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.

So if you're gonna take your life back, you gotta take into a limited amount of that medium and and be able to pursue it not let it pursue you. Today, most people, like, in order to get your attention, we all know what they do, it's called clickbait. Let me create a headline that'll grab you. It doesn't matter if the content is even real news or not. A lot of times the headline isn't really what the whole story is, but it pulls you in. There's whole groups of people whose entire life is designing algorithms and language to make you stay online more so they can make more money, but it isn't necessarily to your advantage. So what Jim Rohn used to say to me is he said, Tony, this is your new daily practice because this is what I really wanna get to you guys here is if you wanna keep momentum, if you've joined me for those few days there, the 5, 6 days or 7, I guess, we did for the challenge or you went immersion with me as well, the key is to get momentum and keep momentum. If you work your tail off to get momentum going and then you drop it, oh my god, you gotta start all over again.

And so the way you do that is you have a daily practice. It's not like, you know, years ago I went to a seminar by Jim Rohn and then my life was perfect, it's like I kept immersing myself in all these things but I also made sure each day I was making some form of progress. And if you wanna know what makes people happy, write down progress equals happiness. Think about it. You can achieve everything in the world and still go, is this all there is? You can achieve something and be excited, but for how long? The only way you stay happy and excited is to keep growing. Progress is everything. If you're making progress on your body, progress in your mind, progress in your motion, you're gonna feel happy. When you get there, you feel excited, but again, for how long? A year? No.

6 months? 3 months? 3 weeks? 3 days? 3 hours? Because we're not made to just sit and, you know, be successful. We're made to grow. We're made to then as we grow, we have something to give. So step 1 is, let's see if you can put a little system standing guard at your mind. And Jim Rohn said to me back then, the number one thing you have to do is read 30 minutes a day. So never less than 20 minutes and I'm not talking about what comes to your phone. I'm not talking about clickbait. I mean a book.

I mean something that you pursue. Great ideas are never gonna interrupt you. They have to be pursued and you if you don't pursue them, you're gonna get what everybody else has which is all this fear, all this uncertainty, all this stuff that won't work because everybody's focused on what won't work, what can't happen. Why? Because they're afraid. They're afraid to fail. They're afraid to try and feel like they're not enough. So you gotta stay on guard with that mind by feeding your mind. You know, Jim Rohn used to say to me, success leaves clues.

If you want things to get better, you gotta get better. If you want things to change, you gotta change. But you gotta do it deliberately and consciously. And he used to say to me constantly, he said, Tony, you've got to constantly find a way to feed that mind. Something that's got strategy in it, philosophy, something that's gonna improve the quality of your life. And if you really learn it, you can help the people you love with the things you learn. And so I got hooked and so I decided I'm gonna read a book a day. I took a speed reading course and I didn't read a book a day but I read 700 books over the period of 7 years all in the area of philosophy, physiology, emotion, the things to me that mattered most.

And what I really try to do is each day try to use something I learn, not just read, not just let my learning lead to knowledge. You know, Jim used to say, if you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learn and lead to action, that's when your life changes. So I started being aware of who was saying what, what I was taking in. You know, Jim used to say, you know, successfully excludes. If someone's successful, they're not lucky. They're doing something different than you. Figure out what they're doing different.

And he said, the first thing is find out what they're reading. He said because he said I remember he said to me something funny. He said find out what poor people read and don't read it. And when he said poor, he didn't just mean financially poor. He meant people that were unhappy, people that were had no sense of meaning in their life, people that were financially strapped because they weren't managing to add value to other people, people that found themselves not taking care of their relationships in their body. Poor isn't just money. Wealth isn't just money. It's emotional, spiritual, everything.

He said, so find out what successful people do, what wealthy people read, what happy people read, and read that. Feed your mind. So step number 1 is every single day, you gotta do something and feed your mind. And if you do that, if you just made that habit, say even 5 days a week, I swear to you it'll change your life but again, not what comes to you, what you pursue, something that has real value, a strategy that can change the game for your business, your life, a philosophy that can make you more fulfilled or happy, a way to make a difference for the people you love. That's a daily start up practice for me. Started when I was 17, I'm now 61. That's why I have the privilege to be able to work with so many people, but most importantly, I've applied these things to me so I have the life that I want. I don't have a life that I'm promoting to other people.

