Transcription
Hi, it's Robin Sharma, the author of "The Leader Who Had No Title." Welcome to my hotel room here in New York City. Uh, this video, and I really hope I get it right, because I think it's an important one. Uh, it's not about tactics. It's not so much about productivity today. Uh, it's not so much about building a great company. It's not so much about a lot of the things that most of us, as business people, and, um, those aspiring to best-in-class performance, usually think about. It, I think, is a little deeper. Um, so hopefully, it'll be of service to you, and hopefully, it'll be extraordinarily valuable to you as you reach your Mount Everest and go out there and do something great with your life and change the world in the process.
So, uh, before I get into what I really want to talk about, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my own story, which I usually don't do. I grew up in a, a town of about 2,000 people. Um, come from very, very humble beginnings. I sure didn't have a silver spoon in my mouth. Uh, immigrant parents who I absolutely adore and who have influenced me tremendously. And, um, you know, this video is going to be very valuable to you, but just press the pause for a second here, or maybe metaphorically speaking. But if your parents are still with you, make some time today to express some gratitude and thanks. I can't tell you, as I travel around the world, how many people come up to me, and these are heavy hitters, elite performers, some of the best CEOs and business builders, uh, and achievers in the world, and they say their number one regret is they didn't tell their family, or their mom, or their dad, how much they appreciated them before it was until it was too late.
So, um, long story short, I became a lawyer. And I became a lawyer for all the wrong reasons. I became a lawyer because I wanted to fit into society. I became a lawyer because the world around me said, "If you become a lawyer, Robin, you will be successful, happy, and you will wake up every day with a, a sparkle in your eye." So I really pushed myself, and I really achieved some, um, some great things in my, in my law career. I got a, a law degree and a master's of law degree. I became a clerk for the Court of Appeal, appeal, and I became very, very successful as a lawyer. The only challenge was, I woke up every morning, and I looked in the mirror, and I didn't like the person who was looking back at me. I was like a hollow man. I was empty. There was no passion, there was no joy, no spark. I wasn't doing my sweet spot. And I think we all have a sweet spot, and if you haven't found your sweet spot, this video is going to help, as well as the next few videos I'll be sending you.
And so here's what happened. I basically pressed the pause button in my life and I started to do some very deep thinking. Most of us, we live out in the world, and we're so busy living in the world and buying into the world's beliefs, we never really think about our own beliefs. We buy into a vision of success that society, the media, the people around us sell us, but we really don't take the time to think about our own version of success. It might not be lots of money. It might not be the Ferrari. It might not be the big house. It might not be social status. It might be teaching kids Spanish. It might be being a ski instructor. It might be being a chef. And the worst, I think, one of the greatest, greatest crimes of humanity is getting to the last day of your last, uh, last hour of your last day and realizing you lived society's life, or someone else's life, your mom's life, your neighbor's life, but you didn't have the wisdom, the guts, the courage, the bravery to live your own life.
And so I started making some profound changes. I started studying, you know, the best of the best, getting into the mindsets of the billionaires and the people who changed the world, the Ghandis, the Mandelas. I started reading great autobiographies. I started spending time with people whose lives I wanted to be living, because as you start to spend time with people who are at the next level that you want to be at, whether it's physically, financially, intellectually, spiritually, their stardust rubs off on you. And it's an invisible, incremental process, but you begin to transform by the people around you, by the books you read, by the, the conferences that you attend, by the environments that you expose your mind to. That's where the transformation begins.
And so I wrote a little book. The book, uh, you may know it, it's "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari," sharing what I learned, sharing how I did my own personal transformation, sharing how I rewired my own thinking. And, um, that book led to other books, and it led to me speaking at different places around the world, working with many of the Fortune 500, whether it's Starbucks, General Electric, Nike, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.
And so really, what I want to focus on, and I guess what I want to say to you is, just because you're watching me here, please don't think I'm any different from you. Going to repeat that again, because I think it's so important. You know, just because you're watching me, or maybe you've read my books, or been to one of my events, or you watched me on YouTube, that doesn't mean I'm any different from you. I'm just doing different things. I am no smarter than you. I don't have talents that you don't have. I just have surrounded myself with people and ideas and resources that have allowed me to achieve the things that I've achieved.
