Use These HACKS to UPGRADE Your Mindset

Life can often feel like someone's literally drowning you, especially if you're in [music] an extreme case of anxiety or stress or depression. And I feel like you just need to feel like [music] you can just come up for a tiny bit of it. My thought, my emotion, my energy, and my body are my instruments of function. They are not impediments in my life. [music] A person can say with their 5% of their conscious mind, I want to be healthy. I want to be happy. [music] I want to be free. But the body is on a whole different program. So then how do you begin to make those changes? Whatever position you're in right now, you can change. No matter what [music] it is, no matter how horrific, no matter what you've been through, no matter what you've done, like there is a way out from under it. If you are in a dark place and you hear change is real, change is possible, doesn't that lift your mood? Don't you want that to be true? And once you allow it because you have to allow it. Once you allow that to lift your mood and you're like, I feel better just by thinking I can change. That was huge for me. That was like moment one was when I realized I actually can change. So this thing that feels like a death threat, this like smothering cloud of just like despair, it can clear away. And it immediately, and it's not like, oh, it went from gray skies to blue skies. It wasn't that immediate, but it was it literally immediately a lighter load just because I realized I can change. So I was like, whoa, I can change. None of this is a death sentence. That's so like just amazing. That was enough to get me going. And people are always looking for how do I have the energy? I'm depressed. I'm down on myself. How do I get the energy to push through? Man, you've got to find a way to find energy in that. You can change. So, whatever position you're in right now, you can change. No matter what it is, no matter how horrific, no matter what you've been through, no matter what you've done, like there is a way out from under it. But part of it is allowing that sense of lightness to be there. So, I allowed it. And so, it began to lift off my shoulders, which then encouraged me to take more action, to read more, to get better. I started my obsession with gaining skills that reading isn't about checking a box. It's about actually getting better at something that lets you do something. And I need a better way to explain this. This is one of those things like if people really understood what I'm talking about right now, this one fact would change their life forever. You don't get skills because it looks good on a resume. You get skills because it lets you do the thing you want to do. If you're playing soft music or you have earplugs in, less sensory information coming to your brain, so you're disconnecting from your environment. If you can sit your body down and tell it to stay like an animal, stay right here. I'm going to feed you when we're done. You can get up and check your emails. You can do all your texts, but right now, you're going to sit there and obey me. So then when you do that properly and the you're not eating anything or smelling anything or tasting anything, you're not up experiencing and feeling anything. You would have to agree with me that you're being defined by a thought, right? So when the body wants to go back to its emotional past and you become aware that your attention is on that emotion and where you place your attention is where you place your energy, you're siphoning your energy out of the present moment into the past. And you become aware of that and [snorts] you settle your body back down in the present moment cuz it's saying, "Well, it's 8:00. You normally get upset because you're in traffic around this time and here you are sitting and we're used to feeling anger and you're off schedule. Oh, it's 11:00 and you usually check your emails and judge everybody. Well, the body's looking for that that predictable chemical state. [snorts] Every time you become aware that you're doing that and your body is craving those emotions and you settle it back down into the present moment, you're telling the body it's no longer the mind, that you're the mind. And now your will is getting greater than the program. And if you keep doing this over and over again, over and over again, over and over again, just like training a stallion or a dog, it's just going to say, "I'm going to sit." And the moment that happens, when the body is no longer the mind, when it finally surrenders, there's a liberation of energy, we go from particle to wave, from matter to energy, and we free ourselves from the chains of those emotions that keep us in the in the familiar past. And we've seen this thousands of times. In fact, we can actually predict it now. Well, a habit is a redundant set of automatic unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that's acquired through repetition. A habit is when you've done done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your mind. So, if you think about it, people wake up in the morning, uh they begin to think about their problems. Those problems are circuits of memories in the brain. Each one of those memories are connected to people and things at certain times and places. And if the brain is a record of the past, the moment they start their day, they're already thinking in the past. Each one of those memories has an emotion. Emotions are the end product of past experiences. So the moment they