How to (quickly) make progress in life

Hey, what's up person? Are you frustrated with your life? No? Are you, uh, tired of spinning your wheels and you keep on watching self-improvement videos trying to find that "aha" moment? The thing that gets you out of your rut? If that's you, stop that!

Well, Jake, it's a relief to know what's been eating on you. I wish you'd have told me sooner. Getting to where you want to be in life, it's difficult, absolutely. But it's extremely simple. The method to getting anything that you could possibly want in life comes down to, I would argue, three things. If you can get all these three things right, then there's nothing that can stop you, unless, you know, all of your limbs get blown off in a terrible accident.

Number one, you need to develop a vision. Because without a vision, there will be absolutely no telling whether you're making progress in life or not. Most people do not have an adequate vision for where they want to be. Most people wake up every single day and just look at the tasks they have at hand and just sort of vaguely hope that they will make more money, find a girlfriend, get a nice house. Eventually, they have all of these sort of pre-installed vague NPC sentiments in their head: things that would be nice, right? But of course, you want those things. Everybody wants those things. Those things are not a vision; that's just sort of like accidentally inheriting the sentiments of society.

You need to develop a vision that is exciting to you and your life. A vision that I can't tell you about; I can't tell you what's exciting to you, but you have to figure it out. You must figure it out. So ask yourself, you know, if everything went your way and you behaved optimally, if you managed to find the discipline necessary to overcome the little obstacles in your life and the big ones, where would you ideally want to be one year from now? Take out a pen and paper and write these things down in detail. You have to create a vision that excites you; otherwise, you will distract yourself with pleasure.

So when you're constructing this vision, I highly encourage you to not just think about the things you want to have. Everybody wants to wake up in a nice giant household with a big comfy bed, drive off in their Lambo, have a very fulfilling job that makes them a lot of money, and they have all these nice clothes, and their body is nice and jacked. These things are nice to think about, but a far more important question is: how do you want to behave? What kind of person do you want to be? How do you want it to feel to be you?

You can imagine yourself with all these luxuries around you, but at the end of the day, think about what that would feel like to be you. Is it sort of powerful, peaceful, focused? Do you want to be somebody who has their priorities in line, somebody who has sort of burned away their lesser self? Are you somebody who wakes up in the morning with energy, just teeming with motivation and excitement to tackle the most important things in your day? Develop a vision that's more exciting to you than the pleasures that surround you.

Okay, so the next thing is to weaponize your attention. Almost everybody underestimates the power of their attention. But there are very few people in the world who understand it fully, and those people are in power. The people who understand attention fully, those are the people who've created an entire economy around human attention. Look no further than your tech giants of the world. The truth is, human attention is the most valuable resource on the planet. When people focus on something, when a society focuses on something, things get done or undone. Societies are built or they crumble.

The modern landscape is built very evidently around influencing, maintaining, and controlling human attention. Even me, right now talking in front of this camera, the longer you pay attention, the better this video will do for me. But hopefully, I can leave you with something where you can go, "Oh wait! I need to develop my own vision! I need to pay attention to that vision, and I need to make things happen in my own life." And then, hopefully, you don't need to watch my stuff; you don't need to watch anybody. You can be paying attention to what you want to be paying attention to.

So in order to gain traction in your life, you need to realize that your attention is the vehicle that will drive you towards your North Star. And it makes perfect sense because attention is a prediction. Where our eyes gaze, our feet tend to follow. You know, a really good example of this is how I became a YouTuber. How did I get here? Is this exactly what I've always wanted to do with my life? Not really. I still want to be a director and create high-quality art, be a master of cinema.

But it makes perfect sense why I ended up here for the time being, and that's because that is all I paid attention to. As a kid, I was constantly making YouTube videos with my friends, comedy sketches, fight scenes. I was constantly absorbing and uploading to YouTube. It's where my attention was, and soon my feet followed.

So ask yourself: are you treating your attention with respect? In what ways are you allowing your attention to go elsewhere? What are you obsessed with? What's constantly on your mind? Whatever that is, if it's not towards your vision, you will lack the fuel to get there. So this might all sound extremely overly simple, but I think the truest things in life are generally pretty straightforward.

