Redoubtable was Dictionary.com word of the day.
With my third grade vocabulary I didn’t know what it means.
But I took it in with great meaning.
When you see “Re” at the front of a word it often means to do it again.
e.g. Remember. Reuse. Redo.
But here it means the opposite of doing doubt again…
Redoubtable—that is to be feared; formidable, especially as an opponent.
Great word, right?
Why again doubt when you can have…
Really, why do we take our lives so seriously?
Of course we’ve got bills to pay.
And kids to raise.
And all those responsibilities at work and in our lives.
But why for so many of us does it all seem so hard?
You know that quote about all the world’s a stage…
I interpret it to mean it’s a play.
Like a lucid dream we’re directing this life on our own stage.
Here to play.
Believe me, for many years, well, basically, all but this one…
I couldn’t live this way.
I was king of…
Is a search that landed someone on my website.
Do you think that might be fun?
OK, let’s play with it.
Our minds are fabulous time machines.
Just by thinking you can travel anywhere in time, can’t you?
Like some time you were a kid running around playing.
Or an adult doing much the same.
Any time you enjoyed in the past.
Or see yourself enjoying in the future.
In fact anything you can imagine enjoying right now in your mind.
It’s a getting a little gnarly, isn’t it?
The political landscape is fractured like the desert after a quake.
Violence is erupting worse than a summer blockbuster.
Abuse is spewing to the surface from many fissures; Church, Scouts, the global pedo network showing their heads.
Stock market is swelling and dropping, perhaps closing out.
In times like these we can all get tossed around, can’t we?
Some of us are directly affected.
Most of us are whipsawed by the media storm.
I’ve trained myself to block out that noisy global catastrophe.
But like I’m sure many of you, some people around me are being battered by the storm.
Epstein…
No comment.
People are better off that way.
Those of us without eyes wide shut know where the stink hole goes, don’t we?
How quickly our society forgets.
For a while we’re outraged when another Weinstein snakes around.
But quickly we get back to our little screens forgetting like Spacey we demand a constant stream of beautiful boys, and girls.
We pretend not to know how they do it.
That the casting couch existed long before the latest crop of pervs and pedos.
In our society that vehemently fights for women’s rights…
We tune into the fashion shows ogling our super women prancing around in their shiny heels and underwear.
No care how they got there.
Nor how many others were picked over and left elsewhere.
Last name ever
First name greatest
Like a sprained ankle, boy, I ain’t nothin’ to play with…
Drake raps in Forever.
But understand nothin’ was done for me
So I don’t plan on stoppin’ at all
I want this shit forever, man—ever, man—ever, man…
Yeah I’m about my business
Killing all these rappers you would swear I had a hit list
Everyone who doubted me is asking for forgiveness
If you ain’t been a part of it at least you got to witness
A teacher told me a tale about two fisherman.
One was just a lowly fisherman.
He grew up by sea, his father was a fisherman, so too was he.
The other was a successful merchant.
One of the richest and most respected men in the kingdom.
Through a twist of fate he lost it all.
His business collapsed.
Wife left.
Friends jumped ship.
Desperate. Broken. Nowhere to turn.
He turned to sea.
Oh, that’s tragic, one might think.
How awful it must be to lose it all.
Yet, as the storyteller, perhaps Seneca, was pointing out…
You may have seen an article on the app DeepNude.
Another massive leap in technology the app uses an artificial neural network…
To remove the clothing in any photo of a woman.
It doesn’t take artificial intelligence to see women have boobs.
But with enough computing power you can better imagine what they look like.
No longer do we have to so desperately await the next iPhone hack to see celebrity boobs.
Or go to strip clubs.
With 50 bucks and the press of a button, all boobs are free.
Push up bras ruined boobs.
Promising so much, revealing less than.
Technology ruined them more.
Fake boobs.
Sexdoll boobs.
Insta “model” boobs.
Porn infested, boob injected Internet.
Technology promised so much, yet what boobs we’ve become.
I see it time and time again.
No matter what success we achieve it’s hard to feel like we’ve made it.
We are yet to do.
Or make happen.
A problem that first needs to be resolved.
We might be like Atlas having hoisted the world on our shoulders.
But maybe we shrugged a little on the way up.
Still not good enough.
Then I’ll be happy.
When we’re no longer bothered by this.
Worried about that.
Concerned for what else might happen.
There’s too often something that stands in our way.
Normal in our world is having never trained your mind.
I’d rather be dead.
Seriously, this is heaven.
Constantly thinking.
70,000 mostly redundant, shit thoughts.
Addicted to distraction.
Fear, of basically everything.
Uppers to get started. Booze, pills, drugs to shut it down.
Worry, FOMO, anxiously picking up devices every 8 seconds.
Constantly looking to the future, so desperately hoping it’s not worse, maybe better.
