We’ve all heard of the terms “quality of life” and “standard of living” get thrown around. Sometimes, without knowing it, we sell ourselves short, thinking one is more important than the other. In this episode, Merrill Chandler takes a look at both of these and reveals why we are selling our soul to one instead of embracing the other. He shares some more quality to life secrets worth 50 years of his experience, helping us transform our priorities into something that would benefit us not only in the end game but also as we are living and thriving.

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It Took Me Over 50 Years To Remember This…

Quality Of Life Secrets

In this episode, I’m going to push the “oh-wow” button because we’re going to be discussing the quality of life versus standard of living and how we are selling our souls to one without embracing the other. Let’s get into it.

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Quality Of Life Versus Standard Of Living

We’re going to be talking about something that without knowing it or not, this concept is driving every one of us, sometimes bananas or to success. We’re going to discuss it all. Every one of us has heard the term quality of life and standard of living. I’ve even spoken about it in our previous episode. We’re talking about how we sell ourselves short by focusing on one or thinking that it’s more important than another. What do I mean by quality of life standard? First of all, in most definitions, quality of life is that quality that makes our life worth living. The grind is a very low quality of life. Quality of life is doing what we love or creating a life we love. To quote my friend, Laurie Frazier, “Doing a life, living a life we love. The more we love it, the higher the quality of that life.” Definition number two, the standard of living is the things you can buy, the size of a house, and the type of car.

You can drive around on a bicycle if you need to get around. You would not believe everybody goes to work. It feels like hundreds of people commute to and from work in front of my house. It’s called the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, and it takes you all the way down to Downtown Salt Lake City. To get around is one thing, but the level at which you traveled is raising that standard of living. The standard of living is about things. Quality of life is about quality. Why is this important? I’m going to start out with this story. Indulge me, but I’m going to read it because I can’t speak it better than it’s already spoken. I want you guys to be able to read it.

An American investment banker was taking a much-needed vacation in a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. The boat had several large fresh fish in it. The investment banker was impressed by the quality of the fish and asked the Mexican gentlemen, “How long it took to catch them?” The Mexican replied, “Only a little while.” The banker then asked, “Why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?” The Mexican fishermen replied that he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “What do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fishermen replied, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, stroll into the village every evening where I sip wine, play guitar with my amigos and I have a full and busy life, Señor.”

The investment banker scoffed, “I’m an Ivy League MBA, and I can help you. You could spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat, then you could buy several boats with the proceeds until eventually, you’d have a whole fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to the middleman, you could sell directly to the processor and eventually open your own cannery. You could control the product, processing, and distribution.” He added, “Of course, you would need to leave the small coastal fishing village and moved to Mexico City where you’d be able to run the entire growing enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “Señor, how long will all this take?” To which the American upright replied, “Fifteen to twenty years.” “Then what?” asked the Mexican. The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and you become very rich. You could make millions.” “Millions, Señor? Then what?” To which the investment banker replied, “Then you could retire. You could move to a small coastal fishing town where you could sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, stroll into the village every evening where you could sip wine and play guitar with your amigos.”

I don’t know how much there is left to say because the end game, the quality of life of the Mexican gentleman was already an idyllic version of what some people say their retirement needs to look like. The investment banker has committed that the way to get there is through the process of working your ass off for 15 to 20 years, selling your enterprise, and then moving back to the fishing village that he started from. It’s a poignant story and ludicrous in the lesson that it teaches because the investment banker had one focus and that focus was bigger is better, more is better.

The purpose of our end game for our time together on this episode is for us to explore, what is your end game? In the A to Z of life, what’s your Z? People are like, “What do you mean?” That’s like asking, “What’s your why?” There are the last two letters of the alphabet. Think of it this way. When people say, “What is your why?” The vast majority of bootcamp after bootcamp, it’s having enough money to send a legacy to my children to provide them a legacy. Send them all to college, and to be able to do charitable work. All the things that people say what their why is. I pushed back a little bit and I’d say, “There is room for Z because your why doesn’t talk about the quality of your life, the new activities you’re going to spend your time doing.”

