The simple idea that changed my life

So I've played a lot of video games in my day. Whether I'm playing Fallout, or The Sims, or RuneScape, just to clarify, I don't still play RuneScape. I've noticed there's a commonality to pretty much every game, and that's this idea that when you upgrade your character, your traits, and your skills, you get to unlock new abilities, new opportunities, travel to new parts of the map, and wield better stuff.

You know, in RuneScape, if you want to wear rune armor, you got to grind it out, fight like a billion goblins or guards, and grind your defense level to level 40. In The Sims, if you want to make any money whatsoever, you got to pick a skill, max it out, and then you can start making money. And in Fallout: New Vegas, if you try to make it to New Vegas before you upgrade your character and your stats and your perks and stuff, you're gonna get completely manhandled by a flying bug.

Even though this is kind of a shower thought, it really got me thinking about how life kind of works in the exact same way. By upgrading your skills, developing your talents, acquiring positive personality traits, it really opens up a lot of new opportunities in life. You get to travel to new parts of the map when you start making more money, and you get to wield better stuff.

Although this is pretty obvious, I feel like we as human beings forget about this a lot. We focus a ton on outcomes; we want to pay off our student loans, or we want to get a girlfriend, or we want to move out of our crappy apartment into a nicer part of town. We get very caught up in all the good things we want to have happen to us, completely ignoring the fact that some sort of personal transformation likely needs to happen in order for these things to actually happen, or at least have a higher likelihood of happening.

We're always tempted to look outside of ourselves for the solutions to our problems, but we forget that often our situation is just a symptom of our character. The character we're playing as, our ever-growing debt is often just a symptom of our bad spending habits and our inability as a person to delay gratification. Our lack of friends might be a symptom of our lack of confidence and low self-esteem. But we don't like to realize that; we don't like to admit that maybe we're the ones that need working on.

Imagine going to the doctor one day because you wake up and your whole body's in pain. Maybe you have a history of, I don't know, a bone disease or something in your family, and you're really concerned and scared. So you go to the doctor looking for answers, and the doctor's like, "Hmmm, pain right here? Have some painkillers." You consider him a pretty crappy doctor because he's not actually trying to investigate what the root cause of the issue is; he's just treating the symptom.

But that's exactly how we often treat ourselves and our own problems. It's like standing at the shore, trying to push the waves away and prevent them from hitting the shore with your hands. It's just so futile. You might stop a couple of them, but the waves, they're just gonna keep on coming.

All of this to say one simple idea that's really helped me trend my life in an upward direction is to focus on internal improvement rather than external improvement. Instead of shopping for a sexy new wardrobe that'll make me feel more confident and give me a little bit of swagger in my step, I stop myself and I think, "What's something I can work on internally that will help me achieve the exact same goal?"

You know, how can I feel confident without having to buy something or get something? Usually, that means getting off my butt and developing more discipline at the gym, having a great workout, starting to eat better. These are things that will help me feel a sense of accomplishment and make me feel proud of who I am, which will make me feel a lot more confident than a new shirt ever could.

Or if I'm feeling like my videos aren't cinematic enough and I'm really tempted to pull the trigger on a really expensive cinema camera on B&H, I stop myself and think about what's something I can work on internally that will help me achieve that cinema look. Well, the answer is pretty obvious: maybe I should learn how to light things better, frame things better, work on my composition.

Upgrading my skills as a filmmaker will do a lot more to improve myself as a filmmaker than buying a new camera. Usually, the best answers to our problems lie within ourselves, and they're really unexciting and they're not as stimulating as buying something or getting something, but they're the actual way to solve the problem.

The nice thing about focusing on internal improvement rather than external improvement is that you develop a sort of resiliency to the chaos of life. Because truth is, anything that you get or attain, or any external upgrade you can make, can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye. Whether that's a pandemic sweeping the nation and you end up losing a job that you worked really hard to get, or maybe the economy crashes and you lose all the investments that you made.

If you spent all your time putting your eggs in the external basket and it all goes away overnight, then you're left with pretty much nothing. But if you spent your time investing in yourself internally, then if you lose all the things you've worked on externally, you've developed the character to bounce back from chaos. You develop skills that make you valuable to your community, and your family, and yourself. You can make something out of nothing, and you can be somebody who naturally creates good outcomes rather than somebody who's just focusing on changing the outcomes themselves without developing the necessary character needed to actually reliably produce them.

So to wrap this whole thing up, just remember this relationship between building your character and upgrading your life. If you focus on upgrading your character, then the outcomes have a natural tendency to take care of themselves. One of the best ways you can invest in yourself is to constantly be learning new things and developing your skills, which is why today's video sponsor, Skillshare, is such a perfect sponsor for today's video.

As many of you know, I'm constantly trying to develop my filmmaking and cinematography skill, and thankfully there are a ton of classes for me on Skillshare. Including DIY cinematography by Ryan Booth, which I'm really enjoying so far. For those of you who don't know, Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes covering dozens of topics. Everything from filmmaking to productivity to how to manage your inbox—pretty much any skill you want to work on, there's probably a class for it on Skillshare.

One of the things I love about Skillshare is that it empowers you to accomplish real growth because all of their classes are designed for real life. They're extremely practical, so you can absorb what you're learning on Skillshare and really apply it to your real-life pursuits. It's also extremely affordable, especially when you compare it to real life classes and workshops, which can run you hundreds and hundreds of dollars every single week.

But if you join Skillshare's annual membership, it comes in at less than $10 a month, so it's kind of a no-brainer. Skillshare is also doing this cool thing where the first 500 of you that click the link below get two months of Skillshare premium absolutely free. So make sure you hit that up, explore your creativity, and as usual, have a great time.

If you like this video, make sure to hit like because when you hit like, the algorithm blesses me and it shoves my bald head into people's home pages, potentially helping them out, which also helps me out. So it's a win-win for everybody. If you're lurking here, consider subscribing and hitting that bell icon so that you don't miss future uploads. Other than that, hit me up on Instagram or Twitter if you want to just follow me around, or check out the second channel. I'm going to be posting there more often.

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Don't that monitor turn off? I have been posting there more often, but other than that, that's all for today. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video.

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Stephen: Whoa, thank God you showed up! You would not believe the symptoms I'm going through right now, man!

Doctor: Yeah, a lot of people who come in here are pretty sick.

Stephen: Mm-hmm, you got me thinking though. What would happen if everyone was sick?

Doctor: If everyone's sick, then no one's sick, technically, right?

Stephen: Yeah, yes. It says here that you've been experiencing some issues.

Doctor: I just woke up this morning, terrible dry cough, my whole body's just in pain. I'm checking off every single symptom of that virus that's going around.

Doctor: Hmm, pretty scared about that. So I don't know if you need to just swab me. Have you seen any other doctors about this?

Stephen: No.

Doctor: Very well, very well. So do you think I haven't— I don't know. So you said you're experiencing a cough, right?

Stephen: Well, you're in luck! I have just the thing for that! I have Halls cherry and Halls mint. This is Halls mint.

Stephen: You're not a very good doctor.

Doctor: No, not really.