6th edition Getting Scammed and Firing up Ambition Ambition

Story: Getting scammed

I was once in a big local market in Bangkok looking for some interesting local fruit.

My girlfriend and I were savvy backpackers and we knew how to do it.

We wouldn’t get scammed by the first vendor who said any price.

So we walked for hours and bargained with many vendors to figure out the real price.

Then we bargained a little more and did succeed in saving a few dollars.

Later at the hotel, I realized something.

I got scammed big time.

I had scammed myself.

I wasted hours having hostile conversations with vendors.

Got irritable with my partner.

Annoyed a lot of people.

And saved an inconsequential amount of $2 or whatever.

In retrospect, I’d have paid a lot more to have a pleasant market experience,
make people smile, share good vibes, and spend the extra hours in a park eating exotic fruit.
Ruining a day was not worth the squeeze.

“I’m never scamming myself again,” I said. I like to think I haven’t ever since.

Maybe, not in that way.

It took me years to be able to share that I got scammed again.

I joined a business coaching program with a big coaching guy.

It was a $2k investment to learn one very specific skill related to monetizing Facebook groups.

I took value from the program. Made ROI in a few months.

But, looking back, I can tell I got scammed.

I could have gotten a lot more value.

I was defensive, thinking the guy didn’t care about me.

Because of that, I didn’t ask many questions. Didn’t share anything.

I ostracized myself because I was suspicious.

Looking back, now I understand he cared more about my business than I did.

And I scammed myself out of networking with some great people.

I scammed myself out of getting his experienced brain to work on my business.

It’s an industry full of scammers. Stay safe out there.

These are both true personal stories by the way. We live and learn. At least we live.

Strategic Note 6: How to set your ambition on fire.

There’s a vast industry selling a transformation, whether it’s business, health, relationships… self-help or full-blown services.

Some people change their lives indeed. But most of the advice, strategies, tactics don’t work.

So, allow me to take my shot at fixing this whole thing.

I want everyone to transform for the better.

That is ambition. Ambition it is.

If you want to understand transformation, you need to understand ambition.

If I show you how to tap into it, you are golden. If you are golden, I’m golden.

Let’s do it.

1. Ambition is the bigger pain that makes the arduous work to get out of a situation feel like a release. Sometimes a solution to a bad thing is a worse thing.

2. Ambition is also the bigger pleasure that makes your current pleasure feel dull. Sometimes to detach from a pleasure, you need a bigger pleasure.

As you see, ambition is a spear with spearheads on both sides.

Both those things make you get what you want.

Just defining it doesn’t do much.

How can we tap into that?

You know how when you are searching for a new apartment, viewing places, and once you find the new apartment, you start imagining yourself living there — and also start detaching and even hating your current apartment?

If those feelings go below your awareness, don’t worry, they are happening anyway.

It’s your brain urging you to make the move. And the brain will do whatever it takes to get you there.

It will justify away the little flaws of the new place; it will justify away the higher rent; it will find reasons to leave the current place; it will arrange the annoying logistics of moving with joy.

Ambition is aroused.

What happened is that you found the thing you want, got a good view of it so that your brain could get on board and start figuring out how to get there — and at the same time, how to detach from the current situation.

So there are these two poles: the excitement of the new apartment, and the hate for the current apartment.

If you don’t view the apartment, you don’t feel the urge to move. Just a dull wish things were better and the dull pleasure of habit that makes you not hate where you are.

That’s the nature of desire.

When you fall in love, it’s the same thing.

You start dreaming (viewing) the best life with a person, and as you do that, you automatically detach from all current desire with other people.

The stronger you want that apartment, the stronger you reject all the others.

Imagine you could go view your next-level life.

That’s what people call visualization.

I’ll show you how to do that.

Because…

You can’t fall in love with a person you never met.

You can’t really want an apartment you’ve never seen.

You can’t want a life you don’t know.

Out of sight, out of mind.

You do need to view it so that ambition kicks in.

How do you view your next-level life?

That’s tricky. Because it’s not materialized yet.

But actually, it’s no different from the apartment or person you fall in love with.

You don’t know what it’s like to live in the apartment or live with that person.

You just know enough for your brain to dream the rest.

And if you want ambition to take you to the next-level life…

You don’t need to know it all, but you need to know it enough.

You need to view it enough.

So let’s tactically do that in 3 magical steps to wake up your ambition.

Viewing the next-level life:

1. Integrate the dream with the current life in a story.
   The brain is a sucker for stories.

   Think of the milestone events of your life and connect them in a way to fit a narrative of how your life is an epic upward journey toward the next level. Connect the dots forward. No stories, your brain is out.

2. Feel the riches.

   Feeling a feeling is how you reinforce neural pathways in your brain. If you make those connections strong, your brain will more readily feel that feeling and look for it again instead of using other pathways.
   I was walking outside and the scent of pine trees made me feel great. I live for that. In my brain, that’s rich. That’s arrival.
   So I stopped and stayed there for a minute with that scent.
   That’s like viewing the dream apartment for a moment.
   And if you want the next level, pay attention to what you already have that is next-level-like.

3. Invest in the vision.

   You can literally rent an Airbnb for 3 days that is a bit out of your budget.
   If you can’t, you can sit outside that beautiful house in the neighborhood you like.
   That’s like you’d be literally viewing the apartment of your next-level life.

   If your ambition doesn’t involve literal better housing, it’s okay. Let’s say you want to hang out with a type of people — you can invest and go hang out with them, even if you don’t quite fit yet.
   Join the activity, the club, or the city where you are around them.

   Maybe it involves a skill you wish to have. You can always afford to jump to the future for a few moments at least.
   You can’t buy the thing, but you can sample it.

Some of these will feel gradual. But that’s okay. It better be.
Ambition can drive you mad.
You want controlled desire. If it goes off the rails, that’s how the worst things happen.

So, just learn how to view that next-level apartment.

You can’t redo your childhood (that’s usually where great ambitions are triggered).

You can’t change your genes — that’s also where the proclivity to ambition can come from.

But you can choose how you frame your story.

You can choose to pay attention to rich feelings.

And you can choose to invest in your future.

That’s allowing you to view the next apartment.

Visualization activates ambition.

Trying to achieve something without activating ambition is like lighting a fire with wet matches — frustrating and mostly smoke.

Or worse, it's trying to push a car with handbrakes on. It's burnout for sure.

Do the viewing daily and your infinitely wise mind will take care of the details.

Or quit all desires and become a monk.