It is when you are going through the most difficult chapter of your life that your hero is revealed, and how beautiful it is when you finally realize— you have the strength to save yourself.

DODINSKY

Some call it an awakening. Others refer to it as coming out of illusion and into reality. And others find strength in seeing that source energy has rooted itself deep within and given way to our emergence as a more complete being.

Regardless of explanation and nomenclature, at some point or another, we all find ourselves digging deep within to solve our greatest cause of grief, turmoil and dissatisfaction in life. Usually this happens when we are backed into the proverbial corner and no other solution remains. People describe it as rock bottom. I assume that metaphor is chosen to convey that there is clearly no lower status that can be achieved.

What if the rock bottom metaphor means in actuality that you have found your foundation from which to return? You have found that core strength upon which to stand tall and proud and emerge as an ever more luminous being than what you are currently exhibiting?

Hollywood conditions us (as has all literature prior) to believe in the white knight who rides in on the white steed with heroic proportion to save the day. Yet, in reality, that is seldom the case. In reality, it is most often times we who are the hero. We find our internal resolution that continuing in status quo will not suffice and we dig our proverbial heels in and make a stand. It lacks most of the fantastical heroic fanfare that fiction uses to celebrate such a moment. Most often, it is a quiet moment of desperation in which every alternate opportunity has been discarded in favor of the option that is at hand. 

Then with a resolute fortitude, we quietly go about making the changes necessary. There is no rush of climactic music to celebrate the event. There is no montage music showing us making each of the steps needed to become our own hero. More often than not, it is a private moment, known by very few… if any, other than ourselves.

Yet, despite the lack of dramatic accoutrement, there is a galvanizing charge that comes with this quiet experience. There is the internal knowledge that we, ourselves, had the power all along. Dorothy clicked her red ruby slippers and said, “there’s no place like home,” and soon, she had solved her odyssey in Oz and was back in her bed in Kansas. It is a crude metaphor for what I am expressing, but it will suffice. Rocky Balboa is so tired of being a bum, that when life delivers him the inconceivable opportunity for redemption, he digs within and finds that courage to wake up into the champion he wished he was.

And so do we. In our moments of quiet desperation, there is only one hero coming to save the day, and that hero is us.

If you believe you need saving, take a long look at yourself in the mirror and think it through. That hero is looking back at you in that moment begging you to take the necessary steps for survival. When you see it for what it is, it truly is a beautiful experience.

Happy Tuesday!

A truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged.

Oh what a tangled web we weave….

If there is one thing that becomes ever more apparent, the older we get, it is the truth. 

Perhaps that stems from life experience. Or perhaps it is due to intuition and the overall vibe we receive. It might come from having weathered the consequences of another’s lies as to leave us far more aware of the potential downfall of accepting what is said to us without consideration.

Whatever the cause, as we age, we sense with more accuracy, the likelihood of something being true versus some alternate flavor of reality that suits the originator’s greater purpose.

So when we lose, do not lose the lesson. If we are victim of someone’s desire to alter the truth to serve their own selfish needs, then it is incumbent upon us to wake up and smell the roses. To recognize that we project a vulnerability in the area that someone has opted to exploit, and to reinforce those aspects of our being so that the next one is incapable of doing the same.

We are living in troubled times. The truth is being massively distorted on a scale heretofore unknown. Humanity is susceptible to large media and those who are really adept at utilizing large media to service their own selfish agendas are leveraging every aspect of the persuasive nature of media to propagate those lies into the minds of more simple people who are less likely to take the time to research the matters at hand and discern the truth from fiction.

The great thing about telling the truth all the time, is you are never caught. You can discuss and answer any last question and so long as you are remaining within the boundary of what is true, there is never a moment of weakness that is revealed. 

Conversely, a lie may make its way around the world five times over while the truth is still tying their laces, but a lie has trapdoors that can be exposed through the intelligent diligence of asking all of the right questions, surfacing the facts and confronting that lie with inconsistencies that eventually cause the house of cards that are supporting the lie to crumble. The entire world of crime dramas are built on this simple procedure. People are heavily addicted to this form of entertainment because subconsciously they want to see the liar get their just deserts. 

