Confucius Says... The Answers Are NOT Within
Today I was reading one of the greatest books of all time: The Analects by Confucius. One line in Book 15 stuck out, "I once did not eat all day and did not sleep all night in order to think, but there was no benefit. It would have been better to study." 
Tai Lopez Mar 15, 2014


It reminded me of the lie so many of us have bought into - that all the answers are "inside of us."

Confucius says that's a bunch of BS. 

The answers are not within us. They are OUTSIDE of us - they are external.

You can't just close your eyes and meditate and somehow magically have the answers to life's hard problems pop into your head.

There are a whole bunch of dumb books and magazines telling you about 'the truth within.' It sounds great. Too bad it's simply not true. 



A few years ago, a friend of mine met a girl and married her in like a month. I asked him if he thought that was a wise idea. He told me that he had sat in silence and meditated and he received a clear answer from the Universe that this was the girl to marry.

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A few months later I was hanging out with him again and I asked, "Hey where is your wife?" He told me that he was divorcing her because he had now gotten new 'clarity' from 'within' that she was no longer the right girl for him.


Kind of hilarious, I know. But I can't laugh. We have all made stupid mistakes when we thought we were following our gut.


Meditation might be good for lowering your blood pressure and relaxing, but for finding the answers to life it's a pretty poor way according to Confucius.

Look, I don't care how you measure success. If you are spiritual maybe you consider Martin Luther King, JR. or Gandhi successful. Or if you're an artist you consider Picasso or Mozart successful. Or if you like money you consider Sam Walton or Bill Gates successful. Or if you like sports you consider Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan successful...

Guess what? Everyone of those people got there BY STUDYING other people and external principles.

Picasso spent his whole life studying, so did Sam Walton, Gandhi, and Tiger Woods.

Michael Jordan had coaches. He didn't meditate to learn how to shoot a basketball.

As the proverb says, "Study to show thyself approved." 

How did you learn English? You didn't cross your legs as a baby, contemplate life, and somehow magically have the words form in your brain.

You listened to other people, you studied.

Sure we have some natural truth and instincts within us. The problem is most of our natural instincts do NOT work in the modern world. They are dead wrong.

There is an amazing book called Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by the Pulitzer prize winning Michael Moss. He shows how we naturally evolved to eat up salt, sugar, fat the second we find it. Now back when we lived in caves and in tribes that made sense. There wasn't much opportunity to get extra calories.

But that natural craving instinct is horrible now in a world full of Doritos and Big Macs. It makes us fat, ugly, and die of heart attacks.

This is the scientific principle called "Mismatch Theory" and is explained like this: "Traits that were at one time adaptive in a certain environment, are now 'mismatched' to the environment that the trait is currently present in. This can present a number of problems for the organism in question.

One example is the taste of foods high in fat and sugar to humans. In Pleistocene environments, sugars and fats were relatively uncommon in the human diet.

In the modern Western diet, however, foods with such properties are relatively easy to acquire. This can be problematic since an abundance of such foods combined with the human adaptation to prefer them can, and often does, contribute to obesity and chronic metabolic syndrome."


This mismatch where our 'gut feeling' leads us astray is the same reason we spend money right when we get it and don't save (the average American saves $4 out of every $100 they make - sad but true). Our inward nature tells us that we never know when we are going to die so we should spend our money as soon as we can. 

That natural, inward instinct is a surefire way to stay poor.  

This is also why racism is so common. We are born with a suspicion of people outside our kin group. The sad truth is that racism is natural.

You see when it comes to judging people, our natural instinct is dead wrong.

That natural racist instinct can and should be eliminated, NOT by going inward but by OUTWARDLY seeking education and knowledge to eliminate a natural instinct that's flawed.

We don't naturally come equipped to know that washing our hands is good, that truth was NOT within us deep down. That's why a hundred years ago 20% of all women died in childbirth. Doctor's would do surgery and then, without washing their hands, walk over and deliver a baby.

Thank God someone studied and figured out soap. 

Like Warren Buffett says, "We all learn from mistakes. But it's better to learn from somebody else's mistakes."

The answer is study, knowledge, and wisdom acquisition. 

Be humble. The humble inherit the earth - they get the health, wealth, love, and happiness everyone wants.

Remember if you are drowning you can't pull yourself out by your own hair.  You need someone standing on solid ground.

Like Alcoholic Anonymous teaches, you have to admit you are powerless to help yourself - that you need something bigger than yourself.

That thing bigger than yourself is the accumulated knowledge of other smart people, their wisdom, thoughts, and experiences.

Go find people who live amazing lives and study what they did and incorporate it into your life.

Read a book.

Get a mentor who is 20 years ahead of you.

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Question: What's the best thing you ever learned from studying others (Leave your answer in the comments below)?

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