I’ve spent the last odd week glued to my phone. Keeping current on stock charts, r/wallstreetbets, Twitter, CNBC, and text chains with family and friends was a full-time occupation. I’ve been following the markets for years, and never have I been more riveted on what was going on. And never have I witnessed a market event garner this much attention from a diverse collection of personalities, ranging from politicians AOC, Ro Khanna, and Ted Cruz, to talking heads Chris Cuomo, Trevor Noah, and Tucker Carlson, to investing types Dave Portnoy, Mark Cuban, and Chamath. One thing is for certain and no matter what happens next week: the game of investing will never be the same again. 

I’m not going to explain here what a short squeeze is and how the rapid surge in $GME (GameStop stock ticker) triggered what may be the greatest short squeeze of all time. (A simple Google search has you covered). Nor am I going to explain how the rapid surge in other tickers like $AMC (movie theater), $NOK (Nokia), and $BB (BlackBerry) had a similar effect that prompted hedgefunds like Citadel and Melvin Capital to cover shorts and eat billions of dollars in losses, and was likely behind a 1,000 point dip in the S&P 500.

Had Robinhood CEO, Vladimir Tenev, and company not unexpectedly (and, to my mind, unfairly and unjustifiably) halted buying of these stocks on Thursday, January 28th, and limited the amount of shares that could be bought on Friday, January 29th, the effect would have been even more pronounced. Robinhood effectively crashed (temporarily) the price of these stocks, costing their retail customers millions of dollars and enabling billionaire hedgefunds like Citadel, with whom they also do business, to exit positions at a more favorable price point. The irony of the name Robinhood has not been lost on anyone. Whether the brokerage ever recovers, class action lawsuits aside, from what many of its users interpret as an epic scandal, and “the worst business decision of all time,” remains to be seen. 

It’s very clear that @RobinhoodAPP and Hedge Funds like Citadel are saying we’ll take our chances with class action lawsuits and white collar crimes and paying people off to stay out of prison rather than their firms going bankrupt #DDTG. . . The thing that drives myself and so many people nuts is this belief that when this is over guys like Ken Griffin from Citadel Gabriel Plotkin from Melvin, Steve Cohen, and Vlad will be at some secret country club laughing at all of us. And deep down we know we are right. #DDTG.

Dave Portnoy, Founder of Barstool sports, who owns stock in nokia and amc. this week he became a voice for retail investors through his many viral tweets and media appearances.

The short squeezes took a coordinated effort, organized primarily on Reddit’s r/ wallstreetbets forum, on the part of tens of thousands of small cap retail investors. While many people were first introduced to the forum this week, which now boasts of millions of subscribers, the reality is Reddit had been planning the squeeze for months in a bid to save GameStop and make Wall Street pay for its greedy, dubious short-selling practices (link). This week marked the first time retail investors managed to radically drive market momentum in an event that is likely to trigger permanent changes in the way hedgefunds and institutions invest their money, and engender new SEC regulations governing markets.

I got to say I LOVE LOVE what is going on with #wallstreetbets. All of those years of High Frequency Traders front running retail traders, now speed and density of information and retail trading is giving the little guy an edge. Even my 11 yr old traded w them and made $. . . Why does Wall Street have such an advantage over the little guy? The SEC. SEC doesn’t follow laws. They have legal precedents. Which means they can sue you knowing you have no financial ability to fight back. As can Wall St. SEC protects no one but the jobs of their own lawyers. . . They [the SEC] could be very clear about what is allowed and what isn’t but they won’t. Why ? Because their entire workforce is built on lawyers who want to Litigate to Regulate. They don’t want clear delineation. They want to sue. They want to intimidate.

Shark Mark Cuban, owner of the dallas mavericks, adding his two cents to the theme this week on twitter.

Top-down enforcement of rules against naked shorting and other leveraged instruments (e.g. effectively capping short interest somewhere below 100%), and voluntary portfolio hedging measures are a likely outcome of this debacle. Billionaire Mark Cuban, for example, said on CNBC this week that he “hedged the hec out of [his] portfolio” to protect himself against unpredictable momentum moves like this in the future. All wise investors will follow suit, and short investors will think long and hard before placing their bets in the future. It is the end of an era, and the beginning of a new, less predictable one with multiple centers of power and less institutional domination.

