Your brain controls the way you think and the way you think controls what you do.

What you do largely gives you the results you see in the outside world (including your bank balance, your house, your car, the types of holidays you go on and the difference you make).

So, if you want to consistently make things happen, it's vitally important that we take a look at the brain and how it's wired. This is especially true as you enter the world of entrepreneurship, because growing a business regularly triggers the extremes of your personality.

An entrepreneur must be a visionary who can see how something can be transformed in order to be more valuable. An entrepreneur must be highly aware of resources that could be useful in the service of that vision. An entrepreneur must be practical and disciplined in order to complete complex tasks without getting distracted.

An entrepreneur must build a network of new people and enrol them in the vision. An entrepreneur will also come up against people's doubts, fears and greed. An entrepreneur has to be aware of when they are operating at their best and when they are being dragged down into the negativity of others. An entrepreneur needs to know if they are working towards a realistic vision or if they are being delusional. All of this relies on you having a useful understanding of your brain.

Industrial-age employees didn't need this understanding. The architects of the industrial age did everything they could to ensure you were neither visionary nor disruptive. They created a schooling system that ironed out the highs and lows of the personality spectrum. They created structures and routines that reduced the likelihood of emotional outbursts and tantrums; equally they limited your exposure to a sense of awe, wonder and possibility, reducing the likelihood that you would be highly innovative. The goal was simple, create workers who won't be disruptive.

As an entrepreneur, these structures and routines are removed and you will open up to a wider spectrum of human experience. You will experience new highs and lows that industrial workers wouldn't dream of. As an entrepreneur, you will meet the worst version of yourself and the best version of yourself, which are already pre-installed – sometimes you'll meet both extremes in the same week!

To give you a simple way of recognising and labelling your highs and lows, I've broken your brain down into three simple modes that you will find yourself in – the reptile, the monkey and the entrepreneur.

The brain is incredibly complex, and an exciting piece of equipment to learn about properly. If you happen to be a brain scientist, forgive me for oversimplifying things but what I am about to discuss is designed to be useful for entrepreneurs rather than accurate for brain scientists.

Here are the three key parts of your ‘entrepreneur brain’.

1. The reptile. The highly emotional, survival-orientated part of your brain that has you see the world as a dangerous place where most people and most things can't be trusted. Its main purpose is to make sure that you can escape and survive any dangerous or stressful situation. When this part of the brain isn't dealing with a survival situation, it's looking for sex or entertainment to give it an emotional fix. If ever you're highly emotional, aggressive, distracted or agitated, you're in reptile mode.
2. The monkey. The functional worker part of your brain that has you see the world as a set of challenges and problems for you to complete. This is your physiological comfort zone, designed to keep you repeating the same day over and over again. If ever you find yourself on autopilot doing familiar tasks, you're in monkey mode.
3. The entrepreneur (or ‘humanitarian’ or ‘visionary’ if you prefer). The entrepreneurial part of your brain has you see the world as a deeply connected place that you can transform in a meaningful way. Your entrepreneur isn't limited by your current circumstances or resources, it's creative, dynamic, caring, loving, inspired and passionate. If ever you are working towards a big and meaningful goal, feeling centred and inspired, you're in entrepreneur mode.

DON'T LET THE REPTILE RUN YOUR LIFE

If you operate from the primitive, survival part of your brain, you can expect to live like a reptile. Reptiles don't achieve very much, they eat scraps, they crawl all over each other, they don't evolve and they feel the cold when the winters of life come around. Reptiles are either fighting for scraps, mating or conserving energy while watching anything that moves to see if it's good for food or sex.

Operating from this survival brain gives you more scarcity in the times we are living in. This part of the brain has no empathy for others, a skill that is vital in ‘value creation’. The reptile isn't able to reason effectively and it has no concept of time. It's not a logical or strategic part of the brain, it's programmed to seek out situations that seem good for immediate survival with as little effort as possible.

Unfortunately, it's easily fooled in these modern times. It's the part of the brain that will gamble on slot machines for hours on end, trading small coins for the hope of many coins, but it will never compute the folly of this activity. It will play repetitive, colourful games on the phone, scroll through endless social media accounts and get fooled into buying dumb things like weight-loss pills on late-night television.

It's the part of the brain that will hope for ‘passive income’ and will sacrifice relationships and genuine opportunities in exchange for a shot at having an endless stream of ‘flies that land in your mouth’ every day on their own.

The reptile believes the only resources that exist are those it can touch right now. If it can't see money, there's no money. If it can't see food, there's no food. The reptile will destroy everything around itself if it thinks that will bring an immediate benefit to its survival. If you have ever lashed out at someone close to you, if you have ever smashed something valuable or sent a venomous email that later cost you dearly, it was you ‘going reptile’. This short-term view will have you make your worst decisions, often leaving you having to apologise or losing someone or something important to you.

