Bob Proctor

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Bob Proctor and author, lecturer, counselor, business consultant, entrepreneur, and teacher of positive thinking, self motivation

and maximizing human potential and that endeavor. He follows in the footsteps of such motivational giants as Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, and Wallace D. Waddles. Bob is the author of numerous books, including the international bestseller You Were Born Rich. His latest book is called The A b CS of Success. He was prominently featured in the book and movie The Secret

by Rohnda Burne. And we invite you to go look at the free resource guide of Bob's three favorite books of all time, his three favorite songs to stay inspired, and his three favorite books he has written, and you can find that at one you feed dot net slash Bob. The last thing I'd like to mention before we get started is that Eric is doing some one on one coaching.

So if you feel like you could do some help with whatever is going on in your life, and if you'd like to go a little further with some of the principles we discuss on the One you Feed, you can talk to Eric and set up some coaching sessions. Just send a request to Eric at one you feed dot net. And with that, here's the interview with Bob Proctor. Hi, Bob, welcome to the show. Thank you, good to be here. Thank you. I'm I'm excited to get you on because one of the things that we're going to spend a

little bit of time talking about is positive thinking. And listeners of the show know that I have some um, you know, I have my I have my concerns about some positive thinking, and some things in your new book really um set that up a lot, and I think give us a lot of good things to talk about. So I'm excited to explore that. But first, let's start with the way we always start, which is the parable of the two wolves. There's a grandfather who's talking with

his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other there's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, you know it is the parable, but it's also very true. We have a paradigm that's genetic and environmental, and it really controls the life of the vast majority of people and Unfortunately, we keep feeding it, and it stops us sent our tracks. It will not let us grow, and it it dominates

the thinking of most people. But we've also been given the ability to originate, to create thoughts or Drawd's highest form of creation. And if we will feed that side of ourselves, if we will strengthen it, develop it, it will beat the bad wolf. But the big bad wolf is the paradigm, and unfortunately it wins in the life of too many people. So I'd like to start off by asking you a little bit about you are. You are well known for having been featured in the movie

The Secret, which has the Law of attraction. And I've heard you say that the movie based on the Law of attraction is pop culture fluff. What what do you mean by that? Well, the movie left people with the idea that you get what you want, and you do not get what you want. Once are they're they're part of the intellect. They're you can have a want, it's an idea in your conscious mind, but you're not going to get that unless that want is internalized and turned

into a desire. And if that doesn't happen, the want's not going to happen. Now, vibration is a law like gravity. It's always been here. It's not a new idea. It wasn't originated in The Secret. But I'd also like to mention I think on to Burn accomplish what she wanted to accomplish. In The Secret got a lot of people

thinking about themselves and about the law. Our brain is like an electro magnetic machine, and whatever we think controls the vibration we're in, and we change the vibration momentarily as we change our thinking. But we can only attract to us what we're environmenting with. If I turned my radio one, I'm only going to get what's on that frequency. I'm not going to get something else. If I'm on a talk station, I'm not going to get candle light

in line music. Well, if you're feeding not they could evolved that bad wolf and you're worrying and you're thinking negative thuts, you're on a frequency that can only attract negative energy. So the law of vibration is attraction is a secondary law. The law of vibration is the primary law. The entire universe moves. We live in an ocean of motion.

Nothing rests. There's no such thing as in their ships um and the vibration we're in is dictated by what's going on in our subconscious mind, what we impress upon it. So I've heard you also say that positive thinking alone does not deliver, It does not fulfill. In fact, it frustrates you because it is not in harmony with what we do. Thinking about music will not make you a musician. Practicing music will well, I mean, that's so true. We the belief that we just get what we think about

is a men. We get what we internalize. I think James Allen puts it very well. He said, you become what you are, and you are the sum total of your thoughts. It's the thoughts that you internalize. Just see just thinking something. Thinking is a function of the conscious mind, and it's done with your reasoning factor, one of your higher faculties. And you can think about something until you're

old and gray. If you don't internalize those thoughts and make them a part of your being, is never gonna happen. And I think that's where a lot of people get They just they get off tracked. They know that's where a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. You know, the power of positive thinking a great book, but it goes far beyond just thinking. Now, positive thinking is required, but you've got to internalize it and then from their act

upon it. That's right, that's right. Well, if you internalize it, if you keep impressing it upon your subjective mind, you are going to act on it. See, whatever is impressed must be expressed, and the expression is the action. The expression is the idea that you are, uh, that you're thinking about and internalizing. Desire was put very well by Wallace Waddles. He said, desire is the effort of the unexpressed possibility within, seeking an expression without through your action.

