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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| On overcoming ennui. | |
| Now, this request video comes from a 23-year-old man who graduated with a degree in biology, which as Aaron Clary pointed out in worthless, is actually a pretty worthless degree if you haven't specialized in something. | |
| It's not very employable on its own. | |
| And he's finding himself in a position right now where he can't find work and he's stuck in a rut, not a completely unproductive rut, but one that isn't going anywhere. | |
| And he's wondering what he should do with himself. | |
| Well, I'd like to break this video down into three segments. | |
| Starting with talk about how, how he got into this rut in the first place, and how so many of us find ourselves in this sort of a rut. | |
| The next is identifying ennui. | |
| This is a French word which I absolutely love, and I think it perfectly sums up your position. | |
| Having a word for it will help. | |
| And the third section, talk about some specifics that he can do career-wise to advance himself. | |
| So how did he get into this situation? | |
| Where he graduated with a degree in biology, not the best of marks, he probably could have done better, but he was slacking off. | |
| Well, you know, this is something I was talking with William Rome about the other day. | |
| About how retarded the education system is, how it's set down to the lowest common denominator. | |
| So if you are, if you have an IQ above 100, you are going to be bored out of your skull in school. | |
| You know, this is what happened to me. | |
| This is what happened to William Rome. | |
| That high school is so freaking easy that any idiot can do it. | |
| I was just reading a report about a family that homeschooled their kids and five of their seven kids, and they're still in their early teens, five of their seven kids have already been accepted to colleges and universities because they're not retarded. | |
| So what winds up happening if you're a decently bright student is you don't need to study, you don't need to work. | |
| There is so little expected from you that you are just craving stimulation. | |
| You know, I used to, back in grade three, I was asking for extra bonus math workbooks to do because I was bored because I completed the entire year in six months. | |
| By the time I got to high school, I'd pass out during most of my classes because it was so boring and have to teach myself everything from home. | |
| God, I skipped most of that year and I still got, you know, some of the top marks in the school, top marks on math. | |
| And then you get to university. | |
| Now, on the one hand, you absolutely do need to study in university if you want to understand the source material. | |
| But you don't have to. | |
| See, the whole university system is designed for mediocre intelligences. | |
| If you want to get good marks, you do have to work, but you never developed those skills back in high school because it was such a breeze. | |
| You were trying to find something more to do, but they wouldn't give it to you. | |
| So you never develop study habits. | |
| So you get to university. | |
| And when you're there, you can just skate by on your intelligence. | |
| And now you're not getting A's like you were in high school, but you're getting, you know, C pluses, B minuses. | |
| When you're not reading the textbook, you're only showing up to half the classes and half asking everything. | |
| Because again, it is retarded. | |
| It is designed. | |
| It is slowed down for the stupid people to get a larger group of people there. | |
| So they're not challenging you. | |
| They're primarily testing if you're any good at vomiting up answers onto a test to get a certification. | |
| You're not there to learn. | |
| You're there to get certified. | |
| Which completely defeats the purpose of taking something in the humanities. | |
| If you're just getting a certification saying you know history, that's useless, especially if you haven't actually learned any history in the process. | |
| So all of this, all the lowered expectations of society, the ease with which you can get by, and yet not succeed, not succeed and achieve greatness, but just get by with ease, and the fact that you never have to learn any discipline or study habits winds up leaving you in a position of incredible ennui. | |
| And so what is ennui? | |
| Like I said, it's a French word. | |
| It's one of my favorite French words. | |
| And it's a state similar to boredom. | |
| Except boredom, you don't want to do anything. | |
| You lay on the couch and you complain that nothing's entertaining you. | |
| And then you watch some stupid rerun sitcom on TV. | |
| That's boredom. | |
| Ennui is just like you're inured to the world. | |
| You're very bored. | |
| You want to sit around drinking absinthe, but not do anything interesting. | |
| It's like a mild form of creative, deep blue depression, passionate depression, if you will. | |
| And this strikes me as where this young man is right now. | |
| Because he's saying he's reading some self-help books, which are kicking his ass, which is good. | |
