Live It by Jairek Robbins | Book Summary

In Live It!: Achieve Success by Living with Purpose, Jairek Robbins helps you lead a life of growth and contribution. He is a renowned performance coach and entrepreneur who provides the steps to go from where you are today to where you want to be.

Introduction: Learn It, Live It, Give It

In Live It, Jairek Robbins presents his framework for achieving success using his philosophy:

• Learn It: Learn all that you need to design your Ideal Vision for your life.
• Live It: Apply all that you’ve learned to achieve the results that you desire and deserve.
• Give It: Find a way to pay it forward and help others do the same.

You can apply this process to take consistent daily action in the major areas of your life. The majors include health, emotional intelligence, intimate relationships, family, professional life, and finances. You will make your life a story worth telling and live with meaning and purpose.

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Chapter 1: Ideal Day Vision

Make your vision a reality by designing the Ideal Vision for your life.

Ideal Day Vision

The foundation for making that change is to create your Ideal Day Vision:

Ideal Day Vision – shows you “the gaps between where you are today and where you want to be,” and:

• Helps you figure out what is most important in life
• Shows you what is going well
• Enables you to determine what is preventing you from achieving your goals

Life of Growth and Contribution

In the long-run, fulfillment comes from growth and contribution. Brendon Burchard, in his book, The Millionaire Messenger, asks you three questions that to answer at the end of your life:

1. Did I live fully?
2. Did I love openly?
3. Did I matter?

Ideal Day Exercise

In Live It, Jairek Robbins recommends spending 30 minutes of deep work to imagine and record your Ideal Day:

• Waking Up: Examine the mindset you will have with the energy, passion, joy, and excitement you feel for the day to come.
• Morning: Start with a morning routine, go for a run, spend quality time with family, or relax with reading and coffee.
• Afternoon: Consider your mental and physical state. Maybe you will seek growth, explore the world, or spend time with others.
• Evening: Think about what would make you feel accomplished, including tasks, goals, learning, growing, or enjoying.
• Bedtime: Ponder your remaining thoughts, practice gratitude, reflect on your health, and consider the positive impact you made.

Ask Yourself:

• What are the most significant parts of your Ideal Day Vision?
• How much of your Idea Day focused on mindset?

Live It Challenge:

• Review your Ideal Day Vision and read it out loud daily for a month.
• Take consistent daily action to move closer to your Ideal Day Vision.

Chapter 2/3: Focusing On The Majors

You will be successful if you focus on the most important aspects of life:

Majors – “the aspects of your life that need to be in order before you can achieve the end results you are after”

As opposed to the instant gratification in mundane things:

Minors – “the less important activities that either tear down your foundation of the majors you’ve established or limit your progress on improving your foundation”

Our world has become obsessed with minors, so we need to transition back to the majors. You need to make significant life changes through planning, discipline, and hard work to maximize your effort and conserve energy.

Major Life Categories

In Live It, Jairek Robbins defines seven major categories for life:

• Health – the quality of life that you enjoy, with the key being to maximize the amount of energy you have
• Emotional Intelligence – the ability to control our emotions, such that they are positive to reduce stress and improve your health
• Intimate Relationships – the partner that shares your big wins, supports your difficult moments, and provides companionship; focus on giving over receiving in the relationship
• Family – the network of close relationships (friends, family, and community) that helps you through love, appreciation, and understanding
• Professional Life – the quest for seeking passion, purpose, and leadership through your work (job, career, or business)
• Finances – the act of making money in something you find exciting and rewarding, eventually building wealth to have the freedom to do what you want
• Spirituality – the higher something that helps people make sense of the world and provides courage when facing adversity

Reflection:

• Rate yourself (scale from 0 to 10) on yourself in each of the major categories.
• Compare this number to what you have laid out in your Ideal Day Vision.

