I have been fascinated by cults. The idea that one man knows all of the answers is appealing to me. Our world is a mess. Old paradigms are breaking down, creating space for new visions. We can let corporations fill those voids, or people can take action. In the early seventies, it was a similar situation. Hundreds of thousands of young people rejected mainstream culture and formed communities to try to create a world they would want to live in. Whether they could sustain themselves or had flawed aspects is not important. The groups’ radical idealism and actions to find a better way of living and a deeper understanding of what it means to be human transformed everyone who participated, including communal hippies like Steve Jobs and Stewart Brand.
For me, a cult has a charismatic leader who is the point of focus and from whom all relevant ideas, decisions, and rules generate. A community by its nature requires contributions from multiple people and is about strong relationships and a type of egalitarianism. The cult/cult leader mentality (including the cult of personality) feels archaic to me now. But community is everything, and it is stillvvery much alive.
Gurus are a funny thing. Any relationship with a teacher should be temporary, as we are each responsible for our own evolution. Seemingly recognizing this, Tony Robbins doesn’t want to be anyone’s guru, in fact, his whole approach is to demolish the “guru game.” His insight is that deep down we all tend to want someone to tell us what to do — the “sheep and shepherd” approach. But rather than waiting for someone else to save us, waiting for some Mr. Fix-it, something divine, to put things right, to decide for us, to lay out destiny, but each individual has to take total responsibility for his or her own life. And with total responsibility comes total freedom.
However, guru means more than a spiritual guide. It can be simply an influencer or teacher.
gu·ru/ˈɡo͝oro͞o/noun
- (in Hinduism and Buddhism) a spiritual teacher, especially one who imparts initiation.synonyms:spiritual teacher, teacher, tutor, sage, counselor, mentor, guiding light, spiritual leader, leader, master; More
- each of the ten first leaders of the Sikh religion.
- an influential teacher or popular expert.”a management guru”
Tony Robbins latest Netflix special is entitled, “I’m Not Your Guru.” That is because he is just that, to so many, in terms of a teacher, but he doesn’t want devotees, he wants you to devote yourself to yourself, hence the title.
Controlling your focus and energy is the key to creating real, meaningful results in your life. And what you focus on is controlled by the questions you ask yourself.
So how do you control your focus? Ask better questions.
Stop procrastinating, making excuses and living anything less than your extraordinary potential. Make this year, this decade – this life – truly magnificent.
Hip 20-somethings don’t really join cults anymore; everyone knows too much to buy into one guy’s idea of utopia. But I think most of us get that yearning, from time to time, for some benevolent overlord to make sense of the world for us. I still like the idea of someone who has all the answers; I just know now that no such person exists. The truth is that ten percent of all the people hold 90% of all the available information.
Furthermore, life in the world of provable phenomena gets dull. There are only so many colors in the spectrum and there are only so many ways to have fun at the bar.
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TONY ROBBINS’ BOOKS
Chances are excellent that if you are here, you are the kind of person who wants to create the very best life possible for yourself, your family and your business. There are many paths to success, but most of them involve developing a new skill or improving upon current ones. Self-help books by Tony Robbins are an excellent tool on your path to bettering your life, be it in a personal or professional capacity.
Tony writes some of the best self-help books available today because he knows the power of positive thinking and the potential we all have for change. These motivational books are part of Tony’s calling: helping people like you live extraordinary lives. With the knowledge inside Tony Robbins’ books and a passion for implementing change inside yourself, you, too, can achieve anything you set your mind to.
- FINANCIALUNSHAKEABLE: YOUR FINANCIAL FREEDOM PLAYBOOKAfter interviewing fifty of the world’s greatest financial minds, and penning the #1 New York Times best seller Money: Master the Game, Tony Robbins returns with a step-by-step playbook, taking you on a journey to transform your financial life and accelerate your path to financial freedom. No matter your salary, your stage of life, or when you started, this is one of many self-help books that will provide the tools to help you achieve your financial goals more rapidly than you ever thought possible.
