The Mindset Mentor - What’s the meaning of life?
Episode Date: October 16, 2023In this episode, we're tackling a question as old as humanity itself: What is the meaning of life? We will dive into various philosophies, personal anecdotes, and scientific perspectives to shed light... on this profound question. We'll explore how the meaning of life isn't a one-size-fits-all answer, but a deeply personal journey of discovery and understanding. 🚀 Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe if you find value in our content. If you like this episode… Make sure to share it with someone that needs to hear it and help us get the message out there so that together we can help make people’s lives better and make the world a better place. And BY THE WAY:My first book that I’ve ever written is now available for pre-order. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.Within its pages, you'll discover powerful insights and practical steps that will revolutionize the way you approach your goals, personal motivation, and mental focus.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/book Here are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robdialjr/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@robdial?lang=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/themindsetmentee/Or visit my Youtube page that is designed specifically for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHl3aFKS0bY0d8JwqNysaeA Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube
Transcript
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not
yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if
you've ever loved this podcast or anything I've put out there, you would absolutely love my new
book, which is on the psychology and science of taking action.
It is called Level Up, How to Get Focused, Stop Procrastinating, and Upgrade Your Life.
And I created it because most people don't understand their mind, which is the most complex piece of machinery in the world. And it is supposed to be the manual to understand your
mind, to take action, to create the life that you want. And so if you want to go out there and buy
it, once again, it's called Level Up. It is everywhere where books are sold. Today, we're going to be talking
about the meaning of life. We're going to be talking about life. We're going to be talking
about death. And I'm going to start off with actually telling you my perspective of death
and life as well and intertwine it with what we're going to go through today.
So I remember the very first person that I ever knew, just so you know,
that passed away was my father. And I was lucky enough to have my father pass away
early. And I say lucky, it was the worst day of my life, but it was also the best day of my life.
The reason why I say lucky, and I have the opinion of that, is because I was able to experience
one of my parents dying when I was younger at an early age. And I remember
specifically the day before my father's funeral, they had him in the casket and he was dressed up
and we were in a small room that was off to the side and it was just enough room for the casket
and a couch. And I remember I was on the far left of the couch and my grandmother, which was his mom,
was right next to me. My sister was next to her and my mom was next to her. And we were in there, and we were able to have a viewing before
everybody else was able to see him the next day. I remember sitting there in the room with the
casket and realizing that my father was gone, and he had so much potential. He was so smart. He had
so many dreams that he wanted. He had so many experiences that he
could have. And none of those things were going to happen anymore. And all of it was gone. And
it makes me think of the Les Brown quote that says, the graveyard is the richest place on earth
because it is here that you'll find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled,
the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that
were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid. And at 15, I knew at that moment that
I was going to make sure that that would not be my life. I was able to see, oh my God, this is final. Like this is legitimate.
This isn't a, this isn't a test life that we get. Like this is final. It is over. And, um,
23 years or 23 days after my father's passing, uh, was my sister's 21st birthday. And, uh,
this is back in 2001 and it was her 21st birthday. And I was driving the car. I was 15 years old. I had my
permit. My mom was next to her. My sister was behind. My mom was next to me. And then my sister
was behind my mom. And I remember we were at a stoplight. I remember the exact location. We had
just got done at Olive Garden for my sister's birthday. We were sitting in Sarasota at a
stoplight at Procter and 41. And my mom said, Hey, you know, it's been a few
weeks since your father passed away. Um, what do you, what are your thoughts around it? What do
you think about the whole thing? And I remember being 15 years old and turning to my mom and
saying, I think that if dad were to know how much good is going to come from this, he would be okay
with dying. And that has been my mission ever since, for 22 years since that moment. And it really
comes down to, and the reason why I want to share that story with you first off is to kind of give
you my perspective of how I see life, but also my perspective as how I've seen death. And there's a
really beautiful phrase that the Stoics have kind of, they kind of lived by. And the phrase is memento mori.
