How to Fall in Love With Life Again

Brendon Burchard reflects on the improbability of human existence and how to stay resilient when life gets hard. He weaves in personal struggles and argues that maintaining a positive mindset and commitment to growth is how you fall back in love with living.
The odds of human existence is like, it's impossible. Think about all this stuff that your mom and dad had to go through just to have you. I'm just like you. I got conflicts and dramas and stress. And even if you're struggling through job one, get back into the best of you. We can either build into the future we want or we can get bogged down and complain. Feel the appreciation that you get to do what you want to do today. You've already achieved the impossible. Think about all this stuff that your mom and dad had to go through just to have you. And then their parents, and then their parents, and then their parents and then their parents and then their parents for a thousand generations. And somehow all of their strength and all of their endurance and all of their evolution has led to the gift of life that you became. That something happened 13, 8 billion years ago that even most physicists today and most cosmologists day and most scientists today still believe that whatever happened, if you only call it a big Bang and you don't believe in a God, they still believe in panpsychism. The idea that there was some kind of consciousness at that moment that birthed the right kind of energy that could, after the radiation, become the matter over time and that the all the ingredients were right there, snapped into an existence 13 billion years ago. All of it snapped into existence by God or by some super weird, maybe quadruple supernova double black hole. I mean, if you want to be a scientist about it, they're kind of. The impossibilities are kind of the same. But all existence, bam, pow. Here we are in this plane of existence that you got to be birthed into. From generations of family to the Earth 4 billion years ago to the universe. 13.8. It's impossible that you were here every day. Even though I'm just like you. I got conflicts and dramas and stress and cortisol. So many things going on in my life all the time. It feels like, oh my God. It always begins with that awe and that appreciation, that reverence for life that I get to live. Many of you know I had my second chance in life from a car accident. And once you get that second chance, even if you have a bad day, even if you're pissed about something, if you have a tough morning, even if they don't show up, even if they inconvenience you, even if you're struggling through, even if they let you down. Job one, get back into the best of you. No matter what the circumstances in Life are. Job 1 get back into the best of you and feel the appreciation that you get to be you. Feel the appreciation that you get to do what you want to do today. Feel the appreciation that you can treat people how you choose to treat them. Feel the appreciation that you can actually cultivate and generate any feeling that you want. In this day, physicists estimate that we're about. The odds of human existence is like 1 in 10. 1 in 10 to the 229th power. That basically means 1 in 1. It means it's impossible. The existence, the human existence so far measured throughout the universe that we've been able to capably measure. It's. We're one of one so far. Don't worry. We can talk about aliens and stuff, but so far from what we definitely know, it's impossible. It's impossible. I'm standing up here. My dad growing up in northern Montana on a ranch in the freezing winters of Montana, barely able to survive and like make it through. His and his family went through just the most difficult human plains type existence on a ranch. If you've ever been in northern Montana in the winter, it's impossible. I even never got here, let alone that he chooses. He wants to get out of there. Joins the US Marine Corps, gets deployed to Vietnam, fights in Vietnam, gets all shot up, somehow survives. Three tours in Vietnam. Dad survives, comes back to the US where he faces equal hardship because then he goes and recruits in the South. After Vietnam, when no one likes the Marines, no one likes the military anymore in the US we turn our back on our own soldiers who are fighting so hard. And then he ends up in Washington D.C. on his last placement. Meanwhile, another impossible story. My mom, born in Vietnam by a French Vietnamese. By a French soldier and a Vietnamese woman. My grandpa, French soldier in the war before America. Our Vietnam war was the French Indochine war and he was a soldier. Met my grandma, they had my mom. He got murdered by a grenade at the end of the war. She gets sent to France to grow up in boarding schools. Grows up in boarding schools, go back to Vietnam. Long story. Ends up in that same apartment building in Washington D.C. is that man from Montana Ranch who had gone to Vietnam to fight. Came back and then there they are in the same apartment building. They meet, the door opens, Boom. Love. How is that possible? Then they go camping. Boom. Children, you know how that works. Then we move from there, where some of us kids are born, over