Someone Stole $45,000 From Me -- Then I Started Smiling

When they asked me to come up and share something new with you guys, I thought what I would do is share something I've been working on for a long time. And I want to share a talk with you that I believe that you will remember forever. I know that seems like a pretty big claim, but I think it's really foundational stuff. And that is something that I've been developing called the hindsight window. And the hindsight window is the window of time between an event which you perceive to be bad at the time and the time sometime in the future that you see it as a symphony, you see it as something that was meant to be, you see it as something you're grateful for. So you got fired and you were angry, and then later you go, "Of course, that was meant to happen," right? How many of you have had this experience? Okay. We call that the hindsight window, and here's kind of my general idea. It strikes me that the longer your hindsight window, the less you are happy. And the shorter your hindsight window, the happier you'll be. Does this make sense? So my father, for example, very often has a long hindsight window on stuff that happened to him 30 years ago, the window is still open. And so that stuff can come up for him, right? And so if you have this long hindsight window, then it's harder to achieve present-day happiness. And if you can have a short hindsight window, then you can have more. In fact, here's another formula for you. Emotion, here's an emotional formula for you. Resentment, regret in the past equals fear in the future. However much resentment and regret you have about your past will show up for you as fear of your future. But the opposite of this is, however much gratitude you have for your past will show up as faith in your future. And so we need to clean up our our past so that we can look out into the future. Because by the way, if you're hanging on to some notion of certainty about your future that everything you want to do is going to work out the way you want to do it, Jim Rohn said it best, "If you picked up a book and you read chapter 1 and everything was alright, and then you picked up the book and read chapter 2 and everything was alright, you wouldn't read chapter 3. You picked up the book for drama, you came into this living here for drama." You just did. And so what we want to do is figure out How do we ride that drama best? How do we learn from it and grow from it best? So there's the past, present, and the future. And if you think about it, the past, the present, or the future, which one do you think is easiest to clean up? Which one is hardest, how about? Actually, it's the present. And I'm gonna kind of give you an example of this. See, when you know something's gonna be traumatic in the future, you can solve it beforehand. I used to do road rage. Does anybody do road rage? A little road rage here and there? Here's me doing road rage. I got my new little convertible. I was driving along in London on a beautiful sunny day. Is anybody here from England? You probably remember that day. And so I'm sitting in my little convertible, and I just bought it, and I'm so proud of myself. And this big— for those of you who are in England, maybe Australia, you guys know White Van Man. For those of you who don't know, White Van Man is a Neanderthal. He's like 99% Neanderthal. And he drives a big van and it has no company names on it, and so he drives around obnoxiously, and there's hundreds of thousands of him. And White Van Man pulls up beside me, and I'm in my little convertible, and I can feel him staring at me. I can feel him staring at me. And I know he wants me to look at him, and then when I look at him, he's going to say, "What are you?" What's he gonna say? What are you looking at? He's just, he's a bully. And so he want, I'm not gonna do it. I'm having fun, I got the music, I'm not. What the hell am I doing? I look. And true to form, he knows his lines. He goes, what are you looking at? And at this point, I'm like, I don't wanna say anything. A red light, I'm trapped here, I don't wanna say it. But my mouth has other plans. My mouth says, the ugliest bugger I've seen all day. "Eric, what are you doing? Is that assist suicide by mouth?" This guy, by the way, his head was this wide. His mother didn't give birth to him, she found him in a glacier and thawed him. I'm like, "He's a huge guy. I am terrified." I have adrenaline coursing through me, and he sucks his head in through the window to talk to his brother for a second, and then he sticks his head back out the window to talk to me. Now, I can't do Cockney, so I'm going to do Southern American. He says to me, "I bet your daddy probably bought you that car." And I'm going, "I bet your brother—" Or he says, I'm sorry, he says, "My brother says your daddy probably bought you that car." And I