building the life of your dreams is hard painful even that's why very few people will get there but not you luckily for you you found the only video you'll ever need because I'm about to let you in on a little secret at the end of the video I'll teach you my five-step process to ensure your brain always craves doing the hard things what I'm about to talk about is born from experimentation from real life experience from trial and error and if followed may actually change your life but fair warning one of about to talk about
is not for everyone take what you can and adapt it to your situation in the end it's pretty simple but simple doesn't mean easy you'll soon see why to start let me tell you a story it's about two brothers they lived in communist China during the height of the cultural revolution when the red guards took power families who owned land were stripped of all material possessions and sent to re-education camps forced into a life of hard labor the two brothers happened to from one of those unfortunate families it didn't matter they were still in elementary
school no more books no more learning the Communist Party had deemed them enemies of the state when they weren't forced to watch Angry crowds of people publicly beat their father or strip their mother they spent their time dutifully fulfilling tasks assigned to them doing what they could to survive the sudden nightmare the younger brother was favored by the family and given the easy job of tending cattle From Dusk to Dawn he' nap on the grassy Fields fashioning games for himself to play to make the time go by the older brother on the other hand was
forced to do everything else from chopping firewood to tilling land to harvesting crops as long as there was Daylight he'd be working but not because of some insane work ethic but because he'd be beaten within an inch of his life if he didn't and by none other than his own family who had no outlet for their anger but their own blood and bones what Hope was there for the older brother when life is literal hell and you're up against the wall you only have two options one to continue living the status quo and waste your
energy simply complaining or two devote every ounce of energy every fiber of being to getting out of this horrible situation the older brother knew nothing would ever change if he didn't first change himself the skills of a farmer would lead only to a life of a farmer and so swearing to himself that he would not die in this godforsaken place he vowed to make something happen while the older brother's resolve was beginning to take form the younger brother continued his simple life in the grassy fields for him it wasn't the greatest life either but it
was okay just okay enough to be tolerable but that's the thing a barely tolerable life is the worst place to be actually it tricks you into becoming complacent blunting your willpower for change it's like a tiny hole in a cup you barely notice that it's it's there but from it all motivation eventually leaks out and that tiny hole was what made all the difference when the sun was up the older brother would toil and tired in the countryside but when the sun went down a new purpose took shape in the darkness lit by candl light
fueled by fat carefully saved over time the older brother taught himself how to read any tiny scrap of paper he could find soon became sacred Treasures each scrap was a new word or a New Concept he could explore and Ponder for the day value worth more than literal gold it didn't matter that the scraps were ripped from communist propaganda pamphlets or the equivalent of modern-day junk mail these little scraps of paper represented freedom and with it he' piece back together a life worth living and so it began a self-education to make up for all the
years robbed from him he tried and ask his father a learned scholar for help but his father simply beat him instead if you have the energy to read you have the energy to keep working he would yell and so the older brother knew the only person he could rely on was himself we all have an energy meter running in the backdrop of Our Lives it's your source of power why you do anything you do where all motivation desire inspiration and the impetus to move comes from neurologically you can think of it as dopamine dopamine is
the brain chemical that spikes in anticipation of a reward simply put dopamine motivates you to do stuff from sex to eating food to having fun we start the day with a full bar but by the end of the day it's pretty much empty there are two ways we end up spinning this dopamine we either put it in the furnace of purpose or the furnace of waste the furnace of waste is what most people choose they burn their entire power meter with it leaking all their fuel into this insatiable incinerator these furnaces are plenty and they
are all around you driven by multi-trillion Dollar corporate machines spending every waking moment trying to make you part with your time or your money this is the dopamine you use up when you mindlessly scroll social media when you drink when you get high when you do stupid stuff that feels good only in the moment but gives you absolutely nothing in return realize that when you burn your power away in the furnace of waste you are directly minimizing the amount of fuel you have left for what really matters it's like you have a bunch of firewood
and you want to stay warm why the heck would you ever trudge 200 miles in the cold snow over to the furnace of purpose when it's literally the farthest one away and even if you did you've probably used up most of your firewood along the way the furnace of distraction the furnace of mindless entertainment the furnace of impressing people you don't care about because hey YOLO hey other people are doing it or hey you got to live a little just got to relax you're too uptight fact is there's a million reasons why you don't have
enough firewood for the furnace of purpose what measy little Twigs you do end up putting in of course will only result in a fire too sickly and weak to matter of course the first few furnaces are going to look a lot better there you get instantaneous warmth too bad those fires never really last though the furnace of purpose may be hard to get to and hard to start but when you do get the fire started it provides a kind of persistent warmth you couldn't have even imagined the little brother never got to feel the warmth
that comes from the fire of purpose he simply kept on living that barely tolerable life wasting his firewood each and every day never venturing Beyond furnaces that were easily available and just like that 60 years later to no one's surprise his life is no different in fact it's much worse now crippled by a gambling addiction and a few debility ating Strokes he's now languishing in a nursing home with not much more to look forward to the older brother well when the cultural revolution ended and colleges finally reopened he was ready graduating from the top schools
