NelsonQuest

How to Be a Weak Pathetic Failure (forever)

How to Be a Weak Pathetic Failure (forever)

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Do you ever find yourself doing something you told yourself you weren’t going to do, and think ‘wow, I f*cking suck.’

Well, you probably do, and maybe it’s finally time to just… give up.

I mean, life is hard enough as it is – so why waste another second struggling to “improve” yourself, when you can quickly and easily join the legions of worthless, feeble-minded geniuses who have discovered that the secret to an easy life is a single word….

Which I’ll share at the very end of today’s video, which is a complete 6  STEP guide on how you can transform from someone doing their best to improve their life, into the weakest, most pathetic, piece of garbage you could ever possibly dream of.

Step #1: Understand the REAL Reason You’re Broke

If you’re broke – it could be for a nearly infinite number of reasons – excluding of course the possibility that it’s your fault.

It’s most likely because of the limited opportunities in your city or even country, despite the nearly endless ocean of job opportunities that exist online…  most of which only require a basic laptop and stable internet connection to get started.

But how could anyone in their right mind honestly expect you to know how to get started?

I mean, despite a nearly endless ocean of free online resources detailing how to get started and make money in virtually any online profession, what you need… AND deserve… is an actual mentor who can hold your hand and guide you.

Yes, I’ve seen the hundreds of messages you guys have sent me asking if I would be willing to mentor you in exchange for your extremely valuable gratitude… and if I say that I can’t, or don’t respond – it’s NOT because I’m busy running a business, making YouTube videos, starting a family, and trying to win a Colombian National Title in boxing –

It’s because I’m racist.

Step #2: Blame Ageism, Sexism, and also definitely Racism… ideally all 3

Listen – as a business owner with over 50 employees, I can tell you first-hand that I’d be OUTt of business…  and probably living on the street and eating out of garbage cans… if I hired people based on the ‘merit of their abilities’.

Because businesses can’t afford to care about profit – what we REALLY care about are 3 things.

The first is what age you are.

Why would a business care about the actual skills you possess or the impressive things you’ve accomplished when you are CLEARLY a young person with no future upside.

The second is what sex you are – please – the last thing I need some intelligent,hard working woman distracting my 100% male work-force.

The third, and definitely most important, what country you or your ancestors are from.

Who cares if you’ve designed hundreds of websites or written hundreds of thousands of lines of code –  what really matters is that you’re not white, because we have diversity quotas to hit.

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The Dark Mode Guide

is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.

This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.

Step #3: Accept that which you cannot change, i.e. your weight and physical appearance

So let’s start with the obvious – if you’re overweight and/or think that you’re ugly, then you already understand firsthand that these things are COMPLETELY out of your control.

Popular YouTubers are always bringing up the “law of thermodynamics”- that its not possible to store more calories than the ones we consume –

But this has already been debunked SO MANY times.

Not by scientists or nutrition experts, but by the masses of people who claim that despite eating only lettuce and cucumbers, that they STILL somehow can’t lose weight.

They’re obviously telling the truth.

And there are so many obvious paradoxes when it comes to improving your physical appearance.

If you’re OUT of shape, how are you supposed to have enough energy to work out and get IN shape?

How are you supposed to get in a car and go to a gym when you ARE a car.

How are you supposed to dress better, or change your hairstyle, when you ARE a car.

Step #4: Stop dating because you’ll never get who you deserve

Women don’t give a shit about how much confidence you have from all of the impressive things you’ve done, how much pride you take in your appearance, or the absolute fucking gauntlet of of trials and tribulations that you’ve survived to be able to achieve financial success –

What they really care about is how much money you have and how tall you are.

Take me for example, I don’t have enough money to buy any of the high status things that we know women flock to because I waste all of my money investing in myself and in investments.

And I’m only 5’6 – a little known fact that I’ve had to painstakingly hide from the hundreds of beautiful women I’ve been with.

Last year I finally gave up on dating and decided to settle down with Jabba the Slutt.

She’s vile, repulsive and I literally hate everything about her, but with a few more surgeries I’m hopeful we can get to the point where I don’t immediately vomit or break down in tears after she forces herself upon me.

Step #5: Embrace failure, and then quit.

We’ve all heard the famous quote ‘talent always beats hard work, even and especially if talent fails to work hard”

Everyone that’s ahead of us in life got there not because they worked hard, but because of god-given talents or luck, both of which we’ll never have.

Henry Ford famously said “the only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

What I’ve learned is that when we fail and then IMMEDIATELY give up, we NEVER have to experience the pain of failure again.

Thomas Alva Edison famously said “I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Now, when I fail, there is only 1 way: I don’t work.

If you don’t try, you can’t fail – it really is that simple.

Step #6: Maintain healthy levels of jealousy

When we see others who have either achieved or obtained those things that we’re striving for – a lamborghini, a rolex, or a dinosaur skeleton  – it’s completely NATURAL for us to experience feelings of jealousy.

What’s NOT natural is for us to then closely examine these feelings, realize that we’re only jealous of others because we want the things they have for ourselves.

Which then causes us to then see OURSELVES in them,

which then causes us to experience jealousy in a way where we feel HAPPY when the people around us succeed, because we now  see OURSELVES succeeding.

Again, not only is this NOT natural – but this also requires EFFORT, our sworn enemy.

What IS natural and requires NO effort – is to simply blindly react to jealousy –

We SHOULD have the things that everyone else has, PERIOD and it’s only because of our not having a mentor, where we live, our age, race, sex, weight, physical body composition, deficiency of money, short stature, and lack of god-given talents, that we don’t have those things. 

 

—

 

Alright guys, so I mentioned at the beginning of this video that the SECRET to effortlessly being a weak pathetic piece of garbage is hidden in 1 single world that MILLIONS of people across the world have already discovered –

And that word is, COMFORT.

Now here’s the thing – the art of comfort involves both ‘physical’ and ‘mental’.

The physical part is easy –

Find the most comfortable place you could be -recreate the most comfortable sensation you could possibly experience – and just do that all day.

The mental part is a tiny bit more involved –

Basically, what you want to do is try to remain as ‘mentally’ comfortable as possible –

which unfortunately means that you will have to use a tiny energy to violently reject anything that even remotely threatens to make you uncomfortable.

For example, if someone even mildly implies that you should take any sort of accountability for your life, or tries to challenge you with ideas that aren’t 100% consistent with the extremely narrow and superior reality that you’ve carefully woven for yourself. Don’t engage them with  rational, energy-wasting type conversation.

Instead, fiercely remind them that they have no idea what the f*ck they’re talking and then immediately shut your brain off until they leave so that you can conserve what little energy you have remaining.

If this article helped you to understand how to truly manifest all this is worthless within you – please subscribe to my YouTube Channel.

This,  is not the path.

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4 Instant Mental Shifts That (Massively) Improve Life

4 Instant Mental Shifts That (Massively) Improve Life

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Personal development is easy. We all know, more or less, the things that we need to do if we want to truly manifest our potential.

Work diligently. Eat healthy and exercise. Apply what we consume to transform raw information into knowledge.

The problem though for many of us is that when we begin construction on this improved version of ourselves, in our rush to start building the visible portions of the house first – good habits, solid work ethic, meaningful goals – we neglect to inspect the foundations upon which we’re building – which as it turns out for almost all of us, are extremely faulty – and so the house collapses… over and over and over again.

So in this article, I’m going to show you 4 mental shifts you can make right now to fix faulty foundations before you start your next personal development endeavor.

And you’ll see that it won’t just be easy, it will feel effortless… as it should be.

This stuff has taken me the better part of 10 years to fully figure out and I’m about to spoon-feed it to you guys in a 10 minute video, so f*cking  pay attention and seriously commit to implementing these shifts immediately after you’re done watching for at least 24 hours and that will give you all you need to want to commit permanently.

Let’s begin.

Shift #1: Think Less

Thoughts are a curious thing, especially here in the West where we’ve been programmed to perceive thoughts as somehow being a critical component of solving every type of problem.

The reality is almost the exact opposite, and it’s actually really silly if you ‘think’ about it.

Look at the entire self-help industry as an example – where the overwhelming majority of players suffer from the same simple problem – a complete inability to take action.

And so how do they try to solve this problem? By thinking themselves into action… which is not only absurd, it is quite literally a paradox.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to think ourselves into taking action. Action, by its very nature, requires us to stop contemplating it in order to take it.

A really good example of this is procrastination – where in an effort to stop procrastinating, virtually everyone tries to ‘think’ or ‘motivate’ themselves out of it, many going as far as to watch videos and read books on the subject.

They’re trying to solve the problem of procrastination with more procrastination. It’s insane.

In the words of, “a person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.”

Think less. Do more.

Shift #2: Feedback Loops

For the past few days I’ve been pondering this quote from Nietzsche:

“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself”

If we look closely at our failures, I think that most of us will find that our natural condition is to actually never look very closely at them at all.

