Path of the Jedi Episode #6 – Into the Dark

In this episode of Path of the Jedi, we explore two core principles – Commitment and Focus. On the surface these two principles might seem fairly straight forward and common sense. But have you ever asked yourself what commitment and focus really mean?

We pulled our topic for this episode from the recent book Star Wars: High Republic – Into the Dark.

The High Republic series of books explores a time in Star Wars two hundred or so years before the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Galactic Empire (the events that take place in Prequel Trilogy of Star Wars films)

It introduces us to a vast cast of new characters expanding the mythos of Star Wars and giving us new conflicts and challenges for our protagonists to overcome.

Commitment and Focus in the High Republic

Of course in all story telling, our heroes must inevitably face conflict. However, it’s HOW those heroes overcome those challenges that sets good story telling apart.

And a story becomes exceptional when we can relate to and learn from the journeys and experiences the characters grow through.

This book Into the Dark provides all the elements we look for in exceptional story telling. Faced with a seemingly endless string of conflicts and challenges, our heroes must find in themselves the commitment and focus to persevere. They must continually decide to press on despite impossible odds.

What are Commitment and Focus?

That’s in essence is what commitment is – a decision made over and over again. And with all the chaos happening around them, it can be very difficult to do this. With all the distractions and chaos of modern life, have you ever had a hard time staying committed to a new goal or vision?

Here’s where focus comes into play. When life is throwing a million things at us and we feel like we’re getting pulled in a hundred different directions, it’s so important to not only focus but also be mindful of what we’re focusing on. Like our heroes from Into the Dark as they face adversity after adversity (oftentimes life threatening), we must work to tune out the negative and focus on the tasks and goals we want to achieve.

Dive deeper in to the subjects of COMMITMENT and FOCUS in this episode of Path of the Jedi. Listen to the full episode and read the full transcript below.

Transcript: Path of the Jedi – Where Star Wars meets Personal Development

Episode #6 – Into the Dark

(Intro soundbite) If you’ve ever known anybody that’s joined the gym with the intention of improving their health for the new year, you’ll see that they’ll be super, super excited – they’re all about it, they’re showing up on the regular for the first handful of weeks in the year – and then by the time Super Bowl comes around and Mardi Gras comes around, they’re completely off the wagon.

(Intro music/main podcast)

All right! Welcome to Path of the Jedi Episode 6! Thank you guys for tuning in today for this week’s episode. Thank you for continuing to support us here at Path of the Jedi and everything! All the feedback I’ve been hearing from all of you has been incredible. I’ve gotten a lot of very supportive feedback from all of you, constructive feedback from all of you, and I I really, really appreciate it. I can’t tell you enough how much it means to me that you guys are listening and continue to listen to Path of the Jedi.

Yeah it’s been a fun, fun ride, it’s been a fun adventure and I love doing this despite how crazy my schedule is right now. I am currently traveling so I’m away from my home studio as it were. I’m back again on the laptop with the corded earbuds so if there’s any kind of sound situation or hiccups here and there, just understand I don’t have the control with my environment that I usually do back home because I am on the road.

But yeah we just roll with it right. We just roll with it. The episode from the park from camping that I did a few weeks ago turned out pretty well it turned so I think you guys are getting good episode here despite the fact that I’m not home. Either way, the content will still… I will still do my very very best to delivery you guys some good content today.

So, let’s kick it off the way we kick off every episode and that is with news and updates.

Right! First piece of news: as of this recording we are officially at 200 downloads! Yes that’s right, 200 downloads. Our first five episodes have reached 200 downloads, guys. Again I can’t thank you all enough for continuing to support Path of the Jedi. It makes me want to work harder and continue to provide great content that will help you guys on your day-to-day journey. So thank you again.

As a corollary to that – things that I’m working on, projects to continue to provide you guys with resources that will help you on your growth journey, your personal development journey – lots in the pipeline. Outside of Path of the Jedi, I am currently exploring and developing ideas for new podcasts, perhaps limited series kind of stuff. Again, more material for you guys to help you on your day-to-day journey.

Beyond that, programs as well. Working at the moment behind the scenes on awesome very, very exciting stuff that’ll help you continue to develop and grow and create the mindsets that you want to create for yourself so that you can ultimately live the life that you want to live. And for all my network marketing listeners out there, programs for you guys as well, specific to helping you build the network marketing business that you’ve always wanted to build.

