The thermostat effect is the reason hard work alone rarely keeps you at a new level: your non-conscious brain has a setting for how much you earn, how hard you push and how good life is allowed to feel, and when you drift above or below it, it pulls you back. That’s how John Assaraf explained it to me. Willpower can lift you for a few days. If you want the change to stick, you have to change the setting itself.

This was John’s second time on the Addicted2Success podcast. After his first episode, I kept hearing from listeners that he was the standout, because he didn’t just tell people to stay motivated. He broke down what happens in the brain. So I opened with this: what’s the underlying block that stops people from having financial success and achieving greatness?

He said when you get into the science behind success, you also have to look at the science behind failure: what stops somebody from getting up one more time. I agreed. Failure is just as important as success. Everyone sees the glory, but they don’t hear the story.

What is the thermostat effect?

John used a hot day in Australia to explain it. You get in your car, turn on the air conditioner, and the car settles at 22 degrees Celsius. You feel great. Then you roll down the windows and hot air pours in. A sensor in the car picks up that it’s 20 or 30 degrees hotter than the setting, and the air conditioner cranks as hard as it can to cool it back down. Do the same thing in the middle of winter and the sensor picks up the cold and sends heat through the vents.

He called it a control and response mechanism. Whatever the setting is, the system protects it.

Now apply that to someone who wants more success. They read more, go to events and use willpower and persistence to raise their performance. John said that for three, four, five or seven days, it works. Then a mechanism in the brain notices you’re burning a lot of mental energy and starts pulling you back to your comfort zone. You get doubts about whether you can sustain it. You procrastinate. And then, in his words, “you’re going to tell yourself rational lies why you can take your foot off the gas and get back to your baseline.”

The part most people miss is that it works in reverse too. If you drop below what you’re used to, the same system kicks you out of bed early, sends you to the book, the event and the networking night, and keeps you working until you’re back at your old level. Not higher. Back.

That’s why John said “so many people try to focus on using sheer hard work to change the thermostat.” Hard work moves the temperature. It doesn’t move the setting.

Your brain runs on autopilot

He gave me a second picture that made it even clearer. You and your mates are on a 50 or 70 foot yacht off Bondi Beach with the autopilot set due north. Somebody grabs the wheel, turns it 30 or 40 degrees to the left and walks away. The autopilot turns the boat straight back to north. Somebody else swings it east and walks off happy. The boat goes right back to where it was heading.

John said human beings have an autopilot too, and it’s the non-conscious brain. Whenever there’s a deviation from what it’s used to thinking, feeling and doing, something he called the error detection mechanism kicks in and says correct course, correct course, correct course.

He listed where it shows up. People who double their income and then sabotage it. Someone who loses 20 pounds, looks great, and gains it all back. Someone who finally gets the promotion and feels so uncomfortable in the new environment that they get demotivated.

Take the anatomy as John’s way of teaching it, not a settled textbook diagram. The pattern itself, most of us have lived.

I had this upper limit

When he said it, I told him I was literally feeling it. I had this upper limit. I broke through it a few years earlier, and then all these things started coming into play, especially with my finances. I started thinking about tax more. I’d tell myself I didn’t want to make more because I’d have to pay more tax.

Looking at it now, I’d love to pay more tax. It means I’m making more money.

John jumped on it. That was the rational lie, and the freaking weirdest part, he said, is that you believe it. It’s the error detection mechanism wanting to keep you stuck and comfortable.

That’s the trap in one sentence. You don’t feel your thermostat pulling you back. You feel like you’re being smart.

Where fear slams the brakes on

So I asked him the question I really wanted answered. Where does fear come into play, and how can we punch that fear in the face?

He walked me through a scene. Say you and I decide to triple our income this year. High fives all around. In John’s telling, dopamine gets released and we feel like we’re going to conquer the world.

But underneath the hood there’s a fear. I’m not smart enough. What if I fail and embarrass myself? What if I succeed and can’t maintain it? Within moments, hours or days, you realize what it’s really going to take, and the fear circuit lights up.

John said that’s when the system floods with epinephrine, cortisol and norepinephrine, three chemicals in the stress response. Those stress hormones are real; Harvard Health’s explainer on the stress response walks through how the body releases adrenaline and cortisol when it senses a threat. John’s point was what it does to you. Real or imagined, emotional or financial, the pain works the same way. The brake on motivation slams shut and you start to procrastinate.

He said the untrained person feels fear, puts the brake on and retreats into what they’re comfortable doing. That’s the thermostat doing its job. His line that stuck with me was that ignorance is not your friend when it comes to neurochemistry.

It’s the stretch, isn’t it?

When I look back at my business, the times I really grew were when I put 20,000 down for coaching. I remember thinking, holy crap, this is a huge financial stretch for me. And something happens to you. You start absorbing more information. You get even more committed, because you know you’ve stepped outside the blueprint you had. It’s like burning the ships. You’re not going back.

John said most people can’t do that because they haven’t had a lot of practice making micro decisions around fear. Before they put the money down, the what-ifs start. What if it’s the wrong decision? What if I worked all that time for it, or borrowed it? What if I don’t apply what I learn?

Then he told me to pay close attention, because the brain’s default “goes to what could go wrong first before it goes to what could go right.”

