The REAL “Law Of Attraction” Part NOBODY Talks About! (Focus On This) | Tom Bilyeu

even the law of attraction you know the i was taught the law of attraction you know i was 23 24 years old um also at a real estate conference they were talking about this law of attraction thing that there's this energy everything's made up of energy i am energy you are energy and my thoughts you know create this resonance between what i attract and what i don't i'm like oh god i like that you were talking about how you wrote down these beliefs and you were reading them over and you were doing what you're told and you're running your finger across you really allowing yourself to feel it imagine it and your brain was screaming something at you my brain was screaming that's [ __ ] that's not true you're not successful you're not earning that amount of money you're not smart you're not this but i was also taught at the same time that when that happens first and foremost that's normal that's the old self and the old patterns trying to fight for their life and he said with repetition and emotion and consistency initially it's hard and you have to use conscious effort to create the new beliefs he says but over 30 days 60 days 90 days 180 days that new pattern that you're focusing on and paying attention to your brain basically says well i guess you really don't need those old patterns you keep activating these new ones let's just make these ones work and let's make these real yeah but i want to understand what happened and and with the even the law of attraction you know the i was taught the law of attraction you know i was 23 24 years old um also at a real estate conference they were talking about this law of attraction thing that there's this energy everything's made up of energy i am energy you are energy and my thoughts you know create this resonance between what i attract and what i don't i'm like oh god i like that [ __ ] you know like i want to attract more of the good stuff right um and so i i i bought in like i bought into stuff that just made sense to me but then i was a voracious student i wanted to understand how like explain to me how it works like if somebody tells me visualize i go why like how does it work like he asked me to visualize like why does it work like why should i invest my time on that versus something else if you're asking me to use affirmations like how specifically why how does it work if you're asking me to emotionalize well what's happening in me that tell me i need to create these false senses of feelings uh i want to know why it works and why does it work especially emotionalizing i think that's something that people hear a lot i talk a lot about embodying something really feeling it yeah but why does it work right great question it has to do with circuits in the brain and neurochemicals that are released and so when we feel something chances are that we're going to release dopamine in the brain the feel good neurochemical that activates the reward center of the brain and chances are if we feel that and we have this positive emotion around it and that neurochemistry is flooding our brain and our body with feel-good chemicals we're actually activating the motivational center of the brain and so when we visualize when we set a goal when we take an action step when we emotionalize when we read our goals the initial flood of neurochemicals dopamine serotonin feel good chemicals and then if we share it with a friend oxytocin those three neuro chemicals those are the neurochemicals of goal achievement but then there's the other side of it the other circuits of fear of stress where norepinephrine cortisol or epinephrine the stress hormones can be released as well and so i'm fascinated and i want to teach people the stuff that we've learned about beliefs self-esteem self-worth fears and the stuff that really holds people back because all the how to how to get healthy and stay healthy we know how do i build a business and sustain we know how do i get into a relationship and make it successful we know we know most of the how-to for anything that anybody wants to do in this time frame that we live in so the how to is the easiest part of the equation so the harder part of the equation is why am i not doing the things that i know i should be doing and why am i not doing the things that i could find out easily how to do let's talk about that so in your real estate company you said i'm giving everyone the same training they're reading all of the same books and yet they're not getting the same results and it wasn't like oh well the smart people are doing better than the dumb people you said sometimes it was people that you were like god in real life this guy's not that bright but he's crushing it so what ended up being the difference between the people who didn't do anything with the information and those that did so in this is going back sometimes i think in 1992 we were stuck but i knew there was more possibility there was there was room for growth and i wanted to figure out if the stuff that i did in the 80s when i was a kid you know that broke free would it work with some of my agents and so we took 75 agents randomly agents said hey do you want to get into a six-month program to like retrain your brain your subconscious brain around your beliefs about what is possible for you to achieve around your habits of what you have to do in order to achieve that and we focused on retraining their subconscious mind and so for six months they had to go through a process of listening to certain audio tapes reading reading certain materials every day and following the process of training their brain specifically their subconscious brain which controls 95 to 98 of all of our thoughts emotions and behaviors today and within six months that group increased sales by 100 million dollars jesus 100 million dollars i said holy [ __ ] right this is working uh and so we started to teach some of what we teach now in neurogym actually now we have the technologies we have the systems that are far better than what we did back in the 90s and we went from 1.2 billion to 4.5 billion a year and it wasn't because we taught them any more skills to be real estate agents we taught them how to change the way they thought about themselves we taught them how to change their habits our agents who made 750 000 or more were in front of a client 75 percent of the time and we asked all the agents that weren't in front of more clients like why are you doing that like why aren't you in front of people that are going to help you earn more income oh well we're busy doing this and doing this and doing this and they had stories and excuses and reasons why and so part of the work that i love to do now is is really help people understand what is your story like what's the story you're telling us because we all have a story we have a money story a relationship story a health story we have a story for everything and then that story keeps recreating our lives over and over and over again and we have beliefs that support the story we have habits that support the story we have people that support the story we have systems that support our story and so my question i always ask people who would you be with a different story talk to me about set points that was something really interesting in what you talk about around the stories and things that we carry that i found really interesting sure so maxwell maltz wrote a great book many many years ago in the probably the 70s called psycho cybernetics right and maxwell maltz was a surgeon who performed surgery on people and what he noticed is even after plastic surgery that he performed on people some people didn't see any change in their faces and it was visible to everybody else but not to them because they had a map of what they thought they look like yes okay so we all have a map of reality we have a map of what we think we look like and any deviation on the physical level to that map to that visual representation we have in our brains that doesn't match the map your brain deletes or distorts it so when we were working with real estate agents or when i worked with business owners in addition to upgrading knowledge and skills if you think about how let's say income we have set points for how much income we earn so whether it's 10 000 a year or 20 or 50 or 100 or a million doesn't matter we get this set point and then we behave the way we need to behave and we feel what we need to feel to earn that income and over a period of time it becomes part of the brain's default mode network so we develop set points for everything and so if the set point's in the brain and there's a psycho-cybernetic mechanism in the brain a control and response mechanism in the brain and it's our brain why not learn how to reset the set point and so now we're looking at what technologies are available to help help reset that what evidence-based methods are there to set that or to reset that and so when we take let's say visualization right and you