recall those memories of their problems, they all of a sudden feel unhappy. They feel sad. They feel pain. Now how you think and how you feel creates your state of being. So the person's entire state of being when they start their day is in the past. So what does that mean? The familiar past will sooner or later be predictable future. So if you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny and you can't think greater than how you feel or feelings have become the means of thinking by very definition of emotions you're thinking in the past and for the most part you're going to keep creating the same life. So then people grab their cell phone they check their WhatsApp they check their texts they check their emails they check Facebook they take a picture of their feed they post it on Facebook they tweet something. They do Instagram. Uh they check the news and now they feel really connected to everything that's known in their life. And then they go through a series of routine behaviors. They get out of bed on the same side. They go to the toilet. They get a cup of coffee. They take a shower. They get dressed. They drive to work the same way. They do the same things. They see the same people that push the same emotional buttons. And that becomes the routine. And it becomes like a program. So now they've lost their free will to a program. and there's no unseen hand doing it to them. So when it comes time to change, the redundancy of that cycle becomes a subconscious program. So now 95% of who we are by the time we're 35 years old is a memorized set of behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that function like a computer program. So then person can say with their 5% of their conscious mind, I want to be healthy. I want to be happy. I want to be free. But the body is on a whole different program. So then how do you begin to make those changes? Well, you have to get beyond the analytical mind. Because what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind is the analytical mind. And that's where meditation comes in because you can teach people through practice how to change their brain waves, slow them down. And when they do that properly, they do enter the operating system where they can begin to make some really important changes. So um most people then wait for crisis or trauma or disease or diagnosis. You know they wait for loss uh some tragedy to make up their mind to change. And my message is why wait? And and you can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering or you can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration. I think right now the cool thing is that people are waking up. Everything in life comes down to what your own value system is. So what's your identity? What are your beliefs? What are your values? What are your habits? What are your routines? When you figure those out that like if you just gave me a sheet that told me what those were about somebody, I would tell you what the outcome of their life is going to be. And for me, implementation, being willing to face the fears, the anxieties, the unknown, um the need to stare at my inadequacies so I can figure out what skills I actually need in order to go and do something because implementation is really a question of skill set. So it that's why motivation ultimately is going to let you down. It's like you may be motivated to go do something, but let me walk you through exactly what will happen. You're motivated to try this thing which you don't know how to do and you suck at it. And so you go do that thing, you suck. It hurts your ego because your ego is tied up in being right, being good, being talented, worthy, all those like permanent um set states that people don't realize are malleable. And so they get stuck in that. It damages their self-esteem. So they want to run in the opposite direction. Psychological immune system kicks in, reminds them that that was stupid anyway. Why were they worried about even trying that? And so they back off. And any one time doing that, it's not a big deal. It's just that people do that over and over and over and over and over. And my thing is that's such a predictable pattern in humanity. It's like, what do you have to do to counteract that? And the thing you have to do is emotionally reward yourself for being willing to take the steps. So, okay, I know I'm going to do this. I'm going to suck at it. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt my self-esteem. And so, what do I need to do to make sure that I don't trip up over that in a way that makes me turn and run in the opposite direction? Number one, stop valuing myself for being good at something and start valuing myself for being willing to learn. So that's just a a core part of my value system is I'm a learner. That's my identity. Being willing to put in the energy to learn and get better as a part of my um not only my belief system that people can do it, but part of my values that that is important to do as a human. You should do that. So when I see something that I want to accomplish, then I know that I'm going to have the fortitude and the stamina to see that through because it taps into my identity of the learner and my value system of this is important and should be done. So then I just keep going down. So I hit the the wall of my inadequacy and I don't meet that with stopping. I meet that with cool, now I know what I have to get better at. I'm now aware of what the skill set is. And so now that I know what skill set I need