His fix was to expect it. If we did a deal together, he said, he’d warn me upfront that a pile of negative thoughts would follow, and that it’s normal. Then he’d ask me to flip the switch and look at the other side. If we execute the plan, is it possible we hit our goals? What I took from it is that the what-ifs aren’t proof you made the wrong call. They’re the thermostat noticing you’ve moved.

Become a better observer of yourself

John said training your brain starts with being acutely aware of your own sensations. What’s my heartbeat doing right now? What’s my breathing doing? Am I anxious and stressed, or calm enough to think clearly? Can I respond instead of react? He called that a skill, which I love, because a skill can be practiced.

I told him about something Joe Dispenza said when we had him on the podcast: “Maybe we’re just poor observers. Maybe that’s our biggest problem.” John said Joe’s a friend, and that the observation starts with yourself. How do I respond when I’m uncomfortable? How do I feel when negative self-talk is going on? What am I actually afraid of when I’m procrastinating?

He also said that, in his view, procrastination usually comes from low self-esteem. If you knew how to do it and loved it, you’d do it. People put things off because they feel doubtful or worry somebody will judge them if it isn’t perfect.

If you’ve ever wondered why your energy disappears right after a big goal, the honest answer usually isn’t laziness. It’s what happens when motivation runs out and the old setting is still in charge.

How to reset the thermostat

I asked John about limiting beliefs, because I feel like they’re always kind of there from a very young age. We can improve them for sure. I don’t believe anything’s hardwired. It’s soft-wired, and we can change it.

John said a belief, from a neuroscience perspective, “is nothing more than a cluster of cells that have gotten together and connected over time repeatedly.” Your parents, school, siblings, TV and books all gave you some of yours.

Then he told me where his own setting came from. He moved from Israel to Montreal at five, spoke Hebrew and couldn’t read or write it yet, and was put in a class of 50 kids speaking French, with English as their second language. He said he sat there two years staring at the wall. Kids spat on him in the playground because he couldn’t speak English. He got into fights and stayed two years behind until he quit in grade 11.

That’s where “I’m not smart enough” came from. He carried it until he was 19, working for $2.30 an hour, when a mentor asked him why he really believed that.

What John did next is the most practical part of the whole conversation:

1. He wrote a new setting. Affirmations like “I am good enough,” “I am smart enough” and “I can learn whatever I need to learn.”
2. He repeated it for hours. He recorded his affirmations and goals and said he listened to them two or three hours a day in his car.
3. He built proof under it. His mentor had him read, listen to audio and practice his skills one hour a day, so his confidence and certainty had something real behind them.

He said things started clicking one after another. By his account he made $31,000 at 19 and $151,000 at 20. Those are John’s own numbers, not a promise of what affirmations will do for anyone’s income. The lesson I’d take is the combination. He didn’t just chant his way to a new setting. He changed the belief and the skills at the same time.

Your business can only grow to the extent that you do

John’s biggest example wasn’t personal. It was a team. He said that at RE/MAX they hit a plateau at about $1.2 billion in sales, and he knew that wasn’t the ceiling. Instead of teaching them to sell more real estate, he said they started retraining their brains: their financial set point, their expectancy point, how they thought about prospecting and the high income, high impact activities.

Over the next four years, he said, sales grew by $3.3 billion to about $4.5 billion a year, and his agents averaged $128,000 when the typical agent was making $30,000 to $40,000. Take those as John’s figures from his own company. If you’re stuck at a plateau despite your continuous efforts, his argument is that more tactics won’t move you. Moving the expectation might.

He said the same about his coaching clients. Without mindset and emotional management training, maybe five or six percent got great results. With it, alongside the skill sets, he said it was 62%. I told him that’s an insane result.

I truly believe your business can only grow to the extent that you do. You are the starting point for everything.

Success is a pattern you can learn

John keeps Rubik’s cubes on his desk. Some people solve one in seconds, blindfolded. His point was that it’s all pattern recognition.

“Success is a pattern,” he said. So are being healthy, being wealthy and having a great relationship. In his view, learn the behavioral pattern and you get a predictable result almost every time.

That took me straight back to being seven. I watched Space Jam and ran around slam dunking the top of the door frames. My mom gave me Rare Air, the Michael Jordan book, and I remember wondering how a guy built like so many other NBA players could be so different. Later I learned Kobe Bryant used to watch replay after replay of Jordan. What he was really studying was the pattern. Success leaves clues.

John said LeBron and the greats before him all studied the patterns of great players. Then he said the line I think explains the whole thermostat effect: if he gave a hundred people the blueprint of what to do, one might do it. Train their brains and their emotions as well, and he said he could get 60 to follow through.

Here’s my take. If you keep hitting the same ceiling, stop asking how to work harder and start asking what your thermostat is set to. Notice the rational lie when it shows up. Take the stretch that scares you a little. Then change the belief and build the skill under it, every day, until the new level is the one your autopilot defends.

FAQ

What is the thermostat effect?

It’s John Assaraf’s name for the way your non-conscious brain holds you at a familiar level of income, effort and comfort. Push above it with willpower and it pulls you back. Drop below it and it pushes you back up.

Why do people slide back to their comfort zone after a breakthrough?

