Add another timeless classic at least once every week and commit yourself to reading 20-30 pages each day and continue this practice for years, reading as much as you can whenever, wherever possible. Do not stop this process. The whole point to all of this learning is not to reach an ultimate end point down the road at some esoteric destination, but to transform something hard at the start into a fun and enjoyable lifetime habit.
Read as much as you can. And take notes as you read anytime new thoughts occur inside your mind. Always have these tools available in order to log more thoughts throughout the day. Take many notes while reading, and studying other people. Think of yourself as an anthropologist: your goal is to extract as much information as possible, that includes books and people.
Now, these notes may be short, to start. You might not have much to say in the beginning and therefore not know what to do. But training the mind requires a particular kind of extended practice for developing your vocabulary in order to attain intense levels of powerful communication.
You might have no idea of what to say for a long time either. And when you do say anything it might seem strange at times to others, or feel like nothing is happening from all this reading. This is natural. You have to let the process run its course. What’s interesting to note is simply by following this process at some point it transpires after many years when you go to return to reading the same books again and notice something has changed. Things are different. You’ve started to see. And that small note that didn’t seem like much at the time from just opening the cover and getting a glimpse of that nascent thought years later, ideas will flow to you and as if out of nowhere.
FINDING SOLITUDE: READ. WRITE. WORKOUT. REST [IN A WORLD LOSING ITS ABILITY TO DO SO]
Free time is something I can never get enough of. There can never be too much free time. And there is no such thing as nothing to do, or boredom. It baffles me how many people say they are bored when waiting with nothing to do. One of my biggest problems is how I’m going to fit it all in before I’m 80-years old, or die. Whichever comes first. Not knowing what to do with one’s self is bizarre to my mind, when people feel bored during free time. What? How do these people not know how to live? So what do you do with free time in order to never feel bored?
ENGAGE THE MIND AND BODY IN PRODUCTIVE ACTIVE ACTIVITIES
Spend your time engaging the body and mind with aim and purpose. Reading (and writing) is a mental workout. It takes discipline and focus to sit down and do the hard work, undistracted when you could easily sit down to watch passive entertaining content instead to fill the voids of free time with the endless circus of media distractions. That choice, however, of passive engagement, will never lead to an increased or more complex self.
Also, it’s just a terrible way to spend your free time. Productive living is a far more enjoyable way to spend your life.
The reason you should continue to read and write then is not to gain attention or seek admiration. Don’t waste any time thinking or worrying about fans or money because that’s ridiculous and also quite demeaning to deduce yourself to only feeling worthy of doing what you enjoy if only someone else will enjoy it with you.
You should do whatever you enjoy and do so for no other reason than for the benefits it brings you. The same way people willingly push themselves into physical exertion activities. We don’t expect fans to cheer us on a treadmill. And likewise should be the same with the matters of living well. However both of these activities do work better together and complement each other. You should therefore have a wide variety of interests and make time for each of these as each one improves the self by engaging with the other.
THE GOAL OF HAVING A PRACTICE
Is to build enough experience in order to someday start turning your energy and efforts into work. Once your 10-year apprenticeship starts reaching its close, it’s not time to stop, but time to launch, into an even deeper academic enquiry as this merely sets the stage for your further creative expansion, beginning the following 10-years continuing extending this skillset wider, sharpening your skill acquisition abilities, further stretching the unlimited horizon of your active imagination until all this knowledge is deeply embedded in your mind.
The whole purpose of having a process is for developing a practice, and for the purpose of always being able to continue successful practicing.
It is a never ending journey of self discovery to see how far you can get inside the core of reality within the very short time you have left to live.
Realise: the 10-year apprenticeship is not about reaching a point where you can finally stop once and for all and be done with the process of your self education, but to keep the mind sustained in this active practice until you reach a skill level of being able to practice for hours on end at a higher level feeling energised and euphoric without ever losing concentration.
