Hello, welcome to another one of our chats. Today I have a very special conversation to bring to you. Everyone remembers about a course of mine called How to Overcome Your Inner Limits. Today I bring to you: How to Overcome Your Inner Limits Part 2. Become a Professional. In 2002, a North American writer named Steven Pressfield, wrote a book, he who's a successful historical novelist, wrote a very differentiated book, which was called The War of Art. This book, which is to be published again in Portuguese with the title: How to Overcome Your Inner Limits, was a
great success. When I discovered this book, I realized the potential richness it contained and gave a long lecture about it. It turns out that Pressfield, over time, he made some continuations. The first book was small and the continuations as small or even smaller, but very interesting as a complement to the reasoning he developed there. Today we are going to work with another book that is also about to be published in Portuguese, which is called Become a Professional. I hope you like it. It is very interesting for those who attended the first course, But it's also
worth it for those who are watching for the first time. They are instructions for what he goes through in the great transition of life, from an amateur to a professional. What he transmits, what he goes through, as instructions so that this journey can be successful and that we are not defeated by resistance, all the elements that prevent us from fulfilling our own human nature. Let's go? So, Become a Professional is a work, as I told you, by Stephen Pressfield, an American writer who develops works as wonderful as, for example, The Gates of Fire, which is
a book that deals with the Thermopylae War, So wonderful that he was even decorated as an Espartan citizen, for the beauty of this work. Well, and other books, like Times of War, a series of very interesting works. When he writes "The Art of War", in its original name, he receives a lot of pressure. People say it was self-help, and that maybe he was wanting to offer life lessons, this is very unfriendly. Put it as a romance, they said. But he realized that this was an important issue for him and that these external voices were also
part of such resistance. I am, myself, one of those who cheer to the fact that Pressfield has resisted these voices, because the book is a preciousness. It enumerates a personal testimony of an extraordinary force. Pressfield was born in 1943, he's still alive and is still producing feverishly, as a professional produces, more and more, and better. So what he does in these works is as if he allowed us a guided visit to his production workshop, which is his own life. He is very humble, very open, very accomplice of our creative dramas. He shows the dramas that
he himself lived a large part of his life, Thrown from one side to the other in the United States, without doing anything, without fulfilling his dream of writing, and always self-boycotting with some excuse, until he realized this necessary transition from the amateur to the professional, until he realized against whom he fought, and understood what he called resistance. And here he will continue to tell us how this transition is, what is an amateur, what is the professional, and how it is in our possibilities, it is in our destiny, we can say so, to go from the
amateur to the professional. We need to visualize it And want to make this transition, and realize that sometimes life is pushing us to it, sometimes violently, to see if we wake up. As I already told you, the first book, War of Art, is a preciousnessof usefulness, honesty and beauty. And this, Become a Professional, does not fall behind. He is an open man, absolutely humble, showing all his dramas of life, what anyone would consider a little embarrassing. He opens his heart and shows it, Shows his failures, and shows how he was able to overcome them. Therefore,
he is of a simplicity, of an authenticity, of an extraordinary beauty. I hope you share with me this satisfaction that these works of Pressfield give me. He is an open-hearted man, giving everything he has. The name of this virtue is surrender, and it is very beautiful to see, and it is even more beautiful to try to copy, not the way he did it, but to copy the idea, copy the practice And execute it within the context of our life. Welcome to a trajectory from the amateur to the professional. Well, the continuation Become a professional was
written in 2008. He writes some others that also have this same tonic. We chose to take this one first, as a continuation, for the urgency of the theme. The need, a man who has this professional connection, not only with his business, but with life, is a very solid man, very well structured, much more resistantto adversity. And in moments of adversity, this is very urgent, This is important to know. I'd even say that it is a matter of life or death. So we chose to start with Become a Professional. He says that this additional instruction is
necessary, and he puts as an example a phrase from one of the characters in one of his books. One thing is to study war, and another is to live the life of a warrior. That is, one thing is to read his book and find everything very cute. But as Blavatsky said, honor the truths with practice, or as Socrates said, Only is useful the knowledge that makes us better. When you start to transform this knowledge into a practice, doubts arise, crossroads arise, elements of indecision arise. Therefore, he had the generosity to continue instructing those who have
already decided to set foot on the path and start walking. So Become a professional is for practitioners, for those who really want to make this transition. It is no longer a theory. Well, he starts by instructing on the question of being professional and how this is linked to self-control. Something that we don't look for much nowadays And that we rarely have. I don't exclude myself, it's a very hard and very difficult path. The point is that in our cultural moment, we even encourage lack of control, as if it meant strength, a strong personality, or anything
like that. We don't understand that lack of control is weakness. Therefore, we don't fight against it. Oh, I became a beast. People are proud to say, "I became a beast". You should be proud to say, "I became human", because that is difficult. Beast is very easy, we already came with this instinctive kit, just let it go, just loosen your collar. I became human, it should be our pride and not the other way around. He will then say that duality is a professional amateur. This transition depends a lot on self-control. It's the ability to resist things
