HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It's. So, let's see. Welcome. Good morning. This is. Let's see. I. I'm just trying something a little, little different. It's the first, first morning meeting of the year. These are just my experiments to try to sort of empty my head out, talk about the things that come to me first in the morning, right after I wake up and do my morning ritual, remind myself what I have to accomplish today. This is the beginning of a new year. So one of the things that I will do, of course, is work my butt off. I've got this book to turn in, but other than that, I will really sink into asking myself which tools are the absolute best tools that I've got to help me along this process. To look at and ask myself that question is pretty valuable. Pretty valuable. So just want to take a look at some basic things. Hold on for a second. Hi there. Yes. So let's see, what can we talk about today? Well, what I was just start with the observation that magic, the magic formula, mapper, model, action, gratitude, intention, which is goals and conviction, clarity, so forth. So on the belief that you can and should do this thing, that if you have all five of those things, you have your basic situation, you have your basic connection with life, and that's what we want. We want to make sure that you have that. On the basic level, if you don't have all five of those, if you don't have a map or model, if you're not taking action, if you're not controlling your emotions to the positive, or at least have a healthy reaction, healthy relationship with your fear, such that it motivates you to move towards where you're going as opposed to paralyzes you. If you don't have a clear goal, a clear intention, in a way of measuring whether you've accomplished it, for instance, and if you don't have the belief that you can and should do this, that's really, really important. You need to believe that it's a useful thing, a positive thing, that you should take these actions. And ideally, you should feel that you should take those actions. Even if you got struck by lightning the day before your store opened or whatever it is that you're doing. You need to have a sense that your days are being spent doing the thing that is in alignment with your spirit. Remember, success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal. It doesn't mean that you have it all. It means that you are moving toward a deeper sense of connection with who you are. So one of the things M is for map or model so we talk about maps today. We're going to talk about maps today. And if we look at the three, probably the three most important aspects of this system, you have the magic formula, you have the three gates and you have the three centers. The three centers are your way to be sure that your actions are balanced within your life so you don't damage yourself. The three gates are the way of making certain that your interactions with others as well as with yourself are deeper and kinder and more in alignment with your morality. I don't know of any religion in the world that does not encourage honesty and kindness or any philosophy that does not ask us to become more and more efficient and effective. So the three gates are a good start. They're a good place to begin. They're a good standard to look at as a map. You could look at applying the three gates to your map or model, to your daily actions, to your sense of gratitude. You know, is it true that you don't have anything to be grateful for? Somebody was just saying that yesterday. It simply wasn't true at all. And once it was pointed out, he got a little bit sheepish about it. But the fact is that this is what we do to ourselves. We say there's nothing in the world, something terrible happens to us and terrible things do happen. But if you're going to go on with your life, you have to find the ways to connect with things that are happy making. Your goal. Is your goal honest and is it kind? Do you have any idea of how to accomplish it? How to measure what you're doing that is more or less useful? See, so. So if you look at the three gates as the x axis, you can look at the magic formula as the Y axis. And now you've got some territory that you're starting to play with and you can actually brainstorm with yourself because you're going to come up with a different set of questions. Just really quick, today, the map that I'm going to be using is probably more than anything else, it probably yoga in terms of my body, because I have to do yoga today. I have to protect myself, I have to protect my energy. I have to get in touch with the part of me, with the energy that is within me and then allow it to flow through my body. And yoga is wonderful for that. The philosophy of yoga, it's not even the yoga poses, it's the way yoga looks at fitness. Most Western fitness techniques are, you know, you push your body. Yoga is you work on the connection between your mind in your body. So Whatever it is you're doing, you can always get better at. You can get better at that connection up to the last breath you take on your deathbed. And that sense of connection, of moving inside your skin, looking at the flow of the connection of your breath and your will, your attention and your movement that will also lead you to the highest level of performance that your body is capable of. Everybody has limitations, but I don't think we very often know what those limitations are. We run into limitations of our coaching, our understanding. More often I think that we run into the limitations of our actual bodies and minds. So that's one way of looking at this whole thing. What other ones are there? Let's take a look at emotions. The persuasion model that we've talked about, we have a lot of different models. I've tried to confine it to about seven models per day for myself, and I'm trying to keep it down to three or four for you guys and moving around between them. So you can see how this is flexible. We want to leave