Live It Challenge:

• Walk or exercise regularly to improve your health.
• Build emotional intelligence by asking yourself:
  • What is great about this?
  • What can I learn from this?
  • What can I do better next time?
• Challenge yourself to laugh for at least ten minutes daily.
• If in a relationship, identify and improve the gifts you share most with your partner.
• If you are not in a relationship, brainstorm how you can share to benefit your friends, family, community.
• Schedule quality time to be present with family or close friends without technology.
• Brainstorm how you can add more meaning and purpose to your professional life.
• Create a budget or financial plan to map out income, expenses, savings, and investments.
• Brainstorm how you will transform your intentions into actions.

Chapter 4: Igniting Your Emotional Rocket Fuel For Results

In Live It, Jairek Robbins claims there is a difference between knowing what to do and doing what you know. Take your knowledge and translate it into action to get results. 

Emotional Rocket Fuel

However, taking consistent action can be difficult, as you may lack Emotional Rocket Fuel: 

Emotional Rocket Fuel – “the source of strong motivation and the reason that people reach and exceed their goals”

Thus, you need to discover and ignite the Emotional Rocket Fuel to empower you to achieve outstanding outcomes in your personal and professional life. There are two keys to doing so:

1. Find Your Big Why: Determine your Big Why, which is “the reason and purpose behind why you do what you do.”
2. Activate Your Big Why: Transform your knowledge using Emotional Stacking to exceed the emotional threshold for taking action daily. You can stack emotions or atomic habits to satisfy the:
   1. Motivation to pursue pleasure
   2. Motivation to avoid pain

There are two challenges to help you ignite your Emotional Rocket Fuel:

1. Overcome Your Fears: Manage your associations with fear to gather the courage and bravery to simply take action.
2. Choose the Hard-Easy Over Easy-Hard: Choose to do the difficult work before the easy steps.

Note, that this emotional rocket fuel is different than the visionary-integrator relationship in Gino Wickman’s Rocket Fuel (book summary).

Live It Challenge:

• Determine your Big Why in your personal and professional life.
• Ponder your Big Why daily to motivate and help you achieve your goals.
• Create a visual to remind you of your Big Why.
• Determine the fears that hinder you from taking action.
• Commit to choosing an area of your life to apply the hard-easy concept right away and be so good they can’t ignore you.

Chapter 5: Falling In Love With Hard Work

Many people believe that they can simply skip to the end results. And so many can start a project, goal, or relationship; however, it takes courage and commitment to finish what you started. Thus, choose hard work over instant gratification. It will allow you to explore your passions, achieve your dreams, and live a fulfilling life. If you need help getting organized at work, check out this blog post.

Shift Your Perspective

You can change your mindset for how you view hard work by:

• Committing to your decision to work hard and stick it out.
• Brainstorming how to reignite your interest in hard work.
• Listing everything that you enjoy about the hard work.

Live It Challenge:

• Identify an area of your life that you are struggling with.
• For that area, shift your perspective by brainstorming ways to make it more interesting, enjoyable, or meaningful.

Chapter 6: The Three Opponents

In Live It, Jairek Robbins describes the three opponents that will prevent you from achieving your significant goals:

• Outside Opponents – the people that know you on a surface level, developed the right way to live, and resist your perspective and vision
• Intimate Opponents – the people closest to you in your life that know who you are, care about your well-being, and will make you doubt yourself and choices
• Internal Opponent – the voice in your head that causes doubt and lowers confidence

Find Your Truth

Create positive habits to build certainty and determination to overcome doubt using the TRUTH framework:

• T – Define your trajectory in your Ideal Day Vision.
• R – Rebuke the naysayers, renounce their doubts, and be relentless in your approach.
• U – Be unconventional strategically, unified internally, and unassailable.
• T – Have the tenacity to overcome the advisory and progress consistently.
• H – Create daily atomic habits to form your safe haven and provide harmony.

Live It Challenge:

• Apply the TRUTH framework in your personal and professional life.
• Create daily atomic habits to focus and take consistent actions on your goals.