start to see yourself even if the picture is not clear in your mind of achieving the next level of your success whether it's releasing weight and keeping it off getting into a relationship that you love and are happy and whether it's to make two or three or five times more money and live a certain type of lifestyle that allows you to do the things that freedom with having money allows you to do if you start in your mind first and you impress that through conscious efforts into the subconscious mind it then causes thoughts and emotions and behaviors so i like to work from the outside in and from the inside out so use both i want every advantage it's interesting so i've heard you now a few times and and the first few times it didn't really make my radar but you always say release weight you never say lose weight yeah what do you do when you lose something look for it yeah i don't want to look for weight that i've lost i want to release it i like to use language patterns as well that are going to empower me versus disempower me self-talk is so critical and so i'm consistently paying attention to how am i speaking to myself am i speaking to myself in a kind motivating empathetic compassionate way or am i consistently self-deprecating and putting myself down i used to think a lot like when i was younger i'm not good enough i'm not smart enough i'm not worthy um those thoughts uh and you know lots of fear fear of being embarrassed fear of failure fear of being ashamed and i still have the thoughts every once a while especially when i'm setting new goals those come up holy mackerel they come up so freaking fast are you smart enough to achieve that are you good enough to achieve that even when i got into really diving deep into the brain science and even my new book i had i was petrified to release my book it took me two years to write it because now i'm entering another whole domain of neuroscience and neuropsychology with world-renowned experts that i've worked with for years but now here i am putting myself out there with hey this is neuroscientifically correct so i had to make sure that it was and but there's a lot of fear but i understand what the emotion of fear is it's a subconscious trigger that causes this feeling that i don't like and it's a ghost signal for me not a stop signal for me that's interesting what do you mean by that well fear is an emotion emotions are all triggered at the subconscious level they release neurochemicals that causes a feeling we are consciously aware of feelings that are triggered at the subconscious level the feeling is the end point of the human experience in the physical body and so when you have something in your brain that that a neural network says well uh what if this book comes out and you fail what if it's not good enough what is scientifically not correct what if what if what if my brain is going to process that the same way as your brain and everybody else because that's everybody's brain's the same the mechanism of how the brain works it's einstein's brain hitler's brain genghis khan's brain tom bilio's brain john acetate all the same functionality so if you understand the mechanics of what's supposed to happen then you say okay great when i feel this then what am i going to do so i like to use an analogy of a car you're driving a car and you're talking to a friend of yours and a light pops up on the dash you don't take a hammer and hit a light it's a signal something's happening in the in the in the in the engine in the trunk in the in the tires something's happening emotions and feelings aren't uh positive or negative they're empowering or disempowering to varying degrees if you don't understand them and so if you think about fear right how does a firefighter go into a burning building when there's this enormous adrenaline and an epinephrine you know that could stop most people dead in their tracks they learn here's the feeling it's normal do you have the knowledge and the skills and the preparation to deal with this in a safe way go if you don't now you retreat so we have this phenomenal brain right it's it's it's genius abilities we can't figure out how to replicate it anywhere with billions of dollars but we are getting some of the user's manual now so when you feel fear what should you do i teach the first two inner sizes that i teach every one of our students number one is called take six calm the circuits so if you have this unpleasant anxious fearful emotion energy in motion right and it's unpleasant and the breaks have gone on if you just take six deep breaths in through your nose out through your mouth like you're breathing through a straw you will deactivate the stress response center which means blood is going to go back to the left prefrontal cortex the einstein part of the brain can actually think through this problem because what happens when the stress response center is activated blood goes away from that into the fear response so you have epinephrine cortisol adrenaline to be able to get you out of this situation it's part of our instinctual brain part of the reptilian brain the first part of the brain that was developed was that then the mammalian brain the limbic system then the neocortex the thinking brain so when our brain has this signal of oh my god you might get hurt you might lose this you might get in trouble you might be embarrassed ashamed ridiculed judged etc that part of the brain is going to get activated so if you take six deep breaths first calm down calm the circuits first then do inner size number two is called aya aia the first day is for awareness what am i thinking right now what am i feeling right now what am i sensing right now what is my behavior right now to you thoughts feelings sensations awareness of behavior what's my intention right now that's the eye well my intention is to move forward i want to do this great what's one very small action step that you can take now the reason you want to take one small action step is one small action step your brain can handle if it's one small step towards it the threat response goes away but if you focus on the end game right away you're gonna get that rush and that instant trigger of the fear response stress response so the first thing you want to do is learn how to manage your mindset and what you focus on learn how to manage your emotions because they drive your behavior more than anything else because we move away from pain and we move towards pleasure but we move away from pain a thousand times faster and pain wires in the brain faster for survival mechanisms so purely from a neuroscience perspective just understanding self once you understand okay this feeling is normal okay what should i do take six con the circuits ayah and now you can start being progressive and make progress towards what you want now while you're in the you know in the uh what am i thinking feeling it's a chance to be aware and the biggest gift we have as human beings is our awareness because awareness is what gives you choice and choice is what gives you freedom most people are living their lives in a reactive state automatic reactive state because of these set points that we talked started talking about so we're in this repetitive cycle over and over and over and over we react to the same things we behave the same way we eat the same foods we dress the same way just to maintain that homeostasis and comfort zones and we've never been taught like when were we taught as kids like here are your six core emotions here's the way you deactivate you know your stress center or fear so here's how you activate your imagination center here's how you have more focus here's how you develop a new belief here's how you develop a new habit here's how you release one we haven't been taught that we've been told they're important things but we haven't been given the tools and then we haven't practiced the tools enough to be able to make them part of our unconscious competence brain so how do you do some of those things i mean that was a pretty extraordinary list and i'll say um beliefs releasing beliefs habits releasing habits like that is really interesting so what is a belief i mean think about what is a belief and let's go to again i'd like to just like to go to the neuroscience fields because just my passion now is a belief is nothing more than a group of cells that have been connected and then reinforced and we have two types of beliefs we have beliefs that whatever i'm going to stop you there because that's so important and so different than i would have expected i think when people hear belief it is believing something that is true which did not enter into your definition no we believe whatever we believe is truth for us but it's not the truth that's really interesting right but we have been conditioned if we go back a little bit to um what we talked about earlier about you know when you were a baby when you were born what belief did you have zero goose egg zero not one and so you learned what to believe and how to even