YouSaid · the spoken record

Leo Babauta

lines on the record: 76
first: 2020-12-22
most recent: 2020-12-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Self compassion that I just talked about earlier. It's just this is an important time to just take care of yourself, give yourself some compassion, give yourself a warm bath, have some hot tea, let yourself eat the nachos. It's okay. Yeah, it's such an important time to take care of ourselves.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have to say, too, that this is just a tremendous honor. Just really love the work you're doing in the world, Tim. So thank you for having me on this. But yeah, the thing that I would leave people with is, you know, sometimes in this crazy world that we're in right now, we have the luxury of finding ourselves in. It can be really difficult. The anxiety can be so hard that it's really hard to practice with it. So when you find yourself in that place where you're just wanting to shut down and curl up in a ball and like, it's just too hard to practice with in this way that I've just talked about, just bring back that”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'll actually just set an attention in the beginning the reason why I'm doing this, the thing that I care about, and then I'll let myself practice with this. And I'll notice that I'm trying to go towards my email. And just sit with the uncertainty of it and then just go move towards the actual doing with this kind of openness. So I'll do it as a daily practice, but I'll also practice pretty much all the time whenever anxiety or uncertainty comes up. And it just becomes like no big deal. So that's another phrase that really helps me is no big deal. It's just an energy of uncertainty. It's not a big deal. So those are the ways that I practice with it right now.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I really love that quote because it just makes you realize you're not in danger, even though it feels completely groundless and you can relax in that kind of like visual picture, right? You can just relax in the middle of that. And what I've found is available to us if you can just relax with the uncertainty that's arising, even anxiety, is there's an openness that's available to us that's always there. And it's just really liberating. And so what I've done is actually started to train myself and now I train other people in it of setting myself these practice. Periods of like, let's say an hour or half an hour of meaningful work that I normally would turn away from, some big project that's really meaningful to me. I'll set that as my practice period where I'm intentionally inducing uncertainty in myself”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a quote actually by Chogim Trumpa, who you might be familiar with. He's a Tibetan Buddhist master, and he has this quote, which is, the bad news is that you're falling through the air with no parachute. So you can feel already in the middle of this quote, you can feel the intense groundlessness, the intense anxiety that might arise. But the second part of his quote is, so the bad news is that you're falling through the air with no parachute. The good news is there's no ground below.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decide to stay in the discomfort, to do the hard thing, to turn towards the thing you're turning away from, to say sorry to someone. All of those things are now available to you when you practice with it in this way.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you're feeling in your chest and your stomach and your throat. And usually it's somewhere around the chest area, you'll feel like a tightening or a tug or a pain or an energy. And the energy itself of uncertainty is not a problem. And what we can do is turn towards it mindfully and be with it with a curiosity. When we have curiosity with us, it's no longer something we need to run from or get rid of. It's actually just completely fine. It's just an energy in our body. And we can just be curious wanting to know more and being open with it. And if you train with it in this way and we have so many opportunities to train right now, it's a very, very rich training ground right now. You can actually learn to be completely comfortable with uncertainty and not need to run to habitual patterns. And what that means is you're now in choice. And you can still eat the nachos. You can still do all of the usual things. And that's nothing wrong with those. But you also can...”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazon and ordering a bunch of things going to Netflix or YouTube or whatever it is that you go to, you'll notice yourself doing it more now than ever before. That's a highlight of your habitual response because the uncertainty is so intense. The anxieties is so intense in our lives right now. And so what I would say is that this is the best time to train. This is the most important time to train because it's so in our faces that we can't avoid it. And so why not turn towards it and welcome it and open up to it and practice with it? And the practice that I have been training people in and training myself in, I think is so helpful is to drop into the body when you're feeling it. And you notice you're feeling it because you're going to your habitual responses, all of the things that I've mentioned, drop into the body and drop your attention into bodily sensations. So just notice.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Day of our lives. And we have some habitual ways of responding to that. You know, smoking and all the things that I've talked about, procrastination, eating nachos would be some good examples of that. Netflix and YouTube and social media and email, all the things that we're familiar with. These are our habitual responses to uncertainty, to a feeling of uncertainty in our heart of like, I'm not sure how things are going. And the way that we usually feel that is some kind of tug on our heart or almost like an elevator is dropping out from under our feet. It's this feeling of groundlessness. And again, we have habitual responses that we've been training ourselves in for years, for a whole lives. And those aren't always helpful. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. But they're automatic. And so we don't have choice because we have trained ourselves to do it automatically when uncertainty arises. And right now you'll see yourself, again, I mentioned going to”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've touched a number of times on uncertainty and anxiety, and I want to just leave people with something here that I think is really important. So in this world right now that we're in, as again, as we record this, we're in the middle of pandemic and lockdowns and frustrations with other people. And in our country, it's the elections and racial protests and also wildfires of here on my side of the country. So there's just like a lot of uncertainty in the world and a lot of anxiety that comes from that uncertainty. And so I've been doing a lot of training around that. And I think it's so important for us to become present with that uncertainty and anxiety. And what I've learned is that we can train in that. It doesn't have to be a thing that shuts us down or gets us spinning out of control. What I've learned is, first of all, we all have uncertainty every”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not yet. I'm sure that will come up. Actually, I have had some where it's like, oh, you need to take some rest. And I thought I had to go and do a bunch of things because I was feeling very overwhelmed. And I was like, no, you need to rest. So maybe the nachos would have been a good part of that. But another one that surprises me is you need to go and apologize to somebody. Like someone came up in the middle of that, I'm like, oh, I hurt them. And unintentionally, of course, but I did hurt them and I need to go and make amends. And so sometimes that comes up and I'm like, oh, shoot. Like I didn't even think of that until I asked that question.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I drop in the question What is life calling me to do? And you can interpret that in a lot of different ways life, God, your inner heart, your intuition, whatever it is. But in that state of wide open consciousness, we're no longer in our place of self-concern. And what comes up for me is usually just one thing and it's really clear. I'll do that at the beginning of a day is just drop in that question, what is life calling me to do? And it's just one thing and then I'll just do that. And I might after that ask the same question and just do that. And one after the other, just ask that question. It's usually the most important thing. It's not the most urgent or the thing that I'm most afraid about, but it's actually just the most important thing.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the best ones, this is the most like, I know people like you and me love practical tactical stuff that comes from deep stuff, right? So one of the best ones that I use tactically on a daily basis, it's part meditation, then part trying to make a decision. So let's say I have a lot of things on my plate and I have to decide, okay, what do I need to do today? And it could really be anything and I'm feeling pulled in a lot of directions. So I think a lot of people can relate to that. What I'll do is I'll drop into it's like a little mini meditation where my consciousness goes like wide like almost as like wide as the universe right so you're like really open mind and really deep consciousness so you go into a state like that and it could really with practice it could really take two seconds to get into that state and then in that state and again i want to give complete credit to john weineland for these practices in this state”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my own emotions. But then be able to do that for my kids, for my wife, for all my other loved ones, and for my readers and the coaching clients that I work with and the groups that I work with. So be able to hold space for them was really important to do this practice because the practice is not just knowing it intellectually, but it's actually getting it in like your nervous system so that you've trained in it for a number of months. In fact, it's the lifetime practice so that when someone shows up as a coaching client, for example, who is completely complaining about you instead of complaining about them back, you just kind of hold space for them with complete consciousness and love and you don't need to collapse.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the energy of the masculine and the feminine. And this is not necessarily gendered. Every single person in this framework has both masculine and feminine energy in us. And so this is really about practicing leadership of our own emotions in order to be able to provide leadership for, let's say, our families or in our relationship. So the leadership is the masculine where you're providing structure and consciousness and able to be with all of our pain and emotions and all the stuff that comes up which would be considered feminine all of our emotions all change all destructive and creative energy is the feminine in all of us and so the masculine in all of us is the consciousness and structure and stillness and so learning to practice in this way was a really profound thing for me that allowed me to practice with my own inner like wounded self”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why did I do it? I think there was a part of me that would collapse in the middle of discomfort. So let's just say an argument with my wife or pain from like a family member or something like that. And so I would collapse in the middle of that, not physically, but like my heart would close and I'd be so discouraged and just frustrated with him. And so I was looking for something to work with that with. And I did a workshop with John Weinelin, who is a disciple of David Data, but he's also branched out and done his own work. And so I actually think he's really an incredible teacher for this kind of stuff. And we did some practices there. There are mindfulness type practices that were quite incredible. And so I decided to just dive deep with him and I went into a nine month program with John. And just to be clear, the polarity work here, they talk about...”