It doesn't mean that it's easy; in fact, honing your attention on what matters is very difficult. But the final component of all this will help you achieve it. It'll make things easier for you, and I've found it personally very helpful as of late. A lot of the ideas from this video were inspired by "Outwitting the Devil" by Napoleon Hill. I listened to that recently using today's video sponsor, Audible, and I think that you should too.

Because this is the first audiobook that I recommended on the channel that I didn't completely love. And why does that mean you should listen to it? Well, I think it's because the good points that Napoleon Hill makes are really good. They're sort of life perspective-altering points, and that's why I made this video. However, there are some other concepts from the audiobook that I'm a little bit lukewarm about, and sometimes they come across as crazy or just genuinely unhinged. And I want you to experience that for yourself.

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So this final component is surrender. I'll call it surrender for this video, but last video I called it submission. So let's rewind a little bit. Remember how at the beginning I talked about reflecting on who you want to be and what you want it to feel like to be you? Well, chances are when you were imagining that, when you were really thinking about that, you actually felt it, right? You actually caught a glimpse and were able to relax into that feeling.

Your posture probably changed a little bit. Maybe you were very stressed before, you were very uptight about all these things you have to do, but you allowed yourself for just a few minutes to relax into the possibility of feeling different. Well, that is proof that you can feel that way right now. The feeling that you want to feel is available to you at all times, right? You can be right now the person that you want to be.

Therefore, all of these external circumstances that you want for your life are merely the branches that grow out from this authentic feeling of being you. And that probably sounds very woo-woo, but just give it a thought. Okay, maybe it's not so much that getting what you want in life externally will make you feel who you want to feel like, but rather feeling how you want to feel in life and behaving in the way that you wish to behave and being the person that you want to be will help you get all of these things as a byproduct.

So, as I was editing this video, I realized that I just straight up didn't explain what submission even is. I just started talking about something entirely different. I already talked about this in like two other videos, but yeah, I should really stop overusing this concept. I think I should really write some new material. Submission is basically this idea. Instead of, you know, like when you need to do something that you know you need to do, there's all this like physiological tension, right? You feel very like, "If I could just get myself to do it, then I'd be a better person," but I suck, right?

There's a lot of tension. We kind of fight ourselves. But when you have a vision for what you want to feel like, who you want to be, and you allow yourself to feel it, then submission is almost like this act of faith. It's less even psychological; it's more physiological. You just do the thing anyways. And I know that sounds very reductionistic, but doing anything in life is just doing the thing anyways. You can try to hyper-cerebral doing what you need to do and overcomplicate it, but at the end of the day, it's just a matter of doing it or not doing it.

So I found personally that it's actually easier to do what's good for you if you relax into it physically and psychologically—this act of just putting one foot in front of the other and having faith that this is the right thing for you. So it's like counterintuitive. You almost try less hard to do what's right for you. But as you get better at doing this, you just kind of disregard the resistance in your way. You start to become very familiar with the feelings that are on the other side of this wall of resistance.

It's a feeling of peace, of calm, of duty. Sometimes it's even a feeling of excitement. You get very excited that you're actually finally doing what you need to do, right? It's a very good feeling. A lot of the time when we procrastinate and we're doing all these, you know, we're doom scrolling Instagram or whatever, we are actually looking for this feeling, and we just can't find it. We can't find it on Instagram. We can't find it on TikTok. It's only found by relaxing into what you know you need to be doing, relaxing into the steps necessary to achieve your vision. And there's no better feeling than that.

Some call it a flow state. You can call it whatever you want, but it's the best feeling in the world. So get good at submitting to your higher conception of good. You can call it your heavenly duty, your vision of heaven, and good luck. Just do it, but enjoy yourself as you do it. If you liked this video, make sure that you actually hit like, because when you hit the like button, the algorithm blesses me. YouTube, the algorithm goes, "Okay, this video is cool. More people should watch this." That really helps me out, and it helps everybody out, so it's just a win-win.

If you're lurking here, consider subscribing. Other than that, though, thank you so much for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video.