Simplifying The Joy Of Living With Barry Shore

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Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys, and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. So if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys, and then we bring on somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. And so this week we're going to be talking about a very rare why, which is the why of simplify. So if you have this why, then you are one of the people that makes everyone else's life easier. You break things down to their essence, which allows others to understand each other better and see things from the same perspective. You are constantly looking for ways to simplify, from recipes you're making at home to business systems you're implementing at work. You feel successful when you eliminate complexity and remove unnecessary steps. And so today I've got a great guest for you. He is known as the Ambassador of Joy. Barry Shore is a mental health activist, philanthropist, multi patent holding entrepreneur, speaker, author, podcaster, and former quadriplegic who is now swimming around the world. Barry the Joy of Living is heard globally by hundreds of thousands and has over 3 million downloads. His latest book, the Joy of How to Slay Stress and Be Happy, is available on Amazon and Apple Books. After a rare disease paralyzed Barry from the neck down, he created the Joy of Living Institute, a platform that teaches people to live in joy no matter the situation. The Keep Smiling Movement that has reached multiple celebrities and distributed millions of Keep Smiling cards worldwide. And changebowl, which is a philanthropic platform featured in Oprah's magazine. Barry welcome to the podcast.

Good day, beautiful, bountiful, beloved Immortal beings and good looking people. Now, Gary, how can I make the categorical statement that all the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people that will be listening and watching this are all good looking? Because by definition, if they tuned in to, to your session of why, then by definition, they're always looking for and finding the good. That's a definition of a good looking person looking for and finding the good. I love that.

That's a great way to define that. Well, Barry, for our audience, there was a lot to unpack there and I'd love to go back and tell us, where are you right now?

Well, we can talk about geographically, we can talk about physically, mentally, spiritually. Actually interesting geographically. My wife and I have recently, literally in the past seven months, decamped Venice Beach, California, right by the water and after 45 years of living here, moved to Henderson, Nevada. Now, anybody scratching their head would say you left Venice beach to move to Henderson, Nevada, outside of Las Vegas. Why? Hello? Why? Well, I can tell you three things. Number one, the entire structure of where we lived in the Los Angeles area, especially Venice beach, has changed because of politics. And there are hundreds, hundreds of people living on the streets and on the beach within literally yards of our multimillion dollar homes. And after all of this happened just the past three, four years, I said to my wife, why be here? In addition to the fact that my son and wonderful daughter in law and two young grandsons moved to Henderson, Nevada the previous year. So we had every why to move. So we did. So geographically, I'm in a completely new place, which by the way, is really fascinating. Again, talking about being in one place for decades with all our family and friends and everything around. But we decided to decamp because the new why was far more entrancing. And at the age of 73, chronologically, I said, wow, how wonderful. Let's move. Because isn't that a great way of getting a new perspective on life? So we did. So I said, physically, we're here mentally. In myself personally and my wife I think would agree for me, maybe for her, that I'm in the best place, mentally that I've ever been in my life. And that happens on a daily basis. Today I'm better than I was yesterday, the day before, because that's what I live with. I live with growth and spiritually the same thing. I am oriented towards making sure that I'm ever striving forward in my spiritual life, which I, God willing and thank God, touches hundreds of thousands of people and millions of people around the globe with our Joy of living program, our podcast, our books, our Keep Smiling cards, and the things that we do. I've been blessed to be a conduit of good, what I call a cognitive or a child of God. So thank you for asking. And what I'd like to do is also mention that everything we do, we work with what I call the three fundamentals of life. And the three fundamentals are, number one, life has purpose. And when you live a purpose driven life, you can now have good. Number two. And this is number two is really good. You can go mad now. MAD is an acronym that stands for make a difference. You lead a purpose driven life, you make a difference in the world. Right, Gary? And number three fundamental is to unlock the power and the secrets of everyday words and terms. Simplest example, right now, our show, your show with me, being carried over the Internet, that magical, mystical, mythical platform that's touched by everybody around the world. And if you ask anybody what does WWW stand for, invariably it has to do with the Internet, right? But in our world, Gary, the world of the positive, purposeful, powerful and pleasant, WWW stands for what a wonderful world. And what a is a word. So everybody listening? From now on, when you see WWW do think, what'd he say? Yeah, what a wonderful world, you have a whole different outlook. You have a smile on your face. You say, where did I hear, oh, yeah, Dr. Gary Sanchez show. But why? He had this crazy guy on there, Barry Shaw. He's talking about joy in life. And whenever you hear WWW What a Wonderful World, right away you think of. Remember that song by Louis Armstrong, Sarchmo. You hear the opening bars of that great song, what a Wonderful World, and what do you do right away? You smile. You can't help it. Now, smile is one of the most important words you could ever internalize, utilize, and leverage in life. Because smile stands for seeing miracles in life every day. Seeing miracles in life every day. What a way to live. How do you like that, Gary? Well, I love it. I love it.

I love your energy and I love the way you simplified things down to three things. Let's go back, Barry, and take us back in your life. Where were you born?

Where did you grow up?

What were you like as a kid? Let us learn about you.

