“Okay. But we gotta get serious,” he said, staring at me with those eyes again. “We’re gonna get you in the gym six days a week, three hours a day, on a cross-training regimen. It’s going to be brutal—are you up to it?” Yes! I said. “We’re going to get you hair extensions and super-low-rise jeans and a little yellow tattoo of a lightning bolt on your hip, okay? Because that’s what turns me on. Are you ready to do that?” Yes! I said. “We’re going to get you …” reading this book, attending that seminar, learning these interesting topics to talk about. Yes, I said, yes!
“Then it gets more difficult,” Tony Robbins said, and I could tell by the look in those steel-blue eyes that this next part was going to be hard for him, too. “You’re going to have to drive by my wife’s house, our house, while I’m on the road, and you’re going to have to leave things for me—gifts, cards … things that don’t make her feel her safety is threatened, but that definitely make her wonder if I’m having an affair. You’re going to sow the seeds of doubt so that the bedrock of trust that sustains my marriage will collapse. Are you ready to do that?” Yes! I said.
I dedicated myself to the program like I’ve never dedicated myself to anything in my life. Once a week, on Fridays, I would check in with Tony so that he could monitor my progress. He would stare me up and down, sizing me up, determining if I was getting hot enough to interest him on a physical level; then we would talk casually for a lot longer, to see if I was becoming the kind of person Tony Robbins could fall in love with.
“Don’t forget to surprise me sometimes,” he said in week two. “Learn all these things, do all these things; but it’s also important in a romantic relationship for both people to feel they are learning and growing from the other person.” This was especially good advice, and I added capoeira, guitar, and Italian films of the 1940s to my areas of expertise. He asked a lot of questions about them, more than you would ask just to be polite.
Around the fifth or sixth week, I noticed something had changed about the way he looked at me. Tony Robbins, the motivator, the man I had fallen in love with, wasn’t the only person looking at me anymore; now there was another man starting to come out from behind those eyes that had always reminded me of locked steel gates. And it was exciting and scary, if those are even different things, to realize that I was on the verge of something so big with this new person I didn’t know, someone I might never know, something with no end date, no target, no limit.
In week seven, I called it off.
He was very surprised. “You’re so close! Let’s just finish the program! Come on! You can do it!”
“I know I can,” I said. “But I don’t know if I want to do it anymore.”
“You need to want it,” he said.
“You need to want it,” I agreed.
I told him I stopped because I realized I was turning love into an accomplishment, and he was turning accomplishment into love, and neither of those things would ever quite be the other. When I told him that, he seemed to both light up and flare out at the same time—like he knew this was the truth, but that it was also hard for him to let go of someone who would say something like that.
But the truth was actually much simpler than that, more visceral. I just realized that I was never going to get over the feeling I had the first time I met him, like I was walking on eggshells.
The Impatient Billionaire and the Mirror for Earth
“If only the earth could hold up a mirror to itself …”
Say no more, thought the impatient billionaire in the audience at the TED conference, who found the speaker’s voice as whiny and irritating as his ideas were inspiring and consciousness-shifting. He already knew the part of the speech that was going to stay with him: a mirror up to Earth—amazing, unbelievable. Tricky but doable. He got it. Let’s make it.
“I want you to build a mirror for Earth,” he said to his engineers, who were used to things like this.
“How big do you want the mirror to be?”
“Full length.”
“How big do you want Earth to look?”
“Full size.”
“Can’t be full size,” said the head engineer.
“Yes it can be,” said the impatient billionaire. “And by the end of today, my head engineer is going to be somebody who tells me how it’s going to happen, not why it can’t.”
“If it’s full size,” said the head engineer, “you’ll only see the reflection of what is in your field of vision up to your horizon point. That’s not what you want, is it? You’re picturing seeing, like, China, right?”
“Yes,” said the impatient billionaire. “Exactly. Things like China.”
“So let’s figure out how big,” said the engineer.
“I want you to be able to look up with binoculars and literally wave at yourself,” said the impatient billionaire. “But you could also look at the White House, or your grandmother in Florida, or see two people on a date in Brazil. My God, do you realize what this is going to mean for humanity?”
“You’re only going to be able to see one hemisphere at a time,” said the head engineer. “That means you won’t be able to see China and Brazil at the same time. Which one is more important to you?”
“I don’t know. Same. Brazil,” said the impatient billionaire.