https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7R\_K6LwKNk

1 00:00:00.000 --\> 00:01:00.000 in this video i'm going to be talking
to you about how to fix the character traits and deficiencies that you
have in your life so whether it be struggling with anxiety or happiness
and depression or being a bad husband or being money focused or whatever
the thing is that you claim to have a problem with i'm going to give you
really the only mental framework that has ever worked for me if you're
new to the channel my name is alex from rosie i own acquisition.com to
portfolio of companies is about 85 million a year and i have nothing to
sell you i make these videos because candidly i enjoy sharing some of
the things that have helped us kind of get through things as we've grown
our companies and there are a lot of people who are broke and i don't
want you to be one of them and so i'm going to probably piss a lot of
people off in this video so i'm going to give you a heads up second
thing is i will be cussing in this video so if you have kids around um i
would say you know mute it or listen to it another time so i was talking
to an entrepreneur the other day and uh they were saying that they were
having panic attacks right and they were struggling with this issue what
i want to do is walk you through um

2 00:01:00.000 --\> 00:02:00.000 the process that i was explaining to
them now at this point they the reason the the panic attacks started for
this entrepreneur ironically um is that they were talking to a therapist
and the therapist was like let's look at your past and dug up you know
crap about their past and then they started looking at this thing and
then they started getting you know anxiety kind of remembering all these
these kind of past experiences and whatnot here's the thing most
therapists and i say this with zero degree most therapists are humans
and most humans suck at most things especially things they think they're
good at and so most of them are just normal people who did okay in
school and now just like talking to people and don't have any \[ \_\_ \]
clue what they're doing all right so here's the deal here's the hot take
what most of them will do is they will try and pull something up and say
something to the extent of what do you make that mean what does that
mean to you the thought process behind this is hey you have this thing
it's triggering a feeling it's because you think that having anxiety
makes you a bad person or makes you a

3 00:02:00.000 --\> 00:03:00.000 bad entrepreneur or whatever thing that
you say it has meaning right what do we make this mean all right that's
the question what are you making this mean all right so if you have
problems and this is especially important with cyclical behavior
reinforcing behavior this is also one of the reasons that i actually do
not stand for the whole aaa concept of standing up in front of people
every morning and say hi everybody i am an adult i \[ \_\_ \] hate it
it's literally like owning this deficiency and incorporating it and
weaving into your contract and your identity and you reinforce it every
\[ \_\_ \] morning it's insanity to me the way to stop being addicted to
something is to stop thinking about it like what does it look like to
not be addicted it looks like you just continuing to live your life not
even thinking about it what does it look like to not have anxiety it's
not you doing your anti-anxiety routine in the morning and say i suffer
from anxiety or i struggle with anxiety it's not saying that and saying
i have to do these things i must i should i i need to in order to not
have anxiety because then you're thinking about anxiety you give

4 00:03:00.000 --\> 00:04:00.000 anxiety power and so what i'm going to
walk you through is the way to hold the space and own the power that you
have in your own mind outside of the thing that you were projecting the
power onto the process that these therapists that are \[ \_\_ \] retards
will do is they will lead you through this thing where they try and
transform meaning they say instead of saying it means you're a bad
person what if we just said this is you know it's a good thing or it's
not a bad thing right so we're trying to transform meaning and i think
that's like level one elementary you know grade school of of cognitive
behavioral therapy right i think that's grade school but the thing is
and this is the problem because i've gone through the cycle which is why
i'm speaking about this so passionately and i'll tell you a quick story
before i dive in so there was a period of time in my life where i was
very unhappy all right and so i obsessed about happiness right i read
all the positive psychology journals i read the the books i read the
happiness equation i mean like i went through all of these things and
yet after spending all of this time trying

5 00:04:00.000 --\> 00:05:00.000 to obsess about happiness i was no less
no more happy and so then i thought to myself well in one instance i can
spend lots of time and effort and be unhappy or i can spend zero time
and effort and be unhappy well this one cost me less i might as well
start pursuing this and this is what happened i adopted this mentality
and i will share it with you called \[ \_\_ \] happiness all right bear
with me and so what ended up happening is that i thought these thoughts
and and whenever uh the idea of is this making me happy and all of these
normal trigger thoughts i'd be like oh i'm not happy this isn't good i
feel sad blah blah blah i would literally have this trump card that i
would just pop in my head and be like \[ \_\_ \] happiness and i keep
moving the difference between \[ \_\_ \] happiness and let's think about
how we should be grateful for things is that when you say \[ \_\_ \]
happiness or \[ \_\_ \] the thing that you are struggling with \[ \_\_
\] anxiety \[ \_\_ \] whatever is that it no longer has power because
we're not trying to transform the meaning of the behavior we are