to develop and I believe that it can be developed, then I just put the work into developing the skill. Now the one thing that I think gets lost in all of that is people lose desire and they think that that means that oh it wasn't as important as I thought it was or I didn't want it as much as I thought I did. The reality is that even desire is something that you have to learn to cultivate to turn into um a raging inferno. Like your wants have to become needs. And I think there's some weird push back that people think that like if it's real, if it's love, then there's no energy that's put into building that up. And I think that's BS. So you think that that desire is a teachable concept? Desire is definitely a teachable concept. The real question is building that desire. Will that actually work? And so I think people have something in their mind of something they were forced to do that they didn't enjoy and there was no natural inclination towards that and I'll say yeah you're probably never going to be able to build something there. So that's like trying to start a fire with wet moss. It probably is not going to happen. But if you have something where it really is a spark of real interest. It's not a love. It's not a passion but it's a spark of real interest. Now, that's something that you can work with and really turn into something by building it because there is a process that goes along with building that desire. There is a process that takes something from interest to full-blown passion. And if people are willing to go along that process, then you really can evolve that initial just sort of, oh, it's a spark of interest to the very thing that I'm willing to give my life over to completely. [music] Well, an apple tree is not trying to be an oak tree. But an apple tree wants to be a full-fledged apple tree. That effort is on in every life. So is it in human beings. But the problem with humanity is just this that for every other creature nature has drawn two lines. Within these two lines, they live and die. So their idea of full-fledged is hitting the ceiling of their life. But if a human being hits a ceiling, he gets frustrated and miserable [laughter] because nature this process of evolution has delivered to us to a place where there is only the bottom line. There is no top line. Though some human beings are trying to breach the bottom line and go below [laughter] that effort also is going on. So essentially what human life is is when life was in the other forms of life that you'll see on the planet. Nature determined a certain compulsive instinctive ways of functioning once you become human. These lines have been removed. You can act consciously. That means what you call as human potential is not of any kind of measurable limit. It can go as far as you desire or as as far as you have the courage to walk. So when we say human potential, unleashing human potential, it is not about reaching the peak. It is a trajectory because what our life is is a combination of a certain amount of time and energy. Time is rolling away for all of us at the same pace. If you sit, it rolls away. If you sleep, it rolls away. If you do something, it goes away. If you don't do anything, it goes away. You're happy or miserable, it goes away. Time is running out for all of us. So, it's only the energy that you can do different things with. If you bring your energies to a certain level of intensity and possibility, what somebody does in 10 years, you may do it in one year. This means if you live here for 100 years, it feels like in people's impact that you have created, it feels like you lived here for a thousand years simply because you have managed your life energies in a certain way. So for me a human being impactful means how conscious have you become. This is very important because if you're in compulsive cycles then your energy gets wasted in so many things. If you observe people in a day let's say let's take 24 hours in that anyway most people by prescription in America they sleep for eight hours [laughter] so 8 hours means one/ird of life is gone in the remaining 2/3 they have to eat they have to you know shower bathroom this that all this another 2 three hours gone so literally 50% of life is gone daily basis just for basic maintenance maintance of this life. 50% of the time is gone in maintenance. Remaining 50% what they have. If you look at every single move that they may make with their body, their thought process, their emotions, you will see a whole lot of it is happening in compulsive cycles. Or in other words, if you are little sensitive to life, you will realize you are the biggest issue in your life. So this is one thing that I'm trying to do with people that you are never the issue in your life. I'm not the issue. My thought, my emotion, my body is never the issue. My thought, my emotion, my energy and my body are my instruments of function. They are not impediments in my life. But I would say for 90% of the human beings their own body then the compulsions of the body the compulsions of their thought the compulsions of their emotions are ruling them most of the time. So when you yourself are a problem well you're on self-help. There are some people who think that their talent and intelligence are fixed traits. That's a fixed mindset. Then there are other people who believe that their talent and intelligence are malleable traits that can be developed and they are developed through challenge and those are people with the growth mindset. So people