YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE ***FREE TALK w/ John Patrick Morgan***
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE
***FREE TALK w/ John Patrick Morgan***
It was in a recent conversation with a friend that I stumbled into the realization that throughout all of my life, I’d been unwittingly creating the freedom I have to take risks.
As the adage goes:
Risk equals reward.
Undoubtedly, my willingness to take risks has been instrumental in what I‘ve been able to create in my life.
Whilst I’ve known that I lived by the idea that one must take risks to bear rewards, I’ve often wondered why is it that I have been so able and willing to risk everything when others are often unwilling to risk even a little.
Some reasons I’ve explored are;
While I’m sure there is some truth in all of these, what became apparent to me recently is that at the heart of my freedom to take risks was a single idea.
It was an idea I’d been living all of my life, but which I’d never noticed before.
When I was about twelve, I remember building a fort on an empty lot in the new development we’d moved into. I knew that soon the developers would come and knock it down as they cleared the land, but that didn’t matter because the wood was free scrap I’d taken from other construction sites and we didn’t own the land anyway. “I have nothing to lose”, I would think as I dragged long planks and sheets of plywood onto the lot.
When I was at University, booking the tour for my band at cities up and down the east coast, I remember thinking that if the venues didn’t deliver - or if our rent-a-wreck tour van didn’t make it to the venue - that it wouldn’t matter because otherwise, we’d just be hanging out in our hometown on Thayer Street anyway, wishing we’d were on tour. I just went for it because we had nothing to lose.
When I was flipping houses in the early 2000s, at around 23 years old with my name on the title for a handful of properties, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in mortgage debts tied to my name, I remember not worrying if it all fell apart, because I had nothing to lose. In fact, I remember driving in my mentor’s convertible to look at a multi-million dollar project and he remarked to me “I like the way you think” when I was explaining to him how “all the properties I own were paid for with money from partners and banks. I’ve only invested my time, so I have nothing to lose.”
This continued into my existing career in personal development. In my early years, when I wasn’t making enough to afford rent in London and living with my now-in-laws, I remember telling my now-wife that I was going to offer a CEO a coaching program at a fee far higher than I'd been paid before. “I’m already living with my girlfriend’s parents in her childhood bedroom, so I don’t really have anything to lose!” I said. Within a few days, the CEO had paid in full and we used the money to rent a flat in London.
These memories had come streaming back to me in that recent conversation I mentioned. With my friend, I was explaining how different my life had become now that I have a wife and two kids and a farm with 2 cats, 50 chickens, and fruit trees, and, on top of all that, a company with a team and payroll.
As I was speaking, I could hear an echo of my words, like a kind of deja-vu, where I remembered sharing them before. This is what happens on the inside when I become aware that a story I’ve been telling is something that may have started as an innocent and accurate description of circumstances but has moved from acknowledgment into a kind of activation and encouragement. There is an automaticness to the telling, a familiar tone, and the use of words. The repetitiveness squeals at me like a microphone feeding back through a speaker. The squealing stopped when I spoke the final words:
“WHAT’S DIFFERENT IS THAT, NOW, I HAVE STUFF TO LOSE.”
In the wake of those words, I fell incredibly silent. My friend was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her. It was as if the volume of the outside world had gone low and muffled as, in a daze, I watched all the memories of times I’d spoken the opposite.
What slammed into my awareness as if a pan had hit me on the side of the head was that all throughout my life, in the countless times I’d spoken the words “I have nothing to lose”, while I thought I was describing the fact of my circumstances, I was actually generating a perspective from which I was experiencing my life.
That perspective I was generating was one in which I had nothing to lose.
BUT I DIDN'T REALIZE I HAD BEEN CREATING THIS PERSPECTIVE.
As far as I was concerned, it was the fact that the wood and the empty lot weren’t mine that I had nothing to lose in building the fort there.
It was the fact that we’d otherwise be just hanging out on Thayer Street that I had nothing to lose by booking my broke and unknown band a tour up and down the east coast.
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It was having not invested any of my own money in the real estate deals that I was sure gave me the chutzpah I had.
It was because I was already living with my girlfriend's parents that supposedly gave me the courage to offer drastically higher coaching fees which ended up turning our life around.
Or so I thought.
Putting my hands on my head and squeezing my hair in my fingers, I saw how all throughout my life, my simply speaking the words “I have nothing to lose” was never the description of fact that I thought it was.
Always, and every single time, my speaking had been the choosing of a perspective that was the literal source of my freedom.
Instantly, I saw how “having nothing to lose”, for me or for anyone, is never a fact of circumstance, but always a created reality.
From the turntable of my mind, I removed the record of the song of all the things I’ve acquired in recent years and I ended it skipping on that line “What’s different now is that I have things to lose”.
Onto the turntable, I replaced this newer record with an older one that skips too, but on a different, and shorter line, that points me in a very different direction.
“I HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE.”
The same farm I look out at from my office looks very different when this record is skipping.
When I think of my company, my car, my kid’s school, and even my wife and boys through the idea that ‘I have nothing to lose’, there is a sudden and pervasive lightness.
In fact, bringing the idea that ‘I have nothing to lose’ into my life again has felt like putting on old, well-worn, and comfortable clothes. I feel more at home with the idea that I have nothing to lose. It is a familiar freedom, in the space in which, love, creativity, joy, service, and power naturally emerge.
Some years ago, I wrote about how I had stopped missing people when I realized that I was missing my wife while hugging her goodbye at the airport, and then, for most of the time she was away, I wasn’t missing her at all. I chose to stop missing people when I realized that my ‘missing’ them wasn’t something caused by circumstances, but rather something that I was doing with my mind. I chose to use my mind to ‘be with’ people rather than to miss them.
It was a radical shift in experience, but what I am sharing here is even more radical.
When I can hold one of my boys in my arms, and at the same time, hold in my mind that ‘I have nothing to lose, including my son’, what arises is not some laissez-faire attitude.
No.
When I am with my boy and absent of any fear of losing him, my attention does not move on from him. Instead, it actually moves into presence with him. I see him more clearly for I am not distracted by imagined images of my loss of him.
The paradoxical power of having nothing to lose is that we actually deepen our presence with what we have. This presence provides a sense of abundance, gratitude, and love that moves us into action that is difference-making and productive.
The words I had habitually spoken and lived throughout my life were not a description of my circumstances.
They were a recurring declaration of having that I was activating, cultivating, and being.
Be still and know that you have nothing to lose.
Feel the freedom, feel the love, and feel the power this gives you.
Loving you, JPM
PS - On Thursday 10th August @ 9am HST I will be giving my next FREE TALK. This month I’ll be speaking about how ideas like ‘having nothing to lose’ and ‘not having to do anything’ liberate you to love in ways that paradoxically provide you with bountiful joy and immense power to create impact and value in business and personal relationships. If you’d like to join us live OR watch the 24 hour replay, comment below requesting the link.
THURSDAY 10TH AUGUST @ 9AM HAWAII / 12PM LA / 3PM NY / 8PM LONDON / 9PM PARIS / 12:30AM MUMBAI (NEXT DAY) / 5AM SYDNEY (NEXT DAY)