Instead, we simply vow to ‘try harder’ the next time, because it’s actually a bit painful to look failure squarely in the eyes because doing so requires confronting the reality of who we really are.

To solve this, I think it’s critical to make a conscious effort to create what are called ‘Feedback Loops’ – a concept that I actually learned from Elon Musk, who explains them as “where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”

I think the best way to do this is to have a set point during the day – ideally first thing in the morning – where we review the previous day and consider our actions critically and directly.

Where and why did we fail? Where and why did we succeed? What adjustments should I make today to improve on yesterday?

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is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.

This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.

Shift #3: Willpower Is a Last Resort

My guilty pleasure food  is ‘oatmeal bread’, lightly toasted, with a single swipe of peanut butter on top…  mmm delicioso.

Even though I have very high levels of willpower – recently I had a problem where every time I bought more bread with the self-promise that I’d eat only two slices per day,  MOST days I ate a lot more. There was even one day where I ate the entire bag. Yeah that was most definitely a low point in my life.

Anway, after a few weeks of this, it finally occurred to me that I should more closely inspect the foundations upon which this apparent weakness was manifesting itself, and what I discovered was surprisingly profound.

The hungrier I became, the more I thought about the bread.

Thinking about something that you don’t want to be thinking about even a single time is distracting enough, but I was probably thinking about that bread at least 50 times per day…

But my problem was actually much worse than that, because when I looked even  closer, I found that within every single one of those 50 distracting thoughts, a battle was actually taking place where my primitive brain was on the offense, looking for any rationalization it could find to justify eating more bread.

“Eating some of the bread will help me focus”…“I’ll just skip dinner later.”.. “I’ll just workout another 30 minutes to burn it off”…

Out of those 50 battles, my willpower only had to lose ONE for me to end up eating more bread.

In realizing all of this, I determined that the only feasible solution was to go to the source and remove the possibility that I could eat more bread than intended.

Hoping I could find a solution that didn’t involve giving up the bread completely, a few creative Google searches led me to the K-Safe – a time-locking container that allowed me to take out the amount of bread that I wanted to eat on any given day, and then lock the rest in the container for 24 hours.

From that moment on, not only was I no longer overeating bread, but once the locks of the container slid into place I was no longer even thinking about the bread. I went from 50 battles per day, to none.

Now the point I’m trying to illustrate here with my enthralling bread battle is that if we want to eliminate negative habits or addictions, we shouldn’t expect our willpower to have to win 50+ battles of the course of the day – we should instead find the source of that thing and use our willpower one single time to restrict or eliminate it there.

If we’re addicted to social media, we shouldn’t just tell ourselves we’re not going to use it – we should uninstall the applications from our phone or even delete our accounts.

If we’re addicted to video games, we should literally remove the ability to use the console by giving the power cord or controllers to someone to hold onto, or stick them in a kSafe if you have one – at the end of this video I’ll share a link you can use to buy one if you’re interested.

Anyway – if we exercise willpower to eliminate the source, we remove possibility, which frees us from having to battle temptation.

I still keep my bread in a kSafe, but most days I forget to even set the lock. Think about that for a minute before we move to the next and final foundation.

Shift #4: Aspire Towards An Addiction To Progress

It’s just as easy to become addicted to fast food, video games, porn and social media.  As it is to become addicted to exercise, work, passions and good habits.

And for as much as I believe it’s important to always keep things simple, I do think it’s important to have at least a basic understanding of how the neurotransmitter ‘Dopamine’ is responsible for our motivation… or lack thereof.

I’ll link a few videos on the topic below in the description – including one where I describe how to ‘switch’ our Dopamine so that it actually motivates us away from low value instant-gratification type activities and towards high value, long-term reward type activities.

This is exactly the reason why some people seem to be addicted to success – because they actually are addicted to success.

Most people make the mistake of looking at everything I do in a day and thinking that I have tremendous discipline and willpower, and while I won’t say that I don’t possess those things, what I will say is that they are almost completely  irrelevant when you consider how utterly addicted I am to what I do.

If I had to rely on willpower to train as hard as I do with boxing or salsa, I would have never become good at them.

If I had to rely on willpower to be able to work entire days, I’d probably still be a struggling web designer instead of owner of a web design company with close to 50 employees.

So the question now becomes, how can we quickly form positive addictions?

Well, from my experience it has a lot less to do with focusing on any individual activity, and a lot more to do with focusing on the underlying element that makes all activities enjoyable – progress.

When we become addicted to progress, then we only need to feel progress within any activity to be able to perform it consistently and effortlessly.

As a bonus, an addiction to ‘progress’ also simultaneously deters us from any activity that threatens to ‘cost’ us progress – like wasting time on social media or Netflix.

To feel progress, all we need to do is take action towards a defined goal.

What helps me here (and something I believe is really important) is to conceptualize an ‘idealized’ version of ourselves. Think of him or her as the ‘culmination’ of all of our goals.

My ideal self is a genius businessman and wise philosopher – who lives a simple life despite others perceiving it as overwhelmingly complex.

He can dance and fight and swim and bike at the highest levels – and has climbed the tallest mountain on each continent.

By defining my ‘ideal self’ – not only is it easy to feel progress within any of the positive activities that I perform, but that progress now also serves a higher purpose.

To become addicted to progress IS to make effortless what was once difficult.

 

 

Follow me on Instagram @nelsonquest – Unless of course you hate learning new things from someone that’s gone through what you’re going through and come out on the other side… looking really handsome.

This is the path-

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Sexual Desire vs Personal Development

Sexual Desire vs Personal Development

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Over the last few months I’ve had the opportunity to meet face to face with hundreds of fans of the channel –

And by far the most interesting theme at each of these meetups has been how much the desire to sleep with attractive women can secretly nest itself in the motivation behind EVERYTHING that we do to improve ourselves.

I say ‘secretly’ because what I’ve discovered is that most men are not only reluctant to admit this to others…  they’re reluctant to admit this to themselves.

This was certainly the case for me – When I first started down this path over 8 years ago and began to take an active interest in expanding my knowledge, developing unique skills, growing a business and improving my physical appearance-

To anyone who asked, I claimed my motivations to be solely rooted in achieving financial independence, maximizing my full potential, and chasing dreams.

But if I was really being honest with myself (which I rarely was in the beginning) my true motivation was this.

And I know I’m not alone – so in this video, I’ll explain ‘why’ sexual obsession tends to be such a dominant subconscious motivation behind everything we do – I’ll explain why we lie about it to others and to ourselves – and then finally I’ll show you what I did to turn this from a ‘toxic’ obsession into a healthy one.

Factor 1: Technology

Technology evolves at a much faster rate than our ability to adapt to it, which is why some of the most profitable corporations and industries in the world are those who use technology to hijack our biological instincts with what are called ‘supernormal stimuli.’

Examples of supernormal stimuli are:

Social Media, which hijacks our instinct to seek social approval. 

Video Games, which hijack our instincts towards hunting and progression. 

Fast Food, which hijacks our instinct to consume calorie-rich foods-

And then there’s the mother of all supernormal stimuli – Pornography – which hijacks our instinct towards reproduction – one of our strongest biological drives.

When we consider this – it’s no wonder that men feel such overwhelming compulsions to consume porn – where we have instant, virtually infinite access to every type of mate we could ever hope to reproduce with.

Porn is seen as a ‘reward’ by the body, and so the more we consume it, the more the neural pathways in our brain become wired to release dopamine to motivate us to consume more porn – an unhealthy obsession that tends to spill over into everything that we do.

Factor 2: Women

There’s this idea that men and women like to dress up just  to ‘look good’ – but this is merely a surface motivation.

Spend 5 minutes with an evolutionary biologist and you’ll understand that the desire to ‘look good’ is rooted in the much deeper evolutionary motivation to increase our sexual attractiveness.

We feel this motivation even if we’re just out with friends or at a business meeting, because sexual attractiveness increases our standing within social groups, which was critical to our survival in primitive times.

I hope it goes without saying but what I’m about to talk about is not a critique of women, who are playing the exact same game that we’re all playing – but women have a massive array of ‘supernormal stimuli’ which they can use to artificially exaggerate their attraction – let’s go through a few of them quickly.

  1. Blush & Lipstick: The purpose of makeup is to be sexually provocative. The reason that red blush and lipstick are popular is because lips and cheeks turn red during sexual arousal. 
  2. Eyeliner: Female eyes are larger in proportion to the size of their faces than a man’s – so using ‘eyeliner’, which makes their eyes look even bigger – enhances their femininity which increases attractiveness. 
  3. High Heels: These cause women to take smaller and more frequent steps with more rotation at the hips and less bending of the knees – which increases femininity and attractiveness. 

Again my point with all of this is to simply lay more foundation as to why sexual obsession is so prevalent among men.

Virtually every woman who we encounter out in the wild is at the very least using makeup – but more often than not they’re using multiple supernormal stimuli. 

