Book Summary - Life's Golden Ticket: A Story about Second Chances by Brendon Burchard.

“If you want your life experience to be bright, choose to contribute.”

Life’s Golden Ticket by Brendon Burchard is a great book that is in an allegory format. The story teaches many life lessons, such as overcoming our fears, living life on our terms, and making a difference in the world. It is a book that I highly recommend; the storyline might not be easy to follow with the multiple characters and scenes, but it contains many messages for navigating life.

What if you were handed a golden ticket that could magically start your life anew?

That question is at the heart of Life’s Golden Ticket. Brendon Burchard tells the story of a man who is so trapped in the prison of his past that he cannot see the possibilities, the choices, and the gifts before him. To soothe his fiancee Mary, clinging to life in a hospital bed, the man takes the envelope she offers and heads to an old, abandoned amusement park that she begs him to visit.

To his surprise, when he steps through the rusted entrance gates, the park magically comes to life. Guided by the wise groundskeeper Henry, the man will encounter park employees, answer difficult questions, overcome obstacles, listen to lessons from those wiser than he, and take a hard look at himself.

At the end of his journey, the man opens Mary’s mysterious envelope. Inside is a golden ticket — the final phase in turning his tragic life’s story of loss and regret into a triumphant tale of love and redemption.

Here are my favourite takeaways from reading Life’s Golden Ticket by Brendon Burchard:

“The truth is always a good turning point.”

The Disatisfaction

You are here because you are restless over who you have become. It is not your dissatisfaction with your job or what you do that has brought you to this park. It is not dissatisfaction with your family. Or your relationship. Or your finances. Or your neighborhood or your home or your car. It is a quiet dissatisfaction with yourself, with who you have become. You feel there is something more inside you, and you have come here searching for ways to dig it up and unleash it into the world. Deep down, you know you are more than what society has said you are or told you to be, and you are here to begin the great quest of proving it to the world and to yourself.
You have been hexed. You have been cursed. You have been hypnotized into believing something so insidious that it has jeopardized your ability to live the life you deserve. You have been lured into a lie that has controlled your mind and contaminated your life, a lie that has prevented you from being your best, from taking risks, from having the confidence and strength needed to seize the life that you’ve always wanted.

Breaking Society’s Spell

First, you must recognize that a spell exists. This one is easy. Look to little children. Watch them play and crawl and be. Does any child believe there is something wrong with himself or herself? No. Do small children routinely, if ever, experience the onslaught of negative emotions like insecurity, doubt, sadness, or depression? No. You see, you weren’t born feeling badly about yourself, you were taught to feel that way. Here’s more fundamental evidence. If, when I say to you, ‘You are not good enough,’ you do not have a strong reaction, a need to fight and argue with me or at least to scoff at me and brush me aside, then there is a spell on you. And it is neutralizing your innate desire to stand up for yourself and become the person you were destined to be.
If you can believe this, then you have taken the first step . . . and you will be able to take the second and third. The second step is to interrupt the spell—to question or tune out society’s messages, as well as those in your mind, that make you question your strength. The third step is to start living your life by conscious control. In your adventure here, you will take these steps and we will help you.

On seeing an hypnosis take place, the main protagonist in the book asked the hypnotizer “How was he able to hypnotize people? The Hypnotizer replied I simply took away the:

Three reference points every person needs in order to be self-aware.

First, I told them to stop paying attention to their thoughts and feelings.
Second, I told them to stop paying attention to feedback from the outside world, to pretend the crowd wasn’t even there.
Third and most important, I told them who they were, in this case, Madonna or a chicken.

Think about it. If you are unaware of the world within you—your internal thoughts and feelings—and you are unaware of the world around you—how people perceive you and your behavior—then you don’t have the ability to answer the question ‘Who am I being right now?’ Because you judge who you are at any point in time by your thoughts and feelings as well as by what other people are thinking and feeling about you.