room for the models that you like, for the goals that you have, for the philosophies or religions that you grew up within or are studying. There's room for all of that. The persuasion model, somebody was, you know, I was saying that you have to. You can't convince people with logic. You have to convince them with emotion. So somebody was challenging on that and basically making it political. I mean, how can we change the minds of people who follow. Follow that idiot? Just whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, there's too much of a tendency to think that the people on the other side are following idiots or are idiots themselves. So what emotions would do that? My comment was, you have to start with the emotion of love and respect. You have to see their humanity. If they know you don't see their humanity, if they know you don't respect them, it just becomes a fight. Somebody has to stop fighting first. If you want to communicate, if all you want to do is beat them up, that's different. And you have to be careful of that because there's a part of us that enjoys that, that enjoys the conflict, that enjoys seeing pain and fear in the faces of people that we fear or we are angry at. So be very careful and ask yourself, are you really trying to communicate or is it just you want to beat the hell out of them verbally, you want to show them how smart you are, you want to make them see how stupid they've been, that kind of stuff. You have to handle your Stuff, you have to handle it because that's not how communication works. And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about communicating with a political opponent or somebody, your family at Christmas dinner or your loved one or your own heart and mind. You have to start with love, start with respect, start with caring, sad expression. They don't care what you know until they know that you care. Okay, so the mind is the arena that I think I wanted to talk about a little bit the most right now, because it's the most important in terms of what I need to do on this first day of the year. What I really, really need to do is to execute a particular amount of work on this book that I need to turn in. The core of it is there and so is tremendous amount of the work, but there's still stuff that needs to be done. So I need to have a clear idea of how to get there. And that's just going to be doing what I call a 5050 today, which is 50 pages of correction and 50 minutes of dictation if that's necessary, in order to fill in gaps. If I do that, I'll get there. And as long as I do that, I don't have to be afraid. That's my minimum today. But as you can well imagine, 50 pages, that's not writing 50 pages, that's going over 50 pages that I've already done. There's still fear there because it's like, oh, the contract is coming up. You know, I've got to turn this book in. There's a schedule. This is, this is, this is the big leagues. This is a team. And there's a certain level of continuous performance that they expect from you. So how do you build up to that? Okay, so let's take a step back. When I was first starting out as a writer, what I needed was a pattern, a model. How do I do this now? Let's see. Let somebody says the temptation to do the wrong thing exists. Dennis Dickens says, may the polishing goes well. And thanks for these postings. You're very well. Dennis. This is, like I said, this is. I have to familiarize myself every day. Every single day, I go through this stuff and remind myself who I am and what path I'm on and how I need to feel, who I need to be in order to do it. Trust me, there is no morning that I wake up just thinking, hey, I'm Steve. You know, I can do all these things. No, it's a level of sort of like putting on pieces of my identity. It's not. It's not faked because it all has to be organic to who it is that I am, or there'll be friction. I can't keep it up, so to speak. The so when I was just starting this path, I was looking what do I need to do to be a writer? Because I was running into a lot of frustration. So if the M is for modeling map, then let's take a look at the way I modeled or mapped writers. I actually went out and I studied. What you look for is the three things that you study in a role model. Their belief systems, their middle syntax, and their use of physiology. In other words, how they use their bodies, how they use their emotions, how they use their minds. The thing that you're looking for will be contained somewhere in there. And you find a model who started approximately where you started. Or even better, with less resources than you had. How in the world did they organize themselves with less resources to get further than you've got? If you have the courage to look at people like that, you will learn things. You will learn that you're wrong about things. You have not been operating at the highest level of efficiency mentally. You've not been operating at the highest level of efficiency emotionally. And you have not been organizing your time and your actions for optimal use. If you have the courage to look at this, you can leap ahead. So what I did was you want to look at. Find at least one. If you have one model, you're in the game. But what I really like to do is to find multiple models. And then I ask myself, what are they all doing? Make a list of everything that they're doing and see what overlaps. You know, what are they all doing in common? So my role models were people like Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, Larry Niven. And I would talk with these people or study their words and see what did they say about their careers. Robert Heinlein, for instance, was famous for writing essays about how to become a writer. Ray Bradbury, in his book Zen and the Art of Writing. Harlan Ellison, endless interviews and speeches and essays. Octavia Butler, in many, many hours of deep conversation, of course, Larry Nevin and Jerry Pornell, I had the opportunity to talk to, to, but they actually kind