HACKER’S TO AN

[Pages:37]Copyright ? 2019 Jeffrey Lerner

All rights reserved.

This book is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. The author is not offering it as legal, accounting, health or other professional services advice. No income claims are made or inferred in this work. You are solely responsible for your results. While best efforts have been used in preparing this book, the author and publisher make no representations or warranties of any kind and assume no liabilities of any kind with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness of use for a particular purpose. The contents of this book are personal opinions and observations, based on author's personal own experience, and should not be taken as anything more than that. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be held liable or responsible to any person or entity with respect to any loss or incidental or consequential damages caused, or alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by the information or programs contained herein. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. No one should make any decision without first consulting his or her own professional and conducting his or her own research and due diligence. You should seek the services of a competent professional before beginning any program. You are responsible for complying with the laws where you live and where you conduct business. You are solely responsible for the consequences of your use of this material.

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Introduction

Ever since starting my crusade as the "awesome life" guy, I get messages all the time expressing the age-old conflict between the desire for an awesome life and the hard realities of living whatever life we have. The messages usually start with a statement along the lines of, "Jeff, I really want to have an awesome life..." Or... "I want to have awesome health, finances, relationships or (fill in the blank)..."

"Ok", I think, "you want the usual things. So does everyone."

Then things get more personal, proceeding with some variation of, "But the logistics of living day-to-day, (of getting through life/ paying the bills/budgeting my time/ dealing with some negative people) keep me from doing that."

Everyone's personal details are different, but really the theme is always the same. "I want x, but getting x is hard because of y and z circumstances."

Here is what I say: It's easy to want to have an awesome life, but it's easier said than done to actually have that awesome life. In fact, it is really hard, especially if you don't have a solid plan that accounts for life's fluctuations (ie: the whole "shit happens" thing). Hence why I created this guide.

People often ask me how I got into the whole awesome life thing -- how did I craft a life for myself that's "awesome" enough to make a living from it and by extension how does one become an expert in having an awesome life.

Well, let me take the second question first. I don't think there is such a thing as expert status in this area. The difference between me and most people is what I focus on and what I believe. I have an awesome life because I believe that life is meant to be awesome and because I am obsessed with having no regrets. I meditate every day on my personal mission statement and I practice what I preach.

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As for the for the "how" of creating an awesome life, or "how" I learned to do it, that I attribute to my training as a jazz musician. That's the closest thing I have to a "success secret". On stage playing jazz music (assuming we've done the work to get good at it), we create everything in real-time, improvising on the fly, while never losing the original thread of what we're doing (the tune and time). And even though it's a very personal act of creation, we also recognize and deal with the fact that it can't be created alone. We have to have enough confidence in the people we are working with, have the ability to listen and respond to them, balance freedom and creativity with agreed-upon standards and systems that we mutually maintain for each other's benefit.

For me, jazz is how I learned to be an entrepreneur, or at least be "entrepreneurial". To be clear, I do not believe that only entrepreneurs have awesome lives, but I do think there is an entrepreneurial quality about every awesome life ? collaboration, value exchange, problem solving, and creativity. And you have to learn to find the right people to rely on to prevent the mythical trap of "going it alone".

Obviously, not everyone can become a jazz musician before building an awesome life. And just because that worked for me, it doesn't mean it's what you need. Translating my success as a creator of life-awesomeness into your success is not a simple copy-and-paste process. I wish it was. I can give you all the tools and mechanics of how I have an awesome life, but that is not enough. I can't anticipate every frustration, obstacle, challenge or life circumstance you will face. Even if I could anticipate your external environment, I don't know what the hell is going on in your brain. None of it is going to matter until you get your mindset on track and your shit sorted out (which is a crude way of saying you need to believe in the best version of yourself and practice being that person daily.)

The trap in reading a handbook like this is the idea that you may believe that just reading my story or getting tips on how I made myself successful will be enough for you to generate change. That is the equivalent of thinking that buying new clothes will help you lose weight! That's not how life works. I can't tell you what to do; I can only tell you what I did and what it says about

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what's possible in this world. But in the end it's about you taking responsibility for your mindset and actions. If extra money would make a difference in your life then, sure, I can give you several ideas on what to what to do to make more money. The more I know about you the more I can tailor those ideas to your situation (despite many people who have initially claimed helplessness, I have yet to work with someone who had zero options for increasing their income). If your relationship with your kids or your spouse is a mess I can give you a half dozen great books to read that aren't feel-good pop-psychology but research-based, clinically vetted ways to improve trust and communication. If you need to lose weight or get in shape I can tell you what I did when facing the same issue...

