Want to Be Happy? Be Grateful

We live in a society where we get caught up in always wanting more. And I find myself there all of the time and very rarely, or at least not enough, do we ever take a step back, look at our lives, and see how amazing things are. Like, just take a second. You might have a life right now that you were praying for five years ago. Your dream life five years ago could be your life that you have now. Think about that for a second and understand. I do understand that when I say life is amazing, I don't mean that it's perfect. I don't mean that there's not a lot of crazy things happening across the world. There always have been, there always will be, because people are nuts. But it doesn't mean that if you just put yourself and be present in your own life and you just be here now and you look at what you have, you can't go, wow, I do have a lot to be grateful for. Because if you're listening to me, you're listening to me through a phone or a computer that's connected to the Internet, that. That's talking to some satellite that's in space, and you're probably further ahead than, like, 95% of people in the world. Like, no matter where you are, there are some people that are in really dire straits. And you probably have a pretty decent life. It doesn't mean you have everything that you want, that you're worth a billion dollars, that you have a yacht. Not all of those things. I'm just saying that your life, it's probably pretty okay. It probably is, isn't it? But we're too busy thinking about what we don't have and what we used to have and what we want and what we desire. And we're like, but where I am is not good enough. And so the more that we can start from a place of gratitude, the better that we can show up and serve the world, to help continue to change the world. And so what I want to do is I just want to give you a perspective shift today. I want to give you a perspective shift. I want to talk about what the world is like right now, today, what amazing miracles we have in our lives today that we just take for granted. So I'm about to go onto a plane in a couple days, and I was just thinking how insane it is to get onto a plane. Like, you have to understand that my ancestors, your ancestors, never a lot of them, traveled anywhere further than just the place that they grew up. If we go back 500 years, all of our ancestors 500 years ago, they usually stayed in the exact same place. I'm going to hop on a plane and I'm going to travel to the other side of the earth, across the pond and go to a country that I'm going to learn and be with my family and eat and have fun, and then I'm going to come back a couple of weeks later. Like airline flight. People act like it's the worst thing in the world. Like, the most miserable people in the world are in airports. I feel like everybody should be on a flight and be like, oh, my God, this is amazing. You're sitting on a chair in the sky, you know, 30,000ft in the air, going 600 miles an hour. And we're like, but, but I have to be close to this person next to me. Oh my gosh, that person has a baby that's crying. You know, you can go from New York City to LA in like, what, five or six hours. That used to take like 30 years. And by the time that you got there, half the people died. The other half of the people are babies and children that weren't there when you started. You, like, get to your destination. Hopefully if you get there and you don't die of dysentery on the way, but you get to your destination 30 years later and it's a completely different group of people. Like whole generations were lost in the time that it took for now us to, you know what, go to the bathroom, watch a movie and take a nap. How incredible is that? It's a miracle. Take your phone, for instance, right? Most people are listening to me on their phone right now. Your phone is basically magic. If we were to bring your phone to somebody a hundred years ago, they'd be like, what is this sorcery? You can think about all of. Have you ever thought about all of the things that your phone does that you used to have to have an individual product in your house for? Like, if you were to say to somebody 25 years ago, I'm going to take a picture with my phone. They'd be like, you need to go into an institution, right? Like your phone has a camera, a camcorder. Those used to be two separate things back in the day, everybody. It's basically replaced radio and CDs, books, a calculator, it's got a voice recorder, you have GPS flashlights, you have a leveler, a scanner. You can use the compass that's on it. It's basically replace video game consoles. Your credit card is on there. It's got an Alarm clock on there, the stopwatch, a timer, a calendar, notepad, photo album, new paper. I have a guitar tuner on mine. Remote control. You can control your TV with it. Car keys. I can unlock my car with it. All of the things we used to have, something separate and it's got on it. All of the knowledge that mankind has ever known. You can Google something on the Internet and immediately get an answer. It's insane. It's amazing. It's the most credible piece of technology that's ever been made. It's a miracle. But people are like, oh, but it's so addicting. Well, yeah, you're letting it be addicting. You know, it's a great servant, but a terrible master. So if you're going to use it, you have to decide how