Why Most People are Miserable (And What 6-Year Olds Already Know)

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Hello and welcome to your ultimate life.

The the podcast dedicated to creating the ultimate life.

A life of purpose, prosperity and joy that is within your grasp.

I'm excited to have a special guest today, Ben Corey, and if he uses it, all of his names.

Ben Corey Feinbloom.

Ben, welcome to the show.

Hello Kellen.

It is such a pleasure to be here with you today and everybody watching from home.

Pleasure to meet you.

Thank you for coming to spend some time with us.

We hope to share with you some information and maybe make it a little magical.

I love that.

So the first time I met Ben, I was really excited about him, who he is, what he's doing, who he's being in the world and made me know he was a great, would be a great guest to share things.

And you know what, some of the things we talk about might seem magic, but they're not out of reach.

So Ben, I want to ask you the first question here.

I want you to not be humble and not be self effacing in any way.

So tell us all, how has Ben adding good to the world?

How am I adding good to the world?

Well, my aim since I was young was to take people who were jaded and felt like they'd seen everything and sort of disengaged from life as either kids or adults.

And I wanted to drop magic into their life so that they had moments of joy and wonder.

And so somebody who was jaded suddenly slipped back into that feeling of childlike wonder that they may not have experienced for decades.

And then after I began delivering that to now over 3,700 audiences around the world, virtually and in person.

And at a corporate event recently for 550 people singing comedy, doing magic.

The singing is there to move people's emotions and the show is really not there just as corporate entertainment or for a social event.

It's there to help people understand the importance of what they're doing so that they can feel more engaged with what they're doing.

And on the second side, I took all of those skills that I used for developing how I interact on stage, the things that I'm observing when I'm about to pull comedy from something, how I do something impossible and get to the point where I can do magic and how I connect with people when I go from one audience to another, in different contexts, in different states, in different countries, in different age groups, and connect with everybody.

I took all of that and 18 years ago, founded a summer camp called Creative Magic Camp, where I take all of those skills while teaching magic.

And I helped 6 year olds get those same skills that I used to master the interactions on stage and develop creatively and find my passion.

And I use it to awaken the magic within.

And so now this is going national through Brainstar Clubhouse and Brainstar Academy, where we take all the stuff we developed over those 18 years and use many different forms of art as a medium to communicate morals, character, values, methods that will help people really succeed in having friendships and connecting with others.

And it's really designed to awaken the magic within.

There was a big problem in the school system as I was growing up.

I felt like I was just having information bombarded that I had to remember over and over again.

But I wanted to be creative and I wanted to be passionate and I wanted to change the world.

And so I ended up designing this enrichment program to help kids become Brain Stars.

Kids who have brain abilities are problem solvers, who are creative, but also have the star ability to step up and lead.

So that instead of kicking the can down the road on big problems in society that will really knock us out, Brain Stars can come in and lead the way.

And by growing up in a cohort of people where that's how we look at the world and how we do things, they have friends who will help them change things, advance things when they want to build something and they just think that's what people do because we start young and that's what we do.

I love that.

That's fabulous.

Now you've said a whole bunch of things and there's at least six or seven that I'd like to dig in a little bit more.

So you alluded back to your childhood and how information was poured on you, and your reaction was feeling like it was an overwhelming flood.

What.

What was the first thing that you can remember that made you think, there has to be a better way?

Like, here I am exploded with all this stuff, and at some point you thought, there's gotta be a bit.

There's gotta be a way.

Can you remember when that was and what you thought and maybe how that led forward a little bit?

So a whole bunch of ideas just flew through my head.

An example that comes to mind, once I had grown up fully, was thinking sine, cosine, tangent.

I really mastered those elements of math and got An A in that class.

But when I went to rent an apartment and later buy a house, I knew nothing about the math that went into those essential life things.

So I realized a giant disconnect.

And also in organic chemistry class, I began as pre med.

I thought I was going to be a fourth generation optometrist.

I'm sitting there and doing all of these things with benzene rings and stuff that they show.

And.

And it was only like in organic chemistry too, that I learned that this is not theory.

They actually look at those organic molecules and the compounds and see that shape through electron microscopes.

And I went, wow.

They just took the most interesting part and took it out completely.

And instead we've been sitting here grinding on this knowledge.

And if I knew you could actually see it and you could actually work with it and watch these things happen, wow, that would have been way more thrilling.

And I think kind of one of the last times is I put a couple things wrong in a chemical reaction I was doing in that same class.

And the solution changed color, moved around, formed a little like a little pile of crystal and changed to bright orange.

And I went, why is that not the experiment?

So all the way along in science, we're learning to memorize things.

This is just one example.

But science is actually about an attitude of curiosity and exploration.

A scientist has got to get to the bottom of what is going on there.

And then there's a process to make sure our mind and our emotions don't trip us up and others can review what we come up with.

And I thought, what if they trained people who had the enthusiasm and attitude of a scientist and they helped people find the topic that they thought was just going to be groundbreaking and so that that person would then, instead of being bombarded with information, go, oh, I want to do this.

