CHAPTER 1 LIFE FORCE: OUR GREATEST GIFT Connect to the Supreme and Vital Power of Your Life Force "A healthy person has a thousand wishes, but a sick person has only one." --INDIAN PROVERB I'm walking through the open air of St. Peter's Square, past the immense dome of the Vatican, awed by the grandeur and beauty of this magnificent setting. As I walk up the white marble steps to the Vatican Hall, I see all heads suddenly turning. I follow their gaze, and I notice an older man with a benevolent smile and humble expression walking toward me. I look directly into his eyes as we reach out to shake hands . . . and then I realize it's the Holy Father, the Pope. I've traveled to the Vatican for a landmark meeting with some of the greatest scientific minds in the world. They've flocked here for a conference hosted by Pope Francis himself. I've been invited to deliver the final speech to a roomful of pioneers in regenerative medicine-- one of the great honors of my life. Over three spellbinding days, we listen to a stream of brilliant scientists, doctors, and healthcare entrepreneurs. They speak with urgency and passion about the solutions they're developing to combat deadly diseases and devastating medical disorders. They share mind-blowing revelations about new methods to restore the body at the cellular and molecular levels--therapies that can reinvigorate muscles and joints and blood vessels, revive damaged organs, conquer illnesses that previously seemed incurable. They take us on deep dives into stem cell treatments, gene therapy, and other life-changing innovations that amplify the body's natural capacity to repair and renew itself. As you'll soon discover, many of these advances are so stunning that even a nonreligious person would describe them as miraculous! As spiritual leader to 1.3 billion Catholics around the world, Pope Francis wants to nurture these scientific miracles for the good of all humanity. In his welcoming speech, he tells us how happy he is to have brought us together "from different cultures, societies, and religions" to serve our shared mission of helping "those who suffer" and exchanging knowledge "for the benefit of all." The fact that the Pope himself is spearheading this historic event tells us just how far regenerative medicine has advanced. It speaks to the enormous potential of these trailblazing approaches to eliminating suffering, restoring our health, and enhancing our well-being. In Rome we had a firsthand, front- row seat to see the impact of these unbelievable breakthroughs. We met a 15-year-old who'd been given less than one chance in three of surviving leukemia--and was now, more than ten years later, in perfect health, thanks to a novel stem cell treatment. We heard from people with advanced cancer who'd exhausted their options with chemo and radiation and were sent home to die. But they didn't give up. They tried some of the amazing new treatments you'll be reading about here--and two years later they weren't just surviving, but thriving! I've written this book to help you understand what all this excitement is about. I want to empower you to take full advantage of this revolution in diagnostics, biotechnology, and regenerative medicine. It has already changed my life in ways I could never have imagined. It's transforming healthcare from top to bottom. It promises to expand our strength and vitality and potentially how long we can live. I want you to be among the first to benefit from these scientific discoveries, because I know from my own experience how dramatically they can improve the quality of your life. In fact, the practical knowledge that I'm about to share with you in these pages might actually save your life--or the life of someone you love. The aim of this book is to give you the latest information on the astounding tools and therapies that are available RIGHT NOW, and others that could soon be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These innovations will enable you to solve many of the most common health challenges before they get out of hand. Imagine being able to find cancer at stage zero, when it's supremely treatable and ultimately curable. Wouldn't it be invaluable to understand your genetic risk factors, and some of the tools available that could lower or stop those risks from becoming reality? Think of the power of being able to change your lifestyle to avoid degenerative problems like heart disease and diabetes. Did you know that one company is in Phase 3 trials with a tool that could heal arthritis to help you regrow fresh cartilage like a teenager? Many of these developments are so astonishing that they sound like they'll be emerging in twenty or thirty years. In fact, many of these are happening right now! The speed of the biotech and healthcare revolution is geometrically accelerating , for two reasons. The first is a massive inflow of capital. While COVID- 19 brought devastation to so many, it also served as a massive stimulus for investment. Despite the pandemic, more venture capital was invested in 2020-- including a record $80 billion in healthcare startups alone-- than at any other time in history. There are more dollars than ever before to drive more and more audacious medical and biotech innovations from research into the market. The second reason is that