Motivation: Spark, Flame, Bonfire

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Hey, my friends, it's Brendon Burchard. And welcome to the Brendon Show.

Hey.

This is a podcast all about your motivation, about your habits, about reaching high performance in your life. What we call hpx the High Performance experience, where you're more vibrant, you're more connected, you're more excellence driven and you're more fulfilled because you're living a life of personal freedom, because you're living a life of service, because you really believe in what we talk about, which is the desire for each of us to reach that highest level of performance in our life so that we can love and we can lead and that we can serve others. So honored to have you here today. Before we start this episode, specifically I wanted to let you know about something I'm so excited about. You know, we spent the last four years in deep research and development in creating our HPX Wellness line. It's a nutrition line of three specific products, three specific supplements that have really helped me in these last couple years optimize my brain, optimize my overall physical well being, for longevity, for joint health, for digestion, and frankly also give me that energy boost that I need once in a while. So the HPEX Wellness line is just three products. So we're not starting some, you know, big supplement company or some MLM or seeking downlines here. I'm not trying to compete with any other supplement companies out there. Just like you, I take a lot of different products from a lot of different companies and I love them all. So this is not a judgment against anybody else. This is just that I couldn't find these specific functional products that I wanted that I knew was well sourced, clean and frankly, uncompromising. And so here's what they are. We've got HPX Optimized, which many of you know is my brain health and mental focus supplement. That is how I maintain that creative edge, that ability to have the mental stamina I need to make through the day, to frankly just be focused, you know. Cause I don't know about you, but mental fatigue and energy, it's something I gotta deal with, you know, especially trying to serve as many people do as many things that I do. So HPX Optimize keeps me mentally focused. Then we've got HPX Organic Boost. This is a 100% organic energy drink mix. You just basically tear open a little these travel packets, you pour it in water, you mix it up and boom, you're boosted. It is delicious. And as I said, It's 100% organic energy. It comes from beetroot, goji berry, coconut water powder, maca root, Yulethro schisandra, rhodiola, and organic clean energy from organic green tea. Just 60 milligrams. So much less than a cup of coffee. And you will not find a blend like this at these dosage levels anywhere on the marketplace. Plus it's delicious, so I love that. And then finally we've got HPX Essentials, which is basically like a functional multivitamin that we really built to support longevity. So it's got astragalus, resveratrol, chaga to support your joint health. So we've got ginger, boswellia, turmeric and our vitality blend in there for L Theanine, ginseng and Schisandra. It is an awesome blend as a functional multivitamin. And here's what I invite you to do. Go check these out@hpxwellness.com that's hpxwellness.com altogether, hpxwellness.com, and check them out. And I really actually invite you to compare and do some price shopping around. You will not see ingredients at this dosage levels in products like these anywhere on the marketplace at all, period. Because most supplement companies could never afford to do this. What they do is they'll release like a proprietary blend that might have a few of these things in there, but they won't tell you what what dosage, meaning what amount per serving per ingredient is in the actual product. So they kind of sprinkle it in there with just tiny dosage amounts that literally don't do anything. But when you see the dosage levels we put in of these amazing ingredients, you will feel the difference. And so go check it out. I invite you to compare and contrast. Again, I'm not trying to take on the supplement world. You know, there's companies out there that sell hundreds of supplements, different products. For us, it's just three built specifically to optimize your performance, to give you that edge, to give you that high performance experience in a way that was uncompromising, with well sourced, well researched ingredients and dosages that will make a difference in your life.

Go check it out.

HPX wellness.com and with no further ado, let's jump into today's episode.

Let's talk about motivation. My favorite topic in the world, because I know that if you don't have the motivation or generate the motivation, you won't sustain. You know, there's, it's fun and great clickbait to say that we don't need motivation. Except all of psychology for over 100 years says it's the root of everything. And so we have to have a sense of motivation that's driving us. And look, doesn't mean that there can't be days where we don't feel inspired. Motivation, where everything's like, yeah, I'm so excited to do the crappy work I have to do today. It's not like you have to be bouncing off the wall as motivation. It's that you have to be driven. And you can't be driven unless you use your psychology in a way to sustain it. Because you'll back off from the drive. Because the drive is going to be struggle. The drive is going to bring challenge. The drive is going to alienate some people around you. The drive is going to, if you don't do it right, make you tired. So we've got to be able to use our minds as weapons to make sure that we stay motivated for the long haul. Because if we don't have motivation and high performance habits together, I mean, we won't practice the habits if we don't have the motivation. So how do you get motivated? Let's break it down psychologically in terms of more of an academic approach to it. But you get this, okay, you'll love this stuff. Number one thing, if you're going to spark motivation, see, there's sort of three categories of motivation. There's the spark, that's the stuff that gets you in the game, gets you going, right?

