Dr Demartini explains why if you’re not living by design, you’re living by default. He also shares powerful tools on how to design and carefully craft your life by creating a clear concise master plan that is congruent with your highest values.
When I was 17 years old, I met an amazing teacher in Hawaii who inspired me to do what I’m doing today. In essence, he encouraged me to set goals for myself, my family, community, city, state, nation, world, and even beyond my lifespan.
This was a huge paradigm shift for me as I realized how I had been living from day to day and week to week. I had never really thought or planned further than a week in advance. Designing my life by writing down my goals was when my life truly began to change.
If you’re not planning your own life, other people are.
As I often say in many of my programs, people will overpower any area of your life you don’t empower. Nobody’s getting up in the morning and dedicating their life to your fulfillment. Instead, they may be dedicating their lives to helping you fulfill THEIR dreams.
People tend to project their values onto you and try to get you to live in a way that supports their values.
I’m certain that nobody’s
When I was 17 years old, I met an amazing teacher in Hawaii who inspired me to do what I’m doing today. In essence, he encouraged me to set goals for myself, my family, community, city, state, nation, world, and even beyond my lifespan.
This was a huge paradigm shift for me as I realized how I had been living from day to day and week to week. I had never really thought or planned further than a week in advance. Designing my life by writing down my goals was when my life truly began to change.
If you’re not planning your own life, other people are.
As I often say in many of my programs, people will overpower any area of your life you don’t empower. Nobody’s getting up in the morning and dedicating their life to your fulfillment. Instead, they may be dedicating their lives to helping you fulfill THEIR dreams.
People tend to project their values onto you and try to get you to live in a way that supports their values.
I’m certain that nobody’s getting out of bed each day thinking, “How do I fulfill Dr Demartini’s dream?” Nobody’s likely to be doing that for you either.
That means that if you’re not actively designing your life, then you’re far more likely to experience entropy. Entropy is the gradual decline into disorder, as opposed to negentropy, which involves bringing order, structure and balance to your life so you can thrive.
That brings me to my first point in learning to design and master your life:
Focus on High Priority Actions:
Suppose you don’t fill your day with the highest priority actions that are most inspiring and deeply meaningful to you. In that case, you can almost be assured that your day will likely fill up with disorder, distraction and frustration.
I experienced this in my practice about 40 years ago when I noticed that the tendency to go from order to disorder automatically took over anything that was not ordered. I also experienced it with money – that if I didn’t put money into an asset that accumulates, grows, and gives me passive income, it’d likely get consumed by consumable depreciables that take money out of my pocket.
I am certain that if you don’t fill your day with challenges that inspire you, it tends to fill up with challenges that don’t. The likely result is frustration, disorder, distress and perhaps even disease.
The point that I’m making is this; if you don’t pull out what’s inside you, that which is truly meaningful and important to you, that which is highest on your values that truly inspires you, that which you spontaneously would love to do, and lay it out and design and organize and master plan your life, don’t expect to be a master.
Practical Steps to Master Plan Your Life:
STEP #1: Start with what you know, and let what you know grow
I often mention this in my signature two-day program, the Breakthrough Experience - it is wise to start with where you are and what you know.
When I was 17 and began setting goals for myself, I started by writing down what I knew for sure: travel the world, overcome my learning problems, learn how to read, be intelligent, and teach.
It was so clear in my mind that my highest priorities were to travel the world and teach, which I still do today.
So I wrote those goals down. It was just a couple of phrases that I then combined into sentences, then a paragraph, and then into a formalized paragraph.
I kept reading it and refining it and reading it and refining it over time and, as a result, I got more clear on what I was truly dedicated to, and what my life was showing was really important to me and highest on my values.
If this is a process that you are inspired to do in your own life, it is wise not to write down whims, fantasies and things that you aren’t inspired from within to do.
Instead, it is wise to write down what you’re truly committed to doing that also means something to you because if you don’t design your life, you’re living by default.
STEP #2: If you don’t fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it’s going to fill up with low priority distractions that don’t
If you don’t fill your week with high priority actions that inspire you, it will fill up with low priority distractions that don’t.
Suppose you don’t fill your month, quarter, year, decade, or generation with high priority actions. In that case, it will tend to fill up with low priority actions that result in you procrastinating, hesitating and frustrating over them instead of living an inspired, fulfilled life.
I’m a firm believer in the power of designing life. I have probably the largest collection of objectives and goals of anybody I’ve ever met. I have 30 volumes of very clear, precise objectives and goals that I do. And I keep metrics on them.
