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The Easy Path Project Livestream #15
Could One Simple Daily Habit Unlock the Doors to Opportunity?
Welcome to the Easy Path Project – Strong Inner Game Outcomes Part Five: Lifelong Learning
And we are live! Well, we made it to Friday night. So hip hip hooray! Welcome to the Easy Path Project live stream. Tonight we’re wrapping up the discussion that we’ve been having for the last week or so about the nine pillars of inner game. Tonight specifically, what we’re going to be discussing is: could one simple daily habit unlock the doors to opportunity?
The Power of Acquiring New Skills
For example, acquiring new skills gives you extra tools to solve life’s toughest problems. Like I mentioned last night, you know the handhold, the finger hold lessons. It’s like sometimes it turns out that you grasp something new – you learn something new – and then that one thing that you just learned opens up a possibility of learning these other things. Once you learn those, you start to get a whole bunch of new skills.
So for instance, if we’re talking about personal development, personal growth, communication skills, relationship skills – all of these different things – as you grow your arsenal, you just have more opportunities to use those particular items or those tactics or techniques or strategies, in some sense. And it makes it easier to solve your problems. Once you start solving your problems with ease, things are going to get better, done right?
Curiosity Feeds Creativity
Anyway, but curiosity feeds creativity. Each new lesson can spark innovative ideas. That was one of the things we were talking about last night – that creativity. Once again, just referring back to the comment I just made: acquiring new skills, right? So once you’ve got these extra skills, then you can approach the situations with more understanding or with more care, or more confidence.
There’s a whole bunch of benefits simply because, once you start trying to think about – like I mentioned – growing your arsenal, that really starts to exponentially grow. And that’s what we’re here for. The Easy Path Project is about easy exponential growth. And each new skill you master becomes an asset, opening doors you never knew existed.
Life as a Video Game
Like, you’ll find that – I mean, if you think about life as a journey, or more like a video game – like if you ever played any of those old Dungeons and Dragons games, once you build your skill set, then you can advance through the game. And life is very similar in that way.
In fact, a lot of times I refer to or I kind of visualize my life as a simulation. And it works the same way. Like the things that I have picked up along the way, as I’ve gone through this personal growth journey that I’m still on, that I’m still in the middle of – which is the topic of the discussion tonight anyway – but each thing that I learn seems to be useful for some things, and it’s then also useful for other things. And it’s really nice to have that little master key
How You Present Yourself Matters
Once you start finding ways to solve these problems and navigate through your life, certainly it’s not going to be instantaneous, although it could be. Like I said last night, keep your mind open to the possibility. But what it is going to be is that as you improve or as you get smoother, you’ll find that the way you move will start to open doors, in a sense.
I mean, that’s something I need to expand on, but it’s something that I’ve been discussing for the last week now. It’s like, just simply how you conduct yourself and how you present yourself to the world. If you’re applying these things we’re talking about here, you’re going to display an improved version of yourself. And once you start doing that, things start to improve rapidly.
The Nine Pillars of Inner Game
Anyway, but without further ado, I introduce the topic of tonight’s conversation: Strong Inner Game Outcomes Part Five – Lifelong Learning. So that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. And I’ll try to talk about a couple of different ways – a couple different lenses to look at this through.
The way I’ve laid it out for tonight is just the absolute most basic – like if you do this, this happens – like in just life in general. But you can extrapolate these things to all the various different components of your life, and you’ll really see the power of this, what I’m talking about.
Just real quick, in case you’re late to the live stream or whatever, it’s nine pillars of inner game in no particular order here, right? This is just the list items: belief in self-worth, positive self-image, true self-expression, lifelong learning (tonight’s lesson), coping skills and resiliency, EQ or emotional intelligence, flexibility, moral courage (that’s what we spoke about last night), and optimism (which is what we also spoke about last night).
