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So this happy pic of me was taken in 1999.
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I was a senior in college,
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and it was right after a dance practice.
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I was really, really happy,
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and I remember exactly where I was
about a week and a half later.
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I was sitting in the back
of my used minivan
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in a campus parking lot
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when I decided that I
was going to commit suicide.
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And I went from deciding
to a full-blown planning very quickly,
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and I came this close
to the edge of the precipice.
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It's the closest I've ever come,
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and the only reason I took
my finger off the trigger
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was thanks to a few lucky coincidences.
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And after the fact,
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that's what scared me the most,
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the element of chance.
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So I became very methodical
about testing different ways
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that I could manage my ups and downs,
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which has proven to be a good investment.
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Many normal people might have,
say, six to 10 major depressive episodes
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in their lives.
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I have bipolar depression.
It runs in my family.
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I've had 50-plus at this point,
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and I've learned a lot.
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I've had a lot of at-bats,
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many rounds in the ring with darkness,
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taking good notes.
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So I thought rather than get up
and give any type of recipe for success
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or highlight reel,
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I would share my recipe
for avoiding self-destruction,
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and certainly self-paralysis.
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And the tool I've found which has proven
to be the most reliable safety net
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for emotional free fall
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is actually the same tool
that has helped me to make
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my best business decisions,
but that is secondary.
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And it is Stoicism.
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That sounds boring.
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You might think of Spock,
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or it might conjure and image like this --
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(Laughter) --
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a cow standing in the rain.
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It's not sad. It's not particularly happy.
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It's just an impassive creature taking
whatever life sends its way.
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You might not think of
the ultimate competitor,
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say, Bill Belichick,
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head coach of the New England Patriots,
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who has the all-time NFL record
for Super Bowl titles.
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And Stoicism has spread like wildfire
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in the top of the NFL ranks
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as a means of mental toughness
training in the last few years.
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You might not think of
the Founding Fathers,
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Thomas Jefferson, John Adams,
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George Washington to name but three
students of stoicism.
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George Washington actually had
a play about a Stoic --
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this was Cato, a Tragedy --
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performed for his troops at Valley Forge
to keep them motivated.
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So why would people of action
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focus so much on an ancient philosophy?
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This seems very academic,
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and I would encourage you to think
about stoicism a little bit differently,
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as an operating system for thriving
in high stress environments,
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for making better decisions.
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And it all started here, kind of,
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on a porch.
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So around 300 BC in Athens,
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someone named Zeno of Citium
taught many lectures
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walking around a painted porch, a stoa
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that later became Stoicism.
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and in the Greco-Roman world,
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people used Stoicism
as a comprehensive system
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for doing many, many things,
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but for our purposes,
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chief among them was training yourself
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to separate what you can control
from what you cannot control,
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and then doing exercises
to focus exclusively
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on the former.
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This decreases emotional reactivity,
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which can be a superpower.
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Conversely, let's say
you're a quarterback.
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You miss a pass.
You get furious with yourself.
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That could cost you a game.
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If you're a CEO and you fly off the handle
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at a very valued employee
because of a minor infraction,
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that could cost you the employee.
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If you're a college student
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who, say, is in a downward spiral,
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and you feel helpless and hopeless,
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unabated that could cost you your life.
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So the stakes are very, very high.
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And there are many tools
in the toolkit to get you there.
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I'm going to focus on one
that completed changed my life in 2004,
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and it found me then
because of two things:
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a very close friend, young guy, my age,
died of pancreatic cancer unexpectedly,
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and then my girlfriend, who I thought
I was going to marry walked out.
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She'd had enough, and she didn't
give me a Dear John letter,
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but she did give me this,
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a Dear John plaque.
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I'm not making this up. I've kept it.
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"Business hours are over at five o'clock."
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She gave this to me
to put on my desk for personal health,
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because at the time, I was working
on my first real business.
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I had no idea what I was doing.
I was working 14-plus hour days,
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seven days a week.
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I was using stimulants to get going.
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I was using depressants
to wind down and go to sleep.
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It was a disaster.
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I felt completely trapped,
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and I bought a book on simplicity
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to try to find answers.
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And I did find a quote
that made a big difference in my life,
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which was, "We suffer for more often
in imagination than in reality,"
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by Seneca the Younger,
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who was a famous Stoic writer.
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That took me to his letters,
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which took me to the exercise,
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premeditatio malorum,
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which means the pre-meditation of evils.
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And in simple terms,
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this is visualizing the worst-case
scenarios in detail that you fear,
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preventing you from taking action
so that you can take action
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to overcome that paralysis.
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My problem was, monkey-mind,
super-loud, very incessant.
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Just thinking my way
through problems doesn't work.
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I needed to capture my thoughts on paper,
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so I created a written exercise
that I called "fear-setting,"
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like goal-setting, for myself,
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and it consists of three pages,
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super simple.
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The first page is right here.
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What if I ... ?
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This is whatever you fear,
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whatever is causing you anxiety,
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whatever you're putting off.
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It could be asking someone out,
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ending a relationship,
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asking for a promotion,
quitting a job, starting a company.
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It could be anything.
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For me, it was taking
my first vacation in four years
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and stepping away from my business
for a month to go to London
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where I could stay
in a friend's room for free,
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to either remove myself
as a bottleneck in the business
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or shut it down.
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In the first column, Define,
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you're writing down all of
the worst things
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you can imagine happening
if you take that step,
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and you want 10 to 20.
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I'm not going to go through all of them,
but I'll give you two examples.