that believe they can grow into basically whatever they want to become. Do humans have limits? Yeah, almost certainly. But there is such a gap between where you are and the upper bounds of human limitation that to even worry about limitation just doesn't make sense. We put people on the moon. So like once you accept that we could figure that out, it's like you're not aiming at anything crazier than that. So, it's going to fall within the limits of what humans can do. So, going after that and developing that mindset and being aware of what Carol Dwet calls the false growth mindset, which you alluded to earlier, where people think they're thinking in the right way. They think they're implementing something, but they're really not. [music] We all get to decide what our values are, what our belief system is, what our rules in life are, the code of ethics that we live by. Those are all decisions that people mistake for empirical truth. But if you want to know how just unempirically true it is, look across all societies. They don't share it. So we just decide that stuff. It's usually handed to us by our parents, which is what makes us confuse it with just being true. But the reality is that we're all constructing this belief system, value system, honor code, all of it. And it's going to determine what we do and how we do it. Now, if you choose to breathe life into from a value and belief standpoint, putting in that work to get those skills, then suddenly that energy of like, whoa, this is going to let me do something that lets me serve all of the sudden like, wow, that's uplifting in and of itself. So, you feel good as you're doing it. Now, as you're feeling better about it, you're going to want to do it more. And so, that became that self-reinforcing loop of I want to do this more, but to do it more, I have to become aware of my blind spots. And that's where self-awareness comes in. But just like any other skill, like you have to cultivate it. You have to get better at it. You have to seek disisconfirming evidence. You have to come to realize where you have been blind. Now, often those moments where we realize that we've been blind, they are emotionally devastating. I love inspiration and motivation, but it is the neurological equivalent of candy. It's rad. It has its place, but you everyone because those just happen to be fleeting neurological states. Yeah. You You just have to find something that's way more grounded. You need a mission. You need a grand why. You need to know what it is. And and this is not a discovery. It's a thing you decide. I decided now because I tell it as a story. People think, "Oh, it was un unavoidable. He meets this kid Rashan and that coupled with all the people that he worked with at Quest. It's sort of inevitable that he decides that he's going to um build Impact Theory and try to change culture to give everyone an empowering mindset." Yeah. Literally a year before I decided to found Impact Theory, my mission in life was to end metabolic disease. So, it's like you decide and then you point yourself at something. Nothing is ever going to feel right. Like, this is what I was put on earth to do. It won't feel that way until about a year or two years after you've been saying that's what you're going to do, that that's what you're committed to and actually acting in accordance with it. And then you'll be like, "Yeah, this actually is my mission." You have to learn how to emotionally re-calibrate. So when I was the kid in the server room and there was a whole bunch of people farther ahead in their entrepreneurial journey than I and they all heard the same message about you can be a partner and none of them did anything with it. I started asking why aren't they doing anything with it and I realized the answer was I could self soothe faster than they could. And so yeah it hurt when I was told I was an idiot. That really sucked especially hearing it from someone you really respect. But I decided to not spin out of control, not waste three days being hurt by it, but instead to recenter and just ask, are they right? Because if they're right, there's something to learn here. And if they're not right, just move on. And if they are right, learn the lesson. And so I just slowly started collecting it and the lessons. And the image I started thinking was whenever somebody throws an insult at you, you have two options. You can let it hit you in the head or you can raise your defenses and deflect it. And your defenses are the psychological immune system. They're real. I'm not making that up. So, all of us have this thing that comes to our aid when somebody says something that hurts you. Then you're like, "Oh, well, they're mean anyway. They're a jerk. They're a bully. Whatever. I don't have to take them seriously." And so, that makes you feel better and you believe maybe that they're being cosmically punished in some way. Being a bully is its own punishment and all that. So, and like that allows you to relax. And they've done studies that show people with the highest level of self-d delusion are the happiest. So, there really is something to it. But the people with the highest level of self-d delusion are usually not the ones that go the farthest because they don't stop to recognize where they really are to own the pain of that. So I thought, okay, instead of raising my defenses, I'm going to lower my defenses. I'm going to let that rock hit me in the head because at my feet now is actually a nugget of gold. And I'm going to pick up