The Real Reason Your Life Isn’t Changing (And How to Fix It)

Everything you want to achieve can happen, but it takes one skill. And I look at my life and I say, why am I here? And the answer is decisions, not conditions. I had pretty lousy conditions. I grew up in a really tough environment. We had no money at times, we had no money for food. But there were certain things along the way that I was fortunate enough or had the grace to decide that, you know, God, the universe. And then I did my part too, led me in a direction. It didn't happen overnight. This is not a. A let's get rich quick scheme like, tomorrow you're gonna make $10 million. It doesn't work that way. But what it does work is if you learn to do a little thing and you do a little better because of technology. You can scale things now. You can take something that before you were in the library trying to do for free and end up with, one of our clients has three to five thousand people a month right now, and she was like trying to talk to 30 people for free in the library. Very few people were listening. That's what technology can provide for us today. But the decisions were really important. So I'll just take for a second to give you kind of a background, if I may, and then give you content about. You don't have to live like everybody else, especially if you decide that you want to find something you believe in, that you want to share with the world, even at a small scale, even part time, and then grow it, because the opportunity today is unlike any other time. What decisions can change your life? Because I want to share with you. There's three decisions you're making every moment of your life. You're even making them right now. And as I walk you through it, you can tell me whether you think it's true or not, you'll experience it. And if you make any of these decisions slightly differently, your whole life changes. Our life is controlled by our decisions, decisions. Sometimes little ones and big ones, they create the fabric of our life. It's not the conditions we're in. Think for a moment. Can you think of something you made a decision about five or 10 years ago? It could have been something simple like where to go to school or what to do for a living, where to live, who to spend time with, who to fall in love with, who to marry, whether you're have kids or not. How many of you can think of a decision you made five or 10 years ago that if you made a different decision, your life would be radically different today? I don't know better or Worse, but radically different. And so part of what I figured out, because I obsessed about it, was that there's three decisions. And I want to share this with you right now because this is what controls your whole life. Whether you succeed or fail, whether you're happy or miserable, whether you have great relationships or terrible ones, whether you start a business or just talk about it and never do it. Whether you succeed or fail is really controlled by these three decisions. And you're making them right now, even as we're speaking now. When I say when you're making them, that doesn't you're making, doesn't mean you're making them consciously. Most of us make these same three decisions over and over again. That's why our life doesn't change, because we do it subconsciously, meaning it's just a habit. But if you wake up to the power of these three decisions, you can change everything. The first decision you're making right now is, what am I going to focus on? Different places in your life, all around the world, there's a million things you could be stimulated by. You could get focused on what happened yesterday, you could be focused on what you're going to have for lunch. There are millions of things we can experience in life when we experience only what we focus on. And if you want to make a note, write down, focus equals feeling. Focus equals feeling. And if you don't decide consciously to focus on, then your brain will just let something else control your focus. So, for example, to take this for example, what's wrong is always available. You can always find something wrong with yourself, with other people, why can't do something, why it won't work. On the other hand, what's right is also always available. And I'm not talking about positive thinking, I'm talking about being intelligent. Most of us let the world control our focus. Most of us let advertisers control our focus today, most of us let social media control our focus. Have you ever sat down, just let your brain disappear and you start scrolling and you wake up and it's been 20 minutes and you thought you were going to do this for two. Most people check their phones and average of 58 times a day glancing at their phone and they spend an average of two and a half hours a day on social media. That's 16 point hours a week, that's 67 hours a month. And if you're not spending two and a half hours, someone else is spending more. Whatever you focus on, you feel, have you ever done this? How many of you have Ever been freaked out about something, worried about something? You're focusing something, imagining it happening, and you feel all the pain right now, and you think about it over and over again, and then it never happened. In fact, some people, there's not something wrong in their life, so they think about crap that's happening in other people's lives and focus on that and feel worried. We wonder why we don't feel good, right? So our focus controls us. If you think someone's trying to take advantage of you and you keep thinking about that, you're going to be stressed out. And by the way, have you ever had someone tell you something like, oh, so and so said this about you, and you went, no, they're my friend. They never did. No, they really did, but. And then after a while, you go, maybe they aren't my friend. I can't believe this. You feel hurt, maybe even confronted them. How could you have said this? And then you find out it's not what they said. You're upset about something that wasn't real. Our focus controls our life, but most of us don't control our focus now. Our focus controls our feeling. But the minute we focus on something, our brain makes the second decision. And that is, what does this mean? Our brain has to know, is this a threat? Is this an opportunity? Can I move forward or pull back? And so it gives it a meaning very quickly. Is this the end or the beginning? Is this person dissing me? Is this person challenging me? Is this person coaching me? Or is this person loving on me? You think the person is dissing you? You're going to have a very different response than if you think they're loving you. And whatever decision you make of what things mean, the fix and shapes how you feel. If you think this person is, you know, trying to diss me, disrespecting me, you're gonna probably feel angry or hurt, right? If you think this person is coaching you, you might lean in. If you think the person's loving you, you might feel grateful. And most of us don't control our meaning. We automatically see something, we've been trained to give it a meaning, and we have that meaning. And the media does that all the time. Media people, by the way, aren't bad. Why is so much of the media negative all the time? Why does it have the worst point of view? Because they know there's a bias in the human brain. It's a survival bias that says we respond more to fear and pain than we do to pleasure. If you doubt it, think about this pain, continuous pain equals damage. Continuous damage equals death. So our brain has learned to deal with that unconsciously. And pleasure makes to survive as a species. I mean, this reason it's making love and procreating is pleasurable. But if you're not sure which one's more powerful, imagine you're procreating and that something threatens your life. And notice where your attention goes, right? It's going to go to what you're afraid of. So in the media, if it leads, it bleeds is a phrase that they always use in the media. It's like, if I can jolt you. The purpose of media today is not to educate you or inform you, right? It's to jolt you because that's what's going to make you pay attention. It made when you pay attention, when you click on that. That's why I have clickbait, where it's not even what it really says. Something upsets you, something excites you, something get you, they get your attention. Well, you and I, if we don't take control of our focus, we're going to focus on what they want us to focus on. We're going to be basically their robots. So learning to take control of your own focus is critical. But the most important thing is the meaning. And the meaning for my father, I know also because he kept saying it under his breath and sometimes out loud is, I'm worthless. I'm worthless. I didn't take care of my family. Haven't you pay for anything? There's not even food on the table. I might as well not be here. I'm worthless. None of this is worth any of this. And that leads to the third decision. What are you going to do if you're really angry, you're going to do something different than if you're feeling excited. Obviously, if you're feeling grateful, you're going to behave differently than if you're feeling worthless. And so my father left our family. And as I said at the time, it was the worst experience of my life. But it made me come up with some different answers. I thought, what was the meaning for me? We all get what we have to have. Some have to succeed, some have to survive. I thought I've always gotten what I had to have, like the food I needed or cover the basic thing I needed. When I had to do it, I found it. What if I just raised my standard, what I have to do? How you could actually create some freedom in your life, how you could do some things that are really meaningful and that it doesn't matter where you are if you think you have nothing to share. We all have some problems that we've solved, some challenge or we know somebody who has. And why is that so important? Because I grew up in a very tough environment. I thought we lived in a, you know, relatively upper middle class family, but we were on the other side of the tracks. We were the poor family. Literally by the railroad tracks. The train would come by and shake the building multiple times in the day. But honestly, it was a very low class economic place. I just don't think compared to. And we were the lowest of the low. And my father always said, no one cares about anybody else but themselves. And I believed it because it really looked like it. Where we lived, we were treated like crap. We looked down on. It was rough. But on this day, my brain got new evidence. It's what changed my life. I knock at the door. I opened the door and this giant guy is standing there and he's got a bag of groceries in each hand. And then he had an uncooked frozen turkey on the ground in an empty pot. And he said, is your father home? And I said, just one moment, right? Somebody delivered this food for my family. And they didn't even want credit. They saved my family on Thanksgiving. They didn't want credit. Strangers do care. And that made me make a decision. I need to care about strangers. That's why I'm here today.