Being in full surrender and acceptance of how things are makes room for the next chapter of life. This week on Acta Non Verba I’m continuing my conversation with Sam Morris as he shares how he embraced Adversity by leaning on his Zen philosophy training and embraced the power of breath work to transition into a mindset of healing. In this episode Sam and I discuss the need for persistence and discipline when dealing with ADVERSITY and how to separate yourself from the circumstances of your life. Sam also shares how his injury gave him a deeper understanding of the Bushido wisdom of “dying before you die to prepare yourself for what fully lies ahead.”
Sam Morris is the founder of Zen Warrior training, a transformational coaching program for high performing entrepreneurs and creative professionals. Sam is an internationally known leader in the field of personal transformation with 20 years of experience studying and teaching the ancient wisdom of Zen philosophy, meditation and breath practices. Sam coaches high performers and corporate clients on how to master their inner workings of the mind, body and spirit, and live from a place of presence, purpose and resolve.
Connect with Sam via his website: https://zenwarriortraining.com/
Episode Transcript:
00:32
In this episode of Acta Non Verba, we hear part two of my interview with Sam Morris, the founder of Zen Warrior Training. In part one, Sam talked about the idea of a Zen Warrior, how ancient samurai fought from a place of inner peace, and how that can be applied in executive decision-making. In part two,
01:02
We discussed the Bushida wisdom of dying before you die to prepare yourself fully for what lies ahead of you. Later in the episode, Sam also reveals the adversity that left him paralyzed from the waist down and how he was able to overcome the victim mentality with his Zen Warrior philosophy. You can find out more about Sam at zenw Now, here’s part two of my interview with the incredible Sam Morris. So one of the things that’s connected us, Sam, my story about the gift of adversity, about being paralyzed from the neck down,
01:32
being told I never walk again, and then being lucky enough to recover. I ask people, because in my mind, the people that I’ve met that are at the highest levels of whatever their expertise is, they’ve all gone through adversity. They’ve all gone through hardship. And you either do one of two things when you hit adversity. You either hit adversity and that’s the ceiling, and you never evolve or grow beyond that.
01:59
And those are the people that are the same when they’re 25 as when they’re 75, because nothing has changed for them. Can you tell us about your story about the adversity that you went through, how that changed you and how you’re able to continue to serve the world and empower others with these experiences that you had in 1999? Yeah. So in the summer of 1999, I was an outdoor leader at the time, and I was 23 years old and I had just
02:27
finished leading a cycling trek for 19 teenagers across the US. And we’d bike 3,800 miles in a little under two months. And we camped every night and cooked all our own food. And it was quite a trek. We went from Seattle to the New Jersey shore. And I think we did it in something like 54 days or something like that. It was, it was amazing. And at the time it was the biggest challenge I had ever taken on. And.
02:53
My whole life at that time, or a lot of my life, revolved around outdoor activities. I was an avid skier and an avid snowboarder and I hiked pretty much every day of my life. And that was the world that I was in. And so that trip finished the end of August of 1999. And then in November of 99, just two and a half months later, I was going out to celebrate a friend’s birthday.
03:23
And the guy who was driving the car was someone who I had only met that night. And he was driving erratically had been drinking and he spun off a dirt road, lost control of the car and hit a tree. It was an old 1973 Chevy Nova with no seatbelt in the back. And my body got tossed from the right side of the back seat over to the driver’s side and hit the side where the impact happened. And in that moment, my T12 vertebra exploded on impact and I became paralyzed from the waist down.
03:52
So I remember the whole thing. I never lost consciousness. It was just boom, just suddenly no longer could feel anything below my navel. And so that began the whole next period of my life. I’d just turned 24 years old. And suddenly, I had lost not only my ability to walk, I had also become permanently impotent. I’d lost my bowel and bladder control and sensation.
04:22
So everything, as you can imagine, everything from the level of the navel that you can feel, everything down became offline. Suddenly my spinal cord was completely injured from that point down. And so that began the second chapter of my life. And I was already someone who very much identified with the wisdom of Zen and Taoist philosophy and principles and practices.
