Transcription
Hey, this is Leo for Actualized.org, and in this episode, I'm going to be talking about strategic thinking.
How to be a strategic [Music] [ __ ].
This is a very important, very foundational episode because what I'm going to tell you here is going to make or break the rest of your life. Most people's lives suck due to a lack of strategic thinking. On the other hand, successful people are highly strategic thinkers.
I listened to a course by the Teaching Company, which I highly recommend, by the way. It's like a 30-hour course on strategic theory. It talks about military strategy, business strategy, sports strategy, and it was taught by Stanley Ridgley, PhD. He's a professor who's been studying military theory for years, and he did this long and amazing course.
As I was sitting there and listening to this course a couple of years ago, I was also thinking about self-actualization and what I'm doing with Actualized.org. I was putting the pieces together, and it just blew my mind how much strategic thinking goes into self-actualization. Everything that this professor was talking about from military theory and business theory, which has been studied for now hundreds of years, applies to our personal lives as well, especially to self-actualization.
You see, in the fields of military, business, and professional sports, there's a long history of studying strategy because these fields are highly competitive and very demanding. They demand tangible, concrete results. Those people that win military victories, win in business, and win in sports are like the best of the best. The stakes are very high.
We've also got a pretty long history now—a multi-year history of military campaigns that humanity has waged on itself—that can be studied and picked apart. We can find the lessons from all those things and distill the principles that work. We've also got a couple of hundred years of serious hardcore business that has been happening, and we can study those principles and break them apart. Additionally, we have maybe a hundred years of professional sports now that we can analyze to find the juiciest principles.
What's amazing is that all these apply to your personal life. I want you to think of yourself as a general standing on a battlefield. Your task is not just to win the battlefield that's right in front of you, but to win the larger campaign—the war that you've been tasked to win.
Now, the question is: what kind of a general are you? A successful general is a highly strategic general. He's the one that will win the battle and go on to win the war. The general that will fail and lose is the one who slacks off and doesn't understand the principles of proper strategy. He hasn't even studied what strategy is.
You understand this is a field of study—a whole field. You can devote your whole career or get an entire PhD just studying this stuff. I took a lot of notes while listening to this course, and I'm going to cite quotes throughout this episode from my notes.
Here's the first example of that quote: "Most people do not engage in a methodical process of questioning, evaluation of assumptions, investigation, information gathering, analysis, planning, and finally action. Most people function in routines that they do not question, living life day to day, facing the same problems every day."
Most people are always struggling with something, and their struggles haunt them till the day they die. People are always struggling with their money, quarreling with their co-workers, or dealing with inefficiencies at work—the same exact inefficiencies, the same red tape, the same limitations, the same handicaps, the same relationship problems, the same inabilities to communicate, the same inefficient techniques that they've always used. They just keep using those techniques over and over again.
They're always putting out some kind of fires or emergencies, and it's always the same kind of fires, the same kind of emergencies. This is what the average person's life looks like. This is a person who's not strategic. Most people do not sit down and actually strategize. They don't strategize deeply enough, and they don't strategize often enough. In the end, they make a lot of strategic blunders in their lives, and they wonder, "What's wrong with my life? How come I hate my life?" Well, this is why.
But let's back up a step and talk about what strategic thinking actually is. I'm going to give you some various quotes that I took here in my notes.
Firstly, "Strategic thinking is setting goals and developing flexible long-range plans to reach those goals based on careful analysis of internal and external environments."
Secondly, "Thinking logically and deeply about the future means that where you want to be five years from now, and five months from now, and five days from now should inform what you do today."
Thirdly, "It's a way of looking at the world with a purpose in mind."
And fourthly, "It's a way of dealing with a constantly changing environment, both responding to that environment to achieve your goals and also attempting, where possible, to change the environment to your benefit."
Also, "It's a method or a plan that we craft to bring about a desired future, such as the achievement of a goal or a solution to a problem."
In sports, strategic thinking is as follows: "Studying the competition, learning as much as you can about his tendencies, his habits, and his weaknesses."
When I heard that, in my mind, I immediately replaced the part about sports with self-actualization work. In self-actualization work, what we should be doing is studying the competition, learning as much as we can about our own tendencies, our habits, and our weaknesses.
Are you doing that? Who is the competition? Why do we even need to be strategic with self-actualization? Well, there is a competitor, and the competitor is you. You are in battle with yourself.
Have you realized that yet? Have you realized that you are your own greatest enemy? Have you realized that there's a battle inside of you going on every day between your lower self and your higher self, between your ego and those spiritual drives and those higher self-actualization drives within you that are pushing you towards becoming something much greater in your life?
Your lower self and your ego are extremely devious, crafty, tricky, and deceptive. It's the most deceptive thing that there is. In the Indian traditions, they call it Maya—a very important concept.