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another one just to mention another resource because I know your listeners love resources. Tara Brock, I think you're familiar with her work. Yeah, radical acceptance. That's what it is. She's awesome”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With that frustration, and you can't really be like open hearted and open minded towards this person who you're frustrated with until you've given yourself some compassion first and dealt with your own pain.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think of it more like this salve that I just put on a wound anytime I'm feeling it back up you know so I have like all these wounds from like childhood and so forth and so yeah when I feel like oh I'm not enough or there's something wrong with me or I'm just judging myself and kind of stuck in one of those kinds of thought patterns, it really just feels like a wound in my heart. And so like I just noticed that I'm like, oh, I'm feeling some anxiety right now. Can I give myself some compassion? Oh, I'm feeling really down about myself and how little I've done this week or how addicted I've gotten to something. And so I'll just give myself compassion. It's really anytime, anything difficult is showing up. Frustration, anxiety, fear, self-doubt, and anger, things like that. So, yeah, you're feeling frustration with someone. You can point your finger at them and really focus on them, but you could also notice you're feeling hurt and just give yourself some compassion. And that really helps.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My heart. And so it was just like almost like this pouring out of this loving feeling towards myself, towards my own wounds, which sounds very kind of woo-woo and like I think there's people who won't resonate with that. But actually it was a really powerful thing when I started to practice that for myself because we don't do that. We are not trained in that as a society.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what I learned is I kept practicing with this was there was a feeling in my heart that would be generated of loving kindness. And that's really the main point of that is not so much like this thought process of loving kindness, but a heart feeling, which is really hard to describe until you start to practice it. And then you start to realize like, oh, yeah, that's the same thing that I feel instantly when someone who I care about is actually in pain. I really want them to not be in pain, right? So this is like human thing. But you can actually conjure it up. And so I learned to do that through this meditation. And I start to notice when I am feeling inadequate or like there's something wrong with me or I'm not doing enough or I got through my day really busy, but I never, I still didn't do enough. There was always this feeling of not being enough that I had. And I started to give myself compassion when I started to recognize that this kind of loving kindness, compassion.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was a hard one for me because at first it was more of a mental intellectual exercise. Just kind of let myself off the hook. I'm not such a bad person and just reassuring talk. It actually came when I started practicing more not only with meditation but with heart-centered meditations like metta I'm sure you're familiar with that one. Loving kindness meditation and so I started practicing with that and that one is for those unfamiliar with it is basically this thing where you kind of picture someone else or a group of people and you start to wish an end to their suffering for example or wish happiness upon them and it's just a lovely little meditation right so you start thinking these thoughts like may they be happy”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enough, and the world is constantly giving us messages of that, and we give ourselves that message. So I learned to kind of sit with that feeling, and I realized it was just a feeling. It wasn't actually the end of the world. And then I learned to tap into self-compassion. And I think that was a huge one for me, was learning to be compassionate for myself.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the thing that I did was I kept digging deeper. Like I was never content to use that word with just like the surface level stuff, which is where I started. And there's nothing wrong with that stuff. The productivity and all the systems and all that kind of stuff, I think, is amazing. There's always deeper levels. And so for me, it's like, oh, why am I not content? I got my life under control. I got my dead under control, habits and everything like that. But there's still something that I'm not satisfied with. And so I started to dig into that. And I think what I hit upon was this underlying uncertainty about myself. Am I good enough is kind of the question. That feeling of inadequacy that a lot of us will feel. And there's nothing wrong with that feeling. I think that's something that kind of gets bred into us by our society. It just becomes part of our world. Like I'm not an”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a bunch of books. I'm totally out of date, to be honest. So there's some radical stuff about just completely like liberating. There's one called Teenage Liberation Handbook, which I highly recommend. There's an author named Alfie Cohn, K-O-H-N, something like that. He's also pretty radical. I would actually lean towards anything that talks about unschooling rather than homeschooling. It's an important distinction. Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling, so it is at home, but it's really about all the stuff that I talked about, choosing your own path and dealing with that. I wouldn't recommend any book that's focused on homeschooling itself because they're usually about how to do school in the home.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of the exact same stuff that you and I deal with on a daily basis. That's what an unschooler starts to do from day one. And they're not going to be good at it at first. And so it's great to have someone who's there to guide them, but they get trained in it. By the time they get to be 18, they can definitely figure out their path to college there, but they can also realize, like, actually, I don't need college for most professions, right? I don't need, unless I'm going to be like a doctor or a lawyer or something like that, I can actually do without college. So there's the uncollege kind of route as well.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They instinctively get it. They already know what that's like. And then if they have a kid or they're about to have a kid, but their kids aren't in school yet, they haven't made that decision yet. That's the perfect time. That's like the golden zone to reach someone. If they're an entrepreneur or a creative type or a leader of some kind and they have a kid or about to who's not in school yet, it's absolutely preparation for any kind of uncharted territory if you're going to be an entrepreneur if you're going to be any kind of leader in any kind of organization where you're not being told what to do, but you have to figure stuff out and deal with the uncertainty of that, the self-doubt. Unschooling is like incredible preparation for that and is constantly filled with uncertainty, self-doubt, people judging you and not getting you, which is exactly the path of an entrepreneur. And yeah, constantly having to deal with all of that stuff. And discouragement, motivation, structure.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, it is, I don't know if it's handicapping them. It is a little bit harder to get into college, but there's plenty of homeschoolers and unschoolers who get into college. There's definitely a path. My kids so far have not chosen that. The ones who were unschooled, but it's definitely a path, and it's not that difficult. It's just you have to put in a little bit of extra effort because it's not all laid out for you. So I would say that's one thing just to make sure that's clear. There's actually books written on how to get into college as an unschooler. But the entrepreneur thing I do want to speak to that because my favorite person to talk to this about is people like you who are entrepreneurs or creative types, authors, you know, anyone who's done anything that deals with uncertainty and discomfort and knows what that's like. Any kind of leader, anyone running a nonprofit, those people get it. So as I start to talk about like, oh, having to figure out your own path, the people who have had to do that for themselves.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That isn't given to regular schoolers. And I wanted to say you're not making a bad decision if you're sending your kids to school and you're not a bad person if you're a teacher or a bad parent. So I don't judge anybody who does that. But school by its nature is someone making the decisions for the kid. So it takes away all of the decision making for them. It takes away the uncertainty of their learning path because someone else has laid it out for you. So you feel like, okay, this is laid out for me, so I'm just going to follow it. And then you get to college and the same thing as there's a path laid out for you. And then you get out of college and then you're like, now what do I do? Because there's no path laid out for you as an adult. And so what happens to most people is that they get out of the schooling thing and they look for another thing to replace that. How can I go to a place where someone else has made the decision?”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were in school, but we're learning on our own terms because we are motivated by it at our own pace with our own structure. That's what unschooling is, is empowering the kids to actually decide for themselves what they care about, what they want to learn. And what that means is that they're not going to necessarily learn everything that everyone is quote unquote supposed to learn by the age of 13. But they would have learned a whole different set of things. The really important thing is that actually learning can be incredibly fun, that they learned how to face uncertainty. They learned how to motivate themselves and create their own structure. They learned that it's okay to give up on learning something if you found something else that you're more passionate about. They also learn how to hold themselves into learning something when they are feeling discouraged about it. So there's like a whole set of meta-learning that is available to unschoolers.