said, "I'll bet your brother is your daddy." The light turns green and I'm gone, right? Gone. And it's funny. But I felt like crap all day. The adrenaline from the fear of it, you know. And a couple of weeks later, I'm driving my friend's BMW Z8. For those of you who don't know the Z8, that's what happens when you mate a Harley-Davidson with a Ferrari. It's a really fun car to drive with all the rumble. And I'm driving this car, and I'm in Vancouver. I pull up to a red light, and I suddenly realize I'm in the wrong lane. I pull into the wrong lane. And I'm kind of straddling these lanes. And a bus pulls up beside me, and 4 cute girls come walking down the sidewalk. And they cross the road in front of me, and they must have timed this, because all 4 of them go, "Nice car, dude." And I'm like sitting there going, "That's right." Because when you're in your friend's car and somebody says, "Nice car, dude," it's your car, right? And I'm in there, and then the bus driver, he's over here, and he goes, "Too bad he can't drive." And then I'm like, "Yeah, well, if I could drive any better, I'd be a bus driver." Only I didn't say it. 'Cause it's funny as hell. And a lot of our humor, unfortunately, in the Western world is funny at somebody else's expense. And had I said that to him, who knows, but it could have been soul-destroying, condescending, and I didn't say it. And the reason I didn't say it is I stopped doing road rage. And the reason I stopped doing road rage is I figured out life hacks. And the life hack was very simple. I lived in England. England is all about football. And so I took a red and a yellow card and I put them in my visor. And I drove around realizing I was no longer going to do road rage. I wasn't going to do that anymore. I was going to become the traffic referee. That's my new plan, the traffic referee. And so what did I do? I would drive around and look for incidents. And the funny thing, as soon as I had the red and the yellow card up there, nobody cut me off anymore. It was the weirdest thing. And then finally one day, this guy cuts me off and I'm like, "Red or yellow?" And I'm like, "Ah, let it go. Let the game go on." I could never have let it go before. No, I had to let him know he was wrong. I had to let him know that he needed to say sorry. And you know, and by the way, you can try every finger gesture in the world and every arm gesture in the world, does anybody ever say sorry? No, they don't say sorry. But I, then one day I'm driving along and a guy does a U-turn right in front of me, right in front of me, 30 miles an hour, 50K, does a U-turn right in front of me, but there's no space in the other lane. So he ends up stopping in front of me and I end up having to slam on my brakes. Is this a red or a yellow card offense? It's a red card offense. Choomph. Grab the red card. I had my convertible, sat up high, "Red card!" He busted out laughing. He knew he was wrong. Everyone else busted out laughing. And then he apologized to me. For the first time ever, I'd ever seen anybody apologize in traffic like that, he did. And what happened is that my whole day was improved, his whole day was improved, and all the people And I hope the people who watched, their day was improved. I had life-hacked road rage. So we can do that. We can clean up our past before it happens. We can stop that stuff when we know. When we know we have a habit, we can figure out the hack and break it. But what do we do when it's in the moment? Or what do we do when it's in the past? You know, so I was working with this woman. She had self-esteem issues. The reason she had self-esteem issues is that her mother had abandoned her when she was 3. That's, by the way, not the reason she had self-esteem issues. It's the triggering event. The reason is because it's a meaning she assessed when she was 3. Because by the way, when you're 3 and you create meanings like we saw in the talk earlier today, you set up your rules for life by the time you're 9. When you create a meaning at the age of 5 about what's going on around you, how much life experience did you have? None. No, not even 5 because your cognitive memory kicks in at 3. You've been a human for about 20, I mean, in mental cognitive terms for about 24 months, then something happens and you go, "Oh, this is what life is like." That means that for the rest of my life. That's what happens, right? And so this woman, what meaning did she create? My mother left because I'm not worthy, I'm not capable of being loved, I'm not a valuable human being. Does this sound familiar to anybody? And so I asked her to go into the memory and tell me what happened. She got so upset, she's in there, she's like, "I was on the bed and I was crying and my mom was packing up and she was crying and then she left and I cried even more and it was awful." And she descended right into it. And I