– He was an American self-help author
and motivational speaker.
His first book, The Erroneous Zone,
is one of the best-selling books of all time,
with over 35 million copies sold worldwide.
He spent most of his early life,
up until the age of ten,
in an orphanage on the East Side of Detroit,
after his father walked out on his family.
He’s Wayne Dyer and here are
his top ten rules for success.
(explosion)
– You can’t give away
what you don’t have.
Now it sounds ridiculous, okay?
But it’s more than what meets the ear as you hear this,
you can’t give away what you don’t have.
People who are not good at giving away love,
can’t give away love
because they don’t have it to give away.
If I want to give you a dozen oranges,
I can’t give you those dozen oranges
unless I go out and pick up 12 oranges someplace.
Otherwise all it is is just empty rhetoric,
and the same thing is true of
virtually everything in your life.
You can’t give away love for others,
if you don’t have love in here to give away.
If what you have in here is contempt,
if what you have in here is anger,
if what you have in here is fear,
then these are the things you’re going
to be giving away in your life.
The second thing that the ego teaches us is that
who I am is not only what I have,
but who I am is what I do, what I accomplish.
And so we spend a big hunk of our lives,
believing that the way that we become quote successful,
happy, fulfilled, self-extolized,
whatever it might be,
is on the basis of what I accomplish,
what my resume looks like,
how many promotions I get,
and so we send our children off to school,
and we ask them to learn,
to identify themselves on how much they get
and what they accomplish.
Your grades become more important
than what it is that you are studying.
What you own, what clothes you wear,
what labels you have, and so on,
and we become obsessed with this kind of absurdity,
and this is the false self at work.
There are many ways to get the things
that we want for ourselves in our lives,
but basically it all begins with
how we choose to think.
As you think,
so shall you be.
Seven little words that I think are perhaps
the most important things that we can
learn and master in our lives.
This old proverb notion
that I become what I think about all day long,
and once you know that what you think about
is what expands,
you start getting real careful about what you think about.
You don’t allow your thoughts to be on
anything that you don’t want,
or that you wouldn’t want to have manifest
or show up for you in your life.
Have a mind that is open to everything
and attached to nothing.
One of the central principles of my life
is that no-one knows enough
to be a pessimist about anything,
and that each and every one of us,
when we close our mind to what is possible for us,
or what is possible for humanity,
closes off the genius
that resides and lives in each and every one of us.
Having an open mind doesn’t necessarily mean
finding fault with all of the things
that you have been taught by others.
It means opening yourself up to
the potentiality and the possibility
that anything and everything is possible,
so having a mind that is open to everything
and attached to nothing,
really means finding within ourselves
the ability to get rid of a trait
that I find so common in the contemporary world.
Do you know that most people that I meet
spend their lives
looking for occasions
to be offended?
They actually are out there hoping
that they can find some reason to be offended,
and there’s no shortage of reasons,
they’re out there everywhere.
The way this person dressed, what this person said,
they turned on their TV, they hear the news,
they’re offended by this,
someone used language that they didn’t like,
someone doesn’t share the same customs that you–
and people all day long–
in fact, if you keep track tomorrow,
you will find probably a hundred reasons
that you can go around being offended,
but a mind that is open to everything
and attached to nothing is a mind that says,
“I’m never looking for anything to be offended by.”
And that whatever anybody else out there has to say,
my response to that is,
“That’s an interesting point of view.”
“I’ve never considered that before.
When you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change.
Albert Einstein once observed that
you have the most fundamental and major decision
that you have to make in your life is this.
Do I live in a friendly
or a hostile universe?
Which is it?
Is it a universe that is filled with hostility
and anger and people wanting to hate each other,
and people wanting to kill each other,
is that what you see?
Because when you see the world that way,
that’s exactly what you will
create for yourself in your life.
This is from great scientific minds,
and the interesting thing is that
this is not just a clever play on words,
that when you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change.
It’s actually a very scientific thing
and I’m going to show you that in just a moment.
I’d like you to imagine the following scene;
you’re in your house,
you’ve got your car keys in your hand,
the lights go out, power failure.
You can’t see a thing,
you stumble around in your living room,
and you drop your keys,
and you look around for a moment,
and you realize that you’re never going
to find them in the dark.
But you look outside,
and you notice that the street lights are on,
so in your mind a light bulb goes off.
Hmm.
