Have you ever been getting your shit together and making consistent progress in the key areas of life you know you need to be doing better in, but then hit a bump in the road, have a setback, or start repeating old self-sabotaging behaviors and think to yourself, “Why am I like this? What in the actual fuck is wrong with me?”
As someone who’s changed a lot in (mostly) beneficial ways over the past decade, I can tell you that it happens to me pretty frequently. I haven’t had much time to sit down and write lately, so I want to take this opportunity to talk a bit about the darkside of self-improvement. You know… the hard parts. The I-feel-like-shit-even-though-I’m-doing-everything-”right” parts. The parts that most social media influencers don’t talk about because it doesn’t get enough likes or because they’re out of touch with reality.
I want to reiterate that something I still believe is an absolute truth is that your life cannot be better spent on anything other than becoming the best version of yourself. It doesn’t mean you have to be loaded with money, it doesn’t mean you have to have a six pack and fuck like a porn star, and it damn sure doesn’t mean you have to pretend like you’re having the best time of your life at Disney World with your spouse and three kids on Instagram… the bags under your eyes are telling a different story, Becca.
It doesn’t mean any of those things. It just means that you should strive to become the best version of you – whatever that means to you. Forget the conventional and societal constructs of what you “ShOuLd dO.” Sit down and ask yourself honestly, “what does a life that I would love to have look like and what do I [realistically] have to do to get it?” Then do those things… and don’t expect it to be easy.
Now that we’ve covered the process in a nutshell, the rest is mainly execution. This is where you realize you’ve got a dream and a goal in mind, but you don’t actually know jack shit about how to attain it. If you like learning, you’re in luck because that’s what you need to do a lot of. Especially in the beginning. Start bridging the gap between the lack of skills and knowledge you currently have and the level of skills and knowledge you need to attain your goal as soon as possible.
If you don’t like learning, well… this is all about changing yourself for the better. So start there. You need to think, act, and behave like the person deserving of the life you want. Don’t get caught up in the information gathering stage and start overthinking everything, but do gather information and think about it. (Everything in moderation, they say).
Embrace the journey and the process of growing into a new, better version of yourself and start taking action towards that end immediately. Putting off until tomorrow what you could be doing today is stacking the odds against you. It’s putting the start of a new, better life on hold. It’s pushing what you want further and further off into the distance and therefore, perpetually out of reach.
See, evolution is not just something we undergo biologically over large periods of time as a species. The process of evolution is also available to each of us as individuals. The evolution of character. The evolution of spirit. The evolution of identity. The caveat is that Nature is unending and so that form of evolution will never cease to exist, whereas our personal evolution is limited by our impermanence.
The second you’re born, the clock starts ticking and we don’t know how much time we actually have. I really can’t stress enough that it’s never too late to get started, but the sooner you do get started, the sooner you will be able to experience the empowerment that comes from owning your full potential. Fortune favors the bold and results favor those who take action.
Once you’re solidly on the path of personal development, you will see how fast you can truly accelerate your life. The rewards you get from challenging yourself, overcoming obstacles, and actualizing your dreams will reinforce and invigorate you to never stop trying to improve. After all, if we are in control of choosing what meaning we bestow on our own lives, what could be a more worthy pursuit?
Again, it’s really important to subjectively decide what the best version of you looks like in your own mind because that will heavily dictate where you focus your time and energy. If you break yourself trying to fit the mold of someone else’s dream or someone else’s best version of you, you will still feel empty inside even if you succeed. Do it for you.
Imagine if you can make the never-ending pursuit of your own personal excellence your main objective and then apply that motivation daily over the course of your remaining life. Is that 60+ years? 50+? 40+? Most people reading this still have a lot of time on the clock. Most people also know what things they should be doing (that they currently aren’t) in order to move themselves in the direction they want to go… if they’re being honest with themselves.
The problem is that few people have the level of patience required to operationalize that knowledge. In the age of TikTok, dating apps, and instacart, humans and chipmunks are competing for the shortest attention span in the animal kingdom. Luckily, patience is a skill that you can acquire and strengthen over time… and you’re really going to need it.