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, they don't care that much about him learning, it's more about him following the rules. And so that was one was following the rules versus learning. And so we started to look at like, is this possible for her to quit? That was why we made the decision. But another thing that we learned along the way that I think is really important this day and age is that unschooling. So we went away from the structure of schooling to the structure of homeschooling and then we tossed all of that out in favor of unschooling, which is a way of learning that's completely unstructured other than what the kid wants to structure for themselves. And so the idea behind unschooling is that you're learning in the same way that you and I do today, Tim, as adults. Like you and I have not stopped just because we're out of school. We haven't stopped learning. We're actually probably learning more than we did.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we were inspired by my sister, who was homeschooling her kids, her two kids. That was one thing. And then the other one was we realized for some of our kids who were in school, school was not working out for them well. We had one son who very intelligent, but he didn't conform well to the rules of school. And what we realized as we started to look into this stuff is that school in a lot of ways is very much about conformity and follow the rules and you'll get along fine. And it doesn't matter so much about how much you've learned, but more, especially in the early days of school, like how much you can actually follow the rules. And so he was learning a lot, but he was not following the rules. And so one day he was, he had read whatever was supposed to be read in the class and was bored. And so he broke out a novel that he was reading and started reading it. And he got sent to the principal's office because of that. And that was like our wake-up call. It's like.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That. And then there's always deeper ways, and there's even much deeper ways to go into these things. So I just wanted to kind of share that really only just practice tools for this area. Okay, unschooling, which is an amazing topic, but I have to start by saying if you ask how God's green earth, my secret ingredient, of course, is not so secret as my wife. So she decided to quit her job as a teacher. So she had some background in education. And then homeschool our kids and at the time we just did homeschooling, which is like school in the house. So we had the same kind of classes, same kind of lessons and books and everything. And so that's, and to this day, like she's down there right now doing that with them. I definitely am a big part of their unschooling, but I just have to say, like, we're actually really lucky that she gets to do that as a full-time thing.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I speak? I do want to dive into that, but I want to speak just briefly to something that you talked about in the previous section, which was the bodhisattva vows. Because you compare them to the Ten Commandments. And there's a big difference that I want to just touch on. They aren't rules or commitments so much as ways to kind of examine how you're practicing with this stuff. So thou shalt not kill. There's a similar precept to that and encouraging others, as you said. But the difference is it's only a lens to examine how are you practicing with the main intention of all of this stuff. And it's not about making yourself wrong and judging ourselves, which is kind of where we usually come from in our Western society is like ways all kinds of ways to judge ourselves. And so that's something I just wanted to bring out is it's really just, oh, maybe I haven't killed anybody, but have I done anything that is aggressive towards people? And so looking at”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was my kids. Honestly, if you're going to ask me a number of my different motivations, 90% of the time, it's my kids. But nowadays it's not just them. But at that time, that was the most accessible thing for me that was beyond myself was my wife and kids. It was so easy, like looking at their faces to really care about them and their hearts and being an inspiration to them. And just to show you how that actually did pay off a few years later, they did a birthday party for me where they celebrated me as like a superhero. They like had super dad and like, this is how they saw me was this person who was larger than life and willing to be a hero. It was so touching because that was what I wanted for them was to have this example who wasn't stuck in comfort zone, who could go out of that for something that was more meaningful. That's what it was.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was faced with discomfort or punched in the face. Like you, if you have something that matters more than yourself, you can actually go through the hardest discomfort. And the same thing when I hit a marathon, like at the point when I hit the wall in the marathon, why was I doing this? I had to have a reason other than my own comfort because I was not feeling comfortable at the time. And so I had to have a reason to do it that was more important to me than my own comfort. And that's what the Bodhisattva vow is.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To open up beyond our self concern, which is where most of us are almost all the time is we're in self-concern. And like, what does this person think of me? Will I be judged? Am I going to fail? Should I take on more? All of these things are all about ourselves. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's not a bad thing. But the Bodhisattva vow is about opening beyond that to all beings. And it's this amazing way of being that you are no longer only in self-concern. You still care about yourself, but that's not the thing that limits you. And that's not where your mind is at and where your heart's coming from. It really actually is the most powerful thing. It's almost like when I talked about when I talked about quitting smoking is having some reason to do it other than yourself when I made the vow to my daughter and my wife, it actually held me in the darkest parts when I didn't want to do it.