Now carry all of this into social media – where you have the additional supernormal stimuli of filters, photoshop enhancements, AND algorithms which pre-select the most ‘virally’ attractive women and place them at the top of our feeds – and is it any surprise sexual obsession is so common when highly sexualized females make up such a large part of our conscious reality?

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The Dark Mode Guide

is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.

This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.

Factor 3: Society

There’s an old saying that “sex sells”, and while this is true, it’s merely a surface observation.

A truer statement would be to say that  “biological impulses sell” – let me explain.

We exist in societies where ‘profit’ is the highest goal – and as can be easily observed from advertisements, media, and social networks – our biological impulse towards sex is the one that is MOST exploited for profit.

This is why companies overwhelmingly use attractive models to promote their products via what’s called ‘aspirational’ marketing.

The idea is the same whether it’s a clothing brand, a car company, or even a gun manufacturer – that by purchasing their product or service, we’ll be just as attractive to females as the handsome models in their ads.

Nowhere are these impulses more exploited than within what I like to call the “success projection” industry – which includes social media influencers, day-traders, dating coaches… virtually everyone selling a ‘get rich quick’ online course – basically anyone whose personal success is directly tied to the ‘image of success’ that they project to others.

I like to joke that the image of ‘success’ that these guys project is essentially just what poor people think that rich and successful people look like – and while exotic cars, rolex watches, and lavish vacations are all important staples…  ‘attractive women’ are at the very top.

Why We Lie

The reason we lie to others and to ourselves about our sexually rooted motivations is because it makes us feel pathetic to admit it…

In primitive times, men who were perceived as ‘more fit to reproduce’ held higher standing within their tribes – which meant better access to resources and mates, and overall a much higher chance of survival.

Here in modern times, we are terrified to admit that we are not worthy of an attractive mate because our primitive brain is telling us that to admit low social standing is tantamount to admitting that we have a low chance of survival.

…At least that’s my own highly educated theory – for anyone who’s interested I’ve linked ALL the sources for this video in the description below.

So now the question remains – Once we identify these root obsessions and motivations, how can we then realign them to be healthy and beneficial?

Conclusion

So how do we ‘fix’ this?

Well the first step is in understanding everything I just laid out in this video.

When you understand the rules better than everyone you’re competing against (which in this case is basically the entire male population) is when you can start to bend the rules –

To everyone else, this will seem like magic – to you, this will be blatantly obvious.

Take your obsession for women, and turn it into an obsession for becoming ‘worthy’ of an ideal partner.

Someone who is just as rational, loving, intellectually curious, and physically attractive as you’re working to be.

That’s it. That’s the secret. Play it back a few times if you need to – maybe even write it down.

If you can understand that, and begin to live it… you will understand what true power is in this lifetime.

 

If you want new articles just like this one, don’t just subscribe to my YT channel, but make sure to click the bell icon.

Unless that is you’re a pathetic, sex-obsessed beta-simp – we can’t have any of you poking around the channel.

This is the path.

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How To (Quickly) Reprogram Your Motivation

How To (Quickly) Reprogram Your Motivation

Table of Contents

Why is it that some people seem to be addicted to things like work, exercise, and studying – while others are addicted to social media – minecraft – porn – and in some extreme cases, youtube self improvement videos?

About 2 years ago, I became OBSESSED with this question, when after years of being ‘extremely’ motivated, things suddenly flipped.

I went from waking up excited to train, working entire days, and winding down with healthy night rituals.

To showing up half-dead to training sessions, endlessly procrastinating work, and winding down with unhealthy night rituals.

I needed to figure out how to flip things back – so I spent weeks researching how motivation works, and experimenting with dramatic lifestyle changes,

And what I discovered has allowed me to now experience what now feels like endless motivation.

Now let’s cut the sh*t – I know what you’re thinking, given that I live in Colombia and you almost certainly have watched the 1st season of Narcos.

But how I fixed things wasn’t with that stuff – what I learned was actually way stronger, and to learn it, I had to solve 3 problems:

Problem 1: DOPAMINE (is NOT what you think it is)

Despite the seemingly infinite number of ‘dopamine detox’ videos on YouTube, most people STILL have no idea how dopamine really works.

Dopamine has EVERYTHING to do with motivation, and VERY LITTLE to do with making us feel good after we perform some sort of action.

Yes, our brain releases dopamine when we see that someone has liked one of our Instagram photos, but it releases WAY MORE dopamine in order to get us to pick up our phone and open instagram in the first place.

And yes our brain releases dopamine when  when we eat tasty food – but it releases WAY more dopamine to get us to do the things that GET US that tasty food.

and when we get a notification that our favorite content creator has just released a new video, because we are of course subscribed to his channel and have clicked the f*cking notification bell.

Our brain releases lots of dopamine to get us to CLICK on the notification so that we can get TO the reward.

So to say this all another way: dopamine release is the HIGHEST when our brain wants us to GET the reward …  and actually pretty low once we’ve gotten it.

Scientists discovered this when they performed an experiment to monitor dopamine release in monkeys:

A signal would come on which let the monkeys know that they could then pull on a lever 10 times to be rewarded with a banana.

The signal represented the ‘anticipation’ of the reward – the lever represented the ‘work’ to get the reward – and the reward (of course) was the banana.

As we can see here, dopamine release spiked RIGHT when the signal came on… BEFORE pulling the lever – and it DECREASED greatly by the time monkeys actually got their reward.

So if you understand ONE THING from this entire video – it should be that dopamine ISN’T just something that makes us feel good when we get a reward.

Dopamine is what CREATES the motivation to PURSUE the things we perceive as rewards in the first place… which brings us to:

Problem 2: DOPAMINE (can’t distinguish between “good” and “bad” rewards)

Human evolution  spans approximately 6 million years – and for 99.999% of that time, there were no ‘bad’ rewards.

Candy bars were only invented about 175 years ago – the white stuff I mentioned at the beginning of this video came shortly after – the first mainstream porn is less than 50 years old – Tik Tok is only 6 years old

Our dopamine reward system doesn’t see fast food as unhealthy garbage – it just sees it as lots of calories, which was important when you consider that for 99.999% of our evolution, we didn’t know where our next meal was going to come from.

Dopamine doesn’t see social media as a… false reality  – it only sees potentially valuable information and social interactions.

And Dopamine doesn’t see porn as unhealthy garbage – it only sees human reproduction; the PRIMARY biological imperative of our species.

And so if we want to redirect our motivation AWAY from these ‘bad’ rewards’ and back towards life-enhancing action, we need to understand.

Get the Dark Mode guide

The Dark Mode Guide

is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.

This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.

Problem 3: SOCIETY (Makes us more Emotional, and less Rational)

What’s the ONE thing all of these modern ‘bad rewards’ have in common?

Seriously – I’m giving you 5 seconds – try to figure this one out for yourself… has something to do with how quickly they gratify us…

Ok time’s up – If you answered ‘they all release tons of dopamine to make us feel good’ … then, you are a f*cking idiot.

The correct answer is:  all ‘bad’ rewards provide INSTANT gratification –

So why is that relevant? And what does that have to do with emotions and Rationality?

Well I’m glad you asked, because in my favorite study on the subject, Princeton University observed that there are two areas of the brain – one for emotions, and the other for rationality.

And the emotional part of our brains LOVE instant gratification –

So when faced with the choice of j*rking off, (while possibly high on c*caine) which can make us feel good RIGHT NOW, or doing difficult work that will make us feel good in the long term.

There’s actually a small ‘battle’ that happens between the emotional and rational parts of our brain.

And when we give into instant gratification, it’s because we’re letting the emotional part win – 

which makes perfect sense if you think about it.

Instant gratification makes us FEEL good, right now – which means every time we eat something we know we shouldn’t, or procrastinate, we’re making an EMOTIONAL decision at the cost of a rational one.

This is also why the WEAKEST people tend to be those who are highly emotional…  those who value how things make them feel over how things really are.

And THIS is how you end up being a mindless slave of the system – because to control you, all the system needs to do is use your emotions against you – But I digress…

So now that we understand the 3 problems – we should see that they actually form a toxic ‘cycle’:

Dopamine motivates us to pursue rewards → but it can’t distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ rewards’ → we end up making ‘emotional’ decisions in the pursuit of instantly gratifying ‘bad’ rewards → and the cycle repeats itself over and over.

The moment I was TRULY able to understand this cycle, was the moment I was able to understand:

The Solution

So 2 years ago, when I became obsessed with understanding how I could FLIP my motivation away from life-wasting actions and towards life-enhancing ones.

Here’s what I discovered that has allowed me to restore the seemingly limitless motivation levels I’m now once again enjoying.

The first thing I did after learning how dopamine is actually the thing that motivates us towards rewards, and we make decisions either with the emotional or rational side of our brains –

The first thing I did was get angry… furious actually… at the fact I had allowed myself to fall victim to all of the fake reward-simulation b*llshit that the system uses to perpetuate it’s control over us.

So that’s when I stopped using Facebook, restricted everything else on my phone using an appblocker, and just overall made it a point to limit as best I could all forms of instant-gratification type mindless consumption.

