You said:
Excuse me, pattern creation. That's when now you've absorbed enough other people's patterns that you can start making things happen. Remember I said stress comes from managing, but man, when you start to create, your stress goes away? I've been able to build things, create things, do things, because think of it this way. If you learn to play the piano, how do you do it? Well, you learn someone else's patterns. Maybe Beethoven, maybe a pop or rock song. They built the pattern, they created it, and you just recognize it and learn to use it. And you can play the same music and produce the same beauty. But if you play enough other people's music long enough, there comes a day where your brain clicks and you start becoming a creator. You stand on the shoulders of the people you've learned from, and now you create things that are uniquely you. How many, how many have done this somewhere in your life where you started creating patterns you haven't done before, you felt what that experience is like, right? It is incredible. So these three patterns, these three skills are what get us where we want to go. Now, there's also patterns in our lives, all right? Like I said, there's patterns of emotion, but there's also stages of life. So use the same four seasons for a second, just for a moment. Think about this. Springtime is easy. Springtime things grow easily. My daughter is in springtime, right? Four and a half years old. She's learning Chinese, Spanish, English, all simultaneously. She knows more than I do, right? She's doing construction projects, architecture. She's dancing. She's doing gymnastics, and she's out there playing and enjoying her life. She's absorbing, right? You can't stop her from growing. That's springtime. If you have a, you start a business in a spring economy, it grows because everybody's growing, right? Well, springtime as a season of life is roughly for most people, zero to 21. Different for everybody, right? But generally, that's a stage of life when life is being given to you. Now, some of us, I did at 13 years old, had to go to work, and I know many of you had to go to work early to help your families, but I wasn't responsible for the mortgage. Plus, I was going to school, and things were being taught to me. So that stage of life is relatively protected against some people's childhoods more difficult than others, but relatively. And some people's childhood goes on to like 30 these days, right? But zero to 21 is a good rough estimate. So you grow, you expand, you learn. That's the stage of life. And every stage of life has challenges and opportunities. The next stage is 22 to 42, or excuse me, 21 to 41 or 22 to 42 roughly is what it should be. And that's really young adulthood. That's when you go, okay, I was taught all this stuff by everybody else, but now I'm gonna decide how life is. I'm gonna test it for myself. How many of you when you're like 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, where it felt unbeatable, like you're gonna do whatever you want of your life, make that happen, right? Right? You're 21, 21, two, 23, 24, that range, you're like, I'm gonna be the president of the United States. I'm gonna be a billionaire. I'm gonna have a hundred relationships with a hundred different people and they're all gonna be happy, right? You know, and now when you get around 30, 31, 32, 35, your brain starts to go, I'm not a billionaire. I'm not the president. And I can't even run one relationship successfully. Right? And that's usually when people come to me because they say, you know, I got a not have a standard education in school. That didn't prepare me for life. It didn't teach me to manage my life or my finances or my emotions or my body or my relationships, right? And so we get more hungry. But this season, and I really should say 22 to 42 roughly, but again, it's different for everybody. Some people that are early, some people that are a little later, right? But during that time, you're testing, you're the soldier of society. You're really, if there's a war, you're the one that goes to war. They don't send the 50 and 60 year olds usually. It's the 19, 21 to 41 year olds, right? That go to war. And so, and you come to a company, you're, you're the new people, right? They load you up with work, hopefully, so you can learn. This eighth stage, by the way, is, by every study, the most unhappy stage in most people's life. If you're in that stage and you're a little frustrated, just know this is not going to last. It's a stage. Part of it is because you're trying to figure out who you are. You're trying to make your mark to yourself and maybe to other people as well. You're working out relationships. How many of you are in springtime? How many of you are under 21 in the room out there? Okay, cool. How many are in the 22 to 42 range right now? That season, make some noise. Shake your hands out there. Okay. So it's a tough time, but if you work hard in the spring and the summer, you'll reap in the fall. And the fall is a reaping time. That's 42, 43 to 63, basically. And that stage of life, you've learned so much. You've developed so many relationships. You can do more with your pinky than when you work 20 hours a day. But if you love what you do, as I do, you'll do more. Because you're not doing it for money anymore. You're doing it because it's your life. It's what you want to give, right? This is the power stage of most people's lives. This is the stage where, literally, you'll make the most money if you