Facebook and @RobinhoodApp are the same: They both trick you into thinking you are the customer. But, in fact, you are the product and your data is the asset. These assets are then sold to their true customers who pay them money and always at your expense. STOP BEING TRICKED! . . . All the money in 2008 was made by suits identifying a market dislocation and exploiting it. All the money in 2021 was made by retail identifying a market dislocation and exploiting it. . . until the suits intervened. . .In moments of uncertainty, when courage and strength are required, you find out who the true corporatist scumbags are.

Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital, who published these viral tweets and became a spokesman for retail investors.

The GameStop saga is so fascinating because it features the intersection of multiple sociopolitical and cultural dynamics. There’s traditional Wall Street / institutional investors versus Main Street / retail investors (IE “big money” versus “small money”). Or “class warfare” framed in more conventional, adversarial terms. There’s also the rise of the internet and online communities as a catalyst for social change. This second dynamic was epitomized by the numbers of r/wallstreetbets users and cooperatives who loyally held their holdings in $GME and $AMC, and added to their positions, all the while mainstream powers were doing everything in their power to create selling pressure.

Take the home run. Don’t go for the grand slam. Take the home run. You’ve already won. You’ve won the game.

Jim Cramer, on CNBC’s “squawk on the street” the morning of 1.29.2021.

“Diamond hand or bust” became the mantra, in a testament to the resolve of many retail investors to ignore the advice of Jim Cramer and company (the high-energy host of Mad Money, who is widely considered an ally of ordinary investors) by holding at all costs, and refusing to take profits or panic sell. Documentaries, theses, PhDs, TV shows, criminal investigations, dramatic anecdotes, and countless articles like this one will spring from this. The GameStop Saga is one of the most significant market events to ever transpire and a fascinating legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw massive growth in retail investing and online communities. 

Motivation on r/wallstreetbets ranged from punishing Wall Street and “sticking it to the man” for exploiting the public for decades, community solidarity, and simply making $. While next week will dictate whether it was a grand slam or simply a homerun, one thing is for sure: the Redditors and the retail investors won. And they won by a landslide.

What is your biggest takeaway from the events that transpired this week? 

[You can follow me on Twitter @creatorvilla.] Today I want to share an image circulating on social media that I thought was thought provoking. It contains observations about the all-important intangibles of faith, trust, hope, confidence, and love, using simple and relatable examples. I don’t know where the image originated—if you do, let me know and I’ll give proper credit. Until then, let’s chalk this one up to “Wisdom of the Internet.” Complete transcript below in case you have issues with the image.

Six Little Stories With Lots of Meaning

1. Once all villagers decided to pray for rain. On the day of prayer, all the people gathered, but only one boy came with an umbrella. That is faith.

2. When you throw babies in the air, they laugh because they know you will catch them. That is trust.

3. Every night we go to bed without any assurance of being alive the next morning, but still we set the alarms to wake up. That is hope.

4. We plan big things for tomorrow in spite of zero knowledge of the future. That is confidence.

5. We see the world suffering, but still, we get married and have children. That is love.

6. On an old man’s shirt was written a sentence, “I am not 80 years old; I am sweet 16 with 64 years of experience.” That is attitude.

Have a happy day and live your life like these six stories. Remember–Good friends are the rare jewels of life, difficult to find and impossible to replace!!

As 2021 begins to unfold and the blog closes in on 100,000 page views (!), I want to open up an avenue for you to participate that I’m excited about. Creator Villa is now accepting guest posts from readers! A guest post is written content you created in the interest of others. If you’ve read around on the blog, you have an idea of the kinds of topics and posts that would be appropriate. You will not be financially compensated for your content (this blog is not for profit), but you are free to include a link to generate traffic for your blog, website, social media, etc.

