How to Make Decisions from Confidence and Strength in Any Situation

AVAlexander Volchek

It's a state from which you can go on to make the right decisions. You'll start moving forward tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. It's a social failure, an incredible social failure happening in the world. People think what matters is knowing the exact answer. You can see this very clearly. Parents know what it's like when their child's temperature rises to thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty degrees Celsius. You give them medicine at thirty-nine, and it doesn't work. At that moment you're thinking, “What do I do?” Even when you recognize that you're feeling sadness, apathy, and anger right now, you still have a point within you where you're confident, where you're strong. Hello, everyone! My name is Alexander Volchek, and today we'll talk about the state of observation—the most important human skill in the twenty-first century, the skill that leads to genuine growth and development. It makes life rich, full of incredible colors and interesting events, and allows you to truly live it. Subscribe to my channel. I have a great deal about human growth, genuine, true development, and personal development in every area, including professional life and business. I didn't emphasize at the very beginning that this is the main human skill of the twenty-first century for nothing. Being in a state of observation means understanding the cause-and-effect relationships at work, not simply recognizing patterns in different events, but knowing how those events will unfold.

That gives you a genuine ability to make the right decisions here and now in your own life. It's very important that only you personally can make the right decision in your own life, because taking a particular road can be a tremendous benefit for one person, while the very same road can mean enormous harm and death for another. Great losses, misconceptions. Completely the wrong path, completely the wrong path. Being in a state of observation enables you as a person—you personally, in your own life, in the city where you live, given who you are and what your name is—to make the right decisions for your growth. So what is observation? Today the important thing isn't simply to discuss the fact that observation exists, but to understand how to live with it, how to work with it, and to discover real steps you can take to be in that state. We'll certainly explore that during this video. To offer something of a definition: suppose someone perceives something from the outside, but remains personally involved in that event and evaluates it personally. For example, I'm recording this video, and I'm looking at myself, observing myself and my pattern of behavior, but still tying it to how I feel inside.

If I proceed and act from my own emotions, my own desires, and my own expectations, then that's partial observation. It isn't observation. If I perceive the whole situation unfolding during this recording independently of my emotions, as though I were perceiving a completely different person—not Alexander Volchek sitting there, but an entirely different person—then I can really enter a state of sound, genuine evaluation, of genuine judgment. That will be real observation, the kind of observation from which I, Sasha Volchek, can then make the right decisions, even about this video. Someone asks me a question: “I'm already in a state of observation, and I can see myself harming another person, treating them badly. We're having a discussion, and it turns into an argument. I remember that I need to be in a state of observation, and I observe myself while continuing to hurt the other person, say unkind things, and act from my lack of awareness, my pride, my ego. But I'm already observing, and I'm still doing bad things. So what really matters isn't being in a state of observation, but making sure I don't do bad things.”

At that point I always say that you aren't in a state of observation. If you're causing someone pain, bringing them a sense of loss and horror, and you can see and recognize that, then your perception of the moment is partial. It's partial; it's one of the phases. Of course it's a great step that you've told yourself you can at least observe it, and that you acknowledge it. You report it, write about it to me or to yourself. But the very fact that you keep doing it shows that you aren't in a state of observation and awareness. I haven't chosen this example at random. It may seem theoretical, a little dry. I'm offering it so that we can come to a shared, genuine understanding of what this state of broad, true perception is. Who is a genuine observer? There's a great deal of confusion about it. What's more, people exploit the subject by saying that what matters isn't observing but acting. Being in a state of observation doesn't mean being inactive. It's a state from which you can go on to make the right decisions.

