Ravikant, Kamal - Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

Contents

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Books

Update

Foreword

What is this about?

Beginning

Why love?

The practice

Window

Mental loop

A meditation

One question

I'm in love

Another meditation

Love and memory

Change

Light switches

Coasting

Thought

Magic

Surrender

Belief

Oxygen

Where I want to be

End

Share

About the author

Love Yourself

Like Your Life Depends On It

By

Kamal Ravikant

Copyright © 2012 Kamal Ravikant

All Rights Reserved

Cover design by Sajid Umerji

To James, Kristine, and Sajid.

You made this book happen. Thank you.

Other books by Kamal Ravikant

LIVE YOUR TRUTH

Update

Today is November 22, Thanksgiving day in the US. I have a lot to be grateful for. Five months ago, I published this little book on Amazon, expecting to sell ten copies. Eight of them bought by me. Life had other plans.

James Altucher wrote a blog post about it. The book took off. Tim Ferriss tweeted that it got him out of a funk. Sean Stephenson said on Facebook that he found "truth, beauty, and strength in this short gem." Amazing people all over tweeted, facebooked, and wrote blog posts and reviews. I get emails regularly from readers sharing the transformation in their lives.

To think I was so close to never publishing it. That the fears of what others would think almost held me back. But because I loved myself, I put the book out to the world. And, well...wow.

If there is one lesson I can share from the experience, it is this: share your truth.

Whatever your truth is, live it, share it. The world will respond in ways you never could have imagined. Life will blow your socks off.

I continue learning new lessons and am happy to share them with you. Below is a link where you can sign up for my email newsletter.

http://newsletter.founderzen.com

It goes without saying, I will never spam, sell your email address, or send you cat photos. You might hear from me once a month or so, only when I have something of value to share.

In the meantime, I look forward to reading your emails, your tweets, your reviews. They are all a gift to me. I can't thank you enough.

Kamal

Foreword

In December of 2011, I was invited to be a participant at Renaissance Weekend in Charleston, SC. Not what you think - no jousting knights or fair maidens. Instead, a conference attended by CEOs from Silicon Valley and New York, Hollywood types from LA, and politicians and their staff from DC. It's like TED, but everyone is assigned to participate in panels or give a talk. The application asked for awards won and recognitions received, and as an example, listed the Nobel Prize. Really.

I have no awards to speak of. Or pedigree. No Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley on my business card. When the founder of the event introduced me to the audience at a talk I gave - the title assigned to me, "If I could do anything..." - he said, "Kamal cannot keep still. Whether as an infantry soldier in the US Army or climbing the Himalayas or walking across Spain on an ancient pilgrimage, he's always moving." He'd done his research. I don't remember the rest, but I remember his last line, "I'm sure he'll have something interesting to share with us."

I had exactly two minutes to stand on a podium and address an audience of scientists, Pentagon officials, politicians, and CEOs - all far more qualified than I to talk about pretty much anything. The speaker before me had been the youngest person to graduate from MIT. Full honors, of course. Before him, the youngest Thiel fellow.

It's interesting what goes through your mind at moments like these. Time slows down, yes. But that's almost cliché. There's only the podium and the microphone. You step up. The audience grows blurry, as if out of focus. Clock starts.

And then I knew what to do. I would offer something no one else could. My truth. Something I'd learned purely from my experience, something that saved me. The audience came into focus.

"If I could do anything," I said into the microphone, "I would share the secret of life with the world." Laughter from the audience. "And I just figured it out a few months ago."

For the next two minutes, I spoke about the previous summer, when I'd been very sick, practically on bedrest. The company I'd started nearly three years ago was struggling, I'd just gone through a breakup, and a friend I loved suddenly died. "To say I was depressed," I told them, "would have been a good day."

I told them about the night I was up late, surfing Facebook, looking at photos of my friend who'd passed, and I was crying, miserable, missing her. I told them about waking up the next morning, unwilling to take it anymore, the vow I made, and how it changed everything. Within days I started to get better. Physically, emotionally. But what surprised me was that life got better on its own. Within a month, my life had transformed. The only constant being the vow I'd made to myself and how I kept it.

Afterwards, and for the rest of the conference, people came up individually and told me how much what I'd shared meant to them. One woman told me that sitting in the audience, listening to me, she'd realized that this was the reason she came. All I'd done was share a truth I learned.

A month later, a friend was going through a difficult time, so I quickly wrote up what I'd learned that summer and sent it to him. It helped him a lot. Months after, I shared it in an email with James Altucher, a friend and my favorite blogger. He replied, offering to feature it as a guest post on his blog.

Naturally, I refused.

Truth be told, I panicked. Lots of my friends read his blog. I'm an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley; it's fine to write about startups. But this stuff?

"You have to share this," James wrote back. "It's more important than 'here's how to be an entrepreneur' or 'here's how to bulk up in 30 days.' This is the only message that's important."

I shared my fear with him - what would people think? His response, something that I will never forget and will always be grateful for: "I don't do a post now unless I'm worried about what people will think about me."

So I struck a deal with him. I'd kept notes about what I'd learned, the practice, how I'd succeeded and failed. I would put those together in a book and send it to him. If he liked it, I'd publish it.

And that's how we ended up here.

What is this about?

Loving yourself. Same thing your mom told you, same thing self-help books repeat enough times to be cliché. But there is a difference. It's not lip service. It's not a fire and forget type approach. It's something I learned from within myself, something I believe saved me. And more than that, the way I set about to do it. Most of it, simple enough to be idiotic. But in simplicity lies truth. In simplicity lies power.

Starting with the writeup I sent to my friend, this is a collection of thoughts on what I learned, what worked, what didn't. Where I succeed and importantly, where I fail daily.

As a wise friend likes to remind me, this is a practice. You don't go to the gym once and consider yourself done. Same here. Meditation is a practice. Working out is a practice. Loving yourself, perhaps the most important of all, is a practice.

The truth is to love yourself with the same intensity you would use to pull yourself up if you were hanging off a cliff with your fingers. As if your life depended upon it. Once you get going, it's not hard to do. Just takes commitment and I'll share how I did it.

It's been transformative for me. I know it will be transformative for you as well.