Quality Of Life: If you spend your entire life driving after these standard of living goals, then what’s your quality of life when you’re done?

You’re going to spend time with your grandchildren and with your loved ones. You’re going to a remote fishing village on the coast of Mexico and fish a little, take siestas with your wife and play with your children. Z is about the quality of your life once you’re there. If you don’t do this right and if you’re not focused on the quality of life while you’re going through these 15 to 20 years of building your empires to pass along to your children, what if your children hate you at the end of this? What if your health is miserable, you’re decrepit, you’re stuck in a wheelchair, a bed, or convalescent home, because you spent all of your energy driving after this standard of living goals? What’s your quality of life like when you’re done? I don’t know where the value is there.

Transformation In Priorities

I have been a slug for the last few years. No physical regimen. I even withdrew from friends and family. I wasn’t even going to birthday parties because I was doing a lot of internal work at the time, which I believe is opening me up to a higher quality of life. You’re reading words. They may even affect you and they may strike you, but until you assimilate this and you make changes in your behavior that are going to help you build a better quality of life, then what’s the point of hearing the words? It’s about transformation, not information. There’s way too much information out there that doesn’t help us transform. My goal for this show is that each of you are able to be open to more transformation in your priorities.

The title of this was awesome, 50 years to finally realize to get this. I don’t want you to wait 50 years. I don’t want you to wait ten years to get this. I want you to build your daily life around a high-quality set of activities. For example, I used to be a bomb-ass meditator. I loved meditation, pulling cards, and forecasting what my day might look like in meditation. I haven’t done it for years. I hadn’t even taken a walk around the neighborhood, much less have any physical activities. COVID was another excuse for me, order more Uber Eats and stay home more than I had the previous years before it hit. In this isolation, some people call them demons facing our greatest fears and facing those things that have been held onto us on our programming. I watched this on a TV show and it was amazing. It said, “Our demons are only little children wearing costumes, so no one can hurt them.” For me, that’s true. Every boogeyman we have in our life, all of our fears, all the tragedies that we’ve experienced, we have these bolstered-up parts of our personality and our soul. We have parts of us that get angry or some of us may even be violent.

We’ll get recalcature, get stubborn, shut down, and cut everybody off in our lives because we can’t deal with the feelings or the sensations that we’re having. If you’re in my tribe, I know you’re working your fricking asses off, but if you’re not focusing on the quality of life, there is no quality of life at the end of this rainbow no matter how high your standard of living. You can have 100 rental properties, a yacht, a speed boat on the lake, a motorhome, but if you’re broken down or shut down emotionally, mentally, spiritually at the end of this, do your children want anything from you except some money maybe to facilitate their lives? Did you create 15 to 20 years’ worth of powerful deposits into their emotional and spiritual bank accounts? Did you have family vacations once a year, twice a year, once every 2 or 3 years, but something that builds that quality of life now?

Many times, I am privy to the pain and suffering of the vast majority of my clients. They come here because they’re not going fast enough and far enough as they want to. Some feel like they’re running out of time or they want to retire at 30. More and more, since I’ve slowly been awakening to this myself, I’m like, “What’s your end game?” “I want to leave a legacy to my children.” “Do you plan on having a good relationship with them?” “Yes, of course, Merrill.” “What are you doing now to build that relationship so that they receive your gift, your legacy with honor, gratitude, and even sorrow at your passing, or is it like glad the old crotchety old man is gone?” At least, I’ve got some money to show for it because many of us are so hell-bent on getting there that we are not smelling the roses, much less loving our children and our families.