And so what I want to do right now is, is offer you a little story. And it's not my story. It's a story I share at a lot of my events. And one Sunday night, there was a father, and the father had a little boy. The little boy wanted to play with his father. And the father didn't have any time. The father was too busy being an adult. You know, the old idea, adults are nothing more than deteriorated children. And so this father was reading this newspaper, and the little boy said, "Dad, let's play. Let's have some fun." And the father was too busy reading the newspaper. And the little boy, "Dad, let's play. Come on, let's get into it." And the dad said, "No, I'm reading the newspaper." And then all of a sudden, to get his son off his back, the father noticed there was a picture of the globe in the newspaper. The father got an idea. The father ripped out the globe and tore it into many tiny pieces and gave it to the little boy and said, "Here, son, go put this back together." Thinking it would take it time, quite a while to do it. But children come to us more highly evolved than adults to teach us the lessons we need to learn. And after only a minute, the little boy came back, and the globe was perfectly back together. And my friend, the father couldn't believe it. He said, "Son, how did you do that?" And the little boy looked up at his dad and he said, "Dad, on the other side of the globe, there was a picture of a person. And Dad, once I got the person together, the world was okay."
And you might say that's a cute story. But let's go to the great Nelson Mandela. I talked to someone who knows him very well, and they said before Nelson Mandela went into prison, he was an angry man. He came out 27 years later, because of his inner work, his study, his reading, his reflection, he came out as Nelson Mandela. And what I'm suggesting to you is, your outer life is a mirror of your inner life. And that is, if you want financial success, if you want your career to be, you know, best in the world, you want a better family life, you want extreme achievement, you want to use your life to change the world, it all begins within.
It's that great George Bernard Shaw quote, and it's, I hope I get it right. He wrote, "The reason a man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in adapting the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." The world may have caused you to adapt yourself, your dreams, your values, who you are, to it. It's like in "The Matrix." The world will pull a veil over your eyes. And what I want to remind you, with deep respect, in this video, is be unreasonable. Don't reverse-hypnotize yourself from any bending you have done to fit into the world, and cause the world to fit into your vision. Cause your life to reflect your values. That is one of the greatest traps. We, we get hypnotized by the world. You know, you were born, I say in one of my books, you're born into genius. But have you resigned yourself to mediocrity? From the moment you were born, you were born with great talents. You can do great things. You have great gifts. You can, you can start that business. You can do that film. You can find that perfect health. You can find that, that relationship that you're looking for. It's not because it's not out there. It's not because you can't have all of those things that you want, those childhood dreams that are still in your heart, that you're longing at a deep level to achieve. It's because you have perhaps bought into the world. You know, you've bent yourself to the world. You've listened to the messaging you've received since you were a little kid. I mean, what do our well-intentioned parents, and what does the media tell us, and what do our peers tell us? What do our teachers tell us? They say, "Be average. Bend yourself to the world. Fit in. Dress like everyone else. Drive the same car where everyone else is driving. Watch the same TV shows. Read the same books." And you've got to be the unreasonable person. You've got to take yourself back. You've got to ask yourself, "What are my dreams? What are my longings? What are my values? Who am I?" And then, this video is a gentle, respectful reminder: Take your power back. Go out there. Take your power back.
So you're starting today, make some new choices. You're only one choice away from your best life. Will you make it? And so I want to just ask you, have you resigned yourself to mediocrity, or have you owned your genius and your talents? And just a gentle reminder again, I'm no different from you. I just learned different things. I just read different books. I just surrounded myself with the best people, and their stardust and thinking rubbed off on me. And each day, incrementally, I started building a better life. And if you each day build a better life, then over a short period of time, you create your own transformation.