So if we apply strategic thinking to this, then we have to say that what we want to do is study ourselves, learn as much as we can about our own tendencies, our own habits, our own weaknesses, and our own self-deception mechanisms.
The mechanisms by which we go unconscious, the way we sabotage ourselves, the way we shoot ourselves in the foot, the way we go to war with ourselves—that's where we have to be extremely strategic.
For most people, this is like a totally new concept. It doesn't even occur to them that this is something they should be doing. Let alone, I would say, not only should you be doing this, but this should be the prime focus of your life.
The majority of your time in life needs to be going towards doing this—towards strategizing about your self-actualization. That's what the majority of your life should be. That's what all your spare time should be spent thinking about.
It's very far for most people to get to this place. It'll take a lot of changing of your habits and your thought patterns to get to this point where I'm telling you to get to.
Most people commit major strategic blunders in their lives—the kind of blunders that would get you killed on a battlefield if you were this stupid, shortsighted, and sloppy.
Let me give you a list of examples of the most common strategic blunders:
- Getting married in your 20s.
- Pissing away the prime years of your life—your teens and your 20s—playing video games, drinking, and partying in college.
- Not developing mastery in anything in life.
- Eating junk food.
- Not going to doctors.
- Chasing money rather than passion.
- Chasing achievement and status rather than inner growth.
- Having kids too soon in life.
- Sticking it out with a bad boyfriend or girlfriend that you know isn't right for you.
- Not continuing your education after college or not even going to college or not even getting an education in the first place—a very big strategic blunder.
- Staying loyal to a dysfunctional family member.
- Investing money in the wrong places.
- Thinking that you can get something for nothing in life.
- Going into debt using credit cards.
- Working for a boss or in some sort of giant company—this is a bad strategic mistake.
- Working 80 hours a week chasing success, climbing the corporate ladder because you think it'll really get you somewhere—that's a huge strategic blunder.
- Being too cheap to hire a therapist or life coach.
- Being too cheap to buy books or invest money in an online course or an information product that could actually help you out.
- Being too cheap to go to a seminar or retreat that could help you out.
- Living in the wrong place.
- Hanging out with the wrong people.
- Chasing sex or love and devoting lots of your time and energy into that.
- Neglecting meditation and neglecting enlightenment work.
- Taking your religion too seriously.
These are huge strategic blunders right here, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. These are just some of the most common ones that come to mind.
Let me talk about some of the strategic mistakes that people make—not these specific blunders, but I want to talk about, in general, what are the failures of strategy that happen for people.
Basically, it's not doing the right things at the right time. It all boils down to that, but I want to break that down into more specifics for you.
Firstly, it's not being able to think micro or macro. What does this mean? To be a good strategist in life, you need to be able to think macro, which is the big picture, and then you need to be able to also think micro, which is the little logistical planning—the detail-oriented stuff.
You need to jump back and forth between micro and macro over and over again every single day. You need to be able to do this. Most people cannot do this. They don't know how to make the jump up or down. They get stuck either in airy-fairy dreamer land and neglect the actual practical execution and the minutia that's necessary, or they get lost in the minutia of life and forget the ultimate goal of what they're trying to accomplish.
Most people are terrible at this, and this is a skill that has to be developed. Without this, you cannot be strategic.
Another one is that people are not able to delay gratification. If you can't delay gratification, then you're always just chasing pleasure for the most immediate gain. Then what strategy can you have? There cannot be a strategy if your strategy is immediate gain.
Have you noticed that all marketing efforts—everything that everyone ever sells you—always plays on your weakness of delayed gratification? Everything promised to you is instant, it's fast, it's flashy—it's all the results that you'll get. Then you get used to that, and what happens is that you just chase that stuff, and you forget that all the really important stuff in life comes through delayed gratification, comes through strategy.
No one just hands you valuable [ __ ] on a silver platter in life. You have to earn it through strategy.
Could you imagine a general on the battlefield trying to win a big war—like think of World War II—and your concern always in every meeting that you have with your staff and your military advisers and all your generals working under you is to just go for the stuff that gives you immediate results? That would be a disastrous military campaign. Your forces would get defeated almost instantly.
Also, people are generally bad strategists because they're unaware of the cul-de-sacs in life—the dead ends, the things you shouldn't do, the things that are traps that are dangerous, costly, and risky. They don't take these cul-de-sacs very seriously.
Also, in general, people lack intel. Could you imagine if I was a general on the battlefield and I had to win this battle, but I had no intelligence whatsoever about the enemy? If I invested no time preparing the intel, didn't send out my spies, and didn't bother to meet with them to get their reports to hear about what's actually going on on the battlefield, I would just assume that I knew everything or neglect the intel altogether. That would be disastrous.
That's generally what people's lives are—there's zero intel. Zero intel about self-actualization, zero intel about meditation, zero intel about enlightenment, zero intel about life purpose, and how to build a great career, and how to start a business. Zero intel on how to start a relationship, zero intel on what love is and how love really works, zero intel on the mastery process, and zero intel on the psychological development that happens throughout an adult's life.
