The Distillation of Tony Robbins

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Tony Robbins is a force of nature. A larger than life personality who creates positive change in other people’s lives by empowering them to go after the life you deserve. It’s probably why Tony and his work have been so influential for me over the years. I’m trying to learn from the brightest minds and deconstruct their wisdom and share it with others to empower you to become better versions of yourself. 

I first read Tony’s book Awaken The Giant Within 10+ years ago and I remember finishing and saying, “WOW, that book just changed my life.” I reread it two months ago and when I finished I said, “WOW, that book just changed my life.” It’s filled with inspiration, action steps, questions to spark your inner work and illuminating insights into the fact that we’re all capable of more. This Distillation is a collection of some of the most impactful lessons I’ve learned from Tony. 

What I appreciate most about Tony is that he was able to come from a tumultuous situation and build an incredible life. He didn’t let his past determine who and what he would become. It’s empowering that no matter what has happened in our past we can make a decision to become more and change our future. Today, Tony is worth an estimated $600 million dollars, has given away 850 million meals and plans to give away a billion by 2025, he has 31 companies doing 7+ billion dollars in sales and he actively manages 12 of them, and he has empowered more than 50 million people from 100+ countries. WOW… talk about coming from nothing and creating a positive mark on the world. 

“It all began with the gift of growing up in a tough environment. Don’t get me wrong. There was lots of love in my family. But my upbringing was also filled with violence, chaos, insecurity, and fear. My mom was wonderful in so many ways, but she struggled with addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs. Many times we were too broke to buy food or clothes. I was desperate for answers, desperate to learn anything that could ease my suffering.” 

 

Tony’s Growth

Key Questions to Create The Life You Want 

“Who will you have to become to achieve all you want?”

Vision – What do I really want?

Values – What is important about it?

Methods – How will I get it?

Obstacles – What is preventing me from having it?

Measurements – How will I know I am successful?

7 Master Principles of Life: Key Beliefs to Help You on Your Journey

You don’t always get your goals, but you always get your standards. The moment you lower your expectations, your life wanes. Raise your expectations. Your real limits are your mindset about what your limits are. 

Skeptics & pessimists are just afraid of being disappointed. Stress is just fear. Your brain cannot process fear and gratitude at the same time: they are opposing states and you have to pick only one of them at a time, so why pick fear?  

People get more of what they focus on, so focus on the things that matter and what you want to achieve. People get stressed because they focus on things that don’t really matter. Self-esteem is measured by how much you can control. When you react to a stimulus, you aren’t in control. You can’t control what events happen to you, but you can control the meaning of the events. Ex. These problems always happen to me. Vs – This is a challenge. It’s time to step up. To get better answers, ask better questions. 

There are two worlds: the inside world and the outside world. We have little control of the external world, but we have complete control of our internal world. People always have gaps between where they are and where they want to be… fill the gap. 

Most people have “goals” that actually wish. Goals aren’t achieved just by hoping. Action is what unites every great success. Action is what produces results. Knowledge is only potential power until it comes into the hands of someone who knows how to get himself to take effective action. 

Everyone has a story about why we can’t have what we want. You can’t lie to yourself and expect to see the success that comes from the truth. In a minute, you can change your life by deciding to never again live your life below what you deserve. Life is something we “get to do”, not something we “got to do ”. If you’re bored, then we need to find something exciting in our life that we can move towards. You can’t build on failure. You can only build on success. Be one of the few who do. If you talk about it, it’s a dream. If you envision it, it becomes possible. If you schedule it, it becomes real. Focus on everything you want out of life as if you’ve already done or achieved it. 

Once we start taking 100 percent responsibility for our experience of life rather than blaming others, we can awaken to a truth that makes all the difference: Whatever life offers us, we get to decide what to focus on what it means, and what we’re going to do about it.

Your Past Doesn’t Equal Your Future

“I’ve come to believe that all my past failures and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level  of living I now enjoy.”

• When we use everything in life as a learning experience and don’t let it define us we begin to empower ourselves to create the life we want moving forward. There is no reason to regret your past, it taught you everything you needed to know to get to this point, use it. 
• Accept this one simple truth: that you hold the control to change your own life and to make it into anything you want it to be! 
• There’s nothing that can stop you unless you choose to let it stop you, which still ultimately is up to you to decide. You hold the keys to your own destiny, to your own outcome, and to your own life, which means that really no amount of circumstance, obstacles, or people can get in your way once you realize it! 
• What do you want your life to be like? 
• How will you make it happen?