6 00:05:00.000 --\> 00:06:00.000 eliminating the meaning behind it all
together we are transforming it into nothing and so hear me out for a
second and i don't know why this is getting all spacey and weird i've
tried to fix this thing a hundred times the reason this is so important
all right is that when you enter these vicious reinforcing cycles so
let's say it's like oh god uh i'm afraid i'm gonna have a panic attack
tonight i don't wanna have a panic attack you start thinking about
having a panic attack and then of course you have a panic attack because
the fear of the thing is what reinforces the cycle and you can do this
with anything right it could be it could be a guy with erectile
dysfunction like i hope it doesn't happen i hope it doesn't happen and
then it happens right because you're worried about it happening not
because the happening itself is the thing right and i'm trying to use
examples that purposefully people derive shame from because the thing is
is that the shame of the occurrence is the thing that gives it power and
so if you remove the shame and by the way the way to remove shame is to
shed light on it so nothing can give you shame if you admit it openly

7 00:06:00.000 --\> 00:07:00.000 think about it if everyone knows the
thing and you accept the thing or deem the thing meaningless then it no
longer has powerful over you so let me let me give you an example so
this entrepreneur that i was talking about earlier they were telling me
that they were having you know they're having anxiety and it was
preventing them from sleeping et cetera right and i was like so they're
like well you know i'm really working on it i was like why and they like
looked at me cross-eyed and i was like how long have you been working
this you know like you know eight months and i was like are you less
anxious than you were before they're like well i think a little bit and
i was like do you think you would be a little bit less anxious if you
just did jack \[ \_\_ \] and waited eight months from when you went from
when you were bad until now they were like well maybe i was like time
does heal lots of wounds i was like so you spent all this time to get
this little outcome and you could have just let time happen and probably
had the same outcome right right i was like but let's take it one step
further why didn't you tell me how many bowel movements you had
yesterday i mean i didn't think it was relevant

8 00:07:00.000 --\> 00:08:00.000 exactly so why are you sharing with me
that you have panic attacks because you think it's meaningful you derive
meaning your brain is telling you that this is something that is a
problem so the thing is is that the deeming of the thing a problem is
the problem and trying to change it or transform the meaning into
something else is in my opinion just as bad because the way that you
created the mess that you are in in a vicious cycle of reinforcement is
that you found a thing and then you said i will give this meaning and
then you spend the rest of your time trying to transform the meaning
when if you want to solve the problem the experience of having the
problem solved is to not think about the problem at all what it is is
actually reversing the process that created meaning to begin with which
is removing meaning altogether i'm saying this because i've had so many
things that i've struggled with in my life that i would consistently
obsess about over and over and over again oh i don't want to have that
happening ah i don't wanna have that happen again and then it would
happen and so in my opinion

9 00:08:00.000 --\> 00:09:00.000 the only way to overcome these issues
is to you can you can slap the \[ \_\_ \] happiness concept on it but
it's to destroy the meaning of the thing itself and let it shrink into
irrelevance most my opinion most of the psychological problems that we
deal with are better dealt with not by trying to directly combat them
but by not giving them the power of our attention and there's a big
difference here i'm not saying the thought of anxiety comes up you say i
don't want to think about it because then it's fear fear gives it power
shame gives it power it's not that it's looking at it and saying why are
you bringing this up this is irrelevant this is a non-issue and so for
the same reason that you can have noise in the background and you don't
think about it is that it's just noise and so what we do is we shrink
the thing from being a signal that our brain deems meaningful to noise
that is in the background that we no longer ascribe meaning to

10 00:09:00.000 --\> 00:10:00.000 altogether and that is how it
eventually shrinks into a relevance and then we only choose to allocate
our attention towards the thing that we find meaningful right and so
when what happened in my little \[ \_\_ \] happiness story is that i
said this is no longer a productive conversation i'd be like i'm unhappy
like \[ \_\_ \] happiness whatever i'm gonna keep moving and a funny
thing happened a few years later i looked up and i realized that i was
significantly more happy than i was before or as i prefer to say i was
significantly less unhappy which also gives less power to the thing
altogether a different point that i want to bring up because i think
it's equally important around this this topic a lot of the fear and the
shame comes from perceived judgment that we have from an anonymous
outside society right we have a voice or a series of voices that we
believe exist that only exist in our mind that are judging us based on
this behavior that we are suffering from one of the reasons that i like
to own the deficiencies publicly is not because of you guys it's