What do you expect? What kind of results can you expect with zero intel? How much energy are you devoting to building up your reserves of intelligence?
For me, this is one of the most important things that I do in my life. My whole life is committed to developing my own intelligence—getting the information I need from multiple sources, not just one source because one source can be unreliable.
Many, many sources—hundreds and thousands of hours devoted to gathering intel—because I need to be able to make important long-range strategic decisions, and I can't do that without intel.
Most people lack self-knowledge as well. How can you be strategic if you lack knowledge about yourself? If you don't know how you work, if you don't really study the machine that is the human mind and the human being?
Most people also neurotically overcompensate for the problems that they have in their lives, and this leads to a whole slew of strategic problems. Could you imagine a general who's always reacting to problems on the battlefield? He's not proactive; he's not planning his own strategy, but he's just always reactive—neurotically reactive.
He gets pissed off and angry, he gets jealous, and he gets sad. He's just always reacting, overcompensating. That would be a terrible general. Yet this is how most people live their lives, and then they're surprised at the results they see.
Another huge strategic mistake people make is chasing the small prize rather than the large prize. They don't know how to evaluate outcomes, and they don't know how to prioritize and really judge, "Okay, this is nice, but that's a bigger prize."
So that thing is worth more than this thing, and then there's a third thing that's even a bigger prize than this thing. Maybe there's this other factor that renders both of these things or this third thing not even as valuable as I thought it was.
Sometimes we have a deception; we think something's a big prize, but then we realize it's not a big prize—it's actually a small prize. What's the biggest prize? What should I be going after? Should I be fighting this battle here or that battle there? Or maybe I shouldn't engage in any of these battles for now, and I'll pick a new battle in six months to fight—the one that's really going to matter.
See, most people don't go through this process. They just kind of do the thing that lands on their lap without really questioning from a ground zero position. They don't really question, "Is this even necessary? Why am I doing this in the big picture? What's it going to mean?"
So people can be very hard workers. They can spend 80 hours a week working on something for 20 years, but the thing they're working on is a small prize. Terrible strategy! They could have saved themselves 20 years.
Another thing that people do is that they're generally oblivious to social and business traps. Do you know and have you studied the traps that culture, society, and business have laid for you? These traps are like minefields.
These traps exist in religion, in education, in the culture at large, in politics, in your social circle, and in the media and advertising—all these traps designed to trick you and catch you, to take your money, to get you involved with the wrong thing that doesn't serve you but serves somebody else.
You understand that, generally speaking, businesses and social organizations' aims are not to really help you. The level of consciousness society is currently at is that the aims of most of these organizations are to serve themselves at your expense.
It's to feed off of you, to leech off of you. But most people don't understand this. Most people just play into it, and they think they're actually getting benefited by this leeching, when in fact these businesses and these social organizations are parasitic. They suck your life energy away from you and rob you of any ability that you have to really self-actualize and grow to your full potential and contribute meaningfully to life and improve society.
They suck you down to their level. Most people aren't even aware of this because they haven't spent the time thinking about this stuff.
See, a really good general goes out onto the battlefield the morning before and analyzes the landscape. He looks and sees where the enemy could have laid a trap for him.
You know that hill over there? That's a suspicious-looking hill. There are some trees there and a little patch of grass. There could be some enemies lurking there, hidden, lying in wait for me tomorrow when we start this campaign.
Or what about that river down there? Maybe there's some kind of dangerous trap in that river that I need to think about and be careful of so that when I'm crossing that river, my troops don't get slaughtered.
Most people don't do this with their personal lives.
Also, another trap people fall into is that they don't invest time strategizing—zero. The average time that a person invests per week strategizing about life is zero.
Could you imagine a general who spent zero time strategizing about his military campaigns? He just rushed head-on into every campaign and just kind of flew by the seat of his pants. That general would be dead very soon.
See, in terms of military, the reason I like military strategy is because the stakes are so high. You're talking about people's lives—you're talking about your own life.
In modern times, when a general loses a battle, he doesn't even lose his head. But a thousand years ago or 2,000 years ago, if you study Roman military strategy, for example, or ancient Chinese military strategy—stuff like Sun Tzu—the general was the first one to lose his head. It was always his head that was on the line.
So he took his strategy extremely seriously in a way that even modern generals can't really appreciate because their lives are not on the line. The president's life is not on the line when he chooses to invade a country. That was not the case 2,000 years ago. His life was on the line, so he was much, much, much smarter about this.
It's nice to have that because it really makes you sober—very, very sober and very invested in making the right choices and the right strategies. Nowadays, it's so easy to be complacent in life.
We live in a pretty comfortable society. You can scrape by pretty easily without being very strategic these days, so people get lazy. The stakes aren't high in their minds, and because of this, they don't strategize and they piss their life away by default—zero times spent strategizing.
