Quest, I called him the five abilities.
Here's the first one. Develop the ability to absorb,
the ability to soak it up like you're doing today.
Be like a spun. Don't miss anything.
And not just the words. It's true.
Don't miss the words, but don't miss the atmosphere.
Don't miss the color. Don't miss the scenario.
Don't miss what's going on. Most people are just trying to
get through the day. Here's what I want you to be
committed to do. Learn to get from the day.
Don't just get through it. Get from it.
Learn from it. Let the day teach you.
Join the University of Life. What a difference that'll make
in your future. Commit yourself to learning.
Commit yourself to absorbing. Be like a sponge.
Get it, don't miss it. I've got a personal friend of
mine who's so gifted in this area.
I think he has soaked up and remembers everything that's ever
happened to him. He can tell you it's a teenager,
where he was and what he did and what he said and what she said
and how they felt and the color of the sky and what was going on
that day. The reason is because he gets
it. He gets it.
I'm telling you, it's more
exciting to have him go to Acapulco, come back and tell you
about it than it is to go yourself.
He's unbelievable. He's got this extraordinary gift
and why is it when he's there, he doesn't miss anything?
Here's a good phrase for you to jot down.
Wherever you are, be there. Be there to absorb it up.
Be there to soak it up. Take a picture if you can, but
take pictures of your mind. Let your soul and heart take
pictures. Get it, capture it, absorb it.
Such an important ability to develop the ability to get it.
Don't miss it. Don't be casual in getting it.
Key phrase casualness leads to casualties.
Let's be real, progress doesn't come from hype, it comes from
habits. Tiny actions repeated daily.
The playbook isn't motivation, it's the structure your future
depends on. Start small, stay consistent,
let the compounding shift everything.
If you're serious about growth, you can't afford to guess.
The system is in the link below. Second, learn to respond.
The ability to respond means let life touch you.
Don't let it kill you, but let it touch you.
Let sad things make you sad. Let happy things make you happy.
I'm telling you, give in to the emotion.
Let the emotions strike you. Not just the words, not just the
image. Let the feelings strike you.
Let the emotions strike you. Here's what's important.
Our emotions need to be as educated as our intellect.
Our emotions need to be educated as well as our intent.
It's important to know how to feel.
It's important to know how to respond.
It's important to let life in. Let it touch you.
I'm the greatest guy in the world to take you to the movies.
I get into a good mood. I want a good movie.
Make me laugh, make me cry, scare me to death.
Teach me something. Take me high, take me low.
Just don't leave me as I was when I came in.
Touch me. Do something.
To me, beginning only lasts so long.
If you begin that first week and then you don't continue.
Yes, you'll be inspired by deciding and planning and
beginning, but all of that now will start to fade away if you
don't do. Number 41 of the great sources
of inspiration is progressing. Once you've gotten started, now
you proceed. You progress.
Now you go to class the second week, you go to class the third
week, but it's not only progressing in terms of time,
it's progressing in terms of what you're learning,
progressing in terms of getting the information that you hadn't
discovered before. Now you're excited about that
progress. One of the greatest sources of
inspiration is progress. When you start jogging around
the block and you know at first it's a little difficult and then
it's two blocks and then you go around four or five times, but
then you notice, notice your breathing easier.
You notice when you go up a flight of stairs, you're not out
of breath and it suddenly occurs to you in a fairly short period
of time. You're making progress with
these incredible Herbalife products.
When people first start taking the products and they've got
some health challenges and they discipline themselves, they do
it the first day and the second day and the first week and the
second week. But it isn't long.
If they need some to lose some weight, you know, a pound or
two, 4 or 5 lbs, that is so incredibly exciting.
You don't have to wait for £50. You don't have to wait for £100.
You know that first one, that first two or three making
progress, having more oxygen in your lungs.
You, you can tell within a short period of time, I'm making
progress on my, my oxygen supply, I'm making progress on
losing weight. Then when you start making
progress in your business, your ability to make contacts, your
ability to talk to people. So the man who shared with me
ideas that changed my life, I want to share with you three of
those basic subjects. When I met him, I was 25 years
old. And when I first got acquainted
with him, I used a lot of excuses as to why I wasn't doing
well. And he said, well, tell me a
little bit about your story. And I told him, you know, I was
behind on my bills, had pennies in my pocket and nothing in the
bank. But I was embarrassed about
being behind on my big mouth promises to my family.
