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For me, I've relieved a lot of the pressure in my life so that I could make better decisions

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by zooming way out and thinking 10,000 years from now will this matter.

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And then if I can make the decision of like, good or bad,

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based on my new context that I created, then I can live a life a lot easier.

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The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game.

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This podcast, the game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to

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building acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio.

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My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe some they

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soon partner with us to get $200 million in beyond.

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I hope you share and enjoy.

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When you're building a business or you're building your career,

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there are stressors that come into play, right?

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And how we manage the circumstances or the conditions that come to us

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is dictates how our life turns out.

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I like, everybody has bad stuff happen.

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And I say that as a pause because you probably believed and nodded your head like,

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yeah, everybody has bad stuff happen, but that's not true.

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Everyone has stuff happen.

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And then we choose to make it better good.

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And so I'll tell you a quick backstory and then I'll tell you how I deal with it.

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So imagine for a second two children that are playing.

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And then one child tells the other child, your nose is really big or you're fat.

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And what's interesting is that the child who hears it is unaffected and the child who says it

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is unaffected.

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They're like, you're fat.

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And he's like, huh?

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Two people communicate.

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Parent comes in and overhears it.

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And she's like, oh my god, takes the child that that was called fat,

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comforts them, gives them the expectation that they should be upset,

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and then tells the other one that that was bad.

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And in a moment, there was something that is now traumatic that otherwise wouldn't have been.

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Because the adult tells both of those children that that was bad.

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And so when we're kids, we walk in the world with no meaning.

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All we do is we observe.

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And then we say, what does that mean?

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What does that mean?

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And then whatever the adults around us tell us and say, this means that we take his fact.

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And it's not true.

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It's their interpretation of the world and we inherit those.

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And then we spend the rest of our life trying to undo these and examine these beliefs that we

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have been told by people that we probably don't agree with.

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And so it's hard to track back every single thing you've ever been told means.

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But you can, just on an exception basis, when something bothers you, pull it out and look at and

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say, what happened and why is this bad?

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What if it were good and what would it look like if it were good?

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And so the two tools that I use for this are time and volume.

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And so the volume example is thinking, okay, I'm in traffic.

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If this happened every day, would I be upset?

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If it happened every day, I'd probably expect it, which means that I would not be upset

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about it because it's just how things always are.

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And so if every time every person got into a car, it always took 30 minutes to get somewhere,

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then that's just how driving a car is.

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And so then our expectation meets reality.

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Or if you want to make it positive, you say, well, what if every time I got into a car,

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normally it would take an hour?

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And today it took 30.

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I'd be pretty excited about it.

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And so all we did is just change the volume on the circumstance to recalibrate

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the meaning that we're choosing to ascribe to it good or bad, right?

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And so I like to think of circumstances a lot like weather,

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which is like you've got sunny days and you've got rainy days.

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And the problem, in my opinion, is that people any day that rains, they say is bad.

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And any day that's sunny, they say is good.

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When in reality, it just is.

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It's just the weather.

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And you need both.

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And if it was only sunny every day,

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you wouldn't be happy about the sun because it's just how it always is.

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And so contrast is what creates the quote good and bad.

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When reality, there's just a middle line and half of it's above and half of it's below.

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And so if we know that, then what we can do is artificially move the line in our minds by saying

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whatever this circumstance is, what would it look like if it were worse?

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And what would it look like if it were worse all the time?

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And then now how would I look at my current circumstance?

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And would it be better now as a result if it were always worse than it is today?

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And if so, then maybe today's a good thing, right?

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The second frame that I like to use is time, right?

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Which is if I go not just 100 years out, but 10,000 years out,

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how much is this going to matter, right?

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And so a good example of that is like if you're looking at

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the reason something affects you is because you have deemed it meaningful.

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You've said it matters, right?

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And it's my world view that nothing matters with a capital M.

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Like nothing matters in the universe, right?

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There's one little pebble into a big thing of sand inside of lots of things of sand,

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14 billion years, whatever, right?

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It doesn't matter.

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And the easiest story that I saw about this,

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I can't remember the writer's name, but there's this statue of a head that's in the sands of Egypt,

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all right? And it's bigger than this whole room.

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And it's just the head.

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And it's worn out.

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And then inscripted along the forehead was, it was that it was a tombstone.

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It says, here lies crazy name, whatever.

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Here lies crazy name, who own everything that the eye could see,

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the immortal, so and so.

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And the only thing that was left was a worn out statue head that no one knew who he was.

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And it was 5,000 years old.

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And so if that guy who ruled the known world,

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to him, wealth probably mattered, right?

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But does it matter?

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No, probably not.

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And so for me, I've relieved a lot of the pressure in my life so that I could make better decisions

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by zooming way out and thinking 10,000 years from now, will this matter?

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And then if the answer is no, does it matter to me?

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And then if I can make the decision of like, good or bad,

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based on my new context that I created, then I can live a life a lot easier.

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And so for me, that helped me decrease anxiety,

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it helped me decrease, you know, sadness around certain circumstances.

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And I'll give you the last example of this.

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So I had a cat named Bill, chill Bill, for us to piece,

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homie, love the cat, really like the cat.

