 Welcome to the 21 convention, Miami, Florida. This next speaker is actually a former keynote speaker of the 21 convention, but also a multiple time speaker, super, super popular guy has changed men's lives in many different ways. And I think that's very important that we today are going to get to see yet another version of the ever-transforming, evolving James Marshall. All right, good afternoon. When I left high school, passed just barely, I was considering two distinct pathways of what to do with my life. On the one hand, growing up in my teenage years, I'd been obsessed with martial arts, meditation, spirituality, as well as a bunch of writers, thinkers and travelers, the beat generation, who were precursors to the hippies, who'd gone on the road off to India, taking psychedelic drugs, meditating in the mountains, going on wild sexual adventures. And these were my heroes, people that I was interested in following in the footsteps of. So on the one hand, I was considering this lifestyle. On the other hand, I got it in my head that the best way to get my father's validation and approval would be to join the army. And so I applied to join the Australian Army, not just as a grunt who could go in and out after a war or so, but as an officer. So I was applying to join the Australian Defense Force Academy. And that seemed like a good idea from a pragmatic level because there was a good dental plan and you got a university degree and you had a steady job. And this was back in the 90s before things were getting too hot in the Middle East. So it seemed like a pretty cool thing to do. And so what I did was I started going through the application to join the army. And this was when over many months and involved various stages that you had to go through. And it was kind of like the X factor where at the end of each session they would kick out half the people and eventually the winner gets to join the army. And because I had been around army people, my father worked with the military. I understood the culture. I sort of knew how they talked, the way that they interacted with each other which was very different than the way that I was actually. There was a lot of mateship and team and no poofders and being in a tough bloke. That wasn't really me, but I was able to play that game and kind of present that front. So I went to each of these application processes we had to do leadership exercises and team exercises. And I kept getting through. And after each one of these, I would leave with this deep boiling, sinking feeling in my intestines that this was a really wrong place for me to be. Even though I was able to get in there and go, oh, yes, James Marshall, Ozzy bloke, yes, yes, so on. I'd walk out of it just feeling like, fuck, this is not what I want. Because if I did get in, I would be obliged to stay in the military for at least 10 years. All right, so this, I was looking down the barrel of spending my youth essentially in an institution not so well known for its free thinking ideas and a place for an artistic, weird spiritual dude such as myself. Any case, I got to the last application, which was an interview with an army psychologist. He sat me down, started asking me questions, and he got to this question. He said, James, if you ever considered suicide and something inside of me just snapped, just couldn't do it anymore. And so I looked at him and I twitched a little bit and I said, well, I mean, of course everyone's considered that, right? Like these are broad existential questions that we're looking at. I mean, what is the point of being alive or not alive? Was it Sartre who said that the only grand philosophical question was whether or not to kill yourself? Right, okay. And did you ever have any specific type of plan? Was this just a more of a vague notion? Well, I mean, of course, you don't want it to hurt, right? And I didn't want to be found by my mother or my brother or something and traumatize them for life. So, you know, something that was quick, preferably doesn't break the skin, so hanging, drowning. Right, okay, gotcha. And they asked a few more questions and then he said, so have you ever had any homosexual inclinations, James? And I said, well, I'm young. I mean, I wouldn't say my sexuality is defined yet. Gave him just a little half a wink. And so we concluded the interview. My best friend and I had agreed that if I didn't get in the army, both of us were gonna go somewhere to a farm, work our asses off, asses off, asses off, and save up money and then go to India. We're gonna hit the road and become these vagabond spiritual seekers that we had read about from the 60s and 70s. And so a couple of weeks later, I got a letter from the military, I opened it, and it said, dear Mr. Marshall, we regret, and I went, oh, fuck yes, they regret to inform me whatever else they're gonna say. And so I got on my bicycle, rode over to my best friend's house in the middle of the night. I don't know why I opened it in the middle of the night, but for the sake of the story, let's just say it was the middle of the night. And went over to his, around to the back of his house, knocked on his window, he went out, I said, what do you want, I said, come out here. And he climbed out the window, we ran up to this hill that was behind the house and cheered into the night, lit this letter on fire, pissed on it, and went, we're going to fucking India. But before we were going to India, I had to go and tell my dad. So I went to him and I said, listen, dad, I didn't get into the army. And he said, oh yeah, well fuck him, what else do you want to do with your life? And I said, I want to go to India, off you go then. And so it was that my life trajectory took the pathway that has led me to being on this stage as well as many other weird and wacky, wonderful stages around the world. And if you were to look back on the series of choices that I've made over my life to get where I am, on paper, they