How to Cope With a Life That’s Not Fixed with the author of ‘Read This or Die’ Ray Edwards

Ray Edwards, welcome.

Thank you, Brad. I appreciate that so much. Happy to be here.

Glad to have you with me here today. In your mid-40s, your life was cruising along pretty good. You were a successful marketer and a copywriter, working with some big names in the field of marketing. Then something happened that basically rocked your world. Eventually, through a long journey, the Securitas process led you to writing your book, "Read This or Die," right?

What happened? Parkinson's disease happened. I was at a conference, but I was writing notes, which always had lots of notes. My handwriting started getting smaller and smaller, and I knew this was not right. So when I got back to my hotel room, I did what we all do: consulted Dr. Google. Dr. Google told me I had Parkinson's, and I was like, "That cannot be." So when I got back home, I saw a doctor in Spokane. A few months later, I went to the neurologist. Sure enough, they said I had Parkinson's, and it turns out they were right. Alive tonight.

At first, it's a life-changing diagnosis because it's way worse for me. It's degenerative, incurable, only gonna get worse, and has a predictable outcome, which is pretty horrible. "Here are some pills. Good luck. See you later." My neurologist told me as we got to know one another better over the years. I've seen the same neurologist now for 12 years in a row. He said, "You know, honestly, I'm a pill pusher. That's all I can do. We have a thing inside of our business. It's called diagnose and adios." How's that for hope-giving, Cambridge?

Kinda like, "See you later, dude." That led you in the process of dealing with this over the years, some ways successfully, some not so successfully. Eventually, it led you to write this book about your process, which I think is "Read This or Die." A pretty stark title that helps us get a context of how serious this is, right?

Yeah, for sure. I tried all kinds of things. I went into denial mode. I had been writing copy for alternative health practitioners and companies, so lots of pills, powders, potions, lotions, magnetic mats, red light therapies. I've written copy for a little guy, so I thought, "Well, my answer is somewhere in this world because I've written so much copy that's convinced me that stuff works." I tried it all, and when I say all, I mean all - crystal healing, energy work, and more. I went to miracle prayer services in the Christian church, both charismatic and non-charismatic. I exhausted all the avenues I could think of. I tried all the standard mainstream medical approaches like carbidopa levodopa pills, the gold standard treatment. The problem is it doesn't work. Over time, it gets less effective, and the side effects become worse than the disease itself. Take Michael J. Fox, for example; his constant movements are from the medication, not the disease. If he stopped taking it, he wouldn't be able to move at all.

I tried all those things, even exercise, crazy diets, supplements, and routines. I arrived at a point where I was getting worse, finding it difficult to walk, unable to travel alone for my speaking engagements. I hit a point of desperation, so I sat down and wrote myself a sales letter because I thought I needed to convince myself. I didn't want to continue living the way I was; I'd rather be dead or on the other side, whatever that was, because I had doubts at the time. It was painful, discouraging, and seemed hopeless. Someone said, "Depression is the inability to construct a hopeful future," or a sales letter that said, "Read this or die," die of failure, die fat, broke, with a string of broken promises behind you. Then I presented myself with alternatives: keep doing what you're doing and end up dead and useless in a pool of self-pity, or make the most of what you've got, give yourself a reason to live, and a meaningful code to live by. That's what pulled me out of the nosedive

And you wrote that out of your own context as a copywriter and marketer. You wrote what you knew. What I found fascinating about this particular sales letter to yourself was when I first read the title, "Read This or Die," I thought, "Okay, there's something about this that's profoundly pithy in the sense that it's a metaphor about life in so many ways." And there's a key word in your title that I want us to talk about today, and that word is "or." It's about choices. It's about "it's got to be this or that." You've talked about global metaphors and global beliefs.

So when we talk about global metaphors, we alone seem to have the ability to use metaphors. In fact, we're the only creatures we know of who have the capability of metaphor. That's why we have languages, probably why we have civilization, and why we have the internet. If we didn't have metaphor, we'd have none of that.