Vomiting opinions, thinking they are our own, not just programmed by someone else.
Thinking how you feel is based on your life and anything other than how you’re using your body and mind.
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.
I asked my friend.
“About a 6.”
We agreed to do some work.
Every minute we can choose whether we settle for something less or bring the…
He is a happy enthusiastic fellow building a great business.
He wakes up energized, gets focused on great stuff, powers through his day.
He loves what he does, but it’s far from easy.
Back to back days.
Lots of responsibility. An organization to manage. Business to build.
He’s constantly stretching. It takes a toll.
Most days he feels good. Some days he feels great. Every day we want him to feel more hells yeah.
This fancy chart I marked up captures where I’m coming from.
The thermometer on the left is “normal” human thinking,
As I write about often, it’s not our fault, our brains and world are built with a negativity bias, so it’s easy to get stuck here.
Think positive can be an atlas-worthy goal but that’s not all we aspire to, is it?
If you’re serious about developing yourself you already know the hardest part.
You’ve gotten clear on what ways you want to transform.
You know exactly how you’re doing it.
But, damn, it can be hard to get yourself to do it, right?
A client is focused on being an “Enhanced” version of himself.
Akin to the movie Limitless, he has two ways of being.
“Regular” he walks, talks, thinks, be’s a certain way.
Regular is good, in fact, regular is very good because he’s already spent years developing himself he’s very much the man he wants to be.
But Enhanced is a level beyond.
Here he’s unstoppable. Nothing phases him. Worries him. He’s never short on confidence or belief or the will to keep creating his dream life.
Over years he’s modeled the “Enhanced Character.”
He knows exactly how he wants to be but as we discussed last night, he’s still not good enough at being it.
I told him.
What he’s doing is positively herculean.
Few people ever change.
You meet them 10 years later and they are more or less the same person, walking, talking, being the same way.
Our brains are set up for consistency.
They revert back to our Regular / habituated / conditioned thoughts and behaviors, which changing can take a massive amount of personal power.
Grrrrrrrr I heard the guy at the gym screaming as he was putting up a big weight.
It’s not enough. Power can only take you so far.
So too can motivation. It might get you to want to change, but really, truly making transformational change takes a lot more than desire.
Or will.
Like developing a business, it takes a disciplined approach that you put to work every day, possibly for years, decades, a lifetime.
“Have you read Think and Grow Rich?” he asked.
“That’s a reason I’m still pissed at my parents and teachers,” he said.
Laughing out loud I asked what he meant.
“When I discovered that book,” he told me “it changed my life so much that I was frustrated nobody had told me to read it sooner.”
“It’s not their fault,” I responded to this fellow I had met at a book signing, “the secret of the mind is hidden from most of us.”
But we all should want it.
I didn’t “need” to read Think and Grow Rich, any self-help books, any blog, or listen to any so-called experts to elevate my life from working in factories to Goldman Sachs.
“Success” was easy for me, merely a matter of working 80+ hour workweeks in high school and university.
I’m blessed with a good memory for ROTE learning and the will to work 7 days a week forever.
But that’s hardly a worthy secret of success.
Sure, this approach got me to Goldman Sachs, yet only a few years later asking myself “What am I doing with my life?” I wanted far better answers.
The paradigms for success that our society promotes—e.g. hard work, sacrifice—are down-right painful and mostly miserable!
When anyone who explores development quickly finds better ways.
“Indeed thoughts are things,” is how Napoleon Hill opens his book.
The best-selling self-help book in history with over 100 million copies sold is cited, quoted, and ripped off by many so-called experts.
Although it’s implied in the title, the book isn’t about making money.
But about creating a rich life through unlocking the secret of the mind.
This hidden secret of the mind might be the greatest secret of this game of life…
And those of us who are “pro gamers” spend our lives hunting the keys.
Popeye is a weakling relative to most of us.
He has to pop a can of spinach to grow his muscles, but we have our worry muscles pumped ready to go.
The best feedback I’ve received this year from anything I’ve written was in response to Winning Like A Loser.
Wake up stressed. Fill your mind with overwhelm. Worry about everything. Go to bed at night feeling like you failed to get it done and looking forward to losing another day…
Plenty of people told me that they were ROFL reading it, before going on to tell me how much it resembled their days…
Writing about the insane way we’ve been conditioned to live I was laughing all the way to the publish, but I was also shining a light on something serious.
Because I’ve spent decades ridding my head of the human condition I can never go back to “not-living” that way, but for plenty of years I did.
Back then I didn’t see a problem with it.
It was “normal” to wake up whining about my job (just talk to many people, even at Goldman Sachs), confused what my life was about, terrified it wouldn’t work out as I dreamed, worried about the utter lunacy of the world.
If you’d asked me I would have told you I was completely justified living that way, “it’s just how it is,” I would have said I was “happy,” but now I’d rather be the walking dead.