Another huge strategic mistake people make is not fixing problems at their root. Most people only care about fixing problems on the surface, not at the root. The commitment to fix a problem at the root is a very rare thing. I see it so rarely.
To me, it's a character trait. You either have this character trait or you don't, and most people don't. They just don't care about fixing problems at their root. They just want to fix something enough that they can go on with their life and keep coasting.
That's not how I think. That's terribly unstrategic because what this means is that in the future, that problem will come back to bite you in the ass.
I don't know about you, but if I face a problem, I want to solve it permanently so it never, ever comes back to bite me in the ass.
Lastly, most people don't spend any time developing their strategic resources. I'll talk more about this as we go on because this is one of the pillars that I'm going to share with you: strategic preparation.
But you have to prepare your resources. What are the resources that you will need in life to live the kind of life that you want to live?
I don't know about you, but for me personally, in my life, as early on as I can remember, it's always been about strategizing about what resources I should build for myself—whether it's more money that I need, or I need a certain amount of time, or I need to be in a certain place, or I need to live in a certain city, or I need to live in a different part of the country.
I need to have a certain kind of education, a certain piece of knowledge, or a certain skill set. I need to go and build and develop those resources.
Can you imagine a general on a battlefield who rushes into battle with no strategic resources? He hasn't prepared food for the troops, he hasn't arranged logistical support, air support—none of these things have been thought of or taken care of.
So he has zero resources besides what he's going in there with. That's all he's got. He's got no reserves, no backup plans—nothing. He's going to get slaughtered, and that's what happens to most people in life.
So let me tell you now, in a nutshell, the seven pillars of strategic thinking—what strategic thinking actually is. Here are the pillars, and then I'll cover each one in some depth and tell you about it.
1. **Strategic Intent**: You need to have strategic intent for there to be a strategy at all. I'll talk about that in a minute.
2. **Strategic Analysis and Gathering of Intelligence**: Pretty self-explanatory, but I'll cover it as well as we go on.
3. **Strategic Preparation**: That's what I was just talking about—preparing your resources for battle.
4. **Concentration of Force**: Concentration of force.
5. **Disciplined Execution and Detailed Tactical Follow-Through**.
6. **Adaptability**.
7. **The Study of General Principles**.
So let's talk about each one of these pillars in some detail.
Firstly, **Strategic Intent**. This is highly important—highly, highly important. Here's a quote that I took from the course: "A compelling vision of the future that motivates action is what elevates a technique into a strategy. It's essential for any effective strategy."
This is what strategic intent is. Strategic intent is the ultimate thing that you're going for. What's the ultimate outcome you want? The ultimate outcome needs to inform all the steps that lead up to it—all the actions you take.
When you're highly strategic, you're highly efficient about this. You don't just take random actions. You don't just go and fight random battles just for the sake of fighting battles.
Think about this: if a nation is fighting a war against another nation, this is an extremely costly endeavor. It has to be motivated by some sort of ultimate strategic intent. What's the point? What do you want?
Usually, you want something, and you better be specific about it. You can't be vague and wishy-washy. You're not just there to fight; you're there to accomplish an aim. What is that?
Do you want to annex the enemy's territory? Do you want to fight to ensure peace? Do you want to change laws? Do you want to conquer the people there? Do you want to enslave them? What do you want?
You have to be very clear about that. Until you're clear about that, you can't have any strategy whatsoever. This is called strategic intent.
Once you have your strategic intent and you're very, very clear about it, now what you can do is backwards engineer every step necessary to get you there.
It's kind of like if you're going to do a very long road trip that's a thousand miles long. You better know where you want to end up because if you just start driving in any random direction, you're basically never going to be satisfied with the way your trip goes.
You're not going to know which way to turn. Every turn in any way will be sufficiently good. You can't make decisions based on that.
Most people have zero strategic intent in their lives. In their personal lives, they have no big picture, no overarching vision—nothing that compels them towards action or planning of any kind—which is why no planning or action really happens.
Then they complain about lack of motivation and lack of results. Of course!
What people do is they just apply techniques and take random steps, thinking that this is strategy, when in fact it's not. Just taking a technique that I share with you and applying it in your life a little bit here, a little bit there—that's not enough to get to the kind of life that we're talking about—the self-actualized life.
You need to be a much bigger picture thinker than that. You've got to see 10, 20, 30 years down the road of what you're shooting for, and then everything that you do today, tomorrow, the next week, the next month, the next year has to all be methodically aligned with that.
Every single day, you have to wake up and ask yourself, "Is this action that I'm taking aligning me and moving me closer to my ultimate strategic intent, or is it not? Or is it irrelevant?"
It could easily be irrelevant. Most of the actions you're taking in your life right now are irrelevant and tangential, or even worse, they're slowing you down and distracting you from achieving your strategic intent.
