You Are One Decision Away From a Different Life
In a Nutshell
One decision can redirect your entire life trajectory, as a single committed choice creates new momentum and destiny. Real change requires cutting off all other options, taking immediate action despite pain or circumstances, and assigning empowering meaning to events rather than feeling victimized. The speaker transformed from a broke, evicted janitor to earning over a million dollars within a year by making one radical decision, proving that results follow decisive action rather than waiting for perfect conditions.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
If you want to see why your life is where it is right now today, all you got to do is go back 5, 10, 15 years. If you would have made a different decision, you would have gone in a different direction with a different momentum. The same thing that happened to two different people. One person gets rich, other person stays poor. How come? The decisions you make about what things mean, and the decisions you make about what to do, are the most important things of your life because they determine where you are.
What changed my life? Enough pain. Not everybody hits bottom. Thank God I did. I was working as a janitor in the middle of night doing two different jobs cleaning out banks in the middle of night. Then I get up and go to school on three or four hours sleep. I was burning. I hit bottom one day. I remember it vividly. I was driving home in my 260 Datsun Z car. I ran out of gas. I had no money left. So I locked the car up. I prayed it didn't get towed. And then I walked a couple miles home to my little 400 square foot bachelor apartment. And there's a note typed and stapled to my front door. And I lit a candle because I had not paid my electric bill. True story. So I'm reading my eviction notice by candlelight. And something in me started to just explode. So I thought, what am I going to do to change?
I'm going to go on a run. I ran as hard as I could run till my lungs were going to burst. And I pushed myself even more. I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT I was doing. I know now. I was doing a radical change in my what? Which put me in a much more powerful what? How many ideas do you need to massively positively change your life forever? How many? One that you what? Not just believe, but one that you use. It's not what happens, it's what you do that makes the difference. Simple idea, but some of the most masterful ideas I think are the simplest.
You've got to now make a decision. You got to decide, you've got to commit, and you've got to resolve so that that energy you've started moving in a direction comes into a some kind of precision, some kind of real impact. Otherwise, eventually even your passion will wear out. And you got to then make sure you take action on those decisions. It's not what happens, it's what you do that makes the difference in the quality of life.
I was like, I have to change my life. I can't spend another day like this, another hour like this. How many of you have ever been IN A RELATIONSHIP WAY TOO LONG and you knew it? Who's done this? Until one day you said, "Not another day, not another hour, not another moment." And you changed. Who knows what I'm talking about? How many of you can think of a decision you made in the past that was a very difficult decision, but you made it and because you made it, you are where you are today.
Sometimes you're heading this direction like this and you make a little 10° shift. See that? Little tiny shift between my fingers? But if you take that 10° shift and you follow it out a week from now, a month from now, 6 months from now, a year from now, you're in a totally different destination. You have a different destiny because you made a tiny change.
Doesn't life happen? Doesn't it happen in ways that sometimes does not seem to support you? And if you hold it as being true that life isn't supporting you and that something happened to you, then you get so caught up in the happening and you'll forget to go do something. In the end, the only way life gets changed is by what we do, not by what happened to it. So, the question is not is it going to happen? That's not the question, is it? What's the question? When? When is it going to happen? Or maybe better yet, what are you going to do when it happens? Cuz it's going to happen inevitably. If you're in life and you're alive and you're moving, it's going to happen. Life is going to challenge you. Life is going to come up and it's going to rain on your parade. It will happen.
See, two people can have the same experiences in life, but they will lives turn out very differently because of what they decided means and what they decide to do. You don't like how things are, change it. You don't like your job, change it. You don't like the way you feel, change it. You don't like your relationship, change you. That'll change you or change it. You don't like what's happening to your kids, change it. And the first step to changing is you must make an absolute real what? Decision. Because all actions are fathered by a decision.
Let's say that you were born a square. You had square values. Your whole life was square. So, after a while, you might get a little dissatisfied with being a square. You find yourself saying, "You know what? There's more to life than being a square. There's got to be." One day, something extraordinary happens. You meet a circle. You're round. You flow with life. Until we get bored. And then you're like, "I'm round and I'm still not happy." See, they're all the same dimension. They're all two-dimensional, aren't they? What we want to really do is change the dimension, which we call transformation. What are you now? Cube. If you just added dimension, if you didn't try to keep changing your appearance, you weren't changing these things, but you just transformed. You deepened. You richened. You experience more of your true nature. But you know what also is beautiful? It is a square as well. Could you have a cube if you'd not been a square? Decision is the father of all action, action is what produces our results. So, decisions are your ultimate power, and most of us don't make decisions very often cuz we've got weak decision-making muscles. Most people have a hard time deciding what to have from their dinner plate tonight, much less make a life change.