I’m not going to sit around here in the dark
and grope around looking for my keys,
when there’s a light on outside,
I’m going to go out here under the street light,
and I’m going to look for my keys.
(audience laughter)
Why are you laughing?
This makes a lot of sense.
So you’re out here and you’re groping around,
and you’re looking for your keys,
and you’re looking and looking,
and your neighbor comes along and says,
“What happened, Wayne?”
“Well, I dropped my keys.”
“Well, I’ll help you look for them.”
And the two of us are now down here
looking for our keys,
we’re looking and finally he says to me,
“Excuse me, but where did you drop your keys?”
“Well, I dropped them in the house.”
(audience laughter)
He said, “You mean to tell me that you”
“dropped your keys in the house,”
“and you’re looking for them out here in the street?”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
And I said, “Well, it doesn’t make any sense
“to grope around in the dark when there’s light out here.”
Now you laugh, and you think how silly that is,
but isn’t that exactly what we do
when we have a problem, a difficulty, a struggle,
that is located inside,
and we’re looking for the solution outside?
Someplace outside of ourselves.
It would be like going to the doctor
and telling him all of your symptoms,
and the doctor says,
“Oh boy, you’ve got a lot of symptoms.”
And he starts writing out prescriptions.
“You need a prescription for this symptom,”
“You need a prescription for that symptom.”
And finally he gets this four or five,
and you go to walk out, and you say,
“Well, I’d like my prescriptions.”
He says, “No, no, no.”
“I’ll give this one to your mother-in-law,”
“And I’ll give this one to your neighbor,”
“And I’ll give this one to your daughter,”
“And I’ll give this one to your father.”
I mean, you’re the one with the struggle, the difficulties,
and expecting somebody else to change,
or something outside of you to get better,
in order for you to make your life work
at this level that I’m calling intention,
is something you have to really take a hard look at.
It’s in here.
I used to say that before I had children,
I had eight theories about how to raise children.
(audience laughter)
And now I have eight children,
and no theories.
But one of the things I know about children,
is that
no-one likes being told what to do.
And this isn’t just children, this is all of us.
One of my favorite songs,
it’s a song from when I was back in high school,
♫ Oh give me land, lots of land
♫ And the starry skies above
♫ Don’t fence me in
Boy, you know it. (audience laughter)
Don’t fence me in.
Don’t restrict me.
Don’t put boundaries on me,
don’t tell me what I can do and what I can’t do,
don’t tell me how to be there,
don’t tell me what to wear,
what to think,
don’t tell me even how to do yoga,
don’t tell me, I don’t want to be told.
This is the soul speaking, always.
The soul
is constantly having
a desire to expand and grow,
and anything or anyone that comes into your life
that attempts to do that,
you will find yourself fighting it and reaching back.
There are no justified resentments.
And this is a very difficult principle
for many people to get,
but one that I believe very strongly in.
I was in a group one time,
of drug addicts and alcoholics,
and I was one of the people that was
a sponsor and leading this group,
and the sign on the wall said,
“There are no justified resentments in this group.”
And what I said to that group that night,
was, “No matter what anybody says to you here,”
“no matter what kind of anger comes directed towards you,”
“no matter how much hate you may encounter”
“showing up in your life,”
“there are no justified resentments.”
Meaning that if you carry around resentment
inside of you about anything or about anything,
and I’m talking about the person
that you lent money to and hasn’t paid you back,
I’m talking about the person in your life
that you feel was abusive in your life,
I’m talking about the person who walked out on you
and left you for somebody else,
I’m talking about all of the things
that you have justified in your heart and in your life,
that you have the right to be resentful about,
and I’m suggesting to you that those resentments
will always end up harming you,
and creating in you a sense of despair.
I’ve often said that
no one ever dies from a snake bite.
The snake bite will never kill you.
You cannot be un-bitten,
once you’re bitten, you’re bitten.
But it’s the venom that continues
to pour through your system after the bite,
that will end up destroying you.
In my mind, as I think about this idea
of getting what you really want,
and being able to attract it into your life,
what we have to look at is basically
the obstacles that we have conditioned ourselves–
and you notice I say that we have conditioned ourselves,
because I have never believed that we need
to be putting the responsibility on someone else.
If you’re conditioned it’s because
you have allowed yourself to become that.
And if we conditioned ourselves to believe
certain kinds of things,
and one of the things that we believe and hang on to,
and live with is this whole idea that
all of the things that happened to me in my past
are what are keeping me from doing
what I’d like to do today.
