Enjoy this excerpt from Chapter 3 of The 200% Life: Your Guide to Spiritual Growth & Business Success Without Meditating on a Mountaintop.

Get your copy of The 200% Life: Your Guide to Spiritual Growth & Business Success Without Meditating on a Mountaintop now on Amazon.

Hey everybody, today I am very excited to share with you a chapter from a new book, the 200% Life. It's actually chapter three, one of my favorite chapters, and I think it is a really good job of identifying a struggle that a lot of business leaders, entrepreneurs, high achievers ask. I know it's been one that we get asked a lot in our podcasts and emails and direct messages to us and it's really this like how do you coexist? Right, how does business and spirituality come together? How do they integrate together? Why lose my business edge? Well, I not want to work anymore. What happens to my family? All these questions that happened from there, and the book serves as a model for how to really answer that question. Why? Because it's been a question on my mind for 2030 years of how do they both coexist? And I had to go through the whole business side first and make a bunch of money and make a bunch of mistakes and realize, well, that doesn't work. And then only to be pointed to the direction of how do you do the inner work? And then, when I started doing inner work, it was more of like, well, what happens to the outer world? And then I finally realized that they come together. So chapter three I'm super excited to read it to you today. It's been amazing. The book's been out for about a week. Thank you so much for the emails and thoughts and how it's impacting you and all of you and the thoughts that you have about the book and different things, and so we're super excited to get this out to you today. Enjoy chapter three and please do pick up the book. It will be on audible relatively soon and look forward to hearing your comments, thank you.

Chapter three business meets spirituality. Business is nothing but a conduit for your personal and spiritual growth. Adam Hergenrother and yes, I did just quote myself in my own book. It's pretty funny. It's actually a big backstory. One time we'll share a podcast with quoting myself. Anyways, we'll get to that later, but I want to read today chapter three for you.

While on the surface, it appears that business and spirituality remember, we're talking about spirituality here, not religion should be kept at arm's length, they're actually a great compliment to each other. What better way to grow spiritually in personally than to have to handle all of the challenges of working in a business managing unhappy clients, making and managing large amounts of money, experiencing cash shortfalls, communicating with different and sometimes difficult personalities, hiring and firing people, navigating a global pandemic, and everything in between. In this fast paced, achievement oriented, productivity hacking world we live in, I think we've all forgotten how to just live and play and enjoy life. We grit our teeth, clench our fists and hustle and grind until we burn out. We are stressed, anxious, overwhelmed and uninspired. To what end? Let you in on a little secret here no one gets out alive. We are all going to die. We're only here for a very short period of time and we often take ourselves way too seriously. What if we just relaxed, released and surrendered a little bit? What would life look like? How would it feel?

Can business and spirituality coexist? I don't only think that business and spirituality can coexist, but that they must coexist. The business leaders of tomorrow are going to have to be just as concerned with their spiritual and inner growth as they are with the bottom line in order to thrive in our new global economy. A decade ago, I don't think I would have been having these conversations, much less hosted podcasts and read a book about this very topic. 15 years ago, I had a very narrow definition of what business meant and that money, success and significance, at least to me In spirituality met church on Christmas Eve or a celibate yogi living alone in a small house meditating on a mountaintop and renouncing money in worldly possessions. Business and spirituality were never in the same conversation. Based on my belief of what spirituality meant, I knew that was not the life I wanted. So when I was 25, I ignored any thoughts of spirituality and set my aim on mastering the business world, and I wasn't looking to merely be moderately successful here. I was prepared to dominate anything and anyone I needed to in order to achieve my goals. In dominate I did.

In my first year of real estate I was breaking sales records and winning both local and national awards. My assistant built the lake house and had a Hummer and Porsche park in the garage. I hit my dream big annual number in just a few years and I wanted everyone to know so. At a holiday party at my mom's house I told her I had made about $500,000 that year, of course, loud enough for other family and friends to hear. She looked at me and said that's great, honey, can you pass the catch up? She didn't care. My mom didn't value money in the same way and she still doesn't. Her love for me and my worst in the family didn't depend on outside alcoleads or how much money was in my bank account. Her love was unconditional. So while she was proud of me, my external awards didn't affect how she felt about me one way or another. That's when it hit me. My mom didn't care. Did anyone care? Did I even care? The money made no difference to how my mom felt about me. So why did it change how I felt?

