WINNING. the RAT RACE. How to Move Beyond the Daily Grind! J A M E S S K I N N E R M A R K V I C T O R H A N S E N

Transcription

1 WINNING the RAT RACE How to Move Beyond the Daily Grind! J A M E S S K I N N E R R O I C E K R U E G E R M A R K V I C T O R H A N S E N

2 How to Move Beyond the Daily Grind! James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen will show you how to leave behind the endless chase that never takes us anywhere. If you re in the rat race now in your career or any other area of your life here s how to get out right now! 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 1

3 The Authors: JAMES SKINNER is the founder of two global financial groups that manage billions of dollars of assets. He is also recognized as one of the world s foremost business thinkers and appears regularly on Japanese television. ROICE KRUEGER co-founded Franklin Covey, the world s largest training company, and has supervised consulting projects for 80 percent of the Fortune 500. MARK VICTOR HANSEN is the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul empire and is the best-selling nonfiction author of all time. His goal is to make the planet work for all humanity! NOTE: Ideas That Can Change Your Life is a collaboration of three of the world s most amazing authors, speakers, and thinkers. The first person I may refer to any of the authors. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 2

4 Welcome to the Rat Race Imagine that you are a rat or a mouse or a hamster running on your little wheel. You run like mad, but you are always right where you started. If you are feeling like that way, you are in the rat race and you can t win. What is the rat race, really? It is chasing the need for money, praise, or recognition. It is the need to feel important, the need for social status. These needs are all based on other people s expectations. Expectations from your mother, father, your supervisor, or even your religion. I first challenged my rat race when my mentor and friend, Dee Groberg, showed me a list of the beliefs and values of many people. He read off the list and showed the negative power it could have in people s lives. Then he said to me, Roice, what are your core beliefs and values? I challenge you to write them down. I became very serious about doing this. I had one of the very first portable Macintosh computers. I took that 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 3

5 with me on my work, and I just wrote everything out. I had thirteen of my beliefs. I started look through them and I thought, Which of these do I really want to incorporate in my life? That s when I started to challenge the rat race. I started taking out those things that were programmed into me by external sources including parents, friends and neighbors. Many people had very good intentions, but they had taught me things that really did not line up with who I wanted to be. I reduced that thirteen-page list to four pages that I wanted to keep. I think if I went back to that same list today, I would probably take off far more than I did back then. What Would Leaving Mean? Before we get into how to do it, I want to ask you this: What would it mean to you or for you to leave the rat race behind? When you think of leaving the rat race behind, what is it that you imagine? What is it that you really want? 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 4

6 Most people want freedom. Freedom from what or freedom to what? Freedom has either an origin or a destination. So you are either free from doing something or you are free to do something. Most of us want less stress. Stress comes from doing things that I do not want to do. When you think about leaving the rat race to reduce stress, you are really thinking about how not to be hassled by your boss or your client everyday. People want to be able to fulfill their dreams. What are you chasing right now that causes you to feel that you are in the rat race? Many people are chasing endless amounts of work that needs to be done. You have eight to ten hours of chasing work every day, but if you keep chasing, are you actually getting anywhere? If not, you are in the rat race especially if you are still using words like chasing. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 5

7 Be careful of your language and listen to what you say. This can tell you a lot about what s really going on. One young woman told me, I have been in the rat race for 30 years. Wow, we have a master rat racer! The first 20 years my father told me that I must study hard and get a degree. This is the paper chase. Then I need to get a good job This is the job chase. After that I worked. The fact is, some people are only comfortable in the rat race. Some people have found that they have been in the rat race for so long that it is the only place they are comfortable. When they get out of the rat race, they run right back into the rat race. This woman continued, When I was 30, my father retired. He got his pension and was out of his comfort zone. He needed to do something, so he started his own business at 55 years old My father was comfortable for 55 years and suddenly he was forced into a new area. When he started his business I thought to myself that I 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 6

8 would not have the energy to start a business at 55 years old. Notice the limiting beliefs here. She is 36 and so burned out with the rat race that she assumes she will have no energy left at the age of 55. We definitely need to change that. You do not want to be in a place where you have to do a business but you definitely want to be in a place where you could if you wanted to. One of the operative principles here is looking at what you have to do because you do not have to do anything. I used to jog every morning through Tokyo for twelve kilometers. I would jog through the Ginza, and in one place there was a garbage pile. Every morning there was the same man sitting in the middle of the garbage. Now this is interesting because we are in one of the most beautiful places on earth and he chooses to be sitting in the middle of the garbage pile. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 7

