A short motivational talk (YouTube transcript) by Ryan Daniel Moran explaining a strategy for staying content while pursuing growth by emphasizing habits of the future-desired self rather than treating goals as gaps to be closed. Uses weight loss and business examples to show how deciding and practicing the habits of your achieved self today produces steadier progress and greater wellbeing.
How do you maintain happiness and satisfaction while also having a lot of desire for more? And so I want to share a strategy that I use in order to stay in the same place of desire and contentment, which is a very rare place to have both. And it is the difference between habits and goals. Here's how most people go about deciding what they want to accomplish and what they're going to focus on. Most people look at what they do not have and. And then they set up a strategy or a system to get what it is that they want to fill the gap. I don't have enough money. I want to have a million dollars. Now I will create the bridge between what I want and where I want to be. And what usually happens is, for some reason, even if our strategy is bulletproof, the goal tends to elude us. It tends to almost be pushed away by that effort. And so we stay in this constant gap all of the time. Dan Sullivan calls it the gap of running from where you used to be. The. The destination tends to move. And so I like to flip it on its head, reverse the whole thing. And it's simply this. Instead of trying to close the gap, it is looking at where I want to be and making the decision from that place, setting the habit from that place versus setting the habit of trying to get to where I want to be. Here's a great example. In our conversation, we use the example of weight loss. In weight loss, most people say, I wanna lose 20 pounds. So what I will do is, is I will do two workouts a day until I have closed this gap. And then when they get to their goal, it's, well, crap, what do I do now? So the flip on the whole thing is this. When you are at your goal weight, how will you eat and how will you move your body? No one asks this question, when you have reached the goal, how will you operate? In business, the question is, often, I wanna make a certain amount of money so that then I can do the thing that I want to do. But very few people answer the question, what is want to do after you have reached the goal? Now, if you can play this thought train out, if you can cast this out and go to the place of what happens when you've achieved the goal and you can identify the habits that you will have in that place, and you start to do those now, the goal will happen faster. So, for example, I weigh about 180 and I want to drop down to about 160, 165. I know exactly what to do, and I Get on this hot streak of, you know, five, six days, and then, you know, one night of cookies and it's all over. So I now discover that I can maintain that hustle for about five to seven days. And then I have to use a lot of willpower in order to keep that going. Willpower that I just don't have right now. So the flip on the whole thing is realizing that I don't have to lose 15 pounds. I have to maintain 165. That's the difference. Because if I can think at 165, I think, how will I eat at 165? I will probably eat this balance of food. I'll have dessert once in a while. I probably won't do a lot of cardio, but I'll go for a lot of long walks, and I'll probably wait, train four days a week. I'll probably do that. To maintain 165, that's what you should do. Now, that's the diet. The diet is how you will maintain 165. Or if you want to make a million dollars so that then you can start the business of your dreams. When you start the business of your dreams, you will make the million dollars. Now, this is different for each of us, which. This is hard listening to somebody else's experience. We often try to see somebody else's experience and pull it into our own, but we have a different context through which we're operating. The way you end up getting the result that it is that you want is by casting ahead to what it is that you do want and making the decision from that place. How am I going to eat today? How am I going to run my business today? How am I going to show up today? How am I going to be present in what I am doing from the place of already having what it is that I think I want? Because all of us really want at the end of the day. Joy, flow, focus, connection, creativity. And we are holding back most of those because we think that we have to hold back things in order to grind towards what we want. But the opposite is actually true. The more that we can allow those things to flow through us from the place of right now, then we have the energy and the resources to be able to go get what it is that we want, want.