formulate your beliefs chances are from parents teachers brothers sisters television maybe when you read some books right and we behave based on what we believe so we might be behaving our lives away based on false or inaccurate or disempowering beliefs so if a belief is a neural pattern in the brain then we probably have some good ones empowering ones useful ones and chances are we have some that are not useful not empowering and not worthy of the geniuses that we all are so the question is is it possible for me to develop new beliefs that i don't believe right now the answer is yeah yes what does that process look like so the process is you can read new beliefs to life and so if you listen to beliefs that are empowering over and over and over again and you emotionalize them and you visualize yourself actually acting out those beliefs and you learn how to pay attention to that little inner critic that says that's [ __ ] that's not true that'll never come true that's not you if you learn and you remember that that little voice is there to consistently keep you in this homeostatic place and it's there to protect the beliefs that are there now the latest research shows that to develop you know a new pattern takes between 66 days and 365 days how do you help people be consistent long enough to form that like when people talk about oh it takes 28 days to form a new habit it's like okay i can get my head around that but when you start talking about 100 days 365 days it gets pretty daunting for adults yeah it does um so you have to use intrinsic and extrinsic motivation so you have to start everybody off well why is it important for you to be able to develop these new beliefs like what will your life be like if you had them right now what would your family life be like you have to give them a benefit that's greater than the switch cost that's interesting right so the switch cost is something that our brain resists the only human that likes change is a wet baby [Laughter] every other human being is resistant to it because safety first and homeostasis and energy conservation so we are biologically wired not to want to change so we have to deliberately coax the brain into motivational reasons emotional reasons you have to have intrinsic reason why must you do this and so you can use pain as a frame as well so if you don't then are you okay with your life being like this at this age in five years and 10 years and 20 years and if you're okay with that then you're not a candidate for change but if you're committed to letting go of the old so you can create the new and you create motivations every day that's where the power is remember earlier progress not perfection so anybody can do one minute or 10 seconds so if you can start to formulate a habit a daily habit a weekly habit it doesn't matter how long it is if you can create that space in your brain that on this day at this time this is what i do and you do that repeatedly that becomes a habit and it takes those 66 days or so for a simple habit that you have to consciously do to then the habit doing you and that's why they say we are all creatures of habit because habits run their themselves their subconscious programs just run themselves most people don't take the time to become aware what are my empowering habits what are my disempowering habits and then the next question is well how do i release this one and how do i strengthen this one or create a whole new one and what we're looking to do is build empowering habits that then run their course what is up my friend tom bill you here and i have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a ten i've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact i will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline all right i've just released a class from impact theory university called how to build ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work i will see you inside this workshop from impact theory university until then my friends be legendary peace out all right one thing i'd be remiss not to ask you about before we go are the three boards so vision boards accomplished boards and the one i don't know about the crap boards so crap board so vision board for seeing what you want the accomplish board for reminding yourself that you've got a lot to uh that you've accomplished so you feel good and the crap do you actually put up images of things you've accomplished uh-huh yeah yeah i have them in my closet in my home encased on the floor like on the floor so that you don't look at them so you know i look at no so i look at them just because i i i sit down and put on my shoes i want to look at them every day interesting yeah on my um i have i have this ritual as well i do something called brush and prime so on my bathroom mirror i have my goals that are on my mirror so that as i'm brushing my teeth i'm priming my brain to see my goals in front of me every morning and every night i love that right so that's priming your brain which is a whole other topic we can have and then the accomplishment boards reminds me whenever i look at the stuff that have accomplished i go that wasn't easy i mean there was a lot of ups downs highs lows failures you know times i thought i'd quit and i didn't so it's to remind me to go through the times that i don't think i'm going to be able to achieve those things and then the crap board stands for conflict uh resistance accomplishments and procrastination so what conflicts are are happening right now that i need to resolve um what resistance is in my way is what are my resistance what in front of me is resisting right now and then accomplishment as well as to remind you that you can get through stuff and then procrastination is what's causing me to procrastinate so if you create a crap board as well you have that in front of you and then you can create a game plan for what am i going to do about it what am i going to do about the conflicts what would you put on a board for conflicts is it a picture of a person oh it could be a person that you're having conflict with it could be uh something you're trying to to figure out that's conflicting whether it's in your company a department uh whether you're having conflicting thoughts of should you do it shouldn't you and there's uncertainty any conflicts that you are experiencing is going to create neural dissonance in your brain it's just going to create chaos in your brain and so if you take it out of your head and you put it on a sheet of paper you can look at it and now you're one step removed from what's happening in your brain and so um the more you can be in coherence it's the equivalent of being part of a band that's in harmony that every player is just like oh man this just sounds so good well the more you can be in coherence the more you're going to be in flow and the more you're going to take action the more chaos there is in the brain neural chaos whether it's because of emotions you're lacking something this conflict there's resistance the more you can get it out into the in front of you and open and say well what's causing this the easier it is for that einstein brain to say okay maybe i could do this maybe i can do that but i can also call a friend or a mentor or a coach or i can research it how does it get that big how does the topic sort of expand so far what is it that people are getting wrong and what are some of the like universal principles that are going to lead people to um i'll say wealth and it's probably worth defining how would you define wealth and then we'll go back to those two questions in my mind wealth is uh an emotion you know it doesn't really matter how much you have how much you make because i've interviewed over the course of my career i've interviewed millionaires and billionaires and some of them are very unhappy and very upset with everything i'm sure you've met some happy ones and very unhappy ones so and also among the people who are struggling with life they are also happy people and unhappy people so i think wealth is an attitude if you feel like you're so happy and so content with what you have you are already wealthy but if you have uh you have if you have to struggle every day and you cannot find happiness either in your business or in personal life i think you're not wealthy even if you have billions in your bank account but that doesn't mean that you don't have to have money that's what i like about your approach is there there is a recognition so part of the reason that i think that people continue to strive for money i lived the nightmare of money can't buy you happiness i had heard a thousand people tell me that money wasn't gonna buy me happiness that you know pursuing money outright was gonna end up being a problem and i still had to do it and when i ran into the wall of oh really truly money cannot buy you happiness how is it that i ended up here when all the people told me that this was going to be the outcome why did i have to walk this path like why couldn't i just accept their