The truth, and nothing but the truth could not be more important now than it has ever been. In the next couple years, the truth will play one of the single most important roles in the evolution of humanity. Everyone would be wise to recognize that truth is a luxury that is afforded to us in a free society. Our obligation to protect the right to access the truth is one of the most important of all of our obligations as citizens of planet Earth. 

Happy Monday!

The way you love is magic in its purest form.

LORELAI

What is love? How does it happen? Why does it happen? What is the internal mechanism that changes when we love something? Is it purely emotional? Chemical? Neural? What physical proof do we have that love even exists?

Do you want to witness a magic trick?  Fall in love with something or someone.

One of your favorite artists releases a new track, and from the moment you hear it, you know you absolutely love it. Why?

Your baby is born, and all through the womb, you are falling in love with it, but something incredibly potent happens as the baby takes its first breath and cries. What exactly has happened in that transformative moment in time?

You are walking through an art gallery, and turn the corner, and suddenly, there it is. The one piece of art that absolutely takes your breath away. One second earlier, you did not know it exists, and in the next second, you know you cannot live without it.

Is that not magic?

We romanticize love taking place in the heart, but in actuality, it is all in the brain…

A few notes from Harvard on the topic of what is love: Love can be distilled into three categories: lust, attraction, and attachment. Though there are overlaps and subtleties to each, each type is characterized by its own set of hormones. Testosterone and estrogen drive lust; dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin create attraction; and oxytocin and vasopressin mediate attachment. Lust is driven by the desire for sexual gratification. The evolutionary basis for this stems from our need to reproduce, a need shared among all living things. Through reproduction, organisms pass on their genes, and thus contribute to the perpetuation of their species. Meanwhile, attraction seems to be a distinct, though closely related, phenomenon. While we can certainly lust for someone we are attracted to, and vice versa, one can happen without the other. Attraction involves the brain pathways that control “reward” behavior, which partly explains why the first few weeks or months of a relationship can be so exhilarating and even all-consuming.

Dopamine, produced by the hypothalamus, is a particularly well-publicized player in the brain’s reward pathway – it’s released when we do things that feel good to us. In this case, these things include spending time with loved ones and having sex. High levels of dopamine and a related hormone, norepinephrine, are released during attraction. These chemicals make us giddy, energetic, and euphoric, even leading to decreased appetite and insomnia – which means you actually can be so “in love” that you can’t eat and can’t sleep.

Last but not least, attachment is the predominant factor in long-term relationships. While lust and attraction are pretty much exclusive to romantic entanglements, attachment mediates friendships, parent-infant bonding, social cordiality, and many other intimacies as well. The two primary hormones here appear to be oxytocin and vasopressin.

Katherine Wu, the student at Harvard whose material I have shared, writes more extensively on the topic. You can read it here. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/love-actually-science-behind-lust-attraction-companionship/#:~:text=High%20levels%20of%20dopamine%20and,eat%20and%20can’t%20sleep.

Wishing you a loving Saturday!

To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people, and not love things and use people.

BUDDHA

How many possessions in your life do you really love? Forgetting about the items that are life essential, and solely focusing on the ones that are in your life because you appreciate them for some reason or another, how many would you estimate you have?

In contrast, how many people do you have in your life that you genuinely love?

Whatever ratio you are able to produce from the two questions above will give you a metric as to the things in life that you ultimately value.

Morality is, for the most, part taught at home. An absence of such creates a void in a human being who works to traverse the world to their benefit while simultaneously missing some of the core ingredients that make for a fully realized life.

Without that morality, the person is left to find their moral compass through the observation of others while simultaneously transposing their life experience atop a series of variables that have manifest out of their own personal encounters with others.

When a person is enlightened, they recognize the higher value in another human being, and in doing so, they discover an even higher value within themselves. How could this not be so?