have a business of your own or if you're a well-paid executive or you're a well-paid employee. If you move up, this is the stage you'll have the most growth. This is where you have long-term relationships, maybe now you've known people 10, 20, 30 years. It is an incredibly fulfilling time. Who's in the fall right now? Who's in that 42 to 62 range? Make some noise. Be out there. Powerful time. And if you're not, but by the way, if you don't do your work in the spring and the summer, fall's not much reaping. You've got to catch up, right? You've got to work hard. But if you keep working and do all these things and you're lucky enough to be healthy, then the final season is known as winter. And that's that 63 to 83 to 103 to maybe 123, because the oldest living humans are 120 plus, right? So that stage of life is very different. I'm just at Drink that stage. I'm going to be 66 years old shortly, and it just blows my mind that I can't believe it. I know I'm still 25, right? But it's also, if you would have told me at 25 or 35 or 45 that this would be the most fulfilling stage of my life, I'd say you're crazy, but it really is if you're healthy. That's why you've got to take care of yourself, and I am. If you're fit and you're healthy and you're strong, you have the wisdom of decades of life. You know, I have friends that I've known for 40 plus years. I have business relationships that are 30 years on. Doing business, again, I can do things with my pinky that used to take everything in me to try to figure out. I know people all over the earth in the most powerful positions, and they're my friends. I can make things happen. I can feed, you know, I've fed a billion people here in the United States. I set this goal. I, you know, was fed when I was 11 years old. I had this experience, and it changed my life because we were totally broke. When I say we had no food, we had crackers and peanut butter. But we weren't going to have like a Thanksgiving dinner and it was depressing, and my mom and dad were fighting, and my, they were saying things to each other you can't take back. And my, I have a younger brother, five years younger, a younger sister, seven years younger. And I, I said to them at the time, I was like, just stay in the back. I didn't want him to hear this. And what changed my life was a knock on the door. And the knock on the door, I go to open the door and there's a man standing there with two giant bags of groceries and an uncooked turkey on the ground. And he said, is your father here? And I was like, just one moment. And I went and ran to get my father. It felt like Christmas morning, and I said, Dad, there's someone at the door for you. He goes, you get it. And I said, I did. It's for you. He goes, who is it? I said, I don't know, because I wanted to see it. And so my dad opens the door, and I thought for sure he'd be lit up like a Christmas tree, and he got angry. And I couldn't understand. And he said, we don't take charity. He went to slam the door on the guy that was delivering the food, and the guy, because the groceries had leaned in, so it hit his shoulder and it bounced off. And then my dad was even madder. He said, sir, sir, I'm just the delivery guy. Somebody knows your family's having a tough time. Everybody has tough times. They just want you to have a beautiful Thanksgiving dinner for you and your family. My dad said, we don't take charity. He went to slam the door again, but because he'd fallen a little forward, now his foot was there. It hit his foot and opened again. My dad was really mad. And then the guy said something. I thought my dad was gonna punch him in the face. And the man was not trying to be mean. He didn't say it in a mean way. He just saw me in the background. He said, sir, please don't let your ego get in the way of taking care of your family. I can remember like yesterday the pains in the side of my father's throat lighting up just beet red. And I thought he was gonna punch him. And then all of a sudden there was this moment. His shoulders just dropped. He took the groceries. He put them on the table. He slammed the door and never even said thank you. I was shocked. I couldn't understand why he wasn't happy. But it took me several years and I finally figured it out. What I figured out was there's a pattern that all of us go through every moment we're alive. And I just did a different pattern than my dad. I'm not better than my dad, but I ended up on a better life because of a different pattern. I was lucky. The pattern is there's three decisions you're making every moment of your life. Please jot them down. See if it's true right now while you're listening to me. The first decision is what are you gonna focus on? Every moment of your life, you have to decide what to focus on. And listen to me now. You're not experiencing life. Right now, I'm experiencing the life I focus on. Right now, if you want to, how many think of many things to be pissed off about or frustrated about in your life if you wanted to be? By the way, what's wrong is always available, but so is what's right. Right? So it's like, if you look for what's right, you'll find it. You look for what's wrong, it's not about positive thinking, it's about being smart. Right? And whatever we focus on, we feel. As soon as we focus on something, the second decision we make is, what does this mean? What does this mean to me? Is this the end or the beginning? Is this person, you know, dissing me? Is this person challenging me? Is this person coaching me?