Then I started working to help my rational brain win more battles by trying to REALLY be ‘present’ when I was making a decision between what was going to make me feel good now versus what was going to make me feel good in the long-run.

Meditation was REALLY helpful here, as being more ‘present’ allowed me to ‘snap out of it’ quicker whenever I procrastinated, or was about to do something I shouldn’t do.

And then the final part of what I did – and possibly the most important part – I had to re-imagine who my ‘ideal self’ was, in a way that was far less…  ‘realistic’.

A big part of the reason I lost my motivation like I did was because I had actually become my ideal self, which should never f*cking happen.

Our ‘ideal self’ should represent as FAR as we are able to dream.. BEYOND what we’re able to dream:  it should represent ‘perfection’ –

But when you grow up thinking you’re going to be a f*cking loser you’re whole life, and you’re surrounded by people who, instead of supporting you, support the ‘idea’ they have of what you’re supposed to be…

Yeah, my ‘ideal’ self was much less than what it should have been – so I fixed it.

Now I’m motivated to train in the mornings not because learning to box is something I never thought i’d do, but because I want to win a national title here in Colombia-

I’m motivated to work not because I need to pay my bills, but because I want to master the art of business.

And I’m motivated to make these videos not just because I want to help the younger version of myself… but because… i feel an obligation to make these videos that I don’t yet understand, but I will someday understand.

So here’s what my new cycle looks like:

Dopamine motivates me to pursue rewards→ distinguish ‘good’ and ‘bad’ rewards based on my vision of an ideal self → make ‘rational’ decisions in the pursuit of ‘good’ rewards.

If you thought this video was helpful or opened your eyes to something, my channel represents the entire philosophy that’s helped me to do many amazing things – you can learn more by subscribing with notifications of course, or  checking out one of these videos over here-

Or head over to nelsonquest.com to grab a free copy of ‘Dark Mode’ – it will change your life.

This is the path – cia and cya in the next video.

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Self-Love will Destroy You (I’ll explain)

Self-Love will Destroy You (I'll explain)

Table of Contents

What is it about self-love that seems so… inauthentic?

Why is it that all of the self-help guru’s and positivity-obsessed masses who shout from the mountaintops that we need to ‘love ourselves more’, appear to anyone with their eyes even half-open to not have any idea what they’re talking about?

Self-love isn’t self-love, it’s self-delusion – and it’s wreaking havoc within our health, our careers, our relationships… within every important aspect of our lives.

Self love has become the very formula for self-sabotage, and in this video I’ll explain why that is, how this all started, and what I believe the solution to all of this mess is.

One thing is for sure – by the end of this video, I promise that you will never look at self-love the same way again.

Let’s begin.

Step 1: Why The Modern Idea of Self-Love is Broken

The whole point of ‘self-love’ is to love ourselves no-matter what, even if we have no objective basis for loving ourselves.

I understand that this ‘sounds good’ in theory – but is it good to just love ourselves completely regardless of the actual qualities that we possess?

What if we’re addicted to drugs?

What if we’re morbidly obese?

What if we spend most of the day attacking others because of their physical appearance, or because we see them as being inferior to us?

There’s this idea that most bullies are people with low self-esteem, people who don’t love themselves – but research shows that most bullies actually have extremely high-self esteem. Most bullies actually love themselves too much.

Now there’s a good argument to be made that self-love is just about self-acceptance, and feeling confident…

But if that was the case… then why wouldn’t we just call it those things?

I’ll tell you why – it’s because doing so destroys the whole narrative that we are somehow special just by existing.

Not everyone is special. In the real world, people don’t get trophies just for participating…

The trophies go to the winners. Why? Because, at least most of the time, those are the people who worked the hardest to put themselves in a position to win.

Step 2: Understand that “Self-Love” is NOT ‘Confidence’, nor is it ‘Self-Acceptance’

The reason that self-love is NOT  ‘confidence’, is because real confidence is something we EARN –  whereas self-love promotes the idea that confidence is something we are simply entitled to.

We feel confident about competing in a triathlon when we run, swim and bike every day.

We earn the confidence that we’re going to ace a job interview when we arrive prepared.

We earn the confidence that we can grow and lead a business when we wake up earlier than everyone else, stay home on weekends, and never ask someone to do something that we weren’t at one point willing to do ourselves.

Now why is self-love also not the same thing as self acceptance?

Because whereas self-love encourages us to blindly love each and every part of ourselves, ‘self-acceptance’  means actually looking at each individual part of ourselves, and accepting that there are ‘good’ parts, and there are ‘bad’ parts.

And when we look deeply into the mirror and are able to accept if we have a drug problem, or that we have a problem with eating, or that we lack the sort of discipline that we need if we want to really achieve success.

When we accept our flaws and weaknesses – we simultaneously establish a clear ‘starting point’ from which we can improve.

Self-love on the other hand limits our ability to improve because it promotes the idea that we don’t need to improve – this is completely delusional – of course we have weaknesses and of course we should work to improve them!

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This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.

Step 3: Understand Why People Actually Promote Self-Love

Look closely at the people who most praise the importance of self-love, and you will find that the overwhelming majority of them fall into three categories. 

  1. Self Help Gurus: These are people who gain financially by making people feel good by telling them the things that they want to hear, which is very different from telling people what they need to hear.
  2. Public Figures: In category two, we have ‘weak-minded attention-hungry public figures –  the obvious example here are plus-sized models and overweight actresses who promote ‘body positivity’

When they post photos of themselves in bikinis or shoveling down pizza, or sometimes both, with hashtags like #bigandbeautiful, they’re  ‘self-love’ as a tool to seek approval for their lack of self-control via the massive praise they receive from masses of equally weak-minded individuals.

Also quick side note – it’s not my intention to be ‘mean’ here, but let’s be honest. Obesity is unhealthy – it’s a leading comorbidity factor in literally everything – including the recent pandemic we just had…  it puts a tremendous burden on healthcare systems…

I’m not saying that we necessarily feel ‘bad’ – at least if we feel bad, we can feel motivation to change. Self-love kills that motivation.

  1. Weak People: The third and final category, are the ‘weak-minded’ masses who are essentially just mindless robots that blindly accept the idea that ‘self love cures everything’ being spread by the copy-paste self-help gurus in the first category, and the weak-minded, attention hungry public-figures in the second category.

Ask anyone in any of these categories ‘why’ they love themselves, and their programmed response will be ‘just because I’m me’.

There’s a word for that – it’s called ‘narcissism’, and research shows that people who think highly of themselves without having any objective basis for doing so, are often less successful in the long-run. 

Step 4: Understand Why “Self-Love” Is Actually A Sinister Motive

So if we already have terms like ‘self-acceptance’ and ‘confidence’, then why do we even need self-love in the first place? And why has it only recently become such a popular idea?

Believe it or not, but there was actually a time not too long ago where self-love wasn’t something that people even thought much about.

How we felt about ourselves didn’t really matter… What mattered was simply who we were, and what we did.

And if you’re thinking that self-love is somehow a ‘cure’ for feelings of self-doubt –

Why do we need a cure for that?

We should feel self-doubt if we haven’t first earned confidence, and if we have earned confidence and still feel self-doubt – then how fuck does self-love fix the problem? All it does is pull a carpet over it.

So why is it that over the last few decades, the concept of ‘self-love’ has gone from relative obscurity, to now being promoted as the magical remedy to all of our pain?

I’ll tell you why, even though you might not want to hear this.

In the modern age, we exist in societies where ‘PROFIT’ is the highest goal – these societies have evolved, and are going to continue to evolve, NOT to promote our well-being, but promote what is profitable, which more often than not comes at the cost of our well-being.

If you need proof, just ask yourself the following simple question – which version of humanity is more profitable to the profit-hungry individuals and corporations at the top?

The version where most of us are weak-minded, unhealthy, and love ourselves because we believe ourselves to be ‘special’?

Or the version where most of us are strong-minded, healthy, and we accept our weaknesses so that we can improve on them, and earn confidence through hard-work and preparation?

Which one of those two versions of humanity is more likely to buy lots of things – to seek out medications to treat what are entirely normal and often necessary human emotions – to spend more money on external solutions to problems that can only be solved internally?

Therein lies the fatal flaw of self-love.

My Solution

Alright guys – so my solution to all of this is simple – realize that ‘self-love’ is a silly-made up concept, and that we should just move past it.

Pretty much all of the ‘self’ concepts – self-love, self-esteem, self-respect – these all breed narcissistic, ego-centric world-views because these are all emotions that we’re supposed to experience with other people, not with our selves.

Self-love is simply unnecessary – and it causes catastrophic harm under the illusion that it is something good.

For the most, part the self is ‘who we think we are’ – but there are two others selves – ‘who we really are’ and ‘who we aspire to be’.

If you really want to love your ‘self’ – love the self that you aspire to be, as that self is constantly working to see past who you think you are – to understand who you really are – so that you can be your best version.

Stop loving your ‘self’ and start loving who you could be.