04:49
I was someone who was already, I practiced Aikido, I was very into mindfulness and presence and that sort of thing. But that was the biggest challenge, obviously, of my life. And I began applying those principles right away to my new situation. And a lot of Buddhist and Zen Tao’s principles revolve around the principle of non-attachment.
05:19
letting go of how you think things should be and being in full surrender and acceptance of how things are. Essentially just being with the nature of reality as it is without conflict. And so that’s one thing when it comes to, you know, maybe losing a girlfriend or maybe failing a test that you meant to do better on.
05:45
It’s a whole other thing when it comes to losing the function of half your body. And so, and so I really had to begin this process of letting go of how I thought my body was supposed to always be. And most people don’t have to deal with that process until they’re very, they’re elderly.
06:11
And then at some point, maybe by the time you’re in your mid 70s or 80s or 90s, things start to fall apart a little bit. That hip ain’t quite working the way it used to be. They might have to rely on a cane or eventually use a wheelchair. I was 24 years old and I was in the prime of my life and I was a professional athlete and I had to deal with that at that age, right in the prime of my life and then no.
06:39
I’ve got my entire life ahead of me and it’s going to be without the use of my lower body now. And I had this moment, this awakening moment that happened in the hospital seven days after my injury when the doctors took me off of morphine. And I’d been doped up with morphine over the course of that first week after my spinal fusion surgery. And I thought that I was tolerating the injury okay.
07:09
But what I didn’t realize was that it was just because I was on morphine the entire time. So as soon as the doctors took me off morning and I became lucid, I wanted to kill myself. I thought, I can’t go on like this. This is bullshit. There’s no way that I’m living the rest of my life paralyzed from the waist down. I’m only 24 years old. Are you kidding me? Like, no goddamn way am I living like this. And yet there was nothing I could do.
07:36
know, my body’s paralyzed, I’m in this hard shell plastic cast, I’m just alone in this hospital room. The only thing that my intuition guided me to do was to start taking deep breaths. And so I started breathing as deeply as I possibly could. This is before I ever knew anything about breath work or the power, anything like that. All I thought was I just need to breathe as deeply as I could. My intuition just guided me there. And I did. And then suddenly out of nowhere,
08:06
something miraculous occurred. I went from, it was like everything that I ever thought that I knew about myself, felt like it was on one side of a threshold. Everything that I had ever identified with, my name, my family, my education, my likes, my dislikes, my athleticism, this, that, all of the things, all the content of my mind.
08:34
and my relationship to my body and everything that I had ever thought I knew about myself was on this one side of the threshold and suddenly my awareness was on another side of the threshold. And I was observing from a completely neutral and objective place, observing a human being going through an experience. But I wasn’t the human being going through the experience.
09:01
I realized that the human being going through the experience was a temporary manifestation of consciousness. But who I was was consciousness, not the temporary manifestation of the consciousness. And this is exactly the same experience that Eckhart Tolle describes in The Power of Now, when he had his awakening moment, the exact same thing. As that happened…
09:30
my breath, I felt like I became the breath. I felt more breath than body. It was like I no longer related to myself through the body and through the mind. I related to myself as primarily breath. And it was eternal. And it was timeless. It was absolutely beautiful. It was God’s space. And it wasn’t necessarily something that was particularly blissful per
09:58
but it was empty of content. It didn’t have all the content that my mind was creating. It was separate from all of the story and drama of who I was and my expectations and this and that. It was just silence. It was a space of silence where I was able to be awareness versus thinking that I was just simply this temporary identity in a temporary body. And from that point on, I became really
10:26
deeply interested in the power of the breath and the power of mindset to heal. And so I began a journey that continues to this day where I’m always using meditation and I’m always using breath work. I’m always using practices of movement and mindfulness to work with adversity. And the way that I have learned to work with adversity is very similar. I mean, I obviously can’t be in that space of that emptiness all the time.