| He's trying to learn some discipline, trying to discipline himself. | |
| He's going to the gym, but he just doesn't... | |
| So he's doing stuff. | |
| He's not bored. | |
| He's not properly depressed. | |
| But he's not really doing anything that goes anywhere. | |
| He's just spinning his wheels in the driveway. | |
| Now, he did mention reading some self-help books, and... | |
| And if you're interested in another one, I highly recommend Cernovich's book, Guerrilla Mindset. | |
| I'll be doing a review of that soon. | |
| So let's talk about that for a minute. | |
| You see you're trying to learn discipline. | |
| And he mentioned his roommate who is really switched on, very hardworking, got a useful degree, and has a responsible position. | |
| I think one of the big mistakes that you can make when you're trying to teach yourself discipline is teaching yourself discipline for discipline's sake. | |
| You're asking me, many of the questions you asked me were along the lines of, you know, is this smart? | |
| Should I discipline myself to do this or that or the other thing? | |
| And those are the wrong questions to be asking. | |
| What you need is a goal, a purpose for having this discipline. | |
| It's great when you're in the army, you know, they teach you discipline because you need discipline to get all that stuff done. | |
| And in theory, if school challenged you, school would have taught you the discipline to study and actually achieve instead of just letting you skate on by and refusing to challenge you because that might make some of the numpties feel bad about themselves. | |
| But now that you have self-discipline, you need to start from a different perspective. | |
| Discipline for discipline's sake, you'll do that for about a week, and then you'll quit. | |
| You'll get sick of it. | |
| You're like, I don't feel like this today. | |
| What you need to do, and A great example of this is from Cernovich's book, Gorilla Mindset, where he says, plan out your perfect day. | |
| See, in the past, I've tried planning out my productive day, a day where I get a lot accomplished, and for a while, I adhere to that schedule, and I am very productive for a while, until, oh, God, I just don't feel like that today. | |
| Because I'm being productive for production's sake. | |
| Not for my sake. | |
| I mean, ultimately, it does serve me, but it's an indirect correlation. | |
| And so what Cernovich challenges you to do is plan out your perfect day. | |
| And you know what's interesting. | |
| When you plan out your perfect day, it winds up being pretty productive. | |
| It is a rather productive day that you outline for yourself. | |
| But because you start with the premise of this is my perfect day, this is the day that I want to live. | |
| This is how I want every day of my life to be, suddenly you've got some motivation. | |
| You schedule, when are you going to work out in the day? | |
| You know, I like working out about 10, 11 a.m., right? | |
| But I work out not because I have some long-term fitness program that's going to pay off, or because, you know, I'm going to dedicate myself to disciplining myself to work out. | |
| I work out because that's my workout period. | |
| I have the shower right afterwards, and I just feel better. | |
| It's part of me having a, like when I look at the whole day, I know if I don't work out, I'm going to feel sluggish and my blood won't be flowing and I'll be miserable. | |
| And so what I'm doing at 10 a.m. is related to what I'm doing later on at 6 p.m. | |
| And so all of a sudden, all of this work I'm doing fits into a pattern of me being happy. | |
| I'm now disciplining myself for very selfish reasons and it winds up being very goal oriented. | |
| So now that you're disciplining yourself for yourself, it's much, much easier to do. | |
| And the final point about moving forward, because he asked, should he build on his degree? | |
| You know, get some sort of specification, some subset of biology that would actually get him a job. | |
| Well, of course, this is going to depend on what your perfect day is. | |
| What do you want to do in life? | |
| But once you figure that out, once you have a direction you're headed, once you have a goal, once you know why you're doing it, like you were taking biology because it interests you, because it's science, because it's, etc. | |
| You had your reasons, but you didn't have a goal. | |
| It wasn't serving you. | |
| You didn't have a selfish enough reason. | |
| But once you figure out what you want to do, now you figure out how biology fits into that and what you can do to get to that place. | |
| So if you need to take a one-year, one-year certification or something, one-year upgrade, all of a sudden you've got a goal now. | |
| Yeah, your academic performance in the past was bad. | |
| But now you have a goal. | |
| Now it's serving you. | |
| Now you've got a selfish reason. | |
| All of a sudden, doing this makes sense and you will do well. | |
| Figure out what you want first. | |
| Aim for that and the discipline will follow. | |
| That's how you kill ennui. | |
| Best of luck. |