like fear, in the first place, and fears are very diversified, we will talk about them, and physical and psychological addictions, which often have in their root, in their creation, in their acquisition, the motor of fear. It is a form of self-boycott, so that we don't do what we came to do, so that we don't face the task of fulfilling the mission of our life. So fear invents a thousand ways. He talks about some of these addictions that we create. Physical addictions are not restricted, although alcoholism, drugs, all of this can also be escape, and often
it is. But psychological addictions, these are terrible, because they victimize almost everyone. So he will talk about false careers, that is, I take a career that somehow symbolically reminds me of what I would like to do, But it is not what I would like to do. And by working hard here, I realize that I am fulfilling my true mission of life. If I'm wrong, I use it as an escape. False careers, emotional dependencies of all kinds, of a person, of several people, or of a place, or of an institution, or of a job, emotional dependencies
are a way of tying us to a master and not allowing us to walk. That is, I am so tied up that now I have a justification not to walk. What else? Bad habits of all kinds, And then comes in first place, all the bad habits that generate dispersion and wasting time. It's the same thing as opening the trash can and putting your life in there. You're putting generous pieces of your life inside the trash can, and that is dispersion. From time to time, associating images with ideas helps us a lot. Whenever you are dispersed,
remember that, the image, opening a trash can in your house and tearing pieces of yourself, throwing them in there. Because time is life. What you are doing is tearing pieces of yourself, And throwing it away in an irrecoverable way. The unused financial resource can be used later, but not time. Time is lost, there is no way to recover. Emotional dependencies, bad habits, victimization. Victimization is the most practiced international sport. All the problems in the world are the other's fault. And so I don't grow, but I also have an excuse. It's the other's fault. If it's
the other's fault, he has to change, I don't. Substituting victimization for responsibility is an urgent, pressing issue. This is a vice that is on the verge of calamity, that steals our life. The habit of putting the blame for everything on the other Has a powerful contraindication. You have to change the other and you get stagnant. This habit of victimizing oneself, which amuses us so much, making a parody of Carlos Drumont de Andrade, is the first to be fought. There is a stoic philosopher called Epictetus, he said, the extinction of guilt marks the beginning of moral
progress. So no one is to blame, everyone is responsible. Everyone assumes their responsibility. And let's start walking. Assuming responsibility for your life allows you to get up and move from the point you are at, to a higher point, a more human point. Otherwise, you are frozen for life. Distraction, dispersion. Our technology may have evolved to produce many elements, some of them very positive. But maybe there is not such a recurring product in our technology of the 20th and 21st centuries as dispersion. We could stop and discuss the usefulness of many things we create. And we
will see that it is fundamental to generate dispersion. There is no other benefit within a visible field. We are dispersion manufacturers and dispersion consumers. Addictions, which is the famous procrastination. When I say I will not do it, my conscience charges me. When I say I will do it tomorrow or on Monday, I am reassuring my conscience. It looks like I'm already doing it, because I've put it on the agenda. But that day on the agenda never arrives. As we usually joke, I didn't say which Monday it was, which month or year. I'm going to start
on a Monday. In general, we take this joke very seriously. And it looks like we're doing something, because we've already put it on the agenda. This is procrastination. And we postpone our needs until October, thinking we will do something. And others, always packed, according to Pressfield, and I agree, gender, number and degree, for a powerful dose of selfishness. Selfishness is behind it. I don't want to take a chance. I'm afraid of losing a lot of things. So I'm not going to venture into fulfilling my life mission, in fulfilling my personality, what brought me to the
world. We came here to give a message, we came here to deliver a word, we came here to add something to the world, to ourselves and to the people around us. And there is something within us that tries to help us, propel us forward. And there is something in us that holds us back. This inner war, so beautifully represented by the epic Indian Bhagavad Gita, Pressfield calls it the struggle, the resistance, with our dream, with our fulfillment. This would be the face and the function of resistance. And then he will say that all this is
artillery of our enemy, to produce self-sabotage. Enemy, resistance, our own. And no one from the outside. Beware of conspiracy theories. It can also be a form of resistance. The whole world is lost, they are plotting not to let me do things. Look, we've had worse historical moments than this one. And whoever wanted to build their life, built it. And he left an excellent example for us, that today we are inspired by them. He will talk about three models that we normally use when we don't want to do things. When we are unhappy, when we feel
anguished and meaningless. We usually use two answers and will propose a third. The first is the therapeutic model. I can't do things because I'm very sick. I have physical or psychic health problems. After I solve this, I will do it. But, once again, it is a form of procrastination. You never heal. Exactly because if you heal, you are lost. Once I heard about a person who was begging on the street and had a big wound on his leg. And I happened to meet the nurse who took care of that person in the hospital. And I