So you build the want in your conscious mind with your intellect, and then you internalize that want, and if you keep getting emotionally involved with it, it will turn into a desire. And then the desire is what's fueling the expression. It's the expression of the ideas that you're emotionally involved with. The action will follow. I've heard you say that discipline is sort of the very most basic thing we have to have. We have to have the ability to uh say to ourselves, we're going to do

something and then do that thing. Um that seems to be it's easy to say, and I agree with you that we can't get anywhere without it. How do we build that discipline? Is that part of what you're talking about here, that is you, as these things become true desires, not just thoughts in the mind, that we will act in harmony with those. We will we will we will have the ability to do the things that we deeply want.

A person will never get anywhere with our discipline, Because if you're really going to improve the quality of your life, you have to change your paradigm. You have to change that part of you that's in control of you most of the time, and that takes a respectable amount of discipline. This I will do, and then you've got to do it. It's giving yourself a command and then follow it. Let me read to something here that I think is incredible.

The mind that is properly disciplined and directed to definite ends is an irresistible power that recognizes no such reality of permanent defeat. It organizes defeat and converts it into victory. Now, that was Carnegie's idea that he gave to Hill, and all the way through it he talks about discipline. He said, the mechanism of the mind is a a found system of organized power which can be released only by one means, and that is by strict self discipline. You see, I

think as children we can be taught that. I wasn't. But I think we can be taught that the same as we're taught a language or how to walk and talk. The problem is we're not people that are successful. I'm talking about the the top two three, their disciplined individuals. They give themselves a command and follow up, and the others, unfortunately, are not. So let's take that other. We say we're going to do something, we don't. We start something, we quit,

We we clearly don't have that discipline. What are some of the ways that people can start to build that that discipline in themselves, because it seems pretty fundamental that without that everything else is going to uh, you know, we're just not going to be successful. So what are some very practical, short term steps people can take to start to build that disciplin that if they don't have it today. Well, you're perfectly right, it is very fundamental.

But I see, I believe our our real problem is that we don't understand ourselves. We don't understand our mind or how it functions, and we're not taught anything about it. As we go through school, I have found psychiatrists that really do not understand it from a practical perspective. And it's the paradigm where the problem lies. And the paradigm is both genetic and environmental. It's the conditioning that takes place. Um, you look like some of your relatives, just like I

look like some of mine. Well, that comes out in genetic conditioning. At the moment of inception, conception, the the the genes are forming the nucleus of you, your mother's and your dad's. But where did they come from their mothers and dads? And it goes back and we don't we're not sure how far back it goes. And then after birth, your your programmed by environment Carl Manninger from the Manager Foundation, since it is more important in heredity, Well,

we've got to understand that paradigm. And if we're not understand we're talked this, this isn't going to happen. This is what explains why brilliant people are leaving universities. They've got degrees coming out the end of their business card and they're pretty well useless. They don't make things happen, And there's someone else that has never seen the inside of an organized educational institution that's building a big organization multimillionaires.

We've got to understand the power of paradigms and what paradigms do. Um it's I mean, I've been teaching this for a long time and I've gone into major corporations and they don't understand it. Major corporations have to ask themselves why are our stars stars? And they don't know. If they didn't know, they can it and give it to everybody. The stars themselves don't know why they're stars. They're what you call unconscious competence. They're very good, but

they're not sure why. And if somebody asked them, they'll say, well, as I do this and I do that. You can find people in the same business that are failing and they say I do this and I do that. They're not consciously aware of why they're doing what they're doing, so they've got something that's non transferable. They can't even give your own children. Well, when an individual starts to grasp the concept of the programming in the subjective mind, the paradigm um, that's when they start to see it

and people attempt to discipline themselves. They say I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, but they don't understand the paradigm. They don't change the paradigm, and the paradigm is going to win. You know, they try, and you watch them going on diets and they're trying to lose what they're trying to try. And if they don't this, fund themselves and change the paradigm, I'm not gonna lose weight. And the problem is they're trying to lose weight. What