Chapter 7: You Are Not Guaranteed A Tomorrow

You are not guaranteed to live tomorrow. Eventually, you die, and all your stuff, money, and recognition will be gone. However, people will remember you for how you positively affected their lives. 

Tools To Help You Live It

In Live It, Jairek Robbins describes a near-death experience and provides several tools to give a new outlook on life:

• Practice Gratitude: Be thankful and show appreciation for what you have right now instead of what you want in the future.
• Determine Values: Decide on the guiding principles that frame your worldview and help guide your behavior to do the right thing
• Time Management: Use your time wisely using the Eisenhower Matrix, which categorizes tasks according to importance and urgency.
• Create a Live It List: Ensures that goals stay in your mind and hold you accountable for achieving them in a specific timeframe.

Five Regrets of Dying

Bronnie Ware, a nurse, asked her patients about what they regretted most in their lives to find the following common responses:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Happiness is a choice, and you can increase it by focusing on activities that provide fulfillment over pleasure.

Live It Challenge:

• Start a gratitude journal and write down at least one thing you are grateful for each day.
• Identify the top ten parts of your life that you value most and organize them by importance.
• Manage your time using your chosen system, such as time blocking, Eisenhower Matrix, Pomodoro technique, etc.
• Brainstorm a list of what you want to accomplish in life and prioritize them by urgency.

Download the PDF Book Summary for Live It by Jairek Robbins

Chapter 8: Back In The Minors

Instead of focusing on growth and fulfillment, Jairek Robbins says in Live It that we tend to fall back into the minors of life by:

• Living out someone else’s life and values
• Getting caught up in the day-to-day grind
• Holding limiting beliefs about what you can accomplish
• Feeling learned helplessness that you are always stuck
• Experiencing dissonance from the people around you

How To Get Out of the Minors

You can get back to fulfilling your Ideal Day Vision by:

• Changing your mindset regarding the story that you tell yourself and feel better
• Changing your actions, through time, effort, and grit, to improve your results
• Making decisions to consciously identify and write down your values
• Respecting other peoples’ values and needs and help them achieve their goals

Four Levels of Awareness

There are four levels that influence how people interpret their world:

1. Self: They care about themselves and meeting their own needs.
2. Community: They recognize or agree with the viewpoints of their community
3. Global: They understand the abundance of values, beliefs, and opinions in the world.
4. Spiritual: They appreciate and try to experience others’ perspectives as they believe that everyone is connected.

Live It Challenge:

• Identify a limiting belief, change the story you tell yourself, and change your results daily.
• Determine the activities that you are spending the most time on every week.
• Determine what level of awareness you usually are at and how you can transition to live at level 4 consistently.

Chapter 9: Finding The True You

You should uncover your true and authentic self to have a fulfilling life. You need to love and respect yourself before fully experiencing it from others.

Discover Your Authentic Self

The following exercise helps people discover who they are using six questions:

1. From whom did you want love, approval, or acceptance the most when you were growing up?
2. Who did you think you had to be in order to receive this positive reinforcement?
3. Who did you think you could never be, or you would lose these people’s positive reinforcement?
4. Who are you today? Out of everything you listed earlier, which traits are still part of how you would describe yourself now?
5. What would you have to add or completely remove from this list of who you are today to be the true, authentic you—to get back to who you are at your core and be the person who is capable of turning your Ideal Day vision into reality?
6. What would you need more or less of on this list to be the true, authentic you?

Now, you can determine whether who you are today matches your true self or wanting to please others. If you have a misalignment, you can make the shift to be the authentic you.

Live It Challenge:

• Realign your values to represent the authentic you:
  • Decide whether each value represents the authentic you.
  • If not, remove it from your list or reduce its rank in your priorities.
  • Identify new values that you feel represent the authentic you.
  • Order your list of values in order of importance.
• Review your new values list daily for a month.
• Reflect upon whether you are taking action in alignment with your values.