Because simply doing things, simply taking actions without perception—mechanically, like a robot—isn't life. It isn't freedom. And I guarantee that you've spent most of your life taking exactly that kind of action, in states where you were completely robotic, without sensing or understanding what was really happening. I'm talking about actions that exist within a state where you perceive the real world, other people, the space around you, and of course yourself. You truly see yourself, feel yourself, and understand what follows from what: the causes of a particular state or a particular mood. Someone wakes up in the morning feeling bad, and people start telling them, “You probably feel bad because you ate late last night, or ate early, because it's been a long time since you ate, or you ate too little. Your mattress or blanket is bad. Maybe certain actions you've been taking over the past few months are bringing you into greater and greater disharmony.” So what is the cause? Our fundamental task, always, at every moment, is to remain in a state of genuine analysis and perception across that whole range, and to know: do I really know the cause, or don't I?

The task isn't to truly know the causes. The task is to be in a state of observing and perceiving this. Again, people very often think—especially in the twenty-first century, especially now—and this is an incredible social failure happening everywhere in the world. They think what matters is knowing the exact answer, rather than asking themselves the question, “Do I actually understand the causes and effects?” That's why we're caught in utopian thinking when it comes to the global economy, politics, our social environment, and human relationships. We're caught in an enormous number of conflicts and problems. That's especially visible right now. So observation doesn't simply come first; it comes before even understanding the right actions. When I say that a state of observation enables you to take the right actions, that's a consequence of it. But the goal, the important goal, isn't correct action. The most important goal from the outset is to be in a state of observation, because observation is a genuine understanding of yourself and a genuine understanding of life. Observation is a genuine study of life. It's when I say to the world that I really understand that the most important thing I can do in this life is study myself, come to know myself, perceive myself, perceive other people and the space around me, come to know life and perceive life.

What matters isn't how I live my life or which events happen in it, but the fact that I want to understand it. At this point someone's head might explode. They might want to turn off the video, stop listening altogether, and say, “Wait a second. The end goal still matters to me.” Even if those events and actions themselves matter to you, even if they're your first priority right now—I'm not taking that away from you—at least look at the right structure of it all. To take the right actions, be in a state of observation. If you simply desire observation itself, observation without wanting a result from it, you'll start moving forward tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. It's a completely different path. After hearing about observation, people generally come to a point where they say, “I'm already observing. I'm observing, but look, bad things are still happening to me.” For some reason, people skip over the phase itself, the process itself, and the fact that they can't enter a state in which they're observing all the time. Being in a state of observation isn't constant. There is no state you can reach where you're one hundred percent an observer. It doesn't exist.

If you say you're observing, that you're in a phase of one hundred percent observation, that you know how to do it and keep track of yourself, that all this is just philosophy and psychology, that you don't need it, and so on…

Then you're essentially admitting that your development is complete, because you're one hundred percent aware. Being one hundred percent aware in your perception of the world means you're fully developed, one hundred percent. Completely. That's it. By any description, essentially, you aren't merely a divine being; you're in the state of a god, at an absolute extreme, an absolute, total extreme. The important thing is that at that moment you're clearly telling yourself you've stopped developing. And your internal ego system, your ego structure, your ego computer, wants to do that. It wants to do that all the time. It says, “I'm already observing.” Then it says, “Actually, I want to reach certain targets.” There's a break in the system. The very understanding that observation is endless gives you a very firm sense that you really, truly need to remain in a state of development. I'm not talking about observation in the social sense, where people say, “You need to watch yourself, track parameters, calculate metrics, constantly take courses and read books.” That isn't what I mean at all. Observation has nothing to do with how many books you read. Observation has nothing to do with how many people you talk to.

Someone will say you constantly need a new social circle, new people. It has nothing to do with that at all. Observation has nothing to do with the number of spaces or places you visit. Observation has nothing to do with where you live. Let's look at a very good example from something that happened to me recently: what the state of observation actually is and how important that state itself is. I always encourage it. Even if you're in a difficult situation right now and can concentrate, there can always be situations in which concentrating and remaining in a state of perception becomes very hard. Usually these involve difficult aspects of major losses. For example, you've been robbed, someone close to you has died, or something very serious has happened to your health or your body—your arm has been torn off, for instance. Very difficult things. At those moments it's extremely hard to bring yourself into the state of a genuine observer. Why? Because your personal self becomes deeply involved, and you perceive things emotionally. Recently something happened to me. I was working through some information on my YouTube channels and deleted an old channel of mine that had nothing on it. It was simply an account I'd created.

