Avoid These Easy Mistakes to Manifest The Life You Want TODAY

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Welcome back, everyone in the School of Greatness.

Very excited about our guests.

We have the inspiring Price Pritchett in the house.

Good to see you, sir.

Thanks for coming back on.

Our last episode, people loved it.

And I've loved your books.

I've loved our conversations.

We've had dinner a couple of times.

And I'm so excited that you're coming back on to talk about a lot of things, specifically around the topic of luck and how to create breakthroughs in our life.

And the first question I want to dive into is, what is one action today that people can take that can trigger them to unlock a breakthrough in their life tomorrow?

Okay.

That's a big question.

Good question.

I think the key word here is trigger.

Yes.

It's not like 24 hours from now, you're going to have made it.

But what is the trigger?

What?

Because how you begin says a lot about how you'll finish.

Okay.

And

I think the first thing

is to decide on an aiming point, some epic goal.

that scares you.

Something that you really have fire in your heart about

is your goal.

It's not somebody else's goal for you.

It's not a should go or an ought to go.

It's a my heart goal.

And

that sets the stage for everything that follows.

And we're talking about fast growth here.

We're talking about making quantum leap.

And

fast growth shouldn't start slow.

I think it was William James, father of American psychology, who said,

if you want to change your life, there are three rules.

Begin immediately.

Do it flamboyantly.

No exceptions.

Interesting.

And I just love that quote.

And that is philosophically so aligned with

what we take a client through in the...

in the quantum leap strategy or the U-squared method, I guess you could say.

Three things.

Begin immediately.

What was the second one?

Do it flamboyantly.

Uh-huh.

Do it big.

It's, yeah, it's almost like burn your bridges.

Uh-huh.

You know, we're talking about give me a real commitment.

Go all in.

Yeah.

And the third one?

No exceptions.

No exceptions.

No excuses, no exceptions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like that.

Why do you think so many people struggle with figuring out what their big dream or goals are?

and making that decision?

Why is it such a challenge for people?

Well, a lot of people are fairly content with their life

and that's fine i think everybody can make a quantum leap

i don't think everybody needs to certainly not everybody wants to and then you've got people who want to but

they won't give themselves permission

um they won't give themselves permission right

and

They don't believe in their own potential.

I've evaluated hundreds of top-level executives over the years.

That used to be

a mainstream part of our business when I was with a firm in Chicago early in my career.

And it was just fascinating watching

how much potential these top execs were just leaving on the table because they wouldn't take a risk.

And a lot of people are really risk-averse.

And there's just a lot of psychological dynamics that come into play when someone puts themself out there.

It's kind of funny how people don't want to fail.

They can't take the punishment of failure.

They don't want to be

embarrassed, humiliated, lose money.

I think it was Alfred Adler, who was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud,

one of the legendary psychologists from back when.

And one of his quotes I love so much, he said, one of your

biggest mistakes in life

will be that you take too many precautions.

And I see that all the time.

If you start to make a quantum leap, you're triggering a new set of dynamics.

You're going to deal with a new set of problems.

I mean, you're kind of going into a fog of ambiguity.

This place you hadn't been before.

We're not talking about incremental change.

You know, we're talking about major change,

skipping rungs on the achievement ladder kind of thing.

And you kind of open with talking about the lucky you book.

And really,

it's funny how this idea of, well, I want to achieve big goals, I want to succeed.

Okay.

Well,

luck kind of

needs to come into the picture.

Um

because

you're probably going to need

luck on your side if you're going to do,

you know,

if you're going to swing for the fences.

Yes.

I want to get into luck here in a minute, but I'm curious first about what you think the biggest traps or mistakes that keep people from accomplishing their goals.

Okay, good.

They think too small.

Think too small.

Most people carry their goals around in their head.

And it's a little too vague.

It's not quite specific enough.

They don't write it down.

Gail Matthews, psychologist, she wrote,

she did this study, this piece of her research, and she found that the simple act of writing down your goal, writing it down, getting it on paper, getting getting it on your laptop or whatever, that that alone increased your chances of success with that goal by 43%.

Come on.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

It just somehow makes it so much more real.

But I guess it's kind of like some people, if they just make a daily to-do list for themselves,

they're more productive the next day.

Yeah, writing down what you want to do tomorrow, you're more likely to go do those things tomorrow.

Rather Rather than just thinking about all the things on your mind, I have to do these 20 things tomorrow.

Maybe you do one or two if you just think about it.

Yeah.

As opposed to getting it down and then saying step by step, here's what I'm going to do.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

So it's almost like

making a goal list like you would your to-do list.

You write a to-do list of the things you need to do today or tomorrow, and then hopefully you can get through those things.

But most of us don't write a goal list

where we're going to get through our goals or pursue our goals and then figure out what's the game plan and how do we accomplish this.

Another mistake.

People look around,

and when they're trying to decide on what their goal is going to be, they think in terms of what will the world allow me to do.

And that really puts boundaries on it.

Instead of thinking, what do I want to do?

What am I willing to commit to and make happen?

It's It's a very different game.

All the time I see people,

they say, I read your book, You Squared, or I read the Quantum Leap Strategy, which is its companion handbook.

It's kind of the sequel to You Squared.

Well, I want to make a quantum leap.

You know,

it's fine.

I've been kind of flatlined.

I've hit a wall, whatever.

And

they make an incremental, they said an incremental goal, though.

And because they think they've got to know how to get there.

If you set a quantum leap go, if you pick a worthy enough target,

you don't know how to get there.

Yeah.

It should scare you.

Yeah.

And

the thing about it is, everything, you've made quantum leaps before.

Every human being has.

And the most simple example I love to give, and it proves that everybody's done this before,

is when you went from crawling to walking.

Yeah.

You can't crawl fast enough.

You can't play that crawling game good enough to become a walker.

In fact, it just, it's a different set.

It's a different technique.

It's a different set of moves.

And same thing when you go from walking to running or from walking, running, whatever, to riding a bicycle.

All of those things.

To driving a car.

Yeah, yeah.

And okay, so what's interesting about any of those things is: okay, so how did you pull off the success in that particular move, whichever it was?

You failed again and again and again.

And people are afraid to fail

because failing feels like losing.

And

I hate losing.

You know that movie Moneyball?

Yes, great movie.

It's a great movie.

And Brad Pitt, in that movie,

there's a scene where he's

somewhere not in the locker room, but some of their quarters around the locker room and everything.

And he's talking to two or three of the players.

And one of them is named Chavi.

And they're talking, and he says, I hate losing, Chavi.

I hate losing.

I hate losing more than I even want to win.

And it's different.

Yeah.

You know, and it kind of reminds me, and that's so true.

Winning's great,

but losing, man,

that's when we get embarrassed.

We feel stupid, you know.

But here's the thing.

When we associate, when people associate failure with losing,

they're always going to feel defeated.

But you and I know that the only way to become successful is you must fail in order to succeed.

So, how do we rewire our minds or reshape it, knowing that failure is part of the process of success, not, and it doesn't equal failure being we are losers personally?

Yeah, I think that

I guess there are several things that we can do.