biology is now an information technology, which means that the field of medicine is getting both better and cheaper at warp speed. Thanks to technology, every phase of medical treatment is being reimagined. On the front end, sensors and networks are upending medical diagnostics. In the middle, robotics and 3D printing are reinventing traditional medical procedures. On the back end, artificial intelligence (AI), genomics, cellular medicine, gene therapies, and gene editing are transforming medicines themselves. Taken altogether, biotech is remaking sick care into genuine healthcare. It's changing the medicine from the one-size-fits-all system we all grew up with to a totally new model: future-looking, proactive, personalized, precision medicine. Not only is healthcare being transformed top to bottom by this geometric progression in technology, but costs are plummeting, as they are in other areas of daily life. For example: We forget how much cellphones used to cost. I actually had the first commercial model back in the 1980s, a Motorola that set me back $3,995-- the equivalent of more than $10,000 today.1 It was more than a foot long and weighed nearly two pounds! The battery charged for six hours, and it only gave you thirty minutes of talk time. Today you can get the latest Apple iPhone for free with most cell service contracts-- and it has one hundred times more computational power than the computer that took the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon. Or think about this: Your computer runs on microchips-- they're the brains of the machine. The first microchip contained 4,000 transistors that cost a dollar apiece. Today's state- of- the- art microchips feature more than six trillion transistors that cost an infinitesimal fraction of a penny. They're 6,500 times faster and 4.2 million times cheaper! Our access to information, education, and entertainment has expanded exponentially as well. Every single day, eighty-two years' worth of new video is uploaded to YouTube, including entire courses from nearly every university in the world. How do these trends relate to healthcare? Well, consider this: Less than twenty-five years ago, it took more than a decade and cost $2.7 billion to read a complete human genome, the full set of genetic instructions for a person's growth and development. Today it's done for under $600--and completed overnight. We now have the technology to "write over" a genome to cure sickle cell anemia and some forms of congenital blindness. Stem cells can regrow healthy lungs once thought to be damaged beyond repair. Other "living" medicines--using enhanced T cells or natural killer (NK) cells--can supercharge our immune system. Pharmaceutical- quality over- the- counter supplements exist today that can restore or enhance our energy and zest for the highest possible quality of life. Do I have your attention? Are you ready to join me on this adventure? In fact, the innovations I've just mentioned are only a sliver of what you'll find in the chapters ahead! But before we go any further into the marvels of regenerative medicine, before we share more about these life-changing, life-saving formulas, I need to tell you a story. I need to explain what brought me to the Vatican in the first place-- what happened in my own life to make me rethink everything I thought I knew about health and healthcare. After all, if you'd told me ten years ago that I'd be rubbing shoulders with these scientific superstars, I'd have laughed! So how did I, of all people, become an evangelist for these groundbreaking advances in cellular and molecular medicine? How did I learn that our bodies could self- renew and self- heal to the point that science fiction is turning into science fact? In short, how did I end up here with you right now, preparing to tell you about all of these remarkable technological breakthroughs--advances that I'm convinced can help you and your loved ones live much healthier, longer, more vibrant, more energetic, and more joyful lives? FROM PAIN TO POWER "Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again." --NELSON MANDELA Like all of us, I arrived at where I am today because of a series of decisions. Some of them were conscious and deliberate. But as I look back, I believe without a doubt in the element of grace, the times when I was guided to the right answer. When challenging circumstances reshaped my core beliefs and made me willing to seize an opportunity that changed everything. I'm sure you've experienced moments like this in your life. You know what I'm talking about. Where something terrible happened, something so painful that you'd never want to go through it again, or have anyone you care about go through it, but afterward, you realized that challenging time made you grow. It made you care more, produced a different level of drive that helped you improve the quality of your life or the lives of those you love. Many of these painful experiences are what prepared me to write this book. The sum of the darkest and most difficult times gave me the insights that I'm ready to share with you today-- insights that can boost your health, happiness, and vitality. That can make life truly worth living. It all began with the gift of growing up in a tough environment. Don't get me wrong. There was lots of love