So I need to collect this, this, this.

And suddenly they're trying to Velcro information to themselves because they know where they want to go.

So it's, it's kind of along that whole way and I love that.

Great examples.

And what I'm hearing is a com.

One of the common threads is how do we preserve, rekindle the, the enthusiasm.

Because it's the enthusiasm, the yearning, the desire to know, to do, to create that causes us to want to Velcro the info.

Go find it and do all that.

I want to jump.

I know I'm going to jump around a bit.

But when you go to the corporate thing, you were talking about the same thing.

So you got a bunch of people in Corporate.

And mostly they come in and they're like, whatever in most corporate relations I've ever been in or associated with.

So why do you think we have created a world where the default mode of everything is kind of a thing in jobs and even in life, where we just sort of settle for mediocrity and kind of think that's the way it is?

Why have we built that?

So the job of the brain, Kellen, and everybody at home is to keep us safe.

Now, back when we were being chased around by bobcats and bears, that was useful all the time.

But we're still in society where we're trying to create safer and safer and safer all around us.

And then if somebody breaks our safety, we're going to sue the daylights out of them.

Well, we have actually taken all the excitement out of life and all of the challenge and all the thrill.

And the problem on this is so big that disengagement from work.

I just saw a study the other day.

We lose $9 trillion of productivity in the global economy because people are disengaged from work.

So the fact that they're not interested and not what they're in doing is really having that big of an impact.

And in the United States, as many as half of the people who are sitting there at their current job are searching for other jobs while they're working.

About half.

So that's how much people are disengaged.

Now, we have often aimed for the wrong things, things that will, like, increase our standard of living instead of our quality of life.

And we don't know by we, I mean most people don't know how to build happiness into their life.

But there's positive psychology researchers now, and they, they know it's well understood how.

And so if somebody is sitting there and goes and, and says, you know what?

I want a BMW.

And they got a Geometro and they dream of the BMW and maybe they save up for a long time to get the start on it.

And then they go, and they go straight to that.

Well, we will adjust to that positive thing, just like we'll adapt to negative things.

So we will then slide back to a moment where we've got that thing and then we adjust to it and it's not important anymore.

This is called hedonic adaptation.

So we have a world that's designed on materialism, particularly in the United States, and more, more, more, more, more.

And we go for that big thing and then we adapt to having it and we need something else.

And in the longest study of social psychology in history.

They studied over the lifespan of people and then towards the end, asked them what was most important in their life.

And it was things like relationships.

And so when people are on their deathbed, that's what they care about most.

But right now, by the age of 20, most kids do not have best friends.

So we've taken the things that are really, really important and those are not what we're doing.

And we've taken all these channels of media and if you go on and watch children's programming or watch things that are being said in many different situations on tv, on the news, all the stuff we're looking at, most of it's crap that is designed to glue our eyeballs to the screen, but not bring actual value.

So we're surrounded in that ecosystem of materialism and all the media that we consume from every direction, not enriching our lives.

And so that is why here's where the connection is.

My programs are all enrichment.

Entertainment for corporate, for social, for kids.

That's how they all connect.

I'm taking entertainment and making it exciting to have an experience that enriches your life.

And you know, this is what we're doing virtually and in person everywhere.

And we're going to aim through every form of media.

But if everybody is operating from a measure like gross domestic product, but they're not operating from gross domestic happiness.

We.

End up off target.

It's like that saying where if you take off in Washington D.C.

and are flying towards London and you're a few degrees off in the airplane, you may end up in Zambia.

So that just then brings me to the.

We've trained ourselves in to live in BMW land or GDP or whatever it is.

And we have defined that that will create us some level of happiness because we wanted it.

The feeling of wanting, and then we get it and then we have adaptation and then it suddenly is nothing.

And so we're looking for the next thing.

And we know all this, it's like, this is not news, right?

And so, but we still are doing this over and over.

The education system, the job creation system, the measurement.

And you just told me I'm losing $9 trillion in productivity because people hate the jobs and half of them are looking for new work.

So two questions.

Why aren't we changing it on the macro scale?

And then I want you to tell me specifically the audience, what is something that you do in one of those sessions to create enriching entertainment?

So let's get really specific.

So on the macro level, and I realize it's sort of philosophical, but what's wrong with us?

Why aren't we changing that?

And then I want you to tell me something that you're doing in a real life thing that aims to make a dent in that problem.

My first belief is that most of what we know how to change is in a silo somewhere like a research article or something like that that isn't getting out to everybody.

So I didn't want to create new information.

I wanted to get the best information to people in the spot right where they were.

Why are we not changing it worldwide?

Well on the macro scale, if we are driven by a sense of getting and what can I get for myself?

And it's this me, me, me, self centered thing, then that lends itself to resources, money, things like that.

And we believe that will make us happy.

Well, I was fortunate enough to learn early that at the time I had, you know, living at home with my family as I was in high school and whatnot and I had literally everything.

There were many times I was the least happy in my entire life while having everything.

And so I said wait a minute, something is wrong here.

So I had that moment early and was fortunate.

