Prosperity Guide

By Jeff Altman, Big Game Hunter

EP 3085 Are you living a life of quiet exhaustion, confused by the relentless drive for true success, and feeling stuck in a “survival mode” reactive state? This is an essential guide to helping you navigate the invisible forces that limit you—from deeply held beliefs to the profound influences of the outside world. If you’re watching this before the book’s November 2025 release,⁠ You can book here

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Have you ever had that feeling, you know, you’re doing everything you’re supposed to do to climb the ladder and hit all the milestones, but there’s that little nagging voice telling you that something is missing and you’re not really living. You just survive. Well, let’s get started, because this feeling is more common than you think.

Even for today’s most successful people, we’ll delve into the great ideas in John Roseberg’s Guide to Prosperity to see if we can chart a path from scraping by to truly living a life without regrets. Let’s understand this. Here it is, the top things people regret when they die, written by a palliative nurse named Brownie Weir.

It’s not about money, a promotion, or a bigger house. No. This is due to a lack of courage to live an authentic life.

This is the stake in the ground. The stakes are high for all of us. This is exactly why we need to understand the huge difference between merely surviving and truly thriving.

Yes, this brings us to the million dollar question. How do we actually do this? How do we live? We won’t regret it. For the author, the question is no longer a theoretical one but becomes extremely urgent after his best friend Nathan is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I mean, watching his friends’ world shrink into a daily struggle for survival. This lit a fire in him to figure out how the rest of us could break through our own walls before it was too late. That’s the surprising part, that feeling of just getting by.

This doesn’t just apply in times of crisis. You can be at the absolute peak of your career, with all the awards and fancy titles, and still feel this deep inner disconnect, and the author talks about feeling like he was just sprinting on a treadmill fueled by fear and ambition, completely unaware that there was another way to live. And that’s the hidden cost of a life spent simply trying to survive.

OK I want you to think about your own day right now. A study from Harvard University took a closer look at this and found a rather alarming number.

It goes to the heart of this collective disconnect. We all feel the number is 47%. So what do you think this means? That’s it.

Almost half of our waking hours our minds are somewhere else entirely. We either relive the past or stress about the future. Researchers basically say it’s a sign of an unhappy mindset.

This kind of mental time travel is a huge red flag that we are living in what the book calls survival mode. This state actually prevents us from being present in our own lives, which brings us to the core framework of this whole idea. This book shows that our entire life experience is essentially run by one of two operating systems.

You are either in survival mode or thrive mode and figure out which mode you are in. Well, that’s the first step in taking back control. So let’s analyze how these two people actually feel.

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Think of survival mode as the emergency alarm built into your brain. You see, it works amazingly well when you need it. Just like if you were actually face-to-face with a saber-toothed tiger, the problem is that our brains have a hard time distinguishing between a real tiger and a passive-aggressive email from our boss.

As a result, this emergency system ends up becoming our default setting for coping with daily stress. It reduces our entire world to a long list of threats we must live with. This chart just lays it all out.

No? I mean, think about it. When you’re in survival mode, your body becomes tense. Your breathing becomes shallow.

You can probably feel it right now, just thinking about a stressful day, but in thriving mode, you feel relaxed. You feel grounded. It’s the difference between recovering from pure fear and taking a breath and reacting with some creativity.

The goal here is not to get out of survival mode. We need it. Just stop living there 24:7.

OK That’s the problem. How do we truly transform? How do we move from constant reactivity to conscious action? That’s why this book gives us a super simple yet powerful tool called the AIR framework.

Think of it as a way to hit the pause button, create a little space, and then consciously choose a new way forward. AIR is an abbreviation. It stands for awareness, inquiry and reconstruction.

The idea is that you can use it to breathe air when you feel like you’re drowning in stress or just reacting to everything. This is a truly practical process that gives you the ability to move from being controlled by your environment to consciously choosing your response to your environment. Here’s how it works.

The first step is awareness. That’s it. Just pay attention to which mode you are in.

Do you feel nervous and unresponsive? Take a look. Don’t judge it. The second step is to ask.

This is where you get curious. You ask yourself, well, what is the ancient story or belief that dominates all of this now? Then finally rebuild. This is where you take back your power.

You actively choose a different perspective, a new belief, that can actually help you and get you back to that thriving state. Now theory is one thing, but let’s talk about how this works in the real world. To really make this AIR framework click.

This book tells us the story of a woman named Emily, whose journey perfectly illustrates what surviving to thriving looks like. So on the surface, Emily has it all figured out. She is a talented executive.

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Everyone admired her, but deep down, she was just smoking hot. She’s completely stuck in survival mode because she’s afraid that one day everyone will find out that she’s actually not good enough. It doesn’t matter what she accomplished.

Shutting down your inner critic is never enough. This is the story of her life. This is her core belief.

My worth is determined by my success. This is the story she learned as a child when she scored 93 on a test. So what about the other seven points? She believed her worth was solely based on her performance, which kept her on the treadmill of constant exhaustion.

This is where AI frameworks start to work their magic. During a coaching session, she was asked this incredibly simple yet profound probing question. What happens if you stop believing this? This one question simply opened up her whole world.

It was an invitation to a truth that she had accepted all her life. It creates enough space for new stories to begin. This is the refactoring part being implemented.

The change wasn’t a big dramatic moment. It happens in these small, ongoing, tiny acts of rebellion against old beliefs. Things like leaving get off work on time, delegating tasks instead of doing them yourself, and saying “no.”

Each of these small actions is like a small experiment, gathering evidence that our value already exists. It’s not something she has to earn over and over again. Emily’s story is so powerful because it shows us that rewriting our inner script is possible for all of us.

It’s not about these huge life-changing moves. It’s about the small intentional choices we make every day. This way, the focus is back on you and the first steps you can take on this path.

If you were to take one thing out of it, it would be this. The goal is not to live in a perfect, stress-free, eternally prosperous fantasy world. Come on, life isn’t like that.

The real power is in building awareness, recognizing when you’re stuck in survival mode, and then having a tool like AIR to consciously and intentionally choose a different, more empowering path, which is important because it’s your agency. It’s your ability to choose how you experience your life. So as we wrap up, I’ll leave you to think about this question as Emily tells her story of success and worth.

We all have these stories that quietly shape our lives. So, what is a story about yourself that you might be ready to start rewriting? Answer this question, and well, it might just be your first step toward living a regret-free life.

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