As I wrote about here, for most of my life I believed that when I was doing what I want I would feel amazing, but now I know we only feel as amazing as we train ourselves to feel.
You have a standard routine for dressing in the morning. Maybe underwear first—not you, P—then socks, perhaps your pants or skirt before.
No matter your “process,” I know every time it’s the same.
You shower and brush in the same sequence too, because just about everything we do is habit.
And while this serves us in many ways—e.g. you don’t have to figure out whether your socks go on before your shoes—our habits of thinking tend to punish us the other way.
The data is astounding—each day we have somewhere around 60,000 thoughts, of which some 90% are redundant and 80% are negative.
It’s sad, but when you consider the nature of the human predicament, it’s obvious why it’s true.
We’re not built for happiness, but survival. Our brains aren’t set up to wander through predator-infested territory smelling the roses but to fixate on what might eat us.
Biologically we’re built with a negativity bias, and we live in a predatory society that feeds on our fears, which ensures many of us are world-class worriers.
His hands are often beaten.
And to a mind that has been feeding on worry, and developed a Popeye-sized worry muscle, there’s always something more to worry about.
See, the problem with muscles is that once you’ve built them you’ve gotta feed them, and indeed mental muscles do a nice job of feeding themselves.
And this means even if there’s nothing “real” in our life to fear—e.g. unlike our ancestors, no Neanderthals are predating us—the brain will find plenty of fake fear to binge on.
Sadly this means, once you’ve built these muscles, it’s near impossible to be happy, other than pretending to be happily-worried all the time.
Us humans are facing an ever-growing health crisis.
All the time you see headlines like World Faces Staggering Obesity Challenge, yet where does this get us?
People are getting fatter and fatter. They are dying of preventable illness.
Their quality of life is significantly diminished by the way they look and feel and as a society what do we do for them?
It’s only in recent years that companies like Dove, with its Real Beauty campaign. And plus-size models like Ashley Graham and Tess Holliday have made it socially acceptable to not look like Kate Moss.
Yet even recently, when Cosmo put Tess on its cover, she was forced to defend herself from shamers… Beautifully telling them “Not to worry about my fat ass…”
Of course our definition of beauty is skewed towards tall, strong, chiseled, handsome men, and thin women, yet we all know that’s not what we are.
We are “normal.” Some of us are taller, fatter, skinnier, smarter, dumber, sexier, geekier than others…
And that’s all good. Our society measures us using the same stick, yet that ugly stick beats many of us down.
Einstein wrote, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
We all come from a different mold, and what matters most is that we are good with who we are.
The best way to win is through brute force.
Everyone knows that hustle is the secret to winning, and that demands that you never have a minute you’re not ferreting away.
Most people are far too lazy for this approach.
Some people are just too stupid to run themselves ragged chasing success, but those who are truly ambitious know exactly how to win.
As soon as you wake up you must get yourself fired up.
And we all know that the absolute best way to motivate yourself is with fear.
Immediately, as soon as you wake up, you want to start thinking about EVERYTHING that you need to get done today.
The best “hack” for getting your anxiety started is to keep your phone by your bed so that within 30 seconds of waking you can check your email.
Of course if you’re serious about winning, you never want to let that anxiety get away from you while lazy people are sleeping, so keep your phone dinging all night.
The most insightful question we should all ask ourselves is, “What keeps you awake at night?”
And then every night before going to bed you want to fill your mind with those things so your brain will keep waking you up to hustle.
It might seem small but just waking up a few times through the night to check your email can make a massive difference. People will know how much you hustle, you’ll feel like you’re all over it, and with just a few thousand sleepless nights you’ll be crushing it.
Now you’ve got your nights sorted and are waking up with the right terror, you want to drive your day the same way.
If you’re serious about success, after you check your email, you want to start filling your mind with all the ways that you might fail, and especially, all the things that might go wrong today.
Instead of paying attention to your spouse, kids, pets, or others you love, you want to be fully in your head thinking about all those things that are happening elsewhere.
A great way to keep building up your fear and overwhelm is to tune into the news, and of course start scrolling through social media, paying careful attention to all the bad things that are going on that have zero impact on you, and you have zero control.
By far Twitter is the best.
It’s only soundbites, so you can easily scroll through thousands of brain farts and overwhelm yourself with noise in just a few minutes.
Once again, if you’re truly ambitious, you’ve been doing this throughout the night, but for those of you who aren’t as committed, there’s still plenty of time to build enough overwhelm to start your day.
A buddy told me that in writing about my most amazing discovery on feeling how you want, I alluded to an uber secret to happiness and then dropped the mic and walked off stage.
It’s somewhat true…
In some ways my work is done. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years obsessively seeking answers to 3 life questions and this was the final piece.
The answer to feeling amazing at will, The Ultimate Solution, is so SUPER SIMPLE, and laughably ludicrous, yet it’s not easy to unpack, even with my clients who are deep on these topics.
