Why You Are Not More Successful – Your Intelligence Is Not Choosing Your Actions

321, Welcome to The Missing Secret Podcast. I'm Kelly Hatfield.

Hey, and I'm John Mitchell. And so our topic today is why you are not more successful. Your intelligence is not choosing your actions. So, Kelly, what do you think? Do you buy that?

Well, I am.. I'm excited. This was a.. you just brought this topic up to me in this concept, so I can't wait to hear what you've learned as you've kind of gone through this process of writing your second book.

Right? Right. Well, I give you.. give everybody a little perspective on this. So I'm creating an entire new academic field called Advanced Leadership of Self, and as AI has, as astutely pointed out to me, whoever defines the field best owns the field. Well, I'm by guy going to do that, and I'm doing it, and have done it, but as I define this field and create this academic field, there's got to be the definitive book that that articulates the field of advanced leadership itself, and it's got to be written, oh, largely from an academic standpoint, and I'm not really an academic, as you well know, but that's what is required, and so I'm writing the book, and they, and the obvious name of the book is Advanced Leadership of Self, the science of leveraging yourself, and so the way I'm doing it is using AI, and so I took AI and Claude, in particular, and uploaded my missing secret book, which I wrote, I guess, two years ago, and was very personal, but explained, explained it all, but probably not in a very academic way, which some people may like, and some people may not like, but then I also have created this new website that I'm going to operate from, called the Center for Advanced Leadership of Self, which I'm founding here at the University of Texas, with the support of the University of Texas and the powers that be there, and so this process of writing this book has been maybe the coolest experience I've ever had in my life, because what happens is once you load all my stuff in there, and and then you start this process of writing this book, and you tell Claude that it's, it's going to be the bible for this emerging industry. It'll, it'll, it'll help me create, you know, we had to do a lot of sort of foundational work around the idea of, of what is the tone that I, that I wanted, you know, what is the tone I wanted in the book, and what were some, some of the foundational ideas, and just, just give it a, a framework from which to

begin with, and so once we had that in place, then we started, you know, going after each chapter, and I'm literally halfway through it, but what was, what has been so fascinating is we'll start the chapter and I'll go, okay, and it sort of helped me figure out what the name of each chapter was, and then I would say, okay, tell me the various components of this chapter. What are the bullet points we're going to cover, and ask me any questions you have. So I would enter in that prompt, boom, you know, 10 seconds later it would tell me all the built bullet points, and and it would ask me questions. A lot of times the questions would be, can you give a personal story about this or personal story about that, and then you feed it back, and boom, 15 seconds, 20 seconds later, the entire chapters written, and then I will go back and review the chapter, but it's 90% written, and probably primarily because it's it has as a source document my prior book, that's where all the work really went. In,

yeah,

And, but, but it is so fascinating. This is what has sort of blown me away, you know. So I'm feeding it, I'm feeding AI my methodology, and everything I've learned about it, and I'm feeding it into an infinite intelligence, essentially an infinite intelligence is giving it back to me, and and is telling me why it's so powerful, or or sometimes it'll push back on something, but it's very little push back, even though I have said please push back, because I want this to be great. I don't want you to just tell me what I want to hear, but it's also come up with things I didn't know, like a number of scientific experiments to support the methodology, and it certainly explains the methodology in a, in a way that is more lucid and sophisticated than the way I do it, so it's, it's, it's pretty cool to, to take this thing that I created, what, 20 years ago, and now see it fed back to me in different languages than my language, but one of the things that came up is, and this is sort of the genesis for today's topic, is it talks about how there is a researcher by the name of Benjamin Labet from the University of California, and he did this research back in the 1980s and basically confirms that you take an action first and then you become conscious of it subsequent to taking the action, and the way he did this is, he would have subjects intentionally open and close their, their fist, they would make a fist and release, release it, and when they hook people up to the scientific instruments, they saw that the action was happening before awareness of the action was happening, and that ended up spurring a ton of research around this, this idea, and, and it really makes me, and you know, the topic today is Why are you not more successful? Your intentions are not choosing your actions. Well, you know how that relates is that the vast majority of your daily actions are unconscious, up to 95% And what is actually happening is you're taking the action, and then a

couple of milliseconds later you're becoming aware of it, but the significance of that is the actual taking of the action is what's most important, and so what's driving taking that action is not your intelligence and intellect, because that's happening in the conscious mind, and so the actions of being being taken by the unconscious mind, which is, is, is controlled and driven by your, your subconscious mind, which is innately wired for survival, and causes those actions, and the decisions to take those actions are fear-based and reactive, and so you know, to me, once you grasp that, once I grasp that, once you grasp that whole different way of playing the game of life, don't you think?

Oh, yeah, no, absolutely, there's no, there's no doubt about it, just having an understanding of how your brain works, well, your subconscious, your conscious thoughts, your subconscious thoughts, understanding, you know, all of the science behind that just unlocked so much for me. It was like, oh, okay, well, then if this is true, then you know this is also been likely true, you know, and it just, it just was the first domino I needed to help me, you know, kind of set everything in motion. Once I knew that one thing,

I wonder why more people can't get that when it's properly explained to them.

Yeah

Why do you think that is?

I don't know. I'm not sure. I don't know whether it's like, you know, we've talked about this before, you kind of have to be in the maybe the right place, you know, to receive it, you know, then, but then also it goes along with the depth at which one is thinking about their life in general, yeah, you don't recognize, and you haven't thought, you know, you're not in, I don't know, whether being. Pain, I like, but you don't recognize that you, man, this isn't where I want to be, you know? Or, man, I'm 40, or man, I'm 50, or man, I'm whatever. What, what do I want this? I think until you really start getting into that kind of mode, and then where you're then open to hearing and receiving things that could, you know, I don't know.

