You Probably Have a Thousand Weeks Left: What Should You Really Focus On?

You probably have a thousand weeks of awake time left.

Think about that for a moment.

By the end of my life, when I'm 80 or 90, if I look back, what will actually be the most important things to me?

That's the question I keep coming back to.

Because one of the biggest problems we have as human beings is that we don't know what to focus on.

And that's becoming increasingly difficult because we're living in a world where everything wants our attention.

The news wants your attention.

Social media wants your attention.

Other people's opinions want your attention.

Your business wants your attention.

Your family wants your attention.

Your phone wants your attention.

And before you know it, you've spent an entire day paying attention to things without ever asking yourself whether those things actually matter.

So the real question becomes:

How do you decide where your attention should go?

The Problem With Trying to Focus on Everything

If you watch a lot of successful people, you start seeing the same pattern over and over.

Usually, they become extremely focused on one area—often their business or their work—and everything else starts to drop.

Not necessarily because they want those other areas to disappear.

It's because it's incredibly complicated to hold multiple areas of life at the same time.

But here's the problem.

As human beings, we're multidimensional.

We don't have just one area of life.

We have our business.

We have relationships.

We have family.

We have fun.

We have connection.

We have faith.

We have our health.

We have ourselves.

So how do you hold on to all of these things without driving yourself crazy?

And who is actually driving you crazy in the first place?

Because there's another problem on top of all of this.

Information is constantly coming at you.

You have to listen to the news.

People are constantly telling you what you should care about.

Someone is telling you what happened on the other side of the world.

Someone else is telling you what you should be angry about.

Someone else is telling you what you should buy.

Someone else is telling you what you should think.

And eventually you're sitting there thinking:

Should I focus on my business?

Should I spend more time with my family?

Should I take care of myself?

Should I worry about what's happening in the world?

Should I be doing something else?

And eventually, you just shut down.

You become overloaded.

I Didn't Want Peace of Mind. I Wanted Peace From My Mind.

There was a period in my life when I used to feel overloaded all the time.

I remember thinking:

I really need peace. I want peace in my life.

But then something hit me.

What do I want peace from?

Why don't I have peace?

And I realized something.

I didn't actually want peace of mind.

I wanted peace from my mind.

Because the whole show was being run by my mind.

It wasn't necessarily other people driving me crazy.

It was my own thoughts.

I could go for a walk.

I could sit down to meditate.

I could try to relax.

And my thoughts would just keep going.

One thought would lead to another.

Then another.

Then another.

And it would continue at night.

I'd try to sleep, but my mind was running.

Or I'd wake up in the middle of the night and my mind would already be going.

And that's the loop a lot of people find themselves in.

The easiest way to escape it is to do something.

Work.

Stay busy.

Distract yourself.

Forget about your mind for a while.

But as soon as you stop working, what happens?

Your mind comes back.

You try to spend time with the people you love, and your mind is still going.

You try to have fun, and suddenly your emotions start coming up.

"What about this?"

"What about that?"

"Have you thought about this?"

"Have you considered that?"

Eventually, you're just trying to get through the day.

And that's why learning how to focus becomes so important.

Your Mind Is Powerful but It Needs Direction

I think the human mind is incredibly powerful.

But there's a problem.

A powerful machine without direction can become chaotic.

Imagine driving an incredibly powerful car, but you don't actually know where you're going.

You keep turning.

"Let me stop here."

"Let me go there."

"Wait, I forgot something."

"Let me turn around."

"Maybe I should go this way instead."

The machine is powerful.

It can take you almost anywhere.

But you don't know where you're going.

That's what our minds can be like.

And if you look at thousands of years of human understanding, you'll notice something interesting.

Spiritual teachers, philosophers, thinkers, psychologists, neuroscientists, all of them, in different ways, keep coming back to the same fundamental question:

How do we take charge of our minds?

That's the bottom line.

How do we take charge of our minds?

Because if we don't, something else will.

You Probably Have About a Thousand Weeks

Let's put this into perspective.

The average life expectancy in North America is around 80 years.

From birth to 80, that's roughly 4,000 weeks.

But if you're already 40, you're looking at something closer to 2,000 weeks.

And if you remove the time you spend sleeping, you might have roughly 1,000 weeks of awake time left.

That's not very much.

I remind myself of that.

I probably have about a thousand weeks.

How long do I have to figure out this life?

How long do I have to figure out what I'm going to dedicate myself to?

Who am I going to spend my time with?

What am I going to build?

What am I going to care about?

How am I going to use this life?

We don't have as much time as we think we do.

But there's a paradox here.

We also have quite a bit of time.

If you take care of yourself, you might still have several decades ahead of you.

A thousand weeks isn't much when you look at it as a number.

But it's enough time to build something meaningful.

And I don't just mean building something in a business sense.

I mean building a life that matters.

Building something meaningful to you.

Building something purposeful.

Building something that, when you look back, makes you think:

I love this. This is my life. I chose this.

You took the risks.

You struggled.

You created things.

You built it yourself.

To me, that's incredibly empowering.

And it means that there need to be some intentions between where you are now and where you're going.

The Four Areas That Matter

So here's what I'm pointing to.

You don't have to focus on a hundred different things.

You need to focus on a few important areas.

You're multidimensional.

Your mind isn't going to leave you alone.

And you probably have a limited amount of awake time left with yourself, your family, and the people around you.

So where are you going to dedicate that time?

For me, it comes down to four areas:

Self.

Relationships.