And memento mori basically translates to remember you must die and to meditate on the fact that you
will die every single day. And for those of you guys that are watching the video, if you're
listening on audio, you can't see it, but if you're watching on YouTube, behind me right here
is an actual skull, not a real human skull, but it's a fake human skull with roses
coming out of it, which is the symbol for memento mori, which is remember the beauty that comes out
of death because there's beauty in death and death is what gives meaning to life. And so,
you know, we can sit there and we can say, oh my gosh, that's so morbid to think that. But I think
that by meditating on the fact that you're going to die and remember the fact that you're going to die actually makes you give more purpose to your life.
It forces you to get up and actually do some shit with your life. And if you've ever seen the movie
Troy, Brad Pitt says a really great quote that I love. And he says, the gods envy us and they
envy us because we're mortal, because at any moment it might be our last and everything is
more beautiful because we are doomed.
And so this is not going to be a doom and gloom episode or any of that. This is an episode to
really give you perspective and hopefully change your attitude in many ways towards your life
and to change your perspective on the ways towards your life and to change your
perspective on the life that you have, the life that you have had, and the life that is also in
front of you. And I remember when I was younger, when I was in my 20s, I didn't really understand
when people would say, life is a journey, focus on the journey. You know, there's a quote that says,
life is a journey, not a destination. And I was like, the fuck does that mean? Like, I just never really understood it.
And now that I'm 37, I kind of actually am starting to understand it. And I'm starting
to understand that there's, when I was younger, I always thought like, there's a moment where I'm
going to feel like, ah, I've arrived. And I've come to realize now that I'm 37 and I'm like,
oh, I don't think there's going to be a moment where I just arrive. There's never a finish line that we get to in
life. There's no finish to improving yourself. There's no finish to personal development journey.
There's no destination that you get to. And the condition of a human, I think, is to lose yourself
And the condition of a human, I think, is to lose yourself and then find yourself and lose yourself and find yourself 40, 50, 100 times a day to get lost and to get lost again
and to find yourself throughout the entire process.
It could be a thousand times a day, but I don't think there's any moment where we're
just like, I've made it.
There's no destination that we're working to get towards.
Because eventually if you're like, if your destination is, I want to be a millionaire, well, once you make a million dollars, what's next?
It was not about the destination of getting to becoming a millionaire. It was the process,
the journey of building yourself into the person who can eventually acquire that money or to be
able to have the skills to be worth being paid that amount of money or whatever it might be.
And the older that I get, the more that I'm finally understanding, oh, life is a journey. There is no place to go. There is no
place to be. The only place that there is to be is literally right now. And then tomorrow
is just another right now. And for the longest time in my life, I was hustling to be somewhere.
And it's hard for me to think over the past 37 years how much of my life I was hustling to be somewhere. And it's hard for me to think over the past 37 years
how much of my life I was not present to my life
because of the fact I was thinking
about the thing that was supposed to be next.
What's the next thing that I need to get?
What's the next mountain that I need to climb?
What's the next thing that I want to buy?
What's the next place that I want to travel to?
And I was just thinking about the next thing,
the next thing, the next thing,
but I was never actually fully present here in this moment.
And so I was looking so far into the distance, telling myself that where I wasn't, wasn't good
enough. And I missed what was actually around me. Have you ever done that before where you're
constantly thinking about the future? You sit down and meditate. And instead of being present,
you're struggling at meditation because you keep thinking about all the shit that you have to do later on
today and tomorrow and the next day versus actually just sitting and enjoying the moment and being
present with being in this human existence. And I didn't really stop and smell the roses because I
was always focusing on what the next thing was. Speaking of smelling the roses, I had a funny
experience.
We were in Santa Barbara about three weeks ago and I was, it was, the sunrise was coming up and
I was taking Bear for a walk and I was walking by this set of roses and I was like, oh my God,
they smell so good. And like, I'm talking about like ridiculously good. There were these white
roses and I never smelled roses so potent. And I sat there for like a good five or 10 minutes just smelling the roses.