wisdom and i realized that one of the things that people don't talk about is that money really is powerful money is you call it energy um i'll call it power like money gives you the ability to close your eyes imagine something that you want to create and then open your eyes and actually be able to do it and if you have the skill set of course and so there there's real utility in money and when people talk about in and i've heard you say before i don't want to get too spiritual like i want to keep this grounded and i think that that's really important because if you tell people hey forget about money because money doesn't matter there's going to be a turn off but if you tell people hey forget about money because it's going to reorient your mindset it's going to change your behaviors it's going to align your behaviors to something that's actually going to allow you to generate actual money then i think that it draws people in a little bit more so with that context i want to go back to the two questions so what are the mistakes that people make and what are some universal things people need to understand if they actually want to be wealthy in the way that you just defined so i think most of us the biggest problem i think especially today is that we are so afraid of money and so as much as we want money we are so scared of it so uh why do you say that i think that that hit me is very counterintuitive why why do you think people are scared of money it's because of a money trauma i call it money wounds that we we've had since our childhood we used to have some uh unless your parents are perfect and unfortunately it's not the case in in in any any culture so we've been scolded about money you know we spend too much we wasted the money or we denied a karate lesson or soccer lesson or a ballet lesson or piano lessons because it's expensive some of my friends were taught you are not worth it well that's like that's a big blow so uh we've been denied so many times around money so that's why as much as we want money because we feel uh money can buy happiness so money money can buy at least freedom but at the same times money have been abused abused us for so many ways so as much as we want to get close to it but if we get too close to it we get burned or like hurt so for a lot of people money is a mystery person so how do they begin to change that relationship i'm assuming some of this is going to be just narrative around how they talk to themselves about money what do you advise people you have to start watching your your language my mother used to say that and then uh around money especially a lot of people say like you know i was ripped off so there are so many negative language around money and my mentor has said you have to use positive words around money otherwise money will not like you and i really i thought it's very cute you know and then uh in my book i talk about what if uh if if money were a person who would it be like is that a person a gentle person or angry person so just um you know you have to pay attention to how you relate to money if you just um feel like money is just a thing like you don't care but if you don't care you know you end up being in debt so you have to be very careful and respectful for money for some japanese people actually one of my students made futon in a bed for a wallet it's so cute to to show respect you know why i rest please money and credit cards please rest here too so it's like a little bed like like a cat cat bed and then you're supposed to put your wallet into the bed so it's just a metaphor but unless you show respect to money and the money coming in money going out both ways you cannot really feel you cannot feel peaceful around money especially this hard time of economy you have to really um pay close attention to your emotions and most of us are so controlled by uh anxiety and fear and money that's why do things which are not really true to us to in order to survive so we feel like uh if we have no money we cannot survive that means your death so uh the funny switch is turned on uh it's i think it's a survival mechanism um you know 200 years ago or 300 years ago everybody was a farmer nobody's you know probably don't use much money but now unless you have money you you cannot buy food so money and survival are so tight in your system so as people begin to tell themselves a new narrative they build the futon bed for their wallet they think about who that person is and they i'm guessing a lot of people are going to think of that person as abusive or you know they wander off and they don't have a good relationship with that so how do they begin to change their mindset around that how do they begin to to turn that narrative do you do you tell them to imagine somebody who is kind or gentle what is that process so uh but since we we've been abused we feel like we've been abused by this person we're a little scared of this person right so i think the first step is actually the step that my mentor takeda taught me that is arigato your money thank you money when money comes in either by in a form of government check or a salary or commission or whatever um the money you receive you say thank you arigato thank you money for coming in because in these days it's so so rare to find you and then and pay you somebody pays you right it either could be government or your husband wife or your clients there are so many other people who do the similar job that you do but they chose you to pay you so like there are millions of reasons to appreciate for the money so when money comes in just say thank you or arigato or danke or whatever your language or mercy you know and and then when you spend money also arigato you know because you're getting something for the money and uh what i said arigato in arigato out so it's almost like a karate kid teaching you know what sing works out so he said uh arigato and arigato al if you do it for two months and then come back so like oh i wanted to have some stock tips or like investment tips or i expected something different but the the thing i got is arigato inaudible and i practice for two months and i felt genuinely happier so i recommend anybody uh you know just try it at least because it doesn't cost you anything and once you start appreciating money coming in money going out you start appreciating about other things so this uh arigato and arigato out opens a door to a new life which is full of appreciation and i think we definitely need that uh waher said appreciation melts fear and anxiety so if you start and if you keep appreciating money coming and going out you cannot worry about money at the same time because a human mind can focus one thing at the time so why he has a a very interesting unique trick uh of um so like changing our wire in the brain so once you start appreciating it's so funny because one of my students said oh gee ken i forgot to worry about money for a week because you folk focus on appreciation yeah i think this is really powerful is is a very important first step and when i think about my own journey um i won't say that i had a negative view about money and if you had asked me to describe what money was i probably would have whoever i could think of that was like glamorous and exciting and powerful like that was my vision of money which is why i was chasing it so hard [Music] ultimately coming to understand okay i'm making more money than i've ever made but i'm not happier than i've ever been and the neurochemistry that i want to feel like this is not taking me there and so i began to what what i began to do was change my behavior so i changed my story about money that what i flipped over into was the only thing that matters is feeling alive so i'm gonna stop chasing money i'm going to start thinking about value and so i had a very negative connotation around money and i just said look i'm going to set that aside for now and i'm just going to pursue fulfillment i'm going to do things to add value to people's lives i'm going to work to improve myself that was a huge part for me was always wanting to get better myself and what i found was i needed both i needed a change of mindset i needed to stop thinking money was going to solve my problems but i also needed to change my behaviors and ultimately i don't i no one is ever going to think their way to success i think that you're you you have to think in a new way that is advantageous but you have to act in a new way that's advantageous so after you know when you do the wax on wax off like eventually we do find ourselves in a karate tournament and we really do have to fight yes so what does that look like especially now in this crazy economy that we're going through right now let's get let's go to that next phase so people are they're already arigato money in arigato money out they've got the futon for their wallet like they're in a zen place like they're doing good now like you retired at 29 not just because you were thinking you retired at 29 because you ran businesses you got