Mindflex- 5 Ideas That Can Transform Your Life- Rabbi Stephen Baars

project expire and the mineflex program this is five life-changing ideas please stay tuned because the number fifth is a life changer i call this concept a walk in the park for this i need you to imagine for a minute that you meet yourself on your deathbed 120 years old and there you're going to ask yourself two questions what was the hardest thing you ever did and what was the best thing you ever did and i'm gonna answer both of those questions for you i know mind mind flex stuff here so the hardest thing you ever did sitting right here right now watching this video you have already done it if you know how to read and write i'm going out on the limb here if you don't i don't need to know about it but if you know how to read and write you have probably achieved one of the hardest things you're ever going to have to achieve in your entire life i'm not saying there aren't other things you've done but that one at the very least is one of the hardest things any human being will ever get to do there is hardly anything that is going to be more consequential more impactful than than that very feat to go from illiterate to literate is an amazing accomplishment in other words if we were to have all the human beings that have that have ever lived on this planet i think they say it's about um uh 10 billion 20 billion people whatever the number happens there they're all alive today the number of people who can actually read and write as a percentage of the total is infinitesimally small maybe one percent maybe one percent so you are part of an incredibly small group of uh of amazingly accomplished people that is mind-boggling not only is it meaningful impactful but it is difficult like crazy like most of those people and those billions of people that could that were literate would think to move from illiterate to literate would be like climbing mount everest in your pajamas without shoes like it's just an amazing like people you just don't realize how difficult such a thing is so you've done one of the hardest things you're ever likely to do it's hard to imagine you're ever going to match or beat that as an accomplishment anything else you do powers to insignificance relative to that accomplishment i'm not saying you shouldn't go for great things go for it but relative to that one that was that's the that's the piece of resistance that's the cherry on the pie everything else is a piece of cake relative to that one okay that's the hardest things you ever done you already don't now what's the best thing you've ever done relative to where you are standing right now you have are yet to do it we all anticipate a phenomenal future we have had great lives thank god but we all secretly or maybe not so secretly suspect and hope that the best is yet to come so the hardest thing you've already done the hardest thing you've ever done in your entire life over 120 years you've already done at this point and the best thing you're ever going to do in your entire life is yet to come now you have never been smarter than you are sitting right now you have never had more ideas more concepts more understanding more wisdom than you are right now relative to today everything previous you were stupid nothing personal i was just as stupid if not even if not more so but relative today you have never you're the peak of your intelligence tomorrow please god it goes even higher but we i've never been as smart as we are sitting right now so now realize and appreciate this you did the hardest thing in your life when you were relatively speaking stupid nothing personal again don't take this personally like me too all of us but you did the hardest thing when you were relatively stupid and you're going to do the best thing in life when you're relatively speaking smart therefore what the rest of your life is going to be a walk in the park that's piece of cake no problem whatsoever now as we're gonna see there's more to this but that's step number one that's the first mind-boggling pieces life-changing piece of whistle when you when you assimilate that concept just conceptually not where how you actually feel about it but how you think about it when you realize that that is that's a truth that that that that really should be the case that is the reality of it of a description of our existence whether you feel that or not that's another point which we're gonna get into but nevertheless this is just a piece of wisdom that's really how it should be once you've learned how to read and write and once you've got to this this degree of level of intelligence the rest of your life should be a walk in the park that's step number one that's the first piece of wisdom what's the second piece of wisdom is that it isn't we don't feel that it's it is like that we're all struggling that's why you're watching this in other words if your life is a piece of cake and you just open up the mailbox in the morning and checks are just coming flying through this people are just sending you money and everyone agrees with you and your kids are a dream and your spouse is a dream not that they aren't dreams and and everywhere you work wherever you work it's just everyone's yes dear yes boss yes whatever right it's just everything is working as many donuts as you want and you lose weight and you go to the gym and just just opening the door gets you gets you in shape and uh and and and you lose you're losing hair you're gaining hair and it's like everything is just you know if that's your life okay then you don't need this you probably wouldn't watch it but if you're like most people you'll be noticing that as time progresses it's almost like a calendar as time progresses it seems the things seem to get more difficult it isn't as we've just said in point number one it's in fact the reverse of that so so how well why is that so i want you to imagine for a minute and this speaks to a big um misnomer or error in western thinking but i want you to think back for a little bit and imagine for a minute your five-year-old comes in one day and says to you i'm never gonna learn how to read never gonna learn how to read why why why do you say such a thing well because the teacher in school in kindergarten said i'm stupid and i'm never gonna learn how to read i'm too stupid to do it or or it's tough to learn the teacher said it's tough to learn how to read and you don't have what it you don't have what it takes right what would you do get another teacher like when your kid comes in and says it's too hard to learn how to read or i can't do it i can't master what do what do we do we make it easier