And that's today's main topic. What is it about you that obstructs yourself from getting to be where you need to be? What's holding you back from your own success? Let's find out, shall we?

So why do you not do what you should do despite knowing you should do it? Why do you hope and dream for certain successes but generally stop short of achieving them? You start out well-intentioned, working and progressing towards your goals and sabotage yourself along the way every time. Why? Why do you do this?

We set an objective and start working on it. Get about halfway there and crash off a bridge at the halfway point. All right. We live in a state of limbo between who we are and who we want to become, and it is difficult to get out of it. Why are we there? And why is it difficult to leave? What's stopping us?

So the purpose of this video is to show you how to identify and defeat this force once and for all. I'm going to show you that the way society sees the world is distorted, and that it's necessary to change the place you're coming from if you're aiming to really, truly, actually surpass yourself.

So why do you need a new paradigm? You might ask, what's wrong with your current one? Well, allow me to demonstrate. I want to show you an analogy. We'll call the blind man and the elephant. All right. The idea is simple enough. A group of blindfolded, near-plug men, deaf and blind to all intents and purposes. And why not? Let's deprive them of taste and smell while we're at it. They're all standing around an elephant. Okay. They're instructed to reach out and grab the air in front of them. And wouldn't you know it? Sure. They each grab a different part of the elephant. They're asked to guess what they're holding and finding themselves with only one limited means of understanding, they each guess wrong in different ways.

Now, sure, they have the option to lift the blindfolds and unplug their ears, and give what they've got a lick and a sniff. But they're regular Joes all, and for the hoi polloi, minimum information and maximum ignorance is the optimum moment to completely stick to your guns. So the guy at the tusk is sure he's holding a spear. While the guy at the trunk swears he's got a snake in his hands. You're one of those guys right now. And your hotel is the elephant and your ignorance and unwillingness to face it. That's the elephant in the room.

All right. To be wilfully blind is a paradigm. And I'm going to spend a while now suggesting that you try another, okay, to understand the concept of paradigms and to learn to identify and alter your own where necessary, is probably one of the most impactful things it's possible to learn as a human being, never mind a hotelier. All right? And most people don't even know what the word means.

Not everyone sees the world the way you do. The fact is, the differences in how the most successful people on earth think and see the world compared to you, are as vast and expansive enough to fill the Grand Canyon twice over. And in case it feels like I may be serving you hamburger dressed as steak, let me personalise it slightly. I did not always fully comprehend these differences and how to overcome them.

My first few steps in this journey were taken in the full ignorance of my school days, and unbeknown to me, they would rock my world in the best way possible. So when I was in California for my MBA in Hotel Management, I was working at the same time as assistant to the Food and Beverage manager in a luxury hotel, the London West Hollywood. At the time, the head chef was Gordon Ramsay, who you might know from his television show Hell's Kitchen. I was in a fairly exciting position. I had loads of responsibilities for someone my age, at least a nice salary, nice flat, small sports car. I was doing well in university as far as I was concerned. I was doing great and on the fast track to a bright future.

And then one day I was invited to spend a weekend in the mansion of a rich businessman in the Hollywood Hills who, for the sake of anonymity, we'll call John. I knew nothing about him, but I was very happy to be there all the same. Having worked the Ritz in Paris previously, then of the Ritz-Carlton chain, and at that point living in Hollywood and working in Beverly Hills with gargantuan houses and luxury cars having become everyday sights to me, let's just say I felt aware, but unmoved by the insane wealth people. Regular humans like you and I can come to possess in the world.

So by this time in my life, I'd lived for many years with the notion that for me, great success meant becoming the general manager of a great hotel. And my thoughts were, if I got to that point, it would be the peak of my career. And so, in a way, the end of that great game I was playing, we call life, let's say. So once I got there, I'd lounge behind the finish line without any thought of another race to run. This was the parameter I'd built around myself and my future prospects, and it was solid as hell for me at that point.

When I arrived to the house, everything was as incredible as you can imagine. Even I was impressed. The site alone must have been worth tens of millions of dollars. With breathtaking views of Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean in the distance, the house itself was tiered and built into the hillside, so this glorious view confronted you at every turn. This picture-like gives you the spirit of the place. Let's say. But just like a phone cover featuring Starry Night by Van Gogh, I'm sure you'll know what I mean when I say you kind of had to be there, I suppose. That was the house we're talking about, right?

So, John, however, the owner, he was dressed down as though to contrast his abode. I could have passed him on the street and taken him as just a regular Joe. He did not look like a millionaire. He was dressed like your typical Californian. So t-shirt, jeans and sneakers. And he was down to earth as all hell. We could have talked about anything under the sun and we did. On the first evening, I noticed that whenever a news report interrupted regular programming, he'd switch off, switch over, or if someone else was watching, he'd simply leave the room without a fuss.

Having noted this behaviour several times over the course of the weekend, I asked him about it and he broke down for me something I've held onto like an heirloom ever since. What he said genuinely changed the way I look at the world, right? He said he had been making a concerted effort for years to not pay attention to anything negative, which did not concern him directly.

Now, at first, not only did I not get it, but I found it fairly irritating. His perspective, not to mention selfish. What just because he was wealthy and powerful, he'd ordered himself somehow above the problems of the world? However, after digesting it a bit, it dawned on me that for all the attention we gave to the wars in the world, it doesn't really help any. You know, his mode of being was an expression of something. I've come to believe wholeheartedly that we each have our own corner of the world to affect and perfect, and there was enough to worry about in that alone, without soaking up the canned negativity from the 24-hour news cycle.

So by focusing only on positives, he had created a kind of a virtuous cycle which not only facilitated his own perpetual improvement, but had visual positive ripple effects on his entourage to boot. He'd become a kind of an engine of positivity by sheer tyranny of will.

I mulled the whole ethos over for a week or so. When I came to the conclusion that he might have something going, especially in terms of improving oneself and one's business. So non-actionable negativity not only wastes brain space, but leaves like a residue that can colour the way you see the world.

What's worse is that with print journalism on its back foot and big media companies becoming increasingly more reliant on clicks to generate revenue, they have in the last few years pushed for more negativity and anger-inducing headlines and content. Because nothing drives clicks like outrages, as we all know. And after that, if you manage to put down your phone for a second, there tends to be, 24-hour news cycles blasting on every second TV you encounter.

Fifty years ago, you might have avoided media negativity by not buying papers and going for a walk or a nap at 6:00 every day, but these days, it needs to be like a very deliberate choice, and it takes no small effort to properly follow through on it.

So suffice to say, I understood it as a philosophy and was fairly impressed. But then when I later learned his hotel empire, there's a hint for you who he is. And it had begun with a three-room guest house. It positively stuck with me and I just needed to know more. So I was lucky enough to meet him several times after that weekend, and I continued to pick his brain. But mostly I just observed him and his many idiosyncrasies, which stood in stark contrast to what most of us

 take for granted as normal. Quite simply, his paradigm was galaxies away from mine, and unbeknown to him, he'd just he'd been the Gandalf to my unexpected journey.

All right. And you guys are lucky. I've taken it for you. And I'm here to share my notes, my conclusions, and hopefully something like a map for your own treasure hunt. And the dragon that needs slaying is the old you. Anyway, I started to question everything. How I lived, how I saw the world, everything back. Working as assistant to the food and beverage manager. Which until recently, I'd seen as fairly close to the top job for me. I began to question everything I'd previously just considered Facts of Life.

I began to imagine my life on the other side of the glass ceiling I'd fitted for myself, that of general manager, and I couldn't separate it from the idea of a total paradigm shift. If John, with his three-room guest house, had built an empire by adopting a different worldview, I figure that's where I'd have to start.

So soon after that, I left California for a general manager position in France and followed up on the promise I made myself. I began to construct a different point of view from which to view the problems of a hotel. Meanwhile, every hotel manager I knew was forever just moaning about OTAs, and I armed with my newfound constructive worldview, began to think about them not as oppressors to bemoan and whinge over, but as like giant established structures waiting to be taken advantage of.

I did a bit of research, and I developed what I call the judoka strategy, which was my answer to all the hotels trying to take the OTAs on directly, like children trying to take down a sumo wrestler. Judoka was my way around and I'll go into that fully a bit later.

Right. The big question, do you think you've any chance of increasing your margins or revenues in your hotel or guest house? Do you think you can generate more direct bookings and therefore pay less commissions to OTAs? I bet you've been thinking about exactly that for some time now. Where are you with it?

I'm asking because most people I've helped in the last few years started out thinking it couldn't be done. They'd figured the internet war was over, that the OTAs had won and the time had come to be good little subjects.

Now, you might think the analogy doesn't apply to you, that you're an outlier, impervious to likelihoods and trends. And I'm afraid I have some bad news for you. The odds are stacked against you, and you're unlikely to overcome them. There's a responsible party and their name is not Ota.

Remember what I said at the start that something is holding you back. What is it? What's the name of the darkness that binds you at the ankles? The invisible wall that keeps you out of Eden? If it was to be personified, you considered them malicious and bitter, and you'd cross the street if you saw them coming. It's them that trips you up at the finish line or distracts you. The night before the final exam, they hid contraband on your person before a police checkpoint and made an anonymous phone call. Who is this saboteur and how do we take them down?

You've probably guessed by now. And if you haven't, well, you've certainly got your work cut out for you. It's you. We all have the reflex to send blame to the next town. It's easy. It means you can carry on doing like you've always done willy nilly, and hopefully the same malevolent forces won't trip you up again. Except you know they will. Because deep down you know who the author of all your own discontent is. And they live in the mirror.

The moment you pop the blame in the post, you pay an opportunity cost. You'll get no receipt for. And it's just another option to self-examine. Gone forever. And I know this because I've been there. I've pointed the finger all around the world before letting it find its way back to myself. I rewrote history time and time again to paint myself as a well-intentioned victim, slighted at the hand of some invented villain or other. Whoever it was, it wasn't me.

But the fact is, it was. And it is. The voices in your head come from you. They are the embodiment of your doubts and your fears, and you and them are in a grand collaboration in the business of forcing errors upon yourself. What keeps you from succeeding? Nay, what keeps you from trying is not a lack of education. Age, your government, your race, your class, your time constraints, your friends, your computer, your jam, the weather. Not one of these things has the power to affect your actions or even your reactions.

That is all on you. And you know it. There's a sizeable amount of things you shake your fist at the sky or your neighbours for that are in fact your own fault. This is the first key fact you've got to inhale and absorb early in this course. And while you might say the stones on this guy with his total lack of sympathy for my plight, well, if you want someone to pat your back and agree with you that life is hard and you did what you could, then go talk to mostly anyone else on earth and that's what you'll get.

People treat people as they'd like to be treated when they drop the ball, and thus the circle of mediocrity continues to roll around on the second tier. While those few who care to see the forest for the trees are printing banknotes up top, people think they want to be comforted. And maybe they do. In the moment where the pang of the most recent failure is still hot on your cheek. But all that kind of reaction assures is that you would be wanting some again soon for something glaringly similar. And in the long run, it's food for suffering.

The last thing the tragic story you're writing about yourself needs is another subplot. The more you add back story to your own woeful parable, the more you're likely to buy into it. It might take a little sting out of it to think that someone else caused your downfall. But I ask you this, do you want to feel better about losing or learn the taste of victory for once? All right, you've got to eat your porridge on this one. Just eat it. You've got to taste it and learn to like it. Let it nourish you.

Look around you at your possessions, the shape you're in, the car you drive, how clean your home is, how much money you earn. The list goes on and on and on. There might be more to you than these things. I certainly hope there is. But that does not change the fact that every single one of them, and beyond good and bad, are direct reflections of you and what you've achieved in life to this point.

It's not unusual to walk through life without a plan or an intention, but the tendency is to wake up one day with a feeling of dissatisfaction. You're not where you thought you'd be by now, and you never even thought it mattered till it started to the gut instinct to blame someone else. But the fact is, there's no power in this. No agency, no autonomy. It's the first step on the road to a bitter end. And the further that direction you get, the harder it will be to come back.

But to realise where you are and where you can go from there early on in the game, not only is there nobility in that, but you're at the only advantage there truly is in the game of life. There's a scene in T.S. Eliot's play The Cocktail Party, where a woman asks a psychiatrist after listing a series of maladies she imagines in herself if he thinks there's something wrong with her, and she says she hopes there is. But which, of course, the psychiatrist is confused, and the woman replies, I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me, because if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself, and that's much more frightening. That would be terrible. So I'd rather believe there is something wrong with me that could be put right.

That's where you need to be. That's where we all need to be. Even if you do see those in the world that need fixing, how well do you think you'll do if you don't fix yourself first?

And the worst part of all this is when we invent. Because that's what it is. Invention. The reasons we're not successful, we render our own success impossible to achieve. How are you going to fix what doesn't exist or is merely a fact of life? You are the one who has your back. It's got to be you. The voices, those experts on what can't be done and shouldn't even be tried. Those are yours, up to them. You stay forever under house arrest in your comfort zone. Which is a perfect place, custom designed to the purpose to achieve absolutely nothing.

In this course, I'll be showing you things, instructing you to do things that those voices will scoff at and tell you. You. It's not necessary or it won't work for you. And in these moments, if you listen to me and take in what I'm telling you, you'll tell them to go get stuffed and we'll go and get something done. You'll have no trouble following Sun Tzu's advice. Know your enemy. Easy peasy. It's you.

Getting to grips with this is essential. The pick you need for the doors you've locked on yourself over the years is the truth in all this, both in your personal and professional lives. If you want to achieve your goals, all of them, even the ones you only have taught out of fear of them never materialising, you need to get back to being the driver. Your mind is a horse and a jockey and that which you think of as you the jockey, while being smaller and weaker, is in fact smarter and must be in control if

 you're going to get anywhere.

The horse wants to chill in the sunshine and eat. You want to win a Grand National and cross the Hindu Kush? Get him in line and don't forget he's from you. He is you head to hooves and back again.

Who you are right now is not who you will be when you achieve what you want to achieve, to become who you want to be, you achieve the goals and aspirations you have for yourself. You will have to change. If you really want to boost your direct bookings, increase your occupancy rates, your revenues and your margins, the first step is to accept that you are your own worst enemy and that getting past yourself is step two.

Nobody doubles their direct bookings overnight. You don't increase your margin by 25 percent with the wave of a magic wand. It just doesn't work like that. You can't achieve your goals by staying the same person you are today. To achieve the success you plan for yourself, you have to become the person to whom that success is not only deserved but owed.

There is no shortage of people who can't get their heads around this as though they are quoting some hotelier. Good book that all insist all you need is good beds, clean rooms and a nice breakfast and a friendly attitude. And this same crowd, even when they know you need a good website to convert visitors into clients, they'll find no shortage of excuses as to why they're not doing what's necessary.

They'll say it's too expensive, or they don't know how, or they're too old, or they don't have the time to do the necessary training or the training is too hard. Not realising, of course, that to anybody else it all just sounds like one of two sentences. Or maybe both. I'm too scared or I'm too lazy.

And just as I'm sure you've heard this crowd and their greatest hits of excuses, I know you'll easily predict what I can identify as the problem from ten miles away. They're unwilling to look inwardly for the reasons their success is stuck on par. If you push them and peel away all the excess onion, they might say, it's just not me. At that point. They're only a step or two away from saying, maybe I need to change me, but those couple steps look like the edge of a cliff. To them. The obstacle is the way and the cliff edge is the opportunity.

People who deserve success tend to get some. You might throw the word luck at me, but we all know that on some level, and particularly when it comes to business, luck is the residue of hard work.

If you haven't gotten the success you want, you probably don't deserve it yet. I'm not saying you're not a deserving person, I'm just saying you're more than likely already getting what you deserve. I'm saying that if you don't get what you want in life, it's a safe assumption that you haven't yet become the person who truly deserves those things you crave so badly.

All right, you must cross the Rubicon at the centre of yourself and evolve so you mark two better you, you and improved. And I'm not saying move town and change your name. Your spouse need not consider you a flight risk. I'm just saying that for a lot of situations, you likely have a book in your head. You've been writing your whole life. A playbook for dilemmas that might feel like a phone book, but most pages are paraphrasing the others. It's the same thing. I want you to toss that book in the bin with a little book of matches and start writing a new one.

These sessions didn't just pop out at random. Everything I'll do here is to a purpose, and if it seems like I'm pushing too hard or overriding the pudding, it's just for emphasis. The sooner you're willing to burn the old field manuals and go rogue with me, the sooner we'll start winning the war guerrilla style. Once you successfully move beyond your comfort zone, once you fall and admit to yourself that you might know absolutely nothing in terms of what you need to, that's when you'll get exponential.

You might be wondering where's the be yourself pep talk I'm used to getting? Why am I being told I'm fine the way I am, and I need to stay true to myself? I'll tell you one of those things. You are probably fine the way you are, and if you're fine with being fine, then by all means, pause me and get gone. Forgive me for thinking you want to be exceptional.

In Western civilisation. We've come to believe that these different things that people say, like stay true to your roots, be yourself, be authentic, don't try to be somebody else. And the kinds of positive affirmations that we need to hear in order to be okay. Do you want to hear the most damaging statement? Anyone who's trying to thrive can hear from somebody mentoring them. It's good job.

Paradigm is the way you look at something. It is your point of view and your frame of reference. It's how you form your convictions. You want to see it as a set of beliefs, judgments, acceptances, stories and concepts, right? The paradigm we use and accept depends on what we believe and what we perceive to be true.

Okay, if you were to walk out your door now and take a stroll and interact with some people and plants and buildings and furniture, your reaction to these things depends on your paradigm and in turn go on to form part of it, if that makes any sense.

This is where my time at the mansion with John gives out. It's real truth. Nugget I used to inhale the TV news if it was on in a bar and I saw a tank rolling across the screen, I'd ask them to turn it up. Since then, I've gradually changed my habits, and while I'm not unaware of the big things happening in the world, they take up close to none of my focus, none of my brainpower, because there is very little that I can use to polish my paradigm into something that will guide me to greater success.

There's very little of that in the TV news. People with high occupancy rates are not watching this video and nor do they need to be. It's not fluke. They've got their mind working in the right way. Those watching this video and not willing to engage in this kind of change will get what they've always got, all right? Those willing to alter their perceptions will get results.

If I were forced to divide credit for success between the two camps of mindset and know-how, I would go 80 20 in favour of mindset, every time. We'll get to booking boosts and visibility, growth and many more things. But it all starts with the paradigm shift. Become the person who deserves their success and it will follow.

And if you feel like I'm repeating myself, it won't be for the last time. Remember that group of blind folks with their elephant where no one has the big picture? So they think it's a bunch of different things and they're all wrong. These guys aren't hazarding guesses. Okay, the tail guy thinks he's holding a rope, and the leg guy thinks he's by a tree. And so on. A lot of people are like that. They buy into whatever they're told with one sentence and no research.

We've all seen people get scrappy defending the veracity of something they barely believe themselves. Just as we've all seen someone change their mind on something like the flick of a switch and move on. We're fickle creatures at the best of times, guys. Or at least I've seen some fickles in my time and I'm sure as hell numbering among them myself. All right. It's in the changes of mind that paradigms shift.

How you vote in your early 20s will be unrecognisable to whatever you put on the paper in the booth once you have a family to take care of or a small business.

So what's wrong with the current paradigm of society? Why do we need a new paradigm? What is wrong with the one we have now? How could society get it wrong? Society is everyone. How could everyone be wrong?

So these are some problems I've identified in society's current paradigm. Frankly, I see them as huge problems of the moment, and unfortunately, you're probably subject to more than a couple of them. First of all, there is a general misunderstanding on the psychology of the self and on the formation of identity. And don't worry if that's going a bit over your head. I'll explain it all in detail later. Too much detail, if anything.

Problem number two is the bias for the tangible, for the old markers of success. We have developed a huge bias in what we can touch and what we can feel and see if we can see it. It doesn't exist. If you can touch it, it doesn't exist.

Problem number three is the misperception of law and authority on a certain level. For instance, we believe that doctors know absolutely everything there is to know about the human body, just like everyone before 1492 knew the world was flat. Well, we all know the way that went. And it turns out that just about every single day, things long considered scientifically verified are being rejigged, rebooted, or debunked. We've lived a century or so with the supposition that someone with a degree is smarter than someone without one.

And yet, recently, certainly the case with my generation, people have been leaving universities with no jobs in sight and nothing but an abyss of debt beneath them to show for their four years or whatever. Despite all this, a good chunk of the population are still leaving university, totally given to the notion that their first paycheques are in the post and success has been pre-ordered for a year's time.

When I was starting hotel management school and the recruiters sold us tailor-made careers, I mean, it was not a case of if, but when, and those imminent earnings included like six-figure salaries and company cars. And you know what? Some of us got exactly that. But not everyone.

A degree will be enough for a very small percentage of the workers. But

 the rest of us grafters, we need to grind, and that's what we're going to do.

We also have a problem in society with polarisation, or the perception of right and wrong with no middle ground. This is problem number four. We have come to believe that if one is right, the other is wrong. If we have an opinion about something, then the other person who has another opinion must be the enemy. A classic example, one which I've already mentioned is elections. There are two sides and according to popular opinion, everyone on the other side is a bad guy of biblical proportions. It's spooky, it's unhelpful as unholy hell, and makes about as much sense in the grand scheme of things as a box of frogs in the post.

Problem number five is the dual truism for which I'm going to give you the example of the big contradiction between the two branches of physics. Right? So ours is a uniquely opportune moment in history in this regard. On one hand, we've got our old-school physics, which for centuries, people have been teaching that matter is visible and solid and what exists may be seen and touched. And then along came quantum physics and showed not only is there a multitude of comings and goings happening on a level we can't even correctly conceive of, let alone see, but it is more crucial to understanding the fabric of reality than anything else that's come before it.

The two live alongside one another in abject contradiction two versions of the truth inseparable yet natural foes in terms of conclusion and message.

Problem number six is victim culture victims and their stories. One of the key facets in our society's paradigm is the tiptoeing around the idea of offence and offending people, particularly visible on social media, and also the best reason to get off social media. It's the other people. As a vegan, I'm offended. As a 38-year-old stamp collector, I find that offensive. People lead into what they're about to say with a clarification of who they are and the conditions they're about to set upon the dialogue, be it something to do with their eating habits, their sexual preference, their gender, their religion, and so on.

On one hand, it's fascinating because it's a sympathy play at best and a tactic at worst. Nine times out of ten, it's an effort to position oneself as a victim in whatever debate might be about to take place, and if it's one thing a victim comes equipped to it. It's a story. For many people, this has become their sole identifier. And as often as not, they don't seem to fully exist without it. The calling card can be any number of things, but the gist of it is the grand thesis of the problem that, say, appears to be this if you disagree with them, then you threaten who they are.

Problem number seven is that of perceived helplessness. We are convinced today that our ability to effect change on anything is nil, and that as a species, we are caught in the current history and that will dictate where we will end up. This one will have to say a lot more about in a little bit when you begin to change.

So you'll see results, you begin to see results as simple as that. The bigger the change, the better the results. From what I've seen, the more your discomfort, the harder you push the milky or. And more full of honey, your promised land is going to be.

Who you think you are is a mere illusion. Guys, the only thing that really matters is who you're going to become. That's the question you need to answer. It's no exaggeration. The most important question anyone can ask themselves. The future is unwritten. Would you like a free pen to get started with?

The static person that you are today is represented by these different points you have to go beyond. So you're asking, who am I? I am who I was born and there's no way to change that. I accept what I'm given and I don't argue. I will not try to be someone or something I'm not. I am true to myself, authentic and glued to my roots. I am defined by who I am and by the limits of my personality. I'm going nowhere.

You need to always remember this. You're a person in the making and that's all that matters. You need to be asking, who am I becoming? I was born a certain way, sure, but who I become is the product of my thoughts, my choices, and my actions. I live and work in the knowledge that I can be who I want to be and achieve whatever I want, should I choose to. I may become who I want to be, and I'm not afraid of the transformation. The self is an illusion. Who I am is not defined statically because I am a dynamic being, evolving all the time.

Remind me for old time's sake, who is keeping you from doing what you should do to achieve your goals? That's right, it's you. You're the only person who can overcome it and I'm going to help you do it. The most important thing is to answer this question who are you going to become?

Just as you've learned to manage a team of individuals, your receptionist, cleaning staff, or whoever else. You've now arrived at a crucial moment of self-reflection. The trick is this: managing your weaknesses is how you unlock your true strengths. That's what we're going to learn how to do today. We are going to talk about the demons that need fighting and why it's an important part of your professional growth.

All right. After that, I'll get a bit personal and reveal to you some of the demons I faced when I was a hotel manager, and how I managed to exorcise them and ultimately get past my doubts, my propensity to self-sabotage, and my inability.

After that, we'll get into my big discovery that there are two forces at work inside me, likely inside all of us, that are constantly vying for control of your day-to-day life sales units, and wrote the line separating good and evil runs through every human soul. And in my case, I wouldn't say good and evil. I would say constructive. That which motivates me to work hard and gain momentum and make my bed in the morning. And destructive, which would see all my efforts come to nature and likely blame the world for my downfall.

After that, we're going to talk about just a small issue of the root of all evil when it comes to personal and professional problem solving: denial. Behind every struggling hotelier, there sounds out an arrogant, convincing voice telling them that their problems are not as real as they seem. Then we're going to talk about how to stop dancing and face the music.

This was the turning point for me, both personally and professionally, and I hope it can be for you too. This is when I stopped knocking down everything I'd been building up on a monthly basis and started adding stories to my success. I'm going to outline the most key observations I've made, break them down into bite-sized, more manageable chunks, and ask you to start applying them to your own situation immediately.

The aim of this video, apart from teaching you things, is for you to begin putting them into practice before it's done playing. We're going to look at issues from a root cause perspective, and we're going to adjust your life and your outlook to give you back control and develop mechanisms within yourself to keep you in the driving seat going forward.

You'll be able to see a problem without a why and how, and pretty soon you won't even be able to see them as problems, but results in waiting.

Let's begin by facing our demons and firstly by defining what on earth I'm talking about when I say demon. Have you ever wondered why one side of you is constructive and the other is destructive? Have you ever thought of a good idea, built momentum, and then abandoned ship for literally no reason? Have you started on the road to accomplishing a dream and listened to and agreed with a little voice that assured you it was too difficult and would take too much effort, so you might as well just give up now?

Cliches are poems that we all know that grow naturally from the soil of truth. From the first time you ever saw a devil and an angel on the shoulders of a cartoon character arguing over what they should do, you knew what was being represented without any further prompting. Do you know why? It's not at all obvious on a pragmatic level, but from an abstract perspective, it's obvious because we all live with voices like this our entire lives. Even if they don't wear red and white costumes, they're there.

Getting past the cartoons, the friction between these two internal avatars can cause a lot of pain, especially when the little red one wins the day. And depending on your mindset, they stand an awfully good chance of winning you over. Because, let's face it, it's a lot easier to just give up than it is to roll up your sleeves and just get stuck in, you know? But the thing is, when the bad voice takes a break after you do exactly what they told you to do, the good voice will be there, waiting to make you feel deservedly bad, and they will succeed in that endeavour because the good voice gets things done.

So where do these feelings come from? The dark side versus the light? I'll give you a clue. It's not from Star Wars. So I'm going to tell you my own story now, warts and all. My aim is to help you shine a light on you, on the demons that you yourself are harbouring. Right? In order for you to make your success a matter of course, before you make a flowchart giving directions to your inevitable triumphs, you're going to have to tame these two sides of yourself.

And that's that. To play any game, you've got to first learn the rules and practice enough so that you can play without being a hindrance to those around you. You practice and practice, and you'll get better and better, but you'll still be just a regular Joe in the park. To play is one thing, to excel is another entirely. In the grand sport of hotel management, in which we're all playing, your triumphs will come down to your ability to identify your weaknesses so you know them when they're coming for you, and you know how to react immediately and get back up like nothing happened.

When I came home from California, fresh-faced with an MBA in hand, I was a fully-fuelled furnace of ambition. I genuinely had it in mind to leave all my classmates for dust in terms of success in the industry. Simultaneously, the idea of being the sole responsible for the success of a restaurant or a hotel terrified me. I was hungry for success, but crippled by a stage fright of sorts. It was nauseating as a fix to be in, and it showed no signs of letting up. I was miserable.

I'd been working like a madman in the run-up to my return, so I decided that when I got home, I was going to take some much-deserved downtime with my family before embarking on any kind of job hunt. Life had other plans for me, though. It was during this would-be time off that I met a hotel owner by total chance, who offered me the position of general manager. So my dream and my nightmare all wrapped into a nice, neat package.

What's more, the hotel was in a bad place financially, and inherent to the position on offer was the straightening up of business into a state of profitability. Clearly, I couldn't have found a more customer-designed proving ground for myself, but at the same time, I was doing somersaults, panicking on the inside.

I accepted his offer though. Well, I accepted his offer to at least take a visit to the place where there was big potential. I saw when I got there that it was clearly being mismanaged. Everywhere I looked were problems begging to be solved, unnecessary expense and underdeveloped opportunities abounded. On paper, textbook at hand, I knew how I'd transform the hotel, but playing an out-of-tune violin between my ears was a symphony of "you're not up to this." Maybe in a few years and go work in a chain. It's easier and it's a safer choice.

I wanted to engage the bull by the horns more than anything, but my doubts kept tripping me up. I was terrified of failure, and that fear was dictating my inclinations. Finally, I managed to stuff it all down and accept the offer. The goal was to make the hotel profitable again within a year, in order to make the balance sheet and the establishment in general attractive to potential buyers, which I managed to do beyond doubt. Throughout the whole process, however, I was at constant war with myself, and it was constraining me, slowing me down.

