Personal Growth

I'll suggest to you that there are two different kinds of people...

1. Peak experience junkies - Who need to travel to awesome places, eat at amazing restaurants, have the most interesting friends, hang out at the hottest nightclubs, have an amazing sex life, go snowboarding in Vail and surfing in Bali, along with accomplishing big goals in business to enjoy life. 
2. Amusement junkies - Those who are content with a life of pedestrian pleasures like watching TV, playing video games, scrolling social media, drinking beer, smoking weed, and hanging out with their family and the people they grew up with.

I used to think that anyone could become a peak experience junkie and enjoy a more lively life, but now I'm not sure. I've seen enough people who clung steadfastly to mundane amusement, shying away from the risks that peak experiences entail. However, if you genuinely want more peak experiences in your life there's a formula that I'll break down here...

Do you find motivation elusive?

Do you start a new project and work intensely for a few days, weeks, or months only to lose steam before seeing the project through to fruition?
Here we’ll break down seven mental hacks for mastering motivation...

This episode covers some powerful tools and tech to accelerate your language learning.

Along with how to be charming in a language you barely know and I finish up by sharing two awesomely embarrassing moments of culture shock.

In this episode, I'm joined by a 20-year veteran of the US Navy SEALs, Commander Mark Divine.

Mark operates SEALFIT, a firm that physically and psychologically prepares Special Forces candidates with a 100% placement rate. We discuss everything from Hell Week and gamifying situational awareness to warrior meditation and preparing to hike Machu Pichu.

In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Cory Reddish a Naturopathic Doctor, Entrepreneur, and infamous enabler of people having a damn good time at Burning Man.

We are going to be discussing 18 life hacks for rock-solid self-control along with how to biohack the negative effects on our minds from consuming alcohol and even hard party drugs. It also includes a quick interview with Dr. Kelly Goldsmith, author of the landmark study on self-control, When Guilt Begets Pleasure: The Positive Effect of a Negative Emotion.

It makes you unproductive, unhappy, and impulsive.

From the abstract of a notable 2010 study on exactly this:

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

I agree with this, I try to avoid mind wandering most of the time. As an Entrepreneur (trying my damnest to claw my way out of the middle class!), digital nomad, and now an expat and family man, I've never known life without constant struggle and challenge. Personally, whenever I let my mind wander it gravitates to something that worries me. Unless you just have a boringly comfortable life, your mind wandering is going to inevitably lead to unproductive worrying. Meditation certainly helps with this but Dual N-Back training is the best tool I've ever found for mastering one's mind.

Before we talk about accelerated language acquisition, using some exciting technologies, Memory Systems, Dual N-Back, and SuperMemo, let's talk about accelerated personal development.

Why is it that some people languish in personal development purgatory for years or decades while other people read a book, take a course, listen to a podcast, apply the knowledge, and get meaningful (or profitable!) results fast?

The most practical, measurable, and non-woo-woo answer to this conundrum is that the person who gets more results faster has a mind with healthier Neuroplasticity mechanisms. Neuroplasticity is a chemical process that occurs on the molecular and cellular levels of our brain's grey matter, it results in new brain cells being manufactured and synaptic connections forming in the mind.