It's very easy for the mind to trick itself into thinking that just because I'm taking this action here or I'm doing this process here, that this is getting me to where I want to go. That's rarely the case—very rarely the case.
It's very rare to meet a human being who has a very clear and strong strategic intent, and if you do meet such a person, you'll see that this person accomplishes amazing things in their life that seem impossible to the average human being.
This is why the general needs to know whether the battle he's going to fight tomorrow is actually going to advance him towards his ultimate purpose of winning the war. Just because you win a battle does not mean that it gets you closer to winning the war.
This is something that has to be always checked and asked and verified over and over again: "Will winning this battle actually get me closer to winning the war?"
No? Then let's not fight this battle. Let's save our reserves and use them where it really is going to count. That's how you have to think.
The second pillar is **Strategic Analysis**. This is the analysis of the strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats that present themselves on the battlefield.
Are you assessing and acquiring and allocating the necessary resources in the most effective and efficient uses possible? How do you allocate your time, your energy, your physical vitality, your charisma, and your attention span?
How are you allocating all these things? What are you putting these things towards in your life? Are you using these things efficiently and effectively to move you towards your ultimate strategic intent?
Also, as part of strategic analysis, you have to anticipate and incorporate competitor responses because the battlefield is not a static thing. It's a very flexible and fluid situation. It's always changing.
Your competitors are smart; they're also scheming and strategizing against you. So you have to strategize and anticipate that and incorporate their potential responses into your strategy.
Now, what am I talking about? Who's the competitor? Again, the competitor is not your business competitors. The competitor is not your family members or your friends. The competition is yourself.
When we're talking about self-actualization, are you anticipating the responses of your ego and your lower self when you're trying to grow, when you're trying to make a change in your life?
Are you anticipating how your subconscious mind is going to react, how it's going to resist, how it's going to rebel, how it's going to trick you? The excuses it will tell you, how it will trap you, how it will convince you that you shouldn't change?
Most people have no awareness of this whatsoever, and so, of course, the competition always wins. The lower self always wins.
The next pillar is **Strategic Preparation**. I've already touched on this, but let me go into some more depth. What this means is the building up of strategic reserves through preparation.
Your maneuvers will be limited if you have no reserves; therefore, you must prepare.
So again, a general on a battlefield wants to make sure that his troops have flexibility. He needs to provide them with weapons, armor, vehicles, support, food, water, clothing, shelter, a backup plan, and a retreat location they can go back to.
He needs to think about all this stuff, and then he needs to prepare and lay the groundwork. It's not just about rushing in there and coming up with the best tactical move on the battlefield that wins the war.
No, a lot of times, wars are won or lost based on how well you prepared for the war. Do you have enough food for the winter? Do you have enough water? If you neglect these very basics, then you will get slaughtered on the battlefield, and most people in life neglect these basics.
What does it really mean to do strategic preparation? It means thorough training, hard work, discipline, sound planning, and then it also means the preparation of your unique capabilities.
Every soldier on the battlefield or every unit of soldiers on the battlefield has unique capabilities. It has unique strengths and also unique weaknesses and limitations. Cavalry has certain strengths that infantry doesn't have, and vice versa.
Your spearmen have different capabilities than your archers, and your archers have different capabilities than your aerial units or whatever. You need to recognize what these unique capabilities are and then develop these in yourself.
What are your unique capabilities in your personal life? Are you developing those? How much time are you spending preparing and bolstering your unique capabilities in life?
For most people, it's zero. And of course, we wonder why we get crap results.
Here's a quote that's relevant to strategic preparation: "Since you can't predict what fortune will hand you, you must develop yourself internally to handle the external circumstances."
You must develop yourself internally to handle the external circumstances. What else is this describing but self-actualization?
This is what self-actualization is about—developing yourself internally to be able to handle the external circumstances of life. This is what Actualized.org is about.
All my work is about how to develop you internally to be able to handle the external circumstances of life. Most people spend no attention on this at all in their life, pay no mind to it whatsoever, and then they fail miserably—fail miserably.
Me personally, in my own life, I spent the majority of my life in strategic preparation mode. I'm highly strategic when it comes to preparation because I know that this is one of the variables that I can control the best.
I can't always predict what's going to happen on the battlefield, and I'm not always the quickest on the battlefield, but I can really sit down and prepare my resources in an extremely strategic way that gives me so much leverage and so much maneuverability on the battlefield that then it's very hard for me to lose the battle.
The next pillar is **Concentration of Force**. This is a super important concept that is studied and taught in all military schools and in any classes where you're studying military battles and tactics.
To win a military battle, fundamentally, what has to happen is you have to concentrate force at a point—a decisive point that breaks through into victory.
Here's a quote from my notes: "Concentration of force at the decisive point is the key to all strategy. It's all about directing as much force to one point as possible, given your limited resources. This applies to war as much as it applies to career development and to business."