Global metaphors. If you want to know someone's global metaphor, ask them a simple question: What's life all about? What do you want to say life is like? Ask them, "What is life like?" Okay, what do you mean? What do you mean? Well, what is it? What would you compare it to? What is life like? Some people think they're funny, they'll say, "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." That's funny. But if they quote that, there's a good chance that's part of their global metaphor. They connect with that statement so much. It's how we compare and contrast and think, "Okay, tell me things are like." Life is like.

Now, if somebody says to you, "Life is a battle. Life is a trial by fire," you suddenly know a lot about how they feel about the world. What is the relationship like? What does a marriage like? Oh, marriage is like a tug of war. Really. Marriage is like a boxing match. Marriage is like a beautiful garden. Marriage is like heaven. However, the answer tells you so much about how they operate. What my global metaphor means to me as I go through life. If I feel like life is a battle, I'm gonna go out the door ready to fight.

So, global beliefs are things you believe to be true globally. If I say, "What is life about?" That's different than, "What are you comparing it to? What is life about?" Life is about winning. A lot of entrepreneurial types say that, about achieving. Life is about leaving a legacy. For so long, I thought that was a good thing to say, and it may be for somebody else, but for me, sometimes I get the question, "What kind of legacy do you want to leave?" And I'm like, I have no desire to leave a legacy other than, "How did I treat the people in my life? Did they feel loved and appreciated by me?" Some people may say, "What I want to leave behind is that people know I loved and appreciated them." And that's a belief. I believe that's the right thing to do. Why do you believe that?

Global metaphor casts a vibe or a feeling in the beliefs. That's what I'm really, yeah. That's a word you use, your plan. The pastor plan, the P in the word "pastor" is for pain. I thought about a couple of metaphors that came to mind on a continuum, a phrase that came up, whether it's Keynes's came to my mind almost automatically. One side of it is "life sucks, and then you die," versus "Don't worry, be happy." How do you react to that?

Sure, that's fascinating. This is why I always enjoyed talking with you because there's no small talk with you. I love that. I think the world could do with less small talk, and let's talk about real things.

But if I go back to what you asked just now, the pastor framework that I use in copywriting and that I use—it's just a way of thinking about persuasion. So for copywriters, it's how do you write messages that get people to do something or believe something? And then for us individuals, I realized when I needed help, and I had nothing else to turn to, I thought, "Well, you've been trading for decades now, selling them stuff. And you need to sell yourself some stuff." So P stands for person, problem, and pain, especially if you're writing to yourself. You're going through the book and writing the exercises out. You're thinking about what hurts. You begin this process to change your understanding of what is hurting and what I need really from.

And then A stands for amplify. And that's just about once we realize something hurts, we need to amplify the pain into the future. We need to ask ourselves, "If I do nothing about this, like if I think I have cancer and I have some symptoms, but I'm not gonna go to the doctor, I'm not gonna do anything about it because I don't want to know, that could have disastrous consequences. If I don't do something about my Parkinson's or if I know there's something about my attitude about my Parkinson's, that can also have disastrous results." And so I think through where am I going to end up if I don't do something about this. As I alluded to earlier in my letter to myself, I wrote, "You're going to end up fat, sick, broke, dead, let your wife down, to sundown," all these horrible things, and people, I get a lot of responses. People say, "I feel like you were kind of hard on yourself, man." But I know myself. I needed somebody to be hard on me.

The S in pastor is for story. This is key, Brad, because the stories we tell ourselves about our life, I believe, become the fabric of our life. In my workshops, for years now, I've done this exercise where I'll have people write out the story of their life. I want you to write it in one page, just sum it up. But write this way. Here are the rules: everything you write on the page has to be true, and everything you write on the page has to be tragic, bad, difficult, painful. It's all you get to write. So go have them write the page. Then I ask them to paper over or flip to a clean page and say, "Now I'm gonna have you write another version, this time, same rules: everything has to be true, and it has to be real, but it has to be happy and triumphant." Always good stuff. Go.

