Would You Rather be Lucky or Work Hard(er)?

Mike and I are very excited about this podcast. We're talking about some things that I think everybody needs to know, especially if you're in the entrepreneurial world. It has to do with how you do the hard interface of hard work and easy luck. How do you work the two so that you're not having to work yourself half to death?

All right, and one of the things that we talk about, and Gay has, as usual, some great stories, some great examples of how to.

Release and relinquish control and allow luck to show up in your life, and a different way of thinking about what luck really is. We're not talking about gambling luck, but it's where you're opening yourself up to manifesting opportunities, receiving abundance and getting out of your way. Might sound a little bit esoteric, but as usual, Gay does an amazing job of applying this to your real life in a practical, tactical way. And we also get into and talk about the relationship between fear, money, and death. And I think that is really worth understanding and contemplating. And hopefully you'll hear it, see it, and feel it through a completely different lens.

Today's episode is about the interface between luck and work. Is it better to be lucky or is it better to work hard? And what's the interface between the two? So this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time, and I'm real eager to share what I've learned about it with you.

All right, so set it up. Tell us a story. I know you always begin with some kind of a story that gets us rolling here, Gay, so I'm going to let you just take it from here and let's dive deep.

Yes. Well, I've learned a lot in my business life from a lot of great business mentors. Actually, when I was a kid, I was always famous for going around asking people's advice about things. So I think from an early age, somehow I became accumulator of wisdom. And they kind of joked about it when I was a kid because I was always, you know, like, if my uncle was around, I'd say, you know, Uncle Bob, what did you learn? I know you were a rider on the Pony Express way back there, and what did you learn from that? So it's always been of interest to me. And if I'm sitting next to somebody at an airline in an airplane, I like to talk to them about what they've learned in their work. So that's the background of this. And I was walking across the street one time with Jurka Russevi, who's The head of Gaia out in Boulder, Colorado, which is a big media company. And it's the company to whom I sold the Spiritual Cinema Circle some years ago when it got too big for us to run. And I was asking Jurka what he'd learned from his entrepreneurial life. He's done several hundred deals and been a very successful entrepreneur for many, many years. Since moving here from the Czech Republic and going to work as a bag boy at a health food store in Boulder. He worked himself up to launching Corporate Express and then Gaia and has been involved in all sorts of things. But anyway, what did he learn from all those years? And he said, well, he always asks people when they sell him a company, why did you go into business? Why did you want to go into business for yourself? And invariably they would say, I went into business for myself because I wanted more free time. And he said, that's always the funniest thing he ever did. Because if you go into business for yourself as an entrepreneur, what you're not going to get is more free time. What you're going to get is a lot of time to think about whatever you're obsessed about. And so if you're obsessed benignly with this thing you want to launch, you don't mind working on it till midnight, you don't want the free time. And you better be that kind of obsessed, otherwise it's not going to be very much fun. And I'm big for work balance with home balance and everything like that. And you also need to realize that if you're going to go into business for yourself, you require almost a passion that transcends almost anything else. Because without it, even with it, sometimes you can't succeed, but without it, it's very hard to succeed. And so I wanted to look into that a little bit because it gets into this interface I'm talking about between do you let luck support you or do you think that you have to work hard? Because if you think you have to work hard, then that takes you down a path that basically requires more and more situations in which you have to work harder and harder and harder. So what I want people to do is learn how to steer the boat from way back in the boat rather than up front on the boat prowl with the rain in your face. Because if you can learn to ease up and get more open to positive energy and to the support that's trying to be given to you in any moment, then you have a much easier way to do the work, even when it looks hard.