found it strange that that person never healed from that wound. And that nurse told me that every time that beggar started to get close to healing, He would run away from the hospital. If he closed that wound, he wouldn't get any more money. Do you realize that this horrible, but real story has parallels with our lives? We never heal from these invisible problems. If I heal, how am I going to escape from life? So this therapeutic model is terrible. It makes us feel bad for the rest of our lives. So we don't have a chance
to have to wring our sleeves and start living. The other is the moralist model. I am unhappy because I committed a sin, a mistake. So I came here to purge that mistake. I came here to suffer. Which is also another thing. Let's move on. We spend a life of punishment and penance. A life of masochism. Believing that in an order of perfect nature, something or someone was placed in the world just to suffer. And not to realize. Some being was dispensed with the function of helping natur to build what it has to build. Some being
was dispensed with the function of helping the Dharma to fulfill its purpose, Along with human beings, along with nature, along with manifestation. That is, everyone has their share of participation. No one is dispensed with. And then he will propose a new model. Of the amateur and the professional. It is interesting that Pressfield speaks of many traditions. But I don't remember seeing him talk about the Incas. He would like the spirit of this people a lot. Because it is very similar to that. The greeting of the Incas, among them, from the peak of the Inca empire,
was Ama liula, ama suva, ama kedia. Don't be a liar, don't be a thief, don't be a greedy one. He said, man can have the problem he has, the physical problem he has. The health difficulties he has. We are going to add to his suffering, an even greater suffering of not being useful. So, within his limitations, he will have part of the construction of society, with some function that is necessary and possible. We are going to add to his pain, the pain of not being a factor of addition at all. He was a spirit that
works is a privilege. Adding, making a difference, delivering your message to the world, is such a necessary thing, that your absence is the greatest suffering a man can suffer. But today we no longer know that. We no longer think like that. We work with the law of the least effort, as a synonym of happiness. He will say, then, that being a professional is free. It doesn't require you to take any course. You don't have to buy anything. But it does have a great emotional, psychological and spiritual cost. It requires that many of your fears be
confronted, if not all. And it requires that you have a discipline, so that once you set foot on the path, you stay in motion, from now on, forever, inexorably. Of course, it's like a car. You buy a very good car, a 4x4, for example. You know that on a paved road, it will run very well, at a speed of x. On a very bumpy road, you will have to reduce it to x over 10. But in neither of the two situations, it leaves you at hand. It is good, exactly, because it is capable of going
through situations that others would not go through. It crosses muddy roads, bumps, and gets to the other side. The human being has to have this same ability. This is the ability of the professional. He guarantees himself, he crosses, he gets to the other side. So, there is an emotional, psychological and spiritual cost, especially of our vices, of stopping, of self-justifying ourselves for the mistakes of others. In certain cases, it starts in a softer way, but I'm going ahead for you. Out there, it says, not in certain cases, but in almost all cases. Nature puts us
against the wall. We are chosen. The passage, the transition, chooses us, and not the other way around. It is what we call crises, some very violent crises. He talks about epiphanies. It can also happen, let's talk about it. You must remember a Zen story, where a monk and his disciple went to a little house, and they found a family that lived in a miserable way. The father, the mother, the children, all their survival depended on a cow, where they milked, made cheese, did everything. They only lived off that cow. They were terribly miserable. Leaving from
there, at a certain distance, the master turns to his disciple and says, go there and push that cow into the precipice. The disciple is frustrated, shocked by that. How so? It's all they have. Do what I'm telling you to do. He goes there, with great pity, and pushes the cow into the precipice. Years go by, and they go back to that state. When they get there, they see a much more beautiful house. There were people, they were the same, they were the same family. People much more well fed, with a much more dignified life. They
get there and ask what had happened. And they tell that, as the cow rolled into the precipice, they had to go to the city, they had to see how they could work to generate resources. Then they began to learn, father, son, a trade. They began to generate something useful for each of them. They began to provide services, products, for that village. They began to perfect themselves and, each time, do better things. They improved the quality of life of the village and of themselves. And today they were tremendously happy. Now, look, this story does not only
refer to the human being, who sometimes has a very assistential posture, and thinks that the only thing he can do for the Other is to give the cow. But it also refers to what nature does. It is tremendously pedagogical. From time to time, it has to go through us and push our cow into the precipice. So that we react. Then you are at the bottom of the well. A phenomenal crisis. You will have to start awakening your latent powers. You will start reacting. And in the future, sometimes, after years, you come to the conclusion that
that blessed cow, rolling in the precipice, was the best thing that ever happened in Your life. So, sometimes, the path chooses us. To hear other phrases similar to Oriental philosophy. That our essence chases us through life. We think we are the ones who are looking for our being, our essence. It seems that it is behind us, trying to wake us up. And sometimes, there are moments of exhaustion, where it puts us against the wall. He talks about epiphanies. Epiphanies, sometimes, are not a conventional crisis of the cow, rolling in the precipice. But sometimes, it is
