The Renaissance Man

I found Leo by searching Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I feel like everybody in the last few years found you through search, and not through recommendations. That's unfortunate, don't know why that happens, the videos still get good views

I found this article on Ralston's life, there's quite a lot on his proficiency in fighting. https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/10270380

Total muscle atrophy is the way, super efficient

I go to bed & start relaxing at 23, fall asleep from midnight to 1, strictly wake up at 9. I tried: Waking up at 6:30, ended up being less sharp in the morning and couldn't fall asleep at 10:30 Not setting an alarm, ended up waking up later and later, ending up wasting the morning But testing out both extremes was quite useful in finding my balance

@bambi I believe your approach will save you from a lot of BS. You're right being skeptic of Ralston. The "trust me bro" advice leads to so much shitty information if you trust it blindly, it's crazy. At the same time, I "trust" Leo's judgment, not only because his work has helped me insanely (not including the spiritual part, which I haven't yet explored at all), and I also get his "like gets like", because as I progress I can tell how certain very specific words Leo say go well beyond parroting any source. They match direct experience too well to be random. I believe (but I don't know), that Leo feels the same about Ralston. At least about the consciousness aspect. Many members that could not tell you exactly why Ralston is so good, and a lot (but not all) of those who say "just read his work" will likely have poor understanding and suck in practice. That's my take. They're afraid of looking into their own incompetence. So I wouldn't blindly trust that advice either. But I believe Leo could be able to make explicit why Ralston is a genius, but that would take time and effort, and from his POV the average user would still not understand, so he doesn't bother. Again, my take. About fighting though, I believe that without fighting experience AND understanding of Ralston's work one cannot make a judgment whether he would excel against today's top athletes. Genius or not, the truth is that you don't know. It's like the Messi vs Ronaldo, the LeBron vs Jordan debate. Standing on either side may be fun but it's fruitless, you don't know, especially if you don't have deep experience in fighting, and event then... So, I am currently studying Ralston's work deeply, and testing it out. Ultimately, that's the only way out of this shit. (curiously enough, this is one of Ralston's main points, to cut through all the BS that one may find in martial arts and spiritual teachings, only trusting your direct experience rather than looking for "secret powers" that many promise). Since Leo's advice was SO EFFECTIVE, and he regards Ralston so highly, I thought it was well worth the time investment to explore what he has to say. But yeah, I'm still at the point where each one of his claims could be BS, because I have not put in the hours. Luckily the practice he promotes is not woo-woo, but highly logical and it makes a lot of sense, so the amount of blind trust required is pretty low (at least for now, I've only read The

Just for feedback, it's by far the hardest and densest book I've ever read. Just to conceptually grasp what he's said in the first half (100 pages) took me 15-20 hours (that's about 10x the time it takes to just read 100 pages). But I was super careful in not letting a single phrase slide with being misinterpreted or missed entirely. And this doesn't yet include practice. So far it's also been the best book I've ever read, but I haven't read that many books. But if you're in the pursuit of learning something... holy shit

Reading a few pages of his books immediately showed me that there was something special. I suggest you give them a try, the videos are too short to provide the structure for certain complex concepts.

In what way? You said he's in his own state of consciousness. I've recently started reading one of his books "The Art Of Mastery", and while really tough, if I went over and over every single chapter, in the end I got what he was pointing at (but maybe this is his easiest book too). I thought that it may simply be to not make his teachings too easy, to force some deep mental understanding processes or something. But then on YouTube he said that his "effortless power" fighting style was born from him trying to fight effortlessly 10 HOURS A DAY, without seeing ANY result for 10 months!!!! This is insane. 10 hours a day for months on end, without a single hint of result, until eventually he started seeing some success. And he said that he discovered that was not normal only once he started teaching others, so he was completely unaware that his work ethic was exceptional (wtf). That another person would've stopped after 2 hours of unsuccessful attempts. This is some robot work ethic. I'm still new to Ralston so I don't how where he is talented specifically, and whether this talent resides in the insane work ethic (which you need to be genetically gifted for, no way you can persist like that otherwise), or in other aspects that are at a high level regardless of practice.

@ivankiss Are you talking about services you pay from people (for example courses, life coaching, technicians?) or even more broadly? When I was doing personal training this matter was very stressful. I felt that if I taught everything I knew people would eventually create their own programs. I even had to change the program even when unnecessary. And the same was for making videos and marketing. But it wasn't like I didn't want to help. Not at all. This dissonance stressed me the fuck out of me. I did my best to actually make the client progress as best as possible, but I always had to add a small degree of "confusion" so he didn't become independent. But maybe this was a projection. I was the first one to hire a coach just to learn, and after a couple months do the same thing by myself. Not everybody is like that though.