Gets you excited.

Then there's the flame, that's the burn. The feel of like, I need to do this. And then there's that bonfire where you just, it's just like you are soul deep, driven, ready to go. And we're gonna talk about those three different levels. The first thing is we're gonna talk about the spark. And the very spark of all motivation begins with the word called ambition. Ambition is always the spark to motivation. Ambition. Now some people don't like that word because the 80s made it sound real bad. But ambition just means desire, right? So like Les Brown taught us all, you gotta be hungry, you wann be hungry. Les Brown the great. I was just on stage with him a couple weeks ago and he still at 72 years old bringing it. There was about 16 of us speakers there and he wasted it, all of us. It was awesome. He just smoked us. 72 years old is the best keynote in the world. Still just smoked us. But he knew you gotta be hungry. Hunger comes from an ambition, desire, right? That's where it stems from it's a desire, it's an ambition, a hunger. And some people, we're scared of those words because they we say ambition, oh, she's too ambitious. That sounds like an insult, right? That's the way our culture has turned it. But I remember I was talking with the Dalai Lama's right hand person and I'm about to meet him again and I'm asking if. Cause I knew that a lot of people don't like the word because even in Buddhism, you know that they speak that a lot of desire leads to suffering, right? And it's not always the case. But in that spiritual practice, that desire can equate to suffering because there's attachment there. And when there's attachment to the expectation and you don't get it, you could suffer, right? But in this case, I said, well, but ambition and desire is not always bad. Because I asked him, I said, isn't it true that you have the ambition to deepen your practice of meditation? See, ambition is just desire for more or desire for depth, right? It's wanting more of something or something new. In other words, ambition is a higher aspiration or a deeper aspiration. Higher or deeper? So for example, you might have ambition to be a better mom. That means different things for you. But there's a higher aspiration for how you show up with the kids. And there's also a desire for a depth of relationship with the kids. Raise your hand if you follow what I'm talking about. Ambition. Ambition. But too many of us back away from it cause it got made bad, right? I was scared to have ambition. Cause you know what? If you have ambition too big for your britches, people start insulting you. Who do you think you are? Oh, you think you can do that? You don't even have any skill at that. You think you can do that? You haven't even had their training. You don't have the degree, you don't have the experience, you don't have the background, you don't have the social following. You don't have the environment, you don't have the money, you don't have the bank account, you don't have the credit.

You don't have.

And people start puking on you when you share your big dream with them. You're like, hey, look, no, listen, I'm trying to go up here. This is where I wanna be, right here. I got this dream. It's huge. I got this ambition, this dream, this hunger for more. And immediately people seek to see whether or not you are qualified. And they judge you based on your past of qualification versus your present of how you show up. I don't judge anybody on their past. Let me see how you show up right now. Cause everybody in this room, how many of you all screwed up a bunch in your life? I mean, oh man, I'm such a screw up. It's so great. We're all screw ups in some way or another. But how are you showing up now is the question. How hard are you willing to work now? What's the discipline you're willing to put in now? Yes, gain that knowledge, skill and ability. But your ambition, everything I do, everything you see me do at a public level, I had the ambition for a mission, but I didn't have the skills to do any of this. Everyone thought I was crazy. I'm gonna leave a safe job out of grad school. I got a safe corporate job. I wouldn't say a safe corporate job, but it was a good job and I liked it and it was a good job and it had a very clear path to rising. And I just didn't. I had something else I wanted to do. So I quit that job and everyone else said I was crazy. I wanted to go write books. I had never written books before. I didn't know how to do that. And then I decided my first major book was going to be a work of fiction. A book called Life's Golden Ticket. And I'd never written a parable before, but I remember reading the Alchemist and being so inspired by Paulo Coelho's the Alchemist. You all read that book. I hope you all read that. It's now the seventh most read book in the history of the world. It's unbelievable, right?

So I.