Well, I'M going to give you a little story of my own that ties into this and it's a little bit of an indirect path, but I think ultimately it answers the question about hard work and doing the brute force exercise and then creating conscious luck opportunities that become the amplifiers, the multipliers, and the vehicle that gives you exponential growth. And this year, my word of the year is exponential. Last year it was leverage. And I'm looking for exponential growth opportunities, exponential income, exponential freedom. And that occurs when a combination of the right who's show up in your life and also the right circumstances, what someone might say a lucky circumstance because most people who talk about their moment that really amplified it was it either came from brute force effort or right place, right time, right market, right person and momentum just was a natural byproduct. So first the, the first story. So on Sunday, I went out for a long walk with a very good friend of mine, Darren Hardy. And if you don't know Darren anyone who's not familiar with him, he was the editor of Success magazine for a long time. He is the most disciplined, diligent human being I've ever known. I mean, just like. And he freely admits, and I what I'm about to share will not betray his trust because he's very open about this. But he says, I am 99.1% on all the time. If it does not have meaning, purpose and an outcome, it doesn't matter what it is, I do not do it. And he said.

And he's reached the point where he doesn't have an upper rung to go after anymore. He has more money than he'll ever be able to spend. He's accomplished more. He's distilled the wisdom and knowledge of some of the most successful people in the world. That's why he did Success is it was like he got access to Steve Jobs, he got access to Oprah and anyone he wanted to interview. He could interview him and learn from them and ask very poignant questions before and after the camera or the audio recorder was running. And he writes to this day all of his own copy, all of his own webinars. He is a machine. And what he said in addition to I don't have another run to go for, he just said, I know I am unhealthily out of balance. And as I told him while we were walking.

I said, if you think about it, you have spent your entire life crafting and creating a massive robot machine, which you are all of your internal chemicals fire and reward you for this extraordinary work. But when I think about it and I look at Darren, could I possibly say for a moment that his success is a result of any luck? I don't think he'd say yes. And any right place, right time was a matter of figuring out how to strategically get there and not wasting a second. So when he focused on it, it happened. Whereas if you look at other super successful people who I know you know plenty of, and you're one.

You spend a lot more time pondering, manifesting, meditating in order to create an atmosphere or a circumstance situation where luck enters in and you open yourself up to the unknown. Darren exists in the known. He would rather have precise predictability than any unknowns. His life has been about eliminating them. So I wanted to pose that and then pass it back to you gay, because you're, you know, you've.

Really figured out a vehicle for bridging the two. And so what have you to say?

Well, I know Darren and I really think highly of him. And Katie and I have actually been interviewed for Success magazine. So we have a lot of regard for Darren. And here's the thing. Darren actually is a perfect candidate for our mastermind. Because.

In a way, I think life only succeeds best when you have that integration of the hard worker in this big contest of the big lucker. In other words, you're as equally open to being supported by unknown forces in the universe as you are on the known forces. We know that if you plan goals out and you choose good goals, what I call luckworthy goals.

Goals that the universe can support in a benign way, I think that brings a certain type of success. However, I think that life is only at its best and most successful when you have that complete integration of the two of the hard work factor, the diligence factor, because I'm allergic to this word hard. I've never. You know, it's like I was a kid. I remember seeing my older brother who was eight years older. He'd be sitting there in his chair and he'd be working on geometry and trigonometry and he'd always have this. He'd be chewing on his pencil and everything. When I got there, I realized there was absolutely no need to wrinkle your forehead in order to solve trigonometry problems. Not required. It wasn't anywhere in the book. It said, to solve this problem, you must scrunch up every muscle in your face. So that was what he had added onto the situation. So in the actual real world, if you want to have life satisfaction, it's got to be this benign integration of a person who's completely open to the unknown and also highly functioning in the known. But one of my great early teachers, Krishnamurti, I went around to all his lectures when he was still alive in the 70s and 80s. And one of his most famous books is called Freedom from the Known. And in my experience, that was one of my early influences. Because in a way, it's the time off that allows you to come back on in a more informed and.