11 00:10:00.000 --\> 00:11:00.000 for me i own like for example when i
had uh you know when we were we were running and growing our our first
big business which was the licensing business i was always up front i
said i'm here to make money and the reason i said that was so that i
would have no shame in making money because then if people in the future
were going to say something like alex is only here to make money i would
then look at them and say and so here hear me out listen to this
dialogue let's say i was attacked because the attacks that i'm saying
i'm going to portray as though it's outside but it's inside of our minds
that we attack ourselves right so let's say somebody comes up to me a
woman and says you're a terrible husband most people say that there are
two forms of defense against this number one is saying no no i'm not a
bad bad a bad husband right and then giving all the reasons why i'm a
good husband the other way to defend against that would be to say well
you know being a husband is not necessarily such a bad thing right and
so one is to dispute the other

12 00:11:00.000 --\> 00:12:00.000 is to alter right we're altering the
meaning behind the thing the first is we're combating and we're saying
that we're not the thing but still allowing the thing to have meaning
allowing a bad husband to be a negative connotation that we ascribe
meaning to i think this is meaningful and i it's negative but meaningful
and so i will say i am not that thing or version two is this thing is
meaningful but i i understand it and interpret differently right those
are the two ways the second way is how most therapy works and i also
think that it's \[ \_\_ \] and so here's door number three is that you
look at the thing in the face and you say and i think you're a bad
husband and you're right and and watch them shrivel they will be
paralyzed because everything that they have exists to have a counter
force but if there is no counter force for it to react to the thought
process stops and so if you struggle with these vicious recurring
consistent dialogues and and

13 00:12:00.000 --\> 00:13:00.000 arguments in your head about what's
good and why should change and why you need to be different and why this
shouldn't be this way just look at it in the eyes and say and and i'm
going to give you a really controversial example of what i think should
have happened in a public scenario tiger woods he was outed you know
what i mean or ousted or whatever it is you know what i mean he was
publicly shamed for the the cheating thing right and mind you this is
not me condoning cheating this is me to illustrate a position of power
and this is a public demonstration of power but you can take it in terms
of how you can internally project that power onto the idea that you want
to vanquish all right and we don't vanquish it by transforming it we
vanquish it by eliminating the meaning altogether and letting it shrink
into irrelevance so what tiger in my opinion should have done in that
situation when they said you banged all these girls and you were lying
and blah blah blah he should have said yes i'm a liar and a cheater

14 00:13:00.000 --\> 00:14:00.000 but i'm the best \[ \_\_ \] golfer
there is next question what do they say when you accept it there is no
conversation and so try this in the next argument you have with someone
a but more importantly with yourself is that someone says i think you're
x y and z and you said you're right just give the power just just say
sure you're right now what and so your point when your brain tells you
something that you don't like or that you don't want to look at instead
of trying to make it into something else liking it to an irrelevant
observation brain why didn't you bring up that i have brown hair because
it doesn't matter brain why didn't you bring up how many bowel movements
had yesterday this doesn't matter brain why didn't you say tell me how
many uh how many stairs i went up yesterday because it doesn't matter
you don't find it meaningful and so why am i now deeming this thing

15 00:14:00.000 --\> 00:15:00.000 to be meaningful it's irrelevant to me
it's it it halts the conversation and it stops the cycle i say this and
i know that i got passionate about this but i say this to someone who
struggled with this for a very long time and so the only psychotherapy
that i was able to do was on myself and it was not through talking out
all of these things and i know that a lot of people get triggered a lot
of people want to say hey i have a therapist they changed my life good
for you that's awesome keep doing it i don't care what i'm doing is i'm
trying to talk to people who have not had that or have done that and
it's and it did not work for them all right and so i'm sharing the
single most powerful mental model that has worked for me which is
purposefully staring at the problem and saying so what your move and
watch it shrivel and then moving on the \[ \_\_ \] with your life so
anyways i love you all mozy nation appreciate you thank you for giving
me

16 00:15:00.000 --\> 00:16:00.000 the attention that you did today i
make these videos because i just i i i hope that some of the lessons
that that that have served me uh can serve some other people at least
and if you're in a darker place or you're struggling with something like
anxiety or struggling with shame around some sort of activity that you
have done i can tell you the only way to struggle to deal with shame is
to shed light on it shade shame only exists in darkness and the only way
something has power is when we fight it because we deem it meaningful or
worth combating and so i think the only way to truly fight it is to not
fight it at all and say it is not a fight worth having and then it will
evaporate and so anyways my friends keeping awesome lots of love i'll
see you guys next video bye
