The Imperative Habit: 7 Non-Spiritual Practices Towards Spiritual Behavior - For Happiness, Health, Love and Success

By David Rossi

Looking back at the life I lived years ago, I see a man who seemingly had it all. I ran my own companies since I was 28 years old. I married a beautiful woman. Together we brought three children into the world and, for 16 years, I ran a business with annual sales of $30 to $35 million. I collected all the hallmarks of the desired life—a big house in the hills bordering Silicon Valley, vacation homes, fully-loaded cars, boats, private schools for the kids, and exotic vacations for all of us.

Only one thing was missing: I wasn't happy. I was much the opposite.

And one day, everything fell apart, and I knew I had to make a change.

By shedding my old belief systems and developing new ones, by releasing ego and judgment of myself and others, by cultivating self-awareness and consciousness, by recalibrating my goals and promoting those goals through my actions, I have transformed my life. I wrote this book to share the Imperative Habit with you, so you too can move from dissatisfaction and suffering to joy, contentedness, and peace. The Imperative Habit details how to shed the old beliefs and make new ones, and how to practice, form habits, and create growth, and eventually real transformation, in your life.

I did it, and so can you!

By practicing the Imperative Habit, you can:
– Leave behind old beliefs that no longer serve you
– Deconstruct self-sabotaging behaviors
– Develop self-awareness and consciousness
– Create new goals in alignment with your true self
– Make conscious choices to drive yourself toward your goals
– Live a happy, joyful, fulfilling, and meaningful life, as you are meant to live

And you can do all this without pouring tomato juice in your hair.

Ready to start?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evolve Global Publishing
• Release date: Dec 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463638095

David Rossi

David Rossi learned a definition of happiness growing up in the grotesque wealth and golden handcuffs of Silicon Valley. Was what he learned a definition that provided true stability, sustainability, and everlasting internal happiness? No. While this talented hardworking man set out to collect the trappings of success, he did everything but just that. Along the way, David amassed substantive wealth, a company, a beautiful wife, three kids, a big house, boats and vacation homes. But he also picked up depression, anxiety, poor health, high blood pressure and eventually lost it all, including the death of his best friend dying, fighting among his family, and a disabling injury requiring back surgery.The losses in his life offered the kind of suffering that eventually turned into contemplation and motivation for change. David explored all realms of possibilities towards finding true everlasting happiness. His goal to apply these lessons to his life. As he engrossed himself in a multitude of self-help books, philosophers and spiritual teachers, he found wisdom, consciousness and answers.What David discover is that the wisdom he collected needed a practice. The Imperative Habit is the practice of applying the teachings he learned. Some lessons from texts are 100s or even 1000s of years old. David turned these lessons into the Imperative Habit to turn his life around. And now he has found and lives with sustainable, internal happiness. The book is a ‘How to” towards transforming your own life from wherever it is into more.The lessons work, the practice solidifies them, and the application of these practices are endless towards Happiness, Health, Love, and Success.

Book preview

Introduction

Clinging to desires has made your life complicated.

—Ram Dass

Looking back at the life I lived years ago, I see a man who seemingly had it all. I ran my own companies since I was 28 years old. I married a beautiful woman. Together we brought three children into the world and, for 16 years, I ran a business with annual sales of $30 to $35 million. I collected all the hallmarks of the desired life—a big house in the hills bordering Silicon Valley, vacation homes, fully-loaded cars, boats, private schools for the kids, and exotic vacations for all of us. 

Only one thing was missing: I wasn't happy. I was much the opposite. 

My life was a regimented schedule of work, taking care of the kids, work, mini-vacations, work, big vacations, work, work, and more work. I woke each morning overcome with anxiety, diving into the day, eager to solve more problems, to take on more projects, to make more money, to buy more of the things that I thought would bring me that elusive feeling of happiness. Day to day, I woke up at 6:30 am hearing my phone ring in my head. I got to work as quickly as I could to bail water out of a damaged ship, my company. I would work all day, eat poorly at lunch, rationalizing I was eating well, and arrive home at 7 pm to domestic entanglements.

At times, dark times, often in the solitude of night, I secretly acknowledged my unhappiness. However, since I defined myself through the eyes of others, I ignored my most heartfelt longings and continued doing what I knew how to do: work harder, so I could buy more stuff. I marched to the drum of a society that told me what was important and what the measure of success and happiness was.

It seemed something was always preventing me from experiencing happiness. If I could just figure out what it was, if I could just work smarter, if I just had another manager at work, if I could take another vacation, if I could just raise the profit margin on a work project—then I could solve the problem of happiness. 