As fascinating and interesting and robust as I am right now, at least my mother would say that she's the one who writes all my introductions and she's in heaven. And she passed them down through the heavenly host. So thank God. I was raised in a place called Boston, Massachusetts. I'LL even fall into a Boston accent at some point. Raised and born in Boston, raised in a just outside of Boston called Brookline, Massachusetts in a very wonderful loving home, thank God. Father worked hard, mother loving and I'm oldest in the family, two younger sisters and we're all close to this very day. Both my parents have passed away just because and was just a wonderful existence. And I share with you the best part, because most of my life has been involved with business. And I want to use this time now to talk about business because it is part of my why. And I have certain very important beliefs about business that I think it's critical for people to understand. Number one, the word business is fascinating. How do you spell business? B, U, S, I, N, E, S, S. Now, I was taught this I when I was literally 12 years old. Business, the you comes before the I. The business is built on service. Most people don't learn this until their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s or 80s. Service is the key of life, right? Doesn't matter if you're a dentist, a lawyer, an Indian chief. Service is the key to life. So business, the word itself shows us the you comes before the I. And one of the ways I learned this, by the way, is that the age of 9, 9, 10, and 11 growing up in Boston, anybody can Google it, look it up. It's in the northeast part of the United States of America. And in the wintertime, guess what happens? It snows. And sometimes you have real deep snow. And when I was growing up, we didn't have Internet. And you listen to the radio and say, oh my gosh, no school today. Yippee. We didn't just sit around, play video games, we didn't have them. Or just play and say, I'm just going to wait, sleep the rest of the day. It was a time to go out and shovel snow and make money. Wow, what a wonderful way to live because you get exercise. And it was really instructive for me because here's what you needed to do again. Age is 9, 10, 11. You go up and down the street with your boots on and get warm and such in a snow shovel. And you knock on people's doors, your neighbors, and now what are you doing? You're going to negotiate. Imagine being a 9 or 10 or 11 year old negotiating with a householder. I want $10, he wants to give $5. And we settle somewhere, say 7 or 8 depending. And you shovel and you're working hard and it's good. And every once in a while they give you A cup of hot chocolate. So you made money. But here's what gets really fun, Gary. I realized I could shovel maybe seven, eight driveways before you get really tired and just got to go home. All right? And I can make 50, $60. That's a lot of money to kid, especially in the 1950s. But it got even better because my father said, you have a lot of friends. Why don't you get two or three of your friends and you go and get the jobs? And if you get, let's say, an $8 job, you give them five or six and you make two or three. And now you're leveraging your time. You hear this? Yeah. The bane of existence for most people. And I don't care if you're charging $1,000 an hour as a lawyer, it doesn't matter. Your time is limited. You're only able to negotiate your time. That's why lawyers raise their rates. But if you can leverage other people's activities so that everybody wins. So I did that, and I had five friends, and I got them the jobs. They didn't do anything other than shovel. And let's say actually you ended up getting up to $10 for a driveway, I'd give them seven. I made three. So now we're shoveling another 30 driveways, and I'm still shoveling some myself. So I'm making real money, $120 sometimes. So again, it didn't snow every single day, but when it did, it was just delightful because now I have money that I could choose to do what I want with. And that's really the whole essence for me about business, and I've kept it going for 60 plus years, is finding, like you say, more simple, direct ways of utilizing and leverage time and energy so that everyone wins. This is the key. Everyone wins. It wasn't that I got $10 and I gave them two. It was the ability to create win win situation. The householder won, got their driveway and stair shoveled. My friends won because they got money. They didn't have to do anything. They have to knock on doors, negotiate. I won because I'm helping them and making money. Hello. That's real. Www Right. What a wonderful world.

So for the audience, Barry went through and did the yos discovery instead of just the why discovery. And he came up with his why is to simplify things so that they're easy to understand. How he does that is by finding better ways. And ultimately, what he brings is a way to contribute and add value to people around him. So we just heard that perfectly in that story. Right. You simplified it down to just a few things. You found a better way by getting your friends to participate with you and leverage your time. And ultimately, what you brought was a way for everyone to win.