First of all, is just stopping for a minute and thinking

in our own mind, you know,

any major change of, or any new skill I've picked up in my life, I mean, learning to eat, look at the mess

a kid makes, you know.

I mean,

they just wreck the floor around them

when they're learning to eat.

The kid doesn't care.

The kid has just got,

you know, the kid wanting to walk, the crawler wanting to walk.

Well, they start trying to walk and they bang themselves up, they fall, they cry, they get a bruise, maybe scraped here and there.

But they're not thinking of embarrassment,

they're not even thinking about it as failure.

They're just thinking about it, it didn't work, okay, and they try again and they keep learning and they get there.

And that's the it's kind of the same thing whether you're trying to learn some new computer skill or

some new athletic sport, you know,

whatever.

And so I think part of it is

just

starting

with this idea that

failure belongs in the process.

If you're not failing, that's the biggest mistake of all.

Because you stabilized, you've leveled off.

You're playing it safe.

You're playing it safe.

There's this whole Chinese proverb that says, failure is the mother of all success.

And

it's so true.

If you think about it, this is what I think throws us.

If you think of a continuum, okay?

Failure on one end, success on the other.

And we think of them as polar opposites, right?

Which you stop and think.

Are you telling me then, Lewis, that failure is a key dynamic in my ability to succeed.

You would say, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And if you start toward a goal and you're not making some mistakes, then you've aimed too low.

If you know how to do it,

you're not staging a quantum leap for yourself.

If you can frame out the game plan, a detailed game plan for this time going to get there,

you've aimed too low.

If you've taken the risk out of it, you've aimed too low.

You know, there's just a number of key differences between, I'm just going to set a conventional goal for myself, an incremental goal.

Makes sense.

It's not scary.

I know how to do it.

And so forth.

You know,

10 things, man, that are just

dramatically different.

Yeah.

You know, it's interesting because there's a great meme that I've seen online for years.

That's a photo of a baby.

trying to walk.

I might have mentioned this in the last interview we did, where the meme says, you know, when a child is learning to walk and falls a thousand times, he or she never thinks to himself, maybe this walking thing isn't for me.

He just keeps trying, or she just keeps trying, it keeps falling.

After the 10th fall, after the, you know, hitting the back of the head a thousand times, the baby doesn't say, I'm just going to stay on the ground and crawl and keep doing this.

It eventually figures out through pain, through crying, through tears.

And usually, most adults will clap when they fail and say, oh, you almost did it.

Yes.

It's like, no one's like, you're a stupid baby.

You know, it's like, no one's like shaming the baby when they make a mistake.

They're like, yeah, good job.

You hit your head and keep going.

You know, there's this encouragement.

But as adults, you know, there is more people laughing at them, shaming them, making fun of them when they try to pursue something that looks like they're going from comfort crawling to, you know, walking, running in whatever goal or dream they might have.

And so maybe there's a psychological shift that happens in society as we age and as we grow older.

So how does someone learn how to rewire their mind or reshape this philosophy that failure is the pathway to success?

And even though when you were a kid, more people encouraged you, as an adult, you may not get the encouragement.

So how does someone learn how to feel empowered internally to support themselves when they're failing hundreds and thousands of times on their path from crawling to sprinting in their quantum leap goal.

How do we do that internally?

Well,

I'll start with, it may not sound like it's internally, but that's where the impact is.

Put your, as much as you can, surround yourself with people who are going to be supportive.

Yes.

Because they're going to have a heavy influence on you.

There may be a mentor

that would

be

your wingman

through the process.

And so when you screw up, they'll get a setback.

You know, they see they're right there.

you know, reminding you.

So that's external stuff, but it's powerful.

The other thing is just try to maintain an optimistic mindset across the board.

It's huge, huge, because performance begins inside the brain.

Always has, always will.

And so it's kind of like you got this quarterback in your head, right?

You got this quarterback up here calling these plays.

And

you can just

try to get, try to say, okay, my quarterback

thinks we're winning, winning, winning.

He thinks we're growing.

We're getting better.

Of course, if your brain's limbic system comes in with all this scary stuff, you know, and

then you just kind of,

you got to discipline your thinking.

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It's just like disciplining.

Here you are, you know, with this

big endeavor you're shooting for within on the handball.

And that takes a lot of discipline.

A lot of energy, thought, time,

discipline.

Yes.

For a big quantum leap trying to go to the Olympics.

Yeah.

I think that's just wonderful.

But

most people don't think of doing that same kind of discipline, that kind of regimented training almost for their thinking processes.

Yes.

It's interesting studies that have been done that said you should, you know,

how many positive thoughts you need to have

relative to every negative thought.

And the last time I was here, we talked about the five C words and how this negativity creeps into our head, very pernicious stuff.

And

most of us, we are oblivious to about 70% of the negative thoughts that are making up the big part of those 50,000 or so thoughts a day we have.

And

so it's being more mindful of where our mind is, what we're

feeding into it.

I mean, you can sit down and watch the

evening news, and I can just get all stirred up, you know, and I can just see myself going negative.

And

it's so counterproductive.

Yeah.

So there's the mental discipline part.

There's the context you put yourself in and the people you surround yourself with.

Is it more important to be more positive thinking or less negative thinking?

Well,

again, powerful research, fascinating research on that point.

And we used to, over the years ever since I guess

Norman Pinsa Vincent Peel wasn't they wrote the book the power of positive thinking uh-huh think positive think think positive be an optimist you know think think more positive thoughts it's that's a good dogma that's a good uh piece of advice it's better to be positive than negative

but yes yes right but what the research has found and we think because if we'll become more positive, then that means we're less negative, right?

That's kind of true.

But what they have found is that you don't have one attitudinal scale with

optimism on one end and pessimism on the other end.

They're two separate scales.

You'll get a lot more knowledge out of reducing, really cutting down on the negative thinking, that is more beneficial to you than increasing positive thoughts.

Because the negative does more damage than the positive does good.

Really?

And again, that's some very disciplined behavioral research.

And it just kind of blew people's mind when that surfaced.

How much damage happens to our brain, our heart, our nervous system when we're thinking negatively on a consistent daily basis?

It can have long-term effects on the body.

You know, cortisol levels in the body go up.

And first of all, it just depletes energy, usually.

It's a real energy.

And not just your energy, but it's depleting

on other people's energy, too.

Attitudes are very contagious.

And there was a study done.

It's one of the classic studies in psychology of

nuns.

This started decades and decades ago.

And over a period of 50 or 60 years, what they did in this research,

they

did testing on a group of young females that were going into

the convent becoming

a nun.

So, and they would test them periodically.

And after, I can't remember if it's 50 or 60 years,

they looked at this group of of women

and what they found,

I'm just really collapsing the data down to the bottom line on this.

What they found was that

those nuns

who were more optimistic,

you know,

they were more upbeat, more positive, were living seven years on average longer.

Really?

than the pessimists.

Wow.

Which is crazy when you start thinking.

That means negative thinking does more damage than smoking.

Wow.

To a lifespan.

So, yeah, that stuff is bad stuff.

And it's funny to me that

we go through grade school, elementary school, and then we

maybe go through college and so on and so forth.

