How To Harness The Power Of Your Intellectual Life | Vishen Lakhiani

Welcome to category six, your Intellectual life. So let's talk about your intellectual life and learning for a moment. In this chapter, we're gonna first look at some of the key ideas around expanding yourself intellectually. We're gonna look at some of the rules around learning, things that hold us back from truly maximizing just how much learning that's happening in our life. We're gonna then do the exercise, and then I'm gonna recommend to you some. Some of my top recommendations for incredible ideas that have truly enriched my life, ideas that you can learn from, too. So first, let's talk about two of the biggest rules around learning. The first rule is that learning is something that you get over with after you graduate from college. And that's so unfortunate. In Michael Moore's newest documentary, where to Invade Next, he does this really interesting bit where he travels to Finland to show the world what Finnish schools are like. But here's the crazy thing about Finnish schools. You see about. In the 60s and 70s, Finnish students did about the same as American students in test. But over the last couple of decades, Finnish students just started rising to the top. Today, Finland has the number one schools in the world. But here's the interesting thing. When Michael Moore went to a typical school in Finland and asked the teachers there what made them number one, the first thing they said is, we don't have homework. And isn't that surprising? No homework? Could that be it? So Michael Moore dove in deeper. What he found is that Finnish schools also have the shortest school day in the Western world. They have the shortest school year in the Western world, and they have no homework. In other words, students are learning more by being crammed in school less. It's as if Mark Twain was right when he said, don't let your schooling get in the way of your education. But what's happening right now is most of us did not have the luxury of growing up in Helsinki, so we went to schools that may have been subpar. I know I did. And so going to school, I hated learning. And maybe you did, too. And the unfortunate problem with that is we come out of school thinking that learning is work. We associate learning with work. And this entanglement is the source of so much misery. What if we instead associated learning with fun? So I'm trying to do this with my kid right now. When I come back from work, we have fun time. But fun time is always learning time. I'll ask him, what do you want to know about the world? And we'll explore quantum physics on fermilabs. YouTube channel or we'll watch IFSL science and learn something new. I'm trying to do everything I can to make sure my kid doesn't grow up like me, where he has an equation in his head that says learning equals work. So as adults, I want you to know that this is one of the biggest crimes that has ever been committed against our brains. And we need to shed this. Learning should be first. Once you understand that learning can be fun and there are so many beautiful, amazing ways to learn right now, especially with the age we are living in, you can start exploring learning further. But there's a second rule that prevents us from going deep into learning. And that second rule is learning takes up way too much time. I mean, we all would like to be able to read two books a month, but again, it takes up time. And we live in our busy lives with careers, with kids, with goals to pursue. How do we make time for learning? So here's the second idea that I wanted to share. Tony Robbins calls it net no extra time. He says that when it comes to learning, you do not need to create extra blocks of time in your life. With learning, when you do it right, you can fill the gaps with no extra time. Here's an example of how I do it. I subscribe to podcasts on my phone. These are my favorite podcasts. And every day as I'm driving to work, I listen to a podcast. I subscribe to countless different podcasts and I'm continuously looking for the key ideas. Podcasts are an incredible way to learn. But here's what I do next. I double speed them. I listen to a podcast between 1.5 to 2x the regular speed and I'm able to absorb these learnings so much faster. Mindvalley Academy also has its mindvalley Academy app and every particular video or audio here you can double speed it. So if you're able to listen to someone with a fast voice, which you probably can do already since you listen to me, you should be able to double speed anything and really accelerate your learning. So I get my learning done in my commute. I actually enjoy my 30 minute commute to work and back. That's almost an hour a day. I do not see it as time wasted. In fact, it is one of the most productive times I have every single day because of the sheer amount of learning that's happening in my commute thanks to podcasts. One of the biggest shifts that happened in my life is when I switched from listening to music to listening to courses and podcasts on my iPhone. So your mindvalley Academy courses, your podcasts, start playing them in your car as you commute to work. You need no extra time, and you can easily squeeze in an extra hour of learning every single day. But there are other ways to learn. Another idea in learning is the whole idea of reading a book. So these are some of my favourite books. These are books that I've read twice or more in my life. I read many books. But these three books, if I had to, you know, right now, pick three books that I want everyone to read, it would be this. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsh, Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity, by far one of the best biographies, if not the best biography I've ever read. And finally, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. This was Steve Jobs favorite book. In fact, when Steve Jobs passed away, this book was given out to everyone at his funeral. When Walter Isaacson wrote Jobs Bio, he said that the only books that Steve Jobs had on his iPad in his dying month was Autobiography of a Yogi, which he would read every year. And if you read that book and see the philosophy that's laid out there, you might understand Jobs and Apple a little bit better. So books are an incredible way to learn. But the thing that I've learned about books is that you can really grab the essence of a book in far shorter amounts of time than what we've been trained to do. There are various techniques you can master, from speaking speed learning to photo reading, that help you read a book considerably faster. You'll find links to some of my favorite speed learning programs below this video. And as I've learned speed learning, I've reduced the time it takes for me to read a book and digest that information significantly. So what once took me eight hours to read, I can now finish in about four to five hours flat. So let's look at some of the key ideas there. Learning should be fun. You can accomplish learning with no extra time. And by mastering speed learning, you can get more books read in a shorter amount of time. But ultimately, just remember this. Even if you're reading a book, even if you're listening to a podcast, it's about making it joyful. Learning as fun is the most incredible thing you can do into your life. So, yes, read a book fast if you want to, but if you want to slow down and just enjoy the experience, do that. That learning should be one of the most fun, amazing things you can do in your entire life. And when you create that equation in your head, Learning equals fun and not learning equals hard or learning equals time commitment. Your life completely shifts. So now let's actually do the exercise so that you can set goals for your intellectual life. So here's what these goals might look like. The goals might be the number of books you read, the number of podcasts you listen to. It might be the amount of time you set aside for learning every single day. It might be new things that you explore just for the sake of exploring them. Now you might wonder, how does this category overlap or interact with the category on growing your skills? Isn't growing your skills also related to learning? Well, here's how we're going to make that division. Skills about growing particular skills that you need for your current career. So for example, if you are a developer, your skills might be learning a new programming language. If you are into marketing, your skills might be learning copywriting. But in this exercise, we're focusing on learning for the sake of learning. Growing your intellectual life in areas outside your career. That's why all the books I mentioned do not fit into a particular category. Rather, they are books that organically open you up to so many new ideas from the amazing minds that wrote them. So here we're going to look at expanding your learning into areas that may not contribute to you career wise, but make you a hell of a lot more fascinating, allow you to discover new things around the world and expand yourself intellectually. So let's get started with the exercise. I'm setting my timer and we'll begin with three minutes. So think about the first category. Experiences, friends, love, relationships, beautiful experiences and adventures that you'd have in life. Ask yourself, what should I need to do intellectually to get there? Do I need to learn people skills? Do I need to learn how to be better at relationships? These might be some of your learning goals. Planning an adventure in a new country. Your learning goals might be a new language. Write down how you would expand yourself intellectually. Now, don't just write down what you want to learn. Write down how you want to learn, the pace with which you want to learn your learning style. Do you want learning to be joyful and happy? Do you want to get so addicted and excited about learning during your commute that you cannot wait to get stuck in a traffic jam? What would you love to learn with your spouse or your kids? What books and movies do you want to watch that will expand your mind? Think about things such as documentaries. How much time a month would you want to spend on documentaries? But learning also takes place in the real world. What type of art or music or theater or museums would you want to go to? I have a goal right now to make another visit to the Natural History Museum in New York, my favorite museum in the world. What languages do you you want to master? What online classes do you want to take? What's that next mindvalley course that you've been inkling to sink your mind into? Remember