So we hang on to these things
and we fill ourselves with blame,
you say, “I’m the middle child.”
“I’m the youngest child, I’m the oldest child.”
“I’m an only child.”
Any one of those is a great excuse,
if you’re the youngest child you can say,
“Well how could I be making decisions for myself”
“and be a fully-functioning person today,”
“when I always had somebody else telling me”
“what to do my whole life?”
“How could I think for myself?”
If you’re the oldest child you can simply say to yourself,
“Well, how could I be expected to think for myself,”
“I always had to think for somebody else,”
“I was always doing it for somebody else.”
And that leave the middle child,
the classic identity crisis, oh poor me.
“My mother didn’t even know my name.”
(audience laughter)
“She was always calling me by this one’s name,”
“or that one’s name.” (audience laughter)
“So I don’t know where I fit in.”
So that takes care of everybody except the only child,
and of course the only child–
Hmm, well.
Your parents looked at you and said,
“We won’t be doing that again.”
Right? (audience laughter)
You have to live with that, I don’t, alright?
So everybody, with their birth order,
or with their mother liked their sister better,
or that we had enough, or we didn’t have enough,
or we had too much, or we lived in the North,
we lived in the South, I’m too tall,
I’m too short, I’ve got too much hair,
I don’t have enough hair. (audience laughter)
It’s falling out, it’s not falling out,
whatever it is, we all have these excuses,
and I call all of these things that we hang on to
and use to keep ourselves from reaching
these higher places in our lives,
the wake.
I call it the wake.
And the wake
comes from a story that I heard Alan Watts tell one time,
and it was a very powerful story.
He said your life is like a boat,
and it’s heading up the river at, say 40 knots, alright?
And as it’s going,
you are somehow able to metaphorically stand on the stern,
the back of the boat, and look down into the water.
Now there goes your life in this direction,
and you’re standing here and you’re
looking down into the water,
and you ask yourself these three questions:
The first question,
what is the wake?
What is it, what is this thing that you see?
And the answer?
The wake is the trail that is left behind.
That’s what it is.
Nothing more, nothing less,
it’s the trail that is left behind.
Second question to ask yourself in this little metaphor,
what’s driving the boat?
What’s making this thing go in this direction?
The answer?
The present moment energy
that’s being generated by the engine,
and nothing more.
That’s the only thing that’s making
the boat go in this direction,
and in this little scene,
this means it’s the present moment thoughts that I have
and how I am using them that is making
my life go in this direction, and nothing more.
Because the third question is
the most important and powerful question.
And ever since I heard it,
I’ve always thought about this whenever I have
a tendency to look back here and blame something.
Is it possible for the wake to drive the boat?
That is, can a trail that is left behind
make a boat go in this direction?
And of course the answer to that is no.
It can’t, it’s just a trail that is left behind,
and in that trail there are an enormous number of things,
and every one of us has a wake.
And we have a whole lot of stuff in it,
and one of the problems that we have,
is that we have a tendency to
look at the wake and all of the stuff that’s in it,
to explain why it is my life isn’t working
the way I would like it to work.
So this was something that Portia Nelson,
who I knew, who passed away a few years back,
ten years back now, she lived up in Seattle,
and she was at a seminar and they were asked
to write the autobiography of their life
in five verses, five chapters.
And they gave them only cards this size,
actually they were smaller than this.
They were 3×5 cards,
so write out Chapter One of your life,
and just go to where you are today.
And I remember doing this very same thing,
but what she wrote was so brilliant,
that I asked her daughter if we could
put it on public television, which I did,
on the most recent show,
and we made a contribution to Portia’s work.
So this is what she wrote down in
the Chapter Five of her life:
Chapter One,
she said I walk down the street,
there’s a deep hole in the sidewalk,
I fall in,
I’m lost,
I’m helpless.
It isn’t my fault,
and it takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter Two of my life,
I walk down the same street,
there’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it. (audience laughter)
I fall in again. (audience laughter)
I can’t believe I’m in the same place.
It isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time for me to get out.
Chapter Three of my life,
I walk down the same street,
there’s a deep hole in the sidewalk, I see it there.
I still fall in,
it’s a habit,
but my eyes are open,
I know where I am,
and it is my own fault,
and I get out immediately.
Chapter Four of my life,
I walk down the same street,
there’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter Five of my life,
finally I walk down another street.