So again, lots of things in the pipeline, lots of very very exciting developments. It’s going to be released gradually overtime. It’s not all going to happen at once, and different things have different time scales depending on the the complexity of the project. But yeah, I mean it’s all really driven by the amazing response I’ve gotten back as a result of this podcast. So more in the pipeline, guys. More coming for you.

Now for some Star Wars news, some very, very exciting Star Wars news: Today marks the premiere of a new series of happening on Disney plus called Star Wars: Visions! Guys, Star Wars: Visions is amazing show. If you haven’t heard of Star Wars: Visions, this is how the starwars.com website describes it: “a new anthology of animated short celebrating Star Wars through the lens of some of the world’s best anime creators.”

As a fan of anime, I find this incredibly exciting and from the previews that I’ve seen it just looks phenomenal. It goes hand in hand really; anime being the animation style that has its roots in Japanese culture really lends itself to the Star Wars Universe. As you watch the the movies you can draw a lot of parallels between the Jedi and Samurai for example. So I’m incredibly excited for this and I cannot wait to dive into Star Wars Visions. Again, this will be made available for streaming on the Disney+ platform.

And now it’s time for the shout-out! All right, this week is a shout-out and a podcast alert in one! For those of you guys who are looking for a network marketing specific podcast to listen to, please check out my good friend Matt Hall and the Network Marketing Mastery podcast. Matt and I have known each other for 4 or 5 years now. Originally connected through the internet, through social media and just stayed in touch ever since. Matt’s done amazing job with his podcast and the network marketing training is that he does. He’s a top producer in his company and he has coached and mentored many top producers in his team. Now I picked Matt for this week’s shout out for a couple of reasons:

Number one – when I was first tossing around the idea of doing this podcast Matt was actually one of the people that I reached out to for advice and guidance on putting a podcast together. Again Matt has years and years and years of experience in podcasting. His podcast the Network Marketing Mastery goes back to 2016. Matt was incredibly gracious in sharing his perspective, his experience, his knowledge on podcasting and it really helped me get over my jitters and hesitations of kicking off Path of the Jedi.

The other reason why I wanted to give a shout out to Matt and his wife Seantay is that they very recently, within the last month or so, hit their first six-figure month, first six figure in commissions. So for any of you out there who still have doubts about the network marketing profession and its viability as a career, well I think these results speak for themselves. And that with determination, consistent hard work, and perseverance, you can really anything that you want to achieve in this profession. So again congratulations to Matt and Seantay on your recent achievement! I know this is just a stepping stone to even bigger and better things.

For those you guys who are in network marketing, please go check out his podcast Network Marketing Mastery Podcast.

All right for this week’s episode we’re going to switch things up just a little bit. I realize that last handful of episodes have dove into some pretty big heavy topics. So today I’m going to go over some of my favorite quotes and passages from the recent book Star Wars: High Republic – Into the Dark by Claudia Gray.

As a reminder the High Republic series is a series of books and stories that take place two hundred or so years prior to Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. For those of you who are just casual fans of Star Wars, some of the characters and situations we bring up in this episode you may not recognize. However, the passages and quotes I’m going to be sharing with you guys today will serve a very many valuable lessons and insights. So let’s dive right in.

The first passage comes from pretty early in the book – and guys normally I would I would give you page numbers so you could go and reference these passages and quotes for yourself. However, I am reading the Ebook. I’m reading the electronic version and with the electronic version since you can shrink and expand the text, page numbers don’t really count for anything. So I can’t give you page numbers but this particular passage does happened in Chapter 1. If you want to go look for it you can find it there in Chapter 1.

The passage goes as such… it says: “The mere making of a decision sometimes had as much power as any action. Purpose clarified every move, every thought.”

In this part of the book our main characters have boarded the ship – some of them are Jedi, some of them are not Jedi – but they boarded the ship and they are about to embark on a journey to the Starlight Beacon. The Starlight Beacon is a space station that was built by the Republic way out in the outer rim… what’s known as the frontier part of the galaxy. For a lot of our characters, especially our Jedi who have spent most of their time on Coruscant or in the city – what would be parallel to a big city on Earth – this trip to the outer rim, to the frontier is figuratively and literally unchartered territory for them. So in this part of the book we get a peek into everybody’s head space, what everybody’s thinking, how everybody is feeling as they set off on this brand new adventure.

