The Power of Being Alone: Why You Don't Need Courses or Technology, Just Yourself

Hello, amazing investors! I just returned from my daily walk, a routine I’ve embraced for years now. But here’s the thing: during these walks, I don’t listen to audiobooks, podcasts, or music. Instead, I choose to be fully present with my own thoughts and emotions. Today, I want to share why this simple practice can be transformative in a world overloaded with information and distractions.

The Problem with Constant Distraction

There’s a quote that I appreciate: "All of man’s problems arise because he can’t sit in a room for 30 minutes without any distractions." Think about that. We live in an era where we are constantly bombarded by information. A book I read, Limitless, highlights how the volume of information we encounter in a single year today is equivalent to what someone in the Middle Ages might have experienced in a lifetime. That’s staggering.

This information overload affects our minds, emotions, and thought processes in ways we don’t fully understand. We are constantly plugged into social media, the internet, and our smartphones, leaving little time to be alone with our thoughts. But here’s the catch: if we don’t spend time alone, we lose touch with our inner selves.

The Importance of Spending Time Alone

Many people, including my clients, struggle with this. They are so used to being distracted that they’ve forgotten how to be alone with their thoughts. The result? They don’t really know themselves. They don’t understand their emotions, thoughts, or even their own identity.

Before the age of smartphones and social media, people had plenty of time to reflect and connect with themselves. Life was slower, allowing for moments of introspection. Today, everything is fast-paced, and we’re constantly on the go. This shift has changed the way we think, behave, and interact with the world.

Why You Need Time Alone

When you’re always distracted, you miss out on understanding who you are and what you truly want from life. For instance, have you ever sat down to define what success means to you? Is it financial success, personal fulfillment, or something else? These are questions you can only answer if you take the time to think deeply about them.

As Aristotle said, "The mark of an intelligent person is to entertain a thought without accepting it." This means you should take the time to consider ideas, dissect them, and see how they fit into your life before adopting them as your own. But to do this, you need to spend time alone with your thoughts, free from distractions.

The Challenge: Spend Time Alone

I want to challenge you this week. Spend 30 minutes every day in a quiet room with no distractions—no phone, no books, no music. Just sit with your thoughts. You might find it uncomfortable at first, but stick with it. You’ll start to notice that many of the thoughts you have aren’t even your own; they’re echoes of what you’ve heard from others.

Over time, you’ll gain clarity. You’ll start to understand your true thoughts, emotions, and desires. You might also realize that you’ve been avoiding certain aspects of your life. Both outcomes are valuable because they represent progress.

Share Your Experience

If you take on this challenge, I’d love to hear about your experience. Consider sharing it in our Facebook Community. Has spending time alone helped you? Has it impacted your spiritual life, your business, or your relationships? Or do you think this idea is completely off base? Whatever your perspective, I’m eager to learn from it.

Until our next conversation, I hope you have an incredible day. Remember, sometimes the most profound insights come from the simplest practices—like spending time alone with your thoughts.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

You , don't need courses. You don't need technology. You just need yourself and your time alone.

women couldn't do it past 8 minutes, men couldn't do it past 12 minutes. So they couldn't sit with themselves for 12 minutes, let alone 30 minutes.

If you are able to do that consistently every day, you will find out that your mind will become clear.

Hello, amazing investors. Great to be here. I actually just came back from my walk and I was there for about an hour. And, um, one of the things that I actually do on my walks, most of the time, I actually just don't listen to anything.

I don't listen to audio books, podcasts, music, or any of that stuff. I actually try to be present with my own thoughts, emotions, what I observe, um, And there's a reason for that. I mean, I have nothing against people listening to podcasts or music or anything. That might be something that works for you. But, um, this quote that I've shared with you guys, I mean, it's been said in different ways.

It's not the first time that I've heard it. And the quote goes like this.

All of man's problems, problems arise because he can't sit in a room for 30 minutes without any distraction, distractions. Um, and, This is probably more true now than any other time in history, and there's a specific reason for that. Think about it. This is the only time in history where we're bombarded by information.

There's a book that I read, Limitless, where the author talks about it, that the amount of information that we're exposed to in a year, somebody in Middle Ages would have been exposed to that amount of information, the volume of it or the volume of that information in a lifetime. Now think about this. We get exposed to more information in a year, uh, versus somebody in the middle ages in a lifetime.

That's crazy to think about. Now think about the overload of that on our mind, on our psyche, on our emotions, on our thought processes. I don't think we fully understand what that means, we are in a world where there's so much information, so much distractions, social media. Uh, then we have pretty much access to everything on our fingerprints. We have access. There's an incredible device that it's a supercomputer that has access to pretty much it. Everywhere around the world, most places around the world, you can watch something, see something.

I mean, even when I was growing up, I didn't have access to anything like that. Like, most of the time you'd be bored. You had to find something to do as a kid. Actually, I never felt bored because I would do lots of things.