Use what motivates you. For me it was the fact that I think my wife is smoking hot and I felt like I was letting her down making her be with someone who didn't take good care of himself. Whatever the issue is, there is a good chance I've got a recommended resource because I've spent the last decade accumulating resources toward fixing my problems, building an awesome life, and helping hundreds of other people work through their own stuff. And none of this is going to work if you don't get your head together.

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My encouragement is that in between the "advice" and "insights", read this guide with an open heart... feel out the tough love as well as the inspiration. Let the spirit of this guide change you, not just the words. The highest level of service I can provide is to inspire in you a sense of what's possible. The mind tends to fill in the blanks of "how" to do something once it truly believes that it can do something.

Cheaper Than Therapy

I promise what you're about to read and the subsequent training I offer is cheaper than therapy, but you have to EXPERIENCE it to get the value from it. As a good friend of mine who is one of the top Child and Family Therapists in the country often says, "Change comes from experience, not insight".

Did you know that the most effective form of therapy in the world is based out of Milan, Italy? The "Milanese School" operates in a unique way that makes it both effective and also, sadly, prohibitively expensive for most people. In Milan there are therapists who will move into your house and live with you for a month or more -- watching, observing, and critiquing your behavior by the minute. As terrible as that may sound, it is the most proven therapy that gets the fastest results in the world. The daily reinforcement, the constant correction (based on agreedupon standards), and the process of getting annoyed and frustrated and overcoming it is as effective as it is painful. In Milan talk of wanting to change is cheap -- when a patient wants to change so much they will pay a stranger to live in their house and mercilessly critique them, that option gets deployed and change happens because the therapy is being experienced through the context of real life, not quarantined into mere intellectual insights that happen occasionally in some strange office you only return to for more insight.

Now I didn't charge you enough for this guide to move into your house so we're going to have to meet in the middle. As you read it, aim to experience the feeling behind the words (and how it makes you feel if you let it). Carry that feeling with you throughout your day and let it be the

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seed of change in your life (that means you'll need to water it by meditating on the feeling and finding your own words to support my words).

Let me put a fine point on this. I could tell you every single thing I do in my business and you could go emulate it. You could even have your head straight, and do all the same work to have clarity of thought to be making the best decisions with the information you have at the time. I could show you the exact methods I use to plan and run my businesses, my workout routine, my meal plan, my marriage, my family, and so on and you could hit your career/gym/kitchen/home in all the same ways and still it might not work because of something circumstantial. The timing might be different, Facebook may have changed their algorithm, someone in your family could be mentally ill, your child could get sick, you could be allergic to coconuts, I don't know. Nor do you know what your special variables will be. But we both know there will be something that comes up.

All that's going to matter then is how prepared you are to handle that upsetting or aggravating event -- to respond to it, modify the plan, and take action with the same intensity and purpose you had before the obstacle appeared (that last part is the key). But in all cases, we're just creating possibilities. You'll never create certainty of a specific outcome; you can only ever be influencing the probability of an outcome. This entire handbook is about increasing the probability of you having an awesome life in whatever way you define that, but if you are waiting for some kind of guarantee, that is just a signal to me that we have a lot more work to do. Don't ever give anyone enough power over you to guarantee anything!

My musical background has taught me how to communicate, make decisions rapidly, work in harmonious relationship with others, make use of dissonance and tension, and most importantly implement a system based on a large amount of complex assumed knowledge while looking graceful and calm on the surface. In order to do all that, a jazz musician is basically a "hacker" of sorts, assembling bits and pieces borrowed from here and there ("licks", "progressions", "techniques" we call them) that all fit within the giant 12 tone framework known as western music and the tradition of jazz.

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Managing the various components of an awesome life, personal, professional, and physical (what I call "the 3 Ps of excellence") is a similarly complex system requiring automatic recall of learned formulas, improvisation, and grace under pressure. And as much as creating jazz is a personal expression, creating our own life is as personal as it gets. Since the majority of people reading this aren't professional-caliber musicians and won't be becoming one before embarking on their awesome life journey, let me share a few licks, hacks, and techniques I've learned along with some strategies for how to put them together. And remember, read with your heart as much as your mind. Feel the intent, don't just think the techniques...

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