I love this passage for a lot of reasons, one of them being that it speaks to new adventures and how we might feel about taking on a new goal or a new task, setting a new vision for ourselves. A lot of times there can be hesitation, there can be reticence when faced with making changes in our lives.. any changes, because human beings are averse to change. Change means uncertainty and in the oldest caveman part of our brain uncertainty mean not surviving.

However, with change being the only through constant, we have to change, we have to evolve. Otherwise we risk extinction. And that’s what personal development really is. It’s evolving, changing, and growing yourself. Understand, any time you take on anything new, any new project, any new health regimen, any new business idea – whatever might be, any new career, anything time you do anything new – there’s always going to be that part of you that’s hesitant, that’s going to ask, “should I do this? Should I actually go for it?” That’s normal. That’s just that part of you that doesn’t like change, old patterns that are there to keep you in certainty.

For example, with this podcast I was on the fence for months before I finally pulled the trigger. There was all kinds of back-and-forth happening in my head… “Should I do it? Shouldn’t I do it? Is going to be a waste of time? Is it going to be worth my time? What if nobody listens to it?” There was all this stuff happening in my head and in the meantime absolutely nothing got done.

So, I decided to just finally do it. Regardless of any potential outcomes I made the decision to make it happen. And the act of making that decision to go for it gives clarity to every step after that, to all the action steps afterwards. But it all starts with the decision first.

So, create a new vision for yourself, create some new goals and make the decision to make it happen. Commit to it. Draw a line in the sand. That’s what decision is. It’s drawing a line in the sand. If you even just look at the word itself… DECISION – DE means “of or from”, CISION MEANS “to cut”. When you make a decision, you’re really just cutting yourself off from all other options except the one that you choose.

Another aspect of making a decision to accomplish a new goal or vision for yourself is that you don’t just make that decision once. What’s going to happen is that decision is again and again going to be challenged on the day-to-day by your old patterns that want to keep you certain. Those old patterns are going to tell you, “hey it’s not going to work. You’re not good enough.” Or it will feed your brain with all kinds of fears and doubts. So, you actually have to make the decision over and over again repeatedly. That’s called making a commitment. A repeated decision is making a commitment to seeing it through to the ultimate outcome that you want to achieve.

For example, New Years resolutions… One of the reasons why New Years resolutions never pan out is because people only make a decision once on January 1st. If you’ve ever known anybody that’s joined the gym with the intention of improving their house for the new year, you’ll see that they’ll be super super excited. They’re all about it. They’re showing up on the regular for the first handful of weeks in the year. And then by the time Super Bowl comes around and Mardi Gras comes around, they’re completely off the wagon. It’s because they only made the decision on January 1st and not repeatedly over time.

You have to renew that decision repeatedly, constantly. That’s what it means to make a commitment. Ultimately, with that repeated decision, that commitment, what will happen is you replace those old habits and patterns that are telling you that you can’t do it with new habits and patterns that are telling you not only that you CAN but that you WILL.

So if there are things that you want to achieve in your life, some new goals and new vision, just make a decision and commit, see the thing through. Because as the quote says, “The mere making of a decision sometimes had as much power (or HAS as much power) as any action.”

The next quote comes from Chapter 4. This is actually from the character Leox who is the captain of the ship that is carrying our merry band of travelers to their next adventure. In this passage he says, “Remember everybody, our perceptions define the reality of the universe. Nothing is even a thing until our thinking makes it so.”

I like this quote and I just love this character Leox. He’s kind of a free spirit type of individual and so I I love getting these sneak peeks into his into his mindset. For me this particular this particular quote really just touches back on our Path of the Jedi Episode 3 where we’re talking about the quote from Qui-Gon Jinn when he said “Your focus determines your reality.” Reality is created by our perception. Our experience of reality is determined by the thoughts we think and the perspective that we have and the meamings that we create in our own minds.

I really, really love this quote. And then there’s another quote that kind of ties into this a couple chapters after from Leox again. In a conversation he was having with one of the younger members of the crew, Leox says, “Sometimes we all need a reminder to focus on the good things in life.”

