So as you begin putting the concepts and materials to work that we've been covering in this whole course one of the things that's very important that we haven't talked about yet is assessing the kind of motivation that is primarily driving you. Now there are two kinds of motivation that people usually talk about which is intrinsic motivation, doing things just because you love doing them and not for any kind of reward. And extrinsic motivation, which is doing things primarily for a reward. And whether you like them or not is sort of indifferent. My own feeling is that those two generally mix. Everybody has some level of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation that is getting them going on whatever their projects are. And depending on the part of your life that you're working on, happiness tends to be more correlated with intrinsic motivation activities, hobbies, time with your children. Work, often more associated with extrinsic motivation, things you get paid for, things that you kind of process in the ordinary way of getting a paycheck. But I'd like to talk about one other cut on motivation that I think is most intimately related to your success concept, and that is to ask a question. In terms of your situation now, and we just looked at the matrix to help you assess that, do you feel like you're more running towards your goals at this point or do you think you're more running away from your fears? The two dominant drivers in the human psyche are desire and fear. Even a snail will move forward to get food with desire but withdraw into its shell if it feels threatened and has fear. So humans have the same two principal motivations. And I think it's important for you to assess which of these and in what mixture you're currently working on your success goals with. Because if fear is an issue and sometimes when I ask this question to students they almost look startled. Because although they've been thinking that they've been moving toward the goal of, say, graduation, what they realize is they've been motivated almost as much by the fear of disappointing their families or the fear of failure if they don't graduate. And to the extent that you've got these backwards and you're motivated more from fear than you are from the desire to achieve something, the chances are that it's going to be a much more haunting sense of success, a much less satisfying sense of success. Because all you're going to do is keep your fear at bay. And you're not going to feel the fulfillment of having actually grasped something that you were pursuing. So, it's important to get this oriented in your mind. We have many fears. You can be motivated by simply a fear of being alone or a fear of being a failure or a fear of being not taken seriously or being unimportant or disrespected. When those fears are dominating your life, I think it's really important to stop and turn and face them and try to identify them and try to grapple with their causes. If you don't, it's a pretty strong chance that any efforts you make toward any kind of substantial achievement are going to be kind of two steps forward, one and a half steps back. Because you're not having taken care of the fear. The desire part doesn't have the freedom to exercise all the skills and talents that you have. And underlying all fears in my view is one really big fear that all humans face, and it's a big mystery. And essentially, it's the fear of death. And I think it's important that everyone at some point come to terms with this important fear. It is sort of fundamental to the human question. I once did a calculation and, basically, if you're lucky enough to be 90 years old and your 90 years are filled with days of full awareness you will live for 32,850 days. 32,850 days, and that's all you're going to get in this life. Now if you believe in an afterlife, then there's another plane of existence and something else will happen. But it's still the case that 90 years gives you 32,850 days. And I think it's important to understand that your time is limited and that you have to accept that as one of the constraints that you're living with. Some people come to terms with their fear of death because they lose a loved one, and they have the experience of losing them and they sort of become profoundly aware of the fact that they themselves may or will someday face this. Others come to it because they have some personal experience of their own mortality. For myself, I was on a world journey, trying to find myself after college and seeking some sort of wisdom that would allow me to figure out how to put my life back together again in the wake of my crisis with my family and the Vietnam War and my separation from their values. And I was living in a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka and I was under the tutelage of a wonderful Sri Lankan teacher. We meditated probably pretty much from 6:00 in the morning til about 9:00 at night. It was an hour of sitting meditation, half an hour of walking meditation. We only had two meals a day, breakfast and lunch, and then no more food until the next morning. And being a Westerner and not having grown up in Asia, I had a terrible time sitting in the posture that you have to sit in to meditate. And so I was in a great pain, you only got to speak for about 15 minutes a day and you spoke only to your teacher. And I was finally at my wit's end one day and I went to my teachers and I said you know I'm doing nothing in my meditation except being aware of pain. My legs are in pain, my back is in pain, my feet are in pain, and this can't be very meaningful for me to be sitting hour after hour and nothing but pain is happening as far as my mental experience. And he looked very compassionately at me in a very wise sort of way and he said I think it's time for you to take a walk in the forest. So he gave me leave to forego my meditation practice for the afternoon. And there was a great big forest outside the back of the monastery in the part of Sri Lanka where we were located. And so I just took a walk in the forest and it was a remarkable experience for me because I was simply walking along wondering why the monk had sent me back there. And then all of a sudden I noticed that the whole forest floor was covered with dead leaves, and then I noticed that there was a dead bird under a tree. And then I noticed that the soil was filled with insects and animals that were sort of basically reprocessing the forest floor from all this detris of nature into something that would give rise to new life, and it just hit me that I had been reading a book and that someone had just given me the key to translating it. And that the book was the book of life, and that the main message was that life and death were connected and had to be with one another in order for either one to be. And that hit me like a ton of bricks. I sat down under a tree, I wept. I just realized that I would die just like everything in the forest, and I just mourned the fact that, that was what lay ahead for me. But it was a very cathartic kind of pain at that point. And so I went back to my meditation, and the truth is, from there I marked that point in my life as basically a turning of the page. Up until that point I think I had been running from a certain fear of death, and after that day I understood it in a kind of visceral way. And it meant I could confront the death of my parents with a very different perspective. It meant that I see suffering in a very different way, my own and others. And so it's been a, I note it for myself, as a big turning point in my understanding of what life is, and essentially what success means. I had a student who had confronted this very differently, and her experience, she's a very religious person. She was an Orthodox Jewish woman, and as a child when she was about ten years old, she was jumping into a lake near her home, and she said that she hit her head on a rock that was not far below the surface, and she felt herself drifting underwater down toward the bottom of the lake. And, she said as she drifted, she felt a very warm, full, enormous presence, surrounding her with love, and that