It is only through the personal determination to rise above societal norm that a person is able to look past their possessions in order that they might see the greater wealth in life that arises from meaningful relationships stemming out of respect for others.

Possessions are a wonderful accoutrement in life, but so many of us make the mistake of valuing them above and beyond everything else, and only through self realization comes the opportunity to transcend the attachment to those possessions in order that we might discover and even deeper value system within our own being. 

Happy Tuesday!

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Have you ever met a real genius? They are incredibly few and far between. 

Many of them do not even realize they are a genius. They clearly know they are very smart, but usually it ends there.

In contrast, there are those who are self-proclaimed geniuses and they are (almost without exception) far from the mark, and more likely malignant narcissists. 

Deepak Chopra says, “This is the nature of genius, to be able to grasp the knowable even when no one else recognizes that it is present.”

The deeper I studied da Vinci, the more clear it was to me from his own notes that he clearly did not think he was a genius. He had a a healthy ego and thought very highly of himself, but his doubt that he could know and understand everything leaves me believing that even he did not see these qualities in himself. And yet, he is one of the only humans in history to test as genius in all 7 measurable metrics.

As life evolves, those of us who are working to invent the future, stand upon the shoulders of the giants who came before us, so that we may have a better glimpse of what could potentially lay ahead. 

In the path to climb upon their shoulders and assimilate information and experiences that they have amassed before us, we are treated to a connected dots experience of watching how they did it. It appears very linear and obvious (after the fact), yet with a genius like Edison, we get a greater glimpse of what it took…. In response to a question about his missteps, Edison once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

Steve Jobs explained  his attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer this way, “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.'” 

When Bell telephone was struggling to get started, its owners offered all their rights to Western Union for $100,000. The offer was disdainfully rejected with the pronouncement, “What use could this company make of an electrical toy.”

Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express, received a “C” on his college paper detailing his idea for a reliable overnight delivery service. His professor at Yale told him, “Well, Fred, the concept is interesting and well formed, but in order to earn better than a “C” grade, your ideas also have to be feasible.

Genius is such a rare find on this planet, but it is omnipresent and most of them do not even see it in themselves. 

Happy Sunday!

You are always one decision away from a totally different life.

We make hundreds of decisions every day. Most of them are made on a subconscious level. Others require more focus. Some are critical. And then there is the one single decision that can change everything.

What gives way to making a decision of that magnitude? Sometimes it’s circumstance. Sometimes it’s dire need. Sometimes it is driven by desire and other times by passion.

Regardless of the stimuli, when a decision of magnitude awaits our focus, we are intensely determined that some aspect of our current existence must change.

When we find ourselves at that crossroad, choices that we are facing could not have greater magnitude, nor greater consequence. If we are to accelerate into a future of our own making, we are compelled to face the tough choices. They may not be pleasant, nor easy to reconcile, but when that moment arrives, we have no alternative but to see the circumstances for what they are, intelligently evaluate all of our options, and then be decisive.

Making those tough choices and life are really one of the greater moments that define us. In some cases, they create limitations and in other cases, they open doors to a future that we could not possibly imagine.

In your quest to reconcile yourself to having to make such a decision, you might find strength by giving yourself credit for getting through some of those days in which you were certain you could not go on.

But, what if you have been assigned this mountain in order to prove to others that it can be moved? If you are feeling completely lost and helpless for a solution, may I suggest that the first step to turning everything around is believing in yourself? Because the reality is that you will never know how strong you really are until strong is the only choice you really have.

The truth is your life is not going to change with the same mindset that caused the problems. Let that sink in for a minute.

Rock bottom is the solid foundation from which I rebuilt my life, and discovering your personal worth in such a low space can be one of the most empowering options in life.

You really are only one decision away from completely changing your life. You just have to make it. 

Happy Thursday!

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Think different. 

That was Apple’s mantra. (Even if they did not use proper English as it should be Think differently.)

The world is changing so incredibly quickly at this moment, we are continuously on the watch for new options, opportunities, and challenges. During this time, we are battling a wave of new obstacles and counter forces, each appearing capable of eliminating our dreams, hopes and desires. 

