because we were both tired and headed home, but I told him that we might be able to continue it another day. The guy doesn't seem enlightened, and neither am I, but I'm curious as to what he knows about spirituality and his true self. Recent Insight: Failing to use your resources properly can screw up your strategy in life. I've mostly been spending all of my productive time working on my financial goals. I want to be fucking financially independent already! Ever since Leo released a video on being strategic, I've been applying what he taught. I consider planning to be one of my natural talents, but a lot of my plans in life do not have all of the 7 pillars of strategic thinking that Leo talked about in his video. I realized this before he put the video out, but it has become more clear to me now. I haven't been using my resources in the most strategic way. Although I have a good overarching life strategy (locking down each level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs one at a time, from bottom to the top of the pyramid), I now know that I shouldn't even be touching anything above the first 2 levels of the pyramid. From now on I'm gonna be allocating all of my productive time to locking down those two levels first. Unless I really, really, really want to write some fiction or I get some great ideas that I have to write down, I'm putting comic book writing and all of that stuff to the side. I previously thought I could do multiple things like my reading goals, comic book writing, and learning affiliate marketing as long as I give the most time to the most important goal for my strategy. However, I realize that thinking like that could really fuck me over. I should just cut out everything that isn't crucial for my life right now, even if it's something that's extremely important and fulfilling later on. Although writing comic books is crucial for my ultimate vision, spending time to write comic books now would take me farther away from my vision.

I purchased it, and I have to say it was the best $250 I ever spent. I felt like everything I needed to know about life purpose was put right there in a single place.

@Zane Nice! I'm glad you agree.