And I get a little pushback usually, but then they finally get in their head, "I can do this. My life wasn't all bad." So they write it up. And then when they're done, I ask the question, "Which story is true based on the rules? We know they're both true." Yes. So then the question becomes, "Which story have I been telling?" And almost overwhelmingly, the answer is always, "I've been telling the negative story, the negative part." Yeah, the story of your life is not your life. It's just a story. Now, I don't mean to downplay any painful thing you've been through, but I am asking you to consider. Do you want to continue replaying that over and over in your head? Is that helping you? I think the answer is no. And I'm not a positive thinking guy. I'm a pragmatic optimist. That means I do not believe the best thing will always happen. But I believe we can always choose to make the best of what does.

Bad things do happen to good people?

Yes, I hear this phrase a lot. People will say to me, and they mean, "Well, they say everything happens for a reason." Oh, boy, well, yes. Everything does happen for a reason, sometimes the bad reason.

I agree with you completely on that.

Yes, so then the T in pastor is for testimony. And that just amounts to let's pile up a lot of evidence to show that in the course of the story, you can come up with some answers about how I'm going to be going forward. Then you need some testimony to prove it can be done. You need some examples of what it can look like so you can actually believe what you're trying to tell yourself.

And then the O is looking for the opportunity in the situation. What can I accomplish because of this? What does this make possible? You know, I get it. When I first got my diagnosis and let people know about it, about every person would say, "Well, he's got to look for the blessing in this." I'm like, "I'll give you a blessing. Come over here. I got a blessing for you." Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anybody who's ever seen anyone who has been treated for or died of cancer knows that's no blessing.

I do believe this. There's a verse in the Bible. Could you check your Bible, just make sure Romans 8:28 is still in it. And Romans 8:28 says that all things work together for the good of those who love God and who are called according to His purposes. I think that doesn't mean that your life is going to be great. I'm not one of these people who believes, "Oh, I love Jesus, I get a Rolex, and a Ferrari, and everything goes right." In fact, Jesus told us, "In this life, you will have trouble."

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? Yeah.

And then the R in our pastor is, you need to respond to your own message. What's your response going to be? Call yourself out to do something, to do this thing that you've written up and apply it to your life. Make it apply to your own life. Yeah. Okay, so that's the pastor framework.

I mean, having said that, and I just got to those types of things come to mind, and I would like you to respond. I think I said earlier, "Life sucks, then you die," or "Don't worry, be happy." Some people see it that way. Don't think one way there.

Yeah, I feel like, Brad, everybody should have interviewed me about 30 years ago when I knew everything. I find that rarely is the answer to any complex question a simple answer. People want simple answers. What we want is not always what we get. Not only can you not always get what you want, you probably shouldn't because later you have to say, "I wanted the wrong thing." Don't worry, be happy versus life sucks and then you die. Both are true to an extent for some people during some period of their life, I think. So that's my most controversial definitive line-drawing statement I'm gonna make. I don't think it's that easy. I think we usually fall somewhere in the middle on those two ends of the scale.

Yeah, and I just think it ebbs and flows on that continuum a little bit. Yes. But I think what your book does, I believe, is kind of gives us a process to follow to kind of navigate some of that type of thing. And that's why I like that word "or" in your title. That kind of helps us get it, "I've got to work this process here."

Thank you for bringing us back around to what you originally said. Because the death I referred to in the title is metaphorical death. We will all die physically. The most accurate had a little bit, "Read This and Die." But I felt like that would send the wrong message. "That" and "or" are different words. It's an exciting world you live in once you realize the difference. The day you realize words have specific meanings. And a lot of people would be well-served by acquainting themselves with those meanings.

I gotta get another one for you here. And this, we talked about story here. Sometimes, I hear people say something to the effect of "preach faith until you have it," or the other side of the spectrum is "faith is fooling yourself." And I'd like to respond to that. Particularly a little bit in your own faith story, Ray. I know that you mentioned a minute ago about kind of looking for simple answers to complex questions. And it seems to me that in your book, you outline kind of a crisis of faith and looking, going around the faith healers and so on, like looking for what I took it to be simple answers to complex questions, the faith issue you were having here, and how that was kind of ingrained in your story to look for, "Okay, this is the way it is. The devil made me do it," whatever it would be.

