How to Design Your Destiny

I believe that destiny is not so unknowable. You know, so many people wonder how their life is going to turn out. Where am I going to end up? What will my ultimate legacy and contribution be in the world? Will I live a good life? Will I have success? Will I make it? Will I have the wealth and influence that I need to achieve the things I want to achieve and contribute the things that I want to contribute. But often when people ask those things and they say those things, they say them from such a. Almost like a disempowering place, as if they believe they have no hand in their destiny. As if it's all driven by just fate. As if it's all driven just by luck or blessings. And the truth is, it is driven by some of those things. But I think that most of our life and where we're going to end up in our lives really comes down to three simple things. And that first thing is deciding who we're going to be. You know, we shouldn't hope to end up one day a magnificent, strong, beautiful, capable, kind, loving person. We should start living like that today, hopefully so that we become that. That who we become is not an accident, but hopefully a purposeful intent. That our days and how we approach our days are literally driven by the intention of who we're going to bring. That we bring our character into each of the circumstances of our lives. And by doing that, maybe we can't always direct every circumstance of our life. We can't control everything, but we can certainly control our responses to them. We can certainly dictate who we're going to be in those circumstances. And that helps us achieve our ultimate destiny that we desire. Not one that just lands on us. I think the other thing that really comes to people's into their power is when they really discover that each of our days is something that we can also design. Not just design who you're going to be. How are you going to design your day? What's this day going to be about? What's going to get your attention? What's going to get your focus? And what should not be getting your focus is just your inbox or just what I call browser blackout. Clicking around on all these blue links or images, or swiping here and swiping there, and then losing four or five hours of your day. Because what ends up happening for so many people is they lose two or three hours of distraction each day, maybe four hours of distraction of television a day. And over the course of their lives. Now a decade is gone of Opportunity. A decade of missed opportunities to connect with your family, to achieve your dreams, to work a little harder to contribute that thing you always contribute, to learn that skill that you wanted to learn. We have to decide on our days. We have to design them. We have to wake up and decide what this day is going to be about, what's going to get done, what's going to deserve our focus, who will we reach out to instead of just responding to everybody else's needs? We did this thing in High Performance Academy, the simple study, and we found that if you check your email in the first hour of your day, unless you're in customer service or your job is doing that every single day, if you check your email in the first hour of the day, you lose 30% productivity over the course of the week. Why? Because you're opening your day and you're opening your inbox and jumping into other people's agendas. The inbox is nothing but a convenient organizing system for other people's agendas. If you wake up in reaction to the world, you're always going to be in reaction. You won't design your destiny, you'll just have one. And you may or may not like it. So first, we have to decide who we're going to be. Second, we have to design our days. And third, we have to deal with fate. You know, fate is the real thing. Things happen to us each day, and maybe they were destined. Maybe you believe that or you don't, but maybe the reality is each day is always going to bring the same sort of three recurring characters. And once you realize that, then life isn't so mysterious. It's just about how you respond to those same three recurring characters, because they show up in cycles and they show up throughout your life, no matter what, every single day. I mean, fate only bears three essential things on the shoulders, right? Every single day. What's going to show up for us? Well, we know that at some point, fake fate is going to introduce us to struggle and suffering. Things aren't going to go well. We're going to have a bad day. We're going to have to go through things and times in our lives where we feel like we really are in a lot of pain and we have to suffer for a period of time. We might not know how long that period of time is going to be, but we do know that fate will introduce us to her. So if that's real, then maybe we should decide as we become more mature beings, as we start trying to live a more consciously designed life, that we say, you know, what struggle is going to happen, suffering is going to come. When it comes, who am I going to be? And how in those times will it define and decide on what my day will be? Because those things happen to all of us. You know, I remember after a recent accident where I had a brain injury. I wrecked an ATV while I was racing with some friends on ATVs, and I ended up with a brain injury. And it was brutal. And it was a period of time in my life where I