I was 20 when I started to learn golf. I remember being obsessed with the game. Playing as often as possible, reading how to books, and taking as many clients on the course as possible.

The best game I ever played was at River Run in Maryland. I finished seven over par, I was 25. At 26 my company at the time, MCI Telecommunications, had a golf outing with our global accounts on Long Island New York, and my foursome won 1st place.

Commitment Before Ego

I struggled to get good at golf, mostly because of ego which is rooted in low self-worth. One of the manifestations of low-self-worth is the inability to ask for help. Low self-worth also has an impact on our leadership development.

I used to think I was not good enough to play with the experts. I was more concerned about how I would “look”, than the benefit I would gain from being around experts and learning how to play better from them.

I was afraid to be vulnerable. I was afraid to admit that I didn’t know something, for fear that I would be judged as not good enough.

I think back to so many opportunities for growth that I had, where I let my ego get in the way by needing to look like I had it all together.

I want to help others not make the same mistake and miss out on growth opportunities. I did eventually learn an important lesson from golf about life and leadership.

“In the game of golf, the only competition you face is your bad habits.”

The greatest of golfers does not analyze how another golfer plays, he/she works on improving his/her own game by developing consistent good habits that generate consistently good results.

The smart golfers, take tips, own that it’s a game requiring constant growth and learning, and they don’t let ego get in the way of improving their game when others offer up constructive criticism.

The same is true in life, isn’t it?

The more open we are to learn, the humbler we remain, the more fulfilled we become as we grow and become better than we were the day before.

Sadly, much like when I was in my 20s and 30s, many people spend a great deal of time figuring out how to look like they are better than others, compete at all costs, and look like they have it all together.

“There is a fundamental problem with the fake it till you make it strategy. You are fooling yourself and holding yourself back from growing.”

Work on Yourself

By competing with others, you end up within a zero-sum strategy. You go after your slice of the pie, but there is only so much to go around. You end up having to force someone out of the game, and ultimately the same can happen to you.

What is the alternative?

When you focus on your own game, and you stay open to growing, learning and being adaptive, you gain the brilliance and means to create new values.

“Being humble and hungry for growth will enable you to add something to the life opportunities pie that is missing… making the pie bigger.”

Widening the pie benefits you, and others too. If more people adopted this mindset, we would never experience economic downfalls and more people would experience prosperity.

Much like the game of golf, for us to experience sustainable success in life requires we focus on developing ourselves to be consistent, productive, resilient, and above all people who add value to others.

“Focusing on adding values makes you a creator, while focusing on competing and beating others makes you a taker.”

When we are in creator mode, anything can be accomplished, when we go into taker mode, we might experience temporary gains in life, but we will ultimately experience chaos. It’s built into the taker operating system.

The economic crash we had in 2008 was a testament of what happens when we consume more than we produce, when we take more than we give. The only way for it to never happen again, is to become beings of creative and giving forces, vs. beings that need stuff to be happy.

The crash came from the need to compete in a zero-sum proposition world. If you are not actively adding value, you are taking from the pie and eventually this causes recessions, and depressions.

The key ingredient to growing as an individual is much like improving your golf game. Focus on yourself. Develop your own qualities. Become consistent, and productive. Improve your own game.

The winner in golf is not the one who beats the other players, the winner is the one who worked on improving his/her own game. The winner is the one who day in and day out outdoes his/her old game the most. Period!

“In life, winning means outdoing your old self, your old ways, your old strategy, your old views, and more importantly the way you view yourself.”

Let Go of the Need for Validation

Because of our desire to be validated, respected, and… we can focus on looking good, so others think well of us, and lose sight of the real game, growing as a human being.

“The real game of life is about evolving to be better, more loving, more giving, more compassionate, more authentic human beings.”

When we focus on just improving ourselves, becoming better than we were the day before, there is no other outcome but a winning outcome.

Validation, respect, and love are all verbs; they are actions that need to come from the inside out, not the other way around.

When a great golfer is losing, he/she does not use the excuse that “the wind” caused them to lose, the great golfer admits when they did not develop a strategy to not let the wind dictate their game.

“In life the wind is what others think of us. If you go outside on a windy day and try chasing it… you’ll never catch it, and you will find yourself exhausted trying.”

When you focus on being better grounded within yourself, you won’t even know the wind is there.

You will have control of the outcome of your own game, and since we’ve already discussed that that game is focused on adding value to the pie by creating values for others, everyone will win along with you.

You might win or lose in a competitive golf game with other players, but if you are focused on outdoing yourself day in and day out, you are winning at the bigger game — the game of life.

It’s tempting and easy to choose to see life as a glass half empty or half full. It’s also easy to judge having more or less, as either being full or empty. Abundance or scarcity. Are these two opposite realities something that happens in the mind, or do they manifest in real life in measurable ways?

