How to Be Happy Where You Are

I know you're an ambitious person cuz you're listening to this podcast and you've got goals and you've got standards and you've got things that you want to do in your life. And from the outside, somebody might look at your life and be like, "You know what? She's got it all together. He's got it all together." But when no one's watching and you're driving alone in your car, there's this like low-grade hum underneath everything. It's like this feeling of not yet. Uh, not yet. Not there yet. I can't settle. I've got to keep going. And you've probably diagnosed this feeling as your ambition. That's just my edge. Like that's what keeps me going. And I get it cuz I have I felt that way for years. First 35 years of my life until I realized what it actually is and it's not ambition. And so I want to actually challenge that today. Because in your brain, there's two completely separate systems. One of them wants things and the other one enjoys things. And those come from two completely different parts in your brain with different chemistry trained independently of each other. Which means that you can spend 20 years making the wanting, the ambition system so strong while the enjoying system is completely weak inside of your brain. And this is why you can hit a goal that you've chased for 3 years and when you hit it, you immediately just move to the next thing. I did that so many times and so many successful people do this as well. And so today, I'm going to show you the neurological reason why your brain won't let you enjoy where you are and I'm going to show you why it always ends in burnout and then I'm going to give you the the actual step-by-step process to fix it. Because by the end of this episode, you're not going to be less ambitious. You're just going to learn how to be driven in a completely different way than you have before. Because a person who is grateful and hungry is almost impossible to stop. Okay, so I want to start with one of the most fascinating pieces of research in this entire space of gratitude and I would be shocked if you've ever heard of it before. But, there's a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan named Kent Berridge, and he spent his entire career on one question: are wanting and liking the same thing? And everybody before his research assumed yes, like you want the thing because you like the thing, right? But, what he found is they run on two completely different systems in your brain. Wanting runs on dopamine. It's big, it's loud, it's spread across many regions in your brain. But, liking and enjoying, like actually feeling enjoyment, runs on completely different chemistry. It's concentrated in these tiny little clusters in your brain that are called hedonic hot spots. And most people are strengthening the wanting parts of their brain every single day, while the enjoying parts of their brain are really not being used. And then you wake up at 40 and you go, "Why does none of this feel like anything?" And it's not because you're like an ungrateful person, it's because you've basically hypertrophied one system and you've let the other system atrophy. It's like the equivalent of like being a, you know, bodybuilder with massive arms and then you got teeny, tiny toothpick legs and you wonder why you can't stand up. It's because the wanting and liking systems, the wanting system's been built up and built up and built up. The liking and enjoying system, you just never have been using. And I want to be clear, like I'm not telling you to kill the wanting system. I love the wanting system that lives inside of me. It's built everything that I have. And we will be right back. Hey, real quick. If you're someone who's already doing pretty well in life, like you've built a business, you've built a career, you've built everything that looks pretty good on paper, but you know that you're nowhere near your potential, and you've been sitting at the same level for a few years now, you need to be at my live event that I'm hosting called Freedom Live. It's 3 days in Austin, Texas. It is not for people that are just starting out. It is for people who are already running, but they know that they're running at like 60% of their capacity. I'm going to teach you how to operate at your peak performance, 95 to 100% of your potential, so that you can build a true life of freedom. Go to freedomlive2026.com or scan that QR code right there. There's currently a $50 off coupon if you join right now. So, once again, go ahead and go right here or go to that QR code right there. And now, back to the show. What I'm telling you is that there's a second muscle, {quote} {unquote}, in your brain that you need to strengthen. And it's gratitude in training. Like, that's the training you need. And gratitude, what it actually is, like, it's not positive thinking. It's not like, "Hm, I'm just going to sit down and chill out because I just have everything that I want." It is a repetition for the only system in your brain that's capable of producing the feeling that you've been chasing with the other one for 20 years. And so, you've been trying to get satisfaction out of the pursuit system part of your brain. Does that make sense? And like, the pursuit system does not manufacture satisfaction. It never has, and it was never designed to. And that's why you will never feel happy with success is because that part of your brain was never designed to do it. That's why you can buy the Lamborghini, you can buy the BMW, and it's cool for like a couple weeks, and then you go back to normal. That's why you can hit a million dollars or 10 million dollars or a billion dollars in your bank account, and then you just don't feel happy about it. And you might go, "That's not me." Please, I know people that are worth over $4 billion and they're miserable. So, clearly, the money does not make somebody happy. Hm, that must mean there's two