a moment of observation. Which is usually imposed from the outside. Any situation that, in a brutal way, we are forced to see ourselves in the mirror, without masks. And there is that terrible pain of realizing that we were nothing we imagined we were. It is a situation that forces us to make a statement. It is some situation in life that forces us to look in the mirror. He talks about the importance of this moment. To generate humility, a sense of reality and shame. Yes, shame is very necessary. It invokes in us glimmers, claws, desire to
change, desire to react. He says, many times he tells episodes of his life, that he really does it As an act of generosity. He says of a time when he worked as an attendant in a retirement home, where people who had already been hospitalized, went to psychiatric hospitals. And he says that these people were very good people. But totally paralyzed by fear. They had suffered failures in their lives, which made them unbearable to hear or try again. So they were good people, he says, some quite intelligent, but totally paralyzed by fear. And this moment for
him was very important to note. At a certain moment, he decided to leave there, to rent such a humble little house, that there was no back door, only the front door. There was no bathroom, there was no kitchen, there was nothing. He would shrink in a corner on the floor with his blanket, and during the day he would make a little fire with sticks to cook his food. In fact, every day a cat appeared, an adult cat, who lived in the forest near the little house. He says he sat on the edge of the forest
and kept looking at him. He threw food and he didn't accept it. He said, that cat was a symbol for me. It was as if he looked at me and said, Do you know about us two? Who is this guarantor? Who knows how to turn around? Who has command over himself? He says that cat was an inspiration for him. The look he gave him, he said, Look, I can do much more than you. You are a miserable toy in the hands of circumstances. But it is very interesting, because at this time of rest, he tells
that he had a very interesting dream. He dreamed that suddenly his room, his shelves, his clothes were all folded, pasted, tidied up, new. His boot was illuminated in a corner. He looked at all that and was satisfied to see all those things. Suddenly he became aware of what was behind that feeling of well-being. I am ambitious, I want more than I have. He says, of course, ambition as a tonic of life does not work. But ambition, at a certain moment, when we are stuck in mediocrity, it is a good symptom of the reaction of our
soul. Oops, I wanted to be more than that. And as culture, around us, sometimes condemns this type of dream, this type of epiphany that he had with this dream. Ah, who are you? Do you want to be better than your companions? What was your family? What was your social core? Look, this is a sin. You are wanting, you are very ambitious, you are being dominated by ambition. He says that this type of culture massacres the impetus of man to get out of the hole where he is and start to ascend towards himself. So, at that
first moment, he had this feeling, I am ambitious, I would like to have a less miserable life than the one I have. He realized this reaction as something legitimate, as a call from his soul, to get out of the comfort zone and start reacting. Situations of this type, sometimes even more complex, can be a type of epiphany. And we feel that it is when we understand the message, when it humiliates us, when it says, in a dream I have more dignity than I have in reality. I don't care if my clothes are old, torn, dirty
and dirty. In my dream I feel proud to have things, past, new and folded. That is, I have more dignity in the dream than in reality. It becomes an epiphany when it hurts, when it humiliates us, when it pokes our will and says, react. Then, yes, we understand this dream. He said that Cao Yung said that, in general, we can have some dreams in our life, which are like driving forward, dreams that are epiphanies. And he considers this as a dream that showed that he wanted more than that. There was this degree, maybe ambition is
not even the right word, this degree of longing for dignity, longing for demigration. He had always imagined that it did not exist. So, from then on, he begins to develop his trajectory, which was not so fast. From then on, there was no immediate change. He will talk a little about the issue of the false career. He says that it is very common for us to get involved in a false career, which is a simile, a metaphor of what we would really like to do. He plays with a citizen who went to do a doctorate in
Elizabethan studies, when, in fact, he wanted to write theatrical pieces, or dramas, or anything like that. And he takes an academic career, which for him is much more comfortable than facing a piece of paper or a computer screen and writing what he would like to write, doing what he does. So, he says that this false career has a series of advantages. Because if I fail in my Elizabethan studies, this is not the end of the World for me. The risks are small. I am not so attached to it. Therefore, I am not afraid of failure.
I can be calm. If they take me away, it will not be a big loss. It does not present a concrete risk. It does not have any profound meaning for us, that task. So it leaves us calm. There is nothing to lose. We are addicted to working for the promise of a prize, or for the fear of punishment. So, if everything goes wrong, it will not make a big difference for me, because we know that. It is not something really important for us. And he says, try to find out why your false career is serving
as a metaphor. Is it a cheap copy and poorly done? What would you really like to be doing? There is a probability that it is a metaphor. Something that keeps characteristics of your dreams, but deformed to the point of not bringing you any achievement. But you alienate yourself there. To pretend that you are doing what you dreamed. And he will say that no one is born professional. And that this is obviously a construction. And he will say something that is sensational. The fall is a great adventure. The fall, that is, losing that situation of comfort.
I lost this job, I lost all the positions I had in this institution. I returned to being an operator down there. I lost a marriage, I got a divorce. The falls are a sign that life still trusts us, still thinks we can re -inherit. For a person who has no condition to re-inherit, there would be no reason to bring her down. To see her dragging for the rest of her life. In general, the falls, the losses, are the beginning of a great adventure. Reconstruction. So I got a job, and they unfairly took everything from me.