THE MONKEY BRAIN DOES WHAT IT'S TOLD

The monkey brain isn't much better than the reptile brain if you want to achieve success as an entrepreneur.

If you operate from the purely functional part of your brain, you will live like a monkey. You will have friends and you will be able to perform repetitive tasks, but most of what you do will not be very meaningful in the long term. You will have a repetitive, comfortable existence, spend your time nit-picking and stay amused with very simple things.

The monkey brain works closely with the reptile to stay entertained. The monkey does all the repetitive tasks, and the reptile provides a variety of peak emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, anger, surprise, sexual arousal and excitement. The chiefs of the industrial age discovered that you can keep the monkey working on repetitive tasks for 40 years if you make sure the reptile keeps it entertained with emotional ups and downs on a daily basis.

The monkey believes the only resources that it can access are those it has been told (preferably in writing) it can access. If you tell the monkey it earns £45,000 a year, it believes that's all there is. If you tell the monkey it has a credit card limit of £3500, that's it until a letter arrives from the bank saying that it's now £4000! The monkey cannot perceive how life can be any different from the way it is now because no one has told it how. The monkey can only act if it's shown how to do something and then it can repeat it.

All the monkey wants to do is stay safe and see what the reptile comes up with next as entertainment.

If you've ever gotten caught in meaningless repetitive endeavours or felt helpless about how to change your life for the better because you don't know how, you were caught in monkey mode.

THE ENTREPRENEUR BRAIN TRANSFORMS YOUR WORLD

If you want to innovate, transform the world and build an inspiring empire, you need to access your entrepreneur brain.

If you operate from the entrepreneurial part of your brain, you will live like an emperor. You will develop a space that is truly your own, people will be honoured to share conversations with you, you will solve big important problems and make a difference to many people.

The entrepreneur part of your brain has great amounts of empathy, logic, reasoning and higher consciousness. These are all great skills for turning a vision into an empire.

Your entrepreneur brain has a capacity, quite literally, to love the world and everyone in it. It can connect with people and events over vast distances. It can calculate future consequences, it can draw unique insights from your own past or even the stories of others and naturally devise strategies. It's wise beyond the comprehension of the monkey or the reptile.

While the reptile believes in resources it can touch and the monkey believes what it is told, the entrepreneur believes in its ability to influence.

An entrepreneur believes that if a resource exists somewhere in the world, it can have a powerful discussion about how that resource gets used. The entrepreneur brain doesn't care who currently ‘owns’ the resource, only that it's possible to access it. If someone has a set of skills, the entrepreneur wants to enrol them in using those skills towards their vision. If someone has money, the entrepreneur is curious to see if that money could be put to better use with their company. If someone is famous, the entrepreneur sees the potential in them drawing attention to a common cause. The entrepreneur always sees the win–win relationships and therefore the entrepreneur doesn't need to own things in order for them to be useful.

Richard Branson sees the media as a resource because he has mastered such influence over the media, but he doesn't own it. SoftBank founder Massayoshi Son raised $45 billion in a 45-minute pitch to build his vision for the future – the money existed in a sovereign wealth fund and he influenced how it would be used.

If you have ever had moments of pure inspiration, where you feel anything is possible, you want to start a movement and do something meaningful for humanity, you were having an entrepreneur brain moment.

THE ENTREPRENEUR IS RARELY IN CHARGE

Here's the problem. The brain was built in such a way that the lower parts of the mind can shut down the higher parts. If the reptile brain is overstimulated, it shorts out the monkey and the entrepreneur and the reptile takes over.

In a genuine survival situation, you don't want to empathise with your attacker and you don't want to just keep doing what you are doing. You want to do what's needed to survive and nothing else. So the reptile is in charge when you feel your survival is imminently threatened.

If the reptile part of the brain returns to calm again, the monkey brain takes over and gets on with its feeble existence, bouncing between repetitive tasks with slight distractions from fluctuating emotions. The monkey brain is in charge when you do not feel like your survival is immediately threatened and you're just getting on with familiar tasks.

The monkey brain is designed to stay focused on tasks while the reptile keeps it entertained from time to time. From a survival standpoint, doing repetitive and familiar tasks that have always paid the bills, kept you fed and a roof over your head makes sense. If you are surviving, your monkey doesn't want you to rock the boat with a big idea that could destabilise things and make the reptile start attacking everything.

Provided the reptile or the monkey brain is stimulated, you cannot access the higher mind of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur only comes out when you truly feel abundant, centred and complete in the moment. The entrepreneur needs to be in an environment that is inspiring.