The type of progress we’re after when we start to prioritize our personal growth must be measured in years and decades, not weeks and months. We live in a world that thrives on instant gratification nowadays, but it is a trap. Play the long game, always.
As cliche as it sounds, getting started really is the hard part. Once you build a little confidence in your ability to work through problems and find the next piece of the puzzle, it starts to feel a bit more like a game you want to keep playing. For better or worse, people really are just over complicated monkeys. The positive reinforcement you gain from overcoming challenges will encourage you to keep seeking new challenges and the continual progress you make each step of the way will stack up over time and can quickly reach mind blowing proportions. Never underestimate the value of momentum in your life.
My personal introduction to all of this began about five years ago in the winter of 2018. By July of 2019, I really started to take a more introspective approach to bettering myself and trying to change my life. I was about seven months into building my current business and had just returned from backpacking around Europe for a month on a solo adventure. I met tons of cool people from all over the world, saw a lot of cool shit, and had to deal with some not so cool shit. I even learned a bit of Spanish and German.
I also got really fucked up. A lot.
Having partied in NYC, Las Vegas, and Miami before, I really didn’t expect to be impressed by the party scenes in Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris, but I was wrong. Europeans are fucking nuts…. but I digress. Something interesting occurred on this trip that would create an ever expanding ripple effect across all areas of my life. I had left home simply excited to see things I had never seen before, but it actually turned out to be the blazing glory ending of a difficult chapter of my life.
When I returned home, nothing felt the same. I hit the local bars in my neighborhood in NYC I used to bounce at and tried resuming my usual routine and habits… but I realized I wasn’t actually enjoying myself. I wasn’t having fun anymore. I started wondering if I ever had been in the first place.
This startling realization made me confront a whole host of internal issues I had been suppressing for many years. My identity as the no-fucks-given party boy was shattered and replaced by the clearer image of a 25-year-old manchild with no direction living with his mom and drinking heavily to distract himself from uncomfortable truths. I wasn’t drinking because I was having a good time, I was drinking because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.
It was then that I decided to try something different. Something radical. Something terrifying. I decided to try living life sober.
If you’ve never dealt with addiction or breaking a cycle of unhealthy habits before, let’s just say that it is not a small mountain to climb. Life is hard for everyone and we all develop our own ways of coping with the hardship of that. Some ways are better than others – drugs and alcohol are an objectively bad way.
To be fully transparent, I got drunk and smoked weed for the first time when I was 13 years old. By the time I was 14, I had tried cocaine and things quickly went off the rails from there. I stopped going to school, I started getting into fights fairly often, and I started selling drugs so that I could do them as much as possible without going broke.
As I descended deeper into the cycle of addiction, I experimented with other drugs and became increasingly dependent on cocaine and alcohol just to function in my everyday life. “Only on the weekends” became a daily habit and my ability to feel good without the use of mind-altering substances was more or less nonexistent by the time I was 17 years old.
I really haven’t spoken much about this phase of my life and the toll it took on my physical, mental, and emotional health… but this behavior lasted in some capacity until I was 25. I’ve since made peace with all of my mistakes and have been working on accepting the parts of me I had tried to suppress with drugs and alcohol for so long. I realize now that what had felt rebellious and cool at the time was really a teenager’s desperate attempt to self-medicate his depression and anxiety because he was too embarrassed and ashamed to ask for help.
Once you’re dependent on drugs and alcohol to function, taking them away feels like a kind of identity suicide. As an addict, giving up these substances is essentially giving up your invisibility cloak. It’s like walking out from cover straight into the gunfire of life. Bullets start to hit you and you have no way of numbing the pain anymore. You start to feel everything fully again and at first it seems almost unbearable. You start to remember why you were hiding and running from it in the first place.