This is the path –

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The ONLY Trait That Matters in a Woman

The ONLY Trait That Matters in a Woman

Table of Contents

Most of us have a rough idea of the individual qualities that we’re hoping to find in an ideal partner. Kindness, loyalty, intelligence, sense of humor, physical appearance, financial security, confidence, and the list goes on.

And this is PRECISELY why we suck at finding partners that are right for us… allow me to explain.

Many years ago as I was transitioning out of the phase where I was chasing girls in the pursuit of brief momentary pleasures – and into the phase where I really wanted to find an ideal partner… I found that I was basically carrying around a ‘mental checklist’ of qualities that I thought I wanted in a girl.

With every new girl that I dated, I would update that list, adding or removing qualities, based on my experiences.

I think we all do that… right?

Maybe we think we want a partner who is hard working, only to date someone like that and realize that what we really want is someone who is passionate.

Or we prioritize physical attractiveness, only to find ourselves bored out of our minds whenever we’re not having sex, and so we come to realize how important intelligence is.

Here’s the thing, I now realize that this ENTIRE system of seeking out individual qualities in a partner – which is something that virtually all of us do – is COMPLETELY broken for two primary reasons.

First of all, how we conceptualize different traits is often very different from the reality of how they manifest in the people we date.

We may think we may want a partner who is passionate, only to come to find that they’re so passionate that they have no time for us.

We may think that we want a partner who is intelligent… but how do you even measure intelligence? Whether or not they went to college? How much do they know about world events? What if they’re intelligent and narcissistic?

Now I know that you’re thinking to yourself “well Nelson, obviously what we’re looking for is a healthy balance of desirable traits”, but this creates an even BIGGER problem… one that virtually GUARANTEES that we’ll never find our ‘ideal’ partner’

When we walk around with an idea of the individual qualities that we want in an ideal partner, what we’re essentially doing here is elevating the ‘expectation’ that we have for our partner to the level of ‘ideal.’

The level of ‘ideal’ is reserved exclusively for perfection… it is the territory of Gods.

Ideals are perfect things, and we are imperfect things.

It’s safe to aspire towards ideals, which are perfect things, only if we understand that we are imperfect, and that we will never reach that level.

For example, I aspire to be courageous – courage is an ‘ideal’ – I will never be perfectly courageous, but I can always be more courageous… are you still with me?

Ok so now here’s the problem with how we conceptualize ‘ideal’ partners – they do not and cannot exist.

There is NO partner that possesses every single quality that we want, and so when we use this framework to envision our ‘ideal’ partner – we create a DISASTROUS situation where we now have to SETTLE for whoever we date.

It’s absolutely insane! And we never think to question this because… how can we even begin to question something if it’s never occurred to us that there may be a better way?

Well, I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve come up with a solution that has worked amazingly for myself and for the small group of people that I’ve shared this with.

Here it is:

Instead of looking for a certain combination of qualities you want to find in your ideal partner, instead look for a singular, ROOT personality trait that virtually guarantees an extremely high degree of compatibility.

Now to be fair, this trait is EXTREMELY difficult to find in other people… which is what makes it so valuable.

But once you’ve found it in someone, and assuming you’ve watched the rest of this video of course…. I promise that you will understand.

That trait…  is…

Intellectual Curiosity.

Now that you know what the trait is, let me give you three reasons that will help you to fully understand.

Reason #1: Intellectual Curiosity BREEDS The Best Versions of Other Traits

What I mean by that is, it’s a personality trait that tends to breed other positive traits.

Someone who is intellectually curious will be intelligent in all of the right ways – because by being curious, they’re compelled to learn about the world NOT as they want it to be, but rather as it really is.

They tend to have knowledge of lots of different things and will want to know more about things they don’t know a lot about – in other words, they care more about ‘learning’ than they do about ‘being right’.

Being intellectually curious, the overall character that they possess will tend to be extremely positive and warm, since this is the character that will most attract other people to them and allow them to disarm those people to be able to have the open, honest dialog that they crave.

They’ll generally have a good sense of humor, or will at least be able to understand and appreciate yours.

They will rarely get offended, since ‘to get offended’ is literally the opposite of ‘to be curious.’ To be ‘offended’ is to take things personally and to react based purely on emotion, while to be curious is to seek to understand motives, and to react based on facts and logic.

When tempted with the prospect of being unfaithful, a normal person will be more likely to act on those impulses because they are slaves to them. They have been conditioned by the society around them to seek instant gratification in everything that they do. Someone who is intellectually curious will still feel those same impulses, but instead of blindly acting on them, will question ‘why.’

To be on the path of self-development is to be intellectually curious. It is to one day look at yourself in the mirror, realize that you can be better, and willfully embark down an unmarked path of self-discovery guided only by an idea of what you could be. Trust me when I tell you that you will want a partner who is also on this path.

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is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.

This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.

Reason #2: Intellectually Curious People are Highly Rational

There’s this idea that it’s ‘normal’ to have fights in a relationship. I think that’s ridiculous.

In most of my more recent relationships, I’ve had virtually no fights. Why?

Because I’m intellectually curious, and I would only date someone who possessed that quality as well.

I already mentioned this in the last section, but someone who is intellectually curious is not going to react based on their emotions. If their partner does something to upset them, they’re going to want to investigate both sides of that coin, which are

  1. Why did my partner do something to upset me?
  2. Why do I feel upset? 

Now I’m not saying that there should never be fights… after all everyone has bad days, and we’re not perfect creatures… but when we investigate the motives of why our partner did whatever they did, in almost all cases we’ll find that there was no malicious intent.

And when we observe our own feelings… in almost all cases we’ll find that we’re reacting based on our own insecurities and biases.

Someone who is intellectually curious will have a conversation with you in an effort to understand your rationality behind what you did, before making a conclusion.

This level of rationality also means that, if things truly aren’t working out despite your best efforts, then the decision to separate will be painless and drama-free.

Reason #3: Intellectually Curious People Grow Together

The most important lesson I’ve learned from previous relationships is how important it is to grow with the person you’re with.

Most relationships start with two different people, each with their own unique goals and opinions.

For the relationship to work, both partners need to use their intellectual curiosity in each other to fuel conversations where they work to understand each other’s goals and world-views so that over time, they can share them.

reflection

I always date younger women because I would like my children’s mother to be young, and I realized that it was completely irrational of me to expect a younger person to have the same level of experience as me at 36 years old …

It’s extremely important for me to feel supported and for me to be with someone who can at least try to understand my goals and motivations, which, frankly, are completely unrelatable to most people. I have never felt supported in a relationship and honestly I’ve never really felt supported at any point in my life, and I know deep down that I need to feel that in someone I care about to reach my full potential.

Lastly, I do a lot of stuff – thankfully most of it is pretty cool – and so it’s important for me to be with someone who can take an interest in that stuff.

For all of these reasons, I came to realize that what I was really looking for was someone who had true ‘intellectual curiosity’ – someone who would want to explore the world with me, someone who would support me as much as I would support them, and someone who would be up for doing lots of cool shit with me.

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8 Years Of Meditation: Everything I’ve Learned

8 Years of Meditation: Everything I've Learned

Table of Contents

So for those of you who follow the channel, or follow me on instagram, you know that I consider meditation to be the single most important habit that I practice. I truly believe that I would not be able to perform at nearly the level that I do in so many different areas, without the steadfast meditation practice that I’ve built over the last 8+ years.

If you clicked onto this post, I know that you know somewhere deep down inside of you that meditation can and will profoundly change your life, but my guess is that you’re either struggling with how to get started, how to be consistent, which techniques to use, or all 3 of those things. I know exactly what it is to struggle with this, and I promise that this post will help you tremendously, because I’ve gained skills, experience, and insights that allow me to explain meditation in the way that it needs to be explained to go from “struggling meditator” to someone who looks forward to meditation as much as they look forward to a big delicious meal after a hard workout.

I’ve structured this post to be a journey of 3 destinations. At the first destination we’ll discuss the actual benefits of meditation specifically within the context of self development. At the second destination, I’ll address the obstacles that I know you’re struggling with, and show you how these aren’t actually obstacles at all. At the third and final stop, I’ll share the unique approach to meditation that I’ve developed, which will allow you to adapt each individual meditation session to the state that you’re in.

Destination 1: How meditation Frees You From Your “Self”

The most limiting factor with respect to our own personal development is the idea that we are our thoughts and our emotions.

Most of us believe our “self” to be some sort of cohesive, permanent thing… This is merely an illusion.

What the “self” really is, is just the conglomeration of many disparate ideas that we hold of ourselves, absorbed from the people and cultural influences around us.

This is part of why I despise terms like ‘self-love’ and ‘self-esteem’ because they reinforce the silly idea that there is actually a self to be loved or to be esteemed!

If we truly want to grow, we should deconstruct the self, not worship it.

The reason I’m able to succeed at everything I dedicate myself to is because I’m no longer limited by the idea that I am anything – which frees me to be whoever I choose to be  –  and I credit meditation with helping me to understand this.