And so what I want to leave you with here is, you know, really a few tactics that will help you reverse-hypnotize your mindset, that will help you sort of not bend yourself to the world anymore, but bend the world to you. The world belongs to you, the unreasonable person. And I want you to start thinking again, again, how much of an impact you can have when you become happier, when you do your dreams, when you wake up every morning, you say, "You know what? I'm living a great life." And that does not mean every day is going to be perfect, but you are so much closer than you think to creating a life that you adore.
So some tactics for you. Number one, you know, remember the power of words. Mandela, for example, changed the world or influenced millions through nothing more than his words. Ghandi used words. Uh, you know, the great business people, Steve Jobs is, I think, a great example at his conferences and the way he talked. I mean, people talked about his, you know, uh, anti-reality feel, to paraphrase it, right? Like he basically, he would talk about the vision before the vision was there, and then he bent the world to his vision. That is the genius of Steve Jobs. And so words are powerful. Get your words right. Stop saying, "I can't." Start saying, "I can." You know, stop saying, "This would never work." Stop saying, "I have a problem." Those are the, that's the language of victims. You know, that when I work with the billionaires, when I work with people at my events, on my online courses, there's always the power of words, not only the words you speak, but the words you think. You're deep, I can't, can't get into it all right now. I want to keep this video relatively short, but your belief system, which drives your behavior, is nothing more than a function of the words you've inputted into your mind, consciously and subconsciously. And so when you start speaking new words, reading new words, talking new words, being around people who are using different words, reading books that are not negative, but about possibility, your beliefs slowly start to change. So get your words right.
Secondly, I talked about this in this video. Get your associations to world-class. Go. I'm here in New York, not to speak, like usual. I'm here at a conference. This year alone, I've gone to, I will go to five conferences. I invest in my education. I invest in my self-development. I spend more money than you could imagine learning insights, reverse-engineering my thinking, figuring out how to build an even better business, figuring out how to be more productive, figuring out how to be even more service to you, to leverage the internet, to leverage possibility. You know, the ordinary people, what they do is they worry about cost. The billionaires, the best of the best, the ultra-successful, they think about, they ask themselves, "What's the value if I go to this conference?" So, what I'm suggesting to you, tactic number two, go to the conferences, go to the events, go to the networking associations. Find the best people in the world who do what you do, and who are living as you wish to live, and go there. And please don't say, "Well, I can't do it." People say, "Oh, I can't afford it." Find a way to get there. I mean, until your mission is an obsession, nothing will change in your life. And your life is just too valuable for you not to change it, for you not to be best in the world, for you not to express your talents.
And then the final thing is a simple tactic. I call it the Daily Five, Nightly Three. Every morning, wake up and ask yourself, "What five little things must I achieve today for this to be a valuable day?" It's as simple as that. And do those five things before you sleep. And at the end of 12 weeks, 12 months from this video, you're watching me here in New York today, that will be 1,850 little wins. Your life cannot help but be at a whole new level 12 months from now. You do it 30 days from now, work it out. 30 times five, 150 little acts of greatness. That's how you build transformation. And related to that, not only the Daily Five tactic, I teach my clients the Nightly Three. Every night before you go to sleep, no matter how rough your day has been at the office or at home, ask yourself, "What are three little wins that I could celebrate in my journal?" And that's really powerful because when you start shifting your focus from what didn't work in your day to what did work in your day, through this little tactic, the Nightly Three, you literally train your brain to start focusing on what's working. And you start to feel like you're winning every day. And that releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which makes you feel strong. You are watching this video because you want to feel stronger. You want to have that faith, because you know you want to build faith in yourself and your dreams when no one else sees the value of your dreams.
These are some tactics. The Daily Five, the Nightly Three. That's a lot of information. I hope it's been valuable to you. And I want to just leave you with this one idea: Your life matters. Have you resigned yourself to thinking you're average? The people who are doing great things are different from you. And if you are thinking that way, please start to reverse-hypnotize your thinking. You were born into genius. Your life matters. Your life is too, your life is too important for you to allow yourself to play small with it. I hope I've been of service to you. I'll talk to you very soon. Take great care. Bye-bye.