Most people live their lives trying to be somebody they’re not - thinking that they're failing because they haven't recognized or honored who they truly are and where the form of their real potential already exists. It's sitting in your hierarchy of values which is summated by your Telos. Telos in the dictionary is defined as an ultimate object or aim. Join Dr John Demartini for a deep dive into living by your Telos. Discover the importance of the telos when it comes to living a meaningful and inspired life.

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If you need motivation to remind you to do what you say is important,

it ain't important. But when you find that one telos, that highest value,

the key to fulfillment and purpose, you don't need to be motivated.

This topic is very significant because the telos,

according to the ancient philosopher, Aristotle,

was an inherent purpose behind all things.

Aristotle believed that every single thing had some sort of purpose to its

design, and you know, not all scientists believe that,

there are people that believe it's telos and there's people that don't believe

there's a telos,

but I certainly believe that each individual has something that truly

is fulfilling, meaningful, and inspiring, that is highest in their priority,

that's most valuable to their life that they can go and fulfill.

And theologians have called it the calling,

business people have called it the métier, Napoleon

Hill called it the chief aim.

one of my mentors Ed Tullison called it the primary objective.

It's got hundreds of names,

but it is the thing that gives you the most fulfillment in life.

It's the path of self-actualization. But, but this telos,

when I start studying about the concept of the telos and the study

of teleology, which is the study of purpose and meaning in life,

I found out as Aristotle's final cause,

it's like the ultimate objective that a human being has in their life.

Everything is a means to that end. It's the end in mind,

it's the primary objective, if you will.

And everybody has something that is most important to them.

And I've been for the last 43, 44 years,

I've been teaching people and discussing about human values as the very

foundation of human drive. And unquestionably,

every human being has a set of priorities, a set of values,

those things that are most important to least I in their life that are unique to

them like fingerprints. And whatever's highest on the value,

on the list of values that they hold,

whether they be raising a beautiful family and children,

or whether it running a business or learning and educating and being a scholar

or being a athlete or being a theologian and being dedicated to some

sort of spiritual quest or possibly building wealth or

whatever it may be, just building a business,

whatever it is that's deeply important to you, the most important thing,

the very highest priority in your life, is the telos.

That's why the study of values,

which you see and hear me talking about regularly and this topic is so important

because the hierarchy of your values dictates your destiny,

and whatever's highest on your value is the telos.

So that's what you wanna write first, that your highest value is the telos.

It is the most important, most meaningful, most inspiring, most fulfilling,

highest priority, most powering aspect that you could pursue in life.

It's the most fulfilling thing, because as you go down the list of values,

things that are lower on value aren't as fulfilling,

the thing at the highest is the highest fulfillment.

So if you wanna maximize fulfillment in life,

filling full your mind and having the most fulfillment in life,

it's pursuing that.

And structuring your life in a way that you're getting to fulfill what's most

meaningful. Most people have a 'Monday morning blues', a 'Wednesday hump days',

a thank God it's Fridays',

a 'week frigging ends' and are doing something that's not inspiring to them.

And then want to take a break and wanna take a vacation and wanna retire and

wanna escape to go do something that they think is meaningful.

And they got a schizophrenic life and they build momentum making money,

and then they blow it over here and spend it, and they're back into zero again.

And they don't really get ahead and actually build momentum by doing something

that's truly meaningful to them and getting remunerated for that,

doing what you love,

loving what you do and getting handsomely paid or beautifully paid to do it.

You know, I've asked the question, what is it I would absolutely love to do?

How do I get beautifully and handsomely paid to do it?

What are the highest priority action steps I can do today to make that happen?

What obstacles might I run into and how do I solve them in advance?

What worked and what didn't work today?

How do I do it more effectively and efficiently tomorrow?

And how did no matter what happened to me,

how is it helping me fulfill that highest value?

That's a mastery path and asking those quality questions gives you a quality

life. But knowing what that highest value is, is one of the crucial things.

And because I've seen that for the last 40, 43, 44 years,

I put on my website as a complimentary offer a way of doing and determining what

that is.

So if you've never been to my website go to the Value Determination process,

it's free, it's private, and it's something I guarantee it's worth doing,

it's eye opening. It's a 13 questionnaire that I've developed over the years,

studying axiology,

which is a study of values to help you discern what really is most important.

What is that métier? What is that purpose in life? What is that telos?

Because the highest value is an expression, that's the key to it.

It's your highest value that allows you to access what Immanuel Kant said is the

transcendental nominal state of awareness.

Most people live in a phenomenal world where they live by their senses and

fooled by the extrinsic world and don't access and live by design.

They live by responsibility, duty and default, but they don't live by design,

and they're dis-telic instead of in a sense Telic in their life.

And there's no reason why you have to be following around the herd and be

subordinate to the crowd and minimize yourself to others and sacrifice for

the many

when you can do something that's deeply meaningful and serve the people.