in my family. But my upbringing was also filled with violence, chaos, insecurity, and fear. My mom was wonderful in so many ways, but she struggled with addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs. Many times we were too broke to buy food or clothes. I was desperate for answers, desperate to learn anything that could ease my suffering. For as long as I can remember, I also hated to see others suffer. That's why I've spent more than four and a half decades of my life working to help millions of people uncover the most effective strategies to get from where they are to where they truly want to be. To achieve their dreams and more-- to live a life of meaning and fulfillment. I'm obsessed with helping people lift themselves up from pain to power. But when I was starting out, I didn't have a single role model for success or achievement. So what could I do? Where could I turn for insight and inspiration? I turned to books-- my great escape. I discovered that I could enter the world of philosophy by reading the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I could enter the world of psychology by reading Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. So I took a speed- reading course and set myself a goal of reading one book a day. As you might have predicted, that turned out to be a bit of a stretch! But I was so hungry for knowledge that I read more than 700 books in seven years. I raced through them in an insatiable quest to learn everything and anything that could help me or anyone who would listen to me! In high school, I was known as Mr. Solution. If you had a question, I had an answer. When I was seventeen years old and supporting myself by working as a janitor, I found my first moment of grace. I met Jim Rohn. A renowned personal development speaker and business philosopher, Jim was the man who helped me to see that for things to change, I had to change. For my life to get better, I had to get better. Bemoaning my past wouldn't get me to a brighter future. Complaining about my current stressful circumstances wouldn't help. Neither would hoping my luck would change or wishing on a star. What Jim taught me was this: If you want to succeed at anything --whether it's building a hugely profitable business, constructing a storm proof investment portfolio, or creating a healthy lifestyle that fills you with boundless energy--you need to study people who have already achieved the result you're after. In other words, success leaves clues. If a person has sustained success in any long-term ambition--whether it was losing weight, growing a business, sustaining an extraordinary relationship--then luck has nothing to do with it. They're doing something different than you are. So you need to understand exactly what they're doing differently, and precisely how they've mastered the skills you'll need to replicate their success. Jim got me to start focusing on the few who do in life, not just the many who talk. I began to appreciate the value of role models, those special people who can help you identify a proven approach instead of expending all your energy in trial and error. If there's already a paved express lane to power, why not follow it? But remember, I was Mr. Solution! So I kept reading voraciously, kept studying the most successful people in every area I wanted to master, kept applying their time- tested strategies. Before long, I'd gathered enough answers to become a coach. I began with one- on- one sessions and built up to small seminars and then groups of several hundred people. Before long, I was working with Olympic gold medalists, billionaire businessmen, and some of the world's greatest entertainers. I had found my calling. It was a beautiful life. I had the opportunity to share the insights and strategies I'd learned and help others connect with their inner strength, courage, and purpose. And, most important, to find out how to get quicker, faster, and more satisfying results. But the truth is, I was a different person back then than I am today. In those early years of my career, I didn't yet know how to handle the fearful part of the ancient fight- or- flight brain that exists inside us all. I'm guessing you've experienced this, too-- those times when your uncertainty runs wild, spurring your mind to invent far- fetched disaster scenarios that would earn you a fortune if you wrote made- for-TV movies! I must have watched a lot of those films, because I started to develop a terrible sense of foreboding about my future. Rationally, I could see that it was no fluke that my career had taken flight. I was working 18 or 20 hours a day on a mission to serve. But an awful thought kept worming into my brain: What if the reason I'd been successful so quickly was that I was destined to die young? Once I allowed myself to dwell on those irrational fears, my mind kept creating more of them. As I've taught people for years: Where focus goes, energy flows. So you better direct your focus! But this foreboding was crazy! It wasn't just my anxiety about an untimely death. I worried that my tragic demise would be slow and agonizing. Instead of getting hit by a truck and dying instantly, I imagined myself rotting away in pain for years with cancer. I even had nightmares about it. Until one day, when my nightmares came to life and