 All right, guys, 21 convention, Melbourne, Australia, 2012. We have our second speaker, and we just met for the first time just a few moments ago, or actually a couple hours ago. But Damian Dica, he is a dating, lifestyle, and executive corporate coach. I'm actually really excited to hear what you got to talk about because he explained his speech a little bit. I'll let him do it. But I actually, I personally feel it's stuff that we need to be focused on a little bit more in this whole realm of personal development, and everything the 21 convention is about. Damian, come up. Woo! What's up, man? Thanks, all buddy. Take it. All right, guys, hello, everyone. Look, I've got to say something. I've met James a couple of times. I've, you know, we cross each other on our paths, we have a similar line of work. I've never actually listened to him do a talk. And today was the first time, and this is only a small talk. His real talk is going to come tomorrow. And I've got to say, I'm really impressed. I think this is a guy who's really switched on. This is a guy who really knows his stuff, and what he says resonates with me in a really good way. So I'm really keen to hear what he's got to say tomorrow. So before I get started, guys, one thing you need to know about me is that I'm quite a geek, I'm quite a nerd. I pretty much burn through a book one or two week. I get through one or two books a week. They're always on the topic of human behavior. Right now I'm following a Stanford University course on human behavioral biology. So you're going to cop a little bit of that from me today starting right now. So what I want from you all is I want to get you all in exactly the right chemical state in your brains, in your body. I want the right chemicals in your brain to best facilitate brain plasticity. That is neuroplasticity, your ability to learn quickly and take on new learning patterns and behaviors as quick as possible. How am I going to do that, guys? I'm going to do that by showing you a picture that's going to get your attention. Because there's something interesting about it. Matt, wait, wait, take a minute. Because we all have to work out which ass we prefer, right? Good, now that we've all got looked at. What has happened now, guys, is we have a new set of hormones running through our body. Those hormones are going to help us learn why, because oddly enough, a man's brain doesn't learn nearly as quickly as when he's got sexy women on the mind. So who am I, guys? My name's Damon Deaker. And I am a dating coach. I run a dating coaching company in Sydney, and I coach men and I coach women. I run these courses in Sydney, in Melbourne, in Perth, in Brisbane, and I was just over in Vegas a little while ago, heading off to Thailand. But guess what, guys? I'm not talking to you about dating coaching today. That's not my thing. What is going on with these slides? Come on, you. Hello, there we go again. Apparently, these are filtering through all in the room. That's okay. I'm also a qualified life coach, by the way. I'm certified diploma, NLP, hypnosis, you get it. I'm not going to be talking to you guys about life coaching. I'm not going to be talking to you about NLP. I also run corporate events, okay, as was mentioned to you in the beginning. That's actually one of the reasons that brought me down here outside of the 21 convention. I had to come down for an event. I had to come down. I had to have an interview with guys. What happens is I don't advertise. I don't advertise to run these sales and marketing programs. Word of mouth spreads and what happens is they fly me around and I do these corporate training things. But guess what, no, I'm not talking about sales. I'm not talking about marketing today. What am I talking about, guys? I'm talking about how to be happy. Why am I talking about how to be happy? You guys are here. You're here to learn a whole lot of interesting things and this is an epic, epic event. The reason why it's epic is because it's a chance for guys to learn a whole lot of important skills. Learn a whole lot of things that's gonna improve their lives. It's gonna do something for them. And you're all here because you wanna learn something. You wanna learn, ooh, how am I going to be more successful with women? Ooh, how am I going to be healthier? Ooh, how am I gonna be more fit? How am I gonna improve my body? How am I gonna improve myself as a man? What do you want that? Okay, you all want that because you believe something about what you're gonna learn here, something is gonna make you happier. Okay, the more something that you're getting here is gonna improve your happiness. And this is big because all of you, okay, have 20 plus, 30 plus years working hard to become happy. All right, but I guarantee most of us if you ask us, are you feeling happy, happy enough, I want more of it. That's our key thing. We want more of that in our lives. And I'm hugely passionate about this. I see this as being a cornerstone to what we all need in our lives. Doesn't matter what you want. If you're a guy looking for women, if you're a woman looking to be successful financially, you need to be happy. If you're not happy, you fail at life. To be happy is big to me. And I'm gonna subject you to a little bit more education here. Who's heard of epigenetics before? One, two, three, great, there's a couple of geeks in the audience, fantastic. Epigenetics, guys, is to give you a bit of a basic lesson. It's where we can inherit certain traits from our parents, but they have nothing to do with our genetics. They're inherited traits that do not follow, they have nothing to do with our actual genetic code. Let me explain and let me explain in a way that'll help you understand why I'm so passionate about being happy. So if I have a look here, I wanna have a look at my great-great-grandmother. And my great-great-grandmother lived in Holland. I'm Dutch, my background's Dutch. And she was married to a landscaper. And this landscaper, he lived on this property of this incredibly wealthy Dutch family looking after their gardens for them. And so, you know, these guys weren't wealthy, but they were quite comfortable. And by every account of anyone, every account of met, and there were a lot of accounts, this guy had a face and temper. He was violently, violently aggressive, okay? He was a very, very unhappy man. Okay, and you can imagine the impact that had on my great-great-grandmother while she was pregnant. So while my great-great-grandmother was pregnant, okay, with my great, with my grandmother, my great-grandmother, pregnant with my grandmother, what happened is all these hormones flushing through a system, all these stress hormones, they're called stereotypically blue-coca-coins flushing through her body while this baby's in her tummy. What's happening is this baby is learning, okay, not cognitively, but it's body is learning. Ooh, the world I'm gonna go into is dangerous. There's a dangerous world out there. I have to be the kind of person, I have to go into the kind of person that's gonna be very, very sensitive to danger in my environment. And so, when these two relatives of mine, hello, had a child, my grandmother, she too had a terrible temper. She was very easily stressed by her environment, okay? Any little thing could go wrong and she would get mad, okay? My mom was frightened of my grandmother as a child. And she inherited this epigenetically from her mother. And so, when she was pregnant with my mother, she had a whole bunch of stress hormones, glucocorticoids flowing through her body, telling her life is tough, life is difficult, any small thing that goes wrong, make a huge deal out of it. So, my mother was born, and she too, bit of a temper, bothered by things in her environment, very difficult to find happiness in life, very difficult because any little thing that goes wrong, it's a disaster. Now, her