It was at this moment that I experienced a profound insight that money was never going to be the answer to whether or not I felt adequate or significant. I started questioning if there was more to life than money, material possessions and recognition. I started wrestling with this idea and questioning everything. Money is money, joy is joy. This pointed me towards a new path, a path of self exploration and inner work. As I started down this path, I wasn't quite sure what would happen to my business and financial success. To a certain degree, I was okay with that. I mean, there was a part of me, that lower self, that ego, that wasn't okay with it at all. But I knew that I didn't want to live a false life anymore, a life of chasing things to turn on my energy and make me feel okay, of thinking that a car, a house or whatever would make me feel better permanently. It's just false, it's not wrong, it just doesn't work. So I became open to what showed up.

After that week, my wife, Sarah, gave me the gift of transcendental meditation for my birthday. I went to an introductory class right away and have been practicing it every day, twice a day, for 20 minutes each session ever since. Somewhere over 200,000 hours of meditation. From there I knew my real work was inner work. Yet I still wanted to create and build an outer world. I still wanted to play in business and sports and have children and experience all life has to offer. So I began to learn how to do both. I felt pulled towards a path of using money as an opportunity to grow personally and spiritually. What if I could experience both? And what if I could teach others how to do that too, becoming a fierce competitor.

When spirituality and business collide, great things happen. When they coexist. The world gets emotionally intelligent, conscious leaders who understand the importance of welcoming their employees whole selves to work. We get authentic and productive employees who want to contribute to the company and beyond we get companies that are just as conscious of humanity, the environment and the world as they are about growth and profit. We get business professionals who can communicate with honesty, transparency and vulnerability in order to get shit done without becoming attached to the outcome. We get a whole ecosystem of people who are clear, centered and neutral and make decisions from this place of clarity, rather than pushing away spirituality and exploration of the inner self because it's too soft for the business world or you believe that you may lose your edge.

I would encourage you to reconsider. I would argue that spirituality and inner work makes you a fierce competitor in the business world. You are clear and concise. Your decisions are not rash. You consider the ideas, feelings and consequences of your decision before you direct others to act. You bring joy, enthusiasm, creativity and energy to your work and to those around you. If that doesn't create great employees and great companies, I don't know what does. I believe business and spirituality are the future. The path is in front of you. What will you choose? You know I chose chapter three to read because I think it does a really good job of showcasing the difference between business and spirituality.

As a place to start, you know I'm really excited about this book the 200% Life. It's a model, a framework for how you can answer these two questions that are essentially discussed in chapter three, which is how do I have this worldly life but not be in it? How do I know that the things that I accomplish out there aren't gonna permanently fulfill me? If you've been a long-time listener of the podcast, you know that we talk about this often, but there's nothing that you're ever gonna get, because you've already gotten so many different things throughout your entire life, from your first driver's license to turning 21, to getting a certain house or whatever it is. If it's not this, it's next. So the minute you get one thing, you just want something else. Things that were once a luxury item, once you have them, are no longer your luxury items and they just become necessities. So it's this inner, deep transformation that we start to go on, but it doesn't mean you have to lose anything else. You know I always find it interesting.

We talk about Eckhart totally being a spiritual teacher, and yet one of the most common questions he gets is like why are you in Starbucks? How do you drink wine? Right? I think we have this perception of people that are doing spiritual work, are literally meditating on a mountain top in front of a fire like sitting Indian style, which isn't even comfortable, right, it's not that at all. In fact, the more you can lean into life, the more that you can truly lean into the depth of experience of life, the more you get to realize what you get to let go of.

If you go, try to hide some place or somewheres, you actually could be doing yourself a disservice for your own growth. Sure, you may be able to get it relatively okay, because nobody will bother you. Isn't that why most of us want money and power and fame to be able to get the external world, the moments, the experiences, the vacations, everything we want the way we want it, so we can control our inner experience that way? That's a lot of work, isn't it? It's a lot of energy. It's a lot of false sense that we have to get something and then we have to try not to lose it and we have to try to avoid everything else. And so you walk around scared, anxious, frustrated, irritated, trying to hold it all together, and you just walk around this cloak of anxiety. Right, it's just there. So the 200% life just kind of shows you that you can do both. You can certainly go out and you know you can easily go out there and have things if you want them. You can not have things.