very thoughtful about how to generate money and save it how should people be acting with their money so we get now how they should be thinking but how should they be acting with their money thank you tom i think it's a beautiful question and i i think that's exactly what we need to learn but because once you start appreciating your life shifts too for example one of the readers on my book she was a single mom with a low paying job she was working as a secretary and then she came to me and she used to complain about her low paying job but after reading my book she changed her attitude and she started appreciating about life and boss and and she realized that she didn't have a college degree but she got she was hired as a secretary so that's a big reason to appreciate her boss before she was always complaining about him and i think the feeling really probably came across to his uh her boss and she got a big raise uh in a few weeks so once you start appreciating i i've heard so many stories i can even write few books on this once you start appreciating your boss your clients they appreciate you back so in my 20s the reason why i was successful was i was a little uh unique in so many different different things for example when i was doing accounting consulting i divided my uh clients to two groups one i do regular job the other i always bring something whenever i got to meet them just a herb tea japanese tea like a book or just not super expensive so in six months i got so many referrals from the the gift giving groups you know i didn't ask for any clients right but they gave me uh so many referrals and the second you know uh group uh not so much so uh i recommend everybody to start giving more uh something a little extra nuts like 30 more but something to to show appreciation and uh it doesn't really matter if you're florist or cleaners or business lawyers or a dentist if you start giving something you get more so this is the law i think if you give more um you receive more and then there's one more extra reason to appreciate about so you you your life would shift so your whole energy will be so different and so content and i think people want to do business with happier people you know people don't want to go with people who are very depressed so the people with the radiance of appreciation often attracts uh more people and more opportunities so this is not a new age or a spiritual thing it's a practice to to um to appreciate more so what you appreciate appreciates and i think it's it's so simple so start appreciating about money is the first step and then second step is start appreciating what you have and if you start sharing what you have i call it gift uh all of us have gifts i've written probably like half of my books 20 books on how to discover your gifts and monetize them because uh we're born each of us is born with a special gift and something to be shared with this planet and if you can find it and if you can uh improve it and you can you can polish it and just share with a society i think that translates into money so i wrote a national bestseller do what you love and make sure money follows you so it's very important you have to have both so talk to me about that so the hearing i've heard you say that before that you've written that many books on um finding your gifts so one i'd like to know what that process is i'm not a big believer and i get this is um it'll be interesting to see your take on this i'm not a big believer that we're born with something um but i think that we can polish like you're saying and really turn that into something um how do people find it and then how do they polish it you know i taught uh probably personally over hundreds of thousands of people you know through seminars and my coaching i do a big event a few thousand people at a time and i do a lot of q a's so i have this track record of how people found their gifts and some people find find them when they're very young you know when you're five or six or seven you your neighbor finds out that you're very good at chess and then he ends up being being champion i've interviewed a japanese champion once and some geniuses are found that way but most of us are not that way right we're not olympic athletes or we're not superstars so most of us are not born with only one gift we are born with several mediocre gifts like like i was i think i i i had a gift of speaking i had a gift of teaching i had the gift of making jokes i make i make jokes all the time and money could be very boring so and money is there are so many funny stories especially couples but anyway so you know so there are many gifts small gifts but you have to multiply them and then you become one and only so so i know where you're going with that before we get to how you chain them together how do you find them because that what you just said really resonates with me you've got minor gifts mediocre gifts i think was your exact phrase i love that okay so you've got these mediocre things inside of you how do you how do you find them like i don't i don't know that people and i know what you're the three things that you chained together are and that'll be really interesting to hear you talk about that especially the third one which haven't mentioned yet um how do people identify that and maybe you walking us through how you found your three will be super useful so you know some people find it by coincidence you know some people find out that your your friend would say hey ken you're good at speaking like what you know because gifts are funny thing it comes so naturally out of you so you don't even notice it so even if you're good at singing you're good speaking you're good at connecting people that's another gift yeah i think you have the special gift of connecting people to so if you have even if you have so many gifts you don't realize them unless you you recognize them and oftentimes i do guide people to find their gifts and in the process they realize like oh gee all these years i've never i've known that i had the gift but i never recognized it as a gift because how do you guide people through that do you have them ask themselves questions yes or survey their friends some questions that people can go through literally a thousand yes so for example one of the questions is like uh when uh when you were small uh what what were the nicknames and then the nicknames have strong something by the way my nickname was a teacher because i was like teaching kids other kids so like nicknames have certain uh characteristics already or like uh when your kids uh what were you scolded for uh when i was small my mother used to say you know you talk too much don't talk that means i had the gift of talking because i want to express myself so when you're escorted about something that is a gift but you thought it's a negative it's it's your actually it's your flaws instead of thinking it's a gift so there are thousands of questions and then when you just show a light on that you realize wow i just never thought that i had so many gifts and then once you kind of like recognize one by one by one and then start sharing um without thinking much you know you don't have to be at this point you don't have to be strategic about uh what what's going to happen because it's well you know fun things will come out you never know i've seen so many fun uh miracles happening to people's lives so you discover certain gifts and then once you realize the gifts will come out on its own it's a so interesting organic mechanism that because you're so inspired by sharing your gifts because more you share your people love it love it and uh you know your listeners who love your shows they're waiting for your shows they'll be upset if you just get a sick leave or something right so that people give you energy so once this cycle starts and you appreciate them for supporting you it grows and grows and grows exponentially and then when that happens you don't want to stop and then at some level it will translate into money so that's let's talk about that so there there's a gap there that i think a lot of people fall into and don't know how to get out of so let's say that they they do the exercise they you know think about what they were into when they were young they think about what they got scolded for nicknames all of that stuff just things that they find interesting and they go okay cool these are the things that i think that i'm it's a mediocre talent but i'm willing to polish it and make it bigger how do they monetize that like how do they actually turn that into money yeah so that is a miracle and also a fun part of life because you never know one of my students was an insurance salesperson and he didn't sell a lot because he didn't want to push people i'm sure a lot of people can relate to that and one day he was he was told to do cold calls he so he had to go to the uh one big house where there was a german shepherd and then he knew that he loves dogs and you know some people dog lovers dogs know you know