Dr James : 0:46

How did we get here? It is episode 200 on the Dennis Union Best podcast and I just wanted to take some time out to commemorate that and to say thanks to each and every person who listens. The fact that there’s even a listener is cool to me and something that I just wish to take two minutes to show my gratitude for and appreciation. So thank you. Thank you to each and every person who listens to this podcast, thank you to all the people that have reached out to me because of it, thank you to the guests, thank you to everyone that’s been involved in any capacity, and what I would say is, being at the point that we have 200 podcasts I don’t quite know how that happened For me, it’s somehow crept up on me. I was so caught up doing other things that I never really got the moment, got a moment to appreciate it and appreciate the gravity of it until right here, right now. So, like I say, just sinking in, because once upon a time I remember thinking to myself how the heck does anybody get to 200 episodes, nevermind 300, 400, 500. And, as I say, here we are and I suppose for me it’s about consistency. I think that, upon reflection, looking back on the whole journey and all the things that I have observed. With regards to positive things that have come off the back of having a podcast, I actually I think the listeners are a huge part of it. There’s a lot of other ROI’s in there as well. Making content, understanding how that’s achieved Once ability to articulate themselves improves massively the more and more content that you create and more and more content that you should. So there’s a skill benefit in there which carries through to other areas of your life, and if I can encourage anybody to go out onto the airwaves and leave a little bit of their heart online, well, I would 100% encourage everybody to do that Also. As well as that, one of the massive cool things about having a podcast as well is the people that you meet and the guests that you have on the show, because I learned from them each and every episode as well, and that’s obviously valuable to myself and valuable to the listeners as well. So there’s a whole load of cool stuff in there that is really, really, really worthwhile If anybody’s on the precipice of making their own content, whether that be a podcast, whether that be something else entirely reels, whether that be TikToks, whether that be a Facebook group or a YouTube channel or whatever the heck it is. I really, really, really fully believe in it and once upon a time that wasn’t the case. I had no idea that social media could be so beneficial to anybody, including myself. In fact, I had a complete belief system wrapped around the fact that I thought it was for show and I thought that it was for the more ostentatious people out there. They like to put themselves out there and show off really, and wow, what a mixed up belief system I had in my opinion on that respective matter. But you never really actually get to learn that unless you directly experience it and try new things. And that’s been a recurring theme in my life and, I’m sure, a theme in many people’s lives, that unless we push a boundary, unless we open a door, you literally never find out what’s on the other side of a door until you try it. And that’s why I follow in your curiosity. Pushing boundaries and expanding your comfort zone is something that I preach about a lot, because I really look back on the person that I was before. I became so aware of that and certainly started to venture outside my comfort zone so much, and I really, really I’m glad that I did so. Of course, that’s different for each and every person, and just because one person enjoys that or feels it’s beneficial doesn’t mean that everybody will. But at least you can say that if you explore and open to these things, at least you can say you’ve tried them, even if you stay exactly the same as you were before. At least you’re now making a decision on that out of knowledge, rather than because we’re just going with the flow or doing the same things that we always did. And you know, on this podcast I was thinking to myself how can I do something that is unique? How can I do something that I haven’t done before? And the truth is I have done similar episodes to this before, but what I’ve never done is thought about how I can articulate some of the coolest things that I’ve learned on this journey to Tune it Episodes and with Dennis, ian Vest and all of those things, and maybe just have an episode where, if I could pick five of the coolest things that I’ve ever learned that I feel were most seminal in my respective journey in my life Now, that doesn’t mean disclaimers, that doesn’t mean that they’ll be valuable to everybody, but I’m here today to share my thoughts and what I believe and what I think. Some people will vibe with it, some people may not necessarily connect with it, and either is cool, either is completely fine. Just because one person thinks one way doesn’t mean that anybody else has to necessarily believe the things that they say or be aligned with them in that respect. But, as I say, one of my core tenets, one of the core things that