It's each one of us a thought. You know recently we talked about this in a podcast which a thought of living a very simple life meaning I'm gonna go sell most of my stuff and I'm just gonna go live in a very simple life is the same as literally somebody going out there and saying I want a whole bunch of things in my life. I understand the outcomes look different, but both of them are a thought. One's a thought to live a simple life and that's gonna make me happier. One's the thought of going out and getting things and that's gonna make me happier. Now I'm not gonna debate which one is better. Right, that's for up to you. But the clearer you get, the more this will fall into your lap, the easier it'll be to see. I do think there's structural, mechanical things you can do, such as living below your means will certainly aid in your ability to feel better. I mean, there's no question about that. So it's not about putting things on credit card to do those things, but if you're gonna fork things and go out and do it.

I've heard spiritual teachers massive spiritual teachers talk about things they've purchased and they don't. You know it's funny because you don't like talk too much about that, but they can live a very ordinary life too, because it's just playing with the world. So again, it makes you a fierce competitor. It also makes you just a fierce individual to lean into life and really enjoy the experience that's there, watching the unfolding of it. And again, you know, talk about the beginning of the book, about just and you're not gonna make it out alive Everyone's going to die.

I mean, we just know that and you just don't wanna come to grip with that. So what is the fear of death? It's fear of death because people think that there's still some special experience that they can get. Reality is, life owes you nothing and there's no special experience. There's different experiences. But if you keep thinking that there's a different experience that you have to obtain before you can leave here, you're gonna be searching all along because it's actually right in front of you. The search itself causes you to not even be in it. So when we get so caught in the doing world and the search world, it pulls us back into our doing instead of realizing what you're looking for in the doing is sitting there staring you in the face if you just call off the search.

And once her Gangaji, who's a famous she talks a lot about her, like at cartoli is kind of like the power of now guy, like present moment. Michael Singer is very much into surrender and racks and release and Gangaji is very much into call off the search, which is, yeah, they're all saying, they're all pointing in the same direction. They say it differently so people can hear it differently. You know Gangaji is big about call off. The search is call off doing things, thinking that they're going to turn on, call off looking for that special experience because you're actually in it and I think that's the gift that you get. The minute you can call off, the minute you can wrap your head or put it to rest a little bit so that you can realize you can go do both. You can build a business and enjoy life and have money and kids or not have any of those things and you can still work on your inner world.

But the key is to lean into life. It's not leaning away from it, it's not trying to get the life the way you want it to be, but in my experience, if you let go of needing life to be a certain way, it unfolds exactly as it should just for you, maybe in a different way than your mind dreamt up, but it still gives you the gift of what you're looking for, which is inner peace, inner wealth. Right, it's not about wealth outwardly anymore, it's inner wealth. I actually believe and this is just just talking at this point, but forecasting here at some point in the 50, 60, 70 years, maybe 40 years, I don't know away we will probably be in some point where our society could even be faster. It could be 20 years where productivity is so high and we have robots in AI moving at such speeds that in terms of work output, it's so high that work becomes a choice. Is there a universal income and then people just get to decide if they want to work?

You think about it doesn't sound. It doesn't sound a little out there. But if you think about food, 150 years ago, being overweight was considered wealth and sexy, if you will, right. And now, when food became you because food wasn't around, you had to work for it and get it, and if you had food, you could put on weight then it showed you had food and you were wealthy. So put you up a status symbol and then fast forward. You know, 100 years after that food was ubiquitous, it became everywhere's and now it's the opposite. Now it's status symbol to not be that and to show that you have restraint and different things. Well, the same thing will happen with productivity. The same thing is going to occur in terms of things, whether 3D printing print you out of Lamborghini or, you know, jet, I don't know, there's different things that are coming out there and at some point, productivity will get so high that work will be a choice. And then again, I think it's gonna be that inner wealth, that inner experiences, that new I don't wanna call it status, but the new driver which is already happening right now anyways, we're all focused on that right now anyways. So that's the gift.

Hope you enjoy the book. Love to hear your comments on it. I'm open. You know there's a lot that I wanted to get in in terms of deeper spiritual work, which at some point there will be a follow-up book to this that focuses more on that.

But this I really wanted to bridge the gap for where a lot of our audiences which is, business leaders, I think struggling with that question which I think the 200% life solves. So hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed putting this together for you as a guide to help you on your life. Enjoy. So there you have it, chapter three, wrapped up the 200% life. If this resonates with you, grab a copy and share your thoughts with me. You can find that on Amazon or by visiting adamhergenrother.com slash books. The link is also in the show notes. To me, the best part of doing this podcast and really writing the 200% life book is the conversations that lead to business leaders like you doing this deep, deep inner work. So I'd love to hear your experience of living a 200% life. If you know somebody else who lives a 200% life, please share this episode with them. Thank you very much.