temper wasn't nearly as bad as her mother's, which wasn't nearly as bad as her grandfather's, okay? And so, I come along and what I'm receiving is a slightly lower dose of glucocorticoids, stress hormones, which were in her body when I was a child, when I was a baby, when I was gestating in the fetus, in her tummy. And guess what? I have high levels of glucocorticoids naturally flowing through my body. What does this mean, guys? When I was 19 years old, I had a breakdown. I was trapped in my bedroom, okay, with panic attacks that didn't let me out of the room. I suffered with horrific depression. This is my background. This is kind of the thing. We've all got a moment, if you talk to James, I'm sure he has too, a moment in life that was so tough, that was so difficult that we had to bounce back and make something of ourselves and just fix it. This was my moment. This was my point that holy shit, my life is falling apart. This is not who I am. I'm gonna make something happen. Now, the reality is I am at an epigenetic disadvantage, you could say. But today I'm a very happy person. My grandmother died four years ago, a very, very happy lady. You see, my grandmother used to go around doing talks on how to be happy as well. She actually learned a few tricks along the way about how to work with what your body's got, how to work with what your body's given you and not actually go, oh, well, you know, I inherited this. So this is just who I am, because it's not like that. What I inherited, guys, is something that a lot of you have, even if you don't know, it's called neuroticism. It's an actual personality trait represented by, among a few other things, an overactive amygdala. The amygdala is a part of the brain that looks for danger in the environment. And it makes it very hard to be happy. This is a straight definition, okay? Neuroticism is a fundamental personality trait in the study of psychology, manifested by characteristics of anxiety, moodiness, worry, envy, and jealousy. I know, statistically. There's a far higher proportion of people in this audience right now who can identify with this than the standard population. But I also know part of the human condition, part of the human condition is never to feel satisfied. And at no point in the history of humanity that we have documented has there been such an epic problem with a difficulty in being happy. Okay, suicide is higher than it's ever been. The more Western you go into the Western world, the higher it gets with a few rare exceptions of island chain groups and things like that, copycat suicides. Western world, Australia, America, London, we're screwed when it comes to depression and suicide. So what, what is this? Right, so I wanna talk about what is happiness. And the first thing I wanna kind of bring up is a mistake that we all make. It's a mistake and logic about what it is to be happy that we all get stuck in. I'm not sure where we pick it up, but we pick it up from our society, we pick it up from marketing on TV, we pick it up from our family, we pick it up from our friends. And this is essentially guys, it's the happiness fallacy. Okay, what is this? So it's this idea that I wanna be happy. We all wanna be happy. We're wide that way. I'm not special. We all wanna be happy. And what we do is we say, well, here are a whole range of things that I know make me happy, right? There's a whole bunch of things that make us happy. Chocolate cake, hot women, right? A night out at a strip club, drinking with the boys, whatever it is, right? There are all sorts of things that bring happiness into our lives. And we go, oh, okay, well, there's this bucket. And in this bucket, if I can feel this bucket and keep it relatively full, I'll feel like I'm happy. I'll feel like I've got a happy, privileged life going on here. And I guarantee you, this is what you've all been doing. You've all been going through your lives with this image in your head of a happiness bucket, and you've been trying to keep it full. You've been doing all these things, trying to learn new facts that are gonna make some sort of a difference in your life, and you're trying to throw them into this happiness bucket to keep it full. If it's full, you're happy. Ah, that makes sense, right? To some degree. More happy events that happen in our lives that happy we're gonna feel. So by that rationale, I should end this talk and say let's all go home and do a few lines of Coke every day for now. Why won't that work? Why just someone just tell me why is it no good to do a few lines of Coke every day? That was expensive, sure. Right, okay, why else? Why else would Coke just not be the solution to this problem? Every day your body needs, every day, your body needs more. Usually when I do these talks, although I have these chocolates that I throw around in the audience, but I figured with a room this side, it's gonna hit someone in the head and it might get sued, so I didn't. But I would give you a chocolate, sir. Yes, absolutely, okay? And it's more than that. Guys, it's, I mean, look, I've been told that if you do cocaine, there's a massive come down. Okay, there's a massive come down. I'm sure if you haven't tried it yourself, you've seen someone who's done it and they do the cocaine like, woo-hoo, yeah, a life rocks, woo! And they're like, oh, fuck man, get away from me, man. Man, I'm angry. That happens, right? That happens, so cocaine's a bad example. But cocaine isn't actually that different from a lot of the other forms of happiness we try to bring into our lives. Let me demonstrate why this is. Let me demonstrate why. No matter what it is most of us is doing to pursue happiness, we're not doing much better than doing lines of cocaine every day. You see, in the brain, when we actually take someone and we put them into a machine called a functional resonance imaging machine, okay? And what actually happens is we can view different areas of the brain and watch them light up as they activate. And so what we can do is we can put people into this machine and we can actually identify when they're feeling happy what parts of the brain light up. And what we found, we found this quite a while ago already, is that happiness actually occurs in two completely different varieties. There are two completely different ways that we can experience happiness in the brain. Two completely different, but in the English language, you really only have one word. Are you happy? All right, and we can give an answer, yes or no. And that's why so often someone says to you, are you happy, right? Like you'll go, yeah, I guess, kind of. Because there's actually an ambiguity and whether we're aware of it or not is because there's these two totally different varieties. So what are these guys? Okay, the first you may well have heard of, okay? It's called, hello? Hadonia. Hadonia, of which of course derives from hedonistic, hedonistic pleasures. And this is what most of us follow one way or another, whether we're aware of it or not. What are we talking about, guys? Okay, we're talking about a piece of chocolate cake. Oh, by the way, I love chocolate cake. Ah, God damn it. Okay, we're talking about boobs. I love boobs. I love boobs. We're talking about attractive women, right? Sexual pursuit, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's a form of hedonistic happiness when we're talking about sex. A new car, a shiny new toy, okay? Don't get me wrong, I like my toys. Being the geek that I am, I actually budget a portion of my income, a portion of what I pay myself every month to buy toys, gadgets. Little things like I'm watching the tech blog, something new comes up, I'm gonna have that, that's me, right? So yeah, these things are forms of hedonistic pleasure. Fantastic. Now, there is a dangerous side to this hedonistic pleasure. Let me give you an example with something that happens to me a lot. So