Gratitude and creating luck

Hello, hello, hello. Steve Barnes here with Morning Mastery. Now, remember, this is all about not survival or even success or excellence, but the question of how to achieve mastery in life. And remember, we're defining mastery as the ability to create spontaneously under pressure. That you know your discipline sufficiently and you've committed to your discipline sufficiently and to do that. And this is George Leonard and Steve Muhammad where they. Their opinions on mastery overlapped and they had demonstrated sufficient mastery in their lives that I felt comfortable that they were describing the territory ahead of me. That in combination, they were describing territory over a horizon's distance away from me and a valid path. So the question of how to achieve that was very important to me. And the question of having achieved that in multiple areas of my life, the question of what lies beyond that. And I'm calling that magic. Now, magic is also the acronym that we use to guide fire dance. I love my morning tea. I'm trying a new combination of nootropics. We'll see how that works. The magic formula is, of course, you have a map or model of where you're going. Otherwise, someone who has gotten the results that you want. You are taking constant action every day. You're doing the minimum necessary that if you did that five, six days a week, you'd get that 1% improvement. You're feeling gratitude. That's the G for gratitude, and that's today. And gratitude is the antidote for fear, an antidote for anger, antidote for depression. It is the door to faith. Because if we have gratitude for what we already have, it's easy to have faith that tomorrow we be a good day. We have clear intentions, the, I mean, goals and, you know, the smart goal idea and then courage or conviction, the belief that you can and should do this thing, that you should take these actions, that this is in alignment with your character, that no matter what lies at the end of the road, that the journey is going to be pleasant and in alignment with your values and your sense of self. Show me somebody who has all five of these things, none of which costs a dime. Show me somebody who has all five of these things, and I will show you somebody who's going to get lucky. The ability to do these things produces effects that are outside the realm of logic. Things will happen and you'll start noticing that the luck will start turning in your direction. And the more you pump these up, the more that luck stuff seems to happen. It's very strange, and it's not something mystical. I think it's more along the lines of when you can't get a credit card, you can't get one. When you need a credit card, you can't get one. But as soon as you've got one, people start offering you credit cards. I think it's something to do with that. That confidence in your ability to create the life that you want, even without the intercession of some massive luck from outside the system, starts creat outside of the system. So you have to get your basics down small enough that you can influence it. And the voices in your head that say, I'm not lucky. I've been oppressed, I've been damaged. All those voices step back and are supported by the voice that says, I will survive, I will do this. I will take care of my family, I will do my duty. That moving away from pain, then once you have it at unconscious competence, starts giving you the ability to say, well, what makes me happy? Where is there joy in life? And that is the point which you start shifting. I was talking to my son Jason yesterday, and he's starting. He's in college now, and he. He has to find a way to take pleasure in doing the thing that he doesn't really want to do. In other words, he doesn't necessarily want to go to this particular class, but he has to overcome his resistance. He has to get on that path because the discipline necessary to succeed in a class is not terribly dissimilar from the discipline necessary to succeed in life. There are. There's a lot of map over. There's some very useful map over. It's not complete, but it's useful. So it passes the three gates in that sense. So for him to do this, he has to. If he's doing it to avoid pain, then he will do the minimum necessary to diminish the pain, at which point the motivation decreases. If he can find a way to have fun in that class. On the other hand, if he can have a final way to be grateful to be going to that class, then the more he does, the better he feels. So you get that when you are running away from pain, you'll do enough to diminish the pain until the motivation stops. And then that's where diets fail. And people will blame their bodies and say, oh, my body doesn't obey the laws of physics. I've literally heard people say this. Whereas what's true is that the path is painful enough that it's like a membrane, and they can do enough, they can push enough to flex that membrane, but they can't get through it. And it's not their fault, but unfortunately it is their responsibility. There's nobody else to do it for you. So responsibility means the ability to respond. We have to do these things. If we can't do these things, it's not that we're lazy or bad or anything like this. We just needed more resources than we had. So if he got himself to the point where he says, I'm neutral right now about school, what I have to do is get him to feel just a little bit grateful. You know, 1% grateful, a tenth of a percent grateful, A hundredth of a percent grateful, A millionth of a percent grateful. Get it there, get it? So he's just slightly leaning. Slightly leaning. A slight preference, a bias towards action, a bias towards doing it. If he can find anything inside himself, look at what there is to be grateful for. If you're at the worst job in the world, either get out of that job or be grateful to have it. Simple as that. Either stop doing it, do something else, or be grateful. In other words, if you can't find something else. And you should be grateful that that's there, right? Because you're paying your rent, you're buying food, you're supporting your family, you're staying off the street, aren't you grateful for those things? So they're bad things at the job. But for whatever reason, the job market or your skill set is so bad that you can't find another place to be. So while you're improving or while you're waiting for the job market to improve, be grateful you've got a job. I mean, working backwards from the notion that the meaning of life is to be joyful. You know, the way the Dalai Lama puts it, joyful and of service, then look for ways to be joyful every day. And gratitude is a fantastic way to approach that. When I am grateful for my son, my son, in fact, my son is alive, well, but I'm grateful for my wife, that I have her, that she loves me. We love each other. I'm grateful for my career. If I'm grateful for my body, this is healthy as it is at this point in my life. Then the negatives are seen in the light of the positives. The negatives are shadows. But I'm standing in the sunlight, and I can see as much of the sunlight as I want to. Emotion is created by three things. What we focus on, the language that we use and the way we use our bodies. So that means that at any moment I can be happy or I can be sad. At any moment, there is no situation in which I cannot find both those things and no situation which someone has not found those, you know, a way to be ecstatic or a way to be absolutely suicidally depressed. Perspective, the way we use our bodies, you know, and of course, for people who have clinical depression, that would include the biochemistry. So, you know, bring a doctor into your wellness circle or. I'm not suggesting that you don't need that, but to the degree that we have some flexibility there, our way out of feeling like we have to push ourselves every day to do the things we need to do is to define the minimums that we need to do and then find ways to be grateful to do them. Grateful to do them. If you. If I ask you why are you happy to be doing this? You need to be able to come up with a reason why. If you want to live a life that is happy and remember the meaning of life is to be joyful. So you're literally skipping, you're literally missing your life if you don't. If you don't find ways to find sparks in the darkness, to find stars in the night sky, to find sunlight behind the clouds. If you don't do that, you're beat before you start. So I would strongly suggest that you spend some time every day going through the steps of the magic formula. What is your map or model to joy and success on your terms? What actions are you going to take? What do you feel grateful for about where you are right now? What is your goal, you know, other than being happy? What is your road to being happy? You know, so I want to make this much per year. I want to make my body to be able to do this, and I want my relationship to do this. And do you believe that this is in alignment with your character? You have to search inside yourself to find the part of you that's capable of doing the thing that allows you to stay on the path that will be joyful and ultimately of service. If you have any comments, questions, or requests about the magic formula and how this work, be sure to PM me. You know, send me a message, let me know what I can do to explain. I can make this clearer. This is for you. I mean, I like to clarify my mind in the morning, so I do it for me. But I could do this in my journal. What I want is to be as much service as possible to you. That's the road of mastery. If you like this message, be sure to share it and PM me and let me know or put in a comment, drop a comment in there. And let me know what I can do to serve you, what subjects you'd like me to handle, what you'd like me to talk about tomorrow. And until then, you take care. Have a wonderful day. I'm going to get to work.