felt like I was suffering every day physically. I broken my wrists and broken up my ribs and threw out my hip and had whiplash and had a lasting concussion. That led to the need to get some help by a neuroscientist to help kind of recover. And in that process of healing and therapy, it was difficult. So I had to be more disciplined about who I was going to be and what my day was going to be, about what emotions I was going to bring to life, what habits I was going to form, where I was going to allow myself to go mentally. Could I go into that deep, sort of deep chasm of negativity and drown in my own sort of pools of pessimism? Or could I find something more to attach to? Could I find something to be enthusiastic about in the future, even if today sucked? That's our great challenge in dealing with the fate that brings us sometimes struggle and suffering. But fate also brings us gifts and blessings, and we ought to be really aware of those and I think incredibly grateful and thankful for them that I think that the more that we appreciate and experience the gifts and blessings of life with real joy and deep gratitude, I think fate says, hey, this gal over here, this guy over here, they like this, just give them a little more. You know, it's recognition by the universe or God or the Creator or the cosmos, whatever you vibe to that says, yeah, this person appreciates what they've been given. And even if you don't believe in all that divine stuff, well, then, hey, just maybe, just maybe you can take a look around and think about who should I appreciate today who deserves a little more gratitude for the blessings and the gifts that they've brought into my life? Maybe you ought to just take stock and realize how lucky you are to be breathing, to be alive, to have the gifts, the opportunities, the joys, the strengths that you have. And maybe you can encourage the people around you to have that same sense. Because I think we also get to decide how we will deal with fate when it brings us the good things and I think the last characters that fate continually brings into our life is love, loss. You know, we get to meet new people. There's 7 billion people on the planet. We get to connect with people. We ought to compliment them. We ought to feel connected with them. We ought to think about the people who we love, reach out to them, send them a letter, send them an email, call them, thank them, put our arm on the shoulder, appreciate them. I think that the gift that fate keeps bringing back to us of love as this recurring character in our life, is one of our greatest gifts and blessings. If I can blur those lines a little bit, you know that there's somebody in your life who's loved you, and there are people in your life who you love. How attentive and appreciative are you to those people? That's designing your destiny, too, because at the end, you're going to wonder whether or not you really loved. So why not live your life each day by conscious design so that the end, your movie looks like a love epic. And then there's also the reality of loss that, you know, several years ago, I had to deal with that. I lost my dad. And my dad was one of my great heroes and great friends. And I remember as I'm struggling through that, my whole family is struggling through that. From his diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia to his death was 59 days. We lost him very quickly, had no idea it was coming. And when that happens, you have to ask, how are you going to deal with it? How are you going to deal with loss? We're all going to lose something that we love. We're all going to lose somebody that we love. It's going to happen. It's just going to happen. None of us escape that fate. So when it happens, what will you bring to it? Where will your mind be? What will you focus on? I focused on appreciation, sheer joy and gratitude in my memory of my ability to carry on my father's torch, of my ability to carry on his message. You know, he was always saying same things to us. So I'd sit down and write him out, and I think about what he said. You know, he's always saying, be yourself, do your best. Be a good citizen. Be kind to others and respect them. Follow your dreams. You know, all these things he was always saying to us, I would just. I just write them down. I can just usually recollect them. And I choose to focus on his message, who he was as a man, what he brought into my life, what I might be able to bring into my family's life by honoring him, by modeling him. And I think that's the way you have to deal with things. You know, we're all going to lose someone, so just carry them on so it doesn't feel like such a loss. Carry on their message. Carry on their spirit. Carry on their teachings. Carry on those things that made them alive and vibrant and joyous and loving. And then it's not such a hard fate to suffer through. It's not such a hard reality. It will always suck. I will always miss my dad. I wish he was here. But he is here. And that's what brings me joy. Those are the things that I think that help us decide our destiny. What are you going to be about today? What's your day today going to be designed as? What are you going to focus on today, Tomorrow? The next time that fate turns its head either positively or negatively towards you? What are you going to do with it? That's the question of the consciously designed life, Sam.