Benjamin Franklin once said: “Many people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 75.” Don’t be one of those people.

3 Keys to Create Change 

1. Raise your standards. Make a list of everything you can no longer tolerate in life. 
2. Change your limiting beliefs: Beliefs are “orders” that come from your subconscious. If you want to reach your goals, your dreams have to be in sync with your belief.
3. Modify your strategy; The most important thing is to persevere but if you want to reach your goals, you need to adopt the best strategy. If something it’s working adjust and change it.

Awaken The Giant Within

• • The three decisions that control your destiny are:

 1. Your decisions about what to focus on. 

2. Your decisions about what things mean to you. 

3. Your decisions about what to do to create the results you desire.

• Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure. It’s not actual pain that drives us, but our fear that something will lead to pain. And it’s not actual pleasure that drives us, but our belief—our sense of certainty—that somehow taking a certain action will lead to pleasure.
• It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean. 

• Any time you want to make a change in your life, the first thing you need to do is to raise your standards and believe you can meet them.
• We must change our belief system and develop a sense of certainty that we can and will meet the new standards before we actually do.
• The way to expand our lives is to model the lives of those people who are already succeeding. It’s just a matter of asking questions: “What do you believe makes you different? What are the beliefs you have that separate you from others?”
• It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently. In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.
• You and I can change how we feel in an instant, just by changing our focus.
• Simply by changing your habitual vocabulary—the words you consistently use to describe the emotions of your life—you can instantaneously change how you think, how you feel, and how you live.

“Achieving goals by themselves will never make us happy in the long term; it’s who you become, as you overcome the obstacles necessary to achieve your goals, that can give you the deepest and most long-lasting sense of fulfillment.”

Modeling

• “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.” 
• Modeling is one of the easiest and most effective ways to develop in life.
• By modeling the habits and strategies of the world’s most successful people and making them your own, you can dramatically shortcut your learning curve and save yourself a ton of time, effort, energy, and money.
• Questions:
  • Who has already achieved what you want to achieve?
  • What was different or unique about their approach, mindset, strategy, and/or technique?
  • What choices and decisions have they made that you have not?
  • What chances, risks, and/or sacrifices have they made that you have not?
  • How do they spend their time differently than you?
  • What resources do they have that you don’t?
  • What training have they done that you haven’t?
  • How do their standards differ from yours?
  • How does their work ethic differ from yours?
  • How do their beliefs differ from yours?
  • How do their values differ from yours?
  • What mistakes have they made that you should avoid?

Set Goals That Inspire   

• Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible—the foundation for all success in life. All goal setting must be immediately followed by both the development of a plan, and massive and consistent action toward its fulfillment. It’s not just getting a goal that matters, but the quality of life you experience along the way. 
• Our goal is not to ignore the problems of life, but to put ourselves in better mental and emotional states where we can not only come up with solutions but act upon them.
• The first step is to ascertain what your goal is, in detail and then to find out why you want to achieve it. By finding strong enough why are you’ll uncover more passion, momentum, and drive to achieve something bigger than you ever thought possible! It’s important to set realistic goals in realistic time frames in order to set yourself up for success. But in general, setting realistic goals is the most sustainable way to achieve them. 
• The next step is to make a conscious commitment to your goals and to give yourself the gift of following through, no matter what! If you are committed enough you will achieve your goals, even if it takes a little longer. 
  • What goal do you want to achieve? 
  • Why do you want to achieve it? 
  • When do you want to achieve it?

• Research has shown that people who write down their goals have a certain edge over those who don’t.
  • Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two eminent organizational psychologists, have spent several decades studying the extraordinary effectiveness of setting specific and difficult goals. In more than one thousand studies conducted by researchers across the globe, they’ve found that goals that spell out exactly what needs to be accomplished, and that set the bar for achievement high, result in far superior performance than goals that are vague or that set the bar too low.

“Success is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is often the result of bad judgment.”

“Divorce the story of you limitation and marry the story of you unlimited capacity your whole world changes.”

When experiencing a problem, ask yourself, “What’s good about this? What can I learn from this?”

“Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.”

“Know that it’s your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.”

“You get what you tolerate.” 