That’s so important a reminder because our perception becomes our reality. Because what we focus on becomes our experience in this life, it’s so important to make sure that we’re really aware of what we’re focusing on because… man, there’s so much craziness that really pull our attention and our focus and then therefore that becomes our reality.

Even just outside of all the crazy current events that’s happening around the world, we each go through incredible challenges throughout the course of our lives. And to be able to carry a healthy perspective and a healthy focus can really help us live a happier and more balanced life. Cup half empty or half full? I choose half full.

What’s cool did they actually reference this later on in the book through another character actually. The young Padawan (or the young Jedi in training) named Reath – Ree-ath or Reeth depending on how you want to pronounce it. I like to say Ree-ath as in two syllables because Reeth just sounds like wreath. In this section of the book towards the end of chapter 14, our young Jedi was reflecting on his own attitudes, his own mindsets because by this point they’ve been thrust into lots of conflict, lots of different challenges. And to be a Padawan is to be on a path of learning and a path of growth so he was doing kind of the self-assessment, self check-in

The passage reads as such: “He’d look too much at the negatives of their situation, not the positives. He ought to have been more likely Leox: grateful for the good instead of complaining about the bad.” Now I love this particular passage for a number of reasons… and actually I didn’t realize how much the character of Leox had resonated with me until I look back at all these different quotes and passages that I highlighted through the story.

This one again references or at least talks about Leox through the eyes of another character, our young Padawan, Reath. Reath had made this observation of Leox that he choses to focus on the good things and not the bad, instead of complaining about the bad things. For me I’m… yeah I’m just not a complainer. I find that complaining really doesn’t get much done. For me it’s all about assessing the situation. If there’s things that need to be fixed or that I can address then I’ll move forward with that information and then adjust my course of action or adjust my activity.

And this segues beautifully into the next passage which again revolves around the character of Leox. The passage reads: “And there wasn’t a damn thing Leox could do about it. He refused to worry about the things he couldn’t change. Time to concentrate on what he could. This comes in chapter 22 of the book. Again, it ties in with everything that we’ve been talking about on this episode so far. When we complain, we’re making a comment or sharing an opinion on some external circumstance that we have zero control over. Or we’re trying to effect change and get those external circumstances or individuals to align with how we think they should be. Again, ZERO control over any of it.

So this passage is guiding us, it’s instructing us to let go of those things that we cannot control. Stop giving away your mental and emotional energies to things that you have absolutely no say in. The things that you can control are: what you choose to focus on, how you choose to perceive the world and the meaning you give to your experiences and the people around you, and the decisions that you make. Ultimately the only thing that you CAN control is YOU.

All right well, that’s going to do it for today’s episode. Thank you guys again for tuning in. I actually still have a ton of other quotes and passages from the book that I didn’t touch on today. If I did this episode word end up being like a two-hour episode. So maybe we’ll save that for a future episode, revisit this book called Star Wars: High Republic – Into the Dark (<–– affiliate link) by Claudia Grey.

In the meantime, let me know what you think about any of what we discussed today or any any past episodes. You can email us your thoughts or even send an MP3 to info@pathofJedi.com – I definitely would love to get some MP3 so I can play them on the podcast. And again please feel free to rate and review the podcast. That’s going to be really helpful to us here in getting the word out. Now I did just learn this recently that “rates and reviews” really are only available on Apple podcast. I didn’t know that before, guys so sorry for misleading my non Apple users. You can still leave your comments and and your questions and carry on the discussion on our Facebook.

Our Facebook page is facebook.com/potjpodcast – or hit us up on Twitter. It’s @potjpodcast

One last thing: if you guys have anybody that you want to give a shout out to on the podcast, please let me know. I would love to give a shout out for you on your behalf. You can send an email to info@pathofJedi.com – Let me know who you want to give the shout out to and the message that you want to leave for that individual or individuals and I will promptly read those emails and shout outs on the next podcast.

Thank you all again for your patience. If there were any sound inconsistencies or discrepancies, I am as I mentioned traveling and I will be traveling through I think at least the next episode. I really appreciate you guys tuning in despite the limitations I have in my in my recording ability while I’m on the road. But hey it’s still working out. We’re still going to churn them out and still get the episodes out so make sure to tune in next week… same Bat Channel, same Bat Time… I don’t know why I said that. This is not even a DC chat… anyway, take care. Be well, be safe, and may the Force be with you.