The answer to both questions is yes. But the more important question is what comes first, the reality or the state of mind? In what order do they happen?

There are many streams of consciousness that make a strong case for whatever we manifest, first starting in the mind. Our state of being, what we focus on, our desires become reality.

I think someone who struggles with poverty, hunger, disease, and other forms of lack, is not likely to agree with the concept that he/she has manifested those things out of desire.

I am here to make the argument that we never lack anything at all. Whatever the situation we are in, there is something we are getting from it. Aware of it consciously or not, we are getting something from the circumstance we are in.

“We get energy from being in whatever situation we are in.”

We get energy from the reasons we aren’t making millions. We get energy from why we are not with our soulmate. We get energy from why we are not healthy. We get energy from anger. We get energy from sadness. We get energy from everything we choose to experience.

Why does this happen?

Because we value the situation we are in, albeit not consciously aware of it, more than the energy we would get from changing it. Breaking from poverty is hard work, it’s going all in and then some. It’s hard to break free, but not impossible.

We are materialized energy, and we are always full, it’s a matter of understanding what motivates us, but we are never at the mercy of anything outside of ourselves.

“We are the producers, directors, and actors of our own reality show — life”

Everything starts with desire, but desire without actions is just that… desire. What we manifest in our lives is a reflection of our strongest desires, conscious and unconscious, followed by our actions, voluntary or robotic.

Overcome the Need to Be Served

Energy is not static, energy is always flowing, it is either flowing to serve you in a positive way, or it is flowing to serve you in a negative way. Energy in itself has no purpose without consciousness.

“You are the source of your energy, and you are the vessel of it at the same time.”

We are either filling ourselves with outcomes that propel us forward, or we are filling ourselves with things like depression, procrastination, sadness, anger, resentment, and judgments.

Let’s call these container of energy “sabotage robots.”

“How energy flows in our lives, depends greatly on whether we are beings who like to give and serve, or beings who like to receive and be served.”

The reality is that to experience true prosperity in all aspects of our lives we need to be both, and at any given moment we are both.

My Buddhist mentor Felix, who was with the Dalai Lama and a monk for over a decade, said to me once: “Tullio to deny the animal inside you, is to deny the divine inside you.”

Our life’s purpose is to balance our animalistic consciousness with our higher consciousness. It’s a dance that if done correctly creates a balanced and fulfilled life.

Knowing that we are constantly in a state of giving and receiving, can help understand why at times we could manifest scarcity. When nothing that we perceive as good is serving us, we turn to those robots we’ve created called “sabotage.”

Our animalistic sub-consciousness reasons like this: “I can’t afford that new toy right now, because I don’t have the money working for me and therefore I don’t have the means to fill my need for happiness right now, so I am going to have sadness serve me because I need something to fill me, something to give me energy.”

There is energy in sadness, depression, anger, resentment, judgment… they are sources of incredible energy; those energy containers are not external of you, you created them and put them on reserve to come and serve you when you are feeling low on energy… so you deploy those robots who come and give you the feeling of control.

“Scarcity can be a form of temporary misdirected fulfillment, whenever we choose not to do the work needed to truly feel joy.”

This realization causes one of three things: Flight, freeze, or fight responses. Those who choose to fight, one by one begin to realize that leading a measurably productive, and accountable life as covered in one my past blog is about pouring energy outward not only into containers, but into pipes that drive the progress and improvement of humanity.

“A pipe has an entry and exit point; it is endlessly flowing. When we choose to let energy flow through us, instead of rest with us, we create synergy with the Universe.”

We create an endlessly supply of energy because we are actively sharing it, not hoarding it.

“The more you seek to be served, the more the sabotage robots are given permission to take over your life.”

When you become inner to outer directed, with the purpose of being a value creator for others, those sabotage robots begin to die. It’s kind of like when you are growing a lawn, the best way to kill the weeds, isn’t to pull them… weeds thrive on space.

You plant more healthy seeds and as the good grass thickens the weeds choke and die automatically, because you are removing space.

It’s very simple. What you give energy to determines your state of mind, and the related actions you take determine your mood. If you are not producing, you are taking.

The sabotage robots in the taking mode of operation are: One-time shots/blast of energy such as abuse of alcohol, drugs, no strings attached sex, anger, resentment, depression, doubts…

These are all intended to fill an emptiness within for that moment, but long-term emptiness cannot be filled from the outside, it can only be filled by emanating positive energy (planting more good seeds).

Fill a Void Without Filling It

When it comes to your state of being, much like the weeds in the grass growth example, you remove the space between the good energy you put out and the voids, by giving more positive energy outward.

“Only in emanating what we desire to experience, can we actually experience it.”