In John’s view, the brain notices you’re spending a lot of energy outside your normal setting and starts producing doubt, procrastination and rational-sounding excuses until you return to your baseline. Hard work changes the temperature, not the setting.

What are rational lies?

John’s term for the sensible-sounding reasons you give yourself to ease off. Mine was not wanting to earn more because I’d pay more tax. They feel like good judgment, which is exactly why they work so well at keeping you stuck.

How do you reset your success thermostat?

John’s approach was to change the belief and the skill together. He repeated recorded affirmations and goals daily, practiced his skills an hour a day and built confidence on real proof. Expecting the fear and what-ifs is part of the process.

Is willpower enough to change your life?

Not on its own, according to John. Willpower can lift your performance for a few days, but if the non-conscious setting stays the same, it pulls you back. Lasting change comes from shifting the belief and the pattern underneath.

Deeper connection starts with asking permission. Most of us leave coffee or a workout with a friend and think, “We didn’t really connect,” because nobody said they wanted to go past the surface. Lori Harder’s answer is simple: tell people you’re looking for deeper conversations, ask if they’re in, then ask better questions.

Lori came on the Addicted2Success podcast as a fitness and health expert, a professional network marketer, a coach and the host of the Earn Your Happy podcast. She told me her show had hit a million plays and downloads in about eight months. Plenty of shows don’t get near that in two or three years.

She hadn’t even wanted to host. What sold her was an hour with thought leaders she’d never otherwise get on the phone. I told her I’ve paid some of these people $20,000 to work with them.

So I asked her what she’s looking for. She didn’t hesitate. Peace, happiness, growth and connection. Every day. Connection is the key right there. It feeds the other three, and the rest of our conversation backed that up.

Why she spent years doing it alone

The book Lori was finishing was about building tribe and community. When I asked why that mattered so much to her, she said that for a really long time she did it alone. She had her husband Chris, plus books and podcasts, but she grew up in the Midwest where growth “wasn’t a normal conversation.” And when you start to grow, some people feel like you’re outgrowing them.

She came from a strict religious family. She loves them. They just weren’t into health or fitness, and every time she went back to old family and friends, she felt herself getting pulled away from where she knew she was supposed to go. So at 18 she moved far enough away that she didn’t have a ton of contact. For a long time she felt like a terrible person about it.

She saw it as building armor: go away, get the tools, then come back able to handle the old situations. Without those tools, she said, your environment is always going to win. She quoted a line she loves: “Your environment is stronger than your willpower.” I agree with her, and it’s why I think changing your environment is sometimes the fastest move you can make.

What I respect is what came after. Now she can go back and accept people where they are, instead of asking why they won’t come on the journey with her. Trying to shift people who don’t want to shift is a lot of pressure to put on yourself.

The answers are in the person sitting next to you

Lori holds a lot of retreats and events, so I asked her for the most powerful exercise people can use to live in their bliss. She said connecting with other people, hands down. She’s obsessed with holding space in a room and teaching people to ask each other real questions.

Then she said this:

“Every single answer is in that person that is sitting right next to you on the subway, at a restaurant, in line at Starbucks, wherever. And we are so off in our own world and we’re so disconnected that we miss the answer every single day.”

Not just the inspiring ones, either. Even if somebody is nuts and you decide you don’t want them in your life, that’s useful. You just learned a boundary. You got some perspective on how other people feel. Cut yourself off from that and you end up isolated inside your own story.

I love being self-reliant and mentally strong. That’s a big part of what I’m about. But you can only work so much out inside your own head. I’m forever a student in the student chair. Usually I learn more from watching how someone shows up in a room, the questions they ask, the way they carry themselves, than from anything they say.

The wall you built as a kid

The best story Lori told was against herself. At a retreat in Costa Rica there was an Italian guy who was, in her words, the definition of a hug monster. A hug every 30 seconds. He talked about cuddle puddles. That was already a lot for her.

On a day of sharing circles she was emotionally exhausted. In a one-on-one exercise he asked how she was feeling, and she told him the truth: she wanted to be back in her room, quiet and alone, because she really enjoys being alone most of the time.

He said, “No, you don’t.” She said, “I don’t?” And he said, “No, that’s a story you told yourself when you were a young kid as protection.”

Her first reaction was, how dare you. But he was right. She grew up in a religious family that didn’t celebrate holidays, she was made fun of a lot at school and she was bullied about her weight. So she told herself she was better off alone. In that moment she realized, “I actually love people. My heart yearns to be around people so much, but I throw up this protective wall.”

She said it took a good year of work, and the walls still go back up sometimes. The difference is she notices now.

I tell the people I coach that it takes habitual action and dedication to break a story like that. A lot of people think their beliefs are hardwired. I don’t. Nothing is hardwired. It’s always softwired. You can untangle it and rewire it. It can take a while, and it takes courage to face it first, but ask yourself where you’d be if that story stopped running you.

Lori put it in gym terms. If you walked into a gym full of foam squares and bubbles, you couldn’t get stronger. The more challenge you put on a muscle, the more strength you gain. She thinks life works the same way. She also thinks you’re allowed a processing period first. You don’t have to find the lesson the same afternoon something hurts. The people we look up to are the ones who shared the struggle and showed they got stronger. That’s inspiration through action, showing others what’s possible through your own actions.