Never seen anything like this

I heard that you can extend the limit by starting multiple threads rather than using a single long thread if you can. This is because for every new message Claude goes through the entire conversation and that consumes extra tokens. So if you are changing topic it's better to start a new thread.

By the way, @soos_mite_ah, @Delusion Slayer, your contribution was very useful, it's true that there are many aspects of the "habits" umbrella that are complex and very effective. I overgeneralized a bit too much, and while I believe there's truth in what I experienced that hints at a larger mechanism at play, I need to consider the larger context of everything that influences behavior. With this post I isolated a very narrow aspect of behavior change, and as you pointed out, this creates contradictions.

By habits I mean the one intended in the self-development/productivity community. Eating healthy, exercising, doing time and task management, etc. The idea of habits is that if you do the thing for enough time, it will eventually become automatic and you'll require no more discipline to engage in it. Has this principle ever worked for you in real life? Please tell me your experience, I'm really conflicted. Has that behavior really become something that requires no discipline? Has it become automatic as they say? -------------------------- My experience In my experience, which is fairly extensive, this has NEVER worked. This is super strange. Too strange to have NEVER worked considering how much time I gave to develop certain habits. Don't get me wrong, my behavior has changed and improved a lot, but what I'm suggesting is that it didn't happen through habits, instead it happened by becoming deeply conscious enough of the reason why the new behavior was healthy. There were behaviors that I was able to change without effort, and quite quickly. There were behaviors that even after hundreds of days of trying, never became habits. (this would defy the theory of habits) There were behaviors that I couldn't change for months and months, but then a single piece of knowledge and understanding made the shift effortless. -------------------------- Backing up my theory Then, why are habits so glorified? I believe the concept was simply extrapolated by the actual ability of the mind to make some tasks automatic, for example muscle memory. But it then was poorly translated in stuff like "going to the gym" which is too broad and full of variable to be truly automated. If you were able to go to the gym, so to adopt a new habit, what I suggest is that the change was one stemming from consciousness of the effects, which came organically, and not from the repetition of going every day. "But Leo (lol), I did actually force myself to go to the gym and then it became a habit" Are you sure? Maybe the repetition worked not because the task became automatic, but because through such repetition you were able to shed more awareness & attention over the chain of benefits of the gym. And that's when the behavior changed. I'll give you a tricky question: If you now are going to the gym consistently, and you either feel like it requires discipline but you're still going, or maybe it's a habit so you're not an enthusiast, but it's automatic, so you're indifferent... Why don't you try not going to the gym for two months? Oh, you can't? Of course you can't, the reason you were able to go in the first place was because you're conscious of the benefits. Discipline is a camouflage. You don't want to not go to the gym! You don't want to eat unhealthy! You could do it before because you were not conscious of the benefits, but once you go regularly, even if it looks like discipline, you are actually unable to skip a month of workouts, because you're too conscious of the consequence, while before you weren't. ---------------- So... are habits BS? Please only answer based on your direct experience, not with theories you've heard from Huberman and James Clear or whoever.

@Delusion Slayer I absolutely agree. But in this case it was about not doing something, rather than doing a new positive activity. So in this case, repetition wasn't the mechanism involved, and what I'm critiquing is the repetition aspect. But it's also true that I didn't specified that in the post, so it's my fault. I would just change "habit" into "behavior change". Because habit implies something is "habitual", or "automatic", while I'd argue the actual thing at work is just you becoming more mature and conscious, and not just indifferent to the discomfort. And then, manipulating cues is very effective to make you a bit more conscious of the behavior, and making you struggle more to engage in it. In your case, not buying sugary food means it's incredibly harder to eat it.

@soos_mite_ah Consider I'm challenging the typical stage orange perspective on habits. I'm not rigid at all, actually, to the point I believe the whole concept does not exist. I believe what those people call "habits", automated, are actually organic, hyper-flexible changes that occur for reasons that are totally different from the sheer repetition those sources propose. About the whole habit thing: the concept of habit is not just about repetition, that's true. It's also about being strategic with cues that trigger certain behaviors, etc. And those are actually great tips, I didn't specify that in the post, my fault. What' I'm specific pointing to is the idea of a "habit" that becomes automated. You said there are things you do even if it sucks, especially in the beginning, but then you get used to it. I'm not saying this does not happen, what I'm saying is that it did not happen because of repetition, but because of a higher degree of comprehension. And while it can be facilitated by repetition, there are a lot of more powerful and nuanced ways to go straight to the source of change. Possible critique is: but if I don't use a bit of discipline and force here and there I risk becoming super lazy and wasting my life. Maybe it's not your thought @soos_mite_ah, but if it is, you'll see that trying to not be disciplined will be impossible for you. Not doing the thing will be too painful, and you'll end up doing it anyway. It's as if the discipline, the punishment, the force, is all an illusion, and only makes the process less effective.