there was this embrace that she was conscious of. And then the next thing she remembers is she was on the shore line next to the lake, and there were people pushing on her chest and shouting that they had located her and brought her back to the side of the pond and had brought it back to life. And she said that this experience of almost dying, very personal, very intimate, had completely eliminated for her, the fear of death, because she now knew in her own experience that death was going to be something very different than she had expected and something much, much more overwhelmingly positive for her. So everything about her life had changed after that. Her concern for things like being alone, or her concern for the death of a loved one that she of course felt you know compassion and a sense of loss, but not a sense of fear, and I think that that fundamentally changes how you approach the success that you want to achieve in your life. So I guess I'd need to ask you where you stand with this big fear, and if you have confronted it, then you've definitely overcome a major challenge that your life will hold for you. If you're uncertain about it, then I think it might be something that you want to look at and try to understand more deeply. Don't be afraid of the fear of death. It's something that is a stage in your maturity, a stage in your growth, and a stage in your ability to help others. So once you transition from running away from your fears, then you have the opportunity to run with all of your energy toward the future and toward the goals that you want to achieve, and I just have a quick exercise that I think might help you imagine that. We call it the lottery exercise. It's inspired by a woman named Cynthia Stafford that I read about in my studies on success. Cynthia Stafford was an office worker or still is, she's alive still. And she always played the lottery, and she reported that over and over and over she would visualize this winning lottery ticket that she imagines she was holding, and she had this amazingly vivid picture in her head of the dress she was going to wear, the ticket, and the number on it and everything about this situation when she won the lottery. Then she played this number of course over and over, and then lo and behold it's a California lottery. She won. And she won on a day when she was wearing the very dress that she had imagined herself wearing. And she ascribed it to a kind of miracle mind power that she just imagined that her mind had created this winning lottery ticket. Now I think Cynthia's story's important, because that's the kind of magical thinking, that actually doesn't work. Because if you imagine that there are 8 or 10 million people playing the lottery, at least several thousand of them are imagining that they have the winning ticket, and the mere imagination of something is not likely to you know affect the lottery machine that's punching out the tickets. But what I admire about Cynthia Stafford is she had this experience, it was a little spooky I think for her, but rather turn it into some sort of motivational speaker career where she went around trying to convince people that magic is what makes you win a lottery, she actually looked inside, found what she was very passionate about, took care for family first of course, setup trust fund or kids were going to college and get some traveling, but after that she became very passionately involved in theater. She helped found some community theater projects in Los Angeles. She partnered with David Giffin, a famous theater person out there, to start a program for disabled people and elderly people to come to the theater on weekends when they were free. And she even started a television and movie production company where she could make films and tell stories. So here's a person who won the lottery, but turned it into her life's dreams. And she partnered with people that helped her become successful. So here's your challenge Imagine you've won the lottery. Maybe you weren't wearing the same colored dress or the same colored suit that you imagined, but you won the lottery, anyway. Now, what would you do with that? Let's assume you would take care of your family. Let's assume you would travel til your heart's content, but let's also assume that you now have the problem of figuring out what to do with all this opportunity. And I think if you'll take a minute and dream a little and write down what would you actually do where money not a problem for you, what you'll find is that you'll get some directional signals. Maybe you would want to work on education. Maybe you would want to work in the media. Maybe you would want to provide education opportunities for people in your community or work in developing country or get involved with politics. But if money were not the option, what would you do? And I think that begins to sketch out the kinds of goals that are good goals that will be inspiring goals to run toward. So I'm going to give you a final exercise that's part of this sequence and I want you to take it very seriously, and its going to have several steps. Step one, I want you to write down four or five goals that you currently have for your life to be. Short-term goal, long term goal, relationship goal, career goal. But any kind of goal you want, it's up to you. But write down four or five of them and pause this video while you do that, and come back, and I'll have your next instruction. So having written down the four or five goals, here's your next problem. I want you to circle the one that is the one that you have to achieve before you can achieve the others. So, which of those goals is essentially the precondition for you to achieve the others? If you worked out a goal that was become a college teacher or write college textbooks, or something. Getting a graduate degree, a PhD would be a first goal that you have to achieve before you can achieve any of the others. Maybe you were down something about a family and children. Finding a life partner would be a goal that you have to achieve before you can achieve any of those other goals. So note the goal that you have to achieve before you can achieve the others and then put a circle around it, and then the final set of this is really simple. At the bottom half of the page where you've written your goals, write down two things that you can do this week to take steps toward advancing on that goal you put a circle around. Two things, two concrete actions you can take today, tomorrow, Friday that would advance you toward that goal that you put a circle around. That is the precondition for being successful on any of the other goals. I think that's the kind of commitment that you need to make. It's the humility that you need to have in order to get your life going in the direction that your own theory of success suggest that it should go. I have a home in summer place kind of down in Virginia that I first encountered as a child and it's a place, cabin, it has four bedrooms and an outhouse. No bathroom and it's on a river pass, and they're lots, and lots of stones in front of it with a rushing river that's going by. And as I was a kid, because my father bought it early in my life and then I've been going back ever since. As a kid, I had a game and I would try to see how far down the river I could get on these stones that littered the river pass without getting my feet wet and see how many different ways you could do it and the river changed every time and it went up and down with the weather. So these life goals are like the stones in the river, you have to take action to get to the next step. And then once you're there, you survey the situation and then decide what's the next best jump you can make to keep your feet from getting to at and make progress to the next step. And then you get to the next step and then survey the situation again, and take action on the next option that you see is a best option. So, this is very concrete. I think one of the things we're trying to do here is not just give you a theory of success, but give you some tools and some motivation to take action toward that theory and making it a reality.