that nugget of gold and form the lesson that the person is throwing at me. And here's the thing to realize. When people really come at you, they're really trying to hurt you. They have sinister intent. They're gonna come at you with something that's true. Nobody comes at you with the stuff that's not real. They're gonna hit you with like the thing that you're the most secure about in the world. So, even the people with the the gravest of intent are the ones that are giving you the most powerful gift because you may be blind to it or maybe you didn't want to acknowledge it. But if you can let it hit you as much as it hurts, then bend down, pick it up, and learn from it, now you can do something. Where I found the um the deepest hooks into how powerful this can be for somebody is when you talk about trauma. You've talked about how people experience a traumatic event, but they then basically rehearse it and how that then has this knock-on effect. So, what is that? Why do people find it so hard to get past trauma? Well, the the stronger the emotional reaction you have to some experience in your life. The higher the emotional quotient, the more you pay attention to the cause. And the moment the brain puts all of its attention on the cause, it takes a snapshot. And that's called a memory. So long-term memories are created from very highly um uh emotional experiences. So what happens then is that people think neurologically within the circuitry of that experience and they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions. And so when you have an emotional reaction to someone or something, most people think that they can't control their emotional reaction. Well, it turns out if you allow that emotional reaction, it's called a refractory period to last for hours or days, that's called the mood. You say to someone, "Hey, what's up?" You say, "I'm in a mood." "Well, why are you in a mood?" "Well, I had this thing happen to me 5 days ago, and I'm having one long emotional reaction." If you keep that same emotional reaction going on for weeks or months, that's called temperament. Why is he so bitter? I don't know. Let's ask him. Why is he so bitter? Why are you bitter? Well, I had this thing happen to me 9 months ago. And if you keep that same emotional reaction going on for years on end, that's called a personality trait. And so learning how to shorten your refractory period of emotional reactions is really where the the work starts. So then people when they have an event what they do is they keep recalling the event because the the emotions of stress hormones the survival emotions are saying pay attention to what happened because you want to be prepared if it happens again. Turns out most people spend 70% of their life living in survival and living in stress. So they're they're always anticipating the worstc case scenario based on a past experience and they're literally out of the infinite potentials in the quantum field. They're selecting the worst possible outcome and they're beginning to emotionally embrace it with fear and they're conditioning their body into a state of fear. Do that enough times body has a panic attack without you. You you can't even predict it because it's programmed subconsciously. So then you say to the person why are you this way and they'll say I am this way because of this event that happened to me 15 or 20 years ago and what that means from biological standpoint is that they haven't been able to change since that event. So then the emotions from the experience tend to give the body and the brain a rush of energy. So people become addicted to the rush of those emotions and they use the problems and conditions in their life to reaffirm their limitation so at least they can feel something. So now when it comes time to change, you say to the person, why are you this way? Well, every time they recall the event, they're producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event is occurring, firing and wiring the same circuits and sending the same emotional signature to the body. Well, what's the revalence behind that? Well, your body is the unconscious mind. It doesn't know the difference between the experience that's creating the emotion and the emotion that you're creating by thought alone. So, the body's believing. It's living in the same past experience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And so then when those emotions influence certain thoughts and they do and then those thoughts create the same emotions and those same emotions influence the same thoughts now the entire person's state of being is in the past. So then the hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before. Period. And the moment you decide to make a different choice get ready because it's going to feel uncomfortable. It's going to feel unfamiliar. It's there's going to be some uncertainty. Why does it feel so uncomfortable? Is it because of the the the neurons that fire together wire together so I've there's like an easiness to that loop just because literally and you've talked very eloquently about this. The way that the neurons connect in the brain, how rapidly I've seen you show footage of how rapidly those connections happen, which is pretty incredible. Um is is that what makes it so discomforting for people? I think that I think that the bigger thing is that we we keep firing and wiring those circuits. They become more hardwired. So there you have a thought and then the program runs. But it's the emotion that follows