Yes!
Now, we’re getting crazy… good.
Here we’re not just focused on living your ultimate life but…
Are you thinking your best?
Feeling your best?
Absorbed in your best actions?
Is today pretty good or…
If not, when do you plan on living it?
Next year?
When you reach that goal?
Get that thing?
Feel like you’ve finally, what…
Made it?
The only time we ever experience is now.
Period.
Full stop.
They didn’t spend more time on social media.
More time reading the news.
More time watching TV.
More time surfing the web.
They know our minds are built for distraction.
Like Facebook they’ve built their honeypots to keep us trapped.
But we can break free.
But how much of our lives do we piss away.
Thinking about shit we can’t control.
Worried about the future. Thinking about the past.
Living in a different time, a different place, how many of us are living here today?
A beautiful Nordic alien recently told me she was sent here in search of intelligent life.
“So far I’m yet to find it,” she said.
“Ha, what do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve been reading your news and watching your TV and it’s obvious there’s no intelligent species here.”
“Have you kept up with the Kardashians?” she asked.
“And your entertainment?”
“What about it?” I asked.
Looking at me with her hypnotic blue eyes she asked, “What type of intelligent species entertains itself with murder and mayhem?”
“Your politicians? They are your leaders?”
Do you know it’s true?
Apparently we have a greater fear of public speaking than death…
It was once pretty close to that for me.
I can’t say that if you held a gun to my head and made me choose, I’d eat a bullet.
But public speaking, and even having a public website, was once a near-death experience.
How comfortable are you speaking in public?
Not just this formal thing we call “public speaking,” but how comfortable are you standing and speaking to a group?
Even socially, do you need the lubricant just to feel more at ease?
In business, do you hold yourself back in meetings or other forums because it’s uncomfortable for you?
Or perhaps worse, diminish your credibility by doing it poorly?
We’ve been speaking in public most of our lives!
And that’s the crux of this public speaking dilemma.
Because we see public speaking as a “special-type” of speaking, we think it requires all sorts of unnatural ways of doing it.
Suddenly we can’t just speak the way we always do.
We need a script. To memorize it. Practice over and over. Imagine the audience naked…
Tim Ferris had it backwards.
It’s not the four hour workweek…
It’s that on average we have 4 hours free every week…
I’m wary of basic ideas and random surveys but it neatly makes my point…
How many of us feel like we have enough “free” time?
In these blessed modern times, how many of us are living the time of our lives?
How many of us have enough time to do the things we want?
In this track from my Masterclass on Surviving Our Sewer Society, I walk through three levels of freeing your time:
Level 1: Is all the time management stuff. How, specifically, do you become so good with your time that you “make more” of it?
Level 2: Four sewer traps that steal our time—Thinking. Feeling. Distraction. Staying so busy to avoid thinking about our lives…
Level 3: The Five Levels of Being Human… The real goal of freeing your time is so you can focus on higher level topics.
No matter how you look at it, all we have is time.
And every second, right now, and now right now, we are stuck in the time prison or freeing the time of our lives.
Here’s Track 4 from Surviving Our Sewer Society, The Time Prison:
Well, it’s that much of what our society shovels us, stinks.
Career advice. Life advice. Financial advice. Certainly, the crap our society shovels into our minds…
And, yes, of course I’m playing around a bit here. 🙂
There are so many amazing things about our modern lives…
Many people are dying every day from opioid, obesity, and other “diseases” of the mind.
So many of us are dying of boredom in jobs we hate.
Financially, so many of us live in lack, even many rich people dying every day with insecurity.
What about our time?
How many of us feel we are living the time of our lives?
What do you truly want?
What is the most amazing life you can imagine?
Are you going for it?
What holds you back?
I don’t know why this became my life.
But I do know exactly how.
I really liked my job at Goldman but I felt there was something I needed to keep exploring.
From where I started in life Wall Street was a huge leap, but my brain wouldn’t let me rest there.
I needed to keep leaping.
If I know the answer I’m already bored.
Stepping back and asking my question—What Do I Want?—I had no idea where it would lead me.
It was easy to stay in a job I liked and make good money, but if you don’t leap into the unknown what might you not find?
