SDS 117: 1-on-1 with Kirill: What I learned in 2017

And I wanted to right away set your expectations. Because this podcast is not going to be about things I learned in data science, and it’s not even going to be about things that I learned in business. It’s going to be about things that I learned in my personal life, in my personal growth, how I have grown as an individual, as a human being, and what that means for me. So if you are interested to hear about that, then I welcome you into this podcast, into this session, and if you’re at home, grab a glass of wine, I’ve definitely got my wine – in fact my wine and tea and water here, because I have no idea for how long this is going to go, and so that’s another part, I guess, of setting expectations, that this might go on for just as short as 30 minutes or so. Or it might go on for a while. But I’ve done a bit of preparation. I have some notes written out. So I think it might go a bit over an hour, so that’s the length, I guess, to expect. So off we go.

We’re going to talk about 7 things. I’ve identified the 7 most important things that I’ve learned for myself in this year 2017, and I’m going to share them with you, and also share what exactly they meant for me and how I have changed as a person this year. And I personally think that this year has been very interesting in growth. And the reason for that is because in the previous years, there was always something more on the professional side of things that I was looking for, that I was aiming to grow, or develop, or achieve, accomplish. But this year, I understood for myself that I have been neglecting my personal growth and have not been paying enough attention to it, and that’s what I was focusing on. So this year I wasn’t specifically looking for major breakthroughs in the world of business, or major learnings in the space of data science. I knew that those things would come if they needed to come by themselves. But this year, I specifically focused on my personal growth. So without further ado, let’s get started.

Out of the 7, the first one that I identified is the 6 needs. So they all have little titles, and the first one is titled “6 needs”. Where did this come from? Where did this learning in 2017 come from? Some of you might know that in May this year, I attended an event called “Date with Destiny” by Tony Robbins. And Tony Robbins is one of the world’s most famous life coaches. I don’t think he likes that term, “life coach”, or “motivational speaker”, he doesn’t like that either. But he’s a person who guides others to success, others to understanding themselves better, and he’s helped millions and millions of people, and he has these events once a year in Miami, Florida, and once a year they’re in Australia. Funnily enough, in Gold Coast.

And so I attended Date with Destiny in May 2017, and there were lots and lots of things that Tony discussed. It was a 6 day event, about 12 hours a day, and as you can imagine, there was tons of value, tons of information. By the way, I couldn’t recommend this event more highly. If anybody is ever considering Date with Destiny, very, very recommend checking it out, attending, and seeing for yourself what it’s all about. But there were lots and lots of things that Tony portrayed in these 6 days, and he was on the stage pretty much 10 hours per day. It’s incredible how much time he was spending with everybody.

And at the same time, in this podcast, I didn’t want to just list all the things that I learned on the day, at the time. Because I did take notes, and I actually went through my notes today, and it took me a couple of hours to highlight everything that was important, and his quotes, and things like that. But what I wanted to outline for today was just the things – and this is what this podcast is about. It’s not about the things that I learned and that I wrote down somewhere, or that I maybe memorised for some time.

This is about things that I learned and stuck with me. Things that I actually implemented. Things that continuously, throughout the year, were changing my life. There were other things, for example at the Tony Robbins event, that were amazing, and now reading through them today, I thought to myself, “wow, this is such a cool concept, how come I didn’t apply it throughout the year?” And that’s my oversight. I should have. I should have paid more attention, or I should have made more effort to apply. But it is what it is, and so I’m just talking about the things that I actually actively applied, consciously or unconsciously, throughout the year.

And so the largest takeaway for me from Tony Robbins, and probably from this whole year, is this first element that we’re talking about, it’s called the 6 needs. I’ll walk you through it. So Tony identifies 6 human needs that basically drive any of our behaviours and emotions and our life in general. And here they are. The needs are: certainty, uncertainty, significance, love and connection, growth, and contribution. So let’s go through them one by one.

Certainty. We all need some level of certainty in our lives. For example, if you’re sitting at work right now (well, on your break, I’m assuming), or you might be riding your bike right now. Let’s say you’re inside a building. A great example that Tony gives is you need a level of certainty, for instance, that the building’s roof won’t collapse. You need that certainty. Otherwise, you won’t be in that building. Everything else won’t matter. You won’t be worried about your work, you won’t be worried about the shopping that you’re about to do, or anything else. You will be getting out of that building. That will be your first priority. Because you are not certain that the walls will hold, that the roof won’t collapse. So you do need some level of certainty in your life.

At the same time, you need uncertainty. How funny is that. You need both. You need certainty and uncertainty. And uncertainty is synonymous with variety. You need some sort of spice in your life. And why is that? Well, because if we are certain about everything all the time, then we’re going to get bored. We’re going to know what’s going to happen tomorrow, the day after, 5 days, a year from now, and life is not going to be interesting. So in order for us to be excited and fulfilled – not fulfilled. In order for us to be excited about life and have genuine interest in life, we have to have both certainty and uncertainty, and an interesting quote from Tony, I’m going to mark these off as I go through them, is “all passion of life is found in the realm of uncertainty.” Something to ponder on. That your passions, you find them in things that you are not certain about. And it kind of makes sense when you think about the whole boredom aspect of it. And if you’re always certain about things, you’re just going to get bored.

And the other thing that Tony says about uncertainty is that “the quality of a person’s life is directly proportionate to the amount of uncertainty they can comfortably live with”. So there we go. We won’t go deep into all of these, but there’s another one to think about, what uncertainty means for people.

So there we go, that’s the first two. The third one is significance. And this is the need to feel unique, special, and important. It’s an interesting one. We’ll talk more about significance just in a second, but we all know that feeling that we want to important in a person’s life, or in many other people’s lives, and some people have more of that need, some people have less of that need.

The fourth one one is love and connection, and that is basically the need to love or be loved, and the need to connect with other people, friends and partners, and just acquaintances, other people around you. It could even be people you don’t know. And what Tony says about love and connection is a very interesting quote, “love requires more vulnerability than connection, but provides a hundred times more reward.” Very interesting as well. And I think we’ve all been in situations where we have a connection with someone, but we don’t actually have the love yet, or at all, and you can tell the difference. You can tell that connection is great, especially in an intimate relationship, a connection is fantastic. But we also know that if we’ve experienced love at least once in our lives, we know that love is a hundred times better. So that’s number 4.

So the first four are called the “basic needs”, and Tony identifies them as basic human needs. Whereas the last two are the needs where we get fulfillment in our lives. That’s why when I was talking about uncertainty and certainty, I corrected myself that that’s not where fulfillment comes from. Fulfillment comes from these last two. And the last two are growth and contribution.

So growth is when you learn new things, when you grow either professionally or personally or with someone, or by yourself. It doesn’t matter. It’s just when you become better and better and better, and you don’t stagnate. You don’t stop learning or developing, and just growing. So what Tony says about growth is that we grow so that we have something to give. And that ties in well with contribution. That contribution is when you give back to the community. Or when you give back to individual people, you help others. And personally for me, I prefer giving gifts to receiving gifts. I love receiving gifts, that’s great. But I actually get so much more out of giving a gift. Like seeing the person’s eyes when they unwrap it, and how excited they are, especially if it’s what they wanted, if it’s the right gift, if I guessed, or if I some how knew what they wanted, and they didn’t know that I was going to give it to them. It gives me this amazing feeling.

And it’s not just about gifts. We’ve all been in situations where you just help somebody out with something at work, or with a personal problem, or you just meet somebody on the street and help an old lady cross the street. Or you do something without expecting something in return. And that’s called contribution. And that makes you feel good, because that makes you fulfilled in life. It gives meaning to your life. It gives purpose. It’s not just like you’re living life for yourself. It means there’s a bigger reason for why you’re here. And those two come hand in hand as well. So you grow in order to have something to give, in order to be able, whether it’s help, or it’s knowledge, advice, money, anything that you can give, you grow and then you can give more.

And about contribution, Tony says, and I think he figured this out when he was quite young, I think 16 or 18, I’m not sure exactly, but he came up with this concept when he was pondering the meaning of life. He came up with the concept that the secret to living is giving. And that’s how he’s been living his life. For instance, he feeds people who don’t have something to eat across the US, or maybe even across the world, and last year, in 2016, as far as I heard, he gave out 300 million meals across the world. I think that’s the correct number. Because his goal is to feed a billion people in 10 years, or something like that. He’s getting very close to it. He actually gave out 300 million meals in a year. And that number’s been growing for – he’s been doing that since he was much younger. Since he was 18 or 20 years old, he’s been feeding 1 family, then 2 families, then 4, then 8, and so on. And now he’s gone into 300 million meals. How crazy is that. And how great is that? And so he’s working towards more. So he’s a great, great person.

And so those are the 6 needs. Why has this changed drastically my life, why is this one of the top things that happened to me in 2017 that I’ve decided to mention? Well because at Date with Destiny, they have this exercise, and this actually happens on day one of the six, I guess they really want to put your life into perspective for you. And the thing is, out of these 6 needs, you need to be able to identify, based on your past life, based on how you’ve lived your life, what you think are your top 2. Because we all have these 6 needs in some combination, in some hierarchy, some are more important, some are less important. They are all present for all people, all 6 needs. But what is important is what are the top two of these needs, because those needs will be driving predominantly most of your decisions in life, most of your choices most of your emotions that you experience in life will be driven by the top 2.

