Transformation Tuesday: Goals and Gratitude

On this episode of the podcast we are giving you a sneak peak at our Transformation Tuesday webinar.
 
This week we talked about how to balance being grateful for where you are while finding the motivation to push yourself towards your goals. We quote experts and authors on how to strike that balance .

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Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

Unknown: 0:38

Alrighty. Hello everybody, and welcome to one of my favorite days of the week. I know I say this every week, but it is. It's true. Welcome to transformation Tuesday. It is just me today. For those of you on the Thursday call, I told you guys this was going to be the case today, because if you have not been paying attention, or maybe you don't watch the you don't watch the what's it called the Today Show. You may not have realized that John is on the Today Show today. He performed this morning. It has aired on both coasts, and I was going to play some clips from it, but I felt like that might not you can find might not you can find that stuff online. So he performed round ball rock in anticipation of the start of the basketball NBA basketball season. Those you again that are not aware NBA the NBA basketball coverage, NBC has relicensed round ball rock. John's iconic theme from the 90s about for basketball. So he they have realized that for the NBA on NBC coverage, that is, that is starting today. So he's on the Today Show this morning. You can find, again, there's an interview component to it also. So he played the song live on the air with a couple of the musicians from his regular band and a couple of musicians that he hired locally in that's a little behind the scenes, little how the sausage is made, couple musicians that he hired locally in New York, off of Broadway and stuff. So it's a pretty good pretty good performance, pretty great performance, pretty excellent performance. And really a cool time for us in anticipation of the start of the NBA season. So those there are two games tonight. There is a thunder game and then a warriors Lakers game. And those are on NBC. You can find those tonight, and you can hear the theme right now. I know, I know they are looking for the right Sports Bar in Manhattan to watch the coverage night. The issue that they're having in New York right now is finding a sports bar that will play the audio for the NBA coverage loud enough in the sports bar. So they are they're trying to find a way to watch in a public setting, the return of the theme, and they're pretty pumped about it over there right now, I am here holding down the fort. I'm here doing this. Oh, thanks, Chrissy, Chris he's putting the performance link for the Today Show in there. There's an interview component as well, to coincide with both the book relentless, you tell some stories from relentless and also, also the release of his new album sports. For those of you that have not checked it out, it is on most, if not all, streaming services. You guys can find it on those streaming services. You guys can play it, listen to it, give us your thoughts. I work out to it. John works out to it. It's a it's a sports themes album that is sort of anchored by the return of round ball rock. So some really cool new sports themes that that are out there, and pretty excited about that being in the world, and John's pretty excited about the promotions that he's doing right now. And it's a good time. So I know sometimes you guys get worried when it's just me and know John on these shows. And I just want to tell you, it's all good things. You know, he can't be in two places at once. So he is, he is handling that on the East Coast right now. Okay, in the Thursday call last week, I made a reference to something that kind of stuck with me. I was, I was talking, I can't remember exactly I was talking about, but basically it's this, we're at a unique time in human history in terms of comfort, and we've talked about that in terms of our food choices on this show. We've talked about it in terms of our, you know, our creature comforts. And I, I just it's, it's important to remember, because, again, our our motto for for transformation Tuesday is getting you from the place you are to the place you want to be. And I often struggle with this idea of having goals, having things that I want to grow in, things I want to improve. I want to get better. I want to improve my life. I want to improve the life of my family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, while also maintaining a posture of gratefulness, of gratitude, of happiness with where I am. And it seems like those two things are in conflict. But there is a way of navigating those narrow straits, in terms of our emotional gratefulness, our anticipation of progress, while also, again, while maintaining that balance between those two things, pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone, moving ourselves forward. Yeah. Yeah, and I want I in preparing for today, I was reminded of just how and again, this does not mean that you don't have real problems. This does not mean that there are not real setbacks that we are all dealing with on a regular basis, but it does mean that we are in a time where where life is better for us, for the average, particularly for the average North American or the average European, but, but across the whole globe, more people are living with more comfort than you know, incredible the equivalent of incredibly wealthy people in human history, kings