Yeah. By the way, may I share one more story? But when I was a kid, because I love the story and I love telling it, because anybody who knows anything about America, look up Fenway Park. Boston Red Sox. Yay, Red Sox. Okay. Because I grew up in Boston, right? So where we live was. Literally, I could walk to Fenway Park. It was just two and a half miles, three miles. As a kid, I got asked by a friend of mine who's his family ran the concession for selling scorecards outside of Fenway Park. And so of the ages of 12, 13 and 14, I was selling scorecards in front of Fenway Park. You get a picture again in 1960, 61, 62. And the red Sox weren't what they are today. People didn't go, maybe the stadium is half full, but here's where it gets fun. So I'm selling a scorecard, a newspaper with a scorecard in the front, and it sells for 8 cents. So people are busy going into the game. And so that's. Of course, they give you a dime. And most of the time, they didn't ask for the two pennies back. So I made two cents for the paper, another two cents. And I'm vocal, you know, selling, hey, scorecard. Scorecard. Okay. I have this great corner because I was really out there, and me. And there was this amazing guy who was my age today. He was probably 72 at the time, 73, and I'm 12, 13. And he's sitting there with a large cart, about 6ft long, 4ft wide, with roasted peanuts on it in bags and peanuts. And he's sitting on a milk crate, and he's old black guy. And I'm standing, doing things. He said, hey, kid, come over here. I come over. And he said, yes, sir. Because that's how I was raised. I said, let me hear what you're talking. I said, scorecard, scorecards. He said, that's very nice. Good voice. I like what you do, but where's the value? You're not telling people what you do? He said, let me show you. Peanuts a dime, three for a quarter, 15 in the ballpark. Peanuts a dime, three for a Quarter, 15 in the ballpark. He said, I want you to tell him, how much is the scorecard in the ballpark? 15 cents. He says, hello, scorecard. Get your scorecard here, 8 cents here, 15 in the ballpark. 8 cents here, 15 in the. Now you're giving value, and people will be attracted to you. This is the word he used. People be attracted to you. You were running after people. Now they're going to come to you. His name was Elijah. I like that. He was really a prophet. And he helped me. We went together almost three years. I owned that corner because I was the best. It was the best corner. And I would make two hours of selling. I would make over $40 here. This $42 while having fun. And because all the people at the ballpark knew me, I got to go to most of the games for free. Hello. I saw dozens, if not hundreds of Red Sox games. It was great. But here's what gets really fun. So I told my father the story, and he said, that's great, wonderful. He said, you know, Tom, let's add value. When people get your scorecard, how do they keep score? And I said, I guess they write down. He said, yeah, but do they always carry a pencil with him? I don't know. Let's do this. Went out. We bought a bunch of pencils. I think he bought 20, 30 pencils. And they're regular long. And he cut them in half, the little pencils that you had at miniature golf courses and things like that. So we took a pencil, cut it in half, and I think the pencil cost a nickel. And now we sold each half for a nickel. So we turn a nickel into a dime. But it wasn't just that we turned the nickel into a dime. He told me about gross margin, which is 50%. You didn't make 100%, made 50% gross margin. But what did you do? You gave real value. So now, scorecard. Get your score. Eight cents here, 15 in the ballpark. And a pen. Would you like a pencil with that? Yeah. How much? 10 cents. Here. Here's a quarter or 20 cents or whatever. You hear it? So we were using the leverage of value. How do you find value that you can add? So, as Elijah told me, show people the value. You attract them. It's called the law of attraction. And now add value wherever you can, as my father did with let's give them pencils. And then how wonderful. Everybody wins. Remember the person who's using it. Me. And what a wonderful world www so those are lessons I learned from the ages of 9 to 14. And it stood me in good stead. And I've done, thank God, many businesses throughout my career, some of them spectacular successes and some of them. Hello. Human not. But it's the ability to always, like you taught me because I took your class, simplify. What can you do to make it as easy as possible for people to work with you? As easy as possible. As we say in the sophisticated. How do you remove barriers to entry not for your competition, but for people who want to work with you? And even by the way, in competition, I've learned a great lesson much later in life is called coopetition. Coopetition was. I learned this in university, actually, and in the university of hard knocks that you oftentimes will compete with people. And those same people, you should look as collaborators. Hear this, Gary, look at them as collaborators. It may be when you were a dentist, maybe you were, I'm just making, I don't know if you did general dentistry, but maybe there was another dentist that's mile away who was a specialist in pediatrics or this and that. And together you can literally channel business to each other. Sometimes you collaborate, sometimes you compete, but it's the ability to be open to it called coopetition.

I love that. So you grew up in Boston, went to high school in Boston. Did you go off to college?

I was a very good young Jewish guy. Of course. I went to university with University of Massachusetts and Amherst and, and here's where it gets really fun. After my junior year, I was a college dropout.

Okay, you and Steve Jobs, right.

