To be honest, there were far more than 30 lessons.
However, in this article I decided to go for 30 lessons because, well.. it’s cool to say “30 lessons before 30”.
I decided to choose the 30 lessons that made the biggest positive impact in my life. The most powerful ones.
And I tried not to tell you cliches or tell you random quotes that I’ve read, because, I can sit here and type the lines from the wisest books and the wisest people on this planet, but these lessons would not mean anything to me. I didn’t experience them, I just read them.
The lessons I chose for you are all lessons that I learned on my own, through my own experience, lessons that made a difference in my life once I started implementing what they teach.
For those lessons I feel credible enough to share. So here they are…
Think about this, what if two people sat and watched the spectacle at the beginning of The Universe and as they sat they chatted. The one person said to the other, “Hey…” let’s call his buddy Jimmy.
“Hey Jimmy, what do you think. What is the chance of a person called Beth to exist on a tiny piece of rock within this almost infinite vastness?”
Jimmy all confused asks “What do you mean Jonny?” We will call the other guy Jonny.
Jonny explains: “Well, what is the chance of all these particles to organize themselves in stars, for over trillion galaxies to exist at the right place just so at one of them there will be one solar system, out of billion, where there will be pieces of rock orbiting this star, and there will be one piece of rock at the exact right distance from its star and the other planets so it has an environment for life and its safe from enough asteroids so that life can flourish. And on this planet there will be countless species each having their choice, but they will all do the right choices leading micro organisms in water to evolve into land animals, and at the right time an asteroid would hit to wipe out the huge and dangerous land animals so other land animals can evolve into humans. And each of those humans will live and die according to the right sequence and set of choices that it all ends up for Beth’s mother and father to meet and she to be born. What do you think the chance of all this happening is?”
Jimmy: “You are crazy. This is not even close to possible. There is no chance.”
You would tell him the same right. I mean who wouldn’t? What Jonny asks for is 14 billion year long shot. one tiny particle going the wrong way and poof, Beth doesn’t exist. Humanity doesn’t exist.
And 14 billion years later, boom!
There she is, Beth came to be.
Somehow, against all those mindbogglingly tiny odds, she is alive.
Not just Beth, all of us.
You are alive!
Against all the odds, you are here.
YOU ARE THE MIRACLE!
We are the miracle!
All those things happened perfectly at the exact right order just so we can be here, just so humanity can exist. You are a miracle. So, act as one.
We all live in our own reality. This was HUGE for me.
Realizing that we all perceive the world in our own way that’s determined by our own unique perception was a big wake up.
Everything you see out there you contextualize because you have a context for it. A context that was developed by your own unique experience and understanding of the world.
If you don’t have a context for one thing, a knowledge, an experience, if you don’t understand a nuanced detail, you are seeing a completely different reality than someone who has a context for that external object or event. It’s not part of your reality.
And not just that…
You don’t really know anyone.
Everyone you know is not actually who they really are.
You are seeing what you reflect upon them. You know them to the level you know yourself.
The rules out there are negotiated. The concepts and theories are negotiated. The identity of people is negotiated. Who you are is negotiated. The narrative you tell is negotiated. The meaning you give to things is negotiated.
With who?
Well, you negotiate it both with others and your own self. Also others negotiate it between themselves.
So your reality is purely what you negotiate it to be. We are all living a shared dreamworld.
There is a saying by Seneca “Every cruelty comes out of Weakness.”
I agree with this completely.
I always looked at the world and I couldn’t differentiate bad people and good people. What I saw was people who were strong to endure the pains of life and people who were too weak to deal with their own pain, emotions, so they acted out on them.
I am not saying that what they did was unjustified or justified, right or wrong.
I am just stating that all the cruelty and ugliness in the world comes out of Weakness, of being too weak to face your fear, your emotions, to control the urges of your Ego, to raise your child in a good adult, too weak to face your shadows, to leave your comfort, to get out of your routine, too weak to face the pain and transmute it into art or beauty.
Behind all of it is Weakness!