they've got to do is release it. Because whenever you lose something, you're programmed to find it. That's part of the paradigm. So the path to better discipline is more about understanding the way our mind works and what we're made of it. It's through study less than um just maybe doing it. Oh yeah, well you see, I just did it personally. Uh maybe you did. I don't know, but I do know that most people that are really winning cannot really articulate on why they are. That's that's

what got me into this business. I didn't sit down beside to be in this business. I was in a different business. I was in an office cleaning business and very successful. It builded into seven cities and three countries, and I absolutely no idea what I was doing. And one day I asked myself, how is this all half? And um, I hadn't gone to school, I'd gone to high school for two months, and yet I was earning

over a million dollars a year. I couldn't accept the idea that there was a capricious or emotional god on a cloud that said, I think all jib baba turn. I didn't think I was lucky, but I didn't know what I was doing that caused things that happened like I was doing. I mean I was reading Thinking Girl Rich, So it wasn't a lot of other people. I was doing certain things so with a lot of other people. And I've been raised to believe, if you're gonna earn

onne money, you've got to be really smart. Well I didn't think I was that smart. Um, but I was learning a lot of money. Or if you're going to have a good job, you have to have a good formal education. I didn't have a good job. I owned the company, and I didn't have any formal education to speak up. So I decided I had to figure out what the heck happened. I was just so inquisitive, and I took teen nine and a half years when I did put it together and realized what it was. All

I wanted to do was teach it. And that's all I've done. I went into Predential of America, the largest insurance come in the world. I have no idea what their budget is for training, but it's multimillions. And then I hope them race sales by hundreds of millions of dollars. One VP told me that it was over a billion. And what I was doing showing the people how to change the paradigm. I need nothing about insurance, but I

know a lot about them. And so when you say change the paradigm is that, can you elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by changing that? If you really become very objective about yourself and look at yourself and say what am I doing and start to maybe I don't know, keep a track of how you're spending your days, what you're doing, the things you do that get results you don't really like, you don't like doing, write them all down, and you know when wright doing

these things, well, you automatically do them. You just do them. You wake up in the morning. There's a routine. You fall into a routine the way you go that it's either productive or it's not productive. But there's a routine. Uh, if you're married, a white as a routine during business, your partner has a routine. So you watch this and you can almost predict with certainty what people are going to do over a given period of time. Well, that

is because their programmed to do it. A paradigm is nothing but a multipude of habits that are fixed in the subjective mind. Well, what we have to realize is then when we're getting results we don't like, the results are caused by a behavioral pattern. Well, then you don't just try and change the behavioral pattern. Ask what's causing this behavior? Well, it's ideas that are fixed in the subconscious mind, So you have to change. How did they

get there? Who cares? That's why psychoanalysis is going down the tooth. See, they've been analyzing people trying to figure out what's causing the problem. Well, let's suppose you find the cause. The cause, they're still there, then you've got to go about changing. I'm saying forget the cause. As the psychotherapy comes in, say, let's realize there's an idea and your subconscious mind it's causing that behavior. Here, let's figure out what behavior would be the polar opposite to that.

Let's suppose you're sleep in every day, You're always late, always an idea in your subconscious mind is causing that. Then what what would be the polar opposite? I wake up? I get up when I wake up, and I wake up failing, wonderful, with a smile on my face, and immediately move into action. You write that out and then sing it to yourself, repeat it to yourself, rewrite it

over and over, write it maybe times every day. That idea eventually is going to get fixed in your subconscious mind, and the other idea is going to die for a lack of nourishment, and you're starting to change your behavior. The behaviors nothing but these ideas that automatically express themselves. That's what it happen is it's an idea that automatically expresses itself without any conscious thought. Successful people just automatically

become successful. And so the key there then is to take those unhelpful behaviors that are tied to some non helpful belief and real program that belief by sort of just simply saying the opposite of it over and over and over and over. Sure, now understand why you're doing it though. That's why then centuries ago Solomon was pretty wise, guys, King Solomon, he said, in all you're getting get understanding,

we've got to understand ourselves. We go right to our educational system, Erica, and you can go service to some of the most prestigious universities in the world and learn virtually nothing about Eric. Who is Eric? First of all, you're not Eric. Eric is your name? You know? And and we've got to start to understand this what makes me tick? Why do I do what I do? This is simple stuff. You can teach it to kids, but that also don't even know, and the kids don't not

