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January 8 - January 20, 2020
Awareness is the essence of discovery. Every now and then, stop doing and gather some research.
Write down the areas where you know you need to make some changes. It could be how you interact with your partner, the way you raise your kids, how you deal with people and projects at work, how you’re pursuing a job hunt, whether your home and other creature comforts make you feel good, or whether you’re making time for big dreams, amazing new experiences, spiritual insights, or creative growth. Maybe you want tune-ups in all of these areas. You’ll get there.
A set point is simply a bare-minimum threshold you establish for yourself that you promise you will not go below. A set point differs from a goal. Goals pull you forward, while set points help you maintain what you have. You need both.
For things you can measure (your weight or your bank account, for example), you can establish specific amounts: My weight set point is X. My bank account set point is Y. You can establish set points for your intellectual life (I will read X books per month) or even your work (I will spend two hours a week researching or studying something that will make me better at my job). The more specific you are, the easier it will be to keep track of the set point and actually stick with it.
There’s a powerful reason why set points work. It’s a natural human tendency to feel that we’ve failed when we slip from our goals. But with set points, a failure is turned into a challenge. If you can’t attain your fifty push-ups, you enact a new goal. Get to fifty-one. You replace the feeling of failure with the positive feeling of striving for a goal.
Stop postponing your happiness. Be happy now. Your thoughts and beliefs do create your reality, but only when your present state is joyful.
Keep the big goals—just don’t tie your happiness to your goals. Be happy now.
I was not going to postpone my happiness until I attained some future goal.
Have big goals—but don’t tie your happiness to your goals. You must be happy before you attain them.
A key ingredient of this state is that your happiness is not tied to attaining your vision. It comes from the pursuit of your vision, combined with a sense of gratitude for what you already have.
We shouldn’t do things so we can be happy. We should be happy so we can do things.
I’ve observed that almost all of the extraordinary people I’ve met or read about have one thing in common: They have a vision for their future. It may be a new piece of art to create, a service or product to bring to the world, a mountain to climb, or a family to raise. These people live in the future in some way. Conventional spiritual growth advocates talk about the need to be “present.” I believe that being present is only part of the story. Happiness in the now grounds you in the present. But you need bold dreams pulling you forward, too. Extraordinary people intend to leave a mark on the
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It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.
Science is showing us that one of the key things that lets us function optimally in the world is our ability to control our happiness level. It’s a requirement for learning to bend reality.
He concluded that in general, optimistic salespeople performed an impressive 20 to 40 percent better than pessimistic salespeople.
In his book The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor describes a study with four-year-olds who were given some “learning tasks” to do. One group was asked to think of something that made them happy; the other wasn’t. The happy-thought group did a speedier job on the task and didn’t make as many mistakes—which
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister, PhD, has found that this “parenthood paradox” is explained when the search for meaning is added into the equation. Parenting is highly meaningful, even though it’s also highly demanding and requires personal sacrifices that go against short-term happiness. What’s interesting about the parenthood paradox is that it seems to indicate that we humans find meaning so important that we’ll sacrifice a certain amount of happiness for it.
Perhaps no single exercise leads to as big a happiness boost as the practice of gratitude—so much so that gratitude is getting significant notice in research and scientific circles.
The moment I start feeling disappointed or discouraged or I start feeling really tense, I immediately say, “Okay, what are you measuring against?” and sure enough, I’m measuring against the ideal. And the moment I say, “Okay, turn around, where did you come from?” And the moment I turn around and I measure backwards [from] my starting point for this particular activity—bang, I feel great…. I’ve learned a lot. We’ve made tremendous progress…. In a matter of a few seconds, I go from the negative zone of being in the gap to the positive zone of measuring my actual progress.
Even in tough times, you can look back and see how far you’ve come, how much you’ve learned, and the support you’ve received along the way.
(alpha waves, associated with high creativity, compassion, insight, forgiveness, and love; theta waves, correlated with flashes of creativity and intuition; and delta waves, associated, we were told, with “altering reality”).
As it turned out, the big secret to increasing alpha waves was just one thing. And we spent seven full days focusing on it. Forgiveness.
The people behind the program discovered holding onto grudges and anger is the single biggest factor suppressing alpha waves.
The Dalai Lama once said: To be happy, make others happy. Giving is the path for doing this.
Kristina asked, “How is it possible to be happy when seeing so much misery and tragedy every day?” The Dalai Lama’s answer was actually a question, and it was simply this: “But who can you help if you’re unhappy?” And this is perhaps one of the most important things to understand about Blissipline. You can be surrounded by pain. You can be empathetic and feel for others, but ultimately the discipline of bliss allows you to help spread more bliss in the world. That is the highest expression of the extraordinary life.
But for most of my life, I pursued means goals. Means goals are the things that society tells us we need to have in place to get to happiness. Almost everything I wrote down as a goal was actually a means to an end, not an end in itself, including: ■ Graduating from high school with a good GPA. ■ Qualifing for the right college. ■ Securing a summer internship.
But when means goals become your focus, you miss the point. I love this advice from author Joe Vitale: “A good goal should scare you a little and excite you a lot.” Scary and exciting are two beautiful feelings that good end goals often bring out. Scary is a good thing because it means you’re pushing your boundaries—that’s how you take steps toward the extraordinary. Excitement signifies that your goal is genuinely close to your heart—not something you’re doing to please someone else or to conform to society’s Brules.