I believe is at least if you have knowledge, at least if you have knowledge of a particular process or area, well then we’re making a conscious choice to decide which way and which path we choose to progress, on which avenue we decide to proceed on, rather than just doing the same old things, as I say, just going with the flow or because we’re creatures of comfort, etc. Etc. Etc. And that’s what this podcast is about. The one real gift on this earth is knowledge. The one real thing that you can give to other people is knowledge, because, in my opinion, as I say, that’s the real way that you can empower them to make more decisions on their own behalf, given that the only person who has complete and utter context in your life is you. Therefore, you’re in the best place to make decisions, not anybody else in the whole wide world. Now someone can guide you, someone can offer what they think is best for you based on what that you say. However, they’re never going to have as much context as you do. So therefore, when you have total information, when you have complete information, it’s like that movie limitless. He takes a pill and he knows every bit of information in the whole wide world and he makes the best decisions. And it turns out his goals and objectives by the coopers in that movie is to become extremely wealthy, and that’s exactly what he leverages that knowledge for, and it’s exactly the same for every single one of us. If there’s where we are and there’s someone with total and infinite knowledge and there’s everything else in between, the more and more we progress towards that path is the more and more progress we make towards our respective goals and objectives on this earth, and that’s why knowledge is the one true gift. And on that note, here are five of the coolest things that I learned along the way on Denys to invest some of these things that I think about every single day. They are some of the most valuable piece of wisdom that I’ve ever come across, and the reason why they’re valuable is number one because they’re seminal. Number one because to me, they were groundbreaking or shattering when I heard them for the first time and also because of the frequency that I use them as well, which is daily. First cool bit of wisdom we don’t know what we don’t know. Now, I know that gets said a lot and it gets thrown around and it’s one of those things that has become almost tried because we hear it so frequently. But I feel like really appreciating this and using it as a bearing on our decisions has actually been one of the biggest drivers in my life towards achieving the things that I want to achieve. On a subconscious level, our brain believes that it’s acting out of perfect information. However, if we know the first thing about knowledge, we’ll know it’s like a limitless vast ocean that can never be crowned inside our head. So really, we probably know one little meter cubed off that ocean of knowledge and when you think that our meter cubed is the perfect meter cube that’s going to take us towards our goals and objectives, the likelihood of that is pretty darn slim. The more information you come across, the more information you earn, and the more information you observe is, the more information you can put into that meter cubed of brain space. However, that is that meter cube volume of water which is exactly analogous to our brain space, and then you get to pick and choose what the best pieces of information are. The more you know is the further and faster go. It’s like Bradley Cooper in that movie. He knows everything in that instant because he takes the pill, and what it means is he can get closer and closer to his goal very, very, very fast. So if we’re not in a position where we’re constantly letting the waves of new information wash over us and pull out the coolest bits, the bits that we actually like, and, in a way, creating that little bit of information that we can keep in our head, well, until we put ourselves through that process continuously, then really we are in likelihood not actually achieving what we want to achieve in the fastest, most efficient possible manner, because we’re not appreciating and observing and being conscious of the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know. How do we actually implement change into our life on that basis? Well, for me, you have to put yourself in situations where you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to find out. However, you feel like there’s a good likelihood that it will be valuable to you. But if we’re operating out of this sphere where we don’t think that that’s possible, we don’t think there’s anything that there’s left for us to learn. That’s never going to happen. We’re never, ever going to do that. So we’ve got to appreciate that fact and be continuously reminding ourselves of that fact, and even if that means that we take like some time out every single day to be disciplined and read a book or learn from someone who clearly is very skilled at what they do, then what it will mean is at least in all of that time, we’ll be able to pick up a few things that are incredibly valuable to us, because chances