 Welcome to the 21 convention Miami, Florida 2016 and this speaker is one of the most amazing guys that I love to watch. Super, super good friend of mine man, but let me just tell you as a teacher of social dynamics for many years and watching somebody else who is such an excellent teacher but also changing his own life and grow that to me is what a leader does. I'm about to bring on stage a super cool guy hanging out with them all the time in Austin, Texas. His name is Nick Sparks and let's rock it. Hey guys, it's good to be here. I'm really, really, really excited to be here. You know I love this convention. I love getting to hang out with all the speakers, getting to talk, getting to spend some time together. I'm really excited to hang out with all of you. For any new guys, if you see me anytime this weekend, please, like you want to talk to me, you have a question, don't hesitate, say hi. That's what I'm here for all weekend. I'm just really excited and yeah, we're doing good things with speakers. So my speech today is called Why Falling in Love Sucks and I was probably more nervous about this speech than probably any other speech I've given on this stage. I've been doing this a while and I'm always nervous when I'm standing up here speaking. I don't know if that's ever going to go away but before the speech leading up to it, I was really more nervous about this one in particular. I was talking to Suck about this last night and one of the main reasons why is because all the other speeches I've given, I had rehearsed that stuff hundreds of times with guys I'd worked with, with clients, fine-tuning it, saying something different every time, seeing what works better, seeing what doesn't, seeing what's more effective. I was really insanely comfortable with that material. I did my sleep. This stuff, I've never actually delivered it all together like this, maybe a random conversation here or there but all together like this at once. So I'm not as comfortable with it. And Socrates asked me right after I said that, he asked me, well why are you doing it? Why are you delivering this speech on this topic today? And I really didn't hesitate when I answered him. The answer was because this is something that's very personal for me. I got the idea for this speech just this past January or so. And it's really not coincidental that that's the time when I came up with this speech idea because that is all the time that I had my last really not so great breakup. And this one wasn't my first breakup. We'd only been together for six months or so. By this point I'd been through this so many times. I was pretty much an expert at knowing when things were starting to get a little unhealthy, cutting it off, taking care of myself, rebounding. I could deliver a speech on that. Maybe I will. But I'd gone through that process so many times I was really good at it. But this time it really hit me particularly hard because this was already a pattern I had repeated so many times in my life. I'd like to see if anybody in here can relate to the same pattern. So I'm going to do something. I'm going to start to describe this pattern as I've experienced it. And if you can relate to it, I just want you to raise your hand. If I go on and I start talking about something that you can't relate to as much, go ahead and take your hand down. I'll try to not drag this on too long so you're not holding your hand up. So first of all, first step of the pattern. I'm out there, I'm single, meet a girl, meet a woman. We have this connection, we have this spark, we have this chemistry. Everything's great, right? Honeymoon phase, everything's perfect, butterflies, sunshine. I feel incredible, right? Who's been there? All right, got most of us, got most of us. Keep your hands up, keep your hands up because we're going to keep going with this. So next step, put your hand down if you can no longer relate to this pattern, right? Next step, all of a sudden things start getting kind of crappy in the relationship. Start fighting about nothing, really, arguing resentment, builds. It starts to drain you more and take more away from you, right? We've all been there. Keep your hands up if this still relates to you, great. I'm going to try to make this fast, my hand's getting tired too, right? Then comes the crappy breakup, right? Leaves you pretty low, leaves you pretty rough, hurts both people, messy situation, right? That's like on a good time, you just kind of break up and it sucks. Bad stuff happens, maybe one, one of you, both of you cheats, right? A lot of pain, a lot of suffering. We've all been there, right? Then you're low, then you've got to claw and drag yourself, build your confidence back up, brick by brick, you know, heal yourself, mend from those wounds, right? Start all over again, say, alright, I'm ready again. I'm ready to find somebody new, right? I see pretty much everybody that's done that first one is now still has their hands up. I don't think anyone who raised their hands initially put their hand down through that entire, you can put your hands down now, right? But why is that? Why did we all keep our hands up? We all fell in love, right? Like I've been taught by movies my entire life that when you fall in love, that's the happily ever after we've been all waiting for. Why is it that we still all had our hands up for the rest of the crap? Why wasn't that all of our happy ending right then and there? So I've been through this pattern more than most people, seven or eight times probably in my life, give or take. And like I said, after time, after time, you think you're going to do something different, right? I'm not going to date that kind of person again, right? I'm going to pick somebody different next time. It's not going to be like the last one. It's going to be different. And then it happens again. But okay, I learned. But now I know. Now I know differently. I'm going to do something different this time. And then it happens again. So like I said, by this last time, it really hit me hard. You start to question what's wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? Why can't I get this right? So like I said, this speech is is one that's very personal for me. And so here I was last January, right, seeing this pattern in my life, wanting to break it, trying different things, trying to change it. And I've got to like, there's got to be something I'm missing. There's got to be something I'm doing wrong. What is it? It had to be one thing. There was only one other thing that I hadn't looked at yet. There was one other thing that I hadn't questioned. But it couldn't be that thing. There's no way because once again, I've been told my entire life that this was the greatest thing in the universe. This was the ultimate happy ending. This was the ultimate happily ever after. It couldn't possibly be this thing, right? But I was out of options. I had nothing else left. So I started examining, right, this thing. Before we go any further, if you are reasonably intelligent, if you have like, if you have a logical brain whatsoever right now, you're probably looking at me or you should be looking at me and asking yourself, Nick, you clearly have not had the most ideal relationship history. I think you've made that point abundantly clear. Why the hell should we listen to you give a talk about relationships? That's a good question. It's really tough for me to fault that logic right there. Not claiming to be a relationship expert. However, as I mentioned, I've been through this process more than most people. I've been through the pain. I've been through the hurt. I've been through all of that more than most people. So I may not know better than anyone what to do. But however, I know better than most people what not to do. I'm basically an expert on what not to do when it comes to relationships. So we're also going to be talking about the things to do because I've done a lot of research on that. But I'm standing up here today because if you can take something from my experience, if you can go through half the painful experiences that I've been through and hurt half of the amount of people in turn as I have, I feel pretty happy about where this is all going. So we're going to go ahead and move on to talk about this whole phenomenon of love. I'm saying it sucks. What is this thing that we're talking about that sucks? Before we even jump further, I want a minute to define what is this thing? When I say falling in love sucks, what do I mean specifically? What is this falling in love phenomenon? You may recall from your middle school social studies books that the Greeks had three different words for love. Anybody recall that? Middle school social studies? Yeah, right? You had friendly love.