Routine Is The Death Of Memory - a podcast by Russell Brunson

Have you ever noticed that the years get faster and faster? Here’s the secret to extend your years and extend the happiness of your life.

On this episode Russell talks about a presentation he saw with Craig Clemens of Golden Hippo while they were in Puerto Rico and how he taught him something that is the opposite of what he believed. Here are some of the awesome things you will learn in this episode:

• Why Craig Clemens believes that routine is the death of memory, and how that makes sense even though it’s the opposite of what Russell believed.
• Find out how you can use event horizons to prolong your life and happiness.
• And what kind of things happened on Russell’s Puerto Rico trip and afterwards that made them event horizons in his and his kids’ lives.

So listen here to find out why routine is the death of memory.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I’m doing this episode while being chauffeured by Melanie.

Hey everybody, alright so I am on the way to go and read the Traffic Secrets book for the audible version for the next two days. So I’m excited and tired and Melanie volunteered to drive me to the office, or the studio today. So she’s driving me and I’ve got nothing to do except for record a podcast episode with  you guys. So I’m pretty pumped about that.

Alright so today’s episode is actually something I learned while we were in Puerto Rico. As you know we went from Funnel Hacking Live, then flew home long enough just to do our laundry and then jump back in a plane and fly to Puerto Rico with the kids. And then we had all sorts of issues with the plane, showing up 8 hours late and then we landed in Atlanta and we were going to sleep at Todd’s house at night at like 3am and then the driver drove us the wrong direction for like an hour.

So we didn’t get to Todd’s house until like 4:30 in the morning. And then we had to be on the plane, we were so tired. We got on the plane, we get to Puerto Rico, we’re all excited, the kids are pumped, they immediately want to go down to the ocean, of course. So within an hour of us landing in Puerto Rico, they run to the ocean, we all go swimming, and the twins both go step on sea urchins. So we had that entire night available to us for the doctor to pull sea urchins out of their feet. So that was the first exciting day.

But anyway, the rest of the trip was amazing. The mastermind was awesome, the kids had fun, we saw Ricky Martin live, which was cool. We did a bunch of other things I can’t even recall any of them now because this last week, it seems like a lifetime away. Anyway it was really, really good.

But I wanted to share with you guys one of the big aha’s I got. There was so many good things that came from the event. You know, masterminds are amazing anyway, especially when you have that caliber of people. I think if you look around the table, there were 5 people that had New York Times bestselling books. One guy had 10 New York Times Bestsellers to his name. A couple of people had 3 and 4, it was crazy. All the best personal development and business people were all there.

One guy, Jay Shetty, had over 6 billion views on his videos. Prince Ea had over 3 billion views. It was just like all these insanely amazing people. And everyone sharing their best things, and it was really, really cool. But one of my favorite things at the very end, Craig Clemens who owns a marketing agency, not agency, a marketing company called Golden Hippo, they do in, I can’t even tell you their volume, it’s nuts. It makes Clickfunnels look like we’re little babies still.

Anyway, he’s killing it. But he had a chance to do a little presentation, and what he shared blew my mind, it totally was counter-intuitive to everything I learned, and yet it was so smart. And for the last week since then, I’ve been trying to implement it. So I wanted to share with you guys, because number one it will solidify it in my head. And number two, hopefully it will help you guys as well.

So what Craig talked about, he shared something. He said, “Routine is the death of memory.” And when he said it at first, I was like, “What are you talking about?” As entrepreneurs and business people, we’re always talking about how you need to have routine. You need to have a morning routine and a night routine, and a daytime routine, and a routine how to get in state, and a routine how you write books, and a routine how you….all these routines right. So I’ve always been told and taught that routines are the most important thing ever.

And then he comes in and says routine is the death of memory, and he goes and says, “Have you noticed as you get older and older, the years seem to go faster and faster? The reason why, it’s not just a thought, it’s actually true. What happens is your brain starts trying to categorize all the things that are happening. So you have this routine and every single morning you do the same routine.”

You wake up in the morning, you do step one, you do step two, you do these things. He says, “Your brain will take all those things and just delete them because it’s like, it’s the same info over and over and over again.” It’s like if you upload the same picture to Google Photos like 8 times it’s like, “You have 8 of these photos. Should you delete the other 7?” You’re like, “Oh sure.” And it keeps just the one.