we make the problem easier those if you go and spend some time with kids who are learning how to read but in the good old days i'm talking about like you know 150 years ago if you learn how to read there would be a teacher in the front and they would say this is a cat c80 cat and that was it now they break it down into seek cook and you say cur and they go through each in other words what do they do they break it down into the smallest possible component part that they can possibly imagine it can be and if they can break it down even smaller than that they do that too in other words when things get difficult they don't say to the kid be tough imagine for a minute you walk into your kindergarten's teacher it's in the classroom right and and and the teacher walks in and says i just you know i quit teaching and there's no other teacher here's a pile of books there's all the five-year-old six-year-old seven years here's a pile of books you learn how to read by yourselves what would happen nothing nothing would happen if one kid and a hundred one kid and a hundred learn how to be a miracle all those kids would turn out illiterate but that's exactly what we do now in other words that process which works incredibly well in learning how to read which is one of the hardest things we've ever done is abandoned when it comes to everything else in life after that we just dump on the kids and as you get older gets worse and worse and worse you know in the sec in that kind of way which is just make it make it difficult and if you don't succeed we blame ourselves we blame the students and we we pile on them and we give them all these pep talks right be tough you can do it drill yourself be like arnold schwarzenegger and all the other tough guys out there we i pulled myself up from the bootstraps and i made it because i was gonna succeed but et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera right and and which is completely counter of how we achieved anything in life in other words if you are stuck on anything whatever your next step is whatever it is you are challenged with right now whether it's in your personal life whether it's your financial life whether it's in your business life whether it's your friendship life with your family whatever happens to be emotional whatever it happens to be right you are stuck why are you stuck and that's very important to understand we all come out of an educational process and it's genius and it's brilliant and it's given us incredible ideas and incredible concepts and you are going to go as far as those concepts as far as those ideas now if you're watching this you are probably one of the one percent richest people on this planet if you make more than 30 000 annual income you're in the top 1 of the richest people on this planet if you make more than seventy thousand dollars annual income you're in the top zero point one percent zero point one percent of the richest people walk around this plan that means 99.9 percent of the whole planet thinks if they had your money they would never complain like you think if you had warren buffett's money and they're closer to being right because it would make a significant difference if you're living less than 30 thousand dollars in annual income you might you probably don't have indoor plumbing there's a thought for you many other things but i'm not gonna go into poverty well that's a whole nother story but nevertheless how what do you do the 99.9 of the world's population cannot do that enables you to earn this amount of money and the answer is the the education that we've gone through not just schooling but society the civilization that we live in trains us to think about about problems and issues and work and all kinds of things that the rest of the world just can't they just can't do it they just can't do it and there's a whole long story a lot of economists talk about this but but we we take for granted and therefore our education gets us to so far we're at that limit and now we've got to cross over we've got to make we've got to expand into the unknown universe into the places no one's got gone before and this is not so strange bill gate i'm not bill gates even though bill gates too but steve jobs is a great example of that edison's another great example of that of people that went to the edge of what the western world has to offer and had to take it a step up in hindsight their step up seems obvious when henry ford automated manufacturing seems obvious but at the time it's it's revolutionary and you have to try other things and get past that point and and that's true in a global sense manufacturing giant sets but it's also true in our personal level sense we're at the edge of the universe of what there is to know and to go past the next step to be the first part to ever learn how to read and write takes tremendous insight it's like it's a it's a whole new thing and the way to do that is not to do it by ways that didn't work before but to use the methods that have worked before and that is breaking it down into the smallest possible components parts if you you're challenged with now is difficult and everyone's next step is difficult because that's what's stopping us we all get to the point where we don't know what to do our education is not it does hasn't given us any answers to this everyone gets to that point and the next step is going to be the breakthrough the people make the break sometimes the break which is a personal thing but sometimes the breakthrough is you know apple computers but everyone's gets to that point and by breaking it down into the smallest parts i always i always like to make this point that steve jobs wasn't born with a computer chip in his mouth and warren buffett didn't have stock tips and making stop tips in his crib right and edison didn't turn the light bulb above his uh uh in his nursery all these people had to think in ways that created this that enabled them to succeed if if steve jobs was born 10 years earlier when computers were not a thing or 10 years later when it was already gone right would he have been the great success he would have been he became and the answer is yes he would because he thought in ways that enabled him to find great success he didn't he wasn't built with that that thinking his brain wasn't structured that way he just learned how to think that way that enabled him to succeed when you think that way you will succeed the same way too and one of those ways that and we it's very interesting because because if you look at all the people who succeed greatly over history and i've done quite a bit of this research on this whether it's whether it's