Are you even aware that this is what strategy is all about? It's all about finding the weak point on the battlefield and then pushing all your troops at that weak point to get a breakthrough.
Now, that's a battlefield analogy. How would we apply that to your personal life? Well, how are you concentrating your forces in your personal life?
Because you've only got so much time, so much energy, so much money, and so much attention in your day. How are you concentrating those? Where are you putting all your eggs? Are you putting them into the right basket or the wrong basket?
Are you hitting problems where the enemy is strongest instead of where the enemy is weakest? Are you finding the weak spots? Are you finding the spots where your force can really have the most leverage?
Most people don't even think about this stuff. Their energy and their focus are dispersed all over the place. They're doing 10, 20 different things in their career, in their relationship, and this and that, and what's happening? Nothing is really moving forward because they're not properly concentrating their force.
See, everyone has limited resources. That's what makes it so important to concentrate those resources properly—not to waste them, not to piss them away.
The next pillar is **Detailed Execution**. After you come up with a plan and you've gathered up your strategic resources, and now you know where to concentrate your force, now what you have to do is execute on the plan.
A great plan poorly executed leads to disaster. Great execution with a poor plan also really leads nowhere. It's highly inefficient and highly non-strategic. You need both.
Most people are very poor executors. I have a whole episode—it's a pretty popular one—called "How to Get [ __ ] Done," which talks about many important points about what it takes to get results, to be a results maker in life, to really be good at execution.
This is something that you need to make a study of. At one point in my life, I just went all out on execution. I focused so much on execution because I knew that I needed to get good at execution, and I became a good executor.
That's something that takes years. It takes years to really become a good executor. It's not something you can do in a week, especially if you spend the last 10 or 20 years being a poor executor. You've developed all sorts of bad habits that now need to be unwired.
So check out that episode if you want to learn more about how to do proper detailed execution.
I'm going to move on to the next pillar, which is **Adaptability**. Strategy is not about selecting the ultimate one best strategy and then going with it forever. That's actually a mockery of strategy.
Proper strategy is all about being flexible and adaptable. It's about understanding that the environment is constantly changing. Every day, what the battlefield looks like today, tomorrow might be totally different.
It might rain tomorrow; that will totally change the battlefield. The troops might lose their morale tomorrow; that totally changes the situation that we're dealing with. They might be out of food tomorrow or out of water, or half of them might be dead—totally changes the situation.
So whatever plans I have tonight, tomorrow morning I'll have to be able to adapt in case things change. I have to plan in such a way where I don't have this rigid plan that tells me, "Well, if X happens, then Y happens, then Z happens, and they'll all just go swimmingly according to plan."
No, you have to plan for all the contingencies and all the disasters—all the misfortunes that might happen.
See, a common naive mistake that people make when they do personal development is they just think, "Well, okay, let me just sit down and come up with a plan." So they come up with their three-year plan for their life, and then what happens?
A month later, all of a sudden, they're not following that plan at all because their plan is over here, and real life is over here, and they're just a gulf apart.
No, that doesn't work. High-quality strategy requires that your plan be flexible, take into account all sorts of different scenarios and contingencies, and you have to be able to sit down and rewrite the plan every week, every day if necessary.
Be flexible! Don't get too rigid. Don't get dogmatic about your plan. Don't get attached and cling to your plan as though it's your baby and it's the only way it's got to be.
This is very poor strategy. You'll get slaughtered if you do that. You've got to be adaptable.
A lot of times, people start businesses. They start a new business, they come up with a business plan, and they think that this is how it's going to go—this is how my business is going to generate.
Then in reality, it doesn't work. This is the naive business plan. This is the person who starts a business for the first time, and of course, they fail—pathetically, miserably fail.
To get a successful business model going, you have to try a lot of different stuff. You have to experiment. You have to see what actually works in the marketplace, what actually works on the battlefield.
A lot of times, this stuff is unknown. You're dealing with a lot of unknown variables. You're not going to have all the intel. You're never going to have perfect intel, which means that you have to be very adaptable.
You have to be willing to change your business plan completely, throw it out, and get a new business plan. Some of the most successful businesses started out with one idea of how they're going to earn money, and then that didn't work, and they just went in a totally different direction, and then they made billions.
PayPal is an example of this. PayPal as a business started out as a mobile payment processing for Palm Pilots, and that, of course, didn't work. Then they got the bright idea, "Hey, why don't we just email each other payments? Let's create a system that allows people to email each other money."
Then they came up with PayPal and generated billions of dollars. But see, they were flexible enough to change because if they just stuck with their original idea, they would have gotten nowhere—they would have gone bankrupt.
So that's very important. That's why I always talk about open-mindedness—how important open-mindedness is. Most people are so stuck in dogma and their beliefs about how life is, how spirituality is, how religion has to be this way, and how education has to be this way, and personal development has to be this way.