Isn’t that great? (laughter and applause)
The next principle I call,
don’t die with your music still in you.
And who better to quote than Theroux,
right here in Concorde,
When he talked about some of us hear a different drummer?
And we must march to the music that we hear.
But all of you, everybody watching,
everybody here in this beautiful parish.
All of you have some music playing,
and all of you have a heroic mission.
There’s no accidents in this universe,
we all show up here with a purpose.
There’s an intelligence that is
a part of everything and everyone,
and all of us are connected to it.
And too many of us
are afraid to listen to that music and march to it.
You out there,
I know you have a book you wanted to write.
I know there’s a composition you wanted to compose,
I know there’s a song you want to sing someplace.
Maybe you want to raise horses out in Montana,
or maybe you want to open up an ice cream shop on Cape Cod.
Who knows what it may be?
Maybe you just want to travel and see the world.
Maybe you want to go into a relationship
with someone but you’ve been afraid to,
but your heart says it’s the right thing to do.
All of us feel something,
and in Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel, The Death of Ivan Ilych,
he asked this question, that would be terrifying to me.
He says, as he has his accountant from Moscow
lying on his deathbed,
contemplating the horror of this question:
“What if my whole life has been wrong?”
I’ve known what my music is.
It’s playing right now,
as I stand here in front of you
with these cameras and in this place,
and as I sit down and write my books
and tell the world what I know are my truths,
I feel always completely on-purpose and fulfilled.
And no time will I ever come to the end of my life
and say, “What if my whole life has been wrong?”
Whoever you are, whatever that music is,
however distant it may sound,
however strange, however weird
others may interpret it to be,
don’t get to the end of your life
and know that you’re going to leave
and not have it played yet.
Don’t die with your music still in you.
– Thank you so much for watching,
I made this video because Jason Han,
video man Jason Han asked me to,
so if there’s a famous entrepreneur
that you want me to profile next,
leave it in the comments below
and I’ll see what I can do.
I’d also love to know which of Wayne’s top ten rules
meant the most to you,
leave it in the comments,
I’m going to join in the discussion.
Thank you so much for watching,
continue to believe and I’ll see you soon.
(explosion)
and motivational speaker.
His first book, The Erroneous Zone,
is one of the best-selling books of all time,
with over 35 million copies sold worldwide.
He spent most of his early life,
up until the age of ten,
in an orphanage on the East Side of Detroit,
after his father walked out on his family.
He’s Wayne Dyer and here are
his top ten rules for success.
(explosion)
– You can’t give away
what you don’t have.
Now it sounds ridiculous, okay?
But it’s more than what meets the ear as you hear this,
you can’t give away what you don’t have.
People who are not good at giving away love,
can’t give away love
because they don’t have it to give away.
If I want to give you a dozen oranges,
I can’t give you those dozen oranges
unless I go out and pick up 12 oranges someplace.
Otherwise all it is is just empty rhetoric,
and the same thing is true of
virtually everything in your life.
You can’t give away love for others,
if you don’t have love in here to give away.
If what you have in here is contempt,
if what you have in here is anger,
if what you have in here is fear,
then these are the things you’re going
to be giving away in your life.
The second thing that the ego teaches us is that
who I am is not only what I have,
but who I am is what I do, what I accomplish.
And so we spend a big hunk of our lives,
believing that the way that we become quote successful,
happy, fulfilled, self-extolized,
whatever it might be,
is on the basis of what I accomplish,
what my resume looks like,
how many promotions I get,
and so we send our children off to school,
and we ask them to learn,
to identify themselves on how much they get
and what they accomplish.
Your grades become more important
than what it is that you are studying.
What you own, what clothes you wear,
what labels you have, and so on,
and we become obsessed with this kind of absurdity,
and this is the false self at work.
There are many ways to get the things
that we want for ourselves in our lives,
but basically it all begins with
how we choose to think.
As you think,
so shall you be.
Seven little words that I think are perhaps
the most important things that we can
learn and master in our lives.
This old proverb notion
that I become what I think about all day long,
and once you know that what you think about
is what expands,
you start getting real careful about what you think about.
You don’t allow your thoughts to be on
anything that you don’t want,
or that you wouldn’t want to have manifest
or show up for you in your life.
Have a mind that is open to everything
and attached to nothing.
