i'm begging you to read philosophy

Introduction and Overview

00:00All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is why you should start reading philosophy. And as you can see from the overview, what we're going to be covering more specifically is first the overview itself.

00:11Then you already have a philosophy. The danger of a nameless philosophy reading gives you names. Philosophy lets you choose. Your life needs a highest idea, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. Now, before we get started, as always, if you want to work with me on improving every aspect of your life, meaning health, wealth, love, and self, make sure to book a call from the link in the description.

00:35If you want this document along with its respective training, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. We also host free coaching calls almost every Thursday on that platform. And finally, if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter from the link in the description.

00:57With that said, let's get started and talk about you already have a philosophy. So, you

You Already Have a Philosophy

01:04already have a philosophy. You've had one for years and you use it every single day. And the odds are that you've never really looked at at it directly before. So right now you're carrying a view of money, a view of love and a view of what your pain means and a view of yourself and a view of your health etc.

01:23You have a philosophy that encompasses your whole life. You never wrote any of it down yet shows up in every choice you make and it decides what you reach for and what you avoid before you even notice a decision is happening. Now somewhere in you sits a belief about what's possible for someone like you.

01:43uh for example, and that single belief sets the ceiling on what you'll even attempt this year, and you've probably never checked where it came from. There's also a belief about which desires you're allowed to have. For example, some wants feel clean to you, and others maybe feel greedy or somehow shameful.

02:00That sorting happens automatically and it's been running for a very long time. And these are just examples. There's countless of examples of what your personal philosophy of life is really affecting. And so part of why this stays hidden is the words you use for it.

02:18You don't call any of it philosophy. You might not call it that way, but you do have it. You call it common sense. You call it being realistic. You call it just the way life is. But it's life according to your philosophy. Some of it you filed under your personality as if you were born with it.

02:33A big chunk of what you call personality is really a stack of conclusions that you drew a long time ago. Old conclusions can be reopened, though, and that's exactly where things start to change. Now, another chunk sits filed under your past.

02:47One painful experience basically turned into a general rule about people or love or risk as examples. Now the event was real and the rule you built it built from it is really what deserves a fresh look now that you're older sometimes sometimes it doesn't you know sometimes our philosophy is actually our philosophy for life is bringing us success in the different domains of life and so not always we have to change everything but sometimes we do need to look under some under the hood essentially and look at what is controlling in our lives and sometimes that's our philosophy.

03:28Now whatever is left you basically call your standards or your type or your taste and those feel deeply personal and chosen. Now most of them arrive from outside of you and it takes real attention to notice that. Now if any of that sounds like a stretch, well your life can be the proof.

03:51For example, your own morning can be the proof of that. If you walk back through what you did in the first hour after waking up, you can see that every single action can be traced back to some idea about what matters most right now and what doesn't.

04:03For example, right? Take something as small as reaching for your phone before your feet hit the floor. Underneath that reach to a degree sits an idea about where good feelings come from and how much boredom you should have to tolerate. You never voted on that idea and yet it still won this morning.

04:27The same goes for what you ate today and how you felt about it afterwards. Right behind that meal lives a belief about your body and what it deserves from you. And there's also a belief about effort and about discipline. Right? Ideas this small end up shaping the whole day when nobody's watching them, including you.

04:47and look at what you worked on and what you kept pushing off. The thing you postponed almost always touches a belief about failure or judgment or being seen. And once you spot that, procrastination starts looking a lot less random. And these are just examples.

05:00Once again, your reactions expose it even faster than your choices do. Notice what offends you, what impresses you, and what makes you jealous. Notice how you talk about rich people or successful people. Notice how you talk about unsuccessful PE people as well.

05:18Each of those is a value judgment firing in real time. And so envy might be the most useful signal on that list. It points straight at something you want and have decided you can't have. And underneath it lives a belief about what's available to people like you.

05:31The people you look look up to work the same way, right? Whoever you admire is really a picture of what your current philosophy calls a good life. It's worth checking whether you actually agree with that picture or whether you swallowed that hole.

05:44Now, the natural question becomes where all of this came from. Almost none of it was chosen on purpose. Most people don't, you know, create a philosophy on purpose. Other people handed it to you piece by piece years before you had the tools to inspect any of it.

06:04And so, a lot of it landed before you even turned 10. You watched how the adults around you handled money or conflict or affection. And you took notes without knowing you were taking notes. You also watched what comments they made and how they talked about c certain people and certain uh philosophies basically without ne necessarily naming them.