I was raised in the faith. I was raised as a tongue-talking, snake-handling, fire-breathing, miracle-wielding, proselytizing Pentecostal Christian in southeastern Kentucky. So that was about as far to that extreme pole as you could go. And as it worked great for me as long as my life was going great, as long as everything was moving along. I mean, I had what I thought of as adversities, like I had a couple of jobs from my job. My boss was a jerk. I thought that was adversity, by the way. Yes. Also, as I've gotten older, I've learned what I think is pain is not even discomfort, really.

Inconvenient for anything else.

Yes. So I went through life. I mean, as an American-born white male, I had so many advantages I didn't even was aware of white privilege. What does that mean? I thought God desires me to have this great life. Meanwhile, unaware of the true state of most humans in the world, not a super great life. As I became more afflicted with this disease, I began to find the beliefs I'd lived by all my life unraveling. Like I believed steadfastly that you could pray, ask God, and he would heal you. And then he wanted to have his will for every human being. I tried to deny this, but the real meaning behind that teaching, to me, ended up being, well, if you're not healed and you're sick, then God's infallible, God's word's infallible. So there's something wrong with you. There's something wrong with me. It's cold, I'm sick, I'm dying. And so I began to question, earnestly sought after God's will, I read the scriptures. So much, I prayed so much. I went to so many sources, I confessed so many sins every second I could think of. I went through healing ministries. I went deep, deep, deep because I knew the problem was me to no avail. And so I began to doubt. I'm just going to cut to the chase. I got to the point, I was like, I don't think I believe this anymore. So I started looking elsewhere.

Before you go too far, did you have kind of an aha moment that you can, "Okay. This is what I grew up with. This is what I was ingrained in, but now it doesn't work anymore."

Well, which one? Okay, I kept, I mean, we're great at the skill of denial. Our creative abilities are enormous when it comes to denying reality. I couldn't escape this reality because it was inside my own body. There's a happy ending so everybody can relax. I went through all these different belief systems and ideas and thoughts, and I went all the way into, I call it nihilism, dabbled with atheism, and realized this is not the answer for me. The atheists are just as foolish as the prosperity gospel people.

Okay. All right.

Ultimately, ended up reading a lot of deeper philosophical works by a lot of Catholic mystic fathers and people who live in a monastic lifestyle. And I'm not saying I'm, if you're waiting for me to say, "Well, here's the one true denomination or Booker," I'm not gonna tell you that. I don't know that. What I know is this: God is for certain not just a big one of us in the sky. That's not God. That's our image of ourselves projected above us. We're worshipping ourselves. I think we worship that God is not nonexistent. The universe doesn't make sense to me. There's no meaning. Can't get there. I've tried to get there, and it doesn't make any sense to me. Who is God? What is God? God is... God is a huge, mysterious, the Creator of all things, the infinite intelligence that made us, that loves us, that has tried, I believe, throughout our existence to contact and communicate with us. And why? I don't know.

So many people are looking for the answer, the aha moment. They are looking for the answer. And there isn't a the answer. It's more of a process, a journey, seeking truthfulness instead of the truth. This is just my take on things here. Yes. And when I've seen people caught up in this simplistic approach to things where they see, "Okay, this certain preacher or this certain situation or this certain product is going to solve all my problems," and it just doesn't because the situation is a dynamic process that is always ebbing and flowing and changing within us. And we have to be engaged with the process. And that's what I loved about your book here, is it helps us to get engaged with the process of seeking truthfulness. And, you know, in my own theological convictions, it has to be about going on to perfection, that we are not perfect here. We go on to perfection and may only become perfect in heaven. But we have to continue to get better, and the process is, does this resonate at all with what you were seeking to do in your book? And your thinking here helped me?