So that's number 1. What's number 2 real fast? If you really feed your mind every day, feed and strengthen your mind with a 30 minute practice and by the way, I start out reading all the time, but then I realized I was in my car all the time in those days. I was like, I'm gonna turn this to a university on wheels and I'm old enough to remember cassette tapes and probably most of you don't even know what the hell I'm talking about. Not reel to reel cassette tapes. You know, we didn't have where you could put 10,000 songs in your phone or go to YouTube and have a 1,000,000 different videos you can watch over and over again. And the value for me on that quite honestly was that I had to pay for this stuff so I had to value it and really use it. Like, when you part with a certain amount of money, and in those days, you know, 6 cassettes, 6 one hour cassettes and a couple workbooks was like $300. It was like the standard offer.

And I remember I went down to this place called Knight Education, Knight like with a sword, you know, and a shield, k n I g h t. And it was this Jewish man, beautiful man named Mario that I became friends with. I was a little 17 year old kid, my little pot belly, I was fat, and I drove all the way down downtown LA, be in but in those days, like an hour and 20 minute drive, and my little old Volkswagen with no reverse, park on the hill so it wouldn't you know, so I could get out and, and I got to be friends with this man and he had collected, this is how old it was, all these albums of some of the great motivational speakers and psychologists and psychiatrists and business people and then gradually those things got to actually to cassette tapes. And so you had all these things and I'd say, like, what's what's the most valuable thing? He said, well, what do you wanna work on? I said, well, my body and my emotions and my mind and my spirit. He was like, you want everything. And he said, okay. Let's start with this one. And I take $300.

I was making $40 a week as a janitor. So this is literally the money I'd save and I'd absorb it and I'd be like, I can't afford this and I'd like, why can't afford not to? Because unless I get these answers, I'll still not be able to pay my basic bills. I'll still be struggling. So that was one of the smart things. I invested in myself. And so I go down and because I invested $300 in six tapes, I remember Jerome said repetition is the mother of skill. Hear something once and you kinda understand it. Here again, you kinda feel hear it enough.

Listen to stuff everyday until pretty soon the things I was hearing in my head were these new thoughts from brilliant people instead of the old thoughts that were basically whatever I've been around before. And it changed my life, it started to shift me because I fed my mind. But the number 2, you gotta everyday feed and strengthen your body and you gotta do something even in the middle of COVID if it's still there, even if it's locked down because if you don't take care of your body it affects your mind, doesn't it? I mean, think about this. What is it that screws up everybody's life? Fear is the number one thing that keeps people from doing what's necessary. And anger and rage, while it can mobilize us, if it becomes part of your life on a regular basis, it destroys it. So how do you balance that out? Well, fear, anger, they're both physical, aren't they? Think about what do you feel like if you're really ever been so afraid that your throat got really dry or you feel this feeling in your gut? Right? That's physical. Courage is also physical. Again, courage does not mean you're not afraid, courage means you're afraid but you do it anyway, Right? It's a it's a way of being in your body.

So one of the things that I started doing early on is understanding, and those of you who spent 4 days with me, you know day and night because we did it and it's in your body still how to change the way you feel instantly by a radical change in your body. And so I really wanna recommend you do something at least 5 days a week. First thing when you wake up in the morning, I don't it doesn't have to be an hour workout even 30 minutes. It can be something as little as 5 or 10 minutes. There is not a day when I wake up, I've shared with some of you this already. First thing I do, I go outside and I'm lucky enough to be at one of my homes anyway. I have homes in different parts of the world because I've traveled the world and done this, I'm very fortunate but I have a cold plunge I've installed in everyone, 56 degrees. In my home in Sun Valley, Idaho, I don't have a cold plunge, I don't need it.

I walk through the snow in the winter, in the summer I walk through the grass and I get in the river and then literally the river is usually about 39 to 42 degrees to give you an idea. Every cell in your body has moved, the blood rushes through everything, right? And I do it for two reasons, there's never a day I look forward to doing it and I don't go, oh, I can't wait to go in there. I do it, number 1, because it transforms your body, the blood flow, the lymph flow is unbelievable from a health perspective. You just go in for a minute, pop out, it's like a different world, right? I don't care what it is or you could take a freezing shower would be the minimum way you could do this or you couldn't do this. But it's about changing your body so radically, and it's also about developing a simple daily discipline. It's like I don't negotiate with myself. I tell my brain, I don't go, oh, wait, I'm not ready or let me let me count to 10 or maybe I'll do it tomorrow. That pattern of thinking is what destroys most people's lives and their dreams.