So I said college, it's interesting, it's nice, it's fun, but it's. I have wanderlust. I wanted to do something. So this was 1969, 70 was just around that era and it was the era of the hippies and things and going on. And I got a one way ticket to Europe. You could do that in those days. One way ticket. I got landed in London. They let me in for only 30 days, said, we don't want you here, get out. And I went to a place called Amsterdam, which was the crossroads of the world in those days. All over the world people were coming through Amsterdam from the Orient, from Africa, from Latin America, everywhere. And I was in the middle of it, got involved with, thank God, a nice group of people. We had what people today would call little commune. And again, how do you survive? I had very little money and so did everybody else. But we got together, we thought of things to do and we did. And out of that came a business three years later when I went back to the United States, a interesting, thriving business. I'll just describe it very quickly. Imagine, let's say a 9 by 12 oriental Belgian rug that had a huge stain someplace in it. And it was sold at the flea markets. They had hundreds of these things. So we would buy them for pennies. Literally, you buy, I don't know, big 9 by 12 rug for $2 dollars. Brought it back to our little commune. We had 11 people. And one of the people there, this interesting woman, she was really skilled. As they said. We cut this, do this, and we make. Put it. Put it back on it. Make a pillow. Imagine a carpet pillow. Or how about a carpet bag? Or how about a coat? How about a hat? And we sold it there in Amsterdam and we made money so we could all live and do what we do and just travel around and travel all over Europe for years. Just one. Just amazing. I said, you know, okay, I feel like going back to America. So I bought a big container full of these things. I mean, hundreds and hundreds went back to Boston and through a friend of a friend, found somebody who also was a genius at doing this, a wonderful woman. And she hired people. And we started making bags and coats and pillows and da, da, da, da. We hung out a great sign on a place called Newbury street in Boston. It was a great story. Newbury street today. Look it up. It is the most fashionable street in Boston. The shopping even then, by the way, it was the hip place. And within a couple of months, I was written up in Boston Magazine and this stuff. Carpet bag, carpet pillows. And we had this little shop which was all oriental rugs everywhere. And it was just fun. It was just truly wonderful. Celebrities. Anybody who was a celebrity in those days that came through Boston came to the shop. They bought Cheech and Chong. They were famous. And at the time, yeah, they bought stuff for all their Hollywood friends and people who were ordering. And we were part of this whole trend in America called the boutique business. This way. We had a boutique, so we were invited to have a boutique to a booth and a boutique show in New York City. And I said, yeah, of course. They get $3,000. Booth. They gave it to a thousand. Okay, I'm going to go. So myself and this nice lady, my head seamstress and such, we loaded up two cars and we were driving from Boston down to New York. Remember, it was a Saturday night in June in 1972, and just going, cruising down, getting ready to go to Manhattan for the big boutique show. Macy's was going to be there. They already expressed interest. A lot of real people. And imagine this, everybody. It was just about midnight and traveling 60 miles an hour. I'm in a Volkswagen Beetle and Somebody fell asleep at the car, at the wheel of their car, big Buick. And the car hurtled over the median and smashed the Volkswagen Bug that I was in and squashed it like a bug. Now, obviously, I'm talking to you and Gary can see me and some other people. Maybe I'm still here. But it was touch and go for that night. And the next day, thank God I didn't pass away. My femur, my right, which is your thigh bone, the hardest bone in the body to break, was smashed in many places. My. My leg was swinging like a gate, and I didn't pass out, thank God. And the police and the fire were amazing that I didn't. And then they showed us pictures weeks later of what the car looked like. It's not possible to have survived, but I did. And I'll make the story very short, but there was an operation that was done to put in special plates, titanium plates and titanium screws into my thigh bone to put everything together. And over the next two and a half years, I had two more operations to remove a plate and 10 screws and plate and 10 screws. But I used that time to do what I call ptl, which saved my life. Prayer, therapy and love. A lot of prayer, A lot of therapy. Two, three, sometimes four hours a day of half a yoga and massage. And I had friends that came by and love that was showered upon me. And it took time. It was a process, not an event. But I can tell you Gary's looking at me now and you can't even see scars. They were picking glass out of my face for two days and I never limped. I did not limp after that. So I was, in a sense, true sense reborn. I had what people call near death experience. I call it near life, because when you get that close to not being here, I call it real life. You taste the essence of what it means to live exuberantly. And because of that, I made a renewed dedication to. To living life to the full in the most positive, purposeful, powerful, pleasant way that I could. That's one story. We'll dog, we'll do another one. But I also want to mention, if I may, Gary here, that this show is very little about Barry Shore, nice guy that he is, and even very little about Gary Sanchez, great guy that he is. This show is really about you. Why? Oh, you. It's all about you becoming the best you. If these stories help or the information helps the. And everybody should doing the yos. Because it's again, when you are the best you, you make the world a better place. You build more bridges of harmony. You create more joy, happiness, peace and love in the world. And we need you. You make a difference. You are a mad man or woman. Make a difference.

Okay, so you went through all the therapy, the ptl, you got yourself healthy again. And then where did you go from there? Did your business, did you continue in that business, or did you end up selling it and doing something different?

That business unfortunately couldn't be done because the next two and a half years I was out of business, essentially. And now, of course, the full circle. I said, okay, what do you want to do? I want to close loops. So I said, I have time. The Good Lord said, Mr. Shor, you get two and a half years. Do something with the time. I went back to university, I only had one more year to go. I said, okay, I'll go back. I'll graduate. While I was in Amsterdam, by the way, I did attend a place called the Fry University, which is very famous in Europe. There's a number of them in Germany. As I've been in Amsterdam, it's a great school. And it was free, truly free. And so I studied there also while I was there. And I went back and got a double degree from University of Massachusetts, which by the way, had just opened up their first satellite campus in Boston before, was always in Amherst. Now, by the way, University of Massachusetts is a very well respected, prestigious university, United States of America, with multiple campuses and medical schools and all kinds of things. But so the first year of the open in Boston, I went and thank God I graduated double degree high in my class. And now looking to see what am I going to do. So they said, thank God I had a wonderful loving family who tolerated me. And I was making the time to think what I wanted to do. My mother, bless her, had worked for a diamond dealer before she was married. And even after she married for the first year or so before they had me. And we were close to that family. And my mother said, why don't you think of doing something in diamonds? So I went to speak to her former employer, Mr. Guinness, and he said, I think you should go to a place called the gia. So GIA means nothing to most people. GIA stands for the Gemological Institute of America. Now today it is the most famous school of its kind in the world. Everybody who's anybody in the diamond or gem business goes to the GIA. Now, when I went there in 1977, it was a small school. It was known only to insiders in the diamond business. And some of the Gem business. And they accepted me because, thank God, graduate college and et cetera. And I took the program. The program was very intensive. It was eight hours a day, five days a week for six months at a time. But I wanted to do it. And I was good enough, actually great. What I did that they said, okay, Barry Shore, we love you, we'd like you to teach the program. You'll be one of two instructors. What's the best way to learn something, Gary? Is to teach it right? And again, just like I learned from Elijah and I learned from my father and leveraging and shoveling snow. You teach and now you learn more. And it was absolutely wonderful. And while I was there, two wonderful things happened to me for my life that changed me entirely. One was I became close friends with my best friend in the world at the time. His name was Frank Barnum. And together we had decided we were going to leave the institute after a few years. We were both there for almost three years to go out on our own, become diamond dealers. But also while I was there, I met and married the true diamond and jewel of my life, my wife Naomi. And we're still married 45 years later. So it was the greatest possible move. And it moved me from Boston where it's. Remember it snowed in the winter and you're in your 20s now. Who needs cold? And you didn't need a visa to come to Los Angeles. Actually I lived in Beverly Hills and the school was just a couple miles away, duh. So I drove across country in my Volkswagen bus, which not the same one, but similar to when I used traveling around Europe. And now I'm in living in Los Angeles and warm and loving and close friends and getting married. And we're going to go into business. And I'll make it short because from 79 to 1981, Frank and I, hard to use these numbers now, but tell you because of my personality and our skills and market was booming. We bought and sold over $100 million worth of diamonds in less than three years. Made a lot of money, had a lot of fun and it was just absolutely amazing. Now before anybody gets jealous in any way whatsoever and say, wow, look at this guy, I will tell you in the year end of 80, 81 and by the middle of 81, at least 80% of everything we made, we lost not because we made mistakes. The market crashed from let's say, example, a diamond that would cost $50,000 for a 1 carat diamond in January of 1980. And we were buying and selling by the end of 80, it was down to $8,000.

