Why You Should Read The Book “UnLearn: A Practical Guide to Business and Life

 

“Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquillity and outer effectiveness become possible.” – Epictetus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Most motivational advice only works if the people receiving it are hyper talented or super lucky or both. But what about the Average Joe or Jane? For them, most advice that is peddled is simply not that useful.

When the advice seems to work for someone and gives them statistically extremely extraordinary results that cannot be consistently replicated, it is usually because of survivorship bias (We, our society and the media focuses on the 1 person who succeeded following that advice, supposed to be proof that advice works, but ignore the 1000 others who failed following the exact same thing with the same sincerity.)

Several years ago, I shared some motivational advice myself, through my movie Carve Your Destiny, through years of interviews with “super achievers.” (I’ll talk about it more in the book). Now, don’t get me wrong, a lot of principles that motivational books or movies talk about are good in principle and do work to a certain degree.

HOWEVER, the world is uncertain. The world is ever changing. The
world does not bend to popular advice, in fact popular advice is
being pushed out to conform society to a set of beliefs that are taking people in a direction that clearly doesn’t work for 99.9 percent of people

I am not saying that motivational books and movies are worthless, all I am saying is they only tell half-truths, they share the incomplete picture, they absolutely ignore the variables of randomness and make you believe everything good or bad in your life is a result of your choices alone.

Go into the deepest truly philosophical books from thousands of years ago, whether it is eastern scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita, or Western works from the ancient philosopher Epictetus and the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. They all talk about one thing – Some things are out of your control and if you want a peaceful life, you better stop obsessing about what is out of your control.

 You are in control of your actions but not always the result of those actions and there are far more factors at play than your own will that will decide what you get out of life.

In fact, if you take this one step further, you should realize that even the thoughts originating in your mind are not always your own. They don’t just happen when you want them to arise, but often arise within a certain dictated framework.

Let me explain. In some ways, our minds have some similarities to AI models of the current era. Just like AI, we are trained on large sets of data and facts, fed by our operator (the society and world around us) and our thinking is limited within the current evolutionary constraints of our own brains, just like other animals cannot possess the cognitive capabilities of a human.

 To think beyond this framework is almost a superhuman task, truly demonstrated by only a few known people in history, the Buddha being one example.

In other words, the one who is blind from birth, has no idea what “seeing” feels like.

For readers who may have a harder time grasping this – let’s use a popular Hollywood analogy. “You cannot understand the matrix while being within the matrix.”

Coming back to my point that the idea of us being in complete control of our destiny is false, let’s examine when this started.

The idea of individuals being in control of their destinies gained significant popularity during the late 17th century and continued through the 18th century. The subsequent Industrial Revolution further reinforced these ideas by emphasizing self-made success and personal agency. They do motivate people to take matters into their own hands, but taken to the extreme, they have surely done more harm than good, because it divided the world into “winners” and “losers”, regardless of whether they deserved to be.  

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So, my view on motivational books or movies (including my own, Carve Your Destiny – hey I was really young at the time, so cut me some slack! ) are they can be good building blocks or serve as basic learning, just like you learn basic math and arithmetic when you are really young, but if counting numbers is all you know even when you are old, and refuse to see the truth in anything beyond what was taught when you were young, you my friend have failed to grow in life.

Also, motivating certain kinds of people and telling them they can all be winners is pointless, or even unethical. For example, motivation won’t increase the odds of the number of people cracking an entrance exam. The number of selected applicants will always be the same each year no matter how motivated the aspirants are. And if they are different, it will be because of government, organizational or university policy changes.

 So, motivating a huge group to crack an entrance exam is pretty much pointless, because, whether you motivate them or not, there are always going to be far more ” failures”, because of the very design of the process. Despite these exams being a “zero sum game,” (for one to succeed, countless others HAVE to fail), blind motivation still causes a huge number of people to waste several years of their life that they will never get back.

Changing your views does not mean you are flip flopping. Changing your views in response to new evidence is the basic pre-requisite of progress. In fact, I will keep updating my views in the future as well, if new evidence emerges.

If you are constantly trying to be less stupid, or if experience tells you that you are wrong, every few years, your perception of life will change.

There may be some segments in the book that may sound “motivational”, rest assured I have only kept them because I actually have discovered some real value in them. In my training/ keynote speeches I now restrict my “motivational” bits only to things that I believe actually work. Like the old phrase goes – Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! In other words, accept what works and reject what doesn’t!

No matter how intelligent the human mind is, it is going to remain ignorant unless it acquires new knowledge. The caveat is that the knowledge should be accurate or at least closer to accurate than it is nonsense.

 This is why I will suggest you to avoid getting all your information and knowledge from popular media/social media. Social media works on algorithms that manipulate the visibility of information. It is not necessary that the most popular viral post is the most useful. On the contrary, it may be the most worthless but simply pleases social media algorithms.

It is far better to exit the framework of social media algorithms and instead define your own, by choosing what you wish to learn about and then actively seeking books or courses on the same, while again remembering that books on the “best seller” lists do not always contain the best information relevant for you! Only reading books on the best seller lists or purchasing the “popular” products means replacing social media algorithms for society promoted algorithms. Always dig deeper, if you wish to get closer to the truth!

Also, perhaps far more important than getting the right information is to get RID OF THE WRONG INFORMATION. That information may have been fed by popular sources such as the environment, our society, our parents, schools, social media, most popular bestselling books.

The first step to accumulate new wisdom is to get rid of the old dogma. Giving up junk food completely gives you more benefit than eating a salad in addition to your junk food (A piece of lettuce in a burger doesn’t make it healthy), because you are still consuming junk. So, give it up!

Don’t treat anything as dogma and anytime you see repeated evidence to the contrary, BE WILLING to update your views!

Even if you don’t learn anything new from this book but if I can help you get rid of the WRONG knowledge that has misguided you for so long, I’ve done my job.

If you read through its entirety, you will either totally love this book or totally hate it. One thing is for sure though, if you have a critical mind, you will certainly never look at society’s advice on success and achievement the same way again

“You must want to burn yourself up in your own flame: how could you become new if you did not first become ashes?”  – Friedrich Nietzsche

 This is an excerpt from my book “Unlearn: A Practical Guide to Business & Life” and you can download it for FREE at
https://anubhav323.gumroad.com/l/unlearnbook