are we can get to where we want to go in a much more efficient manner if we’re just open to new information, if somebody out there somewhere has achieved what we want to achieve and they’ve done it very fast and very soon when we know that if we had their brain and we had their eyes, we’d be able to get to where we want to go very fast and very soon. But that won’t happen unless we actually know what they know. Now, if we knew it, we’d already know it, but the fact is we don’t know what we don’t know, because if we did know it, we’d implement it into our lives and we’d be where we want to be. A very powerful tenet is that really, if somebody is where we want to go, they must know something that we don’t know already. And if we take a point and yeah, there’ll be lots of people that are part of, one other thing that our brain tries to do is say, well, they did it this way and I don’t like it, or they are not somebody who is ethical, or they’re not this or they’re not that, and perhaps they’re not. Perhaps you won’t do it precisely how they did it, but at least if you’re open to it, you’ll learn and you can decide and you can pull out the cool bits. Our brain tends to think in one and zeros, where our brain thinks in very binary terms. We’ll either learn something or we won’t learn something, and actually there’s a huge gray area in between. There’s all the things that we could learn and pick out and choose. We can learn their complete methodology, which is one on the binary scale, or we can learn none of their methodology, which is zero on the binary scale. At least, if you’ve opened the door, you’ve made some progress, you’ve learned something. Then you can pick and choose the parts that you’re actually going to use. Whereas I feel a lot of the time we deliberate over having the perfect opportunity come our way, wouldn’t we better off just having some momentum in the right direction? The number of times I have been open to having a mentor in a certain area of my business sometimes I’ve even paid someone to help me and I don’t even fully know what they’re going to do and to me that’s like the most exciting part, and to most people that’s a huge stumbling block where they don’t know precisely what it is that they’re going to get. Because, if you think about it, you’re almost delegating some of that insight to the other person. Because you’re open and receptive, I literally pay them even though I don’t fully know what it is that I’m going to get. But to me that’s a sound point, if anything, because if I knew everything about what they were going to give me well, then the value has diminished to me to a degree, because they won’t be able to give me new insight and wisdom. So I feel embracing. That is one of the most important things of all time to make progress in this world. It’s really just a knowledge thing. If Bradley Cooper in that movie had perfect knowledge about every single thing that he could do in any given moment, well then it’s clearly obvious that he’s got to where we want to go. So if we can be that person who accelerates herself along that path every single day, just by being open-minded and being aware of these little psychological biases, to me we make much more progress. At least that’s what helped me massively. Number two number two of these five cool bits of wisdom, beliefs are fluid. What do I mean by that? I tend to think that what we believe about the world is objectively true. What we’ve got to remember is, by definition, it’s inside our head. And if it’s inside our head and it’s a part of our subconscious brain which leads to us feeling a certain emotion about a certain situation or action, well, in reality that’s subjective, because we know that it is. And how do we know that our subjective account of that situation, our subjective understanding, is actually the definitive one, and in reality it’s not? How do we even know that most people feel the way we do in that situation? How do we know that the most successful people depends on what you call success. But let’s talk about finance and wealth. How do we know that the successful people in that sense feel how we do in this situation? Because, really, if we think and feel the same things everybody else, we’re likely to get the same results in our life. Now, if that’s what we want, that’s fine. If we want to get ourselves to a position where we achieve unique things in certain areas, chances are we’ve got to think and act in a different way. We’ve got to think and act in a way that is more aligned to get us towards our goals. That doesn’t start unless we understand how our beliefs can sometimes be holding us back. What’s the classic one? If we believe that money is evil, how are we likely to undertake actions in our life which are likely to welcome more wealth into our life? Because there’s always part of our brain that has the stigma around it. If our belief is that to do the best job for the patient is to charge them the lowest price See that a lot of times with Dennis then we are going to be offering them the treatment option that has the lowest price each and every time, even though, in likelihood, the thing that’s best for