One model for a satisfying life is the battery.

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If you suck the last little bit of energy out of your battery and then charge it, next day it will give you a little more…

This is not true for all types of batteries… but, it is true for most people…

If you suck the energy out of the battery sparingly, if you are more worried about the battery than about building something with its energy… at the end of the day energy is left in the battery.

You charge it overnight, and next day the battery will show that it’s full, but this full signifies only the bit you used the day before…

And little by little, your ‘sparing the battery’ attitude, your stinginess, leaves you with hardly any energy to get things done, to think, to dream, to imagine, to be creative.

This is how life works.

Luckily the energy-loss, the loss of vibrancy, capacity loss can be gradually reversed…

Another analogy is the car.

Most people buy a car that can go a lot faster and a lot farther than they intend to drive it.

All my cars have been used cars. And all my cars had given their owners less and less ‘juice’ over time.

The cars were like old people who had lost it…

Use it or lose it.

It took me, each time, months to retrain the cars to speed up fast, to erupt into speed and save my ass in a dicey situation… and eventually they did. All of them.

My first car was a 600 cc East German car. After my training it could beat any size car ‘off the factory assembly line’. And I have street-raced with that car, just to prove it was nurture vs nature… and nurture won. Every time.

People accused me or using special fuel injection, or whatever. But I didn’t… I just trained the car.

Now, why am I sharing all this with you?

Because you and your life are both like a battery and a used car.

You have trained your body and your energy to give you just enough to get by.

Your base ‘instinct’ in life is to hold back, give as little as you can, do as little work as you can, so you can feel like you are getting more than you are giving… it is a kind of winning, right?

You never experience life fully, because you are operating with clogged pipes and lazy batteries…

What you are not getting is that the satisfaction, the happiness you seek is the result of hard, exhausting effort, where you give till it hurts and beyond.

People who have it easy, take it easy are not happy. Are not fulfilled. Do not love life.

They may look happy to you, because you have no idea what happiness looks like, what happiness feels like. You’ve never given life a chance to show it to you.

To me it is easiest to see this on actors… They don’t run away because I am staring… lol.

In the movies, in the American TV shows I watch on Amazon or Netflix, there is no acting… It’s gotten to a place where acting is expected maybe in one scene in a whole series. Where genuine anger would need to be shown, for example. That would be acting…

But they, the actors, actresses don’t know how to do it… they have never learned, never practiced acting, they just say their lines and go home or to the pub to get high, to get drunk.

The ones who actually invest in their craft are famous, get this prize, that prize…

Same in sports. Same everywhere.

But one needs to stop dancing to the socially accepted norms.

It is socially accepted to be a numbskull, a wind bag, a boaster, a pretentious half-educated pompous prick.

And even if you claim you get really tired by the end of the day… if you check yourself, what you got tired of, what you used your life for, you find that it is mostly inconsequential. You did not get done what would matter most.

I have had days when I got more tired that usual… and when I looked I spent most of the day binging on Netflix. Not doing what matters to me or anyone.

When you look: you’ll see that you avoid doing the hard, you avoid doing the important… Because you are trying to spare yourself.

If you were my newly bought old car, it would take me driving you really hard for months to burn out this ‘sparing nature’… so you can apply yourself to what you were born for: hard work.

The meaning of life is to work hard, to do your best every day, to make sure today’s best is more and better than it was yesterday.

And do it in all areas of life. Health, wealth, love and happiness.

Neglecting any of those areas, giving up on any of those areas will leave you not happy, not fulfilled. Leave you with a life you didn’t live well.

I have a theory: if you lived well, you’ll die well.

Everyone is afraid of death… because they are not living well.

I am living well, finally, and I am not afraid of death.

In the Saturday workshop series I’ll go deeper in this.

What’s the truth about you workshop series. Starting on April 30 at 11 am.

I am debating what to call it… I have a mind to call it ‘How you suck and what you can do about it’.

Because you suck. And you suck everywhere in countless ways.

Here is an example:

One of my non-native English speaker students has been decidedly not happy. She was falling behind.

Yesterday it turned out that some instructions she misunderstood… because in her native tongue one of the crucial words was used differently than the way I meant it. 

After practicing it yesterday on the call she finally got what I meant… and she was suddenly happy.

That, misunderstanding something is how she sucked… She never considered that she misunderstood… 

And in one swell swoop we removed how she sucked… until next time.

I am sure that is one way she sucks everywhere.

So in those workshops we’ll be able to diagnose one visible layer, one visible way you suck, so you can attend to it. Next session we’ll see something else, and now you can attend to it.

Ultimately unless you attend to a way to suck and remove it, you’ll remain the same… And that is sad.

Here is the link to sign up if you are interested in finding out how you suck, and you’d prefer that you don’t suck that way.

Let’s diagnose how you suck 

PS: On another note… One of the ways your empty battery shows itself to me is your inability to experience awe.

I’ve written an article on the importance of the capacity to feel, experience awe when you are in the presence of an act worthy of awe.

And I just had the insight that if and when you don’t: it is because you can’t dare to measure yourself to that action, because you, yourself have been cowardly and stingy with your life.

If you have been craving uplifting experiences: you are in for an unpleasant surprise: unless you are big enough, uplifting experiences will not come to you: your pretense mechanism will block it.

What you may call awe… being ‘amazed’ by high achievers or pretty people is greed… it is the desire to have what someone else has, the desire for something you haven’t earned, what you are not willing to earn.

When I read about Sam Walton: I am inspired to make decisions like he did. When you read about Sam Walton: you want his results…

Miserable… ugh.

Start using up your energy (battery) every day for tasks that are important to you…

…especially if they don’t come naturally to you. Do it every day… Maybe even go beyond exhaustion… You won’t believe how much more is in that battery… It’s called ‘second wind’… and there is even a third wind, and a fourth wind.

But if you overdo it… like another one of my students tends to do, you’ll experience burnout. That is counter-productive. Do it 1% a day…

Remember the math? Compounding interest: In a year you’ll have 370% more energy, you’ll be able to do 3.7 times more in a day, you’ll be able to get anywhere 3.7 times faster.

Eventually you’ll be able to experience awe… first about your own self… Sweet. Trust me… Nothing sweeter than that.

PPS: If your cells are dehydrated, you have barely energy to survive… so make sure you get my energizer audio and drink only energized water infused with it!

PPPS: One of the major way real high achievers are different, behave differently from you is this: they know that life, reality, is full of repeating patterns.

In the macro and in the micro.

And they go outside of the issue they are trying to solve… to another place, another industry, another paradigm… Like this article did.

In this article I didn’t address directly why you are an under-achiever, below of what you are capable of, directly.

I went to two different areas, the battery and the vehicle… to be able to see what is the underlying reason. Your self-concern for easy, smooth, effortless, and always pleasant.

The result: you are like a dead battery.