My mission is to transform this weakness into strength and help people do the same in the world, as much as I can.
So I wrote a whole book about dealing with your own Weakness and transforming it into Strength.
You can check it out here. It’s called “How to Play The Greater Game of Life”
Let me ask you something, who is the voice reading this text?
If that’s you, than who is the one listening to that voice?
That’s also you.
You are the observer.
I realized this when I was doing an exercise where I needed to not see, hear, smell, touch and taste anything for 1 hour.
Take away all your senses and what you are left with is pure presence, an Infinite Awareness that develops a Self riding an Infinite Present Moment.
Everything else is just an information you pick from the world around you and decide to become part of your identity, of your Self.
You are not the Self.
You are the observer behind the Self.
We suffer because we avoid our pain, and by avoiding our pain we avoid healing the wound from where this pain comes from.
All that pain tries to show us is where the wound is, be that physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental.
It shows us where we are hurt so we can give the necessary attention to that place and heal.
But instead we numb the pain, we run away from feeling it in mindless distractions. The problem is that by not listening to pain we do not know where it hurts, and we do not heal the wound.
That’s why we suffer. And if we just sit with it, follow it, find the wound and nurture it lovingly, we would heal. And we would be able to live fully again.
Nobody will ever really know YOU.
Nobody will be there with you 24 hours per day but yourself.
Nobody knows you as YOU know yourself and nobody ever will.
Every person knows a bit of you, a side of you, but nobody can know 100% of you, all your flaws and all your strengths, all your thoughts, worries, emotions and desires, frustrations, urges, confusions and excitements.
Nobody will ever know all your battles and hardships, your triumphs and how you got them. Nobody will know your full path, all your memories, and all the opinions you have.
Nobody will ever know all your nuanced personalities, all the lies you tell your self, and all the layers of your psyche.
Nobody will know all of you. And that’s ok!
Learn how to be with yourself, give yourself the attention you need and the relationship you have with your self will improve.
From there, every other relationship follows.
Every day you have a choice, to feed your love or your fear.
To make decisions inspired out of love, or decisions inspired out of fear.
The type of decisions you make will give you just more of what you feed in one way, shape or form or another.
So feed love and choose the decisions that come from there.
It’s harder than it sounds though.
But it’s worth everything.
So don’t miss on opportunities to tell them what they mean to you.
Time will not wait for you.
It doesn’t wait for anyone.
Yeah, you might say that you are never too old to live like you want, but for some things you are too old.
Some opportunities go away and do not come back, some people are not always there to tell them how much they mean to you.
And all you are left with is regrets. Don’t postpone living!
It’s not about sprinting, it’s about enduring.
It’s not about who is the fastest, but what kind of person you are during your run.
The imaginary scoreboard and the competition is a lie, they don’t matter in the end.
What matters is whether or not you enjoyed the run.
What matters is whether or not you gave your personal all.
The Universe is not going anywhere.
Life is the same. It’s not about getting somewhere, it’s just like a dance.
You don’t aim to get to one particular point in the dance, you enjoy the whole thing, the hard parts, the easy parts, the boring parts and the most beautiful parts, it’s all part of the dance.
You might not be stronger, but at least show that you punch back!
Use the push back to do twice as more, use it as a speed up.
It’s not complicated, it’s just hard.
But it’s an antidote to being pushed around and not having control over your own fate.
It’s a formula to regain the control of your sails so when the wind blows in the opposite direction from where you are going toward, you can take down the sails and still paddle forward.
Dogs exist because we were kind enough to feed the wolves brave enough to come close to our fires at night.
Just like that our love has created gardens, and pizza, music and art.
We don’t just see the rainbow we create it.
There might not be much love without us.
We are here to bring love into the world because that’s who we are at our deepest.
We are the love that we desperately seek outside of us.
We need to bath the world in love and not look for love outside because it was always within us.
Of course, not literally.
But teach your ego new things, test your identity, go outside of your comfort zone, lose your self so new version can emerge, try new things.
Let pieces of your old self die every day so other versions of you can emerge.
Practice resurrection once in a while.