But then a funny thing happens – you realize the hundredth bullet doesn’t hurt as much as the first few. If you can maintain your sobriety through the worst of it, you eventually become desensitized to the pain and rise above it. You develop a new set of coping skills that are constructive and propel you forward rather than returning to the destructive habits that had been keeping you stuck in a vicious cycle of self-pity and desperation. You cultivate a special kind of resiliency that makes you dangerously powerful and you start to reach acceptance and find peace with yourself and your life. It is a slow and grueling process, but also incredibly rewarding.
Sometimes your perceived weaknesses are also your superpower in disguise. I’ve thought a lot about this recently when considering how to deliver the message within this blog entry, and here’s what I realized: I’m still the same person who was addicted to cocaine and vodka nine years ago. I’m still very much an addict right now. The difference is, I’m not getting high off of drugs anymore – I’m getting high off of my own progress. Sure, I don’t always feel like waking up and tackling a huge to-do list in the morning and I might feel really overwhelmed in my day-to-day reality on occasion, but when I break through a plateau – when I figure out how to ascend to the next level – I experience the best feeling I’ve ever had in my life. In other words, I didn’t overcome my addiction, I channeled it into something useful instead.
I don’t let it show, but some days are nothing short of a battle. Showing up for myself and the people who rely on me to perform at a high level every single day isn’t as automatic as a Steph Curry three pointer. Sometimes I just feel mentally exhausted and depleted, but I find a way to push through it because I know that what I want from life demands it. I am constantly trying to choose behaviors that are going to move me closer to my dreams and my ultimate goals. It’s far from a linear process – some days are downright dog shit. Sometimes a slump lasts weeks or months. But I still give it my best, and sometimes my best is just staying sober that day, and that’s perfectly fine.
I fully recognize that the separation between achieving my dreams and not achieving them may solely reside in whether I can handle the pain, the setbacks, and the failures of life without self-imploding or quitting on myself. Do I feel certain that I will always find a way forward even if I come up short? When I look in the mirror, do I see somebody that I can count on to do the right thing? These are the questions you need to ask yourself. The external results you want in your life are going to emerge from the relationship you cultivate within yourself, not the million other factors you have no control over.
When shit gets hard, I ask myself what the 85-year-old me would be proud to say I did in this moment – then I do that. I think the worst thing in life would be reaching the end of it and realizing you didn’t leave it all on the field. That you could have done a lot of things better and wish you had. To feel regret for the choices you made and realize you have no time left. I envision what I can do with 56 more years of focus and hard work from the present moment. Those thoughts help me minimize my current problems and align my present day self with my long-term goals. I’m not going to lie, it energizes the fuck out of me.
Because here’s the thing… We all have shit that we go through. A single mom with 2 kids who wants to start a business, someone who is readjusting to life after a physically and emotionally abusive relationship, someone with a chronic injury or illness who wants to get in shape – we all have shit we have to deal with and contend with. We all have reasons why we can’t or why it’s so much easier for someone else to do it. Some of these things might be worse than others and many are completely legitimate factually speaking, but here’s another secret… it doesn’t fucking matter.
The cards you have in your hand are the cards you have to play with. Period. You can cry about your cards and tell everybody else at the table that your cards aren’t fair, but it won’t change them. Which means you essentially only have two options. Option 1) Try to figure out how to win despite your shitty hand or Option 2) You can fold. That’s the game of life. (Tough, I know). I hope you choose the first of those two options, but that is a decision we all have to make as individuals.
There is a particular mentality and perspective I use to help me stay mostly in this frame of mind in my own personal life. It’s far from perfect and I have to really make a concerted effort to keep it at the forefront of my thoughts, but it is more or less a subconscious belief now that permeates my behaviors. This is not to say that this is how you should think about life or that this is the “right” way to think. This is just what I use to help me get outside of my own head and move the ball forward in the direction of what I want most daily. It is, in my opinion, the biggest reason for my ability to generate results that others struggle to obtain.
