Living Well Philosophies

In this introductory episode of the Corey Wayne & Bob podcast, Corey and his friend Bob begin to discuss their philosophies for living well. This series will continue to cover topics in the areas of self-development, politics, high achievement, life purpose, business, spirituality, mindset, etc., so you can create the life and lifestyle of your dreams, effortlessly!

Bob has been a close friend of mine for about fifteen years. I’ve learned a lot from him, and patterned my life after him in a lot of ways. Today we are talking about self-help and finding your passion. My comments are in bold italics like this below.

BOB: What I’ve noticed from my experience with the self-help movement, or whatever you want to call it, is that there is a lot of emphasis in the concept of finding your utmost passion and what you stand for. And sometimes I find that that is a little too much pressure to ask of people. We as human beings evolve during the course of our lives, and to know who exactly you’re going to be twenty years from now, in terms of everything, is sometimes too much of a tall order.

Sometimes you may have a general vision of who you want to become, and it may seem like this goal that’s out there that’s totally unachievable, but what we know is that there are things that are inside of your control, or within your control, and those are what you do on a daily basis. And if you really focus on just doing those things and forget what the outcome is, because in the end, who knows if you’re actually going to get it, you might reach it and go past it or never even get close. Or you may change your direction half way. So the thing to focus on, I would say, is the process, right? Certain things, to get there, take a certain process that are pretty clear, so if you start, I wouldn’t even say enjoy the process, just doing it is what it takes.

COREY: You said something about, you’re not focused on living with passion as you are focused on falling in love with the day-to-day, or something like that. I thought that was pretty profound.

BOB: Yeah, it boils down to just doing it.

COREY: Say today is the first day you’ve decided to work on losing weight or getting in shape, or you decided to start a business, or maybe you’re going back to school, or maybe you just resolved to find a job that’s better than the job you’re working at, you’ve got to start somewhere, and the reality is, there is a lot of time that’s going to pass from where you are right now to where you want to be. And you can’t look at happiness as something that you’re going to achieve 10-20 years from now when you achieve your goals, because you’ve got all that living. You can’t go through life and say, “Well, I’m not going to be happy until I achieve this.” You’ve got to find a way to fall in love with the process of living in the day to day.

The reality is, anything you build or start out to do or become, like I talk about in my second book, Mastering Yourself, will take a minimum of a decade. If you look at Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, or any of those guys that have become household names, it’s not like they came up with this idea for a business and a year later they were billionaires. You didn’t hear about them and everything they were doing for the first ten years they were doing it.

BOB: The concept of having passion for something, by definition, you’re going to have to decide to not do a bunch of things. You may want to become an Olympian swimmer, and at the same time be the most famous rock band in the world. So which one is it? Which one is your passion? That’s a hard thing to decide, especially when you’re younger and you don’t know what’s going to become of you. Maybe that’s just too much pressure. Maybe you should just do a lot of the things that it takes to get to one or the other, and decide which one fits your personality better and decide as you go.

COREY: It’s a matter of immersing yourself in things. It’s like what Steve Jobs said, “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” When I think back on my life, there were so many things I thought would be a great business. Then you experience it, and after a while you realize, “This isn’t that great. I want to do something else.”

BOB: The other part of being on this planet is, sometimes shit happens and you have to go with it somehow for the better or the worse. Success is not that one vision that you had for yourself. You have to be open for multiple ways of being successful. One of the things about being a human being is our adaptability. If you’re so attached to that only way of being successful, then you may be miserable for twenty years, when in fact you are successful in a different way.

Success is subjective, even though there’s a certain level of objectivity towards what it is. You may not have become that rock star that you always wanted, but you may be an amazing father or just an amazing member of society. You’re still successful. And at some point, this comes with being a bit older, sometimes you have to let that dream go. You have to be flexible with what it means to be successful.

COREY: Yes, success is making progress. You have to be able to look at your life and measure incremental things that move you towards the things that you want.

You did well in the technology field. Tell us about your life strategy.

BOB: If you’re going to put a great deal of contribution towards the success of a company, you should be able to somehow negotiate with that company how you’re going to be part of that success. The idea is that you bake the success of the thing you’re doing into your risk plan. You provide the value, because you know you can give them a lot, but at the same time you’re negotiating that you are going to get back a lot. But you have to be willing to forego the cash at that moment. Always negotiate for either profit share or stock options, and that will give you the proverbial skin in the game that’s going to make you want the company to succeed.

What you can contribute comes from your interest and part of the vision you had for yourself. You’ve got to start deciding if where you’re spending your time is something you’re remotely interested in. If every fiber of your body is telling you, man, this really, really freaking sucks, then what is the point? You have to get better at what you like, and you have to get better at what you’re already good at and not try to basically improve on the stuff that you don’t know anything about.