I have learned from experience that when you really want something, you’ll tend to take action steps toward it, plan it, and then metric the results. In that way, you can see if it’s working and not working and refine it as you go so you can keep moving closer to your objectives.
STEP #3: Create a master plan in all seven areas of your life
When it comes to mastering and empowering all areas of your life, there are seven divisions that I refer to:
Spiritual: Your meaningful purpose or inspired mission for your life
Mental: Creating innovative ideas that contribute to the world and using your mental capacities to the fullest
Vocational: Career success, achievement, service
Financial: Financial freedom/independence
Familial: Family love and intimacy
Social: Social influence and leadership
Physical: Health, stamina, strength, and well being
Others will tend to overpower in any of these seven areas that you don’t empower.
If you don’t empower yourself in your mental capacities, you’ll likely be told what to think.
If you don’t empower yourself in business, you’ll be told what to do.
If you don’t empower yourself in finance, you’ll be told what you’re worth.
If you don’t empower yourself in relationships, you may end up doing or agreeing to things you don’t want to do.
If you don’t empower yourself socially, you’ll be told what propaganda to believe.
If you don’t empower yourself physically, you’ll be told what drugs to take or organs to remove.
If you don’t empower yourself spiritually, you may be told some antiquated dogma that may not be rational or self-empowering.
Any of these seven areas of life that you passively don’t empower will leave you vulnerable to becoming overpowered by more assertive others.
Plus, the more areas of your life you don’t empower, the more likely you are to feel like a victim of your history instead of a master of your destiny; that the world is controlling you; and that you are living by duty and not by design.
In my opinion, that’s not the wisest way to live.
I believe it’s wiser to empower all seven areas of your life.
I set out to do that when I was 18 years old and then formalized my master plan as I went along.
I also began to look at the highest priority books I could read, foods I could eat, things to feed my mind, clients I wanted to serve, people I wanted to spend time with, ways to move my body, where to spend my money, and so much more.
Master planning my life resulted in consciously and constantly choosing the highest priority in all seven areas of my life.
As I began consistently writing and working on my master plan, specific goals and highest priorities in all seven areas of my life, I noticed that my awareness of my environment began increasing opportunities.
I noticed that I was taking more action because I was focused on it.
I was not as easily distracted.
I was getting more results.
I had more fulfillment daily because there was a plan, and I hit my milestones.
STEP #4: Baby steps become bigger steps, and bigger steps build momentum.
You can climb a mountain by taking baby steps each day. It’s about consistency.
I’m a firm believer that if you define it and walk towards it every day, you are highly likely to achieve it.
Instead of letting other people decide your life, it is wiser to step back into the driver’s seat and plan out your destination and route to get there.
Most people fit into the herd instead of standing out and being heard. They’re following a culture instead of leading a culture.
The moment you design your life and live by priority, you become far more likely to become a leader, which tends to be far more fulfilling and rewarding than following the herd.
Suppose you are serious about designing and master planning your life. In that case, it begins with getting clear about what you want in life, writing it down, starting with what you know, and letting what you know grow. Then incrementally, refining it, reading it, refining it, reading it, and refining it even further by asking quality questions.
The quality of your life is based on the quality of your questions. Each time I ask a quality question that makes me go “AHA!” and helps me move forward, I collect it.
As a result, I can help people learn to think outside the box, of what’s truly important to them, and get it down on paper so they can start pursuing it and make it happen.
If you live by high priority, you are highly likely to be at the top.
Anytime you do something high in value, you grow in self-worth, attract opportunities and end up leading.
Anytime you do something low on your values, you do the opposite.
I realized early on in life that I was not going to sit there and wait and hope that some magical thing on the outside of me would make my life fulfilled and meaningful.
If you’re expecting the outside world to do that, you’ll tend to blame things on the outside cause when you don’t get what you want. Then you’ll tend to look for some external solution to somehow fix it, instead of realizing that it’s not out there; it’s in you. It’s your perceptions, decisions and actions that govern your world and create mastery and order.
You have an executive center and an amygdala desire center.
The desire center is usually an escape from pain and seeking of pleasure.
The executive center involves embracing pain and pleasure in the pursuit of something deeply meaningful.
The thing that distinguishes us from animals is meaning.
Anyone can avoid pain and seek pleasure. Anyone can hedonistically pursue immediate gratification, but that’s not where the power of life is. The power of life can be found in doing something deeply meaningful to you.