06:25And so those notes hardened into rules while you were busy growing up. Now, kids absorb ideas without ever really evaluating them because they don't have the capability to evaluate ideas against other ideas yet. So, whatever the household believed about work or trust or money or God or ambition went straight in without filter.

06:47And if you listen closely, you can still hear those exact sentences playing in your head today. Money doesn't grow in trees, for example. Now, some rules formed as protection during moments that hurt. A kid might conclude that wanting things leads to disappointment.

07:04So wanting less feels safer. And so that rule made sense at seven and it might be costing you a fortune at 30. Now everything else arrived later through school, media, and whoever you spent your time around. Media especially is constantly pushing a certain philosophy on you, right?

07:17And every feed you scroll is a stream of tiny claims about what matters and who's winning. Every real, every short on YouTube, everything is really a stream of tiny claims of certain philosophies. And so if you see enough of them, they start to feel like your own opinions.

07:38And an idea repeated often enough begins to feel self-evident. It begins begins to feel true even though you haven't really examined it. And that's how slogans end up steering real decisions in real life. That's how countries are sometimes sometimes have a country philosophy, right?

07:57That's how propaganda works as well. Repetition does most of the convincing long before any actual argument shows up. And so your friend group also carries a shared philosophy. Belonging puts pressure on you to keep it. And so the need to belong at least.

08:15So if you question the group's take on let's say money or ambition or marriage or whatever you you'll feel the mood in the room change and most people notice that once and keep their doubts to themselves afterwards. So they just belong to a group even if they might disagree with the philosophy and they can only disagree with the philosophy and stay in the group for so long before they just accept the philosophy as theirs if they really want to belong.

08:43So, if you hold on to all of this, the rest of the video builds on it because there's one question that will show you the actual name of the idea running your whole life. And I'm going to hand it to you in the last section. So, before that lands properly, you need to see why leaving these beliefs unnamed is genuinely dangerous.

09:02And I don't mean dangerous in a dramatic sense, right? I mean years go going by while a belief you never chose makes your biggest calls. career, partner, money, health, all of it sits downstream of ideas you've never won inspected once inspected.

09:14And so nobody plans to drift. And yet drift is the default outcome here. Meaning a life that you don't want. A life built from unexamined ideas ends up looking like an accident, right? You'll feel the difference the moment you start naming things, which is exactly where we're going.

09:31Now, there's a time factor that most people ignore, too. A hidden belief gets more expensive every year. It stays in charge. So the rule that shaved a little courage off your 20s will take a much bigger cut off your 40s. And so what you'll walk away with, if you stay with me, is you'll be able to actually look at your own reactions and trace them back to actual ideas with actual names.

09:59And that one skill will change how you make decisions in every area of your life. Because once you can name what's actually driving you, confusion loses most of its most of its power. Situations that used to feel vague and murky will start making sense almost immediately.

10:13Your work, your relationships, your money, all of which will get easier to think about. And so you'll also start noticing which of your beliefs you'd actually defend out loud. And some will hold up under questioning and some won't. And so watching a false one fall apart is really one of the strangest and best feelings available to you.

10:31Now let's talk about the danger of

The Danger of a Nameless Philosophy

10:38an aimless philosophy. So let's get into the danger itself. And I mean danger in the plain practical sense. Everyone has a philosophy. We've established that much. The trouble starts when yours has no name. And a nameless philosophy can't really be seen.

10:51It can't be questioned. And it can't be replaced. And so a belief you can't see is really a belief you can't change. It could be flat wrong about people, money, or what you're capable of, and you'd have no way of really knowing. So, you correct an error in a visible belief the way you correct any other mistake.

11:04You first have to notice it, then you compare it against reality, and then you adjust. Invisible errors get no such treatment, right? By definition, so they keep producing the same bad results year after year. And that's why some people repeat one painful pattern for decades.

11:23A hidden conclusion sits underneath the pattern playing itself out again and again with different faces and different addresses. And so once you see the conclusion, the repetition finally makes sense. And what stays invisible also stays permanent.

11:36You can't replace an idea you've never really met. And so the belief keeps deciding for you year after year for as long as it stays unnamed. And this is a big part of why people can talk about their problems for years and change absolutely nothing.

11:48They're basically describing outcomes while the source stays out of view. And so naming the underlying idea is a different thing entirely and it's the one that actually really changes things. It also explains why willpower keeps failing you in the same spots because you've been fighting the behavior while the belief that produces it stays untouched and so effort aimed at the surface losses to the idea underneath it.