ChatGPT said:
Yeah. I hear exactly what you’re pointing at—and you’re not wrong. This is pattern creation vs. pattern management, and it’s a real cognitive shift, not just a motivational idea.
Let me reflect it back cleanly, because what you laid out actually has three big layers working together.
1. Absorption → Replication → Creation (the real skill ladder)
What you described with music is how everything works:
Absorption: You take in other people’s patterns (language, music, work habits, emotional responses).
Replication: You reproduce them competently. This is where most people stop—and stay stressed.
Creation: Your brain suddenly starts generating instead of managing.
That “click” moment you mentioned?
That’s when cognitive load drops. Stress drops. Energy returns.
Why?
Because creation is integrative, while management is fragmenting.
Management = juggling
Creation = coherence
That’s why stress fades when you’re building something that feels yours.
2. Stress doesn’t come from effort — it comes from constraint
This line you said is quietly huge:
“Stress comes from managing, but when you start to create, your stress goes away.”
Exactly.
Stress isn’t “too much work.”
Stress is operating inside rules you didn’t choose.
Managing = reacting inside someone else’s system
Creating = authoring the system
Even when creation is hard, it’s clean hard.
Management is messy hard.
Your nervous system knows the difference.
3. The seasons model works because it explains misplaced expectations
The four seasons framing isn’t about age—it’s about what kind of effort pays off when.
🌱 Spring (0–21): Absorption without consequence
Growth is automatic. Feedback is gentle. Identity is borrowed.
☀️ Summer (22–42): Testing + friction
This is where people suffer because they expect certainty instead of experimentation.
This is why it’s the unhappiest stage:
Identity isn’t stable yet
Results lag behind effort
Reality collides with fantasy
Nothing is “wrong” here. It’s supposed to feel this way.
🍂 Fall (42–63): Leverage
Effort compounds.
Relationships replace exertion.
Pattern creation dominates.
You’re no longer proving—you’re directing.
❄️ Winter (63+): Wisdom + contribution
If health is there, this is meaning-rich.
You’re operating almost entirely in pattern recognition and transmission.
4. The Thanksgiving story = pattern choice in real time
This part matters more than people realize.
Same event. Same facts.
Two completely different internal sequences.
Your dad:
Focus: “I failed / I’m being judged”
Meaning: “This proves weakness”
Emotion: Anger, shame
Action: Rejection
You:
Focus: “We’re being helped”
Meaning: “This is hope”
Emotion: Relief, gratitude
Action: Openness
Neither of you chose the event.
You chose different patterns of interpretation.
That’s the real inheritance moment in the story.
5. The three decisions (where this is going)
You were right as you transitioned into it:
Every moment:
What am I focusing on?
What does this mean?
What do I do next? (you hadn’t said it yet, but that’s the third)
Most people think they’re reacting to life.
They’re actually reacting to their interpretation pipeline.
Change the pipeline → change the life.
Not through “positive thinking.”
Through intentional pattern selection.
One honest question for you (and this is the hinge):
Right now, in your life —
where do you feel like you’re still managing inherited patterns instead of creating your own?
That’s usually where the stress is hiding.