when I'm coaching guys, I'm doing dating and coaching, right, I take guys out, they're out in a club, they're first night out, and of course, they're really nervous. You can imagine, they're out with me, they know they're gonna have their asses kicked, they know they're gonna have to talk to women. This is totally crazy, totally scary. And I say to them, one of the things I say is, look, what do you wanna get out of tonight? What, one thing, like what are you just hoping to get out tonight? Number one, we got like nine nights to go, what do you wanna get out tonight? No, you know, they'll usually say, oh look, hey, Damien, if I could have a conversation with a girl for two minutes, just a random girl I don't know, and actually staying there for two minutes, that would be epic because I've never done this before, and if I could just do that, that'd be so cool. Okay, so 45 minutes into our first night, they come to me like, Damien, this is so frustrating, this is killing me. Every time I'm in the conversation, around about five or 10 minutes and they're knocking me out of the interaction. Wait a minute, you just wanted two minutes. Now they come to me, you're upset because you're only getting five to 10 minutes. Mm-hmm, part of the human condition. Remember I talked about the whole cocaine problem? There's a come down, there is a come down with any hedonistic pleasure. With any hedonistic pursuit, there is a come down. Why? Because it's a goal oriented thing, we achieve it and then what does the brain do? Finds 15 other things we want. So before we attain the goal, we want a one thing after we attain the goal, what do we want, 15? I'll give you a better example. When I started School of Attraction, when I started as my first company that I got rolling off the ground, when I started this company, what did I want? I just wanted. I didn't need to be rich, this wasn't about money. All I wanted was a job that I enjoyed that I was really passionate about. Okay, that would make enough that I could just live on it. That was what I wanted, that was all. It wasn't about being big, it wasn't about anything but just being able to do what I love doing and make enough money doing it. Just enough, just enough to get by. So what do you think happened when I started making just enough to get by? Oh, God damn it. How long do you think that happiness lasted, by the way, guys? I didn't even notice it happened, right? And suddenly in my head I'm like, oh man, yeah, but imagine all the people I could influence if I was running in the whole of Australia. And imagine, imagine if we could get this going, imagine if we get this podcast going, imagine if, and I said, oh man, I should actually start using my life coaching more. Now that I'm well known as a dating coach, I'll start getting the life of a man, right? My wants multiplied exponentially, okay? I was less happy having achieved that goal than I was before I achieved it, even though it was something that I very much wanted. It didn't actually bring the happiness that in theory it should have, okay? So this is what Hedonia Graph actually looks like. When we, if you take someone who typically lives their lives pursuing any type of hedonistic result, okay, something that short lived, what essentially do you get guys? You get this, you get day one, you start low, you go, I wanna make myself happy, bam! Shoot up, yeah, I'm feeling great, I'm feeling great. How long does that last? We know it doesn't last very long, we shoot back down. The next day we say, oh no, no, no, I'm gonna do something to make myself happy again, happy again, happy again, bam, we shoot up. You get this typical up and down. I know, I know a lot of you guys recognize this. You recognize this and it might not be day to day, it might be one week to the other week, it might be hour to hour, but it's like, it's up and down, it's up and down, okay? It's manic depressive, but it's not clinical manic depressive, so you know, none of you are taking medication for it. But that's the thing, this is what's going on. Sure, you live some of your life up here, but where is so much of your life spent? Below the curve, not being satisfied, not being happy with the way your life's going. So what does it look like? Who can we look to for a role model for hedonistic living? For living your life, trying to keep that happiness bucket as full as possible, okay? Well, me personally, I like to choose this man here. He has, who would like to have some of what he's got? His money, his fame, his boyish good looks, right? His charm, he's got a lot of talent this guy, right? And let's face it, he's been filling that happiness bucket for quite a while, with women, with drugs, with success, money, it's coming in, and we all know that he's winning. He's winning, right? But he's not, and we all know it, this is not a happy person, this is not a guy, for everything he's got, I guarantee you, there's probably people in this, definitely people here who are happier than him, who actually get more out of life than this guy, okay? We all know that, we all know this common thing that you know, happiness, money doesn't buy happiness, success doesn't buy happiness, having 50 women on hand doesn't buy happiness, right? And then some smile ass always goes, yeah, but I was rich and I was sad, I just buy something to cheer myself up. That's what, that's what he does, doesn't work so well, right? You know, I've got a very big, who here is a fan at all of Buddhist philosophy? We're gonna have a few here in the audience, I'm a huge fan, I'm a huge fan. You know, religions are fascinating things to me, I'm not religious, but I've actually done a lot of reading about comparative religion and how religions form in this psychology and anthropology behind how religions develop over time. And one very interesting thing is, if you read the Bible, the Christian Bible, and you read that as an interpretation, not as heaven being this place where this person, God resides, and you just read it as heaven being a state of enlightenment, nirvana, okay? There's actually a lot of really interesting parallels between the Bible and Buddhist teaching, but that's a story for another day. If you read it that way, and then you look at statements like, you know, it's easier for a camel to pass with the eye of a needle than a rich man to get in heaven, this is the thing. And if you've traveled very often, well notice that people in poor countries seem happier than people in wealthy countries. They have less, they have terrible, terrible, often irrigation problems, terrible, terrible police, corruption everywhere, right? Life is tough, life expectancy is down, and yet what, they're happier, okay? It's not about the stuff we have, and I find it fascinating that we've known this for thousands of years and still hasn't sunk in into western psychology, western way of thinking, okay, that there's something going wrong here, okay? So let's have a look at the other style. What have we got? We've got something called eudaimonia, and it manifests itself in the human brain in a completely different way. So eudaimonia, guys, eudaimonia is essentially a state of doing, a state of pursuit, okay? Instead of looking for a specific end outcome, eudaimonia is a state of pursuit of something you love, a state of pursuit of something you love. It's not about attaining, it's not about an end outcome, it's just a matter of being in the process of going for what you want in life. You know, James touched on that briefly, right? You've gotta be a man that goes for what you like, but that's where the pleasure's gonna come from. That's where the pleasure has to be derived from, you go for what you want, and the more you do that in life, the more you start being someone who becomes, hey, this is what I want, this is the direction I'm heading, the more you start to light up this eudaimonic