nelson whether it's george washington whether it's with amelia earhart or or rosa parks nelson man all of these people achieve success in remarkably different ways but they all fault the same way you will not see a quote from winston churchill that's out of concept out of out of concert sorry out of concert that isn't aligned with with something that thomas edison didn't say they all think alike and when you as opposed to the famous saying great minds sorry this is the thing to say i always get that mixing mixed up it's along the famous like great minds think alike and that's true and if you think the same way you also would have that great success success success excuse me english isn't my first language that's a joke there so so so if you think those way what's that way break it up into smallest component parts that is that is how people achieve great things think about the problems that they are facing and therefore therefore whatever you're struggling with figure out how to make it smaller taking the smallest part you can possibly know and that's going to be very much part of what we're going to be talking about in the next steps as well the third step from the first step is should be a walk apart walking apart the second step is the second step don't don't don't don't make it hard to make it easier right that's if you can't figure out how to make it easy you're not going to succeed there's an easy in everything there's an easy way of achieving everything and you have to figure it out there's a very famous story with yakov when yaakov leaves his home and goes to goes to live with lovin he kisses the story is told the story in the bible that he comes to a well there's a giant rock on it and it takes a lot of shepherds to move this rock whites there's a whole other story but anyway he's going to move this giant rock and it takes many many men to be able to move there right and he moves it by himself astonishing so while she comes along quoting hazal that tell us that how did he move it as easy as popping a coke as easy as popping there's a poop there's it right was she coming to tell us this for like and if it would have been difficult and he's still a tremendous accomplishment i mean if somebody could who could move a boeing 747 by himself that's no small thing i'm pretty impressed right so he could move it by himself okay whether it was easy or difficult what difference does it make and the answer is no no that's exactly the point he understood in every problem in life there's an easy in every problem in life isn't easy if you're finding this issue difficult it's because you haven't found the easy find the easy and that's where great success is you can teach millions if you went to anybody 150 years ago definitely a thousand years ago and said we're gonna have universal education we're gonna teach the peasants how to read and write they think you're crazy they would think you're crazy like these people are never gonna learn how to read all right they're ignorant that's how they thought about people that's how people who are in the upper classes thought about everybody like they're just that they're unwashed masses they're never gonna do it right we created a system by which everybody don't know what intellectual capacity you have learned how to read it because we figure out how to make it easy okay that's that's the second point the third point is and this is a big misnomer in the western world there is no big listen very carefully there is no such thing as tough human beings don't do tough the truth of the matter is nothing does tough gorillas aren't tough they're doing what they do because it's easy in other words an elephant cannot roots a tree and a monkey can climb a tree but for and and both of those things are tough for us but for an elephant's a piece of cake but for an elephant to climb a tree offered for a monkey to uproot the tree that would be tough everything does what it's built to do easily the things that you do well is because you find them easy and this is a tremendous misnomer again in the western world because people who do things that we think are difficult easily is not because they're tough it's because they find it easy there are things that you there are things that you do there are things that you do that that other people look at yoga i wish i could do that whether it's dieting whether it's exercise whatever like like i love these people do marathons nothing again against doing a marathon i don't have a problem with doing a marathon as long as it's in a nice car with air conditioning right but but the people just like they they they go like you know if i don't do a mouth and once them once a month i feel out of place i just they just love it they're not being tough they're doing what they love to do when you do what you love to do it's easy now to everybody else it seems tough because for them it is tough there is no such thing as being tough and the more we use this language with other people so we look at other people that don't aren't able to do what we do easily and we look down at them because like come on be tough when we should really appreciate that we're not tough either we're just doing what we what we what we do easily easy that's just how it works and that fits right into all these points which is you gotta find the easy there is no such thing as tough and when you think that there is such a thing and i know people that have tremendous students of mine that have tremendous accomplishments in things that everyone would think is tough or like falling apart in something that everyone else thinks is easy and they can't do it and those people are really challenged because they think of themselves as tough and therefore they should be able to do it and they go into tremendous denial because i should be able to do that i mean that's easier if i did all that if i achieved all these things then doing this thing should be a piece of cake and it isn't because everybody gets challenged with something and what you have to do is figure out like the third like the seventh or the second point which is you gotta find your easier okay so the third point is there's no such thing as tough the fourth part the fourth point is is you have to find the people who find what you think as tough as easy you know the founder one of the founders of alcoholics anonymous his name was bill w and um they they asked him to sit in it spawned a whole revolution in in dealing with these um addictions and one of the things that spawned was overeaters anonymous so they asked him to sit in one of the meetings and other than the fact it's food or alcohol it's really the same