How to Reach a New Level in Life

AVAlexander Volchek

The best state a person can be in for their development, for genuinely expanding who they are—when they live a full, harmonious life, can consistently make the right decisions and act from their own motives, when they live in freedom, when you personally are in a state of freedom—is a state of not knowing. Today we'll explore what that state is. It's important not only for making the right decisions, but for keeping your life in balance: the balance of genuine growth and development. “First we'll get all the practical aspects of our life in order, get our own apartment, earn a little more, and then we'll focus on children.” Very often, people feel that what happened before was a problem, that something back then wasn't good, but that everything ahead will definitely be good. We live in an endless succession of conflicts, arguments, illusions, fear, and doubt. You have the opportunity—you personally—to begin moving differently. Everyone wants to know what will happen ahead and wants to make the right decisions. Essentially, people think that making the right decisions is the opposite of being in a state of not knowing.

Because if I know what I'll do right now, I know what will happen in the future. Someone I know used to say, “I'll earn a million dollars and move to Thailand.” Someone else says, “First we'll get all the practical aspects of our life in order, get our own apartment, earn a little more, and then we'll focus on having children.” Someone says, “I'll spend a certain part of my life in this job that I can't stand, and then I'll make a choice. I'll choose what I really want to do, something that fits my overall strategy. I'll definitely make that choice. I understand that this is exactly how it's going to happen.” Someone says, “I'll start at the very bottom now, but later I'll definitely make a lot of money. To get a good job, you absolutely must have a good education. To get a good education, you absolutely must suffer as a child.” People have an endless number of conclusions like these. They call it a state of knowing. Essentially, they want to be a prophet, to live in a world where they predict absolutely every event and see the future. I'm talking about the mystical aspect of this—a state they're not actually in.

On the other hand, people are absolutely, categorically convinced about what they do every day, because they themselves make those decisions every day. Whatever anyone says about not making those decisions themselves, they do make them themselves. The reasons behind those decisions are a separate subject to examine. I often explore these subjects here on the channel, and of course I devote a lot of attention to them in my V100 program. Let's do something right now: write in the comments. Comments are always needed to help the channel grow, it seems, but I want to see something about the people watching. Are you in a state of complete knowing, where you know everything that's going to happen, or do you live in a state of not knowing? Do it now, by the way. Just write it down. It'll be interesting to see how your understanding changes as you go through the video. Right now, your understanding of the state of not knowing that I mentioned at the beginning is abstract. It's not what I'm going to describe. So if you've already made it this far, there's definitely a reason to watch to the end. On one hand, people want the mystical gift of prophecy, the ability to prophesy and see what happens.

They know they don't have it now. On the other hand, they make decisions as if to say, “I'm already a prophet. I know it will be exactly this way. I know this is right, this is good. I've heard it everywhere, read it in books, been to training courses. They told me at school. I dreamed it myself—I had the right dream. I read it. A psychotherapist told me. My parents taught me this. My wife or husband tells me this. I've seen famous people do it. I saw someone for whom it worked out that way.” People have completely programmed into themselves the feeling that they understand what will happen. Very often, they feel that what happened before was a problem, that something back then wasn't good, but that everything ahead will definitely be good. What I'm doing now is leading to what's going to happen ahead. There's tremendous confusion here. Listen to a lot of people, look at them, and look at yourself. Where have you said, “I used to live this way, but now I live that way, so my state has changed now”?

For many people, though, that doesn't happen. Someone says, “I used to be poor, but look at me now—I earn a lot of money.” Or, “I used to be unhappy. Look, I'm happy now.” What are they comparing that happiness with? Are they really comparing it with the happiness they had ten years ago, or not? I know other people who, after getting into a difficult situation, say, “I used to think money was happiness. Now money isn't happiness. I used to think happiness meant having a big circle of acquaintances. Now I understand that isn't happiness; I need to spend some time alone.” People draw completely different conclusions. What's important is to look at yourself: what state are you in when you make decisions? Are you living in an illusion, wanting to know more and have a real mystical insight? At the same time, do you feel that the decisions you make are guaranteed to be right? Some people watching this video will probably recognize that they're always insecure, always living in an illusion. But people who are usually deeply insecure feel it. They feel it very acutely.