to Montana. Grew up in Montana, struggling them, trying to figure out how to fight their way through debt and bills and struggle. Just like Everyone here, I'm sure you have that story in your family. It was impossible. They were broke. They're just scrounging to make by trying to figure it out. They loved us so much. We never knew what level of economy we were because my mom just loved on us. She just knew how to bring the joy and life to life, no matter what happened. And my dad was just jolly to be alive, even though he was dealing with PTSD and could be very angry. He was very happy to be alive. He's the simplest things. Please my parents, because they never had anything. And growing up in that mentality of not worrying about what I have, of just like, enjoying life, really gave me an unfair advantage, became impossible when later on I had a car accident and I was trying to heal from a broken heart, not to give up on life. I wanted to. To commit suicide. I wanted to quit and throw it away because life felt impossible. And then you discover, though sometimes it takes a car accident, a shock to the system, somebody else passes away, you go, you know, snort down 7 gallons of ayahuasca in the Amazon and suddenly discover, no, life is pretty amazing. I should just, you know, hang out for a while. And some days you have these visions and the dreams, but, you know, it's so difficult to keep that vision for enjoyment and excellence and an extraordinary life amid all the nonsense that you have to deal with and the negativity and the people not showing up and letting you down and all the hard work you have to do that you still complain about. I'm always like, you still complain about hard work. You've been doing it so long, how can you still complain? It's like people who, to me in la, who drive in the traffic every day, and they still complain about the traffic. I'm that kind of guy. Like, if something happens all the time and you still complain about it, I'm like, either you gotta adjust your attitude or you gotta adjust your actions. Because let me tell you what, it's there. I'm like, it's a known entity. Why complain about a known entity? At some point, part of maturity is going, it's a known entity. You know, it's kind of like if you ever had a second child, you kind of like that. You, you. You kind of allow them to scream in the other room for, like, more minutes than you did with the first one. You kind of just, okay, you know, it's just. You're used to it now, right? Right. The first time you do the diapers, it's so disgusting. And then you're like talking to your friend, eating a banana and doing it. And you're like, what's happening? You're like, just. Just seeing if humor can happen. Just. Are we still allowed to do it? I just wonder why you still complain. Because, you know, you have a lot of things that you want to get done, but your follow through is the victim of your complaint. Your follow through is the victim of your complaint. People think it's their mood. I'm like, well, mood's one effect. But as I always have taught, I never want you to limit your vision for your future life and even tomorrow, just based on yesterday, just based on what you went through yesterday and the struggles and the hardships. Because all of that, no matter what you call it, evolution, grace, serendipity, coincidence, God's plan, whatever it is, here we are. Here we are. And we can either build into the future we want, build into becoming who we want, exemplify the best of who we are no matter what, or we can get bogged down into complaint and old stories and live in the past, puddles that maybe were not our own, and we stayed in too long, and instead we go, oh, okay, what's next for me? Because, see, you've already achieved the impossible. You just kind of forget it. Because so many days feel new, so many challenges feel new. But when you know you've lived through and achieved the impossible already, that you still believe in yourself, then you can keep an impossible vision for yourself. And I'm here to tell you, it always looks impossible from the day that's new. It always looks impossible when things change. It always feels impossible when that thing ends. You get divorced. Oh, my gosh, what's gonna happen? And we always have these two stories in our head whenever we face something hard. And sometimes, you know, something happens. You get divorced. You're like, oh, no one's ever going to love me again. Called catastrophizing. Really. No one's ever going to love you again. Ever. Right. Okay. Can we start with you loving yourself for a minute? Can we just start with you? That's why you have to keep doing personal development. That's why we say in growth day, every day is a great day to grow. It's why we say, make self improvement a way of life. You're not done. You're not done. Most of you, if you can be honest about the potential that you've already activated along the line. If you could be honest, you haven't even gotten started yet. You. It feels like it because you feel old, but you're not old. Your mindset might be old, but you're not old. I got to work with some of the great legends of our time and leaders in so many different areas of life and