who they are so when he was uh in the house and and he didn't and then he says beware dog but he didn't really care so the dog the dog didn't really uh shout on him and bark at him and the owner uh grandmother was so impressed because everybody was harassed by this dog you know mailman and a delivery man and so she thought it's you know it's interesting so why don't you come up to my house and have a cup of tea and then he was invited in and and then she fell in love with this guy because you know uh whoever um her dog loves this person means he's a good man and then she was a head figure in this entire neighborhood so he could sell so many insurance policies and later on he found this dog club and then so like a they do only barbecues you know they do nothing but with dogs you know by the riverside and they go on a trip and so all he does is not selling insurance but since he he has he's surrounded by so many people you know there's a need for insurance he gets it there's another insurance uh salesperson who she loved cooking so she kind of like did the cooking classes right for free and and the cooking classes grew and uh she ended up being the cooking class teacher but uh she sold so many insurance policies on the way and she found more passion in cooking so he she quit the insurance business but in the process of expressing and finding who you are happy money follows you so forget about money is that teaching but you know at the same time don't forget it completely you have to make both ends meet so that's you know i have this accounting consulting background so i'm a very practical person so you have to make sure all the bills are paid in appreciation and at the same time grow um your your energy um the most biggest problem that we have is that we are depressed with our lives so we don't have hopes we're not excited about our lives how much of the brain is allocated to sight and then what have you begun to sort of re-engage with the world now that you don't have vision sure so sites obviously very important evolutionarily biologically but it's not everything and it's certainly not infallible and uh in some respects i think you know as i was saying that i think there's a an interesting metaphor uh to be made or interesting lessons to draw from the way in which uh we experience uh sight as this all-consuming uh you know passive reality um you know versus what's what's sort of really going on in the world and what's really going on in our minds and and site's a crazy thing i apologize if i'm rambling but uh so some electromagnetic light hits the back of our eyes you know our retinas photoreceptor cells in the back of the eye respond to that light send a signal to the brain we call the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes respond to the visible spectrum right well that spectrum of light of electromagnetic radiation is 1 10 trillionth of the total spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that's out there so you know we got this back of the eye that responds to 1 10 trillionth of electromagnetic the electromagnetic radiation in our world from that you know we create this abstracted unique personal virtual world that involves like i said all sorts of things that have nothing to do with data from the eyes the site itself is really only about 10 data from the eyes and yet we walk around or sighted folks walk around thinking that they you know quote unquote know what the world looks like the idea is crazy it's nonsense if that to me is is one of the most powerful things about your book it and in fact the reason that you've said you wrote the book wasn't for people with disabilities or blindness specifically certainly but that you wanted your kids to read it one day so that they would have that frame of reference so that they would understand that basically you're living in this virtual representation like you said it gave me the chills that only 10 percent of vision is created from the data that's coming from your eyes and so the rest is being constructed it's being constructed by what right so once you realize that your brain is constructing the world around you and it doesn't necessarily always serve you then it empowers you to start making choices about not only what to believe but perspective how to see things and so taking that perspective shift you've talked a lot about fear very powerfully what is it what is fear why is it such a potent force in our life and with new perspective what can we do to it sure so you know real world experience have you ever had uh you know the experience where you spot someone across the room you walk over tap them on the shoulder and it's a complete stranger it turns out right so you know we say very quickly we say oh we thought it was our friend or we thought it was our colleague and that's just not true we knew it right and you're in your world in your reality your friend was there right and then it turned out they weren't so uh fear we if we're not careful we can experience uh much the same way fear is this this natural response it serves an evolutionary purpose to be sure it's very helpful in a lot of ways uh but it's also powerfully destructive so fear is this mechanism that sort of fills in the unknown right when we when we confront uh times of change times of crisis you know when we're uncertain you know our fears kick in and we fill in really the worst case scenario right we awful as i call just call it awfulizing which i think is a great term but you know we fill in the worst case scenario and we have all these dark imaginings and these are things that we tell ourselves they're machinations of our own mind but much like that friend at that party these aren't things that we think we experience them as things that we know right if we're not careful when i was first diagnosed with my binding disease i knew that blindness was going to ruin my life right it meant i was going to live a wholly unremarkable life small and sad uh i would never you know it would be the end of achievement for me i thought i'd never have a family uh because uh you know i wasn't even gonna love or respect myself how could i expect someone else to level respect me and on and on and on and these were lies born of my fears uh born of ignorance uh but uh for some time i knew them to be true and uh i think uh had i not had the blessing of this uh this sort of shattering of the illusion of sight itself that i speak of they sort of peek behind the curtains into sort of uh you know the way the mind works the wizard behind the curtains right if i hadn't learned to see through those fears eyes wide open i i would have i mean that's the world i would have lived that would have been my life and the only difference is perspective it's in here it's nothing out there in the world so uh you know like i said this this is this journey of mine losing my sight and then gaining this vision has been immeasurably rewarding for me and fulfilling and it's been one of the best things that happened that makes so much sense to me when i think about the man behind the curtain or the you know the wizard of oz once you realize that they're there that's been really potent in my life as well so when i first started on my entrepreneurial journey i was a total mess and i had no idea how to make the things happen that i wanted to make happen and i found that my own ego was getting in my way and that once i realized that my ego was based on something and i could change what that was that i could flip that around then all of a sudden i could value myself based on being a learner being willing to admit that i was wrong instead of trying to be smart right or whatever and that was really transformative and being able to visualize the structures of the brain being able to understand from an evolutionary perspective why i was set up to be fearful or whatever was incredibly powerful do you find that being able to um becoming aware of the visual tricks because you've said that things would morph right before your eyes as you were losing your sight i think one time you said you went to wash your hands and realize you were actually touching a urinal and but it looked like a sink until you finally realized it was a urinal um does being able to visualize the the physical mechanisms of the brain help you with things other than sight oh sure absolutely and you know as you said i mean the the the value in this this eyes wide open vision that you know that i speak of is is you know it's it's not about sight it's not about blindness it's it's about the lessons we can take uh you know in in really taking control over the reality we want for ourselves literally choosing who you want to be and how you want to live your life uh in any moment right so yes we do this with sight but we do it with the self-limiting assumptions we make about ourselves you know we do it with the way we misperceive success and weakness and failure and strength in life which with the way that we uh i think uh really misperceive luck the force of a lock