As you're gearing up to step back into your normal life, if you haven't already done that, I thought I'd just give you 5 little quick little triggers, just reminders that are so simple, but these are the 5 things that I personally did when I first got kicked out of my house, some of you know the story, my mom was a very powerful woman, had 4 different fathers and she kicked my dad out and on Christmas Eve she decided I was on his side so she kicked me out too and I had nothing, and I had to figure out what to do. She kept my 1960 Volkswagen, I earned it $40 a week. And don't get me wrong, I love my mom but she abused alcohol and prescription drugs and when people do that, they're not themselves, they do little crazy things. But, I am who I am because of her. And part of that was even that first step where I had to just figure out what to do with my life, but it was incredibly depressing. I have a younger brother, 5 years younger, younger sister, 7 years younger, I love them, loves of my life, and I was separated from my brother and sister and I'm walking in the rain trying to figure out what the hell I'm gonna do and I'm still in high school. And so one of the things that I did is I slept on this mountain top, and then, of course, it rained and so the next day I talked to a friend, a lady friend, not a girlfriend, but a girl who was a friend and I her parents let me stay in their laundry room and I mean, I was so depressed. I know I don't know if you've ever been to that place where you're like wondering why you're even around or whether you should be around, it was a pretty brutal time.

But what turned me around was feeding my mind. What I mean by that is, about a year earlier I'd gone to the seminar by Jim Rohn, I know many you've heard of Jim. He's no longer alive, passed some years ago but he was a mentor of mine and I went to a seminar when I was 17 and in the seminar he really talked about the importance of feeding your mind and you've gotta feed it because otherwise things come at you and so I remember I I I took the little bit of change I had left in my pocket and I got on a bus and I drove, they drove me anyway on the bus for about, I don't know, it's about an hours away from where I was because I've been to this place once before, I had this amazing bookstore and I figured I'll go in there and I'll just read a bunch of books while I'm in there because I can't afford any. And then I picked up a book called The Magic of Believing by Claude M Bristol. And in this book it talked about training and conditioning your mind and how what goes in your mind becomes the experience of your life and how to do it and I was so depressed, I didn't know what to do and so I went and I'll never forget, I went back to the full laundry room and there was a mirror there and the book said, you know, put your goals in the mirror so you look through your own eyes into your goals and you see in your own eyes and you read those goals, do it with soap and so I did it in the mirror, then I made these little posters that said things like, only a loser is depressed. Now that's not true, because but I felt like I'm not a loser and that was the leverage I had, right? I can't be depressed if the loser's depressed and so I I just try to work on everything. But gradually, I started turning my life around and I did 5 things and I did them again, I gotta tell you, multiple times in my life when I hit really bad places, when I was told I had a tumor in my brain and that, you know, I might die, you know, when I, buried all 4 of my fathers over the course of a year and a half and my mother. Those are rough times, they start to shift you.

When 2,008 happened and looked like everything was going under and I went back and I reapplied them here at the beginning of the pandemic as well. So they're really simple. But first, of the 5 keys to transform your life, I don't care where you are, how great it is, if you can get to the next level, the first step is stand guard at the door of your mind. And I got that from my teacher, Jim Rowe. I remember, he came to me one day and I was really frustrated and I was saying, you know, I'm just I'm working so hard and nothing's really working and I don't understand it and and I was just I was super frustrated. And remember he came to me and he said, Tony, he said, listen to me. He said, think of tell me who's what are you reading? He said, tell me who you're talking to? He said, tell me who you're surrounding yourself with. And I said, well, I'm mostly isolated by myself, and I said, but I'm so frustrated.

He says, listen to me. He said, answer this question for me. He said, what happens in the world if, let's say, you know, your worst enemy comes by and drops sugar in your coffee? And then I said, well, you don't have sweet coffee. He said, well, what if your best friend, even by accident, drops one drop of Strychnine? What if it's your brother, your sister, your mother, your father, somebody you love, accidentally drops one drop of strychnine? I said, well, then you'd be dead. He goes, that's right. So remember, life is both sugar and strychnine, so watch your coffee. And what you really meant was stand guard at the door of your mind because today, we live in a world where the media, they're not bad people, they're good people but they're companies and they gotta take care of their shareholders and the only way they win is by getting your eyeballs and the only way to get your eyeballs in a world where there's so much information is to startle you. The news is not designed to educate you or inform you, you know that, that's why it says, water, drinking water may kill you, film at 11, you know, anything that grabs you and so we're living in a culture of so much fear.