Most of us convince ourselves that the struggles and adversities we face are unique to us. They may feel unique to us because we live in a small town or because we don’t personally know anybody else going through it, but the chances of us encountering a really unique issue that no one else has experienced is pretty much zero. The idea that your problems are unique to you only serves to create a perception that there may be no solutions to them. As you might have guessed, this is wholly unhelpful to making beneficial improvements in your life. You cannot outperform what you think is possible. You must internalize the idea that you can do it, have it, and be it before you can actually experience it in real life. It’s the basic idea behind manifesting, which is why that practice actually has legitimate utility (even if it is a little woo woo).
It helps to realize that the world is a crazy and chaotic place full of people just as fucked up and confused as you are. As I write this, a new conflict has recently reignited in the Middle East and we have been reminded of the cruelty and inhumanity that exists and has always existed. You can choose to submerge yourself into it… keeping track of every headline… every disaster… every evil deed… you can force yourself to try to reason with the unreasonable… you can force yourself to have an opinion about everything… you can try to figure out the right things to say to appease others… you can drive yourself absolutely mad….
Or you can “zoom out.”
I won’t say I do this every single day because that would be a lie, but I do this most mornings before I start my day. I do several minutes of breathwork and meditation where I just focus on being present in the moment. I listen to the sounds around me, I focus on how my body feels, and I try to silence my mind. As I focus on my breath I visualize myself sitting in my bedroom at the end of my bed. I put my hands together in my lap, cradling the back of my right hand in the palm of my left and touching my thumbs together. I then begin the process of “zooming out” by imagining that I’m rising above myself and above my apartment building and over the entire city of Charlotte. I go further and see the state of North Carolina, then the entirety of the United States… then North America… then the whole earth.
At this point, I begin to speed things up. The planets in our solar system and the sun whiz by. Everything starts blurring together. The Earth where I began my journey becomes imperceptible and the stars and vastness of space stretch infinitely into darkness. The reality of my reality starts to reveal itself. I see and recognize the truth in all of it. I realize that I am just a microscopic dot in the universe.
All human beings collectively at once on this space rock floating through the abyss are nothing more than a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. We are merely a drop in an ocean. Maybe this thought gives you anxiety at first, but I hope you really ruminate on it and allow it to give you strength. You can choose to be anything in this life. Choose to be free. Free from judgment (from yourself and others), free from expectation, and most of all free from the torment you put yourself through when you allow the outside world to dictate who and what you think you should be.
Some may view this as a reason to feel that nothing matters and so then why bother trying, but I would argue to the contrary. If nothing matters anyway, why play it safe? Why try to limit yourself and the size of your dreams? Why not find a reason to attempt the most audacious thing you can think of? Why not try to live the most exceptional life that you are capable of? That makes a lot more sense to me than just sitting on my ass waiting to die. Regardless of whether or not our lives mean anything in the big picture or whether the constructs we create in our minds hold any true value, how we feel is real. To be happy or to be void of happiness is a real condition.
The reality is that you and every single person alive right now to form an opinion of you and whatever you do or don’t do with your temporary time on this planet will be dead 150 years from now. In three generations, the most influential people of our time will have been forgotten except for honorable mentions in history classes. So unless you’re Elon Musk, you’re probably not getting much airtime after you expire. What’s actually holding you back from taking risks and going for it isn’t any logical reason, it’s simply fear. It is a figment of your imagination. After all, this human experience is really only good for one thing… chasing whatever gives it the most meaning and purpose while we have it.
If you can tune out the noise and the distractions of the external world around you and focus on what is actually important, it is unlikely that you will fail in the long run. Zoom out and find true perspective. Consider what you really are and what you are a part of. The substance that comprises the vastness of the universe is alive within you. The fact that you are alive right now is almost unbelievable, from both a mathematical and critical thinking point of view. Life is truly a gift and you are capable of great things because you were given the opportunity to pursue them.
Find a way to think and act from a place of love despite the hate and vitriol that exists around you. Do the best you can each day no matter what that looks like. Do the greatest amount of good that you can with the limited amount of time you have left. Try to live each day without taking it for granted. Remember that it is a waste of time to be outraged, especially if you aren’t helping to make a difference. It is an even greater disservice to the world to allow yourself to be paralyzed by fear when you know that the full potential of your life requires action.
First zoom out… then look inward.