I’ve found that if people get wealth without meaning, they end up in debauchery, but people who gain meaning go out in philanthropy and do something that contributes. I’d much rather have a fulfilling life with philanthropy than a debaucherous life that’s immediately gratifying and leaves little mark on the world or the lives of others.
STEP #5: Create a master plan file
I recommend creating a master plan file on your computer and start putting everything that your life demonstrates as being meaningful to you in that file.
I use the seven areas of life as my categories: spiritual, mental, career, financial, family, social and physical areas of life.
Anything spiritual that I would love to do, including meditation, enlightened reading on great philosophers or mystics or theologically oriented people or religious writings of the world, then I add that to my spiritual file.
My particular file also includes spiritual leaders I would love to meet – many of whom I have now met many times. I’m a firm believer that if you write it down, you increase the odds and probabilities of achieving it.
STEP #6: Once you have identified your highest priority actions, delegate the rest where possible
I’ve learned that I don’t have as fulfilling a life if I don’t delegate lower priority things and stick to the highest priority things. So I’ve surrounded myself with people who take care of everything that I’m not designed to do. I teach research, write and travel; that’s what I love to do and how I have designed my life so I can keep doing it. It didn’t just magically happen because I somehow hoped it would while I was lying on my couch escaping life by watching mindless TV.
People doing the most extraordinary things, like Elon Musk going to Mars, that didn’t happen by hoping or wishing, but instead by planning and designing and engineering and thoughtfully dealing with risks and rewards. Extraordinary things happen when you PLAN, live by priority and actively design your own life.
In Conclusion:
If you’re not living by design, you’re living by default.
If you’re not planning your own life, other people are.
Suppose you don’t fill your day with the highest priority actions that are most inspiring and deeply meaningful to you. In that case, you can almost be assured that your day will likely fill up with disorder, distraction and frustration.
If you would love to design your own master plan for life, then it is wise to:
Start with what you know, and let what you know grow.
Create a master plan file with categories relating to all seven areas of your life
Take daily high priority steps that build momentum in all seven areas.
Delegate low priority tasks where possible
Take regular stock of what you have accomplished so you can tweak your master plan where necessary.
If you would love to have me assist you with the process, then click here for more information on my Master Planning for Life program that has over 2,000 quality questions that will help you get very clear about the life you would love to have and the steps to help you get there.
VIDEO
Perhaps you've always meant to sit down and plan your life, but never got around to doing it. Or maybe you just don't know where to begin. To learn more about an upcoming Master Planning for Life in your time zone, visit: demartini.ink/3wVzuyX
About This Video:
Learn the power of designing your life and the steps you can take to plan your life and blueprint your heartfelt dreams. Through planning, you create a fulfilled life, one filled with greater satisfaction and accomplishment.
⌚ TIME STAMPS: Intro Fill your day with the highest priority Start with what you know Metric your results 7 Areas of life to master Writing your master plan and incremental momentum Governance Creating and organizing your master plan Master Planning for Life Program
To learn more about an upcoming Master Planning for Life in your time zone, visit: demartini.ink/3wVzuyX
About Dr John Demartini:
Dr. John Demartini is a human behavior specialist, a polymath, philosopher, international speaker and best-selling author. He has recently been awarded the IAOTP Top Human Behavior Specialist of the Year as well as the IAOTP Lifetime Achievement Award.
His work is a summation of over 299 different disciplines synthesized from the greatest minds in most fields of study today. His extensive curriculum focuses on helping purpose driven individuals master their lives so that they’re able to more extensively serve humanity with their inspired vision and mission.
#designingyourlife #designyourlife #lifedesign
PODCAST
The Power of Designing Your Life
Transcript (machine generated): The topic today is the power of designing your life. And so I hope you have something right with and write on. When I was 17 years old, I had the opportunity to meet an amazing teacher who literally in Hawaii, where I am right now, I'm in Hawaii right now, inspired me to do what I'm doing. And he sa
Transcript (machine generated): The topic today is the power of designing your life. And so I hope you have something right with and write on. When I was 17 years old, I had the opportunity to meet an amazing teacher who literally in Hawaii, where I am right now, I'm in Hawaii right now, inspired me to do what I'm doing. And he said to us in a little presentation, I was literally 17 years old, he said, you want to set goals for yourself, your family, your community, your city, your state, your nation, your world, and beyond for 100-120 years at least.