to focus on end goals. Think of learning for the sake of learning. In other words, don't want to learn a foreign in other words, don't set a mind to. In other words, don't set a goal to learn a foreign language so you can achieve something. Learn a foreign language because it's going to be fun and amazing and enjoyable. Choose learning opportunities where the joy is in the learning itself and the learning is not merely a means to an end, such as, for example, a diploma. What learning skills would you want to develop? Speed reading, for example, better memory techniques. What learning programs would you want to join? Say, consciousness engineering, for example. And with that, our time is up. So that was your intellectual life. Those were the goals that you're writing down about how you want to expand yourself intellectually. I love intellectual people. Every person I interview, every person who becomes a close friend, I like being with them because we can discuss so many different things intellectually. I think it is one of the most attractive qualities in a person. So when you do this, what you start to find is that you become more interesting, you attract the right people around you, you're better able to see new opportunities. You become a better entrepreneur, a better employee. You become better at what you do because the greatest people in the world have a breadth and field of different knowledge groups that they can plug together to make better decisions, see more opportunities in life, and create great things. So welcome to getting yourself to that level. Now, a couple of recommendations I already mentioned podcasts, which you can get on any smartphone. I've shared with you some of my favorite books. Keep in mind that learning has gotten so cheap that with just eight bucks on Netflix, you can get access to tens of thousands, thousands of documentaries. With just 29 bucks on consciousness engineering, which is my online school, you can get access to many of the world's greatest minds. So I hope to see you spend more time on learning. Now on the next pages in this chapter, I'm going to list for you two things. First, I'm going to list for you many of my favorite books. You would have already seen some of these in the Code of the Extraordinary Mind. These are just books I recommend because they left a major mark on me. And if you're looking for a great book to read, I would so love to recommend these books to you. I've recommended these books to thousands of people. Secondly, there's a little bit of information here on consciousness engineering. See, at a certain point in my life, I wanted to accelerate my learning. And one of the downsides about books is that, and I'm saying this as an author, authors have to deliver a certain number of words to fit the quota, right? So an author wants to speak about a particular subject and he can talk about it in maybe 10,000 words. But to get a book out there, because of the cost of creating and publishing a book, you have to drag that on for 80,000 words. And so the unfortunate thing about many books today is that the ideas are not concise enough. What can be delivered in one hour, you sometimes have to read the for eight hours. So I started doing something interesting. I started calling up many of my friends who were authors and getting one on one conversations with them over coffee or over Skype and just learning from them, getting the ideas. Then I thought, well, what would happen if I recorded this and shared these conversations online? Then I thought, what would happen if I put this within a framework for learning so that every person I'm talking to, I'm getting their models of reality and their systems for living and plugging it into my own framework? And that's how the consciousness engineering school at Mindvalley developed. This is Mindvalley's online program. It's called Consciousness Engineering. It's 29 bucks a month. But what happens is when you join this program, you instantly get access to a training on consciousness engineering, which is in our book. But then you get access to all of these revolutionary minds in different dimensions of learning, from public speaking, to increasing your visions for the world, to spiritual growth, to forgiveness, to meditation, to fitness, to nutrition, to exercise. And what happens is you learn from all of these remarkable teachers, with me next to them, taking their ideas and fitting it into a framework for growth that you already know if you've read the book Code of the Extraordinary Mind. So you learn like crazy. So try it out for a dollar. In the subsequent chapter, you get a link where you can try it out for a dollar for a few days, free if you choose to Continue. It's just 29 bucks a month. But try it out, because as soon as you try it out for a dollar, you get access to a whole range of powerful ideas in different fields. These were the greatest conversations I had with some of the smartest people in the world and I distilled them into pure chunks of powerful learnings for anyone to take on. And this incidentally is also one of the highest rated programs in mindvalley and a top selling program. So I'll hopefully see you in Consciousness engineering. And congratulations for completing your goal list on how you wish to expand your intellectual life.