Mission.

Faith.

These four areas have become incredibly important to me.

I've spent years trying to understand where my focus should go.

Sometimes that focus has gotten me into trouble.

Sometimes it has made me feel incredibly empowered.

Sometimes it's been difficult to focus on these areas at all.

But over the years, I've found that the more I've worked on these four areas, the more I've been able to grow, serve other people, and create a life that is meaningful to me.

Not to my neighbor.

Not to my family.

Not to my friends.

To me.

And that's one of the most important questions I can ask myself:

By the end of my life, when I'm 80 or 90, if I look back, what will actually matter to me?

And that's where these four areas come in.

1. Self

The first area is self.

And when I say self, I don't just mean your thoughts.

I break self down into three areas:

Mind. Body. Spirit.

Some people call spirit the soul.

Some people call it consciousness.

If you're in a more secular environment, you might simply call it consciousness.

But there's something deeper here.

Your Mind

Your mind is the thoughts that are running everything.

Your beliefs.

Your thoughts.

Your language.

The images you create.

The stories you tell yourself.

Everything that's happening inside your thinking mind.

Your Body

Then there's your body.

This incredible machine that runs everything.

Your emotions are connected to it.

How you feel is connected to it.

Your sensations are connected to it.

How you wake up in the morning.

Whether you feel light or heavy.

Whether you feel energized or exhausted.

All of that is connected to your body.

Your Spirit

Then there's what you might call your spirit or soul.

This is connected to the deeper values of who you are.

And this is where it gets really interesting.

What made you you before you were trained to become who you are?

Before you were given a name.

Before your parents told you what you should believe.

Before society told you how you should behave.

Because you didn't arrive here with a completely blank slate.

Anyone who has children understands this.

Two children aren't the same.

Even identical twins aren't necessarily the same people.

They can have completely different personalities.

Different interests.

Different ways of communicating.

Different ways of seeing the world.

So what does that mean?

We come into this life with something.

You can argue that it comes from genetics.

You can argue that it comes from the soul.

You can explain it in different ways.

It doesn't necessarily matter which explanation you choose.

What matters is that you came here as somebody.

Before your parents gave you a name, you were already somebody.

You cared about certain things.

You were interested in certain things.

You responded to things differently.

And your job, in many ways, is to spend the rest of your life figuring out who that person is.

The Lifelong Work of Understanding Yourself

Understanding yourself is much deeper than psychology.

It's deeper than the religion you were taught.

It's deeper than the values you inherited from your family.

It's deeper than your culture.

It's even deeper than your name.

Some ancient traditions understood this.

There were practices where, after people had completed their responsibilities to society and their families, they would symbolically leave behind their status, their clothes, their titles, and everything they had accumulated.

And the question became:

Who was I before I was given all of this?

That's an incredibly powerful question.

And I think it's something we should all be asking throughout our lives.

How much of your time is dedicated to understanding yourself?

Can you actually spend time alone?

Can you sit with your uncomfortable emotions without immediately distracting yourself?

Can you go for a walk and simply think?

Can you sit quietly and ask:

"Why am I reacting this way?"

"Why does this bother me?"

"What do I actually need?"

"Why am I responding to the world this way?"

That's one of the most important areas of focus you can have.

Because if you don't understand yourself, your tendencies will keep taking over.

Your mind will keep directing you in different ways.

Your past will influence your present.

Your emotions will influence your decisions.

And you won't know what actually matters to you.

So ask yourself:

How much time do I spend understanding myself?

It can look different for different people.

Maybe it's going for a walk every day.

Maybe it's meditation.

Maybe it's prayer.

Maybe it's sitting alone.

But there needs to be some space in your life dedicated to this.

2. Relationships

The second area is relationships.

I think of relationships as influence.

Because one of the most important things you need to understand about relationships is that every person around you influences you.

Why?

Because we're wired to be influenced by the people around us.

You've probably heard the idea that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Whether you take that literally or not, the underlying idea is important.

Your environment shapes your thinking.

Spend a lot of time around people who gossip, and your mind starts thinking about gossip.

Spend a lot of time around people who talk about business, and you'll start thinking about business.

Spend a lot of time around athletes, and you'll start thinking about training.

Spend time around monks, and you'll probably start thinking about completely different things.

And it works both ways.

You influence them too.

That's why the people around you matter.

Be Intentional About Your Relationships

Ask yourself:

How do I feel before I meet this person?

How do I feel after I spend time with them?

What need am I meeting for myself?

What need am I meeting for them?

These questions can tell you a lot.

Because often, we're around people simply because they're around us.

There's no intention behind it.

We haven't actually thought about why we're maintaining a particular relationship.

And I would even question some of your closest relationships.

Even your relationship with your children.

What's your intention when you're with them?

How do you feel?

How do they feel?

What are you actually trying to create together?

The same thing applies in business.

When I ask executives:

"What's the purpose of this meeting?"

Sometimes they don't know.

They're meeting because they're supposed to meet.

But that's not necessarily a good reason.

What's the purpose?

What are you trying to create?

What are you trying to accomplish?

Without intention, relationships and interactions can become incredibly complicated.

And that takes us to the third area.

3. Mission

The third area is mission.

If you ask the average person:

"What's your mission in life?"

They might connect it to purpose.

They might connect it to work.

They might connect it to business.

They might connect it to volunteering.

It could mean many different things.

But usually, mission has something to do with what you bring into the world.

You take some aspect of yourself and the things you're passionate about, and you create something that contributes to other people.

