Happy new year.
How was it for you?
I hope you finished the year with a bang and are already rocketing into this year.
Is this how you’re feeling?
Of course none of us know what will happen in our world, and perhaps it won’t be that good.
Still, you can have your best year ever.
Best year ever?
What do you say?
How are you currently seeing this year playing out?
If you went deep into this “High Light Real,” I’m curious what it led you to see for last year and this year.
We’ve heard from many people how valuable it was.
And I hope it was valuable for you because I’m REALLY trying to convey that even in these bizarro times, you choose.
Every day of every year miserable media will program the worst of the world and focus attention on what’s wrong.
It’s all good, misery is their business and many people love the madness.
If you allow them to infiltrate and infect your brain, however, you’re likely focused on a worse year.
Or, just as easily as changing the channel, you can focus on your best year ever.
So, how was it?
How was your 2022?
Out of 100, how would you say your year has been?
Of course not everything is perfect in our world and in any of our years, but how would you rate it among your best years?
Whether it’s among your best or not, how would it be to have a method to get the best from your year?
And use it to best set yourself up for next year?
Best movie ever
There’s lots of ways that you can best review your year and best prepare yourself for next year.
Over the years we’ve experimented with many methods, and this is the best that we keep returning to.
Ideally, every day you’re already focused on the details of what you’re doing to keep making things the best they can be.
And here we’re focused on doing something simple, fun, and incredibly effective for looking back on the best of your year.
Now, this isn’t to say that you never reflect on things that didn’t go best.
But if you do, you never want to dwell on that stuff, and ideally you want to see how you solved it, or otherwise powered through.
Because the point here isn’t watching every twist and turn.
You’re showing your brain the best of this year and giving it a map for making 2023 your best too.
Everybody spread the word
We’re gonna have a celebration
All across the world
In every nation
It’s time for the good times
Forget about the bad times, oh yeah
One day to come together to release the pressure
We need a holiday
If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate (come on let’s celebrate)
Just one day out of life (holiday)
It would be
It would be so nice
You can turn this world around
Many of you loved last week’s article on The Simulation.
I love that you love it.
Because I love this topic more than just about everything.
It’s the most important topic in this world to me.
Where I really started all this work 22+ years ago and where it will dead end.
I want to know all, everything.
And I want to keep sharing.
But
I feel that last week I failed in well enough conveying my most important point.
This isn’t about The Simulation at all—
It’s about you and your best life.
What’s happening in your body and brain and what this means for EVERY single moment of your life.
This is the single most important discovery of my decades of work.
Perhaps to some people it sounds pathetic and a waste of your life to never stop going deeper on this subject.
Yet I perceive that nothing is more important to living your best life than your ‘will and skill’ to choose how you think, feel, take action.
It is the master key to living your best life as many seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years as you can.
Let alone to uplifting all of humanity.
Elon Musk might be the brightest human alive?
Certainly there are people out there who are more book smart.
But who on Earth is capable of dreaming and scheming on his scale and creating it too?
Relative to AI he appears merely human of course, but relative to say the titans who built America I’d say he’s right up there.
He’s a unique thinker with a deep curiosity and formidable intellect.
Still, his math is misleading.
Simulation?
Among Musk’s leading edge thinking is his assertion that we live in a simulation.
Apparently he is so convinced that he’s banned it from further jacuzzi conversation.
Musk rationalizes that there is one in billions of chances that we DO NOT live in a simulation.
Mathematically this means that the probability this reality you are experiencing is “real,” what Musk calls “base reality,” looks something like—
1 / 2,000,000,000 = 0000000001%
Pretty conclusive math, isn’t it?
And for a moment, just think about what this means.
Whereas since birth we’re all taught to take this “real-ity” oh so seriously, Musk sees this more like playing a game.
Still, his math is misleading.
The holidays can feel like crashing through a tape at the end of a marathon.
Especially in these dysfunctional times it’s easy to feel like you’re ready to crash down and pass out.
If you’re feeling that, yearend is the time to cool the jets and recharge.
But if you’re feeling the fire, it’s also your best time to accelerate.
While others are slowing down you can distance yourself and start the new year with incredible velocity.
Especially if the world economy is slowing down.
Speed up your economy.
