Welcome to the “Inner Circle Podcast”, the place where patriot entrepreneurs create, build, and play. Each episode will help you move forward to the place where we all want to be, a place of total creative freedom, personal freedom, and financial freedom.
My name is Mike Fallat and I am your host. I’ve started a bunch of businesses, helped to write a couple of hundred books, and interviewed lots of millionaires. I will be your guide as we enter the Inner Circle.
Mike: This episode will help you move away from what you don't want and towards what you do want. There's actually a science behind it. It's actually pretty cool, so let's get right into it.
Okay, so everyone asks me, what was the beginning like? How did you get into books? How did you start to make things happen? And it really comes down to one thing. It comes down to a dream obituary that I wrote. Yeah, I sat down and I wrote out, “If I were to die, how do I want it to end? How do I want to be remembered?” When I wrote those words, I had no idea how significant that would be to my climb. [01:58.7]
Scientifically, I was doing something that was very right and I had no idea I was even doing it. I was just like, listen, I'm obsessed with … there was a John Cusack movie out there. What was it? Serendipity. Right? And he actually talks about this obituary and it's pretty fascinating. I think that's why I did it. That was pretty much the only reason and I really wasn't thinking too far into the future, but I just was like, What if I died? How do I want it to end? Maybe that will be my target.
What I did there was I set the stage, okay? I got really clear, really clear on the end goal. Now, I don't know if that end goal was the exact end goal, but it gave me a target. It gave me something to shoot for. Now, I didn't do this, but I should have, and I should have listed everything that my life was all about right then and there, but what I did know, what I know, was that I didn't want it to end where I was at. [03:03.2]
The life that I was living was not good. I was not happy financially. My spirituality was not good. It wasn't secure. My relationships were not great. My confidence level was shot. My body was not really in a place where I was thrilled to show it off. There was a lot going on there. But what I did do was set a target. What I didn't do was set exactly what I really hated and what you need to do, and there’s a little bit of science behind all this, but I was listening to Jordan Peterson recently.
Please just start to Google Jordan Peterson's lectures. You're really going to pick up a lot here and he teaches some things, and I do my own research and I figure out, wow, there's more to it than what even just said. But what he talked about was the greatest motivator for human beings obviously is fear, right? Being very clear on what you don't want and also being extremely clear on what you do want. [04:04.2]
I always talk about writing exercises. If you can write in extremes, what's the worst time of your life? What's the best time of your life? Extremes really help you dissect a human being. If you were to dissect yourself right now, what is the thing that you're most afraid of? If you're able to declassify everything in your brain right now and say, You know what? I am afraid of all of this happening. I'm afraid of a divorce. I'm afraid of marrying the wrong person. I'm afraid of staying at this job. I'm afraid of becoming a freaking slob. I'm afraid of becoming a liberal. Oh, man, that'd be the worst, right? Anyway, I'm afraid of that happening. Now, this fear, you could stoke that fire every once in a while. Okay, this fear, right? [04:56.3]
To give you an understanding of the human being, okay, the greatest motivator to the human being is fear. Okay? As a species, we are built to survive. Now, there are basically five emotions, right? There's joy, fear, sadness, disgust, and anger. Joy, fear, sadness, disgust, and anger.
What's the strongest? Technically, if you want to break this down here, fear is, a hundred percent fear, and it actually has to be. As human beings, it actually keeps us alive, right? Because you can't be happy and joyful, you can't be sad, you can't have disgust, and you can't be angry, if you're dead. Fear has kept us alive. Don't walk outside the hut because the Tyrannosaurus rex is going to kill you. Real threats, right?
Fear has kept human beings alive, and since it's so strong and it's so ingrained in us, it could spill over in other parts of your life. Some people have fear to get on elevators or walk outside, or ask that girl out. Fear is real, because fear, if you don't abide by it, could lead to pain or death. Worse than pain is death. [06:15.2]
We summarize all the research done towards leaving the basic human emotions, we would generally conclude that there are those five, right, break it all down there. Fear is the strongest, okay, and it starts in the region of the brain called the amygdala. If I'm saying all these wrong, guys, just let me know in the comments, please. I'm not a scientific guy. I'm a BC student who just loved being an entrepreneur, so I don't really know medical terminology, so take it easy on me, okay?