You can either be a follower of a crowd, or you can be a leader of the crowd.

The leader of the crowd finds their telos and does what they love and does it in

a way that serves vast numbers of people and they make their mark in the world.

Otherwise they fit in and become diluted into the crowd.

As Ernest Becker says in his Denial of Death, that's the key,

is not having a collective hero,

but to actually being the individual hero yourself.

Not sitting there subordinating to the world around you and thinking that

somebody externally are gonna be the heroes,

and being part of the football game or being part of the religion or something

that makes you worship something on the outside,

but actually realize that all that is inside you, nothing's missing in you.

And you can live by your telos and fulfill something amazing and do something

more extraordinary with your lives.

So I'm a firm believer in identifying what that is. So please go on my website,

go and do that Value Determination process. It's free, it's private.

And do it again and do it again because sometimes you'll lie to yourself the

first time you do it, you'll write down what you wish it would be,

hope it would be, the answers,

what you think it should be according to what everybody else is expecting and

fear of rejection,

and you won't be honest with yourself about what your life demonstrates is

truly, truly meaningful to you. But identifying what that is,

is crucial if you wanna master your life. Your highest value,

the very thing that's most important to you is the thing you spontaneously are

inspired from within to do. You don't need motivation.

If you need motivation to remind you to do what you say is important,

it ain't important. But when you find that one telos, that highest value,

the key to fulfillment and purpose, you don't need being motivated.

I don't need to be motivated to do what I do, research, write, travel and teach.

I may need to be motivated to do everything else, but I don't do that,

I delegate that. Anytime you're doing something that's highest on your values,

your telos, you grow in self worth, you expand your space and time horizons,

you end up having more resilience and adaptability and eustress instead

of distress, you maximize your physiological and psychological potential,

you end up doing more extraordinary things,

you don't have hesitation because you're more neutral and objective and focused,

you don't have the fear of loss of fantasies and fear of gain of nightmares.

You're not distracted by impulses and instincts of the subcortical area of the

brain. You're living in your executive function, which is frontal cortex area.

And you have self-governance and self mastery. You see an inspired vision.

These are all some of the things that emerge and you're strategically planning

and you execute plans with conciseness.

Those individuals have the most certainty, and they're the ones that rule.

And it's the people who find out what their Telos is and prioritize their life

and delegate lower priority things and get on to doing what's really most

important in life that liberate themselves from the life of mediocrity and the

life of desperation as Thoreau would say, and live a life of inspiration.

I'm a firm believer that there's no reason why you can't do that.

I've taken people of all different walks of life and if they are willing to

listen and willing to apply, and willing to do what I share with them,

they will get a result, but they just have to do the work,

and most people are looking for a quick fix.

People who are not living by their highest values,

they want a quick immediate gratification.

And immediate gratification costs them their life.

Long term vision pays them an inspired life.

And it's the people that have the telos,

that know their telos and pursue their telos and live by priority and delegate

the rest,

that are actually the ones that build incremental momentum to great achievement.

They lead their uniqueness on the planet.

Because the hierarchy of values is unique. And it's determining how you see,

decide and act. And by living by the highest one, you have the most potential.

Your thalamus has a gating mechanism,

a filtering mechanism in the pulvinar region,

that it filters out all of reality and gives you a very selective attention on

the things that's most important so you can maximize your potential in life,

and not be overwhelmed by the infinity of distraction that surrounds you.

By being focused on the telos,

the highest value you give yourself permission to shine, not shrink,

to radiate outward and expand instead of gravitate inward and contract.

To have a broad mind where it's neutral and loving and appreciative,

instead of something narrow minded and rigid and black and white and

fundamental. You give yourself permission to do something extraordinary,

not ordinary, and that's why going on on the website, and please doing that.

You know, I teach a course called the Breakthrough Experience.

One of the things I do in there is I have people go through that Value

Determination, get clear about what it is,

make all the distinctions so they can realize when they're being distracted by

their fantasies and get clear about what that is and start structuring their

life around that. Then I teach them the Demartini Method in that program,

where I have them show them how to take all those distractions in the past that

are stored in the subconscious mind and dissolve them.

So the super conscious mind is able to do its job, which is the calling,

the telos. When you live by the highest value,

you wake up your super conscious mind. When you try to live by lower values,

because you're trying to fit in and please everybody on the outside and not be

authentic to yourself, for fear of rejection, you end

you devalue yourself. And in the process of doing it,

you lose your site of your purpose.

The subcortical areas of the brain don't live with vision.

And because they lost their vision, they don't flourish.

But the people that live by their highest values,

that area of the brain lights up the back of the occipital region and the visual

associative areas are coming online and you can see your vision,

and those with a vision they tend to flourish.