And so for me, when we did this exercise, it was so interesting. It was extremely easy for me to identify my number 1 need. Number 2 was harder, but number 1 was by far, it was at the very, very top. And before I say mine, so that you’re not biased by what my answer was, if you like, you can pause this podcast and try to think for yourself, what are your top two needs. Just look back at what’s been driving your decisions and generally your life, and what do you think is the most important, is it certainty? Or is it uncertainty? Or is it significance? Is it love and connection? Is it growth? Is it contribution? And the trick here, or the way to approach it is, be truthful with yourself. And the quote from Tony, one that he said probably a hundred thousand times during the 6 days, and it really resonates with you and sinks in, is that the truth will set you free. You’ve got to be truthful with yourself. Don’t answer what you would want it to be, like your ideal version of yourself. You don’t need to share this with anybody. Answer truthfully to yourself, what do you think has been your number 1 and number 2 needs that have been driving your life up until today?

And so, for me, number 1 was so easy to identify, it was just ridiculous how easy it was, and how obvious it was once we did this exercise, once I had to stop and think about it, and for me, number 1 was significance. Why significance? Why was number 1 significance, what does that mean, and is it good or bad? Well, significance is when you need to feel unique, special, and important in other people’s eyes. So the opinion of others matters. And you can already feel that that’s not really a good thing, when you are dependent on the opinion of others.

And the way I identified it is that throughout my life, a lot of the things I had been doing were driven by the need to be acknowledged by others, accepted by others, appreciated by others, or seen as somebody special by others. Whether it is, it was being one of the top in university, and ideally coming first, or being the best at work, when I was working at Deloitte, really, really working. But I wasn’t doing it because I really wanted to contribute, or because I really wanted to grow, or because I wanted to connect, like I wanted to develop connections with people that I was working with. I did it to, as much as I hate to say it, I did it to show off. I did it to show others that I could do it, I am the best. And the worst part is the partners there, and the whole culture there, it reinforces that type of behaviour. They want people who are the best, and they strive to outperform and be overachievers, and so on. That fed this desire to keep doing that.

Or even in sports, when I was doing wakeboarding, I really wanted to be the best in wakeboarding so that everybody would look at me and be like, “oh wow, Kirill can do this and that.” Even though I was nowhere near the best, I was just starting out and could barely do basic things, at the same time, I was always driven by this, and especially when it comes to competitions, not even any significant ones, just like a club competition, I would be like, “oh I have to train really hard to get there” and that’s how I injured myself really badly several times, because I was driven by this need to be significant in other people’s eyes, I would go so full in as to put too much effort into it without the right preparation, without the right skills and knowledge, that I would just injure myself.

And what Tony Robbins does is he helps you go back into your life and understand where those needs come from, why a certain need is in a certain position, like for instance why significance for me was number one. And funnily enough (or not funnily enough), a lot of these things drill down to your childhood. And the way Tony explains it is that we’re born with a brain. And then certain things, nature – not nature, nurture. Family, society, friends, peers, and so on, their behaviours, their beliefs, and so on, things they say to us, these things structure a blueprint in our brain. And based on that blueprint, that is where you get your first and second need, and so on.

And so a lot of your blueprint is of course formed in your family and your parents, and what do children want? When you’re born, at the start, everybody loves you. You’re a baby, you get unconditional love from everyone. But as you grow up, and you become not just an unconscious baby just crying all the time, people can actually talk to you and tell you things and things like that, you notice that there are certain expectations that people have around you. People want you to be certain things, and you realise that in order to get love – you don’t get that unconditional love any more. In order to get love, you need to meet certain conditions. And depending on your parents, depending on the way you’re brought up in your family, those conditions will be different.

For me, of course I love my parents to death myself right now, but at the same time, my parents expected me to be the best. And so they always expected me to be number one in school, I used to play chess competitively, and they expected me to be number one in chess, and number one in everything I do, from school to chess, to arts, to horseriding, to everything, I had to be – probably not horseriding. But everything else, they expected me to be number one, at the very top, and the best. And so I learned early on, from my childhood, that in order to get – again, my parents definitely loved me, and I’m very grateful for the childhood I had. But in order for me to completely satisfy my parents, and for them to love me – as a child, this is the way I understand it, for my parents to completely love me and love me more than anything, and give me that unconditional love that I so craved, that I had when I was a baby, I don’t have right now, for that to happen, I have to be number one in everything.

And what does number one lead to? Number one means significance. Number one, always the top top top in everything, requires you to be associates, or translates into being the best. That’s how significance got to the top of my list. And number two on the list, for me it didn’t really matter that much, because it was so far below. And so for me, I thought it was growth, but then I spoke to one of the mentors there, at the Tony Robbins event, and they helped me understand that it was actually uncertainty, or variety. And I’m not going to go into detail on how I understood that. Just because it didn’t have that much of an impact on me. And possibly in the next year, I will explore that as well, but this whole significance thing is what I wanted to point out here, because this realisation had the biggest impact.

And the best part was it was so easy to let go of that. As soon as I understood it, it was like a click, like that. It was so quick. I just realised, “wow. I am so driven by significance, and this need to be important in other people’s lives, and I need to let go of that. I don’t want that to be my blueprint. I don’t want that to drive my decisions, emotions, and behaviour. And pretty much on that same day, I decided for myself that’s not going to be at the top of my list any more. And then they help you come up with your own blueprint. What kind of blueprint do you want? And so I’m still deciding what exactly it is that’s going to be at the top. I wrote down for myself that I want love and connection at the top. And contribution on the second place. But I’m not sure between the three: Love and connection, contribution, variety or uncertainty. Because I do like to experience new things.

They say that it also depends on the phase of your life you’re in. And so you have to be truthful to yourself and understand, “in this stage of my life, what feels right that should be number one?” But a good tip is that it shouldn’t be — the worst two to have at the top are significance and certainty. If you have one of those two, then possibly, or according to Tony Robbins, you need to change something in your life. Because significance, we already discussed why it’s bad, because it doesn’t help you find love. It helps you be – you know people who like to just buy things so that others will look at them and be impressed? Nobody really loves that type, nobody really loves when people do that, it just gives you that feeling of love, or feeling of accomplishment for 50 seconds, and then you’re back to square one. It’s very tiring to always be significant in other people’s lives. If you’re relying on other people’s opinion in order to be happy, especially in that way, then you’re just going to be super tired all the time and never ever truly happy.

And the reason why certainty is a bad thing at the top is because you cannot grow in certainty. You need to get out of your comfort zone in order to grow, and that means you need to get into uncertainty. And that’s why certainty is not a good one at the top. So that’s a good tip, not to have certainty or significance in the top two in your ideal blueprint. But the reality is, most people, the way we live our lives, we already have one of those two at the top. Or even both of those at the top, like as number one and number two. There’s nothing problematic about that, you can just change it.

I’m still working on my new blueprint, but I’m really happy that I was able to drop this significance, and it felt like a weight was dropped off my shoulders. It felt like woah, that is so cool. I don’t have to impress other people any more to gain. And it all boils down to feeling loved. I don’t have to impress other people any more to feel loved. I can find love other ways, or I can find it – and we’ll get to this further down in this podcast – I can find it deep down inside my own heart. I can have it inside me already.

So, as soon as that dropped, you feel so much lighter because you can just do things for yourself. I don’t mean, like, for ‘yourself’ yourself. You can just do things because you want to do them or you don’t want to do them, not because other people expect you to do them, or you want to do them to impress other people. Also, what that meant is now you can actually do things to contribute back to the world. For instance, in my case, I don’t need to run SuperDataScience and run a business just to prove to the world that I can do it, that I can build this and I can do great things. Now I actually feel so great because I can do it just to give back to the world and whatever I’ve learned to help others learn it. And I can do things that I don’t expect anything in return and it feels good, it feels great. I can do things that I don’t care if it works out or if it doesn’t work out. I’m just doing it because I can see how I can help someone. So that’s about the six needs, but that’s not all about the six needs. And I warned you that this podcast is going to be quite a long one. We’ve already gone 30 minutes and we haven’t even finished the first one out of seven.

Anyway, six needs also come up in relationships. We’ll have a quick diversion here, or a quick side road into that space here – not for long – but I feel it’s important to mention because I found it very interesting. In relationships, the way these six needs work—by the way, I won’t go too much into relationships, it’s like a whole day, I think Day 3 on the Tony Robbins “Date with Destiny” event that they just talk about relationships. I won’t go too much into detail there, but this part I did want to mention. So, in relationships, the way Tony Robbins describes it, these six needs also come up. People in a relationship can meet or not meet each other’s needs. So, the way he came out with this scale is, if you meet one out of the six needs for the other person, they will be interested in you. And you don’t have to be in a relationship. You can accidentally meet a person on the street, and if you meet one of their six needs, they will just be interested in you. If you meet two of their six needs, then you’ll be friends. If you meet three of their needs, then they’ll be lovers and so on. And it gets to six. And this is Tony’s quote not mine: “If you meet six out of the six of their needs, then they will be your love slave, they will be addicted to you, they will want to take you with them everywhere.” And it works the other way around. If somebody meets six of your needs, you will be addicted to them and you’ll want them everywhere with you all the time.