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And he died like some freak heart thing or something.

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So he died in like two years and he was a cute little cat, really nice dude.

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Anyways, when he died, I was bumped.

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I was like, this sucks.

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But then I thought to myself, what if cats only normally lived six months?

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How stoked would I be that he lived four times the normal length of a normal cat?

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I was like, I'd probably be really stuck.

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I'd be like, dude, he lived a long life.

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I can't believe we had him this long.

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And all of a sudden, my perspective around the death completely changed.

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And I was like, I was so grateful that I got to have him as long as I did.

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Hey guys, real quick.

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If you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon called 100 million dollar offers

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that over 8,000 five star reviews and it has almost a perfect score.

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You can get it for 99 cents on Kindle.

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The reason I bring it up is that I put over a thousand hours into writing that book.

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And it's my biggest gift to our community.

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So it's my very shameless way of trying to get you to like me more.

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And ultimately make more dollars to that later on in your business career.

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I can push the bar towards you.

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So that's my gift.

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Go check it out.

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Amazon and back to the show.

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When you play with time and you play with volume,

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how regular is this?

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Could it be worse?

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What if worse was normal and this is what today was?

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Well, then that's the example of the cat or the traffic.

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Like then all of a sudden you can make your current context much easier to deal with

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or even positive, even though you thought of it as negative,

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because you described a different meaning to it.

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And then if we think about this on a very long time horizon,

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we think that none of it's really going to matter because in 500 million years,

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the sun is going to expand enough and engulf the earth.

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And so it won't matter.

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Like literally everything that you do here is going to get engulfed by the sun.

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And it'll only quote matter if we expand to the other, you know, universes.

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Now imagine that you invented something that changes humanity.

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Like the guy who found fire.

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Good dude.

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We appreciate him.

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But you know what?

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None of us knows name.

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Did it matter?

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For us?

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Sure.

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Does it matter that that was his name?

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And he was the guy?

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Probably not.

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When you look at your towns that you live in and you see like Henderson and Jacksonville,

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right?

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These guys were big deals and named cities after themselves.

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And we barely know them.

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And you probably have areas in your city that you would,

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you would aspire to have a street named after you, right?

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Or an entire county named after you, Clark County, right?

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But no one knows who Clark is, right?

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I live here.

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And so I think a lot of times we inflate the micro importance of things.

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One in reality, they aren't important at all.

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And we just choose to make them meaningful.

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First off, we have to be aware of the levers of meaning that exist.

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And then once you're aware of them, you can start moving them in your favor.

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And then looking at your current conditions through different lenses and say,

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what would this mean if it were amazing?

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What would the conditions have to be in order for this to be an awesome thing?

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And then all of a sudden, you just exit the game of happy sad and get to be your own

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game maker, at least that's what I tried to do when I get upset.

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Look at it, pull it apart thing like, is this real?

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Is this true?

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And then go from there.

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I get asked about mindset a lot on podcasts.

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They're like, you have a unique view of the world, Alex.

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And to me, it's weird because it's just how I see the world.

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And so I don't, to me, it doesn't feel unique.

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It feels like how it is to me in general.

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And so I have trouble sometimes articulating it.

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Because to me, I expect that everyone else is thinking that way.

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When sometimes I was surprised that they weren't.

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And so the first time this came out was on the Ice Coffee Hour podcast,

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where they talked about just different views I had on things,

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which apparently were contrary and which I didn't know.

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And so it generated a lot of kind of press and media around it.

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And so my team said, hey, do you think you could make a video just specifically around

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meanings since you talk about it so much with us?

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And so this, although short, is my best attempt to give you three different scenarios

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that I use to create and destroy meaning in my own life that helped me decrease my stress,

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increase the, decrease the emotional affect I have to circumstances so that I can make better

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decisions in my life.

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And so I think the reason that people struggle with this a lot is because

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they try to control the uncontrollable.

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They ascribe their feelings to things that they are reactive to,

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which means if this, so they create these equations for themselves,

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if this happens, I'll be angry, if this happens, I'll be upset,

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if this happens, I'll be, I'll be stressed.

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And so their life is just a series of piano keys that are being played on their emotions,

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and they have no control.

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Whereas if you can flip the script and make it so that you are the one who writes what that

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equation is, then you can change what the keys mean.

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So even though it's high on the keyboard over here, it turns out low over here when you hear it,

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because you're the one who's setting what that key means rather than taking

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whatever the external circumstances.

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So if people have to treat you a certain way for you to be happy,

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then it means that your happiness is in their hands.

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If you have to have a job raise or a amount of income every month that you have to make in order

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to be fulfilled, then you set up circumstances for yourself to not be fulfilled, right?

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And so we want to make, at least in my opinion, the feelings that we have,

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we want to derive them off of circumstances that we can control.

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And then what happens is then you create the shell around yourself, not realistically,

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but because internally is where your emotions are being generated.

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Now, is anyone doing this perfectly?

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No, but simply being aware of the fact that these piano keys are being played,

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but we are the ones who get to assign what the sound is internally,

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gives you a lot more control over your own perception of life and the conditions that are presented to you.

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You