conversation exactly the same steps it's all the same dialogue same concepts everything so they asked us to see him and afterwards they they asked him what was it like he said you can't cost power you cannot cross-pollinate alcoholics alcoholics over eaters overeaters and this is a point i talk about a lot in my book please check it out win you can get it on amazon the book is called win um and um he said alcohol is alcoholics elvis is why did you say that is this because the whole time i'm sitting there hearing these people go on about i i struggling for half a day to eat a cookie and i ate the cookie and then i ate the whole box of cookies and then i went all binge and blah blah blah blah blah right he said the whole time thing it said don't eat the cookie like if you if it's like you know you've got a heart problem and you're overweight and everything so don't eat the cookie and his nose like that doesn't help when it comes to alcohol because he's not challenged with food he's challenged with alcohol this the opposite is also true the food the one who is challenged with food is not challenged with alcohol in other words the person who's challenged with food is challenged with food but he thinks about alcohol she thinks about alcohol in a way that makes it easy he looks at the alcoholic it looks at the gambler the sex antics the uh uh all the other things the crack cocaine the heroin addict right and he looks at them go what's the problem just don't do it you know it ruins your life come on get your egg together and when it's not your issue it seems easy and that's true but what you need to do is find the person who is not who finds what you're challenged with easy in other words your challenge with alcohol go find the person who's not challenged with alcohol and learn from them how they think about alcohol in ways that make it work and easy for them the other way of doing it is to think about the things that you find easy and apply that thinking to tough you have to dissect it a little bit how do you think if not if you're not chad a lot of people are not challenged with alcohol and that's great right so how do you think about it that it makes it easy and apply that thinking to the things that you are challenged with that thinking is the key well how do you think about it and just apply it to food and you're gonna and you're gonna find it's easy we all know how to think about it and it was i know lots of people charge with food and what do they do and they don't get anywhere i'm gonna be tough and i'm not gonna and i'm gonna take it out of the kitchen i'm gonna have it and i'm gonna be disciplined and everything and it doesn't it just doesn't it just doesn't work you have to think of it because when you have alcohol when you're not challenged with alcohol you can have everything around wine scar jeff we think we'll be there and it doesn't bother you one iota because you're not challenging so how do you think about it and apply that thinking to food okay to or wherever you're challenged with okay that's number four all right so number one is a walk in the park that's set number two the number two is finding easy number three is we don't do tough number four is think about the things you have find difficult think about them in the same way you think about the things that you find easy and the number fifth is a life changer don't take on big goals i know it sounds kind of crazy and so counter intuitive but it's incredibly important the rabbis say there's a concept of learning from your enemy who's that enemy what's caught in judaism the atahara and the aids of her only give only only challenges us in small goals nobody broke a diet by eating a chocolate cake what they started off with is a cookie no one broke got fell off the wagon by drinking a bottle of scotch it was a tiny shot the way we lose is through small incremental things one cigarette smoke that's it right and therefore anyone is really bad and you got to stay away from it the opposite is also true great accomplishments come by small goals and that's what we do and why shashana i'm going to be this year it's going to be you know tremendous i'm going to run marathons and i'm going to lose 100 pounds and i'm going to you know blah blah blah all these all these incredible things it comes to nothing don't take on big goals take on small goals the biggest accomplishments i ever have in my life are the times when i'd say that i'm every day now i'm going to do the smallest possible thing and that's the trick whatever it is you want to achieve whether it's moving in the direction of food whether it's work whether it's personal relationships whatever you can do whatever it is the place you the direction you want to go in figure out the smallest possible thing that you can possibly take on that you couldn't possibly not do so i had for instance someone who's challenged who's trying to be a writer and she says like i i just i sit down in front of the computer and i get and she's a great writer and i just like i i i can't be bothered right so i said to him what's the smallest possible goal this achievement you can have every single day and she said right it's writing one word i say every day you're gonna write one word every day if you if exercise is your thing you're gonna exercise for three minutes three minutes that's all you're gonna i could do three minutes i mean come on right in other words what is the goal you can have that's the minimum that you cannot possibly do and you're gonna find that if you keep to that goal it's only gonna be three minutes that's all i'm gonna do i'm gonna write one word that's all i'm gonna do right i'm gonna i'm gonna write to one friend whatever it is that you wanna walk get towards whatever it is i'm gonna be one page learn one page whatever it happens to be one paragraph one sentence whatever it is i'm gonna learn one hebrew word a day whatever it is you want to do you're going to find that because you've you've stepped in that direction you're going to most of the days if not every day you're going to do much more than that but your commitment is only for the smallest amount so when you're feeling down and you can't be bothered you keep the small z and it'll keep you in in the game along that path you're going to see it's a game changer towards life-changing life-changing decisions that are going to put you on incredible path to success good luck everybody please stay in touch let me know what you think if you have any questions feel free to connect with me b a sbars r s h dot com and i'm on youtube and all kinds of other places thanks so much and uh thanks again for project inspired