And I think a lot of people have never reached that moment and what I'm doing to change it now.

Let's talk about in a performance.

So the other day I was on for 550 people who help, they run their own separate organization that helps regulate the 650,000 stockbrokers, sort of a self regulating industry and then they help regulate the markets and they're all seeing what's happening in the markets right now and they're like whole life has been destabilized this and they're seeing it going like crazy right now.

And I used a magic effect where it was a mentalism effect.

And the last they selected their answers and they ended up with a stock market and a, and a world financial center.

And it ended up being the oldest stock market in the world in Asia, in Bombay and Zurich, Switzerland, a pure stable.

And then at the end of that I put a message that was right built into that mentalism effect, which is that your work stabilizes the markets for generations.

That organization's been there for 85 years.

And so if they are seeing their life in the context of everything going crazy at the moment, they're going to go nuts.

If they realize that thing that's going to take them a year and a half to roll out will be there making a difference in 50 years.

They suddenly have a very different feeling about their work.

And I was on for Microsoft the other day and I changed that effect.

And it was a group that handles their ads for global corporations.

They handle the big accounts and they don't write the ads, they don't create the systems.

This group handles the accounts and lets the people know where they should spend more.

And I shared with them at the end of that effect, your work takes potential and turns it into profits or into reality.

So all the potential that that organization that's trying to get their best products into people's hands reaches their hands more because of the work people do now with.

And actually when I said that over the phone with the team at Microsoft, she stopped.

She was on the ads team and she just went, okay, we're getting you.

So my shows are about a stealth transformation and it's about intrinsic motivation, the deepest form that comes from within.

Now, when it comes to our programs in person and virtually, I'll give you an in person example.

Starts with connect with your audience day.

And as we're performing magic or whatever the different program is going to be, I'm explaining that you need to connect because here, let me show you what it feels like if you don't while we're presenting this.

Which one do you like better?

And they all like it better, each step more connected.

So we will have them in the room and we will.

They will crisscross across the room and then I'll say stop.

Turn towards the person who's closest to you.

And I have them then make eye contact and hold it for a little bit.

Now, initially they're all incredibly uncomfortable because they haven't had eye contact with anybody before.

And then we mix it up again.

And as we're doing this, I'm adding in lessons like when you use somebody's name, Kellen, every part of their brain lights up.

Movement, they'll turn to where it is, their eyes will turn, their language centers.

Their whole brain lights up when you share one element, but just, just their name.

And then the next thing I'll teach is how what makes a best friend is the person who listens when we're sharing our life stories.

And so I will teach them how to share a life story with and what that looks like.

Now they're mixing across the room, using each other's names a few times in the conversation, knowing that that's how you remember it.

And then they share a life story.

And then towards the end, I am able to have them hold the eye contact longer and longer, triggering all the feelings of Connection.

And then I sit them down and I ask them to share, you know, what did that feel like for you?

What came up?

And there was one day a six year old looks at me and he goes, I feel really warm inside, like I just made a best friend with everybody.

Do you like it?

I love it.

And he switched on a dime.

Why did nobody tell me this before?

I look across the room and I say, well, now you're on the other side.

You've learned to connect with each person as you're even walking by and then when you talk, when you stop with them, how to connect deeply.

You're now on the other side.

And I explain a study where most people having zero best friends and then as they were doing the study, they came up with people who others would report them 130 sometimes as their best friend.

And I share, you know, listening to each other's stories on their good days and their worst is what makes a best friend.

And then I teach them about fair weather friends.

Most people will just scatter away when something bad is going on in somebody's life because they don't want that vibe, they don't want that energy and it's going to drag them down.

Well, they don't know that.

If you stay in compassion, compassion will shield you from sinking to that person's level and compassion will add to your happiness and you can create space and sit there and talk with that person and hear them through on their worst, most challenging day of their life while everybody has scurried.

And then I teach the kids, you are going to have bad days and life is not easy when it does.

You have a chance for a gift.

Look at everybody else who scurries, take notes and look who's still there.

The greatest gift of having a terrible day is you find out very quickly who your best friends really are.

And then if you build your life surrounding yourself with those people, they're going to be there 80 years later and your life is going to be enriched by deep relationships where you have a personal history, you can share stories together, you can, I can bring up jokes with my friend Ian from when we were six.

And then I'll show them on my Facebook wall.

I'd be like, see all these people who respond to every single post.

I'll click and show the names and tell them who each person is and what they mean to me and why they're there.

And it's usually higher than 130.

And so I have the example of like, I'm doing this, I'm not just teaching you.

This is what I learned to be successful as an entertainer.

But I'm telling you this, and I will tell them this at the beginning.

I'll say, I want you to listen closely, because you're not going to hear this anywhere else.

And when you actually apply it, it will change the rest of your life.

From this moment forward, there will be a before and an after.

So I want to notice several things.

One, I love your demonstration.

I love your experience.

I love the expression.

And there is a before and after.

But I want to do a couple of things.

I just love the way you're telling stories, moving in and out, and your hands and the expression, and it adds to the veracity and intensity of your expression.