One of the central principles of my life
is that no-one knows enough
to be a pessimist about anything,
and that each and every one of us,
when we close our mind to what is possible for us,
or what is possible for humanity,
closes off the genius
that resides and lives in each and every one of us.
Having an open mind doesn’t necessarily mean
finding fault with all of the things
that you have been taught by others.
It means opening yourself up to
the potentiality and the possibility
that anything and everything is possible,
so having a mind that is open to everything
and attached to nothing,
really means finding within ourselves
the ability to get rid of a trait
that I find so common in the contemporary world.
Do you know that most people that I meet
spend their lives
looking for occasions
to be offended?
They actually are out there hoping
that they can find some reason to be offended,
and there’s no shortage of reasons,
they’re out there everywhere.
The way this person dressed, what this person said,
they turned on their TV, they hear the news,
they’re offended by this,
someone used language that they didn’t like,
someone doesn’t share the same customs that you–
and people all day long–
in fact, if you keep track tomorrow,
you will find probably a hundred reasons
that you can go around being offended,
but a mind that is open to everything
and attached to nothing is a mind that says,
“I’m never looking for anything to be offended by.”
And that whatever anybody else out there has to say,
my response to that is,
“That’s an interesting point of view.”
“I’ve never considered that before.
When you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change.
Albert Einstein once observed that
you have the most fundamental and major decision
that you have to make in your life is this.
Do I live in a friendly
or a hostile universe?
Which is it?
Is it a universe that is filled with hostility
and anger and people wanting to hate each other,
and people wanting to kill each other,
is that what you see?
Because when you see the world that way,
that’s exactly what you will
create for yourself in your life.
This is from great scientific minds,
and the interesting thing is that
this is not just a clever play on words,
that when you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change.
It’s actually a very scientific thing
and I’m going to show you that in just a moment.
I’d like you to imagine the following scene;
you’re in your house,
you’ve got your car keys in your hand,
the lights go out, power failure.
You can’t see a thing,
you stumble around in your living room,
and you drop your keys,
and you look around for a moment,
and you realize that you’re never going
to find them in the dark.
But you look outside,
and you notice that the street lights are on,
so in your mind a light bulb goes off.
Hmm.
I’m not going to sit around here in the dark
and grope around looking for my keys,
when there’s a light on outside,
I’m going to go out here under the street light,
and I’m going to look for my keys.
(audience laughter)
Why are you laughing?
This makes a lot of sense.
So you’re out here and you’re groping around,
and you’re looking for your keys,
and you’re looking and looking,
and your neighbor comes along and says,
“What happened, Wayne?”
“Well, I dropped my keys.”
“Well, I’ll help you look for them.”
And the two of us are now down here
looking for our keys,
we’re looking and finally he says to me,
“Excuse me, but where did you drop your keys?”
“Well, I dropped them in the house.”
(audience laughter)
He said, “You mean to tell me that you”
“dropped your keys in the house,”
“and you’re looking for them out here in the street?”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
And I said, “Well, it doesn’t make any sense
“to grope around in the dark when there’s light out here.”
Now you laugh, and you think how silly that is,
but isn’t that exactly what we do
when we have a problem, a difficulty, a struggle,
that is located inside,
and we’re looking for the solution outside?
Someplace outside of ourselves.
It would be like going to the doctor
and telling him all of your symptoms,
and the doctor says,
“Oh boy, you’ve got a lot of symptoms.”
And he starts writing out prescriptions.
“You need a prescription for this symptom,”
“You need a prescription for that symptom.”
And finally he gets this four or five,
and you go to walk out, and you say,
“Well, I’d like my prescriptions.”
He says, “No, no, no.”
“I’ll give this one to your mother-in-law,”
“And I’ll give this one to your neighbor,”
“And I’ll give this one to your daughter,”
“And I’ll give this one to your father.”
I mean, you’re the one with the struggle, the difficulties,
and expecting somebody else to change,
or something outside of you to get better,
in order for you to make your life work
at this level that I’m calling intention,
is something you have to really take a hard look at.
It’s in here.
I used to say that before I had children,
I had eight theories about how to raise children.
(audience laughter)
And now I have eight children,
and no theories.
But one of the things I know about children,
is that
no-one likes being told what to do.
And this isn’t just children, this is all of us.
One of my favorite songs,
it’s a song from when I was back in high school,
♫ Oh give me land, lots of land
♫ And the starry skies above
♫ Don’t fence me in
Boy, you know it. (audience laughter)
Don’t fence me in.