12:16Now the disguise gets worse though, right? An unnamed idea never shows up feeling like an idea. It shows up feeling like the truth about how things are. And so nobody really argues with what they take to be the truth, right? It makes sense.

12:28And whatever you absorbed earliest will also feel the most obvious now. So obviousness is actually a decent clue that you're standing on an old assumption. The things that you see see as obvious, right? And the things you'd never think to question are usually the ones most worth questioning.

12:47So try this on yourself sometime this week. Pick something you consider plain common sense about money or relationships and ask someone from a totally different background about it. And then see that their common sense will most likely contradict yours or at least will be different from yours.

13:07And both of you will feel completely certain. And so whole cultures disagree about what's obvious. Some treat ambition as a virtue and some treat it as a sickness. And it's that disagreement alone that should tell you that obviousness proves nothing about truth.

13:20Now, some of these ideas fuse with your sense of who you feel you are. And that's the deepest version of the trap because questioning the idea starts to feel like questioning yourself, an attack on you. So, you'll defend it with real emotion, including the ones that hurt you the most.

13:40And you've seen this in arguments where someone gets furious over what looks like an abstract point. The point was holding up a piece of their identity. And so rage in a debate usually marks the exact spot where a person's unnamed philosophy lives.

13:58And the encouraging part of all of this is you'll get to experience yourself, right? Once you separate an idea from your identity, you'll be able to drop it without feeling like you're losing yourself. People let go of decade old beliefs this way all the time and they describe the feeling as relief far more than loss.

14:21So what does a nameless philosophy actually do all day? It steers it controls. Every area of your life has a hidden idea directing it. And I want to give you a few concrete pictures of that. So let's take money for example. Take someone who absorbed early on that money corrupts people, right?

14:39That person will keep finding creative ways to stay broke and will experience every single one as bad luck. Watch them for 10 years and the pattern will repeat with startling precision. They'll undercharge. They'll avoid negotiating. They'll feel a a strange guilt whenever things start going well.

14:59And each move will look reasonable in isolation. together you see a philosophy. They form a strategy in service of a belief or a philosophy the person doesn't even know they hold. And so the strangest part is what they call it. They call it integrity or keeping it real or being above all that.

15:19A hidden belief will always recruit virtue as its cover story. Now let's take love and relationships for example. They run on the same hidden rules. Someone who learned early that they have to earn love through performance will treat every relationship like an audition.

15:39They'll essentially exhaust themselves for years and call it devotion. So you might recognize this one in yourself. The constant scanning of the other person's mood or the fear of being too much or the fear of being awkward or the running tally of who owes what.

15:59All of it flows from one early con conclusion about what love costs. And so a belief like this even shapes who feels attractive in the first place. The partners who confirm it feel like home and the ones who contradict it feel boring or suspicious.

16:17So the belief keeps collecting fresh evidence for itself. Now maybe the most expensive one is a hidden belief about your own mind. A person who concluded early that their judgment can't be trusted will outsource every big decision to whoever sounds confident and they'll collect opinions the way other people collect evidence, always looking for someone to tell them what to think.

16:35And so the advice keeps changing and the helplessness stay stays constant. And the problem was really never a shortage of information. And you'll notice that they treat confidence in others as proof of correctness. Loud certainty reads as truth to someone who doesn't trust their own reasoning.

16:55Now stretch all of this across time. The years are what make it truly expensive. So a hidden belief taxes every decision in its category for as long as it stays a hidden. And one unexamined rule about risk can shape 30 years of career choices without ever being noticed.

17:10So think about what one avoided conversation can cost across a whole marriage. or what not asking for a raise can cost AC across a career of salary negotiations. Being afraid to ask, right? So these small repeated costs turn into enormous totals and the belief that's generating them never gets noticed.

17:30And that realization is painful and it's also the beginning of everything good that comes after. And most deep regret traces back to unexamined beliefs. People rarely regret the risks their chosen values led them to take. They typically regret the things they didn't do.

17:51And so the lasting kind of regret comes from years spent obeying a rule that they never agreed to. The there's no neutral position in any of this. Right? You have a philosophy of your life. You are following a certain philosophy of life. And so skipping the choice hands it to whoever got to you first and they made it without asking you.

18:13So parents, teachers, strangers on the internet, set your defaults and some of them might mean well and some of them might be might not mean so well, right? Either way, none of them really knew you or the life you want to build. And the moment you see this clearly, something changes.