Meditation allows us to ‘separate’ from the infinite stream of thoughts that most people are trapped in for all of their lives.

Things happen to them, and they simply react – cause and effect.

Meditation however, creates a space between the thing that happens to us, and our reactions to them.

Over time, this space gets bigger and bigger, so that rather than simply reacting to the things that happen to us, we can actually choose how to react.

So rather than simply ‘trying harder’ to develop a gym habit,  a good work-ethic, or even a meditation practice – only to inevitably fail once more,

Our default mode can be to instead separate from the action – observe it from all angles, and then return to it with a well-formulated plan of attack.

And if that plan of attack fails – it doesn’t matter – because when we learn to observe our thoughts the idea of ‘failure’ transforms into simply ‘vital information’, which we can then use to formulate the next plan of attack.

Meditation gives us the foundation we need to deconstruct the illusion of ‘self’ in relation to the world around it – unlocking the power to ACTUALLY think ‘critically’ and to ACTUALLY be ‘present’, which is where we should spend a reasonable amount of time if we ever hope to truly take control of our destinies.

Destination 2: The Obstacle is Not The Obstacle

Most people who are new to meditation think that the ‘goal’ of meditation is to stop having thoughts –

So when you’re sitting there meditating, and you’re getting frustrated because you can’t seem to stop thinking – you actually failed before the meditation, not during.

I’ll share something that has helped me immensely here – assume that there is an infinite stream of thoughts from the moment we are born until the moment we die. Assume that this stream continues even into our sleep.

When we see our thoughts in this way, the practice of meditation becomes not about ‘stopping’ our thoughts – which as far as I can tell, is actually impossible.

And more about moving our consciousness out of the infinite stream, and into the present moment, by anchoring it onto things that exist in the present moment, such as the breath, sounds, bodily sensations… and even the observation of thoughts and emotions – more on this in a minute.

So to be perfectly clear here – If you sit down to meditate for 10 minutes, and you spend 9 minutes and 55 seconds completely lost in the stream of thought, remembering only one time to bring your consciousness back to the present – consider that a victory.

The point is not to ‘stop’ thinking – the point is to realize when we lose ourselves and to bring ourselves back to the present moment, over and over again.

Now the other ‘obstacle’ most people face is not having enough time.

There’s an old zen saying that goes something like “you should sit in meditation for 10 minutes a day, unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour.” – the idea here is that to see ourselves as ‘too busy’ to perform what is arguably the most important habit with respect to our own mental well-being – is a bit silly.

Especially when you consider that meditation can and should be practiced virtually everywhere, even if for just seconds at a time.

Get the Dark Mode guide

The Dark Mode Guide

is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.

This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.

Destination 3: The Technique

Ok so first and foremost – the recommended posture for meditation is to sit with your legs crossed – back upright, in a wakeful yet relaxed posture.

There is a reason that this position has become synonymous with meditation for centuries now, and EVERYTHING that has survived the test of time should we should always regard with the utmost respect and consideration –

So this should be the position that you use – but with all of that being said,  if you’re not comfortable in this position – don’t force it.

Me personally, I’m not comfortable sitting cross legged unless I’m in a bean bag chair – And because of my thyroid issue Im usually exhausted in the morning when I meditate so I’ll normally just lay on my back, angled upwards, with a pillow behind my head –

Once you’re settled into the best position for you, the first thing you’ll want to do is quickly scan your entire body and relieve any tension you’re carrying –

It’s extremely common especially to carry tension in the face – and you’ll notice that if you direct your conscious efforts, you can relax it so that your brow unfurls, your lips aren’t pressed as tight against your teeth, etcetera.

Now assuming that your general mental state is ‘good’ – my favorite meditation technique is to simply focus on the breath, making sure to breath through your nose and deep into your stomach.

Once you’re focused there – now try to find a specific point where you feel the breath most profoundly – for me it’s usually inside the nose, right at the top of the bridge.

Try to place your consciousness wherever you feel the breath most profoundly and try to just ‘watch’ from there as the breath goes by.

It’s completely normal to lose yourself back into the infinite stream of thoughts – in fact, this will happen repeatedly – and that’s normal – what’s important is that when you catch yourself – gracefully bring yourself back to the breath.

Outside of meditation, it’s good to have goals with regard to your practice – however when you are in the middle of practicing is perhaps the one time in your conscious experience where you should not have any goals.

Nothing matters here – just stay with your breath, watching it closely from the start of each inhale to the end of each exhale – returning to the breath gracefully whenever you drift away.

That’s it – this is meditation.

meditation tricks

Now here are a few tricks to help you based on a few different mental states or situations you’re in.

If you’re uncomfortable or have pain –place your consciousness there and realize that you are not your pain – try to separate from your pain and you can sit with that instead of with your breath.

If you’re in a heightened state of emotion, or consumed by thought – use your meditation practice to separate yourself from your thoughts or from your emotions, and observe them from all angles. Consider why you’re so caught up in these things, and what sort of actions you need to take to get yourself back to a state of peace.

If you’re in a place with a lot of noise then simply place your consciousness on the noise. If you hear a baby crying, or a dog barking – don’t get annoyed by these noises – that’s ‘reactionary’ being’ – instead, simply throw your consciousness onto them.

When I meditate, my housekeeper has no idea what I’m doing and she’ll often come over and ask me questions – I simply respond to the questions and then  return to my breath.

important advice

I think it’s extremely useful to meditate at set points in the day, such as first thing in the morning, or before you go to bed, to help you establish the routine –

But meditation is something that we should carry with us throughout the day –

a few seconds during breakfast, when you throw your consciousness onto each bite – a few minutes after a hard training where you throw your consciousness onto all of the emotions your experiencing – or during a walk, when you can throw your consciousness onto the totality of each individual step –

 

 

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Why You Feel Behind in Life

Why You Feel Behind in Life

Table of Contents

At the ripe young age of 29 years old I decided to leave New York to start a brand new life in Colombia.

At the time, my peers all seemed to be racing through stable, high paying careers and living in swanky manhattan penthouses –

While I had just given up my career to start from scratch as a freelance web designer, and was now living in small bedroom of an apartment I shared with 4 other people

…. and I did NOT feel behind in life at all…  like, not even a tiny bit….

I felt like I was EXACTLY where I should be.

It’s now been 8 years since I arrived in Colombia – 8 years filled with amazing successes and incredible adventures –

And so it was… I guess ‘surprising’… when only a few months ago –  I started to feel extremely behind in life. 

It was like a dark, heavily insulting cloud that followed me everywhere- 

while I worked:

cloud: you started this business 10 years ago, WHY isn’t it bigger?

while I trained:

cloud: you’re 37 f*cking years old man, give it up

while I spent time with my girl:

cloud:  if you have kids now you’ll be a thousand f*cking years old by the time they take their first steps

And that same dark cloud would insult me AND rain down on me whenever i saw someone way younger than me who had already achieved something that i was  struggling to achieve for myself

(Cloud: that kids balls haven’t even dropped and he’s already got more money than you’ll ever have)

Anyway – as SOON  as I realized that this was happening – I got to work

and I’m happy to report that I’ve figured out

1) WHY this was happening, and WHY this seems to happen with pretty much everyone I talk to – (this was EXTREMELY surprising and not what I had originally expected)

And 2) how I could use my brain to make make these feelings work FOR me.

In this video, I’m going to summarize what I discovered – so if you’re someone who feels ‘behind in life’… well – let’s fix that

1. Social Comparison

Ok so let’s start with the basics. The feeling of being behind in life is 100% ROOTED in the comparisons we make between ourselves and others.

Think of it this way – if a meteor were to slam into earth tomorrow and wipe out everyone EXCEPT us – there wouldn’t BE anyone else for us to compare ourselves to.

But for better or worse, mankind still exists – and with respect to how we all feel with where we’re at in life – we exist on the same spectrum.

Here at the leftmost point of the spectrum are those of us who endlessly compare ourselves to others –

fixating on the best qualities of others while completely disregarding our own.

Here on rightmost point of the spectrum are those of us who are COMPLETELY on our own path –

where the only comparisons we make are in relation to who we were yesterday, and who we COULD be tomorrow.

If you’re wondering why we  wouldn’t like to be all the way to the right, it’s because to exist here would literally mean to have 0 comparisons with others –

And the only way to escape comparing ourselves with others would be to completely reject society…

To move to the woods and become a hermit – where we would train martial arts on 10,000 year old trees – bathe in majestic waterfalls – and then either starve to death or get eaten by a bear…

So yeah, most of us would like to be roughly here.

Because we still want to exist within society, within the game so to speak, but in a way where we only compare ourselves in healthy ways to others – like we are designed to do biologically.

Now I know there are lots of young people watching who have been brainwashed to believe that all comparisons are bad…  but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Human, like most animals, exist in hierarchies – and ‘comparison’ is the ENTIRE basis of how we position ourselves within those hierarchies.