Creative way with. Rather than staying on all the time. In my experience, life is its best when it's done in alternating current, not in direct current. And if you look at human beings the way we're all wired too, from the very beginning, like if you study the work of the great developmental psychologist, Psychiatrist Margaret Mahler, M.D. she was at Yale University. She. She mapped out the first year of life and showed that the first year of life, the first half of it, is about union. It's about being nourished and nurtured and learning how to relax and let go and receive nurturing. The second six months of life, when you begin to crawl and move around, is about individuation. And she points out that for the rest of our lives, we go back and forth between union, individuation, union and individuation. So what needs to happen, I believe, to make life really successful is that we get really good at focus and then union focus, coming back home to union, to our own pure consciousness, to the support functions and consciousness of the universe itself. Because you have to realize that we are just microcosms of the whole operation. We wouldn't be here except that we're made of the same stuff as everything else in the universe is made out of, just configured in slightly different ways. And so we need to, I think, at all times be diligent, impeccable in the material world, but also be completely open to the support from that other world that's just sitting there. As the great novelist Franz Kafka said, you don't need to do anything. Be very still and ordinary. Just sit still for a moment and the universe will roll in ecstasy at your feet. It has no choice. I love that because it lets us know that it's the receiving phase that makes so much difference in the quality of life as the doing phase.

So as you were going through that, a few things popped into my head. One of them is one of my favorite sayings. It's. Carl Sagan says, we are stardust, powered by starlight.

And I'm curious what your Perspective is then. So let's just make the assumption that first of all, we are energetically, spiritually part of the whole. And the microcosm is the macrocosm. And anyone who's done deep meditative work or plant medicine knows that part of the experience is letting go, completely sinking in and ceasing to exist. It's releasing and relinquishing sense of self or ego in order to experience this loving divine presence and become part of it and become and be inseparable.

And there are tools like human design, astrology, some divine math, the Kabbalah, and there are many, many other tools that allow you to peer into and experience the perfect math of the universe.

And now I'm not going to pretend to understand or know this, but my outsider perspective of it is, is when you use these divine tools, what it allows you to do is stop and see your relationship in the universe as a whole and maybe get a perspective of where you are, where the universe is going, and be able to predict or divine.

Motion, movement inside of that. And I'm. I'm curious what your perspective is on the usage of these tools.

Taking the chaos, making it predictable in some cases, you know, in Hindi practices, you know, they, they believe in karma and reincarnation. And the, the point and purpose is that there is no beginning or end, that you're changing form and that there is a, maybe a reason why you return. And then you'll, you know, cease at some point you'll achieve the outcome goal that the universe has for you and elevate up into a different state, maybe an angelic state, for example, again, depending on belief systems. But I'm curious what your perspective is to tie luck, work and divination and some of these resources and tools are.

Yes, that's a great question. I want to hark back to one of my original.

Psychedelic journeys way back. And this was about the same time I was learning to meditate back in the 70s. So they're a little bit blurred together because I had a lot of deep meditation experience was when I first began, as I continue to. But I also had a lot of deep psychedelic experiences at the time. And on this one particular experience, I had the experience of watching thoughts materialize from nowhere, kind of to come out of space and to go through a flowering and then lead to other thoughts. In other words, I could see the beginning of a thought chain come out of nowhere, take form, and then see what happened after that. It was like everything was slowed down, kind of like watching fish in an aquarium. I was Watching my thoughts like that, and what I realized is where distortion comes from is where we put the brakes on something because of societal conditioning. Now sometimes it's a good thing to put the brakes on because of societal conditioning. You know, your mom or dad tells you, don't cross the street when you have the impulse look first, you know, and so you learn to put the brakes on. But the problem with that is that we overextend that to putting the brakes on our own creativity. And the moment you start doing that, if you begin to resist your creativity or resist maybe feelings you don't want to feel that are there for some reason, the moment you get into an argument with yourself, you're basically in an argument with the universe itself, because we're all made of the same thing and we're all doing the same thing. And if you think about it like compare, for example, the emergence of a single thought. It kind of comes out of the infinite space somewhere down in your mind, and then it flourishes, it comes to fruition. And it could be a good positive thought, like, hey, I think I'll go down to the homeless shelter and help out today. Or it could be a negative thought, like, hey, I think I'll steal that homeless guy's money that he's got there in the tray. And so in a way, they're both an emergence from space.

And what happens oftentimes when we start resisting things like that is they really turn toxic very quickly. And we create our own karma based on what we resist in ourselves.