Maybe you're an artist.

You create a painting.

You write music.

You create something that adds something to another person's life.

Maybe your work inspires somebody else to become an artist.

Maybe somebody listens to a piece of music and decides to learn the piano.

You're contributing something.

For me, teaching and coaching have always been passions.

Maybe someone watches one of my videos.

Maybe someone attends one of my workshops.

Maybe someone goes through my coaching program.

And something changes in their life.

Maybe they become a better leader.

Maybe they interact differently with their children.

Maybe they treat their team differently.

Maybe they show up differently in their community.

I might never see the full result.

But I know that something I did could create a ripple somewhere else.

That's mission.

Your Mission Doesn't Have to Be Huge

My biggest mission is to help people understand themselves.

That's where I've struggled the most.

Understanding myself.

Understanding my mind.

Understanding my body.

Understanding why I reacted to things the way I did.

And sometimes I think about what my life would have looked like if I had that awareness earlier.

I can't go back and change that.

But I can keep learning.

And I can help someone else avoid some of the struggles I went through.

If I can help one person, I'm happy.

Then I help another person.

Then another.

Eventually, it becomes thousands of people.

That's how a mission grows.

And I also think it's smart to connect your business with something you actually care about.

Why would I spend twelve hours working on a problem I don't care about when I could spend those hours learning about something I'm deeply interested in?

I've dedicated my time to building a business where I get paid to do something I'm genuinely interested in:

Learning about myself.

Learning about other people.

Helping people understand themselves.

And helping them show up as better leaders in their lives, families, and communities.

That's my mission.

Your mission might be completely different.

But you need to figure out what yours is.

4. Faith

The fourth area is faith.

And this one can mess with people's minds because we often immediately connect faith with religion.

But I think faith is much bigger than religion.

Think about the people who had faith before organized religions existed.

Before Christianity.

Before Islam.

Before Buddhism became structured.

Before Hinduism became what we recognize today.

At some point, there were human beings who sat in solitude or experienced something profound and realized something deeper.

They had an insight.

An inspiration.

A revelation.

And then they communicated that insight.

Someone else heard it.

Someone else learned from it.

Eventually, those teachings became structured systems.

That's one way religions develop.

Take something like the Buddhist Eightfold Path.

You can study it your entire life.

But studying the system isn't necessarily the same thing as having the realization that originally led to it.

The same can be said about the teachings of Jesus.

There are teachings about how to live that can eventually become codified into a religious system.

But underneath the system is something deeply personal.

A person's experience.

Their understanding.

Their faith.

Faith Is Personal

I think every person has some form of deeper faith.

That faith can be guided by religion.

But it doesn't necessarily have to be.

You can be a religious person.

You can be a secular person.

Either way, you still have to answer questions about meaning.

Why are you here?

What does your life mean?

What matters to you?

What are you dedicating yourself to?

Where are you going?

This is why so much of religion is ultimately about why.

Why did God create you?

Why are you here?

Where are you going?

What is the purpose of life?

Those are questions about meaning.

And even if you don't believe in God or belong to a religion, you can still sit down and ask:

What is deeply meaningful to me?

Maybe you're a scientist who has dedicated your life to astronomy.

Maybe your deepest meaning comes from understanding the universe and passing that knowledge on to other people.

That can become a form of dedication.

A way of understanding yourself.

A way of understanding the world.

A way of contributing to something larger than yourself.

For some people, that will connect to God.

For others, it might connect to their work.

For others, it might connect to family, service, knowledge, creativity, or something else.

That's why I connect faith to purpose.

You need to spend some time figuring out what your life is going to be about.

What are you going to dedicate it to?

What are the deeper meanings behind it?

The Four Areas Are Connected

What's interesting is that these four areas don't exist independently.

They're deeply interconnected.

Your self connects to your relationships.

Your relationships connect to your mission.

Your mission connects to your faith.

Your faith connects back to your understanding of yourself.

Your body affects your mind.

Your mind affects your relationships.

Your relationships affect your mission.

Everything starts interacting.

That's why you don't need a hundred different categories to organize your life.

You need a few fundamental ones.

Self.

Relationships.

Mission.

Faith.

If you can focus your time and energy on those four areas, you give your mind something to work with.

Instead of spending the next thousand weeks reacting to everything that happens around you, you can decide:

These are the things I'm going to dedicate my life to.

Your Mind Lives in the Past, Present, and Future

There's one final way I think about this.

Your mind can take you into the past.

It can take you into the future.

And it can allow you to experience the present.

So what happens when you connect these four areas to your past and future?

You can look back at your past and say:

"This is the meaning I assign to where I came from."

"This is how I understand the emotions I experienced."

"This is how I've made sense of my past."

"This is how I've understood what happened to me."

Then you can look toward the future and say:

"This is how I want to live."

"This is what I want to dedicate my life to."

"I want to understand myself."

"I want to build meaningful relationships."

"I want to pursue my mission."

"I want to understand my purpose and faith."

Now your mind has something to work on.

And something interesting happens.

Your mind starts leaving you alone.

You can actually live your life.

Because your life now has structure.

You spend some time with yourself.

You dedicate part of your life to relationships.

Part of it to your mission.

Part of it to your faith.

And when something else comes along demanding your attention, you have a framework for deciding whether it matters.

What Doesn't Fit Doesn't Get Your Attention

This might be the most important part.

If something doesn't fall into those four areas, you can largely ignore it.

People are going to send you things you're supposed to care about.