Economy of motion
A favorite quote I cite all the time is from famed basketball coach, John Wooden—
“Never mistake activity for achievement.”
This is a mistake that so many of us “busy-ness” professionals make all day every day, decade after decade.
Hours a day consuming media.
Frenetically running around doing things.
Having “great meetings.”
Feeling productive.
But with way too little production.
That’s a perfect method for burning out.
I wish I had this human tech decades ago.
It would have made my life experience so much better.
In so many ways I’ve lived such a blessed life, and we all have so much to be thankful for, but there were plenty of years where it didn’t feel enough this way.
All those years I was ferreting away thinking that this or that needed to change so you can feel how you want.
Even studying the best teachings was never enough until I built the tools for actually getting yourself thinking and feeling your best, at will.
Irrespective of conditions
A teaching that greatly impacted me is the notion of happiness irrespective of conditions.
Back when I began reading about it some 20+ years ago when I started going deep into the mind, it resonated powerfully.
Because before this my life was about “getting there.”
What I now refer to as the Getting There Program, that’s the thing in our brains that has you believing this FALSE cause and effect—
You must first get what you want to feel how you want.
There are good reasons why the brain is set up this way—namely, survival—and also why our society is set up this way—namely, consumption and control—but this keeps many people thinking and feeling worse than they could.
And it’s also simple, factual, and immediately provable that no matter what is happening or not happening in your life, you choose how you think and feel.
While this fact is too much of a stretch for many people, it’s also what Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl concluded in the worst hell of Nazi concentration camps in World War II.
As he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Have you wondered why someone with so little can be so happy?
While someone with so much can feel so poor?
Why one person can be content with what they have?
While many others achieving more, more, more will never be fulfilled?
What’s going on here?
Two lives
It might be obvious to you.
But it wasn’t always obvious to me and it’s not always obvious in our society and in our own brain.
The life that you see outside of you is ENTIRELY different to what you experience inside.
While you expect that a “better” life out there causes you to feel better inside, ultimately they are independent variables.
Hence why someone can have a heavenly life but be living an internal hell, and vice-versa.
They might as well be two different lives.
It’s like dreaming at night.
What is happening outside of your sleeping body is ENTIRELY different to what you are experiencing inside.
In our school of transformation, RST, we distinguish these as your External Life and your Internal Life Experience.
So even if a person has a fabulous External Life, like Kanye West they can have a terribly sad Internal Life Experience.
This is the cause of ALL problems in our world.
I’m playing for the grandest prize.
It’s what I’ve seen matters most to the quality of your life.
It takes 100% dedication.
There’s never a second that you can take your mind off this goal.
Because 100% mind is the goal.
100% mind
This is an unrealistic goal.
Some psychologists have even told me that it’s a stupid, impossible goal.
Because when I say 100% mind, I’m being 100% literal.
My target is every single thought, feeling, action, being your best all day every day.
Consider this goal for a moment.
If you were to evaluate yesterday, or today, or one of your average days, where would you say you’re at?
I know it’s a vague question, but take a stab.
Out of a perfect 100 score, meaning every single thought, feeling, action was the best it could be, how would you score yourself?
My favorite scene in The Avengers is right near the end.
After Earth’s mightiest heroes have been divided and conquered by the evil deceiver, Loki, they are assembling in Manhattan.
With a grotesque alien army streaming through a hole in the sky they are humanity’s first, last and only stand.
Then, just as the scene is getting even worse, the final Avenger rolls up on a motorcycle.
It’s Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk, looking worse for wear after crashing down into an abandoned factory somewhere.
“So, this all seems horrible,” he says.
The unflappable Black Widow casually responds, “I’ve seen worse.”
I’ve seen worse
You might know that this work began for me in a horrible time back in Silicon Valley.
Bright eyed with the gold rush of technology, I’d landed a plum transfer to Goldman Sachs’ Silicon Valley office right at the top of the market.
By the time I was boots on the ground, however, the first shoe had already dropped.
Those of us in Silicon Valley will always remember March 10, 2000 as the end of the internet bubble, and start of the pop.
But it still wasn’t for another year or so that the other shoe dropped.
The not so great financial crisis in 2008 had the same footprint.
Investing in distressed companies at Carlyle, we were patiently prepared in 2007 when the Bear Stearns first shoe dropped.