So yeah, we’re going to be talking about all these different pillars of inner game, things that you can – the idea here, once again, in case you missed it, is that you start out life like the second you pop out of the womb, you’re perfect, and that as you go through life you pick up crap that’s maybe not helpful, right? And so we’re helping you ditch that stuff so you feel better. Once you feel better, you’ll be going through life differently. You know, you’ll think about things differently, you’ll receive them, you’ll give differently – everything changes.
The Benefits of Lifelong Learning
1. Increased Adaptability
The first thing we’re going to talk about is increased adaptability. Continuously learning helps you stay relevant in a changing world. Yeah, like I mentioned just a moment ago, this is going to apply to different things, different worlds obviously. So like if you’re a tech guy or IT guy, or anything – even if you’re in HVAC or plumbing or whatever – you still have to learn. You’re still picking up things along the way.
And once you do that, it allows you to kind of extend your relevance to the world. And that sounds kind of – it’s a bad way to put it, but I mean in the sense that you don’t want to kind of become a relic to where you’re no longer able to interface with the reality that’s around you. It’s like you want to adapt and to overcome, right? And with this increased adaptability, you’ll find it easier to move into the future kind of with grace.
2. Enhanced Problem Solving Skills
Enhanced problem solving skills – new knowledge provides more tools for tackling challenges. Not only does it help you with just solving a problem – so like let’s say you get one tool for handling one problem – it’s almost like you can look at it from a different angle as: okay well, if I’ve got this kind of tool here and it works this way, what can I take from that? How can I apply this idea or this way of thinking or this course of action? How can I apply that to other things?
And then once you start to have a more rounded, more solid understanding of, first of all, your tool set, but second of all, the problems you’re facing, that just naturally leads to increased ability to solve your problems.
Greater Intellectual Stimulation
Greater intellectual stimulation – learning keeps your mind sharp and engaged. You know, you see all of these senior citizens picking up the brain teaser books and stuff at the grocery store, or doing sudoku or crosswords or all these other things – they’re trying to keep their brain stimulated. You know, it’s kind of like a “use it or lose it” kind of situation.
So as you’re learning and as you’re growing, then it keeps everything kind of sharp. It allows you to move forward from that enhanced state just by the repetition – the exercise of your intellect.
4. Increased Opportunities
Increased opportunities – new skills and knowledge can open doors to different career paths and experiences. While I am not fluent now, at one point I was moderately capable of speaking in Spanish. And by learning Spanish, I was able to live in a foreign country and start a club for English and meet a lot of really super interesting people.
Actually, it’s really kind of funny that the only time I’ve ever spoken directly to a Chinese person was in Spanish. We both could speak Spanish, but he couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Mandarin. And so, just the fact that I would lay in bed at night listening to Berlitz tapes over and over and let the lessons kind of get past my conscious brain and get into my subconscious so that I was feeling and dreaming in Spanish – from lowly beginnings, I was able to enjoy some pretty cool situations.
And so, think about what your situation is like. What are some simple little easy things you can do that will bloom into increased opportunities?
5. Improved Self-Confidence
Improved self-confidence – mastering new things builds a sense of accomplishment, not only for the fact that you did it, but the fact that you know that you can do it again. Plus, whatever you just learned is going to be a springboard for you to learn other stuff. I mean, like I said, it all adds up, it all works together. This exponential growth thing is not a joke.
Relationships and Continuous Learning
Like I said, some of the things that we’re talking about here are very specifically applicable to MGTOW guys – men going their own way, right? They a lot of times get kind of thrown into a really bad situation – courts and divorce and child custody and all these horrible things – and it sucks. You know, you don’t want to point a finger at a guy who’s down or whatever, but it happens just in relationships in general.
When it’s almost like you think, “Okay well, if I can get a girl or if I can talk a chick into marrying me and then I’ve got a wife, well then I can sort of relax, right? I’ve done the hard work.” And it’s like no, no, no, no – the hard work is just starting, right? It’s like you’re past the easy part now. The part where you really have to be on your toes.
