How to Be Truly Authentic (Non-Mainstream Advice)

### The Problem — Too many external influences --- If you’re living an inauthentic life, its because you have too many external influences in your life pulling you in a million different directions. For example, when I was starting out trying to make money online 8 years ago, there were hundreds of different gurus screaming into my ear about the best online business model. “Dropshipping is the best”, “Amazon FBA is the best”, “Trading is the best”, “Affiliate marketing is the best”. Because my mind was plagued by all these people screaming at me from every direction, I couldn’t hear my true, authentic inner voice telling me what I REALLY wanted to do — become a YouTuber. You see, the problem is that you follow wayyy too many people, have too many friends and every single one of them is giving their opinion on how you should live your life. What happens is that you end up listening to them, only to end up in a life that doesn’t feel right. All because you listened to EVERYONE ELSE, instead of the most important person: YOURSELF. Part of the reason is toxic self-help culture which says: You’re a dumb, worthless loser who hasn’t accomplished anything, so instead of listening to yourself, listen to me instead. And while there is value in learning from others, the problem comes about when we completely replace our own inner voice with someone elses. We shouldn’t blindly copy or follow what some self-help guru tells us. Instead, we should only take what resonates, and leave the rest. Gurus, including people like me are there to serve YOU. Not the other way round. They may try to frame control and flip this dynamic where they position themselves as the guru/leader and you the blind follower, but anyone that does this is a shitty “guru”. Any good coach or teacher will always design the best plan of action to help YOU according to your specific strengths/weaknesses and life situation. Not force upon you some cookie cutter plan to profit off you. It’s like buying an off-the-rack vs tailored suit. Obviously the suit that will look best on you is the tailored, not the off-the-rack one. Because it has been designed specifically with YOUR measurements in mind. The way that self help gurus act is kinda like if companies like H&M or Zara were yelling at you telling you not to buy a tailored suit becauset their off the rack suits looked the best on you. We then blindly follow them and end up looking like clowns with suits that don’t look right on us. Self-help culture is the dumbest crap I’ve ever seen. Now, I’ve benifitted tremendously from self-help teachings, however, there is a dark side which people never talk about, which is selling cookie cutter solutions as the “best solution” for your life. I even remember watching an Iman Gadzhi video where he was telling you that “SMMA was the best business model, because of XYZ”. Look, I like Iman, I find his story inspiring, but this is seriously the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There’s no such thing as the best business model. There is only the business model which is BEST FOR YOU. If you go to the career counsellor, they’ll ask you what your strengths, weaknesses are, what you and interested in and then try to identify what career might be suited to you based on YOUR inherent interests. If you go to a doctor with some health issue, they’ll diagnose your issue first before prescribing a solution. Self-help is the only industry where they prescribe without diagnosing, and tell you that diagnosing is a waste of time. If you try to diagnose yourself or even critically think about what they’re telling you, they’ll say “you’re overthinking, stop thinking and just do what I say” or “this thinking is your limiting beliefs speaking, buy my course fast because this fake discount I have is expiring in the next 2 minutes and you need my bullshit cookie-cutter solution”. Obviously it doesn’t just stop with self-help gurus on social media, but also your friends, family and society as they also constantly feed us with their bullshit opinions about how we should live our lives. Regarless of the source, the problem is too many external influences, but what’s the solution? Well that’s what we’ll talk about now… ### Solution --- Ok, so the solution is simple really, we need to block out the constant external noise in our life and start hearing our INNER VOICE. We need to turn our focus AWAY from the external world, and start looking INTERNALLY instead. Think about it like this: Imagine you’re playing a song on your phone. If you’re sat at home where it’s quiet, you’ll be able to hear the song right? But what if you went to a crowded environment like a concert, can you hear the song? No you can’t, because theres too much noise. Even if you turn your phone to max volume you still can’t hear. So the key to living authentically is to turn down the noise, so that we can clearly hear what our inner voice is telling us. ### Practical steps --- 1. Stop consuming so many external influences To turn down the noise in our life, we must cut out the majority of the external infleunces in our life. Sometimes I look at people’s IG accounts and they’re following hundreds or even thousands of people! It’s crazy to me! I only follow 50 something people and most of them are my actual friends, in terms of gurus there’s probably only about 4 of them I actually follow. Not only that, I also have my feed, stories, explore page and reels HIDDEN because I use a hacked version of IG app called distraction free Instagram (link in description), so I don’t even see what they post. For me IG is outbound only, meaning I can only POST content, I cannot consume