Outside of work, I analyzed what I knew would bring me happiness—losing weight, working out, a better diet, more discipline. I employed the tools I had available to achieve these goals, yet nothing seemed to make a difference. Maybe when my kids were older and more independent, I'd have more time to enjoy life? Maybe if I had more friends, I'd be happy? Happiness was out there, I knew it, but I just couldn't nail it down. I would work harder, and the cycle would continue.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I was on the fast track to crazy.

My life was like a huge machine in need of constant maintenance. My nickname at work was The Hurricane because, according to my dear friend, Rob, I did things at hurricane speed. People advised me to relax, to take some time off, but when I tried to get away, some part of the machine would break, putting my desired life in jeopardy, and I'd need to work harder to fix it. I lived in fear of losing the houses, cars, boats, private schools, vacations—all those symbols of success and happiness. Who would I be without them? 

The image I projected to others failed to reveal my absolute misery. But that misery was beginning to reveal itself. I had become indifferent to my physical appearance. I was mentally, emotionally, and spiritually disengaged and disenchanted. Nightly, I unplugged in front of the TV until late at night, channel flipping until I fell asleep, only to be awakened by my wife who would recite her worries and stresses into the wee hours. Soon I’d be in the kitchen, scrounging up comfort food before trying to get back to sleep, only to wake at dawn, get the kids ready for school, then jump back into work, trying to keep up with a fast-paced business that required all my mental energy.

All the while, a cajoling voice urged me to work harder. All I had to do was churn the wheel faster, and my happily ever after would come to fruition, right? Soldiering through the pandemonium, I was working so hard that I didn’t have time to think about anything except meeting the next requisite. I was too panicked to recognize the emptiness. And lacking recognition did not mean it wasn’t there. It was there. A hollow, empty, thin cardboard box, holding together much more than it should have been asked to.

My Uphill Slog to the Imperative Habit

So, what happened? How did my life finally change?

Everything fell apart. The box shredded from the weight. Pieces flying into all aspects of my life, ripping through everything like shrapnel through flesh—relationships, finances, friends, family, marriage, work, self-worth, self-respect, depression, and loneliness. 

In no particular order, my dear friend Dave, my soulmate, the one person I ever thought knew me, died. My marriage ripped at the seams. My business was sideswiped by lawsuits, collections, and the banking collapse in 2007. My health also went down the tubes—an old football injury resurfaced, knocking me down for the count, partially paralyzing me and requiring surgery.

When I assessed the wreckage from ground zero, I knew the path to salvaging my life had to be different from the well-worn track that had led to this collapse.

At my basest, stripped of the polished veneer I had presented to the world, I was confronted with the TRUTH—about myself, about my relationships, about my career, about my dreams. Surrounded by the detritus of my own making, I had no idea how to move forward, but it was finally obvious that I needed a new direction. 

I knew that the frail design for my desired life was an engineering nightmare. But what would take its place? As they say, when the student is ready, the master will appear. My teachers appeared in the form of books, each of which helped me reflect on the flaws in my design and assisted me to build a new way of living. 

Honestly, I was so low at that time in my life, had a book told me the key to life was to pour tomato juice in my hair, I would have done it. I would sit on the couch, channel flipping through TV shows that had no substance, watching TV to numb all my senses, to avoid actually thinking. Watching reality show train wrecks with no storyline but with heavy psychodrama to hold my attention for a few minutes before changing the channel to the next one. I would fill up a large bowl of ice cream with peanut butter and chocolate chips on top. This went on for YEARS. Doing the minimum around the house during the week (trying to make up for it as a weekend warrior on Saturdays and Sundays), while being glued to nothing on the TV but mind-numbing noise, in an attempt at drowning out the painful vomit endlessly spewing inside my head. Only to go to bed at 11 pm. To get up the next day, work, more mind numbness, ice cream, and bed again. 

In short, with nothing to lose, I took a huge leap of faith. I tried everything the masters (the authors of the books I read) told me to do. I put their advice into practice. I took copious notes. I followed the disciplines of dozens of books. 

By profession, I was an engineer. I thought of my work projects as puzzles I needed to solve. Now I applied that skill to rebuilding my life, piecing it together with the key wisdom I found. Between the business books, self-help books, spiritual books, and sports books, commonalities began to emerge. (For the record, they did not involve pouring tomato juice in my hair.) From these, I developed a new design for my life, one that allowed me to live as the most successful version of myself, equipped to enjoy the journey. 

The practices I put into action ultimately developed into the Imperative Habit. 

The Imperative Habit and You

By shedding my old belief systems and developing new ones, by releasing ego and judgment of myself and others, by cultivating self-awareness and consciousness, by recalibrating my goals and promoting those goals through my actions, I have transformed my life. I wrote this book to share the Imperative Habit with you, so you too can move from dissatisfaction and suffering to joy, contentedness, and peace. The Imperative Habit details how to shed old beliefs and make new ones, and how to practice, form habits, create growth, and eventually real transformation, in your life. I did it, and so can you!