in life uh our insecurities our vanities are our seeming uh struggle to listen to each other let alone to our own hearts and and on and on and on so this really is for me it's it's uh it's it's my daily philosophy right it's it's it takes effort there was no uh aha moment right up on some hill where it all you know flipped you know switch flipped and it all became perfect for me i struggle with it every day some days i'm not so good at it but it is my aspiration and it's certainly worthwhile i think on the days where you're not so good at it what actually is happening you know there are times still when i you know have have fears when i fear failure right when i wrestle with that critic in my mind telling me all sorts of awful things when i you know am uncareful and find that i'm um projecting on to others insecurities or vanities that are really all my own and step one is being conscious of it and being aware of it uh but that doesn't always mean it's super easy to overcome it but i i try again you know to i hold myself uh accountable above all else for my role in in in shaping you know the reality that i experience in every moment so i do try to you know talk to my i do talk to myself often and say listen you're feeling lousy you're worried about this you're scared about that you're upset about this and you know it's okay you're human but let's let's pull it apart and you know let's go through the strategies that i've uh developed over the years to to you know overcome those things so i want to get into some of those strategies that in the book one of the most incredible parts was when you buy the cement company in orlando which by the way when you look back on it and becomes insanely successful like there's a safety net to that we've all already landed we know it works out right but you didn't know that it was gonna work out you've got your business partners like telling you hey it took me 20 years to you know save up and protect my family financially you ruined it in three months your mom is having to offer you money for you to keep the company going you've already had to tell your wife that we're gonna have to declare personal bankruptcy move in with their parents right just to really make it fun yeah and in the book you actually walk through like step by step what your brain was telling you the critics so you you differentiate between the critic and the strong man which i want to hear more about and then you really walk through like super raw and vulnerable those steps what what was that like for you going through that and how what were the mechanisms or the just the dialogue in your brain that you used to silence the critic sure so you know it's it's uh i i wanted so badly to surrender gracefully the company we bought was toxic it was hemorrhaging money and it looked like you know we had lost everything and then i had this this lifeline from uh from my mom this offer of essentially her life savings to try to save my business and that was uh it was almost uh an unwanted offer right i i wanted so desperately like i said to just kind of give up but again you're sort of putting my money where my mouth is on this sort of philosophy and taking a step back to you know really hold myself accountable for uh you know the choices i was going to make and what i wanted in life you know on the inside of the business we were even more excited about the vision we were super excited about our team uh we felt we could bring you know technology and professionalism to a very unsophisticated industry and so logically rationally uh you know with with some money with some time you know we could turn the ship around and that was certainly a better approach than than giving up right so uh you know when when you're honest with yourself and and you know the right uh step you got to make and uh you know you got to do it and you got to get yourself there what i love is looking at your life it'd be really easy to dismiss you as just being unnaturally smart and just saying like look this guy's a [ __ ] genius like it is what it is i could never do what he does and what i found so empowering about your book what i think is so cool about what you're doing in this phase of your life is in the book you you walk people through where you're saying you're putting this map together of these incredible entrepreneurs that have come before you that have been bold but you're not that good like you're never going to live up to that and i was just like whoa whoa wait a second like the guy who it would be tempting for me to just dismiss as being a naturally smart is saying it's easy for him to like dismiss other people as being unnaturally smart and it is this so natural thing for everybody to have that voice in their head that says that they can't do it and then the the punchline is that it was basic execution that ended up pulling you out of that sure so talk to me what is the strong man what is that whole concept yeah so you know the the this critic in our minds you know it's that that nasty voice that is quick to pass judgment to tell us what we can't do uh you know to keep us off the field to tell us what others are thinking and saying about us right and uh the way this sort of critic can be so effective so powerful in in in kind of dominating our lives uh in my experiences by uh through an insistence on perfection right which is impossible because the critic insists upon perfection which essentially guarantees your failure uh through comparison relative merit right that critic will compare you to anybody right real roman imagine from any era especially when you compare unfavorably you know and the critic will swap out you know different definitions of success or value or purpose or for your own and you know you won't even notice it so uh you know the critic and of course this comes from teddy roosevelt's you know brilliant remarks about the critic and the strong man the critic for me really is sort of that embodiment of uh you know again our fear of failure you know our uh our own worst enemy in our minds roosevelt strongman on the other hand you know is someone who has no use for perfection right only progress right someone who values effort and growth whose focus is the mo is momentum right the next step not this overarching enterprise this overwhelming endeavor but what is my next step uh and you know for the strong man uh success lies in in striving and actually striving right towards a noble pursuit which at the end of the day is the only thing we can control right uh whether or not uh we are striving to our best toward a noble pursuit and the outcome is less important it's funny you mentioned that uh you know at the time that i was going through it i i obviously did not know that we were going to turn around odc construction and it would be a great success you know you make a big decision and you know later it either works out phenomenally well or is a catastrophic failure well it's so tempting in the face of the catastrophic failure to go back and beat yourself up and say oh this was the worst decision and i'm an idiot and this was terrible and likewise in the face of great success it's very easy for people to tell themselves well man i must have been a genius right i'm the smartest guy there is and just as a law of physics right as a proposition of logic that can't be true it cannot be that subsequent events you know determine the the quality of actions you make decisions you make conversations you have you know behaviors you exhibit you have to assess those things from the perspective of you know the time in which they take place so how does that how does that pan out in my experience was i uh you know uh you know visionary genius to to buy this uh struggling construction company you know when we did no it was i mean it was a disaster we thought we were buying uh you know a humble company but a going concern and we we bought some you know company that was sinking like a stone uh did it work out well yeah of course and it worked out phenomenally well i'm blessed be on contemplation you know again i credit the team with that and and the timing and the vision and luck and all those things but now i'm not going to go back and say it was uh you know a great decision um and likewise this is the harder part likewise um you know i think it's really important that we don't uh you know we don't read our own press right we don't get too excited about uh great outcomes where maybe the the decisions that led to them or the journey along the way was uh you know was less than uh worthy now that makes a lot of sense there's a quote in your book about the strong man that that echoes what you just said which i thought was so powerful i want to read it um exactly as it is the strong man savors the first step he is impatient for it craves it as long as he strives valiantly with his first step he has won what do you mean by that we are uh you know so often our own worst enemies right we we keep ourselves uh you know off the stage you know for fear of bad