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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Have you learned things in life that have changed so much for you?

Of course I know you have, and here I’m trying to get specific with you.

That some or even just 1 of these things might have fundamentally changed you and your life.

You were just going along as you had been.

Like you used to think or feel or behave a certain way.

And then you learned some or just 1 thing that changed you forever.

Perhaps rapidly.

This is 1

1 thing I struggle with in all of my work is how to convey it.

There are things that I’ve come to know that I can’t say how I know.

Or there are things that have been so fundamentally transforming for me but I don’t know how to get the message across.

A problem is that these concepts can all seem to make sense at a certain level.

You think that you really get it.

And then, some thing clicks in a way that you REALLY get it.

It’s like a deepening or insight or knowing.

Once you get this, everything changes.

And it can be the same for ALL humanity.

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