At the moment I deleted it, two of my main, large channels were erased. This channel, the one you're watching, with more than sixty videos on it, was erased. The channel where we make a technology podcast about insights and news from Silicon Valley was erased. It had thirty-five videos; we'd been recording a podcast once a week. All my videos were deleted. At that moment I knew deleted videos couldn't be restored, because while I was deleting the channel it had repeatedly asked me to confirm. You go through a complicated confirmation process. I'd also recently watched what happened when another person deleted videos like that. I contacted technical support. Emotionally, of course, I felt an absolutely insane amount of anxiety, incredible anxiety. It was a big, enormous loss. For an hour and a half, the support agent kept writing that I'd deleted those channels myself. I kept saying, “No, I only deleted one channel.” The reply was, “No, you accidentally deleted the other channels too. People usually do that without noticing.” The suggestion was, “It's no big deal. Just upload the videos again.”

It's astonishing to hear that from a YouTube employee, because it's an enormous amount of work, a huge, simply incredible amount. It isn't even about how much money or time you've spent. It's the moment when you lose hope. It's the moment when you lose the ground beneath your feet, because you know you've been working at this, doing it for a long time, for more than a year. I knew I had plans ahead of me, a reason for doing this over time. Those plans didn't extend just six months ahead. That's very important. When something difficult happens, people often lose their plans for, say, the next six months. My plans extended ten-plus years into the future. Why is it so hard to lose someone close to you? A person isn't distressed because the other person died, left life, and is no longer living it. They're distressed because they'll never see that person again, because they had plans to be together in the future. They hadn't allowed for the fact that life is finite and that everything will end in any case. Despite all my plans for the next ten years, I knew it would end eventually.

Everything always comes to an end in death. When I fell into that state, there was an incredible explosion of different emotions. But the one thing I knew I had to do was look at it without bias, without being guided by my personal state. Even though my mind and body, my personal state, were throwing everything at me. They told me to cry, to worry, to scream, to agree that there was a great deal of good in it and a great deal of bad. But I kept observing it as independently as I possibly could, as if I were dealing with another person who had told me about it and I were offering them advice or recommendations. I tried to be as aware as possible. I looked at the whole situation broadly, constantly broadly, and kept that broad view under control. The more I tried to keep it under broad control, the more uncontrollable the situation became, because the range of possibilities kept expanding. After an hour and a half, one of the female support agents I was still corresponding with again told me that I'd deleted everything myself. I kept telling her that I hadn't done that. “Please check with your technical support team. I wasn't the one who did this.”

She said, “Oh, you know, you have a brand channel. Here's a link. You can restore your video.” I clicked the link, pressed a button, and all my channels came back. Before that, they'd disappeared from everything: YouTube search, the results, everywhere, from the website. All the videos were gone from everywhere. And then, just like that, they were restored! Someone recently left me a comment and a question. I like it when people looking in from outside write, “Well, you assessed the cause of the event, didn't you?” I'd been talking about an event. “What did you need it for? You looked at why you needed it, didn't you?” And there's always this impulse to say, “But surely this event didn't happen for nothing. Why did you need it, Alexander?” I'm now telling you why I needed that event. It doesn't matter why I needed it. It doesn't matter what I did afterward. It doesn't matter what I did. It doesn't matter that the YouTube channel was restored. What matters is how I remained in a state of observation. Honing that ability, mastering the state of being that kind of observer, allows you to live through the most difficult moments. Outside those difficult moments, in life's ordinary, simplest everyday situations, it allows you to make the best possible decisions, act with incredible strength, and act in truth—very importantly, in truth—not like a robot.