18:31You'll begin treating your world view as something you can actually work on. And that single change puts you ahead of almost everyone you know, since most people never even find out there's work to be done. and others are most of the time just arrogant, too arrogant to even question their own beliefs and their own choices.

18:50The people that are the least interested in philosophy are typically the ones that are most completely in its power. Ignoring the subject hands it total control over you. Even the person who says philosophy is useless is really making a philosophical claim.

19:02They just don't know which one, where they got it, and what it cost them. And so the dismissal itself is really an inherited idea doing its work. So some people are proud of being let's say practical and above all this thinking stuff. They see this as unnecessary.

19:15All this thinking stuff that's just do. Practicality is itself a philosophy right with a long history and a name. Philosophers have basically debated pragmatism for well over a century. And these people are living out a version of it without even knowing.

19:37And so their refusal to look protects them from absolutely nothing. When their hidden ideas contradict each other, they experience the clashes anxiety with no visible source or doubt or perfectionism sometimes. And so a lot of what gets called stress is really two unnamed beliefs contradicting each other.

19:55So the question becomes, how do you actually get your hands on these hidden beliefs? You can't name them from scratch since you'd be using the same mind they build. The answer is a lot of reading, even though a lot of you might not like that answer.

20:07And the next section is really about exactly why this works. And you need vocabulary from outside your own head. Thinkers from other centuries worked on these exact questions long before you were born. And their words are the tools you will use to find your own beliefs.

20:22And there's a specific way to read philosophy that makes all of this land much faster because most people read it the wrong way and give up within a week. I'll give you the right way and the actions at the end. So stay with me. With that said, let's actually cover reading gives you

Reading Gives You Names

20:40names. So the real reason to read philosophy is simpler than than most people make it. You read philosophy to discover the names of the forces already moving inside you. The material will feel strangely familiar from the very first page because it's essentially confirming everything you've lived through.

20:58Right? A name changes your entire relationship to a thing. Doctors know this, which is why a diagnosis brings relief even when the news are can be bad. And so that vague dread, for example, had a shape all along and now you can actually respond to it.

21:12An idea with a name is really an idea you can hold out in front of you and examine. The moment you can name something and label it and put attention on it, you create separation from it. And so you can now that you have separation, you can actually examine it and you can ask where it came from.

21:30You can ask who argued for it and who took it apart. You can see who argued against it and why. And so an idea without a name just operates on you from the dark. Well, while an idea with a name, you can actually see and examine. And you'll notice your self-standing getting sharper with every name you learn.

21:46And what used to be a fog of moods becomes a set of distinct positions and philosophies that you can evaluate one by one. And it's that precision alone that is worth the price of every book you'll ever buy. Now, the first shock of reading philosophy is really recognition because you you'll meet your own unspoken thoughts.

22:04All the things that have gone inside your head and have been swirling around there and you've never named now be are recognized and you'll see that someone wrote down what you've been thinking about on on a piece of paper a long time ago. So you will meet your own unspoken thoughts which someone wrote down centuries ago with more clarity than you ever gave them.

22:31And so it's a strange feeling and it it never really wears off. So you'll read a stoic line about controlling only your own judgment and realize you have believed that already. And now you know its name, its history and its strongest criticisms.

22:45Your accidental belief just became an examined one. And there's a real comfort in learning that your private confusion is an ancient human question. Thousands of years of serious people have stood exactly where you're standing and they wrote about it and their notes survived and you get to use them for your own benefit.

23:05You're essentially stealing time. You're essentially buying time. And where it gets really personal, a lot of what you've been calling your mood, your anxiety, your personality is actually a philosophical position that you've never really examined.

23:19That heavy sense that nothing matters, for example, the one that shows up at 2 a.m. has a name. It's nihilism. And serious thinkers have argued about it since the 1800s. Nichze spent his whole working life on it. And his answers are sitting on a shelf waiting for you.

23:32Knowing the name means knowing you're inside an old conversation. And the feeling turns from a private verdict on your life into a position with counterarguments. Counter arguments are exactly what you want at 2 am. Right? And entire books exist on ways through that exact state.

23:51You don't have to invent your own way from scratch. Serious people already worked out responses and reading reading is really how you get to to use them. And the pull towards comfort and pleasure as the answer to everything has a name too. Hedonism.

24:03And that's a real position with a real philosophy behind it with real defenders and real problems. And the Greeks were debating it more than 2,000 years ago. Epicurus himself ended up arguing that simple pleasures beat intense ones, which surprises everyone who actually reads him.