So the people that find their telos are the visionaries.

They're the unborrowed visionaries,

the unborrowed people that have a mission to fulfill in life.

And you see people that are on a mission, you see them, they're the Elon Musks,

they say, let's go to Mars.

And the Amazon Bezos that are going out and creating something that's a massive

companies. They're doing something extraordinary.

You have something amazing inside you that's surfacing,

the second you access your telos.

Every time you do something that's high on your value you tend to walk your

talk. You have integrity. You have congruency. You tend to have certainty.

You don't have emotions. You tend to have an objective, clear, balanced,

oriented thinking process and you liberate yourself from the emotional baggages.

When you're in your amygdala and the lower centers and you're living in lower

values you tend to be, because of the unfulfillment,

you look for immediate gratification to compensate for it.

And that immediate gratification, that consumerism,

which makes you buy other people's brands instead of build your own,

and pay over price,

which keeps you in debt and then that keeps you in the same 'stuckville'.

You don't wanna be sitting there letting your compulsions and impulses and

immediate gratifying, addictive behaviors stop you from something extraordinary,

using all that energy to do something that's deeply meaningful and purposeful,

because the telos is your purpose in life.

I have people that come up to me and say, 'well,

I don't know what my purpose is.' All we have to do is look at what your values

and your life demonstrates that you spontaneously do every day that nobody has

to remind you to do.

The only reason people don't honor it is because they're comparing themselves to

other people thinking, 'oh, it should be this, oh, I'm not like them, oh,

I admire them,

I wish I was like that.' And they envy other people and try to imitate other

people. And Ralph Waldo Emerson said,

envy is ignorance and imitation is suicide.

You don't wanna live and try to be second at being somebody else.

You wanna be first at being you. You don't wanna live in the shadows of people.

You wanna be standing on the shoulders of giants.

You don't wanna be sitting there putting people on pedestals or pits.

You wanna put people in your hearts and be of service to people doing something

that's meaningful to you, that you can't wait to get up in the morning and do.

The highest value is the thing you can't wait to get up in the morning and do,

and you do it spontaneously.

And when you can't wait to get up and be of service to people,

people can't wait to get your service. That's why the telos is so important.

That's why I'm doing this little presentation to remind

is to do it and why I ask you to come either to the Breakthrough Experience and

let me actually take you through it and show you how to dissolve the baggage and

the subconscious stored stuff that distracts you and

awareness, or go and do the Value Determination process on my website,

so you can just do that, at least do that, and then come to the Breakthrough.

That way I can have more time with you and it make a difference.

I've shown people how to do this.

And I've watched what happens to people's life when they get clear about what it

is that they're called to do,

but many people are comparing themselves to others instead of comparing their

daily actions to their own dreams. And that's why they hold themselves back.

That's why they are not recognizing their genius in their capacities to create.

So the highest value, if you look at what you fill your space with,

you look at what you spend your time on most,

you look at where you're most energized.

You look at where you spend all your money mostly.

You look at what you are most organized in, most disciplined in.

What is it you think about most that you would love to have come true,

that you show evidence coming true?

What are you visualizing most and show evidence of coming true?

What are you talking to yourself about most?

What do you talk to others about most?

What inspires you and brings to tears your eyes and what's common to the people

who inspire you?

What is it that you have as goals that are perseverant and consistently you made

come true? And what is it you can't wait to get up and learn?

If you look carefully, those questions, they're on my website. They're free.

They're private. Take advantage of it, go through there and answer it honestly.

And it'll follow through and go through a step by step process to discern what's

really priority to you and find out what that is and determine it.

And then you want to ask yourself the simple question,

how and what is the highest priority action I can do today to fulfill that?

And start living by priority.

If you're not filling your day with the highest priority actions that inspire

you, your day's gonna fill up with low priority distractions that don't.

If you don't take command and live your life by design, again,

you're gonna live by default.

And if you don't fill your day and life with how you want it,

it's gonna fill up with opportunistic expressions of other people's demands on

you. And you'll say, you'll come up with excuses.

As long as you think that things on the outside are causing your problems,

as long as you think those things on the outside are gonna save you from the

problems, you haven't found your telos.

The telos allows you to be intrinsically driven and to take command of your

perception, decisions, and actions in life. It's not what happens out there,

it's what you decide to do with what out there.

Because I guarantee everybody has the same amount of hours.

And some people do extraordinary things and some don't,

it's not the hours that you have, it's not the experiences that you have.

You can use those as being victims of history,

or you can become master of destiny. But when you live by your highest values,

your brain automatically sees whatever happens as feedback,

homeostatic feedback, to do something extraordinary.

But when you live in lower values,

you see things as frustration and you label things, success and failures.

And if you think you're successful and you get proud, you fear the loss of that.

If you think you're failure and you then you think, you fear the gain of that.

