There is only one person that can change your mind, and it's you. Nobody else can. Someone else can tell you something that you start believing in, but the choice is always yours.

As an example, imagine that we're looking at the same tree from different directions. The tree will look different for both of us. I might see a bird on one side that you can't see and when I share that with you, you can chose to believe me or not. You can also hear the bird without having to look at it and know it's there, but not know what it looks like. I can describe to you this bird in all the details that I can, but you will never know what it looks like until you come around the tree and join me from my viewpoint to see the bird yourself. And by going around the tree, you might notice something about the tree that you haven't noticed before. This is the power of perspective.

And what I shared in this episode is my perspective, and I'm aware that you have you own. If you disagree with me, that's great! That means you're critical, and that's important. I don't have all the answers, and I may be off track on some of my ideas. But what is sure is that ideas grow stronger when people bring different viewpoints to it.
Every human is unique
You cannot fully understand something by only looking at it from one perspective

To add to this we have knowledge that supports the identification of tree with another layer of understanding. You may know that the acorn can be harvested for food, but that you need to cook them to be edible. You may know that oak trees benefit from frequent low intensity fire.

But this example is not really about trees. It's about everything that we see. We need perspective to see something from all it's angles. We need pattern recognition to look at something and understand what it is. We need knowledge to know what to do with that thing. The ways of thinking that I'll be sharing in this course are patterns that you can learn to spot in things around you. But you will still need to get perspective and knowledge if you want to fully understand something and know what to do with it.

Knowledge is easy to find, but hard to trust. Like everything we hear on social media these days. That's why you need critical thinking to parse through it.

And perspective, you can only get that through discussion with other people. That's why I create a private sub-reddit: r/waysofthinking. Feel free to join the conversation there. One wise man has once said to me: "Everyone in the world hold a piece of the same great puzzle."

And here's another reason why you should share: Ideas and concepts become clearer when you externalize them. Writing them down or explaining them to someone forces you to test your understanding. Ideas that remain in your head, not shared; they get forgotten, or they remain too abstract. If you can't explain a concept, then you only partially understand it.
We need to externalize ideas to understand and remember them

We live in our thoughts every day, all day, yet we don't stop to ask how we think. Actually, it's a common mistake that we make. We confuse familiarity with understanding. For example, if I ask you if you know how a zipper works, you're likely to say that you do. After all, we use zipper every day. But then, if I ask you to draw a zipper and explain to me how it works, I'm not sure many of you would be able to do that. Same for things like a bicycle. Or a mechanical pencil. We think we know, but we don't know. Same goes for our minds.

But here's the key. When you bring awareness to your thinking, you start to notice patterns. And once you notice patterns, you begin to understand yourself on a deeper level, which grants you greater control over your life. This allows you to direct your life more easily into a direction that you want. It's simple. Awareness is the key to knowing yourself, and knowing yourself gives you real control over your life. And that's why in many ancient philosophies, the greatest purpose of life was summed up in two words: Know thyself.

Alright, all of this is great, but what about you? I could just end it here and you'd go on with you life after listening to this - until the next episode, maybe.

But that goes against what I'm trying to say. To change the way you think, you need to put in effort. If you're ready to put efforts, then, I have a project for you.

The project is for you to think about changing the world using the ways of thinking that I'll be sharing with you. You'll be exploring this through one aspect of the world that you want to change or want to see changed. If you try it, you'll notice your brain working differently. You'll start seeing patterns you've never noticed before.

But I'm just planting a seed until next episode. You'll hear about it then. And this is where the course really begins: not while I'm speaking, not with what I'm sharing, but with your own mind, your own words and your own discoveries.

And I’ll leave you with this:
May you notice your ways of thinking how they shape your life. May you learn to hold them lightly, to turn them over, to see what new ones are out there. And may you remember that every small shift in your thinking creates big change in your life—it echoes outward, into your relationships, your community, and the world.
Changing the world doesn’t begin with armies or revolutions. It begins in your mind.

New thoughts like seeds in fertile ground,
Grow unseen but spread around.
Change your lens, the world looks new—
And what you see is shaped by you.

And that's it for today. Thank you for listening and I hope that some of you found this interesting and will keep up with the course. I invite you to join the discussion online. The link will be in the description.

A mind is a precious thing to waste, and so is our life. Use both fully, so that when comes the times for us to end our amazing journey, we can be proud of what we've built: something that changed the world."

1 - Why changing the way you think will change you and the world