and it's not taught in school. So you see, our educational system isn't an educational system at all. It's uh, it's a place where people go to gather more information. That's how there is an educational system works. Read the book, remember what's in the book, and then answer questions on't If you answer more than right and wrong, you'll pass. That doesn't mean you're gonna do what you read that's

just nolisees store in your conscious mind. See, it's like mad and Montessori said, a child is not like a cup that you fill up with knowledge. She said, the child has all the knowledge. What you have to do is get them to bring it to the surface and utilize it. All the knowledge there, ever was, or ever will be, is a hundred percent evenly present in all places at the same time. You don't get knowledge, you've got it. You become aware of what you've got. It's

like it's like energy. All the energy there, ever was, or ever will be is a hundred percent evenly present in all place at the same time. So you don't get energy. Somebody say, where does she get on the energy? Where does he get all the nobody gets energy. Everybody releases energy, and desire is the trade raine mechanisms mechanism to release energy. Like I'm gonna be eighty one in a couple of weeks. I've got more energy most people there are twenty one because I've got a tremendous desire.

So the desire fuels the engine and where you go. One of the things that I've heard people say is that sometimes the prosperity the abundance. This way of thinking is a little bit like it's all driven by what I want. I want this, so I will do this. I want that is there is there more to a spiritual life and a good life than what I want? Oh? Absolutely, you see the want misguided people will want it so they can. I don't know for self pun grandisement. That's

not what you want. Wants come from the spiritual essence of who you are. Spirit spiritual essence of you is perfection. Your spiritual DNA is perfect. There's perfection and every one of us, well, it's a perfection attempting to express itself in a greater way. Spirit is always for expansion and fuller expression. Although nature operates by law, it's always for expansion, for expression, never for disintegration. So wants come into our consciousness to help us express this essence of who we

are in a greater way. You don't want to get, You want to grow. Your wants are helping you grow. Listen all religions, I don't care which one you look at. Everyone that has stood the test of time, that has been around for any period of time. It's it's based on the emotional appeal of a future promise that you will one day become one with your God. That's why people like candles, That's why they go to church, That's

why they go to the temp or the mosque. They want to raise their love of consciousness until become a are of their oneness with their micro with their God. And God works through us. And if we're doing God's work, then we are creating in a bigger way. We're creative beings. We're the only creature on the planet that is totally disoriented in our environment. All the other little creatures blend in. They're part of nature. They blend in, They operate by instinct.

We have been given higher faculties. We can create our own environment, but we don't know that. So we just love whatever is going on around this control us. Um. It feels to me like yes, the the that growth, that expansion is a core part of our spiritual nature. I also see greed in the world. How do you tell the difference, How do you tell the difference between your fuller expression of your your deeper nature to grow and and to and to become other things, to transform

and when when is it? When is it greed? Because I think at least I see a lot of greed in the world. A lot of greed in the world. That's what causes wars. I want more land, I want to control more of the world. Yeah, greed is a very destructive concept. Um. People are greedy when they don't understand the nature of themselves. When they don't understand the relationship with their creator, they become greedy. To see, you

should only want money for two reasons. One is to be comfortable, and the more comfortable you are, the more creative you can become. The other is to extend the good you do far beyond your own presence. If a person has more money than they need, they're not doing what they should be doing. We should be doing greater good. I want to expand the good that I do more than I'm expanding, and I want to do it all over the world. Our company builds schools and a ACA.

We build a school in our company every two and a half weeks. I want to build one every day, and I know I'm going to reach that objective. So you've got to want for the right reason. I believe our creator intended us to do great work. That's why we've been given great mental faculties. We're not taught how to use them. We're not even taught what they are. In most schools. We have perception, intuition, and reason, the will, memory and intuition imagination, and we can develop those faculties

to a phenomenal degree. And as we do, we can do greater and greater work. First of all, the greedy should understand that everything they think they own, they don't own at all. You never own anything. Everything you think you own at the time, your dusts are going to belong to somebody else. But what you are is yours forever. Nothing's creator, they're destroyed. Dr Werner von Braun, the father

of the Space program. He says nothing disappears without a trace, while all science and as the all to tell you nothing is created or destroyed. You moved into your body, You're gonna move on with You are a soul. You don't have one. You are a soul, and the soul goes on the next phase of its eternal journey. Excellent. Well, let me ask you. Let's let's jump into your latest book, The A. B. C's of Success, which I believe is uh.