10:56
but I know that it was there. I know it as an experience. There’s a reference point in me at all times that that is who I really am, that who I really am is not the conditions of the circumstances of my life. Who I really am is a timeless eternal being that has no name, has no body, has no mind, has no identity, it’s just awareness. And
11:26
As I keep referencing that true self, that awareness, this stuff doesn’t stick to me as much. When the pains of life, the challenges of life present themselves, they just don’t stick to me as much. And I’ve spent, the disability itself, the paraplegia itself was one thing. The real disability for me has been
11:52
a series of pressure ulcers, which are like bed sores that people in wheelchairs develop, that I’ve had to deal with for, I’m dealing with them now, and I’ve dealt with them on and off for the last 20 years. And I still haven’t found a permanent solution to having these things just not appear. But they are an ongoing challenge. That’s where the real disability has been. I’ve spent over two years completely immobilized in hospital beds.
12:20
due to pressure ulcers, not able to work, not able to do anything but lie in hospital beds and stare at a clock or read books or watch crappy daytime TV for years. I think I’ve logged something like close to 20,000 hours of lying in hospital beds immobilized. But I kept on coming back. You know, in the hardest…
12:49
times of struggle and adversity, I kept on coming back to the fact that who I was was not my experience. Who I was was not the circumstances of my life. Who I was was not the thoughts in my head. And, you know, the silver lining of that is that has cultivated, continues to cultivate this wisdom that I now pay forward.
13:19
with in my own life and with my clients and the people that I impact in my world these days, I can say with 100% authority, I can hold that for them that who they really are is not conditioned by the circumstances of their lives or their thoughts about themselves. But who they really are, just as who I really am, is eternal awareness. And when you realize your eternal awareness, what you realize, no, it’s…
13:49
you have the ability to navigate seemingly impossible circumstances because your own mind isn’t creating your limitations. You can move through like the sort of like Bruce Lee uses the analogy of be like water. Water moves with whatever presents itself. It does not stop with obstacles. If you be like water, you can move with anything. So it allows me to be like water.
14:18
It allows me to be in that space of emptiness inside of myself so that as the challenges of life come to me, I’m able to move with them without hiding from them, without confronting them in a way that is pushing against them too hard, but in a way that flows with them gracefully. It’s so true when we stop trying to be conscious and we just become consciousness.
14:46
When we stop trying to be aware and just realize we’re awareness, when we stop trying to have an intention or an outcome, like you said, like water, if we can have that detachment and just allow these things to play out as they will. Again, this comes back full circle to the the Buddha Bushido mentality of, for those of you that don’t know, before a samurai warrior would go on a campaign, he would have a burial ceremony. He would go through the entire thing. So that he
15:15
almost like a geschalt idea of having full circle, taking care of undue business. Now he can go in to the fray. He can go into the face of war and have no hesitation. Not, not wondering. I wonder if I told my wife that I loved her enough. I wonder if my house is in order. I wonder what will happen if something happens to me, because in that moment, you do not have the luxury of being philosophical. Yes. You have to have that space, the ability to.
15:44
to work within those confines, because in the heat of battle, all that goes away. And if you don’t have that already taken care of, you will hesitate, you will falter, and you probably won’t survive. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, coming full circle back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation in terms of the samurai. Essentially dying before you die, before your physical body dies, going through the ritual of death so that you can be completely present and…
16:13
not in conflict with death whatsoever. And in that situation, that’s how the warrior is able to respond with such grace and such presence. They’re already dead. They’ve already gone through the process. It’s okay now. They’ve already moved through the fear. They’ve already moved through the hesitation. And that’s not morbid. That’s what people need to get. It is not morbid at all. That’s saying…
16:43
Basically, when we die to ourselves before we physically die, it’s a process of letting go. Letting go of anything that we are attached to, which we don’t need for our eternal process, whatever that is. Letting go so that we can be fully engaged in the present moment. And paradoxically…
17:14
It means that we can appreciate life that much more once we have died before our physical death because now we’re more available. We’re operating less from fear and resistance to life and more in a space of gratitude and abundance for what we have. It’s not morbid, it’s Muchen. It’s no-mindedness. It’s that emptiness. And like you said, when, you know, I’m always talking about diversity being a gift. That’s the thing.