And I love that.

And I'm saying it because I want people to see that.

And I'm asking each of you to go back and listen to that expression, because he's just given you right now a class in creating relationships, using names, listening, taking yourself out of the picture, being there for people just because you can.

And he's also talked about something important.

We've created this society of distance, of disconnection, of attachment to things instead of people.

And all of those are the antithesis to happiness.

Because at the end of the day, as he said, when you're dead or dying, and at the end, it's the love, the relationships, the people.

That's 100% of the time.

Nobody says, I wish I'd made a hundred more dollars.

No one ever says that.

And so I love that.

And I just wanted to acknowledge the way you're telling the stories and teaching this thing.

You did exactly what I hoped you would do.

So thank you for that.

I want to go.

I want to back up a little bit to the development so you notice these differences.

And I want to do the development piece.

Then I want to go to the kids and the brain stars.

You notice this, and you jump to, when I was an adult, can you talk me through a little bit of.

Because someone could look at you now and say, wow, he's good.

And they would be right.

And you weren't born that way.

And there's a process of growth and development.

And one of the things I think is most valuable, which is why I love helping people write books and tell stories, is answering the question, how did you get where you are?

Because they see your success and they go, whoa, I wish I could, but I could never.

And then they have a whole story about that.

So tell me some of the developmental processes to get you where you are answer a little bit of the question, how did you get to be such a beautiful product of the product, meaning you are a representation of what you share with us.

How did that happen?

Well, first, I'm going to turn this around on you for a second because this is really funny.

I will build a business that helps me grow into the person I want to be.

I will create an artistic expression that helps me become who I want to become.

I will involve myself in things like this podcast that will transform my life just by having the time between us and sharing with the audience.

So aligning myself in that way, as I was taking notes on the various methods that I used, I put them all down and I had the story arc, your book on the screen next to me about how to make a book on the topic of yourself and the story and how you got there.

And I looked down at everything I had written as little bullet points that I might talk about while here, and I went, I just prepared to write an entire book using the story arc process by preparing to come onto your podcast.

So every single thing in life being kind of focused on aligning somehow with a bigger vision, something I'm trying to create, allows it to all come together.

Now I got a new saying and I'm always improving things all the time.

This is now on a post it note so that it's stuck in the middle of my monitor.

And I was asking ChatGPT, I said, There are really great days and there are really bad days and I'm always looking for how to just make it through those.

What is one thing I could tell myself when things are at the top and another thing, when I can tell myself when things are at the bottom, that will be the same thing and help me keep centered as a human being rather than flying all over emotionally.

And here's what it came up with.

This is part of the climb.

And I was born to rise.

Now, now, who says chatty's not intelligent?

Exactly.

The biggest thing I can tell anybody is, and you and I were just kind of touching on this before, before we began to record, is that if you want to get my calculator right here on my phone, if you take three things in a day that are building towards the same thing and improving the same thing, three a day, let's say 30 days a month, that's 90 things times 12 months is 10, 80 things times 10 years is 10,800 improvements.

So given that I knew from a young age I was going to be a magician, I actually thought I was going to be a comedian first.

And then I became a comedy magician.

I decided that whatever was going on every single day, there was going to be three things going towards this vision that I had.

Now, I knew by the time I was like, 11 years old that entertainment and magic was it.

I'm 45.

So wherever you are, if you start with three things a day, you do the math.

Every decade, 10,000 things.

10,800 30 years later, you're looking at 30,240, 32,400 impacts.

So I had a vision for brainstars, actually first.

And I'll tie in another story of my success there.

And there was a program, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, put on by a writing professor, Martha Nelsmith.

And I went.

And they were just learning.

This is like 2000.

How do we.

This new Internet is here.

How do we take the arts and all these good things we can send through this medium and make it an enriching place for technology and the humanities?

And I looked at this, and I met with her and I gave her this big talk about how every medium we had was being covered with trash.

And then I saw that Irvin Kirshner, director of Star the Empire Strikes Back, was delivering a keynote the next day.

I went to the keynote.

Martha was sitting in front of me, looking back over her shoulder, because I gave her the same keynote the night before, and she introduced us.

And shortly after, I asked Irvine Kirishner, I said, I'm looking for a mentor who's navigated this whole thing and made it, would you be my mentor?

He was for 10 years.

And at the end of the 10 years, at his.

Well, his memorial, really, when he passed away, it was a celebration of life at the Directors Guild in Hollywood.

His sons came up to me and they had wondered, how did he end up with a third son?

How did he end up working with me?

And I just had this day, and I was Barbra Streisand there, and every one of the Star wars actors and John Lithgow.

The room is filled with everybody.

I'm talking to this woman.

I'm going, how did you know Kirsch?

She said, we were both writers.

I go, oh, what did you write?

And she said, dirty Dancing.

I went, oh.

And then Barbra Streisand right there.

Just a whole day like this.

But this is the moment that stuck with me the most, when his sons asked him how I ended up connected with him.

And he worked with me on everything.