different parts of our brain we need to work on, right? It's not that you need a better car, it's not that you need a bigger bank account. Getting a nice car and and a bigger bank account will not change the way that you feel long-term. You need to strengthen the different part of your brain. Right? And listen, like I get it. I completely get it for all of you guys. I ran my entire life off of the wanting part of my brain for a long time. And I thought that's what made me ambitious. But wanting and then achieving and then never fully feeling the enjoyment in your life will burn you out. Working really hard with no real feeling of reward will burn you out. Burnout is not caused by working too hard though. Like I've coached thousands and thousands of people. I've watched people work insane hours on something that they loved and they come out energized. That's how I feel about what I do. But I've also watched people work 40 or 50 hours a week on something that they don't love and come out destroyed. The difference wasn't the workload. It's how much they are enjoying and getting enjoyment out of what they're doing but also what they're achieving. And how much they're letting themselves feel the gratitude for their lives, for their achievements, for their challenges, feeling gratitude for the losses, for everything. You know, people think gratitude is soft. Gratitude is not soft. Gratitude is strategic in the brain. I'm going to explain to you what I mean by that. Because the more I can feel gratitude for everything that I have, the more that I want to build an even more incredible life to be grateful for. And when I push and I hit a goal and I succeed and then I allow myself to truly feel that gratitude, my brain releases dopamine. And my brain goes, >> [snorts] >> "Damn, like that felt great. Let's do it again." And it wants to keep achieving. And this is why dopamine is a chemical of motivation. It wants to keep achieving more of what gave it dopamine in the first place. So, if you never truly enjoy your successes, you don't get the dopamine. and then you don't want to keep achieving more. So, as I actually said, gratitude in this case is a very strategic thing. It's not like a soft little mushy woo-woo thing. Like, let me let me shift gears for a second and just I want to tell you something that I believe, right? And you can take it or leave it. But, I believe that there's something running this whole world that we live in, right? You can call it God, you can call it universe, you can call it source, whatever you want to call it. I really don't care what words you use. But, I've come to believe, and I have a deep-seated belief in this, that it operates on stewardship. And if you think about it practically, it makes sense. Imagine you gave somebody a small team to manage in your company, and every day all they did was complain. Like, "Oh, my team's not big enough, and [snorts] you know, I can't do what I want because our budget's not big enough, and nothing's ever right, and my sales people's numbers aren't where they should be." Like, if they're constantly complaining about the small team that you gave them, would you ever give them a bigger team? Hell, no. Of course, you would not. And it's not because you're punishing them. It's because they can't even handle the small team. Like, they've given you very clear information about the fact that they can't handle this tiny little bit that you gave them. And so, if you gave them more resources, I guarantee they would still complain with more. That's like exactly how I think life works out. Like, if what you do is complain with a little that is in your life, why would you ever be trusted with a lot? Like, do you think about that for for a second? If you're like, "Well, my life, it's not very great, and boo-hoo, and my bank account, and all of this stuff." If you complain about the the small blessings that you do have, why would you ever be trusted with more? People don't think about this way. And I don't mean in like some some mystical way where the universe is like keeping score and like with a notebook or anything like that. No. You see, the person who's grateful for what they have and takes care of it and sees himself as a steward of what they have, they notice more. They are better at everything that they do. Better people want to work with them. They act from like a full tank instead of an empty tank. So, they last longer. They don't burn out in year three of building something. So, they're still standing in year 10 where everything starts to compound later on. So, like gratitude doesn't like just like summon the blessing. That's what I'm trying That's not what I'm trying to say. Gratitude makes you the kind of person who can handle the blessing when it compounds and becomes greater than you thought that it could be. And so, I really want you to think about this question cuz I have an honest question for you, okay? If right now you were handed everything that you say you want, right now, today, in this moment, but you still have the exact same identity and operating system that you've always had, would you enjoy it? Or would you eventually find something wrong with it in like 6 weeks like you've done with everything that you have now? It's a real question I want you to think about because no amount of success or achievement will ever change how you feel inside. Right? You fix the internal and the external changes. You fix the external, it doesn't change the internal. So, how do you train this? Before I give you the actual steps on how to train it, well, there's one thing. There's a study that was done out of Indiana University where they had people do a gratitude exercise every morning. And then 3 months later, they scanned their brains. They found out that the people who had the gratitude group showed a greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. That's the part of your brain that