Don’t restrict me.
Don’t put boundaries on me,
don’t tell me what I can do and what I can’t do,
don’t tell me how to be there,
don’t tell me what to wear,
what to think,
don’t tell me even how to do yoga,
don’t tell me, I don’t want to be told.
This is the soul speaking, always.
The soul
is constantly having
a desire to expand and grow,
and anything or anyone that comes into your life
that attempts to do that,
you will find yourself fighting it and reaching back.
There are no justified resentments.
And this is a very difficult principle
for many people to get,
but one that I believe very strongly in.
I was in a group one time,
of drug addicts and alcoholics,
and I was one of the people that was
a sponsor and leading this group,
and the sign on the wall said,
“There are no justified resentments in this group.”
And what I said to that group that night,
was, “No matter what anybody says to you here,”
“no matter what kind of anger comes directed towards you,”
“no matter how much hate you may encounter”
“showing up in your life,”
“there are no justified resentments.”
Meaning that if you carry around resentment
inside of you about anything or about anything,
and I’m talking about the person
that you lent money to and hasn’t paid you back,
I’m talking about the person in your life
that you feel was abusive in your life,
I’m talking about the person who walked out on you
and left you for somebody else,
I’m talking about all of the things
that you have justified in your heart and in your life,
that you have the right to be resentful about,
and I’m suggesting to you that those resentments
will always end up harming you,
and creating in you a sense of despair.
I’ve often said that
no one ever dies from a snake bite.
The snake bite will never kill you.
You cannot be un-bitten,
once you’re bitten, you’re bitten.
But it’s the venom that continues
to pour through your system after the bite,
that will end up destroying you.
In my mind, as I think about this idea
of getting what you really want,
and being able to attract it into your life,
what we have to look at is basically
the obstacles that we have conditioned ourselves–
and you notice I say that we have conditioned ourselves,
because I have never believed that we need
to be putting the responsibility on someone else.
If you’re conditioned it’s because
you have allowed yourself to become that.
And if we conditioned ourselves to believe
certain kinds of things,
and one of the things that we believe and hang on to,
and live with is this whole idea that
all of the things that happened to me in my past
are what are keeping me from doing
what I’d like to do today.
So we hang on to these things
and we fill ourselves with blame,
you say, “I’m the middle child.”
“I’m the youngest child, I’m the oldest child.”
“I’m an only child.”
Any one of those is a great excuse,
if you’re the youngest child you can say,
“Well how could I be making decisions for myself”
“and be a fully-functioning person today,”
“when I always had somebody else telling me”
“what to do my whole life?”
“How could I think for myself?”
If you’re the oldest child you can simply say to yourself,
“Well, how could I be expected to think for myself,”
“I always had to think for somebody else,”
“I was always doing it for somebody else.”
And that leave the middle child,
the classic identity crisis, oh poor me.
“My mother didn’t even know my name.”
(audience laughter)
“She was always calling me by this one’s name,”
“or that one’s name.” (audience laughter)
“So I don’t know where I fit in.”
So that takes care of everybody except the only child,
and of course the only child–
Hmm, well.
Your parents looked at you and said,
“We won’t be doing that again.”
Right? (audience laughter)
You have to live with that, I don’t, alright?
So everybody, with their birth order,
or with their mother liked their sister better,
or that we had enough, or we didn’t have enough,
or we had too much, or we lived in the North,
we lived in the South, I’m too tall,
I’m too short, I’ve got too much hair,
I don’t have enough hair. (audience laughter)
It’s falling out, it’s not falling out,
whatever it is, we all have these excuses,
and I call all of these things that we hang on to
and use to keep ourselves from reaching
these higher places in our lives,
the wake.
I call it the wake.
And the wake
comes from a story that I heard Alan Watts tell one time,
and it was a very powerful story.
He said your life is like a boat,
and it’s heading up the river at, say 40 knots, alright?
And as it’s going,
you are somehow able to metaphorically stand on the stern,
the back of the boat, and look down into the water.
Now there goes your life in this direction,
and you’re standing here and you’re
looking down into the water,
and you ask yourself these three questions:
The first question,
what is the wake?
What is it, what is this thing that you see?
And the answer?
The wake is the trail that is left behind.
That’s what it is.
Nothing more, nothing less,
it’s the trail that is left behind.
