Question Your Life Path? Watch this.
Ryan Daniel Moran reflects on a late-night moment of self-doubt after streaming and how fear can push you into rushed life decisions. He argues for making big choices from peace or energy, not stress, and suggests doing less but better instead of adding more when you're burned out.
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Hey.
Greetings from a beautiful morning in Austin, Texas. My building is right back there and we're out on the trail because it's like six o' clock in the morning. And I've been up tossing and turning since about 2am for no other reason than I woke up and started questioning my life path. Path.
And so we're going to talk about that today because this is a pattern of mine. It's something I've worked through many, many times over many, many years and is not uncommon for a lot of entrepreneurs or really just people who want more out of life.
And.
It'S rare on social media or on the Internet for people to talk about the insecurity they feel about the life path that they've chosen. It's really, you just see other people talking about how they're killing it or crushing it. And that's one of the triggers a lot of the times is you see other people on what we might consider a defined life path that we're jealous of. And so we start comparing ourselves to those individuals. But that wasn't my trigger. My trigger was a little bit different. So as I record this, we're just off the first recording the first episode of a segment that we're testing called Wine with Wyan. And I was so jazzed about this idea of streaming.
A. Streaming.
An episode of drinking wine with my friends and just answering business questions. And I was so jazzed and excited about it all week that I overdid it just a little bit.
And I was so excited and amped about it that I felt like it became a performance more than it was about connection and serving. And so part of someone in my brain said.
That was a failure. You're a failure. None of this will ever work out.
And this spiral just went down and down and down. So I woke up wide awake at 2 something am and.
Started evaluating life decisions. I started looking at houses like, I started looking at houses for sale in Cleveland. Like, I want to go back to Cleveland. And there's a point to all this because I caught it and I think I figured out what it is, because when we question our life path or we start to question decisions that we've made, that's a feeling. It's a usually a fear. It's something that triggers an emotion. It's usually not our brains going, hmm, you know, you know, what would be a good idea? It is more often than not an emotion that gets triggered. And then our brain clicks in and starts making decisions in order to put us on a different path. So that we get different feelings. So for example, for me, having that trigger of.
This is a failure, I'm never going to connect, I'm never going to succeed. Sent me on a spiral of stress, sent me on a spiral of fear, which made me crave simplicity. It made me crave the groundedness of relaxation, of disconnection from a busy, noisy city life.
So what my brain and my body did at first was feel the, feel the stress, feel the feeling. And then brain kicked in and said, you're on the wrong path. So in order to get the feeling that we want, let's change it all up. Let's buy a ranch in the middle of nowhere in Texas or let's buy a big house in Ohio and let's settle and relax. And this is, this is my, this is my brain going, you know, this is a good idea.
When I realized, when I caught the fact that I was just craving a different feeling. But now we can deal with that. So I have a couple journals in here.
Out watching the sky change in the morning over the water. And I know, I know this, I don't feel this, but I know this, that once my body relaxes, I'll have a complete different view on life. It happens only every time. I don't know how many times it has to happen in order to get the lesson and prevent it from controlling our fear based decisions. But we so often feel that trigger and then we make even worse decisions based on the feeling that popped up. Now I've noticed something about me and if you're an entrepreneur, I'm guessing that you are like me in this regard of those feelings pop up almost always when I. We are stressed and overwhelmed and the fix that we think like our brain kicks in and says, you know, well, if we just do this additional thing, if we just add this one more project on top of it, if we just try to do this one more workout.
One more workout, we'll fix it. One more employee, one more project, we add on top of it to fix it and it becomes this big box of stressful gunk and we break. And that's called burnout. And so my thought process when I started to feel that was, you know, what are we gonna do about it? What are we gonna add on top of it? And in reality, the answer is less, Less.
Do less rather than adding on top of it.
So that has been my lesson as a result of not sleeping and feeling that trigger that sometimes pops up that sometimes says you're not good enough or you're not gonna make it or you're not gonna get the Cleveland Indians. Which is my dream as a businessman, to own the Cleveland Indians. And today I caught it. And I wanted to share it with you because I know that I am not the only person who questions their life path after a seemingly insignificant, stupid setback that no one cares about except for me. But it got in my head, it affected my feelings. My feelings dictated the next decisions I wanted to make. They were probably not the smartest decisions. I got a piece of advice once from the author Greg Reed, who said.
Wait until you're in a good spot to make major decisions by your life. Don't make decisions about your life from a stressful place. Make them from a place where you are relaxed and you're in a good spot. Now, there's two forms of decision making. One is when we feel that angst or that stress, where something's gotta change. Like where you.
Hit your threshold in terms of being overweight or out of shape or in a relationship. When you say that's enough and you're done, and there's this surge, there's like this fuel of energy that drives you forward. That's one form, but there's another form, and that is when you're already stressed and you're making decisions from that place. And another decision is more of a distraction rather than a fuel of energy. And when we use decisions as a distraction, that's when we start building half built bridges. And that's where things start to crumble. So as a result, we look for a dopamine kick. We're looking for a distraction, we're looking for something new. We try to build, go in a new direction, date a new person. And so we're looking for that kick. And it's an addiction. And I think I would. This is a conversation for another day. But I think most entrepreneurs probably have some sort of an addict brain.
It's that need for newness, the need for novelty, which is both a gift and a curse if we don't rein it in. So make your decisions from peaceful places, or at least energizing places. Sometimes that energy comes from the breaking point of no more, I've had enough, I've hit threshold. And sometimes the energy is an internal piece in which we can easily move forward. I have a phrase that I like to use which is, when things are right, they're easy, and when things are wrong, they're stressful. And I go into my head, and whenever I go into my head, I'm dead. Whenever I go into my head. And I figure it out. My brain is not smarter than my body and I start working harder than my body allows. And I go into whiteboards and I draw everything out like this is amazing. And my head is saying it's great, but my body is not feeling the same amount of energy.
So that is a very, very good indicator, that is a very good barometer of decisions or making new life paths. The life paths being those major decisions about where we're gonna go. Are we making from a place of energy or are we making them from a place of tenseness, of stress? Because when we're doing that, that's a sign that we need to do less, not make major decisions. So that's where I'm at. I'm kind of in between, kind of transition in my life of selling a company, moving into the next stage, looking for the next thing. You know, I've done the $10 million thing, now I'm looking for the 100 million dollar empire, which I think is going to come from buying and, and building up companies. And.
Everything in me wants to force it. Like everything in me just wants to make it happen. Everything in me just wants to make it go faster. And I can't.
Because that's when I get in trouble. And so I'm choosing to just.
Pay attention, to stay in that place, stay in that zone of peace and energy. Because I know that when it's right, it's easy. And things come so much more naturally when I'm in that zone. Do less. Not more, do less, but better. Because when you operate from that place of ease, everything opens up for you.