24:24So, psychology later confirmed a lot of what philosophy suspected here. Pleasure fades fast and resets to a baseline, which researchers call hedonic adaptation. Philosophy predicted your restlessness centuries before your habits proved it. And once you can see hedonism as a position, for example, you'll be able to decide how much of it you actually endorse.

24:42Maybe you keep some of it on purpose. Keeping part of it deliberately is completely different from being dragged around by it. And that instinct you have to tough things out and control your reactions is also named unnamed tradition. Right?

24:55Stoicism traces back to a merchant named Zeno who basically lost everything in a shipwreck around 300 BC and started teaching on a painted porch in Athens. And you've been improvising fragments of his school without the most useful parts. And the gym guys posting Marcus Aurelius quotes are working with maybe 5% of the the real material.

25:18The actual tradition covers judgment, desire, action, etc. as one connected practice. So reading the source hands you hands you the whole thing and half understood stoicism turns into emotional suppression pretty fast as well as any other philosophy that you misunderstand can turn negative very quickly.

25:38Right? The real thing separates what you feel from what you agree to act on which is a far more workable idea. So getting the real version will save you years of doing the fake one. And so what I'm trying to say is that once you start reading you'll find that most positions a human can hold already have names and long histories.

25:50Materialism, idealism, determinism are all worked out positions with centuries of argument behind them. Each one is alive somewhere in how you already think. For example, take the question of whether you could have done otherwise. Determinism says every event follows from prior causes and versions of it show up in modern neuroscience debates.

26:11Whenever you excuse yourself by deciding you were simply born this way, you're taking a side in that debate. For example, right? So your position here decides how much responsibility you will take for your own change, how much accountability essentially you'll take.

26:30And so a hard determinist and a believer in free will run completely different lives. Most people hold both positions at once and switch depending on convenience. Now reading the actual debate will force you to pick your ground and defend it, and you might land on compatibilism.

26:42Wherever you land, your excuses and your ambitions will finally have to answer to the same standard. Then there's the giant question of what makes an action good, right? Three big answers dominate the whole field. Consequences, duties, or character.

26:55And you already lean on one of them every time you judge anyone. So if you weigh results when you defend a hard choice, you're borrowing from bentham and mill. Utilitarianism has a name. It has a literature. It has some famous problems involving runaway trolleys.

27:13And you'll enjoy finding where your own version breaks. If you care more about what kind of person an action reveals, then you're closer to Aristotal. He argued that you could build character through repeated action, habit by habit. So your gym discipline and his ethics are nearer cousins than you'd expect.

27:31And the modern stuff speaks directly to the feelings you get scrolling at midnight as well. Existentialism says existence comes first and you build the meaning yourself with Camas as a famous name within that place. Now, Camas opened one of his books by calling the question of whether life is worth living the only truly serious philosophical problem.

27:44And that school will really hand you both the weight and the freedom of self-made meaning. And nobody's coming with a preassigned purpose for you. Existentialists treat that as as the starting point. And their books read like manuals for what to do next.

28:01So, CAM specifically will teach you what to do when the universe stays silent. His answer involves defiance and full engagement with life anyway. So, you'll be surprised how practical it feels for a French writer working in the in the 1940s.

28:14Now, one more thing about reading before we move on. People get this wrong constantly. Philosophy hands you better questions and the questions do more work than the answers. A good question will reorganize your thinking faster than some kind of a conclusion that somebody handed you.

28:29So, Socrates built his whole method on this and he never wrote a single book himself. He just asked people to define the things they claimed to know like courage or justice and they discovered on their own that they couldn't and that discovery changed them more than any lecture would have.

28:48So you'll be able to run that same method on yourself. Define success as you're actually living it. The struggle to do that will teach you more about your hidden philosophy than a month of journaling. You can journal during it too when you ask yourself that question.

28:59Getting comfortable with with not knowing is really a skill and it pays off everywhere. The pretense of certainty takes enormous energy to maintain and dropping it frees that energy for actual thinking. So here's the future you can expect if you actually do this.

29:11You will catch yourself mid-reaction and recognize the position underneath it. Arguments, purchases, career moves. You'll see the ideas driving each one before they actually finish driving. Conversations will change first. You'll basically hear the hidden premises and what people say, which makes both persuasion and empathy easier.

29:30And listening turns into a completely different activity as well when you can actually hear the philosophy underneath the words and your decisions will change right after. You'll be able to ask whether a choice serves your chosen values or an old inherited reflex.