And that’s what – so specifically relating to relationships and especially maintaining relationships and growing relationships – is learning about the relationship, learning how to improve it, how to navigate through it more smoothly. How to deal with issues. If you have some bumps in the road, how do you deal with those? If you have something really crummy happen, how do you bounce back? That’s what we’re talking about here.
Like I said, it totally sucks for you dudes that have gone through that MGTOW stuff, but don’t let that prevent you from enjoying a relationship. Learn from this. Like I said, it’s got to be horrible what you had to deal with, but understand that you have to put a lot more work and a lot more intelligent work. You can’t just assume.
I mentioned back in the first of these series of live streams talking about Dr. Brad Blanton. He wrote a book called “Radical Honesty,” and a lot of what he said can be summed up in: talk, communicate, and be honest. You don’t have to be a jerk about it – you can be polite or you can be tactful – but communicate to the other person.
I had some relationships where I would see the man and the woman, and they were in love, right? Like it wasn’t a question of them being in love, but they were constantly bickering because they would not talk. They wouldn’t – I mean, one person would do things their way and the other person would do their thing the other way, and it was just always… it’s like, well, you guys could just skip the crummy part if you just got to the point where you’re actually communicating with each other and telling each other what you want.
You know, it doesn’t have to be a secret. You don’t have to guess. You can actually ask a woman, “What do you think?” or “What do you feel?” You know, you might have to navigate through a minefield or two, but I mean, you’re making the point that you matter.
And that’s what I’m talking about here. So if you learn these skills and you learn how to apply these skills and you continuously lifelong learn these skills, don’t think you can just quit because you’ve got the girl. It’s like now you’ve really got to make sure – if you want this relationship to stick – that you’re going to have to put some… and it’s not effort really, is it? I mean, if you’re getting a good relationship out of it, it’s got to be worth it, right?
So but it’s just you taking the time, being considerate, realizing that the other person in the relationship with you has hopes, dreams, concerns, etc. – and so address them. It’ll be a lot easier for you to make her happy if you know what it is that she wants from the relationship. If you just go in guessing, it’s a good chance you’re going to guess wrong. And vice versa – if she doesn’t talk to you about what you want, she won’t know. And what are the chances of you having a good relationship if both of you are flying blind, not thinking about what the other’s thinking about?
More Benefits of Lifelong Learning
6. Broader Perspective
Learning about different subjects and cultures expands your understanding of the world. You know, that was one of the things that I actually thought – and it probably has been and it probably will continue to be – but like one of the things about the explosion of the internet and the ability for people from all over the world to interact with people from all over the world, right? You know, it’s not going to be so easy for the governments of the world to try to convince us to go to war against each other.
There’s like, if you know Chinese people or if you know Russian people or whoever they decide to make enemies next week – if you know those people, when they try to tell you that “Oh, these people are hateful,” and then you’re like, “Well no, I know this cat, right? Like, he’s not hateful at all. It’s like you must be just trying to bamboozle me, right?”
Anyway, and so that’s just one example. But like when you start to improve your mind and to continually grow, you’ll find that like I said earlier about how you’ll see things from different angles. You can actually pull back. That’s what I always tell people about how to deal with emotions and stuff. Like if you’re in a situation where you can remove yourself just a little bit, so not necessarily that you have to feel an emotion that just slams into you and you have to react, but it’s more like you can pull yourself back and you can see the emotion. Like you recognize it: “Okay, I know what this is coming.”
Once you can start to control yourself – that’s part of the emotional intelligence I was mentioning a moment ago – being able to control your emotions and being able to direct them and stuff. Anyway, but once you start having all these different perspectives, these different angles or lenses, you can look at your problems or your life in general, and you’ll find that it’s a lot easier to deal with. It’s like you don’t have to be reflexive or you don’t have to do what somebody else did. It’s like you’ve got that toolkit and you can deal with it on your own, plus you’re thinking better, right? And once you do that, it’s going to make it easier to move forward.
