Book SummaryAwaken the Giant Within, by Tony Robbins

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within

Virtually everyone has imagined the life they want, but most people become so bogged down with daily obligations and routines that they eventually stop pursuing their dreams. In Awaken the Giant Within, life coach and self-help guru Tony Robbins provides insights and exercises to help you optimize every aspect of your life—from your relationships to your finances—and achieve your dreams by mastering your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

This guide will teach you the principles and practices to transform your life and the world around you. You’ll learn strategies to take control of your thoughts and emotions, kickstart your life transformation with a seven-day challenge, and learn how to apply the self-improvement skills you’ve learned to benefit those around you.

Our commentary will compare and contrast Robbins’s ideas with those of other popular self-help authors, as well as current scientific theories. This will provide you with background and a deeper understanding of the lessons in Awaken the Giant Within, as well as some additional tools for taking control of your life.

Robbins is a leadership coach and business strategist who has worked with CEOs, champion athletes, popular musicians, and four different US presidents. As a former janitor who never attended college, Robbins credits his current success to the system he lays out in Awaken the Giant Within.

Know That Your Decisions and Beliefs Determine Your Destiny

Robbins believes that the first step in taking control of your life is understanding the power of your decisions. Many people mistakenly believe their lives are shaped by their circumstances—they go where the current takes them without making any active decisions, and this makes them feel out of control. However, your life is actually dictated by your decisions. When you decide who you are and what you want, you’re committing to do anything necessary to realize that vision.

To embrace your decision-making power, Robbins says you must first understand that decision-making is like a muscle that you strengthen by making frequent decisions—so take every opportunity to make decisions, big and small. Second, make your decisions wisely, but don’t mull over them endlessly; if you think about them for too long, you’re likely to lose your conviction. Third, learn from your successful and failed decisions.

(Shortform note: In Rework, David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried note that the most dangerous thing you can do is fail to make a decision. They argue that making no decision is even worse than making a bad decision: If you make a bad decision, you can learn from the mistake, correct it, and make better decisions in the future. However, if you’re paralyzed by fear of a bad decision and don’t make a choice (or tell yourself that you’ll “decide later”) then you’ll stay stuck in your current situation.)

To kick off your journey of self-transformation, Robbins gives a list of three decisions to think about. Be conscious about how you make these three decisions and what impact you notice going forward—how you feel, what you do, and who you become:

1. Decide what to focus on: What dreams do you want to achieve? What projects do you want to finish at any cost?
2. Decide what certain things mean to you—in other words, how important they are. For example, how important is your job to you? How important is your family? Your hobbies?
3. Decide what you’ll do to produce the results you want.

Start With Values

What you focus on, what’s meaningful to you, and what you do all have their roots in what you value. In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson explains that our values are what lead us to feel and behave the ways we do. Therefore, Manson argues, the key to changing your life is changing your values.

Manson says that all positive values—values that lead to happiness, fulfillment, and productivity—share three qualities:

• They are based on facts, not opinions or emotions. For example, integrity is a positive value because it’s rooted in concrete, knowable facts—you just have to tell the truth about those facts. On the other hand, happiness is a negative value because it’s feeling-based instead of fact-based (Manson believes that happiness is a natural result of living well, not a value or a goal to pursue).

• They are constructive: They improve your life and the lives of those around you. For example, responsibility is a positive value because it pushes you to do the best you can in every situation. Power is a negative value because it relies on pushing others down in order to elevate yourself.

• They are within your control. Positive values can’t rely on outside forces such as other people’s opinions or actions. Both of the previous examples of positive values are things that you personally decide to do: Nobody else can force you to tell the truth or make you take charge of your own life—and, conversely, nobody can stop you from doing so.

Your Mind Seeks Pleasure and Fears Pain

Robbins says that the driving force behind all of your decisions—and, thus, your actions—is the subconscious motivation to avoid pain (including unpleasant feelings like frustration and humiliation) and seek pleasure (enjoyable feelings such as ecstasy and comfort).

Robbins explains that pain and pleasure associations start in your brain: Every time you experience a positive or negative emotion, your brain links the emotion with other aspects of the experience, creating a “neuro-association.” As a result,...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Part 1 | Chapter 1: Harness Your Power to Create the Life You Want

Just about everyone has dreamed of the life they want. However, most people become so bogged down with daily obligations and routines that they eventually stop pursuing their dreams and give up any hope of meaningfully shaping their destinies.