You are not a finished product that you can define, you are a process of becoming.
Every great thing that happened in my life happened because in one way or another, I was following my heart.
Everything good came out from me following my passions, the things that I loved doing. It all leads you toward the fruit of your love.
When you love you will be most vulnerable and there you will learn the greatest lessons in your life.
Also, you will find your greatest strength.
You are as strong as you are willing to be vulnerable, and loving demands you to drop ALL YOUR GUARDS!
It’s scary, especially if you get hurt.
It’s scary to let yourself be vulnerable again.
But quitting on love is the greatest fail in life.
All the fear in the world is not as bad as giving up your chance to love and be loved.
Love is always worth it one more chance.
In fact, opening to love is how you actually move forward in your own journey.
Usually the solutions to the most serious problems come out of play.
So when you don’t see a solution, get silly, play, think of the silliest way forward, it might be the way.
The world is more complicated than Good vs. Evil.
There are many shades in between and no matter how good you are, you will always be the villain in someone else’s story.
We project different villains upon others, so others also do that to you.
Nobody can survive if they believed what they are doing is evil.
We are great at justifying our actions.
Even the worst people in human history believed they are doing something for the greater good.
Nobody is evil, some people are just assholes.
“There is no spoon.”
There is always a way if you look beyond the system of The Matrix.
When the borders closed I had to enroll in university just so I can visit people I love.
There’s always a way and your mind is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Use it. Don’t comfortably accept the imposed limits. They are as real as we believe they are. All the systems in the matrix are simply illusions we choose to follow.
There is always a way, unconventional, muddy, but there is. Think outside of the matrix.
You cannot control what happens to you but you can choose whether or not the meaning you give that thing moves you forward.
When you understand this you will realize your greatest power in life, to give meaning to the things you can’t control so you still move forward.
You cannot stress and blame why the wind is not blowing in your direction, the wind doesn’t care.
What you can do though is adjust your sails. Let the wind blow. It has nothing to do with you.
Use everything in your advantage by giving it meaning that moves you forward.
What do I mean when I say The Greater Game?
The smaller game is the game where The Ego is player one, The Greater Game is the game where The Soul is player one.
In one game you are a loser, wasting all your life chasing things that do not last, seeking to capture illusions, trying to hold onto them until you lose everything in the end, and in the other game you live as you have already won and life is the reward.
In The Greater Game you do not compete you collaborate, create and go ALL IN for what you love.
You play by a different rules and that makes all the difference. When it is expected from you to hate, you love. When it is expected to seek vengeance, you forgive.
You happen to the world.
I wrote a whole book about this you can check it at www.playthegreatergame.com it will be out really soon!
Because even though if you happen to be wrong, you can learn.
But if you bail on your own self, you will destroy the faith you have in yourself, and that’s far worse than being wrong.
When you don’t trust yourself, you don’t trust the world, you cannot learn even when you are wrong.
There is a muscle to hold on to, to be strong, to focus, BUT there is also a muscle to relax, to let go, to let things flow without you controlling them.
Training them both is crucial.
If you go toward something don’t play not to lose, GO ALL IN, go for the win!
When you play not to lose you don’t play with your full potential, you limit your capability to be just above the bare minimum.
When you play to win you go ALL IN. You go for the first place, you go for what you really want. And when you do that you unleash secret reservoirs of potential you carry within.
And even if you don’t get to the 1st place you will be a lot closer than if you play not to lose.
You are the only one who limits yourself. You are also the only one who can unleash yourself.
Each emotion is telling you a message, but rarely who speaks the language of emotions.
Resisting the so called “Bad” emotions is what makes them bad and chasing the so called “Good” emotions is what screw you in life and makes you lost.
You are not actually listening to your inner GPS!
If you want to learn more go to www.emotionalmasteryprogram.com and look around!
We tend to complicate our lives more than they need to be.
In reality it’s really simple formula:
Test things, see what gives results and double on that.
NOT on what you think that works, but on what ACTUALLY works, on what the experiment showed it works!
