The Abundance Spiral Progression: How to Create Value by Practicing Gratitude - Dan Sullivan

What I'm going to show you here relates to every single human being on the planet now, and there's no prediction of how any human being is going to go, okay? So it's completely non predictive how any person on the planet could go. And I call this the abundance spiral. And interesting enough, if you want to be on the plus side of the microchip, you have to be extraordinarily grateful as a human being. And gratitude is actually a skill. Okay? People say, well, people think gratitude is kind of a result of something, but it isn't. Because really being grateful is something that you make up. You don't have to be grateful. Nobody has to be grateful. People choose to be grateful. But what's really interesting about gratitude is that it's closely related to another word, which is appreciation. And appreciation and gratitude are often used interchangeably. I really appreciate what you did there. I'm really grateful. And there's a crossover. But appreciation is a even more interesting word because it includes gratitude, but includes several other meanings. And one of the primary other meanings is to increase in value. So in the economic world, we talk about gold appreciating, we talk about stocks appreciating, we talk about real estate appreciating. And so very, very interestingly is that there's this one sense in economic sense of the increase in value. And then the other one is there's another word that is used often for appreciation, and that is to fully understand the situation. I've done my research and I fully appreciate what's going on there. So the interesting thing is that it's a full knowledge of something with a corresponding increase in value. And then it's got the gratitude thing of actually feeling that something is special. You're making something special in your life. So what I would say is the proper training for being incredibly wealthy in the world is to get very, very good at gratitude on a daily basis. Gratitude for what? Gratitude for anything you choose to be grateful for. So, for example, tonight each of us could actually write out to Joel, joel, you're here tomorrow. Write out a list and write down five things that you're really grateful for. Joel actually being here today, two things will happen is Joel's value in your mind will go up, but Joel's value in his mind will go up if you give it to him. Now. You don't have to do this. You don't have to do this. But if you choose to do it, value will be created. So that's where I'm saying it's the start of the value creation chain. And what happens then is a second thing is that gratitude leads to creativity. And the reason is Steve Jobs was asked, what's creativity? And he says, putting stuff together. No, I mean really creative people. And he says, really creative people are people who put a lot of stuff together. Okay, so the interesting thing here that I find about this is that you don't put things together you don't value. So in order to be creative, just increase your level of gratitude. And all of a sudden you see possibilities that you didn't see before. First of all, your understanding goes up, because that's one of the meanings of appreciation. And you will have taken the value of something up. But in doing that, you also see new potential for making it even more valuable. Okay, so one of the things that I do, if I'm having a difficult situation where I'm actually going to confront someone before I go into the meeting, I write down eight things that I really am grateful for, the person before. And I walk in and I never say any of those eight things, but the other person picks up on it. They can just tell by my tone what it is. And then all sorts of good things happen out of the meeting rather than a confrontation. All salespeople hate confrontation. How many of you, as a salesperson, absolutely hate confrontation? You can avoid it for the rest of your life if you're willing to just say what you're grateful for about the other person. Immediately their mood will change, their relationship to you will change any difficult problem. Write down the eight things you're grateful for about the situation. Immediately you'll see new possibilities. And that's the creativity. Now we start getting multipliers and you have gratitude times creativity equals cooperation. And this is very important because cooperation is the entire basis for human civilization. And there's a very famous economist by the name of Hayek. How many of you have read Hayek? FA Hayek, Road to Serfdom, the Fatal Conceit? And he said that people have capitalism completely backwards. He says capitalism isn't the cause of anything. Capitalism is the result of something. And what capitalism is is actually an ever expanding system of increased cooperation among strangers. He says all other systems besides capitalism is that you can only have cooperation among friends and family. Capitalism is the only system where you can have trust. Trust among friends, trust among strangers. And one of my greatest examples, because I was born before it was invented, was the ATM machine. So the ATM machine is one of the most amazing examples of cooperation with that I've ever seen. Okay? And I actually had the opportunity and the pleasure of sitting one night with Dee Bak, who created the original visa system. He was the one who got all the banks in the United States to actually