Yes, I think the answer is, and when I say questioning, I don't mean refusing or refuting. I mean question. I want to continuously be questioning what I believe because I'm suspect of my motivations. I know myself well enough to know that I'm the easiest person for me to fool into thinking I know what I'm doing. So I want to constantly be asking and questioning. Christians of one flavor or another, I mean, I have friends who are Catholic, who are Orthodox, who are Reformed Church, all over the map. One of the things I find is they all seem to be afraid of me asking any questions. Do you think God is afraid of your questions? I don't think so. I think His attitude is, "Ask away."

Absolutely. A big fan of the just biblically, I'm a big fan of the Old Testament story of Jacob where he wrestles with God or a god figure and wrestles all night long, but comes out with a broken, messed-up hip, damaged, and gets a blessing and gets broken and a blessing. And I love that kind of metaphor because we're not going to come out, you know, you deal with Parkinson's, and the reality is that something, maybe Parkinson's related, is going to end your physical life someday. I am a cancer patient myself, pretty sobering prognosis myself, something's got to get us eventually in our physical health. But we have a choice of how we react to that. And what you're helping us do in your book, I believe, is give us a little bit of that, of the how-to. Do you remember the story there? Remember the, I think, in the second Indiana Jones movie, where Indiana Jones is on the chasm, and he has to take the step of faith. But before he does, he throws some rocks out there to kind of test it out, to make sure it's safe. He's like, "I don't want to just step off the cliff, I'm going to make sure there's something there." And that, to me, that kind of goes to some of your other, you've got the story here and a testimony about how I loved how you searched out all these faith healers and so on, in order to really research it big time. And you come out with a process, not an answer. So I'm sorry to vamp there for just a second.

I love that. As someone who writes, you know how it is. Sometimes, it takes someone else reflecting on your creation for you to understand what you created to begin with. So, I appreciate those insights.

I love that. I'm a big believer that adversity is a gift, and we all have to experience it. How you deal with it makes the biggest difference. I love the processes and tools that help us do this. Your book is an encouragement. But I get a feeling that there have been people in your life who have come to you, Ray, and said, "Okay, Ray, I'm in deep. How do I get out? What kinds of things do you share with those folks? What kind of things do you reflect on? What questions, you have all these questions in your book. What kind of questions do you ask people personally to say, 'Here's my experience. How can my experience speak into your life?'"

That's a great question. Gone are the days when I think I have a template I can use to get anybody where I want them to get to. They don't care where I want them to get to; they want to get to where they want to get to. If you don't have a solution to a problem, somebody else doesn't think they have one. But let's take this scenario where you said, "Somebody comes to me and says, 'I'm in deep trouble here. What do I do? I'm deeply depressed, or I'm just discouraged.'" It's simple. The answer results in complex activity. You have to ask questions in this. Listen, I love being a know-it-all. I've been one all my life. So sometimes, the thing I still do know it all, but I try hard. Just ask questions and listen to what people are saying, what they mean, why they're saying it. I'm constantly listening, trying to get what's going on inside you. If I reach a point where I feel like I have some insight, I might then say, "Here's what I think I'm hearing from you. I think I'm hearing that you're depressed and you're discouraged because of this situation." I'll go into some detail. I'm looking for the moment when they look at me and they get that spark in their eyes. They go, "You got it. That's it." You can always tell when they feel like you have them and expressed it even better than they did themselves.

The light bulb comes on, and they kind of see it in a different way.

Yes, in that moment, you have an opportunity to ask them a question or plant a thought in their mind that will help them get out of the deep pits they've put themselves in. I was talking to someone yesterday who was very upset about a situation they were in. So I asked them, "What if you thought about that relationship not as a romantic relationship, but as a business partnership? What if you proposed to start a business together?" That one question was just the right thing they needed to hear to wake up and find some hope. Though the situation didn't change immediately, they had that conversation, made that change, and when I talked to them again today, their problems weren't completely fixed, but they were so much better, and they didn't feel hopeless anymore. For me, I'm just trying to listen to where people are and then look for a way to ask a question or give them an idea. I'm not asking them to accept it, just to consider it.

