*Authors Note* I read this back a few times after I originally published this, and thought it didn’t sound too much like me. I also thought the post was a little bit weird and maybe preachy (it’s not meant to be). However, a good friend of mine; Robin Tabari posted on his blog that he tried some of the stuff I suggest here and it changed his mood and perspective after being very down. Since it had that effect on  one person, I thought I’d just say ” to heck with it” and leave this up anyway.

Before I go any further, I am going to warn you this post is going to be slightly on the “self-centered” side, but there is something in it for you too. I am making this post for two reasons. The first is that I really wanted to express, share and talk about my New York experience. Now I can talk till the cows come home about this trip with friends and family, but I am going to say some things here that I don’t think I could say face-to-face to people I know in my “everyday life”. The second reason I am writing this post is because I genuinely believe it *might* help some one out there. This blog is not known for it’s massive traffic, but perhaps 15 years from now, one soul out there might stumble on this post and maybe, if I do my job right here, it might just hep them.

So here’s what’s in it for you…

In this post I am going to share with you how to find the meaning of YOUR life (how to discover the purpose of your life) I am going to share with you 3 books you need to read to help improve your chances of being successful at ANYTHING in life and hopefully this post will inspire you to chase your dreams as well. There will be a couple of other nuggets in this post, but for now, I’ll keep those hidden for you to find yourself!

How and why this trip changed my life and how you can change yours too….

There are three key reasons why this trip changed my life. I’ll just come out and give you them:

1) The city itself. It wrapped it’s arms around me, made me feel welcome and at home and inspired me to achieve more and reach new heights.

2) The books I read. The travel time meant I had a lot of time to do one of my favorite pass-times. Reading. I read books that really resonated with me and are helping me shape my thinking for the years ahead of me. These books can change your life and I’ll share the reading list very soon.

3) The people I was with. My family. I got to know them a lot better, had a great time with them, and they have inspired me (as they always have, even if they don’t know it) to achieve greater and greater things.

You’ll notice only one of the three things mentioned above involved the city. By far the most important factors were the people close to me, and the books I read. The city was the icing on the cake and you don’t need to have a life changing trip to New York to change your life. You just need something to inspire you, be that a person, a thing, a conceptual thought, theory or vision. Anything, you just need some where to aim your sights. You just need a moment or an event where you take stock of what you have, what you want and what is important to you.

If you know anything of New York, you know the city is a playground for the rich and famous. Billionaire’s live in the centre of New York and they build and create huge sky-scrapers and epic buildings for their businesses to be housed in. It is literally a different World to England or anywhere I have been, (even in the United States and Canada). It’s a place of vast success, strength and character, do well in NYC and you can literally do well anywhere (that’s what the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys song says anyway). I fell in love with New York and I knew it was somewhere I wanted to come back to, not as a tourist but as a frequent visitor and maybe as a successful person. An equal to some of the high-flyers there. Big ambitions for some one living in a very small, sleepy rural part of North East England, but I have to start somewhere. The city, the buildings, the lights and the people inspired me and gave me something extra to aim for.

On top of that, my Dad paid for nearly every last damn thing on that trip. He wanted to treat the family, and I know how tough it has been for my Mum and Dad over the years. They came from working class backgrounds and fought hard to get into the middle class. Their success inspired me and my Dad’s generosity. I want to give back to my family and I want to do it without ever worrying about how much it costs (as my parents have had to do). I think this will be the last family holiday I will go on where my parents are paying. Hopefully the next one we are on together, I will be paying for! I believe and want that so much, it has formed a big part of my short-term and long-term goals. Giving back to my family is perhaps the thing that is most important to me.

(I don’t think that is something exclusive to me and maybe that last sentence is something that resonates with you? Let me know if you feel like it).

How to change your life and achieve all your dreams……(It’s a four-step plan)

**Important Note** Please keep in mind as you read this, I am not trying to preach at you, I am just sharing with you what happened to me and what worked for me. If you see value you in it, or want to try all or none of what I suggest, that is absolutely cool. For those that know me personally, some of what I say may seem unlike me. This is unlike me. Some of the things I say here may at first appear a little new-agey. I am not some one who subscribes to the theory of the law of attraction and I like to think of myself as a sound, critical thinker (albeit a critical thinker with a lot to learn). Despite my cynicism and skepticism I tried some of this stuff out and it worked for me. I will talk about WHY I think it works in my conclusion.

1) Find out what is truly important to you and find out truly who you want to be. I will give you a practical exercise or two for you to do to help you with this. (This really is amazing and important to do)

2) Find something that inspires you. New York inspired me, but before that it was other things, such as the efforts of my family, my brothers and the success of other people.

