It makes sense to work to get your body in shape.

If you are an athlete, as a hobby or competitively, the answer is obvious.

But if you aren't, the reasons are still fairly obvious.

Getting in shape will make you feel better.

Getting in shape will make you live longer.

Getting in shape will help you sleep better.

Getting in shape will make you be more attractive.

It will increase your self esteem, build confidence, and on a deeper level, give you a sense of real accomplishment.

This comes across as you slowly feel and see and experience your body changing for the better.

You'll look back in your past, and see how far you've come.

You'll be able to extrapolate into the future, and see how far you'll go.

This will resonate with all the previously mentioned positive benefits.

And all if this is up to your decisions, your actions, and your efforts.

This is a very, very good feeling.

A very long lasting feeling.

One that gives you a deep feeling of control over your body, your health and to a greater extent, the quality of your life.

After all, if you can change your body for the better, what else can you change?

If you can change your body for the better it's a lot easier to believe you can change your relationships for the better, your career for the better, and everything else about your life, for the better.

In this course we will be talking about the same thing, but instead of getting your body in better shape, you will be getting your brain in better shape.

Our mind and our body are THE two critical things that have made humans the dominating species on Earth.

We have opposable thumbs, which means we can make tools and even perform surgery on one another.

If you've ever seen skilled surgeon demonstrating their world class dexterity doing something like operating on raw egg, it's extremely impressive.

This is pure hand eye muscle coordination.

But much more than our opposable thumbs and tool building, our brains are our main selling feature.

In fact, our brains are so big, that our brains aren't finished growing until well after we are born.

Most other mammals are really only miniature versions of themselves when they are born.

Baby elephants and horses can walk right away.

Humans can't walk for at least two years.

And our brains aren't finished growing for 15 to 20 years.

And even then, there is an unlimited amount of learning that we CAN do.

Most, however, never even scrape the surface of the power of their brain.

If you were an athlete, you would need the specific skills for your sport.

Underneath those specific skills you would need some very basic, baseline skills.

Strength, endurance and flexibility.

In this course, we'll be going over those types of brain skills.

So no matter what you'd like to do in line, once you have an understanding what these baseline brain skills are, and how to strengthen them, any specific mental skills you'd like to layer on top of them will be accepted much more readily.

All Life Is Competition

There is a lot of debate today about fairness, and equality.

But to get the most out of life, accept the idea that all life is based, at it's core, on competition.

If you wanted a job, you'd be competing with many other applications.

The interview is when you are expected to demonstrate why you are the best choice, compared to all the other candidates.

If you have your eyes on a gorgeous lady or guy, there is likely a lot of competition for their attention and affection.

So whenever you interact with them, the subtext is always why they should choose you, compared to every other person out there.

80 20 Rule

A rule, or law of statistics is often referred to as the 80-20 law.

This is more accurately referred to as the Pareto principle, after Vilfredo Pareto, states that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.

Some quick examples.

If you have a bunch of songs on your music player, you'll like listen to 20% of them 80% of the time.

If you have a bunch of casual shirts in your closet, you'll wear 20% of them 80% of the time.

For any sales staff, 20% of the salespeople will make 80% of the sales.

For large publishing companies, 80% of their profits come from 20% of the sales.

This is 80-20 situation are also called Pareto Distributions.

Since this rule can be found pretty much everywhere, it's not likely that life is, or even can be, fair..

This might be a hard pill to swallow, but if you are expecting life to be fair, that means that somebody ELSE is going to have the responsibility of continuously augmenting these Pareto distributions.

This may sound like a good idea on the surface.

After all, the people who rarely make any sales are likely trying just as hard as the guys up on top.

But any expectation of something else doing any kind of re-distribution leaves the power OUT of your hands.

Leaving the quality of your life up to somebody else is not a very likely strategy.

As hard as a pill it is to swallow, consider the first step in any successful, consciously driven life to be that everything is competition.

Whatever it is you want in life, is also wanted by plenty of other people.

Think of Pareto distributions like water running down a hill.

Water will always run downhill.

Despite any attempts to redirect it or channel it, water will always find it's own level.

Even life on Earth has been filtered through this never ending competition.

Natural selection is another name for the endless competition between species.

Whoever can survive best gets to stay alive.

Whoever can't survive, dies as an individual, or even goes extinct as a species.

Within each species, there is competition, and humans are no different.

Study after study demonstrates that humans are self organizing, hierarchical primates.

We seem to have a sixth sense for sniffing out, without needing any conscious thought, who is best to handle a task.

Our job, it seems, as humans, is to do our best to find where our own unique skills can land us in that top 20%.

And the stronger your mental muscle is, the more likely that will happen.

Modern Scams

One of the problems with this idea is there is a lot of competition, particularly in the self help arena, of any kind of short cut.

For example, there are plenty of short cut weight loss ideas.

This is because we inherently know that losing weight is not easy.

It's not easy to exercise, when you could be relaxing the couch.

It's not easy to eat some boiled chicken breasts when you could be eating some bacon wrapped hot dogs.

It's not easy to spend the time and effort to cook a healthy meal, when you could have some fast food delivered to your door in half an hour.

This are purely physical constraints.

So even the face of physical constraints we look for shortcuts.

But the idea of anything involving social skills, like dating, romance, any kind of money making or sales, the constraints are mental.

We don't like the idea of getting rejected.

We don't like the idea of people looking at us, or thinking about what we just asked, and saying, "yeah, uh, no, please leave me alone."

Rejection, or even deeper, somebody else who has something we want, telling us we aren't worthy is a terrible blow to the ego.

So we spend countless time and money following fake guru after fake guru, thinking we might find that shortcut.

But just like there are no shortcuts to creating a healthy and attractive body, there are no shortcuts to creating a strong and fit mind.

But as we'll see throughout this course, many of these ideas and exercises will make everything much, much easier.

For example, one of the exercises we'll learn is how to take a much longer view.

And within this mind frame, any short term rejection from any one person is really not such a big deal.

Compared to how you might see things today, where a rejection may seem like the end of the world.

Here's a rough metaphor to help understand what a strong mind will get you.

Suppose you are a relatively weak individual with zero fighting skills.

And you have to walk through a bad neighborhood on your way to and from work everyday.

Just thinking about going to work automatically calls to mind all the horrible things that might happen to you on the way to, and on the way home, from work.

It would be impossible, to separate, in your mind, the potentially dangerous path to work and work itself.

Now take that same situation, but instead of having a weak body and zero fighting skills, how imagine you are strong, flexible and have several black belts in several martial arts.

And to make this metaphor even more interesting, suppose you have a special license to carry any weapon with you that you like.

This would significantly reduce the amount of anxiety you feel when going to and from work, allowing you focus much more on work.

Now, whenever you imagine interacting with others, if you are like most people, you feel a certain degree of anxiety.

Fear of rejection, fear of not being able to articulate your ideas, not being strong enough in your opinion.

The exercises you'll learn in this course will give you the mind equivalent of several black belts and the weapon of your choice.

If you accept the premise, that everything you want involves competition, and by building your brain strength stronger and stronger it will be easier and easier for you to dominate and obliterate the competition, you will be well on your way to success.

After all, from the cold harsh laws set forth by Mother Nature, you were put here to compete, to dominate, and to win.

So, let's get to it.