And the longest running book on the New York Times in history is now the Alchemist. And I remember reading that book and I thought I related with the storytelling in it. And I wanted to write Life's golden Ticket, but not tell my story, my accident, but rather tell the story of a character going through change. And I got this blessed meeting with a big famous author in San Francisco. And I was so excited, I mean. Cause I'd been wanting to write. So I went and had this big meeting with this big fancy author. I wore a suit and I got all dressed up and I was so nervous. And I sat and I talked with this person and he's hearing me describe very passionately why I wanna write this book and what my life's message is about. Second chances. Cause life's golden ticket is really a story about second chances. And So I wanna tell a story about second chances. And I was so excited, and I'm telling him. He goes, so wait, this is your life's message? I go, yeah. And he says, you're really passionate. I go, yeah. And he goes, but you've never written fiction. I go, no. And he goes, brendan, I'll never forget it. He goes, brendan, do not risk your life's message on your freshman effort at fiction. Fiction's hard. I admire that you want to write this book, and that's your dream, and that's your ambition, and that's your goal, but you don't know how to do that. Ambition's really hard. People go to writers conferences for their lives. They get creative writing degrees. Like he said, everyone in this building, I mean, we spent decades trying to figure out how to do. And you're just gonna come and write this fiction book? I don't think that's a good idea. I think you need to write a nonfiction book. And what happens is, we have this big aspiration, but because we don't know the how, sometimes someone tells us, you don't know the how. So what do you do if you don't know the how? Yeah. You minimize it. You drop it back down to here, maybe. You drop it back down to here. Maybe it's like, here. It started up there, but you didn't know the how, and you let other people drop that down. So I listened to the guy. I said, okay, I guess you're right.

It's true.

It sounds logical to me. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, so maybe I shouldn't risk my life's effort. So then I spent two and a half years struggling in San Francisco trying to write life's golden ticket as a nonfiction book. And it just. It was like pulling teeth. I couldn't get it, you know, it wasn't working. And then it was so frustrating. And I was like, I need to figure this out. Cause it was the time I was about to leave my job and everything, and I was putting everything at risk. I said, okay. The timing all turned out. Went back to my childhood home where I grew up. Tiny little home, tiny little bedroom, writing on my mom's sewing room table at the time to complete the book. And in 18 days, I said, you know what? I gotta stop trying to write the book they told me to write and write this book that I feel like I should write. And I started all over from scratch. Complete scratch. 18 days. All I did, I got up, my mom made an amazing big Breakfast. I'd eat a big old breakfast. And I'd write and I'd write and I'd write. But dad would come home from work, we'd go play racquetball. I'd come home, I'd write and I'd write and write until it was so dark and my eyes hurt, it was so late. And I'd get up from my desk and I'd walk around my childhood neighborhood where I grew up and my elementary school and the playgrounds we'd play in. And then I'd go back, go to bed, I'd get up and I did the same thing for 18 days. That's it. 18 days. And at the end of the 18 days, life's golden ticket was done. Submitted it to. Thank you, thank you. It was 18 magical days. If you've ever read the book, there's a huge surprise at the end. I didn't even know that was coming. I did not see that come. I mean, sure. So however shocked you felt, imagine me, I was writing the book. I was just typing along, watching. I'm like, oh, damn. I remember I finished. I'm watching the movie. I finished the book. I'm like, whoa, can that even happen? And I literally got up and I was walking around the little desk and I'm like, can that character. Did I do this? I gotta. And I had to go for a walk just to think about if the book could even end. Cause I didn't know the book was about to end. It just ended with that scene. And I was like, oh, my gosh. So it was a huge surprise to me. And I knew it was magic. I knew it was magic. We put it out there. 21 publishers turned it down. 21. My agent still jokes to this day. He only told me about 19 of them turning it down because he didn't think I could take the other few more that came in. Turned it down, turn it down, turn it down. Finally, boom. HarperCollins gets it. An editor who happened to edit and publish another book called the Alchemist fell in love with life's golden ticket and gave it a shot. We put it out there and I got this dream to be this big author. I'm going to go. We launched life's golden ticket. I have no idea, none, what I'm doing. Put the book out there, we get a bunch of quick early hits. Because I had all these promotional partners in these non profits we were donating money to who supported the book.

Got it out there.