agree to be part of it. And it took him about 12 years to get people to see how taking this risk of being in this big system was actually going to be better for them. And I was struck by that. One day we were in Vienna, and we were staying at one of the classic famous hotel. It's called the Soccer Hotel in Vienna. And I didn't have any Euros. I didn't have enough Euros. So I went downstairs, talked to the concierge, and I asked him, where's the atm? He immediately knew, of course, what I was talking about. And he says, walk down two and a half blocks when you get to the McDonald's across the street, and it's right between the Apple store and Starbucks, Which is another story. Which is another story. And I go, and you know what? English. Do you like English? What language do you want? English. What do you want? You press and then you just hear a series of bang, out comes your money. And if Babs is with me when I do that, I turn around and I say, what a world. Because that's all cooperation among strangers. Nobody who created that system even knows who I am except digitally, okay? So that's what you have to understand. So this constant creating, greater gratitude, lending to greater creativity, creates cooperation. And then what you start getting is massive opportunity. One of the biggest reasons why people are swimming from Cuba to the United States and not the other way. Very few cases of Americans swimming to Cuba, you know, or not. Massive movement of Americans to China, but massive movement of Chinese and their money and their children to the United States is because there's an inbuilt sense. That's where the opportunity is. The reason is I'm moving from a location of just trust among friends and family to a place of trust among strangers. There's an implicit understanding that I'm moving to a place where greater things can happen without me even being born there, me even having a lot of connections there, it's just going to be massive, massively there. If you move a Mexican from 20 miles below the Texas border to 20 miles above the export, you've just multiplied that person's lifetime possibilities by roughly eight times just by putting them in another system. And it's all because the American system is really systematically built on these three things. And then what you get is the real emergence of ingenuity. So if you have someone like The Google people, you have Steve Jobs, you have Jeff Bezos. They're very ingenious. But the reason is they're ingenious is because they have all this working for them. They're taking advantage of a system that's been put in place for not more. You know, it's not just 220 years since the, you know, since the beginning of the American system, but it goes back 400 years. You know, actually, the first English settlers in the United States were 1620. So we're approaching, you know, we're approaching 400 years that a model has been developed that is essentially based on this. And then with these two, Multiply this. These two. Multiply this, These two, multiply this. And then what you start to get is these enormous exponentials that. Peter Diamantis was voted one of the top 50 most influential people in the world by Fortune magazine. I complained because he was number 43. Thank you. Okay, so the other thing is the opportunities times the ingenuity create the exponentials. Now, here's the interesting thing. People will get here and they'll forget where it started, and then they'll lose their influence and they'll lose their fortune and they'll lose their capabilities. And you don't really have to worry about this. You don't really have to worry about this. You don't have to worry about this, this, and this. And the reason is they're byproducts of the first one. If you do the byproduct, you'll get this one if you multiply this times this. So that's the new system. So we're talking about the binary system. This is the one side of the system, okay? And gratitude is its own reward because gratitude eliminates negative thoughts. You cannot be simultaneously grateful about something and feeling negative. You cannot be simultaneously grateful and feeling critical. You cannot be simultaneously grateful and feel and be complaining. You cannot be simultaneously grateful. And there's another system out there, and this one gets better media coverage than the system I just talked about, and it's the one based on envy. And envy is the 180 degree opposite of gratitude. And envy is really based on resenting the better results and advantages of others, okay? And this is very easy to do if you're into that game. Very easy to resent the better results of other people because they're all around you, okay? And then what envy leads to is also correspondingly a sense of guilt that you're feeling badly that one's results and advantages are better than someone else. So I find that People who are feeling guilty, feeling envious, also feel guilty. They seem to go together with each other. So if you multiply envy times guilt, what you get is massive indignation, anger that some people's results and advantages are better than others. And I grew up with a cartoon strip called Little Abner. How many of you remember Little Abner? Little Abner, he had various characters in there, but one of them was an organization, this is 1960s, called swine S W I N E. And that was students wildly indignant about nearly everything. Okay, and it was a big joke, but it was. You were talking about