I don't happen to believe in any kind of past life or post life version of karma. I think it's right here, staring us right in the face. One of my original, when I looked at back in the late 60s, early 70s, I remember Maharishi once saying, reincarnation is only for the lazy. You know, get it done this life and don't mess around. And so anyway, I don't put my attention on what happened before or what happened after, because I can get everything from this moment here. And I think if we're paying attention, you can learn exactly the same things from this moment than you could from any kind of past life regression or even psychedelics or anything like that. It's just that things like consciousness tools like psychedelics and meditation allow you to kind of slow down for a moment and take your attention off the outside world. And probably if you did that in another way, you would get equally good benefits. I know I've learned as much or more from 50 years of meditation every day. Than I ever have for many psychedelic excursions or any kind of the use of any other consciousness tool I've ever used. But anyway, back to the original question. I think the real issue begins when we start applying the brakes to our consciousness so that we slow ourselves down in a way to fit in with what's going on around us. And it's a bad habit to get into. If we start doing that with our own inner creative impulses, it leads to all sorts of toxicity.

Okay, so I'll give you another thought here. When it comes to the interface between luck and work and making and opening yourself up to more potential.

Allowing luck to occur, and as you always say, it's about learning to receive more. It's opening yourself up to reception. I've said this on this podcast before, that when I work with my clients, I always do an energetic exercise where I ask them to look at the ocean when they're with me in our condo on the beach. I let them stay there and smell the ocean, feel the ocean, walk in the sand, and I ask them to make that a ritual before we meet. I say look into the ocean and use it as a metaphor and ask yourself, are you willing to receive all that the universe has to offer you, all that it's willing to give you, and will you bring that with us today as we manifest the new version of you and your business? Right. So that becomes a thought. And then I ask them for their word. What's the word? Their feeling or emotion they want to experience right now, today, and all the time in whatever this manifestation that we create, what we manifest. So I bring that up because.

I.

Was meditating, doing my meditation this morning, and I really ran into, like, an iron pylon.

Of fear. Okay. And I think in my age, I've learned to not fear a lot of things, and yet I'm abundantly aware of how much stuff still remains. And if you asked yourself, if I were 100% fearless, who would I become? Who would I serve? What are some of the things I would do?

How willing would I be to pursue my greatest pleasures.

Opportunities.

Ambitions.

Etc. So, in other words, when you fully relax and sink into the universe of potential, what could that possibly be? And I know my recurring theme that I believe is embedded on a deep DNA level, coming from, you know, the. Coming from an epigenetic level, very poor immigrants who came here.

And. And the recurring thing that'll pop up is, do I have enough stored so that I would. Wouldn't have to work another day in my life? If I wanted to, and maintain a quality of life. Right? So it's that fear of. Of losing the creature comforts and this stasis that I, I have that's just like. And it doesn't matter. I can say, yes, I'm just fine, but it's still this, like, noodling little er. And one meditation which I think ties into this interface between luck and work is the action of work. Although it can feed you and give you purpose and meaning and impact and all that, ultimately it serves a means of providing more value than you're consuming so that you store it. And the concept of what money is, the act of working to earn and store something, Even if that's 100% a societal illusion or.

What'S the word for it? A.

Hallucination is.

Money represents a storage of a fear of death. Okay. And it takes a little noodling to think about that. And then luck.

At least in a primitive state is. You think about luck in the terms of would I win a lottery? Would I win? When I gamble, will I walk in and be able to win on red and pick it and get anything I want? And, you know, there was a Twilight Zone episode, don't remember if you and I talked about it, where the. This guy goes in and he wins and wins and wins and he finds out that he can't lose and he starts going crazy and he thought he was in heaven, but it turns out he's in hell. And during that thing, Satan shows up and he's like, right, you can't lose. So I think luck.

Is like a variable. It's a perfect variable that allows us to experience.

More randomness because if everything were predictable, it would suck if you won all the time. If you got everything you wanted. This illusion, you know, if you believe in the Matrix, for example, you know, in there they, the, the, the agent was explaining to Neo that when we created a simulation.