You can settle for a life like most people have or you can create your dreams but to do it, you need to be able to push yourself so you need to train yourself in little ways or it could be just going and lifting weights and you're gonna do like 10 minutes of pushing yourself or a sprint or a really fast walk, anything because when you get your blood pushing, when you push beyond what's comfortable, it develops this determination inside you, this sense of will that you will then use everywhere else. I always say if you discipline yourself in one area of your life, you're you're gonna be able to do it even more in other areas. You get momentum. Momentum is everything. So if you train your mind, great, but you gotta train your body as well in some way. And I don't care again if it's 5 or 10 minutes where you really push yourself or a full blown workout, it's gotta get there because when you do that regularly, you're gonna find yourself having a better mind. The mind and body can't be separated, they're completely connected. You work on both of them, you're gonna have a different different world and you're not gonna be shut down.

And when other people are like, oh, it can't be done, just move. I'll handle it. It's a different way of being, isn't it? 3rd key, in order to really believe you can turn things around, you need a role model. And so throughout my life, I looked at different ones. The earliest one I looked for since I grew up poor and we had no money and, you know, that seemed to be the real issue. My my mom left all 4 of my fathers, but as I look back on it, it really wasn't money. They could have had all the money in the world, they still would have fought. But it looked like money, so I thought, wow, if I could make money, my family will never have this pain.

So I looked around for role models and I grew up in a place where there were no financial role models, everyone was broke. We don't have money for food, it's why I provide a 100,000,000 meals a year through Feeding America for the last 6 years. By the way, we're up to 700,000,000 meals now. I said we'd feed a 1000000000 in 10 years. We're a year ahead. We're gonna hit it. But the bottom line is it comes because I had nothing. And I found I was like, who who also started with nothing like me and then turned it around and grew and who comes from humble beginnings? And I saw, you know, sir John Templeton, some of you may have heard of him, brilliant man.

1st billionaire investor, started with nothing And the way he did it is he saved money and he invested during the darkest times. And so I saw Sir John as that. And when I was around when COVID happened, I started looking around to see what are people and businesses that haven't given up. Even though everything shut down, they found a way to serve their clients. And even though their way wasn't my way, it reminded me and inspired me to say there is a way. That's how I started building the way that we now deliver for so many people virtually around the world. So find a role model and get a plan. So number 1, feed and strengthen your mind every day.

30 minutes a day, to me now, audio is even better because I can do it while I'm running, I can do it while I'm working out, I can do it while I'm cleaning the house, I can do it in my car, so I use audio, that's why I've used it forever in that area because it just gives you more rhythm, but it's either read or audio, something you pursue. Everyday, strength and feed your body, you make it stronger so that you're psychologically short. Find the role model, get a plan. What's 4? Massive action. Like everybody wants to say, well, I don't know where to start, what do I do first? Well, listen, I got all kinds of tools to help people do that but the most important thing is do something. You know, you know, you don't know what to do, throw the rock wherever it lands talk to the next person, right? It's like you need massive action and then you need to see what's working or not and keep changing and you'll get there. Anyone can get to where they wanna go as long as they get in motion, but again, it's about momentum. And that's the main reason I came to join you.

Last one, step 5 real fast, give more than you expect to receive. If you are constantly trying to take care of people, give to people, if you're worst time of your life, you can give to people, I promise you everything will change. I won't tell you the whole story, bore you with it right now because I wanna do this real quick for you, but, you know, one of the most difficult times in my life when I was completely broke, not not even enough gas in my car, trying to figure out how to survive, not able to pay my rent. And I I had I won't bore you the story, but I had an experience where I took the last $19 I had and I gave it to somebody who else that needed it. And afterwards, I was euphoric. It made no sense but it was the first time in my life where, you know, people say I gotta get beyond scarcity. You never get beyond scarcity, you gotta start beyond scarcity, you gotta declare, you gotta take the last seed you got and plant them. And I remember, you know, the next day, I got a check for $1200 which in those days I could have survived on for almost a month from somebody who owed it to me and not paid me for 2 years.

The very next day after I gave every dime I had, I had no idea I was even gonna eat. I just it was the right moment. It was the right situation, and I just I did what was right. So find someone who's worse off than you are in the middle of COVID. Do something for them, and I promise you, you'll remember how great your life is and you'll feel fulfilled because we all it's not about us. You know what I mean? It's like it's not about me, it's about we. And the more you can get connected either people you love or even strangers and do things not for brownie points, just because it's right, somehow inside your own soul, your own spirit, you remember that problems are not permanent, only your soul is permanent. And you remember that I'm made for more than just solving this stupid little problem.

It just it lifts the human spirit. So those 5 keys, I really encourage you to consider as you're dealing with COVID or coming out of it here to maximize.