Estimated read time: 5 min

Hey there,

Happy Sunday ☀️

Before we begin, let me ask you something:

What did you have to do, exactly, to be able to read the first sentence of this letter?

You had to be alive in a time in history where writing exists. You had to have working eyes, or the technology to compensate for them. You had to have learned the language it is written in. You had to have a device to see it on, a connection to receive it through, and a few quiet minutes to give it. You had to have been taught, in your first 6 or 7 years, that these strange squiggles on a page carry meaning.

That is a lot of factors to already have aligned, there, all of which we take for granted. And it is exactly where I want to spend the letter today.

The Ace You Already Drew 🃏

Tuesday this week was International Literacy Day. UNESCO started the observance in 1966, and the world has marked it every 8th of September since. The point of the day is simple: to acknowledge that reading and writing, which most of us take entirely for granted, is one of the most recent inventions in our species.

Here is a piece I have been using in my teaching for years. It ties directly into the gratitude the day is really about.

Imagine there is a deck of 5,000 cards in front of you. Each card represents one 20-year generation across the last 100,000 years of civilisation. You get to draw one card, and that card is the era you get born into.

The card you actually drew is the one you are holding right now: the day that you were born on, which led you to this year, this week, this morning.

So let me ask you what I’ve asked my students for years. If I offered you the chance to put your card back into the deck, shuffle, and take a chance on one of the other 4,999…

Would you do it?

Would you take a chance on being born 500 years ago, when the kings and rulers and emperors of the world would have given kingdoms for the little device you now carry in your pocket to answer any question you have, for free, in seconds? Would you take a chance on being born a peasant in a mediaeval village where nobody in your family, or your family's family, ever learned to write their own name?

If you are anything like me, there, the honest answer is absolutely not. The card you already have is the ace.

And that is only the first card. If you kept dealing (the country you happen to have been born into, the health you happen to have arrived in, the intelligence you happen to be sitting inside, the fact that you are the kind of person who reads a letter like this rather than one of the alternatives on a Sunday morning) you would notice, one card after the next, that you are already holding aces you did not fully appreciate you had.

Every single one of them, if you paused to think about it, has the ability to put you in tears of gratitude.

Three aces of mine in particular that make me extremely grateful and I do not want to have to draw a second time, there:

The first is Nadya, sitting next to me at every one of these Retreats, helping me hold the room with unparalleled sovereignty.

The second is the cohort we just finished with. The people who walked in two Fridays ago and walked out last Friday were not the same, and watching that happen in real time is the paycheck no bank will ever print.

The third is the ground all of it sits on. I grew up in the UK, where I used to joke that I never saw the sun until I was 12. When I found the Oasis I stopped looking anywhere else, and sometimes, still, I cannot quite believe I get to live in a place where the sun is the default and not the exception.

Three aces I did not draw once and put down.
Three aces I get to draw every single day 🌱 ☀️ ❤️

Which brings me to what I have been walking you toward from the top of this letter. There are many types of literacy, there, and the one that allows you to read this letter is only one of them.

There are also two very important ones that I’ve spent the last several years training my students in: both are real, both are non-negotiable, and both of them are running your life whether you have learned to read them or not.

Being literate in Physical Matter Reality: this means you have learned to cooperate with the laws of the physical world without arguing with them. You do not walk off cliffs. You do not put your hand into a fire. You do not lean against a wall that is not there. You honour gravity, thermodynamics, and cause and effect at the physical level, all day, every day, without ever giving it a conscious thought. That fluency was hard-won by your body over the first few years of your life, and it is the reason you are still here to read this sentence.

Being literate in Non-Physical Matter Reality: this means learning to cooperate with a second set of laws, the ones that run everything you have been experiencing on top of the physical. That your outer world follows your inner world. That your frequency beats your chemistry. That reality itself responds to the intention you carry into it. And underneath all of them, that gratitude is not an emotion but a vibrational state, and the single fastest lever you have to change the frequency you are broadcasting.

You do not need to believe in these laws for them to act on you, any more than a two-year-old needs to believe in gravity before falling out of a chair.

They act on you every day, and they will act on you until the last scene of your movie.

The difference between the two is that everyone alive has been forced to be literate in the first, and almost nobody has ever been shown the second - which is where my lifelong body of work comes in.

If the card analogy landed for you this morning, there, then I want to give you the gift of watching this play out live in a room full of students. Where I cut the imaginary deck in real time so you can experience this landing further. And if you accept the invitation to watch this, in just a few short minutes you’ll realise something most people never will, and that is…

Gratitude is the real antidote to scarcity. Not side hustles, not mastering finances, not any of the mechanics people spend a lifetime chasing while their real ace goes ignored in their back pocket.

This was recorded live at the legendary Millionaire Business School event. It’s a short but powerful clip that underscores today’s message. There’s also a short exercise at the end that makes it real.

👉 Go Watch The Video Here

Here’s the final thought that I want to leave you with this week:

The era you were born into gave you the first literacy for free. That allows you to navigate life. However, if you really want to master your life, then the second type of literacy is the one you want to focus on. Gratitude is an amazing starting point for that journey, but it will not walk over and introduce itself. You have to walk over to it and you can start that with this simple click here.

Have a beautiful Sunday.

All the best,