9 Does he have to do this? He could tell you a long story about his circumstances in life and why he is homeless. But does he have to be sitting in the middle of the garbage pile? You do not have to be anywhere and you do not have to do anything. That man could get up in the morning, walk out of the garbage pile, and be somewhere else. I knew he could walk, I had seen him do it. He would go and use the public restrooms and walk back and sit down in his garbage pile. We need to have that realization. We don t have to be in the rat race, we don t need to have a business, we don t have to do a job but we definitely want to be in a position to do so if we really want to. You should always want to be developing and growing as a person, but not because of other people s expectations. Not because some societal norm says that 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 8

10 you have to go the best university, or that being an artists is not important, or that you need to make a lot of money. You do not want to be driven by the expectation of society or other people. You want to be driven by what comes from inside of you. In working on these books, the three of us are making a self-motivated choice that has nothing to do with outside expectations. You can continue to grow and challenge yourself in or out of the rat race. Only your driving force will be different. Leaving the rat race does not mean ending all productivity. You can continue to be very productive. Or you may choose to be unproductive because it is the right thing for you to do at a particular time. I was coaching a businessmen a few months ago, and I asked him, What would really jazz you in your life? He said, I want to spend all my time surfing. So I wondered, how expensive can it be? We actually did the numbers. We found he would need to buy a couple surfboards a year because he is an extreme surfer and 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 9

11 breaks a couple of boards a year. We calculated what he was going to need for surfboards, and what he was going to need to live on. We figured out that he could retire that very day and surf for the rest of his life. But he did not realize that fact, because he was being driven by the things he had to do. Yet if surfing is something that is going to make him feel completely fulfilled as a human being, then he needs to go out and do it. He may be the biggest genius surfer on the planet. I have a friend in Hawaii, his name is Hans Hedemann, who is a world championship surfer. He spends his life now running a wonderful surf shop in Waikiki. We all need to discover the unique thing that is going to drive us something that is free from the expectations of other people. You Can Have Your Life Any Way You Want It The key is to start asking yourself, How is it that I really want it? What is it that I really want? You need to determine that and get extremely clear on that and then you need to insist for yourself and the world around it that it be that way. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 10

12 Roice and I have a friend whose name is Kenji. One of my favorite things in life is to go to dinner with Kenji, because Kenji understands that he can have his life any way he wants it. No matter what restaurant we go to, Kenji looks at the menu but I have never seen him order one of the meals on the menu. He will say, Can I have the pizza with no cheese? If any of you have never had a no-cheese pizza they are terrific. Then he will say, I notice that you have arugula over here in the salad. Could you add that to the pizza? Then he starts to ask about what kinds of olive oil they have in the kitchen and he is choosing his olive oil. He tells them exactly how much oil to use, and exactly how he wants everything cooked. He can spend almost as much time ordering a dinner as he does eating one. It is terrific because he knows that he wants this meal to be special. Every meal he eats he wants it exactly the way he wants it. Every time that I have been with him he gets it exactly the way he wants it. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 11

13 You need to look at the menu of your life and say, What do I want to order up so that I have a life that nobody else has ever ordered off the menu? It is just not on the menu, it is just not available Being a best selling author and actually writing books in Japanese, while living in Singapore, is something that nobody has ever ordered off the menu before. I do not know of any other foreign people that live in Singapore and write best-selling books in Japanese. This is my little thing. This is the way I want my no cheese pizza. Roice likes to live in his mountain cabin. He goes fishing and he brings his fresh fish back to the cabin to eat them for breakfast. While he is doing that, he is on the board of hedge funds and helps with many major companies and has license royalties. He too has his life off the menu. Then there is Mark. What more can you say than just being around him is Chicken Soup for the Human Soul. He has 6,000 things he wants to get done in his 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 12

14 life. He is like Kenji: the chef up in heaven is saying, This person has 6,000 ingredients that have to go on his pizza! Be willing to think about exactly what you life is going to be when it is exactly the way you want. Which parts are you going to on right now? You can run from something or you can run towards something. You can escape from your job and find that you have to go back because you have not designed something that you really want. You can have your life anyway you want it, but you must know what you want it to be. One day I was staring into the monitor of a computer in an office where I was assisting someone. I will never forget it. Something came across the screen that said there was going to be a meeting in 15 minutes. I was thinking to myself, I don t want to go to the meetings. I don t want to look at this computer screen. I am out of here! On my way out, I asked myself what I was going towards. I gained great comfort when I 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 13