happiness, okay? Most people would explain it, hey, we've all had it before, right? You know when you start going to the gym, two weeks in a row, how is your feeling about life in general, up or down? And it stays up, right? Stays up for a period of time, not indefinitely, but it stays up, right? It stays up if you're at uni and you've actually been doing all your assignments on time. Where does it go? It stays up, right? It doesn't just go, yeah, I did my assignment, woo! Crap, now I'm gonna focus on doing 50 other assignments. Tends not to be, we actually feel good about ourselves. Even if we look and go, crap, I got 50 others to go, we feel good. We go, hey, I have accomplished one, yeah. I'm on the way, okay? I'm in the process. So, you know, right, eudaimonic pleasures include things like hobbies, things that we enjoy, things that we love, right? Surfing, rock climbing, if you may. I like some of this physical stuff, but it's gonna be different for different people, fitness, getting healthy, being in the process. If you go, I'm gonna be healthy, I'm gonna be fit, right? There isn't meant to be an endpoint goal. There really isn't. You are getting into shape, you are going to gym, right? I go to gym five, six days a week. You're doing this, why? Not because I'm going on a competition, not because I'm playing a sport, because I wanna be in shape. I'm in the process of being healthy, okay? It's just an ongoing pursuit. And that makes me happy, it makes me feel good, because I'm going in a direction of, I'm in the process of achieving. Me, what I do, I love what I do, okay? But I'll tell you, it's something really, really dangerous. Really dangerous for anyone, anyone. You talk to any of the coaches here, it's the same deal. The second you focus instead on money and end outcomes, and this is business, this isn't just teaching, dating coaching or life coaching. The second you start focusing on money, or the second you start focusing on end outcomes, it all falls to shit. It really does, it's really dangerous, it's very hard. You gotta run a business, you have to turn a profit to make sure you pay the people who work for you, et cetera, et cetera. But it's very dangerous. You get to become focused on money, my coaching goes down, my happiness goes down, my life contentment goes down, everything goes downhill. I have to be focused on a state of attainment, an ongoing state that this is the direction I wanna go. I'm moving this direction consistently, consistently, consistently. That's how I feel my happiness bucket, not with this, not with this hedonistic, oh, this makes me happy, so I'll throw it in the bucket, oh, this makes me happy, no. This is what I love, so I'm gonna pursue it. And being in pursuit of what I love, that fills my bucket, that makes me happy. It gives me confidence in who I am, it gives me clarity on who I am. And this is what you're gonna look like. You're not gonna stop having good and bad days. In fact, we're all aware of women's emotional cycles. A lot of you probably don't know men have cycles too. Our bodies actually go through hormonal cycles that just not as pronounced as a woman's and they're not timed around while bleeding from any part of our body. But we have them, we have them. So expect to have an up and down day, doesn't matter who you are, you're gonna have these ups and downs. But where do you spend most of your time? Above the curve. And where does it trend? It trends in an upwards direction. Why? Because the more you start pursuing this, the more content with life you become. And this is part of the secret. So who do we know? Who is someone that we can look to? Who is a role model that we can say, wow, this, wow, this guy, is pursuing what he wants, okay? Well, one of my heroes. Some of you recognize him or write it, some of you don't, okay? Hello clicker, Richard Branson. This guy does things because he loves them. Because they intrigue him. He has this compass that he follows, something I'm gonna talk to you about. This guy knows, and he follows it. And would we call him happy or unhappy? From everything we've read, from everything we've experienced about Richard Branson's life. Of course, absolutely, right? And it doesn't mean that he doesn't have a little bit of hedonia in his life. He has, yeah, he has no women everywhere, but he's got his wife, he's got his family, he's got Nekkar Island, there's enormous, freaking beautiful island, right? Of course, he buys himself these things, okay? But his life, what drives him on a day-to-day basis? What, when Richard Branson is faced with a life decision, do you think he goes, hmm, hmm? You know, this totally runs contrary to what I want to achieve in life, but yeah, whatever, it'll make me happy for a short while. So I have a decision-making process works, okay? Success in anything, to be successful in anything, anything that you're gonna be here talking about today, all the talkers, you're going to need to, what, be happy. If you're not happy about it, it's gonna be tough, it's gonna be tough. Just heard of Flo before, couple of you, couple of you. Flo was this concept that was first, was first studied by a Hungarian researcher, by the name of, anyone wanna tell me how to pronounce that? Yeah, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, right? It's a complicated name, it's a complicated guy. He had an amazing life through, you know, his family running away from World War II and all this crap going on, and he really had a tough childhood, and his research led to this concept called Flo. What is Flo? Flo is, how about I use the definition, the mental state of operation in which a person is performing an activity fully, and is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity, Flo. And what he found was that when someone's in this magical state, I'll talk a bit more about it in a second, when you're in this magical state, your creativity is off the charts. Your productivity is off the charts, and your ability to learn is off the charts, and it is one of the most pleasurable feelings. And there's no come down. So when will you get a state of Flo? Who here has found that they sit down to do a task? And maybe the task is writing a letter, for me it might be writing an article, for you it might be starting to write something, it could be an essay for something, it could be an email to someone, and you start writing it, and you're not necessarily that engaged, you start writing it, and after a while it just kind of just, you become totally locked in. And you're in this do state, and this is one of the beauties of being a man by the way, is that while we have a very undeveloped corpus callosum, that is a part that joins the left and right hemispheres, and we're not very good at multitasking, boy can we focus. We love our do state as men. And when we're locked into this state, we don't want anything to distract us, do we? We know it. Sometimes we get it when we're running, when sometimes we get it at the gym, sometimes we get it, sometimes we get it in an interaction with a woman, we're just in this state where everything fades away and just locked in that moment, okay? And when that happens, we learn the quickest, we feel the happiest, we feel this eudaimonic happiness state, okay? Video games, you probably might not know this, built around this concept of flow. So when does flow occur? Flow occurs, guys, when you're engaged in something, that's tricky, that's hard, that requires attention, but not so hard that it frustrates you. It's a magical state, and video games are all designed to keep you at just that level, just that level. They're designed every time, you know it starts easy, and then it gets harder and harder and harder. And ideally, the perfect video game gets harder at exactly the same rate that you learn. So it stays a little bit difficult, but not too difficult, because what