Before You Quit…Do This First

Why aren't midlife crises happening in your 20s? Why? Because you're doing one or two things. It's that now you've gotten so many things piled up that you're doing that you feel discouragement on many of them. And that's where that quitting impulse can come from for many people. They're discouraged across too many things versus having mastery and momentum in one. People are always in that conversation in their head. They might not call it quitting, but maybe you're somebody who go, you, you love discipline, you love motivation, you love the topic of purpose, you love the topic of legacy, you love the topic of wealth. All of those require commitment. And if you're going to have a conversation about commitment, consistency, discipline, and, yeah, winning, you can't have the conversation without also addressing the fact that people want to bail. People don't want to work, people don't want to try, people want to try other things. There's always competing interests in people's minds. Do I go to the gym or do I hang out with kids? That's not bad. That's called competing interests in psychology and high performance research. And when you understand someone's competing interests, you understand they're not quitting often because they're a terrible person. There was another interest there that captivated them or they valued higher. And so all we have to do is understand your decision making framework of whether or not you're going to stay consistent, stay disciplined, and be on the path to that compounding action that becomes winning. Or there's something else that pulls you and we just have to understand what else pulls you. If it's fear, negativity, discouragement, upset, uncertainty, that's not the one you want to pull you off path because that's just lacking emotional regulation. And what I would suggest is let's stop using the conversation in our head of it being so binary of is it quit or not quit? Instead the reframe is, is it repair and improve or is it pause? And most people, when they see that, it's like, oh, well, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if I can repair or improve this. But that should be the first question. Where are you now? What's your story now? What's your circumstances now? What outcomes are you going to go build now? What's the process you're going to build in your life? That is a repair, it's an improvement, it's an innovation to the way that you do things, that you're actually going to double down on your social connections. Now, most often you need to question how you do things, not if the thing should be done. You know, for all the parents in the room, Right. You've had this conversation in your head every week when they turn teenagers, right? Should I have been a parent? Should I quit being a parent? No, no. You got to learn a new way. You gotta adjust your approach. You gotta make a different type of connection. They're of a different age. There's a different time. And so it's about repair and improvement. A lot of people just need a better process. When. When you get a better process, the outcomes get better. But most people, it's not if they should be doing the thing, it's the way they are doing the thing is bumming them out, burning them out, wiping them out. And they're seeing other people doing other ways in other industries. And like, well, that industry must be easier because the grass is greener. Like, we tell ourselves all these stories. It's greener over there. The problem is we carry ourselves over there and our own bad thinking and our biases and our poor processes. So the first thing I always tell people, you're thinking about quitting. I can hear that. What I would love first is I would love for you to optimize the hell out of what you're doing for six months. If you're a real business owner, you're real entrepreneur. Let me show it. Optimize everything. Repair and improve every process. Re look at the whole thing again. Because the reason you probably got into it was a certain level of freedom or joy or passion. And I want you not to lose those just because your process sucks. So this is a recalibration. It's a rebuilding under the same purpose versus well, the purpose just sucks. I'm like, no, the way you're doing it sucks. Just like going to the gym, you know, the way I go to the gym could be infinitely optimized. Better. I show up, I'm like. I kind of like the Smith machine. I really like that leg machine over there. You know, I definitely like that bike, but I hate that thing over there. And I kind of wander around like an idiot. There's no programming, right? Any of you who work out, super great, you could give me a program, I'd get better results. And they wouldn't say, this gym sucks, but that's what people do. The gym sucks. No, your programming sucks. I'm going to guess where many of you are. You got a lot of choices. So here's what happens in the success journey and where this freedom dilemma comes in. So when you first started out, maybe you're. Maybe you're younger or you're beginning, it was kind of like the beginning of something. And your optionality was actually quite low. You. You didn't really know. Like, you just chose one thing. You worked that thing. You. You, like, kind of obsessed about learning about the thing. You probably took some courses, some classes, some certifications, your licensing. You did all this stuff to learn about the thing. Then you got in motion on the thing. You got skill on the thing. That skill became some success, became mastery, became a certain level of success. And financial freedom, that was your expectation. So you got some financial freedom. Awesome. Everyone wants that. Everyone deserves that. You got that financial freedom. And there you are now as you get financial freedom. And years go by, A year, a good season, an unbelievable economic decade of growth. And what happens? You got the freedom and you're doing it, but it's a little easier and it's a little better. And at some point you're kind of like, okay, I kind of got this. It's working. And here's what you do now. You have the freedom. And even if you do quit or if you want to pursue other things at the same time, so either you quit or you do other things at the same time. People expect that new success to start right there. But the truth is, they got to start all the way down the slide again. The slide is always there. And now you got to go down the slide. You got to learn about the things, develop some momentum, develop some skill, develop some success, develop some mastery, and then have the freedom of the thing kind of running and doing well. The problem is people fool themselves when they get some financial success and it goes to their head. They get hubris about it. They think they can take on seven other things, so they take on seven other things and those seven other things. It's down the slide. They got to learn about it, master it, figure it out, get some momentum, get some skill, get some success, then achievement, success. And the issue is many people who have a sense of freedom in their lives, it's not that they're not working hard. It's that they're working dispersed. So now they're investing in five different companies when they used to just build one. Hey, guys, it's Brandon.