Who might you not become?
That headline is my longest ever…
Coz that’s what I think Raj’s sentence should have been—longer.
The guy has the gall to come out of prison and still claim to be innocent in handing off insider secrets to the other Raj.
But that’s only the short of it.
I don’t blame Raj and all the hedge fund scammers.
Like Lance Armstrong and the sport of cycling, to win a highly competitive game, you expect some to cheat.
Especially when the upside is so high, and the downside is so low.
Make billions of dollars with a tiny risk of getting caught and serving a short sentence?
Everyone on the inside knows this is how some of the biggest got big.
Maybe it wasn’t overtly “insider,” but their edge was non-public information.
“Cheating” is a squishy definition.
Obviously you can donate a lot of money and get your kid into a school.
And of course there’s more than one organized racket out there.
Yet, where does the fine line of helping your kid do better in school end, and cheating begin?
Having a tutor is very reasonable, yet something poorer kids can’t afford. Nor a college admissions advisor.
Let alone the many who “brainstorm ideas” or “edit,” let alone straight up write your kid’s admission essays for them…
I saw in Vermont they elected this goat, Lincoln, as Mayor.
Unclear by his name if he’s a Democrat but he certainly has a much better chance than most the 2020 candidates.
I enjoy a fun fight and I’m really looking forward to the Democratic primaries.
It’s going to be hilarious to watch them try to out-PC, out-left each other.
And, then, when they figure that’s a losing strategy…
They’ll start off all nice like their anti-bullying bullying, but soon the field will descend into attack politics.
Like Bernie and Hillary, they’re all playing nice until they’re not.
Recognizing they fail by playing Mr. / Mrs. / Non-binary Good Guys / Gals / Them they’ll start chewing away at each other.
I’m thinking at least we wouldn’t have to listen to the goat poorly attack his rivals.
The only thing it would eat is the stage and perhaps gnaw away at a pant-leg here and there.
And certainly Lincoln might also have a chance against Trump.
Whenever I talk about negative thinking I need a good bath to wash it off.
You can never ignore this elephant dung in the room…
But you also never want to get stuck in it.
As I talk about in the track below, like cleaning out a wound it’s necessary to clear out limited thinking, yet limitless thinking is better and better.
It’s bizarre that in our world positive thinking is a “thing.”
Why amazing thinking isn’t the default in our brains and world is beyond us, yet we can choose.
For some people it’s easy to choose amazing, but for many of us it can take training.
Yet, because the brain basically cycles the same thoughts every day…
Once you get it thinking more limitless, it keeps driving more this way.
“The greatest discovery of my generation,” William James, who died in 1910, said, “is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”
It’s a nice-sounding quote, but 100+ years later, how many of us are trained to actually live this way?
This is the greatest discovery of my life—
How you actually live it.
It’s not about knowing you can alter your attitude.
Or even choosing to do it…
Like getting in the best shape of your life at the gym, you want a training program to deeply condition yourself this way.
Another Shooting…
I no longer indulge it.
I don’t even know how to talk to people about it anymore.
Different shooting, all the same nonsense.
Another lunatic’s version of reality forced upon the rest of us.
Another media cycle, milking murder for the all the ratings it can get.
More politicians using it to push more of their agenda.
Who do we not blame?
Football fans hate on each other as much as Democrats and Republicans as much as this holy war that has raged for centuries.
One man killing a bunch of innocent people a microcosm of the game of hate our god-loving Churches and States—Islamic States, included—play on a grander scale.
Blame the gun laws. Blame mental health. Blame parenting. Any donkey we can pin it on.
Video games that taught him to shoot, and helped him direct his POV-style game. Social media that gives him what many teenage girls want, fame.
Our celebrities for acting out their nightly murder for entertainment.
Someone asked me if I’m laughing at the miserable Chamath the Destroyer how do I feel about parents bribing their kids into school.
Well, of course I find it just as funny, and unsurprising.
Rich and famous people can buy near anything in our world, and anyone who thinks the school system is above bribery hasn’t noticed what “gifting” a building will do…
And I can understand where they’re coming from.