happens if you're playing a video game, guys, and it gets just too tough? Yeah, you're like, ah, whatever, I'm gonna go get something to eat, I'm gonna leave this for another day, blah, blah, blah, but if you're just in that point where you're like, totally, oh, I can totally do this, I can totally do this, what happens? You lock in, right? I remember when I'm a kid, right? Mom comes in, Damien, you should have lunch, she goes, oh, I go, I have to do all this. You don't want anything, you don't want food, you don't want women, you don't want anything, because you're in that state of flow. That's exactly where you want to be, that's the only place you want to be. Businesses around the world are starting to adopt this idea of flow, okay, because if they can get their work people into this state more often, they're gonna be more productive, and they're gonna be happier, and they're not gonna leave the job, it wins on all fronts. Flow is a perfect example of a eudaimonic happiness state. It's a perfect example of it. Guys, we have studied extensively, exhaustively, put a lot of people through these MRI machines, who wants to guess who would be the happiest people we've ever recorded? Ever, who might that be? And I'm not just talking happier, like an average person schools like a seven out of 10, this person's like an eight out of 10, okay? When we put the right people through these machines, they're scoring like well off the charts compared to the average. Ridiculous, who are they guys? Meditative monks. When we put them through these MRI machines, these guys get off the charts. What does that mean? It means that when we look at their brains, when something bad happens, okay? The amount of glutacoid stress hormones that course through their bodies is so much lower. So much lower than the average person. So they're straight away, they're fearless reactive, right off the bat. And then the amount of the amount of endorphins, the amount of counter glutacoid breakdown products that they create, off the charts. So not only do they not get really bugged by things when things go wrong, when things don't go the way they want, none of that, but it lasts like five seconds. Bam, problem solved. Yeah, okay, not a little bit annoying for whatever. Ah, wouldn't it be great if we could go through life like that? Okay, if things could go totally wrong and we can just be like, oh man, that's a shame. Okay, anyway, wouldn't that be amazing? Wouldn't that be, that's what these people do. And there's a book that I recommend you guys read by the way called The Happiest Man Alive. The Happiest Man Alive, okay? It's about, I think it's a French microbiologist who actually leaves his life to become a monk. And he's the man, he's the head man that they were testing doing a lot of these tests with. Okay, and it was completely off the charts. And he's written a book about this concept of happiness as well. So how does a Buddhist monk live their lives? I'm sure some of you guys know, okay? First thing they do is they forgo any ownership. Okay, ownership, monks can't own anything, right? They live their lives from donation, but they're not allowed to own. The other thing they do is their whole lives are about pursuit. What? Pursuit of being present, okay? Pursuit of understanding the philosophy that is Buddhism. Pursuit of trying to spread and trying to make the world a better place. It's pursuit, there's no end point goal in their lives. Okay? They're not allowed to go, oh, I wanna get that car. I wanna get that mobile phone. Their lives are locked down. You don't want your lives to be locked down. But it's a case in point. It's an extreme example. It's an extreme example of how this all fits together. These happiest people in the world. We can move in this direction without having to forgo everything in the world, but I'll tell you what, that is the easiest way to do it. But I like sex way too much to become a monk. I consider it for about five seconds. So guys, here's the thing. How do we go about, it's all great. You know, there's all this theory I've shared with you. How does this come together in a way that we can go, okay, this sounds interesting. I wanna be happier. How are you gonna put that into your lives on some sort of a way that makes some sort of God damn sense. Okay, first things first. We have been told ad nauseam, okay, create this, where do you wanna be in 10 years? Where do you wanna be in 10 years? Create this massive goal. This is what I get taught at life coaching too, right? Create this massive goal. You know, like I don't say I wanna make $100,000 a year. They say I wanna make $100 million a year, right? Create these massive, these bags, right? For these big, hairy, audacious goals for yourself. And you create these goals and you work really hard towards them. That's what most of us are taught, one way or another, okay? We're taught this and here's the problem. The more specific and the more big, hairy, and audacious your goal is, the more you just spend time tolerating your life, tolerating all the shit you have to go through to get that goal, okay? I imagine quite a few of you feel like you're tolerating life until you get to a point you're trying to achieve. You're just tolerating this shit in the middle, right? Some of you may be here thinking, ah, I wanna be better with women. I wanna be healthier. I wanna be fitter. I wanna be more successful financially. This is the shit I've gotta go through to get there. Who feels that way? Yeah, of course, that's the natural way of thinking a lot of us have is, how the hell can you be happy if your life is constantly in a state of, well, this is the shit I have to go through until I get there? Because remember, when you get there, you're gonna find 15 other things you want and then you just go through more shit until you get there and then you get that and then you go through more shit until you get there. But you see, we're locked in this chronic state of not allowing ourselves to actually be happy, okay? It's dangerous. So, the first thing I wanna do is think of any long-term goal and scratch that bad boy off the list if it's specific because long-term, it changes. Whatever you want now is in next year gonna be totally different and it should be allowed to be different. It's the future. It's vague. Every single one of us, James said absolutely perfectly, we should always be learning. We should never stop. And if you're still learning, something may change next year about what you want in the next 10 years, okay? So what we wanna do is we wanna set ourselves up instead, guys, with a long-term goal, with a direction. Forget goals. I'll come back to them. What you wanna look at is a direction. What's the direction that I wanna go? And what do I mean by this? Well, okay, let me give you my directions, okay? For me, my directions are, I wanna influence positively as many people's lives as possible. I wanna be healthy as healthy as possible and I wanna educate myself as much as possible. I'm a huge fan of learning, okay? I'm addicted to it. That's my goals and what happens is, anytime something comes up in my life, a friend says, hey, let's do this or a larger life decision. Shall I move here or shall I move there or shall I spend money on this? Shall I spend money on that? All I need to do is consult these goals of mine, these directions and say it's a compass. Okay, it's a compass that we all have and it's different for all of us and it points to where we want our lives to be going. So anytime an important life decision comes up, what do I do? I look at this compass, I say, ah, does, if I decide to do this, will I get, will I influence more people? Will I be healthier? Or where am I going to learn something valuable? And the answer is no. Then that's a really shitty decision to make. But it's a direction. Our lives should have direction, direction's