But it wasn’t until Lehman Brothers collapsed some 9 months later that the legs cut out.
In both cases, round after round of layoffs later fewer companies and people were left standing.
A late forties executive, he shook his head and laughed.
That’s a gift and curse of FaceTime.
For most years we’ve worked together I couldn’t see his responses.
I’d just told him the name of a song that has been playing in my head recently.
It’s old, from 1984, I doubt I’ve even heard it for a decade.
But it’s a goodie.
And it’s REALLY been speaking to me these last couple months.
“Keep on moving”
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride
Nobody gonna slow me down, oh no
I got to keep on moving
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride
I’m running and I won’t touch ground
Oh no, I got to keep on moving
Do you remember this song, if you were even alive in 1984?
You can see why he laughed, can’t you?
Yet it was still a powerful reminder for him in these treacherous times.
Like Churchill said about hell, you’ve gotta keep on moving.
Here’s the video if you want to rock it out.
btw, it has some trippy dancers and amazing hair like this artist.
“But how can you feel your best about heading into a recession?”
That’s a question we got from this article last week on stopping being consumed by the debilitating fear in our world.
It’s a great question.
Few of us feel our best about heading into a recession.
And even fewer of us feel our best fearfully focusing on the future.
Besides, how many of us feel our best anyways?
Don’t you wonder why we are less than a shiny, happy species?
I wonder if it has anything to do with being served fear as an all day happy meal?
Food for fear
Our society is food for fear.
We’re apparently mystified by our worsening “mental health crisis,” which is exactly what you expect from this 1-2-3—
-
- Incessantly fill your head with mostly negative information
- Focus on unknowable things that feel bad that you can never influence
- Repeat as many seconds a day
About as mystifying as our obesity or loneliness epidemic, right?
Is this how it’s meant to be?
How your brain is supposed to be used?
You’re taught nothing about using this most magical machine, so perhaps this is right?
It’s a machine for filling with fear to be fear filled for the future?
Yet even if that’s right, I’m still thinking that some of us want to feel good about the future?
Heck, maybe this is taking it WAY too far these days, but perhaps even EXCITED?
When you work on Wall Street you have the same conversations over again.
Just like the brain has some 70,000 automatic thoughts a day, 80-95% that are negative and redundant, most conversations are too.
“Where do you think the economy is headed?”
That’s a question you can get pulled into all day every day.
One person shares their opinion.
Others thoughtfully deliberate.
Endless time is wasted.
0% certainty
The future is 100% unknowable.
Period.
Full stop.
We all know this, of course.
None of us have a crystal ball, and all that.
But because of the way our brains are set up and how you are socially conditioned, all day every day you can be “thinking” about the future.
This can be extremely valuable.
A magical thing about being human is the prefrontal cortex that gives your brain the unique ability to strategize, rationalize, plan ahead.
There is limitless value in this.
It is probabilistic thinking, preparing for different scenarios.
This is different to kidding yourself that you have any certainty whatsoever.
This is how I’m feeling these days.
Rocketing into the stratosphere.
We’ve gone supernova.
Hahahahaha.
I’m just playing around here.
But in many ways it does feel this way.
It’s very exciting.
Leap to hyperspace
This feeling for me started a couple months ago when this article from a couple years ago kept getting hit on the website.
It’s from my September Man upgrade that is now a continuous upgrade.
When I read it I cringed a bit.
It takes a pretty aggressive frame but it also does lay out a method for leaping to hyperspace.
Back then we executed this leap, btw, to tremendous effect.
And I feel it building again.
Leaping hyperspace.
Living supernova.
Still I’m just taking steps.
Exploring this magical journey wherever it leads.
I never set out to do this work in the world, let alone to build programs on the brain or reality constructing.
Certainly not to focus on the future of our species.
Beginning this work 22 years ago I MERELY wanted to know how you live the life you TRULY want.
It seemed like the most obvious thing to me.
So I just started taking steps.
Down the rabbit hole
See, this is ALL that got me started on these topics.
I didn’t get it anymore.
Since I “woke up” in high school and creating your best life became my obsession it had seemed obvious.
Work hard in school.
Get the best job you can.
Do your best work.
Keep creating your best life.
Simple, right?
It all made sense, until it didn’t.
