6 things you probably need to hear

Here are six things you probably need to hear.

Number one: Nobody is on their way. This is something that everybody has to realize at some point in their life, and some people realize it when it's far too late. And that is that nobody is on their way to save you. A lot of people sit around waiting for someone or something to come and save them from whatever their situation is. They hope to win the lottery. They hope that when they get a girlfriend, that will motivate them to be the person that they want to be.

You know, maybe you'll land the perfect job out of thin air. Your best friend will come knocking on your front door. Three friends, even an entire social group, will just knock on your front door, and all of a sudden you have friends. But nobody's on their way. Nobody is currently on their way to save you from a life that you don't like because it's nobody's job to. Sometimes people do come along, and they do have a positive influence on your life, but you can't wait around for these people.

But this realization is also a blessing because you don't have to wait for anybody anymore. You don't need permission to change your life. Since you're the only one who can change things and get the ball rolling in your life, you can start now.

Number two: Guard your eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul. They're also the things that people put things in front of when they want to hypnotize you, when they want to influence you. Why is that? Well, there's almost no difference between looking at something and paying attention to it. When you look at something with your eyes, you're also so psychologically paying attention to it. You're assigning value to it.

Companies and marketing firms, probably for centuries, have really caught on to this fact by making products and advertisements as enticing to look at as possible because they know that if they have your eyes, they have your attention, which also means they probably have your money. This is why in the modern age, when companies are extremely good at it, they've perfected the ability to capture your eyesight. It's more important than ever to guard your eyes.

To pay attention to what you're looking at 90% of the time, we can no longer afford to just go onto the internet to see what the internet has for us. La la la la la, no real plan. What will happen is, via your eyeballs, you will be seduced by some sort of thumbnail, some sort of headline or title, or you'll just be super conditioned to clicking on the YouTube shorts tab. And somehow, magically, a whole hour went by, and you can't even name one video that you watched. Utterly valueless, but your attention was farmed.

On the flip side, if you want to pay attention to something, look at it. There was this weird Andrew Huberman video I watched like three years ago, but he mentioned how if you're having trouble focusing on something, just look at it, like stare at it for 30 seconds. And since your eyes are focused on it, your brain will focus on it as well. So if you feel kind of scatterbrained, like you just can't pay attention to what is important in your life, literally just look at it and stop looking at stuff that doesn't matter to you.

Number three: If you want to change your outputs, change your inputs. Watching the same types of videos in the same room, in the same house, in the same town, with the same weather, spending time with the same people, having the same conversations about the same things, and then somehow expecting yourself to live differently than you do now is a little ridiculous. Because you are putting into your brain the exact same things that you always have.

And maybe that's a good thing. I don't want to automatically imply that your life sucks. We'll actually get into that later; that's one of the next points. But just because things are the same doesn't necessarily mean that that's bad. Maybe you find a lot of security and comfort in the sameness of your life. But for some people, the sameness is actually devastating because they don't actually like what they're outputting. They don't like their behaviors. They don't really like their thoughts.

They find themselves lacking any sort of creative inspiration, any sort of motivation to live their life to the best of their ability. So what they do in that type of situation is they look outwards. You know, maybe I need to look up a motivational YouTube video or something. Maybe there's the perfect book I need to read, or maybe somebody is going to come into my life and give me new ideas, better ideas, and everything will change for me.

But the thing is, you're already feeding yourself so much information that is influencing how you behave and how you think. A lot of people tend to dismiss the familiar. They are blind. It's like going noseblind, right? Like if you have a stinky room, but it's a room that you spend most of your time in every single day, eventually you'll become accustomed to the smell until someone else who's not accustomed to the smell will walk in and say, "Holy smokes, dude, what's wrong with you?" And you'll say, "What? I don't smell anything."

Anything that's familiar to you is like that. You know, you could wake up one day and have all these health problems. You just feel really bad recently. You're getting totally burnt out, and someone will say to you, "Hey, man, have you tried getting eight hours of sleep every single night?" And you say to them, "No, that's not it." You're almost insulted by the question because you always get six and a half hours of sleep every single night; that's just normal to you. Most of the time you can survive since it's a baseline for you. You don't consider that that could be the problem.

But I'm urging you, what is familiar in your life? What is regular? What is frequent is almost always the most influential thing affecting your day-to-day experience of being alive. Re-evaluate your familiar because most often the answer isn't some outward idea that you need to have; it's by changing the inputs that you're feeding yourself every single day.

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Number four: There is nothing wrong with you. Ninety-nine percent of people on this planet have something that they've done that they don't want people to know about. Maybe they have a way of living that they're not super proud of, or maybe that way of living was in the past. Maybe it's going on right now, and it's worse than ever, or maybe you're just not very proud of who you are and the life that you live, and you want more than anything to change your bad situation.

Whatever the case is, you may want to go on a self-improvement journey. You might want to rehaul everything about your life—the things you eat, the thoughts that you have, the things that you tend to do on a daily basis—and you hope that by doing these things you will feel better about who you are. And there's a lot of truth to this. If there wasn't, what would be the point of any of this? If you feel bad now and there was nothing you could possibly do to make you feel better than you do now, then that would obviously be super depressing.

But the problem is that there is a psychological trap that a lot of people don't seem to recognize when it comes to self-improvement. They think that, "Okay, I feel bad about who I am now. I'm not proud of myself now, so if I get this body, I get this car, I get this girl, I will feel good about myself. I will like being me more, and other people will like me more, hopefully."

But there's two issues with this. The first issue you've heard before: yeah, if you get all these things, you're still not going to be happy, right? If you get the perfect car, and the perfect house, and the perfect job, you're still going to feel empty inside. Making more money won't make you happy. But you've heard that before; that's boring.