COREY: Increase your competency and your reserve of knowledge.

BOB: In the stuff you’re interested in.

COREY: If you’re not into it, if it’s not fun, you’re not going to put the time into it. You’re not going to be as focused and work as hard. You’re not going to be as eager to learn. A lot of people focus on how much money they’re going to make at something. They’re not looking at what kind of value they can contribute.

BOB: We’re a little misguided as a society, and this is worldwide, where money has become so important to everybody that it becomes the only driver, supposedly, except that it’s an empty driver. It sounds amazing to have all this money and all this type of stuff, but the problem is that’s not enough to make you want to do the things you want to do, that you should be doing, if that’s your goal.

What will you want to do if money is not a goal and an object at all? If you don’t have money in the conversation, why would you do something? Imagine that you already have a lot of it or you won’t get any for it, one of the two. Then see how that changes your attitude towards either what you’re doing or even your goals. Don’t get me wrong, money is basically a tool to do things.

COREY: It gives you choices.

BOB: The more you have the better, I think, because it gives you more choices. It allows you to fulfill certain needs, but after that it also allows you to create more. It allows you to magnify the things you’ve always wanted to do for yourself or for others.

COREY: I remember you were telling me when you were younger, you wanted to get to a place in life where you had time to think. That was really your primary motivator in the beginning, being able to cash out in the technology field. Can you talk about that?

BOB: Everybody says time is money, money is time. It’s true but at some point, money is not going to give you more time.

COREY: I believe it was Frank Lloyd Wright quote that said, “Most wealthy people are nothing more than janitors of their possessions.”

BOB: My main goal throughout life has been to have time. Time has a value. You have to do that mental calculation. Whatever I’m going to embark on is going to diminish the time in the way I envisioned for myself. Is that time well spent? Only you can define what your values are and make sure that whatever you’re doing is in congruence with those values.

COREY: The older you get the more you appreciate how much time you have left. Jimmy Johnson said something important he learned from Wayne Huizenga is, it’s about “QTL,” quality of time left. Not just physical time, but quality time where you’re physically healthy and you can spend your time enjoying it.

BOB: Life does give you a lot of unexpected situations, and some of them are incredibly unfair. When you’re talking about taking care of yourself and your health, and if some idiot happens to run you over, then you have a new situation. You could be doing everything right and still get horrendous results. As long as you feel that your process, your day-to day, is fine with you, then in my book, that’s great. Then as things change, then you have to deal with that at that particular moment.

I think what happens a lot with our goals and this pressure on the future and our future happiness is that we’re hating our day-to-day all the time, so we’re in a bad mood and miserable, because we’re meant for great glory, and that never comes, and in the meantime you’ve just wasted every moment you had.

I believe there’s only so much you can do. Again, to talk about self-help 2.0, I think self-help 1.0 gives you too much pressure. And I’m here to tell you guys that 2.0, the new improved version, allows you to to blame life a little bit, but just not too much. Go with the flow and just focus on the day-to-day stuff. That’s what life is in the end. It’s what you do on a moment by moment basis.

COREY: It’s not always easy when the shit’s hitting the fan to go, “Oh yeah, I’ve just got to find a way to be in the moment and enjoy my life.”

BOB: I think it’s interesting also, as part of a life goal would be, to be aware about what’s going on. I think a variable of success is awareness of where the world is going and asking yourself how you can participate in a way that makes sense for you. It is a given that technology is really one of the drivers. It seems that not a lot of people are into science, technology or mathematics. Everybody wants to, of course, party and write songs and be a philosopher, but in the end, that’s not what’s going to give you the power.

COREY: It’s about adding value through some kind of product or service. When you start something, you don’t necessarily know how you’re going to get there. When I first started the business I’m in now, I knew what I wanted to do and how I wanted to help people. But it was systemitizing that and putting it into a format that was easy to consume — that’s the hard part. That’s the part that most people are just simply not willing to trial and error with it.

BOB: How do you add value? You have to understand what’s valuable. and it’s not that easy to recognize what’s valuable and where things are going. It’s awareness.

COREY: Any last parting words of wisdom on how people can live well based on your perspective and what you’ve been through?

BOB: To summarize, I would say sometimes things get reduced to dumb cliches. And there are a few cliches that are quite powerful and deep. One I like says, “The way is the way.” The path, wherever you are, there you are. You are there right now. At the same time, the future is important, so you have to figure out how to get there by being here first. This level of presence and relative contentment is important. The pressure of happiness and passion, leave that for when you get there. Don’t expect to be super happy all the time, or understand exactly what your passion is or be all smiles and sunshine all the time. To be super happy all the time would be a constant lie. I still know certain things have to get done, and I just do them.

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