29:42And that single check if you run it consistently will redirect the entire course of your life. With that said, let's actually cover why

Philosophy Lets You Choose

29:55philosophy lets you choose. So everything so far has been a diagnosis, right? So now we get to the part where you take over. Now, naming a philosophy breaks its grip on you. Once you can hold an idea out in front of you, you get to decide whether it stays.

30:07So, remember how we said that an unnamed belief feels like reality itself? Well, naming it demotes it from reality to opinion. And an opinion can be inspected, tested, kept or thrown out. And you'll get to do all four. Now, the name creates distance between you and the idea.

30:27So from that distance, you can finally ask what whether it's actually true, where it came from, and what it's producing in your life. And nobody can do that while they're still inside the belief. So testing an idea is way simpler than it sounds.

30:39You just follow it forward and look at what it builds over the next 10 years. Look at the people who live by it fully and check whether you'd want their lives. That's the way you test an idea. So you need a standard for what stays and what goes.

30:53So, here's mine. Keep the ideas that make you stronger, clearer, and more honest with yourself. An idea that requires you to shrink, hide, or lie has no business keeping a place in your head. And so, some beliefs push you to act, to build, to face things directly.

31:14Others hand you permission slips for avoiding your own life. And you'll know which one is which within a week of watching yourself. And give reality a vote, too. A belief that keeps predicting wrongly has told you everything you need to know about it.

31:26Loyalty to a broken idea is expensive sentimentality and you're allowed to end it. So let's look at what most people are actually living and I lived this too. Most people never really choose a philosophy. They inherited one. A little childhood fear, a little school conditioning, a little internet cynicism, all held together by whatever hurt them most.

31:46Now the pieces don't agree with each other. And that's the real problem. One fragment says money proves your worth, while another says wanting money is shallow and greedy and selfish. You can't win with both rules in play. And both of yours have been in play for years.

32:00And that torn feeling that you get around big decisions is usually two fragments that are contradicting each other. From the inside, it reads as anxiety underneath. It's really a debate that you're not having. You're never been allowed to watch, let alone judge.

32:18So serving contradictory rules and ideas and philosophies burns energy all day every day. People blame their tiredness on schedules and screens, but a big portion of it is really philosophical and no amount of sleep will fix it. You can trace where the fragments came from and you essentially lose all loyalty to them.

32:36A cynical teacher, for example, or a wounded parent or a stranger online who wanted your attention, none of these sources had your flourishing in mind. and yet their sentences still get a say in your own head. So your current worldview is largely an accident of geography and timing.

32:50If you were born somewhere else, you'll hold different certainties with the same total conviction. And so you'll want to go through the collection piece by piece. Ask of each belief where it actually came from and whether its source deserves your trust.

33:08And you'll be shocked how many fail that one basic check. Now choosing means more than collecting nicer fragments, though, right? You'll want to build an actual hierarchy with your most important value on top and everything else arranged underneath it.

33:22Structure is really what turns a pile of opinions into a philosophy. Right? So a hierarchy settles conflicts before they start. When two good things, for example, collide, they collide constantly. And the higher one typically wins automatically.

33:39So most of your daily agonizing only exists while the ranking is missing. So say you rank truth above comfort explicitly and in writing. So the next hard conversation gets gets a lot simpler because you now value you've told yourself you value truth above comfort.

33:58Avoiding it would mean demoting your top value. You'll still feel the discomfort and you'll act anyway. So decisions get faster once the ranking is clear. People with ordered values settle in minutes what takes others months of polling their friends.

34:15And so you can watch anyone you consider decisive and you'll find an explicit hierarchy underneath. Now to be clear, choosing once doesn't necessarily mean choosing forever. So you'll revise as you learn. Your values can be updated the way any serious thinker does.

34:34So, a chosen philosophy stays alive through re-examination and revision is part of the deal. The philosophy that serves you at 25 will need amendments at 40. And life will keep producing situations that your current framework hasn't met yet.

34:49So, updating on new evidence is the discipline that separates being convinced of of your philosophy from being stubborn. Now what stays constant is really that you're the one deciding. So ideas will keep arriving from everywhere and that never stops.

35:10So the difference is that from now on they'll actually go through inspection before they get any say in your life. And here's what all of this adds up to and it's the sentence I most want you to remember. Reading philosophy turns your world view view from an accident into a decision.

35:28And everything you'll ever build really rests on that choice. Picture the accident version plainly. It's where nearly everyone stays for life. A collage you didn't make. Running your biggest choices assembled by people who never met you. Whole friend groups hold identical unexamined views and reinforce them every weekend.