So why is this important? And

one of the effects I mean, ultimately, we don't have enough data to understand what the effect of this is on our psychology.

We know that there are negative effects there, of course, positive effects. The positive effect is that we have access to a lot of information. We can do a lot with it. The negative effect of that is we're usually overloaded by information. We're overloaded by even useful information such as books and podcasts.

There's so much out there. If you just literally sat down, all you did was It was consume, uh, podcasts, audio books. You could spend years doing that. You wouldn't go through all of them because it's crazy. That amount of information we have available why? Why do I bring this up? Um, and I think ultimately the bottom line is one of the biggest downsides that I see with my clients, even with myself at times with other people around me, is that when you're always distracted, you actually don't understand your own thoughts.

You don't understand. Who you are. You don't understand your emotions. You don't understand how you want to approach the world. And that is a big problem because think about it. Um, if you just go back before social media, before these smartphones came into the picture before even the consumer world or the industrial age came into the picture, people have lots and lots of time to be with themselves, to connect with themselves, to come up with ideas, to understand themselves.

Life was a lot slower. Now it's much more fast paced. In fact, there's there's one scientist who talked about it. The time has shifted. Time goes a lot faster because of technology changes and that changes our psyche. Marshall McLuhan, I think, said that the medium is the message. Um, and he was at the time he was talking about a completely different thing.

He was talking about television and all sorts of things like that. And it was a powerful statement that the technology, the medium by which we absorb things becomes the message itself. And internet is playing a huge part in there. But coming back to it is my question to you is, do you actually spend time alone?

And now think about it. We take this phone everywhere. We take it to the washroom and we take it. Uh, we have it with us all the time. We are one more with family and friends. We have it in our business. We have it. We have it everywhere. It's not just the phone. It's everything. It's, it's, I mean, a lot of people access us through this phone, but it could be, I mean, your TV that has so much.

Content, and it could be other people who are giving constantly giving you information because they are overloaded by information. So do you ever spend time alone? And this is why I started this off with is that whenever I go on my walks or sit down with my, I try to notice my own thoughts. I try to notice my own emotions.

And most people that I work with and meet and connect with all over the world, you find that their mind is so overloaded by thoughts of other people that they don't actually have their own thoughts. Their thoughts are an accumulation of other people's thoughts. And of course we use this common language.

For example, if you're speaking English, you're going to use the common words created. You didn't create your language, but what, what is the input in your mind? If you're constantly watching news, that's the input you're going to regurgitate. If you're constantly watching social media, Tik TOK, all these things, if you're watching shows, you're going to regurgitate those thoughts.

You're always around people who talk a certain way. You don't understand the influence of that on your mind. And try to go a little bit quiet one day and sit down with yourself, you will notice that you will go, your mind is really loud, you could be in a, in a quiet room, no noise, nothing, you will notice that the thoughts in your head is loud, and you might think that, oh my god, there's a person inside my head or multiple people that are speaking, and it's very loud, And it can get very painful.

Like there's so many multiple thoughts. And this is part of the reason why people distract, distract themselves is because there are always thoughts coming at you and you don't know what to do with that. And, and then you hear all these modalities like meditation and self help programs and all sorts of things that people go through to try to deal with their thoughts, but they can't.

But you know what the simplest thing is? And it's the, The easiest thing to do and the hardest thing to do. The easiest thing is you don't need money. You need, don't need courses. You don't need anything. You don't need technology. You just need yourself and your time alone. And even if that's one hour a day or half an hour a day, if you're on a walk or you just sit in a room, you don't need to meditate in a specific way.

Just sit with your thoughts, see what comes up. If you are able to do that consistently every day, you will find out that your mind will become clear. You'll find out that a lot of the thoughts that you have, they're not actually your thoughts. In fact, you haven't even considered them. You're just regurgitating thoughts that you've heard from other people.

By the way, a lot of coaches, a lot of trainers do the same thing. They just regurgitate thoughts. I have nothing. I mean, we all borrow thought processes from other people, but Most people who share thoughts, they're not really their thoughts. They just take somebody's thoughts and share it with you. They haven't taken the thought and entertain it.

And Aristotle said that the mark of an intelligent person is to, to entertain a thought without accepting it. What does that mean? What is entertaining a thought? It means that you've actually looked at it, thought about it, looked at the implications of it in your life. For example, if you say something like, you know, my life should be about creating success.

Well, first of all, you need to. Think about that statement. What does that mean? You would have to define success. What is success for you? What does that mean in your life? Does that mean financial? Does that mean Uh, does that mean status success? Does that mean success in terms of how you feel inside? Does that mean in your relationships?

You would have to define that. First of all, what does that mean? Or does that mean it's, is it a standard definition for everybody and follow that thought and think about it? What does that mean in your life? How would you apply it and and see how has that been true for you? How has that been true for other people?