And your brain does the same thing with all these routines. It says, “Okay, we’ve done this every single day for the last 6 months or year, or 5 years. Let’s just delete them because you don’t need them.” So your brain deletes all these routines which makes your year seem super fast, because it just deleted all that stuff that happened.

And as he started saying that, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, maybe routine is not the best thing.” And I do think there is a place for routine. Routine is very good, you create habits and stuff like that. But this was kind of the flip side of the coin, the negative side of routine. Most things in life, there’s the positive and the negative. If you just do the positive all the time, usually that becomes the negative and vice versa. And this is definitely true with routine. If you’re not careful, routine is the death of memory. You start losing all these memories and your life becomes shorter, and your years become shorter, and soon you’re just dead.

So I’m like, crap. I don’t want to just die. How do we save ourselves from this? So what he said was really cool. He said the opposite of that, he said, you get to start creating what he called event horizons. It was funny because this is the third time I’d been in a mastermind group with this group together. The first time we went to Wyoming and when we were there we shot guns, and we flew in a helicopter, and we rode horses, and we did all sorts of crazy stuff. Then the second time we went to Puerto Rico and it was the same thing. It was amazing, we went on hikes, did the ocean. And the third one was back to Puerto Rico and we stayed in the same house, same everything.

He said, “What’s interesting, in 10 years from now, I will remember the trip to Wyoming and the helicopters and the guns and the horses and everything. I’ll remember the first trip to Puerto Rico. But the second trip, as amazing as this has been, I’m probably not remember most of it because it was the same as last year as a whole. So my memory is just going to delete it.”

He said these other things were the event horizons, these things that you remember that you stuck in your memory as a thing that you’ll keep with you for the rest of your life. He says the secret to extending your years, extending your life and extending your happiness is to create at least 5 to 10 event horizons per year.

Event horizons are the opposite of routine, and it’s something super huge, it’s this big pattern interrupt that you’ll brain will be like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing.” And he said the things that cause good event horizons are like surprises, going out doors, things that are hard, accomplishments, danger, unique, things that are big challenges. In fact, he had us sit down and he’s like, ‘Write down your 5 greatest memories from the last year, or your 3 greatest memories.” As we’re all writing them down, he’s like, “How many of you guys, was the thing a surprise? How many things was something outdoors? How many times was it something hard that you accomplished? How many times was it something you were in danger? Or it was unique or challenging?” and pretty much for everybody, our things all fit in those things.

He said, you notice that none of your memories were like, “I woke up every morning and had my green drink and then I ran on the treadmill for 19 minutes.” None of those were any of our memories of the entire last year, they were all these event horizons. These things that meant more, that were different, they were bigger for us.

And he started challenging us. In fact, that night he told everybody he said, “I’m going to challenge you guys. We’re going to do an event horizon right now so you don’t forget this trip. Let’s all go down at 9 o’clock at night and let’s go skinny dipping in the ocean, it’s going to be amazing. And at first we were all excited, and then anyway, it’s funny at 9 o’clock at night none of us wanted to go skinny dipping. None of us wanted to go swimming. I think 2 of them jumped in their swimming suits, and the rest of us went home and went to bed. We’re getting old in our old age.

But it was kind of funny because he was just like, “We need to create this thing so we remember it.” And man, I thought more and more about that, and what was cool for me was that this trip to Puerto Rico we had taken our kids to it. And even though my kids stepped on sea urchins the very first hour of us being there, they’re never going to forget that. That is an event horizon.

They’re going to remember walking in the rain forest, they’re going to remember the Ricky Martin concert. They’re going to remember going to church. We walked into church on Sunday and sat down, and all the sudden Norah, her eyes get this big, they’re huge. I’m like, “What’s going on?” and she’s pointing, and I’m like, “What?” she’s like, “that’s the mom. That’s the dad.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” and she’s like, “That’s the mom and dad from my YouTube show I watch.” And sure enough, two rows in front of us in church was this YouTube family that she watches. And her eyes were so big.