One of the hardest things for parents is feeling helpless they can’t do more for their kids.
How do you help your kids win in this rapidly changing modern world?
School has become more competitive than the Olympics so it’s not surprising parents would follow the example of Tonya Harding and bust a rule or two.
Of course we know helping your kids achieve something they fail to earn doesn’t help them in the long-run, but it heavily reduces the burden of actually being a parent…
And what more can you do?
Nobody teaches us to win in life.
Even in school which has a very obvious method for winning—a process for studying—and even more obvious winning skills—e.g. focus, speed reading, memory techniques—nobody teaches us how to win.
Instead we’re taught that life is a battlefield on which brute force wins—put your head down, work hard, sacrifice, give it all you’ve got…
Ugh, near everyone on this planet loses that way.
Growing up we’re told we can do what we want…
Well, how many of us are doing what we want?
How many of us have the careers we want?
The business we want?
Are living the lives we truly want?
How many of us even have a grand vision for our life we’re every day advancing?
Not many. Not enough.
How many of us can even answer the most “obvious” question…
In my experience few of us even know what we want.
I’m not just talking about young people, but many later in life are still waiting to figure out what they want when they grow up.
I’m not just talking about the big questions either; the small stuff is hard enough too.
Do you stay in your job or retire? Keep working for the man or start something of your own? Get married or have a harem 🙂
No matter the question, it’s the “Structure of Choice” that keeps many of us stuck.
I know this all too well for it was the question that started all this for me.
For about 10 years I asked this question.
Reading thousands of books only seemed to make the question more complicated.
Goals. We know we should have them, but with crappy goal-setting advice it’s hard to even get pointed in the right direction.
Over a decade of doing this work for myself I not only answered my question but built a system for all of us to answer.
Since they failed to beat Trump in the election, the Dems have put in all the stops.
With a name like Democrats one might presume they believe in democracy, but all they’ve done is resist the president the country elected.
I’m not saying he’s irresistible…
There’s plenty about him that’s resist-worthy.
All I’m saying is…
If they could win an election…
Maybe if they listen to my Masterclass on Combating Trump…
We wouldn’t be experiencing the grotesque political games that threaten the democracy.
Maybe Mueller’s deep probe will reveal something that every Cold War movie implied but even Cohen denied…
Quick, hide from your Facebook, the Russians are coming. 🙂
Maybe dragging Trump’s lawyer in front of Congress and airing his dirties will achieve their goal of bringing him down.
It’s certainly bringing the country down, but will unlikely even stain Trump.
And, even if they did, how do they expect the half of the country that doesn’t buy the New York Times respond?
You know, the ones with all the guns…
Almost certainly Trump will go on, and then, in 2020, the Dems will get their chance to…
We’ve heard lots of excuses for why Hillary lost, but the only factual one is that she was beat by a better combatant.
Not being political, just factual.
Her one-eyed fans don’t want to see it.
Point out the obvious that she ran a mediocre campaign—Awful slogans. Weak messaging. Zero skills of influence—and the anti-bullying bullies bully in force.
Anyone with one eye can see Hillary could and should have won.
But like the 16 Republicans Trump thrashed, what did she learn from losing to Barack?
I stopped writing articles because I know we need more.
I don’t do this because I enjoy ranting about doing what you want but because it’s my mission to share the solutions I wish someone had handed me.
And over time I came to see that writing about complex topics was of little value to you and me.
We both deserve more 🙂
In the last few months I stepped back and asked how I can deliver to you the types of solutions I needed and build for my clients.
I wanted to create for you actual solutions.
Which led me to the idea of real deep learning in the format of audio Masterclasses.
You’ll see three on this page—Combating Trump, What Do I Want?—and the one I’m writing about here….
Love this from retired SEAL, Goggins.
Whatever you are going through, use it to get stronger.
In fact, seek out shit that forces you to get stronger.
Steel is forged, hardened, by heat and being beaten against an anvil.
To become your greatest get yourself an anvil…
I’m no longer making time to write here, but I did make time to post this word of the day.
Whatever you want.
Whatever you are doing.
Bring more mettlesome.
You’ve got this!