Love Yourself as if Your Life Depended on It Featuring Kamal Ravikant - Genius Network Episode #172

It's a way of being. And when you're in that place, you make decisions very differently, you think about yourself very differently. I know like lately we work doing it really hard and I just, my self esteem just seems to have gone through the roof. So I haven't worked on my self esteem at all. You know, I just working on the love for myself. It's just like a natural byproduct. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius.

Network, go to geniusnetwork.com Jamal Ravikant is the author of the best selling books Love yourself like your life depends on it and live your truth. What is love like? Love yourself like your life depends on it. What does that actually mean from your perspective?

It was literally something that saved me and it wasn't a concept that I necessarily believed in. I was never like I'm going to be the love yourself guy. And it was more in a moment of, you know, went to that classic entrepreneurship thing that pretty much anyone, I think most people here will recognize where you have like that dark night, the soul as an entrepreneur. It was a company I was building and this one I put everything in every dime I had. You know, I self funded for years. And so building a tech company is not in Silicon Valley, is not cheap and we self funding it, those costs add up. After two and a half years I was about this, I don't talk about. I was maybe six, a month away from a really big exit, like a really big like holy shit, let's get a private island kind of exit, you know, because I owned a chunk of it, big chunk of it at six months maybe we were seeing that coming and then the whole thing blew up and I lost everything. And along the pro, along the way I lost myself. I was very sick, I was very, very depressed. I was just miserable out of my mind. Other things happen. It's like, you know what your mind goes that creates more of your life. If you're in a shitty place, it's just gonna create more shitty things. And was in a very shitty place and it created more shitty things. And I was miserable beyond belief. And it was like I remember one night I was like, I can't live like this anymore. I'm either going to get out of this or die trying. And remember I have a journal on my desk. I was living in South America then, this beautiful place overlooking the Embarcadero and walked over to my desk and opened my journal. It was a red journal And I wrote down a vow to myself. And this was an in the moment vow. And it was normal. You know, I'm a big believer in the power of commitment to yourself. Like, I think that's how I've created anything great in my life, whether it's fitness or, you name it, anything I commit. And then when I've committed to myself, then I have no choice but to do it. The thing with a vow, which I've never done, was like a vow is a commitment to yourself, to life, to God, whatever you believe in. And I wrote down, I vow to. And I don't know where this came from because I wasn't thinking. The last thing I was thinking of was love. But what came out in that moment of purity from a place that's not the human me, is I write a love myself. I wrote it and I remember sitting back and staring at it for like a minute or two. I'm like, what is first? Like, what did I just write? Second, I know nothing about this. Third, shit, I gotta live this. Cause I just made a vow. I was sick. I was locked up in my place. I wasn't going out. I was almost like very embarrassed to be out after this public failure. And so I just start working my mind and I would just do like. My first career was actually in clinical research. I used to run clinical trials. So what I started doing was I just started running clinical trials in my head. Whatever I would do that would make me feel better, but using the concept of love. And I noticed that some things would make me feel better inside, so I would go deeper and if they stopped working, I would just throw it away. And before I knew it, within a couple of weeks, I was just walking around, just feeling this deep love for myself. It was a very, very different place than a few weeks ago. What was insane was how I was able to shift my mind. My internal, it was all internal. There was no outside, there was no taking bubble baths or anything. It was all the inner it's mindset, it's heart mindset. It's like when you start to love yourself, life starts to love you. It's almost like finally, dumbass, like, let me show you what this is all about. So within a month, everything had changed. Now I still lost the company. The company was done. But I was able to recreate myself into what I really want to do. Like what I do these days. And so I wrote a very small book that I put out to Amazon. I self published it. I literally thought I was just going to. It was to buy copies for friends, you know, and, and then people would ask me, how do I do this? I would just say like, look, just go to Amazon, it's 299. I've made it really cheap. You know, anyone can buy it. I'll buy it for you. Right? It's literally that and no marketing. Nothing. Which for many of your marketers will find very comical. But within a month, I remember one day waking up and just checking my Amazon rankings and it sold like something like 5,000 copies that morning. I was like, what? And what had happened was the thing literally went viral. It was like all of a sudden good. Everyone was everywhere. People posting on Facebook and Twitter and this and that book, but no marketing went on to sell six years, over half a million copies. And I did something that most people never do is I put my email in the back of the book. Cause I never expected it to sell any copies because what I got emails, I got emails from all over the world. I have like God knows how many, like at least I don't know how many thousands of emails over the years. I still can't even define love. But I know that all these people can create it within themselves because we're all wired for it. It is that thing, it is that feeling. But it's more than a feeling, it's a way of being. And when you're in that place, you make decisions very differently, you think about yourself very differently. I know like lately we work doing it really hard and I just, my self esteem just seems to have gone through the roof. So I haven't worked on my self esteem at all. You know, I just working on the love for myself. It's just like a natural byproduct.

And I believe anyone that really wants something to happen, I mean if they just put every bit of their being into it, they can't.

This is like going to the gym, you know, you'll never achieve fitness mastery and stop and keep it two years later. You know, like, like, you know, I could go to the gym, like get in great shape and then for a year eat bon bons and donuts and just watch tv. What's gonna happen? I asked myself, you know, like, look, when I was putting this book out, if, if I love myself, what would I do? And I would share this truth. I knew I had something. That's another thing that's really helped me was share more of myself with the world, more of my real self with the world, more of the like not trying hotshot entrepreneur or whatever, just more like more like the human being with the world. You know what's really interesting? That's brought way more success to me. I noticed that when I'm doing this deeper I flow through life better and my life, my external life is better. It's not like just on the inside. That's the greatest thing I've learned here. Look, this is stuff that's been said forever. There's nothing new there. I almost left this planet and something what I realized down the road and I got in a very bad place. And I remember lying there in this pain thinking, this is not worth it. I don't. This is really just not worth it. One of the questions when I started out, I used to ask myself is and I still didn't feel like I was loving myself, but I would ask myself, if I love myself, what would I do? This would be a specific moment of any actions or interactions, especially uncomfortable interactions. Because the if statement fear frees you. And if you look at logic right freezey. Because if supposition, if I was what would I do then I would know the answer and I would catch myself in moments of either anger, catch myself in moments of making poor choices. I would still sometimes make those choices, but now I was doing them consciously. Don't miss another episode of Genius Network. Subscribe today@gieniusnetwork.com subscribe if you'd like access to the show notes or resources, please visit geniusnetwork.com/172.