Why deeper connection starts with asking permission

This is the part I’d tell anyone to steal. Lori said a lot of us think we’re connecting when we aren’t:

“We go to coffee. We go to a workout and we leave and we’re like, didn’t really connect.”

Her diagnosis is that we’re afraid to go deeper. We’re afraid to ask the questions. So she does something most people never do. She asks permission. Not necessarily the first time you meet someone, but she’ll say something like, “Hey, I’m looking for deeper connections with people. Would you ever want to join this group? We meet on Thursdays. We ask deeper questions.”

She isn’t knocking small talk. She said there’s a place for it. But if you’re craving more, “you have to know how to create that,” and you need the other person’s permission to go there. Her version is almost a contract: “Are you opted in? Cool. We’re both opted in. Let’s go there.”

That sounds awkward until you try it. Research summarized by the American Psychological Association found deep conversations feel less awkward and leave people more connected and happier than they expect. We overestimate the risk.

Here’s how I’d put Lori’s approach into practice:

1. Say what you want out loud. “I’d love to have more real conversations” is enough.
2. Ask if they’re in. Make it easy to say no.
3. Ask a question past the social layer, like what’s been pulling at them lately.
4. Let the pause sit. Don’t rescue them from it.
5. Agree on how you want feedback, and when.

Don’t fix the pause for them

That fourth step came from Lori’s own podcast. She said she’s learning hosting isn’t about her. It’s about giving guests the space and time to answer.

When she asked a question that made someone dig deeper and they paused, her instinct was to jump in and let them off the hook. On podcast time, she said, two seconds can feel like five minutes. Now she doesn’t fix it for them. Even if they fumble around for the answer, they’re probably heading somewhere they’re excited about.

I think that applies way beyond podcasts. Most conversations stay shallow because someone fills the silence.

Find people who’ll tell you where you’re limiting yourself

I told Lori I used to want to be friends with absolutely everybody. Now I’d rather have a tight group with really deep relationships. My friends know they’re destined for greatness, so we push each other and call each other out on our own crap. Do well in public and you get haters and yes-men. If someone keeps telling me everything I do is amazing, I love them, but I stop going to them for feedback. Sometimes you need tough love.

Lori has a mastermind of women that meets every other Thursday at 8 a.m. The question they bring to each other is, “Where can you see me limiting myself?” She admitted it’s not always fun. It takes a blow to the ego. She said she’s grown more in the last two years with these people in her life than she ever thought possible.

The detail I liked is that they have agreements. She can say, “I don’t want to be told right now that I’m upper limiting myself. I just want to say what I’m feeling and then you can tell me later.” That’s not dodging feedback. That’s knowing you’ll get it, just not mid-vent.

Mastermind groups can change your life. I’ve started one and been part of many. Everyone’s more invested, so they value the time and actually show up to connect. It’s why I believe every entrepreneur needs a mastermind, as long as it’s built on honesty and not applause.

Connection at home: take the walk

When relationships come up with successful people on my podcast, it shows me everything’s touching everything. Plenty of entrepreneurs make millions and can’t hold a relationship together. Lori and Chris work together, and she was open that it hasn’t always been smooth. When Chris came home from managing around 300 mostly men at a mortgage office, his communication style was the quickest way to the point. She was his wife, and she felt like he didn’t care about her feelings. For about three months she wanted to send him back to work.

What fixed it was getting specific about how each of them wants to be talked to. If he says something short in a heated moment, she tells him she didn’t like it and how she’d have responded better. He does the same to her. She pointed out that we often treat the people we feel safest with the worst. They wanted the lifestyle of working together badly enough that the vision won.

Their ritual is a walk. Lori said the first 30 minutes is usually business, but the walk is what has carried them through losing a house together, Chris getting laid off and family issues. “I really believe the answers come through movement,” she said. Most couples who are fried just turn on the TV. She wants to talk to the person Chris, not the business partner Chris.

When people come at you, look for the love

Every coach needs a coach. Michael Jordan was the best in the game and he still had one. So I asked Lori for the best advice she’s had from a mentor. She went to Gabrielle Bernstein’s message that everything can be worked through and healed through love. She said finding that message freed her in her network marketing business, where she and Chris have 125,000 people in their downline. That many personalities, plus money, can bring out a lot in people.

To be clear, that’s her figure and her experience, and I’m not pitching network marketing here. Her point wasn’t about income. It was that most fallouts happen because a story covers up our compassion. When someone comes at her, she tries to see the whole picture: where they’re coming from, what they don’t understand yet, what they can’t see.

My go-to is gratitude. It’s part of my daily habits, and when there’s tension with someone, I start with what I’m grateful for. It just recalibrates the whole conversation. Lori told me she’d just done it on a text with her brother. Things were heating up and she wrote, “Stop. What are you grateful for right now?” Then he answered, and the whole conversation changed.

Be the person who connects people

In ten years, Lori hopes people will say they got connected to an amazing group of people through her and Chris, and that it changed everything for them.

I see this all the time. When I ask people how they found my work, they usually name the person who introduced them. They never forget who connected them. That’s the power right there. With the people I coach, I look for where they can collaborate or cross-promote, and sometimes that intro matters more to them than a coaching session.

Lori called hosting a podcast putting out “the bat signal” so amazing people can land in one place and meet each other. You don’t need a podcast to do that. You need to ask for depth, hold the pause and make the intro.