The news is going to tell you what you should feel bad about.

Social media is going to show you someone else's life.

Advertisements are going to tell you what you need.

Political systems are going to fight for your attention.

AI platforms are going to compete for your attention.

Everyone wants something from you.

They want your attention.

But if you don't have a structure for deciding where your attention should go, your mind will simply grab onto everything.

And that's when chaos begins.

Your mind doesn't know what matters.

It doesn't know what to ignore.

It doesn't know when to send you a warning.

It's like a poorly designed car sensor.

It's constantly beeping—or it doesn't beep at all—because it doesn't know what it's supposed to detect.

But if the system is designed properly, something happens.

You encounter an obstacle.

The system recognizes it.

It tells you:

Stop. Don't go there.

Modern cars can even apply the brakes automatically before you hit something.

Your mind has a similar intelligence.

But you have to give it the design.

You have to teach it what matters.

You have to decide what deserves your attention.

Otherwise, it will pay attention to everything.

And that's why life can feel chaotic internally.

Become a Good Steward of Your Mind

So the questions become:

What questions do I need to ask myself?

Where do I need to build habits?

What areas need more attention?

What areas do I need to adjust?

What actually matters to me?

The goal isn't to make your life more complicated.

It's the opposite.

You're already complicated as a human being.

Everyone around you is complicated.

Life is complicated.

The goal is to create enough structure that your mind can cooperate with you.

You probably have a thousand weeks of awake time left.

Maybe more.

Maybe less.

None of us really knows.

And we don't know exactly what happens after this life either.

Maybe there's reincarnation.

Maybe there's an afterlife.

Maybe there isn't.

Nobody here can tell us with certainty.

But whatever your beliefs are, this version of your life is the version you have right now.

You get to live this one.

So the question isn't whether you have enough time.

The question is:

What are you going to do with the time you have?

Where are you going to put your attention?

What are you going to build?

Who are you going to love?

What are you going to dedicate yourself to?

What are you going to believe?

What meaning are you going to create?

For me, the answer keeps coming back to four areas:

Self.

Relationships.

Mission.

Faith.

If you can figure those out, you don't need to give your attention to a hundred different things.

You can teach your mind what matters.

And when your mind knows what matters, it becomes much easier to live.

Because ultimately, it's your job to be a good steward of your mind.

TRANSCRIPT

And what we're talking about is focus. Probably the most important aspect of your life is determining what you're going to pay attention to.

And this, as I was thinking through this topic, I used to get AI help with some of these trainings, but I stopped doing that because I realized my thinking was getting affected by AI. So now my process is actually very simple.

I go on a— I look at the topic. I have a plan for the week and I go on a walk, think about what it is that I want to, in relation to my experience, my client's experience, and then I literally put them down on these little things.

No AI input, none of that stuff is like what I've seen and what I've observed in my life and my client's life. And so I'm basing it on real case studies of what people have worked through.

And as I was thinking through this, it's actually a fairly complicated topic. I could spend a whole day workshopping this, and so I had to really break it down into what—what will make this useful? How can I be the one who will tell people what to focus on, what not?

So the first problem is—and this is a good way to start. If you watch a lot of successful people, you see the same common pattern over and over.

Almost always what ends up happening is that they focus on an area, usually in their business or work, and all the other areas drop.

They drop not because they want to drop it, but because it's actually very complicated to hold on to multiple areas.

Here's the problem, though.

As human beings, we're multi-dimensional in nature. We don't have one area of our life.

We have our business. We have our relationships. We have our—the fun. We have connection. We have faith. We have so many different areas in our life.

How do you hold on to all of them without it driving you crazy?

And who is it driving crazy to begin with?

And on top of that, add to it the factor of we live in a world where information is constantly coming at you.

You got to listen to the news. You got to listen to people. People are throwing all kinds of things at you.

And before you know it, by the end of the day or week, you're like, "Oh my god, what do I think about? Should I feel bad about something that's going on in the other side of the continent that the news is telling me to feel bad about?

Should I focus on my business? Should I do what my—should I take care of my family, spend time with them? Should I—should I take care of myself?"

Before you know it, you shut down. You get overloaded.

And the problem is actually—I'll—I'll—there's this quote I've repeated in my mind a lot of times a long time ago, and that was the time where I used to be overloaded a lot.

It's like, "I really need peace. I really want peace in my life."

But then it hit me: What do I want peace from? Like, why don't I have peace?

And what I realized was, um, I don't want peace of mind. I actually want peace from my mind because the whole show was being run by my mind.

It wasn't really because other people were driving me crazy. It was my own thoughts that were driving me nuts.

It's like because in a given moment I could—I could—I used to go for walks. I'll sit with meditation. My thoughts would not stop.

And then I was like, "How do I make sense of everything and it's going to run the rest of my life?"

And then it would show up even nighttime. I couldn't sleep, or I would wake up in the middle of the night, my mind is just running.

And this is the loop that most people find themselves.

So the easiest way to get yourself out of it is to just do something and forget about your mind, and you can do—and you can do it to a certain extent.

As soon as you stop working, what happens? Your mind comes into the picture again.

What happens when you're spending—trying to spend time with your loved ones? Your mind is not shutting up. There's just going on.

Um, what happens when you just—just want to have fun? You just want to be at peace and now the emotions are coming out.

It's like, "What about that? What about this? Have you thought about that? Have you considered that?"

Or before you know, it's like, "I just need to get through the day."