The voids in our lives don’t need to be filled, they need to be eliminated by creating more outwardly focused pipes of energy. If you have a plot of land that is empty, you don’t fill it with grown fruit trees, for they might live one season and die the next, you plant the seed, water it, and then you let something called nature take its course.

The seed of the trees are then rooted and participate in the process of growth in the plot of land they were planted in, they were not transplanted, and hence they can keep giving fruit, year after year.

When you create those positive energy pipes, all you do is plant the seed, and water (work towards the realization of those goals) but the actual outcome is not within your hands, the outcome already exists, just like a fruit tree is already existent within the seed.

How well the tree manifests and produces fruit is based on the farmer’s (you) actions, and then the course of nature (reality), which sustains the tree.

All around us there is energy which we are a sub-set of (reality), recognizing this principle will allow us to one by one remove the space in our lives, and stop asking the “sabotage robots” to come to our aid when we feel empty, but rather we begin to plant more positive seeds, (take more actions) realizing that we can be absolutely certain that whatever we plant, the outcome already exists in the Universal Consciousness that becomes reality.

“The reward of living a full and joyful life isn’t based on the outcomes of our actions. The reward comes in being able to play an active self-accountable role in the process.”

Being attached to the end results to be happy is a form of “sabotage robots’ we have created. Desire and action coupled with detachment is key. The way to never experience scarcity is to be proactive in your process to becoming a being of action, a giving force for the betterment of humanity, but stay detached of the outcomes.

In short, do your best, give your best. That’s all you need to do.

hap·pi·ness /ˈhapēnəs/ noun — the state of being happy. Synonyms: contentment, pleasure, contentedness, satisfaction, cheerfulness, cheeriness, merriment, merriness, gaiety, joy, joyfulness, joyousness, joviality, jollity, jolliness, glee, blitheness, carefreeness gladness, delight, good spirits, high spirits, light heartedness, good cheer, well-being, enjoyment, felicity.

Money and Happiness

What is the relationship between money and happiness? Is money a cause, and happiness an effect? Or is money evil, and a hindrance to happiness?

Most people have heard contradictory assertions about money, ranging from “money makes people happier” to “money is the root of all evil.” Upon close examination, one can see the relationship between the two.

Money is a medium of exchange for values.

A person produces values and exchanges those values for money. The more values one produces and exchanges with others, the more money he or she can accumulate.

Then the person can use this money to produce more values, and purchase values from others. This is a very simplified explanation of wealth production.

What about happiness? Happiness is an effect. The cause of happiness is the achievement of one’s core values.

Core values are the fundamental beliefs of a person or organization. These guiding principles dictate behavior and can help people understand and companies determine if they are on the right path towards fulfilling their goals.

Say a person consciously values an enriching love relationship. That person then prepares herself to experience such a relationship. Later, she meets someone that she admires, and they initiate a relationship.

That relationship then develops into a growing love relationship. She may not explicitly grasp the dynamics involved, but she feels happy.

“Happiness is an effect. The cause of happiness is achieving one’s values.”

This presumes that a person has chosen a hierarchy of values. If a person holds money as a high value and earns it, he or she will experience happiness.

The same is true of all values, such as self-esteem, romantic love, and aesthetic pleasures. Ultimately, however, happiness along with prosperity, and romantic love, depends on one fundamental condition.

Without this condition, one will not experience abiding happiness, prosperity, or romantic love. What is that condition?

That condition is “productive accountability”.

Productive Accountability

ac·count·a·bil·i·ty /əˌkoun(t)əˈbilədē/ noun — the fact or condition of being accountable. Synonyms: responsibility, liability, answerability.

No matter how much money or material abundance we might have, productive work is essential to our happiness. Even if a person wins a billion-dollar lottery, that person would need to engage in productive accountable activities to experience abiding happiness.

Why would even a billionaire need to engage in productive accountable activities to achieve abiding happiness?

Wouldn’t that billionaire be able to buy his/her way to happiness?

Wouldn’t that person derive happiness from the unlimited access and consumptions to material goods?

The reason every adult human being needs to engage in productive accountable work is for physical and psychological survival. Higher causes or altruistic reasons or duty to one’s family, community, or nation are a bonus, but at the most basic level — we need to create in order to survive.

We don’t engage in productive work because of tacit or expressed obligations to others. The only reason to engage in productive work is for our own physical and psychological survival.

In the case of the billionaire, or any individual who is financially independent, he or she still needs to be productive in order to experience happiness. The individual who becomes financially independent, no longer works for physical survival. The individual’s material needs are already taken care of. He or she works for psychological fulfillment.

Increased Self-Esteem

Productive work can deliver the self-esteem that is needed for psychological survival. Sexual conquests cannot deliver the self-esteem needed for psychological survival. Neither can praying, hobbies, manipulating others, drug use, criminal scores, killing, or any other activity.

