Kapil Gupta: Conquering the Mind [video]
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Well... isn't that obvious from the definition – "cutting edge"?
The more I listen to this stuff, the more I realize, it is a verbal extravaganza with nothing of substance. It is taking the most obvious things in life, making an intoxicating narrative and interpretation, and master it with excellent spoken skills and voila - you got Naval/Kapil.
They are also rehashing Feynman, Krishnamurthy, Neitsche, etc. and pawning it off as their own.
Top comment on YT summarizes this well:
> This is first I heard about Kapil! What an amazing articulate man. Blown away by how calm and steady he speaks
That's indeed the seductive aspect of their podcasts. The moment you peel it off, it is just basic common sense and nothing actionable or insightful. It is podcast porn.
Why not Kapil and Ryan Halliday ?
Is this because of a subconscious bias?
This is sadhguru level stuff imo and weird that it is something Naval is associated with now.
As far as they are doing this without exploiting people, ripping them off like Deepak Chopra and deluding them, I am fine with it.
Naval appears to be doing his thing just purely out of boredom and to attain fame.
So I think there’s a benefit in having people saying positive stuff even if it’s just meaningless words
And I agree, most of it can be summarised as "life is a complex system. You can't marry any kind of ideology if you want to achieve any goal, but instead keep listening to feedback and tune accordingly"
Perhaps it is a reflection on the underlying anxieties & fears of a society which enable such people to rise up and gain a following.
That's not a good summary. I think you jumped the gun on making a judgment.
A better summary of that section is this paraphrase: even if a great, accomplished man retraced his steps and followed his perception of what he had done the first time around, he couldn't repeat the accomplishment. That's because, the talkers argue, it's the details that matter and they're unknowable in the sense that an algorithm is knowable.
I find their discussion filled with substance that's lacking in most "life insight" blog posts around.
That said, I collected several books by Thich Nhat Hanh that really helped me in my early 20s to shed the past, reduce self to its pure form, and approach each challenge with mastery. At least that was the idea. 20 years later, some of it worked, some of it didn’t.
I continue to conquer my mind, it’s an everlasting struggle with self. I just wanted to add that I do believe there is substance to these teachings. I don’t have the credentials to explain what that is, to me it’s just a feeling. I remember when I changed. I remember what I was before, who I was after.
If you haven’t done it, I highly, highly recommend martial arts (I studied Kung Fu) or Tai chi, or anything that can help you channel your mental gymnastics into a force for unlocking your mind.
Be like Neo in the Matrix.
Sadly, I haven’t found the secret to luck which is needed in varying doses to be a successful founder. I did find success, which is a result of dedication and hard work.
I prefer his direct and succinct approach over what you hear from popular sources of counsel such as Tim Ferris, Gary V, Tony Robbins, and - dare I say - Naval.
And unlike their advice (work 3 jobs you hate, delete emails you don't like, practice not finishing things), most of what he says won't ruin your life.
I spent the last few years building a business and Kapil's writings got me through some of the lower moments:
- A man is who he is. Until it is no longer acceptable to him to be who he is
- Humans do not like being alone. The ones that do have a chance at Freedom
- The Mind does not assault man for his mistakes. It assaults him for the cover-up
- If there was one single thing that stands between man and his freedom, it is the belief that he has time
At the end of the day, there's nothing new under the sun and so the value of a person's words lies in the impact that they have on you.
Naval is the only reason I want to explore Kapil's works a bit more, despite my instinct shouting at me not to. If a guy who has understood the game of life and money far better than me finds this guy a true intellect, maybe I am missing something ?
Trust your experience, it's as close to your reality as you will get. If it feels off, you don't need evidence, and that goes for everything.
Right now you're acting like someone standing outside in the cold, freezing like crazy; but refusing to accept it because someone else says it's warm outside, and you think they might have figured something out that you missed.
There are plenty of real teachers out there, no need to settle for scraps from the table.
Which leads to the question: how do you know? You know because they will tell you to trust your own experience.
There are gurus who encourage the first kind of involvement at the expense of their students, but different people can take different things from the same teacher. Some people are strongly predisposed towards one or the other forms of involvement. Some people want to just sit and listen, and they'll get little benefit whether they're listening to a saint or a fraud.
As for intellect, when someone is presented to you as a guru, all or nearly all of their specific insights are going to be well-worn, recycled cliches. A guru is more of a coach than an intellectual. An intellectual's job is to say new things, or old things in new ways. A coach's job is to say what you need to hear even if it's been said a hundred million times before.
For some reason we get this all mixed up when it comes to "spirituality," and we believe everything hinges on the quality of the ideas. Instead, imagine your kid's soccer team is being coached by the great soccer manager Carlo Ancelotti. Imagine that they spend every practice sitting on the ground and listening to him lecture them on technique and tactics (not that he would make this mistake.) Meanwhile, the other teams are coached by parents who know nothing about soccer, who run their teams through dribbling and passing drills they looked up on the internet, followed by some chaotic scrimmaging. Your kid's team is not going to win a single game, even though they have a "true intellect" for a coach, and the other teams are coached by frauds.
Always think for yourself.
As the saying goes; "A Teacher/Guru can only show you a doorway, you have to walk through it yourself to the destination".
I personally disagree with his view on bitcoin and that's fine.
On the other hand, he does have a book that you can find on Amazon which I haven't bothered to read. So maybe it's all in there.
Is it vastly different from what I assumed?
I concur, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
The whole talk's been stretched out, muddied, and fed through several thesauri.
My gullible brain thinks that he has something valuable to say and that requires more efforts from my side to extract that.
I feel same from reading his books too like.
I don't really take issue with the content, but there's not much of it and he's not very efficient at communicating it.
Examples: When trying to say "don't let the means become an end" he uses the 5-dollar word "intermediary", which typically means a person, instead of the simple "means". He says "my speech is fraught with peril" instead of "If you don't listen carefully you might misunderstand". He says "the solution isn't the solution, the problem is the solution" instead of "There is no arbitrary solution that's applicable to all problems".
He's really just paraphrasing common aphorisms with bigger words or wrapping them in koan-like phrasing. I think that's why he sounds appealing. He's telling us what we already know, but in grandiose terms.