And then from there you sit down to sell? Well, what does that mean for me? Because the thought is just a thought. You're entertaining it, but it also has an effect on your life. Do I want to adapt it? Do I want to do I want to it? Make it as a part of my identity that your life should be about creating success because it will become part of your identity.

Most people adapt these kind of thoughts and beliefs without even thinking about it and noticing it and dissecting it again if you haven't spent enough time with yourself. You will not be able to understand this stuff. You will just go ahead and I'm reading this book. It's actually a great book. Live Big is by my coach Ajit Nawalkha.

It's a beautiful book. It's very, one of the most simplistic books that I've read. Simple yet profound in some ways. Um, but I mean I could read this book and it's a great book. I might get one or two things out of it, but I've been reading in the past couple of days. I've thought about it. I'm like, what does he mean by what he's saying?

Like when he says something like zero fucks given There's a whole chapter on that by the way. Apologies. We weren't uh expecting that now It's a short chapter, but it's a very powerful chapter. What does that mean? Uh, if Should you give a fuck about what other people think or should you not what does that mean in your business personal life?

And even if you wanted to give zero flux, I think as human beings, we care at times. So how do you deal with that? It arises and implies it creates so many implications. And in your life, you will have to entertain that thought, play around with it, experiment with it, and finally realize, does that even apply to you?

But I can entertain the thought that he's talking about, but it will take me time to apply this and make sense of it. And parts of it, I've already applied it, but parts of it, it doesn't quite make sense in my experience. And that's okay. He's not. Accept this, but the point here is that what do you do when you listen to an audio book, a podcast, um, somebody's thought processes.

Do you actually have the time to think about it? I would venture to guess. You don't have a lot of time because you're always distracted by something. It's either other people. It's either your work. It's either your phone. It's either tiktok, social media and ask yourself, why do you need to always be distracted by something?

What makes you uncomfortable to not sit with yourself when it goes back to, you know, That coat. A man, all of man's problem arise because he cannot sit with himself with his own thoughts for 30 minutes. And by the way, the same applies to women. In fact, there was a study I think that was done. Don't ask me for the source of it.

I heard this on a podcast where Uh, they, they kind of did an experiment and they got men and women both to sit down without any distraction in a room with nothing to do. Um, and women, and this is going to sound odd, but women couldn't do it past 8 minutes, men couldn't do it past 12 minutes. So they couldn't sit with themselves for 12 minutes, let alone 30 minutes.

Um, and that's the challenge. Um, if you don't sit with your own thoughts, emotions, you actually don't know who you are. You don't know what affects you, what bothers you, where are your boundaries that are broken, who you are, what your identity is, what are the beliefs that you have? Have you even thought about those beliefs?

What are, what are the thoughts that you're expecting, accepting around you without even realizing it? What are the influences of the people around you? There's so much in there. And, and let's. Let's take it one, one step further. Like think about when people take vacations, like vacations supposed to be a time where you relax, disconnect, uh, reflect on your life, go have fun, do lots of things.

But that becomes a distraction for a lot of people. What do people do? They go on vacation, they get drunk out of their mind and, and by the way, not a judgment. I've done that so many times. And come back, and they actually are so drained, they need another vacation on top of that. Or they're around so many people that they never got much out of it.

They're always distracted. And I went on a vacation like that too, recently, but But then I spent some time thinking about it. What was the effect of that on me? I took the time out and try to understand what does that mean? And that actually shifted some decisions that I made in my life. Again, if you need to distract yourself from yourself, from your thoughts and emotions and who you are, Uh, it's very unlikely that you know who you are, what success means to you, what living, being happy and at peace means to you, to create a better, better relationships, creating a better business.

None of that will come to you better. And some of the best people that I know, they spend quite a bit of time. with their own thoughts and who they are. That's where their creativity comes from. That's where they get connected to their own intuition. That's where they get connected to their faith. Um, and, and my challenge to you is take this week and take half an hour every day without any distraction.

You sit in a open room without any distractions, without any books, without anything, just with yourself, your thoughts are valuable enough to assess or go for a walk without any music, without anything. Okay. Just be with nature or sit in front of the fire. Some people do that or whatever it takes. Uh, or sit down and journal about your thoughts.

That might help you. And do that for a week and see what happens to you. I, I will bet at the least you're going to develop a high amount of clarity. At the worst, you're going to realize that you are avoiding a lot of things in your life. And both of them are progress, to be honest. Um, take that challenge on.

Hopefully this serves you. I'm excited to hear what happens to you. As you take this challenge on. And if you have done this, if you do take a lot of time for yourself in an undistracted environment. Please share your experience below because I want to know has that been helpful for you has not not been helpful Is everything i'm saying complete bullshit or it sounds like bullshit to you.

It's fine that you can have a completely opposing view It doesn't bother me um, but I get to learn from your opposing view if there is or if you've had a similar experience around spending time with yourself Let me know has that affected your spiritual life who you are your thoughts Emotions how you interact with people how you run your business.

I'd love to hear from you until my next conversation Hope you have an incredible day