Do not be limited by the following examples and do be free to think outside the box:

• A testimony of how fitness, fasting, meditation, or any other discipline/technique/life strategy positively impacted your life. E.g. An Hourly Log of My 3-Day Dry Fast (30 Insightful Journal Entries)
• An insight or observation from sports, culture, nature, or human relationships that can help people live better. E.g. A Phrase That Instantly Increases Your Likability
• A research finding or study (from a reliable source) related to personal growth and well-being. E.g. Blue Light From Your Phone May Be Keeping You Awake At Night
• An impactful quote or short reflection by you or someone else (with proper credit) that you want featured in the Quote of the Day section. E.g. Quote of the Day #91: Healing If there’s a short inspiring video you’ve transcribed that might also be a great idea. E.g. Radical Forgiveness Will Change Your Life (Vishen Lakhiani). Shoot me an email in advance and I’ll let you know if I want to feature the clip.

Send all submissions to contact@creatorvilla.com or use the contact form here. Before submissions go live, I will edit for content, style, punctuation, etc; title each post, add a cover photo, include the Guest Post tag at the end; let you know when the post will go live; and potentially write a short introduction in the body of the post. Be sure to give the name you want the submission to appear under, and a link to your blog/website if you want me to include it in the post. This gives you the opportunity to generate traffic in exchange for gifting the community with your creative content. Original submissions only. No plagiarism.

I look forward to reading your submissions in the coming months! Don’t feel bad or take it personal if your submission(s) doesn’t get featured. A small number of posts may get featured, and I will enjoy reading everything you send me.

In the Jewish creation narrative, God spoke the heavens and the earth into existence. In the Biblical Proverbs, words are said to have the power of life and death. In Christianity, Jesus is introduced as the Word that God sent to manifest his power on the earth. Ancient cultures keenly understood the connection between words and the events that took place in the material world. The words of the Creator were of the utmost important. Kings, generals, and commoners sought out divine oracles by which to govern their lives. They labored in temples, churches, mosques, and prayer rooms expressly to persuade God to utter a word in their favor. It was also said that man was created in the image of the Creator. The belief was widespread that a man’s destiny would in some measure be determined by his own words.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.

Genesis 1:3-4

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27

Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.

Proverbs 18:21

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John 1:1-2

The truth is that your life and my life up until this point are the manifestation of words that we have spoken and words that have been spoken over us by others. The seed of every word is a thought. A dumb person may go an entire lifetime without speaking a syllable, but the power of words operates in his own mind. And not all words have equal power. A man may think 70,000 thoughts in a day. But only the thoughts he believes take up root in his mind, reproduce themselves, and have a powerful effect on his material reality. This is something that Jesus Christ understood.

Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Mark 11:24

The thoughts we believe are the source of everything else that happens in our life. They are the prism through which we interpret reality. In every moment, the brain is flooded with far more information than it can possibly make sense of. The brain has what’s called a reticular activating system, whose job is to filter information from the environment by only holding on to information that confirms existing beliefs. This is why someone who believes, “I am successful,” constantly finds evidence to support their belief in the same manner as someone who believes, “I am not good enough.” There is a famous sequence that captures the powerful impact thoughts (and the beliefs that empower them) have on our lives.

Watch your thoughts. They become words. Watch your words. They become deeds. Watch your deeds. They become habits. Watch your habits. They become character. Character is everything.

Experts estimate that human beings think between 60-80,000 thoughts and speak between 10-25,000 words in day. If words are the building blocks of life, it follows that every human being is constantly creating their life. And they are doing so at an incredibly prolific rate. We often don’t see it this way because our brains are on auto-pilot and many of our thoughts are repetitive. The bottom line is that the key to all self-improvement is changing the way we think.

Abracadabra. We’ve all heard this word before. It’s what magician’s say when they perform a trick. It’s from Aramaic and means “I create as I speak.” Abracadabra is the main takeaway of this article. And the main takeaway of this website. Remember it if you remember nothing else.

Beliefs influence how people think, act, and feel; they are based on interpretation of lived experience and have everything to do with perspective. Beliefs are typically not “true” or “false;” they are simply more or less resourceful. Many beliefs that were once resourceful continue to exert an effect long after the circumstances that motivated them have evolved. Enter the elephant-and-the-rope illustration.