Basically what that’s saying, if you rate those needs, like how a person meets each need of yours on a scale from 1 to 10, if for each one of the needs you get 10 out of 10, then things become effortless in a relationship. Tony’s quote here is, “If you want to be in a happy and fulfilled relationship, you have to want to meet their needs crazily.” So the keyword here is ‘want.’ You can’t just do it because you’re checking off some boxes or you’re just following this blueprint and you’re like, “Okay, I need to do this.” You have to want to do it. And if you do want to do it, and you do it crazily, then you will be in a happy and fulfilled relationship. But we will get to relationships more in point number seven, because I have something to say there on that as well, but that’s later on further down.

So, those were the six needs. It’s an amazing concept. There’s a video of Tony Robbins doing a TED talk, I think he’s done two, and one of the TED talks—I think it’s the earlier one, but anyway, in one of them he talks more about the six needs and you can find out more about that. We’ll find the link and we’ll put it in the show notes for you if you’re interested to find out about that more. Okay, so that was the first and probably the biggest thing that impacted me. And again, it impacted me so much because I was able to drop this mask that I had of the need to be significant, of that need driving my life. I was able to drop it and things just became so much easier. There is still definitely lots of work that I need to do on myself to get them in the right order to understand what is most important to me now, where everything else sits, but that was the biggest step for me; the first and the biggest step. Okay, moving on.

Number two, the mini-subtitle here is “Guilt and victim”. This is not a Tony Robbins thing, although something that Tony Robbins mentions is that we are driven by two things in life: they’re either pain or pleasure. It’s good to be driven by pleasure to seek things because you’ll get pleasure from them. It’s not good to be driven by pain or to be trying to do things because you want to avoid pain. We want to always go towards that pleasure side of the equation. So that’s just kind of an overview and it kind of fits in nicely with what I’m about to discuss here. But overall, this whole concept of guilt and victim didn’t come from Tony Robbins, it came from Mia, who is one of my mentors who I met this year in the personal space of personal growth. She introduced this concept to me, I think this was somewhere around August—that’s exactly when we met, July or August, but she introduced this concept in the middle of the year to me that’s called the “victim role.” So let’s dive into this.

I think I’ll start with a bit of a rewind. So throughout my life I have encountered people who in relationships could manipulate me. And I’m sure many of us have encountered people like that. And whether it was consciously or unconsciously, somehow they were able to manipulate me in getting things that they wanted. And this is not because that they had bad intentions. I’m not saying that these were evil people or anything, it’s just that some people are just like that. Through their upbringing, through the way they’ve grown up, they’ve learned to get what they want that way, through whether it’s emotional or psychological manipulation of other people. And the thing is that I generally hate seeing people get hurt. Like, I cannot stand when somebody gets hurt or especially if I am hurting or I perceive that I’m hurting someone. That combo is like dynamite, when a person can manipulate you to get what they want and you are a person who cannot stand hurting other people. In that case it works really well. Let me explain how it works.

Basically, a person wants something. Obviously we’re talking about relationships, so a person wants you to see them on a Friday night, but you have work or something else and there are reasons sometimes when you can’t. But then, because you don’t see them, they turn into this victim mode, they become a victim as if you’re a perpetrator, you’ve done something bad to hurt them and all of a sudden that’s it. They will let you know that you’ve hurt them, that you’re a bad person, that they’re in pain and so on.

So in turn, what happens – these things come in pairs – they are the victim, or they portray themselves as the victim, and you are the perpetrator and you actually start to feel guilty. And we’ve all had this I’m sure we’ve all had this, when you have this very heavy feeling of guilt that is eating you from inside and you’re like, “Oh, wow, how could I do that? I’m such a bad person I hurt them so much,” and so on. And it’s so heavy and then you try to make it up to them and you kind of get conditioned into not doing that again. Even though you had your reasons, even though you needed to work or let’s say you just wanted to see your friends or you had other plans or maybe you were tired and you wanted to be by yourself on that Friday night, but you get conditioned into the belief or the behaviour that you should not do that anymore, because if you do, you will experience excruciating pain of the feeling of guilt. And this ties in with the Tony Robbins pain and pleasure. In the future, if they want to see you on a Friday night when you have whatever else planned already, what will happen is you won’t go and see them out of the desire for pleasure and are being driven by pleasure. You will go and see them out of pain, out of trying to avoid the pain that you will experience if you don’t see them.

And that’s the whole pain-pleasure scale where you have to decide, or the whole pain-pleasure dilemma, which one is driving your life. And you can see it clearly there. But people who fall into a victim role are extremely, extremely powerful. It’s a very powerful state of being because they’re entirely convinced, they are 100% certain that they’re the victim. And the thing is, they don’t do it on purpose, they don’t go, “I’m going to be a victim today. This is going to work for me.” No, it all happens on a very unconscious level. And we talk about consciousness further down in this podcast as well, but it happens on a very unconscious level.

In that point in time, these people are behaving very not consciously, and that’s why it’s such a powerful thing, it’s so hard to combat it. And I’ve had that throughout my life many times. I wouldn’t say hundreds of times, but maybe a couple of times, probably under ten times I’ve encountered people like that. I’ve had the feeling of guilt hundreds of times, but every time I was so confused. I was like, “I don’t know what’s happening.” And if it’s the same person it would happen again and again and again and I would get conditioned into behaving in a certain way out of this fear of getting this feeling of guilt. It was actually, “Oh, I don’t want to hurt them. I have to be like this,” and so on. You stop being yourself. You become somebody completely different. And even though you might love that person so, so much, your consciousness and even your body will start to reject it. You’ll be like, “I can’t take this anymore because it’s so heavy, it’s so draining.”

From what I learned from Mia and from other teachings—by the way, this is also described in Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” book in Chapter Eight—what I learned from wherever I was learning from, a relationship with a person who is constantly in a victim role is simply impossible because they will drain the life out of the other person, they will make them feel very, very guilty all the time, very heavy, so at some point the other person usually will just have enough and it will be very hard, but it will be just too miserable to stay in that.

I’ve had that throughout my life. Before, I didn’t understand what was going on, I didn’t understand how it’s happening and why it’s happening, but I was so fortunate to meet Mia this year and to also read Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” and understand on a profound, deep level what the heck is going on and where this feeling of guilt comes from and what is a victim mode or a victim role. And what I’m grateful for from that is that now I can identify when that happens. I can identify when somebody is being a victim consciously or unconsciously. Well, I hope I’ll be able to, but so far I’ve been able to identify that. And it also has its spectrum. You know, some people can be very victim all the time about everything; some people can be victim about a few things or occasionally, once in a while. But I think I’ve been quite good at being able to identify that.

Sometimes you might want to help a person get out of it and I personally am a believer in that. Like, if you see that a person is behaving unconsciously and isn’t really seeing what they’re doing, helping them through it and helping them understand what’s going on and talking to them and maybe recommending them to read a book or watch a YouTube video or something and trying to explain to them. But if it’s not possible, if the person is just going to keep staying in the victim mode—and unfortunately these things, just like we saw in the six needs, these things drill back down all the way to a person’s childhood, and if they had a difficult childhood and the only way they could get things is by manipulating others to feel guilty because this person was portraying themselves as a victim, if that’s how they grew up, their whole childhood was like that, then it’s going to be very deeply engrained in their blueprint, in their mind. So sometimes, if unfortunately you cannot help a person or if they are unwilling to recognize that and actually practically do something about it to get them to get out of that, if they don’t want to get out of that mode, then there’s nothing you can do. You cannot help people who don’t want to help themselves.

And so in these cases, as my other mentor Paul says—I’ve mentioned Paul before, he is a Kung Fu master. I don’t do Kung Fu, but he’s very, very wise in that sense and he says that sometimes it’s better to love these people at a distance. Sometimes you just have to understand that. Yeah, so that’s that. That’s the feeling of guilt and the victim role. So I’m really grateful that now, even if I can’t help a person, at least I can identify when that’s happening and understand if that person is the person I want to hang out with or not.

And there’s a nice saying to summarize it, my mom keeps repeating it sometimes. There’s two types of people in this world: people who push you up and people who drag you down. And you want to keep the number one type of people in your life, people who push you upwards. And those people who drag you down, you don’t want to keep them in your life and sometimes you just need to make those decisions for yourself. So that’s the feeling of guilt and victim. Almost done with that part, but actually there’s more.

I thought it was very important to point out this example of the other way around, of when we are being the victim. It’s not very easy, but it’s easier to see in other people, especially once you know this concept and you observe it consciously a couple of times, then I think you’ll get better at recognizing when other people are playing the victim role or being in the victim mode even if they’re not playing anything and they’re just being in their victim mode. You will feel that feeling of guilt and you’ll recognise that that’s where it’s coming from. But I think it’s much harder to see that in yourself, again, because of what we discussed, that a victim role is so powerful, is so unconscious that when you go into it you stop being aware of what you’re doing.

And so it’s very important not to victimize yourself or it’s very important not to be the victim, because why would you want to do something to another person that you don’t want to be done to yourself? Nobody likes to feel guilty, to feel that heavy feeling of guilt. Why would you want to inflict that pain on someone else? And the thing is that life will often create circumstances where it’s very easy for us to feel sorry for ourselves. And that’s kind of the key way to identify it, I think. As soon as you start feeling sorry for yourself, that means you’re probably falling into victim mode. And when that happens, when you start feeling sorry for yourself or when you have a thought that someone hurt you and you want them to know how much they hurt you and you want them to suffer for that, like, “Oh, this person did this or they didn’t do what I expected and now I’m suffering and I hope they know and I hope they feel guilty about it,” and so on and so on. So, whenever you have that thought, catch that thought and don’t let that control you. Don’t let that take over you. Don’t be a victim. You’re better than that. Why would you hurt yourself and others even more? Right?