And that was a part of a shift in my paradigm at the time, because I thought, wow I think kind of live day to day and week to week, maybe, maybe month, I think of things, but not much longer than that. And I remember Seneca the Roman poet and politician who said that, I didn't know that then, but I know that now, that you measure an individual by their most distant ends. And that if you're not outlining and kind of laying out and planning your own life, other people are. I've said before, and you may have heard this, that you know, any area of your life you don't empower, people will overpower. And nobody's getting up in the morning and dedicating their life to your fulfillment, they may be dedicating their life to helping you fulfill theirs. People tend to project their values onto you and try to get you to live in a way where they're getting their values met. If you look carefully, that's how the world works to you. So nobody's really getting up and thinking, how do I fulfill Dr. Demartini's dream? Nobody's doing that for you.
So that means that if it's not, if you're not doing it and nobody's doing it, you're kind of at the whims of entropy, the tendency to go to disorder in life, instead of bring order to your life. So I'd like you to take this first note. And that is that if you don't fill your day with the highest priority actions that are most inspiring and deeply meaningful to you and fulfilling to you, and live by priority each day, you can almost be assured, be guarantee, that entropy and unexpected and frustrating, distracting stuff is gonna fill your day. I realized that when I first got into practice years ago, maybe 40 years ago almost, that that the second I had an idle time, a little gap between my patient base, weird stuff would happen. A person would complain or something would break down or a salesperson would interfere, or there was a, something would happen.
And I noticed that entropy, the tendency go from order to disorder automatically takes over anything that's not ordered. So if you don't design and bring order to your life, it's going to automatically take and have disorder. I learned that also with money. I found out that if you don't put money into an asset that accumulates and grows and works for you and gives you passive income, it'll automatically get consumed by consumable depreciable's that will take money outta your pocket. And so I realized at the moment I received income, I had put some of it away into savings into investments, cuz if not, unexpected bills would keep surfacing. And I'd realized that if I didn't design my life with order, the way I was inspired by, it would end up with disorder the way I wasn't. Again, if you don't fill your day would challenges that inspire you,
it fills up with challenges you don't want, and that's called disorder and disease and you know, distress, if you will. So the point that I'm making is this; if you don't pull out what's inside you, that's truly meaningful and important to you, what's highest on your values that truly inspires you, that you spontaneously would love to do and lay it out and design and organize and master kind of plan your life, don't expect to be a master. Don't expect to have the world get up and read your mind and try to create your life the way you want.
So I want to have you write this next little note down. And that is that, start with what you know, and let what you know grow. I've said that in my seminars, the Breakthrough Experience and many others, many times and people at first maybe hear that and it just takes a while to sink in. Start with what you know, and let what you know grow. When I was 17 I wrote down as a result of the teacher, Paul Bragg, I wrote down what I knew. I knew that I wanted to travel the world. I knew that I wanted to overcome my learning problems. I knew that I wanted to learn how to read. I knew that I wanted to be intelligent. I knew I want to teach. Those things just were clear in my mind. I knew I wanted to travel the world and teach, which I do today.
And so I wrote it down. And it was just a couple sentences at first, a few phrases at first. And then I combined into sentences and then into a paragraph and then a formalized paragraph. And I kept reading it and refining it and reading it and refining it over time and got more clear as I became more clear what I was dedicated to, what I was really, what my life was showing was really important. You don't wanna write down fantasies. You don't wanna write down whims and things that aren't really something you work towards. You wanna write down what you're truly committed to doing, that really means something. Because if you don't design your life, you're living by default. You either live by design or live by default. And just like in your brain, you have an executive center and you have a default center.
, it's really called that, the default mode network it's called in the brain. And that's basically for those non-planned, non strategically tasked orientated objectives. So, I basically learned a long time ago to keep records of what I want in life and write 'em down. Now it could be typed obviously, but if you don't fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it's going to fill up with low priority distractions that don't, if you don't fill your week with high priority actions that inspire you, it's gonna fill up with distractions that don't. If you don't fill your month, you don't fill your quarter, you don't fill your year, you don't fill your decade, you don't fill your generation. If you don't fill your life. And you know what's interesting, we go around and we say in theology that we're immortal souls. But where are the immortal goals?
Where's the goals that go beyond our life? Very few people write 'em. Most people have goals within their life, instead of goals beyond their life, too. There's no reason why you can't create things that have perpetuity and live beyond your life. So I'm a firm believer in designing my life. I have probably the largest collection of objectives and goals of anybody you'll meet. It's 30 volumes of very clear, precise objectives and goals that I do. And I keep metrics on 'em. You know, when you really want something, you'll look and take action steps toward it and you'll plan it and you'll then metric the results and see if it's working and not working and refine it as you go, to keep getting that objective you want. So I've been basically, you know, designing my life and planning my life, master planning. I wanted to master my life.