their mouth and best for their health may not necessarily be that thing. Oftentimes it’s not, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Either is fine. If we believe in doing the best job, then actually it’s sometimes our duty to confront our beliefs in order that we can help the patient the most. That’s just one example. There’s millions of examples. There’s so many things. First thing to accept is that just because we feel a certain way in a certain situation, have a certain emotional reaction to it, doesn’t mean that it’s objectively true. In fact, in likelihood it isn’t. Therefore, it could be an example of our beliefs and our opinions and our subconscious mind pulling us away from where we want to go. It’s so important to have that awareness, it’s so important to be able to decipher them, analyze them and scrutinize them because really, in my opinion, 99% of the time they’re not necessarily aligned with our objective. They’re not necessarily aligned with us achieving where we’d like to go in the most smooth, efficient possible manner. The second you realize that. The second, I realized that I was like whoa. My consciousness has been elevated and now I see things in a completely, completely, completely different way. That really, really, really helped me massively. It’s a skill. It’s like anything in life. I’m not saying I’m a master at it. Certainly not. I’m trying to get better every single day and if I can help someone further along that journey, I personally believe that’s a good thing. But again, if my belief may not necessarily be valid for other people, it may not necessarily be the thing that’s going to help them achieve their goal in the most efficient manner, however that looks. But at least if you know this stuff, then you make a choice to analyze our beliefs or not. Analyze your beliefs. Method number three, or sorry, cool piece of wisdom. Number three positive minded people. Surrounding yourself with positive minded people. And it comes back to that story of the crabs in the bucket. And for anybody who hasn’t heard it scientific experiment way back in the day in the 60s, all of the buckets put loads of crabs into the buckets and what they find was that lots of crabs in each and every one of these buckets, these 50 buckets, or whatever the crabs. Eventually, when they’re in the buckets, they just accepted their fate, most often at least for a little while, for the first 10 minutes, and what they noticed was that when one of the crabs decided that it was going to get out of the bucket, it would make some progress. But what the other crabs in the bucket the same bucket would do is they would pull that crab right back down. They would actively pull the crab back into the bucket. Therefore, the crab couldn’t get out of the bucket because of the other crabs that were in the bucket with it. What was that reflection of? It was a reflection of some sort of evolutionary programming in the crabs. No one quite knows why. Here’s the thing to scrutinize and here’s the thing to recognize. Sometimes the people around us in a way, without even realizing it, or the crabs in the bucket. They don’t want us to necessarily do better or elevate ourselves, because that highlights, in a way, their own insecurities, that highlights, potentially, their own shortcomings. Not always, of course. It’s not always the case. We can’t paint everybody with broad strokes. We can’t just say that that’s why everybody is fact full stop. Of course it’s not. The key is to recognize what your objective is and understand if the people around you are necessarily crabs in the buckets. Here’s the thing sometimes lots of people in their life you get the right people around you. They’re the people who are literally standing on the periphery of the bucket trying to pull you the hell out of the bucket so you can be up there with them. You know, a lot of the knowledge, in my opinion, about how to be successful in life, at least in a financial sense, is not the knowledge that we get from academia, it’s not the knowledge that we get from school, it’s not the knowledge that we get from university. It only comes from people who have hit that high and hit that level that we wish to hit in our lives, and therefore the knowledge is not out there, it’s only in human heads, it’s only in their own skulls. How do you actually get that information out of their skulls? First of all, you have to meet them. Then you have to talk to them. The more you meet them, the more you get to know them, the more you understand how they think and the more you realize what they’ve done to get to where they want to go. So to me, it’s about really figuring out what a success looks like for me and also, in that instance at least, surrounding yourself with some people, some people which have achieved what you want to achieve, and therefore they’re going to be the people here standing at the edge of the bucket helping you, pulling you up, pulling you up closer and closer to them. Now, people out there like that do exist. The real winners, in my opinion, are the people who just want everybody to excel and ascend alongside them. Because they have abundance