Within traditional human societal hierarchies, it’s HEALTHY to look at someone who has achieved success, or who has a great relationship, or…  who just generally seems happy… and to not only want, but to aspire to have those things for ourselves.

Again, where this all becomes a problem is…. Well… mostly just.

2. Social Media

Unlike the social hierarchies of old, we’re no longer just comparing ourselves to the 50 people in our tribe, or the 150 people in our small fishing village, or the 850 people in our highschool…

We’re now comparing ourselves with the  billions of  people on Instagram  and Tik Tok.

And algorithms take ALL of the outliers – all of the 16 year olds with lambos and multi-million dollar businesses, and push them to the top of our feeds

AND we’re not even making 1:1 comparisons – we’re comparing our OUR imperfect  human realities to THEIR impeccably curated digital projections.

AND then for some reason, we’re ADDICTED to these comparisons, spending over 5 HOURS PER DAY ON AVERAGE scrolling through feeds and endlessly consuming videos.

We’ve come a long f*cking way from cave paintings… in a REALLY short period of time.

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3. Why we actually feel behind in life

Anyway – so I’m 37 years old now, and while I’ve worked more than anyone else I know over the past decade- THIS year in particular is one where I’ve worked harder than ever.

I’ve only gone out one night this entire year –  not a single saturday or sunday has passed where I haven’t worked for at least 8 hours.

I’ve been making massive investments into my business – which has made this year the first year where I’ve incurred significant debt –

And after years of planning and setbacks – I finally launched  my English YouTube channel – where I’m currently working with an entire team and spending over 40 hours of my own time every week… to produce videos that are only getting a few hundred views each.

Now here’s the thing – my rational brain UNDERSTANDS the game.. which is WHY I’m making these investments in the first place – because I KNOW they’ll pay off in the long term.

Heck, I would bet my LIFE that they’ll pay off in less than a year.

But despite KNOWING these things – my rational brain is simply no match for social media – where I’m constantly exposed to people who are way younger and seem to work far less and achieve  SO much more than me.

And when I look back to the 29 year old version of myself, who could have easily felt behind in life but didn’t –

and compare him to the modern day, 37 year old version of myself, who definitely shouldn’t feel behind in life but still did –

The KEY difference was in how much more time the 37 year old version of myself was spending on Social Media.

Now In my defense, having just launched my English YouTube channel it’s been important for me to watch lots of videos to be able to understand trends and editing strategies, and to spend more time on instagram building my community and sharing personal experiences with those who consider me a friend or older brother … (follow me on instagram: @nelsonquest)

But yeah – the ‘side’ effect of this has been CONSTANT exposure to lots of people who seem to be  WAY ahead of me, which naturally… makes me way feel behind.

So the way I finally STOPPED  feeling so behind in life wasn’t by just getting off of social media… because I want to be able to watch YouTube videos and engage with you guys…  just without, you know, completely ruining my life-

The solution was actually to…

4. Rationalize

Use my rational brain to take control of what was a completely out-of-control situation.

So MY solution to all of this was at the bottom of the following 3 questions:

Question 1. Is it fair to compare myself to the algorithmically selected outliers among billions of other people?

Answer: no. This is silly – and when I look at things this way… RATIONALLY… they don’t affect me negatively.

Another trick here with social media – I try to limit my usage to ‘goal-oriented’ activities related to things I’m working on

Because it’s only really when I use my phone ‘mindlessly’ where I start to get into trouble

Question 2. Should I compare myself to others? 

Answer: Yeah of course. I’m not a hermit nor do I desire to be one – I’m here to play the game and it’s healthy for me to look at others who have achieved things that I want to achieve and to use them as models – to learn from them –

And to want the best for them, because when I look closely, I should see MYSELF in them.

Question 3. …Should I feel behind in life? 

Well, it depends.

If I’m wasting time and not doing the things I know I should be doing – then yeah, I SHOULD feel behind… I don’t deserve to feel any other way… plus I work better when I’m under the right amount of pressure.

But when I’m doing the things that I know will move me forward along my unique path  – while using my rational brain and avoiding non-goal oriented social media usage…

I feel like I am EXACTLY where I need to be.

If you’re someone who feels behind in life – take some time right now to consider the 3 questions for yourself –

If this article helped you out, please subscribe to my YOUTUBE Channel.

This is the path –

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How to Destroy Your ‘Self’ to Free Who You Are (3 Steps)

How to Destroy Your 'Self' to Free Who You Are (3 Steps)

Table of Contents

A quick note before we begin – this video details the extremely dark, painful and ultimately glorious process through which I was able to transform myself into a completely different person.

What I discovered, and the process I’m about to share with you guys… will probably make you uncomfortable, and possibly even upset, especially if you’re someone who believes that these sort of transformations can only be achieved through positive mindset and self-love.

I say this respectfully, but unlike the overwhelming majority of people who create content on this topic –

Not only have I actually achieved colossal transformations within each of my dimensions – but I’ve also spent years working to understand underlying psychology and mechanisms behind those transformations to the level that I can now articulate them to you – the viewer.

Regardless of who you are and what your beliefs are – if you truly want to get the most out of this video, all I ask is that you keep an open mind.

In first part of this down the concepts and exact process that were CRITICAL to my transformation.

And then at the end of the video, I’ll give you the exact formula that I used to reinvent myself from a powerless, futureless nobody, into a powerful, destiny-fulfilling somebody.

Lesson 1: The Self Is Not Something To Improve, It Is Something We Must Destroy

It’s no secret that I absolutely detest the industry of self-improvement.

The problem, ironically… starts with the name itself. The words ‘self-improvement’ positively reinforces the absolutely ridiculous idea that there is even a self to be improved.

EVERYTHING, and I very much mean EVERY SINGLE THING that we are seemingly powerless to improve about ourselves IS literally because of who we believe ourselves to be.

The ‘self’ is nothing more than a construct – the end product of a lifetime of accumulated attitudes, values and behaviors that we mistakenly come to believe are us –

This ‘idea’ that we carry of our ‘self’ –  otherwise referred to as ‘self-image’ – can best be summed up with the following quote.

“I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am” - Charles Cooley

Otherwise referred to as the looking glass theory – it posits that ‘self’ is essentially just what we think other people think we are.

This is why so many of us work so hard to ‘project’ a self that is happy, hard-working, disciplined, and filled with purpose – even if we’re not really any of those things – because as long as we think that other people think we are those things, then WE think we are those things.

This is why when we try and fail to develop good  habits, the real reason more often than not is because we’re blind to the truth that we are NOT who we project ourselves to be.

No – to the contrary, the overwhelming majority of us are weak, pathetic creatures who retreat to hedonistic pleasures like social media and Netflix in the face of anything that threatens the comfort that we are programmed to seek in every waking moment.

It’s why the overwhelming majority of people who project themselves to be improving, are not. They care more about the projection, because to them, the projection is the reality. True reality is irrelevant.

Our  ‘self’ is also an accumulation of things.

We are born as nothing and with nothing, and then over time our ‘self’ accumulates things – mainly material things like clothes, cars, houses – but also ‘beliefs’ – how disciplined we are, how good-looking we are.

The more we have, the more we have to lose.

The more we believe ourselves to be something, the more risk we associate with taking action.

This is why most people who read self-help books take virtually no action – they’re terrified of shattering the illusion of their  improved self that they’ve spent months or even years cultivating from the comfort of their sofa.

So this all brings me back to my original  point – if the very idea of who we are IS what’s standing in the way of what we could become – why the fuck would we want to ‘improve’ that?

Why not just DESTROY it… and allow something far more powerful to emerge.

For me to be able to understand this lesson, I had to first lose everything.

Lesson 2: See Ourselves As We Really Are

The problem with this – and this was certainly my problem – is that we don’t dislike our ‘self’ enough to want to see it as anything other than what we want to see it as.

The old me was an idiot. He knew nothing of the world and had no curiosity to even want to learn, perhaps because he already thought he knew everything.

He spent his entire life following the path that society had laid out for him. He went to college for 5 years, studying a career he hated, only to finally earn a degree that he would NEVER use.

What ‘good’ habits he did have was entirely motivated by the pursuit of material and superficial bullshit that he never thought to question.

Then, at 26 years old, the girl of his dreams left him to go back to a previous boyfriend – a guy who was superior to me in ways that actually mattered.

He was worldly, virtuous, spiritual, philosophical. He had goals and purpose.

When it finally sunk in that the girl was never coming back to me, I sent this superior man an email where I shared very intimate details of our relationship – and email that was designed to devastate him…

However in a final earth-shattering display of superiority…  he thanked me for sending the email and wished me well.

I spent the next few months spiraling deeper and deeper into depression until one day, the pain was so great that my entire concept of self – everything I believed myself to be and all of the things I had accumulated – NONE of it mattered.

By losing everything, the faulty notion of ‘self’ that I had spent an entire lifetime accumulating suddenly disintegrated into nothingness… I was free.