Life coach and self-help guru Tony Robbins wants to restore your dreams and give you the tools to achieve them. He believes you have the power to create your destiny by mastering your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. In this summary, through empowering insights and exercises to help you put the principles to practice, you’ll gain the tools to optimize every aspect of your life, from your relationships to your finances.

The principles and practices in the coming chapters can produce meaningful changes in your life—and they often require only small adjustments, such as swapping out just one word in your vocabulary, or changing one belief that’s holding you back. These are the “leverage points” in your life, where minimal effort can create transformational results. While many people fail to reach their dreams because they divide their attention and effort among too many things, you’ll be on your way to success as you learn to...

Shortform Exercise: Change Your Life Through Decisions

Reflect on how you can use the power of decision-making to transform your life.

Describe one decision you’ve put off making. Why have you procrastinated making this choice?

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 2: Overcome Harmful Neuro-Associations

Given the importance of decisions in taking control of our lives, why do we often decide not to do things that we know would benefit us? Why do we snack on chips when we know fruit is better for us? Why do we put off working on our resumes even though we constantly complain about our jobs?

The answer lies in our pain and pleasure associations. The driving force behind all of our decisions—and, thus, our actions—is the motivation to avoid pain and seek pleasure. For instance, when we indulge in a junk-food habit, it’s because we gain pleasure from munching on salty snacks, and we associate pain with eating veggies instead. There are different forms of pain (such as inconvenience and humiliation) and pleasure (such as ecstasy and comfort). Generally, fear of pain or loss is a stronger motivator than the desire for pleasure or gain—in other words, you’ll continue to eat junk food if your love of chips isn’t as strong as your aversion to healthy food.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss the ways that pain and pleasure associations like this can prevent you from reaching your goals and living the life you want. First, let’s look at what, exactly, these associations...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 3: Recondition Your Neuro-Associations

Now that you know how easily you can develop disempowering neuro-associations and the negative impact they can have on your life, let’s talk about how to change them. Since your neuro-associations are wired into your brain, the only way to change them is to recondition yourself by creating new neural pathways and weakening the old ones. To do this, associate pain with your old, disempowering behavior and pleasure with a new, healthier habit.

In this chapter, we’ll explain how to do this using the Science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning™ (NAC). This is a six-step process through which you condition your nervous system to develop neuro-associations that support the changes you want to make:

1. Decide on your destination, and identify your obstacles.
2. Create a sense of urgency to change.
3. Disrupt your pattern.
4. Create a positive pattern to replace the old, negative one.
5. Reinforce your new pattern.
6. Make sure your conditioning is successful.

But first, let’s briefly dispel some common misconceptions about change.

Alter Your Beliefs About Change

The NAC process we’ll discuss can trigger significant changes in your life instantly. However, ...

Shortform Exercise: Evaluate Your Associations

Take the first steps toward correcting negative associations that are holding you back.

What is one thing that would improve your quality of life, but that you’ve been putting off implementing? Why have you been putting it off?

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 4: Choose Empowering Beliefs

We’ve discussed several ways in which neuro-associations shape your life, such as impacting your decision-making, establishing bad habits, and causing self-sabotaging behavior. Additionally, your neuro-associations are strongly tied to your beliefs—and your beliefs dictate how you interpret and react to your life experiences. Empowering beliefs help you reach your goals and navigate life in a positive way, while disempowering beliefs perpetuate negative thoughts and harmful behavior. In this chapter, we’ll discuss:

• What beliefs are, and how they form
• Different types of beliefs, such as global beliefs and limiting beliefs
• How your beliefs impact your life
• How you can change your beliefs to empower you to reach your goals

Understand the Anatomy of Beliefs

Your beliefs lead from and to your neuro-associations: Your collective pain and pleasure neuro-associations form your beliefs, which then influence your behavior, while also reinforcing those neuro-associations. Here’s how it works, along with an example to illustrate the circular relationship between neuro-associations and beliefs:

1. You have an experience. For example, you take a flight...

Shortform Exercise: Drop Your Disempowering Beliefs

Use the techniques from this chapter to replace a disempowering belief with an empowering one.

Describe one behavior you feel you should stop doing. Why do you want to abandon it?