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So one was I'll go to London,
it'll be rainy, I'll get depressed,
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the whole thing will be
a huge waste of time.
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Number two, I'll miss
a letter from the IRS
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and I'll get audited
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or raided or shut down or some such.
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And then you go to the Prevent column.
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In that column you
write down the answer to,
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what could I do to prevent
each of these bullets from happening,
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or at the very least, decrease
the likelihood even a little bit.
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So for getting depressed in London,
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well, I could take a portable
blue light with me
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and use it for 15 minutes in the morning.
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I knew that helped stave off
depressive episodes.
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For the IRS bit, I could change
the mailing address on file with the IRS
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so the paperwork would go
to my accountant
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instead of to my UPS address.
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Easy-peasy.
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Then we go to Repair.
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So if the worst-case scenarios happen,
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what could you do to repair
the damage even a little bit,
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or who could you ask for help.
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So in the first case, London,
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well, I could fork over some money,
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fly to Spain, get some sun,
undo the damage
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if I got into a funk.
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In the case of missing
the letter from the IRS,
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I could call a friend who is a lawyer
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or ask, say, a professor of law
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what they would recommend,
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who I should talk to,
how had people handled this in the past.
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So one question to keep in mind
as you're doing this first page
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is, has anyone else in the history of time
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less intelligent or less driven
figured this out?
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Chances are the answer is yes.
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The second page is simple.
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What might be the benefits
of an attempt or a partial success?
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You can see we're playing up the fears
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and really taking a conservative
look at the upside.
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So if you attempted whatever
you're considering,
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might you build confidence,
develop skills,
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emotionally, financially, otherwise.
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What might be the benefits of,
say, a base hit?
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Spend 10 to 15 minutes on this.
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Page three.
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This might be the most important,
so don't skip it.
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The Cost of Inaction.
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Humans are very good at considering
what might go wrong
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if we try something new,
say, ask for a raise.
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What we don't often consider
is the atrocious cost of the status quo,
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not changing anything.
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So you should ask yourself,
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if I avoid this action or decision
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and actions and decisions like it,
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what might my life look like in,
say, six months, 12 months, three years.
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Any further out it starts
to seem intangible.
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And really get detailed,
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again, emotionally, financially,
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physically, whatever.
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And when I did this it painted
a terrifying picture.
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I was self-medicating,
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my business was going
to implode at any moment
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at all times if I didn't step away,
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my relationships were fraying or failing,
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and I realized that inaction
was no longer an option for me.
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Those are the three pages. That's it.
That's fear-setting.
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And after that, I realized
that on a scale of one to 10,
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one being minimal impact,
10 being maximal impact,
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if I took the trip I was risking
a one to three of temporary
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and reversible pain
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for an eight to 10 of positive,
life-changing impact
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that could be a semi-permanent.
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So I took the trip.
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None of the disasters came to pass.
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There were some hiccups, sure.
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I was able to extricate myself
from the business.
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I ended up extending that trip
for a year and a half around the world,
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and that became the basis
for my first book.
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That leads me here today.
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And I can trace all of my biggest wins
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and all of my biggest disasters averted
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back to doing fear-setting
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at least once a quarter.
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It's not a panacea.
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You'll find that some of your fears
are very well-founded.
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But you shouldn't conclude that
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without first putting them
under a microscope.
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And it doesn't make all the hard times,
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the hard choices, easy, but it can make
a lot of them easier.
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So I'd like to close with a profile
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of one of my favorite modern-day Stoics.
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This is Jerzy Gregorek.
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He is a four-time world-champion
in Olympic weightlifting,
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political refugee,
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published poet,
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62 years old.
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He can still kick my ass and probably
most asses in this room.
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He's an impressive guy.
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I spent a lot of time on his stoa,
his porch, asking life
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and training advice.
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He was part of the Solidarity in Poland,
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which was a non-violent movement
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for social change that was
violently suppressed by the government.
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He lost his career as a firefighter.
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Then his mentor, a priest,
was kidnapped, tortured, killed,
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and thrown into a river.
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He was then threatened.
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He and his wife had to flee Poland,
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bounce from country to country
until they landed in the US
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with next to nothing, sleeping on floors.
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He now lives in Woodside, California,
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in a very nice place,
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and of the 10,000-plus people
I've met in my life,
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I would him in the top 10
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in terms of success and happiness.
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And there's a punchline coming,
so pay attention.
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I sent him a text a few weeks ago
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asking him, had he ever read
any Stoic philosophy?
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And he replied with two pages of text.
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This is very unlike him.
He is a terse dude.
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And not only was he
familiar with Stoicism,
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but he pointed out for all
of his most important decisions,
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his inflection points,
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when he stood up
for his principles and ethics,
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how he had used Stoicism
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and something akin to fear-setting,
which blew my mind.
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And he closed with two things.
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Number one, he couldn't imagine
any life more beautiful
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than that of a Stoic.
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And the last was his mantra,
which he applies to everything,
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and you can apply to everything:
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"Easy choices, hard life.
Hard choices, easy life."
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The hard choices,
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what we most fear doing, asking, saying,
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these are very often exactly
what we most need to do.
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And the biggest challenges
and problems we face
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will never be solved
with comfortable conversations,
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whether it's in your own head
or with other people.
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So I encourage you to ask yourselves,
where in your lives right now
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might defining your fears
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be more important
than defining your goals?
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Keeping in mind all the while
the words of Seneca:
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we suffer more often
in imagination than in reality.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)