WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.400 If people have to treat you a certain way for you to be happy, 2 00:00:03.400 --> 00:00:07.000 then it means that your happiness is in their hands. 3 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:10.000 I get asked about mindset a lot on podcasts. 4 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:12.000 When you're building a business or you're building your career, 5 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:14.000 there are stressors that come into play. 6 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:17.000 How we manage the circumstances or the conditions that come to us 7 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:18.500 dictates how our life turns out. 8 00:00:18.500 --> 00:00:20.000 Everybody has bad stuff happen. 9 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:22.000 You probably believed and nodded your head like, 10 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:25.000 yeah, everyone has stuff and then we choose to make it better good. 11 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:28.000 Imagine for a second two children that are playing. 12 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:31.000 One child tells the other child, your nose is really big. 13 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:33.000 Or your fat. 14 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:36.000 Interesting is that the child who hears it is unaffected 15 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:38.000 and the child who says it is unaffected. 16 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:39.000 They're like, you're fat. 17 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:40.000 And he's like, huh? 18 00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:42.000 Parent comes in and overhears it. 19 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:44.000 And she's like, oh my god. 20 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:47.000 Takes the child that was called fat, comforts them, 21 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:50.000 gives them the expectation that they should be upset, 22 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:53.000 and then tells the other one that that was bad. 23 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:55.000 And in a moment, there was something that is now traumatic 24 00:00:55.000 --> 00:00:57.000 that otherwise wouldn't have been. 25 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:00.000 So when we're kids, we walk into the world with no meaning. 26 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:01.000 All we do is we observe. 27 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:04.000 And then whatever the adults around us tell us 28 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:08.000 and say, this means that we take this fact and it's not true. 29 00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:10.000 It's their interpretation of the world and we inherit them. 30 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:12.000 And then we spend the rest of our life trying to undo 31 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:15.000 and examine these beliefs that we have been told by people 32 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:17.000 that we probably don't agree with. 33 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:20.000 When something bothers you, pull it out and look at and say, 34 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:23.000 what happened and why is this bad? 35 00:01:23.000 --> 00:01:25.000 And what would it look like if it were good? 36 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:29.000 So the two tools that I use are time and volume. 37 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:33.000 The volume example is thinking, OK, I'm in traffic. 38 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:36.000 If this happened every day, would I be upset? 39 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:38.000 If it happened every day, I'd probably expect it, 40 00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:40.000 which means that I would not be upset about it 41 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:41.000 because it's just how things always are. 42 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:43.000 If you want to make it positive, you say, 43 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:45.000 well, what if every time I got in a car, 44 00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:46.000 normally it would take an hour? 45 00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:47.000 And today it took 30. 46 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:48.000 I'd be pretty excited about it. 47 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:50.000 And so all we did is just change the volume 48 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:53.000 on the circumstance to recalibrate the meaning 49 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:55.000 that we're choosing to describe to it good or bad. 50 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:59.000 I like to think of circumstances a lot like weather, 51 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:02.000 which is like, you've got sunny days and you've got rainy days. 52 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:04.000 And the problem, in my opinion, is that people, 53 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:06.000 any day that rains, they say, is bad. 54 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:08.000 And any day that's sunny, they say, is good. 55 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:10.000 When in reality, it just is. 56 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:11.000 It's just the weather. 57 00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:14.000 Contrast is what create the, quote, good and bad 58 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:16.000 when, really, there's just a middle line 59 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:18.000 and half of it's above and half of it's below. 60 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:20.000 Then what we can do is artificially move the line 61 00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:22.000 in our minds by saying whatever this circumstance is, 62 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:24.000 what would it look like if it were worse? 