And I was like, oh, I'm literally stopping to smell the roses as the sun rises in Santa
Barbara.
And I was like, holy shit, this is actually what we're supposed to be doing.
And it was funny because instead of being like, okay, well, I've got to take bear to
the next thing.
And then I've got to get up and I've got to have my coffee.
And then I have a team call and I have to do this thing.
And I have a Zoom and I have to meet with this person.
It was like I was stopping for a few
minutes. I was smelling the roses and I was going, oh my God, these roses do smell amazing.
I sat there for a while and smelled the roses and it smelled so good. I brought one back with me
so I could smell it throughout the day. And so I was on team calls on Zoom and they would see me
with a white rose up to my nose and I was just smelling it. And I was like, this is kind of the journey is to be present, to stop and smell the roses. And one thing that I think is really
important for being present and thing that I've been trying to make myself do more and more often,
if you've ever been on a Zoom call with me that I've run for Mindset Mentor University and all
that stuff, we always start with a breathing exercise. The reason why is because I'm trying to get myself into my body more often and to notice my senses. Because the thing
that I've noticed about myself, and I notice about a lot of people, is that our minds are always
somewhere else. They're always in the future. They're always in the past. We're always thinking
about the next thing that we have to do. But my body is always here. Like my body is never somewhere else
but this present moment. And I notice in myself my lack of presence 10 or 15 times a day. So I
bring my awareness back to my body so that I can experience the moment in this moment. So I start
to focus on what I can see. I start to try to focus on what it is that I can hear. I try to
focus on what I can feel and what it feels like to focus on what it is that I can hear. I try to focus on what I
can feel and what it feels like to be in my body and my clothes on my skin and the temperature of
the room. I try to focus on what I can smell. I try to focus on what I can taste. And that's
really bringing me back to the only thing that we really truly have, which right now is this
present moment. And life at its simplest form is really this. It is, you are born,
you have a sensory set of experiences, and you die. That is what life is. Whether you get 17
years, whether you get 117 years, you're born, you have a sensory set of experiences, you see
things, you hear things, you taste things, you smell things, all of that, and then you die. But how you choose to interpret those experiences will dictate the quality of
your life. But how many of us are so focused on the next thing that we miss this thing?
Like we miss the present moment. I don't know if you've ever been in the room when somebody passes away.
It is an extremely humbling experience.
It is a beautiful experience.
It is a heart-wrenching experience, but it's beautiful and humbling at the same time.
I was in the room when my grandfather passed away, and I remember thinking to myself,
his body is still there, but my grandfather is gone. The soul that
was in him, the energy that was him was gone. And I think about that really often is I don't want to
get to the end of my life and think, damn it, like I wasn't really here. I was always somewhere else
in my mind. I wasn't really here. And I mean, like really here in this moment, not focusing on
the next accomplishment, not trying to work harder to buy the next thing because, you know, you can't
take any of these things with you. I don't know if you've ever had someone close to you die and
then you need to go to their house and clean out their house. But it really puts a lot of things
into perspective because all you're doing is, you know, imagine collecting toys and collecting things your whole life. And then
when you die, when you die, they're just there. When you die, someone else has to clean up all
of your shit. And what's the point of all of those things, right? So then it brings us back
to the original question of how we started this and the title of this, this episode, which is,
what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of
life? The meaning of life is not what you look like. It's not all the toys that you have. It's
not how much money you have in your bank account. It's not how big your house is. It's not all of
the accomplishments that you have. I'll give you my meaning of life. But before I do,
let me tell you this. I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. I'm just another human,
another flawed individual that's just trying to figure things out. I'm just another bumbling
idiot trying to make sense of all of it. So if you choose to believe in something different,
I fully respect that. I fully respect that you believe anything that you want to.
So I'm going to give you what I think my meaning of life is. My meaning of life, the meaning of life is life. That's it.
