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Thoughts related to how we perceive, how we spend our time now and hopefully correcting some ideas about the importance of finding worthy goals to focus on and avoiding unexpected consequences for splitting our time and effort between things. Uh Even when our motives are good in the sense of trying to increase the odds of a good outcome by pursuing backup plans. So that might seem like a hodgepodge of topics. But I think as we go through here, it'll focus in to a greater extent than I've done in this title. So let's start with the story about Hernan Cortez who was a conquistador who conquered the Aztec Empire. Um trying to sidestep controversy here and just keep it to elementary level facts. So when he got to the new world, he had a fleet of ships and about 600 soldiers and sailors and so on his entourage. When they got onto the beach, he promptly burned the ships. And the message he sent to his men was very clear, this was a one way journey unless they were successful. So the ships were not retained in order to have an escape plan. And um those men knew immediately that they were all in and that changed their motivation. It changed what they were willing to do in life. It turns out in modern life, we have this culture that presents this, this big lie that you can have it all that no matter what you want, what set of things you want, that there's no sense of um mutually exclusive goals or actions. This is a huge lie. It's a topic beyond this video, but we could go into great detail about things that can't coexist things that must coexist things that must follow in a certain sequence, meaning uh things that lead to what we want or things we might want now that absolutely lead to things we do not want later. It's a, it's a very important topic to think about in this video. I'm just gonna touch on. It's a very specific um overview level ideas from that collection of thoughts. So you can't have it all. It doesn't matter who you are. The fact is that life requires prioritization. You have to make choices of relative value. And uh the good news is those choices are yours to make. The bad news is they carry immense consequences that almost always exceed the awareness of those who are in the position to make the decision. Um One reason is that these decisions tend to happen earlier in life. And so there's a, there's a mismatch between the wisdom one acquires through age. Uh years of experience through age and the necessity to make these decisions at quite a young age. So one example of this is Children. Um I don't really care how unpopular it is to say the following. It's absolutely true. There is no comparison between Children raised by a full time dedicated mother who's, who's not working outside of the home, who also homeschools her kids and Children raised by your typical career mom. In fact, I would say that this difference is so strong that the set probably doesn't even overlap at all. Meaning the worst, stay at home mom might be better than the best career mom. So even if that's not true, it approaches the truth that set. If you had a Venn diagram, the overlapping part is tiny if it exists at all. And so the question is if you want kids, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. If you want kids, how could you see and you're young and you don't have them yet. How could you see your path in life is anything but this because the outcomes diverge so strongly and it will only continue to diverge even more because uh many of these differences have only been made apparent in the past few years. Relatively speaking, they weren't so strong 2030 40 years ago, but now they're enormous and it's like these two things are flying in opposite directions at light speed. So, but, but it just hasn't caught on yet that people who say I want to have kids, either you're, you're aiming for this or you are aiming for a situation where you're, you're pretty much guaranteeing that your kids are going to turn out as the kinds of people who the world would be better off without. It's that strong, it's that strong. OK? So we're not holding back punches on this one. So what's closer to the truth than this lie that you can have at all is that you get to pick what matters most and then you should give it your all. So it's not that you can have it all. It's that you can give it all and you get to choose what to give it to. But when you try to split up what you have to give odds are you're gonna end up with way less than if you had just picked one thing. So this is, this is touching on to this idea of prioritization. Again, it's a lie to think that the priority you have to give can be divided as many times as you like without losing what you have to give. There's an overhead in that division, meaning if you have 10 units of attention and effort and you split them 10 ways, you will have less than one unit of attention and effort for each of those 10 ways. There's overhead that's lost in that because there are things you just can't do the same if you're not dedicated. There's another aspect of this idea, which is that you have to pick something that's most important to you. There are way too many people who think that they can go through life without doing that and all they're really doing is making the choice implicitly. They have still made the choice now. They might flip flop on what's most important moment by moment, which is essentially the worst possible thing you can do as far as your outcomes are con are concerned, leaving it up to whatever implicit situation might arise because you don't want to think about it. You don't wanna commit to something, you're guaranteed to make worse choices that lead to worse outcomes than if you had just picked something. In fact, even if you picked something that wasn't the best something you could still end up far better off than leaving it up to just whatever implicit circumstances arise and flip flopping between things that are most important depending on the circumstance. That that's the worst of all