I went to the hole. I start making a reconstruction effort. I see who I am, I see what are the values I really have. I start making an effort to recover. Do you know what will happen? When you are climbing the hole and go through what you lost, you will say, this is not funny at all. I don't want this, nor give me a million rewards. This doesn't interest me anymore. And it will keep going up. You will see this in a very relative way. What almost killed you for the loss, now you don't want
it for a million dollars. You keep going up and looking for more true goals. Therefore, he proposes a toast, a toast to divorce, or lost job, lost self -esteem, that is, the cow in the precipice. That moment that we think is the chaos of our life. It may be the cow in the precipice. He will talk about false life. In this false life, as we have already said, We have a metaphor, a denial of our dream. In general, we run away from this extremely painful inner call and we act by vice. If one day I
have the opportunity, I have already had the opportunity to talk to Stephen Pressfield twice. If one day I can have a little more personal conversation with him, I will tell him a dream of mine, which was an epiphany, within the limits of my possibilities. I dreamed that I was pregnant and I did not want to let the child be born. It was an absurd pain, but I held it, I held my belly, I twisted on the floor, I did not want that child to be born. This was a wonderful metaphor for me. I started looking
at my pains and I asked, is it not because I do not want to let something be born? This was stuck in my life as a meaning directly associated with my pains and has forced me to react. It has helped me to react to many situations that I do not know if I could otherwise. Whether it was painful or difficult, but thanks to this dream I have already overcome many things. When I look at the deep pain, wanting to immobilize myself, am I not trying to avoid the birth of something? This type of thing he
calls epiphany. He will say that we live in the denial of our identity and we act out of addiction. We do a lot of things that take us nowhere, that have no purpose. We let ourselves be commanded by the most absurd compulsions. And the result is sometimes that we get stuck, unconscious and without direction. Every lover, it is not that lover who started now and will become a professional, but the one who becomes a lover for a long time, sometimes for a lifetime, he is an addict. He is addicted to fantasies, he is addicted to
alienations that prevent him from building something solid. He fills his time with addictions so as not to have time to think about His own life. When I give my course on how to deal with loneliness, many people come to me and say, I cannot organize my life much because if I organize it, there will be time left and I will be alone with my own consciousness. I am afraid of this meeting. So I have to live in the middle of chaos because that way I have no danger of turning inside and have a confrontation with
my own consciousness, with my dreams, with everything that I am not doing anything for them and that must be very anxious inside me. So I use chaos, I use fear of loneliness as a way to escape and live. This reminded me too much of this passage that Preston is talking about. We live by running away and listening to our inner voice, our voice of silence, as Blavatsky said. We are stuck unconscious and aimless, addicted to these escapes. He will say, they are not just physical addictions, as we have already said. We are addicted to love,
sex, worshiping children or parents, sometimes even nephews or cousins. Instead of fulfilling your dream, it is not that you have to forget the others or deny the others, but you replace the realization of your ideal of life by taking care of so-and-so. You don't grow up, nor does he grow up, if he doesn't take charge of his life. He knows that every time he shoots himself in the hole, you support him, he Will not grow up. He will not understand the law of cause and effect. And there is the aunt, the grandmother, the mother, the
little sister, whatever it is. Not letting the other also live his cow in the precipice and canceling his life with this vice. And it is not compassion, nor is it being a good father, mother, brother, sister, cousin or aunt. No! It is being a person who buys the karma of the other and does not let the other grow up. That is, it is a vice for you and a vice for him. So he talks about all these things. We can be addicted to ourselves. He quotes some cases of people in a ritual of vanity, of
such delirious self -affirmation that they are addicted to themselves. They have to affirm their image above anything. He will say that every human being, and this is very obvious, much of our time is dedicated to habits. And some are very necessary. Imagine if I had to relearn how to drive every time I get into my car. There is a more or less automated habit, which is admissible at our evolutionary level. They say that a wise man up front has to be aware of everything he does. But we are far from this wise man. So at
this moment, when some things are automated in the habit, when this is constructive and when it was built by a will, you have to understand this. One thing is, I had a will that took me to another school and made me learn how to drive. As it was a will that made me acquire this habit, if I want to lose it, it's easier. Now, when a vice enters through a distraction gap, I don't know, I feel like doing this, or anything similar, it's harder to take it out. Nervous tics, weird manias, compulsions that you let
enter through the cracks Of your fear are harder to fight. So he says that both the amateur and the professional have habits. It turns out that the habits of the amateur are very different from those of the professionals. We will not have to completely free ourselves from the habits, but we will have to clean them up. I reiterate, at our level, the habits are indispensable. Those productive ones acquired by an act of consciousness, and not by a gap of doubt. We can, then, and we must, change our habits. Identify them and change them. You know