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brought the word bodhisattva. So the bodhisattva vow in general is just, I know you're familiar with it, but for those who aren't, it's this idea that you're going to help all beings, which is like this impossible vow. It's like, how the hell are you going to help every single being on earth, right? Which is actually one of the amazing things is that you turn towards this thing that feels completely impossible and you ask yourself the question, bringing curiosity to it, what would it be like to turn your heart open to helping all beings to this intention, this really wholesome, heartfelt intention to help people who are suffering in the world? And so that's what the Bodhisattva vow is. And it's about to basically uphold these 16 Bodhisattva precepts, which I have not memorized if you quiz me right now. If you give me a pop quiz, I won't be able to list them off. But they're all actually really the same vow, which is this thing.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's coming up this year and allows you just to be completely open in the middle of that. It's that embracing the suck that you talked about. It's even like realizing the suck isn't even suck. It's actually just life. It allows you to open up in the middle of life some of the hardest stuff and be completely open and relaxed and present with it. And it's just a completely different way of being than what we're usually taught. And it's not something that you can just do in a week. You have to actually practice with it for a long time. Practice can be discouraging. It can be something that we shy away from because we're busy. And then when you notice yourself discouraged, that's when you bring the practice to that. That's how I've been practicing with it lately.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of confusion that comes up around it. And it's just because it's like this old tradition where they have their ways of doing things. I do find it really useful. I study with a Zen teacher and I am studying the precepts, which are like, you know, don't intoxicate yourself and don't abuse sex and that kind of stuff. So I study with these precepts as a way to deepen into the practice. And I'm planning to take some vows in the near future. So it's something that I am diving deeper into. And the reason why I find it so helpful is not because I need to be like some monk, some Zen master or anything like that, but because it is a way of practice that allows you to open up in the middle of the most difficult stuff that you could face, the dip that we talked about earlier, the uncertainty and anxiety that we talked about.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such an interesting topic because in some ways, if you start to dive into it, it does become really confusing. And I actually don't recommend Zen Mind Beginner's Mind as the first book. It is a great book. It's got so much wisdom in it, but when you start to read it, it doesn't make a lot of sense. So if you read one book to start with, that what is Zen by Norman Fisher is a great intro. But also, if you don't dive into it and you just have this like idea of what Zen is, people think of it as like calm and tranquility and simplicity. And in some ways it is. It does work with that kind of stuff. So when I started, I had that idea like, oh, it's going to be just mindfulness and simplicity and calm. And then I started diving into it and I had that same response, which is like, I don't understand what this is about at all. I don't know what they're talking about. And if you go to like a Zen temple and like meditate with them, there's a bunch of chanting and it feels really off-putting and confusing. So I completely acknowledge there's a lot.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tried, like, as you can imagine, I've tried everything, and it changes over time as some of them get easy after a while, and so I take on something else to adjust to the level that I'm at right now. So right now, I realized that I was filling up almost every single day, seven days a week with Zoom calls. First, it was like it was only going to be on certain days, and then it started to fill up every other time. So I started, first of all, having weekends off, no calls on weekends, which meant I had to move things away from that. And then I started doing no calls on Friday, so I could still work on Fridays, but no calls. And then I started taking, I decided I was going to take December's and Junes off of coaching people and then also doing meetings. Each step along the way, I had to.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, if you have that kind of external thing that holds you in that commitment, and I really like having accountability, so like you commit to a group of close friends that you're only going to do a certain number of projects, that kind of thing, or have a certain number of meetings. Or my meetings are only going to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays or something like that, then it really helps you to highlight all the times when you're trying to rebel against that.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I'm feeling a lot of anxiety. We actually don't usually notice when we're feeling anxiety. We just start to go automatically to our ways of reacting to that anxiety, which, like you said, I think a lot of people listening can probably relate to what you just said, which is we go and take on a bunch of stuff. We go and do a bunch of things or for other people it would be like Netflix or YouTube. So comfort things is one common response, procrastinating on a lot of things is another common one. But for people like me and you who are doers, we go out and do a bunch of things. And that's our way of feeling more in control when things are feeling out of control. So if you have a commitment externally to only do a certain number of things and you notice like, oh, I've broken that commitment in the last week, then you can start to see like, oh, there's something under that is coming up. There's anxiety here. And that allows you to bring awareness to the anxiety and then to start to work with that in a way that doesn't break the commitment.