- FINANCIALTONY ROBBINS’ MONEY: MASTER THE GAMEBased on extensive research and interviews with some of the most legendary investors at work today (John Bogle, Warren Buffett, Paul Tudor Jones, Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, and many others), Tony Robbins has created a 7-step blueprint for securing financial freedom.With advice about taking control of your financial decisions, to setting up a savings and investing plan, to destroying myths about what it takes to save and invest, to setting up a “lifetime income plan,” the book brims with advice and practices for making the financial game not only winnable—but providing financial freedom for the rest of your life.
- PERSONALUNLIMITED POWERIf you want to fulfill your dreams of living a better life, both professionally and personally, Unlimited Power is the book for you. Although written when Tony Robbins was only 25 years old, Unlimited Power remains as one of the most popular and overall best self-help books available.With Unlimited Power, you will learn how to reach the quality of life you think you deserve. Tony Robbins has helped heads of state, royalty, Olympic and professional athletes achieve their goals, and with Unlimited Power, so can you. Tony passionately and eloquently reveals the science of personal achievement and teaches you:
- How to find out what you really want
- The Seven Lies of Success
- How to reprogram your mind in minutes to eliminate fears and phobias
- The secret of creating instant rapport with anyone you meet
- How to duplicate the success of others
- The Five Keys to Wealth and Happiness
- PERSONALAWAKEN THE GIANT WITHINWe all have an enormous potential within us, but too many of us shackle ourselves with limiting beliefs. How many times have you wanted to achieve a goal, only to tell yourself that you’re not capable of doing so? Stop telling yourself that you’re not enough, and instead, work toward achieving the extraordinary. Break the barriers and awaken the giant within with this Tony’s most effective strategies and tactics for mastering your relationships, your finances, your emotions, and your life.
- PERSONALNOTES FROM A FRIENDTony wrote the first edition of Notes From a Friend in 1991, handing it out to thousands of people who needed to overcome their greatest challenges. This easy-to-understand and concise guide is now available to you in this special, updated edition with all-new material.
Robbins’ daily routine involves a process he calls “Priming,” which his website describes as “a ritual that involves powerful and directed breathing and movement to center yourself so that you’re primed for whatever the day brings.” Robbins claims the process “will train and direct your mind” to provide “lasting results.”
All in all, the ritual takes less than 10 minutes, Robbins says. “There’s no excuse … If you don’t have 10 minutes, you don’t have a life,” Robbins says in the book “Tools of Titans, ” by Tim Ferriss.
“Taking this time in the morning, along with a healthy breakfast, can help you get into a peak state and change your day for the better,” Robbins writes on his website. “You’ll set a high baseline for the rest of your day, so that you can accomplish great things in every other area of your life.”
Here’s how it works:
Meditate
You start with a breathing exercise. First, you “sit straight with your eyes closed,” according to Robbins. Then, “inhale deeply through your nostrils while simultaneously lifting your arms in a shoulder press motion, and then exhale forcefully through your nostrils while bringing your arms back to your body, palms up.”
Take those breaths “in quick succession,” says Robbins, and start with three sets of 10 breaths, taking breaks in between each set. The exercise should leave you feeling “energized,” Robbins says.
Meditation is a pretty common tool that a number of successful people believe helps them relax and focus. In addition to Twitter’s Dorsey (who famously took a 10-day meditation trip to Myanmar last year), Arianna Huffington starts her morning with some meditation and yoga, while hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio credits his success to meditation.

2:18The 3 biohacks Tony Robbins uses to reach superhuman energy levels
Be thankful
From there, Robbins thinks of three things he’s grateful for. “They can be from your past, your present or your future,” Robbins writes on his website.
Being grateful helps him eliminate anger and fear from his mind, Robbins says. “You can’t be fearful and grateful simultaneously,” he told Ferriss.
Oprah Winfrey has a similar habit. The billionaire media mogul has said that she says “thank you” every morning, and that regularly practicing gratitude is one of the reasons she’s been so successful.