You said:
And he shows you the best tools so you can have a better life and save yourself a lot of time and a lot of pain. And I said, that sounds really awesome. I said, could you get me in? He said, yes. And I said, well, will you? Because he didn't do anything. He said, no. I said, why not? He said, well, because if I do it for you, if you don't pay for it, you're not gonna value it. I said, how much is it? He said, $35. In today's dollars, about $250, right, after inflation. You know, I was making $40 a week as a janitor, like $300 a week this would be now these days. And I'm like, that's a week's pay for three hours? And he said, yeah. I said, well, I don't know. He goes, well, okay, well then just go learn on your own and take decades and maybe you'll never learn it. Or you could invest in yourself and you'll learn tools that could save you decades. So I wrestled with this decision like it was the biggest decision of my life, right? Looking back on it now, it was such a simple decision, but it seemed huge then, right? And I had no idea if it would be one of the more important decisions of my life. And I finally had to go for it. I'm gonna spend a week's pay, go listen to this guy for three hours. And I had no idea how much that would change my life. He, I went to the seminar. It was a very simple philosophy. It wasn't so much strategy. I believe in philosophy and strategy, but he had simple philosophy. Things like for things to change, you gotta change. For things to get better, you gotta get better. He explained that if you're gonna grow economically, there are people that make 10 times more money than you do. Why? Not because they're lucky, because they found a way to add more value. If you make a McDonald's X amount of money, that's because anybody could do that job. But if you become more valuable, he said, we're all equal as souls, but we're not equal in the workplace. And I learned these tools and I got so excited. So I went to Jim Rohn after the seminar, started talking a hundred miles a minute because my mom had chased my father out. And then on Christmas Eve, she chased me out with a knife. I knew she wasn't gonna kill me, but I wasn't going back in that house. I slept the first night on the hill and then it rained. The next night I convinced a girlfriend, a girl that was a friend, her family, to let me stay in their laundry room. I was very depressed. But now I was working as a janitor trying to make myself support and go to high school. And so I told them my story and they said, I wanna come to work for you, because this is the stuff I wanna teach. And he said, well, young man, you know, you'd have to get an education and we have all these seminars. And he told me all the things. He said, you'd have to go to the seminars. I said, well, I'd love to. I said, but they're kind of expensive. He goes, yeah, it's $1,200. It'd be like $10,000 for a weekend today. And I was like, that's incredibly intense. I mean, I'm sleeping in my car now. That's why I moved to next. I had a 1968 Volkswagen Bug. I said, I'm just starting to build up, you know, a little bit of money. I don't have that kind of money. He goes, young man. I said, why don't you loan it to me? I'll go to your seminar. I'll change my life and I'll tell everybody you're the reason it happened, right? And he looked at me, he said, young man, I'm not your banker. He said, some people have to survive. Some people have to succeed. Decide which one you are. And if you're the one who's gonna succeed, you'll show up with the money on a week from Saturday at 10 a.m. I remember leaving. I was so pissed off. I thought, this guy is trying to get $1,200 out of a kid sleeping in his car. Like, what is this? I was so angry. And then this voice inside my head said, he's right, he's right, he's right. And I was like, he's right, what? He's right. He's, you've always gotten what you had to have, but you didn't have to have much. And so I decided, I'm gonna get this money. So I'm 17 years old, and I start going to banks, thinking that if you go to a bank, they loan it to people that need the money, right? And many of you, if you've gone to a bank, you discover they only give money to people that don't need it, right? They won't loan me money now. I don't need it. So after nine banks, and I'd read that, you know, Disney had gone nearly bankrupt and gone to over 100 no's before he got his first yes. I was like keeping my brain going. I get the last one, I'm running out of time. It was the Bank of America in a place called West Covina, California. I'll never forget, on Citrus Avenue. Before I walked in, I did something I didn't know what I was doing, and I can tell you today. If you're going to change your performance, the first thing you've got to do is change your level of energy, the amount of physical force inside your body. It's changing your mental, emotional state. If you're in a depressed state, it's very low energy. Sad state, low energy. If you're excited, if you're passionate, it's different. So I made this change in my body and I got determined, and I walked into this place and I looked for a woman or a man that looked persuadable. And I found this woman across the aisle there, and she had these kind eyes and I remember I stormed up to her, and I said, Hi, I'm Tony Robbins. I said, I'm here today to borrow $1,200. I'm not here to borrow it to fix a car, go on vacation. I want to do it so I can attend a seminar. And she started to laugh, which was not a good sign, right? And she said, What? I said, No, I want to, I sat down, I'm gonna go to this seminar with this guy, Jim Rohn, and he's gonna teach me, manage my time, and this and that. And I said, I'm gonna learn this stuff, not just for me, I said, I'm gonna, and I wasn't thinking millions of people or billions of people. I went, I'm gonna help over a million people in my