This realisation may start to give you insights into why society is set up the way that it is.

The people who ran the show in the Industrial Revolution did not want millions of disruptive entrepreneurs running around.

Many parts of society during the Industrial Revolution evolved to keep people from going into ‘survival mode’ and tearing the streets up like savage reptiles. Governments set up provision for social security, pensions and healthcare because, without these things, the population might feel their very survival was under threat and end up burning down the city just trying to survive winter.

After survival is taken care of, the system is designed to keep people performing like well-trained little monkeys, who can carry out mind-numbing, repetitive tasks for years on end. Good factory workers. Part of this system is to give daily doses of emotion to the reptile so the monkey can stay entertained.

Most importantly, the system seems to have been set up to keep people from spending time in their higher mind – the entrepreneurial part.

Entrepreneurs pose a threat to powerful industrialists; if an entrepreneur is in business, they can take your market share (like Richard Branson, Steve Jobs or Oprah Winfrey); or, if they are a humanitarian, they can liberate your workers (like Gandhi, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr).

In order to keep the workers as workers, and to prevent them from rising up, two things must happen:

1. People must be convinced that they are able to survive. You must not threaten their survival in the immediate moment or they will turn savage and behave like reptiles; but you must also ensure that people know they aren't abundant yet – however – one day in the future, you will receive rewards beyond all comprehension if you behave as you are told.
2. People must be kept occupied with tasks or entertainment at all times. While they aren't working, they must never have a spare moment to access their higher mind. Not only will this prevent people from becoming disruptive, but also the stimulated reptiles and monkeys love to consume shiny new objects that they get bored with rapidly. The stimulated monkey and reptile brains are wonderful consumers in the economy.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it's exactly how the masses have been treated for the last 250 years. The mainstream news, entertainment and popular personalities all reinforce these two messages.

The traditional, mainstream media is an elegant way to keep most people in their monkey brain. It stimulates emotional highs and lows without immediately threatening your survival, which would throw you into your reptile brain.

If you look at the way we are bombarded by advertising and entertainment, it's no wonder so few people ever escape their monkey life of repetitive, meaningless tasks.

When you look at what's really going on in society, we have built global systems to keep people on the treadmill of being in the monkey brain.

If we examine almost every spiritual teaching that gives you a path to enlightenment, the advice is fairly simple – tune out from all the garbage for a while and give yourself a chance to access your higher consciousness.

Spiritual teachers often suggest going to a very safe place and fasting, meditating, being silent and celibate for a while. It's all about avoiding the stimulation of the reptile and monkey brain.

When people tune out from the noise, they give themselves a chance to access their inner entrepreneur. They tap into new ideas that could help thousands of other people, and they discover vast resources they barely knew existed.

Accessing your inner entrepreneur isn't as hard as you might think. You first need to convince yourself of three things:

1. You don't need anything – you are whole and complete in this moment and your survival is not threatened in any way.
2. You are not required to perform repetitive and meaningless tasks in order to survive.
3. You're here to transform the world for the better, serve others and experience the rewards that come from these inspired acts of service.

In the next chapter we will begin the process of awakening your entrepreneur brain and seeing just how much opportunity is surrounding you right now.

First, let's make sure you aren't feeding the reptile or stimulating the monkey too much. If you are, you'll spend all your time cleaning up the messes they make and there'll be none left for building your empire.

NO MORE STIMULATING YOUR REPTILE BRAIN!

Your reptile brain will destroy you and therefore you need to stop feeding it. This begins with monitoring and improving what you talk about and think about. Avoid engaging in negative self-talk whereby you tell yourself, over and again, how scarce things are and how tough life is. Stop telling yourself or others that you are barely surviving and there are no resources around you. Put an end to sentences like:

‘There's not enough money' and replace it with ‘I'm living in the most abundant time in human history, I can access as much money as my vision requires for its fulfilment’.

‘I'm so busy and have no time' and replace it with ‘time is equal for everyone, I'm completely in control of how I spend my time and there are millions of people who can help me if they are inspired to do so’.

‘I'm not good enough' and replace it with ‘I am fortunate to be surrounded by skilful people who can help and support me to achieve my vision if I inspire them’.

‘You can't trust anyone’ and replace it with ‘I only move in circles with people who share my vision and are open to supporting it’.

This new self-talk might sound a bit fluffy to your monkey and reptile, but it enriches the parts of your brain that have what it takes to succeed. The science is clear, your higher mind is exponentially more powerful than the primitive zones of your brain.

Next for some practical steps to keep your survival fears at bay. Don't keep an empty fridge. Don't deprive yourself of sleep. Don't deprive yourself of access to the cash you need to survive. Don't starve yourself of nutrition by eating cheap food. Don't deny yourself little rewards for your efforts.