And then he gave me one little simple phrase that really
forever changed my life. Here's what he said.
Mr. Owen, if you want the future to change for you, you've got to
change. And he said if you don't change,
the next six years of your life is going to be just like the
last six. You'll still be behind on your
bills. You'll still be behind on your
promises. But then he gave it to me in the
form of a promise when I was 25 years old.
I've remembered it all these years and I've shared this
promise now with probably over 3 million people in the last 30
plus years and it's going to be valid for you.
So listen carefully to this promise.
My teacher said to me, young man, if you will change,
everything will change. If you will get better,
everything will get better for you.
What a clear message that was for me.
He said if you'll change your philosophy, if you'll change
your habits, if you'll refine your thinking, if you'll change
and accept some new disciplines, if you'll turn the corner where
you've been in the past, go for a new life of the future.
He said all kinds of remarkable things will happen for you if
you will change. Before I met Mr. Schoaf, I used
to cross my fingers and say I sure hope things will change.
I was hoping the government would change and the tax
structure would change and that my boss would change and pay me
more money. I was hoping that, you know,
economics would change and prices would come down, and I
was hoping that circumstances would get better.
And then I discovered from my teacher that those things are
going to continue the same. In fact, all of those things
that happened to us is kind of like the wind that blows, and
the wind blows on us all. In fact, in America, especially
the last 6 1/2 thousand years of recorded history, we've got
probably the most favorable wind that's ever blown.
Economics and circumstances, living in a free country,
democracy and freedom, an excellent economy.
Sure, we struggle at times, but compared to the rest of the
world in the last 6 1/2 thousand years, we've got the best wind
ever. But if you just let the wind
blow, I'm telling you, it won't take you where you want to go.
All of us must use this wind to take us to the dreams we've got,
to the equities we want, to the money we want, to the income we
want, and to all the things we want our life to have.
This is where we want to go, and we've got a good wind.
But we must not leave our future just to the wind, just to the
economy, just to the structure of the way things are happening
today. Here's what we must learn to do,
and that is set a good sail. And if you'll learn to set a
good sail, and that's what my teacher taught me in those early
days, he said Mr. Own, the wind is going to blow, however it's
going to blow. Politics are going to be
politics, and the economy is going to be the economy.
And however it turns out, that's the way it's going to be.
What you must learn to do is not to wish for a better wind.
That's naive. The key is to wish for the
wisdom and the skills and the learning so that you can set a
better sail. There's no other thing that will
make you as completely crystal crystalline focused on anything
other than war. There's bad guys that you are
trying to kill and they are trying to kill you.
You, you can't get any more focused than that.
Right there. When I had this conversation,
and I have also said, you know that the best times of my life,
hands down the best time of my life up to this point was being
the task unit commander in the Battle of Ahmadi.
Without question, the worst times of my life also were being
the task unit commander in the Battle of the Body.
By the way, thank. You, it was an honor.
It was an honor to serve the the thing that I came away with and
where I ended up in this conversation with this interview
that I was was doing was I asked him, I said, have you ever known
anyone that's had cancer and bad cancer and they survived it.
And of course he said yes. And I said, what do those people
say about cancer? Often times they say I'm glad I
had it. I'm I'm it taught me I.
Wouldn't go through it again and I wouldn't wish it on.
People I. Wouldn't go through it again.
I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but I'm glad I went through it.
I think there definitely are things that one can iterate on,
but the, the core thing is to have a great product and then
you can always improve and, and iterate on that in all sorts of
ways. And I think, you know, I think
even in, in the tech industry, what's striking is how weak on a
quantitative basis so many of the successful companies were.
It was just, they had a great product and then years later
they were able to optimise it in all sorts of all sorts of ways.
Whereas if you're just trying to optimize and you don't have a
great product, I think that that rarely works.
I think it's always worth asking, you know, where you're
going to go with this business. And so I think we're always
focused on very short time horizons because you have to,
you know, figure out a way to get through the next month, the
next quarter, You know, how do you get some customers?
How do you, how do you track? But it's, it's always worth
thinking ahead, you know, 5 to 10 years, you know, why will
this be a really valuable business in five to 10 years?
And, you know, how's the competitive landscape going to
develop? How's technology going to
develop? How's the world going to
develop? These are hard questions to
answer, but I think, I think, I think the, the great
entrepreneurs that I know always have some perspective on it.