Key Takeaways from Unlimited Power 

1. “The way we communicate with others and the way we communicate with ourselves ultimately determine the quality of our lives.”
2. Action is what unites every great success. Action is what produces results. Knowledge is only potential power until it comes into the hands of someone who knows how to get himself to take effective action. In fact, the literal definition of the word “power” is “the ability to act.
3. How you feel is not the result of what is happening in your life—it is your interpretation of what is happening. Successful people’s lives have shown us over and over again that the quality of our lives is determined not by what happens to us, but rather by what we do about what happens.
4. “You are the one who decides how to feel and act based upon the ways you choose to perceive your life. Nothing has any meaning except the meaning we give it.”
5. Our beliefs about what we are and what we can precisely determine what we will be. Many people are passionate, but because of their limiting beliefs about who they are and what they can do, they never take the actions that could make their dream a reality. People who succeed know what they want and believe that they can get it. 
6. The movers and shakers of the world are often professional modelers—people who have mastered the art of learning everything they can by following other people’s experiences rather than their own. They know how to save the one commodity none of us ever get enough of—time.

“Great leaders and achievers have in common that they operate from the belief that they create their world. The phrase you’ll hear time and again is, ‘I am responsible. I’ll take care of it.’

 

The Ultimate Success Formula

1. The first step to this formula is to know your outcome, that is, to define precisely what you want.
2. The second step is to take action—otherwise your desires will always be dreams.
3. The third step is to develop the sensory acuity to recognize the kinds of responses and results you’re getting from your actions and to note as quickly as possible if they are taking you closer to your goals or farther away. You must know what you’re getting from your actions, whether it be in a conversation or from your daily habits.
4. The fourth step, which is to develop the flexibility to change your behavior until you get what you want.

1. Know Your Outcome 

The first key to success is to KNOW YOUR OUTCOME. People who achieve anything of value know their outcome. They have a reason for producing the desired result. Very few of us tell our brains what we want. We don’t consistently activate the circuitry that could help us succeed more quickly and elegantly. If you know what you want, you literally trigger the circuitry in your brain to give you the neurological choices to achieve that outcome. An outcome is like a magnet that attracts people and events that will provide you with opportunities to achieve your outcome. 

2. The Ability To Take Action – Personal Power

Action transforms dreams into reality. Without action, even if you know what you want, it will remain a dream or a wish. People who take action on a regular basis dominate the field of human excellence. It’s not luck, talent, or learning that creates personal power. Some people think learning creates success. It is said, “if you let learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool; if you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy,” wealthy in the truest sense- spiritual, emotional, and physical wealth- success in all areas of your life. When you study the personal histories of the most successful people, you find that they knew precisely what they wanted and they took action until they discovered what it took to succeed in their area of endeavor. The only way to find out what you need to do to get your outcome is to take action. Then you begin to get feedback. If you are able to learn from that feedback, you are using the third key to personal power. 

3. Sensory Acuity

Successful people know whether they are getting closer to their outcome or further away from their outcome. If you have sensory acuity, every time you get a result you learn from it and can adjust your approach.

4. Change Your Approach 

Successful people learn from the action they take, not the results, and change their approach if they’re not getting closer to their outcome, or if they notice their approach is only partially successful. Nobody always arrives directly at the desired outcome. We all go off course from time to time, so we continually need to adjust, take action, adjust, take more action, adjust, etc… 

2 Factors Determine how you Feel & Behave

1. The way you use your PHYSIOLOGY. Your body is like a television set- if you change the channel you’ll get different signals and see different pictures. You can change the pictures on the tv screen of your brain by changing the way you breathe, your posture, eat and use facial expressions. 
2. How you REPRESENT (INTERNAL REPRESENTATIONS) what happens to your brain: how you PICTURE things, what you picture, how you talk to yourself, what you say to yourself, whether you ASSOCIATE to things that make you happy and DISASSOCIATE from things you don’t like. If you’re in the picture, the picture will have a very different impact than if you’re away from the picture at a distance. In a relationship, you need to learn to associate what you like about the other person if your outcome is to have an enduring, loving relationship. Your perception is governed by the way you organize your pictures- the things you say to yourself and the way you use your body. If you have painful memories, you don’t have to carry them around with you, you can reprogram them. 

 

Communication

• Communication is the primary component of power. Today information is coming at us at an incredible pace, those who master communication with themselves and others are in the true position of power. THE QUALITY OF YOUR LIFE IS THE QUALITY OF YOUR COMMUNICATION. The kind of communication you direct at yourself will govern the kinds of experiences you create in life. You need to master your communication with yourself. When events happen to us in life, we tend to believe that these events have the meaning of their own. Events don’t have a meaning; the only meaning they have is the meaning we give to those events. Often we get caught up in what our environment teaches us, what society teaches us, but WE are the final source for deciding the meaning. Many of us are “on automatic”- we are programmed. It’s important for you to take charge of the meanings you assign to what happens in your life. Otherwise, you’re a robot to advertising, parental beliefs, peer pressure, etc.. Success in the outside world is communicating in a way that causes other people to take action. Success in your personal life depends on your communication with yourself. 

