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.

Know someone who might be interested in this newsletter? Share it with them.

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
Unlimited Power is a revolutionary fitness book for the mind. It will show you, step by step, how to perform at your peak while gaining emotional and financial freedom, attaining leadership and self-confidence, and winning the cooperation of others. It will give you the knowledge and course to remake yourself and your world. Unlimited Power is a guidebook to superior performance in an age of success.
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.

https://youtu.be/n_yV3KBzxx4

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

Tony Robbins | How to Make a Tough Decision, Part 1

“It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”

Every aspect of our lives, from our relationships to our careers, hinges on the choices we make.

Decisions have the power to shape our destiny and propel us toward the life we desire.

They also have the power to keep us stuck and prevent us from achieving our goals.

And a lack of decision can leave us feeling stagnate, depleted, and leads to a complete loss of momentum. Sometimes we’re so scared we won’t make the right decision that we choose NO decision and let the fear of failure paralyze us from moving forward.

In short, it’s the quality of our decisions that determines the quality of our lives.

Think for a moment about the most important decisions you’ve made in your life. Perhaps it was a move, a career change, to start a new relationship, or to end one…

How did you make those decisions?

Whenever I make a big decision, there are key principles I use to make them with confidence and clarity. And just like a muscle, you can grow your ability to make decisions so you’re consistently making progress.

1. All Decision Making Should Be Done in Writing

When you try to make decisions in your head you do something called looping.

Your brain gets stuck in a loop because you’re trying to take something complex and look at it from every angle. You turn each viable option over, examining it thoroughly, your thoughts branching out into other possibilities, and eventually you’re doing that x 10.

You need a visual. Decision making requires the review of lots of information – and it can overload the brain.

In fact, it’s been proven that the more decisions a person has to make in their day to day, the more taxing and energy-depleted they become.

Decision making is an energy-intensive process. Honor it.

Take a moment to write out what you know about the decision you’re trying to make.

Sometimes what feels complex in our own heads becomes vastly simplified on paper.

2. Be Clear About What You Want

The foundation of exceptional decision-making lies in clarity. To make effective choices, you must first gain crystal-clear clarity about your goals, values, and priorities.

What is your ultimate outcome?

What do you truly desire?

Clarity is power.

When you know what you want (your outcome) and your why (your purpose) decision making becomes simplified.

If you’re unclear about what you want and your why, things will seem murky.

You may be influenced by outside forces that don’t have your best interests at heart.

Knowing your what and your why will act as your true north when it comes to making tough decisions.

“When you have a clear vision, the path ahead becomes illuminated, making decisions more straightforward and purposeful.”

3. Decisions Are Made on Probability

No one has a crystal ball to tell them with 100% certainty they’ve made the right decision.

It’s about taking inventory of the information available and making the best choice possible.

Leaders are decision makers. And they step into their decisions without total certainty that it’s going to work out.

This is what sets them apart from everyone else. They’re willing to take action when everyone else is paralyzed by uncertainty.

This is what made General Norman Schwarzkopf a revered leader and mentor to me personally.

I remember talking to Schwarzkopf about mentors that have shaped our beliefs about life and decision-making. He spoke of one of the generals he had worked for before he was the “Stormin’ Norman” he’s fondly known as today.

General Schwarzkopf recalled a situation in which the general was asked to make a decision that he had been stagnant about for almost 10 years. The general looked at them and he said, “The answer is obvious, gentlemen.”

And then he gave them the answer. He said, “That’s our decision. Move on it.”

After they left, Schwarzkopf approached the general and said, “Permission to speak freely?”

The seasoned general replied, “Certainly.”

Schwarzkopf said, “General, I know you don’t have a clue what those guys were even talking about.”

The general smiled at him, and he said, “You’re right. I didn’t understand all of it.” And he said, “But you know what? This has been a decision that no one’s been willing to make for 10 years.”

He went on to state:

“For 10 years they’ve talked about it, going back and forth. The best minds have been on it, and they can’t decide one way or the other, so you know what? We need to pick one and do it. So, I just did.

Because I believe that now all the best people are going to go to work on it, and they’ll either make it work or they won’t. They’ll see it’s not working, and we’ll change directions, and we’ll do what’s right, but what’s happened right now is a logjam of nothingness.

Decisions are power, and I’m here to make them. That’s what I’m in this position for.

That’s what I’m a leader for.”

The general did what no one else could do: he acted.

Often tough decisions are less about making the “right” choice and more about making the choice.

And my friends, despite what you might think, you can always pivot.

If you wait to have all the information, so will everyone else.

If you make a decision that turns out to be wrong or not the best choice you can change things. The important part is making a decision to start with.

4. All Decision Making Is a Clarification of What You Value

Lastly, each decision we make should point to our values.

It can be a tough choice you’re making, but if it aligns with what matters most to you, you’re propelling yourself in the right direction.

And there’s nothing worse than making a decision based on FEAR, rather than what you feel is right in your heart.

When faced with tough decisions, it’s crucial to avoid the trap of limiting beliefs.

I’m worried this won’t work out because…

I don’t want to try that because…

Expand your options and explore alternative paths. Seek out diverse perspectives, gather information, and challenge your assumptions. By broadening your horizons, you open the door to innovative solutions and unforeseen opportunities.

Decision making doesn’t have to be agonizing. It can be an exciting way to align with what you desire most. And you can treat each new decision like an exercise, building your decision-making muscle.

What’s a current decision, big or small, you can apply these principles to?

Is there a decision you’re procrastinating on making because of the fear of failure that you could take action on today?

How can you apply your WANT and WHY to simplify a decision that feels complex?

I’ll leave you with this my friends; while the responsibility of choice can feel weighty, it is our true power to own our destiny and choose our course.

We are the captains of our journey. What will you choose?

Join me next month for Part 2 in decision making where I walk you through the actual process of how I make tough decisions in my own life.

Tony Robbins

Films and Books I’m Loving

· Sound of Freedom

It’s my privilege to be one of the Executive Producers on the film The Sound of Freedom that’s currently out in theaters. Based on the true story and life of my dear friend, Tim Ballard, it highlights some of the darkest aspects of humanity, and yet sheds light on the tireless efforts of many to protect innocent children who are the victims of human trafficking.

Sage and I have partnered with several organizations to help end child slavery and have funded 28,000 rescues and rehabilitations so far. Please support this film and let’s spread awareness of this growing problem. We can be the difference between a child’s freedom and imprisonment.

Find your local show times here.

Looking for more guidance on decision making?

Sometimes we need an outside perspective, someone who can challenge our assumptions and broaden our horizons. Someone who can call our bluff when we’re acting out of fear versus when we are in alignment with what we value most in life.

And maybe you’re not sure what your values and vision are for the life you’ve always wanted. A coach can help you with all of the above! Schedule a coaching session today with a Tony Robbins expert coach and make empowered decisions daily.

“While the responsibility of choice can feel weighty, it is our true power to own our destiny and choose our course.”

Join the conversation