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 5: Control Your Mental-Emotional-Physiological State

We’ve talked about how to alter your neuro-associations to change your beliefs and behaviors—but what about changing your emotions?

Although many people mistakenly think that emotions happen to them, emotions are actually the product of your mental-emotional-physiological state, which is determined by how you position your body (your physiology) and what you choose to focus on. Thus, learning how to control your focus and physiology empowers you to manage your state, which enables you to feel whatever emotions you want, whenever you want.

Since your emotions impact your actions, controlling your emotional state empowers you to promote the behaviors you want to sustain to improve your life. For instance, remaining calm in a situation that would have previously made you angry enables you to make clear-headed, constructive decisions instead of reactive, potentially damaging ones.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to control your state and always feel the way you want by:

• Using your body
• Directing your focus
• Discovering how certain physical sensations (such as sight and sound) affect your state and learning how to manipulate them

Change...

Shortform Exercise: Control Your State

Brainstorm actions you can take to change your state anytime you want.

List all of the emotions you experienced today, and the situations that triggered those emotions.

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 6: Use Questions to Direct Your Focus

In the last chapter, we talked about the importance of altering your state by shifting your focus to positive things, and we discussed how to do that by manipulating your physical position and submodalities. In this chapter, we’ll explore more strategies to control your focus through the questions you ask yourself. Specifically, we’ll discuss:

• How your questions influence your thoughts and emotions
• What empowering and disempowering questions are
• Why you must be cautious in the way you word your questions
• Which questions to ask yourself every day to make you feel more empowered and happy
• Which questions to ask yourself to help you persevere and find solutions when you’re facing challenges

Make a Habit of Asking Empowering Questions

The first strategy for using language to direct your focus is to be mindful of the types of questions you ask yourself. The questions you ask yourself set the tone for your thought patterns, so it’s critical to make a habit of asking yourself positive, empowering questions that will lead to empowering thoughts.

Thinking is merely a sequence of asking and answering questions—in other words, virtually every...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 7: Use Empowering Words and Metaphors to Direct Your Focus

Just as your questions have the power to determine your state, beliefs, and behavior, so do your words and metaphors—and, like questions, you have a pool of habitual words and metaphors that you use heavily in your daily conversations and internal monologues. Make sure your habitual vocabulary is full of empowering words and metaphors to promote empowering thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss:

• How using empowering words and “Transformational Vocabulary” alters your experiences
• How the size of your vocabulary determines the range of emotions you experience
• How your words shape your interactions and influence the way other people respond to you
• How to make your habitual vocabulary more empowering
• How empowering and disempowering metaphors impact you
• How metaphors’ meaning and influence depend on context
• How you can change your habitual metaphors to improve your outlook and your life

Use Empowering Words to Shape Your Experiences

The words you choose to describe an event influence how you experience that event. For example, is your vacation fun or is it magical? Is the conference bustling or...

Shortform Exercise: Assess Whether You’re Using Empowering Language

Evaluate and reform your habitual language to empower yourself.

Think of the last problem you faced, big or small (this could even be discovering that you’re out of milk after pouring a bowl of cereal). What’s the first question that comes to mind when you think of that problem? (For example, “Why does my roommate never take the initiative to replace things when they run out?”)

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 8: Interpret and Learn From Your Emotions

As we’ve learned, you can use various techniques to control your emotions instead of allowing them to be dictated by external stimuli. However, sometimes, in order to shift your emotions, you first need to learn from them. Emotions provide feedback on your actions: Positive emotions let you know that you’re doing something right, and negative emotions signal that you need to alter something. For this reason, negative emotions—or “action signals”—are actually invaluable, because they guide you to the life you want, if you know how to use them.

In this chapter, we’ll:

• Examine three methods people typically use to deal with their emotions, and why those methods will prevent you from living the life you want
• Discuss how to identify, decode, and address your emotions in a healthy way
• List the 10 most common types of negative emotions and explain what each of them signals

Reject Disempowering Ways of Addressing Your Emotions

Although using and learning from your emotions is the most effective way to maintain mental and emotional well-being, most people instead respond to their emotions in one of three disempowering ways. Let’s discuss each of these...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 9: Set Goals That Inspire You

In the summary up to now, you’ve learned about the tools you need to improve your life and accomplish your dreams. Now, you need the motivation to actually start that improvement. That drive comes from developing a clear, compelling vision of your future, which you can do by setting goals. When you set ambitious goals that inspire you, you become excited to pursue them, creating motivation and momentum, even in the face of challenges.