After a time though, I was able to zero in on how exactly it was constraining me. I was taking three steps forward and two steps back, and was gradually doing dire damage to my own managerial engine. I identified the glitch in my own mechanics and tried for solutions in order to stop it so that I might succeed.

I think this happens to a lot of people in our business, whether it's a hotel, a guesthouse, a B&B, or whatever you like. Eventually, they run into themselves. They identify a task they consider beyond themselves, and they retreat back to the comfort couch. This is a psychological pattern known as a positive feedback loop, and it ends with you living on that couch. It's a cycle you've got to learn to break wherever you see it.

So the first step is knowing. Once you know, with a bit of practice, you'll be able to identify at a distance when you're getting caught up in one and get out of it. Because once you identify it, you'll feel it even harder when you yourself destroy something you create, you've created. It's a vicious circle, and there's no two ways about it.

The good news is that as soon as I was fully conscious of the fact that this wasn't simply a fact of life, but a problem, I began to look for solutions. And then finally, I noticed a pattern. The pattern was simple enough. Once I got to grips with it, it was ups and downs. I would get a goal. I'd get from A to B, let's say I would get there. But before I could figure out what C was, I'd find a way to mess it all up and wake up back at it. Right?

The interesting thing was that whether I gained or lost ground, I'd never get higher than a certain level, and I'd never fall below another either. The peaks and valleys were the only constant worthy of note, and it took a while for me to digest that fact.

At first, I thought I was

 looking at erratic death with zero pattern, but given time I saw that it was predictable. The levels of success I attained were the same across data sets, as were the depths to which I fell upon failing. My reading was that it was, though I had a timer set on my motivation that would intermittently turn off or on respectively, as I reached a certain point or hit a certain low.

When a car's engine reaches a certain temperature, then the thermostat tells the car to release more coolant and increase the fan speed, thereby automatically cooling the engine. Alternatively, if the temperature drops too low, the thermostat starts the reverse cycle. It's a regulator, and its purpose is to keep the temperature at a median level.

I had something like that going on, but for me, objectively speaking, and at that time, there should have been no maximum heat for the progress of my career. It frustrated the hell out of me when I noticed, but then, ruminating on it a little, I figured out that somewhere in between the peaks and the valleys was my comfort zone. And unconsciously or not, I seemed completely unwilling to leave it.

My constructive side was the yin to my destructive side's yang. The levels were such high and low, the mean between the two levels represented my cruising speed. That was where you'd average out at if you measured my life in terms of quality over like 90 days or so. That was the comfort zone I was finding myself stuck in.

It was kind of fascinating to me in the moment, to just get visual proof of a kind of order in my life where previously I'd seen only chaos. It just so happened that the order was to build up and tear down with the consistency of the moon cycles, and to gain about as much ground as the tide on a low day.

I soon saw this pattern in every single area of my life. In the first few months of running the hotel I mentioned earlier, I checked in daily with the occupancy rate projections for the coming months, and wouldn't you know it, if the order was lower than I'd like it in the near future, I'd do everything in my power to fill it up ASAP. But alternatively, if it seemed acceptable to me, I'd keep on truckin' without looking further.

So to summarise, the ceiling of my monthly or seemed to be 80%, while I'd start to panic somewhere around 60%. Therefore, my or cruising speed works itself out as 70% or thereabouts.

There's plenty more places you can find this nasty little holding pattern to everything. There is a comfort zone. Cleanliness. At the peak, my apartment sparkles, and you can eat off the floor. I would make the bed daily, hoover, and there would be no dirty dishes knocking about for a week. Naturally, I'd let it slip. Then one day, I'd arrive home and find myself in a jungle of dirty laundry, sticky dishes, and dusty floors. And what's the best thing to do when you're in the jungle? That's right, an impression of Rambo.

I'd scuttle around on all fours until the floor was good enough to eat it. To prepare sushi on. Nevermind. Eat it off. And there you go. Somewhere between the jungle and the floor buffet was my cleanliness comfort zone.

I could see it in my mental state too. Every aspect of my life that involved performance was made up of cycles upon cycles upon cycles. Your ability to concentrate fluctuates and settles, as does your results. Your determination, and anything else you might be able to think of.

What seems like countless times in my life, I've gone through a period of good sleep, sufficient water, daily exercise, healthy eating, and the consequent quality of life that follows all those things. I'd be happy, healthy, fit, and I could approach any task with the rabid intensity of a boxer on fight week. That would be me at my peak.

So naturally, I let it slip, and it wouldn't be long before I was staying in bed later than I ought to have, and things would fall apart from there until I'd be drinking too much, munching kebabs and vegetating on the sofa when I should have been out pounding pavements.

Everywhere I looked, I saw this same pattern, like the rise and fall of an empire. It was a scary thing to observe at first, but it fascinated me, and I knew there'd be a way to spin it into gold.

And eventually, it struck me. What seems like countless times in my life, I've gone through a period of good sleep, sufficient water, daily exercise, healthy eating, and the consequent quality of life that follows all those things. I'd be happy, healthy, fit, and I could approach any task with the rabid intensity of a boxer and fight week.

That would be me at my peak. So naturally, I'd let it slip, and it wouldn't be long before I'd be staying in bed later than I ought to have been, and things would fall apart from there until I'd be drinking too much, munching kebabs, and vegetating on a sofa when I should have been out pounding pavements. Everywhere I looked, I saw this same pattern.

It was a scary thing to observe at first, but it fascinated me, and I knew there'd be a way to spin it into gold.

And eventually, it struck me. They were all in sync with one another. There was a pattern that connected the patterns, which meant that the low in health consciousness would tend to occur at exactly the same time as my apartment was a jungle and my or was in the basement.

Thriving in one aspect meant thriving in all. And the same was true for failure. Success meant the top of the world, and failure meant slumming it in the underworld.

It was an intense discovery to make. It's safe to say that it rocked my world. Up to then, I had no real understanding of my life in the grand scheme of things. I'd felt I existed at the mercy of the universe, and there was nothing I could do to sway it either way.

To sum it up in two words, my former philosophy had been poor me. I'd seen myself as a victim of forces way beyond my control, and felt there was nothing I could do about it. Or at least that's what I was in the habit of telling myself.

I'd felt like God's lemons were all specifically reserved for me, and if I couldn't blame him, I'd find a way to put it on someone else or something else. It's a rotten way to go through life. And if you even are halfway towards recognising it in yourself, believe me, it's much better than being on the other side of that fence.

Once I discovered these patterns in my own behaviour, and after that, in the universe at large, I began to feel a little bit of odd comfort, not comfort zone comfort, you understand? Just comfort that the patterns that seem to be governing my own day to day were in fact in charge of everything from bank statements to the states of nations.

So there I was, having discovered this as of then unheard of rule, at least to me, that I simply knew there was an infinite amount to learn from. So I set to work. I made it my mission to improve in every aspect of hotel management I could think of.

I knew if I learnt enough to dodge the impacts of the destructive side of the cycle and focus on the constructive side, I could truly raise my level beyond my comfort zone.

My initial goal was to learn everything there was to know about hotel management, but more specifically to understand the distribution and marketing of hotel rooms over the internet. I was convinced that this was the biggest challenge to the industry, and that mastering it would render me something like a hotel management rockstar, if you can picture such a thing.

For a long time, I had felt that if I learned to master the theory, I could realistically take over any hotel and make it turn a profit. I knew the most important thing to do was to sell well. And if you could avoid or ease the impact of the negative end of the selling cycle, the only way would be up.

Get a good revenue management system in motion. Put your finances back in order. Adapt your sales strategy to online sales. Build loyalty with your staff and clientele alike. And frankly, the challenge would be for a hotel to do badly under such conditions.

I wanted to make it my speciality to help hotels that were failing then starting out. If you had told me that to really perform well, I would have had to take an interest in personal development, I would have genuinely laughed in your face.

As far as I was concerned, the self-help section was for ninnies, and anyone who bought it was likely taking it to a nudist beach to read between drum circle sessions. Now I'll say it straight and Frank. I was clearly wrong on this one.

Personal development. The idea made me sneer like a teenager and a guidance counsellor, and it was a big mistake on my part. So what did I do? I read. I trained. I consumed hundreds of books on hotel management, from website conversion ratio to fostering loyalty to OTAs to acquisition.

I spent time learning to put everything into practice. Hell, I did put everything into practice. But as sure as the summer solstice is in June, at the end of everything, I hit a damn patch in the negative side of the cycle would catch up with me, and then it was just dancing time again: three steps forward, two steps back, and so on and so on and so on.

Even making a lot of concentrated effort in all the areas that mattered on the surface, I was making minimal progress. And please don't give me the "a little goes a long way" diatribe. That's up there with "good job" as a compliment. I don't want to do a good job. I want to do the best one.

And when it comes to making progress, baby steps are not enough for me,

 and nor should they be for you. And I'm guessing they're not, because you are here listening to me.

Gains are one thing, but maintaining them is quite another. Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't hand in his gym membership after one Mister Universe title, and neither should you cease your efforts after getting a decent raise and or have power or reputation.

One good growth cycle is not enough for your efforts. Once in a while, do not make your success a given. The only given for me and for many owners and managers I coach seems to be that any bit of growth tended to be followed by a regression.

I went through these cycles again and again and again, not even considering for a minute that it was me that needed working on. And then as soon as I was able to really perceive that these cycles were everywhere in my life, my objectives changed.

My new goal was an amalgamation. Not only was I going to understand every aspect of hotel management to the nth degree, but I would above all take control of my mindset. I looked at my typical working week and I saw that on average I was doing one day a week. I could consider excellent. One out of seven. The rest was either growth or decline.

On my good day, I'd be super focused and productive. Confident. I was way ahead of my goals. The major issue, as I'm sure you can guess, is that with only one day of this kind per week, I found myself slipping behind on my to-dos during average or bad days. I needed to find a way to stay in the mindset of excellence all week long.

Suppressing destructive cycles became my obsession. I knew I'd need to understand myself a little better to get near this goal. I had decided to focus on the two things in tandem. I'd learn again and again everything I'd need to know to make a career out of rebuilding failing hotels and make them profitable, but with equal priority. I'd work on my mental state.

I'd become a walking encyclopaedia on hotel management, from money to staffing to internet presence, while at the same time getting mentally dissected by myself and my work performance. I wanted more than anything to get to grips with the interrelationship between my know-how and my general performance, and how I could raise my game in both simultaneously without giving ground in either direction.

I was honestly the best decision I ever made in my professional life. It allowed me to perform better on a day-to-day basis, and happier than I dreamed was possible with my career.

So to recap, and this is very important to know: just knowing about the cycles was not enough to get past them. They carry on regardless. Like ghosts in a haunted house I was living in. It just kept going as it was building and hope and building and hope and bam! It will be decay and destruction all over again. And not only did my knowledge of them not help me get out of them. It made them worse.

Every time I started to fumble the ball again, I'd feel like I was falling off the wagon. I should have been driving at that point. It was torture. Whatever you want to call it, the universe will. Or a phenomenon of failing willpower. It had me cornered in its claws and puzzled as all hell at that.

I couldn't fathom how, despite my knowledge, I could still be caught up in the talons of such a merciless, destructive tide as one I'd put my finger on.

Then one day, in my travels through the Bountiful realms of personal development, I came across the following quote. "Pain can be an excellent teacher if you look at it dead on in the eyes and face it rather than running away from it or sedating yourself. Pain will teach you everything."

It was just one of those big sentences for me. I had a bit of an E equals mc squared moment, you could say, but it really did spark off something great in me, I read it. It may have been a tweet I think, but it just sunk in and I knew it was the answer I'd been looking for.

Up until then, as is naturally a and dare I say, common in people, I tended to dodge difficulty and adversity. It's not that I preferred to procrastinate, and so much as that was my reflex, I suppose because it was simpler on every level, and I was able to convince myself I was doing right by me and mine by floating lazily along through life. Because floating just seems like the right thing to do when you're on a big river in Egypt. Denial.

Like I've said already, and might say again, denial is the root of everything you're out to avoid. Whatever the destructive pattern you happen to be facing in life, whether it's your finances or your health or anything else you can think of, denial has, unbeknown to you, become your mantra.

Denial is the key to killing productivity in life or business. To live in denial means to not take responsibility for your own actions, to mess up regularly as a rule and delude yourself into thinking that you won't later suffer the consequences. By living in denial, you dance around the truth and refuse to face the music.

It's high time you looked at the monster straight in the papers and face the damn music folks. When I say music, when I say face it, you know what I mean? But here it is. Stop lying to yourself and face the truth.

Facing the music, whatever your music happens to be, is simply to stop running away from the pain and the problems in your life by setting things up so they're easily avoided, or you're easily distracted or painfully adept at lying to yourself, or snap all three at once.

A shining example one we've all heard of or lived through happened to a friend of mine, is happening right now. She avoids a whole neighbourhood, the best one, in my opinion, of our city, to avoid running into someone she had an argument with a while back. Her version of running away is simply avoiding a few square kilometres of her hometown like the plague, and pretending it's a perfectly normal thing to do.

The thing is, she's sure to run into this person someday. Without a doubt, it's going to happen. They move in the same circles, so she's essentially sweeping dust under the mat until there's a mound to walk over. I mean, with logic like this, the next thing to do is set the rug on fire.

I would judge who doesn't love to judge, but I was singing from the same hymn sheet myself for so long that if I did that, I'd have to start wearing a nametag that reads hypocrite.

I have allowed mornings to pass without note from underneath a blanket, just because I knew if I made the initial effort of getting out of bed, my feet would drag me to get showered and dressed. And before I knew it, I'd have to start digging into the tasks of the day. And I had no interest in doing that. While I was so busy on a cruise ship down that most famous of Egyptian rivers. Denial.

Facing the music would have been hopping out and taking responsibility for what needed doing and knowing, all the while really knowing that all you get out of life is what you put into it.

And just so, the only things gotten that count are those that you can hang on to. So the only effort that will bring the harvest home is the one you put your back into, and apply yourself with some semblance of regularity.

So how do we do this? How do we stop ourselves from tumbling into the next self-destruct streak and losing all the ground we've gained?

So to even begin to answer this question, I'm going to talk to you now about my observations on business, life, the universe, and everything we're going to talk about the grand umbrella rules that govern everything. Why are these patterns in everything, and why are we doomed to follow them onto death? How can we gain awareness of our own cycles and change them to keep extending the barriers of our comfort zones till they spread like empires over everything it's possible to do in life?

This is what we're going to do right now. Let's start nice and simple. First, for every action, there is a proportional and opposite reaction, credit where it's due to Sir Isaac Newton. In theory, it's simple enough and with a little push or pull, it's even digestible in practice. But the thing to note here today is that it doesn't just apply to physics, but to everything in your life.

One example we've kind of covered it already. As a student, I would study hard and see results, then get too comfortable and watch my grades slide as though I had no control over them. The ups would be followed by downs and the downs in turn by ups.

In your case, it might be that you make a big effort to create a buzz on social media and increase your or and your direct bookings, and then you take a moment to pause and you pat yourself on the back. And that pat on the back will last until you're almost right back where you started, with little to show in terms of actual growth.

The effort was the action, and the swing back to zero. Well, I guess you could fairly name that a reaction. No, that's the system. Newtonian physics as applied to the hospitality industry. For a lot of cases I've seen, and this isn't even the worst case scenario. The growth and decomposition levels will match up with one another so cleanly that all that hangs in the balance is a big fat zero, and that big fat zero could fairly be named your comfort zone, because it's right in the middle of your two extreme states. And the only way out of that comfort zone is violent revolution, folks.

Most people simply lie to themselves to get by this kind of thing in conscience. They try to cheat the system and behave as though it doesn't apply to them, or that it isn't even real. And when the bad stage of their cycle hits, and it hit it most, and they'll engage their expert denial and thrusting

 blame on the world, or the weather, or their competitor or anyone where or what other than themselves. Sometimes they bargain. "It could be worse. Or it's just this once. Never again." Except when it does happen again and again and again.

And it doesn't technically get worse, you could say, but I'm in the business of telling you that if it's not getting better by something significant on the regular, then that's worse than it could be. And that's the kind of worst we're in the business of avoiding. All right. These are the attitudes I've noticed, guys. I'm not in the business of producing fiction.

They face away from the truth and paint a surreal picture, and then wonder why they don't get what they want, and why they pay so much to OTAs, and why their direct booking rate stays in the basement, and the list goes on and on and on. In reality, they're just getting hit face first with the proportional and opposite reaction to their action as they took it, namely once and without any long view to consistency.

The only success is earned by grinding. If you want more direct bookings, you not only have to do something to generate them, but you have to keep doing it. That's the way to pay the bills.

Next up is something called the mirror effect, which is similar but not the same as the first observation. Here's the bookshop synopsis: your fears and your judgments that you outwardly project are simply an inverse representation of your own doubts and anxieties.

This is an important pill to swallow, so take your time. The judgments you make on others swing back and hit you in ways you couldn't possibly imagine. And just because you don't speak them, it doesn't mean that they don't exist. Just because you don't voice them, it doesn't mean they're not inside you, fermenting.

The problem with judging people is that without realising it, we look at our own lives through their eyes and we judge ourselves. And when we judge ourselves, we impose virtual limits on what we can and cannot do.

That person you think is stupid and unable to find a solution to their problems, that's actually you. If you go around thinking like that, you see without realising it, you have limited your own potential by way of undermining others.

The flip side of this coin is the fear of being judged. That's how it works. If you actively judge others, you knowingly foster a fear of being judged by others. You know how the game works, and you're never on the lookout for it being played against you.

So what does that look like? It looks like you staying in your comfort zone and not doing anything constructive, because you're putting up appearances for the folks next door.

The mirror effect tells you the fears and insecurities of other people and yourself, as deduced by how they judge others. It's not uncommon to criticise the wealthy these days, and a great deal of that is rooted in anxiety and the fear around the idea of never succeeding in one's endeavours. People are afraid to step out of their comfort zones, naturally criticise people who live outside of theirs.

The only way to free yourself from your own fear of leaving your comfort zone is to stop judging those brave few who live theirs on the regular. Make a decision to stop heaping judgement on others. Drop all your envy and jealousy and resentment and fear off at the emotional pawn shop for a knock rate and get on with your life.

The sooner you stop labelling people, the sooner you'll be impossible to pin down for all the new capabilities you'll find in yourself. And the inverse is true and much more widely practiced if you believe in yourself.

And the inverse is also true and much more widely preached: if you don't believe in yourself, who will? If you don't invest in yourself, who will? If you don't put money on the table and spin the wheel of education or some development of a skill set, who in their right mind would hire you?

It's the same as with your rooms. If you don't spend a bit of money to ensure they're comfortable, beautiful, and well-equipped, who is going to want to spend the night in them?

The most direct reflection of this in our industry is with revenue management, so the well-researched development of a pricing strategy, which we'll cover later on in the course. You wouldn't believe the number of hoteliers I've had to advise to increase their prices because they were too low, with the result invariably being an increase in their average price without a drop in their occupancy rate, which is the ideal situation.

Why didn't they do it before? I advised them to do it. Simple: fear. The value they saw in a night in their rooms was directly reflected in their efforts to improve their offer, which was ultimately insufficient.

It's a tale as old as time. Hoteliers charging a price that's a direct reflection of their confidence in their product, in the quality of their service. This is why you see a very good three-star hotel with the same prices, or often higher, as competing four-star hotels in the same area.

If you're not willing to, why would they be? Ask yourself this question: why would they pay what you charge at your hotel? Owners and managers who don't invest in their property are usually those who charge the lowest prices and thus make the least profit again. If not you, then who?

Another aspect of your business to which the mirror effect applies is that of reputation, specifically reputation, or your reputation on the internet. Any hotelier I know with a good reputation doesn't just run a tight ship. They treat their guests in an irreproachable manner.

Conversely, any hotelier I've had to help with their reputation, who've had issues with complaints online and negativity on social media, for instance, usually have never taken the time to see what the issues were and whether they were led back to them.

You know, the only way to restore a reputation in a case like that is to look inward. And even if the complaint wasn't directly about you, you need to find a way to interpret it as such. You want your customers to treat you well? It's as simple as treating them well, first and foremost.

Another example: any hotelier I've heard gripe about their customers not leaving good reviews or any reviews at all, I always ask them, when was the last time they left a positive review about a hotel? The answer is usually never. Mirror effect in action. It's on you to become the kind of customer you want to attract.

The third important observation of mine is that people don't have problems in their businesses. They have problems in their lives that come out in their businesses.

It seems daft at first, but think again. You know people with problems in their businesses. You might be one of them. You see their businesses shrinking, stalemates in innovation. They'll look around for some by-the-number solution, and they might even find one and implement it, and they'll stop way short of some introspection on themselves, the person who made all the decisions, who got them there in the first place.

People think business is business and personal is personal. But until machines take over, it will be people doing the business, and their personal lives will ripple into their professional counterparts.

A hotelier not committed 100% to the development of their direct bookings—that non-commitment will inevitably show up in areas of their personal lives. Maybe they're not a fully present member of their family, or maybe their diet is 4.5 days a week, and they eat at McDonald's all weekend. If there's a lack of commitment at work, there will be one lacking at home.

Mark these words: if your home is messy, your business will embody that mess. In commerce terms, your messy mind will show up in your poorly kept accounts, and your cardiologist's comments will show up in your TripAdvisor reviews.

People try to solve problems in their businesses with purely business tactics, and they hit brick walls all the time. Because everything about that approach is emblematic of an unwillingness to go deep. No sale strategy ever solved a personality problem. Look to your life first and watch it fade from your business.

Fourth, big thing to remember: the way you do one thing is the way you do all things. Get that tattooed on yourself.

Remember that unifying pattern for all living things that I discovered? Remember that old chestnut? Well, build up to one level and crumble to another, time and time again—for every action, and equal reaction, all that stuff. This is the connective tissue, the way you do one thing, the pattern at the centre of your approach that can be found in every approach you have to everything.

The structure of one's existence emanates into everything they do, like an essence. If someone takes the cleanliness of their house lightly, they'll take everything that way. You could say someone who procrastinates on small things will do so similarly on large important things.

Late for a doctor's appointment? You'll be late for your own funeral. Think about that. Absorb it and begin to take everything much more seriously. If your business isn't working out, it's more than likely because you're not committed to it, and so will follow that line. And it leads to your non-commitment to exercise or your family and friends.

The standards you hold yourself might change, but truly, truly they are a one-size-fits-all garment.

I've had to clean myself up in my life. Heck, I'm still doing it, and if I'm lucky, I'll always be doing it. So long as I'm walking, I want the faraway hills to be greener. So I've still got something to work at.

Improvement takes time, right? And when I started out making a concentrated effort to improve myself, I couldn't help but notice the other aspects of my life I consider to be in need of a spruce-up, especially my business, were coming along for the ride. It increased my income considerably. I imagine that the secret to making more money was becoming a better person. Have a more balanced life, avoid intake

 of unnecessary negativity aka most negativity, and focus on the positive.

John, my Hollywood businessman guru, was 100% correct, as it turns out. Make a list of all the things you know you have to fix. And little by little, get to it. Make yourself aware of these things and start tweaking. If someone is unhealthy or unbalanced in one area of life, they are unhealthy or unbalanced in every area of life.

The pattern and tempo of how a person trains at the gym or on a bike is the same as when they work, read a book, listen to music, spend time with their friends. The person who arrives at the gym with a plan and gets through some of it and then lets themselves off the hook will begin a work of great literature and finish it on Wikipedia. They'll meet their friends for lunch on a quiet weekend, but back out on babysitting if the timing is inconvenient.

The other person, the person who pushes more and more for reps up until the last minute, until they absolutely have to leave the gym—that's the person who reads with a highlighter and recommends the book to their friends, not only because they want someone to talk to about it, but because they want the best for them and would be happy to walk their dogs while they're away on vacay.

It is what it is and how it is, and we all know what to do with it because it's been dealing with you your whole life. And once you start to notice your own patterns, I promise you you'll recognise your approach to everything in everything.

The good news is you're not stuck in this pattern. Not by a long shot. I think that's the mistake a lot of people make. They think that once they've identified the pattern, their tempo, that's how they are, and it's impossible to do otherwise.

That is not true at all. You can totally change everything. You can turn your bad habits into good habits. Remember, I used to procrastinate, and that's not the case anymore. I even set up tools to help myself—online calendars, CRM and alerts, etc. I no longer miss a reminder nor a birthday, and my group of friends was surprised and elated by my transformation.

And of course, you can do the same. You can change anything you want. Just keep moving forward and reinvent yourself as you go. This week, we're going to learn ways to change connections you might have thought inherent to yourself, and in doing so, you can literally change who you are.

This is not me talking psychobabble. It is scientifically proven that as you learn new things, new proteins actually reshape the synapses in your brain. To literally change your mind will change your bad habits to good ones, and you will follow because you are everything you do.

You can't expect to change what's cooking in the pot without changing the ingredients beforehand. I have personally applied everything I'm telling you. Once I saw the connections in how I did things to each other—the same repeated pattern in different domains—I was optimistic enough to dive right in and commit to excellence in every aspect of my life.

Healthy mind. Healthy body. Healthy personal life. Healthy business. Cliches or clichés for a reason, folks.

So sleep enough. Eat right. Exercise plenty. And drink water by the bucket. That's right. You heard it here first. More direct bookings must be preceded by more water. We can break that down for you if you like.

For those of you in the cheap seats, scrutinising and wanting me to whip out my big old hotel manual and tell you what's what: don't drink enough water, see what happens. You'll get dehydrated, drowsy, fatigued, stressed, unproductive. And that will cost you money. No two ways about it.

Another example from my own stash. I used to lunch out every day, eat too much, and wash it down with beer or wine, and was half there for the afternoon. And while the lunch wasn't anything too expensive on the day, it cost me uncountable euros. Over the many afternoons, I arrived back to work with less energy than was optimum for maximum efficiency.

It is necessary to start making changes from the ground up. Remember, it's 80% mindset, 20% know-how. The 20% know-how is you on the basketball court with a ball and a bit of practice behind you. But the 80% is what it takes to win. And it starts with a healthy breakfast, after getting up on time, after sleeping right, after going to bed on time.

I could keep going and getting—I could get all the way back to breakfast—but just take my word for it: it's everything everywhere, all at once.

So point number five, and it's no small potatoes: we become the fit for our lowest standards, not our most ambitious dreams. Remember the wave with the highs and the lows? You might enjoy your time at the top, but don't get any ideas. The fact is, we are the lows. The lows last longer and are more potent than the highs.

The lows are where we formed the scar tissue that shapes us. The lows put us in survival mode to get back on the El Capitan and climb. It's the point we're not willing to go below that defines us in the end.

Get your printer out or a marker and paper and pin this above the desk you work at: we are not the best version of ourselves that we can imagine. We are the worst version of ourselves we can accept.

You will not do anything to achieve your dreams because dreams are for children. But I'll tell you what. You fight like hell not to disappear beneath the tide when it comes to what you're willing to accept in your bank account, or your laundry hamper, or your business.

The trick is this: if you want to reach your goals and make your dreams come true, you have to turn them into irrefutable standards. There are countless psychological studies to affirm this notion. They call it loss aversion. We will do more to not lose something than we will to gain something else. And that's a fact.

Here's an extreme example: if you were to give a Ferrari to a salesperson, then say you have to generate €10,000 a month in sales and you can keep the Ferrari. But if you make less than €10,000 a month, you have to give back the Ferrari. Well, that salesperson is going to work like crazy. He'll probably never give up those sales because now he has a Ferrari. He doesn't want to lose it. He's going to be very motivated to keep it up. He'll probably sell more than 10,000 a month forever.

On the other hand, if you try to motivate someone with a potential gain, you'll get negligible results, quite frankly. If that salesman was selling 2,000 a month and you said, "See that Ferrari, I'll give it to you as soon as you start generating 10,000 a month in sales." Well, he's not very likely to achieve that goal.

I mean, it's possible, but one lever is infinitely more powerful than the other is what I'm saying. I guess the motivation not to lose something is much more powerful than the motivation to gain something.

That's why we don't become the best version of ourselves that we can imagine. The aim is to be the worst version of ourselves that we can accept, and the trick is to have that person be the owner of a profitable hotel.

This video is called Facing Your Demons, and it's about time we got to terms with what exactly that means. You have to stop running away from your problems, in your fears. You need to face the music and cleanse your life of your bad habits. Deep down, you know very well what those bad habits are.

Face your dark side and stop running away. Stop hiding under the carpet that part of yourself that you know you have to overcome in order to evolve. Look your monsters in the eye and fight them. You'll see everything will get easier.

Facing your demons is a lot easier than you think, and the sense of accomplishment that comes from it is life-changing. Little by little, everything will unlock.

Many people are afraid to overcome their demons, and this is normal for their demons. But you'll see it's not that difficult. Once you face them, it's a lot less difficult than you anticipated. Each and every time I've done it, I've asked myself why I didn't do that years ago. Because the level of effort required might vary. But the benefits are always awesome.

So, homework time. We've done the theory. It's practice time. So we're going to start by identifying your patterns. You're going to do this worksheet called your Patterns of Existence. You can download it with the video.

I've shown you the patterns you're looking for throughout this video. It's this wave pattern. There are ups and downs. And as I've mentioned, anyone's existence looks like this to varying degrees. The depth of the curves will differ slightly here and there, but it will always find a shape something like this.

There will always be ups, and there will always be downs. Find yours. Start by doing this worksheet on something very simple. As I mentioned earlier, your bank account is a good place to start. Think about what your panic amount is. You may be thinking, no, no, I don't have a panic, but believe me, you do.

What's a number below which you never let your account go? For some people it's a thousand, others it's 10,000. For some people it could be $1 million. Anyway, you find the number, and you want to find this low. Then you have to define the high, your highest amount that your bank account would never really seem to exceed or get past.