In the long run, the avoidance of productive work leads to the subconscious thought, “I wish I was dead.” It causes neurosis!

“Productive accountable work is the foundation of happiness.”

Productivity is also the foundation of prosperity. Productive work is indispensable to human beings. Producing more values than one consumes is the essence of a productive accountable and happy life.

Equally important is that no one can dictate to others what work to engage in. For some people’s productive work might consist of landscaping, painting, composing music, or writing. For others, these may simply be hobbies.

Others might choose teaching, healing, or engineering as their means of productive work. The guiding principle here is that productive work requires a long-range perspective, rational goals, a focused mind, and consistent effort.

We need to approach productive work rationally to experience abiding prosperity and happiness. This applies to all productive work, including janitorial work, sales, artwork, building a business, or any other productive activity, including philanthropy.

If productive work is the foundation for all abiding happiness and earned prosperity, and essentially everyone wants to be happy and prosperous, why doesn’t everyone engage in productive work?

There is a two-part answer to this question.

The first part deals with a deeply personal matter. That personal matter is a choice every human being on the planet has to make. Each person has to make the choice to exert the consistent effort that productive work demands. In essence, each individual human being has to make the following choice: to exert consistent effort or default to laziness.

The second part of the answer is a cultural issue. The culture in the upside-down command and control world cleverly works to foster laziness, co-dependency on others, incompetence, and criminal thinking.

A lot of people want to live like a billionaire without earning it, and just have a good old time consuming more than they produce. This unfortunately does not create self-happiness for the long haul.

The command and control culture subtly spreads a dependency attitude in the minds of people. As people absorb this cleverly promoted attitude throughout their life, they subconsciously accept it.

People begin to think it is “cool” to take it easy, sit back, and let others do the work. Those who exert the constant high effort needed for value production are labeled as uncool, overachievers, workaholics, or other disparaging names.

Treat People with Dignity

When I was a child, I depended on my parents to survive. As I became an adult, I learned to depend on myself. I was lucky. My father taught me the value of being productive as a teenager. While my friends were having a good time partying, I was being taught the value of money by contributing to the mortgage, and household expenses.

My mom and dad didn’t need the money, and at the time, I could not stand my father for asking me to contribute like 80% of my part-time hard-earned money towards living expenses. I was 17. Years later, I thanked my dad for teaching me responsibility, but more importantly for letting me earn my fulfillment in life and grow to appreciate the importance of self-reliance, and productive work.

“My dad treated me like an adult early in life, in order for me to become one.”

When you treat people like adults who are capable of taking care of things, you give them the freedom they need to break away from co-dependency. You give them the freedom to find their own way in life. You give them the ability to earn their own fulfillment. You give them the ability to create happiness in their lives. You give people their dignity.

This is not just a theory. There are companies today who have embraced freedom at work, and who treat employees as co-creators, as adults. The results are companies outperforming the S&P by a factor of 10X and very low attrition rates.

At Nearsoft, for example, we have approximately 3% attrition year to date. We’ve been treating our co-creators as adults for over a decade. Our people are engaged, free, super productive and happy.

“Freedom to be productive on our own terms leads to a happy life — it’s that simple.”

Get Out of the Funk

Productivity will get you out of a funk too. I recently got a call from a member of my men’s circle of eight years ago. He shared with me how he didn’t make consistent effort to being productive over the past 40 working years of his life.

As a result, he is not in a favorable place in his life right now. He is going through a divorce, is nursing an injury, isn’t working as a result of his injury and isn’t earning a living. He is living in the back of a construction job site, while his stuff is in storage.

I truly feel for him because he is being hit by a perfect storm. He shared with me how guilty he feels needing help, when a family member is dealing with stage three cancer. I simply replied to him: “Your perfect storm feels to you like you are fighting stage three cancer doesn’t it?” Everything we experience in life is relative to how we perceive things and our state of consciousness.

I talk about my own perfect storm in my new book “Emotionally Aware Leadership”, and how it was a gift in my life. A wake-up call.

After hearing him pitying himself, and shaming himself, and being a victim, I simply asked him: If you went to sleep and woke up tomorrow with clear vision of what you need to do, what would that be?

By sharing with him my own perfect storm experience I was able to help him realize he isn’t the only man in the world, who has had to reinvent himself.

After more conversation, we agreed on him getting his living situation in order first. Just the sense of him having to be productive towards a goal, instead of sitting around feeling sorry for himself, gave him a needed boost to feel a sense of purpose.

That sense of purpose lifted his spirits. This brings me to the final point I wish to leave you with.

If you feel stuck, not knowing what to do, being lazy in your own wallow…. feeling a little down on yourself, feeling a little less than…. the first thing you need to do, is get into action. The moment you get back to being productive, is the moment you start feeling happy again.