that there are certain vices, such as victimization. It's a terrible vice to decide passage. It produces a stimulus equivalent to a drug. It comes to such a point that people have almost a syndrome of abstinence from victimizing themselves. They start to stir up in their past someone who has harmed them, if no one did anything to him today. If he didn't interact with anyone, didn't give anyone the opportunity to offend him or harm him, real or imaginary, he will look in the past. But he can't let himself be a victim at all. This gives almost
a despair. That is, it is a vice with a syndrome of abstinence. So, the addict is the lover. The artist, the creator, the promoter of his own dreams is the professional. And he will say something very interesting. Both deal with the same thing, which is the pain of the human being. The pain of the human creature who is in the world and feels an internal thirst for fulfillment, but has to deal with self-sabotage every day. This human drama. The artist, the professional and the lover deal with the same thing, but one runs away out of
fear and takes refuge in vices, and the other faces these fears and acquires constructive habits. He says that addiction replaces our vocation. And it really is. Look, one thing that would be very interesting would be to spend a day in A different way. Because sometimes we do not become aware of our vices. Unless you do a different day. Then you feel the pain, you feel the lack, you feel the compulsion. I don't know, go one day to the middle of the bush, without a phone, without the internet. And see if you can stand it in
a good way, without feeling any lack. If this makes you writhe in agony, you are addicted to this act. Something you eat, something you drink. Spend a week without admitting or touching these elements. If it is extremely painful, it is not a good habit, it is a vice. It does not mean that we cannot moderately eat this or that, or use our Cell phone. It means that we have to have control over them, and not the other way around. We cannot allow these things in our lives to become escapes. Escapes and tools of self-sabotage. It
is often even elements of food. Chocolate, for example, is famous. Escape from existential anguish, like a ton of chocolate. Alcohol, even more famous. Anyway, you have to realize that these things are not simply silly things in life. They can be very simple and not even harmful in themselves. But they can be harmful in the amount in which you practice them, or in the intensity in which you practice them. They become a tool of self-sabotage. I remember a lot of the principles of Honeyman's homeopathy. He talks about a poison, for example, that in a dose X
kills, he reduces a millionth dose of that. There is a name for this, millesimal, if I'm not mistaken. He cures the same evil. Here he poisons, here he cures. Therefore, it is all a matter of sense and measure. Centesimal or millesimal, that's right. Here, a tiny one, he can cure, here on, he kills. That is, chocolate is not bad, the phone is not bad, even alcohol, socially, is not bad. At the right time, without him enslaving you. When he becomes a tool in the hand of self-sabotage, be careful, you are being a slave to it.
Voluntarily, he enslaved himself. We who talk so much about freedom, as Plato would say, those who talk a lot about food are usually hungry. Those who talk a lot about freedom can look and be a slave. It remains to be seen what and who. The amateur is selfish. This is a very correct and easy point to verify. The amateur is selfish. He is boycotted in the middle of the way, self-sabotaging in the middle of the way, incapacitated, suffering, with life crumbled. But he wants everyone to be stuck to him, mimicking, because he uses his pain,
he makes propaganda of his pain as a mechanism to attract people and channel attention. He wants to be the dodoi eternally fed by other people's pity. And it's funny because, as he is selfish, he doesn't know gratitude. You feed an amateur dodoi for a year, two years, with great personal sacrifice. If you stop feeding him, he will hate you, he will not be grateful. This is a very common sign. It is a sign that you are not helping, you are harming. So, the amateur is selfish, uses his pain to draw attention and creates a character,
the poor one, the poor one, the one who has so much talent, but the world plots against him. And around that, he spends his life feeding this character. The professional, the artist, the creator, he is a guy who has something that you may already have felt. He gets horribly bored of the shape of his personality. When that mental form comes, no, don't do that, do it in a little while, you deserve it, you worked too hard, let's sleep a little, let's nibble something, because you ate little today at lunch, no, let's do something else. When
these voices arise, he says, argh, I can't stand it anymore! It's like there's a cockroach stuck in me, I can't stand this disgusting thing, which is this weak personality that doesn't stop being on my side, annoying me. If it were a human being, I would knock on the door behind him. If it were an animal, I wouldn't have an animal who would be on my side all the time and trying to get in my way. Why do I admit that I do this to myself? I have, at least, self-compassion, self-pity, because if I have self-pity,
I can have it from others. If I don't have self-pity, the other's is an assistentialism, sometimes even demagogic. Let me have mercy on me, I can't stand this tongue-in-tongue anymore. Enough! Silence! I want to do what fulfills me. The world is speaking ill of you. Start from the beginning. 7 billion human beings are speaking ill of me right now. Did I die? No. Does my work continue in front of me? It does. So let's go. Let them speak. It's good that they have a subject. I'll leave the poor ones without a subject. They already spoke,
they already did. I use this resource a lot, accepting the loss. People will say that you don't fit in contemporary thought. They already said. And look how capable they are of being right. They already said. I accept the loss. Do I still have something to do? I do. Let's go. Do you understand that? Because all these blackmails of our personality, they say, look what you ask for. I accept. I already lost. So what's going to happen? Nothing. Okay, let me continue working. I already accepted the loss. The world will turn against you. It has already