reviews and don't even realize that you know in the process we're you know forgetting how to dance and losing to join in right and it's just such a shame you know for me that first step of the strong man to me kind of conveys it encompasses you know uh sort of victory over that critic right that's where you've said look maybe this is crazy maybe it's not maybe you know maybe everybody thinks i'm you know way off base here whatever all the what ifs although you know why why i should why should whatever i put all that aside and i have committed to you know enter the arena and that is the defining moment i think for the strong man and uh i i think when we're honest with ourselves and when we start to recognize significance in in moments like that in our lives when we start to say well if i did this it would be it's a big move right and it doesn't have to be a huge move financially or economic or even you know it doesn't have to make sense to anyone else why it's a big move it's a big move for you it's important to pay attention to those feelings because often that's that's the strong man inside trying to tell you we can do this you know we let's get over this uh you know our fears let's get over our uh you know our self-doubt and let's let's do this you've talked earlier about how people misperceive things they misperceive success and that the critic will even change the definition of success what is an anchor point a vision of success is there something that's universal that you think applies to everybody or is there a process to defining success in a way that will resonate i don't think so personally i think you know who am i to even begin to contemplate what someone else should or should not aspire to do with their time or their lives or whatever right we're all masters of our own universes right alone in our own worlds and and i you know i don't purport to tell anyone how they should behave or what they should aspire to or what success should be however i certainly think everybody you know should figure it out you should figure it out for yourself because time's going to go by either way and you can live a life of happenstance of reaction uh you know or you can take some time to figure out how you want to spend your time who you want to be who you want to be at work you know who you want to be as a parent who you want to be as a spouse and on and on and on and and you know you can you can try to be that person and you can try to live that life so that's what i have in mind when i say you know you you really uh should define your success your purpose and and labor towards it well let's get really specific then so you've had such a diverse life one i'll just walk through a few uh why not you have success in hollywood but you immediately stop uh you then have success at law that is just on another planet and you stop obviously the tech firm ended up doing very well but as far as i know you moved out of that fairly rapidly so all of these things like you've been able to break free of the trap that most people get into which is there's momentum in their life they're succeeding everyone says they're crazy when they go to leave but you've done that over and over and over so you obviously are way in touch with your balance sheet so like what walk us through one or two of those and really say like leaving law i'm gonna guess was the hardest one like you'd so that was a tough invested like how what did you walk through what were the i've got this going but not this so that was a tough one uh on uh you know unless and until i actually thought about it rationally and logically right and then it when then it was pretty obvious which those are often the hardest decisions to make right but so you know here i was i had been blessed to have phenomenal experiences in law in the public sector right working for the justice department uh clerking for a couple u.s supreme court justices i love that and then i sort of took the easy path the direct path you know accepted a a phenomenal cushy job at a very fancy elite law firm international law firm and parents were very very proud i had gorgeous business cards and a skyscraper office and all that but uh you know i was expected to you know to work to build you know 60 70 crazy hours every week and i was involved in kind of litigation as warfare with a constant view towards the billings of the law firm and and it just wasn't the way i wanted to practice law a lot of people weren't people i wanted to practice law with i certainly didn't want to spend you know 100 hours a week doing it just none of that made any sense so everybody thought i was completely nuts and maybe they're right but uh you know the more i thought about it the more i said look you know nothing is permanent in life there's nothing that says if i ever want to practice law again i can't go back to it or in some other capacity or you know some other city or whatever but you know for now what's important to me and what am i looking to accomplish in my life you're going back to that balance sheet um and at that point in my life really by far above all else you know it was it was really quality of life and time with my family got to talk to my roommate zach as you mentioned and and you know we thought hey let's buy a small business together and he would help me you know you'd pay for most of it but he would keep his fancy day job i'd leave behind my fancy day job and run it and you know what could possibly go wrong so that was the uh the thesis i guess you would say that brought us to orlando and that you know sort of took me to uh uh take the helm as the first chief executive officer of our uh residential construction subcontractor and of course uh you know they say man plans god laughs uh didn't it didn't didn't turn out quite that way but uh that was a good decision at the time uh to to leave law that was the right decision for me and my family so then the construction company blows up you make a lot of right decisions i'm sure you'd attribute it a lot obviously to the team but to luck as well yes but now things are going well and instead of just continuing to scale it and grow it you decide that you want to back off again a pretty atypical choice well so look you know again my goal was quality of life for my family you've said that happiness is a choice sure in what way how do we choose to be happy everything's a choice every moment of your life is a choice uh how do you want to spend that moment who do you want to be it is not the circumstances we confront that dictate the lives we experience it just cannot be there are counter examples all over the place i'm just a blind guy like that's no big deal but when you think about prisoners of war who endure the most unspeakable of uh you know human atrocities nazi concentration camp survivors and on and on and you find examples of remarkable people who despite these circumstances make a choice to find purpose in life to find joy to be a source of strength for others in their lives and you know these these shining folks you know again to my mind prove categorically it's not the circumstances we confront that dictate how we you know the lives we experience so choose to be happy literally in every moment and again i'm not saying it's easy again and i'm not you know i'm not saying it's always easy for me but it's certainly a worthwhile endeavor i mean you know you spill on yourself or you you knock something over or you know you're late for a meeting or you know it can derail you it can be you know something quote unquote awful meanwhile most of the world is worried about uh you know healthcare and food and clothing but um you know or you can choose to laugh about it you can choose to have fun with it you can choose to let it go and again every i think every moment is is you know uh an amalgam of precisely those choices and i think it behooves us to spend some time thinking about our answers and do you have a process or a mantra or is it as simple as choosing to laugh when you want to do anything else to actually manifest that happiness it's not simple i don't i don't think there's much in life that's simple everything's nuanced it really it sort of it depends on on the context here in times of crisis is a little different than fear of failure and other sorts of things so there's some nuances there and then so other strategies i think we can bring to bear to look at things like luck in our lives and the fundamental idea like i said is you know you're the master of your reality and you know once you buy that once you're willing to take responsibility for the fact that you are literally creating uh the life you are experiencing the reality you know your reality is your creation again the rest is details most people spend 70 percent of their life living in survival and living in stress so they're they're always anticipating the worst case scenario people become addicted to the rush of those emotions and they use the problems and conditions in their life to reaffirm their limitation