The more we work to evolve, the faster the circumstances around us evolve, making a continuously unstable playing field on which we must make our plans, evolve our approach and perpetually explore every option at our fingertips. 

Under circumstances of this nature, it would almost appear impossible for us to find a proper course on which we may navigate our path to a new safe harbor. Even as we have chosen that course, circumstances may evolve and the path we have set out upon will require new perspectives, approaches and means to accomplish whatever we put forth at the outset.

Yet, despite all of that cacophony in which we operate, we manage to prevail, time and time again. How is this possible? 

Presumably it is due to a continuous set of sensory apparati in our beings that tune into the harmonic distortions that impede us and give us internal warnings that things are changing and that we are going to have to take a new approach if we are to succeed in our respective mission.

The Illusion Factory has earned our place in the future by helping to invent it. Our approach has always been to look at how things are produced currently and project how they will evolve and then invent the pathways, approaches, methodologies and experiences required to help our clients in their pursuit of the future opportunities that await them.

It is no wonder that Apple adopted their mantra, as the continuous wave of revolutionary experiences that they have created has evolved humanity in countless ways. Try and imagine what it was like before you had any computer whatsoever in your access, let alone one in your home! How many phone numbers did you have memorized before you had your first smart device? We, as a specie, have evolved into a cyborg (part human and part machine) as a result of the invention of the iPhone and following that, the Android devices. The smart device is clearly an external hard drive to accommodate the human brain and which augments that brain in countless ways. 

Life will continue to put new problems in our path, and therefore make it incumbent upon us to work daily to find our path between where we are currently and where we are headed. As best as I have been able to calculate, that path is a nonstop maze of solving new problems, and evolving into new beings along the way. 

It may not be easy, but if we embrace it as a fact of life, it is not only fun and challenging, but perhaps it is one of the greatest adventures of all time.

Happy Tuesday!

I do not care how many billions I have down the road, I am still going to treat each person just as I wish to be treated now.

BRIAN WEINER

We have all had the experience of being brushed off or discarded… Treated like we do not matter. Made to feel non important. This is the walk of life. 

In many cases, we are probably more sensitive to the circumstances than perhaps we need be. In other cases, the circumstances are what they are and we truly are being made to feel like we do not matter.

I think one of the true marks of a great entrepreneur is the ability to accelerate into stardom or success, and still remain every bit as humble as they were at day one. To me, that is a true status symbol. The ability to stay grounded, even when life elevates you to a level you have never been on before. I recently watched both We Crashed and Super Pumped and watched two entrepreneurs rise so high that they were wholly unfair to everyone who helped to get them there. What a great lesson to watch!

I was fortunate to have had a chance to visit for an hour with Katherine Hepburn when we had her on one of her last films, This Can’t Be Love, opposite Anthony Quinn. This film was loosely based on her life, and while I have never sought out to meet any of the actors on the projects I have worked on, the chance to speak with her was too good to pass up.  It was 1994, and I was still young in my career, in my young 30’s and walked up to her after she finished a shot, and we spoke for the better part of an hour about life, love, Hollywood, Howard, Spencer and everything about making a relationship work in the entertainment industry. If anyone had cause to be egotistical, with 12 Academy Awards to her name, it was her, but to the contrary, she was genuine, sincere and so warm. These qualities were never lost on me. 

As we work our way through the myriad relationships in business, we meet them all. Some amazing, others, not so much. We encounter ego on all levels, some over the top, others quite in check. To me, the lesson is simple…. The more powerful and successful you become, the more humble and nurturing to others you should be. You should never lose sight of what it feels like to be the “little guy,” struggling and doing whatever it takes to make life work. You should opt for compassion and empathy over arrogance and attitude. 

When given an option, go towards kindness and understanding over short temper, and an unwillingness to understand. Find your deeper inner being that guides your emotions and drives your corporal being through this 3 dimensional playground called Earth and let that inner being guide you to ever greater degrees of brilliance through humility and tenderness.