@Asayake It's actually the opposite. I started off with "believing" this habit thing, and then my direct experience showed me how it didn't work in that way. And now I was checking if it was just me or if the way habits are typically conceived in the self-help industry are a poor extrapolation of another principle. And from the responses here it seems to be the case.

@StarStruck I talked about specific habits, like being productive, going to the gym, eating healthy. I literally said that habits exist, but this self-development variation may be BS. It's obvious that the brain can learn stuff and make it unconscious. I mentioned muscle memory in my post as well... And also I clearly asked to ground your answers in direct experience, referring to specific habits, not just the body doing stuff automatically. I'm also capable of parroting James Clear & co, but the whole point of this post was to question that entire massive branch. @Carl-Richard Thank you. @Basman How did this work in your direct experience? Were you able to change habits of this kind? If you did, was it because of sheer repetition (as the whole self-help industry says), or because of something else, like I'm suggesting? @soos_mite_ah Yes, flexibility is always the solution. All those "protocols", typically stage orange, fail to see the flexibility requirement of a successful integration. Anyway, notice how the "habits" you adopted weren't out of dumb, sheer repetition and force, but out of a simple understanding of the place of such practices in your life. Or at least, that's my whole hypothesis: I believe if you just don't see the point in doing something, there's no amount of repetition that will make you indifferent to doing that thing. And this would mean the whole habit thing is... BS. As a method of integrating new practices, not the fact that changing behavior is BS, to be clear.

Well, I guess everybody transcended procrastination in this forum. Good for you. But your answers weren't pertinent to my question.

Yes it's wrong to talk in absolutes, but if I had to measure the units of value (in how it actually made my life better, even in the long run by giving me ideas or knowledge or fun) per hour spent on IG, man that's REALLY LOW. Even if there was no cost of being "addicted" and wasting days unconsciously. Even if you consciously spent time on IG. Very very low value IMO. Have you found ways to increase your ability to concentrate? Did your ability to concentrate actually increase? If so, what were those ways?

Personally, so subjectively, when grounding the value of TikTok or IG in my direct experience of growth, I've received zero value. I rationalized for a long time the fact that there was good info, slowly following less and less trashy accounts, but still, those bits of information made zero difference to my growth, and this was a problem since I was using IG for 90 minutes a day. Once I recognized, over and over, there there was no value, no growth, no wisdom, no pleasure, I quit with ease. So in my experience it has been a total waste of time, especially as a consumer of content.

Yeah shorts are trashy, but that's where the money is at, because more people's attention is there. And if the money is there, then more people are going to make content on those platforms. And if more people make content, the competition drives the content to be better and better. And if the content is better, the platform becomes more popular, and the cycle continues (until people get hurt enough that they leave) This really looks like the problem of marketing high consciousness stuff you talked about, Leo. At the same time, like @Juan said, it can be a huge opportunity for creators. (a quesiton for you though @Juan, why not creating on other platforms? is it because of the algorithm that works so well?) But even if that's the case (huge opportunity), it is true that not all social media is the same. I haven't experienced the "TikTok effect" on other social media. And it's also true that creators have other platforms to grow, it's not like without TikTok they're done (although some will suffer more than others). And finally, Leo was right in saying content on TikTok pretty much adds no value to one's life. Total waste of time. I could say the same for Instagram, but it's true that it's not as addictive (and retarded). Conclusion: it's fucking complex and I don't know enough about policing and its consequences to make a judgment

@mmKay The problem is that it works so well on retention, that the videos just perform better. It's not the case 100% of the time, and it has its drawbacks, but as of today's social media metrics such as viewer retention, it just works. It's unfortunate.

Are there any of you who think your life purpose is along the lines of teaching wisdom? Along the lines of building a great library of content, not necessarily videos though Are you planning on specializing on something, or do you want to go broad like Leo? What would you do differently from him? Teaching differently, structuring your approach differently, etc.... How is your work going to be extraordinary?

@LSD-Rumi My question was more about feeling the call to create your own catalog of content, in Leo's style. I'm more interested in how ya'll would make stuff differently, or hell, even better than Leo. Yet along the lines of the "building a catalog and teaching wisdom"

Yes I agree with you There's a lot of evidence in your personal experience and observations, and it can be combined with the knowledge of many other teachers to propel you to a new level. This isn't always applicable though, it depends on the theory. I'm not sure whether this applies to Wilber's work or to some of his work or to any of his work at all. Edit: the evidence is not traditionally measured or proven, but intuition can often go beyond anything measurable.