We're trying to overcomplicate this thing. The meaning of life is life. It is to experience
everything, to feel, to feel happiness, to feel sadness, to feel love, joy, pain, anger,
to feel happiness, to feel sadness, to feel love, joy, pain, anger, to be with your friends,
to travel, to watch a sunset, to live, like to really fucking live. But how often do we sit there and we think that there's some other meaning or try to figure out if we can find more meaning in
our work or find more meaning in buying things or find more things in having something else
or finding another accomplishment? How often are we not here, like here in this moment, in our bodies, in this present moment,
but we're off in our mind somewhere else? When the point is to be here now, which is as Ram Dass
would say it, because it's pretty crazy if you actually think about it, right? Like if you
actually take a step back and think about life, like one of the things that I love to do, and it terrifies my wife sometimes is I love to watch
videos of how small we are in this universe, because I really think it gives, it gives a lot
of perspective. And the reason why it terrifies my wife is because she's like, oh my God, it's,
it's so big. It's, I can't even comprehend it. And I was like, yeah, but that's what's so amazing is because it shows you that nothing actually matters.
And if nothing matters,
that means that we could put meaning
to anything that we want to.
We can do all of these things.
If nothing, if we're on this huge universe
and this tiny little speck of dirt in this huge universe,
people judging you doesn't matter.
But there's two ways you can look at life.
And this is a Albert Einstein quote that I love. He says, there's two ways to look at life.
One, as though nothing is a miracle. And the other, as if everything is a miracle.
And when you actually start to look at the universe, you start to look at the world that
we live in, you start to realize that all of this around us is a miracle. Like we live on a piece of dirt,
but it is the most beautiful piece of dirt that we know of, right? If you think about other planets
like Mercury, what would it be like to live on Mercury or Venus or Mars? All of them. They don't
look really as beautiful as this one with all of the animals and all of the trees and all of the
humans and the blue skies and the clouds. Like we're on the best planet in our solar
system. It's like the Disney world of our solar system, right? And you look at it in the earth,
this tiny little speck that we live on, and we're a tiny little speck on a tiny little speck.
This earth is spinning a thousand miles an hour and it's orbiting the sun at 67,000 miles an hour.
And we're moving through our solar system. Our solar system is
moving through the universe at 448,000 miles per hour. And we're in a galaxy that has 100
billion stars. And in a universe that has 2 trillion galaxies.
that has 2 trillion galaxies. We live in a galaxy that has 100 billion stars and there are over 2 trillion galaxies. Like, do you fully understand this? It is insane. Our brains cannot comprehend
the scale of all of this. And we're so consumed with wanting to get a raise. We're so consumed about our next post
going viral. We're so consumed with wanting to make more money so we can buy the next thing
so that we can impress people that don't care about the stuff that you have
because they're too busy thinking about themselves. Like we have to wake up.
Your life is here. It's not somewhere else. It's not in the future. The point of life
is to experience life, to be in the present moment, to be as present as we possibly can.
It's not in the future. It's now. So it's time to experience it and to be present and to let go of
trying to control everything. Let go of trying to make sure that you control every
little single thing around you. Let go of saying, oh, I'll be happy when dot, dot, dot. I'm not
happy now. I'll be happy when I get that raise. I'll be happy when I get that house. I'll be
happy when I finally get into a relationship. No, you won't. Happiness is not when I get that
thing. Happiness is a choice. I know people who have a
ton of stuff. I know people worth billions of dollars that are fucking miserable. I've seen
people in third world countries that have nothing that are the happiest people I've ever seen. So
I'll be happy when dot, dot, dot doesn't make any sense. It's a choice that you decide to make in
the moment. There is nowhere else to go, but here and now and to experience.
And so what I really want you to understand through this episode
is that when you look at life, life is the gift.
Stop searching for something else.
Because in this moment, you already have everything that you're searching for.
Stop trying to get the next thing and start trying to be here now
in this moment so that you can get all of the gifts of the present moment. Because the meaning
of your life is to simply just experience life. And that's it. That's what I got for you for
today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor, share it on your Instagram stories
and tag me in it. Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it
your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.