I don't remember ever having a class

on managing your

mental processes, your attitude,

and so forth.

Your emotions.

Yes.

The only time I got that training was in sports after school.

Yeah.

Where the coaches are like talking about attitude, have a good attitude, you know, all those different things.

Yeah.

That's when I got the most knowledge was playing sports and failing every single day, making mistakes, having a coach correct and try to hopefully reinforce positive behavior, positive attitudes, positive routines,

in order to accomplish the goal of winning.

But you didn't really get that in school.

But you know, your most recent book,

Make Money Easy.

I mean, the psychological principles that we're talking about play throughout that book.

I love the book.

Yes.

Thank you.

Great, great, great reading.

It's all about managing the emotions with our relationship with money.

Because when we're thinking negatively about money all the time, typically, why would we attract more of it?

Why would we generate more of it if we're constantly in a negative mind space around it?

Or when we have it and we're thinking negatively about it, it's just not going to feel good.

And so it's about creating a healthier relationship with money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's a great book.

And

once again, not something that

was coming my direction through any of my education in the early years.

Which is a fundamental basic thing of life.

Yeah.

You know, your ability to deal with money and think about money and manage it.

You know, but yeah, it's a human behavior, and your attitude comes in in spades.

Yeah.

You have a quote.

I love this quote in your book, Lucky You.

It says, so let your deepest desire direct your aim.

Set your sights far above the reasonable target.

The power of purpose is profound only if you have a desire that stirs the heart.

That's something you mentioned earlier in the conversation about really having something that like creates fire in your heart when you're thinking about a goal.

Not just something like, yeah, that'd be nice to have this thing or incremental growth, but really what is that thing that almost kind of scares you a little bit or maybe a lot.

And so I'm curious, what's one mindset shift that

you think is holding people back from allowing themselves to believe in something greater and pursue that thing that really stirs their heart?

Well, sometimes they feel it'd be selfish.

Really?

Why is it selfish to go after our big goals and dreams?

Well, because quadrum leap goals have a big appetite.

They want most of the food on your plate.

Yes, true.

You're chasing one

right now.

Yes.

And that means that other things fade into the shadows.

Yeah.

You got to let go of a lot of other things.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people feel like, I can't do that.

That's all me.

That's just a selfish thing.

I i don't need to do that i'm not sure i can pull it off anyway you know all this stuff and so i mentioned earlier giving yourself permission

uh to do these big things it's kind of funny when we would

when i'm out there working with

on a half a billion dollar merger And I'm sitting with the top exec in the acquiring company, and they're mashing these two companies together, and it's difficult stuff, you know?

And you got emotions running wild, political stuff churning.

Egos.

Oh, yeah, it's got everything.

And so much of the time, my job is

giving him permission to do what he knows he needs to do.

It's saying, here I am.

I'm an expert on the outside.

We've done $350 billion worth of merger deals over the years.

And so I can say,

Lewis, you need to do this and you need to do it today.

Go.

And it's like, oh, thank you.

And they knew they needed to do it.

And so it's giving ourselves permission to do some of the things that

it's where our heart lives.

And another reason that you need to have some real emotional you tied up in it is because you're going to go through some dark moments.

We talked about the failures, the setbacks, just the punishments that come your way

in the process.

And so

it's got to matter to you.

But that's when life takes on real meaning.

And that's when you grow.

And if the person is totally comfortable, I start to tilt my head and look at them kind of at an angle, you know,

because I'm thinking you can have too much equilibrium in your life.

Like too much balance or too much

comfort or

be too comfortable and too much stasis.

It's that's when things

he not busy being born, is busy dying.

That was the Bob Dylan line.

We need friction in our life.

There is

because that's when you grow.

Yes.

And we've talked before.

Okay, when I go to, you know, down the street to LA Fitness to work out, I don't go there to be comfortable.

I don't go there to take a nap.

You know, and

yet I think,

I think exercise, weightlifting and such is the fountain of youth.

I really do.

I mean, it, it is such a pervasive positive influence on you.

And if you want a better optimism, better, you know,

positive outlook on life, exercise is about as good a drug as you can find.

Yeah, you're looking in good shape right now.

You're looking strong.

Not like you, though.

Are you lifting a lot?

I'm semi-regular.

Yeah, yeah.

A couple days a week?

For my age, I'm doing pretty good.

Yeah, you're looking really strong.

Well,

how young are you now?

I am 83 years old.

Wow.

Amazing.

Looking great.

Well, thank you.

Thank you.

You're looking so fit.

It's inspiring to me.

It makes me want to try harder.

That's good.

You know, but talking about this thing about we need friction in our life,

too much equilibrium is a dangerous thing.

But

people get, it's kind of that status quo.

Nassim Nicholas Talib wrote this book.

He's written several.

Fool by Randomness, The Black Swan.

And he wrote this book called Anti-Fragile.

I love that book.

Now, that book is that thick.

And he is an amazingly smart guy.

But he talks about how some things benefit

from being punched around,

from friction, from setbacks, failures, you know, stretching, stretching, putting yourself out there and taking the blows, the slings and arrows of life, you know, as opposed to sitting in your house, you know, leaning back in the T, watching TV all the time.

And he says, okay,

here's a good way to picture it.

Let's say that you have a box

of

fine crystal maquari crystal champagne glasses, and you're going to send them to

Prague,

some friend in Prague.

Okay?

So how do you package?

You package these very, very carefully and then close the box and you stamp all over it.

Handle with care, fragile, fragile, fragile, handle with care.

Okay.

But let's say

you,

because it gets damaged by

friction, we'll say,

or turbulence, change.

Well, let's say that you've got a basketball.

You're going to send it to Prague.

So you put it in a box, same what?

Package it, you know, throw it in there and everything.

If it gets slammed around, the box kind of crusts, okay.

The ball is resilient.

Yes.

The ball comes back and so forth no damage to the ball it's right back the way it was

but if you have something else

that

benefits from change from turbulence from friction

you would put it in there

you wouldn't put any packing around it or anything and you'd stamp on the outside

Throw it around.

Throw it around.

You know, sling it this way, whatever.

It's anti-fragile, and it's good for it to get that.

Well,

that's what we need to make ourselves.

We need to make ourselves anti-fragile.

And that means we need to create this equilibrium in our own lives.

We need to stretch.

We need to do things that are kind of difficult for us.

And then we become less fragile.

Yeah.

We become better than resilient.

We grow from it.

We don't just get back to what we were.

We get better.

We become different.

We become a different person.

Yeah.

That's one thing about the difference between small goals and big goals.

There's a lot that's been written about the small goals, you know, little bitty goals.

And

first of all, I'm just a massive believer in setting goals for your life.

Small goals

are good for to-do list,

or if you're trying to develop a habit and some of those kinds of things.

But

small goals

create small energy.

They attract small resources

and

they're very, very

incremental.

Big goals

create energy.

They stir you up.

They make you more creative.

They attract other people.

People want to be part of it.

And so when you set big goals, you don't just achieve more.

You become more.

That is true.

Then what happens to a human being when they decide to let go of their dreams or give up on their dreams?