A threat stimulus, such as the site of a predator, triggers a fear response in the amygdala, okay, which activates areas involved in the preparation for motor functions involved in a fight or flight response. Okay, so the amygdala is a part of the brain and stores memory. [07:02.0]
I'm going to pull up something else here. The amygdala is a collection of cells near the base of the brain. There are two, one in each hemisphere or each side of the brain. This is where emotions are given meaning. They're remembered and attached to associations and responses to them, okay, emotional memory.
The amygdala is considered to be one of the parts of the brain's limbic system. What’s the limbic system? The limbic system is a part of the brain involved in our behavioral and emotional responses, especially when it comes to behaviors that we need for survival, feeding, reproduction, and caring for our young, and obviously the fight or flight responses. Okay? So, fear is the strongest.
If you're able to dissect what you're afraid of and think about it on a daily basis, it's going to instinctively push you away from it. If you are afraid of staying at that job, put it on the refrigerator. Wake up, put it on the mirror of your bathroom, so you look at it. “I fucking hate my job. I am afraid of staying here for the rest of my life” or “I'm afraid of being a weak nobody”, or “I'm afraid of not accomplishing my dream” or “I'm afraid of not finishing my book”, or “I'm afraid of not being financially successful.” [8:24.6]
Make it very clear what you are afraid of, what is your greatest fear. Manufacture it. Think about it. Speak it into existence. Put it in your brain, so you know to stay away from me. Start pushing yourself away. Human beings will run when there's fear, okay? But don't be like a rat or a mouse. Don’t be like these mice out there, okay? They just scatter in different directions. That's not going to help you.
Running from something without a target doesn't mean shit, okay? If you don't have a target, then you're fucked. You’ve got to have a target. Get clear on what you don't want in your life, and it could be the most mundane thing, it doesn't matter. Get clear as hell. Start writing that down. [09:14.4]
Now get clear on what you do want. Write that dream obituary. How is it all going to end? Do what I did. It could be as clear as possible. It could be a few sentences. My obituary is not in front of me here, all right, the one I wrote years ago, 2015, 2014, but it was basically “He helped start a lot of businesses. He wrote a lot of books. He became a great speaker. A great friend. He had a great family.” Everything that you’d probably envision.
Mine was more about business and accomplishment, and doing great things, being around great people, but being really proud of who you were—that's so important to me. I think you really are going to love your journey and who you are, when it's all said and done—because at that stage, I wasn't. I mean, I hated waking up, going to work, and I looked at pictures of me at corporate events and I'm like, What the fuck? This isn't me. I look like a scumbag. That's the way I looked at it. [10:10.0]
I got really clear on what I did really want, okay. That's how it gave me an advantage. Now anytime an opportunity arose, I struck at it, I went for it, because I had that target.
Another little thing that Jordan talks about in some of his talks is the commonality that humans have with rats, okay, and I'll give you a quick little summary here. Rats and humans are both mammals who give birth to live babies. Both are warm-blooded. Both have similar organs, including livers and hearts. Both have similar nervous systems. Both use similar hormones that regulate the body functions and both are susceptible to many of the same diseases. Why do you think they test so many goddamn things on rats and mice before they give it to humans? I don't think they’ve tested the you-know-what that's pretty common right now. They didn't test that on shit. Anybody who has taken that, you are the rat, just to let you know. So, anyway … [11:04.3]
However, they also found that the rat genome contains about the same number of genes as the human and mouse genomes. That's freaking wild, isn't it? The rodent lineage, which gave rise to the rat and mouse, and the primate lineage, which gave rise to humans, diverged—diverged—about 80 million years ago. Now, that's nuts. There's a lot of similar stuff when it comes to rats and humans. I've met a few rats in my life. Yeah, that's a talk for a different day, but anyway, rats and mice.
Now, a rat and a mouse, rats and mice are deathly afraid of cats. I don't know if you realize this, but, instinctively, they're afraid of cats. If you have the sense of a cat somewhere, a rat is going to run the hell away. That fear is real, okay? What they’ve found out is that a rat will run through absolute pain to get away from that cat or even just a cat smell. Think about this. The cat smell. [12:14.0]
Now, what does this mean? Okay, so the rat would not go through a certain part of a maze, would not go through pain, would not even try to go through something to get food because it was painful, right, and it was difficult and it was tricky, even though they wanted food, even though they wanted to go somewhere else. They basically hit a roadblock. But when the cats smell or even the sight of a cat was in play, these rats, these mice would go through insane lengths to get away. They would go through that pain. They would do what was necessary to escape, and once there was that set target of, okay, there's food over here, let me run towards that food, even if it was a little painful for a little bit, it was still better than dying. [13:00.0]
They’re more afraid of dying and getting eaten and getting killed than of this pain that it will not kill me, and I also can get the reward, whether it's freedom or whether it's that food, something I really, really want. You’re running away from what you don't want towards something that you do want.
Remember, you're afraid of working that job, right, or you're afraid of being a nobody or afraid of not accomplishing your dreams, or you're afraid of your spouse looking at you and saying, What the hell did I marry this person for? They're not go-getters. That fear, if you're afraid of that, put that in your eyes every day, look at it, and then obviously that's the cat, and the pain of going through whatever it is—the uncomfortable situations, the fear of rejection—the shit that's not going to kill you seems a little bit mundane now, seems a little bit boring, seems a little bit, eh, it's not too bad, and you're going towards something. Rather than scattering off and just being a mindless soul, you're running off into something you want. [14:06.4]
If you like what you hear and you are a patriot entrepreneur, go to Mike’sInnerCircle.com. Remember, you are only as strong as your circle. We'll see you there.
Now, that's all fine and dandy. But what about the manufacturing of energy, right? To get you where you want to go, sometimes you need to fake this fear, but you also can use this trick that I've used and that's manufacturing other pieces of emotion.
If you're running away from what you don't want, how can you put gasoline in your tank? Because sometimes that fear is super strong. Sometimes it's not. Could you use anger to your advantage? Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah, now you're using fear to your advantage, but you're also using anger. [15:07.8]
How do you do that? What about all those people who tried to hold you back? What about all those people who rejected you? Okay? What about all those people who basically wrote you off? All right? What about those people? What do you say to them? Because technically what you're doing is you have to think about all the people who turn their back on you, right? All the people who shit on you.
Aren’t they still an asset? Of course, they are. These people who turned their back on you, rejected you, shit on you and try to laugh at you, and try to stop you, turn it into anger. Maybe they made you sad at one point. Maybe they made you disgusted. Now you’ve got four emotions on your side: sadness, disgust, anger, and fear. [16:11.3]
Joy is the reward. Joy is the accomplishment. It’s the getting of the food. It's obtaining your freedom. Remember, that's what you're seeking. You can use all of this shit that came into your life, the dark days, the struggles, the misery, the haters, all can be used to your advantage. Rats only are using their fear to get them where they want. You could use four.
Oh, man, as a human being, you have such an advantage against other people. You can start to use emotions for power boosters, like a gas tank, like an extra octane, if you will. Whenever I left the corporate world, I made sure I remembered all the people who fucking tried to stop me. Goddamn, I still think about it at night. [17:04.0]
There’s a point where it could be unhealthy. There's a point where it's really healthy and there's a time where you’re like, I need to make sure I point this in the right direction, because if I don't, all this energy and all this anger and frustration and sadness and just pure … it's energy.
Remember, you're just recycling because you can't create energy, by the way. You can take it from somewhere and you apply it somewhere else. All of these emotions, energy was given to you from somewhere. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Look that up. You can't create it. You can harness it. You can use it. You can refine it, but you cannot create it. If you don't point it in the right direction, it could be really bad for you. You could become this person who is just downright nasty and it's unproductive use, right? You're going to use it in a way that's not productive for your business, for your life, for your legacy. [18:02.6]
You can use it in ways for revenge in many ways. Oh, man. I'm not a saint, I've thought about some ways to really hurt people that really hurt me. Now, that's there in my brain probably for a reason, right? Back in the day, maybe cavemen were fighting with each other and you’ve got to use it as a way to win a battle or whatnot.
But what I'm talking about here is people are going to do your wrong day in and day out, and if you don't have a strong North Star, if you don't have something you're pointing at, you're not going to have a good refinery in your stomach and your heart, and that energy that comes your way, that anger, that that sadness, that fear, whatever it is, could be used improperly and that'll take you off track even more, so don't do that. Never. Never do that. [18:49.5]
Make sure you get very clear. Remember what you're most afraid of and then what you really want, because what you really want is going to give you this victory, this ability to … because it's almost like in Mario Kart, you're going to feel the sudden boosts just of a push, right? And this push, if you don't have a great control over that steering wheel, you're going to get really knocked off your course, your own path, so you’ve got to know exactly where you're going. There are probably a lot of analogies when it comes to space travel or even shooting or anything that, if you're not dead set on your target, any variable that you didn't take into account is going to push you away from it.