important. So the first thing I want you guys to do, right now, I want you to take a moment and I want you to think what's my direction? And it doesn't have to be specific. Words, individual words are enough, okay? Have a think for a moment, guys. Things like adventure is a word, peace is a word, success is a word, love is a word. Anything that you can think of, what's the direction your life should be heading? What's a vague notion of what words resonate with you? What words do you want, would you want written on your avatar? Is boring a word you want written on your avatar? No, maybe it's then exciting as a word that means something to you, okay? Do you want to be recognized for having innovated something? Or do you just want to be recognized for being loyal? All these things represent a direction. Guys, just have a moment, have a think, get down a couple of words, okay? I'm going to keep talking for a second just to give you a chance. Why? Because I want you to have a direction. Because I want to finish this talk and you all know roughly, this is where I'm headed in life. This is where my life is going. That's important. Very important. So here's the thing, we have a general direction in life. And I know again through my coaching that a lot of people, they have this whole kind of long-term game plan, again long-term, and we think to ourselves, well, this week I'm going to do that, next week I'm going to do that, and next week I'm going to do that, and this is the game plan, and this is how it's all going to fit together. I know this is a lot for developing businesses as well. It's a long five-year business plan, yada yada, short-term, medium-term, long-term. This is terrible stuff, guys. What you want to focus on, and this is what I say with my students, and it works magically every time, only ever focus on the next step. The next step of your life is the only thing that matters. At any point in your life, the next step is the only thing that matters. Everything else is mental masturbation. Everything else is totally useless to you, only your next step, okay? I don't allow anyone that I work with to create goals further than a week ahead of time, because otherwise it's mental masturbation. And if we create goals that are further than a week in time, what do we start to do? Even if it's subconsciously, we create big goals. Big, hairy, audacious things that we want to achieve for achievement's sake, right? And when you set goals, here's another part of your goal. Your goals that you set aren't allowed to be dependent on an outcome. See, here's another mistake we make. Typically, for example, guys go out, they go out to a club, they want to meet some girls, and what do they do? They say, well, tonight, man, tonight, dude, I'm telling you what, I'm gonna get three numbers. That's my goal tonight. My goal tonight is get three numbers. My goal tonight, guys, is tonight, man, I'm getting late. That's it, that's my goal. I'm gonna frickin' kick my ass until I get late tonight. And here's the problem. It's outcome-oriented. It's outcome-oriented. And outcome-oriented with any goal is wrought with danger. Why? Because how much control do you have over making sure that goal is successful, right? If we can have influence over it, sure, right? Take some guys who have practiced a lot, meeting women, picking them up. How much control do they have over it? Well, they've got a decent amount of influence. They don't have control, okay? Short of man handling the woman, they don't have control. So what does this teach you? You don't have control over your life. So what you want to start doing, guys, is any short-term goals you have, it's got to be something you do. Something that only relies on you, and it doesn't require any type of result to happen. What do I mean? Well, when I'm with students that go out, what are their goals? Well, their goals might be, I have to ask three women for a number tonight. Their goals might be, I have to approach nine girls tonight, okay? When I'm setting up goals for me throughout the week, my goal isn't, my goal here, guys, isn't to, my goal is to be here and have you guys love me. My goal is to be here and do everything I can to have the greatest influence possible. That's it, because this, this is part of my eutomonic goals. This is part of my compass. This brings me closer to what? Influencing as many people as possible. It satisfies that. And guess what? It also satisfies education, because I'm gonna hear some great stuff from some of the other speakers. So it's big, it's epic. It's really, really important. So guys, what I want you to have a think about now is what are three things over the next week? Three things that you are in control of that's actually gonna move you closer to these eutomonic outcomes. Have a think about it. You wrote down before that you wanted to be something. Okay, let's say that you wrote, I want to be adventurous. Let's say you wrote that down. That's one of my keywords, adventure. My life needs adventure. Whatever I do, adventure has to be one of the things I'm looking for. If I have a decision and adventure is the direction it could take me in, let's take it. Ah, so you might have a goal. Remember, let's only worry about the next step, guys. So you've got a goal tonight, I'm gonna go home. And I'm gonna make a short list of all these things I could do, all these activities that won't cost too much money, that are gonna bring adventure into my life. So you go home tonight and you sit down and you think, oh, okay. Kayaking, surfing, rock climbing. I could join an urban exploration group. You start making this list. You start making this list and as you go into this list, you're gonna get into what state of flow? Because you're gonna start to get excited about it. It's something you want. It's something you've wanted to do but haven't done enough of yet. So you go home, you've made this list for yourself. How do you think you're gonna feel tomorrow when you come back into this room? Okay, you're not gonna feel let down that you made the list. You're gonna feel happy. You're gonna feel, that's cool. I'm actually moving in the direction I want my life to go. I'm in that process now. I'm in that process now and that's gonna make you feel better than if you go home tonight and do a line of coke. It's gonna make you feel better than if you go home tonight and you have some chocolate cake. It's gonna make you better than if you feel better than if you go home and you go, geez, I'm just gonna head out with the boys and I'll worry about the list another time. We know that feeling. We know that you guys all know that feeling when you pursue something. You want something in life and you make another decision that'll also make you happy but it's only short-term happiness decision and there's always that disappointment that comes along with it. You guys know that feeling. We all know that. The more we do that, okay? The more our state of mind gets degraded. So what I want, guys, I wanna remind you of something. I wanna remind you, first of all, we're talking about tonight. So first of all, guys, happiness has to be derived from pursuit. It cannot be derived from end outcomes. It has to be. Our state of mind, our happiness, our unimmoning happiness, which is the one that doesn't have a massive bounce up and down, the one that's called general life satisfaction. It's about pursuit. It's not about achieving a specific end outcome. Okay, you must know what direction your life is moving. Each and every one of you, every human alive needs to have this. You don't wanna compass. It's the direction upon which all of your life decisions are made and I know the majority of you don't have this. So how the hell do you know what decisions to make when decisions are put forward to you? Okay, then you must make all your decisions based on your unimmoning compass. You gotta