17:43
And I don’t mean it in this fake bullshit gratitude that people talk about where they sit on their hands and they just let their world fall around them and they don’t act and they play a victim. And then they hide behind that ego or that lack of ego or that mentality of, oh, but I’m grateful. It’s like, gratitude, it’s a verb. It’s something you do. If I’m grateful for you, we’re talking about warriors.
18:09
I’ve interviewed JP Janell, he’s an ex-Navy SEAL. He works for Echelon Firm for Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Nick Norris was on Tim Ferriss’ podcast. Chad Wright, he just got through running a 26-hour marathon, ultra marathon. And all these men had that same idea, that same idea of it’s about disrespect and this love and this gratitude that you have for your fellow man. You may not call it that, but that’s what it is. If I trust you, that’s love, that’s empathy.
18:38
that’s having that compassion. If I’m paying attention to you, it’s the best compliment that I can give you, especially in today’s day and age. Yes. And so all of these things come back to this idea, come back to these few concepts that can serve you in any arena that you enter. And these things that we hear about people, where you hear about a person that was a powerful speaker, or they had such influence on people, many times it is simply nothing more than the ability to be present.
19:08
with that person in that moment. That’s absolutely right. We’re both fans of Victor Frankel. He talks about between stimulus and response, there is this space, I call it the gap. And the more present you can become, the more you can meditate, the more you can enjoy any kind of, with my background, when I was injured, I didn’t realize how every movement was a miracle. Being able to pick this cup up with tea and drink it, if I’m just not present to it.
19:36
Yeah, I can just suck it down and set it back down. But if I turn everything off and there’s nothing around me and I just allow that entire experience to become almost this wholly purpose-driven movement, it’s very different. So almost like I tell people that if you turn your adversity into something sacred, it will change everything in your life and how you look at everything. Because for so many of us,
20:02
It’s not the adversity that’s the problem. It’s the way that we look at it. It’s the way that we respond to it. And when we spoke first years ago, there was a beautiful analogy that you made because you and I were both saying how the, it’s easy to talk about these things philosophically, but when you’re in it and you’re facing something that’s truly life-changing, truly brutal, it forces you to adapt. You have no other option other than to try to adapt. And that adversity,
20:32
I made the comment about it and you made a great analogy about with the waves and the sand how that we are better off being struck with a tremendous amount of adversity all at one time than these small little things. Can you expand on that again? Because I love that analogy. Oh, yeah. I love that you remember that analogy. Of course. Yeah. Well, if you imagine our lives being like islands in the middle of the sea and
20:59
You imagine the things that happen to us being like waves that hit that island, that are crashing up against the shore. Now, if we eventually, that island over a period of time is going to start to get eroded. The more those waves crash against that shoreline, the more it’s going to get eroded. If we have the homes built on that shoreline, eventually a home is going to fall. And maybe another home. And over the course of time,
21:30
more and more homes fall into the sea. And yet you hardly even notice because that was just one home here and one home there. And you’ve got the whole rest of the island, the rest of the island is still intact. But little by little, that island gets eroded more and more and more. And those things that we built up, those structures on that island that we were depending on, more and more, they begin to fall into the sea. And the more and more we begin to realize what is happening to this island.
21:58
This island isn’t as strong as it used to be. It’s not as well developed as it used to be because we haven’t even noticed the ways in which these little challenges have been beating against the shore and taking homes off and eroding the shore. And so because we’re not aware of it, because we’re still focused on the rest of the island, we haven’t been in the process of rebuilding those homes that we’ve lost or creating a more solid
22:28
foundation with the shores of the island. But with a traumatic experience like you experience or like I experience, it’s not little waves beating against the shore. It’s a full-on tsunami. When that tsunami comes in, it just washes away the entire island. And it is so obvious when that tsunami hits that your island has been destroyed, but yet it’s still there.