“Identify your problems, but give your power and energy to solutions… Leaders spend 5% of their time on the problem & 95% of their time on the solution. Get over it & crush it!”

Rapid Planning Method

The RPM is a results-focused, purpose driven massive action plan. Focusing by way of RPM means answering these questions. 

1. What do I really want? Have a result you’re totally focused on, because whatever you focus on, you will continuously get to.
2. What’s my purpose? Know your purpose that will move you emotionally. Whichever emotions we use are going to determine what we do. If apathy is your emotion, then you’re going to ignore things. Whatever emotion is inspiring you is going to determine where you go. 
3. What do I need to do? The arrow that gets you to your target is your actions, your MAP (Massive Action Plan). When you write all your actions, you may decide that some are more important than others. You may decide some aren’t necessary. But at least you have a place to look at them when it’s related to something that really matters to you. 

It’s never a discipline problem: it’s more about having important goals, goals that have no power to move you in any shape or form. Very often in life, our value system, what we consider important, is not based on what we really value. It’s based on a habit of decisions made, how we continue to direct our focus. Focus on where you want to go, not on what you fear or don’t want. 

When you know what you want and WHY you want it, the doing becomes easier. It’s maximizing your results and your fulfillment simultaneously because you’re not just achieving something, you’re fulfilled emotionally. You’re achieving the vision you created, and you have the emotions you want most attached to it. An extraordinary life is yours for the taking. 

Understanding Why We Do What We Do

1. What stops us from moving forward? Taking action? Being our best?
2. What controls and determines the quality of our lives?
3. Why do we do what we do? What are the ultimate drives behind all human action?

What stops us from moving forward? FEAR 

• The two primary fears that all humans share are

• We’re not Enough

• We won’t be Loved

What controls and determines the quality of our lives?

• What controls our lives are the meanings we associate to the things in our lives, which are shaped by our own personal psychology and our worldview (the beliefs and values that we’ve created).
• Once meaning is established, each individual will have a pattern of emotions that they associate with this meaning as their natural way of coping.
• All meanings are driven by our individual patterns of emotions. We all have patterns of emotions. Certain people are constantly happy while others are gloomy. 
• All of us have a variety of emotions we consistently experience, and these emotions are driven by three forces that mold the meanings we take from those emotions:
• the three primary patterns of emotion are called the Triad.

The Triad: The Molders of Meaning 

The source of all Emotion is a constellation of Three Forces 

• Force #1:Physiology– How you use your physical body such as breath, posture, and movement.
• Force #2 Focus– Whatever you focus on, you will feel.
• Force #3 Language/Meaning– As soon as we put words into an experience, it changes the meaning we experience. 

Why do we do what we do? 

• No matter who you are in the world, or what you do, there’s a common force that’s driving and shaping all our emotions and actions. It determines the quality of our lives, and ultimately, our destinies.
• The universal force is a human need.  Regardless of who we are- our backgrounds, our professions, our religion, race, or creed- we are all driven, day after day, to fulfill primal needs that have been encoded into our nervous systems over centuries. Although each of us is a unique and special soul, we’re all wired in very much the same way.
• There are six human needs — fundamental drives within each one of us — that compel us forward in a quest to experience a life of meaning. There is no conscious effort necessary, our will to satisfy these primal needs is automatic.

 

Six Human Needs

Four Primal Needs

1. CERTAINTY-Everybody wants stability about their basic necessities — food, shelter, and other material resources. When people cannot control their physical circumstances, they may seek certainty through a state of mind (such as religious faith or a positive outlook).

2. UNCERTAINTY/VARIETY-People have a need to change their state, to exercise their body and emotions. Therefore they seek variety through a number of means — stimuli, change of scene, physical activity, mood swings, entertainment, food, etc.

3 SIGNIFICANCE- Everybody needs to feel special and important in some way. People will seek significance through obtaining recognition from others or from themselves. When people feel insignificant, they may make themselves feel significant by getting angry. They may also meet their needs paradoxically, by having others recognize the significance of their insignificance or the size and complexity of their problems. It is important to remember that for many, helplessness is power.

4. CONNECTION- Humans need to feel connected with someone or something — a person, an idea, a value, a habit, or a sense of identity. The connection may take the form of love, or merely of intense engagement — for instance, one can feel connected by means of aggressive interaction.