Well, they diminish themselves to themselves.

Rid a quote.

I can't remember who said this, but

if you can't overcome the obstacles in your path, it's probably not your path.

So how do we know when to give up on a goal?

Yeah.

How do we know, like, okay, this is this

big thing is in my heart and I feel like I'm supposed to go for it.

I'm so excited, so I'm going to pursue it for six months or a year or five years.

But when do we know to let go of the goal or the dream that's the big question uh it's a tough one too yeah it was that and there was a book that came out not what a couple years back called quit do you read it daily duckworth i think okay um angela duckworth angela duckworth oh yeah

she wrote the book called grit also right um she wrote a book called grit or no the the

The key thing.

I think she wrote a book called Grit, or that was like her key kind of decision.

And I might not even have the name right on this, didn't we?

But there was a book that came out a couple of years ago called Quit.

And it's about this whole thing of

how can you know when to quit, which is a very, very

big, important question.

And she tells some interesting things in it.

She talks about poker players, which is where she kind of got into this, this whole idea of how to quit, when to quit.

And she talks about how, let's say if you're playing Texas Holden Poker, so you get some initial cards.

You already had the ante

to be in the game.

There was just some table sticks.

Okay.

So that's out there.

So you've already got some sunk costs.

All right.

But then you get three cards, I think it is in Texas Hold'em as your first

dealt cards.

So you look at those, and they said that the expert players, I think the statistic was only 12% of the time they play.

They stay,

stay in the game.

And the more novice players, the weaker players, they will stay in longer.

And they'll lose more.

Yeah, yeah.

Because of this sunk cost thing.

And

they don't understand the odds.

There's a lot going on there in the game, of course.

But

it's a tough question.

When do you know you should quit?

What's giving up and is selling yourself out versus,

I gave it a fair shot.

It's

not a good plan for me and i need to

redirect myself cut my losses and so forth how do you know

i don't know that list maybe you got an answer on this what would you say oh man i think for me it's

it would be one that the drive is not in your heart as much anymore.

Like if the obstacles are so big that you're just not excited to endure the pain, like you have to be excited to endure the pain, the challenges, the setbacks, the failures.

And you have to be, you have to enjoy it, I think.

You have to enjoy it.

Maybe you don't love it, but you have to be like, I know it's part of the process.

And I still have this fantasy, this dream, this love for the idea of reaching the mountaintop of the goal that I have.

And I'm enjoying the process.

If you're not enjoying the process, I think it's just going to be that much harder.

So I think that's part of it.

I think the second part is like, have I exhausted every possible avenue that I can think of?

And even then, have I continued to go when I think I've exhausted everything?

If so, do I still love it?

Then let me keep going.

If I don't, then maybe not.

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Maybe there's a timeframe also, or maybe there's just like I have so many other things happening in my life that also demand my time where this is just hurting everything in my life.

All my relationships are broken because of this thing.

So there might be a number of factors there, but I just, part of me is like, I just never want to be the one that has a goal or a dream and gives up too early because it's hard.

And then I regret it forever.

Have you ever had a dream or goal so big?

that you gave up on it too early that you still regret today?

Like giving up on it?

Yeah, I got one that's such that I'm not even going to talk about it.

I'll really tell you.

Yeah.

That you gave up on?

I gave up on.

Years ago.

Ages ago.

You won't share it?

Why?

Because it's too painful or because it's too, you feel like...

Yeah, I mean,

that's how deep it cut.

Really?

Yeah, that's how deep I cut myself, you know.

Now, I don't think it was good casting for me in the first place.

It wasn't the right goal.

Right.

Okay.

But I wanted it to be.

You know, kind of of thing.

Was it more ego-driven versus heart-driven?

Yeah.

So it wasn't the right goal in the first place?

No, it really wasn't.

I wanted it to be.

You wanted it to be.

Your ego wanted it.

Yeah.

But your heart is kind of like, let it go.

Right.

But is there anything that your heart really like fell in love with?

Not your ego, but your heart, that you never pursued to at least see, is there a chance I could accomplish this?

That you ever know.

Maybe you're writing a novel.

But you still have the opportunity to do that.

I still have the opportunity to do it.

You said a maybe.

Is that like a big thing on your heart that you really want to do?

Or is it more like I'd be cool to do this thing?

Well, I think it, yeah, yeah, there's that.

Absolutely.

But your heart's not screaming at you.

No.

You have to be a novel author.

Yeah.

No.

I've had good success.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, in writing, and I enjoy it.

I think it is a talent of mine.

And

so,

but I know it's kind of

a practical call,

a rational,

sensible.

I'm talking about the irrational dream in your heart.

Is there anything you regret from?

I don't know if this would fit your thing.

I always want to do on a corporate jet.

Oh.

That'd be fun.

Yeah.

And that

never came around.

Okay.

Now, I never, I guess, went at it strategically.

You never went at it.

Oh, Annie.

No, I didn't.

You never said, okay, this is what I want.

I'm going to do everything I can in the next three to five years to map this out, to be around everyone I know who's got a data.

Exactly.

You would have bought one.

You would have figured that out.

Yeah.

It was, it was an ego nice thing.

It's one of those things I didn't follow my own rules.

Exactly.

Because it's like, well, I don't know how I'm going to do it.

Just get that out of your head.

Quantum leap.

Yeah.

You're not supposed to know.

I know.

If it was incremental, it'd be too easy.

Now, you know, you said something a minute ago about

I was reading this book by Scott Adams, the guy that wrote Dilbert Carlins, you know.

And

he's written a good book about how I succeeded almost everything and

how most

failed at almost everything and still succeeded, I think is the name of it.

That's close enough.

But he talks in there about this thing about passion.

And

is passion a good signal for your goal selection?

And he said, here's what I found.

I found that

passion is closely tied to talent.

And

as long as you're really talented in some zone,

it's easy to have passion for it.

But he said, if you want to see passion fade, Let the failure start hitting.

Let's say you've got a passion to be an entrepreneur, Okay.

And you're into it three years, five years.

And you lose all your money.

And it's just not working.

Watch the passion.

It's not passionate anymore.

Right.

And it gets back to this quitting,

you know,

finding that proper spot.

So, do you think, in his mind or in your mind, do you think we should be following our passion or following our talent?

They're probably usually connected.

And that

your talent is probably your first signal.

To pursue that.

Yeah, follow that thing.

Yeah.

He writes about he wanted to become a famous cartoonist.

And this idea of setting a goal and keeping it front of mind that I've talked about in Lucky You, he said, I wasn't any good as an artist.

He said, I was no good.

He didn't have the talent.

He didn't have the talent.

He didn't have the talent, but he loved the idea of being a cartoonist.

And he had thought through some real good reasons for that.

It didn't require a lot of infrastructure, he didn't have to hire a lot of people.

Just him pen and the paper.

And so there was all this stuff.

But anyway, how he went at it,

he started writing, I think it was 15 times every day.

He wrote down,

I, Scott Adams, will become a famous cartoonist.

Wow.

15 times a day.

Every day.

Every day.

15 times.

So that's clarity of gold.

That's keeping the goal front of mind.

That's being optimistic.