see how they dealt with end of life. Some of you know, I've gotten to do hospice care in the past as well. And I've been with a lot of people as they contemplate the final days of their life, especially doing what I do. So I hear it all the time. I'm Brennan. I'm sick. Brent. I'm going through this. Brendan. I might not make it through. And it's so easy in those moments to feel like living again and being happy again and manifesting again and breaking through again. It feels so impossible. But only when you keep telling the old story. Because in the old story, you can't see the vision, you can't feel it. In the old story, you'll do the old actions and you can't imagine a better future. But that's your job. Job 1 each day, bring the best of who you are and move in the next right direction of integrity for you. You don't have to know all the steps. Move in the next right direction. Always be moving in the right direction of integrity for yourself. And if you can do that faithfully over and over and over again, you keep growing. If you stop growing, you just got stuck in an old story, stuck in an old pattern, stuck in old thoughts and concerns and worries. And of course, mired in that, you can't see and you can't move and you won't finish anything. If you had a dream, you had a project, you had a goal. And you keep saying I hate this and forgive me, I hate. I'm just remind you, I'm the high performance guy. So my job is not to be the placator. I'm not the. The guy who teaches. Everything's perfect and everything's great and you're perfect all the time and everything's wonderful. Because you can be a jerk. You. You can be mean. You can leave things that you were supposed to do. You can drop obligations and missed responsibility. We can be honest about our performance in life, right? Because we are performing at a level like we're doing things, we're getting results or not. And sometimes we're really hard on ourselves. And so what happens? We get so hard on ourselves after a period of time, we forget that we can play the next game at full tilt. We forget how fast we have been before and we can retrain. We forget that once we were in love and we can change our pattern and fall back in love. We forget that shifts can happen because we get myopic, we get small minded, we have small vision, we get so narrowed in our concerns, we forget the impossible gift and the expansiveness of the universe. See, we only, no matter what you agree on, some of you have faith. I'm somebody who believes in a God and I have a deep connection, a spiritual sense and feeling and a personal relationship with God. For me personally, I'm not a preacher or anything like that. I just, I believe in God and I believe that God gave me a second chance at life. And whether you believe in God or you don't, what is inarguable in those 13.8 billion years ago. The one thing that we know entirely and for sure without any question, some might call it like a cosmological constant, is that from that moment forward, everything has expanded. You live in expansiveness. Like literally here now. You are in an expansive stream. Whether you believe in a quantum field or you believe in quantum energy, or you literally just believe in basic, literally first three chapters of the physics book. All we know is the universe is expanding and we are here because of that expansiveness. Somehow figured out how to take hydrogen and into helium, into other forms of matter that ultimately had a gravitational pull that knocked on some, pulled off some other electrons. And all of a sudden one day matter started coalescing, became self determinant, said, hey, we like coming together. This is cool. We're going to stay together. We eventually have gravity, we eventually have orbits, we eventually have stars and planets. And here we are and it's still expanding and you're spinning around millions of miles and and hour around a tiny little sun. It's so impossible. It's so impossible. And you're worried that you might not get your chapter one done of your book because you can finish the impossible. Finishing the impossible is not a lifelong endeavor. It's literally just one more step on your expansive journey. See, some of you live in constriction. You're constricted. You play small. Your goals are too small for your potential. You constrict yourself every day by being. Trying to be perfect, Trying to be put together. Trying to be perfect. Trying to be put together. Trying to be perfect. Trying to be perfect together. It's like, oh my God, can you move your arms? You know any people like this? Some of you might even point to yourself. It's like you're always trying to be perfect. You're always trying to fit in everything has to be completely organized, controlled, and put together in the exact way. And. And you. For you, that's your safety. That's your cage. And so you constrict yourself. You constrict your options and your choices because it won't fit into a perfect plan. You won't try new things because it doesn't fit into the perfect safe plan. So you're constricted. You're living a life. You have ideas, but you constrict yourself back to today. You don't expand into the dream. You stay in the safety.