because you're not going to have the resources to do any of those things. Well, because you're constantly split across these things. So pick what matters most and give it your all the reason is the greatest outcomes in life. They require your full desire and effort. It's not negotiable. If you took a sample of people who have lived abundant lives and you could define that any way you'd like and you ask them one by one, you interviewed them and you said, tell me all about what's made the greatest difference in your life from your perspective. They are going to tell you about things that took everything they had to give again, whatever the details might be. Who knows, it's up to whatever you think is important, how you pick these people and then what they thought was important and the choices they made, but this is a quality that will come out of all of them. They will tell you that the greatest outcomes in their life required everything they had to give. There are reasons for that, that I'm not going to get into in this video, but they have to do with, with how value works and how meaning works. And it's, it's about what you sacrifice and how fully you sacrifice. The greatest things that you value in your life will be those you paid the highest price for. That's unavoidable. You cannot break that rule. So if you want to maximize meaning and value in your life, you're going to have whatever you choose, it's gonna, you're gonna have to be all in and to the extent you hold back on that you're going to miss out on the value you could have had the meaning you could have had in your life. And like I referred to earlier, that's disproportionately, those decisions are disproportionately going to occur while you're young. Um What ends up happening is as you go through the stream of life, your current situation more and more is dictated by your past choices. So by the time you get later in life, it's not the choices don't matter anymore. It's that odds are, you've either become really good at making them or because you've been very poor at making them. You just don't have many left to make. You're so bound up in the consequences of poor choices you've made in the past that it just doesn't even matter anymore. So that's why the early ones matter the most. And there are many things that the sorts of things you invest your whole life in. Obviously, they have to occur before you've lived your whole life. Otherwise you just don't have that much to give. But things about like uh what career you choose, uh who you marry if you marry, if you have Children, how many you have when you have them, how you raise them. All of that gets determined way early in life, way early and ideally much earlier than people are doing nowadays with the average child. Uh The average age when uh a woman has her first child is over 30 now. So, OK, so here's your recipe for success. You set yourself to know God, you dedicate your whole soul to his purpose, not your purpose, his purpose. So make this your purpose. So the greatest outcomes in life, they require your full desire and effort and there's nothing you can do that would get you further than this, make your purpose to know God and dedicate your whole soul to his purpose. Now, there's a whole lot of questions to answer with this that only you can answer, you're the one that's gonna bear the full responsibility of this. So you better be the one who figures it out. Those questions are things like, well, how does this apply to me specifically in my circumstances? If God, uh if God's spirit possessed me fully right in this moment with, in my exact circumstances, what would he choose to do for the rest of my life? And that's what you should do. And not just on the macro level, looking at your whole life, break it down to the micro level on a, you know, 10 year, five year, one year from now or even moment to moment, week by week, month by month, you could build it down and build it up. It doesn't matter. You fill in the blanks. Now, if you fill in the blanks, obviously, you know, if you're 15 years old and you're asking this question, you're probably gonna have a very different answer to it. 1020 30 years from now, let's hope because we all hope we're gonna continue learning over life. There's , you'll never run out of things to learn about God or about his creation. But the point is to have an answer sketched out to live according to it and to pay attention when things change and that, that change is something we're gonna hit on here in a, in a minute. So because people know that life is volatile and that our understanding is incomplete and that we can't dictate the choices of others because of all that people tend to think about backup plans. So I'm sure Cortez's soldiers, they were thinking that the ships were a backup plan. The Cortez burned them. He was an excellent commander. He was very effective at what he did and he knew that that was a good thing to do because it would increase his soldiers dedication to the cause and that was his mission. So if your mission is to dedicate your whole soul to God's purpose, then anything that deviates from that in any way, it takes away from your ability to accomplish it to the full extent because that will take your full soul will take everything. So having a backup plan is gonna guarantee your failure on the things that are most important in life. Now, I'm sharing all this from AAA perspective of explicit belief in God. You, you could share all these things and they'd be just as true without mentioning God. So it's true on the greatest things and it's true on things that are less than the greatest things. Everything that is close to the top of the hierarchy of meaning follows these principles. So if you have a backup plan for anything that is, that carries AAA strong meaning could provide massive value in life. You're guaranteeing your own failure, you will never achieve the full scope of what's possible there because you have a backup plan now, you might push back against this and say, well, aren't contingencies a good