15 realized that there were several options that I could go toward. I could select from the menu and design what I wanted. Now, my commute is just one minute. I go down the hallway. When I go to work my cat sits on top of my desk and peers down at me. We live in a world with more options than ever before. This is the post-industrial age, the Age of Information. You have a unique set of information and ideas and content that is part of you. This makes it possible for you to go anywhere and have your job any way that you want it. You can say, I want to work with my cat upon my lap. If you were working in a factory 100 years ago, that was not an available option. It is available now. You live in an age that it has always been possible to have it how you want it, now it is just easier. The Pleasure of Not Pleasing 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 14

16 I want you to begin to experience the pleasure of not pleasing. As infants we are unconditionally loved by our parents. As we grow older, they want us to do things in order to be loved. We try to please other people to get what we want. We start trying to please our mother and we start trying to please our father so they will continue to love us and take care of us and feed us. Then we go to school and they put us in a grading system. We have to start trying to please our teachers so that we can continue to please our parents by getting good grades. If we do not get good grades then they yell at us and we feel threatened and physically at risk and so forth. Then we get a job to so and a boss to please. But some people actually do not want to be pleased, no matter what we do. Have you ever had a parent, teacher or boss that is impossible to satisfy? 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 15

17 So I want you to just flip pleasing on its head and start to experience the pleasure of not pleasing. Just say, I know you may not be happy about this, but I am okay with that. You have to stop and realize that your value does not come from the opinions of other people. This is the moment when you get out of the rat race. It is not what they think about me. When we talk about the billionaire traits, the first thing is that they do not care that much about what other people think. When Howard Hughes goes to build the Spruce Goose he does not care whether you like the Spruce Goose. He does not care if you want there to be a Spruce Goose. He does not care if you think he is nuts for building the Spruce Goose. He is still going to build it. Why is he building it? Because he wants to! Because he can! He says, I can build the biggest airplane that has ever been built, I want to build it, I am going to build it and it doesn t really matter if it satisfies any other person. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 16

18 You move from living out of fear to living out of passion. This is the moment you leave the rat race. The question that I want to ask again is, What would you be doing right now if you were completely free from the need to please your parents? Does that question have anything to do with how old you are? Amazingly, there are 50, 60 and 70 year olds that are still being completely governed by the expectations of their parents. You want to start living out of passion instead out of the fear and the place you need to start is from freeing yourself from the expectations of your parents. Your parents have to live their own life. They have to live their own legend. So many parents are trying to live vicariously through their children and it does not work. You get to live your life, they get to live their life and your children get to live their lives. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 17

19 Free yourself from that expectation. You have to be willing to free other people from their expectations that you are putting on them, so they are free to go out and live their passion. We had a person in our seminar who was a dentist and he said, I hate dentistry. Last week I drilled through the side of some guy s mouth and it cost me four hundred and seventy five thousand dollars. If I go to a dentist, the first thing I ask them is if they love dentistry. If they do not love dentistry, I am gone. You do not want a dentist that drills through the side of your mouth. Culture is the Enemy of Consciousness We are now going to take this another step. You have heard me say that culture is the enemy of consciousness. Now I am going to ask you this: What would you do right now, if you were completely free from the need to please and meet the expectations of your culture? 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 18

20 I am Chinese and therefore I have to be this way. I am an American born and bred, red blooded, and that means I have to be this way. I am Latino and therefore I need to be a certain way. What if you were free from all those expectations? How do you really want to be? Just the fact that you happen to be born in a certain culture is a gift. There are many wonderful things that you can gain from any culture. Would your culture have given you many wonderful things? Yes, your culture may be a particularly passionate culture. That would be terrific because you could express your passion more freely. Your particular culture may be a highly disciplined culture in which case it may be easier for you because you are used to it to discipline yourself to get certain things done. You want to take the good things from it but you also want to be free from its expectations. What is giving you stress just because it is part of your culture? 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 19