It's a book, it's put together in a way. Um short little snippets pulled out of you know, your many many years of teaching, and there were some in there that resonated a lot with me, and I thought, uh spoke a lot to the things that we talked about on the show. So I'd like to move into some of those. And the first one that I'd like to talk about is you describe um you describe an old story?

I like parables. I think you you you use a lot of stories where the devil is having I don't remember exactly, but the devil is having a garage sale and he's got a few different things on sale, but the one thing that he will not sell because he has to keep it for himself. It's his best tool is discouragement. You see, you get discouraged if you think you're doing it and it's not happening the way you want it to happen, and discouragement will cause you to

quit every time. But if we understand that the best way it's never been thought of, we'll figure it out and if we stay with it, we're gonna end up with it. Then we don't get discouraged. I mean, if you take take a look at the Wright Brothers at Edison, that Dreadmund Hillary, any of the ones that really did great work, Samuel Morris, mart pony Um. They just did not prevent them to get discouraged. They never saw anything as permanent. Defeat was temporary, Carnegie pointed out. They they

turned that temporary defeat into victory. So the next one is you've got a line in the book from your talking about Sir Alec Ginness, the actor, and uh. It was a phrase that a friend to his another sir who was also an actor, whose name I'm not recalling right now, but they had a phrase that they they used together as a as a way to deal with life day to day. The phrases rise above it. Yeah. Just see, if we let the little things get us down,

we're letting something outside control us. We've got to rise above it. We're bigger, we're higher than that. We don't want to let it yet to us. See, we're either going to react to life or we're going to respond. I was reading something excellent the other day. It was something that Victor Funkel, the viny psychiatrists that spent the warriors in the camp. Your old man search for meaning something. He said. He said, in every situation, between the situation

and your response. There's a space and in that space you can decide what your response will be the last of the human freedoms. He called it. Yeah, it's so good. Like if you did something that really upset me, my nature is going to be going to react to it. But he said, there's a space and you've got to take and in that space say there's some reason why that's happened. I'm not going to let it throw me off track. And we can do that. There is that

space and we can see. I feel when you react, you're the other person or the situation is in charge of you. When you respond, you remain control over you. Just the difference between responding and reacting. Dennis said, rise above it. It used to be something now you're probably familiar. Don't sweat the small stuff, don't let the little things get you. A question that I wrestle with a lot is and we talked about on this show, is that there are wiser responses to things. So don't sweat the

small stuff. Rise above it. Um, you know, not be discouraged. And yet there's human emotion that we have and I'm always wrestling with where do we how do we find the line between the emotions are there for a reason. They're they're telling us something we have emotion. Where is the line between indulging that emotion, feeling sorry for ourselves doing all that, and completely repressing it and pretending that nothing ever bothers us? How do you find for you

what's the right place between those things? Well, you see, I don't think it's an either or choice. I don't think you have to repress it or suppress it. Suppressing is a very dangerous thing to do, causes a lot of disease. You don't have to suppress it. I think consciously you have the ability to deal with it. And if you find it's emotionally upsetting, you can be upset. You don't have to stay there. You can say no way, I'm going to deal with this. I'm going to think

this true. I'm gonna ask why did she do this? Why did he do this? Why did this happen? Um? Michael Beckwith gave me a beautiful response for that. He said, there's a three step approach to this. He said, Number One, it is what it is, accepted. It's either going to control you or you're going to control it. Number Two, harvest the good. There's something good in everything, Harvest the good. And he said, the more you look for, the more you're going to find. And number three, forgive all the

rest forgive, let go out completely abandoned. And it's such an excellent response. See, I don't think you have to suppress it bottled up inside. I think you can. You can feel the emotional response and just know that it's there. It's like grief when you lose someone, Um. Grief is a normal part of dealing with it. I believe grief comes in waves. At first, the waves are big and they're plentiful. Then the waves get smaller and they get further apart. But you don't let it control you. You

control it. And so when we're talking about people like the Right Brothers and and Edison or Um, you know, Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Mount Everest, we use those examples of people who did not get discouraged and kept going. It seems to me that those people probably had normal human emotions of disappointment or discouragement that came upon them

in the moment that say, the next invention failed. But it sounds to me like what you're saying is that then they go through this process by using their human endowments that you you talk about imagination and um and creative thought and all those different things. They use those to process that emotion into a place that becomes useful for them. Yeah, and I think I think they understood that the missing, the mark, and the failures are a normal part of success, of winning, of growing I had.