All four emotions can be used to your advantage, and I would say that every time you feel these emotions, just make sure in your refinery that you basically throw it in the woodpile. If you throw it in the fire and you use it as some type of booster, some type of fuel to get you through that one day, to get you through that meeting, to get you through that business downturn, to get you through all the pain that you're going to go through … [20:07.8]
Remember, this is not like everything is lovey-dovey once you have it all figured out. You're going to go through pain to level up, to transform, to shed, to slay the dragon, if you will. Great little talk here. I'll kind of wrap this up here, but basically going back to the earliest stories in European days, the story that sticks out more than anything and it probably pops up in Hollywood even to this day is there's always a protagonist and there's always a dragon.
Remember, if you go back to the earliest of days, the story is about a dragon that hoards gold and there's a protagonist who has to actually beat the dragon to get the gold. Now, what is this saying? The dragon is the scary, scary, deadly force. It's scary to any human being, all right? And this protagonist, and it was always a male, by the way, because there was a princess or whatever that you had to get to. It's almost like Mario. It's kind of weird. It's like Super Mario Bros., King Koopa, Princess. [21:11.3]
Anyway, this pops up in a lot of things, video games and movies and storytelling for years and years, and it goes back to the very earliest of days. But this story, if you really want to break it down, and this is what even Jordan Peterson says, it’s that what the dragon represents in the human brain is what fear is all about, what scares you the most, and the gold or the princess is what you really want.
Now, the human being knows this, and I don't know if it's instinctively or if it's taught to us, but the human being knows in order to get what it really wants, it has to go through what really scares them. So, you have to know what you really want and you have to know what really scares you. [21:56.0]
If you know that you have to slay the dragon every day, whether it's to pay that bill or start that business or escape that corporation, or get the girl or ask a person out or look like a fool, you’ve got slay dragons day in and day out. And these fears, they're not going to go away, right? Because the human brain is always looking for something to be afraid of, so you can always manufacture something to be afraid of.
But you have to know what you really want, because if you know what you're really afraid of and you can use it properly, you know that if you slay the dragon, you can get what you want, you know that if you become a great fighter or a skilled swordsman, or a great communicator or confident leader, you could beat the dragons pretty easily. They become a little bit less scary to you and you can start getting more and more what you want.
Now, it all goes back to that dream obituary. Today, start writing that down. Start writing how you want to speak, how you want to look, how you want to talk, how you want to dress. Start writing who you want to become, how you want to be remembered. [23:05.8]
What kind of car does that person drive, all right? How does that person deal with individuals? Are they short-tempered? Are they very patient individuals? That target is really what sets the tone. I don't know if you're going to be able to hit it dead on, but you're going to get pretty close, right? You’ve got this target. You’ve got something to shoot for every second of every day.
Oh, and the older I get, guys, it's kind of an eye-awakening experience that nobody knows what the hell they want. Nobody knows where they are going. I say nobody—95 percent of people don't know what they want, don't know where they're going, and don't know how they're going to get there. They're not clear on what scares them the most. They're not clear. They're definitely not clear of where they're going. You're automatically going to have an advantage in every aspect of life. I'm seeing it over the past 12 years, the compounding effect of always trying to level up. [24:07.2]
Ever since I wrote that dream obituary, I’ve known I have a deeper purpose, a deeper meaning than most people. Some people are just like, Okay, I'm good, I’ve got the job that pays me $50,000 a year. I’ve got a car. That's pretty cool. I don't know what else I'm striving for. This target is always going to change. As long as you are aware that there is some type of target, you have to have it there, because the fun, I don't know, maybe the fun is the acquisition, but I think the fun is the slaying of the dragon. I think it's the preparation. I think it's going through the tunnels on the way to the dragon. That's what excites me.
People I've seen who are the happiest and most fulfilled, they're enjoying every moment. They're using everything that comes their way as some type of an advantage. Maybe it's even a test. They look at everything as a test. Can I handle this much pressure? Can I do this? Not many people can. Can I? God, it’s just a whole perspective change. [25:06.4]
So, write that dream obituary. And I'd love to hear from you, so comment down below what you were thinking. How close are you? Did this help you out? This changed my life, and when you think of a rat or mouse anymore, you have a lot in common, but you have a lot more of an advantage to think all this through.
There are going to be a lot of cats. There are going to be a lot of things that are going to try to hurt you on this and as you just live life. Use that fear. Use that real danger to get you where you want to go, and dammit, that's going to be one hell of a story. Slay the dragons every day. [25:46.2]
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