gives things meaning, which means that gratitude actually changes your brain. So, gratitude is not like it's fluffy stuff. It's an actual practice. It's mental training to change your brain. So, let me give you the the the step-by-step process. The first one is this. Get specific. And I mean like painfully specific. Most gratitude practices fall short because people are like, "I'm" and they just take like a bucket of life. "I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my health. I'm grateful for my job." Like those are like categories in life. And your brain has heard my family 10,000 times. So, I want you to go like more granular. You could say, "I'm grateful for my son." Yes. Or, but you could even go more granular than that. "I'm grateful for the specific way that he says words wrong that I know he's going to grow out of in a few months. I'm so grateful for how cute it is when he wants to say crackers and he says coggies instead." "I'm so grateful for when my son wants to say avocado and he says copo." Right? Like that. I'm so much more I'm I'm even like feeling good about that right now thinking about how he does that. Right? So, the more detail that you can be in your gratitude, the better. That's number one. Number two. I want you to catch the complaint and convert it. Okay? You can't stop your first thought, but you can always change your second thought. Right? And so, this week I want you to catch yourself complaining. You will do it. And don't shame yourself for it. Just ask yourself one question when you complain. What in this exact situation would I miss if it was gone? Right? So, let's say like you're stuck in traffic. What in this exact situation would I miss if it was gone? Well, if my car was gone, like I am I'm really grateful actually that I do have a car cuz a lot of people don't have a car. Right? Okay, there's something I could be grateful for. Like let's say you're slammed at work, right? What in this exact situation would I actually miss if it were gone? My job. If my job were gone, like people want to make the amount of money that I make. Or some people just want a job. So, I'm grateful that I do have a job and I can pay my bills, right? Or like your kid is being crazy, cuz we know kids can be crazy. What in this exact situation would I actually miss if it were gone? Your kid is alive. Your kid is in the house. Your kid is healthy. So much to be grateful for in the moment. So, we can take our complaints and by asking ourselves that question, completely change the way that we feel. And you're not lying to yourself about anything. You're just refusing to let your brain run old patterns of complaining when there's something right in front of you you can be grateful for, right? And you're choosing to get stronger in the gratitude parts of your brain. You're finding gratitude, right? So, that's number two. Number three, last one, terminated in action. This is where like what separates gratitude from like passivity. Every time you get grateful, close it with a question. So, ask yourself when you talk about your gratitude practice, so what am I going to do with it? Right? So, let's say you're grateful for the fact that you are so healthy right now. What am I going to do with it? I'm going to go use my body, right? I'm grateful for my business. Okay, so what am I going to do with it? I'm going to go serve a client better today. Because gratitude that stops at just a feeling is just that. It's just a feeling and there's nothing wrong with that, but if you really want to etch it into your DNA, gratitude that has a feeling and then ends in action, that's like stewardship of the thing that you're grateful for. Right? That's the loop. Get grateful for it, so you take care of it. And if you take care of it, it grows. And if it grows, that means there's going to be more for you to be grateful for. Okay? And so, here's what I want you to do. I want you to write this down. Answer this question. What am I currently treating as not enough that I once prayed for? I promise you, every person listening to me, there is something in your life that you're stepping over on the way to your complaining about something else. There's a version of you 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, who would love to have something that you have now. Question number two, if nothing external changed for the next 12 months, what would I have to change inside of me for that to be a good year? Whatever comes up for that one, that's the actual work. Because you're not unhappy because your life is too small. I promise you that. You're unhappy because you've spent so many years training the part of your brain that chases, and you have spent no time at all on the part of your brain that feels gratitude. And the more that you do gratitude, the more that part of your brain actually starts to strengthen. You can fix it. It's like a muscle. But you just never really went to the gym for that one. And when you fix it, you don't get soft. You don't lose your edge. You don't lose your ambition. You become somebody who can outwork everybody else because now you're not running from past trauma, and that's what gives you your {quote} ambition. You're running because you're grateful, and you want to create even more things to be grateful for. Because when you achieve the things that you're working towards, and you allow yourself to actually feel it, you'll be more excited to actually run and go get that thing. Because in all honesty, if we're building these lives, what's the point of building a beautiful life if you don't actually truly let yourself enjoy it. Hey, thanks so much for watching today's video. If you love this video, click this one right here. This is the one that you need to watch next. And if you want to make sure you don't miss any more of these episodes, click that button right there. Make sure you subscribe, and check out the next one.