And then that's the circumstance we all fall into.

And so this is why it becomes so important.

Like we have—and I really think that our mind is incredibly powerful, but it's not guided. It's not directed.

If you actually look at the last thousands of years of human understanding, like what—what are we trying to do?

If you look at the spiritual texts, if you look at the gurus, people who have taught us a lot, spiritual teachers or philosophers or even thinkers, even now scientists are becoming famous—neuroscientists, psychologists—they're all pointing to the same thing.

How do we take charge of our mind?

And that's the bottom line.

How do we take charge of our mind?

Because if you have—think, think of your mind as this powerful machine. It's not. It's much probably much more than that.

Um, think of you behind that machine. Think of you driving a powerful car.

Imagine the car. You didn't know where you were going and you constantly made different—all kinds of chaotic, weird turns.

"Let me stop here. Let me do this. Let me turn around. Go to the other side. I think I forgot something. Let me go there."

But the machine is powerful. It can go take you anywhere, but you don't know where you're going.

It's constantly taking you in different directions.

Our mind is a lot like that.

And I want to paint something here.

Uh, so before I get started, I want to paint this out. Let me share my screen.

I do this in my one-on-one calls. So, but I'll do this. I don't know if I've shared this in a group call. I might have.

Okay. So, we'll whiteboard this.

Now, most people I work with, they fall—what was it? 100.

They fall in most cases. My youngest, younger clients, they fall in their 30s, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100.

So, mo—here's the average age in North America.

The average age in North America falls around 80.

So if you count that from the time you were born to 80, that's about—and it's not even from here—from the time you were born to 80 all the way to 80 is 4,000 weeks.

If you count from, let's say, like average age of my clients go from 30 plus—if I count from 40, which is where I am, 42, I'll be 43.

Um, this is about 2,000 weeks, and I would say about a thousand of that you're going to be sleeping.

And here's what I remind myself of: that I probably have about a thousand weeks.

How long do I have to figure out this life?

How long do I have to figure out what I'm going to dedicate myself to?

Whether I'm going to jump around, who am I going to be involved with, the people in my life, how am I going to figure all this stuff out?

We don't have that much—as much time as we think we do.

But it's also paradoxical.

We also have quite a bit of time.

If you look at it this way, you probably have one, two, three, four—you have about four decades.

If you take care of yourself, you probably have close to four decades of time and energy left, which in 2,000 weeks is not that much, but in the meantime, it's enough so you can build something worth it for you.

And I don't just mean building in a business sense.

I mean building a life that matters.

Building something that you—that is meaningful to you, that is purposeful to you.

Building something that you would look at and be like, "I love this. This is my life. I chose this. I took the risks. I struggled. I created the struggles myself."

You—you built it yourself.

To me, that's very empowering.

Which means that clearly there need to be some intentions from here to there.

You've already lived close to half of your life.

Now, you're about to live the rest of your life.

And this is why in ancient times, actually especially for men, 40 used to be a very important number because even though they didn't even live that long many, many of the times, but this is where wisdom starts to come in if you allow it.

So let me close this.

So here's what I'm pointing to.

You don't have—you need to focus on a few areas.

You're multi-dimensional in nature.

Your mind will not leave you alone.

You probably have a thousand weeks left of awake time with yourself, with your family, with those around you to dedicate yourself to something that matters, and that's it.

You're gone.

Now, we don't know that part.

What happens after you're gone from here? Maybe depends on your belief.

Let's say you believe in reincarnation. Maybe you come back at some point.

If you talk to people with reincarnation, well, when do you think you're going to come back?

Let's say you come back in 100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years.

Do you know?

Nobody knows.

If you talk to somebody who believes in an afterlife, well, where do you think you're going to go?

Are you going to go to hell, heaven? Are you going to go to a different—you? Nobody knows.

Nobody who's here has been there.

Uh, even if you have faith, even—even if you have religious beliefs, that's still—I actually believe in reincarnation. I think we come back.

But let's say I come back in 100 years, it's still this version of my life is—that's it.

I get to try it one time this way.

So I don't have that much time to waste, that much energy to waste.

So where am I dedicating that to?

And this is where, um, I believe these four areas come in that are really important.

And that comes not just from me reading books, but I've really spent some time trying to figure out, like, where is my focus going to go towards.

It's at times it's gotten me in trouble.

At times it's made me much more—feel empowered.

At times it's a struggle to even focus in these areas.

But what I found over the years [is] that the more I've been able to work on these areas, the more I've been able to grow and be able to serve others and create a life that's meaningful to me.

Not to others.

Not to my neighbor.

Not to my family.

Not to my friends.

But to me.

And to me, that's the most important question I can ask myself.

By the end of my life, when I'm 80, 90, whatever, if I look back, what will be the most important things for me?

And it comes down to these four areas.

And I've broken down to simple four areas.

Um, and I'll go through each of those.

And those are self, yourself, who you are inside, not your mind, not your thoughts, not your belief, who you are.

We'll talk about what that is.

Your relationships.

Your mission.

You got to decide what that is.

And that's a complicated one because a lot of people don't even know what that is.

And the fourth one is your faith.

And—and I don't even mean faith in a religious sense.

I'll talk about it that I actually mean this in a very secular sense.

It can connect to religion and God as well.

But you cannot believe in religion and still have faith.

And I'll talk about what that is.

Okay.

So let's break this down.

The first one is self.

And you will understand that all these four areas are actually very interconnected.

So I break down self into mind, body, and spirit.