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that you're bringing this up because it really strikes to the core of what I've been digging into in the last few years, which is uncertainty and anxiety. But in terms of over commitment, I would say it's really good actually to make an external commitment that I want to only have this much in my life. That's really the place to start. So we don't necessarily have to start underneath. We start externally. I know I just, I'm contradicting what I just said, but it really helps to see the stuff underlying if you say, okay, I commit to only doing one project at a time or three projects at a time, or I commit to taking completely Saturdays, Sundays off, and Friday afternoons, something like that where you commit to something externally, which is a limitation. And then what happens is you see yourself rebelling against that when things feel really uncertain. It's the urge to undo that commitment that we start to work with. So the underlying part of it is like,”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that people started to reach for. And so we got so many Amazon packages because we couldn't go anywhere and release that anxiety. And so that was a way for people to release that. And so that's always been true is that we always have gone to getting more stuff as a way to feel control in our lives or security or like I have some kind of protection against the chaos of this world. And so I think that's the place to look is like, how did you get there? What are the mindset and the thought processes that trigger you to having so much in your life? And this also applies to having too many commitments and too many goals and projects and meetings and things like that. How do we fill our lives up so much? And then we can start to look at that underlying stuff and dealing with the uncertainty and anxiety because the external stuff is only symptoms. And I'm not someone who just likes to treat symptoms. But the symptoms are fun to treat too. It's just you can't.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, I do do one-on-one coaching. I didn't do that until a couple years ago, but now I do. The place to start is how things got not simple in the first place. Because you can get rid of like 90% of your stuff and simplify your day, and then I'll be done with you as a consultant and consider that a huge success. And then I come back in three months and things are back to, they're complicated things. So how did we get here in the first place? I think it's really important to look at. And the reason why we have so much stuff and we have so much debt and we take on so much in our lives is really because of uncertainty and anxiety. You notice this year as we record this, we're in the middle of a pandemic is the most anxiety that people have felt in a long time, probably since like war times and the Great Depression. And so as that has gone up, people started ordering things online more.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That year, of many surprises. That was the biggest one, and I still feel really lucky that I wrote about that and tapped into this zeitgeist at the time.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my blog was a lot about simplifying your life, but I realized, oh, it doesn't have to be just about simplifying your possessions. I could write about simple productivity and simple motivation. And so I brought simplicity, that lens to almost everything that I wrote about. And that turned out to be a distinguisher for me that I just kind of looked upon. But again, you throw everything against the wall. So simplicity was something that I thought I was only interested in and not a lot of other people were. So I wrote about it because I liked it, but I thought that wasn't going to resonate. I had to write about productivity and motivation. And it turns out that I tapped into a nerve that people really crave simplicity in their lives when they're feeling overwhelmed and chaotic and just overloaded with all the stuff, with all the emails and messages and everything that we have. Simplicity struck a nerve that I wasn't expecting to strike. That was the one surprise for me.”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and by the way, Dig was a big one for me, too. I got in the front page of Dig a bunch of times, and those were like the early days of social media. Reddit was also getting big, and there was a bookmarking site called Delicious, or if you got on their front page, you'd also get a bunch of traffic. So I remember you're like bringing back all these early memories. The ones that really worked for me were around productivity and motivation, habit change. And then the other one that was a big surprise to me, actually, I didn't think anyone would be interested in it was simplicity. And that's when I said that luck was a big factor because there were a lot of productivity and motivation blogs at the time. There weren't that many that blogged about habits at the time, but there were a lot around productivity and motivation. So mine wouldn't have stood out if it were just about that. But I brought”
2020-12-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #488: Leo Babauta on Zen Habits, Antifragility, Contentment, and Unschooling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT