You Are One Decision Away From a Different Life

If you want to see why your life is where it is right now today, all you got to do is go back 5, 10, 15 years. Because if you would have made a different decision, you would have gone in a different direction with a different momentum.

The same thing that happened to two different people, one person gets rich, other person stays poor.

How come?

The decisions you make about what things mean and the decisions you make about what to do are the most important things of your life because they determine where you are.

What changed my life? Enough pain. Not everybody hits bottom. Thank God I did. I was working as a janitor in the middle of the night, doing two different jobs, cleaning out banks in the middle of the night. So I get up and go to school on 3 or 4 hours sleep. I was burning. I hit bottom one day. I remember it vividly. I was driving home in my 260 Datsun Z car.

I ran out of gas.

I had no money left. So I locked the car up. I prayed they didn't get towed, and then I walked a couple miles home. My little 400-square-foot bachelor apartment, and there's a note typed and stapled to my front door. And I, I lit a candle because I also not paid my electric bill. True story.

So I'm reading my eviction notice by candlelight, and something in me started to just explode.

So I thought, what am I going to do to change? I'm gonna go on a run. I ran as hard as I could run, felt my lungs were gonna burst, and I pushed myself even more. I didn't know what I was doing. I know now I was doing a radical change in my what, which put me in a much more powerful what.

How many ideas do you need to massively, positively change your life forever? How many?

One that you what?

Not just believe, but one that you use. It's not what happens, it's what you do that makes the difference. Simple idea, but some of the most masterful ideas I think are the simplest.

You've got to now make a decision. You gotta decide, you gotta commit, and you gotta resolve so that that energy you've started moving in a direction comes into some kind of precision, some kind of real impact. Otherwise, eventually even your passion will wear out. And you gotta then make sure you take action on those decisions.

It's not what happens, it's what you do that makes the difference. And the quality of life.

I was like, I have to change my life.

I can't spend— I can't spend another day like this, an hour like this. How many have ever been in a relationship way too long and you knew it? Who's done this? Until one day you said, not another day, not another hour, another moment, and you changed. Who knows what I'm talking about?

How many of you can think of a decision you made in the past that was a very difficult decision, but you made it, and because you made it, you are where you are today? Sometimes you're heading this direction like this and you make a little 10-degree shift. See that little tiny shift between my fingers? But if you take that 10-degree shift and you follow it out a week from now, a month from now, 6 months from now, a year from now, you're in a totally different destination. You have a different destiny because you made a tiny change.

Doesn't life happen? Doesn't it happen in ways that sometimes does not seem to support you? And if you hold it as being true that life isn't supporting you and that something happened to you, then you get so caught up in happening, you'll forget to go do something. In the end, the only way life gets changed is by what we do, not by what happened to it. So the question is not, is it going to happen? That's not the question, is it?

What's the question? When?

When is it going to happen? Or maybe better yet, what are you going to do when it happens? Because it's going to happen inevitably. If you're alive and you're alive and you're moving, it's going to happen. Life is going to challenge you. Life is going to come up and it's going to rain on your parade. It will happen.

See, two people can have the same experiences in life, but they will— lives turn out very differently because of what they decide it means and what they decide to do. You don't like how things are? Change it.

You don't like your job?

Change it. You like the way you feel?

Change it.

You don't want your relationship?

Change you.

That'll change it. Or change it. You like what's happening to the kids? Change it. And the first step to changing is you must make an absolute real what? Decision. Because all actions are fathered by a decision.

Let's say that you were born a square. You had square values. Your whole life was square. So after a while, you might get a little dissatisfied with being a square. You finally say, "You know what? There's more to life than being a square. There's gotta be." One day, something extraordinary happens.

You meet a circle.

You're round.

You flow with life until we get bored, and then you're like, "I'm round and I'm still not happy." See, they're all the same dimension.

They're all two-dimensional, aren't they?

What we want to really do is change the dimension, which we call transformation.

What are you now?

Cube.

If you just added dimension, if you didn't try to keep changing your appearance, you've been changing these things, but you just transform, you deepen, you richen, you You experience more of your true nature. But you know what else is beautiful? It is a square as well. Could you have a cube if you had not been a square?

Decision is the father of all action. Action is what produces all results. So decisions are your ultimate power, and most of us don't make decisions very often because we've got weak decision-making muscles. Most people have a hard time deciding what to have from their dinner plate tonight, much less make a life change. But decision has power. And the word decision— decision is like incision. It means to cut off from. When you make a decision, you cut off any possibility except this thing you've committed to. And when there's no other possibility, it's amazing how we show up.

And I was feeling sorry for myself and angry and sad all at once and lonely. Felt like there was no God. It was— it was an intense, intense time. And when I got back to that part of the beach where I left my journal, I I stood there, I drew a line down the page, and on one side wrote everything I didn't want in my life, which was basically my whole life. And then on the other side, everything I was going to change. I didn't want to feel sorry for myself anymore. I didn't want to feel disconnected like there's no God. And so sure enough, I wrote all that I wanted, which was the direct opposite I've been living. Now, I didn't know how to change it. I just knew now it's happening. Now watch what just happened.

Saw the Paul.

From I'm too young, I don't have the education, I don't have the money, I don't have the time, to youth is power, youth is energy, I got what everybody wants. I got a PhD in results, I'm gonna get results. I found money for anything I'm committed to because I find a way to add value. I have— I get the time for anything I'm committed to because I have all the time there is. And my caring is my power. It was such a transformation, I cannot describe it to you verbally Honestly, I can only tell you the results. In 6— 30 days I lost 30 pounds. In 6 weeks I lost all 38 pounds. Relatively effortlessly because I wasn't hanging on to all the tension in my body and upset.

I wasn't overeating. I didn't have any desire for it.

I've got a friend, his name is Mitchell, also known as W. Mitchell. Some of you I know have heard of him. And he had a motorcycle accident. The gas cap popped off. The fuel spread all over and sure enough, from the energy of the slicking of the tires trying to stop, boom, heat ignition. Now, that's what you call happening. Now the question is, what do you do with it?

Well, what do most people do with it? Well, I don't know what most do.

I know what some do. I know some want to check out. I asked him, I said, how come you have such a great attitude? How come your life is so great? He said, because I guess I never figured out how bad it was. He learned how to direct his communication to his nervous system in such a way that it was truly congruently an advantage. I know a lot of people that sit there and moan, you know, if they did survive, sit there and complain about how it happened to them.

You know what his attitude was?

There must be an opportunity out of this somewhere.

And then I went from barely surviving financially, making $38,000 a year, and the next 12 months I made over $1 million. I'm not telling you that to impress you. I'm telling you because it blew my mind. Because I knew I could be better psychologically or emotionally, but financially too? Everything in my life changed. Instead of there's no God, I began to realize it's all God. But I still have to make the right choices. I still have to do my part.

Two people have the same experience. One person decides this means my life is over. The other person says, God is challenging me at the ultimate level. Time to go to another level.

But the only way it's going to change is if you change.

And the only way it's going to get better is if you get better and then you share that with somebody else.

And I want to challenge you to do that. I want you to challenge you to become more than you are even now.

I want to challenge you more than just leave here and just talk about it.

I want to challenge you to do something with what you can use in your lives. An extra moment with somebody could change their life as well as yours.

And I hope you'll do that.

I want you to make your life a masterpiece.

And all of us start with something. Most in this room, you know, truthfully have extraordinary lives by anybody's standards on the planet. We just want more, which is growth, which is what we were made for, was to grow.

It's like, you know, you look at the caterpillar, the caterpillar when he starts wrapping himself up inside this thing what we call a cocoon, which has another set of metaphors for some people in the culture today. When he wraps himself in the cocoon, he thinks it's death, but what it does is it transforms him into something that's even more free. So some people do that in unique ways, maybe.

I don't know.

All I know is that this man, if he has a purpose, is to inspire people all over the world, and that's what he does.

Everything changed. My energy, my vitality, my health, my body, my finances, my relationships, and it changed so fast It was mind-boggling. Now, none of you are messed up level I was. You're already in a great place. So imagine from today what you could graduate to by eliminating these bullshit beliefs that have been stopping you. It will unleash you.

What else are you going to be doing on a Saturday evening? Watching TV or going to an event? Why not try to do something that was beyond your past experience? Don't just be a talker, be a walker.

Change your beliefs, change your mental syntax, and change your physiology, and anything's possible.