turned. Let me be quiet now. It's good that there's no one looking at me. I have more privacy. If everyone is against me, they must be against me. So I have more privacy. Let me work. So, this language of personality, there comes a time when we freak out not to bear it anymore. Enough. From now on, I'm going to take life seriously. And it doesn't matter. All the circumstances that my personality is claiming may be correct. But don't stop me from doing anything. Because there have been men in history who have done great things, with
much More difficulty than these. So enough. Stop it. Let's roll up our sleeves and let's work. Let's try to coincide with ourselves. Let's try to be proud of ourselves in the mirror. For today, I have had a truly human day. Let's try to conquer the sleep of the righteous. Peace with our transverse. And he will talk about it. Professionals and artists have misunderstood each other. They are fed up with their nonsense. And now they can manipulate these elements. They manipulate in such a way that at some point they shut up. Because if they insist, it's
because you're listening. Do you understand what I'm talking about? I always joke with my students about studying philosophy. It's not so different today. Because Plato's parents didn't want him to be a philosopher. They wanted him to be a lawyer, a lawyer, in the modern sense. And he will listen to Socrates to learn the oratory. And be in love with philosophy. I assure you they didn't like it very much. If he had been an excellent lawyer, he would have stayed there, circumscribed To his corner in Greece. Maybe, if he were a good lawyer, some people around
him. He was a philosopher. And we are in 2021, being benefited by him. He was a professional, a professional gentleman. I tell my students, when we start studying philosophy, which is a powerful tool, of help, to become a professional, usually people have some phases. At first, they say, well, this is another fashion of so-and-so. So-and-so keeps inventing things. Tomorrow he's going to drop it, he's going to study Mandarin, then he's going to learn knitting. Let him, it passes. Well, when you like the thing and continue, comes the second phase. This is worrying. What is it?
Look here, so-and-so, he's fanatized, let's see. Then make him buy from friends, from everyone around you, to pull you out of there. If you don't give in, this pressure decreases, decreases, decreases. Then it enters phase 3. In phase 3, it's the following. I don't know what philosophy is, but it must be a good thing. Because so-and-so has become a much better human being. He didn't abandon his friends, he didn't abandon his family, on the contrary, Much more profitable, much more patient, and knows how to say words that really help us. I don't know what this
philosophy is, but it must be a good thing. Now, getting to this phase 3 is a merit. And when you're doing something that fulfills you, and a person comes and says, stop wasting time, look at your cousin, he's got a wonderful job, he's studying such a thing, and you're studying this bullshit of philosophy. If you have any internal doubt, this will penetrate and will boycott you. I have a rule for myself, which is the rule of three minutes. If a person spends three minutes talking about a subject with you and doesn't give up in the
middle of the way, it's because you're reinforcing, Unconsciously reinforcing. There's a millimeter of attention within you, of interest in what that person is saying. And she feels it. They are more intuitive than we imagine. You reinforce that person's speech. And she's still there, trying to self-boycott you, because she feels she's creating roots, that the earth has become receptive to her seeds. Because when you have zero interest, no one speaks for three minutes. In a minute and a half, the person realizes he's talking to the wall. There's no feedback. No one wastes time with something that
doesn't give a return. Go away. It doesn't last until three minutes. So, three minutes of pressure is because you're reinforcing. So, when we start not to reinforce the tongue of our personality, surprise! She becomes more and more amiable, more and more spaced, until the moment she practically goes away. Like a little child. A little child starts to shriek, to hit the floor, to scream and cry. When the mother looks, she cries twice. If the mother doesn't look, it's funny, it's therapeutic. In a little while, there's nothing left. There is even a popular saying that says
that the mother hurts. It's really like that. And our vices, our weaknesses, the forces of our personality, our own personality, it's like an uneducated child. Let's try to roll up our sleeves and educate her from now on. There's a professional inside the house, there's no more amateur. Continuing, when we can't stand the fear, the shame and self-reproach that we feel, we start looking for a vice. Why? So as not to think. Today we have... Well, as I said, technology has helped a lot. A device, a simple telephone device that has served for some time, believe
me, Just to make calls and receive calls, today there is so much inside that it's able to put you all day hanging on it. I challenge you, every time you lose, I don't know, an hour in front of a phone or a computer or more, in front of social networks, any nonsense like that, when you finish, ask yourself, what in that one hour had any use for my life? Did it add anything to my life? You will see that the answer is always zero. And sometimes it can be negative. Sometimes you can put so much
prejudice, so much nonsense inside your head and it doesn't add up, subtract. Whenever you fall prey to these vices, don't leave without doing the math. Ask what in that last hour made any positive difference in my life? And tell me if you got any result higher than zero. Asking honestly this question, I believe that you will not have. So the vice begins to become the false version, the malevolent twin of our vocation. He says this in a very poetic, very beautiful way. And that's what happens. He says that when he worked, it's very funny these