Her last 30 seconds to the world: “No matter what is happening right now, it’s happening for you.” Then ask how it could be happening for you, and how you could love a little more.

FAQ

How do you create a deeper connection with someone?

Tell them you want deeper conversations, ask if they’re open to it, then ask questions past the surface. Lori Harder’s approach is to get both people opted in first, so going deeper feels invited rather than forced.

How do you move past small talk without it feeling weird?

Name it. Something like, “I’d love to have more real conversations” gives the other person a choice. Small talk still has its place, but research shows deep conversations usually feel less awkward than people expect.

Why do some people push others away?

Often it’s an old protective story. Lori believed she preferred being alone until someone pointed out it was protection she built as a kid after being bullied. Noticing the wall is the first step to lowering it.

What should you do when someone pauses before answering?

Let the pause sit. Lori learned not to rescue guests from silence, because two seconds can feel like five minutes. People who fumble for an answer are often heading somewhere meaningful.

Is it okay to outgrow friends while you’re growing?

Lori thinks you sometimes need distance to build your tools, because your environment can beat your willpower. Later you can go back and accept people where they are without trying to change them.

You need more than one purpose because no single thing, not a marriage, not your kids, not one business, can keep you full for a lifetime. That’s what Grant Cardone told me, and it started with a quarter he lost when he was eight years old. Have several things you’re obsessed with, let them feed each other, and you stop being one loss away from zero.

This was Grant’s third time on the Addicted2Success podcast, and it went up in September 2016, a couple of weeks before his book Be Obsessed or Be Average came out. He asked how he looked on camera. I told him he looked like a million bucks. Then I corrected myself. A hundred million bucks.

He came back with a dark joke about what he’d do if he were only worth a million. I won’t repeat it word for word, but the point under it was clear. For Grant, enough is never enough.

The lost quarter: never have only one

I asked when multiplying money first clicked for him. He said there were two big events. The first was when he was eight. His dad gave him a quarter to go to the store and he lost it. When he got home and owned up, his dad told him never to play with money. His grandfather happened to be at the house that day. Grant described him as a gambler and an unbelievable character, a guy who was “either balling or broke.”

His grandfather grabbed him and said the problem wasn’t that he’d been playing with money. The problem was that he only had one quarter. Never have only one quarter.

Grant said he’s lived by it since. You’re going to lose a quarter one day. If it’s your only one, you’re at zero.

The second event was the 2009 crash. He said he was already in the top one or two percent from a wealth standpoint, and even people at the very top got hit. It cut things close for him. His explanation: the money had made him average. He’d lost his obsession with going out and expanding.

Then he said something I didn’t expect. When he ran into Addicted2Success, he asked himself what he’d been thinking. He had great books and programs, but he hadn’t gone wide the way we had.

Make it, keep it, multiply it

Grant said there are three things people need to learn about money. How to make it. How to keep it. How to multiply it. In his view most people never learn the first, fewer learn the second, and almost nobody learns the third.

On keeping it, he pointed at Kanye. Grant said at the time that Kanye was $55 million in debt and asked how many Bugattis anyone needs. Take the number as Grant’s claim in 2016, not a current fact. His bigger point was that money is meant to be used. He said money is going down in value, so it has to go out and produce “babies.”

I told him it’s not what you have, it’s who you become. People don’t just want Grant’s stuff. They want Grant. Too many people chase the things around them instead.

Can you have more than one purpose? Grant’s answer

Grant said he’d read The ONE Thing and liked it. Then he said he doesn’t have one thing. There has never been one thing big enough to keep him excited.

“I’ve never had one purpose. That was just a bunch of people telling me I had one purpose.”

He doesn’t think any single purpose can fill a person up, and he used his own life to make the point. He’s married to a great woman, and she can’t fill him up. He has two kids, and they can’t either. One business didn’t satisfy him. Neither did the second or the third.

That sounds cold until you hear the rest. He wasn’t saying his family doesn’t matter. He was saying no one person or project should have to carry all of it.

And the purposes pay for each other. Grant said his real estate business showed him what’s possible because it works when he isn’t working. He told me that releasing a book in a big way loses money, and that his real estate and his other two companies fund projects like that. Everything touches everything. Put real energy into each one and you lift all of them.

That’s the quarter story grown up. One quarter, one business or one purpose all leave you a single loss from zero.

I told Grant this hit home. When I started blogging and building Addicted2Success I went all in. Whatever it takes, laser focus, and I didn’t stop until I had a team. Then I moved to the next thing, and the next. People get confused and think it’s one thing for the rest of your life. I don’t buy that. We’re meant to grow. Look at nature. It grows.

There’s nothing between obsessed and average

All the greats did more than one thing, Grant said, and they all did things they didn’t want to do. He’s heard people say you should only do the things you want to do. Grant said he does things he doesn’t want to do every single day. If you don’t, you won’t grow your business and you won’t keep it.

His line was that an obsessed person doesn’t care if they have to clean a toilet. They might hate the task. They do it anyway.

So I asked him what gives him that constant flow of energy. He said it’s a choice. There’s nothing in between obsessed and average. You’re either all in or you’re not, so quit kidding yourself that there’s some gray in the deal. Steve Jobs, Mozart, Elon Musk: if we know the name, Grant said, they didn’t come from the average camp.