7. Enhanced Creativity
And this is like the seventh time I’ve mentioned it, but creativity – enhanced creativity. Exposure to new ideas can spark your own innovation. You know, there’s this push in society to try to convince men to go on their own and do their own thing and everything, but that is a kind of a psyop by the powers that be, right? Like, not to go all Karl Marx on you here or anything, but we’re stronger together – we’re social creatures.
You know, you can sit there and dig into personal development or personal growth books, and you can really put a lot of effort into it and everything. But you can also find that if you just have like one evening in a small group of like three men over beers and cigars, and they give you some ideas and stuff that would have just never, ever maybe come into your realm of thought – like it’s just not how you think – so to see it from this other perspective, that is really helpful.
Like I said, if you have certain tools and then another person can explain to you how they used a different tool but similarly, then suddenly you just become a much more creative person. It’s like you find new ways to deal with things and more elegant ways. It’s like you can do it with a flourish – like Zorro the sword fighter or the guy in The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya. I mean, you can do this with flair, and that comes from enhanced creativity.
8. Stronger Social Connections
Stronger social connections – learning can connect you with others who share your interests. Like I said, the ability to communicate is a big part of what we’re talking about here – the ability to actually form connections with humans by understanding, so by having empathy or by forgiveness, so it’s like you’re not judgmental. You’re just letting people be people. You’re not perfect, they’re not perfect, and all these little things will start to add up to where people will feel better around you. Like, you’ll ultimately be becoming a better person, right?
And so as you kind of grow into this better persona, people are going to respond to that well. And like we discussed last night, once you get to the point where people are actually – like they feel good around you, like where they’re happy to see you – they start to form attachments, they start to look at you differently. They have a certain way that they expect you to be, but they find that to be a pleasant thing, or hopefully they find it a pleasant thing. And then the rapport builds, and the depth of your relationship grows. I mean, it’s really interesting to see how that happens.
And like I said, some of this stuff – if you can just kind of pull back and look at what’s happening in your life and see what’s causing it to happen – it can really… you know, it’s like that light bulb moment they talk about, like where you finally get it.
9. Greater Personal Growth
Greater personal growth – continuous learning contributes to your overall development as an individual. Yeah, like I said, this is not just applicable to personal growth in a sense like personal development, like self-help. It’s also like, as you learn how to communicate with someone, like I mentioned just a moment ago, the depth of your interactions, the depth of your connections will grow.
And that’s really what this is all about, right? It’s like we’re hoping to grow and we’re hoping to develop our relationships and our understanding, and all of that kind of comes as part of this – of the nine pillars of inner game. Getting all kind of flustered here – I’m trying to think about how to say this more eloquently.
The idea is that it’s not just one thing, right? Continuous learning, and really in any form, is going to help the rest of your personal development, your overall development. Like, that’s just how it works. Once again, I’ll just start taking little notes here about what I want to explain deeper or more thoroughly in the future, and that’s one. But I mean, the idea that personal growth grows off of itself is the idea of the exponential growth that I’m talking about all the time.
10. A More Meaningful Life
And finally, a more meaningful life – the pursuit of knowledge and understanding can add depth and purpose to your life. I mean, you can just learn for the pleasure and enjoyment of learning. It doesn’t have to be for a reason. You don’t have to be making any effort.
Referring back to stronger social connections and lifelong learning – at one point I had access to the NFL Sunday Ticket program, and part of that is you actually can go back and watch all of the games from the previous weekend, but in a very shortened form, like in 30 minutes or so. So I would spend the Sunday evening or Monday early recapping all these games – watching the short version, learning what happened, who the players were, all the kind of things that were going on with the team. And then later that evening I’d go to the bar.
And because it was a tourist – well, it was a very transient area where I was – there were lots of tourists and a lot of people working, and I just happened to be in like ground zero for where they all came through. And so I got a reputation as the football guy, right? I knew everything about NFL football. And so I would go into the bar and just start chatting up these dudes, and I could talk about their team, wherever they’re from. And they’d buy me a beer, and we’d talk some more. And if we hit it off, that’s great, and they’d buy me more beers, and I would get out of there having spent little or nothing all night just by hanging out, talking about football with dudes who were happy to hear somebody that knew about Buffalo’s football team.
