The Alchemy of Greatness

Summary

Just as an alchemist has the legendary ability to turn one metal into another, so can you transform your own life. You have the ability to change yourself and your fortune.

Here are some lessons on the Alchemy of Greatness:

• Training is how you transform your body and your life. You push yourself and do the work that most people are not willing to do. There is no easy way, but YOU have the ability to do it…because YOU are the Alchemist!
• The goal is not to get rid of the negative things in your life, but to TRANSFORM them into a positive. Take the negative circumstances and you plug it into positive action, to positive belief, to positive training. 
• You transform your life by taking charge of it. Take advantage of the tons of training and opportunities that are out there to help you change your income, health, relationships, your thinking, and all other aspects of your life. 
• Transformation comes with death. Your old self, limiting beliefs, and your small thinking must die. They have to be replaced by someone who dreams bigger & knows what is possible.

Full Transcript

Hey there, it’s Kevin Ward with YesMasters Real Estate Success Training, and this is a conversation about the Alchemy of Greatness. 

Now, if you’ve heard of The Alchemist or alchemy, the science of alchemy is the legendary ability of a scientist, of an alchemist, to turn one metal into another metal, to transform lead into gold. So this was the ultimate alchemy, it’s that somebody can take lead and turn it into gold. So they could take a worthless metal or a cheap metal that didn’t have a lot of value, and they could turn it into a very valuable metal like gold. 

And there was a book written years ago called The Alchemist, which I read years ago, and I don’t really remember that much of the story, except if I remember correctly, the story was that there was a kid who was seeking his fortune or whatever, and he was trying to figure out how to turn some metal into gold or something like that.

And what he discovered at the end was that he was The Alchemist, and that it was not his ability to turn lead into gold, it was his ability to change his own fortune, to change himself, to change himself. But this just hit me this morning, and I’ll tell you why, what happened to me this morning, and then what I think are the lessons about what I call the Alchemy of Greatness, which I just made up this morning. So here is the deal.

The Pain of Transformation

This morning, I went to work out, do my CrossFit with my personal trainer, Forrest Jung, who owns South Bay CrossFit here in the South Bay of Los Angeles, and he is an elite trainer.

He is just one of the best CrossFit trainers that I’ve ever heard of or ever seen, and so he pushes me way beyond where I would push myself. And I tell him, I joke with him all the time when we’re in the last set of an exercise, I’ll be like, “This is why I pay you, because I wouldn’t do this set. It’s you pushing me harder than I push myself.” And he took a picture of me this morning, which I’m going to post on Instagram. By the time you see this video, it will have already been posted.

And the video is of me laying on the floor writhing in agony after doing an ab workout. And I had no idea he took the picture, he sent me the picture, and I looked at that picture and I’m like, “That’s exactly how I felt, man.” I mean, I was laying there, I was dead on the floor. My abs were just burning and I was in excruciating agony, but it’s the agony of victory, it’s that, “Yes!” 

And then I laid there as I looked at the picture and I was like, “I think if I look at it close,” because part of my belly is showing and I’m like, “That’s embarrassing. I don’t want people to see my belly because I still got belly fat.” And I realized, wait a second, but this is the journey. I am transforming the fat into muscle and my goal is not to lose fat, my goal is to transform fat into muscle.

And I know that biologically you’re not transforming fat in a muscle. You’re burning off fat and you’re building muscle. I get that. But in my mind, I’m like, “I don’t want to get rid of fat. I want to transform it from fat into muscle.” 

Transformation is a Journey

And I realized, this is the way you do it. You train, train your butt off. You push yourself. You do the work that most people are not willing to do to transform their body. And I just turned 57 years old, and if you don’t use it, you lose it. And the older you get, the harder it is to regain what you lose. So I’m like, “I’ve got to change. I’m going to make a lifestyle change.”

This is the new habit. I can’t just get in shape, I’ve got to stay in shape. I can’t burn fat and lose weight. I’ve got to stay healthy. I’ve got to eliminate the fat, not lose it and regain it like most of us do in the yo-yo diet world. And so as I’m looking at that picture of me laying there, I’m like, “I am transforming my body,” and I am using the science of alchemy of transforming fat into muscle.