Setting ambitious goals can be scary. Many people who have fallen short of their goals in the past are reluctant to set new ones because they’re afraid of the pain of failing again. To avoid future disappointment, these people often stop formulating clearly defined, actionable goals about what they want in their lives physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and financially—instead, their goals are merely to get by, pay bills, and survive. They don’t realize that their past failures may not be due to their personal shortcomings, but rather due to:

• Poor goal setting: Their goals may have hinged on things that were beyond their control.
• Inflexibility: They may have been too rigid to adapt either their goals or their...

Shortform Exercise: Set Goals for Your Compelling Future

Gain the motivation to set goals and work toward them by reflecting on what your life is like now compared to five years ago.

Reflect on your life five years ago. For each of the following categories, give yourself a score from 0 to 10, based on how well you were aligned with your ideal quality of life in that area. Write a sentence explaining each score.

Categories: Career, finances, living environment, social life, relationships, mental, emotional, spiritual life, attractiveness, physical

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 10: Change Your Mindset With a Mental Challenge

It’s time to put what you’ve learned in this summary so far to use with a 10-day mental challenge that will help you adopt empowering mental habits to transform your life in a positive way. Creating the life you want requires that you don’t just achieve your goals sometimes, but that you reach your goals consistently—and the way to do that is by adopting new, positive habits. After all, your current mental and behavioral habits created the life you have now, which you’re unsatisfied with. Therefore, improving your life will require you to change some of those habits. Even if certain habits helped you succeed in the past, they need to evolve with you on your path to higher levels of success.

The 10-day mental challenge aims to help you:

1. Become aware of your habitual negative thought patterns. Only when you’re aware of them can you begin to dismantle them.
2. Condition your brain to find new, empowering thoughts to replace the old, disempowering ones. This includes learning to focus on solutions instead of problems.
3. Enjoy a boost of confidence from the immediate improvements in your life. When you start to feel the success of taking control of your life...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Part 2 | Chapter 11: Take Control of Your Mind’s Operating System

In Part 1, we discussed the power you possess to radically transform your life for the better, and you gained the tools to control your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You now have the building blocks for transformative change, and in Part 2, you’ll get the blueprint for change through learning about your Master System.

Your Master System comprises five elements, some of which we’ve already discussed and some of which we’ll talk about in the next few chapters:

1. Mental-emotional-physiological state (Chapter 5)
2. Habitual questions (Chapter 6)
3. Values (Chapter 12)
4. Rules, which are a type of belief (Chapters 4 and 13)
5. References (Chapter 14)

Your Master System controls your “evaluations” or interpretations of everything you experience in life, which in turn determine what you think, feel, and do. Think of your mind as a computer, and your Master System as the operating system, which dictates everything about how you take in, interpret, and react to data.

You can often make broad changes in all aspects of your life by making simple changes to your Master System. In the following chapters, you’ll learn the information and skills you need to take...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 12: Live by Your Values

The first element of your Master System that we’ll discuss how to alter is your values. As we talked about briefly, your values dictate your evaluations, decisions and actions, which create your destiny. Knowing and also living by your values brings deep fulfillment, inner peace, certainty, and joy.

When you’re clear on your values, they act as your compass, guiding you unequivocally toward any action that upholds them. By contrast, if you’re unclear on your values or if you have conflicting values, it can cause enduring unhappiness and frustration. For example, if your highest value is independence and your second-highest value is intimacy, you may frequently struggle in relationships between wanting to connect and yearning to be untethered. Furthermore, if you haven’t identified and committed to your values at all, you may sometimes act in ways that don’t align with them, bringing you further unhappiness.

In this chapter, we’ll explore how to identify your values, recognize how they’ve shaped your life, and alter them to support the life you want.

Understand the Role of Values

Before we talk about how to identify your values, let’s explain why you probably...

Shortform Exercise: Evaluate Your Values

Reflect on how you prioritize some of your values and how this hierarchy affects your life.

Describe a dilemma you recently faced, and how you decided to solve it.