He told them I was the only one in his entire life who asked.

Nobody ever asked.

Now, here's another super crucial one.

The I use a concept called the critical inch when you are running a marathon, and many things in life are marathons.

Having a child is a marathon.

Building a business is a marathon.

Getting an education is a marathon.

If you're running a marathon, there is a red tape at the end.

And if you are running the marathon in first place the entire time and just one inch or centimeter, wherever you are in the world before that red line, you stop and someone else crosses before you, you didn't win the marathon.

So on all things that I'm doing, I keep my eyes on the critical inch.

I know what the purpose is of what I'm doing, how it fits with the vision and the critical inch of completing it.

And when I'm going for it, I'll write all the steps down.

I have a project management app next to me.

I use ClickUp now, and anything I want to build, as soon as I decide it's a concept, it's layered in concept in the app.

And I begin to break it down into little steps and it will slowly ripen.

And when I look at it and go, you know what?

I know where to go with this.

Now I will then just follow my steps, which I've written in action format to carry out.

And so that part of me that is a leader who's leading myself or others happens in separate times.

And the part of me that is acting and taking action and driving forward and this is going to get done, that's going to get done, and this is going to happen, that's not the same as like the visionary person.

I make those two separate times.

And when I'm doing actions, I get on a roll.

And here's the crazy thing, there's all sorts of bells and whistles, let's say notifications, calls, emails, emails, or somebody else's agenda arriving on your desk.

All of these things pull your focus away.

So your power is defined by your ability to focus exclusively on one thing.

And so if you have two goals here, one goal here and one goal here, they're this far apart.

If you're not focused, you're going like this all over the place, and you may end up back over here.

If you're focused, it's like a laser beam and boom.

So a big part of the secret is focus for five minutes at a time, and you are focused more than most people are their entire lives.

And here's where you put your focus.

There's an Eisenhower quadrant of urgent and important.

Important but not urgent.

If you can spend your life focused on what is important and not urgent, and you prioritize, A, this is for now, B, this is for soon, and C, this is for when I get to it.

If you do the important and not urgent over and over again, you are building your future.

Now, I have next to me, like the core three projects I want to do at any time.

They're sitting right here.

And I define that for a three, four month period, maybe a quarter and for a year and for a three year period.

And if I come back or when I come back in August and I look at where my life is, my business is and my impact is, and I look back at that paper, at the stuff I completed, my business grew exactly to the level of those things that I completed that I believed were super important, not urgent.

But if I got them done, I knew they would change my life.

So then here's like a, I think kind of the biggest secret entertainment is a little bit like this business is a little bit like swinging from a vine and then you've got to reach off and catch the next vine while you're flying through the air.

Okay.

It's not.

I don't go for stability.

I actually go for explosive growth.

And so how do we operate in this environment?

First of all, fears come up always.

And I have a group of people, coaches.

Kellen, you helped seriously, on the first time before, while we were talking about doing this podcast, I learned your power.

So if you're watching and you're thinking of getting a coach, just go with Kellen if you can get him.

And masterminds, people who are successful at what you do and are all gathered together in a mastermind to share the best practices.

And these are people around the world.

Now we get together on zoom and in person.

I have this for magicians, I have this for business.

I have a therapist.

So that if not if, when life gets challenging, I can work through it quickly so that I can have the energy and resilience.

Because I believe that as a leader, the leader feels every single thing that everybody else does.

But if you can feel it deeply and feel it through fully, you come out the other side.

And that next emotion is the one that allows you to go forward.

And if you get to the part where you are ready to go forward before everybody else and you begin to put together a plan, you are not the leader because somebody called you the leader.

You're the leader because everybody else is going, ah, what do we do.

I'm scared.

What do we do?

And you went through the emotion already and came out the other side with a plan and actions.

And everybody just goes, follow that lady, follow that guy.

And you're the leader.

Just because you recovered quickly and decided to come up with what to do about it.

And behind some of that, there's a process called somatic therapy where you speak with a therapist and as you're talking about something, you have sensations in your body and they're like, where do you feel that?

And I'm like, I got a knot in my chest right now.

The person will say, well, what color is that knot?

It's a giant gray knot.

Pay attention to that.

See what happens.

And suddenly you feel that knot release.

You go, know what?

If I wait on this one thing I'm going to do because it's hard, it's going to be way harder.

And if I do the hard thing now, it's going to be way easier.

And after that moment, I just turn and back to that concept of leaping through the air in the entertainment business.

I succeed on the concept of falling up.

I'm not actually succeeding.

I am at all times failing marketing material.

You throw out all your money and all your energy into your marketing material.

And for 98% of the people who see fails, and if you are super successful, it's 97% and that makes it a huge success, that 1% difference.

So you're actually failing constantly and throwing money at this.

And that doesn't work.

And that creates an experience of constantly falling.

There's always a don't we wish that for me, that next corporate event booked already.

Don't I wish that summer camp was around because it's filled with impact and it's a great time for my business because we sell out like crazy with people coming back and it's just great to see everybody.