35:49And staying there builds you on every misaligned action, right, and decision. Wrong career, wrong pace, wrong measures of success. And that bill arrives so slowly that most people don't connect it to their to its source. And it does feel comfortable.

36:01I'll grant that. Right? Everyone around you agrees. So nobody ever challenges anything. Comfortable but completely unchosen. Now picture the chosen version which is available to you starting today. Beliefs you can name ranked in an order you decided revised as you grow.

36:21When someone asks you why you live the way you live, you'll have an actual answer. You'll know why. So, chosen values hold up under pressure in a way that the ones that you've inherited from others can't. Because the ones you've inherited, you can't actually defend.

36:36You don't even know what they are, let alone defend them. And so, when a crisis hits, you already know what you believe since you since you did the choosing ahead of time with a clear head. And people who skip this find out what they believe mid crisis, which is the worst possible moment for that discovery.

36:54There's also a specific self-respect that only comes from from this. It's the difference between renting your worldview and actually owning it because you feel it within weeks of starting and you won't want to hand it back. So finally, let's cover your life needs a highest idea.

Your Life Needs a Highest Idea

37:19So we've arrived at the deeper layer or deepest layer of this. The one I promised you at the start. Every life organizes itself around some highest idea. Whether the person knows it or not, something is sitting at the top of yours right now.

37:32It's your the top value at the top of your hierarchy. Right? And everything underneath bends around that top value. Now your values sit in a stack one on top of another. When two of them conflict, one wins and the winner reveals the ranking.

37:49And you've been living out a ranking your whole life without ever seeing the actual list. So every time you choose, let's say, sleep over the workout or the safe answer over the true one, it's the hierarchy, right? Individual choices feel small and forgettable.

38:06If you add them up across a year, they spell out your actual highest value with embarrassing clarity. So, your real philosophy shows up in your calendar and your bank statement as well. And your real philosophy can show up in your calendar and in your bank statement as well.

38:18Those two documents record every conflict your values ever had and who won each time, right? They never flatter and they don't lie either because it's just reality. It's objective reality. So, the candidates for the top spot are fewer than you think.

38:37It's typically comfort, approval, pleasure, truth, and then you can add safety, love, power, maybe God, and you've covered most human lives ever lived. Now, these are not the only values that exist. And I actually implore you to look at what other values there are in life and decide what your hierarchy is ahead of time and spell it out actually and sit down and think about it and write about it.

39:11But these are the some of the most common ones, right? And whole civilizations organized themselves around one of these. Medieval Europe put God at the aics and spent centuries building cathedrals on that ranking. Modern consumer culture runs a different aics and you can read it off any billboard.

39:34So individuals work exactly the same way at a smaller scale. A person with approval on top lives a pretty recognizable kind of life. If you put truth up there, that same life reorganizes within a year. Not truth towards others only but towards oneself.

39:52So let me show you what the top slot actually does. This is where it turns practical and concrete. The highest idea really sets the exchange rate for everything else in your life. So you trade away every lower value whenever it conflicts with the one above it.

40:11Right? So if you put approval at the top, you can see what happens to truth. Truth becomes negotiable the moment it risks disapproval. So a person can spend decades editing themselves this way and call it being easygoing. And you'll recognize this pattern by its symptoms.

40:30Opinions that actually change with the audience or apologies for taking up space or achievements chosen for how they'll sound at dinner. the person underneath gets thinner every year while the performance gets more polished because of because they're actually just performing, right?

40:48And they are going for approval at the top. And so the end state is really a person that nobody actually knows, including themselves. They don't know themselves. Plenty of acquaintances and no real witnesses to their actual life. And that's the full price of that particular appex.

41:06Now run comfort at the top and growth itself starts registering as a threat. You start judging every challenge by how it feels in the first 10 minutes and so entire decades can actually disappear into that filter. The comfortable life contracts a little each year and the contraction feels so reasonable that you don't even notice it, right?

41:25You skip the trip, you decline the project, you avoid the conversation. And each of those is defensible on their own. And together they basically leave a life far smaller than you intended. The strange part is that comfort warship doesn't even deliver comfort most of the time.

41:39That's the paradox. Chronic low-grade regret is itself deeply uncomfortable. And so regret is the standard long-term product of comfort as the highest value. Now put truth or self-respect up top and watch the same trade start working in your favor because your excuses will start dying within days.

42:04Why? Because you're now truthful towards yourself. You're start telling yourself the actual truth since excuses need a higher value to hide behind. Right? Hard conversations, honest assessments, real numbers, all of it will get easier under the new ranking.