mindset. They just want to see everybody else win as hard as them. In fact, if anything, they get really excited when they see other people win. Now, those are the people that I want the most off in my life, because those are people that are happy for me and happy for others who succeed. And the key thing to understand is that is, someone’s mindset is relative to their mindset, and understand, and therefore make a choice, whether that’s something that you want in your life or you maybe necessarily don’t want in your life. Either is fine. At least you get to choose, because, of course, there’s no incorrect and correct way to go through life. There’s only actions that are more likely to take us towards our goal in an efficient way. Therefore, surrounding ourselves with people who have achieved what we want to achieve is an important one. Or there’s actions that are going to impede us heading towards our goal or maybe not take us towards our goal in the most efficient way. Again, at least we understand the crabs in the bucket analogy. We get to make a choice. Lesson number four assuming formlessness. Not every action requires a reaction. Contrary to Sir Isaac Newton’s law of motion whatever law that was, I’d be interested to know what law that was Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Yeah, it might do in the physical world, but do we necessarily have to be that person in every single situation where we have to react? No, in fact. What I’ve always found is that when a certain situation, when a certain thing happens, there’s your knee jerk reaction, there’s how you feel there and then, and then there’s how you want to react after you thought about it for a while. And the more you work on that as in not reacting not if you’ve got reaction is, in my opinion, the better decisions we make, because I’ve always noticed that that second reaction is usually a better decision than the first reaction. And again, if you react in the instance, you assume form. You assume form. You take the form of a rock. You’re trying to butt heads with that person in front of you. You’re gonna spend a lot of energy doing that and actually, if they take the same form as in the form of a rock, they’re gonna be directly butting heads against you and therefore, what that means is you’re both expounding a lot of energy without actually necessarily getting anywhere. So the analogy would be instead of becoming a rock, you can be the water in any situation. What is the water? The water flows around the object that is seen in front of it. It achieves exactly the same thing with much less effort, all because it’s fluid. So I’ve always noticed that that second reaction is usually an action which is a lot more thoughtful, which is usually a lot more strategic and clever, and when I say that, what I mean is it’s better for both parties, possibly, usually, and it’s also the reaction that doesn’t necessarily require as much energy as in. We flow around the situation that’s right in front of us. We assume the form of water, and what I always like to remind myself is, I’ll say assume water, assume, not assume water, beg your pardon. Assume formlessness, assume formlessness. That is gonna be the one thing that allows you to get to where you wanna go in the most efficient manner, because you’re expounding much less energy, yet you’re still flowing in the direction that you wanna head in, rather than expounding a lot of energy and maybe not necessarily getting anywhere. Usually, anger is one of those emotions. When we react out of anger, we expound a lot of energy and don’t always necessarily in fact rarely if ever actually achieve what we want to achieve. We’re taking on the form of rock in that particular instance. Cool thing to remember is that when we can breathe, when we can react out of that second more thoughtful idea or reaction to that particular instance, it usually means we can achieve the outcome that we like, which suits our goals and purposes, expounding much less energy and therefore flowing like water. Love that. Always like to remind myself that flow like water, flow like water Such a cool way to think about things. I love the analogy Number five, one of the coolest lessons. Another one of the coolest lessons that I’ve ever come across is how money works, and I won’t spend too much time on this. But the first thing to understand is that if money is something that is printed ad infinitum by a central bank, as in, it’s just created out of thin air, then you know all these thoughts, beliefs and opinions that we have on money. If money is just made up, how can a lot of the thoughts, beliefs and opinions that we have about money ever be concrete by definition? Because if you think about it, it’s a social construct in that sense. Therefore, if we know that actually a lot of those beliefs were probably imbued upon us by someone else who didn’t necessarily realize the true nature of money, then it leads to all these thought provoking insights and questions such as are these thoughts about money actually truly objective? Are my beliefs about money truly objective, or were they passed on to someone else by me, and are they even my