And it might be wrong, but it's just this is what's going to
happen. And then it's sort of well
reasoned. And, and so you have a, you have
a plan and you know, it's when I, when I was playing chess, you
know, in junior high school, one of the early lessons I learned
was a bad plan. It's still always better than no
plan at all. And so, you know, have a plan.
You can always change it, but don't, don't just pretend that,
that you have no clue about what's going to happen and that
everything about the future is random.
If you if you sort of say that everything's random and out of
your control, that's, that's, that's the way you set yourself
up for failure. It's not enough to have a great
idea and the focus and the conscientiousness to see it to
fruition. You must have the strength and
the resolve and the courage to pursue that idea even when the
rest of the world thinks you're insane.
Time and time again, if you look at the stories of
extraordinarily important entrepreneurs, there is almost
always a moment when they are the only ones who believe in the
value of what they're doing. You know, I tell in my book, the
story of my book David and Goliath, the story of Ingevar
Kamprad, the guy who founds IKEA.
And the crucial moment in the in the story of IKEA is when he
faces a boycott from the other furniture manufacturers in
Sweden and he's about to go out of business.
And in desperation, he moves his operations across the Baltic Sea
from Sweden to Poland and sets up shop in Poland.
And that's what IKEA is. IKEA is essentially furniture
ship flat made in Poland. That's the original elevator
pitch for IKEA. What's interesting about that is
he does it in 1961, at the height of the Cold War, at a
time when East and West Communist world and free world
are closer to outright war than at any other time in history.
A guy living in the West, Sweden, crosses the pond to
Poland, the Iron Curtain and sets up shop.
You cannot imagine what a controversial move that was.
That's like, that would be like Walmart opening operations in
North Korea. Literally, it's on that level of
kind of eyebrow raising. You've got to be kidding me.
Who is this guy kind of thing? But he does it and he persists
and he turns his back on all those critics.
Why? Because he is a deeply
disagreeable person. Didn't need people to agree with
him, right? And that's how he's able to
build IKEA into this extraordinary runaway success
story. That's very hard to do.
As human beings, we are hardwired to want the approval
of our peers. And define what you consider.
Wealthy. Wealth is happiness completely
is how much you laugh and how much the people you love laugh.
And that's really what love is, how much time you spend, like
sending money back to somebody like a child.
It's not considered love because kids don't care about money.
I remember when I was a child, all I wanted for Christmas was
for my parents, for my mom's to get back with my dad.
And I didn't, I wasn't able to give that to my any one of my
children. So I still have work to do.
You know, I haven't hit that wealthiness because I haven't
been able to take that most important pain to a child and
take that away from my children. I I haven't broke that cycle.
That would be wealth. If my children don't have to
pick a side, if they don't have to watch us fight, if they don't
have to tune out because they don't want to hear us argue, You
know what I'm saying? What's going to be the secret?
There. What are you finding didn't
finding the right woman for the right reason?
So it's great because I was really, really able to recognize
it in Raquel, but I was like, Nah, this time I'm staying.
We're doing everything together like she's I, I enjoy this too
much. So it's always looking at it
from my kids perspective, my woman's perspective.
It's I think I've learned to take my eyeballs out of my head
and put it in there for a second to see what they see and what
would make them comfortable over me.
As a boss, your job is to think about your business and your
staff before you think about yourself.
It's the same thing a dad does or the head of a family.
So I guess me being conscious of these things at 47, being
evolved enough to take the time to appreciate that that's to me
as well, you know, uncompromised, great quality of
living. Like I prefer not to have to
live in a house that's not big and all the luxuries that I've
worked so hard to get. But I think every circumstance
Rock Keller's and I've been in, we've been equally happy,
whether it's a big house or a studio apartment.
See, grace is available to everybody.
It's like sunlight. Sunlight is available to
everybody, but only those who open their eyes will see.
That's the way it is. But is it not there?
Is it there only for me, not for you?
There's no such thing. It's available for everybody.
It's just that are you receptive?
When we talk about receptivity, see the entire process of yoga.
The word yoga itself means this. The word yoga means union.
Union means what? Right now in most people's
experience, it is me versus universe.
This is how people are experiencing life.
Otherwise, why continuous anxiety, fear.
They think they are fighting for their life all the time.
Why they are fighting the whole universe, individual and the
universal being in competition with the universe is a stupid
thing to do.