Two Spiritual Needs

5. GROWTH- Everything in the universe is either growing or dying — there is no third alternative. People are not spiritually satisfied unless their capacities are expanding.

6. CONTRIBUTION-Just as people cannot survive without others contributing in some way to their welfare (nobody grew up on its own), they cannot be spiritually fulfilled unless they are contributing to others as well.

All human beings are consistently seeking to meet the 6 Human Needs, but we all tend to value two more than the rest. For example, someone who values certainty will live a radically different life than someone who values uncertainty/variety. Similarly, someone who focuses on significance will interact with others very differently than someone whose number one need is for connection/love. When you know which needs you to value most, you can better understand the choices you make, as well as your emotional patterns.

The Driving Force: The Science of Momentum 

What’s Your Identity?

“The strongest force in the universe is a human being living consistently with his identity.”

• We ALL have an IDENTITY — a set of BELIEFS that DEFINE who we are, what we can and cannot or WILL not do. And it’s based mostly on our past — some of which is painful, and some pleasurable.

SUCCESS WITHOUT FULFILLMENT IS THE ULTIMATE FAILURE

• How many people do you know achieved what they wanted but weren’t fulfilled? You have an extraordinary life when YOU see it as extraordinary. If you want an extraordinary life you can’t just achieve, you have to be fulfilled.

“I don’t have to get rid of the fear, I just have to dance with it.”

Decisions Determine Your Destiny, Not Your Conditions  

 “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” 

• I believe our lives are controlled by one force: Decisions.
• It’s not the conditions, it’s your decisions. Decisions what to believe, decisions
• what to do, decisions what to GIVE. I said to people think about you know, look back 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 15 years ago and think of a decision you made, that if you would have made a different decision you would have a totally different life today, better or worse I don’t know but totally different.
• Just as your previous decisions affect you today, your future conditions will be determined by your present decisions. If you want better future conditions, make better decisions now, because the better your current decisions are, the better your future conditions will be.

The most important decision you could make above any on the face of the Earth is deciding that no matter what happens in your life. No matter what happens you’re going to live in a beautiful state. The decision to say I am not going to suffer, that if suffering arises – pain is one thing suffering is another. Suffering comes when we obsess about ourselves, what we’re getting or not getting, what we should have done, what others should have done for us, it’s me me me me my game.

End Your Imagined Troubles 

• Suffering always comes because you’re obsessed with something related to you.
• Stop focusing on yourself and focus on something you want to serve greater than yourself. Your children, your wife, your mission, your life. You can get out of it in an instant because the nature of the human mind is to constantly compare things.
• Your brain is a 2 million-year-old device, it’s not designed to make you happy. It’s designed to make you survive and that’s why it’s always looking for what’s wrong. It could be what’s wrong with a sabre tooth tiger so I can protect myself. NOW people are worried about what people think of them,
 or do they have enough money,
 when two-thirds of the planet live off $2 a day
 and you’re making $38,000.. you’re rich!
• Life’s full of uncertainty, but here’s what you can know, you can decide no matter what happens, you’re going to have a great time.
• We think the outside world determines how we feel. If people have to behave a certain way for you to be happy and if they don’t, you’re unhappy. Then you’re always going to be unhappy because the more people are around you, the more they’re going to change because they’re human. You can’t control all of that. You never know when that’s going to happen, so might as well enjoy yourself along the way.

Ask Better Questions

 “Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.” 

• If you want better answers, ask better questions. 
• Questions are the answers. We ask ourselves questions on a regular basis without even really knowing it and the quality of our questions determines the quality of our lives. 
• The key is to make our questions more conscious and to practice the art of asking empowering, high-quality questions that will lead us to produce better answers to take better actions. 
• Change your “Can” questions to “How” questions. 
• The brain works just like a computer: ask it a question and it will produce an answer, no matter what the question is.
• Imagine the difference if you were to consciously guide yourself to ask great questions. Instead of asking “Why do I always sabotage myself?”, try asking “What can I do differently to get myself to succeed?” Instead of asking “Why am I always attracted to such toxic people?” try something like “Who do I need to become to attract less toxic people into my life?” or “What will it cost me to keep surrounding myself with toxic people?”

5 Keys to Asking Intelligently

#1 Ask Specifically

#2 Ask someone who can help you

#3 Create value for the person you’re asking

#4 Ask with a focused congruent belief

#5 Ask until you get what you want.

