The Door Marked Pull

The most important thing in life is you feeling good. Literally nothing is worth not feeling good. And feeling good is worth everything.

Almost every breakthrough is the same breakthrough: I’m pushing a door marked PULL.

I have done this in actual doorways more than once. Twice in front of witnesses. Once with a coffee in each hand.

And doors are the least of it — we do this with so many things in our life!

We look right at the sign. We sound it out: “P-U-L-L.” And then we go, “Oh, it says Push.” And proceed to blunder headlong into a blocked barrier.

But what do I really mean here? What I mean is that most people — all of us, at times — see their emotions in a backwards way. We believe that when something we like is happening, that makes us feel good. And when something we don’t like is happening or has happened, that makes us feel bad.

But I’m proposing that there is something far more radical and profound actually going on when it comes to our emotions. Whether we know it or not, the real mechanism is this: how we feel attracts and creates circumstances that match the feeling. This is a truly life-altering shift — from seeing circumstances as the cause of how we feel, to seeing how we feel as the cause of our circumstances.

So this is why I’m calling the more common view of emotions “backwards.” If we believe that what’s happening is what causes how we feel, when the reality is that how we feel causes what’s happening in our experience, we’re missing out on the greatest power and opportunity of our entire lives. And we’ll keep creating experiences that feel pretty much like how we’ve been feeling all along.

So what’s the move?

The move is to do anything you can do to move the needle on how good you feel right now. Not once the money comes through, not when someone has changed their behavior toward you, not once you get the body that you want, but now.

Here’s the smallest version of the move, so you can start today: before every next thing — the email, the phone call, the school pickup — do one small thing that feels good, first. Think a happy thought, take a few deep breaths, put on a song you like, smile at someone, put your hand on your heart, eat something delicious — it doesn’t matter what it is. Thirty seconds counts. I call these Mini Mornings — there’s more about them later in the book, but you can start collecting them right now. Go ahead, try it!

Enlightenment is remembering something you knew at six and forgot at sixteen — being in a good mood on purpose. At six you also knew capes make you faster. Keep that one too.†

† Little jokes sitting by themselves, scattered all through this book. I call them relief valves — because in my experience nobody ever transformed their life while clenching. Snort, roll your eyes, read them out loud to whoever’s in the room.

So that’s how you PULL the door marked PULL instead of fruitlessly pushing on it. You make an internal shift, somehow, someway, that lifts your mood here and now — and you don’t wait until later to do it. Because otherwise that later becomes always later.

And this should literally fascinate you. Because it’s the key to getting every single thing you’ve ever wanted. I know it’s a bold claim, but I’m gonna help you understand it, feel it, and know it down to your toes — so deep that your life experience transforms into one of joy and prosperity. And I’ll help you realize it to the point where all you’ll need to do is glance at the cover of this book, and you’ll know what to do about anything and everything that matters to you.

This may all be things you’ve heard before, but it’s my desire to express it so simply and plainly that you’ll have it massaged directly into the sweet spot deep inside you, and that what people call miracles will become an everyday occurrence in your life. I call them normacles and they are never far away. It just takes a bit of tuning in to realize them.

Oh, and another thing. You will forget this.

Not metaphorically. Actually. You will read this sentence — you will feel the rightness of it click in some quiet way — and then you will close the book, walk into your kitchen, discover that the refrigerator light is out, and within ten seconds you will be irritated and be once again pushing a door that is clearly marked PULL.

And that is not a failure. In some ways that’s part of the design — part of the game.

This sort of temporary amnesia is built into being a person. We are wired to forget. It’s how we get the experience of remembering — which is the part that’s actually the most fun: rediscovering exactly how powerful and worthy of all good things we truly are.

Keep this book on the nightstand. Glance at it, pick it up, flip to a random page if you like, and remind yourself of the secret that makes life get easier and more enjoyable right now.

No one — and I mean no one — is ever ever ever in the wrong about their life and how they’re approaching it. No one is behind. No one is late. The forgetting and the remembering are all part of the trip.

And here’s one more thing about every single person reading this. Including you.

We’re all extraordinarily beautiful beings, and we also all have our moments of doubt. No matter who you are or how good you get at this, there’s always going to be another thing that throws you for a loop. That’s just part of being a human being. If you can learn to make peace with always being a work in progress, you’ll progress much more quickly and you’ll enjoy yourself along the way.

Here is what I can promise you, fully. You can become really good at this. Not perfect — because that would mean you’re all done and you wouldn’t even want that anyway. But really good. So good that the range of emotions that you hang out in is between great-feeling and really great-feeling! So good that you can feel when you’ve drifted toward the negative within minutes instead of days or months or years. So good that drifting itself becomes part of the play, because you know how to get back anytime.

Everything we’re talking about here is part of one long practice called life. The practice of finding yourself. And finding yourself is the most fun a person gets to have. Because your self, who you are, really? Is something so magnificent that there are no human words to describe it.

So.

Push the door.

No wait —

Pull it.

There we go. Nice.

Welcome to the book.