Life can be hostile in so many ways. The only thing that mitigates this for all of us is our collective ability to recognize that we have no possible idea what the other person is weathering and as such, we are well served to approach everyone with compassion and extra degrees of latitude.

Happy Sunday!

Wise people are not always silent, but they know when to be.

When is it best to speak up?

The subtlety of knowing what to say, when to say it and most importantly, when not to say it, could not be more important in life. We might study the art of diplomacy with an expectation of improving our knowledge of such, but much of this is learned empirically, either through our own actions or in watching those of others.

Sadly, the art of learning empirically comes with a tough downside. There are moments where we speak our mind as if it were the most important thing in the world, and then we discover that it was the most ill-timed opportunity as we watch whatever strategic move we felt we were employing, disintegrate right before our very eyes. 

The tragedy of these moments is that with greater knowledge, we might have been better served to have learned the art of silence instead. The adage, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and thought a fool, than open your mouth and confirm it,” could not be any more applicable.

In the course of running The Illusion Factory, I have been exposed to countless businesses, methodologies, approaches, strategies and tactics, most of which I knew very little about going into the discussions with the clients. I would say my clients have taught me every bit as much as I have taught them, if for no better reason than I have mastered the art of asking the right questions and not answering the wrong questions with a weak answer, or lying and pretending to know something I do not know. People are very quick to help you if you admit ignorance at the outset.

In personal relationships, the same principle applies. Regardless of which kind of personal relationship you are in, there are times you speak your mind, and other times when holding your tongue and allowing a circumstance to be is (by far) the best option. 

As I was discussing earlier in the week, sometimes silence is your greatest ally. Sometimes it can be thunderous in the silence it communicates to the other party. In that silence, the other party must consider all of the possible reasons for your silence, which may set their mind ablaze with considerations. This can be both a great strategy when timed appropriately, as well as a wise move, when you are trying your best to field the circumstances you have found yourself within, and are still contemplating your best options for resolution.

The short-lived enjoyment of blurting out what is really on your mind, is most often times rewarded with less than what you had hoped for in your calculated thoughts. After enough of these luxuries in allowing your internal being to communicate bluntly with others have exploded in your face, only then does your rational mind take control of the tongue and put everything in check long enough to really consider your options, even if your very best option is doing and saying nothing.

Happy Friday!

Life is so ironic. It takes sadness to know what happiness is, noise to appreciate silence and absence to value presence.

We live in a continuum of opposites. Each side of every spectrum defines the opposite. As we approach either end of the continuum, we discover more and more about the opposite side.

The journey through life inevitably takes all of us to each of the respective sides of the continuum, whether we seek them or not. In our discovery process, we are afforded the opportunity to grow. In some cases, that growth overtakes us in ever increasing ways, regardless of our desire to learn.

When we are on the positive side of one of the continuum, we are reveling in that experience and seldom focused on the opposite end of the continuum. Whereas when we are on the negative side of a continuum, we are continuously thinking about the opposite side and wanting and hoping to be there.

These feelings of lacking are the rocket fuel that propel our internal momentum which catalyze our efforts to get over to the opposite side of the spectrum. Perhaps it is because of our exposure to the negative side of the continuum that we are able to find the resources within to galvanize our effort and behavior in order that we might experience what we are most lacking in that moment.

I find it interesting that sometimes silence is deafening. Sometimes the lack of stimulation can be overwhelmingly lonely and disconcerting, yet after being in a space that is overwhelmed with cacophony, our need for that silence could not be any more pronounced.

Spending too much time with even the best of people can breed its own degree of irritation and frustration, yet remove them from our presence and within a reasonable period of time, we will discover how much we really miss them being around.

We find a silver lining on a cloud because it represents the beginning of the transformation from one side of the spectrum to the other. Yet, without that cloud, sometimes the sunlight is so overpowering and hot as to make us wish for any shelter from the sun.

In recognizing the continuum of opposites and understanding our values placed on either side of that continuum, we are more capable of discovering our own internal harmony from which we may become centered and focused. 

Happy Wednesday!