21 What are you doing just out of cultural duty? Leaving the rat race is a shift from doing things out of duty to doing things out of desire and passion. This year I finally gave up something that I never thought I would give up because I always thought it was good exercise. I do not mow my lawn anymore. I do not have time for that and I do not want to rush down from the cabin just to mow the lawn. There are places in America where the mowing of the lawn is a big cultural ceremony. But this does not mean I have to take part in it. I hire my neighbors boys to mow the lawn, and they do a beautiful job. They love the money and I am contributing to their industry. My grandmother that was not very much into the grass but she would raise the most beautiful roses in her garden. She did not care anything about the grass. The grass was always a disaster but the roses were always beautiful. In the summer, we could go out, cut a dozen roses a day for the dinner table, and never run out of 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 20

22 roses. She kept that passion until the day that she died. Her next-door neighbor, who was even more passionate about roses, was the first person to succeed in creating a purple rose. Being Number One A couple of years ago I was at Book Expo America (BEA). Every year the who s who of book the world shows up 60,000 people in the book trade, plus lots of authors and filmmakers. I have become close friends with Larry Kirshbaum, who was the head of Time- Warner for many years and now has his own literary agency. He was walking with Jack Welsh, who at the time was CEO of General Electric. Larry said, Mark, you have to meet Jack. We shook hands and I told Jack Welch, I have always wanted to meet you and I think the world of you. I own stock in GE and I just want to tell you that you have made me a very rich man. He said, Mark, I haven t ever met you before, how did I make you a rich man? I said, Your credo is very simple. In any business category that GE enters, you are either be number one or number two or you get out. And every one of my books is either number one or 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 21

23 number two. Most of them are number one. I ve had 58 of them on the New York Times Bestseller list. He told me, I have 15 grandkids. For Christmas every one of them got your books, and I never thought I would meet you. Can I please get your signature? And I thought Jack Welch is asking for my signature. Is that cool or what? The thing you need to understand about being number one is it can be a narrow niche, but when you aim and play at that level, it gives you freedom to set your own terms. I have been number one in Guinness book of World Records for selling 50 million books a year, but now I want to sell a billion books to get in the Guinness book of records. One of my friends runs the Guinness Book of World Records, and I had him talk to the 60 or 70 people I had with me at the BEA. He said Every one of you should have as one of your goals to be in the Guinness Book of Records. Pick your narrow niche. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 22

24 There are narrow niches that no one has ever touched. I hope you intend to be in the Guinness Book of Records as number one in something. Or number one in anything. Let me give you the key to become number one. It is very doable because it is evolutionary. Each day, be better in what you were doing than you were the previous day. Pick whatever it is and just improve it each day. Make it a better event, or a greater opportunity. I had a really great experience with this when I started out playing baseball at the age of six. I was the most pathetic baseball player you will ever have an opportunity to see or not see. They had those things you could put the baseball on, the batting tee. The ball would be teed up on that and not even moving towards you and I would swing at it and miss. But at the age of 16, of all the original team members I was the best. This is a pretty good story for me because I had gone from being the worse to the best. But the only reason I had become the best was because I was the only one on the team still playing baseball. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 23

25 Benny Goodman was once asked what the secret to being a good clarinet player was. He said the secret was easy, Keep playing. If you keep playing in that field and you keep going after it over and over and over long enough, eventually you will be number one. This will create options for you so you can really set up your situation any way you want. You Will Know the Technology and the Technology Will Set You Free We live in a world where technology is so empowering and freeing to us. It gives us choices of times, destinations, locations and modalities of work that have never been available before in human history. I run a hedge fund company and as many of you know we are headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. We have offices in Zurich, London, Hong Kong, New York, and Sydney. This is possible only because we have the technology that allows us to communicate with each other 24/7 and 365 days a year. Otherwise it would 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 24

26 never work and there would be no way to hold it together. One hundred years ago you could not have a business like that, because there was no way to communicate. It just could not be done. Rethink the concept of an office. An office is not a location. Everyone thinks that office is location, but it does not have anything to do with location. Office is a concept of how people are connected so they work together. Today your office can be your cell phone, your computer, and you file and it can go with you. I carry mine with me and while I am flying tomorrow I will have my office with me. Some people s office is the back seat of a private jet. Some people s office is on a cruise ship. Some peoples is their living room, some in the suite of a major hotel, some in the library, we had an office for a week at a 1,400 square meter villa over the water in the Maldives. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 25