Visualize
Next, Robbins visualizes “colored light coming down and filling his body, healing anything — body, thoughts, feelings — that needs to be healed,” he writes on his website.
Finally, Robbins visualizes and focuses on three goals that he wants to make happen, either that day or in the future. He imagines that he’s already achieved each of those three goals — essentially, visualizing his success — which allows him to “celebrate that feeling of completion and victory.”
Visualizing your success may be about more than just good vibes, though, as scientists have argued that it is possible to rewire your brainfor success.
Don’t Miss:
Tony Robbins uses these 3 biohacks to keep his energy levels insanely high
Tony Robbins: Money doesn’t equal happiness — here’s what does
2021 Live Program
The quality of my life is the quality of my emotions. Energy is life. Train ourselves to be energetic.
You cannot manage what you don’t measure.
Energy is a habit and no one wants a 5.
Where focus goes energy flows.
Problems are life. Your biggest problem is not having a problem. We grow or we die. Problems are gifts to growth strength grave. Life is always happening for me not to me. When you push through a stress you realize how strong you are, and you realize who your friends real friends are and an immunity to new stresses.
Complexity is the enemy of execution. The past doesn’t equal the future unless you live it. If you change your body, you change your state. What you focus on is what you’re feeling. The warrior says all I need to do, all I need to focus on all I need to do is…
The magician knows I can change it all with my perception. The magician says… The lover says…. The King says…
Change your story, change your life.
The more you beat yourself up, the worse you get. The strongest force in the human personality is the need to stay consistent with how we define ourselves. Your identity is defined by what we think we are and what we think we are not. Your decisions are controlled by your identity.
People are not their behaviors. People are publícalo what the practice privately.
The thermostat is your identity. But you can change that.
If you want to change your life, change your story.
If you get in your head, youre dead.
Think of something you want to do that you are not doing, its because its outside of your identity.
See myself as an intelligent risk taker.
Enhance or expand your identity.
Execution trumps knowledge.
You can’t build on failure, you can only build on fulfillment.
If you only focus on whats missing, you will never be happy. What do I have, what are my resources, what can I control?
Achievers always tend to focus on what they don’t have.
Where do you focus, past, present, future?
Patterns to focus on the past and what you can’t control.
Language equals meeting.
The words that we use for our experience, become our experience.
We need to create a compelling future. There is a reason to make something happen.
I must participate in my own rescue.
What we identify with is what we become. Identity is the most important thing that influences us.
You get what look for which is what we do physiologically, with language and focus.
Incantations. InCANtations.
Progress = happiness. It’s not about getting, it’s about growing, because your life has meaning.
Your brand effects everything.
What affects branding is identity, competitive advantage,
There is a power in discretion and silence. Patience helps with any difficult people.
Embrace the unknown. Push through difficult moments, work through them.
Choosing to be genuinely grateful for all that I had, unconditionally accepting of all I didn’t and accepting responsibility for creating all that I wanted.
Stop letting the unabashedly lazy people who do so little for you control so much of your mind, feelings and emotions.
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It’s a direction, not a destination.
What am I willing to do to achieve my dreams? The people that are lucky are doing something different. 80% of wealth is psychologically and 20% is methodology.
Life is Made of Your Decisions
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Tony Robbins | The Power of Questions: Questions ARE the Answer
“The primary question you ask in your business, your relationship, and your health will determine your outcomes far greater than any goal.” – Tony Robbins
Every day the human brain asks thousands of questions.
And it’s all done subconsciously. Most of us don’t even know we’re doing it.
If you consider it, that’s all thinking really is. Asking questions.
What if I told you the quality of your life was determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself on a daily basis?
You might think that sounds like an exaggeration.
But let me explain.
If you want to lose weight and you ask yourself, “Why can I never lose weight?” Your brain will supply all the reasons why you can’t.
Your brain will come up with answers like, “You’re lazy,” “You have bad genetics,” “You can’t control your cravings,” and other unhelpful responses.
But if you ask the question, “How can I lose weight and enjoyit?” your brain starts coming up with ways you can accomplish your goals.
