For a mentally ill zombie with no money, no friends and no life, I’ve somehow turned things around.
Hearing other people’s life experiences helps you reflect on yours. It’s one of the most powerful things you can do, and it’s why humans are addicted to stories.
Let me share a few wild experiences from my life to inspire you.
Quit a job (and a career)
This isn’t a badge of honor.
I’m not trying to brag because I know you don’t care. This experience has value though.
Everyone should unexpectedly quit their job at least once. The point isn’t to quit and start a Youtube channel and lay on the beach. No. The point is that when you suddenly quit a job it changes your perspective.
You realize there are millions of jobs and you can always get another one.
So if jobs are abundant, then you don’t need to hold on to one for dear life. You can chillax with Max for a little. All the internal business politics has less effect on you.
It’s wild to think you can politely leave a whole career behind in silence and start a new one. That’s exactly what I did. You can too.
Found a woman
The dating game isn’t easy.
I have no idea how any single folks went looking for love during the coroni-rona. Even after all the chaos, the average person like me is still a hermit crab that doesn’t want to change out of their onesie and leave home.
In 2016, I went on a wild hunt for a new partner. I became obsessive. I kept spreadsheets. I graded text messages as if they were college exam papers. I had a sales funnel.
The whole process was exhausting. Why? Ghosting.
Everything can be going great then … Whamo! Never hear from them again. With my low level of patience when it comes to dating, it’s a miracle I found anyone at all. Got lucky.
Looking for love is wild. But the result is worth it for many people.
Got married
No ceremony. No wedding planner. The whole thing cost peanuts.
Just went to the marriage office with two family members and had a 15-minute wedding.
Then we spent the rest of the day enjoying ourselves rather than swanning around like show ponies and pretending to be a happy couple while randoms ate free hors d’oeuvres on our dime.
A simple marriage is wild.
People look at you like a serial killer when you tell them “Nahhhh, we didn’t do any of that fancy stuff. We made the wedding day all about us.”
Created a baby
I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t sure if the swimmers would still be intact. All that alcohol in my 20s and time spent puffing ciggies should have killed the sperm.
Somehow, though, I made it happen. My wife gives birth in November. Naturally I have no clue. I’m speed reading every baby book I can get my hands on out of fear.
Wife: “You got this, right?”
Me: “Yes, honey. All under control. I’m going to be a super dad. Tony Robbins will be proud, I promise.”
Making babies is a wild process. The transformation from adult man-child to father will be interesting.
Wiped out all debt
I can safely say I have zero debt.
I don’t owe any blood-sucking bank a dollar. Not because I’m mega-rich. Far from it. But because I live stupidly below my means.
No streaming services, no fancy cars, no fancy house, no fancy clothes, no fancy luxury escapes.
This isn’t the life for everyone but it’s definitely the life for me.
As a former anxiety sufferer, I need to be hyper-conscious with what I call bullsh*t stress.
- Car stress
- Food stress
- Boss stress
- Shelter stress
- Debt or buy now, die later stress
- Borderlines illegal behavior stress
Society doesn’t want you to know: less debt equals less stress. That’s real freedom.
Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash
Beat mental illness
I don’t say this often … but for most of life my future seemed hopeless.
Every day was torture inside my mind. I thought I was broken. I believed I was born with this condition. Then I learned about neuroplasticity. The idea we can rewire our mind to achieve anything became a huge aha-moment.
For more than 5 years, I’ve been free of the burden of mental illness. It’s the best feeling in the world.
Once you can see mental illness you can defeat it.
The trouble is it lives debt-free in our heads with a cloak of invisibility. Once you expose it with the help of a psychologist, then the healing can begin. It’s not easy, although it will change your life if it’s all you’ve ever known.
Become a millionaire
As someone posted the other day on Twitter, 6-figures is the new minimum wage. 7-figures will soon replace 6-figures thanks to crazy inflation.
Still, reaching 7-figures is a goal I’m proud of. For most of my life I spent every dollar I had as I made it. Then I learned about investing in assets.
Because my discipline levels are terrible, I used automation to send money from every deposit to my bank account into an investment account.
Investing on auto-pilot became an invisible habit.
After so many years it’s turned into an investment portfolio I’m surprised by. Add a little crypto risk … and you end up throwing rocket fuel on your financial life (not financial advice).
It’s not becoming a millionaire that is cool.
It’s the process of getting there, knowing you can do anything, that’s the breakthrough that’ll change your life.
Beat imposter syndrome
Whenever I try something new I feel like an imposter.
When I began teaching online I felt like a fraud. “Who am I to do this? What if people hate it?” Those thoughts all turned out to be lies my idiot brain came up with to scare me out of my dreams.
Now I’m hyper-aware of imposter syndrome. When it shows up I beat it over the head with a baseball bat.
The thinking is we’re all just making sh*t up as we go. So we’re imposters by default. Don’t let it hold you back.
Reached 500m+ views with writing
Again, this isn’t to brag.
The point is when you practice one thing year after year eventually it produces results. The results I got as a writer at the start were terrible. I’d say they were worse than most beginner writers now.
I started writing on an unknown website. I didn’t have access to the writing platforms we have now. In a way, it was a good thing. The writing I had to do to figure out the craft got seen by no one.
Otherwise, I could have destroyed whatever chance I had at writing success.
The biggest win isn’t getting hundreds of millions of views. It’s the crazy messages I get every so often because of something a reader reads.
People telling me they achieved a big goal. Or got a divorce. Or moved to a new country. Or quit their job. Or wrote their book. Or started a newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers.
To be able to spark this many events in the world through words on the internet is wild to me.
The butterfly effect of writing is a miracle. None of us will ever fully understand it. And maybe that’s the way it’s meant to be.
What this all means for you
You can do anything you put your mind to.
