A primer on the book BeCAUSE!



For those that have yet to read my new book because. Here’s a quick primer.



One day, I asked myself a question. If you could have anything you wanted, wouldn’t you? We already know how to do most things and if we don’t, we can Google them or talk to others about it. We want to lose weight, be a better person, learn a new skill, get a new job, pursue a meaningful career, be a better parent, become more resilient, and the list goes on.



But we don’t do that. Sometimes we struggle and sometimes we don’t.



There are things that in spite of us doing everything right we can’t seem to do. On the flipside there are things that we accomplish easily and our friends get very frustrated with us and simply say that “we just have a knack for it.”



Research



My research led to two very important things:



Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle.



Intense research on what all top performers have in common



But this wasn’t enough. Neither one of those things answered the real question they just stopped.



So I took it further and that is what created the book BeCAUSE!.



Survival mode tell-tale signs



In this short episode, we give a recap of the book and talk about what it means to wake up to a monster.















Transcript:



Waking Up to a Monster



Hello, and welcome back. I have something interesting for you today—a new concept for those who haven’t read my new book, and some bonus material for those who have. I will try to be brief, and I appreciate you not laughing at me for saying that.



If you could have anything you wanted, wouldn’t you take it? We all have goals. We want to lose some weight, be healthier, make more money, or change careers. We’d like to be more patient with our kids or finally finish that project we’ve been dragging our feet on.



So, why don’t we do these things? What’s stopping us?



Is it a lack of desire? No, we seem to genuinely want these outcomes. Is it a lack of knowledge? Most people have the knowledge they need, or they can easily Google it. The answer, I found, lies deeper.



Research



My research led me to two interesting places. First was Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology. His flagship theory was the “pleasure principle,” in which he believed that we are all driven by two simple forces: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. While foundational, this doesn’t fully explain why we fail to do things that we know will bring us pleasure.



So then I looked at top performers. I read books and studies, and they all pointed to one thing: repetition. But again, that didn’t make sense on its own. How do they maintain that repetition? How can normal people use that information?



That’s when I realized what was missing—the forces behind the scenes. What was shoving you into success? What was preventing you from failing? And what was preventing you from succeeding?



In our psyche, these forces are what I call Monsters and Unicorns. This is the concept at the heart of my new book, BeCAUSE!