Now some people call spirit as soul.

Some people call it consciousness.

If you're in the secular world, you'll call that consciousness.

Uh, your mind, that is those are the thoughts that are running everything.

Beliefs, thoughts, language, everything that's running in your mind, the images that you have.

Your body, this amazing contraption that runs everything.

Your emotions are connected to that.

You—how you feel is connected to that.

Your sensations are connected to that.

How you wake up, how light you feel, how heavy you feel, that's connected to that.

Your spirit—soul is usually connected to the deeper values of who you are.

Uh, what made you you before you were even trained to be you, before you were given a name?

Because you didn't come from with a blank slate.

Anybody who has a child, they understand that two children are not the same children.

Even if they're identical twins, they're not the same people.

In fact, some identical—many identical twins are complete opposites of each other.

I have identical twins in my family.

So what does that mean?

We come with something into this life.

Now you can argue that comes from our genetics, that comes from our soul imprint, whatever.

It doesn't matter.

What matters is that you—you were somebody before you came here.

You came here as somebody.

Now you can decide whether you have a purpose or not.

That depends on your philosophy of life.

But I believe we do.

Um, so you came as somebody before somebody even gave you a name.

Before your parents gave you a name, you were somebody.

You had interests.

You cared about certain things versus other things.

My son is very different from my daughters.

My first daughter is different from my other daughter, my second daughter.

They have very different interests.

They have a very different way of communicating.

They have a very different way of seeing the world.

Why?

And that was something I had to ask myself over and over and over.

Which means that a huge part of my life is dedicated to understanding myself.

And myself is bigger than just my body.

It's my consciousness.

It's what's underneath the thinking mind.

It's my thinking mind.

It's my beliefs.

It's my connection to others.

It's my—it's how I relate to other people.

It's—and a lot of it has been, how do I get to know the person that came here before I was trained to be a certain way?

Now, I'm not saying your environment is a negative thing.

You were trained to adapt to this environment, but you were somebody before you came here.

Your job is to spend the rest of your life figuring out who you are.

And it's much deeper than the religion you're taught, the values you're taught in your home and your culture.

It's much deeper than even your name.

In fact, some of the oldest practices—for example, Indians had these practices when they get to—when they have finished their duties towards their society, their home, they have a—now it's symbolic, but in ancient times what it used to be is they would wear a white robe or not wear anything at all, and they walk into the forest and they would be like, "Who was I before I was given these clothes, the status, the name, the title, and all that stuff?"

And they spend the next decade or so trying to figure out who they are.

And that's one of the most important parts of their life, and that was an actual cultural and spiritual rite of passage for many of them.

But I think that's a lifelong dedication for you to understand.

Because if you don't understand yourself, all your tendencies will come in.

Your mind will try to direct you in all kinds of ways.

Your trauma will come into the picture.

You won't know what to focus on.

You don't know what matters to you.

So how much of your time and energy is dedicated to understanding yourself?

And I really mean that.

And I don't just mean that psychology.

I mean, do you spend time alone to figure out who you are?

Can you even spend time alone, or your mind will drive you nuts if you spend time alone?

Can you sit with your uncomfortable emotions and feel them and think and sit there without distracting yourself?

Can you go alone for a little while and be like, "You know what? Why am I reacting to all the things that are happening in the world and in my life or to other people? What is it that I need here?"

And that is one of the most important pieces to figure out for you.

That is one area of focus.

If you don't have that, you will always struggle.

And most people who work with me, ultimately their struggles come down to one of the major areas, which is their self.

It's a very vast topic, but that has to be an area of focus for you.

Which means that in your day-to-day life, week-to-week life, do you have time spent to focus in this area?

And the ways can show up differently.

You could go every day for a walk.

You could meditate.

You could sit in prayer.

Whatever that looks like to you.

The second one is your relationships.

And I've done relationships equals influence.

The most important thing you need to understand about a relationship is that every person around you influences you.

Why?

Because our DNA is hardwired to be influenced by those around us.

And this is why they say you're an average of five people around you.

Because it doesn't matter if people are good, bad, evil, whatever it is.

You just spend around time around a bunch of people, you will see that your mind, your thinking will slowly start to become the average of those people.

So if you spend a bunch of people, a bunch of time with a bunch of people who just gossip, your mind will start to repeat thoughts around gossip.

If you spend a bunch of your time with a bunch of people with ideas about business, guess what?

You're going to think about business a lot.

If you spend a bunch of your time with a few monks, you're going to think about other things.

If you spend a bunch of time with a few athletes, you're going to think about it.

So there's and but you have an influence on them too.

But numbers and the number of people around you and their intensity of influence matters.

So if you are the minority and a bunch of people are influencing you, that's a problem.

But if you're a minority and you're the leader in that space, you might be influencing them more.

So you decide what's going on in that space.

So how much of your time is dedicated to understanding how you react to relationships?

And this is where the connection between self and relationships come in because now your emotions come into the picture.

Whenever you bring people into the picture, you will react emotionally.

Your body will react.

Your mind is going to make up a bunch of stories.

Communication becomes a problem.

Boundary becomes a problem.

Agreements become a problem.

Now it becomes very complicated.

This is why our family lives are very complicated.

This is why team dynamics in business are some of the most complicated things.

So you should have a certain amount of your time dedicated to understanding why you react a certain way to people.

Why do you spend the time that you do spend with the people that you do?

When you're with somebody, ask yourself these questions:

How do I feel before I go to meet this person?