What I call the Imperative Habit is actually comprised of seven habits that change a person’s life. These are the seven habits that changed my life. These seven habits I synthesized and organized from concepts and ideas I encountered in the numerous books I studied. I created the Imperative Habit to free myself from the stranglehold of ambiguous stress, doubt, and anxiety, and to make happiness my true north. Because my seven-fold Imperative Habit has worked so incredibly well to transform my life, I am offering it in detail in this book, The Imperative Habit. When you follow the steps I lay out in this guidebook, you can also make authentic happiness your true north.

By practicing the Imperative Habit, you can:

Leave behind old beliefs that no longer serve you

Deconstruct self-sabotaging behaviors

Develop self-awareness and consciousness

Create new goals in alignment with your true self

Make conscious choices to drive yourself toward your goals

Live a happy, joyful, fulfilling, and meaningful life, as you are meant to live

And you can do all this without pouring tomato juice in your hair. 

Ready to start?

Chapter 1 The Shift

Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparation for living, so that we really never live at all.

—Leo Tolstoy

There is a human condition that says we are unable to know or comprehend something unless we have a prior context. I call this the You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know syndrome. In fact, the 2004 movie ‘What The Bleep Do We Know!?’ postulated that the Native Americans did not see the Spanish galleons sailing along their shore. When a conquistador approached them on the beach and said, We have sailed across the world and now place our flag on your beach, it was not until then that the natives had the needed context—sailing and vessels—and only then could their brains use that context to create the correct image of a boat, an image that their eyes had never seen before. 

From a scientific perspective, our eyes only collect information in the form of light reflected off objects. Our brain puts the image together based on context or based on the brain's own programming. Our brain puts together and attributes meaning to 90% of what we see. Since they had never before seen or known of a massive galleon ship, the Native American brain had no context for the information delivered to it. Thus, their brains had no way to interpret the reflected light image of a Spanish galleon. As a result, they didn't see the ships. The images just didn't register. Initially, at least.

Personal introspection, inner growth, and the effort needed to change ourselves is a bit like that too. What I mean is that we can’t even see our problems if we do not have the context to comprehend them. Our problems don't register as problems. They register as being normal, being the way things are. We often cannot see our problems unless we see that an answer exists. 

I didn’t. I had no idea that where I am today existed. I mean, I had no idea I could internally be happy, whole, full of energy, joyous, healthy, fit, successful, and stress-free. Because I had no idea that these things could be achieved without external things. And I had no plans or knowledge to look inward. I always looked outward for things and not inward for growth. Not knowing this inward solution existed caused me to never look in that direction.

When I eventually saw my own problems, I felt like a Native American looking at big Spanish galleons with guns and a flag on my beach. I was totally overwhelmed, whereas moments before I was not.

A solution or better life situation DOES, and will always, exist. Believing and understanding this helps us conceptualize any problem in our lives. Don’t feel overwhelmed (as I did) or bad because (1) we all have problems, and (2) a person’s growth potential is endless. This better life situation will likely not be located on the same path as the one you have already been on. Otherwise, your efforts would only yield more of the same. The context for the same path is already present and not an agent for change. But rather, if you continue down the same path in hopes of reaching a better life, you'll simply encounter the same obstacles and the same results, which are likely a long way away from happiness. 

When we cannot see a new better life situation on a different path, then we have no real context to truly discover the real problems that are preventing us from solving them. Conventional views are that we cannot solve what we cannot see. It is like the old phrase, being unable to see the forest for the trees. This is such an omnipresent quote in society, but we've likely never applied, practiced, and implemented it into our own lives for success. 

Wayne Dyer explained it akin to living life in a dark room and believing the dark room is our complete world. (If you do not know who Wayne Dyer is, I encourage you to look him up. He is an amazing teacher, considered the father of self-help, a real legend, a kind-hearted and giving man.) Since we are located in this dark room, we are not able to know that there are lights in the room and that the room is one room within a 100-room mansion. If we do not know that a light switch exists, and further, that there is more beyond the room that we believe is our world, we are unlikely to search.

Knowing that there are things beyond your own (and beyond everyone’s) comprehension is a belief. A choice. It is also a choice to believe within yourself that there has got to be more. It is a choice to think, Is this as good as it gets? This is different than thinking, What else is out there for me to discover? Believing this creates the context, or open-mindedness, that is needed to explore the room, look for the lights, and believe things without seeing them. 

Believing that you can have a well-lit life is a choice. It is a choice to believe it. It is a choice not to believe it. And there begins the starting point. Choosing poorly can lead to depression. Choosing wisely can lead to enlightenment.

