Transcription
You're in this situation because you got distracted. You lost the battle. You gave up your dreams and sought security in someone else's. You didn't pay attention to the path you were on. You went to school, got the job, and now what? The only thing that occupies your mind are the bills that need to be paid, the work you don't care to do, the student loans that got pushed under the rug and are stacking up. How you don't have the time or energy to be healthy, to start the business, to give life your all. Those thoughts split into a thousand more, walking you into a narrow-minded state of stress and survival. Life loses its zest; days become robotic; opportunities become scarce.
The first step out is to become disgusted with how far you've dug yourself in. I want you to become brutally aware of two things: one, what you don't want; and two, where you will be if you keep taking the same actions. All you need to do is observe the masses and see where mindless action leads, because it's not pretty. You can observe these people in your daily life: when you're out on a walk, or when you're out at the grocery store, or when you're on school campus, or when you're at work. There is plenty of opportunity to observe what you don't want in life so that you can move in the opposite direction.
Now I want you to sit with your thoughts here, because it's easier to know what you don't want from direct experience than it is to know what you want from your imagination. So we're going to create an "anti-vision" for your future. Sit with a notebook and get specific. Write out every single thing that you don't want and why you should feel uncomfortable. Now use that potent negative energy to slingshot in the opposite direction. Commit that it will never happen again. Laser in on one meaningful goal, and if your friends and family don't think you can achieve that goal, even better.
Now, in that same notebook where you wrote out everything that you don't want out of life, with this negative energy brewing inside of you, take out your pen and right now write out exactly what you are going to do to achieve the meaningful goal that you set your eyes on. Write down what skills you need to learn. Write down why you want to achieve that goal in the first place. Write down your commitment to creating a better life for yourself. Filter all thoughts, advice, opinions, and emotions through your vision. Channel the entirety of your life into it. Start completely new.
Now, the last thing you need to write down: all of the potential distractions standing in the way of that goal. Success is less about being disciplined and more about removing the distractions that make discipline difficult. Next, disappear—not from life, but from distractions. These can be people, games, apps. It's easier to remove everything at once and deal with the pain than it is to tell everyone your plans and listen to their crab-in-a-bucket opinions. Reset your days. Start from absolute scratch. Tomorrow, when you wake up in the morning, completely new. Everything that you've done before doesn't matter; you're not going to do it again. You're going to be intentional about doing different things from the second that you wake up, because your habits, your choices, your decisions are what got you into this place in the first place. And so, if you continue doing those things, where do you think your life is going to go? Of course, not everything you're doing right now is bad; I'm just giving you a way to completely reset. You need to drop everything and see what sticks. You need to do nothing, and that alone will shine light on what your priorities are, or what they need to be. Fill your time with learning, building, and experiencing as much as possible. In other words, break your addiction to feeling useless, due to giving time and energy to people, activities, and things that don't care for your well-being.
You don't need to explain yourself to anybody as you're going through this process. You're doing this for you, and not for anybody else. And the moment you find yourself having the desire to explain what you're doing is the moment that you should realize that you're not taking back control of your life for yourself; you're doing it for someone else, and that is an even bigger problem. This process of realizing what you don't want, launching in the opposite direction, and prioritizing long-term success is a part of the origin story of most successful people. In other words, if you don't know what you need to do, rewatch this video and truly internalize it. Don't watch this for the sake of just getting a quick dopamine hit of, "Ooh, I get to learn something that may change my life, but I'm never actually going to change it." Flip the switch inside you and build a foundation that will carry you to the life you want. You'll turn out just fine.
Now, before you leave, I have a Cortex template below for you. You can fill it out with your anti-vision, your vision, your weekly review, your tasks. It's like a planner that you can duplicate every day inside of Cortex, which is a note-taking and knowledge management app that is completely free to use for personal use. Yes, this is an app that I made, but I made it because the other ones on the market didn't fulfill my needs as a writer, creator, and someone who values self-improvement, knowledge, and idea generation. Now, Cortex is of course not open to the public just yet, but if you join the waitlist, you'll get access relatively soon, and you can still look at the template and just write things down on paper; you don't need to duplicate it.
The second thing that I want to ask you is to share this video with a friend. And I know that sounds cheesy to ask—it's just a typical call to action at the end of a YouTube video—but one, it helps me and it helps the channel; and two, when I was younger, I really wish that I had friends that shared more of this style of content with me. 'Cause right now you probably share memes and funny things with your friends, and there's no problem with that at all, but you can cultivate a much deeper relationship with friends, family, whoever it is, by sharing your interest and sharing your desire to change so that you can do it together. That's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it—a bit shorter than usual, but straight to the point, impactful. If you liked it, let me know. Like, subscribe, do what you got to do. Thanks for watching.