thing. Yeah . Sure. Sure. But there's a, there's a difference and I'm not 100% sure about the words I'm using here as far as whether this is the best nomenclature to describe what I'm trying to. But just try to get the ideas, even if the words aren't perfect. There's a distinction between pursuing two things at the same time and having an idea of what you might do under certain conditions that would indicate that your first plan is no longer viable, right? So I could say if I were a young woman, I wanna have kids, but if I don't find a husband that fits my criteria and, or I have fertility problems, here's the decision tree of what I'm going to do under different conditions. And when, right, this is nothing new. People do this all the time across many, many situations, but that's not the same as what the same idea of what I'm talking about with the phrase backup plan. So people pursue their backup plan at the same time as their main plan and that's why it's not good because if your main plan, if you focused yourself on something that has massive, meaning it will not tolerate competition. The greatest outcomes in life do not tolerate competition. If you want a fantastic marriage, you can't have side girlfriends and boyfriends. Right. If you want an amazing career, you can't have 10 careers at the same time. It's, it's gonna take, if you want to build a business for nothing and have it be massively successful, you, you can't have 10 jobs at once unless you're Elon Musk. But uh but you're not. So , so there goes that idea. Yeah, you can't point to, there's a, there's a, there's a chain of argument that I call what, what about ITIS? And that's, um, that's when people present a counterpoint, that's an extreme outlier and they treat it as if it were the normal circumstance. So like, um for example , we shouldn't, shouldn't encourage single motherhood and then everyone's like, well, but I know a single mother who's a great mom. OK. Great. Statistically, it's, it's, it's incredibly significant the, the difference in outcomes between Children of single moms and Children of intact families. You cannot honestly say it's OK to be a single mom or it's ok for a kid to be raised in that situation. It's like saying, well, well, um I know crack babies that turned out, ok. Well, you wouldn't want people to be crack babies. So don't argue for the extreme as if it's the norm this world would be AAA very crazy place. If there were more people like Elon Musk and not in a good way, he's got his place. But you can't look at one person in 7.5 billion and then say like, well, everybody could have 10 jobs and still be successful. No, the richest man in the world can do that. But uh if, if you're going to claim that , that you have some commonality there, you better mention some other overlaps before any credible person would believe you anyway. So doing things at the same time, that's what gets you into trouble when it comes to things of great worth. They do not tolerate competition. On that same note, if a pivot does occur, you have to realize that a change in direction. It's not the same thing as a change in intensity. You're still all in. But now you're all in, under a different set of circumstances, maybe oriented towards a slightly different goal or maybe a completely different goal, who knows? So if you start a business and that bu business fails and it's, it's definitely dead. It's certifiably dead, you're not gonna keep looking back at that the whole time. You're just gonna do whatever comes next. And you probably had an idea about that before you finished the first one. But you didn't sit there and say like two hours a day, I'm going to dedicate to business number two. While business number one is not yet successful, that's the difference. Right. Here's a really important thing. God doesn't do backup plans. He doesn't, you can find scriptural support for this things like he does everything he intends to do. When he says he does some, he's gonna do something. It's exactly what he does. Now, God has this supreme advantage in many things, but in particular, he knows all things from the beginning. Whereas we do not. However, if you make his purpose, your own, he who adopts the purpose of a king will have the blessings of a king. And so you can leverage his knowledge through adopting his purpose completely. And it turns out that the difference between those who live their lives in this sort of irreversible intensity with God. And I'll explain what I mean by that. There's an eternal gulf of distance between how their lives turn out and how other people's lives turn out. Even if they both say the same sorts of things about what they believe. There's, there's an enormous difference between these two things. It can't even be compared. It's so different. And what do I mean by irreversible intensity ? Well, faith is a funny thing when you actually live according to faith, you start doing things that are different than what other people do and you believe they're better, other people will, will definitely disagree. But what happens is you do things that publicly affirm the difference in your beliefs , not per se through explicit religious conversation or statements, but the very things that you do and how you do them will distinguish you, differentiate you from others and they'll do so in ways that are stamped all over the place with your belief in God. People are going to know that you're doing these things because you believe in God and because you believe God would want you to do it that way, even if you don't go out of your way to say it. And because of that, it's, um, it sets people up, I think with this expectation that they're going to be terribly embarrassed if they fail. Now, this is really interesting because it's a case where people aren't doing what God tells them to do. And the reason is because they're afraid of what other people will think and because they doubt that God is going to take care of them. This is super interesting because I think people that live in irreversible faith where