22:57
There’s still something to rebuild with, but you’re going to have to spend a lot of time and a lot of energy for weeks, months, years, decades rebuilding that island in a way that helps it to function again. And so you learn to spend each and every day, every moment of every day rebuilding the island because you have to, because the trauma from that tsunami was so severe.
23:24
The focus is, okay, I’ve got to rebuild here, I’ve got to build here, I’ve got to build here. And you start to get in the habit of building the island. You start to get in the habit of every day, what I do is I build that island, I build it to the way that I want it. In the meantime, these people around you who may not have experienced any sort of intense trauma are still in this place where they’re trying to hold on to the old island, but little by little it’s washing away. They haven’t been in the process. They haven’t learned.
23:54
to rebuild the island because it hasn’t been a big issue. But then by the time they are maybe 50, 60 years old, they’re like, what happened to my island? What happened to my life? My life as I knew it is nothing like what I thought it would be. Where am I? Who am I? Et cetera. And then those of us who had been dealt that heavy adversity were like.
24:19
I’m good, man. I got this island because I’m just used to building every day. This is what I do. I just build the island. I’ve been doing this for decades now. I do this every single moment of every single day. I’m, you know, patching this up and building this house here. And so that’s where there can be that gift and that adversity. I love the way that you phrase that. The gift and the adversity can be it focuses the mind on creating that new
24:48
life intentionally and doing that every moment of every day. And it brings your awareness into the fact that you’re actually able that you are creating your world and that you’re either creating your world or you’re letting your world slowly sink away into the sea around you because you’re not actively created. It’s so true because watching that sand kind of slip through your fingers as we live, like you say, and we see different people experience our lives in different ways.
25:19
That’s why that analogy when you told it to me was so powerful because the analogy reinforces this notion that the silent killer is not heart disease. It’s not diabetes. It’s not high blood pressure. It’s mediocrity. It’s that doing just enough, like you’re not in enough pain to want to change, but you’re not in enough pleasure to continue to improve. And I’m not saying that you have to continually, you know, be a high achiever and I’m crushing it all the time. You don’t have to do that kind of bullshit, but
25:48
You do, but you do have to be very honest with yourself and ask yourself, is this getting me closer to where I want to be in this sphere of my life? Or is it getting me further away? And there is time to relax. There is time, you know, we’re talking about mindfulness meditation, taking time off to recover, you know, endowism. If we continually sharpen the blade, it goes blunt. However, we do have to be very conscious of.
26:14
what’s going on around us. And if we lose that consciousness, if we lose that intention, again, things just slip by us. And that’s why your message is so powerful. And I want people to really listen to this and unpack that thing so that, just like we said, you have to go through tremendous adversity all at one time, many times to get to that place, whether it be a loss of a loved one, loss of a job, whatever the case may be. But if you can even take just 1% of what Sam and I are talking about today.
26:44
and begin to truly, genuinely use that in your life. Use that intention, use that specificity, use that precision, use that surgical idea. A goal is only as attainable as it is specific. And if you have this sort of vague notion of what your life’s gonna be, and then use the cowardice of your ego, claiming you’re not ego driven, and say it’s an adventure,
27:13
I guess that’s the way you can do it. But when Sam was 24 and when I was 40, we realized that that was not the truth. So if you listen to nothing else that we say here today, hopefully this will make an impact on you and give you some urgency towards the things that really matter in your life, as opposed to creating false urgency based on somebody else’s expectations outside of you that in the end matter, not. Amen. Well said. I everything that Marcus just said, I completely endorse and back up. So it speaks the truth.