It helps them to go a little bit deeper and peel back layers. One of the processes I use when counseling people is asking them one question repeatedly. The question is, "What do you want, but you can only provide a different answer each time?" So, for instance, if they initially respond with, "I want a better job," I continue asking, "What do you want?" until they come up with a different response. This goes on at least three times, sometimes as many as 10 or 12. Then, after a certain point, I add, "And what are you going to do about it?" This process helps them dig deeper and identify their true desires and the actions they need to take. You mentioned the importance of peeling back the layers in your writing, and I found it to be a valuable concept. Your book emphasizes that adversity is a gift, and it's up to us how we use it in our lives. So, I just wanted to share that with you.

I appreciate that very much. I'm going to take that prompt and journal about it myself today. "What do you want?" and "What are you going to do about it?" I'll aim to answer "What do you want" at least 10 times.

You gotta get all this to give a different answer. Always gotta give yourself or working with someone. Because, you know, your subtitle, your whole book is about persuasion. And persuasion does not mean dictation. It does not mean telling someone the way it is because that never works. We know that in our world right now. We know that in religious circles. We know that in political circles. We know that in family life, parenting, or anything else. It just doesn't work if you command or demand; it usually doesn't work. But if you help people understand that it's their idea or persuade them, it works. That's a sales tactic, isn't it? Isn't that part of the copyrighted and sales technique to help people think of their own idea.

Absolutely. I mean, Robert Collier, the great copywriting genius of days gone by, said, "You must join the conversation that's already taking place in your reader's mind." This is not a new idea, but it's so true. I'm not talking about Inception here; I'm not talking about some kind of deceptive manipulative practice. If you ask enough questions and reflect back enough of the answers the other person is giving you, at some point, they may arrive at the conclusion that you want them to arrive at on their own. And that decision, they own.

I think a part of that, well, that decision is having a clearer visualization of a preferred future. I was dumped by my girlfriend at age 16, or whatever it was. I got fat, or I got lazy, or I got a bad grade in chemistry, whatever it is in the past. But looking forward is a little more difficult. We think we want to have a good future, but we need to give it more definition and refinement. I mentioned to you earlier that I was diagnosed with cancer about a year ago. In my particular case, that happened in July of 2022. In August of 2022, I was diagnosed with cancer, and my wife and I had really big plans for traveling and living life in retirement. All of that kind of got set aside with a cancer diagnosis. So I had to envision something different in my life. Around Christmas time, I got together with my two granddaughters, ages five and two. But I could visualize them as young women of 21 and 18, doing the things that young women do, like getting married and graduating. And I said, you know, it's gonna be hard for them to hug a dead guy. That visualization gave me my purpose and my sense of meaningfulness moving forward. So I'd like you to speak to this whole kind of sense of how important it is to write something that's persuasive to us with emotional power to move us forward.

Yeah, it's so important. I know that lots of people have a negative reaction to ideas like this, the notion that the way you think about the future and visualize it can cause it to happen. The topic of the movie "The Secret" comes up, and the whole law of attraction, and so forth. So I don't have anything against all that, except when it's used to create a system of superstitious belief that leads people off the side of a cliff. What I do think is, if you're going to take a long journey and you're going to get somewhere, well, you've got to have a few things. You've got to have, first of all, an idea of where you're going. So you have a target destination. You've got to have an accurate map of how to get there. You've got to be able to translate what you see on the map to what you see in the future. And I think you have to also, if a journey is going to require any effort or any possible adversity, you've got to have a reason that's emotionally powerful enough to compel you to finish the journey. That's a metaphor for life. In other words, you have to have a goal, a place you're going, a destination, a destiny, and you have to be able to visualize it clearly. And that sort of becomes compelling to you that you're willing to walk over the rocks and the broken glass or crawl through whatever you need to get there. You're going to go through the hard times, you're going to stick with it. And you've got to constantly remind yourself of why you're doing this. You've got to keep your eyes on the prize, as it says in that book I read once. For all of us, it's going to be different. What works for somebody else as their goal that they're visualizing to get to does not work for me. I can tell you it's not a big mansion or a bunch of sports cars for me. It's something totally different than that. And what my specific goals are, they don't matter to anybody else. But you've got to think about what do you want? We talked about amplifying the pain and the adversity. Think about the aspiration now. What are you aspiring to? What does the perfect life look like to you? In the context of that, I mean, for me, that all changed when I realized what was going to happen with Parkinson's. I had a different idea of what my end goal looked like. It looks like a much more modest home in a natural setting with a great view and no stairs.