And so there's all these periods of falling and sometimes I'm falling and I go, oh crap, I need to get into the emergency savings.

Other time it's, oh crap, I need to use a line of credit and oh crap, I need to sell some stock.

So creating the conditions where you can constantly fall and in that moment when you're falling, have a mastermind, a mentor, a coach, and you need accountability.

Also in that accountability groups is where the real transformation happens.

People who will tell you, you know, you said you were going to do this and you didn't do it.

What's up?

We just lie to all of us.

That'll keep you honest.

With yourself and others.

And so in that process of constantly falling up, I am going towards the next item that will be the greatest contributor to my success.

And no matter what is happening, I'm working on that.

And a lot of people will talk about a fallback position as that safety thing coming again, I will use a fall up position.

I was finished pre med and knew I wasn't going to go in that direction.

And I wanted to study theater and social psychology, which is the science of human interaction, which I wanted to use for the shows and child development and lifespan development so I could understand all the audiences.

Those were all the things I was going to use in college to support my main thing.

And people say, well, what's your fallback plan?

I said, I don't want a fallback plan, I don't want a safety net.

I'm gonna make this work or I'm not gonna do it.

And I've decided I'm doing it.

So I'm gonna make it work.

And it's working already while I'm in school.

So I assume that if I put more time and effort I'll be better.

But I found a fall up plan which was if I took the entrepreneurship courses, the business courses, the marketing courses, then all of that makes it more likely that I succeed in what I want to do.

And now I consult with people in all sorts of different businesses.

And maybe half my revenue came from other businesses this period of time, one of them a cardiology practice.

And so all those business skills I could apply to myself, I could apply in other places where if I needed a time to make more money or, you know, I wasn't going to meet cash flow wise, I had this fall up.

And then in accounting there's a T chart.

It is literally a T is the most essential thing in all of business.

One side of the tea is the money coming in and the other side is the money going out.

If you keep it so that the money coming in is more than the money going out, you can be in business in whatever you're doing permanently.

And so when I got out of school, I was doing maybe five shows a month at somewhere around $250 a piece.

So $1,250 a month.

Well, and I had worked the previous 10 years for other people.

Starting when I was 14 and a half, I got a room.

Now, you can't really do this as easily this time, but I got a room for $550 a month by the time I paid for my phone, my health insurance in my room, I had enough money left over that I could eat out for lunch every single day.

And most of the shows were ending up on one weekend.

So I had almost 28 days a month completely free.

And I just looked at every single skill that I would need to do, and I studied it.

And when I was studying sales, I studied 16 different books on sales.

And by the time I finished, I'm like, these are all the same, and they're all referring back to listening.

And then I ended up finding a listening textbook and studied 400 pages on listening, because that's what the sales textbooks were all saying.

And that's where great actors were saying.

And I'm a conservatory trained actor.

They were saying it was the listening that was important.

And so, like, I've got your book Living with Purpose and Power right here.

And I'm on this.

Chapter two, what do I control?

And so you control what you say.

Perhaps you have habits of muttering under your breath without thinking.

It is still under your control.

You may habitually shout at others when they cut you off on the freeway.

It is still under your control.

You have a running monologue in your head about all sorts of things that is still under your control.

Let me repeat, it is still under your control.

So I surround myself with books where I will read like I won't read it straight through.

I'll go to a chapter that sounds like it's going to resonate with me and I'll zero in on one thing and then I'll read a little bit of it.

And when I have a hit, I will stop and reflect on that.

And there's a thing called stacking order.

Some people read one book at a time straight through.

I've got 15, 20 books spread all over the place.

I'm like you.

Yeah, I read the section.

I need that day to figure out where I'm going right now.

So I'm always.

I view this as like, you learned everything in your life, some the hardest way possible, some from others.

And all those people gathered the greatest information that they could ever find.

And you gathered the greatest information you ever could find.

And you stuck it in something this big and said, here, you can get this.

And so I surround myself with what I believe is the greatest information of all time.

And I'm absorbing that at all times.

And I will focus on the things that I need.

And Now I use ChatGPT to help bring it even closer.

I Here's a prompt.

Ready?

Who are the top 20 experts on this topic?

Fill in the blank.

Bring Those people into this chat as though they're speaking directly to me while we're having this conversation.

And I then have a conversation with the authors of all the books that I just read.

But ultimately I'm aiming to surround myself in every way with people who are way, way, way more advanced or intelligent than I am at that topic.

And what you get is earth shattering moments.

One day I'm standing with Irvin Kirshner, director of Star the Empire Strikes Back, and he says to me, there's only two things you can impact, what people see and what people hear.

And through that they feel what they think.

Now, if you look at the a podcast or anything you're doing in your life and you realize, wait, I can only affect what people see and hear.

You can suddenly cluster every single thing you learn into a tight little package around that.

And you can make sense of an entire body of knowledge around that.

And all right, I can give away one big crazy secret here.

A book called how to Think Like a Genius by Todd Siller teaches about taking a visual representation of something.

And you can write different notes on different parts of that something.

It could be a waterfall for me.