So, a classic example is you get a flat tire on the road. And what do people normally think? “Oh, I’m so unlucky. The universe hates me! Why did this happen to me? This is horrible. Blah-blah-blah-blah…” It’s all victim, victim, victim. But the reality is, flat tires happen. A couple times a year some bad things are going to happen and that’s that. And if you’re conscious about it, if you don’t let yourself fall into victim mode, you’ll be like, “Oh, well it happened. Let’s fix the situation,” you know, that’s a very basic example, it doesn’t involve other people, but you can think of hundreds of examples that do involve other people and they probably happen occasionally or have happened.

So, whenever you have that thought of where you are feeling sorry for yourself or you want others to feel sorry for you, that’s a form of getting attention, that’s a form of getting love, but it’s fake love, it’s not that true love that we all crave. It’s a substitute. So just get rid of it. Don’t let that take over you. It will be hard to always be conscious about these things. And we’ll talk about consciousness again further down, but the more you practice, the more aware you’ll become, the more conscious you’ll become, and the easier life will be, the less you will be upset, the less you’ll be feeling sorry for yourself and sad, and the happier you will be in general. And you’ll make the world a better place. The less we have of people in victim modes and roles the better, because everybody will win in the end. So, that was number two.

Okay, the subtitle for number three is “Being present.” This year I read a book which I really liked, I actually listened to it in audible because I like listening to books in audible. When you drive you can listen to it and other times, your eyes have rest. It’s a book by Eckhart Tolle which I’ve already mentioned on this podcast, it’s called “The Power of Now.” And there’s lots of aspects, it’s a very big book. I haven’t held the book myself because I listen to it as an audio book, but the audio book was like seven and a half hours long, so as I can imagine it’s quite a big book. And the amount of information it conveyed, it’s definitely very voluminous. So, there’s lots of things there, but the one I wanted to point out in this point number three is that too often we spend our time either worrying about the past or fearing the future or worrying about the future—reminiscing the past and worrying about the future. You’ve probably felt this.

A lot of us feel or understand that that is the case, that we are constantly living in the past and what happened and why did it happen, could I have done better or having regrets and stuff like that, or planning for the future, fearing the future, anticipating the future, trying to calculate all possible scenarios what could go wrong and so on and so on. And we miss the present, we miss what’s going on in the moment right now, we miss the world around us.

A great example of this is you’re driving to work or you’re taking the bus to work or you’re walking to work. What do you normally think about? You probably think about, “I will get to work. I’ll do this and that. And what about that report?” and so on. Or you might be thinking about something that happened yesterday or the day before. It can actually be great. You can be thinking about good things. You could be thinking about something that you did that you’re proud of and that happened a week ago or a year ago or a month ago, or you could be anticipating something in the future where you could be like, “Oh, it’d be so great to go to this birthday party, I can’t wait until Saturday,” and so on. But that’s kind of the same thing.

The only note here is that your brain is usually conditioned, it’s like a 20 million year old brain. It’s not designed to make you happy, it’s designed to look for problems. So you’re most likely going to be thinking about bad things. Most of the time you are thinking about problems that happen or problems that might happen. But regardless, whether you’re thinking about good or bad things in the past or good or bad things in the future, you are not thinking about the present. And so when you’re walking to work or you’re cycling to work or driving to work or taking a public transport to work, how often is it that you sit there and you can just observe the world around you and, you know, you might see a tree or you might see an old lady get into the bus or you might actually for the first time ever since you bought the car actually feel the texture of the steering wheel or notice a smell or some bird singing far away or some humming sound coming from the engine of the train that you’re sitting on.

Observe the environment that you’re in and actually feel as you’re being part of this experience, as you’re part of this world. And the worst part is that we often think about our lives, we often use the present as a means to getting to the future. It’s a very deep thought if you think about it. That’s one of the most powerful things I got out of the book, is that using the present as a means to an end to getting to the future. If you think about it, it’s very sad that right now we’re using this present now to get to the future which is, like, “I’ll get to work.” When you’re at work, okay, you’re doing your work and then let’s say you’re planning a project. Again, you’re using your present at work to plan for the future. That project will happen later on. And then you’re driving home, same, using present to get the future.

A lot of the time you’re using your current time on this planet, this second, this minute, this hour, you’re using that as a way to get to the future. And basically that means you’re never going to actually get there. That’s what it means. That means whenever you get to the future you’re going to be using that new present as a means to an end to get to the next future. And as you get to that future, again, that will be the present but you’ll be using it to get to the future.

A way to visualize this is, “Have you ever had this thought that ‘Okay, I’m not really happy right now, but I just need to wait a few months and as soon as this and this and this happens I’ll be happy then?’” And then a few months pass and then you’re like, “I’m much closer to being happy, but I need these other things to happen and then I’m going to get this promotion and then we’re going to go on this holiday and then I’ll be happy.” You’re always kind of thinking ahead that happiness is somewhere. It’s like you have to accomplish something to be happy, some things have to happen for you to be happy.

But the power of now says that you can be happy right now, that there is nothing else. Like, you will always only have this moment. It’s another very deep thought if you think about it. You will always only have the present. There is no past and there’s no future, there is only the present. And if you think about it, then any future is eventually going to become the present and you will only have that present. And if you think of life that way, that the only thing that matters is the present, if you think about life that way, then you will actually live life rather than just fly through it. Instead of just using the present as a way to get into the future, you’ll actually enjoy the present, you’ll look around, you will feel the air or you’ll smell the roses, you will see the trees, you will experience the emotions that are here now.

Bringing yourself back into the present is a very, very hard thing, as I’ve learned from myself. It’s extremely hard. Your mind is just crazy, it’s like a monkey brain. It just rushes away into the future so quickly, or into the past sometimes, and it’s so hard to keep it here, present, aware, conscious, focused on what’s going on around you and just enjoying life. It’s so hard. But if you do do that, that’s where the true happiness lies. You don’t need for something to happen to be happy. You don’t need for someone to enter your life or exit your life. You don’t need approval from someone or for someone to say something. Happiness is here and now if you just pause and observe and feel yourself as part of the world. That’s where true happiness lies. And it’s not just from a book that I know this.

Actually, this year, it’s interesting how I met several people, I can count I’ve met at least five people who are highly, highly conscious and who can live in the present. And one of them, you probably all know, is Hadelin. Interesting, isn’t it? I love giving this example, and I’ve given it a couple of times, I hope Hadelin doesn’t mind—I gave this example while he was right there at the DSGO Conference, like right on stage, I was just asking a few questions and this was one example. You might have heard it already, but nevertheless.

So, when we were on our road trip this summer in Europe, we were two months on the road trip, we went through Italy and France and Germany and Budapest in Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, lots of countries. And so we were driving and we were taking turns driving, and so one time he asked me, because we were driving and he would see that there’s an exit coming up and every time, almost every time I got the exit off the highway. Once in these two months – I think we did a good 20,000 kilometres in total – once in all my driving I missed an exit and he was like, “Kirill, how often do you look at the G.P.S.?” And I was like, “Interesting. How often do I look at the G.P.S.?” And so I just checked, just kind of observed myself. So I was looking at the road, and about every ten seconds I was looking at the G.P.S. just to check. That’s crazy insane! But that’s just how my brain works or how it’s trained to work. It was automatic for me, like, “Driving, okay, check it, check it.” I wasn’t doing it purposefully, like absolutely consciously, but it was happening.

And then when he was driving, and this is the part that that is the craziest part, when he was driving, in our whole trip he missed like 20 exits. So, there’s an exit and sometimes I would be like, “Hey, Hadelin, we have to take this exit.” But then I just stopped doing it or I was busy doing my thing on my laptop or something or just listening to the music or something like that. It’s not my responsibility to check the G.P.S. when he’s driving. And then he would just miss 20 exits in this whole trip, at least. There’s probably more because, you know, maybe while I was sleeping he probably missed another couple. And then I tried to understand why this is happening. And if you know Hadelin, you will know what a great and open and smiling and happy and wonderful person he is. Whenever you’re around Hadelin, you just want to smile, it just gets to you. He just has this aura of good energy around him and that’s just the way he is in life.

And when he is driving, what he does is he—the road is important, of course, and the destination is important, but he is in the now, he’s present, he is observing the clouds, the trees, he is one with everything. He is feeling the nature, he is like the mountains. When we were driving through these Alps, he’s there, he is the mountains, he is the lake. That is Hadelin and he is so present, he’s actually living life. For him the present is not a means to getting to the future. And for me it’s like, “I have to get there. This is why I have to check the G.P.S.” But for him he’s enjoying the moment. And it doesn’t matter that he missed a few exits. He’s living life and it’s his experience on this road trip is incredible because he actually was present pretty much the whole time through this.

So if you ever get a chance to interact with Hadelin in person, that’s the type of person he is. He’s a living example of the fact that you can actually be present and conscious about everything around you in a way that you’re actually experiencing life. You’re not going past and then you look back and you’d be like, “Where did the year ago? Where did my life go?” It’s an example of the fact that you can live life and be happy in every single moment in the now. And I’ve only seen Hadelin not fully happy maybe like for 40 minutes out of all the time that I’ve known him. All of the time he’s just smiling, he is just happy. So, yeah, that’s one of the people that I met this year who is present.