in China he vowed never to be in that same position again leaving behind prestigious jobs he came to the United States finished his PhD and continues working today at his dream job at the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States I'm here today because of that man for he is my father this is the art of dopamine management and it is the most fundamental life skill you will ever learn there are five steps to dopamine management awareness elimination timing rewards and Recovery first step is awareness be aware of where you spend your dopamine you can't
change a behavior if you don't even realize it's going on your brain only makes so much physical dopamine for you to use each day so understand where you spend it take the time to write down a list of all the furnaces you're burning away pressures firewood with second step is to eliminate eliminate all sources of dopamine that distract you from your goals in the nuclear most extreme option you leave yourself with only the furnace of purpose I call it escaping Mount Everest in this method you intentionally create an environment where success is the only option
if the only furnace left is the furnace of purpose it doesn't matter that it's 42.7 miles away in the freezing blizzard when you're at the top of Mount Everest and you need to make it back to base camp it's a no-brainer it's get back to base camp or die trying there's no plan B what's the best way to learn a language drop yourself in that country with no help you'll start picking up the language rather quickly if the only way to get dopamine the only way to stay warm the only source of pleasure your life
is ever going to get is the payout from doing the hard thing well guess what that's what your brain is going to Crave even tiny scraps of paper can become s sources of immense pleasure truth is we live in a world where things are just way too easy when something is too easy we don't value it you can now learn literally anything you ever wanted from the comfort of your own home a power most of humankind could never have even imagined and yet we barely care it's ironic that we live in the Golden Age of
humanity where almost anything is possible and yet our attention spans and ability to get there have been reduced to a vegetative state speaking of pushing the limits of what's possible and learning literally anything you could ever want one tool you should be using is Unriddle AI this video is kind sponsor let's say you want to make sense of a bunch of dense articles and research papers or if I told you there was a tool out there that could read and synthesize all the information for you in a matter of seconds Unriddle AI is exactly that
an insanely smart assistant that can do all of that I literally just uploaded a bunch of PDFs in an entire textbook into unr's brain now I can ask it specific questions on any topic or chapter and breath through my work with custommade notes and takeaways it's like I'm wearing an Iron Man suit and this is my own personal Jarvis when it comes time to write un riddle scans my uploaded documents and suggests relevant content to include literally as I type in real time it even organizes all my references for me so all my citations are
done by the time I finish best part is if you are attacked by a sudden untreatable rabid case of writer's block don't worry just type plus plus and un riddle finishes the thought for you signing up is easy just go to Unriddle doai and make an account today now back to the video third step is to get the timing right your dopamine power meter is at its fullest potential right when you wake up don't waste its power on frivolous tasks do the hardest things first before you spend it on the little things as a rule
I spend at least 5 minutes of my morning on my most important most difficult task it's the first thing I do for the day before checking my phone before breakfast before for almost anything you'll find hard things to be much easier when your brain has a full tank of gas and better yet it makes the rest of your day feel amazing there's a certain lightness you earn when the biggest thing has already been taken care of even if just for 5 minutes consistent 5 minute progress every day adds up rather quickly especially considering nine times
out of 10 you end up doing much more than 5 minutes realistically what happens with me is I tell myself it's just 5 minutes and boom I enter a flow State and Crush 30 minutes or more into something I otherwise would have put off something that would have just sat festering in the back of my mind all day fourth step is to reward yourself getting rid of the furnaces around you doesn't mean you have no more fun at all nor does it mean to always live for some distant future it just means to live with
intention to be strategic with how you let dopamine enter your life take music for example if I don't dilute the power of music by having it on all the time AKA desensitization when I finally do turn it on it becomes that much more powerful and refreshing it makes that break that much more enjoyable I use it to engage the default mode Network in my brain after an intense study session to allow better cognition in connection of ideas for more efficient learning I use it when I work out to get that extra boost by nullifying the
pain of torn muscle fibers it's also about using pavlovian associations to hack your reward centers we've talked about this concept before in a previous video I crave my daily 15-minute planks because it's the only time I get to play Clash Royale no exceptions I borrow the intense dopaminergic Surge from the game and transfix it onto a formally difficult task now that the association has matured over years of repetition I literally crave doing planks I still can't believe it myself sometimes it's wild but it's honestly just the tip of the iceberg what a little bit of
self biion neurologic engineering can do for your life fifth step is recovery as much as I would love to push myself without stop and trust me I've tried we all need a little bit of time for rest and Recovery there's the rest you take at the end of each day and a larger Fuller rest you take at the end of each week this is the hardest step for myself personally often I try to dismiss it and try to power through but afterwards I always pay the price either in reduced efficiency or poor mental health this
message is for me as much as it is for you without rest our power meters never fully recover and we run the risk of constantly pushing forward solely on fumes and guilt a recipe for serious burnout I'm planning a video on the ultimate way to optimize rest and recovery so when the time comes I'll link it right here if you want a reminder of the power of the Furnace of purpose I've created a beautiful canvas and print you can buy from our official spoon fit study store just go to spoonfed study.com at any rate I
hope this video was helpful if you want more ideas stories just like this one delivered to your inbox sign up for my substack and get some digestible productivity tips sent your way today if you want your very own customade character doodle to be part of all future video scenes I draw then become a patreon member you can be yourself a dog or even a rock possibilities are endless and finally as always best way to support the channel is to subscribe go tell your friends your grandma and your pet hamster smell you later