make those decisions. Get into the habit. It's hard in the beginning. It's a bit tricky in the beginning, but once you start doing it, your quality of life, it starts to go up. It starts to increase. Okay, your confidence in yourself goes up. Okay, you need this stuff whether you wanna be successful, whether you wanna be successful in business. James was talking about that in a state of mind where you're like, you know, I deserve this. When you are someone who pursues this, guess what you feel like? Yeah, I deserve. I deserve, because I'm a man who's pursuing what he wants. And trust me, as a guy, when you live a life like that, there's a girl feeling that comes along with it. It's part of what you all want. It's part of what makes you more attractive to women. It's part of what makes you more attractive to potential business prospects, marketing people. It's part of what's gonna get you a raise at work is if you've got that, yeah, I'm a guy who goes after what he wants. He's in the active pursuit of what I want. That makes you more attractive to anyone who matters in your world. And the guys, you, all of your specific goals are gonna be short term and outcome independent. So all of your goals need, anything you wanna achieve in life needs to be outcome independent. Guys, the second we rely on outcome, we're unhappy. If you don't believe me, look at every time in your lives when you've gone for a goal that depended on a certain outcome, you got the outcome, what happened? You started looking for five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 other outcomes after that. Okay, the happiness of achieving that is incredibly short lived, very, very short lived. Now to close off today, guys, I wanna kinda give you all a present, a parting gift, okay? Now I've said a lot of stuff today, but there's one thing I can tell you all for sure, because I don't know any of you personally. One thing I do know for sure is that you will all have a eudaimonic goal that involves improving your life. You are all interested in growing as human beings. And I'm quite sure that's a part of all of your eudaimonic compass. And if I don't do anything more, it's gonna be too easy for all of you to say, hey, that was really interesting. And then forget and then keep going on with this event and say, oh, I better learn something else interesting because I am, after all, giving away three days of my life to hear these talks. What are you? You're outcome dependent, guys. I want you guys, I wanna anchor in all of you the ability to be happy because you're way here, because just by being here, no matter how good you thought my talk was, no matter how good you thought everybody else's talk is going to be, just the mere fact that you're here in pursuit of something that you want, that's where your happiness comes from. So what I'm gonna get you guys to do, I'm gonna get you guys right now, okay, I want you to think it's too, sorry, congratulate as sincerely as possible three people around you right now. As sincerely as possible, guys, get up and thank three people as sincerely as you can, congratulate them for being here pursuing the unimmonic goals. Okay, guys, grab a seat, congratulations. Okay, I've just done something else. Okay, it's called peer-based reinforcement. It's something that happens to coaches. The second someone's called a coach and they say to someone, you must always approach. You must always approach a goal. You must always follow your unimmonic goals. The second you start doing that and the second you congratulate other people for doing it, okay, it creates this really powerful psychological effect that sits up and praising other people for it. I should do it myself. Ah, peer-based reinforcement works both ways. Someone else has come to you and congratulated you for doing something and also anchors the fact that you doing that is the right thing to be doing. So I hope, guys, I hope that after today you appreciate every moment that you'll hear is someone who's being in a state of achieving what they want. Because that's how you be happy in life. That's how you win. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how successful you are. It doesn't matter how many women you bet, what matters is that you're happy. And if you're happy and you get the other things great, good for you. But if you're not happy, do we get you lose it life, okay? You're Charlie Sheen, winning. There's no point. There's no point if you're not happy. No point at all. So guys, thank you very much for being here today. I'm gonna ask you all. I'm gonna ask you all if you've got any questions, things you'd like to ask me about what I've been talking about. Cool, yes. Hey, man, thanks for the speech, man. I really resonated with everything you said. So I got into personal development about a year ago and about six months ago, I started setting. So I got into dating, gymming. I was balancing all with university. So six months ago, I started setting yearly goals, three month goals and weekly goals in, say, like, six or seven facets of my life. So I'd be making weekly improvements in each facet. So then I was balancing it with uni and uni got really overwhelming on top of everything, my relationship. I was trying to jam, I was trying to read personal development books. So then to balance my state out, what happened a couple of months ago, I burnt out really bad. So I was just overwhelmed. So I was like, I need to balance this. In the morning, I'd be doing empowering questions just to focus my positive state. In the meantime, I'd be meditating just to calm myself down. So could I just go take, or do you all take them? Just how to pursue a balance and manage your stress while you're trying to improve yourself and develop? Okay, so I avoid burning out, yeah. Yeah, that's a good question because balance is a really tricky thing. It doesn't just trick you at uni, man. It gets harder as you get older. The more successful you wanna be, the more you wanna achieve in life, the more balance you gotta try to find. Ah, big question. So for a lot of us, this is the problem, guys. Is more of you really have this question sitting at the back of your mind? Absolutely, I'm sure you do. So yes, that's a great question. So how to find balance? Okay, the first thing is part of your great amount of stress more than you probably realize comes from having these result-based goals. This becomes a big problem. Having goals that you need a result from creates a lot of the stress that you're experiencing. A second part of it is this fact that you probably don't have a compass. You probably don't have a hierarchy in your world. This is getting back to more classical life coaching stuff, but we all need a hierarchy. And we actually need to know what has to exist in my life and what do I want in my life. So for example, if you're a student, you may say, well, hey, an education has to happen right now, right? It can happen later, but man, for me, it has to happen right now. A relationship, I don't know. That changes from man to man. But if you don't have a hierarchy, you'll never know where to put things so that they balance. Does that make sense? For me, I love, there's a couple of things I love. I love rock climbing. I love salsa. I love martial arts. But there's no salsa, there's very little salsa and no martial arts in my life. Why? Because I've chosen rock climbing as the highest priority for my hobbies, yeah? So that's an example. There has to be priority. And you have to actually be willing to knock things out. That's just part of everyday life, based on that priority. But all that comes with having this moral compass. But yeah, priority is kind of the key to that. Not a problem, man. Anybody else, guys? Just put your hand up and I'll, oh, yep, fantastic. First of all, thank you for the speech. Not a problem. Thanks for bringing me along. It was