And it was too perfect the human beings didn't believe it existed. And they'd pop out and they couldn't be batteries for the AIs. It was like when you pierced. And so I know I got way esoteric and all over the place here, but again, I'm curious what the tie in between the interface between luck, work, fear of death is and really allowing yourself to let go and sink into manifesting that luck. So was that too all over the place for you?

Well, I appreciate all the detail and I want to kind of look into the central pillar that holds the whole thing together, which is that fear of death.

One of my early therapy mentors, Fritz Perl, said there was only two big fears, fear of dying and the fear of going crazy. And if you think about it, the fear.

Totally agree.

Yeah. And the fear of dying has to do with energy going this way and dissolving into nothing. And the fear of going crazy has to do with energy going this way and dispersing into space in fragmentation going this direction. And so.

Peer into the goldfish bowl and look at fear of death for a second. So storing up money, your unconscious kind of thinks of that as an antidote to dying. You know, that if I get stuff stored, then the problem is, of course, you lead to what J. Paul Getty said on his deathbed, I gladly give up my millions for one moment.

Success, one moment of love, one moment of just feeling loved. And so you got to keep those two things in balance. Otherwise, oh, there's just lots of misery there to be, you know, if you don't hold both of those in equal respect.

But what I think needs to happen is to go into that fear of dying, consciously feel it, be with it, make friends with it, get breath around it, just kind of be with it like you would a cousin that you took a dislike to a long time ago, but now you want to welcome him into your family. You know, it's a thing you got to get around because otherwise it keeps throwing you off. If you're afraid of either dying or going crazy, in my opinion, the two can be handled pretty easily at the same time, because if you go deeply enough into the fear of dying, you're also open to the big energy that flows through you of creativity. And so, in my view, evolved human beings are comfortable with the dissolution of their own body, and they're comfortable with the full expression of their own creativity that you're willing to go all the way with both. You're willing to let go of your physical body when it's time to do that, and also be willing to let go and let through as much pure creative energy as you can while your body's working well.

Yep, I completely agree. So let's. Let's package this for a moment into.

A big leap year vision. For a moment. Because if we were going to give our viewers and our listeners a prescription for.

Interfacing between luck and work, and I'm going to insert a shameless plug here, which is one of the things that Gay and I are doing is something we call the big leap year. It's when you can work with us for a year to really manifest.

Your greatest version of yourself. But we're doing it in unique and interesting ways that I think only Gay can provide with as many years as being a therapist and a successful entrepreneur and, and the same with my background. Our goal is to accelerate this and give you access to some tools that you wouldn't normally have and also get knocked into a new place in your life. So Gay, if you were going to provide a prescription for amplifying that interface between luck and work and oh, by the way, I'll just put this up here. You can learn more at our site, it's@bigleappodcast.com and then just check out Big Leap Year which is a button on the right hand side to apply and get on the the wait list. But Gay, why don't you give us your point of view?

Yes, the experience will appeal mostly to successful people who want to go to an entirely different place with their success. And so just to use a great guy like Darren, for example, his mission in a way would be to support all of that fantastic doing with a big embrace of being so that the two are fully harmonized together. And for another person, it might be about purely focusing on the expansion of that person's ability to receive positive energy both in the relationship domain, through love relationships and business relationships. Being able to receive what those people are capable of giving you, and also being able to give what people are able to receive and learning how to be in complete harmony between your ability to receive positive energy and your ability to express positive energy. That's something that requires fine tuning. And I think I've worked Now with about 800 business executives and about 4,500 couples at this stage. And I haven't found one yet that was mastering that area to his or her satisfaction. So even if you're operating at the very highest level, I always say that if you're operating in an ox cart, you don't need to be very savvy about navigation. But if you're operating your Ferrari at 180 miles an hour, you need to make very fine tuned little movements in order to get out there where you want to get in a safe way. And so it's a lot about adjusting those sales, it's about about fine tuning your ability to receive. And I think that the great thing that we are going to provide people, the kind of people that we want to work with in this particular small context is the kind of people that want to go all the way in every possible way. And most people have, successful people have gone a good bit of the way like Darren, to where he really wants to be, doesn't have to work and things like that. And there's still a lot more room and it's a matter of fine tuning to get those forces working in harmony.