Some of you are already familiar with this story. When the elephant is a baby, the trainer ties a small rope around its leg and fastens it to a peg to keep it from wandering off. The elephant repeatedly attempts to free itself but fails due its small stature. Once the elephant is grown, it can easily break the rope and gain the freedom of movement that it craves–but it doesn’t even try. By then, the elephant has internalized the belief, deep-seated and uncontested, that the rope is stronger.

It takes courage to try where we’ve failed in the past. But sometimes that is the only way to create new evidence without which the brain is loathe to abandon old beliefs.

Today, I’ve transcribed a short YouTube clip that expands on the elephant-and-the-rope story. (FYI, it’s a text-only video). Reality or fiction, I hope you find it as thought-provoking as I did!

Transcript:

Failure isn’t fatal, but failing to change might be (John Wooden).

One of my friends was passing by the elephants and suddenly stopped. He saw that a huge elephant was held by only a small rope tied to his front leg. It was obvious that the elephant could break away from the rope but he did not. My friend asked the trainer why the elephant just stood there and made no attempt to get away.

The trainer said, “When the elephant was very young and much smaller, I used the same size rope to tie him. As he grew up, he was conditioned to believe he could not break away. He still believes the rope can hold him, so he never tries to break free.”

My friend was amazed. Like the elephant, how many of us go through life hanging on to a belief that we cannot do something simply because we failed at it once before? How many of us are being held back by old, outdated beliefs?

The city of God is an imagined place in which everybody lives the way they ought to live. Everything in the city of God is held constant—including nature, weather, geography, and technology—but one important variable changes: human behavior. I initially intended to create a visualization exercise where I would invite you to meditate on the city of God as I conceived of it. However, I quickly found myself short on ideas. I also realized that people can approach the ideal from many different angles. Instead of sharing my own fragmented view, I decided to survey 10 of my friends instead.

You can find the prompt I sent them and their recorded responses below. The diversity of responses reflects the diversity of people I surveyed: the US, Africa, Latin America, and East Asia were all represented. What struck me the most was how practical most people’s ideals are, and the real possibility of making individual progress toward them. I invite you to think about how you would answer the prompt—and to share what you come up with in the comments.

There is an ideal in literature called the city of God or the virtuous city (Plato, Al-Farabi, etc.)–a place where everyone lives the way they should. How does the city of God as you define it differ from the world as we know it?

Respondent #1: Everyone would be happy. Employers would take care of their employees. Employees would treat each other better.
Respondent #2: The world would be a place full of justice, equality, and health. And no more animal instincts.
Respondent #3: People would treat each other better and wouldn’t be so focused on money.
Respondent #4: Each part would be conscious of it’s relation to the whole, but we live in a world of fragments.
Respondent #5: Love would be the norm. Love changes everything.
Respondent #6: Everyone would have a lot of empathy, and development would be defined by cooperation, not competition. And there wouldn’t be violence. As a result, everyone would have access to technology and its benefits (health, culture, traveling, etc.)
Respondent #7: I guess for me it’s the Taoist way—no strong government control, not many people, natural, moral-oriented. . .
Respondent #8: God’s kingdom would be manifest, There would be righteousness, justice, and peace. God would be king of that city.
Respondent #9: Tolerance and acceptance for others. There simply isn’t enough of it in our world.
Respondent #10: I think it would be a stress-free world. I think the majority would be happy. No killings. The world we live in is filled with greed and selfishness. The rich get richer and the poor stay poor.

Many cultures across time and space practiced ancestral worship. Some still do today, as we see manifest in African tribal religions and Japanese Shintoism. These cultures hold that ancestral spirits continue to exist and exercise influence over human affairs. There is also typically a reverence for ancestors that transcends immediate self-interest. This reverence is based on the recognition that ancestors, in general, and one’s ancestors, in particular, were in large part responsible for creating the world that their descendants inherited. Ancestors also deserve credit for having completed the universal challenge that is life. As a result, descendants owe ancestors a debt of gratitude and honor.