Having no food, water, sleep or cash around stimulates the reptile brain, which will push you to the brink of your worst behaviour. You will act aggressively to those who are closest to you, you will take stupid, short-term actions that come back to bite you and you will spiral out of control.

In order to try to stop the spiral, your brain will construct an unattainable fantasy. In your fantasy, you might imagine yourself with passive income, a lazy retirement and big winnings.

In this fantasy, you probably don't have to do anything and money keeps rolling in. This fantasy is designed as a safety mechanism to try to stop you completely destroying yourself.

As with any fantasy, you are removed from your power in this moment and you begin to pursue a juvenile approach to life which causes you to spend what little money or time you have on quick-fix solutions. You might join a multi-level marketing operation that you won't actually give any time to, or send money to a high-risk investment that you don't understand. You gamble or you blow money you don't have trying to create the fantasy.

It's easy to spot these reptile fantasies. They are typically presented to you as:

• Passive income. The reptile imagines that money comes from a source that requires no time, energy, effort or focus. The entrepreneur knows that making money and building a successful business will always require energy, time and effort. However, if you are dedicated to a meaningful cause, it will be fulfilling, rewarding and ethical.
• Retirement. The reptile wants you to squirrel away money that you believe you will live on after you are too old ‘to hunt or gather’. The entrepreneur never wants to retire, but looks to making a contribution for as many years as possible.
• Multiple streams of income. The reptile enjoys fantasising about money coming from many sources, thus ‘safeguarding your food supply’. The entrepreneur loves to focus on earning money from sources that fit perfectly with their mission and vision; if it's one source or twenty, the entrepreneur cares not.
• Big wins. The reptile likes the idea of making all the money you need for the rest of your life in one hit. The entrepreneur doesn't try to get everything done in one hit, because it realises that consistently creating regular wins creates big jumps.
• Entitlements. Your reptile brain believes there's money that ‘should rightfully be yours’. The entrepreneur believes that money is energy and will flow towards people who earn the right to utilise it best.
• Providers. The reptile wants a person or organisation who will take care of you and then you won't need to worry about money. The entrepreneur is looking for organisations, causes and people to provide for.
• Financial freedom. The reptile imagines a time when you will not need to be responsible for money and thus be free from it. The entrepreneur recognises and embraces the need to tackle the financial complexity that's created along with wealth.

Of course, all of these are juvenile concepts created by clever people who know how to sell ideas to reptiles and monkeys.

The only people who have these things are entrepreneurial empire builders. However, they don't even relate to these concepts. They just think about turning their inspired vision into a functioning empire.

For starters, entrepreneurs never retire. They do what they love so they don't want to stop doing it. They typically work as long as they can – often they stop ‘working’ just weeks before they die.

They don't see themselves as beneficiaries of passive income or multiple streams of income. They see that they are in the service of one growing empire, which has much to be cared for.

They don't go for easy, quick wins. They take on the big challenges and, when they do have a big win, they find another big challenge to take on next.

They don't seek financial freedom, they manage financial complexity. They don't look for a provider, they look for opportunities to provide for others.

DON'T BE A MONKEY

Living a monkey life is easy. Almost the whole of society wants you to do this. Often, it's your parents, your teachers, your government and your friends who want you to live by the monkey brain rules. They might say things to you like:

‘Get a good job, settle down, fix your mortgage, don't rock the boat and put that dream off until you retire.’

This is the monkey anthem. It's more than just an anthem – it's the day-to-day noise that is deafening when you realise how loud it's playing.

Even when you do try to tune out, a hundred things will show up and try to tune you back in.

The news, the media, the advertising industry, organised religion, workplaces, families and the government are all beating the same drum. It's designed to keep you marching to that drum – work, consume, pay taxes, repeat.

It might feel nice to march to that drum at times. I've often envied those people who can do it. At times when my journey got tough, I wondered what it would be like to have a regular pay cheque, a planned holiday break and to trust in the government or an employer to look after me in retirement. I imagine it must be bliss to those who haven't woken up their entrepreneur brain. Like you have.

If you want to live like a monkey, repeat the same day over and over again while you ride the little emotional ripples the reptile provides. When you get bored, create pointless drama. When the drama is too much, go back to work. Trust the system and let it age you.

If you want to live as a monkey, settle. Settle for a safe little house with a manageable little mortgage. Settle for a menial job that you could do in your sleep and which pays a basic little survival wage. Settle for TV shows to entertain you. Settle for the spectator seats. Settle for answers that don't make sense. Settle for self-serving institutions that take advantage of what little spare time and money you do have.

If that sounds unbearable, then keep reading. The alternative is to take your life up a gear and live as an entrepreneur.