“Our beliefs are like unquestioned commands, telling us how things are, what’s possible and what’s impossible, what we can and can not do. They shape every action, every thought, and every feeling that we experience. As a result, changing our belief systems is central to making any real and lasting change in our lives.”  – Tony Robbins

Power of BELIEFS

Checkout THIS recap of Awaken The Giant Within for more on Beliefs) 

•  “Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.” 
• “The birth of excellence begins with our awareness that our beliefs are a choice. We usually don’t think of it that way, but belief can be a conscious choice. You can choose beliefs that limit you, or you can choose beliefs that support you.” 

• • No matter what happens to you in life, it’s you who gets to decide what meaning to attach to it.

•  People who succeed on a major scale differ greatly in their beliefs from those who fail. Our beliefs about what we are and what we can precisely determine what we will be. Many people are passionate, but because of their limiting beliefs about who they are and what they can do, they never take the actions that could make their dream a reality. People who succeed know what they want and believe that they can get it. 

• If you believe that someone has hurt you, it’s generally because you’ve decided to label their actions as hurtful; you’ve attached a belief and meaning to their actions and magnetized it to your own life. You can take literally any experience and alter the meaning and belief that you have created about it in order to create an empowering outcome. No matter how traumatic something maybe, you get to decide what it means to you: maybe you can believe that something terrible was necessary to give you the level of empathy and compassion that you can share with the world today? 
• The deepest pains I’ve experienced have turned out to be the greatest gifts of growth and teaching!.
• Nothing in life has any meaning, except the meaning that we attach to it, and it’s not your duty to try to stick everyone else’s meaning of things to your own life.
• Ask:
  • What are the consequences of believing this and continuing to think and feel this way?
  • What will it cost me in my career, life, and relationships if I continue to believe this?
  • What has this belief already cost me mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, and spiritually?

Change Your Should’s to a MUST

 “If you can’t, you must. If you must, you can.” 

• In life, you only get what you MUST have. Not what you should have. If it’s a should it probably won’t happen
• If you can’t then you MUST. Make things a must to get yourself to do anything! If something is a “should” or a “could” and you give yourself the option to fail or to exit, you will never be able to push through. Once you make it a must, though, you will be able to muster up enough courage to follow through. Your brain understands the difference between a should and a must!
• What’s with this word, “should”? What an odd word. “I ‘should’ do this.” Huh? Do it or don’t. But “should?”

Focus on what you want and you’ll get more of it. Focus on what you fear and you’ll get more of that. 

The Morning Power Questions 

Our life experience is based on what we focus on. 

1. What am I happy about in my life right now? What about that makes me happy? How does that make me feel?
2. What am I excited about in my life right now? What about that makes me excited? How does that make me feel?
3. What am I proud about in my life right now? What about that makes me proud? How does that make me feel?
4. What am I grateful about in my life right now? What about that makes me grateful? How does that make me feel? 
5. What am I enjoying most in my life right now? What about that do I enjoy? How does that make me feel?
6. What am I committed to in my life right now? What about that makes me committed? How does that make me feel? 
7. Who do I love? Who loves me? What about that makes me loving? How does that make me feel? 

 

Evening Power Questions 

1. What have I given today? In what ways have I been a giver? 
2. What did I learn today?
3. How has today added to the quality of my life?
4. How can I use today as an investment in my future? 

My invitation is as great as it is to achieve, more important to enjoy. If you can enjoy every moment in that state, when you’re feeling loving and playful and passionate and curious, in awe. You treat other people a hundred times better than when you’re feeling frustrated, pissed off, overwhelmed, worried, stressed, or feeling sorry for yourself, you’re going to be a better parent, you’re going to be a better lover, you’re going to be a better business person, you’re going to be better at life.

So my soliloquy is DECIDE.

Decide today and actually say, “What if I cut it off, what if I said. I’m not willing to settle and I’m just going to live in a beautiful state.” Doesn’t mean you won’t feel bad, doesn’t mean you won’t stay there, you will instantly change, that’s doable.

But what the hell is the success it’s hitting an expectation. I always tell people “Man, trade your expectations for appreciation.” It’s a whole new world instantly. If you can’t appreciate this moment, if you can’t find ecstasy at this moment, in a conversation with a friend, or looking in your wife’s eyes, being with your children, going on a run. If you can’t find ecstasy now.

I’m here to tell you: more money, more people, more love, more business, more anything is not gonna give you more… If you can’t do it here and now, you’re not going to do it then when you’ve got more.

So why not do it now? And have a rich life right now.❞