Personally, in my life, I can't afford rigidity. I can only afford flexibility because to be the most strategic I can be, I have to be extremely adaptable. I have to be willing to throw away everything I believe.
In a sense, everything I believed and do believe will eventually be replaced and thrown away because there's always something better to come and replace whatever you currently hold as true.
The last principle, or the last pillar, is **The Study of Principles**. The study of principles: "Regardless of how chaotic a situation may be, there are principles that can give shape to your thinking about the situation. Emerging in such principles allows for genius flashes of insight."
You need to study the principles—the proper principles of battle if you're a general, and you need to study the proper principles of life and self-actualization if you're a human being trying to live your ordinary life.
This is something that I make easy for you because this is what Actualized.org is about. This is all that Actualized.org is—the study of the principles that make life amazing.
It's all the principles that control your psychology, how life works, how relationships work, how interaction with people works, how your mind works. Some of these principles have been known for thousands of years, but most people don't make a study of it.
You might say, "Well, Leo, I'm already listening to you." Well, that's good, but you're just listening to me. There's a big difference between listening to me and making a study of these principles.
Someone who makes a study of self-actualization principles is like someone who sits down, watches the video from start to finish, takes notes on everything, rereads his notes, studies his notes in the morning and then at night again, and then watches the video again.
He drills it into his subconscious mind, thinks about it, contemplates it deeply. He doesn't just accept what I say; he thinks about it. He integrates it into his own worldview. He combines multiple sources, cross-references everything, checks everything against his own intuition, and makes sure everything fits in with his own life.
He thinks about ways to apply these principles. That's what it means to make a real study of the principles.
It's someone who's not just looking for a fix; he's looking for a deep understanding and mastery of the principles of life. That's a whole other level of commitment and dedication, and of course, it yields a whole other level of results—a whole other level of results.
This is why I want to convince you and sort of psych you up to get excited about learning these principles. I want you to make this a lifelong process. I want you to get as excited about self-actualization as I am in my own life—to really make a study of it.
So those are the seven principles and seven pillars, rather, I should say, of strategic thinking. This is what it takes. Your life will only become satisfying once you start to make wise strategic decisions. That's the only way it's going to happen.
You know, in the movie Pulp Fiction, I like that movie. Towards the end, there's a scene with Samuel Jackson, and he's getting robbed. He has to give his wallet up to the thieves, and then later he asks for the wallet back. They give him the wallet back, and on the wallet, it says "Bad [ __ ]" in big letters—"Bad Mother [ __ ]"—it's kind of embroidered on the wallet.
I really like that, and I was thinking about that scene today, and I thought, "You know what would be even better? If it said 'Strategic [ __ ]' on that wallet."
"Strategic [ __ ]"—'cause that's how I think about myself in my own life, and that's how I want you to think about your life from now on. You are going to be a strategic [ __ ] using these principles and pillars that I talk to you about.
Your whole attitude towards life needs to change from the complacent, lazy one you've been having to this one where you're a strategic [ __ ]. Where every move you make, every step you take has a purpose in mind.
Where you're almost Machiavellian about every action that you take—not in a neurotic, negative way. I'm not saying that you should go and cheat people or rip them off. I'm not saying that you need to be all manipulative like that.
I'm just saying you've got to be very clear about every single step you're taking—where it's leading you, why you're doing it, what the priority is, and then how it fits into the bigger picture of everything for you.
Then what kind of resources you need to develop in order to allow you to do that.
I've been a strategic [ __ ] since I was like seven years old. I don't know; it just probably came naturally to me. I don't know why other people aren't this way, but since I was seven years old, I've been thinking about what my career is going to be and exactly how I'm going to do it, where I'm going to go, what school I'm going to go to, what I'm going to learn, what degrees I'm going to get.
I'm always thinking like 20 years ahead—how much money I'm going to have, what that money is going to allow me to do, where I'm going to live, what if I do this, what about that. My mind just doesn't stop with this.
Just the other day, I was thinking about what the end of my life is going to look like. What do I want Actualized.org to look like when I'm 70 years old on my deathbed? What do I want to achieve? What do I want my legacy to be?
I'm thinking about that stuff now when I'm 30. I'm already planning for that. What I did yesterday was already setting me up for that—for what I want when I'm 70 years old.
I don't just think about it; I actually then take action on it. You know, lately I've been thinking about how to position myself strategically so that I can just be a yogi. That's my thing now.
That's kind of like my strategic intent right now in my personal life. I just have this picture of me being a yogi. That's where my life is. I mean, what else am I going to do with my life, honestly?
There's no point in success for me. There's no pleasure in success for me. There's no real reason for me to go and do more business and become more successful or more popular.
There's just so little that's really worthwhile for me because I've studied so much of these principles that it's just—you know, you study enough of these principles, the only option really for you, if you're wise, is to become a [ __ ] yogi. That's like the only thing that there is to do with your life.
