The Challenge of Modern Goal Setting

• 00:04 Setting life goals for yourself in the 2020s and
• 00:08 beyond is very different from setting life goals for
• 00:12 yourself any other time in the last 200,000 years of human existence.
• 00:19 Let's face it, for most of human existence, life was about scarcity.
• 00:24 There wasn't enough food to eat, you're likely to starve to death.
• 00:28 There was very little entertainment,
• 00:31 if you had even one book in your home, you were considered lucky.
• 00:35 You couldn't really buy that much stuff, you could make a chair for
• 00:40 your house, you'd have a small log cabin.
• 00:44 But for most of human history life was about scarcity,
• 00:48 not enough food, not enough shelter, entertainment was a luxury.
• 00:54 Content, books, things to enrich your mind,
• 00:57 those were things not even contemplated by most humans throughout history.
• 01:04 Things started getting a lot better after the Enlightenment.
• 01:08 More and more people around the world did have enough food, although,
• 01:13 to this day, there's still starvation and
• 01:15 scarcity among the bottom billion people in terms of their revenues.
• 01:21 But things were getting a lot better for the last hundred,
• 01:24 couple of hundred years since the Enlightenment.
• 01:28 But things have changed drastically in the last 20 years, 15 years in particular.
• 01:34 So much of it is because the Internet and beyond the Internet,
• 01:38 coupled with this thing, the cell phone.
• 01:42 We are now living in an era of overabundance.
• 01:46 Throughout most of human history,
• 01:49 to be poor was to suffer malnourishment and often starvation.
• 01:54 These days in certainly developed western countries,
• 01:59 the biggest problem if you are the lower income bracket is, frankly, obesity.
• 02:06 This is not a problem that has ever been a part of humanity until recently.
• 02:11 So it's never been easier to grow and purchase inexpensive food,
• 02:17 we have an overabundance of cheap food that is filling our bodies with sugar,
• 02:22 carbohydrates, fat, salt, things that are destroying our health.
• 02:29 It's never been easier to go on Amazon and
• 02:32 fill your house with plastic, and gizmos, and gadgets, and clothes,
• 02:37 and bicycles, and things that just have you overwhelmed with stuff,
• 02:42 consumer possessions to show people your social status.
• 02:48 And, of course, it's never been easier to consume videos,
• 02:52 movies, entertainment, video games, social media content.
• 02:59 We've gone from a world where most people had free time all day long when they
• 03:04 weren't working on a field, and maybe they had one book to read at home, to now
• 03:09 most people with an Internet connection have a million books at their fingertips.
• 03:16 And millions, and millions, and millions of videos, movies, online content.
• 03:22 It is absolutely overwhelming.
• 03:24 So now the biggest problem for most people if you're wealthy enough
• 03:30 to afford access to a computer or phone and internet to watch this show,
• 03:35 then chances are you're wealthy enough to have the issue of too much food,
• 03:41 too many possessions, too much stuff and
• 03:45 too much content entertainment trying to get attention with your brain.
• 03:50 So that is the landscape we are in right now, and we've got to realize that,
• 03:56 so the strategies have to be completely different.
• 04:00 If you want to take control over the goals for your life,
• 04:04 if you actually want to set the goals for your life, you've got to figure out
• 04:09 a way of stopping and dealing with, and organizing this overabundance.
• 04:15 And that's what we're going to work on in this course,
• 04:19 because until you deal with this fire hose of ideas, content,
• 04:24 videos, messages, jokes, entertainment, cheap food,
• 04:29 anything in the world brought to your home from Amazon with one click.
• 04:34 Until you deal with that, you're never going to be able
• 04:39 to deal with your own goals for your own life.

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