Oh, wow.

And we had a lot of inventory because we were moving, moving, moving. We made a lot of money. We're selling, okay. And things happen. So you need to go through stuff in order to learn real lessons of when to buy, when to sell, when to leave. A famous song by Kenny Rogers. So it was fabulous. My wife's still with me. My best friend Frank was still around. I mean, we ended up not having our business anymore because we didn't have the sufficient funds to really keep going. And the market was down for many years, but it was quite the ride. Lots of experience, and I learned a lot.

You went to the top and then you ended up back at the bottom.

Right? And then now we continue to move up. And by the way, while we were doing that ride of a hundred million dollars, we had built the first and only limited partnership in California that allowed people to buy gemstones and put them in the partnership. And we did some very creative things. Like you said, simplify. We took an arcane idea and we simplified it. And we said, look what you can do to. People say, oh, wow, that's interesting. Was great. When you have skills, it doesn't matter what's going on, because markets move all the time. It's the nature of life, nature of business. Remember, it's all about service. And that's why we hear. Was there stress? Well, yeah, but it's part of wonderful living is how do you deal with stress? I mean, I had been through a deadly automobile accident. That was real stress. This is just money.

So how did you end up paralyzed?

Oh, well, okay, let's go on to this.

Obviously, you're not.

Now, okay, so here's the story. Let's fast Forward from the 1980s. And I still had. I tried a couple of businesses. Some of them were successful, moderately and so and such. And imagine the following. Standing up in the morning, Hale and Hardy, able to leave tall buildings in single bound. And that evening, be in the hospital, totally, completely paralyzed, as Gary just said. And it was not from an automobile accident. It was not a spinal injury. It was a rare disease, Gary, that I never heard of the day before. It took over my body and rendered me a quadriplegic. That's what it's called. Completely, totally parallel. 144 days in the hospital. I was two years in a hospital bed in my own home. I couldn't turn over by myself. Four years in a wheelchair. I had braces on both my legs, my hips to my ankles. Think of Forrest Gump completely with those big braces. And that was progress. But today, thank God, I'm able to be vertical and ambulatory with the help of a seven foot walking wand. But I still have a tripod, not a biped. I still can't walk up a stair by myself. I can't walk up a curb by myself. I have helped 12 hours a day, seven days a week. But you hear my voice. Positive, purposeful, powerful and pleasant. And by the way, it's all because of that one word I told you. Smile. Smile stands for seeing miracles in life every day. I got to tell you a quick story. My 8 year old niece comes over to me a few weeks ago and she says, Uncle Barry, Uncle Barry, can we spell smile? S, M, I, E, L. And I thought about it. Smile, smile sounds the same. I said, why not? I asked her how come? She says then it would stand for seeing miracles in everyday life out of the mouth of babes. But what was she doing, Gary? She was creating the kind of world she wants to live in. And create is a wonderful acronym again. Remember, we love working with words and acronyms. CREATE stands for causing rethinking, Enabling all to excel. This is what you excel at. What you built with the YOS is enabling people to rethink and understand that you are in charge of your own programming. We call it Neuro Linguistic programming. You're in charge of your own thoughts. And when you do that, you literally can understand the six most important words that I teach people whenever they listen. And these are choice, not chance, determines your destiny. Choice, not chance, determines destiny. It's how you respond to any given situation. Do you think it was easy being paralyzed for years? Hello? No. Did I respond by being bitter and angry and such? No. Did I think I'd ever even move again? So for me, in the two years that I was in a hospital bed unable to move by myself or turn over anything, my vision and my abilities were all focused on sitting up and putting my feet over the side of the bed. That was it. That's what I wanted. Again, took me years, but we.

Did you do it? How did you do it?

Well, again, I call upon ptl, prayer, therapy and love. I'm talking deep prayer for myself. People that cared about me, still care about me and still say prayers for me. Because to other people I look like I'm in quotation marks, handicap and therapy. So we hired therapists to come to the house who would move my legs and my arms and massage and dis and push and try everything and anything To. To find mechanisms to get things happening again. And eventually, the therapy paid off. I'll tell you just a story in just a moment and love. Now, I got to tell you personally, it's much easier for me to give love than to receive enormous amounts of love. When people tell me by the dozens, by the hundreds, when they heard and came visiting, we love you, we love you, it makes you feel truly humble. It's much easier me say I love you to receive it and to incorporate it and to allow their honest, caring feelings to suffuse my physical being and energize it. See, I am not just a believer. I know for a fact that love creates healing. Love creates healing. I have an acronym for health, which is help. Stands for helping everyone achieve life through happiness. That's real health. So when you have that flow again, bitter and angry is constricting. Love is expansive.