American society today places little emphasis on ancestors. Our society is founded on the enlightenment value of individualism–the idea that the individual is supreme. In theory, the individual has the power to create their destiny and bears sole responsibility for their success or failure. An individualistic worldview diminishes the role of parents, grandparents, siblings, and relatives, and pays even less attention to ancestors.

However, even in a country as individualistic as the US with the least theoretical underpinning for ancestral reverence, I see it all the time. Millions of Americans use the services of Ancestry and 23andMe and are greatly eager to discover information about their relatives (especially if any one of them was the least bit famous).

I always remember the instance when a friend in grade school told me that his ancestors were kings and queens. I had no reason to doubt his story. I have heard my own family members make similar claims. The only difference is my family members tend to go further back in time since the more recent evidence on our family lineage suggests otherwise.

Human beings seem to have a need for a strong self-image–call it identity. In individualistic societies like the US that have relatively weak family networks, many people find their self-image lacking in meaningful ways. People turn to sports teams, political parties, musical groups, and social causes as a source of identity. Some resurrect nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia. And yet others swear allegiance to gangs and mafias. When people find these avenues deficient, they may even go further back in time like my friend, my family members, and the countless Americans suddenly fascinated by their ancestry.

The myriad ways people craft their identity betrays the fact that identity is socially constructed. If identity is individualistic, it is so in the sense that every individual ultimately chooses how to self-define. Some people even lie or delude themselves in the process, as I alluded to earlier, but their misconceptions may form as strong a foundation for their lives as someone who only operates with cold hard facts. For me, the truth is important. I have a hard time ignoring evidence or believing something in the absence of it. And when people realize the truth they built their life around was actually a lie, then a second-order identity crisis is usually the end result.

When I first started writing this article, I wasn’t sure where I was going with it. But now I think I do. It all goes back to the power of the mind. Just as words have the power to create, they also have the power to change. Somebody who lacks identity has the power to develop a positive one that situates them as a meaningful, contributing member of a community. Similarly, someone with an identity built on resentment, exclusivity, or lies has the power to radically reform it. But there is only one captain on every ship. I can’t do it for you the same way you can’t do it for me.

Telling somebody it’s possible may sound like cold consolation. But the biggest obstacle to change is the belief that the way things are is the way things will always be.

One of the most common pieces of advice ever given is “Just be yourself.” And it’s often just what we need to hear. We as people too frequently modify our personality to please others. We say, do, and act a certain way to win their approval rather than from a place of authenticity. If this describes you, “Just be yourself” can be great advice. However, there’s another sense in which we all rightly want to stop being ourselves. What if we struggle with anger? What if we’re depressed, anxious, or peak stress all the time? What if we’re simply not living the life we know we’re capable of? That’s when not being ourselves is in our best interest.

Joe Dispenza has dedicated his career to improving life outcomes using the power of the human mind. He studied neuroscience in college and is a practicing chiropractor. Dr. Dispenza is author of the best-selling Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One. I was initially introduced to Dr. Dispensa through an online lecture that he gave on his book. I was struck by how deeply what he was saying resonated with what I know to be true from my own research and experience.

I’ve created a transcript of Dr. Dispenza’s fascinating lecture on Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. His main thesis is that to truly change is to think outside your environment.

Transcript:

Good evening. I want you to turn to the person next to you I want you to look them in the eye and introduce yourself as a genius–let’s begin. Now geniuses, so happy to be with you this evening. I have a few questions for you before we begin. How many people in this audience actually believe in the idea that the way you think has some effect on your life? You believe that, yes? So how many people here actually woke up this morning and consciously created a future? You know the biggest reason why people don’t do it is because you don’t really believe it’s true. You see if you knew on a gut level that it was absolutely true would you ever miss a day–come on– and would you ever let any thoughts slip by your awareness that you didn’t want to experience?

So your brain according to neuroscience is organized to reflect everything you know in your life. Your brain is a record of your environment–an artifact of your past. So if you believe this, then does your environment control your thinking? Or does your thinking control your environment?

