The Real Reason You Stay Stuck In Life

So, I think it'd be cool to start this chapter, Drew, with the story of Alcoholics Anonymous. Do you know how it started? >> No. >> No. So, okay. So, it's actually a fascinating story, and it dovetails with so much of the stuff that we've talked about so far. So, there was a guy named

Bill Wilson. He was a Wall Street guy in the 1930s, and raging alcoholic. Like, we're talking [ __ ] world champion alcoholism here. Put himself in the hospital multiple times. Like, literally had doctors look him in the face and be like, "You are drinking yourself to death. You need to stop." He couldn't stop. He couldn't

figure out how to stop. He tried everything. It just kept like he just kept spiraling out of control. He lost his job. He lost marriages. He lost his money. He lost everything. Yet, he kept drinking. And then, one day, in 1934, he ended up back in the hospital yet again, same hospital he ended up every single

time. And he had Well, he had a quantum change mystical experience. So, he was laying there in the hospital bed. Suddenly, he said that that the room filled up with a white light, and he felt this the Holy Spirit blow through the room, and he suddenly became intensely aware of what he was doing to

himself and the future that he was creating for himself. And amazingly, he got sober. Like, right then and there, never had another drink. And he became so profoundly inspired by this event in his own life that he became obsessed with precipitating it in other alcoholics' lives. He dedicated his life to figuring out how he could replicate that

experience for other alcoholics. And so, he went back. He read William James's work. William James was of the belief that the only way to defeat addiction was religion. He didn't see any other way to to do it. So, then Bill Wilson started Alcoholics Anonymous, the support group framework that still exists today and has helped millions of