That's it. That's pretty much all that there is.
I spent eight hours the other day sitting, doing absolutely nothing for eight hours. I wasn't particularly meditating; I just sat there and did nothing for about eight hours. It's hard to do.
I wasn't perfect; I checked my email once or twice, and I got up and ate and drove around a little bit. But generally, I spent a good eight hours just like not doing any business, not doing any work, not reading any books—just sitting there.
Because I was testing out what it's like to be a yogi, right? Because in my mind, when I say I want to be a yogi, it's like I'm going to sit for 12 hours and do absolutely [ __ ] nothing, and that's my perfect life.
That's my strategic intent. I'm moving towards that now. What do I need to do that? There's a lot of preparation that goes into it.
It might sound like, "Well, you can just go do that right now." Not quite. There's a lot of little tactical stuff that I have to figure out how to make that work, and there's still issues I haven't resolved there.
I have to resolve that—what's going to happen with my business? What's going to happen with my relationship? What's going to happen with my diet? What's going to happen with all these things?
These things all need to change drastically in order to support this kind of lifestyle. But already, I'm planning for it, right?
So this is what I mean by being strategic.
Also, what comes to mind for me—I've been watching, it's kind of bad of me, but I've been watching House of Cards. You watched that show with Kevin Spacey? A really interesting show.
When I think about that show and I think about Kevin Spacey's character there, he is a perfect example of what I would call a strategic [ __ ].
Now, he takes it to the extreme in a kind of a negative, narcissistic, egotistical way, so I would encourage you not to do that. But he is a highly strategic [ __ ]. You can't argue with that.
That's how you need to be in your life. Every step has to be leading to the next step, to the next step, to the next step, to the next step.
Even if what you ultimately want is you just want to be sitting there doing nothing, blissing out under a tree like the Buddha, if you want that, be a strategic [ __ ] to get that.
'Cause even that is something you will not get without lots of strategy. Strategy is not just about blind success. You can apply strategy to anything you want—a loving relationship. Apply strategy to that. You're going to have to if you want one.
You want to raise great kids? Apply strategy to that.
So this isn't just related to work or to earning money. In fact, earning money and just going to work and running a business—in those situations, it's actually kind of natural to be strategic. Most people tend to be strategic there.
Where they're not strategic is in their personal lives, in their spiritual lives, in their love lives, in their whole attitude towards life.
I'm extremely strategic in what I ultimately want out of my life. My ultimate, ultimate, ultimate, ultimate strategic intent in life is to die knowing that I lived well—knowing that my life—not that it mattered in some global sense to people—that's kind of silly. I don't really care about that these days.
What matters to me is that I can look back over my life before I die and I can say, "Yeah, that was the way I wanted to live my life. That was it. I don't have any regrets. I didn't piss my life away. I had this one life. I knew from an early age that this was the only one I'm going to have and that I'm going to make something of it that I'm proud of, and that's what I worked for, and that's what I got."
That's my ultimate strategic intent.
And so, I realized just the other day that, you know, to do that, to fulfill that, I have to work less. That's why I sat for eight hours and did nothing.
That actually moved me—might seem like, "Well, sitting and doing nothing is doing nothing. What did that accomplish?" No, actually, that moved me towards my strategic intent. That's exactly what was necessary.
Because life is counterintuitive sometimes. When you're working, you're actually shooting yourself in the foot, which is what I was now seeing for myself.
You know, that's just me. You don't have to do that. You don't have to live the yogi lifestyle. That's my personal preference—that's kind of like what I'm going for. You can do whatever you want with your life. I don't really care.
But just be strategic about it. That's the point.
All right, that's it. I'm signing off. Go ahead, please click the like button for me, post your comments down below, share this episode with a friend, and lastly, come to Actualized.org right here.
Check out my website. I've got cool resources there. I have a purpose course that helps you find your life purpose. I've got a book list. I've got a forum—a free forum you can go to and sign up on, and then you can chat with people about how to self-actualize and share tips and strategies and resources.
Also, you can sign up for the newsletter, which will keep you up to date with new strategies that will be coming out every single week—new principles that you need to study, right?
These strategic principles that you need to study to make a strategic life, to piece it together. This is not a quick-fix solution. What I'm after here is very deep and something very rare that you don't hear very many people talking about, even in self-help circles.
I want to help you to develop a really profoundly deep and accurate map of life—something that's both theoretically inspiring and profound, but also something that's very practical that you can use to transform your life.
So that not only are you getting the theory, but you're also then seeing it materialize in your life and true for you. That's something that's very possible, but you need to have a commitment for it.
What I want from you is a commitment to learn, to master this stuff because this is your life. What else is more valuable to you than your own life?
If you like that idea, then stick around. Every single week, keep watching the episodes. Over time, over the months and years, your perspectives on life will transform in incredible ways.
So go check it out, sign up, and stay tuned. I'll see you with more.