I had the good fortune of working with Hillary on two or three occasions, so I was able to get to know him a little bit, and he's no different to you or me. And that led me to understand that Edison isn't any different. The Right brothers are no different. They just understood something that everybody else doesn't understand, or a lot of people don't understand. When we can understand, we've got that greatness within us, we can do great things.

And we've got to realize they're no different and we can learn from them, and that's who we should learn from. We don't want to listen to the guy next door. Be nice to the guy next door. I have a conversation with him, but if he's never done anything of any consequence, I'm not gonna learn life' lessons from him. I want to learn life lessons from someone who's done what I love to do in a much greater way

than I've done it. I think that's really important, that idea that they're not different than us, so that they're going to feel some of the things that we feel, but they have a they have a back to your point earlier, a paradigm that says, yes, things are not going to go the way I expect every time. Okay, I feel disappointed. Now I processed through it. I know

that's part of the process, and on they go. Um. I think that a lot of times some of the success literature makes it sound like we should never feel any of that stuff, and then when we do, we feel like we're not we're not cut out, we're not made the same way. Now, well, some of that literature shouldn't be written. I remember um Dr Ken McFarland, who was a wonderful speaker for many many years he traveled

for General Motors. He was the great educator from Great Horsemen down in Kentucky, and I still love listening to him. And he said that at one time he said that the the University down Kentucky had done a lot of research into self help books and he found that they were all full of sound and a original ideas. But he said most of the ones that were original weren't sound, and most of the ones who were sound weren't read. You know, So there's you know, everybody wants to be

an author, so they're all pumping out books. I think we've got to say that they have something to write about. Have they? Have they done it? Have they? Are they out there in the marketplace? Are they making it happen? So I like to read vote people you know that have really done something. Um, you recommend biographies of great people a lot, don't you, Absolutely no question about it. One of the great ones is Albert Schweitzer. I love reading his biography, or Lincoln or something, any of them,

any of the great authors. Thomas Troward for for the thinkers. If you're not a real deep thinker, you might not enjoy. But he wrote wonderful books on this. And you know, I think the people that have really made it happen are going to give something to us that's our value. It's the same as where you study. I am very fortunate. I've had some phenomenal mentors, really incredible people. But I learned very early to listen to the people that we're

doing it. See. I started to listen to Earl Nightingale and studying Napoleon Hill, and they both they were both tuned in. They both teach the same thing, and so that's who I started to get my information from. And I don't think you don't ignore everybody, but you don't necessarily follow them. Everybody's got opinions, and most of them are a little weird. In the book, you have a analogy that you use that I really like, the room of mirrors versus a room of windows. Yeah. Well, we

keep looking back at ourselves, you know. Um, And I think we've got to open our mind. We've got to look at the truth of who we are and that this is an orderly universe that we are a part of, and the universe operates by law. I believe the laws,

God's motives, opera, en diets, how everything happens. And if we study that and understand, we're an expression of an infinite power, where the as James Allen said, the offspring of a deathless soul, we've got such phenomenal potential and we want to be developing all the days of our life. I think that's why we're here. We're here to grow. And so the room of mirrors versus the room of windows is the the idea that in a room of mirrors we reflect everything back onto ourselves. Everything we see

we see through our own lens. We see through our own perception. All we see and think about is us. And the room of windows is what you're saying. It's expanding and opening our mind. It's looking outside of ourselves,

it's seeing things through different perspectives. Absolutely, absolutely, Yeah. There's another thing in the part in the book that you like, and this this one has been so helpful to me over the years, and it's where we have a tendency to say, I have to do this thing, I have to do that, I have to go to work today, I have to go pick up the kids from school. And and you say, there is nothing you have to do. Everything you do, you choose to do. I use two

ridiculous examples. I said, you don't have to breathe, you can put a bag over your head, you don't have to pay taxes. You can go to jail or go to attractive tax free zone. We choose to do everything. Jan Martin Coley wrote a marvelous buck I don't know if you're familiar with it. Your greatest power, and your greatest power is your ability to choose. We say we have to do this, I have to work on you, I'm gonna be late, I have to do this. I have to do that, Nona, You're choosing to do it. Yeah.