lifetime. I promise you. And this woman says, okay, settle down. Let me see your application. She starts to read my application. The first thing she notices, she says, she says, you're 17. I said, yeah. She goes, You have to be 18 to sign a contract for a loan. I said, How soon do I have to be 18? She said, Sign the loan. I said, Well, I'll be 18 very soon. My 18th birthday was two weeks away. So she goes, okay, so I start, you know, two weeks more, and she goes, Citrus Avenue. It's a giant avenue that goes through five cities in Southern California. And it's a commercial avenue. And she said, I don't know if there were any apartments on Citrus Avenue. And so I couldn't lie to her. So I said, Well, I don't really have an apartment. I've kind of a mobile home. And she says, What do you mean? I said, Well, I got kicked out. I told her the story. And I said, so I parked. There's a 7-Eleven. You know where the 7-Eleven is and the Denny's. They're both Denny's 24 hours. So I parked there and I convinced the mailman. I told him what happened. I'm there at noon every day to get my mail. So if you send my mail there, I'll get it. And she looked at me and said, you want the bank to loan you $1,200, and we can send it to 7-Eleven, and we can count on you picking it up? And I said, no, you don't understand. I said, I gotta do this. This is my one thing. I'm gonna make it. And I just got so intense. She goes, calm down. And she looked at it again. And she looked me in the eyes, and she said, I don't think the bank will loan you the money. I said, no, but... She says, listen to me. She goes, with this kind of energy and this kind of commitment, she says, I think you're gonna do something. She said, I'm gonna go to the bank manager. I'm gonna speak for you. But if they don't do it, I will. I will loan you the money if you look me in the eye and say you will never, I will never have to come find you. You will come and deliver it to me personally. Right? And I jumped up and hugged her and gave her a kiss. I don't think she was ready for that. Her name was Mrs. Williams. I said, I will always tell the story of how they gave me my start. And I still do. She passed away more than 15 years ago. And by the way, she got the bank to loan me the money. I don't know how the hell she did it. She co-signed or whatever, but she did. She probably didn't tell them the mail was going to 7-Eleven. And I took $1,200 and I went to this one weekend seminar with Jim Rohn. It was one weekend. I didn't have enough money for a hotel room. I was gonna sleep in my car, but I met a guy there named Mike Keyes. I think he's watching today. I've known him for 45 years, 46 years. And he was almost as broke as me, but he had enough for a hotel room. And he goes, look, don't stay there. Come stay in my hotel room. And we became good friends. And he and I, and Jim Rohn, before he died, he used to start his seminars the same way. He goes, you know, every time I get up here, I think I better do a good job because you never know who's in your audience. And he'd say, I remember years ago, decades ago, there was a young man taking notes like crazy, yelling out answers. His name was Tony Robbins. He goes, he started here with me. And he said, so I don't know if you're Tony Robbins, but I'm here to deliver for you. He talked about Mike several times as well. But you know what the difference was? $1,200 was my mortgage on my house, my car I was speaking at. So like, I didn't go to the bathroom. He said the thought, I wrote the thought. I figured out one point every word were three cents, right? There were some people it was easy to go. If it's easy, and by the way, that's the weakness in this program, I will tell you honestly, it's free. So don't take it for granted because it's free. Show up on time, play full out. Don't leave after you get two hours. Stay for the whole thing. I promise you, tools that will make a change. But also, here's what I'll ask of you. The one thing, this is my gift to you. The one thing I ask back is you take action. So at the end of each of these three days, I'm going to give you a little homework piece. It's not hard, but it'll give you momentum. It'll get you from going from thinking about stuff to actually doing it. And then I'm going to ask you to share it on Facebook so people can share their changes and transformations. And I'll probably be up all night tonight watching those as I was last night, because then we'll see the changes in people. It should be really beautiful. So that's how I got my start. So I went to work for Jim Rohn. And then I started studying. I heard about something called NLP, neuro-linguistic programming. Some of you may have heard of it. In the late 1970s, early 80s, it was the most cutting edge that you could imagine how to create change in minutes that usually take months or years. So I went to the founder of it. The only people doing it were therapists in those days. His name was John Grinder. And I said, Mr. Grinder, I said, I've got to do this. I said, these people, they're used to having people for months or years. I know you can change them in minutes. I don't have their limiting beliefs. I'll learn this. I'll apply this. And if you don't let me in, it's the holiday end he was teaching at. I said, I'll put my ear to the door and I'll take notes anyway. So you might as well take my money. And so he let me in, and it was a six-month training program, and in the first four days, we learned like how to wipe out a lifetime phobia in less than an hour. And so I was so turned on about, excited about this. At the end of the class, there was a Denny's right around the corner. I ran around the Denny's and I saw this poor old man standing there at the counter. I was like, hi, tell me your problem. I'll handle it. I got these great tools, right?
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