did not have access to the kind of comfort and and ease of life in certain in terms of our in terms of our ability to just get up every day and be comfortable. They did. They didn't have what we have. It took a servant staff of hundreds to maintain the quality of life that we get by just the appliances in our house, and sometimes we need that reminder. Here is he's a comedian. He is a shocking comedian, but I happen to like his hot takes on things that he's really smart, and I think he says things to intentionally make people uncomfortable. But I also think he's an incredibly good observer. His name is Jimmy Carr, and here he is talking about how unbelievably good we have it, and how to take a second and appreciate it. This is not his comedy. This is just him talking about, you know, the quality of I find him to be a good observer of human nature. You get used to how great your life is. No one had a hot shower until 50 years ago. So I try and do this thing when you stand in a hot shower. George Mack, my friend pointed this out to me when, well, look when you stand in a hot shower, just for a moment, just go, Well, no one that you admire from 100 years ago had this simple pleasure in life. And when you look at world that we live in, we're like you're doing. There's been 100 billion people ever, right? We are in the top, top percentile in terms of the luck that we have had, but the lives, like the calorific intake that we just take for granted, the fact that our children don't die, you know, in the first year, the modern medicine and and our lives and our the entertainment that we get, we're living like kings, and yet life has never been objectively better and subjectively worse, because the nature of humanity is our desires are memetic. So we've got this thing where we sort of, you know, how happy are you? Well, it's, it's your quality of life, minus envy. That's how happy you are. And it's easy to look at everyone else and how they're doing and not take pleasure in what you have. It's easy. It's easy to see people living a certain way, and and these things, these these cell phones, they make it disgustingly easy to be able to find, to find the life that you don't have out in the world, to see the person that you barely know on their third trip to Italy in The last year, and go, Why don't I have that? Why can't I be like that? And the point he's making is that our happiness, our core happiness, is the quality of our life, which is for most of us, objectively better than most people in when I say most people, I don't mean 51% I mean, 99.9% of human history was worse than you are right now, that perspective is lost on us on a day to day basis, and that's the point he's making. Is that for most of us, we're in that top 1/10 of 1% in terms of human comfort, in terms of our life expectancy, in terms of our our day to day, happiness and safety, top 10th of 1% and yet we're not happy because we envy that point zero 1% if we were to look at that objectively, we would see how foolish we are being. It doesn't take away the real emotional feelings that we have about it. So how do we move forward? How do we take that idea that we are in one of the best positions a human being has ever been in each of us? I mean, you guys are all on here because of technology that was once beyond the capacity of nations, let alone the capacity of average individuals who are able to communicate over large distances via video teleconference. I mean, think about that alone. We're having this conversation in a way that was not possible, not even I mean, like 20 years ago, we couldn't have done this. You. Uh, people could do it, but those people were multi billionaire executives, right? That's who was. That's was able to do what we're doing right now, only to talk about things that were important to the bottom line of their stock price, and yet, we are able to do that now. So we have to take a second and breathe and appreciate where we are, but yet, how do we use that? How do we take that not just rest on our laurels? How do we not just sit there and say, I'm grateful, I'm grateful that I can find calories that will sustain me for the day within arm's reach, pretty much 99% of my day I'm within. I mean, I had I had breakfast, egg bites. I didn't raise chickens. I didn't I didn't do the work that it took to get that. I have abundant access to eggs in my home right now, and part of that is, I buy a lot of eggs because I like, I like them and but I, you know, but I don't have to do any of this stuff. I didn't have to grow the grain to feed the chickens. I don't have to have the land and the chicken coop and protect the chickens and all of that, which for so much of human history would have been required. So how do we do that? How do we maintain that? So this is a guy. This is a lens that I want you guys to start thinking about, because when we look back on our lifetime, we don't look back. I don't know if you guys have read I was just listening to an interview with the author of Tuesdays with Maury. What is it? Bomb? I forget his last name and and just about how you know, what are we doing when we want to look back on the stuff that we accomplished? Very few of us think about the extra the extra late hours that we did. We what we do when we're living, when we're in our prime earning years when we're in our prime, goal focused years what we what we do, what we do, in order to think that we to make ourselves, put ourselves in that position of like, Oh, I'm doing the best that I can is very rarely the activity that when