But decision has power. And the word decision, decision is like incision, it means to cut off from. When you make a decision, you cut off any possibility except this thing you've committed to. And when there's no other possibility, it's amazing how we show up.
I know I was feeling sorry for myself and angry and sad all at once and lonely. Felt like there was no god. It was an intense intense time. And when I got back to that part of the beach where I left my journal, I stood there. I drew a line down the page on the one side wrote everything I didn't want in my life, which is basically my whole life. And then on the other side, everything I was going to change. I didn't want to feel sorry for myself anymore. I didn't want to feel disconnected like there's no god. And so sure enough, I wrote all that I wanted, which is the direct opposite I've been living. Now, I didn't know how to change it. I just knew now it's happening. Now, watch what just happened. Saul the Paul. From I'm too young, I don't have the education, I don't have the money, I don't have the time to use this power, use this energy. I ain't got only once. I got a PhD in results. I'm going to get results. I found money for anything I've committed to cuz I find a way to add value. I have I get the time for anything I'm committed to because I have all the time there is. And my caring is my power. It was such a transformation I cannot describe it to you verbally. I can only tell you the results. And six 30 days I lost 30 lbs. In six weeks I lost all 38 lbs. Relatively effortlessly cuz I wasn't hanging on to all the tension in my body and upset. I wasn't overeating. I didn't have any desire for it.
I've got a friend. His name is Mitchell. And I also know him as W. Mitchell. Some of you I know have heard of him. And he had a motorcycle accident. The gas cap popped off. The fuel spread all over and sure enough from the energy of the slicking the of the tires trying to stop, boom, heat ignition. Now, that's what you call happening. Now, the question is what do you do with it? Well, what do most people do with it? Well, I don't know what most do. I know what some do. I know some want to check out. I asked him, I said, "How come you have such a great attitude? How come your life is so great?" He said, "Cuz I guess I never figured out how how it was." He learned how to direct his communication to his nervous system in such a way that it was truly congruently an advantage. And a lot of people will sit there and moan, you know, if they did survive, sit there and complain about how it happened to them. You know what his attitude was? There must be an opportunity out of this somewhere.
And then I went from barely surviving financially, making $38,000 a year, in the next 12 months I made over a million dollars. And I'm not telling you that to impress you, I'm telling you cuz it blew my mind. Cuz I knew I could be better psychologically or emotionally, but financially, too? Everything in my life changed. Instead of there's no God, I began to realize it's all God. But I still have to make the right choices. I still have to do my part.
To be able to save experience, one person decides this means my life is over, the other person says God is challenging me at the ultimate level, time to go to the level. But the only way it's going to change is if you change. And the only way it's going to get better is if you get better and then you share that with somebody else. And I want to challenge you to do that. I want to challenge you to become more than you are, even now. I want to challenge you more than just believe here and just talk about it. I want to challenge you to do something with what you can use in your lives. An extra moment with somebody could change their life as well as yours. And I hope you'll do that. I want you to make your life a masterpiece. And all of us start with something. Most of this room, you know, truthfully, have extraordinary lives by anybody's standards on the planet. We just want more, which is growth, which is what we were made for was to grow. It's like, you know, you look at the caterpillar. The caterpillar, when he starts wrapping himself up inside this thing we call a cocoon, which has another set of metaphors for some people in the culture today. When he's wrapped himself in a cocoon, he thinks it's death, but what it does is it transforms him into something that's even more free. So, some people do that in unique ways, maybe. I don't know. All I know is that this man, if he has a purpose, is it's to inspire people all over the world, and that's what he does.
Everything changed. My energy, my vitality, my health, my body, my finances, my relationships, and it changed so fast it was mind-boggling. Now, none of you are messed up level I was. You're already in a great place. So, imagine from today what you could graduate to by eliminating these beliefs that have been stopping you. It will unleash you. What else are you going to be doing on a Saturday evening? Watching TV and wondering in that? Why not try to do something that was beyond your past experience? Don't just be a talker. Be a walker. Change your beliefs, change your mental syntax, and change your physiology, and anything's possible.
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