Coming out of this hole the first time, he’s three years old and I heard somebody who triggers something. It’s a transformational thing for me. I sent a love note in a video text to my daughter for my grandson to tell him that I love him that Pappie Merrill loves him. He’s three years old. What have I been doing or not been doing as he was growing up? Most of my children are near-ish by. We get together monthly or so, but what else can I do to create a quality of life now? I love physics. My whole acceleration equals momentum equals impact. I’m going to show you how this applies. Every one of you has read books, seen the secret or the power of magnetizing things to your life, your law of attraction, whatever thing that you’ve studied. It doesn’t matter, they all speak the same language.

When we say that we hold space for something, what we’re doing is we’re creating a vacuum in our psychic space, our spiritual space and our emotional mental space, and nature abhors a vacuum. What does nature do? What does life do? It fills it with like-kind energy. Here is interesting. If you don’t create this vacuum by making a stand of what the quality of life you want to have, then it’s clear, written, simple, expressive, and bears in mind your purpose and faith that your purpose will be fulfilled. If you don’t know what your purpose is in this life, we need to start there. When we say that we are clear about what our end game looks like, what our Z looks like, then we’re creating a hole, a space to be filled by your higher power, God the Father, God the Mother, the universe, or whatever it is that how you describe that thing. That magnificent energy that is larger than you. Until you hold space for it, nothing’s going to happen. That’s why we have to work.

If that space is full with your doubt, your fear, “That shit doesn’t work or whatever it is,” then there’s no hole for nature abhors a vacuum. Think about it this way. You know what injection molding is. Rubber balls, plastic toys, plastic dolls. They’ll use injection molding, which means that they create can be glass, wood, metal, but you create the opposite of it. You create a mold for it. You fill it full of plastic, it dries, you take the casing off, and you’ve got your doll sculpture, many types of sculpture the same way. The sculpture you see is not necessarily built from the pieces of metal or otherwise, they create the reverse of it, they create a space that looks exactly like it. They pour the bronze metal in, they crack the casing, and you have your bronze statue. They made a model and then made the casing for it so that it’s the opposite.

We have lots of examples in our lives of what this holding space means. The vacuum that we create to build our quality of life. It’s taken me a whole lot of time to learn these things, but I know that as I come to this, my opportunity and devotion to you to share at least what I know. Because we’re not good at creating and manifesting, we beat down the elements until they relent. The way I described this is setting an intention. That’s the molding and holding space. That’s creating a void for the gods to fill with exactly your quality of life. The other way, not the intention but attention. Attention means that you keep hammering away at a problem until it relents. Which one do you think takes more energy? Which one depletes us more?

Quality Of Life: If you focus on the quality of your life, one of two things will happen. Either one, you will not be so concerned about filling up the void in your soul with things, or you will attract the perfect set of things.

Quality Of Life Starts Now

My intention here is the quality of life starts now. What are you doing? I saw a poster in one of my friend’s house that said, “Do one thing every day that you love.” That’s certainly going to contribute to your quality of life but the real question is, “Why am I waiting so long to have the quality of life that I say I want?” First of all, I’m never going to stop working because my workings are passion projects and I have a mission to give learnings and tools to anybody who could use them to better their lives and to give learnings and tools to their loved ones. Learnings and tools, that’s my jam and my life mission. I get caught up because I’ve been called a workaholic before. I’m no different than many of you, but where’s my quality of life?

I finally got out of bed not to come into my workstation, but to go run. I’m on 2 miles and I’m running half of it. It’s walk and run at 1/10th of mile interval training. I’m also doing a physical regimen. I’m also doing yoga as a warm down and then I’m meditating again for the first time in years. When I leave that, I jump in the shower, and then I come to my workstation. I’ve never been more grounded in my life. I ache a little bit. I’m not in a physical comfort zone. While I’m in the shower, I have a whiteboard with a marker because that’s where ideas come. There has been flooding to me because my brain, my body, and my emotions are quiet. Since I’ve created the space inside of me, all of a sudden, I’m sitting there in the middle of my shower writing down all of these ideas.