I mean, I remember when I started trying to save money, the number I couldn't really seem to exceed was €30,000. I'd go a little bit over and then back down to 10,000. I'd go up to 30,000. I'm back down. When

 I realised that for some reason 30,000 was my glass ceiling, I decided that it should be 50. And as if by some miracle, it quickly became my new ceiling and so on. I just kept working on it.

As soon as I identified the stagnation, the first thing to do to change these lows and highs is to discover and become aware of them. You can use this exercise to do this. Print out the worksheet and get to work. Start with your bank account because it's the easiest thing to do. But then look at everything else.

Think about the way things are going in your personal life. You could party every weekend and end up regretting it. For example, if it's something you do, put it here too. Or if it's about the cleanliness of your apartment or the cleanliness of your car or your productivity, put it on the worksheet. Maybe you're really productive on Mondays and Tuesdays, and everything goes downhill after that.

Or maybe you're really good at making sales at the beginning of the month, or you know, the last week of the month. I've noticed that many of you are really acting to fill the next month when you get to the middle of the current month. When the 15th of the current month arrives, most hoteliers start to panic and go into Superman mode.

You'll see it happens in many aspects of your life. All of life follows patterns, which seem random and uncontrollable until we figure it out. Suddenly everything becomes clear and obvious. You need to understand your mental thermostat and regain control of them to turn them on and off.

When you choose, your mind will sabotage you and your efforts. When you reach your highs and it will put you into Superman mode when you get dangerously close to your lows.

Remember, we do not become the best version of ourselves that we can imagine. We become the worst we can accept.

Refer to this worksheet often when you feel that you are reaching a low point. You know what to do.

That's it for this training video. Now, guys, what I want you to do is print this worksheet and try it for as many different things in your life as you can. Okay.

The first step you have to take in life when you want to take control of yourself is to understand that you are responsible for everything and that you, only you, have the power to change everything. The second step is to start mapping your discoveries. Start mapping them on this wave pattern. For instance, because all your life is a dance between these two extremes, the average of these extremes is your comfort zone.

You want to improve your situation and your life? You need to get out of this comfort zone. The best thing to do is focus on your weaknesses.

And that's a wrap for this training video. Take this worksheet and apply it to the different areas of your life. The next step is to map out your discoveries. Life is like a dance between two extremes, and your comfort zone is right in the middle. But if you want to improve and grow, you need to step out of that zone.

Here's a tip: focus on your weaknesses. It may sound strange, but by addressing your weaknesses head-on, you can turn them into strengths. Challenge yourself, and push beyond your limits.

So grab that worksheet, start applying these concepts, and embrace the journey of self-improvement. I wish you the best of luck and I'll see you in the next video.

To bring about genuine change in our lives, we must embark on a journey of self-discovery. It's not just about knowing our favourite colour. It's about delving deep into the intricate workings of our own minds by exploring how we perceive the world, how we make decisions, and the underlying beliefs that shape our reality. We opened the door to transformative possibilities.

Today, we embark on a quest to unravel the enigmatic mysteries of our own brains. So today, we're going to cover what dualism and the conflict of man is, and why it's so important. Then we'll see how your brain works and how you make decisions. Why do random thoughts pop into your head and how random are they? Actually, why are you afraid to do some things when you have no problem doing others? Why do you have positive emotions about some things and negative emotions about other things? What motivates you to do the things you do?

We're going to get knowledgeable on how the way your brain works affects the way things are for you, versus how they are for others. And we're going to learn how to act on it and even help others do the same if you wish. And why wouldn't you?

We're going to take a good look into the dividing line between the opposing forces in nature. The poles, if you will. We have two poles on Earth. We have the North Pole and the South Pole. A magnet also has poles. It is the positive and negative force. Even with a battery, there is a positive and a negative. With just about everything in the world and in the observable universe. It has poles like day and night, darkness and light, hot and cold. Everything in the observable universe has an opposite. We call these poles of nature. We're going to see why it's important to understand this.

Then we'll have to answer a very important question. Who are you? We're going to look into how you formed your identity. The person that you think you are right now, the self that you have defined and you travel the world with. More importantly, I'm going to show you how to change that identity, which is a pretty key step on your quest for improvement.

After that, I will talk about the conflict that exists between the opposites in society and that informs our perception of right and wrong and good and evil. I'm sure you've noticed that there's a lot of conflict, both within groups and within yourself. You want to do something, but an internal conflict stops you. One side of you says that you should do it. The other side says that you shouldn't do it. That's an internal conflict. Conflict exists and will continue to do so. There are different races, different religions. There are different social classes. Some poor people despise the rich.

I'm going to zero in on how conflicts originate, and how we can dismantle and restructure those inherent in our own lives to make them work for us. We are going to look at the big question facing humanity, one that civilisation has long been asking, and we are going to answer it today. Now, if that's not important, I don't know what it is. Follow it to the end. If it seems long, that's because it is. And after you're done with the video, there's worksheets. So if you've not had your coffee, it might be worth sticking one on or cracking open a Red bull.

All right. So let's begin with the beginning. What is dualism and the conflict of man? Dualism is the way our mind understands things. Your brain is built like a computer. And like in a computer, there is pre-installed software. Your brain contains standardised software that understands things in a certain way. And that way is called dualism. I want you to pay special attention to the different images I'm going to show you, in particular, taking note of the emotion you feel and the thoughts that come into your mind. Don't think too hard. Let your brain relax into it. The first emotion that goes through your mind is what's important.

Here we go. Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton. The devil. Jesus. A billionaire smoking a cigar on Wall Street while burning a $100 bill. A girl in California meditating. An American family in the Midwest with a lot of guns. A family of Muslims. Lettuce, vegetables and healthy food. A big fat burger with tons of fat and cheese. A gangster rapper with two guns. Taylor Swift. Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko smoking a cigar with a glass of scotch emanating the mantra greed is good. And now, poor children.

So how did you feel with each one? Different thoughts and emotions for each one, right. The way the human brain understand something is by comparing it to something else. Darkness is defined by light. If it was always daytime, we conceive of light differently, just as we'd have to reconfigure the meaning of health if disease was eradicated. We think we understand and we define in opposites. You don't believe me, do you? If I told you that right now in my office, it's 450 degrees. Purple monkey, would you take that to mean hot or cold? You just don't know, do you? Because you don't know on what scale the Purple monkey degrees work, and it's impossible for you to know because I just made it up right now.

The first thing your mind tries to do is to try to compare 450 degrees of purple monkey to the temperature system that you understand, depending on whether you're of the family Fahrenheit or Celsius, you you'll compare it to what you know. And just so you know, 456 degrees purple monkey is roughly 20°C. So no need for aircon. But I might open a window. Could you buy an iPhone with ₹38,769 without using a currency converter without googling it? Could you buy one or not? You just don't know. If you don't understand rupees, but the first thing your brain will do is to try to compare rupees to your currency. You're going to try to compare it to euros or us dollars or something, right? We don't know the rupees, so we don't know if we can buy an iPhone with this amount. We have to make a comparison. Simple as that. The human mind cannot understand something without comparing it to something else. That's why we call it dualism.

So next up I'm going to show you how your brain works when making decisions. As you walk through life facing decisions where you have to make decisions, there is a process you undergo that I'm going to uncover for you here and now. So next up, I'm going to show you how your brain works when you're making decisions as you walk through life facing situations where you have to make decisions. There's a process that you undergo that I'm going to uncover for you here and now.

So first a few questions. Right answer out loud. What do you use to see things? What do you use to hear sounds? What do you use to touch things? What do you use to smell odours? What do you use to taste food? If you just shout it out, all of these things, you're wrong if you said that touch. We use our hands to hear, our ears, to cries, to taste our tongue and to smell our nose. You're wrong. These organs simply harvest the information that our brain processes.

When we process information in the brain, we form a perception which is basically an experiential smoothie of sorts, made up of sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste, and maybe a little spinach just to get the fibre in. Everything we experience is perception of information and all perception is done in the brain. There are two ways of perceiving and processing information. The first is through our environment. You can walk outside or read a book or watch TV or anything else, and you will receive information about what is going on around you. You're going to see things, feel things, touch things and hear things. That's the way to capture information. And people tend to believe that that's the only way.

But there is also drum roll your memory and your imagination. If you remember and experience from the past, you are still using information to create perception, just information retained by memory. The thing is, our brain cannot actually tell the difference between something that has happened in real life and something that you've just imagined or remembered. You know the difference, sure. But to your brain, it's all just information to your brain. Information observed via a walk in the park is the same substance as that coming from you. Thinking about your holidays from last year, for example, we can feed our brain with information from our memory, our imagination, or environment.

We can feed it with thoughts from the past, thoughts from the future, or thoughts from the present. The brain processes everything in the same way and I'll prove it to you. Have you ever remembered something that was painful to you at the time, and experienced exactly the same emotions, or a delayed, limited version of them as you did the first time around? Something embarrassing, for example. Think of it now. Concentrate on it. With the right memory, you will begin to feel the embarrassment all over again. The anxiety and the nausea, the general discomfort.

If the brain were certain that the scene you're playing in your mind were not real, you would not have that flushed feeling all over again. Right now, you can do this with happy memories just as easily, and it all goes to prove your brain does not actually know the difference. Just how potent memories can seem is at once impressive and dangerous. For example, if a person says to someone your stupid, or you can't do that with the right amount of

 venom in their voice, it sinks in and the person replays it and replays it until it solidifies as a belief. And that's difficult to come back from, right? A teacher once told me that I was incurably bad at maths and that I would never, ever improve. It felt mean to me at the time, but I also bought into it. And even though this experience only happened once, I relived it in memory over and over again. For years, I just couldn't get it out of my head.

Every time maths came up in conversation, the scene automatically replayed in my head. It went on for years until the memory had become a conviction. During the rest of my schooling, including university and even during my professional life, I remained convinced that I was just lousy at it, and I systematically took out my phone to do super simple calculations. I was too afraid of making mistakes. That's what happens to everyone. A person will once tell them something which is not necessarily true, but this information will be processed by the brain and become a perception of the reality. If the film is replayed often enough, then this perception would become a belief that would become anchored in the brain and will not move.

Scientists have done tests and experiments on people to illustrate this phenomenon. There's one where they sat, a man on a chair, blindfolded and held a charcoal close to his back. They did not put it on his skin. They just held it a few inches away from his body and says, we are now holding a hot cold behind your back. All right. Can you feel the heat? And the guy says, yes, yes, I can feel it. And then they asked, can you feel it coming closer now? As they were closing in and the man said, yes, yes, yes. Then they asked, can you feel it moving away? And the person said, yes.

Finally they brought the charcoal as close as possible to the skin, while telling them they were doing so without touching it, and then at the last minute exchanged it for an ice cube, which they pressed on the man's back. Of course, the guy, convinced that it was a hot charcoal, screamed in panic and stood up. What's really going to bake your noodle, though, is it wasn't just his thoughts telling him porkies his skin started to blister. His body was reacting to the perception of information that the brain had recorded, so it triggered its defence mechanism and caused this skin to swell to protect itself.

Not only was the information misinterpreted in the brain, not only was it an emotional reaction and a mental reaction, but his body, the physical body also reacted. If you repeat something enough, you can convince someone of it and it will become a truth to them.

So that's dualism and the workings of the brain covered. Now I'm going to show you how you form beliefs. Your beliefs are a huge part of who you are, what is good and what is bad, what's true and what's false. Where do your beliefs come from and what's a good way to change them?

If you repeat something enough, you can convince someone to have it and it will become truth to them. So that's dualism and the workings of the brain covered. Now I'm going to show you how you form beliefs. Your beliefs are a huge part of who you are, what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false. Where do your beliefs come from and what's a good way to change them?
So think of your brain as a set of scales. One side holds the positive experiences and the other side holds the negatives. Everything you experience, you create a belief using the scales. Imagine you believe you're bad at maths. For instance, when this teacher humiliated me in front of my class, I put a stone, let's say on the negative side of the scale. If he said something different, encouragement, for example, it could just as easily have been a stone. On the positive side, we keep scales for everything maths, spelling, history, everything, sushi, jazz, mountain climbing, parks, modernist architecture, everything.
In reality, the teacher only slagged me off once. But it might as well have happened 100 times for all the replays that went on in my head, and every single time it was the equivalent to me dropping another stone. On the negative side of the scales, far more beliefs are formed based on memories and imagined scenes, reinterpretations of the past, and ponderings of how something might have gone instead of how it did. This kind of thing not only forms beliefs, but reinforces them with every single replay.
Your brain is a binary system programmed by your environment, your memory, and your imagination. It creates beliefs by thinking about the past, imagining what might happen in the future, and interpreting your immediate environment. All the beliefs you have right now, the things you think you can't do, the things you think you can do, the things you're bad at, and the things you're really good at. Your beliefs about what's right, what's good, what's true and what's false. Who you are as a person. In short, your beliefs about everything are related to the little stones you've piled in your scales. And whatever you believe, that's your reality.
How do you feel about Trump's picture in Hillary's picture? The reason I showed you these images is because these are images for which people have usually a stacked lot of stones on their scales, ready to go with an opinion. These are images that leave no one without a reaction and strong emotional reactions such as indignation, shock, anger make you pile stones on the scales even faster. What informs your beliefs about these two characters? I'm sure you've heaps of stones on scales for them. But how? Why? I'd say I'm safe in saying that none of you have met either, so it's safe enough to say a lot of your beliefs in this case are from your imaginations.
Some people love Trump. They believe he's going to save America. Some think he's the devil incarnate. Whatever the case, the man does not tend to have a small amount of stones on whatever side. He's a love or a hate kind of figure. The same is true of Hillary Clinton. That's why I picked them. In most cases, the scales will have been loaded and beliefs formed on either subject long before I showed you the pictures. And that's how your brain works.
Now, the division of opposites and the two poles of nature. Right? So the world has two poles, north and south, in nature, in the whole perceptible universe. There are polarities just like this. There is dualism. There is a positive and a negative. That's how everything is. And that's how we understand the world. As I already said, the only way our brain can understand something is to compare it to an opposite. So this is the division of opposites and the two poles of nature. There are tons of them. It's by no means all of them, but there are some of the most important ones right here so that you can understand right away what I'm talking about.
So we have the North Pole and the South Pole. And like on a compass you have north and south and east and west. Everything has an opposite. Take time. We have the past and the future. If we think about the past, we have history. And if we think about the future, we have imagination. The opposition of the past is the future, and the opposite of the positive is the negative. Just like on a battery, positive and negative. So the opposite of darkness is light and the opposite of light is darkness. Then on Earth we have days and nights, then we have hot and cold. They are the opposites for the devices. We have the on or off position. Obviously we have good and evil, sadness and joy. Failures and successes. Beauty and ugliness. Fat and thin. There is an opposite for absolutely everything.
Try to think of some opposites. Pause this video for a second and try to think of a few. Think about some things and then think about what their opposites would be. Okay. Everything in this perceptible universe must have an opposite, otherwise our mind can't understand it. As I've already shown you in these examples, when I asked you how hot or cold it would be if I told you it was 456 degrees Purple Monkey, or if you could buy an iPhone with this amount of rupees you didn't know because you couldn't compare it to a frame of reference. Everything in the perceptible universe must have an opposite in order for us to understand it.
Now let's talk about you. We've talked about your brain and how it works. We've talked about dualism, and then we've talked about the two poles of nature. Now let's talk about you as a person. So who are you? I'm sure that's a big question for you. We're all trying to answer it. Who are we? I want to show you the definitive answer to that question. We tend to believe that we are this person and that we were born this way, and that's the way it is. We just have to take what we have and deal with it, because we were born that way, and then that's that. We go through life asking ourselves, who am I? Is it me or is it not me? Are these people like me? Do I associate with that or do I associate with that? Am I for this? Am I against it?
We go through life asking ourselves this question who am I? But when we answer this question, we naturally define who we are and who we are not because it is impossible to define who I am without defining who I am not. That is the nature of things. So we stack stones on our scales. I'm not very good at maths. On goes a stone. I'm not very good with computers. On goes a stone. I don't understand what is on goes a stone. As we experience different things, we appropriate some things and reject others. We say I am this and I am not that.
But the problem is that when you tell yourself that you are something, then you automatically eliminate the possibility of being the opposite or being something else. You're one side of the scales and you can't be the other. It's that mechanism that creates our identity and our beliefs. Imagine your whole life, every experience you've had. Then imagine every thought you've had from the past, every time you've looked back in your memory. Then imagine every dream and every thought you have had about the future. Then imagine that you stacked the scales for all those things. Every time you've had an experience, every time you've had a thought of the past, and every time you had a thought of the future, literally every time you thought you've put something on the scales to tip it one way or the other in relation to that subject.
You cannot have a thought, let alone an experience, without tipping the scales in one direction or the other. What ultimately happens is that the sum of all your scales, for good and for bad, becomes your identity. Every experience you've had, every thought of the past you've had, every thought of the future you've had, which is what ultimately happens, is that the sum of all your scales, for good or for bad, becomes your identity. Every experience you have had, every thought of the past you've had, every thought of the future you've had, which in the course of your life represents millions of scales and form who you are. The sum of all these things together becomes your identity. It becomes the person you think you are, who you think you are in this moment, and who you think you are not at this moment, is simply the sum of all the scales that you have already superimposed on yourself. It is your identity and your beliefs that become your reality.
The way you have formed your identity, who you are right now is your way of living reality. It is your reality. The tragedy is that society has come to believe that we are somebody and that's that we cannot change. We come to think that we are that person. The more time passes, the more who we think we are becomes defined, and the stronger our identity becomes, then the stronger our identity becomes, the harder it is to change our beliefs and our convictions. We become incapable of being the opposites of who we have learnt to believe we are. If you are convinced that you are lousy at filling your rooms with direct sales because of your tears, it will become a conviction and you will not fill your rooms with direct bookings. And that's the way it is. If we don't like the heat and someone invites us to go somewhere hot, we don't want want to go. If we don't like the cold, we will avoid cold places. What is very damaging is that the whole world has come to believe that we are who we are, and this cannot change that. Our identity is fixed.
The real question shouldn't be who am I? But who am I becoming? Because you're not just someone and that's it. You're not just born and you're that person forever.
When Michael Jordan was born, he wasn't born with a basketball on his hand and the innate ability to become the best basketball player in the world. It didn't happen overnight. He had to become the best basketball player in the world. He also had to persevere against the advice of his early coaches, and who told him that he was not cut out for pro basketball, which it's a real thing.
This program will show you how to become what you want to be, and how to let go of who you think you are. Your limits are set based on the identity that you have created over the years by tossing stones and scales. Your identity forms your reality.
Now let's talk about society. Let's talk about the conflict of opposites that society imposes in order to define itself. I'm sure you've noticed that in society, there are a lot of unspoken rules that dictate what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad, what's politically correct, and what's not. And depending on your opinion and your beliefs on these matters, society is going to label you. You will be liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing, polluter or friend of nature, generous or stingy. You have defined who you are as an individual, but society, through its norms, has defined who you should be as a group.
Society is a sum of individuals and their identities, beliefs, and convictions, and that forms together as a group. We define our identities first by who we are not, and so does society. When society defines what is right, it does so by defining what is wrong. In seeking to define who we are, society has defined who we are not. In our minds, if we think that eating meat is a bad thing, it means that eating vegetables is a good thing. If we think that eating vegetables is the only good thing for our bodies, then we think that eating meat is simply wrong. And that's the way it is. When we define right and wrong, we naturally define the opposite.
Society has stacked the scales. It has collectively said who we are and who we are not, and who we should be and who we shouldn't be. And just as you form your beliefs by thinking about the past, the future, and current experiences, so too does society. Society accumulates stones on the scales of what is right and what is wrong. Every time you have a thought or an experience of the past or the future, it tips the scales and creates a belief in something—people should do this, people shouldn't do that. It dictates to people to think the same way, which gave birth to the politically correct movement, actually. He who is not with me is against me. This is the way our contemporary society works. If you don't conform to the mold, then you are against society. He who is not with me is against me, and he who is not like us is our enemy.
Imagine this mechanism over several generations, each one adding stones to the scales of past generations. This is why the identity of a society is so strong. Society's beliefs become its realities. Society has defined who we are when the real question is who are we becoming? This is the cause of all conflict—the conflicts in society, of course, but also the internal conflicts within us. The conflicts within you that are preventing you from doing this thing or that thing because you have built up the belief that you cannot do it. Defining who we are by excluding who we are not is at the root of the limitations we impose on ourselves. It is what limits us from becoming who we want to be.
Which brings us to the big question. The question that humanity is asking itself: what is true and what is false? What is the right way to live and the wrong way? Today, our society is cutting and separating. If you think that earning a lot of money is important, you're on one side. And if you think your well-being is more important than money, then you're on the other. In the same way, we tend to think that the past holds true, then the future is uncertain. This means that when things change, we resist the change. We look into the past nostalgically. Then you have to live by day and sleep by night.
We've come to believe that science is the most accurate source of knowledge that has ever existed. Everyone considers science to be a reliable source of information, and the current trend in Western thought is towards the rejection of religion. In the same way, our industry has come to believe that OTAs are so dominant that we have no choice but to get along with it. We believe our customers are fickle and very difficult to retain. We believe visibility on the internet requires a very large budget, and therefore something that is not within our reach. The conflict within you and society are one and the same—one thing that wants to become something else, and the former iteration wants to give no ground to the future.
There are two versions of you at war, and who you are right now is fighting against who you want to become. And this causes all kinds of stress, fears, dissatisfactions, frustrations. Here's a list of all the topics we're reviewing this week. In this mindset training, we have already covered topic number one, which covered society's understanding of the psychology of self and the creation of identity. If you haven't watched the first video, "The Dark Force Holding Your Field," like we called it, then go back and start there. The program is designed to be watched in sequential order and for good reason.
Topic number two is dualism and the perception of what is right and what is wrong, which we're going to do right now. Our dualism manifests itself in that we have a perception of what is right or wrong or good or bad. We apply that dualism to ourselves, as does, in turn, society. Here's how things are happening right now, okay. Our mind is a programmable on-off system that divides thoughts, memories, and experiences into categories such as it's me or it's not me. This person is right or wrong. I am for or against. This is a friend or an enemy. This division of opposites is called dualism.
We grow up asking who we are, and every experience, memory, and thought stacks a stone on the side of the scales that corresponds. Every time, the sense of self and identity becomes stronger and stronger, and our ability to change becomes weaker and weaker. Society works the same way. It defines an unchangeable identity for each group, an identity that cannot be changed. Dualism is what causes your internal conflict as a person and, in turn, the conflicts in society.
So what is the solution to this problem? Society keeps us reliably misinformed on the issue. Firstly, we're told that by trying to form an individual identity, we are dreaming of being someone we're not. Everybody has that present self, what we are, but somehow what we want to be is not what we are now. We wish to become what we are not, which creates internal conflict. In trying to form a new identity, we dream of being something that our current identity is not, and in doing so, we create an internal enemy.
The same is true for society. By trying to form an identity as a society, we end up creating an enemy of society. At the moment, most Western societies are engaged in a fight against misanthropy and dissatisfaction, and the war is being largely waged with prescriptions to antidepressants. The script of choice for approximately 10% of the UK's adult population in 2022. This is not to deny the existence of the malady of clinical depression, but with statistics tending to max out at around 5% across the board, one has to conclude that some are seeking brain-altering drugs in order to combat sadness. And as anyone making an effort to get off such drugs has reported as a motivation, they take down happiness just as effectively.
All right, killing sadness doesn't equal happiness. Experiencing sadness occasionally intensifies happiness because you understand the latter in contrast to the former. Another example is the replacement of religion with science. After many years of criticism and controversy, science has eked ahead in polls for a lot of people's sources of meaning in life. Okay, people have long placed the two modes of understanding in contrast to one another, but the irony of the current stasis comes when you see the word religion is defined as a universal source of knowledge. That and teachings that must be followed, which is exactly what science has become. Followers, defenders, detractors, and all. The new blasphemy is scientific skepticism. And while you might not be put before the Inquisition, if you utter something in the wrong company, you will get the modern equivalent.
And nine times out of ten, those decrying you for heresy will know next to nothing about the details of science themselves. It's far more common than not for someone to say they're an atheist and not religious, and that they believe in science. They'll say they're not religious, but subscribe to the general thesis of a book they've never read. Just to fit in. That sound familiar?
Another example, in trying to forget about money to achieve spiritual happiness, we find ourselves unhappy because we need money. There are many people who talk about being spiritual, non-materialistic, connected to the universe, and being happy without money. But these are the people, the same people who end up becoming unhappy and stressed out because they don't have money to fix their broken car, for example. They try to artificially erase an intrinsic need they have and end up being caught up by reality. Because this need doesn't care about their belief. In the past, having a permanent job in a large company was considered the promised land in terms of employment. It was the norm for generations, right up until recently when you started to see large companies firing thousands of people in the blink of an eye. Not because the companies themselves were going bankrupt, but because that kind of system didn't allow them to make the maximum amount of money for their investors.
What yesterday was the most of job security today, much less of a guarantee, which explains the global explosion of self-employed people.
So what is the solution in the long run? The only way to get it wrong every time is to choose a side. In our world, everything is changing, moving, and evolving all the time. What is true today may not be true tomorrow. What was true yesterday may not be true today. The surefire way to guarantee loss in the pipeline is to resist change.
This is the equation that governs all evolution, including our own. There's a thesis, then an antithesis, and finally a synthesis. Your thesis is your current situation. Then an antithesis comes in contact with the thesis, and it changes it, and you get your synthesis. For example, if you are the thesis and the sun is the antithesis, then the synthesis will be either sunburn or a nice tan, depending on your skin type and whether or not you're wearing sunscreen.
Let's look at your evolution and how it might fit with society's current paradigm and how you can bust out of that. So we have our current identity as what we think we are. We answer these questions: is this me? Is this not me? Are these people like me or are they not like me? Am I for that? Am I against it? Should I believe in this thing? Our "self" is a unit of our own creation based on our beliefs, what we identify with.
Then we have who we want to be—the desired self. The version who's tanned and wealthy, with plenty of free time and 100% direct bookings with an award through the ceiling. It doesn't have to be exactly that, of course; we all dream differently. Then we have the gap between the two, which I've illustrated here with this ugly grey rectangle. The cause of all our misfortunes. We want to become that other person, but we cannot because our present self prevents us from doing so on a level Freud himself would have considered beyond tinkering with. We just don’t believe that we have it in ourselves to become who we want to be.
It's a philosophy acutely in tune with society's flawed paradigm, and people reassure themselves. It’s all fine with peppy phrases like “stay true to yourself” and “be authentic” and “you’re fine the way you are.” We have etched it in societal stone that our desire to be something better than we are currently is somehow faulty wiring, and frankly, it’s a bunch of horseshit.
What you see on the screen represents the equation of all evolution. We have our current self, that's the system. We have our desired self, which is the antithesis. Then we have our new self, which is the synthesis. The new self is a combination of our old self and our desired self. When we become our new self, that new self becomes the present self again. And this equation repeats again and again. That is why there is an arrow that goes from pink to blue. Because once we have formed a new "I," it will be natural that after a while, we start to desire to be another "I," even more evolved. That's how it always happens.
I remember when I managed to go under my goal of 50% of OR (Occupancy Rate) coming from OTAs, I immediately wanted to go to 40%. It was my desired new self. Let’s say it’s a virtuous circle. We become the person we want to be, and that new guy comes armed with ambitions all of his own.
We need to break the current paradigm of our society and get out of the ready-made thinking models that are putting mediocrity and complacency on the pedestals that used to be reserved for the moguls and the entrepreneurs and the elite-level performers. Accepted truths are the enemy. If everyone says the same thing, chances are the opposite is also true.
Stop thinking that OTAs are all-powerful and that you can’t do anything about it. It’s just not true, guys. Give yourself permission to do better, and you’ll get there. Stop thinking that having a powerful website is only for people who know a lot about computers, or who have a large budget to devote to it. That’s not true either. Give yourself the means to learn, and you will do much better than many web agencies out there because not only will you have the knowledge by that point, but your heart will be in the right place like no one contracted could ever dream of managing.
In the majority of cases, the current paradigm is wrong, and the truth is a combination of the current model and the desired model is what you want. That’s the new paradigm we’re going to work with. Earlier, I took the example of a person focused on becoming rich and a person who’s focused on their own development. Let’s say your new paradigm will be a statement that not only are these two approaches not mutually exclusive, they’re inexorably tied together.
We believe that history is more accurate than the future because history contains facts, and the future is a matter of our imagination. However, it is by merging the two that we build our present.
Another example: if someone is trying to get rid of germs completely, using hand sanitizer and washing their hands like crazy, and is really, really afraid of germs, guess what? He’ll end up getting sick because his immune system has not developed a tolerance. His desired germ-free self is in conflict with the reality of his current self, which needs to be in contact with these germs in order to learn how to destroy them.
Take another notion that’s globally prevalent, right? That to succeed in life, you have to do a lot of studying. And yet today, you have graduates with 4 or 5 years of higher education who are struggling to find work while their classmates who went into technical fields early in their schooling are for sure at the head of successful small businesses. Think about it the next time you call the plumber, and he’ll charge you €100 for the trip.
The right thing to do is always combine both sides, both points of view, both opinions. Learn to confront opposites and learn from them. For example, we’ve always been told that being happy is great and being sad sucks. Well, I’m telling you here and now, you also need to learn to appreciate the pain that comes from being out of your comfort zone.
Remember, no one likes to get out of their comfort zone, but it’s only by exposing yourself to transgressions that you’ll grow and evolve. You think you are not capable of making a website yourself. Convince yourself of the opposite, and you will see that in no time, you will have learned. Anyone can learn how to make a website, especially with the tools available today.
Fight against yourself, and the feeling of satisfaction you will get when you win these battles will give you wings to do more and more. The feeling of surpassing yourself becomes addictive and is the fuel you need for positive change. The key to all evolution is variation, and by that, I mean the light with the dark.
We all have a light side and a dark side. Our present self is the one we have chosen to bring into the light. It is who we are. This side of us we are not is the dark. When we get tired of what is in the light, the only way to truly reach our new self, our desired self, is to consider what is in the dark.
You must remember this equation, the equation that truly governs all evolution: the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which becomes the new thesis. This is the problem with the current paradigm of society and the way everybody thinks and believes. Dualism and the perception of right and wrong.
Our mind is a programmable on-off system that divides thoughts, memories, and experiences into categories such as "it’s me" or "it’s not me." This person is right or wrong. I am for or against. This is right or wrong. This is a friend or an enemy. This is good or bad. The division of opposites is the only way to make sense of things, and it’s called dualism.
We grow up asking who we are, and every experience, memory, and thought stacks a stone on one side of the scales. Over time, the sense of identity and self becomes very strong, and our ability to change becomes weaker and weaker. Society develops in the same way. It defines an identity for the group, an identity that cannot be changed. Dualism is the cause of all our internal conflicts as people. Dualism is the cause of the conflicts in society.
In turn, become fluid in your thinking. That’s the new paradigm you need in your life. We need to understand the nature of our own mind, the dualism experienced by the division of opposites. We need to understand that all conflicts in ourselves, in society, in business, and everywhere else are the result of resistance to change.
We understand that the key to all evolution is variation, and that what slows it down and causes problems is clinging to an identity constructed from stories from the past. We must abandon what we are now to become what we want to be. This involves doing things that we have ignored and judged with our present self and its identity. Eventually, we will have to face the opposite of what we are.
Paradoxes must be reversed. That is why we need to understand the dualism that exists in our minds and lose the binary positioning that there is only one truth and one right and one wrong. If you want to evolve as a person and become a better version of yourself in life and in business, you must consider your dark side and bring it into the light.
If you're introverted, it is time to speak up. If you're an extrovert, maybe it's time to reflect and be a little alone. If you've never been smart, it's time to become a genius. No matter how your scales are stacked right now, the real way to evolve and get what you want is to remove these binary stacks. That is what will allow you to discover what is hidden in the darkness, and that is what will allow you to progress in everything.
Remember, the real question that needs to be answered is: *Who am I becoming?* When you're stuck in life, ask yourself that question again. And now, we're going to do some exercises. This is some real meaty work you'll need to get through. And before we do, I'd like to say that what I want most for you is to succeed and talk about this program. And as far as I'm concerned, this is the best way to ensure that that happens. And I've been doing this long enough and for enough hoteliers that I know what I'm on about.
All right, the first is to discover who you are. To do that, you're going to have to do the Myers-Briggs test by going to this site here. The link is on the screen so you can enter it. It's very easy to do, quick, and free. You have to do it without thinking about it so as not to distort the results. There is no right or wrong answer to the questions on this test. That's the thing to remember. This is not an IQ test, and no one will say you're smart or stupid or anything like that based on the results. Take away any judgement you may have about this type of test and just do it. Just answer the questions honestly, starting with the first thing that comes to your mind for each one. Then write down the result you get. It will be a four-letter word, and you just want to write it on a piece of paper—well, four-letter word or a combination of four letters. You can pause the video and do it right away, and I recommend you do.
The second exercise is to discover the binary poles of your current programming. All right, the way you are currently programmed to do this, you need to complete the worksheet entitled "Your Binary Poles." You will find it for download with this video. Print it and complete it.
The first question is: *Who are the three people you admire?* Everybody admires some people. Who are they? Don't be one of those people who think, "I don't have any." Once you've written down those three names, write down what traits or characteristics make you admire each of these people.
Okay, then: *Which three people do you despise or dislike or think are just plain wrong?* Write their names. I've noticed that when I ask this question, many people answer, "There is no one." And then, when you dig a little deeper, you realize that there definitely, definitely is. You're only human. You have to be really honest with yourself. Right? If you're not honest, the only person you're fooling is yourself. Quite frankly, you're going to be looking at your answers—no one else is going to be. All right, just be honest. Make sure you write them down. Be honest with yourself and write down what traits or characteristics make you hate each of these people.
So: *What do you like to do that you could do all day and never get bored of?* That's the next question. All right, if you had all the time in the world in front of you, and you could not miss anything, what would you do? Find three activities and write them down. Then do the same with what you hate—the three worst things you hate doing the most. Things that totally suck. Write them all down.
Okay, then we’ve got question seven, which is: *Now we want you to circle the answer that best describes you.* For everything that follows, we have logic and intuition, stingy with money and generous with money, masculine and feminine, and so on. Go through all these questions and circle one answer each time.
Then, on question eight, we ask: *What is your dream? What do you really want to accomplish in life, and how do you want to live?* Take a moment to think about what you really want. What would be everything you've always wanted? For example, where would you want to live? What would you want to do? How much money would you want to have in your bank account? What kind of car would you have? Dream about what you want and write it down.
In question nine: *Do you see how your current binary poles are in direct conflict with the dream you have for yourself? Do you see the things you don’t like others for are exactly the things you need to achieve your dreams?* What is happening is that the other side of ourselves—the side of ourselves that we have put out in the dark, that we are bottling up and hiding—is the side that our dreams would like to see emerge and flourish.
Every time you feel that one way of living is better than another, then you become paralyzed. And to get out of that paralysis, you need some of the characteristics that people who live the way you think are wrong live. Okay? You're going to notice, if you look at the people you have chosen above, look at the people you like and their characteristics, and the people you don't like and their characteristics, that what is needed to achieve your greatest dream is actually in conflict with your current binary judgments.
I reassure you, it’s the case with absolutely everyone.
Then, in question ten, we say: *The way you exist right now makes it impossible to realize your dreams.* In the previous video, I told you that who you are now, your current self, will never make your dreams come true. Impossible. It's the last game already. The person you are right now will not make those dreams come true.
To realize our dreams, we must become the person who deserves them and reach out and grab them. We must become a new person. The way we exist right now makes it impossible for your dreams to come true. Who you are right now will never make your dreams come true. I know I repeat myself a lot, but it’s so that you get it for sure. I want this message to become engraved in your mind: *You must evolve to make your dreams come true.* And that means facing your dark side and removing all binary judgments from your mental programming.
Now what you need to do is write below that you are committed to facing your dark side to realize your dreams. If you want your dreams to come true, if you want everything you've always wanted, and if you want to become the person you really want to become, then commit. Now write it down in your own words. Just write: *I am determined to make my dreams come true and face the binary judgments that I have.* Okay, just write it down and make that commitment happen. Commit to yourself.
Then, in question eleven, we say: *Judging others prevents you from doing anything bold because of the fear of being judged yourself.* Ironic, isn’t it? It’s as if someone is too afraid to do anything because of what others might say or think about them. You can do this experiment: Listen to someone pass judgment on someone else, and you will immediately find out that that person is afraid to do that thing themselves, the very thing they’re judging the other person for. You will see that it is very instructive, and it’s almost systematic.
Remember, for every action there is an inverse proportional reaction. If someone is too afraid to do something for fear of being judged in doing it, that person will judge those who dared to do it. Look at the people you don’t like and ask why. Why don’t you like them? You will understand that the reason you don’t like them and the thing you judge them for nine times out of ten is what you need to do to yourself to achieve what you want to achieve.
If you want to free yourself from your fear, you have to stop judging others. What you want to do now is make the decision, consciously and willfully, to stop judging others and take the time to understand their point of view and accept them. Free yourself from the fear of being judged by others, and stop judging others yourself. This will free you from the chains that hinder your progress and that you have set yourself up in.
All right, you can start with small things in your life. If you never eat meat, try eating some from time to time. If you hate classical music, listen to some. If you hate cats, adopt one. Break down the boundaries you’ve set for yourself and your judgments.
The same goes for everything technical we will do later. I know that many of you are afraid to get your hands dirty, to create your own website, to change your good old habits. This is what you will have to do if you want to boost your direct sales and increase your margins. Remember, the only surefire way to retain your status quo is to stick to what you’ve always done and to take the same positions you always have.
In question twelve, we ask: *What are some of the things you don’t like and would never do?* Think of some things you would never do in a million years, that you totally fear, and name three or four that you can do this week. All right, pause the video and write them down on a piece of paper. For example, if you never listen to a certain type of music, say, symphonic metal, then this week, go to YouTube and listen to Nightwish. Or if you’ve never eaten a snail, do it this week. All right, anyway, you’ve got to pick four things that you wouldn’t normally do and go do them. For some hotel owners I’ve trained, it took a long time to get them to do some of the essential operations of their establishment themselves. Okay? By their own admission, I only managed to get them to do them because, before, I made them do other things that they had never dared to do. I even made a B&B owner jump out of an airplane, and you better believe his strategizing felt the benefits in terms of ambition for it. And for the record, by the way, it was a bet that he lost, to which he held up his end honorably.
Then, this question thirteen is very important: *What result did you get on the Myers-Briggs test?* What are the four letters? You will find below the opposite of each of these letters. If you have followed this video, you know what you have to do. The funny thing is that this test is very well known in the world of psychologists, but none of them will tell you that you have to look beyond what you are to become a little more of what you are not.
Okay? If you have not yet paused this video to take this test, you should do so, because you can identify how you are currently programmed. This test will give you four different letters, and there are two options for each letter. All right? You can have an I or an E as the first letter. Then you can have an N or an S. Then you can have an F or a T, and then you can have a P or a J. And the combination of these four letters defines how you are programmed at the time. I seem to remember that there are sixteen possible combinations in total. None of them is better than another. They are simply a reflection of your current programming.
If you have an I, it means you are introverted, discreet, and reserved. If you have an E, it means you are extroverted, noisy, and energetic. An N means you are intuitive. It means that you use your intuition a lot, and you don’t really use any logic. Let’s say you know what you have to do because you feel it. You don’t like rules, and you do a lot of random things. You are unstructured. An S means that you like structure. You’re really organized. You organize your day and everything else. You like things to be predictable. You’re always on time and follow the rules.
Then you’ve got F and T. F is for feeling, specifically emotional feeling. It means that you tend to make a lot of decisions based on your feelings. T is when you use thought—when you think logically and reason. You’re very rational. 100% of men tend to be higher T than 60% of women, and the exact reverse is true of women for F. It’s the way it is, guys. I’m not making it up.
Then there’s P. P is when you’re pretty indecisive. You like to keep your options open, and you don’t really like to make decisions. J is when you’re very decisive. Everything is black and white. These are different letters that you can have. So write them all down.
Then, in question fourteen, you want to identify your opposites and see how you are going to need them to achieve your goals. Right? So, if you are an STJ, then you're going to circle INFP because they are your opposites, and they are your goals. Then go through these different letters and circle your opposites. Okay? If you are an E, choose an I. If you’re an F, choose a T. Then you need to understand that people got it kind of wrong with the Myers-Briggs test. People thought that when you took the test and found out how you were programmed, then that’s the way it is, and it couldn’t be changed, and that’s how you proceed in life and make it better for you. But that is *bullshit*.
And that's a big mistake you should make. If you're extroverted, you can become more introverted about certain things in life, and vice versa. Don't be typecast. All right? It's not good. Ask Matthew McConaughey. It takes a long time to get back from that. All right, all right, all right. This test simply identifies who you are so that you can now identify what you need to change to become who you want to become. It's as easy as simple pie at beginners' bakery school.
Identifying your opposite number is like sketching a map to your goals. If you're introverted, chances are you need to become a little more outgoing. If you're intuitive and random, you'll probably have to structure yourself a little bit more. If you're really, really structured, you probably need to be more intuitive and random, and go with your gut. If you're extroverted, you'll probably need to be a little more introverted. If you're really emotional, you need to get more logical.
You want to identify your opposites, and then you want to try to introduce more of your opposites into your life and your business. Be aware that there will be problems if they are too binary and stuck on one side. There is nothing wrong with being introverted, as long as you're not too nervous to speak, that you are unhappy because you can't speak freely. There is nothing wrong with being extroverted, as long as you don't talk all the time and regularly take time to reflect before expressing yourself.
There has to be a balance between these different things. When you become paralyzed in any area of your life, it is usually when one of these traits is overdeveloped and becomes a binary pole, really stuck in one position. You need to become aware of this and begin to unlock it.
Do these exercises, save them, and come back and do them again from time to time. If there’s one thing you've learned since you started doing this training and learned about your brain, it's that your memory isn't what it used to be.
All right, do the work. Do it now. Because if you say you're going to do it later, you won't do it. If you say you're going to do it tomorrow, you're not going to do it. Do it now and save it.
Finally, the easiest and most fun exercise: *Do something you normally wouldn't do.*
If you want to listen to rap music, listen to rap music. If you want to listen to rap music, try listening to rap music. If you only listen to jazz, try listening to Mozart. If you only listen to Mozart, try listening to some Miles Davis. If you've always had your hair cut a certain way, change it. If you've always worn the same thing, if you've always had the same style, the same sense of fashion or whatever, change it.
If you've always been someone who goes to bed very early and wakes up very early, try getting up a little later. You have to do these different things. You have to start evolving. Eat your dessert before dinner. It's fun to do.
I once committed to veganism for a month because someone observed to me what a totally committed carnivore I am and where I was from. There, I learned a lot about food, and now I eat in a much more balanced way. To be honest, I get better sleep, and I'm less drowsy after meals. It was a good change.
I don't know, now that I think of it, I've probably been doing that too long. It might be time for another change-up. I'd say one month of cheese sandwiches and kombucha coming up. All right, you see, I'm in it with you.
Do the exercises. And there you have it. It's time to take action, learn more about yourself, and try new things. Let me share a personal story with you: Once I committed to a month of veganism after realizing how much of a carnivore I had become, it opened my eyes to the world of balanced eating, improved my sleep, and reduced post-meal drowsiness.
But you know what? I've been doing that for too long. Now it's time for a change-up. How about a month of cheese sandwiches and kombucha? It's important to keep evolving and trying new approaches.
So let's dive into the exercises, start our own transformations, and I'll see you in the next video.