students who were at the very, very top of human life. You know, they had just been born into the most wealthy, victorious society on the planet. They were given every advantage there was massive. And they were just wildly indignant about the unfairness of what had been happening to them. And the reason is their model didn't start with gratitude. It started with envy. And this again is a choice. But you make the same choice enough times in a row, it starts to become a habit. So a lot of people can't remember where it all started. But if you do envy for about 20 years, it's a very, very powerful habit. If you do gratitude for 20 years, it's a very powerful hab. It was a choice at the beginning. And that's why people say, well, they couldn't help it. Well, I said, that sounds like it's in this system. You can always help it. You can always help it in a moment that you can help it just by choosing gratitude over envy. And then if you have guilt times indignation, what you get is a massive sense of unfairness, believing that everyone's results and advantages must be made equal. So there's a lot of political talk these days about making things equal. But you have to understand that all those thoughts about unfairness are based on envy, guilt and indignation. Indignation times unfairness leads to the concept of depletion and depletion, believing that the resources of the world are being used up by an unfair minority. Okay, so one of my favorite writers is a man by the name of Julian Simon, who is an economist, actually a statistician. And he came to the understanding that the bigger the population on the planet, the more resources we have. If you want to increase the resources on the planet, increase the population. And he says with every increase of population, the lifestyle, the well being of human beings increases. We're incredibly better off with a population of 7 billion than we were with a population of 1 billion. What about all the resources we're using up there hasn't been one that's been depleted ever. As a matter of fact, every 10 years the amount of, for example, just using the fossil based fuels. Ten years ago they thought we were running out. Now they estimate the United States just with natural gas, has about 300 years of natural gas available. And he said there are no natural resources. There's just one resource called human ingenuity. And it's only human thinking and human ingenuity that actually makes anything valuable. He said Camel was just something that got camel's feet dirty before human ingenuity turned it into something value. So again, where do you find ingenuity? You don't find ingenuity in this system, you find ingenuity in the other system. And then the final one, unfairness times depletion leads to a fundamental understanding of zero sum, which means believing that one person's gain comes from at the expense of someone else's loss. So if you have something, it means that someone else on the planet has been deprived of something. And you can see how this is self reinforcing. So I have actually college friends that I graduated with who now basically almost 50 years later, I could see that their entire life over the last 50 years has been based on that system. And it's very, very interesting because they're very smart and the smarter people are, the less they actually examine their own thinking because they're very confident about their thinking. And what I notice is that when I get together with them, which I don't frequently, nothing's changed in their life except they're a lot older and they're getting tired and they're feeling that basically they're witnessing the last age of humanity because it's all going to end with them, which I think is a bit of an arrogance. So the interesting thing is that I want to express to you that the reason why we get this huge polarization in society with huge equality is basically because the microchip forces everybody to be a one or a zero and there's no in between and the one. If you want to be on the one side, you have to have gratitude as your starting point. If you want to be on the zero part, you start with envy. So what does this all mean? Okay, well basically you have these two worlds. And what I've noticed a lot of entrepreneurs, and I see it in Strategic Coach that they have every reason to be able to be increasing their success by 10 times, but they don't. Okay, I know people thinking about Coming into Strategic Coach have the basis, talent, resources, other people's capabilities, opportunities go 10 times, but they don't. And I've tried to puzzle this over the years. Why is it, you know, they've got so much going for them, but they don't do it? And then I have people who come into the program and they make rapid progress and they drop out. And I'm starting to say, well, why would you drop out? Things are going so good. And the reason is because they're operating as an entrepreneur in this world, but they're actually living, all their relationships are in this world. And it just becomes too big a strain for them to justify why they should be having increased success in a world where their success is also causing the misery of other human beings, including all of their friends. So one of the things I've gotten to think of, and it really got really triggered when I came to Peter's first abundance360, is that we have to create a barrier, the abundance barrier, between our world and the other world. And what this