Viktor Frankl w as an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor, and he wrote a number of influential and incredible books. In his most famous book, M an’s Search for Meaning , Frankl states that for prisoners at Auschwitz, with all things the same, or constant (for him, the constant was no food, no shelter, and being beaten, abused, and left to die), a prisoner's survival hinged on their ability to change their attitude amidst having nothing. It was all they had left. When stripped of everything, left in an animalistic state, the only thing we have left, as humans,  is the being inside of us, to make us human  beings . We have the power and the ability to choose. It was Frankl’s observations as a prisoner that defined survival as using that power to change one's attitude from suffering to something else—to something that allowed prisoners to survive.

Believing in the power to change your attitude and how the conditions of your whole life hinge upon it—beliefs and choices are the difference between life and death, activity and passivity, autonomy and slavery.

Drowning to Wake Up

As my troubles began to pile up and as things seemed to look worse and worse for me, change began to happen. How did I come face to face with my marriage ending, which it did? Losing my business, which I did? Losing my house, the house I built, which I did? Losing the buildings my company owned, which I lost? All my financial security, which I did? Relationships with my parents and friends, which I too lost (temporarily)? Losing my health (again, lost temporarily) by my forties? And then to write about all of this loss? 

When I look back at my old life, I see a man caught in a whirlpool of work stress, ambition, family obligations, fear, and the overwhelming need to keep up appearances. I was doing everything I was supposed to do in order to find happiness, but I wasn't happy. Worse than that, I was on the verge of drowning. Even worse than that, I didn't even know I was drowning. Then life turned the pressure up a notch, and I began to pay attention.

By my mid-forties, I had given away all my happiness. I had nothing left to give. Inside I was tired, disappointed, and felt deeply that I had given away everything inside me, even given away or lost all my ideals and dreams I thought I had for myself.

Worse is that you could say I got to this point of loss through my own hard work! I got there by applying myself. I got to this ultimate low spot by doing everything to achieve the opposite. So how does a person who has so many things going for them, including drive and a good work ethic towards success, hit the opposite so squarely in the target of failure?

My path toward awakening (not that I realized it at the time) began with debilitating physical pain. In yet another attempt to set my life right, in 2015, I committed to working out harder and more regularly. I decided weight loss and regaining the physique from my youth was key to setting my life on a path for success and happiness. Unfortunately, while working out, running aggressively to rebuild my life, I aggravated an old football injury, resulting in severe back pain. The college football injury reappeared and then grew. Formally, it was a slipped disc in the L5/S1 vertebra. In 2015, the injury grew into an L4/L5 slipped disc and a much worse L5/S1 disc problem. I could not walk normally. I could barely use the toilet. As the doctor had warned, if I could not sit on a toilet, I should go straight to the hospital, so I made sure I could sit on the toilet, at any cost. 

But imagine the disappointment, in an attempt to make my life better, thinking that looking good was key, I was thrown down. It might have been one of my lowest points—feeling like I had no ability or any control over my life. It was incredibly demoralizing to feel so helpless, knowing that all avenues I’d tried resulted in dead ends, or now debilitating pain, forcing myself to sit on a toilet to avoid hospitalization all because of an effort to make my life better. 

Each morning, I would literally crawl out of bed to the closet where it would take me 45 minutes of lying on the floor and stretching before I could attempt to stand. At work, sitting was out of the question, so I stood, propping my computer monitor up on a stack of books and paper. An MRI revealed the two slipped disks had pinched my sciatic nerve. I needed surgery, as my doctor assured me there was no non-surgical cure for slipped disks to this degree. 

While in this state of partial parallelization, an emergency cortisol-steroid epidural shot was given directly into my spine. They administered the shot as an attempt to reduce pain and inflammation so I could walk. There had been instances, medically, that this shot had healed a slipped disc similar to mine. The shot created a form of temporary recovery such that the reduction in pain and inflammation could last for many years. The shot cost $13,000 and it worked! 

For a little while. 

The pain returned. The partial paralyzing demobilization of my left leg, caused by the sciatic nerve being pinched against one of my vertebrae from the two slipped discs, returned. My doctor stated that the shot proved to only be of temporary relief and reiterated that my condition could not be healed from the shot alone or any other method—other than surgery. He told me I would need back surgery. I reluctantly agreed. My doctor set up the surgery and obtained all the proper health insurance approvals. A date for the surgery was set. 

I got another shot for temporary relief, so I could work and walk until the surgery. While waiting for surgery, I was worried about missing too much work during my recovery. So, I did some research. I found out that strength training before surgery could improve my outcome and that it was OK to exercise while the steroid shot was still active. I started a foundation training course, focused on developing my core. My goal and belief was to do what I could to shorten my downtime after surgery. That way I could get back on my feet as fast