Second question to ask yourself in this little metaphor,
what’s driving the boat?
What’s making this thing go in this direction?
The answer?
The present moment energy
that’s being generated by the engine,
and nothing more.
That’s the only thing that’s making
the boat go in this direction,
and in this little scene,
this means it’s the present moment thoughts that I have
and how I am using them that is making
my life go in this direction, and nothing more.
Because the third question is
the most important and powerful question.
And ever since I heard it,
I’ve always thought about this whenever I have
a tendency to look back here and blame something.
Is it possible for the wake to drive the boat?
That is, can a trail that is left behind
make a boat go in this direction?
And of course the answer to that is no.
It can’t, it’s just a trail that is left behind,
and in that trail there are an enormous number of things,
and every one of us has a wake.
And we have a whole lot of stuff in it,
and one of the problems that we have,
is that we have a tendency to
look at the wake and all of the stuff that’s in it,
to explain why it is my life isn’t working
the way I would like it to work.
So this was something that Portia Nelson,
who I knew, who passed away a few years back,
ten years back now, she lived up in Seattle,
and she was at a seminar and they were asked
to write the autobiography of their life
in five verses, five chapters.
And they gave them only cards this size,
actually they were smaller than this.
They were 3×5 cards,
so write out Chapter One of your life,
and just go to where you are today.
And I remember doing this very same thing,
but what she wrote was so brilliant,
that I asked her daughter if we could
put it on public television, which I did,
on the most recent show,
and we made a contribution to Portia’s work.
So this is what she wrote down in
the Chapter Five of her life:
Chapter One,
she said I walk down the street,
there’s a deep hole in the sidewalk,
I fall in,
I’m lost,
I’m helpless.
It isn’t my fault,
and it takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter Two of my life,
I walk down the same street,
there’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it. (audience laughter)
I fall in again. (audience laughter)
I can’t believe I’m in the same place.
It isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time for me to get out.
Chapter Three of my life,
I walk down the same street,
there’s a deep hole in the sidewalk, I see it there.
I still fall in,
it’s a habit,
but my eyes are open,
I know where I am,
and it is my own fault,
and I get out immediately.
Chapter Four of my life,
I walk down the same street,
there’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter Five of my life,
finally I walk down another street.
Isn’t that great? (laughter and applause)
The next principle I call,
don’t die with your music still in you.
And who better to quote than Theroux,
right here in Concorde,
When he talked about some of us hear a different drummer?
And we must march to the music that we hear.
But all of you, everybody watching,
everybody here in this beautiful parish.
All of you have some music playing,
and all of you have a heroic mission.
There’s no accidents in this universe,
we all show up here with a purpose.
There’s an intelligence that is
a part of everything and everyone,
and all of us are connected to it.
And too many of us
are afraid to listen to that music and march to it.
You out there,
I know you have a book you wanted to write.
I know there’s a composition you wanted to compose,
I know there’s a song you want to sing someplace.
Maybe you want to raise horses out in Montana,
or maybe you want to open up an ice cream shop on Cape Cod.
Who knows what it may be?
Maybe you just want to travel and see the world.
Maybe you want to go into a relationship
with someone but you’ve been afraid to,
but your heart says it’s the right thing to do.
All of us feel something,
and in Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel, The Death of Ivan Ilych,
he asked this question, that would be terrifying to me.
He says, as he has his accountant from Moscow
lying on his deathbed,
contemplating the horror of this question:
“What if my whole life has been wrong?”
I’ve known what my music is.
It’s playing right now,
as I stand here in front of you
with these cameras and in this place,
and as I sit down and write my books
and tell the world what I know are my truths,
I feel always completely on-purpose and fulfilled.
And no time will I ever come to the end of my life
and say, “What if my whole life has been wrong?”
Whoever you are, whatever that music is,
however distant it may sound,
however strange, however weird
others may interpret it to be,
don’t get to the end of your life
and know that you’re going to leave
and not have it played yet.
Don’t die with your music still in you.
– Thank you so much for watching,
I made this video because Jason Han,
video man Jason Han asked me to,
so if there’s a famous entrepreneur
that you want me to profile next,
leave it in the comments below
and I’ll see what I can do.
I’d also love to know which of Wayne’s top ten rules
meant the most to you,
leave it in the comments,
I’m going to join in the discussion.
Thank you so much for watching,
continue to believe and I’ll see you soon.
(explosion)
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