63 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:27.000 And what would it look like if it were worse all the time? 64 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:29.000 And if so, then maybe today's a good thing. 65 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:31.000 The second frame that I like to use is time. 66 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:34.000 A hundred years out, but 10,000 years out, 67 00:02:34.000 --> 00:02:35.000 how much is this going to matter? 68 00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:39.000 The reason something affects you is because you have deemed it meaningful. 69 00:02:39.000 --> 00:02:40.000 You've said it matters. 70 00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:43.000 It's my worldview that nothing matters with a capital app. 71 00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:46.000 Like, nothing matters in the universe. 72 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:47.000 It doesn't matter. 73 00:02:47.000 --> 00:02:50.000 There's this statue of a head that's in the sands of Egypt. 74 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:52.000 All right, and it's bigger than this whole room. 75 00:02:52.000 --> 00:02:53.000 It's just the head. 76 00:02:53.000 --> 00:02:54.000 It's worn out. 77 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:56.000 And then it's scripted along the forehead. 78 00:02:56.000 --> 00:02:58.000 It says, here lies crazy name. 79 00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:00.000 Who own everything that the eye could see. 80 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:02.000 The immortal, so and so. 81 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:05.000 And the only thing that was left was a worn out statue head 82 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:06.000 that no one knew who he was. 83 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:08.000 And it was 5,000 years old. 84 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:11.000 If that guy who ruled the known world to him, 85 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:13.000 wealth probably mattered, right? 86 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:15.000 But does it matter? 87 00:03:15.000 --> 00:03:16.000 No, probably not. 88 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:18.000 I've relieved a lot of the pressure in my life 89 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:21.000 so that I can make better decisions by zooming way out 90 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:23.000 and thinking 10,000 years from now, will this matter? 91 00:03:23.000 --> 00:03:26.000 And if the answer is no, does it matter to me? 92 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:29.000 And then if I can make the decision of, like, good or bad, 93 00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:30.000 based on my new context that I created, 94 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:32.000 then I can live a life a lot easier. 95 00:03:32.000 --> 00:03:34.000 And so for me, that helped me decrease anxiety. 96 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:37.000 It helped me decrease sadness around certain circumstances. 97 00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:39.000 And I'll give you the last example of this. 98 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:42.000 So I had a cat named Bill, chill Bill, rest in peace, homie. 99 00:03:42.000 --> 00:03:43.000 Love the cat. 100 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:44.000 He died. 101 00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:46.000 He's like some freak heart thing or something. 102 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:47.000 So you died in like two years. 103 00:03:47.000 --> 00:03:49.000 When he died, I was bought. 104 00:03:49.000 --> 00:03:50.000 I was like, this sucks. 105 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:51.000 Then I thought to myself, 106 00:03:51.000 --> 00:03:53.000 what if cats only normally lived six months? 107 00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:55.000 How stoked would I be that he lived four times 108 00:03:55.000 --> 00:03:57.000 the normal length of a normal cat? 109 00:03:57.000 --> 00:03:58.000 I was like, I'd probably be really stoked. 110 00:03:58.000 --> 00:03:59.000 I'd be like, dude, he lived a long life. 111 00:03:59.000 --> 00:04:00.000 I can't believe we had him this long. 112 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:02.000 And all of a sudden, my perspective around the death 113 00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:03.000 completely changed. 114 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:05.000 I was like, I was so grateful that I got to have him as long as I did. 115 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:08.000 When you play with time, and you play with volume, 116 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:10.000 first off, we have to be aware of the levers of meaning 117 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:11.000 that exist. 118 00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:12.000 And then once you're aware of them, 119 00:04:12.000 --> 00:04:14.000 you can start moving them in your favor, 120 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:16.000 and then looking at your current conditions 121 00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:17.000 through different lenses and say, 122 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:18.000 what would this mean if it were amazing? 123 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:20.000 What would the conditions have to be in order for this 124 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:21.000 to be an awesome thing? 125 00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:22.000 And then all of a sudden, 126 00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:24.000 you just exit the game of happy sad 127 00:04:24.000 --> 00:04:26.000 and get to be your own game maker. 128 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:28.000 At least, that's what I tried to do when I get upset. 129 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:30.000 Look at it, pull it apart and think, 130 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:31.000 like, is this real? 131 00:04:31.000 --> 00:04:32.000 Is this true? 132 00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:33.000 Is anyone doing this perfectly? 133 00:04:33.000 --> 00:04:34.000 No. 134 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:37.000 But simply being aware of the fact gives you a lot more control.