I Made a 300-Year Plan

Do you ever miss the monastery? Yes. I miss the lifestyle. I realize I was born to be a monk.

This is in my DNA. It's what I've built myself up. I feel over many lives. And I miss the lifestyle of the simplicity,

the routine, which is very hard to sustain, and the modern... Yeah, all those things I do miss. Will you ever go back?

No. Okay. I'm quite happy with the path that I've chosen. My wife and I are creating a retreat center in Costa Rica.

So kind of almost rebuilding the monastery, so to speak. And what is the aim for that retreat center? The idea is to have people, adults and children come and learn skills that I learned in the monastery.

Because I felt that, I mean, how are people going to learn this, Brian? I mean, who's going to give up everyone in their life, everything in their life, Go be celibate and go live in a monastery. I don't see a line of people in front of me.

So the idea with Costa Rica is to have a place where I can share monastic tools and teachings to householders. And how great if we could train children, how great if we could teach a two-year-old or three-year-old to understand their mind, to learn how to focus, to develop their willpower,

to become clear of their purpose in life by the time they were five or six or seven eight years old instead of waiting till they're 50 to figure out what life is about. When they live so much more joyous life, they knew right from the start what they wanted. We need to be taught. We need to be trained how to figure these things out.

The whole idea would cost Rika to provide that for people who are serious, not just everybody. Okay, and they'll come down for certain periods of time. Yeah, they'll come for like five days or seven days or nine day periods. And you put them in a hut and do the old school on them?

Not entirely old school. Yeah, we're kind of branding it as a luxury monastery for non-months, I jokingly say. Okay, okay. Yeah, so it's not a monastery. We call it an ashram. There'll be about eight or nine rooms or places for people to stay. But they will go through a very somewhat rigid process. So three meals a day, no snacking in between.

There will be rituals, there will be disciplines to follow throughout the day, exercise as classes. So it's not a spa where you go get a massage and eat a carrot and drink some juice and lay by the pool.

This is a place to learn about yourself and to be trained like you are in a monastery. You're just not giving up the will in your life to do it. Nowadays, what are your metrics of your own success? I mean, you're obviously pushing yourself to do a lot of traveling and to speak in

in front of a lot of groups, and you were telling me about some of them just before the show. I mean, you must have some things in your mind, like I wanna get this stuff done,

but how do you judge your own, evaluate your own success? Success in what way? Like personal business? Yeah, or just your own personal and business goals.

Do you have a thing that I wanna be doing this much in the next year? Or when you come to the end of the year, when you're simplifying, how will you evaluate

whether that was a good year for yourself? Good question. I don't do that very much. I have a 50 year plan for myself, right, that I've created for my life and a 300 year plan

for Costa Rica, my project in Costa Rica. And my whole goal is working towards that. So my primary goal right now is earning enough money to build and establish this place in Costa Rica financially, right?

So I do the best I can each year and that's it. But I don't have a number each year that I'm trying to target or hit and maybe I should but maybe I need to be trained in business. I don't know.

I'm only a monk training, so I do my best every day and whatever that brings forth, I'm content with. Okay.