the thought. If you have a if you have a fearful thought, you're going to feel anxiety. The moment you feel anxiety, your brain's checking in with your body and saying, "Yeah, you're pretty anxious." So then you start thinking more corresponding thoughts equal to how you feel. Well, the redundancy of that cycle conditions the body to become the mind. So now when it comes time to change, person steps into that river of change and they make a different choice and all of a sudden they don't they they they don't feel the same way. So the body says, well, you've been doing this for 35 years. Uh all you're you're going to just stop feel suffering and stop feeling guilty and stop feeling shameful and you're not going to complain or blame or make excuses or feel sorry for yourself. Well, the body's in the unknown. So, the body says, "I want to return back to familiar territory." So, the body starts influencing the mind and it says, "Start tomorrow. You're too much like your mother. You'll never change. This isn't going to work for you. This doesn't feel right." Uh and so if you respond to that thought as if it's true, that same thought will lead to the same choice which will lead to the same behavior which will create the same experience which will produce the same emotion. [music] So pain is a good thing physically because that is your preservation self-preservation mechanism. But suffering is something that you do in your mind. So pain that happens in your body, you take it in your mind and multiply it a thousand times or a million times depending on how capable you are or how stupid you are and suffer it a million times over. Right now most human beings are like this. What happened 10 years ago, they can still suffer. What may happen day after tomorrow, they already suffer. They are not suffering life. They think they're suffering life. They're not suffering life. They are suffering the two most fantastic faculties that human beings alone have. A vivid sense of memory and a fantastic sense of imagination. I want to know how close to encapsulating the notion of thinking like a monk. Can you get like how like if you were to give somebody just a nutshell notion of what that means? What would you say? Say it means to live a life in alignment. And what that means is that you live a life where what you think, what you say, and what you do are aligned with your truest self. And what I mean by your truest self is the self that was not given to you by your parents or by your education or by media or movies or not the self that you've created to function in the world. So I think if you strip away all of those expectations, obligations, and opinions, what you're left with, if you live in alignment with that, then you're thinking like a monk. The monkey mind is what we all experience every day. So the monkey mind is jumping from branch to branch. It doesn't want to focus on the root of the issue. It wants to find the next banana. It wants to find the next excuse. It wants to find the next instant gratification. Right? That's the monkey mind. And so the monkey mind is never going to help you focus on your strengths. And the reason, going back to one of the earlier questions you asked, the reason why we struggle to find our passion is because the world has constantly pushed us away from our strengths. We've constantly been told to focus on your weaknesses. Oh, you've got three A's and a D. You should be working on that D. Let's get that up to an A. Right? I remember in my school they had this excruciating exercise where you'd be ranked 1 to 180 on every subject every year and they'd send the list home to your parents. So there were 180 students in my year group and every subject art, math, English, science, geography, history, you name it, you were ranked one to 180 in every subject based on your test results and scores. And that was like painful when my parents received that. And the crazy thing was I would always outperform always in art, design, philosophy, and economics. I was and English I was always in the top half if not in the top quarter if not in the top five, right, of my whole year group. And stuff like science and geography and and math, I was kind of like in the middle and and towards the bottom end of my year. Now granted, I went to a competitive school, so I was still okay at those things. But the interesting thing was that my parents and my friends parents would never look at what you came one or two or three in. They'd be looking at the things you came 90, 100, and 110 in. And so we've all been programmed to say, "Oh, your strengths are they're fine. They're they're good the way they are, but why are you not performing at this?" And so the one way to know your strengths is to ask yourself, what do you do that you feel the most confidence doing? And it could be something as simple as I'm great at organizing birthday parties. It could [laughter] be like that may be your skill, right? That may be your strength. Or it may be something like I'm really good at putting on makeup. Or it could be that I have a great sense of fashion. It could be any of those things. And if you don't know it yet, you can also do an exercise where you sit down with a colleague, a family member, and a friend because you need people from all areas of your life, and you ask them, "What do you think I do that I excel in that I stand out in?" Or if you could trust me to do one thing in your life for you, what would that one thing be? If we know that people are struggling