That’s going to be awesome for you guys. Everybody might try, 2021 is going to be off the hook because I’m seeking to live a high-quality life. My standard of living is awesome, but I don’t need a yacht. If I want to take my family out yachting, I’ll rent one. I’ve started reprioritizing and I’m asking you to do the same thing. What are you doing right now that is give you a quality of life? Here’s a perfect example. I’m out and I’d been walking for a month, the 2 miles. I go to this what I thought was a business seminar and ended up being a bootcamp. They gave me a 30-day challenge to fit back in my suits that I’ve grown out of. I ended up coming back here and instead of walking, I do interval run and walk. I shaved 1 minute and 10 seconds off my time.

When I’m out there running, my normal way is to go, “I’ve got to do this. Keep your word.” On day 3 or 4, it all changed. I started asking, “Why am I doing this?” I want to fit in my suits. I wish I could call it COVID weight but it’s not. I was already half this overweight before COVID hit, but why am I doing this running? I started looking for podcasts that I could listen to people who would inspire me so that my mind and my heart would be touched during this 30-minute period that I was exercising my body. At the same time, I wanted to feel exhilarated because many times, it’s like, “Let’s get it done. It’s a goal. I’m keeping a commitment. I know it’s good for me.”

Rather than saying, “How can I enjoy this? What can I do to enjoy what I’m doing? How is this part of the quality of my life? How can this contribute to the quality of my life, running and sprinting between two-speed bumps on this 2-mile stretch that I do?” Rather than be one more goal, “I’ve got to finish flipping this house. I’ve got another traunch of notes to buy. I’ve got to finish the staircase so that I could get this up for sale. I’ve got to buy that other franchise.” Instead of it being another damn checklist, how can we improve that?

In your daily, your meetings with your contractors, you’re going out and farming for houses, you’re walking down the neighborhood and you’re passing out flyers, whatever you’re doing, how can that contribute to the quality of your life? If you focus on the quality of your life, 1 of 2 things will happen. You will not be concerned about filling up the void with stuff and things because you have a high-quality life. There’s no void to fill. There’s no hole in your soul to fill. Number two is that your quality of life will attract the perfect set of things. You will be creating space for the universe to fill that vacuum with the things that will give you more quality of life. Either you change your values and say, “My four cars are enough or I want a car for every day of the week.” I don’t care what your values are. I’m saying, “How are you going to stop buying shit that’s trying to fill a hole in your soul and start building the quality of your life?”

I don’t mind the PT side, the physical training, my pushups, sit-ups, and all that stuff. I’ve been doing it my whole life, except for the last several years. That one’s muscle memory. Running when it’s 35 degrees outside and pitch black, that takes a little mental discipline to get out there every day. The second I started is how can these 30 minutes add to the quality of my life? There’s a podcast I’ve wanted to listen to, I’ve never taken a moment. It’s recommended by people I love and respect. I haven’t done a damn thing. I have half an hour to build the quality of my life by feeding my mind and some of them are not about business. It’s about integrity, trust, and building relationships to improve the quality of my life. Ask yourself in every way and every moment, what am I doing to create a higher quality of my life? What can you do? Do you take your child with you and have some time together? Do you send a love note?

My phone is the most amazing instrument because, for the first time in my life, I have been sending love notes to people who are important to me. Some of them haven’t heard from me forever. I’ll text them. I record it in our messages and send it to them. What can you do in the activity that you’re doing to improve the quality of your life? Either your standard of living will go up to meet your quality of life or you’ll naturally and effortlessly readjust what makes you happy. As the gentlemen say, “I could move to a small coastal fishing village where I would sleep late, fish a little, play with my kids, take siestas with my wife, stroll to the village in the evenings, sip wine, and play guitars with my friends.” Do not wait until you retire. Do not build a legacy that you are too dead, tired, cranky, and or the asshole-ish to then pass it on to children who have been angry at you for years. Don’t deceive yourself because every one of your loved ones, the quality of their lives depends on the quality of yours. I’m challenging you, every instant that you’re doing something, find out how it can add to the quality of your life and not some financial goal you have. Goodbye.

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