That’s because it requires you to “out evolve” our most fundamental biological and social conditioning.
Poor baby is crying because she’s got a dirty diaper.
Notice what the “because” does to that sentence…
It rationalizes feeling crap. It makes sense to kick and scream because of a dirty diaper, right?
Wrong. That’s the problem.
At our most basic level we’re conditioned to believe that not getting/doing what we want is cause for us to “feel worse,” and satisfying our wants is cause for us to feel better.
Of course I’m not suggesting that we should leave baby in a soiled diaper to teach it to feel good irrespective of conditions, I’m merely highlighting how this pattern gets conditioned throughout our lives.
A few years later a bigger baby doesn’t get the ice cream it wants and throws a tantrum. Or is begging for a new toy that will absolutely satisfy it… until it’s crying for the next.
20 years later the even bigger baby is upset because they didn’t get the new sweater in mauve or is so desperately seeking that partner to feel complete.
It’s true that biologically we move away from what we don’t want and towards what we do, but that’s different to growing up believing this is the cause of how we feel.
Hidden inside that seemingly innocent question is the cause of much misery in our world.
Why do we need a “because” to feel happy? Why do we need a cause, instead of being happy for no reason? (because many people are unhappy blaming some reason)
I recently saw a quote from a double amputee that said something like, “People ask me how I can be so positive without my legs, I ask them how they can be so negative with theirs.”
Do you see what’s implied? That having legs “should” cause you to be happy, and having them removed should cause misery.
Now, I’m not suggesting that we should be indifferent to having our legs cut off but I am pointing out that if legs were the cause of happiness we wouldn’t live in a Prozac world.
Because it relies on this flawed cause and effect thinking, nearly all of the research on happiness is wrong.
In the last couple of decades, the focus of my work has been through three major evolutions:
In the old days it was about getting what you want because I believed that would make my life everything I imagined.
Coming from a place of lack the brain seeks those things it thinks will make it feel full (full-filled) but we all know this feeling is fleeting.
And after many years of getting and still not feeling “complete,” I came to see doing is where it’s at.
“It’s not about getting somewhere,” I would have said, “It’s about being immersed in doing what you want…”
Nice try… It’s true, but still incomplete.
Feeling is where it’s at.
Growing up working poor I figured that when I got what I wanted I would feel how I wanted.
I was right, then, quickly, wrong…
How often do we get what we want, only to then set our sights on the next thing that we “think” we want?
All the time!
We’re no happier than we were after WWII because we quickly adapt to what we have.
We live inside a half-empty brain that no matter what it gets seeks more things to fill it up.
But that brain can never feel full. Enough is never enough.
Like a yin that at its deepest level is missing yang, it’s incomplete wiring leads the brain to constantly seek that next thing it needs to feel good.
A reason is that our thinking and feeling faculties are separated like a car and driver. The thinking mind can’t feel anything and projects lack onto the feeling body, which means no amount of getting is satiating.
Seeing through this lie of thinking, I saw beyond getting, to doing.
Getting stuck in my massive goals shredded my mind.
In the past I chased down goals like a cheetah, but when I left Wall Street to do this, I was shot in my tracks.
What I called the chest feeling. The inability to sit down and work, let alone write. The painful thinking on thinking that dominated my head in those early days.
I had a dream to do something big, but I couldn’t even get myself to do it small.
It’s for this reason that I build highly systematic approaches for myself and my clients to wake up and crush our days, and I can’t emphasize enough the power of daily systems like this.
Yet it was from years of stuck thinking on massive goals that I discovered the secret is…
Our brain is the most powerful time machine we know that can imagine anything and everything at all times in every future.
One moment we’re thinking about what happened as a kid. The next we’re thinking about 30 years from now. Five seconds later that brain has jumped to what happened last weekend or what might happen next.
Forever stuck in this time machine we can become too overwhelmed by all the things we might do, and focus too little on doing what matter most now.
Instead of living in the world of the actionable, we get stuck in the world of the possible…
If I had written a book for every time I said that, I would have written a library of books on not knowing what you want…
But I knew how to do that well enough, so instead I wrote the one book that helped me solve it!
It’s a big book. There’s plenty of stuff in there, but there’s also a very simple process that drives from front to back.
For many years I was stuck in my own head, confused, worried, frustrated, thinking all the time, What Do I Want?
But after grinding my gears on the same question for a decade, I could see it was false.
Berating myself because I didn’t know what I wanted kept me confused, but I got lucky that every day I was taking the small steps that eventually would lead me to clarity.
The brain can keep questioning forever, and, in fact, being stuck is desirous for the brain craves certainty, even if that certainty is not knowing what you want!
Yet, by continuing to take steps, as I wrote about here, even without knowing what you want, you are navigating your way there.