My new self was free to experience the raw energy of pain however it wanted, and as easily as one might decide to blink their eyes, I chose to now experience that energy as power.

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Lesson 3: The Importance of Solitude

In the years following that epiphany moment, I spent virtually every second of everyday taking action to improve myself.

By far the most critically important element of all of this, is that I decided to completely remove myself from the world until this process had fully taken its course.

No TV. No social media. No interaction with friends and family.

My initial motivation for retreating into the shadows was that I wanted to absolutely blow everyone away with the new person that I had become when I re-emerged.

But after even just a few days of existing like this, solitude became the most important weapon in my self-transformation arsenal.

All of the external noise of life was gone. It was just me, alone in my apartment, with some books, a computer, and a massive amount of work to do with nothing to distract me from doing it.

I could no longer compare myself to others – I could only compare myself to who I had been yesterday, and who I could be tomorrow – and as I made rapid progress within each of my 4 dimensions, these comparisons became the most prideful aspect of my existence.

I had started training for an ironman, and within a few weeks I was training multiple hours every single day –

Every morning began with swimming in an ice cold public pool – Every evening ended with  long jogs into and out of New York City – And every weekend featured a 6 to 8 hour bike ride through New Jersey.

ALL of this training was performed in complete and total silence.

In each individual second I found myself making a choice between taking it easy or giving it my all – my ‘old’ self and my ‘new’ self engaged in all out war – a war that raged for one year and two months until it was finally race day.

By the time I set up on the starting line, I had severe plantar fasciitis in both feet, impingement syndrome in both of my shoulders, and a torn bicep muscle that forced me to let my arm dangle when I jogged…

but my ‘new’ self was all that remained.

Oh, and by the way – by the time I did re-emerge, everyone I knew was completely blown away by my transformation, but that mattered a lot less to me now.

I was just getting started. 

Conclusion

I know that a lot of people are going to critique these techniques – trust me when I say that the overwhelming majority of them literally have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.

What I’ve shared in this video are just my experiences, research, and opinions. Always do what you feel is right.

Make sure to follow me on Instagram @nelsonquest – there’s so much more I want to share in these videos that’s much easier for me to share there.

And lastly, don’t just subscribe to my YT channel, but if you want to be notified first when I release new videos then make SURE to click the notification bell – unless you’re too busy thinking positive thoughts or masturbating to yourself in a mirror over the idea of how great you are, in that case…

This is the path.

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How to be a Master: The Philosophy of Bruce Lee

How to be a Master: The Philosophy of Bruce Lee

Table of Contents

Bruce Lee passed away on July 20th, 1973 – nearly 50 years ago.

Yet his instagram page has over 7 million followers, “The Warrior” – based on an original concept by Lee, is now a hit show on television,  And t-shirts and sneakers bearing his likeness are still flying off of shelves.

Even all these years later, Bruce Lee is still a cultural icon.

And while his movies and overall aesthetic were astonishing – the real reason that his legacy continues to inspire millions of people around the world is because of the philosophy that he came to represent.

It was this philosophy that initially drew my attention and made me curious to learn more about him.

More specifically, it was a clip I saw where explained how to ‘be like water’.

"Be Water, My Friend. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend." Bruce Lee

This was my gateway into the philosophy of Bruce Lee.

It was in investigating his philosophy where I was introduced to Taoism – which I have spent much of the last 8 years studying and applying within my own experience and producing incredible results.

I was introduced to the idea that hidden within paradoxical nature of Eastern philosophy, was a deeper knowledge that held the key to so much of what ails of us here in the West, the key to so much of what was limiting MY own ability to achieve what Bruce Lee considered to be the highest form of human achievement: self-expression.

In this video, we’re going to deep dive into Bruce Lee’s philosophy of Jeet Kune Do and how it lays what I believe is the BEST foundation for the true cultivation of any skill.

The Style of No-Style

Most people understand Jeet Kune Do as being solely a  ‘style’ of martial arts.. And that could not be further from the truth.

Jeet Kune Do was at its core a philosophy of learning, which Lee taught through martial arts.

The core tenet of Jeet Kune Do is ‘instant, frictionless reaction’. To put it another way “the expression of one’s feelings with the minimum movements of  movements and energy”… wu-wei.

It was a ‘style’ of martial art, only in the sense that it was ‘the style of no style’

“Because of styles, people are separated. Research your own experience, absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own”

“The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is.”

He dislike styles when referring to personal processes like self-development,, because he believed that to adhere to any individual ‘style’ was to essentially put ourselves into the ‘box’ of that style – which is restrictive.

Instead Lee saw styles ‘collectively’ – similar to Taoist world-views – and so instead of focusing on any individual style, he focused on the foundations which connected the best elements of different styles.

“Man is always in a learning process. Whereas ‘style’ is a concluding, established, solidified something, you know? I mean you cannot do that, because you learn every day as you grow on, grow older. Each person must not be limited to one approach. We must approach it with our own self”

Lee believed that it was important to not take positions.. In his words “be not for or against”. That we should instead allow our circumstances to dictate our actions.

I see this sort of limiting style approach manifest within so many of the different themes that encompass self-development.

I’ve had people criticize me for laying down while meditating… for walking on a treadmill while I work…  for doing Pomodoros of 50 minutes instead of 25.

I see this in particular when it comes to which style of ‘diet’ or exercise is superior – as if the best diet and best style of exercise isn’t the one that produces the best results for the individual…

As if we shouldn’t experiment with all styles, and “Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially our own.”

In the past, I had the bad habit of ‘marrying’ myself to individual styles and believing that my way of doing things was superior to other ways… even if that way was no longer actually working for me.

When I started to apply Lee’s ‘style of no style’ philosophy within everything I do – my work, my physical activities, my artistic activities,  I’ve now been able to evolve year after year.

The 3 Stages of Cultivation

Within Jeet Kune Do was also Bruce Lee’s unique philosophy towards the actual learning process, which he referred to as the Three Stages of Cultivation.

First, is  the “Stage of Innocence” – or what Lee referred to as “Partiality.”

In this stage, we are completely ignorant to the particular skill we’re trying to learn.

Because of this, if we try to perform the skill, having no knowledge but our own instincts – we’ll act in a way that is natural and reflective… but because we have no knowledge of the skill, our actions will often be incorrect.

Second, is the “Stage of Sophistication” – or what Lee referred to as “Fluidity”.

In this stage we begin learning the skill that we’re seeking to master. We’re taught different ways to perform the skill and we do so in an ‘imitative way’ – meaning that we essentially try to imitate the teacher, whether that be an actual person, a book, or even a video – until we feel like we’re ‘doing it right’.

Because we imitate, we lose the natural, reflective qualities of our actions – often becoming almost robotic.

We constantly second-guess ourselves, and because of that we often freeze.

Third, is the “Spontaneous Stage” – or what Lee referred to as “Emptiness”.

This stage occurs after years of disciplined practice – where, instead of having to consciously force our actions, they happen spontaneously.

Instead of trying to ‘impose’ our mind, we simply react without friction, to whatever the unique circumstance is that we are faced with.

As Lee described, “there is nothing to try [to] do but try to be purposeless, and formless, like water. All of his classical techniques and standard styles are minimized, if not wiped out, and nothingness prevails. He is no longer confined.”

The first time I read about Lee’s 3 stages of cultivation, I was still confused – until one night at a salsa club here where I live in Colombia.

When we first set out to learn how to dance – we don’t know anything – or worse – we know that we’re not good at dancing.

Someone who dances but has no skill at dancing – will still move naturally… instinctively… this is most easily observed in little kids who haven’t yet reached the stage where society has taught them to feel shame over their own unique self-expression – that’s a topic for another video.

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is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.

This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.

Anyway at the first stage, we move instinctively and naturally, but are ignorant as to how to actually dance.

In the second stage, we begin to learn how to dance. We imitate our teachers and because of that our movements are initially very jerky and uncoordinated as we constantly second-guess ourselves and seek to do the thing that makes our teacher happy.

As we get better, we are still mechanical… robotic, because we’re getting better at ‘imitating’ what we believe to be the ‘correct’ way to do something.

Then.. what I realized all those years ago as I sat, buzzed after a few mojitos, trying to figure out the essence of what made these dancers so good.

Was that in the final stage – these dancers weren’t ‘planning’ out their moves. 

Instead, in this ‘highest’ stage of learning… these dancers were simply… forgetting.

Interpreting the music within their own unique styles – no thinking at all – simply ‘existing’ within the unique circumstance of each individual second.

That was the moment where I decided to learn salsa – and here I am 6 years later and I’m still very much in stage 2 – still practicing, ‘imitating’ thousands of repetitions.

But slowly… I am creating my own style.

What I’m describing here is the process of mastery – what Bruce Lee considered to be ‘limitless self-expression’.

And if you’re aspiring to mastery within individual dimensions of your own life, whether it be physical, mental, expressive, or occupational.

Hopefully the philosophy of Jeet Kune Do can help you as it has helped me.

“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and water once again waters.” ― Dōgen

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