Choosing Our Emotions

The Secret to Fulfillment and Success

I recently saw this America’s Got Talent Golden Buzzer clip. If you haven’t seen it, please watch it now because it is amazing singing, an amazing story, and most importantly demonstrates the secret to living a fulfilled life: choosing happiness now, no matter what happens. She says it perfectly, “I decided that I can’t wait for things not to be hard in order to be happy.”

This decision to select our emotional reaction (and thus our actual reaction in the physical world) is the secret to not only fulfillment but also success. Many people ask me how we have built Prime Movers Lab so rapidly and the answer is simple: emotions are the fuel that empower us to execute further and faster. And our firm’s culture is one of radical responsibility: we have all made the decision to take 100% responsibility for our experience of life.

We can’t control what happens in life, but we can determine how we react emotionally and then how we behave based on those emotions. This is true for life events spanning the realms of body and mind. For example, your knee hurts — you get to decide if that means that you are sad because you have pain, annoyed because you can’t exercise as much, peaceful because you get to take a break, or blessed because it gives you extra time for meditation. Or you are involved in a company where regulators make accusations about the business that you believe are demonstrably false (but you can’t contest them without extended litigation that would kill the company) — you get to decide if that means you are angry about an injustice, disappointed about the consequences, calm because life is always happening for you, or grateful because it gives you an opportunity to celebrate your freedom from living a life of uncontrolled emotional reactions.

I believe that the most unique aspect of being a human being is our ability to evolve. Not that long ago as individuals (and also not that long ago as a species in the timescale of the evaluation of life), we learned to walk, talk, read, and write. This gave us the ability to respond to our environment in a myriad of ways previously unimaginable and enabled massive expansions in our external expression of freedom via communication, mobility, and invention.

The next step in human evolution that I believe we as a species are currently being called to is how to choose our emotional reactions to the events of life. That is the source of an even more important form of freedom: inner freedom to experience the life we wish to experience. Not only does choosing our emotional reaction give us a dramatically better quality of life — it also empowers us to consciously design our behavior in the world and much more rapidly achieve our ambitions.

Another way of putting this borrowing a more mathematical term: our emotional reaction can and should be orthogonal to the events of our life. Once you achieve that self-mastery, any experience of life is available to you: and the good news is that every human being on the planet is capable of that right now. Again, please watch the video at the beginning of this post if you haven’t already to see this basic truth of the human experience in action.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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