And all of this is for the purpose of elevating your mind to reach a level which will allow you to evolve, entering into an even deeper state of consciousness, a higher dimensional experience learning level, making your practice its own reward each time you start to engage with the next goal.
Upon entering this cycle you may start to experience flow states, see flashes or have visions, ideas and inspirations, even creative insights as images might appear in your mind or be thrown at you while in play. Each move takes you a step higher up and this will feel extremely enjoyable. Continue to follow this pattern, and after you’ve reached a decade of experience in thought and thinking, this will allow you to enter further still into even higher dimensional thinking again, taking a seat at the table now to tackle subject matters next to intellectual giants and consume works by some of the most intelligent, influential figures and thinkers of our time, being able to assimilate whatever information you choose to sit down to engage with and focus on. This in turn will allow you then to digest even further difficult to comprehend materials, acquiring an even higher skill level yet again, continuously feeding this cycle and feeling the rush of excitement from deep learning, mastering harder skills that once were impossible to achieve, but now deliberately sought out as fun opportunities through this process.
Like trying to conquer foreign lands, or multiple foreign languages, these skills acquired during the first 10-years of your apprenticeship is merely a stepping stone for allowing you to advance onto the path of masters and navigate alongside those who in the past built great, classic and timeless work, all on the the hope that through your own efforts, sheer brute force discipline with a complete and total commitment to lifelong process, you some day might be able to achieve that same goal, producing the level of work you aspire to create yourself.
PREPARING FOR THE SECOND PHASE OF YOUR APPRENTICESHIP
You cannot begin even being ready for starting to embark on this second part of your journey until you have successfully made it through the first phase. And the first phase, depending on your abilities may take a minimum of 10-years before your mind has evolved into being ready to tackle this complexity from the next higher level.
And so, after you have made it through to the end of this first 10-year period, re-enter the loop and go again. Only this time you’re not starting from scratch, not beginning from nothing or nowhere, but with fresher eyes, ideas and this increased perspective from a decade of experience along with far better, far stronger creative insights.
Now, commencing with 10-years of practice already in the bag, this experience will only increase and enhance your intrinsic motivation further from having cultivated this extreme discipline and being intensely focused on the never-ending goal of improving your mind. Repeat the process and you will not believe the heights of power your mind will reach.
It won’t seem obvious to others at times and it might not even make any sense whatsoever to you who is doing the work. And as the years go by it will seem to others like there is no sign of any visible progress, but bubbling beneath the surface under the threshold of awareness radical changes are taking place within the neurochemistry of your brain from all this deliberate practice. It will not be perceivable to any outside observer simply because the sensation of what is taking place can only be felt by you whilst engaged with this process.
However, around the 10-year mark something does happen. Something changes. There is a psychological shifting of your experience. These thousands and thousands of hours logged have drastically improved the qualitative state of your brain, and imagination. Just like the chrysalis that forms during its transformation into a butterfly, we don’t always see the magic at work during this process before that shift takes place when what could only walk starts to fly.
And in the case of the development of your mind, this magic is simply in your commitment to this process of your own self education. Then, after 10-years of study, just like the butterfly, there will be an awakening. You will go through your own metamorphosis.
Forcing yourself to go through a decade-long process of deliberate practice will not yield but produce immense rewards and qualitatively change your experience in extremely positive ways. During this process, you will experience magical flow states.
ONCE UPON A FLOW STATE
Flow states will occur each time when the goal is clear and difficult. It requires reaching for a skill level previously unattained, or seemingly unattainable. It requires going to the outer edge of your abilities and staying at that zone, constantly trying to push further and harder ahead each time once you arrive back in there, making yourself stronger, both physically and mentally, getting creatively deeper, choosing to engage with the challenge of not just never-ending learning as the goal but never ceasing to seek out more difficult challenges deliberately.
