The 200% Life: Need Nothing, Enjoy Everything — 3.5 Ideas from Adam Hergenrother
4 min readAug 28, 2024
“When you keep going for more, eventually you come up empty.” — Adam Hergenrother
Adam Hergenrother is the Founder & CEO of Adam Hergenrother Companies.
Adam borrowed $8,000 and built a $1 Billion business with 1,000 employees. Adam’s first book, The Founder & The Force Multiplier, is a #1 Amazon bestseller.
His latest book is The 200% Life: Your Guide to Spiritual Growth & Business Success Without Meditating on a Mountaintop.
3.5 Ideas from Adam Hergenrother:
1) You say, “Need Nothing, Enjoy Everything.” What Do You Mean?
- “If you don’t need anything from the moment, then you enjoy the fruits that come. You enjoy the interaction with others. You’re no longer measuring yourself based on some need of somebody else because we all know that doesn’t work. Think about how many times you can remember getting what you wanted. Did you ever not want anything else?”
- “That’s the funny thing because everyone at some point in life has been, “If I can just have that I will be good.” And then you get it. Then there’s something else. Then it’s, ‘I just need that next thing.’ And so that’s the game people are playing their entire life. They focus all of their life 100% on the external world.”
2) What Advice Would You Give to Someone Struggling with Self-Doubt?
- “It starts when you take a step back and get some awareness. There’s practices and techniques I did a lot early on. When I would get out of my truck to go into my office, the first thing I would do was stop and take a few seconds before I got out and say, ‘I’m not here to take or get anything from my employees or my clients. I’m here to contribute and serve to the moment. I didn’t say it as some cliche way of doing it. It was just a reminder that I was not there to take anything from that moment.”
- “Every time I picked up the phone, I would remind myself I’m here. I can handle this call. All you’re doing is building up the strength. Just like if you want to learn how to roll on a mat in Jiu Jitsu, you start with certain holds. You start with figuring out how to tie your Gi. You start with the basics.”
- As you build with these things, it becomes easier. The place that you start is to first become aware and then when you’re bothered by the voice (in your head), You let yourself relax. I always say “R.R.A. — Which is when you Relax, you Release, and then you Act on stuff that you can control. There’s going to be plenty of stuff you can’t control. For instance, if it’s raining outside and you all of a sudden find yourself being pissed that it’s raining. In business, you’d call that a 100% cost and 0% benefit because there’s nothing you can do there.”
3) You Write About the “Relax, Release, Act” Technique. What’s that?
- “When you feel your mind giving you negative energy, you Relax around the energy. You Release the energy. Then you Act.”
- “The minute you become conscious in the morning, you’re lying in bed, your mind starts going, right? It starts chattering. The first thing you do is say “Wow, look how fast that mind is going. It’s already trying to get me to suffer. Look at that little guy, freaking out about all these things. Your mind starts going crazy. It’s already mad. It’s already pissed. But the most important thing is you just don’t ever want to touch the mind when its doing that. The minute you engage with it, you engage with that energy.”
- “The example that I love to give is, think of it as like a big pond, that’s perfectly clear. And you take a rock and you throw that rock in the middle. It starts to create ripples. The ripples are the mind starting to talk and you’re sitting on the side going, ‘I don’t like the way these ripples look.’ I’m going to fix them. I’m going to jump in and smooth them out. When you jump in, you just make everything worse. Remember the mind is just doing its nature. The mind produces thoughts. It’s a thought generating machine. That’s all it does. So just allow the mind to do its dance and you just don’t jump in the pond and try to smooth it out. What you can do is sit behind it and allow it to work its way through you. Then your mind has nothing over you.”
3.5) If You Had to Get a Quote Tattooed on Your Body, What Would It Say?
- “You Need Nothing, Enjoy everything.”