How do I feel after it?

What need am I meeting for myself and for that person?

If you ask just these few of these questions, you will understand that usually you're just around people for no reason, just because other people are around you.

But you haven't actually curated why you're around this person.

It doesn't matter who it is.

I would say even question even the closest relationships to you, even with your kid.

What's your intention to be with your kid?

What do you feel around them?

What do they feel?

Ask them what is the need that you're meeting in that moment.

You will notice that there's very little intention we have when we're around people.

Forget everyday relationships.

When I ask executives this question, so what's the point of that meeting?

Why do you meet with your team at this?

They don't know how to answer it because there's no clear intention.

They're just meeting them.

Like, that's not a good reason to meet people just because you're meeting them.

Because you're trying to do something, right?

What are you doing?

They don't know the purpose.

You're trying to create something.

They don't know the purpose.

They've lost it.

Which is what takes us to the third one, which is the mission.

And this is where it starts to get very interesting.

So if you ask an average person, what's your mission in life?

What's your per and sometimes people connect that to purpose.

Sometimes they connect it to work, business, dedication, volunteer.

It could be all kinds of things.

Usually it connects to it connects to the work that you get to do in the world that contributes in some way.

So you bring in a certain type of an aspect of yourself and the work that you get to do and you create something.

So let's say, for example, you're an artist.

You create something that contributes something to the world.

You might not even think of it as contribution, but let's say you did an amazing painting or you wrote amazing music.

It adds something to somebody's life.

Imagine somebody looking at that.

For example, my kids draw, go to a YouTube channel and they draw something.

They copy it and eventually they learn and then they get into it.

Now they're becoming they're getting inspired to become artists.

Or they listen to music, they love the music, they go play it on the piano.

You're contributing without because you're bringing an aspect of yourself and your dedication into it.

For example, for me, teaching has been a passion.

Coaching has been a passion.

So I might not even be there a video of mine or a workshop of mine, somebody's watching it, or a training, somebody's watching it, it changes an aspect of their life.

That's my dedication.

Now, what does that mean?

My mission is to help people, and this is my biggest mission.

My mission is to help people understand themselves more than anything else.

And that's where I struggled the most—understanding myself and my mind, my body, how I reacted to everything.

If I had that awareness early on in my life, I would have done things very, very differently.

I can't go back in time.

I can learn, keep learning more about myself, but I would imagine that somebody watches my video and they're a leader in a community, or they go through a workshop or my coaching program.

Now they're running their family very differently.

They're interacting with their kids differently.

They're interacting with their team differently.

They're interacting with their community differently.

To me, that means a lot.

That even if I never see the results of that person, I know that they're going to—they're going to do things much better than I would have done.

To me, that's a dedication.

I—it's a mission behind it.

Why does it mean?

Because I suffer through that.

I don't need other people to suffer through it.

If I can help a couple other people, even if that's one person, I'm happy.

And that's actually how my mission started.

If I can help one person, I just need to know, then I help the next person, the next.

At this point, thousands of people I've supported, but there is a mission behind it.

Of course, this is also giving me a lifestyle, and I think it's smart to connect your business with the thing that you care about.

What else would I be interested in?

Like, for example, I did this as a side.

I spent one hour on it versus twelve hours on it.

What if I spend another ten hours going and working on some problem that I don't care about?

Why would I want to do that?

So I've dedicated my time to building a business where I get paid to do the thing that I'm interested in, which is learning about myself and other people and helping them understand themselves more so they can show up as better leaders.

That's my mission in their life, in their family, in their community, and with the people around them.

Last one, faith.

Faith is the thing that really messes with people's mind because a lot of times we connect faith with religion.

But if you actually look at the origin of faith, think about the before religions existed, before there was a structured religion.

Think of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism has argued to not be a religion or Hinduism, whatever it might be.

These are very structured systems.

But think about the first few people who ever had faith.

What did that mean?

Here's what you will find.

If you go take it down to the basics, you will find that somebody a long, long time ago sat in solitude or they were in an experience, human experience, and they realized something.

They communicated to something deeper than the surface.

They realized something deeper.

They had an inspiration.

They had a revelation, whatever that might be.

And then they spoke that out loud, or they wrote it out loud, or wrote it on a paper, on a parchment, whatever.

And then somebody took that from them, be like, "Oh."

And then they realized they could teach that to others.

And then guess what happened?

That became the religion.

That became codified.

For example, Buddha's Eightfold Path.

Now you can study Buddha's Eightfold Path all your life.

You might never understand, be at his level of enlightenment because it [was] something he realized through his own awareness, through his own faith.

Same thing with Jesus.

Like if you look at, like, his Sermon on the Mount can be turned into a codified system of here's how to live your life.

But that was Jesus's faith, in a sense.

He taught it to other people and then that eventually turned into a religion, a codified system.

But I believe every person has that deeper faith themselves.

Now they can be guided by a specific cultural religion that they're a part of.

But I think faith is much more personal than most people think.

Now here's how I separated from religion.

So religion is the thing where community comes in.

You speak other people's language of that religion.

So when you're in a Christian community, for example, you can talk about Jesus.

You can talk about how we can relate to each other, how we speak the language of our faith.

And if you can go to the mass, for example, and you can you can be there on Sunday.

But when you're alone in your own space, that's where your real faith shows up.

The rest of it is just adapting to that culture, to that religion.

And your faith is connected to how you create meaning.

This is why most religions everything about religion is about why.

Why did God create you?

Why are you here?