I dunno if you, I ask people in my Breakthrough Experience and many of the other programs that I teach, where I show people how to do this, I ask them a very simple question. How many of you wanna master your life? And they all put their hands up pretty well. And I said, well, the way I define it is we have seven areas of life. We have our spiritual quest, which is our inspired mission in life. We have our mental quest, which is waking up, you know, conscious, innovative, creative, and genius ideas that can contribute to the world and leave a mark on the world, want to be remembered for our ideas too, ideas that can serve in other words. Then we want to create a business of some form where there's a transaction and sustainable fair exchange, and you have a remuneration and an income
so you can live a prosperous life, because money is an important component of the existence. And that you want to master. You want master financial independence. So you're not working your whole life for money. You want to have money working for you. So you're not its slave, you're its master. You want to have a stable, loving, intimate relationship with some capacity, that may be local or global. You want to have some sort of a social influence, make some sort of difference, so when you pass, they don't go, yeah, I never heard of the guy or the gal. Yeah. You made some sort of contribution and made a difference. I've asked people around the world, how many wanna make a difference? Everybody wants to make a difference. Pretty well that's a standard. And then you also wanna have a vital body and feel great.
I mean, if you don't have your health, life's not so fun, you know, not so fulfilling. So you wanna be able to have a vital body and energized body. You want to not just live to eat. You want to eat to live, and you wanna do wise things that allow you to perform at peak performance so you can have a fulfilling life. I'm a firm believer that you're here to master all of them. I've set out to do that when I was 18 years old. And I formalized that as I went along and master planned how I wanted. How do I want my mind to be, how and what do I want to feed it? You know, I realized when I started to learn how to read, 18 years old, and I started to learn faster and faster and faster reading skills, I thought, you know, at the early stage, I realized I can just read a book every week, maybe.
And then at that time I got faster and faster. I was reading multiple books in a day, but at the time I thought, well, if that's so many, that's 50 books a year, 52 books a year. That's, if I live a hundred years, that's, that's not, that's 5,000 books, that's it. That's all I'm gonna read. So I go, what's the priority? What's the highest priority books to read? Highest priority things to feed my mind? If you're not planning out and prioritizing what you feed your mind, you might feed it with something that's not the most nutritious ideas. The same thing on food. If you're not designing and prioritizing what you're eating and prioritizing what you're, who you're hanging out with, prioritizing who your clients are and prioritizing the actions you do in a day, you're basically letting the whims of impulse run your life.
And as you know, if you walk in a store and you don't have a real clear objective walking the store, you'll be easily swayed by sales gimmick and things that around you and the world outside you determines your decisions. So I'm a firm believer if you wanna master your life, you need to design it and at least decide what you want. Again, nobody's getting up in the morning and dedicating their life to your fulfillment, it's up to you. So I started to master plan my life. I did that starting when I met Paul Bragg, 17. It started out as a, you know, wrote down some goals on a piece of paper and a mission statement that was just a sentence to three sentences. And then it turned into two pages. And I did it by pencil on paper originally. And then, that was 1972. 1973
it was a few pages. And I typed it for the first time, which was slow. And I just kept typing it and retyping it and adding to it and reading it and adding a word and adding a sentence and adding a paragraph and adding a picture to it. And I started mapping out how I wanted. It's kinda like a vision board that they talked about in the movie, The Secret that I got to participate in, but it's down on paper. I can't say I was really the vision board guy. I was more the vision document guy. And so I would cut out pictures and paste them onto a piece of paper and retype it again. And I just kept building my master plan. And what was interesting is, I noticed that as I was writing them, I noticed that my awareness of my environment was increasing opportunities.
I was noticing that I was taking more actions cause I was focused on it. I was not as easily distracted. I was more, and I was getting more results. And I noticed that I actually had more fulfillment on a daily basis because I had some sort of design going on. I noticed one time I was out in a field and I was looking at ants. You probably think I'm a bit crazy, but I was watching ants in a field and I noticed that there were ants on a path. Those big ant mounds you see in a field, some ants are on a path. There's literally a path there and you can see 'em carrying big loads. And then you look in between all those paths you look, and there's these weird ants going in all different directions, looking for something, trying to find something.