This is for me. I've been through stuff, lots of stuff. So I'll just tell you another thing about therapy, because I think you might find it of interest in today's world. I have a friend. They would have my. We have, As I said, 12 help 12 hours a day, seven days a week. So when I was back home after the hospital, 144 days and out, sometimes get me into a wheelchair and take me out for a stroll on the street. And one of my neighbors, who we've known for years, comes over and said, look, I heard what happened. It's okay. I got to tell you something. I'll have you up and walking within a year. Okay? I'm listening to anybody. You remember, I'm still a quad at this point. And he said, I'll tell you why. Because I am the best aquatic therapist in America. Now, how do I know that was true? Because he told me, I love people who are confident in what they do. Right. Gary, you told me you were a dentist for a while. Long while. You didn't go and say, yeah, I'm just an okay dentist. You didn't ever think like that. You're the best dentist. If you're not, you're not going to work on my teeth, I can tell you that. Okay, so he's the best aquatic therapist. Well, I'll make the story go forward with his work and just imagine these pools. Now, remember, I'm Southern California, so we did a lot outside, outdoors as well as indoors. But pools and today in America have what's called a hoyer lift. It's a special kind of lift for people that are in wheelchairs. Going from the wheelchair into this lift and the lift will pick you up and mechanically move you and put you in the water. And Vince, his name, he had four people working on me in the water, sometimes for an hour, an hour and a half at a time with flotation device on my legs, my belly and my arms so I wouldn't sink and die and just kept moving. And we did this three, four times a week because I wanted something to happen, I wanted nerves to be triggered again. And lo and behold, after about a year and a half, one day I was in the wild with people helping and I moved my arms over my head and they didn't just move my arms away, I started moving and I moved and I went interesting. I hit my head against the side of the pool, which was great because that means I moved on my own. And I said let me keep doing this. And I kept going back and forth in the pool. I was able to swim and 98 minutes because they were timing me without stopping because I was in such ecstasy. I swam a mile in 98 minutes. And that was a breakthrough moment. That was not just aha, that was I couldn't do it, but I was jumping out of the water. Imagine the whale breaching and going up high. That's how I felt. And I said if I could do it once, I could do it again. So I started doing it twice a week and then three times a week, then four times a week, five times a week, six times because I'm perseverant. I am not going to just let anything stop me from doing this now. Over the course of the next year, it was becoming my routine. I was well known at the pool. And one day one of my friends who I swam with, she's told me about this program called why am I blanking out?

Think about in just a moment. Anyway, it's great form of swimming. And so we got, I contacted the person who was responsible for and we got saw videos and such. And now I'm able to turn on my belly and I still have flotation devices of my legs because otherwise I, I, they sing to this very day. And now talking 12 years later with the belly flotation also and I was able to turn on my tummy, I have paddles on my hands because you can see my fingers don't close. And I use a snorkel. So I now swim on my back and do a backstroke and I do a crawl and I now swim two miles a day, six days a week. And I've been doing this for more than A dozen years. I have over 8,400 miles that I record every half mile, mile, two miles, three miles, sometimes four miles in a day. Because I'm that dedicated. And my goal now is to swim around the world. And I'm telling you because I'm telling other people, the goal is that I'm a mental health activist. And so the goal is to raise money for mental health situation we call stop the stigma. Make people aware that mental health is not something you hide from that you can get help. And it can be either cure it or work with it. It's something to be worked on and to be talked about. And I'm attracting into my life Michael Phelps as my swimming buddy, so that together I'll swim two miles a day, he'll swim two miles a day, and we'll swim a thousand miles in a year. And people will kick in their 2 cents worth. You know how you say, hey, this is my two cents worth of something? So I'm in for two cents. A thousand miles, 20 bucks. We'll have hundreds of thousands of people giving $20 will raise millions of dollars for mental health situations. And then we'll attract more celebrities to do this and create a whole revolution so that we're swimming around the world, because it's not, what is it, 24,901 miles around the world. I have 8,400 already, but got 16,000 more to go. And we'll raise awareness, we'll raise money, we'll have a lot of fun. And we're Barry Shaw, swimming around the world. From quadriplegic to swimming around the world. You hear that, everybody? You can do something in your life also go mad. Go make a difference.

No, I love that. So tell us about your book, the Joy of Living. Now, how did that come about? And when did that come about?