with the monkey mind, they um they're telling they're filling their cup up with a lot of things that are self-destructive, maybe too big of a word, but it's directionally correct that things that aren't leading them to joy, to peace. Um how do we bring the ashroom to them? How do we go about, you know, beginning the process of healing? I know, um a big part of your journey was questions, questions, questions, questions, questions. What are the right questions? Um, do we have to meditate? Is that optional? Do we have to give up sex? Like where where do we fall? When you got to that part in the book, I had to laugh out loud. So, what how do we bring the ashroom to people? How do we help them like now start doing things specifically to empty their cup to refill it with something that's going to lead to to peace and to joy and all? Yeah. The first thing I'd say is I think everyone needs the feeling that they can just come up for some air. Life can often feel like someone's literally drowning you and you feel like you're drowning and floundering, especially if you're in an extreme case of anxiety or stress or depression. And I feel like you just need to feel like you can just come up for a tiny bit of air. So for that, in the book I talk about the 3S model, which is your sights, sense, and sounds. what we see, what we hear, and what we smell has a profound impact on our mental state. And we actually underestimates our sense. And I'll give you an example. All of us have been walking around with masks. And someone said this to me the other day and it hit me. They were saying to me that now that we all wear masks and do this the whole time. I think my mask over there. They were doing this all the time, they realized they couldn't hear people properly. And the reason they couldn't hear people properly is they realized they don't use their ears. They use their eyes to see people's lips and so actually they're not even using their ears that much. They're using their eyes to follow the lips and know what someone's saying. So actually we depend so much on our eyes in every interaction. How many times have you been looking at someone attractive and you forgot what they were talking about? Right? You're just so engaged with your eyes that you completely even forgot to listen. Right? or you're so lost in in the vision of something again and you're in a days you can't smell anything, you can't taste anything. So, we've got to learn to reactivate our senses. So, I'll give you an example of what I mean. As monks, our life was sight designed, sound designed, and scent designed. What's the first thing you see when you wake up in the morning? For 80% of people, the first thing they see in the morning is their phone. And the last thing they see at night is their phone. That is poor site design because you don't even choose what the first message of the day your mind receives. That actually made my stomach drop. That's a gnarly thought. It's true. Yeah, right. Imagine the last thing someone sees is not their partner or their spouse or the person they sleep with. They see their phone and the first thing in the morning they look at is their phone. And guess what? It's not a good site because you're looking at a message that you didn't design for your mind. You're looking at a picture or an image that maybe came through on your Instagram feed that you didn't choose for your mind. So now you've started your day with envy, jealousy, comparison, competition, collap, like all of the all of the monkey mind stuff. And the monkey mind's excited. The monkey mind's on. The monkey mind's like, "Yeah, we're ready to go." And now you started the day with the monkey mind. So my advice is start your day with a quote that you love. Start your day with a picture of someone that you love or your family. Start your day with a work of art that inspires you. Start your day with seeing the first thing that you see. Make it so closely connected to your soul and your goal and your purpose that your monk mind naturally comes alive. So as monks, the first thing that we saw was sometimes a teaching that we'd keep next to us. It might be a spiritual text where I just ripped it out of a book and stuck it there next to my bed. So I woke up to that. Just wake up to something that you actually want to see when you wake up and make it intentional and make it focused. It could even be a reminder on a sticky note. I remember for a long time I had one when I was a monk that said, "I am not this body." Just to disconnect from the fact that I was more than this body. And because we didn't have mirrors in the ashram, it was very easy to forget I was this body. Or I've had other ones where that say to me, I'm exactly where I need to be. and I've read that in the morning and that just reminds me because so often I wake up feeling anxious that I'm behind on my day or I'm late and then I actually make up a mess. Whereas if I read I'm exactly where I need to be and I remind myself I can start my day there. So that's site the and that's simple easy for anyone to do. You don't have to change your mind. You don't need to meditate. You don't have to do anything. The second one is let's talk about scent design. Now, one of the things I've been missing during quarantine is going to a spa or going to like a resort because I love massages and I love spas and like me and my wife love getting away. And if you think about it, whenever you go into a spa or a massage space or whatever they're called or a resort, you can