I I find that so personally helpful in my life because it's very easy to slip into, at least for me, the obligation mindset. I've got to do this, I've I do that. I remind myself, I don't. I mean, I don't have to go pick up my kid from school. I don't ever have to see him again. UM. Now, I don't like the consequences of those choices, but it is still a choice. We've got to understand that no

is a complete sentence. One other thing that you have a line in the book and uh, it's a question that that I bring up a lot on the show, and I and I think about a lot. It's these things that are sort of paradoxical, sort of um. And it is the idea of UM. You say you should never be satisfied, happy, but not satisfied. And I think that's a really interesting distinction because I think a lot of us are caught so much in the striving that we uh, we were never we never enjoy any of

of what we have. And yet that striving, clearly, as we talked about earlier in the conversation, does seem to be a pretty fundamental part of our nature, that that desire to grow and expand. So tell a little bit more about that's happy but not satisfied. When I was a little kid, my grandmother pretty well raised me. My mother raised three of us by herself, and Grandma was there helping, And whenever we ask for anything, grand would say, don't ask, don't ask. You should be satisfied with what

you've got. Well, when I got older and started to study and understand this, Grandma was wrong. Now you see, we have a hard time, first of all, thinking Grandma would be wrong, because grandma's like the deity to a little kid. But Grandma was wrong. Dissatisfaction is a creative state. It was dissatisfaction that gave us the ability to carry on this conversation the way we're doing. It's dissatisfaction. They gave his air travel, It gave us the smartphone, the TV,

that the knowledge of the laws it's dissatisfaction. They gave us the golden age that we're living in. Um. Now, dissatisfaction is going to cause you to want to do better. You see, this wasn't satisfied with a kerosene lamp or a wax candle. He wanted to illuminate the world, so he did well. Dissatisfaction is a creative state. You should be satisfied, never satisfied with what you've got, but you

should be happy with it. And there's a difference. I can be very happy with my results, but dissatisfied with them, like I am happy with the results I'm getting in my life. But I'm going to tell you something, I'm not at all satisfied. I know I'm capable of doing a heck of a lot better than i'm doing, and every day I get up and I attempt to improve what I'm doing. I want it to be better. I want this interview to be better than the last one. I want the next one to be better than this one.

This is the best one, probably, Bob. It's all downhill from here for you. Yeah. I think that's I mean, I agree, and I think that's a very um. That's another one of those things. That's sort of paradoxical and completely true, and it is one of those things that I think I struggle with with finding that right balance of happiness while being dissatisfied. We're raised to believe you should be satisfied and if you're not satisfied, then you're greedy.

That is not true at all. Dissatisfaction is a creative state. It's what causes us to want to improve. And if we've got infinite potential, why nothing is as good as it can be. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be happy with what we've got. We should enjoy what we've got, but we want to improve it. You said that the two most important ingredients for successful life are goal and persistence. Well they are, and but have also you know, you've

got to get in to understand the paradigm. They the goal and the persistence are going to enable you to change the paradigm. And like you want to understand yourself, you've got to have goals. It's going to cause you to stretch and you cannot let conditions are circumstances control you. That's where the persistence comes in. Napoleon Hill said, there may be no heroic connotation to the word persistence, but he said the quality is to the character of the

human like what carbon is to steal. It'll keep you going when everything's beating you back. And that's how you change the paradigm by persisting, absolutely, by persisting to accomplish something beyond where you're at, because the paradigm is going to have your producing the same as you've got and

that's where most people are. There's incremental little improvements, but the average person is about the same place today as they were a year ago, and they could read and then get into positive thinking of positive thing isn't going to do it if they don't internalize it and get the paradigm shifted. Got it well, Bob, thank you so much. This has been a very informative and enjoyable discussion for me. I thank you for taking the time to come on

the show. Eric, it's been a pleasure. Get everybody to go and buy the A b CS of Success sixties seven different subjects. We will have links for it on our show notes at one you feed dot net. Thank you, Eric, Thank you, Okay, take care, okay bye. You can learn more about Bob Proctor and this podcast and also get the free resource guide of Bob's three favorite books of all time, his three songs to stay inspired by, and his three favorite books he has written at one you feed dot net slash Bob