said, "Okay, now stop. Come back to me." I said, "Now," and she used to be a professional sports person, so I said, "Here's what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to give me the play-by-play and the color." Right? The play-by-play is what's happening in the field, and the color is the background, you know. "Well, Jim, they're moving down the field." Well, that's the 4th time he's moved down the field. Are you with me? So I said, "I want you to give me the play-by-play and the color of what's going on in the room. So step out of the memory." And she goes, "Oh, okay." She goes, "Well, there's a baby sitting on the bed, Jim, and the mother's packing up her clothes over here. They're both crying a lot." "Why are they crying?" I said. The background here is she's leaving and the baby knows she's leaving and everybody's upset by that. And I said, "And why is she leaving?" "She's leaving because she's sick," she said. She's leaving because only earlier that week she had gone shopping and forgotten the baby in the house for 4 hours on its own and she realized she was sick and she loved the baby so much she was doing the only thing that she could do to keep the baby safe and that was to leave. And as soon as she said those words, she burst into tears. And she started crying because she had just cleaned up the past. It is never too late to have a happy childhood. We just have to go back and remember it differently. We have to go back and remember the truth of what happened, not the truth of what we believed happened at the time. Does this make sense? Okay, so now it's fine. We know how to do it in the future. We know how to clean up the past. The toughest one is the present, isn't it? You're fired. Handle it right that moment, how about? Right? So I'm going to give you an example of how I handled it in the present. How many of you are familiar with Viktor Frankl? If you are not, please read "Man's Search for Meaning." I read the book twice. I read the book every 2 years. It's a hard book to read. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychotherapist dealing with what he called logotherapy, which was meaning-based therapy. He basically believed that if you could have somebody assess the correct meaning for an event, They could clean anything up. And he had finished his book and he had his manuscript on his hand, and then he found himself on a train to Auschwitz. And his life as he knew it was over. And in that moment, he thought, "You know what? I have an opportunity here. I have an opportunity to prove my life's work by going to the concentration camps." And his book is fascinating. It's difficult to read, so the way I read it, by the way, this is my formula. If you want to read it the way I read it, you get it as an audiobook and you go to Whistler, BC, although any ski hill will work. You read the book as an audiobook on the chairlift going up, and then you listen to Led Zeppelin going down. It works very nicely. Now, I've been working on this book, "The Hindsight Window," and one day my wife and I arrived home. We've been on the road for 6 months. 6 months we had not been home. We had everything we owned pretty much of value with us, all the computers. I had just been in the bush with the Hadza Bushmen for a week with all original footage that was not yet on the cloud. I had all original photography from some time that I spent with wild chimpanzees in Mahale. We had $45,000 worth of stuff with us. Now, the reason I know that is because as soon as we arrived home, somebody stole all of it. Passports, money, cameras, everything, gone. We went in shopping. We left the driver to take care of the car. And instead of taking care of the car, he texted his friends and he told them to come and clear out the car. 6 months on the road giving, 6 months on the road working with people, 6 months on the road of creating all kinds of miracles around the world, and this is our repayment? That's how I'm feeling, right? And so here's what's going on. I open the back of the truck, this stuff's gone. I am heartbroken. It's gone. First, there's denial. "Oh, he moved it. He must have moved the stuff." Then there's reality. He didn't move it. Now, we've heard a few people today talk about changing your eyes to change your stress levels. One of the first things you do when you become afraid is you look intently at stuff and focus. If you are afraid of If you're afraid of public speaking, sometimes it's because you're focusing rather than having a cast-out view of the entire audience. When you open your eyes into a relaxed state, you become more relaxed. In that moment, it's difficult to do that because this stuff's missing and you're looking for clues. And I'm angry, and I'm frustrated, and I'm pissed off. It's all gone. And my wife, crying her eyes out, that pissed me off. Now I'm angry. But is anger going to