we look and reflect back on our lives, that we are the most excited about, the most primed about, because we're not we don't have that perspective. So this guy is, I don't know how to pronounce his name, Gib or mate. He's a Turkish physician who wrote one of the preeminent books on ADHD and a lot on human psychology, and he's taught Mitch album. There it is. I knew his bomb. Thank you. He here he is talking about the lens through which we should view our priorities and and how that relates to the 100 Acre Wood and Winnie the Pooh. If I were to choose to live my life over again, I wouldn't live it in this way. Do you know Winnie the Pooh? Yeah, the end of that book would bring tears to my eyes for years. Christopher Robin, the little boy now has to go to school, and he's telling his friends the toy animals that he won't be able to play with them so much anymore. And what I wasn't aware of when I went to medical school and when I was a physician is how driven I was to justify my existence in the world. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. When you're driven to work too hard, you actually ignore what matters, and what matters is what you were telling me last night about how much it matters for you to spend time with your family. So every summer, you take a bunch of weeks away from your podcast and you just spend time enjoying your kids and your and your wife and your family. And I didn't do that. I always felt I had to keep working. And the book ends with the statement, and whatever they do or wherever they go in the Enchanted Forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing together, and that phase would bring tears to my ass for years, because play is so important and joy is so important, and that's what these people are talking about people sacrifice their playfulness, their joyfulness, for the sake of being accepted and being successful and all that. It's a huge one. Being driven by unconscious needs to validate your existence. And where does that come from? Again? That comes from childhood trauma. In that sense, we can all be Winnie the Pooh and Christopher, we can always keep playing in the Enchanted Forest. And that's just essential. I think what he's talking about there is finding your why. And we've said this before, if you can find your why. You can endure any how. Most of us our Why is something ribbon thin? It is meaningless. We want admiration from our peers, not even our peers, from people we don't even like to justify, as he puts it, to justify our existence. Existence. But the reality is that when we look back on our existence, we realize that the most perishable inventory that we have is our time, and we're not even good about being lazy. We view not working in order to spend time with our children. We view not working in order to, in order to show up, you know, and fix light bulbs at our old our great aunt's house, as laziness. We're not, we're not focusing on producing for the economy. We're not focusing on our goals. And yet, when we when we look back at that time, those become the most important times of our life, and the amount of time that we waste staring at our phone, worrying about things we have no control over, listening to 24 hour news cycles and and and stressing about not matching up to the stuff that we see on here. How many hours are we giving to these things? We're bad about being lazy. We give hours to that stuff. And I've been saying this from a position of authority. I am just as guilty of this. I have been staring at my phone or staring at my computer trying to finish work while my kids are asking me to go for a bike ride. And I guarantee you, based on on what he's saying there, and what everything that I've read Tuesdays and more, all of that, that at the end of my life, I will, I would, I would give up every inch, every ounce of technology, every dollar in my bank account in order to go for one more bike ride with my childhood under 10, aged son and my and my daughters and and one more opportunity to talk to them and see the world through their innocent child like eyes for one one more opportunity to do that, and it's gone like that. So when we talk about our goals, when we talk about what we want, when we talk about getting to the place we want to be, we have to put it through the lens of what is most important to us. And I guarantee you that whatever that goal is shareholder value, right? The the driving mantra that runs our economy is not going to be the number one most important thing, and you will have looked back on your life and realized that you've wasted it in the name of shareholder value, as opposed to maximizing the amazingness of the time that we have, and many of us waste our time on bad habits. We find comfort in the same news stories. We find comfort and the algorithm knows. We find comfort in the algorithm. We find comfort in staring at our phones and having fake communication with fake friends, and it drives us, on a daily basis, towards unhealth. It drives us to be unimpressed with our lives as they are when we have impressive, amazing, comfortable lives. And more than anything else, it drives us to give away our most perishable inventory time. And if you re think your hours in the day, the time that you have through that lens, that doesn't mean that you don't work. It doesn't mean that you don't have goals. If you can re contextualize everything that I said it just it means that your goals are now reframed with a different purpose, and if your goals are not reframed with that purpose, you're not