they burned the ships and they're all in, they're regarded as these sort of spiritual freaks who are extraordinarily different than other people. Probably not in good ways. But you really should question, well, I was gonna say you should question how different they really are. They are different . In fact, I'd say they're even more different than people realize, but they're only different because they actually believe the simple stuff that everyone else pretends to believe and says they believe so, while the difference is, in fact, extraordinary. The basis is not, the basis is just they truly believe the simple things that everyone else pays lip service to but doesn't do so. Here are two really basic scriptures and what they describe is a lifestyle that's so much more intense and all in and irreversible than almost any Christian lives. So DNC 42 O ye, they embark in service of God. See that you serve Him with all your heart might mind and strength that ye may stand blameless before God. At the last day. All your heart, all your might, all your mind, all your strength, not just on Sundays, not just in churchy things, not just when you're reading your scriptures or having church activities or even praying with your family. Nope, everything. Most Christians couldn't even tell you what God has to do with their normal daily activities. So you stop them at work one day and you say, oh, you're a Christian. Uh explain to me how, what you did in the last hour here at work, how you demonstrated the name of Christ and what you did in the last hour, they'd say, what are you talking about? Right? And they write you off as one of these freakazoids. But didn't he say take my name upon you? So what does that mean? What does it mean to be? Even as He is at all times? And in all places, these are all phrases from the scriptures. They're all over the place, first kings 861 let your heart therefore be perfect with the Lord our God to walk in his statutes and to keep his commandments. As at this day, this is a fun one because it directly couples the idea of having our hearts focused on God and actually walking in his statutes. That word in Hebrew statute is important. But um we could swap it out with demonstration, for example, to walk in his example and to keep his commandments. So do what he did and follow what he says to do. And that's what it means to serve him with all your heart. And actually , there's another layer of that, which is your desire, heart can be interchanged with desire. So let your desire be fully focused on God, which means that you live completely in accordance with everything he demonstrated. And you also keep all the instructions he gives you that that might be specifically tuned to whatever your situation is through the Holy Ghost, through personal revelation. That's, that's some heavy stuff. There's no space here for competition. It's all in or nothing, it's everything or nothing. OK? So it's all good to have these high level examples. And maybe we mentioned some things as you went along. But let's get real explicit. I'm gonna give you two examples. We're gonna talk about men and we're gonna talk about women. So for my example, with men, I chose men in career again, I these are principles that apply to all people at all times. But I wanna dial this in really tightly around young people making choices that are going to impact them for the rest of their lives. For young men. The most important thing they could be worried about is how they're going to increase their income. Now, I say the most important thing, the most important thing is God. The way you will most fully live His purpose in your life is as a young man, increasing your income. That is a ridiculously explicit statement. And it's an idea that is sure to offend many. I'm not saying you shouldn't spend enormous amounts of time and effort, reading your scriptures, praying, learning as much as you can about God from people who know Him better than you do. You should. However, you're not going to do that 16 hours a day and in the time you're not doing that, the most important thing you could be doing is increasing your earning potential. The reason for that is because what you do in God's kingdom in this life until everything falls apart will largely be determined by how much money you make under what circumstances, meaning money is not the end. All, be all you have to do it righteously. And one of the goals is to buy your own time because those things will determine the quality of women you qualify for who hopefully will walk with you through the fire that's coming. So even when there is no economy anymore, the wife you have by your side will have been determined by how well you played the game before. But the other thing is that time. So between, between time and money, it's gonna determine the quality of women you can attract and how many kids you can have and when you can have them and how much time you will have to share your wisdom with them and to help them be the best people they could ever be. And that's what matters. But this is how you get it. There are two ends of the same stick. There's no other way for the other end. So with that in mind, there's a vast and rapidly expanding difference between a man who has and is executing a career plan from the mid teenage years and one who's floating through high school or college is not building work experience and is wasting his time and energy on things that do not matter. I want you to think of all the people, you know, who are 30 or under, all the, all the males, you know, who are 30 or under. And I want you to think about how they spend their time. And on that pie chart, I want you to think about the percentage of time that's spent in getting to know God and how much of that pie chart is spent in increasing the value they can add at a job. And what you'll find is that those two slices are probably not even on the graph even for people who say they're Christian. In fact, you might find those slices larger on people who say they don't even believe in God, at