And in the discussion of like the pursuit of knowledge and understanding can add depth and purpose to your life – well, even something as just ridiculous as NFL – just by learning that, I was able to kind of parlay that into stronger social connections and like a more meaningful life. You know, I made friends. I have friends from that era that I still speak to on a semi-regular basis every other day or so.
So this growth can come from anywhere. I mean really, like I mentioned the handhold or the finger hold – like just grab onto something, just start working on it. Like I said, the Easy Path Project live streams are all about personal growth and everything, so start here. Hang out, let’s talk about getting better.
Conclusion
Like I said, I’ve laid all the ideas that I’m going to be discussing – I’ve laid them out over the last 15 live streams or so. So once we start moving into the Q&As and the practical application and stuff, I think that you’re really going to enjoy where this is going.
And in fact, are you enjoying this? Like, are you getting any value from it? If so, please leave a like – likes help – and also leave a comment. Like I said, as much fun as it is to talk to folks out there who are lurking, it’d be more fun if we could actually have a conversation and talk about what it is that you’re thinking about.
Anyway, but that being said, if you do like the live streams, make sure that you subscribe to the channel and also click the notification bell so that you can be alerted. Like I said, these go on about 7:30 PM Monday through Friday, but if you click notifications, YouTube will tell you when we’re going live.
Anyway, so let’s wrap this up. The idea here is that expanding your skill set opens doors to fresh opportunities and new adventures. Like I said, this is called the Easy Path Project for a reason. It’s really – we’re always looking for the easiest, most comfortable, the simplest, least effort kind of ways, and this is it right here. Like, even if it’s just picking up a newspaper or a magazine or something and reading up something like – just sort of jog your intellect, allow yourself to start seeing the world in a different way.
One thing that I like to do for this is I go out and, for whatever reason, YouTube on their recommendations gives me recommendations for just absolutely teeny tiny little channels – I’m talking about people with like 20 or 30 subscribers. And they’re just getting started, but it’s really interesting to hear them talk about some of the stuff that they talk about. It’s not like the normal thing you’d hear.
Like for instance, one of the most interesting ones that I heard – a guy talk about, he was a high schooler, he’s a young kid anyway, but he was talking about how his channel that he’s putting together, he’s actually going to start doing commentary about professional wrestling. And you know, obviously you would think, “Oh well, this kid thinking about professional wrestling.” And he says, “Professional wrestling is like athletics for theater kids.”
It’s like, yeah, that’s kind of a weird way to look at things, but it’s like, okay, well once you got this one thing – athletics and theater kids usually don’t mix – but like the two of them together, and like the fact that professional wrestling is theater and stuff, and it’s really – just that one little thing kind of jogged the way that I think about things. I can’t necessarily tell you how it’s turned out yet, but I mean it might end up being something really cool. And it might be that easy for you too. Like, you stumble across something that just starts the gears whirring in your mind.
And yeah, who knows where that goes, right? What is it they say? The longest journey starts with a single step. It’s like that could be your first step.
Anyway, okay, I think that wraps it up for tonight. Since it’s Friday night and I know everybody wants to go out and hang out and do stuff, I’m going to wrap it up early. But like I said, our live streams are normally Monday through Friday around 7:30 PM Central, and this is the kind of stuff we talk about. So if you dig it, definitely come back and say hi, and let’s get a conversation going.
Anyway, and like I also said, if you aren’t able to make it, then check out the live streams that I’ve got in the playlist so that you never miss a super interesting thing I say, right? Anyway, and with that being said, I’m going to wrap it up for the week. Thanks for hanging out, we’ll see you Monday night. Enjoy your weekend and take it easy.
Join the TEPP Livestream M-F around 7:30pm Central! Watch replays in the live stream playlist!