The real problem is something that almost nobody talks about. The real problem is that by thinking this way, it circumvents your ability to get those things anyway. If you believe that there's something wrong with you and that you're broken and that you suck and that you're weak, human beings tend to behave in a way that's reflective of their own identity. If you believe you're weak, you will act weak. If you believe you're somehow broken and that you suck, you will do things that broken and sucky people do.

So a lot of people get caught in this feedback loop where they're like, "Man, I suck. I'm bad, bad, bad. Hopefully, I can hate myself enough and resent myself enough that I become something more." I have to ask, "How's that worked out for you?" Do you find that you spin your wheels? Maybe you find that you yo-yo back and forth all the time. You burrow yourself into a pit of degeneracy until it hurts so bad that you have no choice but to climb out of it for a short while. And then you're more motivated than you ever have been because you have all this progress.

You learn that it actually feels good to do good things, but then you get so burnt out by doing 19 different good things at a time that you have one bad day, the self-hatred comes back, and you say, "I knew you didn’t have what it takes." So the issue going on here is that you are not recognizing your inherent worth.

I don't really care how cheesy that sounds or how woo-woo or spiritual that sounds, but if you don't believe that you are worth something, if you don't believe that you already have value, then what would be the point of self-improvement? If you're not worth anything, why would you improve something that's not worth anything? You would throw it out.

Somewhere deep inside, the reason why you would want to improve yourself anyways is because you do realize that you're worth something. Everybody has made mistakes. In fact, there's nobody who hasn't made some horrible mistakes, but not everybody hates themselves because of their mistakes, and you don't have to. Don't be somebody who hates themselves because of their mistakes.

And yeah, you're not going to feel good 100% of the time, and there are absolutely things that you can do to make you feel better about yourself. But the reason these things feel good is because they remind you that you are worth something, not because they make you worth something.

Number five: Embrace the chosen suffering. This is a concept directly inspired by something that David Goggins and Chris Williamson were talking about on the Wisdom Podcast. I think it was last year. I don't watch a lot of podcasts anymore, but I remember there was this specific clip from this podcast that rocked my world, and I think it's one of the most profound things I've ever heard on a podcast. The devastation, the trauma is going to come, and you can't allow that to become a jersey barrier.

It can't be a jersey barrier; it has to be something that you can maneuver through very quickly and move forward. That takes a lot of toughness. Unchosen suffering is going to happen, right? So the only thing that you can do is have some chosen suffering to prepare for it. It's the only thing you can do; that's the only thing you can practice for. The unchosen suffering is to have chosen suffering.

Do something that sucks every day. So many people are well aware that a storm is coming in their life. Things can and probably will, at some point, get worse. Tragedy will strike; the unchosen suffering—suffering that you don't choose, that you can't plan for, that you didn't decide—that is coming. And the only thing that you can do to prepare for it is to undergo regular chosen suffering to shape yourself through fire, so that when the unchosen suffering comes in your life, you're somebody who can bear that suffering.

It doesn't mean that it won't hurt, but if you're not used to the language of pain, if you're not used to voluntarily carrying a load, then the unchosen suffering is something that can break you under pressure. And this isn't meant to be discouraging; hopefully, it's something that's just real, and hopefully, you're encouraged by this.

You don't need me to tell you that something bad will happen to you. Something bad has probably happened to you regularly throughout your whole life, right? This isn't a secret to anybody. But the answer is not to hope it doesn't happen; it's to become stronger. I believe this is why so many people are anxious. They deal with crippling anxiety because your fight or flight responses have to latch on to something. It's how we're wired.

Our ancestors were fighting—I was going to say fighting antelopes, but they were foraging, warding off predators. Holy smokes! I just keep on raising and lowering my stand-up desk. We have the same brains as we did back then—maybe slightly different, but like 95% the same. We're used to having a threat, and if we don't make the threats bodily, if we don't actively battle in our lives physically, then we will latch on to hypothetical threats, the prospect of future doom.

So yeah, if that's something you struggle with, if you think about your own death a lot, if you think about terminal illness a lot, then get busy. Start experiencing real pain that you choose—pain that makes you stronger, pain that makes you feel good about yourself because you feel more capable and equipped to handle the unpredictable pain of the future.

And the final thing you probably need to hear is: Get hyped! So one thing that's becoming very clear in my own life is that the time for hyper-serializing is over. Stop trying to outthink doing difficult things. We have established that we need to do things that are good for us. We want to live our life in a better way; we need to get to work because complacency and degeneracy is not an option.

But in the modern YouTube, podcast, pseudo-intellectual culture, there's a tendency to want to find the perfect mental angle to make doing difficult things as easy as possible. We have to find the perfect strategy, the perfect way to look at things so that we're just effortlessly productive. That's just another way to avoid pain. Some things just suck, and they will always suck. And these things don't have to be deep, right? They can just be like doing your taxes.

I don't know what kind of psychopath enjoys, like genuinely loves, and is joyful and exuberant about doing their taxes, right? They found the perfect way to look at it where they're like, "Ah, I love this." Those people are probably aliens—to clarify, aliens from another planet. Yeah, illegal aliens just love doing taxes. Would all aliens be illegal? Like, would it be legal for an alien to invade Earth? Sounds pretty illegal. Maybe all aliens are illegal. What the am I talking about?

The bottom line is: Don’t overthink it. Do whatever the hell you need to do. Maybe you need to do 20 push-ups; maybe you need to listen to the Rocky soundtrack to do that thing that you don't want to do. But get hyped up, increase your energy, and blast past that obstacle because it's been hanging over you for far too long.