3) Define your life’s purpose. Discover the meaning of YOUR life. I did this totally by accident on the plane back from New York and it came out of nowhere. There is a very simple and effective method of doing this though, and I’ll teach you how to do that too.

4) Read these books. I am going to share with you three important books to read. They changed my thinking and behavior for the better and they might do the same for you. I am going to touch on this briefly in this post, but I might well do a bigger blog post about these three books.

Lets break these steps down and lets start with step one.

Who are you and what’s important to you?

I did something during my time away and whilst traveling called the “Core Influence Exercise”. I discovered this technique from a guy called Frank Kern. He says himself he doesn’t think he invented it, but it was something he stumbled upon. He shares this secret in something he sells called the “Core Influence DVD”. It’s over an hour long I think, and it was a DVD I borrowed from my previous employer. Quite simply it blew me away. The exercise described in it is ridiculously powerful (and unlike many marketers, I don’t say that lightly).

Now I am going to link to two youtube videos which are two clips from this DVD. The first clip shows how to do the most important “Core Influence” exercise. The second clip are Frank Kern’s answers to the exercise. You should watch these two clips to get a good idea of what to do, but I’ll briefly summarize here for now.

There were several exercises to do, but this particular one focusses on the “perfect day”. You are in essence describing your prefect day. A day so perfect if you had to live it everyday, you would be happy to do so. You are going to get VERY detailed about what you would do every day and it’s important you put a lot of thought into it. I can’t recommend watching the two clips I linked to highly enough in order to make sure you get this right. So to make sure you do this, or at least take a look at it, I thought I’d go ahead and just embed one of the videos here:

I did this exercise on my holiday and defined what my perfect day would be if I had to live it every day. I then extended this exercise by taking the same rules and principles and defining the following things:

- My idea of a perfect family holiday

-My idea of a perfect holiday with friends

-My perfect business day

-My perfect birthday

-My perfect Xmas

You get the idea! I delved deep into my mind and defined what was important to me and how I wanted to live my life. You don’t have to do this, but I think at the very minimum it is a worthwhile and fun exercise to do the “perfect day” exercise. Even better, if you can get the Core Influence DVD, then it is most certainly worth it!

Find something that inspires you.

I can’t really help you with this. Generally speaking if you think about this for a while, you will come up with several answers, I can think of half a dozen or so off the top of my head. I don’t know any cool exercises for discovering this, and because this is such a personal thing, it is something you need to think about yourself. If anyone has any good suggestions of a structured way of doing this, please let me know.

Define your life’s purpose.

This happened to me by accident on the plane back to London. I had been reading one of my books and was really fired up and inspired my the last 7 days and I decided to write down some exact financial goals for myself in the short term and long term, and pinpoint the exact dates I wanted to achieve these by. I started mapping out things I wanted to achieve and by what age. I went as far as 50 years of age (I figure if I make it that far I’ll be lucky) and since I can’t predict what is going to happen the next goal after 50 was I want to have achieved by the time I die (sounds morbid right?). Don’t get me wrong, I hope and want to live many years, and I will have to if I want to achieve this last ambition.

Instead of the usual financial goals and a date (although the finances was included) I wrote a A4 page of what I wanted to achieve in life. Not just financial amounts, but what mark I will have left on the World. I described what I wanted to give to the World, who I wanted to help and how I wanted to be remembered. I also described how I wanted my businesses, organizations and family to continue after I passed on. At the end of this piece I wrote; “I guess this is my legacy”.

Now I know this page defines my life, my purpose and what I want to do because it came out of no where. I never intended to do this, but I guess I had triggered something in my mind. And as I wrote the last few sentences something REALLY strange happened to me, which I am embarrassed to admit. I was holding back tears. I mean, I was on a plane full of people! I was struggling to keep my emotions under wraps. I was moved and wanted to cry. I never cry unless some one has passed on. It’s unlike me, and I am incredibly embarrassed to admit it, because for those of you who know me, this may not seem like me.

Fortunately I didn’t cry, but I knew I had just written on paper what I wanted to do. And I knew this was my life’s purpose because of an incredible post on Steve Pavlina’s blog which describes how you can determine your life’s purpose with a very similar technique. It is called How to Determine Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes. If you want to really discover why you are here and what your part in this World should be, then read this post! I have never done this exercise but it was always something I wanted to do. Turns out I did it quite by accident.

Even if doing this kind of thing isn’t really “you”. Do it anyway and give it a chance. I never thought I would do any of this stuff, but I am glad I did.

As for the answer to what is my purpose, meaning of life and legacy? Thats my secret for now, but maybe one day I’ll find it in me to share that with the World. I think it’s best saved for the distant future for now though.