And I wanted to conclude this part, this third point with a comment that it is something that I learned, but I’m still not yet there. I’m working on it. I want to be more like that. I want to be more conscious and I want to be more present and experience life, but I know it’s work that I need to do on myself and that will be one of my goals for 2018. But I’m really grateful that at least I discovered this and at least I know that there is more to life than just goals and accomplishments and paths to getting there. There is actually life. There’s actually this experience that a lot of the time we’re missing out on. Okay, so that was number three, being present.

Okay, number four, the subtitle is “Trusting life.” So, if you know me, you’ll probably guess that I’m a person who has learned how to get what I want, and not in a narcissistic entitled way, but through hard work. Throughout my life I’ve understood that if I really want something and I really work very hard for it, I will eventually get it. It might take me time, it might take me lots and lots of falling down and getting up again, but I will get there. In data science terms, you could say that in a lot of ways and a lot of times I brute force my way through life. You know, if I want something, I just go and work for it.

A couple of examples. So, if I wanted to get into a university or when I wanted to get into a university back in the day, I would do so much work. I would sign up for their courses, three years in advance I would sign up for courses, for prep courses, a year in advance I would sign up for their specific prep courses. Because I studied physics and math, I would solve hundreds of math equations, hundreds of physics equations per month minimum, probably more than that. And I’d just work all the time on this goal of achieving. Another example is, if I wanted to get a job or when I wanted to get a job, when I wanted to get into Deloitte, for example, I would just constantly prepare for the interview, send my resume, make sure that I know everything, connect with people, go to their career fairs and so on. I knew I wanted to get in the top four, big four consulting firms and I would just go and send my resumes to all of them, I would find people who already work there and do so many things.

Another example is, if I wanted to start my own business, I would just try this and that and fail and get up and listen to this podcast and listen to that podcast and read this book, read that book, and watch these videos. And I would just keep doing it, falling, failing, getting up and doing it again. I’d do that for years and in the end I’d get into the university, I’d get the job and I would start my own business. But the interesting thing is, there’s always a ‘but,’ there’s always an interesting thing. The interesting thing that I’ve discovered for myself this year through other examples that even happened this year, but also looking back at these major examples in my life, I’ve discovered for myself that there’s always more at play than just me pushing and brute forcing my way through life. There’s something else. In a way, there’s life itself that is participating in these events, in these wants of mine, in these desires, in these goals.

And if I look back at these examples, when I actually wanted to get into uni, I was preparing for one faculty, but then because I prepared a lot and I passed my exams very, very well, I was able to get into a different faculty which I was not expecting to. And moreover, it was interesting that all that preparation, years of preparation I had to put in, but then I remember that it was a very strange feeling. You needed to sign up for that exam, not the written exam but the oral exam when you go in and you actually make your case why you want to be in that faculty. And I went to sign up for that exam, I had like twenty days to go and sign up for that presentation, put myself on the list that I want to go to a faculty. And usually what I would do is I’d wait until like two days left because it was quite far away from the city, I had to take the train, the bus there and it was quite a long way away. So, usually I would have waited because it doesn’t feel like a big deal. But I went like maybe fifteen or ten—I don’t remember exactly, like quite well in advance. And the funny thing is that they invited people to the interview in the order they signed up, and then that order really dictated who could get in and not because they had a limited number of spots, I think they had like 22 spots in that faculty. And had I not signed up earlier on as I did, then all those years of preparation and hard work would have just gone down the drain. So, you know, there’s that one little aspect that I didn’t take into account, but somehow I had this feeling or sense that I should go and sign up 15 days before.

And then with the job, that second example, when I wanted to get into the Big Four consulting firms, I really wanted to, but what I did—like, I studied accounting in my Master’s degree and so I applied for accounting roles at Ernst & Young, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte. And in fact, I actually did an internship in accounting at Ernst & Young. But with Deloitte what happened is that I was brute forcing my way, of course, I was sending these applications and everything, but what happened at Deloitte was my application got mixed up somehow and it went instead of my first preference, into accounting, I think it went to my second preference. I don’t even remember putting forensics as my second preference, but somehow my applications and my C.V. went into the forensics department. And I remember I was actually here where I am now in Gold Coast, in this apartment where I got this phone call from Deloitte from forensics and I didn’t even know what forensics was. While I was on the call I had to google ‘forensics’ and I read the Wikipedia article and I realized there’s like this skull because it was like criminal forensics, whereas the Deloitte forensics is cyber forensics—not necessarily just cyber, it’s corporate kind of business forensics. So I had no idea what they were asking about. I had this phone interview and I passed it and then I had more interviews, but then when I got into Deloitte into the forensic division, even though I applied for accounting, there the partner at Deloitte looked at my resume and looked at me and said, “Hey, man, your skills, rather than to forensics, they’re much better suited to data science. You should be in the data division.” And that’s how I got into data science at Deloitte. And had that not happened, I may have never been teaching courses at Udemy on SuperDataScience on the internet about data science. I would still be doing accounting at Deloitte or somewhere else.

And so it’s funny how I really wanted something, I really wanted to get into Big Four, I really wanted to get into accounting and I really worked hard for that, but then life had its own way. My application got mixed up, I’d met the forensics partner Chris, who was a great, great person, he identified my talent and put me into the right place. There’s no way I could have come up with that myself. There’s just no way. And I would have not even known that I liked data science had that not happened.

And with the third example that I gave with starting a business, I failed so many times, failed in attempts, in ideas. And I tried this and I tried that and so on and at some point I found myself reading a book on Java because I was so confident that I’m going to start a whole company on trading the Forex market and making completely algorithmic trading through data analysis and so on and I needed to learn Java for that. And I was actually studying a course on Udemy about Java by John Purcell, a great person, and Hadelin and I actually went to meet him, he lives in the U.K., in Derby. I went to Derby with Hadelin this summer to meet him and say hello.

Yeah, so I was studying this course and Java and when I got to the end, John actually said in one of the lectures, “Hey, guys, by the way, all I do for a living is I teach online and that’s all I do and it’s really fun and I like it and I helped people and it’s not that hard to create a course. I wrote this eBook on how I did it. So if you want to get it, it’s like £1.50 on Amazon.” And so I bought that eBook and reading that eBook I was like, “Whoa, this is really cool. I have to give it a go.” And then after that the rest is history. So again, even though I was like pushing really, really hard through life, life had its own turn. And here I am.

And so all these examples, what I’ve learned from them is just to trust life, is just to believe in life more. Like, I’m not saying that you need to be lazy and not to work hard. It’s a combination of the two. You still need to work towards your dreams and goals, but sometimes you just need to trust that whatever needs to happen will happen and that’s it. So I’ve adopted that more and I’ve realized this. I’ve kind of always pondered these examples. I was like, “Wow, that’s really cool. What a coincidence. There must be a reason. I don’t believe that it’s just a coincidence just because.” I think there was a reason. I was always grateful for those coincidences or for the ways that my life has shaped, but now I’ve taken it a step further that I let life guide me very often and it’s becoming more and more often.

For example, just recently I was getting the train from Brisbane to the Gold Coast here in Australia. This was literally just a couple of days ago. And I was running a bit late, I could see that I’m not even entering the railway station yet, and you can already see, they have these screens quite a way away from the station. I could see I have four minutes left. I felt like I have to run really hard to get on to this train and, you know, this is going to leave in four minutes, I’ve got like seven more minutes of walking so I have to run really fast to get there.

And I thought of doing that and I normally would do that, but then I thought “Come on, Kirill, these trains, at that time of the day there are like one every 20 minutes. If I don’t get this one, that’s okay. I’ll just wait on the platform and get the next one. Where is the rush?” And if you tie that in with being present, the previous one, if you tie that in with being aware of what’s around you and enjoying life, you can enjoy life sitting on a platform. You don’t have to get somewhere to enjoy life. You can enjoy life wherever you are. I’ll be like, “Oh, that’s okay. I’ll just sit on the platform, that’s totally fine. You know, if I don’t make it, that’s okay.” And I didn’t run. Maybe I did a brisk walk, like, walked a little bit faster, but I didn’t run towards the platform. Like, I wanted to, but I calmed myself down and I made my body just take it easy, take it slow. And yeah it took me more than four minutes to get there, but when I got there the train was still there. And I got on and I went to Gold Coast. So not a big major life-changing example, but at the end of the day that’s an example of how if something is meant to happen it’s going to happen. You don’t have to brute force your way through life.

And another cool example was—like, even these examples that I gave you today, the university example, the job example, the business example, four hours ago I was like, “What examples should I think of?” I was trying to squeeze them out of my brain, I was like, “Which example should I give? Come on, Kirill, remember something.” And then I thought, “You know what? They’ll just come. Relax. I’ll figure it out.” And literally when I was preparing these notes and as soon as I started writing this fourth point, one example came up, second one, third one just came to my head. Again, don’t take it as in you have to be lazy and everything will happen for you. No, you still have to set yourself targets and goals and work towards something, but life will always have its way, so why not just trust that that will happen and understand when you need to get out of the way for life to take over? So, that was number four on trusting life.