You see, questions can predisposeour answers.
They can point us in the right or wrong direction. They can limit or expand our possibilities. They can create joy or pain.
Questions have power.
We all know what it’s like to feel stuck, to have a belief that things can’t get better, or that life won’t go our way.
Questions can change your way of thinking. Questions can change your life.
And if you’re willing to take responsibility for your experience in life, the right questions can lead to inner freedom.
You wouldn’t be here reading this if you didn’t have a willingness to live life on your terms and take the necessary steps to get there.
And I’m here to help you along the way.
Primary Questions
I’ll give you a sneak peek into my most exclusive event, Date With Destiny. There we talk about what I call your primary question. Everyone has one. It’s the question you ask yourself the MOST in life.
The majority of people don’t even realize they’re doing it, but it’s running in the background every single day.
For some people, it’s:
Why am I always messing up?
What’s wrong with me?
For myself it was:
How can I make it better?
For my wife Sage it was:
“Where is the good in this?”
Can you feel the difference between the former and the latter? Can you see the difference in the quality of emotion each question creates?
What’s good about my original primary question?
I’m always looking to improve. But what does this presuppose? That something isn’t good enough. Over the years, I’ve refined this and now it’s simply: How can I help? How can I serve even more?
The primary question you ask in your business, your relationship, and your health will determine your outcomes far greater than any goal.
And it will determine your level of happiness or suffering in life.
In the past my focus was fixing things, always making them better. I still do that every day, but I have a new focus for serving.
My new primary question predisposes that I’m already making an impact and that I can make my impact even moremeaningful.
Take a moment to think about what your primary question is…
Write it down.
Can you reframe it to be one that is more empowering?
Maybe you need a new primary question. What would you like your new question to be in life?
Remember, questions ARE the answer, my friend.
Now that you’ve given your primary question some thought, I want to offer you a tool that I use every single day. It’s a simple exercise I learned from my dear friend Byron Katiethat you can use next time you have a challenge.
I use these questions with executives in all my businesses, and when working with people at my events.
4 Questions and a Turnaround
Pick a limiting belief you have about your career, business, health, or relationship. Something you think often.
I’ll provide an example from a recent client I worked with. Their belief was, “I’ll never find a way to grow my business.”
Yours might be:
I’ll never have a connected relationship with my kids.
I’ll never feel confident in my own skin.
I’ll never identify the right partners for my business idea.
Q1 & Q2 Break the Pattern:
Now start by asking these questions…
Is this true? Is it REALLY true? Can you absolutely know this is true? Could this be a misinterpretation or a misconception? Do you have all the possible information necessary to know exactly what this means?
The moment that you start to see that a limiting belief is not always true, you begin to break the pattern.
Q3 Get Leverage
How do you react – what happens – when you believe that thought? What do you feel, what do you experience, what do you become when you believe this thought?
Change is never a matter of ability; it is a matter of motivation. It’s never “can you,” it’s “willyou.” The next question will generate leverage for you to push through to break the pattern.
It gives you a reason to change.
Q4 Annihilate the Limiting Belief
Who would you be without the thought?
If this thought didn’t exist, if you never had this thought, what would you feel, how would you behave, how would you experience life, what would you be like without it?
The Turnaround
This is where you say the opposite of the thought. Instead of, “It’s impossible to grow my business,” say, “It’s totallypossible to grow my business.”
…or have a connected relationship with my kids…
…or feel confident in my own skin…
…or identify the right partners for my business idea…
You name it. Whatever the limiting belief is, say the opposite.
Now lastly, come up with at least 3 reasons you CAN accomplish your goal. Once you do that, you’ve created a new belief. The more reasons you come up with, the stronger your belief will be.
This is especially potent when you do this as a team at work around a limiting belief that may be plaguing your project or business.
Apply this whenever you have a limiting belief, and you can change it in an instant.
Questions are the answer.
Here’s to asking better questions! Share your new and old primary questions in the comments.
Tony Robbins