If you wake up in the morning and you get out of bed on the same exact side as you did the day before, you shut the alarm clock off with the same finger, you slip into your favorite slippers, you shuffle into the bathroom and you use the toilet like you always do, then you walk over to the mirror and you look at yourself to remember who you are, then you get into the shower and you wash yourself in the same routine way, then you groom yourself to look like everybody expects you to look, then you go downstairs and you drink coffee out of your favorite mug, then you drive to work the same way as you did the day before. You see the same people that push the same emotional buttons. You do the exact thing that you know how to do, and you memorize and can do so well that you’re an expert at. Then you hurry up and rush home so you can hurry up and check your emails. So you can hurry up and go to bed. So you can hurry up and do it all over again.

Here’s my question: Did your brain change at all that day? We can say that you were thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions that create the same experiences that produce the same emotions, but secretly expecting something to change in your life. Would you agree? So then, as the environment turns on different circuits in your brain, you begin to think equal to your environment. As you see the same people and go to the same places and do the same things at the same time, it’s the external environment that’s turning on different circuits in your brain, causing you to think equal to everything that you know. And as long as you think equal to everything that’s familiar or known to you, what do you keep creating more of? Same life. Now the quantum law is still applying to you. You’re just thinking equal to everything that you know, and you keep creating more of the same.

To change–to truly change is to think greater than your environment. And every great person in history knew this. Whether it was William Wallace or Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, or Queen Elizabeth I, or Joan of Arc–they all had a vision. They all had an idea. Couldn’t see it, couldn’t smell it, couldn’t feel it. But it was alive in their mind. It was so alive in their mind that they began to live as if that reality was actually happening now.

So can you believe in a future that you can’t see or experience with your senses yet? But you’ve thought about [it] enough times in your mind that your brain is literally changed to look like the event has already happened. Neuroscience says it’s actually possible. Now your personality creates your personal reality–that’s it. It’s that simple. And your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel. So the present personality who’s sitting here today–you–has created the present personality reality called your life. Would you agree? Would you also agree, then, that if you wanted a new personal reality, that on a fundamental level you would have to change the thoughts that you’re thinking, the behaviors and habits that you’re demonstrating, and the emotions that you’ve memorized that have become part of your identity?

Most people try to create a new personal reality as the same personality, and it never works. We have to become somebody else. So then, as you keep thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions, and living by the same experiences that produce the same emotions–there’s a principle in neuroscience that says nerve cells that fire together wire together. And if you keep repeating the same states of mind and body over and over again, your brain begins to fire in the same sequences, in the same patterns, in the same combinations. And whenever you make your brain work in a certain way that’s called mind. Mind is the brain in action. So as you re-mind yourself every day who you think you are, you’re causing your brain to fire in the exact same ways. And as they fire and wire in the same patterns, over time the brain moves into a very finite signature, and that’s call your personality.

Now that box in your brain isn’t literally a box, but it’s the most commonly wired, neurologically-fired programs that run redundantly because we keep doing the same things over and over again. To change your mind, then, is to make the brain work in new sequences, in new patterns, in new combinations–to begin to make the brain work differently. And the one ingredient that allows us to do that is knowledge, or information because every time you learn something new you make a new connection in your brain. That’s what learning is. Learning is forging new connections. Remembering is maintaining or sustaining those connections.

So now, every time you have a thought, you make a chemical. And if you have a great thought, or an unlimited thought, or a joyful thought, you turn on a set of circuits in your brain that fires in a very specific sequence, pattern, combination, that produces a level of mind that turns on another part of the brain that makes a chemical for you to begin to feel exactly the way you were just thinking–great or unlimited or joyful.

Now if you have a negative thought or an unhappy thought or a self-depreciating thought, you turn on a different set of circuits, and a different combination, and a different sequence and a different pattern that produces a different level of mind. And the brain then begins to make a different batch of chemicals that signals the body for you to begin to feel exactly the way you were just thinking–negative or unhappy or unworthy.

So the moment you begin to feel the way you think because the brain is in constant communication with your body, you begin to think the way you feel. Which makes more chemicals for you to feel the way you think, and then you think the way you feel, and then you feel the way you think, and then you feel the way you think. And some people do this for 20 or 30 or 40 years.