barrier really is is going back to the first exercise is always choosing energy over stuff. This is a stuff world. It becomes more and more of it. There's no energy in this world. There's no energy whatsoever. It's a complete. There is depletion in this world. It's the depletion of energy. Just a complete and total depletion of energy. Okay? The worst, the most ecologically destroyed environment on the world are the Soviet Union and communist China and North Korea, who totally believe in envy, guilt and indignation. So where gratitude is not the basis, you are going to get depletion. So what I'm suggesting, and this is just that I remember Charlie Tremendous Jones, very famous, you probably, Joel, very famous platform speaker for many, many years. He said, I know a lot of stuff, but I know these two things, that who you're going to be 10 years from now is a function of the books you read and who you hang out with, okay? You hang out with. So one of the things we're talking about 10 times, we're talking about technologies here, we're talking about marketing, we're talking about very simple techniques that produce multipliers. But if you're doing all that stuff within an environment where most of the people you hang out with is on the other side of the barrier, you're going to run into increasing strains. So what I've decided, just as part of my trading stuff for energy, is that more and more my world is going to look like this. That More and more. Almost everybody I know operates this way. Almost everybody I know believes in this and more and more. I mean, you only have so much time in the day and if you fill it up just with people who believe this, you don't have any time for people who don't believe in it. So I call this the Abundance Neighborhood. How many of you have given a lot of thought to where you live about the neighborhood you live in? Well, that's physically for the most part, but it isn't just physically. You didn't choose the neighborhood just for the house. You didn't choose the neighborhood just for his services. You chose the neighborhood for a certain community that would really, really support you and make you feel secure and give a great deal of pleasure. I'm saying that that operates on the physical level, but more importantly, it operates on the intellectual, psychic and emotional level. So the big thing just to put the three things together, is that if you have an attitude of 10 times, a lot easier than two times, if you're just in an exchange of stuff for energy, and then you constantly are grateful for everything in your life, you'll start on a path where you'll lead to gratitude and creativity and cooperation and opportunity and exponentials and the ingenuity and exponentials. And then more and more you will notice that part of the stuff in your life is people who are on the other side of the barrier, who are on the envy side of the barrier. Okay. And that's my view of summing up basically the million years of human civilization.

So we're going to break here in just a moment, but just some recommendations other than being in strategic coach on how some rituals and things that people here could adopt and use in order to not get pulled back because it's constant. I mean, we live in a. You know, many parts of the world are very anti capitalistic and do not at all comprehend this and will actually vilify people that have this sort of mindset. So what are some recommendations?

Well, you know, I try to stay away from capitalism because it's a loaded word and it's. And you know what Hayek said? He says it's not about capital at all, it's about cooperation. Capital is just the. Capital is just the byproduct of the cooperation. But the biggest thing I do so for example, last night before I came to 25k, I sat down and I spent about a half hour of eight things that I'm totally grateful about. Genius Network. And so when I came in this morning, I came in just with a totally clear attitude for the creativity and cooperation and opportunity that could come out this morning. And if I had any sense of envy or I was comparing myself with someone else, then if Joel spoke, then I might be put off by that. What's he know? And everything like that. But my attitude is, no, this man has, you know, I mean, you know, I wrote on my card, it was like watching a master, you know, it was just great artistry, what you were doing. And I, you know, and I appreciate great artists. And I just felt that. But the reason is because last night I had, you know, I had already prepared myself to appreciate things and to be grateful for things. So any major event that you're going into, just give yourself a half hour. And what it is, is like an immune system. Bad things can happen to you in a state of gratitude. You know, you can't catch any bad germs in a state of gratitude. I mean, it's just impossible. And it's an active principle. It's not a resulting principle. A lot of people say, well, I'll feel grateful if somebody does that. It's not about what somebody else does. It's created from the inside. And I think that's the biggest thing that's just there. People are having relationship conflicts. Write down the eight things that you're grateful for the other person, and immediately you'll notice some leeway and give in the situation. The main reason for a conflict in relationship is the other person is not feeling appreciated. If you take the level of appreciation up, it breaks the logjam.