Let’s continue. Number five, the title is “Connections exist.” Have you ever had a situation where you think of somebody and then they call you right then and there? Or you get a text message, like, you think of someone and three seconds later you get a text from them? Or you think of someone because you want to call them or text them and as you’re writing the text or as you’re getting your phone out, you get a text message from them? I have a huge confidence in that everybody listening to this has had that at least once in their life and probably more. I have that probably like twice or three times a month. It’s just crazy. It doesn’t happen with everybody. And not just that, sometimes there are some other things that are very strange that you can’t explain. Like, I have that with only a couple of people in my life. With some people it’s stronger, with some people it’s weaker, but it’s still there.

For example, you know, the text messaging or the calling or sometimes I can feel when a person is thinking about me or when a person is sad, I can feel it. I have done this, I pick up my phone and I’m like, “I can feel you’re sad. Is everything okay?” And then they’re like, “No, it’s not okay. I am sad,” or something else, “Stop reading my mind. It’s getting freaky.” Something like that. These connections actually exist. And another thing that I also like is that sometimes when you look into another person’s eyes, especially those people that you have this connection with, you can actually feel something deep. I feel that I can see their soul in their eyes. That’s not always, but it’s when they’re most genuine and most vulnerable, most themselves, you can feel something very deep. And for me, it’s a sign that—even though we can’t explain it and it must be strange hearing it from someone who’s studied physics and math for half their life and now does data science, like, very analytical, very well defined areas to hear something like that, but I really believe in that and I feel that there are things in this world that we cannot explain with physics or mathematics and stuff like that.

You can call it intuition, you can call it connection, but it’s there. And so that’s all I have for this point number five. I just realized I’ve always known there’s something more, and I slowly, gradually came to this point, but I guess this year what happened is that I finally defined for myself, understood that there definitely is something more and that going forward I’m going to not necessarily seek out these connections, but I’m going to welcome them. I’m going to be open to them and when they do happen I’m going to appreciate them and be grateful for them and cherish them and try to develop those connections with those people even more and see where they go. So, I think it’s also a sign when you have a connection to someone. It might not mean that this is the person that you have to spend the rest of your life with or something else. It’s not always black and white, that’s what I mean. Maybe sometimes these things, they just mean that there is something that you will learn from that person and there is something that they will learn from you, or maybe you can help that person on something they can help you with something. There are some reasons behind these things.

So, yeah, that’s what I understood for myself about connections. And by the way, if you would like to have a quite fun explanation of this concept, well, this concept is called intuition by this specific person, by Kerwin Rae, he has a YouTube video called “How Intuition Works.” I wouldn’t say he’s trying to explain it from a scientific way, but it’s fun. He had his own experience, he had a stroke, and then he couldn’t actually talk to people so he just learned—he had short term memory loss so he could only remember things for like 18 seconds so he just learned to feel people. And he developed this sense to an extremely—the way he described it is sort of like an extremely high level of sensitivity and it’s just a cool video, it’s just like five minutes long. so we’ll put that in the show notes as well. But basically, to sum up, I’ve understood that there are connections between people and yeah, I’m going to definitely look out for them more in the future.

Okay, that was number five. Number six, moving on—that was quite quick. Almost there. Number six is “Consciousness.” So, I was flying to Boston in May this year on my way to the ODSC Conference, where Hadelin and I were presenting. By the way, that was the first time I met Hadelin in person. We had been working together for like eight months or so online. What a world we live in, right? Like, people can work together and build courses or projects and products and services even without meeting each other. So, that was the first time I was going to meet him in person, in Boston, even though he lived in France at the time and I lived in Portugal, so it was pretty cool.

And on the plane, I sat next to this guy whose name was Corey. And he was a really interesting person, an Australian guy who was into meditation, into sports, he has his own business that his family run somewhere in Adelaide or he has people running it for him. He was going to some spiritual retreat somewhere in the U.S. and basically, on that plane—it’s interesting, speaking of connections or speaking of trusting life, you know, sometimes things happen and they happen for a reason. And so here, that was the first time when I heard the term “consciousness.” And I’ll tell you how he explained it for me. So, the way he explained the term “consciousness” is he said, “Okay, imagine you have a glass of water and you want to know how hot it is, but you cannot judge by the warmth of the glass. It’s a special glass and you cannot tell how hot the water inside the glass is just by touching it. It’s like a like a thermos type of glass, where it’s insulated so the outside surface of the glass doesn’t represent how warm the water is inside. So what do you do to measure how warm or hot or cold the water is?” Well, you dip your finger into the water and so one phalange of your finger is in the water and that basically gives you that sense for what the temperature of the water is.

So, basically what he said is our lives, us on this planet is that phalange. I really hope I’m pronouncing that right, but it’s that phalange, it’s that tip of that finger in the water, that’s us on this planet. And what he’s saying is that we live here, we walk around, we experience life, we have our five senses, we interact with each other, but that is only a tiny little piece of what is called “our higher selves,” “our higher being.” There’s going to be lots of debates about terminology and how to call these things, you can call it whatever, but in a different dimension there’s like a huge, much bigger part of us, like a higher self that we are connected to and we are only a tiny representative of that higher self, our higher being.

So we live in this life and then when we die we go and reunite with our higher self or whatever happens. But basically, the more conscious you are, the more you listen to your higher being, your higher self, the more you’re aware of things. Your higher being knows much more than you. It’s a huge entity that understands life and everything and every living thing on this planet much better. So right now you might be thinking, “Whoa, this is cool. This is exactly how I feel about all of this and this is really in line with what I believe in,” or you might be thinking, “This is all B.S. What is he talking about? This is some voodoo bullshit.”

In the second case I have an alternative explanation for you and more logical explanation, and possibly, hopefully this will get you on board. So, Tim Urban, who you might know from the Wait But Why blog, if you haven’t checked that out, you definitely should, it’s amazing. He writes on lots of different topics and he has this blog post which is called “Religion for the non-religious.” I will also link to it in the show notes. And there he explains the concept of consciousness in an absolutely different way. So, what he says in short, this blog post is like 50,000 words long, maybe 30,000 words long, it’s like a book and most of his blog posts are like a book, but in a very short sense what he says is, like—I’m going to shorten it down. I was going to explain kind of like the whole chain, but I’ll just explain it in a few examples.

So, if you take an ant and you try to explain to an ant what a monkey is, you can’t. An ant will never understand. Whatever language you speak, even if you speak ant language, an ant will never understand what a monkey is. Then you take a monkey and you try to explain to a monkey what a human is. You can’t. Even if you speak English, Chinese, Spanish, sign language, even if you speak monkey language or whatever language they understand, even if you speak that language and you try to explain to a monkey what a human is, you will never be able to explain to a monkey what a human is just because – and here’s the catch – because they are at a different level of consciousness. An ant is a very low level of consciousness, a monkey is a higher level of consciousness, human is an even higher level of consciousness. And so there is no way for one of those levels of consciousness like a monkey to understand what the next one is about. Monkey can understand an ant, they can see an ant, they play around with ants sometimes, but monkey cannot understand what a human is and that’s that. That’s how the world works. There are different levels and that’s what consciousness means; that is the capacity to be aware I guess of your life and yourself and life around you. That’s my definition. It might not be exactly correct, but this example should put it into perspective.

And so what consciousness then means, without going into higher being and so on—by the way, higher being and higher self, that’s what Eckhart Tolle in his book “The Power of Now” also talks about. But taking the monkey and monkey-human example, what it means then for us as humans is that in the human level of consciousness there are actually different levels, different sublevels of consciousness. As a human, you can move around, and Tim Urban talks about that as well in his blog, so if you want to learn more about it definitely check that out. So, as a human you can move around in your level of consciousness. And remember we talked about point number two, the guilt and victim, somebody who is in a victim mode or a victim role, they’re acting very unconscious, they’re acting with very little conscious. All they can think about is how much they’ve been hurt and how guilty the perpetrator is and so on and so on. That’s a very low level of consciousness.

But if on the other hand, you do get hurt by someone and then instead of feeling like dropping into this low level of consciousness—by the way, Tony Robbins also has his own levels of consciousness. I think he talks about, what was it, like seven different levels of consciousness? If you’ve been to a “Date with Destiny” event, then you will know that they’re identified by colour for Tony Robbins. He has eight different levels of consciousness, but we won’t go into that now. But anyway, going back to that example, if you are hurt by someone you can drop into this victim mode and you can actually be like—you drop into this low level of consciousness. Or you can not do that and be like, “No I’m not going to do that. I’m catching that thought of feeling sorry for myself or trying to make the other person feel guilty or just becoming a victim. I’m catching that thought, I’m not going to do that, I’m better than that, I’m more conscious.” And you actually observe that inside your own mind and you stop yourself from dropping into the victim mode and then you explain to yourself why a certain thing happened or why that person hurt you, or what might be driving them or something, what could have happened to them that in return that they’ve done this to you. And then you let it go and you forgive, or you feel grateful for the experience you had or something like that. Then all of a sudden you’re operating at a different level of consciousness. And I think this example puts it really into perspective. You can’t deny that those two scenarios, the person in scenario A and scenario B is behaving in completely different levels of consciousness. It’s not the same as comparing an ant to a monkey or a monkey to a human, but it is different and you can feel that it’s different. And that’s what consciousness is all about.