you actually want to use it. You know, if you think about like security, I remember one time I was. I like to put my life into perspective and have moments of like, gratitude and be like, oh my God, this is amazing because a lot of times I get caught up in the day to day and then I'll get stressed out about something and I'll forget about how amazing my life is. And I remember I was sitting in Italy a few years ago, it was like five years ago. And I remember I got a notification. I was sitting in Rome in a square, enjoying some food. And I got a notification on my phone that somebody was in my front yard. And I'm a. I'm what, 6,000 miles away? And it was the Amazon guy. And I picked my phone up, went to security through the Ring app and I told him where to leave the package. And then I thought about that for a second. I was like, that's insane. The fact that I have security. I can look in my house from the other side of the world. I can go to my front door and tell the person who's at my front door in the moment where I want him to leave the package. That's insane if you really think about it. We have text messages. I want you to understand. When my grandparents passed away and we went into their house and we had to, you know, go through their stuff and figure out what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to donate. All this stuff. We found letters from my grandparents. My grandparents met, they hung out for, you know, a few months. And then my, my grandfather went to World War II. He was in World War II. And we found all of these letters that they wrote each other. And I remember my aunts were telling me that from their, their mother, my grandmother's perspective that she would write him a letter and just send it off and wouldn't hear back for like three or four weeks. She would just send him a letter, hoping that he was still alive. And then eventually, three or four weeks later, she would get a letter back. Now you can just text somebody and immediately get a message back from them. You could. And if you don't have, you know, there's. There's new things where even if you don't have service, you can connect and send. Send a text message from the satellite if you have an iPhone. Like, that's an amazing thing. How amazing is our lives nowadays? I can send someone a message and say, hey, I'm going to be hopping on a flight. I could send. I sent my mom a picture of my son this morning. I'm in Texas, she's in Florida. Do you know how long it would take to send a picture to somebody? At least a week back in the day. And so you have to understand, I just want to tell you, I'm just trying to give you a perspective shift of how many things are amazing in our life. My grandparents, I remember having a conversation with them about the Great Depression and how terrible it was. And so, like my. My great grandfather, my. My grandmother's father, when the Great Depression happened, he had a grocery store and he had a shoe store, and both of them went out of business. And his shoe store went out of business because people obviously weren't buying shoes in the Great Depression. But his. His grocery store went out of business because he felt so bad for the people in his. In his neighborhood and in his area when they didn't have money, that he just gave them what he had. And so that went out of business as well. And he had no money to feed his family of five children. And so what did he do? He found a plot of land that was in their neighborhood and just decided to start learning how to garden. So he gardened in order to just feed his family because they had no food and they had no money. And so the neighborhood got together and started actually planting seeds and gardening together. And then he had never fished in his entire life. So he learned how to start fishing. So he gardened every day and fished just to keep his family alive. Think of that. How stressed out would you be if you're in that situation? I don't have to worry about that. I can go downstairs and I have food and water and everything that I need downstairs to keep me alive, my wife alive, my son alive. And so I want you to think of your life and realize that it might be great, it might be good, it might feel terrible right now, but even the terrible can actually be pretty good when you put yourself into perspective. In perspective. Here is the superpower. This is what I'm trying to give you with this. I'm trying to. Trying to help you brainwash yourself, to be grateful for the stuff that you have. Because here's the truth. Your life might be hard right now. And I get it. I've been there. You might be dealing with heartbreak, you might have stress, you might have burnout, you might have uncertainty of what the future is going to look like, but can you zoom out of your life and out of your own head for just a second and realize, like, well, you have clean water. That's pretty amazing. There was a moment in time when people did not have clean water. There's people in this world right now, while you're listening to this, who don't have clean water. They have to hike 2 miles to be able to get water to bring it back to their family. You probably ate today. There's many people that are dying from starvation right now. You have access to information. You have access to inspiration. You can hear this message, which means that your ears work, means you have