Where are you going?

What is the purpose of life?

Everything about religions are that.

That's your internal meaning-making machine.

So a huge part of your life is to figure out what that is.

Now you can do this as a secular person.

You don't let's say you're not part of a religion.

You can sit down and figure out, like, what are the things that are deeply meaningful to me?

For example, as a scientist, somebody who has dedicated his life to astronomy could say that, you know what, the most meaningful thing for me is to figure out why we're here and how does the cosmos work and pass on that knowledge to my fellow beings.

To me, that is a form of dedication, a form of understanding the world, a form of understanding himself, and a form of understanding the universe around us.

And when you study that, eventually you will end up in a place where you'll be like, you know what, this is deeply meaningful to me.

So that could be God.

That could be your work, your dedication.

That could be the thing that you're deeply interested in.

That could be the thing that you're contributing in.

That's why whenever I talk about faith, I connect it to purpose.

That if you don't have a sense of purpose and you're not figuring that out and it could connect to your work, and it couldn't.

For some people, it does connect to their work.

For some people, it doesn't.

You need to spend a part of your time figuring that out.

Again, I'm not ascribing to a specific religion, but you need to have enough time to figure out what your life is going to be about.

What is it going to be dedicated to?

What are going to be the deeper meanings behind it?

That could be related to who you are.

And this is why self connects to faith a lot of times.

This is why your community connects to your faith.

This is why yourself connects to community.

That's why it connects to your body.

That's why it connects to your mission.

Sometimes all these areas are deeply interconnected.

So if you can just focus your time on self, relationships, mission, and faith, if you could just figure out these four areas, not a hundred areas, four areas where you can sit there and be like, you know what, I'm going to spend the next thousand weeks or 2,000 weeks if you want to count your sleep time on these four areas.

Then your mind is going to come together.

And I'm going to give you one last slide, one last reminder.

I look at this as a cheat code to understanding your mind.

Your mind works in these three areas.

Your mind will take you to the past, to the future, and allow you to be in the present.

If you can figure out these four areas of self, relationship, mission, faith.

So you look back in your past and you say, you know what, this is the meaning that I'm assigning to where I come from.

This is the meaning I'm assigning to the emotions that I feel.

This is how I've made sense of my trauma from the past.

You figure that out.

You go to the future.

You say, "This is my vision for how I'm going to live my life. I'm going to dedicate my life to understanding myself, others, my mission, my purpose, my faith."

You figure out those two dimensions.

And now your mind gets busy.

Okay, my job now is to figure out these four areas connected to my past and future.

And guess what happens?

This is the effect of it that I've noticed.

Now I have much more my mind leaves me alone.

And now I can actually live my life.

And because my life is structured around those four areas, what happens?

I spend a little bit of time with myself.

I dedicate part of my life to my relationships.

I dedicate part of my life to my mission.

Part of my life to my faith.

That is every religion you go to, every scripture you study, every culture you study, it always ends up with those four areas.

Now, we name it different things.

We give it different strategies.

But those are the main areas.

Now, what does this mean?

That means that anything that doesn't fall into those four areas, you completely ignore it.

People sending you all kinds of things that you should feel bad about.

News, media, other people's Instagram, other people's house, lives none of that matters to you.

What matters to you is those four areas and how to get better.

And you're teaching and training your mind to get better in those areas.

And that's how your mind leaves you alone and you can live your life.

Otherwise, your mind is going to just drive you nuts.

And ultimately, it's your job to be a good steward of your mind.

Your mind is just a part of you.

If you don't give it structure to focus on areas that matter to you, it will just grab onto everything.

And we live in a world where our attention is sought after by everything from AI platforms to social media to the next thing you're going to go to, to the next advertisement, to political systems.

Everybody wants your attention.

So how do you decide where your attention should go?

If you don't have a structure for it, your mind is going to be in chaos.

It's amazing how simple your life gets.

Even if things are challenging now, once you focus, you figure out intention, you have a vision, you have your time blocked for these areas, you have your energy dedicated to these areas.

When other things come that doesn't fit into these four categories for you, your mind already sends a red flag like, "Why? Why are you paying attention? Is this important to you?"

But if you don't have that, it doesn't know how to give you a red flag.

It's like not designing a car, right, where the sensors don't know how to respond.

It's beeping and not beeping no matter what's happening.

You don't know how to pay attention to it.

It doesn't know what to pay attention to.

But if you design it right, if there's an obstacle or there's something you don't—you shouldn't go into a ditch, it's going to beep.

You're like, "Stop going there."

Or it's going to apply the emergency brake.

Nowadays, cars automatically apply brake, which is freak the hell out of me.

It's I'm going backwards and it sensed something.

I'm like, "What the hell did I just hit? I didn't hit anything."

It just figured it out.

It was an intelligent system.

It stopped it before I hit something.

And I think our mind has that intelligence, but you got to feed it what to be—like you got to give it the design of what to pay attention to.

Otherwise, it doesn't know what to do.

It just starts to pay attention to everything.

And that's why it feels like chaos internally.

What are the questions I need to ask myself?

Where do I need to build habits around?

Where are the areas that I need to tweak a little bit?

Where are the areas that I need to pay closer attention to?

We're going to go much deeper into those areas.

Not to complicate your life, to simplify a complicated being that you are.

So you're already complicated as a human being, and everybody around you is complicated, but we're trying to simplify it in a structured way so your mind can cooperate better with you.

Until my next conversation, hope you all have a great day.