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 13: Set Rules That Help You Reach Your Values

In the last chapter, you identified, evaluated, and tailored your values to lead you to your compelling future. You learned that the greatest fulfillment in life is to not only know your values, but also to live by them—but, as we’ll explain in this chapter, you’ll only feel that you’re living out your values if your rules set you up for success.

As a reminder, your rules are the beliefs you have about what needs to happen in order for you to feel that you’ve fulfilled your value. For example, you may have a rule that you need a certain amount of money in the bank in order to feel that you’ve fulfilled your value of security.

You can live a more fulfilling life by simply changing your rules to make them more achievable. In this chapter, we’ll discuss:

• How rules can empower or disempower you
• How you prioritize your rules in a hierarchy
• How rules (and sub-rules) impact relationships
• How you can identify, evaluate, and alter your own rules for a more fulfilling life

Make Rules That Bring Pleasure and Empowerment, Not Pain and Disempowerment

Your rules determine the conditions for you to feel pain or pleasure: **If you have rules that are...

Shortform Exercise: Analyze Your Rules

Reflect on whether your rules are helping or hindering your efforts to live by your values.

What is one of your values? It can be one you identified in the exercise from the last chapter.

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 14: Build Your Beliefs With References

In addition to your values and rules, your references are a critical aspect of your Master System. Recall from Part 1 that your references hold up your beliefs because they are experiences or imaginings that serve as evidence to support your beliefs.

The way in which you select, interpret, and organize your references determines whether they’ll empower or disempower you. For example, one cancer survivor can use the painful experiences of undergoing treatment and feeling isolated from healthy family and friends as proof that life is difficult and unfair. Alternatively, another cancer survivor can draw on references of her friends’ and family’s love and support and her eventual remission to support the belief that life is miraculous and full of second chances.

To improve your life, select and organize your references in empowering ways, which will support empowering beliefs and behaviors. In this chapter, we’ll explain:

• That there are different types of references, and that some are well-suited to support certain types of beliefs
• How to expand your library of empowering references

Understand the Different Types of References

Let’s look at the...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 15: Recognize How Your Identity Dictates Your Behavior

As you expand your references and alter the beliefs they support, you may find yourself feeling like a new person. This is because your beliefs about yourself and what sets you apart from others comprise your identity; so, changing your beliefs may make you feel like your identity is changing.

Although your identity is not fixed or innate, it dictates your behavior, as people subconsciously strive to act in ways that reinforce their identity. For example, if you identify as a low-achieving person, you’re less likely to push yourself to excel—regardless of natural ability—than someone who identifies as a high-achieving person. As such, your identity determines your decisions, actions, and fate; so, it’s important that it pushes you in a positive direction. Ensuring that this is the case may involve needing to remake your identity, if it’s not currently pushing you to be who you want to be.

In this chapter, you’ll learn:

• How your identity forms
• How your identity influences your actions
• What happens when your behavior conflicts with your identity
• How changing your behavior and your identity go hand-in-hand
• How to remake your identity to one that...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Part 3 | Chapter 16: Take the Seven-Day Challenge

Throughout this summary, you’ve learned principles and the practical strategies to completely transform your life. Now, jumpstart your transformation with this seven-day challenge. Each day for the next week, you’ll tackle an assignment to begin improving a different area of your life.

Day 1: Master Your Emotional Patterns

First, change your habitual emotional patterns to experience fewer negative emotions and spend more time in positive, empowering states. We’ve discussed several strategies throughout the book to alter your emotional patterns—some of these strategies help you shift your focus and physiology, and others anchor those changes in new habits. These strategies include:

• Adopting empowering...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 17: Day 2: Master Your Physical Life

On Day 1, you made a commitment to emotional well-being. Today, you’ll make a commitment to your physical well-being, which helps you enjoy your emotional health to the fullest. When it comes to your physical vitality, the first and most important thing to understand is that there is a difference between fitness and health:

• Fitness refers to your physical ability to do something athletic.
• Health means that all of your physical systems are working optimally.