Boom. Charts on Amazon. Really great. Next week. No one's buying it. Totally. I mean, this ambition just keeps getting stomped down. No one likes your book. Big author says it's stupid. They're all turning it down and it doesn't sell. Think about what that can do to your psychology. Think about me now, saying I'm a writer after the book doesn't do well, after everyone turns it down, after they say, don't do it. Think about that, how, where that could have directed me. But your ambition is your own. And your ambition has to be free from all of that negativity. If that's a real ambition, you gotta own that ambition psychologically. I was a writer. I said I was a writer. I said I was a writer. On days I didn't write, I said I was a writer. On the days they all turned me down, I said I was a writer. When that guy who was a big name fancy writer, who'd been on all the big shows, including Oprah, told me I was kind of crazy. And I walked out of his office all dejected. I was still a writer. Sometimes what really gives us the greatest amount of motivation is when we got the guts to actually allow ourselves to tie some of our identity to what we're doing. And we're told not to do that because it can bring discouragement and heartache. But the counterintuitive things is high performers to a t. The top 15% who I interviewed, they said, oh, no, they were comfortable tying up their identity in what they were doing. They were comfortable. It didn't mean it always turned out great. It didn't mean they always felt great. But they were comfortable owning it, right? They were comfortable owning what they were doing. They owned that. And because they owned it, the motivation was there. Cause you know when the motivation isn't there is when your ambitions are half ass. When you kind of want it, you kind of don't. And that's why you kind of work for it sometimes. And sometimes you kind of don't. Because psychologically you haven't allowed yourself to own the ambition to feel it inside and say, that's part of me. I'm gonna make that happen come hell or high water. I didn't care. The first book, I said, name me the next book, name the next book, name the next book. Didn't matter to me. I was gonna keep on that ambition. Cause it was important to me. You've got ambitions important to you and your family and the people you're serving. And it doesn't matter what I say or the person to your left or right says, if you own that ambition. You, you pursue it and you pursue.

It with full heart.

And when you pursue it with more heart, that ambition that keeps sparking over and over and over, you don't have to rev yourself up because it is you.

Hey, it's Brendan. I'm bopping in here real fast for you. To urge you to go to hpxwellness.com and check out our products to help you get more of that mental focus and, and energy. You need to stay at your best, to deliver with excellence, to feel like vibrant again. Because I know we all struggle with mental fatigue and mental focus. We all sometimes get tired and sometimes we're worried about our overall health. And so I created three specific products to help you with that. Go to HPX wellness.com, check out our nutrition line, and let's get you to high performance, baby. Hpexwellness.com.

Second part about motivation, though, the spark, though we know this from psychology expectancy theory, it means this. If you don't expect it to happen, you won't be motivated by it. If you don't expect it to happen, you won't be motivated by it. Earl Nightingale taught us, if you don't believe it, you won't achieve it. If you don't believe it, you won't achieve it. That's true in the studies of psychology. If you don't believe it's possible, you don't feel motivated and that motivation just goes away. Even if you have the ambition, the spark, you've got to believe it's possible. Everyone say, I believe in my ability to figure things out. I didn't know how to do online courses. I didn't know how to do seminars. I didn't know how to do coaching, I didn't know how to do video. And I was terrified of public speaking. But the ambitions, I just thought, someone's done that before, Someone's done that before. I can figure that out. My expectancy my entire life has been very high because after I was 19 years old, when I started studying personal development, every personal development teacher seemed to say the same thing. Find somebody who's done it before and model them. Somebody has done it. Someone on your path has figured out. And you know what? Don't put them on a big pedestal. They were a hot mess too when they began. I was a hot mess. I'm still in many areas of my life, plenty of a hot mess for everybody. We're all hot messes somewhere. So now when you see somebody do something, don't hold them up like they're different than you just say they figured out that thing different than you have. They're a little further on the path. Expectancy, you must expect. It's possible. So when you look at your goal sheet, when you look at your dreams, what are you saying to yourself? That's important. That's the spark. So why do I tell you this? Because you're gonna have those days, you're unmotivated and you're not gonna know why when you leave here. You've had a lot of days in the last couple months where you were unmotivated and you didn't know why. I'm here to tell you this is why. You didn't spark yourself that day with an ambition. Remember why you wanted that ambition and you didn't believe that you could do it or stir the self talk that.

Said, let's go, let's get it, let's do these things.

