25th Birthday Thoughts

Hey, everybody, Ryan here. Today is my 25th birthday and before I head to bed, I wanted to share a few thoughts that I've been having today because people have been wishing me a happy quarter century, bringing that up over and over again. A quarter century, 25 years. And I can't help but wonder.

At the age of the ripe old age of 25, if the younger version of me, the 16 year old, the 18 year old Ryan Moran, would be proud of the person that I've become at the quarter century mark. And this would be the point that I think most people start to enter the, what we call the quarter life crisis. Thank God I went through that already.

And that's a loaded question about whether a past version of you would be proud of the person that you are today. The reason that's loaded is because.

I can't escape the fact that just about every week I have a conversation with somebody around my age who is living in this defined story that they had of themselves at a previous time in their life. So at a previous time in their life, they had this vision of who they would be at a certain age. I know what mine was at 25, I thought I'd be married. I'm not. It's just me and Todd. I thought I would be far more financially successful than I am, even though by many people's standards I'm doing quite well. I'll get to that more.

I thought I would be a thought leader in whatever field I was in. I had these expectations and this story that I had laid out for myself of what it would be for some people it's, I was going to be married and have kids by a certain age. Or for some people it's even I thought I'd have the job, I thought I would have fill in the blank that would make me feel happy or valued or worthwhile.

And what I've discovered is that all of that is an illusion. None of that is actually real. And what's true is that if we were living in accordance with our perceived story, the chances are that we would find dissatisfaction in other areas of our life because we're really as happy as we decide to be. This story that we lay out for ourselves, the story that I had as an 18 year old of what I would be as a 25 year old, or the story that.

Anyone has about what their life is going to be at a certain age, you probably have a story about what your life is going to be five years from now. But all that is an illusion. Yet we define ourselves by that story. You see this a lot with people who.

Have demons in their past, who have baggage that they hold onto, that they define themselves by. And they say, no, you don't know what happened to me. You don't know what this person did to me. You don't know what he or she said to me. You don't know what my dad did that did this to me. And they're carrying that around everywhere they go. And they're actually bringing that past, they're bringing those thoughts into the present and then allowing it to affect their future for as long as they carry that. But the truth is you can leave that past now where it was and live in a completely different reality of now, of whatever you decide it to be. Because happiness or success or value or whatever emotion.

That we feel that we lack is all just connections that happen up here. We can decide to have them in a moment, we can decide to live in them at any time, regardless of what the situation is. But yet our brains, all they know is how to compare. So when the 18 year old version of me wanted to be successful, what that really meant was I wanted to feel a certain thing. And I would get that by comparing it to other people around me. Well, that's a bunch of bull. That's just an illusion. None of that's real. It's just a comparison to whatever surroundings I might find myself in at 25. And now that I'm 25, I've surrounded myself with people who are insanely financially successful. So as a result, my brain wants to look around and perceive myself as less successful than I expected myself to be, or less happy than I expected myself to be or have less stuff. But none of that ultimately fulfills, none of that actually gives us the emotions that we want to have, regardless of what they are.

I posted a quote yesterday that was, if you have the perception that a future now, or even a past now, a past present moment, is any better or inferior to what you have currently, then you're putting yourself in lack of right now. Yet most people live here, most people live in either the future or in the past and miss completely what's going on right now. And yet all that ever happens for you to build a real story that's going to happen, whatever story that is that you want, what you need to do to get there is to bring yourself into the current now, bring yourself very present, and then project that and carry that whatever emotion you want to feel, whether it's happy or successful or whatever you can feel right now. All you need to do is change what you focus on, change what you compare yourself to. If you want to feel successful, what are you comparing yourself to? Are you comparing yourself to media, or are you comparing yourself to most of the world that lives on $2 a day? My former college roommate and I were on a road trip, and he had just accepted a teaching job in Gary, Indiana, the poorest area in the country, and was moving to Gary, Indiana, to go accept this teaching job, moving to the poorest place in America. And we're talking about life. And he says, man, I just feel so lucky because I'm one of the richest people in the world, and I'm one of the most educated people in the world, and I got to be one of those people. Wow, that hit me, because here he was moving to one of the poorest areas of the country, and yet his perception was, I'm one of the richest, most educated people on the planet. And that was so true. But we miss that because of what we compare ourselves to, and we miss that because we compare ourselves to the. This ideal of what an earlier version of ourselves.