thoughts? Are they even my opinions? Are they even aligned with the true nature of the universe? You can go really deep on that. I think what really helps is understanding money is just created continuously, in any given moment, and is therefore made up. Because, well, how can it be anything but that it’s literally printed on a piece of paper with no real, it’s not related to, there’s nothing that it can be exchanged for per se, as in it’s not fixed to a certain quantity of goal? And therefore, if that is the case, how can anything that we think or think we know about money be anything other than made up as well? And that just leads to all sorts of interesting questions, because we never we feel uncomfortable talking about it when we know that’s just our subconscious brain, we know that’s just a reaction, an emotional reaction, and is that necessarily a reaction that is aligned with the true nature of what money is and the true nature of the universe? Well, objectively, it can’t be. So now we get the opportunity to scrutinize our reactions and understand are those beliefs referring back to what we were saying earlier are those beliefs that I have about money actually aligned with taking me to where I wanna go? Oftentimes they’re not, and oftentimes they’re not even our beliefs, they’re just things that we believed and never even questioned, that we’re given to us by someone else when we were very young. Those are five of the coolest bits of wisdom that I’ve ever learned, and I wanted to chuck in a 5.5 or a six, so to speak, and that is the value of the concept of leverage. Leverage is the disparity between the output and the input in every given system. For every unit of input, we wanna get the very most output possible and, of course, if our belief system agrees with this and is aligned with mine, we wanna be ethical and moral while we do it as well, cause I just think that that’s, on the whole, a better way to go through life, a more fulfilling way to go through life on this fleeting period of time that we have on this earth. Well, for me, one of the beliefs that a lot of people have, or certainly what a lot of people would like to achieve whenever it comes to remuneration, is to achieve the greatest level of output, as in remuneration, financially, for each and every unit of input, as in time. So if we work for an hour, we wanna hourly rate to be as great as possible and be moral and be ethical and help as many people as we can. So if that’s the case in any system, there’s only four fundamental ways that you can increase the amount of output per unit input. I’ve talked about these on the podcast before. There’s four slash three, depending on who you ask, but we’re gonna use Naval Rabacan’s definition today and say that those four ways are human cash, human cash, software insofar as coding, and also media. Now I’ve shot a podcast on this before. Maybe it’s worth listening to. It’s called the Four Means, the Four Methods of Leverage. There’s another way of describing them that I’ve come across recently, which is the Four C’s, and that is cash, collaboration, content or code, which is another cool way of looking at it, another cool way of framing it. The reason why leverage is so important is this Think about the wealthiest people on this earth. Think about Elon Musk there’s only 168 hours in a week and Elon Musk only has 168 hours in a week as well, as well as name any other really wealthy, successful person, bill Gates, as well as oh, what’s the guy that runs Apple? His name escapes me at the minute but, like I say, anybody who’s achieved a great level of success. They don’t have more time. Things would make way more sense, things would stack up way more If they had more time, more hours in a week, then obviously they would have more time to be able to generate more wealth. They just know how to get more out of each and every hour. Therefore, they leverage their time more effectively and really, in reality, they just understand these concepts way better than most people do. So if we know we need leverage in order to become wealthy and we know that there’s only four fundamental ways that we can leverage which is probably a whole 30, 40 minute podcast in itself it’s really worth looking up that episode that I did a while ago then we know that actually, whenever we focus on those four areas, any level of wealth can be ours. Should that be our goal on this earth. Five plus one lessons today, those are five of the coolest lessons, five of my hand-picked lessons. Whenever it comes to life, whenever it comes to business, whenever it comes to wealth, I really hope there was at least one thing in there Even if it wasn’t a full lesson, even if it was just one component of a lesson then I’m a happy man insofar as if there was one component of a lesson in there that helped somebody and made them see things in a different way, then what this podcast achieved was it helped you further yourself, closer and closer towards your goal and objective in life, by imbuing the one-two gift that, in my opinion, exists on this earth, and that is the gift of knowledge. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.