So they'll agree with that. For the most part, when they make a decision, they're sure it needs to be made right now, because they aren't deciding from a state of broad perception. They aren't deciding from freedom, stillness, or a good emotional state. They're insecure all the time, and that insecurity creates an imbalance, an absolute imbalance in their decision-making. Yet these people really are sure they're doing the right things. It's surprising, isn't it? Surprising, although you can state it quite plainly. If you consider yourself an insecure person and have acted that way all your life, at least allow for the possibility that most of the decisions you make are illusory, not real. What do we do with all this? How do we work through it? What state should we watch and observe? What's the first thing we need to do to avoid being at that extreme? The state of not knowing I'm talking about is a state in which you understand that your past life—ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago—was neither good nor bad. It was what it was.

When I talk about a state of not knowing, I mean a state in which you don't approach the future from the position that you know nothing or that you know everything. You understand that things will happen as they happen. Many things really will happen; some things won't. You regard that objectively and appropriately. A state of not knowing is when you're doing a task now and you're sure—actually, it's not even about being sure. You radiate the energy of really enjoying it. You put a great deal into it, but you understand that this task, this endeavor, this work, this labor, this family, this career, these relationships will end in any case. They will end in any case. Definitely. A state of not knowing is when you understand that at this moment you're making a decision based on the past, the present, and the future. It's when you know for certain that a time will never come—never—when you'll be certain about tomorrow. The more you inhabit this state of not knowing, this state of truly perceiving life, the broader and richer your life becomes, with an enormous range of experiences. By experiences, of course, I don't mean some abstract count of events.

As though the number of events meant the number of people you talk to, or the number of hours you work. Of course not. When you feel that your life is rich, this state won't bring a sense of certainty about tomorrow. Of course, you'll feel a reasonable stability in your life. You'll feel that your life has a firm footing. You'll feel good emotionally, inside. In this state, you'll be fairly…

You'll be fairly calm about what happens tomorrow. But that's a slightly different thing from being certain about tomorrow. You'll understand perfectly well that tomorrow could bring completely different events. “Tomorrow” is an abstraction, isn't it? Don't think of tomorrow as tomorrow; think of it as ten years from now. What do you feel ten years from now? What do you see around you? Who surrounds you ten years from now? Who are your friends then? I'm forty-one, and in those forty-one years I've lived through so many events, circumstances, and changes: changes in the people around me, in my surroundings, businesses, partners, work. I've watched all sorts of things happen in the world: people who are friends together on the same stage and then, after a while, hate each other; countries that are friends and then hate each other; people in families who are friends and then hate each other. I understand that an enormous number of completely different events lie ahead of me, events I cannot predict in any way. In absolutely no way at all. What certainty about tomorrow could there be? It could only be an illusion. An example comes to mind now. I wanted to make a video today. In 2013, we had a project at Business Molodost.

You had to set ten goals and then report on each of them every day for three months. One of my goals was worded like this: significantly improve my relationship with my wife. That's the video I was planning to make. I wanted to talk about those goals and describe what had happened ten years later—more than ten years later. Improve my relationship with my wife. I remember looking back over those goals a few years ago. When I saw that goal, to improve my relationship with my wife, I read the conclusion I'd written after three months. It's striking how clearly I see now that my conclusion treated improvement as something that had come to an end. There's this desire to finish the task. To finish means that if I say I feel bad now, I begin feeling good. But beginning to feel good is treated as finishing. That's it. There's some state called “good,” and that's it. That's it. That's all there is. What's more, it's as though neither bad nor good exists anymore. As though my state itself no longer exists. Finish dealing with my state, sort out my relationship with my child: there, I've sorted out my relationship with my child.

That's it, as though nothing else exists at all. There's no more life. But life is this: today you feel good, tomorrow you feel a thousand times better. A year from now, fifty thousand times better; fifteen years from now, a million times worse. Then fifty thousand times better again. Life is such that you can experience completely different ranges of feelings. I know clearly that when I wrote those conclusions, I wrote them reflexively, as if the goal had been completed. “Yes, of course I'll keep working on the relationship. I've learned how to work on relationships.” But that isn't true. First, over the eleven years since then, my relationship has improved significantly in terms of my inner state. Let me point out how the task was worded so that I convey it properly. It was about improving how I perceived my wife. I know for certain that now I make much more of an effort to be aware of my wife and see her. Over the past eleven years, I've taken an enormous number of steps in that direction, incomparable to the actions I took in those three years. I'm not devaluing my result. I'm not saying I shouldn't have done it. That was a point in my development, in my growth, at that time.