my idea to come in. Yep. He had an extra ticket, and told me to come down. But what you said resonated with what I've been thinking about and a lot of stuff straight away to you. One question I do have. A few years ago, I used to study a bit of philosophy. Yeah. And I want to know, is it all about the pursuit of happiness? Ah, that's a good question. Yes, I would say so. Being in the pursuit of something that you love, I would usually say being in the pursuit of passion or being in the pursuit of love, right? But other people would call it the pursuit of happiness. But it's dangerous because we're all, any human being, we're wired to be in the pursuit of happiness. We always have been. I don't need to tell you. Guys, stop pursuing unhappiness. Just pursue happiness. Don't worry about that, I'm happy to stop it. You know, I'm not making fun of you. I just mean, obviously, we're all wired to do that. So to say, to me to say, being in the pursuit of happiness is dangerous. Why? Because Charlie Sheen is in the pursuit of happiness. You know, he's sleeping with lots of girls, he's doing lots of coke, he's doing what he does in the pursuit of trying to be happy, but it doesn't make him happy. So there's an art form to the pursuit of happiness. And to me, that's again, pursuing the right type of happiness in the right way. That, is that, does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, we're wired that way. We're endocrinologically developed that way. Okay, it doesn't matter how much you wanna escape it, guys. We have a limbic system that is an emotional part of our brain that's kinda wedged here, right inside. And its whole existence is to get us to run away from things that feel like shit and to run towards things that bring us happiness. Yeah, but like I said, you gotta be careful. There's two types of happiness. But yeah, absolutely. As far as I'm concerned, the more happy you are, because that's the way you're developed, the more you're gonna enjoy life. So yeah, I'll put it that way. Two more questions, guys. Yes. Where does the feeling of content fall into play? So contentness. Being content. Yeah, so being content is much closer to eudaimonia. But there's content, which is toleration content. And there's content which is, I'm really happy with who I am content. So content actually kind of has, is another one of those words that has multiple meanings. You know, you can say, oh look, I'm content with how things are, which is like, I'm tolerating this crap until I get there, I'm not happy enough to tolerate it. Or there's content with, I'm quite happy with things. If nothing changed, I'm totally happy. There's a very different thing. So the content, which is I'm really happy with things, that's eudaimonia. The content, which is where I'm just tolerating for things to keep going on, then it becomes, no, that's all wrong. But it's different definitions for the same word. Cool. Oh, cool. Thanks very much, Damian. Thanks for the call. My question was, why do you think that the stuff that you've talked about. Isn't valued in our modern society, in our world? Right. Well, that's a big question. In my opinion, part of it is because the stuff that I talk about doesn't make as much money. Essentially, I mean, money drives our commerce. And our commerce has been entirely dependent on people consuming since about the, what is it, the 15 or 1600s? Anyone know more about finance than me? Once we invented money lending, okay, which was used to be illegal, by the way, called usury. But once we started inventing that, we had to start spending. Because if we didn't keep spending as a culture, in fact, if people, by the way, if everyone pays off their loan at once, our economy disappears and our money has no value. Interesting thought. But yeah, so a lot of it depends on the consumerism. Because what you find is the more consumerist a country, the lower this eudaimonic happiness becomes. Why? Because to consume, you have to be focused on the fact, on these hedonistic pleasures. You have to be focused on the idea that I can't be happy unless I attain something physical, focused on end point, and you can't be happy with that end point. You have to keep one a new end point so that you drive the economy. So in my mind, why? Because I don't think that there's any one person overarching, oh, yeah, excellent, yes, yes, keep them far away from the eudaimonic goals. But what's happening is it's just this, the way that our financial culture has to work, for people to be successful financially, people have to keep spending. So what do we do? We create ads that say, you're not perfect until, yeah, you're not cool until, have a cigarette, yeah. So our culture has actually created this whole way. That's why I believe, I believe it all has everything to do with money and our financial system, yeah. Yeah, Damien, thanks for the speech, it was very informative. My question relates kind of what was just asked. You said the pursuit of happiness, there's no real end state. Is that what you're saying? Yes, absolutely. Where do you rate self-actualization? If at all you do. Yeah, no, to me, it's all part of the same thing. I mean, what you're doing when you're fine, can I ask you one more question? Hold on to that, Mike. What do you mean by self-actualization? Because there's a lot of words that have multiple meanings, of course. So just try to explain that a little bit. A point at which you would be content. Point? With where you are at life and I can. Okay, so to me, if you say a point at which you're content becomes an endpoint goal. And if you find someone whose goal was to be content, whose goal was to find that endpoint goal to be content, they're likely not to have found it. If someone's whole life purpose is just to learn to be more and more content on an ongoing basis, they're far more likely to get there. I find it's actually quite dangerous. The idea that a lot of people have, which is when I have this I'm gonna be content. Because content self-actualization often depends on certain achievements. So to me, I thought once upon a time I was gonna be self-actualized. If people just recognized me as having interesting valuable things to say and I could have a positive impact on people's lives and that paid for my livelihood, then I'd be self-actualized. But as you can see, as I was explaining, I don't feel self-actualized as a result because it becomes a point in the future. What you'll find is that monks, even meditative monks as amazing as they are on an FMRI machine, there are still moments where they go up and down. So there are moments when they feel less content, moments where they feel more content, but their bodies are much better at dealing with those ups and downs. But yeah, I find it dangerous. If you look at a point, what you should be in is a constant pursuit of being self-actualized, which is where this you don't wanna compass comes from. What you're doing, you're constantly moving in direction that actualizes helps you discover more and more about who you are. Understood, yeah. Thank you. Thanks, buddy. Fantastic, guys, that's the last question. That's it, that's it. Awesome, thank you very much, guys. And again, just like James said, I love what I do. I love talking to people about work. I love influencing people's lives. I love having a positive impact on the way that they exist. I do love that. So if you wanna come and talk to me at any point, please feel free, I'm always available. Again, if I'm annoyed, I'll tell you, I'll just say leave me alone. Hey, those of you who come up to me and ask questions are the ones who are far more likely to actually progress in life. I noticed that with all my students, the students who actually push the hardest to learn the most to really grasp what they're trying to grasp, they're the ones who get the furthest. So don't be shy, guys. Thank you very much.