of came later. And Octavia even kind of came later. But Heinlein, Bradbury and Ellison were people who I studied at a distance through their lectures or their essays. And I asked myself, what are they all saying about how they broke in? Because that was what I wanted. I had made a decision that I would rather fail at being a writer than succeed at anything else. And that meant I was prepared to do whatever it takes. Now, later on, I had to add some concepts of balance in there because being willing to do whatever it takes implies that you're willing to color outside the lines. So if you're not playing by the same rules other people play by, you better have some principles. So the three gates come in really strongly. I did not have them then that question, is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? Would have been very useful to me. And the notion of the three centers balancing between those aspects as I push myself towards my career did come fairly soon because I knew that I was so committed to wanting to be a writer that I would be willing to damage myself. I really could have. So I came up with these rules for being a writer. And they're not rules for being a healthy writer. They're not rules for being healthy human being, but they are rules for being, for getting into the game of writing. So like I said, looking at the three gates and the three centers gives you the other stuff that you need. But this, this pattern, this six step pattern I'm going to talk about is what we give to our life writing students all the time. And so far it has not failed anybody. It's the path for becoming a published writer. And I believe that you can find paths that are similar to this, to becoming a black belt, to becoming a yoga instructor, to finding love and we have. To loving yourself and finding love and having a healthy relationship. And we've talked about these things. We give you these models not so that you can just follow them, but so you can see how we were thinking about it. And what we encourage you to do is to create your own models. So here's one that's very, very precise about writing. And if you can look at what it is that we're saying here and read between the lines and create your own model for the thing that you want to accomplish, especially you want to accomplish this year. What is it you want this year? You create your goals and make sure you have goals in all three arenas. Your physical goal, your emotional goal, your career goal, as the toast goes, health, love, money, and the time to enjoy them. So let's take a look at this pattern for writers. One, you write a sentence every day. Boom. That's it. Write a sentence every day. No kidding, no getting around it. Don't pretend you don't have the time to do it. This is the time that the rubber meets the road you're about to find out what stops you from being the writer you said you wanted to be. And trust me, it ain't time and it ain't energy. It's fear. That's what's stopping you. Because you learn as you go. You have to actually get in the game to learn. So that's A, is a sentence of error number one. Two, B. You write one to four short stories every month. Stay away from trying to write books until you've published stories. I mean, if you haven't published stories. And by published, I do not mean on your website. I mean that you sent in a story to a professional editor and they gave you money for it. That is the transaction you're looking for. I wrote something, I sent it off to a stranger. The stranger sent me money. That's the transaction you look for. That's a critical. It's a critical barrier. It's a critical step. There are wonderful writers who have self published, no question about it. But you have to admit something. There's no lower, there's no minimum level of quality in self publication. The worst crap in the world can be self published. Doesn't have to be grammatical, doesn't have to spell, doesn't have to have any sort of organization. It's terrible. You can put it out there. By asking a professional editor to bet their reputation and their mortgage on your skill. You are saying, I want to be a professional. I want to operate at that professional level. So stay away from novels until you publish short stories. It's the same thing as a novel is like a marathon. Short stories are like running a lap. Until you've run laps, don't try to run marathons. C, publish and submit one story per month. There's so much that is happening there. You have to get yourself used to actually getting in the game. You have to deal with the discipline to do it. Accessing your creativity, polishing and having the nerve to send it off so you're not just putting it in a drawer. That's the third thing. The fourth thing is once you have finished that story and sent it off, don't rewrite it anymore. Go on to your next story. So the fourth one is don't rewrite. Accept editorial request. Important on so many different levels. I could literally, I could write a book about each one of these things. This is hyper condensed E number five. Read ten times as much as you write and ideally you're reading the best material in the genre that you are interested in working in. If you were interested in doing Movies, you could adapt this exact same pattern to writing short scripts. You could. In fact, if you're smart, you could adapt this pattern, or you could ask yourself, what is this pattern asking for? And you could adapt it to anything else you want. Dating, martial arts, anything. Number six, repeat this pattern 100 times. Now, this is critical. I did some research, and it looked to me that the average writer broke through and sold after writing somewhere between 20 and 40 stories. The average might have been about 30. People wrote 30 stories. They kept writing, they kept submitting, they kept writing, they kept submitting. They kept reading and writing and polishing and doing this. And they got into that cycle, and the average one broke through in about somewhere between 