If I've taught you anything so far, it should at least be that things are not what they appeared to be. In previous videos, you learned about the existence pattern, the waves, the highs, and the lows. We improve our lives, gain in terms of happiness, success, and whatever else you rate yourself on. And then we self-sabotage or drop the ball in an obvious or avoidable way. And before we know it, we're back at square one.

We each have this internal thermostat, and it seems beyond our control even after we've noticed the pattern. Things are not what they appear to be. All right. We're going to talk about virtuous circles and something called the burden of conscience. You'll first learn to understand them, and then you'll learn to use them. Then I will question my own existence— that age-old chestnut— and seek answers to big questions. Namely, why are there relationships between my different patterns of behavior and how can I take control of them? 

We will also talk about major advances in quantum physics and the conflict between this new form of science and classical science. Don't let the titles put you off. It's easier than you're thinking. Then we're going to talk again about the current societal paradigm and its biased relationship with the material and the physical—what I call the perceivable—and why it has arrested a lot of people in their development.

This is a big part of what makes people believe that they are who they are and that they cannot change. So many people are caught in traps and want things that their current selves are preventing them from attaining. They want to change, to do better, to live a better life, to make more money, to start a business, and so on. But they can't. We're going to look at why.

Then we'll open your eyes. I'll tell you about my discovery of the universal theory, which applies to everything that stems from my own experience, what I've observed in others, and the models I've outlined in the videos leading up to this one. Anytime I've revealed this theory to smaller groups, it's been a game changer. So I'm very excited to be finally bringing it to a wider audience. I'm sure it will mean big changes for anyone who puts it to use.

Next, I will unveil your new paradigm: a revolutionary new way of thinking and perceiving reality. Have you ever wondered how I went from an independent hotelier to a successful entrepreneur? How do the successful succeed? How do hotels that are not dependent on OTAs get to that place and stay there?

When I was running Le Mans Country Club Hotel, I didn’t have the budget to hire a consultant to help. I didn’t have any budget at all. Come to think of it, we were using out-of-date software. We didn’t even have a channel manager. And even though my MBA in a renowned hotel business school was by my side, I didn’t know anything about digital marketing, and I had never put together a website in my life.

So how did I do it? Simple. Well, simple-ish. I transcended myself. What does that mean, you're asking? Well, think about Maslow’s pyramid of needs. You start out in absolute survival mode. All you care about is water, warmth, and rest. Then come the security needs. You have to protect yourself. Then there is the feeling of belonging, of being appreciated and loved. You want to have someone in your life who does this for you. 

Then, on top of that, you have the need for prestige and the feeling of accomplishment. It’s when you want to achieve something that you get there, and you realize that there is much more you can do. Then there’s a higher level above that called transcendence. All right. It’s when you start to be able to accomplish anything that you decide what you want to achieve, often by being more and more ambitious.

Let me open a short parenthesis here. Actually, you will often hear me talk about ambition in this training. It is not something negative, as many people would like to think. We are talking about a healthy ambition here. Ambition that doesn’t require you crushing your neighbor to achieve its ends. End of parenthesis.

Okay. It’s good ambition. It’s there. When you get to the top of the pyramid, at the transcendence stage, you will really lower your occupancy rate coming from OTAs. This is where you become able to generate a maximum of direct bookings and an increase in your margins. This is when you really begin to understand that you can do anything you want to do. It’s just a matter of making the decision. This is transcendence.

Unfortunately, in the current school of thinking, the concept might as well be science fiction. In our industry, most people believe that the battle against OTAs is already over. They are wrong. Many think that revenue management is a complicated process. They are wrong too. Many think that it takes a web agency to have a successful website that generates a lot of direct bookings. They are wrong. Prove them wrong.

Personally, many people think that in order to be successful in the hotel industry, you must go to a hotel business school. They are wrong. And I’m not saying that going to one won’t help. I went to one myself, a very prestigious one. I’m just saying that anyone can do it without it, with the right set of tools.

Parents tend to believe their children will live successful lives if only they educate themselves to the point of collecting diplomas—all the while knowing the number of people out of work or working jobs that have nothing to do with what they studied. It’s insane. We’re going to look at the way it actually works, and we’re going to put what we learn into action.

The first thing to remember from today is that things are not what they appear to be. The big question you have to ask yourself now is whether you’ve programmed yourself without your knowledge, to be the person you are today. Imagine what else you’ve done wrong without realizing. What other issues are you wilfully ignoring? It’s honestly unsettling when you start to get into it, really.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s explore the huge advancements inherent to this new paradigm and the worldview that comes with it. Let’s start with the virtuous circles and the burden of conscience. Don’t panic if this title sounds complicated or weird or anything, I’ll explain it to you in very simple terms.

Have you ever wondered why there is such a big gap between the rich and the poor? You often hear “the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.” The gap is widening, and the elite are untouchable. And there is next to nothing we can do about any of it, if we are only making €20,000 to €30,000 a year.

Let’s say after more than enough wondering, I did give it a look. And while this might not be news to you, it certainly was to me: the gap is huge. I know this graphic is from 2007, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a new one. Almost as if the topic was taboo. And it’s well enough known that the gap has widened immeasurably since then.

The top 1% are in a league of their own, and the second and third divisions are empty. Everyone else is playing in a regional conference, to take a football metaphor for a walk.

This is Bernard Arnault. He is the richest man in France and the fourth richest person in the world. Last year, he was worth €66.9 billion. The most he’s earned in one year is €6.4 billion. The average salary in France is €40,000. Arnault makes €17.5 million a day. Let that sink in. It’s practically inconceivable. Warren Buffett’s fortune grows exponentially, and he had to start somewhere. He started investing in the stock market with $6,000, I believe. Again, let that sink in.

How can someone earn €17.5 million a day when another person sweats at the thought of having to pay rent at the end of the month? And it’s not just money and business, by the way. The same applies to sport, for example. How is Michael Jordan so good at basketball compared to almost any other player in history?

There are people like me who could maybe catch a ball and bounce it if you threw it at me. Then there are people who I went to school with who made the team—the basketball team. Then there are the best players in Spain, France, Serbia, and other strongholds outside the US. Then there are those who break out and get signed to the NBA. Then you move through the steadily rising levels of players playing professionally at the highest level on the planet, and then encounter a Jordan, a Bryant, a Larry Bird, or a LeBron James. And it seems like the line indicating the level goes from a Dutch polder to the peak of Mount Everest in a single step.

This principle perseveres across disciplines and particularly in sport. They can occupy sort of a mental space one might call alien or otherworldly. It’s as though, to us, they are not human. Not just that, but we assume they were born like that. We assume they were born like that, as though the only way to achieve outlier status is through genetics. The only way to come to such a simplistic conclusion would be to know nothing about how skills are acquired and how virtuous circles work.

Virtuous circles are a powerful tool you can use to improve yourself and achieve goals. Understanding them and integrating them into your

 daily practice will achieve results. However, if you understand these virtuous circles but neglect to use them, you will suffer the opposite effect and return to the pattern of perpetual construction and destruction.

People in the hospitality industry think the distribution looks like this for commissions. People think the graph is linear and that the more rooms you have, the more financial power you have, and the fewer commissions you pay to OTAs. The perceived wisdom is that the big hotels and the chain hotels pay next to nothing, while the little guys with ten rooms or less hold up the whole OTA fort at the expense of their margins.

One reason we’ve learned to think like this is because they taught us to think like this in school—not in any subject, particularly, but in how they grade. They either pass or fail you, and the stepping stones from the top to the bottom think of themselves in terms of who they’re above or below. Some say it’s outdated, some say it’s the best system, but one thing is for sure: it’s devastatingly limited when it comes to knowing the work it takes to get from one stage to the other.

Contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of small hotels that pay hardly anything in terms of commissions, and many large hotels that proportionately pay a lot. This graphic you see on the screen is a false perception. The rule that actually applies is a lot more natural, and we know there are no straight lines in nature. The market is the fairest judge of value, and it’s in the habit of rewarding those who put the work in and giving nothing to those who do not.

You know this. You know if your rooms don’t offer what the market wants, well, you won’t sell them. I’ve seen beautiful hotels with excellent service that still struggle to fill, and end up paying fat commissions to OTAs. They invariably didn’t understand why, despite the massive efforts they made according to their pre-internet management manuals, they faced empty rooms. How’s this for a lesson? Quality is a prerequisite and not an end in itself.

So, what’s the next move? Why bitch and complain about OTAs, the internet, technology, millennials, customers who are no longer loyal? Of course. Meanwhile, their competitors have them spitting dust because they adapted and learned what they needed to do. Distribution— all distribution— follows a rule called the Pareto principle, or more commonly, the 80/20 rule.

Most people are in one of two camps on it. They’ve never heard of it, or they’ve heard of it, but they have no idea how they could apply its wisdom to their own situation. You’ve already seen it in action with Warren Buffett—how he made 80% of his wealth in the former 20% of his life. Another example, looking at the income distribution curves, we obviously notice that 20% of the richest people own 80% of the planet’s wealth, and vice versa. And there’s more.

If you dissect the reported incomes of Booking.com, you can see that 80% of their income comes from 20% of the hotels on their website. We see it in nature: 80% of the planet is water, and 20% of the planet is land. 80% of all existing land is in 20% of the countries, and 80% of the sunshine is in 20% of the countries. 80% of snow and rain falls in 20% of the countries, and 80% of crimes are committed by 20% of the people. Then, 80% of health problems are experienced by 20% of the population. 

Imagine complaining that 20% of countries have 80% of the sun. A system is bad. It’s not fair. They have sun, and we don’t. Or imagine complaining that the population mainly lives in cities and claiming that they should live more in the countryside. As totally bonkers as that sounds, it is exactly what many owners of hotels, bed and breakfast lodges, and vacation rentals are doing when they complain about OTAs and the commissions they have to pay. 

They suffer at the hands of the Pareto principle because they do not know how to hack it and get mad at the system. See what happens? Nothing. The thing to do is learn about it and then use it to your advantage. Don’t get angry. Don’t get blameful. Don’t get bitter. Get to grips with it and get on top of it.

And what does getting on top of it look like? It looks like you on the good side of the divide— one of the 20% enjoying 80% of the market share, working in virtuous circles. So what the heck does that mean? Chill. We’ve been through the basics already. For every cause, there is an effect. For every action, there is a reaction followed by a result.

If I spend time in the sun without sunscreen, my being an idiot in combination with the strength of the sun is the cause, and the effect is sunburn and regrets—UV cause and effect. Then I do it again and again. I did mention I’m an idiot until I’m more sunburned than man. Let’s say this is what we call a vicious circle, a much more well-known expression in our hellish experience, and also the effective converse of the virtuous circles I’ve been referring to this whole time.

So, keeping with the beach, maybe I wear sun cream and I don’t get burnt. And I notice my skin feels much less worn. Healthier, let’s say. And I keep wearing sun cream but also getting monthly facials. Then I join a gym because self-care has become my thing, and I win Mr. Universe and become governor of California. Virtuous circles all the way to the top. 

The principle remains the same on either side. If you learn nothing, the same effect reverberates in a circle around your life, and you become a walking self-fulfilling prophecy, for better or for worse. 

Example: if someone runs into the street shouting, the general level of panic amongst the public will increase, and then more people will run because of the increase in panic. Another example that you’ve probably seen at a party when people start to leave. All of a sudden everyone is leaving before you know it, the party’s over. Obviously, that’s the vicious circle, but the reverse is true. The first person to dance at a wedding is never lonely on the floor for long.

If the temperature is hot, people will use air conditioning. But when we use it, it releases greenhouse gases, which heats up the atmosphere. Which means using air conditioning makes the earth even hotter. It’s a vicious circle, allegedly. When money generates more money in the form of interest, a well-known virtuous circle, and you’d all do well to get in on when money generates more money in the form of interest, that’s a well-known virtuous circle and one you’d all do well to get in on.

After a show, one person applauds, then more join. Then everybody is applauding. Then one person stands, then everyone stands, and then they play one more song. Result.

It’s a simple enough concept, but it is not to be underestimated. For the doubters out there, I’ve got an example, an emotion example. Here we have a guy dancing just by himself. Keeps on just dancing by himself. Now another guy is coming to join him. So we have two people dancing. There’s another. There’s some more and some more. And some more. Again. All of a sudden, there’s more people dancing than not. And they keep coming. They’re running from far and wide. 

So there’s the virtuous circle. We just saw it in action. The more dancers there are, the more dancers join in. It’s an exponential curve. He’s all alone. Then there are two. And after a while, boom! It explodes.

It is important to see this because people often underestimate that a little positive action can lead to incredible results over time. This is the 80/20 rule wound up and let fly. This is what happens in nature, and it’s what you are going to make happen in your business.

And as you can see here, the party continues online. The cycle never ends. The guy dancing started a party. Somebody videoed it. Uploaded it. And as of recently, it’s got 16 million views and 100,000 likes. And you just watched it. 

The 80/20 rule is caused by virtuous and vicious circles. And it’s a natural law. I showed you this to explain to you that virtuous and vicious circles exist everywhere. And more crucially, in spite of us trying to fight the exponential distribution in the 80/20 laws, it's like trying to prevent people from walking on the middle part of the stairs. In any old house with stairs, you’ll see steps that are mostly worn on the 80% in the middle, and the 20% sides are still intact. If you try to fight this law, you’ll burn yourself out over nothing. 