And there was relentless pursuit.

He

started moving in that direction.

He said his first stuff was terrible.

You know.

He talks about the mistakes he made.

And

it's a fun book.

You'd enjoy it.

What's it called again?

I think it's

How I Failed at Almost Almost Everything and Still Succeeded.

Scott Adams, huh?

Yeah, Scott Adams.

You have this, we're talking about luck here, your book, Lucky You.

You have a number of books.

One of my favorite is You Squared.

And for those that didn't watch the first episode we did, I had Bob Proctor on a number of years ago before he passed.

And I asked him, what are the three books that every human being should read that have helped him?

And he'd read thousands of books.

And he mentioned your name and you squared.

And I never heard about you.

Maybe this is 2018 or 2017, 2019.

And I was like, you squared.

And then I finally came back around to it a couple of years later and I read the book and we connected ever since then.

And it's a life-changing book.

And you have a number of companions to it.

But the most recent one is called Lucky You, a Psychological Strategy for Multiplying Luck and Achieving Your Big Ambitions.

In the book, you've got a graph that talks about

what contributes most to career success.

And I don't know if this is towards all success in life or more just towards career.

And it's a graph that is a generalized synthesis drawn from research in behavioral economics, psychology, and sociology.

It's a reasonable estimate, not a precise formula.

But in this graph, it talks about luck being the number one factor that contributes towards career success, 30 to 50% range of luck.

Then you have effort and work ethic that is 30 to 40% range.

Then you have social

slash opportunity as 10 to 20%.

Then you have talent or IQ, which is 10 to 20%.

And

in the same book by Nassam Talib, he says luck is most frequently the reason for extreme success.

And I remember interviewing a friend of mine, Scooter Braun, who is a big music artist, a music talent manager,

who kind of discovered Justin Bieber and managed Ariana Grande and kind of all the biggest pop stars of our generation.

And I was like, what's the key to your success?

And he was like, it's luck.

You know, and obviously it's hard work.

I mean, he grinded for years and he did all the right things and he was willing to put more time and energy into anything else than most people.

But it was like, you know,

finding Justin Bieber at the right time and then taking the actions to really mold and, you know, shepherd him in his career and building that.

And then that created another opportunity with other artists.

And then bigger talent came in.

And then it snowballed the momentum.

But maybe it would have taken him decades if he didn't have that right timing, that opportunity, that synchronicity that created that relationship.

Who knows?

Or maybe none of this would ever happen for him.

But why is luck such a big thing towards success in life?

If we talked about the biggest success story in your life

or my life or anybody else's, it would be that moment of conception.

Okay.

Let's look at this.

I wrote a blog about this.

Yeah.

Your biggest, your greatest success story ever.

So

you had two parents.

You have a mother and a father.

Well, the mother,

the maximum number of egg follicles that she will have in her life is supposedly between six and eight million eggs.

Okay.

You were one of those gametes.

One out of six to eight million.

Okay.

The amount of sperm and

sperm is quadrillions.

Trillions.

Quad trillions.

Trillions.

Quad trillions.

Quadrillions.

So you're that gamete, gamete number two,

we'll call this

first gamete the wonder egg.

Uh-huh.

And then we'll call this gamete number two the super sperm.

Yeah.

One out of quadrillions.

Okay.

Those odds are just absurd to begin with.

But then

at that perfect timing,

I mean, you will never again be that lucky on anything.

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I was having lunch.

I guess the first time that this whole idea of luck even came into my notion, really, was

I was having lunch at Cafe Pacific in Dallas with a real good friend of mine.

He's the, was the chief economist at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank.

And

his wife is from Ecuador and charming couple, lovely people.

And we were sitting just having a nice lunch, Patty and I, and that couple.

And

just in the course of conversation, she turned to me and she said, Bryce, what would you

say is the number one thing that accounts for your success?

You've had a successful career, you know, what?

And it just came out of nowhere.

I said, look.

And

both of them just looked at me like, what?

And I said, well, well, stop.

And then I started to just kind of reason through where that came from.

And I said, okay, look, first of all,

I was born in America.

That's a real advantage.

Secondly, I had good parents.

Third, I didn't have any major disabilities or anything.

Brain functions well enough.

You just go on and on and on, and you look at these things, and anybody that's alive

is

unbelievably good fortune.

But there are things that we can do

to engineer luck into our life.

It does not have to be, we shouldn't allow it to be, just a random event.

It's a random thing, but it's too important to ignore.

And so...

Because people just say, oh, they got lucky.

They had this opportunity.

But you're saying that there is a strategic or scientific way that we can influence more luck in our lives.

Is that right?

Absolutely.

So how do we create more...

First of all, we tell luck what we're wanting.

We tell luck what we want.

Yeah, that's that big goal.

I mean, tell luck what you're shooting for.

When you set that goal

and that clarity, get it out of your head and down on paper.

All of a sudden, you may be surrounded by

So that's one thing you can do.

Tell luck what you want.

The next thing,

luck plays favorites.

Luck has a bias.

Luck prefers the optimists.

Why?

Because, first of all, they see luck's opportunities when he lays them in front of him.

And secondly,

the optimist will take the chances.

That's true.

Well,

the methodist will be like, ah, I don't believe that's a good thing.

I'm not going to take that.

Or that person.

What do they really want from me?

They're trying to bring it up.

Luck gets pissed off when you refuse its chances.

And if your heart's not in it, back to that goal thing,

luck doesn't get very interested either.

It goes looking for someone that's fevered up, man.

It's excited.

Yeah, someone that is cranked

and luck wants to see you working.

If you're not doing anything, luck gets disinterested and goes try to find somebody that's going to put some energy into this.

Yes.

So

tell luck what you want.

Believe in it.

Be positive.

You know, when luck comes before you, do something with it.

Third thing, most of your lucky breaks in life will come via people you know somehow.

Maybe someone you just met

or someone you hardly know.

In fact, a lot of times that happens.

The weak ties.

Yeah, the weak ties.

Why is it more the weak ties where luck comes from versus the strong ties?

Well, if it's their strong ties, you've already checked those out.

You know.

You've known them for a long time.

Well, yeah, you know, if they've had an opportunity for you, it's already been explored.

Yeah.

You need to be in circulation socially

because

luck doesn't come looking for you.

It wants to see you out in the world.

It's kind of like, don't go fishing in your bathtub.

You know,

you're not, you know, if you're trying to become a famous artist, but you won't, you'll put a few of your paintings up on the walls of your garage and leave the door open.

Yeah.

You know, that's not enough.

No.

And so you need to be out there and

you need need to be in new, fresh, different experiences.

And those things are big.

Then you need to give your mind time

to speak to you, your deep mind.

You could call this giving yourself a meditative period every day,

taking a long, slow walk, not trying to work on

a problem, just letting your mind...

But in our coaching and training stuff around U-squared and the quantum leap strategy, we talk about

the quantum leap ritual.

And it's just setting aside a chunk of time every day, probably at the same time a day, sit down, clear your mind, let the prefrontal cortex go offline, and let the theta and alpha waves start to play.

And this is where the deep mind, it kind of opens the door and it lets things seep up from your unconscious.