So here’s another couple of examples. For example, it takes a conscious person to be able to understand that people—hold on, let’s rewind for a second. So, like with the monkey and human example, it’s not just about understanding other levels of consciousness, it’s also about understanding concepts and things. Again, Tim Urban gives a great example that we as humans, we understand that planes, those shiny things flying in the sky above cities, those are planes. Some of them are stars, but some of them are planes. We can understand that. But if you take a monkey and you try to explain what a plane is, there is no way he’ll understand what a plane is. It takes so much technology, so much progress and so on, so many things have gone into a plane and even if you try to explain that to a monkey, it will still think those are stars. It will not be able to tell what is a star, what is a plane. It might be able to see that one is moving and the other is not, but it will never understand they’re different. And the same thing here, people with low level of consciousness and people at a higher level of consciousness. Again, you can move around these levels of consciousness as long as you’ve been to them and you know—like, it depends on the circumstance and it depends on how much you can control your mind and yourself.

It takes a person with a high level of consciousness to understand that people aren’t defined by their actions, people aren’t their actions. So for example, when someone is rude to you, what you can do is you can get angry or become a victim as we discussed. Or if you at the time can stay at a high level of consciousness, you can try to understand them, try to understand where they’re coming from, why are they being rude to you. Maybe something happened in their day, maybe their mother is not feeling well or maybe they’re just going through a breakup or maybe something happened. And instead of just making it about yourself and feeling sorry for yourself or getting angry about it and being rude back to them, you just look at it from a different perspective. Be more conscious about it and then you have completely different interaction. You might actually help the other person.

The other example is when we talked about intuition previously, the connections and so on. To listen and to hear your intuition or these connections, these things that you’re getting from other people, from other people’s souls, you need to be operating at a higher level of consciousness. If you’re at a very low level of consciousness, you just won’t hear them, they will go past you. Whatever they are, these connections, this intuition, you will just not be receptive to it. You have to be very in-tune with your heart, very conscious to hear your heart, to hear what it’s saying. And the more conscious you get, the more you’ll hear them, the more you’ll hear. And if we talk in terms of Corey’s example with the higher being, that means the more you’ll hear these signs, these indications that your higher self is sending to you because they can see much more and they are trying to help you through life and you will hear that more.

And another example is consciousness. When you’re operating at a higher level of consciousness and you’re in-tune with your heart, sometimes you will come across decisions where something makes logical sense to make a certain decision, but you just know that it doesn’t feel right or you know something else feels right. You just know and that’s it. And that is because you can sense much more in that state of being. I’ve been having that more and more over the past year, and I’ve been listening to that. I’ve been listening. And again, this ties in with the connections we talked about, the intuition we talked about in five, but it’s not just that, it’s something more than that. You know that this makes sense, like, “Logically, I should probably do this,” but then you’re like, “No, I won’t. I have a feeling. I just know somehow deep down, I know that I should do this other thing.” And you go do that and eventually it turns out right. Or, by the way, it could turn out wrong. It could turn out that you suffer pain because of that, but it doesn’t mean that you should stop trusting your feeling from there. No, it just means that right now that pain is necessary. That means that maybe two or three or five years from now you will understand why that pain was necessary. But you don’t now. Life is interesting like that. You needed to go through that experience in order for something else to happen.

I think we’ve all had situations like that where you had an injury or a very painful breakup or something happened or you missed the flight or something, a painful experience, but that led to something good in the end. And there’s no way you could have known in advance that that was going to happen, but looking back, you can see that one would not have been possible without the other. Anyway, so that’s consciousness. We could talk about consciousness for hours and hours and hours and hours, but we’re not going to. That blog post by Tim Urban is great about that, and also of course, “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle is a great source of information about consciousness as well.

Okay, finally, number seven. This one is called “Independent happiness.” Remember we spoke about the six needs at the very start, in number one? Well, according to Tony Robbins, when he talked about relationships on Day 3, I won’t go into lots of detail here, in fact, I won’t even give all of the sides of what he said. I’m just going to talk to what resonated with me. Being a man, this is what my take away was. In a relationship, a man needs to be needed by a woman—and this is of course a man-woman relationship, that’s what I’m talking about. So, a man needs to be needed by a woman; otherwise he sees no purpose and he’ll be unhappy. So basically, in order to be happy in a relationship, the man needs to feel that his girlfriend or his wife, she needs him in order for him to feel a purpose, to feel happy, to be fulfilled in the relationship. That’s a requirement.

And at the time at the Tony Robbins event, I believed that because it’s really hard not to believe Tony Robbins. I think he’s been doing it for like 30-something years or 37 years of these events and he’s put in a lot of thought, practice, research into all these things that he says. That resonated with me. But now, looking back – this was in May, now it’s December – throughout these months I’ve learned other things as well. Now I can say that this is one of the few things, but important things or aspects where I disagree with Tony Robbins. Of course, it doesn’t mean you’ve got to believe one or the other. I don’t have that reputation or weight behind what I’m saying.

Yeah, I don’t have that reputation and that experience to say what’s right or wrong, but for myself, and this is not for the world, but for myself I disagree with Tony on this one thing in this specific case. Again, this is my perspective, for me. He also talks about what a woman needs in a relationship and so on. I’m not going to comment on that because I don’t really remember what he said. I just remember this part because it resonated with me and I really thought that that was something that I was going to look for, I guess, or be aware of, but then there were a couple things I learned along the way that now I disagree with that. And so, basically, why I have had to rethink my understanding of this concept is because, as I mentioned, I met quite a lot of people in this year who are very interesting in the sense of consciousness or in the sense of how they are being present and things like that.

And two of the people I met were a very highly conscious couple, their names are Mitja and Ivana. It was incredible seeing them together. It’s just like two people who radiate so much positivity and so much happiness and energy and life. You look into their eyes and you can see they’re absolutely open. You know how you sometimes meet these people who you instantly want to be friends with, you instantly want to be around, you can feel there’s no ego or there’s like zero ego, they have only the best intentions, they have no second agendas, they have no other thoughts, they will always tell you whatever it is as it is, and they always be completely sincere with you?

I met two people like that. They are together and it’s just incredible being around them. So, what they said is that it is not right to expect someone else to fulfil your needs or to make you happy. A quote from Mitja is, “Stop expecting and fulfilling your needs from the other person.” You need to learn how to do that on your own. And then, once you know how to be happy on your own internally, then that is from where you take it into a relationship.

And when I say “being happy on your own,” I used to confuse this quite a lot myself. I thought, “Do you need to go and be able to live in a cabin in Alaska by yourself for like six months and be happy?” For some people that might mean that, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be by yourself. You can still interact, you can still socialize, you can still have a relationship, you can still have all those things. But you need to be sure that your happiness comes from within you. An interesting thing is that in his book “The Power of Now,” Eckhart Tolle identifies three key states of being or emotions, three emotions, three core emotions that constitute happiness basically.

And these are interesting emotions because these are the only three emotions that don’t have opposites. Let’s talk about them. So, we’ve got three emotions, they are love, joy and peace. Any other emotion that you can think of, it will always have an opposite, For example: pain – you got pleasure; pleasure – you have pain. Let’s see, what else? Happy-unhappy. Hot-cold. I guess these are the easiest examples. And even in the case of love, he is not talking about the love that you feel for another person or from another person. That type of love does have an opposite – misery, for example, or loneliness or hate. Inevitably, emotions that do have their opposites, they will turn into their opposites at some point. So, for instance, if you have love for or with another person, if that person were to leave you, you will feel hate or you will feel misery or whatever because that person left you. Or if that person never leaves you, then maybe that love will go away and then you will feel bad. Or maybe if that love doesn’t go away, something else can happen. Those emotions are always conditional on something happening or not happening, keeping those emotions.

Whereas the love that you find inside yourself in your heart just by observing a tree or a leaf falling off a tree – remember we talked about being present and being conscious – that love that you can feel inside yourself that’s just always there, that doesn’t have an opposite. And so once you find that, no one can take that away from you. Same for joy. There is no opposite to joy, that true joy that you feel inside, just the joy of being alive, the joy of being here. There is no opposite, no one can take away that from you. And peace, same thing. Once you find that inner peace, that stillness, again, there is nothing that can take that away from you. So you need to find these three emotions inside yourself and learn how to be in those states.

Eckhart Tolle, for example, once he realized how to do that, he sat on a park bench for two years—not in a row, you know, obviously he went to sleep somewhere, but he was sitting on a park bench for two years and just feeling love, joy, and peace. It’s not to say that that should be all your life, but imagine if you can feel love, peace and joy inside you at any point in time regardless of other people and circumstances and whatever is happening around you. That is incredible.

So basically, Mitja told me that you have to find your happiness inside you and then take that into a relationship. One way of practicing this is you just be in silence and intentionally be bored, which we all hate. We always want our brains to work on something, our brains always want food for thought and so on. But if you just get rid of that and you just be in silence and be bored intentionally, and then you learn how in that silence, in the observation of things around you, to find that love, joy and peace inside yourself and then you take it into a relationship.