27 Offices are totally flexible concepts, because technology allows us to communicate seamlessly. Offices used to exist because they were places where people could be together and communicate to solve problems. Now there are a hundred other ways to do that. So rethink the office concept. Overcoming Gadget-itis The flip side of this is being very careful to avoid gadget-itis. That can drive you further into the rat race, rather than pull you out of the rat race. Gadget-itis will kill you. I see it everywhere I go these days. I think we all worship the cell phone. I have seen people run through solid brick walls to get to a ringing cell phone on the other side. Just because your phone is ringing does not mean that you have to answer it. The fact that you feel that you have to respond immediately to anything that is demanding your attention is probably one of the number one key signs that you are stuck right in the middle of the rat race. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 26

28 Get your friends to help you with this. Have them call you and sit there in front of that phone and do not pick it up. You need to practice that stuff so that when you are doing something that phone does not get answered. When I am working on something important I turn off my connection between my computer and the internet. You can send me messages all day long and I am not even going to know about it. If I am doing important writing or planning I am not going to let something interrupt me just because it can. Some people spend time trying to understand the specs of the latest device that has come out. They buy it and they do not know how to use it when they have a perfectly good unit in front of them that they could have continued to use for productivity but they like the new shiny one, so they buy it. They buy a new one every six months, sit, scratch their heads, and wonder how to use it.! That is a whole other form of the rat race. It s the idea that you have to have the latest and best technology in order to feel special. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 27

29 The Sabbatical Year The idea of a sabbatical is an ancient idea that goes way back and says that you have to eventually rest. Everything that gets used must be refreshed. You need to do that on a periodic basis. In the quality movement it is called Total Preventive Maintenance (TPM), that says you need to fix a machine before it breaks, because if you take it to the point where it breaks, guess what? It is really expensive to get it fixed. I had a friend who used to have a Volkswagen bug, it was the first car I learned to drive a stick shift on, and it was a very old vehicle and they had not paid much attention to Total Preventive Maintenance. One day while he was driving over to my house, one of the fan belts broke. It whipped over and hit the fuel line. Fuel spilled out over the engine and burnt the entire engine. What is the difference between replacing your entire engine and replacing the fan belt? 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 28

30 Think about that for a minute one fan belt or one automobile. Which do you prefer? In life you can take your choice. The problem with the rat race is that we are so busy chasing that we are not doing the Total Preventive Maintenance. Then we deceive ourselves into believing that we are so busy that we can t do the refreshing of something that has been used. The principle is: if it is used, it must be refreshed. Nature tried to teach us this by making us go to sleep once a day. That is the original sabbatical. You have to get adequate sleep, so that you are refreshed, so that you can go back and are productive and useful again. One of the ancient things that our ancestors taught us was to get rest at least once a week, where you get away from the work, so that your mind can refresh and you can go back with new ideas and fresh approaches. You also might want to start thinking about things. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 29

31 Mark Vlikes to take sabbatical months. He will work really hard and then he will schedule a month in which he says, Nope, I m not taking the phone with me, I m not taking the computer with me and I m going away from it all. I can refresh that which has been used, which is my mind, my body, and my creativity. I can come back and create things three times faster after I m back, instead of trying to plod through the month with onethird of the speed. You might even want to start thinking about what happens in universities. Maybe in one year out of every seven you say, Okay, I given everything I had. Now I am going to refresh what has been used. I took a sabbatical year. I built up a company for seven years, then sold it. I was pretty burnt out, and it was time to take a sabbatical year to refresh everything. During that year I created the next seven years of my life. A well of creativity, friendships, and all kinds of things flowed to me in the next seven years, because I had taken the time to refresh what had been used. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 30

32 A sabbatical does not mean doing nothing. You are actively involved in refreshment. You are actively involved in renewing. You are actively doing those things that will engage you so that you can move to the next level. Also, part of the time you want to be actively involved in sitting still. Do your meditation. Do those things that will renew, that will refresh, and that will cause you to be a better person. That is putting you in a state of living relaxation, instead of dead relaxation. If you look at something that is dead, the difference between something that is dead and something that is alive is that the dead thing has no intention in it. But you can sit in a totally relaxed state that is alive, because there is still intention and intelligence flowing through your body. There is no rush, because you have the whole year off. The next step to getting out of the rat race is very simple. Slow down. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 31