can look like a series of major, often ridiculously stupid risks, right? So when I was considering choosing these pathways at the end of high school, I sat down with my career's advisor because I had to and they asked me the same kind of questions. I said, what are you going to be doing with your life, James? Which is the voice of somebody, an Australian person who doesn't like their life. Doing with your life. And I said, oh well, you know, either might join the army, hope not, otherwise I thought I'd travel around India and like learn how to meditate and then maybe start a band or something and then just do the things that I like until I figure something out. Right, well, you do realize your scores do indicate you could go to university and if you don't go to university after high school, you'll be a year behind your contemporaries. I said, what do you mean a year behind? Well, obviously they'd start in 1998 and you'd start 1999, it's not all parties in 1999. And then they would finish earlier and then they'd enter the workforce earlier so you'd be behind them. I said, okay, yeah, all right, I see your logic but I don't necessarily agree with that. I think there might be something to be said for going out and exploring life first before picking something. Well, the other thing is from my experience that if you don't go to university, you'll possibly never go. And I said, all right, thank you, opinion noted. That person was right. I didn't actually, well, I did go to college for a small amount of time, studied a few things I was interested in for a little while and then decided to quit and go and find something practical that I could use to further myself in my life. So what ended up happening was that I chose a life that was very different from the status quo from the previous generation's designs or roadmap for success. And the main points that I wanna make in this speech today is loosely about lifestyle design, looking at how to, which is what is being called like the modern phrase which used to be just called doing things you like doing, having some fun, having a fun life and now is lifestyle design in a package so we can sell it. But what I wanna talk about is the way that you can make choices in your life and this speech is for young guys out there because I get a lot of guys contact me, ask me what should they do with their lives and I don't necessarily wanna be responsible for men quitting university or real jobs and going out to, going to India. I'm not necessarily saying that's the best thing to do but I do want people to start thinking in terms of what are their real options and that it's not necessarily the riskiest thing to go out and live a life that is on your own terms. Our parents' generation, our grandparents' generation came from very different economic socio-political times and back in my parents' generation it made sense more or less that if you were working class, middle class unless you were born into extreme wealth it was a good idea to study hard, get involved in a job that seemed stable and stay there for multiple decades, buy a house early in the city that you were brought up in and get married and have kids. That was the way things were done and it did equate that if you studied hard, worked hard we're pragmatic that likely you're going to succeed. Things these days are very, very different. There are still some industries where that is like the correct thing I guess or makes sense to do and I work with a lot of these guys as a dating coach, a lot of analytical thinkers, a lot of engineers, IT guys, finance guys, those areas that yeah there's still plenty of work out there for but in terms of life satisfaction maybe those things are deficient. However, in my opinion as someone who accidentally became a digital nomad accidentally became a successful entrepreneur because I was never planning to do those things. I was planning to follow passions that I were interested in which originally was martial arts so that meant that I had to go to China because that's where the masters were that I wanted to learn from. So instead of doing what a lot of my contemporary male friends did, buying cars sometimes buying houses, getting themselves saddling themselves with lots of debt in order to try and project a certain status to the world around them I put my limited resources into travel and finding masters and teachers that I wanted to learn from. So it was that I went to the ends of the earth to find the teachers that were really meant something to me. My other passion in life was playing the flute which I play very nicely and so I started a weird wacky funk band which was never gonna work in terms of becoming famous because I was several decades too late for that. If I'd been brought up in the 70s in San Francisco or fuckin' LA then maybe that would have worked but I was too late for that. However, that was what I wanted to do that was an expression of my passion and moving from these kind of odd choices to odd choice, what I did was I recognized that there was certain time and places to experiment with this kind of stuff and that there was also a time to let it go and move on because I did notice playing music for many years that girls would have sex with a guy who might become famous but they don't wanna have sex with a guy who's definitely not gonna become famous. Yeah, there's nothing sadder than seeing that 39 year old guy rockin' out in the local pub still just living the dream still just holding on to that that it's someday it's gonna work. I spent 10 years playing in a weird wacky funk band and I was obsessed with that, that was my life's purpose and at a certain point I realized, okay, if I keep doing this, this is gonna get sad. It's been really fun and interesting up until this point but I need to shift and change. I developed over time the abilities that eventually led me into becoming a really effective entrepreneur which the first one was