help? No. Anger is not going to help at all. The next 2 weeks of our life are ruined. I'm angry, I've got adrenaline coursing through my system, she's crying. And I have to ask myself, "Is anger helping?" And I realized it isn't. And I thought to myself, "Okay, but what would help?" And I said, "Calm." But calm was not available to me. It was not an available emotion. In the App Store. Couldn't get it. And so I started asking a new question. I suddenly realized the Viktor Frankl thing. If he's on a train with his book about meaning and he's on his way to Auschwitz and he can reconcile with that, surely I can reconcile with this. And so I start thinking to myself, "All right, I have actually zero regret. I have no regrets, no anger, no resentments about my past, none." And I had a tough childhood. I had to call the police once to break up a fight between my mom and my dad over a knife. You know, I had a tough childhood. I'm grateful for it. I was homeless at 15 years old in Edmonton, Alberta, in the winter. I would like to tell you that that means -40, and for those of you who are Americans, it's the same. -40 is -40 in both. It's cold. But I don't have any anger or resentment about that. So I looked at this event and I thought, "Well, you know what?" I know that one day I'm gonna feel grateful for this. One day I am. Why might I? Why might I one day be grateful for this event? Why might I? And I started thinking, okay, well, can't come up with anything. No, come on, why might you be grateful for this one day? Well, to be fair, you and Elise could use 2 weeks without work distraction, what have you. So without laptops, you're gonna have 2 weeks of nothing. So you're gonna have a lot of time together. I thought, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. And also, my phone was gone and I'd been trying, I'd been thinking about living without a phone, which by the way, as a result of this, I ended up living without a cell phone for 6.5 months, wrote an 80,000-word book, and had the single most 6-month productive 6 months of my life. That's a whole nother talk for another day. 6.5 months without a phone, and the only reason I bought one is my wife got pregnant. Then I had to have a phone. Fair enough? So I started thinking, "Okay, then I'm going to try my no-phone experiment. I don't have a laptop." Plus, I told my wife when I sold my last business that we're going to take her on this huge shopping spree. I told her, "$15,000 of anything you want." " Clothes, all of it, just whatever you want." She hates shopping for clothes, we've never done it. Now she has no choice. Plus, she has a 3.5-year-old Mac and I'm her IT director, which means I'm the one fixing everything all the time. I find— and she won't let me buy her new Mac. Now I get to buy her new Mac. "Hey, while I'm at it, I get to buy myself a new Mac." I am not kidding you, I'm still standing there with the door open looking at the empty truck and I started feeling good about this theft. And I had a longer list. I just— I kept coming up with reasons that this theft was a massive gift in my life. And I'm like, This is incredible. And I turn around, I put my hand on my wife's shoulders. And men, by the way, if you would like to know what women really want to know from you, what they really want to know above all is that everything is going to be okay. And so I turned and I put my hands on her shoulders and I looked her deep in the eyes and I said, "Listen, I'm telling you, everything is going to be okay." And she looks at me and she goes, "How?" And I said, "This is going to be hard for you to understand at this moment because you have all the adrenaline in your system, but I'm telling you, look at me right now. Do I look angry?" She goes, "No." Do I look upset? No. I'm excited. She goes, "You're excited? Why?" And I go, "Laptops, this, that, plus you and I are gonna have 2 weeks with no electronic distractions. We're gonna have a ton of fun. We're gonna have great sex, walks on the beach. It's gonna be the best 2 weeks of our lives." She's like, "Cool." And I wanna tell you something, it was. The next 2 weeks were fabulous. And it would put me in a position where, by the way, I was the one editing all the surveillance video for the police. I was directing the investigation because when you are rational, people listen to you. When you're all anger-based, they don't. So here's how it works. Event happens, you figure out the emotion you're having, and you decide, is it serving you? Then you say, what emotion would be serving me better? And then you ask yourself, "What would have to happen for me to find gratitude right now?" The more gratitude you can find for your past, the more faith you will have in your future. Thank you guys so very much. It's been an honor and a privilege to be here with you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.