Fitness does not necessarily equate to health because, in pursuit of achieving the strength and stamina to perform an athletic activity, you can subject yourself to injury and fatigue, harming your overall health and wellness. Before we get to today’s assignment, let’s discuss:

• How to balance aerobic and anaerobic exercise to optimize your health
• The importance of committing to a habit of exercising regularly

Exercise Strategically

You can balance both health and fitness by strategically incorporating both aerobic and anaerobic exercise into your life, which trains your metabolism to burn fat, increases your energy levels, and improves your overall health. First, you...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 18: Day 3: Master Your Relationship

Today, you’ll practice mastering your relationship—specifically, your romantic or domestic relationship—because relationships are not only essential to your well-being, but they are also powerful forces in influencing your beliefs, values, and character. Furthermore, you’ll enjoy the successful and empowered life you’re creating even more if you have someone to share it with.

In this chapter, we’ll explain how to maintain a healthy relationship, and then you’ll have a chance to put that knowledge to use with today’s assignment.

Abide by the Six Keys to Healthy Relationships

Before explaining today’s exercise, let’s discuss the six keys to maintaining a healthy, long-lasting relationship:

Key #1: Communicate Your Rules

Minimize conflict in your relationship by discovering the other person’s values and rules. As we discussed in Part 2, any time you’re upset with someone, it’s because you feel that they have broken your rules—even if you never articulated those rules. So, take time to share your rules and to find out about your partner’s rules, and agree to both make an effort to meet each other’s rules.

Key #2: Focus on Giving

Focus on what you can...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 19: Day 4: Master Your Financial Life

You’re on your way to mastering your interior and exterior worlds through emotional and physical health, and you’re nurturing a loving, fulfilling relationship. Now, on Day 4 of this challenge, let’s tackle a common external source of pain: money. Financial stress can cause intensely disempowering negative emotions, yet most people get in their own way when it comes to creating and maintaining wealth. Before we get to your assignment for the day, we’ll explore the three common obstacles that prevent people from having the financial lives they want, and then we’ll break down five lessons for successfully building and protecting wealth.

Avoid Three Common Obstacles to Wealth

To generate wealth, first, address these three obstacles: Obstacle #1: People Associate Money With Both Pleasure and Pain

Most people have a pain-and-pleasure relationship with money. For example, they want money but they often feel that they don’t have enough, or they enjoy having it but they fear losing it. As we’ve discussed, when you have mixed associations about something, your mind reacts to both the pain and pleasure, and you end up pursuing your goal while simultaneously self-sabotaging...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Chapter 20: Days 5, 6, and 7: Master Your Behavior and Time, Then Rest

On Day 5 of this challenge, you’ll create a code of conduct to help you master your behavior and live by your values every single day, because the more consistently you uphold these values, the more successful and fulfilled you’ll be. Even if you’re generally meeting your values, there may still be a lot of moments in your day when you fall short—moments when things don’t go to plan, when you feel stressed, or when some other external force influences your state. This code of conduct will serve as a constant reminder to align yourself with your values.

Day 5: Create a Code of Conduct

Develop a code of conduct to keep you on course to realizing your ideal life:

1. Write a list of all the emotional states that you want to experience every single day. Seven to 10 states are typically enough to create a rich and dynamic variety while also making it manageable to achieve each one of them every day. Some of your states can be the same as your values (such as passion), while others can be states that you feel support your values. For example, a state of cheerfulness might promote your value of being loving.
2. Write a rule for each state. In other words,...

Awaken the Giant Within Summary Part 4 | Chapter 21: Change Yourself, Then Change the World

In this summary so far, you’ve gained the tools you need to take control of your life and shape your ideal future. In this final Part, we’ll discuss how what you’ve learned can also be applied to improve the world around you. Specifically, we’ll explore the importance of:

• Participating in joint decisions to make the world a better place
• Giving back to others regularly
• Sharing what you’ve learned from this book

Understand and Make Joint Decisions

There are countless problems and tragedies constantly occurring across the globe—from climate change to genocides to chronic hunger. Joint decisions, made collectively by the world’s population, determine whether we succumb to or overcome these problems.

It’s up to every person to make individual choices that contribute to joint decisions and solutions—including you. You know that you have the power to make individual decisions that impact your life: Now, participate in joint decisions to impact communities, societies, nations, and the world. If you don’t take an active role, you’ll merely follow the indifferent current of the masses, and you’ll be forced to deal with the consequences that follow.

As...

Shortform Exercise: Find Ways to Give Back

Come up with a plan to make contribution a part of your life.

What is one cause that you care deeply about? Why do you care about it?