33 One of the key factors of the rat race is the need for everything to be fast. This causes problems for your physiology, your mentality, and your spirituality. Once in a while you just need to breathe. You need to be able to take that hour for yourself. Slowing down is a way of speeding up. Look at some of the challenges in your life, and set a minimum time that you are going to spend on them instead of a maximum time that you are going to spend on them. You may have said, I have five minutes to do this, I have ten minutes to do this. Instead. you should say, I am going to spend at least forty-five minutes having dinner tonight. You are thinking, How do you spend forty-five minutes on dinner at night? I have never done it before. You have to tell the waiter to bring stuff slowly. Then, you bring somebody that you like to talk to and you have a leisurely conversation over a leisurely dinner. You get them to light a really lovely candle on the table, and start out with your fresh juice, and say, No, we don t need the rest of the food yet. We are enjoying our conversation. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 32

34 Let me tell you what not to do: Get up early in the morning. You shave. You drive to work. You are on the cell phone all of the time. You are answering all of those s. You run to the meeting. You are working all day long, and you work until seven at night. You go home, and what do you do? You grab a pizza. You throw it in the microwave. You go over to the TV. You turn it on, and you fall asleep. You get up the next morning, and you go from couch potato to work. That is not what we are talking about. That is not it. Slowing Down Remember the words of Stu Mittleman: If you want to learn to run fast, you have to learn how to run slowly. If some of you are having troubles with this, one of the things that I will highly recommend to you is the practice of yoga, which is, in its best forms, the practice of not rushing. A rushed workout means absolutely nothing. Yesterday I received a love letter from my oldest daughter. She had just finished transcribing one of the 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 33

35 tapes, and it moved her. She sent us this wonderful letter. Would you like me to share the essence of what she said? She said, Dad, I ve been a pain to you in life. I have changed. I now have six children. I have changed. That story you told about us moving to another city was about me, and how it had a huge negative impact on my life. That is in my past now. I want you to know that I love my children. I am committed to being the best mother I can be and I deeply appreciate the model you set by who you have become in my life. What did I do? What could be the refreshing thing that you could do in that situation to change the speed of your life? Write a letter back. Send it snail mail. I took the time to do it. For me, this was totally refreshing and meaningful. And it was outside the rat race. Fly Be Free! One last thought. I am leaving the rat race. Sometimes to leave the rat race, you have to leave. We used to have a TV show called Mork and Mindy, in which Robin 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 34

36 Williams picks up an egg, throws it in the air and says, Fly! Be free! Sometimes, you are going to have to get up and move, because if the location that you are in is so deeply anchored and rooted into the rat race for you, maybe the company that you are with right now is so deeply rooted in the rat race, that going there just sucks you back in. It may be the community that you are in that is so rushed and hurried, that you may just have to get up and leave. I had a friend who used to live very close to me in Tokyo. Tokyo was a great place for me, but it sucked him into the rat race. Sometimes it affects different people in different ways. It is not that this place is good and that place is bad, it is that different places affect different people in different ways. He realized one day that it was not working for him. He said, You know what? I cannot do this anymore. I need to be in a different place, or I am going to be sucked into the rat race for the rest of my life. 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 35

37 He moved to Christchurch, New Zealand. He pictured his life, and said, I want a place that looks out over the ocean. He found the only lot in all of Christchurch, New Zealand that has panoramic views looking out across to the national forest, so he cannot see one thing made by man from his picture windows. Will that help get you out of the rat race? Yes. Sometimes, you may only need to move for short periods of time. Sometimes you need to move your situation completely. Sometimes you just need to physically get out into another location that is slower or different paced and moving into a different vibe. You may need to get out into nature once a week, where the rhythm of nature is governing your rhythm, instead of the rhythm of a worrying clock or a worrying machine. Remember that first principle we taught you: You can have your life any way you want it. It is true. This includes the physical surroundings. This includes how you design your life. It includes the clothes you wear. It includes your look or appearance. Sometimes, you just 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 36

38 need to change your appearance move the part onto either side of the head, get a new shirt or haircut. Do something. Dress elegantly. I find that putting on a tuxedo shifts my emotion dramatically, because you feel elegant and refined. Nobody thinks of someone running around in a tuxedo saying, I have to do this! I have to do this! I have 58 other tasks that I need to do today! Do something that gives you that feeling of freedom. Or just do nothing for a while. The choice is always yours. You can leave the rat race. You can win! With best wishes, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, Mark Victor Hansen 2007, James Skinner, Roice Krueger, and Mark Victor Hansen, All rights reserved. 37