If they discover it, then they go on the path and then they do it. And I noticed that the people that were out there wandering around, some of 'em were, you know, for hours, not doing anything kind of. And I found out that 7% of the ants are unemployed, they're not even doing anything. But the ones that were actually on a mission and on the path and they're the ones that are producing and they're actually building the mound, they were metaphors for a life, an ant hill, and ant bed or a farm or whatever, it really gives you a metaphor on human behavior. Because if you're on your path and you know what you're committed to, and you're clear about it, you're gonna go way farther and much more fluent and not have all the obstacles and getting the machete out in the jungle and trying to clear the path. But in the process of doing it, once you define it and you start taking on it, it starts building momentum.
And I learned many years ago, about 27/8 years ago about incremental momentum to set a goal and take incremental momentum baby steps until they become bigger steps, become bigger steps and build a momentum, kinda like the domino effect. And if we keep working towards our objectives, you know, consistently, little by little, by little, by little, it becomes more and more, and it builds momentum. You know, I set out when I was 23, I wrote down that I wanted to be a bestselling author and I wanted to have on the front cover of magazines and I had some of these idealisms that I had. Today they're real. I never gave up on it. But I wrote it down. I still have the original typed statement, on my document on this computer that I wrote at 23. And that's real today. I just signed a deal with a publisher for 10 more books the other day.
And these are real things. I'm a firm believer that if you define it and walk towards it and everyday action steps toward it, you get it. You know, I think Einstein said it really lovely when he said, it's the perseverance towards something that really does it. If you don't give up, you make it. I have a lovely friend of mine that is a singer and she's been working at it for a while and she just keeps doing it. She just keeps doing it, keeps being innovative, keeps working and does another action step towards her dream. And she's doing enormous and amazing things and impacting a lot of lives today. And I really believe that that if you persevere towards something, but if you don't even write down what it is, it's like, if you don't have a financial plan, if you don't have a business plan, if you don't have a health plan, you don't have a spirituality plan, whatever that means to you, cuz there's no rules of what that is,
it's your dream. If you don't have a physical health plan, you don't have a social impact plan, if you don't have a relationship plan, you're letting other people decide your life. And most people fit into the herd instead of stand out and be heard. They're basically following a culture instead of leading a culture. And I'm a firm believer if you take and design your life, you're going to be more of a leader. And leading is way more fun than following way more fulfilling than the following process and being, you know, told what to do all the time. You're living kind of by 'got to's' and 'have to's', deontological they call it, instead of ontological, which is meaningful and purposeful. So I believe that you're the one that extracts meaning out of your existence, you're the one that decides how things are. You have control over your perceptions, decisions and actions. If you're not prioritizing your perceptions, which is why I teach people the Breakthrough Experience, to teach
'em how to master the art of taking whatever happens in their life and see how it's on the way. But on the way to what? If they don't decide what their priority actions are and they don't make a decision about how they want their life, how they gonna link what life is offering them into that? So I'm a firm believer in basically getting clear about what you want in life and writing it down and starting with what you know, and letting what you know grow and incrementally, refining it, reading it, refining it and reading it, refining it and asking quality questions. The quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask. And I basically, I've been asking questions, every time I get a question that makes aha and helps me move forward, I collect it. And I've been collecting those for a long time now and putting those together
so I have a way of helping other people when I'm doing consulting or I'm teaching programs or my Master Planning program or any of the programs I'm doing to make sure I pull out those questions to make people think out of the box, to help them find out what's really important to them, to get it down on paper what that is so they can start pursuing it and make it happen. Again, you're living by default or you're living by design. And it's up to you and how what you decide to do with your time. But I know that I prioritize. I started prioritizing what I read. I started prioritizing what I did. I started prioritizing what I was saying. Started prioritizing what I was feeding my mind. Started prioritizing my investments. Prioritizing where my money was going, prioritizing what I was eating. And if you live by high priority, you end up at the top.
Anytime you do something that's high in value, you grow in self worth and you attract opportunities and you end up leading. Anytime you do something low on your values, you do the opposite direction. And so I just realized that I'm not gonna sit there and wait and hope that some magical thing on the outside of me is going to make it hell happen for me. You know, that's not the way to live. If you're living out there, you'll tend to blame things on the outside cause it's not giving you what you want. And then you'll look for some outside solution. It's not out there. It's your perception, decision and actions that you take upon the world that makes governance of the world for you. You have an executive center and you have an amygdala desire center. The desire center is usually an escape from pain and seeking a pleasure.