Read these books.

Here is three books that I have read recently and on this trip that have helped shape my thinking and attitude on things.

1. Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill. This is a book about the mindset required to become rich or successful. It was created by a man commissioned to interview 500 millionaires across 25 years to discover the “rules” and secret formula to becoming successful. In my opinion he nails it, and if you want to make it big in what you do and want to take the guess work out of it, then you need to read this book!

2. The Magic of Thinking Big – David J. Schwartz. A book about mindset and achievement. This gives you actionable steps to leading an epic life. It focusses more on you and your lifestyle than Think and Grow Rich, and it’s a very different book. If you want to try and develop habits of successful people, then this is a good one.

3. The 4-Hour Work Week – Timothy Ferriss. If you want to take a look at the exciting lifestyle the “new rich” are living then check out this book. It’s about automating a successful business and living a dream lifestyle, but pursuing all your goals and dreams and traveling the World. This guy is in his early thirties, a successful entrepreneur and angel investor. He has another book on being super-human coming out soon and his blog is what helped launch his author career. Well worth a look: Four Hour Blog.

Conclusion

So thats it. My steps to simulating the experience I had without the expense of a costly vacation! NYC gave me an amazing experience and a look at a different life. The vacation also gave me time to think clearly and concisely. I took stock of what I had and identified what I wanted. You can do this too by removing yourself from the stress of every-day life and taking time to take the recommended action in this blog post.

This is why I think this stuff works…

Okay, so that was all a bit conceptual, heavy and new-agey, but it wasn’t meant to be and I don’t think this stuff is. I don’t believe in most of the airy-fairy BS floating around the Internet and I don’t subscribe to the theory of the law of attraction or the ideas talked about in the now famous book “The Secret”. In fact, I totally hate that kind of stuff. I even disagree with some of Napoleon Hill’s suggestions in his book, and don’t believe he gets it all right (still an excellent book).

What I think these activities and exercises do is stimulate parts of your brain and allow you to think deeply about stuff and discover what is at the core of your personality and identify what is of huge importance to you. In my case, I think I stimulated dormant parts of my mind and allowed my subconscious to take over a little bit, particularly when I was writing down my goals. I never meant to do any of this on purpose really, it just hadn’t happened and felt right. I had no other worries, thoughts or concerns to stress me out, and thus I had time to think about things more clearly and with more care. This led me to make a number of discoveries which have already changed how I am doing and looking at things.

None of what I have said might work for you, and this might have been a total waste of time. It doesn’t work for everyone, but if this post helps just one person in the next 30 years and beyond, it will have been a post worth writing. To finish up though, let me summarize the NYC trip and “lighten” the post up with some less heavy stuff.

The tourist stuff…..

Here is a quick list of some of the sights I visited and some of the activities I took part in:

Empire State Buidling

NBC studio tour

Ice Skating at the Rockefeller Center

City Hall

Ice Hockey Game at Madison Square Gardens (Come on Rangers!)

Walked across Brooklyn Bridge

Stayed in a hotel in the middle of Times Square!

Saw “Chicago” on Broadway (one of the girls from destiny’s child starred, but I can’t for the life of me remember her name. She was good though!)

Had a few Hot Dogs from street corner vendors

Stood outside the stock Exchange on Wall Street

Went up to the Crown of the Statue of Liberty

Visited Ellis Island

Visited the American Museum for Natural History (some of Night at the Museum was filmed there)

Shopped on 5th Avenue ( we all bought very little, I am not a millionaire yet)

Took a horse-drawn carriage ride around around Central Park (Quite embarrassing)

Visited Trump Tower (That guy owns so much in New York)

Thats a snapshot of some of the things me and my family did while we were out there. I know I have missed a couple of things out, but I guess thats not too important. The point being we packed A LOT in to 7 days!

As a side note, if you are going to NYC be prepared for these two things:

1) Lots of metal detectors and airport style security

2) Lunatic cab drivers

Both of these things had the potential to spoil the whole vacation, but thankfully we had too good a time to let these things bother us. The security wasn’t so bad on it’s own, but the people doing the checks were often the biggest problem. When they were friendly/professional, the security ran well, otherwise, it was a nightmare. I understand why this security is needed, but until some of the people doing it get better at it, I’d be tempted not to visit any of the tourist attractions again.

Other than that then, a much needed trip and break. I really loved NYC and the opportunity to rest, clear my mind and think. If you have made it this far in this 3,000 + word post, then you are a saint, and I thank you for reading. If you can bare to, leave a comment below and perhaps share some of the epiphanies you have had over the years.