works of Preston, because everything you can imagine, he did. He worked at one time harvesting apples. He worked and was paid by apple baskets. He says there are a number of workers who live from it. It's seasonal. He finished the apple here and starts the cherry there. They go, harvest, harvest, harvest, receive by basket and live their lives like this. When he worked harvesting apples, he had a friend who was a very good guy, very hardworking. He said the worst thing he had was the guy who pulled the pin. Do you know what it is
to pull the pin? Remember those trains that are stuck one wagon on the other by a pin? Pulling the pin is releasing that pin and the wagon behind does not follow the one in front. Stop in the middle of the way, give up in the middle of the way. He said that every time that in the workers' accommodation they woke up, there was a bed made and the things of so-and-so had disappeared. Someone pulled the pin. The inability to carry things to the end. He says, at that moment in my life I realized that I
had pulled the pin of everything I had done. And that was a reflection of me pulling the pin of the mission of my life, the realization of myself, the construction of myself as a human being. If you pull the pin there, it is very likely that you become a great pin puller for life. Pull the pin when your relationships give the first problem. Pull the pin when a job starts to present some difficulty. Pull the pin when social coexistence starts to get slightly heavy. Always pulling the pin. It is that person whose house is a
cemetery of dreams abandoned in the middle of the way. Have you ever seen that? There is a shoe rack hanging on the wall. I did two months. There is a piano. I did three months of class. There is a skateboard. I skated about two or three times. Your house is a cemetery of dreams abandoned in the middle of the way. It is a great pin puller. And this is a reflection of the person who, in the fundamental question of his life, lives pulling the pin. I will not go ahead. I do not stop to seek
the sacred word that I came to pronounce. I do not stop to seek my way to reach the human ideal. Because as I say, life is like a pyramid of countless faces. The apex is They are values, virtues and wisdom. The human ideal. The most complete man we can imagine. I do not stop to seek my way to get to this point. I am not able to face the difficulties to fulfill myself. Therefore, if I am a pin puller, I pull the sense, I also destroy the sense. He tells this story of pulling the pin
and he says, I found out there. I had been until that moment, in all sectors of my life, a great pin puller. It's funny because when I realized that, I began to realize that what my grandmother told me when I was little, that I was stubborn, that I was a sluggard, could be a powerful antidote for pin pulling. That is, unless it is proven absurd what I am doing, I will go to the end. Because giving up that starts to weaken me in search of myself. This is a battle I cannot lose. It is a
matter of life or death. He then says that these artists and entrepreneurs, those who carry out their lives, they are a bit like these pin puller workers who migrate from one station to another, from one fruit to another. Only they migrate, not after the sun, but after their muse. We run after the muse. We run after the fulfillment of our life mission. That message we came to deliver to the world. The muse is our sun, our identity, our fulfillment, our apex of the pyramid. We migrate too. We do not get stuck in situations for comfort.
We migrate, yes. Even if it is an expensive personal price, we go after what we feel is necessary so that our path does not interrupt, so that we do not pull the pin. He will talk about it, because he was also a naval gunner, he was a marine, his story is long. He says that many times, within armies, in war, the soldiers, for fear of going to the battlefield, shoot themselves. So they go to the infirmary and can get low. And if an investigation is opened against this, if it is proven that it was on
purpose, depending on the army, it can even be a death penalty, because it is considered the cumulus of cowardice. Well, I'm not going to talk about the war situation, but he says that this Issue of shooting yourself so as not to do anything is a very present psychological habit. I agree. He is that person who cultivates his problems and when he does not have it, he creates it. Family problems. He talks about it in the War of Art, in the first book, and it's very funny. The whole family already has a plot. When the problem
of one ends, the other begins. That guy has an unadjusted boyfriend. When this problem ends, little Cyclone runs away from home, hits the car. That is, there is almost a coordinated action to provoke drama. And no one does anything. That is, this reminds me a lot, I'm sorry, but there's a little joke that reminds me too much of the situation. There were two friends, alcoholics fishermen. One day they decided to stop drinking because it was destroying their lives. And they really stopped. After a year, they combine a fishing that they liked a lot. Then a
friend looks at the other's luggage and sees that there were a lot of bottles of PINGA. And he says, what is it? We made a pact, I thought you were taking it seriously. Before you go with this lot of bottles of PINGA. And the other says, no, wait, you're offending me. You're misinterpreting me. This place we're going to is full of snakes. And this is alcohol. Pure alcohol, practically. We may need it. Okay, I'm sorry, I understand. And that other package you have there, what is it? It's a snake. Do you realize that we do
this very similarly? We walk around with a snake bag. There's no snake, I'm forced to fish. I'm forced to do what I have to do. So we carry the problems. When it doesn't happen, we make it happen. They are a perfect escape route. With the family I have, with the sick person in my family, I can't do anything. Oh, if I had a better set, I wouldn't have it, because you won't let it go. When the sick person heals, you'll get something else. You walk around with a snake bag, my dear. Look for it, you'll
find it.
