Designing a Life You LOVE with Rand Selig

You know, I believe we can be the designers of our own life, and I think we can in similar way be the author of our own story. Being the author, now that I am a published author, is a really great thing because you can decide what to edit, you can decide what to delete, and then your story is more interesting to you, and it's certainly more interesting to other people that are hearing it. Uh, I, I, I think the This issue of, do you have choice? A lot of people feel like they're on a conveyor belt and they've decided to stay on the conveyor belt. That's a choice. It's a choice. If you wake up and you say, oh, I really don't want to go to work today.

Rand, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. Before we jump into the first question, I'd love to give some Context to everybody. You and I met, geez, about six months ago through a mutual podcaster friend who just thought that we would get along, and we had a series of hour-long calls where you got to know me and I got to know you. We've read each other's books, and now we're recording this podcast so that you can share what you've been sharing with me privately, publicly. So I wanted to address that to give everyone some context, and my first question is going to sound like a little bit of a layup, but I think it'll give some good context for everybody. What is thriving?

Ah, beautiful, beautiful. It's great to be here with you, Nick and Luke. Thriving is this place that we can all get to. Some people are there more readily than others, but it's a place that is— and I'm trying to unpack this and give some, some compass for people to get there. Sometimes we get off track. We do things to hurt ourselves, to self-sabotage, to deny ourselves some possibility, to hold on some bad habits and think that there's no other possibility. But I just want to be a voice of encouragement and inspiration for folks to say, no, you can thrive. Thriving is a very special place. I hope everybody's had that experience at least for some period of time. And what I suggest is that you got to get to know yourself really well, and you can find out what is going on inside. That's what's most important here. It's not the outside world. It's not what other people are doing. It's what you're all about, which takes some homework. You got to look at it. You can't just do it once and 10 years later say, oh, I'm still good. No, you got to keep looking at it periodically because you change and the world changes. I think thriving is a function of 4 things, and I break that into 4 sections of my book. There's thriving personally, which has to do with your character, which has to do with having gratitude. It has to do with how you're handling your finances. It has to do with whether you're going to have purpose and meaning in your life. There's a group of those things. A second element is you got to be thriving with others. And then you go into thriving out in the world, which is volunteering and being of service and being charitable and philanthropic. And then the 4th section of the book, very important, and it doesn't have to be a person who's 70, 80, 90 years old. It happens all the time, which is you got to be thriving by moving ever forward in life. You got to keep gathering wisdom. You got to keep committing to becoming a better better person that you can