On the other hand, you can understand it, take advantage of it, and change your position. So let’s look at how all of this can benefit you.
Let’s talk about virtuous circles and the burden of conscience. First of all, let’s do a quick exercise. Do not cheat. Do it. It’s important. I want you to focus and empty your mind. Try to think of nothing at all. Whatever you do, just don’t think about what I’m going to tell you and show you in a second. Once I tell you about it and show it to you, don’t think about it.
Don’t think of a pink elephant. You’re definitely thinking about a pink elephant right now, for sure. You know what? What someone thinks becomes what that person thinks about.
In other words, what comes to mind is what we think about, what we put our brain to action on. This is an example of a circle, which can be virtuous or vicious, depending on what comes to mind. You see a pink elephant, so your brain prints a thought, a pink elephant, and starts to develop thoughts about it. It’s a spiral in our brain in which there is a relationship between each cause and its effect, which in turn becomes the cause for the next thinking printout, and so on.
The mechanism is unstoppable. If you have a thought, your brain will start to think about that thought. It will come to a conclusion, and that conclusion is your new idea. Then your brain will start to think on this new idea, and it will create its next conclusion, and so on. A completely insignificant thought can set off a vicious cycle and make you sick to your stomach in moments. If you think, "I think I caught a cold this weekend," then your brain will pick it up and run with it. This is bothering me and my throat. I think I must have tonsillitis, and then next up it will be, "I have a sore throat. I’m very sick. I’m going to stay in bed all morning."
And this isn’t even to say you’d be making it all up. Not at all. You have talked yourself into being actually sick. Remember my math teacher started on me with a mean remark that may have been the result of a bad morning and tripped me up whenever I got near a bit of multiplication. Any thought, no matter how meaningless, can start a thought spiral and form a belief that then becomes reality for you.
Fortunately, you can hack this mechanism and create virtuous circles that can make you physically and mentally extremely strong. You might think, for example, "I’m good at spelling." Then you’re going to think, "I’m really good at spelling." And as you have this stored in your mind, you’re going to take special care of your spelling, and you’re going to get even better at it. This virtuous circle is going to make you improve your spelling.
These virtuous or vicious circles can be your best friends or your worst enemies. They can make you a Michael Jordan or a Michael Jordan of hotel management, or destroy you until you get deeply depressed and kill yourself. They can do either. They can really make you do something great, or they can really ruin your life and get you into endless trouble.
I know some of you probably think I’m being extreme when it comes to suicide, but I have to say, if you’re saying that, you may well be contesting one of the most backed-up-by-research statements I’ll make here, and believe me, I’ve researched everything. It’s what I call the burden of conscience. A thought can become a vicious, generalized, person-defining virus.
You know, you don’t get ideas. Ideas get you. Remember, I spoke about mind viruses in the previous video. A thought can mutate into a mental virus. Okay, this is something we all know from experience. It all depends on how you process it. If you receive negative information, which is inevitable in all its forms, in a spirit of negativity, like "Last month, I paid commissions on 80% of my revenues. That’s really bad," then for sure, you’re headed into a vicious circle.
On the other hand, upon receipt of this information, you could say to yourself, "I have a great deal of leeway to improve the situation. I must devote time to find a solution." Then you will start a virtuous circle that will ultimately lead to improving your situation.
We’ve been in such a hurry to understand the mysteries above us—the sun, stars, space, all of it—to help us figure out the "why" of our existence that we neglected to keep a key eye on what’s going on in our own minds. Do you think you’re in control of your own thoughts? Where do your thoughts even come from? Thousands of random thoughts come into your mind every hour out of nowhere. What causes this?
The answers aren’t in space, no matter what Stanley Kubrick might have thought. I’ll show you not only where they come from, but how to control them and put them to work by setting up virtuous circles so you can ride the wave of constructive thinking all the way to lasting success. It’s a new way of thinking that will make you see your day-to-day in a different way, as though for the first time.
That’s why I call this video "Opening Your Eyes." When I figured out what I’m explaining to you now and started applying it to my own life, something clicked in me, big time. At the start, I was skeptical. I like to see things before I believe them. I put it to the test.
I started with the hotel I was running at the time. I took the problem that was causing me the most bother. I took a deep breath and said, "Right, I’m going to find a solution to this problem. I will stop paying a fortune in commissions to Booking, and I will drastically increase my direct sales." It didn’t happen overnight, but every time I got any kind of encouraging result, I doubled down on what I’d done to get them. I started very slowly and then less so. And then there was an exponential curve.
Without really seeing it coming, I had reversed the effect of Booking.com on my hotel’s revenues. I did it by putting the concept of virtuous circles to use in my working life. I saw that by repeating the experience over and over again, I was learning a multitude of things that would benefit anyone wanting to pay fewer commissions to OTAs.
I started to study yield management, hotel marketing, digital marketing software. I wanted to understand which property management system or booking engine was better or worse and why. I looked into websites, promotion, loyalty techniques—anything I could find, I devoured, and I put into use and folded whatever worked into my day-to-day routine. And the more I searched, the more I realized that all of these topics were interconnected.
One example is when I realized that when I’m in a phone meeting with a potential client and I focus on trying to help him without trying to sell him something, he would typically become a client. Conversely, sales techniques would often have the opposite of the desired effect.
That’s not all, either. I discovered that in order to increase direct bookings, you need a website that turns visitors into customers, and that to have one of those, I not only needed to swot up on my psychology, but that any such research would be relatively pointless if I didn’t figure out first the types of people I’d be wanting to convince. It was never-ending, but rewarding. Every time I discovered something new, it tended to come with five other hooray recommendations of what to research next.
One day, I came across a story about quantum physics. There are currently two types of physics: quantum physics and classical physics. Let’s start with the one you all know, or at least know of—classical physics.
Classical physics says that things are how we see them and like they feel. If we see a tree, we think it’s a tree. You look at your desk; it’s wood or glass. You touch it. You think it’s a solid desk. When you see a person, you know it’s a person. They’re made of blood, flesh, and bone, etc. No doubt, a person is a person.
Classical physics is the study and understanding of the material world—what’s perceivable via sight and touch. Physical things like a tree, a desk, or a person. You can see your own hand right now, correct? You can look at your hand, look at it, and touch it with the other hand. It’s physical. You can touch it. You can feel it.
Physics teaches us that one object is separated and isolated from another object.
Here, for instance, we have a person on the left and a tree on the right. These two things are separate. There’s a distance of 30 meters between the two—one person and one tree. These two things are totally separated and isolated from one another. So, classical physics tells us that the tree has nothing to do with the man, and we too are totally separated and isolated from the objects we perceive, whether it’s a rock, a desk, a mountain, or a tree. Classical physics says that the earth spins very fast, circling the sun, and gravity holds everything together.
Now, let’s do a quick exercise. Look around your room or office and pick an object. It can be anything. Right now, for example, I’m looking at my desk. I see a bottle of water. Just pick something. We’re going to represent your object with this blue square here. And there is you. You’re separate from the object. Same here—I look at my water bottle and observe it. I’m separate from it, whether I touch it or not. It’s simply not part of me. There is some distance between you and the object, and between me and my water bottle. You are separated from this object, right?
This aspect of classical physics has made a significant contribution to the paradigm and worldview of today’s society. And here’s one: there are things we can touch and see—they are real, material objects. As human observers, we are separated and isolated from material objects. As human observers, we are separated and isolated from events in which we do not participate. If I see something on the 8 p.m. news broadcast, I am totally separated from it. Our physical human bodies are made up of flesh, blood, bones, and are held together by gravity thanks to a rapidly rotating globe. We are separated and isolated from the physical world and the events that take place in it.
See, physics is easy! But what’s the explanation for the interdependence between the different things? How come different things feel so interconnected? If everything is so separated from everything else, how could there be models of existence—the wavy diagram that goes up and down, present in your income, your behavior, your bank balance, your reservations? If everything is totally separated, things that in themselves shouldn’t be related are related.
If I do my marketing strategy correctly and decide who I want to attract to my hotel, the knock-on sees me adapt my website and my communication and in turn increases the conversion rate of my website, increasing my number of loyal customers and therefore my ranking on OTAs, and therefore the general number of visits on my website, and so on. Sure, there’s a logic in those connections, but what about the Pareto principle? How could every distribution work out at an 80/20 split if everything wasn’t connected on some basic level?
So I found myself up against the current paradigm, which would see everything interconnected as mere coincidence. But I also noticed that I was not alone in this particular predicament. Banks learned this the hard way in the 2008 financial crisis. They created groups of borrowers that they called financial products, and they separated people up into groups of good prospects and bad prospects. So, more reliable borrowers made up one set of products and riskier ones another. The thing is, though, it didn’t matter because once they began to fail, they failed all at once—good and bad—and the same chain reaction happened. How separate they had been didn’t make a difference at all. Despite all efforts to divide risks, there were interdependencies. Things were not what they appeared to be.
Classical physics, we’re back here. It says a tree is a tree, a desk is a desk, and a person is a person. But in quantum physics, we see that these elements are not really a tree, nor is it a desk or a person. We find that they are just particles spinning at a very fast speed, and there is hardly anything inside. If we look at a fragment of a tree or a desk under an atomic microscope, we see particles spinning—separate but together, space in between them but somehow working in unison.
Classical physics, again, is what we see with our eyes and touch with our hands. Quantum physics is what we see when we zoom in so far we can’t conceive of what we’re actually looking at.
Now, here’s the big conflict. Our eyes see desks as solid, consistent objects. We can leave the room and come back, and the desk will still be there. Our eyes see desks as solid, consistent objects. We can leave the room and come back, the desk will still be there. Whereas if you look at a desk under a microscope, walk out of the room and come back, you won’t see the same thing. Some particles will have broken off and new particles will have joined.
Classical physics says matter is solid and physical, and quantum physics says matter is not matter, but particles revolving in a vacuum. Mind blown.
A physicist named Thomas Young demonstrated some unexplainable behavior on a subatomic level with an experiment now known as the double-slit experiment, or Young’s double-slit experiment. Right, the experiment goes like this: you shoot light through a sheet of paper that has two slits, and behind the sheet there’s a screen placed. And the idea is the particles should just hit the screen straight on the other side of the slits. But as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, that’s not exactly how it worked out. With one slit, you got one line, but with two, a wave was visible, and the conclusion they drew was that particles do not move in a straight line or in a predictable manner when placed in tandem to other particles.
What I want you to do now is imagine there is an aquarium in a room. You enter this room and observe particles on the surface of the aquarium with an atomic microscope. You see five particles, represented by these five red dots. You observe these five particles—they’re in fixed positions that do not move. Now, you leave the room, go home, and sleep. Then, the next day, you come back to observe the aquarium with the microscope at the exact spot from the day before, except that there are no longer five but seven particles. Two more have entered—these two blues have joined up, and the initial particles that were there are now in totally different positions.
So, you call a friend who comes in and asks her to look in the microscope, and you ask them if they see seven particles fixed in these positions, and your friend confirms it to you. So, you leave the room and your friend there to observe the particles and wait a few minutes. You come back because yesterday when you left and returned, things had changed. You asked her if they changed in your absence. Your friend says no, they did not.
Then, the two of you decide to leave the room. When you re-enter, you observe that the particles have changed positions again and two are missing. The particles seem frozen as you observe them, while when you leave for a bit, they change positions as though they’re Woody and Buzz waiting for you to leave so they can have fun.
There’s a very famous thought experiment that gets at this too. Imagine you’re walking in the forest and a tree falls in front of you. You’re strolling along, minding your own business, then a large tree begins to sway, and then boom—it falls right in front of you. You can feel it vibrating in your legs like a train passing underneath. But now, jump back in time. You don’t go into the forest—you just chill on the edge and have a nap. In this scenario, did the tree even fall?
From a classical physics standpoint, and the one that most people would take, absolutely it did. Quantum physics, on the other hand, would say that the particle rules are everywhere all the time, but nowhere at all until someone observes them. So, we don’t really know whether the tree is falling or not, unless we’re there to observe it. Without actually being there and hearing the noise, we can’t be sure, so we don’t know. So, from a certain perspective, the answer is no, it did not fall.
So, what does this have to do with you and your business?
Remember my quest to discover the interdependence between things—between hotel marketing, my website, my booking engine, my PMS, my results, and those of my clients, loyalty, and the number of visits to my website? Well, at a microscopic level, they're all particles. One subject is just one group of particles, and another is another group of particles. My thoughts are particles, my results, and my client's results—all of those things are different particles.
The initial question I asked myself was, how are two things interrelated? But my new question is, how are two particles related to each other? Turns out, particles are extremely interdependent. Here's how: large masses of matter attract other masses of matter by gravity. This is the reason we are all stuck to the ground, thanks to the gravity caused by the mass of the Earth. As we see with particles under the microscope, large amounts of particles attract other particles. If there is a large collection of particles, other particles are sucked into them.
Here's what I want to show you. Now, here’s the same video I showed you before where there are these people joining this dancing guy. And here are particles under a microscope. Look at the similarities. It's fascinating. So you can see more and more people come closer and join the crowd. And we can see the same thing happening under a microscope with the particles. As more and more particles come together, more and more particles come together, and more and more come together. They keep joining, and we see the same with crowds. When they start applauding, we see the same. We see the same thing under the microscope with the particles.
And not only that, we see the same thing on the internet with YouTube videos. As soon as the video gets a lot of views, it starts to get more views. It’s a virtuous circle, just like with particles. But there is another, even more intriguing phenomenon: I came across this thing called quantum entanglement. And what this quantum law says is that if two particles are entangled, they are automatically charged in opposition to one another. Clearly, if one of the particles is facing upwards, the other one is always directed downwards. If one is facing down here, this facing up—it always works like that. One cannot go up without another one going down, once they’re entangled. So if two particles are entangled, opposite charges (positive and negative) will always be connected in a way on account of their contradiction to one another.
So no matter how far apart they are, they're still connected. It’s as if they can communicate without moving in space and time—they communicate instantly. Now, remember we talked about how for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction? If you decide to go out and drink, you're not going to feel good the day after. If you decide to hit the gym and wake up at 6 a.m., you’ll probably feel great. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. We see this with the entangled particles—action, reaction.
Now, recall my observations on life and business: the actions and reactions, the mirror effect, and how your judgments are exactly your insecurities, and how your personal problems echo into your business. I’m going to tell you now about my universal theory of everything, but let’s start at the movies.
There’s this really famous movie called *1984,* made in 1984 and based on the book by George Orwell, *1984,* which is also great. If you’re unfamiliar, please go check them out—one or the other, or both, they’re really great. There’s this quote in it that says, “Whoever controls the present controls the past. Whoever controls the past controls the future.” There’s this character, or rather idea, of Big Brother. Okay, he’s watching you—that’s the slogan: *Big Brother is watching you.* Anyway, before a reality show adopted the phrase, it meant something to anyone who watched the film or read the book. It signified different things to different people, but usually a different version of the same thing—a corrupt, menacing, controlling force. For some people, it’s the government. For others, it’s the police. For me, it’s the residential president of my building, Mr. Garcia.
Anyway, the main character in the film works for Big Brother at the Department of Truth, rewriting history. Because “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.”
Far be it for me to pick and choose from classic dystopian literature, but I found a good way to flip that one on its back and harvest its organs for a good cause. In the quote, “Whoever controls the present controls the past. Whoever controls the past controls the future,” *you* can be whoever—you control the present, and therefore you control the past and the future.
Quantum physics, particles, entanglement, action and reaction, mirrors—I had them all shaking around in the great cocktail shaker between my ears, and suddenly it hit me: the way we perceive our past, or the way we believe we were in the past, is what we are going to be in the future. And if we think negatively about what is going on, about what is going to happen in the future, it will negatively impact our perception of the past. The present is really right there in the middle, okay? Right in the middle of this figure of eight. You control the present at this moment, at this exact moment—you control it, okay? You and no one else.
And that was the missing link for me. Everything started to make sense after that. If I do something stupid, then I have a stupid, painful result. If I go out on the weekends and start drinking too much, then during the week I’m going to have a cloudy mind and I will regret it. If, on the contrary, I don’t go out and get drunk, I’m going to have a good and productive week. There’s a high and a low. If I judge someone else for being a loudmouth and bragging about themselves, I would probably like to be a little bit more like that person and be able to do what they do. It means that I am not sure of myself because I am afraid of the judgment of others.
People don’t have problems in business—they have personal problems that come out in their business activities. If you have a personal problem, you are going to have a problem in your business. The way you do one thing is the way you do all things on a level. There is a high, and there is a low. We become the person of our lowest standards, not our loftiest dreams. We will always come down to a threshold of survival, and it is that threshold that defines us. So it has to be raised to the level of progress.
If you’re someone who’s still holding on to your past, if you think about all those painful memories, you’re just taking your pain with you into the future, which will affect you as you go—and in turn, it stands a good chance of destroying you, quite frankly. But if you live here, now, in the moment, you are in control of your past and your future. The present is the wheel, and by living in it, for it, you’re taking it.
Most people don’t, by the way. Most people don’t take the wheel. Most people are paralyzed by their past. They’re too afraid to make changes or actions to create what they want because their past dictates their future. And those who live to project into the future are also crippled because they are afraid that their actions in the present will not allow them to obtain that future in which they want to live.
You remember virtuous and vicious circles? We talked about how what you think is what you will think about. If you’re living in the past, constantly rehashing painful memories, you’re ceding control of your present moment over to the past. And this, in turn, paralyzes you into a state of non-productivity. The worst part is you also lose the future because you’re dooming yourself to create the same thing there. The damage you do can be just as exponential as Warren Buffett’s bank balance. By the way, the more you live in the past, the more you rehash those memories, the more you have negative emotions, the more vicious the cycle will be.
It’s the same thing if you live in the future—you lose control of the present. And as you lose control of the present, you also lose control of the past, and therefore, inevitably, you will lose control of your future, and so on and so forth. You’re not at the wheel in either scenario, okay? You’re hogtied in the boot while your fear speeds through cornfields towards a cliff edge. The place to be is *here*, now, at the present moment. What you have to do is design the future for what you want from it. Write it down. Make a plan. Come back to the present.
You have to project yourself into the future and act in the present to achieve this future. This projection should only allow you to enter the action in the present—no more, no less. If you do this, then you are in complete control of your existence now.
Now, back to everyday life because right now it’s all very conceptual. So let’s talk about your goals.
The key to controlling your virtuous cycles is by controlling your thoughts. You have to create them. When you have a negative thought, chase it away. Or better yet, wait. Breathe. It will go away by itself. It's just a thought. Your positive thoughts are the ones you want to pause and examine in order to cultivate them, so you know how to generate more. Your goals are the gasoline your engine wants and needs. You want an increase in the 20% margin? Very good. Direct your thoughts toward this goal and focus until you see the virtuous circle start to form, and keep following up on what works until the right path starts to reveal itself. By the time you notice it, you’ll be halfway down already.
Next, you need to identify your vicious circles. There will be things you know well—you’ve needed to change these things for years. Look them in the face. For example, I have a huge tendency to procrastinate. Every break I suggested to myself was taken before I had a moment to counter. As soon as I said to myself, “Phew, I’m done. I’ll finish this later,” the task would be dropped, and there tended to be no voice telling me to get back to it after I had unwound sufficiently. Now, I force myself to act when that thought occurs. I drive it away ASAP. I say to myself, “No, finish the task, stick to your schedule, and don’t get distracted.”
I have become a conscious observer of my thoughts. Instead of ignoring or falling victim to them, I identify them and classify them. I keep the positive and release the negative. So if I’m sitting down at work and suddenly I have the feeling, “Oh, I should go get my haircut,” I’ll say to myself, “No. I can see what’s going on here. I need to get back to my work.” I use such a specific example, by the way, because that was one of my go-to “get out of work free” cards for years—the haircut.
You have to do the same. If you don’t, growth cycles will be followed by decline cycles. For example, if you make the decision, as I hope you do, to redo your website yourself thanks to this training, then in order to do it, you need to chase away your pessimistic thoughts. For example, if you think, “Only people who know how to do a website can do a proper job. It’s better to hire a web agency,” that’s the beginning of a bad cycle. Your website is your hotel, for better or for worse—you need to be in control of it.
Stop. Tell yourself, “Many people followed this training before me and have done it with no previous experience. I can do it also.” Focus on the fact that you can make it happen, and that is going to allow you to achieve your goals. Then, without a doubt, you will get there, and that belief will become your reality, and this success will fuel your next success. If you think you can’t make a website, then you’re never going to be able to. If, on the contrary, you choose to think, “Of course I can make a website, especially if I have training that shows me exactly how to do it,” then not only will you be able to do it, but you will bounce back from this success to improve other aspects of your business.
This is our current paradigm and our worldview: there is an object, the distance, and then me. I am separated from the object. I am separated and isolated from the world around me. There’s nothing I can do to change it. If you ask yourself, “Who am I?” If you look at your current situation now and it is not what you’d like it to be, then that belief is confirmed and becomes your reality. You will end up saying to yourself, “This is what I am,” and from there on, you’ll never be able to succeed.
Here is a sentence that you should note: *No matter what is true, what is important is what you believe to be true, because by working on it, it will become reality.* Read this several times. This is how you will be able to create your virtuous circles, nourishing them and your positive thoughts. These positive thoughts will become your beliefs, and your beliefs will become reality. The key is to intervene on your beliefs. Reality will follow. You need to change your beliefs, and instead of asking yourself, “Who am I?” you must ask yourself, “Who am I becoming?”
You need to intervene on your vicious circles and replace negative thoughts with positive ones. If you ask yourself, “Who am I?” and the answer is, “I’m a hotel owner who doesn’t know anything about computers,” then you’re never going to progress. On the contrary, if you ask yourself, “Who am I becoming?” and respond, “I’m a hotel owner who’s training to be able to make my website and much more, which will allow me to get more out of my business,” then you will unlock a new potential.
The difference between these two ways of thinking is fundamental. It's not enough to believe in it. I'm not saying that hard work will be the building blocks of your triumphant future. Positive thinking is only the foundation, crucial but invisible to those who don’t know how construction works.
*No matter what is true, what is important is what you believe to be true, because by working on it, it will become reality.* The balance we are seeking is between the work we do on our mindset and the work we have to do on a daily basis—concrete actions. You have to ask yourself how you did at the end of every day and adjust your plan accordingly. You have to marry the two worlds of mindset and muscle. People who are all grit find themselves stagnating, and people who are all mindset find themselves unemployed, quite frankly.
We reconstruct the mind, put it to work, and grab onto the residual beliefs that prove to us that more hard work is the logical next step. Before you know it, your reality will be shifting around you, and the question will genuinely be, “Who am I becoming?” You'll ask it again and again as your hard work and grit throw up new things at you. Think about new ways to grow professionally and personally. Your newfound self-belief will usher you down these paths, rather than warning you away, as is the case with most people.
So the action is to hack your thoughts and work hard. But we must then take into account the reaction. What is the result of your work? Is it necessary to adjust your plan of action or your goals accordingly? The results of your work are where you see the next steps you’ll need to take, but only if you take the time to analyze them. If it’s your stated goal to get to number one on TripAdvisor in your region, and if after taking a number of actions it doesn’t quite come off the way you planned it, then the easiest thing in the world is to say, “My plan was too ambitious. It can't be done.”
But with the right mindset, the failure is a blessing. You pause, look at what went wrong, what went right, and from there you figure out your new approach, and you keep at it until you get it. It’s odd to say, but the payoff is always more work. Actually, that’s your reward.
What’s happiness but a feeling you get before you want more happiness? It’s the same with success. Work, react, analyze, try again, succeed. What’s next?
And if you don’t approach this with the level of intensity and can-do spirit you don’t have to. There are plenty of mediocre people who don’t go hungry. Then your virtuous cycle can easily turn vicious on you—like decrease your level of intensity, listen to the voices that doubt you, or those that want some Haribo and a nap—and you’ll find yourself less than motivated with the rest of the world.
*No matter what is true, what is important is what you believe to be true, because by working on it, it will become reality.* This is the real secret. You need to change your beliefs, take big action, confirm your reality, analyze your results, make changes if needed, and start the cycle all over again.
Your stated goal doesn’t have near as much to do with your outcome as you’d think. Say you’re going to make a billion dollars tomorrow. Say it, believe it, and go to bed and see what happens. It’s the work that shapes your convictions, and you’ll need them, especially if the plan is to readjust when something doesn’t work out the way you’d like it to.
Intentions are just sentences until your convictions and elbow grease etch them into stone. Let’s say my goal is: I want to start making money. I want to start a hotel. I now have my current situation, and I have my hypothesis, so I can act, and I choose the best possible action to achieve what I want to achieve. Once I have chosen the plan of action, I have to start it, get to work, and get into concrete action. My new reality will emerge from this.
The new situation becomes your current situation. It becomes your present. You have to look at what this new current situation gives you and analyze your actions. On this basis, you must intervene by changing your thoughts and beliefs. Then, you have to take massive, confident action based on these new beliefs, and then you have to experience your reality and take note of whether or not it's working for you.
This is the process that will help you achieve your goals. Most people often do not make plans, take no action, and never have results worth analyzing, so they just keep doing what they’re doing. If people don’t make plans, then they’re not really taking
action to make their dreams come true. If they don’t take the time to analyze the results, then they’re going to get discouraged because they haven’t made the necessary adjustments to their plan of action. And there are always adjustments that need making.
Here are some typical failure scenarios
Someone is speculating but takes no action. They're living in a fantasy world basically, and unless you happen to be part of the royal family, fantasy does not bring home the bacon.
Someone else makes a plan, gets to work, and begins to see results, but the results aren’t exactly what they expected. Instead of pausing to analyze and adjust, they continue with the original plan anyway. Over time, their efforts start to feel like banging their head against a wall, and eventually, they give up.
The process for success is simple define a goal and a plan, take action, analyze the results, adjust your plan of action, improve your actions, and so on. The more you do this, the better your results, which will strengthen your beliefs. And so the virtuous cycle continues.
It doesn’t matter what is true. What matters is what you believe to be true. By working on it, it will become a reality. Here’s a slide you can download link under the video and print out. Hang it somewhere where you’ll see it regularly. In the end, it’s not really about what’s true or not, it’s what you believe to be true that matters the most. If you work on what you believe in, then it’s got a real shot at becoming real.
You’ve got dreams and goals, right? Well, they’re not just dreams they’re totally doable. But you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and get down to business. It all starts with you what you think, what you believe in. See you next time.

Today we'll start by defining what personal alchemy is and why it's important. We're going to look at the gap between who you are and who you need to become. You have your current self as you are now, and then you have your goals, and there is going to be some friction between the two because who you are right now is, by definition, not able to achieve those goals. Trying to make your dreams come true as you are now could generate a lot of frustration, anxiety, and pain. So it's important to anticipate and understand that in order to prepare yourself and to avoid getting caught up in it.

Next, we'll talk about how to transcend yourself and start dancing. Then we'll define who you are at present and what stories about your past self you're carrying with you today. After that, we’ll define your dream life. We're going to planet-design it and bring clarity to it so we can bring it to life. And just because it's fun to do, don't make the mistake of thinking it doesn't matter. Getting it right is essential because if you don't plan your life, if you don't have a clear picture of what you're aiming for, then how can you hope to get there?

Next, we are going to look at the character you'll need to play in order to bring this dream to life. We're going to rewrite your own story to serve you and empower you, instead of letting you bear this burden that you regularly use as an excuse. Then we will mythologize you. We will turn you into a myth. We will plan your story and how it will unfold going forward. This is something that I have done and done again since I started out. I wrote the future chapters of my story, and I come back to them regularly to edit them and adapt them to the changes that I have in my present. 

Remember, by planning and writing the next few chapters of your life, you can hugely influence how it unfolds. Write them in anticipation of where you want to be tomorrow and the day after. You create a self-fulfilling prophecy whose chances of success will double with every time you return to update it. It's the best hack I know for the game of life.

What is personal alchemy and why is it important? If nothing else, it fits in with all the New Age titles you've seen this week. You'll be begging for something mystical when we're doing the pros and cons of competing website builders. So enjoy the Paulo Coelho vibes while we're doing it. Okay, it'll get difficult later.

Alchemy is the transformation of basic metals into gold. In ancient history, the alchemists were people who tried to perfect and aid basic metals like steel and copper and turn them into gold. The metaphorical connotations are obvious enough. Their trade was turning something common and relatively worthless into something rare and prized, which is what we're doing with you. Personal alchemy is transforming who you are now into who you want to be. Why do you need to change? It's a good question that I'll do my best to answer now.

The big entrepreneurs commonly face an identity crisis when it comes to measuring who they are in the moment with the goals they wish to achieve. It happened to me. I was full of ideas, and then the ideas just stayed on paper. I was too full of doubt. Creating your own business was not a done thing in my family, and everyone advised me against taking risks. And to tell you the truth, I bought into all of their doubts. It became an internal conflict for me—a battle between who I was and who I wanted to be and become. And the prize was my soul.

Contrary to what you might think, this is the biggest problem entrepreneurs face. It's not theory or technique or sourcing capital. Anyone can buy a book on revenue management and apply themselves, but it takes a few voluntary dark nights of the soul to reshape a personality into someone confident who deserves the things they want. That's what I mean when I say identity crisis. It's the war you go out with yourself when your past experiences and convictions are blocking the way for the you that would break the mold of old.

I had a big identity crisis when I started out as a hotel manager. I hesitated for weeks about taking that first job that was offered to me, and not because I didn't have ideas. I just didn't have the conviction to believe in myself and follow through on what I was doing to the end. It's the angel and the devil dueling on your shoulders again, and it's common as muck in all walks of life. The only difference is the stakes get bigger when you're trying to get a business off the ground. So the voice telling you not to take risks is the easiest one to take counsel from.

Back when I was a procrastinator and often worried or was too afraid to take action, I feared failure. I took comfort in learning. I would read blogs on the industry, watch training videos, and make plans. Man, did I make plans. The only problem was I wasn't taking one step towards the actual tasks that would need doing to achieve what I wanted to do.

I needed to change who I was, become decisive—someone who was willing to take action and to face a failure or two with the attitude that I'd collect the data from such flops and realign myself to get back in the game stronger next time around. I needed to feel like I deserved the success I was hunting, not simply that I was well enough equipped to pursue it. I needed confidence; I needed to learn how to get past my own thoughts and get working.

All this worrying wasn't for nothing though, because the comfort I took in learning eventually took me to studying mindset. And for that, I'm forever grateful because it gave me the tools I've been sharing with you this week and before their usefulness for you was even a twinkle in my eye. They worked for me and got me past myself.

I look back on that time and I remember it being stressful, which is strange because maybe the most key aspect about my shift in mindset has been I now find situations I used to find stressful more like mazes to navigate, and I can actually have quite a lot of fun doing it. I really, really don't think this need merely apply to hotel management strategies. Everyone should give this a go. Everyone owes it to themselves to give this a go.

The gap you have to cross to get to your next self is treacherous and stormy. But anyone who's made anything of themselves has braved them and won. And you can too. That's it. It's where the dreams of those unwilling to change their minds go to die. So tread carefully. You've got to want it. All the theory in the world of hoteling won't save you if you don't believe you've got success coming to you. And what's necessary is for you to become a different person—stopping just short of your DNA.

And don't come at me saying it's impossible either. It absolutely can be done. I have transcended myself several times and hope to do so many, many more times in the future. Plant the seeds, reap the fruit, replant whatever grew well, and disregard the rot. Rinse, repeat.

So now, enough talking. Let's get to it. I'm going to take you through the whole process step by step. And if you're thinking stuff like, oh, but it's me, it's my life, it's who I am, and I'm just going to put up with it, life is like that, frankly, go take a hike. That's bogus. You have to think of yourself as a character, and your mind is separated from that character, and you can make that character dance any way you want. 

This is what I did and what I continue to do today. If I have a new goal, I ask, what do I need to make this character do now to make it happen? How can I control his actions and his thoughts in order to achieve this goal? You yourself are too prone to emotional reactions. End of story. You, as you, will end up believing that who you are can't make it happen. And you wouldn't be wrong. You haven't made it happen so far.

Whereas your character—you just make yourself a little taller and a little better built, and your mind takes off and you can start pulling strings to get them to do whatever you want them to. Your character is like a puppet, and your mind is the hand that pulls the strings. The mind is the boss, and the character obeys. No questions asked. And dances towards the dreams of the mind.

