Aubrey Marcus Quotes

“A lack of sufficient or timely exposure to light will short-circuit every attempt you make to start your mornings off with the kind of energy necessary to own the day. This is a problem that everyone faces, from students to self-employed moms to workaholic dads to professional athletes.

Upon waking, either from sleep or a nap, blast yourself with five to ten minutes of direct blue-light exposure. Ideally, you’ll be able to do this by stepping outside and exposing as much of your skin as possible to that giant yellow orb in the sky, basking in its bright, warm blueness, like a cat with less body hair.”

“All around you right now you have people looking at you. Some are in your family. Maybe you have kids. You certainly have friends or coworkers, and perhaps even some strangers on social media. They are all looking for some sign that somebody knows what the hell is going on out there and that something better is possible. You can be that sign, that someone, that something better. You can be the one they point to.”

“All fear comes from scarcity.

Scarcity of pleasure = pain.
Scarcity of money = powerlessness.
Scarcity of love = loneliness.
Scarcity of time = death.”

“Before you get sick your body will whisper about its fatigue.
Before you break up, your lover will whisper her requests.
Before your business goes bankrupt, your customers will whisper their complaints.
If you don't listen to the whispers, you'll be forced to hear the screams.”

“Comfort, after all, is the antagonist of growth.”

“Depression is a sense of hopelessness, a feeling that the world, and yourself, as you understand them, is broken. But it isn’t the world or yourself that is broken, it is just your understanding that is deluded.”

“Depression is an important part of the resistance training of the psyche.”

“Depression is the exasperation that comes from believing in false premises.”

“Drinking, smoking, excessive masturbation, etc. All of these are attempts to cure your depression, but they are ultimately exacerbating the issue. Stop them. Look at your storm head on, and face it.”

“Here are the two most common beliefs that lead to my depression:

1) Something outside of myself is responsible for my happiness.
2) I am responsible for other’s happiness outside of myself.”

“I think there is a real crisis of masculinity in that men think to be a man you have to act a certain way, be strong. It’s not about cowering, but it's about not being threatened by a woman in her full power, or by anyone really. You can only be your authentic, true self and only by finding that can you be the type of person who isn't threatened, isn't afraid.”

“I’ve been in an open relationship with my fiancé Whitney Miller for over 4 years, and still, jealousy is a dragon that needs to be slain daily. When 'open' is simply an idea in your head, you think to yourself, “I’ve got this, no big deal.” Then when the person you love most – the person whose smile is precious to you, whose smells are like your private garden of blooming flowers – starts texting, dining, traveling, and fucking someone else, you realize... Maybe I don’t got this.”

“If people really understood self-improvement, there would be a lot fewer books and a lot more actual improvement.”

“If someone around you is depressed, know that it is not your responsibility to pull them out of it before they are ready. Do not rob them of their chance to face the storm and be a hero.”

“If you decide you want to be happy, here are a few steps to help you get there.

1. Stop destructive avoidance patterns.
2. Start positive patterns.
3. Give to others.”

“If you don’t handle the first twenty minutes after you get out of bed correctly, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle all day. Tough mornings aren’t tough because of insufficient willpower. They’re tough because no one teaches us how to make them easy, let alone perfect, even though the perfect start to your day is perfectly within reach.”

“Imagine one of those 3D metal puzzles where you have to unlock and disengage the pieces. If you don’t know what you are doing, those things can be incredibly hard. But when you learn the trick, the puzzle is easy.”

“It's not where you begin, it's where you end.”

“It’s important to understand that depression is a type of human experience, and all human experiences are made up of two parts:

1) The experience itself as created by your nervous system (hardware/biology)
2) The story your conscious mind creates about your experience (software/psychology)”

“Just because you haven’t succeeded yet, doesn’t mean that the thing is hard.”

“Living in a state of abundance is synonymous with fearlessness. It is the belief that you already have everything you need and anything that is in short supply will replenish itself.”

“Open relationship isn’t about having sex with a lot of people. If you get into it for that, you are going to fail. It’s about figuring out how to love yourself without condition, and how to love others without possession. If that is the goal, and you are prepared to meet your shadows with love and forgiveness, being open just might be for you.”

“People often assume that the concept of bettering yourself and the concept of being content with what you have, are contradictory. They aren’t. If you are living correctly, you are betterment in motion. The Japanese call this ‘Kaizen’, or change for the better. It is not about the destination of where you are going, some magical place you will arrive where all of the sudden you are ‘enlightened’ or ‘successful’. This idea that we will hit a certain point, and everything will be stable and we will be happy is a total fallacy. You can both be content with where you are, and continue to strive for more. Because being a human and living life is all about the striving. That’s all there is.

There is a journey, from one point to another. Throughout that journey you will wander, get lost, become found, improve, forget, and hopefully grow a little wiser the whole way through. Enjoy the process, appreciate where you are and the moments you are living right now. But reach for more. Reach for your potential- that blueprint of what you could be if you made it beyond fear and judgment and shame and self doubt.”

“Reading is one of the fastest ways to level up your life.”

“Sixty percent of the average adult human body is made up of water. About the same percentage of Earth’s surface is covered by water. The world is water, we are water, yet here we are, every morning, essentially starving for it. And we wonder why we wake up feeling miserable so often.

A glass of water from the bathroom faucet or tipping your head back in the shower is not going to cut it, however. This isn’t just about curing cottonmouth. Health coach and sleep expert Shawn Stevenson calls that first glass of water in the morning 'a cool bath for your organs'. Another way of putting it: it’s priming your internal fluids before hitting the road.”

“Take a look at something like the placebo effect. It is literally the mind’s ability to change the body. We have to account for it in every clinical trial because it is so strong that to ignore it would invalidate every single statistical result. When you think a stressful thought, your body produces cortisol. When you think of a sexual thought, your body releases sex hormones. When you laugh, your body produces more nitric oxide. Everything is absolutely connected. To improve the mind, improve the body. To improve the body, improve the mind. To improve your life? Improve them both at the same time.”

“The glass partition between mind and body needs to be shattered. It’s not real. The mind is an embodied process. It is the supercomputer that synthesizes the billions of impulses from the human cellular ecosystem. This includes what our nerves, cells, skin, instincts, gut biome, ego is saying, and it translates that into a (hopefully) coherent thought so that we can take action. While it is helpful to create some form or separation for us to discuss, effectively the mind is part of the body, and the body is part of the mind, and they affect each other bilaterally.”

“The trick with self improvement is simple — Focus on the process. Each single decision is not hard, and if you focus on each decision, rather than on changing your entire life in one fell swoop, then transformation becomes the inevitable result of very small choices.”

“There are thirty million of our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, held captive as slaves in the world right now. Two million of them are children. They are raped and used for forced labor. Women. Children. I want you to take a moment to see them in your mind. See a little boy, and a little girl, held captive in an abandoned warehouse. Chained up to a wall behind a red door. Sodomized, subjected to the violence of a new stranger every week – their violations filmed and sold as pornography on the dark web.

This is evil. Real evil. And this isn’t in some faraway country. The United States has the highest demand for child pornography and human slaves out of any nation in the world. These faces you imagined could be you. Could be your children.

Former CIA operator Tim Ballard doesn’t have to imagine their faces. He sees them. He tells the story of a five year old boy that he rescued from one of these warehouses in California, who told him 'I don’t belong here.' Since that moment, Tim and his organization Operation Underground Railroad have rescued over 4,000 victims of human trafficking.”

“There are three critical habits we all can optimize that will improve our hardware. They are sleep, diet, and exercise.”