I see the same gap between being interested and being committed. People draw a line in the sand, which is still the halfway point. You have to draw it in cement.

Everybody is already addicted to something

Grant doesn’t think you need to become obsessed. He thinks you already are. Everybody has an addictive quality, he said. His were survival, talking and fun times. The question is what it’s pointed at.

Some people get addicted to information instead of execution. For Grant at 25, it was drugs.

He traced it back to denying parts of himself. He always wanted to be the coolest guy in the room, the James Bond guy, obsessed with success and money, and he was told not to be. By his late teens he was denying so much of himself that when someone offered him weed, he said yes. It went to weed every day, then pills, then cocaine every day. He said he’d been stuck in it for nine years.

What turned it around was a treatment center. He put the drugs down for 28 days, came back, and replaced that addiction with the things he said he should have been addicted to all along.

I mentioned someone I’d been coaching who wanted to give up drinking because of what it was doing to their relationship and business, but hadn’t made a real decision. Grant’s response was deliberately extreme. Either go all in on being a drunk, or make the decision to be the other guy: obsessed with your health, with being a great dad, with helping people not drink. Read that as Grant forcing a choice, not as advice to drink. If you’re dealing with addiction, get professional help. Grant’s own turn started in treatment.

Why Grant doesn’t love himself just the way he is

Grant told me his mom once said she loved him just the way he was, right after he’d been telling her about all his dreams as a kid. About 30 years later his sister said the same thing. He wondered how many times he’d heard it.

His pushback was blunt. So what? He didn’t love himself just the way he was. If you’re broke, not living on purpose, you can’t get away from a job you don’t like, or you’re stuck in a house you don’t like, why would you love that? His words were that you should become obsessed with hating it. Obsessed or average, pick one.

I think it comes down to the meaning we give it. How painful would my life be if I didn’t take the action?

Keep looking for the vein

Grant has a phrase for this. Keep looking for the vein.

Internet marketers tell him they tried. They hit the list, put the program out, ran Facebook ads. His answer is that you either found the vein or you didn’t. He compared it to a nurse who wants blood from your arm. She doesn’t quit after one try. She keeps looking. The obsessed person, he said, won’t get seduced by an excuse.

He used his own launch as the example. He said he was giving 30,000 books to schools and donating his book proceeds to charity. It was working pretty well, but not where he wanted it. A free audio chapter didn’t move it enough either. So they kept looking.

The day before we recorded, he said, he’d made a bigger offer: a store credit for anyone who bought the book and wrote a review, good or bad, a 10-hour video of him reading the book, and 13 coaching sessions after it shipped. He said sales went nuts. That was his 2016 launch play, not an offer you can take up today. The lesson is the behavior: working pretty well still isn’t the vein.

The purpose of money is that you can lose it to win

His internet team asked about the ROI on all that. Grant said money wasn’t his problem. The book was the target. Then he said this:

“The real purpose of money is that you can lose it to win.”

He thinks a lot of ROI talk is just trying to make sense of average. He pointed to the MyPillow guy. Grant had never bought one of his pillows, yet there he was talking about him. In his view the big players are obsessed with market domination, not this quarter’s spreadsheet.

I told him about someone I’d spoken to who was putting a little money into Facebook ads to dial in a new program. You’re paying for the data and the analytics, so you’re smarter on the next move. And say you drop 5K or 10K into an ad and someone who sees it pays you 100K to speak at an event. How do you measure that?

Grant told me about a Facebook campaign his team said didn’t work because it drew complaints. He called that awesome, because the feedback showed him how to communicate with people. Another ad, about drug treatment and switching one obsession for another, got more comments than normal and no purchases. People said he was just switching one addiction for another. He said that’s exactly what he was doing.

Sometimes, he said, you have to miss a bunch to figure out where the bullseye is. Take all of this as Grant’s view of his own businesses. Speak to a licensed advisor for financial advice.

Feed the Beast, starve the doubt

I asked for his favorite chapter. He said Feed the Beast. The question he gets most is where he gets the juice, and his answer is to feed the beast and starve the doubt. He called it feeding the darkness in you. Quit denying the part of you people told you to hide. Fuel it, and get the people around you to fuel it too.

He said he wanted to give everybody permission to find their addictive personality and refocus it. I told him a lot of people live in a fantasy of who they think they should be, and deny the parts of themselves they could be tapping into.

When I said thanks a million, he said a hundred million, and that he was hunting a billion next. Then he told me to come see him in Miami. I was in Venice, California, and he reckoned LA had plenty of ideas and not enough action.

Here’s my take. If one thing going wrong would wipe you out, you’ve got one quarter. Pick the second thing you’d be obsessed with, give it real energy, and let your purposes pay for each other.

FAQ

Can you have more than one purpose?

Yes. Grant Cardone told me he’s never had one purpose and doesn’t think any single purpose can fill a person up. Marriage, kids and one business all mattered to him, but none was enough alone. Several purposes can fuel and fund each other.

What did Grant Cardone mean by “never have only one quarter”?

At eight, Grant lost a quarter his dad gave him for the store. His grandfather said the problem wasn’t playing with money. It was having only one quarter. Grant took it as a lesson: you’ll lose a quarter one day, so don’t let it be your last.