They could be dreams you've had since you were a kid. You set the right rhythm for the character to dance, to pull the strings to the right tempo. The world is your oyster. The character does not control the mind; your mind controls the character. It might seem elementary, but there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. When you look at how people act, most people let the character take over the master. Most people identify themselves so much with their character that they think of them as a unit, a character-mind merge. It's a tough way to get through life if you want to get anything done being at the mercy of who everyone thinks you are, rather than dancing to the tune of who you want to become. 

The right approach is to make your mind the master of your character. When I wake up at 7 a.m., the first thought that occurs to me is "go back to sleep, you've already done well in life, go back to bed, you deserve it." That's the character catching the mind off guard and trying to call some shots. I'm used to this shenanigan by now. My mind knows well I have more to do, and even if I didn't have more to do, I could probably figure something out if I got

 up and exercised for a bit. So I just crack the whip, and I set myself dancing. 

And it's the same when I do exercise. Exercise is a great example. Sometimes the character wants to give up before they should, so I have to put my foot down and force them to keep on until the time is up. Sometimes when I feel the character is rebelling, I make them run a few minutes after the clock is finished, just to drive home the message of who's boss.

By the way, if this sounds a bit masochistic, well, it might well be, but you get to love the punishment a bit after a while. A lot of the times I'm happy to hear the voice of laziness, because I know then that the time is right to crash a few more kilometers before breakfast, and that honestly feels more awesome than anything I can express in words when, just for a split second, I was considering giving up.

The only way I know of to transcend that kind of negativity is to separate yourself from who you are out in the world and become the boss of that person. Your character is a Norman archer, and you're William the Conqueror, and you better believe the Battle of Hastings will go ahead with or without you.

So let's get down to business. We need to find out who you are right now, and what beliefs and stories you are carrying from the past. The first step towards transcending yourself and taking control of your character is to identify your character and its flaws. Your character will resist. Of course, it will. Who wants to be defined? Your instinct will be to paint yourself in broad, inoffensive strokes. Do not fall into this trap. You need to define yourself as precisely as possible, warts and all. Be brutally honest.

Write down exactly who you are. What motivates you? What defines you? What character traits are most likely to trip you up? These might be the toughest, but let's be honest for a second. You will know these better than anything else because they've been following you for years. We need it all. Profile. Feel like you've been hired to assassinate yourself, so you'll need the worksheets from the previous videos. You'll need all of it. The patterns, the big stuff, the binaries. Pause for a second to gather them if you need to because they're the hymn sheets you're going to be singing from today going forward. 

But if you're up to date, let's go. We are going to start with a new worksheet called Your Current Character. It's available for download. The link is right below this video. I'll open it up on my computer now. Here it is.

So, point one: How would you describe yourself now in three sentences or less? I know this is difficult to do, but it must be done. You really want to describe yourself right now and be brutally honest. The more honest you are with yourself now, the easier it will be for you to take control of your character and become who you need to be. So pause the video and describe yourself in three sentences or less.

Point two: Where do you currently live? How much do you earn? How much do you have in savings? All right, let's take a moment for this question. Where do you live? Is this a place you like? Is it too small? Too far from your family? Too old? Too new? How much do you earn per year, and how much have you saved? It is important to answer these questions and be clear-headed because afterward, you will have to define financial goals for yourself and your business. You can't do it right if you don't have a clear view of where you are today.

Point three: What do you look like? What is your style? What do you wear every day? What is the typical outfit that you always wear? How is your hair, and are you very relaxed and don't care about what you wear? Or are you cautious about your appearance?

Point four: And what was the result of your Myers-Briggs test? It should be a four-letter code, like ENTJ or ISFJ. Write it down.

Point five: What are your current binary poles? You will find the answer on the worksheet of the same name. Just circle the correct answers.

Point six: What are your good habits and bad habits? Which ones do you do on a daily basis? You want to list them all. Be brutally honest with yourself now. What are some bad habits you have? Do you smoke? Are you drinking too much? What are your good habits? If you are an early bird, write it down. It's great. Maybe you play sports regularly. You have a balanced diet. You're charitable and help in charities. But whatever you can think of on the positive is just as important as the negative here, because if we are going to fight to make the negative disappear from your life, we're going to capitalize on the positive side of your character.

Okay, point number seven: What are your strengths? What are five things that you are good at? If you have trouble identifying them yourself, ask those around you who know you best.

Point eight: What are your weaknesses? Name five. What are some things that other people would definitely not count on you for?

Point nine: What negative thoughts come to your mind on a daily basis? All right, list as many as you can think of. For example, when you sit at your desk and try to work, or when you drive or take a walk, what negative things come to mind? For me, it's the shower when they come to me. So you have to start to become aware of these things. All right, what's going on in your head makes you sad or depressed, right? Write them all down.

Point ten: How was your childhood? Describe it in detail. This is really important to do because what people don't understand is that the adult self is created to take care of the child self. Anything that you missed and didn't experience fully as a child is probably what your adult self will be looking for itself. A lot of people don't understand that this is how it works. Really, to be honest, it's the bottom line. Everything you didn't have as a child is what you kind of end up wanting as an adult. It's really important to understand that and look back on your childhood because it will tell you a lot about who you are. Just ask a psychoanalyst.

Point eleven: What past events are you concerned about or repeating in your mind all the time? I remember I had tons of them. One of them is when, for the very first time, I just got screwed online by an unhappy customer, profusely insulted along with my receptionist. I had done everything to make up for a careless staff member of mine, and nine out of ten customers would have been grateful for our efforts, for real. But the carelessness in question—it was nothing serious really, but nothing was good enough to this person. They had venom to spare and needed to spit it out in public. It haunted me for a long time. I was terrified of dealing with another arsehole like this, as I'm not someone who likes conflict generally. It made me really uncomfortable. And you and I know very well that in our business, scenes like this aren't what you could call rare. And that one, especially now for me—I've just gone through it so many times in my head. If it were a DVD, it would be skipping by now.

Okay, so ask yourself, what past events are you concerned about, or you know, are repeating in your mind all the time? Write them all down.

Okay, point number twelve: What worries you about the future? It could be, for example, not making a good enough living, not filling your rooms enough, not selling at the right price, health problems. What worries you about the future? Write it down.

Point number thirteen: What is stopping you from doing what you want to do every day and working towards your dreams and goals? If you sit down at the computer and you're like, "Okay, this is the day. I'm going to do this. I'm going for it," what are the things that block you and end up preventing you from doing what you need to do?

Point fourteen: Who are you currently angry with? What people or things do you blame? Are there people you don't really like who make you angry? And are there some you blame for your current situation and blame for you not achieving your goals? Write it all down.

Point fifteen: Who do you currently judge and for what do you judge them? You can copy your answers from your Binary Poles worksheet if you like. That's what we have them out for.

Point sixteen: What do you love to do and can happily do every day? Here too, you can copy your answers from your binary poles worksheet.

Point seventeen: What do you hate doing that you never want to have to do? Same—you can copy the answers over from the other sheets.

Point eighteen: What is a typical day like for you? Describe one in detail. We're talking about a typical day here. Don't look for a unique occasion. Try to describe just a random day of your life operating your business.

Point eighteen: What is a typical day like for you? Describe one in detail. We're talking about a typical day. Don't look for anything unique or big occasions. No, just try to describe a random day of your life operating your business. How does this day go, from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed? Write everything down.

Point nineteen: What are your character traits? If you had to list the four or five traits that best describe you, what would they be? For example, maybe you are generous, motivated, smart, hardworking, or maybe you are also a procrastinator, lazy, or shy. Remember, there is nothing embarrassing here. Only you will see your answers again. Don't lie to yourself. You will only be

 shooting yourself in the foot. All right, look at me. I didn't hesitate to share with you the problems I had. So be honest with yourself. It'll serve you well. It's better to be brutally honest because then you will be able to make more dramatic changes, which is the goal at the end of the day.

And finally, how do you imagine others talk about you in your absence? As gossipy as you like, dream or nightmare scenario. Write it all down.

It's time to get your goals clear in your head. Every time I got stuck, every time I couldn't evolve, it was because I had lost sight of my goals. You need to define your dream. Spell it out. You'll be just a character in someone else's if you don't. If you have no plans, no dreams, no vision, if you live your years, months, weeks, and days without any clear intention, it won't be long before you're the subject of someone else's intentions. Every day, a lot of people get up and work in our business, but they don't work for themselves. They work for others.

I remember a bed and breakfast owner. She was completely dependent on OTAs. When I made her realize that she was working more at making Booking.com profitable than her own business, she turned pale. Then we worked together on setting an ambitious goal, and she stuck to that vision that she had built for herself. These days, 60% of her turnover is direct bookings, while when we started out, all her reservations went through Booking.com. Okay, and she's no longer an active participant in the Booking.com project because she's too busy with her own.

So here's what you need to do, right? You need to have a dream. Define goals. Make them concrete by writing them down and declaring them. Decide to do everything you can to achieve them, devising a daily action plan, and then executing that plan. These are the steps that will allow you to make your dreams come true.

At the beginning, you have to have a dream. If you don't just have one, project yourself into the future and picture what it should be in ten years, five years, three years, one year. What do you want? Where do you want to live? How much money do you want to earn? What do you want your business to become? What do you want your daily life to be like? How will you spend your time? Think about it carefully and get it on paper.

Next thing you want to do is get precise. Get the details in order. What color is the car in your dream? And the walls of the lobby of your hotel? How many hotels do you have? Do they have pools, all of them? Find pictures of what they look like, what you want them to look like, print them out. Put them up where you can see them.

The next step then, is your declaration. All right. Declare your dreams. Tell people. The more people you tell, the more real you make it by adding reputational stakes to the whole business. All right? A lot of people try to keep it to themselves to avoid exactly this—wrong move. Tell people. People you love and respect. Make their expectations part of your goal.

Next up is a plan of action. Look at your goals and see if you have the skills needed to accomplish them. And if not, you will be able to add timestamps to your goals. Let's say you need to learn web design, and then it will take six months. Divide that six months up by week and by day and set goals for each week and each day. It's all about planned goals. Plan tomorrow today. Take 15 minutes every evening to go over what you've accomplished, and from that, define what you want to get done the following day. Creating this training course required a lot of research and writing work.

The last step is to execute your action plan. This is when you wake up each day. Get out of bed, go to your office, pull out your action plan, and start following it.

All right, guys, the next worksheet will help you design your dream life. It's available to download right under this video. Go ahead, print it out, fill it in, and let me talk you through it.

Okay, so point number one: What is your dream? What do you really want? Your answer should be as detailed as possible. You will then have to reread it every day to program it into your mind. This is not a one-off exercise. This is a mantra you'll be returning to daily or more. What's more, you'll have to do it again for different goals when you need to set new ones. If you're dreaming right, which is our intention, you'll be adding new dreams all the time. Everything visualized gains in terms of possibility, and abstract concepts come down to earth as you write them down.

Point number two is to define your dream as clearly as possible. Details, details, details. How many rooms? What color, wallpaper, or tiles? How many bathrooms? Children? Business? Carpets?

Point number three: Tell the most important people in your life what you wish to do, and do not hold back. By the time you're done with them, they should be able to rattle off points one and two of this exercise with little effort. Tell your wife or husband or kids, or all of them. Tell someone you wouldn't want to feel disappointed in you or, worse, sorry for you. Add their approval and their admiration to your goals and proceed accordingly.

Point number four: What's your ideal day-to-day in this dream? What would you be doing first thing in your new establishment and last thing before leaving?

Point number five: Map out the practicals of your dream establishment. What margins would you need to hit to keep the place afloat? How many employees would you need?

Point number six: It's up to you. Work hard, overcome obstacles, and follow through with your projects and dreams. Okay, if you're here, you've done everything. I hope you're not just proceeding because it won't be me who's made a fool of in that scenario. All right. Okay, let's proceed.

So we've defined who you are and who you wish to become. If you've done it right, there should be a few pages, and there should be plenty of glaring contrast between the two. Remember the identity crisis I mentioned earlier? The one entrepreneurs are destined to take part in if they wish to succeed, and which I've already assured you is coming for you. As you can see in this highly accurate illustration, there's a massive gap to get over here. It can be fairly scary and intimidating, but the first step is acknowledging that it's there. Your current character is here on this side, trying to make your dreams come true with this character. It will end in self-sabotage. I have seen it too many times to foresee anything else.

We've been through the wise end of that, but let me reiterate it plainly again. If this person was capable of achieving their goals, they'd be in the bag already. Quite frankly, their goals require them to be someone else. That someone else is a character they'll create who deserves what he wants and will get it no matter what. That character will know exactly what they need to do because their mind is calling the shots, and it's mind over matter. If you're getting things done, your mind is in charge, and if it says dance, then your character is going to hear music immediately, erases, establishes music, and they will begin to boogie down no matter what's on the stereo. Really. Because if you're the one playing it, they've just got to dance.

So we've laid down the now and drawn and mapped to the dream. Now all we've left to do is put together a profile on the character who's going to get it done. Have you everything we've done up to this point ready to go? Have you your existence patterns in the Myers-Briggs test, the binaries, your descriptions of your current reality, and your dream reality? You need it all. Have them ready to go because you're going to need to refer to them in the following exercise.

So question one: Describe the character who's going to achieve your goals in three sentences or less and aim high. Make what you're aiming for effortless for them. If your breakfast service starts at 7 a.m., I guess this character has an alarm set for 5:30 a.m. and an open revenue management book, ready to study with coffee. All right, make them an early riser who's organized.

Second question: What skills and strengths does this new character need to be able to achieve your dream effortlessly and easily? You've got your A to B; what are the skills needed to navigate those waters?

Third question: What skills and strengths does your new character have that your current character does not?

Fourth question: What weaknesses does your current character have that your new character does not have? This is a tough one again, but it's close to the most important. What can you not do that would help your business? Guess what? The new guy can do it effortlessly.

Fifth question: What are the good habits of this new character that your current character does not possess? What do they do on the regular that you don't? Maybe they're drinking three liters of water and jogging daily. What do you feel you should be doing, but you never do? That's what they do twice a day.

Sixth question: What bad habits does your current character have that this new character does not have? Do you smoke or procrastinate or smoke and procrastinate? Write it all down. All right, everything you do on the regular you've a good idea should not be featuring in your day to day.

Seventh question: What fears does your current character have that your new character does not have?

Eighth question: What does your new character look like? What is their style? It's important to name this because not only the visual aspect, but the act of dressing and grooming like

 the new guy is ceremonial. In a way, it's a daily reminder that there's a new guy in town.

Ninth question: What judgments is this new character free of that your current character still has? Look at who you are now and look at the way you judge others. Make the decision here and now to be free of those judgments. In order to be able to achieve your dreams. Write it down right? I will no longer judge others.

Tenth question: What stories from the past of this new character break free of that your current character is still going through? What are these stories from the past that you still rehash and which slow you down? Write these things down because your new character won't have time for any of it.

Eleventh question: What are the key traits of this new character? Are they motivated, intelligent, hardworking, or extroverted? There's no such thing as being too ambitious here. Think of a person who's annoyingly perfect already. Then make it so they anonymously donate to charities on the way to work in soup kitchens before the gym, which they go to every day. And most of the time, the personal trainers actually ask them for tips. All right. That's what he's like.

Twelfth point: Describe what a typical day looks like for this new character. Map it out from the moment they wake up in the morning, to the moment their head hits the pillow in the evening, and also decide how many hours they sleep on average.

Thirteenth point: Describe the things this new character likes to do that the current character hates to do and avoids doing at all costs. All right, this should be an easy list to get. They like to do almost everything that makes you groan and think about doughnuts. Your new character is going to like doing things that you didn’t like to do, and not only will they like them, but they'll like them so much that they get good at them. They practice and test themselves. They make what you hate into a game and compete with themselves constantly.

Last point: What's the gossip about the new guy? What do people say when they're not around? To their list? The achievements? "Can you believe they're booked out for the summer and it's only February?" "Oh my God." That kind of thing. "And I heard it's 80% direct bookings and everything." That kind of thing. That's what they say about it.

So now you're ready. You're going to step into the new character's shoes, and what the old one considered dreams, the new one considers the standards they will not go below.

All right. Good. Go. Good. You got that done. All right. Excellent. Because you know what? It's important because this is how you're going to cross the great divide in a ship captained by your mind and manned by the new you.

And remember that separation because it's the key. You are the boss of you. And you also happen to be the greatest, most reliable, most stylish employee anyone's ever hired. Boss character. If you really successfully achieve this conscious transformation, the sky's the limit and it won't even take much effort. It will be effortless. Remember, especially for the new character, because everything is effortless for them. Things you dread today are about to become things you'll be chomping at the bit to get stuck into at a later date.

And now we've arrived at something truly grand in scale, outside of anyone's comfort zone. Who hasn’t been sincerely called "Your Majesty" at one time or another? We're going to write the myth of you. What does it mean to mythologize oneself? It means to speak or describe someone or something as a subject that deserves to be mentioned in a myth or legend, to add great heroic depth to one's character. It's not all Achilles or the sons of Odin either. People speak of Colonel Sanders like some sort of wizard, and all he did was figure out how to cook fried chicken in a pressure cooker.

You need to tell your story like a myth and to write the chapters to come. By writing your story ahead of time, you lay the groundwork for it to become a reality. Let's talk about Michael Jordan—how he made his status his destiny and knew it would come true before anyone ever considered that it might. And also that once he was the best, he had another goal to become the highest-paid player in the history of the sport. A lot of people don't know this, but he was the first athlete to become a billionaire, by all accounts.

When he told his coach, age 16, what he wanted to achieve, his coach told him he was lacking in certain areas. And guess what? He worked specifically harder in those areas. He'd often train so hard he'd vomit. According to sources, he'd aim for his shortcomings and read well in his weaker areas until, as mostly anyone knows, he came to be the most successful player the sport has seen up until that point.

Once, post-retirement, he was asked by a journalist what the most crucial piece of his career's puzzle was. He replied, "The legend. The one I wrote for myself when I was 16." Even people as basketball-ignorant as I know of his nickname, Michael "Air" Jordan. But I'm sure relatively few know its origins. Michael himself came up with it. More specifically, he came up with it for himself at a time when he actually couldn't dunk. The name that made a shoe brand sprung out of a teenage belligerence against an inability he was determined to rectify in his game plan.

Now, if you're in any way human, you're probably not even mentally approaching what I'm setting out for you. You think there's no way you can write yourself a legend like this. Well, sorry, that's just plain wrong.

Here's the difficult thing to comprehend: Once Jordan crafted his own mythology and fully committed to achieving his dreams, there was no blowing him off course because he believed in his own myth so much that no matter what way he turned, he was able to put it down as just the next chapter in the grand mythology, the ending of which he was already certain of. He consciously built his myth from his humble beginnings, and anything he hadn't planned on, he just incorporated into the big story. At one point, the press gave him a new nickname: the GOAT (Greatest of All Time). And while it was a surprise to him, it was soon as prevalent a part of his mythology as "Air."

So it's time to do it for yourself. We are going to do a workshop called Building Your Myth. It is available for download, like all the other ones, just below this video.

Point one: Take a look back at your life and childhood and identify the negative points that you've experienced. See how to turn those experiences into lessons that have helped you become who you are today. Add photos if possible. For example, I grew up in a fairly poor family, which gave me motivation to make a good living. Another example: I hated being an employee and having to blindly obey managers who were not necessarily competent. Well, that gave me the motivation to become an entrepreneur, and I couldn't be happier than doing what I'm doing today.

Another example: I experienced OTAs and their dictates as a hotel manager. I hated it, but I'm super grateful to have gone through this step. Otherwise, I would never have had the idea of looking for solutions to generate more direct bookings. And that's what led me to later teach you how to do it. You see, I rewrote my story. Most people are disgusted with their story and they cling to it nonetheless. They say to themselves, "Oh, poor me." You need to understand that from all difficulties arise great strengths. It's just a choice you have to make.

I took everything that had happened to me that was boring and unhappy, and I rewrote it as something I was grateful for because it made me stronger. That's what you want to do. If you really want to be successful, you can't have stories from the past that make you sad or bitter. You need to be thankful for everyone because the pains and difficult times you have in life are teaching you lessons that are very valuable.

Remember, your past dictates your future. That's why you have to do this inspection of your past and make those nasty moments right. Make them positive.

Okay, with your past revisited in positivism mode, you give your present self the boost necessary to create the future you planned for. If you look at your past while lamenting, you will create more of what you made up your past in your future. All right. But if you look at your past and say to yourself, "I had to go through a lot of hardships, but I came out on top. I know how I'm going to go through these difficult times, and overcoming the difficult times taught me valuable lessons and made me stronger." All right, with this mentality, you will become a predator, a machine. You'd say to yourself, "Right now, I'm going to be able to do anything. I just have to decide to do so."

The difficult events of your past must become a series of challenges that could not break you. This is the first step to mythologizing yourself.

Step two: What events or milestones can you incorporate into your story now? Add photos if possible. For example, if you have a hotel and you have 80% of your customers coming from OTAs, take a picture of your PMS.

Step two: What events or milestones can you incorporate into your story now? Add photos if possible. For example, if you have a hotel and you have 80% of your customers coming from Booking.com and other OTAs, take a picture of your property management system with this statistic or take a photo of your last commission invoice. This will allow you to have a marker from where you started. This is the first chapter of your current life before your transformation. This is the moment when you realized you needed to react and do

 something. Start building your story. Start building your myth.

You don't need to publish it on the internet. This is a document that is for you and just for you. But do it. It's very important because once it starts to come true, you'll be very proud you had put it on paper in the first place.

Third point: What is the next step in your story as you see it, as you hope? Look at your goals and dreams. You want to start planning these chapters in the future. If you don't think the chapter can come true, that doesn't mean it won't. You want to write it down. In my story, I wrote things that seemed unreachable at the time, but I actually reached them. This is how you create a myth. This is how a person creates a myth. Write it, write the next chapter of their life, then go out and make it happen. Then you write the next chapter of the life, make it come true, and so on. You just keep going.

For example, to continue with hotels paying commissions on 80% of their turnover, the next step might be to get back to balance, to have 50% direct bookings and 50% of their bookings coming from OTAs. You have to write it down. This could be a renovation and acquisition project. It can be whatever you want. Add a picture and actually start writing the different chapters.

And after that, step number four: Well, what will it be once you've achieved your first goal? What's next? Write it down and find a picture to illustrate it.

Point number five: Add as many steps in the future as you want and add pictures to represent each of these steps. Write a description next to each one. Try to write your story 1 to 3 years from now, just as you would like it to be.

Point number five and final point: Add as many steps in the future as you want and add pictures to represent each of those steps. Write a description next to each one. Try to write your story 1 to 3 years from now, just as you would like it to be. Then consciously put this into practice every day, working hard to reach the next step.

You will see that when you create your own story, when you write down the different stages and chapters like this, it is amazing how much this starts to become reality. The more we can start to write the next chapter of our lives, the higher the chances of it happening.

The bottom line is this, folks: When it comes to your mind, you're the boss. Your character, so to speak, is there to do your bidding. And if you feel like they're not up to scratch, go ahead and make some changes.

Today has been a productive one. Make sure and keep your notes safe because you're going to need them again soon enough. Take care and see you next time.

Firstly, we're going to take a look at some statistics that won't reflect well on the current societal paradigm, particularly with regards to the generally accepted views on success in the business world and making money. Then we're going to talk about separating yourself a little, looking in between your character and your mind, and taking an objective view of your own thoughts. Remember, your mind is in charge, but the character will always try to have an influence and they can be particularly effective at sending negative thoughts your way. I'll show you how to recognize them when they're coming and how to spin them around to make more optimistic ones before they spin you into a vicious cycle.

All right, then, we're going to show you how to put your character back in line when he's getting out of it. So producing a gun when they try to start a knife fight, basically. And next it will be personal story time. And I'll tell you specifically about when I reshaped my character into a new one, capable of achieving goals. And I'm hoping you can use the details of my own life I'm sharing to get fired up about your own.

All right then, finally, we'll put the writing on the wall. We'll put all the pieces of this week together into something cohesive. You'd be as well to call your shiny new paradigm.

All right, so let's start. Statistics and the imperfect paradigm of society. Everyone has flipped a coin. Imagine you tossed a coin in the air and it lands on the table. Heads or tails? Right? For those who don't know the statistics on coin tosses, your chances are 50/50. Society's current paradigm looks at people and their success as unbreakable statistics. There's a generally accepted idea in our industry that no matter what, you'll pay a huge chunk of your income to OTAs, that your direct bookings will be at a minimum, as will your margins. That six out of ten companies go bust. And on and on and on.

People preach the statistical impossibility of success for ordinary people. You can transcend yourself. You're born lucky or you ain't. And most of us are in the former camp. People preach the statistical impossibility of success for ordinary people. You can't transcend yourself. You're born lucky or you ain't. And most of us are in the latter camp, or so the current paradigm would have us believe.

Here's the fallacy in that hypothesis. Coin tosses are 50/50 because they're two-sided and cannot affect their own outcome, right? It's all random when it comes to coin tosses, and there's no chance, more or less, either way. That's how we, society, look at people at large. You've as much chance of success as anyone else, but those chances happen to be not very high. Longshot. All of us.

So imagine a new type of coin, one with a brain and an arm sticking out, one with the ability to think and participate and influence its chances. It could be thinking, "Which side do I want to land on?" Then flap its arms and glide a little and land as it wishes. Imagine someone took this coin out of their pocket and asked if you wanted to bet against it. Do you think that would be a fair bet? Would you take the risk? A coin that could think for itself would be a total game changer.

The current paradigm of our society sees humans as regular coins. We have no truck when it comes to results. The crazy thing is this same paradigm exists in full knowledge that humans are gifted with thought and are capable of acting in their own self-interest. The current paradigm is illogical at its core. As humans in the game of life, we have the ability to think, interact, participate, experience, and determine our own chances at something. It doesn't matter which side of the coin is visible at the moment, it doesn't matter what history the coin has. And the same is true for your own life. It doesn't matter where you are now and whatever your past was, you are not a coin. You can choose, you can think, you can interact, and you can make a difference. You can determine which side you land on.

Don't take this fact for granted, all right? It might seem like I'm stating the obvious, but most people act as though they've forgotten that they have the capacity to think, interact, and participate in their own lives and change their own lives. It's one of life's great ironies that we worry about how much effect we have on the environment, but give no credence to that which we might have on our own lives.

Remember this sentence? I said it about a billion times. I'll say it again: it doesn't matter what is true. What is important is what you believe to be true. Because as you work on it, it will become reality. It doesn't matter if you're broke, paying too many commissions to OTAs, not generating enough direct bookings, margins too low, feeling depressed. It doesn't matter if life has you on the ropes. What matters is what you believe to be true. If you believe you can achieve a goal. If you believe you can make your dreams come true. If you believe you can improve the health of your business. If you believe you can make more money, have more direct customers, pay less commissions to OTAs, retain your customers, then get to work.

This is the master algorithm of all positive evolutions: action, reaction, conviction, reality, a virtuous circle, a spiral that feeds itself. The world will not come to you. Even if it does, if you're content to wait for that to happen, you'll be content to let it pass you by. At the end of the day, leave that attitude at the door and your old beliefs in the trash alongside, and we've got new ones ready to go for you.

The thing to remember the next time the odds are stacked against you is that the odds are irrelevant to you. You get your first foothold and then your second. And maybe you fumble. But rather than giving up, you'll say, "Excellent. Now I know one place not to put my foot," and you'll get back on the wall.

Let's break up the party going on between your mind and your character and see: Do any legible thoughts spill out? We spoke in the last video about the separation of the mind and the character, and how the thing to do is create a character with the ability to dance and then have your mind be the DJ. Essentially, any person developing with momentum towards their goals will have a good, healthy separation going on between who wanders out in the world and who calls the shots. Mind and matter is the separation, and mind over matter is the order of the day.

Your mind is the master, and it can make the character dance as it sees fit. When you have a really strong mind and you separate the character from the mind and pin it down and really control it, then you can bring your character to do whatever you want. You can really make your character dance, bring it into everyday life, and allow it to do whatever you want so that you can get the results you want. It really is the most powerful and awesome thing to experience. You really want to learn how to do this because thanks to this mechanism, doing what you have been afraid to do all your life will become easy. Things that you have wanted to achieve all your life but thought were beyond your reach will become realities. You will no longer be afraid.

Here's how to create that separation. You must learn to perceive yourself in the third person as an observer and master of your character. Look what we have here. It's a video game whereby you are the character we see in front of us. It's called third-person view. First person places you looking out of the eyes. You can see, touch, and feel all the emotions that tend to go in first-person viewing of anything. The goal, if you are to separate effectively, is to end up like this: somewhere outside yourself, in control but unaffected.

This is how you want to start observing yourself, to step out of yourself and learn to see yourself in the third person. That's what I do. Any time I feel myself being dragged a little by the emotions or physical reactions a situation causes to arise in me, one situation I tackle regularly is one everyone does: waking up. If I wake up early to the sound of my alarm, the natural inclination is to want to sleep longer. It's in moments like this I step back and say, "No, let's get up and do something productive." And the character I've established, being effortlessly stylish and productive, wholeheartedly agrees. And off we go. And we leave all the morning right there in the pillow.

And I know, I know, sometimes feelings are powerful. Sometimes you'll want to eat when you oughtn't or sit down when it's time to mosey. You'll have your goals defined, and the only person in your way will be you, your character. You need to be the world's foremost expert on putting them in line. You know the situations they'll fight you on way in advance. They won't want to get up and go to the gym. They'll want to stay out later for more beers. They'll want to McDonald's at the airport. Like Neo in *The Matrix*, you will have to hardwire their fighting style onto your brain so they can't put a foot forward without you having one automatically in place to defend yourself.