So three tips that he gave me were, number one, make space inside yourself. For depth, you need space, and deep connection and even a deep conversation, for deep love, for depth of interactions, you need space. And by “space,” what he means is, don’t let your brain always occupy your life, don’t let it always be churning away and trying to come up with problems to solve or things to worry about or go check Facebook or check your e-mail or check Slack or check messages or send messages or look at photos or go onto one of those .gif websites where there’s things to do. Just don’t let your brain take over your life and just always try to do something. Sometimes just be empty, make space inside yourself, and then you’ll be able to lend that space to other people and let them into that space and that is how you actually will connect. Learn to just have the space and cherish it when you have it, when you have those moments. And slowly but surely, grow that time. So maybe it’s at the start 10 minutes a day, and then 20 and 30 and then one hour, then two, then three, then five hours a day. That is where you find love, joy and peace, not on Facebook, not on Instagram.

Number two, get rid of attachments. The less attachments you have – it might be attachments to things, attachments to people – again, attachments mean you want something from someone or something from something. You can be with someone, you can be in a relationship, you can be in a friendship or interact with other people, but not in an attached way, not in a way that you need them for something, that something will be missing from your life without them. Your life should be full from just who you are from within. And as you can see, that’s where it’s kind of different to the Tony Robbins philosophy of one person fulfilling the other.

So, the way to think about it, the Tony Robbins philosophy comes as an add-on to this, it’s good to have. Like, if you’re happy inside and then you find someone who meets six out of six of your needs, that’s amazing, that’s a bonus. But if you don’t, you’re still happy on the inside. You know, that’s the way to think. Whereas the Tony Robbins philosophy on its own, it’s like you need someone who will meet your six needs to be happy, you need to be in a loving fulfilling relationship. Whereas here, that comes second. First is your internal love, joy and peace, you find them and then you move on to growing that into a relationship. And imagine how much stronger a relationship can be when both people bring that, when both people are, as I called it, independently happy.

And finally, number three from Mitja is, minimize your expectations. Don’t have expectations from other people, just accept them for who they are and how they are. In Tony Robbins’ terms, and this actually aligns with Tony Robbins, it’s turn your expectation into appreciation. Yeah, I think that’s pretty self-explanatory. That we should have as little expectation as possible. And because we already have ideally the love, joy and peace from inside our hearts, then you won’t need somebody to check off some boxes that you have, some expectation that you will have for them. You won’t really need those expectations because you’ll be just happy to accept that person however they are because you are already fulfilled internally.

So there we go, that was independent happiness, pretty cool concept. I know a few people who I can say that they’ve achieved this state of independent happiness. I think everybody has something to work on. There’s always some room to grow, maybe in these aspects that I’ve mentioned or maybe some other aspects, but individually in certain areas like, for instance, in independent happiness, I have met a few people who I can see that they’re happy, they’re fulfilled, you know, some of them have found that love, joy and peace even inside themselves. And that’s it. And from there, whatever happens externally is something they just accept and it doesn’t really bother them or it’s something that just makes their life even better.

Okay, so that was the seventh point, independent happiness, and here we are. Two hours later we are at the conclusion. And by the way, if you sat through the two hours, congratulations. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. I hope this has been valuable to you.

So let’s recap on the seven points. I’m just going to read out the titles. I will read out the titles and a quick summary. Six needs, we talked about certainty, uncertainty, significance, love and connection, growth and contribution, and we learned that whatever is at the top will govern your life. So, yeah, it’s important to make sure that the blueprint that is governing your life is one that you want, not the one that was put into you by others while you were growing up or by society, your family, your peers and so on. Also, we talked about how six needs work in relationships, and that the more needs you actually want to crazily meet for the other person, the more addicted they will be to you and vice versa.

Number two, we talked about guilt and victim, and here we discussed how some people, even ourselves at times, will drop into the victim mode or the victim role. So, if you’re interacting with a person who drops into the victim mode, you will feel extremely guilty, it will be a very heavy feeling. I kind of mentioned that it is possible—I wouldn’t say we learned how to, it’s not a tutorial, but you can see how I switched into tutorial mode there. 

(Laughs)

I mentioned that I think it’s possible to recognize these things, and if you can, that’s great. Try to help the other person if they’re willing to accept that help. If not, then maybe it’s better sometimes to love that person from afar. And also we talked about not letting ourselves drop into the victim mode in order to make other people feel guilty. It’s very hard to do that because victim is such a strong emotion, such a strong state, so be careful of that and hopefully you’ll be able to recognize that more and prevent yourself from dropping into that low consciousness state of victim.

Number three, being present. We talked about how we shouldn’t use the present moment as a means to an end to get into the future or we shouldn’t spend our time in the present just worrying or reminiscing or being proud of the past all the time. Live this moment now. Happiness is here now. We only have the now. I’m starting to talk like Eckhart Tolle. That’s exactly how he talks or that’s how the book is written, “We only have the now. You always only have the now.” But it does have a very powerful meaning to it that you don’t want to miss out on life. You don’t want to just live in dreams about the future or in fears about the future or in memories of the past. Now is here now – use it! Make the most of it.

Number four, trusting life. Life has its own intricate ways of getting you where you don’t even know that you need to go yet. And while hard work is important, don’t try to always brute force your way through life. Sometimes give the control back to life, let life take you. Of course, make your own corrections and make your input, but also trust that life will take you where you need to go. And if something you want is meant to happen it will happen. Just let it be. Let it be so.

Number five, connections exist. Here is where we talked about how we connect to other people or our souls connect to other people’s souls and how we’ve all experienced that through when you want to text someone and then you pick up your phone and they text you like that instant. I’ve actually recently had a case where I was just doing my work and my phone was behind me and was on silent and I was like, “That person just texted me.” And I turn around and I look at it and it’s like one minute ago, that person texted me. How crazy is that! So we talked about, that these connections exist and there’s no concrete conclusion from that on action, but for me—as I mentioned, I’m also recording this for myself as much as for anyone else who wants to listen to it—for me it’s just kind of a conscious decision or a conscious acknowledgement that these connections exist and that I will look out for them, welcome them into my life and be aware of them and see what they turn into. And these connections can be with anyone. You don’t know, it can be any person that you meet. It doesn’t have to be somebody you have a relationship with. It could be a friend, it could be some associate or acquaintance or it could be someone you don’t even know but you feel a connection. And so I think it’s important to look out for them.

Number six was consciousness and there we talked about the two different definitions of the same thing: one through what that person on the plane gave me, the higher self, the higher being and also what Eckhart Tolle talks about, or the other definition, the more logical definition through the ant, the monkey and the human that Tim Urban provides. In any case, we talked about that on the human level we have different levels of consciousness that we can move around through depending on how we feel, how much we are in control of our minds, of ourselves. And that can affect how in-tune we are with the subtle clues that life is giving us or that our higher selves are giving us. And also it can mean what meaning we give to things and how we understand things and how we interact with other people. For instance, if someone’s rude to us, do we be rude back to them, do we drop into a very low consciousness mode of victim or do we understand them and try to maybe help them or try to just appreciate what they might be going through and leave it at that? Or maybe even take the next step and be grateful because whatever that’s supposed to have done for us, one day maybe we’ll learn from that or maybe that somehow has some meaning for us that we don’t yet understand. Personally, I want to as much as I can be in a higher level of consciousness and keep growing in that direction.

And number seven, independent happiness, and we talked about finding the love, joy and peace inside yourself, inside your heart, and not expecting other people to make you happy or one other person or many other people to make you happy. Find that happiness inside yourself and then bring it into your relationships, whether those are intimate relationships or relationships with friends and families and other people. And it’s much more powerful that way than expecting something from other people. Rather finding it inside yourself and then bringing that and just giving that to other people in your life and making their lives much more beautiful and in turn your life will also be beautiful from that.

So there we go. That brings us to the end of this first episode with just me without a guest. I hope you enjoyed this. Let me know your thoughts. I’d love to hear your thoughts, you can leave them in the comments on the page on SuperDataScience or you can leave the comments on SoundCloud. You can always e-mail your thoughts if it’s something lengthy, something long that won’t fit in the comments, you can e-mail it to podcast@SuperDataScience.com. I would love to hear what you thought of this.

Also, I would love to know what is your reflection? So that was my reflection on 2017, on the things that I learned personally, on my personal growth. This took quite a while to put together, but at the same time I think it was very important for me to do that because while I was doing it I understood some of these things even better for myself, but also we tend to forget. More things will come up and I’m sure there will be other learnings and then I might not remember some of these things as clearly a year from now, but now that I have it in audio form I can always listen back to it and remember what I learned and hopefully it will help me one day. And hopefully it has helped you. But the question I had was, what is your reflection? So this was my reflection for 2017. What would your reflection be? Even if it’s not as lengthy, but in a short couple of sentences, what would be your most important reflection over 2017? If you cannot say from the top of your head, then maybe spend some time on it. Spend half an hour, an hour, two hours just thinking about it and looking back over your year. After all, it was a whole year of your life. I think it deserves a reflection.

And on that note, thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed sharing this with you. These two hours flew by so quickly. I barely noticed how that went past. And yeah, I hope that this was helpful or maybe insightful in some sort of way. And on that note, I would like to wish you a Happy 2018 and Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and any other holidays that you might be celebrating.

There will always be ups and downs in a year, but I hope there were more ups than downs and I hope that whatever downs there were, that you learned from them something valuable for yourself and that you’re going to carry that with you into 2018 and onwards. And I wish for 2018 to be a great year for you to accomplish all your goals, to really crush it in every respect, to be healthy, to be wise, to be safe, to be happy and to find whatever you’re looking for. And on that note, thank you so much for being here once again. I look forward to seeing you next time. And until then, happy analysing.