always feel relaxed from the moment you walk in just through the power of scent. It could be the most basic room in the world, but a scent can literally illuminate a whole room. So scents like eucalyptus, lavender, sandalwood, if you've got a diffuser or a candle, and you can make this a part of your routine, before you start your workday, just have a candle that you breathe in for 4 seconds and breathe out for 4 seconds. live through the moment where I know what I would do when I have money and I have to give it up to do something and I choose to go do something that makes me feel alive. I've had the moment where I've had all the money in the world and I know what I do. Do I retire? And the answer is no, I don't. I keep going as if I had urgency for what though. You could say, "Oh, to have the impact to leave the legacy." But I don't think legacy at all in the slightest. If you told me, Tom, you could spend the next 40 years building the saying, but no one will ever know who you are. I'd be like, fine. Does it does the impact actually happen and carry on? Yes, perfect. It is that experiment of thinking like, whoa, we can actually make the world better and that people will go on to do amazing things. The only thing that matters to me is what I think about it. It doesn't matter what other people think about me. That's irrelevant. I can't control it. It's going to change throughout my life. It just too many people have said, "If you stay in the game long enough, you will see yourself become the villain." So, I know like right now people will come up to me crying and thanking me for their help. I'm one sentence away from saying something that really upsets people and then people come and are like, "Fuck you. I hope you burn." So, it's like I get it. I know how that plays out. So, I don't care about that. It's beautiful when it's positive and I've helped somebody, but I'm only worried about what I think about myself. So, I know about myself. The thing that I'm moving towards is really thinking that I'm making impact. And while it's possible that on a long enough timeline I will stop being neurochemically rewarded for that and not care anymore and thus I might slow down and not want to do anything. But nothing in my 42 years of experience lead me to believe that that is true about me. So I am there's nothing there's no shortage of things I'm so excited about that the thing that scares me I have two fears. my wife dying because we have this beautiful shared experience and I don't want I don't want to try to recreate that and it can only be recreated in real time. So it would take me 18 years to get back what I have with her. And then the other thing is brain damage because if I can't process data the way that I process data now, I worry it won't be as fun. So like the struggle of everything, the trying that's I value myself for that and that's what I really love. And then just innately and I don't know that I did anything to earn this. I love change. So where other people are freaked out by change, dude, I welcome change aggressively. The bigger the shakeup, the better. And so what I tell people is because you're more likely to believe something negative. Don't even worry about what's true. Worry about what empowers you when it comes to just yourself. I'm not talking about, you know, fake news or, you know, a post-truth world. I'm just saying for yourself [clears throat] there. Both of those narratives are based on facts. So the truth of one or the other doesn't matter. One is empowering and one is disempowering. Act in accordance with the one that's empowering. If you look at that as a philosophy of life which is let's just accumulate, let's just hoard and let's just celebrate on my own. We know people and stories about people who will not be satisfied that way to just have. You're one of them. You and Lisa, and I can and I can say this honestly, and I said this to Lisa the other day, are two of the most generous, loving people and humble people that I know, despite all your success and incredible achievement. And that's what enders people to you. It's not what you have that enders or that may endear some people to you, but what keeps the right people around is that you both have these human qualities because you want to serve, you want to help, you want to support and collaborate. And so for me, I feel like we either live and then we live the opposite. The other opposite life is, oh, life is just about giving. It's just about service. It's just about helping. That's not sustainable either. And so to me, I've discovered through real monk wisdom that life is actually embracing polarities. It's actually about doing a dance and knowing which way to go at the right time. So I believe as much in strategy as I do in sincerity and I believe in much as generosity as I do in generating value for myself and I believe as much in giving as I do in growing and I think as soon as you start to say no it's either or you have to choose I think that's where we start to lose a part of ourselves and that's why I add that compassion to passion because I know a lot of people who do what they are passionate about but actually lack meaning and purpose in their life because they haven't turned it into a service. Look at yourself in 10 15 20 years time and ask yourself the question is that where I want to be and if the answer is no then you need to find a new path to just get to understand yourself. You don't know what you need in your life until you figure out who you are.