When one chooses to lock in for this journey, what the current goal is now will be subject to change over time, through each iteration that arrives after every next accomplishment. In other words, what you wish to achieve now is not necessarily what you may still want to achieve a decade later. This is to be expected. As continuously entering these flow states will continuously drive your experience in consciousness upwards and forwards, pushing your physical and mental abilities through the roof each time you climb, meaning the ideas that come back to you during these active moments will return with more depth than those before, continuously increasing their level in complexity.
Example: the work you are active and doing right now is merely a reflection of your current skill level. In order to maintain and keep entering flow states your mind must always be set on the task of further increasing the difficulty of whatever the task is you are currently trying to accomplish. By making the task more complex, seeking harder ways of challenging the goal, and your mind, with the addition of physical discipline engaged plus the strenuous amounts of energy required to be absorbed mentally allows you to get deeper inside the problem. And so, following the natural course of this cycle it is only inevitable that after a decade of being engaged with all this complexity continuously pushing the boundaries of your physical and mental landscape, pieces will start to fall then emerge into patterns with structure and order.
And what that will do is it will transform your intellectual ability and lead you onto a path of being able to comprehend much harder work.
You will literally experience your brain synapsing, flooding the body releasing neurochemicals that cause this sensation to arrive allowing you to feel this extraordinary dynamic during play. Skills will start coming to you as if attracted by a magnet and as if out of nowhere without effort or difficulty. Practising the habit of complexity for a decade, as it turns out, transpires into experiencing the practice of doing difficult things as an enjoyable habit.
Every time you sit down to work thereafter you will always be able to set into the task, with ease, and produce a result from having put yourself through this rigorous pre-training process. It will be the end of distraction and the death of procrastination. You are now free to focus your attention in whichever direction you choose for extended periods of time, without interruption, without losing focus, without ever experiencing fatigue or boredom, ensuring that you always get done what you set out to do, even under intense time constraints. And perhaps, even more so, because of so.
SET YOURSELF A DAILY GOAL [OR 3] EACH AND EVERY SINGLE DAY
This is the modal I opt for and operate from each day: set one physical goal and one mental goal and include some sort of other meaningful goal into your day 5-6 days of every week. This is a great way to ensure a life is being well spent, well lived, never bored, always knowing what to learn and do next.
Now, on the days when you plan to read, read. Make one of those goals each day to read 20-30 pages and do that until it becomes a rigid habit in your weekly rhythm routine.
However, what you may find at many times down the line is whenever you go to start the reading you think of something to write. And the whole purpose and reason for why you aspire to read at all, besides the fact of how extremely enjoyable the experience of reading physical books is and how important it is for one’s life, and also as it is still one of life’s most simplest yet greatest pleasures, is to also learn how to be able to write strong arguments yourself, in case you ever need to.
Therefore, always read intentionally. As in, read with a purpose. But when you start to read and immediately think of something to write, don’t read. Write. Why? Because those moments aren’t always there where everything seems to just come through so easily without any effort. And that is a joyous experience once it arrives and completely captures you. Never question it. Follow it though. That’s something that is trying to help you.
Then once you are finished, go and find a good hard physical activity to expel this physical energy created from expending creative energy. You could call it a cool down. But it’s not a cool down at all. As running 10-miles after reading 30-pages and handwriting 5-6 creates this inner tension that needs an outlet to release. And endurance physical exertion activity is a great way to inspire the emergence of better ideas to follow.
It is another way to keep the mind active after productive mental activity. This cycle continues to feed into itself. You will always return back to the task better than you were before. Then it, the work itself, better than it was before. All this engagement and activity will move on to the next skill level. It is important to follow this cycle.
The first 10-years will be extremely hard, no doubt about it. It will also be fun and produce some of the most rewarding experiences of your whole life. You must endure the challenges, no matter what. Because you will have to enter the second phase: the next 10-year cycle. And that’s when it starts to become extremely fun.
Read. Write. Learn. Exercise. Rest. Repeat. And don’t forget to earn between all that too. This isn’t even the start. I haven’t even begun the reading to start the writing. This is just draft being plucked from thin air until I start the work to know what to do later 📚