To act from a state of freedom. Someone will say that acting like a robot matters too, because it often produces results. But the question is different: do you want your life to be about results? Or do you want it to be full, harmonious, and stable, with a sense of strength and confidence inside you? Even when you recognize that you're feeling sadness, apathy, and anger right now, you still have a point within you where you're confident, where you're strong. You can see this very clearly. Parents know what it's like when their child's temperature rises to thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty degrees Celsius. You give them medicine at thirty-nine, then another medicine at forty. You know it's supposedly all right to do that, but the situation is already critical, and it isn't working. At that moment you're thinking, “What do I do?” At that moment, what matters most isn't bringing down the fever or giving yet another medicine. The most important thing is making the right decision. And the right decision can only come from a state of strength and firmness, where you can perceive everything without personal or emotional involvement, because we can't change our psychophysical makeup. If you're alone, the anxiety increases a thousandfold. If you aren't alone, it also increases a thousandfold, because the other people begin to fall into even greater stress.

That emotional anxiety winds you up even more. And the child can't cope with it. The child isn't thinking, “All right, Mom has taken a breath, Dad has taken a breath. Everyone has completely calmed down. Nothing terrible is happening. My temperature is forty degrees Celsius. Let's look at all the factors and aspects of what needs to be done.” So you've given several medicines. You need to know, “If my temperature doesn't come down within an hour, I'll most likely need some kind of injection. We'll most likely need to call an ambulance. If it does come down, we won't.” These things happen. These moments pass. What can you do right now? Can you get to emergency care yourself, or do you need to call somewhere and have someone come? Where is it? Where are you? Do you have access to it or not? Will the doctors definitely be able to help, or won't they? Do you need to call someone? What, specifically, do you need to do? Once the situation is over, I need to study it. Next time I need to know how to handle it, how to deal with it. Do I need extra medicines at home? What do I need to do and know? Is this paranoia, or is it the state of an observer? Is it more important to take courses and study all these aspects and situations? Then you'd have to become an extraordinarily capable doctor, an intensive care specialist, a pediatrician, and probably every other kind of doctor too.

To cover every possible case—or to be in a state of observation so that you can make sound decisions? The more you observe different situations throughout your day, the more you'll be in a state of observation, and then spend even more time in that state. That's what will bring a genuine impetus into your life, a foundation for your own transformation and development. That's what leads to genuine growth in scale. There's nothing beyond observation, because observation has no end. It's…

…no end. This is your freedom; this is the movement toward your freedom. It's an incredible task you can set yourself for your entire life. It's no surprise that there's something you can do your whole life. You'll never find yourself saying you did this wrong. “I spent a lot of time on my business and didn't give time to my children. That was wrong. I thought a lot about how to earn money, when I should have been looking after my health. That was wrong. I looked after nothing but my health and ignored my own relationships with other people. That was wrong.” People are constantly coming to a point where they judge that something was wrong. You'll never be able to tell yourself you observed something and shouldn't have done it. Never. Try entering a state of observation right now. Today, as you're watching this video, look at the things you hear, the insights that come to you, the moments that arise in your body, around you, everywhere. What do you feel in response to them? What are they? Are you really in a state of observation as you listen to or watch this video? Or are you making evaluative judgments, choosing, wanting to choose what's good and what's bad?

That isn't observation. We'll be sure to attach it to this video: Rudolf Steiner has a very good observation practice. There's a video where I describe that practice, among other things, in detail. What you can do throughout your days and weeks to expand your state of observation. Keep track of it. There are many different things: how I perceived other people, what thoughts came to me, what actions I took, what exactly I observed. Watch it. It's very interesting, an amazing thing. These are the things that move people, that move you, toward genuine freedom, true freedom, and true development. In V100, by the way, my group, the key aspect I build and base everything on is for a person to remain in observation continually, through different phases, aspects, and checks; through business and professional development, relationships with people, partnerships, family relationships with children, health, personal development, and the things you do in life. In other words, through the whole of life.