And

it's probably the closest to

magic in terms of creating luck for yourself.

There are several others that we talk about in the book, but one last one that I could mention.

Bring luck to other people.

That's so good.

We live in a world of reciprocity.

You can call it karma.

You can call it

what goes around comes around.

but what Emerson talked about

you know in his essay compensation he talks about

we will be compensated for how we compensate others how we compensate others Zig Ziglar says you know if you want to achieve any goal help everyone else achieve their goals yeah something like that too you know and the interesting thing is it's

it's uplifting to you.

Just the act of giving.

Service, giving.

It brings all of these positive chemicals alive in your body: the dopamine, the serotonin, the oxytocin, and all this kind of stuff.

And

that makes you more willing to accept risks.

It makes you more optimistic.

Those chemicals are working at good things.

And so when you're giving to others, you're giving to yourself.

Yeah.

What is one way of thinking or one habit that creates bad luck for ourselves?

Feeling that we're a victim,

Feeling sorry for ourselves.

Feeling helpless.

I am a huge, huge believer in personal accountability.

If something goes wrong,

how much of that do I own?

Probably 95% or 100% of it, usually.

And anyway, if something

does go wrong in my world,

the world is is typically not inclined to bring me, to fix that for me.

No.

People aren't going to come rescue you.

Yeah.

They got their own problems.

That's right.

When we give luck to another, what are we saying

to God or to the world when we're constantly generating luck in others?

And I'm talking about...

Maybe how do we make sure we're not only a giver to people who are takers?

Yeah.

And not thinking, how can I also return the favor in the future?

Yeah, or giving it to get something back in return.

Don't think in terms of getting something back in return.

Don't count on,

don't even talk about it.

Don't expect to get praise for being a generous person.

Do some things anonymously.

And I think,

and there's one other thing that's kind of akin to what you're asking, I think, and it's this whole thing of gratitude.

Be grateful that you can give, that you're in a position to give, and everybody is in a position to give.

I don't care if it's a compliment.

I don't think it's, I mean, I don't care if it's just giving someone a pat on the back, asking someone opinion and saying, you know a lot about this.

Let me ask your opinion.

Well, that's kind of, you know, that makes the other person feel good.

But

be grateful for all this stuff.

Gratitude is a huge thing.

And you talk about getting the negativity out of your head, you know, reducing the negative thinking.

Gratitude is just every day.

Stop.

When in a situation, you're bummed out about a situation, you're frustrated, and you feeling sorry for yourself, think,

what have I got to be grateful for here today around me, you know, in my world?

Yes.

It's a beautiful antidote.

Yeah.

You've got, again, we've talked about lucky you.

You've got you squared and the quantum leap strategy.

What is the quantum leap framework that you talk about?

Well, a lot of people,

one of the reasons they're unsuccessful with their goals is they don't really have a strategy.

Or they try too many things.

They're flailing about.

Usually, if you want to go into a new area and it looks overwhelming, what do I need to learn?

What do I need to do?

Usually,

there's a very small handful of things

that

have the big leverage.

And we have

these.

First, you need a super clear huge important

lovable aiming point

okay

something that is is going to stretch you and and and it's important to you so pick a very ambitious aiming point second

practice relentless pursuit be the crawler

Stay at it.

Stay at it.

Take the failures as a coaching lesson.

Where's the lesson here?

Okay, a doubt.

Go on.

Don't take yourself to the bench and set the rest of your life out wishing you'd done something.

Aiming point, relentless pursuit, and then the mind work.

And the mind work is

do the necessary mind work.

What is that?

Well, that is disciplining your thinking like you would discipline your body or discipline your child or whatever.

You know, you follow discipline the way you drive, for peace's sake.

You stay between the lines, you know.

You don't run stop signs.

Okay, well, put a stop sign in your mind when the negative stuff comes in.

No, you know,

not going to entertain that, not going to stay there.

So, part of it is

pushing yourself with real discipline and mindfulness to be optimistic.

It's huge.

It is really, really huge.

The

other part of the mind work is the ritual.

That daily

opening your mind.

First of all, you read through your goal

because that keeps goal in front of mind.

And if it goes out of your mind, luck quits thinking about it too.

Okay.

And

during that kind of a ritual, Like I said, that's when your intuition

is free to kind of surface, bubble up through your head.

So we've got the aiming point, relentless pursuit, do the necessary mind work, and the fourth one, which sounds so simplistic and nobody does it.

And it's the tracking.

Tracking.

Track your results.

Track your results and measure progress.

When I go to the gym,

that evening, I mark on my calendar.

I get to put a square around that, around that day.

And if you're not tracking, you're hiding from the truth.

Because

tracking is like a truth serum.

It says whether you're following the quantum leap ritual, whether you're following this whole U-squared method of aiming point, pursuit, mind work, and tracking.

Now,

are there other things?

There's a zillion other little tactics

that one can do.

But we're talking about not just 80-20 in terms of

your trying to achieve greater levels of success.

We're saying 95-5.

95% of the stuff is noise.

It's helpful, maybe, maybe even unhelpful.

But

5% is mission critical.

That's the mission critical.

If you will stay with that, trust.

Trust the method.

Trust the method.

Just do that.

People overcomplicate this.

Yes.

And

I keep saying that all the time.

Trust the method.

You've been in psychology and high-performance learning and teaching and training for six decades now, right?

Basically five.

Five learning.

About six.

I think that's a good thing.

Six decades

studying in school to

working with individuals one-on-one to then working with corporations and businesses and high-profile individuals.

So in six decades,

if you could give yourself three pieces of advice of all the information you've learned from all the books you've written, all the books you've read, all the research, all the science that was out back then, the science that's out now, if you were like, I can only give myself three pieces of advice to use

to create an incredible life for myself, what would that be for you?

Take more risk,

believe in myself more,

Be willing to fail.

Why believe in self more?

There is a saying that the SEALs, the Navy SEALs have.

I think it's,

I may be a little bit off on this list, but I think it's the 40% rule.

It says most people, when they get to 40%

and it gets harder, they quit.

They think, I'm through, I'm finished.

And

that much is left in terms of true capability.

Potential.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

60% left.

They haven't tapped into it.

Yeah.

We

don't test ourselves.

If you don't take yourself to failure, you don't even know.

And it's not just failure this first time.

It's, you know, you keep on.

You know, in working out, you know, if you're lifting weights, the saying is the last few reps are the ones that count.

It's not the ones that come easy on the front end.

The first, say,

let's say you got X amount of weight, you're doing

dumbbell curls,

X amount of weight.

Okay.

Let's say you're saying, I'm going to do 10 reps, take myself to failure.

The last few reps are the ones that count.

And it's not when it gets hard.

It's not when it starts to be uncomfortable.

The first one was probably uncomfortable.

Yeah.

You know?

So

living with failure.

If you've pushed failure out of your life,

you've made a big mistake.

People need stretch in their life.

They need friction.

Hypothetical scenario.

Again, you've learned so much in these last six decades.