Yeah. I think what I've found in my observation and knowing an enormous number of high performers is.

It'S very rare to meet anyone who feels like they're operating on a perfect 10, on everything. Right. Even if they nail it on a business level, it'll be like, well, it's been at the expense of my personal relationships, my happiness and satisfaction in some way, shape or form. And.

Darren, one of the things he talked about is psychological fulfillment. You know, how. And that's different than being happy, different than being successful. And we talked about, you know, being balanced in all three of those. And I would also say that the same level of success and energy that you apply to.

One area is just a different one than something else. So specifically with. With what I talked to Darren is, is he says, I'm just like. He says, I've tried taking on all kinds of hobbies, photography. I've got all the equipment, I've done this, done this. And I said. He says, it just is. It doesn't juice me. And I'm like, well, that's because the mental framework you're using in one doesn't apply to the other. It requires releasing the attachment to getting the same.

Shot of chemicals and joy. And so, I mean, we spent hours exhausting this level of thought. But I think going back to the prescription, wherever you are, where if you got asked the simple question, what area in your life, whether it be.

Happiness.

Impact, personal fulfillment related to impact, psychological abundance or feeling as though there's massive infinite growth, personal relationships, body, whatever that area is, you know, if you could have a perfect 10, what would that thing be? And are you willing to relinquish the control or the model of what you think success is from other areas of your life? That is really the reason why you're not achieving that fulfillment. And that, I think, is the exercise. And it's very rare that we have the ability to coach ourselves through that growth process. It requires an observer. It's hard to be the observer and the individual to accomplish it.

Well, that's what happens on your first big meditation retreat or your first big psychological or psychedelic journey. You realize, wow, all that stuff's been going on while I've been sitting here going about my life.

So I think, yes, exactly. That at this stage of the game, for many people it's about making a paradigm shift or a subtle shift in their ability to receive that takes them the rest of the way. And that's a very subtle process and requires some fine tuning. And it requires commitment and willingness, too, for starters. But there's a lot of technical fine tuning that needs to happen there. And it's the kind of thing that I've been thinking about for the last 60 years. So I have a lot of opinions on it. Good.

Well, I think let's wrap up this segment and ultimately, what's going on is hopefully this gave you some great insights and what to explore, how to explore, and you can interpret some of what's been shared as a prescription. But then ultimately, if you genuinely want to take action, you know, check out, first of all, bigleappodcast.com click on Big Leap Year. There's a few questions that Gay and I ask, and then someone on our team will reach out to you and see if you're a right fit for the program. But we'd love to learn more about you at a minimum. And in the meantime, make sure that if you've enjoyed this or if you know someone, one or two people who you think are looking for that next level of achievement, fulfillment and are coachable, send them over this way, share this episode with them, and of course, rate. Review this on itunes or wherever you downloaded the podcast. And Gay, anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the segment?

It's such a pleasure to have these conversations, Mike. I just, I get email and people contact me on Instagram and Twitter and things like that to say how much they're appreciating the podcast. And I'm so glad because a lot of times I just had one this weekend. A woman wrote me on Instagram and said how much we were changing her life, and she looks forward to this every time. So, yeah, sometimes speaking into the void over a microphone is fun, but I like to get that kind of feedback, too. So please let us know what kinds of things are appealing to you from our conversation.

Oh, that's awesome. Thanks. And I have the same thing. I have a lot of people I know who I didn't know were listeners saying the same thing. So, yes, in case you want to know, Gay and I get an enormous amount of satisfaction. So reach out. I'm easy to find on all the social channels. And of course, there's links on Big Leap Podcast. Same with Gay Hendricks. And we do pay attention, we do listen, we do respond. So with that, thank you for listening or watching this episode of Big Leap podcast with Gay Hendricks and Mike Koenigs. I'll see you in the next one, Gay Thanks.

In the meantime, many big leaps for everybody.

Sa.