Because there are 3 worlds.
The Natural world from what we evolved. We get our primal urges and drives from here. We all have to obey the rules of Nature one way or another. We cannot escape it because we ride in its meat suits.
The Human world that we all build together. This is a mix of all the worlds and there are certain dynamics and mechanisms that also apply here.
The Personal world that we all live in individually. In your personal world you can have countless ideas and think that all of them are great, but until you throw them out there into The Human world you will not really know what of them actually works and what just makes sense in your Personal world.
Many people will think they have good ideas, test them, and when these ideas do not work, they will think that it’s just not meant to be.
What they fail to realize is that the real world, The Human world has different dynamics than the ones they took in consideration for that idea.
The real world is much different than our personal world. That’s why testing, seeing what gives results and doubling on that is crucial. Nobody knows all the variables in play so experimentation is the only way.
The main purpose of your mind is to keep you alive by using bare minimum energy. Our minds will always choose the way of least resistance if we do not add conscious effort. They will always try to save energy.
That’s why our minds develop cognitive biases, programs that they can run in various situations without us thinking too much that, on average, give satisfying results.
Our minds find patterns, and when they find a pattern, they write an action script, a habit, a loop of steps we can follow without using energy to think again for similar situations.
However, all of these biases distort reality to an extent, just like water distorts the objects we see in it.
And our minds have over 200 mental biases that were officially reported and researched.
If you want to learn more about each of these 200 mental biases go here, I dive into each of those 200 and explain all of them with easy to understand real life examples and metaphors.
Discover all the tricks that your mind pulls on you.
That’s why depending and listening too much to your mind, it’s not smart. There were countless times I could bet that things were like I thought they were, but in reality I was sooo wrong.
I trusted my mind too much and believed a distorted version of reality that didn’t allow me to take right action for many things.
Most of your thoughts are not based on reality, most of them are echo of the world around you, some are spawns of your emotions and others are distorted reality.
Use your mind, don’t get used by it. Use your mind for information and creation, for innovation and strategy. But don’t let your mind tell you what reality is, because what it will say it’s just an illusion.
Face your fears and you will realize this!
We often underestimate the difficulty of things, for example, starting to workout or quitting a bad habit. On the other hand we overestimate how scary other things are, like approaching someone at the bar or doing a public presentation.
We might spend hours per night dreading the presentation we need to give the next day, and we will keep doing a bad habit saying that we can quit whenever we want.
But in reality, quitting a bad habit is much harder than we think, and giving our presentation is far less scary than we think. When you realize this you will adjust your actions.
The hard and brutal fact of life is that you will die.
We all will.
There is no safe road.
We all lose everything at the end, so why not go ALL IN for what you want while you are here?
You can fail at what you don’t want to do so what not give what you love a try?
There is no excuse!
You are not just alive, YOU ARE LIFE!
What do I mean with this?
Most of us are conditioned to believe that the world or life should serve us on a silver platter, that we are entitled to something.
The truth is that you were not sold on life. The sale’s team of life didn’t call you to negotiate with you to buy their life package. You weren’t promised anything and you didn’t ask for anything.
You were not given life, you ARE LIFE!
You are responsible for what you will give to yourself.
And you shouldn’t live in fear. Because if you are life than you do not experience death you just go away.
But while you are on the stage, act as LIFE!
Be alive!
Happen to the world instead of waiting for the world to fit your standards!
Show the world your way!
So many times I allowed people to tell me how much I should care for someone, if I didn’t get the same amount of love back I forced myself to not care.
I allowed others to dictate how I felt.
Well, love is not like that. You can’t let others decide for you, or calculate how much you feel based on their reaction.
When you love someone or something, YOU LOVE that thing or person.
It has nothing to do with anyone and it shouldn’t have.
You can pretend that you do not care and give away your greatest power or… you can give the love that you feel unconditionally!
And by doing that you will find freedom unlike you ever thought possible!
To love is your greatest power!
Others should not have a say, it’s your right to love as much and as hard as you want, not for anything nor to get anything back, but for the sake of loving!
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