And the executive center is the embracing of pain and pleasure in the pursuit of something deeply meaningful. And the thing that distinguishes us from the animals is meaning. You know, anyone can avoid pain and seek pleasure. Anybody can do that and hedonistically pursue immediate gratification. But that's not where the power of life is. It's meaning, doing something that's deeply meaningful. I've found that people that get wealth without meaning, they end up in debauchery, but people that gain wealth with meaning they go out and go out in philanthropy and do something that contributes. I'd much rather have a fulfilling life with philanthropy than a debaucherous life that's immediate gratifying and escaping. Life is pretty magnificent, when you design it. So I'm hopefully getting the point across that to take the time to do it. So I always say, start with what you know. Now today we have computers and iPhones and iPads and we have ways we can type onto it.
And I personally believe you want a file, you create a file in your computer that is your master plan file and start putting every single thing that you know, that you know, that you know your life demonstrates as meaningful to you, start putting it in and organizing it. I use the spiritual, mental, career, financial, family, social and physical areas of life to design by. And I map that out and I start putting it in there and I put 'em in categories. Anything that is spiritual that I know I wanna do, if I wanna do some sort of meditation so every so often, I want to do some sort of enlightened reading on great philosophers or mystics or theologically oriented people or religious writings of the world then, okay, do I wanna spend a half hour a day on that and focus on that?
Do I want to meet great spiritual leaders on the planet? I did. I set it out and wrote all the great spiritual leaders. And I've met a lot of these individuals as a result of me writing it down. I said I wanted to meet celebrities. I wrote 'em down. I met 'em. I met lots of them. And I go out and meet people in politics or people of royalty. I'm a firm believer that if you write it down, you increase the adds and probabilities of doing it. If you are really committed to doing something, you take actions on it and you ask yourself, what are the highest priority actions I can do to make those happen? You get there. I'm a firm believer my life has been by design and I'm pretty inspired by what I get to do every day. You know, I've learned that if I don't delegate lower priority things and stick to the highest priority things, I don't have as fulfilling life.
So I've got surround me, people that take care of all the things that I'm not designed to do. I, I teach research, write and travel, that's basically it, cuz that's what I love doing. But that's because I designed my life, not because I just hoped and prayed it was going to happen. That' doesn't help you. And the people I know that have done the most extraordinary things, you think Elon Musk going to Mars, that's not by hope. That's by planning and designing and engineering and thoughtfully dealing with risks and rewards and using the executive function in a brain. You don't accomplish things like that without that. You don't build Amazon without that, you don't create a movement in the world without some sort of planning and foresight. I'd much rather have foresight, than I would have hindsight.
Foresight takes you places, but foresight means planning. And hindsight means reacting. I'd rather think and act and not react than react and not act and not think. So I'm a firm believer in planning, as you can guess, and designing your life. So it's time to prioritize your life. And if you really wanna do that, I know what I'm about to share with you will help you, cause I've taken all those questions that I've had in my life that I've picked up from all the consulting and teaching and everything else over the years in my own life and my own journey and watching what worked and didn't work, and I put together a system there called Master Planning for Life. It's, if you can imagine sitting down for three days and having 2000 questions in front of you. Imagine, you know, there's nine questions that determine whether or not you're gonna be financially independent.
What is your total assets? What's your total liabilities? What is your current net worth? What exactly is your passive annual income you want to have every year that you say is financial independent? What is your average interest rate you can earn on your investment understanding? What's your inflation rate you're up against? What exactly is the total net worth that you require in order to give you that passive income? What's the shortfall between your current net worth and that desired net worth? And what's your strategy? Those are 9 questions outta 2000 questions to hold you accountable. And somebody asked me those nine questions when I was 27 years old and changed the trajectory of my financial pathway, and I'm financially independent because of those questions. So I've got 2000 questions in a file, goes to you and a stick goes into your computer and we go to work, and we sit for three days and we plan out our life.
Cuz most people say, well, yeah, I know I need to plan, but I never get around to doing it. Well, I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna be with you and we're gonna help you go and plan that. And I just think that it's an absolutely insane thing not to take advantage of it because, in your life, if you don't organize and structure your life, everybody else does. And again, nobody's committed to your fulfillment, nobody, except you. And if you're not, well, don't expect a highly fulfilled life. You'll wake up with Bronnie Ware's regrets. The five regrets in life because you didn't plan it. So Master Planning for Life is an amazing opportunity. A great life is not by accident. It's by design. And I'm a firm believer that 2000 questions I've got and holding you accountable to do it and make you sit down and do it and then give you, you know, feedback and private little meetings and consulting with you and everything else to do everything I can to help you master plan.