other people’s content. Which works out amazing for me, my authetnicity and mental health! If you want to live authentically you need to cut out every single influence who ISN’T aligned with the life you want. Anyone who tells you to do something which isn’t aligned with the path you’re following is what I call a class 2 distraction, which you must avoid at all costs. (I talk more about this in my vid: Discipline doesn’t work, so check that vid out) Not only that though, you need to stop following new people all the time. The problem is on platforms like Instagram, it’s so easy to click the follow button. You just see someones profile, scroll for 2 seconds, think its cool and click follow. HUGE MISTAKE! Why do most people do this? It’s because they think that the more people they follow or listen to, the more successful they’ll be, this could NOT be further from the truth. True success in life comes from defining a clear path for yourself in terms of what you want to achieve, following it and avoiding distractions which take you off the path. If you follow 5000 different people, you have 5000 distractions pulling you in a million directions. You don’t need 5000 influencers planting seeds of doubt in your head all the time causing you to second guess your own path, you just need to stick to your freaking plan! Imagine if you had 5000 people in your house right now, all of them yapping away. Would you be able to think clearly? Of course not. So just bear in mind this 1 key mindset: The LESS people you follow and are influenced by, the more successful and happy you’ll be in life. I have an uncle in China, the guy went from being a taxi driver to billioanire, do you know how many self-help gurus he follows? None. He doesn’t even read books or any of the typical self help crap. He does everything that is “wrong” according to self-help culture. First thing in the morning he opens up WeChat (Chinese messenger app), watches the news and eats a crappy diet. So why is he successful? Because he simply created a plan for his life and folllowed it without be influenced by others. In fact, during 2021 you might have heard of the real estate crisis in China. This affected big name developers like Evergrande who had wayyyy too much debt, as a result they went bankrupt. My uncles company, despite being located in Shenzhen, which was a hot bed for developers, stuck to their own guns. They decided that they wanted slow, conservative growth because they were building generational wealth for their family, so they didn;t want to take crazy risks by taking up too much debt. As a result, they managed to do perfectly fine throughout the entire crisis while other companies drowned. So stop following and listening to so many people. Begin cutting down the external influences that don’t align with your life. There are severe diminshing returns the more people you listen to. You only need a handful of positive influences in your life, and the rest are pointless. Figure out who those key valuable influences are and ignore the rest. 1. Filter everything you hear As I’ve alluded to already, most people blindly follow whatever someone tells them to do — regardless whether it’s some social media influencer or their parents. This is called idolization and its the *wrong* way to live your life. You need to re-frame how you view these people. Instead of you blindly following them, they are there to serve YOU. You have to view yourself as the CEO of your life. Everyone else, influencers you look up to, your friends, peers, teachers etc. merely sit on the board of advisors. The advisor can give advice, but it’s up to the CEO (you) to decide whether or not to listen to it. Most people live the complete opposite way, they make everyone else the CEO of their life, and they are the servant. So once you’ve re-framed how you view these people, you then have to filter everything everyone tells you. It doesnt matter who is giving you advice, it could be someone you have zero respect for, or even if its someone you highly look up to and respect, you MUST filter what they’re saying against these 2 questions: (1) Does this make sense for me, my personality, preferences and current life situation? If something is right for you, it has to align with your EDGE in life. What do i mean by that? Well in investing, there is always talk about identifying what your edge is and leaning into that. Your edge is the thing you’re uniqueness gifted to be good at. If someone is 7ft tall, they’ll have a huge edge as a basketball player, but perhaps not intellectually. If someone is highly intelligent, they’ll have an edge as a academic, but not athletically. If someone is naturally good looking, they have an edge in modelling or as a celebrity, but not academically where they’re judged negatively for being good looking. Living an authentic life is about identifying what YOUR EDGE is, what your strengths are and doubling down on that. Not by focusing on your weaknesses. Warren Buffett, world’s most successful investor always talks about finding your “circle of competence”, which is whatever industries you are naturally skilled, knowledgeable or good in, and only investing in those companies. Not only that, he also makes it extremely clear that you should AVOID at all costs investing in companies which are outside of your circle of comptence i.e. companies you don’t have an edge in. But its not just Buffett, other billionaire investors like Ray Dalio, George Soros and Howard Marks all talk about the importance of finding your edge and sticking to that edge. Successful investors don’t invest in anything and everything, they stick to what they’re good at and avoid the rest. If these