42:19Fair warning here, your ego pays first, right? Truth at top means being wrong out loud and updating in public sometimes. And that cost can be real to to your ego and it buys you a mind that people can actually trust starting with you. And the gains tag the same way the losses did under the old rank ranking.

42:41Better information will lead to better decisions and better decisions will build you a better life. And two years in, you won't even recognize the person who used to to hide away from these honest numbers. And now the question I promised you at the beginning, the one that names your current philosophy.

42:55Look at what you refuse to trade away when everything is on the line. Whatever you protect at any cost is your highest idea and its character is the character of your whole philosophy. So run your last three big decisions through this check.

43:18Find what each one protected when things got hard. The common element across all three is most likely sitting at your apex right now. And the first answer you come up with will probably be flattering and at the same time wrong. So you need to push past it to what to what the evidence of your actual behavior shows.

43:37And the real answer tends to arrive with a small sting. And the sting is how you'll know it's true. So do this on paper since memory is always pretty fragile and will negot negotiate with you otherwise. Write the three decisions with each one protected and a common thread.

43:49And then you'll see that 10 minutes of this will beat a year of vague self-reflection. Now, whatever you find, skip the shame. Right? This is not the point here. You never chose that ranking. So, you don't owe the old results any guilt. From here forward, the choosing is yours and so are the results.

44:10Now, there's a real lightness waiting on the other side of this diagnosis, right? Because the struggle will finally have a shape and name. And not only will you have read philosophy, but now you're going to know what kind of philosophy you've been living with and you have given it a name and you can now tackle it with the knowledge you gained or the knowledge you're about to gain.

44:28And also named problems can actually be worked on, right? And yours is about to have a name. And people overestimate how long this reordering takes. The seeing really happens in an afternoon and then the behavior starts following within weeks because they're they're finally clear.

44:46A year from now, the difference will be visible to people who don't even know what you did. Choose the top slot on purpose and then take your time with it. This is the God term of your entire life. The highest value orders everything beneath it.

45:06So pick it slowly and deliberately and everything you build afterward will rest on it and audition the serious contenders against your actual life. So truth, growth, love, self-respect. For each one, project 10 years forward and look at what that ranking builds and what it costs you.

45:25Now the 10-year test cuts through all the noise, right? Because if you put approval at the top for 10 years, it produces one very specific life and you've already seen previews of it of it. If you run the same projection for truth and growth, you notice which future you actually want to live in.

45:43Certain candidates will feel heavy the moment you imagine serving them for a decade. And the one that produces both fear and appetite at the same time is usually the true answer. And then you need to make it concrete. So your highest idea should be visible in your calendar within a week.

46:02It should change at least one recurring decision immediately or you've chosen words that and called them values but you are not actually living them. So your virtues need to align with your values. Now the virtues are the actions you take in order to meet your values.

46:20So build one daily checkpoint where you actually apply the ranking. One deliberate hour will start pulling the other 23 into line. Pick someone who will actually check on it and give them permission to be annoying about it. And if you need someone, then make sure to book a call from the link in the description.

46:40Now, that said, let's actually cover the review. We covered the overview. We covered you already have a philosophy,

Review

46:46the danger of a nameless philosophy. Reading gives you names. Philosophy lets you choose. Your life needs a highest idea, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. With that said, so first sit down tonight

Action Items

47:00with a paper and write out the philosophy you're already living by using your last three big decisions as evidence and then let the first draft be ugly and embarrassing since accuracy matters a lot more than being flattering yourself here. And after tonight, the thing running your life will finally have a name.

47:18Then pick one serious philosophy book this week. And here's the reading method I promised you. Read one chapter at a time and stop at every line that actually makes sense to you or stings since that sting is really what marks a spot where the book found one of your hidden beliefs and then hunt for the ideas that expose you.

47:37Finally, decide what belongs at the top of your life and write it somewhere you'll see every morning. Then cut one belief this month that contradicts it, starting with whichever one costs you the most. Your calendar should show the new ranking within 7 days.

47:52And that's the only proof that actually counts. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it brought a lot of value. If it did, make sure to let me know in the comments. Make sure to subscribe, like the video, etc. If you want to work with me oneonone, make sure to book a call from the link in the description.

48:10If you want this training along with this respective document, make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. And finally, if you want weekly newsletters helping you improve every aspect of your life, then make sure to join the free newsletter again from the link in the description.

48:22Once again, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.