What does “find the vein” mean?

It’s Grant’s phrase for refusing to stop at “we tried.” Like a nurse who keeps looking until she finds a vein, an obsessed person keeps testing until something clearly works, and doesn’t get seduced by excuses when results are only okay.

Is there anything between obsessed and average?

Not in Grant’s view. He said you’re either all in or you’re not, and calling it gray is a way of explaining average. He also believes everyone is already obsessed with something. The choice is what you point it at.

What are the three things people need to learn about money?

Grant says how to make it, how to keep it and how to multiply it. In his view most people never learn the first, fewer learn the second, and almost nobody learns the third. Speak to a licensed advisor for financial advice.

Why you’re not sabotaging yourself is simpler than a willpower problem. You’re living what you really value, and it already shows in how you fill your space, where your time and money go, where you’re organized and disciplined, and what you think and talk about most. Dr. John Demartini calls these value determinants. Once you can see your real values, you have two choices. Set goals that match them, or change your values to match your goals.

A couple of nights before we recorded this episode, I went to one of John’s events. It was about a two-hour session and I could see people all over the room having breakthroughs. So when he sat down with me for the podcast (it went up in August 2016), I had a list of questions I didn’t get to ask that night.

The answer that stuck with me most came near the end. I asked him about people who keep sabotaging themselves with money. He told me he doesn’t even like the word. More on that below, because it’s the most useful reframe in the whole conversation.

Why what you say you value isn’t what you really value

John has written over a hundred books, including The Values Factor, and in my intro I said he’d read close to 30,000 books. His whole body of work comes back to one idea. Everybody lives by a set of priorities, from most important to least important, and your life already demonstrates them.

The problem is that if you ask people what their values are, they hand you what he called “social idealisms.” Family. Health. Kindness. Wealth. The stuff that sounds right.

He brought up the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg here. As John put it, most people are either avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, subordinating to mothers, fathers, preachers and teachers, or following the herd of whatever their society says is normal. Very few are living by what they actually value.

Then he said the line I want you to remember:

“I’m not interested in what people say. I’m interested in what they’re living.”

He also warned about injecting other people’s values into your life. Learning from mentors is smart. Trying to be somebody you’re not, in his words, is “almost guaranteed to be self-defeating.”

How to tell what you really value: the value determinants

When I asked how we become more conscious of our values, John listed the questions he uses. Answer them honestly, based on what you actually do and not what you wish you did:

• How do you fill your space? What’s sitting around you right now?
• What do you spend your time on?
• What energizes you?
• What do you spend your money on most?
• Where are you most organized?
• Where are you most disciplined?
• What do you think about, visualize and affirm to yourself most, and is it already coming true?
• What do you love talking to other people about?
• What inspires you, and what do the people who inspire you have in common?
• What’s a goal that’s persisted in your life and keeps getting achieved?
• What do you love learning about?

Look for the answers that repeat. That’s your real hierarchy, not the one you’d put on a vision board. John has a free version of this on his site, the Demartini Value Determination process. He said it takes about 30 minutes, and you can come back every three months to see how your values are shifting.

Here’s the one that hit me personally. I said to the audience, look at your library. What books are in it right now? It’ll show you what you value most. Then I had to admit something on air. I know for sure I don’t have enough books on finance. I wasn’t struggling, but I felt like I could be doing a lot better. John said he’d read about 1,400 books on finance and economics. That’s the difference in one shelf.

Why you’re not sabotaging yourself

This is the part I mentioned at the top. I asked John whether people who can’t get ahead financially are sabotaging themselves because they can’t hold the money in their container.

He pushed back straight away. He said he doesn’t find sabotage a productive word, because when someone says they’re sabotaging themselves, it means they don’t know what their real values are. They keep expecting to live by somebody else’s values. When their actions keep following their own, they call it sabotage.

Once they see their real values, he said, the story changes. They stop seeing sabotage and start seeing decisions that make perfect sense. “No wonder I keep doing that.”

I think that’s more useful than any amount of beating yourself up. You’re not broken. You’re doing exactly what your real values tell you to do. If you don’t like the results, the fix is the values or the goal, not more willpower.

Your spending already shows what you really value

I told John that so many people live in the fantasy of being wealthy. They see the glitz and the glamour, and it ends up being more of a nightmare than a fantasy.

He said he’s asked millions of people worldwide if they want to be financially independent. They all put their hands up. But in their minds they’re picturing the lifestyles of the rich and famous. They’re spending on depreciables and consumables that won’t build an asset base. In his experience, 1% or less actually want to study the numbers, study investments and patiently build assets over time.

His line was blunt: “Tell me what you value most, I’m going to show you where your money is going to go.”

Think of the person who says they can’t get ahead, then keeps spending on clothes, trips and instant gratification. In his view, they don’t really want to be wealthy. They want to live the things they keep doing. He said he’s interviewed billionaires and people who are broke, and the ones who are committed to building wealth have it in their top four values. The others don’t.

That’s not investment advice, and it isn’t a judgment on anyone’s spending. It’s a mirror. If you want the mindset side of money, read how to change your money blueprint before it caps your income. Here, the question is simpler. Does your bank statement agree with what you say you want?