billioanires think like this then what business do you have trying to force yourself to do something which you don’t have an edge in? For me, I realized after years of failing at business that I did NOT have an edge in selling things I didn’t believe in. Some people believe it or not are capable of peddling crap they don’t believe in, but I’m not one of them. That’s why I failed my first business which was selling on Amazon, where I had to peddle BS products I didn’t care about, just to make money. Many years later though I figured my biggest edge was my brain, my intellect and my ideas about the world. That’s why after many other business failures which I didn’t have an edge in, I decided to do YouTube, because I feel in my heart it’s the 1 thing I have a major edge in versus everyone else and could use this edge to not only help others, but make money in the process. (2) Does this resonate with me? The big mistake most people make in life is purely making decisions based on logic and thinking, and not taking into account the way they feel. This is because we discount the way we feel, and tell ourselves that feeling and emotions are “weak” and so we make purely logical decisions, without listening to how we FEEL about it. This is dumb. An authentic life rquires you to make decisions based on what I call head+heart coherence. Something must not only make sense logically, but also feel right in your heart. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. If you make decisions purely from the head, you’ll quickly realize that your life and the decisions you made lack soul, meaning and joy. You’ll sit there wondering why on earth this decision which seemed so logically correct, doesn’t fulfill you. It’s because while this decision might have been logically sound, your heart was saying no, but you didn’t listen. — I want to make a quick point about the importance of disagreeing with your idols. In my own life, the 1 self-help guru I look up to the most is Owen Cook. (Watch my vid: How i changed my life, to learn how he changed my life for the better). However, despite being a huge fan of his, I STILL filter and critically analyse everything he says. There are many things I hear him say and I agree with, and many things which I don’t. Just because you like and respect someone doens’t mean you have to agree with everything they say. A very easy trick I use to figure out if someone is blindly following someone is by asking them what do they disagree with their favourite guru on. If they don’t disagree with them on anything, I know they’re a blind sheep. And you don’t want to be a blind sheep, because if the shepherd turns out to be malicious, they’ll lead you off the cliff to your death. And you don’t want that. 1. Identify what constantly reappears in your life (this is your true authentic calling) So back in 2012-2014 I was obssessed with the gym so I started watching fitness YouTubers like Matt Ogus and Christian Guzman. After watching them I had a desire to be like them, I wanted to be a YouTuber. So back in 2015, had a channel called Progressive Lifstyle Development which was more a hobby thing, and I eventually deleted it in 2017, becuase I was focused on the other businesses I was starting at the time. However, even as I was working on these other businesses, I’d find myself trying to figure out some way to include video content and YouTube videos into them. For example I had an Instagram page called High Vibration Thoughts where I would make videos on spirituality. In 2021, I started making YouTube videos again and was making more short film style videos on more philosophical topics which resonated with me at the time. I then stopped because I told myself I had to focus on my other business at the time. In 2023, I started making videos yet again, uploaded like 5 of them and stopped yet again, because of the same reason. And finally back in September of this year (2024) I was watching an old Christian Guzman video where he was talking about his YouTube journey, I then felt a deep calling back to YouTube to make videos. So I decided to do so, and now, after like the 5th time, I finally felt like I found what I was truly meant to do all these years. You see, in the past 10 years, the desire to be a YouTuber was always there, it was always in my heart. Every once in a while I heard that quiet inner voice telling me to do it, but I ignored it because my “logical brain” was telling me to do something else instead. So ask yourself, what things in my life seem to constantly be there, what themes in your life constantly re-occur? Your true calling in life is something you can NEVER escape, no matter how hard you try. In the story of Jonah in the Bible, Jonah was given a command by God to go to the city of Niniveh to preach to the people there. However, Jonas hated them so he didn’t want to obey God’s command. Instead, he tried to run as far as he could but no matter how far he tried to run. God would interefere in his life and bring him back to his destiny. Eventually he gave in, obeyed his calling and went to Niniveh to preach. Regardless of whether you believe in Christinaty or the Bible, the lesson still stands. Each of us have a path, a desinty we’re meant to follow. Our true life calling is the one which cannot be escaped no matter how much we try to hide or run. Your true calling will call to you constantly, no matter what, even for years or decades until you answer that calling. [DO THE OUTRO HERE - ] Recap - Steps 1. Remove external influences to tune out the noise in ur life, so u can hear inner voice 2. Filter everything you hear, from everyone 3. Identify what constantly re-appears in your life, this is ur calling