The Charge: Activating the 10 Human Drives That Make You Feel Alive - Hardcover

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Brendon Burchard is the founder of High Performance Academy and author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Charge: Activating the 10 Human Drives that Make You Feel Alive, and the #1 New York Times and #1 USA TODAY bestseller The Millionaire Messenger. He is widely recognized as the world’s leading trainer on the topics of motivation and high performance. His famous training events and videos inspire millions of people to start anew, find their voice, live more fully, and make a greater difference in the world. Visit him at BrendonBurchard.com.

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Introduction

This book is an unapologetic assault on boredom, distraction, mediocrity, withdrawal, and living a “normal” life. It will directly call into question why you are allowing yourself to live at the energetic level where you currently reside, and it will aggressively challenge you to live a more vibrant, strategic, and engaged life.

In the pages ahead you will find a pragmatic, often counterintuitive guide that cuts through the clutter of bad advice, lays waste to nearly half a century of psychological misunderstanding, and paves a shimmering golden path to one, and only one, destination: a new life that makes you feel truly, fully, magnificently alive.

Face it: the emotional energy of the world has flatlined. Over the past forty years, across almost every developed country in the world, the diagnosis of clinical depression has grown nearly tenfold. This, despite the fact that almost every factor we associate with well-being—plentiful food, money, education, safety, access to the arts and health care—is abundant in these societies. Increasingly, people are reporting feelings of restlessness, fatigue, stress, and a sort of unnamable malaise that leaves them too often feeling bored, unsure, or frustrated.

My guess is, you can relate. Like everyone else, you have everything they say you “need”—safety, shelter, sustenance—and yet there are too many days that you don’t feel as excited, productive, or fulfilled as you thought you would. At some level, you may sense that you are not fulfilling the promises you’ve made to yourself or expressing the potential that lives within you. You start each year fired up for the big race, only to finish at a slow trot. Your week is scheduled to the hilt, but deep down you can tell that the work keeping you busy isn’t your life’s work. You’ve got the smarts and the soul and the hunger and the will, but all too often you find yourself spinning on a less-than-merry-go-round of doubt and delay. You’re connected to everyone and everything online, but you don’t feel nearly as connected to the world or to others as you would like. You’re waiting for some kind of permission or right timing to live full out every single day. You feel a restless desire for something more.

Well, I’m here to tell you that you deserve something more. But there’s a catch: to get it, you’re going to have to demand more of yourself. Those words might discourage you or even stop you dead from reading on, I know. You’re already fighting hard to stay afloat and awake, hammered by a tough economy, unreasonable demands from every quarter, and not enough sleep. Probably the last thing you want to hear is that you’ve got to try harder, work smarter, or give more in life.

The problem is, you do. And whether it makes me popular or not, I’m going to challenge you in these pages—and I hope you let me and then rise to the challenge, because I think you know there actually is more for you out there. I think you’ve tasted plenty of magically happy, engaged, and satisfying moments in your life and are willing to do what it takes to enjoy more of them. You can remember times when you had more fun, when you were wild and carefree and felt more excited and hopeful than you ever imagined possible. In short, you’ve already had a glimpse, a taste, of the Charged Life—a heightened existence that makes you feel energized, engaged, and enthusiastic about living.

If that’s true, then let me show you my cards: I don’t think the restlessness, boredom, anxiety, fear, or any other enduring negative emotion you may feel about yourself, others, or life in general has anything to do with the economy, the evermore chaotic world we live in, your childhood, bad luck, or any other easy excuse that the propagators of victimhood are handing out these days. No, any lack of charge in your life is only the result of a colossal failure in strategy. Only the failure to strategically control the contents of your consciousness keeps you from feeling the consistent internal charge of being fully alive, engaged, connected, and fulfilled. The good news is, you now hold in your hands a very strategic book.

I’m convinced that you’ve felt a spark in life before, one that lit you up for days. But I don’t want just to give you back an emotional charge you may have sensed once or twice before—that would be the sort of cheap trick you could expect from a carnival hypnotist. I want to show you an entirely new plane of possibility and emotional vibrancy that you never knew existed. A more vital, more colorful, more exciting, sexier reality can be yours.

To help people reach that kind of existence, I’ve spent fifteen years intricately studying everything I could get my hands on in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, human potential, and high performance. I’ve dedicated my life to the pursuit of helping others strategically, radically, and permanently increase their energy, their engagement, and their enthusiasm—their internal charge—in every area of life. I’ve helped executives reinvigorate not just themselves but their entire companies, couples reignite their love lives, athletes get their mojo back, artists reconnect with their higher genius, parents revivify their relationships with their children, and celebrities and politicians reenergize their followerships, all by helping them tap into a stronger internal charge—something they already had waiting within them. For this work, I’ve become one of the best-paid high-performance coaches and trainers in the world, and my world-renowned seminar, High Performance Academy, sets the standard in the personal growth and effectiveness business. But here’s the thing: this isn’t about me, and it never has been. I don’t do this by chest pounding or by hyping you up with affirmations. I do this by building a strategic plan that allows you—no, that challenges you—to live your best life.

Modern Motivations

It’s time we all got more strategic and purposeful in how we live our lives.

Why is it that in our abundant world of choice and connectivity so many of us feel lacking and detached? With all the how-to information available at our fingertips, why are we so unsure of which levers to pull to dramatically improve our lives? How is it that we have so much—a roof over our heads, opportunity, safety, choices, access to the entire world—and yet don’t feel sparked with energy all the time (or at least a lot more of the time)?

In days gone by, self-help gurus and armchair psychologists would respond to these questions by suggesting that we’re all crazy, ungrateful, or oblivious of all the good things being heaped upon us. They would say we are driven by dark needs that don’t allow us to bask in the sunlight, that we are too trapped in the past, that we expect too much, that we are unconscious of our real thoughts and patterns, or that we are not sending out enough powerful thoughts to attract the happiness in life that we deserve. These answers, of course, are inadequate. In fact, they have caused more harm than good.

So . . . back to the essential question: With so many of our basic human needs now being met, why don’t we feel more electrified and satisfied with our lives?

The answer introduces a controversial argument: We feel unsatisfied because the entire baseline of our human motivations has evolved. What made us feel happy, energized, and fulfilled just fifty years ago no longer applies, because our brains, bodies, and society have changed so radically.

Such...