So this is really something for me. It came about because of laying in bed and as a quadriplegic for years and thinking about it, prior to being paralyzed again, I was in business. I created two companies that I sold to other public companies. Multimillion dollar exits in the beginning of the Internet, 1997, 98. And I had three U.S. patents. I'm doing stuff. And because of research into the human condition and now being in a human condition, paralyzed, I had a lot of time to think about it. And I formulated what I call the 11 Strategies for Learning how to Live. Enjoy Daily, no matter the situation. And again, the subtitle, as you said, is how to Slay Stress and be Happy. So as an example of something really deep. I put all of this into my mind. Again, I'm making an analogy. Think of somebody who's in prison and circumstances and you don't have the ability to write things down because they didn't give you time about real stuff. You think about it and you dwell on it and you formulate it and you can see it. And so when I was able at some point later to begin to write. Now you see my hands, Gary. But so I can thank God right today and type out with two fingers and such to put into the on paper or on the screen what I was thinking about. And these 11 strategies are just so good because they work just like what you do with yos. The reason people flock to you is because YOS works. It's that simple. Something that works that is a benefit to me, to everybody listening. Again, this show is about you. That's who you care about. And that's great by the way. You tune in because you care the most in the whole world. But you. That's wonderful. Its self enlightened interest is wonderful. Right. So what happened is that I was asked to speak to people because of the story. It's a great story, right. Paralyzed. Yeah. Swimming a bit. Okay. So I was articulating and writing down and people say I used to write a book. I thinking about it now. I made the time after a certain amount of years to put onto the paper what it is we wanted to do. Got an editor and such like that. And I'll tell you everything that some of the stories that I've already told you, story about Elijah about shoveling snow and things like that, they're in the book because the book is not just doesn't read about Barry Shaw's life. The first two chapters are about stress, the debilitating aspects of stress. And by the way also how to leverage stress. You can use stress to your advantage. See, people think stress, sometimes stress. How do you build muscle? You need stress, right? You're a doctor, Gary, you need to. So it's. It's the ability to understand stress and then work with the 11 strategies. One of them I mentioned to you is smile. Seeing miracles in life every day. I'll tell you one a great story though. Here I am at the pool and getting in the hoyer lift into the water. So I'm swimming in the special lane they call the handicap lane, you know, special needs lane. And next to me is a woman who's walking in the water, not on the walking in the water. And she is. Her name is Aida. And at the time, she was 95.

And of course, I'm swimming with time every once. Rest once in a while. And we're talking. And over the course of a couple of weeks, she said, barry, I just love your energy. I'm 95. I'm happy, I'm alive, but I want to be like you. I want to be happy like you. And I said, you don't want to be me, you want to be you. I said, yeah, I want to be the best me. So she said, will you work with me? I said, it'd be honored to. So I'm going to tell you all amazing two stories, number one of the 11 strategies. One of them is called get uncomfortable. Get uncomfortable. Barry, I don't like being. Yeah, get uncomfortable. Now, we're not talking about walking around with a pebble in your shoe all day. And we're talking about. Talk about Dr. Gary Sanchez. As a dentist, we're talking about. For me, I teach people how to brush your teeth with your non dominant hand. Because when you brush your teeth, and you should do it at least two minutes right? Without stopping, when you do with your dominant hand, it becomes a mindless activity if you do it with your non dominant hand. And I don't mean electric, even though I use electric today and it's good to do it, but so for me, my left hand is non dominant. You got to think about it, because especially when you don't do electric, but even if you do electric, you got to think about it because it's uncomfortable. That's the purpose, being mindful. So Aida's most. The strategy she liked the most was get uncomfortable. And we worked with all the 11, but this is the one that resonated with her. And I can tell everybody here, and you should applaud this just because it's not me, it's about her. I just had the opportunity a few months ago to sing, because I sing to her whenever we see each other. She said, hi, Barry. Sing me a song, whether we're in the pool or other places. I sang Happy Birthday to aida on her 109th birthday. Wow, 109th. And she'll tell anybody who listens, say, he's the guy who didn't just keep me alive, he kept me alive and happy. Don't take it from me. These strategies work. This book, the Joy of Living, how to Slave Stress and Behavior. By the way, Gary, with your permission, we're going to do something amazing. Yep. Anybody who wants to book, it's the year 2020. Two, we're going to give 22% off. You go to barryshore.com book or maybe we'll call it/get. I'll send the link to you. We can. We'll put it out. 22% off. I think it sells now at $15.95 on Amazon. Do you get it from our site? It'll be 22% off as a physical or ebook either way. And that will include shipping and handling and sales tax. Because we want everybody to have the book. Thank God. It sells very well. But it's not just a book of stories. At the end of each chapter is takeaways, simplified takeaways and things to do, not exercises, things to do for your benefit. This is all about you. The book is a handbook, a guidebook. And don't take it from me. Take it from my eater. Take it from the story about David. Take it the story about Heather. These Keep Smiling cards that we give out, that's another one of the strategies. They saves lives. Dozens of people have not committed suicide. They've told me. I've gotten emails because they got a Keep Smiling card from somebody. Somebody. In other words, a human touch. But I'm going to leave you with one last story, if I may, because you wanted me to speak about something. What's the best advice you've ever had? Right. Yeah. Yep.

I was just about to ask you that. Best advice you've ever been given or given.

Okay, here we go. Everybody put on your seatbelt. Here it is.

Learn to love dog poop. Did Barry Shaw just say, learn to love dog poop? Yes. Because remember three things. Three fundamentals. Life has purpose. Go mad, make a difference and unlock the power and the secrets of everyday words and terms. Dog poop stands for doing the good power of one person. When you recognize the power that you have, one of the strategies is your words matter. You recognize the power that you have. And then when you think in good and you speak in good and you do good, that energy can never dissipate. It can never be stopped. It goes around the world. It will touch you, your family, your friends and all living beings. And exactly. Right now, we need you more than ever. You need me, Need Gary. Every single one of us. When you recognize that you have that power, the power of one person reaching out to another, reaching out to another, reaching out to another, reaching out to another. That's it. Doing of good. Power of one person. Next time you see dog poop, you say, yeah, I love dog poop. He said, what are you talking about? So I heard Barry Shore and Gary Sanchez is, yo, you know why? And he said, you gotta love dog poop. And it opens up the ability to have a conversation, doesn't it, Gary? For sure.