Chapter 10: Harnessing Your Mental Strength

Imagine being able to go out into the world 100 percent full, day after day. Regardless of your goals, you need to start with your mind to achieve incredible outcomes. Mental strength can be inspiring, but claims that you still need to take regular action to get results.

Harness Your Mental Strength

In Live It, Jairek Robbins provides the following tools and exercises to help you harness your mental strength:

• Add Automation: Create a playlist of YouTube videos, songs, or audio to get you energized for your day.
• Create a Vision Board: Helps you visualize your motivation with goals, thoughts, ideas, quotes, and affirmations.
• Have a Mental Rehearsal: Envision precisely what you are about to do and focus on how you will do it to the best of your ability.
• Harness Your Thoughts: Use the power of prayer, meditation, or positive thinking, especially towards others instead of yourself.

Live It Challenge:

• Spend five minutes to rehearse mentally about the vital challenges in your day.
• Pray or meditate for 10-20 minutes per day to clear your mind and prepare for the actions you will take.

Chapter 11: Raising Your Standards

The environment that you surround yourself with reflects the standards you hold for yourself. Your environment consists of how you dress, who you spend time with, and what your financial picture looks like.

Raise Your Standards

If you are not satisfied with an area of your life, you need to raise your standards using four steps:

1. Beliefs: Identify your current limiting beliefs (prevent you from reaching goals) and empowering beliefs (help you succeed).
2. Decision: Decide to no longer allow limiting beliefs to prevent you from getting the outcomes you want.
3. Commitment: Commit to your decision of breaking through your limiting beliefs and raising your standards.
4. Action: Take 10X actions and raise your standards:
   1. Focused Action: Don’t multitask as it lowers your productivity. Instead, focus on one task at a time.
   2. Consistent Action: More action over time increases your chance of getting the results you want.

Live It Challenge:

• Determine the top limiting belief preventing you from living your Ideal Day Vision.
• Decide to break through your limiting beliefs and raise your standards.
• Commit 100 percent to break through your limiting beliefs and raise your standards.
• Take consistent action to create momentum to achieve your life and work goals.

Chapter 12: Ideal Life Vision

Similar to producing your Ideal Day Vision, you will create your Ideal Life Vision encapsulating a longer timeframe. You will identify what you want to do in life and then understand how you will get there.

Ideal Life Vision Exercise

Spend at least 30 minutes creating your Ideal Life Vision:

1. Imagine what your life would be like in 20 years, and brainstorm everything that you want to do in that time.
2. Focus on the majors, and specifically outline what you want in each category.
3. Create a set of SMART goals for each major category.
4. Work backward to break down the milestones you need to get to fulfill your Ideal Life Vision.
5. Further break up larger goals into smaller ones to get ten-year, five-year, yearly, six-month, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily actions.

Strategies For Your Ideal Day Vision

There are several strategies to help live out your Ideal Day Vision:

• Gather Tools and Resources: Get additional help from books to learn, training to teach you skills, friends to help you, coaches to hold you accountable, etc.
• Measure and Adjust: Constantly measure your progress to ensure you are tracking to your goals. If you are off track, then adjust your approach to get back on track and make progress.
• Allow for Grace: After doing the best you can on your goals, you realize that you do not have total control over the situation. Now, allow for grace to intervene and finish what you started.

Live It Challenge:

• Establish a system to measure and adjust your life daily, including asking these questions:
  • What was great about today?
  • What did I learn from today?
  • What could I have done better?
  • How can I apply it for tomorrow?
• Create a list of how divine grace has affected you in the past to remind you to look out for it in the future.
• Celebrate all of your achievements daily, no matter how big or small.

Download the PDF Book Summary for Live It by Jairek Robbins

Next Steps: Check out Live It by Jairek Robbins

This book is the beginning of achieving your Ideal Life. You have gotten the knowledge to make changes, and now you have to take consistent, focused action toward your goals. Read Live It by Jairek Robbins and challenge yourself to learn, live, and give all that you can every day.