What do you think is going to be the biggest psychological breakthrough in the next six decades for human potential, for human advancement, with all the changes that have happened in the world and society from AI and tech now really emerging over the last 20 years

to wherever it's going to be in the next six decades, what do you see as the greatest potential for unlocking human potential in the future?

Well, it'll be something to do with brain processes.

our thinking,

in my opinion.

Because we're learning so much more about the brain, how it functions.

We're coming to the point of helping people do more with themselves, I think.

It's kind of funny.

Back in the Ph.D.

program, when I was going for my doctor's degree,

was that early 60s?

What was that?

It was

late 60s.

Late 60s.

And early 70s internship and so forth.

But

like I said,

the things that are in my writings, like Lucky You, Quantum Leap Strategy, and

U Squared,

that wasn't in any of the textbooks.

No.

Okay.

And those books, such as mine, were basically ridiculed, certainly discounted.

Not worth.

And I was struck by the fact that,

well,

those books have some really good advice that I I can do with me.

I don't have to have a therapist or a counselor or, you know, some psychologist or whatever

to work on me and make me better, make me more successful.

There are things I can do for myself.

I want to know that.

Okay.

And

during the past 25 years, there have been an amazing number of really good books out of the professional community.

I mean, the highly pedigreed psychologist, you know,

they've really come into

getting that stuff out more to the public.

The findings of research and self-sufficiency and

personal accountability and those kinds of things.

And I think that trend will continue.

Yeah.

Do you think people will learn to believe in themselves more with the more tools and research and accessibility they have to

technology in the future, or they'll believe in themselves less?

I don't know.

I think we're all so intellectually arrogant.

We think we've got so much figured out, and there's so little we know

about everything.

Yeah.

I really do.

But that's getting into kind of metaphysical stuff, you know.

For me, it's interesting because you said the three things over the last six decades, if you could give yourself these three pieces of advice, the second one is to believe in yourself more.

And I wrote a whole book called The Greatness Mindset, which is about overcoming self-doubt.

I think self-doubt is the killer of dreams.

I think when you have a big goal or a big dream and you doubt yourself, you limit yourself from taking the action, building the energy, allowing for luck to come into your life.

You're just more insecure.

You're less willing to take the risk when you doubt yourself.

Ah, you're more, you know, on eggshells.

And I think

learning to believe in yourself is one of the greatest tools that you can have.

And you don't need to be smart

to develop that, which for me, I never felt like I was smart because of my school grades, but I learned how to believe in myself.

And I felt like that's what allowed me to accelerate the results of my life was belief was,

hey, I think I can do this.

Let me go try.

Oh.

I actually was able to do this thing.

All right, maybe I can go do this other thing.

And now this is another thing.

And I was able to stack evidence by having more belief in myself.

Yeah.

And almost almost being ignorant to a lot of the world and being like, I don't have the answers, but I believe I can figure out a way to make it happen.

And that belief gave me courage, gave me confidence, gave me the ability to develop more skills.

Yeah.

And those things, I think, created the luck for me, created more opportunities for me to succeed in what I was dreaming and thinking about.

And I truly believe self-doubt is going to be the killer of dreams for people.

No matter if they have all the best wearable tech that gives them the data and and the information, if they read all the right books, whatever it might be, if we don't learn the skill of believing in self, we're not going to take more risks and we're not going to be willing to fail.

So, I think that is a massive thing that most people

never learn how to do.

So, how do you think we learn how to believe in ourselves more based on everything you've learned?

Well,

I think we got to put ourselves out there and find the edge of our capacities.

Yes.

Yes.

And learn that failure is an advantage.

Brings, you know, failure is

just,

it's not a bug in the system.

It is the system.

Yes.

It's a feature.

You know?

Use it, man.

Exactly.

R.D.

Lang is psychiatrist, psychologist from back when.

He said, if I don't know I can, it's a twisted kind of very cryptic statement.

And I always want to remember this thing, and I'll

go back and study it, and then I can't remember it because it's kind of tricky.

It's like,

if I don't know, I can,

I think

I can't kind of, you know.

Uh-huh.

If I don't know how to do something, I think,

well, anyway, we read more into it than is there.

We don't test our limits.

And

so we never discover what's inside yeah

do you feel like you've tested your limits

somewhat but not greatly really yeah you got you know six decades of work in this you got 15 million books you've sold your impact but we don't compare we don't we compare ourselves to people that are better

we always look at their best side you're like holly next our worst side yeah why is that i don't know but if you compared yourselves to you 40 years ago and if you would have said said when you were, you know, 43 or 42 or whatever it was, and you said, one day I'm going to sell 15 million copies of my books and I'm going to help, you know, multi-billion dollar companies acquire and merge and build.

And I'm going to coach some of the biggest names in the world.

And like, what would you have thought when you were 40

of that type of dream and accomplishing it?

Wouldn't you have been like, wow, that's amazing.

I would have thought, yeah, that's bull.

Yeah.

You know, I would have thought that would be wonderful.

But

it's kind of interesting.

Some people just have a higher need for achievement than others, too.

It's kind of in the DNA.

I don't understand some of that.

Some people, we just have different cravings,

you know.

And

I think everybody has a lot

more within if they're perfectly, I mean,

dazzlingly happy with that,

that I'm happy for them.

Yes.

And I don't want them to feel bad about not wanting to push for more.

But...

How much of your potential do you feel like you've tapped at this season of life?

Don't know.

I guess a better question.

What is the big goal or dream that you have over the next 20-plus years?

I want to be healthy.

I want to be happy.

I would like to continue to

figure out what I believe, what I think, and get it down on paper?

Just to kind of document that, because I think somebody else might get some knowledge out of it.

But that's not a

big goal.

It's like, I want to be happy, I want to be healthy, and I want to get my thoughts down and help others.

No, I don't know.

It's not something new like money or dream.

I think it's kind of interesting.

Risk-taking peaks

for, well, it peaks a couple of years earlier for girls than boys.

Risk-taking in girls peaks at about age 16.

Really?

Yeah.

You mean they stop taking risks around 16 or they start?

No, it peaks.

That's at its highest point in their life, probably will peak at that age.

For boys, it peaks at about 19,

18, 19, 20.

That's when it peaks.

So this is risk-taking.

And then it gradually now risk-taking lasts longer for boys into the 30s

than for women.

But

in general, it's a life.

Then you start to preserve what you've created or you start to like

be more comfortable with what you've risked.

I've been talking about this.

Yeah.

Because early in life,

we are accumulating, accumulating.

We're accumulating knowledge, friends, contacts, experiences, and

money, skills, all of this kind of stuff.

Okay.

So, and that continues, it seems to me, until about somewhere in the maybe mid-50s.

And then there's this funny turn.

You want to get rid of stuff.

And it starts like this.

And people start, well, first of all, kids start leaving home.

And your friend making for most people starts to diminish.

They may scale down their house.

They have all these possessions that they bought and everything.

And God, you know, here, they start handing that off to kids and things like that.

And risk-taking risk-taking really drops, and dopamine levels drop,

which affects risk-taking.

And part of it is just people looking down the road and say, shorter runway.

Yeah.

Or less energy, or they just don't care as much.

Yeah, and I mean,

what am I going to do?

Make a 30-year plan?

