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The first principle of Buddhism is that “All life is suffering.” If the Buddha were a stand-up comedian explaining this concept today, I think he’d say something along the line of, “Sh*t happens!”

Lots of people focus on problems, on the negative, on what’s not working. The simple truth is that what we focus on expands. If you focus on what’s going wrong in your life, you will get more of what’s wrong in your life. If you focus more on what’s going right in your life, you’ll get more of what’s right.

Everything is energy.

Wayne Dyer puts it bluntly. He says, “A lot of people do personal work on their shit.” These kinds of people walk down the street and see a lump of it. What do they do? Not only do they step in it, but also have to kick it around, stick their noses in face in it, smell it, be in it.

Why not notice it and just walk around it, or go get a shovel and try to clean it up as best as you can? Do you have to clean up every piece of crap in your life in order to be happy?

So many people say, “Once I handle this challenge or problem, then I’m going to be happy.”

Here’s a big hint, folks: If you think like that, you’re never going to be happy. If your relationship is going great, there’ll be some issues in your business. Maybe someone’s suing you. Then that gets resolved and your relationship gets messed up. Or someone calls and says your house is burning down. Or your kid gets arrested.

Reality check: Not everything has to be going well in life in order for you to be happy.

Here’s what you do to really let this lesson sink in:

1. Show Your Appreciation & Gratitude. Make a list of 10 (that’s right, TEN, at least 10) things that you are appreciative of that’s going good in your life right now. If you can’t think of 10, then you’re focusing too much on the crap. Maybe you’re not living in the kind of home you want to be living in. But if you have a roof over your head, guess what? Millions of homeless people in the coldest regions of this country don’t have that. Maybe you hate your job, but there are others who aren’t even employed. Be grateful for the little and big things that are working in your life, always with an eye on where you want to be, what you know you can improve upon.

2. Redefine Success. What does success really mean to you? Think about this. If success means, “ …when I have $1 million in my bank account,” how are you going to feel until then? If success means, “…when I find an intimate relationship that lights my fire,” what does that say about how you should feel about yourself if it’s not happening now? Remember, if you’re waiting for some “big” thing to happen in order to be happy, that’s a dog chasing its tail. No one can tell you how to define success and happiness for yourself. Yet consider small, attainable goals as big wins. “Tomorrow, I will play with my kid from 8:00 to 8:30 and nothing will stop me.” If you can’t find happiness in the little things…

3. Action Items. Now create a list of three actions for today or tomorrow. In fact, stretch yourself to seven if you can (the maximum number we can reasonably focus on without scattering our energy). Remember: small, attainable goals and maybe mix a couple “big ticket” goals. Get on that coaching call. Sign up for that workshop. Make goal attainment a daily commitment.

By showing gratitude, redefining success and creating small, attainable goals for yourself, you are setting yourself up to make more money. You are going to be 5, 10 and 100 times as successful. Why?

This gives you confidence and strength of spirit. You know that when you say you will do something, it will be done. You will execute what is in front of you, and you won’t let shit stand in your way. But most of all, you can’t appreciate the big stuff that comes with success later if you can’t be grateful for the small stuff now.

Communicate how much you appreciate the people in your life who add love, humor, knowledge, wisdom, value… anything that makes your life great right now. Communicate this to the universe, whatever that means for you. Focus your energy on what’s good and what’s right.

 
To Your Success,

If you’re anything like me, your desk looks like what you’d imagine a newspaper editor’s desk looks like. You can even see it on the faces of people who come into your office like, “Oh my God! How do you know where anything is? How do you get stuff done!?”

I used to have this fight within myself. I’m sure a lot of you can relate. In my mind I want to start every day jumping on the phone attending to every voicemail, every email in my inbox, and start hammering away until it’s all dealt with. It was a habit for me for a long time.

Does that kind of stuff bother me? Does it make me feel overwhelmed? It used to, but not anymore Why? I focus my attention on what I need to do.

For some people, the clutter of papers and folders and memos and endless, minute tasks makes them feel claustrophobic, maybe even a bit panicky, like there’s just not enough time to go through it all and get anything done. The same goes for those dozens if not hundreds of emails to go through!

If this kind of thing stops you in your tracks, that just means you get stopped too easily. If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because you feel overwhelmed; it’s not because you are overwhelmed.

The overwhelmed feeling comes from your mind, not your work. It’s not the papers. It’s not the emails. It’s not the snail mail. It’s not the memos. It’s nothing outside of you. It’s inside of you.

What can you do to reduce the clutter, both outside and inside your own head? How do you take the weight off?

1. Focus on the present/guided meditation. Focus on what’s in front of you right now and stop thinking about all the other stuff you have to do. “I still have to get through all this and do all this. I have to clean up all of this, and I have so much to do. Oh my gosh!” I’d feel overwhelmed too if I thought like that! It’s normal for people to think like that. Handle one thing at a time and stop worrying about what’s coming next.

If it helps and if time permits, take yourself through a quick guided meditation if the overwhelm is too… well, overwhelming. There’s this amazing, free resource we all have access to called YouTube! In the search bar at the top, type in something along the lines of ‘guided meditation anxiety’ and dozens will pop up. Guided meditations are particularly effective because it takes you away from your thoughts, and the visualizations of the person guiding you through the meditation helps calm anxiety. Most of these meditations are anywhere from 5-30 minutes long, but if you stop worrying about answering every email immediately or making sure every single piece of paper is in its proper place, you’ll find that you do have time to calm yourself in stressful moments. Have a pair of headphones handy and don’t feel self-conscious about attending to your mental health.