And I was like, “Isn’t it interesting that the only way you can transform fat into muscle is to work out.” There is no pill that turns fat into muscle. Now, you can take pills to burn fat, you can diet to burn fat, but you can’t diet your way to gaining muscle.

You only do that through training, physical exercise. So physical exercise will cause you to burn calories, and if you’re balanced at all, it’s not just working out. You also have to have the right diet and all of that. But if you do it right through the training, through the pain, through the crying, through the work, fat becomes muscle. Again, not biologically, but practically, the fat disappears and muscle takes its place. And it looks better, it feels better. It’s more powerful all the way around. 

Too many of us spend too much of our life waiting for something to come along to take away the things we don’t want in our life and to bring in the things we do want in our life. So I want to eliminate debt and I want to make money, and I’m waiting for something to come along or some magic pill or some magic bullet or some magic formula to come along that will make it easy for me to eliminate debt and gain money.

How do you Transform Your Life?

So it’s the alchemy. How do I alchemy? How do I turn debt into wealth? How do you do that? How do you take brokenness and turn it into wealth? How do you transform it? And here’s how you transform it, by you taking charge and you doing the things that will transform your debt, your lack of money into an abundance of money. And you have the ability to do it. We live in a country that is limitless in opportunity. Whether you live in America or anywhere in the world, right now, there’s never been a time where globally there is more opportunity to create wealth for almost any human being who is willing to do the work, to get the training, to learn the stuff, and then do the stuff that can transform scarcity into abundance, it can transform bad relationships into good relationships, it can transform the loneliness into intimacy, it can transform anger and depression into joy and fulfillment and gratitude, it can transform obesity into elite physical condition.

Turning the Negative Into a Positive

Whatever it is you want in your life that can transform from boredom to a life of acceleration, you have it in you to transform what you don’t want in your life into something you do want in your life. Instead of waiting for something to come along to take away the negative in your life, why not turn the negative into a positive? 

Because here’s the thing, you want power. You think of it like electricity. How do you get electrical power? It takes positive ions called protons, combined with negative charge, which is electrons, and you put protons and electrons together, and guess what? You get electricity. It takes both. 

If you just have positive charged protons without electrons, you get no power. It takes the negative plus the positive to create power. That’s the alchemy. That’s the transformation, is you take the negative that you don’t want in your life and you transform it into the positive that you do want in your life. You combine it with the desire for the positive, the desire to eliminate the negative, and you take the negative circumstances and you plug it into positive action to positive belief, to positive training. 

If you don’t know what to do, you’ve got to learn what to do. You’ve got to get the help. You’ve got to get the mentorship, the coaching, or whatever it is like I do with my body. I’m like, “Okay, technically I probably know what to do to get healthy, but I won’t do it. I don’t push myself.” And then when I get stuck, I’m like, “I don’t know what to do,” or I’m not willing to push myself. So I hire a coach like Forrest, who will push me when I don’t want to be pushed. Because his commitment is to my goals, just like I’m committed. When I lose the commitment to my goals, he still has them, so he still pushes me.

So, my friend, you are The Alchemist. Take in your life, what you have that you don’t want, and look at what you do want and say, “I am going to transform the circumstances and the situations and the things in my life that I don’t want into the things that I do want.” 

The Death That Comes with Transformation

Now, in the process of alchemy, in the process of transformation, there is inevitably going to be pain. And to be real honest with you, a lot of times that pain is going to be beyond just pain. It is actually going to require death. It is going to require for you to put to death some of the things in your life, or even parts of your life, even the conditioned mind, the way you think, to the old person in you that is bounded by scarcity and limiting beliefs, that person will have to die in order for you to be reborn into the new person that you can become, to create the alchemy.

If you take lead and transform it into gold, the lead has to go away in order for the gold to appear. And that requires the death of your whole self, your limiting beliefs, your small thinking. All of that’s got a die to be replaced by the big dreamer, by the possibility, by the one who knows absolutely what is possible. 

You got this. Figure out what you want. Figure out what you don’t want. Focus on what you do want. And begin the work of transformation. You, my friend, are The Alchemist.