And all, we had an hour long first hour of church we were sitting in this meeting room, and she’s like star struck. My little 4 year old is star struck, freaking out, the biggest smile on her face ever. Then afterwards we went and found them and introduced ourselves and she got pictures with them. And she will remember that. And even, you know, a week and a half later we called my mom yesterday and the first thing Norah says is like, “Grandma I saw (I can’t remember the name of the YouTube channel) the Jay Rocks (or whatever) family at church on Sunday.” And that is seared into her mind. She’ll probably remember that 10 years from now.

But I was thinking about just, the Puerto Rico trip, as much pain and how hard it was for us to get there and get the kids there, and you know, half the time we were miserable, and there was fighting, and all the things that happen with kids. At the end of it, it was like, wow. They’re going to remember that.

And then we got home, it was funny, we were home for a couple of days and then we were planning on Saturday to just relax and do nothing, and then one of my friends called me on Thursday and he was like, “hey, do you want to take the kids, we’re going to get snowmobiles, we’re going to ride snowmobiles up to the hot springs, and we’ll sit in the hot springs and ride home and it’ll be a ton of fun.” My first thing was just like, “No. I want to sleep on Saturday. I do not want to do that at all.”

Then I started thinking about this concept of an event horizon. Man, my kids will not remember my Saturday routine of us waking up and watching cartoons, eating breakfast, sleeping, going and playing in the wrestling room, you know, the stuff we do all the time, they’re probably not going to remember that. But I was like, man, they’re going to remember this.

So I sent the message to Collette, “Do you want to go?” and she’s like, “Yes.” I’m like, “Ah, okay we’re going to do it.” So we did this thing and it was so hard. We woke up at 5:30 in the morning, we jumped in a car, we had to drive 2 hours to McCall, Idaho. We got there and we went to the pancake house, we had cinnamon rolls that were the size of our heads, we ate those. Then we jumped another 45 minutes to get to the trail. Then we jumped on, we had 8 snowmobiles, jumped on 8 snowmobiles, rode for over an hour to this hot spring, and everyone was cold. We had fun, but it was freezing cold and all these things.

We got there, we jumped in the hot springs for like an hour and a half. We ate pizza around this campfire, it was super fun. We had to get dressed again, and it was really hard because there were 900 people in this little changing room. My kids were scared of seeing other people changing anyway, so we’re all crammed in here, and it was uncomfortable, and we’re soaking wet, trying to get in dry clothes, knowing they’re about to jump on another snowmobile ride for another hour, all the things.

And finally we get them all dressed up, jump on the snowmobile, another hour drive of the snowmobile. I’m driving the snowmobile and Norah falls asleep in my arms so I’m  holding her, and we get back and we have dinner, and then we had to drive two more hours home. It ended up being 17 hours from when we woke up to when we got back home. And Collette and I were sitting in the car for like 10 minutes, we didn’t even want to get out of the car, and the kids were all asleep in the back.

We’re like, “I can’t believe we did.” And then we started thinking, they’re going to remember today. That was an event horizon. As hard and as miserable as it kind of was for the parents, not that it was miserable, we had a good time, but it was a lot of work. But for them, they will remember that. That will be something, “Remember that time we went snowmobiling up to the hot springs?” and I’m just grateful I had a friend that was willing to pull me out of a routine and give us that opportunity.

So for me, I’m not going to do it every weekend. Some weekends I want routine, some mornings I want routine. But what Craig said, 5 to 10 times per year figure out an event horizon you can do that will just break up the pattern, it will extend your weeks, extend your months, extend your years, extend your life and make you happier and give you things to remember and experiences with your family, your kids, your spouses, whoever you do your things with.

So that was kind of the message for today. I hope that you guys get some value out of it. I hope you guys start realizing the routine while it’s good in some cases, can also destroy and is the death of your memory, and it’s important to not forget your event horizons. So with that said, I appreciate you guys all.

We are almost there. We are 3 miles away from the studio to go read the traffic Secrets book in the next two days. Wish me luck, I hope my voice doesn’t….I’m already losing my voice, that’s not good. Just warming up the vocal chords for the next two days. Melanie’s got my spray and everything so I can survive this for the next two days. It wouldn’t be that bad if it was just 2 days, but I’ve gotta read 3 books over the next 6 days. So yes, here we go. Alright thanks you guys, appreciate you, and we’ll talk to you all soon. Bye everybody.

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