I used a star frequently and I would write a different thing on each point of the star and then I would write a question down the center.

How am I going to make this website work?

How am I going to advance this relationship?

How am I going to make this song I'm going to sing in my show better?

And then I write the categories of ways I can influence things on the point.

And I take one point over here and one point over here and I draw a line and I say, what connects these two things?

I draw a line.

What connects these two things?

What connects these two things?

And so I have this three dimensional thought that forms in answering the questions I have.

And so instead of coming at things with a thinly thought through, or let's say peripheral thinking, which we need peripheral thinking for the snap decisions, but for things that really matter, having them really deeply thought through, how do we get there so that I'm not wishy washy?

I really know where I'm headed.

And that clarity is often a huge part of success.

I've got that worked out from these metaphor, which is taking a metaphor for what you're doing in picture format and thinking through it in that way.

And in that process, I would find things that sort of lit me up.

And there's a book called the Passion Plan by Richard Chang that I got probably in the 90s and it's been on my nightstand ever since.

And it talked about, you don't find your passion, you find like one little ember and go, oh, what's that?

You find another little ember.

Go, oh, what if we put these together?

Ooh, that's warmer.

Ooh, there's another one over here.

So collecting the embers up.

And as your passion gets stronger, which is your emotion side and your spirit and your energy, and you've really thought things through and created a vision and a strategy and a mission behind what you want to create, the biggest secret is that the universe is going to conspire with you to make it happen.

I was talking about Brainstars with a friend.

She mentioned an organization and I said, well, all those people sound like they're thinking that way.

And I joined that organization and I met Kellen right at the beginning and I went, he's totally thinking that way.

And he goes, here's my podcast.

And I'm like, this is him thinking that way to share it with everybody else, just like I am with Brainstars.

And so the world will conspire to have you succeed when you have a meaningful vision.

I got this idea in my head from a speaker.

At the end of your life, while you're on that bed, aware that your last breath is coming, if your 18 year old self walked up to you, do you want to tell that person the story of what your life might have been?

Or do you want to tell them a story that your life became?

And so the world will conspire with you for you to succeed?

When you have a meaningful vision and effort, literally every resource you need will creep out of the woodwork for it to happen.

And then I use something that I got from a singing method.

I do sing in my shows and it's one way that I create magic on a different way, you know, connecting through song.

A book from it was called Power Performance for Entertainers, for Singers.

And it talked about you improve a little bit before you improve a little bit during while you're actually singing the song in this case, or while you're carrying out the business practice or while you're having that conversation with your significant other.

You go, wait, you know, hold on, I can tell I'm blaming here.

Let me try this again.

I don't want to blame you for this.

I'm just saying this is how this impacted me.

And then you're improving during.

And then after you're walking away and you get your journal out, you think through or you call a mentor, whatever the situation is.

And I have a mentor for every single thing I'm doing.

And you improve after.

So if you improve before, during and after, whatever you're doing to create 30,000 important but not urgent impacts building towards your vision, you really start to get somewhere.

Now here's the reality.

Everything screws up all the time.

The software screws up that as I got these enormous events, I would be looking at somebody who wanted to spend tens of thousands and then somebody would call me who wanted to spend $200 for a longer performance.

I'm like, ah, that's not really who I am anymore.

And the big one would take a while to book.

And it's a very large sum of money.

The little one would have created the cash flow, right?

And so now I'm sitting here as my career is taking off and these big things are happening and I'm going, oh crap, I see I'm doing phenomenally right here.

But there's a big gap and this one's not going to pay for a couple more weeks.

What do I do here?

Software screws up.

You can't get through to people.

You need to get things done.

Team members will come in and want to throw hand grenades into your business if they are not first attracted to the vision admission that you are on for your business or your life.

Every single thing will go wrong all the time.

And as quickly as possible, you have to sit back and say, what is the one thing I need to learn to outgrow this situation?

It sounds like, how can I fail up in this moment?

How can I fail up in this moment?

And the most important one, Kellen, every time I got to a bigger stage, I was more and more scared.

2000 person global virtual conference.

Not only did I learn while I was performing for one of those, if you are ever performing for 2,000 people on Zoom, you should never pick an audience volunteer named Alexa.

Very important.

But the butterflies go like crazy.

Whenever I feel that adrenaline, which is really, really what it is.

Many people think of that as fear.

I think of that as my body shifting into the larger than life mode that's going to get me through to make it happen, I feel that fear.

I feel that jitteriness.

I feel it coursing through my body and I go, wow, this feels scary as crap.

And I stand there and I breathe a little bit deeply in my lower gut and I come back to one phrase that I've used ever since I was a kid, which is, this is so scary.

I bet that right at this spot, this is where somebody else quit.

And.

I make a decision that that's not.

Who I want to be, that's not going to be me.

Well, and I step forward.

I love that somebody else quit right here.

I love that.

I'm going to take that away from this.

Benjamin, that is an absolute.

I ask you the question, you know, describe processes, and you have, and you've given a lengthy masterclass on that.

And I love it every single moment.