some form of connection to the Internet. You are alive, your heart is beating. Everything is good in that moment. You might have great health. You still have time. And so that I want you to realize with just what I just told you, you have more than 95% of people in the history of mankind ever have. Here's what's crazy, right? Think about this, for instance. If you watch old shows of, like, the Middle Ages and, like, you know, kings and queens and stuff like that, if you're living just a average life, not anything amazing, not anything terrible, you do pretty good. You have a job, you have a house, air conditioning, food, water, shelter, clothing, you're living better than kings did and queens did. Five hundred years ago you did like you are right now. You're living better than kings and Queens did 500 years ago. You have access to more food and water and access to opportunity and access to security than your great, great, great, great grandparents ever even dreamed of. I always. I always think how crazy it is when you look back at castles, how castles are always on top of a hill because they had to be on top of a hill because people would just show up and murder people. Like, how insane is that? Like, think about how better, how much better your life is and just kings and Queens were 500 years ago. And so, yeah, you might be going through some things. Life is up and down and up and down, but it's still amazing. You're listening to me right now. Your quality of life is a hundred times better than people's quality of life was 500 years ago. We all have food, water, shelter, clothing, a couple people that love us. And we're sitting there and we're like, mmm, boop, boop, be do. But I want more. Shut up. Like, just be grateful for a moment because I really want you to understand that one of the secrets that I found of what I feel is a secret of the universe is, is you will not be given more than you currently have if you cannot be grateful for what you currently have. If you can't be trusted with a little, there is no way that you're going to be trusted with a lot. If a child constantly complains, you're not going to want to give them. If you give them a toy and they're like, oh, I hate this toy, they throw it across the room, are you going to want to trust them with another toy? No. So the universe, or God or whatever it is that runs this thing isn't going to trust you with more until you become a good steward for what you already have. So really, what you want to do is you want to try to use gratitude to set your internal GPS for how you want to feel. The same way that you get into your car and you put in your GPS where you want to go, you do the exact same thing with how you want to feel. You decide how you want to feel. You can choose that you want to be in gratitude and awe and wonder and curiosity and joy and say, that's my destination that I'm trying to get to. And you can choose to see everything as a gift instead of seeing everything as a burden. You can choose to go, yeah, my life isn't exactly what I wanted. Yeah, maybe I'm dealing with a lot of shit right now, but still, if I look at my life, there's so many things to be grateful for. Because the law of life is what you focus on, you get more of. If you focus on your problems, you're going to find more problems. If you focus on what. What's missing, you will find more things in your life that are missing. But if you sit down and you consciously make yourself focus on what you have, focus on all of the magic around you, focus on what's working, focus on what you're grateful for, even, like the tiniest things, you'll start to See of it, more of it, you're going to start to feel more of it and you're going to start to radiate that as well. Gratitude is basically the gateway drug to joy. Here's the thing about gratitude. It's not about denying your problems or like, toxic positivity or saying, oh my gosh, that terrible thing that's happening right there. It's not, it's not happening. Like, that's not what we're talking about. It's not about any of that. It's about noticing your blessings while you have them. Because if you're stuck in the moment of like, I need more and I need to hustle more and my life's not good enough and you're throwing a pity party, you're going to have to understand you will not be given more until you are truly grateful for what you have. And if you keep, keep talking about all that you don't have and focusing on how your life's not good enough and how you're not smart enough and the people around you, X and Y and Z, your life is going to be terrible for a while. But when you start focusing on the things to be grateful for, even if there's just a few, it's like it will start to expand. Gratitude unlocks abundance in your life. And so what you focus on, you receive more of. And if you sit down, you say, how do I want to feel? Well, I want to feel good, I want to feel joy, I want to feel happy today. Well, let me start from a place of gratitude. Notice the little teeny tiny things around me that I can be grateful for. And as you start to do that, what's really interesting is you will be given more things to be grateful for. And you'll just notice that you feel better because life is amazing. You have so much to be grateful for. Just remind yourself at least that a few times a day. 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