least the preparing for the future one. And that's really sad. So, we are, we are in a situation where the vast majority of men, young men alive today will absolutely never encounter anything close to the full meaning they could have in life. And the only reason is because they don't choose to attain it. It's right there before them, it's right there before them. All they have to do if, if they're 15 or so, preferably earlier than that is, start thinking about and looking into what they can do to be the most financially successful, they can be at the youngest age. I'm gonna make another video about that this morning. So look for that. Ok. Now let's pick on the ladies. There's a vast and rapidly expanding difference between a woman whose top goal is to be a wife and mother at 18 and one who sees marriage and family is something she will do after she accumulates, ex-boyfriends , gets a degree as a career and travels the world. Now, this video is not meant to persuade men to be responsible or women to want Children. However, if you're a guy and you say you want to be successful and or you would like to have a female partner long term who's not a dirt bag and who's actually happy with you. I'm telling you the way to do it and there is no other way to maximize that value today. You're not gonna get there going any, anywhere near where the rest of people go to try to obtain this, which is just a float through life. And then at some point in your early thirties, you come out of your culturally or drug induced stupor or some mix of the two. And you realize that maybe earning minimum wage for the rest of your life is not a viable plan. And let's shake it up and try to do something by then the doors will be shut on the women's side is actually slightly harsher in terms of the reality. It's a lot better in terms of how easy it is to obtain. The guys really have a rough road to hoe these days. But the ladies, the challenge is the onslaught of false information is much greater and it directly feeds female nature, which is not a good thing. I mean, female human nature, not, not sort of the ideal feminine and it all has to be figured out at a very young age. And odds are your mom is the last person in the world who's gonna tell you these things because it's gonna make her feel very bad about the choices she made. So, um, the, the last generation that did this well, is dead. So that great grandmother isn't gonna tell you these things. So, um, if you are a young lady who does want a husband and kids, what I'm saying to you again, this is not going to persuade anyone who's not already there. But if you're that person who says those things who wants those things, you're not gonna get those by going off to college as. Oh, well, I need a backup plan career so that if I marry a dirt bag, um, and he cheats on me or divorces me or decides to just stay at home all day and watch TV, and play video games, then I can still support my family in both cases with the men and the women . This is an all in thing for the guys. No quality woman is going to look twice at you. If you're not earning bucks, it's just reality today. If she wants kids and she sees the public schools are disaster today and they're just getting worse by the day, she's going to know because she will have looked into what it costs today to have kids and she will know because she's done some extrapolations on inflation what it's gonna cost in 10 years to have kids. And she will have a price tag under which she will not go as far as what you're earning and she's not gonna risk all this on potential, unrealized , potential So for her, the game is, wait at the finish line and pick a winner. She's not gonna trade that for a game of chance where the odds are stacked against her. And you only have one roll of the dice because you get one choice as a woman with, with who you're gonna be with. You can't just play the field, lowers your value lowers what you have to give. Conversely if you're a woman and what you want is marriage in a family. You need to understand every boyfriend you have lowers your value in the eyes of a quality man because what you can receive from him is reduced. You going off to college shows, you don't have faith. If you say I want a husband and kids, what are you doing? I'm a sophomore in college. Well, then you don't want a husband and kids because you're spending all of your time getting a, a degree that you're not even gonna use surrounded by men who you would never marry because you're, they're your age and they're also pursuing degrees, which means they have no clue what the world is like. And they're extremely unlikely to be able to make the kind of money that you will require to be able for, to have kids. And uh don't get me started on folks traveling the world. So saying all that this bit about having a career. So I'm not talking about strategic jobs. So remember my whole distinction with backup plans is something that takes away from your main goal. That that would be something else you did if it didn't work out. So if you get a job as a bank teller, because you want the inside track on finding successful men who are single and that's a really easy way to do it. That's not what I'm talking about here. The fact that you make a paycheck is just gravy. That's not the reason you're doing it. It's just an added bonus. The fact that you will have a, uh, uh, uh, a dandy career, a sufficient career if it doesn't work out and you end up as the bank manager. Ok, great. That's just icing on the cake. That's not a backup plan in the sense it's taking away from your goal. It's exactly how you're completing your goal. You're doing what you can to meet guys who are successful and have a filter on the folks who don't meet your standards in the way any, you know, in the, in the limited ways that you can before you actually get to know them. But don't even get me started on traveling the world. Huge red flag. Ok. This is long enough and I think I'll cut it now. I hope this is helpful. Please share this with people. It really helps.