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Are investing in 12 different things they're trying to learn and master and do. Now they're an agent, but they are also doing everything else around it. And so that focused action that led to the first build up, the slide is no longer there. It's not a lack of hard work because if they got to the financial part the first time, the hard work's in the gut, they got it. The grit's there. It's now that they're dispersed. And guess what? The more dispersed you are in your focus, the more your surface area, meaning opportunities for discouragement, happen. And now you used to do one thing, but now you got five things and three of them aren't going well. And it just sits on you, man. It's like, dude, three things not going well. You know what I want to do when three things don't go well? Quit everything. I'm gone. Most midlife crises happen only because you gather up disbursement at midlife. Why aren't midlife crises happening in your 20s? Why? Because you're doing one or two things. It's that now you've gotten so many things piled up that you're doing that you feel discouragement on many of them. And now you're like, eff it, tear it down, burn it down. And that's where that quitting impulse can come from. For many people. They're discouraged across too many things versus having mastery and momentum in one. And why this is important is because if you hop to another industry, you're going to go to that industry and you're going to pull in. Usually the same preference of the investment of time, energy, resource, money and sanity. So people always think a new opportunity changes them. And yet it's like, but you brought the same equation in. What changes things is when you change the equation, not necessarily the industry or the thing. I'm working with a billionaire right now. This person keeping confidence is really struggling with their marriage and they are in this place where, you know, the last couple years has not been good and they're very disheartened. By it, they've had a lot of conflict, a lot of challenge. They also had some financial big swings. And so they're in this place of going, I don't think we can do this anymore. And as I talked to them about the last two years, what became very clear is they just didn't put any time in them the last two years. Their investment of their time with each other was kind of non existent. And so other things just festered and other things became frustrating. And and I said, you know, they, they asked funny, it's like, bottom line, what do we need to do? And I said, well, I'm not a therapist, but if I were you, I would double down on your marriage for the next two months and then extend it another four months and then extend.

It for a year.

Like, why would you quit something that's gone this great for this long and you actually do genuinely care for each other, but you've never said, hey, let's double down on a relationship for six months and see how we feel. Instead, what people do is they get protective and they fight more and they silo more, they speak less, they invest less time on each other because they're mad. They don't want to engage in uncomfortable emotions. And so when we don't like the emotions we're feeling, we usually bail. But that's usually the indicator. Uncomfortable emotions don't mean bail. Usually it means address the thing. Address the thing, the emotions gets better. And when you learn to address the thing now you have higher agency. Often it's victimization to run right? It's that feeling that we are out of control. That's why we quit. I don't have any control anymore, so I quit. I don't have any control over my spouse anymore, so I quit. This relationship versus the emotion that feels uncertain, upset, disengaged, unsure. It's like, well, that's saying, hey, actually give the thing some attention. So I advise all people, you could probably buy in the idea before you leave something you want to know. You doubled down on it for a while because you don't want regret. And regret is I bailed too soon without ever going full out intellectual optimization effort towards a singular thing to improve that thing. That's what I said. It's repair or improve the thing before bailing on the thing.