You know?

And so there's a practical side to this, and

there's a physical capacity side to it.

Because people's...

Yeah, so much energy, so much time you have.

I mean, listen,

it's even more like, you know, some of them may have heart problems and they can't get out and exercise or do things, you know, or all kinds of, you know, that's why I'm a big believer in health, fitness, and so forth, because

it is such a big factor in having a good, happy, full life.

So you're focused more on

staying healthy, staying happy, making sure you keep sharing your ideas and thoughts.

Yeah, I think so.

And I don't know.

Now, I know that people need goals.

I don't care your age.

And in fact, they found from studies, like in nursing homes, they found if you will just give someone an assisted living place, give them a plant.

This is your plant.

Take care of this plant.

Their mood goes up.

It's just a, and they do better.

We need purpose.

We need a sense of direction, goals, something.

I think goals are magnetic.

In fact, that's another thing that Alfred adler said the psychologist he said that goals are teleological they pull us toward them and he says

i think it's george land

that said

your future does

every bit as much or more to shape you than your past that is fascinating what is it what do you mean by your future does everything to shape you as much as your past does.

Well, if you set a goal that means something to you, you really have your hearts invested in that thing,

then it starts shaping your life.

Now, we know that we've been shaped by our parents, our teachers, experiences in life, all of that kind of stuff.

There's huge shaping.

But

what you're pursuing shapes you too.

And big goals, like I said, you don't just achieve more, you become more.

That's true.

So the smaller the goal we have,

the less likely we're going to become our greatest self, is what I'm hearing you say.

Oh, yeah.

I think that's a very safe conclusion.

Interesting.

Hmm.

What else am I missing here?

Anything else around luck that we haven't talked about?

Well,

I think that

we need to take it more seriously and realize that we've got a lot more influence over it than perhaps people would think.

And

if luck accounts more for career success than any of these other factors.

And talent and all these other things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Then we should be courting

luck.

Yeah.

And

make love to luck.

Yeah.

You know,

make love to luck.

You talk about in the book,

page 27, your brain's first impulse is to scan for danger and unpleasant side effects.

You automatically focus on the trouble or setback,

the setback or failure causes.

It's a brain pattern rooted deep in our survival instincts.

We're just wired that way as human beings.

As playwright John Dryden put it, self-defense is nature's eldest law.

But if we're looking and scanning for

danger or unpleasant side effects, it sounds like constantly failing and having people make fun of us is the greatest psychological threat.

Is people making fun of us or criticizing us or judging us or talking badly about us behind our backs or not wanting to be around us?

Isn't that a great psychological side effect or threat that failure and making mistakes and putting out the big goal you're going to go after in the world?

Yeah,

I'm sure that's true, but I think that for many of us, I think

we're our own worst creators.

Yes.

Man, that's true.

We probably defeat ourselves more than anyone else.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Most people aren't paying that much attention to your life.

Right.

Don't take yourself that seriously.

Yeah, it's true.

You know, they're not.

They got their own life.

Yeah.

You can get up, start making a speech, and you do something.

Maybe.

You spill some water

or just

maybe you hit the mic accidentally and it screeches or something like that.

And you feel like a fool, you know, and embarrassed.

And you don't want to do any more speeches.

And the crowd,

you're not that important.

They weren't that big a deal.

They didn't care.

Yeah.

You know,

yeah.

They were oblivious more or less, you know?

That's why I think going back to what you talked about in the beginning, it's so important to manage our mind when we're thinking negatively or self-critical.

Yeah.

Because being self-critical is not the same thing as being a self-coach.

And when you're coaching yourself and you're saying, okay, I'm going to analyze what I did right or wrong today and how I can improve, you're giving yourself more empowering feedback based on your failures, based on your setbacks or the mistakes you made towards your goal.

Whereas the critic is just making you feel bad, the self-critic.

So I think try to become more of a self-coach rather than a self-critic in the pursuit of your dreams.

Yeah.

Be careful how you talk to yourself.

Yes.

You talk to yourself more than anybody else in the world.

It's true.

You know, and if

manage, manage that dialogue going on in your head up there.

That's powerful.

I love this.

I want people to get the book, Lucky You, A Psychological Strategy for Multiplying Luck and Achieving Your Big Ambitions by Price Pritchett.

They can go to your website and get this book, PritchettU2.com, and it'll have this, the book on here.

It'll have your accelerator coaching program, which is a new coaching program that you have that can help people kind of go through your processes, your training to optimize their life.

Can you share more about the coaching program?

It's an eight-week program.

And what we've done is we've distilled

these key principles from the U-Squared Handbook, Quantum Leap Strategy, Lucky U,

and

other

writings that I've done, like a book I wrote called Heart Optimism

and so on.

It's an eight-week program, and I think it is powerful,

but it's very minimal effective dose.

Again, it's

what are those

5%,

you know, that separates signal from noise.

If 95% of all this stuff out there,

it's good, or maybe it's even junky in the world of how to manage your life and become become more successful.

What are the, you know, what are those things, though, that are just the real

guideposts that give you the high leverage?

And that's what it's based on.

Gotcha.

Eight-week program.

They can go through it.

Can you sign up anytime and go through it or is it once every quarter or once a month or how is that?

Well,

this is a fun thing.

We just, we're just launching this thing.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

And our first launch session is in September.

Okay.

Mid-September.

We have another one that we're putting on the calendar in October, and then we'll be booking on that.

So very cool.

This baby is new.

Brand new.

The

U-Squared Accelerator Coaching Program.

Make sure you guys check it out.

PritchettU2.com.

And it'll take you to that link.

Once you get there, you'll see it there.

A couple of final questions for you.

I think I asked you this the last time, and I'm curious your three truths.

If

you had to distill all of your work work into three lessons, what would those three truths be for you?

And maybe you already said it, but I'm curious if you have.

I would stick with the same thing I said last time, I think, is, and those three truths are, first of all,

you are the most powerful person in your life.

It's not your daddy.

It's not your boss.

It's not your mother.

It's not your best friend.

You are the most powerful person in your life, and you have been for a long time.

Secondly,

you have an amazing capacity for change.

Truly amazing capacity to change.

And third, you are the solution to your future.

Yeah.

Own it.

Yeah.

That's beautiful.

And what's your definition of greatness?

Last question.

That's going to depend on the individuals.

What would my definition of greatness?

I guess it would be

being able

to

look

back

at

your life.

I don't care if you're 35, 45, 65, whatever,

and

say,

I put myself out there.

I put myself out there.

I didn't play it too safe.

I think we have to do that to be able to say I came anywhere within eyesight of greatness.

Yeah, no one's getting out of it.

And probably you're going to have to look back and say,

you want to see the huge screw-ups?

And not to the countless little ones.

Yes, yes.

No one's getting out of this place alive.

No one.

You might as well go all in.

You're error-free.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's kind of like we tell the clients on the very front end of a merger.

There's no such thing as a perfect merger.

Right.

And going slow, trying to get it perfect is the biggest mistake you can make.

Wow.

Yeah.

Price, thanks so much for being here.

Appreciate you, sir.

Such a pleasure.

Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.

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