So you end up with fear and fright instead of actually fuel

for utility. If you live in futility and not utility,

you're not contributing and serving and having the rewards of fulfillment with

sustainable fair exchange with people that you can serve.

It's actually filling your day with challenges that serve the world,

problems in the world that you can solve, that you would love to take care of.

If you do in finding that, that's the path of meaning.

And the difference between the animal and the human is the humans can find

meaning. Aristotle said that any excess or deficiency,

which are the vices can be brought into the golden mean to make meaning.

And in my Breakthrough Experience,

people I show how to take whatever happens in your life and extract meaning out

of it and fuel out of it so you can live by your telos. Your telos is again,

the expression of highest value, identifying that is so crucial.

I identified that when I was 17,

and I've been focused on that for literally 50 years almost.

And in the process of doing that,

I'm now going to do on to do exactly what I dreamed about doing.

And I'm absolutely certain I can show you how to do that,

in the Breakthrough Experience, by doing the Value Determination,

these little classes I do every week,

everything that I'm doing in every program, every webinar, every podcast,

everything that I do is for that objective,

to help everyone who's listening to do something extraordinary with their life.

You deserve to do exactly what it is that you feel your métier and your calling

is. I believe that when you do, your human will matches divine will,

your predestination matches your master plan. You're now in zone,

on tune and target and on time with your zone of possibilities.

And giving yourself permission to do that is what I want you to be able to do,

because that way you can say thank you in your life.

You don't have regrets when you live by your highest value,

you have regrets when you try to live in a fantasy world about, you know,

trying to be somebody you're not and running into snags.

Everything in the universe is like a intelligence in the universe,

a panpsychic intelligence, if you wanna call it that,

everything in your physiology, psychology, sociology, and even theology,

is all weaving around and trying to help you become authentic.

The most magnificent you is the authentic you and the authentic you is the one

that's expressing your highest value. Your ontological identity,

your very essence of being is the highest value.

Your epistemological studies and where you have maximize your growth and

awareness intellectually is in your highest value. Your teleological purpose,

where your vocation is most profoundly empowered is in your highest value.

The highest value is why Aristotle made a study of it because he saw that even

in his times, the people who accessed that,

were the most productive individuals,

had the most fulfillment and meaning in life.

So I just wanted to go and share some of the ideas about how important the telos

is. I know I spoke pretty fast because I was very inspired by it.

I did another program right before I got on this one and I'm kind of revved up a

bit, but I just know that if you go and listen to this more than once,

and listen carefully,

maybe take some notes and go on my website and do the Value Determination

process

and come to the Breakthrough Experience where I can actually work with you and

show you how to narrow that down and structure your life and prioritize it and

free yourself up. Cause if you're doing low priority things,

don't expect an empowered life.

You can't have an inspired and fulfilled life doing low priority things.

It's only gonna occur by you learning the art of doing what it is you love to

do, finding a way of making it where it serves people and it fills a need,

to have a sustainable fair exchange where it generates an income and exchange

where you're remunerated for doing what you love so you keep getting rewarded

for doing what is inspiring to you that's authentic, that is meaningful,

where you excel and you have a,

your competitive advantage because it's where knowledge base is most,

and then delegating all the other things to give job opportunities to other

people and to free yourself up from so you can do exactly what you love to do,

so you can't wait to get up in the morning and be, and do, and have that.

I'm a firm believer that's doable. I live that,

I watch that happen with my students who apply it.

And I'm certain that you can do the same.

So please take advantage of what's online on my website and do that exercise

and come to the Breakthrough Experience where I can personally help you on that

journey, because that's what I love doing,

helping people do something extraordinary with their lives.

And I know that this little presentation is just a catalyst.

Listen to it again and again. And please take advantage of this.

I wanna make this little offer, free on demand masterclass,

Finding Meaning and Purpose on the Path of Self Mastery and take advantage of

that.

Cuz I'm gonna actually do a little private presentation online for you there,

that it will help you move forward on that. So go to the website,

do the Value Determination process.

If you know anybody else that's sitting lost and kind of crazed out and not

knowing what they're doing and in a plateau and frustrated and not having the

energy that they want and not feeling clarity of what they're doing and not

making the income that they want, have them do the same thing.

It will help them too.

And it might just be the catalyst that makes a difference in their life.

And if we help other people get what they want to get in life,

we get at what we want to get in life. So take advantage of that.

Join me at the Breakthrough Experience.

Make sure you go with the masterclass and just know that there's no way you can

hang out with me without having your mind start to think and expand.

So I look forward to being with you next week again at my next little webinar.

I hope you enjoyed today. Please take advantage of the masterclass, go online,

see you at the Breakthrough Experience,

make sure you live by your highest value if you want to do something,

when you value yourself, so does the world, if you live by your highest values,

you're going to end up being more inspired.