“Self-awareness is all about paying attention to the world within us and the world around us and then using that information to decide whether we need to change our consciousness or conduct, what we’re thinking, or what we’re doing.“

The Sailors and The Spinners

Squirt: There are two kinds of kids: There are the spinners and the sailors.

The Sailors

The sailors are the kids who hop into the boat and head for open water—they’re the explorers. They have a dream and they set out for it. Yeah, they’re dreamers and doers. They know exactly where they want to go. And no matter what bumps into them, they get there, because they keep steering in that direction. They’re the ones you’ll hear screaming, ‘Get out of my way!’ The sailors are vocal about what they want. Once they get to the other side, they’ll come back and bump everyone. When I blow my whistle letting everyone know time is up, sailors always end up on the other side of the pool from where they started. They gladly hop out of their boats, because they got what they wanted. They got their goal and they got to have fun bumping other boats.

Spinners

The spinners . . . well, actually, they start just like the sailors. They also want to head for open water. But as soon as everyone gets going, the spinners quickly realize there are a lot of other people in the pool. They realize how hard it is to steer. So the spinner does something unique. The spinner makes an assumption: it’s hard to steer my boat without bumping into other people, so I won’t be able to make it to the other side. Spinners give up quickly. They say, ‘Well, I guess I can’t make it to the other side, so I’ll just have fun here by myself and spin.’ They might even bump a few people. They do something that is entirely unhelpful to their original goal, and everyone else’s goal: they spin in one place, bumping and blocking everyone from getting to the other side, without even knowing it. Most of the time spinners spin quietly. When I blow the whistle for everyone to stop, they’re the last ones to dock, and they’re almost always disappointed in their ride.

Crank “The Mechanic”

Cycle of Silence.

You’ve lived your whole life holding in your feelings, your thoughts, your concerns, your dreams, your nightmares. You’re looping the same old story: ‘I don’t want to impose my world on anyone. . . . I don’t want to be a pest.’

“Here’s the truth. If you stay in this cycle, if you don’t start telling the world how you feel and what you want, then you’ll be forever stuck on the same life track you’re on now—a track that makes you feel numb and queasy. And the only way to break the cycle is to understand how it began in the first place and then slow it down and stop it.”

If you don’t start telling the world how you feel and what you want, then you’ll be forever stuck on the same life track you’re on now—a track that makes you feel numb and queasy.

“In life, the path of least resistance is always silence. If you don’t express your feelings and thoughts to others, you don’t have to deal with their reactions to it. You don’t have to feel vulnerable. You don’t risk rejection.But I’ll tell you what: the path of least resistance leads exactly where that ride leads to.” He pointed again to the carts looping around the track. “Nowhere.”

“If you don’t know what you want, you can’t change from here to get there. You have nothing to reach for, nothing to measure yourself against. It doesn’t matter if you’ve sword-fought with dear old Dad, or ridden horses with Grandma, or swum in the crystal blue ocean with Mary. Just because you feel better about the past and who you are doesn’t mean your life will change. This is now. In here, we talk about the future. You have to know where you want to go and adjust your course . . . or you just drift.”

Strong Mike

“We all get to a point where we decide to become stronger. When we start that process, a lot of people unknowingly stop our progress by trying to protect us or to keep us living according to the label they’ve created for us. If I had listened to my mom or my brother or my friends or my coaches, I would be a small, frail, weak kid who secretly despised himself for being that. Instead, I listened to those who encouraged me—like my dad—and I listened to my inner desires. I became who I wanted to be because I didn’t get trapped in other people’s ideas of who I should be. That is how I went from mouse to Strong Man Mike.”

“You see, most people, maybe including you, have lived life as if they were at the whim of circumstance and as if they were supposed to get something from the world. The miracle makers in this world, though, are the people who live by choice and live to contribute. They ask what they’re making happen, and they ask what they’re giving. I think that you’ve probably learned a lot about living by choice in your time here at the park. My final lesson to you, then, is about contribution, and it says simply this: if you want your life experience to be bright, choose to contribute.”