What’s the meaning of life?

0:07Welcome 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.

0:41And 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.

1:16The 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, you know, have a viewing before everybody else was able to see him the next day.

1:52I 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.

2:33And 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 test life that we get. Like this is final. It is over. And 23 years or 23 days after my father's passing was my sister's 21st birthday. And 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.

3:19We 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. 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.

3:58And 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.

4:36And 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 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.

5:12and 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 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.

5:49And 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 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.

6:35It 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 wanna 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 not present to my life because of the fact I was thinking about the thing that was supposed to be next.

7:34What'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 ever 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.

8:16And I didn't really stop and smell the roses because I was always focusing on what the next thing was. I had a funny, 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 the 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 sunrise in Santa Barbara.

8:53And 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 do the next thing and then I've got to get up and I've got out 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 this is kind of the journey is to be present, to stop and smell the roses.

9:28And 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, you know, 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. They're always thinking about the next thing that we have to do.

10:01But 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 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.

10:42And 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.

11:25It is a 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.

12:15I 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. 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 in the title of this episode, which is what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of life?

12:47The 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.

13:22So 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 over complicate 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 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.

14:04How 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.

14:40It'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 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 an 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.

15:16And when you actually you 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 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?

15:48And 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. 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.

16:40And 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.

17:22Let 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.

17:57It'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.

18:37If 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.