But I still treated it as a kind of achievement chasing. It's a very good thing that my life unfolded in a way that didn't leave me at that stage of development in how I experienced my wife. It's a very good thing that my love for my wife has grown so much stronger—so much stronger, a love that doesn't depend on any values or patterns of behavior. This love doesn't need anything. It simply exists. It's a very good thing that my life turned out this way. That's how it happened. It could have happened differently. When you play the game of short-term achievements, you're in a zero-one mode: the task isn't done; the task is done. You don't understand that your relationship with your wife will develop throughout your life. Throughout your life, in any case. Even if you separate, by the way, that relationship will still develop in some way. It may disappear completely, and you may stop seeing each other. Or perhaps you'll see each other once a year, or all the time. I'm even showing the range of ways things can unfold when a relationship ends. The relationship will end in any case. One of us will die before the other, and it will end at that point. We're unlikely to die together in the same split second, although that is theoretically possible too.

This kind of self-assessment, reflection, analysis, and observation lets you grow in a truly extraordinary way, through long-term growth rather than short-term achievement chasing. I think the key thing people forget in the twenty-first century—and society has very much forgotten it—is that growth and development, genuine development, need to continue throughout your life. It's striking that there are false frameworks around this. Well, it's not surprising, but they make up most of them. Development is taken to mean reading books, doing as many different things as possible, constantly learning something new. In other words, development is placed on the level of discovering something new, memorizing it, and acquiring much more information. When I talk about growth and development throughout life, that's absolutely not what I mean. Don't confuse it with that. It's not about that. You can learn absolutely nothing new about your profession, your work, or new devices. You can stay completely away from social media, not watch the news, live a fairly secluded life overall, and still be developing and growing—developing and growing tremendously. Yourself, first and foremost, as a human being. You're only interested in yourself. You're not interested in anyone else. You're only interested in yourself.

I'm not saying you should become selfish. Absolutely not. But it's important to acknowledge that you can only develop and grow yourself, because genuine growth and development concern you personally as a human being—you alone as a human being. That's number one. What am I doing? What decisions am I making? How do I feel? Where am I? What am I hearing? That is the real state of not knowing. A state of not knowing together with genuine growth and development, growth throughout your life. A dream. A dream. Society has forgotten this. Completely forgotten it. We live in an endless succession of conflicts, arguments, illusions, fear, and doubt. Endless fear. A few years ago I ran a company that was part of a holding company. I had quite a large team: more than five hundred people, and several thousand teachers. And of course there were thousands of people in the holding company's shareholder organizations. I kept asking the same question at meetings: could we work with the senior management team—I had twenty or thirty directors reporting to me—in a way that let us experience the joy of being human here and now? The feeling that the goal has been achieved here and now. Always. At the same time, a desire to develop and move forward overall.

This was a business, and we needed to grow substantially. But without feeling that a bright future would only arrive in a few years, because it might never arrive. Why suffer constantly? They never did resolve that question, by the way, and they're still endlessly waiting for a bright future. I have a friend, Lyosha, and of course we talk to a lot of different people in business and entrepreneurship. In business circles you often hear the idea that people work better if the carrot keeps moving ahead of them. The carrot isn't standing still. Many of you have heard this idea. The carrot really is moving; life keeps moving, and the carrot moves ahead too. Keep putting a carrot in front of yourself, keep setting goals, creating motivation. He and I would always talk about how I, for example, work better when everything in my life is going well. I work better when all my plans have been carried out. I work better when relationships in the company are good. I work better…

When relationships in the company are good. I work better when everything is done. I work better when no one is endlessly driving me onward, saying happiness will arrive in five or ten years. I'm far more effective. I'm someone who works. Of course, there are people who don't like working and need a whip behind them. That's not our topic today. But I know for certain that I put in more effort, live better, and work better when my overall state is good. Society has changed this framework. People have changed it and forgotten what's really going on. And of course a great many people don't want to do anything. They shift responsibility onto others. Look at how many people are caught up in the horror and ineptitude of what's going on, completely unable to perceive what's happening. All you have to do is open YouTube and read the comments—different comments on different channels. Are there very few comments on my channel? Very few. But some channels have a lot. Read the comments and look, and you start to understand what's happening. You have the opportunity—you personally—to begin moving differently. If you've watched this video up to this point, you have that opportunity a thousand percent. You can reach an entirely different level of growth and development, enter a life you can't even imagine.

We'll finish here. Have a good day.