That's your reality you got to do with your reality, don't you?

Yes, right. So I can visualize that very clearly, and I do every day because it's very clear what my wife and I are doing every day, how we're living our lives. That's a compelling vision to me. And it's important for me to remind myself of it because the world around us will interrupt us with their vision of what they want from us. So powerfully, we'll be distracted and lost. That's why we feel that way. We start to devolve into scrolling Instagram and TikTok and Twitter. Just doom scrolling. As a term, I like to call it the "infinity pool of success." It's never any reinforcement of the wrong beliefs. You get to decide what's the right belief. And ultimately, that decision is up to us. It was left up to us by our Creator. We visualize the future we want intentionally with emotional intensity because we must if we want to overcome the gravity of the Earth that's trying to pull us down to the level of everybody else, which is fear, hatred, division, anger, bitterness, unforgiveness, disaster, woe is me. I mean, I know there's realities in the world that are like that, but if you're trying to climb out of a deep, dark hole, you don't get started by thinking about how much deeper and darker the hole could get and digging down further. You start by stopping the digging and start working your way out. This is how you do it.

We started talking about that word or that, let's close it with the word and include your book, with the phrase "read this and live." And you use a phrase in your book, which I really love, "belief can guide you towards the life you want but hold you back from the life you have now." And it's like, just speak to that, how your book and how people can choose then to have an "and" and live.

You know, there's a writer named Byron Katie who says, "When you argue with reality, you only lose 100% of the time." That's a miserable way to live. If you're unhappy, really, the formula for happiness is very simple. You have reality that you live in, you have a blueprint in your mind of how things are supposed to be. If you're unhappy, it's because the blueprint or reality is wrong. Guess which one it is? I think the way to have the "and" is, Parkinson's, I have cancer, I have my husband or wife died, or whatever happened. Good friend of our family, their adult son was just killed in an automobile accident. That's reality for them. So now what? I believe we start looking for that purpose that lies beyond this moment of grief. We have to try to get ourselves some perspective. So it's a process. I don't have a simple formula. I just know there's a process we need to go through. And it starts with thinking about, is there any way I can look at the future and see some kind of hope, some kind of reason, some kind of purpose? And when you can do that, and you start, take that small bridge, and you begin using it to build on and visualizing what that might be like. And I think, Brad, I started my journey in life believing that I could achieve anything and do anything and be anything I wanted, that I had all these goals. And I still believe that life has got a golden, shining purpose at its core, but it doesn't look anything like I thought. For me, the goal I'm trying to get to is not checking something off a list of accomplishments or having a certain number of things. It's the kind of person I'm becoming. And, say, "Hey, now I'm super successful." I mean, that's what my publisher wanted. They want to have, you know, we're kind of looking for a book where you just give the formula for how you fix your life. And like, "Well, I didn't fix it."

Yeah, it's an ongoing process.

Yeah, and what I'm trying to tell you in this book, dear publisher, is we're writing a book about how to deal with your life. It's not fixed because guess what? Nobody's life is fixed.

Yes, great stuff here, though. His name is Ray Edwards:s. The book is titled "Read This or Die: Persuading Yourself to a Better Life." I love the thought we're leaving things here with "read this and live," that this is an ongoing process. We thank you for being our guest today here on Brad Miller:. Thank you, Ray, for being with us.