Something interesting happens when you give your mind a clear vision. Whether the goal is a means goal or an end goal—your mind will find a way to
bring it to you.
A-Fest was never a goal in itself. Rather, it emerged as an evolution of all the items on my bucket list coalescing, merging, dancing with each other, and pointing me toward the creation of a model of reality that was completely new in the world. And that’s the most important aspect of end goals. They help take you off the beaten path and move you away from the restrictive models of reality, systems of living, and Brules that school and society prod you into following. End goals help you step off the treadmill of the ordinary and get on a trajectory toward the extraordinary.
So, don’t choose a career, lest you end up in a mind-numbing occupation. Nor should you just declare that you want to be an entrepreneur—lest you turn into a stressed out, bored one. Instead, think of your end goals and let your career or creation find you.
MEANS GOALS USUALLY HAVE A “SO” IN THEM. Means goals don’t stand alone but are stepping-stones to something else. They’re part of a sequence. For example: Get a good GPA so you can get into a good college. This often means that goals get strung together into (life) long sequences, like this one: Get a good GPA so you can get into a good college, so you can get a good job, so you can make lots of money, so you can afford a nice house, car, etc., so you’ll have money saved to do all the stuff you really want to do after you retire. Does your goal have a “so” attached?
MEANS GOALS ARE OFTEN ABOUT MEETING OR CONFORMING TO BRULES. Is your goal one you think you “should” meet as part of achieving your ultimate goal—for example, thinking that you should get a college degree in order to have a fulfilling job or that you should get married in order to have love in your life? Many means goals are cleverly concealed Brules.
END GOALS ARE ABOUT FOLLOWING YOUR HEART. Time flies when you’re pursuing them. You may work hard toward these goals, but you feel it’s worth it. They remind you of how fantastic it is to be human. When you’re working on an end goal, it doesn’t feel like “work.” You could be doing it for hours on end, but it genuinely makes you happy or gives you meaning. You don’t need to step away to get “recharged.” Working on the end goal itself recharges you—it doesn’t drain you. For example, for me, writing this book is an end goal. It’s so much fun that I’d do it even if I never got paid.
END GOALS ARE OFTEN FEELINGS. To be happy, to be in love, to consistently feel loving, to consistently feel joyous are all very good end goals. A diploma, an award, a big business deal, or other achievements can certainly bring good feelings, but they are not end goals UNLESS you’re happy AS you’re pursuing them—in other
words, unless the act of studying for your diploma or closing the business deal itself brings you happiness. End goals have happiness baked into the pursuit.
No matter what you believe about humanity’s origins, one thing is clear. We’re here to experience all the world has to offer—not objects, not money, but experiences. Money and objects only generate experiences. Experiences also give us happiness in the now, a key component of the extraordinary life. We need to feel that daily life holds wonder and excitement to sustain our happiness—which fuels our movement toward our goals.
If time and money were no object and I did not have to seek anyone’s permission, what kinds of experiences would my soul crave?
On a piece of letter-size paper, they draw three columns marked Experiences, Growth, and Contribution. Within the columns, they write down their visions and aspirations for each of the three areas.
Steve Jobs said it wisely: You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path; and that will make all the difference.
Extraordinary minds do not need to seek validation from outside opinion or through the attainment of goals. Instead, they are truly at peace with themselves and the world around them. They live fearlessly—immune to criticism or praise and fueled by their own inner happiness and self-love.
A good end goal is something you have absolute control over.
No object or person can take it away from you.
You know you have a hole to plug when you find yourself feeling hurt or creating meaning around someone else’s action or words. You can’t control someone else’s behavior toward you, but you can control your own reaction and how your meaning-making machine construes that behavior. The key is to override our inner desire to prove ourselves or our tendency to feel as if we’re not enough without the love or validation of others.
When you look back at the formative experiences of your life—whether they are the most painful or the most positive—you’re likely to find your meaning-making machine running on high. Someone’s words or actions influenced you in some way, and you created a meaning around them.
Every time you give someone the power to build you up with praise, you’re also unknowingly giving that person the power to destroy you with criticism. Therefore, accept praise and criticism as nothing more than someone else’s expressions of their models of reality. They have nothing to do with who you really are.
Suddenly I remembered advice from my friend, the author Sonia Choquette: Be present. I took my attention away from the fears and worries. Instead, I focused on
the leaves of the plant on the restaurant table before me. I noticed the subtle veins running through the leaves, observed the sunlight falling on the green surfaces, and used my fingers to feel the texture and pliability of the stem. In one minute, I felt as if I had just popped a relaxation pill. Everything went almost back to normal. This is the power of becoming focused on the present. It takes your mind off whatever stress, fear, judgment, anger, or frustration you’re having with the world or the people in it—and it forces you to remember who you are and to be present in the now.
The next time you feel an apparent urge to lose your cool, or you feel judged, insulted, or hurt by a loved one, remember to be present. This quick mental hack to autocorrect your mental state can instantly pull you out o...
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Shortly after filming Marisa Peer speaking at an event, Al Ibrahim, our cameraman, realized he had a question about this matter of being “enough,” so he asked Marisa about it. In a nutshell, his question was this: If it is true that “I am enough” and if we don’t need to get validation or praise from others, what is the driving force that pushes us to do big things in the world? What would prevent us from just being happy couch potatoes, doing nothing but enjoying the present? Marisa replied: If you sit on the couch all day and do nothing, it is precisely because you don’t think you’re enough.
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