This brief (8 min) audio describes very succintly some of the fundamental ideas of Flawless Living as they apply to working on your passion point for the purpose of creating wealth via leveraging and compounding. It also addresses some of the dramatic economic changes that are likely to hit us in the next decade and ways that we can protect ourselves.
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Partial transcript of Mike Jay’s interview with Henri Schauffler on October 26,2010
We basically have to contextualize what’s happening to us. What’s happening to us is not going to be a continuation of what has happened to us. I used to tell my girls, the world that you are going to live in is not the world that you grew up in. And consequently we are going to have about 100 years of change within the next decade. Now it’s impossible for me or for anyone else to tell you what that will be like. I can tell you however that is not going to be like it was. The only way to have it be like it was is to isolate yourself in an environment that doesn’t change, and some people will choose that because it will make them happy. For the rest of us we are going to have to deal with these changes. So when I contextualize why you should work to a passion point it is in the context of what’s going to have to shift in your life over the next number of years, and the only way that I see meaning, matter, sense-making, the true happiness coming is through our passion lens, because the rest of the world is going to be tough to predict, it’s going to be moving, it’s going to be turbulent and you’re going to have to adapt, so you’re going to have to find a way to create some free energy. And I know for sure that you can do that through the passion point system, because you are working in flow, you are doing things naturally, you are doing them without thinking, you are doing them with a lot of non-conscious ease, and as a result of that you are refueling your happiness engine and you are creating free energy which you are going to need to cope. So staying close to your passion point is going to be a good way for you to keep you healthy, wealthy and wise.
The other part of this is that when you look at some of my charts and videos I show that as a baby boomer, which I and most of the people here are part of, the illusion that we have bought into that is no longer the case and that is dying, is that growth will continue. Now growth will continue but it is going to move to the east. It’s going to move to Asia, demographics in the West and in Europe are now tipping, we are going into a different kind of economy, we are going to have a different world, we are going to have a new world in terms of what some people call a “new normal”. Now the reason we work on passion is is that at some point most of us are going to want to do less of what we “have to” and more of what we “want to”. But we are going to have do do that in a deflating economic system and that is not going to be easy for us.
I am suggesting as a part of this system that when you get happy you can let go of probably 33% of the things that you are right now maintaining, keeping up, buying, you can let them go. And the reason you can let them go is that your happiness will switch from a pleasure-based system, which is why you are maintaining all the things, to a values-based system where there is a tremendous amount of meaning. And you realize that things that you are trying to keep up was to offset the fact that you are not very happy. So we have to keep in the pleasure mode. Once we shift into a values-based happiness system, where there is more meaning we can let go of a lot. My sense is that all of us in a world where resources and some of the old ways are becoming more scarce, that we don’t have to keep working as hard and making as much as we did. So as we de-escalate with the system, ahead of the system, we consume less and we actually have a higher standard of living relative to where our happiness lies, and we don’t have to work as hard, we don’t have to do as much “have to” and we can do more “want to”. And that “want to” is the passive income engine that can begin to start to pull some of the load.
Now creating passive income streams is extremely difficult because most people try and do it from somebody else’s success model. And this Henri, circling back now, this is why we point you in the direction and why we hold the seminar so that you can interact with other people doing the same thing to get to your passion point, to get to where you can say, “heck, I would do this even if I didn’t get paid”. Now it would sure be nice if I was paid, and if I was able to monetize this and I was able to grow this over a period of time so that this income could replace some of my active income. And that of course is what we’re trying to do through retirement, savings, annuities, whole-life insurance, buying land and holding it commodities, there are a million different ways. But my point is that I think a person should have a diversified strategy and what I’ve seen in my clients, the ones who are beginning to move to “where the puck is going to be”, like our friend Gretzky answered when asked why he was such a great hockey player, he said most hockey players skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be.
So what I am trying to do is to take a group of people who are going to start to skate to where the puck is going to be rather then reactively chase it. The way to do that, in fact the only way I know to do this, is to go through your passion lens. Because if you make a mistake while you are working through your passion lens you are still going to be happy. But if you make a mistake working through someone else’s “you should do this” or “you should do that” most likely if it doesn’t work you are not going to be very well off. You cannot make a mistake in life if you are working through the passion lens. And that’s the reason that I focus so much on that versus, well, “let me teach you my success model” like another guru or motivational speaker might do. My success model won’t work for you because because you are not motivated to do the things that I do to be successful. But what will work for you is a success model that is designed based on what you will do and keep doing every day.
And the secret Henri is this. The secret to all wealth is two words. One is leverage and the other is compounding. Most people who are not wealthy do not understand the power of compounding and it’s very simple: it’s where you keep doing something long enough that the profit and interest that you get from doing it well are reinvested, which causes the principal to double at the rate of interest. So if you are going to do passion work over 10 or 20 years, just doing it and being passionate about it will give you leverage and compounding and in many ways will make you wealthy.
Now you still have to learn how to monetize it using the rules of business, which most people don’t know very well. But you can make a mistake. The system will not sit on the shelf because you are passionate about it and you would do it if you didn’t get paid. So you are going to continue to put time into it, you are going to continue to fool around with it at night while the kids are watching TV, you are going to continue to come to calls like this, that fuel that passion, and the key thing with passion is the quality of information that you provide by having done something for a long period of time because you have researched it, you have found the secret, you have a lot of experience, you have become wise, and every one of us on this call has something like that in us that we are motivated to do. That is the secret, Henry that is driving this.
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