I need to ask you a final question that's really important, and that is where are you going to send people?

Or what do you have?

Because with what you've taught, I urge everybody to go back and go through this and listen, because he's given you some concrete practices, some specific actions, some attitudes, some words, the importance of mentorship and getting the right help, importance of your internal dialogue.

And all of those things are so true.

And I love the stories and everything.

How do we find you?

How do.

How do people get more of you?

All right, so at the core, enrichment, entertainment, virtually and in person.

You can find me@BenCorey.com for all of my shows.

I travel anywhere in the world.

Or online, you can find Brainstars Club, which is where we bring that enrichment.

And this information, I just told you here, this is what we're teaching 6 year olds and 7 year olds and 8 year olds and 9 year olds and 10 year olds, you can go to Brainstars Club, fill out our contact form if you have kids that you would like to involve in our programs.

And I want you to have something that's been very special to me to take as a gift.

If you go to bencorey.com at your event and maybe I'll copy this for you, Kellen, to put in the program bencorey.com at your event gift, I will send you some of the things that I used every day to keep myself on track.

One is a poem that I stuck on my wall since I was like nine years old.

It's called the Power of Littles.

And it starts with great things.

We often find on little things depend.

And I kept that on my wall so that as I focused on that one thing I was going to get done, then zeroed out every single other thing.

I knew that that one thing would add up over time.

So if you fill out the form on there, I'll send you an email with that poem.

And then I think there's a couple other things that go out.

I had not thought about that online gift for a very long time, so I don't even know what the second email is, and I'm going to go afterwards and Change it to gift.bencorey.com Remember, improve before, during, and after.

Because I thought gift.bencorey.com is going to be way easier to find than the way that I wrote it before.

I'm literally living exactly what I was talking about in this moment.

I love that.

That's a fabulous example.

And one of the things, you know, you've talked about it and you've done so well.

I want people to hear that.

Because the moment of discovery.

The moment of discovery and the moment of execution, when we can shorten that time, the moment of discovery and moment of execution, when we can reduce the time in between those things, we fall up, we fail up, we move forward quickly.

And one of the keys is no drama.

So it's not like, oh, that was bad, and you make yourself bad.

So drop all that.

This is just growth.

Because when you're committed to your project, every possible improvement is exciting.

And it's not an indictment.

It's not an indictment because this is part of the climb.

And I was born to rise.

I love that saying.

So thank you.

That's fabulous.

One thing just on what you said, social psychologists, that's what my degree is in.

I use it every day.

They discovered they wanted to test if somebody is berating themselves or others for not achieving something or getting something right.

Do they then get a better result?

And it turns out that you can berate yourself for everything going wrong and you can berate other people.

All it does is drains your energy and you don't get anywhere with it.

So you can take your hand and just put it on your chest.

A wonderful speaker told me about this and just go, okay, Ben, I recommend using your name for this.

Okay, Ben, that didn't work this time.

What's going to work better?

And instead of going into that place of criticism, go right into that direction and then look for the people who are criticizing you in your life.

And this is a former communication director from Disney told me this.

Those people who are criticizing you in your life and making you feel terrible in this way, learn how to just sort of step away.

You had a relationship with them, but now you're just going to step out and you surround yourself with people who are like, this brainstar thing Ben is doing is amazing.

How can I help him find people to join?

These shows are entertaining.

How can I get people to bencorey.com who might need that show?

You find the people who are like that and you surround yourself with those.

In that case, today it was Kellen.

I'm so blessed that you shared your audience with me today.

I was thinking, I'm really passionate about helping people have their best life, which is the same thing Kellen is.

And his audience is really passionate about having their best life.

I was like, maybe they want their kids to have their best life too.

And there's like this amazing alignment there.

Absolutely love it, Ben.

Thank you.

Just spectacular.

I've really enjoyed listening to you.

I've really enjoyed learning your processes and your growth.

It was instructional.

And again, I advise all of you to listen to this a couple of times or more.

Take it apart.

You know, you can download podcasts, so have it.

Thank you for sharing everything with us today, Ben.

You're welcome.

And now that I have written all the things that I wanted to say and realized, wait a second, I have 40 hours of podcast material.

And I went, I'm going to need the story arc book now to use Kellen's method for putting that into a book.

And then I pop on and the first thing Kellen wants to tell me about was a challenge that you have coming up where for free, you'll help a group of people develop their foundation for their story arc.

But I was like, you see, when you're in alignment, it all just piles up like that.

Boom.

Boom is the first thing you said.

And I had the book sitting next to me on the screen.

That's what happens when you're living your life in alignment.

Everybody listen, I want you to go back and listen to this a couple times.

I really do that.

I say that on different shows, but really he gave us a masterclass on personal choice to create growth and failing up and several other things that are available to you now today as you move forward and create your ultimate life.

Never hold back and you'll never ask why.

Open your heart in this time around.

Right here, right now, you're opportunity for massive growth is right in front of you.

Every episode gives you practical tips and practices that will change everything.

If you want to know more, go to kellenflukermedia.com if you want more free tools, go here.

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