Envisioned for us. And the cure for that, the cure for that is to bring yourself into what is absolutely present, into what is absolutely current right now, and living in that moment and feeling whatever emotion you want to feel by changing what you focus on. I think one of the most freeing things is coming to terms with the idea that you are going to die.

And.

When you come to terms with the idea that you're going to die, you realize A, that nothing is permanent, and B, that you don't have time to maintain regret. You don't have time to let whatever baggage in your past or whatever story you told yourself in the past weigh you down, that all of that belongs back there, and it doesn't have to affect what is going on right now. When you embrace the fact that you are not here forever, it frees you to actually be present now. And in the same light, I believe there's a part of you.

Really the real part, that makes up who we are. That is what I call indestructible.

Better term would be unaffected by the world. Regardless of how much money you make or who your friends are or what people say about you, there's a part of you that stays the same no matter what that is. And when you embrace the fact that you're not here forever, you're free to live in that part of you that is indestructible, because what other people say about you doesn't have to matter. Because you're not here forever. You're not here forever. And you don't have to live by the confines of what other people put on you. And you don't have to live in the baggage that happened in your past.

And.

When I remember that, when I remember that.

I'm not here forever.

It'S such a freeing thought to me.

It allows me to release hurt. It allows me to release disappointment.

There's a part of me that wants to beat myself up over the disappointments that the 18 year old version of me would have than who I am now. Even though by most people's standards I do a lot of awesome things. And that's another thing. We tend to perceive others as having it all together. And yet most of us see ourselves as being.

Flawed. We see the best in others and the worst in ourselves. And you know why? Because we're the only people that see our own insecurities. We know ourselves better than anybody else, so we know our own junk. We know our own flaws and our own insecurities, but we don't see them in other people's, especially in a world that lives on Facebook all the time. And you see people's travel photos and their beautiful girlfriends and, and all the cool things that they do and you know, the duck face pictures that they take in the mirror. How embarrassing. Stop doing those really seriously. It makes you look bad.

We see other people's best. And yet we know the conversation that we have in our brain about why we're not worthy of love and why we're not enough. We hear those in our own head and think that they're special, think that they're unique, think that they're true and don't hear anybody else's. And so we perceive other people as having it all together.

And.

None of us do. None of us have it all together. No one gets exactly what they wanted in life. And the natural tendency, if we haven't accepted this, is to beat ourselves up over those imperfections, over those flaws.

And that's why I say that the most freeing thing, I think, is embracing the fact that we're not here forever. That at some point we're gonna go. At some point we're gonna die. Even of those who think that the rapture is gonna happen and steal us all away if Obama gets reelected. No, we're all gonna die one day. And that can either cripple us and make us not want to do anything, or it can absolutely liberate you to live and in this moment and embrace everything that you are and not let anything else affect who that is and affect how you feel when we realize that we're not here forever.

What that person said about me a year ago, or that girl who I desperately want to date that isn't ready for me, or the disappointments that I've had or the amount of success that somebody else has that makes me feel inferior doesn't have to matter.

And.

Embracing that has.

Allowed me to do really cool things because risk becomes far less of a big deal.

Being who you are becomes less of a big deal. When we embrace that and when we live fully in today rather than in the past or in our expectations of what we were supposed to be or in projecting ourselves into the future of things going wrong. All you have is now. So embrace that and be fully present in who you are and love that person.

That's my deep thought my 25th birthday. Thanks for listening.