Are you awake or asleep?

On the surface it’s a pretty straightforward question, isn’t it?

That’s because by the traditional definition of these words, it is straightforward.

Being asleep you’re unconscious, generally in bed.

Awake you’re consciously aware.

That’s different to the deeper definitions we’re talking about here.

“Awake?”

You may know that there’s a deep rabbit hole here?

In fact, perhaps this is the deepest rabbit hole that you can ever explore.

If you are on this path of evolving yourself and particularly have explored new-age or Eastern or spiritual or deeper esoteric teachings you might be using this word as we do.

Often you hear people on this path use this in a negative, judgmental way.

Because they are accumulating knowledge and are now more awake to how the human being is truly functioning (e.g. automatically), they label themselves in a more flattering way as having woke or being awake.

Others are labelled often pejoratively as being asleep, or called say “Sheeple.”

I suggest that you never want to judge anyone, especially when you know how easy it is to keep falling asleep.

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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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