20 and 40 stories. Call it 30. Because I really wanted to do this, because I really wanted to be a writer. I needed to create the room to fail. I needed to create the room where I could. I could operate, I could fall on my face and I could operate, I could fall on my face and fall on my face, and fall on my face way beyond 30 times. If that was the average, then I said to myself, I have to be prepared to vastly exceed the average because I had disadvantages. Everything in my philosophy is designed for people with disadvantages, okay? So if I wanted the life I wanted, I figured three times what it took the average other person to do, and I came up with 100. I said, I am going to write, Polish, submit 100 stories before I even ask myself whether or not I should be on this path. I will not even concern myself with the results I get until I'm up to 100 stories. You know, in martial arts, I might be. I will fight 100 matches before I expect to win one. It just gives you the room to fail. I will ask a hundred girls for dates before I expect one to say yes. Whatever it is, give yourself the room to fail. So those six principles I got from analyzing the belief systems, the actions and the emotional sets of. Of famous writers, and I found the things they had in common. They all wrote. They all finished what they wrote. They all submitted what they wrote. They all read encyclopedically. They just did. And they had tenacity. They kept going and going and going and going. Did some of them drink? Were some of them bad to their wives or husbands? Some of them egotistical monsters? Of course. But by examining the core of what they're doing and comparing that to success patterns that you've got from other places, you can start asking yourself, what are the critical things? What are the things that are most important and ignore the other things. So today, on a Monday, I invite you to ask yourself who you want to be at the end of this year, what you want to have accomplished this year, how you want to feel every day of this year, and create the goals such that your actions towards those goals give you the emotions, take a step, help you start becoming the person that you want to be. This is good stuff to think about, and it's a good day to think about it. And let's see, See, Kyle May said, Happy New Year to you and your family. Steve. Not to interrupt, taking middle notes. That's great. If you have any comments, any questions, be sure to ask me. And you can put those comments or questions in the. In the chat, even after I sign off and I will answer them. Yeah. For Dennis Dickinson says, for reading list, dig out the writings that win awards. Hugo, Nebula, best of lists of magazines. That's exactly right. That's exactly what you do. And you read 10 of those for every story that you write. So what does that mean? That means that if you have a minimum of writing one story a month, you need to read a minimum of 10 stories a month. Simple. You quantify this, and then you track this stuff and you put it on the magic formula. Do you have a map or model? Did you take your daily action? Did you control your emotions? And how do we control our emotions? We control our emotions by focusing on how we use our bodies, what we focus on mentally, and the words that we use. So every day, if you join me here or you go out onto YouTube and find some video, somebody who is talking about becoming the kind of person you want to become, accomplishing the kinds of things that you want to accomplish, healing the kinds of wounds that you have, whatever it is. And you know, half hour a day, you just input that, input that, input that. I do this every day, literally every single day. Well, six days a week, I will be sure to listen to something that is positive. I probably will go back over think and Grow Rich, which is the book that I started with. And I think it's the single best book on the subject of personal accomplishment. And I will go through and make sure that each one of those chapters is incorporated into my philosophy that I'm doing these things. Because the percentage of successful people that I know who have researched this arena deeply, who admire that book as their model is huge. You can get it free on the Internet. You can find audiobooks, YouTube. It is my honor to serve you. It is my honor to let you see what's going on in my life in a way that hopefully will let you decide whether or not I'm someone whose path you can follow, whether or not that path is valid. But please accept my very best wishes that this is going to be a fantastic year for you. That if you were to ask yourself what would it take for this to be the best year of my life, no matter what the external circumstances are, finding the connection with the part of you that accepts reality as it is and is constantly moving towards greater joy and service that's independent of what's happening externally. So no matter what's happened, even if there have been tragedies, just as the yogic approach to fitness is not your body constantly becoming stronger and stronger and stronger, there's a point in which that's not going to work anymore. But you can continue to use a higher and higher percentage of what you have left. A higher and higher percentage of what you have left. Apply that to relationships. I want to give a greater percentage of who I am to my wife and my friends. I want to put a higher percentage of my mind and my heart into my work. Whatever there is left of who I am. Rather than trying to affect the absolute quality or the absolute quantity of what it is that I am, I will work on the relative percentage of of Am I doing the best I can at this moment? If I am, that is all I can do. It's the best I can do. And curiously enough, it also makes me the best I can be. You take care. I'll talk to you tomorrow. If you'd like to sign up for, you know, coming to the Zoom meetings on Saturdays totally free, just Sign up at www.stephenbarnslist.com. take care and I'll see you later.