Rest – Alex Soojung, Kim Pang

Find Meaning

The Principles

“Once you understand the game, you begin completing a series of quests – that form a storyline – to gain experience. As you gain experience, new opportunities become available to you. You unlock dungeons. You can join a guild. You can travel to new locations to complete different quests. In the real world, we often aren’t aware of what these opportunities can be, so we choose to remain stagnant, comfortable, and ignorant.”

Self-experimentation leads to true experience, and true experience is how you differentiate yourself in the marketplace.

💡No idea is too sacred to question, and the more sacred it seems, the more it should be questioned.

Don't judge things that you have not experienced.

Things aren’t supposed to be anything other than what they are, and once you accept this, expectation aligns with reality.

💡It is obvious that the only way to make novel discoveries, creations, and innovations is to embrace the unknown, preferably with curiosity as your driver toward a meaningful goal.

Success cannot exist without failure.

It is wise to try new things, and I would recommend adopting that habit, but you need a project to develop.
→Without a tangible vessel for your knowledge, skill acquisition, and discoveries, you may end up with years of energy spent with nothing to show for it.

If you are a truth seeker, your job is to hunt for kernels of truth in every perspective, even those that aren’t human.
→This forces you to reject all ideology, dogma, or belief system that even the masters may hold as absolute truth.
→This is the only path to sustainable peace, enjoyment, and wisdom.

You don’t get rid of the ego; you develop it to the point of being at one with reality.

In business, close the client even if you don’t know with certainty that you can deliver results. In life, book the flight across the country even if you don’t think you can afford it.
→Make the decision that requires you to finally execute reaching your next stage of evolution.

Self-education, self-reliance, self-experimentation, self-control, self-reflection, self-awareness, self-employment, and self-management. Those traits are to be prioritized.

The 3 Pillars

💡Study the patterns of successful people.

Every successful person by any standard, even if that version of success means rejecting the world and living a life of peace in the woods, knows that focus is the catalyst to the good life.

Focus is a muscle, and success is reserved for those that train it.

1. Focus

• Attention is the currency that runs the world. It is the foundation of existence. If it doesn’t occupy your attention, it doesn’t exist.
• In a modern sense, businesses can only exchange money if attention comes first.
• Religions are only as powerful as the amount of people that give said beliefs attention.
• Corporate pyramids have more people with less power at the bottom, and less people with more power at the top.→The top holds more power because attention-demanding tasks are delegated to those beneath them.

2. Energy

• “Energy flows where attention goes.”

3. Experience

• If you continue solving your own problems, or correcting your past mistakes, a positive future is inevitable.

Evolution is restricted by the unconscious individuals that don’t take responsibility for their lives. →Take responsibility of your life.

Start identifying your problems that make life less enjoyable. Seek to understand how you can fix those problems. When you do, learn how to fix them, and fall in love with this process.
→Success in life, business, relationships, and health is about solving a never-ending string of problems that gets better, and more rewarding, with time.

You have 2 options in this life: create something bigger than yourself and let it impact the world, or regress into your animalistic nature of reaction, viciousness, and lack of reason.

The Universe

If you are in a low point in life, seek to see the big picture. understand that the lows are not permanent.

Be wary when things are going to well.
→If you are in a comfortable state of mind, you aren’t making progress.

It’s not a battle, but a dance.

Reinvent Yourself

The Self

💡If you don’t define your own goals, standards, and expectations for success, you may end up a slave to someone else’s.

🔑If you wait until you feel passionate enough to act, you will never discover what is truly meaningful to you.

If you stop making progress, you begin to feel less satisfied with life, and if it drags on too long, the pain can be unbearable.
→Why? Because you subconsciously know that you are wasting the mental currency you’ve invested in a goal by not achieving it.
→If you don’t have the feedback of progress to remind you that you are on the right path, you begin to feel lost.

Intention is a magnet toward a desired future that is enhanced with reason.

The Game

Life is a game and the select few that are aware of its existence are the ones that can play to win, maximize their enjoyment, and sleep well, knowing that they are in control of their future.

If you don’t focus your mind on what you want, it will be focused on what others want for you.

Be wary of those that put a clear path in front of you. In a world where the masses flock toward the promise of a certain future, a wise decision is to embrace the uncertain nature of life itself and create your own certainty through focus.

The Lens

Rather than becoming attached to a specific way to doing things, see it for what it is, a perspective in a subjective reality. When you study different perspectives, you are collecting lenses for your camera.

Life is a mind game, and if you don’t have the skill, you won’t be able to continue playing. Your quality of life is dependent on the quality of games you choose to play, because those demand a specific quality of mind to play them. Beware that this path is a beautifully painful one. A certain level of mind breeds a certain level of loneliness. With every level of mind there are less people occupying that state. But when you find them, the connection you have is one that lasts a lifetime.

If we want to see your problems for what they are, you must learn the art of zooming out.

Human understanding, which has a direct correlation with quality of life, comes down to asking quality questions.

Realize the source of enjoyment is clarity.

The Formula

Anyone can dig into the experiences of their past, generate a potent energy source within them, and focus that energy though action toward an intrinsic hierarchy of goals.
→This is the secret of the disciplined and successful.

First, become brutally aware of 2 things:

1. what you don’t want.
2. Where you will end up if you keep doing what you’ve been doing.

Create an anti-vision for your future. Write out every single thing you don’t want, why you don’t want it, and how you are going to avoid it.

• What does an unfulfilling day look like to you?
• What kind of person would you avoid as a significant other?
• How do you want to look, feel, and act?
• How much money is too little to sustain your lifestyle? Why is it too little?
• What won’t you be able to do with that money?
• What environment would you hate living in? Why?