Well, no, I think you have nailed it. I really do. I think that people in general are so shallow thinking, like I mean, like you've said, said it before, you know, they're not thinking about success and all that, they're thinking about I've got to pick up the cleaning tomorrow, and you know they got to do this and do that, but but they also are innately operating at a very shallow level of thinking, which is driven by this flip through culture of social media, and so that because so anytime you're talking about anything of substance they likely will not get it, and, and you know, I've seen this lately, just in, in conversations with friends. I, I was talking to a friend of mine who has this entrepreneurial idea, and, and I think I called him up because he told me about the idea, and I thought about it a little, and then I, I wanted to share with him my thoughts, and I was, I was sharing with him, there's part of this I like, and there's part of this I don't like. Well, I told him specifically what I didn't like, and he couldn't hear it, he just could not hear it, because it was, you had to listen, you had to really think about it, but I think that's oftentimes the case, like, like people who are listening to this podcast, they're probably driving more often than not, and they're sort of listening, so they're sort of not listening, so if, if, if we go into anything that is is deep, unless we repeat it two or three times, it sort of probably goes in one ear out the other to some degree. Although I think a lot of our audience, it's like preaching to the choir, they get it, you know.

Absolutely, and I think you'd have to be, I think, in that place again where you're thinking, you know, in any kind of depth about your life. I think that you have to be open to, you know, I think that people's ego gets in the way a lot, you know, where their brain just shuts down because of, you know, something is said that, you know, oh, well, that's not me. You know, you know where there's again this goes back to kind of like personal accountability, not having the victim mindset, taking ownership of your, you know, so it there is, I think, a I don't want to say special kind of of mindset, but I do think that, you know, people need to be at the right place in their life and frame of mind to hear and to go, oh, and for the light to, you know, to come on, and I think it is somebody too who naturally has that growth, you know, kind of mindset and open mindset about, like, huh, okay, naturally curious, somebody who's like, 'Hi, I wonder if that's true, and is really, but again, that's again, you're thinking more deeply about things.

Well, and you know, I think you're right, Kelly, that that if you key a person into like a pain that they're having, they'll, they'll hear it, whereas if you don't, they won't. As an example, if they hear me talking and go, you know, I wasn't as successful as I thought I should be when I'm 50, when I was 50, you know, they might go, you know, I feel that way, I'm not as successful as I think I should be. And where, and so that, that will take them down the rabbit hole of listening to what we're talking about, whereas if you said to, hey, let me tell you how success works. Well, you know, maybe not as interested in it, and you know, I'll tell you something. Our audience should try. I've just been blown away by this, and I may have even mentioned this before, but it's powerful. So, tonight, when you're finished with your day, and maybe you're laying in bed, grab your phone and ask ChatGPT or Claude one question, and you got to have the paid version, where you can have a conversation with it, but say to it, so I am however old you are, say over the next 10 years, what am I going to learn about the art of living that I don't know today? And and also you might ask it, say ask me any questions you need, and watch what happens, and when I did that just a week or two ago, what it came back with was so powerful, it, it, it sort of essentially said you need to be more forgiving. You need to be more patient. You always need to be modest and humble, and, and you need to realize that people are doing the best they can, even though it may not seem that way. And you know, that is pretty damn profound.

Oh, absolutely. yeah,

And and the other thing in writing my book, the one of the questions AI asked me was, so what was the turning point in your life, really? What was the turning point? Was it being blessed to take your income to over a million a year, or meeting the ginge, or what was the most profound thing, and I see that the most profound thing was realizing that I had a false belief that I controlled my daily actions, when in fact I didn't, and that for me to have a higher level of success I had to gain control over those unconscious daily actions, but that eliminating that false belief was the, it was the single most important thing in my life. So, if I ask you that question, what? What do you? I know I'm hitting you cold.

Yeah, what was the question? What's the single most..

What was impactful thing that is that has happened in your life?

Boy,

That's just knock that one out off the top of your head, if you want to think about that

I need to think about that. That's a tough one. I, you know, I think that, you know, my initial, like, response takes me back, you know, to when I'm 18 years old. Yeah, you know, and but then, you know, also, too, I think, just, you know, taking the leap and starting my own business,

Yeah,

A fter having, like, I think that was a major point, you know, point in my life that changed things for me, right, of course, being introduced to the think it be, it be it method, you know, meeting you, um, and you know, was a major pivot point my life, and something that really changed my life, understanding this was like put things on steroids, and just again, I just, my life is just so, you know, I feel like a different person in all of the best ways, because I'm able to show up, you know, as the best person of myself most of the time, not all of the time, but most of the time I am, you know, like my stress level is even, and even given kind of the time that we're living through right now, I'm able to manage my mindset, you know, through this methodology, and it's a game changer.

Well, and and I, one of the things that came out of this, this process of writing the book, and this is pure AI, not me, but it had a great line that I think I've said before, says working harder is like stepping on the gas with the parking brake on if you're not leading yourself deliberately and intelligently, and, and as, as I look at it, of course, I'm, I'm looking through life from the lens of advanced leadership of self. Most people aren't leading themselves, they're just getting up every day and doing the best they can, and there's no real clarity about exactly where am I going to go and how am I going to get there and and they're hoping for the best and and candidly you know come on I mean if you're going to if you want to be really successful she got to intelligently and deliberately lead yourself and and I have evolved to realize that the enlightened 2% get that and the unenlightened 98% will never get it, probably. So, and I'm good when they, when they get it, if they get it, I'm here for them. So that's my, my attitude. Okay. Well, you think about that, that question, and I would say that to our audience as well. Bigger picture, you think about that when you lay down tonight, ask AI, what don't you know today that you will understand way more deeply? 10 years regarding the art of living, so until next time, we'll see you.