going to get them and you're not going to be happy when you do. And that is how we find that navigation between contentment and gratefulness and striving and goals. If our why for our goals is in the right place, if our appreciation for where we are it comes from understanding how perishable our time is, then we begin to become very precious with what we give our time to, and that includes undoing the bad habits and building the good habits that will get there. And I mean that, you know, for example, I like to go for a run, and I've never regretted going for a run, and I have had times had to step away from my family to go exercise. But I know that there's a greater purpose to that. I know that me spending 45 minutes exercising, going for a run right now means that I will be healthier, longer and better able to be there in my children's lives and my grand, hopefully future grandchildren's lives, all of that. So I am investing my time into something that gives me more time in theory, right? Mm. I there is a lens through which I view that, and I don't regret my runs. I don't regret the times when I've been like, I'm gonna go exercise. I mean, sometimes you have to be, you know, a little bit militaristic about it in order to maintain your focus all that stuff. I get that. But what? What my I don't regret investing in myself in that way in order to be able to have more time with my kids. Here is so we got to build those habits. We got to build those habits that get us to that place. Here is Chase Hughes, who is he's an interrogator and psychologist talking about how to reprogram your brain to build the habits that you want. Reticular activating system, whatever you want to change in your life, anything you want to change in your life, jam it down into that part of the brain. And the way to jam it down in the part of the brain is, how can I communicate? This to a dog? It requires imagery, emotion, smell and then repetition, just training a dog. There's a formula that I used to teach for actual brainwashing, and it works the same to brainwash ourselves out of a behavior or into a new behavior that's focus emotion, agitation and repetition. So agitation, meaning I'm going to change my environment very regularly, so my brain doesn't go into I'm familiar with this mode, so it's like, wow, these walls are a different color in my office, my couch, my living room, is in a different place. I continuously move things around to force the lower brain to say things are new. You need to pay attention. Yeah. So he's talking about introducing novelty in order to get more of your brain engaged, which is something we've talked about from a different angle before. And this idea is that the more novelty you can inject, the less your brain is on autopilot, which means the more of your brain you can engage. And we have an abundance of energy, abundance of calories, so we actually don't need those systems in our brain often that make life easier. So if you can change things up in order to get more of your brain activated, you can then use more of your brain to build the new habit. And what's cool is the new habit can actually become something that goes into autopilot, and so that you can use your new brain, your more active brain, in order to develop new habits. So the other cool side effect of introducing novelty is that it slows time down. One of the reasons why your life from age you know, four to age 10 feels like it was an eternity, and your life from graduating high school till now feels like a blink. Is because everything you did from age five to 10 was a novelty. Everything was new, and so your brain slowed time down. It took in more of the surroundings, and it felt like those, those five, six years of elementary school was half your life. And for many, or most of us, it's, you know, it's been decades since we were in high school, and yet it doesn't feel like it's been decades. That feels like a shorter amount of time than the time that I was a child. I'm speaking from personal experience, but my reading is that is, and conversations is that that's an it's a shared experience. This idea that childhood takes forever and adulthood is a blink, and part of that is because we don't manage our time well and we don't introduce enough novelty. So he's talking about tricks, where you rearrange the furniture in your house, where you redo things that the in terms of your your daily patterns, where you you move things so that you have to use more of your brain in order to begin to groove new dendrites and form new habits. And that is a great way to do that. And one of the cool things that happens as a side effect, again, is that it slows your brain down. How do we now determine how to take our new, more activated brain and put it to good use? Google is a famously successful company. Google has not just famously successful in terms of shareholder value, but but also in terms of what it has, what it in terms of employee satisfaction, in terms of its growth, in terms of its ability to build and retain talent. And one of the one of the core concepts, is this idea of 7020, 10, and it has to and I've had, I've had many friends who have worked at Google, and the this, this concept that that is about to be talked about from Sergey Brin is actually a good model for how to build your life towards. Life of purpose that you want. Sergey, 15 years ago, came up with a concept called 10% of the budget should be on things that are unrelated. It was called 7020 10, 70% of our time on core business, 20% on adjacent business, and 10% on other and he proved mathematically, of course, he's a brilliant mathematician, that you needed that 10% right to make the sum of the growth work. And it turns out he was right, right? So it's a simple concept, 7020, 10, 70% of your core business, that is your job right now. That helps you pay your rent, pay your mortgage. That is the actual fundamental comings and goings of getting to doctor's appointments, etc. 20% on the adjacent stuff. You got to have dinner. Well, you got to cook, you got to chop vegetables, you got to, you got to do all of that kind of stuff. 