The only two ways to fulfillment

John said there are only two ways to have fulfillment. Set goals that match your values, or change your values to match your goals. They have to be congruent.

To change a value, you stack up associations. List the benefits of something you want to rise on your value list and it goes up, because now you have more reasons to do it. List the drawbacks of something you want to drop and it goes down.

I asked if that’s just putting pen to pad. He said no. Writing it is an inventory, but you have to actually feel those benefits and drawbacks until they change your perception. He gave the example of an eight-year-old girl singing in front of 400 people at school. If they give her a standing ovation, she’ll want to sing again. If she forgets her words and people walk out, she probably won’t. We already move through our values based on pains and pleasures. You can let the world do that to you, or you can take command of it.

For wealth specifically, his process went like this:

1. Find out where wealth building actually sits on your value list.
2. Raise it, using that stacking process.
3. Link what you need to learn to the values you already have.
4. Learn the way you learn best. Visual, auditory or kinesthetic. YouTube, mentors and small chunks of reading all count.

He said you don’t have to read books to become financially savvy. He’s had mentors in almost every area of finance, and one hour with them is sometimes better than the book. Everybody loves learning what’s important to them.

Inspiration vs motivation

I asked John the difference, and his answer is the simplest I’ve heard. When you live by your highest value, you’re inspired from within. Nobody has to remind you. As you go down the list, things get more extrinsic, and you need outside motivation to do them.

His highest value is researching and teaching. He said he does it every day and doesn’t miss one. Domestic stuff? He said he’s about as domestic as a cockroach. He made a list of what he loves (research, writing, traveling and teaching) and delegated everything else.

I jumped in with “high income generating activities.” He added one word: meaning. You want income because it means you’re serving others, and meaning because it’s serving you. Put the two together and you’ve got your niche.

If you’re still doing every low-priority task in your business yourself, that’s often the real reason you’re burned out. And John didn’t think burnout comes from hours. He said people doing what they love can go 18 hours a day without feeling stressed, while someone forcing themselves through uninspiring work for that long is heading for a heart attack. He also said that whenever you’re not fulfilling your highest values, you increase the odds of addictive, compulsive behavior to compensate.

I told him about a mate of mine who’s worth hundreds of millions and is happy and grateful all the time. I was standing there when somebody asked if he ever burns out. He laughed and said he wasn’t a candle. John’s take: he’s doing something meaningful and serving a lot of people.

John went further on the brain side, too. He believes that when you work toward your highest values, the brain remodels itself to support it, and the executive center lights up. He also said the brain is about 10% neurons and 90% glia, and that the study of glial cells will matter as much as neurology in the decades ahead. Take that as John’s view, not settled science. He also recalled Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: live on purpose and you age differently.

Where entrepreneurs get their values wrong

I asked if there’s anything apart from values that holds people back. He said one of the most unwise things an entrepreneur does is assume what’s important to them is important to everybody. They come out with a cool idea and spend years fighting uphill.

He described two overlapping circles, like a vesica piscis. One is what you’re inspired to do. The other is what people are inspired to receive. The center is where the power is. If you can’t wait to get up in the morning and deliver it, and they can’t wait to get it, you’ve found your niche.

Can everybody be an entrepreneur? He said the capacity is in everyone, though not everyone will use it. He’s seen people who worked for security their whole lives find that overlap and take off.

What self-love has to do with your values

I get emails about this all the time, so I asked: how do we love ourselves more?

John said the only time we don’t appreciate ourselves is when we compare our daily actions to other people’s values that we’ve injected into our lives. Live by your own and you can look in the mirror and say thank you. He told me a Vogue magazine interviewer once asked who he’d be if he could be anyone in the world. His answer: “I have no desire to be anybody but me.”

His last 30-second speech was the same idea. Look in the mirror and know that no matter what you’ve done or not done, you’re worthy of love. And give yourself permission to do something extraordinary.

Here’s my take. Most people already know what they really value. They just don’t like the answer. So pull up your calendar, your bank statement and your bookshelf this week, write down what they say, and decide which way you’re going. Change the goal or change the value. Knowing this and doing nothing with it is the same as not knowing.

FAQ

How do you know what you really value?

Look at your actions, not your words. Dr. John Demartini’s value determinants ask how you fill your space, spend your time and money, where you’re organized and disciplined, and what you think, talk and love learning about. The answers that repeat are your real values.

What is the difference between inspiration and motivation?

Inspiration comes from your highest values, so you act without reminders or rewards. Motivation is the outside push you need for things lower on your value list. Demartini says the further down the list a task sits, the more motivation it takes.

Is self-sabotage really a values mismatch?

Demartini says what people call sabotage usually means they’re judging themselves by someone else’s values while acting on their own. Once you see your real values, the pattern looks like a decision, not a failure, and you can change the goal or the value.

Can you change your values?

Yes. Demartini’s method is to stack associations. Link many real benefits to a value you want to rise and drawbacks to one you want to drop, and actually feel them. The alternative is setting goals that match the values you already have.

Why can’t I get ahead financially if I want to be wealthy?

Demartini’s view is that your spending follows your values. If money keeps going to consumables instead of building assets, wealth building probably isn’t high on your value list yet. That’s a values question first, not a willpower one. Speak to a licensed advisor for financial advice.