The foundation of human behavior is purpose-oriented problem solving, and if you don’t find a purpose with meaningful problems to solve, you will be assigned a purpose with mindless problems to solve.

To open up room for curiosity, creativity, and consciousness, you must master your survival.

With time, our goal is to acquire as much perspective as we can, broadening ours to that of the Universe to realize that All is One.

💎If you’re lost, the answer is education. If you’re educated, the answer is execution. If you’re executing, the answer is consistency.

Do the thing that other people will think are you crazy for doing, because that’s how you make leaps of meaningful progress.

4 paths to take to pursue your curiosity further:

1. appreciate it for what it is.
2. Seek to understand it.
3. Master it.
4. Monetize it.

Create your Ideal Future

The Shift

We are all here to maximize our human experience. That’s it.

The first lesson of any teaching should be to encourage the questioning of any teaching.
The second should be to lean into the curiosity that will allow you to fail the fastest.
From there, we can include topics on persuasion, mental models, research skills, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship as vessels for applying any skill the induvial may learn.

💡If business professors understood the changing business landscape, they would have a business.

Knowledge not found in schools is the source of money not found in employment; and the internet has democratized wealth generation for those that take responsibility for their education, skill acquisition, and self-promotion.

🔑The future demands that we earn with our mind, not our time.

You must expand, organize, and focus your mind in an iterative nature as you solve local, social, global, and potentially cosmic problems and beyond, in that order.

The future of work will not be work. It will be play.

Entrepreneurship is about leveraging your stack of skills, unique story, and finite focus to create a life of meaning.

Everyone is a consumer, yes, but as the dualistic nature of life goes, one must also become a creator so that extreme consumerism doesn’t overtake their potential.

The New Rich

Happiness is a skill. It is not given but created.
→As with all skills, it must be practiced, refined, and adopted as a part of your life.

Every great success comes after great failure.
If you want to be happier, you need to expose yourself to more negative experiences that allow you to create the positive ones.
→Through an equal and often more painful past.

You don’t want absolute freedom, you want autonomy.
→Freedom implies a lack of structure, where autonomy is your ability to choose within a structure.

Writers from multiple domains like Hemingway, Tarantino, and Ogilvy would spend the majority of their days lounging by the pool, talking to beautiful women, and doing everything aside from what they deemed work.
→They gave room for the creative emergence of ideas that fueled the impact of their work.

3 things to consider for maximum mental output, creativity, life enjoyment:

1. how will you fill your mind
2. how you empty your mind
3. how you use your mind

It is up to you to create a daily system with time and practice. If your energy is highest in the morning, schedule your work around that. The same goes for night owls.
→Gain awareness of when your natural energy is highest and use that time for narrow-focused output.

The Skill Stack

The state of work is changing. Specialists are out, but so are generalists. We live in a time of specialized generalism. You must pursue your curiosity, become obsessed with one crevice of reality, stack skills to solve burning problems within that domain, and let the base of your skill tree spread its roots into other connected domains.

You need 3 things:

1. A valuable message
2. A medium for distribution
3. A results-oriented skills for delivering a transformation
   →Then, we can eliminate competition through individuality and compound results with our increasing ability to solve creative problems.

A valuable message is a way to communicate with others that is relatable, understandable, or actionable. If it isn’t perceived as valuable, it won’t capture attention.

You have to learn how to capture attention if you want anything(including money) from someone else.

Value is determined by perception.

💡The world’s most successful people are those that use unethical skills in an ethical manner.

Humans find meaning in transformations, and if you want to gather people that find value in what you have to offer, base the message you put out around an implied “before and after” with a clear path in between.

Your job is to understand a specific group of people, study their problems, reflect on your experience from solving your own, and create a solution in the form of a product to help them reach the next stage.

The valuable message you craft should educate, entertain, and inspire others to solve their problems and actualize their potential.

The Project

Everyone is an entrepreneur; some just choose to get paid for the problems they solve in their personal life.

You become an entrepreneur when you take your projects public.
→And remember, you are the ultimate project.

The path to the good life is simple: actively pursue your idea lifestyle, create solutions to problems along the way, and get paid for sharing that solution with others.

The Vessel

💎Information is the primary resource of modern success.

Reading, watching, and listening to information that challenges your current ideas, beliefs, and philosophies must become a cornerstone habit in your day, because you may grow attached to those ideas and your self will cease to make progress.
→From this we realize that happiness is not found at the top of the mountain, but in getting better at climbing to new peaks of a mountain that is infinitely tall.

Information leads to awareness of opportunity.→Awareness of opportunity leads to valuable ideas.→Valuable ideas to lead to positive behavior change, not only in yourself, but in others.→Positive behavior change ripples from individuals to community to society and beyond.

Everything is information, or in formation.

The future belongs to those who occupy the most mental real estate with their ideas.

The future belongs to those that can capture and hold attention with valuable information for the most amount of time possible.

Resources & Inspiration

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

• Expanding the perspective on what it takes to live an enjoyable life.
• The pioneer of the “flow” philosophy.
• A starting point for reversing “psychic entropy”. – Flow

David Deida

• Notice spiritual patterns in more than just emotional intelligence.

Eckhart Tolle

• The Power of Now
• A New Earth
• Introduction to non-ideological spirituality.
• Recontextualization of God.

Ken Wilber

• A Brief History of Everything
• Kosmic Consciousness
• Mental model for making sense of the nonsensical.

Naval Ravikant

• See wealth and happiness from a big picture perspective.

Alan Watts

• Spirituality YouTuber

Anthony De Mello

• Awareness
• Understanding what true spirituality is.
• ‘If I could recommend one book to read for the rest of your life, with the goal of being happy, this would be it.’