You just went through the motion of the day and about halfway through the day you felt unmotivated. Feeling unmotivated is just like feeling unhappy. You have to do things to get there. But there's other ways to reverse and engineer it too. You can be more motivated if you revisit those ambitions and you feel them. Like, my ambitions are so real to me, they're just real. Like when I wanted to become a best selling author, it was real. I'm like, I'm gonna do that. Not because I wanted the tag line of best selling author, because I knew best selling meant I'd put a lot of books out there and people be reading them. And that was just what they called it, best selling. I was like, I want that. I wanted to be able to do stages and I never even knew how to do any of that. I mean, how do you get all the lights in here and how do you make the squirrely things on the walls? I didn't know how to do that. How far do you space the chairs and the aisles? How do you make this stuff work? What are all the rules about what you can do and can't do it? I didn't know any of that didn't matter. The ambition was there. I'm gonna be a teacher. I'm gonna learn the research, I'm gonna practice it in my life and I'm gonna report out what I'm doing. And some people will like it and some people won't, but I'm gonna put myself out there. Let's go, let's go. I can do this. I can figure it out. Someone else figured it out. I Can run the same playbook. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out every day. I revisit my ambitions every day. And you know what I think? By revisiting your ambitions every day, what ends up happening? New ambitions start getting added to it too. And expands your mind. Because the challenge is if you don't purposely look at ambitions, you don't perpetually expand them. Raise your hand if you follow. If you don't keep looking at them, you won't expand them. You barely even hit the baseline. Then you have to expect it. Then what this thing really catches fire is in the flame. And that is your attention. Motivation is only sustained by attention. The spark happens. The flame, the sustainment is attention. We gotta put your attention back to the things that matter. We'll keep coming back to that as a theme, over and over. Your attention back to things that matter. We gotta take back the agenda of your life away from your phone, away from social media. And we gotta take back where you're giving your attention. Negative people versus positive people. Disempowering thoughts versus empowering thoughts. High ambitions versus low feelings. We've gotta suss through that and get your attention back. Here's what you should be doing every week on Sunday, on Sunday nights, you should always be reviewing the week before. And what you should do is score yourself. And here's what I want to give you, the gift of score yourself on attention. Score yourself. Say, okay, in the last seven days, how good has my attention been? Attention low. That's a one. Attention high. And on the right things, that's a ten. Because you can train attention, right? You can train attention. They do it all the time with fighter pilots. They do it all the time with people who have to develop a high level of expertise. You can develop more attention. Many of you right now, your attention is waning because you traveled or you had a long day or what you ate other people in this room. Your attention. I can see. Boom, you're right here. If you're here, say I'm here. It's like, if your attention is still going at this hour on day one, that's only because you've been training your attention, right? You've just been training it. You've been doing a good job at that over and over and over. So you have the mental stamina. I worked with, who I felt like was one of the greatest consultants I ever worked with. She did big deals. And I asked her, what's the difference between people who aren't good and people who are good? And she said something I hated at the time and now I discovered it to be true. She said, stamina, mental stamina. The ability to put your attention on something and keep it there. You can train yourself at that. You gotta get your attention back. You want more money, you gotta get your attention back. You wanna be a better lover, you gotta get your attention back. You want to do better in your community, you got to get your attention back to the things that matter. And that will give you motivation. When your attention is high on the things that matter, your motivation is high. Other part of the flame, effort. There's a myth that you have motivation. You get things done, you get momentum and progress in your life. And we have to continually remind ourselves it's the other way around. Momentum, progress, generates motivation. All right.

Hey, it's Brendan. I hope you enjoyed that episode and I hope it helped you reach another level of high performance in your life, whether it's just a shift in your mindset or shift in your habits or a shift in your intention for the day. I really honor you for listening to the Brendon show and I'm deeply thankful. So could you do me a favor? Could you just go onto itunes or Apple podcasts and rate and review this episode or any of our episodes? And also while you're there to help me, just download the last five episodes too onto your phone because, you know, Apple really cares about the downloads and the rating and reviews, and I've never really asked for that in six years of podcasting and finally my friends convinced me to ask you to do that for me. I've never asked anything with my podcast community ever, but I really, really appreciate if you could do that. Also, if you would like some more in depth training, please don't forget that every single month I go live for two hours and teach new and original personal development research new frameworks to my entire virtual community in our HPX coaching program. And you can just go to hpxcoaching.com that's hpxcoaching.com to learn all about the different options there. But listen, I'm live two hours every single month with literally thousands of high achievers from around the world who tune in to get these new frameworks for reaching high performance in their life. Sometimes we talk about relationships, sometimes we talk about breaking bad habits. Sometimes we talk about achieving another level of confidence or discipline or goal attainment. But we are there every single month and I'd love for you to join us. Just go to hpxcoaching to see all of your options and really join us. Dedicate yourself to personal mastery. Dedicate yourself to this journey. Not just once in a while with an episode here or there or a book there, but literally a program that could change your Life. It's called HPX Coaching, and you can go to hpxcoaching.com until next time, my friends, please remember every single day, you can choose to be average or ordinary or just kind of go through the motions. Or you can be more intentional, more disciplined, more excellence driven what you do because you know you need to serve those you love and those that you lead. You can choose to be extraordinary. So my friends, go out there today and be extraordinary.

Sa.