27:42
Well, maybe I should write a book or maybe I should be a public speaker or something. I don’t know. Yeah. No, that’s, it’s such a powerful analogy. And if there was one piece of Zen wisdom that you could give people right now that they could apply in their lives, like a 24 hour challenge, for example, what would that be to help them create this understanding? Is there something that you could give them like a tool or a technique or?
28:12
whatever you feel would help them. Absolutely. I will give it to win a four hour challenge. I’m gonna give, it’s gonna only be for your waking hours. And what I’m going to suggest is every waking hour of a given day, maybe it’s tomorrow or the next day or whatever, maybe it’s today, set your timer on your phone to go off once every hour. And when it goes off, take a pause.
28:42
and then take 30 deep breaths in and out of your body. I’m not talking, you know, I’m not talking that kind of thing. No, just make sure it can be calm. It can just be an easy breath in and out of your nose. Follow the sensation of breath as it moves in and as that moves out of your body and do it count 30 times. Just take it, all it’s going to take is less
29:11
than a minute and a half to do 30 deep breaths. Do it once per hour over the course of your waking day. And begin to notice the difference in how you’re thinking and how you’re showing up just from simply setting a timer and breathing 30 calm deep breaths. Because what it’s going to be doing for you is it’s going to be actually re-engaging the parasympathetic nervous system.
29:39
which is responsible for all the automatic function of the body. When you do that, everything begins to become more peaceful because your body is less in a stress response to the circumstances of your life and more present. That’s why people become more present when they are connecting to their breath is because it’s engaged in your parasympathetic nervous system and your vagus nerve. So the things that your body is supposed to be able to do.
30:07
to manage itself effectively are happening effectively. The only reason we go into a stress response is because the body isn’t getting what it needs in terms of our attention. And so just by doing that, once every hour over the course of the day, set yourself an alarm on your phone, pretty easy. And you might end up finding that you wanna do it every day. And then you might suddenly find that more often than not, you’re connected to your breath. And I…
30:36
Personally, I’m doing this so much, I would say that 90% of my day I’m consciously breathing. I’m aware of my breath. Maybe 10% of my day I kind of lose connection, but 90% of the day I am aware of the sensation of breath moving in and out of my body. Because of that, I’m able to stay present. I’m able to stay calm, centered and relaxed, and I’m able to be highly intentional with the actions that I take as I take them, simply by
31:06
connecting to the greatest resource and a free resource. Nice thing is you don’t have to pay me five bucks or a hundred bucks. You don’t have to pay me my private fee for my clients. You just go ahead, it’s free. It’s right under your nose. It’s right there. Literally. And the only people who no longer have access to their breath are dead and it no longer matters anymore. So. That’s brilliant. And like what he was touching on, the parasympathetic vagal tone, heart rate variability.
31:36
If you want to look into this stuff, you can find more about that at Zen warrior training.com with what Sam does. There’s so much to be said for that. And I just did the math real quick while you were saying it, if we’re awake 16 hours a day and we do that math and we’re doing it for one minute, one and a half minutes, you’re cumulatively creating almost like a 24 minute presence Zazen kind of experience over the daytime. And while it’s not ideal to maybe having an entire time at once.
32:03
Again, you’re coming back, you’re resetting, you’re getting to that place, and now that may be enough to kind of reground, reboot, and now you can come back from this place of, as opposed to, like you said, being constantly stressed out or fearful or chasing something, you understand that there is nothing to chase. There is nothing that does not need to be done. It’ll happen as it shall, if you understand that. Could you…
32:31
And the ultimate goal would be to get to a point where you are just doing this. This is just how you’re living the way that I just described it, how I’m living. If you can get to that point where your breath is on tap all the time, it’s a whole different experience of life because you are way more present, way more calm, way more focused, way more chilled while still being connected to your power.
33:01
And it gives you sustainable energy to last throughout the day. You don’t have to be getting yourself jacked up on coffee. No, nothing wrong with caffeine, but you don’t have to rely on it. You don’t have to rely on stimulants. You don’t have to rely on anything because you’ll be connecting to the sustainable source of energy that comes through your breath. And a lot of exhaustion that people have is not actual physical exhaustion. It’s mental exhaustion.