Now I'm going to tell you how I got my own character in line. I've mentioned already how I was a chronic procrastinator with a morbid fear of failure. I eventually got myself in line

, but it wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination. Every step of my journey, my character berated me with doubt. I'd get up in the morning intent on working and find myself pausing for a minute after breakfast or in the shower, their voice raining down on me, screaming, "This isn't you! Give in. Go do something with less risks involved because you'll never reap these rewards you've got in your head."

Near the start, I gave in quite a bit. I was ill-equipped to take myself on, and my character kept on winning. If I even thought about stepping out of my comfort zone, I'd be flooded with powerful emotional appeals, reasons not to, and they were invariably too strong for me, and I just gave in. The progress I made was negligible until I got a bit of fighting spirit in me, until I made a trip to the emotional armory and strapped on a sidearm.

I've made this point many times, and here we go again: I am not the same person I was starting out on this route I'm taking you on. I've evolved many times over since I began, and you will too. Never stop evolving. That's not even a choice, by the way. Evolution never stops. You might hit a plateau every now and again, but any time you do, either look for the next slope going upwards or invent a flying machine, because the only way to not drown is to keep on transcending.

Any success I have, I owe it to my ability to break the old mold and change characters whenever the situation calls for it. Success meant for me before margins were rising and OTA commissions dropping, breaking free of what seemed preordained for me, and beginning to march to the beat of my own drum.

How did I evolve? Well, I've learned from the markers of my existence. Remember the Existence Pattern worksheet with the wavy pattern? That's where you can learn yours. There are two types of markers, remember: high and low. High markers are events, thoughts, or patterns that begin to occur as soon as we reach the peaks where performance is at its best. I have 80% direct occupancy rate for the next month. Everything is fine. I rock. And then, without realizing it, you start to lose focus and stop doing what got you there in the first place. You start taking long lunches, impulse buying on Amazon (and I'm just speaking from my own experience, by the way), and before you know it, you're on the way down until you get to your lowest, and oh, or below 40% for the next month, for example, and you start to panic, and this kicks you into gear enough that you begin to ascend again.

This cycle will go on and on and on and on unless you make a proper go at identifying your markers, which luckily for you, you've already done—or you should have done. If you haven't, go back. But I reckon you have. Probably. You're on video six.

You can also identify if you are in a period of growth or decline, and while in either case there is an appropriate action, it's obviously more crucial to react punctually in the case of, you know, a decline. The truth is there are no fixed positions in life. You are either improving or getting worse. If you think you are staying still, you're getting worse because the world is evolving. *Gone With the Wind* was the most successful film in history once, but if it were made the same way today, a studio would need to close because of it. Of course, you might say, "But if you adjust for inflation..." and I say, "What is inflation?" The world revolves around you, you know what I mean? It's still the same currency; the environment it exists in is different.

Here is the typical pattern I experienced in the past. I'd wake up in the morning and think of reasons to stay in bed, and remind myself of the benefits of sleep, and think of an extra hour in bed like an extra portion of broccoli instead of dessert. Then I'd fall asleep again, and I'd eventually get up, and I'd regret the extra time I'd spent snoozing. I'd make a resolution to not do that anymore, and then I'd do it again. Before long, rinse and repeat. I'd do it again and again and feel worse and worse. Scared for my future, hating myself—legitimately, I would say. It was no way to live, and I did it long enough to know.

When I finally got to grips with the patterns of my existence and my markers, everything got better. I became an early riser, an actual early riser. I learned to step outside myself and notice the thoughts of my character as just part of the pattern. I'd hear the spiel about sleep being good and go, "Not today, buddy, not in the mood." And just like the callus on a guitar player's hand, that kind of resolve gets stronger every time you do it.

By separating my mind from my character, I was able to intrude on bad decisions before they happened. Every time they pulled a weapon, I'd escalate. I decided that way better than any alarm clock would be me trying to convince myself to stay in bed. That became my pre-gym espresso. I did it for a day, then a week, then a month, and eventually, there was no voice. I transcended—a new me, me 1.0 to me 12.0—all by treating my typical triggers for bad behavior as a starting gun in whatever race I was running at the time.

There's going to be no final draft either, as far as I'm concerned. Not until I'm laid out on a table waiting to go six feet under.

The other key, of course, is taking your dreams and making them standards. Your dreams are the standards of the new character. You've got to become a new person, and the worst he's willing to accept is the best you could dream of.

So let's bring it all together. Special thanks for all those skeptics who've stuck with me this far. I wouldn't.

Okay, let's bring it all together. Special thanks for all those skeptics who've stuck with me this far. I would have been on your side for many years with regards to personal development, so I know the allowances you're making here. And I guess, seeing as you've made it this far, you're committed to personal transformation now. And all I can say is, good for you.

The current paradigm of society says this: We believe in classical physics, which says it's a tree, it's a desk, it's a person. We believe and have faith in what is physical, what is tangible and measurable. We also believe that we are just a physical body made up of muscles, blood, flesh, and bones, and that this matter constitutes what we are, who we are. In short, it defines us.

This guy is Rob. He's not very smart. Rob's story and his journey to date shows that he is not very good at performing, and his brain is simply not as smart as other people's. Rob is an introvert. He is shy. He is worried, he doesn't know much, and he is unable to change because he thinks that Rob can only be Rob as he knows himself today. This is the current paradigm of society.

Rob sees himself as he is at the moment and believes he is unable to change. Society places so much emphasis on defining individual identities from an early age that it creates an extremely strong self-image and sense of character. We have names, identity documents, birth certificates, and even death certificates. There is often our photo, our size, everything is documented. We have school reports, Facebook profiles that have timelines and stories and pictures of us and our friends. We also have Instagram with more pictures still. There are also these forms that we fill out at the doctor's office, or as soon as we have to deal with an administration. We need to tick boxes, and all of it just defines who we are. And this is Rob's story.

All of these different things make up his identity. Rob thinks this collection of facts and information about him defines him. "It's my identity. It's me." All of these elements of the physical world are defining him as he walks through life. However, as we all know, I'm proposing a new paradigm. In this paradigm, we can change anything in our physical reality with our mind. And I'm not suggesting you abandon your body either. Not only will you need that, but last I checked, it's physically impossible to leave and come back. The two work in tandem. But let me be clear: the mind is in charge. The body is still recovering from 50,000 years of glucose shortage. Left up to your body, you'd drink Coca-Cola all day to wash down doughnuts. Your body needs a boss. The corporate structure of you works as follows: mind over matter. Take control of yours, and pretty soon your surroundings will be up for grabs.

We're in a relatively new stage of human evolution. For donkey's years, it was just stay where you are, be who you are, be who your parents were, and do more of the same. The world got small very quickly, and now the possibility of being something else, whatever you want, is not only a reality, it's a necessity considering how quickly the world happens to be moving.

So we're finding ourselves at war with our dinosaur genes. They want to be, and we want to become. And it's paralyzing. Humanity's defining characteristic is to know about the future and to make deals with it. But the only way to live up to bargains like these is to transcend ourselves.

Remember our old buddy Maslow? Remember his hierarchy of needs. We start with the physiological needs such as water, warmth, rest, and then the need for security, then belonging, the need for self-esteem, self-fulfillment, and finally we have transcendence. Transcendence is when we transcend all of our

 basic needs and become who we want to be.

Now let's get back to those. Let's start with the misunderstanding in the psychology of the self and the creation of identity. The current paradigm in society says that you are what you are, and you cannot change on a fundamental level. Our new paradigm says the self is nothing but the sum of mental programming used to form beliefs. Who you are emerges from a combination of your positive and negative views about everything you encounter.

Society believes the self is immovable, whereas the new paradigm says the self is just the programming of who you are, and anything that's programmed can be reprogrammed. The current paradigm of society believes that the self is the final value, that a person is either left-brained or right-brained, and that a person cannot change. On a personality level, a person is either creative or logical, or has a particular type that features somewhere on the Myers-Briggs test. You could be an ENTP, or an ISFJ, or some other combination of those letters. That's who you are.

And that's not well. This new paradigm doesn't, by any of the personality tests, don't matter except to say what areas you need to work on. Our new paradigm says the ego is a character created by the mind, which you can recreate just as easily with a little work.

This is the misunderstanding in the psychology of the self and the creation of identity. We have come to think of ourselves as a specific person, with an identity and characteristics that define us as a person. We've come to believe that we ourselves are incapable of changing, and that we should love ourselves as who we are without changing anything, and that people just do not change. Be yourself. Be true to your roots. Remember who you are. Stay true to yourself. Be genuine. These are all the expressions we hear all the time. It's an epidemic that has been fueled by our New Age philosophy, which teaches that life's great question is "Who am I?" We seek what we recognize so we can fit somewhere and think, "These people are like me. I associate with them. They form such a group. Therefore, I am part of this group."

The sense of self and character becomes very rigid when defined. Over time, we form an identity, and we build our whole life around things that conform to it. The problem is, as human beings, it is natural to desire more than what we are. We dream of improving and growing, and we form that image of our desired selves. This is when the conflict arises. Whenever we try to become that desired self, we are not aligned with our current self. This is when chaos arises. We live crippled, dreaming lives and end up regretful for not taking action and becoming who we could have been.

The new paradigm breaks with this and tells us it is pointless to try to answer "Who am I?" You should answer instead, "Who am I becoming?" The self does not exist. It is only the sum of the mental programming that you have received. The only way to reach your goals and make your dreams come true is to become the person who deserves them. The only thing that matters is to answer this question: Who am I becoming?

That's the first point. We can cross it off our list. Fallacy number two is the bias for the tangible. Our current paradigm is all about the physical. Something is only real if you can physically touch it and see it. We take it as a given that everything is separate. We are isolated objects from the trees and the stones and the desks, and vice versa. We are separated from other objects, and we can no more influence them than they can us. The current paradigm is very biased towards the physical world and gives less credence to the mental, metaphysical world. That said, quantum physics shows us something different.

Zooming in, a tree is not quite a tree. It's spinning particles and empty space. We know for sure now that everything we see is just spinning particles and empty space, but we just can't conceive of any of it. We walk around and see trees and birds and rocks, and even though we know on a level that it's all just atoms and space, our mind is more than capable of making us think one thing of reality that is, in fact, another. And we know it.

And just like the tree is just spinning particles, so too is your situation not as solid as it appears. If you are poor, you can get rich. And if you are not smart, you can become a genius. Once you see reality for the illusion it is, it becomes all the easier to shape it to your objectives.

We have grading systems that are limited: pass/fail, 100%, 75%, 60%, 50%, fair, good, very good, excellent, uneducated, high school diploma, graduate, bachelor, master, MBA, doctorate. With these classification systems, there is a ceiling. A lot of hoteliers think our industry breaks down like this. The big hotels and chain hotels that have significant financial means pay less commissions because they have the means to recruit people with degrees who will solve this problem for them. Then there are those who are in the middle—the average hotels. And then finally, there are the small hotels, guesthouses, furnished tourist accommodations, which pay the highest proportion of commissions because they do not have the means to fight.

In reality, most forms of qualification act as a false sense of authority because it makes a person believe that he is qualified and that he deserves to be rewarded by the market. The market is a fair judge of value, and it has a habit of rewarding those who have value and giving nothing to those who have not. It means that if you know what to do to pay less commissions to OTAs and generate more direct bookings, you will get there. No matter the size of your establishment, and no matter what your background is.

The current paradigm in society is based on education optimized for graduation. It makes us believe that diplomas will allow you to perform better. It also makes us believe that the bigger your establishment, the more money you earn, the better you will perform. It is not so. The market does not care how well you did at a top hotel management school. I have coached four- and five-star hotels that had a lot of money and were nowhere near doing as well as some of the bed and breakfast owners I know.

For instance, the new paradigm says diplomas don't matter, and neither does the size of your hotel. What matters is how well you optimize your plan of action by analyzing your results. The market is made up of the world's population. You must therefore be on the lookout for new knowledge and know-how that will allow you to remain competitive.

Do you remember? We covered some of the bigger questions humanity asks itself: What is true and what is wrong? What is bad and what is good? What is true and what is false? What is the right way to live and the wrong way to live? It's often taken for granted that a Wall Street stockbroker is bad, and being a wellness guru in California is good. We see the value in the past, but we fear the future. We believe that living and working during the day is a superior lifestyle to those who live and work at night. We believe that generating direct bookings by bypassing OTAs is good, and working with OTAs is bad. We believe science is right and religion is wrong.

And there you have it. This is dualism and the perception of right and wrong. Our mind is an on/off programmable system that divides thoughts, memories, and experiences into categories such as true or false, for or against, good or bad, past or future, friend or foe. It's how we make sense of things, dividing by opposites—dualism. It's how we answer the question "Who am I?" Without knowing it, our worldview forms from the positive and negative stones we choke on, the infinity of scales of experience that make up the grey matter between our ears. We strengthen and define ourselves this way over time and convince ourselves we are who we are. And there's no changing.

Society doesn't help this predicament because it works the same way and reinforces the sense of disbelief and doubt. We sow the same seeds as a group and see ourselves as incapable of change because that's what society tells itself too. It's this viewing of the world through black-and-white spectacles, the lack of nuance and viewpoints, that's the cause of most of the conflict in the world, and a great deal of those going on inside you as well.

Our solution is to stop being binary in our points of view and balance the scales. All right. We need to comprehend that all of these fixed viewpoints are just our general resistance to change, masquerading as something more objectively acceptable. Variety is the spice of life, and variation is the key to evolution. Change your opinions. Change your reality. Just like fish leaving the sea to become monkeys, or monkeys who didn't like the land returning and becoming dolphins. (Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened.)

In the same way, the great roadblock on the highway to personal evolution is the past and how we cling to it. The stories we told ourselves that paint us as inept, that we can't let go of and we carry them with us everywhere, literally, no matter who you are. It's time to play the other side of the fence. Don't do sports? Join a football team out of interest. Read the Bible? Don't go to the cinema—go see a double bill. No spicy food, you say? Well, let me meet you for an Indian, why don't we?

So that's point number four. We can cross it off the list now. Point number five: Dualism or the contradiction in science or with classical physics, which I told you about. Things are things. It's a tree. It's a desk. It's a person. These are physical, palpable things. We can touch them

. Quantum physics says things are not really things. They are particles, atoms that spin in large, empty space. Classical physics is what we see with our eyes and touch with our hands. Quantum physics is what we see when we zoom in with an atomic microscope.

The best way I can describe it is with this little analogy that you should already know if you've watched the videos in sequence. But anyway, I'll go through it again quickly. Imagine you go into a forest and watch a tree fall right in front of you. Big noise, vibrations. You see it all happening, makes a huge bang. Now imagine you turn back time and instead of going into the forest, you just chill at the edge of it and have a nap. Right? Well, the question is: Did that tree still fall? Did it make a noise? If it did, did it fall to make a noise?

The current paradigm of society says yes, it certainly did. But quantum physics says particles are basically everywhere and nowhere until someone observes them. It is only at the point of observation that the particles assume a specific state and position, which means we don't know whether the tree is falling or not unless we're there to observe it. It is only at that point of observation that the particles assume a specific state and position.

What does this all mean? What does this have to do with business? Well, do you remember my obsession with discovering the interdependence of things? What makes one subject related to another? How can a subject have anything to do with another subject? How is it that the quality of my website is linked to the loyalty of my customers? Logically, these two subjects are independent of each other. How can what I think affect the outcome of a conversation with a client? How can my results affect my client's results if they are separated? Well, on a microscopic level, they're all particles.

The current paradigm of society is based on the prejudices of classical physics and considers that we are physical beings separated from our environment, without interdependencies. The new paradigm says that we are not only physical beings but also forms of light. We experience consciousness and see reality as an illusion created by our mind, interconnected with everything in the universe.

The societal paradigm would have it that all the failure and suffering experienced can be blamed on some kind of outside force, and that to be a victim of some circumstance is a virtue of sorts. It's turned into a badge of honour to try and not succeed and then stop trying. We don't even need to give ourselves excuses, but we do anyway, because there's no shortage of folks lined up to say, "Oh, you did your best. And that's what counts. The economy is bad right now. It's not your fault."

The current paradigm in society is about believing the victim and their story, giving them sympathy, and blaming others for their misfortunes. So I propose a new paradigm that sees losers as people who don't need sympathy, and who need to get up and roll up their sleeves and win. They need to get off their asses and fight. I believe anyone can win. Anyone can be successful. I don't just believe it—it's a fact. People make up stories about why they can't win. It makes them feel better. It relieves them of the responsibility for their failures, essentially. And it would help them to take on that responsibility. They make excuses as to why they can't, and then complain that they are stuck in their current situation and that they'd like to change it, but they can't.

Basically, everybody wants to succeed, and everyone can. But as soon as you play the victim, as soon as you create a story to clear yourself, you will lose systematically. As soon as you start to feed the victim with sympathy, it's literally like feeding an addiction. It's like giving drugs to an addict. It only makes matters worse. You cannot give sympathy to a victim. They have to get up and get back in the game of life.

In society, if someone is successful, we say, "Oh, this person's lucky. I know they were born brilliant," and we don't care anymore beyond that. On the contrary, if someone fails, we spend time consoling them, finding them excuses, and so forth. But it should be the other way around. We should give our attention to those who are successful and learn from them. People who don't win just have to make the decision to get up and participate in the game. If life's got you stuck in the corner of a ring, fight and get out. You have to fortify yourself and fight with everything you have, and never play the victim. And most importantly, never believe your own stories.

It's human nature to build stories in order to avoid taking responsibility. So when you realize that, you say to yourself, "Damn, I'm lying to myself. I'm setting myself up on my own. I have to find a solution." There isn't necessarily a solution to my problem because there is always a solution. Don't believe your stories. Don't create a story. Don't play the victim. You must grow fangs and turn predator. You must fight and defend yourself with everything you have.

The current paradigm in society is that a person is separated from the tree. There is a space between these things. They are separated. They are not related to each other. We believe that we are separated from an object, and the space between them is the distance. The current paradigm of society considers that what is there is a separation between what is in our mind and what's outside of it. We cannot influence the physical world from our mind.

The current paradigm includes the concept of physical cause and effect, but not of mental cause and effect. The chair you're sitting on, eating your dinner—that started in someone's mind. Think about that. You remember we discussed quantum particle entanglement and explained how for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—action/reaction. If one particle has a negative spin, the other particle has a positive spin. They are forever connected.

So on, we discuss these things. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. We also talked about the mirror effect and how your judgments simply reflect your own insecurities, and the fact that people don't have work issues—they have personal issues reflected in their business. We also saw that the way you do one thing is the way you do all things. I also explained to you that we become our lowest standards, not our loftiest dreams.

There are also patterns that inevitably form cycles in which cause and effect are inexorably linked. They feed off each other. A cause creates an effect and in turn swings back like a pendulum, with the next cause ready to go. Depending on your outlook, positive or negative, these cycles or circles can turn virtuous or vicious. Whichever way your cycles end up going, like anything that can feed on itself, it becomes exponential and in turn either strengthens or weakens your position as it goes.

And it all comes down to your belief. Believe in what you're doing, and you will spot the way forward, even when you fail. Doubt yourself, and all you'll see will be brick walls—invisibility one way, and depression the other. It's your choice. The current paradigm by which most people live generally refuses to acknowledge this. The cause and effect they see is like a hammer hitting a nail. They refuse to see that knock-on effect of what's going on with the human mind.

The new paradigm I'm giving you sees only cause and effect, and knows the ones to latch onto to get a virtuous cycle going, and those to avoid if you want to avoid vicious ones. Judge others, others judge you. You judge yourself, you limit yourself. On the other hand, assume whoever you see knows something you don't. The thing is, it's completely certain that they do. And with the right attitude, it's also certain that you can make use of it. Sky's the limit with that kind of attitude.

Simply put, your hypothesis affects your results. Your current situation is your hypothesis. You need to define this hypothesis. Define your current situation. "Well, my current situation is this. And if I take this action, then I think I will get this result." This is your hypothesis. Then you have your action. Your action is what you are actually going to do to make your hypothesis come true. Then you have your new situation, which is the result of your current situation and the application of your action. You experience it. From that experience, you do an analysis. You draw conclusions about what worked and what needs improvement. This feedback feeds into the cause, which allows you to adjust your belief and then adjust your hypothesis, and then adjust your action plan.

And little by little, slowly, because there's no other way to do it, you get closer to your goals. This is how success works in sport with legends like Michael Jordan, in business with entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, but also in your personal life with your friendship, family, and marital status. Action, results, feedback, regroup, adjust. Go again. It's the algorithm that governs everything.

You want to increase your margins. To do this, your hypothesis is that you have to pay fewer commissions to OTAs while keeping a stable or growing turnover volume. This is your assumption. You start. Maybe you are blogging, advertising on Facebook, improving your SEO. After a while, you get results. Some are positive, others less encouraging. You draw the necessary conclusions and modify your hypothesis accordingly.

Sometimes the hypothesis won't need to be changed, but beliefs do. This is often the case. "Oh, I thought blogging would be effective. It didn't work out, but my SEO did." Then you just have to adapt your action plan accordingly.

Remember, only what you believe to be true is important because by working on it, it will become reality. Now, as you should have just noted, you have a bit of work ahead of you. Research, analysis, experimentation. I mean, who said changing your life was going to be easy

? Not me. Snake oil salesmen did.

That's it for today. Bring all your homework for the final module because you're going to need every little piece of it.

Goodbye.

Next up we'll explore our conception of reality, which as someone who's watched the preceding six videos, I'm sure you have a comprehensive understanding of by now. After that, we're going to talk about the twin biases of synchronisation and confirmation. Synchronisation is when you think you noticed patterns in the world, but it's just ripples of what you're thinking about. For example, if you want to buy like a Tesla, let's say, who doesn't? We all do. Well, maybe you don't. I don't know, I do, but if you want to buy a Tesla, for example, and you really, really start thinking about it, you will begin to notice Teslas everywhere around you. And they won't just have appeared out of nowhere. But to you, it's as though the world has synced up to your mind, you know, telling you to buy the Tesla.

We'll also talk about confirmation bias and how, alongside synchronisation bias, these two imposters can be the making or breaking of you. Then we'll talk about the human mind is an evolutionary algorithm that can be hacked, actually, to make things you want in life more easily attainable. And I hacked my own brain. And I'll talk a little bit about that and figure out how I read and study probably hundreds of hours of psychology, psychoanalysis, behavioural economics in order to learn this stuff. And now I'm giving you the cliff. You're welcome. By the way, everything in this video is geared towards making what we've done so far like taking it and arranging it in such a way that you can get started yourself today. All right. Right now.

So with that in mind, no time like the present. Let's get started. So to start, what do I mean by reprogramme yourself? Einstein Albert Einstein famously said, God does not play dice with the universe. Well, now I'm going to famously say Einstein was wrong. It's beyond popular belief. It's nearly an accepted fact to say that life is a game of chance in a way. You know, it's a box of chocolates as, a great man once said, there are or no, his mother said that there are probabilities for everything that might happen, and as such, we have to play our luck with those probabilities in mind. If a certain percentage chance of getting sick and your business has about a 60% chance of failing. And guess what? Those are the odds. And the odds are the odds, and there's nothing you can do about it to get past any of it. All right. So you might as well accept it. That's the common thinking thing is, though, the dice are loaded. And for those of you not up on casino lingo, loaded dice are cheats. Dice, right? They're manufactured with one side heavier in order to increase the probability of them landing on one side or another. So, like, if someone bets, they can roll, seven, ten times in a row, and they do, the chances are those dice are loaded. In a manner of speaking, this video is just me teaching you how to load up your own dice.

Next, what do we know about reality? We don't. Plenty of physics so far. So I'm sure you'll remember the viewpoint of classical physics, right? Objects are tangible and visible and isolated from other objects, whereas quantum physics, on the other hand, tells it's it's all just spinning particles in space. And then on a level, everything is intrinsically connected. You know, we are the stuff the stars are made of and all that. It's a contradiction. And one which we created a scenario involving an aquarium. To better illustrate, if you remember correctly, it was in the video titled Am Opening Your Eyes all summarised right. A guy observes five red particles under an atomic microscope on the surface of an aquarium. He notes it and leaves the room when it comes back. Not only have they moved around a bit, but there are two new ones. They're blue ones, and all the changes occurred when he wasn't observing matter, material, reality, all that stuff. It needs a thinking. Participate to observe it in order to exist. It's the tree falling in the forest or Schrödinger's cat or whatever. If no one is there to witness it, then it's accurate to say that on a certain level, it actually doesn't exist. Reality is the world as filtered through our perceptions. Look at it from a different perspective. What is belief but projected perception? All right, shape your beliefs into a grounded hypothesis and your hypothesis can't help but affect your results.

Now let's move on to the biases, namely those of synchronisation and confirmation that variety synchronisation bias is the observation of events or objects that appear to be significantly related but have no obvious cause and effect. And if that isn't the kind of definition that should come with examples, then I don't know what is as complicated as it sounds. You for sure recognise it once I give you some examples, as it's kind of impossible. I've gotten through life beyond childhood and not experienced the phenomenon of synchronisation bias at one time or another.

First example is the Tesla when we talked about earlier, but it can be with anything. The last one I remember for myself was a yo yo prams. I had been researching them as I had a baby on the way, and all of a sudden it seemed to me like everyone in the world with a baby had one already bought. All right, it's like that. Another one that's been more and more common in recent years is politics. All right? Particularly American politics for some reason, you know, even for people, mostly for people who don't live in America. And no matter what side you're on, they sort of began to take over a lot of people's lives a few years ago. Like, let's say you hated Donald Trump. Pretty soon you'd find ways to associate anything negative with him or his administration. And the only news you'll see are items with him in them or relating to him. Another common one is when you're thinking about someone and they seem to text or call you in that instance, any science minded individual will tell you that these are all meaningless coincidences, but I've said it to Einstein already and I'll say it to them they're wrong. 

Leonardo da Vinci said, learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else. You know. Remember what we talked about? When we talked about observable entities in physics? I leave my desk to go to the toilet. And then on a very real level, it's accurate to say that the desk ceases to exist. In those moments, I thinking observer is necessary to confirm the existence, or lack thereof, of anything in the physical universe. Remember? Rob? Rob. Remember he was observing the tree. They're looking at it and touching it. If he leaves, the tree, disappears from his reality and therefore disappears from the observable physical universe because he was the only one there. And of course, you will say, of course, it's still there, but I new level. Can you actually know that? All right, don't worry, I'm getting somewhere with this. 

So let's go back to the twin biases and let's look at confirmation. Confirmation bias is very much related to seeing synchronisation everywhere. Right. Let's go back to Trump. You hate the guy. But you could also say that you're kind of interested him in a way. Confirmation bias is very related to seeing synchronisation everywhere. Let's go back to Trump. You hate the guy. You presumably a lot of people do. Well, you can also see you're interested in a way, of course, you're aware that there are many people out there who love Trump, and there's probably articles and news items to support this position, too. But you will never seek them out. And you'll never find any of them by accident, because you're much more likely to seek out or find information by accident that confirms what you already believe in, namely, that he's not a very nice man. I understand this right. If you behave in an unchecked manner and you have convictions about things, you will only look up and consume media items that back up what you already think, and you probably ignore anything that might contradict your position. All of this happens unconsciously, but it's a proven phenomenon that happens nonetheless. 

So altogether, what does this mean? It means that not only does reality not exist without a conscious observer to take it in, but every conscious observer will have beliefs and thoughts and convictions that will directly shape the way they see the world, and thus reality itself. Remember, it's not reality. It's reality filtered through you and your method of questioning. I'll show you an experiment to demonstrate these phenomena exist. It won't take a second. And it's fun. It's a fun way to see how your mind works. Right. So I'm sure you've heard of the Flat Earth crowd, the Flat Earth Society, they're a group of people who think the Earth is flat. Few centuries ago. Try seven. This theory was shared by the majority of the population. But today, the majority of people agree that the the earth is round, albeit begrudgingly. However, there's an exponentially growing group of people who once again believe that the Earth is flat. If you have an unshakeable belief that the Earth is round, you will think that these people are foolish, crazy even, and you will obviously not listen to the evidence that they provide to prove that the earth is flat.

In short, your confirmation bias is that the Earth is round and you're only going to pay attention to information that points in that direction. I want you to abandon the conviction that it's round, and open yourself to the idea that it

 could be false. I'm not telling you to believe that it is. All I'm asking you to do is abandon the belief that the Earth can only be round, and open yourself up to the fact that there is a very small chance that these people are not wrong. Just be curious enough to look at what they produce as evidence to support their argument. You'd be surprised to see that a lot of it makes sense in a way, or is at least compellingly demonstrated.

I did it myself, by the way I was watching the internet community grow with my own amusement, and then I suddenly figured out I could kind of use it to just, I don't know it, test my beliefs, put my binaries to the test, and, so I decided to proceed as though at least open to the world being flat. So I started to listen to all these different people, and they all had a lot of evidence that was flat. There's a lot of pilots out there that say they've never seen the curvature of the Earth, no matter how high the Arab. And according to basic mathematics, at regular cruising altitude, you should be able to see that curvature. In fact, another one was if you throw a like a laser beam across a super long lake, it hits the exact same point on the other side, same height. And you know, whatever. And the point is, this should not happen because if the Earth has a curvature, the laser beam should not be able to hit the exact same point, etc., etc.

I know, I know, I know it's convincing, right? But despite all this going in there with my knowledge of confirmation bias, it was impossible not to know the width of it and everything. I so like for all the research they did one way, I had no doubt they were all operating by an unspoken policy of never looking into anything that might suggest the world is actually round everywhere they look, they see examples that demonstrate the world is flat and nowhere do they notice anything. To the contrary. It's textbook synchronisation and confirmation bias. It's a fascinating exercise to do in the right frame of mind by the by, but like, just look for a near universally detracted point of view and do your due diligence. Look into it and you can also see the two go hand in hand.