Now the redundancy of that cycle over time creates what I call a state of being. And a state of being is when your mind and body are working together, or your thoughts and feelings are aligned to a concept. So thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. And as people get caught in this cycle of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking, over time they can condition their body to memorize that emotion as well as the conscious mind.

And whenever the body knows as well as the mind, that’s called a habit. A habit is when your body is the mind. Now 95% of who you are by the time you’re 35 years old is a set of memorized behaviors, a set of emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes that run just like a computer program. So 5% of your conscious mind begins to work against 95% of what you’ve memorized. So the person wants to think positively, but they’re feeling negatively. They want to create their dream board, and put up their future life, but they feel unworthy. That’s mind and body in opposition. We have to recondition the body to a new mind.

So how many people here know someone who’s memorized suffering? It doesn’t have to be you, it can be anybody. And you say that person, “Hey, did you read the book I gave you?” What do they say? “No [sad voice]” “Did you see the DVD I gave you?” “Oh, no. [sad voice]” “Hey, listen, we’re going to go out to dinner, we’re going to go see some stand-up comedy, we’re going to go for a walk along the water, do you want to come?” “No. [sad voice]” What do they say? I’m insisting on this chemical order that no person, no thing, no experience can move us from it. And we have these three brains to allow us to move into a new state of being. And the quantum-field, universal mind–whatever you want to call it–responds to who you’re being. Not what you’re thinking, not what you’re feeling, but the combination of what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling called a state of being.

Most people wait for crisis or trauma or disease or loss to really want to change. They wait until the point where the ego is brought to such a low level that they cannot go on business-as-usual any longer. That’s when we begin to look at how we’re thinking or what we believe or how we act or our attitude or what emotions we’re living by. And my message is why wait? We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, which tends to be the human model. Or we can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration.

Now you want to learn the hardest part about all of this–are you ready? The hardest part of all of this–the hardest part of all of this–is making the time to do it. That’s it. That’s it–making time for your precious self.

Executive business coach Marshall Goldsmith understands the power of a near-death experience. His life flashed before his eyes on his way to Santa Barbara when his pilot announced that the landing gear wasn’t working. You can imagine how he felt when he heard the pilot say, “We have a minor problem. The landing gear isn’t working. We are going to circle the airport until we run out of fuel so we can land more safely with the wheels up.” Landing with the wheels up is cold consolation when the airplane isn’t working. The plane ultimately did land safely, and the first thing Goldsmith did when he got to the hotel was write 50 thank-you notes to the people who had helped him in his life.

Have you ever been so close to death you could hear it breath? I haven’t, but the people who have all seem to have one thing in common: they come away from their near-death experience different than before. They didn’t suddenly age, they didn’t change jobs, they didn’t magically have new friends and family. The power of their transformation is the power of perspective. And what if we could tap that power using only the imaginative faculties of our minds?

Research has demonstrated that when we visualize the same part of our brain gets activated as when we experience something in the material world. The goal of the exercise that follows is to obtain the psychological benefits of a near-death experience minus the trauma. It is structured as a prompt followed by a series of 10 reflective questions. For more on the power of perspective, see the Top 5 Regrets of People on Their Deathbed.

A Near-Death Experience (Thought Experiment)

Imagine you are on that plane headed for Santa Barbara suspended 35,000 feet in the air. Now imagine it it is the engine that malfunctions instead of the landing gear. The pilot says he will do everything in his power to cushion the blow, but that an unnatural landing will take place within 20 minutes. The plane begins its slow decline, the clock starts ticking, and your life flashes before your eyes.

1. What do you love most about the life you’ve lived?

2. What people and experiences are you most grateful for?

3. What do you love least about it?

4. What are your top 3 regrets?

5. When your plane landed safely, what is the first thing you would do when you arrived at the hotel?

6. How is your life now different?

7. Did the experience change how you treat people?

8. Did the experience make you a more grateful person?

9. If you answered yes to at least one of the last two questions, why do you think it took a near-death experience to produce this change?

10. How can any of your answers to the above questions inspire you to live your life to the fullest today?