So you got a document in front of you about 300 page document of how you want your life, that you can work on the rest of your life. Mine is a vast document today. It's the most inspiring document and book that I have in my life. And it's how I want my life. And I get to read it and refine it and read it and refine it. And I work on it every single day of my life. It's not a joke. If you came and met with me and you said, let me see your computer, let me show it to you, your mouth would drop looking at the amount of work I put into it. But as a result of it, I get to live the life that I designed. And I want you to, I want you to have an inspired life.
I want you to live something, do something magnificent. I want you to be able to live by design, not by default. I don't want you to be sitting there and going bitching about what's going on around you and how the world's stopping you from doing what you dream, cuz it's absolutely, whatever's happening out there is ultimately on the way to what you want if you know how to ask the right questions and hold yourself accountable to priorities. If you can't prioritize your perceptions, can't prioritize your actions and can't prioritize your decisions, the three things you have control over, just know that everybody else is. So I want you to join me at Master Planning cuz I know it will make a difference in your life and it's coming up very shortly. I think it's this week and there's another one coming up next week.
But please take advantage of this opportunity because that one thing that Paul Bragg did for me when I was 17 years old and asked me to write those things down, those never stopped. Those never stopped. They just kept going. And I took command of my life from that. And I noticed that not everybody in the world did that, but I noticed that the trajectory of my life changed compared to a lot of people around me. And a lot of people were living by default, not design. So I just wanted to take the time to go over how important that is. Right now it's the beginning of the year. It's January. Why not start there? Why not plan your year out? Plan your life out for that matter. I have a posthumous biography in my master plan, it's a thousand years of how I want to be perceived a thousand years from now. By studying all the great immortal philosophers and teachers and thinkers in the world,
I wanted to be able to leave a mark like those individuals. So I mapped out how I wanna do it and what I'm going to do to increase the odds of that. That's why you probably see me on YouTube and podcasts and everything else, because if I go out and I be of service to people, Zig Ziglar taught me if I help other people get what they wanna get in life, It helps me get what I wanna get in life. So I'm constantly putting something out there to be of service to people because it helps me fulfill my dream. I want you to do your own dream, but you gotta decide what the heck that is. So please take advantage of Master Planning and please take and listen to this recording again, but actually doing it. Just hearing it is not the where the power is.
It's actually getting down on paper and working through and make sure you have congruent poles and you're not contradicting yourself. And it's really congruent, in line with what you value most. And what's really priority to you, what your life is demonstrating. So you'll build momentum and you'll become unstoppable in the achievements. And that's why I want people to live by design. Majority of people live, again, by just the whims and blame things on the outside. If you want to go and try to live by blame, you're not gonna empower your life, if you wanna empower your life, you're gonna live by design. Cuz you have the capacity to change your perception, decisions, and actions. So join me at Master Planning and take command of your life. If you want to be a master, it will help you. If you don't well, then that's fine.
But I think deep inside, the only reason you wouldn't wanna master your life is because somehow you banged your head against the wall because you didn't know how to go and master it in the first place. Let me help you. I've spent 49 years plus of my life working on that objective. And I think I've got some ideas that can help you. It's certainly allowed me to live the life I have today. And it's pretty extraordinary. And I know that you can do that too. There's no reason why you can't do it. I know some of you think, well I'm older, whatever. I met a 72 year old man in Dallas, Texas that said he was too old to do that. And I got in his face and I said, if you're not, as long as you're green, you're growing. As soon as you ripen your rot.
If you're not designing your life now you're gonna let other people design it. And I guarantee if you don't have something to live for, you got nothing, you got things to die for. And it woke him up and he started planning. He created a new consulting firm and he was back alive and he looked younger literally four months later than he did when he was at the program. So don't come up with excuses, come up with actions. Anyway, I just wanted to do it. I went a bit over today, but I just wanted to take the time to talk about how important it is designing your life. You deserve it. So I know I can help you. Please join me at Master Planning. Take advantage of this opportunity and please listen to this more than once. It might just catalyze a little bit of action towards a dream that you you have inside you. You deserve to have an extraordinary life. Anyway, this Dr. Demartini. Thank you for joining me for today. Please take advantage of Master Planning and I look forward to seeing you there, look forward to helping you do something extraordinary with your life. Live by design, not default.
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