20% on this sort of like, you know, personal maintenance. You got to bathe. You got to you got to do the things that allow you to work on the 70% but many of us take that last 10% and we waste it. That 10% goes to watching television, that 10% goes to doom scrolling, and that 10% goes to enviously looking at other people's Instagram feeds, and my encouragement to you this week as we come to the end of our time, and I'll read some of the comments in a second here, as we as we end, is for you to take what we've talked about today in terms of how to reframe your thought process, How to reframe the value of your time, and take that 10% of your time that we are wasting right now, and I don't mean just you, and I'm sure you're gonna tell me all of the things. I promise you, there's 10% of our time that we are all wasting, and I know I do it, and use that 10% to build and invest in the stuff that gives us the playful purpose, the 100 Acre Wood dancing with poo, the idea of of how far we can go in terms of our sense of ourselves, how far we can go in terms of living the life that we want in a way that aligns with our core values, that when we look back on our lives, that will be the stuff that we realized was the most important to us. Spend your 10% of your time doing that. So, you know, for for 24 hours in a day, that's, you know, 2.4 hours. Can do we have 2.4 hours that's, that's, you know, two hours and 20 minutes, two hours and 20 minutes every day, working on those goals that build our playfulness. A couple of things that people have said one that I want to point out, that what I'm, what we're talking about today, falls in alignment with a group called under earners anonymous. And I have a friend who's actually an under, under earners anonymous. And the idea behind that is that many of us, we are squandering, we are squandering our most valuable possession, which is time, and we squander it because we it's usually for for smart people or people who are in a similar position to what motivated us to join this group, but usually it's this is using the 12 step program, which is, we are not unhappy, but we are not at the place that we want to be. We want to be. We believe that there's something that we need to unlock in ourselves, the 7020 10 rule April, is that 70% of our life is going to be spent on our core business by Google. It's Google is a search engine. Google has Google Docs. Google has YouTube, which is also a search engine. By the way. It's the second most popular search engine in the world, behind Google itself. Google is a search engine, maintaining the quality of the search, maintaining the servers that it needs to run the search, selling the ads around the search terms, all of that that is their core business for you, that is your day job, that is the logistical nature of getting to and from work. Mean, you know, all of that, 20% on the on the ancillary parts of the business. So again, I said, for Google, it's maintaining the servers as part of the 70, but it's for Google, it's making sure that their searches, their search is constantly, is never down. It's making sure that some of the side parts of the business. So for Google was like buying YouTube, right, realizing that searching through video is just as important as searching on text. And so they bought they buy YouTube, and then they build that into the number two search engine world. That's the 20% on the side. So for an individual that's keeping your car maintained, making sure that you can get to and from work, that's, you know, going to your tooth clear. Meaning every, every 12, six to 12 months, and getting your annual physical, all of that stuff. That's all in that 20% but then the 10% is the dreamer, and we waste our dreamer time. And when we look back on our lives, that dreamer time is the most important to us. What we do with that dreamer time, is it creating experiences for our children that we will look back on with fond memories that they will then pass on to their kids? Is that what we do with our 10% is it building the the chair of the business that funds the charity that takes care of sea otters? Because we love sea otters, whatever those things are, that 10% is fundamentally what the most important part of our life becomes. And I want to encourage you guys to rethink your schedule with that 7020, 10 rule this week, to reimagine how comfortable your life really is, and to take that with you every single day. So that's your goal this week. Figure out what your 10% is, what you're going to work on it and cut out the rest. Cut out the stuff that you're wasting in that 10% thank you guys, that is our time today. John should be back. I mean, John will be back. I guess he gets in either tomorrow or Thursday. So I don't know if he's going to be on the Thursday call or not, but he but he will be back in the saddle at least by next week, probably by Thursday. Thank you guys for being here, and I look forward to seeing you guys next week. You.