It's interesting that you. I was waiting to ask you the question that you answered without me asking. And then while you answered the question I hadn't yet asked you, you brought up something that I had written on my paper here and put a big box around it. And that was the power of word choices. And so I'm curious, have you always focused on the words that bring you energy? Tell us what you believe about word choices.

I really have been involved with words since I was below the age of nine, probably even the ages of four and five. I was already involved with books, with. I was a conversationalist.

A storyteller, and I was around storytellers, by the way. My mother was a great storyteller. My father, less Obi, told some stories. And the people, they associated with something called the gin club. And that doesn't mean they drank gin. They played gin rummy. And they were five or six couples, and they would use. They would play cards. But the cards was their way of being together as 10 or 12 people and telling stories and listening. So listening to adults or people, I guess, who were older kids tell stories, it's always fascinating. So when I see the word words, because, yes, you just said W, R, D, S, I look at that, I say, what is that? Well, look at that. Words are so powerful in Proverbs, ancient wisdom text, which, by the way, is the acronym for awe. Awe stands for ancient wisdom educates. Ancient wisdom educated. That's what you say. Oh, Proverbs says life and death is in the hands of the. Doesn't say the gun. Didn't have a gun. Then. Life and death is in the hands of the tongue. The tongue, because that is so important. You can hurt so deeply with words you can raise up. As I have been benefited by people telling me, I love you, I love you. When I was. From the car accident, when I was paralyzed, those words penetrated. And if you look at the word words, if you move the S from the end of the words to the front, it spells a sword. Now, a sword is a very interesting item because a sword can do several things. It cuts, obviously, so it can be used as an offensive weapon, can be used as a defensive weapon. A small sword can be called a scalpel, can be used to heal. So the ability to look at this thing called words and understand the power of them. And I'll leave you with one story. People often ask me. I speak to groups, sometimes as few as 50, sometimes as few, as many as 5,200. Where did you find the strength to do this stuff and get through and not be bitter, not be angry and feel positive, purposeful, powerful and pleasant? Because my mother. My mother was born more than 100 years ago because I'm 73 now with a large red wine stain through three quarters of her face. Now, imagine kids in school today. Is bullying something? Yes. Minutes less so where we're cognizant of it, all that sort of stuff. 100 years ago. Hello. You know, bullies were bullied. Kids are kids. It's amazing to say this. My mother didn't just get through the process that she had this and live with it, she was beyond it. She learned at some age that the people who made fun of her, that was their problem, not hers. You hear this? How adult that is for a kid? And how do we know some of this? Because as kids, we growing up. So she still kept a lot of friends. She always making friends from high school. So her high school friends would come to the house. We knew them. Hey, this is your mother. This is Frances. What do you want? That's who she was. So my mother always wore heavy pancake makeup and stuff because she didn't want to have it. And it was pockmarked also. But it's my mother. And when she didn't have the makeup on, so it's my mother. But it wasn't that she carried a chip or anything. She was free from that. And she lived life so fully that it was beside the point. I mean, she had the regular stresses of life, family and income. I mean, just stuff. But it wasn't that. So I learned very early on, this is my model for living. Enjoy daily, no matter the circumstances. I love it.

I love it. So, Barry, if there's people that are listening that want to get a hold of you, they want to follow you, they want to learn more about you, how should they best connect with you?

Well, everybody should. That's number one. Gary, right?

Yes.

Best way is to go to www.what a wonderful world.barryshore.com B A R R Y S H o r e barryshore.com you go there and you'll see there's a free mini class that we give. The videos are absolutely fabulous. I mean, thousands of people tell me this. I'm not saying it. People tell me this makes a difference in people's lives. That's free. You have a Free newsletter. We're here to serve. We're here to grow. We're building a community called the Joy of living. Community is coming out in May and we're making it virtually no barrier to entry. We charge $10 a month, very small amount because you need to charge something to be able to have people have value. But the value for $10 a month, $120 a year, the value is in the thousands because you get a webinar with me, you get the full course for $197. You get a copy of the book for free joy package. I mean, literally thousands and thousands of dollars worth of value. We want people to be in the community because then to learn about dog poop and they share with other people in the community. And it's not limited to the United States. This is, we live an interconnected global environment that really everybody, everybody wants to learn how to reduce, mitigate, maybe even eliminate debilitating stress and live in joy daily. Who doesn't want that in their life? So that's how to contact www. What a wonderful world.barryshore.com do it. You'll be happy.

Thank Gary Barry, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I'm looking forward to staying connected as we go on our journeys. And I love what you're doing and count me in, man. I'm going to go over there and sign up. So thank you so much for being here and we'll stay connected.

Can we leave everybody with a blessing?

Sure.

Okay. Our blessing from Gary and Barry is go forth, live exuberantly. Spread the seeds of joy, happiness, peace and love.

Go mad. Go make a difference. I love it, man.

That is so awesome.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to why institute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez and I'll see you on the next episode.