a cancer diagnosis turned my world upside down for real. But it wasn't me who got the diagnosis. My girlfriend at the time, Liz, burst into my apartment one day, sobbing uncontrollably. "My mom has cancer," she told me. "They think she has nine weeks to live." It felt like a punch to the gut. It took my breath away. I loved Liz's mom, Ginny, and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Struggling to hold back my tears, I asked, "How is this possible?" Ginny had gone to the doctor with a big bulge on her back, just below her shoulder. Now she was being told it was cancerous-- and that she also had a tumor in her uterus. What's more, those doctors had decided that it wasn't even worth treating her because her cancer had progressed beyond the point of no return. All she could do was set her affairs in order and bravely face the prospect of dying in her forties. This terrible news shook me to my core. But I was someone who could never accept pain, suffering, or defeat without searching for a solution. I knew that tens of thousands of people had beaten cancer after hearing it was incurable, and that many of them had followed nontraditional alternatives to radiation or chemotherapy. What if their success had left clues that could help Ginny? So I went to work, reading everything about cancer I could lay my hands on. I came across a short book by a Kansas orthodontist who'd overcome pancreatic cancer and credited a nutritional program that apparently detoxified his system. At the same time, he revitalized his body with concentrated pancreatic enzymes. It was a controversial approach, and I wouldn't recommend it today because better options now exist. But at the time, Ginny had nothing to lose and no promising alternative. So she embraced this experimental approach with an unshakeable belief that it would save her. Incredibly, within just a few days, she started to feel better. After a few weeks, as her body began to cleanse itself, she felt better still. After two and a half months, Ginny's doctor was shocked by her radical improvement. Eventually he persuaded her to undergo exploratory surgery, so he could see what was going on. When they opened her up, they discovered that a fist-sized tumor had shriveled to the size of a fingernail. The doctor was blown away. Ginny explained what she'd been doing to heal herself, but he had no interest in hearing it. He couldn't believe that her diet and her mindset could have had such a profound effect. "You don't understand," he told her in that patronizing tone. "This is just a spontaneous remission." Today, I am happy to tell you that Ginny is alive and well in her eighties--more than forty years after being told that she had only nine weeks left to live! That experience changed me forever. To this day, I can't explain the precise mechanisms that healed Ginny's body. But I can tell you this: Ginny's recovery strengthened my core belief that there's almost always an answer , even in the toughest situations. And it taught me that we need to search for those answers with an open and inquiring mind, never accepting without question that the "experts" must be right. Sure, there are times when the traditional "standard of care" might be the best approach. But we all have to think for ourselves and do our own due diligence. We can't outsource the oversight of our health to anyone else, no matter how many diplomas are nailed to their office wall. We can't take it on faith that they have all the right solutions. Likewise, we can't blindly follow the average person's example. Why would you, given that the average person isn't particularly healthy? Seeing how Ginny's life was turned upside down by cancer-- and then right side up again-- showed me the simple truth that nothing matters more than our health . As you can imagine, it convinced me that taking care of my body had to be a top priority. Some people behave as if work or money is more important than health. Think about it, there are billionaires who've been diagnosed with a painful chronic or terminal disease, and who'd give up everything to restore their physical well-being. As we'll discuss later in more detail, our lifestyle choices-- especially nutrition, exercise, sleep, and mindset-- play starring roles in optimizing our health. Small and simple changes in these areas can have a tremendous influence on our quality of life and our level of day- to- day energy. So I decided to go all in to adopt a healthy lifestyle that would help maximize my strength, my vitality, my capacity to grow and share, and my ability to live life to the fullest. I started working out like a banshee. I became a vegan at a time when it wasn't exactly fashionable in America--the homeland of supersized steaks, barbecued ribs, cheeseburgers, and deep- fried chicken! It won't surprise you to hear that I occasionally took things too far. I pushed myself so hard that there were days when I found it difficult to run or even walk without back pain. But I became immensely strong and was bursting with energy. I felt for the first time that I'd truly connected to my own power, my essence, my life force . Excerpted from Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life and Those You Love by Tony Robbins, Peter H. Diamandis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