If your mind isn't moving, your convictions are set in stone. You have confirmation bias and synchronisation will be sure to follow another example, probably closer to our hearts. Is Trump and Biden on one side? You think Trump is the worst man in the world? On the other side, well, I think the same about Biden. Big Trump fans might read right wing articles, join Facebook groups corresponding to their opinions. But crucially, though, ignore or exclude anything negative about Trump, positive about Biden, and certainly anyone who has a positive word to say about Joe Biden. And it's not an easy thing to be judgemental about. To be honest, because we all know well that not only does one of those sides do it on the other, but we all do it. Everybody does this.

Do yourself a favour. Indulge a little, depending on your position in some. But a pro-Trump or pro Biden literature, depending on your position. Again, I say, you'll be amazed how much compelling stuff you run into. Look at both and look at both positive and negative. Notice the way you lean in spite of the mountain of evidence you'll find to contradict you. That's your confirmation bias. What we experience is not reality, but reality exposed to our method of questioning your hypothesis affects your results. Flat earthers experience a reality that confirms their hypotheses, as do people from differing political camps. Your reality is one that confirms your hypothesis. Confirmation bias.

Now let's talk about the human mind as an evolutionary algorithm, which is the conclusion I've come to based on lots and lots of research. This is what the algorithm looks like. You have your current situation and then your action, and then your new situation, your current situation could be that you're pale and you're staying indoors too long. You're absolutely you're absolutely going to have to go out and enjoy the sun. All right. This could be your current situation. And then your action is to go to the beach and start lying in the sun and getting a turn. Then your new situation is that you have a tan. Simple, right?

This is how your mind's algorithm works. I think I've mentioned I was bad at math. Or at least I believed really strongly I was, because I was assured as much one time by a teacher. So my situation was I was bad at maths and my action was to not study or try. And so my next situation was worse than maths. But there's one key element that everyone forgets. It's the hypothesis. A hypothesis is what a human being has in his consciousness. Not only do we have an algorithm, but we also have the ability to predict, to look into the future and to think about what we want from it. Ask yourself right now, what do I want to achieve in the future? With this question, and especially with the answer, we can create a hypothesis about the future. When we have this hypothesis, we can look at possible actions we could take to realise this hypothesis.

We are able to predict. We can look into the future and play with different hypotheses. We are able to think, okay, I want to make a better living with my hotel. My hypothesis is that I need to make more direct sales and reduce what I pay in commissions to OTAs. Our mind is not just a basic algorithm, like a basic set of rules that form as a unit, like with a computer. No, it has the like the ability to predict, anticipate and hypothesise, making it an evolving how the algorithm. You make your decisions about your situation in the future and then create a hypothesis about what actions to take to get there. Then armed with these, you go to work by hypothesising about the desired outcome in the future and the actions you believe are necessary to achieve that desired outcome.

You were using the synchronisation and confirmation bias to your advantage. This is the brain hack to end all brain hacks. If you think you are bad at maths, then you will fail the maths exam. But if you change your assumption and say to yourself that you can become good at maths, then you will develop an action plan to become good and you will pass your exam. Synchronise how you see the world to your new convictions and confirm them with your actions. You can completely change the biases and use them by altering or simply writing a new your hypothesis for moving forward.

Let me give you some examples. Your current situation might be that you're bad at maths. You see your future as being even worse in maths, so your hypothesis emerges as being. Don't do anything at all and sure as anything you will get right where you predicted. So your hypothesis about the future leads you to the future you predicted. But the thing you need to see in this is that your failure was pre-programmed. From the moment you hypothesised around it as an inevitability, you started a vicious circle. If we make negative assumptions at the outset, we expose our reality to negativity. Conversely, if we make a, positive assumption, we will colour our reality in a positive light. What we see in our lives, are not really the material objects and beings they appear to be, but many rotating particles and different possibilities depending on our state of consciousness and how we choose to see them.

Another example. You have a situation whereby your bookings are mostly coming from OTAs, and on which you pay in proportion to your turnover, large commissions, your current situation is that you don't know how to reverse this trend, but you decide to make a hypothesis. You will find a solution. So you take action. You do some research. So by doing this you're already putting synchronisation and confirmation bias to work for you. Because the more you take action and are convinced you will find the solution, the more knowledge you will collect that will help you in this direction. With this knowledge, you will take action and through your actions you will receive feedback and you will analyse what works and what needs to be improved. And you will adapt and your hypothesis and action plan accordingly. You've set in motion a virtuous circle. Your hypothesis was that you would master your marketing and become more profitable. This affected your reality and made you stronger. Commercial and more profitable. Your assumption affected your bottom line.

That's how you're going to reprogramme yourself. Define a positive hypothesis and put the power of synchronisation and confirmation bias on your side, and you'll start a virtuous circle. The sky's the limit. Reprogramming yourself consists in hacking this algorithm by first defining the hypothesis of what you want to accomplish. Our mind then goes to work to optimise the desired result. All right, now that I've explained all of this, at last, it's time to give you the tools that will allow you to reprogramme yourself.

I'm going to show you how I hacked my own brain. I'll show you the exact process I followed the habits I established in the notebook I used for the purpose. Before you continue, please make sure that you've you've all the work done to this point on hand because you're going to need it. Download and open the document called My Alchemy, which is, available for download with this video. And I'll show you. I'll show you what it is now. I'll show you around. All right. You can open it using keynote or Microsoft PowerPoint. So here's this book I made called My Alchemy. As you can see, I'm the title page. On this page you'll see some instructions. Basically, you're going to fill in a whole book like this one and read it every morning, like a prayer book or an instruction manual for living a good life. And it will help you form habits powerful enough to, you know, help you change your life. That's why we're here.

The next page has a set of man

tras you want to hardwire onto your brain, and you do that by rereading them every day before you get started. All right, so point one, you might remember it. It doesn't matter what is true, what is important, it is what you believe to be true. Because by working on it, it will become reality. Your thoughts form your beliefs and as you live them, your beliefs become reality. That's the algorithm for good living. With a little feedback tacked on to the end for good measure. Beliefs. Action. Results. Feedback. Rinse. Repeat.

Point two you are responsible for yourself, past, present, and future. There are no outside forces it's appropriate to give credit to for your current situation. You're in charge of you and you answer for what happens to you the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Point three we create our own reality through our thoughts, beliefs and actions. The ideal is to live life by fulfilling your dreams, constantly evolving and becoming what you want to become.

Point four we're never the best version of ourselves we can imagine. We are the lowest standard we are willing to accept. You won't bend over even slightly backwards for your so-called dreams, but you fight like hell not to slip beneath the surface of what you're willing to put up with. Raise your standards and your game will follow.

Point five know and be wary of your own patterns. As humans, we tend to be in constant conflict. It's between who we are and who we'd rather be. And there's blood on the floor. The conflict forms a pattern that emerges as a wave that repeats. Highs and lows and highs and lows. And so on and so forth. Be aware of these.

Point six evolution is variation. The patterns of your existence are what you know. They're visible out in the light. It's time to step into the darkness. If you want to grow in the right direction. The universe is changing around you all the time, and if you don't want to be left behind, it's time to switch on some tunes and get dancing. Ask not who you are. Who are you becoming?

Point seven we've pre-programmed our own realities by forming our own beliefs for everything we encounter in life. There is a scale and based on our own reactions, we we pop stones. You might remember positive or negative reactions on either side of the scales. Each time we remember something negative, it gets more negative reinforced. And this is how we form beliefs. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, why is he rereading everything we've already covered? Like I wasn't paying attention? Well, you clearly weren't paying attention to everything, if that's what you're thinking. Repetition is key. I read this stuff every day and have done for hundreds of days in a row by now, and so should you. If you want to successfully reprogramme, you don't want to forget this stuff. That's why they're here, and that's why they're in my notebook. So I never forget them. So I'm perpetually in a virtuous circle right now.

Back to it. Point eight pay attention to virtuous and vicious circles. To a certain extent, we are. What we think about negative thinking is the cause and effect of living in a certain manner, and the same can be true for positive thinking. Either way, presents a choice that offsets a self-fulfilling prophecy, virtuous or vicious. And in either case, it's a race to the top or to the bottom.

Point nine. Mind over matter. Most people have such a strong sense of themselves, that the character they present to the world who they are or think they are to other people calls the shots, and it needs to be the other way around. If you're here reading this, then the character you think you are is no longer cutting the mustard for you. All right. Take them down a peg or three and fill in the blanks with someone more capable of accomplishing what you want to accomplish. And never forget that this guy works for you. Reread this every morning before you get going. Make it part of your daily routine. Coffee, toast and mantras. Yum.

So next up, we got your daily ritual. All right, at the top. You recognise the algorithm for success? I showed you before, remember? You work on your beliefs, you live them, you reap results, and then you analyse and regroup. Rinse and repeat. All right, in line with this, here's the daily ritual. We figure it out for you from morning till evening.

Before going to work, you read your alchemy cover to cover. I mentioned it already. Remind yourself of everything you want to accomplish, who you wish to become, and the legacy you intend to leave. You are the captain of the good ship future, headed into the unknown with a view to conquer something.

Second point as you think about your goals, say them out loud and picture what life would be like if you had already achieved them. Live in that reality for a few moments and let the positivity flow from it.

Third thing, read your affirmations aloud. The philosophies, the new you will strive to live by and do the same. Live a few minutes in the headspace of someone for whom these are already a reality. Let the feelings shape you.

Then you're going to be listening to the recording of your statements. Do it in privacy, somewhere comfortable, like a sofa. Listen to them. Imagine them to be true. Soak up the emotions this produces and let them nourish you spiritually.

Then you plan your day. Write it down. Not from a To-Do point of view. How glum, but from the perspective that to get each of these things done, to move whatever projects you have going currently by however many inches would make today a great day.

Then you just work hard all day. Do it. Do what you planned to do. Recognise your demons when they come knocking and send them packing the back the way they came.

All right then. Point seven in the evening. Take a few moments to reflect. Set aside a few minutes to look back on the day and to analyse what you achieve. What needs work? What you're going to do to improve for tomorrow when there's more to do. There's always more to do. Because 10.8, 7.8 you wake up and do it all again. I know I've just mentioned some things you don't really know about yet, but that's not to worry. We'll be covering them all very shortly. The point of this whole spiel has been establish a daily ritual and stick to it. All right. People who abandon the mental programming side of things are not long for the world of success. I've spoken to them. I've seen them in action, believe me.

All right. Treat it as though every day you wake up with no memory of who you are or where you are. And in this dossier, it explains your life to you and gives you a map out of the desert to the promised land, where you're going to make it to one daily ritual followed through upon at a time.

So this is the performance tracker, right? You're going to fill it in every day like it says at the top. It's unbelievably important to have a visual representation of the progress you're making. It'll only take a few minutes, and soon you'll find yourself in a headspace whereby you look forward to it. It takes roughly four weeks to establish a new habit, or to stop an old bad one in its tracks. Stick with this for that long. Set reminders on your phone and do it even when you don't feel like it. By the by the end of it, not only will you have started doing something new with time tested and proven value, but you'll be able to look back on the weeks you started and see the improvement as proof that what you're doing is working, and this will spur you to continue a virtuous circle in action.

It's a good demo of one, actually, and I've included this sheet as a sample, but you can chop and change it any way you like to suit you what you want, you know, incorporate some of your more personalised markers of success.

That's it. I would say hold on to the date sleep tracker, the mindset rating, whether or not you read your alchemy and how you think you performed, which I tend to rate by percent, but you do whatever works for you. As it's my own, I put reading, meditation, and exercise my own iteration of spiritual broccoli that I sometimes might not feel like, but are always good for me. But as I said, you put whatever works for you. You know, if you feel like you, I don't know, playing with your dog or bathing your baby gets you into the right place to maximise potential, then by all means, put that down. Whatever works for you to get the most out of this consistency is key. If you skip your alchemy for five days, alarm bells if you tend towards five days of exercise and fall off for a few days, then boom, you found your pattern zone and you know that keeping it up for days six and seven are the first steps out of your comfort zone that you can take. And remember, whatever you put down, the goal is four weeks get four weeks worth of yes in the alchemy column or 28/8 in the time spent sleeping section. And the chances are you've picked up these habits for keeps. All right, new habits and will be formed overnight. And neither are bad ones dropped like shaping amount time and pressure are the secret ingredients. Okay, guys. All right. Next up to vision page you have in front of you an example I created. Cut-outs, of some of the more common, don't know, less potent tint, dreams. I've heard people express over the years. You might share some of them. You might not. Either way, this is just an example. Your job is to start from scratch and make your own.
All right. The first thing to do is to put down some keywords that you associate with the you you want to become. I can only speak for what I suppose. So I've written entrepreneur, a good partner, good parent will read, fit, happy, grounded and self-made.
Next step is to add images relating to these keywords, ones that inspire you personally. I've put down one of, Tim Ferriss, a one time angel investor turned author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru. Paul Newman, is my model for a good partner. He stayed with his wife, Joanne Woodward, from before his success as an actor all through his superstardom right up to his death. I include him not only because so many Hollywood marriages fail flatly, but because they were quite open about what they felt made their marriage work so well, which was humour and mutual respect. I was like that.
My model for a good parent is a fictional one, Tony Stark. Still, anyone who's seen Avengers Endgame will know what I'm talking about, and I can't talk about it too long, or I'm honestly going to cry, for, well, read. I've put down a picture of the late, great Christopher Hitchens, a journalist as prolific for his a ceramic wit and fearless prose as he was for his voracious reading habits. Then, as my fitness guru, I've put Cameron Haines, an American Bull Hunter. He runs approximately one marathon minimum per day and whose, unstoppable motto is no one cares. Work harder. I love that.
My cue for general happiness comes from another dearly departed, the late, great comedian Norm MacDonald, a Stand-Up who spent the last decade of his life actually dying of cancer, but telling nearly nobody for fear of it affecting how how people would perceive him and receive his jokes. And he was reportedly happy up to the end for being allowed to go out like this. And he was he was quite well read too, actually.
For a bonus, for my grounded person, I've got Sam Harris, a famous neuroscientist and meditator who's so grounded he can actually be too much to listen to at times. But heck, he is grounded. Finally, you have Conor McGregor, an Irish martial artist who rose from nothing to become world champion twice over. This is just me for the minute. You can change any of these you like, put in a house. You want to buy a car anytime and anytime you feel the need to change what you're dreaming of. You change it.
Look at this, though, on a daily basis. All right? Immerse yourself in the reality of who you want to become. Here, we put things that we've already done that we're proud of. So the part of your life you'd like to focus on as the before story to the after you've outlined on the previous page, it's the myth you're going to build on, which is why we call it my legend up to now. Now, like the previous page, I want you to list keywords and find some pictures that represent them. Maybe you're proud of getting married or winning a competition, or climbing a mountain, or getting a good job or whatever.
Here we have some relatively vague photos, but considering it will be based on your life, you should definitely put pictures of you. Your actual life, moments you lived, and objectives you crushed. For my part, I put the pictures here. But, I dropped out of college, and after a few years in the wilderness, I went back to finish. Only to do so. Well, I received letters from the president of the university. At the end of every remaining semester, I got perfect grades, which I still have all the letters. And I'm extremely proud I was able to achieve that.
Also, I ran marathons, saved up and bought a house. Married the woman I loved. Had a beautiful kid. I directed a play. I wrote, that. But that's enough about me. I seriously fill this page up with you and your glorious past. All right? Looking forward and projecting yourself into the future. But a solid bedrock of that which you've achieved thus far is pure fuel, because it zeroes in on things you've already achieved and shows you that you can do great things. And you will again.
Next page is where we get really personal, which is why we're switching to an avatar, quite frankly. Remember Rob from earlier on in our previous video? Rob, well, remember I commented on his intelligence negatively? Well, that comment stuck in Rob's craw a little, and he got out of his own way and achieved something for himself. We'll take you through Rob's journey now. Or rather, he will, because this section is called My Story. So I got my MBA, which I was super proud of because I'd never done well in school, and I really strode through to the top of the class.
The MBA was in hotel management and doing so well. I practically walked into my first job, which was as swanky as all hell hotel in downtown Paris, where none other than Yannick a piano was chef de cuisine. Six Michelin stars that man has. Then I did swanky Spain hotels, swanky L.A. hotels, a little bit of swanky Dubai, and bit by bit I realised I wanted to make up whatever my next step would be.
So soon after settling and getting married, I quit everything and I started a consulting company. I knew enough about the business. I had spoken to so many people who'd opened hotels as a retirement plan, but found themselves in dire straits when they discovered that it wasn't as easy as all that, and they couldn't afford to take a few years off to go to a hotel management school. So I could be their life raft.
So I ditched working for people, became my own boss, and I started printing money. Basically. Now I don't need a retirement hotel. I'd be too busy breeding horses on my private island. Okay. His voice might have changed a little at the end, and I might have gotten a little off course there towards the end. But you get the drift. And as you can see, I haven't included those last bits because not only are they not my actual dreams, but I'm not interested in not working. And neither should you be.
By the way, see how I've broken it up into stages and left one blank or three blanks at the end? Well, those are Rob's next steps. All right. I'm not sure what he'll do, but it's sure to be good. And what you'll be doing. Break it into stages and get a picture to remind yourself how you got where you are now. Like everything else in this book, you need to be looking at it every day. Remind yourself every day of the stages of your life you'd most want highlighted if you were hiring, I don't know, a writer to pen a super flattering biography.
Okay, tell your story in terms of peaks. They're all that matter in the long run. So next up is the manifesto. This is where we write about who we're going to become. The trick is to write about it as though it's already happened. Like you're reading that biography we just talked about and you're the main character. Read this again and again daily, remember, and you will hack your brain. It's a powerful tool. It inverts the psychological forces of synchronisation and confirmation bias to have you believing in yourself on levels you've never dreamt of.
Here's Rob's Rob is first and foremost a family man, but behind that, he's a hard worker, an entrepreneur, an enthusiastic traveller, an accomplished cook, an author, and a film producer. He spent many moons helping transform struggling hospitality businesses into formidable, self-sustaining enterprises. It was tough on his family at first. While his time was his own, he was his own boss and his only employee. The choice between taking a government paternity leave and staying working to provide for his wife and twin boys wasn't really any choice at all.
Eventually, when the boys were four and their younger sister had just been born, he found himself comfortable enough to leave a little longer between jobs and upping his rates slightly, only taking projects that interested in. Basically, he was able to spend more time at home, at last enjoying his kids when they were young and helping out his wife in a way that saw their relationship flourish. He set his mind cooking the meals and made a promise to himself.
His meals would be of a Michelin standard, albeit Michelin stars. For one part home cooking, he would spend 2 or 3 hours, 2 or 3 nights a week preparing stews, soups, marinades and braises ahead of time so that when it came to serving time, usually the day after the food was cooked, he could focus on preparing seasonal vegetables and salads to go with them, which he had. He'd taken great pains to get into, and given his garden space was limited, he did everything hydroponically.
It had started as a promise he made to himself to make up for the first few years of his business, when he'd been away so much. But then he began to notice a method emerging and saw something marketable. He got to authoring a book somewhere between a lifestyle guide and a cookbook, and took to taking work every two weeks on Mondays and Tuesdays, but exclusively with bed and breakfasts that had gardens or small hotels in rural locations with restaurants, or the ambition to open what
the plan was to teach his food preparation methodology to hospitality businesses, giving them not only a means to get ahead of food prep, but to provide them with a whole new side of their business to sell. As a story to the ever-growing foodie sector, he started off flogging at lower rates and leaning heavily on his good reputation, the only deal being that he could count on the testimonials of these early birds to help sell the methodology at a higher price, which he was ready to do within a year of starting.
Demand exploded, but he made a deal with himself that he'd keep to his own deal. Two days working and five at home doing meal prep. He got several offers for book deals and played several publishing houses against one another until he got one eight digits long and then said deal. The only hitch was to his eyes. The book did not do the whole of what he had to teach justice.
With the eight figures in the family account and a newfound fear of missing the young life of his fourth child, which was on the way at the time, due to his later success, he set to work on an online course, his own masterclass as to how to build this latest kind of ship he dreamt up. And as he put the finishing touches on that in the run-up to the birth of his second daughter, it dawned on him he might do the same with all of his first workshops and hospitality consulting, but it was too much work even for him at that time.
Babies are not easy work, let alone with three other young kids on the boat. So he brought in a producer, gave him all of his old notes, and told them to call him when he had a structure and some scripts ready to go. Six months later, the producer got in touch. Everything was ready to go. He just had to sign on the dotted line. They arranged interviews with some of his biggest success stories, had visuals and themes ready to go, and a script studio and a teleprompter ready for him to work.
He was amazed he finished his work on the course in a day and a half and hit it home. Home had changed since the book deal. He'd moved to the coast and had a huge garden with a view of the Atlantic Ocean and a whole extra house for him to work on his own and or watch the sorts of films his wife had no interest in.
His hobby through life had always been cinema. It was his downtime: cinema, literature, history, and hospitality. One evening, while rewatching *The Battle of Algiers*, an idea hit him. He'd been recently rereading *Down and Out in Paris and London* by George Orwell during the day, the greatest non-educational book about the hospitality industry there is, and it struck him. There hadn't been a truly great large-scale film about the Spanish Civil War. Nothing to do. He hit the play button on research, but at the time he met up with the producer again, hit the bones of the story he wanted to tell and some ideas as to who could tell it best.
They shook hands and now he's in the film business, still piling up royalties from his book and his online courses, and now creatively engaged with his other passions and spending time with his family as much as he wants, and travelling the world with them as often as possible. He's not exactly waiting for his next idea to come along, but he knows that when it does, he's got the strength and character and focus to make it happen. And he will. And there will be more ideas because they're always there.
He has enough money, but lucky for him and his drive, it has never, ever really been about that. Well, for a fake guy, I made up Robert some nice ideas. I might have to steal some of them. Anyway, you get the idea. Make it as big and ambitious as possible.
The fact of it is, and listen for my absolute confidence in you, you are going to achieve your first set of goals. You just will. Don't get cocky or anything, but you've made it this far and you've committed. It would be a minor miracle if you didn't.
The fact that follows that one is that once they're done, you're going to need new ones. Even if you eventually change your mind from whatever you write in the manifesto, edit it later if you want. It helps enormously to have a long view of your own success story. It will make your chest swell every morning when you read it and say to yourself, damn, I got a lot of work to do.
Next up, we're going to lay down the bricks that'll build the new you. Hell yeah. This one should be easy. You wrote them all down during the week, remember? You're just. You're going to have to get out your worksheets. Transcribe them here so you can look over them whenever you feel the need to go through a checklist of what you should be like.
Here's Rob's. All right. So character traits. He's an early riser. He's up at 7 a.m. every day and in bed by 11 p.m. One seven is the absolute latest he'll get up. If he wakes up earlier, he'll get up then. So long as he's had seven hours of sleep, right?
Relentless. He pursues his goals until he achieves them or gets close to death trying. Confident. He's comfortable enough in his ability to improvise. It's safe enough to say that not many things could shake him.
Creative. If there's ever a wall in his way, it's safe to assume he'll get into tunnel digging or bypass design before the day is done. Reliable. If he says he's going to do something, you made a bet it will get done.
Manager. He'll take care of a situation that needs it, but otherwise he'll believe in his team and give them enough credit for the success. Responsible. No matter the situation of what happens, he'll find a way to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong so he can grow from fixing it.
Lawyer. Unless you do something to burn the bridge, he'll stick by you through thick and thin. Friendly. Even those who don't deserve it will get a smile and a friendly word from him.
He's been reading these traits to himself every morning over and over again, and in doing so, he's acquired them. But that's no reason to stop reading them. If he wants to keep up with this programming that he started. And then if he wants to acquire something else, let's say to get into meditation or something, he simply adds it here.
Physical appearance and style. Then he's got short hair with a side parting. Don Draper is clean shaven every day. He's stylish but never overly formal. Steve McQueen's reference carries a hip flask with his family crest on it. He weighs about 75-76kg, runs five kilometres twice a week, and goes to the gym on the days in between.
All right. And if you're scoffing at Rob's choices here, you might be missing the point which is to be aspirational. Think big, because this is the version of you that's going to achieve your goals.
Next up comes the accomplishments. First, you should list ones you've already accomplished. Right? This way, you've developed a mental association between what you've achieved and what you aspire to achieve. Call it a sprinkling of gravity for your dreams.
Right. Here's Rob's. All right, start my own company, get married and have loads of children. Refurbish an old school into a living space. Own an Aston Martin Db11. Release my own label of red wines and remotes.
Right. Then comes mentors. As a rule, you should limit yourself to three. These are people who inspire you directly, people you know and look up to. And if you put too many, it dilutes the potency and has the potential to be confusing. Rob's are his parents and his friend Tom.
Then branding. What are the words you'd like to be directly associated with you? The expressions Rob picked: charismatic revolutionary in the hospitality industry from a classical hotel management background, but with a curious disposition towards anything considered forward-moving. He's approachable as a person, ruthless as a businessman, and always classy.
Next up, you jot down your objectives. Start with the most pragmatic ones. Take savings. Number one should be what you currently have. And then the next one should be your future goals, benchmarks, or tiers. If you like, you might have 20,000 saved. Put down 50,000 as your next goal and follow that up with 100. Then put down your business objectives not in terms of turnover. Do it if you want, but I'd advise against it.
In terms of net result, do it the same as with your savings. Start with the present and fill in the future in terms of what you see to be the next steps for you.
Next up is your health and well-being, which you neglect at your peril. By the way, here you have Rob's, but you do your own. Tailor them to you. But at the very least, make sure you do a few hours walking per week, let's say. All right. Health is wealth.
Next, we have some habits. Rob wants to anchor in his life. For example, someone with kids might want to establish in their routine at least one hour a day playing with them. Rob wants to lessen the time he spends staring at screens and use the time gained to read more from actual paper books.
I once met a lady who had horses in the field adjoining her guest house, but she never rode them and they were hers. She made a commitment to herself one day that she'd go riding at least once a week. And the last time I checked in with her, she was going three times a week. Despite it having little to do with the running of her business, the demonstration she'd given herself that it was within her power to commit to something and
get it done has given her a really powerful morale boost.
Last up on this page is your standards, which you need to define for yourself, just like Rob has. Remember, it's these standards that define where you're headed far more than whatever lofty dreams you have floating around up there.
Take the time to do this right. It is necessary if you want to make a drastic change in your life and livelihood. Go in with the right attitude, and the effect it will have on you will make the few hours you spend doing it seem like nothing at all.
Think of it as writing the movie of your life. You're writing the script, hiring the actors, building the set, and in general getting as many details as possible right before you yell action! When you print this out and read it and look at it and take it in emotionally as well as visually—your own, of course, not mine—you will hack your mind and set yourself properly on the road to success.
So, final page: affirmations. You read these out loud every day, record yourself doing it, and listen to them again. Here are Rob's examples, and I'm sure you haven't gotten this far without thinking of a few yourself. The idea is to take what is an obstacle for you, something that grinds your gears, and turn it into something you aspire toward.
Right? Rob used to hate getting up early, but after a while of reading and rereading this, he can't stand staying in bed past 7 a.m., even on holidays. His wife isn't thrilled about that part, but it can't be helped. He's been reprogrammed. Same goes for procrastination. Rob used to be awful for it. Now he can't stand to be in the same room as something that needs doing. He'll just do it rather than leave it.
When you listen back to these affirmations, you need to associate an image and an emotion with each one just to make sure you're popping stones on the correct side of the scales. Now, I have one tool left to bequeath to you—the planner.
Now, guys, I have one tool left to bequeath to you: the planner. Now take this printed or digital—it’s entirely up to you. I'm a bit of an analogue man in a digital world myself, so I personally prefer to print them and write by hand, but I know plenty of people who get along well with editing the file and simply saving it with a number and the date as the title, and then editing the original again the next day. It’s up to you, really.
It's self-explanatory to look at, but don't let the simplicity fool you. It's invaluable. So firstly, the date, and then the day’s priorities, which, at least at the start, you should limit to three. Bearing in mind when something is essential to get done, like booking a doctor’s appointment and not time-consuming, then by all means, have four.
Next, it’s what would be great. These are things that you can give yourself an extra solid pat on the back for if you get them done, like finishing your website, updating all your offers, balancing your chequebook (if that’s still a thing).
Next, your agenda, a plan of your day from beginning to end. There’s no sure way to get things done than to plan. And plan meticulously. Some things will repeat daily, like reading your alchemy or exercising, for instance. They should, but everything else is yours to plan. Apart from anything else, it stops you from wasting your time while wondering what you should do next.
Next up are your ongoing projects. One of mine, for example, is to make a course on Facebook advertising, and I'm having to develop it alongside my day-to-day because it’s a big project that will take time. And as such, I track my progress here on the planner, which naturally leads us on to the performance section, where we keep track of your data via the most useful hospitality KPIs there are.
Then you have a little chapter called "End of Day." What were the big wins? Did you just smash through a goal on your way to Triumph Town? Write it down. If you failed at something you’d intended to get done, you have to write that down too. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. The best way to learn is by failing, and thus recording your failures and giving yourself a more accurate tracker of your progress with this feedback. That’s how you develop. That’s how you learn.
Okay, guys, with mistakes, this is the end of this course and, all going well, the beginning of a new chapter for you. You’ve got the tools you need to transform yourself. You will encounter obstacles—they are inevitable—but with the right kind of thinking, they are as much your friends as a healthy breakfast in the morning.
How about this: if you apply yourself right now, I’m supremely confident you will succeed. Thank you for taking this course, and I’ll see you soon.