2. Put blocks of your time in place. First, start with what I call your big rocks calendar. You simply take your monthly calendar and write down your priorities. If that means working out X amount of times per week, great. If that means taking smalls steps within larger projects, fantastic. Important meetings … certainly. This is the stuff you sweat, the stuff that’s most important to you, not those hundreds of tiny things we all have to do, like going through the mail or answering email. That stuff … that’s your small rocks schedule. Take a morning block for emails and all that other crap you have to do. Then take a late afternoon block for the stuff that really matters. If you allow for mail, email and all that other stuff to dominate your day, I guarantee you’re not effective or productive, and you certainly won’t get rich. People who are effective block their time.

Instead of watching three hours of television, take an hour or an hour and a half in the evening to answer the emails that came in during the afternoon. Make sure you’re not doing emails past 10:00 p.m.

Don’t get stopped. Not everything has to look and be perfect for you to succeed. Throw all the stuff in a basket beside your desk and move on. Keep going. Do what you need to do.

Most importantly, regardless of the time of day, put your attention on what you’re doing right this moment. Take your attention off what you still have to do that is driving you crazy and making you feel overwhelmed. You become less productive, less energetically effective, and less successful. Learn to stay present with what’s going on right in front of you, right now.

For Your Freedom,

In my 20’s, while struggling to make a success out of myself without much to show for it, a friend of mine once told me, “You know Harv, you have a way of making things much harder on yourself than you really have to.”

He wasn’t anywhere near rich or even successful, at least not to me. My initial reaction was, “What the frick do you know about it?” I dismissed his observation… and continued to fail.

But he wasn’t talking about how I was running my businesses. He was talking about my mindset.

See, we all get caught up in this belief that in order to get the payoff, it has to be hard. Not true!

Success is actually not difficult. It’s our beliefs that complicate things.

Think back to a time in your life where either you or someone you know had a goal and reached it. It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about: a good grade on a test; a great date; the job we thought we wanted; the parking spot right out front.

We’ve all wanted something and got it, no matter how big or small. Yes or yes? Now, what helped us get what we wanted? More than likely, it included determination, focus, confidence, passion and faith.

Now, if we can use these qualities for one specific goal and get what we want, why don’t we apply them more often and get more of the things we want in life?

From my experience, it’s because our minds create this big difference between something we perceive as easily attainable – like, say, finding a way to buy an expensive item even though you may not have a lot of money – or something that seems harder, like becoming a millionaire.

The point is, when we really want something, hell or high water won’t stop us. So when it really comes down to it, it’s not the process that prevents us from getting what we want. It’s our mindset that says, “This is going to be too hard.” It’s only as hard as we make it out to be.

Ironically, the hardest part about learning how to make millions is, first, unlearning the belief that it’s hard. It’s just as easy as anything else you’ve really wanted to learn about and have reached success with.

Second, it’s keeping a consistent routine of actions. But again, that’s not hard either. If you can maintain the routine of getting up and going to a job you really couldn’t give a frick about, you can certainly create a routine of actions that would one day produce a million-dollar result.

Every action and outcome first begins with a thought. Change your thoughts, and change your life. Whatever goal you’re trying to reach, focus on the truth that it won’t be as hard as you think. Don’t just take my word for it. Give it a try and see what kind of results you get.

 
To Your Success,

If what you’ve been looking for is where you’ve been looking, chances are you’d have already found it by now. That’s what we all start out doing: looking for opportunities in the outside world. It wasn’t until I started looking inside that I began to get clearer.

Clarity is not necessarily about knowing what you want. It’s about having clarity on what you intend.

What some people might call ‘magic’ is just your intention directed powerfully by your will. This is because you are absolutely clear on what you intend without having to think about it so much.

Clarity doesn’t come from finding anything. It comes from removing the blocks that are in your way and uncovering what is already there and completely natural to you! It doesn’t matter how talented, smart, or in tune you are. If you are still contaminated by the past—especially family history – you will have difficulty discovering your true path.

Imagine the freak out I got when I told my parents I was quitting school – when they told me my whole life that I was going to be a lawyer, doctor or accountant. They yelled things like “You’re gonna be a bum!” and “You’re never going to amount to anything!” Do you think that specific incident might have had an effect on me?

The message I got, and many of my students got from their parents was simple: if you’re not going to be a working professional, you’re going to be worthless.

One of the biggest issues that inhibit us from choosing paths in life that are natural to us is gaining the approval of others; parents, partners, even kids, teachers, role models, friends, past or present.

The idea is to reclaim your life versus their lives.

You’re here to take your place in the universe, not theirs.

EXERCISE FOR YOU:

(1) Think back on your experiences growing up. What messages did you get as to what careers were valid, appropriate, worthy, and which were not?

(2) What or whom did you model in terms of how you work? Did your parents have a “stable” job? Did one work while the other didn’t? Were there conflicts over work? Did they love their jobs or just did “what they had to do?” Was work a joy or a sacrifice?

(3) Were there any instances that directed you in how you think about work and money today? When you first started did you do it for your money and did “what you had to do,” only to find yourself doing something you loved?

Take a few moments to recall the messages about work and money that stuck with you and how your life has reflected these messages you got.

The goal here is to be aware of these messages and give yourself permission to let go of those ideas if they aren’t your way.

Like the saying says “It’s my way or the highway!” So what works for you? What do you believe as how far as how your job or work should be? Do you believe in following your heart and passion?

This is your chance to wipe your slate clean and start following your true path.

Once you do this you there’s a good chance there will be a lot waiting for you to discover. It’s true that new opportunities tend to come our way when we’re not blocking them.

 
To Your Success,