33:29
It’s because they’ve spent so much of their day thinking about unnecessary crap. And it’s just, they’re exhausted. They want to go to sleep at night because mainly because they’ve been concerned about stuff that doesn’t matter. Well, and how many times have we talked to people about meditating or helped them begin to practice and they say, well, when I sit down and I close my eyes, you know, I have all this stuff that goes on in my head and I tell them, well, one, we all do that, especially the beginning.
33:59
But, but two, would you rather that happen now while sitting on a cushion for about 10 minutes, or would you rather that happen around 12 midnight when you’re trying to go to sleep and now all that stuff comes rushing forward and you’re remembering, you know, whatever it is you’re remembering, right? If you want to allow, you know, let the mud settle from the water and give yourself that clarity and get to tap back into kind of what you really are, your real consciousness. That’s the best way to start. And so that breathing, that presence is.
34:28
It’s literally you cannot put a price on it. No, it’s invaluable. That’s brilliant. Sam, where can we send people to learn more about you? You’re, you’re a speaker. You do workshops, you, you speak to companies, you do one-on-one coaching with CEOs and executives, leaders of all sorts. Where can we find out more about that? My website is zenw My Instagram is at zenw Facebook.com slash zenw
34:56
Or if you just want to reach out to me via email Sam Zen Warrior training calm Feel free to reach out to me and tell us about this podcast you have going out to the Zen warrior podcast I just started recently and we’re gonna be a guest on it very soon, which I’m excited about I am too Yeah, keep an eye out for this then warrior podcast I’ve recorded a bunch of episodes and I’m just now about to get it up on all the podcast distribution channels
35:25
So keep an eye out for the Zen Warrior podcast. Absolutely, and I highly recommend everybody do that. And to help Sam out, whenever that comes out, what I would ask all of my listeners to do is to go to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, subscribe, do like a quick five-star review, and say a couple of words about Sam. And that will take you 30 seconds. But what that will do is that will help Sam’s message, this powerful material that we’re talking about today.
35:53
It will literally help bump it up to help more people. And when it gets higher in the algorithm, that means more people are more likely to listen to it. So it’s not very much effort on your part. So if you got anything valuable from what Sam talked about today, please go do that. That will help. That could literally change somebody’s life if you just take that 30 seconds. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate that. Yeah, we’ve already got some great guests on. I’ve interviewed Kenny Aronoff, one of the most famous drummers in the world.
36:20
I interviewed Scott Page who was the sax player for Pink Floyd and he just loves Zen and mindfulness. He’s a mindfulness geek the way that we are. I’ve got Keith Ferrazi, the business consultant, I interviewed him. So I’ve got some really good guests who have been on. There’s some fascinating guests with some fascinating stories. So I think everyone will really like it. And that’s the thing we can learn so much from reading a book that somebody’s written.
36:47
And for those of us that are maybe too busy or you’re traveling a lot and you don’t really wanna read a book, if you can have a person like who he’s just discussed come on and tell their story or give you a piece of information, that might be the piece that you need, that first domino that falls to create the change that you need. And whether it be in something specifically Zen oriented or specifically philosophically bound, or maybe it’s just the idea of, if I’m more present with my partner, we get along.
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It’s right. It’s these simple things that build your presence is your greatest asset. There is nothing more important than your unique presence combined with your unique gifts. That is it. You don’t have the money in your bank account. You don’t have your family. You don’t have your job title. You have your presence. That is what you can actually own.
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is your presence. All of the other stuff can follow and it will follow. You’ll have a happier family. You’ll have more money. You’ll have a better job title all by connecting to your presence and you’ll be more damn fulfilled and everyone around you will be more fulfilled. Everybody wins. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here, brother. Thank you, Marcus. It’s been a pleasure. Namaste. The badass in me recognizes the badass in you. Likewise.
